The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

  ‘I don’t know anything about business.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve more qualifications than I have.’

  ‘They’re not great qualifications.’

  ‘Irrelevant. You know enough. You’re presentable. You speak English, French, German …’

  ‘My German’s terrible.’

  ‘It’s better than mine. People like you. They see something in you. Something … genuine. Also’ – he gestured with his right hand as if a decisive point was coming – ‘you’re an Uccello. Weaving’s in your blood. And …’ He grinned as if this clinched things. ‘You can pillage our back catalogue and produce that book of designs. Three centuries of Uccello velvet …’

  ‘A century and a half or so. Those earlier ones we inherited.’

  ‘No one’s interested in minor details like that. Three centuries of Uccello velvet …’ He took my hand. ‘Help me get going. Move back into the Colombina. Stay here for a little while and let’s see how it goes.’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ I asked and regretted it the moment I said the words. He looked so hurt.

  ‘You’ve always had a choice. Haven’t you? That’s why I’ve spent most of the last twenty years wondering where the hell you were. You wanted something different. Now, just for a month or two, I need a favour in return. After that go and do what you want. Whatever it is you know I’ll always support you. You’re my flesh and blood. All I have. Well …’ He frowned. ‘Anything except parachuting into some stupid war. Where that insanity came from I’ve no idea.’

  Of course he hadn’t. And, of course, there was no way I could refuse. So we went through some of the practicalities and I agreed – my things would be shipped from London and I’d start work straight away with him, rebuilding the House of Uccello as an independent supplier of luxury fabrics around the world. When affairs were more settled we’d talk about what came next.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, as I was leaving. ‘There’s one small thing. A public event I was supposed to attend tomorrow. Can’t do it now because of this stupid operation. No need to make a speech. They just need an Uccello there. We’re paying for it after all.’

  ‘What kind of event?’

  He smiled, a fond memory returning.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve ever been there. The place where Nonno Paolo started us off near San Pietro. We sold it when you were little. The city never could work out what to do with it. Then some young people came to me with a few ideas. I put in a bit of money and now it’s reopening. The Biennale are helping out. It’s going to be one of these trendy new bars.’ He hitched himself up in bed. ‘You might get a surprise when you see it.’

  ‘I bet …’

  ‘There’s a very forceful woman behind it—’

  ‘The Giardino degli Angeli …’

  ‘That’s the spot. Don’t look at me like that. She’s not my type. Valentina Padoan. Left-wing firebrand. She threw a milkshake over your old friend Scamozzi the other day.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Scamozzi. He’s in the Senate now with all those other right-wing bastards we have to contend with. Don’t you keep up with things? You’re still Italian, you know.’

  But I hadn’t. I’d been drifting. Lost in work and the bustle of London. So Maurizio Scamozzi, the thug I once watched bullying a little Jewish kid and didn’t do a thing to stop him, was now a politician of sorts.

  ‘This country’s changed, Nico,’ my father said with a shake of his head. ‘God knows how. I never saw it coming. Makes you think that evil old bastard Berlusconi wasn’t so bad sometimes. The lovely Valentina threw a drink over your old school friend when he was giving some rabble-rousing speech about kicking out all the immigrants. I admire her sentiments if not her methods. Look … all you need to do is go along, be your usual calm, polite self. Talk to her. Cut a ribbon or something. Then you’re done. The Giardino degli Uccello they’re going to call it, not that it’s ours, you understand, and I expect that’s more to do with the birds than us. I gave them some money, a few other things too. You’ll enjoy it. She’s quite a sweetie so long as you keep her away from the milkshakes.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes off San Michele, that shining white outline across the water.

  ‘You really had me worried.’

  ‘I said I’m sorry, didn’t I? Don’t go on about it. We’ve never been very good at communication. That’s the trouble. Never mind …’ He squeezed my hand again. ‘We’ll work on it. We’ll make things right.’

