Garden of Venus (19 page)

For three long weeks she sees faces in her dreams.
Mana comes to soothe her but recoils as she sees her daughter’s body covered with pus. Is that how you want your life to end, Mana asks her. She shakes her head and waits for a wave of heat to pass. In the dreams that come after that she walks through the desert without a drop of water. She lifts her flask and places it at her lips but nothing flows out. It is so hot that the air burns her feet and hands. Someone, Lysander, throws burning sand into her face and her eyes. She screams and screams and Carlo comes again and moistens her lips.

‘The passport has arrived from Istanbul,’ he says. ‘We can leave as soon as you are well enough. Your mother sends you this.’

He slips something into her hand. A metal figure that quickly warms up in her hot hand: St Nicholas, the patron of travellers and errant girls.

‘Has he come to ask about me?’

Carlo shakes his head. What more proof does she want?

‘Don’t think about this scoundrel,’ Carlo says. In his voice there is compassion now. Perhaps this means she is really dying.

‘I want to live,’ she whispers, squeezing the holy figure in her hand. ‘I so very much want to live.’

There were four of them in the grand salon: Sophie, Olga, Rosalia and the Graf.

Graf von Haefen was sitting on the day bed, leaning backwards, his left arm extended on the arm rest, thinking that once the front rooms in the East wing were finished, he would ask Herr Schinkel to take a good look at this salon, too. Nothing too drastic, but the effect must be much simpler, more elegant. His wife had been right when
she said that his father’s tastes had been far too flowery, too ostentatious.

A Polish maid, the plumper one of the two, came in with a plate of lemon tarts. The cakes were a gift from the Graf’s Potsdam housekeeper.

‘These tarts,’ Olga said as she stood up to serve him tea. ‘Are the best I’ve ever had. Maman says so, too.’ The samovar, the Graf noted, stood right where his father used to keep his favourite brandy.

The tarts were, indeed, delicious. The pastry was light and flaky, the cream fragrant with vanilla and lemon zest. Each tart was decorated with a candied slice of lemon.

‘They come from the most precious of friends,’ Sophie echoed, and Graf von Haefen thought once again how Olga’s features lacked her mother’s beauty. They were too sparse for her face, too reminiscent of the perfect mould not followed. It must be hard on her, but who could equal the divine Sophie who had once bewitched Berlin and Paris with her
beaux yeux
and her Greek costumes.

‘My wife,’ Graf von Haefen said, ‘keeps telling me I should stop riding as if I were a young lad. She is sure one of these days I will break my neck.’

‘How is her Ladyship?’ Sophie asked.

‘Quite well. Quite well. She asked again if she could come by to pay her respect.’

‘I wish for no visitors,’ Sophie said. ‘Please indulge me.’

‘Your wish is my command, my dear friend. This is what I said to Fredericke. It is no time to pay respect. Your illness …’

‘I wish not to talk of my illness. You will have to indulge me again.’

Graf von Haefen was finding his new trousers too tight. Peg-top trousers, strapped under the instep that he knew
would be getting in between his buttocks. They were a bow to fashion, or rather a sign of his stupidity, he thought, and proof of his Italian valet’s powers of persuasion. As annoying as the high starched collar of his shirt, the upturned points chafing his cheek.

‘Berlin has changed,
ma chere amie
, from the time, so precious in my memory when you dazzled us all here. More beautiful than Rafael’s Venera, I swear. Driving us all to madness. I, for instance, still recall my own incredible foolishness, but don’t worry. I shall be silent on this topic in the presence of your young daughter.’

The countess’s smile was faint but visible.

‘At that time,’ the Graf continued having winked at Olga, ‘I still thought that the German nation had a role to fulfil. A sacred role. Now we’ve been overtaken by the parvenu, by the vulgar. Jews and philistines have sneaked into our world, and now it is no longer ours. This little Levin woman I’ve been writing you about, managing to marry one of our diplomats! This is what terrifies me. They are baptised, their women marry into the best families. They change their names, but they cannot eradicate their nature.’

‘My dear friend,’ Sophie said. ‘You are too sensitive.’

