The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  “You shouldn’t speak so loudly . . .” she whispers. “You’ll get us dragged into the police station with talk like that.”

  “What are you afraid of? The police don’t see us as a threat. You’re just a girl with a cello on the street. They’re too stupid to even notice us.”

  Elodie looks around. What Lena said is true. The piazza is lined with women pushing baby strollers and a few men walking toward the post office. They are just two young girls carrying instruments, and easily blended into the scenery. No one takes notice of them at all.

  THREE

  Verona, Italy

  APRIL 1943

  As a child, Elodie fell asleep with music in her head. In the morning, she would wake and hear it, too. “Sleeping with the angels,” is what her father called it when your dreams were accompanied by song. But Elodie couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t hear notes while she slept. Her father played long into the night, when he thought the house was already asleep. Softly and quietly, he played a nocturne, or occasionally a quiet romance.

  He always stood near the tall paned windows that overlooked the street, his white shirt slightly unbuttoned, his violin tucked expertly underneath his chin.

  His playing was the lullaby of her childhood. She knew when he played Mozart that he was savoring good news, when he was nervous, he played Brahms; and when he wanted forgiveness from her mother, he played . She knew her father more clearly through his music than she did through his words.

  Like her, he spoke very little. It wasn’t that he didn’t have thoughts or feelings. If anything, he had too many of them. He didn’t have a quiet head. He felt things too deeply. Music had become a tonic for him early on in his youth, and he had learned to play three instruments expertly: violin, cello, and piano.

  Elodie’s mother, Orsina, was not a musician herself, but had fallen in love after hearing him perform.

  He had been invited to play in her native city, a labyrinth on water. A place where in winter, the fog merged with the sea. Orsina’s father knew the feather of every bird and made a living from all things ornithological. He traveled three months a year to places as far away as Africa to collect rare plumage for his hat store, a jewel box known to the city’s most fashionable at the corner of San Marco’s Square. Ostrich, peacock, and yellow and blue parrot, every journey brought home a trunk full of feathers, each one more exotic than the last.

  Orsina couldn’t forget the sight of her mother’s beautiful bed, laid out in feathers. Silky plumes layered in abundance; a feather coat of turquoise, lapis, and green. It was her mother who took her father’s extravagant bounty and transformed them into the beautiful hats that filled the windows of their store. Her narrow, tapered fingers were so delicate and nimble as they sewed dozens of seed pearls, silk corsages, and thin wisps of veil. Orsina learned the styles early from her mother: cloche for the ladies and the English tourists, broad-rimmed for church and weddings, and the flapper headbands with beads and white feathers for those who liked to dance. In her mother’s workroom, there were always tall stacks of fashion magazines her father had sent from Paris so that his wife could be kept abreast of the latest styles. Orsina spent her days leafing through the pages, dreaming beyond the lagoons of her own childhood, to places like France, where there was a different kind of light. Cities where one didn’t float but were beautiful all the same. She imagined them like confectionary sugar, air-spun and light as gauze.

  Orsina had not expected that it would be a concert in I Gesuiti that would cause her to leave Venice. But her life took on another path, when one Friday evening, shortly after her twentieth birthday, her parents closed their shop early and took her to hear a rising young violinist play. It was at that concert that she found herself transported by music and entranced by the musician who played before her.

  She and her parents walked that evening to the church, her father in a dark suit, her mother in a pale lavender dress; a cloche hat the color of plum blossoms framed her face. Orsina had chosen something wholly different; she wore her hair loose and a yellow dress made of the lightest chiffon.

  As they settled into the wooden pews, the sounds within the church seemed to shift. Gone was the somber atmosphere of a Sunday Mass. It was as if the pale gray and celadon marble, with its intricate patterns and lace cut from stone, was electrified. Excitement and anticipation now filled the holy walls. No one glanced at their prayer books. Instead they all craned their neck to see the dashing violinist tuning his strings.

  Soon he stood with his instrument at his side and smiled modestly as the church’s cultural director proudly introduced him as the latest virtuoso from Verona. The audience clapped and Elodie’s father began to play.

  Elodie loved the description her mother often told of hearing those first notes.

  “Like magic,” she said. “I had seen feathers all my life, and his notes seemed like feathers floating in the air. Arabesques of movement that made my head spin.” Her mother always gasped for air after remembering the moment so intensely, as the memory literally took her breath away.

  “When he played a Beethoven Romance the audience was enraptured. Your grandfather tapped me on my leg and told me: ‘You’ll always remember this, the first time you heard genius!’

  “But I already knew I would never forget it. I was completely intoxicated by the music.” Orsina always smiled at this point and took another breath. “And I knew that the man who could create such beauty was the man I wanted to love.”

  At this point, Elodie’s father would laugh and reach toward his wife’s hand.

  “I’m glad I’ve always played my violin with my eyes closed . . . Had I seen your mother in the front pew, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders and her eyes as green as tulip leaves, I would have forgotten every single note. I’m thankful I saw her only after I’d finished playing.”

  Orsina beamed. “I told your grandmother that I wanted to learn to play like that. But she shook her head and told me that such playing could not be taught. That is a kiss on the head from God.

