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.
One evening Tanya overheard Captain Vasojevic trying to console her father, who seemed worried or upset. He was saying: Even octopi can be tricked into grabbing hold of olive branches. — What her father said to that she could not hear.
Now the younger sisters, as was indeed their own desire, began in turn to be married off closer to home than the elder, their destinies as simplified as the concentric blue leaf-waves on their parents’ plates. They wove their trousseau-clothes as industriously as a nest of elegant spiders. As each one was wed, she gently kissed her parents, brothers and sisters on the cheek.