Passion (9 page)

'Fm a woman,' I said, lifting up my shirt and risking the catarrh.

She smiled. 'I know.'

I didn't go home. I stayed.

The churches prepared for Christmas. Every Madonna was gilded and every Jesus re-painted. The priests took out their glorious golds and scarlets and the incense was especially sweet. I took to going to service twice a day to bask in the assurance of Our Lord. Fve never had a conscience about basking. In summer I do it against the walls or I sit like the lizards of the Levant on top of our iron wells. I love the way wood holds heat, and if I can I take my boat and lie direcdy in the path of the sun for a day. My body loosens then, my mind floats away and I wonder if this is what holy men feel when they talk about their trances? I've seen holy men come from the eastern lands. We had an exhibit of them once to make up for the law prohibiting bull-baiting. Their bodies were loose but I have heard it's to do with the food they eat.

Basking can't be called holy, but if it achieves the same results will God mind? I don't think so. In the Old Testament the end always justified the means. We understand that in Venice, being a pragmatic people.

The sun is gone now and I must do my basking in other ways. Church basking is taking what's there and not paying for it Taking the comfort and joy and ignoring the rest. Christmas but not Easter. I never bother with church at Easter. It's too gloomy, and besides the sun's out by then.

If I went to confession, what would I confess? That I cross- dress? So did Our Lord, so do the priests.

That I steal? So did Our Lord, so do the priests.

That I am in love?

The object of my love has gone away for Christmas. That's what they do at this time of year. He and she. I thought I'd mind, but since the first few days, when my stomach and chest were full of stones, I've been happy. Relieved almost. I've seen my old friends and walked by myself with almost the same sure-footedness that I used to. The relief comes from no more clandestine meetings. No more snatched hours. There was a particular week when she ate two breakfasts eveiy day. One at home and one with me. One in the drawing-room and one in the Square. After that her lunches were a disaster.

She is much prone to going to the theatre, and because he does not enjoy the stage she goes alone. For a time she only saw one act of everything. In the interval she came to me.

Venice is full of urchins who will carry notes from one eager palm to another. In the hours we could not meet we sent messages of love and urgency. In the hours we could meet our passion was brief and fierce.

She dresses for me. I have never seen her in the same clothes twice.

Now, I am wholly given over to selfishness. I think about myself, I get up when I like, instead of at the crack of dawn just to watch her open the shutters. I flirt with waiters and gamblers and remember that I enjoy that. I sing to myself and I bask in churches. Is this freedom delicious because rare? Is any respite from love welcome because temporary? If she were gone for ever these days of mine would not be lit up. Is it because she will return that I take pleasure in being alone?

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secredy relieved when the beloved is not there. That gnaws away at the night-time hours desperate for a sign and appears at breakfast so self-composed. That longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion, and plays roulette with anything precious.

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness.

We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not.

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

The Holy child has been bora. His mother is elevated. His father forgotten. The angels are singing in the choir stalls and God sits on the roof of each church and pours his blessing on to those below. What a wonder, joining yourself to God, pitting your wits against him, knowingthatyou win and lose simultaneously. Where else could you indulge without fear the exquisite masochism of the victim? Lie beneath his lances and close your eyes. Where else could you be so in control? Not in love, certainly.

His need for you is greater than your need for him because he knows the consequences of not possessing you, whereas you, who know nothing, can throw your cap in the air and live another day. You paddle in the water and he never crosses your mind, but he is busy recording the precise force of the flood around your ankles.

Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion. Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.

In our dreams we sometimes struggle from the oceans of desire up Jacob's ladder to that orderly place. Then human voices wake us and we drown.

On New Year's Eve, a procession of boats alive with candles stretched down the Grand Canal. Rich and poor shared the same water and harboured the same dreams that next year, in its own way, would be better. My mother and father in their bakery best gave away loaves to the sick and the dispossessed. My father was drunk and had to be stopped from singing verses he had learnt in a French bordello.

