Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Where does the forest begin? The entrances are invisible, and yet one clearly feels them as they open and they close, and when one is inside or outside, quite apart from the fact of being or not being surrounded by trees. One entrance, a personal one maybe, is the Pomočnjaki (“very damp”) clearing alongside the road – a gozdna cesta (“path in the woods”), which offers no guarantee of being passable – connecting the Padežnica plain, where the snow falls in abundance, Mirine’s two houses and the clearings of Grčovec clearing, with their knotty trees as suggested by the name and the richly turfed Travni dolci. Then it rejoins the main road, so to speak, that leads to the summit. For a few seconds one morning in the Pomočnjaki clearing the newly risen sun created a perfect cathedral of light out of the vapour that was rising from the grass, a form that became thinner and thinner as it rose, culminating in a cusp; the door, a great Gothic portal, was a luminous cloud, a gleaming, dense curtain that hid the wood behind. The figure sitting nearby in the grass, close both at that moment and over the years too, had stood up in the meadow at the forest’s edge where we had both been waiting for the things to emerge from the dark, to emerge foretold from the unmistakable smell of dawn, or for the morning star to fade out at the apex of the red fir opposite, suddenly invisible in the brightness. Then the figure had set off slowly towards and in through that door of light, entering and fading in the impenetrable clarity, out of sight.

  At that moment one could have believed that every disappearance, even over the ultimate threshold – the one that the roebuck in the clearing would no doubt soon have crossed, what with the gun-shots beginning to echo round the mountain – meant no more than passing through such a curtain, so there was no need for that dark, anxious fear that increasingly strips things of their meaning as the years pass. But unlike that clearing where the figure had reappeared in the gold of the grass with the daisies and bluebells, white mugwort and purple-red thrifts beginning to materialize, the wood restored nothing; that which had disappeared was gone for ever, devoured or decomposed in the moist soil, without compassionate lies or any illusion of burial, like that stag with its throat cut in the Dolčice clearing or that badger by the roadside on the way to Trije kaliči, the highest and most disturbing of the hollows, just below the summit of the mountain. The gold of the grass was turning brown, gold tarnished by time which simply flows and decomposes and disappears, as finally you spit out the fir bark that you’ve been chewing for a long time as you wait for the arrival of an animal – good, fresh and bitter bark that forms a grip on your teeth and stimulates the saliva until you spit it out and it mingles with the moist soil.

  Anyway, there, beyond the door of that cathedral which evaporated immediately, the forest opened, while on other occasions it was ready to exclude whoever crossed it, to lead him to feel himself estranged from the thick wood, even though it surrounds him. Padežnica, Pomočnjaki, Grčovec, Travni dolci, Dolčice, Trije kaliči, Črni dol, Črna draga … these clearings were a shared history, with the years they turned more or less into the lineaments of a face, assumed the colour of thoughts and feelings; certainly landscape of loving, perhaps because it was easier, in the dawnings, to love the face close by that emerged pure from the dark. In that shadow you were no one and thus, stripped of all personal shabbiness, it was easy to love, because nothing came between love and life, which so often presents obstacles, perils and traps for love just as the hunters set traps for the wildlife. In the strong animal smell of dawn there was no need to clean any mud off, like that doe which for a moment threw herself into the pond at Pomočnjaki and came out running off happily with all that mud on her back, fresh and clean as clear water. She did not shake it from her and it had all the goodness of her own skin.

  The roe at Pomočnjaki, the buck at Travni dolci which ran to the mating call (imitated with a skill worthy of more serious ventures), and then disappeared, barking disappointedly; the wolf at Trije kaliči, great tawny beast, really close, as he turned slowly; the two deer bent over the small spring of Saint Andrew; that frightened, sleepy hazel mouse on the path to Planinec; those careful, vigilant boars at Pales; the falcons, the wildcat, the dormouse working away all night above the tree-platform, while yet again one hoped to catch sight of the bear…. But for years and years everyone else saw the bears, even those who went around in the woods making a racket and spreading litter. We alone, who even knew where to find the dens where the animals went to hibernate or to cub – we were the only ones who never saw them, and summer followed summer cadenced by this expectation and this quest and above all else by their failure.

