Garden of Venus (31 page)

In the grand salon the countess was trying to raise herself up, fighting with the pillows as if she were drowning. Her mouth opened like a gash across her face. Fear, when it came with such force, Rosalia thought, maimed all.

‘I don’t want to die.’

At moments like that comfort did not come from words.

‘Shhhh …’ Rosalia whispered. She had wrapped her arms around her mistress and rocked her gently back and forth, shielding her with the soothing warmth of her own body, alive and strong against the dying one. The countess’s head slid over her shoulder and onto her right breast, flattening it until it hurt.

‘Shhh

‘I have no legs. I have no hands.’

Her mistress’s hands were indeed cold, her fingers moving with difficulty. Rubbing produced no effect. She needed help.

‘Don’t go,’ the countess said, shivering. ‘He is waiting for you to leave.’

Rosalia rang the bell for Marusya and told her to fetch
Doctor Lafleur. The maid crossed herself before rushing out of the room. Rosalia could hear her steps recede down the hall, her knock on the doctor’s door.

‘He won’t make me cry,’ the countess said. ‘I won’t let him.’

Moments like this were becoming more frequent. The lapses of time, the incomprehensible declarations. Only last night, the countess had begged someone not to go. ‘Not now,’ she muttered. ‘Not now.’ Then she wanted to know why the baby was crying so much. ‘Does the wetnurse have enough milk?’ she asked. When Rosalia said there was no baby, the countess insisted her daughter had brought her grandson with her. ‘I saw him just a minute ago,’ she said. ‘You were there too, Rosalia. I saw you take him in your arms and smile.’

Doctor Lafleur sent Marusya for the sacks of oats warming by the kitchen fire. Restoring the vital signs, strengthening the body weakened by bleedings was the first step in any crisis.

‘Laudanum is no longer effective,’ he declared. The time had come for pure opium.
Papaver somniferum
. He had it in his room. He would fetch it right away.

With Pietka’s help, Marusya managed to bring five of the sacks. One by one, the hot sacks went under the quilt, and around her mistress’s shivering body. The maid was now sobbing loudly, upsetting the countess even more. It was the dream the maid kept saying, that same old dream from St Petersburg. The dream of teeth falling out, a whole handful of them, the omen of death.

‘What is she talking about?’ Doctor Lafleur asked, frowning at the commotion. Marusya was trembling as if possessed, her hands covering her eyes, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

‘She had a silly dream.’

Thankfully, the warmth was having its effect. The countess quieted down and closed her eyes. Her tousled hair encircled her head, making her face seem small. She was biting her lower lip. By the time Rosalia managed to send Marusya back to the kitchen, the shivering had stopped.

‘Where am I,’ the countess asked.

‘In Berlin.’

‘How did I get here?’

‘We came here in a carriage.’

‘Oh, yes … the carriage. I remember.’

‘It should be reddish-brown,’ Doctor Lafleur said, showing Rosalia the small cake wrapped in poppy leaves he had just brought from his room. He told her that in Turkey its bitterness was often disguised with nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon or mace, but that he mixed it with honey and dissolved it in red wine.

The countess was fully conscious now, her eyes wandering through the room, resting on the votive lamp under St Nicholas, asking if the water could be changed. The flowers, she said, did not look fresh.

‘I’ll bring new ones,’ Rosalia said.

‘With this,’ Doctor Lafleur said, handing the countess a glass he had just stirred. ‘You will have a good, quiet rest.’

‘If you say so, Doctor,’ the countess said. She could taste the bitterness, in spite of the honey, for her lips curled in disgust.

‘Close your eyes and think of something pleasant. A good moment, dear to your heart. You will feel that your body is getting heavier, that your pain is slowly leaving you. Rest, smile, sleep.’

The countess closed her eyes and moaned, but a few
moments later she was asleep already, her hands gripping the quilt. Hands so thin, Rosalia thought, that holding them felt like clasping a bunch of twigs.

‘Pure opium,’ Doctor Lafleur told Rosalia in a low whisper, as he prepared to leave, ‘might buy us another week. Maybe two. The countess might be more sluggish though, even more absent.’

He was not looking at her when he said that, and Rosalia felt a tinge of disappointment.

Something was happening to her in this Berlin palace. Something unaccountable, frightening. Wild. She could not name it. She did not dare name it. There was an image she carried with her. On a hill top, a tower struck by lightning. High and mighty, once impervious to danger, now split in half by bolts of light.

