‘Largely…’
‘Their relationship … did continue, yes. She lived on the crumbs from his table, if you like.’
The marshal frowned. The nature of love was another of those things he hadn’t had much occasion to think about but he’d have felt more comfortable with something a bit cozier than what the lawyer was talking about. It reminded him too much of the lives of saints, their names long forgotten, recounted with bloodcurdling relish by the priest of his childhood. All that burning purity being offered up.
‘Like he was some sort of god.’
‘Oh, no. She knew his faults. They only seemed to bind her closer to him.’
‘And what about him? I mean, while she was giving birth to his child he was piling up his fortune. So what was she for him?’
It had been a rhetorical question, really, since the man married somebody else, but the lawyer seemed to be giving it serious consideration. At last he said, ‘His conscience, his truth. The man Ruth loved was the real Jacob Roth. He clung to that.’
The marshal looked carefully at the lawyer, thinking over what he’d said about how it happened to men and women. He was quite sure that D’Ancona had been in love with Ruth Hirsch and her pure burning flame for the whole of his life. Perhaps with both of them, with their story. After all, what could have happened since of equal intensity to this provincial lawyer? The only one left out of the story was Sara, who never lived. Sara, brought up on leavings to dream of greater things, who would have been satisfied with a sensible man and a couple of nice kids. Instead of which, blasted by war and greed, egoism and passion, she’d started life hidden in a convent with a lonely, frightened mother and ended it…
‘May I ask what you are thinking that makes you frown so? You find my assessment of their relationship unconvincing?’
‘No, no … I don’t know anything about that, no. I was thinking that Sara died by accident and—oh, it’s nonsense really but she never seems to have been important, does she? Not even important enough to have been murdered. Why did they want her out of the apartment?’
‘I don’t know but probably to sell it.’
‘You said it was owned by a trust.’
‘Set up by Jacob, yes.’
‘Were you on the board of trustees?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Rinaldi?’
‘Yes.’
‘So he’s an interested party.’
‘I must ask you to be patient. When you know the full facts and can appreciate what I am trying to do I shall be able to help you.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m here to listen to you, not interrogate you. It’s just—well, what I said before—Sara never seems to have mattered.’
‘She mattered to you. She told me that you were very kind to her and took her seriously. I have to confess to you that I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘I’m sure you, too, must have had your doubts about whether these threats she talked about were real or imagined.’
The marshal was relieved. ’Yes. Yes, I did and I’d thought until now that it was because I didn’t know her well enough to judge but if you say the same … I promised to go and see her and I left it too long. When I got there she was dead.’
‘And you blame yourself.’
‘Not exactly. I know that would be nonsense. It’s just such a shame that she was never important enough. Some people can command attention for the most trivial thing while others…’
‘Ah yes. That was the driving force behind everything Jacob did, do you know that? Some boys could study, but not a shopkeeper’s son, some could choose their future, develop their talents but not a shopkeeper’s son. Jacob had brains and skill. He wanted to paint but from the age of twelve he was working in the shop for his father. His parents had worked so hard and felt so proud of having created a thriving business, a secure future for their son. They could never have imagined the future that awaited them in Auschwitz or Jacob’s future, that of a man so enriched by that same terror that he could practically give their little shop away. His intention was to make himself rich but, more than that, to belong to that class of people that treads on the rest, not to the class of people trodden on. He threw away his paints.’
‘And might he really have been a great artist?’
‘Might have been … I’ve never believed in “might have been”, Marshal. Given the ferocity of Jacob’s driving force he would have succeeded at whatever he chose to do—like Picasso, whose mother once said that had he been religious he would have become pope. But Jacob didn’t use his force for art, he used it for himself, to make himself what he wanted to be in his own eyes and in the eyes of the world.’
‘Yes, I can understand that. But could he paint?’
‘Oh, he could paint. I have nothing here to show you—at least, nothing original. As a youngster he spent a lot of his spare time making copies from the great masters, as Florentine art students do. There was one in particular … I asked him to give it to me as a present. I was impressd by it. I still am. If you’d like to switch on the lights over there next to the French windows you can see for yourself.’
The marshal went, hat in hand, to the end of the overcrowded room. In the gloom he banged his hip on the corner of a table stacked with books and files. Just like the prosecutor’s office, in which case there would likely be books piled on the floor too. Best tread carefully. The thin slash of brilliant light between the slightly open louvred doors only accentuated the dimness of the room.
‘The switch on the left.’
The marshal looked at the painting and he, too, was impressed. The Concert.’
‘You know it—but, of course, being stationed at Pitti. You did say and I’d forgotten. You must know the galleries well.’
‘No, no … Just a few pictures … This one I remember because there was a special exhibition for it when it was restored. I have to be at these events. But—the young one on the left, the one in the feathered hat—his face is blank.’
‘Yes. If you look closely you’ll see that the features are very faintly sketched. He left the faces until last, he said, because they were the most difficult part, and in the end he didn’t finish that or anything else he was working on.’
