Alibi

CHAPTER ONE

After the war, my mother took a house in Venice. She’d gone first to Paris, hoping to pick up the threads of her old life, but Paris had become grim, grumbling about shortages, even her friends worn and evasive. The city was still at war, this time with itself, and everything she’d come back for-the big flat on the Rue du Bac, the cafes, the market on the Raspail, memories all burnished after five years to a rich glow-now seemed pinched and sour, dingy under a permanent cover of gray cloud.

After two weeks she fled south. Venice at least would look the same, and it reminded her of my father, the early years when they idled away afternoons on the Lido and danced at night. In the photographs they were always tanned, sitting on beach chairs in front of striped changing huts, clowning with friends, everyone in caftans or bulky one-piece woolen bathing suits. Cole Porter had been there, writing patter songs, and since my mother knew Linda, there were a lot of evenings drinking around the piano, that summer when they’d just married. When her train from Paris finally crossed over the lagoon, the sun was so bright on the water that for a few dazzling minutes it actually seemed to be that first summer. Bertie, another figure in the Lido pictures, met her at the station in a motorboat, and as they swung down the Grand Canal, the sun so bright, the palazzos as glorious as ever, the whole improbable city just the same after all these years, she thought she might be happy again.

A week later, with Bertie negotiating in Italian, she leased three floors of a house on the far side of Dorsoduro that once belonged to the Ventimiglia family and was still called Ca’ Venti. The current owner, whom she would later refer to, with no evidence, as the marchesa, took clothes, some silver-framed family photographs, and my mother’s check and moved to the former servants’ quarters on the top floor. The rest of the house was sparsely furnished, as if the marchesa had been selling it off piece by piece, but the piano nobile, all damask and chandeliers, had survived intact, and Bertie made a lend-lease of some modern furniture from his palazzo on the Grand Canal to fill a sitting room at the back. The great feature was the light, pouring in from windows that looked out past the Zattere to the Giudecca. There were maids, who came with the house without seeming to live there, a boat moored on the canal, and a dining room with a painted ceiling that Bertie said was scuola di Tiepolo but not Tiepolo himself. The expatriate community had begun to come back, opening shuttered houses and planning parties. Coffee and sugar were hard to get, but wine was cheap and the daily catch still glistened and flopped on the market tables of the pescaria. La Fenice was open. Mimi Mortimer had arrived from New York and was promising to give a ball. Above all, the city was still beautiful, every turn of a corner a painting, the water a soft pastel in the early evening, before the lamps came on. Then the music started at Florian’s and the boats rocked gently at the edge of the piazzetta, and it all seemed timeless, lovely, as if the war had never happened.

I learned all this many weeks later in a telephone call she had somehow managed to put through by “going to the top.” At this time the trunk lines into Germany were reserved for the military, so I imagined that a general, some friend of a friend, had been charmed or browbeaten into lifting a few restrictions. The call, in any case, caused a lot of raised eyebrows in the old I. G. Farben building outside Frankfurt where I pushed files into one tray or another for US-FET while I waited for my separation papers. I had been in Germany since the beginning of the year, first with G-2, then attached to one of the de-Nazification teams separating the wicked from the merely acquiescent. Frankfurt was still a mess, the streets barely passable, filled with DPs and hollow-eyed children with edema bruises. The phone call, with its scratches and delays, seemed to come from another world, so far from the rubble and desperation just outside my window that its news seemed irrelevant. The marchesa was quiet; you hardly knew she was there (“darling, not even a flush ”). My room had a wonderful view. Her pictures hadn’t arrived from New York yet, but Bertie, a treasure and fluent, was looking into it. It was a call that began in what my father used to call her medias res-a plunge into the middle of whatever she was thinking, followed by exasperation when you didn’t know what she was talking about. Finally I understood that she had moved to Venice intending to stay, which meant that my home would be there too. The point of the call, in fact, was to say she was expecting me for Christmas.

“I’m still in the army.”

“Well, they give passes, don’t they? I mean, it’s not as if the war’s still on. And I’m sure you could use the break. I’ve seen the newsreels-it looks just awful there.”

“Yes.” Camps full of corpses, wheeled out in farm carts to mass graves. Feral kids eating out of PX garbage cans. Women passing bricks hand over hand, digging out. Not what anyone had expected, pushing over the Rhine. GIs rich with a pack of Luckies. What happens after.

“Well, then,” she said. “Won’t it be wonderful? To have Christmas together? It’s been years.”

“In a Fascist country,” I said, half teasing.

“It’s not the same thing at all. They weren’t Nazis. Anyway, all that’s over. It’s lovely here, just like before. I can’t wait for you to see the house. Maybe it’ll snow. They say it’s enchanting in the snow.”

Characteristically, she hung up without giving me her address, so it was to Bertie that I later wrote to say that I’d be spending Christmas in the hospital. After surviving actual combat and the tough early days of the occupation, what got me, embarrassingly, was a rusty nail, a careless step in the debris of a Frankfurt street that caused a puncture wound and required tetanus treatment and a holiday spent with amputees and boys with nervous tics. By the time I finally got to Venice it was February, I was out of the army, and the city was huddled against a damp, misty cold.

The piano nobile, as grand and formal as described, was freezing, kept dark but not draftless by long, heavy drapes. The sitting room, warmed by space heaters from Bertie, was comfortable, but the high Tiepolo dining room made meals so chilly and unpleasant that my mother had taken to eating in the kitchen or off a tray sitting next to the bars of her electric fire. Above us, the marchesa had become so silent that a maid was sent up to check, as if she might be one of those birds who grow still on a winter branch, then suddenly fall over. What would have changed everything was sun, cutting across the Adriatic to seep into all the tile roofs and parquet floors as it often did even in February, but the sky that winter was German, cloudy and gray. In the evenings, near our house, there was no light at all. A fog would come in from the sea, filling the Giudecca channel, streetlights were spaced far apart to save power, and the calles became dark medieval paths again, designed for people with torches.

