The Art of Waiting (21 page)

‘She's not here. Who are you, anyway?'

‘Do you know when she'll be back?'

‘Are you one of them? You won't find her here any more. She won't be coming back.' Aldo could feel spittle on his face as the man chucked out his bitter words. ‘The last I heard she was living in the ghetto somewhere,' he went on. ‘And no, I don't have the address. But if you hang around long enough in the streets you might spot her. I'm not sure you'd recognise her, though. She's changed a bit since, well, since when? When was it you knew her?'

He looked Aldo up and down. ‘You must have been one of her later ones. Her taste went downhill towards the end.'

Aldo was already walking away, too exhausted for further conflict that evening.

‘As I said,' the man called out, ‘look for her in the ghetto, in the streets somewhere. In the gutter.'

Aldo walked the streets for the rest of the night but he saw no one he knew and towards dawn, as the first light of another July day, his first morning back in Venice after eight years away, began to inch itself up behind San Giorgio Maggiore, he found himself in the public gardens towards Sant'Elena. He lay on a bench beneath a tree and listened to the waves of the lagoon until they washed him up on the rocks of broken sleep. When he woke he pondered where to go next and set off back towards the house in Cannaregio, with no particular idea of why he was going there, other than that he could not think of anywhere else. He thought about knocking on the door but instead he walked up onto the arched bridge opposite. He saw the woman from the previous evening in an upstairs window and he opened his mouth and began to raise his hand, but she closed the shutters before he could speak. He walked on towards the railway station and thought about getting back on a train, but where could he go? This was no longer home, but nor was anywhere else, and what he really wanted was to be taken back into the past, to a wooden house beside a Russian lake in the spring of 1943. He walked back through Santa Croce and Dorsoduro to Antica Locanda Fausto. The door was locked and bolted now, the shutters closed, the tables
absent from the quayside, so he kicked hard on the door a couple of times, shoved his nose up against the wood, examined the grain, decided it was oak, yelled a few obscenities through the gap between the door and the frame, and walked on towards the boatyard. He heard the church bell strike nine. At this time of the morning Antonio would certainly be around. Aldo pictured him hunched beneath an upturned hull, muttering away to himself at the shoddy quality of someone else's workmanship, and he imagined the old man's surprise at the welcome return of his former apprentice. He might even offer him some paid work or allow him to resume his training, or possibly even both. It would be a foothold at least, something to build on. The door of the boatyard was open. Aldo went inside and sure enough he saw the hunched figure beneath the hull of a boat. He walked quietly up behind him, wanting to surprise the old man.

‘Hey, Antonio, how about a coffee?'

A voice came back at him. ‘Eh?'

‘Can I get you a coffee? A good one, just like I used to make.'

The figure shuffled round and a head poked out from under the boat. ‘What the bloody hell are you talking about?'

‘Oh, I'm so sorry. I thought you were Antonio.'

The man looked at Aldo as if he were an idiot. ‘Antonio hasn't been here for years! Hadn't you heard?'

‘Don't tell me. He's gone away?'

‘Gone away? Hell, no. They shot him in '44.'

‘Oh my God! Who on earth would shoot Antonio?'

‘The communists. They said he'd been helping the Germans. He hadn't, of course, but they shot him all the same. Some sort of vendetta, from long before the war.'

Aldo walked the streets aimlessly for the rest of the day and towards evening found himself on Fondamente Nuove. He took a
vaporetto
to Burano, passing the cemetery of San Michele and stopping at Murano before carrying on towards Burano, the small island at the northern end of the lagoon where his grandfather had his house. Aldo got off the boat and walked the short distance from the quay to the centre of the village, passing the fishermen's houses all painted
pastel shades of blue and red and yellow to guide the fishermen home. Tourists stood around and examined the lace that the women of the island had eked out of barren winters past. At the far end of the island, on a scruffy plot of land that served as a garden, one side bordered by a stagnant canal, the other by the lagoon, Aldo's grandfather's house, its walls daubed a deep powder-blue, stood beside a pair of stunted trees. The blue paint was flaking off the walls, lumps of plaster gouged out by the fingertips of time, and several windowpanes were broken or missing. Aldo looked around the garden, overgrown with wild flowers and weeds. His grandfather's boat was still tied up at the end of the canal but it held a slough of green water. The door of the house was open. Aldo went inside and looked around. Most of the furniture was still there as he remembered it, but his grandfather had always kept it neat and orderly and now it was strewn around the room. Sunlight shone down from the bedroom above, passing through the holes in the ceiling. The stone floor of the kitchen was barely visible beneath lumps of plaster and clumps of grass and dirt that something had dragged in from the garden. Aldo sniffed. The room smelt of animals. He heard the ruminant chewing of the goat before he saw its insouciant eyes. It was standing half-concealed in the cupboard beneath the stairs. He ignored it and went upstairs. Another one stood by the window, nosing the air through the broken pane, then chewing at the edges of the glass. Aldo went downstairs and out into the garden and he knocked on the neighbours' door.

