by David Hewson
‘Would you?’ He rapped his finger on the table. ‘I did the only thing I thought I could do at the time—’
‘You shot my sister in the back. I saw you—’
‘She’d killed a German officer in front of them all,’ Alberti cried. ‘She was waving that gun round like she’d do it again. She—’
‘Mika was brave.’
‘She was dead already.’ Then, more quietly, ‘I did the kindest thing I could think of. I put her down. Do you know what would have happened if they’d got her back to Ca’ Loretti alive? Do you have any idea? I do. I saw it. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. You wouldn’t have thanked me for that.’
‘And she’d have given you away.’
‘Maybe,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Believe it or not I really didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything back then, any more than she did. I saw the look in her eyes when she went for Oberg. She knew what she was doing. She knew the cost and she wanted it. She craved being some kind of martyr. I just saved her the agony of getting crucified along the way.’
He nodded at the gun, then reached for the glass again and took a long swig.
‘If you’re going to do it, do it now. Before my wife and kid get back. There’s a tarpaulin in the garage. You wouldn’t want blood on the seats of your nice new car.’
‘Will you tell her?’ he asked. ‘One day?’ He put the lion banner back in its box. ‘Will you show her this?’
‘No.’
‘What about your girl?’
‘Sophie? Nah. She’s four. Bright little thing. So long as the Russians and the Americans get along she’s going to grow up in a world where ordinary people don’t kill each other just because some big guy told them to.’ He thought of another drink, then pushed the bottle away. ‘Maybe when she has a kid though. Or that kid has a kid. They should know. Do you think we stopped it? Really? Do you think we can just shake it off and put it down to experience? Tell ourselves that’s what old people, primitive people do? We’re better now? We’re smarter?’
Straight away Paolo said he hoped so.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Alberti muttered.
‘My wife’s pregnant,’ Paolo added and didn’t know why. ‘She told me just before I left.’
The man across the table smiled and Paolo had to stop himself thinking, I could like him.
‘That’s good. Children make men of us if we let them. Took me two goes to learn that but I’m stupid. By the looks of you, you’re not.’
There was a long silence between them, then Alberti nodded at the gun and said, ‘The longer you wait the harder it gets. I speak from experience.’
He couldn’t stop thinking of Maria, back on her own in Venice. How he’d left her the day after she told him she was pregnant, driven all this way on a lie, intent on killing a man out of anger and vengeance, nothing more. He knew Mika. He understood they’d said farewell to one another that dreadful morning. If it wasn’t Alberti it would have been another, and perhaps in circumstances yet more cruel.
‘I can’t shoot you,’ he said, pushing the gun to one side.
Too late, Paolo saw the trick. An old cop’s one maybe. Or a collaborator’s. There was still that part of him inside.
Before he could do a thing Alberti snatched the gun, held it like a familiar thing, pointed the barrel in his face, arm straight, face cold and hard.
‘The longer you wait the harder it gets,’ Paolo said. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘You come here …’ Alberti snapped. ‘My home. I spend all these years working to put that shit behind me. You march in. Expecting what?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. And that was true.
‘Your sister would have shot me without a second thought. Shot my wife and kid too.’
‘I don’t know about that last part.’
‘You didn’t see what she did to that bastard Bruno. He was a mess of meat.’
‘I can’t forget …’
‘None of us can.’ Alberti was waving the gun around as if he didn’t know what to do. ‘Think about your wife. Your kid. The world they got coming to them.’
‘I’m trying …’
The man across the table shook his head. His eyes were glassy now.
‘Try harder,’ Alberti said. ‘People now … they’re already rewriting everything. Sanitising it. Saying, look the British won. The Americans won. We all lost. We always do. That’s what war means. There are never any winners. Here …’ He tossed the gun across the table. ‘Shoot me if you like. If you think it’ll make anything better.’
Paolo picked up the pistol and dropped it back in his bag.
Alberti wiped his eyes with his arm and nodded.
‘That’s a relief. We’ve got bookings next week. Need to clean this place up first. What are you going to do?’
