Trieste

by Daša Drndic

  I, too, have train-station nightmares, train-station nightmares, nightmares, frightening dreams, repeats Haya, while she digs around in the red basket, then finds a little photograph that, back in 1944, slid in—she doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know how, how did it slide in?—among the pictures that S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz gave her. Here it is, she says.

  On 31 October, 1944, at about 6 p.m., Ada’s sister, Haya’s aunt, Letizia Puhaz, shouts: Fanny, run and fetch Teresa from Via Caporetto! At 8.17 p.m. Teresa Cavalieri, a midwife from Via Caporetto 51, delivers Haya Tedeschi’s baby. Antonio “Toni” Tedeschi comes into the world.

  Kurt Franz sees his son twice. In late December, leaning over the counter at La Gioia, Kurt Franz twiddles a lock of Haya’s light-brown hair between his index finger and his ring finger, leans in to her face and whispers: My little Jewess, we can’t go on like this. Oh, yes, I know, Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name. Besides, my fiancée is waiting for me at home. Heinrich Himmler, Minister of the S.S. Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt has finally granted me permission to wed. I am leaving for Düsseldorf at Christmastime, and when I come back, I will not be in touch. Please do not ask for me.

  This is when Haya seeks out Don Baubela. Antonio Toni is baptized as every good Catholic should be, in the presence of Letizia and Laura Puhaz and Teresa the midwife, he is entered into the church books with his father’s name, yes, Kurt Franz, and is given the mother’s surname, Tedeschi. All of this should remain a secret, Haya says to Don Baubela. The times are risky, she says. Don Carlo Baubela probably says not a word, because that is the way of priests. Don Baubela dies in 1946, having lived to more than eighty. Gorizia believes that Antonio’s father has died in combat, but in whose army? On whose side? This doesn’t interest many. The times are murky.

  Gorizia is a small town. Nevertheless.

  On Friday, 13 April, 1945, Haya takes Antonio Toni, as usual, to the Duchessa Anna d’Aosta Asilo Nido in Via Veneto, in other words to a nursery where he is cared for by Iolanda Visintin, a friend of her mother Ada’s from elementary school days. At the front door the postman says, You have a letter. Your parents are sending you money from Milan. Sign here. When Haya turns around, Toni’s pram is empty. There is no-one walking along Via Veneto. Not a single passer-by. The morning is brisk, sunny, and the air is clear after several days of driving rain; the trees are shyly blooming in white and pink. The postman and Haya stare, appalled, at how this magic trick has happened. And so it is that, five months after his birth, Antonio Toni Tedeschi disappears, suddenly and quietly, as if he had never lived.

  Oh yes, Haya searches for Antonio high and low, high and low. Gorizia is on its feet. The police investigate, dispatches fly, phones jangle, tears well, chaos reigns in her mind. The nights do not pass. The days do not pass. Time grows like yeast, time swells, then one day it overflows, pours out of Haya’s breast, clambers up on to a merry-go-round and off it flies. Nothing could be done.

  History decides to hide, to go underground for a spell. I need a break, says History, turns its back on the here and now, sweeps up all its rattles, leaving a huge mess behind, a hill of rubbish, vomit everywhere, and with a satanic cackle, witch-like, it soars heavenward. On Saturday, 28 April the partisans kill Mussolini and Clara Petacci at Mezzegra and on Sunday they hang them head down on a gas pump at an Esso petrol station at Piazzale Loreto in Milan, somehow gauging this at precisely the same moment that Hitler swears his fidelity to Eva Braun “until death do us part”. On Monday, 30 April, 1945, Adolf and Eva kill themselves; Dachau is liberated by the Americans; and on Tuesday, 1 May the Yugoslav 4th Army and the Slovenian 9th Corps march into Trieste. Who has the time to look for one stolen child?

  In 1946 Ada comes back to Gorizia with Paula and Orestes from Milan, and Florian and Nora go off to Salò, where old Tedeschi and his second wife Rosa have come through the war essentially unscathed. They burn their Fascist Party membership booklets, although they needn’t have; no-one asks them for anything.

  After the war there are no heroes, the dead are forgotten immediately, pipes up Jean Giono. The widows of heroes marry living men, because these men are alive and because being alive is a greater virtue than being a dead hero. After a war, says Giono, there are no heroes, there are only the maimed, the crippled, the disfigured, from whom women avert their eyes, he says. When a war ends, everyone forgets the war, even those who fought in it. And so it should be, says Giono. Because war is pointless, and there should be no devotion for those who have dedicated themselves to the pointless, he says.

  Listen, Romain Rolland says, war is not over, nothing is over; humankind is in fetters.

