The high commissar of the Adriatisches Küstenland, Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer, has big plans for “his” district. After the war all of Friuli province is to flourish. Trieste, this “little Berlin” at the heart of Rainer’s future provincial paradise, is to spring to life, it will awaken and take flight (within limits). The artists and writers will come flocking back, except the Jews or decadents. The port within the structure of the new German empire will be a pure and virtuous port of a new age. The new man will work there in earnest. He will be supernatural, strong, robust. Rainer will not be able to separate all the ethnic chaff from the golden grain of his imperial periphery. The Slavonic, Slovenian and Croatian corncockle will linger; the Italian Friulians will linger; the rather crude Cici and Morlaks, with their unfortunate allies; the belligerent Cossacks, whom Gauleiter Rainer has compelled to come from the East, promising them the Heimat they never had, their own little Cossackland at the foot of the Carinthian alps in the rugged and impoverished area around Tolmezzo and the River Tagliamento, to which they drag their horses and their tents, their women and their children, until 1945 when nearly all 50,000 of them are repatriated to the Soviet Union and killed, without succeeding, as Gauleiter Rainer had hoped, in defending the Friuli-Venezia Giulia province from the incursions of crude partisan bands, unbridled bandits and infidels. But in 1944 Rainer is hard at work building a compact Furlanentum, carving out a Furlani nation in which Trieste is to become part of German territory, even though the entire province, this special sunny oasis on the edge of the empire of Mitteleuropa, is tainted by the inferior Slavonic race, which, thank God, is in the minority. The workers need better living conditions, Rainer insists, so he is particularly attentive to them. Even Florian, who is selling umbrellas, is not so badly off. Perhaps that is why he doesn’t complain. Rainer sees to it that Italian and Slovenian workers have new (workers’) clothing and new (workers’) footwear, since they are soon to become German workers. The clothing and footwear the workers have been wearing make them look like tramps, and the workers are the heart and soul of his (Rainer’s) project. Rainer has an almost communistic vision of how to set up his provincial realm. He establishes canteens and kitchens, Werkküchen, in which workers are to be given more generous and tasty portions than the rest of the non-working population, so they can bring verve and efficiency to their labours, with a song on their lips. Florian is satisfied. These shoes are excellent, he says, though I am not fond of brown, and he wears Rainer’s workboots when he has to and when he doesn’t, at home, for instance, while listening to Rainer’s radio broadcasts, while leafing through Rainer’s propaganda newspaper, and while smoking Rainer’s cheap cigarettes. We’re not so badly off, Florian says then, at least everyone has an umbrella. The office for labour, at an order from Friedrich Rainer, introduces a special supply of cigarettes for Rainer’s workers, because although some may claim that tobacco is not essential for life, as Rainer declares in his new newspaper, Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, cigarettes are certainly one of those little things that make our everyday life, especially this wartime travail of ours, more bearable, and bring it a touch of brightness, as Rainer says in Deutsche Adria-Zeitung. And aside from that, as a student of the Law, Rainer had undoubtedly come across the notion of mens sana in corpore sano, so he introduces numerous cultural and recreational activities, in factory halls as well as at stadiums, such as those Werkskonzerte of his that are held during lunch break, which all workers, the local managerial staff and representatives of the Nazi administration, are obliged to attend, charged with noting down who comes and who does not. Health matters. Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer knows that health is key: an ailing population becomes depressed and sluggish, productivity diminishes, and with it, patriotic fervour. That is why everywhere in “his” district Rainer has built playgrounds and parks. He organizes competitions and little local festivities, which are advertised along with the broadcast of marches and sentimental hits that alternate on the new hour-long local programme Die Stunde der Friulaner, so that the listeners can dream out their Austrian dreams and navigate the healing waters of saccharine nostalgia. Meeting the cultural needs of the working class is just as important as providing adequate compensation for human labour, Friedrich Rainer says in his Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, because man does not live by bread alone, Rainer says. Rainer’s paper, the Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, is delivered regularly after 14 January, 1944, to Haya’s tobacco shop and Haya takes the Zeitung home and Florian reads it, often aloud, so that everyone in the house can hear, so they will take note of what Rainer recommends and not forget their, his, Rainer’s, German language. In order to secure peace among the civilians, for he has enough headaches with the partisans (Italian, Slovenian and Croatian), Rainer starts a local, separatist weekly called La Voce di Furlania, co-opts Slovenian and Croatian collaborationists, and re-opens the Slovenian schools, so the Tedeschi family get a free set of fourth grade textbooks for Orestes, over which Ada then pores, searching for (and not finding) the lost, distorted time of her mother Marisa (neé Brašić) and her grandmother Marija (neé Krapez). The final issue of Deutsche Adria-Zeitung comes out on Saturday, 28 April, 1945, but Haya doesn’t open up her little shop that Saturday, because she is already touched by a fate from which, as Saba says, one does not die but loses one’s mind instead.
If he were alive, Haya’s grandfather Bruno Baar would probably have told her which of the Gorizia newspapers he read, what papers piled up in the house, which ones Marisa used to wash the windows or to wrap what was left of her set of drinking glasses as they got ready to evacuate the city, back in 1917. And Ada would be able to tell her, tell Haya, which magazines and newspapers she had sold at her tobacco shop before they left Trieste, before fascism dropped the curtain behind which it tapped out the first steps of its diabolic dance, still tentative at that point and with no musical accompaniment, the audience mostly sitting in the theatre and waiting (and finally watching) the beginning of the dramatic second act. But Haya did not ask, Haya does not ask, and Ada soon forgets not only her own life, but life in general.
Before the Great War they read Gaberšček’s Soča and Primorec in Gorizia and Trieste. There is a political paper called Gorica, and Primorski Gospodar, and weeklies such as Novi Šas and Goriški List, and were she to poke around her grandfather Bruno’s now abandoned wine cellar, Haya would find old issues of the monthly Cvetje among the dry barrels, with essays by Škrabec, the Franciscan monk, on the Slovenian language. She would find dusty bottles draped with sheets of paper from Naši Zapiski and Veda, crumpled vestiges, traces of a time that was only just birthing, as if that time were a premature infant which the war was compelling to rest, swaddled, waiting. And now here is another war, the campaigns follow one upon another like the seasons; the commands from invisible powers spurt in brief, sluggish sprays and well-worn history flows like lava down the streets and squares, seeping into rooms and turning people to stone. Like Trieste, Gorizia lives its maddened parallel lives again, careening along railway lines from which the rails have been stripped. In it, in that accursed blot on the three-way border, at the intersection of four languages and invisible pasts, carelessly buried, dispersed or swept aside like squandered alluvia, only occasionally does ordinary life gleam forth, like a flash from the sky that sticks to the windowpane and on it, dies.