A VISIT TO BELGRADE, 1985

From my travel diary.

Me, fourth from right

Saturday 11th May

Greetings from Belgrade! We caught a taxi from the station to this absolutely palatial hotel where we’re waited on hand and foot, with red carpets, room service, chandeliers, beautiful blue and white damask table cloths and serviettes – the whole bit! Its name is the Hotel Jugoslavija.

But what of the train and the city? Well, the Hellas Express dropped off carriages and picked up carriages throughout Serbia, so the train was eventually very long indeed, and very high up off the ground when you were trying to get your luggage down. The third class sections filled up with many young men dressed in green khaki uniforms all leaning out the windows, so that by the time we got to Belgrade, the train looked like something out of ‘Bridge over the River Kwai.’ The station was covered, and long enough to match the train. There were a number of very tall men standing around, not thin, as tall blokes often are at home, but well-proportioned without being overweight. A lot of taxi drivers standing on the platform asked Lyn if she wanted a lift – notice, no one asked me. Maybe they thought I was a local - so we finally chose one, and off we went.

Although Belgrade looks a bit grotty near the station, it is, later on, a nicely laid-out city with wide streets, a big river crossed by many fine bridges, and green lawns; shrubs and trees everywhere. This morning, we went for a walk into town – about three kilometres – along the Sava River and over one of its many bridges. There was a large space of grass and woodland down from the hotel – apart from the gardens along the bank – and on this was staged a military display to mark the 40th Independence Day. It was a huge turnout. I haven’t seen crowds like it since Queen Elizabeth came to Australia in 1970 and we went to see the fireworks. To make matters worse, many of them are very tall and well-built, so for once in my life, I couldn’t see over the crowds. There were jet displays with stunt flying – really noisy – red, white and blur tail flares, missile exhibits. On the river, speed boat tactics, tanks on barges and pontoons. The land content was a series of deafening explosions, soldiers climbing up trees, radio controlled planes, tents and other equipment. All this was accompanied by brass and military band music and a male chorus that sounded for all the world like the Red Army Choir. There was dancing in National Dress, too, so I took some photos.

The city is cleaner than Athens and the buildings are nicer to look at, but to us it was still fairly drab. The older buildings have an interesting architecture and would look attractive with a bit of care.

Our tour started at 6pm with drinks and a speech by the guide, Saša, and a four course dinner.

1. Cheese and cured meat with bread.

2. Tomato Soup.

3. Skewered pork, beef and sausage, carrots, beans and French Fries.

4. Chocolate layer cake with an uncooked meringue topping.

I’m trying to eat half of everything so I don’t waddle off the bus when the tour ends. There are many Americans touring with us who can be, in some cases, overbearing. They think money can buy the world and the earth is America’s oyster. Joan and John Taylor are a nice couple from Bendigo who we have teamed up with. As with us, he works in a hospital.

Sunday 12th May

Today is Sunday and I haven’t been to church for three weeks, which I regret. We sat down to breakfast at five to eight and I thought of the service starting at home, and whether Brian or Graeme would be playing the organ. Ah well! I am here and not there, so what’s on the agenda for today? A two and a half hour tour of Belgrade showing the old and new parts of the city. Note that it was extensively bombed during the war, and a lot of older buildings were destroyed. “Belgrade” means “white city”, a name given to it because of the white stone it was made of. Yugoslavia has had a long and checkered history. It was first settled by the Celts in the third century BC and then taken over by the Romans in the second or third century AD. From then there have been Slavs, Turks, Austrians, Germans, Hungarians and the modern people fighting for domination. The history is long and complicated and needs a detailed study to understand it correctly.

There are six states according to the tour guide: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro. Belgrade is the capital and there are three religions: Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim. Belgrade is dominated in the new section by large areas of parkland, un-kept, usually, dotted by huge housing complexes (as in Redfern) and sky scraping offices rising out of the greenery. Near the hotel, two rivers converge, the Danube and the Sava. The parkland was once swamp which has been filled in by sand and built on since 1948. It’s funny that there are sometimes really flashy modern buildings for international conferences, but the gardens around them are entirely un-kept. Obviously a case of priorities!

There are many large public buildings in the older section and some beautiful churches creating interest in the otherwise grey, straight streets. The shops do sell modern clothes, shoes and so on, but are not made to look bright and attractive like they are in Sydney or London.

The next stop was an interesting, if exhausting, hike to the tomb of President Tito. This is a very sacred place for the Yugoslavs and they come in large numbers to pay homage, often bowing before the simple white marble rectangular tomb. There is a guard of four soldiers there 24 hours a day, and the whole tomb, as we walked around it, was surrounded by beautifully coloured, cultivated flowers. The effect is very nice and certainly reverent. Tito obviously meant a lot to them. The hike, by the way, is because the tomb is at the top of a hill in a densely wooded park. Since the weather is so humid and the older members of our party so slow, I was pretty wacked going up and down.





Joan said, from experience, that if I don’t forget the Americans and their silly talk, and try not to notice them, I will go bananas. I think she is quite right. Even the middle aged ones. If they don’t control their brash rudeness and be more sensitive to those around them whilst travelling overseas, they will make a very bad name for the United States wherever they go.

This evening we went to a lively and traditional area of the city where crowds of people go to eat - inside and outside tables – traditional food and dishes borrowed from other countries. Our restaurant was one of those beautiful oak-panelled rooms with frosted and patterned glass doors and soft romantic lights. Very like something from the Orient Express. The band moved around the room, playing as they went to various sections of our party, some of whom decided to dance. As they played, they often sung in rich voices and beautiful harmonies. There was an excellent violinist, a guitarist, a dark ukulele, a double bass and a piano accordion. All men. All the bands, inside and out along the cobbled streets were un-amplified. Needless to say, the atmosphere inside our restaurant, with the band and superb male singing was as near to heaven as I could imagine. They sung fast, they sung slowly, loud and soft, mournful and exciting. So wound up was I in thoughts and the spirit of the night that, when the party rose to leave, I got such a surprise that I almost didn’t follow them.

Menu:

1. Cheese, cured meats and polenta.

2. Salad, bread and sauerkraut.

3. Vela stew and red and yellow capsicum with rice.

4. Apples stuffed with nuts, with meringue and cream.

Poems of World War 2 - Josip Cazi and the Yugoslav Partisans

         THE BOMBED FOREST  

                         by

                  Josip Cazi                                            

This morning Papuk was awoken at the crack of dawn, but not from birds chirping or squirrels clicking - a reconnaissance plane was searching over Papuk this morning, an ominous vulture in that dreary first light.

And round about the peak and its rugged sides ruby flares spread like blood into the branches of the firs, scarlet in the crimson dawn, as if snarling wings had cast over Papuk a bleeding squadron of fire.

The forest collapsed. Appalled and shaking, it roared and death flowed from the air like fiery rain. Lightning felled trees centuries old. Lucifer danced through Papuk and all its hell. Demons shrieked and shrieked all day, demanding the Partisans from the heart of the inferno.

But the heart they sought - in the mighty bosom of the mountain with its immense heartbeat - from it lashed hundreds of flaming arrows. From it shot thousands of thunderbolts, and the vultures slanted and slid. They overturned and fell in flames into the fiery forest. 

