One evening we crossed the Grand Canal at the San Simeone Bridge, discovering ourselves near the railway station. The area was full of cheap rooming houses and cafes, none of which attracted us, so we turned to the right, crossing the first bridge we came to. Here, hardly anyone was in costume and since it was a warm night, I threw back my cloak and removed my mask with some relief, holding it in my hand in case I needed to don it again.
The area was unlike any other I had visited in Venice. Some of the houses leaned as high as six storeys, threatening to sink into the mud beneath their own weight, and the whole place had the atmosphere of some sort of enclave. Troops of merrymakers came and went, but did not seem welcome. I soon realised we had entered the notorious Ghetto, the Jewish area of Venice, which had been here since the twelfth century and which provided us with the legend upon which Shakespeare based his oracular, yet almost philo-Semitic, play Shylock; or, The Merchant of Venice, which I had already seen in the excellent silent film version starring John Barrymore.
Only Jews had been allowed to build so high, by special agreement. The alternative would have been to extend the Ghetto area which, of course, nobody wanted. We were intruding and I became anxious to leave. I had no wish to give offence to the Jews. I knew how vengeful they could be. It has been fairly said that Jews have long memories and do not easily forgive a grudge. I already had Brodmann on my tail. I did not need an entire tribe of the Chosen People taking against me! The Ghetto was claustrophic. Narrow streets closed in on us. Brightly lit bakeries, butchers’ shops and little coffee houses were everywhere. From their steamy windows dark eyes regarded us; dark hands stroked glistening black beards. The alien smell from the little restaurants was delicious, however, and reminded me of wonderful food I had eaten in Rome’s Via Catalana a decade earlier. I was tempted to consider risking the wrath of the Sons of Shem and see if their love of money would conquer any antagonism they might feel towards us. We were hungry and had no idea how long it would take to find our way out of the Ghetto. Maddy Butter, with her usual happy insensitivity to the nuances of our environment, was delighted with everything she saw. We entered a square which seemed to have no exit and I realised to my discomfort that the building immediately ahead of us was a synagogue.
‘I’m sure we’re not welcome here,’ I told her. My instinct said we should turn and go back the way we had come. But La Butter found the whole place wonderfully exotic. She stopped an old woman to ask her the name of the synagogue. The woman responded with a superficial friendliness but could not understand our Italian. When she replied, her accent was equally difficult. It had the strong Spanish sound of most Venetian speech. I asked her in Yiddish how we might get back to St Mark’s Square. Either she affected not to understand me or was one of those Jews whose first language was Hebrew. Eventually she shrugged. With a hypocritical smile she continued on her way. Now Maddy saw a dark narrow opening leading out of the square. We headed for this — at the precise moment that a band of elaborately costumed merrymakers spilled from the alley into the gaslight. Urgently I tried to replace my mask and cape, but it was too late.
At once the gorgeously costumed players surrounded us. In raucous Italian they chided us for our ‘nakedness,’ our ‘bad manners’. To be fair they were probably not all Jews. Their banter was good-natured enough. Their blows were delivered with balloons or cloth slapsticks. But even when I replaced my mask they were comically dissatisfied. We had to be ‘educated’, they announced, in ‘appropriate behaviour’. Only then could we become true Venetians and save ourselves from expulsion. There was nothing for it but to go along with their game and put as good a face on it as possible. With a bow and an avanti or two, I gave myself up to the comedy.
We were to be the chief players, we learned, in a piece called Deceiver Deceived. I was assured I had all the best parts. All of them. I had seen this performed earlier in the Piazza San Sebastiano and had been quite unable to follow it. It involved the flourishing of some score of commedia masks, each of which was slightly larger than the previous one, designed to fit upon the other. The chief character was a lover who failed time and time again to cuckold an old man with a young wife. I called on him in the pretence that I was So-and-So the knife-grinder or Such-and-Such the upholsterer, minor characters in the commedia, with their own distinctive masks and personalities. All were well known to the local audience. We were forced into enveloping white smocks, and quarter-masks were fitted over our heads. Then we were turned this way and that until we were staggering with dizziness. It is impossible to conduct such an affair with any dignity. I have seen the people on Sunday Night at the London Palladium with those abominable compères goading people to speak ludicrous lines and perform ridiculous actions in a sketch even that grand master of communist gibberish Harry Pinta might disown! I have always been baffled as to why people should agree to such humiliation when their lives are not even threatened!
