Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (24 page)

Kazan learns that Ana Luzzatti is an art historian, who was born and raised in Israel, and married Laszlo's father, Alberto, when she was an art history student in Rome.  She has the wild enthusiasm of an outsider for everything Italian, punctuating every other sentence with “
Che bella!” 
Her manner of speaking is slightly operatic—like Julia Child describing
beurre blanc
.  Everything is
bellissima, sfarzoso, magnifico, incredible.
  Her driving is equally enthusiastic, if not death-defying. 
Kazan adores her immediately.  

She zips over Ponte Vespucci, up some narrow streets, and parks in a piazza in front of a scaffolded church, Santa Maria del Carmine.  “The Brancacci Chapel is only open a few hours a week.  Come, come.  Father Gregorio is waiting.”  She hustles the boys inside, speaks in lightning-fast Italian to the priest, who leads them to a frescoed chapel and clicks on an electric light.

The chapel is floor-to-ceiling color, the figures nearly life-sized.

“Isn't it marvelous.  They call it the Sistine Chapel of the early Renaissance.  This one is by Masaccio,
The Tribute
Money. 
Can you believe he died when he was only twenty-six?  The most important Renaissance painters all studied this painting: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Verocchio, Raphael.  They all took his ideas about light, air, perspective, color, landscape, psychology, and the human body.  Look at how the light sculpts the figures, as if coming from the window up there.  Look at the life-like feet. 
Bellissimi piedi.
  So planted on the earth.  They give an almost three-dimensional weight to the figures.  The faces are so individual, so emotional.” 

Kazan immediately sees what she means.  The figures almost look more lifelike than photos, and he wonders how that is possible.

“Look at Peter's face, so surprised, full of disbelief.  'Really, you want me to get money for taxes from the mouth of a fish?  You've got to be kidding.'  And John's face, so serene.  He believes Jesus implicitly.  A masterpiece of drama and perspective.” 

She steps closer to
a
small panel of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.  “Masaccio also painted this one.
 
Look at Adam, how tormented he is, his abdomen, convulsed with sorrow.  You can almost hear Eve's wail.”  Ana's voice trembles with emotion, her hand to her chest.  “No painter, before or since, as ever told the story with such angst, such physical and psychological reality.”  

“She certainly likes paintings,” observes Kazan as he and Laszlo follow Ana back into the sunlight.

“I'm just glad she has someone else to torment.”

“I think it's interesting.”

They squeeze back into the car and drive to the Luzzatti home, a small yellow  villa off Viale Michelangelo, overlooking the city.

“Wow,” Kazan says.

“It's a sweet little place isn't it,” says Ana.  “Costs a fortune, of course—all the renovations and upkeep.  It's crazy.  I wouldn't do it again, but I adore it.”  A slight balding man greets them at the door.  “There you are darling,” Ana croons, “my hero.”  Alberto apparently had taken her Mercedes to the mechanic and gotten the radiator fixed.

In Kazan's eyes, Ana seems far more Italian than her reserved husband, who obviously dotes on her.

Alberto is a quiet gentle man, who talks in long philosophical observations.  He asks Kazan what he wants to do with his future, and other thought-provoking questions.  Kazan cannot imagine his father ever asking him such things.  Ahmed calls him once a month at the dormitory, always on a Sunday night, and asks how classes are going.  How he's doing in math.  If he's playing soccer.  Does he have friends.  He never asks what he thinks or feels or wants.

Kazan notices how Laszlo talks to his parents as if they were friends, and calls them by their first names. 

That evening, Kazan eats the best meal he's ever had in his life, and sleeps in a room with French doors, under a spread that looks like a tapestry, in a seventeenth century bed of black walnut.  He steps onto the balcony and watches the moon rise over Florence until his lids grow heavy, then crawls into the downy bed and falls asleep. 

“Today we are going on a
grande avventura.” 
Ana greets Kazan the next morning as he sips his cappuccino.  “You and Laszlo will be my detectives, my Holmes and Watson.  Pia packed us a picnic, with a nice Chianti.  It'll be splendid.  We'll pick up fresh bread on the way.  Everyone must come.”

