Garden of Venus (14 page)

He is a curious man, impenetrable. When she asks him about his past life, he shrugs his shoulders and talks of something else. He has asked her to dress as a page so many times that she begins thinking he might be tired of women. When, prompted by her mother, she suggested bringing a young boy to him, he agreed. But then he sent the boy home without touching him and said he was just testing her. ‘Testing your willingness to sacrifice,’ he said.

Mana likes to remind her that the internuncio is leaving in a few months, and that she will never see him again. Yes,
she says, but … and there is a whole world in this
but
. A whole world of promises. I’ll miss you, he has said. In Warsaw, I could do with a little bit of cheerful company.

He will send for me, she tells her mother. When the moon turns blue, Mana replies. Men are all alike, Dou-Dou. Don’t trust them. Look out for yourself, for no one else will.

‘Are you listening to me, Dou-Dou?’ the internuncio says sharply.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Beauty is cheap,’ he repeats as if she hasn’t heard him say it before.

She nods.

He tells her that the universe is made of two kinds of matter, active and passive, and these two kinds of matter attract each other. The dance of the universe, he calls it, the essence of life itself, the only force able to defy decay and rot. In the universe everything, every material is either male or female, and the function of the male essence is to penetrate the female, and infuse it with life. The sun is like a man, while the planets that circle around him are female. The rays of the sun fertilise the earth that contains matrices of an infinite variety of life forms. Without it there is nothing but death.

Only God, he says, is above this universal struggle. Only God, in whom all things are contained, is neither He nor She.

‘Listen to me, Dou-Dou,’ the internuncio says.

A beautiful woman has been put on this earth with special duties to perform. In her, like in no one else, the passive principle is at work. To release the best in the male spirit, to stimulate the essence of humanity is her duty, her destiny. To use the power she has been given for the force of life.

‘Tonight you will do something for me,’ he says. He is taking her with him to a private party given by Monsieur
Stachiev of the Russian mission. He trusts she is smart enough to know which side her bread is buttered on. Unlike on other occasions she will not be dressed as a page.

Her new dress has just arrived. The clean blue of the sky, festooned with tulle and tied with three bows down the bodice.

‘It will make you look tasty,’ the internuncio says and makes a gesture in the air, as if he were opening her up like a box of sweetmeats.

You will be wise to keep your eyes open, Mana has said. Benefactors have disappeared before, leaving behind nothing but debts.

‘It’ll make them all green with envy,’ the internuncio says.

Monsieur Stachiev has asked for her three times, he informs her, in the flippant voice he assumes when he speaks French. She can understand enough already to make him abandon Greek altogether. If she tries to answer in Greek, he tells her,
Français
,
s’il te plait
. In French her thoughts come out unsure, hesitant. Words elude her, trick her into using them, only to prove something other than she intended. In French she apologises a lot, and is much more quiet. Every time she makes a mistake, he corrects her with an air of uncontested superiority. Is language part of the male essence too, she wonders. Or are some languages male and others female?

Tonight he wants her to be especially nice to Monsieur Stachiev.

‘Someone has been pressing the Sultan not to receive me. I need to know who.’

How
nice
should I be, she wants to ask, but doesn’t. ‘What if he tells me, but I don’t understand what he is talking about,’ she asks instead.

He stops in mid-step to take a look at her and laugh.

‘It is capital,’ he says, ‘to discover over and over again how highly you think of yourself.’

The internuncio doesn’t expect Monsieur Stachiev, the Russian ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to tell her anything of value. Why would he? But if she is nice to him and Monsieur Stachiev loses his head, being the fool he is, then he might have to give up something for the privilege of a sweet little visit to
Mon Plaisir
.

‘You want me to go to him,’ she asks. Her throat is dry, but her voice comes out steady. Her mother would be proud of her composure.

‘If he cooperates,’ the internuncio says. ‘Only then, and not before. Only when I tell you. Tonight, give him a taste, but don’t let him try too much. I don’t have to teach you how, do I?’

She is thinking of the seedlings growing in the shadow of the oak tree; of the silk belt in a coffer at the Seraglio; of the nights when her mother’s body is racked by fever and when sores open on her skin. Sores on which she smears foul-smelling salves knowing they will not heal.

