Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  I see pages being written, then burned. The canals of Venice and St. Petersburg. A man in a stone room feverishly scribbling. Other hands writing as well, sometimes warming themselves, sometimes touching, though rarely, the hand of another.

  Do you know of Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the novel The Master and Margarita? Lately his book has been coming into my mind, I don’t know why. It is said he burned his unfinished manuscript, then wrote it all over again. This was under Stalin. From 1928 until his death in 1940, he hid it in a drawer, worked on it in secret. In the book there is a character called the Master who also writes a book and burns it.

  With Bulgakov many questions arise. For instance, the novel’s first paragraph as transcribed by his wife, can be found nowhere in his surviving notebooks. So did he dictate it to her before he died, or did she alter it after his death? Such things can never be known. What can be known is the compassion of the text. And the Master’s love of books and for his companion, Margarita. The many strivings, transformations…

  Sometimes my mind wanders I

  I believe there is a certain notebook in Venice, now lost, not by Bulgakov, but by someone else. I don’t know why it comes to me or why I care, though

  I sense in it many feelings not far from my own. A hurt presence like the Master’s. A person struggling with his body as I struggle with mine. Sometimes I see the hand that writes but never the inked pages. So I know nothing of its contents—only that there’s suffering in it, and gentleness, and deep care for another.

  Turgenev worried that one of his ghost stories was too fantastical, but Dostoevsky countered that in fact it was not fantastical enough. That the ordinary is stranger than anything if only we could see it.

  I think about this often.

  In my mind’s eye I see you walking in Venice, though I know it is hard for you to walk. I see you climbing up stone steps and finding in a drawer—or somewhere—the pages of that notebook, but how can I even say this to you?

  Una notte bianco—a night in white—this is what Venetians call a sleepless night. So much whiteness in me now, so much distance.

  You will understand now why I can no longer come to the office.

  Think of how fragile they are, the islands of the Venetian Lagoon. So thin and unprotected.

  I believe you understand such fragility. I have sensed your kindness.

  If you go there I will write to you, I promise—

  I’d lived a solitary and bookish life to be sure, one with a particular malady that lent itself to long periods of immobilism and wondering, contemplation. Still, what could have prepared me for this letter? All that silence between us, and then this. It’s true, I noticed for some weeks she seemed paler, thinner, her left hand often trembled. (The small bird inside my hump gently watched this.) But I thought I was most likely mistaken as I never looked straight-on, and in any case mistrusted my assessments of most everything outside me. Those frequent interludes as a child in the infirmary and then later in my own bed healing, had made my mind restless, sometimes feverish, “too active”—a crack in the wall became a spider or the checkpoint to a foreign land; a bed-crease a sinuous, blind creature. Words in my book broke apart, their letters flying to link-up with letters from other, broken words: ste pulled free from listen and hooked up with a solitary p much farther down the page (itself loosed from what other crumbled word?) where they melded into step. K broke off from back, and “n” from “no” and both flew sidewise to find own, which then was known.

  Yet even as I mistrusted my own eyes, I noticed books she kept at her workstation to read on her lunch hour and coffee breaks: Pavel Florensky’s The Imaginary in Geometry, guidebooks to Venice and Moscow, Filippo Pedrocco’s Titian, a biography of Dostoevsky, a thin volume titled Architectonics: Line and Meaning. I wondered what she was thinking—what she might say if we could speak. Wondered what went on inside her mind.

  So when that morning her typed note appeared at my work-station, neatly folded and tucked into a plain white envelope with an inked red “A” at its center, what was I to think? To this day I don’t know how it got there.

  That night, I ran my hands over the white, believable surface, crisp and lightly flexible. Read it again and again. A plain sheet of multi-purpose copy paper filled with small black marks that seeped into my brain and lodged there. What was I to make of what she wrote? Did it require an answer? Who was she and now where? We who’d never even spoken.

