The Art of Waiting (31 page)

‘Can you feel that, my friend? Can you feel what it's like, to be stabbed in the heart? That's for Luca, for what you did to him, and
it's for my mother and sister too. And it's also for me, and for all the other poor bastards you and your kind helped to send away to war. You're right, Chief Inspector, the dead have a voice, and I can hear them now. Can you hear them too? They're talking to you, Chief Inspector, they're talking to you through me, and now it's your turn to suffer in silence.'

The Chief Inspector moved his lips as if desperate to speak but Aldo slipped a firm hand over his mouth and pressed his words back inside.

‘In silence, I said. Suffer in silence, you fascist. You pig.'

Aldo felt the impact in his stomach before he heard the shot, the Chief Inspector's finger tightening against the trigger of the gun that he always carried inside the pocket of his coat. Aldo coughed and tasted the blood in his throat and saw little specks of it on the Chief Inspector's face. He pushed the knife in hard again and the Chief Inspector's eyes slid shut. Aldo stood up and threw the knife down and wiped his hands on a coat in the hall and stumbled back out into the street, clutching his abdomen. As the pain from his wound spread out from his belly, and waves of nausea threatened to overcome him, he staggered against a wall and let his head rest against the damp bricks.

‘Fausto Pozzi,' he said out loud as his legs threatened to give way, his face pressed hard up against the wall now. Fausto, he thought, you bastard, you tricked me good and proper in the end, just when I thought I had you, lying about the bullet and its origin, about who fired the fatal shot, when it was you that fired it all along. And if you lied about that, you'd just as easily lie about Luca. All that stuff about my parentage, I knew it couldn't be true. But the Chief Inspector, he was a bastard and a liar too, so who to believe? And no time left to me now to find out the truth of it, not now, not in this state. Truth and justice, they were all I ever wanted, but I'll be leaving this world with neither of them now. And so you're going to get away with it after all, aren't you, Fausto? Just like you always do, you and the likes of you.'

But he could not let it go, not without a fight, not until his last
breath had left him, so he stumbled along to where he'd left the gondola and he climbed unsteadily aboard, turning it around and pointing it down the canal in the direction of the lagoon and Fausto Pozzi. But he had gone barely fifty yards when his vision dimmed and blurred and his eyes blacked over and he fell into the well of the boat. He got up again, unsteady on his feet, poling frantically at the water with the oar, but then came a terrible weakness in his arms, exhaustion catching up with him. He knew he was never going to make it now, not all that way to the island in the lagoon. But someone had to know, someone must know the truth, so he turned the boat around again and inched it up the Canale Grande, under the Accademia and Rialto bridges, then up the side-canals and into the ghetto. He tied the boat up beneath Isabella's window and lifted the oar to tap on the frame. He saw Isabella's face behind the glass and she came down and let him in and he followed her up the stairs, past the books and the cats that littered the way, and he lay on the bed with his head in her lap. She bent down and kissed him, tasted the salt in his hair, felt the damp in his clothes.

‘Aldo, my dear, where have you been?'

‘Out in the gondola. The lagoon.'

‘There was a storm last night.'

‘Yes, I saw it. I've been out in it all night. I'm tired, Isabella, so tired.'

‘You can rest now, Aldo. I'll take care of you, don't you worry about that.'

He looked at her as if suddenly confused, as if some sort of certainty had unexpectedly started to dissolve.

‘You know, Isabella, perhaps you were the one. Perhaps you were the one all along and I just didn't realise it.'

‘Aldo, that's ridiculous, I can't have been.'

‘Why not?'

‘I can't have been, that's all. What about your angel? Your angel in the snow . . .'

‘My angel? Do angels really exist?'

‘What do you think?'

‘She seemed so real.'

‘There's your answer, then. If she seemed real, then she was.'

He closed his eyes and she caressed his clammy brow. Then she saw the blood on his shirt.

‘Oh my God, Aldo, what's happened to you? Let me fetch a doctor.'

