Martin also found out that the attack had been planned for three whole days, secretly following them, by one notorious bandit with 38 men. He would not have attacked unless two army units had joined him – 94 men in total, to whom he had to promise previously that the division of the prey would be strictly based on the number of fighters, equal to everybody. The ambush was made in that valley, closed with Crn Kamen, a bit above the Veselova mountain and Mengulova Kula, at the very border of the Restelicki sinor, at 2.200 meters above the sea level, surrounded and almost wreathed with several strong and clear springs. This valley had no name until then, but it was simply called the Hole, but the next summer it became known as “Austrian Heads”.
Always running, always chased, with military and police behind their backs, the bandits did not even try to bury the killed. They had one casualty among them (Martin was convinced that it was the man shot by captain Trakl at the moment when he himself was hit), who was buried quickly near a spring (so that soul is not thirsty!), and four wounded, who were placed in the villages of the Ljuma region, where they had their informers. 162 men, the whole unit minus him, Martin Lupino, remained in the grass and flowers, at the disposal of the beasts, birds and the gradual organic disintegration.
The rare passers-by, shepherds mainly, avoided the place for a long time. Only several years later some of them dared to pass through the area covered with already whitened and scattered bones, turning their eyes away every time they would see a human scull in the thick grass or rich flowers.
Nobody still had their flocks grazing there, and the toponym Austrian Heads marked the place where one passes in case of utter need only, and even then quickly, without a word, with the needed grace.
Martin resisted the temptation to revisit the place of the event for a long time. Finally, in the summer of the third year of his new, gifted life, joined by Mursel, with whom he had a kind of almost mute friendship, he went to this awful pilgrimage. The bones had whitened in the strong mountain sun, wind, ice, rains, and in that clear day they shone almost like saint’s. He was particularly shaken by the skulls – those Austrian heads had really gotten some expressive energy that must have made even the simple shepherds choose the impeccable name for that place. Through the holes of those caves, once inhabited by souls, thoughts, plans, now there were only shrubs of grass, flowers; Martin remembered the story of the people who made idols out of their thoughts – captain Trakl had told him about the English philosopher Francis Bacon “Idola specus”, the idols of the cave, thought Martin then, and those were really idols of what is inside the cave called one’s own scull. The inhabitants of these sculls, those former homes of souls, moved away to who knows where, and everything that remained was indeed the desert of the empty caves.
He never removed this image from his memories, and he never returned to visit the Austrian Heads.
When he made a bit of money and when the news of the stabilization of the situation reached Rastelica, distant and lonely, Martin cooked a big lunch for the whole village, bid good-bye and told the people he was going home, to Italy. Martin waited for Bolzano with a shiver and mild fear. In his thoughts he hugged all of those dear places where he went with his friend Franciscus Trakl, filled with bitterness that opened under his heart when he thought that now those were places where his captain was no more, and he would never be again. He did not want to work at the same hotel and shortly afterwards, he moved to the region of Abruzes and Maremo, because of two reasons. First, he wanted to avoid meeting Franciscus Trakl’s parents and wife; he felt that his friend and captain would not like that anything else other than the official notice that they had already gotten is found out: MISSING!
Second, the fascinating energy of those areas seemed like such an important factor in their common destiny, that he believed that the inevitable meeting with Franciscus Trakl and all of his friends killed there can only happen at a place of approximate beauty. Central Italy with Gran Sas was the most similar.
There were two dreams, that recurred often and he wrote down couple of lines on them.
First dream: I saw her, by the waterfall, beautiful and fatal, standing and teasing, as the slim, deadly mushroom calls in the May dew. At the Dervish tekke I will wait for you, she said. And she rode a dorat horse under the oak tree. And all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of that heavy hair, as if when man steps in the thick
fragrance of the forest covered with secret herbs sprouting.
The meaning of these words could be felt in the fact that an unknown amount from some foreign country regularly came to Mursel’s address, whose beautiful daughter refused to get married for a long time.
Second dream:
Once I saw it, I have dreamt of it all my life!
In their heads there are the dreams of Croce and Hegel, the paintings of Raphael and Titian float, Michelangelo and Leonardo… and the big bears come, and silent wolves’ shadows, and fast foxes, and the ravens caw and the eagles hit with their powerful wings, and the bearded eagle circles! And they tear apart the Newton’s theories with their powerful jaws and they break the sculptures of David and they digest the frescoes of the walls of the Sistine Chapel with dissolving acids, the colors of the Renaissance masters leak from their bloody beaks, and Pico della Mirandola flies into the insides of the white headed vulture. And, in winter, the snow covers the empty caves without their inhabitants in layers…
… Once I saw it, I have dreamt of it all my life. And I know that those beasts and birds are tortured, they’d like to speak, to make it easier to themselves, I know that the paintings, sculptures, formulas and pages of many books dance before their eyes in their dreams, when they mate or hunt. I hear what they hear, and in my ears it echoes that Hegel and Leonardo speak through their roar and howl, their crowing and screeching, through their bears’ throats and wolves’ jaws, through fox’s snout, thorough the bony beak of the ravens and eagles. And only I can understand that mute language of the souls turned into beasts… And then I go there and I collect the remains of those paintings and books, fragments of screams and music, and I return them to the museums, to the basis, to the libraries, everything to its proper place, and they are all alive again, they shake my hand, and they leave somewhere to get some sleep, and the animals and birds bless me and joyfully chattering and crow and happily speak in their own languages only…
And then I wake up. And then I see the same thing, exactly the same thing, awake.
On the full meaning of these words only Martin Lupino could say the real thing. Both writings were sent to that same Mursel by mail, many years later, and not knowing what they might mean, he put them in a crack between two stones in the wall of a bacilo, when in late fall he left for the winter season with his flocks, home to Restelica, travelling as usual, along the longer way via Dedel-bey and Zendel-bey, circling around Austrian Heads in a broad line. Above that valley, the snow storm had already started. The snowflakes stuck to those empty caves where their inhabitants did not reside any more in hives.
Translated into English: Elizabeta Bakovska