I noticed none of this-or rather, it was all so like the gray I was used to that I accepted it as natural, the way things were. The gloomy afternoons were no different from the weather in my head, full of listless shadows, an urge to draw in. Does anyone really come back from the war? The lucky ones just keep going, on to the next fight, unaware that they’re breathing different air. The rest of us have to be brought up in stages, like deep-sea divers, to prevent the bends. The boys in the hospital had come back too fast-their faces twitched, their eyes darted at every sound, prey. I slept. The fog that came in at night from the lagoon would fill my head too, a lulling numbness, asking to be wrapped in blankets, left alone. Sometimes there were dreams-really ways of going back, reminders of the nightmare time that was supposed to be over-but mostly the sleep was just fog, opaque and shapeless.

“Just like Swann, couche de bonne heure,” my mother would say, but idly, not really worried, for by this time Dr. Maglione had come back into her life, so she was spending evenings out, unaware that when she left me with a book I was already halfway up the stairs in my mind, curling up with the fog.

The result was that I was waking early, before first light. It wasn’t insomnia-I slept deeply, snug under a warm duvet-but some automatic awareness that the light was about to change, the way plants are said to lift their heads toward the dawn. My bedroom window faced across the channel to the Redentore, and I would look out into the darkness waiting for its lines to start forming, as if Palladio himself were sketching them in again, until finally everything had definition, still murky but real. Then I would put on my heavy wool army coat and leave the house without making a sound, quieter even than the shy marchesa, and begin my walk.

Venice is often said to be a dream, but at that hour, when there is no one out, no sounds but your own steps, it is really so, no longer metaphor-whatever separates the actual paving stones from the alleys in your mind dissolves. The morning mist and the gothic shapes from childhood stories have something to do with this, the rocking slap of boats on the water, tugging at their mooring poles, but mostly it’s the emptiness. The campos and largos are deserted, the buoy marker lights in the lagoon undisturbed by wakes, the noisy day, when the visitors fan out into the calles from the Piazzale Roma, still just a single echo. Things appear at that hour the way they do in sleep, gliding unconnected from one to the next, bolted garden door to shadowy church steps to shuttered shopwindow, no more substantial than fragments of mist.

The walk was always the same. First down along the Zattere, past the lonely vaporetto stations. Just before the Stazione Marittima I would turn into the calle leading to San Sebastiano, Veronese’s church, and a bar for stazione workers that was always open by the time I got there, the windows already moist with steam hissing from the coffee machines. The other customers, in blue workers’ coveralls bulked with sweaters underneath, would nod from their spots at the bar, taking in the army coat, then ignore me, turning back to their coffee and cigarettes, voices kept low, as if someone were still sleeping upstairs. Even at that hour a few were tossing back brandies. The coffee had been cut with something-chicory? acorns? — but was still strong enough to jolt me awake, and standing there with a first cigarette, suddenly alert to everything-the steamed windows, the whiff of scalded milk, isolated words of dialect-it seemed to me that I’d never been asleep at all.

Outside there were a few more people-a boy in a waiter’s uniform heading toward one of the hotels, an old woman in a fur coat coaxing a dog to pee, a priest with his hands in his sleeves, staying warm, all the insomniacs and early risers I’d never seen before I became one of them. I supposed that if I headed over to the Rialto I could see the fish stalls being set up and the boats unloading, the early-morning working world, but I preferred the empty dream city. From San Sebastiano it was a straight path, only slightly angled by bridges, to Campo San Barnaba. No produce market yet, just a man hurrying toward the traghetto station, perhaps still not home from the night before. Then right toward the Accademia, following the natural course of the streets the way water runs in canals, looping finally around the museum, then through the back alleys toward Salute, not a soul in sight again, past the great swirling church and out along the fondamenta to the tip. Here, huddled in my coat with my back against the old customs house, I sat for hours looking across the water to the postcard everyone knew-Ruskin’s waves of marble, the gilt of San Marco catching the first morning sun, the columned landing stage filling with boat traffic, all the beautiful buildings rising out of the water, out of consciousness, the city’s last dream.

I thought at first that my mother would tire of it, the way she tired of everything finally except the past, but Dr. Maglione was an unexpected wrinkle, a piece of future. After my father died there had been a period of melodramatic grief, followed, I assumed, by a series of friendships. But these had happened, if they had happened, offstage. I was away at school, then in the army, then overseas, so what I knew came from letters, and these had been full of other things-volunteer work, openings, her three-week job (unpaid) at the Art of This Century gallery and the inevitable fight with Peggy Guggenheim that followed. Then she had come back to Europe, not really looking for anyone, and suddenly there he was. Not slick or too young or in any way unpleasant-not unlike my father, in fact, gray hair thinning at the temples, quiet, almost reticent. And yet amused by her, the way my father had been, both of them perhaps drawn to a quicksilver quality neither possessed himself. In any case, he was here, making her look brighter, in love with Venice, not even aware the rooms were cold. So I put off going back to New York, unsettled, not sure where any of us was heading.

“He’s not a fortune hunter, you know,” Bertie said. “Besides, if you’re after money, why not young money? Much nicer. And you know I adore Grace, but she can be a handful. Anyway, he had doges in his family.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does if you have them. And he’s a real doctor, you know, it’s not an honorific. My doctor, in fact, and I’m still here.”

“I thought it was drink.”

He picked up his glass. “Well, that too. The point is, he’s not a gigolo.”

“So you introduced them.”