The game began:
First I was the fishmonger calling at the door with a basket of fish. As I was about to embrace my mistress, a creature dressed as a cat seized the papier mâché fish, forcing me to chase after it, to great applause. Happily my actors instincts came to my rescue. I almost began to enjoy the charade. Maddy Butter, as my amante, had very little to do but simper and breathe heavily. I, however, began to play to the crowd. I was used to making the best of a bad stage and an unresponsive audience. Mrs Cornelius and I had toured America’s West Coast in just such conditions.
Now I was an old woman selling apples. A third mask was set upon the second. The apple basket turned over and there was much comic chasing of papier mâché fruit. Again I received approving applause.
I found it difficult to see through so many pairs of eyeholes as the next mask was set upon my head. I was a butcher whose sausages were stolen just at the moment when Maddy lifted her rouged cheek to be kissed.
A fourth mask. I began to feel uncomfortable. I was a canary seller, whistling and chirping as best I could within the confines of the mask. Next I was a broadsheet jack. Yet no matter what my disguise, something always went wrong and I was frustrated in my designs.
Every time I donned a new mask, I became less and less able to see. Therefore, to the audience, my actions became funnier and funnier. I stumbled back and forth, bewildered by the shadows and the jumping gas jets, unable to distinguish the other actors or find my lover among them. Jewish hands spun me this way and that. Some directed me to Maddy, others to mincing mummers pretending to be women.
Surrounding us I glimpsed the mocking Hebrew faces, the huge dark eyes and oiled locks, the prominent noses and thick, red lips, who applauded each new caricature I was forced to assume. Was I the focus of their scorn? Had I misinterpreted them entirely? The grotesque papier mâché probosces grew longer until I was supporting a beak some two feet long while the weight of the accumulated masks began to drag my head forward. I found it difficult to hold my neck upright. I stumbled around seeking my ‘lost love’, locating her now only by her cries. Was Maddy panicking?
By now I was finding it almost impossible to breathe. I gasped, begging for a little relief. But my captors merely jeered and spun me round and round again.
I lost track of the masks. I was the dentist, the soldier, the gypsy and the Jew. I began to struggle for air. My heart was beating rapidly and every inch of clothing was soaked in sweat. The more I begged them to show common sense and mercy, the more they goaded me and added another mask. Baker, musician, prince and demigod. The less easily I supported the weight of the masks, the more grandiose became my roles. I was frightened now. Weeping, I was pushed backwards and forwards, my head pulling me downwards, my body racked with aches and pains, my legs weak and my hands nerveless. I cried for Maddy to help me, but she was joining in the fun. They all thought I was a wonderful actor. I was choking. I was deaf. I was blind. I was dying. Soon I would not be able to draw another breath!
Nothing I said would make them stop. They were utterly pitiless. Another mask was
added. And another. I was drowning, I told them. They were killing me. This elicited massive applause from the Jews. I begged them to stop. Their only response was to demand yet another role for me. Was this how all actors ended their careers? Driven to their deaths by public demand?
‘Please,’ I begged them. ‘Please. I can do no more. I am not in good health. I am choking!’
Almost mindless with panic, I wept and begged the Jews for their mercy. They chose to believe my pain a joke, a piece of superior acting, and applauded me further. I was beaten by their sticks. I was abused and humiliated by their fingers. I was tormented by their mockery. I was brutalised by their cruel demands.
