Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere Read Online Free Page B

miles north of the city, and so fell in love with the setting that when he married Carlotta, daughter of the King of Belgium, he built them this pretty folly on the spot.
    In a way it was a little like a romantic idealization of the empire itself, a fairy-tale mock fortress on this southern shore, and when I see it out there I am reminded poignantly of the passing of all empires, those seductive illusions of permanence, those monuments of hubris which have sometimes been all evil, but have sometimes had much good to them. In particular of course I am reminded of the Pax Britannica, which has been part of my life always, in fact as in imagination, and which originally brought me to Trieste—when I first came here a Union Jack flew in the Piazza Unita and British warships often lay at the quays (“They never seem to keep still,” I heard an elderly Triestino say to his companion, one listless August day, as they watched the Royal Navy incessantly scrubbing its decks and polishing its brasswork . . . ). The city was very poor then, in the aftermath of war, and I remember still as an imperial gesture the decision of a fellow officer of mine, as we sat together in a restaurant, to send some quite large sum of money, a few million lire in the nonsensical currency of the day, to two abject beggar-boys mouthing appeals outside our window—who pranced away down the street, delirious with delight, as if they had been rewarded by the King-Emperor George VI himself. Ours seemed to me a good empire then, and on the whole I think so still. Over the years I have learnt to look back at it only occasionally with shame (the fundamental principle of empire having soured on all of us) but more often with a mixture of pride, affection and pathos.
    For most of its citizenry the immense Habsburg dominion, too, was undoubtedly a happy enough construction—not for its subversive idealists, the nationalists and social reformers who found themselves ruthlessly suppressed, but for ordinary people who simply wanted to live in secure contentment. It was an autonomy of the stuffiest kind, but like Miramar it had charisma—the saving gift of grace. Its pomposity could be endearingly comical, and it had a gift for Fortwursteln , what the English called muddling through, which tempered its absurd obsessions about rules, ranks, regulations and forms of etiquette. Besides, in its apogee, which was also the apogee of Trieste, it did not work badly. Slow and laboured its methods might have been, but they gave people a comforting faith in the underlying competence and benevolence of Authority, however distant: and Authority itself, Authority almost in the abstract, was personified in the diligent figure of the Emperor, Franz Joseph the Father of his People, who went to his office in Vienna scrupulously at eight each morning, wore only a simple military uniform and preferred boiled beef and sauerkraut for his lunch. Many a simple citizen of Trieste doubtless thought of the imperial government, as did Joseph Roth’s character Andreas Pum, that it was like something in the sky—great, omnipotent, unknowable and mysterious. “Though it was a delusion that our fathers served,” wrote Stefan Zweig of his childhood’s empire, “it was a wonderful and noble delusion. . . .”
    At one time or another the Habsburgs had ruled many parts of the world, but their Austrian empire had no overseas possessions, despite the Emperor’s hypothetical kingship in the Holy Land. This empire thought of itself as embracing rather than commanding, of assimilating all its scores of constituent peoples into one imperial family—the lesser nations were nations no more, but “provinces.” The empire’s only shoreline was on the Adriatic, and traditionally the Austrian fleet was no more than a theoretical factor in the balance of Europe. This made Miramar even more a paradigm: the little castle stood there with a toe in the world’s ocean, fancifully.
    Trieste was one of the