The Art of Waiting (11 page)

‘The war . . . Your papers still haven't come through?'

He shook his head.

‘Thank goodness,' she said.

‘But I'm expecting the call any day now.'

‘The longer they make you wait, the better.'

‘Most of my friends have already gone off for training.'

‘Maybe someone's protecting you.'

‘I doubt it.'

‘But it happens sometimes. The right contacts, a word or two in an influential ear.'

‘I wish. But who would do that for me? Who could? I don't know those types. They'll call me soon enough.'

‘So then, Aldo darling, make the most of me while you can.'

There was a noise from somewhere, the creak of floorboards along the corridor.

‘Isabella, who's that?' whispered Aldo, his voice suddenly urgent, the darkness no longer a sheltering friend but an accomplice to whoever was outside the room.

‘Ssh, Aldo. Don't worry. It's nothing. Really nothing.'

‘But there's someone there. Who is it?' he whispered back.

‘Aldo, I told you, don't worry.'

He got up and began to dress, fumbling around noisily in the dark for his clothes. The footsteps receded at the noise.

‘Don't go, Aldo, it's nothing. Please trust me. Please stay, I want you here with me now.'

But he shook his head and stepped into the inky passage and as he started down the stairs he saw a figure behind him on the landing.

‘Who are you?' Aldo said, his voice brittle now.

‘Who am I?' said the man. ‘Who am I? You've got a nerve. Who the fuck are
you?'

Isabella hurried along the passageway, clasping a robe in front of her.

‘Aldo, I'm so sorry,' she said. ‘Oh, God, why must it always be like this? Listen, Aldo, it's best if you go now. Please go.'

‘But, Isabella, will you be all right?'

She laughed, something small and dark in her laughter. Something wrong.

‘Yes, of course. I'll be just fine. Go now. Please. It'll be better that way.'

Aldo hurried down the stairs, stopped, turned, changed his mind again, stepped out into the courtyard. He walked slowly home through the narrow streets, regretting every foolish step, leaving his gondola again where he should have been, still lashed firmly to Isabella's jetty.

The next day, when the lunchtime regulars had left and he had wiped down the bar and rearranged the tables, removed the scraps of food from the floor and sprinkled it with fresh sawdust, Aldo left Casa Luca. He saw her as he was closing the door, leaning against the arch of the bridge, her long dark hair upon the velvet blue of her coat.

‘Aldo,' she said, and at the sound of his name, of her voice, his irritation at the way things had ended the night before fell away.

‘I'm sorry about last night,' she said, but really she needn't have, he had forgiven her already.

‘Isabella, it's fine, really it is. It's not as if I should have been there anyway. It's hardly the place for me, is it?'

‘But I wanted you there. You should have stayed. You will next time, won't you?'

Next time, he thought. So there will be a next time after all? He had been wondering. And now his heart lifted and he felt a growing warmth towards her, and a warmth coming back the other way as she stood there smiling, sweeping her hair back with a hand he wanted to take in his own now, but dare not, not yet at least. Later, yes, the next time: she'd just said so, hadn't she?

‘Were you all right when I left, Isabella?'

‘Yes, I said I would be. Didn't you believe me?'

‘I wasn't sure, that's all. I regretted leaving, thought about going back. I was kicking myself all the way home.'

‘Poor you. Listen, Aldo, can we walk for a while? I'd like to explain.'

‘There's no need.'

‘Oh, but I must,' she said, her hand on his arm now as she spoke.

They walked the short distance to the quayside of the Zattere,
the long promenade lining the southern edge of Dorsoduro. They sat at a table in the sun outside one of the cafés that punctuated the waterside. A waiter brought the drinks and Isabella paid him. They sat in silence and sipped their coffees and looked across the water to the island of Giudecca, where Byron had swum in the days when the water was still clean. The church of Il Redentore, visited by the doges each year in centuries past, their entourage crossing the Canale della Giudecca on a bridge of shifting boats, stood ephemeral in the afternoon light. Aldo watched Isabella as her eyes fell upon it, as thousands of eyes had done before in search of redemption across the long years.

‘I suppose you know who the man was last night?' she said at last.