There was only one thing when he thought about it.
‘Leave you here. With your memories.’
‘They’re our memories, Giovanni … Paolo … whatever I’m supposed to call you. They belong to both of us.’
He got a pair of scissors from the table drawer, cut Salvatore Bruno’s bloody banner in half, put one section back in the gilt box and shoved the other to one side on the table.
‘Take this with you.’
‘I don’t need it.’
‘You know what keeps me awake at night?’
‘Lots, I imagine.’
‘Not what you think. What keeps me up is this big conundrum. Here we are, we lived through it, and more than anything we’d like to bury all that horror, all that blood. Pretend it never really happened. But my little girl here …’ He tapped the table as if that made her real. ‘One day, if this all comes back, she’s going to need to remember. And all they’re going to tell her about are the heroes. People like you.’ Alberti jabbed a finger hard in his chest. ‘It’s me they need to remember too. Me. How do you square that one, Mister Bright Guy? How do you fix that?’
‘I’m no hero,’ he murmured. ‘I never was.’
‘Doesn’t matter. They’ll make you one. It’s all turning into a story now. A fairy tale. Good and bad. Black and white. Nothing in between. Except it’s the in between that matters.’
Paolo Uccello flipped the case shut, got to his feet and took out his car keys. Alberti went and stood in front of the door.
‘There’s no way I’m going to let you drive through the mountains at this time of night. Even in your fancy car. Too dangerous. I’ll make up a room. Laura will be home soon. She cooks this Swiss thing. Macaroni and potatoes and cheese and apples. You won’t get that back home.’
‘You want me to eat with you?’
Alberti opened his arms.
‘The fighting’s over in case you hadn’t noticed. But if you like it’s not unknown for guests to dine on their own.’
There was a sound outside. Tyres on gravel.
‘Please. We’ll talk about Switzerland. And Venice. Never the war, not with them around. No one’s going to say a word about that in here. Maybe it’s best they never do. I don’t know.’
He hesitated which was as good as a yes.
‘Oh. And if you could remember to call me “Ettore” that would be much appreciated too. OK … Paolo?’
The next morning, as the sun was rising over the great lake below, he set off for home. The three of them stood in the drive of their little hotel and waved goodbye, Ettore Romano, his wife, still bemused by the quiet meal they’d shared the night before, his charming little daughter. There was a gift, a piece of cheese from the mountains, in the boot alongside the gilt cardboard box which, later on, he hid behind something he bought at a souvenir shop near the border.
Ten hours later he parked in his private space in Piazzale Roma, bought an expensive bouquet of roses from the florist’s in the campo and a box of chocolates from the fancy shop around the corner.
‘Did you sell much?’ Maria asked as he took her in his arms on the steps of the palazzo.
‘Not a thing.’
Sh
e tapped his hand lightly.
‘A wasted trip! You don’t make many of those.’
‘It wasn’t wasted. Not really.’
‘Then what?’
He’d left the present outside as a surprise. She clapped her hands in delight and laughed when she saw it.
A wooden cot, old-fashioned, very Swiss, with rockers, hearts and carved flowers on the side.
The child to come was all that mattered. The life before them. And one more obligation he’d been thinking about all the long drive home.
‘I’ve been thinking of names,’ he said.
‘I thought we agreed we’d wait a while.’
‘I know. But I couldn’t stop myself. If it’s a boy … Giovanni. A girl … Micaela.’
She leaned on the outside wall. He knew that look. It was the same one she gave him when she first got sight of his ham-fisted attempt at bookkeeping. Puzzlement and curiosity.
‘What happened in Switzerland?’
‘I drove too far. Too fast. It was the car. Sorry.’
Maria placed her hands on the wooden cot.
‘I could like Giovanni. If it’s a girl we think again. Since we’re talking presents … what do you want on Saturday?’
‘Saturday?’
‘It’s your birthday! You’re the only man I’ve ever known who can forget the day he was born.’
