There is no place on earth more exuberant than Venice on a breezy, hot, cloudless day. The boats rock and swell in the Lagoon as if launching themselves, crewless, on adventure; the ornate facades brighten in the sunlight; the water smells fresh, for once. The whole city puffs up like a sail, a boat dancing unmoored, ready to float off. The waves at the edge of the Piazza di San Marco become raucous in the wake of the speedboats, producing a festive but vulgar music like the clash of cymbals. In Amsterdam, Venice of the North, this jubilant weather would have made the city sparkle with renewed purpose. Here, it ended by showing cracks in the perfection-a weedy fountain in one back square, for example, whose water should have been on full spray and instead made a rusty dribble over the lip of the basin. Saint Mark’s horses pranced shabbily in the glittering light. The columns of the doge’s palace looked disagreeably unwashed.
I commented on this air of dilapidated celebration, and my father laughed. “You’ve got an eye for atmosphere,” he said. “ Venice is famous for her stage show, and she doesn’t mind if she gets a little run-down, as long as the world pours in here to worship her.” He gestured around the outdoor café-our favorite place after Florian’s-at the perspiring tourists, their hats and pastel shirts flapping in the breeze off the water. “Wait till evening and you won’t be disappointed. A stage set needs a softer kind of light than this. You’ll be surprised by the transformation.”
For now, sipping my orangeade, I was too comfortable to move, anyway; waiting for a pleasant surprise suited my aims exactly. It was the last hot spell of summer before autumn blew in. With autumn would come more school and, if I was lucky, a little peripatetic studying with my father as he roamed a map of negotiation, compromise, and bitter bargains. This fall he would be in Eastern Europe again, and I was already lobbying to be taken along.
My father drained his beer and flipped through a guidebook. “Yes.” He pounced suddenly. “Here’s San Marco. You know, Venice was a rival of the Byzantine world for centuries, and a great sea power, too. In fact, Venice stole some remarkable things from Byzantium, including those carousel animals up there.” I looked out from under our awning at Saint Mark’s, where the coppery horses seemed to be dragging the weight of the dripping leaden domes behind them. The whole basilica looked molten in this light-garishly bright and hot, an inferno of treasure. “Anyway,” said my father, “San Marco was designed partly in imitation of Santa Sophia, in Istanbul.”
“ Istanbul?” I said slyly, dredging my glass for ice. “You mean it looks like the Hagia Sophia?”
“Well, of course the Hagia Sophia was overrun by the Ottoman Empire, so you see those minarets guarding the outside, and inside there are huge shields bearing Muslim holy texts. You reallysee East and West collide in there. But then there are the great domes on the top, distinctly Christian and Byzantine, like San Marco’s.”
“And they look like these?” I pointed across the piazza.
“Yes, very much like these, but grander. The scale of the place is overwhelming. It takes your breath away.”
“Oh,” I said. “Could I get another drink, please?”
My father glared at me suddenly, but it was too late. Now I knew that he had been to Istanbul himself.
Chapter 12
December 16, 1930
Trinity College, Oxford
My dear and unfortunate successor:
At this point, my history has almost caught up with me, or I with it, and I must narrate events that will bring my story up to the present. There, I hope, it will stop, since I can hardly bear the thought that the future may contain more of these horrors.
As I have related, I eventually picked up my strange book again, like a man compelled by an addiction. I told myself before I did it that my life had returned to normal, that my experience in Istanbul had been odd but was surely explicable and had taken on exaggerated proportions in my travel-wearied brain. So I literally picked the book up again, and I feel I should tell you about that moment in the most literal terms.
It was a rainy evening in October, only two months ago. Term had begun, and I sat in pleasant solitude in my rooms, whiling away an hour after supper. I was waiting for my friend Hedges, a don only ten years older than myself of whom I was extremely fond. He was an awkward and eminently good-natured person, whose apologetic shrugs and kind, shy smile disguised a wit so keen that I often felt thankful he turned it on eighteenth-century literature and not on his colleagues. Except for his shyness, he could have been at home among Addison, Swift, and Pope, gathering in some London coffeehouse. He had only a few friends, had never so much as looked directly at a woman not related to him, and fostered no dreams that reached beyond the Oxford countryside, where he liked to walk, leaning over a fence now and then to watch the cows chewing. His gentleness was visible in the shape of his big head, his meaty hands, and his soft brown eyes, so that he seemed rather bovine himself, or badgerlike, until that clever sarcasm of his suddenly stung the air. I loved to hear about his work, which he discussed in a modest but enthusiastic way, and he never failed to urge me on in my own pursuits. His name was-well, you could find it in any library, with a little poking around, since he brought several of England ’s literary geniuses back to life for the lay reader. But I will call him Hedges, anom de guerreof my own devising, to give him in this narrative the privacy and decency that were his in life.
This particular evening Hedges was to drop by my rooms with drafts of the two articles I had squeezed out of my work at Crete. He had read and corrected them for me, at my request; although he couldn’t comment on the accuracy or inaccuracy of my descriptions of trade in the ancient Mediterranean, he wrote like an angel, the sort of angel whose precision would indeed have allowed him to dance on the head of a pin, and he often suggested polish for my style. I anticipated half an hour’s friendly critique, then sherry and that gratifying moment when a true friend stretches his legs at your fireside and asks you how you’ve been. I wouldn’t tell him the truth about my rattled and still-healing nerves, of course, but we might discuss anything and everything else.
While I waited I poked up the fire, added another log, set out two glasses, and surveyed my desk. My study also served me for a sitting room, and I made sure it was kept as orderly and comfortable as the solidity of its nineteenth-century furnishings demanded. I had completed a great deal of work that afternoon, supped off a plate brought up to me at six o’clock, and then cleared the last of my papers. Dark was coming in early already, and with it arrived a gloomy, slanting rain. I find this the most appealing kind of autumn evening, not the most dismal, so I felt only a faint shiver of premonition when my hand, searching for ten minutes’ reading, fell casually on the antique volume I had been avoiding. I’d left it tucked among less disturbing items on a shelf above my desk. Now I sat down there, feeling with lurking pleasure the suede-soft old cover fitting into my hand again, and opened the book.
Immediately I became aware of something very strange. A smell rose from its pages that was not merely the delicate scent of aging paper and cracked vellum. It was a reek of decay, a terrible, sickening odor, a smell of old meat or corrupted flesh. I had never noticed it before, and I leaned closer, sniffing, unbelieving, then shut the book. I reopened it after a moment, and again stomach-turning fumes rose from its pages. The little volume seemed alive in my hands, yet it smelled of death.
This unsettling malodor brought back to me all the nervous fear of my return trip from the Continent, and I stilled my feelings only with a concerted effort. Old books rotted, that was fact, and I had travelled with this one through rain and storm. The smell could surely be explained thus. Maybe I would take it to the Rare Book Room again and get some advice on having it cleaned, or fumigated, whatever was required.