Garden of Venus (37 page)
Perhaps America is not such a bad idea, she thinks. Bad times cannot last forever. Lately her old restlessness has returned, her hunger for change. She longs to smell the ocean, to feel the sway of waves under her feet. She longs to forget about Poland, Russia, France – to start again, to make no mistakes this time.
‘I’ll go wherever you want,’ she says.
But Felix rapidly forgets all about America. Hamburg, he decides, will be far enough from the turmoil of the Warsaw streets. He tells her that in a voice that he believes is calm and assured. ‘Until sanity prevails,’ he says. ‘Until people here listen to reason.’
The news of the hangings come when she is in Hamburg, with Felix. Her belly is still sore from labour, her breasts heavy, and ache merely from walking. The scent of flowers, nauseates her. In the morning her head spins and her maid needs to support her when she washes herself. It is July of 1794 and Nicolai, their second son, is two months old.
‘He is beautiful,’ Felix says whenever she urges him to look at the baby, but she has noticed that he never smiles when Nicolai burps or twitches. Babies are not that interesting, he tells her. He prefers when they have grown up a bit, when he can talk to them.
He lives for news. Poland has risen to fight the partitioning powers. The insurrection, led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko, has just had its first victory over the Russians at Raclawice, but it is in Warsaw where tempers are running high, where those accused of selling the Polish freedom pay with their lives.
Felix insists he is not a traitor. He is guilty, yes. Guilty of miscalculation, of too much trust. He has made a political error and he is paying for it. Paying for it with his own name, his own shame. What he cannot stand is that she is paying for it too. This is not the life he wanted for her, not the life he wanted for his children.
His
children. Does he mean Kotula and Nicolai too?
The life he wanted for her is one of quiet, peace and contentment. The life in which she could be proud of his love for her.
The Hamburg Poles pretend not to see them in the street. Their calling cards are refused at the door. But Hamburg is not a desert, she points out to him. French exiles are flocking here too. There is French theatre and opera. There are English chop-houses. There are balls in Bosoltroff where they are always welcome. She would like to go there as soon as she feels better.
‘Didn’t I tell you that in Jassy?’ Felix says, slapping the paper with his hand. ‘They are a Jacobin rabble! It was not enough for them to provoke Russia. Now they want to murder us all.’
He reminds her more than once of the fate of his Tulchin neighbour, Princess Lubomirska, who left her husband in their Chernobyl palace and ran away to Paris with her lover. She was guillotined in spite of all the diplomatic pressure on the French. He likes to repeat the word
guillotined
. On the day of her execution, her own mother saw her in a vision, swathed in muslin, disappearing behind a long row of closing doors in the Chernobyl orangery.
Kotula is next door. ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses, A pocket full of posies,’ the English governess sings to him. He has learned to clap his plump hands and to blow bubbles of spit. He is too young to have a governess, but they could not find an English wetnurse and Felix wants him and Nicolai to speak English. There is no more mention of America, but there are hints of buying an estate in England for them.
From Ukraine letters come every week. Josephine has chosen to ignore Madame de Witt and her bastards. Instead she reports that the price of wheat has risen, that the Uman steward needs to be let go, for the summer palace is in a bad shape. What, a year ago, would have been the simple matter of repairing the roof, now means replacing the rafters and rebuilding the upper storey. There
is news of the Potocki children, the dogs and the state of the Tulchin garden. There is gossip too: in Chernobyl Princess Lubomirska’s ghost appears to her own peasants returning from their fields, her eyes wide with terror. ‘Run away,’ she begs. ‘A terrible disaster is coming. This land will become poisonous and barren. You, your children, and your children’s children will perish here. Run away as far from this cursed place as you can. Run away for in this land there is no hope.’
Felix reads the paper to her: a proof that he has been right all along.
… At noon, on the 28th of June 1794, right in front of the old town hall in Warsaw, the gallows were waiting. The crowds teemed with hatred. ‘Death to traitors,’ the women shouted, putting the children on their shoulders to let them see better. ‘Hang Moscow’s lackeys.’
Among those who died were Prince Antoni Czetwiertynski, Bishop Ignacy Massalski, Hetman Piotr Ożarowski, Józef Ankwicz, and Charles Boscamp.
