G.

Nuša considered that G. was unlike most other men. She was apparently alone and yet he did not approach her as though she were a prostitute. He said he was Italian but he was polite to her. (He must be, she decided, an Italian from far away.) He was very well dressed yet he suggested that they should sit down on a stone seat together. He said the seat was over two thousand years old. He did not try to touch her except when he took her hand to help her up the steps to the seat. (She was prepared to shout as soon as they sat down but there was no need.) I come here every day at this time, he said, why do you come here? She was about to say she had come with her brother when it suddenly occurred to her that he might be a police agent. I come here, he continued, because I hate Christian tombs. This remark mystified her. Then he spoke normally about the weather and Trieste and the war.

After a while he asked her where she came from. The question seemed harmless and she told him she was born in the Karst. In that case, he said, please say something to me in Slovene. She said in Slovene: It is sunny today. He asked her to say something longer. She said: Most Italians despise our language. She said this loudly, with a certain defiance in her voice. She wondered whether he could understand, but he continued to smile. Say something more, he asked, tell me a story or whatever comes into your mind. She asked him if he could understand what she said. He smiled directly at her. I promise you, he said, not a word; your secrets are safe. She could think of nothing to say. He waited and then he looked at her with raised eyebrows to express surprise at her silence. She said in Slovene: You see the cat over there in the grass?

She stopped and put a hand to the shoulder of her blouse. She had large arms and hands. When either walking or sitting, the way she held her shoulders and neck gave the impression that her whole body was leaning very slightly backwards. In another life this would have given her a somewhat imperious air.

It is not a place I like, she said. I would not come here by myself. She stopped, alarmed that she had inadvertently betrayed the fact that she had come here with her brother. Then she remembered that she was talking in Slovene. If I found one of these broken stones in one of my uncle’s fields, I would say it was disgusting and throw it away. I have heard people say they are worth a lot of money. But if they are worth a lot of money, why do they leave them here lying in the grass? If they were precious, they would have taken them to Vienna. Over there by the arch there are several plum trees, she continued, people say if the war goes on the city will starve; they will take everything to Vienna.

You speak beautifully, he told her. It is our language, she said, but she had to say it in Italian. He asked her where she worked. In a factory. What do you make? It is a jute mill, she replied. Have you worked there long? Three months. It smells of fish which is bad. Why fish? It is the oil used on the jute to make it soft and mixed with the water.

As they talked, different suspicions occurred to her. Again, that he was a police agent for the Austrians. That he was mad—this garden made her think of madness. That he intended to offer her a job as a servant in his house. (She would never accept this.) That he was a ‘friend’ from abroad who was waiting to make contact with her brother.

Her brother, Bojan, was somewhere else in the overgrown garden of the Museo Lapidario. Since his return he had come here every Sunday, and sometimes she accompanied him. He came to meet his friends because the museum garden was usually deserted and on Sundays there was no entrance fee. They called it Hölderlin’s garden, and Bojan explained to Nuša that Hölderlin was a German poet who loved Greece and wrote an epic about a Greek patriot, a great hero, who took part in a rising against the Turks, like the Serbs had done, but that Hölderlin lived too long and had gone mad. A broken stone foot, always on its side in the grass, and a child’s white body without arms, propped against a wall, made the German poet’s madness more credible to Nuša.

At a time when national independence has become or is becoming a conscious issue, one may find in an undeveloped and colonized society, within one family and even within one generation, extraordinary differences of knowledge and sophistication; yet such differences do not necessarily constitute a barrier. The one who has received a higher education at the hands of the imperial power (for there is no other education available) is aware of how consistently his own people’s history and culture have been denied, and he values in his own family the vestiges of the traditions which have been suppressed; at the same time the other members of the family may see in him a leader against their foreign oppressors whom until now they have only been able to fear and hate dumbly. Educated and ignorant share the same ideals. The difference between them becomes a proof of the injustice they have suffered together and of the rightness of those ideals. Ideas become inseparable from aspirations.

Nuša was taught to read by her brother, who was two years older, when she was twelve. At that time she lived in the village where her father was a peasant.

The Karst is composed of high, hard limestone ridges and much of the land is uncultivable. It is a mineral landscape, offered up to the sky without much covering. The rock is porous and there are many caves. She remembered her brother drawing a map which showed all the caves he knew. He gave each one the name of one of his friends: Kajetan, Edvard, Rudi, Tomaz. The chasms, gulleys and loose rocks of the Karst make you think of the remains of a city constructed without geometry or man. On the coast where the ridges of limestone descend to the sea, there is the modern city of Trieste, most of it built in the 1840s to realize the dream of Baron Bruck, the Minister of Finance in Vienna, who needed a large southern port for his proposed German-speaking ‘Empire of Seventy Millions’. Between outcrops and steep slopes of scrub, there are small hidden valleys and hollows, painstakingly cultivated as fields and vineyards.

Nuša’s father had three cows and he sold fruit and flowers to the markets in Trieste. Through the help of a local schoolmaster, Bojan obtained a place in the Realgymnasium in the city. When Nuša was sixteen her mother died. The father was disconsolate and Nuša was unable to take her mother’s place; she was moody and her father accused her of being too talkative. (Her brother had encouraged her to talk even when nothing practical depended upon it, but in this, unlike her reading, nobody else in the village encouraged her.) The following year, 1913, her father died. She went to work in Trieste as a maid for an Italian family.

After 1920 when Trieste was Italian and the Fascists had forbidden the Slovene language to be used in any public situation, an Italian doctor was asked: But how can the peasants explain their symptoms to you if they don’t know Italian? The doctor replied: A cow doesn’t have to explain its symptoms to a veterinary surgeon.

Nuša’s spoken Italian improved but she left the family and found a job in a warehouse. Bojan went to the School of Commerce in Ljubljana where he earned his living as a waiter by day and studied at night. When he received his diploma he went to work in Vienna for a firm which imported non-ferrous metals. Ever since attending the School of Commerce in Ljubljana he had been a member of a small, clandestine group of students and secondary-school pupils associated with the Young Bosnians.

Two months earlier, in March 1915, he had returned to work in the Trieste branch of the firm.

The sight of his sister sitting on a kind of throne beside an unknown, conspicuously well-dressed man, shocked Bojan. He had not expected anybody else to be there. He had pictured his sister walking slowly by herself among the fruit trees. In addition, this man was morally unprepossessing. He might be an Austrian (Bojan was too far away to hear what kind of Italian he spoke). He was obviously rich. He had a cunning, disenchanted face. Seated together on the carved stone seat raised up on a dais, overhung by a fig tree, the two of them looked like characters in an illustrated story of some cheap Viennese magazine. Their difference of class, compounded with the fact that they were man and woman, precluded any innocent interpretation. The degree to which the man’s clothes were spotless and elegant was an index of his inner corruption; just as his sister’s skirt and blouse and the scarf tied round her head were signs, despite her own will, of her easy availability. Bojan tried to argue that Nuša might have a good reason for talking with such a man; yet the way the man regarded her was too eloquent to be ignored. The fact that his sister could provoke such looks made him angry. He asked himself how she had lived during the years he was away. She was too large, he thought: she filled her clothes too obviously, it was a form of immodesty. Why was she so large? Why did she continue to grow large long after most girls stop? He could not avoid the suspicion that it was a question of will. In accordance with a precept of the Young Bosnians, Bojan had vowed to abstain from sexual relations and he knew how important it was to develop the will. She did not wish sufficiently strongly to preserve her innocence. Her innocence as a girl, when he taught her to read, had become fixed in his mind as an ideal. Caught between his anger and an onrush of tenderness released by the memory of his sister’s soul, which could not have entirely changed, he ran forward into the detestable, cheap, soulless illustration. He ran lightly on his feet, like a messenger who may have a long distance before him. On reaching the steps he did not mount them, but came to a halt, stood like a soldier and addressed the man in formal Italian: You must forgive us, sir, but I and my sister are already late. Then in Slovene he said: Nuša, please come immediately.

She rose and followed her brother.

The Young Bosnians named themselves after La Giovane Italia, formed by Mazzini in 1831 to fight for an independent republican Italy. The aim of the Young Bosnians was to liberate the Southern Slavs (in what is now Yugoslavia) from the domination of the Hapsburgs. Groups were strongest in Bosnia and Herzogovina—particularly after these two provinces were annexed by Austro-Hungary in 1908; but they also existed in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slovenia. They were terrorists and their principal political weapon was assassination.

The assassination of a foreign tyrant or his representative served two purposes. It reaffirmed the natural law of justice. It demonstrated that even crimes committed in the name of order and progress would not go forever unavenged: crimes of coercion, exploitation, oppression, false testimony, intimidation, administrative indifference. But above all, the crime of denying a people their identity. The crime of compelling a people to judge themselves by the criteria of their oppressors and so to find themselves inferior, helpless, and wanting. The justice of natural law demanded that the innumerable victims of these crimes in the past be redeemed. The act of political assassination might also rouse the living and make them realize that the power of the Empire was not absolute, that death, for once serving justice and not indifferent to it, could question that power. If the example of the assassin was followed by the mass of his people, they would rise up against their foreign oppressors and throw them out. To do this was no more impossible than killing a tyrant in public in the street.

‘There is no duty more sacred in the world,’ wrote Mazzini, ‘than that of the conspirator who sets out to avenge humanity and to become an apostle of natural law.’

On 2 June 1914 Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, was shot dead with his wife, as they drove through Sarajevo in an open limousine, by Gavrilo Princip, a Young Bosnian of nineteen.

Six other Young Bosnians were in the crowd waiting to assassinate the archduke. For different reasons five of them failed to act. But the sixth, Nedeljko Cabrinovič, threw a bomb. It exploded behind the royal car wounding several people in the crowd but leaving the heir presumptive unhurt. Cabrinovič tried to kill himself on the spot by taking poison and jumping into the river. The dose of poison was too weak. Hauled out of the river, he was asked who he was. I am a Serbian hero, he replied.

