I asked, “What kinds of puzzles?” Jigsaws were all I knew.
“Like riddles,” she said. “Like word problems. Do you like to solve word problems?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“There are puzzles everywhere,” said Olga. “There are very simple kinds of puzzles, and there are kinds that grow more and more complicated. People are a puzzle. I like to piece together their actions in order to understand their thoughts.” She looked at me. “Sometimes puzzles are so complicated you don’t recognize them at first as puzzles.”
Olga lifted her bulk off the floor with a ladylike grunt and went to pull a painting from behind an armchair. “This is a puzzle,” she said. “This is very special, this painting. I looked for it for many years before I found it, and that was very satisfying, but,” she sighed, “there is more to the puzzle that I haven’t solved yet, and that is very upsetting.”
It was an oil painting. Thousands of little dabs of paint had been put together to make a picture of a city. I wondered what was puzzling about it.
Olga looked thoughtfully at the painting and sighed. “I keep working on it.” She slipped the painting back behind the armchair and returned to the jigsaw.
I spent every afternoon thereafter with Olga and her puzzles. She asked me riddles and produced brainteasers. We fitted together jigsaw puzzles, and we talked. Some days she suggested a walk on the beach. Whenever we topped the sand dunes and looked over the ocean for the first time, Olga would pause. She looked so sad that I finally asked what distressed her. She shrugged.
“You are growing a little more sharp-eyed, Charlotte,” she said. “I am only wishing I could swim through the waves.”
“It will be warm again soon,” I said.
“It is not the cold that keeps me out of the water.”
“Can you not swim?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine someone living surrounded by ocean and being unable to swim.
“I used to swim,” Olga explained, “like a fish. But then I changed.” She waved a hand at her heavy body and shrugged. “With a body like this I would sink like a stone.”
I looked her over and admitted to myself that Olga’s bulk would be hard to propel through the water. I thought she must have been much thinner when she was younger.
“Do you go wading?” I asked. Lots of fat people did that.
“No, it only makes me sad to wade without swimming. But enough of that. We have puzzles still to be solved, and maybe someday I will swim again.”
One afternoon I sat in Olga’s living room waiting while she talked on the porch to a fisherman about the weather. I pulled out her painting in order to look at it more closely and wondered again what there was about it that was puzzling. I thought at first it was a picture of a river running through the middle of a city, but then I realized that it was a picture of Venice, where there are canals instead of streets. There was a bridge so steep that it had steps going up one side and coming down the other. There were people and shops all along the sides of the canal, and thin black boats, like canoes, crisscrossed the water. The boats were called gondolas, and I thought that the bridge must be the Rialto. I had read about it in my geography lessons. There were bright flags hanging from the bridge and the eaves of all of the buildings, and you could tell the sun was shining and the flags were blowing in the wind. When Olga came in, I asked her what the puzzle was.
“There is something hidden there, in Canaletto’s painting,” explained Olga. “It was put there by a very unpleasant man.”
“You mean Canaletto?”
“No, not the artist, another man, who then hid the painting. So what I’ve been searching for has been doubly hidden.”
“Why did he hide it?”
“He knew that it was very precious to me. He hoped that I would marry him in order to get it back.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No, even if I’d married him, he would have kept it and kept it and kept it, and I would never have been free. He thought I was helpless and had no choice, but I am not powerless, and I have a few friends. They helped me make a home on this island, and the people here pay me for what I can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh.” Olga shrugged. “Foretell them the weather, find their fish, sometimes call their boats home when they are lost. Simple things.”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. I asked, “What happened to the unpleasant man?”
“He was injured while hunting narwhals. The wound turned septic, and he died.”
“Good,” I said. If Olga said the man was bad, I believed her.
Olga lifted the picture behind the chair and sighed, “I just wish he had told me about the picture before he went off hunting narwhals.”
“We leave tomorrow,” I said to Olga as I stepped through her front doorway.
“So soon?” Olga asked vaguely. She was sitting in the dark of the afternoon in front of the Canaletto. She had her comb in her lap, but her hair was bound back in its bun. She sat on a small three-legged stool. The picture was propped on an easel, and all around were art books opened and closed right side up and upside down. Olga looked discouraged.
After a moment, she collected herself and asked if I would like a few cookies before starting a new puzzle. I said yes and followed her into the kitchen, where she burned herself twice boiling water for tea. We were supposed to work on a new jigsaw that afternoon, but I asked if she would like to go for a walk on the beach instead. Or maybe I should go home? I hated to lose my last day with her, but maybe she would prefer to be alone.
Olga put out one hand to my head and rubbed a thumb across my eyebrows. “It is that painting,” she explained. “I have tried so many things without success. It makes me not very good company.”
“Can’t I help?” I asked, seeing a way to avoid spending my last afternoon by myself.
“I was going to ask you,” said Olga, “but now you are going home, and I think it is too soon.” She turned back to the tea.
“It isn’t too soon,” I said, not having any idea really of what she was talking about. “Let me try.”
