Lucifer's Shadow

32 In the eaves of the ark

The bells of San Girolamo marked twelve as we slipped back into the ghetto. The Jews must retire early. There was scarcely a light in any window and not a sound in the building as we climbed the stairs. Jacopo was out on his rounds, ever the busy physician. The night remained passably hot. Rebecca threw her cloak onto the chair by the fireplace, then took my own, gripped my hands tightly, and looked into my eyes.

“Lorenzo,” she said. “Where do you think this God is that has nothing better to do with His time but peer down upon us like some base spy? In every church? In every bedroom? Watching us now? Is this all He is? Some servant of the state with wings and all-seeing eyes?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what? Some divine thorn to prick our consciences and make us ever aware of our own shortcomings?”

“You mock me. I think I should go.”

She continued to cling to me. “If you like, Lorenzo. But I had something to show you. One of the oldest gods of all, and I hoped that if you saw Him for what He truly was, perhaps we’d both be the better for it.”

I said nothing. Rebecca wore the black dress of the concert musician, with a circular neckline and a slender silver chain around her throat. Her face was more serious than I had ever known. She had the benefit of just six years over me, but at that moment I felt like a child in the company of an elder.

“Come,” she said, and took my hand. “Be brave. Don’t look down. You won’t fall to hell, but you will go six floors down to the ground and you won’t much notice the difference.”

I followed her to the large sash window at the side of the room. This gave onto the corner of the square, the jumble of buildings surmounted by the wooden ark of the synagogue which she had pointed out to me on an earlier occasion.

“Be as quiet as you can so none shall hear us. And mind your footing. Follow me all the way.”

With that, she threw open the window, lifted a leg, and was out of the house onto a tiny, flat tiled roof no bigger than a balcony. I followed and stood there, with nothing to hold but her arm, and we swayed, just for a moment, in front of the great black maw of space an arm’s length in front of us.

“Be calm,” she whispered in my ear, and then reached round for a handhold, found it, and beckoned me to follow.

This cannot have been the first time Rebecca had made this journey. On some occasion during the day, she must have sat in the square, stared at this shambling collection of gutters and roofs, and even, at one point, a small external ladder — used, I assume, for maintenance— marking down each point, fixing the route she would take when she decided to tackle this queer little peak, like a mountain goat consumed by curiosity. Tentatively, not once looking down, I came on behind, trying not to clutch for her hand too often, slipping once or twice, then seeing her anxious face, alabaster in the light of the moon, peering at me from above.

After two or three minutes which seemed, in all truth, as long as an entire evening, I dragged myself up and found her sitting on a tiny wooden balcony close to the peak of the wooden ark. There was a small leaded window. Through it came the yellow, waxy light of distant candles.

Rebecca put a finger to my mouth and said, “Shush. There are men inside. But they won’t be there long.”

We waited until we heard the sound of a door closing, then she slipped open the window and we prised ourselves through, half falling into a corridor that seemed to squeeze itself beneath the eaves of the building. There was a narrow walkway on the wall side. Opposite was a line of plain wooden benches, and, in front of them, large shutters running almost the length of the floor, which opened onto the room beyond, much like those of La Pietà behind which the musicians hide. The “nave” of the synagogue, though, was one floor below us, as I discovered when I opened the nearest shutter and stuck my head through into the central hall. It was like being thrust into the kind of fantasy one finds in dreams where dimensions are quite out of joint. I felt at one moment like a child peering into some rich, ornate doll’s house, and the next a pygmy who had crawled upon the roof of some hidden cathedral, bare wood on the outside, full of golden riches beneath the skin.

“This is where you worship?” I asked Rebecca, who sat on the bench, arms folded, awaiting my reaction.

“Where they worship,” she replied. “Women are not allowed. We must wait up here, watching through the shutters, unseen, not worthy of their thoughts. The Hebrew God is a busy one, Lorenzo, at least for the Ashkenazim. Don’t ask me if it’s the same for everyone else. He has only time to talk to men, and prefers a bearded rabbi above all others.”

I looked at the place. It was beautiful, but so different from anything I had seen elsewhere in Venice. Then it struck me. “There are no paintings, Rebecca. Where are all the glorious martyrdoms? Titian and Veronese would starve if they were born into a Jewish state. What would they do?”

“False idols, Lorenzo. We must allow no graven images in our temples. There are a few paintings if you look, though. And I gather that’s unusual.”

I craned my neck and saw she was right. Around the walls was a collection of small landscapes.

“There,” she said, pointing to one. “Moses leading his tribe through the Red Sea.”

I screwed up my eyes to follow her finger. “But there’s no one in it.”

“I told you. It isn’t allowed. Also, we mustn’t depict God, either. Or utter His proper name — which is Yahweh, in case you’re interested. There. I said it.”

I felt quite baffled. The place was so unlike any Christian church I had ever entered. Yet it did feel holy, and I couldn’t help wondering if one might find the same air of sanctity in a mosque or the temples where the Hindu worship. Could it be that holiness comes not from God but us? Do we make Him after the image we would have of ourselves?