Earlier the same morning Cabrinovič went to a photographer’s shop and had his portrait taken with a school friend. He ordered six prints of the photograph. They would be ready in an hour. He asked his friend to send the photographs later the same day to addresses which he gave him. At the trial—where there were twenty-five accused—the Judge was perplexed by this story of the photographs.

I thought posterity, explained Cabrinovič, should have a photo of me taken on that day.

One of the photographs was sent to a certain Vuzin Runič in Trieste. Cabrinovič had worked in Trieste in a printer’s shop until October 1913. He had left Trieste saying: You’ll hear of me again. Wait and see what happens when certain people with red stripes down their trousers and helmets with feathers on their heads come to Sarajevo!

Shortly after his return to Trieste, Bojan took this photograph out of his wallet and asked Nuša if she knew who it was of. She shook her head. Then he told her his name. And now, Bojan said, he is dying, dying in chains of cold and damp and starvation. The conditions where he is are so bad that even the gaolers fall ill there. His chains weigh ten kilograms. At night there’s ice on the floor of the cell. Gavrilo is there too. But the prisoners are in solitary confinement day and night. Nedeljko was willing to die. We are all willing to die. Why did they not execute him? Because our imperial and royal majesty prefers his prisoners to die slowly in agony.

Nuša saw a photograph of two young men in dark suits and stiff white collars. They wore the same kind of clothes as her brother. Nedeljko was on the left. He had black hair, dark eyebrows and a moustache. His friend beside him had placed his hand on his shoulder.

When the photograph was taken, said Bojan, be didn’t expect to live for more than three hours. Everything was badly arranged—including the poison.

Sometimes Nuša was disturbed by what her brother said; he spoke too quickly of too many things.

The expression on Cabrinovič’s face is grave but calm. It is his friend that looks determined; for Cabrinovič there is nothing more to decide (or so he believes at the moment the photograph is being taken, the moment which he intends to represent his whole life). He has chosen his destiny. And if, in the next hour, he should hesitate, his portrait will be there, already developed, printed in black and white, forbidding him to relent.

I despise the dust of which I am composed: anyone can pursue and put an end to this dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me what I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of the centuries.

Nuša thought the photograph was like a photograph on the head-stone of a grave. She had never seen any of these in the village cemetery. But in the Cimitero di S. Anna in Trieste there were many. The only difference was that being out in all weathers they were more faded. Looking at the photograph she knew that whatever her brother or his friends asked her to do, she would do, because they were heroes, and because, flowing through her large body, mixed with her blood, there was something unchanging, which each of them loved, not in her but in itself, and which each of them was prepared to die for.

Princip and his accomplices wished by an irrevocable act to draw attention to an incontestable reality: the wretchedness of the Southern Slavs under Hapsburg rule. Their act, however, was interpreted in terms of the phantasmagoric unrealities of Great Power diplomacy. Austria maintained, without evidence, that the Serbian government was involved in the plot. Russia, Germany, France, Britain took up their respective positions. The words their ministers dictated and the orders they issued referred to a view of war and of national interests which no longer had any basis in reality. Not one of them foresaw the simplest facts about the war they were about to launch. Moltke, the German commander-in-chief, who was perhaps the least deceived, said that nothing could be foreseen.

Have you ever heard an artillery barrage? asked Bojan.

I have stayed here.

You think your eardrums are going to break.

Bojan, what?

When you hear an artillery barrage you think: it’s enough to wake up the damned in hell. But you’re wrong. The noise of the artillery is the noise of the nations snoring in their sleep. And a few poets and revolutionaries suffer from insomnia. What is happening to the world, Nuša, has never happened before.

What will you do? asked Nuša anxiously.

I will leave soon. Even non-ferrous metals won’t save me from the draft much longer. I will go to Paris.

Paris!

Vladimir Gacinovič is there and I want to see him. We must correct our mistakes. We must be ready for when the war ends. They will arrest you in France.

All I need is an Italian passport. Hundreds of Italians are crossing the frontier illegally all the time, to avoid the army. I will go with them. But if, unlike them, I have an Italian passport, I can go further.

The Museo Lapidario is near the castle on the hill of St Giusto which overlooks the whole bay of Trieste. From the top of the hill several narrow streets descend towards the southeast. Nuša is walking with long strides, letting the soles of her feet bang against the cobbles and leaning back against the gradient. Her skirt billows like a heavy flag. Her large arms swing a little across her body. When I reach the Corso, she says to herself, I will walk like somebody from the city.

She believes that Bojan is far-seeing: he can see all that she cannot. He and his friends acclaim today the good which the rest of the world will only acclaim tomorrow; they condemn the evils to which everybody today turns a blind eye and which in the future will incur the wrath of all. She believes, too, that Bojan is incapable of being unjust. He is willing to die for justice.

She passes a trattoria from which the smell of fried batter is wafted and the noise of people laughing. She stops to look through the open door. At the far end of the eating room a group of Italians are seated round a large table on which many plates, half-empty carafes of wine, a bundled napkin, broken rolls of white bread are strewn in the oddly suspended disorder which may descend upon a table when lunch continues into the late afternoon and nobody wants to leave. If I went in there, Nuša thinks, and started to sing, they would fall silent and afterwards they might give me money because they have eaten well and it is Sunday; but it would have to be an Italian song. She dares herself to try. Before she has resolved to do so, one of the Italians turns round and beckons her to come in from the doorway. She hurries on.

She wonders whether their ability to judge and their love of justice comes from the many books Bojan and his friends read or whether it is their ability to judge which enables them to find and choose the books. She admires their patience. She has seen them pass hours with books in front of their faces. They take no notice of anything else in the room. You have to move round them as though they are trees which have grown up through the floorboards. And then suddenly one of them comes to the end of his patience. He might have been struck by lightning. He throws the book on the table, leaps to his feet and shouts something like: We must act now. Already too much time has gone by! Sometimes the others stand up, equally excited, questioning each other with their eyes. Then, without a word, they put on their coats and caps and go out. Once she looked at a book left on the table. It was written in German which she could not read.

The street turns and becomes on one side like a bridge from which one can look down on the buildings of the city centre, around the Exchange. Most of them are the sepia colour of the wood of cigar boxes. Every window and doorway has its Corinthian pilasters, architrave and pediment. The German-speaking Empire of Seventy Millions was meant to preserve the heritage of Classical Greece. Its authority was carved and moulded upon the façades of its port.

Nuša begins to sing in her head one of her favourite songs she would not have sung to the party in the trattoria. It is a song about a young man who crosses range after range of mountains but who continually promises that he will come back to his mother in the village. Irresistibly the tune prompts her throat and opens her mouth and in a moment Nuša is singing out loud. Her walk changes. She ambles. One hand she clenches and the other she opens. With the open hand she combs the air and with the closed one she slowly beats upon it. She imagines, as always during this song, a stream flowing between rocks. The clearness of the water with its silver edges which undulate in the mountain light like lines of millions of silver pins round the hems of skirts is what she sometimes thinks of, faced with the jute, saturated in its oily slush. She passes an old couple proceeding very slowly down the hill. The wife holds the husband’s arm and on his other side he keeps within touching distance of the wall. There is a connection between the way they walk and the little they eat. As a child in the village Nuša never saw such old people. There, the old were either housebound or robust; either they awaited visits or else they were sturdy and could make visits themselves. The old woman, on hearing Nuša singing, says in Slovene: Good, my little one! It’s Sunday, isn’t it?

Nuša recalls Bojan’s reproaches. As soon as they left the museum garden, he began to scold her. He said she was losing her self-respect. He said it was despicable to let oneself become a victim. He told her men like the Italian wanted to make her into a prostitute. What do they call us? he asked. They call us Sc’iavi! don’t they? And they laugh like thunder at their joke! (Schiavi in Italian means Slavs; sc’iavi means slaves.) By agreeing to sit down with such a man, he said, you show you are willing to become a slave. Do you remember the summer when I came home, he said, and we read Preseren together and you declared you would like to live like he wrote? Your soul, he said, can’t have changed, but then you lived in a village; now you live in this city—this city without a soul, this city with a German mind and an Italian stomach—and here you must question everything you do if you want to live in the way we once aspired to, which is the only way worthy of modern men and of women who are the equals of men. To be found laughing with an Italian who has accosted you in a public garden is a long way from Preseren, he added.

Later, when he was calmer and they were sitting a little apart from his friends on the grass near the castle, he asked Nuša whether she had ever thought of getting married. She shook her head. He seemed pleased by her answer. From where they were sitting they could see the three hills on the slopes of which Trieste is built. The three hills are bracketed together by the sea. There was a very gentle breeze. The leaves of a tree were slightly agitated so that their shadows on the ground shifted quickly, like coins falling or rolling, yet the breeze was not rough enough to sway the branches. Nuša noticed none of this but she felt a very slight breath of wind on one side of her face because it was hot where she had blushed at her brother’s anger. The time will soon come, Bojan said, when we will break out from this anachronism (she did not know the word), we will be free—and then will be the time to marry and have children, the free sons and daughters of our own country. To have children now, Bojan said, is to breed soldiers and slaves for those who tyrannize the world.

The Corso is almost deserted. All the large streets have a neglected air. Since the outbreak of war the trade of the city has disastrously declined. There is considerable unemployment. The port handles only a fraction of the shipping it was built for. Nuša stops before a dress displayed in a shop window. Her hair, still invisible beneath her scarf, is fair, the colour of dark honey. She can see the colour of her hair as though it were on a white cloth in front of her. The dress is in crêpe de chine.

When the right time according to Bojan has come to marry and have children, will she and her friends each have a dress like this? As soon as she imagines asking Bojan the question, she becomes ashamed of it because she knows he would consider it frivolous. She frowns. She can see a dim reflexion of herself in the shop window. She has strong shoulders and large hips. The lower part of her face is soft and large like her bosom. But her forehead is wide and hard. She is standing solidly on her feet. She cannot see her eyes, but she does not appear to herself to be frivolous. Bojan’s reproaches about her conduct in the garden now strike her as undeserved. He had no idea, she says looking hard at her reflexion, what I had in mind. And at this moment a new idea enters her mind. She sees how, out of the very incident which led Bojan to reproach her, she can prove herself to him.

