Rosethorn (35 page)

Perhaps he was an unassuming British lord of a crumbling castle in Yorkshire and owner of whippets that help him hunt pheasant when he wasn’t intriguing Sera by showing up in the unlikeliest of places. She laughed at her wildly improbable fantasy and made a mental promise to strike up a conversation next time they crossed paths so she can find out who he really was.

At that moment, perhaps sensing that he was being watched, the stranger turned his head and seemed to look straight at Sera. Reddening, she pointed the camera to the left in a none-too-subtle pretense of looking elsewhere. She nonchalantly tucked her camera back into her bag and strolled out the front doors to resume her walk around the lake.

Although it was a very picturesque town set against the Julian Alps, visiting Lake Bled had not been Sera’s idea. Nor was Venice. She had pitched Slovenia as the next hot destination and the editor at Vagabond had agreed. However, instead of an article on Lake Bohinj, which was a quieter, not as well known lake town, her editor had instead strongly suggested she write about the more touristy Lake Bled.

Further, he had asked for yet another article on Venice. As if it had never been done before, he had suggested an article about the last
squero
, gondola boatyard, in Venice. He had asked casually, sounding like he was asking her to stop by the store on her way to work, that a day or two in Venice while en route to Slovenia would be enough to write a thorough explanation on the state of gondolas.

“Will do,” Sera had replied, with lackluster enthusiasm. She would have to sacrifice time exploring Istria in neighboring Croatia, her destination after Slovenia, to write something on a well-exploited subject.

“The entire city’s sinking under the weight of tourist mobs wanting an expensive Disney ride. What else is there to write about?” she wanted to say to her editor, but bit her tongue instead.

Even if he was more concerned about the bottom line rather than exploring off-the-beaten paths, he had also bought five of her last articles. Venice sells, he would just say. She should be flattered and grateful of his assurance that he would purchase both articles on Lake Bled and Venice as yet unwritten, he was that confident of her abilities.

Writing about gondolas in Venice was like writing about the glass-blowers of Murano or even the problem of the sinking city—it was a cliché. As Edith Wharton had once famously expressed over a hundred years ago, what could she write about Venice that had not been written before. Rather grudgingly, Sera had flown into Marco Polo and, being ever frugal, taken the bus, then the vaporetto to her hotel, which was five minutes from Piazza San Marco. Everything, she had discovered over her last two rather disappointing trips to Venice, was five minutes from the famed Piazza.

Her initial visit had been during her first trip to Europe, right after she graduated from Columbia three years ago. Since she had never been anywhere except up and down the East Coast during her college years, Europe was to be her Grand Tour. With little more than a backpack and a camera, she had gone from England, to France, Spain, Germany, then Italy.

Venice, she had saved for last, and best, she had thought. After three months of stimulation, perhaps she had been too weary and homesick to have been in awe of the floating palazzos on water, the stone bridges, the elegant decay that the city embodied. Venice was like an aging actress on a stage of tarnished mosaics and peeling baroque illusions—once beautiful, but with decrepitude lingering underneath the thick surface of makeup.

Doubtful of her harsh first impression, she had made a second visit. After a lengthy stay at Elise and Marcello’s palazzo in Umbria, where she had whiled away lazy summer days devouring plates and plates of fried zucchini blossoms and growing brown under the Italian sun working in their sprawling garden, she had, with regret, taken the train from Florence to Venice.

Yet even as she walked out the doors of the Santa Lucia train station to be greeted by what should have been Venice at her most breathtaking, Sera felt nothing but indifference.

When Sera told Elise this, concerned that perhaps she was missing something, Elise had laughed and assured her that she had felt the same about Venice the first few times. “Get out of the Piazza,” she instructed Sera over the phone. “I know that’s where everybody gathers, but walk, get lost in the labyrinth of
calles
, linger in lesser known
campos
, perhaps then you’ll find her charm."

Sera had obediently done just that, but still the magic of Venice eluded her. It was during this third time that Sera realized what it was that disturbed her about Venice, that although she loved ruins and places steeped in old stories, Venice made her feel too sad. It was one of those places whose beauty only came alive when visited with a lover. She had been traveling by herself for years now, neither feeling alone nor lonely, and yet in Venice, she felt both, unbearable longing almost overwhelming her.

The sinking city was not without her treasures. Sera’s second trip had yielded part three of her series on the world’s best cemeteries. The first and her favorite had been Pere Lachaise in Paris, to be followed by the ones in New Orleans. The cemetery on island of St. Michele had the right combination of eeriness, forlorn beauty, and graves of the famed to qualify as one of the world’s best, with an especially creepy footnote that bones of the lesser known were uprooted and relocated to the mainland after 50 years.

No such scintillating subject waited for her this third time around, just 2,000 words regarding the ubiquitous symbol of Venice, the gondola.

She had chosen her prey carefully, a young gondolier who had yet to make a name for himself, for he and his rather plain gondola were consigned next to a remote campo. The nearer to the Piazza and the more elaborately decorated the gondola would indicate an experienced gondolier and therefore more guarded and less susceptible to her charms.

After a few minutes of her smiles and halting attempts in Italian, the earnest young gondolier, Gianni, had offered her a free ride. Knowing that the going rate was for 100 euros, Sera had been tempted, but declined very prettily, and instead secured a promise that he would show her around the
squero
in the morning.

She had blown Gianni a kiss over her shoulder while she walked away and as she turned, she had caught the amused face of a man leaning over a bridge across the way. Feeling unmasked, she felt the seductive smile she had worn for the gondolier drop. The man looked almost knowing, gazing at her with a directness that implied he had seen through her practiced and calculated flirtation. She had kept on walking down the cobbled walkway, knowing that the stranger watched her until she was out of sight.

