Altai: A Novel Read online

  Altai

  Wu Ming

  Translated by Shaun Whiteside

  Dedication

  To Valerio Marchi

  Epigraph

  Drifting on the sea go the swift ships.

  Slacken the sails, there, loosen the ropes,

  catch the wind and save your companions

  if you want us to remember your name.

  Stay far off, go not where the troubled wave rises.

  Now it depends on you.

  —Archilochus, seventh century BC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Mi Star

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  Interlude

  Part Two: Tikkun Olam

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  Interlude

  Part Three: Mağusa

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  Finale

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix

  Prelude

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Constantinople, 8 Muharram 977

  (June 23, 1569)

  From the rooms in the palace no sounds come. The smell of the Bosphorus and the muezzin’s chant accompany the living into the evening, toward a semblance of peace. Beyond the open windows, the sky is ablaze with purple and gold. Fishing boats part from Asia and drift on the honeyed current.

  A thought takes hold of Gracia: The greatest artists in the world—and she knew many of them when she was in Europe—can only imitate the beauty that the Lord has given us; they can never match his wonder.

  She lifts the pen from the paper; now she is holding her hand in midair. Her eyes are closed as she listens to the chant.

  As the last note fades away, she signs and seals the letter, and finally she relaxes against the back of her chair.

  Dana watches her, studies her desk. The letters already sealed, and those awaiting a reply. She knows that the Senyora is exhausted. She won’t be able to spend the evening writing, as she did until a short time ago. Her strength is leaving her, and there is still so much to do. Everyone is calling to her, from one end of the Mediterranean, and Europe, to the other. Fleeing exiles, persecuted Jews, Sephardic merchants, Ashkenazic rabbis.

  “Help me,” Gracia says. “I want to get up.”

  Dana tells her off: “You shouldn’t stand up, my Senyora. You shouldn’t even sit at your desk. You should rest.”

  Dana knows it’s her part in the play, and she performs it every evening. Donna Gracia will repeat her order, her maidservant will obey, the Senyora will put an arm around her and take a few steps into the room, accepting with serenity the creaking of her joints.

  The mirror on the wall is covered by a green cloth. For some time now, Gracia has relinquished makeup or any form of ostentation. She has given up admiring herself, but tonight she moves the cloth aside and looks at her own image. Over the past few years she has obscured herself. Dana takes care of her body every morning, with the greatest possible attention.

  She is fifty-nine years old, and in the pane she sees the face of an old woman. Wrinkles at the sides of her eyes and mouth, the skin of her neck loose and pendulous, her nose pointed, her silver hair opaque. She studies the folds in her face, seeks the girl who one night received a secret name, and the following day a Christian baptism to protect her from the Inquisition. Beatriz de Luna Miquez.

  Looking into her own eyes, Gracia seeks the lights and shadows of the alleys of Lisbon, the house of her childhood and her earliest youth, little Yossef who called her aunt. Memories, the voice of his mother, the story of how the Miquez family fled from Spain.

  Beneath the layers of time, in the curve of her eyebrow, is the girl who was married to Francisco Mendez, el Gran Judio, and who had to bury him too soon and found herself left with a little daughter and the huge family finances to fetch to safety.

  This is what her life has largely been like: the life of a wealthy Jewish widow, in business, fighting against princes, kings, and emperors, first in the Low Countries, then in Venice, and finally in Constantinople.

  In the face of the Senyora, Dana sees an ancient queen, whose devoted subjects are scattered from one end of the world to the other. Over the past fifteen years she has done her best to reunite them and drip them, drop by drop, inside the borders of the Ottoman empire. As the shepherd pulls from the lion’s mouth two feet or the lobe of an ear, so the Israelites will escape. It’s the first passage of a most ambitious project that among a thousand difficulties is taking shape down there, in Tiberias, where the Senyora wants to go to die.

  Dana glances outside at the stretch of sea in front of the palace. She wonders if the letter will arrive. She knows that it is bound for a man far away—the Senyora mentions him from time to time, in phrases dense with love and compassion. Phrases from an intimate past.

  Gracia lets the cloth fall back. Weariness is calling to her, claiming her, dragging her to itself, deeper and further away. Dana walks her to the bed and helps her to lie down, arranges the pillows behind her back, unlaces her dress, and then they sit there, looking at the waves and the vessels beyond the window.

  “It’s time for me to go down there,” Gracia murmurs, her eyes half closed.

  “Take me with you, my Senyora,” Dana pleads.

  She strokes her face, takes one hand between her own.

  “No, my little one. You must stay by Reyna’s side. You must live.”

  Then she juts her chin toward the desk.

  “Take the letter. Send it to you know who.”

  Part One

  Mi Star

  September 13–December 10, 1569

  1.

