Garden of Venus (16 page)

He helps her out of her blue dress, taking care to fold it neatly and place it on one of the cushions. ‘Don’t be too long,’ he says, pinching her cheek before leaving. ‘Don’t disappoint me. I want them to envy me.’

In the silk sack she finds a gauze shirt and pantaloons, a bodice embroidered with cekins, a long tulle shawl, and a small tambourine with bells. The skirt and the pantaloons are almost transparent.

In the small mirror, kohled, her eyes are even bigger, more luminous. Flaring.

By the time he reached forty Thomas had seen so many deaths, that the death of his own father had melted into a multitude of agonies, last words, and death rattles. Valet to Marquis de Londe, a Parisian libertine of unsavoury reputation, his father was a man of no possessions. He thought Thomas, his only son, to be his justification for every blow he had ever taken, every humiliation of his position. Thomas could still remember his father coming to the little room in the attic they shared where rats chased one another behind the wainscoting. Before getting into bed he would blink his eyes and shake his head and shoulders like a dog shaking off the water after a plunge.

He shielded his son with his own arms, his own body. Only at the later trial Thomas realised that his father may have been shielding him from more than just blows, for the Revolutionary Tribunal accused the Marquis of sexual orgies during which little boys and girls had been tortured and
sodomised. The Marquis, of course, denied all accusations and his father was no longer there to offer testimony.

The Marquis was sentenced to death on the 13th of Brumaire. His wife and daughter were guillotined the week after.

Gilles Lafleur, was only fifty when a carriage pole pierced him, pinning him to the stable door. A surgeon called to his bedside announced that it was a miracle he was still alive. When Thomas was a medical student he came across the description of his father’s case.
A complete severing of the muscular and cartilaginous structures, including the cartilages of the ribs from the 4th to the 9th, wounding the pleura and lung
.

His father lived for five more weeks, to the great amazement of the Parisian doctors who came to see him and examine the pieces of lung protruding from his side. Proud of his sudden fame, Gilles Lafleur greeted them all with seriousness and ceremony. By then he was the number one Parisian oddity. Thomas’s father welcomed such attention and would have proudly agreed for his mortal remains to end up on display for doctors to study and learn from, if anyone had asked.

Right before his death, in the bigger room on the first floor the Marquis allotted his favourite valet in the last weeks of his life, fingers smoothing the fine bed-linen meant to impress the doctors, Gilles Lafleur told his only son he wanted him to be a man who didn’t have to bow to anyone.

That afternoon, back from a brisk walk around Berlin, he saw that two notes were waiting at the pension. In the first one, Ignacy, as Thomas expected, again called him a fool who would not bend his mighty notions of what was right.
Do come for dinner, though
, the note ended.
I need to forgive you
.

The second note carried a faint smell of camomile and soap.

The note (the handwriting
was
beautiful) was signed Rosalia Romanowicz, and Thomas could not hide a flicker of satisfaction when he read it.

… As Your Royal Highness knows so well, the slings of fortune have wounded me many a time, and I, remembering how the Pontian king Mitridat accustomed his body to poison, adapt myself to the challenges of the future believing that a small dose of pain every day will render me immune to what fate has in store. Nevertheless, to counter the calumnies of my enemies, to snap at the head of the vile gossip claiming that I enrich myself in Your service, I am enclosing this undisputed evidence of the meagre life I lead. I trust, Your Highness, that even one, most cursive glance at this pitiful account will suffice to prove my selflessness and devotion to My Merciful Sovereign.

Expensa:

Knowing Your Highness will not leave His faithful servant without consolation, I hasten to present another instalment of the story that has amused Your Highness so much.

Your humble servant.

Charles Boscamp

Mes amours intimes avec la belle Phanariote:

For a few weeks the internuncio delighted himself with his new mistress, but as once the demon of jealousy threatened to break the course of his antics, this time it was the demon of disagreement, shaking its snaky hair and kindling the fire with its bloodied hand, that was already thinking up ways of destroying their ties, at the same time, unwittingly, spinning the thread of fate that had brought our heroine to her present position.