  I spent the rest of the day drifting around the city in a daze. Dad was right about one thing. Venice had changed. It wasn’t just the size of the crowds milling aimlessly around San Marco and the Rialto. The neighbourhood shops I knew so well – bakers, butchers, greengrocers – had mostly gone. In their place was all manner of small establishments – mask shops, jewellers, scores of places selling trinkets and cheap glass that were surely never made in Murano. There seemed to be a cafe every few steps along the principal streets that led to and from the Rialto. Our new housekeeper, a charming and very loud Filipino woman called Madge, complained that it was simple enough to buy an Aperol spritz or the mask of a Plague Doctor a minute from our door. But if you wanted toilet cleaner or a fresh chicken for the pot you had to walk ages.

  Then there was the atmosphere. Something about it that reminded me of the tensions I’d noticed lately in England. Gone was the sleepy, idle Venice of old. There were soldiers with weapons and armoured vehicles guarding the bridge as it led from terraferma into the busy hub of Piazzale Roma, something I’d never seen before. More armed men patrolled the ghetto, watching visitors as they arrived. A plaque now stood on the wall of Aldo Diamante’s house, recording his role in defending the Jewish community and praising him for his courage and – in spite of what I’d read in Nonno Paolo’s story – his faith as well. Across the way the old people’s home still looked much as it did when Luca Alberti saw pensioners being dragged from there by Nazi troops.

  When I went to the Jewish Museum I had to go through a security scanner as if I was checking in at the airport. Once inside I spent a quiet hour wandering the corridors and the synagogue hidden away in the tall tenement buildings of the campo. There was an advert for a tour of the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Lido later that day. I bought a ticket straight away, feeling Nonno Paolo’s story coming to life again. I knew the time was coming when I could avoid facing it no more.

  Time to spare. I walked to the vaporetto on the Murano side of the lagoon, past a couple of Africans hanging around street corners asking for change and an elderly woman dressed in ragged black robes, a veil over her bowed head, kneeling on the hard cobbles, begging the way you saw in drawings from centuries ago. Where she came from … I couldn’t guess.

  On the boat I read a newspaper someone had left. There was a story about a black kid, an immigrant, getting beaten up by his fellow school pupils on a bus in Treviso. It made our bullying of the Jewish boy, twenty years before, egged on by a boy who was now an Italian senator, seem petty if no less cruel.

  Then we docked in the Lido and I took the long walk along the waterfront to the iron cemetery gates at San Nicolò. A young guide unlocked them and let us in. She was giving the tour in English, not that she spoke it so well. The place was extraordinary, vast and went back centuries, lichen-covered memorials written in Hebrew scattered everywhere beneath the shadow of sprawling trees.

  Towards the end I asked the guide where were the graves of the victims of the Nazis? There were three names I was interested in. Mika and Vanni Artom. A woman from Castello called Isabella Finzi. She was a student, perhaps a little out of her depth, and perplexed that questions about the war weren’t in her script. So she called someone, came back and said there were no graves from that time. Mussolini had stopped Jewish burials in the cemetery with the Racial Laws of 1938 and they’d never resumed.

  ‘Where would they be buried then?’ I wondered.

  ‘I don’t know, mister. That’s a long time ago.’
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br />   ‘But it isn’t.’

  ‘It is,’ she said, ‘to me.’

  I took the number one boat back, the slowest there was. Fifty minutes from the Lido to San Stae, my nearest stop. I wanted time to think. Back home I bought myself a pizza, ate it alone in our kitchen with a glass of wine, remembering the tranquil days in the Palazzo Colombina when there were three of us rattling around the big, old place, two happy bachelors and a young boy whose grandfather would read to him, history mostly, in my bedroom, the third floor on the right.

  One storey below his mansard study.

  That place of his looked no different. Not even a fresh lick of paint, although the housekeeper made sure everything was polished and free of dust. The key he gave me was at the bottom of the Grand Canal so I got a crowbar out of the toolbox in the shed and took it to the old wood instead.

