The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

  Inside the paper bag for the bread there was a wad of notes. Paolo took them out, placed them on the counter, and said, ‘I believe these got here by mistake.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ the grocer replied.

  Paolo smiled, left the money there anyway and walked outside. As usual there was a bunch of locals, men mostly, at the bar of Greta’s along the street. They watched him go, he felt sure. But that wasn’t new. He was an Uccello and could always feel their eyes upon him as he went for a walk around their part of Castello, a middle-class intruder among the proletariat of the terraces.

  By the time he got back Chiara and Vanni Artom were sitting at the Jacquard looms. She looked cross. He seemed deeply amused.

  ‘We’ve met,’ Chiara announced before Paolo could say a word.

  ‘I must say,’ Vanni added, ‘your lady friend’s a wonderful teacher. She was on her own. I didn’t want her to be lonely. So, since we’re due to be working together, I thought it best if I came and asked her some questions. Chiara explains everything so much better than you.’

  ‘That’s because she knows so much more than me,’ Paolo replied and handed out a couple of cornetti for the three to break between them.

  The night before he’d taken a lantern into the workshop and, under the dim light, showed Vanni Artom the basics of how to use the Jacquard. Just the simplest task, pushing the weft yarn with the beater, allowing the loom and the punch cards to arrange the thread and form the pattern without any extra work on the part of the operator. The hard part, the cutting and shaping of the soprarizzo he never mentioned. That was for Chiara.

  Vanni kept clutching at his leg. How easy it was going to be for him to work hours on end … it was hard to guess. Mika had emerged from their bedroom and watched for a while, reluctantly and grumbling. Both listened as Paolo did his best to outline in a very rudimentary form the way the Jacquard worked. At one point when he explained the role of the punched cards in determining the pattern Mika had appeared quite interested. Their father, she said, had spoken of development on a similar system at Olivetti that might one day be used for automated calculating machines to do away with the drudgery of pen and paper and the abacus.

  All the same, when he showed her that the job of weaving velvet was entirely manual – pushing the beater, preferably to the goldcrest rhythm he’d learned from his father – she’d lost interest and returned to bed.

  ‘Enough cornetto,’ Vanni announced, standing up and brushing the crumbs off his rough, torn country jacket. It wasn’t warm in the workshop. The excess of conservatory glass made sure of that. There was still the slightest fragrance from the citrus trees outside which, with the briny tang of the lagoon nearby, made the place feel fresh and pleasant. Much worse could be found in Venice and in Mestre, his father had always said. Mills and factories where labourers slaved away in dark and cramped conditions for a pittance. Though now most of those were idle, waiting on what came next.

  ‘You,’ Chiara told Vanni, ‘can take the spare loom in the middle.’ She glanced at Paolo. ‘It wasn’t set up entirely correctly but I’ve seen to that. Do what I told you. The beater, nothing else. If a thread breaks I’ll hear it. If you make a mistake, I’ll hear it. If you slack or try to do something different—’

  ‘You have excellent hearing, signora,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m grateful to be your student.’ He tipped a salute to Paolo. ‘Grateful to be here. As is my sister even if she’s not always good at showing it.’

  ‘Less chat, more work,’ Chiara replied, then rolled up her sleeves and went to the left-hand loom, the better to watch the apprentice as he got down to the job.

  As the clatter of three looms began to beat a busy rhythm in the Giardino degli Angeli, two men met outside an old, genteel cafe on the campo by Giovanni e Paolo, the basilica older locals called Zanipolo. One was tall, with a shock of grey hair and a beak-like eagle nose. He wore a heavy black coat and stooped a little as if there were a weight upon his shoulders. The second was in the flowing black cape of a priest in winter. They greeted one another as if surprised, which they were not. Their caution was, perhaps, extreme. No one was likely to see a former surgeon in his sixties and a priest a decade and a half younger bump into one another by the equestrian statue of the bloodthirsty medieval warlord Bartolomeo Colleoni. Still, both felt the need to be careful. The assignation had been quietly organized after news of the safe arrival of Vanni and Mika Artom. Since then the men had heard only that Paolo Uccello had visited Gallo’s shop in via Garibaldi and been given supplies for three as arranged. Cigarettes among the pasta, cans of vegetables and cheap wine from the barrel.

