Garden of Venus (34 page)

‘I’m glad to see you resting,’ he said.

‘It’s just for a short while. The countess is still asleep.’

Doctor Bolecki had brought her a book from his own library. A book of Polish folk songs simple as the people
who composed them, but beautiful nevertheless. It used to be his daughter’s favourite. The daughter he had hoped would marry and give him grandchildren, but then she chose God instead. Perhaps it might lift Rosalia’s heart too, bring her some respite.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Not at all, the pleasure is mine,’ he said, bowing slightly.

He wanted to tell her something that might amuse her. Only the day before he had a most curious visit. A young man, a poet, had come to see him. The young man had arrived in Berlin from Göttingen over a year before, where he had suffered the pangs of unrequited love. ‘What a surprise to be referred to a Polish doctor,’ he had said. ‘By Graf von Haefen himself.’

The young man was remarkable. Germans, he said, were far too willing to look at Poles through their own spectacles and find them wanting, but he respected the Polish nation for its struggle.

‘Was it why the young man came to see you?’ she asked. It pleased her that Doctor Bolecki smiled.

‘He came to ask me to cure his headaches. They were so strong that they were splitting his head.’

The pain was like liquid lead streaming inside his head. His eyes were also prone to infections, which was particularly unfortunate for a poet and a student of law. But anyway, he was digressing, this was not why he was telling her the story. For the young man had spent his whole visit praising the charm of Polish women. He called them
the altarpieces of beauty, the angels of the earth whose gazelle eyes made heaven out of earth
.

‘I thought he had suffered from the pangs of love in Göttingen,’ Rosalia said tartly.

‘What better way to cure a love-sick heart?’

She laughed.

He laughed too.

‘If you allow me to express interest in your fate, Mademoiselle,’ Doctor Bolecki continued after a short pause. ‘I’d like to ask what you will do after …’ He made an uneasy gesture as if he wanted to encompass the countess, her illness and her position in this household.

‘I don’t like to think about it,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s not the first time my life will have turned upside down.’

‘Forgive me,’ he said, rising and kissing her hand. ‘I shouldn’t have asked. It’s too soon. All I want is to know you will not disappear from my life.’

‘I’m not an apparition, Doctor. I don’t turn into thin air.’

‘Is that a promise?’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘In that case I should be satisfied.’ His voice was solemn, too solemn perhaps, she thought. It made her uneasy, but also it flattered and pleased her. As if his seriousness proved something, made something whole again.

She cast her eyes down to the floor, watching the patterns of the wooden mosaic, the chessboard of light and dark squares. Then the tassels on the curtain caught her attention, tempting her to play with them the way she did when she was a child.

He told her that he worked too hard because he found the emptiness of his house too hard to bear. He told her of his visits to Mietskaserne, the former barracks of North Berlin were now converted into housing: 2500 people lived in 400 rooms, sharing just a few privies outside. Two families to each tiny room which the women put a cord across and hung their washing on. They all, even the children, worked in factories or the iron foundry. Their pockmarked faces were pale. Consumption and scurvy were rife.

‘Old dreams, Mademoiselle, of freedom for all men,’ he sighed. ‘Where are they now?’

He is a good man, she thought. A man who will not disappoint me.

It is 1791, in the Moldavian capital of Jassy where the Russian army is savouring its victory over Turkey and are about to sign a treaty with the Porte, trouble is brewing.

The Polish magnates have arrived to ask for Russian help. As her prince predicted, while the new constitution may be hailed in Warsaw as a victory for the new Polish spirit, a manifestation of Polish political independence, not everyone is happy with the reforms. Those who oppose them point out that, with Prussia and Austria at the ready, separating the Polish cause from the Russian is folly. Wouldn’t it be better to seek help from our Slavic brothers, they ask. They call the King misguided and fooled by the radicals; claim that he has abolished
aurea libertas
, the golden freedom of the Polish nobles, the quintessence of the Polish Commonwealth, giving power to burghers and Jews. How could that, they ask, strengthen Poland?

Count Felix Potocki, Count Seweryn Branicki and Count Franciszek Rzewuski have come all the way to Jassy to seek out Prince Potemkin’s help in ending the Polish folly. In Warsaw, they are called traitors to the Polish cause. Here in Jassy, they are the realists, the saviours.

