In 1946 Ada comes back to Gorizia with Paula and Orestes from Milan, and Florian and Nora go off to Salò, where old Tedeschi and his second wife Rosa have come through the war essentially unscathed. They burn their Fascist Party membership booklets, although they needn’t have; no-one asks them for anything.
After the war there are no heroes, the dead are forgotten immediately, pipes up Jean Giono. The widows of heroes marry living men, because these men are alive and because being alive is a greater virtue than being a dead hero. After a war, says Giono, there are no heroes, there are only the maimed, the crippled, the disfigured, from whom women avert their eyes, he says. When a war ends, everyone forgets the war, even those who fought in it. And so it should be, says Giono. Because war is pointless, and there should be no devotion for those who have dedicated themselves to the pointless, he says.
Listen, Romain Rolland says, war is not over, nothing is over; humankind is in fetters.
Old Paolo Tedeschi lives in a neo-Baroque villa on the shore of Lake Garda, but he is not at peace. The words Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name pound in his head throughout the war; they press against his chest. When events reach fever pitch, when Paolo Tedeschi feels they may reach fever pitch, he slips into hospital where his friend Dr Armando Bosi sets him up in the intensive-care unit. There, in intensive care, Paolo Tedeschi gets vitamins intravenously, a lovely view of the hospital garden and a sense of the seasons passing. When the birds chirp Paolo Tedeschi listens to the birdsong. When rain falls he listens to the patter and it lulls him to sleep. Then he is given a laxative and says, Ah, this, too, will end. Paolo’s stays in the hospital are brief and well rehearsed. After them, he goes home heartened and stronger. Paolo’s sons Sergio and Walter take their mother’s surname, Brana (after the war they take back their father’s, Tedeschi). In 1944 they report to the Italian branch of the German Army and manage mini-submarines, which attack the Allied forces. Paolo’s youngest son Ugo, otherwise a flautist, crosses over into neutral Switzerland before September 1943 to the little town of Untersiggenthal in the Aargau canton, and entertains the beer drinkers on a second-hand accordion in a local tavern. In the mid-1950s he sends his parents a postcard from the Gripsholm translatlantic Swedish-American ocean liner, writing that he is sailing on the Gothenburg-New York line, playing in the ship’s orchestra. In 1954 the Gripsholm is rechristened the Berlin, but Ugo no longer writes. Catholicized Jew Paolo Tedeschi dies in 1948, and his second wife, Rosa Brana, a Catholic born and bred, dies a year later. Paolo’s eldest son Florian remarries in 1963. Walter and Sergio find work in a nearby liqueur factory. Nora starts her own family.
As if there had never been a war.
Years follow in which deaths are what is remembered, some gentle and quiet, anticipated, peacetime deaths, some violent and maybe unjust. Haya attends the funerals of her closest family as if going off to shallow confessions from which she lugs back to Gorizia her bundles of deaf nausea and second-hand incredulity. Paula dies of cancer in Trieste in 1963; Florian, on the shore of Lake Garda in 1972. After Orestes graduates from secondary school in 1952 he abandons Gorizia. All of you are full of shit! he shouts, and as a member of the Red Brigades he dies in a Roman prison on 17 March, 1978, of a heart attack a day after he takes part in the assassination of Aldo Moro; while Nora, as a happy housewife, closes her eyes with God’s blessing in Brescia in 1990.
Ada is the first to go.
Ada drinks more in Gorizia. She drinks so much, especially in the afternoons, that she can no longer manoeuvre herself downstairs. She falls. She has cuts all over, especially on her face. Later they treat her at the hospital, stitch her up. And so the years pass. Ada’s face is scribbled with scars and the visible traces of surgical sutures, the knots tied to close her open wounds. Ada looks more and more like a patch, a rag, totally unusable. She often cries for no reason. Her words jumble into long, snotty, garbled sequences, which she swipes at with the back of her hand, but fails. She finds it hard to bring the fork to her mouth. Her food dribbles on to her bosom. Her clothing is covered in greasy stains. She is soiled and unkempt, the situation, in general, is serious.
So they commit Ada to the psychiatric ward of Gorizia hospital, where she decants absinthe, grappa, vodka or any alcoholic beverage she can lay her hands on, into perfume flasks, which, with great effort and cunning, she tucks into toilet cisterns, pillow cases, other people’s bags, through which she rummages frantically at night, barefoot and urine-soaked.
At this point, in 1953, Haya begins to study mathematics in Trieste.
Ada gets to know Umberto Saba at the hospital and they have long conversations, all sorts of conversations, while both of them stand, elbows on the sill, at a tall window with iron bars and sniff the fresh Gorizia air. Later, in 1961, when prominent psychiatrist Franco Basaglia comes to Gorizia, the iron bars are removed, the front door is left unlocked, the patients stroll around the gardens, some slowly as if dreaming, some spry, on their way home. Ada wears two sprigs of white oleander behind her ear and sings, then, when Basaglia comes to the hospital, as he indulges her little alcoholic binges. But by the time Basaglia gets there, Saba is gone. Saba dies in 1957, Ada dies five years later.
It’s nice here, Ada tells Haya when she comes to visit. Sad people live here. Jews, too. Umberto speaks of Trieste, where there is also plenty of sorrow, and
next to the hill there’s a graveyard
in ruins, which funerals pass
and where no-one’s been buried for as long
as I can remember
says Umberto,
my ancestors lie here,
he says, and he is a Jew, too, Ada tells her.
Umberto says, Trieste is a pungent and melancholy city, the strangest city, Umberto says, a city of boyish adolescence and rude charm, so he says, says Ada, then he takes me for a stroll, and we amble around Trieste, this isn’t the Trieste we lived in when Florian was serving coffee at the Piazza Unità, this Trieste is serenely innocent, so Umberto says, says Ada, it is a lovely world, Umberto says, and he paints that world for me, he paints me suppressed longing and aching love, so he says, I’ll paint you unspoken longing and aching love and exhausted words fiore-amore in that murky madness, Umberto says, in that madness in which vainly discordant voices reverberate, he says, this is a lovely Trieste, not the Trieste we fled, Ada says.
Where I dreamed of patent-leather shoes, and never got them, Haya jumps in, but Ada doesn’t hear, Ada is ambling around Trieste with Umberto, and Haya is skipping after her.
There, Ada says, we go off to the Ponterosso, Umberto and I, and we look at the birds, because Umberto likes birds, Ada says, and now I like birds too, though the stuffed birds Grandfather Angelo had were frightening, their dead glassy eyes, Ada says, and he takes me, Umberto, to Via Riborgo or Via Pondares, I forget, to the house where he was born, in what was the Jewish ghetto then, but those houses are gone now, the house I was born in is gone, Ada says, today that’s an altogether different house — houses are disappearing, Haya, people, too, now I see — and we make the rounds of the trattorias Umberto remembers, and we have a grappa at the Alla Bella Isoletta, I am a little island, too, Haya, a barren little island, left behind, but it wasn’t always like that, no. Then we go to where Carolina was born, she was Umberto’s wife, and Umberto talks about her a lot, and he talks a lot about Lina — Linuccia — he uses pet names for her, I never used pet names for you, Haya. We were always in a hurry. We had no time for tenderness. I don’t know how that happened, that we were left without time. What would I have called you? Haya, Hayuccia, Hayichen? asks Ada and starts to sob, then through the tears, she says, You could have brought me another couple of bottles. These bottles are so small. They are very little, these bottles you bring me. And Umberto ran away, you know, just like we did, he ran away from fascism, so he tells me,