‘Tell me about your parents,’ the countess asked.

Their story began on that fateful June day, in 1768, when Ukraine was still the easternmost Polish province. The scorching hot June day in Uman, the Potocki’s town, the jewel of the Ukrainian steppes, its cellars filled with gold and wine, its only well empty of water. Her parents remembered that empty well, the way they remembered the dried bones in the steppes, skeletons of man and beast cleaned of all flesh by the crows, bleached white by the sun. The way they remembered tussocks of grass, high enough for outlaws,
haidamaks
on horseback to hide among so well that a traveller would not spot them until their cold blades touched his throat.

Ukraine, the province of Polish lords, Jewish merchants,
and Ukrainian peasants. The land of vast estates where a lord ruled like a king and of wild fields where the only true master was a man with a sharp knife and a fast horse. A peasant was a chattel, bound to till his lord’s land and to obey his owner. But who would find him if he refused? Who would find him if he took to the steppes, become a
haidamak
? Or a free Zaporogian Cossack if a Cossack unit took him in and let him live in the Sich, the Cossack haven, the lands on the left bank of the Dnieper river where neither the power of the Polish King nor the Russian Tsar meant much, where the Cossack warriors could dream of a free Ukraine, empty of Poles, Russians and Jews.

Their story began with fires at the edge of the forest, rumours of hangings and plunder. Rumours of men in bast shoes turning village trees into gallows. Of throats slashed, gifts refused. Polish lords and their Jewish lackeys.
Lach, Zyd i sobaka, vse vira odnaka
: Pole, Jew and a hound, all by the same faith bound.

The story of hatred and revenge.

The story of fear.

The story of a Jewish girl and a Polish boy orphaned on the same day when churches and synagogues of Uman went up in flames.

‘Why?’

Rosalia had often asked her father that. Why did the
haidamaks
leave their homes and fields to ride through the Ukrainian steppes, to kill and burn?

‘When men live in slavery, their hearts breed hatred and sin. When men turn away from nature, Rosalia, they turn away from reason.’

‘So your father was a Jacobin?’

Her father believed that all men were created equal, that no one should be deprived of freedom. Did that make him a Jacobin?

From her Ukrainian manor, Helena Romanowicz, Rosalia’s grandmother, sent to Paris for her copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Emile
the way other women of her station sent for ballgowns or lingerie. She had nursed her son herself, and bathed him in cold water, summer or winter. She forbade swaddling and in his nursery, in loose flannel flaps he was left free to wander and explore. He was fed when hungry, and left alone in the dark so that he would not grow up to fear it. Jean Jacques. Jan Jakub.

‘Nothing in nature, Jakub, is disgusting. Evil and shame are bred by servitude and restraint. Only when a man turns away from nature, the world goes all wrong.’

He thought about it on the evenings he heard his father’s bellowing, his curses bestowed on the whole world: the King put on the Polish throne by his Russian whore, chosen over a true-blood prince from Saxony; priests with big bellies and even bigger collection boxes; dirty Jews sucking out the blood of the Christian nation; stupid serfs who were ruining him with their cunning indolence.

His mother was his real teacher.
Pan
Jankowski, the tutor hired by his father preferred to spend his days shooting swallows and was satisfied if Jakub recited his daily pages of Alvarez, his grammar book. His mother taught him French and geography, and she told him stories of the past. History excited her, but unlike his father, she didn’t care much for military glory. Her hero was Kazimierz Wielki of whom she said that he found Poland ‘made of wood’ and left her ‘made of stone’. She told Jakub of Queen Jadwiga who founded the Jagiellonian university; of Copernicus who proved that the Earth moved around the sun. But most of her tales were cautionary stories of lost opportunities, of dissipation and betrayal. She told of the magnates – richer than the King – growing in power, believing in nothing but their golden freedom; of Prince Radziwill’s trips to Paris, his horses shedding
golden shoes, Polish largesse to the Parisian mob at the time when public coffers were empty at home; of the mighty Potockis, unsatisfied with their vast Ukrainian estates, dreaming of the Polish crown; of
liberum veto
, the law once meant to protect the dissenting voices and foster debate, which was now like rust eating up iron, allowing one man to break the
Sejm
for some private reason. She mourned the long rule of the Sas kings, electors of Saxony and kings of Poland, whom she blamed for the dissolution of the Polish virtues. King Augustus III, she said, had made himself invisible. In Warsaw, the Russians did what they pleased. Indifference and greed were choking the once mighty country to death, breeding hatred in the hearts of the peasants. ‘Eat, drink, and loosen your belt,’ she said, ‘that’s all the Poles care about.’

