The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

  For some reason both Father Filippo and Diamante were gazing at him then, and the old doctor cast a glance in Chiara’s direction too.

  ‘You’re leaving here if I have to drag you,’ she declared, pushing him quite forcefully towards the wooden bridge that led towards home.

  ‘I told you. I’m not a child.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I promised your mother …’

  The priest rushed to join them and there was a firmness in his voice even she couldn’t miss.

  ‘Leave this to me, please. I can take the young man back home …’

  Chiara cast the man in black a glance that was almost hostile.

  ‘No need, Father—’

  ‘I insist,’ he said and seized Paolo Uccello by the arm.

  The workshop of the Uccello began life as an elegant pavilion in the garden of a palazzo belonging to an aristocratic clan from Vicenza. Made rich by trade, they’d built themselves a mock-Palladian mansion in the shadow of the Arsenale boatyards, complete with arbours, bowers, rose beds and fruit trees, a shady retreat from the searing heat of summer.

  During the turmoil of unification the family backed the wrong side and found themselves ruined, washed away on a tide of political acqua alta that sent them scuttling from the city. As arguments built over debts and titles and ownership, the palazzo was abandoned, looted eventually by locals seeking stone for their own homes and to shore up the banks of San Pietro across the canal. Behind the remaining high wall and narrow channel of water crossed by its private wooden bridge, only the pavilion, its conservatory and the gardens survived, out of sight in a solitary quarter of the city few visited any more. There was no reason. The Arsenale to the west was a forbidden military area while San Pietro and Castello to the east and south were poor, working-class districts where many struggled to pay the rent. To the north, past an old, ruined, hexagonal watchtower, lay the sluggish lagoon stretching out towards the little-used islands of Certosa and Le Vignole.

  It was a secluded, private hermitage in a city where, the wealthy apart, most people lived on top of one another, crammed into terraced tenements, family upon family. The ruins had remained empty until Paolo’s grandfather, an enterprising fabric merchant with ambition, hit upon an opportunity and picked up the deeds for a pittance. Silk weaving had virtually vanished from Venice in the early nineteenth century after Napoleon closed the republic’s fabric school on Fondamenta San Lazzaro. But Simone Uccello, who Paolo remembered only dimly since his grandfather had died when the boy was four, had discovered the equipment for the old school remained in the shuttered building. He was canny enough to pay the city chickenfeed to clear the place, rescuing sixteen wooden looms and sufficient equipment to restart a weaving business from scratch.

  This was the 1880s. No one had used a Jacquard loom in decades, though a few old hands remembered how. With their help and some reference books, Simone created a small, highly skilled weaving shop which, after a few years, was able to replicate the finest velvet of the Venetian Republic at its peak, directly from the patterns they’d used.

  Europe was entranced by these sumptuous fabrics from another age. Prosperous decades followed. By the early twentieth century the House of Uccello was a small but established business producing a range of fabrics to traditional patterns, for wealthy locals, for those elsewhere in Italy who could pay the price. At its height in 1928 the company employed sixteen weavers full time, one for each of the Jacquard looms. Their work won medals in Turin and Paris, New York and Barcelona. Uccello velvet could be found in grand houses in England, city halls in Copenhagen and Reykjavik, opera houses and the ballrooms of grand ocean liners.

  The prosperity was already starting to fade when Paolo came into the world. The economic woes of the 1930s made handmade velvet a luxury few could afford. At the age of twelve he was removed from school, a place he hated, and joined the family business, learning the way of the loom as an apprentice with the idea that one day he would take over from his father as company director.

  Even so money, something the family had once taken for granted, was short. Paolo soon realized the early curtailment of his education was as much to do with cash as anything else. They needed cheap labour. They needed commissions. When he turned thirteen the family was forced to abandon their beloved apartment on the Zattere in Dorsoduro with its splendid view of Palladio’s Redentore across the Giudecca Canal. Father had converted some spare warehouse space at the back of the workshop into two-bedroom accommodation and they would now live there.