“No, no. They’ve known each other for years. Since the old days. When we were all-well, younger than we are now. The parties, my god. I suppose that’s part of it. It reminds them. Anyway, you ought to be grateful. You don’t want her sitting home alone, do you? Imagine what that would be like. It’s the first thing that occurred to me. There she was, all excited on the phone and packing bags, and I thought, what on earth am I going to do with her? In the winter, no less. People think they’re going to like it here in the winter-they come for Carnival and wouldn’t this be nice? — but they never do. The third night at Harry’s, you can see it on their faces. Bored stiff.”

“You’re not.”

“It’s my home. I know what to expect. The point is, Grace needed a friend and now she has one. She’s happy and she’s out of your hair. You’ve got your life to get on with-not worry about her. What are you planning to do, by the way?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Oh, the young. All the time in the world.”

“Right now I’m enjoying Venice, that’s all.”

“Are you? Grace says you sleep all day.”

“No, I walk all day. It’s the only way to see the city. Then I get tired and sleep at night.”

“Mm, a sort of farmer’s life. Up and down with the birds. Are you that bored?” he said, his voice still light, just a hint of concern underneath.

“Not really. I like it. It’s like being on leave.”

“From what?”

I shrugged. “The army. Everything. Just for a while.”

“Don’t stay too long, then. You don’t want to get addicted.”

I looked at him, caught by the word, as if he knew somehow about the mornings sitting against the Dogana, drifting, the beauty of the place a kind of opiate.

“No. But I want to make sure she’s all right. Doges or no.”

“Adam, they have dinner. A drink. Chat. Nobody’s posted the banns. You know what I think? I can say this because I’ve known you all your life. Before your life. I remember when Grace was pregnant with you.” He lifted his glass, pointing a finger. “You’ve got a little too much time on your hands. You’re making trouble where there’s no trouble to be made-for yourself, really. My advice-I know, who ever listens? — is be happy for your mother and mind your own business. Of course, maybe that’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“Not enough business of your own.”

I glanced at his thin, almost elfin face, eyes bright and interested behind the half-moon glasses.

“I don’t want to be introduced. To anybody. Fix up someone else.”

“I don’t fix people up,” he said, almost sniffing at the phrase but enjoying himself. “What’s that, army slang?”

“Yes, you do. Those cozy lunch parties and you sitting there watching, like a turtle.”

“A turtle. Listen to him.” He reached to a box on the coffee table for a cigarette, thinking.

“I mean it, Bertie. I can make my own friends.”

“People never do, though, you know. Have you noticed?”

“You seem to do all right.”

He lit the cigarette, looking over the flame with an arched eyebrow. “Well, I hire them. Oh, don’t be vulgar, I don’t mean like that.”

But I grinned anyway, thinking of the long line of research assistants, young men known to be in the house but rarely seen, like upstairs maids.

“One would think you were still twelve years old. Ten.”

“Almost,” I said, still grinning. “Anyway, too young for your black book.”

“Oh, there’s bound to be someone. People have sisters, don’t they?”

And cousins, as it happened. Or, rather, the cousin’s friend, a connection so tenuous that by the time it had been explained we were already introduced.

“He always does that,” I said, as Bertie walked away to join another group. “He says it gives people something to talk about. It’s Claudia, yes?”

She nodded, watching Bertie. It was one of his afternoon drinks parties, too late for tea but early enough to catch the sunset on the Grand Canal outside. Bertie’s palazzo was near the Mocenigo on the Sant Angelo side, just before the canal makes its last bend toward the Accademia bridge, and in winter the late-afternoon light on the water was muted, almost a pale pink. What sun was left seemed to have moved inside to the burning fireplaces making small circles of heat on either side of the room. The crowd was Bertie’s usual mix-pale-faced curators from the Accademia, where he was “attached” without being officially on staff, a few attractive men whom I took to be former research assistants, overdressed expatriates with drinks, and Venetians rich or idle enough not to be at work at five in the afternoon. I had seen her earlier, standing alone by the window, looking out of place and stranded, like someone who’d been promised a drink and been forgotten. She was fingering her collar button, an unconscious distress signal, then caught my eye and stopped, dropping her hand but not looking away. I started over to rescue her, but Bertie suddenly appeared, moving her back into the crowd, still awkward but at least talking to people. By the time he made his way to me, any shyness was gone, her stare frank and curious.

“What do you usually talk about?” she said, her voice almost flat, as if the effort of speaking English had lowered it, brought it down an octave.

“Anything. Where you learned English, for instance.”

“In London. Before the war. My father wanted me to know English. But of course it’s difficult, these past few years. To speak it.”

“It’s fine,” I said, looking at her more carefully now. She was the first person I’d met here who had referred to the war at all. She was thin, with dark curly hair and a long neck held erect, a dancer’s posture. She had come in office clothes, a gray suit with padded shoulders over a white blouse. Given the cocktail dresses around the room, she should have receded, drab against all that plumage, but instead the suit, with its pointed lapels, gave her a kind of intensity. She held herself with an alert directness, full of purpose, so that everything about her, not just the suit, seemed sharply tailored.

“No, it gets rusty. Rusty, yes?” she said, waiting for me to nod. “I need practice. That’s why I asked to meet you.”

“Really? I thought Bertie-”

“Yes, I asked him. You’re surprised?”

“Flattered. I guess. Why me? Practically everyone here speaks English.”

She smiled a little. “Maybe now it’s not so flattering.” She glanced toward the room. “The others look-”

I turned to follow her glance-maids passing trays, everyone talking loudly through wisps of smoke, laughing as the light faded behind them through the window.

“Frivolous,” I said.

She looked surprised, then bit her lip, smiling. “Yes, but I was going to say old. And you were standing by the fire.”

“So I got elected. What if I’m frivolous too?”

“Signor Howard said you were in the war. So it’s different. You were in Germany? In the fighting?”

