The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  They walk through the small, snaking calles of Castello and toward the harbor, their beautiful hats pulled over the rims of their eyes.

  In the center of San Zaccharia, three German officers struggle to ask for directions in broken Italian, and an Italian woman gestures in the direction of the Rialto. Orsina dips her head and whispers just low enough that Elodie can hear.

  “Resistance can come in many forms, it seems,” she says, her lips curling into a slight smile. “In this case, she’s sending them the completely opposite way.”

  They walk past the near empty Hotel Danieli and the Bridge of Sighs with its windows carved with stone bars.

  She inhales the air, damp and briny lifting off the harbor. The mist, so intoxicating, fills her lungs. The buildings of Giudecca emerge in the distance and the sound of church bells and ferry horns fill her ears. Elodie’s eyes struggle to differentiate between the sea and the sky.

  And then past the marble arches of the Doge’s Palace and the brick tower of the Campanile, she is suddenly in front of San Marco.

  As she lifts her head toward the basilica, Elodie hears the sound of fluttering wings. Hundreds of dark pigeons, with iridescent necks, taking flight.

  It is a place of wings and starbursts. High above San Marco’s ramparts, a winged lion looks over the square, its majestic gate flanked by a parade of Etruscan horses. Glimmering mosaics sparkle underneath gilded arches, and a cobalt blue frieze is studded in gold stars. And in the pale, afternoon light, trapezelike shadows fly across the piazza like another dark, exotic bird.

  But at the outdoor Café Florian, the pianist is playing Die Wacht am Rhein for a few German officers. Elodie’s body stiffens at the sound of the German melody, her mother sensing the tension in her daughter’s arm looped tightly within her own.

  They cross through the Square and dip into another side street until they reach the vaporetti.

  And as they begin to wander home, they avoid passing through the stone gateway that leads to the Ghetto, the ancient neighborhood that the Jews of Venice had lived in for centuries. Two shops flanking the archway are already shuttered closed, both marked by large swastikas and an ordinance announcing that they were “Verboten,” having once been owned by Jews.

  Elodie’s eyes search for any signs of life within the damp, stone buildings. In a tall narrow window, she spots a child staring with half-hollow eyes, her head wrapped in a scarf as gray as an oyster shell. The girl’s eyes meet Elodie’s for a brief moment, before falling back into the shadow of her apartment.

  In a few steps, the women suddenly find themselves facing two large German soldiers.

  “Halt!” they call out to the women. Orsina and Elodie stop in their tracks like a pair of hunted deer. “Ausweis.”

  The women reach to find their papers.

  “Where are you going?” one of the men asks in German. He takes their papers. When neither woman answers, he tries again in broken Italian.

  Orsina responds in Venetian. Her vowels elongated, her tongue rolling each word.

  “She’s speaking in bloody dialect,” the soldier curses. “I can’t understand a word.” They each cast an eye on Elodie, who has yet to lower her eyes under the brim of her dark red hat. On the contrary, she stares directly, unflinching. Lena would have been proud.

  The German hands their papers back. “Go! Get yourselves home!”

  Elodie can feel her mother’s pace quicken, her chest inflating and her breath slightly halting. Only after they are steps away from Valentina’s apartment, does her mother finally let go of her arm.

  Over the next week, Elodie learns to glide through the city like a native Venetian. She memorizes the small, narrow passageways and the bridges with only a few steps, even the ones that don’t have names. She avoids the large, populated areas like the Rialto or the Piazza San Marco, where German officers frequent in groups, their boots marching against the cobblestones, their battle songs and anthems filling the air.

  In the evenings, as Elodie tries in vain to fall asleep, her body sagging against the couch’s weak springs, her mind replays over and over every moment she spent with Luca. And one night, a sentence he had said only in passing when describing his past returns to her. He had mentioned a friend in Venice who owned a bookstore with a funny name. “La Toletta,” he had said, and laughed. “The name means ‘the vanity table.’ Pelizzato and I used to sell books together on the streets in Milan. Our carts stood side by side.” A sense of longing fills her heart as she remembers the intimacy of being in the back room with Luca, the smell of paper, and the thrill of telling each other stories filling the air.

