Earthly Remains

by Donna Leon

  ‘What from?’

  ‘It might be varroa,’ Casati explained.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Mites. Tiny mites that suck the blood from the bees and weaken them.’ His disgust showed on his face.

  ‘Not kill them?’

  Casati made a noise. ‘If they’re weak, then other things can kill them,’ he said. ‘Too little food, viruses, pesticides, herbicides.’ Casati picked up his oar. ‘Man’s turned against them,’ he said.

  Brunetti looked around and ahead of them and saw only salt water and salt marshes. ‘All they have is salt water. Doesn’t that harm them, too?’

  Casati smiled. ‘Did you have time to eat breakfast?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, thinking of the fresh bread, jam and honey he’d found on the table, the butter in the refrigerator.

  ‘How was the honey?’

  ‘Delicious.’

  ‘It didn’t taste strange?’

  He thought of what Pliny had written about honey, the different places from which it came, and that honey made from thyme was good for the eyes and for ulcers. ‘No, it tasted fine,’ Brunetti said, knowing now what was coming.

  ‘It’s from here,’ Casati said, jutting his chin out to encompass the vast expanse of water that surrounded them. ‘Emilio’s family always made honey. And now I do, too.’

  Deciding that it was time to row, Brunetti inserted his oar, waited for the sound from behind him, and joined Casati’s rhythm. Today he wore the same trousers as the day before and an old cotton shirt he’d had since university. And a hat he’d found in a drawer, a faded orange baseball cap he could not have worn anywhere but here, where there was no one to see it. And the gloves, still. At least, he told himself, he’d wear them for the way out to wherever they were going. His hands felt faintly bruised and roughened after yesterday’s rowing, but there was no sign of blisters.

  They went the same way they had the day before. There was almost no traffic on the Canale di San Felice, broad and studded with houses on the Treporti side. Brunetti had a vague memory that this part of the laguna was completely enclosed by land and thus isolated from the Adriatic, which explained their near solitude on the water. They continued slowly ahead, soon working into a rhythm that suited them both. As had happened the day before, Casati sometimes called Brunetti’s attention to a bird rendered almost invisible by the tall grass or to a current that might cause them trouble or help them along. He seemed easily at home in what to Brunetti was an amorphous, uniform grey-green expanse. No buildings, no bright flowers, no shadow, no points of reference: Brunetti was as lost as any stranger in the streets of Venice.

  A group of buildings and fields appeared on the right, a few boats, and soon after, the canal veered to the left, and they followed. It began to narrow, and they came to a fork, where they took the unmarked, even smaller, canal to the left. Brunetti had a good sense of direction, and he felt that they were not far from where they had seen the bees the day before.

  Suddenly he heard a soft ‘shhhh’ from behind him, and Casati’s oar rose from the water and stopped. Brunetti lifted his own free of the water and turned to the man at the back. Both hands on his oar, Casati raised one finger and pointed to the right. Brunetti looked in that direction but saw nothing. He squinted to cut out some of the sunlight and then he saw them: along the side of the canal floated a duck with five tiny ones behind her, all of them absolutely motionless and, Brunetti assumed, doing their best to look like floating leaves.

  The momentum of their last strokes carried them forward, and in no time they were beyond the ducks. Brunetti turned to see what the ducks would do, but the mother must have enjoined silence for not one of them moved, and then they disappeared as perspective hid them behind drooping grass.

  Casati’s oar slipped back into the water, and they continued ahead. Brunetti rowed on in the growing heat and light and wished he had thought to bring sunglasses or to put on sunscreen. At least the sleeves of today’s shirt were long, and he was wearing gloves.

  How long had they been rowing? Again, he’d left his watch behind, equating timelessness with freedom. A field of cultivated land sprang out of the reeds on their right, but Casati did not slow their rhythm. Brunetti consoled himself with the thought that the slaves in the galleys had not had long-sleeved shirts nor baseball caps. He rowed on, conscious of thirst and his tight shoulders and tighter back and little else.