“At first. Then a kind of cop. Hunting Nazis, for war crimes.”

She stared now, taking this in, interested. “Then you know. How it was. Not like them,” she said, waving her hand a little to take in the room.

“Maybe they’re the lucky ones. Like Venice.”

“Like Venice?”

“You get off the train here, it’s hard to believe anything ever happened.”

“Well, from Germany. But even here, you know, wartime-it’s not so easy.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said quickly, imagining the lines, the shortages. “I just meant, no bombs. You were here?”

“Most of the time.”

“A true Venetian.”

“Not for Venice. My family was from Rome. It was my grandfather who came here.”

“Your grandfather? In America, that would make you a founding family.”

“Founding?”

“Old.”

“Ah. No, but in Rome we were an old family. Since the empire.”

“Which empire?”

She hesitated, not sure what I meant. “Rome.”

“What, with chariots?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“Claudia. A Roman name,” I said, watching her sip from her glass, easier now, even the sharp lapels on the suit somehow softer. “How do you know Bertie?”

“I don’t. He invited everyone from the Accademia. I work there. His friend has a cousin who knew-”

“I heard. I couldn’t keep it straight then either. I haven’t been yet-the Accademia. Maybe you’ll give me a tour. Now that we’ve broken the ice.”

“There, that’s one,” she said quickly, ignoring my question. “You can help me with that. What does it mean, break the ice? I know, to be friendly, but how does it mean that? Like breaking through ice on a lake? I don’t understand it.”

“I never thought about it,” I said. “I suppose just a general stiffness, when people don’t know each other, breaking through that.”

“But not melting the ice-you know, the friendship making things warmer. It’s breaking.” She looked down at her drink, genuinely puzzled.

“All right, melted then. But now that is, would you show me around the Accademia?”

“You should have a guide for that. I’m not really an expert on the paintings.”

“I’m not interested in the paintings.”

“Oh,” she said, unexpectedly flustered. She looked away. “Are you in Venice long?” A party question.

“My mother’s living here-for now, anyway. She’s one of the frivolous people over there.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“No, she is frivolous. It’s part of her charm. It’s what everybody likes about her.”

“Including you?”

“Sure.”

“A son who loves his mother. Very Italian.”

“You see how respectable. So, how about it? Some lunch hour? I’ll help you with your English.”

She looked directly at me. “Why?”

I stood there for a second, not knowing how to answer. “Why?” I said finally. “I don’t know. I’m in Venice. I should get to know some Venetians.”

“They’re Venetian,” she said, moving her hand toward the others.

“None of them asked to meet me.”

She smiled. “Don’t make too much of that. It was for politeness. And now you want to go out with me?” she said, trying “go out.” “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know your people go way back. So that’s all right. And you’re the first person I’ve enjoyed talking to since I got here.”

“But it’s you who are talking.”

I grinned. “Okay. You talk.”

“No, I have to go.”

“And leave me with them?” We turned. “Look, now it’s priests.” Bertie was greeting a priest in a flowing scarlet cassock, who extended his hand in a royal gesture, barely moving his head, standing in front of some unseen throne. “Who’s that? Do you know?”

“No.”

“I thought everybody here knew everybody. He must be a monsignor or a cardinal. Something. I wish I knew the difference. You’re from Rome-can you tell by the colors?”

“I don’t know. I’m a Jew,” she said quietly.

“Oh,” I said, turning back to her.

“Is that a problem?”

“Why should it be a problem?”

“Jews are not so popular. Not in America either, I think.”

“So you don’t know,” I said, ignoring it, “if he’s a monsignor.”

“No. Don’t you? You’re not a Christian?”

“I’m not anything. Not a Catholic, anyway.”

“But not a Jew either.”

“Part. My grandfather.”

“Miller?”

“Muller. Changed. My father was a mischling.”

“One grandfather.”

“It was enough in Germany.”

She looked at me, then held out her hand. “Thank you for the English. I have to go. It’s already dark. Do you see Signor Howard?” She glanced around the room.

“He’s getting the Church a drink. Come on, no one will miss us.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I’m taking you home.”

“No, it’s far.”

“Nothing’s far in Venice.”

She laughed. “How well do you know it?”

My mother intercepted us at the door, glass in hand.

“Darling, you’re not going. Gianni will be here any-He’ll be sorry to miss you.”

“Not too much.”

“Of course he will. Don’t be silly. The army certainly hasn’t done very much for your manners.”

“You say hi for me,” I said, pecking her on the cheek. “I have to run. This is Miss-I’m sorry, I don’t know your last name.”

“Grassini. Claudia Grassini,” she said, nodding to my mother.

“How nice,” my mother said, shaking her hand. “Finding someone new at one of Bertie’s parties. You probably think we’re the waxworks.”

“We have to run,” I said.

“Perhaps you’d like to join-” my mother started, looking carefully at Claudia, assessing.

“Another time,” Claudia said.

“Of course,” my mother said, a pas de deux. “Did you say goodbye to Bertie?” she said to me.

“He’s in confession.”

She giggled. “Oh, Bertie and his priests. You have to admit, though, he’s the best-dressed person in the room. How did they manage, do you think? During the war. I mean, did they have coupons?”

But by this time we were out the door, walking down the stairs to the hall.

“What was that all about?” I said to Claudia. “That look between you?”

“She’s a mother. She wants to see if I’m all right. You know, like in the market. You feel the fruit.”

I laughed. “How did you come out?”

“She’s not sure. She’s a widow?”

“For years.”

“What did he do, your father?”

“Have fun, mostly. Then he got sick.”

“Fun?”

“It was a different world. People did that then-have fun.”

“These people,” she said, lifting her head toward the stairs, then turning to the maid who was holding her coat. “You don’t have to do this. It’s a long way. I can meet you at the Accademia if you’d really like that.”

