The Clean Copy

The treaty that eventually fixed that frontier was signed at Rapallo in November of 1920, and it did not use article eleven at all, and it did not mention any of the four names, and Emil learned about it from a newspaper on a tram.

The line went where Bardi had wanted it to go, by a different route, in a different instrument, negotiated bilaterally between two states in a villa on the Ligurian coast with no commission and no translator's query slips and no schedule of toponyms. Sveti Duh became San Spirito, in Italy, on the twelfth of November 1920, and there was no ambiguity about it whatsoever and there never had needed to be.

Emil sat on the tram with the paper on his knees and experienced, for about eleven stops, the specific vertigo of a man discovering that the thing he has been holding carefully for eighteen months was never the thing that mattered. Bardi had not needed the amendment. The amendment had been an insurance policy on a question that got settled elsewhere by other means, and Emil had spent a year and a half of his interior life on an insurance policy.

He was, for about four months after that, extremely bitter, in a quiet way that he concealed successfully from everybody except Miss Aldridge, who said nothing about it until March and then said one sentence over the top of her machine: "You are sulking because the world did not arrange itself so that your document would be important."

He was angry with her for a fortnight and then went and apologised, and she accepted the apology in about four words and gave him a piece of advice that he wrote down that night and kept in a wallet through two more wars: that a paper filed is not an argument won, that it is only a paper filed, and that the entire value of it lies in its being there on a day you will not be present for and cannot imagine.

The commission wound up in the summer of 1921. Aylward went back to Shrewsbury and wrote twice and then stopped, in the way of men who have been kind to you in a foreign city. Miss Aldridge went to Geneva and then, eventually, to a job at the League that she was grossly overqualified for, and they corresponded four times a year for twenty-six years.

And Emil Vasari, who now had Italian papers because he had been in Trieste when the city became Italian and because a man in an office had written Vasari with one s and not asked, took a post as a translator with a shipping firm on the Riva, in the same building, two floors down, and translated bills of lading for eleven years and was, by most measures anybody uses, perfectly content.

The decree came in 1927 and it was four lines long in the Gazzetta and it required the restoration of place names in the eastern provinces to their Italian forms, and it abolished, as a matter of administrative fact, about nine hundred Slovene toponyms in a single afternoon.

It was not only the villages. It was the streams, the passes, the upper pastures, the field names that had been used by four families for two hundred years and that appeared on no map and were now, technically, not names. And it was surnames: there was a procedure, and it was encouraged, and in the eastern provinces a great many people found that encouragement had a texture.

Emil kept Vasari, which had been his grandfather's name and was already Italian enough to pass, and which he had not chosen and did not defend and about which he felt, for the whole of the 1930s, a low continuous shame that he never once put into words. Anton Kozar became Cosari on a document in 1929 and never used it and had it on his identity card for sixteen years.

The schedule was, by then, four years in the boxes in Paris and two years in a shelf in a building on the Riva that had changed hands and been cleared out. He went, once, in 1928, to see whether the eastern sector file was still in the building, and it was not, and the man in the office was pleasant and had no idea what he was talking about and offered to look in a cupboard.

He did not go back to the village between 1923 and 1946. There was no single decision about this. There was a year when the papers were difficult, and a year when he was ill, and a year when he had a reason he could not afterwards remember, and then the sum of the years became a thing in itself and got harder to break rather than easier, which is how that always works.

He married in 1931, a widow named Renata with a daughter of six, and was happy in a way that surprised him and that he was slightly furtive about, as though contentment in that decade were something you ought not to be seen carrying. Renata knew about the schedule. She was the only person in Trieste after Miss Aldridge left who did, and she asked about it perhaps four times in twenty years, and each time in a way that let him not answer.

The last time she asked was in 1943, in the autumn, when the Germans came into Trieste and the city became a considerably worse place than it had been, and she asked whether it had been dangerous, what he did in 1919, and he thought about it for a long time and said, honestly, "No. It was a translator's note. It was the least remarkable document in the building." And Renata said, "Then why have you never once forgotten it," and he had no answer at all.

