peter.author

The arriving waterbus had hardly nudged the rubber fenders of the floating dock before the tall man was by the exit amongst the few passengers at that time of evening, impatiently waiting to disembark.  Striding across the walkway bobbing on the wind ruffled Venetian lagoon, he staggered slightly as he stepped onto the stone fondamenta, the broad pavement by the water’s edge.

He hesitated and, with a look of irritation on his face, pulled out the pocket sized map and checked the route again.

I should know this, he thought.  I was here for so long and I should still remember it.

His steel toe caps clicked his progress from fondamenta to campo, a square surrounded by crumbling apartments.   From there to the next alley and the next, the fading day was barely augmented by the dim street lights set at corner angles to the poor buildings.

From a distance, the tall man looked younger than he was.  His erect posture and proud, almost arrogant gait were only betrayed by his face with its lines and wrinkles and his head, now devoid of all but a few white hairs.

Still, he strode swiftly and tugged impatiently at his wheeled suitcase which followed behind like a reluctant pet out for a walk it doesn’t want.

Exiting below a low worm eaten wooden lintel as old as the Venetian republic by its appearance, the man turned right and breathed a small sigh of relief as he spotted his lodgings a few metres ahead.  In his earlier time here it had been a nondescript building, he thought, a warehouse or some such thing.  Now it was a four star hotel.

He paused then as the unwelcome memories came back in full force provoked by the gentle lapping of the canal, the faint smell of stagnant water and sewage and the damp cold chill of a Venetian autumn.  Just down the canal, he thought.  Two bridges down and cross.  Then turn right and walk to the next bridge and cross there, into the ghetto.  He remembered it so well he felt his feet were walking those uneven paving stones now without conscious volition.

He shook himself and shuddered unwillingly, then turned and pulled his obedient luggage towards the warm and bright hotel lobby.

   *****

His room was neat and clean; not big but comfortable.  The carpet pile was deep and well vacuumed, the bed wide and immaculately made up, the en-suite bathroom spotless with chrome taps and white sanitary ware.

To the man's eyes it was almost dazzling and he nearly recoiled.  Growing up in relative poverty in the twenties and thirties, two adults and three other children in two cramped rooms, he had always wanted luxury and, above all, space.  Space to be himself, space to be alone.  But when he reached that point after the war, he no longer wanted the luxury.  Even though he had long since renounced it, his religion had had little time for monks and monasteries so he sought his own austere existence.   Steel beds with rusty frames, thin mattresses, bare floors and shared bathrooms were his desire.  Hard physical work in hot sun or bitter chill, a spartan diet and then just sleep, a sleep so deep no nightmares could disturb it.

He unpacked his few belongings and left the hotel.  His memory felt its way in the nighttime dark of Venice from street to bridge, from bridge to alleyway, from alleyway to shops, and from shops in general to a small tourist restaurant where he ate an adequate but simple meal.

Although it was not the main tourist season, Venice was popular all year and as he sat and ate so he watched the other diners come and go.  

Watching, he thought, I'm good at that.  I've had lots of practice.

Unconsciously a slight sneer twisted his lips as he saw the noisy Americans (self-indulgent, no discipline);  the fussy French (disorganised, with an overwhelming self-esteem not shared by anyone else);  the chattering Japanese (Samurai tourists, cutting down everyone in their way by dint of sheer numbers for another group photograph, inevitably obscuring whatever it was that they had come there to see);  and, of course, the lugubrious Italians themselves (giving up too easily, only brave with someone weaker).

Leaving the warmth and light of the restaurant, welcome at least in as much as it distracted him from his memories, the tall man walked quickly back towards his hotel.   The main street, Strada Nova, had been called something else in his time, he was sure.   The modern shop-fronts jarred both with his recollections and with the period buildings that housed them.   Only the poor dim streetlights seemed familiar.  The concrete block-shaped supermarket at the end was entirely strange.

His footsteps echoed again as he turned right after the second bridge and onto a narrow footpath alongside a quiet canal.  Few tourists came down here and only a handful of locals at this time of night.  Mostly they were back home in their apartments.  The tall man could glimpse family life from uncurtained and unshuttered windows as he passed by.  A bright ceiling light illuminated a family at a table.  A fancy chandelier shone down on an empty room.  Two old people watched television in a small room with a bed in it.

Unwanted memories, prompted by sights of family life, flooded in, tightening his chest, moistening his eyes.  That was the before-time.   A cramped but happy home, mother and father, relatives in and out, feast days and festivals.Later, there were the stirrings of adolescent lust and curiosity.  Warm lips seeking his, soft breasts pressed against his chest, not one girl but several.  He was tall even then, well built, handsome.  There was no room for false modesty in his innermost thoughts.

It had never gone further than that.  Too many people, no privacy and  a chaperone wherever you turned, inadvertently or by design.

The war came to them and everything changed.  Traditional values became paramount: loyalty to one's own kind above all and the certainty that God was with them.  But doubtful worms ate the apple of  assurance.  Things happened that erased previous certainties.  Even so, for a young man there was a chance of life and living, independence, freedom and, not least, the opportunity for  real sex, given or forcibly taken, free from fumbling if not from guilt.

Then the after-time.   More women, he was still young, in his twenties and thirties, still handsome, tall and strong.  Many wanted commitment from him but he knew he couldn't give it.  So he became cynical and cruel.  He took what he wanted and he left.  

There was no other way, he thought.  I had my needs and they had theirs. It was a simple bargain. It was being kind; kinder than the disillusionment and betrayal if we had had a longer relationship.

And that was when he heard the footsteps behind him.

   *****

At first he thought it was his own footsteps echoing, then he heard the other steps speeding up.  A local in a hurry.  He didn't think much about it until the footsteps got closer and closer.  He turned to look.  There was no-one there.

