Garden of Venus (32 page)

His uniform, he has once told her, cost nine hundred thousand roubles. At his table she has tasted caviar from the Caspian, melons from Astrakhan and China, fresh figs from Provence. Today, she is his beloved, his favourite sultana.

She shivers at the sound of his voice.

One of his eyes is blind. A scar from the Orlov’s sabre, he says, the scar of jealousy. But only the other day she heard him say that a tennis ball hit him in the eye and then a quack with his remedies finished it off. The remaining eye, though, is enough to pierce through her as if her body were no defence.

He is standing in front of her now, in this grand uniform, covered with decorations and diamonds, embroidery and lace. His head is dressed, curled and powdered, but she still remembers him in his morning gown, his neck bare, legs half-naked in large slippers, his hair flat and badly in need of combing. That one eye of his has the power to cut her off, encircle her in some invisible glass dome. This is what she thinks when she is with him. Of some fairy tale where she has been caught trespassing, of prison cells where she cannot hide, innumerable faces, gawking at her through the glass. Watch out, her heart warns her, with him you could lose all you’ve achieved.

This is the time to remember Lysander, the bitterness of her awakening, the piercing, suffocating pain of betrayal. The time to salvage what can still be saved. Instead she remembers the sunny meadow and the waves of joy. She remembers how he spilled thick, sweet wine over her neck, how it flowed across her breasts, through
the hollow between them, down to her navel, leaving its trace on her skin.

I’ll cry tomorrow, she thinks.

His impression of indolence and boredom is a disguise. Prince Potemkin will remember every word he needs to remember. Every name, every incident she ever mentions, every confession he has forced out of her lips.

‘
Ma belle Phanariote
. Come to your prince.’

Once he took her for a ride in the country. Their horses, young and restless, strained to get away, pulled and neighed with impatience when the Prince forced his stallion to trot beside her. Not to talk of love or desire, but to tell her how the Empress when she entered the room always made three bows
à la Russe
, to the right, left and middle. Appearances matter, he said and grinned. Catherine, the Empress of All Russia is always right. ‘How you love her,’ she said, jealousy choking her throat. She tried to make the words sound calm and indifferent, but failed.

‘Come here,’ he says. ‘
Ma belle Phanariote
. Make me forget. Make me laugh.’

Gossip amuses him. Stories of Count Barecki who ordered a battle picture with himself as one of the generals even though he has never even owned a uniform. Of Prince d’Artaud in Versailles who offered her the key to his private apartments and when she declined said, ‘Comtesse de Witt, you have no ambition. You do not love French princes.’

‘People are fools,
ma belle Phanariote
. They will believe anything if they set their minds to it. Have you ever thought of that?’

He lies down, chewing a blade of grass slowly, staring at the sky. ‘Talk to me,’ he says. ‘I like when you talk.’

She is trying not to think of the news from Istanbul. Her Mana has died peacefully, blessing her on her deathbed.
The only regret she had was not being able to
see you and your son
, her Aunt wrote. But
you mustn’t be sad, dear Dou-Dou. She wanted nothing more than your happiness
.

Princess Dolgoruka, she tells him, keeps a slave girl under her bed at night. If she cannot sleep, the girl is always there to tell her fairy tales. One story after another until her mistress tells her to stop.

‘I have everything I ever wanted,’ he says, his face red with too much blood.

They are sitting at the dinner table in his St Petersburg palace. The white tablecloth is embroidered with gold threads. Diamonds glitter among the fruit, making the bowls sparkle. ‘I wanted high rank, I have it; I wanted medals, I have them; I loved gambling, I’ve won and lost vast sums. I have houses, palaces, diamonds. All my passions have been sated. I’m entirely happy!’

Funny, she thinks. How would it feel, having nothing to wish for anymore. She cannot imagine it.

Then, suddenly, the sound of porcelain smashing on the floor, scattering on the marble tiles makes her quiver.

Prince Potemkin has swept the priceless china plates off the table. He storms out of the dining room, crushing the broken pieces underfoot, kicking at whatever is in the way. She can hear a dog whimper. The guests in the Taurida palace sit motionless, unsure what to do next. She rises and follows him.

