The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  It was not that Rabino had never desired a woman before. But until now he had found it possible to subdue such thoughts with kindness for the object of his love. He knew that he was ungainly, his beard coarse, his eyes over-moist. He had never dared to wish himself upon the kind of woman he himself might want. Sosia was different. Her erotic presence perfumed the air he breathed inside the house, and every oyster, every artichoke she served reminded him of his moments inside her soft body.

  He knew from the moment of the act that he was not the first. The initial shock of that realisation only dishonoured him more; instead of saving her, he had joined the rank of those who had apparently brutalised the girl to the point where she saw nothing wrong or even unusual in loveless congress with her employer.

  Perhaps she has been trained to offer this service to anyone who pays her? He wondered, but cast the thought aside as too sordid to be true. She was only fourteen, perhaps fifteen; he had taken her straight from her parents, who, despite their wretched state, were respectable in the extreme. Until then she had lived her entire life under their protection. He had been assured of this. Moreover, her gauche manner and her lack of charm forfended any possibility that she might have been reared as a courtesan.

  Other times he contrived to see himself as the victim of Sosia’s debauchery. His profession had taught him that people who were damaged, whether physically or mentally, manifested the worst behaviours, and that they would drag innocent souls into the abyss with them, for company or to avenge their own wrongs.

  Rabino was too good and too intelligent a man to let such justifications deafen the cries of his conscience for long. It soon became his obsession to make up to Sosia what had been robbed from her. He would be good to her. Her life would become good; he would spend the rest of his own redeeming it. She would become his familiar and helper. She would come to trust him and shed the cool furtiveness of aspect that hardened her features now. Kindness she would acquire; all who dealt with sick people did so, in his experience.

  And so he persuaded himself, in continual silent monologues, while he made his rounds, to engage the rabbi, the calligrapher for the wedding document, and the tailor to make the girl a new dress for the ceremony. For those three weeks it took to ready them both for the marriage, he did not touch her. Perhaps, he reasoned to himself, despising his own hypocrisy, even virginity can renew itself, God is good, he prayed.

  Too late, on their wedding night, he became aware that Sosia was not the victim of men; that the act of love was as natural to her as eating. She was not unwilling; she was not frightened. She was dismaying in her appetites. He realised that it was the seep of flickering memories from her skin that cluttered up the air around her. The shock of the first revelation did not leave him. Once he had imagined her body curved around another man’s, he could no longer look on her without that vision writhing in front of his eyes.

  At first, it sickened him; sometimes, when he acknowledged that he did not love her, it raised in him a kind of excitement he felt to be unhealthy. He knew of booksellers in Venice who could supply woodcuts of the kind of scenes he imagined; he knew that noblemen among his patients exchanged these pictures. So far he had fallen from grace, from dignity: he was now bonded in honour by a primitive act to a woman whose soul was as anonymous to him as one of the participants depicted in those obscene prints. He could not meet his own eyes in the mirror; he shuddered at the speculations of the neighbours. He knew that in Venice they were always omniscient.

  He stopped looking at Sosia. It was in looking at her that the trouble had started. He no longer cared to know whether she was beautiful or vile of face. Doctor and wife now exchanged information with their eyes averted, for Sosia, it seemed, had no more desire to reach out to him, except in the basest, physical way. When he asked her to read aloud to him, to spare his tired eyes, she seemed to turn the purest poetry into cold and dizzying licentiousness, without changing a word or the monotone inflection of her voice.

  It was a mystery to him how she did this. Perhaps it was the contradictions: despite what seemed the deliberate iciness of her voice, she could not disguise the pleasure she found in the words. When Sosia was reading, it was an act of her whole body. She held the book in four cupped fingers, one hand like a tray of sweetmeats, poring over it. Her body squirmed like a child’s, too excited to contain the knowledge it was ingesting. Rabino disliked watching this. Sosia loves to read, he thought, but I hate the way she loves it.