Leaving the Corso, she makes her way through many side streets to the Via dell’Industria where she lives. If only, if only, she prays as she walks, it is true that the Italian stranger goes to Hölderlin’s garden every day at noon.

When G. left the museum garden he walked in the opposite direction from Nuša; he made his way north-west and she south-east.

Those were the significant geographical co-ordinates of the city. Trieste was considered the last station of modern Europe; south-east lay the Balkans, the Near East and Asia leading imperceptibly, according to West Europeans, from one to the other, from ignorance to cruelty, from barbarism to famine. It was the last city—or the first, depending on which way you were travelling or fleeing—where the virtues of European protocol, honour and production could almost be taken for granted. On this one point both the Austrians and Italians of Trieste were agreed. And the crucial differentiation was visible within the city itself. The north-western end of the city and waterfront was comparable with the modern port of Venice. The eastern end was populated by hordes of Slavs and small colonies of Mohammedans, Turks, Persians, Arabs, of whom the male children, it was believed, all carried knives. Even the trees and the grass and the earth by the sides of the roads looked different—and indeed were different because of the dust caused by the bad state of repairs of the roads in the east, the many unstabled horses there, the broken fences, the dumps, and the immigrant families from Galicia and Serbia and Macedonia who, during every summer until 1914, whilst waiting for a ship to the United States or South America, slept out like tramps on the grass under the trees.

G. had been living intermittently in Trieste for several months.

His face was considerably aged. The process of maturing and, later, of ageing, involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of oneself from the exterior surface of the body. People took him to be nearer forty than thirty. His eyes were dark and keen as before. (Eyes of agate, a woman in Warsaw had written about him.) But the lines of his face and the corners of his mouth were over-worn. An interest easily awakened in his eyes was registered by the rest of his face as an effort which called upon some reserve of energy. He was fatter than five years previously, and more evidently his father’s son. Whether, however, this increased resemblance to his father was a natural or a deliberate development it is hard to say, for he was in Trieste under the pretence of being a rich Italian candied-fruit merchant from Livorno, who wished to investigate the possibilities of setting up a plant for canning the fruit grown in Carniola. He was there pretending to be his father’s legitimate son.

In August 1914 he was in London. At first he welcomed the news of the outbreak of war. In Britain it was clear from the very first day that tens of thousands of men wanted to enlist immediately, leave the country and go and fight in France. They were convinced that the war would be over by Christmas. Their principal worry was that it should not end—naturally, so far as they were concerned, with an Allied victory—before they had fought in it. Such a situation offered a prospect of a multitude of women being left behind without fiancés or husbands or brothers, and a prospect, within a few weeks, of thousands of widows. Some of these women he would choose. The men were going to war like Captain Patrick Bierce had done, and he would find further Beatrices.

To describe the nature of his memories of Beatrice would require a book with its own uniquely established vocabulary. (It would be the book of his dreams, not mine or yours.) He never made the slightest effort after he had left the farm to see Beatrice again. When he arrived in England in July 1914 after an absence of five years, it did not occur to him to inquire how or where Beatrice was living. Yet his memories of her were inerasable. He did not individually compare other women with her, but, because she was the first, she was equal in his memory to the sum of all the others. As the sum of the others increased in his life, so did her value, or, more precisely, the value of his sexual encounter with her, increase in his memory.

Very soon his attitude to the war began to change. He had never made a distinction in his mind between women who had given themselves to him and women who had not. Every woman had in common with all others her possible susceptibility to his propositions. In London at this time he met women whose behaviour was so unlike any he had previously met that he began to doubt whether they had anything in common with other women. These women were not the property of other men; they belonged to, they were the creatures of, an idea. He had met fanatical women before, but their fanaticism always involved a faith or an idea which was like a heart in the body of their own lives; they lived by it, and it, however rigid or absolute, pulsed with their own blood. The fanaticism could be embraced with them. The women in London were possessed by something outside themselves. They were possessed by the idea of hatred. They knew nothing of the passion of hatred. And what they hated was entirely unknown to them.

G. had often observed the certitude of the bereaved widow who is convinced that she can love only the memory of her husband. Unlike a wife, a widow is likely to despise the time still left her. A wife of a certain age may find herself trapped within the press of time: behind her, her life till now with the man she married: in front of her, coming closer every day and soon to form a monolithic block in which she will be encased, her life, from now until she dies, with the man she married. Trapped like this, she considers infidelity in the hope of proving that her husband’s gradual accumulation of each hour, day, year, decade of her life is not inexorable.

A widow, by contrast, embraces the inexorable. She recognizes her husband’s absence as final. She returns to the past. She pretends that time is repetitive. If she thinks of the future at all, she thinks of it as eventless. Her refusal to consider any possibility of remarrying, her insistence on having ceased to be, in a sexual sense, a woman, are not so much an expression of a permanent and absurd fidelity as of her conviction that no important event can ever occur again in her life. She believes that her life will always be full with the event of her husband’s absence: an event which can be endlessly reproduced so long as she lives with her memories in the past. She tries to make her own life timeless. She considers the passing of time a trivial affair. Her husband has entered eternity. (This is an accurate formulation even if she is without religious belief.)

If a man puts his arms around her, she is convinced that this does not constitute an event. She believes that her compliance is of no more significance than the placing of her head, as a child, on the lap of her father. She is convinced that within the emptiness of her life, an emptiness which she accepts as proof of the depth of her loss, the man’s caresses and her responses are utterly without significance. And this is actually a proof of her grief.

The wife so values the time still left her that she is desperate to fill it with new experience.

The widow so despises the time still left her that she is certain that no true experience can enter it.

Both are deceived.

In London G. met widows whose certitude was of a different order.

MRS. CHRISTINA FENTON

I lost my husband in France six weeks ago. He was serving under General Sir Hubert Gough and the General wrote to me telling me of the circumstances of his death. He was killed by a German machine-gun while leading his men—

May I offer you my condolences.

On the day war was declared he was already impatient to embark. In the last letter I received from him he wrote that he hated to see the Boche so close to Paris. Nothing would have stopped him. He never hesitated.

Hesitation is always dangerous.

Men look to us women to see what we admire.

And what do you—not the others—you admire?

There is no difference between us. We admire those who are willing to die for their king and country. I admire my husband, there is no reason why I should not say so. He died as I would wish a man I loved to die. I never thought he would be killed, I never thought this (she picks up a corner of her black silk shawl and drops it again) would happen to me. But no more did I ever think we would live in a time as inspiring as the time we are living now.

Do you dream of Joan of Arc?

It is not our place to lead. Our duty is to set an example. You are not entirely British, are you?

An example of what?

I trust you have no German blood. But you haven’t, I can see. If I had to guess, I would guess you had a Persian ancestor, a long way back, on one side of the family.

The Persians have the swiftest cavalry troops in the world.

You do have Persian blood. And if you are not in the army, you must be in the Royal Flying Corps.

How did you guess?

You can fly an aeroplane.

Yes, I can fly.

I knew it. You have the face of a flyer. Have you seen the Boche from the air?

They look like kangaroos.

Why do you say that?

To surprise you.

I hate them. By next spring we must take Berlin.

It is the colour of their uniforms which makes them look like kangaroos.

Would you come and meet the Patriotic Penelopes? No, you cannot refuse, it is your solemn duty, and when you are killed in the air, we shall hold a memorial service for you. I shall send a car for you tomorrow evening and you will see the example we are setting. What are you?

We call ourselves the Patriotic Penelopes because we are widows whose husbands have made the supreme sacrifice or sisters whose brothers have done the same. Nobody else has the right to join us. (She looks up at him with her light grey eyes and a light expression on her face as though she were talking about gardens.) We are going to start another circle for mothers who have lost their sons. We decided at the beginning not to admit mothers into the same circle as our own because of the difference in age. We—the Penelopes—are all young women, or fairly young. We don’t for one moment believe that it means less for a mother to lose her son but we feel the loss is of a different kind. We shall invite the mothers to join us on many occasions but we shall remain separate circles. For public events our being young widows is important because it brings home the truth to people more tellingly. It began when two or three wives who lost their husbands in France met and began talking. This was just before my husband was killed. One of them was the wife of Colonel C.A. Jones, you may have seen his photograph and an account of his heroic action in The Sphere. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his outstanding bravery. We found we had the courage to bear the first shock more easily if we were not alone too much and if we could talk to other women who were suffering in the same way. Members of the family—we came to notice later—often make matters worse by too much personal sentimentality. When one learns that somebody very dear to one has been killed over there, one must remember why he himself was willing to face death, why he went out to meet the enemy with a clear conscience and such high hopes. He knew we were fighting for a better world. (Her delivery becomes slightly oratorical.) He knew we had to defend little Belgium against the inhuman brutality of the Germans. In Belgium they are cutting off the breasts of women and the hands of little children. He knew we were fighting for freedom and the Empire and for a world safe for children and womenfolk to live in, a world where the meek are not frightened of the strong. If one remembers this, it is as clear as day what one’s duty is. We must do everything in our power to continue the fight which he began, continue it until what he gave his life for has been won. We are making great advances. We are twenty now and we plan to start similar circles in every city throughout the land. Of course we no longer just talk amongst ourselves; we call that Common Condolence. Now we have moved on to Patriotic Action. We go out and those of us who are able to speak well speak on public platforms. We encourage recruitment, we urge women to take up munitions works, we talk to nurses. We go to army training camps—we go to them in pairs, not in a group—to express our gratitude to the volunteers. It is a very profound experience, that. One looks down at them sitting there, row after row in front of one; they are fully-grown men but they listen as attentively as children. They will be going any day to France, many of them will not come back, and as one talks one knows that for some of them one’s words, simple words of gratitude and determination from two young officers’ widows who have lost their very dearest ones in the war, one knows that these words will come back to them when they find themselves exhausted or wounded on the battlefield. We English are often too shy to say what we feel. But who knows of the passions which rage within? And somebody has to tell those lads that what they are going to do is fine and noble. You should hear the way they cheer.

