by Arnold Zable
A Chorus of Feet
It wakes me at dawn, the steady rhythm, the percussive beat. It can be heard as I stir from my sleep. It rises from the streets with the aroma of coffee, the clinking of cups, the clash of cutlery and plates. I unfasten the shutters, look out over the rooftops and glimpse the canal at the end of a side street.
The early sun is seeping in, lighting a table strewn with a laptop and notebooks: the tools of my trade. I descend the stairs, stop at the ground-floor café, order a coffee and drink it standing at the crowded counter among Venetians who down their espressos in one hit. When I am done, I join them as they hurry out.
On the pavements I jostle with the crowd. A woman flings open the shutters and pounds the bedding on the windowsill. Romanian musicians, a fiddler and an accordionist, carry their instruments in search of a busking place. A plump middle-aged woman saunters over a canal bridge. She wears red stilettos, a black mini-skirt and a low-cut red blouse. She strides through the streets, her head held high, her back straight.
Commuters are waiting at canal stations, boarding vaporettos, hailing water taxis and spilling off gangways into streets and piazzas. Goods are being delivered in handcarts and trolleys and on barges and motorised boats. One boat transports a miniature forest of bonsai trees. A second is loaded with winged angels and haloed shepherds bound for the cemetery island of San Michele. A boatman stands at the stern, one hand on the tiller while the other holds a mobile phone to his ear. His workmate lounges on a cushioned wheelbarrow, legs dangling over the sides beside mounds of gravel and cement.
The absence of cars is a leveller, and the city a democracy of feet. I now know that the music I have become a part of is the tread of Venetians on their way to work. The rhythm evokes memories of journeys I have made to Venice over the years and my first approach by boat, a voyage that I owe to a chance encounter in 1974 in Eilat, a Red Sea port.
In the first weeks I had worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a beachside resort. My domain was a small space, about two metres wide and three metres in length. I cleaned the machine each morning in readiness for the waiters’ assault. They rushed by with the breakfast dishes, and slapped them down on the bench. Mid-morning I wheeled out the garbage. The desert heat slapped my face. Flies crawled over the refuse; the smell of rotting food choked the air.
The kitchen was a hellhole. Tempers were frayed. Cooks squabbled. Fights erupted. During one lunch break, a waiter flew at me without warning, punching and clawing until he was dragged away by workmates. ‘Don’t worry,’ they assured me. ‘He runs amok from time to time. Don’t look him in the eye and all will be fine.’
I left the kitchen to work on the building sites. It was far better out in the open, the lines of work more clearly defined. My immediate superiors—the carpenters and plumbers, bricklayers and plasterers—were Palestinians. After I had worked with them for a month, they invited me back to their communal house.
I placed my work boots beside a row of boots lined up by the door. On the kitchen shelves were photos of the women and children the men hadn’t seen since embarking on their latest work stint. My workmates took out photos from their wallets and laid them on the table: a stone house in Bethlehem, a two- storey home a family once owned in Jaffa, a house in a refugee camp in Jericho, from which they had fled after the Six Day War before settling in an apartment on the West Bank.
For a time I worked in a desert settlement laying foundations for bomb shelters. Late one afternoon I wandered over to a Bedouin camp. Through the flap of a tent I saw a man and his family, seated on rugs for an evening meal. He invited me in and motioned me to sit and eat. ‘Schweya, schweya,’ the old Bedouin said. ‘Slowly. Slowly. Haste is from the devil. In the desert there is no other way.’
Schweya. Schweya. The hills and valleys around Eilat were scattered with people who were drawn to the fringes: a circle of Japanese hippies who spent their days in a wadi seated in the lotus posture, a retired biologist who set out each dawn on the off chance of locating a rare desert species, and an eighty-year-old pilgrim from Texas who had come to the ‘Holy Land’ to await the second coming of the Messiah.
