Garden of Venus (39 page)

‘How does one die of yellow fever?’ Rosalia asked him.

Her eyes were reddened, her cheeks streaked with tears, but she offered no explanation. He didn’t ask for one either. Her face, he noticed was paler than usual. All this waiting for death was taking its toll. She never complained, of course, but he had never expected her to.

He didn’t ask her why. It was a painful death he told her. Sometimes it began with a general feeling of sickness, exhaustion and depression. Most often, however, it came suddenly. Very sharp pain appeared in the eye sockets, feet, loins and stomach. Then came quick shivering fits, followed by a dry fever. The patients’ face became flushed, tears flowed from their glazed eyes. The upper chest burnt with fever, but the rest of the body was cold.

He stopped, wondering if he should go on. Something in her face worried him, something fluid, threatening to spill. She was not one of his students, he reminded himself. Should he really tell her of the fear of suffocation; a face turned livid, thick whitish-fluid covering the parched tongue which changed into black incrustation; of faeces black with blood; spotty patches on the neck, chest and shoulders. Or of the final moment when utterly exhausted the patient would not be able to raise his eyelids. Only the tremor of ocular muscles would announce imminent death.

‘I beg you,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask more.’

Her lips were trembling. He could see that other words were on the tip of her tongue.

‘My father,’ she whispered. ‘died of yellow fever in Santo Domingo.’

He stood up and poured her some brandy from the decanter on the marble sideboard. This was not the first time that he had blessed Frau Kohl’s housekeeping skills. She took the glass in her hand and raised it to her lips.
One sip. Then another. He wanted to tell her to slow down, but seeing the colour return to her cheeks he stopped himself. What could he tell this woman, still young, and so consumed with mourning. This woman with eyes only for the dead.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. What else could he tell her? That Napoleon had cared nothing for the Polish freedom, or anyone else’s, and that it was this ruthlessness that made him who he was. That if her father lived he could well have died in the fields of Russia, beaten to death by peasants who paid two silver roubles for the privilege? Should he insist as Ignacy would have done that deeper meaning should be forged out of pain? Meaning that never lessened with time, passed on to the next generation, in a relay of duties, of obligations. Thomas couldn’t argue with such noble sentiments but wished that it wasn’t so, wished that she could be spared.

The brandy had made her cheeks pink. This was one of these moments when she looked more than pretty, her face lit by the shy November sun, her hazel eyes warm and moist.

Vis medicatrix natura
, he thought. This is what will force the sadness out of her heart.

She thinks: Between God and the Devil, there is uncharted territory. Is it foolish to hope she won’t be lost there?

Felix is so proud of himself when he brings her here for the first time, into this Ukrainian gorge littered with reddish boulders, just a short ride from his Uman summer palace. ‘It will be so much better than Arkadia,’ he says. ‘You will see.’ They dismount and the servants hold their horses. He takes her hand and pulls her to follow him to the spot where the river falls down the slope.

‘Your garden,’ he says. ‘Look.’

With Felix everything is possible. From Africa and Italy will come the trees, fallen giants dug out of the earth, their roots wrapped in moist burlap, crossing the sea and dragged with chains from the ships in Odessa: plantains, Wejmut pines, poplars. The nettle tree, so solid and heavy that it would sink in water. The Turkish filbert from Caucasus, able to thrive in complete shade. She will watch them propped in enormous holes, watered day and night until they take root in alien soil. Until it seems they have always grown there, until they are no longer foreign. The Uman serfs will toil around the clock, lighting the way with torches, moving the streams, digging up the lake. Then the birds will start coming, crimson, black with orange patches, blue and green. She will ask the gardener where they are from, thinking that they too must have been brought over from Italy or France, but the man only smiles. ‘They are from here,’ he will say, ‘from our Ukrainian groves.’ He calls them cardinals, orioles, and evas.

‘Your wishes,’ Felix kisses her hand, ‘are my orders.’

She says she wants peacocks, and so peacocks strut along the paths of her garden. She wants music and the orchestra is summoned and hidden beyond the bushes so that no sight of men will spoil her mood. She wants the little huts built, teeming with life, and he will order his serfs to live there, dressed as hermits and shepherds.