  That night’s dream comes back to me clearly even now:

  I was standing at my work station scanning a passage of Nansen’s Farthest North where after months of being alone he sees “above the southern edge of ice a red lantern inexplicably moving.” Then I wasn’t in the office anymore, but in Venice where bolts of red cloth hung outside the dyers’ shops to dry. I felt someone beside me. After a while I understood it was the painter, Titian. “I died in a plague year,” he said, “Yet my name doesn’t appear on the Health Office’s list of the 164 citizens who died of plague on that same day, August 27, 1576. How can I explain this? And many of my works no longer exist. Of my frescoes for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi only one crumbling fragment remains. Salt and time ate the rest. I can see it is hard for you to walk. But the red cloth is beautiful, isn’t it? Now that I am dead I miss the keen outlines of things, the touch of wet cloth, a stone wall’s irregular edges.”

  That was all.

  Why had I let myself walk the streets of Venice, even if only in a dream? The thought of going seemed absurd. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder if maybe I should go. After all, aside from Ambrose who was born and died many centuries before me, she was the one I felt closest to on earth, though it was a closeness I couldn’t explain. Still, something about who she was—or what I sensed or believed of who she was—the hurt tenderness in her, a stubbornness and kindness, a withdrawal much like my own—had come to live within the fault-lines of my bones. Even though we didn’t speak.

  On the envelope there’d been no signature or initials, no return address. Could her name be on some memo I’d discarded?—a joint email, maybe, with new rules for handling damaged books, or an update on the latest technology? But all I could find was the email she’d had at work that was no longer in use: mmwys@Proscan.com How could she have learned my name when I didn’t know hers?

  I imagined her wide-eyed, unable to sleep, maybe feverish and pacing, watching Bulgakov’s manuscript burn, a hand writing in a notebook.

  Was it possible my going could in any way help her?

  Over the years I’d made little money. Had little use for money. But had saved some nevertheless. I’d kept my brown coat for 20 years, my few shirts for almost as long.

  For the next week her work station stayed vacant. I was sure in a few days they would replace her.

  How to speak of where I went and what I did? Though verbs and their tenses line up like obedient soldiers, I think now they’re wounded at the core. Conflicted, hobbled, partly lost. Something shuddering outside them they can’t catch, a rougher, truer breathing not bound by the clear coordinates of time and space I once believed in (even as minutes glow on my computer screen, and mapping-sites calculate routes from starting-points to destinations).

  All time and space more vulnerable, more porous, than I thought.

  Unstable, thin, erratic—this is the Lagoon of Venice. In 1894 Horatio Brown noted the stone pines, Pinus pinea, that once covered the islands, a protection for the soil, but by the time I arrived few remained. Brown marveled at the strife and inconclusiveness inherent in the islands’ shifting forms and porous boundaries, mud-banks alternately covered and laid bare. 160 square miles in the shape of a fallen crescent moon.

  The ground beneath my feet drifting fragments of shadow and light as I walked.

  At first much of what I learned came more from books than what I saw—how tamarisk and sea lavender thrived years ago, and Venice’s earliest name was Refugium in Periculus. But haven’t so many of the facts I’ve come to
love first come to me like fictions overall?—things believed in, felt, trusted to be real, but not experienced first-hand.

  Even so, I saw much from the moment I arrived. I thought, for some reason, that Venice is an isolate city, but quickly realized I was wrong. There are 118 islets scattered within the Venetian Lagoon, and though I never went to all, I’ve felt on my skin the soil and stones of several.

  Some believe these narrow islands—none more than a half mile wide—were severed from the mainland when the ocean-force on one side, and the Brenta, Sile, and Piave rivers on the other, shuddered them apart. The Adriatic swept landward while the rivers swept toward the sea. Or could it be that the islands are “a bar built by the rivers across their own mouths”? As if they began in self-inflicted muteness—restraint across the lips, imprisonment, enclosure.

  (How could I not think of the one across the ocean and myself?)

