Lucifer's Shadow

12 The mysterious Levis

What should I have expected? The smell of incense in the air? Strange people in strange clothes eyeing this suspicious Gentile invader from the world outside? I had no idea. The very oddness of this task had banished imagination from my head. When I walked over that wooden bridge, I might have been ready to enter the Tower of Babel. Instead, I discovered ordinariness in abundance. The ghetto is much like any other corner of the city, only plainer. The towering buildings which line the circular perimeter of the island are just a few rooms deep. Beyond them is a small cobbled square with a well in its centre, a scattering of modest-sized trees, and — the only curiosity — men and women dressed uniformly in dark clothes, sitting on benches, toying with beads, and reading books.

I asked a young chap with a wispy black beard where I might find Dr. Levi (speaking very slowly and clearly so he might understand). He pointed with a long, pale finger at a house in the corner of the square, next to a curious jumble of buildings surmounted by what looked like the wooden cabin of Noah’s Ark. I crossed and entered by the downstairs door. There was the smell of cooking — potato and cabbage — and the noise of young families. I read the list of names on the wall, then climbed — and climbed — all six floors, past doors half-open, past arguments and banter, the bawl of infants, and, once, the unmistakable sound of sobbing, and was relieved when I reached the top to find myself in something that might pass for silence.

I knocked on the single door. It opened and a young man’s a fable face, clean-shaven, intelligent, with glittering brown eyes and a high forehead, met mine, smiling, with an amused expression upon it.

“Scacchi sends his lad,” he said to someone behind him. “Obviously not man enough for the job himself. Come in. We won’t bite. Like some tea?”

I entered the place and found myself in a tiny, ill-lit room requiring candles even in the middle of the day. There was a pleasant smell not unlike attar of roses. The floor was carpeted, and every seat was covered in some kind of soft drape. On the lone table stood a globe and several books. In the corner, obscured by the shadow cast from the window shutter, a lady sat most upright, as if observing me.

“I think we should be going, sir,” I answered. “Vivaldi abhors lateness.”

“Decisive, eh! I think they found you a man in the city at last, Rebecca. You will take good care of her… um?”

“Lorenzo, sir. Lorenzo Scacchi. My uncle sent me.”

“Quite. I am sorry I cannot cure his claw, by the way. Even Hebrew medics have their limitations.”

Some kind of debt was being repaid here, I gathered. I was risking my neck not just to ingratiate ourselves with the Red Priest but to save Leo a doctor’s bill.

“I am Doctor Jacopo Levi. You shall call me Jacopo,” he told me, extending a hand. “And your ward shall be my much-loved sister, Rebecca, Lorenzo. I’d do this myself, but that would only double the risk and I fear this city is too unruly for her to venture out alone. So be wary. I don’t want to rescue either of you from the Doge’s dungeons.”

“I will do my best, sir,” I replied earnestly, watching the lady rise from the corner and move towards us, into the narrow shaft of light that entered the room from the single, small window facing onto the square. “I will do everything in my power…”

And do you know? I haven’t a clue what I said after that. These next few moments are burned upon my memory, but they contain only images, nothing as mundane as words. I am back where I started when I tried to describe the wonder of St. Mark’s Basin on Ascension Day. Some things defy those clumsy old foot soldiers of the alphabet. Ovid could dedicate an entire work to this lady, and perhaps in another incarnation did, but all my humble pen can give you are facts.

Rebecca Levi is, she tells me, just turned twenty-five, though she seems to me closer to my own age. She is a touch beneath my height, very slim, but with an upright bearing, straight-backed, and a strong pair of shoulders (there’s the fiddle player for you). On our first meeting she wore a fine black velvet dress that ran from her neck to ankles, sleeves cut to the elbow, as plain as you might ask for. Around her slim white throat was a narrow band of roped gold, and from her ears fell two gems, each scarlet red, of what breed I haven’t a clue, nor could I care. Rebecca has no need of jewels. Her face shone out of the gloom like that of a Madonna painted by a master in order to enlighten some dank church corner (there goes my soul — perhaps this letter is not for posting after all).

