Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (12 page)

Who any of them were remained a wavy, blurry secret, rippling through those seeming crudenesses which deceive us like the blocky reflections of the lighthouse in the winter seas; Darinka Kvekich, for instance, appears so stiffly monumental in that photograph that our acquaintanceship extends only to her exoskeleton. As a matter of fact, Serbkinas are said to be the most passionate of women, and I have accepted this ever since I first saw cigarette smoke blossoming from a lady's long white fingers one autumn afternoon in Beograd. (If only I could have offered her Friulian wine!) But this quality they keep hidden from most foreigners, treasuring it within the wall of bluish-white river which waits within the beech trees of Serbia; and their inconspicuousness succeeds all the better because there is so much flamboyant Italian beauty in Trieste. I myself sometimes still pine for a certain exemplar of Franz Lehar's
danza delle libellule,
who made her appearance in an ice-blue gown with blue clouds around the hem, a blue scarf draped over her arm, and a strand of blue pearls dangling from her disdainful wrist. Meanwhile, in a dark niche in Trieste dwells the faint wooden statue of a Slavic woman, whom hardly anybody visits; while in a neighboring recess hangs an icon of the Madre della Passione, also called Strastnaja; as Cirtovich demonstrated to the Philadelphians, she is gold and silver on velvet. The heads of Serbkinas stare at me through oval window-mats, as if through the visors of iron helmets. They are no more distinct to me than any gulls and pigeons in Trieste's cypress-shaking wind.

Meanwhile, our Signor Cirtovich grew a trifle rotund, and his hair whitened and withered. His brothers sailed to Izmir and the Orient, prosperously, but not overly so—another reason the Triestini preferred
them to Jovo. They greeted a man like Christians, and weren't too proud to eat squid! By now we bought salt from the Venetians, whose prices the Ragusans no longer hoped to approach. Where Cirtovich obtained it he would not tell, but to the Triestini he sold it cheaper than anyone, and it savored better. (The only way to take advantage of him was to offer him old maps and manuscripts; he remained greedy for such trash.) To the Jews of Trieste he brought, secured in an inconspicuous wooden chest, an Ark of the Torah, whose golden-green flowers and radially symmetrical vines upon a pinkish white background comprised a paradise as lovely and secret as his home. The Jews praised him and paid him well. Thanks to him, they could house their treasure in a silver cover inlaid with gold.

Although he had never yet been tricked by any of the sea's shining and tarnished moods, bit by bit he seemed to grow shyer of the aqueous element—or perhaps merely more home-loving. Something disagreed with him, something as small yet black as a single housefly in a whitewashed whitestone room in Ragusa at high summer noon. At about the time that his son Nicola came of age, Cirtovich began to closet himself with a very old man (most likely Slovenian) who carried a snakeheaded walking-stick. Luca Morelli told Captain Robert that he had overheard the two principals discussing an iron hoard in the ground near Bled. Evidently a certain species of iron stood infallible against monsters of all types, and the old man agreed to bring a piece of it to be tried. Cirtovich replied something to the effect that any octopus can ooze through a tiny hole, at which the old man swore by the Mother of God that no sea-monster could get around his metal, in token of whose holiness he requested Signor Cirtovich to be informed, as could be verified by any number of esteemed persons, that from this very same ore had been smelted the sword of Prince Lazar, may Christ smile upon him, who could have vanquished the Turks at Kosovo had he not preferred a heavenly kingdom. Cirtovich responded in a very low voice, so that Morelli failed to comprehend his syllables. Six weeks later the old man reappeared shouldering a heavy sack, but soon left the warehouse in a rage. Cursing Cirtovich and all Serbs everywhere, he threw the sack into the Canal Grande, stamped his foot, then rapped his stick against the railing of the Ponterosso three times. That was the last they saw of him. After
that, Cirtovich received fewer visitors. His smile failed to match his gaze. He kept his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets, except when he played with the chain of his pocketwatch. Even his friend Pavle Petrovic, another old settler whom he had previously greeted at church, began to feel unwelcome in this man's shadow. Complaining to Florio and Alessandro, he was told: Well, that's our brother.

