Brotherhood of the Tomb

by Daniel Easterman

  every movement as though once more in possession of his own body.

  Swaying slightly, as though still drunk, he took several steps towards the door. Was this hallucination never going to end? He pulled back the curtain, revealing the low wooden door through which the others had come. The handle was iron, cold to his touch. He turned it, sweating.

  A narrow hallway led to another door. He walked down it softly, as though frightened that he might waken someone. The floor was a mosaic, with spirals of golden angels. On the face of one angel, he saw a drop of glistening blood, still wet.

  He opened the door and stepped inside. It was brightly lit by electric bulbs. On the wall facing him, a spotlight gave brilliance to a painting by Moreau. Near it stood a bookcase, its shelves tightly filled with paperback books. A television set in one corner was tuned to a game show. The volume had been turned off, but from somewhere there came the sound of low music. He recognized it at once as Albinoni’s Oboe Concerto No. 2 in D minor, a favourite from his years in Dublin, when Francesca had introduced him to the splendours of Venetian baroque: Vivaldi, Tartini, Marcello and Galuppi. This had been one of their best-loved pieces, played over and over in a recording by I Solisti Veneti. He looked round, as though expecting to see her come through the door.

  Turning back, he caught sight of the television again. The game show had been replaced or interrupted by what looked like a news bulletin of some sort. People milled about in confusion. A SWAT team was tidying up in the background, while police tried to hold back a large and angry crowd. Red and blue lights flashed. Without sound, accompanied only by the ethereal tones of the music, the scene had

  the appearance of a nightmare snatched out of the unconscious and projected on the tiny screen.

  Suddenly, the camera shifted. On the ground, rows of bodies were being lined up by rescue workers. The camera moved in, greedy for spectacle. Patrick saw blood-stained faces, children’s faces, shattered bodies, severed limbs. The camera moved along the rows, its hunger growing. The music swelled. He saw small teeth pressed against bloodless lips, eyes fixed in death, hair matted with blood and plaster. He closed his eyes, and still bloody images marched across his vision, the screaming child, the knife, the flesh tearing, his hands plunging into the open chest, the steaming heart. He opened his eyes and saw the television faces again, saw the room rock, heard the music grow and fade, grow and fade, the walls bulge and close in. As he fell, he heard the voice of the oboe change to a last, despairing scream against the darkness.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Between Burano and the mainland lie the mud-flats and shattered islets of the northern lagoon. It is a region of the desolate heart, wreathed for much of the year in mists and shadows, dull, remote, full of reeds and marine sadnesses. Its narrow channels are marked by tall bricole, long wooden stakes that pattern out the shallows from the navigable deeps. They stand high in the tired sunlight like stumps of an ancient forest from whose branches the birds have long since fled.

  They had taken the water-bus from the Fonda-menta Nuove to Burano. They carried small bags, with a little food and two flashlights with spare batteries. The boat had travelled slowly, as though bereft of purpose, cold, unsteady, and almost empty. Four other passengers kept them company: two as far as Murano, the remainder to Mazzorbo. They had gone the rest of the way alone, save for the pilot and his assistant, reaching Burano by mid-morning.

  Once there, it had proved surprisingly difficult to find a boatman who would either admit to knowing the whereabouts of San Vitale in Palude, or show himself willing to take them to its shores. It was as though a curse had fallen on the place. Patrick detected a mute uneasiness in all with whom he spoke. Once, bending to tie a shoelace, he had noticed an old fisherman to whom they had previously spoken watching with an intent and troubled expression. After a little while, the shaking of heads and the sullen silences combined to produce in them a state of despair akin to hopelessness.

  They found their man just after lunch in a small bar not far from the little harbour.

  ‘They tell me you’re looking for someone to take you to San Vitale.’

  He was old and rather down-at-heel, with a hard leather face that might have been stretched and moulded over a frame in Claudio Surian’s workshop. White bristles peppered a weak chin that had once been badly injured and reassembled by a clumsy surgeon. Unfocussed eyes suggested longer hours at the bar than at the rudder. He smiled toothlessly and without the least trace of warmth.