Felix has far grander plans. He can already see a big lake fed by the cascading water. A hidden lake into which a visitor would be taken by an underground tunnel. He likes the very idea of a subterranean journey, a moment of reflection between night and day, between death and life. A moment in which confronted with the memory of past sins, the soul will free itself from them through the hope of the future.

‘I would like that,’ she mutters.

On that lake there will be an island of Circe, but unlike
in the
Odyssey
where on such an island Greek sailors were turned into pigs, here animals will achieve human form for, in this blessed garden the sins of the flesh will be overcome, darkness conquered, and souls born again.

Countess Josephine Potocka refuses to talk of the divorce, so Count Felix is promising her another Arkadia.

‘More beautiful,’ he vows. With grottoes where the guest can hide from summer heat; with secluded spots where they can ponder the vagaries of fate; with vistas that take away one’s breath; with a ‘Greek forest’ named in her honour; with boulders scattered as if by a giant’s hand; narrow paths suspended over precipice; vast, gloomy meadows turned into the Elysian Fields.

Le jardins de Sophie
.

Sophievka.

There is an engineer he already has in mind. An expert in hydraulics. Metzel his one time aide-de-camp, meticulous to a fault. He has seen the first plans already.

‘Kiss me, my
Elpida
,’ she says. She lets herself be careless, forget caution. In her womb she can feel another child stirring. Her own love, she assures him, is so overwhelming that she will agree to any fate. ‘I’ll be your slave,’ she says. ‘Your mistress forever if I cannot be your wife. Nothing you do will change it. Without you there is no life for me.’

‘Look,’ she tells Felix, knowing that he sees nothing but her delight. In his gaze she sees no danger of passion receding. He believes her like a child might.

Elpida
. The giver of hope.

Olga thought herself a bird in a cage. Her sister should have been with her now, as should her brothers. She should not be alone with death.

I’m not like Maman, Olga thought. Her body was delicate, bone-thin, frail. Her mouth too large for her face, her eyes but a pale copy of her mother’s. They were black, but too small, shining, but without the force her mother could effortlessly summon. The force that made men adjust their cravats, and follow her with their eyes wherever she went.

Rising from her bed Olga twirled her skirt out in a spiral of silk taffeta. Her brothers often teased her that they could encircle her waist in one hand. She could hear the French doctor come out of the library. He was talking to someone now in a booming voice.

Quickly Olga rubbed her cheeks to make them red and loosened her hair. She sat on her bed and spread the skirts around her, making sure her feet showed. She had taken off her slippers and was wearing white silk stockings. She began to sob.

The door to her room opened and Olena came in, but Olga waved her away.

‘My head,’ she moaned, ‘my heart. Call the doctor. Quick.’

The French doctor did not look alarmed. He felt her pulse. His thin hands were warm, reddened. She wondered why he couldn’t make the redness go away. He was a doctor after all. Quite handsome too, in a manly way, even if a bit short. She watched the hairs on his thumb raise slightly.

‘It’s the pain in my heart,’ she said, pointing to her breasts. ‘Right here.’

From his leather case Thomas took a stethoscope and placed it to her chest. For a moment she listened to his breathing. There was the smell of snuff around him. He said that he heard nothing unusual, just agitation: no doubt it was caused by the situation she found herself in.

‘I’ll give you a few drops of laudanum, Mademoiselle,’ he said, and she hated the compassion in his voice. ‘It’s
a difficult time for you. You mustn’t be too alarmed by moments like this. We are only human.’

At her sister’s wedding she drank far too much champagne, loving the lightness it gave her. She danced without stopping, giddy with happiness. Before her new brother-in-law, Pavel, took her by the elbow and asked her to take a turn with him in the garden, she had danced a waltz with the young Count Naryshkin. ‘You are more beautiful than your sister,’ he said. Sophie, the bride, her cheeks flushed, was looking at her from across the room with a look of warning. ‘It’s your
joie de vivre
,’ the Count said.

‘Try to calm down,’ Thomas said. ‘Take a deep breath.’

She stared at him when he poured some water from the decanter, added a lump of sugar, measured the laudanum, and began to stir it all together. His eyes took in her dishevelled dress, the frills of her petticoat, the shape of her small feet. She wondered if he too thought he could encircle her waist in one hand. Perhaps she should have let him see her spin out her skirt. See her in a twirling of taffeta. Hear the rustle of the fabric.