‘I suppose I do. I assume it wasn't the Spanish one, anyway.'

‘It wouldn't have been a problem if you'd stayed in the room.'

Aldo turned to look at her. ‘But, Isabella, I couldn't really have stayed this time, shouldn't have, anyway. My mother would have been worried to death. I can't do that to her so soon, with my father not being around any more. It was best that I went when I did.'

‘But I wanted you to stay.'

‘With him creeping around outside like that?'

‘He wouldn't have come in. He never does. He just listens.'

‘Clearly a gentleman.'

‘He was, once upon a time. When he still thought he needed me.'

‘Have things been this way for long?'

‘For long? Yes, for too long, for far too long. We've been married seven years, nearly eight. I was only twenty. At the beginning I had such high hopes. You know how it is when you're young.'

She did not look at Aldo as she spoke, her gaze fixed still on Il Redentore across the way, as if she were talking to the building itself, as if it were able, in its age and wisdom, to understand the pain of a soliloquoy she had rehearsed a thousand times but never spoken.

‘It happened gradually, I suppose. And when we realised what was happening, it was already too late. We tried and we tried, and at first he blamed himself, but it's not him, it seems, it's me. And when the doctor confirmed things, well, he just lost interest. Can you
imagine how that felt, Aldo, how it feels? I'd have been a good mother. Maybe not the best in the world, but I wanted it, you know. I'd always assumed it would just happen, I'd have two or three kids, they'd grow up and then they'd have their own, and I'd learn how to bake big beautiful cakes on all their birthdays. Or something just about edible, anyway.' She laughed. ‘But then it was gone, the hope, and there was nothing I could do about it and it seemed, from one day to the next, that I was different, completely different. He even looked at me differently, something subtle, something hidden in the eyes. Everyone did, his family, his friends. You know, that look? Just different.'

‘Oh yes,' he said. ‘I know that look. That sudden difference.'

She looked at him.

‘Since the hunting accident,' he said. ‘That difference, that look, I see it in nearly everyone now.'

‘Nearly
everyone?'

‘Not in you,' he said.

‘No,' she said. ‘I would hope not.'

‘Really,' he said. ‘And that makes you special.'

‘Oh,' she said, suddenly flustered, then snapping herself away from it again, back to what she'd been saying. ‘Anyway,' she said. ‘That look. He had it, has it still. I hated him for it at first, hated them all. If only he'd put his arms around me and told me he still felt the same, that nothing had changed, that I hadn't changed. But of course he didn't, and even if he had, his eyes would have told me his lies, and anyway, everything
had
changed, and there was nothing he or I could do about it. Not his fault really, I suppose.'

‘Not yours either.'

She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose, then twisted and turned the lace between her fingers. The deep yellow light of late afternoon lifted off the waves and kissed her face with its warmth, glistening the tears that streamed down her face.

‘Oh, I've been so stupid, Aldo. I've made so many mistakes. You wouldn't know about that, you haven't had a chance to make yours yet, but one day you'll know what I mean. Maybe he never really
loved me, even at the beginning, but there was this invisible third person then, this future person, binding us together. But then that person was gone, before they had even arrived, and so it was always just going to be the two of us. The thing is, it might have been all right if there'd been a reason for it, if I'd known why I couldn't have a child. But that would have been too easy, wouldn't it? Too logical. So anyway, that was that. I took to sleeping in the spare room, another piece of furniture, another piece of wood.'

She rapped her knuckles hard on the table.

‘And we arrived at a sort of unspoken agreement. He does what he wants, and I do my own thing, and we get by. I offered him a divorce, in fact I insisted, but the church and everything . . . It means a lot to him, and so he couldn't bring himself to do it, said it would turn us into sinners.'

She laughed again.

‘Isabella, I really don't know what to say.'

‘Then just say something, anything . . . anything would be better than nothing. I've had enough silence from others to last me a lifetime.'

‘I'm so sorry, Isabella. I really can't imagine what it must be like – how you manage, how you cope.'

‘Well, I suppose you can get used to anything if you have to.'

They stood up and walked along the Zattere. At Accademia they parted.

