Garden of Venus (45 page)

So soon, she wanted to ask. Why so soon?

Before he left for Santo Domingo her father gave her a present.

‘Go on, Rosalia. Listen to it,’ he said, putting a big piece of amber to her ear. He had just rubbed it against a piece of fur and she could hear a tiny snap. Then a spark touched her.

‘Is it for me?’ she asked and then saw that inside the amber there was a tiny fly sitting on a piece of a leaf.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘For you.’ With the corner of her eye Rosalia could see that he was holding her mother’s hand.

‘Go to sleep now,’ her mother said, and kissed her. Her father kissed her too, and tickled her ribs the way he always did, sending her into fits of laughter.

Lying with her eyes open, listening to the noises of the house, she heard her parents’ voices in the room beside hers. ‘I cannot take you to the unknown. Not in your condition,’ she heard. Her mother’s crying could only mean that her father would be leaving soon. Leaving without them.

She remembered wondering about the little fly caught in the amber. Amber, her father had said, was resin that used to be soft and sticky but that had hardened with age. She wondered if the fly struggled or whether it had died instantly. She wondered what the world was like at the time when the fly was alive.

The day before her father left, in the street, they saw a wagon filled up with quartered carcasses of cows. A swarm of big green flies circled over it. Every so often a big drop of blood fell on the paving-stones.

What can be worse, her mother said, than the memory of happiness at the time of sorrow?

‘The miracle of morphine, Mademoiselle Rosalia,’ Doctor Lafleur said, recalling the bliss on the countess’s face. ‘Happy memories, marvelled at and left to float again.’

He stopped in mid step as he was telling her this, and it seemed to her that he was lingering on purpose, that he too wished this moment to last longer. He watched as she brushed the hair from her face.

He would take morphine with him to America, Doctor Lafleur continued. He would present Magendie’s results and his own observations, lecture on the benefits of moments when pain was pushed aside. The true gift from the Old World to the New.

She watched him gasp then as if something important had escaped his memory and now, at that very instant, had to be dragged back into the light. Something that had to be said.

A delusion, of course, one more phantom of her fancy. Behind the closed door of the grand salon she could hear Madame Kisielev’s sobs. Then came the soothing voice of the countess.

‘Is that not a worthy gift?’ Dr Lafleur asked.

That afternoon, alone in her room, Rosalia drifted into a shallow dream in which she was flying. Flying over the city, the red tiled roofs, the gardens. It was enough to think of a direction and her airborne body took her there without effort. She flew over fields of poppies, hovered over trees, peeked into bird’s nests where chicks opened their beaks so wide that she could see their little flicking tongues deep inside their throats. Then she aimed for the white fluffy clouds, and wrapped them around her face like a gauze shawl.

This sense of elation, the gift of the dream, was still with her when she awoke. She jumped out of bed. The
floor was so cold that the soles of her feet tingled. An old tune came to her and she hummed her mother’s favourite song:

‘What will you do when you no longer have me to fuss about, Rosalia?’ the countess had asked her. ‘What will you do when you have only yourself to think about?’

What is the use of a life
, she wrote in her diary,
in which the dreams are more important than anything that passes during the day?

Her son is born on the day her husband dies.

Yuri is holding the baby for the first time, amazed how tiny he is, how fragile. He kisses the tiny nose and cheeks before putting his son back into the bassinet next to her bed. In his mourning ensemble, Yuri is even paler than before. He did not see Felix before he died. The prodigal son has not asked for forgiveness and has not been forgiven.

‘Our little boy,’ Yuri says, ‘will be named Boleslaw.’ It is the ancient name of Polish kings. It means,
he of a greater fame
.

‘Bo-les-lav,’ she tries to repeat after him, but on her lips it comes mangled and split. The name is too heavy for a baby anyway. She will call him Bobiche.

‘Have you suffered much?’ Yuri asks, putting his hand on her now strangely flat stomach. She can still smell blood, behind the incense the midwife has burnt. And the urine that escapes her, just like that day in Bursa, when her father’s whip slashed her buttocks. That’s what these babies do to you, the midwife has said. Some ladies cannot leave their homes without leather petticoats to stop them from wetting their dresses. Once she no longer hurts, she should pull the muscles inside her and hold them for some time. Do it every day. It will help.

