Michael Pearce: A Dead Man In Trieste

‘Nor at lunchtime,’ he said. ‘How about an aperitif?’

Now that he was speaking Italian he seemed a different man.

‘I’m sorry I spoke in German,’ Seymour said. ‘I was going by the name.’

‘It is German,’ Kornbluth said. ‘Or, rather, Austrian. But that was a long time ago. My family have been here for, well, over a hundred years. Trieste born and bred, that’s what I am.’

‘And so you grew up speaking Italian?’

‘Not Italian,’ corrected Kornbluth. ‘Triestino.’

‘Ah!’ said Seymour. ‘That’s it! I’d been wondering why it was different.’

‘And the difference is important,’ said Kornbluth. He looked at Seymour curiously. ‘You can hear it? You speak Italian very well.’

‘But not Triestino,’ said Seymour.

Kornbluth clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But after a slivowicz or two, you will.’ He held the door open. ‘We’ll go down to the old city,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you something about Trieste. And about Signor Lomax.’

The Canal Grande ran back from the bay in a long three-hundred-yard spur right into the heart of the city. At the end was a domed church with a classical portico. Between the Ionic columns girls were sitting darning socks and cutting out material for cloaks. Both sides of the canal were lined with working sailing boats from which singleted crewmen were unloading sacks on to the quay. Occasionally the sacks were torn and Seymour could see what they contained: olives, pistachio nuts, figs, muscatel raisins. Whenever the contents spilled out on to the quay they were immediately seized on by young girls who scooped them up and put them in the pocket made by lifting up the front of their dress.

As well as sacks, there were barrels, either of wine or of olive oil. There were also barrels, not sacks, of coffee beans. Seymour had seen the barrels standing outside shops. Sometimes they were open and then the pungent smell spread out across the street.

The harbour was framed by tall neo-classical buildings which rose up on each side. Kornbluth took him to a little cafe at the foot of one of these where the tables spread out across the quay right to the edge of the water. From where they sat they could look down into a boat piled high with watermelons. The men had stopped half-way through unloading and on the quay above was a similar stack. The ripe, almost over-ripe, smell of the melons hung over the tables.

Kornbluth looked around him with satisfaction.

‘Do you know what I see here?’ he said.

‘Boats?’ hazarded Seymour.

‘Work!’ said Kornbluth. ‘The work that has made Trieste what it is. I like to see people working. I don’t mean shoving bits of paper around. I mean really putting your back into it. Now you don’t always see that down in the new docks where the large ships are. It’s all cranes and things. But you do see it here. And what I like about it is that it’s real. Real people handling real things, olives and nuts and so forth. Watermelons,’ he said, looking down into the boat. ‘Not fancy people pushing bits of paper around. Ah, I know that’s progress, that’s what it’s got to be when you’re a big port, as Trieste is these days, the seventh busiest in the world, so they say. But it all started here, right here, in what was the old port, with people working their asses off.’

He sipped his slivowicz.

‘And that’s what I don’t like about layabouts. Sitting there drinking what other people’s sweat has earned.

‘Sweat was what built Trieste. That, and one other thing: order. Oh, I know what you think: he’s a bloody policeman and so he goes on about order. But just think what Trieste is. It’s Austrians and Albanians and Italians and Croats and Slovenians — Slovenia is only five miles away, you know — and Greeks and Turks and Montenegrins and Christ knows what. Now, how are all these buggers going to live together and work together if you don’t have order? They’d be at each other’s throats in half a minute.

‘So, order and sweat. That’s made Trieste what is it. Now I love Trieste and I like it as it is. And I don’t want to see it go. But go it would if some of these bastards with their half-baked ideas had their way.’

‘Go?’ said Seymour.

‘That’s what they want. Some of them.’

‘Go? How can it go?’

‘Like Venice. Venice was part of the Austrian Empire fifty years ago. And now it’s part of Italy.’

‘Well, Venice is part of Italy. Look at the geography.’

‘So is Trieste, in some people’s view of geography. The geography of those layabouts, for instance.’

‘The ones Lomax was with?’

‘That’s right. What I’ve got against them is not just that they’re layabouts but that they want to take my city from me.’

He looked at Seymour.

‘And that’s the sort of people your Consul spent his time with,’ he said. The sort of people he had for his friends!’

After they had parted, Seymour walked slowly back to the Consulate. It was getting towards noon and the heat lay heavily on the streets. Shops were closing for lunch and siesta and even when they were open there didn’t seem many signs of activity. A few latecomers were still pushing through the bead curtains of the doors of the bread shops but the windows were empty. Most of the day’s baking had gone. In some of the dark side streets there were sounds from the tavernas but for the most part the city had gone quiet.

When he got to the Consulate he half expected to find it closed but the clerk, Koskash, was still inside, a bread roll and an orange on the desk beside him. No, he said, he didn’t go home for lunch; and he wouldn’t have done that anyway, in the circumstances and knowing that Seymour was here.

He was a thin, grey-haired, anxious-looking man. When Seymour had gone in that morning he had got to his feet and bowed in the Continental fashion. There was an air of formal, old-fashioned politeness about him. Like almost everyone Seymour had met, he seemed to speak several languages, switching easily from Italian to English to German. Going by his name, his home language was none of these.

It had been a distressing, sad time, he said. He and Signor Lomax had worked closely together. He had developed a great esteem for the Signor, had always found him very simpatico . It had been a great shock when -

Signor Seymour would find everything in order, though. There was, truthfully, not a lot of business coming into the office at the moment and what there was was all routine. He, Koskash, could handle it. Indeed, he normally did handle it. Signor Lomax left most things to him, concentrating on the occasional necessary negotiations that were the usual feature of a port consul’s job. He would drop in at the Consulate every morning to see how things were going and to check on what had to be done, but after that would go on down to the piazza.

Down to the piazza? Well, that was where he liked to spend the day. He was, the clerk explained, very much an ‘al fresco’ consul.

Fresh air consul? What was that?

The clerk hesitated.

Well, it was just that he liked to spend the day there. Usually in the Caffe degli Specchi, the Cafe of Mirrors. Always in the same place, at the same table.

With the same people?

Was it imagination or did Koskash shift uneasily?

Usually with the same people, yes. The artists.

Artists?

Signor Lomax was interested in art. Surely Signor Seymour had noticed the paintings in his room?

Signor Seymour had not, but he went to take a look now. How had he missed them when Koskash had shown him into the room that morning? The walls were a blaze of colour. On second thoughts he could see how he had missed them. He had looked away. They were such a blaze of colour that they quite hurt the eye. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much else. They weren’t of anything and there didn’t seem to be any pattern or shape to them.