Trieste

by Daša Drndic

  His uncle, Bruno Piazza, writes Roberto Piazza, escaped alive from the San Sabba rice mill, unlike thirty-three members of his, their, immediate and larger family, and they are Alceo Piazza, Antelo Piazza, Angelo Piazza, Anita Piazza, Bruno Piazza, Donato Piazza, Edvige Piazza, Elio Piazza, Elisa Piazza, Elvira Piazza, Emanuele Piazza, Fernanda Piazza, Giacomo Piazza, Gina Piazza, Gino Piazza, Giuseppe Piazza, Maria Luisa Piazza, Rachele Piazza, Regina Piazza, Sed Angelo Piazza, Sed Camilla Piazza, Sed Cesira Piazza, Sed Consola Piazza, Sed Costanza Piazza, Sed Emma Piazza, Sed Ester Piazza, Sed Eugenio Piazza, Sed Leda Piazza, Sed Marco Piazza, Sed Rosa Piazza, Sed Sara Piazza, Umberto Piazza, Virginia Piazza, who ended up at Auschwitz and Dachau, among them his grandfather, also Bruno Piazza, writes Roberto Piazza. I lay on the floor, on boards, as his uncle, Bruno Piazza, tells it, writes Roberto Piazza, and they beat me until I passed out. At night voices reached my cell, telling me what was happening, and horrible things were happening, someone on the other side of the wall whispered: I am buried alive, no air, thirsty, tonight they’ll shoot me, Bruno Piazza says, but the next morning the man was incinerated, not shot, incinerated, Bruno Piazza says, as Roberto Piazza writes. Then a woman spoke up who said that every night they were shooting people in the back of the head, and after every shot the dogs barked something terrible, that was how they killed lots of partisans, but I got out, says his uncle Bruno Piazza, writes Roberto Piazza.

  In the envelope are the names of about 9,000 Jews who were deported to Nazi camps between 1943 and 1945 or killed in Italy, writes Roberto Piazza. There are people from Gorizia, maybe his teacher remembers some of them, writes Roberto Piazza. On the list there are forty-four people with the last name Tedeschi: Ada Tedeschi, Ada Tedeschi, Adelaide Tedeschi, Adele Tedeschi, Adolfo Tedeschi, Alberto Sebastiano Tedeschi, Arrigo Tedeschi, Benvenuta-Ines Tedeschi, Bianca Tedeschi, Bice Tedeschi, Emanuele Amedeo Tedeschi, Emma Tedeschi, Emma Bianca Tedeschi, Ermenegilda Tedeschi, Ernesta Irma Tedeschi, Eugenia Tedeschi, Ezio Tedeschi, Francesca Tedeschi, Franco Tedeschi, Giacomo Tedeschi, Giacomo Tedeschi, Giacomo Tedeschi, Giacomo-Mino Tedeschi, Gino Tedeschi, Gino Tedeschi, Giorgio Eugenio Tedeschi, Giuliana Tedeschi, Gualtiero Tedeschi, Irene Tedeschi, Lidia Tedeschi, Lionello Tedeschi, Luciano Tedeschi, Mafalda Ida Tedeschi, Marco Tedeschi, Marisa Tedeschi, Natalia Tedeschi, Sabato Giuseppe Tedeschi, Salomone Tedeschi, Salvatore Tedeschi, Silvio Tedeschi, Umberto Tedeschi, Vittoria Tedeschi, Vittorio Tedeschi, Wanda Tedeschi, had his teacher, Haya Tedeschi, heard of some of these people? Had she known some of them? writes Roberto Piazza. Was his former teacher, Haya Tedeschi, aware of them? he enquires.

  Since he is working on designing this book on famous Gorizians, writes Roberto Piazza, he thought of her as well, his teacher Haya Tedeschi, and he wants to take this opportunity to ask what the war years were like for her, his teacher, does she have any memories, and he would also like to ask her, the maths teacher from the Dante Alighieri Gymnasium in Gorizia, why she never took them in 1975 to visit the museum, which opened that year on the site where the San Sabba camp had been.

