The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  She had imagined many things about the city, like the gondolas, the mist, and the lagoon. And I Gesuiti, with its celadon and gray marble walls and dark pews, where Orsina had first heard Pietro play.

  What she could never have fathomed, however, was the sense that they had arrived at the end of the world. Waterways stretch like blue carpets waiting to be sailed, and pastel palazzos emerge magically from the sea. Beauty and decay seem to coexist, creating a sense of integrity that is both defiant and uniquely its own.

  The facades of the palazzos had remained splendid, even though their yellow and red pigments had faded and become pitted over time. The great buildings were like ancient trees whose rings came not from age, but from the incessant rising and falling of the tide. It was as if the city bore a unique wisdom: it knew it was wiser to live amid the ever-moving currents than to do battle against them with mere bricks and stones.

  “You’re carrying too much,” Orsina tells Elodie. “Let me carry your cello, at least. Let me . . .”

  Elodie shakes her head and tells her mother she is fine. A bag in one hand, her cello in the other, and the rucksack on her back. “Don’t worry,” she instructs. “I promise I won’t tip over.”

  “Where are we going?” she asks Orsina.

  Orsina pauses to look at her daughter. “Someplace safe.”

  They dip into small alleyways and reemerge into the light. They walk across bridges and see starving cats in the corners and iron balconies draped with bougainvillea and laundry lines.

  Up in the sky, the sun is beginning to set.

  “Castello,” her mother finally says. “We will find Valentina there.”

  Above a small, shuttered shop that read “Hats for Sale,” they find a buzzer with the last name “Scarpa.” Orsina rings the bell. It is now almost dusk, and a woman opens the shutters from above. She looks down and searches among the shadows.

  “Who’s there?” she asks. She does not recognize the older woman with the red valise or the girl with the cello.

  “Orsina Moriani,” Elodie’s mother replies, looking up toward the window.

  “My God,” Valentina utters. “Come up . . . I can’t believe you’re finally here.”

  On the top flight of the stairs, an old wooden door creaks open and a small, delicate woman embraces Orsina.

  “Come inside, you two,” she says, and waves for them to enter.

  Elodie scans the room, amazed. Inside, it is a crowded den of scraps of material, wooden heads wearing felted hats, jars with feathers, and open boxes stuffed with beads and fake pearls.

  “It’s like old times, Valentina,” Orsina says, setting down her valise. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you . . . It’s a relief to see some things never change.”

  “Oh, they have, Orsina. Don’t let all the ribbons and velvet fool you.” The woman smiles and her face softens.

  Her age is difficult to pinpoint, though Elodie knows she is younger than her mother by the way the two women speak of the past. She notices Valentina’s hands as they flutter through the air punctuating her speech, like two little birds aloft.

  “I can’t believe you’re back in Venice after so long . . . Let me take your coat, your bags.” She speaks with considerable warmth and looks at Elodie with affection. “And your instrument, my dear . . .” She smiles at Orsina. “I see she takes after Pietro, no?”

  Orsina lowers her eyes. “Yes. Very much.”

  “And how is he?”

  Orsina doesn’t answer and Valentina crosses herself.

  “I’m so sorry. May God rest his soul.”

  She offers them what she has: some water boiled from the well. A bowl of unsalted polenta. “I’m sorry I have so little. The rations . . . We all have to get by now on so little here,” she says, again apologizing. “Some days it seems we exist on nothing but water and air.”

  “Like our city,” Orsina says smiling.

  “Yes, if we are to die of starvation, at least we will float away with grace.”

  Elodie watches as her mother and Valentina try to merge the last images they each had of the other from years before with the person now standing before them. They discreetly scan each other. The lines of the face, the condition of the hands, the wisps of silver in the hair. These are all clues to a life. Valentina’s hands are lined and rough, and show years of work and toil. And although her mother is older by a decade, the comfort of her life in Verona has made her look nearly the same age as Valentina.

  “It’s been over twenty years,” Valentina finally says. “Yet looking at you now, I still can see so many traces of your mother. She was beautiful in every aspect of her life.”

  “Thank you,” Orsina replies with tears in her eyes. “And she would be so proud of you, to see how you’ve managed to carry on with her work.”

  Orsina looks around at the apartment, cluttered with so many odds and ends. She remembered that Valentina had a unique gift. While some people could only see beauty when it was perfect and whole, Valentina could also see it in fragments. She was the rare person who could pick up a shattered piece of porcelain and find the art in it.

  “After the war began, I couldn’t keep up with the rent on the store. But I’ve managed to make some extra money with a little imagination. Venetians still want to be fashionable, even in hard times.”

  Elodie’s eyes travel to a black coat thrown over a chair near Valentina’s sewing machine. The inside of the coat was lined in a beautiful red silk.

  “Ah, you like that one, carina?” She walks over and lifts the coat from the chair to show Elodie. “You know where I got the lining for that?”

  Elodie shakes her head, her fingers reaching to touch the silk. The red was beautiful. It reminded her of the color that Francesca, the harpist, wore the night of the concert at the Bibiena.