“No, I want to see where a real Venetian lives.”

“A poor one, you mean.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, of course. Who lives like this now?” she said, looking up the staircase to the piano nobile. “Only foreigners.”

We were alone at the vaporetto station, huddling in the corner against the cold. The fog had come in, blocking out the opposite side of the canal, so dense you felt you could snatch it in handfuls.

“So what do you do here?” she said, hunching her shoulders, hands stuffed in her pockets.

“Walk. See the city. What does anyone do in Venice? Meet people.”

“At Signor Howard’s?”

“You disapprove?”

“No, no. It’s not for me-” She stopped, then turned away, stamping her feet for warmth. “Signor Howard helped me, at the Accademia.”

“Bertie likes doing that. Helping people. But you still don’t like his friends.”

She looked up at me with a half smile. “Do you?”

“Not anymore. I’m not sure why. I mean, I’ve known some of them for years. It’s just that everything seems different now.”

“For you. Not for them.”

“No, not for them. It’s the same party.”

“I used to see them in the windows, from the canal-all the parties.”

“And now you’re inside.”

“You think so? Ha, brava. The international set. But now it’s like you-it’s all different. I don’t care.”

“I’m glad you went to this one, anyway.”

“Well, for Signor Howard. It was hard to get work when I came back from Fossoli.”

“Where?”

“A camp. Near Modena. Where they put the Jews.”

“There were camps here?”

“You think it was only in Germany? Yes, here. Beautiful Italy. Not so beautiful then.”

“When was this?”

“Forty-four. The first roundups were in forty-three. At the end. But I went later. It was a holding camp. From there, they shipped people on.”

“To Poland?”

She nodded. “So you know that. No one here does. No one here talks about it.”

“You?” I said, involuntarily looking down at her sleeve, as if I could see through to the tattooed numbers.

“No, I stayed at Fossoli.”

“So you were lucky,” I said, thinking of the piled-up carts.

“Yes, lucky,” she said, turning to a bright light coming toward us on the water. “At last. It’s so cold.”

The boat, finally visible through the mist, slammed against the dock.

Inside, we found seats toward the back, the windows steamy with condensation, so that it seemed the fog had moved in with us. There were a few other passengers, tired people going home with string bags, teenagers smoking. In the harsh light of the cabin everything seemed public again, the easy intimacy outside somehow part of the dark. The boat moved slowly, following the cone of its headlight, the motors groaning at the reduced speed, too loud for quiet conversation. But in the sudden warmth we were no longer hunched over. When Claudia sat back and crossed her legs, one came out of the coat, an unexpected flash of white, exposed.

“Do you live with your family?” I said, looking away from her leg.

“No, they’re dead. My mother years ago. My father just last year.”

“Oh,” I said, and then there was nothing to say, nothing worth saying over the engine anyway, drawing attention. Instead we sat quietly, suddenly awkward, rocking with the boat, the swaying movement pushing our bodies together so they barely met, then pulled back, like waves. It was a kind of dancing, a permission to touch in public, aware of each other, the warm skin under the coats.

The other passengers sat nodding to their own rhythm, looking up surprised when station lights suddenly appeared, then gathering their packages, unsteady on their feet until the ropes were tied. After San Marco the boat began to empty, until no one else was in the cabin but an old couple who appeared to be asleep. Outside, everything was still suspended in the fog, the lamps on the Riva just pinpricks of light.

“Where do we get off?” I said, leaning to her ear to say it, so that now there was the smell of her, wool and skin and the faint trace of some perfume she must have put on for Bertie’s.

“Soon. I told you it was far.”

“The Lido?” I said, an excuse to stay close to her face.

She smiled, turning to me. “Not that far. Two more stops,” she said. Then she was silenced by a foghorn off to our right on some invisible ship.

We got off at the public gardens, leaving the old couple to keep drifting out into the lagoon. After a dark stretch bordering the park, the calles took on the usual twists through small deserted campos lit by hooded single bulbs at each corner. This was the tag end of Venice, neglected and out of the way, soundless except for Claudia’s heels on the pavement and a few radios chattering behind shuttered windows. The fog was thinner than it had been on the water, so that even with only a few lights we could see the facades of the buildings, plaster peeling from some of them in large patches. Occasionally, overhead, laundry still hung to dry in the damp air, as if someone had simply forgotten to bring it in.

“You see it’s not the Danieli,” she said as we walked along a misty canal. “But still, a water view. That’s San Isepo. I’m just there.” She pointed to one of the peeling houses. “Can you find your way back?”

“Is this where you lived before?”

“No. In Cannaregio. The ghetto. It’s a Venetian word, you know that? We all lived there, so it was easy to find us. And after, when I came back from Fossoli, I thought, no, anywhere but there. So I found this-the other end of the city. It’s far, but I like it here. At least I can’t hear it anymore, in my head.”

“Hear what?” I said, looking at her closely. We had stopped by the bridge just before her building.

“Nothing. A figure of speech. When I see the streets there, the ghetto, it reminds me. Of the sirens. Here it’s different, it looks different, so the memories aren’t like that.”

“What sirens?”

“For the air raids.”

“I thought Venice wasn’t bombed.”

“No, drills.” She looked away, then back at me. “You want to know? What it was like? They used the air raid sirens so nobody would hear. When they rounded us up. So late, all the screaming and the pounding on the doors, anybody would hear it. At the Casa di Riposo-how do you say, old people’s home-all the patients, so much noise. So they used the sirens to cover up the noise. So no one would hear.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly, embarrassed to have said anything.

“They took all the patients. Even the ones too sick to move.” She turned away. “Well. Enough of that. Do you have a cigarette?”

I lit it for her, studying her face in the glow of the match. She leaned back against the wall of the bridge.