  Not even Boris managed to take us to the right place at the right moment – Boris, the gamekeeper of the aristocratic face, had seen countless bears, once even four together. Whenever he scattered some corn or left a carcass out as bait at Pales, it was like fixing an appointment with the bear; once it even came to uproot the post to which a cow was tied, two days dead, and dragged both off into the wood. But when he took us with him, the bear never came, not even when encouraged with a dead horse. Bearless year after year; at the most there was some fresh track or recent dung, which on our return were announced triumphantly, while the others – and the children too, although even they, without admitting it, made that elusive bear the focal point of their summers and perhaps even something more – the others congratulated us, laughing, on this excremental coronation of the season we’d waited all year for.

  At Gomance, under a thick and twisted fir that covers the soil beneath, that German helmet must still be there, complete with bullet hole. It was right to put it back after having stumbled upon it; perhaps it is the only tomb, albeit vicarious, of whoever wore it and has probably disappeared completely now, because the forest, unlike the fields, provides no recognizable burial plots to bring a little order into the world. The woods of the Nevoso were a nerve centre in the partisan war; there were small groups here that moved like lightning and important headquarters were set up on the mountain, especially the bases for the couriers who maintained the clandestine links with the distant units of Tito’s Ninth Corps. For the Yugoslav resistance the Snežnik was a theatre and in it they displayed an extraordinary capacity for political organization, military efficiency and courage. These qualities soon evaporated, however, when the valiant and merciless rebels of the woods mutated into a managerial class that was, all things considered, shoddy and parasitic; it survived artificially long after its actual demise thanks to the cover afforded it by the genius and the ingenious deception of Marshal Tito.

  Partisan hospitals were hidden away at Beli Vrh and Požar, the Germans’ headquarters were at Ilirska Bistrica and a few kilometres off, at Zabice, there was a group of the Germans’ Chetnik allies under the leadership of Dobroslav Jevdiević. The Italian barracks at Morele and on Monte Aquila had been abandoned in 1943 and destroyed. A number of Italian soldiers had joined Tito’s partisans, but soon realized to their cost that the proud and rightful rebirth of a nation oppressed by the Fascists was in its turn becoming savage and oppressive nationalism. Wandering through those woods in search of the bear it was strange to think of Father – or of Grandfather – who, in the hour of defeat had come this way, leaving behind the devastated barracks, to return to Trieste, and this at a time when a man’s life on these very paths was worth no more than that of a beast. Thus a track led to Morele as well, under the rubble beneath which there had been a home – or den or prison – for a person whose face and gestures, with the passing of the years, are ever less distinguishable from those of his son, who would like to be even more like him than he is.

  The partisans fought well, their rifles oiled with dormouse grease; even the woodsmen executed by the Germans at Klanska Polica knew how to face death. The worst clash came at Mašun, where the Tomsič brigade put up a fierce fight for the pass, before retreating to Leskova Dolina and burning the little town’s fortress. In that war in the woods the fabric was being woven of a policy that had a global view and aimed not only at liberating a country,
but at creating a new society. When the partisan groups met at Mašun in September 1943, along with the military commanders there was the Slovene leader Edvard Kardelj, possibly the only one of Tito’s heirs who might have saved the Federal Republic from its shameful collapse. He was the inventor of that self-management that for some years seemed to be – and for some years therefore was – a true third way for socialism, available as a model for a large part of the non-aligned world in the Cold War and an instrument for genuine internal liberalization, unknown in the Communist countries. He was also responsible for the policy pursued by Tito on the international stage, combining as he did gifts of leadership with those more befitting Baron Munchhausen.

