Garden of Venus
Garden of Venus
Eva Stachniak
An alluring, exotic novel based on the life of the famous and much-painted courtesan, La Belle Phanariote. Perfect for fans of Painting Mona Lisa.‘Stories precede her. Whispers of delighted amusement at her exotic beauty, her mysterious past. Some swear she has been a Sultan’s odalisque. Others that she is a Greek princess. Princes praise her exquisite manners and her pleasing ways. And the King of Poland leads her in the polonaise.’Sophie, the Countess Potocki, is travelling with her entourage from St Petersburg to Paris, to consult with French doctors, when she stops at the Berlin palace of her friend, the Graf von Haefen.There, her whole extraordinary life during one of the most turbulent periods of European history comes back to haunt her – the many strands of her life, the many roles in which she has presented herself, the many biographies she has made up, the many lovers and protectors she has cherished and deceived. And still she continues to attempt to manipulate the lives of those around her.Brilliantly written, cleverly constructed with a strong cast of characters, both real and fictional, and vivid scenes, Garden of Venus is an alluring, sensuous and exotic saga which will delight readers of Tracy Chevalier, Philippa Gregory and Isabelle Allende.
EVA STACHNIAK
The Garden of Venus
For Zbyszek
Contents
Cover (#ub6b378a6-4a93-52c8-a072-56ea915bca7a)
Title Page (#u041546a1-1ecb-52c3-bd42-5a1a109a1b1b)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#u59e9448b-bf0e-559d-86a9-7b1ce86300f1)
BERLIN, 1822: Water (#ue148d078-b5d7-5ae7-8e0d-9c203eee418b)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
BERLIN, 1822: Laudanum (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
BERLIN 1822: Opium (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
BERLIN, 1822: Morphine (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ulink_f14a32f2-ac06-59cd-8f9b-e6ac9d86dc4a)
From Mes amours intimes avec la belle Phanariote
Bursa—where our story so humbly begins—a town spreading at the feet of Moundagnà or Mount Olympus is but a day’s journey from Istanbul. Mars, Neptune, and Venus had once been worshipped there, and they could still lay their claims to this land on account of the valiant warriors hailing from the Greek Empire and Byzantium, on account of sailors recruited here, and on account of modern Lais and Phrynes whose presence adorns the cafes and bawdyhouses of Istanbul. The worshippers of the Love goddess, I hasten to add, are of both sexes, for the boys ministering to the desires of the Byzantines are as beautiful here as the girls.
Beholding the multitude of beautiful faces in this mountainous and healthy region, one is tempted to say that, for such delightful fruit to be so plentiful, Aphrodite, sailing in her conch from Cytera to Paphos, must have unloaded in this land some of her precious cargo, her aphros, that essence of pleasure and beauty, the source of our very existence. For this region has always supplied the world with superior talents from the realm of Venus, natural talents capable, with little effort, of conquering the hearts of courtiers and kings. Is this a wonder that, in Istanbul, the terms ‘a girl from Moundagnà’ and ‘a prosperous girl providing fanciful pleasure’ have become synonymous?
In this town of Bursa, la belle Phanariote was born in the year of 1760, and very ordinary blood flows in her veins for she is the daughter of a cattle trader and among her relatives are many a ferryman, craftsman, and a shopkeeper.
(#ulink_a465e460-53b1-5c65-a8b5-610d61042d7c)Her childhood was spent in the fields and meadows surrounding her native town where she led that free and naïve existence so much praised by some philosophers of yesterday.
(#ulink_01d118e8-904c-50df-b157-7f182324a678) So much for the rumours of her descent from Pantalis Maurocordato, her kinship with the former rulers of Byzantium!
BERLIN, 1822: Water (#ulink_a77bf207-df0b-53a2-85e0-ca9efff51ee6)
Rosalia
In the end it fell to Rosalia to make sure that the imminent departure of Countess Sophie Potocka (accompanied by her daughter, Countess Olga Potocka, and companion Mademoiselle Rosalia Romanowicz) via Paris to the town of Spa for her prescribed water cure—had been announced three times in the Petersburg Gazette. Only then the passports could be collected and the padrogna—the permission to hire horses on the way—be signed by the Governor General.
The countess left St Petersburg on 12th July, 1822, (July 1st in the Russian style). ‘On Paris, I insist with utmost gravity,’ Dr Horn said—his voice raised, as if defending himself and not offering medical advice—‘French surgeons are far superior, even to the English.’ Before departure, everyone, including the servants, sat around the breakfast table to pray for a safe journey. They had already been to confession, asked forgiveness for their sins from everyone in the household, and exchanged parting gifts with those who would be left behind, sashes with sweet-smelling lavender, ribbons, holy pictures, and boxes lined with birch bark.
The morning was cold and wet, but, thankfully, the thunderstorm had ended and there was no more talk of omens, in spite of Marusya’s dream about her teeth falling out and making a clunking sound as they scattered on the marble floor of the hall. (‘Why didn’t you stop this foolish talk,’ Olga snapped, as if Rosalia could have.)
The kitchen carriage left first, with provisions, cooking utensils and a collapsible table, since the inns en route with their smutty ceilings and walls grown shiny from the rubbings of customers’ backs were not to be trusted. Two more carriages were packed with luggage, one carrying a trunk that opened to convert into a bedstead with pillows, so that the countess could rest during the journey.
Rosalia may have come to St Petersburg as the countess’s companion, but it wasn’t long before the timely administration of compresses and salves became more important than keeping up with the daily correspondence, greeting guests, or reading aloud after dinner. Which, as Aunt Antonia triumphantly pointed out in one of her many letters was not that hard to foresee.
Aunt Antonia, who liked to remind Rosalia that she was her only living relative and, therefore, entitled to such straightforward expressions of concern, might have forgiven Jakub Romanowicz for marrying a penniless Jewess only to die and leave his wife and child on her doorstep, but she could not forgive Maria Romanowicz for writing to Countess Potocka and begging her to take care of her only child. In Zierniki, the family estate near Poznań, a room was waiting for Rosalia. A room overlooking the orchard, with an iron bed the maids washed with scalding water each spring. A room where her mother’s old dresser still stood, its drawers smelling of dried rosemary and mint to keep the mice away.
There had been many times on this long journey when Rosalia pleaded with the countess to stop. The sick needed peace to regain strength and how was she to assure these precious moments of peace with all the packing, unpacking, and constant ordering of vats of boiling water (the grime of the inns had to be washed before the beds could be brought in). She too had her limits, and her nerves were strained to the utmost with this constant migration of coffers, crates, and trunks, the nicks and bruises of carelessness and neglect, futile searches for what should have been there and wasn’t. (The embroidered scarves and votive lights for the holy icon of St Nicholas had been left behind three times in a row and a servant on horseback had to be sent back to retrieve them.) Through August and September they had travelled for not more than a few hours daily, usually from four until ten in the morning, to avoid the heat, and then, perhaps, for two more hours in the afternoon. Often, in spite of the hot-water compresses Dr Horn had prescribed for the journey, the countess was in too much pain to travel at all.
It was already the beginning of October when they reached Berlin where Graf Alfred von Haefen put a stop to the nonsense of further travel. The Graf met the countess at the city gates and did not even try to hide his horror at the sight of her. ‘I forbid you to spend another hour in this,’ he said, pointing at the Potocki’s carriage. ‘My ears shall remain deaf to all objections. You’ll have to submit to a man’s judgement. This is the price of friendship.’ His Berlin palace would be at their disposal and so would be his own personal physician, Doctor Ignacy Bolecki. Bolecki, one of the best doctors in Berlin, was a Pole but had been trained in Paris. After assuring himself that the drivers understood his directions and would not attempt to take the wrong turn at the first junction—on moonlit nights oil lamps were put out to conserve fuel and that made the sign of Under the Golden Goose tavern where the right turn had to be taken barely visible —the Graf said to no one in particular that if an operation were truly necessary, a French surgeon would be sent for immediately.
By the time their carriage rolled into Graf von Haefen’s courtyard, the party was greatly reduced in numbers. Five servants with the kitchen carriage were sent back to the countess’s Ukrainian palace at Uman, leaving Rosalia with only two maids, Olena and Marusya, Agaphya, the cook, and Pietka, the groom. Mademoiselle Collard, the French lady’s maid had left in Poznań without as much as giving notice. ‘I have to look after myself,’ she said to Rosalia before leaving. ‘If I don’t, who else will?’ Always eager to question the refinement of Countess Potocka’s tastes, she did not fail to remind Rosalia that the white Utrecht velvet upholstery and green morocco-leather seats of the Potocki carriage had been chosen by Countess Josephine, the Count’s previous wife.
‘You are my prisoner, mon ange,’ Graf von Haefen said, opening the carriage door to help the countess step out into the chair that was waiting already, kissing her hand twice and holding it to his heart, ‘and there is nothing you can do about it.’
To Rosalia’s relief, her mistress did not protest. By the time the countess was resting upstairs, awaiting the final arrangements of her sick room, their journey, she calculated, had lasted three months, three days, and five hours.
Sophie
The heat has abated. It is September, the month of the smallpox. Her time now, Mana says. She is old enough and she will not be alone. Six of her cousins will have it too.
‘Help yourself so God can help you,’ Mana says.
In her hand Sophie is holding her mati, a blue stone, one of her birth presents. It has a black eye in its centre, and—like the red ribbon in Mana’s hair—it wards off the evil eye, human malice and the power of jealousy. Every time Maria Glavani hears that her daughter is growing up to be a beauty, she spits three times on the ground.
‘My precious Dou-Dou.’
Dou-Dou means a small parrot. A pleasing chirping bird everyone likes, everyone wants to touch and pet. Her true name is Sophie, or Sophitza. It means wisdom.
Mana cooks for three days so that there is enough food for the party: roasts slices of eggplant and marinates them in oil and lemon juice; cooks her best lamb ragout spiced with coriander. The meat will be tender enough to melt even in toothless mouths, and simmering for a long time, it absorbs the fragrance of spices. There is a big pot of soup with lentils and cardamom, pilaf sprinkled with cinnamon. And in the earthenware pot that is rarely used, chunks of feta cheese marinate in the best olive oil Mana can afford. Big jugs of country wine stand in the corner, by the window, like fat dwarfs. Strings of quinces and pomegranates, sage, mint, rosemary and savory hang from the beams. The water in the pitcher that greets the visitors at the front door has been drawn fresh from the well and is still cool. The hens are locked in the chicken coop and the goat is tied to the fence.
‘We are not beggars yet,’ Mana says. Maria Glavani’s daughter is not going to go wanting. There will be four kinds of sweet pastry, and baklava soaked with honey is already laid out on the plate with a yellow rooster in it.
Even the thought of such delicacies is a temptation. Dou-Dou has touched just the rim of the plate, but when she wants to lick the tips of her fingers, to savour even the smallest traces of sweetness, Mana stops her. ‘You are not an orphan,’ she says. ‘You have a mother who has taught you how to eat properly.’
The Glavani smallpox party will be remembered in Bursa for the food and the laughter. And for the singing too.
Rain, rain, dear Virgin,
Send snow and waters,
To moisten our vineyards
And our gardens….
The old woman who has the smallpox brings it in a nutshell. Her name is Agalia and she smells of soap and dried mint. Her own children have long left the house, but every one of her daughters sent for her when the grandchildren were old enough.
‘The best smallpox there is,’ Agalia assures the mothers and guests with a serious nod of her head and a smile of satisfaction. ‘Fresh as the morning bloom.’ There is a murmur of consent in the room, followed by sighs of relief. Maria Glavani has chosen well.
Dou-Dou giggles. Diamandi, most favourite of all her cousins, has poked her ribs, having pointed at Agalia’s grey hair. She’s so thin that her plait looks like a rat’s tail.
‘You are a happy one,’ Agalia says. ‘Good. Laughter is like sunshine. It makes everything grow. It makes people love you.’
The children are asked to present their veins. An ancient custom calls for four openings: on the forehead, on each arm and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross. Point to your thigh, Dou-Dou, Mana instructed her, up here. You don’t want a scar on your forehead. You don’t want anything to spoil your face.
Her cousins will all have the sign of the cross, but Sophie does as her mother had said. She turns around and points to the inside of her left thigh. Agalia hesitates for a split second. Then she rips the vein open and puts as much venom inside as she can fit on the head of her needle. ‘It won’t hurt,’ she mutters, but it does.
Sophie watches Agalia’s hands as the old woman takes an empty shell and places it on the wound. Bony hands with freckles, the skin paper thin. Watches as she binds it carefully with a clean strip of cloth.
One by one the children’s veins are opened and the venom is put inside while the mothers and the neighbours watch. Sophie saw a few frowns when she did not present her forehead and her arms to be pierced, but her mother’s laughter and the plates she fills with her best stew have lightened the mood. The women eat with delight, praising the softness of the lamb, the fragrance of the sauce. Maria Glavani is an excellent cook.
There will be singing and dancing, and secrets will be whispered in low voices so that the children would not hear them. In the courtyard, under the olive tree, the women will drink the young wine and laugh until their throats are hoarse. Mana will sing for them and they will dance, bodies swooning to the rhythm of the clapping hands.
The children will play together for the rest of the day, play hide and seek, and tag, chase each other until their mothers tell them to stop. Too much running around could upset the bindings. Seven days will pass and nothing will happen. On the eighth they’ll all come down with a fever.
‘Diamandi is sick already,’ Mana whispers. ‘And Costa and Attis.’
For two days Sophie stays in bed, like all the other children, her fever rising and falling, her head pounding. Mana, smelling of lemon blossom and laurel oil, wipes her forehead with a wet cloth. Cool and dripping with water which flows down her forehead and sinks into her pillow.
Mana sings to her, funny songs in which goats wish to become camels and flies envy the eagles in the sky. Mana’s cool hand on her forehead is an invitation to sleep. A tiny dab of the balm of Mecca on her finger, she rubs around the smallpox wound. It will keep her Dou-Dou beautiful, she says. Her epilda. Her hope for the future. Her only hope.
Thomas
Berlin, Doctor Thomas Lafleur thought, was a grim city, in spite of the profusion of oil lamps swinging on chains, illuminating small circles of the street below. The aftermath of the armies treading through these lands might account for some of this grimness, but Thomas liked to reflect on the universal human capacity for creating misery. He did not assume America would free him from the disgust he felt with the human race, but at least it would give him a chance.
‘Please hurry,’ Ignacy’s letter said, ‘my dear Thomas. The Art as we have learnt it serving the Great Man is unsurpassed here. I need you badly, and so does my new patient. America can wait. I cannot agree it will be such a Great Deliverance as you are trying to convince me, for Human Nature is the same everywhere. To me it looks more like a Great Escape. Graf von Haefen is sending his fastest carriage, so you can judge for yourself how much you are needed here.’
The mention of the fee he could charge for the operation, 50 louis d’or (and more if what I see is any indication Ignacy wrote), has been enough to make Dr Thomas Lafleur subject his body to the torture of travel. Like his colleagues, he may have saved thousands of lives on the battlefields of Europe, but his rewards had been meagre. A small pension of three thousand francs, a position at la Charité, a few anatomical demonstrations, a few lectures at the Val de Grace.
‘Sometimes I think I have dreamt all this,’ he had often told Ignacy. ‘Borodino, Berezina, Kowno, Waterloo. As if it were nothing but a mirage.’
Anticipating Thomas’s wishes, Ignacy had found him simple lodgings in Old Berlin, on Rosenstrasse, two rooms: a bedroom and a small parlour that could easily serve as his study. Frau Schmidt offered services of a maid, breakfast in the morning, and swore that the room would be kept warm if the French doctor were kept longer with his patient. ‘Another of your hiding holes,’ Ignacy had called it, this friend whose relentless lupine energy in the months of the Russian campaign Thomas had envied.
That the rooms looked poor and bare, with their simple poplar furniture and narrow bed, did not bother Thomas. After being tossed around and jolted in the black box of Graf von Haefen’s carriage, he was ready to welcome any place that did not move. Besides he had been an army surgeon long enough not to mind.
Sophie
Diamandi’s skin is as smooth as a fresh fig. ‘Catch me,’ she cries to him and reaches for the first branches of the oak tree at the edge of the meadow where the sheep graze. He is still standing, unsure of what he should do. After all, she is but a girl with scabs on her knees. Thick scabs she likes to tear off, impatient for the new pink skin underneath. She is but a girl, even if she can swim like a fish and steer a kaiak better than many boys he could name.
Even if she can outrun him. Make him gasp for breath. Make him pant right behind her like a dog.
‘Catch me, Diamandi.’
He makes the first cautious step toward the tree, his tanned hands reach toward the lowest of the branches. Then there is a snap of a twig. A curse. The sound of a body heaving up, pushing through the leaves. She is halfway up already where the branches are thinner, her hands grabbing, testing their strength. ‘Like a squirrel,’ Mana has said, in a voice half angry and half approving. A squirrel is agile and cheeky. Digs out bulbs and cuts the stems of flowers. A squirrel mocks the fat tabby who stalks it in hope of a skirmish.
From the top of the tree Bursa looks small and forlorn. Even the big houses of the rich seem insignificant, their gardens but patches of greenery, really no different to her mother’s small kitchen garden. The garden where the flowers are only allowed on the edges, for the soil is too valuable for ornaments.
‘Come on, Diamandi.’
He is right behind her, and gaining speed. His body is wiry and strong. Stronger than hers, even if not that fast. Her cousin is a ferryman and a shepherd. He is older by seven months, fourteen already, while she is still only thirteen and has not yet bled like a woman.
He wrestles with other boys, pins them to the ground, breathes in their faces until they squirm. His eyes are flashing with victory. He will not let her win that easily. He will hold her down, if he has to.
‘Dou-Dou!’
There is pleading in his voice and the promise of tenderness.
‘Dou-Dou!’
She stops right before reaching to the thinnest of the top branches that could still sustain her weight. She waits until Diamandi comes right behind her and orders her to climb down. ‘Right this minute,’ he says and his hand rests on her behind. Just for a moment, for a split second, but enough to make her skin hot and tingly.
‘You are crazy. Your mother would scratch my eyes out if anything happened to you.’
‘Then let’s see who can climb down first,’ she says.
She can feel his eyes on her as she climbs down. A tricky old tree. But she knows which of the branches are rotten through and would not support her. She trusts her strong hands. Her legs can wrap themselves around a branch and hold her. She does not mind the scratches on her skin. The thin trails of blood, the bruises. ‘A bit of pain always sweetens the pleasure,’ Mana says, laughing, her white teeth even and small. Her father’s eyes narrow at such moments. His fingers drum on the edge of the table, a funny rhythm, a staccato of sounds that end as suddenly as they started. There is something heavy in the air, a promise of a storm. She has often heard that her father is a jealous man, and that her mother gets nothing more than what is her due.
‘You are not to do it ever again,’ Diamandi says. What a voice he has, this boy-man. Pretending to be angry and yet wanting her to defy him. Daring her to shake her head and laugh in his face. Daring her to tell him he is nothing but a boy.
He has jumped off the last branch and is now holding her down. His hands are cool and dry. There is a smell of dried grass around him and of fresh milk. She wriggles away.
To this lithe, olive-skinned boy she is a mystery, the half-wild creature of his dreams. The wind is now cool against her cheeks. ‘I’ll race you,’ she cries and runs until, by the olive grove, he pulls her down onto the soft grass, kisses her lips and pushes his tongue through her teeth. The air is again sweet with blossoms, moist with the sea, and she is shivering.
‘I love you more than my own soul,’ he whispers, and for now she believes him.
Rosalia
Two tall German grooms who had brought the big empire bed trimmed with white satin asked where Rosalia wanted it. ‘By the wall,’ she said and pointed to the place far enough from the windows so that the light would not disturb the invalid. The grooms nodded and lifted the bed again. They had already removed the Persian carpets and, once the bed was in place, they would hang a thick curtain of garnet velvet that could be drawn across the room.
Countess Potocka was resting, waiting for the necessary transformations of the grand salon. (The Blue Room suggested by the Graf had proved too draughty.) In the afternoon light, her pallor was turning ashen. Her eyes, wide, liquid and filled with pain, followed Rosalia as she placed a bowl of fresh figs by the makeshift bedside. The countess reached and touched Rosalia’s hand.
‘Merci, ma fleur,’ she whispered.
Graf von Haefen had sent basketfuls of delicacies from his Potsdam estate; figs, pineapples, oranges from his greenhouses, fish from his ponds, venison from his forests. ‘Which Madame won’t even try,’ Marusya had said. Rosalia had to admit that flowers would please her mistress better. Roses in particular and orchids.
Only a few days before, at a roadside inn, the countess still had enough strength to make a few long-awaited decisions about Sophievka, her beloved garden right outside Uman. Since Dr Horn’s insistence that surgery alone could stop the haemorrhaging, there was no more talk of moving to the Uman palace for the summer (another disappointment that had to be endured). But the countess asked Rosalia to copy the drawings of the mountain ash that she wanted her chief gardener to plant in the spring. Sturdy and resistant, I am assured it will withstand most severe frosts, the countess dictated. A bed of purple irises, a symbol of a great orator and a great leader, was to be planted around the marble bust of Prince Joseph Poniatowski. New paths were to be charted. Make them lead to a vista, or a building. Otherwise a wanderer would turn back in disappointment. The giant oak by the river was not to be touched. Don’t trim the branches, a human hand has no right to correct such beauty. An oak once wounded, loses its primal force and will always grow slowly.
‘The bed will be ready soon,’ Rosalia said, but the countess only managed a slight nod.
Outside, in the courtyard, the hooves of the horses made a hollow noise; carriage wheels clattered and squeaked. Soon, Rosalia thought, Pietka would have to spread a straw carpet on the stones to muffle all noise. And he would have to stop singing, as he was doing now.
In Vinnytsia, on the border,
At the foot of a grave mound, on the bank of the Buh River,
Under the walls of the Kalnytsky charterhouse…
This palace in the heart of Berlin would provide some relief. From what she had seen, Rosalia could tell its workings would be flawless. Since their arrival, the marble floor in the entrance hall had already been washed and wiped dry. After mentioning that charpie would be necessary to dress the wounds and that the French surgeon would likely ask for an old mattress, she was reassured both would be procured without delay. Frau Kohl, the Graf’s housekeeper, had also brought a pile of old sheets, well-washed and soft.
Rosalia wiped her mistress’s face with a sponge dipped in warm, lavender-scented water, washing away stale sweat and caked powder. Her underclothes were again stained with blood, dark and clotted with what looked like pieces of chopped liver. Mademoiselle Collard used to complain she was a lady’s maid not a nurse. ‘Neither are you,’ she reminded Rosalia. Her family’s land may have been sequestered by the Russian Tsar, but Rosalia’s father had been a Polish noble and it was her duty to guard her own station in life. It was all too easy to slip down, let herself go. With that Rosalia had to agree, as she retrieved clean undergarments from a travelling trunk and helped the countess change into her lilac dress with little embroidered rosebuds, but then the question remained of who would do it. The maids had their hands full with all the unpacking, mending and ironing. Mademoiselle la Comtesse conveniently managed to vomit every time she caught the whiff of the basin. (‘She has her father’s constitution, Rosalia. Nature cannot be helped,’ the countess said.) Only this morning—having seen the bloodstained undergarments the maids were taking away to be soaked in cold water—she became so agitated that Rosalia had had to give her a double dose of laudanum to calm her down.
‘I don’t want to see anyone but Graf von Haefen,’ the countess whispered, closing her eyes. ‘Let my daughter receive all other visitors.’
‘The French doctor will be here soon,’ Rosalia said. She was trying to foresee what else the surgeon might ask for. If he came from Paris, he would not have assistants. Doctor Bolecki would be of help, but this might not be enough. She wondered if the two grooms were strong enough to hold the countess down. And if they would withstand that much blood and the screaming.
‘I’m so tired, Rosalia,’ the countess whispered.
The pain was never far away, crouching inside her, but it was letting her breathe. It might let her fall asleep again. ‘Mademoiselle Rosalia, you should try to lead her thoughts away from death,’ Graf von Haefen had insisted with great firmness, before leaving. ‘Talk only of what brings her joy.’
The gardener reported that Sophievka was already covered in snow. He had seen icicles hanging from pine trees and from the gnarled branches of the oak tree by the lake. In the greenhouses roses and orchids were blooming and he wished he could send the countess some blooms the way he used to send them to St Petersburg, in a carriage kept warm with braziers. The nettle tree was doing fine and so was the Turkish filbert from Caucasus. He had planted it in complete shade, as instructed.
‘The nettle tree, I was assured,’ the countess said, ‘would not sink in water.’
When her mistress was dressed, Rosalia combed her hair, grey and so much thinned by her illness. Then, from the red travelling case, she took a black wig, a shapely halo of black locks, trying not to pull as she pinned it to her hair.
‘By the summer, you’ll be strong enough. We’ll go there together.’
The countess gave her the most beautiful of her smiles.
Perhaps, Rosalia thought, happiness could only come from such simple moments. From knowing that the touch of her hands calmed the sick and eased their pain. ‘Which is precisely why she would take advantage of you,’ Mademoiselle Collard would warn. ‘She already has two daughters, you know.’ It was in Rosalia’s disposition to take unending duties upon herself, feel responsible for the most insignificant of things. Like the lost charcoals, a whole box of cedar of Lebanon: Olena, the maid who had packed the dinner service at the last stop, was sure she put it in the same box with the silver. ‘Surely,’ Mademoiselle Collard would mock Rosalia’s agitation over this trifle if she were here, ‘she can afford to lose a box of charcoals. Isn’t she rich enough?’
The countess, her eyes closed, looked like a waxen figure. It was only the faint warmth of her skin that told Rosalia her mistress was still alive.
Sophie
Her cheeks still smart from her mother’s slaps. One, two, three. A fool. She is a fool. Or a whore. What was she thinking? What was on her mind? Doesn’t she understand anything? Anything at all? Hasn’t she seen and heard what human tongues can do?
The salty taste of blood inside her mouth frightens her. The memory of happiness, of lightness is gone. Instead, she has to face her mother’s fury.
‘What did he do?’ Mana screams and pushes her on her bed. Another slap, weaker than the one before. Her skirt is lifted, her legs spread. She has been damaged, nibbled at and spat out. Tried and left aside. Who will buy damaged goods now? What man in his right mind would pay for what he can have for free? Who would keep a cow if the milk comes for nothing?
Mana is poking inside her, feeling for the damage. How cruel her fingers can be. How rough.
‘Was he hard,’ she asks. ‘Did he put it in all the way?
‘Dou-Dou, I’m talking to you. Answer me, girl.
‘Tell me everything. I’m your mother.
‘It’s for your own good.
‘Plenty of dirty pots in the kitchen that need to be scrubbed. The maid can be let go, the scruffy thing she is, and dirty too. You want dirt? You can scrub the pots with ashes. See how your hands redden from scalding. See how your knuckles grow and crack open. See how they bleed.
‘Is that what you want, girl? Is that what I gave you your life for? Is that why I screamed with pain for the twelve hours you took to be born? Tearing me apart, almost killing me?
‘And for what? A poke from this runt? This good-for-nothing? This high-and-mighty cavalier whose tongue is stronger than his dick. Who now walks around the town in his glory, telling everyone what you let him do.’
In the end Mana’s tears are harder to bear than her anger. Seeing her hide her face in her hands in shame. Hearing her sobs.
‘All I ever wanted for you is now lost.’
Dou-Dou wants to scream that this is not true. Isn’t she still her mother’s beloved daughter as she was a day ago? But her mother only looks at her with unseeing eyes.
‘You do not know the power of the human tongue.’
The sun is caught in Mana’s raven black hair. If angels have faces, that’s how they must look. The shape of the brows enlarging the eyes, the cheeks full and smooth. The lips like cherries, glistening from the tears that have rolled down her cheeks.
‘Is that what you want girl? Is that what I gave you your life for? Is that why I screamed from pain for the twelve hours you took to be born? Tearing me apart so badly that I could have no more children?
‘I’ve always wanted my daughter to do better than I’ve done. Not to waste what God has given her. Not to throw it away. Was it too much to hope for?’
Konstantin Glavani comes back from the tavern. Even from his steps, Dou-Dou can tell that he knows. From the force with which his heels hit the ground. From the way his fist lands on the table. With a thump. With choking anger. Something falls off, rolls, smashing on the floor.
There is a slap, then another one, and a scream. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ he yells. ‘Is that what you teach her? To spread her legs for every loser in Bursa?
‘To be the talk of the town?’
The door opens and Sophie’s body softens like a kitten readying itself for a fall. She is lying on her stomach, sobbing into a pillow and her father is standing beside the bed. His breath is all she hears. In and out, in and out. In his big hand she can see the handle of the whip Konstantin Glavani uses to corral the sheep.
This silence frightens her more than Mana’s screams.
He lifts her skirt, her shift, and exposes her buttocks. If she doesn’t tense them, it will hurt less. The swish of leather through the air comes first, before the spasm, before the warmth of her pee dissolving into the mattress. When the strap touches her skin, she feels another spasm. And another until there is nothing but burning pain.
She doesn’t scream. Her face is buried in the pillow. Tears soak into the embroidered fabric. Mana had stitched these birds singing on branches, their beaks open wide. And the tall cypresses that sway in the wind. She did it in another time when Sophie was but a child and wanted to know about everything. How to make such a bird look real. How to make a thread go through the eye of the needle.