‘And your mother, Rosalia?’

A pang of pain, still so fresh, so raw.

Her mother’s name was Miriam, that of Moses’ older sister who hid in the rushes to watch her brother float away to safety; who rejoiced at the sight of the pharaoh’s daughter, kissing the baby’s head, pledging to protect him from all evil; who asked,
Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, so that she might nurse the child for thee?

Miriam, was the daughter of Avram Davidowich a wine merchant from Uman and his wife Rachela who always hid a splinter from the Uman gate in her husband’s travelling trunk so that – on his long journeys – he would not forget his home and people. When she saw the first fires outside the gates of Uman, Rachela hurried to the Uman cemetery, to make the candles for the living and the dead, to awaken the forebears of Israel, the matriarchs and patriarchs, Adam and Eve. To plead for the purity of her soul, the resurrection of the dead, the deliverance from exile,
and the restoration of the Temple. To plead for the enemies to be turned away from the gates of Uman. To beg the dead to help her save the life of her child.

But neither reason nor faith were of much help on that day of blood and hatred.

‘Tell me about love, Rosalia.’

Love was waiting for her in the lilac bush, thick and covered with white clusters of fragrant flowers. The lilac bush into which Rachela pushed her little Miriam and told her to hide.

Miriam had to close her eyes for the lilac twigs were smacking her cheeks. Rachela’s voice was urging her not to turn back, but she would have, if Jakub did not stop her. Jakub Romanowicz, a boy in brown breeches, with curly blond hair and eyes the colour of the sky. A
goyim
boy staring at her in silence, who then, slowly, took her hand in his.

‘How do they call you?’ he whispered, and she said, ‘Miriam,’ trusting him already. She let him pull her toward him, to make a spot for her, away from the moist earth that might dirty her dress. She let him tell her how they should stay here, in this hiding place, for a while.

This is how amidst the blood and the screams of the murdered, the two children who would one day become her parents fell in love, and everything that happened later was but a consequence of that dive into the lilac bush in Uman. That day Jakub covered Miriam’s ears to drown the screams of the murdered, whispering stories into her ears. Stories of fairies and silly devils tricked by smart girls who kept their wits about them. Of a Polish king whom his own mother called a Piast, for unlike other kings he did not come from foreign lands and had no other kingdoms to worry about but Poland,
and who would come to Uman, to save them all.

‘From the Cossacks?’ she had asked.

‘From the Cossacks and from the
haidamaks
,’ he had promised.

In the hours that followed, men walked past their hiding place, and a small dog came, too, and sniffed for a while but then it went away, limping. All this time Jakub held Miriam in his arms, wiping the tears from her eyes and cheeks. He covered her ears and watched her fall into a shallow sleep, eyeballs moving under her eyelids. He wished to see what she saw then, now unable to stop himself from brushing her hair with his lips. He tried not to move even though his shoulder had gone stiff and he desperately wanted to stretch it. He must have slept, too, but his was a feverish sleep in which he saw the eyes of dead foxes staring at him, and heard his mother’s screams.

The lilac bush that had harboured them, gave away its secret in the end. The branches fell under the sabre, revealing the face of a Cossack who had cut it down, his yellow
żupan
stained with blood.

Six pairs of eyes staring at each other. A moment when all is decided for reasons never revealed. Miriam’s hand clutched on Jakub’s, her fingernails digging into his skin. It seemed to Jakub that his heart had stopped. He saw every line on the Cossack’s face, every smudge of blood and soot. Every hair in his long curly moustache, the colour of dirty straw.