Aleš Čar: On Tolerability
excerpts from the novel
translated by Gregor Timothy Čeh
ROULETTE
Every morning after the raising of the flag, volunteers were called for in most
detachments, formations, detention camps and penal battalions of the Italian army.
One day it was for the special units, then for the paratroopers, the sanitary units, the
engineers, the lorry drivers, the artillery, etc. But this was only the beginning of the
problem. A normal and generally accepted part of this system of involuntary
volunteering that provided the base for the functioning of not only the Italian Army,
but the entire infrastructure of the Italian state, was the sport or entertainment it
provided for the commanders and officers who picked the volunteers. They lied
blatantly, all the time. No one knew why they had just been chosen when they were,
let’s say, made to stand in the line volunteering for communications operators. In
the majority of cases they ended up somewhere entirely different, carrying out tasks
that had nothing at all to do with operating communications. In their ignorance
many were thus sent to Spain to aid Franco’s units, meaning that a few days later
they would find themselves right on the front line, face to face with communist
fanatics. No one knew what kind of a fate the officer who happened to point his
finger at them at that specific moment was marking them out for. Actually no one
knew where they would wake up the following day.
Gramps was a member of the orchestra in one of the regular formations of
the Italian Army that were spared this huge game of roulette played every morning.
This ended in 1936 when the orchestra was given an order sending them to
Abyssinia where they were to play at ceremonies and celebrations of the indubitable
victory of the Italian Army that was being forecast in Africa. Before departure,
Gramps got some leave. He came home in his Italian Army uniform and found Nan
with Nulta in her lap. This was when they conceived Prima. In February 1936 the
orchestra landed in Italian Somaliland and was immediately loaded onto trucks that
drove them across the Ethiopian deserts, but a few hundred kilometres before
reaching Addis Ababa they took a wrong turn, ending up in the middle of a minefield.
Gramps woke up with bits of the guys from the orchestra, pieces of instruments and
parts of the trucks showering down around him. Shrapnel from a wheel of one of the
trucks was lodged in the huge double bass case he was holding, right at head level.
This was the first time his double bass saved his life.
After a short period of recuperation in a hospital on the edge of town,
Gramps and the Flautist, the only members of the orchestra without any serious
injuries, ended up in the formations of the supply units and, with this, within the
system of the huge roulette of the Italian Army. This was the start of a joint long
march for both of them, the little guy and the big guy, scrawny and brawny, the
orchestra-less flute and double bass players, rolling on from one orchestra to the
next, from one formation to the next, from one armada to the next, from one
uniform to the next, looking for a way to survive. In any case they were by no means
invisible – one of them a two metre hulk and the other rather delicate, almost
feminine – and officers’ fingers soon started picking them out. Relationships were
established right at the start. The first time an officer’s finger pointed in their
direction and started pushing them towards an uncertain fate, even before Gramps
had a chance to figure out what was going on, the Flautist told the officer a complete
lie that his colleague the double bass player and himself were waiting to join an
orchestra that was on its way from Addis Ababa to play at the formal merger of
Eritrea, Abyssinia and Somaliland into Italian East Africa. A week later the situation
repeated itself with a different officer and the Flautist told the same story, just that
this time they were due to play at the ceremony proclaiming Marshal Graziani as the
Viceroy of Ethiopia. At the mere mention of Marshal Graziani the officers turned
away without a word, but the soldiers around them soon picked up on the differing
stories. When a second full cast orchestra arrived in Addis Ababa the officers could
pick up on their lies with one simple phone call. It was the Flautist, cleaning the tank
guns one afternoon who apparently said that the flute and double bass players had
disappeared. They are still looking for them, but I’m afraid they are unlikely to find
them, he added with a smile. Gramps didn’t take him seriously, but the following
morning he heard his own and the Flautist’s names called out in an order for them to
report to the battalion headquarters.
It is not clear what happened with the flute and double bass players from
Italian army orchestras who kept mysteriously disappearing whenever the Flautist
and Gramps appeared on the scene. It is not clear how many such disappearances
actually happened, but we certainly are looking at at least three or four, and quite
possibly many more. This is, of course, not something one would just flippantly drop
into a conversation. In fact, Gramps himself only mentioned it once and even then
only in one of those jokes of his. Wearing his beret pushed to one side, he once
asked me whether I knew where they buried flute and double bass players from
Italian army orchestras during the Second World War. The answer was that, with the
bishops’ blessings, they were cemented into the foundations of new churches across
Italy and Africa. In reality this was likely to be just the typical black humour of that
particular phase of Gramps’ inebriation.