In about 1746 Jovo Cirtovich received delivery of a fine book-chest with three mirrors glued inside the lid, and over the main compartment, as Vasojevic was called upon to ascertain, a lockable wooden panel figured with grapes and crowns. Captain Robert said: His brain must be worm-eaten! Why should he waste good gold like that?— Luca Morelli proposed that the man had a mistress. They asked Petar, who kept heroically quiet even over two bottles of wine.— In fact the item was for Cirtovich's youngest daughter, Tanyotchka.

Triestina that she was, she grew up in the lovely softness of dirty grey stone, promenaded through brickwork like a sunset made of russet graveyard earth, secluded herself in shining veils and dresses each one of which could have been the silver cover of a sacred book. Her very first memory was of a yellow-green pine branch swaying in the rough sea; she could not remember that on that occasion her father had been carrying her in his arms. Sometimes when she opened her eyes he was gazing down at her with his sad smile. Then she remembered the painful brightness of her mother's sunny curtains in the Triestine sea-wind, and the Ponterosso swiveling up and down for her father's ships; Srdjana was letting her water the garden flowers, so she felt important; in the garden she used to chase slate-hued lizards with her brother Veljko, and when caught the creatures would cast off their wriggling tails. It was already time for church. The priest with the long white beard bowed to everyone and disappeared within the golden door of that great house where Jesus lived. And of course she would not forget Uncle Massimo and Aunt Eva, who gave her presents; even more significant were the sad dark eyes of Prince Lazar from the icon over her parents' bed; he looked like the king of a deck of cards come alive. Then there was a certain painting in the drawing room, and in her imagination Tanya was or somehow would
become the tender longhaired girl on the white horse, laying down her many-bangled arm upon the man's head. Who he was she never thought to ask. She remembered how her sisters laughed at her whenever they caught her dreaming over this picture (Aleksandra and Liljana were the cruelest; Gordana cared the least). Her father in his grey homespun trousers, her mother with the little dagger at her belt, them she most frequently remembered not in and of themselves, but rather as elements of scenes, as when, for instance, she was riding in the coach with her mother to see her father off; arriving at the Canal Grande, they watched through the narrowest conceivable parting of the curtains as he descended the stone stairs to the skiff where two of his sailors waited to ferry him out to the
Sava
or the
Lazar
(by then he had turned over the
Kosovo
to Uncle Massimo, the
Beograd
to Uncle Florio).
Sometimes Liljana might ride along; her brothers still accompanied them when they were young; they would leap out onto the quay and their father's servitors would set them easy tasks, praising and humoring them as befitted the sons of a rich man. Uncle Florio or Uncle Stefano might be about the docks; they would always approach the carriage to greet the family in Christ's name, kissing Tanya on the forehead. Once, while some gaunt carpenter bent far forward over his bench to watch, a sailor questioned Vuk about that neck-pouch which their father guarded like some diadem, but the boy took fright and sprinted back to the coach. By then their father had commended them to Saint Sava, vanishing promptly, while Petar conveyed the remnant home, her mother too proud to weep, the child knowing that the worst had happened: her father had left the world again, perhaps forever; and she imagined that the evening breeze was sobbing by means of the shaking reflection of leaves in a windowpane. While she was still very young, this image of the absent father quickly became as pallid as San Giusto's above-the-doorway marble saint in his concentrically dimpled robe, holding a castle in one hand and a rake in the other, with his head cocked wryly; then her father came home to renew himself in her mind. Her mother slaughtered two chickens and a lamb; there were onions, potatoes, greens of all sorts, and Friulian wine, of course—never squid or octopus, which her father would not touch. Tanya and her sisters were kissing him in delight, because he had brought them a little box of coral-figured golden buttons. What her brothers got
that time she disremembered. For a bedtime story he told them about blind creatures he had recently met in a certain limestone cave. Only Tanyotchka dared to ask: Papa, what were you doing in that cave?—to which he smilingly replied that perhaps he had needed to hide a certain something. In the morning she watched him reading old documents in an unknown alphabet. Then almost at once, or at least so she remembered it, they were escorting him back to the Canal Grande. He embraced them and stepped out of the carriage. Petar's eyes grew as milky blue as the lagoon of Grado. Captain Vasojevic was waiting on the quay; he kissed his hand to Tanya. Her mother's lips moved in a prayer, and as they turned up the road past the Teatro Romano, Tanya forgot her father because a plump black-and-white cat lay on the rim of the old Jesuit well, unmoving, her green eyes wide, and so the girl pleaded with her mother for a cat. Her mother kissed her wearily. Her brothers were hounding Petar to tell them how their father once escaped from a boatload of ravenous
uskoks.
— Well, young masters, why not ask Captain Vasojevic? If it happened, he must have been there. I don't know about anything but horses.

