G. (41 page)

When I found you with that unsavoury Casanova? Yes, I remember. And, you see, that is what we fear, now more than ever, the Italians will take over the city and we shall exchange one tyranny for another. And the second tyranny will be worse than the first because between the two there will have been the lost chance of freedom. The Italians will be worse, worse even than the Austrians.

What you spoke to me about then showed me something, she said.

He continued to stare out of the window. The apparent size of the men unloading the ship intensified his pessimism. If you think, he said, of the Italy Mazzini dreamed of, if you think of Garibaldi, and you look at what Italy has become—

In Paris you will see your friend. She knew no other way to reassure him.

Yes, I will see Gacinovič. My life is like a swan flying through the fog towards a light that is very distant but irresistible. Gacinovič wrote that.

Nuša put her arm round her brother’s back and her chin on his shoulder. Their two heads close together in the small window, they looked down towards the ship whose hatches were open. Slowly, once, he rubbed his cheek against hers. It was a gesture of
tenderness such as normally he would never have allowed himself, but he was overcome by an awareness of how closely their childhood had bound them together. Each of them sensed that the image of the distant light in the fog had profoundly affected the other. To neither was the light a precise symbol or hope. It was not something they could discuss together. But to measure how far away it was, both would begin measuring from the time when he first taught her to read.

The final fitting for the dress was on the Tuesday of the second week. In three days Nuša would be paid her wage; she was still earning the passport. She gazed at the extraordinary dress she was wearing in front of the hinged mirrors.

The skirt was made of black silk. Embroidered upon it, in the Indian style, were eight or nine red peonies, a few silver-green rose-leaves and three or four mysterious sprigs with blue fruit hanging from them like sloes. Each rose-leaf was almost the size of one of her hands. The corsage was of muslin, its colour scarcely different from that of her skin. The sleeves were short and wide, bordered with pearls. She stared at her own shoulders and bosom, rounded and solid through the mist of the muslin, and she thought: if this is the dress he has chosen for me, I will be safe at the ball, in this he will not dare to touch me. And then she thought: on Friday morning I will go to where Bojan lodges still wearing this dress and I will wake him up and give him my wage, I will give him the passport which will allow him to go. And then again she thought: it will attract too much attention like that, I must take the dress off before I go to see Bojan.

She did her best not to think about going back to work at the factory after Bojan had gone. When she was working on the softening machine she had to dampen the streaks of jute by pouring an emulsion of whale oil and water on them. Each time the top rollers of the machine pitched down on to the sodden streaks to mangle them against the fixed bottom rollers, her face was splattered with
the emulsion. Some of the girls wore a tarpaulin. She had tried, but she found it too constricting. When she was carrying the streaks in her arms from the softening machine to the barrows, they made her blouse wet. At first she thought she would always smell of whale oil. If she could find other work she would never go back to the jute factory.

The modiste was adjusting the very high red silk belt. Inadvertently the old woman’s knuckles prodded the young woman’s breasts. Nuša felt the huge embroidered flowers with the palms of her hands. The skirt was tight over her hips. Sometimes when she was feeding the streaks on to the delivery cloth of the softening machine the rollers tugged at the streak she was still holding and the sharp tresses caught on her nails or between her fingers. Her present employer had bought a cream like milk for her hands and every day he asked her to hold them out to him and he gravely examined them to see whether they were softer.

The modiste shifted her attention from the belt to the side seams of the skirt. A fraction taken in here, she said to one of her assistants who wore a pincushion on her wrist like a thistle. Nuša could feel hands moving lightly down the outsides of her thighs. Someone else was altering the fastenings at her back. These light touches of fingers she could not see—for she knew she should not move even her head—had a slightly hypnotizing effect.

When she was sick as a child she imagined a swan who came and settled on her stomach as though on the surface of the water. She used to feel a webbed foot trailing along the outside of each thigh. From its position there, bending its long neck forward with its head down—as a swan does when searching under the water—it fed her gently and lovingly from its beak. Surprisingly the taste of the food the swan gave her from its beak was neither fishy nor stale. It in no way resembled the smell of jute. The swan gave her small cakes which were scarcely larger than cherries and tasted of them.

The modiste stood back to appraise her work.
Ça présente drôlement bien
, she said in her hoarse voice to herself. Two women knelt on the floor to arrange the train.

Walk a few steps, my dear, said the modiste.

Nuša walked very slowly, as though in the dark, towards the mirrors. One of the women on the floor asked her to pick up the train as she would do if she were dancing. Nuša had no idea how this was done. G., who on other comparable occasions had been there to guide her if she looked lost, was in the ante-room waiting for her to emerge in the almost finished dress. Close to the mirror, she was once again amazed by the fullness of her own radiance through the salmon mist of the muslin. Once again she felt a pang of disappointment that her brother would not see her in this dress when she went to wake him on Friday morning. Then she said: You must show me how I do that.

From ten o’clock onwards on the evening of 20 April 1915, the social élite of Trieste drew up in their carriages and motor cars before the steps of the Stadttheater where footmen in uniforms of blue and gold waited to help the parties and couples out. No one expected it to be a ball like the ones before the war. People remarked that it was not the same thing to drive along the Molo to a ball without the liners lit up in the bay. There was not a single ship to be seen in the darkness. Nevertheless the ball was unusually well-attended, perhaps because the idea had occurred to everybody that it would probably be the last one for a good many years.

