The Colour of Heaven (22 page)

‘I promise,’ said Paolo.

‘You must be the last voice in place of her.’

Jacopo closed his eyes. His breathing was fitful, awkward, as if he could never settle. A slow steady stream of air was taken in gradually over time, the body trembling as he inhaled. He lay dormant, as if already dead, before the breath gathered again for each shuddering exhalation.

Paolo watched Jacopo drift into sleep. He thought of the travels they had shared and all that they had done.

This was what it was to watch a man die.

‘You have been a father to me,’ he said.

Jacopo did not move. He seemed between worlds.

Paolo watched the effort of breathing: the dry mouth, the sweat on the brow. Dying was such hard work.

Salek returned to the room and Paolo began to read from the Book of Psalms.

He vowed that the Lord was both a refuge and a fortress, and that, even though it failed him, Jacopo’s heart was glad. He asked God to show his loving kindness, the path of life, the fullness of joy, and pleasures for evermore. He asked him to keep Jacopo as the apple of his eye and to hide him under the shadow of his wings; so that he no longer feared the terror by night, nor the arrow that flew by day, nor the pestilence that walked in the darkness, nor the destruction that wasteth at noonday. He begged God, through the Psalms, to let Jacopo arise, with angels taking charge of him, and show him the salvation promised to those who put their trust in him.

As the breathing diminished, Paolo prepared the final prayers. He spoke loudly and steadily, as if he truly believed.

‘I acknowledge unto thee, O Lord my God, and God of my fathers, that both my cure and my death are in thy hands. May it be thy will to send me a perfect healing. Yet if my death be fully determined by thee, I will in love accept it at thy hand. O may my death be an atonement for all my sins, iniquities, and transgressions of which I have been guilty against thee.’

Jacopo raised his hand.

Was it an acknowledgement, a greeting, or a farewell?

Then the arm fell and his head turned to one side. For a moment it looked as if he had swallowed something distasteful.

He opened his eyes and stared into the distance, beyond those present, beyond the mountains, transfixed on a horizon only he could see. His eyes were dark brown, but they glittered with a terrible beauty. Jacopo seemed in awe of death, filled with its power and wonder. He closed his eyes and sank back.

Still the breathing continued.

Paolo watched the stillness. How pale the body lay. This was the heart of life, the inevitability of death. He looked at Salek, and they spoke aloud, ‘
Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one
.’

Then Jacopo gave a long, slow sigh, as if all the cares of the world were fading. It was the last breath of a life.

He died, as he had wanted: like a swan leaving a lake.

This was the fact of death: as simple as birth, as strong as the shock of love, and Paolo was silenced by its power.

Here it was, laid out before him; magnificent, lucid, and distinct.

Salek placed a feather across Jacopo’s lips and watched for any last sign of breath.

They waited for eight minutes.

Paolo closed the eyes and mouth.

He extended the arms and hands alongside the body.

Then he bound the lower jaw.

Salek lit a candle. ‘The prophet Mohammed kept a Jewish wife, Safiya. The philosopher Maimonides was physician to Saladin. We are all people of the Book, children of Abraham. One day we shall see God.’

The two men watched over Jacopo in silence. There was no sense of life remaining, only absence. The body had been vacated. And in such absence Paolo recognised that mortal flesh meant nothing. The body had been a house, a prison, and a tomb; now it could not matter less. Their friend was elsewhere.

Paolo thought then that the secret of heaven and hell resided not in the afterlife, but in the moment of death.

The only religion lay in how a man died.

For the next few days Paolo was haunted by the fact that his life continued when Jacopo’s could not. He packed his friend’s prayer box, menorah, and shawl; the jade for Sofia; his candles, clothes, and cooking pots: the remains of an existence. Salek took the goods and hitched them to their mules as the women of Tun-huang offered flour, butter, milk, and cheese for the journey.

The men could hardly believe they were leaving and Paolo was filled with a melancholy that he was quite unable to hide. He even tried to imagine his own death. How old would he be? Who else would be with him?

‘We all must die,’ said Salek, checking their possessions. ‘It is only that you have not seen it before.’

‘And what do we do now?’

‘We continue the journey; we live in sorrow; we try to fulfil that which we have promised.’

They set off through the streets and the markets of Tun-huang, back through the Jade Gate, and on towards the mountains in the northwest. Paolo wondered how the lives of the people around him could stay the same, continuing as if nothing had happened. Did they not know what death meant? Why had life not stopped?