I had entered a nightmare I might never escape. This could only grow worse. My Egyptian captivity had declined step by step into a horror my conscious mind hardly dared recall. Was this some dreadful repetition of that experience? I began to think they meant to kidnap me. Miss Butter was, after all, working for Brodmann. Was this perhaps a scheme of Brodmann’s? Was he plotting in concert with his Ghetto brethren? They intended to drive me to suicide. For Brodmann this would be a satisfactory conclusion to a case obsessing him since he had relished my terrible shame at the hands of the Cossack, Grishenko. Did Brodmann live to enjoy my mortification over and over again?
‘Brodmann!’ I shouted. ’I have done nothing to you! For the love of God, Brodmann, let me go!’ I reached out blind, pleading hands.
The mummers around me mocked the sound of my voice. They cawed and cackled and clucked. They gibbered and hissed and shrieked. They pinched and they poked and they tweaked at me. They were trying to open my trousers. Brodmann had revealed something about me. But he was lying. My father had lied. Even my mother, poor soul, thinking she was doing her best for me, even she lied. All have lied. Esmé betrayed me. You, too, lied to me.
Salachti. Der Scochet im Goluth. Salachti. Salachti. Jude, mach mores! Jude, mach mores! Kesteneist schrecklich? Nine. Nein. Meyne Engel? Meyne Freiheit? Lieblos, die Fremdeluft is. Sachlichkeit?
The fires danced and threatened. The shadows jeered. Strange little hands slipped under my clothing to fondle me. I felt an urgent need to vomit. But if I threw up, I would drown. The masks would see to that.
They forced me to perform another scenario. I was a matron. A queen seeking her long-lost daughter. From somewhere I heard Maddy’s voice. I stumbled towards the sound, lost my footing on the cobbles and fell forward, running to catch up with myself, the weight of the masks dragging me down. I expected at any moment to step off the edge into a canal to fill my lungs with that foul water, the accumulated waste of Venetian Jewry.
At that moment I had crossed some threshold between reality and fantasy. I stood on the brink of the Inferno with no Dante to guide me. I shouted for Maddy to help me, to pull me back into the familiar world. But my voice could not be heard. My mouth was full of swelling paper. Nothing would come out. I could barely draw in air. I struggled with the Jews. I beat at them. And from all sides came their laughter, cruel, rough voices, a prodding and pushing. I was buried in masks. I was drowning in masks. I screamed. My voice filled my body. I began to choke. ‘Please! No more!’
Again the masks dragged my head down. I lost my footing in something slippery. Again I fell. Now there was no one to catch me. The great weight of papier mâché dragged me to the cobbles. I was on my knees. I heard water. The Ghetto and its sinister denizens had claimed me. Suddenly I was back in the shtetl, with those hands, those clutching fingers, those eyes. There they had wanted to kill me. It was the same. I would die. And no poet to save me. No Jew from Arcadia.
‘Why are you afraid?’ asked the Jew in the shtetl.
They came out of the synagogue and they surrounded me. They put a piece of metal in my womb. You say that this is all my fantasy. But it was reality, then. We knew no other reality. A fantasy only for those of us who were not its victims.
It happened so suddenly. And then we were engulfed.
* * * *
NINE
I fly no flag, I said. I am my own man. I felt weak. A chill had come to my stomach like a piece of cold metal that can never be warmed, even by blood. Blood alone could quench the fires. We drowned in it, and we were grateful.
The Jew said: ‘You idiots, I am a doctor. Quickly! The poor devil’s asphyxiating. Get those masks off him before they kill him!’
City of sleeping goats, city of crime, city of crows. The little boys sing untruthful songs. The synagogues are burning. You are alive, said the Jew. You are safe. He had a job on a newspaper in Odessa and lost it. But it was peaceful, he said, in Arcadia.
I find it impossible to understand the motives of such people.
I lay in a little white bed. The sheets were damp.
‘What is wrong with him?’ asked Maddy Butter in halting Italian.
