Trieste

by Daša Drndic

  Come on, forget those dolls, forget the Borghilds, chuckles S.S.-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, organizer of the “Night of the Long Knives” and the brain behind the Einsatzgruppen, chairman of the conference at Wannsee, later known as the Butcher of Prague, who at this juncture is head of the S.S. Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (R.u.S.H.A.), the race and settlement office, transformed as it was from an unprepossessing institution into a powerful organization wielding authority over a broad network of informants with thousands of dossiers on Communists, unionists, social democrats, on rich industrialists, Jews, even members of their own Nazi Party and S.A. (Sturmabteilung) henchmen. Reinhard Heydrich, the reclusive sadist, accomplished gymnast, skilled fencer, fearless pilot, is raised in high society in a family of musicians and artists. Forget the dolls! exclaims Heydrich. We have genuine, first-class ladies ready to give their all for their homeland! After the war, while in prison, Walther Schellenberg pens his memoirs, which he calls Labyrinth, and in which he asserts that “their” women, who worked at Kitty’s, were qualified and cultivated ladies from the Berlin demi-monde, but that there were others, too, from the cream of German society, women prepared to serve their homeland without reservation. On account of his liver cancer, Schellenberg is released from prison after serving two years of a six-year sentence, and in 1952 he dies in Turin, convinced that he has been one of the most successful spies of all time.

  The war is fast approaching. Information leaks now and then, with wine and beautiful women, in the throes of coital passion, all sorts of things slip out. So Reinhard orders Walther: Put pressure on Kitty Schmidt. Kitty Schmidt hands over her famous house of ill repute to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and signs a secret statement, according to which she will ask no questions and do whatever she is told. She also signs that she understands, should she fail to obey, that they will execute her immediately. And so, although prostitution is expressly banned, or rather strictly forbidden, workmen move into the house at Giesebrechtstrasse 11, following Walther Schellenberg’s orders. A complete refurbishment ensues; a new, more beautiful, luxurious, perfect brothel is built; a high-class whorehouse for V.I.P.s and spies. All the rooms, from the corridors to the boudoirs on the third floor of the building at Giesebrechtstrasse 11 have double walls into which surveillance equipment is installed, and from it hidden cables run down to a bricked-off portion of the cellar where there are five monitoring desks, each with two record turntables and wax discs spinning on them, which means that conversations from ten rooms can be recorded on those wax discs simultaneously.

  Then S.D.-Untersturmführer Karl Schwartz sets out to snare personnel. These unprecedented raids on whorehouses, nightclubs and streets corners multiply. Young women are pulled aside and grilled in a rigorous selection process. Doctors, psychiatrists, linguists and university professors all help Schwartz whittle his shortlist of ninety breathtakingly beautiful potential “activists” down to twenty first-class women. Under lock and key for seven weeks in a sealed-off wing of the Sonthofen Officers’ Academy, amid thick forests, small lakes and natural wonders, which they have no chance to appreciate because of the snow, surrounded by fresh air they have no time to enjoy, the beauties spend their nights engaged in a fundamental re-education. After gruelling training in foreign languages, marksmanship and unarmed combat; after instruction in politics and ideology, and courses in international and domestic economics; after the study of secret codes and cyphers, and memorizing countless charts of military insignia, uniforms and decorations, twenty peerless Nikitas of Nazism and counterintelligence are born, o temporal o mores! R.u.S.H.A. finally inserts them into the redecorated Salon Kitty in March 1940, and they write reports after every instance of sexual intercourse, unaware that they, too, are being recorded.

  Madame Schmidt receives her final instructions. Carry on as before, Schwartz tells her, or was it Schellenberg, either way. Welcome all your old customers. Keep on your existing girls. But every so often we will send along special guests, might this be Schwartz speaking? On no account are you to introduce them to one of your regular girls. Show them this album of twenty girls, Schwartz, apparently, says. When they choose their lady friend, phone for her. She will arrive in ten minutes. You will not discuss their clients with these girls, and they will leave immediately after the special guest of yours, of ours, has left the building.