  Still the work dwindled. When the looms broke down they became uneconomic to repair and were sold for scrap and firewood. By the time his parents left for Verona on that last, ill-fated trip in July, there were just three left. The family had been reduced to eating cheap pasta and vegetables most days, avoiding creditors whenever possible. Chiara Vecchi had first worked for his father when she was thirteen. Now, yet to turn thirty and widowed, she was the last worker left as they struggled to get by in the strange, artificial world that war had imposed upon Venice.

  It seemed the cruellest irony that Verona gave the drowning company a lifeline and sent back Paolo’s parents in their coffins. A few days after the funeral in Mestre the order arrived, with a down payment of ten thousand lire – the equivalent of almost five hundred American dollars – and the promise of a further twenty thousand upon production of the final item, three small identical banners to a specific pattern. The bank had looked at him sideways when he came to deposit the cheque, inquiring if he was old enough to handle the company accounts. Legally he was, just, even if he relied on Chiara to tell him how they worked.

  The detail of the commission was easier. His parents had produced a detailed template already and the punch cards for the loom to make the pattern, so desperate were they for the contract. Sitting in the garden, on the old wooden bench beneath the orange trees, weeping at the memory of his lost parents, the letter in his hand, Paolo had known he had no choice but to accept. Who the customer was scarcely mattered. Work was what he needed, to occupy his mind, to give the ever-loyal Chiara some money too. To blot out the fractured world beyond the red-brick wall of the sanctuary the Giardino degli Angeli offered him.

  The birds were singing as he went over the letter from Turin. The last of the goldcrests, a flock of them, tiny, bright shapes scattered through the orange and yellow fruit on the branches. Their melody – two notes, high-pitched, repeating seven or eight times – was the rhythm his father had told him to think of when working the loom, pushing the weft yarn with a beater to make the pattern the punch card demanded.

  Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.

  Uccello. Their name meant ‘bird’ so perhaps it was simply a joke. Soon the goldcrests vanished, headed south to escape the freezing Venetian winter. They, at least, could fly the beleaguered city whenever they wished. No birds sang at all as he walked back from San Pietro, Father Filippo Garzone by his side.

  They stopped in the garden, next to the fallen head of a weather-beaten angel. Shattered sculptures from the old, ravaged palazzo ranged across the lawn, heads and torso and arms. His father had tried to sell some when they were struggling, but there were no rich foreign tourists around in wartime. So they stayed where they were, like fallen victims of a long-forgotten battle.

  ‘You have a lovely home, Paolo. Many would envy you.’

  Father Filippo was a familiar figure, a man who pottered around the northern quarters of Castello in his dark priest’s robes, stopping to talk to everyone. He was fifty or so, not stout like some of the priests who were forever cadging food and favours from their parishioners, but almost skeletal, as if he was sick or starving himself in sympathy with the privations of his flock. His hair was long, chestnut shot through with grey, his voice had the accent of his native Vicenza. Had he not joined the church he would have made a good hotelier or restaurateur in Paolo’s opinion. There was always something charming about him, a steady, patient temperament that sought calm amid strife.

 
; Technically the Uccello were of his parish since it extended across from the island of San Pietro to take in the terraces running to the Arsenale. But they had never been frequent visitors to his services, or inclined to confession. Work got in the way, even on Sundays, father said. There was more to it than that. His parents were business people first and Catholics second. Enthusiastic believers busily crossing themselves if there was a clerical commission to be won. When they’d dried up years ago, so it seemed had their faith.

  ‘What would they envy, Father? My parents are dead. I’ve no idea how we can keep the looms working. Even if I want to.’

  Garzone briefly closed his eyes as if in pain.

  ‘I apologize. A priest says stupid things as easily as anyone else. I meant …’ He gestured at the garden. ‘This. Seclusion. Solitude. Peace.’ He smiled. ‘Well, as much as one can call it peace in times like these. A private peace. Which is a start. How are you coping? Is there anything I can do to help?’