Do you all know what Penelope was weaving?

It was a tapestry of some sort, wasn’t it?

Not exactly.

We chose her name because she was the one who was left behind and she kept faith. (She looks down at her own hands lying in her lap.) We see it as part of our task to keep ourselves informed about developments on every front so that we have all possible arguments and facts at our fingertips for our war work and for this reason we invite speakers to come and address us. You simply must come. You will, won’t you?

Let us meet in the afternoon first.

At what time? We have not had an officer from the Royal Flying Corps yet. We know almost nothing about the war in the air. You must come in uniform. (She pauses.) What was Penelope weaving?

Where will you be at three?

At home.

A winding sheet.

I don’t understand. Can I expect you?

He became impatient to leave London, as he eventually always became impatient to leave whatever city he was in. What, however, was unprecedented was that his impatience now included a slight but persistent anxiety. It was not so much a question of his wishing to be somewhere else; he wished to leave because London made him uneasy. There was a further new element in his predicament. The number of places in Europe to which he could go was strictly limited because of the war.

Was his uneasiness partly the result of a premonition of the vast historical changes under way—changes which would transform social and private life and death in Europe to such a degree that he must become unrecognizable to himself? I do not know. He showed no interest in history or politics. From certain things I have already written it would seem that the future filled him with foreboding, but not in a personal sense:

‘As soon as one of you disappears there is another to take his place and the number of places is increasing. There will be shortages of everything in the world before there is a shortage of you. Why should I fear you? It is you who speak of the future and believe in it. I do not.’

In early December G. left London for Trieste. The idea of his going into declared enemy territory came about in the following way. Of his contemporaries at school he had remained in contact with only one: an Anthony Wilmot-Smith who worked at the Foreign Office. They had met at various flying events during the past five years because Wilmot-Smith was also a flying enthusiast. G. happened to complain to him about the way he found himself trapped in England. Such an unpatriotic attitude at such a time might have shocked Wilmot-Smith; in the circumstances it did not, for he had always thought of G., ever since their schooldays when he was nicknamed Garibaldi, as being more than half foreign.

A few days after their conversation he telephoned G. and asked him how well he spoke Italian. Like an Italian, G. told him. They arranged to meet the same evening. Wilmot-Smith explained that since he worked for the Italian desk in the Foreign Office, he was in a position to make an offer, on a personal basis, to his old friend. He could arrange for G. to be given an Italian passport with the surname of G.’s father. With this passport he could leave the country immediately and travel where he wished. In exchange, he would ask G. to visit Trieste and there meet some fellow Italians who might have some messages for him to take out. He assured G. several times that he would be running no appreciable risk, or anyway a far smaller one than going for a flip in a Blériot. To Wilmot-Smith’s surprise and consternation G. acepted the proposition without demanding a single further explanation.

Later Wilmot-Smith tried to point out to G. that the small task he had agreed to undertake would be of great service to the interests of both Italy and Great Britain. The Italians in Trieste, he began to explain, were increasingly restive under the Austro-Hungarian yoke and had to submit to ever more repressive measures; meanwhile His Majesty’s government were trying to seek an accord with the Italian government whereby the Italian right to all Italian-speaking parts of the Adriatic coast would be recognized and admitted as an allied war aim. Beginning with these developments, Wilmot-Smith hoped to come reasonably and reassuringly to the aim of British tactics in Trieste. (The British wished to encourage the Italian nationalists there to demonstrate and so provoke savage Austrian reprisals. These reprisals would then strengthen enormously the popular appeal of the war party in Italy). G. cut short Wilmot-Smith’s explanation and told him he only needed to know whom he had to meet where. I do not believe, he added, in the Great Causes.

After the Austrian frontier, the train went through a number of deep cuttings and tunnels until it emerged at a point where he could see the whole bay of Trieste before him. He could not think of himself as being in enemy territory. It was winter. The city looked frozen and desolate. The train was ill-heated. The sea was empty of ships. But, as he looked out of the train window down at the streets of buildings arranged sometimes neatly and in other parts haphazardly round the semicircle of the sea, he had a sense of controlled excitement or tension which in itself or by association was pleasurable. It was comparable to what he felt when he was about to enter a house from which he knew the husband or the male owner was absent. This absence, which he has foreseen, fits in with his own presence like a handle to a blade. Inside the house all the furniture and properties which are visible, the curtains and cupboards, the objects on every table, the doors, the carpets, the family beds, the books, the lamps, the portraits have all taken up their positions (without having to be moved a centimetre) to line, like a crowd, the way along which he is about to walk towards the woman who is expecting him.

From the museum garden, on the day he first met Nuša, G. walked slowly towards the Exchange in the Piazza della Borsa. At a corner he stopped to see whether he was being followed. With the streets so empty it must be hard, he thought, to trail somebody and remain unnoticed. He passed the end of the street in which an Austrian banker called Wolfgang von Hartmann lived with his Hungarian wife. Von Hartmann was one of the men with whom he was discussing the fruit-canning project. He retraced his steps and walked down the street, past the house. Behind its windows and its heavy swathes of brocaded curtains, the objects were in place, already lining the route of his arrival of which the exact day and hour had yet to be arranged. To picture Marika, the wife of von Hartmann, he had only to recall her extraordinary mouth and nose.

In a café just off the Piazza Ponterosso, two men were impatiently awaiting G.

He always makes us wait, grumbled Raffaele, the younger of the two men.

Let us watch him when he comes in, said the other, a man in his late fifties who was known as Dr Donato.

When he entered the café the two men were hidden behind the half-closed door of the back room.

He has come! Dr Donato whispered.

We should ask him straight away to explain himself, said Raffaele.

You are too impatient, my ardent young friend, said Dr Donato. The door had a glass window and the elder man was holding up a corner of the curtain so that he could peer through. I have often had occasion to notice in my work, he continued, how much you can learn about a man if you watch him closely without his realizing it. There is a moral language of gestures. The informer sips his coffee in a different way from other people, a distinctly different way. This is not superstition, there are good reasons for it. For example, the idea may cross his mind that his coffee is poisoned, because his mind is accustomed to intrigue. The idea then becomes evident in the way he picks up the cup.

Her nose broke with all conventions. It was so asymmetrical and irregular that it seemed to be almost shapeless. If a cast had been made of it and it had been removed from the context of her face, it would have looked like a delicate piece of a root. Its protuberances and dents, although very slight in themselves, were like the irregularities one finds on those parts of a plant which grow downwards into the earth towards water, rather than upwards towards light. The whole centre of her face suggested a reversed orientation. The outer edges of her lips were already part of the inside of her mouth. Her nostrils were already her throat. When she was seated, she was already running.

Look! He has chosen a table by the window. Now he is trying to peer down the street. He is moving the curtain aside. But he pretends it is because of the sunlight in his eyes. He is sly. There is no doubt about it, he is as sly as a fox biding his time. Look! He is beckoning to the waitress. A little furtive movement of the head—and she goes because she is inquisitive and can’t resist secrets. You—take you—you would never call a waitress with a gesture like that. Dr Donato let the curtain fall and placed his hand on the younger man’s arm. Everything you do, he explained, has a certain grandeur and confidence. And why, we may ask. Because you want everything to be seen.

Raffaele looked suspiciously at his companion with the thin face and white pointed beard.

Because you have nothing to hide, Dr Donato reassured him.

Dr Donato was by profession a lawyer. His intelligence was evident in his eyes and in his voice which was a little high in tone but very distinct. He took great pleasure in all explanations. He prided himself on being an atheist and a republican. What satisfied him more than anything else was to be able to explain the passion of others. Excess fascinated him because to explain it, in either positive or negative terms, was to demonstrate the full reach of Reason. He had been a member of the Secret Committee of the Italian Irredentist Party in Trieste for twenty years. Many credited him with the famous plot of the tricolour in the Piazza Grande.

On 20 September 1903, exactly as the clock in the Piazza Grande struck noon, a large Italian tricolour unfurled itself and flew from the mast on the tower of the city hall. Police ran into the building and up the stairs to take it down. The door to the tower was locked and barred. Italians ran into the square from all sides to gaze up at the flag against the blue sky. Many thought: when the city is at last Italian, a flag will fly like that every day. 20 September had been chosen because it was the anniversary of the day Rome was declared the capital of Italy. The flag was visible even to ships at anchor in the bay.

When asked about his contribution to this affair, Dr Donato would shrug his thin shoulders and say, as if speaking in a code and wanting to emphasize the fact: We Italians are the most musical race in Europe, and our second most outstanding gift is our ingenuity.

Once more Dr Donato lifted up the corner of the curtain. He has seen something, he said.

What has he seen?

Somebody.

Can you see them? asked Raffaele.

No, but something has reassured him. He looks pleased. Who it was or exactly what sign passed between the two of them, we cannot yet know for we are not yet certain of his motivations. Is he really as interested as he pretends in canning fruit? Who exactly is he? When we have established that—

Raffaele interrupted the older man without trying to disguise the impatience he could no longer contain. Let us confront him with the facts, he said. He led the way across the café floor to the table by the window. A big man, Raffaele had the air of having been anointed since infancy with praises and love. (A semblance which may well signify the opposite.) As he walked across the café, he attracted considerable attention. The clientèle was entirely Italian and Raffaele was well known for the patriotic fervour of his articles in Il Piccolo and the way he cunningly evaded the Austrian censorship. He walked across the café as if he were leading, not one thin man with a white beard, but a whole company of his compatriots.

