Garden of Venus (42 page)

‘A crook,’ she says, ‘a charlatan.’ If she could, she would have sent him packing long ago.

‘A holy man,’ Felix says, ‘who has come to show me the way to salvation.’

The holy man likes to stand in front of a mirror and stare at his white teeth. He is fond of expensive brandy and roasted game. He speaks in demented puzzles Felix ponders over for days. ‘The Word stepped down to earth from above, to teach the children of Jacob. The children closed their father’s lips and the Word lost its power.’ That she refuses to listen to the voice of this holy man is another sign of her weakness. She gathers she should be grateful for the word ‘weakness’, undoubtedly suggested by the
holy
man himself. He does not dare call her evil. Not yet. He knows he might still need her. So, for now, she is merely weak, a woman, a vessel that needs to be filled.

‘Listen to me please,’ she begs Felix on the rare days he is still hers. In the morning his face is bloated, red. Sometimes the tips of his fingers become purple and he is short of breath. ‘Your health is failing,’ she tells him. ‘This is what brings on all these thoughts.’ But when she suggests a trip to Spa, or a consultation with one of the St Petersburg doctors he dismisses her words. His problems, he says, are not of the body.

‘Can’t you see?’ she asks Felix, angry at his blindness, at the quiet stubbornness she knows she cannot change. ‘All he wants is your money.’

‘That is what people said about you,’ he answers. ‘Was it true?’

He has answers to everything she says now. He dresses in black, because he needs to remind himself of the sins he has committed. He despises vanity. He does not dance, because dancing brings forth the Devil in the human soul. He does not touch wine or spirits for only the strongest souls can handle such a potent stimulation.

The strongest soul, she assumes, is that of Monsieur Grabianka.

‘Such a comment is beneath you, Sophie,’ Felix answers and walks away from her. She knows that he has made a new will. He will leave most of his money to his children by Josephine – Yuri, his firstborn, will get the biggest share. Her children are provided for, though she has been told that their share will be modest, and she can administer their funds until they come of age. Potocki’s widow will be left penniless.

Is this your penance, Felix? she wants to ask. You want to punish me for your own sins? Is this what my stepchildren convinced you is just? Is this what will bring you peace in the afterlife?

The law is on his side. She has not brought any dowry to the marriage so she is not entitled to anything. ‘I call it injustice,’ Yuri tells her, pressing her hand with his, sliding it up her arm. ‘I’ll never allow it, as long as I live. You will have my share of the fortune, I swear it. All of it.’

Her stepson’s love for her is like a disease. It claims him in feverish bouts, in spells of maddened desire. He cannot sleep, he cannot eat. He swoons and falls to his knees. His lips when he kisses her are hot and dry.

Pavel Dimitrievich Kisielev was a thirty-four-year-old general in the Tsarist army. His career had been spectacular. He had taken part in the 1812 campaign against
Napoleon, he had been aide-de-camp to the Tsar himself, and a commander of the Second Army stationed in Tulchin where he had courted and won Countess Potocka’s elder daughter.

General Kisielev’s carriage was now approaching Berlin. The much awaited permission from His Majesty, Tsar Alexander, for a short leave, had arrived on the fourth day after his wife’s hasty and, he must call it by the name it deserved, hysterical, departure. With the permission came his passport. Had his wife agreed to wait, as he asked her to, they could have made the journey together at a much lower cost. The carriage was thick with dust, the horses were tired. In the carriage – rebuked, his valet had kept silent – General Kisielev had a long time to think.

General Kisielev considered his wife’s reactions excessive and unpredictable. Sophie was a new mother, however, and he had been warned that women’s characters changed when the first baby arrived. He had felt that change already. His Sophie had been teary and impatient all the time, accusing
him
of being callous. In that last week she had talked of nothing but Maman. General Kisielev had used to think that as mothers-in-law go, his wasn’t the worst. At first he thought her most charming and even – if he had to be honest – seductive, but then he changed his mind, even before the scraps of these vicious rumours began reaching him.