  How will I know this is a special guest? asks Madame Kitty, because she can barely wait for work to begin again.

  Our guests will use the codeword “I come from Rothenburg”, Schwartz says, or was it Schellenberg?

  Where is Rothenburg? asks Kitty Schmidt.

  Schellenberg immediately reminds Kitty Schmidt of the secret agreement she signed, and Kitty Schmidt no longer asks questions, she just coordinates the work and feigns naïveté. A soldier who is genuinely from Rothenburg shows up once at Salon Kitty He is no special guest, but this soldier receives first-class sexual services with the lady listed in the album as Number 7, and though the soldier from Rothenburg does climax, he gives away no information to anyone, he merely climaxes as he never has; and even after the magnificent orgasm, while he sips champagne, nibbles caviar and whispers foolish promises in the ear of beauty Number 7, he betrays no secrets, because he has none to betray, but the wax discs in the cellar spin, around they spin, recording only moans. Until late 1942 Kitty is visited by various prominent people, domestic and foreign powermongers: Count Galeazzo Ciano, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and their Spanish colleague, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ramón Serrano'Súñer, then S.S.-Major-General Sepp Dietrich, a particularly demanding guest who asks for all twenty girls at once for a party, a huge orgy; the cables on the “bugs” are red hot from his sexual potency and physical stamina. The confidential staff in the cellar are astonished and agitated. The only time the recording and listening equipment is turned off is during Reinhard Heydrich’s regular, in fact, frequent “tours of inspection”. Spies stop in at Salon Kitty, such as Roger Wilson, a British spy who gives his name as Ljubo Kolčev, a staff member at the Bulgarian Embassy. He happens to trip over a surveillance cable while workmen for the secret service are running it from the cellar of Giesebrechtstrasse 11 to the offices of the main staff of the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) on Meinekestrasse, in the close vicinity of the building where Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész happens to live today, a man whose fate was probably tailored by Eichmann in the mid-1940s right there at Meinekestrasse. Upon seeing other things besides sex going on at Salon Kitty, Wilson, the British spy, secretly introduces his own secret British service of counter-espionage. Forget poor Borghild. Those were the days, my friend. In 1940 alone, more than 10,000 men take the stairs up to the third floor of Number 11 on Giesebrechtstrasse in Berlin. In just one month there are more than 3,000 orgasmic sessions recorded. But as time passes there are more and more special guests; they outnumber the ordinary clients, and the “special ladies” work full steam, spending more time at Madame Kitty’s parlour. They drink more, report less, discipline dwindles in the sexual headquarters of counter-intelligence, the Gestapo send in additional quantities of food and drink. This all costs a pretty penny—there’s a war on—and Heydrich’s dissatisfaction grows. In July 1942 a bomb falls on the building on Giesebrecht-strasse, and the Gestapo wash their hands of the operation. The bugging apparatus is hastily removed. Kitty and all the girls, the special girls whose golden carriages have overnight turned to pumpkins, and the ordinary Cinderellas who have been with her for years, set up shop on the ground floor of the building and go on working. Until her death in 1954 Kitty never breathes a word about the entire operation. Twenty-five thousand recorded discs in the Gestapo archive mysteriously disappear after the Russians enter Berlin, and word has it that they end up at Stasi headquarters, and the war waged via cunts proves yet again to be without effect.

