Garden of Venus (50 page)

‘France,’ General Kisielev said, taking a pinch of snuff from a silver box, but not offering any to Thomas, ‘I consider a country inhabited by frivolous people.

‘What I mean,’ he continued, sneezing into his white handkerchief, ‘is that the French have given the most eloquent expression to the tendency of the human mind that values can be arbitrary. This is what is wrong with the modern man.’

Punctuating his sentences with wide and elaborate wavings of his arm, General Kisielev was looking Thomas straight in the eye.

‘Religion, morality, economy, politics all have become common and accessible to everyone. The new man believes not in experience but inspiration. Instead of faith he embraces individual conviction. He believes himself strong enough to embrace all questions and all facts. Laws do not bind him, for he has not contributed to make them. Power resides in himself, why should he submit himself to anyone’s authority? Nothing that had been conceived in the ages of weakness is deemed suitable in this age of reason and universal perfection. Our morality is passé, our laws are obsolete. He wants to be a sole judge of his own actions and his own faith.’

He continued this tirade for another few minutes. Thomas was relieved to see Rosalia come in. He was just about to stand up to greet her when she begged him to hurry.

‘Stop him from putting flowers on me,’ the countess ordered him firmly when he came up to her bed. ‘I’m not dead, yet.’

She was flailing her thin arms as if fending off a deluge. She was losing consciousness. He had hoped the morphine would keep working.

‘Who?’

‘Felix,’ she said. ‘Felix who could never understand anything.’

She was pointing at the shadows on her throw, the glittering of the gold thread. He drew the curtains to keep the shadows away.

‘I’ll tell him to stop.’

‘Don’t tell him anything. Just stop him.’

‘He’ll not come back.’

‘So why is he still there?’

He sat down beside her and wiped the sweat off her forehead. The cold of the sponge soaked with ice-water brought her back to clarity.

‘How long will it last?’ she asked. She was lucid, now, breathing heavily. She too was thinking of the morphine.

‘Another few days, perhaps. I don’t quite know.’

He measured another dose and gave it to her. He had to lift her up before she would drink it. He hoped she would not vomit it all out.

‘I want to be buried in Uman,’ she said. ‘Don’t let them leave me here.’

‘No one will leave you here,’ he said, holding her hand.

‘It’s such a silly thing, breathing, Doctor,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Resisting death. So utterly silly.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It is.’

‘As silly as to resist a woman who is ready to love you?’ She let go of his hand and closed her eyes.

He didn’t dare believe what he had heard.

‘Leave me now,’ she said. ‘I want to sleep.’

‘It’s not hurting any more,’ she tells Felix when he comes in again to accuse her.

Death is soft with morphine, lingering like a patient lover. It puts a metallic taste in her mouth, gives a heaviness to the body, which began in her legs. As if she were being erased bit by bit. Toes, feet, calves, knees, first growing thicker, heavier and then disappearing altogether, a memory in the hearts of those who loved or hated her.

‘You have betrayed me with my own son. Hell is waiting for you.’

The new medicine is making its divine rounds inside her. Felix is growing dimmer, melting away.

From behind the curtain the pale soprano is singing:

She can see them all, gathered around her body. Her daughters are crying, unsure what to do. Olga is placing two gold coins on her eyelids. She has kept them in her pocket for a long time.

‘No one has to know Maman died,’ she says. ‘We could just say we are taking her back home.’

There is silence in the grand salon. Rosalia lifts her head. Two tears detach themselves from her eyes and roll down her cheeks. Two tears leave two glittering trails in which the flames of the candles dance. ‘Be brave, Rosalia,’ she whispers. In the will there is a provision of ten thousand ducats for her.

Sophie, her beautiful daughter, is sobbing.

‘We can sit her in the carriage and leave in the morning,’ Olga says. ‘The doctor will know how to fix that.’

Pavel Dimitrievich Kisielev paces the room in anger. Prussian bureaucracy can only be defeated by having someone set fire to all these German books and ledgers. The special permission to take the body to Uman will not be issued before the prescribed period of ten days.

‘Surely, my dear General,’ Graf von Haefen says with a smirk, ‘even in your mighty Russia there must be laws that cannot be broken at anyone’s whim?’

Her body is lying on the table in the small room the French doctor had discovered behind the library, a secret Graf von Haefen pretends to know nothing about. Doctor Thomas Lafleur is bending over her, thinking that the tiled floors could be hosed down, and then the gutter around the room would take care of the water.

He has prepared the room already, covered the paintings with white shrouds, removed the collection of whips and the red ottoman. Now the room is bare, except for a tub filled with von Haefen’s best brandy and two tables. The long one is for her body, the low, square one is for the instruments he would need: syringe, lancets, tubes, a blunt hook, horsehair and sweet grass.