  Old Paolo Tedeschi lives in a neo-Baroque villa on the shore of Lake Garda, but he is not at peace. The words Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name pound in his head throughout the war; they press against his chest. When events reach fever pitch, when Paolo Tedeschi feels they may reach fever pitch, he slips into hospital where his friend Dr Armando Bosi sets him up in the intensive-care unit. There, in intensive care, Paolo Tedeschi gets vitamins intravenously, a lovely view of the hospital garden and a sense of the seasons passing. When the birds chirp Paolo Tedeschi listens to the birdsong. When rain falls he listens to the patter and it lulls him to sleep. Then he is given a laxative and says, Ah, this, too, will end. Paolo’s stays in the hospital are brief and well rehearsed. After them, he goes home heartened and stronger. Paolo’s sons Sergio and Walter take their mother’s surname, Brana (after the war they take back their father’s, Tedeschi). In 1944 they report to the Italian branch of the German Army and manage mini-submarines, which attack the Allied forces. Paolo’s youngest son Ugo, otherwise a flautist, crosses over into neutral Switzerland before September 1943 to the little town of Untersiggenthal in the Aargau canton, and entertains the beer drinkers on a second-hand accordion in a local tavern. In the mid-1950s he sends his parents a postcard from the Gripsholm translatlantic Swedish-American ocean liner, writing that he is sailing on the Gothenburg-New York line, playing in the ship’s orchestra. In 1954 the Gripsholm is rechristened the Berlin, but Ugo no longer writes. Catholicized Jew Paolo Tedeschi dies in 1948, and his second wife, Rosa Brana, a Catholic born and bred, dies a year later. Paolo’s eldest son Florian remarries in 1963. Walter and Sergio find work in a nearby liqueur factory. Nora starts her own family.

  As if there had never been a war.

  Years follow in which deaths are what is remembered, some gentle and quiet, anticipated, peacetime deaths, some violent and maybe unjust. Haya attends the funerals of her closest family as if going off to shallow confessions from which she lugs back to Gorizia her bundles of deaf nausea and second-hand incredulity. Paula dies of cancer in Trieste in 1963; Florian, on the shore of Lake Garda in 1972. After Orestes graduates from secondary school in 1952 he abandons Gorizia. All of you are full of shit! he shouts, and as a member of the Red Brigades he dies in a Roman prison on 17 March, 1978, of a heart attack a day after he takes part in the assassination of Aldo Moro; while Nora, as a happy housewife, closes her eyes with God’s blessing in Brescia in 1990.

  Ada is the first to go.

  Ada drinks more in Gorizia. She drinks so much, especially in the afternoons, that she can no longer manoeuvre herself downstairs. She falls. She has cuts all over, especially on her face. Later they treat her at the hospital, stitch her up. And so the years pass. Ada’s face is scribbled with scars and the visible traces of surgical sutures, the knots tied to close her open wounds. Ada looks more and more like a patch, a rag, totally unusable. She often cries for no reason. Her words jumble into long, snotty, garbled sequences, which she swipes at with the back of her hand, but fails. She finds it hard to bring the fork to her mouth. Her food dribbles on to her bosom. Her clothing is covered in greasy stains. She is soiled and unkempt, the situation, in general, is serious.

  So they commit Ada to the psychiatric ward of Gorizia hospital, where she decants absinthe, grappa, vodka or any alcoholic beverage she can lay her hands on, into perfume flask
s, which, with great effort and cunning, she tucks into toilet cisterns, pillow cases, other people’s bags, through which she rummages frantically at night, barefoot and urine-soaked.

  At this point, in 1953, Haya begins to study mathematics in Trieste.

  Ada gets to know Umberto Saba at the hospital and they have long conversations, all sorts of conversations, while both of them stand, elbows on the sill, at a tall window with iron bars and sniff the fresh Gorizia air. Later, in 1961, when prominent psychiatrist Franco Basaglia comes to Gorizia, the iron bars are removed, the front door is left unlocked, the patients stroll around the gardens, some slowly as if dreaming, some spry, on their way home. Ada wears two sprigs of white oleander behind her ear and sings, then, when Basaglia comes to the hospital, as he indulges her little alcoholic binges. But by the time Basaglia gets there, Saba is gone. Saba dies in 1957, Ada dies five years later.

  It’s nice here, Ada tells Haya when she comes to visit. Sad people live here. Jews, too. Umberto speaks of Trieste, where there is also plenty of sorrow, and

  next to the hill there’s a graveyard

  in ruins, which funerals pass

  and where no-one’s been buried for as long

  as I can remember

  says Umberto,

  my ancestors lie here,

  he says, and he is a Jew, too, Ada tells her.

  Umberto says, Trieste is a pungent and melancholy city, the strangest city, Umberto says, a city of boyish adolescence and rude charm, so he says, says Ada, then he takes me for a stroll, and we amble around Trieste, this isn’t the Trieste we lived in when Florian was serving coffee at the Piazza Unità, this Trieste is serenely innocent, so Umberto says, says Ada, it is a lovely world, Umberto says, and he paints that world for me, he paints me suppressed longing and aching love, so he says, I’ll paint you unspoken longing and aching love and exhausted words fiore-amore in that murky madness, Umberto says, in that madness in which vainly discordant voices reverberate, he says, this is a lovely Trieste, not the Trieste we fled, Ada says.

  Where I dreamed of patent-leather shoes, and never got them, Haya jumps in, but Ada doesn’t hear, Ada is ambling around Trieste with Umberto, and Haya is skipping after her.