  The next morning, she tells Valentina and Orsina she wants to find a new novel to read. “I’m getting restless and need something to do, but I’m afraid to disturb the neighbors with my cello.” She has taken it out of its case several times since arriving in Venice, to stroke the varnish and rub rosin into her bow. Sometimes, when the other women were busy with their sewing, she had quietly plucked the strings, just to let the instrument know she had not forgotten it.

  “Yes, as much as I’d love to hear you play,” Valentina agrees, “since everyone around here knows I’ve lived alone for years, the sudden arrival of a cellist would bring suspicion.” She walks over to Elodie and touches her shoulder lightly. “A few bookstores are still operating. I could certainly suggest a few . . .”

  “A friend once told me about a shop in Venice that had a good selection of American novels in translation.” Elodie pauses. “La Toletta . . . I think that was the name.”

  Valentina nods, pulling a pin from between her pursed lips and fastening it to a piece of fabric in her hands.

  “Yes. Of course. It’s not far. Close to Accademia.” She places her sewing down and draws Elodie a quick map with landmarks. Elodie looks at it intensely for a moment and then reaches for her coat.

  “Don’t you need the map?” Valentina asks her.

  “Oh no,” she says, delighted to have the chance to put her good memory to use. “It’s already in here . . .” She taps her finger to her temple.

  Orsina smiles. She knows exactly what Valentina is thinking: that even though Elodie is not a native to this city, she has still inherited her memory from Orsina’s bloodline.

  Walking down the Calle del Magazen, Elodie crosses the Ponte dei Greci near the gothic Palazzo Zorzi, with its rose-colored facade and tall windows, before walking through the Campo San Provolo. Her stride is quick and efficient, a form of camouflage in itself. When she finds herself in the Piazza San Marco, always densely populated with German soldiers, she doesn’t linger for a moment. Instead, she slips into the shadow of the Procuratie, where she tries to be invisible and avoid any eyes, Venetian or German.

  She continues walking past the Baroque church in Capo San Moisé, quickly memorizing the statue in Capo San Stefano as a landmark to guide her return. She crosses a wooden bridge, the Ponte dell’Accademia, and upon reaching the other side, turns right and passes another small square and bridge until she finally sees the long black and gold sign reading “La Toletta: Libri.”

  Dozens of books are in the window. She sees Dante and Bocaccio. She sees Chaucer in translation, as well as the newly popular Pearl S. Buck. She pushes through the door of the shop and pulls down her scarf. Inside, the perfume of pulped wood and tanned leather overpowers her. It is the scent of Luca, his essence captured in the fragrance of paper and ink and in the stacked crates filled with books. She feels her heart breaking, for the scent carries her back to a place where Luca was very much alive.

  “May I help you?” A voice emerges from behind a bookshelf.

  Then a slender figure with a head full of thick black hair appears. She notices the apron, the rakish grin, and the eyes that are neither hazel nor brown but something in between. At first glance, he could easily have been Luca’s brother.

  “Looking for a book, I gathe
r, signorina?”

  “Well . . . I . . .” she is stammering. She doesn’t know where to begin. Even deciding how to introduce herself presents a challenge: If this man knew Luca, does she go by Elodie or Anna? Will he even know that Luca is dead?

  “A friend told me about this store . . .” Her voice is soft and she can hear her nervousness laced throughout the words. “He had a shop just like this . . . in Verona . . . we were good friends . . .” She feels her voice falling away. “I have just moved here and I . . .”

  He has moved closer to her, so that their bodies are only a few feet apart now. He has taken his hands out of his apron, and his eyes scan her. She can see in his squint, in his now-intense gaze, that he is hardly listening to her words, but instead focusing on the other things she is communicating beyond her control: the inflection of her voice, the pauses of her breath, the slight tremor in her movements.