She drank the laudanum slowly, making a face. In spite of the sugar, the bitterness was there, right under the surface. When he reached to take the glass away, she grasped his hand and pressed it to her heart.

‘Can you feel it now?’ she asked. ‘It’s even stronger than before.’

He removed his hand from hers, peeling off her fingers one by one.

‘You shouldn’t get agitated. Please. I’ll ask Mademoiselle Rosalia to sit with you.’

That
Jewess, she thought, watching the doctor leave the room in a hurry. Jeroslav was right. She should have her coffers searched. It was all so unfair. Wasn’t it enough that she had to watch Rosalia’s hands? Make sure her
mother was not robbed on her deathbed? That vulture, already counting the ducats she would get, scheming to get her mother’s dresses, her jewels. As if it weren’t enough that Maman were dying. That this horrible, half-empty palace gave her shivers. That she was suffocating here.

The door opened quietly. She didn’t have to look to know it was Rosalia. She could recognise her steps anywhere.

‘Go away,’ Olga snapped. Hiding her face in her pillow, she could still feel Rosalia’s hands adjusting the throw on her feet. The flash of hatred that hit her was like a bolt of lightning.

‘Leave me alone, you sneaky Jewess.’

The satisfaction, a long forgotten pleasure of getting even. Like screaming at her brothers in the nursery. It didn’t matter for what. The sight of crimson on Rosalia’s cheeks made her go on. This and the suggestion that Doctor Lafleur should be sent for again, right away, to bleed her perhaps.

‘Oh, run after him,’ Olga screamed. ‘You think I don’t know what you really want? But he doesn’t want you. And my mother won’t help you.’

Only when the laudanum began to work, the sharp edge of this anger dissipated. Her eyelids heavy, Olga surrendered to the sweet calm enveloping her.

On the way to the Uman palace, her coachman takes the wrong turn at the crossroads. It is a Sunday and the carriage rolls through a village with its thatched roofs, cranes, pots left to dry on the wattle fences. She parts the curtains to take a look at the maze of paths leading from one whitewashed hut with red window frames to another, at the gardens overgrown with lilac bushes and sunflowers.

There is something about this village that makes her think of Istanbul. The smell perhaps, of dust and heat. The feel of the hot earth under her foot. The hunger in her for that other, forgotten world. I am me, she remembers thinking, and nobody is like me. The seedlings are pushing through the soil around an old oak tree. ‘See how many of them have high hopes,’ the internuncio once asked. ‘How many, do you think will be allowed to grow.’

Charles Boscamp. But she will not think of him. Or the gallows in Warsaw where his tortured body swung for hours, lashed by the rain. Every day is a new day.

There is a fair in the village and soon her carriage is slowing down, its path obstructed by the thickening crowds. ‘Like locusts,’ Felix would have said at the sight of so many carts, platforms, heaps of fruit, baskets, bast shoes, painted plates and bowls. Deafened by the squealing of pigs, the neighing of horses and cackling of hens. A woman is selling dumplings, a small stove right in front of her, pan at the ready. She keeps the dough under her skirt. She licks her fingers so that it doesn’t stick to them, pinches a piece of dough from a bowl, and throws it into the pan.

She doesn’t know these people, Felix would say, urging the driver to get them out of there. He has tried to frighten her with his stories of runaway serfs, army deserters,
haidamaks
, pointed out to her the Uman well once filled with Polish corpses, the synagogue where the Jews were burned alive. The orphaned children from Uman stayed for months in his father’s palace, before arrangements were made; so many orphans, their eyes wide and empty.

‘You have never known such fear,’ he said.

You only strive after that which is bred in your bones, Felix. You only see that which appears to you.

Nobody can see all the trees, Felix. Only God can see the entire forest.

By the village inn she can hear the tapping of heels and the first tunes of a Cossack dance. A young man outside of the tavern is holding a bottle of vodka in one hand and a small bowl in another. ‘
Pij
,’ he coos to passers by. ‘Drink, brother, it’s Matwij Szpon who is paying!’ She sees men stop and drink with him, wiping the bowl with the rim of their white shirts. If anyone refuses, he pours the vodka on the ground and spits after the fool.