Garden of Venus

Thomas

Outside, in the small vestibule decorated with panels of pale green marble and white Grecian urns, Mademoiselle Rosalia stopped him.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Just a few words.’ Her hazel eyes were bloodshot and the dark circles under her eyes spoke of sleepless nights. A daughter of a Polish hero and a Jewess from Uman. He knew what she would ask before he heard the words.

‘Is there really no hope, Doctor?’

‘None.’

‘I thought so too,’ she said, which killed the note of irritation in his voice. ‘But both Dr Bolecki and Dr Horn before him sounded so sure that an operation could save her.’

Rosalia, for this was how Thomas began thinking of her from that moment on, insisted on reporting the details of Dr Horn’s last treatments. It would be important for him to know, wouldn’t it. She had been taking detailed notes, if he only cared to take a look: purgings with senna and salts; thirty leeches, every two hours to restore the body’s internal harmony; no solid food.

‘Doctor Horn said that cancer always starts in the stomach,’ she said, swallowing hard. ‘Is that what you also believe?’

‘I haven’t seen much evidence to support this theory.’

‘What is it that you believe then?’

‘Nothing I cannot prove. Not much I’m afraid.’

She gave him a quizzical look, but did not ask anything else.

Dr Horn, with whom Thomas had less and less sympathy, clearly was an ardent follower of Brossais’s methods. It was his caustic salves that had irritated the stomach area. He scribbled a note for the pharmacist for a lotion that would calm down the skin.

‘For now,’ he said, ‘I would double the dose of laudanum. Then switch to pure opium to dull the pain.’

She took the note from him. ‘I’ll send the maid for it right away.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You must think me cruel.’

‘No,’ she shook her head in protest. ‘Madame la Comtesse wanted the truth. You were right not to lie to her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

Olga Potocka, Mademoiselle la Comtesse, called him a complete fool. She bit her lip and said she insisted on a second opinion. ‘Doctor Bolecki assured me that a skilled surgeon would be able to remove the tumour,’ she said.

‘Of course, by all means, you should consult another doctor,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m not God.’

‘But Thomas,’ Ignacy’s face was red, either with exertion or embarrassment, he couldn’t tell. ‘Are you that sure?’

From the corner of his eye he could see Rosalia lean forward as if she wanted to defend him. A thought flashed through his mind: I wonder why she is not married.

‘Yes,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m that sure.’

He had to repeat the same words a few minutes later when the Potocki coachman drove them through the Berlin streets, swearing at the horses in either Russian or Ukrainian, Thomas couldn’t tell.

‘I’m not saying you should have operated, Thomas, but you should’ve given her hope,’ Ignacy said with an impatient gesture.

‘I didn’t think she wanted false hope. And I don’t believe in lying.’

‘This is but one way of looking at it, my truth-loving friend,’ Ignacy said, obviously vexed. He was breathing with difficulty. ‘Now, she will let some charlatan take advantage of her.’

‘That I cannot stop,’ Thomas said, preparing for a long tirade, but nothing else followed.

They kept silent until the carriage reached Ignacy’s home. Ignacy alighted but did not continue his reproaches. He didn’t wish him good day either. Thomas watched until his friend’s ample figure disappeared behind the front door. Disappointed. There would be no influence in the Russian court for him now, Thomas thought not without some malice.

As the Potocki’s carriage rolled on the cobblestones toward Rosenstrasse, Thomas tried to talk to the coachman and find out where he was from, a task rendered difficult by the fact that they only had a few French and German words in common. His name was Pietka and he was a Cossack.

‘Zaporozhian,’ he said with pride. The skin encircling his eyes had a sallow tint. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the street. ‘No good. No life.’

Thomas would have liked to learn what a Cossack considered life, but Pietka’s French ended there. As he spat onto the ground, his teeth, Thomas noticed, were black with decay.

‘Uman,’ Pietka said. ‘Beautiful. Doctor know where?’

‘Poland,’ Thomas asked. ‘Russia?’ He was trying to recall what Ignacy had explained so often. The shifting borders of the east. The changing of hands, loyalties, the trajectories of hope and despair. Ukraine, once the easternmost Polish province, now part of the Russian Empire. Poland no longer on the map of Europe, partitioned by her neighbours. Who did this Cossack side with?

‘Ukraine?’ he said now. The name caused a vigorous nod of Pietka’s head and a torrent of words, fleeting, like a melody. He must have touched on something he was not aware of. He did not know what to say next.

When Thomas made his first step toward Frau Schmidt’s pension, the Cossack turned to him and said, ‘People here. No heart!’ He cracked his whip and was gone.

Sophie

You have to make him jealous, Mana has said. That’s why a man would want to keep you; to stop others from having you.

