Veljko, the brother whom Tanya loved best, used to write her whimsical messages in Lingua Venetica, which the rest of the family had long since turned their backs on. One night after drinking Friulian wine he asked whether she supposed that sky travel was an apocryphal fantasy, and was astonished when she burst into tears. Constitutionally less impelled toward what lay overhead than toward things beneath the earth, he trolled the multitudinous limestone caverns of the Dalmatian highlands in search of their father’s secret hoard, which probably never existed. At first Nicola flattered and probably sincerely admired Veljko, hoping that his discoveries might finance an army of liberation-minded hajduks. Both brothers fell out after the latter sold their father’s manuscript of Gjin Gazulli and got (so Veljko told Tanya) only enough for a drunk at the “Heaven’s Key.” Veljko continued his prospecting for seven years; until in Zara, which the Cirtoviches of course continued to call Zadar, he fell for a certain grey-eyed blonde. Keeping her in fine style, and meanwhile caring for his wife and children, he overtaxed his heart and died long before his brothers.
As for the sisters, they got along well enough, raising Orthodox children and praying for everyone’s souls. Discreetly they sold their bracelets of silver coins, as their father would have wished them to do. Now that he was gone, their husbands found courage to beat them whenever they deserved it; but in prayer the women consoled themselves, the priest swishing the tinkling censer, perfuming away all ills, and presently it seemed fantastic that their father had ever been able to shelter them from kicks and blows, which are, after all, the lot of most wives.
Of the dead man’s brothers, Massimo and Alessandro survived best; they stuck to the wholesale trade. Stefano, whose old face had grown as flat and wise-eyed as a flounder’s, found himself ever more often called upon to help Jovo’s children, which he did; may he receive his reward in better days. Cristoforo became an olive oil merchant. Strange to say, these four, who once had longed to impale Turkish heads in every castle tower, gave over that design, perhaps because it did not pay. As for Florio and Lazzaro, they sailed away to Izmir, and were never again heard of.
In the final years of the Ragusan republic, the Lazar was sunk by Venetian pirates, and the Cirtoviches nearly fell into debt. After this they began to buy insurance like everybody else. They went on drinking the three toasts, and never neglected that fourth cup in honor of Prince Lazar. If only they could have gotten hold of that leatherbound talisman, whatever it was! It must be admitted that they kept mostly cheerful, in obedience to that Serbian proverb when his house burns down, at least a man can warm himself. Sometimes they sat at the “Heaven’s Key,” theorizing as to the qualities and whereabouts of that enigmatical treasure. So went the years. Blaming Tanya’s bookkeeping practices, Nicola, who had bravely sold out his share of the business, was reduced to coming home in a bragozzo, with his conical wire-mesh traps full of lobsters. The others found ever less to do in their father’s countinghouse; first they voyaged; then they sat at home scraping their capital together. The other fishermen disdained them for slovenly souls, whose ropes lay as loose as the hair of women at a funeral. Luca Morelli bought the fittings of the Beograd, just to humiliate them. Nicola and Vuk were already dead when Serbia cut away the Turkish noose (which happened, as I recall, around Easter). So far as I can tell, the next generation remained in Trieste, although several did fall out of the records; perhaps they too met with accidents at sea, or even adventured back into their family homeland. By then the Cirtoviches possessed only two waterlogged merchant ships. As Milovan Djilas once wrote: Society has no way out of disappointment but the death of whole generations and whole classes… Austrian customs officials further hedged them in, and so I drink their memory-toast in Friulian wine.
Although Marija failed to survive him by many years (she aged with an eerie rapidity), Tanya lived into the era of diamond clasps, weaving her nephews’ undershirts, still hoping for her father to return. By then her family’s garden had been eaten up by caterpillars, and the Spanish consulate had taken over her father’s warehouse. Just as a preying nautilus extrudes its tentacles, so this or that rich Triestino overhung her property, trolling at its deeds and taxes, making her shameful offers. A certain Alberto importuned her the most, but he was too old. Meanwhile her brothers and uncles hounded her, hypothesizing that since she had been her father’s favorite she must know something about his treasure. When nothing came of their investigations, they ostracized her, I fear, but in time they forgave her. She became quite the old maid. All protections having been not only superseded but countermanded, death slavered to get at her now, so that even the brick-scaled, flag-clutching pier-claws of the harbor occasionally sought to close upon her whenever she promenaded in search of her father (sometimes followed at a distance by Alberto), with her woman’s dagger at her side, inquiring among the cloaked, barelegged Ragusan merchants, quizzing the beggar-children huddled together like figures on a dirty old marble frieze; but again and again death spat her out, not relishing the taste of her indifference.
How much did she comprehend? Although her father never told her in so many words that he had hoped to sail high enough to approach not only the stars and saints swarming through the sky like the ships in Venice on Ascension Day, scarlet bunting everywhere, oars swiveling like crustacean legs, lapis-cloaked ladies in the shaded galleries, peals of cathedral bells, but also the starry canals to grander spheres, until he came into the gold-haloed presence of his most adored saint, didn’t Tanya guess it all? Turning away from this, she rigged out yellow ledger-pages like the cutched sails of the Cirtoviches’ fleet, valiantly angling for the slightest breeze of profit. Even in this skill, in which she had no interest, she proved better than her father’s other children. But, as the Triestini remarked, the planets were against her.
She married late; her husband was a merchant whose family came from Muggia. He was as handsome, sad and smoothfaced as the bearded golden reliquary bust of Saint Nicholas, whose moustaches, beard and hair flow together like so many parallel waves of yarn; but Tanya scarcely noticed him. Their children died early. From across the room the husband frequently stood for a moment to watch this woman (who never permitted him to call her Tanyotchka), with her long grey hair hanging down and her chin in her hand as she did his accounts. He felt proud of her; she knew nearly as much as he did. Sometimes he got her to sit beside him by pretending interest in her father’s doings. When he died, he left her a decent portion.