Thirst by Ken Kalfus Page B

spared by the mercenaries, Alessandro staggers from Biaggio’s wall. He will, evidently, die someplace else. He advances along Calle Bognolo in the direction of San Marco, stopping at frequent intervals. When the siege began, the city was already depopulated. The wealthy and well connected had received advance word of the Austrians’ approach. As for himself, Alessandro knew that the city was threatened, but he did nothing to protect his person or his household, not out of courage or patriotism, but out of indolence. Or did he too put all his faith in the Republic, in the President, now the beloved Dictator, Manin?
    With the citizens gone, the dogs have come out, and they slink along the walls and into the yards. The dogs are mangy—presumably, the more appetizing ones have been eaten—but they are not thin. They’ve found food, somehow. Perhaps the Austrians have contrived a way to feed them, in order to taunt us.
    There are fires this morning. Black smoke plumes over rooftops from three distant quarters. The fire department, led by Manin himself, will rush to put them out, but not before more citizens are left homeless.

    Manin has forbidden priests to ring handbells on their way to administer last rites; he fears the din might panic the population. Instead silence looms over the city, a thundercloud of hopelessness.
    On the door of a bakery, Alessandro sees a sign: “This shop is closed because of the death of its proprietor.” Scrawled on the wall alongside that, he reads: “Viva La Republica!” and “Viva Manin!”
    There is human feces in the street: the dogs sniff it for the most intimate scents of their masters, and then trot away. The excrement is runny, sour smelling, and entirely different from the excrement of other animals, Alessandro thinks. It is a shade less dark. Here on the next street is more shit, though firmer—and recognizably a man’s, showing a faithful model of his entrails. Alessandro considers the following: that each animal evacuates in a particular way, depending on the size and shape of its anus and the strength and contours of the muscles that deliver the excretion. Perhaps in the future doctors will invent an entire medicine based on fecal measurements, a discipline to rival phrenology.
    It is on the next street that he sees his friend Donatello Bartini, who is married to his cousin Celia. Bartini is on his stomach, one of his arms splayed beneath him. Alessandro thinks of the many kindnesses Bartini has shown him in the past; he can recall his high-pitched, easy laugh.
    The best life is the one that prepares you best for death. This is the life in which you gradually lose your ties to the earth: those to your parents, your siblings and cousins, your wife, your children, your comrades.
Rather than being struck down when you feel yourself to be most loved, it is better to lose your teeth, your hair, your eyesight, and then your loved ones and thus for your body to lose weight in increments, so that in the end you barely disturb the soil of the earth you tread. This is what has happened to Alessandro in the last few days, losing everything, but fortunately in such a fashion that he can hardly recall his former health and prosperity. Now he is ready to die. The angels of death shall come and he will set a place at his table for them.
    A number of citizens have congregated at the Piazza, but they make no demonstration. They do not speak, not to Alessandro nor to each other. Occasionally, one of them looks up at Manin’s offices. They are humiliated. They have placed all their hopes in Manin, in the Republic, in democracy—that is, in themselves, and they have discovered themselves wanting.
    And it is now that Alessandro sees the first of the balloons since the Madonna della Salute, dropping slowly down the front of the dictator’s palace. It precipitates at his feet, a taffeta sack about an arm’s length across, open at the bottom, where, attached to the bag by some stiff wire, is a