We were in Trieste for three days. It It wasn't as good there, although by then it had turned out that we still had enough money left from the foreign currency allowance that we had to cash in at home in those days to be able to eat freshly-baked pizza once a day if we wanted to. And eat pizza we did, twice in the three days we were there. In fact before that, in Venice, we had even had a sit-down meal in a proper restaurant, and we ate fish. Fish! At a table set out in a street, stinking of fish and garbage, we ate slowly, savouring it, with the sea canals beneath us, as everywhere in Venice, and we paid for it like Croesus; I even left a tip.

Trieste was already more sombre, the old yellow-and-black Austro-Hungarian Monarchy incarnate, after the joyfulness and colour of the Italian cities; this was a brutal re-acclimatization for the place we would soon be returning to. We tried to domesticate Trieste for ourselves—James Joyce had lived there, hadn't he? And of course there was the sea, and the trattorias that we saw the outside of; but the dismal high-rise apartment blocks did not evoke the Italy we yearned for, the one we had seen up until then.

In Trieste we stopped making love.

It wasn't there, though, that I decided we would have to split up. I had made the decision a week or so earlier, in Perugia, and we actually liked that town. There, I was my wife's husband for the last time. And we were able to express something of the sort to each other there. She said, with amazement, that our marriage, which had become a continuous nightmare, had come alive again in Italy, and that if we lived in a southern land we would not have any problems. This of course also meant that as we did not live there, there was therefore no hope. I too articulated something by the fact that I did not say anything. I remained not saying anything because it was something she knew all too well anyway. If two people do not adore each other in every way wherever they are in the world and whatever the circumstances, then they will not stay together long, and this must ultimately be acknowledged. It was there I decided at last to get a divorce. I should have made the decision four years before, but I was weak and did not have the courage to admit it to myself in time. She, meanwhile, couldn't help it, she was not mature enough to make the decision herself.

So Trieste, where we wandered around for three days, was depressing. On the first day we realized that we should not have gone there, but we had paid for the hotel room for three nights and couldn't let it go to waste. Once on our wanderings we strayed into a part of the town that was down by the sea; there was a dilapidated pier, long disused, and makeshift stalls on the open area, or rather the wasteland, there, where they were selling all kinds of junk from Eastern Europe, and scores of Fiat knock-offs with Yugoslav numberplates parked all over the place. They were speaking Serbo-Croat and Albanian. Not a word of Italian was to be heard. We strolled aimlessy amongst the trash on sale and I had a growing feeling of trepidation.

I said to her: we could be in trouble if we go home on Sunday.

She didn't understand.

I said to her: this is a weekend market. These people obviously arrived on Friday afternoon and will be going back to Yugoslavia early Monday morning. I'm sure not all of them will have come by car. They are smugglers, every one of them. They'll be making a rush for the same train we've got reservations for and we might not get a seat.

My anxiety was further fuelled by the fact that we had an Italian visa valid for one month and I didn't know what would happen if we overshot that one month, calculated with such precision, even to the minute.

Right, she said, we'll get to the station early.

I said to her, these are Shiptars, that's what they're called in Yugoslavia, Jules Verne wrote that awful novel of his about them. They're a dangerous bunch. They are still living in the Turkish era.

She was not too bothered by this information, and she hadn't read the novel by Verne.

We got to the station an hour early. My hunch had been correct. The crowd hanging about on the platform with their wares all packed up, their cases and their plastic bags, and speaking Albanian and Serbo-Croat, was big enough to fill at least six trains. When the train appeared on the other side of the platform, the crowd juddered into action.

By the time the train had pulled into the station, a pitched battle had broken out.

When the train came to a halt, the crowd charged at the carriages individually. It was an orderly attack, with no hand-to-hand combat and no bayonets, but an attack nevertheless. I fought like a madman. I shoved her onwards in front of me roughly and without concern for her feelings, so that she at least would get on that train; after all, I could speak several languages, I would be able to explain more easily than she to an Italian, Croat or Hungarian why I had over-run the time allowed on my visa. Battling on both flanks with my elbows, I shoved her by the rear up the steps of the carriage. It took five minutes of close combat for me to make it onto the train too by way of the legitimate entrance steps, by which time the Shiptars were pushing each other in through the open windows of the carriages.

Once in the corridor, it took me a further ten minutes to carve a way through to the compartment where she was sitting, and it was only the second compartment from the carriage door. By some miracle she had managed to keep half a seat free for me beside her, though how she did it I do not know—maybe her Soviet experience helped; that was no uneventful experience either—so I squeezed in beside her over the mound of human flesh.

The compartment had been designed for eight people, but there were at least twenty of us in there. There were ten people, both adults and children, sitting on the floor under our feet. We could not move. Out on the corridor, a fresh consignment of human flesh was arriving via the open windows, and another three crushed into our compartment as well. The train was still stationary, it hadn't left yet the station, but already there was no air. The stench of human bodies, the smell of garlic, tobacco smoke, nausea. We'd have to spend the whole night in that compartment until we got to Zagreb, I explained to her, because a lot of them will get off there, they work there as internal immigrant workers, slogging their guts out, thieving and pilfering.

It didn't look as if we were in for a very pleasant night.

I was certain that we were the only ones in that compartment, mugs that we were, who had a ticket and a seat reservation. Whether or not I was right never transpired; the Italian conductors avoided making an appearance or asking anyone for their tickets until we reached the border station, where, I imagine, they were just glad to get off the train. There is a war on, I acknowledged, but this time I did not say it to her. It was August ‘82, and in fact some world peace or other was raging just then.

