The Caviar Lady Page 17

  Today everything is frosty and white. Apparently they don’t even get fog any more. That has gone, like the fishermen on the riverside, the pontoon bridges, the sturgeons. Like Nicola, back then. Like me and Bechi now.

  I still remember when we almost collided in Milan, at the university. I looked into those dark eyes, the same dark eyes I remembered from the day when I tried to help her clean our kitchen floor. And her, a woman of class, from a good family. She was in Milan because she’d been sent to study law. And she wasn’t really the Turk’s niece. It had been Clara Macchioro, the caviar lady, who convinced Uncle, and Uncle who convinced the Turk, to hide her among the fishermen. The racial laws had been passed and the lady had her head screwed on: she knew it was only going to get worse, and that Bechi wouldn’t have survived if she’d stayed in the city.

  When I think that I used to believe that it was the Jews who ruined the world, who brought down the Roman Empire and crucified Our Lord... And I believed it alright, when I went to visit Bechi wearing my black shirt. How was I to know that Jews could be dewy-eyed and cultured? I’d never seen one, and without realizing it I was falling in love. With a Jew, I mean. Actually I’d already fallen in love with one, because the caviar lady was Jewish and I admired her more than... more than Uncle, more than the Turk, more than anyone else I knew. It’s taking me back, that’s for sure. I sound like a child again, at the age of almost eighty.

  Anyway the day I heard Bechi being called by her real name, I got the shock of my life. Her friend was calling her: “What’s up with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Rebecca, c’mon! Let’s get a move on!”

  “Rebecca?”

  “I think we need to talk...”

  So me and Bechi, and her friend, all went to have a hot chocolate, which at that time for me was the height of luxury. And she blurted it out. It didn’t take me long to figure out the rest. So I worked up the courage and told her my secret.

  “My real name is Nullo, not Nello, like I told everyone.”

  “What did you say your name was?” the friend asked.

  Rebecca was laughing.

  “Nullo, Nullo Scaramagli. It means Nobody. It’s the name my father gave me before he went off and got killed with the anarchists in Spain. He gave me a name, but not a surname.”

  I couldn’t look either of them in the eye, but then I felt Rebecca’s light touch on my face.

  “What are you doing? Everyone’ll see you!” her friend hissed.

  When I opened my eyes I saw that she’d kept her fiery spirit from the riverside years: she was sticking out her tongue, like a monkey, at her friend, who was all red in the face. Good on you Bechi. You’ve always been special, my love. I knew it the first time I set eyes on you. That’s why I couldn’t bear the idea of such a smart girl being there, in the Turk’s house, leading that life. How on earth did you fall for Nicola? Couldn’t you see what kind of future you would have had? Boiling up the laundry with wood ash, then beating it in the river, on your knees mopping up sturgeon blood, risking your life on a wooden boat in the river currents, or waiting at home, with a hungry brood, waiting to hear the cry that a whopper had been landed or receive the news that the fog had taken your man. But that’s how it was. You were in love with Nicola. He told me he’d kissed you. And it was plain to see.

  I don’t recognize the villages I’m seeing through the train window. Even though it’s the same journey I took to school every day. Every day on this very line. Who knows what Uncle would say if he could see all these derelict stations. I can’t even seem to recognize any of them...

  I get off at the village, but there’s nothing there that reminds me of the places where I grew up. The station is new, brand new, with a proper foyer, but no stationmaster’s office, not even a ticket office. Automatic glass doors. Remo’s signal box on the other side of the tracks has gone too. There’s nothing left. I look up and see that even my home has disappeared: the flat above the station where I lived as a boy - Mother’s kitchen, the room where Uncle used to sleep after his night shifts, our lounge. The terrace where I used to look out over the countryside. Where I studied. Where I could watch the trains from above. Where they put the anti-aircraft guns towards the end of the war...

  There’s nothing left of my home. In its place is a pointed roof, as if it was a Greek temple and not a stupid station in a backwater by the Po. I don’t know why I’ve come.

  I look around. The road is different too, there’s a roundabout, a square, I don’t recognize any of it, and I can’t even work out which way the village is. I ask at the coffee bar where I go to warm up. At my age you feel the cold more. I stir the froth on my cappuccino, messing it around, and wonder what’s become of my old life, the station. All these questions are going round in my head, but suddenly I’m not even sure I can still speak Italian. In the end all I manage to do is ask the way to the village.

  “You walking or taking the bus?”

  “Walking.”

  “That way then.”

  On foot, of course. The station was only ever just outside the village. I start walking, along the frost-covered fence by the railway line, lost in a swirl of memories I can’t quite pin down. Here must have been where the railway workers’ house was, and the villas would have been over there... But now there’s nothing left. Just an empty road, and old me walking along. A few cars pass, going in the opposite direction, towards the station. I must be nearly at the village, they can hardly have moved that...

  I never told anyone. Secrets are only secrets if you take them to your grave. What I didn’t understand back then was that it was us, with our wars and our progress, killing the world. I’d thought it was just fate, chance. That’s why, deep down, I was glad they’d killed Nicola. I’ve always been ashamed of that, but it’s the truth.

  It was when I ran into Bechi that day in Milan that I realized that that bullet was my good fortune. Or perhaps I should say our good fortune. For as much as we cared about Nicola, or thought we did, in all those years we never mentioned his name again. We buried him. Only when our son Andrea was born was I afraid that Bechi would want to call him Nicola. But she didn’t.

