Dead Europe (16 page)

—I first heard jazz in Venice, he told me. Isaac, you must go to Venice.

I remember it was raining hard, that it had been a wet and awful winter, and I was anxious to return home where my mother had baked a cake and my family were waiting to celebrate my birthday. My school jumper was clinging to me and smelling of damp and tobacco. I was still miserable and missing Paul. Signor Parlovecchio handed me a box wrapped in gold-tinted paper and tied with a red ribbon. I opened it. It was my first camera, a Pentax, bulky and black.

That spring I was still miserable. But I had begun to take photographs.

 

The woman came over with a coffee. Well, Signor Bruno Parlovecchio, I finally made it. I am in Venice. But the music on the radio was Arabic, not jazz, and the skies above me were dark and low and Venetians were crowding the bar watching soccer beamed in from a satellite above. The city felt cramped and small. There was a crack of lightning and then thunder rumbled and a surge of harsh rain began to fall. The woman turned on a switch and electric light illuminated the cafe.

—You've picked an awful week to be in Venice, the woman said to me, smiling, as she headed back to the bar. Her husband was cleaning glasses by the sink and increased the volume on the radio to drown out the clattering sound of the rain. A young woman wearing a leather coat rushed in, dripping wet. Behind her shuffled a stooping old man in a long black coat; the rain had plastered his still-thick brush of white hair across his skull. He hung his soaked coat on a hook near the doorway, took a seat across from me, unfolded a large handkerchief and wiped his face and neck dry. When he finished, he clicked his fingers. There was nothing supercilious in his seemingly arrogant gesture. In fact, the woman at the bar looked up at him and responded by smiling and saying something polite to him in Arabic. He nodded, also with a smile. Something in his obvious happiness—he took a newspaper from his pocket, he was smiling as he rubbed his
hands together for warmth—reminded me of Signor Bruno. This man was content to be here, in the Café Beirut, in Venice, awaiting his coffee and his opportunity to read the paper. I was aware for the first time of something that I had no chance of perceiving in my cruelly indifferent adolescence: that every day of his life, Signor Bruno must have missed Venice. And that Signor Bruno Parlovecchio was not an aristocrat. If he had been, he would had never needed to leave Venice.

 

—It's a spooky place.

Colin was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching me pack. He was still in his dark blue overalls, and our cat Stanley was sitting on his lap. Colin was holding my airline ticket.

—How long did you stay there? I asked.

He laughed loudly.

—Fuck, mate, Venice costs the bloody earth. The whole bloody north of Italy does. I was there for a few hours, then I took the train back out. He stroked underneath Stanley's black and white chin. I couldn't afford Venice, he said.

I stopped packing and sat next to him, lifted the sleeve of his t-shirt and traced my finger along the lines of the fading swastika. Stanley lifted his head, circled once, twice on Colin's lap, then jumped onto me and promptly fell asleep. I leaned my head on Colin's shoulder.

—Did you wear long sleeves in Europe, I asked him, even though it was summer?

—All through fucking Europe, mate. All through fucking Europe in the fucking heat.

—Did you feel guilty? You should feel fucking guilty.

He stood up then.

—I'll take a shower. He kissed me on the lips, then tussled a moment with the cat. Did that Mister Old Talk tell you about the ghetto in Venice?

I shook my head.

—I bet he didn't. He told you about art and music and bloody jazz, told you about Harry's Bar, but he didn't talk about the ghetto, did he?

 

Across the canal from the Café Beirut there is an old yellowing building. A carved stone doorway leads into a small square. I will drink my coffee, I will settle my bill, and I will walk across into the Jews' Venice.

 

In the Café Beirut the fluorescent lights were flickering and outside the rain was still falling. The old man was smoking a cigarette. I noticed that the bold black headlines across his newspaper were in the Hebrew script. The woman brought him a small glass filled with thick, dark spirit. Then suddenly, as quickly as it had come, the rain stopped, the clouds parted and light filled the world outside. The electric lights were switched off again and through the glass I could see that the bridge across the narrow canal was glistening. Across from me the old man downed his burnt amber liquid in one, two swift gulps. The woman refilled his glass. I threw the envelope of photographs into my bag and paid for my drinks. Across the bridge I stooped to enter through the low narrow gate and walked into the world's first ghetto.