 

 

The wounded forest screamed appallingly: the cries of frightened deer and howling wolves by the thousand, in pain and with panicked voices. In the lake of fire flowers seemed to bloom, an inferno hissed from the surging flames, yelping and reeling.


All day Papuk was shaken, thundering and booming, all day Lucifer danced beside Papuk.

But now it is quietened and, as the day wanes, the glowing fires, in a hundred colours proud and exquisite, quiver in the forest, my mother.


And at sunset, Partisan songs sweep through it like an inexhaustible fountain. Along the slopes the column of soldiers moves out into the lowlands. They will go into action at night – the cycle of history is still turning. Above Papuk the fires die in the evening.

            MEETING 

                 by 

          Josip Cazi 

On rainy evenings we used to walk through the muddy factory town beside the Danube, Jelice, my blue-eyed girl - both tired from work.

But now you’re a fighter in the brigade of the Slavonians, my factory girl, the apple of my heart, whom I met on the slope of the mountain after many years. You used to be a child of the suburbs, the daughter of a fisherman.

Our meeting would be brief: a warm handshake.

Your mother?

     - in the camp.

Your house?

     - devastated.

Your fields?

     - unploughed weeds.

But the column of soldiers is moving on now. Again the brief grip of the hand, the regard in her blue eyes, lit up with joy. The warm trembling voice and sweet smile, like a fragrant, blossoming rose.

Jelice, my blue-eyed apple girl, my partisan rose with the wild hair, my fragrant quince in the blushing dawn, in pearls of dew.

My small hero.

Long ago you already entered the mountain peaks and I am still, for a time, down on the plains.

Through the forest glades and dewy shrubs I have a vision that the sun sent me your fragrant and dancing hair in greetings of golden ribbons.

A PARTISAN LETTER  

                by  

         Josip Cazi 

                        

Fireflies! In the bruised dawn the warm gold invigorates them. We are resting in the high mountains beside the forest. In the top of the beech tree, whose pearl overflows, a rooster is crowing at dawn and a blackbird plays on its silken flute.

The entire night we were in a hellish shootout and now we are in a meadow full of flowers. We are celebrating gladly by the woods and up the hill is heard the song of our comrades.

Hey, what are you singing about? About yearning, that like a barque sails through the soul. Oh, when I have a voice and when I sing the blood of my heart would pour into our song.

But you know how much I think about you, while my exertions mock me in the whistling shots and spattering shells, and death that follows them swiftly. My dear darling, this moment I am embracing you. This moment I care for you like a loving parent.

Oh, how I would love in any way to come to you, to lay your gentle head on my chest and shower you with kisses. After so many days and nights, my desire, my early dawn, my most beautiful flower among flowers!

Here in the sky the morning star is fading with all its grains of dazzling gold. Its name is dear to you, and so you are to me.

And the bird from our nest, our small son, our little treasure?

I heard that for fourteen nights and days you endured devastation while the mountains of Slavonia burned, with our toddler in a sling in your arms. The poor little thing, our white dove. Slavonia was a blazing sea. The villages were on fire, the bushes choked. Ancient forests – our mountain jewel and the shield of our land – all were swallowed in a fiery hell.

Oh, how you are, my sufferers? It was severe for you. Did the little one cry a lot? Where are you now? – for black sorrow gnaws at me. Over and over again I hope that I will meet you somewhere in some village, some refuge or on some Slavonian road. Your eyes are looking for me. My heart expects you.

Daddy! – some little orphan piped up yesterday as, all happy, he twitched my moustache. The grandmother scolded him bitterly but, to me, while I was caressing the golden strands on the child’s head, brimming tears trembled in my eyes – and I saw in my thoughts your two dear faces.

THE KISS

    by Josip Cazi  1941

At the first sight of our free homeland I sunk my head into the juniper bushes.

The morning smoked and froze. It expanded over the bay and the partisans held their rifles cocked in their arms behind a rocky outcrop.

Oh, free woods! Oh, free mountains! My native land!

I am kissing you, naked cliffs, full of zeal and joy like the son returning home to his old mother.

 

Hey! To the forest where the timid deer runs,

Where he smells the firs and the green pines.

To the hills where all wounds are healed,

Buds like flowers, in sunny freedom.

Hey! When would you come to me, my comrades, and rejoice, and with bowed head kiss the free cliffs over our bay.

 

 

 

The Yugoslav Partisans and the Poems of Anđelka Martić

 

 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two opposing political movements emerged from the fall of the old empires: the extreme right of fascism and the extreme left of communism. Today we hold communism in horror as something that restricts the freedom of the individual, but it should be seen in the historical context of those times.

Following the end of feudalism in Europe in 1848, there was a call for the national rights of individual countries that had once been part of empires large and small. Using Italy as an example, the Risorgimento became a movement to unify a country that had either belonged to a succession of empires or been independent city states like Florence, forever at each other’s throats. Italy was united in 1860, Venice was added in 1866 and finally Rome in 1870. If everything had stopped there, it might have been fine. Italian nationalism however, developed into ultra-nationalism and, from there, into a fascist empire in which Mussolini demanded more and more territory inhabited by people who did not speak Italian. Hitler was once known as ‘the German Mussolini’.

Enter World War Two and the Yugoslav Partisans.

Josip Broz Tito was a non-commissioned officer in the Austrian Army when he was bayoneted through the back in the Carpathian Mountains and taken prisoner by the Russians in 1915. Tito had no love for the Austro Hungarian Empire into which he had been born and, following his lengthy recovery, learned about communism in Russia. That he tended, nevertheless, to do things his way is illustrated by his break with Stalin in 1948 when Stalin attempted to boss him around. I spent two weeks in Yugoslavia in 1985 and, to me, it seemed a happy modern country.

Bearing this history in mind, I was delighted to read the poems of Anđelka Martić who joined the Yugoslav Partisans after her brother was killed in occupied Yugoslavia in 1941. I discovered her in 2018 when I bought a book in Rijeka called ‘Po Šumama i Gorama, Through Forests and Mountains, the Poems of the Fighters’. It was clear to me, as I read the poems, that the Partisans in Yugoslavia fought against fascism. As Basil Davidson writes in his book Partisan Picture ‘for them the equation was a simple one and, in destroying the apparatus of corruption and privilege and cruelty they understood by Fascism, they saw the way to their millennium.’

Anđelka Martić wrote her poems in Croatian. The verses are rhythmic and rhyme in either an ABAB or ABCB format. I’m still working on this in English, but for now I’d love to record the depths of Anđelka’s heart that I believe one can only find in poetry. 

TO MY FALLEN BROTHER by Anđelka Martić 

You’re gone, but the place in the line of soldiers

At which you waited is not empty,

Your young sister gladly took your heavy rifle

In her tender hands.



Now I am walking where you would have been, beside the mountain.

I am stifling my pain for you in a blaze of colour.

Dream quietly, brother, I know what you wanted,

Until the end your faithful rifle will be heard.



THE LONELY GRAVE by Anđelka Martić 

A lonely mound in a pine forest.

Silence everywhere, only the wind is whistling.

Somewhere far away, a lonely mother

With tearful eyes wails for her son.



But the trees in the forest, the branches sob.

They sway sadly, now easy, now more

Now the forest trembles again like her who calls,

Now the forest is stronger, it is ardent, it is calm.



