What the Villagers Call It

He went up in the last week of May, on four days of leave that Aylward granted without asking a single question, which was its own kind of statement. The train to Gorizia, then a carter as far as the bridge, then eleven kilometres on foot with the pass still holding snow on the north faces and the whole valley smelling of wet stone and cut hay.

He had not been back in four years. The war had come within eleven kilometres of the village and had then gone somewhere else, which in that country counts as extraordinary luck and is spoken of as though it were a personal achievement of the community. The mill was working. The church roof had lost slates. There were four fewer houses on the south road than he remembered and he did not ask.

His aunt Marija was seventy-one and had buried two sons in 1916 and 1917 and greeted him with a slap on the arm and immediate criticism of his coat. She fed him for two hours. She asked after nobody in Trieste by name and everybody by category: the landlady, the office, the colonel, was he eating, was there a girl, why not, was it the coat.

He asked her, in the evening, when the light had gone yellow across the field behind the church, what she called the village. She looked at him as though he had gone soft in the head. "Sveti Duh," she said. "What else." "In the market at Gorizia." "San Spirito, because the man writing the docket writes San Spirito, and if I say Sveti Duh he writes San Spirito anyway and takes four minutes doing it, and I have cheese to sell."

"And on your tax paper?" "Heiligengeist, and it has said Heiligengeist since my mother's time and there is a stamp on it and if you change the stamp they lose the paper and then you pay twice." She was clearing the table and did not stop. "It has four names because it has four sorts of business. What is the matter with you."

Emil sat in his aunt's kitchen and tried to explain the treaty, and got about four sentences into it before he understood that he was going to fail, and kept going anyway for eleven minutes because he had come all this way. She listened to all of it with her hands in the basin.

At the end of it she said: "So the paper in Italian says the line is here, and the paper in Slovene says the line is there." "Yes." "And they will both be signed." "Yes." And Marija dried her hands on her apron and said, without any particular heat, in the tone of a woman confirming the price of salt, "Then in a few years somebody will come up the road and tell us which one it was. That is not new, Emil. My mother had that four times."

He went to look at the church in the morning because he had told himself for four years that the lintel said 1704 and had begun, in Trieste, to distrust his own memory about it.

It said 1704. It said, in Slovene, in letters cut two centimetres deep by a mason who had been paid by a parish that had raised the money over eleven years: the house of the Holy Spirit. Underneath, in the plaster of the porch, somebody had painted San Spirito in the 1880s, in Italian, in the ornate hand of the period, and it had faded to about a quarter and had not been repainted.

And on the door jamb, at about the height of a man's shoulder, was the imperial survey mark from 1876: a small iron plate, four centimetres by six, stamped with a number and a benchmark arrow, screwed into stone that had been there for a hundred and seventy-two years by an Austrian surveyor doing his job, and it was from that plate that the coordinates in Emil's schedule had ultimately come.

He stood in the porch of the church he had been baptised in and looked at three languages and one number on four square metres of wall, and understood the title of the thing he would never write, which is that every door in that valley was a country, and that the people who went through them four times a day had never once been asked.

The priest came out and was not the priest of his childhood, who had died in 1915, but a young man from Ljubljana who was extremely nervous of him for the first eleven minutes, until he worked out that Emil was not from any ministry, and then became enormously talkative and gave him coffee and told him the parish's problems in an unbroken stream for an hour.

The problems were: the roof, the school, four families who had not been to mass since the war, a dispute about the upper pasture, the roof again, and a young man named Kozar who had come back from the Isonzo without his left hand and who the priest was worried about and did not know what to do for. Not one of the problems was the frontier. Emil raised it and the priest looked briefly baffled and said, "Well, that will be what it will be," and went back to the roof.

Walking down to his aunt's afterwards, Emil realised that in four days nobody in the village had asked him a single question about the peace conference, and that he had come up the road privately expecting to be received as a man bringing important news, and that this said a great deal more about him than about them, and he was ashamed of it for a while and then, oddly, comforted.

