Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland the capital of which was Trieste the Hapsburgian, the place was dangerous, uncontrollable, groups of Resistants held entire regions and mounted deadly operations against the Germans, like the one that cost Christian Wirth his life in May 1944, maybe they had sent them there for that very reason after all, so they’d die, so that the only real witnesses of the camps in Poland would disappear, witnesses of the mass graves where the badly burned bodies of hundreds of thousands of asphyxiated men women and children rested, Globocnik nicknamed Globus by Himmler was born in Trieste when it was still Austrian, the swine was detested by anyone with an ounce of sense, he was a liar, a thief, willing to do anything to increase his personal wealth which he had built by appropriating a share of the Jewish possessions intended for Berlin, because massacres brought in millions and millions of reichsmarks, might as well combine business with pleasure, thought Globus the ironic, just like Wirth the pretentious, only Stangl wasn’t cunning enough to fill his pockets, he was a little spineless Austrian cop who ended up mechanically carrying out unpleasant tasks, he drank a lot after Treblinka, he drank a lot, for him the Jews were wood, freight that had to be “dealt with,” he hated having to go by himself to see the bodies taken out of the gas chambers, he secretly detested Wirth the mustachioed brute, Stangl liked beautiful things, in Treblinka he had organized a Kommando of gardeners to strew the camp with ornamental plants, and had even installed a little zoo, with turtles a monkey and a yellow-and-white parrot, where he liked to spend hours on end in the tropical heat while 500 meters away, in the death camp, corpses were being roasted all the blessed day, in Treblinka Stangl wore a handsome immaculate white jacket, his virginal carapace, those were the days, in Udine he was afraid, especially after the attack on Wirth on the road to Fiume, he spent most of his time closeted in his office and only went out when he absolutely had to, mainly to go to Trieste, he was solitary, even though he sometimes drank and played cards with Arthur Walter and Franz Wagner, with whom he had traveled through the whole extermination chain, from euthanasia of the mentally ill in Germany to the shores of the Adriatic, where everything was going badly: the Slovenian, Croatian, and Italian partisans were at least as numerous as the few troops left to them after the collapse in the East and the Allied advance into Italy, the end was near, at what moment does he realize that the war is lost, maybe in June 1944, maybe before, when he arrives Stangl is at first posted to Trieste itself, as the head of a police transit camp called La Risiera di San Sabba, set up in a former factory for the processing of rice, where arrested partisans come through with Jews who were about to leave for Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, or Buchenwald depending on the transports, Globocnik’s diligence soon fills the place out, in the beginning of 1944 Wirth asks Erwin Lambert a gas and cremation technician to build an oven there to get rid of the bodies of the 5,000 people killed on site, usually with a club, their ashes are thrown, at night, into the nearby sea by the Ukrainian executioners whom the specialists in destruction have brought with them, in Trieste the White, port of Austria Italy Slovenia and Croatia, in 1992 with Vlaho and Andi on a binge we didn’t see anything of the city, bars bars icy wind rain fried fish a long seafront a whitecapped bay lined with hills a lighthouse a few rare girls in grey coats running to take refuge in empty taverns, we were staying near the train station in a pension run by Slovenians, Vlaho was sulking, he didn’t understand what the hell we were doing there, when we could easily have gone to his place in Split and party and raise hell, tourism didn’t justify everything, what’s more Italy was ruinously expensive, but it was a change from Zagreb with its deserted nightclubs and whores’ bars full of soldiers and mafiosi the sad ambiance of the capital of our country at war, in Trieste I forgot the fighting the dead comrades for a while, for Andi it was all the same, so long as there was something to drink, we stuffed ourselves on spaghetti with seafood washed down with white wine before going to nightclubs that were no doubt also very sad but which seemed to us the height of gaiety, because we were the only soldiers there in the midst of the students of Trieste, they had no idea where we could be coming from, despite our smell and our short hair, three drummer boys on the way back from war, three drummer boys, I remember dancing for a few minutes with a young Italian in her early twenties, she kept smiling at me, we danced shoulder to shoulder without exchanging a word, she had long hair pulled back, pleasant features, I thought if she wants me I won’t go back to Herzegovina, to Bosnia, I’ll stay in Trieste, if she wants me, Aphrodite was coming to save me, she danced with her wrists up to her forehead, her head bent forward, she wore a black cotton long-sleeved dress that contrasted with her fair skin and her blond bangs, at her neckline a brooch gleamed, a little ceramic red rose, at times she raised her eyes and looked at me smiling, the music was a Pearl Jam or Nirvana hit I forget, she was murmuring the words, her feet made her hips sway right and left rhythmically, once the song was over she smiled at me one last time before moving slowly away, with measured steps, Andi took me by the arm to pull me over to the bar, I hesitated, I watched the girl being swallowed up in the crowd and I went to drink vodka with Andrija and Vlaho, they were smiling too, we thumped each other on the shoulder, then I went to look for her, she had disappeared, in the muffled din of the nightclub that would soon be closing, I hadn’t understood, I couldn’t understand the shape Fate sometimes takes, I went to Bosnia, I signed up for a few more months of war, maybe she would have saved me, that unknown girl, who knows, when we went out we went to find some whores, to console me said Vlaho, maybe that girl would have saved all three of us, in Italy there were no brothels but shady bars where a few sad dumpy Albanian women were hanging around, I declined, Vlaho our champion nothing could diminish his libido since his cold got better disappeared into a back room with one of them, we kept drinking, drinking still and always as if the world were turning liquid, the whole world, and we went back to Herzegovina — forty years earlier the members of the Einsatz R. drank everything they could in Trieste, the Wirths, the Stangls, the Wagners got drunk unremittingly while waiting for death or defeat, the tired Ukrainians forgot themselves in the rage of torture and the whip, scattered between Udine, Fiume, and Trieste the old companions in massacre saw little of each other, and when they did meet they didn’t talk about Poland, about Treblinka or Sobibór, in the meantime Stangl had gone back to his place in Austria, to see his wife and children, he missed them, he was anxious for the war to be over, to go back to the comfort of his hearth, I wonder if he intuited that the dead of Treblinka and Sobibór would prevent him from ever returning to his home, probably not, all those guys lost on the shores of the Adriatic must have been dreaming of an improbable victory of the Reich, or clinging to the illusion that they had hidden their crimes well enough, which weren’t even crimes, in any case, for Stangl it wasn’t a crime since the Reich had excluded these bodies from humankind, wood, they were wood that was suitable for burning, a mistake of nature to be rectified, a prolific species to be eradicated and even if the stench was extremely unpleasant it was impossible to recognize oneself in these imploring victims dripping from the filthy cattlecars, euthanasia with carbon monoxide was painless after all