‘Come and get your gondola sometime, take me out. If you want . . .'

‘Yes, I'd like that, Isabella.'

‘Tonight?'

He nodded.

‘Good,' she said. ‘Meet me in front of Caffé Florian at eight.'

She touched him gently as she turned away, and he felt her touch remain on his arm until they met again that evening, until they lay again together in the darkness of her room in the silence of the night.

PART THREE

Russia and Ukraine

Train to nowhere

Brescia, July 1942

Aldo looked down at his uniform, the rough green cloth, stiffer than any he'd ever worn as a civilian, the badges and the belts and the buckles and his clean black boots, as if all this might make him ready for war. He looked around at the other men – Gianni, Luigi, Sergeant Tancredi, all the others. Most of them had joined the division at the same time as him, shortly after it was formed in March '42 – the 277th Infantry Regiment of the 156th Vicenza Division, based in Brescia on the edge of the northern plain between Venice and Milan. What was it with the Army, Aldo thought, all these bloody numbers? They had spent their months of training learning the drill. This is how you walk, this is how you talk, this is how you fold your clothes and this is what you eat. And don't you bloody forget it. Oh, and this is how you wear your hair. He recalled that last day in town, out with Gianni and Luigi on a two-hour pass, looking for girls – but all they found was the sergeant. The sergeant had a thing about haircuts – Aldo suspected it was because he was going prematurely bald. Nice and short, the sergeant always said, just a little bit longer on top if you must. On the way back to the barracks that day they had passed a barber's and the sergeant had pushed them inside. The sergeant went first, taking the lead, setting an example, just as he'd been taught. Aldo watched as the barber shaved the sergeant's head, and he exchanged glances with Gianni, as if about to make for the door – but instead they just sat there and waited their turn, and the barber took away what was left of their civilian life, the right to wear their hair in the way that they preferred.

‘You'll be better off that way,' said the sergeant as they left. ‘Less chance of fleas. And the girls love a tidy man.'

‘Not the girls I like to be with,' said Luigi.

‘As if you'd know . . .' said the sergeant.

That had been two days ago. Aldo took off his cap now as he waited for the train. He rubbed his hand across the back of his head, felt the stubble, rough against his hand.

Fucking sergeant, he thought. Bald as a fucking egg.

He gazed at the hundreds of soldiers who were crowded onto the station platform. Numerous flags hung from the walls and the crowd that had gathered to see the men off waved dozens more, all red and white and green, an excited buzz spreading throughout the station, the occasional patriotic song starting up and then fading before it could really gather momentum. It struck Aldo that most of the noise was coming from the crowd. The soldiers were largely silent – disciplined or contemplative, depending on your point of view.

Gianni looked at his watch repeatedly and tutted. ‘Call this military efficiency?' he muttered. ‘I thought the fascists were supposed to know what they were doing. If they can't even get us there on time, how on earth will they ever get us home?'

‘Shut up,' said the sergeant. ‘Who said you were coming home anyway? This is a major undertaking. It's just a minor hitch. They'll be getting the train nice and ready for us, fit for kings.'

Aldo turned his attention away from the bickering. There was too much on his mind, too much he was missing already, too many people he needed to see. His family, of course, and Isabella, and Fausto Pozzi, always with him now, keeping him company, along with that memory of the forest and everything that had happened there. And now Aldo was here, on this damned platform, heading off in completely the wrong direction, away from life, away from what his life should have been. When would he be coming back? He had no idea. And would he even make it home? No idea about that either, but he didn't like the odds, didn't like the look of them. Oh yes, of course the papers said otherwise, a straightforward fascist victory,
even against the great mass of Russia. Russia! How could they ever win against all that? His gran had told him so – Russia, her native Ukraine, the whole damned Soviet Union? Little Italy was going to make war with that lot, along with her German chums? You'll be like ants on a map, son, waiting to be stepped on. Thanks, Gran, that's really reassuring, as if I had a choice. Luca, he would have said the same, Aldo was sure of that – don't trust
Il Duce
, that fascist bastard, always kissing Hitler's arse, sending away the likes of Aldo, off over the horizon, somewhere they'd never seen, somewhere they should never be. But here he was, here they were, waiting for their train, and off they'd go, him and all the other poor bastards. So they waited – Aldo, Gianni, Luigi, Sergeant Tancredi, all the hundreds of others, the sergeant eager in his ignorance to be off towards a fate you couldn't imagine. The sergeant had tried to clarify things for them the other day, to tell them what victory would mean.