  “The line was so long to meet your father after that concert. The cultural director himself had to stand between him and the crowd.” Her mother’s black hair was now streaked with wisps of gray, but Elodie could always still see the young girl beneath whenever her mother laughed.

  “I saw you right away, Orsina,” her father said. The years melted away from his wife’s face as he saw her once again standing there in front of him for the first time. The pale lemon dress, the jet-black hair, the sparkling eyes. He remembered with great sweetness how her hands trembled as she handed over her program for him to sign.

  “He took me from my beautiful lagoon,” her mother would now say, so many years later. “But I have no regrets.” But sometimes, on very hot nights, Elodie could detect a wistfulness in her mother’s voice. There was a parchedness, a thirst within her words. And when the summer bore down its horrendous heat, Elodie could hear her mother’s words like an elegy, sad and full of longing.

  “It’s the dryness of the heat here. I’m not used to it . . .” Every summer brought the same lament. Elodie would watch sympathetically as her mother took a handkerchief to wipe her forehead. “I grew up surrounded by water. Inky blue. Green and black. We marked the seasons by the height of water, the mist, and the fog. As a child, my first memory was the touch of water. My first taste was the salt from the sea.”

  Elodie knew her mother had tried to fill her life with all things beautiful, and that she saw life through a unique prism. A pair of optimistic eyes. One only had to shift the angle to reveal another facet, to radiate another beam of light.

  She filled their house with flowers. Venetian vases the color of ribbon candy were abloom with lilacs in the spring and roses in the summer. She prepared comforting food from her childhood: baccalá and polenta. Risotto steeped in squid ink and Burano cookies, which her father had loved to dip in sweet
wine. But music she left to her husband and daughter. The only time Elodie ever heard her mother sing was when she was alone in her bath.

  Does everyone have a song? Elodie wondered if even those not blessed with a musical gift still had their own melody somewhere locked within. Her mother’s voice emerged only when she was shoulder deep in water. It struck Elodie like the gentle hum of honeybees, modest and sweet. It floated over the steam of the bath. She saw her mother’s hair piled on top of her head. Her long neck like a swan’s, the angles of her well-chiseled face. She sang songs in Venetian dialect. Mostly love songs, but occasionally she would sing one of the melancholy ballads of the gondoliers.

  But it was the latest French songs that her mother seemed to love the most. Her affection for Paris had been the reason she had chosen a French name for her daughter. “Your name came to me like the notes from a harp,” she would tell Elodie. And she would smile at her daughter, knowing that although she had never yet visited that other city of bridges and light, she had created something with its own sparkle and beauty.

  Orsina believed that her singing was her own secret. Little did she know that on the nights when she excused herself to bathe, Elodie and her father would lock eyes. If they were practicing their instruments, at the sound of the heated bathwater being poured, they’d place down their bows. Then the two of them would sit back in their chairs and close their eyes. They did not rustle or even make the slightest sound. They just waited, like the audience at the conservatory, for Orsina’s voice to come.

  It emerged almost like a flute, her sweet voice floating through the door. Gone was any trace of parchedness. Orsina sang in a language her daughter didn’t understand. But Elodie intuitively comprehended every melody. Her mother’s voice reflected these subtleties in the same way Elodie interpreted her musical scores. Elodie now understood why Orsina had wiped tears from her eyes when she or her father played. She understood what it was like to listen to music created by a person you love.

  FOUR

  Portofino, Italy

  OCTOBER 1943

  “My name is Angelo,” he tells her, and Elodie is immediately struck by the sweetness of the name.

  Her sleep has refreshed her, and when she awakens, he is sitting in the small dining room. There is a long loaf of bread on the table and a small triangle of cheese. A carafe of wine and two glasses of water.

  She notices the paintings on the walls. Small, simple scenes of the water. A fisherman and his net, and a white house against a sea of blue. She finds his age is difficult to estimate. His hair is still dark, but there are the first wisps of gray. He is paler than the men she saw at the port. His eyes are a soft, dusty blue.

  There are books everywhere. On the shelves against the walls. On the small coffee table, stacked in threes, with shells placed neatly on top. She sees there is an open book on the counter, placed front down, as if he had stopped in midsentence.

  The sight of the books conjures up memories of her first encounter with Luca, and she finds herself wanting to cry, though she stifles the urge to do so. But it snakes up her throat and she pushes it down with such intensity that she feels it twist like a tornado within her belly.

  He lets her eat in peace, and she is thankful that he does not need to fill the air with words. In the silence, she hears only the sound of his knife cutting against the plate, or the snap of the bread as he breaks it in his hands. The quiet wash of water as he sips from his glass.

  These are sounds that she can tolerate. Their rhythm soft with a simplicity that soothes her. She hears her mother singing Venetian melodies in the distance of her memory. She closes her eyes and tries to quell herself with another’s song.

  She wonders if this man sitting across from her realizes that her mind is elsewhere. That as she breaks her bread and chews it into bits and pieces and sips from her water glass, just as he does, her body is her cloak of deception. It occupies the space across from him, it mirrors his in the simple ritual of eating, but her mind is far away.