She tells her internuncio of a man who lives across the street and who stares at her every day. An Armenian banker, millionaire and the director of the Padishah’s mint. He clicks his tongue at her. He has sent his servant to her three times already. If she agrees to come to him, he would give her a purse filled with cekins.

‘What did you say to that,’ he asks.

‘That my master takes good care of me.’

But the man is insistent. Every time he catches her eye, he shows her something new to tempt her. A ruby as big as a nut. A diamond that glitters in the sun like the stars in heaven.

‘And you didn’t take it?’ the internuncio asks.

She shakes her head and says that nothing on this earth, no diamond, no ruby, no sapphire would ever make her turn away from her beloved master.

‘You shameless liar,’ the internuncio says and pinches her cheeks. ‘Confess right away. You are waiting for me to leave.’

‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘he has parted the folds of his anteri and pulled out his own jewel.’

‘How big was it,’ the internuncio asks, and she whispers right into his ear that it was big enough to bring Saint Mary Magdalene to fall again.

His ensembles are embroidered with silver or gold threads. She likes the feel of velvet, the thin cambric of his shirts. He wants her to walk around the room barefoot. Sometimes he asks her to put her feet on a pillow for he likes to touch her toes.

He tells her strange and wonderful things. Tells her of that other Greece, the Greece he calls the land of wisdom and true culture. In that other Greece, men possessed true nobility of spirit. They were heroes and valiant warriors, their bodies as perfect as their minds and hearts. He also tells her about the women he calls haetteras, women so wise that the famous philosophers thronged to see them.

‘It is the art of conversation, my Dou-Dou, that distinguishes common souls from people of quality. Every woman knows how to spread her legs, but not everyone has learnt how not to bore.’

She listens to his every word.

The Greek women of today, he tells her, are but pale replicas of these other women, Lais and Phryne, women of quick minds and beauty seasoned with wisdom and refinement. He tells her that his heart bleeds when he thinks of modern Greeks; slaves, their hearts cowardly, unworthy of the glory of their ancestors.

How, he asks her, can a handful of lazy Turks keep with pistols and daggers the descendants of the ancient race who bore Homer and Scio in submission?

How could the descendants of such a noble race have sunk to the level of thieves and whores? He has been to miserable Greek villages littered with fragments of ancient pillars that once adorned an ancient temple. The peasants shamefully hide these traces of the past glory, as relics of pagan rites they wish no part of. In one of these villages, he tells her, he once saw a piece of white marble that bore the inscription: C. MARCIVS. MARSVS/V. F. SIBI. ET. SVIS. Covered with mud and manure it paved an ignorant peasant’s barn.

Had he not been taught to admire Grecian courage, wisdom, and talents, he might look upon the meanness of her race with less emotion. The victors from Marathon, Salamis, Platea, he says in an accusing voice, while his hand pats her buttocks, cringe at the feet of their Turkish masters. He tells her how, at the Isthmean Games, Titus Quinctius announced to the Greeks that they were free, but that was nothing but a ruse—a trap into which they all fell when they began shouting for joy. For the true freeman needs no trumpet to declare that he is free. His looks, his expression are the heralds of his own independence.

‘Does your little head understand any of this, Dou-Dou?’

He tells her that when beautiful Lais moved from her native Sicily to Greece, princes, lords, speakers, philosophers, all rushed to see and admire her. But then a few common women, jealous of her beauty, murdered her in the temple of Aphrodite, forty years before the birth of Christ.

She thinks about it for a while. About jealousy that can kill. About a knife plunged into a woman’s heart.

‘The art of conversation,’ he says, ‘is the most powerful of arts. It alone can open the doors of palaces.’

‘What did they talk about, these ancient haetteras.’

‘Philosophy, art, literature. They enjoyed exchanging arguments, civilised dispute. Things, my little Dou-Dou, you have no idea of and never will. Things far too complicated for you.’

‘Tell me,’ she asks.

‘Tell you what,’ he laughs at her eagerness, but he is not displeased. Clearing his throat he says: ‘La Mettrie contends that all we imagine comes from our senses: no senses, no thoughts; a few sensations of the body—a few notions in the mind. Do you understand?’

She thinks she does, but shakes her head. He laughs again.

‘If there is no soul, and if the essence of life can only be found in separate parts of the body, where would most of you be, Dou-Dou.’

She smiles and waits for what might follow, but he gets tired of his own game.

‘You have to learn French,’ he declares. ‘One cannot have an intelligent conversation in any other language. French is the language of polite company, the language of the courts and salons.’

‘Teach me,’ she asks.

‘La chambre, la cocotte, meux beaux oeils.’

He likes when she pours oil on his skin and massages it the way Mana has taught her. Gently at first, then deeper and deeper until she reaches the knots and dissolves them under her fingers. She is proud when he groans with pleasure.

Sans Vous je ne peux pas vivre.

Je suis Votre esclave.

