Free Death in a Serene City by Edward Sklepowich Page A

You surprise me—you with your love for Venice.”
    â€œIt’s Venice I love, not dying.” She shot him a vulnerable, troubled look that went straight to his heart. “I can’t say that I care for all its associations with death. It’s impossible to escape them.”
    â€œBut didn’t one of your countrywomen—I don’t remember who it was—say a long time ago that there was no other city better for the retreat of old age?”
    â€œThat’s hardly more consoling.”
    They walked in silence for a few moments. Urbino assumed they were on their way to the boat landing until the Contessa said, “Indulge me for a few moments. I’d like to visit the Orthodox section.”
    He didn’t have to ask why. It was to visit Diaghilev’s grave. Her mother had been a close friend of Diaghilev’s and had always regretted not having been at his funeral, not because she had missed Diaghilev’s friend jumping into the grave but because she had been unable to pay her last respects to a man she had loved and admired. As they made their way into the Orthodox compound and down to the wall to Diaghilev’s simple stone, Urbino even knew what his friend would say.
    â€œThere’s another one.” She pointed to the ballet slipper on the top of the tombstone. It had lost its shape and color. It was filled with decayed leaves, and a spider had spun a web across its opening. “I wonder who leaves them. In all the times I’ve been here I’ve never seen anyone even looking at the grave.”
    â€œIt’s one of Venice’s romantic mysteries. After all, Venice is a city of love as well as death—and they’re not too far apart. Remember that Wagner not only died here, as Voyd reminded us, but he also wrote the “Liebestod” of Tristan und Isolde in his palazzo on the Grand Canal. Love-death, death-in-love, love-in-death, love’s death,” he reeled off with an inappropriate grin.
    Then, right there in the corner of the Orthodox section against the wall by Diaghilev’s grave, he startled the Contessa—and in fact himself—by breaking out into his weak, uneven tenor:
    â€œ Nun banne das Bangen ,
    bolder Tod ,
    sebnend verlangter
    Liebestod! ”
    And then, fearing his friend might have missed his point, he started over in English:
    â€œ Let fear now be banished ,
    gracious death ,
    yearningly longed-for
    love-in-death! ”
    â€œThat’s more than enough, thank you! Come, I think we’d better go. You have the most peculiar sensibility for an intelligent man!”
    Once again arm in arm, they left Diaghilev’s grave with its lone, mysterious slipper and walked slowly back to the boat landing.

Part Two
    BLESSED REMAINS

1
    EVERYTHING had gone well at the Glass Museum despite spite Sister Veronica’s preoccupation with Margaret Quinton’s death last week and her less than keen interest in glass. Although the daughter of a glassblower, she had little appreciation for the art. What she now knew about it had been learned long after her adolescent rejection of her father’s profession and because of her tours of Murano for the guests at the hospice. Even now she still had large, almost willful gaps in her knowledge, something that couldn’t be said of her knowledge of Tintoretto, her grand, if chaste passion.
    At one point this afternoon Sister Veronica had thought there might be a problem when the chubby little boy from Perugia started to slide himself across the floor in the room of the Wedding Cup. His momentum had almost carried him into the showcase with reliquaries but fortunately his mother had stopped him at the critical moment. She had just shrugged at Sister Veronica as if to say, Well, what can we do? He’s a boy!
    Now, two hours later as they stood in the Church of San Gabriele, the boy was being so quiet that Sister Veronica was getting nervous. She knew, from her own