  She travels through time and space. Extracting her spirit from her limbs, in the same way she used to pull music from an instrument that would otherwise have remained silent.

  First and always there is the image of Luca standing in his bookstore. His dark hair and canvas smock with two sharp pencils in the front pocket. His fingers smudged with newsprint. The smell of paper. The dizziness from a chamber of so many words.

  She tries with all effort to push these thoughts from her mind. Instead, she finds herself reaching for the small dish of salt, but her hands shake as she lifts it toward her. When she looks up, she sees her host has noticed this as well.

  She wants to tell him that she is not shaking because she is nervous. She is beyond that. It’s because her fatigue is bone deep. She wonders if that is how the elderly feel. So tired from the arc of their life, there is an almost instinctual urge to surrender. To finally give up and find rest.

  After dinner, sensing she is still weary from her journey, he asks her if she would like to take a bath. He is quiet and respectful, giving her privacy as he shows her the door to the small room with the deep, wooden tub already half-filled with cool water.

  She waits for him to bring her the kettle of hot water. Two more rounds will follow until the bath is sufficiently warmed, but the sight of the rushing water is a relief. She undresses with the door closed, and the simple ritual of removing her shoes and her skirt soothes her. She unbuttons her blouse and removes her slip and underpants. She does not look at herself in the mirror above the sink. She does not glance at the skin, now stretched taut and white. She places one foot in the water, then the other before she sits and pulls her knees to her chest. She closes her eyes and twists back her hair. Then, softly, quietly, thinking no one will hear her, she begins to sing. Not out of joy. But out of longing. Out of a desire for comfort. Just like her mother did, all those years before.

  FIVE

  Verona, Italy

  APRIL 1943

  From the age of eighteen, Elodie attended full-time classes at the Liceo Musicale, studying chamber music, music theory and later orchestra training. In the hallway, she would often pass her father, a professor there.

  But she began to notice slight changes in him. A look of strain, of increasing agitation, had replaced his former peaceful expression. He had believed the Liceo to be sacred, one of the few places where Fascism couldn’t penetrate. The saluting and the marches to show support for Mussolini, indeed all of Italy’s politics, had, for the most part, remained outside its walls. But the anti-Jewish laws enacted four years before, forced out every Jewish professor from his position, and Jewish students were no longer able to enroll. Elodie remembered with great clarity the day her father came home enraged and related how Professor Moretti had been told he could not even retrieve some papers in his office.

  Her father’s reaction came flooding back to her the moment Lena mentioned to her that she’d been privately instructed by Professor Moretti since she was seven years old. Moretti’s family had the apartment above Lena’s, and the two families had been friends for years. It was Professor Moretti who first noticed Lena’s musical potential, studying the young child’s hands, the expansion between the fingers, and her unique ability to follow complicated rhythm patterns, and had encouraged her parents to nurture it. Over the years, through private lessons after his regular day of teaching at music school, Moretti had taught Lena everything she knew, from first learning to hold her bow to mastering complex chamber pieces. Even now, her parents paid for her to have private instruction with him, giving him the chance to bring in a limited income to his struggling family, since he could no longer work at the school.

  One afternoon, after they had finished classes, Lena looked particularly upset.

  “What’s the matter?” Elodie pressed.

  Lena shook her head. “Things have become worse for the Morettis. They are practically starving. M
y mother tries to send them some soup and what few vegetables she can spare, but they are embarrassed by the charity.”

  She paused and then whispered, “I’m going to join Luigi tonight for a meeting.”

  Elodie didn’t understand her. “A meeting for what?”

  Lena shook her head. “Of people who want to stop all of this.” She took a deep breath. “Our country will be unrecognizable in a few months. Just wait, Elodie; you’ll see.”

  “You’re barely nineteen, Lena.” Elodie attempted to be logical. “You can’t exactly fight the Fascist army.”

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to watch as my professor is rounded up with his family and act like I’m blind to it.”

  “But you’re not going to do anything that could put you in danger, are you?” Elodie winced just imagining what the police might do to Lena if she were arrested.

  “Danger?” Lena smiled and her eyes looked like firecrackers. “Well, no one will help me get false papers for the Morettis until I prove myself to them. That’s why I’ve been helping them distribute materials. I hope to become a messenger for the group. That doesn’t sound too dangerous, does it?”

  Elodie looked at her friend, too shocked to utter a reply.

  “How about you join me, then?”

  “I wish I could, Lena.” Her words sounded so weak, that as soon as she said them, a slight sense of shame came over her.

  “It’s just . . . my parents have such expectations for my musical career, and I don’t have a stomach for danger.”

  Elodie could sense her friend cringing inside. She knew her answer, her evident lack of courage, was as repellent as the sound of broken strings.

  As the weeks went by, Elodie noticed a transformation in her friend. Music was becoming less important to Lena, and Elodie sensed the difference first in her friend’s playing. There was no longer the same connection between her mind, heart, and instrument. Now Lena merely recited the notes. The spirit she used to give to her viola was instead focused on her activities for the early Resistance. Every afternoon, she left Elodie after their studies and went to the art studio of Berto Zampieri, one of the group’s members.