by Daša Drndic
When I was young I used to go mountain climbing, Aurelia says. Mountaineering is good for breathing. And it fortifies the will, Aurelia says.
In the coordinate system the parabola may hold an interesting position, Haya says. The ordinates of a parabola may be positive, plus and negative, minus, if the sign of the derivative of the parabola is only positive or only negative in a neighbourhood, then no extreme values can exist in that neighbourhood. Don’t mention mountaineering, that mountain discipline, Haya says. I do not like disciplines. I don’t even like cycling anymore.
The days do not unfurl, but neither do they trip over one another. Strangely, Haya does not get ill. Haya is a hale old woman. A small dental bridge with the upper-right first and second molars, (the other teeth are hers); cataract surgery on both eyes; her gall bladder removed; mild bronchial asthma (in spite of which she continues to smoke some fifteen cigarettes a day); a fractured tibia thirty years ago—that would be it. Of course, the functions of her body are slowed, diminished and brief, and a nasty itch plagues her in the early evenings: lower arm, upper arm, the left lower arm, then the right, Haya scratches and scratches and scratches, she holds her arms under a stream of cold water and looks, aghast, at the tracks of her fingernails on her thin, dry skin. Am I disappearing? she asks. Her sleep is light, her bloodflow inaudible, the beats of her heart short, like her steps; her vision and her dreams, yes, her dreams, are melting; only Haya’s wait grows and she is frightened that this wait of hers will spill over into nothing; that it will drain away, that soon it will whisper to her I am the wait that got tired, I am your lifeless wait and I’m off now, ciao.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Though she has had a computer for fifteen years now, Haya uses the Internet at the city library, it costs less. It’s all so simple, this Internet, Haya says to the librarians, who are surprised; she cannot see why the librarians are surprised. And so, three times a week, from eight to ten at the city library, Haya reads the newspapers on the Internet (mostly German, Italian and Slovenian), and sends letters to the International Red Cross, the Italian Red Cross, to the state and city and tracing services at home and abroad. Slightly hunched, bent at the waist, petite, grey-haired, with spectacles perched on the tip of her nose, her lips pursed and her chin held high, she peers at the monitor as if looking for spots to wipe away with a moistened finger. But they can’t be wiped away. What she comes up with, what she sees while she writes her electronic missives to known and unknown witnesses scattered around the world, to the tracers who are like truffle-hunting dogs, like burrowers through the past, becoming one herself, a bloodhound riffling through the rubbish heap of time, are nothing but gleams of lives among which is hers, gleams reduced to embers under the ashes of which writhe small truths, no longer needed by or essential to anyone. And, while Haya taps at the keys, Gorizia whispers Crazy Haya. And Haya asks, Is it time?
In June 2006 Haya is visited (after all) by a little dream, a quiet dream, so small and so quiet that Haya barely recognizes it.
on the street, barefoot and in the dark, haya goes to a public toilet. the floor of the toilet is awash with urine and faeces, she has nowhere to go, behind her the ground is caving in. to get to the toilet seat, haya wades through the excrement and stares at her belly, which swells before her eyes. i am calm, she says, although no-one knows who the father is, she says. later, haya returns to an old abandoned flat, then a man with a camera around his neck runs in to the flat and says: i am a spy. it is alright, i am pregnant, haya says, i’ll lean on your chest, she says. light brown freckles come out on her temples and forehead. ada springs up from somewhere, all dripping in urine. haya says, mama, now we look alike, but ada only smiles and jerks her head. then ada says, here, haya, read this. on a page torn from pravda are written the words, józsef nagy: “the truth is hard to find”