Farther out, hidden away in the inner city, the exiles had their own observation. The dark canals were as dark as ever but a closer look revealed tattered satin on yellow bodies, the glint of a goblet from some subterranean hole. The slant-eyed children had stolen a goat and were solemnly slitting its throat when I rowed past. They stopped their red knives for a moment to watch me.

My philosopher friend was on her balcony. That is, a couple of crates fastened to the iron rings on either side of her nook. She was wearing something on her head, a circle, dark and heavy. I slid past her and she asked me what time it might be.

'Almost New Year.'

'I know it. It smells.'

She went back to dipping her cup into the canal and taking deep swigs. Only when I had gone on did I realise that her crown was made out of rats tied in a circle by their tails.

I saw no Jews. Their business is their own tonight.

It was bitterly cold. No wind but the icy air that freezes the lungs and bites at the lips. My fingers were numb about the oars and I almost thought of tying up my boat and hurrying to join the crowd pushing into St Mark's. But this was not a night for basking. Tonight the spirits of the dead are abroad speaking in tongues. Those who may listen will learn. She is at home tonight.

I rowed by her house, sofdy lit, and hoped to catch sight of her shadow, her arm, any sign. She was not visible, but I could imagine her seated, reading, a glass of wine by her side. Her husband would be in his study, poring over some new and fabulous treasure. The whereabouts of die Cross or the secret tunnels that lead to the centre of the earth where the fire dragons are.

I stopped by her water-gate, and climbing up the railing looked in through the window. She was alone. Not reading but staring at the palms of her hands. We had compared hands once, mine are very lined and hers, though they have been longer in this world, have the innocence of a child. What was she trying to see? Her future? Another year? Or was she trying to make sense of her past? To understand how the past had led to the present. Was she searching for the line of her desire for me?

I was about to tap on the window when her husband entered the room, startling her. He kissed her forehead and she smiled. I watched them together and saw more in a moment than I could have pondered in another year. They did not live in the fiery furnace she and I inhabited, but they had a calm and a way that put a knife to my heart.

I shivered with cold, suddenly realising that I was two storeys in mid-air. Even a lover is occasionally afraid.

The great clock in the Piazza struck a quarter to twelve. I hurried to my boat and rowed without feeling my hands or feet into the lagoon. In that stillness, in that quiet, I thought of my own future and what future there could be meeting in cafes and always dressing too soon. The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to.

In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water.

If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

The Moors on the great clock swing back their hammers and strike in turn. Soon the Square will be a rush of bodies, their warm breath ascending and shaping little clouds above their heads. My breath shoots out straight in front of me like the fire dragon's. The ancestors ciy from about the water and in St Mark's the organ begins. In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex, passion is. My oars lie flat on the water. It is New Year's Day, 1805.

There's no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear. What I learned about war in the years before I came to this lonely place were things any child could have told me.

'Will you kill people, Henri?'

'Not people, Louise, just the enemy.'

'What is enemy?'

'Someone who's not on your side.'

No one's on your side when you're the conqueror. Your enemies take up more room than your friends. Could so many straightforward ordinary lives suddenly become men to kill and women to rape? Austrians, Prussians, Italians, Spaniards, Egyptians, English, Poles, Russians. Those were the people who were either our enemies or our dependants. There were others, but the list is too long.

We never did invade England. We marched out of Boulogne leaving our little barges to rot and fought the Third Coalition instead. We fought at Ulm and Austerlitz. Eylau and Friedland. We fought on no rations, our boots fell apart, we slept two or three hours a night and died in thousands every day. Two years later Bonaparte was standing on a barge in the middle of a river hugging the Czar and saying we'd never have to fight again.
It was the English in our way and with Russia on our side the English would have to leave us alone.
No more coalitions, no more marches. Hot bread and the fields of France.

We believed him. We always did.

I lost an eye at Austerlitz. Domino was wounded and Patrick, who is still with us, never sees much past the next botde. That should have been enough. I should have vanished the way soldiers do. Taken another name, set up shop in some small village, got married perhaps.

