The underground press printed illegally by the partisans is not, of course, delivered to Haya’s tobacco shop, so as far as Haya is concerned that sort of press, anti-fascist, focused on national liberation, in Slovenian, Croatian and Italian, does not exist. Had she by chance stumbled upon papers such as those, she would have learned that the German Army was suffering losses, that the German generals were gradually losing their patience, and becoming more strict and brutal. She would have learned all sorts of things. She would have read about horrors, and her civilian life might have stepped out of the ordinary, or maybe not. In any case, for Haya the only newspapers are the official press, the papers read by the German soldiers and the Italian soldiers, and the other honest folk who don’t ask about things that aren’t their business. Nevertheless, throughout the Adriatisches Küstenland, all through the war, newspapers circulate, song books, dictionaries, children’s picture books, poetry and prose, cranked out on Cyclostyle machines in secret, in homes, warehouses, bakeries, carpentry workshops, are distributed despite the life-threatening danger to all those who know of them and want to know. Slovenski Poročevalec, Zakaj je Propadala Jugoslavija, Morje, Snežnik, Ljudska Pravica, Mladi Puntar, Mladina, Mladi Rod, Il Nostro Avvenire, Bollettino, Naša žena, Il Lavoratore, Otroške Pesmi, a whole library of another reality that always exists, everywhere, at every age and time.
Sometimes there is no running water in town, and sometimes the electricity goes out, but good Lord, things like that happen in peacetime, too. Haya’s Aunt Letizia says that in October the previous year (in 1943, right?) she happened to be near the Casa di Cura Villa San Giusto and she saw the Germans firing at the train station, for no particular reason, as if they were having a bit of a lark, and she saw the large clock topple off the front of the building, and time simply stood still, and time dies anyway during a war, she says. The heart of time beats in secret, she says. Time isn’t going anywhere, she says, so they don’t need that clock up on the railway station building anyway. She says that she kept walking along the Corso and happened upon two Italian armoured vehicles that were shooting left and right, like crazy, Letizia says, though there was practically no-one out on the street, only me with my five fresh eggs, she says, and she saw another woman, over there by the Parco della Rimembranza, and how the woman did not have time to run into the nearest entranceway, because they shot her. Letizia’s husband Parigi Puhaz says that on 22 September (he remembers exactly when) a shell hit the Braunizer house on Piazza Vittoria, and the next day one hit the Vittoria cinema. Four people were wounded, he remembers that precisely. Four. Then he says, You, Haya, you don’t have to see every single show. After that short conversation Haya’s uncle Parigi Puhaz goes to Vienna, where he dies in a flower shop in 1945, no-one ever finds out how. Florian listens to these and many of the other little stories that find their way into the dining room of the Baar family home, where the Puhaz family and the Tedeschi family are now living. He listens to these stories, these tales, fabrications which take a seat, uninvited, at their table, while they eat their rationed meals, more often than not in silence.
Haya’s brother Orestes, who turns ten in 1944, goes out with his pals and collects bits of shrapnel on the streets and in the parks, and already has an enviable collection of metal fragments, the exemplars of which he trades and hoards on a shelf in the kitchen in the large apothecary jar, the same jar in which Marisa used to keep her flour, but this shrapnel has nothing to do with what is real, these are just children’s games, reason the members of the household.
In February 1944 Haya goes to see Mrs Donati, who sells “exclusive” caps and hats, cappelli di lusso, at Grosso Valtz & Co., her fashion salon at Via Garibaldi 5, because Haya would like to replace her black knitted cap with a little blue hat, or maybe even a red one. There she runs into two ladies who are whispering while she tries on the hats in front of a mirror, and she overhears what they are saying, she can’t help it. The older woman says that Rina Luzzatto, a teacher, has been forced, meaning prematurely, into retirement, which immediately reminds Haya of her school in Naples, but heavens, after all the times are grim, and she hears how maestra Luzzatto is in un stato deplorevolissimo, because nearly all the Jews of Gorizia, or so says maestra Luzzatto, including her brother and some others from nearby towns, are arrested at first, because there are suspicions they are in league with the partisans, and then, on that terrible night of 23 November, 1943, they are thrown into cattle wagons headed for Auschwitz.
In February 1944 Haya has no idea about the terrible night of 23 November, 1943, because at that point she was not in Gorizia. Afterwards, while the war goes on, Gorizia shrinks, because of nights like that, turns into a tiny ball wrapped in a membrane of silence, and then oblivion settles over it like sodden snow.
But Haya remembers 18 March, 1944.
What does she remember?
It is a Saturday. The snow is melting. Spring is on its way. She goes to the Ospedale Civile for a check-up with Dr Boschetti, who says, Everything is fine. Come back in a month. Airplanes buzz over Gorizia at about eleven o’clock. At 11.30 the bombs begin to fall. Haya huddles under the counter in her tobacco shop.
At dinner Florian says, At least one hundred and fifty people were killed.
Orestes says, Enzo blew up into thin air.
Ada asks, Enzo who?
Enzo, my eight-year-old pal, says Orestes.
Enzo Vida. The son of that Gigette, daughter of Luigi Spanghero, Letizia says.
He is in the partisans, Florian says.
Then Orestes shouts, Today I collected a whole pile of nifty shrapnel!
Haya says nothing.
This is the day.
Yes, Gorizia lives a parallel life, parallel lives, fractured, schizoid, from the inside.
4
In 1991 Haya finds a book, Un Altro Mare by Claudio Magris, in her postbox, sent to her by Roberto Piazza, a former student of hers. Roberto Piazza writes that he wouldn’t be surprised if she, Professor Tedeschi, has no memory of him, because he was an average student, in fact a poor mathematician, but that doesn’t worry him at all. He, on the other hand, remembers his teacher, whom he hasn’t thought of for years, probably because he was busy with other things that had nothing to do with mathematics. All the same, Roberto Piazza says, when he read the book he is sending her, his former maths teacher Haya Tedeschi, when he read the slender but powerful volume he is giving her, his former teacher, as a gift, through the mail, like this, it hit him that in all the five years she taught them (from 1971 to 1976, right?), she, their teacher Haya Tedeschi, never once spoke of the war, or of the people who disappeared in town during the war, World War Two, you know? writes Roberto Piazza. Also, he writes, he is surprised that she, their maths teacher, never spoke to them, her students, the class of 1971–76, of Renato Caccioppoli, the famous mathematician, especially since word got around school that she, Haya Tedeschi, attended the gymnasium in Naples at roughly the same time Caccioppoli was living there, in Naples, and that he was an anti-fascist, isn’t that so? And the fascists arrested him and he had to hide out in an insane asylum, writes Roberto Piazza, but since she, their teacher was just an ordinary schoolgirl at the time, who maybe decided to become a mathematician later, you know, because of awkward things going on in her life, perhaps, you know, maybe it isn’t so strange that she doesn’t seem to have known anything about Professor Caccioppoli. He, writes Roberto Piazza, lives in Rome now where he works in graphics, in a manner of speaking — he is a graphic designer, and he is now working on the layout of a book about Gorizia’s famous people, and so he came across names which none of his teachers at the Dante Alighieri Gymnasium had ever mentioned during his five years there from 1971 to 1976, you know, while he, Roberto Piazza, was going to the Gymnasium more or less every day, and, writes Roberto Piazza, he finds this very surprising. For instance, writes Roberto Piazza, only when he read the book he is sending her, her, his maths teacher, only when he read A Different Sea, Un Altro Mare, did he understand that there are threads interwoven in Gorizia, the beginnings of which are impossible to divine, threads that can no longer be disentangled, in whose snarl lies an entire cocooned history.