The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (21 page)

We stayed talking together until lunch time. With the result that from then on the door between the billiard room and the study, which until then had always been shut, often stayed open. Most of the time we both carried on in our respective rooms, of course. But we met much more often than before: professor Ermanno coming to see me, and I going in to see him. When the door was open we even exchanged a few words: “What’s the time?”, “How’s the work going?” and so on. Some years later, in the winter of 1944, in prison, these were the phrases, the kind of questions, I was to exchange with an unknown neighbour in the next cell, shouting up through the cell window: spoken like that, above all for the need to hear one’s own voice, to feel alive.

At home, that year,
Pesach
was celebrated with a single supper instead of two.

It was my father who wanted it so. With Ernesto studying in France-he said-it wasn’t really suitable for us to have a
Pesach
like those in previous years. And then, apart from that, how could we possibly manage it?
My
Finzi-Continis had been marvellously clever, as usual: with their garden as an excuse, they’d managed to keep on all the servants they wanted, passing them off as outdoor workers. But what about us? Since we’d been forced to get rid of Elisa and Mariuccia, and instead get that hopeless old Cohen creature, we’d been to all intents and purposes without servants. In the circumstances you couldn’t expect even Mother to do miracles.

“Isn’t that so, my love?”

His love’s feeling for the sixty-year-old signorina Ricca Cohen, a distinguished pensioner of our community, were not really much warmer than my father’s. Apart from rejoicing, as always, when she heard some of us running down the poor old thing, mother agreed gratefully to the idea of a subdued Pascal feast. That was fine-she said approvingly: just one supper, the one on the first evening, and with ten guests at the most, there’d been nothing in that, would there? She and Fanny could manage practically on their own, without “her” -and she waved in the direction of signorina Cohen, who had bolted into the kitchen, quite off her own bat-making trouble with one of her usual sulks. What’s more, just to avoid her having to go back and forth with plates and dishes, at the risk of tumbling around on those poor old legs of hers, what about doing something else: instead of having it in the drawing-room, which was so far from the kitchen, and this year, what with the snow and things, just about like Siberia, lay it all here, in the small dining-room instead. . . .

It was not a gay meal. The wicker basket holding, besides the ritual “morsels”, the earthenware dish of 
haroset,
the bunch of bitter herbs, the unleavened bread, and the hard-boiled egg reserved for me, the first-bom, stood grandly but pointlessly in the centre of the table under the blue and white silk handkerchief embroidered forty years before by grandmother Ester. Although it was carefully laid, in fact j ust because of that, the table in the small dining-room looked rather as it did on the evening of Yom Kippur, when it was prepared only for Them, the family dead, whose bones lay down in the cemetery at the end ofvia Montebello, and yet were still very much present here, in spirit and in effigy. Here, instead of them, we, the living, sat that evening; but fewer than we had been before, and instead of being gay, all laughter and shouting, we were as sad and thoughtful as the dead. I looked at my father and mother, who had both aged so much in a few months; I looked at Fanny, who was now fifteen, but who, as if a secret fear had stopped her development, looked no more than twelve: I looked at them all, one by one, uncles and aunts and cousins, most of whom were to be swallowed up in the German crematoria within the next few years; not that they dreamed, of course, of ending up that way, and neither did I imagine it, but none the less even then, that evening, their poor faces looked to me so dingy under their respectable little hats, framed in their respectable permanent waves, and I knew their minds to be so obtuse, so utterly unable to see what the present really meant and to read into the future, that they already appeared to me wrapped round in the same aura that now enfolds them in my memory-mysterious, statuesque, predestined; I looked at old signorina Cohen the few times she dared peep out from the kitchen door: Ricca Cohen, the lady-like spinster of sixty let loose from the home in via Vittoria to act as maid to her comfortably off co-religionists, but who wanted nothing more than to go back to the home, and die there before things got any worse; finally I looked at myself, reflected in the opaque water of the large looking-glass opposite, no different from the others, already slightly grey-haired, caught up in the same mechanism as they were, and yet reluctant, stil unresigned. I wasn’t dead, I said to myself. I was still very much alive! But then, ifl was still alive, what was my object, how could I hang around here, with all these others? Why didn’t I get away at once from this desperate and grotesque gathering of ghosts, or why at least didn’t I plug my ears so as to hear no more about favoured categories, patriotic merits, certificate of Aryanness, quarters and eighths of blood, so as to stop hearing the petty complaints, the grey, monotonous, pointless dirge the family was intoning softly around me? The dinner would drag on like that, and it was anyone’s guess how many hours it would last, with the same old talk, with my father every now and then recalling, with bitter glee, the various “affronts” he had suffered during the past months, starting from when the Federal secretary Consul Bolognesi had told him, in the Federation office, looking pained and guilty, that he was forced to “cross him off” the list of party members, and ending with the time when, looking no less sad, the President of the Circolo dei Com-mercianti had sent for him to tell him he must accept his resignation. Oh, the tales he’d have to tell! Till one o’clock, till two ! And after that? After that, there’d be the last scene of all, the farewell scene. I could see it already. We had gone down the dark staircase in a group, like a flock of sheep worried along. When we reached the portico, someone (me, perhaps) went ahead to open the street door a little, and now, for the last time before we parted, the good nights, good wishes, handshakes, hugs, and kisses on the cheek started up all over again, from everyone, including me. But suddenly, through the front door half-opened on to the darkness, comes a violent gust of wind, a hurricane, out of the night. It hurtles into the portico, crosses it, goes whistling out through the gates that separate the portico from the garden, forcibly scattering anyone who wants to stay, and, with its wild roar, suddenly silencing anyone who still lingers to talk. Thin voices, faint shouts, are immediately overwhelmed, blown away like light leaves, like bits of paper, like the hair on a head turned white with the years or with terror. . . . Oh, Ernesto was lucky, really, not to have been able to go to the university in Italy. He wrote from Grenoble that he went hungry, that with the little French he knew he could understand practically nothing of the Polytechnic lectures. But he was lucky to suffer from hunger and be scared of failing exams-maths, especially! I had stayed here and, having stayed, had once again, out of pride and barrenness, chosen solitude, nursing vague, nebulous, impotent hopes; but for me there was no hope, simply no hope at all.