Why, trees in the forest? Why does your wood

Disturb the silence on a peaceful day

And the scent of the flowers on the bleak grave?

This forest tells the story of that dead partisan…



It whispers to her about our struggle,

About wonderful life when the people win,

About our joy in the success of everyone

And how much these graves are worth!



And a long story about him while the darkness falls.

And when the dawn brightens the sky,

Then the whole forest shivers with whispers:

“Hail! fallen fighters, glory to you!” 

WHO ARE YOU? by Anđelka Martić 1944

       U listu “Slavonac” III. Bat., XXI, ud.div.



Who are you, who call us in order by our names?

Who from a distance come closer and closer, illuminated by the sun of joy?

Who are you, for whom lives fall, for whom they gently perish,

For whom our hearts will not stop yearning?



Who are you, who like a goddess calls us your own,

For whom the canons thunder, for whom we love to murmur,

For whom the villages long,

Without whom no one would want to live?



Who are you, who in ours ears whispers to us splendid and beautiful words,

Whom we think of in the fiercest colours?

What is your name, from where do you come?

O come soon, we desire you, we want your presence.



Who are you? What is your name?

O tell us, tell us, what is your lineage?

Through the mountains, through the gorges, the many rivers and fields,

Comes the echoing voice:

I am called freedom!



I am called freedom and I will come soon! 

I translated four of Anđelka’s poems and have two to finish. They reflect the beauty of the land for which the Partisans fought and which, it was clear to me, lay very close to her heart. She writes ‘Red [cyclamen] are everywhere through the forests where the fighters are moving. They see them and smell their pungent aroma. We twitch the gentle stems, we roll up the small flowerets and think it takes us back to the warm streams of our childhood. Once we ran in the woods, gathering red cyclamen. Our song filled the paths and tracks of the forest, but today the forests have become the graves of our fallen comrades.’ In her poems Anđelka first writes about the beauty of the land, but the tragedy of war always follows. ‘And so on a clear spring day, dreams are muddied by reality. But we are not sad because this struggle of ours, the story of thundering guns, concerns beautiful freedom.’

As Tito wrote, ‘Tuđe nećemo svoje nedamo.’
Tuđe means 'foreign' or 'other people's'. Nećemo is ‘we don’t want’.
Svoje is a possessive pronoun. It means ‘one’s own’.
Nedamo comes from the verb ‘dati’ to give. It means ‘we do not give’.

So ‘Tuđe nećemo svoje nedamo’ may be translated as ‘other people's [land] we don’t want, our [land] we don’t give.' 




My new novel about the Yugoslav Partisans will be published next year by Penmore Press. Its title is Through Forests and Mountains.

Slovenian Trieste

 This article first appeared in TOTAL SLOVENIA NEWS on 4 August 2020.

                                     

By what convoluted route did an Australian come to write an historical novel about Slovenian Trieste? It’s a long story.

Asking my birth mother Silvana (1920-2020) for her family history was like getting blood out of a stone and, when at last she began to reminisce about her earliest days in Istria at the age of 90, it was a race against time to record it. Nevertheless, I discovered that her father came from Trieste and her maternal grandmother, Marija Matiasić, had run away from a village in Slovenia aged 16 sometime in the 1870’s. I began to write His Most Italian City so that these memoirs might not be lost, in the process uncovering the history of Slovenian Trieste that ran parallel to it.

In common with Sydney, where I come from, ports are multicultural places and in my novel I have drawn Trieste this way. It is a city perched at the crossroads of Slav, Latin and Germanic peoples and, before World War One, served as the port of Vienna. Half its population spoke a dialect of Venetian, like my mother, and the Slovenes, who made up one quarter, were the largest ethnic minority. When I wrote on page 117 of the novel that ‘half his friends came from mixed marriages,’ you can easily see this ethnic diversity in the nineteenth century marriage records of Trieste. 

‘Repressed by Austria no more! Viva l’Italia!’- page 65. Austrian tolerance of multiculturalism was a threat to an Italy only recently united, and deeply resented by its intellectuals and politicians who had been the driving forces of the Risorgimento. Declaring themselves the inheritors of ancient Rome, they envisaged an Italian Empire, and developed a movement involving land claims where Italian ethnic or language groups lived, called ‘irredentism’. Its definition varied from reasonable to extreme. For example, in the novel my Istrian grandmother Dolores is half Slovenian and half Croatian, speaks Venetian but considers herself Italian. If a town contained enough people like her (or even if it didn’t) an irredentist might claim that the town was Italian. For the Slovenes in Trieste the movement signified that irredentists considered Austrian Trieste to be ‘unredeemed Italy’.

Piazza Oberdan by Boris Pahor begins by chronicling the growth of the irredentist movement in Trieste and its effects on the Slovenian population. The book is the collected memoirs and stories of a particular place at a particular time by an author who was frequently an eye witness. It is essential reading for anyone who is interested in Slovenian Trieste. Unfortunately, I could only find it in German and Slovenian. (Translators, please note: when can we expect an English edition?)

 ‘The Irredentist movement became particularly significant in Trieste after 1870’ with the Italian occupation of Rome and the Vatican. ‘The Irredentists so strongly influenced public opinion that gradually the citizens began to give way to it… This was not in harmony with the Slovene population….The irredentists, therefore, turned their attention to the Slovene middle class and often provoked clashes between Trieste citizens of Slovenian descent and Italian agitators.  

 ‘Apart from the fact that they wanted to shake off German dominance, the Italian nationalists had an additional motive for connecting the city to Italy: resistance to the economic and cultural growth of the Slovenian people. Although this population had been an integral part of the city for twelve centuries, it consisted of peasants in the suburbs, but in the city itself it consisted of carters, waterside workers, cooks, nurses, masons, labourers, and small merchants…In 1848, as in Vienna, so in Trieste, people demanded the recognition of their Slovenian identity, and so gradually began to form a Slovenian middle class.

[The construction of the Narodni Dom in 1904] ‘was a great provocation to the anti-Slovenian Italian agitators, accustomed to seeing the Slovene community composed of small karst farmers, dairy maids, housewives and labourers. When, after the end of the war, Rome seized control of the city and its surroundings, the Narodni Dom became one of the main targets of the hate that had hitherto been suppressed.’

Pahor records its destruction.

‘On that afternoon of July 13, 1920, the sky had turned blood red before sunset, and at the same time we learned of the fire… we ran downhill in the direction of those dull voices that came up from the piazza. We were actually witnesses of the events when we stopped at the corner in front of the coffee house Fabris. Everything in front of us was as if it were on a stage: that screaming crowd, over which the flames were zipping out of the windows of the Narodni Dom. We were shocked, held each other's hands, and stared at the firefighters. The attackers refused to allow them to direct their streams of water at the burning building… I probably wondered, as was the case later, why this fire, what was this crowd, this assault on the fire hoses, so that the water did not shoot up but poured itself on the ground? I learned later that people from within the Narodni Dom had doused it with petrol from the barracks, and that two people had jumped out of a hotel room onto the street.’

 In what has been termed ‘Trieste’s Kristallnacht’, a great deal of other Slovenian property in the city was also attacked. 

 Pahor continues, ‘As the editor of the newspaper Il Piccolo, Rino Alessi, put it in his article “Trieste has placed itself at the head of fascism.”’ He goes on to detail the violence towards the Slovenian community in Trieste and in the Slovenian territory given to Italy after World War One.