  He didn’t know how to answer those questions. The memory of the dead Isabella Finzi, drenched, stiff from the cold lagoon, wouldn’t leave his head.

  ‘I’m trying my best.’

  ‘And Chiara …?’

  ‘She helps.’

  ‘We need friends in times like this. I’m sorry you witnessed all that, Paolo.’ The priest was always good at reading someone’s thoughts. ‘I wish you hadn’t. Sometimes one should try to walk on.’

  There was a curious note in the man’s voice. Almost as if he was fishing.

  ‘I was passing. I saw something happening. I couldn’t … not watch.’

  Garzone nodded.

  ‘Does Chiara bring you news?’

  ‘Sometimes. And I listen to the radio.’

  ‘It’s easiest to stay behind these walls. Keep your head down. I know we don’t get real news here. Not true news. But word gets out. The Americans and the British are coming up from the south. Now they have Rome firmly in their sights, this can only go one way. The Germans are losing and they know it.’

  ‘The ones you see here don’t seem to. They look like victors. More so than ever.’

  Which was true. But Venice, everyone said, was unique, an island attached to the mainland by a single slender bridge. It had little in the way of military importance, being at the edge of the Adriatic in the north east. The Americans and the British wouldn’t bomb the city because of that and its heritage, or so it was rumoured. The Germans and the Fascists used the place principally almost as a leisure destination, somewhere they could go for a few days to escape the shock of conflict. One night, after some wine, his mother had grumbled that there were more brothels in Cannaregio now than had ever existed before the war. Ribald theatres and nightclubs had set up too. The bars in San Marco and the fancy hotels on the Grand Canal and Riva degli Schiavoni were as busy as ever, though with visiting Germans and Italian Fascists, not the international set of old. Even La Fenice kept up its opera programme, with well-known names.

  ‘The Crucchi we see here in Venice are mostly inadequate fools, Paolo. That’s why they’re here. Not out terrorizing ordinary people in the countryside. Murdering partisans or anyone whose face offends them. We must be patient. We must wait.’

  Again it seemed as if the man was looking for something.

  ‘How long? How long must we wait?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Paolo didn’t believe that.

  ‘My father told us the Americans and the British would invade France soon. When they do, that’s where they’ll try to win this war.’ History. He still remembered some of that from school. ‘If they came through Italy they’d have to make their way across the mountains, like Hannibal in reverse. Why take the trouble when they can go straight to Berlin the easy way?’

  There was that friendly nod again.

  ‘You’re rather more in tune with affairs than I realized.’

  ‘I’m not a child!’

  ‘How could you be?’ Garzone said in a quiet, considerate tone. ‘After what you’ve been through.’

  ‘So even if Italy is liberated we may be the last. They could be here years.’

  ‘Possibly. But we will be free one day. This war will end. Your world will turn to good. It always does. God demands it. So do men eventually. Mussolini and the Germans will be defeated. Of that I have no doubt. Nor do many of us in Venice, not that we say it out loud in public. That would be unwise.’ A quick and inquisitive look then. ‘This radio of yours …’

  ‘It’s not against the law.’

  ‘That depends what you listen to.’ He took a deep breath. ‘May I see?’

  ‘Why?’

  The priest drew his cloak around himself.

  ‘If it’s a problem …’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be taking care of Isabella Finzi?’ Paolo asked.

  ‘She’s a Jew. Diamante will find one of their undertakers.’ He took Paolo’s arm for a second and leaned down, then said, almost in a whisper, ‘How do you feel about the Americans and the British? Do you blame them for your parents’ deaths?’

  It seemed a strange question.

  ‘They dropped the bombs.’

  ‘Yes. They did. Bombs kill and maim. Anonymously, those who dispatch them believe. The newspaper said the aircraft were aiming at civilians deliberately. But they’re run by the Nazis. You can’t believe a word they print. A friend from Verona told me the target was an army barracks. They mistook the railway for something else.’

  Paolo wasn’t minded to answer that question. Still the priest persisted.