On Monday, 3 July, 2006, Haya receives a letter from the International Red Cross, or rather the International Tracing Service (I.T.S.) in Bad Arolsen. This letter, as Haya realizes immediately, is not a Christmas or New Year’s card, because it is not winter but summer. The Red Cross, in fact their tracing service, in fact Mrs Helga Mathias, who signs the report, informs her that a copy has been found in Bad Arolsen of a baptism certificate which matches the one Haya sent them with a black-and-white photograph of an infant, on 2 February, 1946, asking for their help in finding her son Antonio Tedeschi, born 31 October, 1944, in Görz, then part of the Adriatisches Küstenland, within the borders of the Third Reich. Helga Mathias writes that in this letter Haya describes how her son Antonio Tedeschi disappeared on 13 April, 1945, but Haya cannot grasp why Mrs Helga Mathias is repeating what Haya wrote sixty years before, because Haya remembers every word of what she wrote to the International Tracing Service sixty years before; after all, children do not go missing every day, the disappearance of children is not such a commonplace event. The disappearance (of children) is something one remembers for a lifetime, isn’t it? Despite the fact that the baptism certificate is incomplete, writes Helga Mathias, and as the mother of the child, Haya Tedeschi, which we are assuming to be you, was not wed to the father of the child, S.S.-Untersturmführer Franz Kurt, born on 17 January, 1914, in Düsseldorf, we gave your petition serious consideration, writes Helga Mathias from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen. Helga Mathias adds that the petition was in a misplaced box with documents, untypically preserved, about the secret Lebensborn project, with it a letter from Father Carlo Baubela from Görz, today Gorizia, who baptized the child and then handed a copy of the document about the birth of Haya’s son to an unknown person, and that with the letter from Carlo Baubela they found an official order from the Central Office of Reich Security under the supervision of the Ministry for Internal Affairs in Berlin (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or R.S.H.A.), signed by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-S.S. and Minister, who was in charge of the Ministry at the time. Apparently, according to Heinrich Himmler’s directive, writes Helga Mathias, “a male child of Aryan descent, with the temporary name of Antonio Tedeschi is to be sent to Schloss Oberweis near the town of Gmunden, region of Traunsee, in the former Austria”. Since most of the files holding documentation from most of the Lebensborn homes throughout the former Third Reich were destroyed just before the capitulation of Germany, Helga Mathias writes, it is highly unlikely that we will find any information pertaining to Schloss Oberweis. For now we are assuming that your son was given up for adoption to a German or Austrian family, and that his name was changed at the time. For additional information, writes Helga Mathias, please contact the Red Cross of your country at CROCE ROSSA ITALIANA, Servizio Affari Internazionali, Ufficio Ricerche, Via Toscana 12, 00187 Roma.
For sixty-two years she has been waiting.
If she knew how to pray, Haya would now say to the sky:
Thou bringest all who are dispersed by war
The sheep thou bringest home, to rest:
the child thou bringest to the mother’s breast.
but Haya does not know how to pray,
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
so all she says is
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Haya sits and rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of a building from the time of Austria-Hungary in the old part of Old Gorizia. The rocking chair is old and as she rocks, it whimpers.
Is that the chair whimpering or is it me? she asks the deep emptiness, while she turns over the letter from Helga Mathias, and lying around her everywhere are lives which have dropped like old L.P.s that have played what they have to play. Photographs, papers, posters, letters and little objects from which oozes a thick, sticky silence. And the sole remaining snapshot, cracked, on which the infant Antonio Tedeschi’s face is fractured, as if in a broken mirror.
Then Haya says, The red basket is empty. I have cleared out the years. I see the bottom.
Space has turned into time - Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit. Oh, daughters of the Soča, the e
ssence of reality lies in its multiplicity. Every convergent series is limited. The number a is the limes, the border value of the function f when x tends toward a, lim (x) = A, oh yes.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Daughter of woman,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . .
Yes, a heap of broken images.
So, Don Baubela did not keep his word. He betrayed Haya’s secret; which may turn out to have been for the best in the end, which may have pointed to a trace, which may have contributed to the end of the story. For sixty-two years Haya Tedeschi has been waiting.
On Via Aprica, where until recently there was a butcher’s shop, a café bar called Joy has opened facing the building in which Haya lives. What a coincidence, Haya says, while through the window she sees the first guests nibble at their antipasti with slivers of salmon and beads of black caviar. Her stationery shop Gioia, this café Joy, the letter from Mrs Helga Mathias, as if the path is narrowing as it approaches the jumping-off point from which a person vanishes.