  There, Ada says, we go off to the Ponterosso, Umberto and I, and we look at the birds, because Umberto likes birds, Ada says, and now I like birds too, though the stuffed birds Grandfather Angelo had were frightening, their dead glassy eyes, Ada says, and he takes me, Umberto, to Via Riborgo or Via Pondares, I forget, to the house where he was born, in what was the Jewish ghetto then, but those houses are gone now, the house I was born in is gone, Ada says, today that’s an altogether different house—houses are disappearing, Haya, people, too, now I see—and we make the rounds of the trattorias Umberto remembers, and we have a grappa at the Alla Bella Isoletta, I am a little island, too, Haya, a barren little island, left behind, but it wasn’t always like that, no. Then we go to where Carolina was born, she was Umberto’s wife, and Umberto talks about her a lot, and he talks a lot about Lina—Linuccia—he uses pet names for her, I never used pet names for you, Haya. We were always in a hurry. We had no time for tenderness. I don’t know how that happened, that we were left without time. What would I have called you? Haya, Hayuccia, Hayichen? asks Ada and starts to sob, then through the tears, she says, You could have brought me another couple of bottles. These bottles are so small. They are very little, these bottles you bring me. And Umberto ran away, you know, just like we did, he ran away from fascism, so he tells me,

  We ran into fascism, Haya interrupts, but Ada doesn’t hear.

  and he hid in attics. I hid everywhere, Umberto says, in attics in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, says Umberto, says Ada, and she also says, The next time you come, bring some ampoules of morphine for Umberto and little bottles of rum for me, and when I die, bury me at Valdirosa, over there, in Slovenian soil. And he, Umberto, talks to me, you know, says Ada, he tells me about train stations we didn’t know about, and he asks me,

  Stations, do you remember? At night, full

  of final farewells, unchecked weeping,

  crammed with people the transport takes.

  The order “move” given by the

  sob of a trumpet;

  and ice, ice around your heart.

  but I don’t remember, Haya, I don’t, says Ada, maybe it’s the drink. And, you know, says Ada, Umberto’s last name isn’t Saba anyway, though that is exactly what he is called, Umberto Saba, because his name is actually Umberto Poli. Did you know that? Though he might have been Umberto Coen. He could have, says Ada. He could have been Coen, because his mother was Jewish and her last name was Coen, not his father’s, his father’s was Poli, says Ada, and he left them, Umberto and his Mama Rahela, a nice name, Rahela, says Ada, Jewish, she says, and then Umberto declared, I will take the name Saba, because none of this matters anyway, you know, what your last name is, he said, though I’m not so sure it doesn’t matter, I am not so sure, and that is how Umberto takes the last name Saba, because he had a nanny whose name was Pepa and he loved her a lot and she was Slovenian, like my Mama Marisa, my Mama Marisa from Gorizia, your grandmother, Haya, who also disappeared. Oh Haya, how people vanish. It’s so painful, and Umberto says there are no unborn or dead, there is only the living life for eternity; pain that passes, happiness that stays, Umberto says, whose last name is Saba, though really his last names are Poli and Coen. There is pain that passes, Umberto says, and so it is that your pain will pass, Haya, and so it is that Rahela sent Pepa packing, and Pepa’s last name was Sabaz, and then Umberto declared, That will be my last name, after my Pepa from Gorizia, because it doesn’t matter anyway what your name is, says Umberto, says Ada. Sometimes he doesn’t feel like talking, Umberto, Ada says, so he, Umberto, recites poems about birds for me, and we look at the trees and I listen to his poems about birds, and he recites for me his poems about birds, and I long to be a bird, and Umberto says,

  the leaving, this year, of the swallows

  because of a thought my heart will squeeze,

  and he says,

  my loneliness will be bereft of swallows,

  and love at my advanced age will freeze,

  says Umberto, and then we go on looking into the garden, which is shadowy, and we observe those trees, and then I say to Umberto, Look at how shadowy this garden is. We could hide out there, if they allowed us to walk around it sometimes, around the shadowy garden, and he says, There is no shadow where my tiredness could find shelter. But I am tired, too, Ada says, and she says, Haya, don’t forget to bring me rum. They think they’ll cure me. They will not cure me. I don’t want to be cured, because I’m not ill, but Umberto says, If you feel like drinking, drink, they won’t cure you here. Though it isn’t bad here, though I would like to go for a walk, maybe even sing. For the time being I sing softly, more to myself, then I ask Umberto, Am I crazy? because sometimes it seems to me that all this, this life, my life, your life, that all this is a serious madness, but Umberto says, says Ada, Umberto says that Dr Weiss says (and I trust Dr Weiss, Umberto says), Dr Weiss says, Craziness is a dream from which a person doesn’t awake. That is what Dr Weiss says, Umberto says. Haya, bring some rum for sure. If there’s no rum, buy gin, in a little bottle, a mini-bottle, in several little bottles, and bring Umberto morphine. He sometimes sits and whispers a poem that isn’t his. He whispers a poem that is called “Solitudine ”; then I see that everything is different from what it seems, because he sits and whispers: