Most of those who served them in the shops—the jewellers, the glovemakers, the shoemakers, the haberdasher—were so astounded to see an Italian gentleman accompanied by a Slovene village girl (she was like a carthorse, they said afterwards) that they explained everything by this unusual phenomenon. But one or two may have remained more puzzled. What was the relationship between this couple? They were polite to one another but absolutely formal. They never spoke except when the outside situation demanded it. They looked at each other without rancour but equally without affection. Neither pretended to the other. There was not a trace of the theatricality that goes with prostitution. She was not a tart. Yet neither was she his wife or mistress: there was no intimacy beween them. Then why, with such care and extravagance, was he buying her these presents? Why did she give no sign of gratitude? Or, alternatively, why did she show no disappointment? At times she looked nonplussed. But most of the while she did what was required patiently and with a certain slow natural grace. Two solutions occurred to the puzzled shopkeepers. Either she was simple-minded and the Italian was in some mysterious way taking advantage of her; or else he, the Italian, was mad and she was a servant humouring him.
Nuša both hoped and dreaded that she would soon see her brother. She wanted to know what his latest plans were and she thought she might find a way of hinting that she could procure him a passport. At the same time she feared he might have heard that she was not going to the factory and would insist on her telling him what she was doing.
Bojan came to her room late on the Friday afternoon of the first week. Her fears proved unnecessary. He was so distracted by the political situation and the imminence of war that he asked her nothing about herself and assumed she was still working as before.
You must get used to eating less, he said to her abruptly, if you are a little thinner it won’t matter.
I never eat so much in the summer, she said.
The Empire will be defeated, that is certain, it cannot survive. When it topples and breaks up, all the cities will be very short of food and supplies.
When are you going to France?
I haven’t got everything I need yet. We have to make a whole organization in exile.
Will it be before next week?
I cannot tell you, but I will come to say goodbye before I go, I promise.
If you wait one week I will be able to help you. It will make it safer for you.
What do you mean?
Wait and see.
He sighed and looked out of the small window down the hill on to the docks where a cargo ship was being unloaded. The men looked as small as tin-tacks and the horses with their draycarts on the quay looked no larger than beetles.
She wanted to tell him more, not about her plan, but about her good will. Do you remember on the Sunday before last scolding me in the garden—
When I found you with that unsavoury Casanova? Yes, I remember. And, you see, that is what we fear, now more than ever, the Italians will take over the city and we shall exchange one tyranny for another. And the second tyranny will be worse than the first because between the two there will have been the lost chance of freedom. The Italians will be worse, worse even than the Austrians.
What you spoke to me about then showed me something, she said.
He continued to stare out of the window. The apparent size of the men unloading the ship intensified his pessimism. If you think, he said, of the Italy Mazzini dreamed of, if you think of Garibaldi, and you look at what Italy has become—
In Paris you will see your friend. She knew no other way to reassure him.
Yes, I will see Gacinovič. My life is like a swan flying through the fog towards a light that is very distant but irresistible. Gacinovič wrote that.
Nuša put her arm round her brother’s back and her chin on his shoulder. Their two heads close together in the small window, they looked down towards the ship whose hatches were open. Slowly, once, he rubbed his cheek against hers. It was a gesture of tenderness such as normally he would never have allowed himself, but he was overcome by an awareness of how closely their childhood had bound them together. Each of them sensed that the image of the distant light in the fog had profoundly affected the other. To neither was the light a precise symbol or hope. It was not something they could discuss together. But to measure how far away it was, both would begin measuring from the time when he first taught her to read.
The final fitting for the dress was on the Tuesday of the second week. In three days Nuša would be paid her wage; she was still earning the passport. She gazed at the extraordinary dress she was wearing in front of the hinged mirrors.
The skirt was made of black silk. Embroidered upon it, in the Indian style, were eight or nine red peonies, a few silver-green rose-leaves and three or four mysterious sprigs with blue fruit hanging from them like sloes. Each rose-leaf was almost the size of one of her hands. The corsage was of muslin, its colour scarcely different from that of her skin. The sleeves were short and wide, bordered with pearls. She stared at her own shoulders and bosom, rounded and solid through the mist of the muslin, and she thought: if this is the dress he has chosen for me, I will be safe at the ball, in this he will not dare to touch me. And then she thought: on Friday morning I will go to where Bojan lodges still wearing this dress and I will wake him up and give him my wage, I will give him the passport which will allow him to go. And then again she thought: it will attract too much attention like that, I must take the dress off before I go to see Bojan.
She did her best not to think about going back to work at the factory after Bojan had gone. When she was working on the softening machine she had to dampen the streaks of jute by pouring an emulsion of whale oil and water on them. Each time the top rollers of the machine pitched down on to the sodden streaks to mangle them against the fixed bottom rollers, her face was splattered with the emulsion. Some of the girls wore a tarpaulin. She had tried, but she found it too constricting. When she was carrying the streaks in her arms from the softening machine to the barrows, they made her blouse wet. At first she thought she would always smell of whale oil. If she could find other work she would never go back to the jute factory.
The modiste was adjusting the very high red silk belt. Inadvertently the old woman’s knuckles prodded the young woman’s breasts. Nuša felt the huge embroidered flowers with the palms of her hands. The skirt was tight over her hips. Sometimes when she was feeding the streaks on to the delivery cloth of the softening machine the rollers tugged at the streak she was still holding and the sharp tresses caught on her nails or between her fingers. Her present employer had bought a cream like milk for her hands and every day he asked her to hold them out to him and he gravely examined them to see whether they were softer.
The modiste shifted her attention from the belt to the side seams of the skirt. A fraction taken in here, she said to one of her assistants who wore a pincushion on her wrist like a thistle. Nuša could feel hands moving lightly down the outsides of her thighs. Someone else was altering the fastenings at her back. These light touches of fingers she could not see—for she knew she should not move even her head—had a slightly hypnotizing effect.