He shrugged and continued walking.  After a few moments, the footsteps started again.  This time he noticed an irregularity, one footfall was firm, one was not.  Someone limping.  The odd beat was familiar somehow and he searched his memory until he realised it sounded like a friend of his from years back.  He had a bad leg, weakened by polio.  He limped but could hurry even so.

Once a friend, a good friend.  But that was long ago.

As the thought crossed his mind, the footsteps abruptly stopped.  The hotel lay directly ahead.  The lighted lobby beckoned but was, he felt, unlikely to banish the ghosts.

    *****

After breakfast, he set out on his pilgrimage.  Turn right along the canal, left over the second bridge, right again along another canal and then left.  The last bridge took him into the campo of the Jewish ghetto.

The morning was cold and misty; there were few people about.  At first sight there appeared to have been little change in sixty years.  The same buildings, taller than others in Venice because the Jews had had to build upwards to accommodate more people.  They were not allowed to reside outside the ghetto and were locked in at night.

It had always been that way, even before the war.

A second glance showed changes had occurred.   There was a pet shop (pet shop? he thought), then a travel agent.  He suddenly realised that few Jews still lived there; that the people and their needs were now profoundly gentile.  There was even an international  hotel in the building that supported the synagogue on its top floor.

To one side of the square there was a police post, the grey uniformed young officers lounging outside, talking to locals and smoking.   In my day, he thought, in my day any officer, anyone, in uniform being so sloppy would have been....

He clenched his jaw and turned away, the rage of impotence making his head ache.  But no matter.  That time was past.

Two walls held plaques to commemorate and mourn what had happened here. On one wall was a monument to all those taken away to the prison camps never to return.  Their names were inscribed behind iron bars, their symbolic imprisonment continuing for all time.  Flowers, now also dead, were entwined in the bars.   He looked at the names and turned away.  He had known those people.

On another wall were six small plaques, each showing a picture of the atrocities committed: hangings, firing squads, crucifixions.  

The police laughed and smoked obliviously next to it.

A water tap in the centre of the square ran and ran.  Municipal tears for the past, totally unheeded except by the pigeons who bathed and squabbled in its flow.

The man turned and walked slowly to the largest of the five synagogues.  He entered the door, shivered in the inner chill and climbed slowly to the top of the stairs.

As he entered the synagogue itself, a bent old man coming the other way bumped into him.  With a muttered apology the man went to go by but the tall man grasped his shoulder and peered into his face.

"Isaac, is that you?"

The old man peered up into the other's face.  His face darkened as recognition came back after so many years.

"You, surely not after all this time.  But maybe yes, your look is familiar.  What do you want?  Haven't you done enough here?"

"I'm not back from choice.  I've spent my life running away from this place."

"I hope you rot in hell for what you did.  Thousands from here died..."

"They would have died anyway.  I wasn't responsible for them all."

"No, you weren't.  But some would have survived, hidden, tucked away.  Old people, the very young, the sick or the blind  But no, you, you ferreted around and found them and they were taken away, too.  Do you know how many came back?  A handful, that's all, a handful; out of thousands here."

And the old man brushed past and was gone.

The tall man stared emptily at the space inside the synagogue.  It hadn't worked, coming back was a mistake.  There was no succour here.  There was no forgiveness inside himself so there could be none from outside either.

He turned and from memory found the stairway to the women's gallery and from there outside to the roof via a small door.  Standing at the roof's edge,  he could survey the Venice that tourists came to see: maybe sometimes to escape their own fears with the intoxication of the new and never before visited, or to sooth their own pasts with the balm of a history that encompassed a thousand betrayals.

The Grand Canal, the Rialto and San Marco lay before him.  Glittering in the morning light as the mist lifted and all just paste: fake jewellery and tinsel gilt.

He heard once again those limping footsteps behind him and then Isaac's rasping old man's voice.

"You're going to jump?  So jump!"

"Isaac, we were friends..."

"Were, not now.  That's what we can't forgive.  If you had been German we would have understood; not forgotten, not forgiven but understood maybe.  A fantasy of Aryan supremacy you would have had or maybe you were just following orders.  But, you, you're Jewish - or you were!  How could you betray your own people?"

"I was seventeen when the Germans came here, Isaac, you remember.  They were smart in their uniforms, efficient, modern.   God help me, I admired them.  I didn't realise how bad they were, how could anyone?  I wanted to live, to make love to many women, to get away from this place.  They offered me that chance.   What was there here to keep me?  Old rituals and dusty customs, rabbis in beards and glasses muttering from scripture.

"I did no harm, that's how I saw it then.  The Germans would have found those people anyway."

"Maybe, maybe not.  But with you to sniff them out, they had no chance.  As children we were in and out of all these buildings, we knew every stairway and landing, every cupboard and closet in our friends'  houses.  How could they escape from that sort of knowledge?

"And for what?  The Germans would have killed you anyway, when you were no longer of use."

"I know that now but the Allies came and the Germans fled and left me.   Isaac, I just wanted to live.   Was that too much for a seventeen year old to want?"

An icy wind from the Dolomites blew suddenly across the rooftop.  The tall man shuddered.  He clutched at one last straw.

"Isaac,  I had to return to find some sort of peace.  I saw your name on the memorial below but you survived after all; others must have too, perhaps more than anyone thinks."

"I didn't survive, I'm not here nor there or anywhere.  Only in your head."

The tall man turned then.  There had been no sound of retreating footsteps.   He saw he was truly and forever alone.  

He turned back and clung to the low wall at the rooftop's edge as heaven and earth spun around him.   

He let go of the wall, straightened and said "My God", either as a prayer or a curse before leaning forward to the point of no return he had passed sixty  years before.

The End