When all three men were seated, their heads close together over the centre of the table, Raffaele asked G. whether he had brought any news from Rome. He spoke quietly, so as not to be overheard, but his jaw was thrust forward and he was scowling.

No, I did not go there.

And the present for Mother?

It should have arrived by now.

You entrusted it to somebody else!

Yes.

To whom?

In an exaggeratedly conspiratorial whisper G. said: If you are working for Mother, the fewer names you know the better. That should be one of the first rules of a clandestine party.

Two weeks ago you told us you were going! shouted Raffaele, pushing his chair back and making people at the nearby tables look up.

I changed my mind.

Men who change their minds are traitors!

When Raffaele was moved he had to make a noise. The first thing he was willing to abandon was secrecy. He considered numbers more important. His own duty, as he saw it, was to rally thousands of Triestine Italians to the cause by setting them an example. The example of a man who would not be intimidated.

Wait until you hear from Mother, replied G., again whispering, then you’ll know whether she received our present safely.

You are a traitor and a coward! And either way you are bloodless. At this hour when the whole future of our family is in the balance, you have nothing better to do than dither here discussing how to put fruit into tins—Raffaele lowered his voice at this point in order to underline the fact that he, unlike G., was prepared to use words that indeed required whispering—WITH THE ENEMY! Or do you talk about something else with them? Our Mother, for example!

Dr Donato intervened. Caro—he addressed Raffaele—do not let us start accusing each other. He is with us, not against us; he has already helped us on several occasions. He planned to make a journey and he found he was unable to do so and he sent a cousin—shall we say a cousin?—instead. Do not let us jump to conclusions, for my own part I am persuaded—he turned towards G. placing his hands palms down on the table—I am persuaded that we can and must count upon you. Like us you are a dreamer and like us you wish to make the dream reality. The only question, which will eventually answer itself, is whether or not we share the same dream. His voice trailed away and he made his breath whistle softly between his teeth as if he were pretending to fall asleep. Behind his pince-nez his eyelids almost covered his eyes.

You are wrong, said G., I am not a dreamer.

All men dream.

Some less than others.

The dream of our country made great and powerful again is a dream shared by forty millions, said Raffaele. He held a single finger up in the air. This was an Irredentist gesture signifying a United Italy.

G. silently addressed Dr Donato: Twelve young women sitting on the floor at your feet, benefiting from your stories after Trieste has become Italian, you select one and when you take hold of her breasts she cries out lovingly: Papa! Papa! That is your dream.

Have you any daughters, Dr Donato?

Unfortunately not, why do you ask?

A confusion about names, that is all.

Raffaele gripped the table with his hands. It was time, he believed, for plain speaking; Donato should warn G. that if they found any further reason for suspecting him, his life would be in danger. Raffaele distrusted subtlety because he associated it with the intrigues and subterfuges which had bedevilled Italian political life for half a century. Intrigue for him meant the corridor and the lobby; and to these he opposed the battlefield and an overseas empire where Italy would rediscover herself and again impress Roman virtue upon the world. He advocated a return to the austere patriotic purity of a Garibaldi. He saw Donato as a latter-day, obsolete and over-crafty Cavour. He respected his astuteness but he believed that this time, unlike the first, Cavour’s influence should be second to the General’s. Once, in the Ginnastica Triestina, he had taken a sword down from the wall and cut the air with it round the older man’s head and shoulders. Donato also liked to imagine that he had a lot in common with Cavour. And so, as the sword whirred through the air, he calmed himself by recalling how patient Cavour had sometimes to be in face of Garibaldi’s childishness.

I want to warn you, said Raffaele, that we are not satisfied with your explanations. You undertook to go to Mother and you failed to do so. What kept you here?

An affair of the heart.

Why did you not inform us?

You know the lady in question, said G.

Raffaele leant back in his chair to suggest the wealth of the possibilities he was considering. May I ask who? He made the question sound as casual as a glove held in the hand.

You may ask them all! said G., laughing.

Raffaele resented the fact that Dr Donato also laughed.

Would you consider helping us in another way? asked Dr Donato. As an Italian from Italy, come here for important commercial negotiations, you are probably in a position to approach certain influential Austrians. Among them there may be one or two who enjoy the confidence of the Governor or the Bishop. Last week a young man—whose Christian name is Marco—was arrested whilst trying to cross the frontier. Would you be prepared to try to use whatever influence you have to persuade your Austrian acquaintances that this young man should be treated as leniently as possible? Best of all we would like to obtain his release.

At a time like this? When the two nations are almost at war?

Wait, wait. The case is an exceptional one. The young man in question is seriously ill with TB; his father, who lives in Venice, is dying; he is exempt on medical grounds from military service; he has no political record, none whatsoever. He tried to cross the frontier to visit his father on his deathbed and he was arrested.

It sounds unlikely.

That is why his case is exceptional. I have all the evidence here—the lawyer discreetly shook his black dispatch case. A campaign for clemency on humanitarian grounds is quite realistic. Polite society everywhere and especially polite Austrian society likes nothing better than a temporary good cause. Women are particularly attracted. A little campaign can be mounted, nothing public of course, a purely social campaign which means dropping the right words into the right ear at the right moment at the dinner table.

I don’t believe in the credentials you brought us, interrupted Raffaele, and it must be clear to you that at a time like this we cannot afford to make mistakes. Either you prove to us that you are trustworthy, and do so quickly, or—slowly he drove one fist into the palm of his other hand. We have our eyes, he added.

Can you find a better cause? asked Dr Donato as though Raffaele had not spoken. You have a young man suffering from TB, accused justly in a legal sense, but too harshly in a wider sentimental sense, of having tried, out of filial piety, to visit his father on his deathbed. It is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a police inspector. And what is more, the idea of a pardon might well please His Highness the Governor. His Highness, at a time like this, would probably welcome the chance to make a theatrical but insignificant concession to Italian sentiment. Several other men were arrested the same night. Some of them were going to Mother. The courts can make an example of them. But clemency in Marco’s case would be an intelligent tactic from the Austrian point of view.

Tactic! said Raffaele.

Why are you so anxious to save him? asked G.

Donato put his hands to his chest in the gesture which announces: And now I shall bare my soul to you, and said: I am a lawyer. I do all I can for my clients. You, you are not obliged to do anything.

But if Marco did receive a light sentence or was pardoned, we would be exceedingly grateful. That is all. I will give you the little dossier I have prepared on this case.

The three men left the café together. Dr Donato took G.’s arm. Our friend Raffaele, he said, drank too much Tokai last night. You can count on me. I shall be extremely grateful if you can help me in the Marco affair. He lowered his voice. You may deny it, but you are a dreamer too.

At the first corner they separated.

Why did you laugh at his jokes? demanded Raffaele. And why did you confide in him about Marco?

Caro, you should have more confidence in me than that. He has no idea who Marco is. True, it is unlikely he can do anything for Marco, but we must try everything. If he is working for the Austrians and they do not know who Marco is, which is quite possible, they may release Marco so that our friend from Livorno can offer us a little present which, they calculate, will increase our confidence in him and hence his usefulness to them. We were not born yesterday, were we? If he obtains Marco’s release I will take it as tantamount to proof that he is working for them. So we shall have achieved two things: Marco’s release, which is more urgent than anything else, and a clear warning about our friend from Livorno. If, on the other hand, the Austrians know who Marco is—and in that case there is no hope for Marco—then the fact that he tries to arrange for Marco’s release will convince the Austrians that he is really working for us, and if they suspect that, I don’t think we shall see him many more times in Trieste. There is a chance, a small chance, that he is going to render us, without realizing it, a last service. What can we lose? He put a hand up to his eyes to shade them from the sun.

G. lay on his bed. Across the windows hung white lace curtains. The leaves of the plants embroidered on the curtains were slightly whiter and less transparent than their background. Through the curtains the house on the other side of the street was visible, its curved classical orders and its stucco thrown into relief by the bright evening sunlight. The stone was the sepia colour of cigar boxes. A woman who had apparently just washed her hair and wrapped a blue towel round her head like a turban appeared in a window of the house opposite wearing a loosely-tied teagown. She Watched the people in the street below; it was the hour of the caminada, when young men from families who consider themselves respectable walk in groups along a route laid down by tradition, to follow and watch the groups of strolling girls from similar families.

At the end of the street a wide canal led into the sea by the main quayside where the liners used to anchor near the Piazza Grande. Before the war scarcely a day passed without a ship, at least as large as the City Hall, closing the fourth side of the square. The canal was a venture which had never been completed. Its entrance was wide and handsome. But two hundred metres from the quayside it stopped. It began as a canal and ended as a dock. The woman who had washed her hair yawned for a full half-minute. She was probably the wife, G. thought, of one of the shopkeepers below. She was quite unaware of being observed. To her, his room behind its lace curtains looked as dark as night. She made as though to go back to her room, hesitated, leant once more on the windowsill and yawned again. A ship blew its hooter, a sound like a seal’s bark indefinitely prolonged. The embroidered leaves on the lace curtains were acanthus leaves.

According to gossip, Marika, Wolfgang von Hartmann’s wife, had had not long ago an Italian lover who was forced to leave the city. He was a musical conductor and he provoked a public scandal by arranging a concert at which the first syllable of the title of each work, as printed in the programme, spelt out an anti-Austrian slogan. Most of the audience were Italians and they soon spotted the message, gave the conductor an ovation, and at the end started shouting VERDI! VERDI! which meant, in the Irredentist code, Vittorio Emmanuele Re d’Italia. As a result, the conductor lost his post at the Conservatoire and left the city.

Lying on his bed, G. smiled as he foresaw himself pleading the case of Marco to von Hartmann in the presence of his wife.

Nuša was released by the police the following afternoon. Most of the questions put to her were about G. When she said she knew nothing about him, they asked her why he took her to the ball. She shrugged her shoulders. Are you his mistress? She stopped herself answering No. Please ask him, she said. Did he speak to you about his other Italian friends here? He is not like an Italian, she replied.

