Miss Garnet's Angel (17 page)

But Vera wouldn't hear of it. ‘No, no. I am absolutely fine. I can quite easily find the stop. I shall call you tomorrow and let you know our plans.'

Julia walked back into the courtyard with her and watched her over the rail-less bridge beetle off up the narrow
calle.

And the blessed relief of being alone! Feeling she might now look less inhibitedly around the cool interior, Julia wandered back inside the church to inspect Tintoretto's tomb. A notice beside described how the painter had flown into a rage over the execution of a portrait. The row which broke out had been so violent that Tintoretto had been obliged to hole up in the church as a consequence. How tremendous to have the courage of one's emotions! But the Venetian nobleman, object of the painter's displeasure, could no doubt take it. One couldn't really howl and throw things about, like Tintoretto, at Vera, as she had wanted to do.

The door to the right opened and a priest came out; another part of the church! Pushing against the heavy doors she entered a side chapel.

Before rows of candles sat an effigy of a woman, a solid-looking baby on her capacious stone lap. Of course! The Madonna dell'Orto—the eponymous Madonna who was found in a local's garden, of which Sarah had spoken.

Julia approached the broad-beamed Virgin and as she did so a figure, crouched at the statue's foot, started up from behind the row of burning candles and was by the door through which she had entered before she registered who it was.

*    *    *

‘Sarah, where is your apartment? I've always been meaning to ask.'

Julia, returning from the Madonna dell'Orto, had gone by the chapel and had found Sarah packing up her things.

‘In the Ghetto. Why?'

The Ghetto, once the province of the Jewish settlement in Venice, was close by the area she had just come from. ‘I was up near you, then, today.'

The girl's fair hair made a halo of the early evening sun. With her androgynous shape and face she might be described as ‘angelic'. But something held Julia back from the revelation she had come to make. If it was Toby (and she did not seriously doubt that it was Sarah's twin she had seen praying by the stone Madonna) evidently he did not want his presence in Venice to be known. Inexplicably, Julia felt she should protect his obvious desire for anonymity.

‘You must come and call.' Sarah smiled and for a second Julia felt guilty that she had not divulged her impression of the figure she had watched hurrying from the side chapel. She had followed, as swiftly and discreetly as she could, through the body of the church. But when she had emerged into the courtyard there was no sign of him. For a while she
had stood, shading her eyes from the sun, searching along the
fondamenta
after a hurrying shape. She was as certain as she could be that it was Toby; there was something in the way he held his neck.

But if so, for whatever reason, it was information she found now she was reluctant to share. ‘How nice, I should be delighted. You can give me tea for a change!'

‘How was your friend?'

‘Tiresome.' Julia stopped herself from grimacing. ‘She's gone off to see the Doge's Palace with her WEA party. But I took her to see
The Last Judgement
in the Madonna dell'Orto and she liked that!'

‘Oh yes. The scary Tintoretto. Tobes likes it too.'

So it probably was him in the church. The coincidence was too great for error. But for some reason still Julia did not feel like imparting the news to Sarah that her brother was still about in Venice. Instead she said, ‘He's in good company then. According to my friend, Ruskin thought it was the bee's knees!'

At home, sitting on her balcony, she wrote:
Death draws the line under the account i.e. the ‘sum' of one's life when all that can be has been. This must be why it is the moment of ‘judgement'. What does my life really amount to?

W
e followed the barley-growing valleys of the Tigris down for many miles, Kish running before us, and then struck east along a tributary which ran through undulating hills. The valley was narrow and the hills dusty, quite unlike the fertile green country we had left behind. It was a comfort to have Azarias at my side. He told me stories along the way which helped lighten the journey. One in particular, he called ‘The Grateful Dead', was about a man who buries a corpse he finds by the wayside and is later brought good fortune by the kind offices of the corpse-spirit, which reminded me of my father. I had never been from home before and the thought of my father and my mother often made me home-sick. But this I never let on to Azarias.

After a while we left the tributary and struck upwards to a new terrain. Here on the high plains we passed caravans of travelling nomad people, with their strings of camels and donkeys. Sometimes they would stop and offer us dates or the soured asses' milk they drank laced with honey. On such occasions Azarias left me to do the talking with the chief—stepping hack into his position of hired hand. Once, one of the mules in the caravan had developed fits and I heard from one of their muleteers that Azarias had run his hand along the creature's hack and over his flanks. After a while the mule opened its mouth with a great ‘hee-haw'-ing and then stumbled to its feet cured.

But mostly we saw no one. It was a peculiar time and often when we had walked many miles in silence I saw strange sights. At this date I do not know still whether they were phantasms, born of the harsh sun and lonely conditions. Once I thought I saw a bush burning in the distance. It was at a time when Azarias had gone ahead, seeking water. When he returned, the goatskins full to the neck, I could no longer see any trace of fire—so I had no witness of the sight. Another time a cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, hovered over us, seeming to follow us as we walked. But Azarias appeared unaware of anything unusual, and merely strode on with his long gait. Fearful of having him diagnose sickness and enforce a stop (as he had once before when I had visions of water and date palms) I kept the vision to myself.

Once I woke in the night with a dream in which Azarias
had left me. I cried out—as I cried when I woke as a child and found my mother missing—and getting up to look by the fire found Azarias gone and only Kish guarding it. Although I was ashamed of it at the time, I can say now that a desolation fell upon me then the like of which I have never felt before or since. I cried out again, this time in real fear—and in a lightning second, as if a hawk had dropped out of the sky, Azarias appeared out of the darkness and was with me again. That night he sang me to sleep—a sweet, high sound. I had heard from the herdsman that Azarias had sung such a song to the sick mule—like a bird's song it was; but such a bird I have never heard in this mortal life.

