The Spark Gap--Trieste

by GEORGE DE SANTILLANA

1

To BE in Trieste is to be in the spark gap. The Yugoslavs crowd us in on two sides from the hills, where the Partisan boys love to cut loose with small arms at night, just to remind us that they are there and intend to come back. This is the so-called Morgan Line, which must have been traced after much hard bargaining, for it leaves out a vast chunk of ex-Italian territory, the so-called Zone B, which is now Yugoslav by simple right of occupation. Zone B includes the port of Fiume and the Istrian Peninsula. But Istria is not quite so Slav as the Slavs would like to make out. Tales of terror still seep out from there. On the other hand, we hold on our side of the line, as it runs north, tens of thousands of Yugoslavs who do not accept even our temporary rule, and who have recently gone in for aggressive non-coöperation. I wanted to see this hell’s kitchen where the future is cooking.

“You can have my car,” the Major had said. “But mind you keep to the approved road. The Yugs are trigger-happy, and you might land yourself in the clink for the night. I’ll give you Jock. The two of you in uniform ought to get through all right.”

So here we are on the road, having passed the frontier inspection a couple of miles from Trieste. The houses violently proclaim in stencil the joy of belonging to the Federative Democratic Progressive Republic. The road echoes that joy in slogans running crosswise and lengthwise on the asphalt until they form an uncouth carpet pattern. Yugoslav soldiers watch us from the slopes. At the first bend, we have to brake sharply; two men are in front of us, the red star on their caps and tommy guns slung across their shoulders. They move over unwillingly to make way. They do not seem reconciled to the fact that this is a convoy route.

“There they go,” says Jock cheerfully. Jock is a truck driver from Lancashire, and his sympathies are with the laboring masses; but he does not understand foreign ways. He eyes in silence couple after couple of Partisan militia walking along in full accouterment. At a bridge, an armed threesome scrutinize? us some more. This is the police (they always go in threes or sixes): OZNA, regional, and Partisan police, watching over everything and also over each other.

As we climb up a hill, Jock surveys the thinearthed landscape, scarred by the cruel white stone of the Carso cropping up everywhere. “What I don’t understand,” he says, “is why people want to fight for this kind of land.”

“They like it as it is,” I reply listlessly as I watch the tommy-gunners go by. What admirable faces, one feels, open and sturdy, deeply engraved with character—individualized faces. No better stock than the Slovene peasant anywhere. This is not fascist material. The contrast is clear between those faces and the mass-produced slogans screaming from every house wall. Zivio Tito, Stalin, the Allies, Stalin and Tito, the Federative Democratic Progressive Yugoslavia. We want Yugoslavia. This is Yugoslavia. This is Yugoslav Istria. A young chorus of fine athletic specimens, eyes fierce and yet gentle, lit by holy fire. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord —

Bingo. A squealing of brakes. Road block. A triplet inspects us, salute, all right.

The road now bends towards the coast. Triplets and more triplets. Stalin Tito, Stalin Tito, Stalin Tito.

“In this part of the world,” says Jock, still following his thoughts, “I’m told even hens have to join the Union for Red Aigs.”

We speed along the seashore in the wonderful morning air, with the mountains of Italy lightly modeled in the distance, between earth and sky, away across the open sea. The ancient town of Capodistria, with the graceful arches and svelte spires, reaches out into the waters as if to rejoin the motherland. The situation there is known and clear-cut: a town 100 per cent Italian, and not happy.

I overheard the other day in a streetcar an argument between a Communist worker from Trieste and a man from Capodistria — both Italians, each wishing himself on the other side of the line. “You can have your unprint-fathered obscenity of an Italian government,” the worker was shouting. “Italy only gave us Fascism and Cosulich. If we get back under it, we’ll be run by another fascism upheld by the Anglo-Saxon Reaction. We want. to be an autonomous republic in the Yugoslav federation. D’you get that, you bum?”

“Well and maybe Italy is what you say,” retorted the Capodistrian, “but my mother’s my mother, and whatever you call her, I’d rather have her than any stepmother.”

2

BACK in the States, I used to imagine that we should have no more of the old Trieste problem. An exchange of populations, anything, so long as this boundary sore which had wasted a million lives was put out of existence. I had figured it all out. The only valid settlement was that which could be reached on the spot by the local patriots united for the first time against the Germans.