But who can ever see ahead? What can we know about ourselves, and about what we are going to meet?

As it turned out, at about eleven, when my father, obviously hoping to dissipate the general gloom, had just begun singing the
Pesach
rigmarole of
Caprct ch avea compera if signor Padre
* The little goat that Father bought: Jewish Ferrarese jargon. (it was his favourite: his hobby-horse, as he called it), I happened to glance up into the large looking-glass opposite and noticed the door of the telephone room very gently opening behind me. And through the opening, cautiously, poked old Cohen’s face. She was looking at me, right at me; and seemed to be asking for help.

I got up and went over to her.

“What is it?”

She pointed at the receiver dangling on its cord, and vanished in the opposite direction, through the door into the hall.

Left alone, in complete darkness, even before I put the instrument to my ear I recognized Alberto’s voice.

“I can hear singing,” he cried, strangely gay. “Where’ve you got to?”

“To
Capret ch avea compera il signor Padre,”
I replied.

“Oh, good. We’ve already finished. Why don’t you come over?”

“Now!” I exclaimed, astonished.

“Why not. Conversation’s beg^^ing to droop, and with your well-known talents you can perk it up for us.” He giggled. “And besides,” he went on, “we’ve got a surprise for you.”

“A surprise? What sort of a one?”

“Come and see.”

“You
are
being mysterious.” My heart was thudding furiously. “Come on, tell.”

“No, don’t hold off. Come along and you’ll see.”

I went straight into the hall, took my overcoat, scarf and hat, poked my head into the kitchen and asked old Cohen softly to say, if anyone wanted me, that I’d had to go out for a moment, and two minutes later was down in the street.

It was a splendid moonlight night, freezing, dead clear. There was practically no one about in the streets, and corso Giovecca and corso Ercole I d’Este, so white they looked almost salty, opened out ahead of me as smooth and uncluttered as two great race-tracks. I pedalled along the brightly lit middle of the street, ears aching with the cold; but I had drunk a good deal of wine at dinner and didn’t feel the cold, in fact I was sweating. The bicycle tyres swished faintly on the hardened snow, and the dry dust they raised filled me with carefree joy, as if I were skiing. I rode fast, not afraid of slithering; and as I rode I thought of the surprise Alberto had said was waiting for me at the house. What was it: could Micol be back? It was odd, though. Why hadn’t she come to the telephone herself? And why, before supper, hadn’t she turned up at the synagogue? If she’d been there I’d have known it already. My father, at the table, enumerating those present at the ceremony, as usual (it was partly for my benefit: an indirect reproach for not having gone), obviously wouldn’t have forgotten to mention her. He’d mentioned all of them, Finzi-Continis and Herreras, but not her. Could she possibly have arrived on her own at the very last minute, on the quarter-past nine express?

With the snow and the moon gleaming together even more intensely, I set off across Barchetto del Duca in the direction of the
magna domus.
Half-way across, I remember, a little before I got on to the bridge over the Panfilio canal, a gigantic shadow suddenly loomed up in front of me. It was Yor. I recognized him after a second’s hesitation, when I was just going to cry out. And the moment I recognized him fear changed into almost equally paralysing premonition. So it was true -I said to myself-Micol was back. Warned by the bell from the street, she’d got up from the table and come down, and now, sending Yor ahead to meet me, was waiting at the little side door used only by members of the household and close friends. A few more turns of the pedals and then MicOl, Micol herself: a small dark figure outlined against a glaringly white background, like a power station, and haloed by the protective breath of the central heating. In a few seconds I would hear her
“ciao”.

“
Ciao
,” said Micol, standing there. “This is fine, your coming. ’ ’

I had foreseen everything exactly: everything except that I would kiss her. I got off the saddle, answered: 
“Ciao.
How long have you been here?” and she still had time to say: “Since this afternoon, I came with my uncles,” and then . . . then I kissed her. It happened all of a sudden. But how? My face was still hidden in her warm scented neck (it was a strange scent: a smell of childish skin and talcum powder together) when I started wondering. How could it have happened? I had taken her in my arms, she had made a faint effort at resistance, and then had let me. Was this how it happened? Maybe it was. But what about now?

I drew away slowly. Now she was there, her face just ahead of mine. I stared at her without speaking or moving, incredulous, already incredulous. Leaning back against the doorpost, a black woollen shawl round her shoulders, she was staring back at me in silence. She was looking into myeyes, and her look went straight inside me, sure and hard: clear and inexorable as a sword.

I was the first to look away.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“Why sorry? Maybe it was me, I was wrong to come and meet you. It’s my fault.”

She shook her head. Then she sketched a smile, nice, affectionate.

“All this gorgeous snow!” she said, motioning towards the park with her chin. “Just think: none at all in Venice, not an inch. If I’d known there was such a lot here . . .”

She finished with a movement of her hand: her right hand. She had pulled it out from under her shawl, and I noticed a ring at once.

I took her wrist.

“What’s that?” I asked, touching the ring with the tip of my first finger.