Earthly Remains

by Donna Leon

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Brunetti said, glancing around. Brunetti loved square rooms, which answered some sort of impulse towards harmony in him. The double bed was of dark mahogany with a high headboard, like the bed his grandparents had slept in. There was a long walnut desk against one wall, east-facing windows to either side of it, another window in the wall to his right, this one facing south. Curious to see what was visible from the first windows, Brunetti went to take a look. As he approached, light flooded across his feet, warming his sockless ankles. There was the water, and, he thought, Treporti just on the other side of the canal.

  He turned back to Casati, repeating, ‘It’s perfect. Thank you.’

  Casati smiled as he said, ‘I’m not the one to thank, Signore. It’s Signor Emilio, who called me.’

  ‘Then I thank you for coming to get me and for carrying my suitcase.’ Before Casati could speak, Brunetti added, ‘And for rowing so beautifully.’

  7

  The compliment must have pleased Casati, who lowered his head in an attempt to hide his smile. To fill the silence, Brunetti went on. ‘I’ve rowed – though only off and on – since I was a kid, and recently I went out again with an old friend. But I’ve seldom seen anyone so completely in command. I could have been in an armchair.’ He decided he’d said enough and feared embarrassing the other man.

  ‘Thank you,’ Casati said. ‘I value your opinion.’

  It was now Brunetti’s turn to be embarrassed. ‘I don’t know why you should, Signor Casati.’

  ‘You rowed with one of the best, so you know the difference,’ Casati said, a remark that confused Brunetti utterly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand.’

  ‘Your father,’ Casati said. ‘You rowed with him, didn’t you?’

  Brunetti’s mouth fell open in surprise he could not hide. ‘How did you …?’ he began. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘We won the regatta in 1967,’ Casati said.

  Brunetti stared at the other man. ‘Davide?’ he asked. ‘You’re that Davide?’ Without thinking, Brunetti crossed the room and wrapped his arms around the older man. ‘No, it can’t be.’ He stepped back from Casati and looked at him as though seeing him for the first time.

  ‘My father talked about you all the time, about that regatta and how you told him to take the oar at the back, and how you almost had a fight about it.’ Memories buzzed into Brunetti’s mind, and for an instant he could hear his father’s happy voice, telling about his day of glory.

  ‘He was the better rower,’ Casati said, then seemed to drift off to that same race, half a century ago. ‘We had a good boat, and that helped.’ He smiled again. ‘Old man’s chatter, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It was one of his happiest memories,’ Brunetti said. ‘Maybe the happiest.’

  ‘He didn’t have many happy ones after he came back from the war, I know,’ Casati said, then added, ‘I didn’t go to his funeral. My father was … and the doctor told me I should be with him because …’ He stopped and said, ‘Doctors.’ Then added, ‘I saw your mother once and tried to explain, and she told me I’d done the right thing. But I don’t know. My father had another week, but I didn’t know that at …’ His voice died away, and neither spoke for a time.

  Brunetti turned away from the other man, and walked over to the window and looked down at the garden.

  Unconsciously, Casati had slipped into the familiar ‘tu’.

  The window was open, the air perfumed by the flowers below. Brunetti, urban to his marrow, was incapable of distinguishing the scent of one flower from another, but the scent pleased him. He looked down at the garden and at second sight made out the pattern more clearly: variegated colours in the middle; then the straight lines of fruit and herbs down the two sides. He could see shapes that from here looked like stacked boxes; packing cases, perhaps. ‘What are those?’ he asked, pointing at them.

  Casati cleared his throat and came over to the window. ‘Flowers,’ he said.

  Brunetti laughed and said, ‘No, the boxes. What are they?’

  ‘Beehives,’ Casati answered and gave Brunetti a puzzled look. ‘Haven’t you ever seen them?’ he asked, continuing to address Brunetti as ‘tu’, and thus establishing that he was speaking not to the son-in-law of Conte Falier come out for two weeks, but to the son of an old friend.

