they were well treated, Globocnik had dealt with Poland the way you attack a field of potatoes that had been invaded by beetles or blight, Wirth and Stangl had carried out their duty, with varying degrees of pleasure and enthusiasm, and it was very hard to bear, this responsibility, especially when they had to reopen the mass graves that the gases of decomposition and putrid fluids made ripple like the sea, what a weight all that was, take out all those compressed liquefied bodies pierced with worms burn them on big grates built from railroad tracks, Wirth the ingenious had even recycled a stone-crushing machine to get rid of the bones that didn’t burn, the most fertile land in Poland said Wirth the humorist, we’re leaving here the most fertile land in Poland: upon leaving, once the camp was destroyed, to mislead the curious they had set up a little farm for a couple of Ukrainians, where the land was in fact so fertile that the beets and cabbages grew huge, the wheat sprang up before their eyes, the bread the woman kneaded for her husband required almost no leavening, the ash and fir trees grew in record time, carrying in their nascent trunks their leaves and needles the sap of dead Jews, their substance and memory up to the sky, there is nothing to see in Treblinka, nothing to see in Sobibór, aside from immense trees sagging beneath the snow in silence, they rustle, that’s all you hear there, a movement of branches and the crackle of footsteps on the ground, nothing more, a doe, a fox, a bird, the great cold of the plains, the flowing River Bug, the terminus of absence, nothing — in Trieste the Einsatz R. so well-trained went on with its labors, its war effort, against the Slav partisans and dissembling Jews, Globus began by transforming the great synagogue devastated in 1942 into a warehouse for despoiled possessions and he got down to work, roundup after roundup the little community of Trieste was sent to Auschwitz or Dachau passing through the San Sabba camp, farewell Trieste gate to Jerusalem departure-point for ships from Lloyd’s that were taking the first emigrants to Palestine, Trieste meeting-place of the Ashkenazi of the North and the Sephardim of the South, farewell, it didn’t matter that the agents of Aktion Reinhardt were tired or that they were heavy drinkers, they all knew their job, counting rounding up misleading expediting exterminating, in the beginning of 1944 the method was perfected and who better than Wirth or Stangl knew what was waiting for the Jews at the end of the journey, there is a little bit of Trieste, of Corfu, of Athens, of Salonika, of Rhodes in the land of Poland, bluish ashes, Rolf the Gentle told me all this in Trieste, Rolf the Austrio-Italian is neither Jewish nor Slavic, Rolf Cavriani von Eppan is a cousin of the Hapsburg-Lorraines and the Princes of Thurn und Taxis inventors of the postal services, born in Trieste during the war, a little mustachioed gentleman last descendant of a ducal family that used to own half of Bohemia and Galicia, Rolf knew why I had come to see him and he showed me around the city, Trieste had changed quite a bit since 1992, as I remembered it there hadn’t been so many pedestrian malls the buildings weren’t so white the people not so elegant, I wondered if I was going to see the girl from the nightclub, the one who had let me go to Bosnia, just as Stéphanie had let me go to Trieste, let me fill my suitcase and without realizing it set me off to Rome and the end of the world, Rolf Cavriani had agreed to meet me in a beautiful café decorated with mosaics and wood moldings a stone’s throw away from the synagogue, Rolf is the owner of an international banking compensation company that launders the money of thousands of more or less legal enterprises by making it pass through tax havens as opaque as they are exotic, he owns a castle outside of Salzburg a manor house in Carinthia and a magnificent villa perched above Trieste, where he rarely goes, nostalgic for a time when the Empire held the region, when Joyce the drunk Berlitz professor haunted the brothels and taverns of the old city, destroying his liver: in July 1914, a few days after the shots fired by Gavrilo Princip the tubercular from Sarajevo Joyce is on the main quay of Trieste in the middle of the crowd, a vessel belonging to the Austrian navy has just berthed, the bells are sounding the alarm, the whole city is there to see the remains of Franz Ferdinand and the beautiful Sophie solemnly brought to land in a catafalque covered with the flag with the two crowns then conveyed to the train station, where a special railway car will carry them to their tomb in the Artstetten Castle, do Joyce and his very