Garden of Venus (4 page)

The two assistants on either side pressed their fingers
on the arteries, and the surgeon began the cleaning, his hand separating the tumour from the skin and muscles, cutting off the cancerous tissue. Blood splattered his hands and arms. There were a few drops of it on his face. When Rosalia heard the blade scraping the breast bone, she could feel her mother’s hand loosening her grip. Maman had fainted and for a moment something close to panic overtook her until she reminded herself that, unconscious, her mother was free from pain.

The procedure took twenty minutes. There were operations that could be performed well and fast, but this was not one of them. The whole of the diseased structure had to be removed, the surgeon said afterwards, and he could not afford to miss anything. ‘I can amputate in under two minutes,’ he said. ‘But with this, no half measures will do. If the reoccurrence of the mischief is to be prevented…’

Rosalia was so hopeful then. The surgeon assured her that the operation had gone well and showed her how to dress the wound, applying a large, thick compress of charpie to the sutures and binding it on with a flannel roller. It didn’t take long for blood to appear through all the bandages. Maman’s face had lost all its colour and her limbs all life. The assistants carried her to her bed, and Rosalia was told to change her dressings every two hours and watch for signs of infection, for the weakening of the body.

At midnight her mother opened her eyes, but she did not seem to know where she was.

‘He is standing by the window,’ she kept saying.

‘Who is?’ Rosalia asked. All she wanted was to throw herself into her mother’s arms, to hide her face in her breasts the way she did when she was a child. Instead she could still hear the knife scraping against the bones.

‘He is pointing at his heart.’

Her lips were parched and she drank a few sips of water. ‘I am going with him,’ she said. ‘I have to.’

Rosalia tried to quiet her. The surgeon had assured her the operation was a success. The cancer was removed, all of it. ‘You must be strong, Maman,’ she pleaded. ‘You cannot leave me alone. You cannot leave your only child.’

‘I have to go,’ her mother whispered and closed her eyes. ‘He is waiting for me. He will take me away.’

Seeing that the blood had penetrated the dressing again, Rosalia replaced it with a fresh one. Maman did not open her eyes, but she no longer seemed in pain. Perhaps, Rosalia thought, the crisis had passed. She promised herself not to fall asleep, but the silence and her mother’s calm, soft breaths proved too much. When she woke up, startled, it was still dark. The windowpanes were covered with the white, intricate patterns she loved to watch in Zierniki where the windows froze for most of the winter. Beautiful white ferns, branches of trees with spiked leaves, flowers of tiny petals that reminded her of figures her father drew to amuse her: pentagons, hexagons, octagons.

The room was silent and still. Death she thought was like that. A moment of loss too profound to comprehend. A moment in which love fuses with pain. A moment from which there is no now and no future. Nothing but memories of the past, crumbling and fading with time.

She didn’t have to touch Maman’s face to know she was dead.

Just as she did on winter days in Zierniki, Rosalia breathed at the windowpane. When the ice petals melted, she peered through the hole and saw a boy pass by. He was carrying a lantern carved out of a turnip, slits in its side let out enough light for him to see where he was going.

There were a few other objects in Rosalia’s travelling chest but these would remain unpacked, a testimony to the temporary nature of her stay in this Berlin palace: a small
wooden star she had found among her mother’s things; her father’s snuffbox with the Rights of Man engraved on the lid; a black silhouette of Kosciuszko’s profile and three sketches of Napoleon in a wreath of oak leaves – her father’s heroes.

These treasures Rosalia kept locked in a mahogany box, underneath her clothes in the trunk. It was a flimsy hiding place. Any of the servant girls might want to go through her things, try on her dresses or petticoats. Smell her rosewater or jasmine oil and dab a few drops on her brow. In St Petersburg handkerchiefs and sheets of paper disappeared routinely. The paper was what the cook used to curl her hair with. ‘If it wasn’t meant to be taken, it wouldn’t be lying around,’ Rosalia had heard Marusya mutter.

Her back hurt from lifting sacks of clothes, from helping the countess stand up. Taking off her shoes and her stockings, she walked about the room, until her aching feet were consoled by the smoothness of the carpet. If only Olga cared to help more, but some people were born to luxury and some were not. ‘It’s your own mother,’ Rosalia was often tempted to say, but never did.