The wet cobbled stones and the dark brick walls sparkled in the sun. In the far corner was a small shop with Hebrew script on the awning. Against one wall, plastered posters announced political meetings and the tour of Blur. On the far wall was a sculptured relief. I walked over to examine the spidery steel structure. Embossed human forms, shadowy and elongated, looked despairingly down at me. The metallic mural showed the shipping of the Jews to the death camps in the Second World War. In Italian, in English and in Hebrew, a memorial plaque gave written testament to the scene. I closed my eyes and attempted to muster compassion. Or grief. Or shame. Anything, some damn emotion.

I felt nothing. I began to take my photographs. I took photo after photo of the stricken figures, of the plaque, of the wet stones. I took close-ups of the posters: the one word, Blur, the hammer and sickle, the rotund face of the Prime Minister. I took shot after shot of the shop awning, clicked every individual letter. I took a shot of a puddle and took a shot of the sky above. Even as I was shooting I knew what I would do with these photographs. I would have them printed on large white canvases and exhibited in a vast gallery space. I would attempt to replicate the ghetto, and hope to move people in a way that I found I could not be moved at the site. I exhausted my supply of film, and walked back to the memorial, trying one last time to feel remorse or guilt, shame or humility, but instead there was the warm sun on my skin, the murmuring of rainwater in the drains, and I could not stop myself from smiling.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again, the old man from the Café Beirut was beside me, watching me. He was wearing his long black coat. Then silently he raised a finger to his pursed lips and with his other hand motioned me to follow him. I watched him walk away, drunk and clumsy in his movements. Turning around, he frowned on seeing that I had not followed him. He violently waved his hand at me and I decided to follow. He was old, pissed and not at all threatening. He led me through the square and into a large dank corridor flooded by the rain. The man snorted in anger, then grabbed a long plank sitting upright against the wall and splashed it onto the ground. We stepped along the plank; I was holding onto the old man, to ensure that he did not fall. Then he led me through the corridor, out to an alley: I could hear water splashing against the side of a canal. He pointed to the alley wall. A black swastika was scrawled in thick brushstrokes on a peeling whitewashed wall. He pointed at my camera. He wanted me to take the photograph.

I shot the photograph. He took me through the ghetto, all the while pointing at graffiti and wordlessly commanding me to take photographs of it. It was mostly swastikas, the menacing crossed arms sprayed in aerosol on an awning outside a bakery, daubed quickly on the bricks underneath the street sign to the ghetto. But he pointed out other signs to me as well.
Forza Italia
, always painted in black,
USA Out
. A crude sketch of the three interlocking
fasces
of the old fascist party. He led me his dance until we were again inside the square of the ghetto.

Suddenly the old man gave a deep sigh and staggered. I took his arm and led him to the bridge. He took a cigarette case from his pocket. He offered me one as well and we smoked together on the bridge. A mangy white cat leapt off a roof and turned and screeched at us. Below us, an empty rowboat bobbed in the water.

—Are you alright, sir?

The old man ignored me and looked out into the water. His eyes were forlorn and I could smell the alcohol. I looked around, back towards the ghetto, and I tried to imagine what this man might have seen. His insistence on me photographing the crude symbols of continuing racism had touched me. This desperate need to confirm the relevance of history made me melancholy. He was living, he was alive. He moved me. He was a last, dying connection between life and the grotesque sculptural reliefs on the Holocaust Memorial. He, at last, he moved me.

I asked him again, Are you alright, sir? He touched my sleeve, threw his cigarette in the canal, and beckoned me.

He was surprisingly quick for someone old and frail and drunk as he made his way through twisting alleys. We reached a narrow street of tall imposing apartments and I followed him through a low corridor. We climbed a staircase to the third level. At the top of the stairs I turned and looked down at the old city on the water. I could see spires and
golden crucifixes. I walked through a heavy wooden door into the old man's apartment.