‘No, Isabella, don't go. I have to tell you something. I want somebody else to know, this secret mustn't die with me. Fausto Pozzi, he did it, I know that now, or I think I do. Yes, yes, it was him, it must have been. He killed Luca. And the Chief Inspector covered it up and later he did away with my mother and my sister and he'd have done the same to me. Tell the papers, tell them about their deeds, tell them to look for the bodies in the garden on Burano, beneath the window by the lagoon, where the wild flowers grow thickest. Will you tell them that, Isabella? Will you?'

‘Don't worry, Aldo. I'll tell them.'

‘And will you find Fausto Pozzi for me? Don't let him get away with it. Will you see that justice is done?'

‘Yes, Aldo, I'll do that, I'll do that for you. I don't know how, but I'll find a way.'

‘And try to find a way to take on Casa Luca. Call it Casa Isabella, if you want. I would like that. But Isabella, run the old place as Luca would have done.'

She nodded, uncertain now, he could see it in her eyes.

‘Isabella, I mean it. Do it for me. Justice for Luca, and Casa Luca for him too.'

‘Don't worry, Aldo. I'll do it. I'll do it for you, just for you.'

‘Thank you, Isabella. And there's one more thing . . .' He swallowed hard.

‘Don't worry, Aldo, I already know.'

‘No, you don't. The old man, the street musician, I killed him. I'm so sorry, Isabella. I deserve no forgiveness for that.'

‘Aldo, I already knew.'

‘But how, Isabella?'

‘I just knew.'

‘But I don't understand why the police didn't pursue me further. They had me, they knew all about the violin, and then for some reason the story changed. They said they had the wrong violin. That mine didn't match the description. But it did, I know it did. It just doesn't any make sense.'

She stroked his hair and smiled. ‘It makes sense, Aldo. Somebody swapped the violin. Somebody went to your house, broke in, found the violin in the kitchen cupboard, replaced it with another for the police to find.'

‘But who? Who would have done that for me, Isabella?'

But he knew the answer.

She reached under the bed and pulled out the instrument and laid it on the mattress next to him.

‘It'll remind me of you always,' she said.

‘Is that a good thing?'

‘Yes, dear Aldo. A very good thing.'

Isabella stroked the waves of his hair again, then wrapped him in arms that were at last more tender than voracious.

‘Oh, Aldo, sweet child, how I've loved you, right from the start – I surprised even myself. If only I could have kept you from harm.'

She held him ever tighter and the pig on his arm blinked and closed its eyes at last, forever this time, and Aldo allowed his eyelids to fall across his eyes too, and his breathing slowed and his ears picked out the sound of a boat passing beneath the window and he followed the sound and let himself get on board and the boat carried him away into the beautiful heart of Venice.

Isabella sat beside the coffin as the gondola toiled through the waves towards San Michele, the rain cold and incessant as the gondoliers lifted the dark box out onto the quay and carried it among the graves. Isabella and the priest stood alone as the coffin was covered over while Fausto Pozzi looked on from further back, unseen among the tombs. Then Isabella returned to where the gondoliers stood smoking
beneath the trees by the perimeter wall. They extinguished their cigarettes as she stepped aboard and they carried her back across the grey-green waves to Venice. When she had gone, Fausto Pozzi placed his flowers on the grass beside the muddying earth, turned his collar up against the cold, and stood for a long time alone in the rain.

Isabella went to Michele's shop and pushed the door open.

‘I've come to let you know that Aldo won't be coming back.'

‘No?'

‘No. He's gone.'

‘Gone where?'

‘I mean he's gone.'

He saw her black clothes and the look in her eye.

‘Isabella, I'm so sorry.'

He put an arm around her but she withdrew.

‘Have a wine?' he said. ‘For him.'

They drank from small squat glasses, Isabella taking a sip, then draining the dark red liquid into her mouth.

‘Michele, I have to go.'

‘Come back later . . . if you like.'

She looked at him. ‘I don't think that would be appropriate on a day like this, do you, Michele?'

‘Perhaps not,' he said, and adjusted his hair.