  Roberto Piazza writes in detail to his former maths teacher from the Gorizia Dante Alighieri Gymnasium about the philosophy of Carlo Michelstaedter, though when she perused his little tractate in 1991 Haya Tedeschi hadn’t understood what it was all for. Michelstaedter came from a prominent Gorizia Jewish family, writes Roberto Piazza. He wanted to study mathematics in Vienna, but he went to Florence to study art history. She, his teacher Haya Tedeschi, must surely have heard of him, of Michelstaedter, writes Roberto Piazza. Today Carlo Michelstaedter is very popular, writes Roberto Piazza, he is even mentioned in the little Gorizia tour guides. He doesn’t want to tire her with philosophy and Carlo Michelstaedter’s biography, writes Roberto Piazza, but if she is interested in the life and philosophy of Carlo Michelstaedter, if she is interested in his paintings and poems, she will find plenty of material even in the modest Gorizia bookstores, he merely wants to remind her of the fate of his (Carlo’s) mother Emma Luzzatto, the fate of his (Carlo’s) sister Elda, the fate of his close friend Argia Cassini, to whom, in 1908, two years before he shoots himself with a pistol belonging to his friend Enrico Mreule, Carlo pens these verses in Piran

  Parlarti? e pria che tolta per la vita

  mi sii, del tutto prenderti?—che giova?

  che giova, se del tutto io t’ho perduta

  quando mia tu non fosti il giorno stesso

  che c’incontrammo?

  While Argia Cassini, Argia Cassini the pianist, in love with Carlo Michelstaedter, plays, writes Roberto Piazza, Carlo paints her portrait, a portrait of Argia Cassini, and on the piano a crystal glass of Picolit rings, and their lips touch and touch the marzipan and blackberries nestled in a warm Gorizia pastry. Argia has thick dark hair, writes Roberto Piazza, and she is twenty-one, the same age as Carlo. Argia Cassini is in the convoy that takes Elda, Carlo Michelstaedter’s sister, first to Mauthausen, then to Auschwitz, Roberto Piazza writes. When the Nazis arrest Argia Cassini and seize all of her property, writes Piazza, she entrusts her daughter forever to the care of her school and wartime friend Elsa Finzi. Roberto Piazza wishes to remind her, Haya Tedeschi, he writes, of her three compatriots, who were taken to Auschwitz that terrible night in November 1943, where Carlo’s eighty-year-old mother Emma and his eldest sister Elda die almost as soon as they arrive, while the third, Argia Cassini, the pianist, dies a year later, writes Roberto Piazza, and he wants her, his former maths teacher, to look for Professor Verzegnassi (he believes the man lives at Via Giovanni 1, if he is still alive) to tell him that he can trust his former pupil Roberto Piazza and send him the drawing of Carlo’s, which along with more of Carlo’s writings Professor Verzegnassi managed to preserve, through the war, from the Nazis, who were bent on destroying what they called degenerate art, because Roberto needs the drawing for the book he is designing, and he will return it to him personally as soon as he comes up to Gorizia, and he will write to him himself, all he needs is his teacher’s blessing, Roberto Piazza writes. He understands the fate of his teacher, Haya Tedeschi, and he urges her to comb through Carlo’s thoughts on persuasion and rhetoric, because in them she may find respite from her nightmares, but, of course, he is not advising her to kill herself. Small towns always have a contingent of chronically unhappy people, writes Roberto Piazza, and hence the general atmosphere of unhappiness leads to numerous suicides to which the weather conditions also contribute. In small towns people are always inclined to suicide. All of them have the feeling they are suffocating, because they are not able in any way to alter the situation they find themselves in. Bernhard says so, too, writes Roberto Piazza. He, Roberto Piazza, agrees with Carlo Michelstaedter that human life is formed of remorse, a guilty conscience, melancholy, boredom, fear, rage and suffering, and that all man’s endeavours show how much he, man, is a passive being who throughout his life re-works, revises and appends his own biography and the biographies of those around him, writes Roberto Piazza. Therefore he doesn’t blame her, his former teacher, for not knowing who was doing what and who was doing the killing at the San Sabba camp, while she, Haya Tedeschi, was going to the cinema and engaging in lovers’ trysts.

