G. (40 page)

You have never seen a passport? They are nothing much to look at. They always have a photograph inside.

With an amused smile he takes his false Italian passport from his pocket and hands it to her. She fingers the pages, stops at the photograph. His face looks almost as white as his collar and he is wearing a black suit and a tie. She is reminded of the photograph of Cabrinovič taken on the morning of the archduke’s assassination. The face is different but the small rectangle of grey and black and white paper is very similar and like the pictures in the cemetery, except that being out in all weathers they are more faded.

I don’t want to look at it, I want to have it.

If you keep it, we will have to stay together here for the rest of our lives. Without a passport I cannot leave.

I need it very quickly.

A butterfly alights in the grass near her hand. Its flight, its stillness, wings upright and congruent, and then again its tremulous movement belong to a time scale so remote from Nuša’s and G.’s that if it was applied to them, they would seem like two statues.

What for?

I cannot tell you.

Why ask me?

You are the only Italian I know to speak to.

Trieste is full of Italians.

Not Italians with passports.

I will give it to you on one condition. Let me take you to a ball at the Stadttheater.

Bojan was right, she mutters in Slovene, and she glowers sullenly at the trunk of the nearest fruit tree. It is like a return to her village in the years of poverty. She stares at the implacability of the world. Bojan said that he would want to make her a prostitute, and that was what the Italian meant by a ball at the Stadttheater.

I ask you for your passport, she repeats stubbornly, still staring at the tree trunk, what do you ask?

At the end of the ball when they play the last waltz, you shall have my passport. There is nothing to fear. I am asking nothing else. I give you my word.

You mean a ball at the Stadttheater?

What else should I mean?

I wouldn’t be allowed in.

We will buy everything you need. Your dress, a wrap, a bag, slippers, gloves, pearls, everything. You will be my guest.

You do not know what you are asking. She looks puzzled but no longer sullen. I would be thrown out. They will say you have brought a woman-of-the-street to their ball.

Perhaps neither of us know what we are asking, says G., but I will do what you ask if you will do the same.

When is the ball?

On Thursday next week.

It will be too late. Give me the passport now.

One butterfly follows another making loops in the air near her wide feet in their laced boots. The air smells of fresh still green grass. In the depth of the green are purple and white flowers. The fact that she believed he wanted to make her a prostitute and that she was mistaken in this, now emboldens her. She places a hand on his arm and looks up at him with encouraging eyes. Give it to me now, she says.

If I gave it to you now, you would not come to the ball. You are not a fool.

I cannot come anyway. I have to work.

And today?

I told you, I came to ask you.

I will pay your wages.

Give me the passport now and take somebody else. Why does it have to be me? You will find lots of fine women there.

From what I hear I don’t believe there will be any war with Italy before Thursday next week.

I cannot dance your dances.

To hell with their dances!

Then why do you want me to go?

He knows that if he flatters her she will again become suspicious. On the steps of the Stadttheater, he says, on Friday morning you can give me your
carnet de bal
and I will give you this. He taps his pocket.

All right, she answers softly but gruffly, I will come.

The deserted garden with its unpruned trees, its walls overgrown with creeper, its stone fragments invisible in the long grass, its dragonflies and cats, has never seemed madder to her than now. She is about to leave it, but what she has just said in it will affect everything else in her life outside it.

G. lightly kisses the back of her hand. Meet me here tomorrow at eleven in the morning and by then I will have found a dressmaker.

She wonders if he is a ghost: it would be no more improbable than what she has agreed to do. The most real thing she can think of is the possibility during the next few days of being able to steal the passport.

Do you know what we call this place? she asks.

I like it, he says,
il giardino del Museo Lapidario
.

I, having written this, cannot forget the garden.

Wolfgang informed his wife that, out of sheer curiosity, he had
made enquiries about the young man Marco who was in prison. The whole story, he told her, as recounted by G., was a fabrication. The young man carried forged papers. There was no dying father in Venice. ‘Marco’ was trying to reach Italy in order to speak as a representative from Trieste at the rallies being organized everywhere by the Italian war party. There was already a file on his activities at the Ministry in Vienna. He belonged to the extremist wing of the Irredentists and had the reputation of being an effective orator. Marika asked her husband whether he thought it likely that G. had known the truth. Wolfgang expressed no opinion but made it clear that he was still quite willing to stand by his agreement. The mystery doubled Marika’s impatience. First she would yield to the man who was Don Juan and afterwards she would discover what he wanted her to do.

