Garden of Venus (46 page)

They were to play a game called ‘secretary’. The five of them, the countess, Madame Kisielev, Olga, Rosalia, and Thomas. Each was to write a question on a slip of paper, and then draw these slips at random. Once the question was drawn, they were to reply to it most truthfully, writing one’s answer underneath the question, and put the slip of paper back into the pile. At the end, they would read all the questions and answers aloud.

Parlour games, as far as Thomas was concerned, were nothing more but an amusement for empty minds. The means of passing the time if one had too much of it and nothing useful to do. But this time was an exception. The
playfulness of this very moment was significant in itself. In his medical notes he would call it
a manifestation of euphoria
. After the second dose, he would note, the patient experienced an illusion of strength, of timelessness; a long period of giddiness; a temporary release from death.

‘Hurry up, Doctor Lafleur,’ the countess said. ‘We are all waiting for you. Surely you can think of a question you would like one of us to answer, can you?’

But it took Thomas at least another minute before he came up with a question that did not sound utterly silly or pretentious to him. At first he wanted to ask about hope.
What is the virtue and fault of hope
? perhaps, he thought. But then it seemed too transparent. He decided against it. He would ask about lies, instead. He folded his slip of paper and put it into a bowl.

He could see that Rosalia hesitated too before writing hers. A frown, a pouting of lips. A long moment of deliberation as if this was an important choice.

It was Rosalia who read it all to them:

‘In Tulchin,’ the countess said, leaning back on her pillow, ‘we used to play it all the time. Remember, Olga? We had living pictures too.’

The talk was a sign of strength, but it was the manner of his patient’s speech that pleased Thomas. The sentences were longer, punctuated with the waving of her hands, with giggles and laughter. The memories that came were also joyful. A drunken guest in her garden was found praying to the bust of Voltaire whom he had taken for a holy figure. A neighbour who had had the windows in her ballroom painted black so the guests would not know when the sun rose and kept dancing as long as she wanted. Three Polish princesses bribing Prince Poniatowski’s butler and sneaking into his bedroom at night dressed as Greek nymphs only to be sent back, for he arrived,
enfer et damnation
, with his actress lover.

‘Sitanska. She used to ride with him in the carriage all over Warsaw. Naked,’ the countess said.

‘Marshal Poniatowski?’ Thomas asked. Was this the same man who threw himself into the waters of Elstera talking of Poland’s honour. He must ask Ignacy about this.

‘He
was
quite dashing,’ the countess said. ‘He had excellent calves.’ In candlelight, with her head thrown back she seemed carefree and radiant. ‘Just like his uncle, the King.’

There was more. The countess told them how in Warsaw, at Madame Oginska’s, she staged
Five odalisques in a seraglio
. ‘Four nymphs bending over me,’ she said. ‘I was lying on a red ottoman, dressed in white tulle, so transparent that you could see through it. I was supposed to be asleep. They fanned my face, my breasts. The most beautiful women of Warsaw. The King was very pleased.’

Thomas could hear their laughter echoing off the walls, coming back, and disappearing again. A reminder of other
times, he thought, but then corrected himself. No, not a reminder. Just a pocket of joy in the time of sorrow. A moment to cherish. To draw strength from.

Behind the curtain, the pale soprano was clearing her throat.

‘My nipples showed through the tulle,’ the countess said, still laughing. ‘The King said they looked as if the bird of love had been pecking at them. Is it true what I hear that the young guards in Berlin are particularly fine looking?’

Olga giggled again.

From behind the curtain the pale soprano sang something in Italian. Her voice was trembling with angry fervour. The only words Thomas could make out from the lyrics were:
larve
and
ruine
.

She is still weak after her
accouchement
, but she wants to see Felix’s body. She wants to do it alone, without her stepchildren watching her every move. As she was pushing her little son into the world, she could feel their hatred focussed on her, the tentacles of poison sticking to her skin.

