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how sad, they say she was beautiful
, James does not reply, Sophie’s beauty doesn’t matter much to him, not many things matter to him, in any case, that very night he’ll have forgotten everything, in one of the bars of Trieste the tolerant where he will get drunk, to the lugubrious sound of the foghorns of the mortuary boat that is sounding its departure, without his realizing it, one of the unsuspected consequences of the pistol shot of Gavrilo Princip the TB victim, an assassination in Sarajevo sends Joyce to Paris, Joyce said when
Finnegans Wake
was published that at night nothing was clear, Joyce such a wise professor during the day became a lustful drunkard by night, obscure to himself, obsessed with money, with a God he didn’t want, with shameful urges, for very young girls that looked like his own daughter, fragile and alienated like Yvan Deroy the mad, Joyce wanted to write a piece of shadow, 600 pages of a dream of all dreams, all languages all shifts all texts all ghosts all desires and the book had become living dying sparkling like a star whose light arrives long after death and this matter was decomposing in the reader’s hands, unintelligible dust because Joyce did not dare to confess his secret desires, the violence that inhabited him and his guilty love for his own daughter, he was forced to hide it in writing, poor little man with the perforated ulcers and sick eyes, Joyce had been happy in Trieste, in the brothels of the old city, the brothels and hangouts that have disappeared, today the Irishman from the continent is a tourist attraction there like any other, like Italo Svevo or Umberto Saba, statues are erected to them in the streets they frequented, statues so alive that you want to take your hat off to them, Rolf Cavriani took off his hat to Joyce to Svevo to Saba whenever he passed them thus petrified by Medusa the decapitated Gorgon, at a bend in the street, between two stores, in front of the municipal library, and I don’t know if these bronzes are life-size but they all come up to your shoulder, headgear included, which made Rolf say laughing that to be famous in Trieste you had to be little, that today’s inhabitants couldn’t bear grandeur, their past and foreign grandeur, and so they belittled great men in the secret aim of surpassing them by a few centimeters, the way a guy with an inferiority complex uses inserts, Cavriani von Eppan had his complexes too, much more tragic ones, he had never used his title of duke, and that ate away at him, for not only was this duchy about to disappear with him but even while he was alive he didn’t dare make use of it, which earned him both the ire of his ancestors from beyond and a great shame in this laughable life, Rolf Cavriani was born in his great villa in Opicina, on top of Trieste, a stone’s throw from the old road to Vienna, in 1941, his father died of illness not long after his birth, during the defeat his mother had carried the very young Rolf to holy Austria, just before the debacle, before Tito’s supporters occupied the region for a while and took savage reprisals on the few soldiers and civilians they could find here and there, then the family had returned a few years later, my mother was a very capable woman, said Rolf, she was wealthy, and this wealth allowed her to turn her nose up at the new European borders, as she had done in 1918, she continued, like my grandparents before her, to spend six months every year in Trieste, spring and fall, summer in cool Carinthia and winter at the theaters and operas in Vienna, for my mother the nation or party in power was absolutely immaterial, he said, she had excellent relations with everyone, the Italian royalty, the fascists and even the Nazis, God knows though that they hated nobility, which didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid, that great lady, especially at the fall of Mussolini in the chaos of autumn 1943 when the communists had begun to massacre the fascists right and left and throw them into bottomless
foibe
, until the Reich intervened she had taken refuge in impregnable Austria, and similarly when the defeat was there, in April 1945, she had hurriedly cut short her spring stay to return to the hoarfrost of Carinthia—her relations with the German occupation authorities were cordial, she watched them burying their dead in the military cemetery close to her residence, with all the same a profound disgust for stiff-arm salutes and the Nazi flag, out of pure aesthetic concern, understand, there was never a woman who had less ideology than my mother said Rolf, she had high-ranking Wehrmacht officers over for dinner, Colonel Kalterweg with the strange name, dashing Hohnstetter commander of the panzers, and even a few SS officers, especially Rösener and Globocnik the Trieste native, after all he had been
Gauleiter