She turned abruptly away and walked back out into the bustling, seething street. She stopped a little way along, nearly turned back the way she had come, to look for Fausto Pozzi. But no, she thought, not now, not this day – there would be plenty of time for all that. Somehow she would find a way – she would find a way to sort out Fausto Pozzi, and then she would take on Casa Luca. But she wouldn't call it Casa Isabella, as Aldo had suggested, nor Casa Luca, as Aldo would really have preferred, but instead the name that Isabella felt to be most fitting, a final act of love: Casa Aldo.

And then she made her way slowly back to the house in the ghetto and sat on the stairs and wept while Madame Leroux whispered her name in the darkness of an adjacent room.

Barbed wire

Tambov, April 1952

Katerina stepped off the train and caught the bus to the village. Her footsteps were light and silent as she moved along the path that led into the forest. She walked for some time through the trees, then up the slope and down over the rocks to the lakeside and up and over the outcrop that led to the secret path, now overgrown with brambles and hawthorn bushes that sent white petals showering down like perfumed snowflakes in the warming breeze. Viktor's house stood at the edge of the treeline still, facing the beach, its broken windows looking out over the silver-blue waves that rippled to the shore from the other side of the island. Katerina knocked on the door and pushed it open. The room was covered in dust, cobwebs strewn across the beams, hanging in wispy grey beards around the place. The furniture was as she remembered it, the sideboard with the violins and the pickled vegetables, the stove in the far corner and the table with the three empty chairs in the middle of the room. She went to the far side of the room and opened the door to the bedroom and looked out through the window towards the lakeside, and she thought she glimpsed for a moment Viktor's silhouette on the beach with his nets and his boat, but when she went outside he was gone and the nets and the boat were no longer there.

As she walked back towards the path she saw a small cross that had been driven into the ground near the edge of the trees, the name of Koshka carved into its wood. She walked back through the forest, across the small clearing where the stream ran over pebbles and the footprints of wild animals lay fresh in the mud, and then on through the long grass where the mayflies would soon gather along
the edge of the forest. The trees parted and she saw the watchtower a short distance away, its tall dark skeleton stark against the sky. She walked beneath it, past the open gate and the first of the bunkers, and she looked towards the side of the decaying camp, to the place where Aldo's stooping figure had been in 1943, staring into the woods. She quickened her pace, reached the spot where Aldo had stood and faced her. She reached out her hand again now, twisting it towards his memory, and this time there was no barbed wire to impede her touch, because time had rusted away its bloodied strands, and she stepped easily across its broken remains and stood where he had once stood.

She thought of what might since have become of him, how they had promised to write to each other, perhaps even find each other again in Venice after the war. And she
had
written to him – many, many times – but she had received no reply. She had even gone to his house that first time when the Kirov had toured Italy, had knocked on his door but the people there could not or would not help. And that other time, after that, when she had seen someone very much like him in the audience at La Fenice, just left of centre, just yards from the stage, and she had wondered if indeed it was him, come to find her, perhaps hurrying in afterwards to find her backstage. She had lingered longer than usual that evening before leaving, but of course he had not come. How could he have come? He would have been long gone by then, she was sure of that, lying in the Siberian earth outside some god-forsaken gulag in the east, another young life lost, a delayed victim of war just as Oleg had been. But she was a survivor, she knew that now, and she would live life for both of them, she would make the most of life's little leap, would leap for them too, lifting them up in her heart as she did so.

She turned and looked towards the woods, just as Aldo had always done. She saw that a small lake had lifted itself out of the ground in the years since the war. A spring breeze rippled its surface, shifting the reeds, and as she watched, fish flung themselves skywards, chasing after bugs. She put her hand in her pocket and felt the little wooden fish that Aldo had given her all those years before.

‘It'll last forever,' he had said. ‘And it'll bring you luck.'

And he was right. It had brought her luck – she had survived the war and had fulfilled her dreams, most of them anyway. And it had certainly lasted – it had lasted the test of time, just as her memories of him had done. The war was long gone and the prison camp had decayed, the woods advancing into it, nature taking things back and hiding what had happened there – but Katerina's love for Aldo had outlived it all, and it always would, tucked safely away in her heart.