I didn't expect to come here. The view is good and the seagulls take bread from my window. One of the others here boils seagulls, but only in the winter. In summer they're full of worms.

Winter.

The unimaginable zero winter.

'We march on Moscow,' he said when the Czar betrayed him. It was not his intention, he wanted a speedy campaign. A blow to Russia for daring to set herself against him again. He thought he could always win batdes the way he had always won batdes. Like a circus dog he thought every audience would marvel at his tricks, but the audience was getting used to him. The Russians didn't even bother to fight the Grande Armee in any serious way, they kept on marching, burning villages behind them, leaving nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. They marched into winter and we followed them. Into the Russian winter in our summer overcoats. Into the snow in our glued-together boots. When our horses died of the cold we slit their bellies and slept with our feet inside the guts. One man's horse froze around him; in the morning when he tried to take his feet out they were stuck, entombed in the britde entrails. We couldn't free him, we had to leave him. He wouldn't stop screaming.

Bonaparte travelled by sledge, sending desperate orders down the lines, trying to make us outmanoeuvre the Russians in just one place. We couldn't outmanoeuvre them. We could hardly walk.

The consequences of burning the villages were not only our consequences; they were those of the people who lived there. Peasants whose lives ran with the sun and moon. Like my mother and father, they accepted each season and looked forward to the harvest. They worked hard in the hours of daylight and comforted themselves with stories from the Bible and stories of the forest. Their forests were full of spirits, some good some not, but every family had a happy story to tell; how their child was saved or their only cow brought back to life by the agency of a spirit.

They called the Czar 'the Litde Father', and they worshipped him as they worshipped God. In their simplicity I saw a mirror of my own longing and understood for the first time my own need for a litde father that had led me this far. They are a hearth people, content to bolt the door at night and eat thick soup and black bread. They sing songs to ward the night away and, like us, they take their animals into the kitchen in winter. In winter the cold is too much to endure and the ground is harder than a soldier's blade. They can only light the lamps and live on the food in the cellar and dream of the spring.

When the army burned their villages, the people helped to set fire to their own homes, to their years of work and common sense. They did it for the litde father. They turned themselves out into the zero winter and went to their deaths in ones and twos or in families. They walked to the woods and sat by the frozen rivers, not for long, the blood soon chills, but long enough for some of them to be still singing songs as we passed by. Their voices were caught in the fierce air and carried through the stubble of their houses to us.

We had killed them all without firing a shot. I prayed for the snow to fall and bury diem for ever. When the snow falls you can almost believe the world is clean again.

Is every snowflake different? No one knows.

I have to stop writing now. I have to take my exercise. They expect you to take your exercise at the same time each day, otherwise they start to worry about your health. They like to keep us healthy here so that when the visitors come they go away satisfied. I hope I will have a visitor today.

Watching my comrades die was not the worst thing about that war, it was watching them live. I had heard stories about the human body and the human mind, the conditions it can adapt to, the ways it chooses to survive. I had heard tales of people who were burnt in the sun and grew another skin, thick and black like the top of overcooked porridge. Others who learned not to sleep so that they wouldn't be eaten by wild animals. The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there's no food it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I've seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside for ever. There's no pawnshop for the heart. You can't take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times.

You can't make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.

And if you refuse?

If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted and the birds are silent.

When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correcdy.

As the weeks wore on, we talked about going home and home stopped being a place where we quarrel as well as love. It stopped being a place where the fire goes out and there is usually some unpleasant job to be done. Home became the focus of joy and sense. We began to believe that we were fighting this war so that we could go home. To keep home safe, to keep home as we started to imagine it Now that our hearts were gone there was no reliable organ to stem the steady tide of sentiment that stuck to our bayonets and fed our damp fires. There was nothing we wouldn't believe to get us through: God was on our side, the Russians were devils. Our wives depended on this war. France depended on this war. There was no alternative to this war.

