But the door to the library was firmly locked, and no amount of jiggling would open it. Instead, I knocked on Frigga’s door and, after a moment, went in.
The overhead light wasn’t on, only a small lamp by the bed. Frigga stood, still in her Chanel suit, by the window watching the sunset over the Giudecca Canal. The gathering storm had brought piles of blue-black clouds, embroidered with gold thread.
“I was in Venice as a girl,” she said, half turning to see who it was, and then turning back. She spoke in German, and I had to strain to understand. “I came with my father and mother in the twenties. They were prosperous then, at least enough to take an Italian holiday. We stayed on the Lido, not here in the city. The city was thought to be unhealthy. We stayed at the Excelsior. I remember my father saying we would return here often. But of course we never did. The economy turned very bad, and my father lost his factory. I married. Hitler came to power. I sent my daughter to Vienna to study, to be safe. She was safe. For a little while.”
I’d charged in meaning to interrogate Frigga. After the tour of the synagogues, I hadn’t been feeling particularly friendly toward members of the German population. Now I took a seat on the bed. The room was quite dark; only Frigga, small and almost young-looking stood out, silhouetted against a window full of black clouds and streaks of color, was in focus. Speaking in her own language, not in haltingly correct English, she was clear and fully herself.
“What happened to your daughter?” I asked, when she said no more. My German was not brilliant, but it was good enough to understand her story. What I did not understand, the sadness of history filled in for me.
“Dorothea was a music student at the conservatory in Vienna. She married, quite suddenly, a Jew who was a fellow student. He should have left when he had the chance. But something happened, he did not. Shortly after, he was arrested. He died in Dachau a year later, though I did not find that out for a long time. He simply disappeared. Dorothea came home to me in Munich, pregnant. During the war she died in a fire. I took the child and moved to a small village near the Rhine, with relatives.
“Ruth was all I had. My husband was shot very early on in the war. There was no chance of remarrying. We were scraping to live, for years and years. Ruth was my life, and yet I could not stop her from suffering. She suffered to be an orphan, she suffered because she was a girl of much talent, she suffered because she was half Jewish. She grew up hating everyone. Her life was a tragedy. She could have been a musician like her parents. She had the skill and the temperament. If she had not lived in this village. If we had had money, or someone to help us after the war. Instead, she threw herself away, at only twenty. She threw herself away with a boy in the village who cared nothing for her. She was a sensitive, beautiful girl, like her mother. She had a baby, and the shame was too much for her. She killed herself.”
Frigga had wrapped her arms around herself tightly, and rocked back and forth. There was very little light now. In the distance there was lightning. The air was close in the room.
“I resolved I would bring up her little boy and do everything I could do for him that I had not done for Ruth. The times were better then. He went to an excellent school, he received a scholarship to study music at the university. He was a good and faithful son to me, who always called and who never went with bad girls. That is why I do not believe he was engaged to this Swedish woman. Not after knowing her only a week. He told me nothing about it.”
“Did he call you from Venice?”
“Oh yes, several times. He described it beautifully. He said I should come. I said, no, I was too old to travel. Too old to travel to Venice.” She laughed with some bitterness. She came away from the window finally and turned on a lamp. Our eyes blinked in the sudden light.
“You didn’t happen to call the evening he was…found?”
“I never called him,” said Frigga. “I didn’t have to. He called me.”
“But I heard his phone ring several times. I heard him talking to someone he called Frigga.”
She looked astonished and then hurt and then firm again. “But he would never have called me Frigga,” she said. “He always called me Grossmutter, just as Ruth had.”
Marco knocked and came in. He still looked worried. “You will join us for dinner I hope, Mrs. Reilly.”
“Sorry,” I said, looking at my watch, “I have plans for the evening. But I would very much like to speak with Anna de Hoog.” I scribbled down the name of the restaurant where the klezmer band was to play. “Perhaps she could join me there when she returns from the cemetery.”
I said good-bye to Frigga with more gentleness than I’d shown when barreling into her room earlier. Marco followed me down the stairs.