  Tintoretto could never envision them apart from their watery destruction.

  I had gone where she asked me to go. Had brought my computer, a few books.

  But why was it called Refuge in Peril? It seemed so imperiled itself, water always threatening to overwhelm the fragile boundaries. So how could it possibly provide protection, and to whom? Yet it had been a refuge for those who fled the mainland when the Goths and Huns invaded in 452, leaving everything charred, in ruins. The first island to be settled was named Isola del Rialto and the next Isola della Citta Deserta (Island of the Deserted City). What great power would want to conquer such a place? Desolation would be its sole protection. One settler wrote: “the unnerving isolation of the waters, this strange barrenness that keeps us safe.”

  Before that, there had been only a few clusters of rudimentary huts, and for work the harvesting of sea salt, and fishing. Cassiodorius, the earliest official visitor, noted, “Thus you live in your seabirds’ home all under equal laws, none too rich or too poor; house is like unto house. Envy, that curse of all the world, hath no place here.”

  Juvenal pointed out that the rough cape, bardo cucullus, was worn by rich and poor alike. And Herodotus, that every year when the virgins were gathered together to be chosen for marriage, neither the “deformed” nor “less fortunate” were excluded.

  “What is the sea?” Alcuin asked his pupil, Charlemagne’s son. And his pupil replied, “It is refuge in danger.” “Yes,” Alcuin answered, “but the sea is also danger. It is both.”

  How many nights did I fall asleep hearing Cassiodorius in my mind? And how he said, “Yours is so frail a bulwark. You live like sea-birds. You have not tried to straighten your streets or overpower the wildness of the sea…”

  On my first day I found myself a room on a narrow winding street by the bus station where syringes and cracked vials lay scattered on cobblestones and sills, thinking How could I have come here, what could I possibly have been thinking, what have I done? The room held a single bed, a wooden nightstand, a lamp with a green shade. In my mind I’d go over the books I saw by her work station, thinking maybe I should read them. That maybe in some way they’d help to bring her closer, make my mission less strange. Who was Pavel Florensky in any case? And why would she read him? And The Master and Margarita—that book she wrote of in her note—I supposed I should read that also.

  Meanwhile, I tried to make sense of where I was. I soon learned the city is divided into six sestieri, each with its own consecutive street numbers reaching into thousands. There were dozens of alleyways with the same name but in different districts. So I would see a white street sign (ninzoletti, “little bed sheets” as they’re called) marking a certain street, only to wander into another sestieri and find the same street name on a different street. A few had more than one name; on those there was an “o” between each choice.

  Rio Tera degli Assassini, Calle delle Procuratie, Salizada San Pantelon, I walked as best I could, my cane often in my hand though I disliked using it and it was difficult to raise my head enough to truly see what was in front of me.

  Stone faces. Two baskets of eggs in a doorway. Shining pyramids of oranges and eggplants. Warm loaves in bakery windows.

  When I think back to those first days, they seem a frayed, confusing tapestry given to me by a hand an ocean away. What was it doing, that hand, as I walked?—pushing back sweaty hair from a forehead, or turning pages, or fastening scotch tape to the rim of broken glasses—restless, feverish, not sleeping?

  All around me, a language I could barely understand.

  Those first weeks were a strange mixture of Venice and Russia. By day I was in Venice, learning, exploring, thinking about canals, the lost notebook, the doctor, but at night when I read I was also in Moscow with Bulgakov—I had found a copy of The Master and Margarita.

  Sometimes I imagined I was her as I read, back home across the ocean, waiting, maybe, for some word from me. But how could she expect me to find her when she gave me no name or address?

  Some things exist in silence only.

  Increasingly the words I had for time and space and whatever is claimed to separate the two, seemed ever more inadequate, confusing.