Now he could see quite clearly what his wife, the favourite daughter, wouldn’t. Her constant manipulation of everyone around her, the planting of doubt here, jealousy there. Jan de Witt, the son from the first marriage, so clearly favoured in financial matters, was now in the Tsar’s secret service. A despicable man, always ready to offer one a drink, or boast about his amorous conquests. To think of it, always trying to make friends with young
officers, getting them to talk too freely. Alexander, the first of the Potockis’ children, would never question his mother’s word, so was always in charge of her affairs. Only Mieczyslaw, the younger one, miserable boor that he was, had dared to oppose her. Grabbed what he thought was his and turned his Maman out of the Tulchin door. But that, of course, was never mentioned.

A daughter of a Greek cattle trader and a whore
. His wife refused to listen. She would not foul her own lips, she had said, with vicious rumours.

‘Her blood,’ she said, ‘is flowing in your son’s veins.’

General Kisielev opened the curtain of the carriage window. The houses of the German peasants were so much more solid, more prosperous than the huts of the Russian serfs. That was wrong, he thought, poverty bred discontent.

The possibility of ordering the world, of making life run an efficient and predictable course, fascinated General Kisielev, especially after his visit to Gruzino, General Arakcheev’s estate. His Imperial Majesty had been impressed too. The Gruzino serfs lived in houses made of bricks. They worked ten hours a day, except Sunday. Woods and thickets around the estate had been razed so that lazy serfs would have nowhere to hide. Pig keeping, private plots, vodka were all banned. All peasants carried with them their punishment books at all times where their offences were listed and punishment recorded. Women offenders were made to wear iron collars and to pray to be forgiven for their sins in front of the whole church. In the libraries and schools peasant children, scrubbed clean and attentive, learned to read and write. Everywhere they went, there was order and cleanliness. General Kisielev was not surprised when the Tsar ordered the construction of military settlements based on the Gruzino model. If only he had thought of it himself first.

As the carriage rolled on General Kisielev’s thoughts went back to his wife and the letter she had sent from the first station.
My heart is heavy with fear, and I’m afraid, Pavel, that I will never forgive you if I’m too late to see her
. It was evident to him that every frown he had made, she must have carried in her heart.
Your detachment, your refusal to listen to me, pains me greatly. You are my husband and I love you, but I’m not one of your soldiers
.

Under other circumstances, General Kisielev’s thoughts would not dwell on women for that long. Women complicated things too much, wavered and changed their minds. The miseries of the boudoir, as he used to say, were best treated with laudanum and a visit from a milliner. All women were good for was the few moments of pleasure one could snatch away from their greedy claws.

The birth of his son had filled General Kisielev with pride. He would have a successor, a confidant, a soldier. The baby needed his mother now, but soon he would have to watch more closely over his upbringing. Women would only fill his heart with their stories, their sentimental nonsense and make him too soft.

‘Faster,’ he knocked on the roof of the carriage. The carriage swayed as if hesitating for a moment and then it rushed forward with a heavy lurch.

Well, the old girl had infinite confidence in her fading charms.

Fools! The Potockis, like all Poles, were fools. Rash,
impatient fools, who, on one day, would prostrate themselves in front of the Russians only to stab them in the back on another. He should have found a Russian woman to marry: a woman who would not turn up her nose at black bread and pickles, a woman whose family would not shame him.

To calm himself down General Kisielev looked through the carriage window again. It was cold and damp in November. The air was filled with smoke; Prussian peasants were burning leaves and dead branches in the fields. Peasant women bent down in the field, presenting their ample behinds. He recalled the latest wetnurse his wife had taken for Volodia, a plump, cheerful Russian girl whom he liked to surprise as she suckled his son. Her breasts were white and full of milk, her body big and rose coloured, her hair pale white like fields of wheat. Around her he felt the pull of the earth, the world of simple pleasures. Of hunting trips when he would trek through the snow-covered land, of falling asleep with his clothes on, of smashing ice to melt it over the fire to brew tea, small bits of grass still trapped in it. Of staggering into the icy night to relieve his bladder right there on the snow bank, watching the steam rise from the stream of his urine. His desire for his own wife had nothing to do with such images. Before Volodia’s birth, Sophie submitted to his embraces without a protest but without passion, her body too soft, too pliant. Not that he resented it too much, especially when he considered Maman’s reputation. In the end, a wife and a mother had other functions in life and a man could find his pleasures elsewhere.