  Garzone wondered if that was another curse he’d passed on to the rather sad and solitary Uccello trapped in his hideaway behind the walls of the Giardino degli Angeli: tobacco. He was little more than a lad. Still, there was more to care about than the state of his lungs.

  Three months on from the arrival of the Germans, Venice was on edge. Everywhere locals felt frightened and resentful of the foreigners who strutted the streets in their unfamiliar uniforms as if they were the new masters and would never leave. Most Venetians loathed Mussolini. Some of the older residents dreamily longed for the days their great-grandparents might have remembered, when Venice was a state of its own, an independent republic, not part of a reunified Italy. Now Il Duce was captive to Hitler and the Crucchi were in charge, it was difficult to decide where one’s national loyalties lay. With a king who’d fled Rome for the protection of those who’d invaded the country from the south and rained bombs on the industrial and military areas of terraferma day and night? Or to the Fascist dictator who’d got them into this mess in the first place and was now keeping his captive population tame through a more direct and personal form of terror?

  Principally, Filippo Garzone judged from quiet conversations in the confessional, people came to the conclusion that the primary responsibility of every sensible family in the city was to oneself and one’s relatives. If they had allegiances elsewhere, only those who knew him personally – partisans or the devout who quietly came to their aid – spoke frankly of them in the cold and airy depths of San Pietro di Castello.

  Over the past year there’d been plenty – men mostly, but not always – who, in the quiet of his small wooden confessional, had admitted to assault, the smuggling of weapons, even, on occasion, murder, then listened in silence, waiting for some word of comfort. Not absolution. He could never offer that. But these were strange, unbelievable times. He couldn’t always condemn them either.

  Diamante’s old workplace, in truth his own basilica, lay across the campo from the cafe where they sat down to drink their macchiati and eat pastries made thin and crumbly by the shortages of war. It was the hospital that spread out behind the façade of the former scuola of San Marco, the most beautiful entrance to a medical facility anywhere in the world, or so Diamante always claimed. None who saw it disagreed. Here he’d started work as a junior doctor in his twenties after medical school in Bologna. Here he’d worked diligently, seven days a week, nights too, caring for the sick, learning the complex administration of the medical facilities, some modern, some ancient, that ran all the way back to the waterfront with its views of San Michele and Murano to the north. Here, too, he’d risen to become a senior surgeon and administrator until the Racial Laws intervened and deprived him of his livelihood. A bachelor, Diamante had saved enough to survive, and still earned a little money treating Jewish patients in the city. Though mostly now he was occupied with other work.

  ‘Is there any word on when your friends may be moving to more suitable quarters?’ Garzone asked, dipping a dry and tasteless biscuit into his coffee.

  ‘None. I apologize. Is that a problem?’

  The priest frowned.

  ‘Hard to know until it arises. If the pair are sensible and stay behind Uccello’s walls, I don’t see how they can be found. It’s hard to think of a better hidey-hole. Few know about it. Even fewer think about it. The locals ha
ve never taken to the Uccello. So long as they stay out of sight. But men took them there. If there should be—’

  ‘My friends are doing what they can, Filippo. We’re all grateful for your assistance.’

  ‘Huh.’ He laughed at that. ‘What have I done? Put a lonely young orphan in great danger, against his instincts, I think. He still smarts from the loss of his parents. He blames the very side your friends are fighting for over their deaths.’

  Diamante stirred his empty cup.

  ‘The Artoms are fighting for a cause, not the Americans. From what I hear I suspect they’d prefer to be liberated by the Russians much more than a bunch of Yanks.’

  ‘Oh,’ Garzone muttered. ‘I don’t believe you ever mentioned that.’

  Diamante seemed puzzled.

  ‘Would it have made a difference? If I’d said they were godless communists whose last wish is to return us to the kind of easy-going democracy a pair of old men like us can just about remember? Would you have said no?’