  After some thought, Brunetti answered, ‘I don’t think so, but I probably wouldn’t have known what they were, anyway.’ He glanced down at the garden again and added, ‘They look like plastic.’ Brunetti knew, or thought he did, that beehives were of wood or straw.

  ‘These are,’ Casati said, sounding as if he’d been caught out in a lie. ‘I’ve got others that are made of wood.’

  ‘Down there?’ Brunetti said, waving down at the garden.

  ‘No, out in the laguna.’

  This made no sense to Brunetti. The laguna was salt water. Bees needed, he thought, land and flowers to find pollen. Come to think of it, though he’d read about them, he really didn’t know much about bees. But he did know that he loved honey.

  Curiosity got the better of him, and he asked, ‘Where in the laguna?’

  ‘Oh, on some of the barene,’ Casati said, suddenly sounding evasive.

  ‘But they’re just marshland in the middle of the water. Nothing can grow on them, can it? What happens when the tide comes in? To the hives, I mean.’

  ‘I’ve got the hives up on stands on the man-made barene because some of them are lower than the natural ones. So even when a high tide comes, the water doesn’t reach the hives,’ Casati said, moving away from the window and towards the door. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

  ‘I’d like you to find me something to do.’

  Casati’s eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m going to be out here for a while,’ Brunetti said, suddenly conscious of how long two weeks might be. ‘And I’d like to do something physical.’

  ‘Such as?’ Casati asked, honestly puzzled, then suggested, ‘Ride a bicycle? Go jogging?’

  Did he look so irredeemably urban? Brunetti wondered. ‘No, more like work. I don’t know, chop firewood or work in the fields or help you if you have to transport goods.’

  Casati surprised him by asking, ‘You’re a policeman, aren’t you?’

  Usually, when asked this, Brunetti tried to make a joke of it, but Casati was very much in earnest, and so Brunetti answered, ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Does that mean you don’t talk about what you do?’

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘And if I ask you not to?’

  Immediately worried that he was going to be caught up in semi-legal activity of some sort, Brunetti answered, ‘Then I don’t tell anyone,’ but thought it more honest to be frank with him and added, ‘so long as it isn’t against the law.’

  Casati shook the idea away with his head. ‘No, it’s perfectly legal. I just don’t want people to know about it.’ That, Brunetti thought, could cover a wide range of actions.

  Casati looked at his watch and must have calculated something, for he said, ‘It’s almost twelve-thirty. There’s some lunch for you in the kitchen. If you eat now, we could leave in an hour, and we’d be back before five. You want to come?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, and went down to the kitchen to look for his lunch.

  At one-thirty promptly, Brunetti, now wearing his tennis shoes, left the house, telling himself not to worry about leaving the door unlocked, and walked down to the mooring place where Casati had tied up the boat. He heard the older man before he saw him, shifting something around in the bottom of the boat.

  He noticed that the water was higher than when they had arrived. He stepped easily into the boat, saw a second oar lying on the gunwale, the second fórcola in place on the left side of the boat. ‘Rub some of this on you,’ Casati said, handing him a metal tin. The label said it was dark brown shoe polish, and he wondered if this was some sort of miracle suncream known only to sai
lors: Paola would be amazed. He prised up the lid and saw that the label had got the colour wrong: the goo inside was beige.

  ‘It’s for the mosquitoes. Rub it on, and they won’t bother you.’ When Brunetti hesitated, Casati said. ‘My daughter made it: it works.’

  Brunetti did as told and rubbed it on his hands, arms, ankles, and neck: he could smell camphor, lemon, and something sharp and acid. He handed the tin back to Casati, who put it in a wooden box under the platform at the back of the boat and pulled out a pair of leather gloves.

  ‘Put these on,’ Casati said, tossing them to Brunetti. When Brunetti hesitated, Casati added, ‘I shook your hand. You’ll need gloves the first few days.’