  ‘We can pull over here,’ Casati said suddenly. Brunetti stopped rowing, leaving it to the man behind him to decide where to pull in and moor the boat. Casati gave a few more strokes, and the boat slid up to the left bank. Brunetti heard a thud behind him and looked to see Casati sitting on the rowing platform, knotting a rope to one of the corners of the frame of the metal grating. He stood and tossed it on to the land, where it sank into the tall grass and would serve as an anchor.

  ‘Here. Catch.’ Brunetti turned just as Casati threw him, as he had the day before, a bottle of mineral water. This time Brunetti opened it immediately and began to drink. So immersed in pleasure was he that he heard nothing, and when he looked back, all he saw was Casati’s naked back and short trousers disappearing over the side of the boat. But in that flashing moment Brunetti had seen a broad trail down Casati’s back. Red, darker than red, almost black, covering both his shoulders and running down to his waist, the mark covered most of his back. Scar or birthmark, Brunetti wasn’t sure.

  Brunetti watched the other man swim away from the boat. Silence returned; the heat and sun assaulted him. He capped the bottle, set it upright against the planking, and untied his shoes. He stripped and piled his clothing on the board behind him, set the baseball cap on top, and rolled over the side of the boat into the water. He frog-kicked away from the boat into the centre of the channel. He dived, and when he surfaced, he was entirely alone in the laguna. He swam back to the boat.

  Brunetti started off the way Casati had gone but stopped after twenty strokes or so and swam back to the boat. Then he did the same distance in the other direction. To his surprise, the motion relaxed his arms and shoulders and allowed him to begin to hope that he would be able to use them again. He went back and forth until, head raised from the water as he turned, he saw Casati swimming towards him with an awkward, one-armed breaststroke, his other hand held above his head.

  Brunetti swam to the side of the boat and draped an arm over it, treading water. As Casati approached, Brunetti saw what he held in his hand: a small plastic vial with a green plastic cap like the one he had used to collect the dead bees the day before.

  Casati swam up to the stern and leaned over to set the vial on the top of his folded shirt, then draped both arms over the side, visibly winded from the swim.

  Brunetti pointed his chin at the vial. ‘What’s that – more bees?’

  Still breathing deeply, Casati answered, ‘No, it’s mud.’

  ‘No bees?’

  ‘They’re all dead,’ Casati said, and pushed himself abruptly away from the boat. He swam to the side of the grass island and pulled himself up on to it, then walked gingerly to the back of the boat. He stopped to remove his trousers and wring them out, shake water from them a few times, and put them back on. He stepped into the boat, reached under the horizontal board at the back, and pulled out two towels, tossed one on to Brunetti’s place, and began to dry his calves and chest with the other. Brunetti saw only flashes of dark red when the other man turned round.

  Seeing no easier way to get back into the boat, Brunetti swam around to the front and climbed on to the island. Stubbly grass poked at his feet, and he looked down to avoid the sharpest patches. He stepped into the boat and used the towel to dry himself, then put his clothes back on, leaving his feet to the sun.

  When he looked at Casati, the older man was dressed and sitting on the towel folded on the back bench, staring off into the distance. There was no sign of the vial. Casati bent and began to wipe his feet, then slipped them into his frayed old sneakers. He stood and spent an in
ordinate amount of time folding and unfolding his towel and then draping it neatly over the side of the boat. ‘It took a long time, but we finally killed them,’ Casati surprised Brunetti by saying, sounding as if he included Brunetti in the crime by virtue of his humanity. ‘First we killed her, and now we’re killing the bees. Next it will be Federica and her children, and your children, too.’ He nodded a few times to emphasize his certainties.

  Brunetti sat, wondering if too much sun had driven the older man beyond strength and patience. He said nothing and tried to remain motionless, telling himself to become part of the wooden board he was sitting on, to turn himself into one of the planks on the bottom of the boat. Brunetti tried to imagine what it would be like to become a piece of wood. What did Daphne feel as her limbs became branches, her toes roots? She was soon invisible in the forest, just as he now half hoped to become invisible out here in the laguna. Flotsam? Jetsam? Brunetti didn’t care which, just so long as Casati stopped raving.