“You know, Mrs. Reilly, the police…”
“It’s all right, Marco. I won’t be telling the police what I know. I won’t reveal your deep, dark secret.”
I meant it for a joke, but he stared at me, shocked. “I have no secret.”
I felt sorry for him—conflicted about his sexuality, obviously in thrall to his father and Sandretti’s devious financial machinations, despised, perhaps rightly, by his strong-minded sister. “About Andrew,” I said impulsively. “I hope the two of you…”
But that seemed only to alarm him more, though he tried to hide it.
Giovanna and I had arranged by phone that Nicky and I would meet her at her aunts’ restaurant in a small campo near the Via Garibaldi, away from the main tourist areas near the public gardens. There we’d have dinner and then stroll over to the Ghetto to hear Roberta and her klezmer group.
Not surprisingly, Nicky was practicing when I arrived. It was something I recognized, one of those Vivaldi largos or andantes that separated the first and third allegro movements of just about every bassoon concert I’d ever heard of his. It did no good to ask Nicky which concerto it was, because she always said No. 18 or No. 12, which gave me no mnemonic clue. But for some of them, I had my own secret names; this one was “The Snake” since it had a lovely sinuous longing to it. I didn’t knock until she finished that movement; then I barged in. The first thing I did was to take my Canadian Mounties’ beret off the chair post and stuff my hair back inside it.
“Giovanna awaits,” I said.
“Right,” she said, tossing the bassoon aside and searching for her shoes, a newly purchased pair of silver boots with impossibly high heels.
“Nicky!” I said. “We’re going to have to walk.”
“I can walk. Besides, I adore these boots, and I need to erase the image of those hideous brogues from Giovanna’s mind.”
She ripped the beret off my head and started pulling at the sleeves of my bomber jacket.
“Hey, leave off,” I protested.
“I want to see you in a cape I just bought.”
She threw open the wardrobe and hauled out a long black velvet cape with a hood. It was beautiful, but it was her, not me.
“Cassandra, live a little. Forget the beret. Find your inner Venetian. Put on the cape, lass. See, you look exactly like me, especially with the hood over your head.”
“Oh, is that the plan, then?” I said.
“Well you’re the one who wants me to go out,” she said, tugging on the bomber jacket. “To go where I could well be recognized.” Panting, she tried to zip up the jacket.
“Don’t break the zipper!” I warned. I was quite liking the feel of the velvet, though I would never have admitted it. I threw it off and wrestled the beret from her head and the jacket from her back.
The rain still held off as we set out, but the air was violent, and the sky crackled. I was not going much faster than Nicky. After all, I had been on my feet nearly all day, had hardly had a proper meal, and was still carrying the conductor’s biography as well as the two novels in my satchel, and one of the novels was very heavy.
“Oh, just toss them,” Nicky said when I complained. “Tell Simon both of them are dreadful. He’ll never know.”
“The whole issue,” I said,
ignoring that suggestion, “is what sort of literature should be published. I’m being asked to decide, and I can’t. One of these is entertaining and one isn’t. One of these is profound, and the other is superficial, but with some feminist interest. But literature can’t just be entertaining.”
“Why not?” asked Nicky. She was absolutely the wrong person to discuss this with. She adored historical romance novels, particularly if they had dramatic Highland settings, and the men were called “the Bruce” and wore short skirts, and the women defended their castles with pots of boiling pitch. She’d probably love Lovers and Virgins.
“Entertainment is not enough,” I said. “It’s enough sometimes. You don’t want to hear the Beatles fully orchestrated. You don’t want Aretha singing Tosca. But serious literature is so much better. So much deeper. So much…”
“You take the high road and I’ll take the low road,” hummed Nicky.
“Well, you won’t be there before me in those ridiculous shoes,” I snapped.
“Oh, come along, Grandma,” said Nicky, pushing me on to the vaporetto at San Tomà and into a seat. “The best art is entertaining and serious. Like Vivaldi. Like Matisse. Like a big, beautiful woman wearing high heels.”
