you know? You don’t know anything, any of you. You come with your money-ah, Venice. Why? To look at pictures. So how would you know? A man like him. That’s who your mother meets? A murderer. But that’s all over, yes? Let’s give a ball, like the old days. Ha. Did I ruin the party? No, have some champagne. Let’s just go on like before. Such a nice man. A doctor. Who cares what he did?” All in a rush, snatching at the air for words, trying to keep up with herself.
“Stop it,” I said, taking her by the shoulders. Behind us a few passengers looked up, curious. A lovers’ quarrel. A thief with a coat. Nothing was what it was.
She twisted away. “Leave me alone. Go back to America. Take him. A souvenir of Venice. No one will know him there. Ha. He thought no one would know him here. We’re supposed to be dead. And then one comes back. They say that, you know? When you least expect it. A party. And here comes death, pointing the finger. So that’s me now. Brava. Oh, look at your face. You think I’m crazy. You don’t know anything about it. For you it’s all nice- kisses, La Fenice, Mama and her nice friend. Maybe it’s better not to know. To be so lucky-”
“Stop it,” I said calmly, holding her still.
She shook my hand off and gathered her coat. “I’m getting off.”
We had rounded the lower bend in the canal and were pulling into San Toma, the Rialto lights up ahead in the distance. I took her hand, holding it down.
“Sit. I want to know.”
“What?”
“What happened. Tell me about the nod.”
She looked at me, slightly puzzled.
“You said with a nod of his head. How?”
“In the hospital.”
“Your father was sick?”
“Yes, sick. Dying. But they didn’t want to wait. Why wait for God when you are God? The Jews weren’t dying fast enough for them.”
“Who?”
“Who. The Germans, their friends. They searched the hospitals. Sometimes there was an informer. Grini- you’ve heard of him? No. He used to help the SS. In the nursing home, even. They took them out on stretchers. But not this time. This time there was only your friend. He pointed out my father to them. ‘That one,’ he said, with the nod. ‘Over there.’ So the SS took him. You know how he knew? My father told me later. From medical school. They were both at medical school, so he knew him.”
“And you were there?”
She nodded.
“Did he point you out too?”
“No, I did. Myself. My father told them I was a neighbor, to protect me.” She paused. “Not his daughter. A visitor. Maybe they believed him, I don’t know. Maybe I could have walked out, hidden somewhere. But how could I do that? Just leave him? Sick. And they find you. In the end, always.”
“So you went with him.”
She nodded. “And all for nothing. When we got there, they looked at him-who wants a sick Jew? Let the Germans take care of him. So, another train. And I said-imagine how foolish-I’ll go too, someone has to take care of him. And they laughed. Don’t worry, you’ll go later. At that time the head would send only the hopeless cases. And the children. The Germans wanted everyone, but he kept the workers back. To save them, maybe to bargain later, I don’t know. Later everyone went. Unless you were special.” She stopped, then looked up. “So you see, it was for nothing. They just put him on another train. I always wondered, did he die on the train? He was so sick. He’s on the list at Auschwitz, but maybe he was dead when he got there, who knows? Nobody can tell me for sure. Nobody came back, not from that train. No one. That’s what he thought, none of us would come back. No one would know. But I know.”
We were passing under the high bridge, a dark space between the wavy lights on the water.
“And where do I see him? Meeting Mama. So I ruin her party. Oh, such behavior. Terrible. And she’s with a man like that. My god. She thinks she knows who he is. None of you know. What are you doing here, all of you?”
I said nothing, letting the words drift off, like vented steam. She lowered her head.
“You should go home.”
“No,” I said. “Not now.”
She looked at me, then turned to the window. “Oh, and that solves everything.”
“What do you want to solve?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Nobody pays, do they? In a few days, it’ll be-gone. Gossip. ‘Poor man. I heard about that girl. She must have been crazy.’ And everything goes on. Nobody pays, not those people.”
“Yes, they do. In Germany people are starving. Everybody’s paying.”
“You think it’s the same? Hunger? No, they won’t pay, not the murderers. That’s how it is now. Everybody pays but the murderer. And here? Signora Mimi is planning a ball. And the murderer is going to marry a rich American.”
“No, he’s not. You think I’d let that happen?”
“Because of this?” She shook her head. “It won’t make any difference. He’ll explain. Some story. And she’ll believe him. And even if she doesn’t believe him, it’s better to forget, no? Put it in the past. Easier.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“I don’t have to be fair. He pointed at my father. At me. You be fair.”
“He didn’t point at you.”
“No,” she said quietly, “I did.” She looked out the window, then back at me. “So you can feel better when you see him at dinner. He didn’t point at me. Just the sick old Jew.”
“I’m not going to see him at dinner,” I said evenly. “Stop.”
“She’ll thank you for that,” Claudia said, and then she did stop, folding back into herself again, staring out the window. We were almost at San Stae.
“We should go back. I’ll take you home.”
“No, one more stop.”
“What’s there?”
“My old house. I thought I would never go there again, but tonight I want to see it.” She turned to me. “You want to see Venice? I’ll give you a tour. Not the Accademia. This one.”
I said nothing, pulled along by her mood, unsure where she was going now. No one else got off at San Marcuola, so we were alone in the empty square, near a dark silent church and a few streetlamps. She asked for a cigarette.
“You know, my father would never allow it, a woman smoking in the streets. And here, so close.”
We started walking north into Cannaregio, gloomy long canals and workers’ houses.
“He would have been ashamed. Imagine. Of this. Think of the rest of it, what it would have done to him.” Talking to the air, to herself.
We passed a shop with Hebrew lettering.
“This is the ghetto?”
“Almost. The edge. In the beginning you had to live on the island, where the campo is. It’s easy in Venice to separate people. One island, three bridges. At night they put chains across, to keep everybody in. Except sometimes they let a doctor out, if a Christian was sick. My father used to say, no wonder the Jews liked medicine. It got them out of the ghetto.”
“But that was the Middle Ages.”
“Until Napoleon,” she said, playing tour guide. “Then you could live anywhere. Of course, most people stayed here, nearby. It was what they were used to. You see the buildings at the end, how high? They ran out of space in the ghetto, so they had to build on top. Nowhere else do you see buildings like this-six stories, seven. So many stairs.”
We turned off the main street into the narrower Calle Farnese, where we were shielded even from moonlight, forced to rely on a corner light and a few slivers coming from the shuttered windows.
“Here,” she said, stopping about a block before the bridge. “You see up there? Those windows? My aunt lived