‘Hello,' he said.

They looked at him. He saw that look in their eyes again, that subtly different look, the one Isabella had told him she'd seen in others who looked at her that way for very different reasons, but the same look all the same – that knowing look, as if they were well-informed, when really they were mistaken, the look he had seen before the war, when he could read people's thoughts, when he could tell they were thinking about Luca and what Aldo had done to him, out there in the woods. Well, fuck them, he thought. Fuck them then, fuck them now, they really haven't changed.

‘Hello, Aldo,' said the neighbours. ‘We thought you were dead.'

You weren't the only ones, he thought. Bet you wish I was, using the house as a stable.

‘Well,' he said, ‘you were wrong.'

‘Yes. Well, it's good to see you.'

They had never liked his grandfather. It was the usual thing, neighbours on the wrong end of each other's misunderstandings, digging in, entrenched in their positions, a simmering lifelong hatred that would linger on in stalemate until one side moved house or died. And that clannish thing too: hate one member of the family, hate them all, as if they were all the same.

‘I suppose you'll want to know where he is? Your grandfather?'

But Aldo already knew the answer, the house had told him at first glance. Stalemate broken. The neighbours had outlasted him, war of attrition won.

‘We're very sorry, Aldo,' they said. ‘It's a terrible shame.'

Yes, he thought, I believe you. I'm sure you think it's
such
a terrible shame.

‘Where did they put him? After he died?

‘San Michele. Next to Luca.'

‘Good,' said Aldo. ‘Well, you know what I mean . . .'

‘Can we offer you a coffee?'

But he knew they didn't really mean it, wouldn't really want him in their house. So, yes, let's have a coffee, just to annoy you, you hypocrites.

The neighbours drank their coffee in a hurry, looking increasingly towards the door as they did so. So, thought Aldo, time to bring up the goats.

‘Your goats . . .' he said.

‘Oh, yes . . .'

‘They'll have to leave.'

‘At such short notice? But they need shelter.'

As if goats had rights!

‘I need shelter too. They'll have to go.'

‘But, Aldo, the house is unoccupied, has been for years. We've acquired certain rights.'

‘That takes twenty years. We all know the law.'

‘But it was unoccupied, it was going to waste.'

‘Well, it's occupied now. I'm moving in.'

And he stood up and thanked them for the coffee and slammed the door as he left.

He walked back into the house and saw the goat was still in the cupboard. He chased it out of the room and it ran off down the garden. Then he went upstairs to sort out the other one. It was standing in the far corner by the window and it shat on the floor when it saw him.

‘Fuck off, Mister Goat! Off you pop now, get out!'

But off he did not pop, Mister Goat. It just stood there and looked at him, chewing on nothing. Then it shat some more.

‘I said get the fuck out of here!' Aldo yelled, and he ran at the thing. It hurtled towards the window, tried to exit through the aperture, pushed itself half through, then forced itself back into the room and stood there looking at him again. So Aldo ran at it again and up it went, onto the bed and down the other side, then through the door and he heard the clatter of its hooves and then the banging as it fell down the stairs. He ran down after it and chased it out into the garden and it ran over to where the other one stood beneath the pair of stunted trees.

‘Keep out of my house!' he shouted. ‘And get off my fucking land!'

But they stood by the trees and watched him, all quizzical again, and the neighbours were all on the doorstep, jabbering.

‘What the fuck are you lot looking at?' he said, and he banged the door as he went back inside. And so Aldo moved in, and after eight years away put a roof over his head. He unpacked his one small bag of possessions and placed beside the bed a worn-out photograph of a girl in a ballet class in Leningrad. That night, Aldo lay on the bed in the upstairs room and stared at the ceiling until the wooden beams disappeared into the gathering dark and the island fell silent but for the chirruping of the insects in the long grass outside. And then, sometime between midnight and dawn, there were footsteps outside, the footfalls of a large bear of a man tracing a dotted line in the dew. Unseen in the darkness the man placed a bunch of fresh
flowers on each of the slight elevations that lay beneath the back window of the house, and when he pushed his boat back off into the night, the goats wandered across to the unmarked graves, nibbled at the fresh green leaves, and chewed the red and white heads off the blooms.