‘That’s when he gave up?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you hang this picture as some sort of reproach to Jacob?’
‘I hadn’t thought so but I suppose you could be right. Still, I was only about two and a half years older than he was, in my first years as a student of law. I was luckier than Jacob, you see. My parents had a little more money than his and ambitions for me that coincided with my own. I could hardly criticise him. I couldn’t even understand him. I don’t know if I ever did really understand, though, like we all do, I flattered myself that I was the only person in his life who came near to it, with the exception of Ruth. But then, she loved him.’
The marshal made his way back to the leather chair and hesitated, wondering whether to sit down again or whether it wouldn’t be wiser to let the prosecutor talk to this man. He seemed to talk a lot but where were the facts, the facts about Sara’s death? He was deciding to leave it to the prosecutor when he heard himself asking, ‘That blank face … There’s still one blank face in this family picture—I’m very grateful for your help, of course, but I’m wondering where the brother is. She talked about a brother. And where is Sara’s other painting?’
Ten
The cages with their vertical iron bars were all empty. They stretched the opposite length of the courtroom from where the marshal stood at the press entrance looking for the prosecutor. He saw him at last to his right on the front row below the bench. He was very still, very quiet, which made him easier to spot since the lawyers were on their feet making a bit of a fuss about something. The hearing resumed. The marshal said to the official at the desk behind him, ‘I thought that Mafia car-park trial was on today.’
‘Next door.’
‘Oh.’ That would accoun
t for the empty cages.
‘This is the joker who was allowed out of prison for a day, murdered a prostitute and set fire to her bed, then went back to his cell. The judge will adjourn after this witness. Should be a psychiatrist’s report next but he’s not here.’
‘Thanks.’ The marshal went in as soon as the court rose but just before he reached the prosecutor a plainclothesman got there first and engaged him in some complicated discourse in an undertone. The marshal stepped back and waited until it was over and the prosecutor turned to leave and saw him.
‘Has something happened? How did you find me?’
‘I rang your office.’
‘He’s adjourned till Monday. Let’s go for a coffee.’ The prosecutor’s place at the long table was a miniature version of his office. He tipped the lot into his battered briefcase and pulled at the stock around his neck.
The marshal had told him most of it by the time they reached the bar across the broiling piazza.
‘And did he tell you?’
‘About the brother? There is a brother.’
‘So he has the painting.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Two coffees! He could be behind the attack on Sara, then, if she wanted it back. What did he say about it?’
‘Nothing really. He gave me this. He said now that Sara’s dead it can serve no purpose.’ The marshal produced a videotape in its black cardboard sleeve from the pocket of his uniform jacket. ‘He thought we ought to meet Jacob Roth.’
‘Guarnaccia! You’re not going to tell me he’s not dead either?’
‘No, no … He’s dead. He left this for his daughter, Sara.’
‘Come on. There’s a video machine in the office next to mine—no, let me get this.’
They drank off the thick espresso in one swallow and pushed their way out through a horde of incoming tourists.
‘Do you have your car?’
‘Over there.’
‘If you get there before me, it’s the office to the left of mine.’
‘My dear daughter, when you see this I will be gone, perhaps long gone. I shall give it to Umberto, who will keep it as a sort of insurance policy for you in case of difficulties. I foresee no difficulties but most of what has happened to me in my life has been unforeseen.’
Jacob’s face had become gaunt and his hair was white but he was recognizable in the photograph of Jacob as a younger man from the intensity of his dark gaze. He was seated in the very armchair that the marshal had occupied less than two hours ago.
‘You know your name is not mentioned in my will. I owe you an explanation and you shall have it here. Your mother, my Ruth, never in her life wanted explanations, excuses, apologies. If I tried to give them she would place a finger over my lips and look deep into my eyes until she had quieted me. You have her eyes, Sara. The first time I saw you in that gloomy convent reception room, you looked at me with Ruth’s solemn eyes in your baby’s face. You seemed to be reproaching me for intruding on you and distracting your mother’s attention. You hid your face in her hair at the sound of a man’s voice and later you screamed when one of the nuns carried you away. Yesterday, as you left us, you had that same expression. I decided to prepare this message for you. I will tell you the truth about your painting, because it is yours and it will return to you and be a joy to you if you are married and financially secure, which I hope you will be, or a means of sustaining you if you are not.
‘You know from your mother that she brought two paintings by Monet to us from Prague and that I sold one for her on my return to Florence. I settled some money on Ruth in addition to the proceeds of that sale and gave her the use of the second- and third-floor flats in Sdrucciolo de’ Pitti so that she would have a home and a little income.
