John Berger - G.

On the way back to the Stadttheater she sat bolt upright in the carriage, but this time she could see out of the windows. The harbour was very still. A few carriages were leaving the theatre.

During the next thirty years the story was recounted many times. After the occupation of Trieste by the Yugoslav partisans in 1945, when briefly, for the first time, the city was in the hands of Slav patriots, the story lost its allure and began to sound somewhat discreditable. But the versions varied on one point. All agreed that the Hungarian wife of an Austrian banker, a woman with red hair, drew out a whip from under her wrap and began to flog a Slovene woman, whose appearance at the ball had already caused much consternation, down the stairs and out of the building; where the versions differed was on whether she also tried to flog the man who accompanied the Slovene.

Fine horsewoman though she was, Marika was not able to control with absolute precision the lash of her whip and since G. was beside Nuša she may also have struck him. But he bore no marks upon him whereas Nuša had three red weals, one across her neck and two across her back and shoulders.

When Nuša ran down the stairs towards the entrance with Marika in pursuit, G. closed with her to seize hold of the whip. The two figures struggled and Marika fell. Several men advanced upon G. Brandishing the whip in their faces, he broke free and ran down the stairs to join Nuša who by this time was in the street.

With her skirt and train held high up above her knees she was running fast. She had lost or flung off her turban. G. caught up with her. Behind them they could hear shouts and screams. A few of the younger men in evening dress gave chase.

G. took hold of Nuša’s hand in case she fell, and they ran together out of the small piazza, away from the sea towards the Exchange. Nuša knew where she wanted to make for — the narrow dark streets by the end of the canal. As they ran hand in hand, panting, without saying a word because they needed all their breath, G. remembered the Roman girl in Milan who had pulled him from under the rearing horse and run with him to the Giardini Pubblici. And you will buy me, she said in Italian, some white stockings and a hat with chiffon tied round it. Yet it was scarcely like a memory. The two moments were continuous; he was still running the same run and in the course of it the Roman girl had grown into the woman, all of whose clothes he had bought, now running fast but heavily beside him.

They took the first street out of the large piazza on the far side of the Exchange. Nuša was beginning to flag. Her hand was wet in his. Her face was red and contorted with effort and pain. They saw a patrol of Austrian police coming down the narrow street towards them. Their pursuers, running more slowly, had turned the corner by the Exchange. He pushed Nuša into a doorway and tried to hide her but they had already been noticed.

At police headquarters they were separated. Left alone, G. remembered Nuša’s face as it was just before she was led away. And again he found it impossible to make a distinct separation between her face and the face of the Roman girl in the courtyard in Milan when she splashed water on him and told him to drink. Their features were entirely different. It was in their expression that the mysterious continuity resided. To break this continuity so as to make room for all his adult life between the first and the second face, he had to forget their smeared foreheads, their mouths and intense, silent eyes and remember only the meaning of their expression for him. What mattered the first time was what her expression confirmed and what until that moment had been wordless: what mattered then was not being dead. Now, the second time, what mattered was what her expression confirmed and what until now had been wordless: why not be dead?

Nuša was released by the police the following afternoon. Most of the questions put to her were about G. When she said she knew nothing about him, they asked her why he took her to the ball. She shrugged her shoulders. Are you his mistress? She stopped herself answering No. Please ask him, she said. Did he speak to you about his other Italian friends here? He is not like an Italian, she replied.

They treated her as a half-wit, and this seemed to be justified when they told her she could go. Have you old brown paper, she asked, which you do not want? One guard winked at another. I must be covered, she said, pointing to the muslin top of her dress bordered with pearls. They found her a piece of sacking.

When she got to the quarter near the arsenal, she stopped at the corner of each street to see whether there was anyone she knew; in mid-afternoon the streets were mostly empty. She hurried along close to the walls of the buildings with the sacking over her shoulders. In her room she undressed and sitting on the edge of her bed she bathed her shoulders and her feet from a basin of cool water. She was trembling. If he was released, she asked herself, would he still bring her the passport?

The cross-questioning to which G. was subjected was close and repetitive. The reports sent to the Chief of Police suggested that his original impression of G. at the ball had been the correct one. After briefly interrogating the prisoner himself, he was satisfied. G. was released on Sunday morning on condition he left the country within thirty-six hours.

THE STONE GUEST

I went to a friend’s house to look at the photographs he had brought back from North Africa. When I came in I said hello to his eldest son, aged ten. A little while later I was concentrating on the photographs and had completely forgotten about the son.

Suddenly I felt a tap on my arm, a rather urgent tap. I turned round quickly and there, the size of a child, was an old man, bald, large-nosed with spectacles. He stood there holding out a piece of paper to me. (Let there be no mystery: the ten-year-old son had put on a mask. But for the duration of perhaps half a second I did not realize this. I started. When the boy saw me start, he burst out laughing and I realized the truth.)

I was surprised and shocked by the old man’s presence. How had he arrived so suddenly and silently? Who was he? And from where? Why was it me he had chosen to approach? There was no satisfactory answer to any of these questions, and it was precisely the lack of any answer which startled and frightened me. This was an inexplicable event. Therefore it suggested that anything was possible. I was no longer protected by causality. Probably this was why his size — the most improbable thing about him — did not surprise me. I accepted his size as part of the chaos his very presence proposed.

I do not retrospectively exaggerate either the complexity or the density of the content of that half-second; when profoundly provoked, one’s memory and imagination reproduce one’s whole life in an instant.

No sooner had he frightened me, no sooner had he pulled away causality from under my feet, than I recognized him. I do not mean I recognized him as the ten-year-old son of my friend. I recognized the bald old man. This recognition of him as a familiar in no way diminished my fear. But a change had taken place. The fear was familiar too now. I had known both man and fear since my earliest childhood. I had the sensation of not being able to remember his name. A small socially conditioned part of me had a reflex of embarrassment. For this part it was no longer a question of how and why he had found me, but a question of what I could say to him.

Where had I first met him? Here it is impossible to avoid paradox. But a single glance back to the depths of your childhood will remind you how common paradox was. I recognized him as a figure in the infinite company of the unknowable. I had not once, long ago, summoned him up in the light of my knowledge; it was he who had once sought me out in the darkness of my ignorance.