John Berger - G.

The skirt was made of black silk. Embroidered upon it, in the Indian style, were eight or nine red peonies, a few silver-green rose-leaves and three or four mysterious sprigs with blue fruit hanging from them like sloes. Each rose-leaf was almost the size of one of her hands. The corsage was of muslin, its colour scarcely different from that of her skin. The sleeves were short and wide, bordered with pearls. She stared at her own shoulders and bosom, rounded and solid through the mist of the muslin, and she thought: if this is the dress he has chosen for me, I will be safe at the ball, in this he will not dare to touch me. And then she thought: on Friday morning I will go to where Bojan lodges still wearing this dress and I will wake him up and give him my wage, I will give him the passport which will allow him to go. And then again she thought: it will attract too much attention like that, I must take the dress off before I go to see Bojan.

She did her best not to think about going back to work at the factory after Bojan had gone. When she was working on the softening machine she had to dampen the streaks of jute by pouring an emulsion of whale oil and water on them. Each time the top rollers of the machine pitched down on to the sodden streaks to mangle them against the fixed bottom rollers, her face was splattered with the emulsion. Some of the girls wore a tarpaulin. She had tried, but she found it too constricting. When she was carrying the streaks in her arms from the softening machine to the barrows, they made her blouse wet. At first she thought she would always smell of whale oil. If she could find other work she would never go back to the jute factory.

The modiste was adjusting the very high red silk belt. Inadvertently the old woman’s knuckles prodded the young woman’s breasts. Nuša felt the huge embroidered flowers with the palms of her hands. The skirt was tight over her hips. Sometimes when she was feeding the streaks on to the delivery cloth of the softening machine the rollers tugged at the streak she was still holding and the sharp tresses caught on her nails or between her fingers. Her present employer had bought a cream like milk for her hands and every day he asked her to hold them out to him and he gravely examined them to see whether they were softer.

The modiste shifted her attention from the belt to the side seams of the skirt. A fraction taken in here, she said to one of her assistants who wore a pincushion on her wrist like a thistle. Nuša could feel hands moving lightly down the outsides of her thighs. Someone else was altering the fastenings at her back. These light touches of fingers she could not see — for she knew she should not move even her head — had a slightly hypnotizing effect.

When she was sick as a child she imagined a swan who came and settled on her stomach as though on the surface of the water. She used to feel a webbed foot trailing along the outside of each thigh. From its position there, bending its long neck forward with its head down — as a swan does when searching under the water — it fed her gently and lovingly from its beak. Surprisingly the taste of the food the swan gave her from its beak was neither fishy nor stale. It in no way resembled the smell of jute. The swan gave her small cakes which were scarcely larger than cherries and tasted of them.

The modiste stood back to appraise her work. Ça présente drôlement bien , she said in her hoarse voice to herself. Two women knelt on the floor to arrange the train.

Walk a few steps, my dear, said the modiste.

Nuša walked very slowly, as though in the dark, towards the mirrors. One of the women on the floor asked her to pick up the train as she would do if she were dancing. Nuša had no idea how this was done. G., who on other comparable occasions had been there to guide her if she looked lost, was in the ante-room waiting for her to emerge in the almost finished dress. Close to the mirror, she was once again amazed by the fullness of her own radiance through the salmon mist of the muslin. Once again she felt a pang of disappointment that her brother would not see her in this dress when she went to wake him on Friday morning. Then she said: You must show me how I do that.

From ten o’clock onwards on the evening of 20 April 1915, the social élite of Trieste drew up in their carriages and motor cars before the steps of the Stadttheater where footmen in uniforms of blue and gold waited to help the parties and couples out. No one expected it to be a ball like the ones before the war. People remarked that it was not the same thing to drive along the Molo to a ball without the liners lit up in the bay. There was not a single ship to be seen in the darkness. Nevertheless the ball was unusually well-attended, perhaps because the idea had occurred to everybody that it would probably be the last one for a good many years.

Among the guests Austrians and Italians were fairly evenly mixed. In most public situations in Trieste Austrians were outnumbered, but this was a special occasion since it was the charity ball for the Austro-Hungarian Red Cross. To put in an appearance at this ball was to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the forces of His Imperial and Royal Majesty and to assume as one’s own the determination with which these forces had overcome their defeats — hence, incidentally, the urgent need for medical supplies. There were middle-aged and elderly Austrians there who considered it their patriotic duty to dance the mazurkas.

The Italians, mostly from well-established trading and shipping families, were less idealistic but no less anxious for the Empire to survive and to have themselves counted amongst its loyal and influential supporters. The Irredentists in Trieste drew their strength from the professional classes and the intelligentsia. The Italian business and trading community was quite shrewd enough to foresee that without Vienna, Trieste would no longer make commercial sense as a port. If they overlooked this truth they had only to ask themselves why their Venetian competitors were so pleased to finance the Irredentists. The Italians at the ball were nervous. When they went to a window to take a breath of air they half expected to see artillery fire across the gulf.

Wolfgang von Hartmann and his wife came in a carriage. Marika was wearing a dress of lilac and pale green. Her deer-coloured hair was drawn very tightly back. She was breathing through her mouth which was slightly open. The whole day and especially the early part of the evening had seemed endless. She had played patience, she had taken a bath, she had had the hairdresser arrange her hair twice. When she walked through the drawing-room she remembered saying: If we were at home we would go now while he is out of the room. On the parquet floor she traced the path into the forest. She sighed. Waiting ten days had aged her, she would never have waited when she was younger. As the carriage drew up in the small piazza outside the theatre steps, Wolfgang took his wife’s hand and told her she looked disarmingly beautiful. She bowed her head without saying a word. The top of her head looked phosphorescent, as if wet from the sea. Remember, he said, I am no Karenin, I. I wish you a very happy time. When her hair was smooth he was convinced of the ultimate control he had over her.

Their carriage drove away. On the steps they heard somebody say in German that although he did not doubt the future importance of the motor car in trade and war, he found it an unsuitable vehicle in which to come to a ball. Marika craned her neck up at the sky. The milky way was just visible. A waltz was being played in the first ballroom.

Whilst they met acquaintances, shook hands, smiled, received compliments, Marika was searching amongst the groups and couples to see if G. had yet arrived. One of the directors of the Trieste branch of the Südbahn railway, an elderly but energetic man with one eye that was always half shut, asked her if he might have the pleasure of the first mazurka. She picked up and dropped her carnet de bal into her bag as though to indicate that she need not open it to know that the first mazurka was promised. But abruptly, before she snapped her bag shut, she changed her mind. She would be dancing the first mazurka with the Herr Direktor when G. arrived. He thanked her. She opened her fan and behind it glanced at the wide red-carpeted stairway which mounted to the second ballroom.