‘Should we just despair and give in?’

‘It might be time, my friend, to forget the affairs of the nation and think of yourself more.’

The Graf rose from his place as if to approach her, but sat down again, cursing his new trousers. He would make his valet wear them. He took another lemon tart from the plate. A few crumbs fell inside his waistcoat. Olga must have seen it, too, for she burst out laughing and tried to cover her outburst with a cough.

‘Are you all right, dear child?’ the Graf asked. He was just about to rush to her help, but Rosalia was faster. She too believed in a good slap to clear the throat. The tart,
he noticed with some regret, fell to the floor, which was strangely bare without the carpet.

‘Are you all right?’ Sophie echoed. Olga was still coughing, her hand pressed to her chest.

‘Raise your hands,’ Rosalia said.

‘The wrong way,’ the Graf said. ‘A piece of the tart went down the wrong way. It’s nothing.’

The commotion suited Olga, he noticed, brought warmth to her cheeks and took away some of the harshness from her face. Definitely, more weight was called for. He was wondering if there was any truth in the rumours that Sophie arranged for her daughters to have a little romance with her friend Tsar Alexander in Tulchin, as a little investment in their future. The Tsar was a fool, of course. Always in uniform, his enormous feet decked with solid gold spurs, when everyone knew he never stirred out of his villa when Napoleon marched on Moscow.

‘She needs a drink,’ Sophie said. The concern in her voice annoyed him. He would have liked to be alone with her, have her attention to himself.

Rosalia poured Olga a cup of tea from the samovar, and she took a few sips. When she finally stopped coughing, he resumed his monologue.

‘Oh, how easy it is to talk to you, my dear friend,’ he said to Sophie, taking another bite of the tart, this time managing not to spill any crumbs. ‘To know you understand all, share all. I feel lost in this new world. It has no place for me.’

‘Perhaps nothing in this world is pure and unmixed. Perhaps our enlightenment always has to come at the expense of our pleasures.’

‘You always say that.’

‘I always mean it,’ she laughed softly. ‘Can I ask for one more favour?’

‘But of course, dear friend. Anything.’

‘Music,’ she said. ‘It’s so quiet here, that I can hear my own thoughts. I long to hear some music.’

After he had said his good byes to Sophie – refusing to accept any more thanks for taking care of all their arrangements, including the daily administering of the accounts – and after he had closed the door behind him, Graf von Haefen turned to Olga who had accompanied him out of the room.

‘I don’t think laudanum is working, my dear Olga,’ he said and his words extinguished the last traces of her childish glow. ‘My eyes are still good. She is in much pain. Your dear Maman was clenching her teeth the whole time.’

The letter in her hands is short. It is meant to dispel whatever hopes she might still have.

The courier who delivers the letter into her hands smells of fried onions and the dryness of old age. He is on his way to Istanbul and says that Monsieur Boscamp’s orders are direct and straightforward to take her back to her mother. A drop of saliva dangles from his upper lip, stretches to its limit and falls.

She is still weak from the measles, but the rash is gone. Her skin is more translucent too, and she is more willowy, more airy now than before. Even the old courier cannot help staring at her.

‘Monsieur Boscamp,’ he repeats, ‘left me clear orders.’

She refuses to think of Lysander. Carlo is forbidden to mention his name. She is not interested. There is only that much a heart can take, that much that can be eviscerated, bloodied, destroyed.

She has slashed the white blouse she wore on that day. Slashed it into strips with a razor blade.

‘I’ve been betrayed,’ she says to the old courier. Her voice is calm and steady, but her beautiful eyes are drowning in tears. She lets the tears flow, until the old man, moved by her stillness, fishes for his own handkerchief and hands it to her.

‘A man whose advances I’ve rejected, is doing everything to destroy me. My heart, I’ve told him, belongs to my beloved master. No promises, no force would ever sway it. In this very room where we stand now, I revealed to this evil man the secret of my heart and he left in anger. Before I fell so gravely ill, I’d been warned that he has sworn to avenge himself. To my own peril, I’ve dismissed his boastings. I trusted with my whole heart that nothing in this world could turn my beloved master against me.’