Her father stops and turns her over. ‘Look at me,’ he says. ‘See the man who can’t look his friends in the eye. Who has to listen in silence as his daughter’s name is dragged in filth. The man whose daughter is a whore.’
She looks at him. He is standing above her, big body swaying, his breath smelling of wine and roasted lamb. Red blotches have sprung up on his neck, his mouth is twisted into a grimace of disgust. She remembers that his fingers can bend a horseshoe. He will not be made the laughing-stock of Bursa. He will not allow his daughter to disgrace his name. He will kill her first, and then kill himself.
‘A brood mare.’
He lifts his hand in the air. A big hand, calloused and reddened, with chapped skin on the knuckles. Will her neck snap with a crack, like that of a chicken?
She fixes her eyes on him. Everything can happen now. Everything is nestled in such moments, the malice, the revenge, the pain. The hand falls down slowly, limp, alongside his body. It clenches into a fist and then relaxes, defeated.
How does one escape the power of human tongues?
She has heard of a man slashing his daughter’s face with a razor. Of burning her cheeks with hot coals to scar her beauty. Her father keeps looking at her, forcing himself to keep looking, until, in an instant, he turns on his heel, and walks away. The door slams after him, and she wipes the tears from her eyes and cheeks. There is a pitcher of water and a basin her mother has left for her, and she splashes cold water on her face. Then she squats over the basin and washes the place between her legs, still wet from her pee. Where the strap hit her, she can feel needles of pain in a web of punishment, the memory of her defeat.
Konstantin Glavani announces that they are leaving Bursa.
She watches his quick, determined steps, listens to the stomping of his heels on the floor. Outside, the earth smells of camomile, lemon blossom, and laurel. Her friends are in the fields, running or riding horses. Or making bonfires on the edge of the river. Diamandi is there too, but she won’t see him. She is not allowed to leave the house of shame.
The stories flow, thicker and more poisonous each day. The stories men whisper in low, lusty whispers. The stories women repeat with gasps of disbelief. There will be no end to them now, no end to the malice of lashing tongues. The torrent of gossip will follow her until the day God pleases to call her to His presence and account for her sins. An egg once broken cannot be made whole again.
Konstantin Glavani is pacing the room. He has been punished for the sins of the flesh, for marrying beneath himself. For being a fool and closing his ears to the words of the wise. Slash her throat, people tell him. Make her kneel in the dust and cut your daughter’s throat. Make her bellow like a heifer when she sees a knife raised above her head.
What a fool he has been for thinking that God has blessed him when his daughter was born. For thinking his little Dou-Dou would be the light of his soul, the blessing of his old age. For thinking that he, a father of but one child, would sit in her garden one day and rock his grandchildren on his knees.
This is not what God in His wisdom has prepared for him. The sins of women are bred in the bone, working their silent way from the day a woman is born until the day she dies. He should have known that this daughter of his would be his Gehenna. The day she was born he should have sprinkled ashes on his head.
Women are like bitches in heat, bringing nothing but trouble, but Diamandi is no better. Diamandi is a traitor. A man of no honour, no family loyalty. For what he has done to his own cousin, for bragging to his friends about it, he should be hung from the tree. Or branded on his forehead like the liar he is. But Konstantin Glavani is not a murderer. He is not a Turk. He is a Christian man. A Greek. A man of honour. If he were a lesser man, he could have dug out some dirt too. Everyone knows what Diamandi’s elder brother is doing. A barber, his father says. Working for a Turk, a man from Istanbul who calls himself a philosopher. A worshipper of Sodom who carries his lovers’ powdered filth in the box around his neck.
‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,’ he says.
Has he forgiven her?
Mana is listening, too, her silence dark, furtive. There is a black bruise around her left eye and her neck has red blotches on it. Her eyes rest on Sophie, tell her to keep quiet, to wait it all through.
Yes, this daughter of his is his burden, but Konstantin Glavani will not refuse it.
He has already sold all his cattle. For a song. For a quarter of what the herd is worth, but such is the ruth-lessness of those who know he cannot afford to wait. The house will be rented to a distant cousin. An honest man, even if a bit slow in the head. They are going to Jerusalem, to the Holy Grave. The three of them, together. To beg God Almighty for forgiveness.
When their journey is over, they will not come back here. They will go to Istanbul where no one knows them. Where, with the money he got for his cattle, Konstantin Glavani will buy a position with the Istanbul police. He will be in charge of Christian butchers in the district of Pera, and there no one will dare spit after him when he walks the streets.
Rosalia
In the room Frau Kohl has chosen for her, on account of its closeness to the grand salon, Rosalia took out her dresses from the travelling trunk, gave each a vigorous shake, and put them in the wardrobe which smelled of varnish. That’s also where she placed her dark grey overcoat, but even then the wardrobe was only half filled. The three hats and two bonnets went on the top shelf. Her petticoats and chemises filled only one of the five drawers.
‘An operation,’ the countess had said, ‘cannot be on a Tuesday.’
‘If there is an operation,’ Dr Bolecki had said. The examination had been a short one, the smile on his face forced.
From the bottom of the trunk Rosalia took out the miniatures of her parents, Jakub and Maria Romanowicz, and placed them on the small table beside her bed. The silver-framed miniatures had been painted right before the Ko?ciuszko Insurrection of 1794 and the final defeat, before the day the word Poland had been erased from the map of Europe. The painter was not skilled. The expression of the two pairs of eyes were identical, as if mere copies of each other. Both her parents were looking ahead with melancholy, as if they could already see the future.
‘It is that Tuesday is a bad day,’ the countess had said.
‘Will it hurt much,’ Olga asked. The way she bit her lower lip touched Rosalia more than the sobs she sometimes heard at night; a sign that Olga too feared the worst. Perhaps because the sobbing was invisible.
In the miniature her father was in the Ko?ciuszko uniform, a white peasant sukmana, a cravat tied in a bow under his chin, a symbol of Equality and Freedom for all Poles. His face was clean-shaven and, like Ko?ciuszko, he was not wearing a wig. Her mother’s black hair was parted in the middle. It encircled her white, porcelain face and dissolved into the background. A string of pearls was woven in her hair and she was holding a fan with which she covered her chest. Rosalia remembered that fan. When it was flicked open, Artemis appeared. The goddess with a leopard’s skin on her shoulders, its limp paws hanging behind her like a train. Where was it now? Lost in one of their many moves, forgotten perhaps in one of the trunks Aunt Antonia was keeping for her in the dusty attic in Zierniki.
You have already turned twenty-six, Rosalia, and I shall never believe you are foolish enough to trust your mother’s misguided hopes. Did she really think that being Count Potocki’s godchild would give her some special rights? That it would make the count’s wife take special care of her orphan? Sometimes I think it best your dear father had not lived to see this.
Two years before, on such an October night as this one, Rosalia had listened as her mother moved about her bedroom. Drawers opened and closed; the floorboards creaked. The smell of burning paper wafted through the doors. For a moment it seemed that she could hear sobs but, when she rose from her bed and listened, what she took for crying turned out to be the sound of wind in the chimney.
‘The matter has to be treated most seriously, Madame Romanowicz,’ the surgeon said. He looked pale in his black suit and drops of perspiration appeared on his forehead. He wiped them off with a chequered handkerchief. ‘Most seriously, Madame,’ he repeated. Her mother’s eyes had a vacant look Rosalia didn’t like. The examination had been short. The breast was swollen, the tumour had grown to the size of a plum. Time had already been lost, too much time. The surgeon spoke of women who withdrew from the world suffering only a trusted nurse to come and wash the fetid running sores as their breasts were eaten away, drowning in filth.
He would not reveal the date of the operation. He never did. All he could do was to offer a warning of two hours at the most, for anything longer would only be the source of undue agitation. He would need old linen, charpie, old undergarments freshly laundered. Soft. An old armchair. No carpet. Nothing that could be splattered with blood and would be hard to wash. ‘But first, Madame Romanowicz will have to sign a permission. This is of utmost importance. Without it I cannot proceed.’
The note from the surgeon came as they were sitting down to breakfast. Today at ten o’clock. The maid brought it on a tray, perched against the coffee pot.
‘I’ve made my peace with God. There is nothing else for you to do,’ Maman said. She had been to confession, she took communion and asked for extreme unction. Seeing the alarm in Rosalia’s eyes, she assured her that the last rites had been known to heal the sick.
She won’t die, Rosalia repeated to herself, registering the progress of fear. In Zierniki, in winter, she had seen ducks imprisoned by ice in the pond. At first they were still able to move, until the ice thickened and refused to crack. Then to free them, the grooms had to hack at the ice with an axe and take the birds to the warm kitchen to thaw.
I won’t let her, she repeated over and over again. I won’t.
When the doctor arrived with three assistants, all dressed in black, Maman emerged from her room in a light batiste nightdress. If she were afraid, Rosalia could not see it. Her voice was steady and her eyes dry.
‘I want all the women to leave,’ the surgeon said. The maid scurried in the direction of the kitchen and closed the door. Her muffled sobs reached them a moment later.
‘I’m a soldier’s daughter,’ Rosalia said. ‘Let me stay.’
The surgeon glared at her as if she were creating difficulties, but she met his eyes without flinching.
‘If you faint, no one will have the time to attend you,’ he said sharply.
‘I won’t faint,’ she replied. Maman looked at her with relief.
Bare of furniture, with just the armchair in the middle covered with three white, freshly laundered sheets, the parlour looked bigger and far too bright. The wallpaper was darker where the picture and the oval mirror had hung. The ceiling, Rosalia saw, needed a fresh coat of paint. Her mother’s hand when she held it was cold and dry but then, without warning, perspiration broke out.
‘When you were giving birth, Madame,’ the surgeon asked. ‘Did you scream?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then I want you to scream—scream as much as you can.’
The operation was performed in absolute silence. The doctor seated Maman in the armchair, gave her a glass of wine cordial to drink, and covered her face with a cambric handkerchief. Then he motioned to the tallest assistant who placed a pillow under her head and positioned himself behind. The other two assistants silently came to stand on each side of the armchair, holding her arms. Her mother motioned to them that it was not necessary, but when, through the fine mesh of the handkerchief, she saw the glitter of steel she tried to stand up. The men held her so fast that she flinched.
Nothing, no past memory of love would ever equal this moment when Rosalia could feel her mother’s fingers clutch hers like clamps and saw her knuckles becoming white. It did not seem odd that her own body registered her mother’s pain. That this pain united them, sealed them to each other. That together, she with a clear eye and her mother through the mesh of her handkerchief, they watched as the surgeon made the sign of incision in the air, with a straight line from top to bottom of the breast, a cross and a circle. That they shuddered together when the blade cut horizontally, nearly in the direction of the rib, a little below the nipple. That the scream that came, came from them both.
The two assistants on either side pressed their fingers on the arteries, and the surgeon began the cleaning, his hand separating the tumour from the skin and muscles, cutting off the cancerous tissue. Blood splattered his hands and arms. There were a few drops of it on his face. When Rosalia heard the blade scraping the breast bone, she could feel her mother’s hand loosening her grip. Maman had fainted and for a moment something close to panic overtook her until she reminded herself that, unconscious, her mother was free from pain.
The procedure took twenty minutes. There were operations that could be performed well and fast, but this was not one of them. The whole of the diseased structure had to be removed, the surgeon said afterwards, and he could not afford to miss anything. ‘I can amputate in under two minutes,’ he said. ‘But with this, no half measures will do. If the reoccurrence of the mischief is to be prevented…’
Rosalia was so hopeful then. The surgeon assured her that the operation had gone well and showed her how to dress the wound, applying a large, thick compress of charpie to the sutures and binding it on with a flannel roller. It didn’t take long for blood to appear through all the bandages. Maman’s face had lost all its colour and her limbs all life. The assistants carried her to her bed, and Rosalia was told to change her dressings every two hours and watch for signs of infection, for the weakening of the body.
At midnight her mother opened her eyes, but she did not seem to know where she was.
‘He is standing by the window,’ she kept saying.
‘Who is?’ Rosalia asked. All she wanted was to throw herself into her mother’s arms, to hide her face in her breasts the way she did when she was a child. Instead she could still hear the knife scraping against the bones.
‘He is pointing at his heart.’
Her lips were parched and she drank a few sips of water. ‘I am going with him,’ she said. ‘I have to.’
Rosalia tried to quiet her. The surgeon had assured her the operation was a success. The cancer was removed, all of it. ‘You must be strong, Maman,’ she pleaded. ‘You cannot leave me alone. You cannot leave your only child.’
‘I have to go,’ her mother whispered and closed her eyes. ‘He is waiting for me. He will take me away.’
Seeing that the blood had penetrated the dressing again, Rosalia replaced it with a fresh one. Maman did not open her eyes, but she no longer seemed in pain. Perhaps, Rosalia thought, the crisis had passed. She promised herself not to fall asleep, but the silence and her mother’s calm, soft breaths proved too much. When she woke up, startled, it was still dark. The windowpanes were covered with the white, intricate patterns she loved to watch in Zierniki where the windows froze for most of the winter. Beautiful white ferns, branches of trees with spiked leaves, flowers of tiny petals that reminded her of figures her father drew to amuse her: pentagons, hexagons, octagons.
The room was silent and still. Death she thought was like that. A moment of loss too profound to comprehend. A moment in which love fuses with pain. A moment from which there is no now and no future. Nothing but memories of the past, crumbling and fading with time.
She didn’t have to touch Maman’s face to know she was dead.
Just as she did on winter days in Zierniki, Rosalia breathed at the windowpane. When the ice petals melted, she peered through the hole and saw a boy pass by. He was carrying a lantern carved out of a turnip, slits in its side let out enough light for him to see where he was going.
There were a few other objects in Rosalia’s travelling chest but these would remain unpacked, a testimony to the temporary nature of her stay in this Berlin palace: a small wooden star she had found among her mother’s things; her father’s snuffbox with the Rights of Man engraved on the lid; a black silhouette of Ko?ciuszko’s profile and three sketches of Napoleon in a wreath of oak leaves—her father’s heroes.
These treasures Rosalia kept locked in a mahogany box, underneath her clothes in the trunk. It was a flimsy hiding place. Any of the servant girls might want to go through her things, try on her dresses or petticoats. Smell her rosewater or jasmine oil and dab a few drops on her brow. In St Petersburg handkerchiefs and sheets of paper disappeared routinely. The paper was what the cook used to curl her hair with. ‘If it wasn’t meant to be taken, it wouldn’t be lying around,’ Rosalia had heard Marusya mutter.
Her back hurt from lifting sacks of clothes, from helping the countess stand up. Taking off her shoes and her stockings, she walked about the room, until her aching feet were consoled by the smoothness of the carpet. If only Olga cared to help more, but some people were born to luxury and some were not. ‘It’s your own mother,’ Rosalia was often tempted to say, but never did.
Her most excellent bed, as Frau Kohl—the Graf’s housekeeper—had described it, did not help. It felt too big, too cold. Rosalia turned and tossed around, trying to warm up the clammy sheet, wondering if she should call for another eiderdown. There were noises outside her room; German words exchanged by the footmen; the sounds of doors opening and closing—the life of this palace, temporarily interrupted by their arrival. She recalled Marusya’s talking about strange noises in the maid’s room, like someone’s knocking on the window-pane, and complaining that the room smelled of mice. ‘Perhaps the Count has come for the Mistress,’ the cook had said.
Sophie
She opens the gate. The fence of their Istanbul house is made of staves of wood fastened with wire. The wind pushes her back, and the first rain drops fall on her face. She is thinking of the smooth feel of velvet on her cheek.
‘Quick,’ Mana screams. ‘Upstairs. To your room.’
The front door is hanging open. A doctor is in her parents’ bedroom, bending over her father. Or someone who looks like her father, in spite of the swollen red face, an eyeless face locked in a scowl.
‘Go,’ Mana screams.
Upstairs, in her small room, Sophie throws herself on her bed and listens. The doctor’s voice is harsh and commanding. He is calling for water, and he is pounding something. Pounding hard and shouting at Mana who rushes outside and then comes back.
She can smell her own body. A slightly sour smell she breathes in and out. For a moment she feels that she is growing large, her feet are endless and wide, stretching to the edge of the world, but then she moves and the feeling is gone.
She remembers the time when he was proud of her. When he told Mana to dress his daughter in her best dress and to plait her hair with ribbons so that her father could take her with him to the garden where, under the deep shade of almond blossoms, his friends gathered for their evening coffee and sweetmeats.
Her father stood her on the carpet and clapped his hands. She bowed and smiled, eyes stealing swiftly across the faces of the men and back again to her father. From the overgrown lake, right beside them, came a rotting smell of reeds.
Her father took a garland of flowers and put it around her neck. A beautiful garland of reds and yellows, of roses and wild daffodils. She sniffed at the flowers and their scent made her sneeze. ‘A sign,’ her father said. Someone was talking about her now. Right this minute someone was saying her name.
The thought pleased her. The waves of whispers, the eyes of strangers following her.
‘Pray to the Lord,’ her father said, ‘that what they say is always good. Once soiled, a good name is lost forever.’
The men laughed and clapped their hands.
This is what she wants to remember: the wine glasses raised to the sky, toasting her health and her good luck. Toasting her beautiful voice breaking into a song of love. A song sad and sweet. A song she has heard shepherds sing in the fields.
A child thrice blessed. A child kissed by an angel.
Her father carried her home that evening, and she remembers his breath, in which wine and coffee mingled. He carried her in his arms like a princess so that her embroidered slippers would not, Heaven forbid, be soiled. The soft slippers Mana had made out of an old dress she had stopped wearing.
Downstairs the pounding stops and there is silence. She crosses herself three times. She is sorry for all the times she has been angry at him.
In Jerusalem, in the Temple, she cried as the friars lifted up the cross and led the pilgrims to the place where Our Lord suffered and died. She was holding a candle and the wax, melting, scorched her skin, but she did not feel pain. When they reached the Mount of Calvary she fell to her knees, recalling the suffering of Our Lord and those who were with him in these dark moments of pain and despair. Recalling Mary Magdalene, forgiven for her sins, taken back into the heart of the Lord. And then her own heart filled with love and compassion for all human suffering, and she could not think of anything she wanted so much as to lie there, on the holy ground and let her tears soak into the earth.
Mana is standing at the door, her hands hanging loose, her lips moving. There is a drop of sweat rolling down her forehead.
‘It’s Tuesday,’ she hears.
Tuesday is a bad, unlucky day. On a Tuesday, Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks and would from now on be called Istanbul. On a Tuesday the Emperor Constantine turned into marble. Just before he was to be struck down by the Turks, Byzantium’s last Emperor was seized by an angel. The angel, his golden wings shining in the rays of the sun, carried him to a cave near the Golden Gate and turned him into a statue. ‘You will wait here,’ he said, ‘for the time when God our Lord is ready to restore freedom to the Greeks.’
‘Cry, Dou-Dou,’ she says, ‘cry for your father. We are all alone in the world.’
But her own eyes are dry.
In the Istanbul port, where the straits merge with the sea, opaque patterns glide over the water and flocks of shearwaters skim low over the surface, never to rest. The Turks say they are the souls of the damned.
Mana says these tiny birds are the souls of the odalisques the Sultan sent to their deaths. Drowned in the Bosphorus, in brown burlap sacks, their hands tied, their mouths gagged. In this world it is better to be a dog than a woman, Mana says, for she has seen carriages stop for a dog lying in the sun. She has seen servants get out, lift the dog up, and carry it out of the way.
The fishermen come back from the sea with swordfish, red and grey mullet, sea bass, lobsters and mussels. Sprats are caught with a lantern. The light reflected in the water makes the fish blind, she has heard, and they do not see the net.
‘Sing for us, gorgeous,’ the sailors ask.
In the market her mother has shown her how to watch out for bad fish. The stink of decay can be rubbed away with pine tar; dull skin buffed with a piece of rag until it shines. Air can be blown inside the belly to make a catch look bigger and more succulent.
Watch out, Mana says. You have already bled like a woman. Men can pick that scent. Men can tell.
She likes the sight of them. The young men with olive skin, shirts stained with grease, open at the chest. Their muscles tense as they pull on the ropes.
‘I won’t,’ she laughs and hurries away.
For a Christian woman the streets of Istanbul are fraught with danger. Even if she casts her eyes down and follows her mother, quickly, without looking. Even if she promises herself not to stare at the rich, handsome cavaliers who come to the district of Phanar where the Greek merchants’ wives lounge on their verandas, attended by servant girls. Men whose steps are light and sprightly. Whose embroidered belts are fastened with broad golden clasps. Whose horses prance and neigh, impatient with restraint imposed on them by their riders’ hands. Men whose eyes are on the prowl.
She has seen the Janissaries with white feathers on their heads, and the royal gardeners dressed in their habits of different colours so that from afar they looked like flowers themselves. She has seen the Aga of the Janissaries in a robe of purple velvet lined with silver tissue. His horse was led by two slaves. Next to him was the Kilar Aga, the chief eunuch of the Seraglio in a deep yellow cloth lined with sable. The Sultan was mounted on a horse whose saddle was studded with jewels.
She often thinks of fate. Fate that can push her any which way, make her a slave or a queen, a lady or a whore. Lady Fate whose breath she feels right behind her, tickling the skin on her neck. Lady Fate, blind, fickle and full of spite.
Or is it benevolence.
Help yourself so God can help you, Mana says.
‘Look at yourself, Dou-Dou.’
This is her aunt who says she could be her sister. Whose dresses are made of Genoan damask and silk. Whose rings catch the rays of the sun and reflect them back with a rainbow of colours. ‘These, my little Dou-Dou, are real diamonds.’
Aunt Helena, Mana’s younger sister, hardly hides her annoyance at their hungry eyes trailing after her clothes, after the food on the table, after the trinkets with which she adorns herself. Aunt Helena with her sweet voice and the scent of roses around her, with hands soft and white.
‘Look at yourself,’ Sophie hears and watches how her cheap, coarse dress drops down, how her aunt’s fingers gently release the hooks of her petticoats, the folds of her chemise. How nothing obstructs the sight of her body. The shapely breasts, the belly button, the mound of black curls below. ‘Move your hips, Dou-Dou,’ Aunt Helena whispers into her ear, the hot air of her breath tickling. ‘Slowly, slowly. Don’t shake too much.’
She sways her hips, shy at first, cautious. But she likes what she sees, she likes this nymph, this slender, beautiful girl framed by the gilded mirror. Standing beside this aunt of hers, her mother’s sister who now braids a string of pearls into her long hair. Is this the way Eve felt in the Garden of Eden when she saw her own reflection in the mirror of still water?
‘You are so beautiful, Dou-Dou. You can have everything you want. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, girl.’
She turns her back to the mirror and looks over her shoulder. Her back is smooth and flexible. She can bend as easily as she climbed the branches of the oak tree in Bursa. She can kneel on the floor and let her body fall backwards, into a graceful curve, and then come back, slowly, her eyes locked on her own image.
‘You are worthy of a king’s bed.’
The longing in her is like an ill wind that makes the air clammy with heat, filled with dust, unbearable. There has to be a release to all this want that has gathered in her. In the mirror her own eyes stare back at her. Two black coals of desire.
She lowers her eyes, as if she were ashamed of her own beauty, and her aunt claps her hands and laughs. ‘Perhaps, I don’t need to teach you that much after all,’ she says.
From the big mahogany chest of drawers, Aunt Helena takes out her best cashmere shawl, the one on which there is a flower on a stem, its roots dangling in the air. Long tendrils, clean of soil, no longer hidden in the earth. Such is the taste of the true ladies, her aunt says. They like botanicals. Botanicals, the word itself sounds different, more worldly than mere plants or flowers.
Soft and silky to the touch, the shawl envelops her with misty warmth, a promise of a caress.
‘For a woman, nothing, my little Dou-Dou, works better than a bit of mystery.’
A length of gauze replaces the cashmere shawl. Her aunt drapes it over her hair, around her waist. There is something flowery about the girl in the mirror now. A promise of lightness and fragrance of petals.
Sophie laughs. She preens and coos, and kneels in front of the mirror. She bows her head in a sweet gesture of submission her eyes deny. For the girl in the mirror is no longer a girl; she is a young, beautiful woman. A woman who likes her own boldness. A woman who likes the brightness of her own eyes; the flash of her beautiful white teeth; the dimple in her cheeks, and the pink nipple peeking from underneath the white gauze.
‘I’ll teach you to dance,’ her aunt whispers into her ear. ‘The Oriental dance.’
Thomas
Right after his arrival in Berlin, Thomas took a brisk walk, past an old church with twin spires and a red roof. Rosenstrasse was a narrow street, lit only by the light coming through the windows. A night watchman with a horn under his belt gave him a quick, cautious look, his sabre catching the reflection of the light. The insides of the houses were hidden behind curtains, lace, muslin, silk screens that kept secrets well. Sometimes Thomas could get a glimpse of someone moving inside, like a figure in a shadow play or magic lantern.
In his letter Ignacy had mentioned the patient was a rich Polish countess who had just arrived from St Petersburg. Countess Potocka, once the most beautiful belle of Europe, in search of a healer. She is unable to travel to Paris, so Paris will have to come to her. After all, my friend, you too will profit from a change of place and a good dose of forgetting.
‘Please, the best of friends,’ Thomas muttered in response. ‘Don’t.’
In spite of his fur-lined cape and high boots, the leather soles squeaking as he walked, he could not warm up. The air was clammy. The whiff of the sewers made him cringe. As he almost stepped onto gobbets of horses’ dung, he heard a woman and a man quarrelling behind one of the impenetrable windows. The woman’s voice was whiny, drowning the man’s complaints in a barrage of reproaches. Then the doors of the house opened and the man stepped out. Tall, lanky, tattered leather jacket on his back. The door slammed. ‘Du blöde Hure,’ the man yelled at the closed windows and walked away.
Thomas followed the man from a distance, hoping he would lead him to a neighbourhood tavern where he could have a beer and drown the constant stutter of the carriage wheels in his head, but when the man walked into a dim alley Thomas decided to turn back. This time he took a different direction and in one of the windows, its curtains parted to allow for a glimpse inside, he saw the glow of red and blue lanterns, golden tassels, scarlet ottomans. Two young women in low-cut gowns sat at a small table staring at cards, laid out in a cross. Beside them stood two glasses of clear yellow liqueur.
Sex was the need of a body. A fundamental need, Thomas stressed when he lectured to his students at Val de Grâce, that kept the disintegration of life at bay. He was not entirely convinced by Dr Brown’s theory that the flow of life needed to be controlled, boosted or dampened according to need. ‘The word need,’ he liked to warn his students, ‘is the problem. How would one know one’s true needs?’ Such doubts, of course, did not trouble Dr Brown. In London he was known to lecture with a glass of whisky in one hand and a bottle of laudanum in another, taking sips from one or the other.
For Thomas, the sight of the corpse stretched on the metal table was enough to renounce vain discussions and hypotheses. Life and death, he told his students, should be observed and examined without preconceived notions. Ars medica tota in observationibus, as Laennec had repeated ad nauseam. There was always something theatrical about that first incision. A moment pregnant with revelation, best approached in expectant silence. ‘Gentlemen, watch and take note. Refraining, if you can, from idle speculations.’ Ignoring the flicker of impatience in some of the eyes set on him, Thomas would perform his magic. His arm slightly raised, aware of the glitter of steel, he would wordlessly bend over the corpse and cut the skin without further declarations, defeated by the eagerness of youth.
One of the women in the window must have noticed him, for her hand slid down her neck in a well rehearsed gesture, inside her frilled décolletage, revealing full breasts. It was only then that Thomas realised with embarrassment that he was staring at her, the mute cause of her performance to which a smile was now added, tongue lingering over the bottom lip. Quickly he wrapped his cloak around him and turned away, walking down the dark alley as if pursued, though he could hear nothing but the pounding of his own heels on the pavement.
In Paris, in Rue de Clairmont, Minou expected him on Fridays. Dressed in black lace, with her smooth breasts pushed up by her corset, she smiled gently and poured a glass of red wine for him the moment he walked in. There was a pleasant smell of lavender and he liked her room, in spite of its garish combination of red and black, the lowered blinds and the smoky lamp. Minou didn’t try to talk or pretend he was anything but a paying client. She washed in front of him and made love with a pleasant efficiency that both excited and released him from desire. He paid her well, and his demands were simple. When the lovemaking was over, he liked to watch her comb her long, reddish hair. Thomas suspected she dyed it with henna. Redheads made more money, he had heard. She came from St-Malo; her father and her two brothers were sailors.
‘A sailor,’ Ignacy once said to him in response to a statement long forgotten. ‘You know what they say of sailors’ wives? Femme de marin-femme de chagrin.’
It was ten o’clock by the time Thomas returned to his lodgings. His landlady was in the living room with her embroidery hoop. In her heavy dress, plaited hair arranged into a tight bun, she looked the embodiment of domesticity. She offered him tea, but he made a lame excuse and rushed up the stairs to his rooms.