  Kardelj was involved, furthermore, in the creation of Golj Otok, the gulag on the bare island in the western Adriatic established by the Tito regime for the imprisonment and torture of its political opponents, not least – following the rift with Stalin – the Stalinists, including those Italian Communists who had chosen to move to Yugoslavia in order to contribute towards the construction of socialism.

  Thus in those days of war these woods, peaceful and secluded from History, which at the most had known the raids of the Turks in 1528 or the Islamicized Wallachians in 1758, became the place where an intricate web of hopes and lies was being spun, projects for freedom and plans for totalitarian violence, a spirit of sacrifice and of rapacious domination. In the forest a small anonymous pyramid recalls the unknown partisans buried there; the woods know not illustrious tombs or gravestones.

  Kardelj, Tito, the Nevoso and naturally the bear are all found in an anonymous painting which lies in an attic in Ilirska Bistrica – the client, the Party, never collected it. The painting depicts the wood, a fire and a bear killed by some hunters – Tito with his hands on his knees and Kardelj with his florid sausage-eater cheeks, gesticulating in evident imitation of the threatening lunges of the bear that has just been killed. Unfortunately Kavčič is also there, a leader who fell into disgrace immediately after the painting was completed, and thus it never found its rightful place and had to be removed from circulation. The bear lies on the ground, looking well nourished and blissfully asleep rather than dead, and one can almost hear him snoring. He’s the only one enjoying himself amidst all these coups de théâtre: one eye looks half open and peeks mockingly at the leading politicians-cum-hunters; the right way to look at History, a sly, sideways glance.

  And so even the woods are penetrated by History, with its continuous scene-changes and relocations. When the people fought in these valleys they felt Yugoslav, they were proud to have recovered from Fascist oppression by their own merits; this had been rendered possible thanks to Yugoslav unity; they did indeed consent to those injustices inflicted in the name of their country against the Italians – not on the Nevoso, which had always been Slovene and was usurped by its annexation to Italy following 1918, but in the Italian territories of Istria that can be seen from the summit of Snežnik or the Orlovica and which Yugoslavia would contrive to annex after 1945, cruelly persecuting the people who lived there. Until recently Josip Križaj was a Yugoslav hero, a Slovene Air Force ace who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, too, and came down in these woods near Mount Cifre by the Jarmovec in a mysterious accident in 1948; a monument there still commemorates him. For some time now the rumours have been that it was the Serbs who shot him down in 1948. In the museum of Kozarišče castle they are waiting for the return of the portrait of Princess Ann, Prince Hermann von Schönburg’s sister. The portrait, together with paintings and precious objects from various castles, had been taken to Brdo to adorn one of Tito’s luxurious and kitsch villas. Now, as with the other articles, it will return to the ancestral home. History is about moving house, arranging and removing furniture from the attic to the best sitting room and vice versa.

  The Nevoso Castle, at Kozarišče, mentioned by old Janez Valvasor in his monumental eighteenth-century work in praise of the Krain, was neither destroyed nor burned during the Second World War, unlike the other castles in Slovenia. Credit for this goes to the bursar, Leon Sauta, a Czech who administered the castle for its owner, Prince Schönburg-Waldenburg. Whenever the victors of the moment arrived – those who had taken possession and wanted to raze the castle to the ground – Sauta explained that they were now the new owners, that the castle therefore was and would remain their property, hence it was absurd and against their own interests to destroy it. He said this to the Italians, the Germans and the Partisans and time and time again that simple, impeccable reasoning convinced occupiers and liberators – evidence of the fact that logic and grammatical analysis, if we had more confidence in them, might spare us many ruins. Leon Sauta would have many things to teach many people today even, especially those former Yugoslavs who take it in turns to destroy one another, intent on razing their cities to the ground and cutting one another’s throats in a crazy bloodlust, regardless – in the stupidest of fratricidal wars, the tragic failure of Tito’s great attempt at founding a state – that the life they are destroying is their own. But the civilization of these woods, like that of Slovenia in general, is far removed from this barbarism that came before civilization.