 In order to record a balanced judgement, it’s important to put this historical period into context. Fuelled by misinterpreted Darwinism, racism was in vogue not only in Germany and Italy, but even in Britain. This meant that, in response to Italian demands at the secret Treaty of London, which in 1915 brought Italy into the war, Britain had few qualms about incorporating one third of small Slavic Slovenia into an enormous Italy already on the brink of Fascism. After the war, the single voice for the national self-determination of the Slavs was Woodrow Wilson of the US who addressed this issue in his Fourteen Point Plan. Unfortunately his suggestions were ignored and Mussolini, who was shortly to take up office, was a vocal anti-Slav racist. What followed were the ravages of Fascism as it stretched its tentacles far and wide.

The best referenced article I have read about this time was written by Gianfranco Cresciani. ‘A clash of civilizations? The Slovene and Italian minorities andthe problem of Trieste.’ Italian Historical Society, Australia. Volume 12, No. 2 July-December 2004.  

Dr Cresciani writes: within Trieste and Istria the Fascist regime ‘progressively shut down most Slovene or Croat institutions. Between 1918 and 1928, 488 primary schools were closed, as well as some 400 cultural, sporting, youth, social and professional organizations and libraries, three political parties, 31 newspapers and journals, and 300 co-operatives and financial institutions.’ 

One day when Silvana was 97, we were out for a walk when suddenly she said, ‘My father was very unhappy. The government wanted to move him all over Italy.’ This was Romano Tonon (1886 -1956), born in Trieste of an Italian mother and a Venetian father, but apparently limited in his career choices because he was educated in Graz rather than Italy. On page 138 of the novel, my great uncle (1896 – 1984), who was Slovenian and Croatian and also educated in Austria, was denied promotion at the University of Florence. Silvana deplored the discrimination he suffered. She mentioned it on many occasions. I have a photograph of Zio Lin, as she called him, still lecturing about a mosquito that attacked olives at retirement age. In 1928 his family’s name was Italianised. The original Italian in the birth register reads: ‘Il controscritto cognome di Micatovich è stato corretto a quello di Di Micheli con decreto del Prefetto di Pola.’ ‘The countersigned surname Micatovich has been corrected to that of Di Micheli with the decree of the Prefect of Pola’ – page 18 of the novel. In the same register a further round of Italianizing Slavic names occurred in 1933.

I believe that any article about Slovenian Trieste needs a reference to Britain. There are several of these in the novel. ‘Britain, in particular, will back Italy as harmless if it serves British interests’ – page 24. ‘Istria was given to Italy after the war by the winners because the Italians asked for it, and to reward it for fighting on their side’ - page 174.

In 1923 King George V ‘conferred upon Mussolini the insignia of the Order of the Bath and congratulated the country for emerging from its recent crisis “under the wise leadership of a strong man of government”’.  (Fascist Voices by Christopher Duggan, Vintage 2012.) And according to my father-in-law, who was an Australian soldier in Italy between 1942 and 1945, it was fear of the communism of the Italian Partisans (not Yugoslav) that led Britain to approve of General Badoglio as Prime Minister following Mussolini because, despite his Fascist war crimes, he was anti-communist. Douglas Walker received the Certificato al Patriota for his work with the Italian Partisans but he continually stressed the importance to the Allies of stabilizing Italy.

Lastly, Trieste Goes to Australia by Gianfranco Cresciani (Padana Press, 2011) documents the fate of so many Slovenians in Trieste when the city was returned to Italy in 1954 after nearly a decade of being a free port under Allied occupation. Particularly poignant are the photographs of the Audace Pier crowded with thousands of forced emigrants, ten percent of Trieste’s population. After their departure, depression fell upon the city. 

Today is a time for understanding and healing between two nations. Italy has thirty times the population of Slovenia, and at least that number again living around the world claim Italian heritage. We are far enough removed from Mussolini for these Italians who may not know of his excesses to study them objectively. So my last words will come from an Italian:  To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child – Cicero.

How to Write an Action Scene – DIY or blow-by-blow?

I confess to being terrified of writing action scenes, although I love reading them. When my publisher Penmore Press sent me out the PDF Book Block of His Most Italian City for proof reading I nearly fell over backwards when I read my own attempt that had given me such labour and angst. It actually sounded like a real action scene. I wrote to my editor expressing my amazement but, I have to confess (again), writing one now still fills me with dread and anticipation (the bad sort of anticipation that leaves you awake night after night replaying the moves in your head and finding nothing but faults). Writing the next book Through Forests and Mountains that will come out in 2021, I decided to do the DIY technique: perform the action yourself then rush home and write it up before you have forgotten the chill mists, the pounding heart and the taut manoeuvres. 

We live about two hundred metres from the Australian bush, a pretty menacing place after dark. Often I had walked down long after the sun had set in an attempt to persuade myself to venture just five more metres into its black embrace, before turning and fleeing back to the comfort of the street lights lest I be eaten by wolves, bears and other things that don’t exist in Australia. (There’s always yowies, I suppose. Haven’t seen too many of them recently.) We had lived in the house for over twenty years by this stage and, confronted by the possibility that I would die here and never go for a scary bush walk at night, I persuaded my nephew, who was living with us at the time, to go with me. I was at the point of writing a similar scene in the novel and needed it to be realistic. 

My nephew said we had to take the dog – he weighs thirty-five kilograms and his bark packs quite a punch - so I saddled him up and off we went. Well, to cut a long story short, the three of us went on two bush walks at night, one during the full moon and one two weeks later, because I wanted to be able to write about the differences. The bush was suitably spooky, enjoyably ominous and the trip enabled me to write several hundred realistic words each time. You have to do this straight away, and don’t rationalize it too much. Turn your brain off. Just translate the experience into words and fix up the mistakes later. That’s the Do-It-Yourself method and it works really well. I have also tried it out sailing and created a thousand action-packed and water-logged words without a single neurone helping me.

The blow-by-blow technique, by contrast, requires research and a great deal of imagination. Also it takes much longer, because you have to keep returning to the work week after week to correct the inevitable errors. This is what I had to do in His Most Italian City, never having had the opportunity to submerge in a World War One submarine. There are a few basic maritime expressions, like port and starboard, bow and stern, that you’ve got to understand for starters. Also, don’t think nuclear submarines. These early subs were basically boats that had the ability to submerge and there was even much argument about that. The Austrian U1 that I had originally been using, stopped, flooded and only then sank. Obviously it would be no good in a chase scene. I decided on the U27 because it was the most successful Austrian submarine. This boat pushed down into the water as it went using the hydroplanes, and it could achieve this in under thirty seconds. Perfect!

So the point of the chase scene in the novel is that a powerful motor boat must try to sink a small submarine by swamping it. This was achievable because the U27 had saddle-like tanks on each side that made it roll a lot on the surface. What you want to do is to make it roll over so far that enough water will get in, threatening to sink it. This was forever happening to those submarines. They would simply disappear and never be seen again. They were quite unstable and you had to keep your forces balanced. This is why the submarine in Das Boot sank. It became unbalanced. Whether you could get them to resurface was the question. 