  Patrick nodded.

  ‘How much?’ the old boatman asked.

  ‘I’ll give you one hundred thousand. There and back.’

  ‘Vaffanculo! What you think I am, mister? A fucking gondolier? Listen - you want a nice little trip up some nice little canals, you want some cunt to sing some pansy arias, get the fuck back to Venice. Two hundred.’

  Patrick shrugged. He was in no mood to argue. They had lost enough time already.

  They left Burano in silence, creeping away like thieves whose movements are being watched. Having negotiated his price, the old man had clammed up. He evinced no curiosity about his passengers or their journey, expressed neither surprise nor disapproval. The last thing Patrick saw as their sandolo moved away from the harbour was a little knot of fishermen on the quayside, watching them turn into the channel that led to Torcello.

  The only sound was the creaking of the oar turning in the rowlock. Patrick was reminded of his dreams. This, he thought with a stab of fear, was the dream’s continuation, its working out in the waking world.

  But now that he felt himself so close, he feared a denouement, dreaded whatever revelation the next hours would bring. In the swirling water, he fancied he saw figures move across a television screen.

  He had said nothing to Assefa about his dream of the night before. Waking at dawn, he had been covered in sweat and shivering, but he had not cried out. Images from the dream clung to his mind like flies to an old web; he could feel the feet of spiders moving close, but however hard he tried, he could not shake the images free. Above all, the sound of the child’s screams echoed across the empty landscape through which they passed. He dipped his hand into the water, as if to wash it clean of blood.

  A low mist lay on the water like a mask. They were a small black shadow, a beetle or crab, crawling slowly across the flat white surface, pushing the mist aside only to see it form again behind their stern. It was cold out on the lagoon. Patrick and Assefa shivered, regretting they had not come better dressed. The old boatman seemed impervious to the damp chill of the place, as though his leathery carapace had been genetically created for the rigours of life on such desolate waters.

  Once, Patrick thought he saw another boat move out from the shelter of an islet to their west, but when he drew it to Assefa’s attention, it had already gone. Here, beyond Torcello, the channels grew more treacherous and the bricole fewer and less certain. In places, fishermen had set thin willow-wands and rods of bramble to mark off their fish-traps.

  They ran aground twice on hidden mud-flats, and all three men were forced out, knee-deep in mud, to push the sturdy little craft back into deeper waters. Here and there, a dismal islet showed the remains of an abandoned wall or gateway, tokens of vanished

  glories: old monasteries long ago dissolved, forts useless now against a tide of tourists and international business executives, the wattle huts of fishermen, empty for the winter. Once, they passed a tall wooden tripod on whose top a shrine to the Madonna stood custodian over a particularly fretful channel. Faded flowers clung to her feet, and by her hand an extinguished candle marked the devotion of some passing boatman.

  The old man raised one hand and nodded past the shrine.

  ‘La paluda maggiore. The great marsh. Not far now. Half an hour.’ They were the first words he had spoken since their departure.

  Patrick felt uneasy to be so much at the old man’s mercy. Out here, in the lost reaches of the lagoon, where no sound carried and not even a sea-bird’s wing broke the e
xpanse of mud and water, they could be left stranded without difficulty.

  They drifted to a halt. The boatman shipped his oar and turned to face the side.

  Why are we stopping?’ Patrick asked. Was the old man going to demand more money, now he had them in the middle of nowhere?

  But he merely unbuttoned his trousers and proceeded to urinate over the side of the boat. Finished, he rowed on, but his brief action had further impressed on Patrick the man’s intimacy with this place: This is my lagoon, these are my waters, I piss in them as I would at home, they don’t mind.

  Just over half-an-hour later, the hazy outlines of a low island appeared above the mist. As they drew nearer, it acquired shape and texture. Dark cypresses ringed the fractured lineaments of a squat, twelfth-century church. Closer still, the building developed depth and detail: the style was Ravenna Byzantine,

  the materials chiefly brick and marble, both much distressed by inclement weather and long neglect. Beside the church, a free-standing campanile had lost its upper storey; it jutted up from the cypresses like an admonitory finger placed there to warn the curious away from the island’s deserted shores.