The next night, her last in Venice, she and Gianni had rendezvoused at Piazza San Marco, where they danced first to the band at Florian’s then crossed to the rival band at Quadri’s. She had been tempted again by the young gondolier’s boyish charm, his long-lashed brown eyes and shy smile.

He had shown her that morning, as promised, the
squero
, where artists had been busy crafting the gondolas with skills they had taken 10 years to learn. To thank him for being such a gallant guide, she told Gianni to meet her at the piazza at dusk.

As he twirled her in this romantic, open-air ballroom, whispering outrageous flattery that only Italians could get away with, she had again spied the stranger from the night before sitting on an outside table at Florian’s by himself. He was watching them, or her, not too intensely so that she felt alarmed, but with a
wistfulness that she recognized.

It was then that she decided, in his tweed blazer and brown corduroys, he must be an English professor alone on holiday. Perhaps he felt as she did, even in Gianni’s arms, alone and lonely in a city made for lovers. She felt sadness for him and for herself and in the future would have occasionally remembered him sitting alone at Florian’s as a mental image of how Venice always made her feel, had she not seen him again standing at the opposite end of the Dragon Bridge in Ljubljana some days later.

She had been surprised but not surprised; it was almost as if she had expected him to be there—a mirror of her own feelings.

As she started photographing the carved green bronze dragons that flanked both ends of the bridge, annoyed at lovers loitering mid span to ruin her long shot-she wondered briefly if she would ever again be one of them, half of a pair so immersed in the other that all this beauty and grandeur would merely fade into the background. And as soon as she thought it, there he was.

She could have said hello to him then and asked in a slightly mocking yet friendly tone, “Are you following me?" But she didn’t.

She had made the mistake before when, lonely in her solitude, she had indulged in flings during her travels. Inevitably, no matter how exotic and romantic the surroundings, she would become disappointed or irritated, then wish fervently to be alone. Not one had ever continued after the holiday was over. Lovers met in far-flung places satisfied her constant restlessness only temporarily.

Once she had traveled to Egypt with a current boyfriend, entranced with the idea of riding side by side on camels amidst the pyramids. The stress of travel, the heat, and an unfortunate bout of explosive diarrhea contributed to their undoing, however. They were barely speaking to each other by the time they got to Cairo and all but over upon reaching the Great Sphinx. The Egyptian disaster did not cause the problems in that relationship. It had only made it impossible to ignore.

So although she found the English professor to be handsome and rather mysterious, Sera had finished taking her photos, then continued on to the castle above Ljubljana without acknowledging that she had noticed him.

Ljubljana had not made an impression on Sera for it reminded her of half a dozen other European cities like Salzburg or Vienna. Bled pleased her more and would provide excellent photos to accompany her article, especially of the crystal blue lake and its enchanting island in the middle.

Once she had checked in at her penzion, she had immediately set out with her camera and notebook and taken an exploratory walk about town, checking out restaurants and cafes, approaching a few locals, mostly young people, who were more open to her questions and spoke better English. Having indulged in too much of Bled’s famous cream cakes, vanilla custard in between layers of flaky pastry, Sera vowed to tackle one of the many mountain trails the next day as both penance and research. She had been circling
the lake and had stopped by the Grand Hotel when fate, it seemed, had led her once again to cross paths with the stranger.

It was a matter of time now, Sera realized. Perhaps tonight when I have dinner at Bled Castle, he will be there or tomorrow as I reach the summit of the mountain, so will he. Perhaps it was all a coincidence, but she felt that they were moving towards that moment when a meeting would be unavoidable.

She stopped at the dock by the hotel and watched as a wedding party, a bride in a white gown and tulle veil, a groom in a three-piece suit, and their guests were ferried over to the island in pletnas, wooden canopied boats twice as wide as a gondola and manned by a single oarsman.

According to legend, on the island of Lake Bled used to stand a pagan temple dedicated to the Slavic goddess of love, Ziva. It was considered to be very romantic and lucky to be married in the island’s baroque church and so couples from all over would hold their ceremonies there. To show their fitness for marriage, brave grooms would carry their brides up the 98 steps to the church. And for additional insurance, couples could always ring the wishing bell of the church belfry.

She now watched with apprehension the pletna bearing that afternoon’s wedding party struggle against the northern wind, which had grown fiercer since her arrival at Bled. The oarsman, who stood on the platformed end like a Venetian gondolier, expertly maneuvered his two oars so that once his pletna reached the midpoint between the dock and the island, Sera felt reassured.

Shivering, she wrapped the long ends of her scarf twice around her neck and tucked her camera inside her coat. 

Why not, she thought as she approached a waiting pletna and handed over her euros. The pletna looked bigger and sturdier, if not as beautiful and sleek, than a Venetian gondola. It was wide enough to accommodate at least 10 people and felt solid. The oarsman of the pletna she boarded was the picture of stocky solidity, with thick, muscled arms and strong legs.

A photo of the couple’s wedding ceremony and even a brief interview in the midst of newly wedded bliss would lend her article that extra touch of romance she knew would please her editor, and so she disregarded her fear of crossing water, even though the pletna, which was still tied to the dock, was rocking too much for comfort.

The oarsman poised at the platform pointed to some people approaching the dock, indicating that he wanted to wait for more passengers before heading out to the island. An excited British family, a mother, father, and two boys, got in, followed by the stranger in his tweed and corduroys. Sera would have laughed if she were not so nervous. The stranger sat across from her, a smile on his lips as if he too wanted to laugh.

So it starts, Sera thought as she met his eyes.

Seeing that there were no other passengers adventurous enough to cross the lake in this wind, the oarsman unwound the chain mooring his pletna to the dock and pushed off.