The bed creaks when Yuri sits beside her, smoothing the lace frill on her pillow. The smell of fried bacon around him is a good thing. He has had his breakfast. There is black dirt under his fingernails. Are your fingers in mourning, she used to ask the children.

‘No,’ she says. ‘And I don’t remember pain anyway.’

She is grateful for her heart still pumping blood. She is even grateful for the torn skin. For the muscles contracting, for her body so small now under the quilt, so empty.

There is a certainty about Yuri she has not seen before. Her maid said that Count Yuri had never left the room next door when Madame was in labour, not even when the news came of his father’s death. She had told him to get some sleep, or eat something, but he refused. As if he could help, her maid said. As if any man could help at such times. This morning, she also said, he was in the stables before breakfast, asking for the grey mare. He would ride every day, he had told the grooms, from now on.

He is not trying to lay his head on her breasts.

‘I’ll take you with me,’ Yuri says. ‘I’ll not go alone. We’ll get married in Rome. The Pope can marry us, if you wish. And there will be more children, more sons.’

In his voice there is triumph. His eyes are shining from
it – or could it be the fever. The cough has stopped, he tells her, as if he were reading her thoughts. He has not felt better in months.

‘Staszewski says I resemble my grandfather,’ he says. Staszewski is the old footman who has always eyed her with a frown.

‘Has he not noticed that before?’ she asks and turns her head away. How cool the pillow is, how soothing to her hot cheek.

‘He says I’ve always resembled him, but he has never noticed it so clearly.’

The king is dead, long live the king. Yuri is the patriarch now, the firstborn son of the Potocki clan and he likes his new role, imagines himself changing. At least for the time being, until the novelty wears out.

‘Yes, my darling,’ she whispers. Her lips are parched again, but Yuri does not see it. He also does not notice that he is pressing her hair hard against the pillow. She cannot move her head without pulling it. ‘We’ll do as you wish. As soon as we are all well enough. But now let me sleep. I need my strength back. The doctor says I’ve lost a lot of blood.’

He bends over to place a kiss on her forehead. It is a soft, fatherly kiss, a stamp of approval.

The maid has aired all her black dresses and bonnets for the mourning, all black crepe, black lace. The veil she has worn after her children died. In its folds her old tears must still hide. Salty stains, invisible but to a mother’s heart. Felix’s body is in the Tulchin chapel, awaiting the funeral. How unhappy they have made each other. How sore.

You are water, and I am fire, she told him once. It was in St Petersburg, at a ball in the Winter Palace. She remembers an enormous room, lit by hundreds of candles, music
filling it in excited waves. The rustle of silks, the tinkle of sables, the glitter of medals and epaulettes. Perfumed moustaches that brushed her fingers as she gave her hand to be kissed. She wore a dress of silk taffeta with tassels and her best diamond necklace, the one Felix had bought for her as her wedding present.

‘My dear friend,’ the Tsar greeted her. ‘We’ve been waiting for you with much impatience.’

To Felix it was yet another tedious duty to get over with, but she felt so happy, so elated. She wanted to dance, to laugh, to feel the eyes turn upon her as she passed. She was Countess Potocka, she was beautiful, she was the Tsar’s most keenly awaited guest.

‘Sire, what a wonderful idea,’ she said to him later that evening, interrupting a long conversation about inventions that would – the men were sure – change the course of human history. It was artificial insemination that was enthusing them.

‘How wonderful, Sire!’ she said, her eyes twinkling. ‘Now, instead of going through all the farce of royal weddings, an ambassador could be sent over with a good sized syringe!’

She could see His Majesty’s eyes narrowing with merriment. He extended his arm to her, and they danced to the accompaniment of hushed whispers and more laughter as the story of her wit made its predictable rounds.