In any case, it seems that this young, gentle flute player from the outskirts of
Gorizia who undoubtedly felt a deep respect for Gramps, maybe even something
stronger, was the key to the most important moves of this pair. It’s no secret that
the Flautist was homosexual. Gramps never tried to hide this, quite the opposite, he
did not even hide the fact that the Flautist was particularly fond of him. But that’s all
that can be said with certainty about their relationship and I feel that there is little
else to add. I am pretty sure Gramps would not be able to talk about it all in such a
relaxed and composed manner if there had been further emotional or any other kind
of involvement. So I remain convinced that, though the Flautist might have felt a lot
more towards Gramps, it all stayed at a platonic level and, as far as Gramps was
concerned, his own respect towards the gentle murderer from the outskirts of
Gorizia was a case of genuine logic of survival, since it was pretty obvious that he had
a far better chance with the Flautist than without him.
A few times he commented on how these guys had a quite unintelligible way
of instantly recognizing each other in any situation in any place, and how they
adhered to an absolute solidarity that Gramps compared to that of the Communists,
the Church and, interestingly enough, the Yugoslav punk scene. With his
deliberations he tried to point to the fact that only the aforementioned networks in
Europe at that time transcended national borders, coats of arms, uniforms,
languages, nations, minorities, ranks, etc., because they did not use ideologies to
find reasons with which to justify the aggression exerted on their immediate
environs, but used ideology as a mimicry in setting themselves free. Below the
surface their game was played on a then still deeply intimate level, whilst above the
surface it was all about spectacular wars of huge ideologies. In this sense, what is
undoubtedly important and significant as far as Gramps’ fate goes, and something
that bears some significance in developments later on, is the fact that it was those
with illicit sexual tendencies who monopolized the organizing of military orchestras
in the Italian Army.
ANTHEMS
In 1939 Gramps returned from Africa and briefly came into town on leave. That was
when Prima’s tiny fingers felt across Gramps’ bristly chin and tanned face for the first
time and that was when they conceived Seconda – and just before he disappeared
for the next six years, Gramps in his Italian Army uniform turned towards Nan and
said that next time he stepped across the doorstep he did not want the Eyetie
bastard Nulta around.
Upon his return to the barracks, an order from the Headquarters of the
Italian Army awaited him commanding that all Slovenes and Croats should instantly
relinquish any responsible positions they held, which in practice meant that all ranks
and insignia were removed and they were sent to the Battaglione SpecialeLavoratori, the penal work battalion. Gramps and the Flautist ended up in the
marshes on the coast of Sardinia, swollen by the amount of water that flowed into
them from the mountains during the winter rainy season. The stagnant bogs with
the resulting mixture of fresh and salty water were ideal mosquito hatching ground.
In season they literarily covered mile upon mile from the coast towards the interior.
Without quinine malaria was just a matter of time and, although drugs
arrived regularly and in adequate quantities, the camp commander kept them under
lock and key and sold the quinine for his own profit. The commander, who turned
homosexual during the war, was trying to fulfil his wife’s wishes and was saving hard
for their new Roman-fascist style villa that was supposed to be built somewhere on
the outskirts of Rome.
God only knows where Gramps got his quinine from. God only knows
whether this move can be seen in any other light than the irrationality that was, at
the best of times, known to overcome Gramps when he sensed the possibility of
profit. The commander, of course, soon noticed that the sale of quinine in the camp
was visibly on the downturn and with either stick or carrot soon found out a name.
He barged into the sleeping quarters in the middle of the night with six fascists. They
started shouting at all the Slavic scum, switched on all the lights, tore all the nets
from the windows and ordered everyone to strip naked. The boys and men turned in
disbelief towards the windows from where ever thicker swarms of mosquitoes
poured into the room and literarily covered their naked bodies. On average they
received about two hundred bites a minute and kept their eyes tightly shut to try
and protect their pupils. Once the mosquitoes had virtually eaten them all alive, the
commander opened Gramps’ locker, took out the quinine, wished them all a
pleasant remainder of the night and left.
No one betrayed Gramps, but Gramps truly fucked up the whole lot of them.
People from town whose fathers served in the army with Gramps in Sardinia would
mostly say that in his place they would have taken responsibility for their own shit,
rather than pass it on to the shoulders of all the rest of them, already struggling to
get from one day to the next. Smeared with sand, mud, charcoal and anything else
they could find, they all awaited morning, hatching up plans for the following night
which bid no good for Gramps. But the following night never came. All swollen and
scratched to the blood, the co-sufferers listened to the order for the Flautist and
Gramps to report to the 69th Regiment formation in Florence. By the afternoon they
were on the boat, leaving behind a huge crowd of furious faces.
