After Love (20 page)

Two months after the letter from Jijee-ma, Vasu received a letter from Uncle Triple K which carried dreadful news. I saw him reading and re-reading it and asked him if he were all right. He said no – and showed me the letter.

The news was so bad that I realised no words from me would comfort him.

‘
Your Jijee-ma has been diagnosed with cervical cancer and the prognosis isn't good. She asked me not to tell you but I know she wants you to know. But don't drop everything and rush back. She wants you to finish your studies and to pray for her. “Don't worry about me”, she says. “When the time comes, I'll be at the airport to greet Anna and Vasu
.”'

I suggested he should go home to be with her. The thesis and the book could wait. I said that I would come with him. He looked at me surprised and I realised that this wasn't the right thing to say. That I had lied, both of us understood at once. What he had really wanted to do was finish the thesis and the book as soon as possible and take me back to India with him to stay. He feared that if I went for a week or a fortnight and took a dislike to the place, the doors would swing shut.

I knew how much he loved Jijee-ma. The idea of her being in pain was intolerable to him. But I didn't know how to comfort him. That night I pulled him close, but he resisted, asked me not to worry about him and went straight to sleep.

I lay awake listening to the wind and trying to order the scattered thoughts wandering through my mind. Suddenly a strange and rather wicked idea floated in. I was aghast that I was capable of entertaining such a dreadful possibility. I got up to go to the bathroom, turned on the light and looked in the mirror, feeling ashamed of myself.

The next morning Vasu appeared calm and composed. This irritated me but I needed to confess what I had thought. He laughed guiltily after I had finished, which infuriated me even more.

‘Annushka, my dear,' he said, ‘such thoughts have also crossed my mind. They make me feel bad and incredibly selfish too. But of course you're right. Once Jijee-ma is dead, I am free of her— and of India.'

I was shocked. ‘What about Uncle Triple K?' I asked. He just smiled sadly. ‘He'll understand. He'll feel bad – perhaps let down – but he'll understand.'

Vasu

Yes, Uncle Triple K would have understood my predicament. But to forgive me would have been hard. He was, I am sure, very disappointed in me and although I had tried a few times to explain my situation to him, his brief ‘I know' and ‘It doesn't matter' had left me feeling more disgusted with myself than ever.

The fact that I had now decided to go somewhere quite different, not return to India, would upset him even more.

A year earlier a professor at the School of Architecture in Venice had come to Moscow to attend a conference. He didn't know Russian but spoke English and I was asked to be his interpreter. I was surprised that he had read my paper on
Vastushastra
in an obscure German journal. Perhaps that is why he then asked me to work with him on a collection of essays on the role of emotion in designing urban spaces.

He had wanted me to show him ‘my Moscow', which wasn't easy. I had no idea where to start. I had to ask Anna for help and she readily agreed to accompany us. She also invited the professor to a concert at the conservatorium where she and Vika were playing Shostakovich. After the concert we took him home to meet Leonid Mikhailovich and be shown his jazz collection.

‘He likes you,' Anna had said after we had seen the professor off at the airport.

It took more than eight months for the invitation to work in a temporary position at the university in Venice to arrive.

‘You deserve it,' Anna said after reading the letter. ‘I hope you are going to accept it,' she added.

‘I'm not sure,' I replied.

We didn't talk about the letter for a week. Then one evening walking home from the station Anna said that she wanted me to call Shurik and talk to him about the offer from Venice.

‘Why Shurik? Have you told him?'

‘I have.'

‘And?'

‘And he wants us to go.'

‘Are you sure? Because he said something very different to me.'

‘What did he say to you?'

‘Don't ever go there.'

‘Why?'

‘He said:
It will ruin you both
.'

‘Did he say that? Really? I don't believe you.'

I didn't tell Anna that Shurik was convinced that Russians such as he and Anna had lost the habit of freedom. Its sudden appearance would hurt and impair us both.

Instead I lied: ‘Yes, he wants us to go.'

‘You aren't lying?'

‘No,' I lied again.