They treated her as a half-wit, and this seemed to be justified when they told her she could go. Have you old brown paper, she asked, which you do not want? One guard winked at another. I must be covered, she said, pointing to the muslin top of her dress bordered with pearls. They found her a piece of sacking.

When she got to the quarter near the arsenal, she stopped at the corner of each street to see whether there was anyone she knew; in mid-afternoon the streets were mostly empty. She hurried along close to the walls of the buildings with the sacking over her shoulders. In her room she undressed and sitting on the edge of her bed she bathed her shoulders and her feet from a basin of cool water. She was trembling. If he was released, she asked herself, would he still bring her the passport?

The cross-questioning to which G. was subjected was close and repetitive. The reports sent to the Chief of Police suggested that his original impression of G. at the ball had been the correct one. After briefly interrogating the prisoner himself, he was satisfied. G. was released on Sunday morning on condition he left the country within thirty-six hours.

THE STONE GUEST

I went to a friend’s house to look at the photographs he had brought back from North Africa. When I came in I said hello to his eldest son, aged ten. A little while later I was concentrating on the photographs and had completely forgotten about the son.

Suddenly I felt a tap on my arm, a rather urgent tap. I turned round quickly and there, the size of a child, was an old man, bald, large-nosed with spectacles. He stood there holding out a piece of paper to me. (Let there be no mystery: the ten-year-old son had put on a mask. But for the duration of perhaps half a second I did not realize this. I started. When the boy saw me start, he burst out laughing and I realized the truth.)

I was surprised and shocked by the old man’s presence. How had he arrived so suddenly and silently? Who was he? And from where? Why was it me he had chosen to approach? There was no satisfactory answer to any of these questions, and it was precisely the lack of any answer which startled and frightened me. This was an inexplicable event. Therefore it suggested that anything was possible. I was no longer protected by causality. Probably this was why his size—the most improbable thing about him—did not surprise me. I accepted his size as part of the chaos his very presence proposed.

I do not retrospectively exaggerate either the complexity or the density of the content of that half-second; when profoundly provoked, one’s memory and imagination reproduce one’s whole life in an instant.

No sooner had he frightened me, no sooner had he pulled away causality from under my feet, than I recognized him. I do not mean I recognized him as the ten-year-old son of my friend. I recognized the bald old man. This recognition of him as a familiar in no way diminished my fear. But a change had taken place. The fear was familiar too now. I had known both man and fear since my earliest childhood. I had the sensation of not being able to remember his name. A small socially conditioned part of me had a reflex of embarrassment. For this part it was no longer a question of how and why he had found me, but a question of what I could say to him.

Where had I first met him? Here it is impossible to avoid paradox. But a single glance back to the depths of your childhood will remind you how common paradox was. I recognized him as a figure in the infinite company of the unknowable. I had not once, long ago, summoned him up in the light of my knowledge; it was he who had once sought me out in the darkness of my ignorance.

There was nothing objectively menacing about him now. But he was threatening because he had figured in a contract to which I had agreed. I had forgotten the circumstances which led to this contract. Hence the initial mysteriousness of his presence. Yet I was able to recognize—without being able to remember—one of its principal clauses; hence his familiarity. The old man, the size of a boy, bald, large-nosed and with absurd round spectacles, had come to claim what that clause promised him.

It was a morning of early summer, one of those mornings on which, if one has nothing to do, the evening seems a lifetime away. The sea merged into the sky above Trieste, the same blue hiding them both.

It was fine too in Northern France and Flanders. But those who lay on their backs, dying or wounded, did not stare up at the blue sky with a sense of lucid affirmation as Tolstoy describes Prince Andrey doing on the battlefield of Austerlitz. The finer the day, the greater the confusion death caused on the Western front. Death had been robbed of all significance there; consequently it was easier to accept it as one more condition, like the mud or the cold, in a world fundamentally inhospitable to man, than in a climate and season so full of promise. It’s a fucking fine day to croak.

G. walked to his apartment and before changing his clothes lay down on his back. The acanthus leaves on the lace curtains reminded him of how twenty days ago he had foreseen seducing Marika. He clenched his jaw. Not because of what he remembered, but because for two days he had done little else but remember. His memories did not in themselves cause him regret. Mostly he had achieved what he wished, and he would wish the same again. What weighed heavily upon him was the suddenly awakened faculty of memory itself. Or, rather, the prodigious capacity of this faculty. It was the sheer number of memories, their mass, which oppressed him.

He found it impossible to separate one memory from another, just as he had found it impossible to separate Nuša’s face from the Roman girl’s. It was as if his mind had been turned into a hall of mirrors in which, although all the reflexions moved together, each represented something different. The effect was the opposite of what memory normally does. For example, instead of bringing his childhood closer, the sheer mass of his memories since childhood made his childhood seem absurdly far away. Memories of Beatrice, such as he did not know he possessed, filled his mind, one after the other, each extremely clear, but each inseparable from memories of other women, so that it seemed to him that he must have last seen Beatrice a century ago. Yet I am not conveying the truth accurately enough. The stream of involuntary, precise but concatenating memories which filled his mind appeared to elongate his past life. This I have indeed suggested. But it was equally true that, because nothing remembered could be isolated and set independently within its own time, his remembered life also appeared excessively hurried and brief. Memory alternately stretched and compressed his life until, under this form of torture, time became meaningless.

Last night I heard a friend had killed himself in London. By putting together the three letters of his name, JIM, I do not, even to an infinitesimal degree, begin to reassemble what is now scattered. Nor can I judge his act by invoking the word tragic. It is sufficient for me to receive—receive, not merely register—the news of his death. G. must leave the city within thirty-six hours. But where must he go? The only place open to him was Italy. From there he could go elsewhere. Perhaps he pictured himself returning to Livorno and living in his father’s house. Doubtless he thought of other possibilities. But each of them was a return of one kind or another and he had no wish to return. Thus he began to forget about the where. The question became different: how much further could he go? How far could he still put between himself and his past? It was no longer time in itself that would take him further, for time had become meaningless. It was his realization of this which made him decide to walk to Nuša’s room and give her his passport. By this act he would go further.

In the Piazza Ponterosso there was a stall with a woman selling fruit. The woman, like Nuša, was from the Karst; he could tell by her features. He bought some cherries. On his way eastwards towards the docks, he began eating them, spitting the stones out on to the street as he went.

Just as in the red of cherries there is always a hint of the brown into which they will disintegrate and soften when they rot, a cherry, as soon as it is ripe enough to eat, tastes of its own fermentation.

He passed groups of men talking sombrely in different languages about the imminence of war. The further he went, the more ragged were the clothes of the men he passed, the more closed their faces.

Because of the smallness of a cherry and the lightness of its flesh and its skin—which is scarcely more substantial than the capillary surface of a liquid—you find the cherry stone incongruous. You may know better but you expect a cherry to be a gob. The eating of a cherry in no way prepares you for its stone. The stone feels like a precipitate of your own mouth, mysteriously created through the act of eating a cherry. You spit out the result of your own eating.

Twice he stopped and turned round because he had the impression of being followed. He sat down on a wall near some shops and watched the women queuing for vegetables and bread. In this part of the city everything was in short supply.

Before you bite the cherry in your mouth, its softness and resilience are identical with the softness and resilience of a lip.

If he was to defy time, he could not hurry.

The house was one in a row of small houses whose front doors opened straight onto the street. He knocked and a woman with two children came to the door. She eyed him suspiciously. He asked for Nuša. The woman said what did he want. She spoke a very halting Italian. He offered the children some cherries but the mother hustled them away before they could take any. Her room is at the top of the house, she said, I shall send my husband up in ten minutes.

Nuša opened the door at the top of the staircase. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. You! she said, and, with a glance down the stairs, she beckoned him in and shut the door quickly behind her.

You have brought the passport!

The room was small with a slanting ceiling. On one side her bed and a cupboard, on the other side a bare table and a chair; between them the dormer window with a view of the docks below. He poured the cherries out of the bag on to the table.

They released me this morning, he said. He took the passport out of his pocket and handed it to her. It seems to her that they have come through their ordeal and reached their destination. She clasps his hand in both of hers. He puts his arm round her. Far from resisting, she leans towards him. Her sense of achievement is so great that for a moment she assumes they have shared the same aim. She leans against him. If he were the weaker, she would have held him up. It is as though they have outrun their pursuers, both of them together, and are now exhausted, limp with exhaustion, but safe.

It is the first time they have been alone together indoors.

Your hair is softer when it hangs down, he says picking up some tresses and letting them fall from his hand.

It hides that! she steps back and throwing her hair forward over her face she shows him the purple weal across the back of her neck. Slowly he puts his hand on it and she stays quite still as though being examined by a doctor. Between the hairs her scalp is very white. Her hair smells of blankets.

You should put some raw steak on it, he says.

She straightens up, her cheeks flushed because the blood has run to her head, but the pink in them is uneven, visibly distributed in blood vessels as intricate and livid as those at the root of the tongue.

Raw steak! she says, I would eat it, not put it there.

Are the other places worse?

I can’t see them properly.

Let me see them.

He is the only person she can show them to and they are part of how she earned the passport. She turns her back and slips one shoulder out of her blouse and chemise.

Across her large full white shoulders run two raised weals, but the skin is not broken. The pores of her unhurt skin emit a kind of light which is indistinguishable from the smell of her skin. He touches her shoulder with the tips of his fingers.

The first night I couldn’t sleep, they were like burns.

Through the small open window comes a noise of distant perturbation; a strange confused noise which suggests human voices but is too regular to be speech and too discordant to be music. Two or three sounds are being continually repeated. To G. one of them resembles the Hup! Hup! Hup! of his childhood. Nuša and he glance at one another and then go to the window. Down below on the quay they see people running towards a circle of crowded figures who are waving their arms. Somebody in the crowd is carrying a black and yellow Austrian flag.

Who are they? G. asks.

I do not know.

Her face is impassive but her breast is heaving. They look like our people, she says, the ones who work in the docks.

