The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

She dragged off the remains of the dress Vitale had given her, ran her bloody fingers through the fake blonde hair wondering how quickly she could get rid of that as well. Stood in front of them, bra, grubby pants, caked blood running up and down her legs like daubs from a bad painter.

  Then she threw off the last of her clothes and looked at herself naked, not minding that they saw. There was nothing left for her to reveal.

  ‘I need to wash this dirty Crucchi shit off me now,’ she said. ‘You got a towel?’

  Filippo Garzone sat in the silent belly of his church, not the most attractive in Venice but there was so many to choose from. San Pietro was his so naturally he loved it as one might love the runt of a litter. It was only natural the soldiers would look for him first in his small terraced house next to the basilica. Where else? That was where he’d lived ever since he’d moved from Vicenza. Perhaps it was difficult for the Germans to understand that, on a black night when the soul was tested, a man of God would wish to be closer to his altar than his bed.

  Come they would though. He’d guessed that from the moment he’d learned about Aldo Diamante’s suicide. The whispers he’d heard that evening, round-ups beginning throughout the tenements of Castello and an aborted attack on the Crucchi in their beloved hotel-cum-brothel, only made him more sure. Garzone was no partisan. In truth politics puzzled him since he failed to understand why, when it came to matters of life and death, temporal issues should take precedence over the spiritual. But someone, somewhere, perhaps under duress, would mention his name. Reveal him as a sympathetic ear for those whom the Germans wished dead. A whisper was all that was needed.

  There were no regrets. He’d served his flock, be they Fascist, one of the rare religious communists among them or, more often, an ordinary citizen frightened and puzzled by the predicament in which he or she found themselves. Anyone who came and asked him to listen deserved to be heard, whatever reasons took them to that wooden booth in San Pietro. To be brought closer to God too if that was only possible.

  It was just such a conversation the Monday before, later shared quietly with Diamante, that had led him to hear a rumour that two Jewish partisans from Turin were seeking sanctuary from the Nazis. Diamante, a man much like himself, detached but concerned, knew much more already, and had come to the conclusion there was nowhere safe where he could hide the pair. The Nazis were already starting to look at the city’s Jews with greedy, expectant eyes. To place wanted fugitives in their threatened midst would only enhance the risk for all. Then the two of them together heard that unexpected outburst from Paolo Uccello as men dragged the body of the unfortunate Isabella Finzi from the icy lagoon. The young man’s words meant an equitable solution seemed to suggest itself, hiding the pair with the solitary weaver living like a church mouse in his tiny home tucked away at the perimeter of San Pietro.

  It was a mistake, on both their parts. The likelihood was always that the Crucchi would keep harassing and torturing those they suspected until the fugitives and those who’d helped them were exposed. He’d never walked close to their grim headquarters in Ca’ Loretti but he’d heard enough tales from there. Of screams from the downstairs cells. Of shots ringing out in the courtyard, before them, on occasion, the defiant shouts of those about to die.

  Did that mean he was wrong to involve the innocent young Paolo in the schemes of others more worldly? Which was best? The right decision made for the wrong reasons? Or the wrong for the right? What, in the end, was the difference in any case? In the end we were all dead, corpses in the arms of God awaiting resurrection. He’d cautioned his parishioners time and time again to be patient. To await the moment – inevitable surely, he always said – when the forces of freedom triumphed from the south and Hitler, Mussolini and the vileness that came with them were banished to grim chapters in history books yet to be written.

  Mute, private opposition to the horrors around you was the wisest course of action. One that might save your life and that of your family even if it left a whisper at the back of the head, a cruel and hurtful voice that spoke of cowardice while others made the most painful sacrifices.

  Thinking of all this in the pews of San Pietro, head bowed like any other parishioner before the altar, he opened his Latin bible, the one he’d owned since he was a teenager in then peaceful Vicenza, and found the page he wanted, scanning it under the waxy light of a single oil lamp. A suitable section. Matthew 26:36. The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus awaiting his fate after the Last Supper, knowing he would be betrayed and that his cruel death was only days away.

