Garden of Venus (30 page)

Poor Gertruda. She did not foresee the power of pride. She was prepared to be shunned for a few months, to throw herself at the feet of the Potockis, and beg their forgiveness. She trusted the power of her youth – and the smile of her baby. A son, she hoped. Count Potocki, her son, whose tiny hands would reach out and melt the fury of his grandparents’ hearts.

What did she think of when the Potockis’ men, their faces smeared with soot, invaded her parents’ home? People say they were dressed as Cossacks, and pretended to search for confederates. What did she think when they dragged her through the snow. In her nightdress, her feet bare, her baby whose first shy kicks she may have already felt keeping still inside her. What did she think about as she was suffocated under the furs in the sledge that carried her into the cold February night?

Yes, only a fool would forget Gertruda’s fear. Only a fool would forget that Gertruda’s body was thrown into the Rata river, and when the river returned it in the spring, the Potockis’
ekonom
buried it in the field. Or forget how quickly the love of the mighty ends: in the letters Count Felix sent from Paris, Rome, and Vienna, he begged his
parents’ forgiveness for his despicable moment of weakness and offered all his assistance in having this foolish marriage that had caused his beloved parents so much sorrow and tribulations annulled.

‘God Himself did not wish for the Potockis’ disgrace,’ Countess Anna Elizabeth was to say when she heard of Gertruda’s death.

But they had to pay for their sins. People say the old Potockis died within weeks of each other, terrified of every noise, every horseman clattering through the Krystynopol courtyard. That Anna Elizabeth’s ghost came to beg a novice in the St Benedictine Order in Przemysl to pray for the salvation of her soul and demand that her son completed the construction of the church. Her ghost left behind a wooden plank with the fiery imprint of her right hand, as proof of her words.

But, even when his parents’ deaths freed him to admit the memory of his first wife, Count Felix refused to mention Gertruda’s name, and he paid the Komorowskis lavishly to drop their suit so that nothing would stop him from leading Josephine Mnishek to the altar.

‘De Witts, at least, have never murdered anyone,’ Joseph says. ‘Our name has not been tarnished.’

She lets Joseph peel off her dress. He lifts her petticoats, tickles her skin with his moustache. His lips are hot and dry. He breathes in her perfume, and beams with pride when his tickling makes her laugh aloud.

In the grand salon he watches the countess move her head. Her arms, Thomas noticed, were wrapped in a Kashmir shawl. Hers, of course, his father would have whispered to him, was the real thing, not the English imitation to
be bought for twenty pounds in London. Look, Thomas, pay attention, he would have said, his fingers pressing on his shoulders, as if he did not trust his son to care enough. Look how light it is, how smooth. Look at its sheen. It is woven from goat’s hair not silk or wool, from the finest softest fleece of wild Asian goats.

‘Am I awake?’ the countess asked.

‘Yes,’ he said and gave her some sweet tea to drink. She swallowed a few mouthfuls.

‘What time is it?’

‘Late morning,’ he said. ‘The fresh air made you sleep.’ The big clock in the hall had just struck eleven. She moved her nostrils, twitching at the smoke from the fireplace.

Her eyes, no matter how prepared he was for their luminosity astounded him every time.
So you think you know me, Doctor?
they seemed to tease him. It was the human fascination with the symmetry of perfection, he might have told his students. A willingness to overlook all manner of transgressions as if extreme beauty should be freed from restrictions of those less perfect and live the life of unreachable heights.

‘My dear Doctor Lafleur,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve asked for a hot bath.’

‘Baths are not the best for you, in your state, Madame.’

‘This is what this dear child, Rosalia, told me, too. But I don’t believe it is good to deny oneself pleasure. Someone told me once that sad people commit the worst crimes.’

The countess looked through him, as if he were not wholly there. The laudanum was still working, he thought, pleased. He held her wrist. The rotting discharge from her womb told him the tumour had become ulcerated. Each illness had a smell, each stage of it a different scent: German measles smelled like plucked feathers; scrofula like stale beer; typhoid like baking bread; yellow fever
like a butcher’s shop. This was the smell of rot.
Karkinoma
, he thought, the ‘stinking death’.

‘Does it bother you, Doctor,’ she asked. ‘To always see people at their worst.’

‘No,’ he said. Laudanum slurred her speech, slowed her down. She took longer breaks between words.

‘Good. I want you to remember me from my best side. And I want to know you.’

