After Love (21 page)

I would begin tutorials with a short introduction to a topic, then distribute the material and let them work on their own assignments. The room we used was big and dark and my favourite spot was a window leading to a tiny balcony.

One day I was standing near the window when I noticed how dark it was becoming outside. Just as I went to switch on the lights, there was a huge flash of lightning. Another ripped the sky in half. A crash of thunder followed. It rolled over the buildings, bringing a massive downpour. Drops as big as marbles rattled the roofs and hit the dense heavy surface of the canal water with such power that it seemed to warp. All water traffic stopped except for two motorboats speeding in opposite directions.

People ran inside. Only the foolhardy tried to brave it out in
vaporetti
and water-taxis. Suddenly lights in the windows of buildings across the canal began to splutter like splinters from sparklers. My heart trembled as I felt the tremors of still more rolling waves of thunder. The building literally shook, shuddering from right to left.

The storm was over in ten minutes. But overawed by its furious beauty we decided to end the class. ‘Let's go to a café,' suggested Simone. We found a table, removed the empty cups and plates and sat down to listen to a young woman singing Duke Ellington.

That evening I hurried home to see if Anna had been out in the storm. I wanted to share my experiences with her. But she wasn't there. I found her note on our bed. ‘I'm with Sophia, rehearsing. Call if you need me. I may spend the night at her place. See you in the morning. Love you.'

I phoned and Sophia told me that she had just gone out with Marco and Isabella to get ice-creams.

I liked Isabella, Sophia's six-year-old daughter. She was unusually perceptive for her age. I would look after her when Sophia and Anna were rehearsing or performing.

Sophia told me that Isabella liked my stories and the sketches I drew to illustrate them. Her favourite was about Misha, the clever monkey, and Gena, the stupid crocodile. She and I made drawings together as I spoke. Some of her drawings were fresh and creative and I encouraged her to work with different materials: pencils, crayons and even watercolours. Natasha would have been proud of what we produced.

Isabella and I fastened the drawings together to make a little booklet. There was Misha on a mango tree, Gena the crocodile in a lake, Misha riding on Gena's back as he swam in the lake. The most beautiful drawing of all was a mango tree loaded with fruit.

‘It looks more like a Christmas tree to me,' I told her.

‘It really does, Zio Vasu,' she agreed, and laughed.

The faces of her monkeys resembled my face.

‘Why?' I asked her.

‘Because I like you,' she said.

‘And who is the crocodile?' I asked.

‘Probably my Papa,' she replied.

Sophia was impressed by Isabella's booklet and agreed that she showed enough talent to enrol her for special art classes.

Anna

Isabella had grown very fond of Vasu and he adored her. Towards me she was either indifferent or formal. I didn't mind, because, to be honest, I don't know how to handle children. Vasu was a natural. All children loved him. And when he was with them all his inhibitions disappeared.

We went to the Lido to swim and Marco and Isabella came with us. The summer bathing season had almost ended so it wasn't very crowded, although it was still hard to hire a bathing hut for the day. We had a long lunch at a beachside café, but Vasu didn't have much time for us. Isabella had brought her Chinese kite and the two of them ran along the beach to test it. Then they sat on the beach drawing figures in the sand, chased one another and kicked and threw a soccer ball.

Only when Isabella was tired did Vasu find time to sit with us. Marco tried to engage him in conversation, but he didn't respond. Even Sophia couldn't persuade him to talk. As for me, I was used to these unexplained periods of silence. To change him would be impossible. Often the idea that I had to live with this for the whole of my life filled me with dread and even loathing.

‘You don't like Marco, do you?' I asked him that evening.

‘He's very nice and handsome.'

‘But you don't like him?'

‘I do. I just don't know how to relate to him. He's always so happy, so keen, so chatty.'

‘Is that bad?'

‘I just can't keep up with him. He's so quick at everything he does. Confident and arrogant. A go-getter.'

‘So you don't like him. Does he intimidate you?' He didn't respond. I waited and asked him: ‘Do you want me to stop seeing him? I can, if that's what you want.'