For years they had been selling off their country, bit by bit, fattening up on Russian and Prussian money and the end they met with was just. Trembling with fear the traitors were led to the gallows. Prince Czetwiertynski cried and kissed the hands of the executioners but that cowardly act did not stop the execution and he was hanged in front of his own windows. Ożarowski’s son, looking at his father’s convulsions, said: ‘This man stopped being my father when he betrayed my country.’ Having read a sign over the gallows that such is the punishment for the traitors, Ankwicz tried to defend himself. ‘Everyone took money,’ he said. ‘Everyone
signed the act of partition. When everyone sins,’ he asked, ‘will you hang everyone?’ Boscamp gave the executioner a few ducats and asked for a quick and easy death. ‘Are these the same ducats you have taken for Poland’s partition?’ the executioner asked and, taking hold of his private parts, he twisted them so hard that the miserable traitor turned black in the face. The crowds cheered and danced with joy. At three o’clock a gust of wind came and brought in black, heavy clouds. It felt as if the world was about to end. Rain poured down, heavy and vicious, turning the streets into muddy streams. It was the rain that drew the crowds away …
His voice is tense. ‘The justice of the mob,’ he says. ‘Will they not stop until we have rivers of blood flowing in the streets, like in France?’
She thinks: Charles Boscamp is dead.
‘How long before Polish peasants start slashing our throats?’ Felix continues. ‘Raping our women? The way the
haidamaks
did in Uman?’
The cup is shaking in his hand and some coffee spills on his dressing gown. She takes the cup from him and puts it down on the breakfast tray. He tries to mop the stain with a napkin.
‘The
true
nature of the common people is now revealed,’ he tells her. ‘The common man is a murderer, a violent beast, a monster.’
Charles Boscamp is dead, she thinks.
Life is so short, Dou-Dou, so fleeting. Shouldn’t we suck the pleasure out of each moment?
Did Boscamp die thinking of her, wishing he could see her one more time?
She remembers that party in Istanbul. The sounds of the citra in the next room, the laughter of the men, the
musty room where he wants her to change into the gauze shirt and pantaloons. ‘I’ve promised you’d dance for them. Do not disappoint me.’ She remembers the taste of her tears, the spasm of fear at his anger. She remembers thinking:
His whore. I’m nothing but his whore
. She remembers her eyes in the mirror, lined with kohl, flaring.
Life is curious at times. Someone said that, but she cannot remember who it was.
A traitor and a Russian spy? He betrayed her too. Despite his promises, he tried to sell his revelations, the true story of
la belle Phanariote
, many times over. Fragments of his manuscripts still surface where she least expects. They won’t stop either, with his death. There will be always someone ready to pass them on.
Worn stockings, she could have told him. In the sea of lies about her, one more story does not make a difference. There is nothing she has in common with that trembling girl who stood before her master in Istanbul, fearing he might send her back to her mother. Nothing but a name.
Felix reaches for
Nouvelles Extraordinaires de Divers Endroit
to confirm the account he has just read. He is silent, but she knows that, in Warsaw, his portrait was hanged on the gallows.
Pamphlets make their way into their house, their carriage, appear in most unexpected places. The piece of paper Kotula was playing with turned out to be one of them, another one she found pinned to her cloak. There are crude drawings of Felix on the gallows:
The Targowica leader, the murderer of Poland
. There is Felix hiding behind a woman whose full breasts are spilling out of her low-cut dress:
I’ve killed my first wife, my country, and my honour. Now I’m hiding behind my whore
. The servants cry and swear they do not understand how it is
possible. Felix has dismissed five grooms and two maids already.
If she can, she burns the pamphlets herself, before Felix can see them. But she cannot burn his wife’s letters. Countess Josephine begs him to repent, to return to Tulchin, to abandon Madame de Witt and her bastards.
I’ve assurances from someone very trustworthy that the younger one is not yours, Felix
.
Boscamp is dead. What did Cleopatra say when Hailes despaired:
If you find him sad, tell him I’m dancing
.
‘I’ll sit with the countess,’ Doctor Lafleur said. ‘Get some rest.’ She was holding a candle, watching its flickering flame. Melted wax gathered, dripping down the side.
Was he sending her away?
This was one of these moments she didn’t know what to do with. Unspoken words seemed to stretch between them, like swampy fields. She had a feeling she misunderstood him all the time, that his words lured her into illusion. There was also the humiliating thought that, unlike hers, his life had endless possibilities – the very nature of which allowed him to wait and hope. What could she bring to weigh against such freedom? Nothing. Nothing at all.
This memory could still colour her cheeks with shame.
In the end all she had to do was to push the little pillar and the drawer snapped open, revealing the loose sheets of vellum paper and some letters. A pack of cards was wrapped up in a piece of black silk.
A woman whose name was but a squiggle thanked her mother for her help and asked God to bless her and her child.