Upstairs, he poured cold water from the jug into a porcelain basin, took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He didn’t think of himself as handsome or well-built, in spite of Minou’s protestations to the contrary. She liked his ruddy skin and brown eyes, and, with an air of fake ease, swore that his nose was ‘aquiline’. Where did she get a word like this, he wondered. In the mirror he could see that his hair was thinning already. He was not as tall as Ignacy and far thinner, but his body had the sturdiness of generations of peasants, and could carry him in the saddle for hours.
He lay down on the hard, narrow bed and closed his eyes. He thought of a young woman, a girl he healed once, at la Charité. She was not older than fifteen, with red, lush curls and little freckles all over her face. She was writhing in pain, her lips livid and bleeding from the pressure of her crooked teeth biting into flesh. He had ascertained that the patient was brought by a young man who had left as soon as he could, without leaving his name or address. When he examined the girl, he found a pig’s tail pushed into her anus. The nun who had helped him undress her, averted her eyes. Someone had tried to remove it, but the hair on the tail had got stuck in her flesh. The girl was bleeding and her anus was filled with pus.
Thomas inserted a small tube around the tail and extracted it. He didn’t take the girl’s money. He didn’t warn her against continuing her trade. He didn’t tell her how often he saw women with their private parts torn, with broken glass stuck in their vaginas. He figured she knew all that. She cried and thanked him in her thick, Breton accent. He kept her at la Charité for a few days until her wound began to show the signs of healing. Then he let her go.
Sophie
The plague is stalking the streets of Istanbul, this city of golden towers, of mosques and minarets, of crescents, kiosks, palaces and bazaars. At street corners bodies of the diseased are being burnt, together with all their possessions. The smoke has already filled the air, spilled into every street, lodged deep into the fibres of everyone’s clothes. Whole sections of Istanbul have been cordoned off, though people say that well-placed bakshish can do wonders. Announcements in Turkish and in Greek forbid all contacts with foreigners, especially visits to the foreign missions. Any Greek woman caught with a foreigner would be beaten in public. Forty lashes to the heels of her feet.
Maria Glavani is carrying cloves of garlic in a sash around her neck and blue beads to ward off the evil eye. She never leaves the house without the holy picture of St Nicholas to whom she prays until her knees turn red and sore. In the mornings, when she comes back home smelling of liquor and men, she washes her hands and face with water to which she adds a few spoonfuls of vinegar.
‘You stay inside!’
Mana’s voice is harsh, impatient. The lines on her face are deepening, no matter how diligently she massages them every day. Sophie does not like these frenzied preparations, the ironing of dresses, the pinning of hair. The slaps when she is too slow or clumsy; when a hem is ripped; a pin misplaced; a line of kohl smudged. But after Mana leaves, the silence of their small house chokes Sophie. In her empty bed she hugs herself. What comes back to her is the smell of smoke and vinegar mixed with her own sweat. Everything that has happened in her life so far seems to have curled up in her, poised and waiting for release.
Death does not frighten her. In the street she does not turn her eyes away from the burning bodies. This is not the way she will die. She knows that. A fortune-teller told her once that she would die after a long life, without pain. Far away from home, but among those who loved her.
Mana’s black crêpe mourning dress is folded at the bottom of her coffer. In Bursa Maria Glavani would have been the talk of the town. Here, no one remembers Konstantin, the unlucky Greek with greying hair, or his widow. If only she knew what life had in store when she looked into his black eyes for that first time. If only she listened to her own mother who pointed out the threadbare clothes and the chaffed shoes of this man who talked incessantly of diamonds big as walnuts, of herds of cattle, of silk and gold lace. Such is the fault of love. Love that brings a woman down and leaves her at the mercy of strangers.
Mana no longer talks of Christian duties, of sin and honour and the good name. They are eating meat again, and fresh fruit Mana buys at the market herself. The days are still cool. To keep warm, they put hot ashes into the tandir and sit with their feet on it. The warmth stays in their bodies for a long time. They need to be strong and round off their hips. By the time a fat man gets thin, a thin man dies.
‘I want the best for you,’ Mana says, and Sophie believes that. Her thoughts fold and refold around the promises of the future. She knows her mother has been making enquiries. Do any of the foreign diplomats in Istanbul show the first signs of boredom with their current mistresses? A Frank, rich and powerful, and refined. A man who would not slap her daughter around and then leave her without means to lead an honest life. The girl, she hears her mother’s whisper, is an unspoiled virgin, worthy of a king’s bed.
When she hears this, Sophie thinks of Diamandi’s hand on her breasts, his body crushing her to the ground, his hot tongue parting her teeth, its earthy, lingering taste. She thinks of his strong, smooth legs, the man’s hair on the boy’s chest. The sharp pain of his love, and the blood on her legs.
An innocent girl, her mother says, with a good heart who could be grateful, who would be so grateful for a nice home, a carriage, beautiful dresses that would show off her skin and her hair. Dresses that would add glitter to these beautiful black eyes in which some have already seen the moon and the stars.
Dou-Dou. A virgin. Unspoiled. Innocent. Naïve to the highest degree, and with a good heart.
Yes, Dou-Dou can be grateful and funny and good at pleasing. Skilful, too, in the art of massage. Her touch is light, her skin is warm and dry. The girl is no weakling, she can press what needs to be pressed, knead what needs to be kneaded.
A foreign diplomat, her mother whispers, would leave one day. But, as any honest man would do in such a situation, he would provide a dowry for his girl. Sweeten the nibbled goods for his successor, a merchant or a shopkeeper. Someone solid, honest. Someone who would want children and a beautiful wife with a handsome dowry, even if he had to close his eyes and take a jewel from the second floor.
Why is Mana hiding all these schemes from me, Sophie thinks. Why the charades, the pretence, the games. I’m no longer a child. I know no one will marry me without a dowry. In bed at night she lets her fingers run down her neck, over her breasts, down to her belly. There is a moment in which a touch turns into a caress. A sweet moment of pleasure. She likes the thought of a rich man of the world who would tell her what lies behind Istanbul and Bursa. A man who would teach her the dances of the Frank courts, tell her what the ladies do to hold their hair so high. A man who would teach her to speak French. She is quick with languages, has always been. Greek, Turkish and Armenian come to her naturally like breath. She has already picked quite a few French words from her aunt, and some Russian ones too: Bonjour mon cherie. Spassiba. Slichnotka.
Aunt Helena, a frequent guest at the Russian mission’s balls and soirees, has promised to keep her eyes open. She has always liked the Russians whom she calls ‘the fair race from the North’, and ‘the people who know the meaning of pleasure’. She has always liked their caviar from Astrakhan, their clear vodka that goes right to your veins. Liked their dances until dawn, as if there were no tomorrow, as if the world would end that very day. Glasses, she tells her niece, get smashed against the wall so that they could not hold another drink at an inferior time. There is one more thing that pleases Aunt Helena. The Russian victories over the Turks. ‘The black camel of death will soon kneel at his doors,’ she says, pointing in the direction of the Sultan’s palace.
Yes, a Russian diplomat would be best for Dou-Dou.
All talk, Mana says with bitterness. Liars are branded in this country for a reason. Her sister, may dear Lord forgive a widow’s bitterness, has always been fickle and not above jealousy. Just because she lives in the district of Phanar does not make her rich and powerful. And all these stories she comes with are nothing more than accounts of her own goodness. Fanciful accounts given to them like scraps from her own table. Maria Glavani knows such talk when she hears it. Didn’t she have a good teacher? Konstantin too never stopped weaving his schemes until the day of his death.
So Aunt Helena’s words are listened to but not believed. For there is always a little mishap in her stories, a small obstacle that would have to be waited through, ironed out, removed. The undersecretary who kept asking to see Dou-Dou before he would recommend her to his superiors was a known libertine and his request to meet Sophie had to be dismissed. We don’t want to cheapen her, Maria, her aunt has said. No touching if they are not buying.
The plague is what makes Sophie’s situation worse. The plague cools many a heart. In the presence of death, amour wilts and shrivels. Besides, even a foreign diplomat caught with a Greek woman would have to face the Ottoman justice. Not everyone wants to risk that much. Not even for such a beautiful pair of eyes.
In the Russian Mission, Monsieur Stachiev’s wife is so terrified of the plague that she has locked herself and her children in an upstairs bedroom and refuses to see or meet anyone. This, in itself, is not such a bad thing, for it leaves Monsieur Stachiev free to pursue his own merry interests. But it doesn’t help to have people talk that she has sent her surgeon away for wanting to bleed her. That she screams at the top of her voice. ‘We’ll all die here in this infidel country. We’ll all be punished.’ She has already cursed her husband. ‘Your sons will pay for your fornication,’ she said. ‘You will kneel at their coffins and then where will your whores be?’ She will call the Janissaries, if she but spots a Greek woman entering the mission building.
‘Dou-Dou, you are slowing me down,’ Mana says. They are coming back from the market, their baskets heavy with meat and fruit. As always, people stare at them as they pass. The men look at them with longing and often stop them, asking for directions or pretending they have mistaken them for someone else. Women’s eyes are curious, assessing their beauty as if it were a threat, a challenge.
‘Come on, girl, we don’t have all day.’
A black man who stops them is a eunuch. Not an ordinary eunuch either, but a eunuch from the Sultan’s court. His robes are woven with gold and silver and mazanne blue. The face under the burgundy fez is smooth, layers of fat testifying to the richness of his table. His voice is soft and warm. Having lived his life among women, he knows how to calm their fears.
‘Beautiful ladies,’ he says and smiles, flashing his teeth. As white as hers, Sophie thinks.
The Ottoman Princess, the Sultan’s daughter, has ordered him to stop them. He was summoned by his mistress, told to drop all he was doing, and go after them. Go after two Christian women who have caught the Princess’s eye.
Sophie’s eyes travel upwards, toward the palace windows. She cannot see anyone there. Perhaps it is the Sultan himself who has seen her. Perhaps, with one look of His eyes, her life has changed forever.
‘Follow me. We mustn’t make the Princess wait.’
‘Are you sure you are not taking us for someone else,’ Mana asks the eunuch, but the black man laughs. His mistress’s mind is an open book to him. They should not doubt their luck. The heavy baskets can be left with the servants who can take them to their home. ‘Just tell me where you live,’ he says.
‘We’ll take them on our way back,’ Mana says sharply. ‘Ourselves!’
Is there is a note of fear in Mana’s voice? Unease? Anger as she clasps her daughter’s hand in a firm grip as if she wanted them to turn away and run? But how can a Christian woman refuse an Ottoman princess? How can a Greek say no to a Turkish master?
Dou-Dou does not want to notice Mana’s fear. Her mind flutters with delicious visions of glittering jewels, gauzy dresses and garden paths bathing in sweet, dappled shade. She can feel the harsh impatience of her mother’s hand, the reluctance of her steps. She wants to laugh and assure her Mana there is nothing to worry about. She is ready. When her chance comes, she will know what to do.
They follow the black eunuch past the palace gate, past the first courtyard filled with cool shade, fragrant with the jessamines and honeysuckles that coil around tree trunks, past the giant clay vases filled with blooming roses. The big courtyard is bustling with life. Two tall grooms hold Arabian horses, snow white, with the legs of dancers. A short, fat man in a leather apron is rolling a big wooden barrel. A young man is whistling a merry tune, trailing Dou-Dou with his eyes until the eunuch’s look stops him.
Inside the Seraglio the sweet perfume of the jessamines penetrates the gilded sashes easily. A white marble fountain releases the stream of water that falls into four basins below. The sound is pleasing. By this fountain, the eunuch leaves them. ‘The Princess shall send for you,’ he says, lifting Dou-Dou’s head with his index finger and looking straight into her eyes.
‘Beautiful,’ he murmurs. ‘These eyes will shame the light of the moon.’
When they are left alone, Sophie looks around. The tiles on the floor are cool to the touch. She would have liked to take her shoes off and step on them with bare feet, but Mana’s eyes stop her. The walls are covered with tiles of different patterns. Most of them have blue, and gold in them, and the colours mingle in her eyes and shimmer. The thick stained glass windows dim the rays of the sun, make them dance with colours of amber and silvery dust. There are no chairs, but a few big cushions on a raised sofa covered with Persian carpets. The scent of honeysuckle joins the jessamine, the scent that penetrates her hair, her dress, clings to her skin.
Is this how the Sultan smells, she wonders. Is his skin as soft as she imagines? As cool as the tiles?
‘Don’t say anything until you are asked,’ her mother whispers. Her face is pale and her eyes dart around the room. What is it that she wants to find?
‘Don’t look at the Princess. Keep your eyes down.’
Mana has removed her own kerchief and wraps another layer of cloth over her daughter’s hair.
What if the Sultan will not care for her? What if he takes one look at her and sends her back?
But these are thoughts easily laughed away. In her heart of hearts she trusts her joy. A woman the Sultan summons becomes a quadin, a chosen one.
‘Someone must have seen you,’ Mana hisses, her voice rough with anger. ‘Didn’t I tell you not to wander alone.’
The servant woman who enters the antechamber is wearing a pink kaftan over blue drawers, her hand touching her heart and lips in greeting. Silent, she beckons with her right hand and they follow, their heels clicking on the tiles. They walk through long winding corridors of closed doors, past a big room where women sit on big satin cushions, smoking nargila, working on their embroidery. One of them with diamonds in her turban, sitting on a lap of a Negress throws herself into her arms as if to hide in them. In another room a woman in a red dress is bending over a big loom, absorbed in the invisible patterns. To Sophie these images seem like pieces of a puzzle, a mystery she alone would be allowed to solve. This is making her deaf to Mana’s sighs.
The Princess is wearing a vest of purple cloth, set with pearls on each side down to her feet and round her sleeves. It is tied at the waist with two large tassels embroidered with diamonds. Her shift is fastened with an emerald as big as a turkey egg. In the middle of her headdress two roses glitter, each made of a large ruby surrounded with clean diamonds. She is seated on a big silk-covered cushion, like an enormous animal at rest, its belly still full, but its eyes already on the lookout for the next meal. Her arms are strong and muscular, her skin smooth. Her black eyes, lined with kohl, are short-sighted for she leans forward as she speaks.
‘You have come,’ she says, as if their obedience surprised her. ‘Welcome to my home.’
Perhaps, Sophie thinks, the Princess has been sent to appraise her, to see if she is worthy of the Sultan’s time. The Ottoman Princess, blessed with the riches of her father, her body cared for by her army of slaves, scraped, massaged and perfumed with the most precious of scents. Her hands are too big though, in spite of all the beautiful rings. Five on her right hand only. Two have diamonds bigger than hazelnuts.
‘Your Highness,’ she says, with her loveliest smile. ‘Is too kind.’
The Princess gives a sign and servants enter with wooden trays, carrying sweets and strong Turkish coffee, its aroma filling the air. There are dried apricots, figs, raisins and dates from Basra, the sweetest that there are. Nuts in a gilded bowl. Fresh figs too, black and green. A jug of sherbet to drink. A sherbet for which, Sophie is told, snow has been fetched all the way from the highest mountains of India.
‘I love figs,’ Sophie says brightly and clasps her hands in delight.
It’s too late for Mana’s look of warning. The Princess laughs too and promises that such a sweet child, such a beautiful girl could have all the figs in the Ottoman Kingdom. And apricots, and raisins. And pistachio nuts and sweet dark coffee that races in the veins and brings flashes of colour to the cheeks.
She can have everything she wants. Beautiful dresses. Shawls. Velvet and damask and silk that the merchants bring all the way from China. The most exquisite patterns. A girl so beautiful should be wearing lots of gold to set off her raven hair and her olive skin. And soft, soft leather for her feet.
‘This child deserves the best,’ she says, her eyes leaving Sophie for a moment and resting on Mana, as if she were responsible for her daughter’s poverty. ‘Not the rags that she is wearing now.’
Mana wriggles on her cushion.
‘Most illustrious of Princesses,’ she begins. ‘Your Imperial Highness. The light of my eyes.’
She begs the Princess to think of her. A widowed mother of an only daughter. A beloved daughter she cannot think of parting with.
‘But she would live with me, in the palace, you silly woman. Have everything she could ever need. Can’t you see that? Does every Greek have to be so dense, so infernally stupid?’
Seeing a frown on Sophie’s forehead, she changes her tone, quickly. Too quickly.
Surely a mother cannot deny her child’s fate. Fight the fortune God offers her. The good life of opulence and comfort. Look at her hands, the Princess says, still accusing. Cracked and reddened like those of a scullery maid. Is that what you want for this angel? Is she to be your maid? Scrubbing pots? Ruining the gifts Allah has bestowed on her?
‘My God,’ Mana says, ‘forbids a mother to leave her child among strangers.’
‘My God,’ she says, looking straight into the Princess’s eyes, ‘does not allow some kinds of love.’
The Princess laughs. ‘I know your God, woman,’ she says. ‘All your God wants is a good price for her. Here. Take this!’
A purse filled with cekins lands in Mana’s lap with a thud. It is heavy. A bounty, a treasure. Money that could last them a few months. Pay the debts, buy new dresses, good tender lamb and fresh fruit. Pay for dangling earrings that would set off Dou-Dou’s shapely lobes, the graceful turn of her neck.
A purse filled with gold.
This is a fair price for a poor Greek girl, isn’t it? This and a promise of a good life, a full stomach, and hands that would not have to touch dirt ever again.
‘With me she will want for nothing.’
Sophie looks at her mother. There is nothing I can do, Mana’s body tells her. I can refuse the gold or take it, this won’t make any difference. But I cannot tell her I do not allow you to stay here.
‘She’ll be like a daughter to me,’ the Princess coos. She has moved closer and the heat radiating from her touches Sophie’s arms.
‘She will sleep in my bed. She will go everywhere with me. I’ll buy her everything she wants.’
Fear signals its beginning with a spasm in her stomach, then another, closer to Sophie’s heart. The soles of her feet are cold, her hands begin to tremble. In Bursa she has seen men show a bloodied leg of a fox, all that has remained in the snare they have set. The beast has chewed off its own hind leg and escaped.
‘I have never even asked your name,’ the Princess says.
Sophie hesitates. She doesn’t really like the Princess at all. She doesn’t like the way her strong hand rests on her knee and squeezes it, as if the two of them had to stand together against Mana. She doesn’t like the hint of rot in her mouth. The tooth in front is black with decay. The visions of the Sultan’s favour have receded and suddenly she sees herself as a servant in this palace, carrying trays with raisins and nuts, making coffee somewhere in the kitchen. Perhaps scraping hair from the Princess’s legs and arms, holding a towel for her in hammam as her big body breaks out with sweat.
How do you say no to an Ottoman Princess whose whims are their orders? Who could, with one word, send them to their deaths, the way the Sultan is said to dispose of unfaithful concubines: wrapped in a burlap bag, and thrown into the waters of the Bosphorus; or left naked in the street of Istanbul, unknown to anyone, a corpse with raven hair and skin white as milk, chest pierced with a dagger.
‘Don’t be shy, my precious,’ the Princess says.
Sophie raises her eyes. There is a flash of defiance, though she is trying to disguise it.
‘My name is Sophie,’ she says. ‘It means wisdom.’
She watches how, with one gesture of dismissal, her mother is made to leave the room, the purse of gold cekins in her hands. How she takes one more look at her daughter, a look of such pain and despair that Sophie wants to run toward her and throw her hands around her neck. ‘I’ve failed you after all,’ Mana’s eyes say. ‘I have not kept you from danger. Forgive me.’
The doors close after her, silently, like the doors of a tomb.
Rosalia
Only a week had passed, even if the memory of the journey seemed already faded and oddly remote, as if whole weeks separated them from the grimy inns and the jostling carriage.
In the first days of October, morning took a long time to arrive. With curtains drawn, the only light in the grand salon was a votive lamp underneath the icon of St Nicholas. In the twilight, the red reflections on the Saint’s bearded face made the holy image waver and float.
The countess was awake already. She tried to lift herself up, but the task was too strenuous and she fell back on the pillow.
‘Don’t look at me, Rosalia,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to remember me like that.’
Blood stained her clothes, seeped through the sheets, the blankets. They should be soaked in cold water right away. The mattress would have to be burned. The maids have to stop gossiping in the kitchen and clean more carefully. Rosalia could see the patches missed by the duster, the trails of neglect. One cannot rejoice at this constant lowering of your station in life, Aunt Antonia had written, hinting once again at the disastrous but perhaps foreseeable consequences of her father’s Jacobin dreams, the true cause of all her misfortunes. She herself was far from supporting tyranny or injustice, but all this talk of freeing the serfs or making Poland a republic frightened her. Like everything else in life, equality too had its limits. Your place is here, her letters to Rosalia invariably ended, at my side.
An operation would take place right in this room. A mattress could go on a table. She did warn Frau Kohl that one might be needed at short notice. A fairly big one, with sturdy legs.
Since their arrival in Berlin, breakfast meant a few morsels of bread dipped in red wine to strengthen blood and on a better morning a few sips of consommé the cook prepared fresh every day. Dr Bolecki always came around ten o’clock and, after a short examination of the countess, insisted that Rosalia escorted him downstairs. This was the only time, he said, they could exchange their observations about the patient, only they never did.
On the first day Dr Bolecki told her that his father had fought in the Ko?ciuszko Insurrection; that he, Dr Bolecki, trained in Paris, thanks to Napoleon’s insatiable need for army surgeons; and that the French doctor who was coming from Paris could amputate a limb in under two minutes. On the following day she learned that Dr Bolecki’s beloved wife died of consumption and his only daughter was a Carmelite nun, in Rome. He had to take her there himself, in January last year. On a day so cold that he couldn’t stop thinking of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. ‘Was it really that terrible?’ Rosalia asked, out of politeness. ‘I mean the campaign,’ she added quickly lest he thought she was prying into his life. He hesitated for a moment, and said that the most eerie was the silence before the Moscow fires started. ‘A void,’ he said, ‘awaiting human screams.’ Of the march back he refused to speak at all. ‘It’s better for you not to know,’ he said. But then, even though Rosalia did not insist on returning to the subject, he added that death from cold was kind. ‘The worst,’ he said, ‘always comes from a human hand.’
‘I think him very pleasant,’ Rosalia said when the countess asked how she liked Dr Bolecki. She meant ‘reliable’, but ‘pleasant’ seemed a safer word to use. Olga had complained, on two occasions, that Rosalia was putting on airs. ‘As if she were a doctor here,’ were Olga’s words.
Today, as the examination followed its usual route—pulse, signs of fever, the usual questions about appetite, bleeding, and acuteness of pain—a lock of grey hair kept falling over Doctor Bolecki’s left eye. This, Rosalia thought, might be responsible for his air of restlessness. The countess suffered these ministrations without a sign of impatience, but let Rosalia answer all the questions. Only Dr Bolecki’s assurance that he would bring the French surgeon the next day, restored some alertness to her face. ‘As soon as possible,’ he kept saying. He kept looking at her too, Rosalia noted, as if something managed to change about her since the day before. Her nursing skills, he said, were most impressive. Not every patient was thus blessed. ‘I trust you, Mademoiselle, completely.’ This he repeated three times in a row, adding that he was sure his high regard would be shared by Doctor Lafleur.
There was a sound of footsteps outside the grand salon, then silence. The door opened and Marusya appeared, balancing a tray with letters and a pot of coffee with some difficulty. It was one of the countess’s whims, a pot of freshly brewed coffee at her bedside. The smell of it, she said, was enough. She could not drink any of it, but that shouldn’t stop Rosalia from having some. The maid put the tray on the table. Her eyes were fixed on the tray and her chore, as if any distraction could cause her to lose control. The tray wobbled and Rosalia half expected to hear the crash of china falling to the floor, but this did not happen.
‘Your son has written, just as he has promised,’ she said, spotting Bobiche’s handwriting on one of the letters. The countess’s youngest son had managed to write two whole pages instead of his usual one. L’abbé Chalenton was making progress.
When are you coming back, Maman? We have had terrible history with dogs. Fidelle bit a Postillion and Basilkien declared that she must be mad. But she continued to drink water and came when was called, so we thought she would be all right. Then she bit Basilkien’s finger and ran wildly in the yard and bit a pig. A week later, Basilkien showed symptoms of madness and the doctor made a cut on his finger to obtain a few drops of blood. Then he mixed the blood with milk and gave it to Basilkien to drink. He is much better as I write this and has stopped complaining! The Postillion, is also well, but the Doctor said Fidelle had to be killed, for there was no way of telling what will become of her, and so she is no more.
Everyone misses you very much. Tell Olena I’ll take her for a ride in my new carriage when she comes home.
Nothing, yet, from Odessa, from the countess’s elder daughter, Madame Kisielev. As soon as the news of her safe delivery reached them, Rosalia insisted that Madame Kisielev should be told the truth. The baby would no longer be affected by the mother’s agitation. Besides what daughter would want to be away from her mother in her time of need.
And so, in her last letter, the countess asked her daughter to come to Berlin. Please hurry, my dear Sophie, she wrote, if you want to see your mother alive. Enclosed with that letter was a bank order for 50,000 roubles. Madame Kisielev could well be on her way.
Sophie
That night, the silent servant with an unsmiling face takes Sophie to her bath. Her body is scrubbed and scraped clean with a sharp end of a seashell dabbed with precious drops of perfume. The dress that touches her skin is light as gossamer, soft like the skin of a newborn baby.
When her nail snags the soft fabric, the servant clucks her tongue. She is shaking her head, mouth twisted in a grimace. Without a veil, she is no longer mysterious. A woman with crooked teeth and nose too big for her face who pinches Sophie with impatience reserved for those whose position is not yet established. Reserved for a Greek slave girl with uncertain future who might not please the Princess after all.
‘Her Highness is waiting,’ the servant whispers. ‘Hurry up, girl.’
The Princess has her own apartments in the Harem. There is a tiled fireplace in her bedroom for nights cooler than this one. The walls are wainscoted with mother of pearl, ivory and olive wood, more beautiful than the lid of the best jewellery box in Aunt Helena’s home. The carpet on the floor is soft and thick. On the bed a golden throw glitters in the candlelight.
‘Come on, my sweet wisdom,’ the Princess says and pats the spot beside her. She is not wearing her pantaloons, but a loose dress. Through the slit of the dress Sophie can see her leg. White, smooth skin that she does not want to touch.
The Princess removes the smallest of her rings and extends her hand. ‘Take it,’ she says. ‘I want you to wear it.’
The ring is too big. It will have to be resized. The jeweller will be summoned first thing in the morning. For now, Sophie can wear the ring on a string around her neck.
Sophie casts her eyes down. Thoughts abandon her. Her body shudders, each movement is an effort.
‘Lean on me, my child. I want to feel your warmth.’
It is not cold, she wants to say but doesn’t. On her way here the silent servant ushered her into a latticed room and opened a large coffer. Inside there was nothing but a silk belt. The servant gave her a curious look and mimed strangling her own throat.
Sophie closes her eyes when the Princess’s hand caresses her cheek, her neck, her breasts. A hot, heavy hand, burrowing its way into her body. Is this what Mana knew would happen to her?
What a fool she was to dream of the Sultan’s love.
Someone walks by the Princess’s chamber, something rustles, something falls to the floor with a thud. The hand that touches her freezes, but only for a moment.
In this moment Sophie closes her eyes and tries to imagine this is the hand of a rich foreign diplomat, the man of the world who will teach her to dance and tell her stories of foreign lands. Stories in which women have carriages and beautiful jewels. Where their hair is piled up and adorned with flowers and birds and strings of pearls. Where men whisper sweet words into the women’s ears.
‘How soft your skin is, my sweet wisdom.’
‘Come closer. You are not afraid of me, are you?’
Is this what fear does? Freezes the heart? Stops the mind from dreaming?
She lets the Princess hold her hand. Mana has taught her how to give pleasure. Each body has its own desires. She knows how to press a muscle, gently first, then harder, and harder, until the pressure inside it is released. She knows how to dissolve the knots of tension, to bring relief.
A smile is pasted to her lips, a contortion of flesh. It makes her mouth quiver. The Princess calls her an angel, a sweet, beautiful child. A temptress. Sophie will lack for nothing. Ever. Sophie will be like a queen.
‘Kiss me,’ the Princess says, pointing at her lips.
‘Not like this. Harder.’
There are bruises on her thighs and arms, but she has not felt pain. Her own body feels as if it belongs to someone else, to another woman she can see from above. A woman whose face is covered with kisses, whose body is pinned to the bed. Whose clothes are prised away from her and whose hands clutch to her naked breasts. This other woman has stopped fighting her fate. She is lying motionless in the soft bed, with her eyes closed. She is trying to sink so deep that no one would find her. She is trying to close herself to the touch that yanks her from her dreamlike state. Nothing is happening, she repeats to herself. This is nothing. Nothing.
‘What is done once,’ the Princess whispers, ‘cannot be undone. What is felt once, will never be forgotten. You are mine, now,’ she whispers. ‘My own little wisdom.’
In the darkness Sophie prays for time to hurry, to go faster. Her lips are sore where the Princess has bitten them.
‘I am making you happy. You cannot hide your own pleasure from me.’
‘Say it!’
‘You are making me happy. I cannot hide my own pleasure from you.’
‘I am your mistress. There is no one else but me.’
‘You are my mistress. There is no one else but you.’
‘Ever.’
‘Ever.’