“So now you know all about me. Where I live, where I work. Now even my memories. I don’t go to Harry’s. I live here. Not Signor Howard’s Venice. Not yours, either.”

“No. Did they take you that night?”

“Later. In the fall.”

“And then what happened?”

“At Fossoli? You want to know that too? Everything?” She hesitated, then looked directly at me. “Yes, all right. Look how easy I say that. I told no one. Now some stranger at a rich party, and-” She stopped again. “Why was I lucky? One of the men who ran the camp raped me. Of course he didn’t call it rape. Only I thought that. Every time. So. Is there anything else you want to know?”

I said nothing. She drew on the cigarette, watching me, as if she were expecting me to turn away.

“No?”

“Yes. Why you wanted to meet me.”

She smiled a little. “That too? All right. I don’t know. Maybe I liked the look of you.”

I smiled back, surprised. “No one’s ever said that to me before. Are you always so-” I paused, not finding the word.

“You prefer the old Venice? The masks? The notes? I used to want that. How wonderful to look over your fan at La Fenice. So romantic. But now it’s what you say-everything’s different. I came back and it’s all different. So now I’m like this.”

“My mother came back because she thinks it’s all the same.”

She dropped the cigarette and ground it out with her shoe. “Good night,” she said. Then she looked up at me, studying my face. “Are we going to be lovers, do you think?”

I met her stare. “Yes.”

“You think so.”

“Don’t you?” I reached up my hand, but she stopped it with hers, letting our fingers touch.

“I don’t know yet. Maybe. But not the first meeting. I can’t do that.”

I leaned closer and lowered my face to hers. A tentative kiss, on the lips, a hint of salt water; then another, longer this time, our mouths slightly open; then more, taking our time until we were moving over each other, open and excited, and she broke away with a small gasp.

“Can I come in?”

“No, it’s too soon. Go home, think who I am. Then, if you still want to, we’ll-see each other.”

“Over fans at La Fenice.”

She smiled. “That’s right. Over fans. Do you know how to get back?”

“Walk toward the water.”

I waited while she put the key in the door.

“When will you know?” I said.

She made a teasing face. “When I know you better.” She made a shooing motion with her hand. “Just follow the canal-you’ll see the gardens.”

On the boat back, I stood at the deck rail. As we moved in and out of the fog, toward the lights, then away again, Venice seemed more than ever dreamlike, something not really there. But once there had been sirens and dogs. Think who I am. Not just another folder on my desk in Frankfurt. More disturbing than that, here, tasting a little of salt. At home, staring out the dark window, for the first time in weeks I didn’t sleep.

It took hours for the room to fill up with light, reflecting off the water, then moving along the walls in ripples. I opened the window, listening to the canal sloshing against the house. Too late for sleepwalking but too early for open shops, anything else. I dressed and headed for the Accademia, but it would be hours before the tall doors opened. I could walk out to the Dogana, my usual morning seat, but all that now seemed to have happened weeks ago, somewhere else. How could anyone just sit, looking? I started up the broad wooden steps of the bridge. Over to Santo Stefano. A coffee and a newspaper. But that was idling. Who could sit? The point was to keep going, now that I had somewhere to go.

The sun held all the way through San Marco and along the Riva, bouncing off the white marble and back against the water. I walked faster. Even the air, after weeks of mist and damp, was sharp and dry, as if it too had cleared its head and decided what to do. And then, like a sudden shift of mood, it was over. The sky began to fill with clouds again, blown back in from the west, and by the time I reached the funfair at the far end of the Riva the shuttered caravans and children’s rides were as drab and dismal as they’d been all winter. The brick towers of the Arsenale, glowing like kilns a few minutes before, had turned gloomy.

I crossed the last bridge before the vaporetto stop suddenly feeling foolish, still hours early, the idea of coming here at all like something out of a song lyric, silly in the gray light. The sensible thing would be to catch the next boat back and go to the Accademia at lunch hour. Instead I waited, smoking on a bench near the floating dock, not willing to waste a morning. What time did the staff get to the Accademia? A few people were opening umbrellas. I felt a light drizzle on my face and took shelter inside the vaporetto station. So much for the expansive gesture, sunshine, and open arms. Now I was hunched over with a damp collar.

It didn’t matter. She came onto the quay and it was just as I imagined it would be-the same direct walk, a glance up from under the umbrella, a sudden stop, and her surprised face, unguarded, absolutely still until something turned over inside, loosening an involuntary smile. She was wearing the same wool coat and sharp-lapeled suit-her only one? — and for a second I saw how she would take it off, just the jacket, nothing else, sliding it back from her arms while she stared straight at me, taking it off for me. Now she hurried into the shelter, folding her umbrella, eyes still wide, disbelieving.

“Have you been here all night?” she said, laughing a little.

I shook my head. “I get up early.”

“But what are you doing here?”

“I want you to get to know me better.”

Her face softened. “At this hour?”

“I thought we’d better start. I don’t know how much you want to know.”

She said nothing, her eyes still reading my face, pleased.

“I like risotto. Any kind of fish.”

She laughed. “Do you think I’m going to cook for you?”

“Okay. We’ll go out.”

“A rich American.”

“I live in Dorsoduro. My room has a view of the Redentore.”

“I’m not going to your room. In your mother’s house.”

“Then I’ll find something else.”

“I’m not going anywhere, except to work.”

“That’s why I’m here. We can talk on the way.”

“To come here like this, at this hour. You must be crazy.”

“Must be. What time do you get off for lunch?”

“You’re so sure of this?”

“Yes.”

She looked away. “Here comes the boat.”

I reached up and moved her chin with my hand. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Only a few people got on with us, but the boat was already packed with commuters coming from the Lido, reading newspapers or just staring out the windows. We stood away from the rain but wedged near the gangplank gate, pressed against each other.