That was a tricky question for him. To say either ‘yes' or ‘no' would have been hard. Saying ‘no' would have meant that he was lying and ‘yes' would have proved that he was jealous, which was demeaning to him and to me.

So of course he didn't say anything. I stopped probing. That evening we cooked a meal together. Nothing special: just nice pasta with a sauce that I had learnt from Sophia. We hadn't done this for a very long time. He kindly let me do the cooking and helped to chop and slice the vegetables.

I opened the bottle of wine which the manager of the bistro had given me when we performed there. Vasu and I made love afterwards and we realised that we hadn't done that for a very long time. ‘Just too busy, I suppose,' I said, I with my music and wanderings about the city and he with his work.

Afterwards, around midnight, I went out on the balcony to smoke and he followed to sit with me. He shouldn't have. Smoke is bad for his asthma. I was dreading that he would ask me to play. Luckily he didn't and we returned to bed.

‘Did you notice that we've stopped sleeping naked?' he asked. Of course I'd noticed, but this time I didn't reply. Then after a few moments he opened up. He told me that he was worried about me and Marco. Rehearsing and playing music together would eventually draw us closer. He had, he said, observed something similar watching me and Vika play.

‘One day you'll find that I'm superfluous and discard me,' he said.

‘But I love you,' I wanted to say. I didn't. I knew what he would have answered: ‘So what? Love comes and goes.'

‘What about our marriage?' I could have asked him. ‘Doesn't that count any more?

‘Maybe it has turned into a piece of paper signed in a registry office,' he could have replied.

Soon he was asleep, as always with his arm around me, holding me tight.

But he was right that I had been spending more and more time with Marco, not only at rehearsals with Sophia. Often we weren't rehearsing, just flirting and daring each other to go a bit further. Some of my notes to Vasu about being with Sophia were lies.

With Marco I felt at ease, happy and adventurous.

The first big row between Vasu and me was not long in coming. I was expecting it, because a week before we had got into an argument about a university function he wanted me to attend. I told him that I was busy and could not cancel a performance. He reminded me that it wouldn't look good if he went alone to a ceremony chaired by one of his professors. They were unveiling a significant monument created by Arbit Blatas, the well-known Lithuanian sculptor who had lost his mother in the Holocaust. He had installed seven bas-reliefs on the wall of the Jewish Ghetto in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. Only a few days earlier I had walked past the wall not far from Ponte dei Tre Archi and seen them being installed.

Vasu was visibly upset, rare for him. He reminded me of my Jewish grandfather, Tonya's father. He told me that I had a moral obligation to attend. I was enraged and told him not to bully me by dragging my grandfather into the argument. I didn't care if I was Jewish or not. The monument would still be there when I had time to go and see it. It was mean and unreasonable of him to force me to do something I didn't want to do.

I stormed out and didn't come home that night. I phoned to say that I was with Sophia. Luckily he didn't come to check, because of course I wasn't.

I blame Marco for the big row which followed that first argument. One evening Vasu had come back from work a little earlier than usual and I was sitting on the balcony smoking cigarette after cigarette. I knew that this was stupid, but only cigarettes helped alleviate the terrible bouts of weeping which occasionally overpowered me. Otherwise I would just cry and cry.

Vasu saw me on the balcony and said: ‘I hate your smoking.'

‘I don't care. Just leave me alone.'

He came out on to the balcony and sat with me.

‘What's wrong?' he asked.

‘Nothing and everything.'

‘Please tell me.'

I told him that I had called Aunty Olga and that she hadn't been in. I had so wanted to talk to her. I didn't tell him that I had also tried Vika's and even Sergei's numbers.

He understood that there was something wrong but that by asking again and again he wouldn't get anything out of me. So he finally left me sitting there, still smoking, and went back to the kitchen to cook.

After he had prepared the meal he came out again, and that's when I told him that I had lost $2000 at the casino on the evening he had asked me to accompany him to the unveiling ceremony.

