John Berger - G.

You should put some raw steak on it, he says.

She straightens up, her cheeks flushed because the blood has run to her head, but the pink in them is uneven, visibly distributed in blood vessels as intricate and livid as those at the root of the tongue.

Raw steak! she says, I would eat it, not put it there.

Are the other places worse?

I can’t see them properly.

Let me see them.

He is the only person she can show them to and they are part of how she earned the passport. She turns her back and slips one shoulder out of her blouse and chemise.

Across her large full white shoulders run two raised weals, but the skin is not broken. The pores of her unhurt skin emit a kind of light which is indistinguishable from the smell of her skin. He touches her shoulder with the tips of his fingers.

The first night I couldn’t sleep, they were like burns.

Through the small open window comes a noise of distant perturbation; a strange confused noise which suggests human voices but is too regular to be speech and too discordant to be music. Two or three sounds are being continually repeated. To G. one of them resembles the Hup! Hup! Hup! of his childhood. Nuša and he glance at one another and then go to the window. Down below on the quay they see people running towards a circle of crowded figures who are waving their arms. Somebody in the crowd is carrying a black and yellow Austrian flag.

Who are they? G. asks.

I do not know.

Her face is impassive but her breast is heaving. They look like our people, she says, the ones who work in the docks.

She steps away and adjusts her clothes, doing up the small buttons with her large hands. I must go, she says, with the passport now.

G. wants to place himself, to intervene between all the forms of her physical being, her heaving breast, her thick hair that smells of blankets, her white scalp, her large hands, her cheeks, the pores of her skin — to intervene between her body as she stands there by the window looking down again at the quayside and her consciousness of herself. He wants to take the place of what she is looking at. He wants to present her to herself as a gift and for the offering to be boundlessly free of virtue. He wants to carry the gift on his own body to satisfy his own need. We have no time, Nuša, he says.

When he spoke her name it was with despair.

For the first time the question of what he would do without a passport occurred to Nuša. She tied a scarf round her hair. We must go. They bundled down the dark stairs.

When G. said: We have no time, Nuša, he might have been referring to Nuša’s impatience to deliver the passport, to the crowd coming together on the quay, to the landlady’s husband coming upstairs, to the thirty-six hours within which he was meant to leave Trieste, but none of these contingencies presented difficulties which were insuperable and in the past he would have ingeniously found a hundred ways to get round them. The statement meant something more.

For two days he had been oppressed by the abundance of his memories. He had come to the point of feeling condemned to live even the present in the past tense. What had not yet happened was merely a section of his past not yet revealed. When they released him from the police station, he had the impression of walking back, regardless of the direction he chose, towards the past, towards the life he had lived before von Hartmann had offered him Marika and he plotted to take Nuša to the Stadttheater. Whatever he chose was like re-entering a choice he had made before, a choice of which the consequences had already taken place. The opportunities before him were illusory. Time refused to face him. His desire for Nuša was indistinguishable from his despair. Aieeeee!

(Passion must hurl itself against time. Lovers fuck time together so that it opens, advances, withdraws upon itself and bends backwards. Time which their hearts pump. Time whose vagina is moist with timelessness. Time which spends itself when it ejaculates generations.) We have no time, Nuša, he said.

Imagine a character in a legend becoming conscious as he was when alive. The legend is made and cannot be altered. Its unchangeability proffers a kind of immortality. But he, alive and conscious within the legend which is being told, which has already been repeated many times, will feel buried alive. What he will lack is not air but time.

Thus G. descended the staircase with Nuša.

People had come to the doors of their houses and were talking in loud voices together. A young man ran up the street and then down again. G. could not understand a word being said, everything was in Slovene. Several men followed the youth running downhill towards the sea. Nuša asked something. Then she whispered: the Italians have declared war now, today we are at war with them.

G. gripped her arm. It is too late, she said, speaking the words close to his face, if only you had given it to me before.

He did not try to keep her and she ran down the hill. A little way down she stopped to speak to a man. G. saw her pointing up at him. Then she ran on, holding up her skirt with one hand, her boots banging against the cobbles.

To Nuša’s surprise Bojan asked only once how she had obtained the passport. She said she found it. He thought that with the passport there was still a hope that he might be able to leave; there would probably be a last train to Italy tomorrow or the day after.

Bojan indeed reached France and lived several months in Marseille where he aroused the suspicions of the French police. In a Marseille police circular during the winter of 1915 his place of birth was given as Livorno, his name as G.’s, his age and occupation as his own. There is a reference number to a file which probably contained a photograph and further details. No specific criminal activity is mentioned — as is the case with other names on the circular. He is simply listed as Suspect.

The British Foreign Office made no attempt to trace the man whom they had supplied with false papers; he was assumed to be missing, probably dead. Years later when working in Yugoslavia against the dictatorship of King Alexander, Bojan still sometimes used G.’s false name (the name G. would genuinely have had if he had been brought up by his father Umberto) as an alias.

G. walked downhill towards the docks. As he passed the man to whom Nuša had stopped to talk, the man smiled and without any attempt to conceal what he was doing, started to follow G. They soon met a crowd of several hundred coming up the hill towards them. In the rear the ranks of the crowd were fairly well organized and a group was carrying a large Austrian standard. But the vanguard, most of whom were men, was very different and advanced like a wave continually breaking and reforming, murmuring and roaring. Everything about them appeared to be diverse — their clothes, their ages, faces, headgear, physique, language. They had come originally from many different places: Slovene and Istrian villages, Serbia, Galicia, Greece, a few from Turkey and Russia, one or two from Africa. All that they had in common was their poverty and their destination.

Once more G. was aware of the absurdity of the question: where should he go? Once again, in place of an answer, he could only think: further. He began to walk with the crowd in their direction.

It was very unlike the crowd he had seen in London on the day war was declared there.

The crowd in London was a static crowd which did not know where to go. It demanded nothing. It bellowed and roared with blank staring eyes because it was impatient to have what it wanted. But it did not know what it wanted. It was a crowd waiting to be let in and waiting to be despatched. It stood outside Downing Street and Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament impatient to be issued with its own future. It sacrificed itself supremely, without knowing it, in the act of cheering. Its cheers were to become gushes of its own blood hurled up into the air and falling down again over its own staring eyeballs, leaving millions of bloodshot veins in them, down its own jugular choking its exits, down over its stomach interminably bayonetted to where each wound with its unquenchable thirst drank it up, only letting, inadvertently, a few drops of blood dribble from the lip of the wound into the pubic hair. There were many women in the crowd, they pushed with their hands against the smalls of the backs of the men, they pushed them out, they aborted them in blood in the Strand and in Trafalgar Square where they lay, the men-embryos, without hairs or feathers on them, all bones and fleshlings. Yet when it dispersed, the London crowd on the first day of war, it did so calmly; all the men and women went home still calling each other by their usual names, unaware of what they had begun, but buoyant with a sense of unusual pride.