Garden of Venus (36 page)

Olga stood up and walked toward the bed, her body tensing in anticipation. The steps slowed down, and then turned away. Her mother groaned.

‘I don’t want to remember her like this,’ she thought.

Through tears, Olga looked at her mother’s face, the skin melted on the bones. ‘This is how she will look in her coffin,’ she thought and felt her throat contract and stiffen, as if she were choking.

Count Felix Potocki is a shy man.

He comes up to her the next day, his hands trembling, eyes clouded. There is so much uncertainty in these eyes, she thinks. Curious in a man who commands so much. Not a handsome man. Lips too thin, eyes bulging. There is no surprise in him. She can foretell all his pronouncements, finish his thoughts for him. She does not like herself much these days. She feels detached, remote, as if what is closest to her did not exist. She is still sore, still hurting.

You’ll have to look for your king elsewhere, ma belle Phanariote
.

She thanks Count Potocki for his most thoughtful gift. Her son is delighted, she assures him. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘how to find your way into a child’s heart.’

‘I try,’ he says. ‘I try very hard.’

Silence follows, awkward and sticky. He doesn’t know what she thinks of him. Sometimes he is filled with hope,
sometimes despair. He is still struggling for words; he doesn’t know what to ask her about or what to tell her. If he were a fruit, she would feel him for ripeness. The image of it makes her smile.

‘Am I that funny?’ he asks.

She shakes her head.

‘Why then?’

What made her laugh, she explains, is the memory of her son when he was still little. How he demanded a wooden ark so that he could put all the animals inside and save them from the flood. Once she caught him trying to pair an elephant with a lion. She protested that they wouldn’t fit together. Oh, but
they
think it is a good idea, he had said.

‘A smart boy. Your only one?’

‘Yes,’ she says with a sigh. ‘My only one.’

He stops as if surprised at the turn of the conversation. A blush flashes on his cheeks and disappears.

‘Our paths have crossed before,’ he says. ‘This is a sign.’

He reminds her that he was staying in Warsaw when she came there for the first time, that they exchanged a few words of introduction.

‘Risking your wife’s displeasure even then, I presume,’ she says, unable to refuse herself this little victory.

‘I blush at the memory of her bitterness, Madame. Your beauty is too much for a small heart.’

‘How is her Ladyship?’

‘I don’t want to talk of her. Please.’

Seeing the pain in his eyes, she smiles.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘My heart is not immune to bitterness either.’

Count Felix Potocki does not believe in coincidence. All life is interconnected, he tells her, all moments in which two souls come together have deep meaning. It
may be hidden at the time, unrealised, but it is there. It offers a chance to touch the essence of existence.

His voice falters slightly when he talks of destiny and fate. God is the Great Engineer of human fate, sending us onto the checkerboard of life with instruments to help us in our journey. When fates cross, when circumstances bring two souls together, one has to bow one’s head to the influence of the Grand Design of Life.

‘How beautifully you speak,’ she says. ‘I’ve never thought of life in these terms.’

‘Life or death,’ he says. ‘We have to choose which side we are on.’

‘Life,’ she says. ‘I chose life.’

‘But death is not to be dismissed, either. It frees a spirit and releases it from earthly obligations. There is peace in this release and the chance to forge new passages, make detours in the paths of life, surrender to new love.’

‘How would I know if it is God and not the Devil who sends such temptations?’

‘The Prince of Darkness cannot tempt with love. His domain is envy, shrewdness, cold calculations, and not the tenderness of the heart.’

‘I believe you,’ she says, and places her warm hand on his. ‘
Mon Elpida
.’

‘
Elpida?
’

‘It’s Greek,’ she smiles. ‘It means hope.’

He kisses her hand softly and places it on his heart. His lips tremble as he whispers her name. The pale, thin lips of a Potocki. If she plays her cards well, Countess Sophie Potocka sounds so much better than Madame de Witt. After all with money and influence marriages can be annulled. Josephine and Joseph might well find themselves in the same boat. Josephine and Joseph: another example of divine coincidence?

The thought makes her laugh aloud. Upstairs in her
bedroom her coffers are half filled with her dresses and shawls. The maid has been told to pack only the best.

‘You make me so happy,’ she answers the questioning look in Felix’s eyes. ‘The happiest I’ve been in a long time.’

