Salamander (20 page)
Authors: Thomas Wharton
The news that uncertainty had returned at last to Venice brought everyone out, and soon the deserted streets were packed with the usual crowds, with buyers and sellers, with the gazers and the gazed at.
In the afternoon, as they made their way along the riva to the Piazza San Marco, Flood and Pica could not help but overhear the stories about them. To Flood it seemed as if his earlier imaginings about pursuing his trade at sea had run on ahead into the future and fulfilled themselves, while he himself lagged behind.
As they passed the grey façade of the Ospedale, Pica tugged her hat lower and hurried by without looking up. In the swarming, noisy piazza they sat at a table under a busy colonnade, where they awaited a reply to the letter, and the spoon, they had sent Kirshner the metallurgist that morning.
Out of nowhere a waiter materialized and took their order. He asked them if they had seen the ship.
– What ship? Pica asked.
– The floating bookshop, the waiter said. The
Bee
.
In the crowded streets, Flood had not only heard rumours about himself but about the metallurgist as well. He was reputed to be of fabulous age, every morning extending his already unnatural lifespan through the drinking of strange fruit juices and the ritual stretching and bending of his limbs. The much-feared Council of Ten had been investigating Kirshner for some time, it appeared. Responsible for the moral health of the city, the Council regularly employed spies, thieves, and arsonists to safeguard and maintain that health. If you learned that you had made it onto their Index of undesirables, one certain truth loomed: someday they would come for you, spirit you away to their prison from which few returned, the Leads.
It could be days or months
, Pica had informed him earlier, having heard all about the Council of Ten while growing up at the Ospedale.
Or even years. But they would come for you
.
Flood listened anxiously to these tales of dread, and wished he were back aboard the ship. This briny Venetian murk, like a room that moved with him, blocked out any glimpse of sky, any suggestion of distance, but it did have an alarming tendency not to behave like proper walls, to drift and thin out, allowing apparitions through, like the one who appeared suddenly at their table, a tall figure costumed as the Jew: wide-brimmed black hat, huge hook nose tied on with string, devilish two-pronged beard.
With the threat of the Council hanging over him, why had the metallurgist, or his agent, chosen to disguise himself as his own grotesque double? Flood was about to confirm that this was in fact the person he was supposed to meet here on the stroke of three, as the letter had stipulated, when the costumed
man leaned towards him and breathed, in even poorer Italian than his own,
– How much for a night with your girl-boy?
Flood was already turning away when Pica, much to his surprise, spat at the masker a gondolier’s insult,
Coglione!
The man stepped back and stared, his eyes darting from Flood to Pica and back again.
– Do you know the metallurgist? Flood said.
The man’s tongue began to flick in and out like a snake’s, a gesture that was difficult to interpret in a face hidden behind artifice. Just then a hand tapped Flood on the shoulder and a voice whispered a single word.
Kirshner
. He turned to see a boy, a year or two older than Pica, he guessed, in a cloak and tricorn.
The boy held up a tarnished spoon.
– I saw them first, the costumed man protested halfheartedly as the boy led Flood and Pica out of the piazza. Couldn’t we share?
– Foreigners, the boy muttered. He tugged down the brim of his hat and increased his pace.
As he hurried to keep up, Flood asked the boy why everyone in the streets seemed to be so restless.
– It’s the wind of doubt. Rolls in once every few months. Stirs everyone up.
– I think we brought it with us, Pica said.
– There will be a celebration tonight.
The forse
. The carnival of uncertainty.
They passed a man lighting lanterns despite the fact that it was mid-afternoon, and further on an old woman in rags squatting over a grate and whistling as she loudly emptied her bladder. They were followed for a while by a shabby figure in
sackcloth, shouting and crying after them about the eighth level of hell being nearly full. Eventually, after a few more turns and windings, his blood-curling shrieks faded away.