Psaro, a Greek boy from the archipelago, and more precisely from Mykonos, poor, but with excellent calves and very dashing, Chevalier Psaro, well familiar with Hadja Maria’s skills and services, slyly began visiting the house where Dou-Dou resided with her mother, staying, according to the reports of the internuncio’s faithful informers, well into the night. These reports caused our internuncio some agitation and he decided to pay his young mistress an unexpected visit to see what he very much not desired to see. Psaro, having heard the noise at the front doors, escaped so quickly that only his shadow was spotted jumping out of an open window and disappearing into the side street.

The accuser of Dou-Dou’s conduct who saw the man coming into the house with a silver sword and escaping
without it pointed out, not without reason, that it should be sufficient to discover the place the sword was hidden to prove the girl’s unfaithfulness. As all of this was happening, Dou-Dou stood with teary eyes, staring at her mother with an accusing glare, as if trying to say, ‘Wasn’t I right, Maman. Didn’t I warn you?’ Immediately, the internuncio and the valet began searching for the sword in the very room where, in separate beds, both the mother and daughter slept, and the sword was indeed found in the head of the mother’s bed – or at least in the bed she said was hers – under the pillows. This discovery should have cleared Dou-Dou from the accusations and proven her innocence, but the internuncio’s valet let it be known how Psaro boasted in front of him that he availed himself of the charms of both the mother and the daughter (one after another or both at the same time) and that the mother (having indeed enough time to do that) could have placed the sword under her pillows to draw accusations to herself.

Then another incident worsened Dou-Dou’s situation, for a small boy who lived there and slept at the door of her room, said, without being asked, that his kokona
^†
welcomed chevalier Psaro’s attentions and that he saw and heard the indiscretions that went between them. All that – coupled with Dou-Dou’s gloomy silence and her mother’s swift disappearance (dear maman, without doubt, was terrified at the prospect of the storm over her head) – was the reason why a whip was produced and Dou-Dou was ‘encouraged’ to provide some more lively explanations. Bearing her punishment without a murmur of protest, Sophie repeated over and over again that she would willingly bear any whipping ordered by her beloved master, if she could get back his feelings for her, but this
statement, however pleasing to the internuncio, did not shed much light on the matter. As a result the decision was made that Sophie would leave the Mission’s house the following day, taking her mother with her; from now on Dou-Dou would live in Phanar, from where she had been brought according to her lover’s whim and wish; she could keep with her all that was given to her, excepting a few intimate mementoes, like rings and a medallion with a monogram, which were immediately taken away, with the promise of their equivalent worth in money, and that she would receive a small salary until the time she found a husband. Then came a swift separation without even a word of good-bye that, our internuncio noted, left Dou-Dou despondent, while to him the entire scene felt lifted from Molière’s comedy.

Having returned to his rooms, and feeling some heaviness in his heart, the internuncio called his Greek valet who – he had noticed it at the time – was crying during the scene I have described above. ‘Why did you cry?’ the internuncio asked. ‘Is this girl a relative of yours? Or are you pitying me that I had to send her away?’ ‘No, Sir,’ the boy said, ‘neither this nor that. Pray forgive me, but I cried over the victim of all these lies and over Yanaka’s
^‡
deviousness. For a long time this ingrate has tried to destroy the innocent girl and now he is congratulating himself on his efforts. Not longer than three days ago, he boasted that, soon, Mistress Sophie would be back to her old occupation of scrubbing pots and washing dishes in her mother’s house.’

Confronted with such an answer of the servant-defender, his master ordered him to go to Dou-Dou’s house
and see what was happening there, without revealing, however, the nature of his visit. Nicholas, for such was the boy’s name (and St Nicholas, it should be noted, is the patron of errant girls) returned saying that Dou-Dou was accusing her mother, who had in the meantime returned, that through her weakness for Psaro she had brought disaster on her own daughter’s head. The mother was trying to console Dou-Dou with the hope that her lover would return and that, should that happen, the girl should beg to be heard and to explain everything.

‘Swear on God Almighty,’ she kept saying, ‘and on our sacred faith that you are innocent. Tell him that as a daughter you couldn’t betray your own mother, but now, should the internuncio demand it, you would gladly let your mother leave.’

‘Oh, no,’ Sophie cried. ‘Indeed, I know him too well. Nothing will appease his anger, and I’ll never see my beloved master again.’