The old man is listening.

‘Was I wrong?’ she lowers her eyes. ‘Is innocence always at the mercy of malice?’

The old man clears his throat. The skin on his neck is loose. It shakes when he swallows. She asks him if he has children.

He is the proud father of five, his youngest daughter is her age. She is married already and with child. A sweet and lovely daughter who has never caused him a heartache, unlike the eldest of his sons.

‘Reckless?’

‘Disrespectful,’ he says. ‘Thinking with the foolishness of youth that the world is his for the taking.’

‘Disrespectful? To such a father?’

The old man suddenly frowns and stops talking. The matter is, she hears, that he has been warned. She is a temptress, Monsieur Boscamp has said, and a consummate actress who can wring a man’s heart any way she pleases.

‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘Does it surprise you that an arrogant youth who has always had everything he wanted in his life cannot take my rejection? That he wants my ruin?’

He shakes his head.

‘Does it surprise you that he wants my master to turn me away from him?’

She sits down and clasps her hands close to her chest.

‘Oh, if I could only stand in front of him and tell him what really happened. All I ask for is a chance to tell him the truth. Then, once he hears it, he can send me away. If this is his true wish, I shall not object.’

‘Do what you need to do, child,’ he says, giving her the money Monsieur Boscamp entrusted him with. The money meant to pay for her journey back to Istanbul.

‘May God be with you,’ he says and gives her a father’s blessing, a sign of the cross on her forehead.

She kisses his hand as a daughter would. She has had enough of Fokshany and Moldavia to last her a lifetime. Tomorrow she will set off for Kamieniec Podolski. For Poland.

Every morning she makes herself get out of bed and dance across the room, swaying to the rhythm of her clapping hands. She forces herself to imagine the way her body gathers strength, her blood flows faster in her veins. When
she catches herself repeating Lysander’s name, or recalling the touch of his hand, her heart clenches, but then she wipes the thought out, makes it vanish.

The light of my eyes, he had called her. Are lies that hard to spot?

Kamieniec Podolski is a small border town. By now she has been everywhere. To the parish church, to the fortifications. She has even touched the white rock on which the fortress is built. Touched it and then smelled her own finger as if the rock were a flower that would shed its scent.

This is Poland, she tells herself.

A garrison town, the outpost of the Polish Commonwealth, a fortress erected to tower over the wild lands to the east, the realm of the Tartar hordes and Ukrainian
haidamaky
. A rabble, she hears when she asks about the latter, armed with pitchforks and cudgels. Riff raff who slash the throats of their betters, just as they did in Uman, a Potocki town three days’ journey to the east. The orphans of the Uman slaughter are still waking at night screaming in fear, remembering the bodies ripped apart and the screams of the women. In his Krystynopol palace, not far from where she stands now, Old Count Potocki housed at least forty of these orphans, before families were found who would take them.

The Potockis, she hears, are Polish magnates, owners of many palaces, of vast Ukrainian estates that reach to the end of the Polish Commonwealth. Richer than the King, more powerful.

Kamieniec Podolski. She learns to pronounce the name without hesitation.
Urbs antemurale christianitatis
. The outpost of Christianity, the gate into Europe.

Beggars are called
dziady
. So many of them hobbling on one leg, waving stumps. Some singing long, melancholy songs, some pointing at their empty eyes or at the
skin eaten with gangrene. Their hair is long and matted, their feet wrapped in bloodied rags. The Uman murderers, people whisper, bearing their punishment, their bodies branded with the signs of revenge until the day they die.

Perhaps, she thinks, she should return to Istanbul after all. Why fight what is coming at her with such force? So what if all the Istanbul Greeks must already have heard of her humiliation? Istanbul is not Bursa. Soon another scandal will come and people will have other things to talk about. But she doesn’t want to go back. Journeys are like that. They make you unfit for return. Make you long for more.

Madame Czerkies, her landlady in Kamieniec, is delighted to have someone to talk to. Her days are long and empty ever since her husband departed from this world. From this vale of tears, she has said, from this domain of pain and sorrow.