  ‘First few days. First few days.’ Brunetti repeated the words to himself like an incantation while Casati cast off and pushed the boat away from the wall. Brunetti pulled on the gloves, a size too large for him. He picked up the oar and slipped it into the fórcola, tilted it and ran it knife-like through the water. The length and weight were familiar; without conscious effort on his part, his feet and knees adjusted to the boat. He turned to see where Casati was in his stroke, waited until Casati lifted his oar from the water for the next stroke and did the same. It took Brunetti a few strokes to adjust to the rhythm set by the other man, but when he found it, he relaxed and entered into the steady rhythm set by the man behind him.

  Brunetti looked forward, lining his sight with a distant object and aiming for that so as to keep in a straight line. ‘Bit to the left,’ Casati said, and the boat followed the words. Brunetti didn’t have to be told when the curve was finished; his whole being sensed when it was time to sight another object and row straight for it.

  As he rowed on, he began to feel the muscles in his legs and back react to the strain. As his hands ground against the wood of the oar, he felt a roughness inside the glove just at the bottom of his right thumb. To smooth it out – and he wasn’t sure whether it was the stitching or the beginning of a blister – he would have to take his hand off the oar. He rowed on.

  Bend forward, pushing the oar to the back, twirl it out of the water and bring the blade forward while straightening a bit, cut the oar into the water again, bend into the forward thrust, twirl the oar and lift it out.

  He thought of Levin in Anna Karenina, the scene where the city slicker goes out to cut hay with the peasants. Urban, out of shape, body howling with pain, but on and on Levin went, swathe after swathe, hands covered with blisters, seeing how effortless it is for the peasants, and when, dear God, can I have a drink of water?

  Levin had been harvesting hay, so the work he did made a visible difference. Brunetti, instead, saw only water, sky, marshland, more water, the occasional cloud. No colour, no sound, just a flat, dull horizon and endless water, always the same.

  Behind him, Casati said, ‘I think I’d like something to drink. How about you?’ He felt the slowing of the boat and heard the thump of Casati’s oar being set in the gunwale. He did the same, took the opportunity to look down at the shirt that clung to his body, and saw that the front was a darker grey all the way to the bottom. He stood up straight but was careful to do it very slowly, warning his spine what he was doing.

  He turned and looked at the other rower, and when he saw how small what he took to be Sant’Erasmo seemed, off in the distance behind Casati, Brunetti realized how far they had come. The older man pulled something from a wicker basket beside his feet and tossed a bottle of mineral water to Brunetti. He forced himself to open it slowly and gazed around before taking his first sip. How enormous the laguna was. No safe pavements, streets, places with names: only the veins and arteries of the laguna, disappearing with the tide, returning when it withdrew.

  The sun was his only sure way to tell direction: if it beat down on his left shoulder, they were heading north. He tried to remember the excursions he had made with his father, but his memories – not only of the geography – were no longer to be trusted.

  Burano had to be off to the left, he thought. He turned to look and, indeed, it was there, but farther off than he thought it would be.

  He tried to take small sips, but thirst overcame him and he finished the water, put the top back on the bottle and wedged it into the space in the gunwale. If that was Burano and they were heading north …

  ‘Are we in the Canale di San Felice?’ he asked Casati, hoping his memory was right.

  ‘Very close. It’s the next one to the east,’ Casati answered, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his brow. He wore no hat. Real men. ‘This is Canale Gaggian.’

  Brunetti shook his head to show he didn’t know it.

  ‘It goes north, too.’

  Brunetti shrugged his shoulders to show he still didn’t know the canal, then smiled to say it didn’t make any difference to him.

  ‘It goes to l’Isola di Santa Cristina.’

  ‘Ah,’ Brunetti exclaimed, recognizing the name. ‘It’s private, isn’t it?’ he asked without thinking.

  ‘Yes,’ Casati answered after a moment, and then, ‘But I know someone.’

  When he realized that this was the only explanation he was going to get, Brunetti said, ‘So we could go back the other way, past Torcello?’ He tried to sound conversational and completely at home out here.

  ‘Yes. Good,’ answered Casati and looked at his watch. ‘Let’s go. The tide’s changed, so we have about two hours before the water will be too low.’