‘Then why do you look so sad?' she demanded.

‘I don't know.'

‘You're worried about Jijee-ma. Aren't you?

‘Yes – but not as much as I was. The chemotherapy is working. She's feeling much better.'

‘That's great, isn't it?'

‘It is. But—'

‘But you're scared.'

‘Yes. Of the new city. New language. New people.'

‘But you love Venice. It's one of your lovely water cities.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘And I'll be with you. Me and my cello. You love us both and we love you.'

That evening we stayed outside and sat quietly near the little creek that ran close to our
dacha
. It was a warm summer evening lit dimly by a reluctant moon. In the dense silence we heard the water whisper. Suddenly a pair of yellow wagtails appeared. They hopped around for a few moments and then flew off to land again on the rotting trunk of a tree lying in the creek.

‘Don't be so sad,' Anna said. She got up and walked towards the creek.

‘Aren't you coming?' I heard her call.

She took off her clothes, tossed them in my direction and stepped into the water.

I couldn't move. I sat motionless as if tied to the yellow trail left in the air by the little wagtails. I saw Anna bend, kneel and lie down in the knee-deep water. And then she began to sing.

Please stop
, I wanted to say, but couldn't open my mouth, choked as if by the immaculate beauty of the moment.

‘I'm doomed,' I thought then. ‘Doomed because I love her.'

Venice

Anna

‘You either come here to die or to kill someone,' the man told me. He was drunk and as he spoke his body swayed. I was sure that he would slip off his chair and fall into the water. I had stopped for coffee at a bistro near a Venetian canal, after my morning walk.

‘You'll love it, I promise,' Vika had remarked in Moscow. But after the excitement of the first few weeks I had become almost indifferent to this beautiful city. Every now and then a strange feeling of panic would grip me, as if something untoward were just about to happen. I should just have ignored the drunken man. He wanted me to stay and talk, and I would have because he looked so forlorn. But I was frightened by his bloodshot eyes and the uncontrollable shaking of his hands.

I didn't tell Vasu of this encounter, wary that he would refer me to
Death in Venice
. I didn't want to read anything for a while. In fact I didn't want to do anything except walk, look and feel.

I enjoyed the pure idleness of my days. I knew that it would have to stop soon, that I too would have to find a job. Vasu hadn't rushed me. He had willingly adopted the role of responsible husband.

We had arrived in Venice by the back door, as they say. The railway station was surprisingly dull and dirty and the hotel we stayed in during our first week was shabby too, except for the white façade with patches of peeled-off plaster, and bright red tiles on the roof. The window of our room opened on to a large and ugly square, the Piazzale Roma, the city's main road terminal, filled with cars and buses and smelling of diesel. The view from the windows of the dining room was just as uninspiring: a bridge and two flyovers. One brought the traffic from the mainland to the city and the other directed it to some warehouses. The bell tower of the little church next door to the hotel was the only beautiful thing and it brought us some joy.

Soon we found a place of our own in a block overlooking a park in the Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio. The architecture department of the university where Vasu was working was close by and so were the Rialto markets. For the first few weeks I went there every day, just to look at all the wonderful Italian fruits and vegetables: the shallots and onions, beans and aubergines and broccoli, bulbous pumpkins, chillies, grapes, fresh and dried figs, shapely pears, peaches, plums and most amazing of all, the fat orange mangoes.

The fish market too overflowed with plenty:
branzoni
, squid, red mullet, silver anchovies, eels, flatfish and crabs. Barges were loaded with lettuces, tomatoes and big bunches of bananas. One barge was piloted by a large woman always accompanied by a huge beast of a dog. But my favourite was the one moored under the San Barnaba Bridge. Because it was small, the fruit was piled right up to the roof of the stall.

A blind man would sit on a stool nearby and play his accordion. After a while I decided to bring my cello and play some tunes with him. ‘Bravo,' he said after we had finished the first. He wanted more. I played some Russian songs and he responded with a version of
Kalinka
. That evening I earned my first Italian
lire
and an invitation to return whenever I liked.