  We left him there, on the riverside, and went looking for our own happiness. The guilt has always stayed with me, as if we’d killed him with our own hands, when all we did was bury the memory.

  And, I suppose, or rather there’s no supposing about it, I did nothing to find out who killed him. Because I had a suspicion that it was not a stray bullet, but a revenge killing on the very last day of the war, Remo taking his revenge on the Turk. An evil deed, with the war over, borne of the hatred and bitterness in Remo’s heart. I don’t know. That’s what I thought, but I never actually tried to find out what really happened. There were little clues, sensations, hints dropped by Remo when he returned to the station after the amnesty for Fascists. I could have investigated, sleuthed a bit, tried to find out whether there was some element of truth in my suspicions. Or maybe it was the war that got me thinking badly of everyone, even someone who had nothing to do with it and was only trying to save his own skin. I don’t know.

  I do know that Nicola’s death brought me relief rather than anger. That’s what I’ve never told anyone, not even Rebecca. For a long time, in the early years, before I forgot, I told myself that it was fate that took Nicola, natural selection. Natural selection to save the best kind of people. And stupidly I counted myself among that number. But that kind of natural selection does not exist: no one saved the sturgeon and the caviar, which have been gone from around these parts for half a century. In the Caspian Sea the sturgeons are destined to go so quickly that I might even see it in my own lifetime. The Turk was right: when humans meddle with things, they make a mess.

  Rebecca, she was the key to it all. She’d chosen Nicola when she should have chosen me. In the end she married me, and she lived like a queen. But she was not happy.

  I never had any regrets. After all, I was happy she had chosen me.
It’s taken me a lifetime to understand that a single moment, a single deed, can change the course of history, but that the new course is not necessarily better than what got left behind. I did everything I could to forget the past.

  But now I’m here and I can see myself as a boy, on the riverside, that morning as day was breaking. I’d gone because it was time to end the war and we couldn’t let those bastard Germans escape with their lives. Remo, and the Fascists like him, needed a lesson too. However far they ran, there was no way they could swim across the Po. At seventeen I was old enough to be part of that war, the war that had taken everything from us, even the very idea of who we were.

  I’d gone to the riverside to ask the Turk and Nicola if they wanted to come and hunt down the krauts. Then when I got there I heard the shot. I turned around. Nicola’s shout was muffled, more shock than pain. The Turk’s scream ripped through the morning mist like a curtain being torn in two. I got scared and ran to the river. And then I saw. And I understood. And...

  I look up at this icy December morning. These old legs make everything seem further away...

  My God! It’s the station! My station! Those bastards have moved the station, built a new one. No respect, not even for this. Our station, Uncle’s station, is right here, boarded up with panels and padlocks, abandoned.

  What I wouldn’t give to breathe in the comforting aroma of Mother’s minestrone soup, to hear the voices, the trains rattling through, and smell the fug of coal and fuel oil, the black smoke of the locomotives. To hear Uncle blowing his whistle, the telegraph tapping and the Lady waiting... There are the vegetable plots by the railwaymen’s houses, and the... I sit on the bench by the first platform. It hasn’t changed. I feel drunk... I feel... I...

  I look around and everywhere I look there’s a memory that comes to me like a scene in a movie. I get up and start walking again. Every step is harder than the last. Every time I blink there are different colors, smells, people. The years pass by, my life, I don’t know...

  And look over there! The tracks are half buried, the sleepers are piled up in a heap, the bumpers are rusty. Even the railings on the terrace of our house look like they’re coming down...

  The track is still there, I should have spotted it on my way here. You can still see the sign with the name of the village in white letters against a black background, over the entrance, where the ticket office used to be. I walk onto the platform. Now I recognize everything. Even the smells.

  I can see Remo’s house, the old signal box on the other side of the tracks. The windows are broken, the door is hanging off its hinges. What a lousy world we’ve left.

  There’s just one more thing I have to understand. One thing I have to see. Something that I have been too much of a coward all my life to do: to find out whether it was him, Remo, who killed my best friend. Because Nicola was not only the best friend I ever had, perhaps he was my only real friend. And I chose to forget him. I blocked him out, erased him from my memory. Only now, that Rebecca is gone, do I realize how much life is a useless race, a foolish attempt to get there first, leaving everything and everyone else behind. I try to climb up towards the tracks, slipping on the stones, but even one meter seems an impossible feat. It’s the kind of effort where you have to stop for breath. On the first attempt my feet sink into the stones and I don’t make it up the mound where the tracks are.

  The gray sky looks threatening against the white frost, but I know that this is my station. And that is Remo’s house. And that’s where I have to look for answers. I’m old. And getting mixed up. And not very steady on my feet either. I’m ashamed to say it, but there it is. It’s hard to know what’s real and what is dreams and memories. I can feel the stones slipping and sliding under my feet.

  “Nello, don’t do it!”

  I hear a strangled cry. It sounds like Rebecca’s voice, but without the softness of time. It has an almost metallic edge, this distant order carried by the wind.

  “Nullo, don’t do it!”

  This time it’s my real name.

  It’s then that I see the white horse. I see it running towards me and it’s turning into a sturgeon, an immense sturgeon. Then the train comes.