My mind was overwhelmed by both the sacredness and the ordinariness of these surroundings. Here, Rebecca pointed out, was the ark where the laws were kept. Here, the eternal light and the raised platform from which lessons were read, much as they are from a Christian pulpit. This was the seat of the daily round of ritual which the Hebrews used to explain their place in the world, why men lived and died, fought and loved, just like anyone else who walked the earth.

Rebecca sat close, watching my face avidly as I scanned this holy temple, wondering what it meant to me. I wore a plain white shirt, the neck open. It disclosed the Star of David she had given me. She reached forward, took it with her hand, and was flattered, I think, that I wore it.

“Do you think God’s here, Lorenzo?” she asked. “Do you think He is hiding behind the Torah, His face like thunder, all because two hapless mortals happened to walk where other men said they shouldn’t?”

“No,” I said honestly. She was right, of course. My grief had eaten into my mind. Lucia was dead because of some accident of fate, not the actions of her foolish brother. “But God is with us, I think. Not your God or my God, but something more simple, and more complicated. I don’t believe we are like the animals, Rebecca. When I listened to my sister sing to me in my bed, when I watch you play in La Pietà… Whatever Jacopo says, I don’t believe our lives can be written down as numbers on a page. I don’t think love is an affliction of the blood, like palsy. We are more than we seem, and we build these places to try to explain our bewilderment at our imperfect state.”

“Jacopo,” she murmured with a gentle laugh. “He is my brother, and I love him dearly. My impetuousness mirrors his caution. But one day a woman will trap his heart, and then his pretty theories will fall down like bricks in a child’s toy castle.”

I felt well, I felt whole. Rebecca had healed me. And why not? The Levis were a family of physicians.

“Thank you,” I said, and gingerly, with the soft, remote tenderness of a brother, I kissed her pale, warm cheek. She did not move. The temple was silent save for the erratic sputtering of the lamps below.

“Here is another piece of God,” she said, and quickly, with not a moment’s hesitation, unfastened the back of her dress, letting the black fabric fall open to expose, in the half light that came through the shutter, the fullness of her breasts, the colour of a marble statue in a rich man’s palace, and as smooth and perfect too. “Here.”

She took my hand and pulled it towards her, splaying the fingers. They came to rest upon this warm and lovely place. I felt her life pulsing beneath my touch. I felt the tightening of the tender rosebud trapped lightly in my grasp, heard the sudden short, halting breaths sucked between her teeth.

I brought my hand to her hair and, slowly, wishing that we might both record every moment of this for eternity, kissed her open mouth, our lips pressed firm together, our breathing as one.

She broke away, an urgent look on her lovely face, then stood up and, in one swift movement, pulled her dress over her head, clutched it modestly to her chest for a moment, then bent down to lay it carefully on the bare wooden floor as if to make a bed for us. I swear that at that instant I felt as if I could die. My lungs were starved of breath, my blood refused to course its natural path.

“Lorenzo,” she said, and tugged at my shirt, twisting open the buttons with a flick of the hand. “Lie with me now and I will remain yours always.”

I started to babble ridiculous sweet nothings, and she laughed, silenced me, and bade action. I threw an arm around her naked back, feeling the gracious form of its curves. Her body pressed urgently against mine. I disrobed and, wrapped around each other, we wound slowly to the floor. Thus, in the narrow corridor on the first floor of the Ashkenazi synagogue, on the island ghetto of Venice, I left my childhood behind and entered, willingly and with much joy, the adult world.

Afterwards, in the most unforeseen of locations, while setting a line of type or walking alone across the Rialto, a detail of that encounter would appear in my head out of nothing. This act is a blur of passion, a string of confused images and sensations. I recall the shock of feeling Rebecca’s tongue probing my mouth. I remember the sudden alarm and just as sudden passion that followed when, with her guiding hand, I found that secret part of her and discovered, beneath the luxuriant locks, the unexpected well of heat and dampness within.

That night shall live with me always, whatever the future holds for the two of us. Rebecca threw open the shutters of the world for me, and I can never remain the same hereafter. But one image remains uppermost in my mind. Ecstasy and agony walk hand in hand in this act, much as they do in life itself. At that point when our two bodies moved in such tight rhythm that we might have been a single creature, I opened my eyes, anxious to see her face in the moment of rapture. It remains an image I find both hypnotic and shocking. Eyes tight shut, mouth half-open, she had the look of the dead upon her. The long moan that issued from her throat might have been her last breath upon this earth. The French call this the little death, with much justification. I watched her so and found my own cries rising to mingle with hers in that narrow, ill-lit corridor, on the clumsy pile of clothes that scarce hid the hardness of the boards beneath.

I saw my love at this instant of rapture, and her face made me think of Lucia, distant Lucia, dead Lucia. Here was Rebecca’s most important lesson. That when life is as ephemeral as the beat of a butterfly’s wing, these moments of wonder give us reason to exist. And that, in itself, might be a gift from God.