John Berger - G.

He paused, looked from one to the other and nodded.

On 20 May, that, to be precise, is four days after the term of your wager runs out, a wager incidentally, Marika, which I absolutely refuse to accept, on Thursday 20 May there is the charity ball at the Stadttheater. It is for the Red Cross, a cause which we would all find worth supporting. You and I (he raised his glass to his wife) will be attending it, always provided that your foot has mended by then. And I hope that our Red Cross will benefit now from the sale of two extra tickets. They cost two hundred and fifty crowns each. Please come (he raised his glass to G.) to the ball and bring, for the sake of propriety, a suitable companion with you. At the ball you will be free to dance with my wife as many dances as she sees fit to grant you. At the end of the evening I am leaving to catch the night train to Vienna. I return here on the Saturday. I repeat that you can count, during those twenty-four hours, on my tact. (Again G. was reminded of Dr Donato who said: I am persuaded that we can and must count upon you.) As for the Internat , which may be crossing your mind, I do not think it’s going to arise. If I was going to place a bet on the date of the outbreak of hostilities, which I have absolutely no intention of doing, it would not be before the twenty-fifth of this month. I think I am likely to be right. You will therefore have plenty of time to return to Livorno before there is any risk of internment.

Von Hartmann had never before made such a suggestion. But Marika was not surprised. A new legend had begun: she was married to a man who publicly proposed that she should take a lover. She did not fail to notice that he assumed that the story would be a short one because war would break out and she would be separated from her lover. But her husband was a German at heart and was always convinced that everything ended as it began. The end was by no means certain. Before war broke out she might go to Verona with her lover; she might not return to her husband before the war was over. They might all be dead within a week. She would accept to die with the man who put his hand over her mouth an hour ago. She would not die happily with her husband. It would be like dying sitting down.

Marika did not doubt that, if he was Don Juan, he would desert her. She wished only to begin.

Wolfgang was smiling, watching them both. His smile made Marika feel grateful and triumphant. She was grateful for his compliance. She was triumphant because, according to her, nobody knew how it would end. She swung her legs down on to the floor. She needed to disguise the fact that her ankle had swollen. She began to dance slowly down the room towards where she had fallen. You see, my foot is better already, she cried out laughing, we shall go to the ball.

G. took an envelope out of his pocket. I thank you, he said, for your invitation. I shall come to the ball as you suggest. Here are the details of the case I was telling you about. I think you should reconsider the affair. Now that war is certain, the risks in releasing him have become insignificant.

A few minutes later G. got up to leave. How shall we wait till Thursday? asked Marika, and, with the freedom which she believed had just been granted her, proffered a cheek for G. to kiss while Wolfgang stood at her side.

G. took her hand, raised it formally to his lips, bowed and said: Until we meet at the Stadttheater.

It is only now that I understand an incident in G.’s childhood and a prophecy which were mysterious to me when I wrote them:

You’d better watch him if he says so, he says to the boy. The man goes to the head of the first horse, bends over and strikes it. The boy can’t see what he strikes with. Perhaps it is the bottle. He does the same to the second head. Not one inch of the horses’ flesh such as the boy can see in the lamplight so much as quivers from either blow. The man stands upright, nothing in his hand. So I killed them, you saw I killed them, didn’t you? The boy knows he must lie: Yes I saw you. The man approaches him, evidently pleased and pats him on the shoulder. There is blood on his hand which reeks of paraffin. So you saw, he says. Yes I saw, says the boy, you killed two horses. He is aware that it is he who is now talking to the man as to a child. You killed them very well, he hears himself saying.

No terror can match the disgust he feels for the man in front of him. It is a disgust to the point of nausea. In a moment the smell of paraffin will force him to vomit.

Can I go?

Don’t ever forget what you saw me do.

Away. The lamp invisible. The smell of paraffin present but now imaginary. He feels his way between the trees.

His fear is overcome, both his fear for himself and (for it is different) his fear of the unknown: not overcome by an appeal to will-power or the summoning up of courage — how often can such direct appeals of a purely formal morality ever work? — but overcome by another, stronger revulsion. It is beyond me to create a name for this revulsion: the ones I think up all simplify. It has nothing to do with the slaughtering of horses or with the sight of blood. It is a revulsion not uncommonly felt by children and men, but one that quickly disappears never to recur if systematically ignored. With him it was always to remain stronger than his fears, for he never ignored it.

When G. descended the balustraded staircase of the von Hartmann house into the massive vaulted entrance hall, from which doors led off to the servants’ quarters, he had the impression that permeating the stone-cold darkness was the smell of paraffin. A fact which could doubtless be explained by a lamp having been spilt.

The following morning, after he had met Raffaele and Dr Donato in the café, after the threat of the goods train, G. walked to the garden of the Museo Lapidario and sat there in the sun beneath the plum trees.

Why did he not leave Trieste? He could still have returned to Livorno or London. He could have straightaway taken a ship to New York. After the sinking of the Lusitania many bookings were cancelled. Was it a question of sheer obstinacy? He was not an obstinate man; obstinacy is defensive and is deployed round a fixed citadel. There was very little about him that was fixed. Had he then become suicidal? Five years ago he had welcomed the threat of death — Camille was right when she felt that he might have loved her repeatedly if only her husband’s threat to shoot them both had been ever-present and credible. But to challenge death is not the same thing as to seek it. I do not believe that G. was any more suicidal than Chavez. Like Chavez, he may have been careless. What then was keeping him in Trieste? The charity ball at the Stadttheater. Not until that Thursday night could he take his revenge on von Hartmann. Beyond this he was incapable of seeing. The degree to which we can postulate or see beyond this is the degree to which we cannot be him. But there is something to be added. Because what G. intended to do at the Stadttheater was the contrary of all he had done since the end of his childhood when he first kissed Beatrice’s breast and took her nipple in his mouth, he must have been conscious of the fatality of this intention. Doubtless he was aware of the fateful days Trieste was living through. But he could only be aware of them as an accompaniment to his own — hence they could not directly affect him.

Nuša saw him as soon as she came through the door into the garden. This time she had to pay to go in. She still had the ticket in her hand. The ticket would also have entitled her to look at the more complete classical sculptures arranged in the gallery. She had eyes, however, only for the man she could now see sitting on a broken stone in the tall grass under the plum trees.