‘So, let me get this straight,' Gianni had said. ‘We're going to Russia to defeat the Russians?'

‘Yes, the Russians – the Soviets, the whole damn lot of them,' said the sergeant.

‘And why would that be?'

‘Because they're the enemy.'

‘The enemy?'

‘Communists. The very worst.'

‘Ah, I see.'

‘It'll be a glorious victory,' the sergeant continued. ‘The start of a new empire. Future generations will thank us for it.'

‘And this glorious victory,' said Aldo, chipping in where Gianni had left off. ‘What will it look like? Just so I know it when I see it.'

‘You'll know it when the fighting stops. A few months from now, I expect.'

‘And then what?'

‘Well, then we'll come home, I suppose.'

‘Oh, right,' said Aldo, and Gianni laughed. ‘So why go there in the first place? Just to come back home again? Why don't we just stay put?'

‘Look,' said the sergeant. ‘There are important things in play here, big things, politics and stuff, things you lot don't understand.'

‘You're right about that,' said Aldo, and Gianni laughed again and the sergeant told them to shut up and went back to shining the buttons on his tunic.

Well, thought Aldo now, as he waited for the train – at least the sooner you go, the sooner you might come back. Or something like that, even if none of it made sense.
Nothing makes sense, Aldo, nothing makes sense. Remember that, and you'll always be all right
. That's what she'd said, Isabella, that first time, and he realised now that she was right. He slapped at a fly as it landed on his face, picking at the sweat of him, one of the last of them as evening drew in and swallows swooped low across the tracks. Then a train's whistle sounded, silencing the crowd. The whistle came again, long and melancholy, closer this time. Aldo saw the smoke of the engine before the train came into view, twenty or thirty wooden cars in all, almost more than you could count. The huge dark engine, its brakes screaming against locked wheels, came to a halt beside the platform. The crowds of civilians cheered and waved their flags. The military police blew their whistles and the numbers of units were called out amid the din. Aldo pulled on his pack and his helmet, his water bottle and his spade and his gun and all the other things, and he looked at the other men doing the same. He pulled himself up into the carriage, then turned and helped Gianni and Luigi as they struggled to do the same. He choked on the dust that billowed up in clouds as he threw down his pack, Gianni and Luigi coughing up dust beside him too.

‘What was that you said, sergeant?' said Aldo. ‘A train fit for kings?'

Aldo slumped down, resting his head against the wooden wall of the carriage. Oak, he thought, then he coughed again and closed his eyes, relieved at last to have found a place to rest, a small space he could call his own, if only for a few days on the long journey into Stalin's empire and all that it meant. He heard more pushing and shoving as more and more men climbed aboard, then he opened his eyes and watched as one of the men in his platoon – a man whose
name he would soon forget and never really knew – vigorously cursed the Virgin Mary and jumped back down onto the station platform where he said he'd left his gun, feeling such a fool, telling himself out loud that he was, and before the man could return, the carriage door was slammed shut. So who's the fool now, thought Aldo. Go home, you happy fool, pretend you never came here, let all us other fools go instead, packed in like sardines, packed off to die. Go home, brother, leave your gun, spend the war in front of your fire, drunk on wine, with your woman, or your mother. Forget about us, forget about
Il Duce
and his fat fascist arse.

Aldo stood up and leant against the carriage wall as the train lurched its way out of the station. He watched through a crack in the wood as the lights of the town faded and the countryside darkened behind him, and his mind eased open the door again for Fausto Pozzi and let him in and allowed him to look around his thoughts, and every mile the train travelled was another mile away from Fausto Pozzi, another mile from the truth, another mile from what Aldo knew should be his fate – Fausto's too – and the dimmer the lights of home became, the brighter burned the flame of revenge. It was only when Aldo finally slept that Fausto slipped out of sight, appearing again at intervals in his dreams as Aldo's head bibbed and bobbed to the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks, the nodding of a man resigned to his fate now, but the wrong fate all the same.