‘What if he doesn’t marry you?’ Joseph says, a tinge of sadness in his voice. Resigned sadness, but wistful still. ‘What if his wife won’t allow it?’

He knows that he has lost her. She has heard that he has taken to drinking and gambling but whenever she sees him he is always sober. She shrugs her shoulders.

‘You are not my mother,’ she says.

Joseph de Witt knows that marriages can be annulled. A good lawyer and well-paid witnesses can prove that Sophie Glavani was forced into an unwanted marriage. Forced at gunpoint, when she, a young virgin on her way from Istanbul to Warsaw, naïve in the ways of the world, accepted de Witt’s hospitality at the Kamieniec fortress.

He will do whatever she wants, he assures her. He will swear whatever she wants him to swear. It is Josephine she should worry about. If she does not agree, what will happen to her then?

‘Let me worry about that,’ she says. For a brief moment she wants to take his hand in hers. Once he has agreed to let her go, her resentment evaporates. Her impatience with him, her anger. They have a son. A child they both love. A child Joseph promises to let her see whenever she wants. A child she can provide for better than he can.

She is not that sure of victory, but she will not let anyone see it. She tells him how generous Felix has been to Jan and to him. A hundred thousand roubles and a small estate in Ukraine is just the beginning.

‘I can be a better friend than wife,’ she says.

He nods and smiles, relieved in a way. In the past
whenever she threatened to leave him, he broke down and tearfully begged her to stay. Now he too has discovered that the anticipation of pain may be worse than the pain itself.

No, she will not tell him of her doubts. Of her feeling of want, like a wild, untamed cat, pacing the cage in which it is locked. Making hungry rounds in search of something that would make escape possible. She will not tell him that what she wants is never what she already has, that a dream made true ceases to soothe, that only the impossible has the power to entice.

‘Tell me something amusing, Doctor,’ the countess asked.

‘I’m not good at fashionable talk.’

‘What makes you think it’s fashionable talk that I want to hear?’

Another defeat, he thought amused.

He told her that at the battlefields, when there were not enough instruments and dressings for the wounds, the patients survived more often than in hospital. The human body, left to itself, would often heal. There was a force in all living beings, a powerful force. For a long time he had suspected that many cures prescribed by him and his learned colleagues were nothing but obstruction. The only way to save the best of humanity was to give it space and time to develop according to nature.

‘But this force won’t help me,’ she said.

‘Not any more. It has carried you until now, though. It has made your life possible.’

‘You are telling me to be grateful for the life I have had.’

‘In a way,’ he conceded. ‘I’m not boring you, Madame?’

‘On the contrary. You make a lot of things easier. Tell me more.’

He told her of his one-time mentor, Corvisart, dazzling his students with his diagnoses. At the bedside of a wounded soldier, Corvisart lifted the dressing of the wound, touched its edges and smelled its pus. ‘Look and observe,’ he said. Then he placed his hand on the patient’s chest to feel the heart beat and asked all his interns to follow his example. ‘What do you feel?’ he asked them, and one by one they described the slight purring, like that of a cat. ‘The mitral valve will not open completely, gentlemen. It’s his heart that’ll kill him,’ Corvisart said. ‘Not the wound.’

‘Have you felt it, too?’ the countess asked.

‘Yes, but I didn’t know then what it meant.’

‘And was he right?’

‘He was right. Corvisart was always right,’ he said. He had loved proving it to them in the operating theatre, that old magic trick the opening of the heart to reveal its faulty valve.

‘What does it?’ she asked. ‘What damages the heart?’

‘Emotions,’ Thomas said. ‘Passions, fits of anger, fear, distress at the horrible times we’ve all had our share of.’ His voice rose, and he almost forgot he was not lecturing his students.

‘Like a criminal killed by the unexpected news of a pardon, or a lover struck by the paroxysm of passion.’

She lay motionless, considering his words.

‘How do you cure a sick heart, then?’

‘I would let time heal it. Unlike some of my mentors I don’t think we, doctors, are actually doing that much good. I try not to harm. I amputate a shattered limb to prevent gangrene, if I still can. I remove a tumour to stop it from spreading. I leave the rest to
?is medicatrix natura
, the healing power of nature. Corvisart, of course, would not agree.’

