TITO'S LAST STAND

Komiža, Vis - port of the Partisan 
and Allied navies

 

September 1943 – Fascist Italy capitulates to the Allies. Nazi Germany invades the Dalmatian coast and its Adriatic islands. Only Vis remains unoccupied.

January 1944 - Tito declares that Vis must be defended.

Island of Terrible Friends by Bill Strutton is the sixth eyewitness account I have read about World War 2 in Yugoslavia. The previous five were Embattled Mountain by Bill Deakin, Eastern Approaches and The Heretic by Fitzroy Maclean, Irregular Adventure by Christie Lawrence, and Partisan Picture by Basil Davidson. We have these British soldiers to thank for grit, honesty and a rough admiration of ruthlessness, and those contemporary politicians in Belgrade and Zagreb who rewrite their history in order to honour themselves would do well to read them.

War is a terrible thing and although one may commence a book of this sort believing that the British were British and the Yugoslavs were Yugoslav, and never the twain shall meet, yet these British authors give praise where it’s due. ‘But if the Commandoes imagined they were fighting a tough war, the [Yugoslavs] were fighting a far more desperate one, right by their side.’

Island of Terrible Friends is written like a novel and records the mission of Major James Rickett from the Royal Army Medical Corps to set up a field hospital in January 1944 on the Adriatic island of Vis for the 50 Commandos there at the time. Also present were 1000 Partisans and a steady stream of wounded civilians escaping from the German occupied coast.

The commando’s task was to harass the Germans.

Commando Lieutenant Barton ‘dressed as a peasant and with two Partisans to show him the way, loaded his Sten gun on a mule under a burden of firewood and walked passed a number of German sentries right into the village of Nerežiše on the island of Brać, garrisoned with 200 Germans. One of the Partisans stood guard outside while he knocked on the Commandant’s billet, was admitted, thrust past a screeching woman to a bedroom upstairs, and there, in the faint light of a candle, fired a burst at the German Commandant who, half risen and gaping wordlessly, leaned over and fell. Barton calmly helped himself to the dead commandant’s automatic, his compass, an excellent pair of binoculars and a rifle. [Then] he beat it with his two Jugoslav comrades through a thicket of sentries.’

With scant medical stores and a general reply of ‘No’ when he requested any more, Rickett begins treating injuries with a lack of everything except desperation, removing a ruptured spleen, for instance, by a Tilley lamp fuelled by rakija until he was able to ransack a Liberator that crashed on the island, for wire and switches to light his hospital.

‘The sea around [Vis] was busier after dark than Piccadilly in the blackout’ and the Germans were always at their door. Each morning Messerschmitts circled, attacking the settlements of Vis, and the Partisan Navy of tuna boats and trawlers camouflaged themselves in the steep bays, caves and inlets until setting out on their missions to sabotage the Germans bases on islands so close that they could be easily seen with the naked eye.

The British opinion of working with the Partisans varied between admiration and outrage. ‘Twenty-eight German divisions [were] drawn and pinned down in the Balkans by Partisan ebullience.’ Yet, their discipline and ruthlessness that sometimes shocked the British reflect the harshness of pre-war peasant life recorded in such works as Irregular Adventure by Christie Lawrence and Rural Women in Croatia-Slavonia in 1900 by Elinor Murray Despalatovic.

That these famers, labourers and housewives could so irritate the Germans to the extent of gaining their respect as an army, Strutton doesn’t seem to have appreciated as well as Basil Davidson or Bill Deakin, or even Fitzroy Maclean who was from the Scottish aristocracy. Strutton writes to entertain an English audience, and his descriptions of the Partisans lack the intimacy of the other writers. They are devoid of the solemn Partisan purpose and discipline that drove the resistance movement and was like a holy thing to them. It might be a language problem, as I noticed he made mistakes when transcribing what the partisans say in such simple things as numbers.

One can easily see from the photos of the Partisan Navy in the Adriatic Naval War (Freivogel/Rastelli, Despot Infinitus 2015) with what pride the sailors respond to Tito’s inspection of their fleet. ‘Continuously at sea in spite of adverse weather and taking every risk in the face of German and Italian revenge.’ Yet Strutton often describes the Partisan Navy like a ramshackle afterthought without an understanding of the lives of its members.

One scene, however, I cannot forget. A stricken Allied bomber crosses the island, blazing from nose to tail, and crashes into the sea. One young man alone parachutes out. Upon landing safely, he collapses in tears of shock all over an elderly peasant woman who has no idea who he is and can’t speak his language. She soothes and strokes him, calling him ‘my son’, until transport arrives to take him to hospital. It reminded me of the words of Jesus: wherever the Gospel goes in all the world, this story will be told in memory of her.

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.

 

Amazon.com: His Most Italian City (9781946409942): Walker, Margaret: Books

Through Forests and Mountains - Kindle edition by Walker, Margaret. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

The Monster in the Dunny – a story about a fisherman.

                      First published 1999, ‘Dead Things Magazine.’

My mother was a fish widow from a family of fish widows. This untimely fate, which she much bemoaned, was not her fault. Nature, realizing that long periods in an open boat restored sanity, had implanted in her that patient exasperation necessary for the task that men like my father recognized a mile off.

In the early seventies, that time of dark summer evenings, Imperial measurements and plentiful fish stocks, my parents, my brother, my sister and myself were on holidays at Wandandian, a hamlet south of Nowra, New South Wales, when something alarming occurred. That the adventure took place at all was undoubtedly the fault of lawless minds, but it was entirely due to fish that the clues were missed.

Along Wandandian’s single street was a small fibro house we used to rent from a friend of my father. Its rear yard sloped down to the creek where Dad moored his boat. Beyond the back door was a small market garden and, through the middle of this, a cracked concrete path led to that lair of all childhood terrors, the dunny. This was a small shed with a door that opened onto a polished wooden board that had two holes cut into it, one big and one small. Each had a lid. Within the holes were buckets emptied weekly by the night soil man. For some unimaginable reason, it was not the fashion long ago to put a light in outdoor toilets and, though a lot of thought had gone into making the dunny comfortable, once inside with the door shut, it could have been any hour after sunset, even at midday.

Now, I had a healthy respect for dark places, particularly dunnies. I knew that they housed all manner of nameless horrors and that it was a particular brand of parental sadism to force children into such an edifice and then refer to it as a call of nature. Thus, I and my siblings crossed our legs around the clock until desperation forced us to use it.

All went as well as could be expected until, at the end of the first week, the fridge broke down. Up to this time Dad had not caught anything, though he fished St George’s Basin from dawn till dusk and the January rains reduced his wardrobe to his pyjamas. This was pretty normal. Our Dad loved gadgets. He had lots of gadgets for catching fish: hooks, lines, sinkers, rods, even an echo sounder but, unfortunately, the more sophisticated his methods, the less he came home with. We, in fact, were happy eating chops, and Dad was happy with his gadgets, and Mum hated cooking fish anyway, so everyone was happy.

One dark night, while thunder rumbled above the tin roof and lightening like Frankenstein-plugged-in robbed graves on the horizon, I went to the toilet. I had to go. I could by no means fair or foul avoid that fateful journey out the back door and up the path, though all the world but carrots and cabbages might sleep around me. How reminiscent of yawning tombs were the cracks in the concrete! How hideously did the dunny rear skywards into the frenzied clouds. Ah, dread vision!

I entered. Car lights in the street intruded into the outskirts of the yard. I closed the door so that they wouldn’t catch my knees knocking. Being only twelve, I always used the smallest hole. I opened the lid and sat. Almost at once I felt a splash. The liquid contents of the bucket were foaming beneath me! I had held on for so long that retreat was impossible but, nevertheless, I was sure that the sound was not mine.

Splish, splash I went.

Splish, splash went the sound.

I stopped.

Splish, splash went the sound.

I leapt from my seat and ran shrieking into the house.

‘Aghh!’ I screamed. ‘There’s a monster in the dunny!’

I woke my brother and sister. I woke my parents.

‘Where’s the monster?’ they asked.

‘Right behind me!’ I yelled.

‘Where?’

Any second now they would hurl at me that vivid imagination stuff parents were always going on about. I could tell by the looks on their faces.

‘All right, I’ll prove it to you.’

Dad grabbed the torch and we all tramped outside.

Splish, splash, splish, splash.

‘See!’ I cried. ‘I told you.’

‘You’re a nincompoop,’ laughed my father. ‘That’s not a monster, that’s my fish.’

‘But Dad, you never catch any fish.’

He shone the torch into the hole. Half a dozen long, grey bodies with marble eyes swished up at us.

‘What’s that?’ he demanded.

‘Fish,’ we replied.

There existed a set of rules I had once read regarding occurrence. The first says that, should the fridge break down, all fishermen will immediately catch more fish than they can eat. My father, that king of quick thinking, was simply storing his surplus catch in creek water in the most easily accessible bucket he could find.

‘When are they coming to fix the fridge, Dad?’

‘Not for a few days,’ answered my mother wearily.

That was the second rule: that the refrigerator repairman shall always be flat out south of Nowra.

‘And until then,’ said Dad. ‘You’ll have to use the big hole in the dunny, and if I hear any more screams, I’ll know you’ve fallen in.’

‘It’s okay, Dad. We can swim.’

‘And no more jokes about the size of Mum’s bottom, okay?’

‘Okay.’

One other thing about fish widows, they put up with a lot of teasing.

Thus it came about that we and the fish regarded each other’s motives several times a day for the next two days, suspiciously, covertly, carefully, and always damply.

Did they bite? I thought.

‘Flatheads don’t bite,’ said my father. ‘Particularly as you’re not using their dunny.

‘But maybe they’ll grow legs and get ideas,’ I rambled on. ‘I mean, we eat them, why shouldn’t they get a taste for us?’

‘We’re bigger than they are,’ my father pointed out.

Yeah, but had he heard about the secret nuclear testing south of Nowra? The fish might be really huge down here.

‘What is it with you and south of Nowra?’

‘Sorry, Dad.’

On the morning of the third day, my mother came in from the dunny and said, ‘That fish is really growing on me.’

We brushed her off.

‘There,’ we said. ‘You don’t smell so bad now.’

‘It must be cooking the stuff three times a day.’

My father took off down the path. We heard him open the door.

‘Pooh! This place stinks!’ he bellowed.

So, it wasn’t Mum after all.

We raced up and peered into the bucket. There were the fish, as happy as a meal could be expected to be. Not to see anything of forensic interest, though, was a bit deflating, but we had stuck our noses in a fair way and putting your nose in a toilet was a rather misanthropic operation, even a toilet teeming with marine life. So we left it another day, during which passed several more meals of fish, and Dad continued to catch more than we could eat, almost more than the dunny could hold but not enough, unfortunately, to stop him fishing.

Rule number three: that there shall be no relationship between fishing and the consumption of fish.

Day four dawned auspiciously. To begin with, none of us but Dad could get anywhere near the dunny. Its smell was overpowering. The air was thick with it and the repairman was apparently taking forever to come and fix the fridge. Desperation forced us to beg for help from the neighbours.

‘What had gone wrong with our dunny?’ they enquired.

‘What can go wrong with a bucket?’ we replied.

‘Then what do you want to use ours for?’

‘Dad,’ we complained, ‘the neighbours won’t let us use their toilet.’

‘This calls for desperate action,’ said our father.

He rang the police to tell them, we assumed, that the neighbours were committing child abuse.

‘Because they won’t let us use their toilet?’ asked my sister.

‘What else would you call it?’

‘That’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?’

The poor neighbours looked very alarmed when the white and blue car drove up outside out house, but the police went nowhere near them, heading instead straight down the garden path to the dunny. Very threatening and grim faced they were.

‘I wouldn’t like to be those fish,’ said my mother.

We stood in a worried scrum at the door, just barely restraining my brother from racing out to assure them that the flathead had nothing to do with it. After five minutes the body of a man with a filleting knife protruding from his back was dragged from the moist soil below the bucket. Homicide was called in, blue body bags appeared. A stretcher bore the victim away while we held our noses. It was all very distressing and we had a terrible time calming the fish down afterwards. Eventually Dad took the bucket down to the creek and tipped them in. They splashed their tails and swam away despondently, and when we returned to the house we found a policeman waiting to talk to us.

‘The victim had something written on his shirt,’ he explained. ‘Hard to make out. It was frayed and dirty, W.ST…HO.S. What is that, do you think? Some sort of code?’

‘Worsted hose?’ said my mother. ‘That’s stockings, isn’t it?’

‘Westinghouse!’ roared my father. ‘That’s the refrigerator repair man!’

No wonder he hadn’t come.

‘In that case,’ said the policeman. ‘What do you make of these? We found them stuffed roughly into his pocket.”

He produced a packet of photographs, all clearly labelled and dated. In chronological order, this is how they ran:

The One That Got Away.

The Elusive Four Pound Bream.

My First Tuna.

Fly Fishing In The Snowy Mountains.

Prawning At Merimbula.

Rock Oysters On The Hawkesbury River.

Sea Perch Five Miles Out The Heads.

The Wife Throwing Up When I Cut The Outboard.

How I Launched My Boat Using Newton’s First Law of Motion.

How The Men On The Jetty Got Such A Shock That Their Dentures Fell Out.

What A Good Laugh That Was!

But How I Broke The Back Seat Of The Car Doing It.

How The Wife Was Unimpressed.

All Right I’ll Do It The Old Way Next Time.

What Do You Mean There’s Not Going To Be a Next Time?

What’s Wrong With Fishing Anyway?

Stupid Wife. What Would She Know?

Hey Has Anyone Seen My Filleting Knife?

The policeman put the photographs away. There followed a respectful silence.

Then, ‘Poor bugger,’ said my father.

“I think I can understand,’ my mother responded.

My parents regarded each other wordlessly. It was so quiet we could hear the fish biting.

‘All right!’ said my father finally. ‘We’ll go to the beach tomorrow.’

‘And?’ replied my mother.

‘Bush walking the next day?’

She nodded.

‘And abseiling?’

‘And?’

‘Windsurfing, canoeing, bike riding. I’ll take the kids to the movies, and the museum and the zigzag railway. Then I’ll mow the lawn and clean the house, and do the shopping while you put your feet up.’

My mother clicked her teeth.

‘And no more fish for a week?’ Dad asked hopefully.

‘Ever,’ she replied.

Little did we know that the corpse itself had lived in Wandandian only two doors down and, on the night my father had removed the bucket from the dunny to fill it in the creek, the murderer had stuffed it into the gaping hole in his absence. Why hadn’t my father seen it when he replaced the bucket? Because there was no light in the dunny.

Rule number four: that tungsten shall prevent odours.

The refrigerator repairman’s wife (for she it was) was arrested and initially charged with murder though this was later dropped to manslaughter due to diminished responsibly. My mother questioned the wisdom of describing her as ‘diminished’ rather than ‘aggravated’ but, no doubt, the judge knew best. Being a man given to irony, he then handed down a suspended sentence that he obliged her to pass in sweeping the Sydney Fish Markets for a year, and during this time three of the local fishermen with loud mouths disappeared.

Final rule: that all fishermen shall mind the fish widow bearing a grudge.

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.’

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