Let me start with the chin, which is delicately rounded and always facing up to you, as if to speak. Her mouth is inquisitive. She has the whitest teeth I have ever seen, each like some small, exquisite pearl. Her nose is modestly snubbed. Her skin has the pale, luminescent quality of a full winter moon, with only a faint trace of colour to her cheeks. She has brown eyes the shape of some precious opal from an emperor’s crown, eyes that twinkle, as if laughing, and never leave the person she is facing, not until their business is done. And above all this loveliness, like a frame to some gorgeous piece of classical portraiture, is as wild a head of hair as you might find on one of those gypsy lasses who used to tease us at the fair: loose and cascading, a sea of feral, shining curls and waves the colour of chestnuts fresh from the tree in October. It falls around that superlative face all the way to her shoulders, and I have no idea how much of this is artifice and how much simple wilful abandonment, though I can say that from time to time she runs her fingers through her locks as if to free or shape them, and this provides a moment which will leave an entire monastery of monks praying for instant release back into the wicked world.

My auditory senses appeared to fail me until I heard two quick, deliberate coughs from behind: Jacopo trying to bring me to my senses. I felt hot and somewhat giddy and hoped the room’s darkness was enough to cover the blood that had undoubtedly risen in my cheeks.

“He does speak, doesn’t he?” she asked in a voice, slightly accented, that is as light and musical as a flute.

Jacopo’s face came round to meet mine, his expression mock quizzical. “He did. You haven’t bewitched another, old girl? I’m clean out of broken-heart ointment.”

She giggled. No, be truthful now. She snorted! Quite unladylike, and I couldn’t help bursting into laughter too.

“There,” she said, and, with a sudden purpose, picked up a battered fiddle case from the floor, then pulled a scarlet silk scarf from her skirt pockets and tucked the best part of those lovely tresses beneath it. “Lorenzo has found his voice again. May we go now?”

Jacopo bent down to kiss his sister, an act which made my heart perform a rapid somersault inside my chest. Then he took me by the arm. “Take care of her, my boy. She’ll impress the hell out of this priest of yours, and then the fun really begins. But if anyone should challenge you, profess all ignorance and say I sent you both on this escapade, on pain of death. You’ll be amazed the things they’ll believe of a Jew in this town.”

“I will do no such thing, sir!”

Jacopo’s eyes blazed at me with a sudden anger. “You will follow my instructions to the letter, lad, or drop this escapade at once. There’s danger behind this laughter, and none of us should forget it!”

There. Two threats in the space of a single afternoon. One from my good Christian uncle, promising to incriminate me in something of which I am quite innocent. The second from some Hebrew stranger who pledged to exculpate me of a crime I was about to commit in full knowledge of my guilt.

“Very well,” I agreed, making it clear from my tone that this last part was not to my taste at all. “If you insist, then I seem to have little choice in this matter.”

“Splendid.” Jacopo was his old, amiable self again.

Outside, in the ghetto square, none looked at us twice. We strode quickly out beneath a nearby arch, over the bridge, past the guard, and into the city. Close to the church of San Marcuola and a jetty where we might find an inexpensive boat to San Marco, Rebecca suddenly grasped my arm and pulled me into a dark alley by a fish vendor’s stall. There she snatched the scarf off her head, shook her hair as if to free it from some prison, and ran her strong, slim fingers through the curls.

“If anyone asks, Lorenzo, we are cousins and visitors to the city, and any o fence we may have caused comes from our ignorance alone.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Lorenzo!”

“Yes, Rebecca.”

She seemed pleased with that. “Aren’t you even the tiniest bit afraid? I am.”

In all honesty, the thought had not occurred to me. I was too engrossed in other matters to consider much the cost of failure. I worded my reply carefully. “My father often said that fear is mainly a reason men cite for doing things they’d rather not. And that what we should fear most doesn’t lie in the external world but in our own hearts.”

“Clever man,” she said.

“I believe he was. I miss him, and my mother also. It is because they are dead that I must live with my uncle.”

She regarded me with an expression I could not decipher. “I am sorry to hear that, Lorenzo. Tell me. Do you think any will look at me now and see a Jew?”

“No,” I answered honestly. But they will look at you anyway, I thought. Who could blame them?