of the superb style, ascribe it to the younger, better-known brother. But others, of whom I am one, are passionate for the elder. It is a great dispute!’
‘And the story?’ She did not so much care who painted the angel–it was the fact that he had been painted that was so miraculous.
‘It is from the Jewish Scriptures–you call it, I think, Tobias and the Angel?’
He took the crook of her arm and they walked about the tall, theatrical, shabby church while he recounted the story of the young Tobias who travels, unaware he is accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, seeking a cure for his father’s blindness.
‘The cure is found in a great fish but before this Tobiolo has married and saved a young woman, cursed by a demon. The demon rests inside her, killing, on their wedding night, the young men who try her virginity. Seven men have died before Tobiolo arrives but, of course, he has the Angel Raphael to help him.’
‘And does he help?’
‘Certainly. He instructs Tobiolo how he must burn the heart and the liver of the fish and so’–like a conjuror, Carlo waved a hand–‘the demon is driven out, cursing.’ He grimaced, imitating the departing spirit.
‘And this is in the Old Testament?’ Surely this was some racy Catholic version of the Bible. His sudden impersonation of the demon slightly disconcerted her.
‘Oh, indeed, I assure you. It is a tale of wonder, is it not?’
‘More like magic, I should think. Why does the angel help?’
But Carlo gave a little shrug as if he had become bored with the topic. He had called, he explained, to find out how she was and to invite her, if it would amuse her, to a concert that evening. Julia Garnet could think of no reason why she should not accept the invitation. The Reverend Crystal could never have instructed her so entertainingly–nor, perhaps, with such authority. Later, as she stood before the sparse collection which made up her wardrobe, exercised by what to wear for the evening’s entertainment, she allowed herself to wonder what so personable a man wanted with so dowdy a companion as herself?
I am an old man near the end of my life–although my son lies and protests this is not so. (He is a good son, in spite of the lies.) You may ask what an old man of one hundred and eighty-five years can have to say to interest you? The secret of my longevity, perhaps? Well, it may be that our years are not reckoned as you reckon yours. But even allowing for differences I would say we live close to the cycle of the sun and moon, we rise and go to bed with the birds, labour hard, eat frugally and these things conspire towards longevity; but I will hazard there is another thing more important than these: it may be we may live long because there is something we value above human life–I shall not give it a name!
Among our people the old are respected for their wisdom–I hope it may be the same with yours. However it is with you, if you are young now you might hold it in your mind that one day you too will be old and may find yourself glad then to be heard; if you are already old, perhaps like me you already have a story to tell (for all lives, I think, have some sort of a story in them)? Yet I do not tell my own because I wish it, or because I wish to instruct you in how to live, though I’ll admit that might once have been my purpose. No, I tell you this because I was told to tell it–by what you might call ‘a higher authority’–and truth is, the thought of how to tell it has taxed me for many years.
I promised so long ago to set all this down but you know how it is when you make a promise? There is that small serpent voice inside which says, ‘No need to bother about it now,’ or ‘Later will do better,’ or (most true in my case) ‘Give me time to understand.’ Thinking leads to a kind of weighing of words which holds back action. But now I feel the shadow of the Angel of Death upon me and I do not think I have much more time.
At first it was not only that I did not understand but that I did not even know how to begin to understand. What happened to me and my family was so remarkable that I believed I should bungle the telling of it. But I was only a third through my life when these events took place. Nowadays I have come to see that bungling is what all of us do; perhaps bungling is what we are here for?
I would like to begin at the beginning if I only knew when the ‘beginning’ starts. Some might say it was when we were first fashioned out of the mud of the great River Tigris, before our wives were pulled out of our ribs to create a source of perpetual reproof to us! (That is my little joke: I call my wife, Anna, ‘Rib’; I have an idea this oft-repeated joke of mine annoys her but she is a generous woman and mostly puts up with her husband’s trying ways.)
Or maybe the ‘beginning’ was later, when our first parents lost their paradise (which some say was here between the two rivers, which the traders still call ‘garden’ on account of its great fertileness) and had to make their way in the world? From the time of our first parents our people were wanderers–until the patriarch Abram came from Ur into the land which was then called Canaan. Later our people found their way into Egypt–and out again, through the vision of Moses, who we call ‘Liberator’, by a path through the Sea-of-Reeds. In time we returned to the land which was promised us, provided we did not ‘play the harlot’ with other gods.
In those days the twelve tribes inhabited two kingdoms and there was bad feeling between the northern country and the south. Perhaps northerners will always be slow to toe the line where the south is concerned? Among the northern tribes there were many who did play the harlot. In my own young days already my own tribe of Naphtali had begun to sacrifice in secret to the old gods (more persuadable than our own with gifts of oil or barley) and I alone travelled to the kingdom in the south, to Jerusalem, the holy city, to the temple with the brazen pillars, the ornaments of gold and ivory and lapis lazuli, and the walls lined in cedar-wood from Lebanon by Solomon, son of David, who ruled over both our kingdoms. I alone kept faith and went with my first fruits and firstlings and the first shearings of sheep and one tithe of all my corn and wine and oil and pomegranates; but my kin openly gave their tithes to the heifer Baal, and in the end my own tribe was led captive, to Nineveh, in the land of Assyria, and the other tribes were scattered among the far cities of Media, a proverb of reproach to all the nations among whom we are dispersed. But you see, from the first it was our way to be sojourners and strangers!
When Julia Garnet looked back on this period of her life she remembered it as a time in which she discovered excitement. The concert to which Carlo took her, that first evening, was in an old scuola, with dark, painted ceilings, coffered, gilded and carved. She sat listening to Vivaldi, Albinoni, Corelli–triumphant musical spirits of Venice–played by a quintet of pretty girls in long frocks and wild-haired young men.
The musicians looked too young to understand the gaiety of the music they played. Yet when they attacked their fiddles, their violas and their cellos they communicated an energetic vibrancy which sent the blood around the body leaving one, Julia Garnet reflected, positively tingling. Thinking of the dismally picked out hymns of her childhood piano lessons she became humble. ‘I could never have played like that!’ She stood, slightly chilly, in the marble hall during the interval. Beside them, around white Venetian necks, luxuriated copious fur tippets and wraps.
‘This I do not believe.’ Carlo took off his jacket and whisked it, with the adroitness of a matador, around her shoulders and when she tried to demur: ‘No, no,’ smiling as ever, ‘this is our Venetian way. The woman is for cherishing!’
This
