The Thief of Venice (27 page)

The service was nearly over. The rabbi unrolled one of the recovered Torah scrolls a few inches, and began reading aloud in Hebrew, using a silver pointer to follow the line—

"BERESHIS BARA ELOHIM ET HASHAMAYIM VE ET HAARETZ."

Homer beamed with pride, because he knew what it was, it was the first chapter of Genesis, because the rabbi was reading the line from right to left at the
end
of the scroll, which was really the
beginning
, because the Torah went
backward
with Deuteronomy at the front and Genesis at the back, and therefore Homer knew exactly what the Hebrew words meant because the first five books of the Bible belonged to both Jews and Christians alike—

IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH.

Everyone beamed. Eyes were wet. The rabbi covered the scroll in a velvet garment and carried it solemnly in procession with the other rabbis. The bells on the crowns and finials of all the Torahs jangled and clanged. Men reached out their shawls to the velvet coverings, then reverently lifted the knotted ends to their eyes and lips. There was more chanting and singing, and the service was over.

Mary and Homer moved out of the Scuola Spagnola in a friendly crowd. To their surprise they found the celebration continuing outside. Young men were joining hands and dancing. Their pace was slow and solemn, two steps forward, one step back, around and around.

Perhaps, thought Mary, the tramp of their dancing feet was shaking the pilings under the entire city of Venice, trembling the withered toes of Saint Catherine of Siena, ruffling the Veil of the Virgin, knocking together the saintly bones in the Treasury of Saint Mark. Well, of course that was silly, but dancing was a wonderful kind of worshiping.

Why didn't they dance in the First Parish Church in Concord, Massachusetts, instead of gazing at their shoes in prayer? What about all those other places where she had sat beside Homer on a Sunday morning?

They had listened, agreed, disagreed, and sung hymns, but they had never danced in Old West Church in Nashoba, or in the Church of the Commonwealth in Boston, or in Quaker Meeting in Nantucket, or in Memorial Church at Harvard, or in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in Oxford, or in the Cathedral of Florence, and of course most especially they had not danced at Walden Pond, which in spite of its eroded banks and trampled hillsides, in spite of its sunbathers and hikers and tourists, was a kind of church. It was another place where you could prod awake a wisp of devotional feeling. All it needed was a little dancing.
 

And so they left for home.

The sensible way to get to the mainland would have been to take the train. Instead they counted their remaining lire and splurged on a water taxi that carried them down the whole length of the Grand Canal.

"Look, Homer," said Mary, as the lagoon opened out before them, with the domes of San Marco rising like puddings beyond the Campanile. "Say good-bye to Santa Maria della Salute!"

Homer looked at the great domed church affectionately as the taxi streaked past it, neatly maneuvering between a pair of vaporetti—one going, one coming—and dodging a gondola floating like gossamer.

The gondola was carrying the party of English visitors who had been on holiday in Venice at the same time as the Kellys, visiting the same tourist sites under the same pellucid sky, poising their umbrellas against the same rain, splashing through the same high-rising tides. They too were ready to go home (all but the wife of the bishop, who had not finished collecting colorful observations for her Venetian novel).

"So long, good old Salute!" cried Homer, leaning far out over the spray to wave good-bye.

"Who is that man?" said Elizabeth Cluff-Luffter, staring. "He's waving. Do we know those people?"

"Surely not," said Tertius Alderney, member of Parliament from the Channel Isles.

"Americans, I think," sniffed Louise Alderney.

"I never saw them before in my life," said the bishop of Seven Oaks.

But the great church of the Salute seemed to know them. It turned on its hexagonal bottom as though keeping them in sight. Greedily they watched it float away behind them, relishing its Venetian double nature—because Santa Maria della Salute was not only an architectural marvel, it was a piece of fantasy, a fat round temple rising from the sea, its dome alive with springy spirals, its broad steps dropping down into the water as though Neptune himself might ascend, his long hair streaming with seaweed, his whiskers clotted with shells.

AFTERWORD

The character known in this book as Armando Levi was inspired by a real Venetian doctor, Giuseppe Jona. Doctor Jona, president of the Hebrew community and head physician of the Ospedale Civile, was revered in Venice as the doctor of the poor, "the Hebrew saint." After the German army descended on the city in 1943, Jona committed suicide.

Signer Cesare Vivante, currently the president in Venice of the Comitato per il Centre Storico Ebraico, knew Doctor Jona very well, and compares his suicide to that of the Roman stoic, Cato of Utica. In Dante's
Divine Comedy
, Cato was the guardian of the approach to Purgatory. In life, after losing a battle to Julius Caesar, Cato was reputed to have killed himself rather than survive the death of the Roman Republic. In the
Divine Comedy
, Virgil pleads with Cato for Dante's entrance to Purgatory—

'Tis liberty he seeks—how dear a thing
That is, they know who give their lives for it;
Thou know'st; for thee this passion drew death's sting
In Utica...

The words of the last paragraph of the fictional will of Armando Levi are really the words of Doctor Jona, as given in a book documenting this period,
Gli Ebrei a Venezia, 1938-1945
, edited by Renata Segre (Venice: Cardo, 1995).

Levi's grave as it is described in chapter 57 is like that of Giuseppe Jona in the Hebrew cemetery on the Lido. But Armando Levi's hidden collection is of course entirely fictional.

Raphael's
Portrait of a Young Man
was lost in World War II. In 1940 it was removed with many other works of art from the Czartoryski collection in Cracow. During the next two years it was shuttled back and forth between Germany and Poland in company with Leonardo's
Lady with the Ermine
and Rembrandt's
Landscape with the Good Samaritan
. After the war the Leonardo and the Rembrandt were returned to the Czartoryski Museum. The Raphael was never recovered.

The story of its disappearance and the history of what happened to other European works of art during the Second World War are vividly told in two books,
The Spoils of War
, edited by Elizabeth Simpson (Harry N. Abrams, 1997) and
The Rape of Europa
by Lynn Nicholas (Knopf, 1994).

My account of the fate of the Raphael is of course pure invention. No Torah scrolls or ritual objects are missing from the Scuola Spagnola, nor have any Aldine books or Bessarion manuscripts been added to the holdings of the Biblioteca Marciana. The Church of Santo Spirito and the Veil of the Virgin exist only in cloud-cuckoo-land.