The next morning Aldo set about tidying up the house, removing the rubble, sweeping out the dust and restoring the furniture to its rightful place. He could do nothing about the broken panes but the gentle summer breeze brought welcome disturbance to the air. He went down to the boat at the end of the garden and tried the outboard, but it was rusty and seized and the rotten wood of the boat caved in when he stepped on it. He walked up the main street and bought some bread and fruit at a shop and he went back and ate at the table in the downstairs room. He thought about the elevated price of what he had bought and he counted the money he had left. The resettlement allowance wasn't going to last him very long and soon he would have to find a job. He decided to try again at the boatyard. If there was no work for him there, he would ask around at the market and in the bars and restaurants that proliferated in the narrow streets and alleys all over town. He caught the
vaporetto
to Venice, stopping off at San Michele to find the place where his grandfather lay in the ground, and his thoughts turned to his father, lying in an adjacent grave. And then, inevitably, he thought again of Fausto Pozzi.

‘One day he'll pay for what he did to you, Dad, I promise you that,' he said, and he left the cemetery in tears and got on the next
vaporetto
to Fondamente Nuove.

He went to the trattoria to look for Fausto Pozzi but it was still closed.

‘Earned enough money for one day already, have you, Fausto?' Aldo whispered at the door. ‘No need for the long hours that you made Luca work?'

He continued over the bridge and along the quayside to the boatyard, but the man there had nothing to offer and told him not to come back.

‘Everyone's looking for work now,' he said. ‘There's no need to bother me again.'

Aldo walked the streets for hours, waiting until the trattoria opened, and he sat on the wall beside the bridge and watched as the customers came and went, and he paid particular attention to the whereabouts of Fausto Pozzi, gazing in through the windows at him, and as Fausto locked up for the night and headed off towards San Marco, Aldo followed unseen and unheard. He gradually reduced the distance between them and as he did so he felt the knife in his pocket, pricked his finger with the tip and gripped the blade. But then he turned the next corner and Fausto had gone and the only footsteps were somewhere behind him, so he withdrew his hand from the knife and went back to Fondamente Nuove and waited for the
vaporetto
back to Burano.

He returned to the boatyard the following week anyway, despite what the man had said, and the week after that too, but there really was no work and finally the man chased him away, and every evening Aldo waited near the trattoria and followed Fausto Pozzi unseen. On more than one occasion he was close enough to kill him but he became uncertain at the moment of truth, and so the knife remained in his pocket and Fausto Pozzi remained on this earth.

Aldo trod his steady daily path around town, looking for work at the bars and market stalls, and he finally found a part-time job filling sandwiches at a bar near the railway station, but it was only for a few days and they didn't pay him what they had promised, and so he complained too forcefully and was soon back on the streets. His enthusiasm drained away and he returned each night to the house on Burano, dodging the fare on the
vaporetto
, and he counted his few remaining notes and coins and slept beside the photo of Katerina in the warm summer air in the half-ruined house and woke again to shout at the goats and to take the
vaporetto
back to Venice to recommence his search. Each day the piece of bread he ate was smaller and staler than the one he had eaten the previous day, and each night his sleep became shallower and more troubled. And then his money ran out altogether and he faced a choice between the life
of a scavenger and that of a criminal, and he chose the former as a more gentle slope into the abyss. The first time that he went looking in the bins, the looks of disapproval caused him to flee back to Burano and he remained there for several days until hunger drove him back to Venice with renewed purpose, turning over the rubbish more methodically this time, and the rewards were correspondingly greater and soon he mapped out a regular route, equipped with his sacks and his bags, and he returned to Burano each evening with enough scraps to keep him fed for a day or even two, and occasionally with half-broken ornaments with which he would adorn the window-sills, and one day he found a serviceable picture frame in which Katerina's photo could sit safe behind glass. And on another day he returned with a couple of rickety café chairs with tall curving backs which he placed by the window that looked out across the garden towards the lagoon, and he would often sit there late at night and imagine that the beach at the end of the garden was the beach by the lakeside in Russia in the spring of 1943, and that Katerina sat in the chair beside him and that Viktor was somewhere out of sight upon a wooded hill, but then he would see the chair by his side was empty and the night was silent but for the lapping of the waves and the incessant bleating of the goats.