  Matthew, always. For some reason he preferred this to Luke, perhaps because, being a physician, the latter felt moved to record Jesus sweating tears of blood as he prayed. Garzone was a man for feelings and emotions, never physical detail. They seemed needless.

  Since the Germans flooded into Venice and seized control the previous September, he’d reread Matthew’s version frequently. It seemed apposite. Part of his calling as a priest, his principal role in life perhaps, was to persuade the men and women and children of his flock that God was real and the blood of Jesus still flowed through them at the Holy Mass just as it once ran through the veins of Christ in Jerusalem almost two thousand years before. Some, perhaps most, regarded this as a fairy tale, a gilding of the lily that was the Catholicism they’d grown up with, as much a certain part of their lives as the vast expanse of the lagoon and the changing of the seasons.

  Yet now, finally, Garzone believed he was beginning to see this part of Christ’s story in true relief. Waiting for the Crucchi it almost felt as if Jesus himself had somehow made his way to the modest streets of Castello, was walking among the cobblestones and mean terraces, casting his gaze into the eyes of his weary and frightened parishioners. Into the face of his priest too.

  And saying to them … I understand my child for once I was afraid as well.

  In the smoky yellow lamplight Garzone’s finger ran down the flimsy page until he found the line.

  Pater mi, si possibile est, transeat a me calix iste.

  My father, if it’s possible, let this cup pass from me.

  The cup being misery, death, pain, all the horrors the fallen world of man might deliver.

  Then, three verses later, came the acceptance of his coming crucifixion.

  Pater mi, si non potest hic calix transire nisi bibam illum, fiat voluntas tua.

  My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to pass from me unless I drink it … thy will be done.

  Fiat voluntas tua.

  God’s will. The greatest mystery of all. At the seminary when he was young, long before the war, they’d been visited by a travelling choir from distant Wales, not Catholics at all but no one minded because they had such beautiful voices. They’d sung a gorgeous hymn that had stayed with him, especially the opening words which a friend had translated from the English and Garzone, ever careful, had noted down in his diary, with a vow to remember them.

  Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

  In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes …

  So much was veiled from the living, invisible because the frail and the fearful, and he was both, wished it to remain unseen.

  Now that self-imposed ignorance was coming to an end. His finger stayed on Matthew’s words and, as if by a kind of magic, the refrain of that old hymn returned from the depths of his memory and rang through his head, all those sweet foreign voices in lovely harmony. Filippo Garzone closed his eyes and smiled. He was a priest and had spent his entire adult life ministering to others. In all that time he had, perhaps, come to believe the Lord’s will applied more to them than the man, the weak, imperfect man, through whom God spoke.

  This deep and inner reverie was broken by a loud and violent sound at the back of the nave. Voices, harsh, threatening. German. Then the door was slammed open and the frantic beams of torches began to break through the quiet dark.

  I never lock it, Garzone said to himself, amused. Why must they make such a racket? This is a churc
h and a church is always open.

  There should have been a prayer. He always found one of those when a parishioner demanded it, for happy times, baptism and births and marriages. For sad too, sickness, death, the diurnal turn of the world from light to tragedy and, after a while, back again.

  But no words came. Only those still ringing in his head.

  Fiat voluntas tua.

  Immortal, invisible, God only wise.

  He was murmuring them as a rifle butt stabbed into his shoulder. Once. Then again.

  ‘I am ready,’ Garzone said, raising his hands as he got to his feet. ‘I am ready, and for what ensues I forgive you.’

  Though he doubted they understood a word.

  PART FIVE

  I stayed up reading into the early hours, barely hearing the traffic on the Grand Canal fading to the odd night vaporetto and water taxi. The following morning there was a message from school. With only one more week to come before the summer break they’d decided the miscreants currently under suspension could stay away for that as well. Which meant I was now on my own for months, trapped in the lagoon, waiting on a dying grandfather and the strange story he was revealing to me piece by piece.