After stumbling in the gloom over two prostrate bodies reeking of drink, they came at last to a narrow bridge barred by a heavy chain. A uniformed man sitting in a sentry box leaned out slowly to look them over, glimpsed the boy, and unhooked the chain to let them through. They crossed an empty, echoing campiello and descended a short flight of uneven stone steps into the narrowest passageway they had seen yet, where the sky was finally shut out by the rain-gutters of the leaning walls.
The boy took them through an arch and under a long sottoportico until he halted at last before an unmarked door set in a wall of featureless lead-coloured stone. Fastened to the doorframe was a small metal tube with a tiny window in its side, in which Flood glimpsed a rolled-up scrap of parchment. The boy unlocked the door and opened it, releasing a grey cat that slid like quicksilver into the shadows.
– You’ve got a message, Pica said. In your letter-box.
The boy’s solemn face broke into a grin.
– Thank you for letting me know.
When they were inside he shut the door and led Flood and Pica along a dim passage. At the end of it they climbed warily down another uneven flight of steps, to a subterranean canal that smelled sharply of mould and damp. The light of a file of torches flung dancing water shadows onto the vault of stone over their heads. Flood stopped and gazed around him, his breath suddenly coming in short gasps. Pica touched his sleeve.
– I’ll be fine.
They went along the edge of the canal to a landing where a
small boat was tied. The boy climbed into the rear of the boat and they followed, sitting in front on the narrow wooden slats. The boy poled them along a tunnel lit by ventilation shafts in the arched roof just above their heads. From time to time Pica glanced over her shoulder at him, and whenever his eyes met hers, a suppressed smile would tug at the edges of his mouth.
When they emerged from the tunnel they were in a sunlit garden alive with insect hum and the twitter of sparrows. The world was a green well in which pollen swirled like falling snow. The boy helped them climb from the boat and led them along a curving path bordered by a dark box hedge, at the end of which knelt a white-haired old man, digging with a spade in a bed of tomato plants. Various articles of furniture stood around him on the grass: a type cabinet, a table displaying a disordered array of files and other metalworking tools, a lacquered folding tray on which sat the remains of a meal. The old man raised his head at their approach.
– I’ve brought them, Grandfather.
– Thank you, Nathan.
The boy turned to go, and as he passed Pica he grinned once more. The old man struggled to his feet and greeted them with a bow. Pica curtsied, a remnant of her Ospedale upbringing that Flood had not seen before.
– This is my workroom, Kirshner said, slapping at his dusty breeches, as well as my kitchen garden. Light is important for both. But forgive me.
He patted the empty bench beside him.
They approached and sat, waiting for him to speak again. Kirshner had not yet looked directly at them, and this close Flood could see that the metallurgist’s face was pitted with tiny
scars, the pupils of his eyes clouded. Something had shattered into atomies in front of him, Flood guessed. A hazard of his profession.
Kirshner felt in the basket at his feet and plucked out two tomatoes.
– Hungry?
Flood declined.
– Too bad. These are the best vegetables in the city. How about you, young lady?
– Please, signore.
– Catch.
He tossed Pica a tomato.
– Thank you.
– You have your mother’s voice, my child.
Pica lowered her eyes and blushed.
The old man sighed.
– I wish I could tell you where she is. But I am afraid the last contact I had with the House of Ostrov was when I filled your father’s order for type. Twelve years ago now. Though I’ve thought of you, Mr. Flood, many times since then. And strangely enough, not long ago I had a visit from someone who might be able to help you in your search. The Abbé de Saint-Foix. He told me that you had left the Count’s employ, and so he had taken charge of your project. He was eager to learn if you had commissioned anything from me in that regard.
– Did he tell you where he was going?
– He did, in rather loud hints. He wanted me to know that he had been invited to Alexandria by the Ottoman governor. Some prestigious post at court, although he wouldn’t say exactly what it was. For my part, I gave away even less by way of help or advice. Not even a spoon.
– The spoon, Flood said. I didn’t understand why you sent it.
The old man smiled.
– Neither did I, then.
