Authors: John Berger
… He has fallen, but he has fallen as a hero who has accomplished a great feat, which everyone thought impossible and mad. Honour and glory to him!
As they came out of the Duomo, the mourners screwed up their eyes against the sunlight and bowed their heads. They had the air of having partaken of some secret which they could not share; the more so because, for those who had remained outside, the solemnity of the occasion was lessening. Boys handed more baskets of tuberoses to the girls in white. Some of the girls were laughing. The band struck up another funeral march and the procession slowly moved off towards the station.
A schoolmaster explained that the guide from Formazza who had slapped his own cheek had meant that the spirit of Chavez would live in the mountain air so that, high up, climbers would feel his spirit on their cheeks like you can feel the wind or the heat of the sun.
The train waited silently. It was the second time a train on this line had been specially stopped for Chavez. The pall-bearers who carried the coffin from the hearse to the train were all aviators, among them Paulhan. The station master saluted as they passed. The journalists were already telephoning. The girls in white veils lined the platform. Suddenly the locomotive gave a shrill prolonged whistle.
He thought again of Camille. Not Camille as she would be when he saw her in Paris but Camille as she had been when she challenged him to come to Paris under threat of death, a threat in which he could no longer believe but in which at that moment, before her husband had failed to kill him at point-blank range, he could still believe. She had offered this challenge like an invitation. And in
issuing this invitation she had spoken, as no woman had spoken to him before, with the unconfoundable authority, the distance, the astonishing familiarity of a sibyl. Had she been right not only about him but also about her husband, he would have immediately accepted.
The whistle, arranged by the station master and the engine driver as a salute to the hero at the beginning of his last journey, was unlike any of the other sounds which had been heard that morning. It had no resonance, no echo, no meaning. It was a squeal without a soul, like the squeal of a saw. Long after everyone expected it to stop, it continued. It drove out every thought except the anticipatory one that surely it must stop now. Now! Now!
Chavez’ grandmother banged her stick up and down on the platform, but it was impossible to know whether she did this in anger at such an inappropriate initiative being taken by an engine driver, or in the agitation of unbounded grief.
Nuša considered that G. was unlike most other men. She was apparently alone and yet he did not approach her as though she were a prostitute. He said he was Italian but he was polite to her. (He must be, she decided, an Italian from far away.) He was very well dressed yet he suggested that they should sit down on a stone seat together. He said the seat was over two thousand years old. He did not try to touch her except when he took her hand to help her up the steps to the seat. (She was prepared to shout as soon as they sat down but there was no need.) I come here every day at this time, he said, why do you come here? She was about to say she had come with her brother when it suddenly occurred to her that he might be a police agent. I come here, he continued, because I hate Christian tombs. This remark mystified her. Then he spoke normally about the weather and Trieste and the war.
After a while he asked her where she came from. The question seemed harmless and she told him she was born in the Karst. In that case, he said, please say something to me in Slovene. She said in Slovene: It is sunny today. He asked her to say something longer. She said: Most Italians despise our language. She said this loudly, with a certain defiance in her voice. She wondered whether he could understand, but he continued to smile. Say something more, he asked, tell me a story or whatever comes into your mind. She asked him if he could understand what she said. He smiled directly at her. I promise you, he said, not a word; your secrets are safe. She could think of nothing to say. He waited and then he looked at
her with raised eyebrows to express surprise at her silence. She said in Slovene: You see the cat over there in the grass?
She stopped and put a hand to the shoulder of her blouse. She had large arms and hands. When either walking or sitting, the way she held her shoulders and neck gave the impression that her whole body was leaning very slightly backwards. In another life this would have given her a somewhat imperious air.
It is not a place I like, she said. I would not come here by myself. She stopped, alarmed that she had inadvertently betrayed the fact that she had come here with her brother. Then she remembered that she was talking in Slovene. If I found one of these broken stones in one of my uncle’s fields, I would say it was disgusting and throw it away. I have heard people say they are worth a lot of money. But if they are worth a lot of money, why do they leave them here lying in the grass? If they were precious, they would have taken them to Vienna. Over there by the arch there are several plum trees, she continued, people say if the war goes on the city will starve; they will take everything to Vienna.