  “From an old Italian flag! I found one in the trash heap; can you believe it? Probably some kraut tore it down and threw it in the garbage bin.” She clicks her tongue. “I’ve still got two more panels of the flag left. And I certainly can’t let them go to waste!” She lets out a small laugh. “I’m going to sew another coat with a green lining.”

  “You were always so clever!” Orsina says, complimenting her. She, too, took her fingers and reached to touch the lining of the coat. She was amazed that her friend had the resourcefulness to create something beautiful from something she had taken from the trash.

  “Oh, thank you!” Valentina says, her voice clearly showing her happiness in what her handiwork had produced. “If only I had access to more flags, we could all be wearing our secret allegiance in the linings of our clothes.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Portofino, Italy

  OCTOBER 1943

  Ever since Dalia’s death, Angelo had gravitated toward fragile things that needed extra care. He rescued the half-dead potted flowers from his sisters’ gardens. He fed stray cats. He sprinkled seeds for the birds.

  For every patient whom he knew had no money to pay him, he would still wake up in the middle of the night and go to his side. He never denied a single person—rich or poor, mean spirited or kind—his attention or his care. Even now, he still visited the German kommandant every evening with a small vial of insulin, injecting him so skillfully that the man had vowed never to return to Germany.

  “Here I’ve got the air, the lemon trees, the roll of the sea. And a doctor with a touch so light, I don’t even feel the needle!” He spoke Italian, but though his vocabulary was rich and his choice of words precise, his intonation still lacked the melody of a native.

  “We all want to return to the place where we’re born, sir. It’s part of the cycle of life,” Angelo said as he pushed up the kommandant’s sleeve and quickly injected him with the needle. The man didn’t wince.

  “No,” the kommandant said, rolling down his sleeve. “Dusseldorf or here? I chose here, thank y
ou very much!” He reached for another sip of sciacchetra and licked his lips.

  On a large marble commode was a gramophone. Classical music filled the air.

  “Do you like music, Dottore?” The liqueur had loosened him.

  “I’m not an expert. But I did go to the Theatro Carlo Felice a few times when I was in medical school.”

  The kommandant smiled.

  “And whom did you hear play? Do you remember?”

  “I don’t, I’m sorry. It was a string quartet visiting from Austria, but their name escapes me. I just remember that my friend and I could only afford standing-room tickets.”

  The kommandant laughed. “I excuse you. You didn’t get the full experience then.”

  “Well, my feet did.”

  “I’m sure. But music should be savored amid comfort.” He gestured to the paintings on the walls, the gilded furniture. Angelo knew the red house that the kommandant had taken for his personal quarters had once belonged to the Bassani family, and he wondered how much of the sumptuous belongings were actually theirs.

  But the gramophone was unmistakably German. The heavy wood case. The dial with the brass fittings. The best Italian versions looked like music boxes you opened, their covers inlaid with designs of mother-of-pearl in intricate designs. The kommandant’s looked like it would resemble a humidor with its lid closed.

  The music continued to flood the room.

  “Do you recognize this, Dottore? It’s by one of your country’s great composers.”

  Angelo couldn’t hide his lack of musical knowledge. “No. I’m afraid not. I plead ignorance on my own musical knowledge.”

  “Rossini’s Fifth String Sonata.” The kommandant smiled again. “You know, he composed that when he was only twelve years old.”

  “Incredible,” Angelo said, listening to the intricacy of melodies and instruments intertwined.

  “Indeed. Prodigies like that are few and far between.”

  Angelo nodded his head.

  “I played the violin for years, but my father played three instruments. We moved around as children and I always remember my father warning the movers that his instruments were more precious to him than the furniture.”

  “And what did you tell the movers when you were sent here?”

  “I told them ‘Heil Hitler!’ Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  The mentioning of Hitler’s name made Angelo’s blood turn cold. More than seven hundred kilometers south, in the boot of Italy, the Allies had already started liberating Salerno. The fighting in Rome was escalating. He wondered if the bloodshed would reach Portofino. He knew the boys in Cinque Terre were already joining the Resistance. He looked at his hands as the needle began skipping on the gramophone. No more notes floated into the air, only the sound of an ended recording. He was still holding the empty vial of insulin he had used for the kommandant’s shot. He placed it into his medicine satchel and clamped the bag shut.

  “I will see you tomorrow, Dottore.”

  “Yes, tomorrow. Of course. Do you need anything else?”

  “As a matter of fact . . . Might I have a few more of those sleeping pills . . .”

  “You are still having insomnia?”

  “Yes. I end up spending the whole night listening to records.”

  Angelo reopened his bag. “I will give you just a few . . .” He tapped out three tablets and handed them to the kommandant. “Only use them when necessary. They can easily become a habit.”

  The kommandant grunted.

  “How’s your cousin?” he suddenly asked Angelo, the words catching the doctor by surprise. “One of my men told me you had another visitor staying with you. This one’s quite pretty, I hear.”

  Angelo smiled, maintaining an outward appearance of calm. “She was not feeling well for some time, but the sea air is helping her recover.” He forced a smile on his face for the sake of appearances. “So she’s doing much better now. Thank you, sir.”