Her most excellent bed, as Frau Kohl – the Graf’s housekeeper – had described it, did not help. It felt too big, too cold. Rosalia turned and tossed around, trying to warm up the clammy sheet, wondering if she should call for another eiderdown. There were noises outside her room; German words exchanged by the footmen; the sounds of doors opening and closing – the life of this palace, temporarily interrupted by their arrival. She recalled Marusya’s talking about strange noises in the maid’s room, like someone’s knocking on the windowpane, and complaining that the room smelled of mice. ‘Perhaps the Count has come for the Mistress,’ the cook had said.

She opens the gate. The fence of their Istanbul house is made of staves of wood fastened with wire. The wind pushes her back, and the first rain drops fall on her face. She is thinking of the smooth feel of velvet on her cheek.

‘Quick,’ Mana screams. ‘Upstairs. To your room.’

The front door is hanging open. A doctor is in her parents’ bedroom, bending over her father. Or someone who looks like her father, in spite of the swollen red face, an eyeless face locked in a scowl.

‘Go,’ Mana screams.

Upstairs, in her small room, Sophie throws herself on her bed and listens. The doctor’s voice is harsh and commanding. He is calling for water, and he is pounding something. Pounding hard and shouting at Mana who rushes outside and then comes back.

She can smell her own body. A slightly sour smell she breathes in and out. For a moment she feels that she is growing large, her feet are endless and wide, stretching to the edge of the world, but then she moves and the feeling is gone.

She remembers the time when he was proud of her. When he told Mana to dress his daughter in her best dress and to plait her hair with ribbons so that her father could take her with him to the garden where, under the deep shade of almond blossoms, his friends gathered for their evening coffee and sweetmeats.

Her father stood her on the carpet and clapped his hands. She bowed and smiled, eyes stealing swiftly across the faces of the men and back again to her father. From the overgrown lake, right beside them, came a rotting smell of reeds.

Her father took a garland of flowers and put it around
her neck. A beautiful garland of reds and yellows, of roses and wild daffodils. She sniffed at the flowers and their scent made her sneeze. ‘A sign,’ her father said. Someone was talking about her now. Right this minute someone was saying her name.

The thought pleased her. The waves of whispers, the eyes of strangers following her.

‘Pray to the Lord,’ her father said, ‘that what they say is always good. Once soiled, a good name is lost forever.’

The men laughed and clapped their hands.

This is what she wants to remember: the wine glasses raised to the sky, toasting her health and her good luck. Toasting her beautiful voice breaking into a song of love. A song sad and sweet. A song she has heard shepherds sing in the fields.

A child thrice blessed. A child kissed by an angel.

Her father carried her home that evening, and she remembers his breath, in which wine and coffee mingled. He carried her in his arms like a princess so that her embroidered slippers would not, Heaven forbid, be soiled. The soft slippers Mana had made out of an old dress she had stopped wearing.

Downstairs the pounding stops and there is silence. She crosses herself three times. She is sorry for all the times she has been angry at him.

In Jerusalem, in the Temple, she cried as the friars lifted up the cross and led the pilgrims to the place where Our Lord suffered and died. She was holding a candle and the wax, melting, scorched her skin, but she did not feel pain. When they reached the Mount of Calvary she fell to her knees, recalling the suffering of Our Lord and those who were with him in these dark moments of pain and despair. Recalling Mary Magdalene, forgiven for her sins, taken back into the heart of the Lord. And then her own heart
filled with love and compassion for all human suffering, and she could not think of anything she wanted so much as to lie there, on the holy ground and let her tears soak into the earth.

Mana is standing at the door, her hands hanging loose, her lips moving. There is a drop of sweat rolling down her forehead.

‘It’s Tuesday,’ she hears.

Tuesday is a bad, unlucky day. On a Tuesday, Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks and would from now on be called Istanbul. On a Tuesday the Emperor Constantine turned into marble. Just before he was to be struck down by the Turks, Byzantium’s last Emperor was seized by an angel. The angel, his golden wings shining in the rays of the sun, carried him to a cave near the Golden Gate and turned him into a statue. ‘You will wait here,’ he said, ‘for the time when God our Lord is ready to restore freedom to the Greeks.’