  He no longer followed her to the pantry, and rarely joined her in their bedroom. These days he clung to the side of the narrow divan in the soggiorno rather than join her in the darkness. The conjugal bed, with Sosia in it, had become in his exhausted mind a kind of terrifying mollusc with a slimy, greedy mouth at the centre. In outline, in the moonlight, Sosia’s body under the coverlet looked to have a hundred grasping limbs. She slept restlessly, churning her feet and grunting like an animal. He would look down on her when he arrived home at midnight, and lift the sheet as if to join her. But at the last moment abhorrence overcame him and he stole away, wiping his hands on his tunic.

  Rabino longed to talk it over with his friend, the surgeon Smuel Ben Shimshon, but Smuel could not be expected to understand, and his sympathy would be painful. He shared a tropical joy with his own young wife. Rabino knew – from Smuel’s eagerness to return home after even the most pleasurable evening’s discussions, from his rueful tiredness some mornings – the nature and extent of his friend’s physical and sentimental happiness with his Benvenuta. Once he had asked Smuel, ‘What’s that beautiful smell?’ Smuel had blushed and stammered out a confession. His wife liked to put sprigs of lavender in their bed; at night they released their oils.

  Rabino imagined Benvenuta strewing the fresh herbs over the linen, smiling in happy anticipation of sharing their delectable scent with her husband. He had no idea what Sosia thought about when he was away from home, what she looked forward to, if anything.

  He did not know how she passed her days, whether she had friends. There were other Serbs in the town; fewer Jews, as all of them, except physicians like himself, had been exiled seven decades before. Was she lonely? he wondered. Was she perhaps homesick? Did she seek out her own kind?

  Perhaps she longed for a child, he thought, but he could no longer bring himself to do what was necessary to fulfil such a desire. Anyway, his professional eye had long since detected some slight malformation in the bone structure of her hips, which explained her loping walk. It would be difficult for her to bear a child to term.

  Rabino stayed away from home more often; volunteering for night vigils over dying patients, relieving other surgeons like Smuel and sending them gratefully home to their wives and families. He would go to the dread island of Santa Maria di Nazaret, the lazzaretto for those infected with the plague and the depository for all contaminated goods. He was there so often that the monks gave him his own cell with a clean, hard pallet. But he had to go home, sometimes. During the day he snatched some hours’ sleep while Sosia went to the market. His signal to rise hurriedly from the bed would be the sound of her key in the latch. He would pass her on the stairs with a polite greeting that she ignored or to which she replied, mockingly, ‘Tired, are you, Mister Doctor?’

  Over their mid-day meal he remained as silent as she did. The food was unappetising and he did not comment upon it. He did not even wish to draw attention to it by adding condiments or peeling the burnt crusts from sippets in the meat porridge. He knew that it was not mere incompetence that resulted in sustenance as revolting as the messes Sosia placed in front of him.

  It was hatred, quietly and passively executed.

  Chapter Three

  He just lies like a log in a ditch.

  He knows so little about her

  that he might never have had her.

  This idiot of mine sees nothing,

  hears nothing,

  knows less,

  whether he’s coming, or has ever come …

  Rab
ino assumed that Sosia hated him for his neglect. In this he was completely in error. Regarding her husband, his absence was the only thing that gave Sosia pleasure. She had loathed reading Petrarch aloud to him, hated watching the softening of his eyes and the way he looked to her to satisfy the tender needs the poet created in him. She had soon made sure that he stopped asking. She had other fish to fry. Unsupervised, Sosia took to stealing pleasure where she could find it. She had become an expert at procuring it and detecting those who also knew where to look.

  On the Venetian ferryboats Sosia stood close to other women, close enough to gauge the percentage of sweat mixed with their civet perfumes, to know whether they menstruated or had copulated that morning or afternoon. To those smelling of the latter events she would give a crooked, complicitous smile that made them look to their baskets of cherries, the knotting of their shawls or the ribands of their children, in blushing confusion.