‘Which casino? You mean the one in the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi?' he asked.

I nodded.

‘So what!' he unexpectedly laughed. ‘There's no harm in losing money in a building with such heavenly windows.'

He was certainly trying to calm me by making light of my serious error of judgement, but it somehow sounded very different. I felt my hand suddenly move to grab a piece of broken brick lying in the balcony floor.

He saw my hand move and looked into my face, stunned. Then he got up, took his coat and walked out the door.

He didn't return home that night.

I went to his office the next morning. He told me that he had slept on the floor in his sleeping bag. I apologised. He kissed me and told me that I shouldn't worry about money because the advance he had received for his book would more than cover my losses. But he would have to work even harder to meet his publisher's deadline.

We had breakfast in a café and he told me all about the storm he had witnessed standing at the window in his office.

‘Peace,' I said, as I was leaving.

‘Of course,' he replied. He kissed me and returned to work.

Vasu

Peace. We both knew that peace would never come to us again. We had failed each other, miserably.

We both needed some time apart to sort out the mess

Perhaps that is why at first I wasn't surprised by her absence. I had gone to Milan to attend a conference and on my return, she wasn't at home. I assumed that she was at the music shop, went to the office and tried to call her several times. The shop's phone was constantly engaged.

Late that afternoon I called into the shop to surprise her with the little present I had bought for her in Milan. The woman there told me that she hadn't seen Anna for more than a week and was wondering if she was all right. On the way back home I phoned Sophia and was told that she had last seen Anna on Monday, a week ago, and although she had appeared a little out of sorts, she had been friendly and chatty. She would phone Marco, she told me, and find out if he knew where Anna was. Then she would call me back.

I was tired from the travel and the hectic work of the conference. I took a few pills, turned on some music and went to bed. The following day I kept myself busy at work, taking my class on an excursion around Venetian gardens. I returned to the apartment quite late in the evening.

When I opened the bedroom door I saw on the floor, near the bed on Anna's side, a photo. I picked it up.

It was the only picture I had taken of her in Venice. Anna and Sophia were sitting on the Lido beach quite early in the morning before the sun had properly risen. Little Isabella was still asleep, stretched out between them, her head in her mother's lap and her legs resting on Anna's right thigh. Sophia was staring at the camera but Anna's head was turned a little to the left. On the sand in front of them lay her glass bangles: red, yellow, blue and green. Just near Anna's kicked-off sandal were her feet in their full magnificence, dusted with moist brownish sand speckled with mica flakes.

I put the photo back on the bedside table between two heavy books to flatten its folded corner. I noticed Anna's slippers poking from under the bed. She had gone but she was still there: her hair on the pillow, her smell in the sheets, her toothbrush in the glass and near it the tube of paste, squeezed as always from the middle.

I looked into the mirror above the washbasin and saw her face. ‘What should I do?' I asked her. Her face in the mirror told me to go for a walk.

And so I did, to walk her presence away.

That first night I found myself on the island of Torcello. I don't remember anything about my walk except that I returned the next morning and slept again in my office. On the second night I walked again. I walked through the alleys and up and down the bridges, many times finding the deadends forcing me to turn back. Soon I was lost and had to sit down and lean against damp walls waiting for the map in my mind to tell me where to go. I walked and walked and found myself in the Ghetto. I noticed it only when I discovered that I was going round and round in circles.

It reminded me of the narrow alleys of Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, with their tall three-, four- and even seven-storey buildings, simple and shabby with their peeling plaster, cracked red bricks, broken windowpanes and white sheets hanging on washing lines even at night. I bumped into boats and sat for a while in one of them, waiting for the moon to slide across the alley.

In one narrow street near a bridge a dog barked, got up and followed me. I didn't run away but stopped and let her catch up. She was friendly and stopped a few steps away, looked at me in a confused way and then wagged her tail. I searched my pockets and found a piece of dry bread which I offered to her. She smelt it, didn't like it, and turned away.