He has done it before, of course. A military surgeon had to learn to embalm. The illustrious dead have to be preserved for the state funeral, for the long journey back home. They all did it, Larrey, Corvisart. Perfected the procedure, shortened the required time. Her body is lying in front of him, but the French doctor’s thoughts drift toward Rosalia. He can’t stop thinking of the rustle of her dress, the sounds of her heels on the floor.

There is not enough light in the room. The windows are too narrow and in November the sky is too dark. To offset it, he has ordered candles to be hung from the
ceiling on a wooden plank. Now he lights them, one by one, filling the room with the smell of melting wax.

The blood that drained to the bottom of her body has coloured her back and shins purple. Death, the good doctor thinks, is the natural state of all creation. Resisting it, is another victory of hope against reason, for this resistance is the cause of all pain.

A gift for a gift, mon ami
.

He is picking up the brass syringe that he has assembled just minutes before. He is checking if the piston, the valves, the barrel are firmly in place. With the syringe and the tube he flushes out her stomach and large intestine. Then he fills them up. As he is doing it, he recalls the ancient belief that while veins carried blood, the arteries transported spirits.

I trust you will know what to do with it
.

Only then does he open her belly to excise the tumour. It has grown into her uterus, a mass of hard tissue, rich tawny red. It is entwined, there is no boundary between the tumour and its unwilling host. A growth that has fed itself on what was not meant for it at all. The French doctor is thinking that he was right not to touch it. He is thinking of the body defending itself, fighting for survival. There could be no compromise in this fight, no peace. It is either one or the other. And justice? Well, he is prepared to concede there is some justice in this war of the flesh. Cancer, when it wins, kills its host and destroys itself too.

For a moment he is tempted to make an incision along her chest, to expose the heart, to glance at what he remembers his teacher Corvisart called ‘the evidence of life’s emotions, the slate on which life engraves all our feelings.’

He doesn’t do it.

His eyes cannot help registering the evidence of her illness. The hands so thin that he can see the ligaments through the skin. The body has been wasted by defence,
starved. He cleans the cavity that he has just emptied of the tumorous mass. Then he powders it with oxychloride of mercury and stuffs it with horsehair.

This is not the way you will remember me, Doctor
.

Her body is so light he can lift it without effort. When it is immersed in the tub filled with brandy, he pinches out the candles. Before she is dressed and made up, he will coat her cheeks and hands with a slightly tinted varnish, to give them some semblance of colour. More horsehair will go into her mouth to lift her sunken cheeks. She will have to be tied with ropes to the carriage seat. A hat will cover her eyes, glued fast.

The maids have prepared the travelling clothes. Olena is crossing herself, again and again. Her fingers when they touch her body are as careful as if this shrunken shell still smelling of brandy were made of gossamer and could be destroyed by one careless touch. The dress was one of her favourites: the dark blue one, with the black fur trim. Over it Marusya throws her favourite pelisse, lined with sable fur. Dressed and seated in the carriage, her face partially hidden behind a fan, Sophie is ready for her last deception.

The air in the Sophievka is frozen. The lake is one plain of snow, and even the cascades have stopped flowing. This garden of hers where orchids grow as if they were never taken away from the wilderness, where the spring will make petunias bloom, the offspring of that very first one she brought from England. This is a place of beauty where the pain, the despair, the ugliness that is spreading like cancer through this world can be forgotten.

For a moment she can still feel the pleasure of knowing that she moves through the snow-covered alleys without leaving a trace. Behind and ahead of her, the snow remains white and undisturbed.

The hall of Alfred von Haefen’s palace is strewn with opened crates, piles of dishes, sacks of linen and clothes. Thomas is there, tripping on a braid of straw, but recovering himself right away.

Rosalia sits in the grand salon, with its now empty bed, staring into the fire. Her auburn hair shines in the glow of the flames.

‘What will you do now?’ he asks, still unsure of what he already hopes possible. She lifts her eyes slowly.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she says.

Only a few weeks ago this America where he is going to seemed to her like the magnet mountain of her childhood stories, pulling nails out of ships, snatching anchors from the boards and knives from the sailors’ pockets. Drawing pails, kettles, and pans from the ships’ kitchens, leaving the sailors who resist its power on a wreck of floating wood. Now instead, she imagines the giant trees that remember the beginning of the world and people who do not bend their necks.

To stop the fire from dying, Thomas feeds it with a new log. The log is wet and the wood begins to sizzle when the flames touch it.

Where he saw desert, he now sees gardens. Seeds swell and break, seedlings poke through the earth, drinking up the light and water. They grow, thicken, become lush and vibrant. But then a voice in him warns it might all be an illusion, a wishful thought he should be laughing at. A mirage, the apparition of light, conjured up by a starved brain of a thirsty traveller in the desert.