  I was still just beginning to learn the many streets, their crookedness not unlike mine, and their many bewildering inconsistencies, the histories behind them. Why was one stretch of a calle Santa Margarita, and another stretch Santa Margherita? Why did Santi Giovanni e Paolo suddenly turn into San Zanipolo? There were streets named after long-lost trades: Calle dei Saoneri (street of the soap-makers); Calle dei Fuseri (street of the spindle-makers), etc. Five centuries ago on Riva di Biasio, a man by that name, a sausage-maker and murderer, suffered a terrible death by beheading. Campiello de Cason was the site of a prison, and Agnello Participazio, one of the Republic’s first doges, had lived there long before. I had loved that doge’s name for as long as I could remember, having stumbled upon it in my boyhood reading; its sound of peacefulness, inclusion.

  Meanwhile in Bulgakov’s book, the devil had arrived in Moscow. He sat on a park bench by Patriarch’s Pond where he conversed with two men of letters. He seemed not devilish at all, but more like a distinguished, somewhat elderly scholar from abroad. A gentleman, well-educated, thoughtful. His name was Woland.

  In my sleep, I heard the soft lapping of the canals.

  Then one day—I’d never really believed I’d actually hear from her again—another letter came: But how could she have found me?

  Dear A,

  Sometimes I wonder, what is kindness? Where does the word come from, from what is it derived? Isn’t there a strong sense of attachment in it, kinship with another, and yet there is also this distance, this xxx

  Such separateness I cannot cross and yet you crossed an ocean out of kindness

  Now that sleep is strange to me, I spend many hours sorting papers. Things I clipped or wrote yet barely remember.

  Today, for instance: a black and white photograph of a bronze head of Bellini, believed to be genuine, though much injured.

  Maybe your eyes are now seeing what he saw. Even when quite old, each day he rode back and forth in his gondola from the Lido. Always he wore the same thing—a black cap and long black robe, a slender chain around his neck holding a bronze medal that the senate had bestowed on him in honor of his painting, The Transfiguration. It’s said he ate only ripe figs, coarse bread and nuts, and shared these with his servant, a hunchbacked man who took care of the boat all day while he painted. The old man was deaf, and though his back was deeply hunched, for hours he scoured the gondola, straightened its awning, saw to its white cords and tassels, polished the two brass lions on its sides. Yet every evening when Bellini returned it was he who took on the role of servant. He insisted the hunchbacked man recline on a pillow, and Bellini, standing erect in the stern, ferried him across the water, humming quietly to them both Te Deum Laudamus.

  Why do we need to believe these things, picture them, repeat them? And yet the air would be so empty without them—

  I still see the lost notebook.

  I wonder what yo
u have found in Venice. I still think of your kindness—

  But I am so tired now xxx I xx

  Her note, in a plain manila envelope, was on the small oval table in the cramped entranceway of the building where I stayed.

  I still had her other note in my pocket; each day I took it out, read it, then put it away.

  Though I was baffled she’d found me, I soon realized another part of me wasn’t surprised. For a moment I worried she was toying with me, playing some odd game. But in the end this just isn’t what I felt. Even so, I didn’t know how to look at what was happening. As if the troubled sweetness of words I had long associated with Ambrose had fallen away and left me in some stranger, coarser place—though it was a place I somehow sensed all along.

  Liste are main streets, and crosere, crossroads. But most of the streets were called calle, and as I walked I noted that this was a feminine word: la calle, le calli—and so felt at times that I was walking through the labyrinth of the thoughts of the one who had sent me—mysterious, without summary. The way I couldn’t say she was one thing or another, one truth or falsehood or another. (I sensed in her a truth, but then thought about the ways truth itself is mysterious, unsteady.)

  Of course much of Venice is in its essence largely hidden. Over one hundred thousand supporting wooden poles stand submerged beneath the Basillica della Salute. And though St. Mark’s appears secure and formidable, it’s held in place by a raft built on stilts.

  I wondered, would I hear from her again?

  I was still reading The Master and Margarita, but hadn’t yet been able to find anything by Florensky.

  How was I going to search for the notebook? How could I even begin?