Hatred haunts this big sprawling palace in Tulchin, its long corridors where generations of the Potockis look at her with disapproval from their darkening portraits. Men dressed in long crimson gowns, their waists encircled with embroidered belts. ‘The dress of a Polish noble,’ Felix told her when he brought her here for the first time, ‘the salt of the earth. The descendants of Japheth.’ There were three of them, Noah’s sons. When their father lay drunk, it was Ham who derided him while Japheth and Shem covered Noah’s nakedness. ‘A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,’ Noah said of Ham. This was why
Japheth was the patriarch of all nobles, Shem of all Jews, and Ham, cursed for his sin, of all the peasants.

Laughing, she had pulled him toward her. Let all these descendants of Japheth see their son kiss her lips, her neck. Let them watch him on his knees lifting her petticoats, impatient to touch her skin.

You bring so much joy into my life, Felix said then. You make me want to live.

‘Papa died cursing you,’ Ludwika said when she came to see her new stepbrother. ‘And him,’ she added in the direction of the cradle. Her face was empty and stern.

Words like that are best ignored. Fear can only claim the ones who let themselves be frightened.

Ludwika was so plain, so devoid of charm, an awkward child with narrow, pale lips. Once she took a steak from her plate, carried it like a flower into the salon and then put it inside the grand piano. At another time she emptied a bottle of ink on her writing table, wiped it out with her cashmere shawl and then cut the stain out with her scissors.

‘Go back where you came from,’ she said. ‘Go back to Istanbul.’

One small blessing was that Monsieur Grabianka was nowhere to be found. Her maid, asked to make enquiries, was told he had left for St Petersburg in disappointment. In the end the rumours of disinheriting Yuri and paying the King of Israel’s debts proved to be just rumours. Perhaps Felix did not want to punish her that much after all.

With the maid’s help, Sophie puts on the heavy mourning dress of black crepe and black stockings. It is still strange to touch her flat belly, to know that the baby is not there any more. Her head spins and she holds on to her maid’s arm for a while, to steady herself. She will
have to wear her mink cape too. The big hall is chilly, and the chapel will be freezing.

‘Shouldn’t you wait, Madame,’ the maid asks. ‘One more day?’

The day before he died, Felix called the children to his side, their children, Alexander, Mieczyslaw, Sophie and Olga. She, his wife, was not even asked to come with them. The doors were closed all the time. When they were let out, she asked Alexander to tell her what his father had said. ‘Papa said he was not feeling well,’ he told her with his usual seriousness. ‘That I should be a good boy and look after my brother and my sisters.’

Felix did not allow the children to kiss him, but he asked them to repeat a prayer after him, a long prayer they didn’t understand.

‘Is Papa angry at us?’ Alexander asked. It was his voice that had frightened the children, low and stern. And his long blessing from which Alexander recalled only one phrase,
absolve from sin
.

Felix refused supper that evening. Prayed and asked to kiss the holy icon of Saint Yuri. It would give him strength to fight the evil around him, he said. The forces of sin, poisoning his blood. Then he fell asleep, peacefully, and did not wake up. Ludwika noticed it first, in the morning. He was so motionless, she said. So peaceful. Now, in the Tulchin chapel, his body is lying in state, dressed in the grand uniform of the Russian General, his last public office. The Potocki Cossacks guard him. Every day more people come to pay respects: neighbours, servants, serfs.

What has been done cannot be undone.

The maid insists on holding her arm to stop her from slipping on cold marble tiles. Two flights of stairs, a long walk through the East wing, then another flight of stairs. By now, one of her stockings is threatening to slip down.

‘I should have asked the footman to carry you, Madame,’ the maid says. ‘What if you start bleeding again? Doctor MacFarland insisted that you should not stand up for another week.’

‘Don’t fuss,’ Sophie says, but she has to stop a few times and rest. The baby has sucked her strength away. The doctor said it should be her last.

As soon as they approach the chapel, she knows that something is wrong. The Cossack guards are sprawled on the floor, asleep, their shaved heads shining with grease. Empty bottles lie about, some of their contents still trickling on the floor.

‘Oh My Lord,’ the maid gasps, clasping her hands. ‘Holy Mary Mother of God.’

‘Wake up you wretched fools,’ she screams, ‘Countess Potocka is here.’ The Cossacks do not even open their eyes. One of them is snoring, another grins, his eyes half-opened, rolling eyeballs revealing the whites of his eyes.

The chapel door is closed.

