Books & Rough Business

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162 Books and Rough Business X So Pironti Editore had become an international house, one that people sought out. Authors, agents, friends or family—there was no predicting who might call or come through the door on Piazza Dante. I was roped into episodes such as I’d never have imagined. The response from the reading public, too, pitched and yawed. That’s how I recall these years, the middle ’80s, a period of ranging far afield, with more than a few stumbles. A typical incident took me to Zagreb, with a lanky photographer of the type people used to be call “dark Italian.” He had a lot of the African in him, Ciccio, and he stood out among the fashion-conscious cameramen working in Milan. Ciccio had a knack for capturing the personality, seizing those moments when masks and defenses came down. He got plenty of work up North, but I reached out to him on behalf of a new author, Karlo Stajner. I suggested that the photographer and I take a ride over into what was then still known as Yugoslavia. We went in pursuit of publicity, to be sure. I was bringing Stajner copies of the Italian edition of his book, and I’d seen Ciccio’s work in the country’s most popular journals, like Oggi. I believed that, if the photographer came through with images of his usual quality, one of these magazines would be glad to run a piece on Stajner and his autobiography. The title I’d given the book was 7000 Days in Siberia, and I still believe it belongs beside Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Publishers all over the world had brought out 7000 Days, but for the Italian edition, once again I’d gone the extra mile. I’d arranged for a touching preface by Danilo Kiš, an author often on the short list for the Nobel Prize. Kiš had a mixed background like Stajner’s—between the two, they combined Serbian, Montenegrin, Jewish, 163 Tullio Pironti Hungarian, Austrian, and Croat—and above all, an understanding of the isolation that Stajner had suffered, held prisoner up by the Artic Circle in far eastern Russia for an incredible stretch, from 1936 till 1956. Yet in the middle ’30s, Stajner had moved to Moscow from Sarajevo as a dedicated Communist, only too glad to work in the Party’s publishing sector. In those days, he wasn’t a writer so much as a copy-editor and typographer, and his idealism extended to his private life. He fell in love with another Yugoslavian expatriate, Sonia, the night they met. After a whirlwind courtship, they married, and half a century later, Karlo Stajner still considered this woman the great love of his life. But he and Sonia had only been together a few months—her pregnancy was just starting to show—when Stalin’s police came knocking. Stajner was hauled off first to the notorious Lubianka Prison, then to Siberia, convicted as a “counterrevolutionary .” At what passed for his trial, he was informed that he was lucky to escape a firing squad. After that followed his 7000 days in the Gulag, many of them with temperatures below -50 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet when Ciccio and I reached the writer’s house in Zagreb, we found a sturdy, smiling fireplug, seventyplus but full of energy. Happily Stajner trotted out his creaky schoolbook Italian, and so long as we were in his apartment he had a friend over to translate. Still, a lot of what passed between us took the form of gestures. He kept what was left of his hair trimmed close, little more than a spots of white lichen, but he was forever doffing the fisherman’s cap he wore for warmth, shaking it at us. When I unwrapped a copy of my Italian edition for him, he didn’t sound at all like a victim. “I’ve lived to tell the world,” he declared, smiling. “My comrades in the struggle, especially. I’ve lived to let them know how our dream of one brotherhood has been perverted.” Myself, I recalled the passages in his book that spoke of what writing meant for him. He’d described how the scraps of draft and diary he finished, day after day, had kept him alive in spirit. The act of putting his suffering into words made him a witness for better. Writing kept him a creature of thought, of hope; he was never reduced to what he called...