‘They have cares of their own,’ said Salek. ‘If they grieved every time a man died they would be unable to live their lives. We must go on.’

‘It is hard.’

‘But at least we are alive. You must still learn from life.’

‘And what must I learn?’ Paolo was almost too tired to ask.

‘To leave a person as if you might never see them again; and a place as if you will one day return.’

‘The partings seem so different …’

‘And yet they are the only ways.’

Salek suggested that the quickest route back would be to travel north to Samarkand. They would take the swiftest course, making good use of clement weather and the availability of food, rest, and water.

The temperate climate made all their previous travels seem an unimaginable folly as they journeyed to Bokhara and Merv, and then south of the Caspian Sea and on towards Hamadan, Palmyra, and Tyre. They travelled on, through orange groves and rice fields, past low-lying silk plantations and mulberry groves, riding at last on pale-gold Turkoman horses some fifteen hands high.

The landscape became almost benevolent as they passed the last of the primroses and the first of the columbines, gathering wild mushrooms, mustard, onions, purslane, and watercress, buying buttermilk in the markets, and fishing in lakes and rivers when they could.

At Hajar El-Hubla Salek showed Paolo the quarry containing the largest hewn stone in the world, visited and touched by pregnant women to make them fertile. They walked amidst the cedars of Lebanon, and visited the stone temples of Jupiter and Bacchus at Baalbek. Salek told tales of wonder as they travelled, of spectacular sacrifices, mystical prayers, and secret orgies. Paolo worried if his guide only told such tales to avoid talking about himself and his past, as if the memory of his home was too painful. And, at times, it seemed that everything that mattered – Aisha, their homecoming, the death of Jacopo – and all their fears for the future were best left unsaid.

Paolo thought how little he had known Salek. They walked together and were true companions, but could he ever call himself a friend?

In the Egyptian harbour at Tyre, they found a boat that would take Paolo to Venice. The port was filled with merchants dressed in red and white keffiyehs selling dye from crushed murex shells, glass from Sarepta, cedar from Sidon and Bcharre. The men cried out, offering stone from the sarcophagus of Ahiram, fool’s gold, turquoise, sapphire, and quartz. A Frenchman toyed with five civet cats, making them sweat in the heat, gathering perfume from the glands beneath their tails in order to create a scent to attract all women; while an apothecary distilled a mixture which promised to allay the stench of death for ever.

Paolo struggled to remain hopeful, and was tempted to trade here, giving away all their possessions, returning with nothing, as the monk had told him. But Salek urged him to stiffen his resolve, take the jade to Sofia and the lapis to Simone. ‘Then, and only then, if you decide to return, the people in Tabriz will know where to find me – if I am alive.’

Paolo sighed. ‘Of course you will be alive. I know that I will see you again.’

‘Yes,’ Salek replied, ‘even tomorrow if we are spared.’

‘That is not what I meant,’ said Paolo.

They watched a group of swifts circle overhead. Salek wondered when his companion would ever learn to take life less seriously.

‘Will you return to your village?’ Paolo asked.

‘No. I have only one more journey; and it is the one which I must make alone.’

‘You will live to be a hundred.’

‘I do not want to.’ Salek smiled. ‘When I am called, I will be ready.’

‘I owe my life to you,’ Paolo replied.

‘No, you know that you do not. Only Allah protects a life.’

‘I wish I had your faith.’

‘It will come,’ Salek answered. ‘But you must want it to come.’

The next morning Paolo stood on the side of his boat, watching the figure of his friend recede, and began to wonder if his life could be anything more than an everlasting farewell.

The ship was a lateen-rigged Venetian trading galley, and, on the route home, Paolo tried to remember what his life had been like before he set sail from Ancona. The memory of that first departure was as distant as childhood. As they sailed across the Ionian Sea and up into the Adriatic, he lay in his bunk and thought of all that had happened: the friendship with Jacopo and Salek, the discovery of the blue stone, love, spectacles, death.

The confined space made him think what it might be like to be placed in a grave and to lie like this for all eternity. What would his last thoughts be? Would they be of Aisha? Was sleep simply the daily memento of death, given to remind us what it must be to prepare for the final darkness? This is what Jacopo had believed. Every night he had thought of his beloved, death, and his Creator, praying as if he might not live to see the morning. Was that how Paolo’s life should now be lived?