Olga, however, was altogether different. The thought of his ‘little sister’ pleased him. During the wedding feast, she had dragged him into the garden and kissed him hard on the lips. ‘It’s the champagne,’ she whispered. ‘Please forget it.’ She fled, before he had time to recover.

In Tulchin, Felix is dying. It is January 1805. A winter so cold that birds fall frozen from the sky.

The snow has covered the Tulchin garden. Cold, melting under her hand. Melting on the tip of her tongue, freezing flesh. The
hammam
is empty. The unborn baby has stopped her from taking steam baths. Her skin is clogged and rough. Itchy at the elbows and knees. The doctor is adamant. Unless you want to lose it, he has said. She is forty-five years old. In the nursery, every morning after breakfast, she likes to watch her children at play. The maids praise them, good little angels. Little Sophie’s gentle ways. The boys are already like little men, red with anger if anything refuses to go their way, the squabbling, the big tears, the pushing and shoving. But it is still so easy to make them forget, turn their attention elsewhere, toward the lark in the sky or a tickle on the tummy. Would you like a little brother or a sister, she asks them. ‘A brother,’ Mieczyslaw says, hands on his hips. ‘But smaller than me.’ So smart for his age. Always knowing what he wants.

There will be no baths. She doesn’t want to lose her baby.

Her bastard, Felix said. He spat the word at her, flanked by his two daughters – Josephine’s daughters of pure blood – Victoria and Ludwika, restored to their rightful position at his side. The real Potockis. A Greek whore, they call her behind her back. Her rule is over, their eyes tell her. She has lost. She is not invincible.

Dreams visit him, dreams Felix describes with flushed cheeks and clouded eyes. Dreams of fiery wheels, of smashed cups spilling their content into the ground, of a shaft of light that shines right into his eyes, blinding him. There are nights when he sobs and prays, stretched
on the chapel floor, begging for God’s mercy. Once he came to her saying that he saw an angel pass by the open door of his room, clad in a luminous gown, smelling of incense.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is a sign that forgiveness is still possible.’

She has an image of a thicket growing between them: thorns and brambles, spikes that tear the flesh. A thicket denied, lied about. In his presence she is always generous and cheerful and at ease. It is Felix who trails her with his darkened gaze, who makes everyone conscious of his ugly squint, slipping off her, dissipating, withering.

Is there still time? Can she still turn it round?

She is not allowed to cross the threshold of his bedroom until he sends for her. She is not allowed to touch his food. Why would I want to poison my own husband, she has asked. Is there anyone else who would lose more with his death? In this country a widow is left with nothing – unless her husband chooses to provide for her.

He has been a coward, Felix tells her. She has been his punishment on this earth. His Gehenna. His Sodom and Gomorrah for which there is no other place after death but Hell. Every time he touches her, he purifies himself with holy water and salt.

He points at the faces of their children, asking, which ones of them are truly mine?

Remember Gertruda, Felix? Remember the child who was not even allowed to be born? Where were you then? Its father?

‘Repent, when there is still time. Fall to your knees and beg the Lord to forgive you for your sins.’

When he breathes, his nostrils widen and twitch. Every so often his breath is hoarse, and he clears his throat as
if about to choke. His right eye is bulging more than the left, and both are always rimmed with red. There is a smell that precedes him, of tar, camphor and unwashed flesh. A festering smell that reminds her of rotting roots in the muddy Tulchin pond.

‘You have betrayed me with my own son. My children were right. I was a fool not wanting to believe them.’

God’s will, God’s punishment. God’s grace, and God’s forgiveness. Those last two are reserved for him of course. For her there is nothing but damnation and the fires of Hell.

‘You have no shame,’ Jeroslav says. This stepson of hers who once said he should have plunged a dagger in her back, right after the wedding. Before
they
were born. Her children. The Potocki blood has been thinned. Balsam has been diluted with tar.