“I wanna hear ‘Volare,’” he grumbled in English, his voice rough and carrying an accent she couldn’t quite place. He held a crumpled and dirt-stained 10-euro note. He was perhaps 35, though it was difficult to be precise. He stood at least six feet tall, muscular, almost athletic, though the thought seemed ridiculous.
“‘Volare’ is a song, sir, not a piece of violin music,” she responded, with more teenage ungraciousness than was, perhaps, wise.
His face, as much as she could see behind the black unkempt beard, seemed sharp and observant. More so, it occurred to her, than most street people who were either elderly Italians thrown out of their homes by harsh times, or foreign clandestini, Iraqis, Africans and all manner of nationalities from the Balkans, each keeping their own counsel, each trying to pursue their own particular course through the dark, half-secret hidden economy for those trying to survive without papers.
There were other more pressing reasons that made hers a bold and unwise response. The money her uncle had given her had not been much to begin with, though more generous than his meager living as a Warsaw piano tuner ought to have allowed. Two months before, on the day she turned 19, he had abruptly announced that his role as her guardian was finished, and that it was time to seek a new life in the west. She chose Italy because she wanted warm weather and beauty, and refused to follow the stream of Poles migrating to England. The grubby, slow bus to Rome had cost 50 euros, and the room in a squalid student house in San Giovanni swallowed up a further 200 each week, as did the language-school lessons in Italian. Her adequate English meant she could get some bar work but only in tourist dives at what the owners called “the Polish rate”-four euros an hour, less than the legal minimum wage. She ate like a sparrow, pizza rustica, precooked, often disgusting, but less than two euros a slice. She never went out and had yet to make a friend. Still each week the money from Uncle Henryk went down a little further. She could not, in all conscience, call and ask for more.
“I know it’s a song,” the tramp replied with an unpleasant sneer on his half-hidden face. Then he crooned a line of it, in the voice of a long-dead American singer she’d heard when her mother and father played music on their cheap hi-fi to remind themselves of their days in the States, before they returned to a new, free Poland in search of different lives. The name of the singer came back to her: Dean Martin. And the tune too, so she played it, pitch perfect, from memory, improvising a little after the fashion of Stephane Grappelli, putting a leisurely jazz swing on each inflected run of notes until the original was only just recognizable.
She was good at the fiddle. Sometimes, if she was bored or there seemed to be someone musical in her audience, she would pull out some sheet music stuffed into the case, ask a spectator to hold it, then play Wieniawski’s Obertass mazurka, with its leaping fireworks of double stopping, harmonics and left-hand pizzicato. Both of her parents were musical, her mother a violinist, her father an accomplished pianist. Together they had provided her with a musical education from before she could remember, in a household where music was as natural and easy as laughter, right up until the black day they disappeared and she found herself under the wing of Uncle Henryk.
The tramp stared at her as if she’d committed a sin.
“You screwed with it,” he spat. “Bad girl. You ought to know your place.” He stared at his own clothes: a grimy overcoat that stank of sweat and urine, with a belt made, perhaps a little theatrically, out of rope. “One little step up from me. Nothing more.”
Then he threw a single euro in her violin case and stomped off toward Largo Argentina, the open space where she used to catch the bus back home, fascinated always by the wrecked collection of ancient temples there-a ragged, shapeless gathering of columns and stones populated by a yowling community of feral cats, a piece of history only she and the passing tourists seemed to notice any more. She didn’t like cats. They were bold, aggressive, insistent, climbing into her fiddle case when it was open to collect money. So she kept a small water pistol, modeled on something military, alongside her music and rosin, and used it to shoo them away when the creatures became too persistent.
The bum caught up with her four times after that. Twice at the Trevi Fountain. Once in the Campo dei Fiori. Once outside the new museum for the Ara Pacis, the peace monument erected by Augustus that now lived in a modern, cubist home by the hectic road running alongside the Tiber. She was surprised to see him there. It didn’t seem the usual kind of place for street people, and she caught him staring through the windows, engrossed in the beautifully carved monument inside she had only glimpsed from the street too, since paying the entrance fee was beyond her. Homeless men rarely looked at Imperial Roman statuary, she thought. Most of them never looked much at anything at all.
And now he was back near her again-on this hot, sunny summer morning in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure at the weekly market her uncle had told her about. It took place at the foot of the Via dei Polacchi-the street of Poles-and made her homesick every time she went. This was where the poor, migrant Polish community gathered in an impromptu bazaar that was part economic necessity, part reaffirmation of their distant roots. There were cars and vans, all rusty, all belching diesel as they arrived bearing plates from Warsaw and Gdansk. Quickly, not wishing to draw the attention of the police, they threw open their doors and trunks and began selling all the goods that Polish immigrants could not find or, more likely, afford in their new home: spirits and sausage, ham and pastries; some clearly homemade, a few possibly illegal.
Felicia knew none of these people. But sometimes the poor were the most generous, particularly when they knew she was Polish too, alone in the city, still a little lost. The Berlin Wall had tumbled to the ground when she was 12 months old, an infant in some small apartment in a suburb of Chicago. She knew this because her parents had told her so often of the joy that followed. Of their own expectant return to the country they had fled in order to throw off the shackles of Communism.
There had always been a shadow in their eyes when they spoke of that decision. As she grew older she knew why. When they left Poland it was a world of black and white, and they returned to one that was a shifting shade of gray. The bad days before she was born was a time of secret police and cruel, arbitrary punishment of dissent, but no one had to travel thousands of miles to a distant country to earn a living. They said something good had been lost alongside the visible, more easily acknowledged bad. Talking to the old men and women who gathered at the foot of the Via dei Polacchi she had come to realize there was a gulf between them and her that could never be bridged, a strange sense of guilty loss she could never share. Yet there was a bond too. She was Polish, she was poor. When she played the right notes-a mazurka, a polonaise-there were misty eyes all around and a constant shower of small coins into the fiddle case.
And on this day there was the tramp too, with a hateful look in his eyes, one that said, she believed… shame on you, shame on you.
As she bowed a slow country dance she told herself that, if he continued with these attentions, she would upbraid him, loudly, in public, with no fear. Who was a tramp to talk to anyone of shame? What gave him the right?…
Then, feeling a hand on her shoulder, she ceased playing and turned to find herself staring into the amiable, bright blue eyes of a middle-aged man in a gray suit. He had a pale, fleshy face with stubbly red cheeks, receding fair hair and the easy, confident demeanor of someone official, like a civil servant or a school headmaster.
“You play beautifully, Felicia,” he said in Polish.
“Do I know you?”
He took out an ID card from his jacket and flashed it in front of her face, too quickly for her to make much sense of the words there.
“No. I am a Polish police officer on attachment here in Rome. There is no need for you to know me.”
She must have looked startled. He placed a hand on her arm and said, in a voice full of reassurance, “Do not be alarmed. There is nothing for you to worry about.” His genial face fell. “I am simply performing an unhappy task which falls to this profession from time to time. Come, I will buy coffee. There is a small place around the corner.”
The man had such a pleasant air of authority that she followed him automatically into the Via dei Polacchi, even though she couldn’t remember any cafe in this direction.
They were halfway along when he stopped her in the shadow of an overhanging building. There was such sadness in his eyes, a sense of regret too.
“I am sorry,” he said in his low, calm voice. “There is no easy way to say this. Your uncle Henryk has been killed.”
Her stomach clenched. Her eyes began to sting. “Killed?”
“Murdered, as he worked. With two other people too. Such a world we live in.”