  The old man beached the sandolo in a small cove just west of the church. Whatever landing-stage had once served the island had long ago collapsed or been covered by the tangled bushes that in most places crept unhampered to the water’s edge. They disembarked in two feet of water and helped the boatman pull the sandolo higher up, above the tide-mark. The beach was stony and green with water-weeds.

  ‘How long you going to be?’ The old man spat and took a mouldy pipe from his inside pocket.

  ‘Not long,’ Patrick replied. ‘We just want to look at the church. Let’s say a couple of hours at the most.’

  The boatman shrugged and started filling his pipe with foul-smelling tobacco.

  ‘Suit yourselves. But I can’t stay here all day. I want to get back to Burano well before dark. A man can get lost in these waters. There aren’t no lights out this far.’ He found a small knoll further inland and sat on it, lighting his pipe and puffing out smoke like a chimney with indigestion.

  ‘If you aren’t back in two hours, I’m leaving. And if I leave, you’re stranded. Nobody comes here, understand? Nobody. If I’ve got to come back for you tomorrow, it’ll cost you double. No skin off my nose.’ He spat a gob of brown saliva on the ground and stuck his pipe back in his mouth.

  There was no direct route to the church, but after a bit they came across what might once have been a path.

  ‘Why should anyone build a church on its own

  out here?’ asked Assefa. ‘It seems sort of pointless.’

  Patrick nodded. ‘It does now, yes. But the lagoon has a long history. There used to be some important settlements in these parts, before Venice became the centrepiece of the region. Places like Torcello or Mazzorbo, where we called this morning. They were great places once, with cathedrals and monasteries and palaces of their own. There’s not much of all that left now, so we think of the lagoon as just a wilderness.

  ‘I think this church must have served as a monastery church at first, then as a basilica for the surrounding islanders. Later, as Venice took over, people would have migrated there, leaving the church stranded among the reeds. No other explanation makes much sense.’

  Assefa looked round at the rough, windswept landscape, the broken campanile whose bell had once tolled daily across bleak and treacherous waters.

  ‘Unless someone actually wanted a church where no one else would want to come,’ he said.

  Patrick did not answer. He was thinking of the screams of the boy in his dream. How loud they had sounded, how easily they could be lost in all this wilderness.

  They carried on in silence.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Close up, the church was more dilapidated than it had appeared from the sea. Parts of the roof had collapsed, many of the windows were broken, the main doors were unhinged and gaping. Pieces of masonry had fallen from the walls and lay scattered among long grass and reeds. Occasional flooding had left its mark on the lower courses of stone, and in the damp cracks between the brickwork, thick green moss had taken hold. And yet, in view of its age and the length of time it had been abandoned, the building was in remarkably good shape. It was as though, from time to time, someone had come to tidy it up a bit and hold back the elements a little longer.

  The main door led directly into a dark, malodorous narthex, a hovel of crumbling plaster and spiders’ webs. An archway opened straight out of it into the main body of the church. Beyond the arch, wintry sunlight filtered through a thousand holes, creating a secret paradise in stone, as though another substance had come in place of it. Each brick, each marble fragment, each chipped and fractured piece of limestone shook with its own hue, its own antiphon of light. The ceiling, broken and torn, hung like a canopy of alchemical glass above the empty nave.

  Like children, coming at last upon a place that adults have long reserved to their own uses, Patrick and Assefa stepped over the dim threshold. The silence unfolded about them like a Mass, plainchant rising among rose marble pillars, a solemn litany, stone and light made song. To their right, a great window of perforated alabaster sent shaft upon shaft of nacreous light into the hushed and hollow spaces

  below. Bushes grew among fallen ornaments, grass wreathed the heads of saints, a heron had made its nest in a baptismal font.