The bed is crumpled and moist with sweat; pillows have fallen off, to the floor. Silk-covered pillows, soft and smooth. The Princess is still holding her arm, making her lie there. There are other kinds of wisdom, she says. Many crave it, but few are chosen. Only to the few it shall be revealed. Wisdom that speaks of the true delights of love, of secrets common women are not meant to know.
‘Listen, my little wisdom. With me you will know it all.’
These stories speak of mysterious journeys across parched deserts; of abandoned inns where, in spite of the worst fears, sumptuous meals await an exhausted traveller; of crossroads where the hanged long for the mercy of the burial; of old hermits who know the way. It is enough to close her eyes to see the deep dungeons where hatred and envy rule and the fragrant gardens where beauty and love meet in secret. In search of their fate, the travellers of those tales fight hunger and thirst, battle false desires—the phantoms that drive the soul away from its dream.
‘Such are the stories of the night,’ the Sultana whispers. ‘They are all for you, my sweet wisdom.’
For there are more stories. Stories wrenched away from the possessed. Stories from forbidden books, stories of women who know as much as the men, but who guard their secret knowledge with their lives.
‘I know them all, my sweet wisdom,’ the Sultana says. ‘And soon, you too will know them.’
But then, a moment later, she is snoring, her arm heavy on Sophie’s shoulder. For a long while Sophie tries to wriggle out from under this arm. To stand up, gasp for breath. Her stomach churns and the coffee she has drunk rises up her throat. For a brief moment of despair she considers standing on the edge of the window and throwing herself down, into the paved courtyard underneath, but she doesn’t want to die.
She lets the tears flow, silently, until sleep comes. In the morning, she will think of something. Luck will not abandon her like that. Without warning, without giving her another chance. Luck may have played a mean trick on her, but Sophie has not lost her faith.
‘I’m worthy of a king’s bed,’ she thinks, just before sleep comforts her, just before she remembers the smell of jessamine and honeysuckle; just before she forgets the silk belt in the black ebony coffer and the cold anger in the servant’s voice.
The Greeks are but our slaves, she hears, their race a perfect example of what happens when the men are not separated from the women. No work ever gets done, because with all these women running in the streets men only want to have fun. Idleness and lies rule them. And deceit.
But the Russians, she says in protest, do not separate the women. Or the French. Or the English. No one heeds her words. What does she know, a plaything that has caught the Princess’s fancy. Clanging bells on her arms so that her arrival does not go unnoticed.
The Harem, she hears, is a woman’s blessing. Without it, a woman would be exposed to curious glances in the streets. To prying eyes, to jeerings from the passersby. Here, a woman has everything she may ever want. Why would she want to venture outside? What is it that she lacks?
When she laughs, the women say: ‘Don’t laugh too much or you’ll cry soon.’
It is in the small courtyard, by the fountain, that the women gather: odalisques, servants, and slaves. On low tables the slaves have laid clays, dried pomegranate peel, nut bark, saffron, dried roses, myrtle, orange flowers. There are fresh eggs the whites of which will be rubbed with shebba to make the thick lumpy mass that will cleanse the skin. For it is with the skin, they say, that you touch the world.
The women, their faces covered with gooey masks, sit patiently and talk. Things have to be done right, the way they were done before. Only the conceited believe one could discover a better way than the one practised for generations. A better way of embroidering or preparing a face mask. A better way of dancing or making coffee. A better way to live.
But there is other talk too. Of slaves whose beauty caught the eye of the Master, of these moments for which one prepares one’s whole life. A moment in which a man’s eye can change the woman’s fate; when a slave can become an odalisque; and then, if Allah wills that, maybe even a mother of a Sultan’s child. Unless, of course, one day, in the hammam, such a woman finds the doors locked, and the heat and the steam take her breath away.
Why?
The women shrug their shoulders. Doesn’t she know how easy it is to cause envy? To make a false step, say one word too many. Doesn’t she know anything?
Every night it seems to Sophie that she can hear the locking of many doors. There is a restlessness in her. A force sets upon her as soon as she opens her eyes and does not leave her until she falls asleep under the heavy arm of her mistress. The same restlessness that makes a fox caught in a snare chew off its leg.
To stop it Sophie thinks of the black eunuch. His black skin has a warm tone, and he smells of sandalwood. Hadim Effendi, a learned one, the Princess sometimes calls him, laughing. He was but a boy when he was first brought to the Palace. A boy who cried and cried until one of the slave women had the presence of mind to sing to him. Now he is kislar aghasi, master of the maidens. Unlike the white eunuchs who guard the gates of the Seraglio, he is allowed to enter the chamber of the women. He is fond of bright embroidered patterns, of jackets trimmed with gold.
Hadim Effendi likes her. She has discovered that on one of the restless nights when her mistress sent her for a pearl necklace, and she got lost in the corridors of the Seraglio. To silence the clanking bells, she stopped by the latticed window and looked outside. A beautiful moon, milky white, illuminated the sleeping city. It was difficult to believe that people lived there, in these dimly lit streets. That they loved, worked, slept, died there. That there was anyone else there besides Bekjih, the night watchman, his feet tapping on the cobbled stones as if he came from the kingdom of the dead.
‘Do you know the rules?’ Hadim asked, startling her with his presence.
‘Yes,’ she said, emboldened by the moon. ‘The rules do not allow holding any woman in the Palace against her will.’
‘The same rules also allow for killing anyone who has left. You should remember that.’
He was looking at her. There was much softness in his eyes, beside the sadness she had noticed before. She smiled.
‘The secrets of the Palace may not be shared among the living.’
Slowly, as if she were asleep, she opened her shirt and bared her breasts. He did not stop her. He did not touch her either, but stood there looking at her for a long time. She didn’t move.
She removes the clanking bells from her arms and knocks on the door to his room.
‘Come in,’ the master of the maidens says, lifting his eyes from a thick leather-bound volume.
‘I’ll die here if you don’t help me,’ she says and holds her breath. With one word he could have her flogged. With one word he could have her begging for her life.
He closes the book and motions to her to come closer.
‘You won’t die,’ he says. ‘Your eyes have nothing but life in them.’
He hands her a cup of coffee and motions to her to drink. She takes a sip, then another, but he shakes his head. ‘Drink it all up,’ he says.
In her coffee grounds he reads her future. He doesn’t talk of death without pain. He sees five dogs that bring her gifts. He sees three camels with more gifts and light shining in her way and a great door opening up. There is a tree too, its branches touching the sky. A tree with thick foliage, its branches laden with fruit.
‘Please,’ she whispers. ‘Tell me what to do.’
The master of the maidens stares at her coffee grounds. ‘You will travel far and wide,’ he says, smiling at her. ‘There is no cage in this world that will hold you.’
‘Will I be rich,’ she asks, pleased by what she takes as a promise of a merchant husband who might take her with him on his journeys.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Richer than you can imagine.’
‘Happy?’ she asks.
He puts her hand down and shakes his head. ‘This,’ he says, ‘your coffee grounds do not reveal.’
There is a long moment of silence. She moves her fingers to her blouse, wanting to open it as she did before, but he extends his hand and stops her. It is a warm, chocolate colour against the whiteness of hers. When his fingers touch her lips, she kisses them.
‘Tell me what to do,’ she asks. ‘Please.’
‘I’ll never have children, but this does not bar me from having pleasure,’ he says.
She closes her eyes and feels his hand caress her neck.
She is to wait for the time of great commotion. When she sees the camels in the courtyard, she has to be ready. She will have to climb down the vine to the courtyard, wrapped in a servant’s yashmak. It is high time for the Princess might well have noticed the change in her. She has become careless, impatient. The other day, she turned so abruptly that one of the slaves dropped the tray of coffee cups and smashed them all.
‘Will you be there?’ she has asked, but the master of the maidens shook his head. No one should see them together. But under the jasmine bush, she will find a basket she will carry right outside the gates.
On the fourth day, at dawn, she hears a soft tap on the door. The Princess is fast asleep, and Sophie dresses quickly, in the dark. Pantaloons, a kaftan. The plainest yashmak she can find. The bells she stuffs under the big cushion in the corner.
There is no one in the hall when she opens the window. Outside, she holds on to the thickest of the vine, and doesn’t look down. For a moment she is the child in Bursa again, Dou-Dou who can outrun every boy and climb the tallest trees. Her hands tell her that the vine is old and sturdy.
On the ground, under the jasmine bush, she finds the basket. Inside there is a gift. Nazar Bonjuk, a blue glass eye to guard her against the evil look. She pins it to her kaftan and waits for what seems a long time, until the gates open and the caravan arrives. As soon as the first camel enters, she leaves her hiding place and heads to the gate. A servant on her master’s errand. When the time comes, the master of the maidens said, eyes will be averted, swords will stay in their sheaths, and no one will be sent after her.
The guard takes one look at her basket and waves her through.
Thomas
At Graf von Haefen’s palace, their arrival was anticipated with visible impatience. As Ignacy’s carriage approached the front courtyard, Thomas saw that one of the Graf’s Swiss guards was standing on tiptoe, shouting in the direction of the carriage house, summoning a groom to hold their horses. A tall footman who had been waiting in the open doors disappeared as soon as he saw the carriage roll in.
‘Gossip I take to be not unlike cancer,’ Ignacy said, oblivious to the signs of impatience they were the source of, concluding the monologue of the last ten minutes. ‘Insidious. Surfacing when we think it conquered.’ He hadn’t changed at all, Thomas thought, if one overlooked the grey in his hair.
Thomas was not paying as much attention as he perhaps should have. But why really? The countess, like most women of her class, had had many lovers so did it really matter if this German Graf had been one of these liaisons amoureuses? He could see why Ignacy was so keen on her unprecedented influence in St Petersburg. (‘After all, the Tsar, Thomas, is her close friend and, I take it, quite ready to listen.’) Why was it ‘unprecedented’, Thomas could not tell, but it had to have something to do with the late Count Potocki’s position at the Russian court. Or with the perennial Polish hopes, doomed fights for the lost independence. Yes, the Poles had been dealt a rotten hand. No other country had been eaten alive in the middle of the Enlightened Europe and told it was for her own good. But wasn’t it all part of what old Europe had always been? A whore siding with the strong and the mighty. Preening herself for the favours of the rich?
‘Only one does not die from being talked about, Ignacy,’ he said.
Graf von Haefen’s palace was a two-storey sand-coloured edifice in the Renaissance style. On the entrance gate of wrought iron two plump-looking angels were clinging to their posts. The footman, still panting from a rushed run upstairs and back, the gold trim of his crimson livery slightly dull at the edges, led them into a small vestibule whose tapestry of nymphs, monkeys, and flowers was reflected back in giant gilded mirrors. A few moments later, a thin, young woman appeared, black hair coiled around her head. The diamond on her neck, Thomas thought, could have paid for a good pair of horses. She extended her hand to be kissed. Ignacy took it first, in both hands. Then Thomas bowed over it, awkwardly, merely brushing it with his lips.
‘Mademoiselle la Comtesse! How is your dear Maman? Has she slept well? Has the pain lessened?’
‘You’ve arrived at last, Doctor,’ Mademoiselle la Comtesse said, ignoring Ignacy’s questions. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hands trembled slightly, but her voice was calm and composed. ‘Maman has been waiting all morning.’
The countess’s daughter was wearing a simple morning dress, and, Thomas noted with some bemusement, her right cuff was stained brown. Youth made her attractive in a coltish sort of way, but she could do with some fresh air and less coffee. There was a gauntness to her face he did not quite like.
‘Doctor Lafleur I spoke to Graf von Haefen about,’ Ignacy said, pointing at Thomas who bowed slightly, ‘straight from Paris. Heartily recommended by Baron Larrey.’
Larrey’s name made no visible impression on young Countess Potocka who led them upstairs and into a grand salon that had been turned into the sick room. The enormous empire bed, by the wall, was covered by a golden throw. A day bed and an armchair had been placed beside it. An Oriental screen hid the paraphernalia of illness, the medicine bottles, the chamber pot. The air was thick with the smells of almond milk, camomile, and mint. The underlying whiff of ammonia made Thomas clear his throat.
The countess was fully dressed, reclining on the bed, her eyes closed, black eyelashes evenly set in her white lids. She was breathing slowly, as if asleep. One look was enough to make Thomas see that the illness had melted the skin on her bones. She was deathly pale.
She doesn’t need a doctor, he thought, she needs a miracle.
His eyes lingered over two women standing by their mistress. One was obviously a maid, of rosy plumpness, flaxen braids wound around her head like a crown. The other, in her pale yellow dress, a cameo brooch pinned to a lace collar around her neck, he decided, was the nurse. Mademoiselle Rosalia Romanowicz. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to Ignacy’s words. He vaguely recalled the praises of her nursing and her devotion to her mistress. A daughter of a Polish hero and a Jewess from Uman. Or was that someone else entirely? He noted the thick auburn hair, pulled back and held tight by a barrette, in the shape of folded hands.
‘Good morning, Doctor Bolecki,’ the countess said, turning to Ignacy. The back of her head rested on the day bed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all this time.’
This was a reproach.
‘I came as soon as I could, Madame,’ Ignacy replied in what Thomas thought was too much of an eager schoolboy’s tone.
Thomas made a step toward the bed, but stopped, unsure if the examination should begin that abruptly. The countess’s eyes were clearly her most striking feature. Large, black and luminous eyes that lit up her face. Fixed on him, now, probing. Suddenly he became aware of how baggy his trousers had become and wished he had ordered a new pair.
‘Doctor Lafleur, great surgeon, Madame la Comtesse,’ Ignacy continued what to Thomas sounded like a mountebank’s pitch for snake oil and the elixir of youth. ‘The only one, Your Highness, I would trust with my own life.’ He mentioned the years spent at la Charité, lectures at Val de Grâce, and once again flaunted Baron Larrey’s personal recommendation.
‘Please, my dear Doctor,’ the countess said, lifting her hand to her lips, and Ignacy stopped. Her eyes did not leave Thomas for a second, taking in the aquiline nose, his reddened hands, and baggy trousers shiny at the knees.
To steady himself, Thomas thought of his father who had been beaten by his mistress for being inadvertently in her way. He recalled wounds masters had inflicted on other servants: burns on the hands and legs, cuts, lashes. In Russia, he reminded himself, serfs were called ‘slaves’ for a good reason. Once, in Vilna, he had been asked to treat a man whose back had been broken by the lashes his master commanded. When the man died a few hours later, his master promptly ordered another serf to marry the widow.
‘What are you thinking of, Doctor Lafleur?’ the countess asked in a low, raspy voice that held a note of irony as if she had guessed his thoughts and already found fault with his reasoning.
‘You should not exert yourself, Madame la Comtesse,’ Thomas replied and he approached the bed. He tried not to look at her eyes but to observe. The shade of her skin, the spots on the pillowcase were all hints as to what her body was harbouring inside.
‘Yes, Doctor,’ she said, tilting her head slightly. ‘From now on, your words will be my commands.’
The smile she gave him lit up her face making him think of a child offered a rare treat, a reward long lost, despaired over, but never forgotten. In the morning light that swept over her, Thomas thought he had seen the secret of her attraction, the way she must have appeared to all those men Ignacy spoke about. Men who had loved her over other women. Yes, he had seen through her pale, luminous skin no longer fresh and supple; through her parched lips folding as if ready to grant him secrets revealed to no one else. You will be my saviour, her eyes said. There will be no one else, but you and me. You have all my attention, all my loyalty. Nothing and nobody else matters.
‘I’ve dismissed Doctor Horn, my Russian doctor. He was not helping me at all.’
‘Are you in much pain?’ Thomas asked, piqued by the casual reference to a hapless man who had, undoubtedly, tried his best.
The countess stopped smiling. Her beautiful eyes were dry.
‘They say that my womb is rotting, Doctor, and it hurts. Is that what you want me to describe to you?’
‘But Madame la Comtesse,’ Ignacy protested. ‘Courage! You are in the best of hands.’
‘Let Doctor Lafleur decide,’ the countess said.
The nurse stepped forward, placing her hand on the patient’s arm with a gesture of appropriation. A firm, steady gesture meant as a warning.
‘Madame slept well last night,’ she said. Her voice was pleasant, her French just slightly foreign. Foreign, Thomas would reflect later only because, in spite of its flawlessness, he could attach it to no specific region or city. ‘But today she complained of pain in her back. On both sides.’
A bit over twenty, the thought flashed through his mind, still considering the possibility (however slight) of an operation. Good solid constitution. There was no frailty about her, no threat of fainting spells. She would not be a nuisance.
‘Rosalia, my dear,’ the countess said. ‘Send everyone away. Let the doctor examine me.’
‘Everyone,’ she added, seeing how her daughter hesitated. ‘Only Rosalia and Dr Lafleur will stay. No one else.’
The countess was, indeed, in the last stages of the disease that had been ravaging her for years: her face a wax mask over the skull; her arms, hands transparent. Thomas could almost see the tendons clinging to her bones. She had prepared herself carefully for this visit. Her clothes were of embroidered velvet, the kind maids were told to be careful with for their wages would never pay for the damage carelessness might inflict on the fabric. He had noted that the dress had been hastily altered to fit a thinning body. The lingering smell of musk and wild roses told him that she had bathed and oiled her body for this encounter.
As she stood up, she tried to hold herself straight, but the effort it required was obvious. Even in her slippers, flat and soft, she rested her arm on the day bed, to steady herself. The nurse jumped forward to hold her, but the countess shook her head.
Her eyes were now following his every move. She was, he decided, studying him very carefully: the way he stood, sat down, opened his bag, assembled his stethoscope.
He began to establish her medical history, the way he had been examining his patients at la Charité. She said she was fifty, but even though traces of obvious beauty were still visible, he could see she was not telling the truth. Closer to sixty, he would say.
‘How many children have you had, Madame?’
‘Ten.’
‘How many are still alive?’
‘Six.’
‘How old were you when your first child was born?’
‘Is it important?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your medical history is important.’
‘I was seventeen.’
‘Were there any complications?’
‘No, my children came easily to this world. They didn’t cause me trouble then.’
He asked if she remembered her childhood diseases, and she laughed. ‘In my childhood, Doctor, there were two kinds of diseases: those you survived and those you did not.’
‘How many of them did you survive?’
‘My mother told me of two times I was near death with fever. She prayed for me and the fever went away. I also had measles.’
He proceeded to ask her about her diet, her sleeping patterns, the ease of her bodily functions. She was frank and unembarrassed by his questions, a fact he noted with some pleasure for many female patients shied away from telling him about their bowel movements and gas. Many times it was their relatives who had to provide the information he needed for diagnosis. Countess Potocka said she ate very little, having lost her appetite quite some time ago. She was thirsty most of the time but couldn’t drink more than a few sips of water and found the simplest tasks tiring. The nurse was smoothing the folds of her patient’s dress, nodding as if to confirm her words.
‘When did you begin feeling the first symptoms?’
‘Five years ago,’ she said, ‘I was losing weight, but I didn’t think much of it. And blood.’
Blood stained her undergarments, but the Russian doctor maintained that this was normal for a woman of her age, clearly not a point of concern. It was as if her menses returned, she continued, and she felt a slight pain in her belly. At that time it was more of a thought rather than a feeling.
But this pain began bothering her. That mere thought, uneasiness, soon became a constant companion. She woke up aware of it, and it was with her until the time she fell asleep. This pain began interfering with her days, forcing her to come home earlier from a ball, a soirée, or even stay in bed for a day.
‘I’m so tired, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I cannot stand up without feeling faint.’
Thomas ascertained that the first haemorrhage had been almost five years before. The treatments did not work. The dismissed Russian doctor bled her for five consecutive days, told her she had too much heat in her and that she needed cold baths. She was advised to take a water cure in Carlsbad, which she did. The haemorrhaging did not stop.
Thomas turned away as the nurse helped the countess take off her heavy velvet dress.
‘I’m ready,’ she said and when he turned back she was wearing nothing but a light, batiste nightgown. He asked her to lie down on the bed.
All there was to know, the evidence of her life was here, written on her body. He could see stretchmarks from pregnancies, dry patches of skin on her thighs and breasts. In her youth she must have been agile; the muscles, even in their deterioration, still preserved a shadow of their strength.
Her breasts were still relatively full and smooth. Obviously she did not breastfeed her ten children. On her thin thighs there were scars. A series of cuts on one, three burnt patches on the other. Two scars on the inside of her knees clearly were smallpox inoculations—round hollow pockmarks, whiter than the skin around them. He could also see scars on her back, long, white traces of something sharp slashing the skin. She closed her eyes often as he was examining her and breathed with difficulty.
Her disfigured, chafed belly was hardened by the mass growing over her uterus. Fixed. That realization alone was the death sentence. If it were mobile, he might have attempted an operation, but he would never operate on a fixed tumour. He agreed with Le Dran that cancer had commenced locally and was later spread by the lymphatic vessels to the lymph nodes and then into the general circulation. That’s why when he performed mastectomies, Thomas made sure that he dissected the associated lymph nodes in the axilla.
He put no faith whatsoever in various remedies that promised to dissolve the tumour. He had also seen disastrous effects of caustic pastes. As far as research into cancer was concerned he hadn’t seen much of value. Bernard Peyrilhe extracted fluid from a breast cancer and then injected it into a dog. But all he achieved was that the animal howled so much that his housekeeper objected and the dog had to be drowned.
‘The pain,’ the countess whispered. ‘It’s keeping me awake at night.’
He placed the stethoscope to her chest. Her lungs, he could tell, were clear. The difficulty with breathing was a sign of the general weakness of the body. Her pulse was fast and weak.
‘The bleeding,’ the nurse interrupted, ‘has never stopped.’ The pad she removed quickly from between the countess’s legs was stained with dark blood. He asked to see it and noted that the discharge was caked, clotted thick.
The children who died in infancy, Thomas ascertained, had no abnormalities. The countess had had the mercury cure a few times, but he could see no other evidence of syphilis than her weakened heart. When he pressed a fingernail on her index finger, he could see a pulsating vein, a sign of dilated aorta. This, however, was not what was killing her.
‘The pain,’ the countess repeated.
It was this pain that had made the journey impossible to continue and had forced them to stop here, in this Berlin palace so kindly offered by an old family friend. This pain took up all her thoughts, made travelling impossible.
‘It’s in my bones, Doctor. It is in my womb. I cannot move without crying.’
Carefully he disassembled his stethoscope, and put it back inside its leather case. He wished Ignacy had not been ordered out of the room with the others, leaving him alone to pronounce his diagnosis. The nurse, no matter how capable, would not be of much help at the moment of truth. He expected a fainting spell, a fit of screaming. This was the time to talk of God, of afterlife, of grace and repentance. Of fate and resignation. Not his kind of talk.
‘Please, Doctor,’ the countess said. ‘I want to know.’
Ignacy would not agree with me, Thomas thought. What right do we have to take hope away, he would ask. Why cut off the flow of the vital force? Deprive the body of its only defence. But hope, as far as Thomas was concerned, was a fickle notion. He had come to value facts over feelings and so far, he had had little reason to doubt the wisdom of such an approach.
‘I cannot offer you any hope, Madame la Comtesse,’ he said, finally, defying Ignacy’s voice in his head. ‘The tumour emerges out of the womb. It feeds on your body. It is fixed. I cannot operate.’
She was silent. Her eyes followed the movement of his lips. The nurse, he had noticed, grasped the countess’s hand in hers. Two hands, one strong and smooth, the other like a claw of some starving bird.
‘Cancer is like an invasion,’ he went on. ‘Your body has fought bravely, but the battle has been lost.’ Encouraged by her calmness he told her that before death came she could expect a few better days. She would have more energy, not enough to walk, but clearly enough to take an account of her life and prepare herself for the end. He did not avoid her eyes as he said all this. Their beauty urged him on.
‘Thank you, Doctor Lafleur,’ she said when he put the rest of his instruments back into his leather coffer. ‘For telling me the truth.’
‘I’m truly sorry. All I can do is to try to diminish the pain.’
The countess closed her eyes.
‘I want to be alone now,’ she said.
Sophie
She is standing behind Mana, waiting for Monsieur Charles Boscamp, the internuncio of the Polish mission in Istanbul. The study in the mission building is a big, bright room with an enormous gilded desk in the centre. The portrait of the Polish King hangs above it. In it, the King is holding a map and is looking at an hourglass. As if he didn’t have time for all he wanted to do, for his face is sad and withdrawn. There are wrinkles of sorrow on his forehead. In his eyes she sees an uncertainty that makes her wonder what has he seen in his life to doubt like that.
Don’t touch anything, Carlo has warned her. It is for him that Mana reddens her lips with carmine, and makes them shiny with walnut leaves. It is hard to tell if he is a guard, a valet, or a butler in this house, for he is vague describing his duties; but sometimes he makes it sound as if the internuncio could not take a step without consulting him. For weeks Carlo has been a frequent visitor to their house, growing more and more alarmed by Sophie’s presence. The Sultana has been making inquiries, sending her spies to find out where her little ungrateful wisdom lived. No house in Istanbul would be safe for long.
‘Don’t show your face to anyone,’ Carlo has warned her every time, bringing his gifts of food and wine. Right from my master’s pantry, he always says, drawing their attention to the internuncio’s fine tastes. What he doesn’t see, he doesn’t miss, he also says. It is this master who will be Sophie’s salvation, her escape. Carlo has told him a story of a beautiful girl from Phanar who has to be saved from the ardour of a young, penniless pasha. It is Aunt Helena who lives in Phanar not them, but a little stretching of the truth never hurt anyone. A daughter of a friend of his, an honest Greek widow who wishes only for her daughter’s well-being. ‘A girl,’ he said, ‘worthy of a king’s bed.’
The internuncio is still not ready to see them, even if it is long past midday. The annual mission party to celebrate the King’s name day ended at dawn. Everyone had been there. The Russians, the French, the English. Diplomats and men of stature and importance. The whole house still smells of roasted meat and melted wax. Over a hundred candles, Carlo has said, all burnt to the very end.
Mana has placed a shawl over Sophie’s head. ‘We won’t let him see you right away,’ she whispers in her daughter’s ears. ‘Stand straight, but don’t look at him. Keep your eyes down.’
But Sophie cannot stop herself from looking. After the Harem, this is the most beautiful room she has ever seen. The walls are painted the blue of the sea and have its luminous shine. The glass in the window sparkles. On the shelves, there are rows of books bound in leather. Has the internuncio read them all? What sort of things are in them? Tales of other worlds, of ships sailing through seas and oceans? The maps on the desk are spread wide, their ends kept from rolling up by two white rocks, studded with white crystals.
She doesn’t even know the names of the lands drawn so beautifully on these maps. Her own ignorance angers her, for she can imagine another woman, a woman who can walk through such rooms with ease, who can talk about the books she has read and journeys she has taken.
‘Look down,’ Mana whispers, pinching her elbow.
The internuncio is not as she imagined him. She thought he would be big, with strong hands, ramrod straight. Instead he is small and sinewy with rouged, wrinkled cheeks. Like an apple stored for the winter. She doesn’t like his stained and crooked teeth either.
His name may be Charles Boscamp, but, even in her mind, she cannot bring herself to call him anything but the internuncio.
‘Better be right,’ the internuncio says to Carlo who towers over his master. There is no anger in this voice though. No tension. No, he is not quite as she imagined him, but his clothes are rich. A green velvet dressing-gown embroidered with gold, white stockings and silver clasps on his shoes. The powder from the wig has spilled over on his vest. His valet should be told to be more careful. She is trying to keep her eyes down, the way her mother told her to, but cannot stop watching him.
There is an air of importance around the internuncio, in the force of his steps, the upward curve of his spine. In the way he wrings his hands, which are the white perfumed hands of a noble. She can imagine him riding, his legs spurring a horse on to greater effort. She can imagine him touching her.
She likes that thought.
Mana is talking fast, assuring the internuncio of her beloved daughter’s meek nature and good humour. Dou-Dou will not be a burden to a gentleman. There is not a trace of moodiness in her, or anger. She is sweetness itself. She is love and devotion and purity, so unlike these French ladies she hears so much about, brought up to speak their minds and put their wants ahead of anyone else’s. Dou-Dou’s heart is filled with nothing but the desire to please. She knows how to be grateful.
‘She is my daughter,’ Mana says. ‘My beloved Sophie. You will not be sorry.’
The internuncio looks at her sharply, as if doubting all these words. She keeps her eyes down, fixed on the clasps of his brown leather shoes. She crosses her arms across her chest and trembles.
‘Is that what you really want, child,’ the internuncio asks. He has lifted her chin up. His finger is soft and warm. Dry like a handful of sand. His eyes are blue, like the sky over Bursa, the whites reddened by last night’s excitement. Can she really make these eyes see nothing but her?
She doesn’t say anything. Her chin rests heavily on his finger. Her hands clutch at the shawl that covers her breasts.
His lips are thin and pale, but there is a smile on them. A smile of pleasure.
He touches her lips, slowly, lingering over their shape. He parts them gently with his finger and touches her teeth. There is a taste to his skin, bitter, pungent but not unpleasant.
‘Leave her then,’ the internuncio sighs. He is so close to her that she catches a sour whiff penetrating his shield of musk and snuff.
‘Not now, My Illustrious Lord. Not yet,’ Mana says. ‘The girl is suffering from her menses and our Lord forbids a woman to lie with a man at a time like that. Wait a few days and I’ll bring her back to you, clean and scrubbed.’