  An infernal messenger flew just now along the avenue

  to a chant of thugs; an orchestra pit,

  firelit and arrayed with swastikas,

  seized and devoured him, the windows,

  shabby and inoffensive, though adorned

  with cannon and war toys, are shuttered up,

  the butcher who laid berries on the snouts

  of his slaughtered goats has closed; the feast

  of the mild murderers still innocent of blood

  has turned into a foul Virginia reel of shattered wings,

  larvae on the sandbars, and the water rushes in

  to eat the shore and no-one’s blameless any more.

  So this is how Roberto Piazza wraps up his letter, with lines from Montale, as if she, Haya Tedeschi, doesn’t get it. Long after the war, and unti
l just a few years earlier, Haya Tedeschi had been reading all sorts of texts, even Michelstaedter; she read Heidegger and Wittgenstein; she studied the paintings of Kokoschka, Kirchner and Heckel, looking through those works for confirmation of her own rage at language, for her own revolt against the European logocentric tradition, which had proved to be deeply vacuous, if, indeed, vacuity has depth, seeking from these works endorsement for her campaign to confront language; out of many years of painful reckoning she emerged, faltering and mute, the loser. This much she sees. She is aware that her disdain for language subsides in a schism, much like a gaping wound in the middle of which swirls a terrifying silence, death transformed. Life is a delusion for those who function rhetorically, the scientist and merchant, the teacher, the priest and prophet, Michelstaedter says, and Haya agrees and wonders with him how to find again what has disappeared in the course of living, what has been lost, what perhaps never was, the nothing that begins to think, which says to itself I have my inner being, which I do not know. When a spirit no longer finds its identity anywhere, when everything it knows as constant, enduring, all values in their outward form disappear, it searches for the sole surviving identity, for the source of all values, the key to all valency. If the experience of historical events is, in essence, the experience of the self, then to possess oneself means to possess everything, Michelstaedter says, and Haya concurs. But self-awareness is an illusion, elusive and impossible to attain. Self-awareness leads to self-destruction.

  Haya senses that a little cemetery is sprouting in her breast with a jumble of tilting tombstones like the ones at the old Valdirosa burial ground; she feels as if the already rotten, damp and blackened crosses and faded stars are knocking against her ribs; they are crowded, the crosses, the stones, the stars seem to be growing in her breast, reaching her throat and choking her, so she says, I’m having trouble breathing. There is a need to look inside, set to rights the proliferating hotchpotch before it breaks through her armour, before she, like a gigantic hedgehog, continues along the paths of her everyday life, before this cemetery of hers in her breast collapses and in its place yawns a chasm at the bottom of which, in the dark, beats a tired heart. She can no longer say whose heart this is.

  In 1991 Haya Tedeschi is already retired, but fully in gamba. She goes off for walks, because the walks shorten her wait. She listens to symphonic music, because symphonic music has no words and everything that has no words is fine with Haya Tedeschi. She plays with mathematical formulas, turns them around and shifts them, comes up with new ones, remembers old ones, tries to tailor a new language using symbolic language. Words are quickly exhausted, Haya Tedeschi says. I no longer know what to do with them, she says

  Je suis né. Je suis né de l’ombre,

  je suis né dans l’ombre et mon désir

  fut longtemps qu’on ne m’arrache pas

  à l’ombre où je suis

  and says out loud the words of Pierre Goldman as if they are hers. One should speak with the hands, using the language of the deaf and dumb, Haya says, there would be fewer misunderstandings, the messages would be short and terse, she says, and starts moving her twisted fingers, gesticulating with her wrinkled palms as if shooing or summoning shadows. Then she laughs aloud and says Bah!

  Haya Tedeschi looks at the envelope sent to her by her former student Roberto Piazza, of whom she has no recollection. It is a thick envelope, bulging, and inside are only the dead. Haya Tedeschi shivered back then in 1991 and laid the envelope on the bottom of the red basket, as if lowering it into a grave. Now, in 2006, while she waits, while she sifts through the past as if opening dry beanpods from which the beans fall like sealed, enslaved little stories composed of images flitting by in flashes, while she digs through the red basket at her feet uncovering the crusty layers in the little piles of sealed lives, out slips the envelope, so she puts it on her lap and rocks it as if it is a stillborn child.