  I didn’t realize how much that was starting to unnerve me until I had to walk across the city to the hospital. That day I decided to cross by the Scalzi bridge and go through the Ghetto in Cannaregio, a part of Venice I barely knew. There were a few tourists in the campo, milling round waiting on the Jewish Museum to open. Opposite what must have been the building where Aldo Diamante lived and died was a large, municipal-looking block bearing iron lettering which read ‘Casa Israelitica di Riposo’. The nursing home from which the unfortunate Jewish pensioners had been dragged by German soldiers. It wasn’t hard to work out where Luca Alberti had stood watching them after he spoke to the priest, Garzone. It was under the sotoportego that ran out of the ghetto to the south east. So I went there, stood where he did. In the unseasonal June heat it was impossible to imagine a cold December day fifty-six years before, the screams and cries of the unfortunate, the hammer of Nazi boots on the cobbles. Now the few trees in the square were in leaf, visitors meandered round licking at their ice creams, a couple of kids played football against the old wellhead in the middle.

  Somehow this only made the story in my head more real, more unnerving. I wanted to go up to them and shout, Don’t you know what happened here? Can’t you feel the traces of all that misery? There were old people around too, locals, I could tell from the dark, unfashionable clothes they wore as they sat on benches reading newspapers or simply enjoying the sun. A few might have been children during the German occupation. Perhaps they saw their own grandparents hauled out of their homes, forced into cattle trucks at Santa Lucia station, headed for the extermination camps in Germany and beyond.

  I found myself shivering and close to tears. People were starting to look at me, perhaps the way they’d looked at a young Paolo Uccello, thinking … what’s wrong with that one? Is he normal?

  All the same there was still one place that troubled me more, somewhere I had yet to dare to enter. The Giardini degli Angeli itself. When I pushed Chiara she told me it was now a temporary exhibition space for the Biennale which explained the work I saw going on there. As a local I could walk in pretty much any weekday afternoon for free.

  Not yet, I thought as I left the high tenement blocks of the ghetto and found the long stretch of the Misericordia canal that would, in fifteen minutes or so and by a circuitous route, take me to Diamante’s old hospital of Giovanni e Paolo.

  A trio of musicians, electric piano, bass and drums, was practising on a long barge by one of the popular Misericordia bars. A young girl pressed a flyer for a concert into my hand. Another time I might have thought of trying to come back that night. The place was popular. Kids I knew from school used to turn up there and hang out, drink beer, try to pick up girls. I took her leaflet, then pushed it into the nearest bin. More and more I felt I was walking through two cities at the same time. The Venice I’d grown up in. The different, darker, violent city that Nonno Paolo had known when he wasn’t much older than me.

  Half-dreaming I stumbled over the bridge into the campo of Giovanni e Paolo. Across the square was the cafe of Rosa Salva, somewhere Nonno Paolo used to take me for pastries and ice cream when I was tiny. Now, I knew, the very place a doomed Aldo Diamante and Garzone used to visit too. Was that why Grandpa liked it so much? Was he trying to keep in touch with those memories too while I stuffed my face with pastries and ice cream?

  I wandered over to the front window, almost expecting to see them there, peering out at me, an expression on their faces that said, What took you?

  Instead there was a gaggle of middle-aged women in blowsy floral dresses, a foreign party I imagined, tucking into cakes and coffee. People on holiday, trapped in the present, oblivious to the past.

  One more part of the story, Nonno Paolo said. Then we’re done.

  ‘Say it,’ he ordered.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Whatever’s on your mind. Your face is what the English call an open book, Nico. Which is both a blessing and a curse. There’s something there you want to get out.’

  He looked more frail. His cheeks were an ashy shade of grey and his eyes had lost their usual bright and lively sparkle.

  ‘I don’t like him. Vanni Artom.’

  ‘Because he’s Jewish?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Are you sure? Because he liked other men from time to time?’

  There we were again. I could feel my face flushing once more.

  ‘It’s not that.’

  He shook his head and asked, ‘Then what?’

  ‘He took advantage of you. He made you do those things to distract you from Mika. From the danger he’d put you in.’