Her mother is not leaving anything to chance. There will be a deposit of 1500 piastrs made with Kosta Lemoni in Phanar, the spice merchant who will keep the money in trust for Sophie, her daughter’s dowry to be paid to her on the day she stands at the altar beside her groom. There will be assurances for the rides in a carriage, and the new dresses, and shawls Dou-Dou likes so much. She could keep all the gifts he might give her: the dresses, the rings, the pendants.
‘Do you want my soul too, woman,’ the internuncio laughs, but Sophie can tell he is not angered by her mother’s shrewdness. He is a man of honour, he assures Mana. He will do what is right.
‘If she pleases me though,’ he says, his finger raised in the air as if he were warning her that not all is settled yet.
‘A virgin,’ Mana answers boldly, ‘needs a good teacher. Then she will learn how to please.’
He likes that. His laughter rings out, shaking his belly up and down, bringing moisture to his eyes.
He takes a small ring from his finger and slips it into Mana’s hand. They examine it later, carefully. Note the thickness of gold, and the shine of the small sapphire. The colour, Mana would tell her later as if Sophie hadn’t noticed it herself, of his eyes.
The crimson robe is wrapped tightly around him. Crimson, he will tell her later, is the colour of the Polish nobles.
The internuncio is sitting in a gilded armchair, a glass of wine in hand, legs spread. ‘Come,’ he says and she walks slowly, her eyes cast down. Slowly, holding her legs together, just the way Mana has shown her. Inside her, her mother’s fingers have slid a pessary made from a lamb’s bladder. She is not to upset it by too sudden a movement. A vial of dove’s blood is hidden in a secret pocket in the fold of her shift. When he is asleep beside her, she is to quietly spill the blood on the sheets. She takes small steps, her hips swaying gently.
‘Closer,’ he says. Her feet are bare, the skin tingling at the smoothness and richness of the carpet.
Her head is spinning with her mother’s words. Don’t look him in the eye. Hold your head down. Smile, don’t laugh. There will be time for laughter later. There will be time for dancing and for rejoicing when your future is assured. Not now, not yet.
‘He is a libertine,’ Aunt Helena has said. ‘For such a man there is nothing sweeter than corrupting innocence.’
Now her shift is lying on the floor. Her naked body is covered with a sheet, so white that it shines. Her hair has been beautifully braided and pinned high, revealing the nape of her neck. Her eyes have been kohled, lips reddened. At the hammam her mother has helped her scrape the hair off her legs and made a special nourishing face mask from an egg yolk and honey. Her skin when she touches it is smooth.
‘Closer. You are not afraid, are you?’ he asks, rising from the chair, putting his glass aside. There is another glass of wine on the side table, filled to the brim. It’s for her. She is to drink it with him. To pleasure. To love. To the good times.
‘Life is so short, Dou-Dou, so fleeting. Shouldn’t we suck the pleasure out of each moment?’
Nodding, she takes one more step toward him. She takes the glass in her hand and sips the wine slowly, avoiding his eyes. One small sip after another. The wine smells of oak and berries. It is heavy, with a tinge of sweetness.
‘Is it good?’ he asks.
She nods. She can hardly stop her eyes from darting to the sides. The internuncio’s bed is big. The four posts rise almost to the ceiling. Underneath she can see a white chamber pot, covered with a lid.
The wine dizzies her. She giggles and puts the empty glass back on the table. The room is hot and she feels drops of sweat gather and roll slowly down her back. The internuncio fills the glass again, but he is not asking her to drink, so she doesn’t reach for it.
She closes her eyes, just like Mana told her to do, when he parts the edges of the sheet and stares at her for a long, long time. He is muttering something in a language she doesn’t understand. He sniffs her like a dog might, nose close to her skin, tickling her. There is a grimace of displeasure on his face.
‘Your odour,’ he says. ‘Too strong for my taste.’
She reaches for the second glass of wine and drinks it fast. Then, standing straight, she lets the sheet fall down from her body. It’s her beauty that needs to speak now. The shine in her eyes, their brightness. The purity of her skin. She takes his hand in hers and kisses it. Kisses it again and again.
His hand caresses her breasts, her belly. Then it slides down, touches the mound of Venus. She shivers.
The internuncio calls it Mon Plaisir.
The robe unwraps. He is naked, his belly protruding, over a patch of grey curly hair. He turns his back to her and makes a few steps to lie on his bed. His bottom is sagging. ‘Turn your eyes away,’ Mana has said. ‘Tell him you are afraid. Tell him he is too big for you. That he will break you inside and make you scream.’
But she has no time to say anything for he sits on the edge of the bed and motions to her to come to him. He is smiling, his eyes narrow, like folds of fabric. The vein on his temple has thickened and darkened.
She sits beside him on the bed and waits.
‘Come on, girl,’ he says. ‘Hasn’t your mother taught you what to do? Should I have taken her instead?’
She shakes her head and crosses her arms, as if to cover her breasts. In his voice there is a note of anger, but perhaps she only thinks it is.
‘Do what I tell you then,’ he says.
She is thinking of the pessary inside her. What if it slips out. What if he puts his own hand there and retrieves it, calling her a liar. Sending her back to her mother. The orders are a relief, for at least she knows what to do to please him.
‘Lie down.’
He is a traveller in the land of Venus, he tells her, a true Explorer, for whom the sight of a Foreign Land is always welcome. A Land with all its Harbours, Bays, Rocks, Beacons and Caverns. Especially a Land not Ploughed before. A Land for which Directions have to be established. A Harbour which has to be thoroughly assessed to assure the safety of his precious cargo. Its Waters explored with Proper Instruments that will measure its width and depths.
Just do what he wants you to do, Mana has said. Make him happy.
The candles in the room make the shadows dance on the ceiling. She tries not to look at his sagging skin. His Instrument and his precious Stones are of excellent order, he assures her. She should thank her lucky stars.
She thinks of Diamandi’s smooth olive skin and the strength of his boyish arms. She thinks of their run across the fields, their mad run of desire.
She can smell the wine on his breath, or is it hers. Somewhere in the back of her mind questions hammer. What if she is not pleasing him? What if she is not what he has expected? What if she doesn’t know what a man wants?
He is grunting, crushing her with the weight of his body. He has pushed himself into her, as if he were squeezing in something soft and lifeless. His hands rest upon her breasts, pinching her nipples.
Her scream pleases him.
But it is only when he wakes up in the morning, when he pats her buttocks and tells her that the Fortifications were not very strong after all, not a match for his Vigorous Attack, and when he sees the blood on the sheets that she knows she has not disappointed him at all. He will not send her back to her mother.
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.’
They slash her dresses with razors. They smash the glass she keeps near her bed. They spit on her, on her bed, on the sheets folded neatly in the closet and smear it with something foul. Then they leave as suddenly as they have come. She hears their footsteps on the stairs, their braying laughter, their whistles of triumph. She gathers herself up, wipes the blood from her face, wraps herself in a blanket, and runs away to her mother.
The internuncio is shocked and very sorry. This is what his note says. He sends his own doctor to bleed her and clean the wounds. She has a fever and her body is rattled with shivers. ‘Tell my master,’ she says in a low whisper, ‘that I’ll die thinking of him.’
The doctor says she won’t die. ‘No one has ever died from a few scratches. Your bones are intact. You’ve just had a bad fright. Nothing more.’
Mana is sobbing in the corner, cursing her fate and her daughter’s misfortune. She doesn’t want to accuse anyone, but wouldn’t her daughter be safer within the Mission’s compound. Where she is now, anyone can find her. Only the other day someone came asking about a Greek girl called Sophie. A man with a red beard and shifty eyes. A sign that the Sultana has not forgotten.
By the time the internuncio comes to see her, it is already dark. The invalid is washed and bandaged, her breath is uneven, her forehead hot. ‘If she dies,’ Mana says, ‘I’ll never forgive myself.’
The internuncio is uneasy. He touches her forehead as a father might, checking how his daughter is feeling.
‘I thought I could trust you with my only child.’
‘Poor Dou-Dou,’ he says. In his voice there is something she could take for concern. When he raises the covers to check the bruises on her body, he is really looking at her.
He calls the doctor and takes him to another room. She can hear their raised voices, a barrage of questions followed by long explanations. When the two men emerge from the room, the internuncio smiles. To Mana he says that he will make sure Sophie gets the best of care. Two of his own servants will be at her disposal, day and night. She will have meals brought from his own kitchen.
‘Am I like Lais?’ she asks.
‘Only you won’t die,’ he tells her, holding her hand. ‘The doctor tells me you have a strong constitution. That it would take much more to kill you.’
She asks him to tell her about Poland.
He tells her of palaces with green lawns and hundreds of servants, hurrying around. Of carriages speeding through the streets, of balls where women of quality dance polonaises and mazurkas. Of tableaux vivants in which the court’s most beautiful ladies appear in the costumes of nymphs or muses.
What do they do?
Nothing. They pose as if a painter painted them. Let everyone admire their beauty. The themes of these tableaux often illustrate a saying or a proverb. Or an old story. Amor bending his golden locks over sleeping Psyche, Danae showered with golden rain.
She asks about the King. Do men tremble when they see him?
He laughs. In Poland, kings are elected and therefore weak. Their powers are limited by the golden freedom of the nobles. Liberum veto, he tells her. Remember that. It means that one Polish noble can stop the law, one Polish noble can break the Sejm for his own private reason. One Polish noble can oppose the king’s wish.
‘Eat, drink, and loosen your belt,’ he says, ‘that’s what the Poles care about.’
She listens.
He is not Polish by birth. His is a complicated story, he warns as if she were unable to understand anything of importance. He was born in Holland but his parents were French Huguenots. That of course would not mean anything to her, would it, but as any intelligent person would know, they had had to flee France to keep their heads on their shoulders. Having lost their estate, his parents could give him little more than his education. This he put to a good use, serving the Prussian King for seven years, and then moving on, to Poland, where the Polish King, then newly elected, recognized his outstanding qualities.
‘That’s why I became Polish, my little Dou-Dou. I thought it far superior to becoming Prussian.’
She doesn’t know when he jokes and when he is telling the truth. The Prussian court, he likes to say, is so enamoured with thrift that guests leave the table hungry and grey stuffing sticks out from the cushions of gilded chairs.
‘Can one just become Polish?’
He laughs. Not ‘just’. Not everyone. A foreign man has to prove his worth, document his belonging to the gentry class. It takes years of patient pleading, of favours bestowed on those with influence. But he has done all this. He even has a new Polish name now, Lasopolski, which means ‘coming from a Polish forest’.
She looks at him with pride.
A foreign woman, he says, reading the question in her eyes, has an easier path before her. All she has to do is marry a Polish noble.
He pinches her cheek as he says it, laughing at the thought. ‘Let this not turn your pretty head,’ he warns her. ‘Your father was a cattle trader. You should be happy with what you’ve got.’
She gives him a mischievous smile and nods.
In her dreams Poland is very close by, a place she stumbles upon almost by chance. She knows it is Poland for everyone speaks in a strange language she doesn’t understand, and she bows and asks to be taken to the King. ‘He will know who I am,’ she repeats. ‘The King,’ she says slowly, and makes the sign of a crown over her head. The people stare at her for a long time, nodding, but not moving at all.
The dream always ends before she can see the King, for when she starts running toward him, the distance between them never diminishes, as if she were running, on soft legs that sink into the ground.
When she is alone in the Polish mission she goes to the internuncio’s study to look at the King’s portrait. In His presence she practises her curtsying and gentle bows of the head. She looks into his blue eyes and says things like, ‘My soul thirsts for you, Sire.’ Or ‘The light of your eyes is too bright for your humble servant, My Lord.’ She says it in her new voice, which is sweet and lingering, thick like honey dripping from a spoon.
One day as she is practising what she thinks of as her manners the internuncio surprises her. Having hidden himself behind the door, he cracks with laughter and tells her that she is ludicrous, a true spectacle.
His hand is pinching her bottom as he says that. ‘Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself, Dou-Dou?’ he asks. ‘Forgetting your place? Your god-given station in life?’
‘The King,’ the internuncio says, ‘is in need of a bath attendant à la Turque.’
When she enters his study he is sprinkling sand over the letter he has just finished writing. He motions to her to sit and begins to read it out.
Massages given by men resembles torture so that one has to be a Turk or a devil to enjoy them. Those who had experienced such baths here say similar things one hears in Warsaw about male and female cooks, i.e. that the latter are cleaner and it is better to be served by them when it comes to the main dish. It is only in the company of a pleasant woman who can bathe, massage, and dry the body of her companion in so many ways, that one can imagine the delights promised by Muhammad to his faithful Muslims. I know of a girl from Phanar, sixteen years of age, who would please Your Majesty highly. I could arrange for her to travel to Warsaw as soon as I received word from Your Majesty.
Without thinking she rises and throws her arms around his neck. She covers his face with kisses. She jumps up and down with joy.
The internuncio likes being able to speak French to her. The true language of the salons, he says, of intelligent conversations. She will now take French lessons. Every day for three hours. If she doesn’t make progress, he will whip her.
‘I’ll take any punishment,’ she says meeting his eye, ‘if it comes from my master.’
‘What an eager girl you are?’ he murmurs, but she can hear from his voice that her exuberance pleases him. ‘Perhaps I should be a bit jealous?’
Jealousy, Mana says, is a good sign.
That day—when she prepares to give him his daily release—he pulls her toward him and places a kiss on her lips. A long, lingering kiss that she will remember for a long time for it tells her that—perhaps—she is not as worthless to him as he wants her to believe.
In the weeks that follow she can’t hide her excitement. When she is alone she likes to imagine herself in Warsaw, this city filled with palaces and green lawns. In her dream, the King is brought to the hammam by his attendants, but he waves them away and enters it alone. He is naked but for a thick towel wrapped around his body, a towel she will peel off. His skin is soft and perfumed, his hands slender. A bath pavilion she imagines covered with tiles. Musicians are cleverly hidden in tunnels, and they fill the royal bath chamber with delightful music. Warmed by the fire, her hands are soothing and strong. Around her she imagines jars with the scents of jasmine and musk. The King is tired after the long day of ruling. He talks to her, his only real friend. He tells her of all the people who want something from him, who make his life a misery. With each motion of her hands, she melts his tensions and soothes his sadness. She alone is different, the King says. She alone understands him, makes him laugh. She alone brings life back into his heart.
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Eva Stachniak
An alluring, exotic novel based on the life of the famous and much-painted courtesan, La Belle Phanariote. Perfect for fans of Painting Mona Lisa.‘Stories precede her. Whispers of delighted amusement at her exotic beauty, her mysterious past. Some swear she has been a Sultan’s odalisque. Others that she is a Greek princess. Princes praise her exquisite manners and her pleasing ways. And the King of Poland leads her in the polonaise.’Sophie, the Countess Potocki, is travelling with her entourage from St Petersburg to Paris, to consult with French doctors, when she stops at the Berlin palace of her friend, the Graf von Haefen.There, her whole extraordinary life during one of the most turbulent periods of European history comes back to haunt her – the many strands of her life, the many roles in which she has presented herself, the many biographies she has made up, the many lovers and protectors she has cherished and deceived. And still she continues to attempt to manipulate the lives of those around her.Brilliantly written, cleverly constructed with a strong cast of characters, both real and fictional, and vivid scenes, Garden of Venus is an alluring, sensuous and exotic saga which will delight readers of Tracy Chevalier, Philippa Gregory and Isabelle Allende.
EVA STACHNIAK
The Garden of Venus
For Zbyszek
Contents
Cover (#ub6b378a6-4a93-52c8-a072-56ea915bca7a)
Title Page (#u041546a1-1ecb-52c3-bd42-5a1a109a1b1b)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#u59e9448b-bf0e-559d-86a9-7b1ce86300f1)
BERLIN, 1822: Water (#ue148d078-b5d7-5ae7-8e0d-9c203eee418b)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
BERLIN, 1822: Laudanum (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
BERLIN 1822: Opium (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
BERLIN, 1822: Morphine (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ulink_f14a32f2-ac06-59cd-8f9b-e6ac9d86dc4a)
From Mes amours intimes avec la belle Phanariote
Bursa—where our story so humbly begins—a town spreading at the feet of Moundagnà or Mount Olympus is but a day’s journey from Istanbul. Mars, Neptune, and Venus had once been worshipped there, and they could still lay their claims to this land on account of the valiant warriors hailing from the Greek Empire and Byzantium, on account of sailors recruited here, and on account of modern Lais and Phrynes whose presence adorns the cafes and bawdyhouses of Istanbul. The worshippers of the Love goddess, I hasten to add, are of both sexes, for the boys ministering to the desires of the Byzantines are as beautiful here as the girls.
Beholding the multitude of beautiful faces in this mountainous and healthy region, one is tempted to say that, for such delightful fruit to be so plentiful, Aphrodite, sailing in her conch from Cytera to Paphos, must have unloaded in this land some of her precious cargo, her aphros, that essence of pleasure and beauty, the source of our very existence. For this region has always supplied the world with superior talents from the realm of Venus, natural talents capable, with little effort, of conquering the hearts of courtiers and kings. Is this a wonder that, in Istanbul, the terms ‘a girl from Moundagnà’ and ‘a prosperous girl providing fanciful pleasure’ have become synonymous?
In this town of Bursa, la belle Phanariote was born in the year of 1760, and very ordinary blood flows in her veins for she is the daughter of a cattle trader and among her relatives are many a ferryman, craftsman, and a shopkeeper.
(#ulink_a465e460-53b1-5c65-a8b5-610d61042d7c)Her childhood was spent in the fields and meadows surrounding her native town where she led that free and naïve existence so much praised by some philosophers of yesterday.
(#ulink_01d118e8-904c-50df-b157-7f182324a678) So much for the rumours of her descent from Pantalis Maurocordato, her kinship with the former rulers of Byzantium!
BERLIN, 1822: Water (#ulink_a77bf207-df0b-53a2-85e0-ca9efff51ee6)
Rosalia
In the end it fell to Rosalia to make sure that the imminent departure of Countess Sophie Potocka (accompanied by her daughter, Countess Olga Potocka, and companion Mademoiselle Rosalia Romanowicz) via Paris to the town of Spa for her prescribed water cure—had been announced three times in the Petersburg Gazette. Only then the passports could be collected and the padrogna—the permission to hire horses on the way—be signed by the Governor General.
The countess left St Petersburg on 12th July, 1822, (July 1st in the Russian style). ‘On Paris, I insist with utmost gravity,’ Dr Horn said—his voice raised, as if defending himself and not offering medical advice—‘French surgeons are far superior, even to the English.’ Before departure, everyone, including the servants, sat around the breakfast table to pray for a safe journey. They had already been to confession, asked forgiveness for their sins from everyone in the household, and exchanged parting gifts with those who would be left behind, sashes with sweet-smelling lavender, ribbons, holy pictures, and boxes lined with birch bark.
The morning was cold and wet, but, thankfully, the thunderstorm had ended and there was no more talk of omens, in spite of Marusya’s dream about her teeth falling out and making a clunking sound as they scattered on the marble floor of the hall. (‘Why didn’t you stop this foolish talk,’ Olga snapped, as if Rosalia could have.)
The kitchen carriage left first, with provisions, cooking utensils and a collapsible table, since the inns en route with their smutty ceilings and walls grown shiny from the rubbings of customers’ backs were not to be trusted. Two more carriages were packed with luggage, one carrying a trunk that opened to convert into a bedstead with pillows, so that the countess could rest during the journey.
Rosalia may have come to St Petersburg as the countess’s companion, but it wasn’t long before the timely administration of compresses and salves became more important than keeping up with the daily correspondence, greeting guests, or reading aloud after dinner. Which, as Aunt Antonia triumphantly pointed out in one of her many letters was not that hard to foresee.
Aunt Antonia, who liked to remind Rosalia that she was her only living relative and, therefore, entitled to such straightforward expressions of concern, might have forgiven Jakub Romanowicz for marrying a penniless Jewess only to die and leave his wife and child on her doorstep, but she could not forgive Maria Romanowicz for writing to Countess Potocka and begging her to take care of her only child. In Zierniki, the family estate near Poznań, a room was waiting for Rosalia. A room overlooking the orchard, with an iron bed the maids washed with scalding water each spring. A room where her mother’s old dresser still stood, its drawers smelling of dried rosemary and mint to keep the mice away.
There had been many times on this long journey when Rosalia pleaded with the countess to stop. The sick needed peace to regain strength and how was she to assure these precious moments of peace with all the packing, unpacking, and constant ordering of vats of boiling water (the grime of the inns had to be washed before the beds could be brought in). She too had her limits, and her nerves were strained to the utmost with this constant migration of coffers, crates, and trunks, the nicks and bruises of carelessness and neglect, futile searches for what should have been there and wasn’t. (The embroidered scarves and votive lights for the holy icon of St Nicholas had been left behind three times in a row and a servant on horseback had to be sent back to retrieve them.) Through August and September they had travelled for not more than a few hours daily, usually from four until ten in the morning, to avoid the heat, and then, perhaps, for two more hours in the afternoon. Often, in spite of the hot-water compresses Dr Horn had prescribed for the journey, the countess was in too much pain to travel at all.
It was already the beginning of October when they reached Berlin where Graf Alfred von Haefen put a stop to the nonsense of further travel. The Graf met the countess at the city gates and did not even try to hide his horror at the sight of her. ‘I forbid you to spend another hour in this,’ he said, pointing at the Potocki’s carriage. ‘My ears shall remain deaf to all objections. You’ll have to submit to a man’s judgement. This is the price of friendship.’ His Berlin palace would be at their disposal and so would be his own personal physician, Doctor Ignacy Bolecki. Bolecki, one of the best doctors in Berlin, was a Pole but had been trained in Paris. After assuring himself that the drivers understood his directions and would not attempt to take the wrong turn at the first junction—on moonlit nights oil lamps were put out to conserve fuel and that made the sign of Under the Golden Goose tavern where the right turn had to be taken barely visible —the Graf said to no one in particular that if an operation were truly necessary, a French surgeon would be sent for immediately.
By the time their carriage rolled into Graf von Haefen’s courtyard, the party was greatly reduced in numbers. Five servants with the kitchen carriage were sent back to the countess’s Ukrainian palace at Uman, leaving Rosalia with only two maids, Olena and Marusya, Agaphya, the cook, and Pietka, the groom. Mademoiselle Collard, the French lady’s maid had left in Poznań without as much as giving notice. ‘I have to look after myself,’ she said to Rosalia before leaving. ‘If I don’t, who else will?’ Always eager to question the refinement of Countess Potocka’s tastes, she did not fail to remind Rosalia that the white Utrecht velvet upholstery and green morocco-leather seats of the Potocki carriage had been chosen by Countess Josephine, the Count’s previous wife.
‘You are my prisoner, mon ange,’ Graf von Haefen said, opening the carriage door to help the countess step out into the chair that was waiting already, kissing her hand twice and holding it to his heart, ‘and there is nothing you can do about it.’
To Rosalia’s relief, her mistress did not protest. By the time the countess was resting upstairs, awaiting the final arrangements of her sick room, their journey, she calculated, had lasted three months, three days, and five hours.
Sophie
The heat has abated. It is September, the month of the smallpox. Her time now, Mana says. She is old enough and she will not be alone. Six of her cousins will have it too.
‘Help yourself so God can help you,’ Mana says.
In her hand Sophie is holding her mati, a blue stone, one of her birth presents. It has a black eye in its centre, and—like the red ribbon in Mana’s hair—it wards off the evil eye, human malice and the power of jealousy. Every time Maria Glavani hears that her daughter is growing up to be a beauty, she spits three times on the ground.
‘My precious Dou-Dou.’
Dou-Dou means a small parrot. A pleasing chirping bird everyone likes, everyone wants to touch and pet. Her true name is Sophie, or Sophitza. It means wisdom.
Mana cooks for three days so that there is enough food for the party: roasts slices of eggplant and marinates them in oil and lemon juice; cooks her best lamb ragout spiced with coriander. The meat will be tender enough to melt even in toothless mouths, and simmering for a long time, it absorbs the fragrance of spices. There is a big pot of soup with lentils and cardamom, pilaf sprinkled with cinnamon. And in the earthenware pot that is rarely used, chunks of feta cheese marinate in the best olive oil Mana can afford. Big jugs of country wine stand in the corner, by the window, like fat dwarfs. Strings of quinces and pomegranates, sage, mint, rosemary and savory hang from the beams. The water in the pitcher that greets the visitors at the front door has been drawn fresh from the well and is still cool. The hens are locked in the chicken coop and the goat is tied to the fence.
‘We are not beggars yet,’ Mana says. Maria Glavani’s daughter is not going to go wanting. There will be four kinds of sweet pastry, and baklava soaked with honey is already laid out on the plate with a yellow rooster in it.
Even the thought of such delicacies is a temptation. Dou-Dou has touched just the rim of the plate, but when she wants to lick the tips of her fingers, to savour even the smallest traces of sweetness, Mana stops her. ‘You are not an orphan,’ she says. ‘You have a mother who has taught you how to eat properly.’
The Glavani smallpox party will be remembered in Bursa for the food and the laughter. And for the singing too.
Rain, rain, dear Virgin,
Send snow and waters,
To moisten our vineyards
And our gardens….
The old woman who has the smallpox brings it in a nutshell. Her name is Agalia and she smells of soap and dried mint. Her own children have long left the house, but every one of her daughters sent for her when the grandchildren were old enough.
‘The best smallpox there is,’ Agalia assures the mothers and guests with a serious nod of her head and a smile of satisfaction. ‘Fresh as the morning bloom.’ There is a murmur of consent in the room, followed by sighs of relief. Maria Glavani has chosen well.
Dou-Dou giggles. Diamandi, most favourite of all her cousins, has poked her ribs, having pointed at Agalia’s grey hair. She’s so thin that her plait looks like a rat’s tail.
‘You are a happy one,’ Agalia says. ‘Good. Laughter is like sunshine. It makes everything grow. It makes people love you.’
The children are asked to present their veins. An ancient custom calls for four openings: on the forehead, on each arm and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross. Point to your thigh, Dou-Dou, Mana instructed her, up here. You don’t want a scar on your forehead. You don’t want anything to spoil your face.
Her cousins will all have the sign of the cross, but Sophie does as her mother had said. She turns around and points to the inside of her left thigh. Agalia hesitates for a split second. Then she rips the vein open and puts as much venom inside as she can fit on the head of her needle. ‘It won’t hurt,’ she mutters, but it does.
Sophie watches Agalia’s hands as the old woman takes an empty shell and places it on the wound. Bony hands with freckles, the skin paper thin. Watches as she binds it carefully with a clean strip of cloth.
One by one the children’s veins are opened and the venom is put inside while the mothers and the neighbours watch. Sophie saw a few frowns when she did not present her forehead and her arms to be pierced, but her mother’s laughter and the plates she fills with her best stew have lightened the mood. The women eat with delight, praising the softness of the lamb, the fragrance of the sauce. Maria Glavani is an excellent cook.
There will be singing and dancing, and secrets will be whispered in low voices so that the children would not hear them. In the courtyard, under the olive tree, the women will drink the young wine and laugh until their throats are hoarse. Mana will sing for them and they will dance, bodies swooning to the rhythm of the clapping hands.
The children will play together for the rest of the day, play hide and seek, and tag, chase each other until their mothers tell them to stop. Too much running around could upset the bindings. Seven days will pass and nothing will happen. On the eighth they’ll all come down with a fever.
‘Diamandi is sick already,’ Mana whispers. ‘And Costa and Attis.’
For two days Sophie stays in bed, like all the other children, her fever rising and falling, her head pounding. Mana, smelling of lemon blossom and laurel oil, wipes her forehead with a wet cloth. Cool and dripping with water which flows down her forehead and sinks into her pillow.
Mana sings to her, funny songs in which goats wish to become camels and flies envy the eagles in the sky. Mana’s cool hand on her forehead is an invitation to sleep. A tiny dab of the balm of Mecca on her finger, she rubs around the smallpox wound. It will keep her Dou-Dou beautiful, she says. Her epilda. Her hope for the future. Her only hope.
Thomas
Berlin, Doctor Thomas Lafleur thought, was a grim city, in spite of the profusion of oil lamps swinging on chains, illuminating small circles of the street below. The aftermath of the armies treading through these lands might account for some of this grimness, but Thomas liked to reflect on the universal human capacity for creating misery. He did not assume America would free him from the disgust he felt with the human race, but at least it would give him a chance.
‘Please hurry,’ Ignacy’s letter said, ‘my dear Thomas. The Art as we have learnt it serving the Great Man is unsurpassed here. I need you badly, and so does my new patient. America can wait. I cannot agree it will be such a Great Deliverance as you are trying to convince me, for Human Nature is the same everywhere. To me it looks more like a Great Escape. Graf von Haefen is sending his fastest carriage, so you can judge for yourself how much you are needed here.’
The mention of the fee he could charge for the operation, 50 louis d’or (and more if what I see is any indication Ignacy wrote), has been enough to make Dr Thomas Lafleur subject his body to the torture of travel. Like his colleagues, he may have saved thousands of lives on the battlefields of Europe, but his rewards had been meagre. A small pension of three thousand francs, a position at la Charité, a few anatomical demonstrations, a few lectures at the Val de Grace.
