John Berger - G.

There was nothing objectively menacing about him now. But he was threatening because he had figured in a contract to which I had agreed. I had forgotten the circumstances which led to this contract. Hence the initial mysteriousness of his presence. Yet I was able to recognize — without being able to remember — one of its principal clauses; hence his familiarity. The old man, the size of a boy, bald, large-nosed and with absurd round spectacles, had come to claim what that clause promised him.

It was a morning of early summer, one of those mornings on which, if one has nothing to do, the evening seems a lifetime away. The sea merged into the sky above Trieste, the same blue hiding them both.

It was fine too in Northern France and Flanders. But those who lay on their backs, dying or wounded, did not stare up at the blue sky with a sense of lucid affirmation as Tolstoy describes Prince Andrey doing on the battlefield of Austerlitz. The finer the day, the greater the confusion death caused on the Western front. Death had been robbed of all significance there; consequently it was easier to accept it as one more condition, like the mud or the cold, in a world fundamentally inhospitable to man, than in a climate and season so full of promise. It’s a fucking fine day to croak.

G. walked to his apartment and before changing his clothes lay down on his back. The acanthus leaves on the lace curtains reminded him of how twenty days ago he had foreseen seducing Marika. He clenched his jaw. Not because of what he remembered, but because for two days he had done little else but remember. His memories did not in themselves cause him regret. Mostly he had achieved what he wished, and he would wish the same again. What weighed heavily upon him was the suddenly awakened faculty of memory itself. Or, rather, the prodigious capacity of this faculty. It was the sheer number of memories, their mass, which oppressed him.

He found it impossible to separate one memory from another, just as he had found it impossible to separate Nuša’s face from the Roman girl’s. It was as if his mind had been turned into a hall of mirrors in which, although all the reflexions moved together, each represented something different. The effect was the opposite of what memory normally does. For example, instead of bringing his childhood closer, the sheer mass of his memories since childhood made his childhood seem absurdly far away. Memories of Beatrice, such as he did not know he possessed, filled his mind, one after the other, each extremely clear, but each inseparable from memories of other women, so that it seemed to him that he must have last seen Beatrice a century ago. Yet I am not conveying the truth accurately enough. The stream of involuntary, precise but concatenating memories which filled his mind appeared to elongate his past life. This I have indeed suggested. But it was equally true that, because nothing remembered could be isolated and set independently within its own time, his remembered life also appeared excessively hurried and brief. Memory alternately stretched and compressed his life until, under this form of torture, time became meaningless.

Last night I heard a friend had killed himself in London. By putting together the three letters of his name, JIM, I do not, even to an infinitesimal degree, begin to reassemble what is now scattered. Nor can I judge his act by invoking the word tragic. It is sufficient for me to receive — receive, not merely register — the news of his death. G. must leave the city within thirty-six hours. But where must he go? The only place open to him was Italy. From there he could go elsewhere. Perhaps he pictured himself returning to Livorno and living in his father’s house. Doubtless he thought of other possibilities. But each of them was a return of one kind or another and he had no wish to return. Thus he began to forget about the where . The question became different: how much further could he go? How far could he still put between himself and his past? It was no longer time in itself that would take him further, for time had become meaningless. It was his realization of this which made him decide to walk to Nuša’s room and give her his passport. By this act he would go further.

In the Piazza Ponterosso there was a stall with a woman selling fruit. The woman, like Nuša, was from the Karst; he could tell by her features. He bought some cherries. On his way eastwards towards the docks, he began eating them, spitting the stones out on to the street as he went.

Just as in the red of cherries there is always a hint of the brown into which they will disintegrate and soften when they rot, a cherry, as soon as it is ripe enough to eat, tastes of its own fermentation.

He passed groups of men talking sombrely in different languages about the imminence of war. The further he went, the more ragged were the clothes of the men he passed, the more closed their faces.

Because of the smallness of a cherry and the lightness of its flesh and its skin — which is scarcely more substantial than the capillary surface of a liquid — you find the cherry stone incongruous. You may know better but you expect a cherry to be a gob. The eating of a cherry in no way prepares you for its stone. The stone feels like a precipitate of your own mouth, mysteriously created through the act of eating a cherry. You spit out the result of your own eating.

Twice he stopped and turned round because he had the impression of being followed. He sat down on a wall near some shops and watched the women queuing for vegetables and bread. In this part of the city everything was in short supply.

Before you bite the cherry in your mouth, its softness and resilience are identical with the softness and resilience of a lip.

If he was to defy time, he could not hurry.

The house was one in a row of small houses whose front doors opened straight onto the street. He knocked and a woman with two children came to the door. She eyed him suspiciously. He asked for Nuša. The woman said what did he want. She spoke a very halting Italian. He offered the children some cherries but the mother hustled them away before they could take any. Her room is at the top of the house, she said, I shall send my husband up in ten minutes.

Nuša opened the door at the top of the staircase. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. You! she said, and, with a glance down the stairs, she beckoned him in and shut the door quickly behind her.

You have brought the passport!

The room was small with a slanting ceiling. On one side her bed and a cupboard, on the other side a bare table and a chair; between them the dormer window with a view of the docks below. He poured the cherries out of the bag on to the table.

They released me this morning, he said. He took the passport out of his pocket and handed it to her. It seems to her that they have come through their ordeal and reached their destination. She clasps his hand in both of hers. He puts his arm round her. Far from resisting, she leans towards him. Her sense of achievement is so great that for a moment she assumes they have shared the same aim. She leans against him. If he were the weaker, she would have held him up. It is as though they have outrun their pursuers, both of them together, and are now exhausted, limp with exhaustion, but safe.

It is the first time they have been alone together indoors.

Your hair is softer when it hangs down, he says picking up some tresses and letting them fall from his hand.

It hides that! she steps back and throwing her hair forward over her face she shows him the purple weal across the back of her neck. Slowly he puts his hand on it and she stays quite still as though being examined by a doctor. Between the hairs her scalp is very white. Her hair smells of blankets.