  When the thunder came I was still awake. Sitting at the table, I was flicking through accusations and denunciations by candlelight. I was committing to memory the names and addresses of spies. Then my ears exploded, the floor shook, I was caught in a rain of glass and plaster. For days afterward I was picking shards from my hair.

  I raised my head. The room was dark, but the shattered window framed a glare of light. It looked like sunrise, but it was the depths of night, and the wind carried the smell of cannon fire.

  I got up and saw torches floating beneath the stars, behind the steeple of San Francesc
o. The tezoni, I thought. The dry docks, the Arsenal. The heart of La Serenissima in flames.

  I dashed down the stairs. The main door of the palazzo had come off its hinges, but it was obstructed by a pile of rubble. I found a crack and pushed it until at last I emerged on the other side. In the calle, stunned faces quizzed one another in terrified silence. The more daring whispered the words earthquake and Apocalypse. Whole families were fleeing their homes, some leaping down from their balconies as if from the sides of a sinking ship.

  The second explosion scattered the herd in a cloud of ashes and screams. I leapt into the middle of the calle to escape an avalanche of tiles, looked up, and saw them: two gondolas flying in the sky of Venice. They had wings of flame and they flew in uncertain arcs, like wounded birds. One crashed into the bell tower, which was sounding a constant fire alarm. The other disappeared from sight, beyond the rooftops.

  In the hours and days that followed I would hear a thousand stories about what happened that night, and in each one it was a different object that was flying. Oak trunks came hurtling down, millstones for saltpeter, buckets of pitch, roasted corpses of men and horses, then dragons, comets, stellar explosions, the Madonna and Lucifer, Christ crucified and Christ resurrected.

  I had to get to the Arsenal, join my men, stop and question as many people as possible. My legs started running as a gray veil fell over the city. It fell on the gawping crowd; it fell on the wounded, turning them into living statues. It fell on the wine carriers who came running with barrels and on the old people who stood speechless in front of the skeletons of their houses. It fell on the canals of Castello, so full of ash and rubble that the water itself seemed to be made of stone. It fell on the bodies on the ground, which looked like corpses but were not in fact dead, because only about twenty people had died, and the rest were prevented from getting up by the fear that the sky might crash down on their heads.

  To cross Campo San Francesco I had to step over men and women on their knees, busy singing the Psalms as they waited for the Lord’s Judgment. I don’t know if it was that suggestion, my weary, dusty eyes or the smoke-filled air. I know that I looked at the bell tower of the church and for a moment I was sure that it was rising into the air. I nearly fell to my knees myself, to shout out witness to the miracle and forget my duties.

  Instead, I made for the Porta da Terra. The austere elegance of the marble framed a chaotic hubbub of people pushing, running and shouting. Above it, the Lion of San Marco observed the crowd with its jaws half open and its claws on the Gospel.

  I shoved my way through the entrance hall. The fire was blazing at the far end, where the powder was stored.

  I came upon a line of helpers passing buckets and leather bottles. There were splinters of wood and bits of scattered metal everywhere, but the main buildings seemed to be undamaged, and the wind had driven the fire beyond the outside wall toward the private dwellings and the Celestia Monastery.

  I advanced toward the flames, drawn like a moth to a lantern. The heat burned my face; I was boiling inside my clothes and drenched with sweat. Smoke-blackened carpenters carried big wooden planks out of a workshop still threatened by the flames.

  It was then that I heard someone say the name Giuseppe Nasi. It was the first time, that night, but it would become a refrain: the Swine of Judah, the Sultan’s Catamite, the Archenemy of La Serenissima, the evil mind behind the catastrophe.

  I reached the galley basin. The fire was still consuming two saltpeter mills, and one galley was ablaze on the still waters of the dock. The waves thrown up by the explosion had dislodged it from its moorings, and no one could get close enough to it to extinguish the blaze.

  As I watched the galley burn, the outside wall of the dock began to crumble. The water of the lagoon was forcing its way in, as if inviting the ship to come away on a voyage. The galley set off slowly, the keel ablaze, and the flames seemed to be emerging from the sea and climbing up the masts, the stays and the sails, and then still higher up, like banners stirred by the wind.

  Like an evil spell for the coming days.

  2.

  We floated slowly on a silent, funereal sea. The sheet drifted toward us on the surface of the water. An oar seemed to sink it but instead brought it closer to us. I leaned out of the dinghy and caught it between my fingers: the page of a book. The burned edges framed inky blurs. Only a single sentence was still legible: Et tulerunt Ionam et miserunt in mare; et stetit mare a fervore suo.

  The Bible, the Book of Jonah, the storm-tossed ship. Jonah turns to the crew and asks to be thrown into the water. He is to blame for the storm, because he disobeyed the Lord. They take him and do as he asks, and the sea is immediately calm.

  I too had to calm a storm, throw the guilty party to the Consigliere, free Venice from fear. I looked for fragments of the disaster, tiles to reassemble the mosaic. Perhaps this oracle would help me.