Among the guests Austrians and Italians were fairly evenly mixed. In most public situations in Trieste Austrians were outnumbered, but this was a special occasion since it was the charity ball for the Austro-Hungarian Red Cross. To put in an appearance at this ball was to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the forces of His Imperial and Royal Majesty and to assume as one’s own the determination with which these forces had overcome their defeats—hence, incidentally, the urgent need for medical supplies. There were middle-aged and elderly Austrians there who considered it their patriotic duty to dance the mazurkas.

The Italians, mostly from well-established trading and shipping
families, were less idealistic but no less anxious for the Empire to survive and to have themselves counted amongst its loyal and influential supporters. The Irredentists in Trieste drew their strength from the professional classes and the intelligentsia. The Italian business and trading community was quite shrewd enough to foresee that without Vienna, Trieste would no longer make commercial sense as a port. If they overlooked this truth they had only to ask themselves why their Venetian competitors were so pleased to finance the Irredentists. The Italians at the ball were nervous. When they went to a window to take a breath of air they half expected to see artillery fire across the gulf.

Wolfgang von Hartmann and his wife came in a carriage. Marika was wearing a dress of lilac and pale green. Her deer-coloured hair was drawn very tightly back. She was breathing through her mouth which was slightly open. The whole day and especially the early part of the evening had seemed endless. She had played patience, she had taken a bath, she had had the hairdresser arrange her hair twice. When she walked through the drawing-room she remembered saying: If we were at home we would go now while he is out of the room. On the parquet floor she traced the path into the forest. She sighed. Waiting ten days had aged her, she would never have waited when she was younger. As the carriage drew up in the small piazza outside the theatre steps, Wolfgang took his wife’s hand and told her she looked disarmingly beautiful. She bowed her head without saying a word. The top of her head looked phosphorescent, as if wet from the sea. Remember, he said, I am no Karenin, I. I wish you a very happy time. When her hair was smooth he was convinced of the ultimate control he had over her.

Their carriage drove away. On the steps they heard somebody say in German that although he did not doubt the future importance of the motor car in trade and war, he found it an unsuitable vehicle in which to come to a ball. Marika craned her neck up at the sky. The milky way was just visible. A waltz was being played in the first ballroom.

Whilst they met acquaintances, shook hands, smiled, received compliments, Marika was searching amongst the groups and couples to see if G. had yet arrived. One of the directors of the Trieste branch of the Südbahn railway, an elderly but energetic man with one eye
that was always half shut, asked her if he might have the pleasure of the first mazurka. She picked up and dropped her
carnet de bal
into her bag as though to indicate that she need not open it to know that the first mazurka was promised. But abruptly, before she snapped her bag shut, she changed her mind. She would be dancing the first mazurka with the Herr Direktor when G. arrived. He thanked her. She opened her fan and behind it glanced at the wide red-carpeted stairway which mounted to the second ballroom.

During the next few hours most of the guests wanted to forget what the next days or months might bring. Yet what they had to say to each other inevitably and disagreeably reminded them of the following day in their provincial war-threatened city. Their release depended upon the music The music sounded both familiar and timeless to them. As soon as it started up after each pause, they were reassured and, once reassured, they had the impression of dancing in the same world as they had danced in since their first ball.

Yet to a solitary listener on one of the deserted jetties who had nothing but his ears and memory to go by, the distant music might have sounded different. It was neither timeless nor entirely familiar.

The orchestra, in blue and red uniforms, belonged to an Austrian regiment which had served on the Eastern front and recently been transferred to Trieste in anticipation of war with Italy. The players no longer believed, as they had before, in the time of the waltzes. They were playing them—not to fill the present moment—but to remind themselves bitterly of the past. All Viennese dance music was nostalgic. But this was no nostalgia for a vague past which could always be conjured up and induced to return. This was bitter simple regret for seven brief irrevocable months during which they had seen too much that they would like to forget. Without realizing it, without thinking of it, they played in order to exaggerate, like parodists.

G. entered with Nuša as a dance ended. They stood side by side, surveying the couples who were leaving the floor. She was the same height as he. And she was like no other woman there. This was instantly apparent to all who set eyes on her.

Taking Nuša’s arm, G. led her towards von Hartmann and his wife. A silence fell upon that part of the room and several guests ostentatiously turned their backs as the couple passed. He presented Herr von Hartmann and Frau von Hartmann to Nuša, which was the contrary of all that etiquette demanded. Then, in a stentorian voice, he thanked the Austrian banker for inviting them to the ball and, as the music started up again, swept his partner away. Von Hartmann stared at them dancing, his face fixed in an absolutely expressionless mask. His voice when he spoke was calm and flat. The only thing which indicated his rage was his choice of epithet; he wanted to find an expression which came from the same depths as the woman whom G. had had the effrontery to bring to their ball. To come with a plate-licker! he said. His wife smiled. She knew who G. was, and his insolence filled her with enthusiasm.