  ‘Of course not. But I would like to have known.’

  ‘I assume your young friend feels the same way. He took them in, didn’t he? No going back from there. If he were fool enough to walk into Ca’ Loretti and hand them over they’d still shoot him for harbouring them in the first place.’

  ‘True,’ Garzone admitted. ‘And here we are, drinking coffee, chatting amiably as if it’s back before the war and we might be engaged in a friendly argument over whether La Fenice deserves its status.’

  ‘You’re a theatre man. You always prefer the Goldoni.’

  Back in the Thirties the two of them would come here for better coffee, better biscotti. Hour after hour they’d dissect the latest productions in the city, amateur critics both.

  ‘There’s opera now if you want it, Aldo. La Traviata, I believe. They’ll sell you a ticket, surely. They always seem to like Jewish money even if they don’t like Jews.’

  ‘That’s a little unfair. Since you’re not an opera man you miss the nuances. They put on Boito’s Mefistofele last month.’

  ‘So I read. Was it good?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t go. It was a subtle slight to Il Duce and his enslavement to his new master, Hitler, I believe. I admire their courage but to risk the wrath of the Fascists over a libretto and a piece of music seems a little rash to me. This is a time to stay out of sight. Not flaunt oneself with the Crucchi and their whores in the boxes of La Fenice.’

  ‘Understandable.’ Garzone took a deep breath and told him the one piece of news he had. An anarchist from the Lido by the name of Tartaglino had been arrested by the SS and tortured. ‘I heard they cut off his ears before they shot him. Did you know?’

  ‘No,’ Diamante confessed. ‘I’ve never heard of this Tartaglino. Was he part of any network?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware.’ The priest ordered two more coffees and let the waiter go back to the counter before he continued. ‘A strange kind of intellectual who lived on the Lido. An atheist. Or anarchist or something. An eccentric fellow with eccentric beliefs. Lord knows why they picked on him. I doubt he had anything to tell them except a few bizarre theories about Gramsci or some other philosopher he admired. I wonder …’

  He found it hard to say.

  ‘You wonder what, Filippo?’

  He stared his friend straight in the face.

  ‘I wonder what I’d do in those circumstances. If they picked me up and took me into that dump of a municipal building where I used to go to plead mercy for a parishioner who couldn’t pay their taxes. I wonder if they put me to the torture, whatever it may be, whether I’d truly have the courage to say nothing. Or betray everyone and everything to stop the pain. I’m a priest. I’m surrounded by images of martyrs wherever I go. But for the life of me I’ve no idea whether I would have the courage to be one myself.’

  Diamante said nothing.

  ‘I was hoping you’d have an opinion, Aldo.’

  ‘My opinion is that no one knows. Not until it happens. Personally I believe I’d allow them to go so far, then talk. And tell them such rubbish that it would be of no use whatsoever. At which point either they’d kill me or discover it was rubbish and resume. After which perhaps I’d try to take my own life—’

  ‘Which is a sin. For Catholics.’

  ‘And giving the Nazis what they want isn’t?’

  He always won the arguments they had. That was one reason Filippo Garzone admired the man.

  ‘You’re braver than me. The Jews have always had to be. The things we’ve done to you. The things we’re doing now, though God knows what they truly are …’

  Diamante smiled, reached across the table and took the priest’s hand.

  ‘Now that is nonsense. I’m a surgeon, remember. I’ve seen inside more bodies than most men could ever imagine. How does it go? “Hath not a Jew hands? Are we not subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means? If you prick us, do we not bleed?” It works both ways. You and I are no different. And remember I’m not merely a secular Jew. I’m an atheist. I’m amazed you even talk to me.’

  ‘I feel I should be doing something.’

  ‘You have,’ Diamante insisted. ‘And now you should do nothing. Very slowly. A month ago the Germans asked me to compile a register of the qehillà.’