Laszlo's sister, Gabriella, complains the most.  She is not really anorexic.  Kazan thinks she is gorgeous, aloof and glamorous.  She has an odd way of posing all the time, as if she expects someone to take her picture.  But in the end, she agrees to come, as long as she can bring her boyfriend.

Thank goodness they take the Mercedes rather than the Cinquecento: Ana, Alberto, Gabriella and her boyfriend, Laszlo, and Kazan.  Plus a gigantic picnic basket and blankets.  Ana does the driving.  And the talking. 

They drive southeast into the gray-green wall of the Pratomagno Mountains for about twenty miles.  Rolling hills of vineyards and olive groves, guarded by rows of cypress trees, standing like sentries along the hill crests.  Even in winter, Kazan can feel how rich the earth is.  As if it was almost human, breathing, warm, fragrant, nurturing.

His eyes drink in the beauty and he feels a little homesick.  But he's not homesick for Turkey.  It feels like this is his homecoming, as if Tuscany is his home and he's finally returning.  It makes him emotional.  He thinks if he died right now, he'd be happy.

Ana drives up a steep curving road to a rustic medieval town, and parks by a tiny chapel that is boarded up and covered with scaffold.  They get out.  The moist air carries odors of roasting coffee beans, rich earth, and wet stones. 

“We are looking for the two missing panels from Masaccio's 1426 Pisa altar piece,” says Ana, stretching her back.  “He painted thirteen panels for the Carmelite church in Pisa, which was dismantled in the early seventeenth century during a renovation.  Bernard Berenson discovered the center altarpiece with the Madonna and Child.  Ten other panels resurfaced.  But the two panels flanking the Madonna are still missing.  The only description we have is from the historian Vasari, who described them in 1568 as depicting four saints—Saint Peter, John the Baptist, Saint Julian, and Saint Nicholas.  Today we might find them.  Isn't it exciting?  I got a call from Father Failli, who said he'd discovered two panels in the cellar of this little chapel.  Are you ready, Signor Holmes, Signor Watson?”

Laszlo rolls his eyes at Kazan.

Ana knocks on the door of a house a half block away, and Father Failli greets her with a ring of skeleton keys.  The two of them chatter in Italian as they walk to the crumbly chapel.

Only Ana and Kazan follow the priest inside.  The rest of the family wanders off in search of espresso and a bakery.

The panels turn out not to be Masaccio, but perhaps, in Ana's opinion, the work of one of his assistants.  In any case, they are far too small for the altarpiece, “crude and labored with overworked finishes,” she opines, clicking her tongue in opprobrium.  “You can see the foreshortening is all wrong with that little angel.  Even if it was painted to be seen from below, it is all wrong.  No, definitely not Masaccio.”

She doesn't seem disappointed in the least, and sets out to find the perfect picnic spot overlooking a valley of trussed up vineyards.  Kazan traipses behind.

“Che bella!
Have you ever seen anything so beautiful.  It almost makes you believe in God.  I live in a household of agnostics, but you, Kazan, I know you understand.” 

She takes his hand, and the two of them gaze out over the rolling vineyards, the  yellow winter light, the orange-tiled farmhouses.  Below the serpentine road, a narrow stone bridge crosses a roaring brook, part of the old Roman road.  Tiny buds of green on the naked pear trees peek through the porridge gray.  Winter spelunkers.  The sun breaks through the clouds.  Dew dappled grape vines glisten like diamond necklaces. 

“
Incredible,”
she gasps.  “
Come un quadro.” 
They look in silence, as they did in the chapel. 
“I once read that the Quran lists ninety-nine names for God,” she whispers.  “All the creative possibilities present in God.  What a beautiful thought.
” 

“We use a rosary, a
subha,
to remember them all,” says Kazan. 

“That's all you need to know, isn't it,” she says dreamily.