Her pulse was weak and fast. Her heart might have been pumping with all its might, but there was little blood reaching her starving organs.

Animal magnetism – in his head even now he was still explaining everything to those eager young faces still hopeful that they would decipher the mystery of life – is a force of life condensed into a fireball that draws us all into it, a miracle of life, never still, never the same. He would have pointed out the element of constant surprise, that tug on the heart one could never tire of, for it never stayed the same. Is this how she made him feel better than he was? More important? Stronger than he thought himself to be? Hopeful, too, in some foolish way. Promising unexpected passages where he had hitherto seen only walls.

‘I’m amusing you, Doctor. Good. I want you to smile. I have enough of these gloomy faces around me. I was right about you from the start.’

He could see that she was pleased with herself. She was very pleased, and made no attempt to hide this pleasure shining from those large black eyes of hers. ‘What for?’ she seemed to be saying. ‘We both know, don’t we?’

‘Don’t go.’

He hadn’t been going to leave, but she must have seen him twist his body.

‘I had a dream,’ she whispered. ‘A very long dream.’

She sank into the dream the same way she liked to sink
into the bath, slowly and gently. She floated over peaks of mist, which gave way under her, forming tunnels and caverns, coagulating into the faces of people she had met. They all spoke in strange tongues she couldn’t understand. Then through one such misty tunnel, she was taken to a burial chamber where she saw men dressed in long, priestly robes. Their faces were set and grim. Her arms and legs were heavy as lead and she could not move them. She was but a corpse, awaiting burial.

The oldest of the men, with white hair and a glittering medal around his neck, poured scented oils on her body. She could feel the oil flowing, filling up the pores of her skin but still she could not move. The man cut her open and removed her insides. She was empty, just a shell of herself. And then another man, younger, his face covered with reddish blotches, began wrapping her up in bandages. When she was all wrapped up, like a cocoon, they placed her in a coffin and put her into a tomb. She had been there for a thousand years, waiting.

‘You saved me, Doctor,’ she said to Thomas. ‘You took me out of my grave.’

It was the increased dose of laudanum that made her dream like this. Its telltale signs: the awareness of every passing second stretching into infinity and the vividness of images. He asked her how she had felt, entombed, and she answered that she felt absolutely still, like water in a calm lake, that everything around her had been suspended. She had had no impatience, no desire to do anything, to break the passage of time.

‘Is that what death feels like?’

‘That I don’t know.’

‘Do you think they are waiting for us?’ Her voice was so quiet that he had to strain to hear her.

‘Are the dead waiting for us, Doctor,’ she repeated.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe they are.’

‘Do you always have to say what you think?’ she asked, attempting a smile. ‘You would ruin the best of parties with such atrocious manners.’

The curtain that divided the salon moved. Thomas could hear movement behind it, the throat clearing, the muffled knocks of objects upon the floor. The musicians were coming in.

‘You should be warned. I like to meddle in other people’s lives, Doctor.’

‘In mine, too?’ he laughed. She was tempting him, he thought, with illusions of his own importance.

‘Especially in yours. For you are the man who likes to speak his mind.’

‘Sometimes. In some matters.’ He was trying to be cautious, thinking he should leave before the musicians were settled, to avoid the awkwardness of finding his way among the scattered instrument cases. The woman singer made him uneasy, especially the pallor of her skin.

‘Tell me, then, my truth-loving friend, what do you think of my Rosalia?’

‘Mademoiselle is an excellent nurse. You couldn’t have found a better one.’

‘You are not in love with someone else, are you?’

She had surprised him, after all. He was expecting a game, a tug of conjectures, a salon talk of half-smiles and half-truths. Her abruptness disturbed him and sent blood right into his cheeks. He resented that, too, and the sudden trembling of his face she could see. He began his withdrawal.

‘I don’t think I can answer that.’

‘What a pity! Time is so short,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I wish you did. I would know what to do.’

He resisted the temptation of asking her what she would do. ‘You must drink more,’ he said. ‘Much more.’

‘You are not good to me, Doctor,’ the countess sighed. ‘You are not listening.’

‘Oh, but you are mistaken, Madame. I pay the utmost attention to every word you say.’

‘Then why are you hiding your desires?’

‘Perhaps this is the best strategy.’

‘Now you are talking like a soldier,
mon ami
, but I don’t care much for war. I’m talking of simple happiness. You are not thinking of giving up love for the sake of your friend?’