  Nothing had changed since the night I hurriedly pushed everything in there, the gilt box, the gun and six envelopes, one of them still unread, and threw the key into the canal. Watching the dust rise from the drawer as I opened it I felt as if I’d opened someone’s grave. But whose?

  The lid on the box was still stiff. The blood on the torn banner looked darker though I could touch it now. I was no longer scared.

  The gun I left where it lay. It was just Nonno Paolo’s final chapter I took with me down to the kitchen where, the rest of a bottle of Soave by my side, I placed the pages on the table and started on the final chapter of his secret life.

  ORDINARY MONSTERS

  Vanni Artom had heard distant gunfire and the cries of soldiers as they approached, but a single, louder shot was much nearer. After that came the stamping of boots through the building above him. German voices, men who sounded angry and aggressive. Drawers were noisily emptied, their contents thrown to the floor. The soldiers didn’t stay long. There wasn’t much to loot from Paolo Uccello’s modest home judging by their gruff remarks. Given the chaos and slaughter on the streets they were probably called away for support.

  All the while he’d sat there in the dark, silent, trying not to move, to give himself away. Was that cowardice? He wasn’t sure. He had no weapon, no means even to climb the steep staircase to the trap door. The wound hurt and itched like hell. There seemed no point in asking himself the obvious question: if things were different and he was fit and armed, would he be like Mika and go straight for them, knowing this was suicide but hoping to kill a couple of Nazis along the way?

  There was no food, no water, only the faint winter light from the tracery window after the torch failed. On what he believed to be the third day, when he was beginning to think he might starve to death with the stink of the lagoon in his nostrils, he heard the carpet above move away, the trap door creaking open. Vanni dragged his aching body to the foot of the steps, blinked against the searing light of a probing torch and wondered if he was about to die.

  ‘Paolo?’ a woman’s voice asked.

  No Germans. She seemed to be on her own.

  ‘Paolo? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Paolo’s dead, I think.’

  She opened the heavy door all the way and let it slam on the kitchen tiles. Chiara Vecchi stared down at him in misery, tears starting to trickle down her cheeks.

  ‘They said it was you. The Germans found your ID. They put it in the paper. They said the terrorists, you and your sister, were dead.’

  ‘I wish I was. I wish it was Paolo here. Honestly …’

  He was weeping too. There were no more words for either of them. She came down and helped him up the steps.

  For days he lay in bed, sweating feverishly in a freezing room, watching the snow fall outside. Christmas came and went. Chiara moved into Paolo’s old room on January the sixth, Epiphany, concerned about the state of him. A timid, nervy doctor arrived a few days later at her insistence. When he left she told him, Look after the leg or lose it. Then gave him new medication, not that he knew how she paid for it.

  She started to call him Paolo and when he asked why she said, Because that’s who you are now. Everyone assumed the solitary final member of the Uccello family had either fled when the Crucchi came or been murdered by his partisan guests. The doctor apart, no one knew he was living in the Giardino degli Angeli. She told anyone who inquired that she’d been given the job of looking after the place in the event anything happened to the family. The story went unquestioned. No one cared much about a failed weaving firm on the edge of San Pietro. Nor were they in much of a mood to ask hard questions in Venice that difficult winter.

  One day, feeding him warm white polenta with a few onions and dried mushrooms in it, she said, ‘If they ever find you here you’ll tell them that evil terrorist Vanni Artom made you take him and his wicked sister in. You ran and hid. Then you came back. Maybe they’ll believe you. If they come …’

  She sounded doubtful about that last and he wondered why.

  ‘They’re losing the war,’ she said with a shrug. ‘They’re beginning to know it too. The man they sent to replace the German your sister shot … he’s useless. The Crucchi spend their time drunk mostly or with their whores. Those bastards in the Black Brigades are still rounding up what Jews they can find. Shooting partisans. Even they’re starting to wonder what happens after. When others are doing the shooting.’ She put down the bowl and lifted the sheets to look at his leg. ‘I think you’ll be fine.’

  ‘The doctor—’

  ‘He won’t be back. He’s run off south with all the money people like me have given him. He’s not the only one.’

