CHAPTER 1
Animula Vagula Blandula
Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis iocos
Hadrian
Ah, gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay!
To what unknown region borne,
Wilt thou, now, wing thy distant flight?
No more, with wonted humour gay,
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.
Byron
'I think I like it here' said Erich. None of us had spoken for some time and no one replied at first. Erich thought a long and heavy time before he said anything and this was a thought he had never uttered before, not even to Lev and Giovanni who knew him first. The fog slithered slowly and insidiously over the snow covered ice on the canal as we each considered Erich's statement. Under the connecting bridges where the Griboedov canal meets the Moyka there was little to distract us. What traffic there was made only soft and muffled protests about the conditions. Occasional voices drifted down, the words too tired to leave any meaning. We usually gathered here from the first days of November until the ice began to shift and stretch over on the Neva in the spring which comes late here. Since I had become the fifth and last member of the group we had never been disturbed here.
'I shall never be able to say that again'. It was Lev, the first, the oldest of us all whose deep, sad, slow singing voice always commanded attentive silence and would do so for long, long periods as he told how he came to be here and described a time and a place, a life and a love, long before any of us, even Giovanni, had been dreamed into existence. 'It saddens me to remain as I have since the first trees were cut, the first pilings driven and the first ditches dug; to know I cannot change these things or change myself. Before those things began was empty grief, the gnawing pain of loss and regret, the futile questions without answers; but it seemed as it ought to be. The winters came and the marshes lay still and rigid in the dark days. When the ice broke and pressed on our island, when the floods slackened and birds sang in the small green branches, when the mosquitoes and the mould told you it was summer as you fished in the reed channels, then it all seemed as it should be, always would be. The berries and the baskets of autumn, the slow dying acceptance of the season always suited my mind best, not that I had any cause to feel that my purpose had been fulfilled. All that was destroyed forever by one long man.' The silence that followed we had all heard before; a deep, rolling, long drawn out, immensely ancient thing from before there was speech; the first singing in the world.
We all heard it and remained still, absorbed in the depths of our being. Lev had told us, little bit by little bit, of his wife, the woman who shared the seasons and the uncertainties with him; the woman who had given birth to nine children. Three of those children had lived long enough to die of the fever that took them all: Lev, his wife and children: one Spring. They died in their mud, wood and reed house in the marshes. Their bodies and the house subsided into the mud, disintegrated and became a part of the marshland that had seemed to them eternal.
As I had grown older, like everyone else I knew, I'd listened to my friends repeat their stories, their jokes, their lies. My wife usually told them that she had heard it all many times before, that they were senile and that it never had been amusing anyway. I kept out of sight, stuck to the weather, the ball game and last night's TV, none of which interested me. People pitied me, thought me a wimp or a saint and invited us back for my sake only. I kind of agreed with them. Here none of us ever tell Lev that we had heard him say such things before. I think this is because it never was exactly as he had told things before. There were subtle complex changes; a different colour in the birch leaves of autumn, a different note as the first ducks returned to the lagoons, a different turn of the mouth when one of the children smiled. We were the listeners, the only listeners, to an infinite set of variations on the theme of living in and with a primaeval world, a world of slow deep movement, unchanging over centuries, that was at its end. The changes were incomprehensible to Lev even now. The world of words and ideas, the grandchild of Lev's world, had destroyed it.
Giovanni was the next to speak. 'Yes, Erich, I know that feeling but I had it the moment I and my master Domenico set foot in this place. All the new palaces, the new churches, the paved roads by the new cut canals, the energy of men creating new beauty; all this excited me. I felt that I could make things here, create my own new beauty and make money, enough money with which to return to Impruneta a wealthy and respected master of my trade. I saw mud and stinking ditches turning into golden domes, pillars and beautiful statues. I saw an empty place, inhabited only by otters and herons becoming the glittering centre of an aristocratic, wealthy, witty world stretching to Rome and beyond. That I was only a journeyman plasterer with few enough jobs to my credit in Florence, did not suppress my delight in this place. And so it remained until I finished my work.'
Giovanni was, in certain ways, the youngest of us all in spite of his years. It was he who showed us how to drift into that Georgian restaurant just off the Nevsky Prospekt. It was he who moved with the music there, gently, almost imperceptibly at first then with all his fragile being as we watched the dancing, heard the drum and the pipes and the wildness of the singing and knew that life was good for the dancers that night. It was Giovanni who pulled us out and made us watch the long legged girls with stiletto heels and miniskirts parade their bodies for all to see and enjoy. Giovanni has an erotic imagination that matches that of anyone I have ever known and he used it to the full while telling us exactly how he would reduce each girl to quivering, spent ecstasy. We enjoyed seeing the delight that Giovanni took in his meticulous professional descriptions far more than thinking of the pleasures he described.
Behind all he showed us was a very different place, a place of poverty and death where the sun shone on the graves of his brothers and sisters. His mother too had died and left him as the only survivor of the hopes and sweaty joy of his parents. His father had been killed by a French mercenary in a tavern brawl when Giovanni was ten, two years before his mother's death of a sudden fever in the early spring. His uncle only wanted him gone and arranged an apprenticeship to Domenico, a condition of which was that Giovanni moved to Florence to live with Domenico's family. Living with the family consisted of dirty straw to sleep on in the stable and just sufficient food to avoid starvation. He told us of the dark stone faces of the palaces with the smell of horse shit and open sewers. He told us of the first time he found a dead man whose dark gelatinous blood spread over his back from the narrow cut in his shirt where the knife had entered. Giovanni had turned and run, soundlessly, from the shadow and stench of that alley by the Bargello and told nobody what he had seen. That Florence was not a place to know anything, was a lesson that you learned early and well if you were to survive to an age when you might realize your dreams.
Domenico told him one morning of an offer that had been made by a...