Since then, I have heard these very same thoughts spoken by Yugoslav leaders — and the more I hear them the less do I recognize them. A federation of local autonomies, wonderful. But what do those words — autonomy, union, federation — mean to the Slav side? The way they handled Trieste during the forty days of occupation was nothing like federative respect.

The Garibaldi Brigades were, at one time, what they were meant to be — united Italian patriots under Yugoslav command. Since those days, however, they have been purged of Socialists, of Actionists, of everybody not of the strict Communist obedience. This fanatical core, then, was indoctrinated and sent back to filter into Italy with definite instructions. Totalitarian democracy, as one of them put it.

They are winning people, to be sure, these young Yugoslav leaders. Eager beavers all, utterly sincere, the difficulty is they use our concepts only to hit us below the belt. No way of common discourse.

We have skirted the huge rusting carcass of the Rex lying on its side in the shallow waters offshore. We have left behind us the ancient Venetian cities of the coast. We are driving now into the interior, which is supposed to be generally Slav.

Looks still like Italian countryside to me. More Italian even than Trieste, which is still an Empire city. The way the houses are set, the Euganean grace of the hills, the contours and vine festoons organizing the terraced fields — no question. Now, above us, a dark-walled borough on top of a hill. Don’t swerve, Jock. Let’s drive in. They can’t mind if we look for cigarettes.

The square is crowded with Yugoslav soldiers who stare at us stonily. In the little dark store there is a knot of townsfolk who brighten up on seeing my uniform. Any Red Stars? Sure, lots. Want five packages?

“How are things around here?”

An uneasy silence.

“Someone answer quick,” grins a gray-haired man, obviously the drugstore keeper, “before They follow you in.”

He has no sooner spoken than two massive shape; edge their way into the den, managing their Breda guns through the doorway as oxen would their horns.

“I see. How much? Forty? So long, boys.”

Off on the road again, overlooking the beautiful sweep of the valley of the Quieto, with ancient hilltowns scattered on the tops. I realize that so far we have not met the usual patient knot of civilians waiting for a lift at every crossing. Wonder what that means. Here is a man just ahead, laboring up the grade with a biggish pack on his back. “Let’s try and pick him up,” I suggest.

“Now, sir,” remonstrates Jock, “don’t you know there’s standing orders against pickups this way? People get compromised.”

“Never mind, Jock. Do as I tell you.”

As we stop by him, the man gives us a frightened look and waves us off. We drive on in silence.

“I say, Jock, don’t you think the radiator needs water?” I ask after a while.

“Maybe it does.”

“Then let’s stop at that house down there.”

The road stretches out straight and empty ahead. No one in sight in the bare fields. We borrow a bucket from an old farmer. “I say, Grandpa, what’s the matter that people won’t let us give ‘em a ride? Too proud?”

“It’s because of the Allies, God knows,” mutters the old man bitterly. “We can’t even look at them.”

“Now are you satisfied, sir?” says Jock as we pick up speed again.

“Not quite yet. Let’s try the next village.”

A village after Visinada. We pull up beside a wall proclaiming: “Istria to the Istrians. We want the rights of the Atlantic Charter.” I walk into the store. Any cigarettes? Sure.

“Nice-looking country here,” I remark casually. “How’s the maize this year? It was all burned up in Veneto.”

“So-so,” says the owner. Two Red Stars with tommy guns have walked into the shop and lean against the counter on either side of me.

“Maybe the wine is better this season. I’d like to try it.”

“Down the street, sir, to your right.”

Down we go. The little low tavern is utterly bare. The woman has a nice homely peasant face.

“We’d like a glass of wine. How are things this year?”

The woman does not answer as she pours it out, but looks steadily at us with a sickly, pathetic smile of resignation. Sort of unnatural smile. Suddenly it fades. I turn around; the empistolados have walked in after us. The woman’s face has taken on the look of closed despair that one remembers from Flemish paintings of the Crucifixion. No use going on.

“Have a drink, sirs,” I say holding forth the glass. They are taken aback, mumble embarrassedly. We drink in silence. They look rather foolish as we walk oiut past them, Jock the image of British insolence.

“I’m getting new ideas on the Atlantic Charter,” says Jock as we take up the road again. “That wine was nothing much. And by the way, sir, did you see those little boys up in taown? Regular Hitler youth.”