“Just like the bus,” I said, but of course it wasn’t, dipping with the shallow waves, even a morning commute turned into an excursion. The water gave everything in Venice this playful quality. Ambulances were boats, so not quite ambulances. Fire boats and delivery barges and taxis-all the same, yet different, bobbing on the water, somehow looking half made-up. “We should have a gondola, like the old days.”

“No, they frighten me. So unsteady. I can’t swim.”

“In Venice?”

“Nobody swims in Venice. Where, in the canals?” She made a face. “It’s not so unusual. Even gondoliers.” A city people, rooted to pavement. “Anyway, I never learned. So I don’t go in boats. Only these,” she said, waving her hand toward the crowd.

“I’ll take you out. I’m good with boats-that’s something else to know. You’d be safe.”

“Oh, you have a gondola?”

“Actually, I do. One came with the house. But no gondolier, so it’s up on supports. There’s a boat, though. We could take that. With life jackets. Go and have a picnic.”

“In this weather.”

“Well, when it’s nicer.”

“And you’ll be here when it’s nicer.” She turned to me. “You don’t have to do this.”

“What?”

“Act like this. Take me on boats. Take me anywhere. Picnics. Like the films. So romantic. It’s not like that anymore.”

“No?”

“Not for me.”

“What do you want me to talk about, then?”

“What you’re thinking. Not this-what?”

“Flirting?”

“Playacting. It’s not serious.”

“No. It’s supposed to be part of the fun.”

She looked away, then stepped back to let some passengers get near the rail. We were pulling into Salute. She moved farther away, not wanting to talk with anyone close by, pretending to look at the church. Even in the drizzle, the baroque curves were bright white, like swirls of meringue. When the boat swung out again, she turned to find me looking at her.

“Now what? More picnics?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“What I’m really thinking?”

She nodded.

“What it would be like. You, taking your clothes off. What you would be like.”

For a moment she said nothing, her look embarrassed, no longer direct.

“I’m sorry. You said no more playacting. It’s what I was thinking-what it would be like.”

She nodded slightly. “All right,” she said, and turned to the rail.

Which meant what? Anything. But her back was to me, like a finger to the lips, and I said nothing. We rode that way, both facing the palazzos. After we tied up at Accademia, I took her arm and we crossed the gangplank. In the open square in front of the old convent, we stood bareheaded, surrounded by umbrellas.

“What time do you get off for lunch?”

“One. Go and look at the pictures.”

“All morning.”

She smiled. “Some people take days. And now it’s the best time-no one’s there. You can stand in front of The House of Levi as long as you want.”

“A Jewish picture?”

“No, the Last Supper. But Veronese put in a drunk and dwarfs and the pope said it was-what? profane? — so he changed the title.”

“Italian accommodation.”

“Hypocrisy. Well, we had good teachers.” She looked up at me, serious. “It won’t be like that with us, will it? No pretending. Just what it is.”

I nodded. “So you’ve decided.”

“When I saw you this morning.”

I leaned forward. “Don’t go to work.”

“No, one o’clock,” she said, then reached up and put her hand on my chest. “Get a room.”

I felt a twitch, like a spurt of blood.

“My house is-”

“No. Somewhere no one knows us. Not here. Near the station. One of those places. You can afford that,” she said with a small smile. “You’re a rich American.”

I bent over to kiss her, but she stopped me, pushing against my chest, her eyes playful. “Later,” she said. “You can think what it will be like.”

We became lovers that afternoon in one of those hotels off the Lista di Spagna that put up students with backpacks and salesmen from Padua. The vaporetto ride had seemed endless, dripping umbrellas and anxious looks, not talking, the few blocks on foot worse, umbrellas forcing everyone to walk single-file in the narrow calles. In the room, past the sour desk clerk, we were suddenly shy, like the students who usually stayed there, and then she slipped off her jacket with the sliding movement I’d imagined, and hung it in the armoire and turned to me, and I understood that I was to unbutton her blouse, and I began fingering it, feeling the warmth underneath, until finally she put her hand over mine, guiding it to each button so that we did it together.

It had been so long since I’d had sex, at least with anyone I’d wanted, that it felt curiously like a first time-tentative and then urgent, wanting to get it right but too hurried to find a rhythm. We hung up all her clothes, an efficiency that became a tease, then a kind of ritual, and when we were naked I started running my hand over her slowly, wanting to touch every part of her, but when I reached down she was already wet and after that we fell on the bed, both in a rush. Without the suit she was round, her skin soft, but her movements were still direct, the way I knew they’d be, never coy, reaching out to pull me into her. Just what it is. Skin on skin, without nuance, first-time sex, so hungry, tongues and sweat and a hurrying you can’t stop, over too soon. We lay for a minute, finally not moving, still together, panting. Then she reached up and pushed my hair from my forehead.

“I don’t have to go back,” she said.

“No?” I said, feeling myself hard again.

“We have lots of time.”

“I’m sorry I-”

“No, no. Me too. Now we can start.”

And this time it was slower, almost lazy, so that I felt her around me, not plunging in and out, everything slick, but taking the time to feel the moist, hidden skin, the secret part of her.

Afterward we lay in a tangle, exhausted but not wanting to stop, touching each other.

“What did you tell them, at the Accademia?”

“That I was sick. Everyone is sick in Venice in the winter. My god, listen to that. No wonder.”

The rain had grown stronger, a real downpour now, noisy against the window.

“But it makes it nice in here,” I said, the cheap hotel room suddenly a refuge.

“Yes. And freezing,” she said, pulling a sheet up around her.

“No, let me look at you. I’ll keep you warm.”

She moved closer, talking into my shoulder.

“It’s the first time since I came back. You forget how peaceful, after.”