‘You are the only woman who intrigues me,’ he says when she finds him in his bedroom, fists jamming the pillow, a smudge of blood on his cheek. His hand is hot when he pulls her toward him, squeezing her breast. Her heart is pounding. His hair brushes her cheek, and now she can feel the heat of his breath. His lips bury themselves in her skin. She is trembling with joy. With desire. With fear.

With love?

All of it, she thinks, all of it at once.

After the first dose of pure opium, Rosalia reported, the countess slept for five full hours, her body retaining warmth without the need for more sacks. Upon waking, she had a few spoonfuls of beef tea, a morsel of white bread dipped in red wine. The shivering stopped. So did the confusion. The countess was wide awake now, asking for him.

There was a new note in Rosalia’s voice, he thought, scrupulously trying to avoid her eyes: a halting note of confusion, a trace of fear, perhaps too. Ignacy said she had lost her mother not long ago, and now she would have to bear another death. He fought the urge to reach out to her, to let her rest in his arms, to be of use.

‘Please,’ he said instead. ‘Go and sleep. You need it more than anything else.’

A fly buzzed and bumped against the window pane.

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice flat, monotonous with weariness.

He opened the door for her and caught a waft of her scent: attar of roses from that perfume machine she had shown him, mixed with camphor and soap.

Having closed the door behind Rosalia, Thomas took out his stethoscope, opened it and proceeded to listen to his patient’s lungs. Cancer liked to spread, he reminded himself. It could attack her lungs, her kidneys, her bladder. Like a cunning spy, it could surface in the most unexpected of places to take over a new territory.

‘Is this what you came up with not to touch women’s breasts, Doctor?’ the countess asked.

‘Not me,’ he laughed. ‘Laennec. He might have had other reasons, though.’

Stethoscope, he told her, was nothing but a long tube that carried sound. It let him listen to the sounds of disease: the creaking and rustling of the body. She smiled.

‘What is it that you hear? The sounds of death?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sometimes.’

‘How does my death sound, Doctor?’

‘It doesn’t sound like much. It’s not in your lungs. If it were, I could hear it.’

He folded the stethoscope and put it back into his coffer.

‘Do you think God is punishing me?’

‘No. I don’t think God is concerned with us, Madame.’

‘Is that what you believe?’ she asked, the ring of irony in her voice. He had noticed the holy icon in the corner of her bedroom, with a prie dieu in front of it, though he doubted she could kneel in her present state. A votive lamp with its red light was always lit, though, and the flowers were always fresh.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what I believe.’

The opium was working. She gave him a fleeting, coquettish look but didn’t pursue the subject further. There was a softening of the body and a limpness in her hands.

‘I want,’ she said slowly, ‘to see my first grandchild. My elder daughter is on her way here, from Odessa. Let’s make a deal. You have to keep me alive until then.’

Her daughter, Thomas was informed, had married a Russian general. A brilliant man with a brilliant future. The Tsar had been most gracious to them. Her grandson had been pronounced a most charming baby. By the Tsar and Countess Razumov.

Each sentence was short, Thomas noted, clipped of unnecessary words. She was conserving her energy. He felt that it was his duty to meet her eyes as long as she looked at him, and he hated himself for his willingness
to do so. What is it in this woman, he wondered, that makes me want to please her? He had never been impressed by opulence or by the incidence of noble birth that made a syphilitic cripple ‘better’ born than a healthy peasant. He was a child of the Revolution after all. So why was he lingering by her bed then, wanting her to notice his diligence?

‘A deal, Madame,’ he said. ‘What will I get out of it?’

‘That you will learn when I think you ready.’

‘I don’t know if I should trust you.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t, but you will.’

The countess was silent now, breathing hard. Talk, even that short, was too much of an effort.

‘Try to eat more, Madame,’ he said. Behind the burgundy curtain the musicians were taking their places. ‘Mademoiselle Rosalia told me you had some beef tea today. That’s commendable.’

‘Is food all you can think about, Doctor?’ the countess said, the reflected flame of the votive candle dancing in her beautiful eyes. She fixed them on him, narrowed like a cat as if she knew exactly what he had been thinking about, knew her own power over him. ‘Is it because you are French?’