‘Until then, those two paintings, and many others, had been hidden in Umberto’s garden because of the Occupation. I took away a number of the paintings after the war and sold them. When I moved here with my young, ingenuous wife—the war to her had meant a shortage of food and stockings, girls instead of men working her father’s land—she saw your painting. That was the first of a series of unforeseen disasters. She wasn’t meant to, of course, but it was delivered with the rest of the things remaining with Umberto and she was there … Would it have made any difference if I had been ready with a story? That it was in safekeeping for a friend, anything? She said, “It’s so lovely. They’re my absolutely favourite flowers.” She said, “Give it to me! Darling, let it be your wedding present to me, please!” I was afraid. I was a coward. I said yes. And she had it hung in the prettiest room in the house and loved it more than anything else in our home for the rest of her life. When I think of her life I think of light, serenity, and flowers. When I think of my own it is dark. Dark … a turmoil of nightmares just kept at bay. And not always kept at bay … Everything I did was an attempt to be part of that other world. I was bound to fail, I know that now. You have to be born into it, to be ignorant of anything else, to be like my wife.
‘I told Ruth what had happened. I offered the price of the painting. I offered to sell another, more valuable one of my own for her. She refused. She didn’t want money. She had lost her family in the camps, lost her home, lost everything but what she had carried here in a suitcase. She asked for nothing and she took nothing except what was necessary to secure your future. When I asked her why she hadn’t told me she was pregnant before I left Florence to be stranded in England for the rest of the war, she answered me, “I was seventeen years old. Why didn’t you ask?” She was proud, Sara, your mother. She loved me unconditionally. She never considered using you to persuade me into marriage, even though I was only engaged when I found her again. I think—no, I’m sure—that she knew from the start what my marriage was about. She knew, too, that I loved her and would never leave her. She was part of me. She was, in the end, the only part of me that survived. She and Umberto kept me alive.
‘Well, your painting remained in my wife’s room and it remained Ruth’s property. Our decision was that it would return to her—or to you—on my wife’s death. It was Ruth who died first, as you know. My wife survived her by only a few months. She left her favourite painting to our son. He paid the death duties on it from her estate. It was the one memento of happier times that she had clung to. Not because it was my wedding present to her but because I was able to assure her that it was not one of those … tainted ones, the ones that had made her despise me … How could I have told her it belonged to the woman I loved and to you, our daughter?’
Here Jacob interrupted. The direction of his glance changed and another voice murmured something in the background. Jacob looked to one side, said, ‘Yes’, and the screen filled with fuzzy white spots, then went blank.
‘Damn!’ The prosecutor got up and reached for the remote control. ‘That can’t be the end and it’s obviously an amateur job. Let’s hope it’s not broken.’
It wasn’t broken. Jacob’s face reappeared. He was in a different chair, and the picture, which had been darkening as he talked, was now much brighter and clearer. Some leaves, tinged with rosy pink, were moving gently to the right and you could now distinguish the fine quality of Jacob’s clothes, his long brown hands. Evidently, he’d moved out into the lawyer’s garden, perhaps as the afternoon light faded in the big room.
There must have been a third person. Another voice said, ‘That’s fine. Don’t touch anything. Give me a shout if there’s a problem.’ A young, cheerful voice that belonged to another world. Then a pause.
‘Sara, the unforeseen …’ He stopped a moment and closed his eyes, and when he went on they remained closed for the first sentence or two, as though he were unable to look at the camera, at an imaginary Sara. ‘The unforeseen thing that happened to me … and to my wife is very hard for me to tell you. Even so, I am at the end of my life and the last thing that remains for me is to protect you by telling the whole truth and giving it into the safekeeping of Umberto in case you should need it.’
H
e coughed and murmured something, looking down. Someone gave him a glass of water from behind the camera. The marshal recognized the shiny, arthritic joints of the fingers, the age-spotted skin. Jacob sipped from the glass and, still holding it, forced himself to continue.
‘Ten years after my marriage I received a letter from a man whose name doesn’t matter. He is dead now. He had sold me a number of Impressionist paintings in the thirties for a very low price. Like your mother, he was fleeing from Nazi persecution. He and my father had dealt with each other for many years. He came back to me because he and his wife were old, sick, and penniless. I received him myself and took him to my wife’s private room since she was absent and no servant would be likely to disturb us there. He was … agitated. When I offered him compensation—which he considered so insufficient as to offend him—he became more angry, angry and noisy. I was worried we would be overheard. I asked him to step out into the garden.
’“Afraid somebody might hear the truth about you? That’s it, isn’t it? Your parents died the worst of deaths but at least they didn’t live to know how you stole from their trusted friends. How many of us were there? How many other desperate people did you cheat of their lives?”
’“I cheated no one. I paid. I paid for everything.”
’“Paid a pittance! Paid an insult!”
’“Paid as much as I could afford at the time.”
‘“You’ll pay the price of your actions yet! You remember that. You may not pay money but you’ll pay, you’ll rot! Under your fine clothes you are putrid!”
’“I have paid! My parents died in the camps. I was cheated out of my life in every possible way. I built another and you won’t destroy it.”
’“Give me what you owe me!”
‘I gave him a cheque. It was for a large amount, for a credible amount Did Umberto D’Ancona, behind the camera, say something they couldn’t hear? Or just look at him?
‘No … it wasn’t the full amount, not even then when I had everything. It wasn’t … I was afraid. How many others might appear out of the past?
Some Bitter Taste Page 17
