The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘No, just stupid,’ I said, full of my own defence. I could not turn away fast enough from his closed face. Venice has been good for him, I thought. It’s reshaped him softer and sweeter. If he’d stayed here in Germany, he would have become entirely rigid in his ways.

  The landlady took pity and hustled me away to her kitchen to clean my beer-sodden skirts. She used me very kindly, plying me with pickled salmon and conserves. ‘You are such a little sweeting,’ she said in German (words I understood, as my man used them also when he flowed with love for me). She would not desist from cupping my numb cheeks in her great rasping hands. Then she ran her fingers, tarantula-like, over my breasts and my hips, all the time sucking in her breath, as if to say: ‘How can anything so tiny really be grown and married?’

  Soon my man appeared in the kitchen, shamefaced and sad, to take me away. The landlady made a sorrowful noise at this, and gestured passionately to my man.

  ‘What is she saying?’ I asked.

  ‘She says, and I suppose it’s the truth, that you are so delectable she could just eat you up. Also that they never saw a little Venetian lady here before.’

  This splintered the ice that had grown between him and me since I spilled the beer, and I ran to him. He was full of sorry-ness and tender as a mother. So I comforted him in turn and all was well with us again.

  Every night we ate more than I could have thought possible. It was our only protection against the cold.

  The food lay on my gut as if it had died there. It was the ‘wild’ season, they say, by which they mean it’s the time to kill and eat all things that run fast with blood dark enough for rich gravy. So we chewed on deer and wild pig and wild goose, all doused in cream or floating in it. Cream soup with mushrooms, cream sauce with cabbage, cream custard, cream pie with rhubarb. I begged for some fish, and a stinking thing, awash with yellow cream, was brought to me. Lake fish and river fish are different from sea fish, I told them, and thrust the creamy dish away, like a spoiled child, which pained my man.

  He looked as if he might be wrathful. A strange affray went on inside him – anger fighting against sadness, and sadness winning. He went out to the stable where they let us rest Johann’s coffin and stayed there a while. I guessed he was talking to his brother about the business.

  Some nights I hardly cared. My guts grew most mutinous on that diet. I was stricken with the cramp colic and I rolled up in a ball on the bed. When he came back to the room, I lay with my back to him. He always forgave me my whining, and stroked me until I slept. If I woke up in the night, feeling better, then we made what I call ‘mountain love’, that is, the superstitious kind which keeps out your fears.

  But when we got to Freiburg, I said, ‘Enough.’

  We were staying at an inn called Zum Roten Bären, the Red Bears, so we could be close to the parish church which was said to be the most beautiful in Christendom. Its spire was picked out like a veil, and that was pleasing, but otherwise I could not see what was lovely in its flat red stones and the horrible gargoyles who leered at me down every gutter.

  We’d taken a diversion there, because Johann had always wanted to see it. My man wished to light a candle for him in the Münster so that at least his soul might rest more easy in Heaven, with one more dream achieved on Earth.

  I knew we lacked but a few miles till we could be in Speyer, and that I would now not meet his ma and pa. I knew it was not kind of me, but I could not go on. By that time, I’d run out of patience with the mountains and the roads and the high skies and all that cream.

  Of course there was a graver reason than that. I was deeply afraid of going all the way to Speyer with him, more afraid than I had been even of the cat-headed dragons and the ghost of Pontius Pilate.

  The journey had opened up a little glimpse of a chasm between me and my man, made us see the invisible glacier that runs between his German-ness and my Venetian nature. He found the mountains beautiful; I found them repulsive. He’d showed me his stiff and closed side for the first time. I’d let him see my childish tantrums. Something was spoilt between us, who had hitherto only shown the best of ourselves to each other.

  Now I could not come to Speyer, present our flawed love to his parents, show my flawed self to his town. All those clear-eyed Germans would see right through me. They would say to my man, ‘Stay here! Why go back? Johann has died; you cannot run a business by yourself in that strange town. Stay here, and there will be work for you without worries. Your wife must do as she’s bid.’