  Ah, yes, Haya also remembers Marika Rökk, the Hungarian, who conquers the great compact heart of Nazi Germany in Die Frau meiner Träume, Leichte Kavallerie and Der Bettelstudent; who dances and sing
s and acts in the movies until the 1960s, when she does the same in theatres here and there, everywhere, but the troupes with which Marika Rökk performs do not tour Gorizia, and all Haya is left with is a poster from 1944 and a tinge of melancholy when she hears over the local Gorizia news of Marika Rökk’s fatal heart attack at some point in 2004, by which time Marika Rökk is well into her nineties. She takes with her to eternity the jubilee Bambi Award 1948 and the jubilee Bambi Award 1998, named after the much-loved book by Felix Salten, born Jewish as Sigmund Salzman, who begins his career as a writer by sending poems, letters, stories and essays to several Viennese newspapers, using an array of pseudonyms. Bambi, the book of Haya’s and Nora’s childhood, is a big hit when it comes out in Vienna in 1923, and for a decade and more children are crazy about Bambi, but it is suddenly banned in 1936, because the Nazis decide it sends the younger generation all sorts of terrible messages, and no filthy Jew is going to stir up their fount of life. So Bambi was not a childhood favourite for Haya’s sister Paula and her brother Orestes, who listen instead to the tales of Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, because these are enduring stories, written by brothers whose last name is Grimm (not someone whose surname is Salzman), boys of fine, pure blood. This Salten is a prickly fellow. In 1902 he riles the public with his in memoriam to Emile Zola, and in 1910 he ruffles the feathers of the townspeople of Vienna when he criticizes the city’s recently deceased, beloved mayor of many years Dr Karl Lueger, a member of the Christian Social Party and a flagrant anti-Semite, a favourite of Hitler’s, whose bronze statue stares straight into Café Prückel, where celebrated cabaret artists—Jews—performed in the cellar before they were sent off to the camps, and whose ring road, the Dr-Karl-Lueger-Ring, still encircles the heart of old Vienna.

  So it is that Marika Rökk goes off into oblivion with an award for life’s work; for her contribution to the German film industry. It is not important, concludes Haya. Chaos rules everywhere, regardless.

  Then there is María Mercader in the film Finalemente soli, and Doris Duranti as Contessa Castiglione, and Ernst von Klipstein, whom Haya doesn’t like much because of the long face, and the celebrated Margit Dayka in that movie, what was it called? in which she plays an orphan who learns when she grows up that she is probably Jewish, so she cannot marry her boyfriend, who, like all those actors, is tall and fair-skinned and healthy and strong and has gleaming white teeth, and she loves him so much, and he is forbidden from loving any Jewish woman, no matter what she looks like, even though there are blonde Jews who are tall and healthy, with teeth every bit as white, but there is no chance, absolutely out of the question, and then the girl, Haya thinks the name was Rozsi, yes, this Rozsi played by Margit Dayka plans to kill herself, but everything turns out fine in the end, because it transpires that Roszi is actually not Jewish after all, so she can freely marry her beloved. Such a tender film gives Haya hope for a more beautiful life on those bleak nights in Gorizia. In 1944 Haya is dreaming about the future, sometimes while under the covers, sometimes in the darkness of half-empty cinemas; while up there, on the silver screen, which grows and spreads in the dark, stare countless penetrating blue eyes, men’s and women’s eyes, and she looks back at them, and observes all those mother-of-pearl complexions, the wavy hair, and follows the valiant destinies, Lord, what a world of enchantment in the middle of little occupied Gorizia, in mid-winter, oh Lord, with all of them here it is impossible to be alone.

  Meanwhile, neighbours are disappearing.

  Francesco Bevk (who lived for a time at Via Montesanto 26) is no longer around, says Amalia Valich, new owner of the building, and Ada cannot find his children’s book, the one in Slovenian, and she would really like to find a copy, because now that she is drinking grappa and Strega more often and hiding it less, so much so that even spraying her mouth with cheap perfume doesn’t mask it, now, when things are as they are, in war and poverty, the voices of her ancestors, the poems her mother Marisa used to read to her, flit through her thoughts, and it happens that Ada lies there for hours, overcome and whimpering, and then, dishevelled and snivelling, she natters on about things no-one understands . . .

