Showing posts with label His Most Italian City novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label His Most Italian City novel. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

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 and the 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.



https://www.mwalkeristra.com/







Saturday, June 6, 2020

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.
 




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Thursday, March 12, 2020

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.



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Monday, January 13, 2020

HIS MOST ITALIAN CITY - Chapter Four


Giovanni awoke in a coffin, to a tiny sawing noise like bone scraped upon wood. In the gradual awareness of consciousness, he did not immediately realize where he was or how he had gotten there. He did not open his eyes. He did not move. He lay oblivious to sensation. If this were death, then he was not initially alarmed.

But consciousness, like the thief who steals in the night, cast its rapacious eyes his way, and under its gaze he sensed a measure of concern about his dark, closeted environment. His hands lay still, two dead weights upon his chest. His feet he could not feel at all. His resuscitation had achieved particularity in some points and obliteration in others, so that his legs remained paralyzed even as in his fingers he detected the faintest tingling, which quickened over the minutes and forged a path towards his wrists. He wriggled one finger, then another. Some sensation returned to his palms, his wrists, and his forearms and, with that knowledge, he discovered that his hands were tied – and wasn’t that odd if this were death?

But there went his brain again and he couldn’t stop it, sailing over the horizon and into sleep once more. This time he dreamed that the gate in the sea wall opened to him of its own accord. The roof of the high old house reposed in shadow but, as he watched, the dawn forged a path across the ridge cap and at once the tiles lit up like autumn leaves. With the sparkling new day the Bora had ceased and Giovanni saw his father waving a greeting from the kitchen window. Relief coursed through him as he realized that everything was all right, after all. He smiled and waved back, but a distracted look had crossed the old man's face and from inside Giovanni heard the dog bark. His father peered down and said, 'There you are, Gilda! We were so worried.' Then he turned to Giovanni. 'Nice to meet you. A pity you have to go, but I have something for you.' He grappled within the room, pulled out a poker from the range and began to scrape it against the windowsill. Though it looked far away, it sounded very close and Giovanni was unable to resolve the paradox. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

I've got to get out of this dream, he thought. He shook his bound hands and stretched them upward.

Immediately they collided with a low lid and, when he shot out his left elbow, it hit wood. Oh, God. Quickly he rolled his head to the right and realized that, barely beyond his ear, there was a void. Yet, even as he welcomed it, such a cascade of dizziness overcame him that he was forced to lie back and let it pass. He waited in the cozy prickle of his wet wool suit until he detected wounds burning in his thigh and shoulder, a throbbing neck and a roaring headache from that crash onto the rocks now he remembered what had happened. He’d suffered an injury outside his home and here he was, lying fully clothed in a coffin with three sides. It all made sense! That noise that scraped and slid, as muted as a shovel into a grave, as persistent as a funeral bell. That sweating stink that sank into his lungs like corruption. Like a carcass that was returning to the earth.

Surely I have not been left alone with the dead!

Still too frightened to open his eyes, he eventually realized that he felt warm. If he were buried he would be cold, would he not? Vaguely, out of the fug in his brain, he perceived a rushing sound and a sense of movement. Perhaps it might even be that the walls vibrated and, very distantly… Could he hear an engine churning out a monotonous clunk?

Slowly and methodically, Giovanni forced himself to breathe in time with its rhythm, and imagined at each pulse the blood rushing through the wound in his thigh and on, to his knee. As he breathed he felt his calf, then his ankle and finally he imagined that life was returning to his feet, encased in wet socks and boots – and tied also!

At last it was that clunk piercing his skull, that persistent scraping and the odd combination of warmth and moving cold that persuaded his eyes to tremble apart. He unglued one eyelid and through the lashes saw a faint amber, trembling against one wall.

It’s not a grave, he marveled, for what grave ever throbbed and glowed? Therefore, I have not been buried alive. If there is a mechanical source of sound and a light source, it means that men are behind the creation of this sphere.