She steps away and adjusts her clothes, doing up the small buttons with her large hands. I must go, she says, with the passport now.

G. wants to place himself, to intervene between all the forms of her physical being, her heaving breast, her thick hair that smells of blankets, her white scalp, her large hands, her cheeks, the pores of her skin—to intervene between her body as she stands there by the window looking down again at the quayside and her consciousness of herself. He wants to take the place of what she is looking at. He wants to present her to herself as a gift and for the offering to be boundlessly free of virtue. He wants to carry the gift on his own body to satisfy his own need. We have no time, Nuša, he says.

When he spoke her name it was with despair.

For the first time the question of what he would do without a passport occurred to Nuša. She tied a scarf round her hair. We must go. They bundled down the dark stairs.

When G. said: We have no time, Nuša, he might have been referring to Nuša’s impatience to deliver the passport, to the crowd coming together on the quay, to the landlady’s husband coming upstairs, to the thirty-six hours within which he was meant to leave Trieste, but none of these contingencies presented difficulties which were insuperable and in the past he would have ingeniously found a hundred ways to get round them. The statement meant something more.

For two days he had been oppressed by the abundance of his memories. He had come to the point of feeling condemned to live even the present in the past tense. What had not yet happened was merely a section of his past not yet revealed. When they released him from the police station, he had the impression of walking back, regardless of the direction he chose, towards the past, towards the life he had lived before von Hartmann had offered him Marika and he plotted to take Nuša to the Stadttheater. Whatever he chose was like re-entering a choice he had made before, a choice of which the consequences had already taken place. The opportunities before him were illusory. Time refused to face him. His desire for Nuša was indistinguishable from his despair. Aieeeee!

(Passion must hurl itself against time. Lovers fuck time together so that it opens, advances, withdraws upon itself and bends backwards. Time which their hearts pump. Time whose vagina is moist with timelessness. Time which spends itself when it ejaculates generations.) We have no time, Nuša, he said.

Imagine a character in a legend becoming conscious as he was when alive. The legend is made and cannot be altered. Its unchangeability proffers a kind of immortality. But he, alive and conscious within the legend which is being told, which has already been repeated many times, will feel buried alive. What he will lack is not air but time.

Thus G. descended the staircase with Nuša.

People had come to the doors of their houses and were talking in loud voices together. A young man ran up the street and then down again. G. could not understand a word being said, everything was in Slovene. Several men followed the youth running downhill towards the sea. Nuša asked something. Then she whispered: the Italians have declared war now, today we are at war with them.

G. gripped her arm. It is too late, she said, speaking the words close to his face, if only you had given it to me before.

He did not try to keep her and she ran down the hill. A little way down she stopped to speak to a man. G. saw her pointing up at him. Then she ran on, holding up her skirt with one hand, her boots banging against the cobbles.

To Nuša’s surprise Bojan asked only once how she had obtained the passport. She said she found it. He thought that with the passport there was still a hope that he might be able to leave; there would probably be a last train to Italy tomorrow or the day after.

Bojan indeed reached France and lived several months in Marseille where he aroused the suspicions of the French police. In a Marseille police circular during the winter of 1915 his place of birth was given as Livorno, his name as G.’s, his age and occupation as his own. There is a reference number to a file which probably contained a photograph and further details. No specific criminal activity is mentioned—as is the case with other names on the circular. He is simply listed as Suspect.

The British Foreign Office made no attempt to trace the man whom they had supplied with false papers; he was assumed to be missing, probably dead. Years later when working in Yugoslavia against the dictatorship of King Alexander, Bojan still sometimes used G.’s false name (the name G. would genuinely have had if he had been brought up by his father Umberto) as an alias.

G. walked downhill towards the docks. As he passed the man to whom Nuša had stopped to talk, the man smiled and without any attempt to conceal what he was doing, started to follow G. They soon met a crowd of several hundred coming up the hill towards them. In the rear the ranks of the crowd were fairly well organized and a group was carrying a large Austrian standard. But the vanguard, most of whom were men, was very different and advanced like a wave continually breaking and reforming, murmuring and roaring. Everything about them appeared to be diverse—their clothes, their ages, faces, headgear, physique, language. They had come originally from many different places: Slovene and Istrian villages, Serbia, Galicia, Greece, a few from Turkey and Russia, one or two from Africa. All that they had in common was their poverty and their destination.

Once more G. was aware of the absurdity of the question: where should he go? Once again, in place of an answer, he could only think: further. He began to walk with the crowd in their direction.

It was very unlike the crowd he had seen in London on the day war was declared there.

The crowd in London was a static crowd which did not know where to go. It demanded nothing. It bellowed and roared with blank staring eyes because it was impatient to have what it wanted. But it did not know what it wanted. It was a crowd waiting to be let in and waiting to be despatched. It stood outside Downing Street and Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament impatient to be issued with its own future. It sacrificed itself supremely, without knowing it, in the act of cheering. Its cheers were to become gushes of its own blood hurled up into the air and falling down again over its own staring eyeballs, leaving millions of bloodshot veins in them, down its own jugular choking its exits, down over its stomach interminably bayonetted to where each wound with its unquenchable thirst drank it up, only letting, inadvertently, a few drops of blood dribble from the lip of the wound into the pubic hair. There were many women in the crowd, they pushed with their hands against the smalls of the backs of the men, they pushed them out, they aborted them in blood in the Strand and in Trafalgar Square where they lay, the men-embryos, without hairs or feathers on them, all bones and fleshlings. Yet when it dispersed, the London crowd on the first day of war, it did so calmly; all the men and women went home still calling each other by their usual names, unaware of what they had begun, but buoyant with a sense of unusual pride.

The crowd in Trieste on the day war with Italy was declared, was neither buoyant nor proud nor calm. It proceeded in fits and starts like a drunk sure of his destination but undecided about the exact route there.

Sometimes men ran ahead waving. One had a bell which he rang like a town crier, but he wore no uniform and the bell was black and rusty—perhaps a ship’s bell found in the mud of the harbour. Faces appeared in windows. It is war! the men in the street shouted. Come and see what we are going to do! Some groups started to sing but nothing was sustained for very long.

G. walked a little behind the vanguard in the middle of the stream of the crowd. Although he had taken off his jacket and was walking in his shirt-sleeves, his clothes made him conspicuous. The man to whom Nuša had spoken in the street was still walking a few steps behind and each time somebody accosted G. he intervened, speaking in Slovene which G. could not understand; each time the interrogator seemed to be appeased and asked nothing more. G. began to feel that he could leave all decisions to the man walking behind him. As the crowd made its way north-westwards towards the Exchange and the Italian part of the city, its character began to change. The contrast between its raggedness and the ordered streets down which it was proceeding became more and more acute. By the arsenal it had looked like a crowd of underpaid or unemployed workers; in these streets now it looked like an army of beggars.

A man near G. threw a stone (which he must have been carrying in his hand since they set out) at the shop front of a grocer’s. The glass broke. Men started breaking the rest of the glass with their hands, bound round with their overalls or shirts for protection. When they could reach the cheeses and sausages, they threw them back into the crowd. A patrol of Austrian police passed near by, pointedly ignoring the incident. The shopkeeper, terrified, began to hand out his own flasks of wine to the nearest fists thrust out in his direction. It is a good wine, he kept on repeating, as if he were still selling it.

Pressure from the back of the crowd forced them onwards past the grocer’s shop. The incident made them all aware, however, of their temporary immunity from the law. When they saw a number of well-dressed people they shouted menacingly: Down with Italy! and sometimes also: The Thieving Rich! The streets became empty. And this again changed the crowd’s character. In their own part of the city they had been a spectacle drawing people towards them. Here they put everything into abeyance. It could not occur to them, as it had occurred to the crowds in Milan in 1898, to take over the city. They had no wish to establish their own control or order. They wished to establish only the empty deserted spaces of the streets and piazzas in which anything might happen without order.

The man behind G. tapped him on the back and passed him an open flask of wine to drink from. G. drank, spilling a little on his shirt. Although the progress of the crowd was haphazard and erratic, he had the feeling of being borne along by it ceremonially, almost like a body in a coffin. He looked up at the buildings they were passing between. Caryatid after caryatid dumbly and uncomplainingly bore the weight of pediments intended to prove the culture of those who lived behind their doors and windows.

Sexual acts, like dreams, have no surface appearances; they are experienced inside out; their content is uppermost and what is normally visible becomes an invisible core.

In a room up there Louise had been lying on her back. His arms around her knees, he put his tongue into her vagina. He could recall the taste only of the wine he had just drunk. Slowly a quiver passed from one of her thighs to the other like a wave. It turned, flowed back again, returned. A grain of sand was shifted first one way and then the other way by the alternating movement. From the grain of sand and the warmth between her legs was born a dog’s ear. A pointed one. The fur on the outside of the ear was softer and smoother than her own skin. The inside of the ear was transparent pink. From the ear was born a jug of milk. Beneath the surface of the milk, invisible beneath its whiteness, were the trees of a wood, winter trees without leaves. The jug poured the milk over her lap. Upon some parts the milk remained in white pools; from others it ran down; drops of milk hung like white berries in her hair. He could see the branches of the winter trees in the traces made by the milk. The man with the bell started ringing it again. Look at their houses! Further! Further! The words rose to G.’s throat involuntarily but calmly. They were as surprising to him as they were incomprehensible to those around him. Further! Further! He walked with his head right back staring at the blue sky.

The crowd turned into the Piazza San Giovanni and quickly filled it. In the centre was a statue of a gigantic man sitting comfortably in a chair shaded by trees. On the plinth was written VERDI. These letters spelt the name of the man who wrote Rigoletto; but in Trieste they also meant Vittorio Emmanuele Re d’Italia. Two men had climbed on to the lap of the statue and were striking the head with iron bars. You could see the shock of each blow jarring their upper arms and shoulders. Women went from door to door round the piazza trying to gain entrance to the buildings. All were locked or bolted. Occasionally a face, half hidden behind a shutter, looked down in alarm at the piazza below filled with i teppisti. Some youths climbed into the trees. There was the sudden sound of glass being smashed. It worked like a pre-arranged signal. Everybody near the edges of the piazza began to hurl whatever they could find at the nearest unshuttered windows.