young wife understand that these imperial corpses and the Serbian bullets signify the end of the city they know, and that soon the First World War will send them to the North, to boring Switzerland, and will bring an end to a stay of almost ten years in the Hapsburg port: when he returns the man with the little hat and the veiled eyes will not find the city he knew, Italianized, cut off from the Slavs, the Austrians, its immense port empty of all activity, in competition with Venice La Serenissima hidden in the shadows, farewell Trieste, Joyce will go to Paris — on July 3, 1914 on the main quay his companion Nora takes him by the arm, impressed by the royal coffins, she says to him how sad, they say she was beautiful, James does not reply, Sophie’s beauty doesn’t matter much to him, not many things matter to him, in any case, that very night he’ll have forgotten everything, in one of the bars of Trieste the tolerant where he will get drunk, to the lugubrious sound of the foghorns of the mortuary boat that is sounding its departure, without his realizing it, one of the unsuspected consequences of the pistol shot of Gavrilo Princip the TB victim, an assassination in Sarajevo sends Joyce to Paris, Joyce said when Finnegans Wake was published that at night nothing was clear, Joyce such a wise professor during the day became a lustful drunkard by night, obscure to himself, obsessed with money, with a God he didn’t want, with shameful urges, for very young girls that looked like his own daughter, fragile and alienated like Yvan Deroy the mad, Joyce wanted to write a piece of shadow, 600 pages of a dream of all dreams, all languages all shifts all texts all ghosts all desires and the book had become living dying sparkling like a star whose light arrives long after death and this matter was decomposing in the reader’s hands, unintelligible dust because Joyce did not dare to confess his secret desires, the violence that inhabited him and his guilty love for his own daughter, he was forced to hide it in writing, poor little man with the perforated ulcers and sick eyes, Joyce had been happy in Trieste, in the brothels of the old city, the brothels and hangouts that have disappeared, today the Irishman from the continent is a tourist attraction there like any other, like Italo Svevo or Umberto Saba, statues are erected to them in the streets they frequented, statues so alive that you want to take your hat off to them, Rolf Cavriani took off his hat to Joyce to Svevo to Saba whenever he passed them thus petrified by Medusa the decapitated Gorgon, at a bend in the street, between two stores, in front of the municipal library, and I don’t know if these bronzes are life-size but they all come up to your shoulder, headgear included, which made Rolf say laughing that to be famous in Trieste you had to be little, that today’s inhabitants couldn’t bear grandeur, their past and foreign grandeur, and so they belittled great men in the secret aim of surpassing them by a few centimeters, the way a guy with an inferiority complex uses inserts, Cavriani von Eppan had his complexes too, much more tragic ones, he had never used his title of duke, and that ate away at him, for not only was this duchy about to disappear with him but even while he was alive he didn’t dare make use of it, which earned him both the ire of his ancestors from beyond and a great shame in this laughable life, Rolf Cavriani was born in his great villa in Opicina, on top of Trieste, a stone’s throw from the old road to Vienna, in 1941, his father died of illness not long after his birth, during the defeat his mother had carried the very young Rolf to holy Austria, just before the debacle, before Tito’s supporters occupied the region for a while and took savage reprisals on the few soldiers and civilians they could find here and there, then the family had returned a few years later, my mother was a very capable woman, said Rolf, she was wealthy, and this wealth allowed her to turn her nose up at the new European borders, as she had done in 1918, she continued, like my grandparents before her, to spend six months every year in Trieste, spring and fall, summer in cool Carinthia and winter at the theaters and operas in Vienna, for my mother the nation or party in power was absolutely immaterial, he said, she had excellent relations with everyone, the Italian royalty, the fascists and even the Nazis, God knows though that they hated nobility, which didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid, that great lady, especially at the fall of Mussolini in the chaos of autumn 1943 when the communists had begun to massacre the fascists right and left and throw them into bottomless