Vango (21 page)

The Cat didn’t take her eyes off the young man.

He put the violin back in its case, checked that Weber was sleeping soundly, stole his keys, and left the chapel. He went over to the small house in the second courtyard, opened the door with the biggest key, and went upstairs.

The Cat followed him via the roof.

The boy soon reappeared and walked back over to the grille. He went out into the street.

The Cat trailed him to where he was staying, in student accommodation, and the next day, to the burial of Father Jean in Montmartre Cemetery, and finally all the way to the Ritz Hotel at the end of the afternoon.

There, she discovered that he worked for a man named Boris Petrovitch Antonov and that he was also looking for Vango.

By the time she was back home, safely on her roof, the Cat was feeling very pleased with herself. She had a lead, that lead was named Andrei, and he was a violin student. The Cat knew the sound of his voice, his address, and the name of the person he worked for.

That evening, though she wasn’t yet ready to admit it to herself, this lead, with his violin and his tousled hair, with his sad eyes and his handsome face from a cold climate, made her heart beat as fast as the hoofbeats of a crazy little horse in the Siberian taiga.

Aeolian Islands, May 1, 1934

Vango had been dropped off by the
Graf Zeppelin
on the islet of Basiluzzo. He had instantly recognized that rock perched in the sea between the volcano and the island of Panarea.

At dawn, he’d called out to the fishermen who came to comb the rocks just above sea level, to dislodge fish and octopuses. They didn’t ask what he was doing there. They just let him slip in between the baskets of fish. One of them, at the bow of the boat, was singing.

Listening to them speak, and feeling the swaying of the boat, Vango understood that he was back.

The fishermen came from Lipari. They took him to their large island.

From there, he caught a regular boat for Salina. There were no seats left. Vango squeezed in behind a man sleeping on his suitcase. He watched the twin peaks of his island slowly getting closer. He was at the stern of the boat, the only traveler without any luggage, while the other passengers were transporting enormous packages of supplies and hardware. Some of them wouldn’t be leaving their islands before the autumn. They would have to hold out until then.

The boat sailed around the pumice stone quarries of Lipari. The current was against them. The journey felt terribly long to Vango — even though his island was right there, behind that big square sail, which wasn’t coping well with the wind.

Vango was huddled with his arms across his knees. Around one ankle, he’d knotted the blue handkerchief that never left him. He had time to rehearse his big reunion with Mademoiselle several times over in his head.

He knew she wouldn’t reproach him for anything, that she would stand back a little to see how tall he’d grown, that she would run a hand through his hair, apologize for her dress, put his plate and glass on the table, say it just so happened there was still a warm vegetable gratin in the oven, and some sweet biscuits, and then she would add a tender word or two of endearment in one of the languages she loved, before immediately giving herself a telling-off because he wasn’t a child anymore.

She would do everything to ensure he didn’t have time to ask her forgiveness for not coming back, for only having written four letters in five years, four letters that gave no address and that simply said:

Four letters as empty as letters written by soldiers in a war. Health good, morale good.

Vango advanced in life by erasing all trace of himself. He didn’t call this paranoia but survival. He was like a man on the run, dragging branches behind him so as not to leave any tracks.

He believed he was protecting Mademoiselle by not telling her anything.

Thanks to his silence, they wouldn’t be able to get to her.

They had been spying on him for five years.

Those who wanted him dead.

Those whom Father Jean had referred to as “your illness,” but who had managed to take Father Jean’s life in the end.

But at Notre Dame everything had changed. Thousands of people had seen bullets exploding all around him.

And Vango had felt the urge to call out, “See! See! Am I really mad? They’re real! They’re here!”

For a moment, when he was up at the top, he had even stretched out his arms, ready to receive the shot in his heart so that there would be a mark on his body, the kind of evidence that a surgeon could remove with his tweezers and place on the table. But instead, the impossible had happened. He had seen a sparrow flying toward him in slow motion, batting its wings feebly, almost to the point of stopping, in a way that no sparrow can do.

A gunshot rang out, and the sparrow had stopped, pierced through, before plummeting the full height of the cathedral.

The bullet had been knocked off course, so that it only brushed against Vango’s side rather than piercing his heart.

In Salina, Vango disembarked at the port of Malfa.

It was growing dark. People were waiting for the boat.

They were out on an evening stroll, turning up to see the crew, to help them unload the packages, to watch those passengers who remained on board headed for another island, or to dream about seeing new faces. Vango could tell that nobody recognized him. There were couples sitting, legs dangling just above the water. An old man was counting the fish in his basket again.

As Vango took a few steps on the quayside, he sensed how much he had changed. He was no longer the same person. The boy who had spent his childhood running away from the inhabitants of his island was now interested in looking at them.

“Can you help me out, young man?”

A man had put his hand on Vango’s shoulder.

“I’ve got to carry the mail up. One bag each.”

Vango took the bag and slung it on his back.

He recognized this man, Bongiorno, who handled the mail and the boat tickets, who sold vegetables and shoes, and who repaired broken windows. A man who had replaced five or six of those who had left to try their luck on the other side of the world.