It was to disarm this something that she threw herself into the day’s chores. Idle hands she thought, were the temptation of devils. She shuttled from the sickroom to the kitchen, scolding, reminding, remembering the medicine, the clean sheets, the lotion for the bedsores. If there were moments of hesitation, she reminded herself what would happen if she let herself go. The maids would gossip in the kitchen letting the dust settle, the coffee grow cold before it was brought upstairs, the fires die or suffocate in ashes. The smoothness of days would disappear, eaten up by unforeseeable disasters. Life required drudgery, vigilance, eagerness to oversee and control the minutiae of every day. She was just that, an overseer, and she could not let herself go.

What else was there anyway? Acres of solitude?

Doctor Lafleur rose, bade her a good rest, and left. She could hear his steps grow fainter in the hall. Suddenly she noticed that the knuckle of her hand was bleeding. She sucked at it and waited. The blood did not come back.

‘There is nothing for me here in Kamieniec,’ she tells Joseph. ‘For us,’ she adds, seeing his lips twitch but actually thinking of her son. Still her only son, for that second one did not live beyond one short day.

Don’t be a fool
, Mana writes.
The evil eye is never idle
.

‘If there is a door, open it.’ Her old restlessness is back, her need to be on the move. She has tried to quench it with visits to Warsaw, to Lvov, to Vienna. Anywhere but here, in this backwater. This cesspool of gossip, of jealousy and spite.

How many times can one cross the same field, meet the same people, give alms to the same blind beggar, she says.

‘Even my own mother does not want to live here,’ she screams. A lie, really, for Mana refuses for quite another reason.

Please come
, she has written, but her mother is forever offering excuses that shouldn’t matter in the least. A wave of heat that makes a thought of a carriage a torture, some debt she needs to collect, Aunt Helena’s recurring indisposition that requires her presence.
Two widows looking after each other
, she writes.
That’s what we have become. Thinking of the time when you were with us. Always laughing, like a ray of sunshine, my dear Dou-Dou
.

Her mother is afraid she might spoil her daughter’s luck.

Joseph nods. He has learned to close his ears to gossip. Her lovers are his dear friends. All he wants from them is transience. All he wants from her is swift impatience with each lover. All he wants from her is to keep her heart cold to everyone but their child. When she leaves
Kamieniec, he writes to her daily, asking her not to forget them. Reporting on Jan’s every word, every antic, begging her to come back: without her, he is nothing.

‘Jan too needs a future,’ she tells him. ‘You don’t want your only son to command this.’ She makes a sweeping gesture with her hand. Dismissive, impatient. Angry.

‘Without you,’ Joseph says, ‘I cannot live.’

That much, she tells him, is true. Without her connections, he would never have become the commandant of Kamieniec. The position he curses now, for with the Russians and Turks at war, a commandant of a Polish border fortress cannot accompany his wife in her travels. If she only let him, he would have resigned his commission, but that she will never do.

Kamieniec is watching the progress of the Russian-Turkish war that promises to bring Istanbul to its knees and restore the ancient Byzantium under a Russian rule. By December of 1788, after a long siege, the Turkish fortress of Ochakov falls to the Russians and the ladies can take sleigh rides to see pyramids of frozen Turkish bodies blackened with blood.

With each victory, the Russian headquarters are on the move to Ochakov, Bender, Jassy, and Madame de Witt often accepts the invitations to balls and feasts there. After all, with the war dragging on, there is a great need for diversions. For balls and concerts, for witty conversations, and for genteel company to take the mind away from the hardships of war. For a beautiful Greek who understands what the Turkish prisoners say to one another, and who wishes for a Russian victory. ‘A sad army can never undertake the toughest assignment,’ Prince Potemkin likes to repeat.

General Potemkin, the Russian Prince of Taurida, chief commander of the Russian troops has a passion for what he calls ‘Asiatic magic’, scent boxes filled with Arabian
perfumes, carpets interwoven with gold, a divan under a baldaquin, and beautiful women dressed in oriental costumes, lounging on the sofas around him. Princess Dolgoruka wears an odalisque costume for him. Countess Branicka announces her imminent arrival. Madame Lvov is coming soon with a young girl of fifteen, beautiful as Psyche.

