The Bellini Card

70

South of the familiar brown bulk of the Frari, Palewski found himself in a region he didn’t know, following Yashim as he worked his way confidently through the narrow streets. This part of Dorsoduro seemed, if anything, poorer than the rest; the large Campo Santa Margherita, which they crossed at a slant, was full of idle men, lean cats, and laundry, as if the women took in other people’s washing. The women, indeed, were down by the small canal, scrubbing and rinsing their linen in the murky green water. One of them sang out as Yashim and Palewski crossed the bridge, and there was a burst of laughter.

Farther west, they reached the court where the Contarinis lived on the ground floor. Maria was there: she ran forward and hugged Palewski, lifting her bare feet from the cobbles.

“Mio caro! I did not think I would see you again!”

The kitchen was very dark and smelled of smoke. Signora Contarini rose ponderously from the fire, which she had been feeding with little twigs, and bobbed a curtsy.

Yashim explained Palewski’s need for a billet.

“You are welcome,” the signora said, with an elegant sweeping gesture of her hand.

Later, Yashim found himself watching Signora Contarini as she worked with a short knife, enthroned on a stool by the fire, slicing carrots and onions and garlic against her thumb. She had a knack of slicing the onion so that it remained whole until the last minute, when it cascaded into rings.

One by one she dropped the vegetables into a cauldron set on irons above the fire. The polished stone hearth jutted out into the room; over it, about three feet up, hung a canopy. The smoke drifted lazily upward, some of it escaping into the room to darken the beams and ceiling. The fire itself was small, and the old lady tended it carefully with a poker, now and then tucking back stray twigs and sticks.

When the water came to a boil, the signora carefully unwrapped the beef and lowered it into the cauldron with both hands. Having watched it for a few moments, she went to the table and began to sift through her stores. She shook out a bunch of parsley, folded it, and chopped it finely into a wooden bowl. She cracked a clove from a bulb of garlic, peeled it swiftly, and with little movements of her forefinger sliced it first one way and then the next, before slipping it over and paring it into fragments.

She lifted the lid of a clay jar and fished out a few capers, which she added to the sauce. From another jar she speared a pickled cucumber on the point of her knife and sliced that, too, as she had chopped the garlic.

She put her thumb over the neck of a small green bottle and shook a few drops of vinegar into the bowl. A pinch of salt, a round of pepper, and then she began to stir the mixture, adding a thin thread of oil from an earthenware flask until the sauce felt right.

“There must be something I can do to help,” Yashim said. “Perhaps I could stir the polenta?”

With her eye on the sauce the signora gave an amused grunt: the Moor, stir her polenta?

“I make it come la seta,” she said. Like silk.

She poured a jug of water into the copper standing beside the fire.

“Talk to your friend, signore.”

Yashim moved away politely: he had no wish to put the eye on his hostess’s polenta. Maria was sitting by the window, stitching her torn dress. She was wearing the blue bodice and patched gray skirt she had put on before she knew they would be having company.

Yashim glanced back to see the signora threading an endless stream of yellow maize from one hand. The other worked a wooden spoon in slow, firm circles. He smiled and turned his back: in Trabzon, where he was born, the women made kuymak in the same way.

Perhaps they worshipped the same gods, these women, as they performed the daily miracle of transforming the baser elements into silk, the rarest luxury the world could afford.

Maria raised her head from her sewing. “Some days,” she said in a near whisper, “we hang an anchovy on a string, above the table. Then we each rub the anchovy on the polenta-and it tastes so good!”

Her mother leaned over the copper and examined her work. She had finished pouring the maize but she continued to stir, slowly, with her free hand on the rim of the pot as the polenta gradually stiffened.

“Maria! Fetch the board.”

Maria set aside her sewing and jumped up. She took what looked like a little bench down from two pegs in the wall and set it before the fire.

Yashim watched, in spite of himself: the signora’s face was rapt as she tilted the pan and the polenta glided out across the board, as smooth as yellow silk.

Maria was putting plates and forks around the table.

“Maria!” Her mother hissed and nodded to the wooden chest. There followed angry words in a thick dialect that neither Yashim nor Palewski could properly understand.

Maria blushed and cleared the table again. Then she fetched a fresh cloth from the chest and shook it out over the table.

Yashim smiled at the signora and she eyed him back, one eyebrow faintly raised. Yes, he thought, we understand each other, Moor and Venetian, in the simple duties of ceremony and propriety. The table had needed to be dressed.

The cloth sparkled, and it seemed as though the room were not the mean, low-ceilinged hovel it had been but brighter, orderly, hospitable. Even the food smelled richer.

Maria set the table. Her mother skimmed the stock.

Maria’s father, a whippet-thin man who worked on the boats and had been enjoying a puff of cigar smoke with his friends in the yard, joined them with handshakes and curt welcomes.

They ate the beef sliced, on a mattress of polenta swimming with good stock, with spoonfuls of the salsa verde, in silence and appreciation. Maria’s little brothers and sisters sat with uncanny stillness, having been bawled in from the neighboring alleys. Except for the oldest boy, a good-looking lad with Maria’s tangle of black hair and rolled shirtsleeves, they had shaved heads and huge round eyes, which they turned on Palewski and Yashim, but particularly Yashim, as they silently spooned up their polenta.

Finally a little girl, more wriggly than the rest-she could scarcely have been more than seven, Yashim supposed-broke the silence to ask him if it was true that in Moor-land nobody had to go to church.

“I think that God would be sad,” Yashim said thoughtfully, “if nobody went to thank him, now and then. For food like this, and children like yourselves, and a sunny day like today.”

“Is he sad in your country, when nobody goes?”

“Not at all, signorina. Because some people do go to church, and others go to mosque, and some people go to the synagogue. So he hears people thanking him in lots of different voices, like yours, and mine, and your mother’s, and our friend Palewski’s here, and that makes him four times as happy.”

She looked at him again, a little dubiously, and didn’t reply.

And much later, when everyone else was asleep, and the two friends sat together by the embers of the fire, Yashim spoke about the calligrapher, Metin Yamaluk, and the missing book of Bellini drawings, and how his instinct had warned him that there was something wrong.

“He was a pious old man. He died with a look of terror on his face.”

He told him, too, about Resid’s cryptic remarks. “He knew something was going on in Venice. Something dangerous.”

Palewski for his part explained about the contessa’s party, and the death of Barbieri, and how Alfredo had been his last hope.

Yashim bit his cheek. “Yes-and I wonder how this Alfredo knew what you were looking for.”

“Rumors, Yashim. Speculation was born on the Rialto.” His chair creaked. “Everyone knows something and is sure of nothing. Except that I miss my bed,” Palewski murmured, pulling the blanket up beneath his chin. In a minute he was asleep, legs outstretched, his feet on the hearth like a soldier on campaign.

Yashim took longer to settle. Palewski had sketched for him a cast of characters: some were frauds, some were dead, and some, he was sure, knew more than they were letting on.