In the Sultan’s palace, she tells him, beautiful slave women serve the Princess on their knees. Their breaths are sweet and their eyes deep and soft. The Sultan’s every order is obeyed instantly, for punishment is swift. She has seen a room where whips of black leather hang on the wall. A whole row of them, with knots and little hooks tied to their ends. She has seen burlap sacks filled with stones, ready for the death by drowning.

He is listening.

‘At the Seraglio, dinners are long. They can last for hours. Dishes are brought one by one.’

‘Everyone knows that,’ he says yawning.

‘Does everyone know the eunuchs make sure that all cucumbers are served sliced?’

His belly shakes when he laughs. One of his front teeth is longer than the other. It gives him a slightly lopsided look. His brows are thick, bushy, forming a straight line over his nose. Such brows, Mana has said, are a good sign in a man. This and a hairy chest.

He wants to know about the Princess. Is she really as ugly as Dou-Dou swears she is? With pimply skin and black fuzz on her upper lip? Or perhaps this is just another lie? Perhaps there was something about the Sultana’s strength that wasn’t all together unpleasant? Is she indeed what the Turks call a cibukli, well equipped to play the role of both sexes? Are the women in the hammam at the Seraglio really not allowed to touch one another?

But most of all he wants the stories of punishment. Of whips and satin belts. Of deep dungeons from which only groans are heard. Of purple bruises on milky white skin. Stories that grow as she tells them, twist in new directions, each measured by the intensity of his attention. Stories that astonish even her.

‘These,’ she whispers to him, ‘are the secrets of the Palace for which I was to pay with my life, had I not managed to escape. You may be the only Frank to know them.’

The girl from Galata, her predecessor, has sent words of venom. You viper, you dirty whore, she had scribbled on a piece of paper. I’ll scratch your eyes out. I’ll make you lick the floor of the room that used to be mine.

‘I didn’t even know the frumpy creature could write,’ the internuncio says, reading it, crumpling the paper into a ball and tossing it into the fire. ‘Now, I know what to do if you do not please me the way I want it.’

She doesn’t like it when he says things like that. The girl from Galata is younger than she is and was sent back to her mother without warning, just because Carlo brought her round, a new toy, a new distraction.

There are days when her internuncio does not come at all. The walls of the apartment he has rented for her seem to close on her. She dresses herself in her new clothes; pins up her hair; forces the maid to clean her room once again; arranges fresh flowers beside the mirror, so that the blooms are reflected in it. Fusses with the throw on the bed, the pillows, until everything is pleasing to the eye. Then she waits and waits, watching through the window how other people, free, walk in the streets. She envies them sometimes. Even the servants carrying big baskets of fish, or leading donkeys. She envies the dogs that roam the streets in packs, or lie basking in the sun knowing no one will disturb them.

His life at the Polish mission is busy, the internuncio tells her. He has important duties to attend to. A delicate position to maintain. ‘The art of observation, my little Dou-Dou,’ he tells her. ‘Of knowing what you are not supposed to know.’

A very useful art. Indispensable in politics, for politics is the art of knowing. Of predicting. Of turning your enemies against each other and making sure your friends stay loyal out of self-interest. An art Charles Boscamp, Esquire, excels at.

As soon as he comes in, she helps him remove his coat and his shoes. In her company, he is emptying himself, clearing his mind, softening himself for pleasure. She should be like the sound of a waterfall, the soothing distraction. Like a garden where he can find respite.

‘I would like politics,’ she says.

‘I’m sure you would.’ He laughs when he says that, pinching her cheeks. He likes when he senses the want in her, the desire for his world. Sometimes she thinks that he doesn’t really want anything any more, that in his mouth sweetness is not as vivid as in hers. That his pleasure is not real until he sees it in her first.

‘Divide et impera,’ he says, wiping his hands on a towel she is holding for him. ‘The Sultan’s counsels are vying for power. There is no consistency in the Porte.’

His caresses are short and fleeting; his hands touch her as if she were a pillow or a thick blanket meant for comfort. He likes when she kneels in front of him. He never stops talking when he pushes her head down between his legs. ‘My jewel,’ he has taught her to say. She has learnt that release comes quickly, and she is grateful for it. Sometimes she thinks he prefers a massage to the act itself, for then he can close his eyes and forget about her altogether. His presence leaves her hungry, filled with longings. She has taken to touching herself when he leaves, imagining that it is his hand that slowly rubs the sweet spot between her legs.

The internuncio likes to talk. He has met the Emperor of Prussia and the King of Poland. He tells her that the Polish King became king only because the Russian Empress wanted it. She has sent her troops to Warsaw, to the election field. Some people say that she ordered her own husband murdered. Suffocated with his pillow.