  And I had one last secret fear. I worried lest I should get with child in Speyer. Sometimes it surprised me that I’d not fallen yet, and I expected it at any minute. If I should conceive in Speyer, how much stronger would be the demands of that town upon him! For then our baby would be more than half German. My man can count. He would work it out. He would start thinking on it. And what a catastrophe, what an ill-starred thing that would be.

  Chapter Six

  Do the milk-white

  girls detain you?

  Wendelin argued with his wife, wasting precious days trying to change her mind.

  ‘My parents will adore you,’ he told her. ‘I want you to see Speyer. Now that you are married to me, it’s partly your home town, too.’

  At this, she had stuffed her hand inside her mouth and turned away, her eyes full of tears.

  Wendelin tried to tempt her with tales of Kraichgau streaky bacon. He tried to make her laugh with menus of ‘Schnippelbohnensalat’, and ‘Rahmpfifferlingen’, which he told her were ‘fairy’ mushrooms in cream sauce. At the word cream’, she made a childish face.

  Something had broken in her in the trip over the Alps. She had become more dependent on Wendelin and at the same time more distant from him. She interposed herself between him and everything he wished to see or do, demanding attention, and yet she was remote with him.

  She is not well, she’s worn out, Wendelin told himself. This is the only way I can account for her behaviour.

  A happier thought struck him: Perhaps she is with child. Things are not quite right between us and she wants to wait till a beautiful moment to tell me. This is how women do such things. This is how she would do it.

  * * *

  Whatever was happening inside the impenetrable lead coffin, Wendelin felt increasingly anxious to inter his brother. When he saw that his wife would not be induced to join him, he made reluctant plans to sail up to Speyer without her.

  It was two more days before he arrived in the outskirts of his town, catching his breath at the sight of the familiar walls looming over the edge of the Rhine plain, and the turrets of the Dom spiked above it. With the help of his servant, he loaded the coffin on to a smaller boat. In it, they took a fork into Speyer’s own town river, arriving at the port on a cold morning. Pausing on the Sonnenbrücke, he listened to the panting of the Speyerbach flowing below him, and looked over the rooftops of the twisting lanes of Hasenpfuhl, remembering the hare hunts there in his boyhood, but it seemed like someone else’s young days he remembered, not his own, as if he’d once long ago read a story about two young boys growing up in Speyer, as if Venice had claimed not just his present life but his memories, too.

  Feeling like a ghost, he felt almost surprised to know his way from the port to the busy wood market, next to the fish market. How mean and poor seemed the display of grey fish compared to the vivid drama of Rialto! He sniffed, remembering which of the sharp stinks was that of a barrel of salted fish from Cologne, which was a freshly caught sturgeon. Or perhaps not so fresh, he thought, wrinkling his nose. How restrained were the cries of the fishmongers; how pallid and lumpen their wives, he thought, shivering. Even the pretty young girls selling apples seemed as mild as milk pudding in colouring and character.

  Hiring two men and a cart, he took the narrow streets to Little Heavens Alley and the family home. Both parents came to the door to greet him, stepped quickly out to the street to gaze at Johann’s coffin. His father thumped the wood once. His mother whispered consecu
tive prayers expressionlessly.

  Padre Pio appeared, waddling up the road at a surprising speed, his round cheeks slick with tears. When he reached Wendelin, he took him in his arms, and cried heartily on his breast, ‘My son, my poor son.’

  Wendelin, rocked in the priest’s embrace, whispered hoarsely, ‘I never thought we would come back like this.’ He pulled away and gestured to the coffin, and to his own gaunt frame, pared away by the hardships of the journey. His parents, hearing their son speak Italian for the first time, exchanged fright-ened glances.

  ‘Where’s your lovely wife, my friend?’ asked Padre Pio, continuing in Italian, for he’d observed the parents’ discomfort.

  ‘She’s not well, she could not come all the way,’ mumbled Wendelin, scarlet-faced.

  ‘Not well, in a good way, I hope, my son?’ Padre Pio leaned forward, gesturing at his own round belly.

