“Where are we going?” Amy asked eventually.
“To paradise,” Piero replied, turning up the little diesel engine until it coughed like an asthmatic donkey. “Away from this festering sore of iniquity and these hard-assed city bastards.”
Laura waved at him. “Poppycock. You worked in the city when you were younger, Piero.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but only in the morgue. Therefore, I dealt with dead people who were, to a man and a woman, very decent and unobjectionable. The living, on the other hand— Hey! Pisquano!”
A water taxi roared away from the neighbouring jetty, sending up a swell which tipped the Sophia to near forty-five degrees. They clutched for handholds. Xerxes barked angrily. Amy’s drink spilled down the front of her elegant dress.
“Shit!” she hissed with a sudden vehemence.
Laura reached into her bag, crossed the boat, and motioned for Daniel to return to the other side. Then she set about dabbing at the fabric with a damp tissue, clucking all the while. It did not work. The dress now possessed a long, broad stain, the colour of bright blood, running from Amy’s navel to her knees.
Daniel saw the sullen fury in her face and watched the way she let Laura, who had so quickly assumed the role of servant, try to help. La Pietà moved slowly past behind him. Sant’ Erasmo lay on the horizon, a long, low finger of green.
He finished his drink and, for no reason at all, found he could not shake from his head the image of Giulia Morelli and her incessant questions. Daniel took the pack out of Laura’s bag and, for the first time in his life, began to smoke a cigarette.
32
In the eaves of the ark
The bells of San Girolamo marked twelve as we slipped back into the ghetto. The Jews must retire early. There was scarcely a light in any window and not a sound in the building as we climbed the stairs. Jacopo was out on his rounds, ever the busy physician. The night remained passably hot. Rebecca threw her cloak onto the chair by the fireplace, then took my own, gripped my hands tightly, and looked into my eyes.
“Lorenzo,” she said. “Where do you think this God is that has nothing better to do with His time but peer down upon us like some base spy? In every church? In every bedroom? Watching us now? Is this all He is? Some servant of the state with wings and all-seeing eyes?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what? Some divine thorn to prick our consciences and make us ever aware of our own shortcomings?”
“You mock me. I think I should go.”
She continued to cling to me. “If you like, Lorenzo. But I had something to show you. One of the oldest gods of all, and I hoped that if you saw Him for what He truly was, perhaps we’d both be the better for it.”
I said nothing. Rebecca wore the black dress of the concert musician, with a circular neckline and a slender silver chain around her throat. Her face was more serious than I had ever known. She had the benefit of just six years over me, but at that moment I felt like a child in the company of an elder.
“Come,” she said, and took my hand. “Be brave. Don’t look down. You won’t fall to hell, but you will go six floors down to the ground and you won’t much notice the difference.”
I followed her to the large sash window at the side of the room. This gave onto the corner of the square, the jumble of buildings surmounted by the wooden ark of the synagogue which she had pointed out to me on an earlier occasion.
“Be as quiet as you can so none shall hear us. And mind your footing. Follow me all the way.”
With that, she threw open the window, lifted a leg, and was out of the house onto a tiny, flat tiled roof no bigger than a balcony. I followed and stood there, with nothing to hold but her arm, and we swayed, just for a moment, in front of the great black maw of space an arm’s length in front of us.
“Be calm,” she whispered in my ear, and then reached round for a handhold, found it, and beckoned me to follow.
This cannot have been the first time Rebecca had made this journey. On some occasion during the day, she must have sat in the square, stared at this shambling collection of gutters and roofs, and even, at one point, a small external ladder — used, I assume, for maintenance— marking down each point, fixing the route she would take when she decided to tackle this queer little peak, like a mountain goat consumed by curiosity. Tentatively, not once looking down, I came on behind, trying not to clutch for her hand too often, slipping once or twice, then seeing her anxious face, alabaster in the light of the moon, peering at me from above.
After two or three minutes which seemed, in all truth, as long as an entire evening, I dragged myself up and found her sitting on a tiny wooden balcony close to the peak of the wooden ark. There was a small leaded window. Through it came the yellow, waxy light of distant candles.
Rebecca put a finger to my mouth and said, “Shush. There are men inside. But they won’t be there long.”
We waited until we heard the sound of a door closing, then she slipped open the window and we prised ourselves through, half falling into a corridor that seemed to squeeze itself beneath the eaves of the building. There was a narrow walkway on the wall side. Opposite was a line of plain wooden benches, and, in front of them, large shutters running almost the length of the floor, which opened onto the room beyond, much like those of La Pietà behind which the musicians hide. The “nave” of the synagogue, though, was one floor below us, as I discovered when I opened the nearest shutter and stuck my head through into the central hall. It was like being thrust into the kind of fantasy one finds in dreams where dimensions are quite out of joint. I felt at one moment like a child peering into some rich, ornate doll’s house, and the next a pygmy who had crawled upon the roof of some hidden cathedral, bare wood on the outside, full of golden riches beneath the skin.
“This is where you worship?” I asked Rebecca, who sat on the bench, arms folded, awaiting my reaction.
“Where they worship,” she replied. “Women are not allowed. We must wait up here, watching through the shutters, unseen, not worthy of their thoughts. The Hebrew God is a busy one, Lorenzo, at least for the Ashkenazim. Don’t ask me if it’s the same for everyone else. He has only time to talk to men, and prefers a bearded rabbi above all others.”
I looked at the place. It was beautiful, but so different from anything I had seen elsewhere in Venice. Then it struck me. “There are no paintings, Rebecca. Where are all the glorious martyrdoms? Titian and Veronese would starve if they were born into a Jewish state. What would they do?”
“False idols, Lorenzo. We must allow no graven images in our temples. There are a few paintings if you look, though. And I gather that’s unusual.”
I craned my neck and saw she was right. Around the walls was a collection of small landscapes.
“There,” she said, pointing to one. “Moses leading his tribe through the Red Sea.”
I screwed up my eyes to follow her finger. “But there’s no one in it.”
“I told you. It isn’t allowed. Also, we mustn’t depict God, either. Or utter His proper name — which is Yahweh, in case you’re interested. There. I said it.”
I felt quite baffled. The place was so unlike any Christian church I had ever entered. Yet it did feel holy, and I couldn’t help wondering if one might find the same air of sanctity in a mosque or the temples where the Hindu worship. Could it be that holiness comes not from God but us? Do we make Him after the image we would have of ourselves?
My mind was overwhelmed by both the sacredness and the ordinariness of these surroundings. Here, Rebecca pointed out, was the ark where the laws were kept. Here, the eternal light and the raised platform from which lessons were read, much as they are from a Christian pulpit. This was the seat of the daily round of ritual which the Hebrews used to explain their place in the world, why men lived and died, fought and loved, just like anyone else who walked the earth.