As the boat neared Venice, he sensed that he was travelling back from his future and into his past. Just as land had given way to water on his departure, now he felt the horizon narrow and the sea become shallow. But he no longer had to guess landfall. He could see the soft green islands of pine and olive, the amber light on the campanili of Torcello, Burano, and Sant’Erasmo. The buildings almost shouted colour: violet, crimson, gold, and green; a panoply of contrast; marble and stone, water and reflection.

Paolo disembarked and tried to imagine the meeting with Jacopo’s wife. On the journey he had wanted to forget his duty to discharge the news but now, back in the Veneto, he could think of nothing else. Perhaps he should have sent a boy ahead to inform other family members so that they might tell Sofia in his place. He could picture her sitting down, outside, in a small garden, under a tree; or she would be on the waterfront waiting for the ship to return; or on her way home from the synagogue, at peace with the world.

Paolo wondered if Sofia might instinctively know, if a feeling had come upon her, an unexpected, sharp moment of absence, as if the heart attack had travelled across the face of the earth, and she was aware of its pain. He imagined her in the market, inspecting tomatoes fresh from the vine, stopping suddenly, surprised by a strange intimation, a world stilled.

He paused, tired by the sweat on his forehead, the weight of possessions on his back, the ache in his legs. How could he avoid a confrontation in which a world would collapse, and hopes would be extinguished?

He tried to prepare himself by anticipating every possible reaction to the news: silence, anguish, disbelief, despair: a small dark Jewish woman collapsing onto a bed with grief; a scream, tears, or a long, low guttural howl climbing up from the stomach and being released out into the air, a never-ending screech of denial.

He knocked on the door and waited.

Would Sofia be alone or in company? He thought he should have checked. Now it was too late.

There was a stirring from the room, and he heard the latch lift. The low afternoon sun pierced the gap between the door and the lintel so that the figure was almost blinded by this influx of light.

The woman raised a hand to shield her eyes. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

Paolo had forgotten that he would have to explain. ‘I have travelled with your husband.’

‘What do you want?’ Her tone was aggressive and Paolo was unprepared to be defensive.

Perhaps he could leave now, at this moment, before the despair. ‘You are Sofia, wife of Jacopo Anatoli?’

‘I am.’

Paolo thought he should have found a rabbi. That was how she should have been told: by a rabbi with the rest of her family around her. ‘Can I come in?’

The woman paused. ‘It is the eve of the Sabbath. You must leave before sunset.’

She opened the door and let Paolo pass.

He tried to imagine this small olive-skinned woman standing by her husband. He pictured the day of their wedding and the two of them eating together afterwards at the table and laughing.

Happiness.

Already the home seemed empty.

It was a simple room with no obvious signs of wealth. This was what Jacopo sailed and traded for: this home, this wife.

What would it have been like had Sofia been there at the death?

‘You have news?’ she asked.

‘I do.’

He felt hope leave the room. Should he ask her to sit down? Jacopo would have known. Paolo recalled his voice, telling him, protecting him. He had told him the last things to say but not the first; what to say but not the means of telling.

‘And what is your news?’ she asked.

Paolo sensed the fear rise inside him, the sickness in his stomach, his mouth dry, as if it had been sealed.

There were grapes on the table.

Sofia walked towards them and began to eat.

Now she stared into the distance, eating the grapes, as if, by doing so, she could forestall his news.

Paolo waited for Sofia to finish.

When she had done so, he looked down at his feet, and then across to meet the eyes of this new widow.

‘Has it come?’ she said at last.

‘Yes,’ said Paolo.

‘He is dead?’

Paolo remembered Aisha telling him about the death of her husband. The rage and the despair.

But Sofia spoke abstractedly, as if she had already joined him. ‘I have always tried to imagine this day. Sometimes I hoped that I might die first; that he would be with me. But, because he was older, I always knew that it would be him. It was his heart?’

‘It was.’

‘I knew that he would be away. That he would leave me and I would not see him again. It would come upon me suddenly.
See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil
. My life has led to this moment.’

Paolo took out Jacopo’s purse and set it down on the table. ‘The profits of his trade.’

‘I do not care for that.’

‘There is jade. It will protect you.’

Sofia said nothing.

‘He wanted you to have this. It was the purpose of his journey. Do not deny him this. Take it.’