“With analogies like that, it’s a good thing you’re a bassoonist and not a poet,” I said, but “Grandma” had made me think of “Grossmutter.”
I told Nicky about my conversation with Frigga. As I talked I was conscious of a word or two lying just below the surface in my memory. Something someone had said, or that I’d read, that hadn’t quite jibed.
“That’s incredibly sad,” she said. “I couldn’t see Gunther for Bitten. It’s strange, isn’t it, how they both were marked by the war? Bitten lost her father in Dachau and Gunther his grandfather.”
We had the brightly lit Palladian rectangle of the Church of the Redentore on our right and the sweep of San Marco’s waterfront, the Molo, with its stairs leading down into the lagoon, its view into the Piazza, coming up in front of us. The front door of Venice, it had been called. It still astonished me whenever I saw it. Nicky didn’t look at the glorious view, however, but directly at me. I could see she was thinking over what I’d told her, and was worried.
Music students in Vienna. Attempts to get to London. Dachau.
“But Bitten’s mother, Jakob’s wife, was named Elizabeth,” Nicky said. “Bitten and Gunther can’t have been related, can they?”
“Gunther’s grandmother was Frigga’s daughter, Dorothea,” I said. “She didn’t go to Sweden, she went to Munich and died in a fire.”
“And she didn’t have a girl called Bitten. She had a daughter called Ruth, who was raised by Frigga.”
“In wartime, there must be so many similar cases,” I said uneasily.
“And anyway,” said Nicky. “Someone would have contacted Olivia if Jakob had had children in Germany.”
“Bitten’s mother never tried to contact Olivia.”
“There is no way Gunther and Bitten could be related—unless Jakob had two wives,” Nicky said. As soon as she said it, dismissively, we both thought of Gunther’s height and blondness, and how similar Bitten was. If Gunther’s grandfather was named Jakob, that would make him Bitten’s—what—half-nephew?
“If Bitten is Olivia’s granddaughter,” I said, as our boat began to travel along the length of the city to our stop at Giardini, “It’s amazing that she’s a bassoonist, just like you.”
“No, not like me, Cassandra,” said Nicky, almost harshly. “Because I knew Olivia, I cared for her, I loved her. Bitten never even met her.”
Sixteen
I HAVE FRIENDS who moon over picture calendars of rural Tuscany, and save their money to rent villas outside Florence for a week or two in autumn and return home with bottles of wine and freshly pressed olive oil and longings to live la dolce vita permanently. These Italy-worshipping friends would never think of visiting Venice. It’s too crowded, they say. It’s too expensive. It’s cold and haughty and damp and putrid-smelling. And, worst of all, it’s the one place in Italy you can’t even get a good meal.
But those people have clearly never eaten at a steamy little trattoria run by Giovanna’s aunts, two energetic ladies in their sixties who kept the dishes coming for a good two hours: artichokes served with lemon and olive oil, followed by pumpkin gnocchi with a sauce of butter and sage. For Nicky, the heartless carnivore, there was a tender slice of veal Marsala, and for me, a lightly grilled local fish. Giovanna was presented with an array of vegetarian plates: roasted eggplant, crisp green beans, white beans with black olives. The aunts filled our glasses with Pinot Grigio, and at the end of the meal brought plates of fresh figs along with golden vin santo.
The aunts clearly approved of Nicky. They liked her auburn ringlets and hearty appetite. They ran their hands over her silver lamé tunic and exclaimed when they heard she was a bassoonist. “Nicola, Nicolina,” they were soon calling her, while their tongues twisted on Cassandra. “Eat, eat,” they cooed, as Nicky cleaned her plate. They nudged Giovanna, “Another musician, hmmm?”
Giovanna took it in stride. Her little pink dress was gone, and, surprisingly, her strawberry hair had taken on a darker tint since this afternoon. She’d replaced her big green-rimmed glasses with wire-rims and was wearing a linen jacket over jeans. She had clearly tried to replicate Nicky’s respectability even as Nicky had gone in the opposite direction to match Giovanna’s earlier verve.