And the heaviest lie? That we could go home and pick up where we had left off. That our hearts would be waiting behind the door with the dog.

Not all men are as fortunate as Ulysses.

Our sustaining hope as the temperatures dropped and we gave up speech was to reach Moscow. A great city where there would be food and fire and friends. Bonaparte was confident of peace once we had dealt a decisive blow. He was already writing surrender notices, filling the space with humiliation and leaving just enough room at the bottom for the Czar to sign. He seemed to think we were winning when all we were doing was running behind. But he had furs to keep his blood optimistic.

Moscow is a city of domes, built to be beautiful, a city of squares and worship. I did see it, briefly. The gold domes lit yellow and orange and the people gone.

They set fire to it. Even when Bonaparte arrived, days ahead of the rest of the army, it was blazing and it went on blazing. It was a difficult city to burn.

We camped away from the flames and I served him that night on a scrawny chicken surrounded by parsley the cook cherishes in a dead man's helmet. I think it was that night that I knew I couldn't stay any longer. I think it was that night that I started to hate him.

I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a litde more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

When Patrick arrived some days later I searched for him in the blistering cold and found him wrapped in sacks with a jar of some colourless liquid beside him. He was still look-out, this time watching for surprise enemy movements, but he was never sober and not all of his sightings were taken seriously. He waved the jar at me and said he'd got it in exchange for a life. A peasant had begged to be allowed to die with his family in the honourable way, in the cold all together, and had offered Patrick the jar. Whatever was in it had put him in a gloomy temper. I smelled it. It smelt of age and hay. I started to cry and my tears fell like diamonds.

Patrick picked one up and told me not to waste my salt

Meditatively, he ate it

'It goes well with this spirit it does.'

There is a story about an exiled Princess whose tears turned to jewels as she walked. A magpie followed her and picked up all the jewels and dropped them on the windowsill of a thoughtful Prince. This Prince scoured the land until he found the Princess and they lived happily ever after. The magpie was made a royal bird and given an oak forest to live in and the Princess had her tears made into a great necklace, not to wear, but to look at whenever she felt unhappy. When she looked at the necklace, she knew that she was not.

'Patrick, I'm going to desert. Will you come with me?'

He laughed. 'I may only be half alive now, but sure as I know I'd be fully dead if I set out with you in this wilderness.'

I didn't try to persuade him. We sat together sharing the sacks and the spirit and dreamed separately.

Would Domino come?

He didn't speak much since his injury, which had blown away one side of his face. He wore a cloth wrapped round his head and overlapping his scars to mop up the bleeding. If he stayed out in the cold for too long the scars opened and filled his mouth with blood and pus. The doctor explained it to him; something about the wounds going septic after he'd had himself stitched up. The doctor shrugged. It was a batde, he'd done what he could but what could he do with arms and legs everywhere and nothing but grape brandy to ease the pain and still the wounds? Too many soldiers are wounded, it would be better if they died. Domino was hunched up in Bonaparte's sledge in the rough tent where it was kept and he slept. He was lucky, looking after Bonaparte's equipment just as I was lucky working in the officers' kitchen. We were both warmer and better fed than anyone else. That makes it sound
cosy...

We avoided the worst ravages of frostbite and we got food every day. But canvas and potatoes do not challenge the zero winter; if anything, they denied us the happy oblivion that comes with dying of cold. When soldiers finally lie down, knowing they won't get up again, most of them smile. There's a comfort in falling asleep in the snow.

He looked ill.

'I'm going to desert, Domino. Will you come with me?'

He couldn't talk at all that day, the pain was too bad, but he wrote in the snow that had drifted still soft under the tent.

crazy.

'I'm not crazy, Domino, you've been laughing at me since I joined up. Eight years you've been laughing at me. Take me seriously.'

He wrote,
why?

'Because I can't stay here. These wars will never end. Even if we get home, there'll be another war. I thought he'd end wars for ever, that's what he said. One more, he said, one more and then there'll be peace and it's always been one more. I want to stop now.'