It seems strange to Kazan to be talking with Laszlo's mother about God and art.  It also seems perfectly natural.  

“We'd better get back to the others before they eat all the
olive ripiene. 
Laszlo will gobble them all if he can.” 

The picnic reminds Kazan of family picnics in Turkey, except for the sandwich meat
—coppa, prosciutto, salametto
.  “Jews aren't supposed to eat pork, either,” says Ana, “but when it tastes like this, how can you resist?”  No one does.

For Kazan, the three weeks in Italy pass like a dream.  Every day a revelation.  The museums of Florence, the beaches of Viareggio, three days skiing in France.  No one in the family talks about politics.  Their interests are art, nature, and really really good food.

“How did you like my family,” Laszlo asks on the train back to Berchtold.  He hands Kazan a
pancetta
his mother had made for the trip.

“I think they are the most wonderful family in the world.”

Laszlo laughs.  “A bunch of loonies. 
Tutti pazzi.
”  He picks out the prosciutto and dangles it above his lips, guiding it into his mouth.

Kazan decides to ask his father to send Ana Luzzatti a Turkish rug next time he calls.  One with the muted colors of Tuscany in winter.  He wants her to know he'll always remember.

After he and Laszlo return to Berchtold and throw themselves into classwork, he thinks about Italy and the Masaccio and the rolling hills of Tuscany.  He wonders what it would be like to have parents who act like enthusiastic tutors. 

When he falls asleep, he is afraid he'll wake up and find himself back in a cinder block hut in Turkey. 

But this never happens.

Ozymandias

Spring is riotous in the mountains.  Kazan lies awake at night listening to the creeks rushing with snow melt.
 
He jumps out of bed when the birds start chirping, the perfume of alpine flowers greeting him, the cold metallic smell of melting ice.  He can hardly believe the school year is almost over. 

“Are you going home for the summer, Laszlo?”

“Nah.  I'm going to
Israe
l
to work on a kibbutz.”

Kazan likes the sound of that.  He would like nothing more than working on a farm over the summer.  Laszlo couldn't care less.  “Ana wants me to go.  She thinks it's important to experience our Jewish roots.  There's nothing to do there.  Except milk goats.  I guess I'll read a lot.  What about you?”

Kazan shrugs.  He feels a gray dread blooming inside his chest.  He feels lost.  Many of the other students talk about trips they'll take with their parents—Africa or Vietnam or Tibet—some glamorous adventure.  Some will intern at embassies.  Others will go to expensive camps—tennis, dressage, computers, mountain climbing.  Their lives are constant activity.

Kazan yearns for the peace of his village.  And yet, he has a scary feeling that he will never go back. 

The next day he gets a letter from his father. 

Ahmed has decided to move the family to Amsterdam.  Since he already has a business incorporated in The Netherlands, moving there will not be difficult, although there is much bureaucratic paperwork.  He doesn't say anything about their home in Turkey.  Is he selling it?  Is the land so worthless and he so rich that he can just leave it?  What about the other people in the village?  They depend on his father's handouts to pull them through rough patches.  Is he going to abandon them?  What about the village school, which his father financed?

On the one hand, Kazan is excited about moving to Europe.  He can hardly wait to explore the cathedrals and bridges and canals.  On the other hand, leaving his village in Turkey is like ripping his heart out.  It seems like a huge betrayal.  “Amsterdam is full of opportunities,” his father writes, but the word
opportunity
simply makes Kazan think of the word
opportunist. 

A week later, Ahmed calls and tells him to take the train to Zürich that weekend, and gives him the name of a restaurant in which to meet him.  It's the first time Kazan has traveled alone, and he is very excited.  He takes a bus down from the mountains to Lugano.  From there, he takes a train.

The train ride thrills him.  Impossibly high bridges entering impossibly long tunnels.  White clouds billowing down steep mountains.  Chiseled white faces of snow.  Streams gushing out of the sides of rock like broken pipes.  Fields of yellow flowers.  He feels the brutal beauty of the mountains, chilling and cutting his insides like ice crystals.