The perfect happiness of sex, drowsy and full, something you think happens only to you.

“I feel honored,” I said, teasing. “Why me?”

“I told you, I liked your looks.”

“That’s right. My looks.”

She raised herself on one elbow. “And you. Do you like mine?”

I shook my head. “Your mind.”

She looked at me, puzzled, until I smiled. “It’s an American joke. Don’t worry. I like everything. Here. And here.”

She wriggled away from my hand but stayed close. “Did you have a girl in Germany?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I felt sorry for them. You can’t, when you feel sorry for somebody.”

“Sorry for Germans?”

“They were hungry. Living in cellars. So they’d do anything-even make you think they liked you. How would you feel?”

“Don’t ask me that. I can’t feel sorry for Germans.”

“Anyway, I didn’t go with anybody,” I said, moving away from it. “Maybe I was waiting.” I brushed a lock of her hair behind her ear.

“Ha. More romantics.” She was running her fingers across my chest, an idle examination. “No marks. Were you wounded?”

“No. I pushed paper. Not so dangerous.”

“So you never killed anybody? No Germans?”

“No. Did you?”

“Who would I kill?”

“I don’t know. The man at the camp maybe.”

She stopped running her fingers and sat up, turning toward the window.

“He kept me alive. I was grateful to him. Imagine, being grateful to someone like that. Imagine what the others were.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was killed. After the Germans left. Maybe by partisans. It was like that, those first weeks.” She turned to me. “You don’t mind about him?”

“No. Why should I mind?”

“Some men-” She paused. “I saw his body. Dead. I felt nothing. After all that, nothing. Maybe you get used to it, all the killing. That’s the problem. You think you want to kill them all. Where do you stop? The guard who pushed the children on the train? Yes, him. Then why not the ones watching? Why not everybody? And then you’re like them.”

“You’re not like them.”

She looked up at me. “Everybody’s like them.”

“No, we’re not,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder and pulling her down to the bed, leaning over her. “Anyway, it’s over.”

“Yes.” She reached up, touching my neck. “I wanted to know. If it would always feel-the way it was with him.”

“Does it?”

She shook her head.

“Good. Let’s make sure.”

The afternoon went on like that, stroking each other and then, excited again, grabbing at flesh in a kind of fury, and then dozing off, drugged with sex, hearing the rain in our half sleep. Even when it was finished we kept touching lightly, not wanting to arouse each other but unable to take our hands away. Once, during a break in the storm, I dressed and ran out for a bottle of wine, half afraid that when I got back she’d be taking her clothes out of the armoire, the mood broken, but she was still there, sheet pulled up just over her breasts.

“I’m sick, remember? I have to spend the day in bed,” she said while I poured the wine. “You’re soaked.”

“Not for long,” I said, taking my wet clothes off and climbing back in, clinking glasses. “So, a picnic finally.”

“Oh, on the Lista di Spagna.”

“You should see the water out there. We’ll be our own island in a few hours.”

She looked at me over the glass. “That’s nice, to say that.”

We slept finally, lulled by the wine and the steady rain, her back curved into me, and when I woke the sound of running water was coming from the tub. There was a thin light under the door. I got up and looked out the window. Not really late but already dark, as if the waterlogged city had simply given up and turned out the lights.

“I don’t know if there’s enough hot water for two,” she said when I went into the bathroom. “It was already getting cool. Do you mind? I thought, at your house-”

“That’s all right. I’ll just watch,” I said, sitting on the edge of the tub. The room was spare, the bathmat just a skinny towel thrown on the cold linoleum. Whatever steam there had been was now gone from the flat mirror over the basin.

“One look, then. I’m getting out,” she said, pulling herself up and posing with her hand on her hip, a kind of burlesque wiggle, then folding her arms across her chest in a shiver. “Oh, this cold.”

“Here,” I said, wrapping one of the thin towels around her as she stepped out. I held her for a minute, letting the towel blot the water, then began rubbing her dry with another one. “Come back to bed. It’s warm.”

“No, it’s late.”

“Have dinner.”

“No, it’s time to go home. I have to keep respectable hours. For the neighbors,” she said, slipping on her underpants and hooking her bra. “To be respectable.”

“You’re not,” I said, smiling.

She came over and put her hand in my hair. “I used to be.”

I picked up my shorts. “All right. I’ll take you home.”

“No, not tonight.” She looked at me. “It’s better. You stay here.”

“What am I going to do here?”

“You can watch.” She slipped on her skirt, her face sly, as if she knew this covering up would turn erotic, each simple move, even lifting a blouse from its hanger, a secret between us, her body something only we knew, more ours than ever as she hid it from everyone else, piece by piece.

She came over to the bed and looked down. “And you want to go on the vaporetto?” She leaned down, taking my erection in her hand while she kissed me. “Sometimes, you know, when it’s like this, we want to think it’s something else. But it’s not, it’s just what it is, that’s all. It’s enough for me, what it is. You understand?” She ran her fingers up the side of my penis, then moved her hand away.

I nodded.

“Thank you,” she said. “For the day. For the room.”

“Tomorrow?” I said.

She looked at me, then smiled. “But somewhere nearer. I’ll have to go back to work. Not all day, like this.”

“Anything. The Gritti?”

“No, somewhere cheap. With sheets like this.” She gestured toward the rumpled bed. “So we don’t care what we do.”

I got up to follow, grabbing part of the sheet to cover myself, making her giggle.

“Very funny.”

“Well, it is, though. How is that? So serious and then it’s funny. You think it’s funny for the animals?”

“No, but they don’t go home early, either.”

She laughed. “One o’clock.”

I went over to the window and waited to see her come out below, the wide shoulders of her coat as she moved into a line of umbrellas, people hurrying home from work, none of them turning around to look back, none aware that anything had happened.