This calmed him somewhat while, in his more hopeful frame of mind, the overwhelmingly putrid smell even though it was still there now seemed tinged with something sharper. Something he had smelled from time to time along the thoroughfares of Florence and even on the farms of rural Istria: diesel. That smell at last convinced him. He opened both eyes completely and now he could tell that he was certainly in a machine of some sort that, with its throbbing pistons and dim lights, seemed to him like an industrial Dante’s inferno.

He strained his neck into the void and looked around. To the far left of his vision he saw a passage branching off towards the source of the light, so narrow that there was space for only one man to pass. To his right was blackness. Above him, beyond the confines of his niche ran pipes, and the low ceiling along which they lay seemed no higher than he was. The shadowy, shrunken room pressed in on him: a rank, suffocating, claustrophobic enclosure. For a moment, the discovery of diesel had quieted him, but now Giovanni, biology teacher, nature lover, felt the rise of panic.

He heaved himself up until his head brushed the board above him and by the clotted light flickering against the hem of his trousers he observed a large rat filing its front teeth on his boot - scrape, scrape, scrape. With a gasp of horror, he kicked his legs until his knees slammed into the wood above him. 

Va via!’ he yelled. ‘Go away!’

The rat plunged from its perch and disappeared. He heard its claws scrabbling for purchase on the floor below him.

Heavy steps sounded from down the disappearing passage and suddenly it seemed that five or six men stood directly in front of him, with more behind whom he couldn’t clearly see. With their arrival, the source of the stench was immediately obvious. Unwashed bodies, diesel, human waste, the glorious stench of young manhood, decayed dinners, and the rat. The whole lot had accumulated in the slim bunk upon which he had been laid, which they had probably all slept in. Even the metal ceiling with its dimly outlined pipes seemed to reflect and intensify it, and the walls pressed it in upon him like a dark cocoon. 

The men themselves did not seem to flinch under the sour reek, but the years spent among the Florentines had honed Giovanni’s natural fastidiousness. The smell was so overpowering he felt barely able to breathe. As much as he tried, he could not stop wrinkling his nose in disgust.

Rather than look offended the men laughed.

‘You’re in a pig boat,’ said one, a huge man, older than Giovanni and twice as heavy, who had to stoop to avoid knocking his crown on the ceiling.

He spoke the rough Italian Giovanni had heard on the docks of Trieste, and his human words, the laughter and the attention, broke the spell. Giovanni calmed down, realized he could breathe, took a gulp of air. The tiny room expanded. 

He examined the remaining men. They were all young except one. At a quick reckoning they might have been much the same age as his students, some smooth-cheeked, others on the verge of manhood, overgrown and resolute. All of them were curious about him rather than wary, knocking against each other in the small space, their back row digested by the gloom.  

The exception stood with his arms folded across his chest and his eyes focused on Giovanni with the direct stare of authority.

‘What’s a pig boat?’ Giovanni asked him because under such scrutiny it seemed scarcely permissible to ask anybody else.

‘No room to wash in a submarine,’ replied the man.

Nobody spoke. Giovanni didn’t speak either. Silly, really, not to talk, but it couldn’t be helped. It was as if he had relinquished control of himself, and his claustrophobia dissipated as he was held to attention by the man with the commanding eyes. 

Giovanni peered out from his prison. The man seemed to be of medium height but stocky, with a strong upper body, dark hazel irises, a short sparsely graying beard and hair of the same salt and pepper. Though the floor shifted with the movement of the boat, he maintained an experienced stillness and, if anything else were necessary to proclaim his profession of seaman, above blue military trousers he wore a loose, collared shirt like the fishermen of Cittanova. Nevertheless, Giovanni had the impression that he would look exactly the same whatever he wore because his mere presence demanded one’s attention so much that it would render any clothes unremarkable.

Even as Giovanni lay prone before him something in the tremor of the boat caught the man’s attention. His eyes lost their fixed gaze.

As they released Giovanni, his former panic abruptly returned.