  “And I remembered he had mentioned your store . . .”

  “Is that so?” he says. He unties his apron and places it on a table of books. “What is the name of your friend, and the name of his store?”

  She does not believe there is anything to be lost by being truthful now. Luca is already dead. The bookshop, ransacked by the Germans, is now no doubt shuttered and closed.

  “Luca Bianchi, and his bookshop was called Il Gufo. It was on Via Mazzini.”

  He takes a kerchief from the pocket of his trousers and wipes his brow. Still, she can feel him studying her. Her face. Her eyes. Even her hands.

  “And you?” he asks. “Did you work in the store with him?”

  “No,” she says slowly. “I studied music there.”

  To this, he smiles, as if the pieces of a puzzle are suddenly making sense.

  “Yes, Luca was a friend of mine. One of my best, in fact.” By speaking of his friendship in the past tense, she realizes he knows that Luca is dead.

  “He was mine, too.” There is a quiver in her voice, like a finger that has momentarily slipped off its string.

  “May I sit down?” she says, gripping the edge of one of the tables in the store. The image of Luca’s limp body suddenly flashes before her. She feels the floor coming out from beneath her.

  “Please . . . Yes, of course,” he says, rushing to find her a chair.

  When she catches her breath, she looks up and discovers he is offering her a glass of water. His kindness is so heartfelt, she feels it like an embrace.

  Under damp timber, the walls lined with books, they share stories of Luca. Pelizzato tells her he had met Luca when he first started selling books from a cart in Milan.

  “We traded stock. He always preferred the modern writers, while I was building up my collection of the classics.” He laughs. His teeth are a shade paler than coffee, and his eyes are filled with light. “We were also reading Marx, debating the pros and cons about Communism, smoking too many cigarettes, and trying to flirt with pretty girls like you . . .”

  She finds solace in his memories. She can see Luca with his back against his cart of books, a cigarette between his lips. And everything about this store—the scent of paper, the half-uncrated boxes, the crowded shelves—it all reminds her so much of Luca.

  After a few moments of silence between them, Pelizzato’s voice reemerges. “May I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” she says, shifting slightly in her seat.

  “You said you’re a musician?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “What instrument do you play?”

  “The cello.” She is studying him now as intensely as he is studying her.

  “Luca told me about a cellist with an extraordinary mind. I can put all the pieces together now. Your eyes, your hands, even the way you move.” He takes another breath and scans her again.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Dragonfly,” he says extending his hand.

  Given all of Pelizzato’s similarities to Luca, it does not surprise Elodie that he, too, has been running supplies for the Resistance through his bookstore with the assistance of the Wolf.

  “There are several booksellers involved in the Resistance, Dragonfly. But it was Luca who really emphasized to all of us how much could be hidden within a book.”

  She nods. “Yes, I saw him demonstrate it with a Beretta.”

  “Ahh, the gun tucked within its pages is not such a new idea . . .” He laughs. “That one is an eighteenth-century invention. But using the pages to conceal messages is rather genius. It almost always got past the controls . . .”

  “I remember he used Tolstoy when he demonstrated the codes . . .”

  “War and Peace?” He laughs.

  “Yes,” she says. She was happy he knew Luca so well.

  “There were certain things that the Wolf insisted he didn’t want written down at all. Even if hidden in books. That’s why Luca was so excited by your ability to transmit codes and information through your music.”

  She looks down and bites her lip. “Until I blundered it all.”

  He doesn’t acknowledge her remark, but rather focuses solely on the facts of the bungled mission. “Yes, we were hoping to coordinate our intelligence information with Zampieri’s contacts within the French Resistance . . .”

  He clears his throat and fumbles into his shirt pocket to find a cigarette. Between their two faces, blue rings of smoke waft into the air. “The Wolf had his hand in many operations. He was intrigued by you because there was no way anyone would know there was a code locked inside your music.” He takes another puff.