Just as I was planning to move on, I exchanged books with a fellow traveller. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice had fallen into my hands. It was not the mid-life crisis of the tortured writer Gustav Aschenbach, his weary heart and his fraught search for distraction, which drew me. I was not yet weighed down by ambition, not yet enslaved by a compulsion to produce. Rather it was Mann’s description of Aschenbach’s approach to Venice by sea that made an impression—the domes and bell towers that rose from the water as if in a dream. And the first sight from the San Marco canal, as Mann put it, of ‘the most remarkable of landing places, that blinding composition of fantastic buildings which the Republic lays out before the eyes of approaching seafarers: the soft splendour of the palace, the Bridge of Sighs, on the bank the columns with lion and saint, the advancing, showy flank of the enchanted temple, the glimpse through the archway, and the giant clock.’
As Aschenbach looked on, ‘he thought that to reach Venice by land, on the railroad, was like entering a palace from the rear, and that this most unreal of cities should not be approached except as he was now doing, by ship, over the high seas’.
On the travellers’ grapevine I learned there was a ferry service from Haifa to Venice. A month later I was on board, moving out on the Mediterranean. The winds of history were charting our course. The boat did not dock, as was the plan, in Cyprus. In recent months the island had been invaded, properties razed and islanders driven from their homes. Settlements lived in for generations were occupied by strangers claiming them as their own. The line between Turkey and Greece was being brutally contested and redrawn. The new border cut through towns and villages, impervious to the pleas of those who had long lived there, those who had worked the fields and vineyards.
The boat dropped anchor in Piraeus the following morning. I had left Athens in November, and in the intervening months the junta had been overthrown. A weight had lifted from the Polis. It could be felt on the streets. The thoroughfares were thronging with strollers, a lightness in their steps.
During my previous stay my Greek appearance and youth had been grounds for suspicion. The city was under the control of soldiers and police. I was harassed many times, had my passport scrutinised, my bags searched. Perhaps I was observed entering the music store that acted as a front for the activities of dissidents whose fellow students, months earlier, had been overrun and killed by army tanks. ‘We have no more tears to shed,’ whispered the manager of the yards where I had worked building ferro-cement yachts.
From Piraeus the boat cut through the Corinth Canal and turned north along the Ionian coast. Throughout the night a succession of ports drew me back on deck, to the sight of yet another town perched on a steep hillside, houses descending like vines to the waterfront. On each approach, the same dreamlike sequence: the dark outline of mountains, the entrance to the harbour, the boat docking, heaving its bulk to the wharf like a beached whale. Then the boat disgorging cars and travellers, buses and trucks, directed by stevedores and port officials lit by globes hanging from the quayside posts.
In one port a gypsy woman moved among the disembarking passengers selling tissues. A truck driver, oblivious to the commotion, squatted over a primus stove, cooking his meal in a frying pan. Cats sniffed and pawed at luggage, in the vain hope of accessing the food within. I stood on the deck in the anonymity of darkness, witness to feverish welcomes and farewells. Then the entire sequence was re-enacted in reverse: the ropes untied and flung on board, the whale heaving its bulk from the quay, the town lights receding and the wind assuming its sharp bite as the boat returned to the open sea.
Sunrise heralded a full day on the Adriatic. The boat was following the former trade routes of maritime empires. On the starboard side stretched the austere mountains of Albania. Then there were hours at sea beyond sight of land, the boat occasionally moving closer to shore withi
n sight of fortress towns, once on guard against attack on two fronts: the sea and the hinterlands.
The following dawn I was back by the rails. Thomas Mann did not betray me. A damp mist was rising, unveiling the outlying isles. Two hours later, proceeding along the Grand Canal to Piazza San Marco, the landmarks appeared as Mann had described them: the Ducal Palace, the projecting side wing of the basilica, the giant clock and gate tower and the piazza columns topped by lion and saint.
Thirty years later I approached the city by sea a second time. I stood on the deck beside my ten-year-old son. Islets moved towards us, seagulls circled, wheeling and swooping over the deck. And on my son’s face, a look of wonder at the scene unfolding: cathedrals and mansions, cupolas and domes, appearing, disappearing. Buildings restored and glowing, others in decay, bruised and flaking, stucco crumbling: Venice suspended like an apparition under a rising sun.