But his joy will not go away. Like a bird it perches over him, preens itself, oblivious to the voice of doubt.

He stretches his hand over the flames. He covers Rosalia’s hand with his, warm from the fire. He can feel it stir. In his mind images appear, possibilities he entertains with delight. The strength of Rosalia’s arms around
his neck, the sweet pressure of her lips. The persistence of hope still astonishes him, the power with which the past disappointments are blotted away. The foolishness of the human heart, he thinks, is, after all, its greatest strength.

He presses his lips to Rosalia’s hand. She doesn’t take it away.

‘I love you,’ he says and then he waits.

Three carriages stop at the Prussian border on a moonless November night, chilly and dripping wet. Two guards come out of the guardhouse, carrying lanterns and a big, black umbrella, slightly frayed on the edge. The heavy drops of rain splash on the tin lantern lids. Inside the first carriage, the guards see a Russian general, beside him a wetnurse who is rocking a baby in her arms. In the second carriage servants are squeezed in between crates, coffers, and shapeless bundles. It is the third carriage, however, that will make the guards talk long after the travellers have gone on their way. A lady, dressed in a heavy pelisse trimmed with fur, her face overshadowed by the trim of her hat, is flanked by two young women. Countess Sophie Potocka and her two daughters are going home, to their palace in Uman.

Countess Potocka, the guards are told in a curt manner, is indisposed. Thankfully, she has just fallen asleep and should not be disturbed.

The guards nod and carefully unfold the passports, making sure that the black umbrella is shielding the paper from the rain. The passports, bearing the signature of Tsar Alexander of Russia, allow the travellers to travel in Prussia and France. The guards salute and wave the carriages through.

It is only when they see the wheels of the last carriages disappearing into the darkness that the younger guard bursts out laughing.

‘That,’ he says wistfully, ‘must have been a very good brandy.’

Garden of Venus
is a work of fiction. In writing it, however, I have depended on a number of historical sources, either for the basic facts of the story or the inspiration to disagree with their interpretations.

I have read many 18th and early 19th century memoirs, letters, and monographs that let me absorb the details and the voices of the times. There are too many to list here, but I would like to acknowledge all direct quotes.

My greatest debt goes to two books: Jerzy Lojek’s riveting biography of Sophie Potocka (
née
Glavani), published in 1970:
Dzieje piȩknej Bitynki (The Story of a Beautiful Bythinienne);
and to Lojek’s Polish translation of Charles Boscamp’s manuscript
Mes Amours Intimes avec une Jeune Bythinienne
, presented to the last Polish King, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, in 1789.

Jerzy Lojek’s biography provided me with the basic facts of Sophie’s story and her letters to Charles Boscamp, to Felix Potocki, and to her daughter Sophie Kisielev. Readers familiar with this book will notice that my interpretation of Sophie’s character and personality differs significantly from Jerzy Lojek’s.

Charles Boscamp’s manuscript has lent its voice to the four italicized passages that proceed the four parts of the novel.

The fragment from Trepka’s
Liber Chamorum
quoted to Sophie by Boscamp comes from Norman Davis’s
God’s Playground
:
A History of Poland
.

The conversation between Sophie and Emperor Joseph of Austria is based on
Secret Memoirs of Princess Lamballe
.

The song Thomas and Ignacy sing in the Berlin tavern comes from
Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs Written by Herself
.

The lines of the Polish poem Ignacy recites to Thomas come from Adam Mickiewicz’s
Oda do mlodosci (Ode to Youth)
.

The translation of Suvorov’s letter to Prince Potemkin comes from Simon Sebag Montefiore’s
Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin
.

The last stanza of the poem that Count de Lagarde recites for Sophie is his own translation into French of
Sophievka
, a poem by Stanislaw Trembecki.

Many people have helped me most generously in the writing of this novel and I would like to thank them all. My research into the history of medicine profited enormously from the generous and selfless help of the members of Listserev Caduceus, especially Eric Luft whose prompt responses to all my queries and help in verifying the accuracy of medical references were priceless. Any mistakes I have made are mine alone.

Shaena Lambert, Barbara Lambert, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Bethany Gibson, and my wonderful agent, Helen Heller, have read this novel in manuscript at its subsequent stages, offering insightful comments and invaluable encouragement. Without them and without the editorial assistance of HarperCollins editors, Susan Watt and Iris Tupholme, this book would not be the same.

I would also like to acknowledge the financial help of the Canada Council in funding the necessary research trips to Polish libraries and archives.

And, as always, for sustaining me over the years I’ve worked on this novel, to Zbyszek and Szymek Stachniak I owe thanks beyond words.