  “You were an asset. An original one. And he appreciated it.”

  She feels shame creep over her, like a daughter who has disappointed her father and knows it. “I had every intention of transmitting the code that night. For some reason, I lost control of my mind as I was playing . . .”

  “Mistakes happen. It’s unfortunate when they do, but the Wolf is a resourceful man. He takes risks and sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don’t. He’s the best type of man to have in the Resistance. He moves like smoke . . . and he’s not afraid to die.”

  Elodie felt herself shiver.

  “You mean because they took his wife?”

  “Yes . . . Isn’t it a fact that when you lose the person you love most in the world, you no longer fear death?”

  She looks at him, her confidence returning. The discovery of this store and its owner, a man to whom she can talk freely, is a relief. It is like a rope tethering her to her old life.

  “Yes,” she says. “I know this feeling well.”

  He withdraws the cigarette from his lips and twists it into the ashtray.

  “I know you do, Dragonfly. That’s why I said it.” He smiles at her. “But maybe in your case, you can still try and stay alive a bit longer.”

  Over the next few days, Elodie watched her mother and Valentina settle into each other like sisters who had not been particularly close as children, but had found each other late in life. Each of them happy to have each other and to share many of the same memories.

  To Elodie’s surprise, Orsina came alive working with all the scraps of material cluttering the apartment. Although it was far from the abundance of exotic and luxurious materials that she remembered from her mother’s studio, Orsina enjoyed the challenge, much like Valentina, in creating something beautiful out of another person’s castaways.

  Valentina had found an old handbag and was unstitching the leather and pulling at the pieces to see if she had enough material to make a pair of children’s shoes.

  She stood up to search for a stiffer needle and stronger thread.

  “The two of you are amazing,” Elodie said, looking at the workshop the women had made of the living room. “I could never imagine making a pair of shoes out of an old leather handbag.”

  “When you get to be our age, you learn the art of reinvention,” Valentina said wit
h a small laugh. “It helps to keep you young.”

  “Actually, I think I need a little of that myself,” Elodie said, as she found herself needing to sit down in one of Valentina’s old velvet chairs. Her fatigue was so suddenly intense, she wondered if she might be ill.

  She was desperate to sleep. A long, deep slumber that she hoped would cure her of her recent constant exhaustion, of her stomach feeling queasy all day. But her sleep was always restless and fitful. She missed her old bed, its smell of starched linen and the adjacent living room, where for years she and her father would get up in the middle of the night and play.

  And her dreams were more like hauntings, fitful ones that depleted her energy instead of restoring it. She would see Luca behind her eyes, dressed not as a bookseller, but as a partisan. The bandanna wrapped around his neck, the gun in his arms. She would wake up with her hand balled into a fist, as though his amulet was still placed between her fingers.

  Restless, but not wanting to awaken Valentina and her mother, Elodie would sometimes unlatch her cello case and caress the instrument, as if it were the last thread that connected her to her old life. Afterward, as she wrapped it back into its silken scarf and laid it back in its case, she would touch the music that the Wolf’s wife had written. As she tried to fall back asleep, her mind would be filled with thoughts of this woman whom she had never met, but to whom she somehow felt connected. Each of this woman’s notes sounding like a requiem inside her head.

  During the day, she challenged herself with walks around the city, trying to memorize each landmark so that she could navigate her way home. There seemed to be a hundred different ways to reach the Piazza San Marco, and every day she took a new path and discovered another secret passage or another hidden spot of beauty.

  She learned to interpret the sounds of footsteps. The light tread of a Venetian, who sprang with ease over the bridges, in contrast to the heavy sound of a German’s boots on the pavement, which penetrated her bones like percussion. And she learned to find places where there was no sound at all, tiny pockets of the city that maintained a perfect and exquisite silence. It was in those spaces that she closed her eyes and heard only the sound of her own breath interlaced with the beating of her heart; a music that was utterly private and wholly her own.