For Dolfin to have got away with that was loathsome enough. For him to be touted as a paragon of selfless heroism by the unwitting Rosa Coin was even worse. But to desecrate his victim’s memory by parading this alcoholic doxy as Rosetta Zulian was a gesture of arrogance and contempt almost beyond belief. Zen felt a suffusion of fury suffocating him. On some level he knew that it had less to do with Andrea Dolfin, whatever his sins, than with Francesco Bruno and Carlo Berengo Gorin, with Tommaso Saoner and Giulio Bon, and above all with Cristiana Dal Maschio and her husband. But that insight was impotent against his overwhelming urge to lash out, to smash his fist into Dolfin’s face and shatter that mask of serene detachment once and for all.
It was something in the woman’s face that restrained him, a quality of rapt attention whose meaning was enigmatic but which was utterly compelling in its intensity. As he returned her insistent gaze, Zen realized why she had appeared familiar when he walked into the bar: the woman bore a quite astonishing resemblance to Ada Zulian. You had to be looking the right way to see it, looking beyond the seedy details, the quirks of dress and accidents of age, to the underlying genetic structure. Then, like a trick drawing, it suddenly clicked into place, bold and unmistakable.
As so often in this waterborne city, Zen had the sensation that the whole room was in motion, the floor undulating gently like the deck of a boat. But the instability was all internal. In a twinkling, all the ideas he had so confidently been rehearsing seemed as insubstantial as a dream on awakening. No amount of elaborate theorizing counted for anything beside Zen’s abrupt conviction that the woman sitting opposite him was indeed Rosetta Zulian.
Noting the consternation on Zen’s face, Andrea Dolfin smiled artfully.
‘She was always a great favourite of mine. Weren’t you, dear?’
The woman continued to gaze expressionlessly at Zen.
‘Her mother pretended to think there was something unnatural about it,’ Dolfin continued. ‘Wishful thinking! The plain truth was less palatable. Rosetta simply preferred my company to that of her mother.’
He made a disparaging moue.
‘Not that that was any great accomplishment on my part. La contessa was obsessed to an absurd degree with considerations of her family’s lineage and gentility. The rest of us just laughed at her pretensions, but poor Rosetta had to live with them, day in, day out. Ada set rigorously high standards of behaviour and taste, but her conception of the aristocratic ideal didn’t allow much room for maternal love. On top of that, she wouldn’t permit her daughter to associate with the local girls of her age, whom she of course considered common. Since the Zulians scarcely mingled in the social circles that Ada might have regarded as acceptable, poor Rosetta was starved of both affection and company.’
He exchanged a glance with his companion.
‘Her response was to come and visit me whenever she could, and to make a secret friend in the Ghetto, a world to which her mother had no access.’
The woman smiled elliptically. There was something bizarre about her continuing silence, and the way that Dolfin was discussing her as though she weren’t present.
‘It shouldn’t be necessary to say it, but after what Ada has no doubt hinted I had better make it quite clear that there was never any question of carnal relations between us. Quite apart from anything else, my own proclivities in that regard — they have ceased to trouble me for many years — happened to be for my own sex. My lover was killed in 1941 fighting the British at Benghazi. He was the reason I joined the party in the first place. All that died with him, all the big ideas, the high hopes. I had to start again, like someone after an accident. I had to think about all the things I’d taken for granted. And that’s where Rosa helped me.’
He looked at the woman and smiled.
‘She says I saved her life, but she’d already saved mine.’
Zen looked at him sharply.
‘I thought it was Rosa Coin whose life you saved.’
The woman looked at the old man and gestured impatiently. Then she spoke for the first time.
‘That’s enough bullshit, Andrea.’
The voice was pure Venetian, as turbid and swirling as water churned up by a passing boat. She turned back to face Zen.
‘I am Rosa Coin.’
Zen searched her eyes for a long time without finding any weakness. He shook his head feebly.
‘But she… she lives in Israel.’
‘I used to. Some cousins of mine who lived in Trieste went out there after the war, and once they were settled they invited me to join them. I didn’t know what else to do. Andrea had been hiding me in his house, but I couldn’t go on living there once the war was over. I wanted to make a fresh start, to begin again, a new life in a new nation.’