‘Let me out!’ he cried, for he felt that the ceiling was falling on him and the walls were contracting. ‘I can’t breathe. Please, let me out!’

He twisted his legs violently towards the weakly lit corridor and only succeeded in tilting halfway off the bunk when the weight of his dead feet and wet boots dragged him into a sodden pile on the floor. At the level of his eyes stood a dozen pairs of sea boots ornamented in a paisley pattern of mold in white, green and orange.

The captain for what other term could be used to describe him? growled some command to the men crammed so tightly into the miniature room that their shoulders rubbed together, and one, producing a sailor’s knife, cut the ropes tying Giovanni’s wrists and ankles. Then he retreated, as shy as a child, without assisting him further. The huge man who had first addressed him scowled at the sailor, shoved two meaty hands under Giovanni’s arms and hoisted him to his feet.

Giovanni swayed weakly, clutching his spinning head until he overbalanced backwards and hit his shoulder on another shelved bed stacked above the one on which he had been lying. Three bunks lay on top of one another almost to the ceiling, which he could have brushed with his head by standing on his toes.

‘Thank you.’ He looked down. ‘Where’s the rat?’

‘Plenty more where he came from.’

‘In a submarine?’

There was no reply, either from the crew or from their intimidating leader, though Giovanni sensed that the young men were waiting for the man to speak first. He began to feel as restrained as one of his students. Any hope he might have had of striking up a conversation in this foreign world seemed destined to be disappointed. He tried again.

‘Is this the navy?’

The captain seemed to find this entertaining and his closed manner softened enough to permit a restrained amusement.

‘For you we’ll term it the People’s Navy.’

‘The People’s Navy? You’re a patriot? A pirate? A spy? Yet you speak Italian. What does that make you?’

‘We choose to speak to you in the Italian of the Austrian docks. That’s all you need to know.’

‘Then you come from Trieste? I thought the submarine base was at Pola.’

‘That’s where he stole it from,’ countered the huge man.

‘Don’t shoot us in the foot, Zorko, any more than you have already,’ returned the captain while the slightest indication of emotion entered his voice. It may have been frustration but Giovanni could equally have called it anger. ‘Let’s say I borrowed a submarine for the occasion.’

A ripple of mirth spread through the men.

‘What occasion?’

From the rear Giovanni observed a knuckle pushed into a palm accompanied by a muted sound like surf on a beach, a parody of an explosion which required little interpretation. A wind of fear raised the hairs at the back of his neck. They were all watching him, standing before them in his suit and tie, twisting his wrists like a nervous secretary and biting his lip. A shudder knotted his shoulder blades, an urge to gulp the fetid air instead of breathe it, and with it came a compulsion to talk. As he gained momentum Giovanni realized that he sounded like a man devoted to his family, who rarely had the occasion to be anything but neatly dressed and whose temperate wit was appreciated in academic circles. Which was what he was.

‘You stole a submarine? That’s innovative and, if the consequences don’t bother you, I have no problem with it but, if it was me, I would consider them first. And could you tell me why I’m here, please? I’m no threat to you. My parents were upset because the government changed their name. Did you know that? My father is seventy-one. What’s the point at his age?’ He swiped a rim of perspiration from his top lip. In a second, the hot prickle returned. ‘So I told them I’d just step out for half an hour to clear my brain, and they’ll be wondering where I am. Do you want money? I’m only a teacher. I don’t have any. I work in Florence. I was visiting my family. Do you think you could take me home or drop me off somewhere convenient? I promise I won’t say anything incriminating and I don’t mind a walk.’

‘You’re Italian?’

‘No. I told you. I was visiting my family.’ 

The group regarded this wordlessly while a wave of recrimination seemed to pass through them. After the minutes of restrained silence, the younger crew commenced speaking rapidly amongst themselves in a language Giovanni didn’t understand but recognized as Slavic. Clearly they were discussing him and not looking very happy about it.