‘A political faction,’ de Witt calls them. Since the Prince’s death she has come to call him de Witt in her thoughts: Joseph suddenly seems too intimate. De Witt thinks that the Polish magnates are right. He too spews indignation about the new constitution, the reforms and the dreams of independence. The King has always been an impractical fool, a builder of ruins.

He has learnt a new phrase ‘legalising injustice’ and he repeats it
ad nauseam
. The new constitution is legalising
injustice. Taking rights away from the nobles is legalising injustice – allowing the contagion of Plunder and Equality to spread.

She tells him that he hates the King because he is jealous. She tells him that she cannot stand him near her; that only her son’s presence stops her from packing her things and leaving.

‘Potocki has come to see Prince Potemkin,’ de Witt smiles, ‘but now he’ll attend his funeral. If he came a bit earlier, he would have begged you to help him. Then our footman could’ve told him we were not at home.’

Does he really think she wants to hear it?

The constant dreams in which she seeks consolation disappoint her. When she wakes up, only fragments remain. Someone’s hand over her mouth, stopping her screaming, the sound of a bucket falling down a well with a loud splash.

‘Let’s go home,’ de Witt says. ‘There is nothing for us here.’

He may think that the magnates are right, but he doesn’t like to take sides. It is always better to wait through times like that, hedge your bets. She would have agreed with him at other times, but now his mere presence in the same room chafes her. The thought of returning to Kamieniec is enough to make her slam the door in his face.

In the salons of Jassy, everyone has something to say about the Polish question. In Warsaw, the talk is all of strengthening the army, rebuilding the economy, enriching the cities, regaining the long lost powers but here, in Jassy, she hears that according to the new constitution, any burgher can now claim equity with a noble. Isn’t that a harbinger of the same movement that now holds France in its deadly grip? The French King was stopped on his way to Varenne and returned to Paris, a prisoner of the
common man. What will come next? The public hangings of aristocrats? Peasants slashing the throats of their betters as they did in Uman?

You’ll have to choose, her Prince had told her. Are you with the Russians or with the Poles?

‘If only it were that simple,’ Count Potocki says when she asks him the same question. The balls have all been cancelled in mourning for the Prince, but the salons of Jassy are full. Count Bezrobodko has taken over Potemkin’s place, and holds court every day. And in his residence, Madame de Witt is a cherished guest.

Count Felix Potocki’s estate extends over half of Polish Ukraine, a million and a half hectares of land and 130,000 serfs, his yearly profits around three million Polish
zlotys
. She hasn’t had to do anything to attract his attention. His eyes haven’t left her face.

Her question would be simple, Count Potocki tells her, if the reforms had the slightest chance of accomplishing what they promised. But they are bound to fail and will plunge Poland into more chaos. Isn’t it better to stop it all now, before it is too late, to salvage what can still be salvaged?

‘Let me put your question in a different way,’ the Count says. ‘Would you rather side with the Russians or the Prussians? Which is the surer bet for the future of Poland?’

‘You have no doubt that the reforms will fail?’

‘None whatsoever. I know my countrymen. I know my king.’

Do I want him, she thinks. She is thirty-one and, she hears, more beautiful then ever. If she doubts that, no one knows. Beauty is not merely in the smoothness of skin. Smitten, drunk with hope, Count Potocki no longer thinks of pride.

She recalls his face that day he stepped into the carriage in the courtyard of the Krystynopol palace. The palace is
now sold, for Count Potocki has a new residence in Tulchin. Here is the Count too grand to receive Madame de Witt. This could be her triumph, if she cared. If it mattered in the least.

‘My wife,’ he says, his cheeks flushed, ‘is busy with her own life. We have
never
agreed on most important matters.’

She could tell him that it didn’t matter. That she has forgotten all about the day when the Potockis were showing Madame de Witt her proper place in the world. She doesn’t.

Count Felix Potocki can’t stop following her around. In every fibre of her body she can feel his desire. For him there is no one but her in this room. He hears nothing, sees nothing, understands nothing. The powdered wig lightens his face, giving him an innocent air, but there is a smell of unease around him. He is patient, waiting for the right moment to approach her again. She walks away, quickly.