At the door there were embraces and kisses. The aunts handed Giovanna her violin case and our coats. They had Nicky in my leather jacket and me in her flowing velvet cloak before I could stop them.
“Relax, Cassandra,” said Nicky when I began to protest. “Your inner Venetian, remember.”
Outside in the small campo, the air was unstable, eager, and from an upper window came a woman’s voice, singing. With the wind flapping the cloak around me, we began to walk down the Via Garibaldi to the embankment that ran along the lagoon. Giovanna and Nicola, deep in a discussion of Vivaldi, linked arms. The camaraderie of musicians was something I’d always envied. Painters couldn’t paint together, writers couldn’t write; but whenever you got two musicians together, they always wanted to play something, sing something, even just hum.
We were strolling toward the Pietà. Over the last few days, I’d approached the church from the other direction, battling through tourists and vendors. From this direction everything was far less crowded; the heart of Venice, the Piazza, lay in front of us, but distant enough so that we saw only the lights, and didn’t hear the babble of language. The sound of Venice tonight was the gurgle of the lagoon waters against the stone retaining walls, the faint buzz of motor boats, Giovanna’s voice humming an example from some movement or other.
I caught up with the two of them in time to hear Nicky quoting, “‘The canals are crowded with musical people at night, bands of music, French horns, duet singers in every gondola.’ 1745, Dr. Charles Burney. He was an English musicologist who gave us a picture of Venetian musical life at that time, especially the women’s orchestras of the ospedali. I’m thinking about using his words in the opening scenes of the film, as the camera pans over the city in an aerial shot, with gondolas arriving in front of the Pietà.”
Only this morning the project had been a CD-ROM; in the library Nicky had begun talking of a video documentary. Now it was a film.
“You might show the audience going through the doors of the church of the Pietà,” suggested Giovanna. “Lots of talking and bustle. Eighteenth-century dress, gold and velvet and silk in the candlelight. Slowly we become aware of the girls, all dressed in white, in the balconies above.”
Nicky continued, “The camera focuses on the faces of the various girls as they tune up. The audience quiets. Vivaldi raises his baton. There’s a long close-up of one girl, a bassoonist, raising the instrument to her lips. And then another voice-over, in her words: ‘I never expected to find myself a performer in an all-women’s orchestra…’”
�
�And now a flashback to a room where her mother, a celebrated courtesan, is giving birth…” Giovanna made some baby noises.
“The mother gives her baby an agonized look, and then turns away. ‘Take her to the Pietà. At least let her have a different life than I can give her, than I had!’”
“A shot, a shot right here,” Giovanna said excitedly, for by now we’d arrived at the Pietà itself, “of the baby going through the little door in the wall. The maid gives the sign of the cross as she places the baby inside and rings the bell. Then we see the baby being received on the other side by a nun. The baby is washed, marked with a small P. ‘Your name will be…’”
“Giovanna,” said Nicky.
“Isn’t it time we should be getting to the klezmer concert?” I asked.
“No, it’s early yet,” said Giovanna. “Let’s go inside a moment.”
Very often the church had concerts at night; this was one of the few evenings it was empty. There was a soft rope stretched across the entrance to the church interior, but Giovanna persuaded the sacristan that Nicky was a famous filmmaker from London. At least I think that’s what she said, for she spoke to the man in dialect.
It wasn’t a particularly magnificent church, yet with imagination it was possible to people the space with chairs, not pews, and to place flickering wax candles on the walls instead of electric bulbs. It was possible to peer up and see the girls peering back through the grilles of the balconies above.
“And she looks out and sees her real mother,” said Giovanna and added, sighing, “Isn’t that what we all wish!”
“Yes,” said Nicky, taking up the story. “Her mother is now old, raddled from syphilis, no longer able to work as a prostitute to the wealthy. She’s dying, in fact, but she’s come to see her daughter play the bassoon one last time.”
“Now, Nicolina, are you absolutely firm that the focus of your film is the bassoon? Because Vivaldi was a great violinist, you know. Will there be perhaps some small role for a girl who is a violinist?”
The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists Page 13