At once the gorgeously costumed players surrounded us. In raucous Italian they chided us for our ‘nakedness,’ our ‘bad manners’. To be fair they were probably not all Jews. Their banter was good-natured enough. Their blows were delivered with balloons or cloth slapsticks. But even when I replaced my mask they were comically dissatisfied. We had to be ‘educated’, they announced, in ‘appropriate behaviour’. Only then could we become true Venetians and save ourselves from expulsion. There was nothing for it but to go along with their game and put as good a face on it as possible. With a bow and an avanti or two, I gave myself up to the comedy.
We were to be the chief players, we learned, in a piece called Deceiver Deceived. I was assured I had all the best parts. All of them. I had seen this performed earlier in the Piazza San Sebastiano and had been quite unable to follow it. It involved the flourishing of some score of commedia masks, each of which was slightly larger than the previous one, designed to fit upon the other. The chief character was a lover who failed time and time again to cuckold an old man with a young wife. I called on him in the pretence that I was So-and-So the knife-grinder or Such-and-Such the upholsterer, minor characters in the commedia, with their own distinctive masks and personalities. All were well known to the local audience. We were forced into enveloping white smocks, and quarter-masks were fitted over our heads. Then we were turned this way and that until we were staggering with dizziness. It is impossible to conduct such an affair with any dignity. I have seen the people on Sunday Night at the London Palladium with those abominable compères goading people to speak ludicrous lines and perform ridiculous actions in a sketch even that grand master of communist gibberish Harry Pinta might disown! I have always been baffled as to why people should agree to such humiliation when their lives are not even threatened!
The game began:
First I was the fishmonger calling at the door with a basket of fish. As I was about to embrace my mistress, a creature dressed as a cat seized the papier mâché fish, forcing me to chase after it, to great applause. Happily my actors instincts came to my rescue. I almost began to enjoy the charade. Maddy Butter, as my amante, had very little to do but simper and breathe heavily. I, however, began to play to the crowd. I was used to making the best of a bad stage and an unresponsive audience. Mrs Cornelius and I had toured America’s West Coast in just such conditions.
Now I was an old woman selling apples. A third mask was set upon the second. The apple basket turned over and there was much comic chasing of papier mâché fruit. Again I received approving applause.
I found it difficult to see through so many pairs of eyeholes as the next mask was set upon my head. I was a butcher whose sausages were stolen just at the moment when Maddy lifted her rouged cheek to be kissed.
A fourth mask. I began to feel uncomfortable. I was a canary seller, whistling and chirping as best I could within the confines of the mask. Next I was a broadsheet jack. Yet no matter what my disguise, something always went wrong and I was frustrated in my designs.
Every time I donned a new mask, I became less and less able to see. Therefore, to the audience, my actions became funnier and funnier. I stumbled back and forth, bewildered by the shadows and the jumping gas jets, unable to distinguish the other actors or find my lover among them. Jewish hands spun me this way and that. Some directed me to Maddy, others to mincing mummers pretending to be women.
Surrounding us I glimpsed the mocking Hebrew faces, the huge dark eyes and oiled locks, the prominent noses and thick, red lips, who applauded each new caricature I was forced to assume. Was I the focus of their scorn? Had I misinterpreted them entirely? The grotesque papier mâché probosces grew longer until I was supporting a beak some two feet long while the weight of the accumulated masks began to drag my head forward. I found it difficult to hold my neck upright. I stumbled around seeking my ‘lost love’, locating her now only by her cries. Was Maddy panicking?
By now I was finding it almost impossible to breathe. I gasped, begging for a little relief. But my captors merely jeered and spun me round and round again.
I lost track of the masks. I was the dentist, the soldier, the gypsy and the Jew. I began to struggle for air. My heart was beating rapidly and every inch of clothing was soaked in sweat. The more I begged them to show common sense and mercy, the more they goaded me and added another mask. Baker, musician, prince and demigod. The less easily I supported the weight of the masks, the more grandiose became my roles. I was frightened now. Weeping, I was pushed backwards and forwards, my head pulling me downwards, my body racked with aches and pains, my legs weak and my hands nerveless. I cried for Maddy to help me, but she was joining in the fun. They all thought I was a wonderful actor. I was choking. I was deaf. I was blind. I was dying. Soon I would not be able to draw another breath!
Nothing I said would make them stop. They were utterly pitiless. Another mask was added. And another. I was drowning, I told them. They were killing me. This elicited massive applause from the Jews. I begged them to stop. Their only response was to demand yet another role for me. Was this how all actors ended their careers? Driven to their deaths by public demand?
‘Please,’ I begged them. ‘Please. I can do no more. I am not in good health. I am choking!’
Almost mindless with panic, I wept and begged the Jews for their mercy. They chose to believe my pain a joke, a piece of superior acting, and applauded me further. I was beaten by their sticks. I was abused and humiliated by their fingers. I was tormented by their mockery. I was brutalised by their cruel demands.
I had entered a nightmare I might never escape. This could only grow worse. My Egyptian captivity had declined step by step into a horror my conscious mind hardly dared recall. Was this some dreadful repetition of that experience? I began to think they meant to kidnap me. Miss Butter was, after all, working for Brodmann. Was this perhaps a scheme of Brodmann’s? Was he plotting in concert with his Ghetto brethren? They intended to drive me to suicide. For Brodmann this would be a satisfactory conclusion to a case obsessing him since he had relished my terrible shame at the hands of the Cossack, Grishenko. Did Brodmann live to enjoy my mortification over and over again?
‘Brodmann!’ I shouted. ’I have done nothing to you! For the love of God, Brodmann, let me go!’ I reached out blind, pleading hands.
The mummers around me mocked the sound of my voice. They cawed and cackled and clucked. They gibbered and hissed and shrieked. They pinched and they poked and they tweaked at me. They were trying to open my trousers. Brodmann had revealed something about me. But he was lying. My father had lied. Even my mother, poor soul, thinking she was doing her best for me, even she lied. All have lied. Esmé betrayed me. You, too, lied to me.
Salachti. Der Scochet im Goluth. Salachti. Salachti. Jude, mach mores! Jude, mach mores! Kesteneist schrecklich? Nine. Nein. Meyne Engel? Meyne Freiheit? Lieblos, die Fremdeluft is. Sachlichkeit?
The fires danced and threatened. The shadows jeered. Strange little hands slipped under my clothing to fondle me. I felt an urgent need to vomit. But if I threw up, I would drown. The masks would see to that.
They forced me to perform another scenario. I was a matron. A queen seeking her long-lost daughter. From somewhere I heard Maddy’s voice. I stumbled towards the sound, lost my footing on the cobbles and fell forward, running to catch up with myself, the weight of the masks dragging me down. I expected at any moment to step off the edge into a canal to fill my lungs with that foul water, the accumulated waste of Venetian Jewry.