I got to know Bella, the blind accordionist's daughter. She managed the barge and the shop with her husband, a huge man of enormous strength who could pull the half-loaded vessel along the canal all on his own, like a horse. He had tattoos on his back, shoulders and arms and used to be a sailor on a merchant ship.

They were amused that I didn't speak Italian and took it upon themselves to teach me the Venetian dialect. I didn't know the difference until Sophia demonstrated to me the pronounced softness with which the Venetians spoke.

I met Sophia Serino through Vasu, who had seen her in the studio of a well-known Venetian architect. He noticed her violin and told her about me and my cello. She also found me a part-time, three-day-a-week job in a music shop on Riva degli Schiavoni, not far form La Pieta, the church where Vivaldi played music as a concertmaster.

I first met Marco at the shop where he had come looking for some music by Monteverdi. Like me he spoke a mixture of Italian and English. We started talking and he told me that he had to come to Venice to work on improving his harpsichord technique at the music school. His home was in Sydney.

He said that he often played at a bistro and invited me to join him. Soon the idea emerged of a trio with Sophia on the violin and we began rehearsing and playing together, both for fun and money.

I had never wanted to be a professional musician because I lack the necessary discipline. But I needed the money and I enjoyed playing. Besides, Vasu was more and more preoccupied with his job at the university.

Marco was a handsome man and, what's more important, joyful. His happiness was infectious, his optimism glorious and his laughter warm and inviting. He wasn't very tall but his long arms and hands were always ready to hug and touch, and he wasn't shy about kissing or being kissed.

He was one of those men who when they take you out to dinner you know will choose the best wine and suggest the most delicious dish on the menu. But he wasn't a very good musician. He played rather mechanically and lacked the confidence to improvise and invent.

Sophia and I agreed, however, that he was charming. In many ways he was the opposite of Vasu who, according to Sophia, carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. ‘Marco is a flirt,' she told me. ‘You have to be careful with such men. They mess with your mind and heart and then leave you marooned.'

Of course Marco reminded me of Tonya's Paolo. That I had suddenly started thinking about the son of the locksmith from the village near Turin troubled me. I was worried that one day I would wake up and rush down to the railway station to buy a ticket for Turin. Sophia told me it was very close to Venice.

‘I'll come with you,' she even said, although of course she didn't know why I wanted to go there. I knew I wouldn't do it, but the fact that I had to force myself to give up the idea of going to Turin surprised me.

Vasu

A few months after our arrival in Venice, Antonio, a fellow-researcher at the university, asked me to join him on a trip with his students to Pienza. For the first few days I couldn't keep my eyes off the buildings. But I soon became bored by Alberti's precise symmetry of shapes, colours and patterns.

In Venice I was confronted with the same tyranny of symmetry, accentuated by the presence of water everywhere, the upside-down images mimicking every structure. But the water also brought rhythm and smells and loaded the air with tiny globules of moisture creating colours. The city turned lilac in the winter mornings and rose and crimson when the sun went down.

The window of my office opened on to an expansive view of the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi on the northern bank of the Canal Grande. A classical cornice sits atop three Corinthian columns delicately fluted on the
piano nobile
. The arches of its large biforate windows are topped by oculi which gaze at you inviting you to look back. It's the windows which make it appear unnaturally weightless, so light that I often felt it would rise on marble wings and float in the light air warmed by the soft moist
sirocco
. Then it would land with such immaculate precision that people would fail to notice that anything magical had happened.

My university class was small, with only five students, three young men and two slightly older women. It was touching for me that they were interested in my short course on
Vastushastra
, the ancient Hindu practices of architecture and urban planning. Simone, a woman from Nice, spoke Bengali. When she was young she had spent time with her parents in Auroville, the mission city established by Aurobindo Ghose in Pondicherry. She was disappointed that she couldn't practise her Bengali with me, since I don't speak it. There was also a couple from Sweden learning Sanskrit because they wanted to read the major text on
Vastushastra
in the original.