Alma

The return to Trieste of Alma, who fled the city to start a new life far away, takes three days, and now she has returned to collect the unexpected legacy of her father. A rootless man who hated the cult of the past and its legacies, a father full of charm but elusive, who came and went across the border, not knowing what work he was doing there on the island, in the shadow of Marshal Tito’s ‘viper eyes’. In Trieste, Alma rediscovers a forgotten map of her life. She rediscovers the beautiful house in the plane tree avenue where she spent her childhood, thanks to her maternal grandparents, guardians of the Central European tradition, of cultured and worldly cafés, light years away from the noisy disorder of her home, ‘where people came and went and it seemed as if the clothes had never been taken out of their suitcases’. She finds the house on the Karst where they had suddenly moved and where Vili, the son of two Belgrade intellectuals who were friends of his father, had arrived. Vili, who from one day to the next entered her life and erased Austria-Hungary once and for all. Now Alma must receive her father’s inheritance from Vili, who has been ‘a brother, a friend, an enemy’. But Vili is the last person she wants to see again. The three days that culminate in Orthodox Easter thus become the watershed between what has been and can never return – childhood, freedom, her father’s Yugoslavia, the seductive air breathed in the shadow of the border – and what will be.