  It is January 1944, a Wednesday. A darkness is descending all wrapped in snow-white sparks, resembling the crystals flying into the La Gioia tobacco shop when the door opens, and like magic dust it settles on the golden-yellow wooden counter steeped in the fragrance of tobacco, the fragrance of honey and cherries, over which Haya, like Ada before her, with her index finger traces out her future. With a smile of closely held hope, Haya awaits the last customer that evening. A thirty-year-old German in a uniform comes into her tobacco shop. Oh, he is as handsome as a doll. The German already has the Polish nickname Lalka, but at this point, when she first sees the dashing German, Haya knows nothing of that, the dashing German tells her later, I am no Lalka, you are my Lalka. The German is tall and strong and oh, firm and gentle. The German takes out his Voigtländer Bessa, leans over the counter, looks deep into Haya’s green eyes and says Ein 120 Film, bitte. Ein Kodak, bitte, softly, as if whispering to her breathless by an open hearth—Strip off your clothes. So, after twenty-one years, when the love story of Ada Baar and Florian Tedeschi is already spent and falling away in tatters, the little brass bell on the door of the La Gioia tobacco shop announces the beginning of a new life, ding-a-ling, the beginning of a new love story in the Tedeschi family. And so begins the war romance of Haya Tedeschi and Kurt Franz, because the dashing German second lieutenant, S.S.-Untersturmführer, is named Kurt Franz.

  Kurt Franz is a passionate amateur photographer. From his Voigtländer Bessa jump all sorts of little black-and-white scenes, 45 x 60 millimetres; like, for instance, one shot from the Gorizia fortress in the spring of 1944, when Kurt takes a picture of his colleague Willi, after which the three of them, Kurt, Willi and Haya, go out for Kaiserfleisch at the Trattoria Leon d’Oro on Via Codelli. Kurt and Haya meet secretly, of course, in the private rooms of out-of-the-way inns, in the Gorizia suburbs, but they also go for a day’s excursion to Trieste when an engaging opera or operetta is playing, because Kurt likes music and after outings like that with Haya he is awash with a special tenderness. They go to see Lehár’s The Merry Widow, but also Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Verdi theatre. They take in a new film at the Casa Germanica and enjoy a good Apfelstrudel, because Kurt adores Apfelstrudel, because Apfelstrudel reminds him of his mother, whom he also reveres and loves, and Haya has nothing against sweets, but she does prefer panna cotta to Apfelstrudel and they did not offer panna cotta at the Casa Germanica at Via Nizza 15. They, Haya and Kurt, almost always go to matinees so that Haya can be back in Gorizia in time; so that no-one will suspect her passionate love, which, Haya knows, she needs to keep secret. Sundays, Kurt visits Franca Gulli, a violin teacher in Trieste, at Viale Sonnino, where he spends at most two hours playing simple, brief compositions by famous masters, such as a Bach minuet or the Brahms “Lullaby” (“Wiegenlied”), Op. 49, No. 4, or Gershwin’s “Summertime” (with Professor Gulli accompanying on the piano), or Shostakovich’s “Little March” from his pieces for children, because Kurt genuinely loves music. Haya, meanwhile, goes to church, each time to a different one. At church she makes a full confession, is given absolution, and then everything is fine. Kurt tells Haya all sorts of pretty tales. He talks the most to her about his dog Barry; his big beautiful mutt who looks like a St Bernard, but he had to leave it back in Poland, where he used to work at a park on the edge of a beautiful forest near a charming little railway station where there was a zoo with pheasants and rabbits, which he, Kurt, knew how to serve up like a master chef, because he was trained, among other things, as a cook, and where he took so many great photographs, which he keeps in a special photo album called “Schöne Zeiten”, meaning “The Good Times”, and under the title he writes “Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens”, meaning “The most wonderful years of my life”, although now, while he is with Haya, he says he’s no longer so sure they were.