G. discovered which was the best dressmaker in the city. The modiste was an old woman from Paris. He discussed with her what kind of dress Nuša should have. He said it should make her look like a queen, an empress. The modiste pointed out that Nuša was young and that to make her so regal would be to age her unnecessarily. He insisted that whatever she wore she would look young, but she must also look commanding. She must look like Sheba, he said.

Nuša submitted to the first visit for measuring like a conscript. She stood there dumb, sullen, apparently locked in the thoughts of her own life which was far away. If other village women had been undergoing the same ordeal, she would doubtless have smiled at them and whispered some truculent comment. She was not cowed but she was entirely alone in a foreigner’s world. When she caught sight of herself in one of the mirrors, she saw herself there in that
salon de couture
through the eyes of her mother or some of the girls at the factory and she blushed, her face and neck going a blotchy crimson, not because she was ashamed but because she could hear the story they would tell about her. She had imagined herself being married, being a mother, dying one day. But in none of the situations she had foreseen for herself was she ever as alone and central
as she must be in the story they would tell about her. She knew she was justified. What she was doing or allowing to be done was not only just, it was for the sake of greater justice. But to be such a solitary and principal character was like being a criminal. She could speak to nobody about what was happening to her. It was the loneliness of her conspiracy which made her feel like a criminal. Without the slightest pretension she tried to think of Princip and Cabrinovič in their jail in Bohemia, whilst an Italian with a tape-measure called out the measurements of her back to another woman who wrote them down in a book bound in velvet.

G. arranged to see her briefly each day. They met first in the museum garden. Afterwards they went to some shop, which G. had already selected, to buy another item of her toilet. Each day Nuša carried home to her room in the street near the arsenal another parcel. As soon as she had shut the door of the room she undid the parcel and hid the contents at the bottom of the cupboard which served her as larder and wardrobe. She had already decided that after the ball she would sell everything she had acquired. And so, when on the second day she found a number of bank notes stuffed into a dancing shoe, she was not outraged. It did not appear to her as money given her by a man, but simply as part of the sum she hoped to realize when this extraordinary week was over and she must go back to the factory or find other work. She found no opportunity to steal his passport.

Most of those who served them in the shops—the jewellers, the glovemakers, the shoemakers, the haberdasher—were so astounded to see an Italian gentleman accompanied by a Slovene village girl (she was like a carthorse, they said afterwards) that they explained everything by this unusual phenomenon. But one or two may have remained more puzzled. What was the relationship between this couple? They were polite to one another but absolutely formal. They never spoke except when the outside situation demanded it. They looked at each other without rancour but equally without affection. Neither pretended to the other. There was not a trace of the theatricality that goes with prostitution. She was not a tart. Yet neither was she his wife or mistress: there was no intimacy beween them. Then why, with such care and extravagance, was he buying her these presents? Why did she give no sign of gratitude? Or, alternatively, why did she show no disappointment? At
times she looked nonplussed. But most of the while she did what was required patiently and with a certain slow natural grace. Two solutions occurred to the puzzled shopkeepers. Either she was simple-minded and the Italian was in some mysterious way taking advantage of her; or else he, the Italian, was mad and she was a servant humouring him.

Nuša both hoped and dreaded that she would soon see her brother. She wanted to know what his latest plans were and she thought she might find a way of hinting that she could procure him a passport. At the same time she feared he might have heard that she was not going to the factory and would insist on her telling him what she was doing.

Bojan came to her room late on the Friday afternoon of the first week. Her fears proved unnecessary. He was so distracted by the political situation and the imminence of war that he asked her nothing about herself and assumed she was still working as before.

You must get used to eating less, he said to her abruptly, if you are a little thinner it won’t matter.

I never eat so much in the summer, she said.

The Empire will be defeated, that is certain, it cannot survive. When it topples and breaks up, all the cities will be very short of food and supplies.

When are you going to France?

I haven’t got everything I need yet. We have to make a whole organization in exile.

Will it be before next week?

I cannot tell you, but I will come to say goodbye before I go, I promise.

If you wait one week I will be able to help you. It will make it safer for you.

What do you mean?

Wait and see.

He sighed and looked out of the small window down the hill on to the docks where a cargo ship was being unloaded. The men looked as small as tin-tacks and the horses with their draycarts on the quay looked no larger than beetles.

She wanted to tell him more, not about her plan, but about her good will. Do you remember on the Sunday before last scolding me in the garden—