  The chronicles speak of borders and frontiers with obsessive insistence. A compendium of them, in manuscript, is kept in the castle at Kozarišče. It is in German, and its author, Franz Schollmayer, compiled it in 1923 as a summary of the vicissitudes of those lands and especially of the princes Schönburg-Waldenburg, for whom he worked. Over time there were repetitions of the conflict between the lords of the Nevoso – or Schneeberg as it was known to the author and previous chroniclers – and the city of Laars, with all the ensuing jurisdictional complications. Even more recurrent were the conflicts between the woodsmen of the Nevoso and those from Cabar, beyond Klanska Polica. That line represents a persistent and fatal clash: the Romans’ frontier against the Scordiscians which was perhaps already contested between Gepidae and Celts; much later it became a disputed tract of the frontier between the Austrian empire and the Hungarian kingdom, settled for once and all by a mixed Austro-Hungarian commission in 1913; then the frontier between Italy and Yugoslavia, and now between Slovenia and Croatia, in other words until recently the border between two Republics in the same Federation and today the border between two states, not at war but inclined to look upon each other with mutual wariness. “It was inevitable, he’s a Croat,” said Milka, the custodian of the Planinski Dom at Sviščaki when she told the story of how her daughter had come to divorce.

  Wars between empires and between poachers, family rows, street fights, turning points in history and the daily simplicity of chalets in the wood; those woodsmen whose incursions are often complained about in the news – in Slovenia or in Croatia – are the symbol of the centuries-old toll paid in violence that a border often demands, an idol that requires blood sacrifices. Borders: a need, a fever, a curse. Without them there is neither identity nor form, there is no existence; they create existence and arm it with its all-pervading talons, like the hawk that in order to exist and to love its nest must make its dive for the blackbird.

  The woods are at once the glorification and the nullification of borders: a plurality of differing, opposing worlds, though still within the great unity that embraces and dissolves them. Even the light, in the forest, makes clean cuts that create different landscapes, and, in the same instant, different times. There is the black light in the deepest darkness and that deep underwater green beneath a vault of branches that twines above the path; and while in the golden clearings there is still the light clarity of bright daytime, just a few metres away, in the wood, it is already evening, a grave shadow.

  But the forest, ever since Actaeon was savaged by his dogs, has been indistinctness and Dionysiac destruction, a return to the primeval magma; legend speaks of fear of the wood, which is fear of losing oneself and being annulled. The long summers and the familiarity with the hollows, the thickets and the paths are not enough to penetrate that unknown in any true sense, it re
mains untouchable even when one crosses it in autumn, in a crystalline and gusty air that freezes the tiniest noise, the creaking of a branch. Old Drago Karolin, he was certainly in the wood and he never came out of it not even when he went to town; his entire life was wrapped up within the clearings of the Nevoso. To be in the wood as he was it was not enough to walk beside him for hours on end across the Snežnik, as he placed signs at the forks, repainted old faded words, drew maps that recorded even the smallest of paths, collected and polished bizarrely shaped roots, angrily stamped on his hat when he took the wrong way and then immediately resumed the conversation in an old-fashioned and high-flown German, peremptorily hushing his wife, the ebullient Mrs Ida. He also dedicated fine paintings and poems to the Nevoso, thus finding a place for himself in the small tradition of homage to the Muses that flowered in the shadow of the Snežnik: the nineteenth-century local stories of Janez Bilc, the poems of Župančič or Marička Žnidaršič, Avčin’s descriptions, Poročnik’s photographs.

  For Karolin the forest was open, a garden or a house to look after and keep tidy; the lynx was like a pet cat and the centuries-old, mouldy fir trees of the wood around the Andreas Quelle were like a piece of furniture to be polished. The forest did not give much away to anyone else: it rebuffed them ironically in alien clumsiness, their enthusiasm was in vain; perhaps this was why not even the bear would make an appearance. To be at home in the wood one probably had to know how to write Karolin’s clichéd, rhyming verses, “Yonder rustles the forest remote …”