“Normally,” said Bongiorno, “that fellow comes with his donkey, but he isn’t here this evening. We’ve just got to get it up as far as the square. I’ll pay you something.”

“Don’t worry,” said Vango. “I’m going that way anyway.”

He was watching some children diving off a rock. They disappeared into the inky black water. A man and a woman were running down the winding path toward the boat. They were calling out, begging for it to wait. Someone struck the ship’s bell, just for the fun of making them run even faster. The young girls sitting on crates burst out laughing. A boy dived off the prow. Vango wondered why he’d never swum with the children from his island.

He saw a woman who looked like a vagabond, crouching under a roof of planks that hung off the seawall of the port.

“Who’s she?”

“You’re not from here!” said Bongiorno.

“No.”

“But you’ve got a faint accent from these islands.”

“I came here a long time ago.”

Bongiorno was walking in front of Vango.

“That woman is mad. She’s been waiting for her husband for . . . I don’t know how long . . . many years. She stays there so she’ll be able to see him when he arrives.”

“Where did he go?”

“If you ask me, I think he’s dead. I feel sorry for her.”

He threw her a coin and shouted, “You need to eat, Donna Giuseppina!”

Vango slowed down as they walked past. He had just recognized Pippo Troisi’s wife.

“She’s always there,” Bongiorno said. “She stays to weep.”

Vango couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“What about you? Where are you going?”

“Me?” asked Vango, a bit lost.

“Yes. Where are you going on to, afterward?”

“I’m going up there, to the Madonna of Terzito, on a pilgrimage.”

Vango was referring to the tiny forgotten sanctuary on the pass, between the mountains. He couldn’t think of anything better to satisfy Bongiorno’s curiosity.

And it worked: the postmaster didn’t ask any more questions on the way to the square in Malfa.

When they got there, Vango left Bongiorno with his bags, explaining that he wanted to complete his climb before it was fully dark.

“Take these coins,” the man offered. And when the boy refused, he added, “Light some candles to the Madonna for me. You won’t be alone; there were two foreigners this morning who were headed that way.”

Vango took the coins. He left the village on the west side. He was almost running. In less than an hour, he was above the crater of Pollara. A light was shining in the village, hundreds of meters below him.

At that moment, in the house at Pollara, Mademoiselle was sitting in a small armchair made by Vango at age twelve from driftwood — the kind of wood that rolls in the sea for a long time and ends up polished and bleached by the pebbles. The chair was a nest made of pieces of wood tied together. It was very comfortable to sit in. Mademoiselle spent her evenings in it, reading or sewing, and sometimes she would wake up in the morning with a book on her knees.

That evening, her book had fallen to the floor, but Mademoiselle wasn’t sleeping. She was simply staring at two men who were destroying the interior of her home.

They had entered without saying a word, just a thin polite smile for Mademoiselle.

There were so few objects inside these walls that the intruders were almost disappointed. Mademoiselle was petrified. She couldn’t move at all. They paced about a bit, then started by ripping out the pages of the books in the small bookcase. They found a pile of papers in a folder made of blotting paper and emptied them into a travel bag. They also threw in a stitched notebook in which Mademoiselle used to copy out her accounts and some poems in no particular order.

Then they broke a few plates. And, as if that wasn’t enough, they started smashing the blue china tiles that covered the walls. These didn’t fall off but splintered into a thousand slivers. The whole room was like the inside of a kaleidoscope that would make anyone’s head spin.

They did all this without saying a word, as if carrying out an intricate job that required complete concentration. To free up their hands, they had put their weapons down on the table: two Tokarev TT33 automatic pistols and a double express pump-action shotgun that must have weighed six or seven kilos.

When they’d entered the home, Mademoiselle hadn’t looked particularly surprised.

She’d told them in Russian that she’d been expecting them for fifteen years.

Vango rushed down the path. All he could feel now was the euphoria of the moment. He was returning to the place he loved, the house that was his homeland, the woman who was his family — a race on a May night after five years of exile. He forgot about everything else.

He took a shortcut to the left. This time, he could clearly see the white roof of the house and then, as he got closer, the lamp alight in the window. She was there.

Vango didn’t want to give Mademoiselle too much of a shock. So he thought he would knock, to indicate his presence on the other side of the door. But first he made a small detour via the olive tree. Its leaves rustled as he approached, and he put his hand on the bark, pressing his forehead against the tree.

Inside the house, through the tiny windows, it was possible to make out some signs of movement. She wasn’t asleep.

Mademoiselle.

He owed her so much. Mademoiselle was a world in her own right. She seemed to know all of life’s secrets, but she let you into them one by one, almost without your noticing. Like this olive tree that shed its leaves throughout the year, without ever seeming to be missing a single one.

Whenever Vango had been feeling sad for too long, she would say things like, “That’s enough of the day wasted on one set of troubles.” She invented her own wisdom.

Before leaving the cover of the tree, he paused for a few seconds.

An enormous shadow was advancing toward him from behind. It was as if Vango was deliberately giving it time to get close. But he hadn’t seen anything and simply wanted to make a sweet moment last a little longer, as he leaned against his tree.