‘What if someone is still there,’ the maid asks, her lips trembling. Her foolish head is filled with nonsense. The dead rising from their graves, drinking the blood of the living.

She pushes the maid aside and opens the door to the chapel. In the dusk her eyes take a few moments to adjust before she can see clearly. The coffin is empty.

A few moments pass before she spots her husband’s body crumpled on the floor. A shrivelled, pale white body with sutures from the surgeon’s cuts, his penis but a limp fold of skin nestled in grey curls of hair. The uniform is gone and so are the rings from his fingers. The maid grabs the yellow
żupan
off the drunk Cossack’s back to cover the Count’s nakedness.

‘Don’t look, Madame,’ she begs her. ‘Do not look.’

But Sophie cannot stop looking.

Her husband’s lifeless body is lying like a shapeless sack. Without his finery, he looks lost, abandoned. Smaller than in life. Cold.

In his room, suddenly angered by his own exuberance of a few minutes before, he looked at his red hands, at the sabre scar above his wrist. The palms of his hands, when he stared at them, were two vast territories, creases crossing and leading off the edge, some ending like tributaries of undiscovered rivers. He had always considered palm reading to be one more manifestation of the irrational desire to make the future pliable, to mould it according to human dreams. So why was he staring at his hands?

The feel of the carpet under his bare feet pleased him. The muffled patter of his heels. He hummed as he washed, rubbing his skin hard with a cloth, feeling his blood flow faster and skin tingle.

America. Dreams of wilderness, waiting for those who want nothing from the old world. The ingenuity of free minds, unshackled by old dreams.
Kein Koenig dort
, as the Germans repeated with awe. They, from a nation of thousands of princes, knew what it meant to say the New World had no king. The common man given a fighting chance. Science allowed to penetrate the recesses of nature for the betterment of mankind. Perhaps, like the Boston sailor he read about in von Haefen’s library, he would travel further north, take a position of a doctor on some ship. He would learn from the natives, observe their cures. He would collect samples of their remedies. If opium turned out to be the source of morphine, what other undiscovered plants might he encounter. At forty he was not too old to make his own discoveries.

Alone.

There would be disappointments, of course, there were bound to be. Ignacy was right to remind him that America would not be free from sin. That there would be greed there, pettiness, jealousies and hatred. Yet such thoughts did not diminish the pleasure he felt at the contemplation of the New World. He was a doctor. He knew that the well nourished, human body could perform miracles. Given proper nourishment of the spirit, human beings could rise to new levels of experience. Even if they failed, these would be very different failures.

Outside his room, in the hall, he could hear the quick, short steps of a woman. His heart quickened when the steps seemed to stop in front of his door and the woman, whoever she was, hesitated. Then she moved on, with what could be reluctance. But this could have very well been an illusion.

I may have renters
, she writes to Diane de Polignac,
but I’ll have no owners
.

Yuri is in Paris, on his way to the Pyrenees where his doctor insists the waters are his only cure, telling everyone he meets that his Sophie is on her way there to marry him. Diane is horrified at the sight of him. A skeleton with fiery eyes, his hands hot as the desert sand.
Is this the kind of love you want
, she has asked.

Diane is writing her memoirs. She wants to preserve the memories of the murdered, record what they said and how. She has visions of muslin-clad figures, their dresses stained with blood. In these visions she can sometimes recognise Princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette, Princess Lubomirska, red velvet ribbons around their necks. Scarlet red, drops of blood detaching themselves from the fabric,
flowing down their breasts.
We were spared
, she writes,
to record what has been lost
.

Joseph also likes to recall the past. In his estate just four hours’ ride away from Tulchin, one of Felix’s gifts to sweeten his loss, he bores guests with stories of his friendships with kings and queens, stories that grow fatter with each retelling. He sends her gifts of wild honey and kasha from his fields, claiming that the soil there gives it a taste she would not find anywhere in the world. Jan visits him often, now that the second Madame de Witt is buried in the village cemetery, and tells her that her portrait is hanging over the mantle. She too sends him gifts: pineapples and lemons from Sophievka, bottles with the strengthening tonic he swears by, lists of guests at St Petersburg balls and, though not too often, greetings from those who still remember him.