THE METALLURGIST’S TALE
He was born not far from the Castle Ostrov, on the other side of the mountains, in a little Polish village. His father Avram was also a metalsmith. He made candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and brooches, and often experimented with alloys, on more than one occasion almost blowing himself up in the process. He travelled often to Krakow to find out what was in fashion and to hunt for new commissions. Each time he returned he would sit Samuel on his knee and tell him about what he had seen on the way there and on the way back. On every trip he invariably encountered something odd or amusing to relate. Avram was a bear of a man, tall and long-bearded, and Samuel would gaze up at his father as he told his stories, in a kind of worshipful fear of those glittering black eyes, that great grinning mouth. Only many years later did he suspect that most of what he had accepted as truth was nothing but the purest invention.
Finally, when Samuel was old enough, he was allowed to accompany his father on the great journey to Krakow. When they got to the city, he was silent and sullen, and when his father wanted to know what was the matter, he asked why they hadn’t met that peasant.
What peasant?
his father asked.
The one you said you saw the last time, carrying a saddle on his back
.
The boy had been certain he would see everything his father had seen, as if the sights along the road existed as a fixed and eternal tableau for their eyes. He thought it deceitful of the world not to remain as his father had described it, but he would be fooled no longer. He would believe only in what he had seen for himself.
When Samuel began his apprenticeship, Avram Kirshner would often hold up a soup spoon or a knife that they had just made, and instruct his son to remember how strange and miraculous it was that everything in the universe is really a word, a thought thinking itself in God’s mind.
He spent as much time scouring obscure old kabbalistic tomes as he did making brooches and candlesticks. And he was not alone. Half the men in the village came to the house in the evenings to discuss these phantom visions of dead mystics. Avram and his sad-eyed colleagues would sit up all night drinking tea and arguing about the hidden meanings in mystical texts, about the
en-sof
, about the shattering of the vessels of light and the Angel Metatron, whose little finger spans the distance from the earth to Saturn. They talked as if the infinite was as real, as close and solid and undeniably
there
as a table, a chair, a floor you could stomp your foot against.
When he was old enough to leave home, Kirshner moved to Venice, a place where men trafficked in what could be seen, touched, tasted, bought, and sold. As a parting gift from his father he asked for one tarnished spoon.
While the old man was telling his story, the wind rose and a cloud passed across the sun. A drop of rain touched the back of Pica’s hand. She stirred, looked up at the changing sky, anxious to be gone now that she knew the old man could not help them. When the sun emerged again its light seemed to be rising out of the earth.
– Perhaps, Mr. Flood, the spoon does taste the broth, Kirshner said. Tell me, the imaginary book your letter mentioned, did you have a name for it?
– The
alam
, Flood said. I called it the
alam
.
–
Alam
. That is good. I like that. There have been many other names for it, of course.
Zohar. The paper-thin garden. Il’bal
.
– Other names. How could there be?
– In imagining your
alam
, Mr. Flood, you became a member of the world’s oldest reading society, one that has existed for centuries, under countless names, in every part of the world. A society dedicated to the dreaming of fabulous, impossible, imaginary books. Have you heard of the ninety-eight volume
History of Silence?
– No.
– There are many others, only a few of which I myself have heard of, and even fewer of which I’ve read.
The Book of Water. A Universal Chronopticon. The Almanac of Longing. The Formulary of the Ten Thousand Things
. They are all books imagined by the society, and some of them, beginning as insubstantial dreams, have become paper and ink.
– I’ve done that, too, Pica said. Sometimes, before I open a book, I imagine it’s some other book.
Flood stared at her.
– Thank you, Countess, Kirshner said. Over the years I’ve come to understand that a book itself desires to be. Dream a
book, no matter how outlandish or unlikely, and that book will find a way to exist, even if it must wait a thousand years.
A gust of wind stirred the tops of the trees and died away again.
– Twelve years ago I began to think again about infinity, Kirshner said. And books.
He lifted a green cloth from the tabletop to reveal an iron chase about the size of a large folio volume, already filled with a forme of assembled type.
– There’s still an empty space, Pica said. There, in the middle.