Now, three years later, I walk a city that I have traversed many times. It has been barely a day since my most recent approach, this time by train from Warsaw. During the night I was jolted from sleep several times by border police banging on the compartment door, demanding my passport, shining torches on my belongings and at my face.
Stations whipped by like lanterns. Countries appeared and vanished. The announcements of stationmasters broke into my dreams like brazen strangers. I opened my eyes to the serrated outlines of mountain ranges. Or was I dreaming, imposing what I had seen by day on the passing darkness: the forested slopes beneath the snowline, the ravines and valleys, the alpine hamlets.
I stirred from my restless sleep at dawn, as the train was passing over the causeway from the mainland. Venice is the terminus to an entire continent, Santa Lucia Station, the final stop. Schweya. Schweya. Haste is from the devil. I stepped out with the milling throng into the forecourt and descended the stone steps to the canals.
By sunrise the following morning, the Venetian chorus had fully reclaimed me. It accompanies me under archways and over bridges, through culs-de-sac and alleys and into unexpected courtyards, past hanging gardens, dwellings with misshapen chimneys, and water, always water, and boatmen calling, their voices clear and transparent in the carless city.
Workshops are being unlocked. Artisans are at work in the confined spaces they had taken leave of the previous night: shoemakers and upholsterers, lithographers, glass blowers, ceramicists, jewellers and mask makers. Shops are being opened: patisseries and cafés, photographer’s studios, tourist bookstores and emporiums trading in Venetian crafts and artefacts.
Yet, as on my previous visits, I find myself returning like a homing pigeon to one particular enclave in the northwest corner of the city, far from the landmark glories of Piazza San Marco. I stop at a hotel where I had once stayed, and climb the stairs to reception. And he is there as I had last seen him, standing behind the counter.
‘You can see me because I am not dead,’ he says, as if continuing a spiel we had left off when we last met. ‘And if I am dead, how can you see me?’
At seventy, Signor Marcello retains his sardonic air. His hair is grey and receding, his cheeks a drinker’s red. He wears an open-necked white shirt and a pair of grey trousers. His belly is a gourmet’s paunch. His gaze is direct and wary, and on his face is the wry smile I had come to know so well during a previous stay here.
‘You want a nice coat? You have to pay. You want a beautiful woman? You have to pay. You want to live in a beautiful city? You have to pay. So my good friend, why should it be any different for a hotel?’
‘I don’t need a hotel,’ I say. ‘I have dropped in to pay my respects.’
‘I know what you are up to,’ he says, finally recognising me. ‘All you care for is a story. All writers are thieves and scavengers. Will you give me a share of the royalties? Eh? You want to do business you have to pay. You want information you have to pay. You want a story you have to pay. So why should it be any different with my tale?’
Yet he obliges and adds flesh to the bones of a story he had begun when we first met. His father was born in Budapest into a Jewish family and had worked, as a young man, in the hotel business. He arrived in Venice in 1920 with his Austrian-born Catholic wife, and worked his way up from kitchenhand to waiter, then from receptionist to manager of the hotel.
He bowed and scraped, grinned and nodded, stood to attention, hauled trunks and suitcases, scoured and polished. He tended lifts, fetched newspapers, knocked on doors tray in hand, lit cigars on the lips of strangers and cleaned the mess of departing guests. He performed his duty without fail, and with utmost courtesy. He fathered two sons and inched his way up the hierarchy, and had finally become the director of a hotel on the Grand Canal.
The building rose from damp foundations on the approach to Piazza San Marco. The sights that had drawn Aschenbach out of his torpor were Marcello’s father’s daily reality. After years of labour he could now afford a little time to indulge them. He stood on the uppermost balcony and allowed himself a moment’s reflection. Below him, vaporettos and gondolas, steamers and barges moved by in a hypnotic parade.
He did not mind that Venice’s glory days were long over. In fact he preferred it this way, preferred the loss of imperial ambition and the live-for-the-day mentality of its hardened citizens. He understood, as someone who had spent a lifetime tending to the needs of those accustomed to wealth and dominance, that empires are built on power and servitude.
