The girl shook her head somberly. “Then my father isn’t the only one, is he? But you see, Mr. Freeman, you can defend your own good name. Tell me, how is he to defend his?”
That was the question which remained in his mind afterward, angry and challenging. He tried to put it aside, to fix on his own immediate problem, but there it was. It led him the next morning away from proper destinations, the ruins and remains italicized in his guide book, and on a walk southward along the Tiber.
Despite gray skies overhead and the dismally brown, turbid river sullenly locked between the stone embankments below, Noah felt a quickening pleasure in the scene. In a few days he had had his fill of sightseeing. Brick and marble and Latin inscriptions were not really the stuff of life, and pictures and statuary only dim representations of it. It was people he was hungry to meet, and now that he had an objective in meeting them he felt more alive than he had since his first day in Rome. More alive, in fact, than in all those past months in New York, working alongside his father in the old man’s tailor shop. Not that this small effort to investigate the case of Ezechiele Coen would amount to anything, he knew. A matter of dredging up old and bitter memories, that was about what it came to. But the important thing was that he was Noah Freeman again, alive and functioning.
Along Lungotevere dei Cenci construction work was going on. The shells of new buildings towered over slums battered by centuries of hard wear. Midstream in the Tiber was a long, narrow island with several institutional buildings on it. Then, facing it from the embankment, the synagogue came into view, a huge, Romanesque, marble pile.
There was a railing before the synagogue. A young man leaned at his ease against the railing. Despite the chill in the air he was in shirt sleeves, his tanned, muscular arms folded on his chest, his penetrating eyes watching Noah’s approach with the light of interest in them As Noah passed, the man came to attention.
“Shalom.”
“Shalom?” Noah said, and the young man’s face brightened. In his hand magically appeared a deck of picture post cards.
“Post cards, hey? See, all different of Rome. Also, the synagogue, showing the inside and the outside. You an Americano Ebreo, no? A landsman?”
“Yes,” said Noah, wondering if only Americano Ebreos came this way. “But you can put away the pictures. I don’t want any.”
“Maybe a guide book? The best. Or you want a guide? The ghetto, Isola Tiberina, Teatro Marcello? Anywhere you want to go, I can show you. Two thousand lire. Ask anybody. For two thousand lire nobody is a better guide than Carlo Piperno. That’s me.”
“Noah Freeman, that’s me. And the only place I want to go to is the rabbi’s. Can I find him in the synagogue?”
“No, but I will take you to his house. Afterwards we see the ghetto, Tiberina—”
The rabbi proved to be a man of good will, of understanding; but, he explained in precise English, perhaps he could afford to be objective about the case of Ezechiele Coen because he himself was not a Roman. He had come to this congregation from Milan, an outsider. Yet, even as an outsider he could appreciate the depth of his congregation’s hatred for their betrayer. A sad situation, but could they be blamed for that? Could it not be the sternest warning to all such betrayers if evil times ever came again?
“He’s been dead a long time,” said Noah.
“So are those whose lives he sold. Worse than that.” The rabbi gestured at the shuttered window beyond which lay the Tiber. “He sold the lives of friends who were not of our faith. Those who had lived in Trastevere across the river, working people, priests, who gave some of us hiding places when we needed them Did the daughter of Ezechiele Coen tell you how, when she was a child, they helped remove her from the city at night in a cart of wine barrels, risking their lives to do it? Does she think it is easy to forget how her father rewarded them for that?”
“But why her?” Noah protested. “Why should your congregation make her an outcast? She and her brother aren’t the guilty ones. Do you really believe that the sins of the fathers must be visited on the children?”
The rabbi shook his head. “There are sins, Signor Freeman, which make a horror that takes generations to wipe away. I welcome the girl and her brother to the synagogue, but I cannot wipe away the horror in the people they would meet there. If I wished to, I could not work such a miracle.
“Only a little while ago there was a great and flourishing congregation, here, signore, a congregation almost as ancient as Rome itself. Do you know what is left of it now? A handful. A handful who cannot forget The Jews of Rome do not forget easily. To this day they curse the name of Titus who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem as they remember kindly the name of Julius Caesar who was their friend, and for whose body they mourned seven days in the Forum. And the day they forgive Titus will be the same day they forgive Ezechiele Coen and his children and their children to come. Do you know what I mean, Signor Freeman?”
“Yes,” said Noah. “I know what you mean.”
He went out into the bleak, cobblestoned street, oppressed by a sense of antiquity weighing him down, of two thousand years of unrelenting history heavy on his shoulders, and not even the racketing of motor traffic along the river embankment, the spectacle of the living present, could dispel it. Carlo Piperno, the post-card vender, was waiting there.
“You have seen the rabbi? Good. Now I show you Isola Tiberina.”
“Forget Isola Tiberina. There’s something else I want you to show me.”
“For two thousand lire, anything.”
“All right.” Noah extracted the banknotes from his wallet. “Does the name Ezechiele Coen mean anything to you?”
Carlo Piperno had the hard, capable look of a man impervious to surprise. Nevertheless, he was visibly surprised. Then he recovered himself. “That one? Mi dispiace, signore. Sorry, but he is dead, that one.” He pointed to the ground at his feet “You want him, you have to look there for him.”
“I don’t want him. I want someone who knew him well. Someone who can tell me what he did and what happened to him.”
“Everybody knows. I can tell you.”
“No, it must be someone who wasn’t a child when it happened. Capisce?”
“Capisco. But why?”
“If I answer that, it will cost you these two thousand lire. Shall I answer?”
“No, no.” Carlo reached out and dexterously took possession of the money. He shrugged. “But first the rabbi, now Ezechiele Coen who is in hell long ago. Well, I am a guide, no? So now I am your guide.”
He led the way through a labyrinth of narrow streets to an area not far from the synagogue, a paved area with the remains of a stone wall girdling it. Beyond the wall were tenements worn by time to the color of the clay that had gone into their brick. Yet their tenants seemed to have pride of possession. In almost every window were boxes of flowers and greenery. On steps and in stony courtyards, housewives with brushes and buckets scrubbed the stone and brick. In surrounding alleys were small stores, buzzing with activity.
With shock Noah suddenly realized that here was the ghetto, that he was standing before a vestige of the past which thus far in his life had been only an ugly word to him. It was the presence of the wall that provided the shock, he knew. It had no gate, there was no one to prevent you from departing through it, but if it were up to him he would have had it tom down on the spot.