  ‘And what of the partisans … the Italians fighting the Black Brigades and the Germans?’

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘Are they brave? Are they foolish? Are they your enemy too?’ Garzone hesitated, as if unsure of the answer himself. ‘Or should they behave like the rest of us? Stay quiet, obedient. Tame. Hope to get through the day until finally we are free.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think I don’t know.’ The priest smiled and looked around the garden. ‘If I lived in this place I believe I’d want to stay behind these walls until the sun broke through those clouds and the war was over. My work, my duty … they make that impossible.’

  Chiara hadn’t wanted Garzone to accompany him home. She must have had a reason.

  ‘I was simply seeking your opinion, Paolo. Whoever it was murdered Isabella, because murdered she surely was, the police and the Germans will do nothing to bring the fellow to justice. Even if that policeman Alberti wished it, the Nazis would stop him. They think we belong to them now. Theirs to do with as they wish.’ The man in black put an arm around his shoulders. He had a firmer grip than Paolo expected. ‘Bombs are indiscriminate, though I know they’ve caused you pain. The Black Brigades, the SS … they inflict agony deliberately and choose the ones they slaughter. An accidental death is a tragedy. A deliberate one cold-hearted murder. These people are beyond the Lord. They grin in their victims’ faces as they wield their blades and prepare the rope. I know you’re happy in your little hermitage. But the world outside blows in on the wind and rain. Can you remain content here forever, Paolo? If there was the smallest, safest opportunity to offer a spark of hope against the darkness … would you reach for it?’

  If only it was summer and he could hear the birds singing again. Though, he wondered, too, how many times he could sit in this garden crying over his mother and father. What they would say? Politics never interested either of them. Right and wrong, though. They mattered. That, he now realized, was the cause of his outburst in the thin grey fog of San Pietro. It was their dead voices in his head, protesting at another innocent lost to the cruelty of war.

  ‘I’d very much like to see that radio of yours,’ the priest added. ‘Mine is old and will need replacing soon, I fear, since the chances of repairing it these days … Well …’ He lumbered towards the dusty glass of the conservatory. ‘This is a conversation we should continue inside.’

  Luca Alberti was thirty-nin
e. Police work was the only job he’d known. First in the Carabinieri building near the Greek church in Castello where he’d soon risen through the ranks. Then, after the creation of Mussolini’s new puppet state, as a captain in its replacement, the National Republican Guard.

  The landings of the Allied forces in the south had divided Italy in more ways than one. Il Duce was first under arrest after the coup in Rome, then freed by a daring German raid and taken north to start his phoney republic under Hitler’s fist in Salò. The Italian military caught on the wrong side of the line as the Nazis took control faced a grim choice: side with the old guard or risk being shot if the Germans feared they might defect to the new. Nor had the battlefront changed much in months. The British and Americans had made slow progress north as the wettest and vilest winter in years came to greet them. For the Nazis in the Veneto, the Black Brigades and the rest of the Fascists left working for Mussolini, the greatest local threat came from the disparate forces of the partisans fighting a guerrilla campaign of assassinations and strategic bombings of railway lines and military installations.

  In Venice, Mussolini’s artificial state now found itself in a strange, almost idle lull. There were still a few who believed that the Germans would prevail, or perhaps even that there would be an armistice allowing two rival Italian nations to exist, north and south. In his gut Alberti understood there could be no such solution. The king and his government had sided with the invaders and knew which way the war was headed. One day they would come, perhaps not soon, but the end was inevitable and when it arrived it would be bloody.

  By that time he’d be gone, out of Italy altogether. He had money. He had contacts too, and nothing to keep him in Venice. The year before his wife had left him and taken their son to live with her parents in Chioggia. She’d become sickened by the fact that, more and more, he was working alongside the Fascists, tracking down partisans or those who were intellectually hostile to the regime, men and women who might be executed in public or simply disappear. What really got to her was when he began paying a madame of one of the brothels for German lessons and a few tricks on the side.