  It was a word Garzone had never heard.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Qehillà. It’s what we call the Jewish community. Those of us who live within the city of Venice, from Burano in the north to the city, to the Lido. Even a married couple who live in Malamocco and an old man in the rest home in Alberoni, would you believe? They’re all my flock now since the Fascists decided I was to be its president. As an atheist this is rather new to me. Though on that subject …’ He glanced out of the window at the hospital across the square. ‘Deprived of my natural home I must say that the longer this goes on the more Jewish I begin to feel. It’s odd. Perhaps I will ask a rabbi a few questions one day. If there are any left.’

  The priest tried to think this through.

  ‘They want you to compile a list?’

  Diamante nodded.

  ‘Of everyone. Not just the ghetto. Every last man, woman and child with Jewish blood in Venice and the islands.’

  ‘That’s impossible! We have what … a hundred thousand-odd people in this city! The obvious apart … who’s to know who’s Jewish or not? Unless they volunteer and you’d need to be an idiot to do that.’

  Diamante stirred his empty coffee cup and slowly shook his head.

  ‘It’s not quite as hard as you think. Jews usually know who Jews are, even those who try to hide it. Relatives. Friends. People they went to school with. People they need to rely upon now they can’t do much without the help of other Jews. It’s not beyond the wit of man to find names. I gather the Germans are calling in assistance to make sure I do it right too. One of ours who’s crossed the road.’

  ‘No, surely …’

  ‘The fellow’s called Salvatore Bruno. From Turin originally. Though he sometimes goes under other names when pursuing his work. A notorious individual who’s travelling Mussolini’s small state pointing the finger right and left. Sometimes Bruno gains their confidence by pretending to be a partisan. Sometimes he drags them into a room where the Nazi torturers can do their work. Whichever way, the end’s the same. They go into a wagon, disappear, or simply die against a wall or on a hillside in the mountains. Then he gets his bounty. I’m told it’s usually seven thousand lire a head. Given his success he must be a wealthy man by now. The bastard’s on his way here, I gather. At some point very soon I’m to hand in my report for his approval.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Diamante looked around the room. They were the only ones there. No one could hear. It was more as if he didn’t want to say the words.

  ‘They round us all up, I imagine. Why else would they need a list? The end I don’t know in any detail. Only the beginning.’

  Garzone’s voice almost failed him.

/>   ‘Oh lord. What are we becoming?’

  ‘What have we become already and never noticed?’ his friend replied. ‘People are getting the message already. I do wonder if perhaps the Black Brigades are spreading it deliberately through their informers. To get us to move. To expose ourselves. To panic. Already some are trying to flee to Switzerland. A few make it through, those with enough money and the right contacts to bribe. Any who get caught are robbed, then shot on the spot. I gather a few brave souls are trying to make their way south beyond the German lines. You could try and take a boat down the coast from Rimini and pray the coastal defences don’t see you. Or the British or Americans blow you out of the water if you make it that far.’

  Garzone clasped his hand.

  ‘I’ll speak to people I know. We can get you out of here.’

  The old surgeon stared at him, shocked and jerked back his arm.

  ‘Are you serious? This is my home. The only one I know. I was born here. If anyone were to deny me the privilege of dying here I should be very cross indeed. Besides, they made me their president.’

  ‘The Fascists did that. The Nazis. What do you owe them? Nothing.’

  ‘I’m not running. I can’t—’

  ‘I beg you.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time.’

  Before the war their conversations could run for hours, covering everything from politics to football, opera to the latest exhibition in the Accademia. Now he could feel this one petering out by the second.

  ‘How long will it take you to compile this list?’

  Diamante laughed, then leaned forward with a conspiratorial wink.

  ‘Oh. I finished that last week. Give me a job and I do it properly.’

  ‘Do they know?’

  ‘Of course not. Do I look a fool? There are a couple of hundred very visible Jews among us. Many of the ones I know of are elderly. Few with the money to bribe their way out of this here even if that were wise. How can they flee? Where to?’ He leaned forward again to make the point. ‘Listen to me. You see the difficulty you have in keeping two communist renegades out of their hands? A brother and sister used to subterfuge and fighting? How can I do that with a middle-aged baker and his wife, their children in tow? Or a widow in her eighties who can barely walk?’