  The galley canal was a graveyard, full of detritus. Wooden beams, smashed packing cases, whole oak trunks, scraps of sail, sheets, fragments of biscuit, ropes, the scorched and disemboweled carcasses of horses and mules. And the corpse of a man, his face and belly immersed in the water.

  The scene was like a naval battle, when the ships have rowed or sailed away from the theater of death and all that remains is flotsam, bodies and the memory of the rage just passed.

  On dry land, on the other hand, everything was in a state of agitation: dockyard workers, gawpers, people cursing and wailing, getting in the way of those with a task to perform. That was why we were in the boat. From the water I could look around, reflect and talk to my men as they rowed their way around the wreckage.

  Silence. The sounds from the shore were drowned out by the waves. There was nothing but the lapping of the hull and the heavy breathing of Tavosanis the Friulian. My breath was the same, open-mouthed, as if I, too, were rowing.

  “What an absolute disaster,” murmured Rizzi from Rovigo. And it was true that the water seemed to have emerged from the Apocalypse, and yet you had only to look up to realize that the scene was not as tragic as all that. The fire had only consumed three warehouses. Pillars of black smoke were still rising from the rubble, but the other buildings around the dock were largely intact. Shattered glass, doors off their hinges, but not much more.

  Perhaps the fire had been confined to the water, but I had to get a better understanding of what was going on, do things logically, check the site of the explosion in person.

  The powder house, in the furthest corner of the Arsenal.

  I came ashore just opposite the ruins of the three burned warehouses. To reach the powder store we had to pass all the way through one of them. Thank God it was empty, like all of the structures in that brand-new wing. Work on the galleys had not yet begun; the big merchant ships that were there to be repaired and refitted for the purposes of war rested calmly in a corner of the port.

  Suddenly Rizzi pulled me by my jacket against what remained of the wall. Rubble rained from the blackened skeleton of the roof. We quickened our pace.

  The powder monkeys were in a state of utter confusion. Tavosanis looked at them grimly and opened up a passage for us through the crowd. We found ourselves on the edge of a blackened crater, all that remained of the storehouse. All around, not so much as a stone, as if the explosion had thrown everything onto the moon. I asked to speak to the head armorer, and they pointed me to the saltpeter mill, now reduced to a pile of rubble.

  Teams of dockyard workers were digging among the debris, carrying away rubble, drawing up inventories, trying to decide what could be saved and what had been lost forever. A big quern stone had got stuck upright in the ground. It looked like a wheel about to set off on a solitary journey.

  The man I was looking for had a terrified expression on his face, a child woken by nightmares. “Signor De Zante, have you seen? A ruin. I’d said to myself, and you know it, too, and I’ve been saying it these thirty years or more, you can’t make powder where you make ships. Now that at last the Senate ha
s listened to me, the storehouses are ready on the islands. Look, over there. Luckily, half of the boats left yesterday.”

  He was scared, and the stream of his words couldn’t hide it. He knew I was there to provide answers for the Republic, and he knew that the easiest way would be to accuse him of negligence.

  “Calm down. I want to know what happened.”

  He spread his arms. “I don’t know what to say. My men are all careful; I do the rounds of the Arsenal five times a day and everything’s been fine for months.”

  “That’s great, but you haven’t answered my question. I want to know how the fire has spread.”

  He gestured beyond the wall, toward San Francesco. “Last night’s wind drove the fire outside. The Celestia Monastery is ruined, and the houses all around it were destroyed. We had one only man dead here, a guard. Over there, though . . .”

  “Boss, boss!” A dockyard worker was waving his arms around a few yards away. “Look what we’ve found!”

  We joined him, already surrounded by an excited crowd. The name of Giuseppe Nasi ran from mouth to mouth, from lips twisted into grimaces of disgust, and on faces expressions of alarm appeared. Giuseppe Nasi, the Swine of Judah, La Serenissima’s greatest enemy.

  “It is no accident! The Turkish dog is waging war on us!”

  We made our way to the front, Tavosanis just behind me, Rizzi to my left.

  On the floor, in the middle of the circle of legs, were two black stains as big as the palm of a hand. The boy who had summoned us pointed to them with a beaming smile.

  “Pitch, boss. It’s pitch!”

  I leaned forward and touched it, then sniffed my fingertip. Pitch, no doubt about it. Pitch in a powder store. Like stoat-shit in a chicken coop.

  “What a spectacle!” Rizzi muttered between his teeth as Tavosanis pushed the boat toward the foundries. “You don’t need pitch to set fire to a store of saltpeter. It only takes a spark.”

  “Right” I agreed. “And the motive for all this?”

  He started counting on his fingers. One. “If it’s pitch, there’s someone involved.” Two. “If someone’s involved, it’s not an accident.” Three. “If it’s not an accident, then they’re not to blame for anything.”