‘Sometimes I think I have dreamt all this,’ he had often told Ignacy. ‘Borodino, Berezina, Kowno, Waterloo. As if it were nothing but a mirage.’
Anticipating Thomas’s wishes, Ignacy had found him simple lodgings in Old Berlin, on Rosenstrasse, two rooms: a bedroom and a small parlour that could easily serve as his study. Frau Schmidt offered services of a maid, breakfast in the morning, and swore that the room would be kept warm if the French doctor were kept longer with his patient. ‘Another of your hiding holes,’ Ignacy had called it, this friend whose relentless lupine energy in the months of the Russian campaign Thomas had envied.
That the rooms looked poor and bare, with their simple poplar furniture and narrow bed, did not bother Thomas. After being tossed around and jolted in the black box of Graf von Haefen’s carriage, he was ready to welcome any place that did not move. Besides he had been an army surgeon long enough not to mind.
Sophie
Diamandi’s skin is as smooth as a fresh fig. ‘Catch me,’ she cries to him and reaches for the first branches of the oak tree at the edge of the meadow where the sheep graze. He is still standing, unsure of what he should do. After all, she is but a girl with scabs on her knees. Thick scabs she likes to tear off, impatient for the new pink skin underneath. She is but a girl, even if she can swim like a fish and steer a kaiak better than many boys he could name.
Even if she can outrun him. Make him gasp for breath. Make him pant right behind her like a dog.
‘Catch me, Diamandi.’
He makes the first cautious step toward the tree, his tanned hands reach toward the lowest of the branches. Then there is a snap of a twig. A curse. The sound of a body heaving up, pushing through the leaves. She is halfway up already where the branches are thinner, her hands grabbing, testing their strength. ‘Like a squirrel,’ Mana has said, in a voice half angry and half approving. A squirrel is agile and cheeky. Digs out bulbs and cuts the stems of flowers. A squirrel mocks the fat tabby who stalks it in hope of a skirmish.
From the top of the tree Bursa looks small and forlorn. Even the big houses of the rich seem insignificant, their gardens but patches of greenery, really no different to her mother’s small kitchen garden. The garden where the flowers are only allowed on the edges, for the soil is too valuable for ornaments.
‘Come on, Diamandi.’
He is right behind her, and gaining speed. His body is wiry and strong. Stronger than hers, even if not that fast. Her cousin is a ferryman and a shepherd. He is older by seven months, fourteen already, while she is still only thirteen and has not yet bled like a woman.
He wrestles with other boys, pins them to the ground, breathes in their faces until they squirm. His eyes are flashing with victory. He will not let her win that easily. He will hold her down, if he has to.
‘Dou-Dou!’
There is pleading in his voice and the promise of tenderness.
‘Dou-Dou!’
She stops right before reaching to the thinnest of the top branches that could still sustain her weight. She waits until Diamandi comes right behind her and orders her to climb down. ‘Right this minute,’ he says and his hand rests on her behind. Just for a moment, for a split second, but enough to make her skin hot and tingly.
‘You are crazy. Your mother would scratch my eyes out if anything happened to you.’
‘Then let’s see who can climb down first,’ she says.
She can feel his eyes on her as she climbs down. A tricky old tree. But she knows which of the branches are rotten through and would not support her. She trusts her strong hands. Her legs can wrap themselves around a branch and hold her. She does not mind the scratches on her skin. The thin trails of blood, the bruises. ‘A bit of pain always sweetens the pleasure,’ Mana says, laughing, her white teeth even and small. Her father’s eyes narrow at such moments. His fingers drum on the edge of the table, a funny rhythm, a staccato of sounds that end as suddenly as they started. There is something heavy in the air, a promise of a storm. She has often heard that her father is a jealous man, and that her mother gets nothing more than what is her due.
‘You are not to do it ever again,’ Diamandi says. What a voice he has, this boy-man. Pretending to be angry and yet wanting her to defy him. Daring her to shake her head and laugh in his face. Daring her to tell him he is nothing but a boy.
He has jumped off the last branch and is now holding her down. His hands are cool and dry. There is a smell of dried grass around him and of fresh milk. She wriggles away.
To this lithe, olive-skinned boy she is a mystery, the half-wild creature of his dreams. The wind is now cool against her cheeks. ‘I’ll race you,’ she cries and runs until, by the olive grove, he pulls her down onto the soft grass, kisses her lips and pushes his tongue through her teeth. The air is again sweet with blossoms, moist with the sea, and she is shivering.
‘I love you more than my own soul,’ he whispers, and for now she believes him.
Rosalia
Two tall German grooms who had brought the big empire bed trimmed with white satin asked where Rosalia wanted it. ‘By the wall,’ she said and pointed to the place far enough from the windows so that the light would not disturb the invalid. The grooms nodded and lifted the bed again. They had already removed the Persian carpets and, once the bed was in place, they would hang a thick curtain of garnet velvet that could be drawn across the room.
Countess Potocka was resting, waiting for the necessary transformations of the grand salon. (The Blue Room suggested by the Graf had proved too draughty.) In the afternoon light, her pallor was turning ashen. Her eyes, wide, liquid and filled with pain, followed Rosalia as she placed a bowl of fresh figs by the makeshift bedside. The countess reached and touched Rosalia’s hand.
‘Merci, ma fleur,’ she whispered.
Graf von Haefen had sent basketfuls of delicacies from his Potsdam estate; figs, pineapples, oranges from his greenhouses, fish from his ponds, venison from his forests. ‘Which Madame won’t even try,’ Marusya had said. Rosalia had to admit that flowers would please her mistress better. Roses in particular and orchids.
Only a few days before, at a roadside inn, the countess still had enough strength to make a few long-awaited decisions about Sophievka, her beloved garden right outside Uman. Since Dr Horn’s insistence that surgery alone could stop the haemorrhaging, there was no more talk of moving to the Uman palace for the summer (another disappointment that had to be endured). But the countess asked Rosalia to copy the drawings of the mountain ash that she wanted her chief gardener to plant in the spring. Sturdy and resistant, I am assured it will withstand most severe frosts, the countess dictated. A bed of purple irises, a symbol of a great orator and a great leader, was to be planted around the marble bust of Prince Joseph Poniatowski. New paths were to be charted. Make them lead to a vista, or a building. Otherwise a wanderer would turn back in disappointment. The giant oak by the river was not to be touched. Don’t trim the branches, a human hand has no right to correct such beauty. An oak once wounded, loses its primal force and will always grow slowly.
‘The bed will be ready soon,’ Rosalia said, but the countess only managed a slight nod.
Outside, in the courtyard, the hooves of the horses made a hollow noise; carriage wheels clattered and squeaked. Soon, Rosalia thought, Pietka would have to spread a straw carpet on the stones to muffle all noise. And he would have to stop singing, as he was doing now.
In Vinnytsia, on the border,
At the foot of a grave mound, on the bank of the Buh River,
Under the walls of the Kalnytsky charterhouse…
This palace in the heart of Berlin would provide some relief. From what she had seen, Rosalia could tell its workings would be flawless. Since their arrival, the marble floor in the entrance hall had already been washed and wiped dry. After mentioning that charpie would be necessary to dress the wounds and that the French surgeon would likely ask for an old mattress, she was reassured both would be procured without delay. Frau Kohl, the Graf’s housekeeper, had also brought a pile of old sheets, well-washed and soft.
Rosalia wiped her mistress’s face with a sponge dipped in warm, lavender-scented water, washing away stale sweat and caked powder. Her underclothes were again stained with blood, dark and clotted with what looked like pieces of chopped liver. Mademoiselle Collard used to complain she was a lady’s maid not a nurse. ‘Neither are you,’ she reminded Rosalia. Her family’s land may have been sequestered by the Russian Tsar, but Rosalia’s father had been a Polish noble and it was her duty to guard her own station in life. It was all too easy to slip down, let herself go. With that Rosalia had to agree, as she retrieved clean undergarments from a travelling trunk and helped the countess change into her lilac dress with little embroidered rosebuds, but then the question remained of who would do it. The maids had their hands full with all the unpacking, mending and ironing. Mademoiselle la Comtesse conveniently managed to vomit every time she caught the whiff of the basin. (‘She has her father’s constitution, Rosalia. Nature cannot be helped,’ the countess said.) Only this morning—having seen the bloodstained undergarments the maids were taking away to be soaked in cold water—she became so agitated that Rosalia had had to give her a double dose of laudanum to calm her down.
‘I don’t want to see anyone but Graf von Haefen,’ the countess whispered, closing her eyes. ‘Let my daughter receive all other visitors.’
‘The French doctor will be here soon,’ Rosalia said. She was trying to foresee what else the surgeon might ask for. If he came from Paris, he would not have assistants. Doctor Bolecki would be of help, but this might not be enough. She wondered if the two grooms were strong enough to hold the countess down. And if they would withstand that much blood and the screaming.
‘I’m so tired, Rosalia,’ the countess whispered.
The pain was never far away, crouching inside her, but it was letting her breathe. It might let her fall asleep again. ‘Mademoiselle Rosalia, you should try to lead her thoughts away from death,’ Graf von Haefen had insisted with great firmness, before leaving. ‘Talk only of what brings her joy.’
The gardener reported that Sophievka was already covered in snow. He had seen icicles hanging from pine trees and from the gnarled branches of the oak tree by the lake. In the greenhouses roses and orchids were blooming and he wished he could send the countess some blooms the way he used to send them to St Petersburg, in a carriage kept warm with braziers. The nettle tree was doing fine and so was the Turkish filbert from Caucasus. He had planted it in complete shade, as instructed.
‘The nettle tree, I was assured,’ the countess said, ‘would not sink in water.’
When her mistress was dressed, Rosalia combed her hair, grey and so much thinned by her illness. Then, from the red travelling case, she took a black wig, a shapely halo of black locks, trying not to pull as she pinned it to her hair.
‘By the summer, you’ll be strong enough. We’ll go there together.’
The countess gave her the most beautiful of her smiles.
Perhaps, Rosalia thought, happiness could only come from such simple moments. From knowing that the touch of her hands calmed the sick and eased their pain. ‘Which is precisely why she would take advantage of you,’ Mademoiselle Collard would warn. ‘She already has two daughters, you know.’ It was in Rosalia’s disposition to take unending duties upon herself, feel responsible for the most insignificant of things. Like the lost charcoals, a whole box of cedar of Lebanon: Olena, the maid who had packed the dinner service at the last stop, was sure she put it in the same box with the silver. ‘Surely,’ Mademoiselle Collard would mock Rosalia’s agitation over this trifle if she were here, ‘she can afford to lose a box of charcoals. Isn’t she rich enough?’
The countess, her eyes closed, looked like a waxen figure. It was only the faint warmth of her skin that told Rosalia her mistress was still alive.
Sophie
Her cheeks still smart from her mother’s slaps. One, two, three. A fool. She is a fool. Or a whore. What was she thinking? What was on her mind? Doesn’t she understand anything? Anything at all? Hasn’t she seen and heard what human tongues can do?
The salty taste of blood inside her mouth frightens her. The memory of happiness, of lightness is gone. Instead, she has to face her mother’s fury.
‘What did he do?’ Mana screams and pushes her on her bed. Another slap, weaker than the one before. Her skirt is lifted, her legs spread. She has been damaged, nibbled at and spat out. Tried and left aside. Who will buy damaged goods now? What man in his right mind would pay for what he can have for free? Who would keep a cow if the milk comes for nothing?
Mana is poking inside her, feeling for the damage. How cruel her fingers can be. How rough.
‘Was he hard,’ she asks. ‘Did he put it in all the way?
‘Dou-Dou, I’m talking to you. Answer me, girl.
‘Tell me everything. I’m your mother.
‘It’s for your own good.
‘Plenty of dirty pots in the kitchen that need to be scrubbed. The maid can be let go, the scruffy thing she is, and dirty too. You want dirt? You can scrub the pots with ashes. See how your hands redden from scalding. See how your knuckles grow and crack open. See how they bleed.
‘Is that what you want, girl? Is that what I gave you your life for? Is that why I screamed with pain for the twelve hours you took to be born? Tearing me apart, almost killing me?
‘And for what? A poke from this runt? This good-for-nothing? This high-and-mighty cavalier whose tongue is stronger than his dick. Who now walks around the town in his glory, telling everyone what you let him do.’
In the end Mana’s tears are harder to bear than her anger. Seeing her hide her face in her hands in shame. Hearing her sobs.
‘All I ever wanted for you is now lost.’
Dou-Dou wants to scream that this is not true. Isn’t she still her mother’s beloved daughter as she was a day ago? But her mother only looks at her with unseeing eyes.
‘You do not know the power of the human tongue.’
The sun is caught in Mana’s raven black hair. If angels have faces, that’s how they must look. The shape of the brows enlarging the eyes, the cheeks full and smooth. The lips like cherries, glistening from the tears that have rolled down her cheeks.
‘Is that what you want girl? Is that what I gave you your life for? Is that why I screamed from pain for the twelve hours you took to be born? Tearing me apart so badly that I could have no more children?
‘I’ve always wanted my daughter to do better than I’ve done. Not to waste what God has given her. Not to throw it away. Was it too much to hope for?’
Konstantin Glavani comes back from the tavern. Even from his steps, Dou-Dou can tell that he knows. From the force with which his heels hit the ground. From the way his fist lands on the table. With a thump. With choking anger. Something falls off, rolls, smashing on the floor.
There is a slap, then another one, and a scream. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ he yells. ‘Is that what you teach her? To spread her legs for every loser in Bursa?
‘To be the talk of the town?’
The door opens and Sophie’s body softens like a kitten readying itself for a fall. She is lying on her stomach, sobbing into a pillow and her father is standing beside the bed. His breath is all she hears. In and out, in and out. In his big hand she can see the handle of the whip Konstantin Glavani uses to corral the sheep.
This silence frightens her more than Mana’s screams.
He lifts her skirt, her shift, and exposes her buttocks. If she doesn’t tense them, it will hurt less. The swish of leather through the air comes first, before the spasm, before the warmth of her pee dissolving into the mattress. When the strap touches her skin, she feels another spasm. And another until there is nothing but burning pain.
She doesn’t scream. Her face is buried in the pillow. Tears soak into the embroidered fabric. Mana had stitched these birds singing on branches, their beaks open wide. And the tall cypresses that sway in the wind. She did it in another time when Sophie was but a child and wanted to know about everything. How to make such a bird look real. How to make a thread go through the eye of the needle.
Her father stops and turns her over. ‘Look at me,’ he says. ‘See the man who can’t look his friends in the eye. Who has to listen in silence as his daughter’s name is dragged in filth. The man whose daughter is a whore.’
She looks at him. He is standing above her, big body swaying, his breath smelling of wine and roasted lamb. Red blotches have sprung up on his neck, his mouth is twisted into a grimace of disgust. She remembers that his fingers can bend a horseshoe. He will not be made the laughing-stock of Bursa. He will not allow his daughter to disgrace his name. He will kill her first, and then kill himself.
‘A brood mare.’
He lifts his hand in the air. A big hand, calloused and reddened, with chapped skin on the knuckles. Will her neck snap with a crack, like that of a chicken?
She fixes her eyes on him. Everything can happen now. Everything is nestled in such moments, the malice, the revenge, the pain. The hand falls down slowly, limp, alongside his body. It clenches into a fist and then relaxes, defeated.
How does one escape the power of human tongues?
She has heard of a man slashing his daughter’s face with a razor. Of burning her cheeks with hot coals to scar her beauty. Her father keeps looking at her, forcing himself to keep looking, until, in an instant, he turns on his heel, and walks away. The door slams after him, and she wipes the tears from her eyes and cheeks. There is a pitcher of water and a basin her mother has left for her, and she splashes cold water on her face. Then she squats over the basin and washes the place between her legs, still wet from her pee. Where the strap hit her, she can feel needles of pain in a web of punishment, the memory of her defeat.
Konstantin Glavani announces that they are leaving Bursa.
She watches his quick, determined steps, listens to the stomping of his heels on the floor. Outside, the earth smells of camomile, lemon blossom, and laurel. Her friends are in the fields, running or riding horses. Or making bonfires on the edge of the river. Diamandi is there too, but she won’t see him. She is not allowed to leave the house of shame.
The stories flow, thicker and more poisonous each day. The stories men whisper in low, lusty whispers. The stories women repeat with gasps of disbelief. There will be no end to them now, no end to the malice of lashing tongues. The torrent of gossip will follow her until the day God pleases to call her to His presence and account for her sins. An egg once broken cannot be made whole again.
Konstantin Glavani is pacing the room. He has been punished for the sins of the flesh, for marrying beneath himself. For being a fool and closing his ears to the words of the wise. Slash her throat, people tell him. Make her kneel in the dust and cut your daughter’s throat. Make her bellow like a heifer when she sees a knife raised above her head.
What a fool he has been for thinking that God has blessed him when his daughter was born. For thinking his little Dou-Dou would be the light of his soul, the blessing of his old age. For thinking that he, a father of but one child, would sit in her garden one day and rock his grandchildren on his knees.
This is not what God in His wisdom has prepared for him. The sins of women are bred in the bone, working their silent way from the day a woman is born until the day she dies. He should have known that this daughter of his would be his Gehenna. The day she was born he should have sprinkled ashes on his head.
Women are like bitches in heat, bringing nothing but trouble, but Diamandi is no better. Diamandi is a traitor. A man of no honour, no family loyalty. For what he has done to his own cousin, for bragging to his friends about it, he should be hung from the tree. Or branded on his forehead like the liar he is. But Konstantin Glavani is not a murderer. He is not a Turk. He is a Christian man. A Greek. A man of honour. If he were a lesser man, he could have dug out some dirt too. Everyone knows what Diamandi’s elder brother is doing. A barber, his father says. Working for a Turk, a man from Istanbul who calls himself a philosopher. A worshipper of Sodom who carries his lovers’ powdered filth in the box around his neck.
‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,’ he says.
Has he forgiven her?
Mana is listening, too, her silence dark, furtive. There is a black bruise around her left eye and her neck has red blotches on it. Her eyes rest on Sophie, tell her to keep quiet, to wait it all through.
Yes, this daughter of his is his burden, but Konstantin Glavani will not refuse it.
He has already sold all his cattle. For a song. For a quarter of what the herd is worth, but such is the ruth-lessness of those who know he cannot afford to wait. The house will be rented to a distant cousin. An honest man, even if a bit slow in the head. They are going to Jerusalem, to the Holy Grave. The three of them, together. To beg God Almighty for forgiveness.
When their journey is over, they will not come back here. They will go to Istanbul where no one knows them. Where, with the money he got for his cattle, Konstantin Glavani will buy a position with the Istanbul police. He will be in charge of Christian butchers in the district of Pera, and there no one will dare spit after him when he walks the streets.
Rosalia
In the room Frau Kohl has chosen for her, on account of its closeness to the grand salon, Rosalia took out her dresses from the travelling trunk, gave each a vigorous shake, and put them in the wardrobe which smelled of varnish. That’s also where she placed her dark grey overcoat, but even then the wardrobe was only half filled. The three hats and two bonnets went on the top shelf. Her petticoats and chemises filled only one of the five drawers.
‘An operation,’ the countess had said, ‘cannot be on a Tuesday.’
‘If there is an operation,’ Dr Bolecki had said. The examination had been a short one, the smile on his face forced.
From the bottom of the trunk Rosalia took out the miniatures of her parents, Jakub and Maria Romanowicz, and placed them on the small table beside her bed. The silver-framed miniatures had been painted right before the Ko?ciuszko Insurrection of 1794 and the final defeat, before the day the word Poland had been erased from the map of Europe. The painter was not skilled. The expression of the two pairs of eyes were identical, as if mere copies of each other. Both her parents were looking ahead with melancholy, as if they could already see the future.
‘It is that Tuesday is a bad day,’ the countess had said.
‘Will it hurt much,’ Olga asked. The way she bit her lower lip touched Rosalia more than the sobs she sometimes heard at night; a sign that Olga too feared the worst. Perhaps because the sobbing was invisible.
In the miniature her father was in the Ko?ciuszko uniform, a white peasant sukmana, a cravat tied in a bow under his chin, a symbol of Equality and Freedom for all Poles. His face was clean-shaven and, like Ko?ciuszko, he was not wearing a wig. Her mother’s black hair was parted in the middle. It encircled her white, porcelain face and dissolved into the background. A string of pearls was woven in her hair and she was holding a fan with which she covered her chest. Rosalia remembered that fan. When it was flicked open, Artemis appeared. The goddess with a leopard’s skin on her shoulders, its limp paws hanging behind her like a train. Where was it now? Lost in one of their many moves, forgotten perhaps in one of the trunks Aunt Antonia was keeping for her in the dusty attic in Zierniki.
You have already turned twenty-six, Rosalia, and I shall never believe you are foolish enough to trust your mother’s misguided hopes. Did she really think that being Count Potocki’s godchild would give her some special rights? That it would make the count’s wife take special care of her orphan? Sometimes I think it best your dear father had not lived to see this.
Two years before, on such an October night as this one, Rosalia had listened as her mother moved about her bedroom. Drawers opened and closed; the floorboards creaked. The smell of burning paper wafted through the doors. For a moment it seemed that she could hear sobs but, when she rose from her bed and listened, what she took for crying turned out to be the sound of wind in the chimney.
‘The matter has to be treated most seriously, Madame Romanowicz,’ the surgeon said. He looked pale in his black suit and drops of perspiration appeared on his forehead. He wiped them off with a chequered handkerchief. ‘Most seriously, Madame,’ he repeated. Her mother’s eyes had a vacant look Rosalia didn’t like. The examination had been short. The breast was swollen, the tumour had grown to the size of a plum. Time had already been lost, too much time. The surgeon spoke of women who withdrew from the world suffering only a trusted nurse to come and wash the fetid running sores as their breasts were eaten away, drowning in filth.
He would not reveal the date of the operation. He never did. All he could do was to offer a warning of two hours at the most, for anything longer would only be the source of undue agitation. He would need old linen, charpie, old undergarments freshly laundered. Soft. An old armchair. No carpet. Nothing that could be splattered with blood and would be hard to wash. ‘But first, Madame Romanowicz will have to sign a permission. This is of utmost importance. Without it I cannot proceed.’
The note from the surgeon came as they were sitting down to breakfast. Today at ten o’clock. The maid brought it on a tray, perched against the coffee pot.
‘I’ve made my peace with God. There is nothing else for you to do,’ Maman said. She had been to confession, she took communion and asked for extreme unction. Seeing the alarm in Rosalia’s eyes, she assured her that the last rites had been known to heal the sick.
She won’t die, Rosalia repeated to herself, registering the progress of fear. In Zierniki, in winter, she had seen ducks imprisoned by ice in the pond. At first they were still able to move, until the ice thickened and refused to crack. Then to free them, the grooms had to hack at the ice with an axe and take the birds to the warm kitchen to thaw.
I won’t let her, she repeated over and over again. I won’t.
When the doctor arrived with three assistants, all dressed in black, Maman emerged from her room in a light batiste nightdress. If she were afraid, Rosalia could not see it. Her voice was steady and her eyes dry.
‘I want all the women to leave,’ the surgeon said. The maid scurried in the direction of the kitchen and closed the door. Her muffled sobs reached them a moment later.
‘I’m a soldier’s daughter,’ Rosalia said. ‘Let me stay.’
The surgeon glared at her as if she were creating difficulties, but she met his eyes without flinching.
‘If you faint, no one will have the time to attend you,’ he said sharply.
‘I won’t faint,’ she replied. Maman looked at her with relief.
Bare of furniture, with just the armchair in the middle covered with three white, freshly laundered sheets, the parlour looked bigger and far too bright. The wallpaper was darker where the picture and the oval mirror had hung. The ceiling, Rosalia saw, needed a fresh coat of paint. Her mother’s hand when she held it was cold and dry but then, without warning, perspiration broke out.
‘When you were giving birth, Madame,’ the surgeon asked. ‘Did you scream?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then I want you to scream—scream as much as you can.’
The operation was performed in absolute silence. The doctor seated Maman in the armchair, gave her a glass of wine cordial to drink, and covered her face with a cambric handkerchief. Then he motioned to the tallest assistant who placed a pillow under her head and positioned himself behind. The other two assistants silently came to stand on each side of the armchair, holding her arms. Her mother motioned to them that it was not necessary, but when, through the fine mesh of the handkerchief, she saw the glitter of steel she tried to stand up. The men held her so fast that she flinched.
Nothing, no past memory of love would ever equal this moment when Rosalia could feel her mother’s fingers clutch hers like clamps and saw her knuckles becoming white. It did not seem odd that her own body registered her mother’s pain. That this pain united them, sealed them to each other. That together, she with a clear eye and her mother through the mesh of her handkerchief, they watched as the surgeon made the sign of incision in the air, with a straight line from top to bottom of the breast, a cross and a circle. That they shuddered together when the blade cut horizontally, nearly in the direction of the rib, a little below the nipple. That the scream that came, came from them both.
The two assistants on either side pressed their fingers on the arteries, and the surgeon began the cleaning, his hand separating the tumour from the skin and muscles, cutting off the cancerous tissue. Blood splattered his hands and arms. There were a few drops of it on his face. When Rosalia heard the blade scraping the breast bone, she could feel her mother’s hand loosening her grip. Maman had fainted and for a moment something close to panic overtook her until she reminded herself that, unconscious, her mother was free from pain.
The procedure took twenty minutes. There were operations that could be performed well and fast, but this was not one of them. The whole of the diseased structure had to be removed, the surgeon said afterwards, and he could not afford to miss anything. ‘I can amputate in under two minutes,’ he said. ‘But with this, no half measures will do. If the reoccurrence of the mischief is to be prevented…’
Rosalia was so hopeful then. The surgeon assured her that the operation had gone well and showed her how to dress the wound, applying a large, thick compress of charpie to the sutures and binding it on with a flannel roller. It didn’t take long for blood to appear through all the bandages. Maman’s face had lost all its colour and her limbs all life. The assistants carried her to her bed, and Rosalia was told to change her dressings every two hours and watch for signs of infection, for the weakening of the body.
At midnight her mother opened her eyes, but she did not seem to know where she was.
‘He is standing by the window,’ she kept saying.
‘Who is?’ Rosalia asked. All she wanted was to throw herself into her mother’s arms, to hide her face in her breasts the way she did when she was a child. Instead she could still hear the knife scraping against the bones.
‘He is pointing at his heart.’
Her lips were parched and she drank a few sips of water. ‘I am going with him,’ she said. ‘I have to.’
Rosalia tried to quiet her. The surgeon had assured her the operation was a success. The cancer was removed, all of it. ‘You must be strong, Maman,’ she pleaded. ‘You cannot leave me alone. You cannot leave your only child.’
‘I have to go,’ her mother whispered and closed her eyes. ‘He is waiting for me. He will take me away.’
Seeing that the blood had penetrated the dressing again, Rosalia replaced it with a fresh one. Maman did not open her eyes, but she no longer seemed in pain. Perhaps, Rosalia thought, the crisis had passed. She promised herself not to fall asleep, but the silence and her mother’s calm, soft breaths proved too much. When she woke up, startled, it was still dark. The windowpanes were covered with the white, intricate patterns she loved to watch in Zierniki where the windows froze for most of the winter. Beautiful white ferns, branches of trees with spiked leaves, flowers of tiny petals that reminded her of figures her father drew to amuse her: pentagons, hexagons, octagons.
The room was silent and still. Death she thought was like that. A moment of loss too profound to comprehend. A moment in which love fuses with pain. A moment from which there is no now and no future. Nothing but memories of the past, crumbling and fading with time.
She didn’t have to touch Maman’s face to know she was dead.
Just as she did on winter days in Zierniki, Rosalia breathed at the windowpane. When the ice petals melted, she peered through the hole and saw a boy pass by. He was carrying a lantern carved out of a turnip, slits in its side let out enough light for him to see where he was going.
There were a few other objects in Rosalia’s travelling chest but these would remain unpacked, a testimony to the temporary nature of her stay in this Berlin palace: a small wooden star she had found among her mother’s things; her father’s snuffbox with the Rights of Man engraved on the lid; a black silhouette of Ko?ciuszko’s profile and three sketches of Napoleon in a wreath of oak leaves—her father’s heroes.
These treasures Rosalia kept locked in a mahogany box, underneath her clothes in the trunk. It was a flimsy hiding place. Any of the servant girls might want to go through her things, try on her dresses or petticoats. Smell her rosewater or jasmine oil and dab a few drops on her brow. In St Petersburg handkerchiefs and sheets of paper disappeared routinely. The paper was what the cook used to curl her hair with. ‘If it wasn’t meant to be taken, it wouldn’t be lying around,’ Rosalia had heard Marusya mutter.
Her back hurt from lifting sacks of clothes, from helping the countess stand up. Taking off her shoes and her stockings, she walked about the room, until her aching feet were consoled by the smoothness of the carpet. If only Olga cared to help more, but some people were born to luxury and some were not. ‘It’s your own mother,’ Rosalia was often tempted to say, but never did.