Olga thought while she poured the tea into cups. She handed one cup to me and took the other and a handful of cookies. “All right,” she said. “We will try.” She walked out of the kitchen and back toward the living room. With my tea and my own handful of cookies, I followed her.
Olga sat down on her three-legged stool, her bulk overflowing its sides, and waved for me to join her. The two of us faced the picture.
Olga took a last sip from her teacup and placed it on the seat of a nearby chair. One arm she wrapped around my waist. The other she lifted behind her head and pulled the pins from her hair. As her hair dropped, its smooth waves brushed across my bare arm.
“Look at the picture,” said Olga. “What do you see?”
I looked, and I saw that each of the tiny figures in the painting was moving. The thin black boats crossed slowly from one side of the canal to the other. The larger boats drew closer or farther away. Crowds of people who were no more than scraps of color passed over the bridges, and on the waterfront more crowds hurried or dawdled or paused in conversation. As I watched, the picture grew clearer and clearer until I could make out individual faces and see the words printed on the prows of nearby boats.
“Can you see? Can you see?” whispered Olga, her voice strained with hope.
“They’re moving,” I whispered in turn. “Everyone is moving.”
“Ah,” Olga sighed in relief. “Then it is not too soon.” I dragged my eyes away from the picture and looked at her instead. “It takes time for people to begin to see,” Olga said. “Some never see. Those are the ones that take their boats out to sea and are wrecked because the skies looked clear to them and they did not believe a weathercaster’s warnings. But even those who might believe an old weathercaster don’t see all at once. So there are ways to teach them to open their eyes. Your puzzles that are always new, the riddles and the word game
s, have all shown you a new way to see. But it takes time, and I did not think you had seen enough to understand my picture.”
“You’re magic.”
“Yes.”
“You do cast spells for the people on the island.”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
Olga smiled.
“I thought when you said that something was hidden in the picture, it was like one of those drawings with fifteen things hidden in it that you were supposed to find.”
“No,” said Olga. “What I am seeking is more carefully hidden than that. Somewhere in the picture is a place that was not in Venice when Mister Canaletto painted it. In that place is the thing that I have lost. But I cannot get to it, even now.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Look carefully. The frame is very small, and I am very stout. And see what lies across the bottom of the frame? Water. Even if I could squeeze through the frame, I would probably drown. If it is my only hope, I will eventually risk it, but I thought that you might help me. If you could.”
“How?”
“You can fit through the frame. You can swim.”
I still had my teacup in one hand. I took a sip from it and thought before I answered. “Okay.”
“Good girl,” said Olga, and wrapped me in both arms and squeezed until I almost dropped my tea. “Good, good girl.”
“Excuse me, lady.” The cabdriver interrupted Aunt Charlotte’s story. We were stopped at a red light behind a long line of other cars. “There’s some construction down there near the museum. You mind if I take you the long way, up Independence Avenue and back?”
“Oh,” said Aunt Charlotte, “whatever you think best will be fine.”
I hunched forward on the seat until she began again.
Olga described the precious thing I was to look for in the picture. A fur coat seemed a strange thing for Olga to have sought all these years. Olga gave careful instructions. She thought that if I found the coat, I could take it without anyone to stop me, but if I ever was frightened, I should come back.
“You are more important,” she assured me, “than a coat.”
When I was ready, Olga began to sing. I reached out for the lower edge of the picture frame, and it was as steady and as firm as a stone banister. I hooked one foot over its edge. I swooped my head through the frame and fell with an ungainly splash into the smooth water of a canal. All around me were boats filled with people, but no one looked my way as I flapped and splattered through the water. They showed no interest in me, a foreign girl swimming through their canal in strange clothes. I was invisible and inaudible to them as well. As I neared the dock, I was nearly run down by several gondolas whose gondoliers passed their poles over my head unaware of my existence.
When I did reach the side of the canal, I realized a great difficulty. The water was more than two feet below the level of the stone street. I couldn’t pull myself out. I looked back over my shoulder and could see the gold leaf picture frame floating four feet above the canal. If I couldn’t even get myself onto the quayside, how was I ever going to get myself back up to the picture frame? Before I could panic, I heard a voice behind me say, “Here, turn around and give me your hand.” The English words stood out from the babble of Italian.
I turned. A blonde-haired girl in a green coat bent down to take my hand. She braced herself and pulled, but not hard enough. My waterlogged clothes dragged me back. Before she’d had a chance to pull a second time, a boy arrived beside her. He was much more dramatically dressed, in a gold embroidered coat and a scarlet sash. He grabbed my other hand and pulled as well. Two others came to help. By the time I was out of the canal, a large puddle had spread across the stone pavement and my helpers were almost as wet as I was.