of Vienna, and Rösener was the commander in chief of military operations in Slovenia, he sometimes visited Ljubljana, my mother didn’t much like them, it was almost a social obligation, during the few times she spent in Trieste during the year she entertained little, that was normal, she knew nothing of the horrors committed in Slovenia or Poland, you know? still when Globocnik offered my mother a brigade of laborers to rebuild the wall around her property she accepted, could she have refused, I suppose so, but could she know that Globus the perverse was going to send her a commando of partisans who were about to be executed, with an escort armed to the teeth, guys fished out of the special jails of La Risiera di San Sabba to go play at being masons, their lacerated torsos still bore the marks of the tortures they’d undergone, she housed them in the beautiful vaulted cellar, because a solid metal grille closed it off, the escort stayed in the outbuildings with the servants, this was in February 1945, imagine, everything was lost for the Reich, it was just a question of weeks, my mother was in Trieste since the Red Army was approaching Vienna, the wall did need to be repaired, an entire section had collapsed, the poor Slovenians or Croatians set to work, closely supervised by their warders, the work went quickly, I remember I was almost four and I think I saw those convicts in our garden, I was fascinated by the guards’ weapons and uniforms, you understand, the repairs were almost finished by early March, the news was bad, the Allies had just crossed the Rhine in Germany and were approaching Italy, it was agony, my mother much altered by events decided to organize one last dinner, a farewell dinner, with Rösener, Globus, Kalterweg and others whose names I don’t know, a few women too of good Austrian and Trieste society, they all knew the game was up, that soon they’d have to go take refuge near Klagenfurt to avoid the Yugoslav partisans who were massacring everything as they went, nevertheless the evening was very gay, everyone wanted to forget the war, to forget the imminent end of the Reich and the enraged messages from Berlin that were giving orders to burn the land, the last crates of champagne were opened in euphoria, the gramophone kept spinning, the women had put on their most beautiful dresses, all that must have had a whiff of the apocalypse about it, the end of a world, after midnight the guests were drunk, they sang “Lili Marleen” at the top of their lungs, without caring either about the proprieties or the women present, my mother must have been shocked I suppose, maybe not, maybe she was tipsy too, after all my father had been dead for almost three years, she could have a little fun, the times were dark, a little joy was welcome—I imagine Rolf’s noble mother drunk, her eyes glittering her dress riding up a little revealing her black stockings felt up from afar by the lustful gaze of the fat Globus, I imagine the fear, the fear of defeat and punishment in the Nazis’ eyes, the thousand year Reich was indeed going to provide beautiful ruins but much sooner than Speer had foreseen, we left the elegant café for a little stroll, Rolf von Eppan was in a nostalgic mood, he took me to the wooded neighborhood above the station where Globocnik had his villa, requisitioned from a certain Angelo Ara, at Number 34 on the Via Romagna, a beautiful Art Deco residence that Globus the ingenious connected by underground passageways to the courthouse buildings where he had his offices, it reminded me of his house in Lublin in Poland, just as strategically situated, next to the SS quarters, the occupation administration and the HQ of Aktion Reinhardt, a villa with two floors and a garden, just like the one in Trieste, Lublin the red was prettily paved, a commercial artery led to the monumental gate to the old city cut in half by the Nazis to install the ghetto there, the dark little streets were not reassuring at night, a little lower down was the castle, a big rather austere barracks, I was there in winter, an icy snowy winter that had no reason to envy the winter of 1943 where temperature is concerned, in the center of Lublin not many things had changed, I was staying at the Grand Hotel, transformed during the war into a
Deutsches Haus
, with an officers’ mess, Stangl had slept there with his wife when she had come from Austria to visit him, it had become a giant hotel with Communist rooms, grey wall-to-wall carpeting and formica cabinets, there were two splendid bars, one looked out onto the square, with a piano and high ceilings, the other was cozier, more intimate, the former library of the
Deutsches Haus