  Suddenly Casati leaned towards him, but Brunetti, protected by his now-treelike nature, did not move. In the sort of speculative voice in which Brunetti’s moral theology professor had posed the rhetorical questions that always preceded his lectures, he asked, ‘Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?’

  Brunetti looked down at his dry feet. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered calmly, as he had so often done in class, hoping it would force the professor to make things clearer. Then, reluctant to do so, he said, ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

  Casati gave this long consideration and finally said, ‘Let me ask Franca if she thinks I should tell you.’ To hear Casati refer so casually to his wife in the present tense made the hair on the back of Brunetti’s hands rise, but before he could say anything, they were surprised by the sound of flapping wings, and three herons rose from the water ahead of them.

  Casati slapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. ‘Well,’ he said amiably. ‘We should start back, I think.’ He reached over and pulled the improvised anchor across the rough grass, hauled it in and set it on the bottom of the boat.

  He picked up his oar, obviously waiting for Brunetti to do the same. When Brunetti did, Casati poked his oar into the embankment and shoved them out into the channel again, and then they were off.

  To his own surprise, Brunetti felt refreshed, either by the swim or by Casati’s sudden return to reality. He was ready to row to Trieste if Casati asked him to.

  Brunetti rowed, musing on what Casati had said but failing to make sense of it. In the distance, planes continued to take off and land, so far away that Brunetti was never certain it was the planes he could hear and not the motors of far closer boats. He glanced to the west and saw what he thought was Santa Cristina.

  His oar hit something submerged in the water and he pitched forward, but before he could fall over the oar, it slipped free and tore itself loose from the fórcola and from his hands and slid into the water. Brunetti danced around in the bottom of the boat until he regained his balance, then lowered himself to sit on the gunwale until his heart stopped pounding.

  Eyes closed, Brunetti could feel the boat slow and stop, and then he heard a solid, banging noise from Casati’s direction. When he opened his eyes, Brunetti saw the older man leaning over the side of the boat, poking his oar in the water.

  ‘What did I hit?’ Brunetti asked in what he struggled to make sound like a normal voice.

  Casati remained bent over the side for some time, gazing into the water. He sat back on his heels, one hand wrapped around his oar, and looked at Brunetti. He muttered something that, to Brunetti, sounded like ‘my past’, but that made no sense. After a moment, Casati stood, looked into the water again and said, in an entirely natural voice, ‘Out here, it could be a submerged root, or a piece of rotten wood that got carried out by the tide.’ Setting his oar on the bottom of the boat, he reached to grab Brunetti’s, which was floating in the water, and placed it beside his own. He looked at his watch, glanced at the sun, then turned and looked back to where they had come from. Casati pulled up the top of the storage box to rummage around in the space below it. His hand emerged with what looked like a telefonino, the old type, with the cover that had to be opened. Casati pushed a button, then another one, then closed the device and placed it back in the box before shutting the lid.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Brunetti.

  ‘A GPS,’ Casati told him. ‘Tells me exactly where we are.’

  ‘Why?’

  He stared at Brunetti for a long time before he said, ‘No special reason. But I always like to know where I’ve been.’

  Without comment, Brunetti pushed himself to his feet and bent to slide his oar closer. As he did so, he looked into the shallow water at the side of the canal and saw something that looked like a metal circle, about the diameter of an inner tube.

  ‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked, pointing at the object.

  Casati leaned in the direction Brunetti indicated. ‘Could be something that came loose from a boat. Lots of things wash up around here.’ He straightened and put his oar in the fórcola. ‘Let’s start back,’ he said.

  Brunetti had no idea how much time passed before they stopped again: it could have been twenty minutes as easily as forty, and they could have been anywhere in the waters between raised patches of tall grasses.

  ‘One more visit, and then we can have lunch,’ Casati said, reaching into the box under the platform but this time pulling out the by now familiar leather case.