He met Anton Kozar on the third day, sitting on the wall above the mill with his sleeve pinned, watching the water, and Emil sat down next to him because there was nowhere else to sit and because the priest had said his name.

Kozar was twenty-two and had been at the eleventh battle of the Isonzo, four kilometres from where they were sitting, which is a sentence that Emil had to hear twice. He had been carried down this valley on a stretcher past his own family's mill without being conscious enough to know it, and had learned that fact eleven months later from a man in a hospital in Ljubljana who had been one of the stretcher party.

They talked about nothing for a while, in the way of two men on a wall. Then Kozar said, "You do the papers in Trieste." "I translate them." "Is it true the frontier comes here?" And Emil, who had told the truth to a colonel and refused it to two delegations, found that the only person who had actually asked him plainly was a boy with one hand on a wall, and told him the whole of it in four minutes.

Kozar listened to the end. Then he said: "The mill or the church." "The mill or the church." "So if it goes the Italian way, we are Italy, and the road to Gorizia is open, and the pasture is across a frontier." "Yes." "And if it goes the other way we keep the pasture and the market is across a frontier." "Yes." He nodded slowly. "Then either way it costs us the same and it depends which one you need in a bad year."

"That is exactly right," said Emil, "and I have not heard anybody in Trieste say it in four months." "There is nobody in Trieste who has had a bad year up here." Kozar said it without any bitterness at all, as a fact of geography, and then he said the thing that Emil carried for the rest of his life: "The part I mind is not which. I have been in an army. I know they do not ask. The part I mind is that in ten years a man will come and tell me I have been in Italy since 1919 and I will not be able to say he is wrong, because I will not have anything with the date on it."

Emil looked at the water going under the mill. "If there were something," he said slowly. "A paper, in an archive, with a date on it. From 1919. Saying what this place was called and exactly where it stood." "Then a man could take it to an office." "It would take years." "Everything takes years," said Anton Kozar. "That is not an objection. That is just what things take."

He walked down that evening past the four doors of four centuries on the south road and thought about the six typed copies going into four archives in two countries, and for the first time since the thirty-first of March he felt something other than sick about it. Not confidence. He never had confidence about it, not once, not in twenty-eight years. But the feeling of having put a stone somewhere it would still be.

His aunt walked him to the bridge on the last morning, which was eleven kilometres, at seventy-one, and refused four separate offers to turn back.

"You will not come again for a long time," she said, about halfway. "I will come at Christmas." "You will not. There will be a frontier and you will need a paper and the paper will take a year." She said it entirely without reproach. "I am not complaining. I am telling you so that you do not promise it and then feel bad. Come when you come."

He did not come at Christmas. He came in 1923, once, with the correct papers, which had taken fourteen months, and by then the school was teaching in Italian and the priest from Ljubljana had been replaced and his aunt had had a stroke and could not say his name but knew him perfectly well and was furious about the coat.

At the bridge she stopped and looked at him and said, "What is it you have done, in Trieste. You have not said. You came up here for four days and you have gone round the village looking at walls and you have not said." And Emil, who had rehearsed no answer at all to this, said: "I made a list."

"Of what?" "Of what places are called. All of them. In every language, with the survey numbers." Marija considered this. "And that is worth something?" "I do not know. Probably not. Possibly, in a long time, to somebody in an office." She nodded slowly, in the way of a woman who has been dealing with offices for fifty years and has views.

"It is better than nothing," she said, "and it is a great deal less than they owe us, and you should not confuse the two, and you will, because you are like your father." She slapped his arm. "Go on. And get a proper coat, you look like a clerk." He said that he was a clerk. She said that this was not a reason, which he thought about on the train for two hours.

She died in 1926 and he did not get the papers in time to come to the funeral, which he had expected for seven years and which was not, in the event, any easier for having been expected. The letter reached him in Trieste eleven days after. It was in Italian, because by then all official letters from the village were in Italian, and the village on the letterhead was called San Spirito, and there was no other name on it anywhere.