  The street-whores turned away from her, defiantly. They did not want to be complicit with such as Sosia Simeon, even if they did not know she was a Jewess. Her foreignness chafed with them, her unwholesomeness was so pervasive as to be contaminating. She seemed capable of stealing their own slender strand of innocence by polluting the sweetly shabby memories in their heads.

  Although she would automatically always say, if asked, that she hated Venice, the city suited Sosia Simeon and her purposes. She might live like a character in a book there, rather than as a mere person constrained by circumstances. When she was not reading aloud to Rabino, Sosia loved books. She loved the choice of universes they offered, far from the restricted life of a Jewish doctors wife in Venice. In reading a book, Sosia could be male or female, potent or passive. The more she thought about it, the more Sosia considered herself free to try those other kinds of lives, sampled from intrigues of the Old Testament or picturesque, amoral tales of the Orient. The values that she prized were those of the fabled East: cunning, superbly executed malice and secrecy.

  Venice was, it seemed, built for all these things. From her Crusades, the city brought back more than physical plunder: she stole ideas of beauty too, but made them subtly her own. Her architects had taken the traceries and arcaded courtyards of the East and turned them outwards, so that the modesty of inner sanctums became delicate but flagrant display in Venice. What was impenetrable in Aleppo was permeable in Venice. Anyone might walk the unnumbered streets and peer through shapely holes in the stone to see Sosia and her kind at their honest and dishonest pleasures. And she would be aware that she was watched, and find the sensation conducive to further enjoyment.

  If Sosia feared the stone lions’ heads fixed in certain Venetian walls, their mouths gaping open for anonymous denunciations, she did not show it. She loped briskly past them, on the way to her assignations.

  * * *

  Rabino was correct in one theory about his wife. Sosia was not born the way she lived now.

  Her parents, on his brief meeting with them, had seemed decent and kind. So something, Rabino reasoned, must have happened to the girl. The one thing he always remembered, guessing that it must be relevant, was that her mother had not looked at Sosia when she said goodbye.

  Rabino could not know that Sosia’s mother had not met her daughter’s eyes since the day her family fled their home in the mountains of Dalmatia.

  On that pewter-grey December morning heavy footfalls in the forest had filled up all their senses with terror, finally growing into the tall silhouettes of men gaunt as nails against the pale gold of the field.

  Sosia would not talk to Rabino of what had happened next; about the garrotting of her grandfather and the beating of her grandmother, the pulpy noise as the wrinkled faces collapsed; how ineffective had proved the cunning with which her parents had hidden the children in a wooden crate in the dung-heap. The soldiers were wise to farmers’ tricks. They were farmers themselves when they did not have better things to do.

  They had prodded the box with pitchforks, none too careful with them. The children, screaming and bloody, were tumbled out into the dung, where they sat blinking and passionately sucking their thumbs. The soldiers sent the baby flying with a sharp butt of the fork to a heap of hay where it lay ominously silent. Nor were the younger children of interest. But they hoisted Sosia, the eldest, by the neck of her dress and held her kicking and scrambling above the dung-heap while they looked up her skirt. She squealed and twisted.

  ‘She’s ripe,’ said one.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Well, I’m ripe.’

  ‘You go ahead then. What’s stopping you? The Venetians don’t tax it yet, do they?’

  ‘The Venetians wouldn’t touch a scrawny piece like this. They’d throw this one back. They wouldn’t touch her, dirty little Serb.’

  ‘Not even going to be pretty,’ observed his companion.

  ‘Not even going to be anything,’ laughed another, with menace, brandishing his pig-slaughtering knife.

  The consensus was that it would be more enjoyable to torture her than copulate with her.