The four of them stood and looked at me, and I, with my hair dripping down my face and my clothes dripping onto the street, looked back at them. The first girl had a black flat-brimmed hat, like a sailor hat, that matched her coat. Beside her stood a boy, taller and probably older, in a fox red shirt a shade darker than his long brownish red hair. He, too, had a hat, but his was a deep black velvet rolled up around the edges. Beside him, and a little behind him, was another girl, dressed in a white dress with a black taffeta shawl across her shoulders. On her head was a peculiar collection of lace and ribbons that looked like a tiny wedding cake. She was pulling wet yellow silk gloves off her hands. The last of my helpers was a boy. He had no hat. His hair was trimmed very short and curled against his head. His clothes were far and away the most fancy, brightly colored and embroidered with gold. He looked like an illustration for a prince in a book of stories.
The first girl reached out a hand and said very formally, “I am Celeste.” When I took her hand, intending to shake it, she sank into a curtsy. Beside her, the boy with the long hair bowed from the waist. “I am Antonio.” The second girl also curtsied. She held her skirts out to the sides with both hands and whispered, “I am Caroline Howard.” And the second boy stood up straight to announce, “I am Rannuccio.”
I had no idea how to respond to introductions this formal. I thought that I should probably curtsy like the girls, but I didn’t know how. The head bob I usually gave to ladies at my mother’s tea parties wouldn’t be enough. I stood paralyzed by shyness. Finally the girl called Celeste broke the tableau. She covered her mouth with both hands and stifled a burst of giggles.
“Oh,” she laughed as she said, “you are so wet. You are like a cat pulled out of the well. A dog caught in a rainstorm.” Her giggles were contagious. Antonio was the next to break down, then Rannuccio. I swept my soaking dress to one side and executed an exaggerated imitation of the girls’ curtsies. Even Caroline smiled down into her silk gloves.
Celeste was the first to stop laughing. All her formality was gone. She took my hand and towed me toward the nearest bridge over the canal. “You are too wet to stand in the cold,” she said. “Come to the other side of the canal where there is sun.”
We climbed up the steps of the Rialto Bridge. Celeste kept tugging, but I paused to look over the edge at the top. I watched a gondola glide under me, before Celeste dragged me away. Once we reached a block of sunlit quay on the other side of the canal, she stopped.
“Here you will not be so cold.”
Now that she had stopped, I had questions to ask.
Celeste told me that they all had been sent by Olga. Olga’s magic had brought them to search Canaletto’s Venice, but on their own they had not been able to find Olga’s treasure.
“But we stayed to help you,” said Celeste.
“Olga thought that you might like company,” said Caroline.
“But where did you come from?” I wanted to ask why they were all dressed so strangely, but I thought it might be rude.
“From our frames,” said Celeste. She was far and away the most talkative.
“You are…paintings?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Rannuccio. “We are not Venetians.” He said it with a certain amount of disdain that I didn’t understand until later. Rannuccio was painted by a man in Florence. Antonio was also Italian. He was painted by Giovanni Boltraffio in Milan. Neither of them thought much of any city besides their own, although for the sake of politeness, Rannuccio said nothing of Milan and Antonio said only that he preferred Florence, of course, to Venice.
“But it is Venice we must search, and we should start soon,” said Antonio. “But first you must get dry.”
“Yes,” said Celeste. “You must be dry or you will be cold.”
I held my heavy skirts away from my legs. “If only I could shake myself like a dog,” I said.
Caroline spoke up diffidently. “There is the clothing market. She could wear the gondolier pants and a sweater.”
Rannuccio brought me the clothes. Then he and Antonio turned their backs while Caroline and Celeste helped me undo my buttons. I pulled on the pants, and dragged the sweater over my head. On a gondolier, the pants would have reached the knee; they cove
red me to the ankles. We used a scarf to tie them up. The sweater fell to my knees, and Caroline and Celeste rolled up the sleeves until they found my hands. As soon as my hands were free, I pulled Mother’s gold watch out from underneath the sweater. It was round, like a man’s pocket watch, and it hung on a gold chain around my neck. Until I changed my clothes, I had forgotten it was there. I should have taken it off before jumping in the water. I held it up to my ear and was reassured to hear it still ticking.
“Oh,” said Celeste, “how pretty. It is like Papa’s, only smaller.”
Antonio and Rannuccio peeked over their shoulders, and when they saw that I was clothed again, they turned around. Neither of them had ever seen a watch or any mechanism so small and intricate. I showed them how the small door over the face popped open so that you could read the time. Then I very carefully opened the back so that they could watch the tiny gears winding around and around.
“How does it work?” Antonio asked.
I had to admit that I didn’t know. “You wind this peg at the top and that makes the gears go around, but I don’t know how.”
“May I hold it?” Antonio asked. I pulled the chain over my head so that he could hold the watch. He stared into it, fascinated.
“What time does the watch tell?” asked Celeste.
Antonio thought a moment before answering, “Seven minutes until two o’clock.”
“Do you know what that means?” Celeste asked. All but Antonio turned to look at her. “Lunchtime,” she announced.
“Ah, no.” Rannuccio slapped his hand against his forehead and groaned. “She’s hungry again.”
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