‘You do not know him well enough,’ the mother said. ‘He loves you. Surely, even now he must be already consumed by sadness, thinking of what has happened. Go to him right away, with this Greek valet of his. I guarantee you’ll not fail. And when you return you’ll not find me in this house, where, from my own indiscretion and weakness, you have suffered so terribly. It’s right that I should be punished for my sins.’

To which Sophie replied, ‘I would fly to him, I would throw myself at his feet and wet them with my tears. I would take any whipping, any punishment he would care to inflict on me, if I only knew that my beloved master would listen to his slave.’

As soon as the valet reported all this, the internuncio ordered him to fetch the girl, and this is indeed what happened. The prophecy of the experienced mother had been fulfilled, and the two lovers were fully reconciled in less than fifteen minutes.

Shivering with cold, Thomas woke the following morning, his last at Frau Schmidt’s pension. He had already made arrangements for Pietka to take his meagre belongings to the von Haefen’s palace. He tried not to think of the unpleasant conversation he had had with Frau Schmidt, who reminded him in an icy voice that he had made his reservations for the minimum of three weeks and that she expected him to pay for this time.

Frau Schmidt counted her money in front of him and, satisfied she was not cheated, walked heavily toward the kitchen muttering about the French always putting on airs and acting on their whims with no regard for others while she, a widow of a Prussian officer, had to make her living. Perhaps to punish him on his last night the fire had been allowed to die. He was shivering.

On the Great March from Moscow Thomas had seen men warm their freezing hands under the nostrils of horses. The death from cold, he thought, was not the worst. After all it came with a deadening of the senses so the victims slowly stopped caring. One could scream and hit them,
and they would not move. Skin, flesh would peel away, all the way down to the bone, as if a human body were nothing more than a wax model of removable layers. Those who froze to death often had gentle smiles on their faces as if, in the last moments, the memories of their loved ones, of warmth and comfort became so real that they believed them.

At Berezina, where he got the touch of frostbite that permanently reddened the skin of his hands, Thomas saw a woman in a white muslin dress cut open a dying horse and dive inside, sabre in hand, in search for the liver. A wisp of a woman he would never have suspected of enough strength to kill a fly.

Austerlitz, Borodino, Moscow, Berezina. Thousands of wounded, many with necrosis and advanced gangrene, too late for amputation to help. No matter whether it was victory or defeat, it drowned in pus, vomit and congealing blood. He was surrounded by gangrene eating up healthy tissue in its relentless hunger, rats chewing on freshly cut limbs, maggots crawling in fresh wounds. The cries of the wounded were everywhere, their hands clutching his, begging for assistance. He had learned to be so fast, so incredibly fast.

Larrey had kept telling them that amputation was the only way to save lives. Nothing but a clean cut could stop crushed bones and dirt from doing their deadly work. ‘Faster, faster,’ he urged them on. ‘We have to reach them within the first four hours. There is no time to deliberate.’ Thomas’s Parisian students listened in awe as he told them about Larrey’s miracles: a Polish officer with general emphysema caused by a thrust from a Cossack lance cured with cups and wine embrocations; a Russian colonel whose severed nose Larrey re-attached to his face. In spite of perforated lungs, stomachs and intestines, bones smashed, lacerated and broken down into splinters, in
spite of the gangrene, the swellings, the fevers, life clung to this world.

‘Have you noticed,’ Thomas had reminded Ignacy, during these long evening talks in Paris, ‘how we stopped calling him His Majesty and the Emperor. How it is back to Napoleon or plain Bonaparte.’

Ignacy, Thomas thought, like most of the Poles he had met, was a man of little luck. When, at twenty-one, he thought he had found happiness at the side of Alicja, his father was killed in the last battle of the failed insurrection against the Russians, which had brought about the dissolution of Poland. Afraid of persecutions and anxious to secure her son’s future after the final partition of Poland, Ignacy’s mother left for Paris where she married again, an officer in Napoleon’s Polish legion. When Thomas expressed his doubts that, in 1795, Paris was that much of an improvement on Warsaw, Ignacy was adamant. Even stained with the blood of the Terror, Parisian streets offered more hope he said. It was in Paris where Ignacy and Alicja’s only child, Constance, was born.