Zen got out his cigarettes. After a moment’s hesitation he offered one to the woman, who took it with a shrug.
‘I shouldn’t, but…’
‘At this stage, my dear,’ Dolfin put in, ‘I can’t really see what you have to gain by giving up.’
Zen lit their cigarettes.
‘You were talking about moving to Israel,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘I lived there for almost ten years. It was a wonderful experience which I don’t regret for a single moment, but I never really felt at home. At first I assumed that that would pass. Where is a Jew at home if not in Israel? It was a long time before I realized that I must give up the idea of ever being at home anywhere. I would always be an Italian in Israel and a Jew in Europe. And once I accepted that, there seemed no reason not to come back to Venice.’
Zen smoked quietly for a moment. Now that the fit of rage had left him, he felt dazed and drained.
‘And Rosetta?’ he murmured.
‘Everything I told you about her was true,’ said Andrea Dolfin. ‘She had the run of my house, and came and went as she pleased. One afternoon I came home to find a note from her on the dining table. She apologized for putting me to so much trouble, but she said she knew I’d understand.’
He sighed.
‘I did, and I didn’t. In the end, it’s impossible to understand something like that. Anyway, it made no difference. She’d been dead for several hours.’
Dolfin struck his fist hard on the table.
‘She should have told me! At the very least I could have given her some practical advice. She must have thought it would be quick and painless, like an execution. She didn’t know that without a drop, hanging is a form of slow strangulation. I could have told her. I’d seen enough partisans hanged that way, from lampposts and balconies. I knew how long it took them to die. She should have told me! She should have trusted me!’
He broke off, struggling to control his emotion. The woman covered his trembling hands with her long, slim, articulate fingers, like a benign insect.
‘I’d failed Rosetta,’ Dolfin went on in a low voice, ‘so I decided to make amends by saving her friend. That meant concealing the truth from Ada Zulian. I could claim that that was a difficult decision over which I agonized long and hard, but it would be a lie. If her daughter had been driven to take her life, the contessa was at least partly to blame. If I’d failed Rosetta, what had her mother done? Perhaps it was just as well that she never knew the truth.’
He took the woman’s hands in his.
‘The main cause of Rosetta’s despair was undoubtedly the fact that the Coin family were among those Jews who had been selected for the next round of deportations. The Ghetto had been cut off from the rest of the city, like in the old days, but with my position it wasn’t hard to persuade the guards to let me take Rosa Coin out for a few hours on my personal recognizance. I told them that she had been my secretary, and that I needed her to help put my papers in order before she was deported. I did not tell the Coins about Rosetta. I only said that I would do what I could to save their daughter.’
The woman dropped her cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. She wiped her rheumy eyes on her sleeve.
‘When the police came, they never doubted the identity of the corpse. I’d dressed it in Rosa’s clothes, including the Star of David, and cut the hair to match. I told them she had hanged herself while I was out. They weren’t surprised, given the fate in store for her. They took the body away and told the Germans what had happened. And meanwhile the real Rosa was hiding in my attic, where she stayed for the rest of the war.’
‘I remember my father calling me,’ the woman said in a dreamy voice, as though talking to herself. ‘Andrea was sitting on the best chair, the one only visitors used. I had only met him once, when I was out walking with Rosetta, but she had told me how kind he had been to her since her father was killed. Papa said I was to go and stay with Signor Dolfin for a few days, until things got better again. He tried to make it sound casual, but his voice was hoarse and my mother was crying and I knew that something strange and terrible was happening.’
She started to weep.
‘Afterwards, when Andrea told me the truth, I tried to imagine the unspeakable anguish they must have felt, knowing that they were seeing me for the last time, yet having to pretend that everything was all right so as not to scare me.’
Zen was staring out of the window, his attention drawn by a movement on the other side of the square. A group of men had emerged from the sottoportego and were now standing in a circle, talking loudly and gesturing expansively. The sound of their voices could be heard faintly even inside the bar. Zen got to his feet.
‘I apologize for intruding, and for my rudeness. Please forgive me.’