  ‘It may be that, I hope … but we must think now of my poor brother.’ Wendelin’s voice broke on the last syllable, and Padre Pio enfolded him in his arms again, and let him heave and gulp for a moment or two. Wendelin’s parents turned away in embarrassment.

  The undertaker, already sitting with his hands folded in the parlour, was summoned out and discreetly took charge of the cart. As he handed his brother’s remains to the man, Wendelin felt a moment of rebellion. Why should a stranger take over these intimate duties that until now had been his own? He’d become used to the presence of the coffin; it had taken on a familiar personality, quite separate to that of his brother. He realised that in a strange way he would actually miss it.

  But his parents were so convulsed by its presence that he could not reasonably leave it any longer in their sight. He saluted the undertaker with perfect civility, bid an affectionate farewell to Padre Pio, put arms around each of his flinching parents, and drew them inside. He realised that neither of them had asked of his wife, and by this he knew that they wished he might not leave them again nor return to Venice. In the quiet ways of the family, though, he also knew that this would never be discussed, and that they would at some point allow him to depart without fuss, as they had done the first time.

  * * *

  I made him leave me in Freiburg where baby canals ran through the streets to carry water for fires and for the beasts. They are called the ‘Bächle’ which means ‘little brooks’, and I soon saw the Freiburghers took the same bad delight in them that we of our town take in our canals when they wrong-foot the foreigners who come here. So often I saw a man of the South or further North, black with wet up one leg to his thigh where he’d mischanced upon a Bächle or walked backwards into it while gazing up at the spire of the Münster.

  So my man went on to Speyer without me, and I stayed on at the Red Bears. He told me he would be back in a fortnight, and left me one manservant, who straightaway disappeared to the fleshpots of the town. I did not care. I spent my days sitting by the arched windows of the dining room that gave on to the street. I watched the Freiburg folk outside.

  These Germans look so rich, I thought, with their thick clothes and their thick buildings. But I wanted to scream, ‘You are poor, you are poor! Rat-poor in the things that matter, for all your cream and butter. For how do you amuse yourselves? What do you do for fun and laughter?’

  But I liked their wardrobes painted with birds and flowers, and I liked the width of the German ladies. I imagined their shape under their clothes – their bellies must be oval as plums with the cleave of the haunch starting high up at the back and the front all taut and soft and rounded. Walking behind two of them, you could see just a thin hourglass of light chipped between their bodies. I wondered if I, little as I was, could slip between them and not be noticed.

  It was late autumn so there were still gourds in dream shapes in the windows, in oranges and green. With all the sights to amuse me, I thought I would do fine without my man, but I was wrong.

  Within an hour I’d started to miss him and to regret my stubborn nature. I begged a piece of paper from the landlord and I made a big square. I divided it into many little squares. And then more. Enough for one tiny square for each hour my man would be away. As each hour passed I coloured in a square with a little kindle of charcoal. When the time seemed to pass too slow, I would go out, so that when I came back from my excursion – to the Münster or the icy river or the mossy park – I might blacken two or three of the little squares at one time. So tiny were the increments of my relief that I thought I might go mad.

  * * *

  The day after Johann’s funeral, Wendelin made his way through Markt and Krämergasse, crowded with stalls selling cereals, wood and vegetables. Everything was scented with the earth, he noticed, wrinkling his nose and pulling his cloak more tightly around him. He realised that he was missing the tang of salt in the air. He remembered fondly the lush perfume of the Merceria in Venice where the scent-merchants burned pastilles of Egyptian incense twenty-four hours a day to attract custom.

  A canal ran through the centre of Speyer’s main street. Wendelin looked at the water, his eye seeking the sparkle to which it had become accustomed. But the city canal ran dully, not mirroring the ashen sky, but shadowed by it, and in a dead straight line from the city gate to the Old Mint, as if, he thought, it lacked the wit or curiosity to weave even a little from side to side in its course.

  He laughed at himself, thinking, This is not my thought: this is something Lussièta would say. I wish she was here to contradict me.