In spite of Ignacy’s protestations to the contrary, Thomas gathered that this was not an easy time. The two women did not get along. There were constant accusations of greed and thoughtlessness, tear-filled, silent days Ignacy couldn’t stomach. He used to walk through the Parisian streets for hours, wearing out the soles of his shoes. It was only after Alicja’s death from consumption, that Ignacy’s mother declared her late daughter-in-law a saint. ‘Or a mere angel, on her worse days,’ Ignacy said with a wry half-smile. ‘A saint
I
never cherished enough!’

A year ago, in January, Constance had asked to be taken to Rome, where she joined the Carmelite order. Once her vows were taken, she would not be allowed to lift her veil for any man, not even for her father. All Ignacy
had left was her last portrait painted by a friend, the last image of her he was permitted to see.

Ignacy had hoped Constance would be Thomas’s bride, that their bloodlines would unite in the next generation, but Constance wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It wasn’t you,’ Ignacy said apologetically. ‘It was the idea of marriage that revolted her. She wanted nothing but to serve God. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas said. ‘I understand.’

He understood the desire not to have anything to do with this world. This was perhaps the only thing about her he truly understood.

Gazing at the scar on his left wrist, a permanent reminder of the slash of a Cossack sabre, Thomas wished he could have seen Napoleon on Saint Helena, alone, without his epaulettes, his uniform, even without his kerseymere waistcoat. Naked. Just a man. Stripped like the men and women during the days of Terror, who were tied together and thrown into the river. The mob, roaring obscenities at them, had a name for this deathly embrace:
marriage revolutionaire
.

Rosalia was standing by the window, looking at the rain. She was waiting for him, she said, to show him to the room Frau Kohl had prepared.

‘I insisted it needs to be close to the grand salon,’ she said. ‘I trust you agree.’

At that moment, in spite of the bright yellow dress, she seemed to him almost funereal. When she turned around toward him, he saw no trace of rouge or rice powder on her skin. Her translucent pallor was the result of long days spent in darkened rooms. Some ladies took small amounts of arsenic or were constantly bled to make their skin similarly look like alabaster. He never tired of denouncing such measures.

‘In St Petersburg it must be snowing.’

‘Yes,’ he said. A flicker of unease was caused by the fact that she glanced at him, quickly, without seeing.

‘Doctor Bolecki tells me that you are leaving for America. When?’

‘As soon as I’m free,’ he said, shifting to relieve the pressure on his knee. The pain turned dull. The rain was stopping.

‘Aren’t you free now?’ her voice gently mocked.

‘I mean when I’m no longer needed here.’

‘That soon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘To Philadelphia first.’

‘And then?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ll see.’

The new room, he assured her, was more than satisfactory. Luxurious would be a better word. He had forgotten such wide beds existed. And all the space in the drawers.

‘The drawers can be kept locked,’ she said. ‘The housekeeper has agreed to give me the key.’

He watched as she locked and unlocked the drawers one by one. ‘It’s better not to tempt the servants,’ she said with a smile.

He was looking at her, aware of a growing layer of pleasure. Looking at her soft, auburn hair tightly pulled back from her face, her fine, narrow nose. The tiny lines around her eyes, the softening of the tired skin. She smelled of camomile and soap.

This is what he liked, just watching her. Watching as she moved across the room in her yellow dress, her hair dark against the nape of her white neck. He liked watching her hands when she smoothed the countess’s bed, when she fed her lifting a silver spoon of broth to her mouth.
Her face did not register disgust with the blood and the pus, which was quite remarkable in a woman still young who – as Ignacy said – had been thrown into her role quite recently, by circumstances. She took it all as if there were no difference between a bouquet of flowers and the contents of the chamber pot. Yes, she was quite remarkable.

It wouldn’t be long before the countess died, a few more weeks, perhaps not even that. Patients had astonished him before, so Thomas wouldn’t insist on his predictions. Some clung to life longer, but even they had to let go. When this day came, he would be free to board ship for America. He imagined himself alone on the deck, open to the new world, the new life, unencumbered by what he was leaving behind.

It was the groom’s voice, coming from the courtyard. The mournful tune and the sweet sounds of the bandura were haunting.

‘What is he always singing about?’ he asked.