Behind the windows was the property of those who benefited from the existence of Trieste. Those who were beating Verdi’s stone head and smashing the windows between the caryatids hated the existence of the city, and they were out to avenge their enforced presence there. They were out to avenge as covertly, as slyly as possible, without further risk to themselves, a small portion of what they had suffered since poverty had forced them or their fathers to leave their villages and settle on the outskirts of the foreign city. The administration of the city was Austrian but its essence was Italian, hence the names of its streets and piazzas, hence the language in which its merciless commerce was conducted. Few of the crowd had any political theory, but all of them knew one thing of which the professors and students of the gymnasium were largely ignorant: they knew that what had happened to them in their villages was part of the same thing as what had happened to them when they arrived in Trieste and had happened every day of their lives since. The unity was historic. Theories may embrace and define this unity. But to each of them it was defined by the unity of his own life’s suffering.

Break his head!

Knock his ears off!

Rip the shutters off!

Has nobody told you about your houses? I discovered it a long time ago. You are walking leisurely—in any city in Europe—through a well-off residential quarter down a street of your houses or apartments. Their window frames and shutters have been freshly painted but their colour barely differentiates them from the façades around them, which absorb the sunlight but give off a slight granular scintillation like starched linen table-napkins. You look up at the curtained windows in which the curtains are so still that they might be carved out of stone, at the wrought iron-work of the balconies imitating plants, at the ornamental flourishes referring to other cities and other times, you pass polished wooden double doors with brass bells and plates, the silence of the street consists of the barely perceptible noise of a distant crowd, a crowd made up of so many people so far away that their individual exertions, their individual inhaling and exhaling combine in a sound of continuous unpunctuated breathing … and then suddenly you realize with a shock that each residence, although still, is without a stitch of clothing, is absolutely naked!

Set fire to the place!

There were rumours that another crowd had already set fire to the building of the Liga Nazionale. It may have been an Austrian agent who first proposed the newspaper office of Il Piccolo. A hundred or so men, G. among them, hurried there from the Piazza San Giovanni.

A few Italian printers and journalists including Raffaele had arrived at the Piccolo’s office for the evening’s work. Shouts in the street brought them to the windows. They saw a body of men, some waving sticks and others carrying cans under their arms, running across the piazza towards the main entrance of their building. The scourge of the docks! said Raffaele and in doing so coined the phrase he would later invariably use when describing the rioters. Close the shutters and blinds, he ordered. Then he picked up a telephone and asked for police headquarters. It is very urgent, he said.

By standing close to a blind he could see through the slits the first men reach the building. There were blows and the sound of smashing glass. They were breaking the lamp that hung outside the entrance. He could hear others running up the stone steps to the printing shop. Suddenly he laid the telephone down and pressed his nose against the window pane to be sure of what he could see. He saw G. with a small gang round him point at the windows of the second storey and make explosive gestures with his hands. Raffaele’s initial astonishment gave way to a strange satisfaction. In a threatening and unpredictable situation he had found a certitude and this certitude confirmed his own acumen. He could hear them breaking up the furniture on the ground floor.

G. was not only an Austrian agent, Raffaele asserted, he was one of the men employed by the Austrians to mobilize the Slavs. It was now obvious why the Austrians had tolerated his extraordinary behaviour at the Red Cross ball. Everything which had been mysterious about him became instantly clear. With this certitude of interpretation came an equally satisfying certitude of decision. There was no need to consult anybody. He told those who were watching him telephone that they must abandon the building. Make sure everybody leaves, he said. Take this—he took a revolver from the drawer of the desk and handed it to the man facing him. No one else is going to defend us, he added with satisfaction.

He was going to put an end to G. The telephone was still silent. He rattled the earpiece holder violently up and down and asked for another number. I need all of you immediately at the Galleria di Montuzza, he said, I will meet you there. After this call he asked again for police headquarters. He wanted to speak to Major Loneck. He demanded immediate protection for the Piccolo newspaper building which was in the hands of i teppisti who were about to burn it down. Major Loneck evidently temporized. I am not excited or hysterical, yelled Rafaele, it is a question of civil order.

The incendiaries in the print shop worked quickly and systematically. One of them had found a cupboard full of rags dirty with grease and ink. They placed these rags at the end of the room near the largest press. A man doused them with paraffin from a can. Others were breaking up tables and chairs and laying the wood across the rags. G. emptied some drawers of paper and scattered these too on the pyre. Light it! he urged, for the small of the paraffin was choking him. The man to whom Nuša had spoken in the street was standing guard by the doorway. An old man with shining eyes screwed up a torch of paper, lit it and threw it on the rags.

For a moment they all waited to see whether the fire would catch. Almost immediately there were flames as high as a man. It was about to burn the presses which printed the language of the city, the language of law, insult and demand, the language of the overseer. There was the breathing noise of fire with intermittent very light cracks like those which accompany footsteps in dry undergrowth. The man waiting by the door smiled approvingly at the fire they had made. At first the fire reminded them of their villages; it was still a small fire. Later the same night, after three more attempts to set fire to the building, when it was truly ablaze, they would watch fascinated by the dimensions of their achievement; the more uncontrollable the fire then became, the more they would think of themselves as its master. G. stood somewhat nearer the flames than the others, be felt their warmth on his body.

Quick! cried the man in the doorway, the firemen are here. As the incendiaries ran out, the firemen accompanied by soldiers ran in. There was a scuffle but both parties continued on their way and there were no arrests. A cordon of soldiers was placed round the building and the fire was soon extinguished.

Raffaele was remonstrating with Major Loneck on the other side of the piazza by the corner of the Via Nuova. The Austrian police officer argued that he had other buildings in the city to protect and that as soon as the crowd dispersed he would have to withdraw his guard. If your soldiers go they will try again, insisted Raffaele, the safety of the population is your responsibility.

They should have thought of that yesterday in Rome! said the Major, speaking German.

On another corner G. was speaking to several of the men who had started the fire in the print shop. You see, he was explaining, they are using the hydrant from the building next door. You must put that out of order next time.

Raffaele left Major Loneck and went over to a circle of figures standing in the entrance to the Galleria di Montuzza, the tunnel which runs under the hill on which the cathedral and the castle and the Museo Lapidario are built. He pointed out G. (who appeared to have lost his jacket and was easy to identify in his white shirt) and issued his orders.

A false calm descended upon the piazza and the streets leading out of it. There were many people about, but they were not the people normally to be found in these streets. The firemen went away. The crowd broke up into small loitering groups waiting to see whether the platoon of soldiers would remain or march off. The inhabitants of the area were nowhere to be seen.

G. strolled back towards the Piazza San Giovanni. Ahead of him was a woman whom he thought he had seen before. She was dressed somewhat like Nuša but she was smaller. He stopped in his tracks. Further, he said out loud, further still!

The man in the white shirt whom they were following had a distinctive way of walking: he hunched his shoulders and his head so that he had the lunging gait of a bull. Suddenly he stopped and said something out loud to himself. It was not difficult for them to believe that he was a traitor.

G. walked on. The woman’s air of vague familiarity increased his interest in her. Between the two of them he saw his past self hurrying forward to draw level with her. He would recognize her face, he would speak to her. He saw her interest being aroused by his past self. Yet he did not quicken his pace to discover who she was. Whatever it was that separated him from his past self was very slight, amounting to no more than a whim, to no more perhaps than the heat he imagined he could still feel on his body from the fire in the print shop.

If G. had struggled with the four men when they came up to him, their fight might take several pages to describe. He did not struggle.

If, on the other hand, he submitted to them without any resistance at all, several pages might be needed to describe his acceptance of death. He did not submit without resistance.

What happened can be quickly told and the rest can be conveyed at last by my silence.

They forced him to walk out of the piazza past the church of San Antonio. On the way he caught a glimpse of the face of the woman who had seemed familiar: it was from this woman that he had bought this morning the cherries in the Piazza Ponterosso. Two of the men held his arms forcing them against his sides like the arms of a foetus not yet detached from the body. The third man walked in front and the fourth behind. They went along by the canal down to the mole. There they turned right towards the railyards. The waterfront was deserted. From time to time G. tried to release his arms. He could not. They took him to the water’s edge.

Until that moment I do not think he foresaw the exact circumstances of his own death. Certain doubts or hopes must have remained. Perhaps death when it arrives is always a mounting surprise which surprises itself to the point at which all reference—and therefore all self-distinction—disappears.

They struck him on the back of his head. He fainted. The taste of milk is the cloud of unknowing. They supported him, moved forward a few inches and then dropped him feet first into the salt water.

The sun is low in the sky and the sea is calm. Like a mirror as they say. Only it is not like a mirror. The waves which are scarcely waves, for they come and go in many different directions and their rising and falling is barely perceptible, are made up of innumerable tiny surfaces at variegating angles to one another—of these surfaces those which reflect the sunlight straight into one’s eyes, sparkle with a white light during the instant before their angle, relative to oneself and the sun, shifts and they merge again into the blackish blue of the rest of the sea. Each time the light lasts for no longer than a spark stays bright when shot out from a fire. But as the sea recedes towards the sun, the number of sparkling surfaces multiplies until the sea indeed looks somewhat like a silver mirror. But unlike a mirror it is not still. Its granular surface is in continual agitation. The further away the ricochetting grains, of which the mass become silver and the visibly distinct minority a dark leaden colour, the greater is their apparent speed. Uninterruptedly receding towards the sun, the transmission of its reflexions becoming ever faster, the sea neither requires nor recognizes any limit. The horizon is the straight bottom edge of a curtain arbitrarily and suddenly lowered upon a performance.