We were passing under the high bridge, a dark space between the wavy lights on the water.

“And where do I see him? Meeting Mama. So I ruin her party. Oh, such behavior. Terrible. And she’s with a man like that. My god. She thinks she knows who he is. None of you know. What are you doing here, all of you?”

I said nothing, letting the words drift off, like vented steam. She lowered her head.

“You should go home.”

“No,” I said. “Not now.”

She looked at me, then turned to the window. “Oh, and that solves everything.”

“What do you want to solve?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. Nobody pays, do they? In a few days, it’ll be—gone. Gossip. ‘Poor man. I heard about that girl. She must have been crazy.’ And everything goes on. Nobody pays, not those people.”

“Yes, they do. In Germany people are starving. Everybody’s paying.”

“You think it’s the same? Hunger? No, they won’t pay, not the murderers. That’s how it is now. Everybody pays but the murderer. And here? Signora Mimi is planning a ball. And the murderer is going to marry a rich American.”

“No, he’s not. You think I’d let that happen?”

“Because of this?” She shook her head. “It won’t make any difference. He’ll explain. Some story. And she’ll believe him. And even if she doesn’t believe him, it’s better to forget, no? Put it in the past. Easier.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“I don’t have to be fair. He pointed at my father. At me. You be fair.”

“He didn’t point at you.”

“No,” she said quietly, “I did.” She looked out the window, then back at me. “So you can feel better when you see him at dinner. He didn’t point at me. Just the sick old Jew.”

“I’m not going to see him at dinner,” I said evenly. “Stop.”

“She’ll thank you for that,” Claudia said, and then she did stop, folding back into herself again, staring out the window. We were almost at San Stae.

“We should go back. I’ll take you home.”

“No, one more stop.”

“What’s there?”

“My old house. I thought I would never go there again, but tonight I want to see it.” She turned to me. “You want to see Venice? I’ll give you a tour. Not the Accademia. This one.”

I said nothing, pulled along by her mood, unsure where she was going now. No one else got off at San Marcuola, so we were alone in the empty square, near a dark silent church and a few streetlamps. She asked for a cigarette.

“You know, my father would never allow it, a woman smoking in the streets. And here, so close.”

We started walking north into Cannaregio, gloomy long canals and workers’ houses.

“He would have been ashamed. Imagine. Of this. Think of the rest of it, what it would have done to him.” Talking to the air, to herself.

We passed a shop with Hebrew lettering.

“This is the ghetto?”

“Almost. The edge. In the beginning you had to live on the island, where the campo is. It’s easy in Venice to separate people. One island, three bridges. At night they put chains across, to keep everybody in. Except sometimes they let a doctor out, if a Christian was sick. My father used to say, no wonder the Jews liked medicine. It got them out of the ghetto.”

“But that was the Middle Ages.”

“Until Napoleon,” she said, playing tour guide. “Then you could live anywhere. Of course, most people stayed here, nearby. It was what they were used to. You see the buildings at the end, how high? They ran out of space in the ghetto, so they had to build on top. Nowhere else do you see buildings like this—six stories, seven. So many stairs.”

We turned off the main street into the narrower Calle Farnese, where we were shielded even from moonlight, forced to rely on a corner light and a few slivers coming from the shuttered windows.

“Here,” she said, stopping about a block before the bridge. “You see up there? Those windows? My aunt lived on the other side. My mother’s sister. They used to talk across. Like cats, my father said.”

We stood there for a few minutes, looking at the house and seeing nothing—ordinary windows like all the others, a door flush with the street. Around us, a smell of canal debris and damp plaster. A cat ran past, then disappeared into a shadow. A drab back calle. But Claudia was seeing something else, her eyes fixed on the dark walls as if she were looking through them to the rooms inside, her own past. Family dinners. Homework. Radio. How different could it have been? Then the change—backdoor patients, unofficial. Curfews. Her aunt’s window shut tight.

“What happened to her?”

“My mother? She died when I was eight. Oh, my aunt. In the roundup, the first one.”

“With the air raid sirens.”

She looked at me. “Yes, with the sirens. You remembered. You can see, in a street like this, how noisy it would be.” An alleyway, every shout an echo. “Come, see the rest.”

She led me over the bridge onto the island and through a passage so low I had to duck my head. We came out into a larger campo with a well in the center, an enclosed patch of faint moonlight entirely surrounded by the built-up houses, walled in.

“You see there, those windows, five in a row? That was the synagogue—out of sight, but a visitor could find it by the windows. Five, for the five books.”

I looked up, involuntarily counting the windows, then turned slowly, taking in the whole campo, dingy and peeling, a tree with spiky winter branches, not a hint of warmth anywhere, the coldest place I’d seen in Venice. It seemed utterly deserted, as if everyone had gone away, leaving a few lights on by accident.

“When was the roundup?”

“Oh, dates. All right,” she said, adopting a guide’s voice, “dates. You know Italy surrendered in forty-three? The king surrenders. September. Mussolini, he goes to Salò, and of course the Germans come in. So now, here, it’s the occupation. New Jewish laws, much worse. Now we are enemy aliens. My family, here since Rome, now we’re aliens. The broadcast was—when? End of November. I remember they came to Jona then for a list. He was head of the community, and the Germans asked him for a list of the Jews living here. Two thousand, I think. Everybody. A good man—my father knew him. What could he do? Yes, tomorrow, he told them, and that night he warned us. Then he killed himself. So he was the first. But now we knew—run, hide if you can. Like rats. You see over there?” She pointed north to a long gray building, prisonlike. “The nursing home. They couldn’t run. Some couldn’t even move. So they were easy to arrest. You see, without the list it was harder, they had to take who they could find.”

“Like your aunt.”

“She wouldn’t run. You have to imagine. Midnight, the sirens, people screaming, pounding on doors. She couldn’t move, the fear was too strong.” She shrugged. “So they took her. She scared herself to death.”

“But you hid from the Germans?”

“Germans? No, Italians. They used us to do it. Our own. Carabinieri, police, some Fascists. Maybe that’s why they waited till it was dark—maybe they didn’t want to be seen. Later it was SS. More efficient. With the police, it became a farce. They took everyone to Collegio Foscarini, but there were no facilities, nothing. So people came with food, they would throw food through the windows for the children. Ten days like that. A public embarrassment. So to Casa di Ricovero and they release the sick ones. They didn’t understand—no one could be released. So the SS came and arrested them again. A farce. But finally, the train. After that it was mostly SS, with their informers. Grini. He would take them through the hospitals, even the mental hospital. It wasn’t enough for them if you were crazy. You had to be dead.”

She folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself, rocking a little.

“You’re cold.”

“Of course we didn’t know they would go through the hospitals. We thought it was safe there. We were on the Lido then. Hiding, but not hiding. A vacation flat someone found for us, empty, you know. The neighbors pretended no one was there. We still had a little money. How much longer could it go on? It was just a matter of time, if we could wait it out. But then my father became too sick to stay there. He had a friend at the hospital, from the old days. He thought it would be all right. Use another name. Who would look in the critical wards? What for? They were already on their way to San Michele, almost dead.” She lowered her head. “But they did look.” She stretched out one arm. “That one. Dr. Maglione. You think I would forget that face? Never. And then tonight, one look and I was back in that ward. But this time, champagne. Everyone smiling. And I thought, he got away with it. They all did. They got away with murder.”