Her most excellent bed, as Frau Kohl—the Graf’s housekeeper—had described it, did not help. It felt too big, too cold. Rosalia turned and tossed around, trying to warm up the clammy sheet, wondering if she should call for another eiderdown. There were noises outside her room; German words exchanged by the footmen; the sounds of doors opening and closing—the life of this palace, temporarily interrupted by their arrival. She recalled Marusya’s talking about strange noises in the maid’s room, like someone’s knocking on the window-pane, and complaining that the room smelled of mice. ‘Perhaps the Count has come for the Mistress,’ the cook had said.
Sophie
She opens the gate. The fence of their Istanbul house is made of staves of wood fastened with wire. The wind pushes her back, and the first rain drops fall on her face. She is thinking of the smooth feel of velvet on her cheek.
‘Quick,’ Mana screams. ‘Upstairs. To your room.’
The front door is hanging open. A doctor is in her parents’ bedroom, bending over her father. Or someone who looks like her father, in spite of the swollen red face, an eyeless face locked in a scowl.
‘Go,’ Mana screams.
Upstairs, in her small room, Sophie throws herself on her bed and listens. The doctor’s voice is harsh and commanding. He is calling for water, and he is pounding something. Pounding hard and shouting at Mana who rushes outside and then comes back.
She can smell her own body. A slightly sour smell she breathes in and out. For a moment she feels that she is growing large, her feet are endless and wide, stretching to the edge of the world, but then she moves and the feeling is gone.
She remembers the time when he was proud of her. When he told Mana to dress his daughter in her best dress and to plait her hair with ribbons so that her father could take her with him to the garden where, under the deep shade of almond blossoms, his friends gathered for their evening coffee and sweetmeats.
Her father stood her on the carpet and clapped his hands. She bowed and smiled, eyes stealing swiftly across the faces of the men and back again to her father. From the overgrown lake, right beside them, came a rotting smell of reeds.
Her father took a garland of flowers and put it around her neck. A beautiful garland of reds and yellows, of roses and wild daffodils. She sniffed at the flowers and their scent made her sneeze. ‘A sign,’ her father said. Someone was talking about her now. Right this minute someone was saying her name.
The thought pleased her. The waves of whispers, the eyes of strangers following her.
‘Pray to the Lord,’ her father said, ‘that what they say is always good. Once soiled, a good name is lost forever.’
The men laughed and clapped their hands.
This is what she wants to remember: the wine glasses raised to the sky, toasting her health and her good luck. Toasting her beautiful voice breaking into a song of love. A song sad and sweet. A song she has heard shepherds sing in the fields.
A child thrice blessed. A child kissed by an angel.
Her father carried her home that evening, and she remembers his breath, in which wine and coffee mingled. He carried her in his arms like a princess so that her embroidered slippers would not, Heaven forbid, be soiled. The soft slippers Mana had made out of an old dress she had stopped wearing.
Downstairs the pounding stops and there is silence. She crosses herself three times. She is sorry for all the times she has been angry at him.
In Jerusalem, in the Temple, she cried as the friars lifted up the cross and led the pilgrims to the place where Our Lord suffered and died. She was holding a candle and the wax, melting, scorched her skin, but she did not feel pain. When they reached the Mount of Calvary she fell to her knees, recalling the suffering of Our Lord and those who were with him in these dark moments of pain and despair. Recalling Mary Magdalene, forgiven for her sins, taken back into the heart of the Lord. And then her own heart filled with love and compassion for all human suffering, and she could not think of anything she wanted so much as to lie there, on the holy ground and let her tears soak into the earth.
Mana is standing at the door, her hands hanging loose, her lips moving. There is a drop of sweat rolling down her forehead.
‘It’s Tuesday,’ she hears.
Tuesday is a bad, unlucky day. On a Tuesday, Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks and would from now on be called Istanbul. On a Tuesday the Emperor Constantine turned into marble. Just before he was to be struck down by the Turks, Byzantium’s last Emperor was seized by an angel. The angel, his golden wings shining in the rays of the sun, carried him to a cave near the Golden Gate and turned him into a statue. ‘You will wait here,’ he said, ‘for the time when God our Lord is ready to restore freedom to the Greeks.’
‘Cry, Dou-Dou,’ she says, ‘cry for your father. We are all alone in the world.’
But her own eyes are dry.
In the Istanbul port, where the straits merge with the sea, opaque patterns glide over the water and flocks of shearwaters skim low over the surface, never to rest. The Turks say they are the souls of the damned.
Mana says these tiny birds are the souls of the odalisques the Sultan sent to their deaths. Drowned in the Bosphorus, in brown burlap sacks, their hands tied, their mouths gagged. In this world it is better to be a dog than a woman, Mana says, for she has seen carriages stop for a dog lying in the sun. She has seen servants get out, lift the dog up, and carry it out of the way.
The fishermen come back from the sea with swordfish, red and grey mullet, sea bass, lobsters and mussels. Sprats are caught with a lantern. The light reflected in the water makes the fish blind, she has heard, and they do not see the net.
‘Sing for us, gorgeous,’ the sailors ask.
In the market her mother has shown her how to watch out for bad fish. The stink of decay can be rubbed away with pine tar; dull skin buffed with a piece of rag until it shines. Air can be blown inside the belly to make a catch look bigger and more succulent.
Watch out, Mana says. You have already bled like a woman. Men can pick that scent. Men can tell.
She likes the sight of them. The young men with olive skin, shirts stained with grease, open at the chest. Their muscles tense as they pull on the ropes.
‘I won’t,’ she laughs and hurries away.
For a Christian woman the streets of Istanbul are fraught with danger. Even if she casts her eyes down and follows her mother, quickly, without looking. Even if she promises herself not to stare at the rich, handsome cavaliers who come to the district of Phanar where the Greek merchants’ wives lounge on their verandas, attended by servant girls. Men whose steps are light and sprightly. Whose embroidered belts are fastened with broad golden clasps. Whose horses prance and neigh, impatient with restraint imposed on them by their riders’ hands. Men whose eyes are on the prowl.
She has seen the Janissaries with white feathers on their heads, and the royal gardeners dressed in their habits of different colours so that from afar they looked like flowers themselves. She has seen the Aga of the Janissaries in a robe of purple velvet lined with silver tissue. His horse was led by two slaves. Next to him was the Kilar Aga, the chief eunuch of the Seraglio in a deep yellow cloth lined with sable. The Sultan was mounted on a horse whose saddle was studded with jewels.
She often thinks of fate. Fate that can push her any which way, make her a slave or a queen, a lady or a whore. Lady Fate whose breath she feels right behind her, tickling the skin on her neck. Lady Fate, blind, fickle and full of spite.
Or is it benevolence.
Help yourself so God can help you, Mana says.
‘Look at yourself, Dou-Dou.’
This is her aunt who says she could be her sister. Whose dresses are made of Genoan damask and silk. Whose rings catch the rays of the sun and reflect them back with a rainbow of colours. ‘These, my little Dou-Dou, are real diamonds.’
Aunt Helena, Mana’s younger sister, hardly hides her annoyance at their hungry eyes trailing after her clothes, after the food on the table, after the trinkets with which she adorns herself. Aunt Helena with her sweet voice and the scent of roses around her, with hands soft and white.
‘Look at yourself,’ Sophie hears and watches how her cheap, coarse dress drops down, how her aunt’s fingers gently release the hooks of her petticoats, the folds of her chemise. How nothing obstructs the sight of her body. The shapely breasts, the belly button, the mound of black curls below. ‘Move your hips, Dou-Dou,’ Aunt Helena whispers into her ear, the hot air of her breath tickling. ‘Slowly, slowly. Don’t shake too much.’
She sways her hips, shy at first, cautious. But she likes what she sees, she likes this nymph, this slender, beautiful girl framed by the gilded mirror. Standing beside this aunt of hers, her mother’s sister who now braids a string of pearls into her long hair. Is this the way Eve felt in the Garden of Eden when she saw her own reflection in the mirror of still water?
‘You are so beautiful, Dou-Dou. You can have everything you want. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, girl.’
She turns her back to the mirror and looks over her shoulder. Her back is smooth and flexible. She can bend as easily as she climbed the branches of the oak tree in Bursa. She can kneel on the floor and let her body fall backwards, into a graceful curve, and then come back, slowly, her eyes locked on her own image.
‘You are worthy of a king’s bed.’
The longing in her is like an ill wind that makes the air clammy with heat, filled with dust, unbearable. There has to be a release to all this want that has gathered in her. In the mirror her own eyes stare back at her. Two black coals of desire.
She lowers her eyes, as if she were ashamed of her own beauty, and her aunt claps her hands and laughs. ‘Perhaps, I don’t need to teach you that much after all,’ she says.
From the big mahogany chest of drawers, Aunt Helena takes out her best cashmere shawl, the one on which there is a flower on a stem, its roots dangling in the air. Long tendrils, clean of soil, no longer hidden in the earth. Such is the taste of the true ladies, her aunt says. They like botanicals. Botanicals, the word itself sounds different, more worldly than mere plants or flowers.
Soft and silky to the touch, the shawl envelops her with misty warmth, a promise of a caress.
‘For a woman, nothing, my little Dou-Dou, works better than a bit of mystery.’
A length of gauze replaces the cashmere shawl. Her aunt drapes it over her hair, around her waist. There is something flowery about the girl in the mirror now. A promise of lightness and fragrance of petals.
Sophie laughs. She preens and coos, and kneels in front of the mirror. She bows her head in a sweet gesture of submission her eyes deny. For the girl in the mirror is no longer a girl; she is a young, beautiful woman. A woman who likes her own boldness. A woman who likes the brightness of her own eyes; the flash of her beautiful white teeth; the dimple in her cheeks, and the pink nipple peeking from underneath the white gauze.
‘I’ll teach you to dance,’ her aunt whispers into her ear. ‘The Oriental dance.’
Thomas
Right after his arrival in Berlin, Thomas took a brisk walk, past an old church with twin spires and a red roof. Rosenstrasse was a narrow street, lit only by the light coming through the windows. A night watchman with a horn under his belt gave him a quick, cautious look, his sabre catching the reflection of the light. The insides of the houses were hidden behind curtains, lace, muslin, silk screens that kept secrets well. Sometimes Thomas could get a glimpse of someone moving inside, like a figure in a shadow play or magic lantern.
In his letter Ignacy had mentioned the patient was a rich Polish countess who had just arrived from St Petersburg. Countess Potocka, once the most beautiful belle of Europe, in search of a healer. She is unable to travel to Paris, so Paris will have to come to her. After all, my friend, you too will profit from a change of place and a good dose of forgetting.
‘Please, the best of friends,’ Thomas muttered in response. ‘Don’t.’
In spite of his fur-lined cape and high boots, the leather soles squeaking as he walked, he could not warm up. The air was clammy. The whiff of the sewers made him cringe. As he almost stepped onto gobbets of horses’ dung, he heard a woman and a man quarrelling behind one of the impenetrable windows. The woman’s voice was whiny, drowning the man’s complaints in a barrage of reproaches. Then the doors of the house opened and the man stepped out. Tall, lanky, tattered leather jacket on his back. The door slammed. ‘Du blöde Hure,’ the man yelled at the closed windows and walked away.
Thomas followed the man from a distance, hoping he would lead him to a neighbourhood tavern where he could have a beer and drown the constant stutter of the carriage wheels in his head, but when the man walked into a dim alley Thomas decided to turn back. This time he took a different direction and in one of the windows, its curtains parted to allow for a glimpse inside, he saw the glow of red and blue lanterns, golden tassels, scarlet ottomans. Two young women in low-cut gowns sat at a small table staring at cards, laid out in a cross. Beside them stood two glasses of clear yellow liqueur.
Sex was the need of a body. A fundamental need, Thomas stressed when he lectured to his students at Val de Grâce, that kept the disintegration of life at bay. He was not entirely convinced by Dr Brown’s theory that the flow of life needed to be controlled, boosted or dampened according to need. ‘The word need,’ he liked to warn his students, ‘is the problem. How would one know one’s true needs?’ Such doubts, of course, did not trouble Dr Brown. In London he was known to lecture with a glass of whisky in one hand and a bottle of laudanum in another, taking sips from one or the other.
For Thomas, the sight of the corpse stretched on the metal table was enough to renounce vain discussions and hypotheses. Life and death, he told his students, should be observed and examined without preconceived notions. Ars medica tota in observationibus, as Laennec had repeated ad nauseam. There was always something theatrical about that first incision. A moment pregnant with revelation, best approached in expectant silence. ‘Gentlemen, watch and take note. Refraining, if you can, from idle speculations.’ Ignoring the flicker of impatience in some of the eyes set on him, Thomas would perform his magic. His arm slightly raised, aware of the glitter of steel, he would wordlessly bend over the corpse and cut the skin without further declarations, defeated by the eagerness of youth.
One of the women in the window must have noticed him, for her hand slid down her neck in a well rehearsed gesture, inside her frilled décolletage, revealing full breasts. It was only then that Thomas realised with embarrassment that he was staring at her, the mute cause of her performance to which a smile was now added, tongue lingering over the bottom lip. Quickly he wrapped his cloak around him and turned away, walking down the dark alley as if pursued, though he could hear nothing but the pounding of his own heels on the pavement.
In Paris, in Rue de Clairmont, Minou expected him on Fridays. Dressed in black lace, with her smooth breasts pushed up by her corset, she smiled gently and poured a glass of red wine for him the moment he walked in. There was a pleasant smell of lavender and he liked her room, in spite of its garish combination of red and black, the lowered blinds and the smoky lamp. Minou didn’t try to talk or pretend he was anything but a paying client. She washed in front of him and made love with a pleasant efficiency that both excited and released him from desire. He paid her well, and his demands were simple. When the lovemaking was over, he liked to watch her comb her long, reddish hair. Thomas suspected she dyed it with henna. Redheads made more money, he had heard. She came from St-Malo; her father and her two brothers were sailors.
‘A sailor,’ Ignacy once said to him in response to a statement long forgotten. ‘You know what they say of sailors’ wives? Femme de marin-femme de chagrin.’
It was ten o’clock by the time Thomas returned to his lodgings. His landlady was in the living room with her embroidery hoop. In her heavy dress, plaited hair arranged into a tight bun, she looked the embodiment of domesticity. She offered him tea, but he made a lame excuse and rushed up the stairs to his rooms.
Upstairs, he poured cold water from the jug into a porcelain basin, took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He didn’t think of himself as handsome or well-built, in spite of Minou’s protestations to the contrary. She liked his ruddy skin and brown eyes, and, with an air of fake ease, swore that his nose was ‘aquiline’. Where did she get a word like this, he wondered. In the mirror he could see that his hair was thinning already. He was not as tall as Ignacy and far thinner, but his body had the sturdiness of generations of peasants, and could carry him in the saddle for hours.
He lay down on the hard, narrow bed and closed his eyes. He thought of a young woman, a girl he healed once, at la Charité. She was not older than fifteen, with red, lush curls and little freckles all over her face. She was writhing in pain, her lips livid and bleeding from the pressure of her crooked teeth biting into flesh. He had ascertained that the patient was brought by a young man who had left as soon as he could, without leaving his name or address. When he examined the girl, he found a pig’s tail pushed into her anus. The nun who had helped him undress her, averted her eyes. Someone had tried to remove it, but the hair on the tail had got stuck in her flesh. The girl was bleeding and her anus was filled with pus.
Thomas inserted a small tube around the tail and extracted it. He didn’t take the girl’s money. He didn’t warn her against continuing her trade. He didn’t tell her how often he saw women with their private parts torn, with broken glass stuck in their vaginas. He figured she knew all that. She cried and thanked him in her thick, Breton accent. He kept her at la Charité for a few days until her wound began to show the signs of healing. Then he let her go.
Sophie
The plague is stalking the streets of Istanbul, this city of golden towers, of mosques and minarets, of crescents, kiosks, palaces and bazaars. At street corners bodies of the diseased are being burnt, together with all their possessions. The smoke has already filled the air, spilled into every street, lodged deep into the fibres of everyone’s clothes. Whole sections of Istanbul have been cordoned off, though people say that well-placed bakshish can do wonders. Announcements in Turkish and in Greek forbid all contacts with foreigners, especially visits to the foreign missions. Any Greek woman caught with a foreigner would be beaten in public. Forty lashes to the heels of her feet.
Maria Glavani is carrying cloves of garlic in a sash around her neck and blue beads to ward off the evil eye. She never leaves the house without the holy picture of St Nicholas to whom she prays until her knees turn red and sore. In the mornings, when she comes back home smelling of liquor and men, she washes her hands and face with water to which she adds a few spoonfuls of vinegar.
‘You stay inside!’
Mana’s voice is harsh, impatient. The lines on her face are deepening, no matter how diligently she massages them every day. Sophie does not like these frenzied preparations, the ironing of dresses, the pinning of hair. The slaps when she is too slow or clumsy; when a hem is ripped; a pin misplaced; a line of kohl smudged. But after Mana leaves, the silence of their small house chokes Sophie. In her empty bed she hugs herself. What comes back to her is the smell of smoke and vinegar mixed with her own sweat. Everything that has happened in her life so far seems to have curled up in her, poised and waiting for release.
Death does not frighten her. In the street she does not turn her eyes away from the burning bodies. This is not the way she will die. She knows that. A fortune-teller told her once that she would die after a long life, without pain. Far away from home, but among those who loved her.
Mana’s black crêpe mourning dress is folded at the bottom of her coffer. In Bursa Maria Glavani would have been the talk of the town. Here, no one remembers Konstantin, the unlucky Greek with greying hair, or his widow. If only she knew what life had in store when she looked into his black eyes for that first time. If only she listened to her own mother who pointed out the threadbare clothes and the chaffed shoes of this man who talked incessantly of diamonds big as walnuts, of herds of cattle, of silk and gold lace. Such is the fault of love. Love that brings a woman down and leaves her at the mercy of strangers.
Mana no longer talks of Christian duties, of sin and honour and the good name. They are eating meat again, and fresh fruit Mana buys at the market herself. The days are still cool. To keep warm, they put hot ashes into the tandir and sit with their feet on it. The warmth stays in their bodies for a long time. They need to be strong and round off their hips. By the time a fat man gets thin, a thin man dies.
‘I want the best for you,’ Mana says, and Sophie believes that. Her thoughts fold and refold around the promises of the future. She knows her mother has been making enquiries. Do any of the foreign diplomats in Istanbul show the first signs of boredom with their current mistresses? A Frank, rich and powerful, and refined. A man who would not slap her daughter around and then leave her without means to lead an honest life. The girl, she hears her mother’s whisper, is an unspoiled virgin, worthy of a king’s bed.
When she hears this, Sophie thinks of Diamandi’s hand on her breasts, his body crushing her to the ground, his hot tongue parting her teeth, its earthy, lingering taste. She thinks of his strong, smooth legs, the man’s hair on the boy’s chest. The sharp pain of his love, and the blood on her legs.
An innocent girl, her mother says, with a good heart who could be grateful, who would be so grateful for a nice home, a carriage, beautiful dresses that would show off her skin and her hair. Dresses that would add glitter to these beautiful black eyes in which some have already seen the moon and the stars.
Dou-Dou. A virgin. Unspoiled. Innocent. Naïve to the highest degree, and with a good heart.
Yes, Dou-Dou can be grateful and funny and good at pleasing. Skilful, too, in the art of massage. Her touch is light, her skin is warm and dry. The girl is no weakling, she can press what needs to be pressed, knead what needs to be kneaded.
A foreign diplomat, her mother whispers, would leave one day. But, as any honest man would do in such a situation, he would provide a dowry for his girl. Sweeten the nibbled goods for his successor, a merchant or a shopkeeper. Someone solid, honest. Someone who would want children and a beautiful wife with a handsome dowry, even if he had to close his eyes and take a jewel from the second floor.
Why is Mana hiding all these schemes from me, Sophie thinks. Why the charades, the pretence, the games. I’m no longer a child. I know no one will marry me without a dowry. In bed at night she lets her fingers run down her neck, over her breasts, down to her belly. There is a moment in which a touch turns into a caress. A sweet moment of pleasure. She likes the thought of a rich man of the world who would tell her what lies behind Istanbul and Bursa. A man who would teach her the dances of the Frank courts, tell her what the ladies do to hold their hair so high. A man who would teach her to speak French. She is quick with languages, has always been. Greek, Turkish and Armenian come to her naturally like breath. She has already picked quite a few French words from her aunt, and some Russian ones too: Bonjour mon cherie. Spassiba. Slichnotka.
Aunt Helena, a frequent guest at the Russian mission’s balls and soirees, has promised to keep her eyes open. She has always liked the Russians whom she calls ‘the fair race from the North’, and ‘the people who know the meaning of pleasure’. She has always liked their caviar from Astrakhan, their clear vodka that goes right to your veins. Liked their dances until dawn, as if there were no tomorrow, as if the world would end that very day. Glasses, she tells her niece, get smashed against the wall so that they could not hold another drink at an inferior time. There is one more thing that pleases Aunt Helena. The Russian victories over the Turks. ‘The black camel of death will soon kneel at his doors,’ she says, pointing in the direction of the Sultan’s palace.
Yes, a Russian diplomat would be best for Dou-Dou.
All talk, Mana says with bitterness. Liars are branded in this country for a reason. Her sister, may dear Lord forgive a widow’s bitterness, has always been fickle and not above jealousy. Just because she lives in the district of Phanar does not make her rich and powerful. And all these stories she comes with are nothing more than accounts of her own goodness. Fanciful accounts given to them like scraps from her own table. Maria Glavani knows such talk when she hears it. Didn’t she have a good teacher? Konstantin too never stopped weaving his schemes until the day of his death.
So Aunt Helena’s words are listened to but not believed. For there is always a little mishap in her stories, a small obstacle that would have to be waited through, ironed out, removed. The undersecretary who kept asking to see Dou-Dou before he would recommend her to his superiors was a known libertine and his request to meet Sophie had to be dismissed. We don’t want to cheapen her, Maria, her aunt has said. No touching if they are not buying.
The plague is what makes Sophie’s situation worse. The plague cools many a heart. In the presence of death, amour wilts and shrivels. Besides, even a foreign diplomat caught with a Greek woman would have to face the Ottoman justice. Not everyone wants to risk that much. Not even for such a beautiful pair of eyes.
In the Russian Mission, Monsieur Stachiev’s wife is so terrified of the plague that she has locked herself and her children in an upstairs bedroom and refuses to see or meet anyone. This, in itself, is not such a bad thing, for it leaves Monsieur Stachiev free to pursue his own merry interests. But it doesn’t help to have people talk that she has sent her surgeon away for wanting to bleed her. That she screams at the top of her voice. ‘We’ll all die here in this infidel country. We’ll all be punished.’ She has already cursed her husband. ‘Your sons will pay for your fornication,’ she said. ‘You will kneel at their coffins and then where will your whores be?’ She will call the Janissaries, if she but spots a Greek woman entering the mission building.
‘Dou-Dou, you are slowing me down,’ Mana says. They are coming back from the market, their baskets heavy with meat and fruit. As always, people stare at them as they pass. The men look at them with longing and often stop them, asking for directions or pretending they have mistaken them for someone else. Women’s eyes are curious, assessing their beauty as if it were a threat, a challenge.
‘Come on, girl, we don’t have all day.’
A black man who stops them is a eunuch. Not an ordinary eunuch either, but a eunuch from the Sultan’s court. His robes are woven with gold and silver and mazanne blue. The face under the burgundy fez is smooth, layers of fat testifying to the richness of his table. His voice is soft and warm. Having lived his life among women, he knows how to calm their fears.
‘Beautiful ladies,’ he says and smiles, flashing his teeth. As white as hers, Sophie thinks.
The Ottoman Princess, the Sultan’s daughter, has ordered him to stop them. He was summoned by his mistress, told to drop all he was doing, and go after them. Go after two Christian women who have caught the Princess’s eye.
Sophie’s eyes travel upwards, toward the palace windows. She cannot see anyone there. Perhaps it is the Sultan himself who has seen her. Perhaps, with one look of His eyes, her life has changed forever.
‘Follow me. We mustn’t make the Princess wait.’
‘Are you sure you are not taking us for someone else,’ Mana asks the eunuch, but the black man laughs. His mistress’s mind is an open book to him. They should not doubt their luck. The heavy baskets can be left with the servants who can take them to their home. ‘Just tell me where you live,’ he says.
‘We’ll take them on our way back,’ Mana says sharply. ‘Ourselves!’
Is there is a note of fear in Mana’s voice? Unease? Anger as she clasps her daughter’s hand in a firm grip as if she wanted them to turn away and run? But how can a Christian woman refuse an Ottoman princess? How can a Greek say no to a Turkish master?
Dou-Dou does not want to notice Mana’s fear. Her mind flutters with delicious visions of glittering jewels, gauzy dresses and garden paths bathing in sweet, dappled shade. She can feel the harsh impatience of her mother’s hand, the reluctance of her steps. She wants to laugh and assure her Mana there is nothing to worry about. She is ready. When her chance comes, she will know what to do.
They follow the black eunuch past the palace gate, past the first courtyard filled with cool shade, fragrant with the jessamines and honeysuckles that coil around tree trunks, past the giant clay vases filled with blooming roses. The big courtyard is bustling with life. Two tall grooms hold Arabian horses, snow white, with the legs of dancers. A short, fat man in a leather apron is rolling a big wooden barrel. A young man is whistling a merry tune, trailing Dou-Dou with his eyes until the eunuch’s look stops him.
Inside the Seraglio the sweet perfume of the jessamines penetrates the gilded sashes easily. A white marble fountain releases the stream of water that falls into four basins below. The sound is pleasing. By this fountain, the eunuch leaves them. ‘The Princess shall send for you,’ he says, lifting Dou-Dou’s head with his index finger and looking straight into her eyes.
‘Beautiful,’ he murmurs. ‘These eyes will shame the light of the moon.’
When they are left alone, Sophie looks around. The tiles on the floor are cool to the touch. She would have liked to take her shoes off and step on them with bare feet, but Mana’s eyes stop her. The walls are covered with tiles of different patterns. Most of them have blue, and gold in them, and the colours mingle in her eyes and shimmer. The thick stained glass windows dim the rays of the sun, make them dance with colours of amber and silvery dust. There are no chairs, but a few big cushions on a raised sofa covered with Persian carpets. The scent of honeysuckle joins the jessamine, the scent that penetrates her hair, her dress, clings to her skin.
Is this how the Sultan smells, she wonders. Is his skin as soft as she imagines? As cool as the tiles?
‘Don’t say anything until you are asked,’ her mother whispers. Her face is pale and her eyes dart around the room. What is it that she wants to find?
‘Don’t look at the Princess. Keep your eyes down.’
Mana has removed her own kerchief and wraps another layer of cloth over her daughter’s hair.
What if the Sultan will not care for her? What if he takes one look at her and sends her back?
But these are thoughts easily laughed away. In her heart of hearts she trusts her joy. A woman the Sultan summons becomes a quadin, a chosen one.
‘Someone must have seen you,’ Mana hisses, her voice rough with anger. ‘Didn’t I tell you not to wander alone.’
The servant woman who enters the antechamber is wearing a pink kaftan over blue drawers, her hand touching her heart and lips in greeting. Silent, she beckons with her right hand and they follow, their heels clicking on the tiles. They walk through long winding corridors of closed doors, past a big room where women sit on big satin cushions, smoking nargila, working on their embroidery. One of them with diamonds in her turban, sitting on a lap of a Negress throws herself into her arms as if to hide in them. In another room a woman in a red dress is bending over a big loom, absorbed in the invisible patterns. To Sophie these images seem like pieces of a puzzle, a mystery she alone would be allowed to solve. This is making her deaf to Mana’s sighs.
The Princess is wearing a vest of purple cloth, set with pearls on each side down to her feet and round her sleeves. It is tied at the waist with two large tassels embroidered with diamonds. Her shift is fastened with an emerald as big as a turkey egg. In the middle of her headdress two roses glitter, each made of a large ruby surrounded with clean diamonds. She is seated on a big silk-covered cushion, like an enormous animal at rest, its belly still full, but its eyes already on the lookout for the next meal. Her arms are strong and muscular, her skin smooth. Her black eyes, lined with kohl, are short-sighted for she leans forward as she speaks.
‘You have come,’ she says, as if their obedience surprised her. ‘Welcome to my home.’
Perhaps, Sophie thinks, the Princess has been sent to appraise her, to see if she is worthy of the Sultan’s time. The Ottoman Princess, blessed with the riches of her father, her body cared for by her army of slaves, scraped, massaged and perfumed with the most precious of scents. Her hands are too big though, in spite of all the beautiful rings. Five on her right hand only. Two have diamonds bigger than hazelnuts.
‘Your Highness,’ she says, with her loveliest smile. ‘Is too kind.’
The Princess gives a sign and servants enter with wooden trays, carrying sweets and strong Turkish coffee, its aroma filling the air. There are dried apricots, figs, raisins and dates from Basra, the sweetest that there are. Nuts in a gilded bowl. Fresh figs too, black and green. A jug of sherbet to drink. A sherbet for which, Sophie is told, snow has been fetched all the way from the highest mountains of India.
‘I love figs,’ Sophie says brightly and clasps her hands in delight.