  At the thought that they might be back at the house in two hours, Brunetti felt guilty relief. He had taken his watch off so as not to be conscious of time and calculated that they had been out for an hour and a half. So that meant they were more or less half done. Thank God.

  He put his oar back in place and waited for Casati’s stroke. When it came, he dug his oar into the water and headed for l’Isola di Santa Cristina.

  As the canal narrowed, they saw spoonbills ahead of them, waving their beaks from side to side in the mud as they searched for food. Instinctively the two men pulled in their oars and approached the birds silently, but one of them must have made a motion, for the two birds took wing and were gone in an instant. They continued and before long Casati hissed to Brunetti as they glided past four fledgling black-winged stilts, long-legged and fluffy, pecking into the mud at the edge of the canal. At their approach, the birds slipped under the overhanging vegetation and instantly became part of the reeds and stalks of dry grass.

  Some time later, Brunetti saw what looked like a clump of low trees to their left. ‘Is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Casati answered and gave a hard stroke which turned the boat in that direction. They ran along a low sea wall behind which stood a thick row of trees. About ten metres farther on, Casati stopped rowing and dug his oar into the water to slow the boat.

  ‘Pull in here,’ he called to Brunetti, who helped turn the prow by digging his oar into the water; they glided up to the side of the canal. Near the edge was a large cement block with a metal mooring ring. Brunetti pulled in his oar and tied the boat to the ring.

  Casati stepped on to the island and moved ahead to Brunetti. ‘I’m going to see my girls,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘Would you like to come and see them?’

  Without waiting for an answer, Casati extended his hand and helped Brunetti step up beside him, then turned away and walked towards and then into the small clump of trees Brunetti had seen from the water.

  Brunetti saw no girls, no matter where he looked. On the other side of this small island – they could have crossed it in minutes – was a house with closed shutters. Within and under the trees, they were surely invisible. As still were the girls. He saw a flash of white to his left and took a quick step away from it. But with a flurry of wings it moved faster and farther away: a duck, perhaps, but not a girl.

  In a small clearing at the centre of the small clump of trees, Brunetti saw a row of three wooden boxes similar in shape to the plastic ones he had seen from his room: red, white, green: evviva Italia. And then he heard
the girls: buzzing and whizzing and filling the air with their low noise. Brunetti stood stock still, afraid of the bees.

  Ahead of him, Casati reached into the pocket of his corduroy trousers and pulled out a large chip of wood and a cigarette lighter, then stopped and set the wood alight. After a moment, a small column of smoke rose from the chip. Casati waved it around them like a magician’s wand, and the bees slowed in a hovering trance. Casati turned to him. ‘Come on. They won’t bother you. Give me a hand,’ he said, his voice blurred by the sound of the bees, which intensified as they approached the hives.

  Casati moved off, and Brunetti followed, certain that the other man must know what he was doing. And indeed, the bees encircled them but ignored them. Casati continued to wave the smouldering chip, creating a safe path for them as the bees flew away from the trail of smoke, leaving it to the two men to follow the cloud of smoke through the tunnel of their whirling sound. Casati handed the chip to Brunetti, who continued to wave it around them in the same drifty manner.

  Slowly, the way Brunetti had seen drugged people move, each motion an arabesque, a caress of the surrounding space, Casati removed the top of the first hive and set it upright on the ground. He reached in and pulled out a wooden frame covered with bees: crawling, walking, slithering, insinuating themselves under and over one another, each touching the others in a harmony of gentleness.

  Casati waved Brunetti closer. His fear in abeyance, Brunetti moved beside him and looked at the wooden frame in Casati’s hand.

  ‘Do you see her?’ Casati asked.

  ‘Who?’ Brunetti asked. Bees, he knew, were female, so these were his girls. But which could be the Girl?

  ‘Look for the blue dot,’ Casati said, and for a minute Brunetti feared the older man ought to have worn a hat under the sun. ‘On the back of her head. That’s the Queen.’