3

ECONOMICALLY, Central Europe is going to be a stray for years to come. Politically, a kind of Oliver Twist. Do we want to keep contacts with Vienna, with Prague, with Budapest, with Yugoslavia itself? The contacts they are asking for? Then we have to stay right here. Trieste does not mean only the port: it means the freight rates to that port, it means the whole rail network beyond it, it means the land base of disputed territory. Otherwise —

Clear out? Today, the Tito boys would like to bring the torch of social liberation to Italy (they would have done it in May, but for the British), but the Italians are correspondingly losing their yen for Red leadership. They feel that they have been plenty liberated by the Allies already.

By letting go, we should merely postpone the problem a few years; whereas now we still have our foot in the door. Which is maybe a shoddy simile, a Fuller Brush proposition, but it means peace.

We are heading south in a silent landscape — a monotonous plateau of sagebrush and white stone.

The ground slopes everywhere into funnels, some of them full of good arable earth at the bottom, others deep as mine shafts. The foibe. Much has been written and clamored in Italy about the executions in the foibe last year. There are no eyewitnesses, since people knew better than walk about in those dread nights. They closed their shutters and prayed. Hundreds have certainly vanished down those bottomless pits. Not so many, anyway, compared to what happened in the mine pits of the Donets at the hands of the Germans.

What the Italians are not ready to see is that this was really popular justice of a rough sort; most of the victims had been agents of the Fascist regime. Agents is a vague word, of course. I myself talked to the only known survivor of a foiba, and he certainly might have been spared. He was a young man who had joined the Fascist militia in order to avoid being drafted to Russia. The usual Hobson’s choice. He was taken with live others at night near one of these pits; their hands tied behind their backs with wire and weighted with stones. They were told to jump. This man hesitated at the brink. The guards fired a few rounds to push him over, and he felt the stone drop, freed by a chance bullet. He jumped with all his strength to avoid out-jutting rocks, hit the water eighty feet down, came up struggling, swam with his legs only until he reached a ledge in a cavern recess where he could steady himself. He saw his comrades plummet down one after another and vanish in the deep. Then he worked for two hours at the twisted wire, tearing his wrists (the deep scars still show) until his hands were free. He climbed up the rocky funnel before dawn and escaped.

No conclusion to be drawn from this. Just contemporary reality. The Italians have executed sixty thousand of their own fascists, and there are still plenty left.

Feud and counter-feud have been pyramiding executions since 1930, from Spain to the China Sea, and there is no end in sight. As we speed on, we pass a clump of trees with red wreaths and a placard: to twelve patriots hanged there by the Germans, “enduring witnesses to Italo-Slovene brotherhood.” That was indeed our hope. Now it has become a tricky slogan for a party. No conclusion here, either.

Down we race into Pola, the ex-naval base of the Hapsburgs, today a dead and shivering city. Right in front of the Roman Arena, I run into the man I was looking for. He is with some friends. More tales of sorrow. A Slav lawyer, respected by the Partisans for his anti-Fascism, says: “I’d rather go clean drains in Italy than live under this multiple of Fascism.”

The time has come to start on the road back. Jock is also mindful of his tea.

I am trying to add up the score.

A plebiscite? But if it were held freely and in preliberation conditions (a squaring of the circle) the Italianized Slavs would make a majority for Italy. The other side would never accept it. A line through the middle? Unnatural. An exchange of populations? Or rather, a pushing out of this population? On what basis? Ethnographic? Linguistic? The only criterion would be fear and flight.

The Italian officials from Italy badgered and oppressed the Slavs. Now the Slavs from over there are meting it out in triple measure to the Italians. A local affair in terms of universal slogans. This unhappy peninsula, in the spark gap between East and West, reveals more clearly the tensions between race and culture, between modern hopes and old hatreds. As a racial problem Istria makes no sense. That’s flat. Not even folklore will help. A mixture of Italian colonists from the Venetian Empire, Croatized Serbs, Serbifled Croats, Slovenified Albanians, and what not, including the mysterious “Cici.”

The tension is between the Western way of life of the towns and the new aggressive Slav peasantry. Now a new “popular culture” is rolling in from the East, powered by Popular Culture Departments, and the Italianate people have to go. Ancient individualism vs. modern organization. The tension is really between two forms of society. Culture? What kind of culture?

Dignano. A road fork. “Approved Allied road” to the west. The hell with it, Jock, let’s take east and see what happens. We’re on our own today.

The forbidden road is white and dusty, but how much more beautiful. Soldiers on bicycles (Army men this time) stare at us in surprise before they are swallowed by the choking dust. A chapel by the wayside, St. Mary of the Sea, set among oak trees, of ancient Romanic simplicity, a jewel worthy of Tuscany or Provence. The region here is still Italian according to the population map, but there is no doubt of its having become solidly Slav.

