by Greg McGee
There was no point in shouting to him, so she hurried down the other side of the bridge. Her father had shown her how the map of Venice resembled the shape of a fish and she remembered that the area on the other side of the bridge was the fish’s spine, Dorsoduro. By the time she’d plunged into the maze of alleys, he’d disappeared, so she followed the signs for the museum, thinking that must be where he was making for. After all, he’d hung two Milan Mrkusich paintings on his office wall, plain oblongs of dark grey and blue, and seemed to enjoy the fact that most of his clients found them impenetrable.
Before she reached the museum, she crossed a wide canal running at right angles to the Grand Canal. From the top of the bridge, she saw her father making his way down the footpath beside the canal, away from the Guggenheim building. She was about to call out, when she saw him stop and look up at the name of a street sign, then compare it with something he was holding in the palm of his hand. It was a piece of paper, surely the one Aldo had given him last night.
She kept her distance as he worked his way along the canal, checking the names of the side alleys. The fourth time he checked she saw him hold himself taller, straighten his jacket lapels and nervously wipe his mouth, before disappearing into the alley. And she knew in that moment he was looking for a woman, perhaps the same one he’d been looking for at Campo Santo Stefano and at the market below Rialto.
She stopped at the top of the alley. The houses were tiny, three storeys high but barely a room wide on each level, with doors painted mostly in pastel colours, yellows and blues, turquoise. The door where her father waited was a deep red, almost maroon, and was barely taller than him. He must have knocked once already and got no answer. She saw him knock again, and once again perform that hopeful pantomime, standing taller, patting his hair, wiping his mouth. The door opened. Whoever stood there was not welcoming: she saw her father become agitated, arms wide in supplication, then the door closed on him. He looked bereft, shrunken, raised his hand as if to knock again, then slumped against the wall beside the door. She couldn’t bear to watch any more.
Clare walked on some twenty metres and stood gazing out towards the wide water at the end of the canal. He’d played her for a fool. Telling her he was coming for a reunion when all the time he’d had another quest in mind. If he’d been honest about that, she could have got him onto a few internet sites and he could have trawled through those and saved them both the trouble of flying to the other side of the world to have a door slammed in his face.
Perhaps she was too raw from her own betrayal, but she felt like challenging him. Poor Mum. A big, ebullient woman who’d been gradually worn down by her father’s indifference. The rational part of Clare accepted that a stroke was a combination of bad luck and genetics, but a loveless marriage may have played a part. Even on her deathbed, her mother kept insisting, ‘He’s a good man.’
Another of her mother’s mantras had been ‘We’ve got you’. As if her daughter’s existence justified everything. That old joke about the only child that someone cruel recited to her: they tried it once and didn’t like it. It could almost have been true. He’d been so polite and stiff with her mother. She’d thought that was normal until she was old enough to notice the sly nudges and knowing winks and surreptitious little taps on shoulder or bum between her friends’ parents, the shared secrets of true intimacy. There’d been none of that for her mother, who’d come to remind her of one of those sheep dogs, running all day for a rare pat on the head or a word of praise. It was like living with a pair of polite monks.
When she turned to confront him, he was resting on the iron rail at the edge of the canal, lost in his own misery, staring at the water.
She knew she should go to him, offer him some comfort in his wretchedness.
She couldn’t even look at him. She turned and walked away.
15
She found herself sitting on a wooden jetty, just a collection of piles really, projecting out from the old customs house at the end of Dorsoduro. The dome of La Salute was at her back, and she could look out across the wide water to an island her father had told her was Giudecca. To her right, a wide sea wall ran back towards the mainland. The tide was coming in and the water was just a couple of metres below her. She felt as if she was at the very edge of Venice, away from its claustrophobic centre.
She knew she’d overreacted. It was partly because she was so raw and broken by her own betrayal, but it was more than that. Her counsellor had suggested she go back through what she knew of her family, and as she did so a pall of gloom had fallen over her that was far harder to shift than mere tears. What a tale of woe it had been, her parents’ marriage, the little her father had told her of his own upbringing. For at least a couple of generations back, her family seemed to be caught in a repeating cycle of loveless marriage, misery and early death.
She’d left that session feeling as low as she’d ever felt. There’d been something almost reassuring in knowing that what she was going through was nothing more or less than hundreds and thousands of people endured when their relationships ended. The jumble of loss and grief. Her counsellor had talked about that, and given her some sort of emotional map to navigate with. But the examination of her family told her a different story: she was uniquely and irrevocably cursed, and there was no way out.
Seen in that light, or shadow, Nicholas wasn’t just an unfortunate accident who might have happened to anyone: he was fire to her dry tinder. It hadn’t just been his looks, but his emotional extravagance, his willingness to engage, even his volatility had offered her a warmth and overt humanity that had been missing between her parents. Seen in that shadow, Nicholas had been her fate.