He went up in September of 1946 with a permit that had taken five months and that described him as a resident of Trieste visiting family graves, which was accurate and had taken four separate offices to establish.

The road was the same. Four of the doors on the south road were gone with the houses behind them; there had been fighting in the valley in 1944 and reprisals after it and the village had had, this time, no luck at all. The mill was working. The church had lost the rest of its slates and gained a hole in the north wall that had been mended with concrete.

Anton Kozar was forty-nine and ran the mill and had two daughters and a wife from Tolmin, and he knew Emil at forty metres and came down the yard at a run, and neither of them managed to say very much for a while.

They sat on the wall above the water in the afternoon, which they had done once, twenty-seven years earlier. Kozar had spent 1943 to 1945 doing things he referred to once and glancingly, and had come out of it with the same number of hands and, he said, considerably fewer opinions than he had gone in with.

"They are going to draw it again," said Kozar. "There is a commission. There are Americans this time." "There is a commission." "And it is the same question." "It is the same question, and the same watershed, and the mill and the church are where they were." Emil looked at the water. "And this time there is no imperial cadastral survey on any shelf in this country, because it was in German and it was in Gorizia and Gorizia burned in 1944."

Kozar was quiet for a while. "Then how does anybody prove where anything is?" And Emil Vasari, aged sixty-one, sitting on a wall above a mill in a valley that had been in four states in his lifetime, said the sentence he had been not-quite-saying to himself since he read about the commission in a newspaper in June: "There is a paper in Paris."

He explained it. It took eleven minutes. Kozar listened all the way through, which he had also done in 1919, and at the end of it he said: "You made that in 1919. Before I asked you." "You asked me on a wall in May and I made it in April." "Then why did you make it?" And Emil said, "Because a colonel told me nobody had instructed me not to, and because it took eleven minutes and a ruler, and because I could not think of a reason not to." Kozar said that this was the worst account of a good deed he had ever heard and that Emil should practise it.

He wrote to Doreen Aldridge on the fourth of October 1946, at an address in Geneva that was twelve years out of date, and the letter reached her in eleven days because she had left a forwarding instruction with a concierge in 1938 and the concierge was still there.

The letter was two pages. The first page was twenty-six years of news, compressed, in the way of people who have written four times a year for a long time and never once about themselves. The second page asked one question: whether the drafting materials of the 1919 boundary commission, eastern sector, had gone into the archives of the conference, and whether they had survived the war, and whether there was any way on earth for a shipping clerk in Trieste to find out.

Her reply took six weeks and was four lines long and said that she would find out, and that he was not to write to anybody else about it in the meantime, and that she had never in her life been so glad to be asked to look for a filing box.

What she did, over the following four months, Emil only ever learned in fragments, because Miss Aldridge did not describe her own methods. She had been at the League for eleven years and then in London through the war doing something she never named, and she knew, in the way that a certain kind of person knows, exactly which four people in Europe could locate a box.

The box was in Paris. It had been moved twice, in 1940 to a depot at Chartres and in 1944 back again, and eleven of the sector files had been water damaged and four were missing outright. The eastern sector was intact. In it, third from the top, in a folder of drafting materials, were six pages typed on the twenty-second of April 1919 under the heading Schedule of Toponyms, Eastern Sector, with a date, and a provenance line, and eleven villages and four hamlets and nine watercourses and two passes and a chapel, in five languages, against the coordinates of the imperial cadastral survey of 1876.

Miss Aldridge's letter telling him so ran to nine pages and was the longest thing she ever wrote to him. Seven of the pages were the transcription. The last two were her own, and the final paragraph of them said: I have read it four times this week. I typed it in an afternoon in 1919 and I thought at the time that it was the only honest document I had handled in five months and I have thought so ever since, and I am seventy years old now and I would like the pleasure of telling you that I was right.

Emil read it at the kitchen table in Trieste in February of 1947 with his wife asleep and the harbour making the noise it makes, and he was not a demonstrative man and he had not cried since 1926, and he sat there for rather a long time.