  The kommandant nodded and reached for his silver cigarette case. “How close a relation is she? A first cousin? A second?” He laughed.

  “Third, actually,” Angelo replied without any inflection. Inside, however, he could feel his adrenaline rising.

  “Well, that’s good,” the kommandant said, a grin coming over him. “It’s getting to be wintertime, and a pretty girl is always the best thing to hold when the weather gets cold.”

  Angelo left the kommandant’s villa unnerved. He hated to think that he was the subject of any village gossip and certainly did not want to rouse the suspicions of the few Germans who were assigned to patrol the area. Not that there were so many of them now that the high season had come to an end. Portofino was morphing into the ghost town it typically became after October. The German soldiers who came for their leave and filled the hotels the way the English tourists had for nearly a century, had since left to return to their units. The shopkeepers that kept embroidered linens and other souvenirs had since shuttered their windows. All that remained of the village activity was the one bakery and the grocery store, and even they kept limited hours.

  Angelo did not believe there was any suggestion on the part of the kommandant that he was harboring a war fugitive. If anything, his remarks smirked of sexual overtones. One benefit was that if the villagers were gossiping about him and Anna, no one had seen the girl outside of his house since she arrived. And thus, no one but Vanna and he had noticed her thickening waistline.

  Angelo had suspected her pregnancy from the first morning she stayed with him. He noticed how she could barely eat anything for breakfast except for a few morsels of torn bread, despite the fact that she clearly had been on the run from something and thus lacked access to food. How she fatigued easily. How she held her hands protectively over her belly, how her skin was luminous like a deep sea pearl.

  But it was Vanna’s sudden maternal overtures to the girl that confirmed his medical suspicions. She seemed to visit his house daily now, more often in the past few weeks than she had done in the past several years. Vanna now came almost as frequently as she did when he first returned from Ethiopia to the unfathomable news that he had lost his wife and child.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Venice, Italy

  SEPTEMBER 1943

  They are eager to leave. Valentina has been generous in giving them shelter, but she has little room to spare for long-term guests. A foot-pedaled sewing machine takes up most of one corner, along with a table piled high with bolts of material, patterns, and tins full of needle and thread. And while Orsina shares Valentina’s bed, Elodie has slept on the couch.

  “I need to stretch my legs and to get some air,” she tells her mother. Valentina cautions her to be careful. “The Germans are swarming the city. And it’s so easy to get lost if you’re not from here.”

  “Yes, let me go with you,” Orsina implores her. Orsina knows that, after a few walks, Elodie will be able to memorize the paths and bridges she would need to return back to the apartment. But until then, Orsina does not want Elodie out alone.

  Elodie agrees, and the women change their clothes to go out. Elodie, into a simple navy dress, and Orsina into a black one.

  Valentina looks at the two of them and frowns. “I’m not even going out,” she says, pointing to a pile of work she has to do, “and I still look more fashionable than the two of you.”

  Dipping into the back of the apartment, she returns with two cloche hats.

  “Here,” she says, handing one to Orsina made of burgundy felted wool with a black ribbon sewn around its edge. For Elodie, she selects a navy one stitched with a scattering of translucent beads.

  “Your mother would never have forgiven me if I didn’t offer you one of her hats for a walk in Venice with her granddaughter.”

  Orsina takes the hat between her hands and is comforted by it. The contrast between the stiff fe
lt construction and the delicate plumage instantly takes her back to her childhood, when she loved to touch all the beautiful things that flowed in abundance in her mother’s workshop.

  “Are these ones salvaged from the store?”

  “Yes,” Valentina replies. “I still have a few that I could never bear to sell. You should each have one. Elodie, in particular, should have something made by her grandmother’s hands.”

  Elodie goes to the oval mirror above the side table and places the hat on her head. She never wore a hat in Verona. When she was cold, she simply wrapped a scarf around her head. The hat makes her looked older, more sophisticated.

  “You look beautiful, Elodie,” Valentina says as she approaches. Orsina had already positioned her hat on an angle, like a natural. She goes to grab her purse.

  “You two should be careful,” Valentina cautions. “The Gestapo shot two gondoliers just a few nights ago. They claimed they were running guns for the Resistance.”

  Valentina clicks her tongue. “The poor boys. They were brothers. I don’t know how their mother will manage now.”

  Elodie’s eyes shift to the window just beside Valentina’s sewing table. A pale flash of light is streaming in through the narrow opening, which gives the dark, cluttered apartment the air of a Tintoretto painting.

  “Orsina, Venice will come back to you,” Valentina promises. “I’m sure as soon as you start walking, the pathways, all the hidden spots of beauty, will return to you as if you were here only yesterday.” She smiles. “But use caution. The Germans are patrolling in full force.” She shakes her head. “And avoid going through the Ghetto. There is terrible suffering everywhere in the city, but especially for the Jews. We should be helping them more.” She let out a deep sigh. “But fear has made everyone blind.”

  Several days have passed since they ventured out into the streets of Venice. Fall has cast the city in a veil of soft light and everything around them sparkles. The dome of the Salute church glimmers in the harbor. And the palaces on the Grand Canal are a bouquet of soft pastels against the chalk-blue sky.