On 12th October her little Jan will be ten. She had planned a lavish celebration, but after Prince Potemkin’s death, she will have to settle for a little private party; twenty guests, no more; red velvet chairs and napkins. She will raise a toast to him, tell him he has been her hope and her happiness. Her only happiness.

What do you want to have most of all, she asked him. He said: a brother.

She held him to her heart and buried her face in his hair, breathing in the wood smoke and saddle soap for he has been to the stables again. She too would like another child. Children are the greatest treasures, Mana would have said. May you be blessed with many.

The room is too hot. A waiter passes by with a tray, and she motions him to stop. She picks a glass of champagne. It is cold, a mist of frost hanging to the outside of the glass.

Letters that come from Paris are full of foreboding.
A la lanterne
, the mob cries at the sight of a carriage. It has become unwise to go out, to dress up, to remind the world of one’s existence. Diane de Polignac has been hinting at her desire to come to Poland, hoping for a hospitable home where she could wait through the worst of times. Perhaps, my dear friend, you could help? Princess de Lamballe, however, refuses any suggestion of leaving the Queen’s side.

She sees Count Potocki make a few steps in her direction. She looks straight at him, and then turns on her heel and leaves the room, running away as if it were his presence that scared her.

Joseph is still up when the carriage brings her home. There is the sharp smell of vodka on his breath. She slams the door of her bedroom and sprays perfume everywhere. The curtains, her pillows, her hands, her hair. Attar of roses.

The last gift from her prince.

‘Oh, Madame,’ her French maid, Paulette, says in the morning. ‘The flowers are so beautiful. But alas there is no card.’ But then she whispers, ‘Sergey says he has seen the men who delivered them. They were wearing the Potocki livery.’

The flowers have filled up the living room and her boudoir. Roses, daffodils, lilies, orchids: crimson roses; white lilies, tulips of a beauty she has not seen before. He must have sent to his own greenhouses in Tulchin.

She picks one rose from the bouquet and pins it in her hair. A red rose from the most beautiful bouquet. Paulette hands her the Venetian drops. One drop enlarges the irises, adds fire and tenderness to her eyes.

She may be wearing his rose in her hair, but she still avoids the count that evening. As soon as she sees him take a step toward her, she turns away to someone else.
If he is close enough to hear what she is talking about, she changes the conversation from politics to her memories of the Prince. ‘He was like a father to me,’ she says, fanning her face. ‘I’ll never forget him. Nothing else matters, in the face of death. No dreams. No desires.’

After supper, she lets herself be persuaded to sing, and for her little recital she selects a Greek love song. The song, she explains, is about a beautiful Greek girl waiting for her long-lost lover, waiting in vain, her heart bleeding. As she sings, she holds her hand to her heart.

The song fills her eyes with tears. When her audience applauds and asks for more she excuses herself and asks to be taken home.

‘My heart,’ she says, looking right into Count Felix’s eyes, ‘cannot forget its loss that easily.’

When he decided to prolong his stay in Berlin, Thomas had hoped he and Ignacy would go back to the carefree intimacy they once enjoyed, but now his own heart insisted on recalling his friend’s limitations. Both real and imaginary, Thomas was honest enough to admit. For why should he suddenly find his friend’s cheerfulness annoying. Or his whistling. Or the sudden care Ignacy put into tying of his cravat, the amount of starch in his collars, his insistence on walking rather than taking the carriage for it made the blood flow faster.

They had met at the entrance of Nicolaikirche and, after a quick stroll through the narrow streets, settled into a small corner tavern, right behind the Castle Bridge. The thick wooden table was covered with carved initials.
H.P. for W.H
. framed in a heart was pierced with an arrow.

‘Soldiers who are brought back away from the battlefield, Thomas, tend to lose their sanity. We have seen that
often, haven’t we? But the ones who are kept near the sound of cannon fire, no matter how severe their wounds, stay sane. I think that this is no coincidence. As long as we still have a hope of fighting back, we will survive. I’m going back to Poland. To fight back.’