, in the morning I had taken Stangl’s road, to Sobibór, near the Ukrainian border, miles and miles of magnificent forests, under snow, flat forests, without a hill in sight, so smooth you could have slid to Moscow without realizing it, not a mountain this side of the Urals, birch trees, birch trees to the heart’s content, birch trees and a few firs, there were not many cars, mostly pedestrians who walked by the side of the road to get to the nearest bus stop at the outskirts of villages, and then nothing else, the forest, I had passed the railroad which told me I was headed in the right direction, the heat turned up high in the car, the silence and the noise of the engine, the noise of the engine of the Russian tank that Stangl and Bauer had brought from Lvov, the malfunctioning diesel engine propelled black gases into the little brick room at the end of the open-air corridor bordered with thick hedges made of branches stuck in the barbed wire, the naked Jews ran with their feet in the snow in the winter it wasn’t necessary to whip them much the cold whipped them well enough the cold and the snow are effective the shouts the door the silence and the sound of the engine, in the interminable straight line I suddenly see a young woman in a black coat standing by the road, alone at the edge of the trees, I must have been dreaming, no, she is really there in the rearview mirror, what is she doing motionless by the side of the road in her coat a little black shoulder bag a thousand miles away from any inhabited land I hesitate to make a U-turn, she must be waiting for the bus, next to trees collapsing beneath the snow, there is nothing here, no village no farm no house just a woman in the middle of the cold the snow and the dead Jews is she waiting for me, a reincarnation, a ghost, strange omen, I don’t do anything, silence and fear, like many others I do nothing, I don’t turn my car around, a sign indicates the train station of Sobibór on the right, a snowy path in a dense wood, my wheels spin at times, there are blankets of fog I am approaching the terminus then the narrow-gauge line, Stangl’s house where he drank vodka with comrades whom he detested, the train station, the important little camp where thanks to German meticulousness hundreds of thousands of bodies were processed, tons of flesh among the birch trees, there it is, the terminus is approaching, the end of the line, there is nothing, a green cabin the museum closed in winter I park the car against a heap of snow, behind me railroad workers are sending off a train loaded with logs, nothing changes, they’re laughing because I got covered in snow, next to a memorial that no one visits, before they laughed because strangers came to die in these lands made for hunting deer for wood for snow but not for running naked towards a tank engine started by a red-faced German, the Poles have a good laugh when faced with disaster, they’re used to it they’ve been working here for generations, I’ve come to see so I get out of the car but I know that the trees aren’t going to speak, I sink into the whiteness up to my ankles I go forward into the forest, a wide lane leads to a clearing where there is a great dome of silence, the Eastern terminus, here end the railways that leave from Salonika Westerbork Ternopol Theresienstadt Paris from so many cities and villages, the only traces are those left by the does and birds in the snow, there is nothing but the unimaginable and the tallness of the trunks, the wind blows gently the sky is opaque I wander around for a while in the clearing without trying to determine exactly where the buildings were the ditches the bodies my brain is white as linen white as virgin skin I pushed the car managed to make a U-turn and started off again for Lublin, the young woman wasn’t waiting anymore in the middle of the deserted forest, back at the Grand Hotel I’m stone-cold, frozen stiff I sat down in a club chair in the immense bar wondering what Stangl the gardener drank when he was here with his wife, the night was pitch-black, outside vehicles were skidding on the melted snow turned muddy, I was very far away, very far, I ordered a tea in an immense and glacial solitude, a blind man came in accompanied by an old lady, she sat him down at the piano, a black ancient-looking baby grand, he said a few words and started up a ballad by Chopin, the instrument was out of tune and sounded off-key, I quietly finished my tea, determined to brave the cold and the snow to buy myself a bottle of vodka in the closest supermarket and confront the long Polish night, the blind man attacked “My Way” in a particularly mawkish tempo, a sign said
for the blind and crippled
next to a wicker basket, I left him all my change—in Trieste there’s no pianist in the luxurious restaurant where Rolf the banker took me, he’s talking to me about Globocnik the snake, I don’t dare ask him if Himmler’s man was his mother’s lover, probably not, Globus the boor must not have been tempting to Austrian nobility, or vice-versa, Rolf Cavriani von Eppan the nostalgic has been keeping us informed about the covert accounts of his clients for years, companies, various mafias, façades for suspicious activities, out of philanthropy, or almost, and I suspect him of acting in the same way with a number of European agencies, which explains why his business is prospering and out of the law’s reach, Rolf the son of the duchess who was slumming it with champagne with the heads of the