I decided that the U27 had to submerge to escape the motorboat, but it was being chased out of the harbour and the depth of water at the entrance was only thirty-five metres. After that it went down fairly steeply. The submarine itself was thirty-seven metres long. If the submarine crash-dives at an angle of thirty degrees (the maximum possible) how deep does the water have to be to avoid a collision with the ocean floor? Enter trigonometry. (Don’t laugh, I actually did this.) 

Now, as you might suspect, all this took a long time to get right. You also have to get the sequencing correct, and the reactions of the characters must be believable. More than that, it took a lot of soul searching, internal life to make it readable and exciting. Hence my pleasure at the final result. 

I guess if you are writing fantasy, or something that you couldn’t research or employ the DIY technique, it would be a major feat of imagination. I was wondering to myself the other day why Wuthering Heights has become a contemporary cult classic when it didn’t slot at all into middle Victorian sensibilities. The answer, of course, is that it is a fantasy novel. Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë’s fantasy world of Gondal. 

So, to finish, here is a quote about Wuthering Heights in praise of imagination in writing action scenes. 

‘If the rank of a work of fiction is to depend solely on its naked imaginative power, then this is one of the greatest novels in the language.’ – G W Peck. American Review, June 1848.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Most-Italian-City-Margaret-Walker/dp/1946409944/ref=sr_1_1?crid=25Z5Q0ENHG557&dchild=1&keywords=margaret+walker+his+most+italian+city&qid=1591491204&sprefix=His+Most+Italian%2Caps%2C378&sr=8-1

My Favourite Character (from the Australian Merchant Navy)

His Most Italian City is dedicated to Captain Peter Ferrar, Master Mariner, Australian Merchant Navy. From the time of its first draft, when I realized that the novel had the potential to attract a mainstream publisher, I had intended to dedicate it to Peter, so let me tell you why I based my favourite character on him. (That’s right, he was the captain of the submarine, Stefan Pirjevec.)


Peter was my next door neighbour, a retired sea captain, bosom pal of my golden retriever, and the personification of quiet authority. There was a story about him that, some years before we moved in, the council had sandbagged the banks of the creek that ran through our front yards, in the process disturbing the roots of two large eucalypts on our respective properties that afterwards became dangerous and had to be cut down. Peter, so the story went, quietly advised the council that it was their fault and they should pay, while the man who lived in our house failed to convince them and was forced to pay himself. This summed Peter up. People acted as he reasonably requested them to, and without fuss.


He was in love with the sea and this was what I tried to convey in the character of Stefan. I come from a family of English and German mariners on my father’s side and I feel that the sea is my natural medium, but until I met Peter I had never seen it expressed in one’s whole character. His wife told me she was going to wean off the sea like a baby off the bottle but I don’t believe that was possible in his case. Though he was quiet, he became loquacious whenever I asked him about the sea, which I did at every available opportunity. I once asked him to describe the weirdest thing he’d ever seen when he was at sea. He replied by explaining the phosphorescent wheels off the coast of Thailand, spinning wheels of light created by algae. This particular time, he said, he’d seen two intersecting wheels. ‘It made you wonder what you’d been drinking!’ On another occasion I showed him a photo from a book about sea disasters in which the entire bow of a merchant ship had been destroyed, allegedly by a wave. I’m sure the image was geared to shock civilians. Peter just looked at it and commented, ‘Poor seamanship.’


‘Did anything like that ever happen to you?’ I enquired breathlessly.


So he told me that once (once!) he’d run aground off South Africa, a coast notorious for its ferocious seas.


Whilst the other characters I simply made up, I had to be very controlled when I wrote about the captain. (It is unlike me to be controlled on paper.) I had to have Peter always before me and not lose my focus and get carried away. After ten months, I sent off the first draft to the manuscript assessor, Sarah Minns, and this is how she replied:  ‘Stefan – I like this character and I think he’s quite clearly drawn.’


First the self-control, then the payoff! I was very pleased by her comment. It gave me the confidence to develop him further.


But - in the book, Stefan’s wife Nataša has been murdered by the fascists. Because Brazzi the protagonist was in love with her, and because he had a vicious streak to his ego, he falsely claimed that he and Nataša had been having an affair. This implication of Nataša’s complicity restricted Stefan’s expression of his grief, and this in turn led to anger that is resolved by the end of the novel when Stefan learns the truth.  Now, the single instance of (righteous) anger I had ever seen in Peter was when he gave up smoking. He was not an angry man. So I experienced a certain measure of guilt explaining the character to his daughter when I asked for permission to dedicate the novel to him. I hasten to add that I loved the ending. I felt that I had brought Stefan to a point of peace.

I remember reading The Sound of One Hand Clapping by the Australian author Richard Flanagan, also about Slovenians, and how beautifully the novel resolved. This was what I was hoping to achieve for this character.

TERROR ON THE HIGH SEAS Part 2 - From HMAS Ovens to the U27

Penmore Press 2019

Submarine art U27 Danijel Frka

My challenge in the novel was to write a chapter that stemmed directly from my experience in HMAS Ovens (‘Terror on The High Seas’ posted 6 Jan 2020). It had to be written from the perspective of someone who knows little about submarines. That someone is Giovanni, a biology teacher from Florence. Now I had done a reasonable amount of research and, because I was a science teacher, I had a good working knowledge of physics, mechanics and maths – but I was not a submariner.

So the plan was to play it safe. Be simple and write about what you know. But I encountered a few problems.

Here was the biggest one:  I absolutely agonized over what to do about the hatches – open or closed?

The U27 in the novel, Austria’s most successful submarine, was launched in 1916. It was a small coastal vessel, only 37m long and not far above the waterline. It had the standard two hatches at the top and bottom of the conning tower, and the top one had to remain open to provide the oxygen that allowed the engines to burn diesel. 

But what about the bottom one? In order for poor Giovanni to be well and truly claustrophobic, it had to remain closed.

Now, I had spent a couple of weeks in the northern Adriatic where the novel is set and I knew that, although the sea doesn’t have the huge rolling swells of the Pacific, the surf can be vicious when the winds are up. I had seen it thundering over the breakwater in Novigrad, and the wind that had created that surf was not the famous Bora. The Bora is worse. Is it reasonable in the novel for the captain to order the bottom hatch closed in a high sea on the Adriatic? Yes, I believe so but, if he does, won’t the conning tower fill with water?

The answer to this will undoubtedly hit you straight away, but it took me several months of reading article after article on the internet to realize that the early submarines were very watery places and had numerous pumps, at least one of which drained the tower. So Giovanni has no option but to endure his claustrophobia as best he can. From my experience, what sort of mind games can he play to do this? If I was him what would I do?

And then I thought, ‘Well, I was him!’ when I visited HMAS Ovens back in 2016.    

Without further ado, here is the chapter:

His Most Italian City, Chapter Seven

Giovanni had lapsed into a state of controlled panic.

He had been unable to prevent himself losing consciousness again after the rat incident, and had woken an indefinite time later with no sign of the offending rodent, concluding that it was off pursuing its nefarious activities in another part of the vessel. He did not desire the company of the strange group he found himself with but neither did he relish solitude. While he’d slept, the bunks above and below him had filled with men, and three hammocks, also occupied, had been strung across the small space. Hot bodies and warm breath had produced condensation that bubbled visibly upon most surfaces, coalesced into rivulets and showered downwards sporadically, angling to the left or right as the boat rolled. Two of the men in the hammocks had covered their faces with oilcloths.