She resented seeing herself like that, as a victim of both nature and nurture. With her counsellor’s help she’d been gradually moving herself out of that penumbra towards the light, until she’d seen her father abasing himself at that little red door. She’d wanted to shake him, tell him Too late! He should have had the courage to follow his feelings back when he could have all those years ago, should have declared himself back then to whatever exotic creature lived behind that door, rather than condemn her mother to twenty-five years of marital half-life.
Maybe this discovery of her father’s real reason for coming to Italy was an improvement on what she’d previously known about him. Once, albeit a long time ago, he’d fallen in love. Fallen, as in lost control of his emotions. She’d yearned almost as much as her mother to see some sign of that, but they’d both, without ever discussing it, accepted that he was incapable of letting go. Love might have been deep inside him somewhere, driving his always impeccable behaviour towards his wife and his daughter, but he had never been able to see how crippling it was. He seldom talked about his own upbringing but when he did, it was strangely objective. He didn’t describe himself in the third person, but he might as well have: an only child in a huge landscape, which swallowed his mother. His father was never mentioned.
The more she thought about it, knowing that he had loved and lost someone here in Venice wasn’t that much consolation: it simply added another stitch to the pattern of despair. A passionate mistake followed by a loveless marriage was also a template she recognised.
And there was something else, something she now wished she’d discussed with her counsellor. She was pregnant. She’d told no one, because she hadn’t decided whether to go through with it or have a termination. These two weeks which, she’d calculated, would take her to twelve, were her time to decide. She desperately wanted children, a child, as she’d desperately wanted a good marriage.
She sat straighter on the wooden slats and dangled her feet over the edge, just above the rising water. She put one hand on her heart and one hand on her belly and tried to think kindly thoughts about herself and her baby, keep the fear at bay. Fear that the bad acids of anguish over the break-up would be harming the tiny bud of cells inside her.
The rhythm of the waves be
neath her was comforting, like the moon last night. Your pain changes nothing, she told herself. The tide still comes in and out. Keep breathing. In. And out. It’ll be okay.
* * *
She knocked on his door, resolved to extend her kindness to him too. After all, she, too, had come here with a secret. She was going to ask him questions, instead of throwing accusatory barbs. Who is she? Did you love her? What happened?
She knocked again. ‘Dad?’
He had to be there. He’d been on his last legs. ‘Dad?’ He would have come straight back here. She knocked harder. ‘Dad!’
Even as she hurried back down the hallway to ask the woman at the desk to open the door, she knew.
Gemona 1943
16
Joe woke late with a start, hearing voices. There were workers in the field beside the drain picking rows of beet. There was no chance of getting themselves and their bikes out of there without being seen, so Harry stood up, smiled and said, ‘Buon giorno.’
The workers couldn’t have looked less surprised. Clearly they already knew the Kiwis were there. Harry looked at his watch. ‘Christ, gone nine.’
By the time they’d hauled their bikes back onto the road, some of the workers had returned to their labours, but some were looking at them still, anxiously.
‘Tedeschi,’ said a woman, making a T with her hands. ‘Dappertutto.’
‘Germans,’ translated Joe, anxiously and perhaps unnecessarily, unsure how much Harry understood. ‘Everywhere.’
‘Andiamo via,’ said Harry.
Calling thanks to the woman and her companions, they rode off. ‘Do you reckon she was trying to tell us something?’ asked Joe, alarmed at how easily the workers had recognised them as foreigners, despite their clothes and their best buon giornos.
‘Like what?’
‘That one of them had told the Germans or their overseer where we were?’
‘There’s nothing we can do except keep moving,’ said Harry, and that made sense.
The day was overcast and they couldn’t see the mountains, but Harry reckoned he could feel the position of the sun behind the cloud cover. That gave him north, and he could plot a course that avoided Udine and took them more directly towards the mountains.
They felt safe enough on the small country roads that dissected the plain. There was vegetation to give them cover, trees and hedgerows, shoulder-height fields of maize and grapevines, and the roads were all busy enough to make them unremarkable among the traffic: people on bicycles, tractors and farm machinery, horse-drawn wagons, the odd car and many trucks.
Harry set a good pace, telling Joe they had to get across the major rivers before Jerry put guards on the bridges. The biggest one they crossed was the Tagliamento, braided like the Waitaki, with pale blue snow-fed waters. As they crossed, they saw a convoy of German trucks coming the other way. They dismounted and pressed themselves and their bikes back against the rails.
Joe forced himself to look at the trucks as they passed. German infantry were sitting shoulder to shoulder in Wehrmacht grey under the canopied trays. The only German troops Joe had seen until that moment wore the light tan of the Afrika Korps. The grim vacant faces flitting past stared out at the river and countryside and showed no interest in a couple of cyclists heading in the other direction.
On the northern side of the Tagliamento, they turned left onto a long straight road that followed the river upstream. Harry said they’d follow the river back to the snow. Joe marvelled at the way Italians used everything around them — here the farmhouses were made of round stones from the river, split and mortared. They stopped and ate their bread and tomatoes beside a field of maize by a sign for a village called Dignano. The sun had burnt off the cloud cover and they saw the mountains for the first time since they’d left San Pietro. They looked like a dragon’s back, close enough to touch, formidable enough to make Joe shiver.