The types and bearing of peasants tell the story. Buxom women ask for a lift without embarrassment and chat easily. No longer the mechanized bellowing of red stencils on houses, but free scrawls. This is Croat Istria, we don’t like Dragoljub, Zivio the Twenty-third Congress of something or other. Come to think of it, there was no mention of congresses in the western zone. The land, too, is different, set in confusion, roads messy, fields in unfamiliar patches. But the whole is vital. White oxen on the red earth, young and old behind the plow still in Partisan uniform with red stars on their caps. One imagines their guns resting behind a bush. It is almost like a print out of the French Revolution. The landscape seems to be humming “Ça ira.”

Blown bridges, charred and gutted houses, the reminder of bloody Partisan fighting, underscore the new hope. One would say that these people, like the British, live at home. “There’s one thing Mussolini has done,” Jock says meditatively. “He’s united the Slavs.”

A startled road block forgets to inspect us. We speak English, act confused, ask for the road to Trieste. This way, this way.

The sun is setting. People are going home to their dusky houses on the heights. Girls in groups, carrying their shovels like rifles and singing.

One thing seems clear to all of them: the state is a serious thing. It is the serious thing (there is absolutely no talk except of politics in the Balkans). Who can blame them? We used to take the state easy, in our old easy world. But the poor people on the receiving end had known in their bones that the state was a serious thing. They always seemed to know what it was about. Today the state acts purposefully, because it is the business committee of the bourgeoisie. Today, in the new classless society, the state has only the interests of The People to mind; therefore the state can do no wrong. This dreadful logic out of books.

4

WHAT, then, is this freedom? Never the freedom of the self, always the freedom of the We. The freedom, as one of these men had told me, “of achieving great things.” Yes, and I had reminded him of how many times we had heard that word in Hitler’s speeches. Too bad. Great things can only be achieved together— there you have your logic again. No escape. How right was Plato when he said that to refrain from what could be done was the true mark of the intellect. But this is our time. Intellect means operation. Big things, still bigger things.

The car is now speeding along a hill crest, with the valleys already plunged in the shadows. The landscape is only an outline of darkness and peace against the western glow. A village. As we turn inside it at right angles, our headlights sweep the vast walls of a church and explode another riot of pronouncements. Progressive federative democratic Tito Stalin Zivio Zivio. We don’t want Peter. To hell with Peter. Tito is ours and we are Tito’s. Darkness now, and the rush of the road. We ruminate. On and on, wrapped in the night, the countryside lost.

Is this the new faith? There are so many outside it. I remember the words of a candid observer who knows a lot about the Balkans: “Do you know what would topple Tito just like that? Don’t believe me if you don’t want to. Just an American military band playing in Belgrade.”

But maybe this is the new faith. There is no other, unless we take our good old labor liberalism to be one still. Maybe it is, too. But not the way we mean when we think of early Christians. This is it. I have seen the Comrades.

Yes, but, is it? These are not really early Christians, even if the hope is there. No slow growth, no hidden certainties that take on substance in passing from father to son. No architecture of myth and dream. Cold pragmatism, the loud-speaker truck, the advertising slogan.

The “Titos” leap at us from the curbstones in spectral succession. Jock breaks the silence at last. “It’s not so healthy to be around at this time. They might take a pop at us.”

“It’s all right, Jock. We’re almost there.”

We are not there yet. We are inside the inimical night, heavy with suspicion. Words have lost the power to communicate. We mean nothing to Them, they little to us. Everything is perilously poised. But we should hold on. Our own words mean so little now. War and progress, for instance. We shall have to find new ones. They too. At times, one feels as if a miraculous and very simple idea were just around the corner. A kind of intellectual mutation, I have seen too many people wondering what it all means.

Up a long grade, another road block. The flag. Why, this is the border. A young soldier scrutinizes our papers under an oil lamp, all the while trying to prevent his tommy gun from tumbling over them as he labors at deciphering the, to him, undecipherable. All right. Pass on.

A hundred yards beyond, the Allied guard post. Two New Zealanders with modest-looking carbines wave us in. We join a long line of UNRRA trucks waiting for inspection.

Two Yank drivers sit on a running board. They are leaning against each other and crooning: “It must be love — because I feel so well — ”

Deep down below, beyond the curve in the road, a few harbor lights show the vast outline of the muted city. Above it, the huge beams of Navy searchlights subtend the sky. This is Trieste.