G.

by John Berger

  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 hav
e 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.