Prodamo
Migration | Fable 5
I. Pirano, May 1950
They argued with the shutters latched, because that spring even the walls of Pirano had learned a second language.
Nino was supposed to be asleep. He sat on the third stair instead, where the dark began, and watched the kitchen through the rails: his father’s hands flat on the table, his grandfather’s fist around an empty glass, his mother at the stove she had already scrubbed twice.
“Quindese generazioni,” nonno Bepi said. “Fifteen. There were Apollonios cutting salt at Sicciole before there was a Yugoslavia to run from. Before there was an Italy, if it comes to that. Mi de qua no me movo.”
“Then you’ll stay alone in a town that’s leaving,” Ettore said. “The Rossis went in March. The Viezzolis went last week on the night boat, the baby dosed with grappa so it wouldn’t cry near the patrols. Zorzi said one word against the cooperative and spent four days answering questions, and now he says nothing at all. You saw the election. One list on the ballot, and still they counted until morning.”
“Elections pass.”
“Schools don’t. Nino sits in a classroom copying words he can’t read, and when I asked after his old teacher they said transferred. Transferred where, nobody knows. The Trieste plan is dead, everyone knows it, and when they carve up the carcass we will be on the wrong side of the knife. Foreigners in our own kitchen.”
Nonno Bepi looked at the wall as if he could see through it, up past the alley to where the campanile of San Giorgio stood over the roofs, its archangel turning with the wind, small cousin to the one over Venice. His fathers had climbed that hill to be baptized, married, buried. He had assumed, the way a man assumes the tide, that he would be carried up it once more himself.
Anita ended it. She laid Nino’s winter coat on the table and turned back the hem to show her stitching, and inside the stitching, the flat shapes of folded lire and her earrings.
“I finished this Tuesday,” she said. “I was only waiting for the two of you to catch up.”
They went on the fourth night. Nonno Bepi came out of the house last. He stood under the lintel where some earlier Apollonio had cut A.A. 1601 into the stone, traced the letters once with his thumb, then locked the door and put the key in his waistcoat pocket, where other men kept watches.
From the water, Pirano gathered itself into a single shape: roofs the color of old flowerpots, the salt warehouses, the point with its lighthouse, and above everything the campanile, holding the town in place. Nino watched it until the light off the gulf made his eyes sting, and everyone in the boat allowed him the lie that it was the light.
II. Piran, July 2026
The heat in Tartini Square is the flat white kind that makes the paving too bright to look at. Giulia and Marco have driven down from Trieste for the weekend, thirty-five minutes with traffic, because the water is cleaner here and the calamari cost less.
Giulia stops at the realty office window on the way up toward the church. She stops at listings everywhere; it’s a habit. PRODAMO, says the placard, and beneath it, in Slovenian and English: apartment in the old town core, 92 square meters, third floor, preserved original details, €465,000.
The third photograph shows a doorway. Cut into the lintel: A.A. 1601.
“Marco.”
He wanders back, all sunscreen and boredom. She doesn’t need the photo enlarged. She has seen that lintel her whole life, in the one photograph that crossed the gulf in 1950 and in grandfather Nino’s telling. Third house from the well. Salt stains in the cellar. The flyer gives the address as Ulica IX. korpusa, named for a partisan corps. In the stories it was simply casa.
For a moment something in her leans, the way you lean at the top of a staircase. They could. People do. There is the agency’s number, there is her savings account, there is a version of her life lived behind that stone.
Then the agent looks up from her phone and mouths through the glass, in Slovenian, that she’s welcome to come in. Two kids pelt past arguing in Slovenian over an inflatable shark. The menus, the street signs, the radio in the gelateria: the whole living air of the town runs in a language her family never spoke. Buying the house back would mean emigrating one more time, to a country that happens to contain it.
Giulia shrugs, mostly at herself.
“Gelato?” Marco says.
They walk on toward the point, past the lighthouse, and below the walls the sea their great-grandparents rowed out across lies flat and shining to the horizon. The same water.