Giovanni thought briefly of remaining in what now resembled a campsite in a wet cave before deciding that men awake and silent were better company than men asleep. Scattered remnants of young male disorder lay around him: bunched-up socks, a crust of bread, a rind of cured meat, a water bottle in a canvas sack, a pair of discarded boots, a flat wicker basket designed to slot into a shelf, a balaclava and a thick cabled jumper whose intricacy of design bore witness to a patient parent and a warm hearth far from here. The boat chugged along with the same noise, smell and confinement he might have expected within the engine room of a coastal steamer and, feeling marginally better than he had earlier, he peeled himself from his bed and cautiously made his way through the narrow corridor, swaying with the roll of the vessel, supporting himself by placing his hands before him on the walls.

Scarcely had he left than he ran into a solid metal wall with a large round hole, through which he had to bend over double before at length unfolding into another space – he could not call it a room – lit by a single electric bulb strung in a cage from the ceiling. The space seemed to him like a narrow railway carriage with the blinds down and, though swarming in broad pipes and snaking cables, it had a higher ceiling than the sleeping quarters. Beside two spoked wheels, like a bicycle without a seat, a slender youth with buck teeth stood as patiently as though he had nothing with which to concern himself but to await orders. He might be about to milk the cows, thought Giovanni, observing the young man’s bovine tranquility, before upbraiding himself for his lack of charity. 

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘The control room,’ answered the boy.

‘What do you do here?’

‘I’m the apprentice electrician. I stay until I’m relieved.’

‘May I sit down?’

He nodded, so Giovanni carefully arranged himself on the dampish deck plating, with a watchful eye on the bewildering tangle of ironwork surrounding him.

The control room resembled an automobile where body, muffler, exhaust and every moving part had been dismantled and reassembled into an area half the size, squashed and suffocating, for a complex network of pipes stretched over every available surface except the floor, even up into the arched roof. It was much hotter than the crew’s quarters and, through a further small curved door passing through a metal wall above him, he heard the booming rhythmic knock of the diesel engines from which the heat originated. Without windows the heat was unable to escape and the gloomy atmosphere had become very close, like summer without the sun. From time to time a young face flitted across the opening and another man, as youthful as his compatriot, seemed to busy himself at what might have been something electrical at the far end. Above him sprawled a structure like the many-headed hydra, its flanks mounted with dozens of wheels of all sizes, from fungus-sized buds to bloated gargoyles to enormous enteric flowers. In the turgid gloom, the complex and intimidating monstrosity loomed over Giovanni. Less and less easily could he call to mind the world he thought he belonged to, for he would never before have called a machine intimidating.

Under his arms and up into his groin his skin itched from being encased in his wet woolen suit – the crew worked only in trousers and shirts with the sleeves rolled up.

It’d be better to take my jacket off like them, he decided. Roll my sleeves up. Florence wouldn’t approve, but does Florence matter?

And he was just about to do that when an uncomfortable little voice whispered to him that by doing so he was condoning this situation. It would be best, his homunculus went on, if he did all he could to preserve the person he believed himself to be. So the boat stank with the odor of unwashed men and he just sat and sweated and added to it: sweat, diesel, urine, bile, rotten egg gas. To top it all off, they pitched and rolled in the swell and he was starting to feel seasick.

But worse, far worse than the stink, the machinery and his deteriorating self-perception was the need to leave this enclosure immediately: to escape the lowering ceiling and forge his way up to the sky. With the claustrophobia arose the conviction that there were not two people squashed into this iron cupboard but three. The third, an intangible menace, had arisen as he’d sloughed off his unconsciousness. Down the brief passage it had accompanied him, through the bulkhead and into the control room, and now it settled above his head, threatening and malevolent. By devious means it attacked his heart which began to thud wildly within his chest. Then it strangled his breathing. The weak tungsten globe fading in the clutch of its wire cage seemed like the last sliver of twilight and, as night closed in, the presence focused itself upon him. He felt as if he were travelling along a tunnel searching for daylight, with this awful phantom clinging to his back, and, at each moment, he anticipated the approach of the sunshine that would subdue it. But he saw no end to the tunnel. And no sun. And so the fear and the panic proliferated. It was distressing to think that he, a product of a comfortable home and a good education, had been reduced so rapidly to this desperation. The presence hovered just beyond his recognition so that he was unable to name it, but when he closed his eyes he saw its face melting like ice in a flame.

 Eventually he managed to control himself just enough to develop some distraction strategies while a dozen or more drops of warm condensation rained down upon him. First he said the Lord’s Prayer and the Gloria, then he recited his times tables in his head from one to twenty. That took him ten minutes, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen being the challenging ones. Next he reviewed his knowledge of biological classification systems which forced him to recall his Latin and Greek, and that moved his thoughts on to Epicurean philosophy which he hoped to emulate by living modestly and learning about the natural world. Finally with the engines pounding in his ears he listed the dukes of Savoy, the kings of Italy, the emperors of Austria, thirteen of his favorite Italian wines and the church’s calendar from Advent to Pentecost.

If the men coming and going beside him paid him no attention in the meantime, as little did he notice them, and gradually he derived the reassuring notion that he might not be a prisoner at all. No one had in so many words stated the terms of his captivity and it looked like, as their leader had said, they were still working out what to do with him.

So he cleared his throat and addressed the control room electrician as moderately as he might have done before a biology class with his fingers spaced before him on the lectern. Only the topic fell short.

‘How do I get out of here?’

The young man seemed surprised to be spoken to a second time, and his teeth protruded a little further from his mouth, but he answered Giovanni’s polite request agreeably enough.

‘Up there,’ and pointed to an aluminum ladder sliding into the room, which Giovanni had been too absorbed with itemizing Italian wines to notice.

 He shifted so that he could see what it led to, a heavy round object with a wheel, apparently sitting on the ceiling. 

 ‘The door? The lid?’

‘It’s a hatch.’

‘Oh yes, I see.’ Giovanni examined it through the humid murk. ‘It looks shut.’

‘We can open it. It’s not secured.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘Well,’ began the boy, before pausing in order to give his reply some placid consideration. (He has certainly come from a farm, decided Giovanni. He has milked the cows and now he is explaining the features of his new tractor.) ‘We’re not very big and we roll a lot, that’s all, especially when the sea’s up. You don’t want too much water getting into a submarine.’

‘Aren’t they like ships?’

‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘We’re not a ship. No superstructure. And a funny shape. Bit unstable.’

Dreadful things and dire warnings.

‘Are we going to sink?’ gasped Giovanni.

‘No,’ the boy answered, mildly startled at the alarm in Giovanni’s voice. He frowned before returning to the patient mode of explanation in which he was clearly more comfortable. ‘I don’t think so. But Captain doesn’t want water in the circuitry or the batteries.’

But Giovanni was already surrounded by water. Water draining in unseen cavities towards a slurp-gulp, slurp-gulp repeater that could only be a pump. Water chopping on the hull. Water in his hair, water on the walls and water in his dreams. In fact, water everywhere.

‘It does seem rather wet in here to me.’

Through the boy’s reserve came just the hint of a sly smile.

‘We’re not bailing the bilges yet. That would be wet.’

‘Ah, yes. Yes, I’m sure it would be. Thank you, um... what’s your name?’