It was tiny. The room we stood in was cluttered with furniture and its walls were covered by prints of pyramids and fauns, of old temples and grinning gods: the whole of the ancient world covered the walls. The space was crammed with books: heaped against a small statue of the Sphinx, teetering in piles to the ceiling, covering the small coffee table in the middle of the room. A book lay open on the arm of the old sofa. He took me through into a small back room that served as both kitchen and bathroom, the two rooms divided by a stained yellow sheet. There were books lying on the tiny table in the kitchen, and on two small chairs. He threw the books on the floor and indicated that I should take a seat. A small window was open to the sour sea breeze, and from it I could glimpse the scalloped red tiles of the rooftops of Venice. The old man disappeared and I glanced at the spines of the books around me.

Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, German, English, French. Jude. Juif. Juden. Jew. Each seemed to have as its subject the history of the Jews. I rose and walked over to the window, and picked up a book from a pile lying face-down on the sill. I flicked through the pages. The photos were familiar. The death chambers, the dying prisoners in their striped uniforms, the fields of massacred civilians. A mass of arms raised in Nazi salute.

The old man came over to me and looked down at the book. He nodded, agreeing with something in his own head. He stooped and searched a cupboard beneath the small kitchen sink, then smiled and triumphantly hefted a bottle of brandy. He poured two glasses. I was still holding the book. He took a seat and picked up my camera. He was now grunting furiously. He skolled his drink and poured another. He pointed at the camera, then to me and to the book, making odd, rasping, grunting sounds. Again he pointed to
the camera, and then to me and to the book.

It was then I realised that he could not speak. I realised too, with embarrassment, that the old man thought I was a Jew. Though I also knew I had not pretended to give this impression, part of me also felt inexplicable guilt. It was as if the old man had assumed a sacred trust, mistaken though it might have been, that I did not wish to break. But inadvertently I was shaking my head, and as if to answer for me—or possibly to betray me—the crucifix that Giulia had given me slipped out of my shirt. I closed the book I was holding.

Signor Parlovecchio, I am in Venice.

His grunting stopped. He stared at the gold of my crucifix as if transfixed by it. Then a shadow passed across his face. He skolled his drink again and poured another. His hand was tightening around my camera. He pulled it close to him, under his arm and glared at me defiantly.

I reached out my hand.

—Give me my camera. Please.

He smiled, enjoying the hint of panic in my voice, and tightening his hold on my camera.

—Give it to me.

He smiled and shook his head. I rose from the chair, and as if mocking my actions, he rose as well. I lunged and he jumped back. I was astounded by how sprightly he was. I grabbed after him but he had dashed into the next room. I stumbled and kicked over piles of books as I followed him. He led me around and around the small central room, crashing against books, making bizarre squawking sounds as he ran. His grip on my camera never loosened. At one point I grabbed him and he turned around and viciously bit my hand. I shouted, pulled back, and looked down at my hand. The teeth marks were clearly visible, deep in my flesh, and I waited for the blood to appear. But there was no blood. I was transfixed by the raw pink wounds. There was no blood.

I was alone in the room. I went back to the kitchen. The old man was by the sink. He was examining my camera.

—Give it to me. My order was loud.

His back was to me. I heard a click. He had pulled out the canister of film. He began to unwind it from the spool, exposing the negative to the dying light streaming through the kitchen window. I moved towards him but I was too late: he flung the ribbon of film out of the narrow window. It billowed and curled in the wind, a frenzied serpent; it glided for a moment, then fluttered and spun quickly onto the rooftops below.

He turned to me then, his breathing long and hoarse, his body shaking. He was still holding my camera. I walked up to him, looked down at his old wrinkled face, his decaying, dying face.

—Give me back my camera.

He spat at me.
He spat at me
. The phlegm smacked my cheek. I wiped it from my face and stared murderously at him. He was hissing, a continuous low sound that cautioned and threatened like a snake.

—Give me back my camera, you fucking Jew.

I had never uttered this curse before. A rush of power surged through every particle of me. It was as if I had been yearning to utter that curse since the beginning of time.