  He looked hopefully at blonde girls in the street. There was no one who resembled his incomparable wife: none with her slant almond eyes or that rich bloom to her skin. There was no one as complicated as Lussièta. The young girls were simple as dolls in their mien, stiff, pretty little dolls indeed. They lacked the vivid plasticity of his wife. The older people he passed all looked the same; square, handsome, tall and fair, prosperous, relentlessly decent, well upholstered in firm flesh against the cold.

  Yet in Venice he had remembered Speyer as cosmopolitan, sophisticated, with Jews and foreign merchants enlivening the city.

  Speyer is changing, he thought to himself. Or is it me? Perhaps the damp of Venice has eroded my sense of myself. He counted in his mind the good things about Speyer, the crispness of the sheets, the fresh dryness of the air, the joy of understanding everything said around him, the bite of the beer, the proximity of his parents and the affectionate Padre Pio. But at night in his narrow childhood bed, unable to sleep, his thoughts and desires turned constantly to Lussièta.

  In the street, Wendelin picked up a retinue of curious acquaintances from former times. Every time he stopped at a stall, merchants clustered around him, asking about Venice.

  ‘Is it true that there are gold tiles in the Markusplatz?’ they asked him. ‘Do the women show their breasts in the streets?’

  Others clamoured to know if those streets were truly made of water. Or were they just like Speyer’s own town canals, exaggerated, Italian-style, in the telling?

  Wendelin laughed but he did not answer them, for he did not like the way the questions were put. He resented the cynicism of his fellow-townsmen, and their lack of imagination. It’s not my role to be ambassador of Venice, he told himself. Let them go there for themselves – they’ll never believe what I tell them, anyway.

  He continued on to the cathedral, walking fast enough to leave his questions behind.

  He had always boasted to his wife that Speyer’s Dom was one of the most important in Christendom. He’d told her of its immense size, its political importance. She had asked him, impatiently, ‘Yes, but how beautiful is it?’

  He had described it for her proudly, ‘A church built by Emperors and chosen for their final resting place. It’s like a … like a great full-breasted ship, like a galley at sail that you can see above all the rooftops.’

  Looking at it now, its immense straight body and its stumpy little towers, he could no longer answer her question with unequivocal loyalty. Yes, it might still be said to resemble a great ship
. But it was rooted immovably in the ground. Its triangles and cones seemed the pieces of a primitive toy building set, put together by a child who lacked fantasy.

  He shook his head, as if to dislodge these inconstant thoughts, and stepped inside the cathedral.

  He found it, as ever, full of light – clean, scouring unmysterious light – with everything made clear; the very opposite of the shadowy Venetian churches. The cathedral had expressed to him, as a young man, everything great about his faith. Ordnung und Klarheit, order and clarity, it had personified both, on a grand scale. Now, he was forced to confess to himself, it was unsatisfactory to his senses. Its colours were cold and wintry. Its interior failed to raise on his skin the goose-pimples of sacred mystery, as always happened at San Bartolomeo in Venice.

  He proceeded, as he had planned to do, to the Taufkapelle on the right of the nave, where he wanted to light a candle for Johann. The capitals of its four squat columns were carved with acanthus leaves. He could not help but compare them with those he had left behind in Venice where the art simply flowed from the hands of the artisans so that their leaves twined around columns as if still growing. Here in Speyer the stone acanthus stood stiffly upright, as if dying on the point of a pin.

  Wendelin lit the candle for Johann in one of the crypt altars and prayed, briefly, in German, stumbling over the words. Among the many images of his brother which floated through his mind were two of Johann at the stamperia: one, the moment of hiring young Bruno Uguccione; the other of the day he had brought back to the fondaco the precious monopoly document.

  He was filled with exhaustion at the thought of the stamperia and the problems that awaited him. His funereal duties to Johann himself were now completely discharged; he was emptied of that responsibility. It was time to shoulder the ones Johann had left for him to complete. This pivotal moment, between one great task and the next, also offered him an escape, he realised, rocking on his knees on the cold stone floor.