‘Madame la Comtesse,’ he said, raising and folding his stethoscope, his face flushed. ‘The matter of my feelings is mine alone, and this is how I wish it to remain.’

She did not try to stop him when he rose.

The musicians were tuning their instruments. Thomas parted the curtain and saw them standing at their posts. There was a smell of autumn around them, of burning leaves and cold wind. They did not take any notice as he passed by. In spite of all his efforts to move slowly, he had managed to knock over a violin case propped against the wall.

His speed increased as he went along the corridor, by now he was striding. From the walls generations of Prussian Grafs mocked him. The fat faces of epileptics who must have ended their days in a fit of passion that pushed the blood all the way to their heads looking down at him. Syphilitic fools who mounted their servant-maids and let their sins loose. Thomas walked faster and faster until his own vigour suddenly pleased him and he smiled.

Your Majesty, this is how we, harried travellers through time, arrive at the next
étage
in the life of our delightful heroine – or as Your Royal Highness might prefer – to the following act played by her in the
theatrum mundi,
where all of us, for better or worse, play our earthly roles. But before I allow myself to dwell on the compelling evidence of Dou-Dou’s growing powers of seduction, let us take a closer peek at the object of our scrutiny at this pivotal moment in her life:

Her head resembles that of the famous Phryne, a Greek like her, and is worthy of Praxiteles’s chisel. This head destined to conquer the hearts of so many – young and old, and even a few crowned ones – is adorned with the most beautiful eyes in the world, black and luminous, and red lips between which glitter her small, white teeth. Her chin is worthy of utmost admiration, the raven-black hair that she ties into a knot to reveal the nape of her neck, is like Daphne’s, and her forehead and ears stun the admirer with their perfect proportions. This magnificent head rests on a neck and shoulders, unfortunately not equal in perfection. Dou-Dou’s
shoulders are shapely enough, but her hands are too big, like the ones of the antique sculptures in her country. The same can be said of her feet, far bigger than those we admire in women, resembling the ones depicted for us by the ancient sculptors
.

After her neck and shoulders, come her breasts. I would have liked to compare them with the breasts of Phryne, of whom Quintillian says that when she stood in front of the court accused of blasphemy against Aphrodite (having impersonated her during the festivities), and when – in his defence speech – Hyperides bared her breasts asking if such divine beauty could ever offend the gods, she was immediately given a sentence to her liking. Unfortunately, if Dou-Dou were ever forced to do the same, she would surely lose her case. Her breasts are withered, shapeless and inflexible (perhaps because of the hot baths so favoured in this part of the world). They hang like pears on her belly, which, I must say is of rare beauty, as if trying to point to its perfection and say, ‘descend and forget about us.’

The area of the mount of Venus is faultless. Its centre would have also been perfect, if it wasn’t for a certain protrusion, visible in the fortress around the nest of pleasure, a protrusion that may deter more discerning men.
^*
That defect, however, Sophie is able to cover with the beauty of other parts. Her delightful little buttocks, smooth like silk, her milk-white thighs, her knees and calves could pass muster with the best sculptors of the world. This body, filled with natural charm in all its shapes and movements, with what modern Greeks
following the examples of the Turks call
nouri,
the light of the body, is animated by a soul, far superior than many
.

Dou-Dou’s soul is a well-functioning machine that allows her to move with astonishing agility. She is characterised by a rightness of opinion, quickness of mind, and finesse, far exceeding the average. She reasons with natural logic, even when she lies, so one could have taken her for a pupil of Aristotle. With her sophistry she has reached such perfection that she can get her opponent into a corner in the blink of an eye. Her penetrating intelligence is visible in her gestures, words, and thoughts. No man can escape her scrutiny, for she studies him so deeply that she can predict his dreams and desires. Her memory is angelic; her inventiveness, her perseverance in pursuing her wants, astound me
.

She cares not for the future but lives for the moment, drawing happiness from every passing second. She shows no traces of whims, no sentimentality, no artifice, and is never boring. With the same self-assurance and courage she tells the truth and lies. She can tell stories, with all their little fibs, in such a way that the wisest of us would not know where she has by-passed the truth
.

Never surprised at the turn of fortune, she does not show excessive joy or sorrow. Nothing, no ties of blood or friendship, will stop her from getting what she wants. Joyful and pliable, she knows how to stay on the best of terms with her friends and lovers so that no one leaves her company unhappy. A true coquette, she can draw advantage from every circumstance
.