  ‘Bees?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes, I want to check them. These are the farthest out up in this part of the laguna.’

  ‘May I come along?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Certainly. There’s nothing illegal about what I’m doing,’ Casati said, sounding unnecessarily defensive.

  ‘I’d hardly think that,’ Brunetti said with a laugh to show how absurd the idea was.

  ‘Only secret,’ Casati went on.

  He tossed the makeshift anchor up on to the grass, and they climbed out of the boat. There was no trace of a path to follow in the rough grass, but Casati set off purposefully, heading due north. Brunetti, glad that he was wearing long trousers, followed him through the grass, which in places was sometimes high enough to rub itself aggressively across the back of his hands.

  The earth seemed softer out here. It offered little or no resistance and seemed to provide his feet with a cushion at every step. The first squelch explained all of this to him: the rising tide had permeated the sandy soil.

  Casati quickened his pace. ‘The water normally rises to two centimetres here,’ he said. Brunetti hurried to keep up as Casati led him across the grass, directly towards a large, sloppy-looking bush beside which stood a raised wooden platform holding three beehives, each with a different- coloured stripe on the front.

  As they approached the hives, Casati stopped to set fire to a chip of wood and handed it to Brunetti; then they set off again. The bees surrounded them in fact and sound: they flew at them and around them, occasionally landing on a hand or shoulder to explore a bit. But then they left and went back to their peaceful business; the buzzing soared and lowered, now absolutely unthreatening to Brunetti.

  The older man removed the top of the first hive and set it against one of the legs of the platform on which the three hives rested. Carefully, moving like a man under water, Casati checked all three hives and seemed pleased with what he found. When he was finished, he took the still-burning piece of wood from Brunetti and tossed it to the ground, then carefully ground it into the wet earth with his toe. Brunetti turned to leave, but when he failed to hear Casati’s steps behind him, he stopped and looked back, only to see Casati stoop down to pick up the piece of charred wood and place it in a plastic ziplock bag he pulled from the leather case. He stooped and shoved some of the wet grass over the place where it had been, removing all trace.

  They walked back side by side; Brunetti watched the rising water devour their footpr
ints the instant they lifted their feet. When they got to the boat, Brunetti looked back to where they had been. He saw nothing but a meaningless hump in the middle of the barena.

  10

  It was easy to fall into a routine: Brunetti made himself coffee a little after dawn, read for a time, showered, then ate the breakfast Federica had left for him. Some mornings, he persuaded her to at least have a coffee with him while he ate. She was in her early thirties, tall and slender, an attractive, dark-haired woman, with a soft voice and very like her father in the way she moved her hands when she spoke. She had a ten-year-old son who wanted to be a fisherman when he grew up and a seven-year-old daughter who wanted to learn to row a boat. Federica was shamelessly proud of both of them. She smiled and shook her head in wonder at what life could bring a person.

  She had lived on Sant’Erasmo since she was a child, had married a fisherman, Massimo, who had lived four houses away, and had known happiness until her mother’s sickness and death. During their conversations, which sometimes continued when she brought him half an apricot cake in the afternoon, Brunetti learned that her father had still not fully recovered from her mother’s death and probably never would.

  ‘I think he feels guilty about it,’ she’d said towards the end of the first week, trying to explain this to a curious Brunetti.

  ‘People always want to save the people they love, don’t they?’ was the only thing Brunetti could think of to say.

  ‘It’s more than that. I told you: he blames himself for her death.’ She had taken a few breaths, then asked, ‘But how could he save her?’

  Uncomfortable at hearing this and having no answer, Brunetti had reached for another piece of cake and changed the subject.

  He and Casati set out early each morning and rowed in the laguna for much of the early part of the day. If they were going to be out longer, Casati told him the night before and brought an abundant lunch with him the next morning. Sometimes they’d meet friends of Casati’s and then often didn’t get back until late afternoon. Everyone they met insisted on giving them fresh fish.