‘So what would Napoleon’s great doctor have told me?’

‘That nature doesn’t heal. That life brings about its own end and the psyche can damage the soma. He would have told you to think of the cases in which nostalgia brings about the diminishing of life force. He would have told you to use all the means at your disposal to force the sadness out of your heart.’

She laughed.

‘And you don’t think he could be right?’

She has gambled and lost. When thoughts like this come, she doesn’t know how to defend herself from them.

She has been Felix’s mistress for two years. Three months ago, in April of 1793, she gave birth to a boy, Konstantin, whom she calls Kotula. Unlike Jan who cried often when he was a baby, this son of hers watches everything in silence, his eyes full of calm inquiry. Now she is pregnant again.

He has failed her, Felix says. She left her husband for a man who has been declared a disgrace to his country; whose wife laughs at his requests for the annulment of their marriage, telling him that Madame de Witt can be his whore if she wishes, and bear him even more bastards, but that there will be only one Countess Potocka at his side.

In Poland, or what is left of it, Felix Potocki is called a traitor and a fool. Right after that fateful trip to Jassy when he fell in love with her, the Russian Empress summoned him to St Petersburg. Fanning his anger at the King she convinced him that he should lead a confederacy against the reforms and the new constitution. A confederacy of Targowica, named after one of Potocki’s towns, would then ask Catherine of Russia for help to restore the old Poland, perhaps even make him its next King.

Catherine of Russia outwitted him.

As Felix predicted, the Polish troops were no match for a hundred thousand Russian soldiers, but the Empress did not intend to share her victory with anyone. All promises were forgotten, all assurances abandoned. Instead of the restoration of the old Poland, there was another partition, and there would be no more Polish kings. When he arrived in St Petersburg to protest, the Empress stomped her foot and reminded Count Potocki that his own estates were now part of Russia and that his loyalty was to her. He still doesn’t want to talk about it.

A traitor and his whore
, the pamphlets call Count Potocki and his mistress.
The infernal pair
.

They move from one rented palace to another. She has already lived in Cherson, Lvov, Grodno, and Minsk. They do not dare go to Warsaw even for the shortest of trips after an old man forced his way into their carriage there. ‘Get out of Poland, you and your whore,’ he yelled. The footman stopped him, but not before the man spat full in Felix’s face.

‘Do you still love me?’ Felix asks.

‘You are all I’ve got,’ she says.

It is at night that Felix wakes up screaming. He won’t tell her his dreams but he still believes in the power of confession. ‘I never thought it would end like this,’ he whispers. He means the Russian invasion, the partition. ‘All I wanted was to stop the King, to defend our freedom.’

He asks if she believes him.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I believe you.’

‘Will I be punished?’ he asks.

She holds him in her arms. In the nursery, Kotula is fast asleep. He is a quiet, sweet child, a little angel. For a moment, before she makes the thought vanish, she thinks of a rabbit in a dog’s mouth, its limp body carried so gently the teeth
do not break the skin. She wishes for a daughter now that she could teach to walk like a cat. Jan has written that his tutors are very pleased with him. How his handwriting has changed, hardened. For his little brother, he has sent a jar of the best Kamieniec honey. Dark and smelling of the grassy meadows
so that his whole life is sweet
.

Felix kisses her on her cheek, like a little boy, with gratitude and relief. Moments like this soften her heart. This is not the end of a Potocki, he says. He is making more and more outlandish plans. They could go to America. Buy the biggest estate there is and live far away from human envy and scorn. For this he has enough money in the London banks alone. They could be happy there, just the two of them and their children. What do they really need but each other?

‘I miss you even when you are asleep,’ Felix whispers. ‘Without you I wouldn’t have the strength to go on living.’

From France, the news is not good. In January the Jacobins executed the French King. Marie Antoinette is in prison, awaiting her fate. Diane de Polignac writes that the King showed courage beyond anyone’s expectations, taking off his coat by himself, stepping firmly on the scaffold.
The world has lost its meaning
, she writes,
nothing will ever be as it was before
. She is safe for now, in Switzerland, relying on the hospitality of old friends.
Thank you, my dearest Sophie, for Count Potocki’s generous help in making sure we stay in comfort
, she writes,
but do please assure me that I’m not making your situation awkward and causing you trouble
.