The train set off, and we were on it. Victory. Opposite me sat an old woman, with a baby in her lap. Its grandmother, I thought. When the train began to move, the old woman lifted her dirty black top, she had nothing on underneath, and started to feed the baby from her drooping, bluish, withered breasts.

And when the baby had finished, she milked both breasts into a plastic cup in full view of everyone, and then set the cup down on the floor. The cup could not have fallen over; there were twelve people sitting compressed together at our feet.

The breastfeeding grandmother said something to us in Albanian, then she said it again in Serbo-Croat, smiling, almost apologetically, a crooked smile, spiteful. In the latter language I understood what she said: that the child was hungry. I felt unsympathetic and stayed silent, as did all the non-Albanians in the compartment. That was the first time that I knew something but kept it to myself. Had I kept things to myself at other times, all the time, everywhere, then I wouldn't have lived so stupidly and misguidedly.

The train must have been going about ten minutes when, as if by command, a commotion erupted in the carriage. Jeans appeared from the plastic bags that had been put on the luggage rack and the floor. Lots of them. They began to put them on. Men, women, children all began methodically to put on jeans. They sorted them neatly according to size and began by putting on the smallest, then the next size up, then the next, and the next, and again until they had put on the largest size. The breastfeeding granny opposite me put on six pairs under her wide skirt, while the girl of ten or so sitting next to her had eight. The men had fewer. They didn't have the colourful, wide skirts that covered everything.

No conductor or customs official braved the smugglers' train during the entire journey.

Some hard-looking young men were standing out in the corridor, and they kept looking into the compartment. Gradually it became clear that this was all one family, or rather tribe, and everyone was related to everyone else. it turned out that they basically spoke Albanian, which I do not understand, but using many Serbo-Croat words. Their mother tongue had degenerated, corrupted by the language of the political majority. When they spoke to us, non-Shiptars, — there was no reaction; there were five other anxious non-Albanians besides ourselves in the compartment—they used Serbo-Croat. That was the world language to them, and although the seven of us did not reply, I could see from their eyes that they knew we must have understood, because that was the world language. The existence of other world languages was completely unknown to them.

The half seat in fact turned out to be just a fifth of a seat, and we were not able to sit side by side on the one and one-fifth seats. We rattled on through the Italian and then the Yugoslav night, taking it turn-about to get up and go out to the corridor. It was not easy to get out to the corridor, because there too human flesh sat, stood, and squeezed close together. Every time we went out it involved a quarter of an hour's jostling. There was no animosity in response to our pushing and shoving; they simply did not move, there wasn't room to move. They understood our intention, but simply did not bother about it. We could not go out together, since then we would have lost our one whole seat. We stopped for a long time at the border, but not a single Italian or Yugoslav border guard or customs officer appeared. They knew only too well the reason why not. The Albanian smugglers' train was impossible to check, and so it was not subject to checking. It was outside the historical era in which they, the blessed twentieth-century Italians and Croats, God's chosen and favoured peoples, lived.

Around dawn it was my turn to fight my way out to the corridor.

I was standing on one leg by the window, not knowing where to put my other leg down amidst the throngs of human flesh, when a middle-aged Serbian woman latched onto me, speaking to me in Serbian, although I had not given any indication that I could speak any human tongue. She took a Serbo-Croat Bible out of her bag and prevailed upon me to repent. She belonged to some sect or other. And she went on and on to me, the numb targeted individual, thrusting her lunacies at me, she talked of the hellish fires of hell that would lap at me too if I did not repent at once.

I did not answer her at all. She just went on and on.

She spoke of the end of the world, the last judgement, and such like. Neither now nor then did I think she was not in any way right. But I did not answer.

In Zagreb the people stinking of six or eight pairs of jeans and several months of unwashedness got off the train. Still no conductor, customs officer, or border guard came onto the train. By then there was no need anyway. It was already morning. At last we were able to sit side by side in relative comfort, we the spouses who had been strangers to each other for a long time already, but not yet able to break free from each other, in our luxurious, blissful misery.

She was appalled, she was horrified, she was speechless.

But she nevertheless started to say that she thought the woman who looked about the right age to be a grandmother, who had already got off the train, was a grandmother, and she had been shocked when the woman started to breastfeed the baby.

I said to her, that woman is probably younger than you.

She didn't believe me.

I know I was right.

She was exactly thirty then.

She died eleven years later.

That baby is now seventeen years old. Or would be. That baby, and all the members of the extended family of jeans-smugglers who were sitting in that railway compartment have since been murdered, or are being murdered right now. And anyone of them who has not been murdered assiduously sets about murdering in his turn, for as long as he is alive, until he too is murdered.

Of all those who got on the train in Trieste, there were five of us who stayed on as far as Budapest.

I wonder now, in retrospect, at those five people in amazement; I wonder too, with new eyes, at the way we were, because our lot is to die an individual death, and to be individually mourned, in contrast to those who got off the train in Zagreb.

This is certainly true of my wife. She died at the right time, in terms of being mourned by lots of people, mourning nobody but her, the beautiful, unique person that she was.

It is a tremendous treasure, this, I now think, although I am also afraid that I may be mistaken at least as regards us, those still alive at the present time in my home country. But one thing is certain, it is the only real and lasting treasure that any human being can hope to acquire in his life.

Translated by Anna Canning