haya is riding a bicycle through the woods. the green leaves shine so brightly that beams bounce off them and penetrate her skin, crawl under her eyelids and pour over her ageing organs, wrap them in the fragrance of the soca. the wheels spin ever faster, her eyes fill with wind, a strange song floats in her head, a chorale soft and sunny. what a stupid song, says haya, angels don’t exist. she keeps missing the pedals, a fist in haya’s breast tightens while she clutches the handlebars, the path is white and uneven, the wheels spin quickly, quicker and quicker. haya lets go of the handlebars, haya flings her arms open in the wood, lifts her feet from the pedals, spreads her legs towards the woods, raises her head to the sky, flies, she flies through the rhomboid images of a kaleidoscope. there in the corner, squinting through this cardboard box of interwoven charms, haya sees her life as it crouches and waits, as it stares at her with dry, wide-open (lidless) eyes. commotion, in her head commotion. via aprica narrows to a glowing arrow. the arrow flies and embeds itself in Haya’s eye, turns into a tiny globe reflecting the sign: Joy
Those roads were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, agonies, resurrections,
days and nights,
half dreams and dreams,
every obscure instant of yesterday
and of the world’s yesterdays,
the firm sword of the Dane and the moon of the Persian,
the deeds of the dead,
shared love, words,
Emerson and snow and so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my centre,
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.
I squeeze shut my lidless eyes
and wait.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
On Friday, 30 June, 2006, I leave Salzburg for Gorizia.
It is night. The train glides along, lit from the inside and nearly empty. I move through the black silence, through the fragrance of summer, through a silence which envelops itself, which pours slowly and lazily across the earth and sky, everywhere around us.
A woman sits opposite me, smiling as she looks out the window into the dense nothing glued to the windowpane, into a breath that sways behind us, which follows us like a wind-borne shroud. Going to Gorizia? the woman asks me. Why?
I say nothing.
The woman has on heavy shoes, winter shoes, she is wearing them on bare feet with no laces. The woman has firm hands, thick hair, black, and she’s about forty. There is neglect on her face.
I have four voices I recognize, the woman says, three which are someone else’s and one which is mine.
Oh, I want to say, just don’t speak of voices, not of voices.
Now my voices are quiet, the woman says, so we can talk, she says, but I don’t feel like talking, in my lungs, like colourful ribbons, my voices are dancing mischievously, thin, wheezy and cacophonic voices, which clench my breathing, and I feel like beating myself hysterically on the chest in order to dislodge these intruders and send them fluttering off into the night. I am not in the mood to talk, I say.
Are you originally from Gorizia? continues the woman, as if she doesn’t hear what I am saying, and I tell her I don’t know. I don’t know, I say to the woman who is sitting opposite me and travelling with me to Gorizia and who irritates me, because I don’t want to talk, I don’t feel like talking, and this woman keeps asking, she keeps asking, It remains to be seen whether I am from Gorizia or not, I tell the woman, and she goes on as if I hadn’t said a word. If you are from Gorizia, she says, I may know you. Many people in Gorizia know each other, and I tell her that I doubt it, that I truly doubt our paths have ever crossed anywhere, at any time. I doubt it, I say, and she concludes philosophically, Reality is intertwined and boundless, reality is indivisible like my voices. And coincidences are rare, says that woman on the train to me. Reality is a skein that knits us in, entangles us, says this woman who is bothering me by this time, and then, thank goodness, we arrive in Gorizia and I bid her goodbye.
I stay at the Palace Hotel at Corso Italia 63, for 31 euros a night. The row of trees my window looks out on is dense and deeply green. I ask them to bring to my room a portion of gubana goriziana and a bottle of Picolit. I will lie in the half-dark and caress the golden-yellow thickness with my tongue, the fragrant heft of that discreetly chilled, discreetly dignified Picolit, which they bring me, this is what I have in mind. The taste and fragrance of dried figs, honey, vanilla, wild flowers, peaches, acacia, red and black berries, the warmth and softness of dry-sweet acidity, the tartness of the little oak barrels in which the hundred-year-old fragrance of the Gorizia forests will course through my body, slide to the tips of my toes and back into my breath, to the depth of my eye sockets in which waters of the past are sloshing like blurry mirrors with portraits of my unknown ancestors. Picolit is a miraculous wine. One shouldn’t drink it frequently. Picolit is a delicate wine, a wine of the European nobility, the exclusive nectar of meditation, always produced in small quantities. Picolit is an ancient wine born during the Roman Empire, and it preserves its history in the records of Antonio Zanoni from 1767. I know all sorts of facts about Picolit, a heap of useless details. Later, Picolit imparts serenity and a quiet joy to the already peaceful aristocracy of Germany, France and England. Picolit is an ever-changing but perfect symphony, a unique jewel, which will bring me, I believe soundlessly, painlessly now, after such a long wait, to the scarred past, mine and that of my family, so alien to me. Picolit must be imbibed in solitude, because Picolit is made by courageous vintners for refined palates. So much for Picolit.