by John Berger
Neither man moved immediately. She made a sound which might have been a laugh. Her husband ran towards her more quickly than he intended. The sight of physical violence always disturbed him. By the time he reached her, she had begun to get to her feet and brush down her dress.
What did you do? he asked. If he had asked: Why did you do it? she might have taken advantage of him.
I misjudged the distance. I am not hurt. Do you accept my bet?
Some brandy, said von Hartmann.
G. noticed that as soon as she took a step she had to disguise a limp.
Your wife has hurt her foot, please allow me to carry her. Before von Hartmann had time to reply, G., leering outrageously, had picked her up. Frau von Hartmann made no protest but laid her cheek against the chest of the man who was her imminent lover.
The trio proceeded down the length of the room.
When the brandy had been served, von Hartmann began to speak softly but distinctly, looking most of the time at his wife who had been laid on the sofa with her legs up.
I will not say that you look like a couple, the two of you, but you look well together side by side. I hope you will not misunderstand my reason for saying that.
He lay back in his arm-chair, holding the large glass in his two hands like a chalice.
Do you remember Anna Karenina? I have never been able to believe that Karenin was the successful statesman Tolstoy wanted us to believe he was. The contrast between his well-managed public life and his ill-managed private life was quite unnecessary. Karenin lacked the consistent clarity of mind which a proper administrator needs to have. He probably married the wrong woman, but having married her, he certainly treated her in the wrong way. Why did he not face the truth about her infidelity before it was too late? Because he took it far too seriously. If she was unfaithful it meant the end of the world, and so time after time he postponed the day of reckoning. And what did he do when he could no longer avoid the truth—do you remember, Marika? Anna tells him on their way back from the races.
He held the glass so that the brandy was level with his eyes. His gaze was focussed on the horizon within the glass.
You remember? Karenin went away to think about it and he came to the conclusion that they must both go on living as before. The end of the world when it comes is softer than a whisper. Nobody must see it or hear it. But both of them suffered it silently day and night. Karenin made a tragedy. He made it. There was no need for a tragedy, there probably never is. Anna had to leave him although she knew it would be her undoing. If she had stayed, in the end she would have become as deranged as Karenin. Now, I’m not Karenin, that is what I want you to understand.
He put the glass down on a table, and dabbed once at his lips with a folded handkerchief with his monogram embroidered upon it.
I apply the same realism to my private life as to my public life. It has been obvious to me for some time that you would like to seduce my wife, and it has been equally obvious that she would like to become your mistress. Doubtless this is what, under normal circumstances, might have happened without a word from me. But the circumstances are not normal. Time is running out for all of us. This is why I am raising the matter. I want to tell you that you can count, both of you, on my co-operation.
He paused, looked from one to the other and nodded.
On 20 May, that, to be precise, is four days after the term of your wager runs out, a wager incidentally, Marika, which I absolutely refuse to accept, on Thursday 20 May there is the charity ball at the Stadttheater. It is for the Red Cross, a cause which we would all find worth supporting. You and I (he raised his glass to his wife) will be attending it, always provided that your foot has mended by then. And I hope that our Red Cross will benefit now from the sale of two extra tickets. They cost two hundred and fifty crowns each. Please come (he raised his glass to G.) to the ball and bring, for the sake of propriety, a suitable companion with you. At the ball you will be free to dance with my wife as many dances as she sees fit to grant you. At the end of the evening I am leaving to catch the night train to Vienna. I return here on the Saturday. I repeat that you can count, during those twenty-four hours, on my tact. (Again G. was reminded of Dr Donato who said: I am persuaded that we can and must count upon you.) As for the Internat, which may be crossing your mind, I do not think it’s going to arise. If I was going to place a bet on the date of the outbreak of hostilities, which I have absolutely no intention of doing, it would not be before the twenty-fifth of this month. I think I am likely to be right. You will therefore have plenty of time to return to Livorno before there is any risk of internment.
Von Hartmann had never before made such a suggestion. But Marika was not surprised. A new legend had begun: she was married to a man who publicly proposed that she should take a lover. She did not fail to notice that he assumed that the story would be a short one because war would break out and she would be separated from her lover. But her husband was a German at heart and was always convinced that everything ended as it began. The end was by no means certain. Before war broke out she might go to Verona with her lover; she might not return to her husband before the war was over. They might all be dead within a week. She would accept to die with the man who put his hand over her mouth an hour ago. She would not die happily with her husband. It would be like dying sitting down.
Marika did not doubt that, if he was Don Juan, he would desert her. She wished only to begin.
Wolfgang was smiling, watching them both. His smile made Marika feel grateful and triumphant. She was grateful for his compliance. She was triumphant because, according to her, nobody knew how it would end. She swung her legs down on to the floor. She needed to disguise the fact that her ankle had swollen. She began to dance slowly down the room towards where she had fallen. You see, my foot is better already, she cried out laughing, we shall go to the ball.