  The only man with a semblance of uniform ostentatiously turned his back while three men approached her, spread her flailing limbs like a windmill against the colourless sky. A fourth wiped his stiletto blade across the sweat of his forehead to moisten it. Sosia’s heartbeat gulped to every noise: she could not hear their words any more. Deep throbs blockaded all her senses, as if each beat excavated and threw a heaped load of snow from an endless drift. Her scream was thin; she was choking on bile in her throat.

  They slashed through her dress and carved a large, shallow S in her back, having ascertained her name from the other children. They laughed and shouted as she whimpered, writhing on the post.

  After the soldiers had melted back into the forest, Sosia’s parents emerged from their hiding place in the barn. Sosia’s father tipped her off the pitchfork, into the mud. She rushed to her mother, pulled at her arms, tried to make them encircle her, but in vain. No one would look at Sosia, and when she made to climb on to her mother’s lap, she was pushed away.

  With the simple fervency of childhood, she decided to die as quickly as possible. She refused food and water. They were not offered again.

  Somehow it didn’t happen. The wound swiftly sealed, without infection. Physically, Sosia thrived. But the bereavement of her mother’s gaze damaged her in ways that ran beneath the skin.

  She assumed a new persona.

  She did not cry, she who had been known since infancy for the readiness of her tears and the softness of her sensibilities. She did not refer to what had happened. What she had made of the words the men had used to her was a mystery. She did not mention them, or the soldiers. But their cruel glances began to cross her own face and their coarse phrases started to take part in her own sentences. Those sentences became opaque, and as brief as possible. Her glare was poisonous, her hand quick with slaps and pinches for the other children. Suddenly Sosia, like a basilisk, was someone to be feared.

  Within hours of the soldiers’ departure the family had fled. Sosia’s father closed up his school and posted a regretful notice on the door. They travelled down from the mountains. Sosia leapt into the cart at the last minute. No one welcomed her, but nor was she denied a place.

  They came warily into the walled port of Zara, looking for a passage to Venice, where, they were told by the workers on the docks, all those with skills were made welcome: so rich was the city that she needed endless supplies of foreign labour to support her luxurious existence. In the shade of Zara’s fortress wall, inscribed with reliefs of the winged Venetian lion, the father negotiated a passage with a Greek captain, who neglected to mention the fact that Jews were excluded from the island city.

  In Mestre, the land approach to Venice, they slipped off the boat, grey as a family of rats in the dawn light. A great truculence of porters, swarming round the arriving merchants, cast them such contemptuous glances that they fled the crowded docks immediately.

  Sosia’s father hid them in a Chr
istian church while he went to look for work. No other refuge could be found from the iced wind screaming in from the lagoon. That night the younger children screamed in their sleep. The dismembered saints painted on the church walls seeped into their imaginations and took possession of their empty bellies in the dark. The looming figures soon seemed to resemble the soldiers who had come to their village.

  Inevitably, given the nocturnal shrieks of the children and the stink of urine in the darkest corners, they were discovered. A priest, arriving at midnight to exorcise the church of suspected ghouls, found the family stretched in uneasy sleep behind the altar.

  They were taken into custody. Rabino Simeon, the Jewish doctor, was called in by the Provveditori della salute della Terra to examine them for plague, lice and venereal disease. Except for Sosia, the children were found to be diseased with one proscribed illness or another, gifts of the fetid vessel that had brought them. The family was to be put on the next ship. Rabino could not know that the memories they had left in Dalmatia were worse than the church, worse than a Venetian prison or lazzaretto. They did not resist, however. The faces of the parents wore the immutable acceptance of those who face a slow death, without even the means to foreshorten what would be an entirely miserable life.

  When he had examined Sosia, Rabino found more flesh than on the other children. The large letter S on her back had healed astonishingly well, though he could see that its infliction was recent. She would answer no questions about it, merely looking at the ground as he traced the slender scab with a gentle finger. Turning her around to listen to her breathing, he found small breasts and definite hips, though with an odd curvature to them. There was a slight murmur in her heart, but if she were kept well fed then this would not harm her. A miracle, he thought. This little girl has a chance to survive.