The countess and her entourage occupied but a fraction of the von Haefen’s Berlin palace. The rest of the building was a maze of guest apartments, galleries, passages, and stairs. The palace, Rosalia had mentioned, was to be renovated, and the signs of the coming changes were all around. In one room the hunting trophies had been taken down and propped against the wall. In another, the walls had been stripped of old wallpaper and freshly plastered.

As long as the opium was working, Thomas reflected, he would be able to develop the routine he had longed for. Early morning: check on the progress of the night.
Then breakfast, followed by the monitoring of the haemorrhages and the level of pain. Same in the evening, combined with a review of possible remedies: applying calming lotions to the stomach area still irritated by Dr Horn’s blisters and camomile compresses on the eyelids. Watching for the first signs of bedsores. But here, he was ready to concede, Rosalia was most capable on her own. As long as the opium worked, he would have time to go to the Graf’s library and do some reading. Find some accounts of America, perhaps.

Passing the vestibule on the way to the library he saw that it was raining heavily, streams lashing on the windowpane. Dampness in the air would flare up in rheumatic joints and old wounds. His own knee had reminded him of it already.

Pietka’s voice reached him from downstairs. It had been Rosalia who offered this translation a few days ago, but it was fixed in his memory. The groom was playing his bandura again to the amusement of the fat cook whom Thomas had caught adding pearls and gold coins to the broth she was making for the countess. ‘It’s an old cure,’ she said and gave him a defiant look daring him to forbid it.

Thomas liked the library. He liked this big, rectangular room lined from floor to ceiling with mahogany shelves, decorated with portraits of ruddy men who must have preferred the pleasures of the flesh to the dusty volumes
they were now forced to look at. Many of the shelves were empty; the Graf must have moved his favourite books to the Potsdam palace. Thomas took the thick, leather-bound volumes off the shelves, touched their spines, ran his fingers over the gilt-edged pages, letters stamped with pale gold. Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire. Right next to them, Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
. Cervantes, Racine, Molière; he had read them all in his student days, in the cold garret smelling of rats and faeces. Then the old maps of the world with their compass roses, the holy cross marking the east.

On the top shelf he found Marquis de Sade’s
Justine
,
Juliette
, and
The 120 Days of Sodom
. Beside them,
Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in her Nightdress
,
The Bordello or John the Fucker Debauched
. Published, he noted with a wry smile, ‘At Incunt, c/o Widow Big Mound’s.’

Thomas was not surprised. Why would generations of Prussian Grafs be any different to French aristocrats? Dr Brown did have a point. Indulgence, after all, was the direct result of over stimulation, bringing the weakening of the desired effect and the need for more stimuli. He had seen men vomit black from overdosing on
pastilles à la Richelieu
, candies laced with Spanish fly that promised to make them potent.

The rain had stopped. Through the library window he saw gardeners raking wet leaves and pruning shrubs. Thomas resumed his search through the shelves. Goethe’s
Die Leiden des junger Werthers
, he had read some time ago in English, the story of an artist who kills himself because he is in love with a woman engaged to someone else. In its time, he recalled, the book had caused a sensation. A small army of men in blue coats and yellow breeches plunged into self-induced states of melancholy and blamed it all on the book. He used to wonder why.

Feeling a draught coming from underneath one of the
shelves, Thomas wondered if the shelf might be a hidden door, like the one his father showed him in Marquis de Londe’s palace. Removing a few books, he found a lever, and after a shrill squeak, the shelf gave in, revealing a small, octagonal chamber with marble floors, slightly on an angle, sloping toward a gutter that ran around it.

In the semi-darkness he saw that most of the windows had been nailed shut, but he managed to open one, letting in enough light to see the paintings on the walls. The Rape of the Sabines, Susanna and the Elders, Leda and the Swan. Beside the paintings there were large, gilded mirrors, from the ceiling right to the marble floor, in the rich rococo frames of the last century. The room was cold and smelled of mice. The door leading to it, the backside of the library shelf, was well padded and covered with black leather. Two scarlet ottomans stood in the middle of the room, beside them a rack with whips. Cane whips and cat-o’-nine-tails that Thomas remembered seeing in the Marquis de Londe’s collection. His had been made of hemp, the ones here of iron and brass.