by John Berger
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. I
f 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.
