Four Names for One Place

The boundary commission had taken three rooms on the second floor of a shipping office on the Riva, because the shipping company had gone under in 1917 and because the rooms had good windows and a great deal of table, and Emil Vasari worked in the smallest of them at a desk that had been built for manifests and was the wrong height for everything he did on it.

It was March of 1919 and the city was full of men in four different uniforms being extremely polite to one another in corridors. Emil had counted, in a single morning on the stairs, a British major, two Italian carabinieri, a French engineer, an American with no uniform at all and a great deal of money, and a Serbian officer who had said good morning to him in Hungarian, which had been either a courtesy or a test and he had not worked out which by the time he reached the landing.

He was thirty-four. He had spent the war translating requisition orders for an army that no longer existed, on behalf of an empire that no longer existed, in a language that in this city you now used quietly and only with people you already trusted. His identity papers described him as a subject of a state that had been dissolved in November and no office in Trieste had yet decided what to write on the replacement, so he carried the old ones and nobody had stopped him.

The work was not difficult and it was not, most days, interesting. Draft articles came in from the political sections in French and English. He rendered them into Italian, into Slovene, into German, and where required into Hungarian and Croatian, and passed the fair copies to Miss Aldridge, who typed them, and they went into the box for the plenary, and he never learned what became of any of them.

What he was good at was not the languages, which any of eleven men in Trieste could have done. What he was good at was noticing when a French draft used one word in article four and a different word in article nine for the same thing, and going to ask, politely, whether the difference was intended. It usually was not. Four times in eleven weeks it had been, and each of those four times the person he asked had looked at him with an expression he had learned to file away and not comment on.

Colonel Aylward, who ran the section and who was the only person in the building Emil positively liked, had said to him in the second week: "Vasari, you have the single most dangerous job in this building and I want you to know I know it." Emil had asked why and Aylward had said, "Because you are the only man here who reads every version of every sentence, and there is going to come a day when you notice something that everybody else has arranged not to."

He had thought at the time that this was the sort of thing a colonel says over brandy in order to make a clerk feel important. He thought about it a great deal, afterwards, in the light of what happened, and concluded that it had not been that at all. Aylward had been giving him notice. Aylward had been giving him eleven weeks of notice, in a corridor, in English, in a sentence that could be denied.

The draft came up on the fourteenth. It was a section of the eastern boundary description, four pages, and Emil read it through once in French for sense and then began again at the top to work, and stopped at article eleven and put his pen down and read it a third time.

Article eleven described a stretch of frontier running along a watershed for some eleven kilometres, and it fixed the line by reference to three named places: a bridge, a chapel on a spur, and a village. The village was the middle point of the three and the whole eleven kilometres hung on it, because the bridge and the chapel were four kilometres apart and everything between them was decided by which side of the village the line passed.

The village in the French draft was called Saint-Esprit, which is a name nobody in that valley had ever used for anywhere, and which existed only because a French draughtsman had been handed an Italian gazetteer and had done what draughtsmen do. Emil knew this because he had been born four hundred metres from the church that gave the place its name, and had left it at nineteen, and had gone back twice since, and knew precisely what it was called.

It was called Sveti Duh by everyone who lived there, which is what it says on the church, in Slovene, cut into the lintel in 1704. It was San Spirito on every Italian map since 1866. It had been Heiligengeist on the imperial cadastral survey, because the survey was done in German and the survey is what the tax was assessed on. And it was Szentlélek in the registry of the diocese, because the diocese had been reorganised in 1868 by a bishop in Zagreb who had done his correspondence in Hungarian.

One village. Nine hundred and eleven people at the last census, of whom rather more than eight hundred spoke Slovene at home, and rather more than four hundred also spoke Italian at market, and perhaps ninety spoke German, and perhaps four spoke Hungarian, and every one of them without exception, if you stopped them on the road and asked where they were from, said Sveti Duh, and then, if you looked Italian, said San Spirito, and then waited to see which one you wrote down.

Emil worked through the rest of the article and left eleven blank and came back to it at the end of the afternoon with the window open and the noise of the Riva coming up, and did the only correct thing, which was to write a query slip and take it upstairs.

The query slip said: Art. XI. The place given as Saint-Esprit has four current names in four languages. Request instruction as to which form is to appear in each of the treaty texts. He signed it and dated it and put it in Colonel Aylward's tray at ten minutes past six, and went home, and slept perfectly well, because at that stage he genuinely believed it was a question about spelling.