‘T
here is really no need,' Vera said.

‘But I would like to come,' said Julia, on the whole meaning it.

They were arguing over Vera's departure. Julia had suggested she should see them off at Marco Polo. Now that her friend was leaving she felt compunction at her own unfriendliness.

Peggy said, ‘It would be a help with the bags,' which made Julia wish she had not volunteered to go at all. But still, she rather fancied the long water journey past the Cimitero, the burial island on which the bones of dead Venetians were permitted to rest for ten years before being transported to the
more permanent ossuaries; out past the small, bobbing, diving birds which patrol the roped-off avenues of water leading to the airport.

The WEA party were travelling in the hotel boat. ‘I am sure we can squeeze you in,' Peggy had suggested; but Julia, preferring not to be ‘squeezed', took the public service.

At the airport she met Vera and Peggy, short-temperedly shunting baggage in a line for the check-in. Feeling rather useless she drifted off in search of coffee to bring back to them.

There was a queue at the coffee bar as well. While waiting, she amused herself observing the reflections mirrored in the window-glass of the surrounding shops: a man with a shaved head and a plait down his neck; a woman with green hair in shorts and high-heeled sandals; a businessman with a silver case—and Toby!

But where was he? Confused, she twisted around trying to locate his position in relation to the shaven-headed man. There was the green-haired girl and there, just ahead, was Toby, walking from her. Extricating herself from the queue Julia pursued his disappearing form across the hall and round a corner. He was walking rapidly and, half-running after, she saw, in her mind's eye, his sister's retreating back, walking away from her across the Campo Angelo Raffaele.

Ahead of her Toby crossed the hall. To her horror she saw the sign ‘Departures' and Toby placing—she was almost sure of it—a long flat package under the X-ray machine.

‘Toby!' she called out, desperate at the prospect of losing him. And again ‘Toby!' But her voice sounded thin in her own ears and he never looked back.

For the second time in two days she was left staring in dismay after the retreating figure of the missing twin.

W
hen you walk you have time for thinking. The journey was tough-going, the more so when we reached the spine of mountains which lies between Assyria and Media. But with each day climbing made me stronger, and perhaps it was because of this that a sense of something else also grew stronger within me.

I have not spoken of the great God Yahweh for whose sake my father would anger my mother and bury the bodies of our dead. My father was strict: as a child he would teach me the Torah, the books of law, and tell how the tribes had offended our God by worshipping the bull-god Baal and that because of this we had been taken as punishment out of our own land, which had
been promised us, to serve under the yoke of the Assyrians.

I had taken this idea in with my mother's milk and felt pity for the boys of other families whom my father said had forgotten the land of their fathers and were growing up godless heathens. And yet here, high on the mountain passes, climbing with Azarias and Kish, and the camels we had bought for the journey, I felt a new freedom: a relaxing of my spirits, as if away from my father and his austere God I had a chance to be someone else. My mother used to tell stories to me of the hills round Lake Galilee where she grew up; there was a light, she said, which dances on the waters there and she spoke of her grandmother Deborah, who had the gift of foresight and told how a day would come when a man would walk on that water and by that it would be known he was the Messiah. My mother spoke, too, of the high, green places and leafy sanctuaries which were shrines to the old country gods where our people had gone secretly to sacrifice. The old gods perhaps were kinder than our Only one, who (I dared to think as we walked further and further from home) was somewhat demanding. I had so often heard he was a jealous God and how his name was ‘Jealous'. It seemed to me that perhaps I understood why our God Yahweh had been forsaken: He was a hard taskmaster; maybe other gods asked less of their worshippers?

One day, these thoughts running through my head, I asked, ‘Do you worship, Azarias?' and then felt awkward for a man's god is his own affair.

But Azarias was not the kind who made you feel awkward. ‘Indeed,' he said. ‘You might say worship is my business!'

That was rather too enigmatic for me; Azarias was a hired hand who gave his labour in the marketplace. ‘How so?' I asked.

But to this he gave no reply. He was having trouble with one of the camels, a bad-tempered beast at the best of times, and he was talking coaxingly to it. Eventually he said, ‘Maybe you will find that out when we get to Ecbatana.' Then he whistled his bird-call whistle at the camel, who sneezed at him.

The mention of Ecbatana drove all god-interest from my brain. ‘Ecbatana? Why Ecbatana when we're for Raghes?' The city by the far sea, my father named it.

‘No,' said Azarias. ‘Not Raghes. Ecbatana.' He whistled some more at the camel.

At this I grew alarmed. ‘No, no, Azarias,' I cried out. ‘My father demands we go as quickly as possible to Raghes to recover his debt; he will be counting the days to our return. We must do as he desires.'

The camel seemed to have calmed down and was now walking sedately beside Azarias with its high-stepping gait. ‘Tobias,' Azarias said, and I realised then that this was the first time he had addressed me by name, ‘we shall not go to Raghes tonight. We shall go first to where your kinsman, Raguel, lodges in Ecbatana.'

I had never heard of this Raguel. ‘Listen,' I said, ‘I think
you misunderstand. In the absence of my father I am the master here and you the servant. So let's have no more about Ecbatana, please. We are going to Raghes and that's that!'

When I was a boy the king had a steward, a fat old eunuch who, never having promise or a child himself, took somewhat to me. He told me tales of the fierce Sea People and of terrible creatures from far-off lands. One he told of could look at you and turn you to stone with its glance. Azarias did not look at me like a basilisk, for his glance felt as if it could turn you not to stone but set you on fire—but that is the closest I can come to describing the effect it had upon me. All I know is I cried out, ‘Very well, very well, we will do as you say. To Ecbatana, by all means Ecbatana!' and I said nothing for several miles.