Pietka was singing the same
dumy
, songs the blind
dziady
, old beggars, sang in Ukraine, Rosalia told him. They sang of Cossack flesh cut to the white bone; captives languishing for years in Turkish cellars; legs slashed by sabres, arms pierced by arrows; the lost freedom of the steppes; the destruction of the Sich. They promised death to Turks, Poles, and Jews, describing the pain that would be inflicted on them, the sweet taste of revenge.

‘Payment in kind,’ she lowered her voice, ‘for what was done to them.’

It seemed to him that she shuddered.

‘You wouldn’t know,’ she said.

‘I’ve been to Moscow.’ He tried to make his voice sound devoid of feeling. ‘With Napoleon. I can imagine a lot.’

In the last post, she said, there had been a letter for the countess from the Tsar, thanking her for the poplar saplings she had sent him from her gardens in Uman. These were grown from the trees her late husband, Count Felix Potocki, had brought from Italy and planted in his Ukrainian estate.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘you are serving the personal friend of the Russian Tsar.’ Her voice reminded him of a flute – soft and warm, floating in the air, soothing.

‘Bourbon is back on the French throne. Life is curious at times.’

She smiled and then, in an instant, her smile disappeared, a candle blown out.

‘I have to go, now,’ she said.

He stood up and walked her into the corridor. Her skirts rustled softly. She was still crumpling the handkerchief in her hand. If she dropped it, he thought, he could at least pick it up and give it back to her.

‘Good day, Doctor,’ she said from between two Grecian vases perched on twin marble columns, then disappeared round the corner.

‘Good day,’ he said to empty space.

She will not be travelling alone. Carlo, the same Carlo who had once brought her – a girl from Phanar worthy of a king’s bed – to his master, will accompany her. The internuncio wishes it.
A servant
, he has written,
in whom I have utmost trust
. Carlo and Monsieur Karwoski, an engineer from Danzig, with a pockmarked face that blushes easily and cold, sweaty hands. There is a nervous tinge to his voice as if anything she did could cause him
some great misfortune. The Danzig engineer is the one who can write.

They are her master’s spies, her chaperones, the guarantors of her good conduct. It has been nine months since the internuncio’s departure and through all these long months she has been chastity itself. As her master demanded of her, she did not go back to live with her mother, but stayed as a lodger with Monsieur Boscamp’s translator and his family, renting a small room where no visitors ever came, making sure her grief and longing for her master were noted. This journey too is a trial, a test. Every action of hers will be recorded, every word she utters will be included in the dispatches to Warsaw. Monsieur Boscamp – in mourning for his beloved wife and mother of his three children – may have sent for her, but he does not want trouble.

‘Don’t go,’ Mana says. Carlo no longer has her favours: too uppity, too jealous and taking to drink. Him she is not sorry to see go to that faraway Poland. ‘Can’t you see how men look at you? You can pick and choose from the best merchants in Pera. What else do you want? Why go where no one will be able to help you? What will you do when he tires of you or sends you to the streets?’

But nothing can be said that can stop her. She has seen so little. She is hungry for the world. The world is rampant with growth, fresh and so incredibly beautiful. The sun is brighter than she has ever remembered it, the wind warmer. Underneath the bark of the pine trees, sap gathers.
Every bud is a promise of a new shoot, a flower, a fruit. Birds swoop down from the sky. The old almond tree that grows outside Mana’s house has burst into flower. Sophie breathes in its peppery scent and presses her palms against her cheeks, just to feel their warmth.

‘Don’t worry about me. I know what I am doing.’

She knows the secret of Lais and Phryne. The pleasure imagined is greater than the pleasure fulfilled. It is not merely her beauty that she relies on, but subtle promises. A glimpse of her ankle, a finger resting on her lips, a rustle of her skirt, a tremor of submission. How you have changed, the internuncio has said, just before leaving.

Mana grunts, but nods her head. ‘Go then,’ she says. ‘But don’t be a fool, girl. Watch out for yourself. Everywhere on this earth, you are either a married woman or a whore.’

Mana is afraid. That very day the carriage they were riding halted so abruptly that their bodies were thrown forward like sacks. The horse had stopped for the corpse of a young Turk, no older than eighteen, with a pale girlish face. His turban was lying in the dust. Death had come to him through his shaved neck, for this was where the bullet hole was. It seemed a sign, an omen; but for whom?

‘He is a widower now,’ Sophie says, smiling. ‘Isn’t he?’