You speak beautifully, he told her. It is our language, she said, but she had to say it in Italian. He asked her where she worked. In a factory. What do you make? It is a jute mill, she replied. Have you worked there long? Three months. It smells of fish which is bad. Why fish? It is the oil used on the jute to make it soft and mixed with the water.
As they talked, different suspicions occurred to her. Again, that he was a police agent for the Austrians. That he was mad—this garden made her think of madness. That he intended to offer her a job as a servant in his house. (She would never accept this.) That he was a ‘friend’ from abroad who was waiting to make contact with her brother.
Her brother, Bojan, was somewhere else in the overgrown garden of the Museo Lapidario. Since his return he had come here every Sunday, and sometimes she accompanied him. He came to meet his friends because the museum garden was usually deserted and on Sundays there was no entrance fee. They called it Hölderlin’s garden, and Bojan explained to Nuša that Hölderlin was a German
poet who loved Greece and wrote an epic about a Greek patriot, a great hero, who took part in a rising against the Turks, like the Serbs had done, but that Hölderlin lived too long and had gone mad. A broken stone foot, always on its side in the grass, and a child’s white body without arms, propped against a wall, made the German poet’s madness more credible to Nuša.
At a time when national independence has become or is becoming a conscious issue, one may find in an undeveloped and colonized society, within one family and even within one generation, extraordinary differences of knowledge and sophistication; yet such differences do not necessarily constitute a barrier. The one who has received a higher education at the hands of the imperial power (for there is no other education available) is aware of how consistently his own people’s history and culture have been denied, and he values in his own family the vestiges of the traditions which have been suppressed; at the same time the other members of the family may see in him a leader against their foreign oppressors whom until now they have only been able to fear and hate dumbly. Educated and ignorant share the same ideals. The difference between them becomes a proof of the injustice they have suffered together and of the rightness of those ideals. Ideas become inseparable from aspirations.
Nuša was taught to read by her brother, who was two years older, when she was twelve. At that time she lived in the village where her father was a peasant.
The Karst is composed of high, hard limestone ridges and much of the land is uncultivable. It is a mineral landscape, offered up to the sky without much covering. The rock is porous and there are many caves. She remembered her brother drawing a map which showed all the caves he knew. He gave each one the name of one of his friends: Kajetan, Edvard, Rudi, Tomaz. The chasms, gulleys and loose rocks of the Karst make you think of the remains of a city constructed without geometry or man. On the coast where the ridges of limestone descend to the sea, there is the modern city of Trieste, most of it built in the 1840s to realize the dream of Baron Bruck, the Minister of Finance in Vienna, who needed a large southern port for his proposed German-speaking ‘Empire of Seventy Millions’. Between outcrops and steep slopes of scrub, there are small hidden
valleys and hollows, painstakingly cultivated as fields and vineyards.
Nuša’s father had three cows and he sold fruit and flowers to the markets in Trieste. Through the help of a local schoolmaster, Bojan obtained a place in the Realgymnasium in the city. When Nuša was sixteen her mother died. The father was disconsolate and Nuša was unable to take her mother’s place; she was moody and her father accused her of being too talkative. (Her brother had encouraged her to talk even when nothing practical depended upon it, but in this, unlike her reading, nobody else in the village encouraged her.) The following year, 1913, her father died. She went to work in Trieste as a maid for an Italian family.
After 1920 when Trieste was Italian and the Fascists had forbidden the Slovene language to be used in any public situation, an Italian doctor was asked: But how can the peasants explain their symptoms to you if they don’t know Italian? The doctor replied: A cow doesn’t have to explain its symptoms to a veterinary surgeon.
