Haya is six years old and recalls little of Trieste from this time. She remembers her father Florian as he inches, legs rigid, between the tables, holding his tray high above his head, as if collecting the rain. She remembers how she waits for Florian to finish his shift at Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza Unità on Sundays, so they can go for ice cream at an ice-cream stand, because the ice cream there is cheaper. She remembers a family, dressed in finery, dignified somehow, and she remembers how she wants to live in a family like that. Haya observes the woman in her dark striped suit with a cloche hat perched on her head, taking a little mirror from her purse that catches the rays of the sun, and how the lady smiles at her sons in a way that Ada has never smiled at her. Haya watches the boys in their little blue suits and wants to ask them What language are you speaking? She wants to say to them, I am Haya and I can sing to you in Slovenian if you like:
The gentleman doesn’t smile at his sons, because he is reading the paper. He has white hands. He has a moustache and an elegant grey suit with a sheen. The boys drink hot chocolate and Haya suddenly wants some, too. She’d like to sip hot chocolate at the Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza Unità, and swing her feet and admire the brand-new patent leather shoes she doesn’t have. Haya remembers her surprise and her curiosity, Who are they? Then, just as when a mirror slips from the fingers, the image shatters. A man from a neighbouring table rises to his feet, the chair tips over, he takes two marching steps, stands behind the man who is reading the newspaper and shouts, he shouts terribly loudly, and he is scowling and his eyebrows are tangling into writhing leeches, and his mouth opens into a small tomb that flashes and all the while he is holding a large cup of coffee in the air as if he were at the Olympics preparing to heave a hammer that looks like a bomb but isn’t, it is a white porcelain coffee cup from the Caffè degli Specchi on Piazza Unità full to the brim with aromatic Illy coffee, then he swings and the cup smacks the gentleman below the shoulder and the black liquid starts to steam and soak into the grey suit — to get warm? to hide? — leaving a large, dark, wet splotch.
Schiavo! howls the person who flung the cup. Schiavo, qui si parla solo italiano! The boys jump to their feet, pull out handkerchiefs, dip them in the water from their father’s glass and mop his back. The coffee flees, sheds its aroma, spreads around the man’s belt, trickles down his right trouser leg and wriggles to the ground like a small dead snake. On the light grey suit an image is left resembling a squished cow pat.
One damp Trieste evening, as Florian Tedeschi strolls along the deserted sluices, staring with horror at the empty belly of the port, nearly touching the sundering of the city which joins with his own sense of fragmentation, which, this rift of his, this schism, sinks perilously into rigidity like the calcified spine of an elderly stroller, he catches himself repeating, to the beat of his footsteps: vorrei dirvi, vorrei dirvi,
one, two,
vorrei dirvi,
I am a businessman,
not a waiter,
I am a soldier,
in every businessman,
in every soldier
hides an ache from which the soul cracks like frozen glass.
Florian Tedeschi turns into Via San Nicolò and stops at Number 30, where the sign Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba still stands today, but Umberto Saba is no longer in Trieste and there is a ribbed iron curtain drawn over the display window of the bookshop.
Tell me about a life and everything
that happens in it
in murky madness
of vainly discordant voices
says Florian Tedeschi staring at the tips of his waiter’s shoes.
Words exhaust themselves
he says
I remember everything, but understand nothing.
Time has shrunk like a jumper rinsed in hot water.
It is getting tight.
The next day, on 15 November, 1932, Florian Tedeschi goes to a branch office of the Banca di Napoli and to a friend from his army days, Luciano Grauer, says: Get me out of here.
In the 1930s there are about five thousand Jews living in Trieste who quickly leave the city, particularly after 1938. One of the four centres in Italy for the study of the Jewish Question is in Trieste, hard at work “profiling” the Italian nation, so Jews start scattering in every direction. Those who stay are captured efficiently by the Nazis and transported to camps all over Europe. Of the more than seven hundred Trieste Jews who are herded on to the freight cars of the trains that pull regularly into Trieste train station, fewer than twenty return after the war. The Tedeschis get out in time without even realizing it.
In late November, the Tedeschi family sail on the ship Ganga, or it may have been the Marco Polo, arranged through an association known as the Società Adriatica, from which a sticker remains, from this Adriatic association, the Adriatic ocean liner, whatever, and the sticker is remarkably preserved, torn no doubt, which was later lost without trace, travelling on its own to a world Haya never knew. from an item of family luggage, no doubt, which was later lost without trace, travelling on its own to a world Haya never knew. The Tedeschis arrive in Naples. For Haya, Naples is an image of blurred colours that mean peace of mind. There are no outlines, here and there a spark.
Paula and Orestes are born. Florian works at the Banca di Napoli. Ada follows Enrico Caruso as he sings “O, sole mio”, and she cooks and washes and cooks and washes, and feeds fish and pasta to her children. After dinner Haya listens to Leoncavallo with her father Florian, Pagliacci is always in fashion, now especially when Gigli is singing, one of Mussolini’s favourites. Every 12 December the family go out to the square where the Giornata della Madre e del Fanciullo is celebrated, when the names are announced of the twenty-three most reproductively active mothers in Italy, each with at least fourteen sons, and the mothers are received at a ceremony and given a modest award by Mussolini and the Pope. One year their neighbour Amalia wins with her eighteen sons, but little red-haired Rita is not part of the competition, as if she were not even there. Life is beautiful. The house is roomy. There are oranges in the garden. The children are given a donkey called Kroo. There are many joyful photographs. Their mother Ada is wearing a white hat, tipped to the right in all the pictures. They ride bicycles. Papa Florian goes to work in a suit. One evening Ada cries as she takes off her wedding ring. Florian removes his wedding ring, too, but doesn’t cry. We’ve been ordered to, he says. Haya wraps in a yellow flannel cloth the silver coat of arms of Gorizia that had hung in her grandfather Bruno Baar’s winery, so Ada says, and which they had brought with them on the long trek to the camp where it had served them, flipped over, as a bread board. I will not give them Marisa’s earrings, Ada says. Florian shouts, You must. With a red-hot needle Ada pierces Haya’s ears, though her hands are trembling. This is all I have of Mother’s. There isn’t even a grave, she says, and so it is that the earrings with their wreath of tiny, poorly burnished, grimy diamonds do not go to Mussolini. Haya has been wearing them for seventy-two years. There, as if they’ve shrunk, she says and touches her ear lobes. Then she says Enough for today and goes to bed.