The Garden of Angels
Page 37
When everyone thought she was finished she said, ‘And now … a surprise.’
On the far wall was a scarlet curtain decorated with the lion emblem of Venice, a product of our looms I didn’t doubt, held in place with a gleaming satin ribbon.
‘Nico.’ One of her helpers handed me a pair of scissors. ‘Please.’
I’d no idea what was going on but Valentina Padoan was not a woman to be denied. When I snipped the ribbon the curtain fell to the floor to reveal a bright new bronze plaque attached to the wall. I read it and once again felt giddy.
Here, one cold winter’s day in 1943, a partisan called Giovanni Artom fell, a martyr to the Fascists like his better-known sister Micaela. Patriots of a free Italy, dedicated to justice and liberty. We will remember them always.
‘War is full of stories,’ Valentina said to the audience in the confident tones of a born academic. ‘Some known. Some unknown. Giovanni Artom was one of the latter. He was not a Venetian but came from Turin. He died here and was forgotten over the years. It’s our belief we must keep alive the memories of all the fallen. Even those who, for whatever reason, have fallen through the cracks.’
For a moment the audience seemed to listen as Valentina set forth her explanation of how she and her students had discovered there’d been another victim that bloody December Sunday in 1943. A man whose sacrifice had never been acknowledged. Perhaps because there’d been so much death that day. And he was a stranger, not a Venetian.
They didn’t listen long. This audience wasn’t here for distant history. They wanted free drinks, some selfies, the opportunity to see a small part of the city that was usually kept from view.
I watched her start to lose their attention, and the way she realized this was happening, how much it hurt. And I found myself thinking of the world I grew up in, an easy, lazy one, where no one talked much of war and poverty. All those years we took for granted.
‘Please,’ Valentina begged them. ‘A moment’s silence for Giovanni Artom and all those who died so that we might live in freedom.’
At least they gave her that. Even the birds and the boats on the lagoon seemed to acknowledge it, though doubtless that was my imagination. Then, on cue, it was back to normal and everyone was talking, wandering round the garden, looking at the statues and the children’s decorations, my photographs from twenty years before, queueing for more free drinks.
By then I was remembering Maurizio Scamozzi, a school bully I’d fallen in with for a little while out of nothing but laziness and fear. A man of some power now in this strange, new world that had succeeded those idle years of old.
I thought of soldiers at Piazzale Roma bearing weapons as they stood by their armoured cars. Of men with rifles in the ghetto, beggars ignored in the street and a teenager getting beaten up on a school bus in Treviso for no reason except the colour of his skin.
The spell was broken by something familiar, eternal, real and haunting.
Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.
A goldcrest flitted across the garden, always busy, always alive.
‘I’m sorry, Nico,’ Valentina said, her eyes welling with tears. ‘People don’t really listen sometimes. They’re too … busy.’
I was astonished by my own blindness. At how long it took for the scales to fall from my eyes.
I thought Grandfather meant this story for me.
‘Let me get you a drink,’ she whispered.
Of course he didn’t. He placed his memories in my hands for safekeeping. The voice of an old and long-dead Venetian doctor was in my head then, saying something to a turncoat policeman in a chilly alley in San Marco. Though perhaps the words were Nonno Paolo’s all along.
It wasn’t enough to remember the fallen. You had to remember how and why they fell.
This story – his story – wasn’t for me.
It was for now.
For today.
For you.
‘I’ve a tale to tell as well,’ I said, glancing at the plaque on the wall and the name there: Giovanni Artom. ‘A big one. I’m going to need your help.’
‘Of course,’ said Valentina Padoan.
And here, at last, it is.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction though it takes some inspiration from events that followed the German occupation of Venice in September 1943. Up to that point the city’s Jews had been persecuted by the Italian Fascist authorities but few had been interned. From the moment the Nazis took total control, however, the oppression became all too real. Professor Giuseppe Jona, the president of the Jewish community, committed suicide on September 17th after refusing to hand over to the Germans a list of members of the city’s qehillà. In November Mussolini declared all Jews foreigners of a hostile nationality, ordered the confiscation of their estates, and marked them down for arrest. For the sake of a fictional narrative I have changed the real-life timeline of events and invented much. While Aldo Diamante owes something to the courageous Jona, all characters in this story are inventions.
During the German occupation some 230 Venetian Jews were deported to German concentration camps. Only eight of them returned alive. According to Susan Zuccotti (The Italians and the Holocaust, Persecution, Rescue, Survival) wartime Italy’s relatively small Jewish population lost 6,800 of its 38,400 members to Nazi and Black Brigade murderers after the persecutions.
Some 200,000 Italians are estimated to have taken part in the resistance efforts against the Nazi and Italian Fascist regimes. Around 70,000, both civilians and partisans of all backgrounds, are thought to have been killed. L’Istituto Veneziano per La Storia della Resistenza (iveser.it) has recorded many stories of partisan activity in their research archives on Giudecca.
The weaving of fine velvet is a long tradition in Venice. There is still one manufacturer using the technique of ancient Jacquard looms – Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua (www.luigi-bevilacqua.com) based in a palace on the Grand Canal in Santa Croce. I’m grateful to the company for showing me round its fascinating weaving room there, though I should say the real process is far more complex and time-consuming than it appears within these pages.
David Hewson
Kent and Venice
December 2018 to April 2020