Each time she was parted from her father, she continued to feel a fearful bewilderment as to how she ought to live without him, but ever less apprehension on his behalf, since he owned such heavenly luck. Soon she could remember him better and better, in part by means of a certain old book which he sometimes unlocked from his strongbox to show her. Its silver covers were mounted with mosaics of tiny gold, somber malachites, carnelian and hematite tiles; mostly it was all gold. Christ hovered, His pale robe glittering like mother-of-pearl and the four spokes of His golden wheel-halo making a cross as He shone there within an oval womb surrounded on all sides by haloed saints each of whose halo was a golden pavement of beads: Saint Lazar, Saint Sava and their kin reached out to touch the spears of golden light which radiated from His envelope. Opening the silver covers of this book, Tanya found the secret of those rays. But what it consisted in could not be expressed. The child believed that her father knew it as well as she; they had no need to speak of it. As for her sisters, they invariably exclaimed over that precious object, then, summoned by their mother, returned to their weaving and sewing, which they much preferred because, safely away from their father, they could laugh and sing as they desired.

These were some of the pictures in the book of Tanyotchka; they made her who she was. Throughout her life they accompanied her, sometimes closer or farther from her head, like the seagulls crying just before a rain. And I must not fail to mention the picture she simply lived in. Caressed on every fair day by that light of Trieste, which is born of sun, sea, paint and stone, and might be yellow or beige, but masks itself in all the colors, she never realized how Italian she was.

As he travelled less, her father built up his library, and long before that renowned Triestino Baron Revoltella even began to assemble his glass-fronted shelves of match-bound, spine-labeled volumes, Cirtovich possessed considerable bibliographic treasures. These became a portion of her heritage, and only hers, because to everybody else in the family that chamber felt as eerie as the site of a solitary burial. Once she asked her Uncle Alessandro what his favorite book might be, and he laughed, staring at her. Then she knew why her father kept aloof from his brothers.

She and her sisters used to play with seventeenth-century brass coins worn down into spurious translucency; their father once brought home a coffer of them, salvaged from some shipwreck and quite worthless except to children. The girls strung them into bracelets and necklaces. As for their brothers, they hid, hoarded and traded their shares.

Their father loved them all in the best way, doting on them, yet, as they somehow were aware, seeing their faults, guarding them from perils and follies, indulging them when that would do no harm, and correcting them only by necessity. The boys often disagreed, and fell to pummelling each other with shipwrights' nippers, clamps and chisels; they would have swung wide-bladed axes if they could. Remembering his own childhood, Cirtovich did not beat them even for these follies. (He never struck his daughters at all; it was left to Marija to do that, without his knowledge.) Once, it is true, he laid hands on Vuk, whom he caught teasing his sisters with a dead octopus he had found, but that was to teach him that a man must never disrespect any woman.
*
The Triestini had come to
imagine him as overbearing and even ferocious; and indeed, as might as well be confessed, in darker ports he had assaulted certain stubborn customs men, when the latter were unreasonable, and outnumbered, and if it happened to be a moonless night; but up here at home, when the sea breeze passed in between the shutters, which on spring and summer afternoons grew pearlescent with that special Friulian light, he played games with the children on his hands and knees. Marija laughed a little, then turned away.

Tanya's brothers already dreamed of foreign coasts, and among themselves (saying nothing to their father, who simply awed them—he had no use for their plans) they fashioned ever shrewder fantasies of secret lucre. Nicola was the eldest, then Vuk and Veljko. Once they had mastered arithmetic, Captain Vasojevic quizzed them on Grisogono's Venetian circles for calculating the heights of tides. Then he took them down to the harbor. Their hands grew rough and they spoke less and less. Their mother and sisters soon virtually lost sight of them, so frequently were they away in their father's ships, learning the lie of the Dalmatian coast.