  Nemiren sem, ko voda, ki šumi,

  razbit ko slap, ki v brezdno moč prši

  in sam si šteje kaplje bolečine,

  ki padajo vse dni, vse dni . . .*

  Today in Nova Gorica, something Haya knows, the central square is named after France Bevk, and there is a statue to France Bevk there, and the library there is also called France Bevk Knjižnica.

  Costatino Costatini, the architect who used to live at Via P. Diacono 51, has apparently moved away somewhere, Florian Tedeschi says one morning, sweetening his coffee with condensed milk, which he gets through a contact, though in limited quantities, fifty grams per person every month. I was thinking about building a partition to divide the children’s rooms.

  Carlo Hakim de Medici, a sculptor who lives at Via Petrarca 3, does not mange to finish work on the tombstone for Ada’s father, Bruno Baar; at the clinic of Ada’s and Letizia’s family doctors, Luigi Bader and Glauco Bassi, the patients are received by some new doctors. Giovanni and Luigi Fuchs, the goldsmiths at Via Rastello 28, do not seem to be opening their shop.

  Enough! says Florian Tedeschi and turns up the radio, because it is 2 p.m. and they are broadcasting the giornale radio in lingua tedesca on 263.2 megaherz.

  Life knits circular pathways. It submerges in a repetitiveness without which it would die. Like her mother Marisa twenty years ago and more, Ada bakes crescent rolls and macaroons, and takes them to the club at the Aosta barracks on Via Trieste, although the image is a little blurred, because Ada’s hair doesn’t ripple; Ada has limp hair with no shine and Ada does not sway her hips provocatively, and her shoes are old and all of it, all the palaver that for twenty years has stretched like thin, sticky dough, the smiles drawing out the lips, the wait for life to begin, all this is beating Ada down, she doesn’t feel like doing much any more, there is no music in the house, no-one sings, not even Gigli. Colonel Scharenberg, commander of the German forces in Gorizia, awaits Ada with a smile, slips his hand into the napkin-covered basket, as if preparing for seduction, stuffs two rošćići cookies into his mouth, and says Danke as he chews. The sweet crumbs dance mischievously on his whiskers. Ada points to them and says, Staubzucker. The same way each time.

  Transports have been running for a long time now.

  Quietly, almost conspiratorially, the freight trains run through Gorizia at night, when the moon draws a black veil over its face. Gorizia is blocked. One can enter or exit only with special permission from Gauleiter Globočnik, which means almost never. The names of the residents are put on lists. There must be order. Colonel Wellhausen, commander of the operative zone, issues a directive on 23 September, 1943, according to which all who have moved to Gorizia since 8 September must leave.

  The station slumbers by day and by night it dies in the phantasmal light of the lanterns of the train dispatchers, which sway, so everything on the platform looks as if it is dancing, the tracks, the train cars, the hanging baskets with flowers, as if in a wild, musicless Tanz in which outlines twist and fracture, sliding along the entire fenced-in area, which turns into a gigantic human face contorted with pain, shedding no tears.

  Transport 3

  The train leaves Cairo Montenotte camp (Savona-Liguria) on 8 October. It arrives in Gusen on 12 October, 1943, and in Mauthausen on 23 January, 1944, whence it departs the next day for Auschwitz. On that train there are 999 people of Italian nationality from Gorizia, Trieste and Kopar.

  Transport 48

  The train leaves Trieste on 31 May, 1944—destination Dachau. It stops along the way in Gorizia and Udine, where new internees are boarded: civilians, anti-fascists who have been arrested, partisans and Italian soldiers. The train arrives in Dachau on 2 June, 1944, and there are between 342 and 352 “travellers” on board. Ten wagons leave Trieste, and the German authorities add another eight in Udine.

 
Transport 58

  The convoy leaves Gorizia on 27 June, 1944, and arrives in Dachau three days later. There are 194 people on board; 190 of them reach the destination.

  Transport 79

  The convoy leaves Trieste on 29 August, 1944. It stops in Gorizia, where new internees and prisoners are loaded on board. Number of deportees: 289.