From this point onwards the pace of developments began to increase in both
frequency and irrationality. The move to the 69th Regiment was a jump from the
frying pan into the fire, for they were immediately boarded onto a ship bound for
Libya and from there sent to the Egyptian front where they found themselves in total
chaos. This was the result of a British counter-attack that ended in the capture of
over one hundred and thirty thousand Italian soldiers, the Flautist and Gramps
among them. In the English detention camp the Flautist, as usual, disappeared and
only returned after a day or two with some useful connection or piece of information
at least. When the young lad re-appeared this time, Gramps found out that they
were awaiting a ship that would take them back to Europe where they were to be
positioned in various Allied formations. But a day later the Flautist came along with a
six-foot English officer who asked Gramps in a velvety voice: You want to be my new
bass, Joe?
In the detention camp orchestra, dressed in British army uniform, Gramps
played God Save the King every morning under the British flag and had great trouble
trying to find out from a totally drunk trombonist, some pockmarked Irish guy, why
everyone without exception made way for the six-foot English officer. He found out
that in this orchestra no double bass player lasted more than six months, that they
seem to be a special fancy of this particular officer and that all the English bass
players were scared to death of him. Supposedly he had family ties high up in the
military structures, some rumours had it they reached as far as the General
Headquarters so, rumours or no rumours, he was untouchable. Who would have
expected that Gramps would be saved by Rommel who mounted a swift attack with
which he regained all lost territory, including the detention camp and all the
prisoners. The Germans returned a number of them to their original formations,
some were integrated into their own support units, a whole load of them ended up
in the minefields and others were made to dig tank entrenchments and carry
ammunition in the heat of the day or clean the tank guns and the latrines. Gramps
and the Flautist ended up in the supplies unit eighty miles south of Tobruk.
According to my information the bass player of the German orchestra was sent for
recuperation due to third degree burns. The cause is no mystery in this case. It was a
banal case of alcohol-induced carelessness, drinking and playing with petrol around
the fire. Gramps only played Deutschland, Deutschland über alles dressed in German
army uniform under the German flag for a few weeks. Then the British re-occupied
the area.
This time round the British decided not to leave matters to luck, since with
Rommel luck was not something you could count on, so they lined up all the
Yugoslav soldiers and called them individually into the office, where they were
shown a newspaper on the desk in front of the officer. On one page it had a large
picture of Tito, and on another an equally large picture of Draža Mihajlović. Each
soldier had to choose between them and no one chose wrongly. Tito was the ticket
back to Europe. But just before boarding, the six-foot English officer appeared in
front of Gramps and pulled him out of the line. Gramps was so furious he wanted to
cry, but the following day news came through that the ship which Gramps was
supposed to have boarded was torpedoed by a German submarine, and though the
rescue teams arrived on the scene of the tragedy relatively soon, of the five
thousand men only just over one hundred and fifty survived. The reason was not the
explosion, but one of the largest shivers of sharks ever to have been noted. There
was talk of a blood spill nearing half a mile in diameter making the sharks go wild
and the few survivors splash around in fear and trepidation amongst half gnawed
torsos, limb parts and remnants of entrails, waiting for the jaws to start on them.
A couple of months later the six-foot officer disappeared and Gramps ended
up on an American ship that dropped them off in Naples. There all the Yugoslavs
were assembled in the Partisan headquarters and divided into groups. Having
completed a short training course with the British, Gramps was assigned to the
telegraphists. A month later they boarded a British navy ship and set sail for
Dubrovnik. The Partisan colonel lined them up in the middle of Stradun, the main
street in Dubrovnik, first collected their watches they were given by the British as
part of their essential telegraphist equipment, ordered a show of pockets and
collected absolutely anything of any value from there too, and then scornfully
started going on about African sons of bitches and lions and told them that whilst
they had been sitting under palm trees sunbathing their arses, rivers of blood had
been shed over here, how he did not give a rat’s arse about the Sahara and their
Morse code and how they should get ready to go through hell from dawn till dusk,
since this was where the real war was happening and not some afternoon tea party.
The following day they were driven to a hangar, full of shot down and broken down
propeller planes that they were supposed to repair, since telegraphists, through God
only knows what reasoning, were supposed to also know how to repair aeroplanes.
They lay around the hangar for a month or so and then a different colonel
interrogated each one separately to find out what they knew beside Morse code and
only a few weeks later Gramps started playing in a Partisan orchestra and returned
home in 1945.
He sat there with Prima in his lap without saying a single word. Undoubtedly
he was convinced that one could simply not take any more madness than this in a
single lifetime. That after what he had been through, he had become resilient to
madness in all its shapes and forms, that he had seen and experienced all it was
possible to see and experience in earthly life. He never anticipated what these tiny
fingers stroking his bristly chin would manage to bring out in him. The thought that
the worst part that always comes as the adverse to anything nice was still ahead of
him never crossed his mind. That the madness of this world, which he believed he
had depleted right down to the dregs, was but a weak approximation of the home
brew that awaited him in the future.