Nuša’s spoken Italian improved but she left the family and found a job in a warehouse. Bojan went to the School of Commerce in Ljubljana where he earned his living as a waiter by day and studied at night. When he received his diploma he went to work in Vienna for a firm which imported non-ferrous metals. Ever since attending the School of Commerce in Ljubljana he had been a member of a small, clandestine group of students and secondary-school pupils associated with the Young Bosnians.
Two months earlier, in March 1915, he had returned to work in the Trieste branch of the firm.
The sight of his sister sitting on a kind of throne beside an unknown, conspicuously well-dressed man, shocked Bojan. He had not expected anybody else to be there. He had pictured his sister walking slowly by herself among the fruit trees. In addition, this man was morally unprepossessing. He might be an Austrian (Bojan was too far away to hear what kind of Italian he spoke). He was obviously rich. He had a cunning, disenchanted face. Seated together on the carved stone seat raised up on a dais, overhung by a fig tree, the two of them looked like characters in an illustrated story of some cheap Viennese magazine. Their difference of class, compounded
with the fact that they were man and woman, precluded any innocent interpretation. The degree to which the man’s clothes were spotless and elegant was an index of his inner corruption; just as his sister’s skirt and blouse and the scarf tied round her head were signs, despite her own will, of her easy availability. Bojan tried to argue that Nuša might have a good reason for talking with such a man; yet the way the man regarded her was too eloquent to be ignored. The fact that his sister could provoke such looks made him angry. He asked himself how she had lived during the years he was away. She was too large, he thought: she filled her clothes too obviously, it was a form of immodesty. Why was she so large? Why did she continue to grow large long after most girls stop? He could not avoid the suspicion that it was a question of will. In accordance with a precept of the Young Bosnians, Bojan had vowed to abstain from sexual relations and he knew how important it was to develop the will. She did not wish sufficiently strongly to preserve her innocence. Her innocence as a girl, when he taught her to read, had become fixed in his mind as an ideal. Caught between his anger and an onrush of tenderness released by the memory of his sister’s soul, which could not have entirely changed, he ran forward into the detestable, cheap, soulless illustration. He ran lightly on his feet, like a messenger who may have a long distance before him. On reaching the steps he did not mount them, but came to a halt, stood like a soldier and addressed the man in formal Italian: You must forgive us, sir, but I and my sister are already late. Then in Slovene he said: Nuša, please come immediately.
She rose and followed her brother.
The Young Bosnians named themselves after
La Giovane Italia
, formed by Mazzini in 1831 to fight for an independent republican Italy. The aim of the Young Bosnians was to liberate the Southern Slavs (in what is now Yugoslavia) from the domination of the Hapsburgs. Groups were strongest in Bosnia and Herzogovina—particularly after these two provinces were annexed by Austro-Hungary in 1908; but they also existed in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slovenia. They were terrorists and their principal political weapon was assassination.
The assassination of a foreign tyrant or his representative served two purposes. It reaffirmed the natural law of justice. It demonstrated that even crimes committed in the name of order and progress would not go forever unavenged: crimes of coercion, exploitation, oppression, false testimony, intimidation, administrative indifference. But above all, the crime of denying a people their identity. The crime of compelling a people to judge themselves by the criteria of their oppressors and so to find themselves inferior, helpless, and wanting. The justice of natural law demanded that the innumerable victims of these crimes in the past be redeemed. The act of political assassination might also rouse the living and make them realize that the power of the Empire was not absolute, that death, for once serving justice and not indifferent to it, could question that power. If the example of the assassin was followed by the mass of his people, they would rise up against their foreign oppressors and throw them out. To do this was no more impossible than killing a tyrant in public in the street.
‘There is no duty more sacred in the world,’ wrote Mazzini, ‘than that of the conspirator who sets out to avenge humanity and to become an apostle of natural law.’
On 2 June 1914 Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, was shot dead with his wife, as they drove through Sarajevo in an open limousine, by Gavrilo Princip, a Young Bosnian of nineteen.