Moni laughed derisively when the last piece of bar fell to the ground accompanied by cheers. What the devil? I thought. There was no reason at all to regret the opening of the border. When it first went up, all it brought was misfortune, then with détente it had become a joke. Nobody took it seriously anymore, especially after the suicide of the ex-Yugoslavia, so it was only right that it should disappear. It was the poison fruit of a war brought on by the Fascists, and for decades it had separated Trieste from its natural hinterland, the hinterland that had made it rich when it was part of the Austrian Empire at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why would I ever miss that damn iron bar? Now I could cross the border wherever I wanted. Separate microcosms were now reunited and I was free, free as the wind, to set out on foot, by car or bicycle, to recompose the severed topography of my world. Yet… I really started to feel as though I were missing something. Something… but what? What was it that my friend meant to tell me with that derisive howl of some nocturnal predator?
It wasn’t long before I understood. What I missed was the dream, the shadow line to cross over, the sense of the prohibited. Wasn’t it the very presence of that border that first pushed me to travel? Didn’t my wanderlust come from the claustrophobic sense of confinement in which Trieste had been closed on the exact date of my birthday, December 20, 1947? “What’s on the other side?” I wondered as a kid, listening on an old static-filled radio to the voice of the Communist world carried on the airwaves from Budapest, Prague, and Belgrade.
From then on, I had begun to navigate in that direction, toward the land of the storks between the Vistula and the Danube. First with my imagination, then—as an adult—on old trains, bicycles, buses, even river barges.
My home is a land of seashore, rocks, and wind. A place I inhabit more as a base camp than a city. Trieste is a place of refuge clinging to the north coast of the Mediterranean, a place that every now and again God enjoys turning upside down with his ladle, in a tempest of air and water called the bora. Trieste, with its furious continental wind, is my hiding place. Between one journey and the next, I’m on the lookout for nooks and crannies where I can’t be seen. Taverns, penumbrae, ghosts, old bookstores, blind alleys, no stylish nightspots, and not even piazzas. I would like to sweep away all the obstacles that separate me from the sea. Go, go, a sailboat and I’m gone. A city to be used only as a boarding area, a place to leave from. A lookout, a balustrade from which to gaze at new horizons.
The Finnish bus snores up and down the slightly sloping road, past elongated shields of moss-covered rock, and right here, in these vast spaces, I realize that my little homeland is not a territory but a line, a frontier in itself. Since birth I’ve been poised precariously on that fault of mine like a tightrope walker on his rope.
I’m a man of the frontier, situated between languages and cultures, between the sea and the mountains. In Trieste, there is nothing between the Alps and the Mediterranean, and even the local news and gossip reflect this extraordinary contiguity. On a street two minutes’ walk from the center of town, an old lady adopted a sweet little puppy looking in the garbage for food, and not until several months later did she realize it was a wolf. A young goat, having come too far down off the mountain, had no other escape route than to throw himself into the sea, right there in the heart of the city, and several times the papers have run stories about Slovenian bears that have come to the edge of town to snack in local chicken coops. In Trieste, the industrial area backs up to a wilderness canyon called Rosandra, with sixth-degree cliffs, and that gorge takes you to the border in a half hour’s walk. That’s where the no-man’s-land is marked by my inn with the iron bar; a place typical of the Cold War, still intact, where thirty years ago soldiers from the now defunct Yugoslavia used to stop in for some rounds of unauthorized drinking with the Italian tax police.
Once, during the Jewish feast of Purim, in which getting drunk is a licit activity, a Jerusalemite rabbi whose family was originally from my area gave me the best definition of my Heimat (home). “When a Triestian sits at the head of a dock and looks out at the sunset with a good bottle of wine in hand, well, that is prayer, great and blessed prayer.” And if you pay close attention in those moments, he added, “the sea bristles with pleasure, the grass on the Karst turns to velvet, and women look at you with bursting desire. And the master of the universe, caressing his beard, says to you with satisfaction, and just a pinch of envy, ‘My lads, you’ve got the better of me yet again.’” In other words, the magnificence of the place resides in its unique contiguity with antithetical situations. Seeing is believing. The distance between a mooring berth and the opera house is fifty yards, between your boat and a tavern less than thirty.
I am proudly attached to this shoreline of mine, where I have dreamed up all of my departures. There are nights, especially autumn nights, when the breeze kicks up, the air turns to glass, and the ferries to Istanbul weigh their anchors to pass in front of the freshly snowcapped Alps, when I really do have the sensation that God envies us mixed-blood bastards perched between worlds on this fabulous precipice. Standing at the head of a pier, without moving an inch, we can see Europe and Turkey; imagine the islands of Ulysses and the beer halls of Prague, where Bohumil Hrabal looked for his passengers; make out, among the ribbing of the surrounding hills, the front of the Great War, which intertwines with the Iron Curtain; sniff the warehouses of Serene Venice, packed full of goods from the East, and at the same time the wild smells of the steppes beyond the Danube. In the mid-1980s, when a Bavarian chancellor landed with his helicopter on one of these piers, he said, “Unglaublich” (incredible), because such was the synthesis of the different worlds.
So when the borders began to open and the rhetoric of globalization started dismantling the sense of the Elsewhere, slowly, in the spirit of contradiction, there began to grow inside of me, without my knowing it, a sense of nostalgia for a true border. I longed for one of those borders from days of old, with barbed-wire fences, glowering looks, searched luggage, and tense silence in front of a man in uniform scrutinizing your passport. Yes, what I needed was a long journey along a limes, a boundary path. That was my unexpressed desire that my friend Moni—transborder poet—had simply rendered explicit and no longer postponable.
So I had to leave, then. But for where? The Iron Curtain was gone; the fences had been replaced by landscaped parklets, museums, and cycling paths. In order to find some still untamed places, you had to go beyond that, to the eastern frontier of the European Union. Maybe that was where “another world” began.
And so there was nothing more to do than imagine a borderline itinerary from the glacial Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean, all the way to Turkey, or maybe even Cyprus. There would be no lack of surprises. Between Russia and Finland, the barrier separating the two worlds still ran alongside the fences of the big chill; the bunkers from 1940 had not been dismantled. Two steps from the North Pole was Murmansk, with the most mysterious submarine base in the world, the one from which the submarine Kursk set sail on its final tragic mission. There was Belarus, the last Communist dictatorship in Europe, and then Kaliningrad, a city of spies come in from the cold, surrounded on all sides by the European Union. Followed by Ukraine, with its elbow of the Carpathians crisscrossed by smugglers and the powerful remnants of its lost Jewish presence. And then, the Black Sea, with its frightful, unending silence. That was where I had to go.