‘Cry, Dou-Dou,’ she says, ‘cry for your father. We are all alone in the world.’

But her own eyes are dry.

In the Istanbul port, where the straits merge with the sea, opaque patterns glide over the water and flocks of shearwaters skim low over the surface, never to rest. The Turks say they are the souls of the damned.

Mana says these tiny birds are the souls of the odalisques the Sultan sent to their deaths. Drowned in the Bosphorus, in brown burlap sacks, their hands tied, their mouths gagged. In this world it is better to be a dog than a woman, Mana says, for she has seen carriages stop for a dog lying in the sun. She has seen servants get out, lift the dog up, and carry it out of the way.

The fishermen come back from the sea with swordfish,
red and grey mullet, sea bass, lobsters and mussels. Sprats are caught with a lantern. The light reflected in the water makes the fish blind, she has heard, and they do not see the net.

‘Sing for us, gorgeous,’ the sailors ask.

In the market her mother has shown her how to watch out for bad fish. The stink of decay can be rubbed away with pine tar; dull skin buffed with a piece of rag until it shines. Air can be blown inside the belly to make a catch look bigger and more succulent.

Watch out, Mana says. You have already bled like a woman. Men can pick that scent. Men can tell.

She likes the sight of them. The young men with olive skin, shirts stained with grease, open at the chest. Their muscles tense as they pull on the ropes.

‘I won’t,’ she laughs and hurries away.

For a Christian woman the streets of Istanbul are fraught with danger. Even if she casts her eyes down and follows her mother, quickly, without looking. Even if she promises herself not to stare at the rich, handsome cavaliers who come to the district of Phanar where the Greek merchants’ wives lounge on their verandas, attended by servant girls. Men whose steps are light and sprightly. Whose embroidered belts are fastened with broad golden clasps. Whose horses prance and neigh, impatient with restraint imposed on them by their riders’ hands. Men whose eyes are on the prowl.

She has seen the Janissaries with white feathers on their heads, and the royal gardeners dressed in their habits of different colours so that from afar they looked like flowers themselves. She has seen the Aga of the Janissaries in a robe of purple velvet lined with silver tissue. His horse was led by two slaves. Next to him was the Kilar Aga, the chief eunuch of the Seraglio in a deep yellow cloth
lined with sable. The Sultan was mounted on a horse whose saddle was studded with jewels.

She often thinks of fate. Fate that can push her any which way, make her a slave or a queen, a lady or a whore. Lady Fate whose breath she feels right behind her, tickling the skin on her neck. Lady Fate, blind, fickle and full of spite.

Or is it benevolence.

Help yourself so God can help you, Mana says.

‘Look at yourself, Dou-Dou.’

This is her aunt who says she could be her sister. Whose dresses are made of Genoan damask and silk. Whose rings catch the rays of the sun and reflect them back with a rainbow of colours. ‘These, my little Dou-Dou, are real diamonds.’

Aunt Helena, Mana’s younger sister, hardly hides her annoyance at their hungry eyes trailing after her clothes, after the food on the table, after the trinkets with which she adorns herself. Aunt Helena with her sweet voice and the scent of roses around her, with hands soft and white.

‘Look at yourself,’ Sophie hears and watches how her cheap, coarse dress drops down, how her aunt’s fingers gently release the hooks of her petticoats, the folds of her chemise. How nothing obstructs the sight of her body. The shapely breasts, the belly button, the mound of black curls below. ‘Move your hips, Dou-Dou,’ Aunt Helena whispers into her ear, the hot air of her breath tickling. ‘Slowly, slowly. Don’t shake too much.’

She sways her hips, shy at first, cautious. But she likes what she sees, she likes this nymph, this slender, beautiful girl framed by the gilded mirror. Standing beside this aunt of hers, her mother’s sister who now braids a string of pearls into her long hair. Is this the way Eve felt in the
Garden of Eden when she saw her own reflection in the mirror of still water?

‘You are so beautiful, Dou-Dou. You can have everything you want. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, girl.’

She turns her back to the mirror and looks over her shoulder. Her back is smooth and flexible. She can bend as easily as she climbed the branches of the oak tree in Bursa. She can kneel on the floor and let her body fall backwards, into a graceful curve, and then come back, slowly, her eyes locked on her own image.