It’s too late for Mana’s look of warning. The Princess laughs too and promises that such a sweet child, such a beautiful girl could have all the figs in the Ottoman Kingdom. And apricots, and raisins. And pistachio nuts and sweet dark coffee that races in the veins and brings flashes of colour to the cheeks.
She can have everything she wants. Beautiful dresses. Shawls. Velvet and damask and silk that the merchants bring all the way from China. The most exquisite patterns. A girl so beautiful should be wearing lots of gold to set off her raven hair and her olive skin. And soft, soft leather for her feet.
‘This child deserves the best,’ she says, her eyes leaving Sophie for a moment and resting on Mana, as if she were responsible for her daughter’s poverty. ‘Not the rags that she is wearing now.’
Mana wriggles on her cushion.
‘Most illustrious of Princesses,’ she begins. ‘Your Imperial Highness. The light of my eyes.’
She begs the Princess to think of her. A widowed mother of an only daughter. A beloved daughter she cannot think of parting with.
‘But she would live with me, in the palace, you silly woman. Have everything she could ever need. Can’t you see that? Does every Greek have to be so dense, so infernally stupid?’
Seeing a frown on Sophie’s forehead, she changes her tone, quickly. Too quickly.
Surely a mother cannot deny her child’s fate. Fight the fortune God offers her. The good life of opulence and comfort. Look at her hands, the Princess says, still accusing. Cracked and reddened like those of a scullery maid. Is that what you want for this angel? Is she to be your maid? Scrubbing pots? Ruining the gifts Allah has bestowed on her?
‘My God,’ Mana says, ‘forbids a mother to leave her child among strangers.’
‘My God,’ she says, looking straight into the Princess’s eyes, ‘does not allow some kinds of love.’
The Princess laughs. ‘I know your God, woman,’ she says. ‘All your God wants is a good price for her. Here. Take this!’
A purse filled with cekins lands in Mana’s lap with a thud. It is heavy. A bounty, a treasure. Money that could last them a few months. Pay the debts, buy new dresses, good tender lamb and fresh fruit. Pay for dangling earrings that would set off Dou-Dou’s shapely lobes, the graceful turn of her neck.
A purse filled with gold.
This is a fair price for a poor Greek girl, isn’t it? This and a promise of a good life, a full stomach, and hands that would not have to touch dirt ever again.
‘With me she will want for nothing.’
Sophie looks at her mother. There is nothing I can do, Mana’s body tells her. I can refuse the gold or take it, this won’t make any difference. But I cannot tell her I do not allow you to stay here.
‘She’ll be like a daughter to me,’ the Princess coos. She has moved closer and the heat radiating from her touches Sophie’s arms.
‘She will sleep in my bed. She will go everywhere with me. I’ll buy her everything she wants.’
Fear signals its beginning with a spasm in her stomach, then another, closer to Sophie’s heart. The soles of her feet are cold, her hands begin to tremble. In Bursa she has seen men show a bloodied leg of a fox, all that has remained in the snare they have set. The beast has chewed off its own hind leg and escaped.
‘I have never even asked your name,’ the Princess says.
Sophie hesitates. She doesn’t really like the Princess at all. She doesn’t like the way her strong hand rests on her knee and squeezes it, as if the two of them had to stand together against Mana. She doesn’t like the hint of rot in her mouth. The tooth in front is black with decay. The visions of the Sultan’s favour have receded and suddenly she sees herself as a servant in this palace, carrying trays with raisins and nuts, making coffee somewhere in the kitchen. Perhaps scraping hair from the Princess’s legs and arms, holding a towel for her in hammam as her big body breaks out with sweat.
How do you say no to an Ottoman Princess whose whims are their orders? Who could, with one word, send them to their deaths, the way the Sultan is said to dispose of unfaithful concubines: wrapped in a burlap bag, and thrown into the waters of the Bosphorus; or left naked in the street of Istanbul, unknown to anyone, a corpse with raven hair and skin white as milk, chest pierced with a dagger.
‘Don’t be shy, my precious,’ the Princess says.
Sophie raises her eyes. There is a flash of defiance, though she is trying to disguise it.
‘My name is Sophie,’ she says. ‘It means wisdom.’
She watches how, with one gesture of dismissal, her mother is made to leave the room, the purse of gold cekins in her hands. How she takes one more look at her daughter, a look of such pain and despair that Sophie wants to run toward her and throw her hands around her neck. ‘I’ve failed you after all,’ Mana’s eyes say. ‘I have not kept you from danger. Forgive me.’
The doors close after her, silently, like the doors of a tomb.
Rosalia
Only a week had passed, even if the memory of the journey seemed already faded and oddly remote, as if whole weeks separated them from the grimy inns and the jostling carriage.
In the first days of October, morning took a long time to arrive. With curtains drawn, the only light in the grand salon was a votive lamp underneath the icon of St Nicholas. In the twilight, the red reflections on the Saint’s bearded face made the holy image waver and float.
The countess was awake already. She tried to lift herself up, but the task was too strenuous and she fell back on the pillow.
‘Don’t look at me, Rosalia,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to remember me like that.’
Blood stained her clothes, seeped through the sheets, the blankets. They should be soaked in cold water right away. The mattress would have to be burned. The maids have to stop gossiping in the kitchen and clean more carefully. Rosalia could see the patches missed by the duster, the trails of neglect. One cannot rejoice at this constant lowering of your station in life, Aunt Antonia had written, hinting once again at the disastrous but perhaps foreseeable consequences of her father’s Jacobin dreams, the true cause of all her misfortunes. She herself was far from supporting tyranny or injustice, but all this talk of freeing the serfs or making Poland a republic frightened her. Like everything else in life, equality too had its limits. Your place is here, her letters to Rosalia invariably ended, at my side.
An operation would take place right in this room. A mattress could go on a table. She did warn Frau Kohl that one might be needed at short notice. A fairly big one, with sturdy legs.
Since their arrival in Berlin, breakfast meant a few morsels of bread dipped in red wine to strengthen blood and on a better morning a few sips of consommé the cook prepared fresh every day. Dr Bolecki always came around ten o’clock and, after a short examination of the countess, insisted that Rosalia escorted him downstairs. This was the only time, he said, they could exchange their observations about the patient, only they never did.
On the first day Dr Bolecki told her that his father had fought in the Ko?ciuszko Insurrection; that he, Dr Bolecki, trained in Paris, thanks to Napoleon’s insatiable need for army surgeons; and that the French doctor who was coming from Paris could amputate a limb in under two minutes. On the following day she learned that Dr Bolecki’s beloved wife died of consumption and his only daughter was a Carmelite nun, in Rome. He had to take her there himself, in January last year. On a day so cold that he couldn’t stop thinking of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. ‘Was it really that terrible?’ Rosalia asked, out of politeness. ‘I mean the campaign,’ she added quickly lest he thought she was prying into his life. He hesitated for a moment, and said that the most eerie was the silence before the Moscow fires started. ‘A void,’ he said, ‘awaiting human screams.’ Of the march back he refused to speak at all. ‘It’s better for you not to know,’ he said. But then, even though Rosalia did not insist on returning to the subject, he added that death from cold was kind. ‘The worst,’ he said, ‘always comes from a human hand.’
‘I think him very pleasant,’ Rosalia said when the countess asked how she liked Dr Bolecki. She meant ‘reliable’, but ‘pleasant’ seemed a safer word to use. Olga had complained, on two occasions, that Rosalia was putting on airs. ‘As if she were a doctor here,’ were Olga’s words.
Today, as the examination followed its usual route—pulse, signs of fever, the usual questions about appetite, bleeding, and acuteness of pain—a lock of grey hair kept falling over Doctor Bolecki’s left eye. This, Rosalia thought, might be responsible for his air of restlessness. The countess suffered these ministrations without a sign of impatience, but let Rosalia answer all the questions. Only Dr Bolecki’s assurance that he would bring the French surgeon the next day, restored some alertness to her face. ‘As soon as possible,’ he kept saying. He kept looking at her too, Rosalia noted, as if something managed to change about her since the day before. Her nursing skills, he said, were most impressive. Not every patient was thus blessed. ‘I trust you, Mademoiselle, completely.’ This he repeated three times in a row, adding that he was sure his high regard would be shared by Doctor Lafleur.
There was a sound of footsteps outside the grand salon, then silence. The door opened and Marusya appeared, balancing a tray with letters and a pot of coffee with some difficulty. It was one of the countess’s whims, a pot of freshly brewed coffee at her bedside. The smell of it, she said, was enough. She could not drink any of it, but that shouldn’t stop Rosalia from having some. The maid put the tray on the table. Her eyes were fixed on the tray and her chore, as if any distraction could cause her to lose control. The tray wobbled and Rosalia half expected to hear the crash of china falling to the floor, but this did not happen.
‘Your son has written, just as he has promised,’ she said, spotting Bobiche’s handwriting on one of the letters. The countess’s youngest son had managed to write two whole pages instead of his usual one. L’abbé Chalenton was making progress.
When are you coming back, Maman? We have had terrible history with dogs. Fidelle bit a Postillion and Basilkien declared that she must be mad. But she continued to drink water and came when was called, so we thought she would be all right. Then she bit Basilkien’s finger and ran wildly in the yard and bit a pig. A week later, Basilkien showed symptoms of madness and the doctor made a cut on his finger to obtain a few drops of blood. Then he mixed the blood with milk and gave it to Basilkien to drink. He is much better as I write this and has stopped complaining! The Postillion, is also well, but the Doctor said Fidelle had to be killed, for there was no way of telling what will become of her, and so she is no more.
Everyone misses you very much. Tell Olena I’ll take her for a ride in my new carriage when she comes home.
Nothing, yet, from Odessa, from the countess’s elder daughter, Madame Kisielev. As soon as the news of her safe delivery reached them, Rosalia insisted that Madame Kisielev should be told the truth. The baby would no longer be affected by the mother’s agitation. Besides what daughter would want to be away from her mother in her time of need.
And so, in her last letter, the countess asked her daughter to come to Berlin. Please hurry, my dear Sophie, she wrote, if you want to see your mother alive. Enclosed with that letter was a bank order for 50,000 roubles. Madame Kisielev could well be on her way.
Sophie
That night, the silent servant with an unsmiling face takes Sophie to her bath. Her body is scrubbed and scraped clean with a sharp end of a seashell dabbed with precious drops of perfume. The dress that touches her skin is light as gossamer, soft like the skin of a newborn baby.
When her nail snags the soft fabric, the servant clucks her tongue. She is shaking her head, mouth twisted in a grimace. Without a veil, she is no longer mysterious. A woman with crooked teeth and nose too big for her face who pinches Sophie with impatience reserved for those whose position is not yet established. Reserved for a Greek slave girl with uncertain future who might not please the Princess after all.
‘Her Highness is waiting,’ the servant whispers. ‘Hurry up, girl.’
The Princess has her own apartments in the Harem. There is a tiled fireplace in her bedroom for nights cooler than this one. The walls are wainscoted with mother of pearl, ivory and olive wood, more beautiful than the lid of the best jewellery box in Aunt Helena’s home. The carpet on the floor is soft and thick. On the bed a golden throw glitters in the candlelight.
‘Come on, my sweet wisdom,’ the Princess says and pats the spot beside her. She is not wearing her pantaloons, but a loose dress. Through the slit of the dress Sophie can see her leg. White, smooth skin that she does not want to touch.
The Princess removes the smallest of her rings and extends her hand. ‘Take it,’ she says. ‘I want you to wear it.’
The ring is too big. It will have to be resized. The jeweller will be summoned first thing in the morning. For now, Sophie can wear the ring on a string around her neck.
Sophie casts her eyes down. Thoughts abandon her. Her body shudders, each movement is an effort.
‘Lean on me, my child. I want to feel your warmth.’
It is not cold, she wants to say but doesn’t. On her way here the silent servant ushered her into a latticed room and opened a large coffer. Inside there was nothing but a silk belt. The servant gave her a curious look and mimed strangling her own throat.
Sophie closes her eyes when the Princess’s hand caresses her cheek, her neck, her breasts. A hot, heavy hand, burrowing its way into her body. Is this what Mana knew would happen to her?
What a fool she was to dream of the Sultan’s love.
Someone walks by the Princess’s chamber, something rustles, something falls to the floor with a thud. The hand that touches her freezes, but only for a moment.
In this moment Sophie closes her eyes and tries to imagine this is the hand of a rich foreign diplomat, the man of the world who will teach her to dance and tell her stories of foreign lands. Stories in which women have carriages and beautiful jewels. Where their hair is piled up and adorned with flowers and birds and strings of pearls. Where men whisper sweet words into the women’s ears.
‘How soft your skin is, my sweet wisdom.’
‘Come closer. You are not afraid of me, are you?’
Is this what fear does? Freezes the heart? Stops the mind from dreaming?
She lets the Princess hold her hand. Mana has taught her how to give pleasure. Each body has its own desires. She knows how to press a muscle, gently first, then harder, and harder, until the pressure inside it is released. She knows how to dissolve the knots of tension, to bring relief.
A smile is pasted to her lips, a contortion of flesh. It makes her mouth quiver. The Princess calls her an angel, a sweet, beautiful child. A temptress. Sophie will lack for nothing. Ever. Sophie will be like a queen.
‘Kiss me,’ the Princess says, pointing at her lips.
‘Not like this. Harder.’
There are bruises on her thighs and arms, but she has not felt pain. Her own body feels as if it belongs to someone else, to another woman she can see from above. A woman whose face is covered with kisses, whose body is pinned to the bed. Whose clothes are prised away from her and whose hands clutch to her naked breasts. This other woman has stopped fighting her fate. She is lying motionless in the soft bed, with her eyes closed. She is trying to sink so deep that no one would find her. She is trying to close herself to the touch that yanks her from her dreamlike state. Nothing is happening, she repeats to herself. This is nothing. Nothing.
‘What is done once,’ the Princess whispers, ‘cannot be undone. What is felt once, will never be forgotten. You are mine, now,’ she whispers. ‘My own little wisdom.’
In the darkness Sophie prays for time to hurry, to go faster. Her lips are sore where the Princess has bitten them.
‘I am making you happy. You cannot hide your own pleasure from me.’
‘Say it!’
‘You are making me happy. I cannot hide my own pleasure from you.’
‘I am your mistress. There is no one else but me.’
‘You are my mistress. There is no one else but you.’
‘Ever.’
‘Ever.’
The bed is crumpled and moist with sweat; pillows have fallen off, to the floor. Silk-covered pillows, soft and smooth. The Princess is still holding her arm, making her lie there. There are other kinds of wisdom, she says. Many crave it, but few are chosen. Only to the few it shall be revealed. Wisdom that speaks of the true delights of love, of secrets common women are not meant to know.
‘Listen, my little wisdom. With me you will know it all.’
These stories speak of mysterious journeys across parched deserts; of abandoned inns where, in spite of the worst fears, sumptuous meals await an exhausted traveller; of crossroads where the hanged long for the mercy of the burial; of old hermits who know the way. It is enough to close her eyes to see the deep dungeons where hatred and envy rule and the fragrant gardens where beauty and love meet in secret. In search of their fate, the travellers of those tales fight hunger and thirst, battle false desires—the phantoms that drive the soul away from its dream.
‘Such are the stories of the night,’ the Sultana whispers. ‘They are all for you, my sweet wisdom.’
For there are more stories. Stories wrenched away from the possessed. Stories from forbidden books, stories of women who know as much as the men, but who guard their secret knowledge with their lives.
‘I know them all, my sweet wisdom,’ the Sultana says. ‘And soon, you too will know them.’
But then, a moment later, she is snoring, her arm heavy on Sophie’s shoulder. For a long while Sophie tries to wriggle out from under this arm. To stand up, gasp for breath. Her stomach churns and the coffee she has drunk rises up her throat. For a brief moment of despair she considers standing on the edge of the window and throwing herself down, into the paved courtyard underneath, but she doesn’t want to die.
She lets the tears flow, silently, until sleep comes. In the morning, she will think of something. Luck will not abandon her like that. Without warning, without giving her another chance. Luck may have played a mean trick on her, but Sophie has not lost her faith.
‘I’m worthy of a king’s bed,’ she thinks, just before sleep comforts her, just before she remembers the smell of jessamine and honeysuckle; just before she forgets the silk belt in the black ebony coffer and the cold anger in the servant’s voice.
The Greeks are but our slaves, she hears, their race a perfect example of what happens when the men are not separated from the women. No work ever gets done, because with all these women running in the streets men only want to have fun. Idleness and lies rule them. And deceit.
But the Russians, she says in protest, do not separate the women. Or the French. Or the English. No one heeds her words. What does she know, a plaything that has caught the Princess’s fancy. Clanging bells on her arms so that her arrival does not go unnoticed.
The Harem, she hears, is a woman’s blessing. Without it, a woman would be exposed to curious glances in the streets. To prying eyes, to jeerings from the passersby. Here, a woman has everything she may ever want. Why would she want to venture outside? What is it that she lacks?
When she laughs, the women say: ‘Don’t laugh too much or you’ll cry soon.’
It is in the small courtyard, by the fountain, that the women gather: odalisques, servants, and slaves. On low tables the slaves have laid clays, dried pomegranate peel, nut bark, saffron, dried roses, myrtle, orange flowers. There are fresh eggs the whites of which will be rubbed with shebba to make the thick lumpy mass that will cleanse the skin. For it is with the skin, they say, that you touch the world.
The women, their faces covered with gooey masks, sit patiently and talk. Things have to be done right, the way they were done before. Only the conceited believe one could discover a better way than the one practised for generations. A better way of embroidering or preparing a face mask. A better way of dancing or making coffee. A better way to live.
But there is other talk too. Of slaves whose beauty caught the eye of the Master, of these moments for which one prepares one’s whole life. A moment in which a man’s eye can change the woman’s fate; when a slave can become an odalisque; and then, if Allah wills that, maybe even a mother of a Sultan’s child. Unless, of course, one day, in the hammam, such a woman finds the doors locked, and the heat and the steam take her breath away.
Why?
The women shrug their shoulders. Doesn’t she know how easy it is to cause envy? To make a false step, say one word too many. Doesn’t she know anything?
Every night it seems to Sophie that she can hear the locking of many doors. There is a restlessness in her. A force sets upon her as soon as she opens her eyes and does not leave her until she falls asleep under the heavy arm of her mistress. The same restlessness that makes a fox caught in a snare chew off its leg.
To stop it Sophie thinks of the black eunuch. His black skin has a warm tone, and he smells of sandalwood. Hadim Effendi, a learned one, the Princess sometimes calls him, laughing. He was but a boy when he was first brought to the Palace. A boy who cried and cried until one of the slave women had the presence of mind to sing to him. Now he is kislar aghasi, master of the maidens. Unlike the white eunuchs who guard the gates of the Seraglio, he is allowed to enter the chamber of the women. He is fond of bright embroidered patterns, of jackets trimmed with gold.
Hadim Effendi likes her. She has discovered that on one of the restless nights when her mistress sent her for a pearl necklace, and she got lost in the corridors of the Seraglio. To silence the clanking bells, she stopped by the latticed window and looked outside. A beautiful moon, milky white, illuminated the sleeping city. It was difficult to believe that people lived there, in these dimly lit streets. That they loved, worked, slept, died there. That there was anyone else there besides Bekjih, the night watchman, his feet tapping on the cobbled stones as if he came from the kingdom of the dead.
‘Do you know the rules?’ Hadim asked, startling her with his presence.
‘Yes,’ she said, emboldened by the moon. ‘The rules do not allow holding any woman in the Palace against her will.’
‘The same rules also allow for killing anyone who has left. You should remember that.’
He was looking at her. There was much softness in his eyes, beside the sadness she had noticed before. She smiled.
‘The secrets of the Palace may not be shared among the living.’
Slowly, as if she were asleep, she opened her shirt and bared her breasts. He did not stop her. He did not touch her either, but stood there looking at her for a long time. She didn’t move.
She removes the clanking bells from her arms and knocks on the door to his room.
‘Come in,’ the master of the maidens says, lifting his eyes from a thick leather-bound volume.
‘I’ll die here if you don’t help me,’ she says and holds her breath. With one word he could have her flogged. With one word he could have her begging for her life.
He closes the book and motions to her to come closer.
‘You won’t die,’ he says. ‘Your eyes have nothing but life in them.’
He hands her a cup of coffee and motions to her to drink. She takes a sip, then another, but he shakes his head. ‘Drink it all up,’ he says.
In her coffee grounds he reads her future. He doesn’t talk of death without pain. He sees five dogs that bring her gifts. He sees three camels with more gifts and light shining in her way and a great door opening up. There is a tree too, its branches touching the sky. A tree with thick foliage, its branches laden with fruit.
‘Please,’ she whispers. ‘Tell me what to do.’
The master of the maidens stares at her coffee grounds. ‘You will travel far and wide,’ he says, smiling at her. ‘There is no cage in this world that will hold you.’
‘Will I be rich,’ she asks, pleased by what she takes as a promise of a merchant husband who might take her with him on his journeys.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Richer than you can imagine.’
‘Happy?’ she asks.
He puts her hand down and shakes his head. ‘This,’ he says, ‘your coffee grounds do not reveal.’
There is a long moment of silence. She moves her fingers to her blouse, wanting to open it as she did before, but he extends his hand and stops her. It is a warm, chocolate colour against the whiteness of hers. When his fingers touch her lips, she kisses them.
‘Tell me what to do,’ she asks. ‘Please.’
‘I’ll never have children, but this does not bar me from having pleasure,’ he says.
She closes her eyes and feels his hand caress her neck.
She is to wait for the time of great commotion. When she sees the camels in the courtyard, she has to be ready. She will have to climb down the vine to the courtyard, wrapped in a servant’s yashmak. It is high time for the Princess might well have noticed the change in her. She has become careless, impatient. The other day, she turned so abruptly that one of the slaves dropped the tray of coffee cups and smashed them all.
‘Will you be there?’ she has asked, but the master of the maidens shook his head. No one should see them together. But under the jasmine bush, she will find a basket she will carry right outside the gates.
On the fourth day, at dawn, she hears a soft tap on the door. The Princess is fast asleep, and Sophie dresses quickly, in the dark. Pantaloons, a kaftan. The plainest yashmak she can find. The bells she stuffs under the big cushion in the corner.
There is no one in the hall when she opens the window. Outside, she holds on to the thickest of the vine, and doesn’t look down. For a moment she is the child in Bursa again, Dou-Dou who can outrun every boy and climb the tallest trees. Her hands tell her that the vine is old and sturdy.
On the ground, under the jasmine bush, she finds the basket. Inside there is a gift. Nazar Bonjuk, a blue glass eye to guard her against the evil look. She pins it to her kaftan and waits for what seems a long time, until the gates open and the caravan arrives. As soon as the first camel enters, she leaves her hiding place and heads to the gate. A servant on her master’s errand. When the time comes, the master of the maidens said, eyes will be averted, swords will stay in their sheaths, and no one will be sent after her.
The guard takes one look at her basket and waves her through.
Thomas
At Graf von Haefen’s palace, their arrival was anticipated with visible impatience. As Ignacy’s carriage approached the front courtyard, Thomas saw that one of the Graf’s Swiss guards was standing on tiptoe, shouting in the direction of the carriage house, summoning a groom to hold their horses. A tall footman who had been waiting in the open doors disappeared as soon as he saw the carriage roll in.
‘Gossip I take to be not unlike cancer,’ Ignacy said, oblivious to the signs of impatience they were the source of, concluding the monologue of the last ten minutes. ‘Insidious. Surfacing when we think it conquered.’ He hadn’t changed at all, Thomas thought, if one overlooked the grey in his hair.
Thomas was not paying as much attention as he perhaps should have. But why really? The countess, like most women of her class, had had many lovers so did it really matter if this German Graf had been one of these liaisons amoureuses? He could see why Ignacy was so keen on her unprecedented influence in St Petersburg. (‘After all, the Tsar, Thomas, is her close friend and, I take it, quite ready to listen.’) Why was it ‘unprecedented’, Thomas could not tell, but it had to have something to do with the late Count Potocki’s position at the Russian court. Or with the perennial Polish hopes, doomed fights for the lost independence. Yes, the Poles had been dealt a rotten hand. No other country had been eaten alive in the middle of the Enlightened Europe and told it was for her own good. But wasn’t it all part of what old Europe had always been? A whore siding with the strong and the mighty. Preening herself for the favours of the rich?
‘Only one does not die from being talked about, Ignacy,’ he said.
Graf von Haefen’s palace was a two-storey sand-coloured edifice in the Renaissance style. On the entrance gate of wrought iron two plump-looking angels were clinging to their posts. The footman, still panting from a rushed run upstairs and back, the gold trim of his crimson livery slightly dull at the edges, led them into a small vestibule whose tapestry of nymphs, monkeys, and flowers was reflected back in giant gilded mirrors. A few moments later, a thin, young woman appeared, black hair coiled around her head. The diamond on her neck, Thomas thought, could have paid for a good pair of horses. She extended her hand to be kissed. Ignacy took it first, in both hands. Then Thomas bowed over it, awkwardly, merely brushing it with his lips.
‘Mademoiselle la Comtesse! How is your dear Maman? Has she slept well? Has the pain lessened?’
‘You’ve arrived at last, Doctor,’ Mademoiselle la Comtesse said, ignoring Ignacy’s questions. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hands trembled slightly, but her voice was calm and composed. ‘Maman has been waiting all morning.’
The countess’s daughter was wearing a simple morning dress, and, Thomas noted with some bemusement, her right cuff was stained brown. Youth made her attractive in a coltish sort of way, but she could do with some fresh air and less coffee. There was a gauntness to her face he did not quite like.
‘Doctor Lafleur I spoke to Graf von Haefen about,’ Ignacy said, pointing at Thomas who bowed slightly, ‘straight from Paris. Heartily recommended by Baron Larrey.’
Larrey’s name made no visible impression on young Countess Potocka who led them upstairs and into a grand salon that had been turned into the sick room. The enormous empire bed, by the wall, was covered by a golden throw. A day bed and an armchair had been placed beside it. An Oriental screen hid the paraphernalia of illness, the medicine bottles, the chamber pot. The air was thick with the smells of almond milk, camomile, and mint. The underlying whiff of ammonia made Thomas clear his throat.
The countess was fully dressed, reclining on the bed, her eyes closed, black eyelashes evenly set in her white lids. She was breathing slowly, as if asleep. One look was enough to make Thomas see that the illness had melted the skin on her bones. She was deathly pale.
She doesn’t need a doctor, he thought, she needs a miracle.
His eyes lingered over two women standing by their mistress. One was obviously a maid, of rosy plumpness, flaxen braids wound around her head like a crown. The other, in her pale yellow dress, a cameo brooch pinned to a lace collar around her neck, he decided, was the nurse. Mademoiselle Rosalia Romanowicz. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to Ignacy’s words. He vaguely recalled the praises of her nursing and her devotion to her mistress. A daughter of a Polish hero and a Jewess from Uman. Or was that someone else entirely? He noted the thick auburn hair, pulled back and held tight by a barrette, in the shape of folded hands.
‘Good morning, Doctor Bolecki,’ the countess said, turning to Ignacy. The back of her head rested on the day bed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all this time.’
This was a reproach.
‘I came as soon as I could, Madame,’ Ignacy replied in what Thomas thought was too much of an eager schoolboy’s tone.
Thomas made a step toward the bed, but stopped, unsure if the examination should begin that abruptly. The countess’s eyes were clearly her most striking feature. Large, black and luminous eyes that lit up her face. Fixed on him, now, probing. Suddenly he became aware of how baggy his trousers had become and wished he had ordered a new pair.
‘Doctor Lafleur, great surgeon, Madame la Comtesse,’ Ignacy continued what to Thomas sounded like a mountebank’s pitch for snake oil and the elixir of youth. ‘The only one, Your Highness, I would trust with my own life.’ He mentioned the years spent at la Charité, lectures at Val de Grâce, and once again flaunted Baron Larrey’s personal recommendation.
‘Please, my dear Doctor,’ the countess said, lifting her hand to her lips, and Ignacy stopped. Her eyes did not leave Thomas for a second, taking in the aquiline nose, his reddened hands, and baggy trousers shiny at the knees.
To steady himself, Thomas thought of his father who had been beaten by his mistress for being inadvertently in her way. He recalled wounds masters had inflicted on other servants: burns on the hands and legs, cuts, lashes. In Russia, he reminded himself, serfs were called ‘slaves’ for a good reason. Once, in Vilna, he had been asked to treat a man whose back had been broken by the lashes his master commanded. When the man died a few hours later, his master promptly ordered another serf to marry the widow.
‘What are you thinking of, Doctor Lafleur?’ the countess asked in a low, raspy voice that held a note of irony as if she had guessed his thoughts and already found fault with his reasoning.
‘You should not exert yourself, Madame la Comtesse,’ Thomas replied and he approached the bed. He tried not to look at her eyes but to observe. The shade of her skin, the spots on the pillowcase were all hints as to what her body was harbouring inside.
‘Yes, Doctor,’ she said, tilting her head slightly. ‘From now on, your words will be my commands.’
The smile she gave him lit up her face making him think of a child offered a rare treat, a reward long lost, despaired over, but never forgotten. In the morning light that swept over her, Thomas thought he had seen the secret of her attraction, the way she must have appeared to all those men Ignacy spoke about. Men who had loved her over other women. