Approaching Paolo’s outdoor café, Sue said, “If any of y’all are interested in stopping for a coffee, Jenna and I can recommend this café here on the corner.”
One suggestion was all it took. Coffee wasn’t something this group had to be convinced to stop for.
Soon we had three tables pulled together and were gathered in a huddle, ready for more food and more conversation, two of the great attributes of the Venetian lifestyle.
The men still were talking about St. Benedict. Fikret told us how this Italian monk lived in a cave outside of Rome. He eventually directed twelve monasteries and wrote a book outlining instructions for the men who lived at those monasteries. What amazed me was that all this happened more than fifteen hundred years ago. Yet the same principles of prayer, community, work, and rest were the four pillars holding up this week for all of us. More than ever I felt honored to be part of this time with Sam and his band of brothers.
The waiter approached our assembly and addressed us in English. He was quite a bit younger than Paolo, who appeared to be missing this evening. I supposed Paolo needed to go home sometime. Perhaps this young man was Paolo’s son.
All of us ordered coffee except Sue. She hesitated and then finally agreed to coffee as well.
Our coffees came, but I noticed that Sue couldn’t stop fidgeting. The moment I saw her nibble on what was left of her thumbnail, I leaned over. “Go ahead. Order some gelato. You know you want to.”
Sue gave me a look of mock surprise. “How did you know that’s what I was thinking?”
I rolled my eyes.
She cleared her throat and jumped into a brief pause in the conversation. “I have another question for y’all. I’m working on an independent research project and …”
We ordered gelato all around. In an effort to be helpful, of course.
Each of us selected a different flavor and agreed to report our evaluations to Sue. It was hilarious listening to these studious men try to seriously, or maybe not so seriously, appraise the gelato.
“I found the pistachio to be crunchy like a nut,” Peter said. “Write that down.”
“The limoncello is like a lemon,” said Eduardo. “Only with sugar.”
Sue put down her pen after Sergei from Ukraine described his amaretto as “cold.”
All the men laughed good-naturedly and serious Sergei finally gave way to a half grin that I was sure he had been hiding ever since he had caught me blowing kisses that morning.
I decided then that some secret delights will never be understood by the male species. Such joys are best shared only between girlfriends and should never be revealed to the unappreciative.
I leaned over and whispered to Sue, “I think it’s a Sisterchick thing.”
She nodded her agreement and dropped her notebook back into her bag.
Fourteen
The next morning Sue made sure little Pesca Netareena had enough crumbs and water before joining me in our daybreak jaunt to the panetteria. I was eager to see what delicious treats, fresh from the oven, Lucia had this new day.
Sue was eager to see if the gondolier would be there again. She was disappointed. I was not.
The bakery special of the day came in square, flat loaves. Lucia told us the name three times. “Schiacciata alla Amaretto.”
When none of the words rang any bells for me, she cut a slice for us to try. The rich, dense, egg-batter bread sandwiched a thin layer of almond paste, and sliced almonds topped it all.
“Delicious!” I nodded at Lucia to let her know we would take all four of the loaves she had on the counter. She seemed pleased and talked earnestly to us in Italian. I hate to admit it, but at that point, I missed the gondolier. We needed an interpreter. My guess was that she was telling us why this was a special recipe. It seemed she had gone to extra effort to prepare the bread. I expressed, in English, my appreciation.
“We should buy a couple of bread loaves for lunch,” Sue suggested. “To go with the minestrone soup.”
Pulling out our money, I pointed to several loaves. We purchased more bread than we needed, but it all looked and smelled so good. Plus I felt as if each loaf had been baked with sweet care. How could we possibly walk away from Lucia’s offering?
Lucia grinned broadly and asked me a question that included the word domani.
“Si,” I answered. “Domani. Ciao!”
“Did you actually understand her?” Sue asked as we waved good-bye.
“I think she asked if we’ll be back tomorrow, and I said yes.”
Sue and I took off, looking like robbers who just had held up a bread store and didn’t have enough hands to carry the loot.
When we entered our palace apartment, all was strangely quiet.
“I have a feeling we missed Malachi’s reading,” Sue whispered.
I made a pouting face. My disappointment at not hearing Malachi read from the Bible again was greater than I expressed outwardly. I listened for any sound of the men and wondered if they were in the sitting room at the front of the apartment having a time of quiet prayer.
Sue and I tiptoed through the back hallway to the kitchen. Netareena chirped from her nest, providing the only sound in the apartment.
I put down the shopping bags and looked through the open door into the dining room. No one appeared. Walking through the dining room, I checked the large sitting room.
“No one is here,” I told Sue when I returned to the kitchen. “Or else they’re still sleeping.”
“I doubt that. It’s late.”
“This place is awfully quiet when no one is around.”
Just then we heard the sound of slow, muffled footsteps on the marble floor. The sound came from down the hallway that led to the princess suite. Sue and I exchanged wary glances.
“This is like that Nancy Drew book where Nancy and Bess were in the mansion and …” I didn’t finish my whispered thought because the footsteps were louder now and definitely coming toward the kitchen.
Sue and I stared at the door, waiting for it to open.
The footsteps stopped, and Sue reached for one of the kitchen knives on the counter.
I mouthed the word “Sue!” and gave her a scowl.
She put her finger to her lips, her eyes wide, fixed on the closed door.
I could feel my heart rising to my throat where it thumped soundly.
The kitchen door opened slowly. Sue put her arm across the front of me, as if she were about to protect me from whatever would pounce on us. In her other hand, she raised the knife.
“Sue!” I whispered.
The door opened all the way, and Sergei timidly peered into the kitchen.
Sue dropped her arm and the knife. She flipped her hair behind her ear as if nothing unusual were going on. “Morning!” she said a little too brightly.
“Good morning.” Sergei looked at me and then at Sue. I was sure our wild-eyed first expressions must have told him something was wacky. Again. Of course, if he noticed the raised knife in Sue’s hand as he entered, then he definitely figured out we were nuts.
“It’s so quiet,” I said, more as a weak explanation of our strange behavior than as a conversation-starter.
“The others have gone,” Sergei said.
“Gone where?”
“To morning prayers at San Giorgio Maggiore. Were you still with us last night when the group decided to go this morning?”
“No, we went straight to bed,” I replied. “We must have missed hearing about the plans.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t know.” Sue pulled herself into a more normal posture and expression. “We could have prepared something for them to eat before they left. Was it a problem that breakfast wasn’t ready for them?”
“No, they took breakfast with them.”
“They did?”
“The fruit.” Sergei pointed to the empty bowl that had been spilling over with nectarines the night before. “They hoped it would be all right.”
“Oh, it’s more than all right.??
? A relaxed grin returned to my face.
“Good. I stayed behind to make a call, and I left my phone in here to charge.” He reached for the mobile phone that was plugged into an outlet above the sideboard.
“We have breakfast bread now,” I said as Sergei turned to leave. “It will be here in the kitchen if you want some.”
“Thank you. I will come back.”
“And I’ll make some coffee,” Sue called out.
Sergei left, and Sue turned and playfully fwapped me across the midriff.
“Hey! Why are you hitting me?”
“Because you had me going with all your Nancy Drew, ‘Mystery of the Vacant Venetian Palace’ stuff.”
“Me!? You were the one with the butcher knife!”
“It’s not a butcher knife. Look at it. That’s just a dull bread knife.”
“What were you planning to do? Butter him up?”
Sue ignored my pun and sputtered, “Well, I was all creeped out. I thought we were going to have to run for our lives!”
I laughed. “And just where would we have gone?”
Sue eased up and shrugged. “I don’t know. The bakery. Or maybe the fruit stand. Those men would have protected us.”
“Right! Once they started singing at us, our assailant would have fled for sure.”
We had a good laugh. I decided I liked the kitchen much more when laughter echoed off the high ceilings. The silence was a little creepy in such a large place.
As if invited to now make noise, Netareena chirped.
“That’s a good sign.” Sue went over to the nest. “I think she’s laughing, too.”
“How’s she look?” I asked.
“She’s not moving much, but at least she’s chirping.”
Sue made coffee, and the place felt even more awake and homey instead of somber and mysterious. I sliced the almond bread into generous wedges since we had so much.
We took our breakfast goodies into the empty dining room. The two of us sat across from each other at the large table, ready to eat, but it seemed as if something was missing.
“I feel like we should read from the Bible for our own morning worship,” I said. “It won’t sound anything like Malachi but …”
“It’s a good idea,” Sue said. “Did you see the Bible over there on the chair?”
I picked it up and looked inside. It was Malachi’s Bible. The cover was worn. Some of the pages were torn or stained. I opened to the Psalms and slowly turned the pages. Every page of the book had handwritten notes in the narrow margins. I felt as if I were looking into someone’s diary.
“I feel like I’m being intrusive,” I told Sue, holding the Bible so she could see what I meant. A thin slip of paper fell out and floated to the table.
“A Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to a person whose life isn’t,” Sue commented. “My mother used to say that. Her Bible looked like that, too.”
I picked up the note that had fallen out. It appeared to be a handwritten schedule with the dates of the retreat across the top. Under each date was a list of verses. “If this is Malachi’s note, then today he was going to read John 21. He wrote, ‘Breakfast by the Sea’ and ‘Jesus Restores Peter.’”
“Go ahead,” Sue said. “Read the chapter. You don’t have to read any of his personal notes in the margins. Just read the verses.”
I turned to John 21, the final chapter of that gospel and read about impulsive Peter and how he jumped out of his fishing boat to swim to shore because Jesus was there, waiting for him beside a small fire.
When I got to verse 12, I read, “Jesus said to them, ‘Come and eat breakfast.’”
I looked up, and Sue was smiling, too, at Malachi’s choice of verses.
“They were having fish and bread for breakfast,” Sue noted. “I’m glad we skipped the fish and just went with the bread.”
I carefully returned Malachi’s Bible to the chair where I had found it and tucked the note back inside. Then I gave thanks in a smile-laced prayer. Sue and I broke almond bread together and talked about what we should do that day.
“What about going to Murano?” She glanced up at the intricate chandelier over our heads. “I’d love to see how they make something like this.”
I had studied the chandelier a number of times since first entering the dining room. Each time I saw a different color or pattern in the vibrant, blown-glass masterpiece.
“We could go this morning,” Sue said. “We could start the minestrone soup, then we could leave for a couple of hours and come back to heat it up when it’s time to eat.”
“Okay. What do you need me to do?”
Before Sue could answer my question, Sergei entered the dining room and nodded a greeting to both of us.
“Are y’all ready for some coffee now? I’ll get it.” Sue hopped up.
Sergei took a seat and glanced at me timidly. “I think my wife would like it here.”
“I’m sure she would like it here very much.”
Returning from the kitchen Sue added, “I think any woman would love Venice.”
“Venice, yes,” Sergei said. “But I have seen how happy the two of you have been these few days, and I was thinking how much my wife would like to laugh with you.”
“This trip has been like medicine for both of us, hasn’t it, Jenna?”
I nodded, glad to hear Sue felt that way.
Sergei’s expression remained serious. “My wife works very hard for long hours. I think she needs more friends. More friends that are not heavy to her heart. Do you know what I am saying?”
I nodded, feeling a tug at my heart for Sergei’s wife. I knew all too well the feelings of isolation and the need for a female friend who understood. My circumstances over the past few decades may have been different from Sergei’s wife, but the feelings of loneliness were, I’m sure, the same.
“Where do you and your wife live?” Sue asked.
“Kiev. In Ukraine.”
“What mission organization are you with?” I asked.
Sergei said the name in Russian, and I stopped breathing for a moment. My reaction must have been obvious because Sergei said, “Have you heard of us? We are not very large. I do not think we are known in the States.”
Finding my voice I said, “No. I mean, yes. I know your mission. I …”
“Jenna, are you all right?” Sue asked. “You’re turning pale.”
I drew in a steady breath and looked at Sergei with my heart pounding. “I know your mission very well.” My voice was quavering. “I worked at the German office a long time ago.”
“When?” Sergei leaned forward.
“It was a long time ago. Thirty years. I went … I took. It was back when the borders were still closed and—”
“You were a courier?” Sergei finished my sentence for me. His voice was low, as if KGB might be in the other room listening.
I nodded.
His eyes widened.
“Y’all just lost me there,” Sue said. “What’s a courier?”
Both of us hesitated. My training at the mission as a twenty-one-year-old was explicit about protecting the believers in the underground churches. The fewer people we told the fewer chances of putting the persecuted Christians at risk. In the past thirty years I had told only a handful of people about how I had agreed to go with another woman into countries that, at the time, were ruled by Soviet Russia. We made the journey with nothing more than God’s protective hand on us and a memorized address of a believer who was willing to receive our delivery.
“What do you mean by courier?” Sue repeated.
“A courier is a smuggler,” I said.
Sue looked at Sergei and then back at me. “What did y’all smuggle?” She didn’t look as if she really wanted to know. But I told her.
“Bibles.”
“You, Jenna? You smuggled Bibles?”
I nodded.
“What year was it?” Sergei asked.
“I’m trying to remember. It’s been so long.”
“Did you come by train?”
“No, I drove a camper with another woman my age. A young German woman.”
Sergei leaned across the table, looking stunned and then strangely delighted. “You came with Deborah.”
“Yes! Did you hear about us?”
“Of course. You were the two young women who did what many men could not do.”
Feeling as if I could at long last spill the story from my closed-up, alabaster box, I turned to Sue and explained, “Some of the men who worked for the mission were caught at the border when they tried to take in a few Bibles. The mission had more than five thousand Bibles ready to be delivered, but no couriers who could make it through with so many Bibles.”
Sergei added, “Only a few willing couriers worked on the German side. They had their passports stamped too many times with the same countries of entry. The guards always were suspicious.”
Sue’s mouth was frozen in a dropped open position. She barely was blinking.
“So,” I continued, “the mission office in Germany decided to send women instead. Deborah and I had current passports, and neither of us had applied for visas to the East before. We could travel less noticeably on student visas. So we decided on a Tuesday afternoon that we would go. By Friday of that week we were in Vienna applying for our visas. We planned to drive all the way to Kiev with the Bibles.”
“But you only reached Czechoslovakia,” Sergei said.
“That’s right.” I was amazed that Sergei knew so many of the details. I guessed that our exploit was an urban legend within the mission. I never knew because I returned to the States a few weeks after the trip and didn’t do a good job of keeping in contact with Deborah or any of the other people at the mission after I married.
“We made it through the first Eastern European border into Czechoslovakia without any problems. The guards weren’t used to seeing young women driving a large vehicle into their country, so they acted kind of flirty with us. We flirted back, and they let us go right in.” With a quirky awkwardness I added, “Shows you what Girl Power can do.”
Neither Sue nor Sergei responded to my poor joke. I immediately felt foolish. “It wasn’t Girl Power,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry I said that. It was God Power all the way.”