When everyone turned against me and condemned
what I had done, you found it in your heart not to judge me. May the Virgin Mary hold you in her special care
. The letter meant little to her and she quickly put it away.
There wasn’t anything Rosalia was looking for. Her prying was more a petty act of defiance for her mother’s silence, for feeling pushed away.
Before he left, Jakub kneeled and hid his face in the folds of my dress, as if he were drinking from my belly. I was thinking that if only I hadn’t told him I was expecting a child, he would have taken us with him. He tried so hard to avert my attention from that drowned ship and from Fiszer’s refusal to go on this unknown mission. ‘There is no other way,’ he said. ‘You know I wouldn’t ask you to stay if I didn’t think it best.’
‘I’ve left my people for you,’ I said, ‘but you won’t leave yours.’
I was so angry with him then that I pulled my hand away and wouldn’t let him touch me. I told him he was taking away the only reason I had for believing that I did the right thing. That without him there was no place for me, no family, no people I could call my own. I knew he wouldn’t change his mind, but I wanted him to know how much I was hurting. For this I’ll never forgive myself, either.
When he left I went with Rosalia to the harbour. I heard her count the ships and I told her to stop. Counting anything was bad luck my mother and Aunt Hannah always said. The evil eye would know where to look. Later when Rosalia was flying a kite Jakub had given her, I tried to kill the bitterness in my heart but couldn’t. Poland, I thought, was like a bloodthirsty beast that demanded its sacrifice from
each generation. It would never have enough, and it would always take the lives of its best sons. I sat on the bench at the harbour long after the sails disappeared over the horizon, feeling as if my life had ended, as if everything I’d ever done had brought me to this moment of utter loneliness. Time, I thought, was a thief, stealing life a drop at a time.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ Jakub said. ‘Life is not over, Miriam.’
He called me Miriam. ‘Sweet little Miriam,’ he whispered into my ear right before stepping on board.
A fear gripped me, a thought: What if he never returned. ‘A bad hour,’ my aunt used to call a time like that. A time when the worst thoughts come true. I tried so hard to undo that thought, to wipe it out from my heart. In church I kneeled in front of the Virgin Mary to whom, Jakub once told me, King John-Casimir consecrated Poland making Her our Queen. A Jewish Queen of Poland, I kept thinking, she will understand me. I have given enough already, I prayed. I have given up my people, my God. I didn’t cry when I had to raise my child in exile, not knowing where we would live from month to month. I followed my husband faithfully all the way to Livorno harbour, I went wherever his duty and love for Poland called him. I tried to be a good wife and a good mother, not to burden anyone with my own pain. I taught my daughter to pray for Poland and to call her father a hero. Shouldn’t I be spared?
Now I know it was already too late. Now I know so much more. ‘A Jewess will always be a Jewess,’ I’ve heard Antonia say to Klemens.
There were two letters in that brown sack. The first one was written a month before the yellow fever
took him, so faint I could hardly make out the words. ‘Why are we here, so far away from Poland,’ he asked. ‘We were told we would be maintaining order among our equals, but we are maintaining the French order over slaves.’ He wrote that the negroes attacked them mostly at night. They heard the singing first, then voices of women and children, a short burst of a song and silence. Then another burst came from another direction, then another long silence and another song. They were armed, watching around them, waiting. The negroes emerged out of the forest, threw themselves at them, and then disappeared into the darkness as if nothing but phantoms.
The French assured him that they had no intention of bringing slavery back. Napoleon was only stopping the rebellion from destroying the country. The light of freedom cannot be stopped at will, they said, denied to some and bestowed on others. He wrote as if he tried to believe them.
The second letter was shorter. Jakub was writing it from hospital. He could already feel sharp pains in his eyes and he knew what was coming next. He had seen enough of his soldiers die of the fever. He wrote that he had heard rumours of Polish soldiers crossing over to join the negroes in their fight for freedom, four hundred of them. ‘I pray,’ he wrote, ‘that these rumours may be true.’ Then the last lines were so faint it took some time before I could read all the words: ‘Oh, Miriam, my sweet Miriam, I wish we died that day in Uman: holding hands, innocent, together.’
Oh, Jakub. My dearest, my beloved. Once you told me that we could change our destiny and still find happiness. When I lay awake at night I think
that I brought this death upon you, that you had to die for my sins, die so far away from Poland, from everything you loved. I wish I had enough strength to have stayed in Uman and accepted my fate, to be the mother of Jewish children who would not be ashamed of me, who would cherish my parents’ names and carry their dreams into the future.