Felix, she could see, was not laughing. She could spot him wandering round the room, talking to people who sought his company. He was not looking in her direction. She could feel the ill-humour gathering, his irritation with the noise, the smells of sweat, perfume and melting wax. If he could, he told her many times, he would never leave Tulchin. Why bother with these throngs of sycophants and schemers.

‘So that they don’t forget you,’ she said. He was not convinced. Besides, he said, he wanted to be with her.
Alone. Without these constant distractions. Without having to elbow his way past the throngs of her admirers.

Why did she never have enough?

The music tore her away from these thoughts. The music, the laughter, the eyes following her. The poems to her eyes printed on dinner napkins, rings with her miniatures on them, notes delivered in bouquets of flowers. The chase is all I want, she tried to tell him. The very thrill of it, the rush of hot blood in her veins. How could she tell Felix that this was life itself. That, without it all, she was suffocating.

Tired from dancing, she stopped to pick a glass of champagne from the tray a footman offered her. Drops of moisture gathered on the cold glass. She could see Felix coming up to her, a solemn, relentless march past the crowd of dancers. Soon, so soon, she would feel his hand on her shoulder, hear his whisper. ‘We are leaving, Sophie,’ he would say. ‘I’m too tired.’

Being his widow, she thinks, will be so much simpler than being his wife.

She is grateful for this baby sleeping so peacefully next to her. For his even breath, the big blue eyes that open for a few moments before they plunge back into sleep. For the tiny yawns, a small fist clutching to her finger. For the sweet baby smell she breathes like perfume. She is grateful for life.

In the evening the countess had summoned them all to the grand salon. She had dressed for this occasion; the sleeves of her dressing gown were trimmed with white fur. He saw how she touched it with her fingers as if to remind herself how it felt. How she raised her own hand
to the light and looked at it for a while. For the first time in many days, the windows had been left uncovered.

One of the better days, Thomas thought, when morphine was working its magic. A day when good memories came, when not a moment seemed wasted on pain. With the corner of his eye he could see Rosalia remove the string of tallow from the candle and roll it into a ball. The music from behind the curtain seemed listless to him, in need of a stimulant.

The countess talked incessantly. There was a gown remembered, embroidered with flowers and pearls. ‘Pints of pearls,’ the countess said, her eyes fixed on her elder daughter. ‘And now I don’t even know where it is.’ There was a certain St Petersburg ball where every lady was presented with a gift. Hers had been a bunch of asparagus which opened to reveal a roll of love poems tied with a red garter.

Life was filled with puzzles, the countess said, curious puzzles that defied reason. Near Archangel, in Russia, there was a district where at sunset almost everyone became blind. Old and young. Men and women. As the evening approached everyone hurried home, for otherwise they would not be able to find their way there.

‘How would you explain that, Doctor Lafleur?’ she asked but did not wait for his answer.

She had seen it with her own eyes. She was travelling in the region with her husband and some boatmen were rowing her party to land. When the sun set, the men said it was impossible for them to go any further. Their eyes did not change in appearance, but they swore they could not see the water or the land. ‘It is all the same to us,’ they said. In their voices though, there was no alarm. They had always been like that.

‘Imagine that,’ the countess said.

Thomas tried to imagine a world where, in the twilight, all objects became indistinguishable as if greyness
drowned them. A world that changed its face every night, blurred what would be again clear in the morning. A world in which, every evening, sight gave way to touch and hearing.

A world forever divided, forever altered by its own shadow.

‘She sleeps so much more now,’ Rosalia whispered to him. ‘Much more peacefully than before. Does morphine affect her dreams?’

She turned around when she asked this, as if caught in a gust of wind. A wisp of her hair was curling over her forehead, softening her face. A flash of auburn, a promise, but not to him. Ignacy was already talking of folding his Berlin practice. Would Thomas know a good doctor who might want to replace him?

‘Yes,’ he said, aware that this simple answer would not satisfy her. He wasn’t sure what else to say. The countess, when he had asked her about her dreams, laughed and said they were her own. You will just have to imagine them, she said, when you report on me to your learned colleagues. Or, if your imagination fails you, my dear Doctor, invent your own.