  But their eyes were riveted in front. The walls and roof of the apse had suffered least of all, and though the altar had been uprooted and the Host removed and the light extinguished forever, it was as if some miracle were still being worked there. Above the stone benches of the priests, above the single window of smoked glass, above the marble cladding, a figure of the Virgin holding her child rose triumphant to the domed ceiling. Fragments of the mosaic had fallen away, yet nothing had marred her beauty. She seemed to float against a sky of gold. She was slender and sad and full of light, and on the blue field of her robe, tiny red flowers lay like drops of a child’s blood.

  From his jacket, Assefa took a thin white candle. He lit it with a match and set it on a stone in front of the apse. For a time he stood gazing at the Madonna, then he genuflected and recited a quiet prayer. When he had finished, he turned and spoke to Patrick.

  ‘Whatever we have to do, Patrick, let’s do it now.’

  There were several tombs, all in a state of disrepair, around the sides of the church. It did not take long to find Pietro Contarini’s: it lay to the left of the spot where the main altar had once stood, an elaborate Gothic sepulchre built in marble and terracotta. The paint and gilding had long vanished, limbs had been broken from the figures of saints that stood in its niches, and the casing had cracked in places; but the tomb had remained intact. At the top, beneath a canopy held erect by angels, an effigy of Pietro Contarini lay in slumber. By his head, a marble jar held the stems of withered flowers. They could not have been there more than a year at the outside.

  Patrick had no very definite idea of what he was looking for. But he was certain that the tomb held the answers to his questions. He began to go carefully over the reliefs carved in the facade of the monument, and soon a pattern began to emerge. With a shudder, he recognized the first of a series of panels as a representation of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The boy was strapped and gagged and lay on his back across a large rock, while his father stood over him, knife in hand.

  The next panel was more obscure, and Patrick was not at first sure what it represented. A man was sacrificing a goat beside a tall stone pillar, watched by silent onlookers. And then he remembered the story of Jacob, and how he slaughtered a beast at Jegar-sahadutha, where he had set up a pillar of stone, and built a cairn of rocks. Someone was making the most of the play on words.

  A third panel showed the Children of Israel slaughtering lambs and smearing their blood on the stone lintels of their houses: the institution of the Feast of Passover. Patrick felt his heart beat rapidly. Things were beginni
ng to fit into place.

  Other reliefs followed, most of them portraying scenes of sacrifice from the Old Testament. Above the first row stood a separate register of panels depicting incidents from the life of Christ, culminating in a relief of the Resurrection. Christ the supreme sacrifice, Christ the symbol of eternal life. For some reason, the thought made Patrick uneasy.

  But clear as the iconography was, it seemed to offer no further help. Patrick had hoped for more than a lesson in how the Old Testament prefigured the New. He felt suddenly downcast, as though someone had broken a solemn promise to him.

  ‘Damn it!’ he exclaimed. ‘It makes no sense. Why

  all the mystery? Why the cryptic verses? Half of them don’t even fit these scenes, and the ones that do are scarcely earth-shaking. There has to be something more.’

  ‘Not necessarily, Patrick. The religious mind sees significance even in the mundane. Perhaps the man who gave the verses to Corradini just wanted him to understand some esoteric interpretation of our Lord’s sacrifice. After all, that seems to be the message of the tomb. It’s nothing very new or exciting, but it has its own profundity.’

  Patrick shook his head.

  ‘No, it isn’t that. Not just that. The sacrifice motif refers to something else. I know.’

  They started to go over the carvings again, as though they concealed a message that they might read if only they had the eyes to see it. Panel by panel, figure by figure, they examined the scenes, trying to relate them somehow to the verses in Corradini’s book. Half an hour later, they gave up.

  They had brought a little lunch in bags. Assefa opened them and spread the food out on a flat stone. They ate in silence, dejected, beaten, shivering in the damp air. Each man knew that, when they had finished their meal of salami and cheese, they would return to the boat and ask the old man to row them home. They drank by turns from a large bottle of Recoara water. The food was tasteless to Patrick; he ate slowly, without appetite. When he had taken his last mouthful, he raised the bottle to his lips. As he did so, he noticed the words on the label: Sorgente Recoara - Recoara Spring. And in that moment he knew.