The captain stood listening while they argued and interrupted each other, and the set of his jaw tightened with the emotion Giovanni had earlier detected until the sides of his mouth strained like a dam about to burst. At length he slammed his hand hard against the pipes above him and swore in the same language his crew were using.

The chatter abruptly stopped. The captain rounded on Giovanni.

‘Name!’

‘Giovanni Di…..um, Micatovich.’

‘A teacher in Florence?’ broke in Zorko. ‘That’s not your real name.’

‘I just said the government changed it,’ insisted Giovanni. ‘But it is my real name. I studied in Graz when Istria was Austrian. I fought for Austria during the War, not Italy, but now Istria’s Italian I have to find work here in that language. I’ve taught in Florence for eight years.’ He rushed a breath. ‘And, anyway, what’s wrong with being Italian?’

Zorko spat on the floor in front of him.

‘Fascist,’ he said.

‘Fascist? I’m not a fascist!’

‘You look Italian.’

‘But I’m Istrian! My name is Micatovich, with a ‘k’. My mother’s name was Matjašić. Very Slavic,’ he insisted with more confidence than he felt. ‘I’m on your side.’

Zorko leered close with his enormous dirty face. ‘And which side is that?’

‘Well, weren’t you speaking in a Slavic language just then?’

‘Yes, and which one was it?’

When Giovanni stumbled for an answer, the captain nodded to his crew.

‘You see?’

‘We can’t let you go now,’ added Zorko. ‘You know too much.’ 

‘I don’t know too much!’ cried Giovanni. ‘I don’t know anything except that I’m sure I’m here by mistake.’

The captain refolded his arms across his chest.

‘Yes, you may be,’ he acknowledged, ending cryptically, ‘It would be wise not to be so well dressed next time.’

‘Or the same height,’ Zorko chimed in.

‘You’re impatient, Zorko.’

‘It was dark,’ remonstrated that man.

And, thought Giovanni absurdly, someone as big as you has no need of language to get your point across. I’m half your size and look how prone I am to illogical speech in desperate situations.

‘I really must escape this dreadful machine,’ he explained out loud while they squabbled tersely and the walls lurched in on him. ‘Point me to the exit, if you please, right now.’

The captain seemed not to be one for debating for he welcomed Giovanni’s prim request in order to turn away from his quarrelsome companion. He asked pertinently, ‘Can you swim?’

‘Please...’

‘We’re halfway down the coast, Giovanni Micatovich. Until I work out what to do with you, you’re stuck here.’

Giovanni tried once more.

‘I need to get away from the rat.’

‘Yes, so do we.’ He turned to leave. He was losing interest. ‘The best thing for those who don’t like confined spaces,’ he observed in passing, ‘is to look down, not up.’

‘And then you’ll see that rat as well,’ Zorko said with a wink.

The captain allowed the younger men to go out before him, the courtesy of rank forbidden by the cramped enclosure. Then, with that rolling walk that seamen acquire from keeping their balance in rough seas, he finally retreated back down the narrow maze until his shoulders dissolved into the gloom.

With his departure hopelessness settled upon Giovanni. He sat down on the bed and stared at his boots, pulled at his trousers where the damp fabric clung to his skin, loosened his tie. He discovered that he had lost a cuff link, so he checked and removed the other one, laying it as carefully as a treasure in the deepest pocket of his trousers lest he lose it as well and by so doing unwittingly deposit a little part of himself in this tomb. He hoped that he had lost the first cuff link in the water by his father’s house where it would be free. The thought quickened a note of nostalgia in him and a faint smile washed a little of the sadness from his face. It dropped swiftly away and, as he watched its descent, there, en queue, was the rat. Its wicked little eyes had been watching him from its small corner the whole time.

He leapt up and stumbled after the men.

‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘Don’t leave me here!’

But he was overtaken by further dizziness and such a surge of nausea that he had to stop, holding his head in his hands, breathing harshly, fighting the urge to vomit. And one of the young men noticed. Shaking his head and clicking his tongue as if he were Giovanni’s mother, he put a hand beneath his arm and guided him back to the bunk, laid his head on the pillow and waited until he settled. Then he handed Giovanni a wrench.