‘Anton.’

‘And my name’s Giovanni. How are you, Anton?’

‘Good,’ mumbled the boy.

‘Well, you see, Anton,’ explained Giovanni, struggling not to sound desperate, ‘I don’t like being shut in. I would feel better if the hatch was opened a little.’

Anton seemed unsure how to answer and, though it was no use pretending the young man was part of one of his classes, Giovanni smiled to show that his reasoning was on the right track. The boy seemed pleased.

‘Well,’ he said, clearly relieved to feel that he had finally helped, ‘Captain might leave this one open for you if the sea were not so high… or if we were at war or something.’

‘What difference would war make?’

‘You’d probably want to get down quickly.’ He nodded as if he were agreeing with himself. ‘There’s also another hatch below the bridge, above the helm in the tower, but you’ve got to leave that one open for the diesels to breathe.’

Giovanni had not understood a word of this and he was beginning to see that any attempt to ask the boy to repeat himself would only end in more confusion. He gathered that the hatch was going to stay shut. Reflecting bleakly that teachers were doomed to consider duty of care in any and all circumstances, he commented in his attentive classroom manner, ‘You sound like you’re really interested in submarines.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Anton. ‘They are interesting.’  

This enterprising exchange was interrupted when a sudden shower of water tumbled into the control room, followed by a blast of cold salt air and a perfect ray of sunshine that played upon the floor at their feet. With a cry of joy, Giovanni grasped at it like a drowning man at a rope until the captain jumped down into the room from the middle rung of the ladder and shut the hatch behind him, cutting off the light.

As if the earth had shifted in its orbit, the atmosphere in the cramped room immediately tightened. Anton squared his shoulders, a face from the engine room checked to see if he were wanted, and even Giovanni sat up straighter. In his hand the captain held a sextant that he rested on the floor with a dull steel thud. Then he gave Anton some directions and presently the buck-toothed electrician disappeared into the crew’s quarters.

Giovanni waited alone on the lifeless floor. He had felt some companionship with the young man, and the sunbeam had heartened him. Now he sensed only a profound loss, and lurching back towards him inched that dark fear.

‘Please, please, could you leave that hatch open?’ he begged.

‘Not in these seas,’ said the man.

‘But not much water would get in if you opened it a little.’

‘Not now.’

‘But I could climb that ladder and you could close it behind me.’

‘There’s no room on the bridge at the moment.’

‘You don’t understand… I’m frightened. I’m so lonely.’

Given the tasks he had at hand, the captain allowed a look to cross his face that was midway between incredulity and annoyance. In its muted tone, Giovanni suspected that there may have been a time when he comforted small children but right now he’d forgotten how to do that. So he made an incorrect assumption and instead of soothing he said, ‘If you want to go up I can take you before sunset, after this watch.’

‘Sunset!’ lamented Giovanni. ‘I’m never going to get out of here! How long till sunset?’ He scrutinized his wrist watch, scrunched his eyes up, and managed only to look like a myopic clod. His academic colleagues would not have recognized him. Either through his dip in the salt water or because he had not wound it last night, the timing mechanism of the watch had stopped at three o’clock. He tapped it, fiddled with the winder, frowned at the hands. Why wasn’t it working?

The captain realized that it was broken but was not sure why Giovanni was looking prehistoric. ‘The sun sets at half past four,’ he said. ‘This watch ends at three.’

‘What time is it now?’

‘It’s gone midday.’

Giovanni sank back upon his soggy floor plate. Two drips landed on his forehead and ran down his nose.

‘I’ll just amuse myself until then,’ he volunteered miserably. ‘If you’ve no objections.’

Irony was not what the captain expected to hear. From his crew he expected, ‘yes, Captain’ or ‘no, Captain.’ He let out a terse sigh, as if he had been pumping up tires all morning and finally they were all filled. The last heave. He faced Giovanni as if he’d had enough of pumping.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to open that hatch.’

So the man heaved himself halfway up the ladder and shoved open the recalcitrant hatch. With finality. Don’t ask me again.

‘Thank you,’ said Giovanni.

The sun hovered just over the meridian. Giovanni couldn’t see it but it announced its presence by softening the silver of the aluminum rungs leading down from the world above, though it lacked the angle to dapple them. He thought that if he lay flat on the floor beneath the open hatch he might just have a chance to see it before it dipped westward. Only a fine mist was seeping down the cold tower. So he rested his head upon the slimy floor, positioned himself beneath the tower and scanned hopefully. Almost immediately he was hit in the face by a jet of water – a big whoosh as if from a blowhole – that cut him like a blast from a fire hose. Dripping wet, he shuffled along the floor plates into a safer position and watched the ladder change color as the vessel rolled. Back, gray, and forth, silver, back and forth, gray and silver, back and forth, gray and silver. As if launched from the hands of demented bailers, random showers started to spray the floor plates below the tower and soon Giovanni was aware of a substantial slosh of bilge water below him that until now he had noticed as no more than the purring of a tide. In response to the sound, he kept his eyes on the ladder as if it were a lifeline, despite the deluge further drenching him, so that he wished, bizarrely, that he had brought his umbrella.

One thing, though, salt water smelled clean. In the midst of Giovanni’s bath, the captain glanced up reproachfully but said nothing and after a moment more under the waterfall, Giovanni retreated to what he was coming to think of as his scullery. And the hatch stayed open.

He was getting his head together now, but the loss of control and his panic had been outside his experience and he remembered how they had possessed him. Here he was learning what fears prowled around the outskirts of his world.

 Above him the captain inspected a book and scribbled some figures with a pencil on a scrap of paper inserted between the pages. He transferred the result of his sums to what Giovanni assumed was a log, and placed both book and log on a flat iron surface adjacent to the phalanx of wheels. Next, he commenced scrutinizing a sea chart. Occasionally he tapped the pencil on his teeth or angled the chart away to protect it from getting wet, but he did not talk to himself, or belch, or fart or yawn. He did not even stretch. He seemed the most physically composed person Giovanni had seen for some time and he commenced observation of the captain.

For I have nothing else to do, he mused. And it is astonishing how one’s discernment is sharpened by captivity, monotony and the desperation to hold fear at arm’s length.

The dark hazel eyes turned upon the chart did not invite conversation; rather, they were focused on the task. Even the captain’s breathing in the stale air was regular, and seemed under his control. If he had thoughts to share, then within himself they would stay until he felt inclined to share them. Nevertheless, Giovanni passed the time formulating possible scenarios based on the man’s physical features combined with what he already knew.

He has stolen a submarine, Giovanni decided, because he wishes to approach by stealth. Therefore his actions reinforce the traditional criticism of submarines as being ungentlemanly. Opposed to this is the observation that he has the loyalty of his crew. They are quite pleasant, except that big fat one whose one redeeming feature seems to be his loyalty to his captain. The boy by the wheels could have been tense, but he wasn’t, and that other motherly man was almost kind. Not something one expects from terrorists.