When Aldo woke, his mind turned to that evening in May when he had left what remained of his family at the door of their home in Cannaregio, when he had caught the boat to Mestre and then the train to Brescia. Everyone had been worried and he had put on a brave face. The news about Massimo didn't help, coming when it did, two days before. He had hardly set foot in Russia before they killed him. That's all anyone knew – no detail, killed in action, that was all. That was Massimo – dead for the honour of Italy, for
Il Duce
and his fat fascist arse. Well, Aldo wouldn't be dying for
Il Duce
, he was bloody sure of that.

‘Please don't worry on my account,' Aldo had said as he was leaving. ‘I'll be just fine, you'll see. The angels will keep me from harm.'

‘There are no angels where you're going, Aldo,' his mother had said. ‘Only Russians. So you just look after yourself instead.'

She prodded him in the chest with a finger as she spoke, as if pushing the words into him where he'd remember them.

‘Really, don't worry,' he said. ‘I'll be back – you know me, you know I will. And I'll write to you all whenever I get the chance, every day if I can.'

He embraced his mother one last time. Then he hugged his grandmother too, to whose country he was being sent to fight, not in its defence, but in the aid of those who were invading her. And then, bending down, he whispered in Elena's ear, ‘Don't worry, little one, I'll be back – I promise you I will.'

But she began to cry and Aldo turned and left them so they would not see his tears, three hunched figures and a small black dog by a bridge beneath a perfect evening sky. At Piazza dei Mori, beside Tintoretto's house, he thought again of Isabella. He had seen her the day before. Her husband had been at home but he had left them in peace in the room at the end of the passage and then he had watched from the window as usual as Aldo departed, probably wondering which one it was this time, walking under the arch into Calle degli Specchieri and out of Isabella's life again, perhaps forever this time. On the bleak jetties of Fondamente Nuove, Aldo had waited an age for the boat to come and take him away and more than once he had turned to walk back home. Would anyone really notice if one young man, barely more than a boy, did not come, if he just ignored
Il Duce
, ignored the order to go and fight, somehow forgot to turn up where and when they had told him to? Maybe he could go and live in the marshes, or hide away at his grandfather's house on Burano and only come out at night to spend the dark hours lying beneath the beamed ceiling of Isabella's room, wrapped in her arms, listening to the sound of her breathing and the boats passing beneath her window in the night. Looking out across the waters of the lagoon at the silhouette of the church on the island of San Michele, in whose cemetery they had buried his father the previous autumn in the rain, he remembered for the hundred-thousandth time how he
had come to be there among the graves that day, how Fausto Pozzi had joined the mourners at the burial, Aldo's outrage at this deceit, and the terrible scandal that followed, the scandal of his repeated accusations. And he remembered yet again his father as he used to stand, rolled-up sleeves revealing thick strong forearms, grinning broadly behind the bar, his bar, at Casa Luca. And then the boat arrived and Aldo got on board, and when he looked again the lights of Venice were small and distant in the night, and then they disappeared altogether.

The train crossed out of Italy the next day, into central Europe and then on into the Ukraine. Aldo watched the countryside grow harsh and unfamiliar as the train pulled him east, the comforting and familiar landscapes of northern Italy replaced by wide open spaces flecked with forests of birch. Flatbed cars loaded with artillery were coupled to the train and Aldo and the others took it in turns to stand guard in the fresh air that night brought with it. One night the train was rolling through a scrubby stretch of birch forest, Aldo standing guard with Gianni, both of them leaning against a tarpaulin, cupping their hands to shield the glow of their cigarettes from the eyes in the woods. Aldo could feel something hard and uncomfortable pressing into him as he leant on it, a piece of a field gun, a sinister piece of metal only fit for use at the front, only fit for killing people or making you uncomfortable if you leant into it on a lurching train somewhere in the depths of nowhere. He shifted his position but the thing jagged into him again. He pulled up the tarpaulin, saw the dull metal, black and ugly. He covered it up again.