I had no interest in this. I was sleeping over the stove while my mother ironed. My father had gone. I was glad of it. He brought only tension. I longed for my familiar food, for the honest warmth of home, and it seemed for a little while that I had recaptured everything I had lost. I was in one of the houses off the square, Maddy told me. I was in shock, she said. I had a fever. I had caught something from the water, perhaps.
I thought I noticed Esmé smiling at me from the dark curtains of the room. Everywhere I looked I saw a friend. Captain Brown brought me a drink. Esmé cooled my forehead. My mother prayed for me.
‘We must take him back,’ said Miss Butter. ‘He must be moved. You have been very kind.’
I did not want to leave. I was home. I wept for Kiev and the days of my greatest security. I wept for Odessa and my greatest happiness. I wept for the future that was stolen from us. They all had guns. They were all greedy. They had become nothing but appetite and they fed on destruction. ‘Let me stay,’ I begged. ‘We cannot allow it to begin again. This is our chance. This is our chance to change the story. Let me stay.’
They took me to an ebony barge swaying on scarlet water. It smelled of flour and blood. They laid me down on the sacks. I could not swallow my grief. Little birds flew out of my mouth; tawny rats gnawed at my genitals. They put a piece of metal in my womb. It is a Star of David. ‘You will be well soon,’ said the doctor. ‘You should rest. Your friend, signorina, is of a very highly strung disposition.’
‘He is a genius,’ she explained. ‘An artist.’
A figure rose above my head. He carried a long spear which he plunged again and again into the flowing marble around the barge. I wanted desperately to see his face, but he would not show it to me. Dante, I sought my Virgil.
They said it was Charon and the river was the Styx, but this could not be. I was freed, I said. I have been made whole in the Land of the Dead and Anubis is my friend. They should not force me to make that journey again. It was not fair, I said. I have paid the price. I have answered the questions. I have done the deed. I am clean. I have eaten only clean food. I have put on only clean garments. I have purified my thoughts. I have purified my loins. I am redeemed. Let me stay. It is my home. Let me stay.
The black marble waters were silent. I lifted my head and looked down. A thousand golden eyes stared back at me, the eyes of beasts, unforgiving, ungiving, unkind. I wept for my lost future, for my despoiled past. Gott herrscht, winkend, leitend, wie Wesen auch, die frei sind, handeln, herrscht für die Gegenwart uttd für die Zukunft! Spricht durch Tat auch, welche die Sterblichen tun, die Gottheit? Weg zur Freiheit? I do not think so.
I looked for mercy. I found none. Only sympathy. The little girls lifted their voices. Their skirts were like fresh fallen snow, they were so pure. Kyrie eleison! What more must I do? I yearned to kiss his long hands. I cannot deny it - he was a Jew. He showed me a line of poetry. It meant nothing. Love grows from within. There is a coil in my womb. It is copper. It conducts electricity. It is cold. They put it there. It forbids love. Ask me any scientific question. I am afraid of betrayal. There was never enough love. We walked into the twilight. They had pissed on Odessa. You could smell
it all the way to Arcadia. From Moldavanka came the stench of old smoke. ‘You’re a hard one to read,’ I said. I could scarcely stop myself from touching him. I wanted his gentleness. I looked for my childhood. Everything was rubble. I decided I must go to the station.
I cry out. My voice is amplified by the bridges and aqueducts. It echoes across the rooftops and comes down the alleys. I must reach the station.
We will get you there soon, they said. Be quiet now. You will wake the city. But my buttocks were alive with ancient pain. Grishenko’s whip rose and fell. Brodmann watched in gloating triumph.
I must get to the station. I must get away.
Softly they reassured me but I could not trust those Jews. How could I?
The barge moved through darkness. Too late. We crossed a border. I heard distant laughter. The sky was full of flames and sparks.
They are burning us, I said. They are burning us to death. They have set fire to the shtetl.
Just a display, they said. A celebration.
I heard the shrieks and the bangs. I smelled the smoke. Not safe to stay, I said. I cried for my mother and for Esmé. I loved her so much. I wanted her with me. Why did she lie to me? They were all I ever wanted. But how I had longed to fly!