They’d been pushing it, and became drowsy in the heat. Joe closed his eyes for what seemed like a moment and was woken by a yell from Harry, who was leaping on a man struggling up the bank with one of the bikes.
‘Get the other thieving bastard!’
Joe scrambled up the bank and hit the second man in the small of the back with his shoulder. When they fell on top of the bike, the handlebars smacked the thief in the ear. ‘Jeez, mate!’ he protested.
Harry had the other thief in a choke-hold, but it was clear from his desperate gurgles to ‘Lay off!’ that he wasn’t an Italian either.
‘There are hundreds of us around here,’ said the Aussie when they’d all calmed down. He and his companion, a Canadian, had escaped from another huge work camp called Prati Nuovi just before the Nazis had arrived and put everyone on a train for Germany. They were making for the mountains with about ten others and had taken shelter in the maize because the Jerries were everywhere. They had no food or water.
‘Or transport,’ said Harry.
‘Sorry about that, mate,’ said the Aussie. ‘We thought you were Eyeties.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Harry.
The Canadian sought to explain, said they were welcome to join them. They’d made huts in the maize, were going to hit up the locals for food. He talked about safety in numbers.
‘We’ll take our chances,’ said Harry, and when they were back on the road, he told Joe they were better off on their own. Joe was in no position to dispute this: they had transport, which the others clearly didn’t, but as of now they had no food or water.
By late afternoon, the field worker’s warning took on substance. As they pedalled north and west, leaving the plains and having to work harder as the contour changed to hill and dale, the German presence grew more pervasive. They even saw a German bicycle patrol ahead of them, luckily cycling in the same direction.
* * *
Towards evening the signs indicated they were close to a biggish town called Gemona, which seemed to sit up on the side of a hill to their right. Harry wanted to keep going, could see a gap in the mountains behind opening up into a huge V, almost certainly a pass, he reckoned. But they’d crossed on a railway bridge further down the road and found they couldn’t get back across the river or the tracks.
They almost rode into a German control point on one bridge. Without papers, they would have had no chance. Again they were saved by a warning from an Italian peasant who seemed to have no trouble recognising that Harry and Joe were not of his ilk. He put his scythe down and made the T sign. ‘Al ponte,’ he said, pointing ahead. He said the Tedeschi were looking for ‘prigionieri e partigiani sulle biciclette’, prisoners and partisans on bikes. This seemed to him a great joke, and he revealed a wide grin completely bereft of teeth.
When Harry and Joe dumped their bikes and crept forward to see whether the old man was having them on, they got a shock. There were four Germans on the bridge all right, but not in uniforms Joe had ever seen before. Their collars were black and they had the jagged lightning flashes at the throat.
Harry didn’t say much after that, but they rode much more carefully, south and then west. Again, they came to a bridge over the tracks, which, when they recce-ed it, was also manned by the SS.
When they retraced their steps they realised they were trapped between the railway tracks and the town, which covered the flank of the hill in front of them. They were hungry, tired and thirsty as the day faded and lights transformed the buildings above them from bleak to seductive.
There were no barriers to the town itself, apart from its topography. The streets were canyons between old houses that clung to the steep hillside. They pushed their bikes up the narrowest alleys they could find, but couldn’t avoid crossing larger streets and piazzas, disconcertingly full of German uniforms: on foot, on motorbikes, in the occasional car.
Most of them appeared to be off duty, and none of them gave Harry and Joe a second glance, but when they stopped at a larger
piazza near the top of the town, a dapper young man stood beside them for a moment. ‘You’re English,’ he said quietly. ‘You should know that there are Republican soldiers in town looking expressly for escaped prisoners of war.’ He walked off without waiting for confirmation or denial.
‘Who the hell are the Republicans?’ asked Harry.
Joe didn’t know either, but by simple deduction they had to be Italian fascists, working with the Germans. That was a problem, perfectly illustrated by the young man who spoke such immaculate English, and also by the old toothless man with the scythe: they might look like Italians to Germans, but to Italians they stood out like dog’s balls. Any confidence they’d had about working their way through the town and out the other side drained away. Now they felt as if there was a sign around their necks drawing everyone’s eyes to them.
‘We need to find a place to lie low,’ said Harry. They agreed their best bet was to find the poorest part of town and knock on doors until someone was kind enough to take them in for the night.
As they stood there, undecided, a priest pushed past them, making for a church that fronted the far side of the square. He was a tall, spare man, quite unlike Don Antonio, but a priest is a priest, thought Joe.
‘Sia lodato Gesù Cristo,’ he said.
‘Sempre sia lodato,’ the priest replied.
‘Ci da santuario, Padre?’ Joe asked. Can you give us sanctuary, Father?
The priest looked troubled, then looked right and left.
‘Soltanto una notte,’ said Joe. One night only.
‘Take your bicycles round to the side door,’ said the priest in excellent English. ‘I’ll let you in there.’
With that he hurried across to the main entrance of the church. Joe looked at Harry, worried that he might not approve.
