across the mud and hopped into an open drain. In older buildings, people still kept a heavy stone on the toilet cover to stop the creatures from getting loose in the house.
The alley scuttled off between the houses on the other side, eventually joining a broader street with shops and a church. Zen made his way past doors whose numbers read like the dates of an impossible life: 1684–1679, 1635–1628. He crossed a bridge where a man was manoeuvring a handcart laden with cans of cooking oil up the ridged pavement on the wheels fitted to the leading edge. The house opposite was clad in scaffolding and sacking, with a large plastic chute to carry waste rubble to a barge moored alongside, now aground in the mud. A workman was shovelling sand out of another boat into a wheelbarrow which his mate was holding on the plank bridge they had rigged up.
Zen squinted at the frontage. Surely that was where the Pagan family lived? The two boys had been at school with him, although they were never part of the same set. Presumably they must have inherited by now and were having the place done up. He was surprised to feel a stab of envy. If only he could afford to have the Zen house turned into a proper home for all of them, with a separate flat for his mother and plenty of space for him and Tania…
He immediately dismissed the idea. It was absurd to think that he could make a life for himself here at this late stage. There was nothing here for him now. He had used the place up, converted it to experiences and memories that made up the person he was. To return would be to condemn himself to a form of spiritual incest. Nothing new could happen to him here, nothing real. Besides, Tania wouldn’t want to move to a city which, despite its glamour, was essentially a provincial backwater. He walked on, frowning at the realization that this was the first time he had thought of Tania since his arrival.
Under the flat bland noonday light, the wedge-shaped campo looked like a small-scale replica of itself, a set of mocked-up frontages. How different it seemed in the eye of memory! Grand in stature, full of significance, peopled with a vast and various cast of every age and character, inexhaustible and yet coherent… Now it looked diminished, paltry and deserted. The city was dying. The paper Zen had bought earlier that morning had spelled out the grim rate of attrition. The preceding twenty-four hours had seen six births and twenty-one deaths. Twenty-one unique and irreplaceable repositories of local life and lore had been destroyed, while most of the six new citizens would be forced to emigrate in search of work and accommodation. In another fifty years, there would be no Venetians left at all.
Of all the houses in the neighbourhood, the Morosinis’ had been the liveliest and most welcoming. It was identical in size and layout to the Zens’, yet the two homes could hardly have been more different in every other way. The Cannaregio area was midway between the station and the slaughterhouse, and most local men worked for one or the other. Like Aurelio’s father, Silvio Morosini was a railwayman, and he had taken full advantage of this once the war came. No heroics for Silvio, who had decidedly left-wing sympathies but also an uncanny sense of which way the wind was blowing and when to keep his head down.
Angelo Zen could also have claimed exemption — the railways were then the sinews of both the economy and the war effort — but he had preferred to volunteer and was sent off to serve in the ill-trained and worse- equipped token force which Mussolini dispatched to the Russian front in order to bolster his status with his German ally. There Angelo had disappeared, along with the tens of thousands of other Italians unaccounted-for and presumed dead. The growing certainty of that death, coupled with the lack of any proof which would permit its recognition, had infiltrated the Zen household like an icy draught from the frozen battlefields and prison camps where the Armata Russa had met its miserable and ignominious fate.
But where Zen’s father was a dominating absence, celebrated at every turn by stilted sepia photographs of a figure whose third dimension increasingly seemed as hypothetical as the existence of an afterlife, Silvio Morosini was one of a crowd of unequivocally real presences jostling and clamouring for attention in the household of which he was the nominal head. In fact this position was filled by his wife Rosalba, who had been Giustiniana Zen’s closest friend long before her marriage and was not about to desert her and the fatherless only child now that Rosalba’s prediction that the union in question would come to no good had, God forbid, come true.
The result had been that Aurelio had grown up treating the Morosini house more or less as his own, and had often taken advantage of this freedom to escape from the intolerable spectacle of his mother weeping silently as she went about her work. The quarrels in Silvio’s and Rosalba’s home were frequent, open and vociferous, shows in which anyone present was expected to join, whether or not they were actually involved or indeed had any idea what the whole thing was supposed to be about. Everyone got their chance to yell and posture and strut about, and in the midst of these amateur dramatics the original cause of contention gradually frittered away, forgotten if not forgiven. The young Aurelio did not necessarily want to live permanently in such an atmosphere, but it certainly made a refreshing contrast to the stifling tensions of his own home, whose existence could not be admitted never mind assuaged.
Like the whole neighbourhood, and the city itself, the Morosini house was of course a quieter place these days. Rosalba had continued to keep in touch by letter and phone when Giustiniana moved to Rome to be with her son, and Zen had thus been kept informed of the children’s marriages and of Silvio’s death the previous year. It was nevertheless a shock to be confronted by the old woman who came to greet him at the head of the stairs. On the phone, Rosalba still sounded much the same as ever, and Zen had irrationally been expecting her to look the same. But the vigorous, bustling woman he remembered now bore an astonishing resemblance to his fading memories of Rosalba’s grandmother, a legendary figure who had been born before Venice belatedly joined the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. All her features had drawn inwards towards each other, like a contracting universe, producing a compact, miniaturized version of the face he remembered.
‘Welcome home, Aurelio!’ she cried, embracing him repeatedly. ‘I hope you found everything as you expected it. I did the best I could in the time, but it’s no easy task to bring a house back from the dead when it’s stood empty for so many years.’
Zen smiled warmly at her.
‘You did wonders, Rosalba. A real miracle.’
Seeing her as she really was, he felt ashamed of having agreed to let her do the heavy work of preparing the house for his arrival, even though it had been her idea. He had merely phoned to let her know he was coming and to ask her to see if the house, to which she had a key, could be made habitable. He might have known that she would not trust anyone else to do the job properly.
‘Let me take your coat,’ Rosalba continued animatedly. ‘I expect you find it cold here now you’ve got used to living down south.’
Zen sniffed the air appreciatively.
‘Something smells good.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing much. A little risoto de sepe col nero followed by sole. Come in, come in!’
Installed in the large armchair in the living room, Zen sipped a glass of sparkling wine while Rosalba gave him a crash course in local news and gossip. The armchair had formerly been the throne from which Silvio Morosini had dispensed judgements and decrees and generally lorded it over his unruly clan. At that time, Zen would no more have dreamt of sitting in it than of touching the firm plump legs of Silvio’s elder daughter Antonia, who was then causing him so much distress and bewilderment as the first member of the opposite sex he found himself unable to dismiss as ‘just a girl’. Antonia, for her part, had regarded Zen as suitable football and playground fodder for her brothers, but of no conceivable personal interest to her whatsoever. And now she was a mother of four and an estate agent in Vicenza.
‘… always flying off somewhere on the other side of the world. My grandchildren know Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong better than they do our poor Venice. And when they do come, it’s just to gawk like everyone else. Families are what we need, not tourists! But what can you do? There’s no work, and the kind of rents they charge are just crazy, even though half the houses just stand empty…’
She broke off, perhaps remembering that the Zens’ house had been unoccupied since Giustiniana’s move to Rome.
‘Some more wine?’ she suggested, appearing in the doorway with the bottle. ‘And then we can eat.’
They were joined for lunch by a young woman who was introduced to Zen as Cristiana Morosini. A late and unexpected addition to the family, Cristiana had been a mere toddler when Zen had joined the police and left the city for a series of postings on the mainland. She was now a good-looking woman in her early thirties, with a slow, sensual manner and a striking resemblance to Zen’s memories of her elder sister. As she served the risotto, dark grey from the cuttlefish ink, Rosalba explained that Cristiana had left her husband, a local politician, after