The instruction came back on the seventeenth in a memorandum of four lines, unsigned, from the political section rather than from Aylward, and it said that each treaty text should employ the toponym appropriate to the language of that text, and that the translator should not concern himself with the establishment of names, which was a matter for the delimitation commission in due course.

Emil read it four times. Then he went and stood at the window for a while, and then he went back to the desk and made the four fair copies exactly as instructed, because that was the instruction and he was a translator and there was no part of this that was any of his business.

In the Italian text article eleven passed north of San Spirito. In the Slovene text it passed north of Sveti Duh. In the German text, north of Heiligengeist. Four texts. Four names. One line, north of one village, and every version identical in substance, and he took the copies up to Miss Aldridge on the eighteenth and thought no more about it for eleven days.

On the twenty-ninth a revision came down. Article eleven was reissued with the descriptive clause amended, and the amendment was in the Italian text only, and it was four words long, and the four words moved the line from north of the village to along the watershed above the village, which sounds like the same thing and is not, because the watershed above Sveti Duh runs south of the church and north of the mill, and the church and the mill are eleven hundred metres apart with the whole of the village between them.

Emil sat with the two Italian texts side by side, the one he had made on the eighteenth and the one that had come down on the twenty-ninth, and read them, and read the Slovene text, which had not been amended and still said north of Sveti Duh, and understood with a completeness that made him feel physically cold what it was that he was holding.

Two treaty texts. Both authentic. Both signed. One putting nine hundred people in Italy and one putting them in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the difference invisible unless you had the two languages, both, in front of you, at the same time, and knew a valley eleven kilometres long well enough to know where its watershed actually ran.

And nobody would have both languages in front of them. That was the elegance of it. The Italian delegation would read Italian and the Yugoslav delegation would read Slovene and the plenary would work from French, and the French text still said Saint-Esprit and still said north, and Saint-Esprit was a place that did not exist and could not therefore be contradicted by anybody who lived there.

He took it to Aylward on the thirty-first, in the evening, when the building was nearly empty, and laid the four texts on the colonel's table in order and said nothing at all, which he had decided on the stairs was the only way to do it.

Aylward read for a long time. He was a heavy grey man of about fifty-five who had been a solicitor in Shrewsbury before the war and had spent four years doing something in Salonika that he never once referred to, and he read the four texts twice through and then took his spectacles off and pressed the bridge of his nose with two fingers.

"How many people," he said. "Nine hundred and eleven at the census of 1910. Call it eight hundred now." "And which country do they want to be in?" And Emil, who had prepared for a great many questions on the stairs and not for that one, found he had to think about it. "They want the pass open in April," he said at last, "so that they can take the cheese down to Gorizia. They want the priest to stay. Eleven of them want to be in Italy very much indeed and about forty want to be in Yugoslavia very much indeed and the rest want the pass open in April."

"Yes," said Aylward. "That is what everybody wants, everywhere, and it is the one thing that is not on offer anywhere in this building." He put his spectacles back on. "Now. I am going to tell you what will happen, and I want you to listen to all of it before you say anything, because you are going to want to interrupt me at about the third sentence."

What would happen, said Aylward, was this. He would raise it, formally, in writing, tonight. It would go to the political section. The political section would establish that both texts had been prepared under instruction, correctly, by a translator following the instruction, and that no error had occurred. It would then be referred to the delimitation commission, which would meet in the spring of 1920, or possibly 1921, and which would decide the matter on the ground with surveyors.

"And in the meantime the treaty gets signed with both texts in it." "The treaty gets signed with both texts in it, and both texts are authentic, and the discrepancy sits in the record for twenty-five years until somebody needs it." Aylward folded his hands. "That is not a conspiracy, Vasari, and I want to be very clear with you about that, because you are thirty-four and you are about to decide that it is. Nobody in this building sat down and planned that village. Four separate men in three separate sections each did a small reasonable thing, and the sum of the small reasonable things is a trapdoor under eight hundred people, and there is nobody at all to be angry with, and that is very much worse."

Emil said, after a while, "Then what do I do." And Colonel Aylward looked at him for a long moment across a table in a shipping office in Trieste and said: "You are the only man in Europe who has read all four of those texts. I cannot instruct you to do anything about that. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that nobody has instructed you not to."