He wanted to say it. To tell her. It wasn’t his birthday at all but that of a dead man, a friend, a brief lover who sacrificed himself so that he could live. But Alberti was right. His generation wanted to blank out the harsh memories of the war and replace them with the Technicolor fantasies that were filling the cinemas. Then, at the same time, plead with the next generation to remember the horrors somehow. To conjure them out of next to nothing.
Maria came close, smiled, kissed his cheek.
‘Such a strange husband I have at times. So what do you want? For this birthday you always forget?’
He didn’t know where it came from. Perhaps the memories of being a student in Padua, struggling to write before he possessed any story to tell.
A typewriter, he said. An Olivetti portable, the Lettera 22.
The kind of thing his father would have worked on if he’d lived.
That would do.
It was almost one in the morning by the time I finished the final piece of the jigsaw Nonno Paolo had left for me. At seven I got up, went for breakfast in some kind of hipster cafe that had taken the premises of our old, beloved butcher, came home and read it again.
Late that afternoon I walked to Piazzale Roma and took the 5.2 boat to San Pietro, walked through narrow streets I barely knew except from a story first told to me a long time ago by a man I loved. The basilica was as I recalled, as it was to Filippo Garzone too: vast, grey, not pretty at all. Any more than the white campanile that sat, leaning a little, in the dry summer grass in front.
There was a memorial at the foot marking the events of December the fifth, 1943, not new but shiny. Someone kept polishing it. Alongside a brief description of the massacre were the names of thirteen ‘martyrs’. The ten condemned along with Mika Artom, listed as a ‘brave partisan’, and two locals killed in the ensuing fracas. Next to that was a second, smaller bronze tablet dedicated to Father Filippo Garzone, naming him ‘righteous among nations’. This, it said, was an honour given by the ghetto of Venice to a gentile who risked his life to save Jews from the Nazis and the Black Brigades.
I stood in front of that curious white tower for a long while, waiting for their ghosts. But somehow they weren’t there, not in the way they used to be. Not shadows taunting me for my timidity, my fear, my inability to understand Nonno Paolo’s story and what it truly meant. Twenty years, perhaps a quarter of my life, had passed between him secretly handing on that tale of his and the day I finally found the courage to stand again on the spot his sister died as he watched, crippled, helpless, from the bridge across the canal towards the Arsenale.
It was a new bridge now, fresh wood, smart grey railings, as yet untainted by the harsh salt air. On the other side the walls of the Giardino degli Angeli gleamed a rich ochre in the late afternoon sun. The ledge which Mika had used to escape the place had fallen away and was far too sheer to cross in safety. On the side was a red and white sign for the Biennale: Il Giardino degli Uccello. People were milling over the smaller bridge that led through into the side of Paolo Uccello’s old home.
I fell in with the crowd.
A young woman was waiting at the door bearing a card with my name. She had very short hair and a serious, sunburnt face. There was a tattoo of the winged lion of Venice on her left arm and the scarlet design of a raised revolutionary fist on her right. With her ragged jeans, torn at the knee, and a white T-shirt bearing a loud anti-capitalist slogan she looked every inch the student revolutionary.
Valentina Padoan, it turned out, was a professor of twentieth-century Italian history at Ca’ Foscari and a published author.
‘I regret to say I’m a capitalist by birth,’ I said, looking at the message on her shirt as I introduced myself. ‘Please don’t throw a milkshake at me.’
‘I only throw them at Fascists. It’s an English thing. Milkshakes. My boyfriend came from London. Well the last one. Blame him.’
‘If I get the chance.’
‘You won’t. He’s gone. Besides …’ A smile did come then, quick, mischievous and very captivating. I could see how she could worm money out of Dad. ‘If you lot weren’t capitalists we wouldn’t have been able to sting you for all this, would we?’