Men tremble at the sight of her, he says. Handsome Russian boys are groomed to catch the eye of the Empress, coached by their mothers in ways to please a woman, the whole family making plans for its illustrious future. His wise friend, Count Vronsky, always bows to all handsome valets de chambre and calls them brother. He knows that a day may come when one of them would be elevated above him by the whim of his Empress.

‘This is not natural,’ the internuncio says. ‘Not right. It is against the order of things.’

She closes her eyes and imagines the Russian Empress pointing at a young handsome man. She imagines sending her troops to Poland to make her lover a king. Bending over her gilded desk and signing important papers. Stamping her foot to make her courtiers hurry.

‘The Ottoman Porte,’ the internuncio says, ‘is crucial for the Russian Empress, and therefore, my position here is of a delicate nature. The Russians do not like that the Poles are courting the Sultan’s support.’

He has been warned a few times; questioned at the Russian mission. He smiles in a way that tells her he is not concerned.

She pours oil onto her hands and warms them with her breath. Slowly she begins pressing his shoulders, kneading away the tension. She loves when he talks of such important matters. Of people rich and powerful and yet how very much similar to the signoras and signores of Phanar.

Once she tells him that. Tells him how people seem to be the same everywhere, how the powerful are not as different from those who are beneath them. How men are really not that different from women, either.

‘Phanar,’ the internuncio says, ‘is the kingdom of busy-bodies, of chatterboxes feeding on any hint of scandal—the kingdom of calumny and hypocrisy.’

There is anger in his voice, impatience.

‘The world,’ he says, ‘is not what you imagine.’

Rosalia

She was born in exile, her father always said. Better than born in chains, for 1796, the year of her birth, was the first year there was no Poland on the map of Europe.

‘You saved your father’s life,’ her mother said. ‘Before you were born he spoke of nothing but death.’

In her father’s study, there was an engraving of Poland led to her grave. Polonia was a young woman in white, her hands chained. The grave was a square hole in the ground, and three men, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, were already holding the stone lid that would intern her. ‘But not forever,’ her father always said.

In 1795, at Maciejowice, defeated by the Russians in the last battle of the Insurrection, Tadeusz Ko?ciuszko, thinking himself dying, said: ‘Finis Poloniae.’

‘This is what we all feared then, Rosalia,’ her father continued. ‘But we were wrong.’ The soldiers in Napoleon’s Polish Legion had a reply to these words spoken in that black hour of defeat:

Jeszcze Polska nie umarla póki my Żyjemy

Co nam obca moc wydarla szabla odbierzemy

Poland is not dead as long as we are alive

What the foreign powers took away from us we shall regain by the sword

It was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man of iron will and a god of war, who had taught the Poles how to win. A god of war who had gathered the defeated Polish soldiers under his wing and gave them the chance to fight the enemies of their country. Bonaparte who would soon smash the might of the Russians and lead Poland out of her grave. Then there would be no more exile, no more rented rooms, no more packing and unpacking of trunks and crates. They would go back to Poland, to their manor house confiscated by the Russian Tsar because Jakub Romanowicz had refused to stop fighting for Poland’s freedom, had refused to live in slavery.

Rosalia loved when her father said that. She loved the way he smelled of snuff, the way his prickly cheeks chafed her lips.

‘Where is Poland now, Papa?’ she liked to ask, sitting down to a familiar ritual. Wherever they were—Paris, Rome, Livorno—his response was always the same. He would take her hand in his and place it on her chest.

‘Can you feel it?’ he would ask as her hand registered the rhythm of her heartbeat.

‘Yes,’ she would say, in her solemn, serious voice, waiting for what was coming.

‘This, Rosalia, is Poland.’

She believed him. She believed that Poland, this beautiful maiden entombed alive by Russia, Prussia and Austria would one day be resurrected. Like Jesus Christ, the Saviour, she would rise from the dead and lead the nations of Europe to a new world order. A just, wonderful world without wars, hatred and slaves. A world where it would not matter if you were a Pole, Jew, or a Cossack, a noble or a peasant, a merchant or a pauper for Poland, like a good mother would make room for them all.

‘I may not see it, Rosalia. You may not see it. But your children, or your children’s children will.’ Her father’s voice shimmered like pebbles in the stream. She imagined them, these faint generations yet unborn. Shadows waiting to come to being. Waiting for their time.

Sophie

The girl from Galata must have bribed the Janissary the internuncio has placed at the entrance of the building, for three Greek furies—the girl and her two cousins—enter her bedroom when she is alone. They throw themselves upon her. They tear out clumps of her hair; scratch her face. She tries to defend herself, but the three of them are bigger and stronger. At one moment she almost manages to escape, but she trips over her own shoe and falls flat on the floor. With that same shoe her enemies beat her, leaving bruises all over her body. ‘He will turn away from you as he has turned away from me,’ the girl from Galata screams. ‘He will see how pretty you are with a black eye and scratches on your cheeks.’