  I knew straight away I’d got that wrong.

  ‘Didn’t he?’ I added.

  ‘In the brief time the two of us were together we didn’t do a thing we didn’t want. You can’t imagine what it was like then. We were living day to day. Hour by hour if I’m honest. Trapped in that place. Thrown together. Frightened. Desperate. As I said … curious. If you could count your life in days what would you look for?’

  ‘Love,’ I said because I thought it was the answer he wanted. That made my cheeks flush hotter too.

  ‘Exactly. And love comes in many forms.’

  He reached for the bedside cabinet and I saw how much the effort drained him.

  ‘Let me,’ I said and opened the drawer.

  One more envelope. I took it out and noted the title, one that filled me with dread.

  ‘Oh, poor Nico,’ he said, shutting the drawer with a shaky, skeletal hand. ‘I’m so sorry. Perhaps I’m being cruel, giving you this unwanted gift. A boy of fifteen. With Venice to himself. You could be out there, enjoying yourself. Feeling your young blood run through your veins. I’m not so ancient I forget what that was like.’

  ‘We started this story together. We’ll finish it together.’

  ‘Even if it upsets you? Endings do that sometimes. This isn’t a fairy story. It’s real life. Messy. Such a thing lacks the symmetry of the tales you read in a book.’ His eyes were glassy. ‘Sometimes matters linger. Some things never go away.’

  ‘I think I can cope, thank you very much.’

  ‘You’re not just putting on a brave face?’

  ‘Does it look like it?’

  He smiled and said, ‘Only you know that.’

  ‘I’m fine. You tell a good story. I can’t stop now anyway. I’m hooked. It’s as if I’m seeing these people on the streets. Diamante. The priest. Poor Mika.’

  ‘Poor Mika …’ he whispered.

  I didn’t know what to say. There was that awkward silence between us, one neither knew how to break.

  Finally he tapped the envelope.

  ‘Go read now. Come back tomorrow and tell me what you think.’

  Then I kissed him, quickly, tenderly on both whiskery cheeks. He l
ooked surprised. Shocked even.

  ‘I do so hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake.’ His voice was breaking and there were tears in his weary eyes. ‘It’s hard to know sometimes what’s right, what’s wrong. Not till the die’s cast and by then it’s too damned late.’ He patted my hand. I was ready to cry too. ‘Time to go, dear grandson. This old man’s story needs to run its course.’

  BLOOD ON THE STREETS

  Sunday morning, just before seven. Paolo couldn’t face the Artoms. So he stole quietly out of the front door, stepped through the garden, past the rotting oranges and lemons and the dead eyes of the fallen angels, out through the door in the wall, across the little bridge into San Pietro.

  Venice in December was always cold, today more so than ever. The sky had cleared overnight. A thin covering of sparkling frost sat on the cobbles and the bridges. There were icicles hanging from the runoff water on the boats moored in the dockyards to the south of the island and the smaller craft that lined the Rio Sant’Anna as it led to via Garibaldi. Fewer people than usual. Perhaps he’d come out a little early. Gallo, the timid, scared shopkeeper, might not even be open. He’d have to wait, maybe buy himself a coffee in Greta’s. It felt good to be out of the house. Good to be away from Vanni and Mika. He’d no idea how they might escape now. How Mika might keep her promise to get them out of Venice.

  As he strode towards the commercial part of the street a figure dashed out from the shadows of a sotoportego and dragged him into the dark.

  A woman, sturdy, shaking in a black coat, a woollen hat pulled low over her ears.

  ‘Come here …’ she begged. ‘We need to talk.’

  Chiara looked terrified, so much it took him a moment to recognize who she was.

  ‘Listen to me for once, Paolo. The Germans are everywhere. They’ve seized the priest, Garzone. They’re taking people in for no good reason at all. Someone got killed last night. One of theirs.’

  ‘Some of ours too,’ he said and she stared hard at him for that.

  ‘The priest never meant for you to become involved. You were supposed to hide them. Nothing more.’