Popi levered himself from the swiveling leather chair and reached for his hat.
It was time, he thought, to visit the Croat.
He’d have had his drink by now; he’d be ready to work again. If not, well, sometimes you needed to be cruel to be kind.
Popi walked, scowling, from the Arsenale toward the Ghetto. It was a long, difficult route: as late as 1840, few of the canals had been provided with pavements and the fashion for filling them in had not yet begun. Districts were still preserved as the islands they had always been, clustered around their church, their campo, and their well, speaking a dialect that marked them out from other islanders in the city.
Popi did not ponder the irony that a man who made his living from canals should detest them, but it was so. They were sluices of gossip, in his opinion-gondoliers to recall the address you visited, boatmen to note your passing. Beggars and idlers hung about the bridges, and in the dankest, dirtiest dark bends of a canal the inevitable old crone was forever craning her neck from some upstairs room for a better view. You took a gondola only if you wanted to be noticed-visiting a rich American art collector, for instance. Otherwise you used the pavement and walked the long way around.
In the Ghetto he found firmer footing, where the Jews had been crowded up behind their gates. The air was filled with floating goose down, like a gentle snow, for the people here used goose fat where other Venetians used pork, and it reeked of more than the sewage that offended visitors to Venice elsewhere in the city. It stank of old fish and rags, and the sourness of confined spaces. Napoleon had had the gates demolished, but everyone knew that they still existed in the Venetian mind. A few rich Jews had moved away, and a few-a very few-impoverished gentiles had taken rooms in the Ghetto, but otherwise little had changed in forty years.
Popi stumped along, looking neither left nor right. Something in his manner made the women working in their doorways draw in their feet as he approached; the men shrank to the wall as he passed. It was not that Popi looked officiaclass="underline" when the Austrians sent patrols through the streets the people just watched them go, sullen and unmoving. It was, perhaps, that he came from the other Venice, a Venice that festered beneath the golden afternoon light and the fine tracery of a Byzantine facade, a Venice unimaginative visitors would never penetrate, no matter how much poverty or wretchedness they passed by, trailing their fingertips in the water until their solicitous gondolier hinted that it would be better, perhaps, to keep their hands folded on their laps. How could they, when even the more engaged, more lively minded visitors to the city allowed themselves to be seduced so readily by the prettiness of its whores and the cheapness of its appartamenti?
The people of the Ghetto shrank from Popi as a man of thalers and kreuzers, and of little accounts kept rigorously in black books that had the power to ruin lives.
Popi stopped to stick a cigar in his mouth and lit it with a match, then carried on up the narrow calle like a steam tug. After several turns that he executed without stopping, he ducked into a low doorway, crossed a small dark hallway, and found the stairs. He began to climb, slowly, to the top.
The stairs were dark. At each landing, narrow passages radiated into a deeper blackness relieved occasionally by a tiny opening, without glass, which gave onto a narrow well of light. On the lower floors the light was blocked by the accumulated rubbish of many centuries-moldering feathers, desiccated rats, pigeon droppings. Reaching the fifth floor, Popi ignored the stairs and pressed on down a corridor barely wide enough to let him pass. Stooping, he fumbled his way until his outstretched hands encountered another set of stairs, running up and back the way he had come. He took the cigar from his mouth and stood leaning against the wall, waiting for breath. Then he began to climb again.
Pressed into their narrow space, the Jews had built their houses higher than anyone else in the world.
Now, when he leaned against the wall for breath, Popi could feel it flex against his weight; another piece of plaster crumbled and fell to the floor.
At last, holding the stub of cigar at eye level, he perceived a door. He hit it with the heel of his hand, and it swung open, drenching him in sunlight.
Popi blinked, tears starting to his eyes. The cold reek of cabbage and drains that had followed him up through the warren of stairs and passages was swept aside by an overpowering sweet smell of alcohol and decay, wafted out on a raft of summer heat.
He coughed and stepped through the narrow doorway.
The first thing Popi noticed were the flies. They crowded the skylights and crawled across the sloping ceiling, buzzing and falling, swirling in the dust on their wings. With an exclamation of disgust he lunged at the nearest skylight.
The room was in disarray: tangled bedding, empty bottles, lumps of bread were strewn across the floor. The easel that normally stood beneath the window was overturned. Only the box of paints and the jar of brushes were in place. In the middle of the room, naked on a high stool, sat the Croat himself: waxy, immobile, his eyes staring on vacancy. His thin shoulders were flung back. His back was straight.
Popi’s first thought was that he must be dead.
He stepped closer. The Croat continued to stare. Only when Popi was close enough to smell the man’s skin did he realize that his lips were moving, minutely, horribly, like hairless caterpillars.
Popi took a step back: the Croat, alive, repelled him more than the notion of the Croat dead.
Popi was not unimaginative. He could tell, for instance, that the Croat was somewhere where Popi and the drink and the stench and poverty of his life could not reach him. He sat like a prince upon his throne, issuing soundless orders, perhaps, to the invisible minions who flitted before his glassy stare.
But Popi was unsympathetic.
He snapped his fingers in front of the unseeing eyes.
Nothing happened.
“I’ll bring you around,” he muttered. He took a drag on his cigar, lowered the glowing tip until it reached the level of the Croat’s naked belly, and stubbed it out.
Way below, in the street, some people thought they heard a high-pitched scream, but the gulls were wheeling overhead, too, and they couldn’t be sure.
13
Yashim was reading the latest novel from Paris, a rather improbable account of the life of Ali Pasha of Janina lent to him by his old friend the valide, the new sultan’s grandmother. The subject matter had taken him by surprise. Yashim was used to discovering Parisian life. Reading Ali Pasha, he felt, was rather like peering through a keyhole, only to see an eye looking at you from the other side.
“I find this Monsieur Dumas sympathique,” the valide had told him. “His father was a French marquis. His mother came from Santo Domingo.”
Yashim nodded. The valide herself was born on another Caribbean island, Martinique. The extraordinary story of her arrival in the harem of the Ottoman sultan, and of her inexorable rise to the position of valide, or queen mother, would have challenged the imagination of Monsieur Dumas himself. ^*
“The novel is a bagatelle, Yashim,” the valide added. “I’m afraid it kept me up all night.”
Yashim found the novel riddled with falsifications but also surprisingly energetic. It was certainly unlike anything he had read before. He wanted to discuss it with the valide, but a visit was out of the question. Even though she did not live in the palace of the sultan, his presence was sure to be noted. The sultan expected him to be in Venice, on the track of the Bellini.
Resid was right to hint that the sultan’s infatuation with a painting he had never seen would pass as he grew into the responsibilities of office. Yet the deception bothered him. Not merely the disloyalty, if it was such. What mattered more was the complicity he shared with Resid Pasha and the vagueness of Resid’s support.