It is in Ochakov where Madame de Witt displays her Greek chitons. The red silk one with golden threads, and the purple one, woven with silver. Her black hair is pinned up to reveal the curve of her neck. She declines the invitation from the Prince of Taurida to join his select company of sultanas. She prefers to be the bearer of secrets.

‘You are a Venus and a Greek,’ he tells her. ‘Is there anything else I should know about you?’

She shakes her head. Caution is what she believes in now: small steps forward, followed by a swift retreat. In the next room, an orchestra is playing, of the best Russian drummers. When the Prince cavorts with Princess Dolgoruka, the drummers are asked to drum until just before the supreme moment. Then, his Grenadiers, with their hundred cannons and forty blank cartridges each, are ordered to fire.

‘Tell me what is the best way to conquer a woman’s heart?’

‘Why?’

‘To please me.’

‘Mystery will please you better.’

He likes to talk to her, but even more than that he likes how she draws the looks of desire and expectations. He offers to make Joseph a governor of Kherson. His Empress, he tells her, would do whatever he wishes, so nothing is impossible.

‘If I were your mistress,’ she says, ‘you’d already have forgotten me.’

She pretends to tell his future. She says that she can
see change. Someone now close to him has no more love in her heart.

He shrugs his shoulders and laughs. ‘Anything else,’ he asks.

‘You will take Ismail within three weeks,’ she says, taking another look at his cards.

‘I have more infallible ways than fortune-telling,’ he answers. When she asks him what these ways are: he says, ‘General Suvorov.’

When in December 1790 Ismail falls, he shows her the letter General Suvorov has written:
Nations and walls fell before the throne of Her Imperial Majesty. The assault was murderous and long. Ismail is taken on which I congratulate Your Highness
.

‘Wasn’t I right?’ he asks.

She is dressed in a Turkish tunic embroidered with roses and precious stones, made by Cortet et fils in Lyon, not by some cheap Russian imitator. She is sitting for the portrait the Prince of Taurida ordered.

It is better not to look too closely into her own heart.

Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, the victor of the Turkish campaign, has asked her to come with him to St Petersburg. He has chosen the way she is to sit, hands folded across her breasts, a shawl wrapped around her hair and shoulders. ‘My last sultana,’ he declares, but she can see how he looks at his own niece. The painter, warned that one too daring look at his model would be enough cause for the Prince to cut his balls off and let his mastiffs chase him naked across the snow, is snatching short, nervous looks at her.

‘The likeness will be striking, Madame la Comtesse, my Prince,’ the painter says. His voice trembles, his hands are pale and smeared with paint. He is Italian from Turin, and new to Russia.

‘Leave us alone,’ she says to her prince and, to her surprise, he obeys.

The painter, obviously relieved at the Prince’s departure, mixes colours on his palette and tells her about Russia. He has seen a Jewish wedding. The Jews of Russia, he has been assured, are always ready to marry someone. Three hours after Prince Razumov’s order, the whole synagogue came to the manor with their choirs, jesters and the betrothed. He saw two orphans wed in front of the spectators, under a canopy. There were fiddlers and dancers and the jesters. The groom was carried around on a chair and the men danced most beautifully.

‘I thought it most delightful,’ he says.

She inspects his work and decides that one of her eyes looks crooked. It is also too big. She demands that he change it.

‘It is because your eyes, Madame, paralyse me,’ he says. His shirt is open at the collar, specks of paint stain his neck.

He says Russia is a country for artists and lovers. Women here have the charm of nymphs.

She reminds him that Prince Potemkin makes no vain threats and his mastiffs are known for their fierceness. No one would ever inquire what had happened to an Italian painter with a penchant for Russian brothels and vodka. That stops him mid-sentence and the portrait is declared finished. She still does not like the right eye.

A chill is coming over her too. Someone must have opened the door and let in cold icy air.

The portrait is called, ‘Sophie, Comtesse de Witt.’

‘Come,’ she hears his voice, burly in the darkness of this giant room. Prince Potemkin. A lover who tells her to strip and covers her naked body with jewels as if they were grains of sand, whose hands leave purple bruises on
her white arms. A lover who kisses her naked feet, who asks her to place them on a black velvet cushion like jewels and watches when the maids dust them with powder. A lover who would drop her the moment his eyes saw another, younger or prettier or just new.