He belonged to the backrooms, to those who maintained the show. Those who set up the props, vacuumed the dressing rooms, stoked the boilers, scrubbed the curtains and readied the city for yet another day of spectacle. He knew the rear side of the peacock: the warehouses, loading docks, factories and chemical works, the city’s engine rooms. He knew the cunning of the traders and the scams of the boatmen who had so annoyed Aschenbach.
And he knew of the darker history: the secret tunnels and cells within the Doge’s Palace, the trials that had taken place in the empire’s heyday. He had seen the routes of the prisoners before they were hauled before their inquisitors, their journeys to damnation. He knew the travails of those who questioned the prevailing order, knew that no empire could thrive without its armies of the night, its clandestine networks of spies and informers.
He knew the contrast between the visible splendours and the hidden horrors, between the turrets and arcades, the marbled hallways and corridors, the sumptuous halls where the Council of State once presided, and the apparatus of violence hidden away behind walled passages and padlocked doors. He knew of the torture chambers, the iron collars clamped around necks, the slow strangulation by garrotte.
He knew Venice from the bottom up, and loved it for what it was. Yet he did not know that the city was not done with imperial ambitions.
The Nazis entered Venice in 1943. ‘It was spared from being bombed,’ Signor Marcello tells me, ‘because the Germans were spread throughout the city. The hotel was commandeered for Nazi officials. Fortunately, the commandant took a liking to my father. After all, we are a family of handsome men. Take a good look. I bear a remarkable resemblance to Marcello Mastroianni, no?’
He pauses, glances at his reflection in the foyer mirrors and runs a comb through his hair, strategically rearranging the thin strands.
‘The commandant offered my father a bone,’ he says. ‘Convert to the Catholic faith and your family will not be put on the train. The word “train” made my father shudder. He was aware of the rumours of slave labour camps and worse. Hotel workers are the most discreet of eavesdroppers. We know what is what ahead of time.
‘My father converted. What choice did he have? Eh, my good friend? You want to stand in judgment? You want to assume the superior air of the intellectual, the holier-than-thou observer? I know how it is. I know the way you and your kind think. I know that you see yourself as above the dirt that most of us have to grovel in.
‘You have not had to face questions of life and death, my friend. If you want your children to grow up in one piece, you have to pay. I
f you want to stay alive, you have to pay. If you want to save your family, you have to grab the bone that is thrown to you. This is what my father taught me, and this is how it is.
‘Unfortunately my fellow countrymen did not fare so well. I may look like an ignoramus, but I know my history. The Jews of Venice were rounded up and deported. The first train left some time in November 1943. Forgive me. I am not certain of the exact date. I do know, however, that the last train departed eight months later, on August 17.
‘Yes, my friend, I know what took place as my father chewed on the bone that was thrown to him, and as we, who depended on him, sucked on the marrow. Of the two hundred and two Venetian Jews deported, just eight returned. Unbelievable, no?
‘And through it all I have remained a Catholic. What was the point of changing back? If it would save my life and the life of my children I would be whatever you wished: a pagan, an idol worshipper, a devotee of any god. Let them all fight each other and preach salvation. It is all the same to me, as long as I am left in peace. This is how it is.’
The words accompany me as I descend the stairs. ‘This is how it is.’ Pronounced as a statement of defiance. I imagine the scene as I continue my walk. Marcello’s father feigning salutes, clicking his heels, nodding at Nazi banners while in a parallel world, in another part of the city, his fellow Jews were being driven to the station, to the death camps.
Just one bridge and a tunnel, and I am there, in that particular maze of streets I have come to know so well. The sun is still low, the alleys and canals shaded. Here and there a glint of light plays upon the water’s surface. Underwear and bedspreads, sheets and towels hang on lines strung between balconies over narrow waterways. The multi-storey tenements on either side are all but touching. The lower reaches are skirted with damp and patches of stucco peeled back to brickwork. Small boats are tied at tiny landings jutting from weathered walls that resemble the colourless scales of dead fish. Pigeons fly down from leaden rooftops, their wing-beats amplified in the narrow confines.