  ‘Why are you doing this? Not that I’m ungrateful but—’

  She looked astonished by the question.

  ‘Who else is there to look after you, Paolo? I promised your father.’

  ‘My name’s not—’

  ‘I know your name and so do you.’

  Spring arrived and with it warmth and sun. By then he was walking round the place with barely a limp. During the day Chiara would vanish into the city, cleaning for people, looking after the elderly in her old parish, coming back with what food she could find and scraps of gossip.

  He spent the time reading every book in the place. When he was finished with those she fetched him more from somewhere. Poetry books. American and British crime stories. History too. Lots of history.

  Then one June afternoon she returned beaming and placed a bottle of Prosecco on the table along with some bread and prosciutto.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  ‘They chased the Germans out of Rome.’ She popped the cork, poured two glasses and made some panini. ‘The Crucchi are on the run, Paolo. Not long now.’

  They toasted the future. He felt happier than he had in months. Better in himself too. The guilt, the memory of that last bleak day by the campanile, remained but framed into perspective by Chiara’s sacrifice and the risks she’d taken saving him. He’d always be haunted by the events of that bleak winter, but their bitterness was tempered by the decency of a stranger, unasked for, perhaps even undeserved.

  ‘Now,’ she said when they’d finished the bottle. ‘You need to go back to earning a living.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I was a student. Of poetry and literature. I’ve never earned a living. I’m not sure I ever can.’

  She wagged a finger at him.

  ‘You’re the offspring of the finest weavers to use a Jacquard loom here in ages. I’ve seen you work. You’ve promise. I’ll teach you the finer points. As your father taught me.’

  He pushed the bottle across the table and wished there was another one. A case. An endless flow of booze to take away the memories.

  ‘I can’t pretend like this. Not forever.’

  ‘Soon it won’t be pretending, Paolo.’

  ‘Not my name,’ he whispered.

  She seized his arms.

  ‘The war’s not over. If they hear Vanni Artom’s alive they’ll come hunting. And they’ll find you. Me too.’

  ‘But it will be …’

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sp; ‘We think about that when the time comes. Right now I need you on that loom. I’ve got work for us. A rich lady in Dorsoduro in need of curtains. I can’t do this on my own.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Chiara,’ he said and the following day he was there, seated at the middle Jacquard, just the two of them now in front of the bullet holes in the conservatory glass which she’d covered with black tape.

  Later that month, as the weather turned warmer, he saw a tiny shape flit across the garden and heard a snatch of birdsong.

  Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.

  Soon it echoed his rapid movements on the loom.

  Liberation didn’t come quickly. On April the twenty-ninth the following year, 1945, soldiers from Britain and her colonies finally rolled over the bridge from terraferma and rounded up the surrendering Germans. Four days after most of the country had found itself free of Nazi rule.

  It was the first time she allowed him out into the street. San Pietro was deserted. They had to walk to the foot of via Garibaldi to find the crowds, waving at their liberators, ripping flowers out of the public gardens to throw at them.

  Chiara seemed to know everybody. She introduced him to all the curious as Paolo Uccello, gave him a hug and declared she’d managed to hide him from the Crucchi ever since that grim day sixteen months before when the Nazis murdered the priest Garzone, the grocer Gallo and all those other innocents. No one seemed surprised. No one questioned her story. Paolo was a stranger to them all in any case. Besides, the city was in turmoil, different parties fighting for control. They had bigger things on their mind.

  News was slow to arrive and often doubted. It was only when people saw the photographs that they truly believed Mussolini and his mistress had died the day before Venice was liberated, shot and hanged from girders in the Piazzale Loreto, Milan, three fellow Fascists alongside them. Locals had gathered to spit and piss on their corpses and cut at them with kitchen knives. Then came the best news: Hitler had killed himself in his bunker in Berlin. They heard the announcement on the old radio while they were at the looms, busy on a fresh commission, expensive soprarizzo for an aristocratic family on the Lido.