He actually carries a sextant. He must be a pirate! Kind as his crew may be, I don’t know anyone who carries sextants except pirates, and people who kidnap biology teachers on the high seas are obviously pirates. It suits me to call him captain because an adventure story is the only scenario I can summon under the circumstances. He would be Captain Under the Water or Captain Unscrupulous or Capitano Sotto Voce, or something along those lines. This pirate captain, then, is only a little taller than I am, and a moderate height must be an advantage in a confined space. His face is tanned but not thickened by sun exposure, like fishermen, and his hair is plastered to his scalp with salt spray. I can smell the salt and his shirt is wet. It has welded to his skin, becoming the color of dried bone. Through it I can see him breathing in and out, as shallow as a fish. His chest is defined by his wet shirt, rather broad, and he has gills, certainly. (Giovanni spent some minutes determining how gills might  develop from human respiration.)

He is considerably older than his crew, perhaps twice as old, maybe more. One would expect a man of that age to have settled down to a desk job and not be gallivanting around the Adriatic badly dressed and bearded. Something in his past has rendered him an outlaw, or, more likely, somebody has done something to him. I wonder what it is?

He squinted his eyes towards the face that until now he had only wanted to elude.

There’s nothing more tantalizing than a man with a past, but how do you read a face that is unreadable? How do you discover his story? No one here is going to tell me because I am just part of the background. I have no purpose but to frame the purposeful. I cannot be found because I was never lost.

A single drop of condensation hung poised on the sextant’s telescope until it fell imperceptibly onto the measuring arc below.

That drop is my insignificance, mused Giovanni. Nobody wants me at all.

 So he continued to watch the captain with the same detached curiosity, as if they were moving in separate worlds, until the man completed his navigating and again approached the ladder and Giovanni comprehended that he was about to disappear and take with him the answers to his questions. Worse, he might close the hatch. He shook himself from his reverie, reached out and tapped the man on the calf. He turned around. Giovanni looked up.

‘Excuse me. Where are we going?’

‘Back,’ the captain passed a grimy hand through his beard. ‘To do what we should have done when we picked you up.’

‘Home?’ Hope sprung in his heart. ‘When? I mean, where are we now?’ 

‘South coast. Just off the shipping lanes.’

‘You mean…’

‘Not far away.’ He shot Giovanni a malicious grin. ‘Does that please you?’

The phrasing of this curt remark did not tally with his appearance.

He certainly has a past, concluded Giovanni to himself. Something has brought him to this, for in other circumstances he has been clean shaven and better dressed. He has come from a different world.

‘You’re educated?’

‘Less educated than you,’ the captain answered shrewdly.

‘I’m only a teacher.’

‘You teach in Italy but you’re not Italian. Enlighten me: what gives Italy the right to suppress another race? Education or a treaty drawn up by foreigners?’

Giovanni was struck by the inconsistency between his words and his looks. 

‘Who are you to ask me this?’

The man began to reply then apparently thought better of it.

‘Just curious,’ he said.

‘I don’t think you’d go to all this trouble over a treaty.’

‘I might.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t,’ replied Giovanni. ‘I know treaties are not fair. Allies betray each other. People who were once neighbors are now enemies. That’s what happens after a war. It’s a shame.’

‘You’ve got a comfortable view.’      

‘Yes, that’s true. I have fitted in, but I had little choice.’

Giovanni’s interest had been sparked and he felt determined, now he finally had a conversation established, that he would not let the subject go and meekly resume the role of prisoner. He pushed himself up on one elbow. ‘Referring to your earlier comment, I would like to know what it is you think you should have done.’

The resting head turned slightly.

‘When?’

‘When you picked me up. You said,’ he persisted, ‘“what we should have done when we picked you up.” You can only be looking for the person I was mistaken for.’ 

The captain paused. In the set of his jaw and the stillness that veiled his gaze, Giovanni knew, as if by second sight, that he nursed a hurt that differed as much from a grudge as a tree did from a splinter.

I was right! he thought, allowing himself some modest triumph.

That certainty quickened his emotional antennae. People said he was soft but his answer to this would have been that the natural sympathy that he possessed in abundance would not permit him to either deliberately hurt another person or stand by unmoved when he could help. It particularly pleased him, as well, that his instincts had been correct, and, as if the man were one of his pupils with a personal problem, he forged ahead when he should have held back.

‘You are, aren’t you?’

He moved his body forward into an attitude of compassion.

‘Whatever’s happened in your past,’ he pursued gently, ‘is none of my business, but I’m happy to listen.’

Now he had laid down the gauntlet. He had probed the man’s life like a seer. He had looked into his heart and seen its secrets. In his professional opinion, the time for revelation had arrived.

But the ploy could not have been more obvious if he had asked him to relate his story and offered support, and, too late, Giovanni realized his mistake. The captain’s composure disintegrated in front of him. Horror swept his face as he battled the rush of emotions Giovanni had provoked. His hands clenched by his side, the firm mouth warped and, for an instant, such a mask of penetrating regret obscured his features that Giovanni forgot his own troubles in his surprise. And, just as quickly, it was gone, replaced by anger, shame at a moment of weakness, and, with it, the desire of the wounded to wound.

In a second he had sloughed off the moment as if it were a pretense. He was in control again and his indifference was more terrifying than his anger.

He snapped his fingers. ‘Zorko!’

Zorko’s huge mass at once squeezed in through the engine room hatch, scraping his big ear. He’d had it pressed to the engine room bulkhead the whole time and he’d been looking forward to this.

The captain jerked his head at the conning tower.

‘Throw him overboard.’

The giant commenced pacing forward. As Giovanni struggled to his feet and backed away, Zorko grasped one of his shoulders and shoved it into the ladder.

‘Up!’ he barked.

Giovanni noticed little things then: the sunbeam had come back and, in the patch of seawater on the floor, a rainbow was shining on its scum of diesel. The frosty winter air swarmed into the high narrow opening like a gale through a tunnel, sweeping out the stench and the dead rankness, filling the steel hull with hope. But he could see nothing save the ladder leading up to the world he had loved and feel only a terrible sadness at leaving it. He shut his eyes. Somewhere very close were his parents, frantically wondering what had become of him. Close were the green hills, the parks of oak and pine, the fishermen sorting their catch, the blue waters of the bay, the grand and overarching sky. Giovanni stared numbly at the first rung, unable to move, wiping away the tears that would not stop.

When he saw him weep, Zorko slapped him on the back as if he were the presenter at a boxing tournament, leered familiarly into his face and said, ‘You’re not navy material, we regret, but have you tried the army?’

Then he roared so heartily at his own joke that at length he was forced to wipe his eyes with a sleeve smudged with oil, until he imagined he resembled the pistons he had just been lubricating. This notion caused him to laugh with even greater gusto and, as he returned to the engine room, his snorts were drowned out by the diesels, but only just.

The captain remained, watching Giovanni, pensive and grim, while something akin to gratification flickered across his features.

‘Nearly got what you wanted. And you’d better hope that we don’t run into any ships because, the minute I see something, we’re diving. You won’t like that.’

Back he went up the ladder, the hatch closed behind him and the end of Giovanni’s bid for freedom was like its beginning: the walls, the stink and the gloom.

A hollow shudder rocked his soul. He seemed lost in a moonless night upon a black ocean, alone but for the mournful cry of a sea bird and the clang of a warning bell laid upon a rock. Only that old fear to keep him company. Then grief surged in and its wave broke at the crest, snatching him away, sweeping him on towards the beach. Left alone on the swell, his unpleasant familiar drifted out to sea. And there was some sort of peace without it. Giovanni sat down and abandoned himself to sleep.