  From Kurt Franz’s album, photographs given to Haya Tedeschi in Gorizia in 1944

  Kurt Franz on an outing with Haya near Gorizia in May 1944

  Kurt Franz, October 1937

  Kurt Franz with his mother in Düsseldorf, 1937

/>   Kurt’s beloved Barry, 1943

  In late March 1944 the Tedeschi family move to Milan. Florian gets a job through his contacts there. Being a capo ufficio in a firm engaged in the distillation of molasses seems like dignified work to Florian, compared to selling umbrellas at the Della Tre Venezie in Gorizia. Haya says I am not going. I need to look after the shop, and she stays with Aunt Letizia; in good hands, her mother believes. From Milan Haya’s sister Nora writes and calls. Roses are not blooming, it seems, for them there. The family arrive in Milan by train on a cold and rainy night just as the city is under air attack, the same way the Tedeschi family arrived in Venice after leaving Albania back then—ah, these repetitions, these wartime coincidences, Nora complains to Haya, and there they all perch on their suitcases, she, Nora, Paula, Orestes and Ada, they are drenched for hours at night in the pouring rain at the corner of Via Broletto and Via Bossi, waiting for Florian to bring the keys to a flat, and the bombs are falling, incendiary bombs, Mama Ada says, who is drunk as soon as night falls, people die from bombs like these, she says. The office, the distillery—whatever it is, where Papa works—is on the outskirts of town, all the way out of Milan, Nora writes, and they live in a house that has been allotted to them as refugees, which she, Nora, cannot understand, because the people around them are Italians, although there are plenty of Germans, too—so how can they be refugees? But Ada says things are like that in wartime: civilians are forever on the run, mostly going to where they have family, where they think they’ll be safe, and she, Nora, no longer knows who is “them” and who is “us”, she writes, because in Albania at first they weren’t refugees, then overnight they were, writes Nora. It’s not very nice—the house where they are living—writes Nora. They are on the second floor, and on the first floor are some crude people who speak no Italian and greet them in German with Heil! Maybe these people are refugees, too, writes Nora, there is always shooting going on, so none of them—she or Paula or Orestes—attend school, too dangerous, Papa Florian says, and she is already old for school anyway, she writes, soon she’ll be turning eighteen. Papa, Nora writes, has found her a place in “his” company, and she is already working there as a translator from the German and as a typist, so now every morning she goes with Papa on the local train to work. The Underwood typewriter is so big and cumbersome to type on, writes Nora. There are no dictionaries and she often asks the German soldiers for help. They seem to be everywhere, writes Nora, and they aren’t the least bit unpleasant, in fact, they are courteous, there are even good-looking men among them, just as Haya told her about how decent Kurt is. The trains are packed, the electricity often goes out, and they travel an hour or more to work every day, and the bombs are always dropping, writes Nora, and besides they do not have enough to eat, life was better in Gorizia, she writes. One day Paula took Florian’s bicycle, Florian bought a new bike, really light, aluminium, writes Nora, and she went into a field to steal a few potatoes, but they saw her so she ran off and now they do not have the bike any more, writes Nora, and they are all turning yellow from the carrots. In early May Nora writes that on 21 April she and Florian barely survived when they were on their way home from work, they had heard shooting all day, which was pretty normal, but there was something terrible going on at the train station, total chaos, people were saying that Milan had fallen into the hands of the partisans, in any case, writes Nora, the Germans seem to know they are losing the war, some are even deserting, and she and Papa Florian walked for five kilometres, and, sure enough, the partisans showed up and shoved people around, they were really rough, they had the people line up and walk towards Milan; and they, Nora and Florian, did not walk along in the middle of the road, they walked along the edge, by the ditch; and she saw dozens of dead bodies, writes Nora, mutilated bodies, actually, in the ditch, the handiwork of the partisans for sure; and she writes that she was amazingly lucky to be alive, because she had on her a membership card for the Fascist Republic of Salò, and if the partisans had found it they definitely would have killed her, but luckily they did not touch her, writes Nora, and she writes how the partisans during those days did many bad things, and then, thank God, the Allies got there. She almost started crying, writes Nora, when she saw how in the courtyard of a school they were shooting a fascist whom they’d caught. They stood him up against a wall, writes Nora, and gave this ten-year-old boy a gun—the boy was no older than ten, not a day over ten, like our Orestes, writes Nora—and ordered the boy to shoot, because he, the fascist, had killed the boy’s father. Shoot! they shouted, and the little boy did not know how, writes Nora, and all that, the shooting, ended badly: the boy shot and shot and the fascist kept not falling, he just bled more, then they killed a few Germans who wouldn’t surrender, right there in front of us. This is what Nora writes.