‘If the rat worries you,’ he said kindly, ‘belt him with this.’


https://www.mwalkeristra.com/

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

THE ADOPTED PERSON'S GUIDE TO ISTRIA


    I had no interest in modern Italy nor the Italian diaspora that has produced restaurants in almost every city on earth. My adoptive mother and father were proud colonial Australians. They didn't go to restaurants. They went to the cricket. They caught fish, and their parents referred to Yugoslavs as Balts even though Yugoslavia was nowhere near the Baltic.

    Discovering herself overnight the parent of a very large baby, my mother accordingly brought me up on a mixture of Australian oral history and stories of the female Yugoslav Partisans. I thought they were thrilling, and I just knew that my birth mother had hurled grenades at fascists. Yugoslavia seemed a wonderful place to me and, when I spent two weeks there in 1985, I settled as naturally into its lakes and forests as if I had taken root.

    So, when I met my brother in 2002 and his first words were ‘my mother is Italian,’ I was less than impressed. (I recall that my half-Italian husband and I may have differed on this.) My sister’s children also told me, ‘Nonna is Italian.' They retrieved a stack of postcards from a dusty shelf addressed to Silvana Di Micheli Tonon.
    ‘Di Micheli is her mother’s name,’ they said.

   Well, I had met my biological mother in 1989 and I knew better.
​​
   'Silvana told me that her mother's name was Micatovich.'  

   I produced my adoption papers and tapped 'Yugoslavian' prominently.
     ​​
   ‘Italian,’ they replied.
     
   ‘Yugoslavian,’ I said.
​    Welcome to Istria.
     Silvana was born in Tar, an Istrian hilltop village, in 1920. She took her holidays in nearby Novigrad. Trieste was her city. Following the war, having been Italian for a brief 25 years and Austrian before that, Tar became part of Yugoslavia. In its park, on the cenotaph beneath the partisan star, is an inscription in Croatian and Italian written in 1952, 'This stone is erected as a sign of gratitude to the Croatian and Italian fighters of this community. Casualties for the liberation of our people.'
  
    But Silvana never went back. She was Australian from the minute she stepped off the ship in 1950 and her family, growing up without oral history, were left to their own devices in deciding where she came from. Then one day, when she was nearly 90, she began to reminisce about her childhood. My sister, scribbling furtively, recorded as much as she could, and this is how I discovered that, when her parents took on Italian identity after the war, Silvana herself decided to become Yugoslavian.
    What she ultimately related did not amount to a book, but it was enough to bring the past to life and to create the story world for the novel. When she and I read a book together that my brother had bought her about Novigrad, called ‘Cittanova D’Istria,’ it encouraged further memories.
    ‘Mandracchio?? ' she exclaimed, thumping the page. (She was 97.) 'Ha, ha, ha! Mandracio, please, not mandracchio. And see those Venetian walls!’ More thumping. ‘They’re to keep the Turks out. People in Cittanova would say to one another, "I’m not a Turk!"’

    And finally a few quotes to shed light on that troubling Yugoslav/Italian question:
​​
   ‘I like Italian culture but I don’t like Italians. Italians are distrustful because they have been invaded too many times.'
   ​'My father was very unhappy. The government wanted to move him all over Italy.'
​   ‘I saw Mussolini with Hitler in a car in Florence. I was surprised how small he was.'
​​   ‘I felt displaced in Italy.’
   ‘Micatovich was an important name in our village. It was the name of an island down the far south coast near Albania.'
​   ‘My grandmother came from a village near the Austrian border.' 
   'We were Austrian, then Austria lost the war. Then we were Italian, and Italy lost the war!'
    My own feeling is that Silvana thought of herself in regional terms, not national. She was Istrian and the mixture of cultures that that implies. ​I fancy that nationality is a modern invention.