She waved her arm at the garden behind. It was nothing like the grim collection of spare trees and grass and wreckage I imagined. There were ornate flower beds, tall rose bushes, patches of exotic lilies. Next to a newly paved winding path that led to the conservatory stood a classical stone fountain where nymphs danced over grinning dolphins and water bubbled out of a vase held by a naked Venus. Rising above the gleaming glass of our former weaving workshop was what looked like a new terracotta-tiled roof for the house. Beyond was the ruined octagonal sentry tower, its reflection rippling in the grey-blue of the summer lagoon. The horizon was marked by the low, shrubby outline of the little island of Certosa where a vaporetto was docking – something new, that had never happened in my day I felt sure.
The broken statues, the heads and shoulders and wings of the lost angels, were still there, scattered across the lawn. Signs by them said that, as part of the Biennale, they’d been decorated by children from local schools, each putting their names to the rainbow garlands and ribbons and crowns that adorned their brows and fractured limbs. Beneath the fruit trees tables and chairs were set, most of them occupied by people lounging in summer clothes, sipping drinks and chattering away.
I turned back to the gate and tried to imagine what it was like that distant winter day when a man called Luca Alberti, half-traitor, half something else, came here with a group of German soldiers after he’d shot Mika Artom. How they’d approached the glass conservatory only to see the man behind it shoot himself in the face, then miss altogether the fact that the partisan they really sought was locked away in the cellar.
Past and present seemed to sit together side by side now, in my mind at least. Those ghosts weren’t buried. They were a part of us all, shades locked to our footsteps, companions on the same journey.
She took my arm and showed me round. We walked through the conservatory where three looms – Jacquard they had to be – had been installed at the front as showpieces. A woman in a long, historical dress sat at the nearest fiddling with silk thread. Examples of classic Uccello velvet adorned the walls, framed like paintings. Next to them were photographs of Venice. It took a moment for me to recognize them. They were mine, shot that summer of 1999 with the camera outfit Dad had bought me. He must have found the negatives and produced new prints for the exhibition.
‘These were a gift from your father. The machines that made you rich. Your father gave us lots of nice pictures too. We’re very gr
ateful.’
I smiled at the weaver and, with a nod of permission, ran my finger along the old wood, the soft silk, and asked where on earth they’d found them.
‘Didn’t he tell you? They came from here originally. They were the ones they used during the war.’
‘I’ve been abroad,’ was all I could find to say.
The house was now a modern, trendy cafe. On the left side, where the real Paolo Uccello’s grandparents once slept, was a counter with a kitchen and storeroom behind. To the right ran a line of tables where a couple of young people tapped away at laptops beneath yet more of my photographs. Along the outer wall a panoramic glass window offered a view back to the basilica and campanile of San Pietro across the canal. It was all as pretty as a tourist postcard.
‘And this,’ she said, leading me to the steps, ‘is what we’re most proud of. We built it pretty much from scratch.’
I hesitated as we stopped at the top of a set of steep new stairs. The cellar.
‘Come on,’ she said and almost dragged me down.
It was now a basement floor for the cafe, with double doors that opened out to the platform over the lagoon where people could sit and enjoy the view. The breeze outside was welcome. I felt light-headed and she must have noticed.
‘Are you alright, Signor Uccello?’
‘My name is Nico. Please call me that.’
‘Are you alright, Nico? You look like you might faint. Or throw up. Neither of which would be terribly convenient right now. We have work to do.’
No, I said. I wasn’t going to throw up. But I did want a drink. A Negroni. A good one.
‘Good ones are all I make,’ Valentina Padoan told me. We went upstairs and she raced behind the bar to grab some glasses. ‘After that,’ she ordered while juggling the bottles, ‘I speak. You smile and cut the ribbon. Then …’ That smile again. ‘We can talk some more.’
‘Si, signora,’ I replied with a salute.
There was a small crowd outside. The mayor, or so they said later, and a few local politicians, though no one from the party of Maurizio Scamozzi. With any luck he was still smarting from the unexpected violence of a milkshake.
I should have known there was more to it than I was told. Valentina gave a brisk speech thanking the Uccello family for bringing their old home back to life for the benefit of the city. Then the Biennale for its help in providing artworks for the garden. Finally, the schools who’d decorated the statuary, which brought a round of giggles and applause from a group of kids in the audience.