Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice Read Online Free PDF

I whisper.
    â€œHow American and trivial you are, Jessichka.”
    â€œIs this the Russian way of flirting—abuse and insult?”
    â€œYes. And then I drag you to my cave.”
    He smiles for the cameras, striking his best angle. Grigory is movie-star handsome (high, Slavic cheekbones, retroussé nose) and movie-star vain, but the creases in his pale brow (and the darting blue eyes beneath) betray the price he has paid for being a survivor in a country where artists are either silenced in Siberia or speak with forked tongue all over the world.
    But then I am a survivor, too; survivor of a system just as brutal to artists in its own way. I have paid for my passion for Shakespeare with movie and television roles so silly that sometimes I wanted to giggle (or weep) when I first read the script. I have been murdered again and again, seduced and abandoned again and again, and now that I am in my “middle years” (though just how middle, I do not say) I sometimes play the mother of the girl who gets murdered or seduced, or seduced and murdered. The whole women’s movement came and went without murder and seduction ceasing to be the principal fate of woman on film. Which is why I am happy to be working again with Björn. At least his women are subject to fates more complex—if no less brutal.
    I cross my legs. A hundred cameras with flash attachments are at knee level. We are on the stage and the photographers are crouched directly below the footlights. The president of the Biennale makes a long speech full of words like artisticamente , belle arti , cinema come arte . When people talk about art, I reach for my gun. Every scoundrel with a sinecure prates of art. We who attempt to do it (however imperfectly) know that sometimes one has to be murdered on film to pay the rent, and sometimes one works for love—though love doesn’t pay for Vuitton luggage nor for the kinds of clothes you need when crossing your legs before a hundred photographers.
    I am wearing a purple silk dress full of odd-shaped patches of purple print, gold lamé, and silver lamé—a Koos van den Akker collage. On my feet are golden gladiator sandals; on my toenails, golden polish. I take my sunglasses off and put them on, aware that merely sitting here is part of my performance. I wet my lips with my tongue. From time to time Grigory, also an actor in his way, gives my shoulder a squeeze and smiles at the press. The flashbulbs accelerate dramatically.
    The president of the Biennale is followed by the mayor of Venice, who is followed by the president of the film festival, who is followed by some unknown cultural capo , who is followed by the president of the jury. As the speeches go on and on, I drift away into another world…the movie I would write if I dared write anywhere except in my journal, my own little filmic fantasy of Venice…
Two young men are arriving in the Serenissima. They are Elizabethan dandies, men of the world, and they have sailed from London to Southampton, Southampton to Lisbon, Lisbon to Cadiz, Cadiz to the Balearic Islands, the Balearic Islands to Palermo, Palermo to Messina, Messina to Corfu, then up the Adriatic coast to Zara, Trieste, and Venice. The journey has been long, the rations at sea half rotten and wormy, and the ports along the way teeming with slaves and prostitutes, escaped criminals, and all the wretched refuse of the earth. They have sailed in a Venetian galley—the galley of Flanders, say, that plied the Atlantic route to Bruges and Antwerp, with stops at Southampton and London. This great, wide-beamed merchant ship sailed the seas in a convoy of three or four other such vessels, great galleys with lateen sails, and nearly two hundred oarsmen as well…An astounding ship for its size and height, at times it was so swift it could make the journey from Southampton to Venice in as few as thirty-one days, except that on this occasion there were all sorts of