G. took an envelope out of his pocket. I thank you, he said, for your invitation. I shall come to the ball as you suggest. Here are the details of the case I was telling you about. I think you should reconsider the affair. Now that war is certain, the risks in releasing him have become insignificant.
A few minutes later G. got up to leave. How shall we wait till Thursday? asked Marika, and, with the freedom which she believed had just been granted her, proffered a cheek for G. to kiss while Wolfgang stood at her side.
G. took her hand, raised it formally to his lips, bowed and said: Until we meet at the Stadttheater.
It is only now that I understand an incident in G.’s childhood and a prophecy which were mysterious to me when I wrote them:
You’d better watch him if he says so, he says to the boy. The man goes to the head of the first horse, bends over and strikes it. The boy can’t see what he strikes with. Perhaps it is the bottle. He does the same to the second head. Not one inch of the horses’ flesh such as the boy can see in the lamplight so much as quivers from either blow. The man stands upright, nothing in his hand. So I killed them, you saw I killed them, didn’t you? The boy knows he must lie: Yes I saw you. The man approaches him, evidently pleased and pats him on the shoulder. There is blood on his hand which reeks of paraffin. So you saw, he says. Yes I saw, says the boy, you killed two horses. He is aware that it is he who is now talking to the man as to a child. You killed them very well, he hears himself saying.
No terror can match the disgust he feels for the man in front of him. It is a disgust to the point of nausea. In a moment the smell of paraffin will force him to vomit.
Can I go?
Don’t ever forget what you saw me do.
Away. The lamp invisible. The smell of paraffin present but now imaginary. He feels his way between the trees.
His fear is overcome, both his fear for himself and (for it is different) his fear of the unknown: not overcome by an appeal to will-power or the summoning up of courage—how often can such direct appeals of a purely formal morality ever work?—but overcome by another, stronger revulsion. It is beyond me to create a name for
this revulsion: the ones I think up all simplify. It has nothing to do with the slaughtering of horses or with the sight of blood. It is a revulsion not uncommonly felt by children and men, but one that quickly disappears never to recur if systematically ignored. With him it was always to remain stronger than his fears, for he never ignored it.
When G. descended the balustraded staircase of the von Hartmann house into the massive vaulted entrance hall, from which doors led off to the servants’ quarters, he had the impression that permeating the stone-cold darkness was the smell of paraffin. A fact which could doubtless be explained by a lamp having been spilt.
9.
The following morning, after he had met Raffaele and Dr Donato in the café, after the threat of the goods train, G. walked to the garden of the Museo Lapidario and sat there in the sun beneath the plum trees.
Why did he not leave Trieste? He could still have returned to Livorno or London. He could have straightaway taken a ship to New York. After the sinking of the Lusitania many bookings were cancelled. Was it a question of sheer obstinacy? He was not an obstinate man; obstinacy is defensive and is deployed round a fixed citadel. There was very little about him that was fixed. Had he then become suicidal? Five years ago he had welcomed the threat of death—Camille was right when she felt that he might have loved her repeatedly if only her husband’s threat to shoot them both had been ever-present and credible. But to challenge death is not the same thing as to seek it. I do not believe that G. was any more suicidal than Chavez. Like Chavez, he may have been careless. What then was keeping him in Trieste? The charity ball at the Stadttheater. Not until that Thursday night could he take his revenge on von Hartmann. Beyond this he was incapable of seeing. The degree to which we can postulate or see beyond this is the degree to which we cannot be him. But there is something to be added. Because what G. intended to do at the Stadttheater was the contrary of all he had done since the end of his childhood when he first kissed Beatrice’s breast and took her nipple in his mouth, he must have been conscious of the fatality of this intention. Doubtless he was aware of the fateful days Trieste was living through. But he could only be aware of them as an accompaniment to his own—hence they could not directly affect him.
Nuša saw him as soon as she came through the door into the garden. This time she had to pay to go in. She still had the ticket in her hand. The ticket would also have entitled her to look at the more complete classical sculptures arranged in the gallery. She had eyes, however, only for the man she could now see sitting on a broken stone in the tall grass under the plum trees.
Yesterday she had been on the point of giving up hope of ever finding him again. But she consoled herself with the thought: perhaps he comes every day except Sundays. Yet, she argued, this couldn’t be true because it was on a Sunday, last Sunday, that she had first met him here. On the other hand, she had never seen him here before on other Sundays when she came with her brother. When he said: I come here every midday, either he was lying or else he meant every day except Sundays. If he wasn’t lying, the Sunday she met him was an exception to the exception. She did not reason in these paradoxical phrases but her reasoning led her to a startling, unexpected plan. Tomorrow, Monday, she would not go to the factory, she would go sick, and then she would be able to come and see whether he came to Hölderlin’s garden on weekdays. She foresaw she would have to buy a ticket to go in and she thought she might risk losing her job. But all last week she was listening to people talking about war with Italy and she saw that her brother must either go soon or not at all.
She walked towards G. He had his back to her. Had he been watching her, she might have been intimidated. This way she approached him as though he were a load on the ground that she must somehow move.
He is surprised to see a woman advancing towards him with such determination. He supposes that she is the custodian’s wife coming to tell him it is forbidden to sit under the trees. When she comes closer he recognizes her and stands up.
The Slovene, he greets her, who told me her secrets!
So you do come here at midday.
I often come here, yes.
But not on Sundays.
I didn’t come yesterday, did you?
I came to look for you.
If I remember correctly, your brother interrupted us the last time. Or a gentleman who said he was your brother.
I have something to ask you.
The clumsy way in which she says this—she says it with such bluntness that it is like a command—inspires G. with the idea he needs. Ask me.
You said you were an Italian from Italy.
G. nods, offering her the seat on the stone.
I will sit in the grass, she says. If you come from a foreign country, you have come with a passport. Can you give it to me? She speaks the last sentence very lightly despite the fact that for a week she has feared that she would never have the opportunity to say it.
You have never seen a passport? They are nothing much to look at. They always have a photograph inside.
With an amused smile he takes his false Italian passport from his pocket and hands it to her. She fingers the pages, stops at the photograph. His face looks almost as white as his collar and he is wearing a black suit and a tie. She is reminded of the photograph of Cabrinovič taken on the morning of the archduke’s assassination. The face is different but the small rectangle of grey and black and white paper is very similar and like the pictures in the cemetery, except that being out in all weathers they are more faded.
I don’t want to look at it, I want to have it.
If you keep it, we will have to stay together here for the rest of our lives. Without a passport I cannot leave.
I need it very quickly.
A butterfly alights in the grass near her hand. Its flight, its stillness, wings upright and congruent, and then again its tremulous movement belong to a time scale so remote from Nuša’s and G.’s that if it was applied to them, they would seem like two statues.
What for?
I cannot tell you.
Why ask me?
You are the only Italian I know to speak to.
Trieste is full of Italians.
Not Italians with passports.
I will give it to you on one condition. Let me take you to a ball at the Stadttheater.
Bojan was right, she mutters in Slovene, and she glowers sullenly at the trunk of the nearest fruit tree. It is like a return to her village in the years of poverty. She stares at the implacability of the world. Bojan said that he would want to make her a prostitute, and that was what the Italian meant by a ball at the Stadttheater.
I ask you for your passport, she repeats stubbornly, still staring at the tree trunk, what do you ask?
At the end of the ball when they play the last waltz, you shall have my passport. There is nothing to fear. I am asking nothing else. I give you my word.
You mean a ball at the Stadttheater?
What else should I mean?
I wouldn’t be allowed in.
We will buy everything you need. Your dress, a wrap, a bag, slippers, gloves, pearls, everything. You will be my guest.
You do not know what you are asking. She looks puzzled but no longer sullen. I would be thrown out. They will say you have brought a woman-of-the-street to their ball.
Perhaps neither of us know what we are asking, says G., but I will do what you ask if you will do the same.
When is the ball?
On Thursday next week.
It will be too late. Give me the passport now.
One butterfly follows another making loops in the air near her wide feet in their laced boots. The air smells of fresh still green grass. In the depth of the green are purple and white flowers. The fact that she believed he wanted to make her a prostitute and that she was mistaken in this, now emboldens her. She places a hand on his arm and looks up at him with encouraging eyes. Give it to me now, she says.
If I gave it to you now, you would not come to the ball. You are no
t a fool.
I cannot come anyway. I have to work.
And today?
I told you, I came to ask you.
I will pay your wages.
Give me the passport now and take somebody else. Why does it have to be me? You will find lots of fine women there.
From what I hear I don’t believe there will be any war with Italy before Thursday next week.
I cannot dance your dances.
To hell with their dances!
Then why do you want me to go?
He knows that if he flatters her she will again become suspicious. On the steps of the Stadttheater, he says, on Friday morning you can give me your carnet de bal and I will give you this. He taps his pocket.
All right, she answers softly but gruffly, I will come.
The deserted garden with its unpruned trees, its walls overgrown with creeper, its stone fragments invisible in the long grass, its dragonflies and cats, has never seemed madder to her than now. She is about to leave it, but what she has just said in it will affect everything else in her life outside it.
G. lightly kisses the back of her hand. Meet me here tomorrow at eleven in the morning and by then I will have found a dressmaker.
She wonders if he is a ghost: it would be no more improbable than what she has agreed to do. The most real thing she can think of is the possibility during the next few days of being able to steal the passport.
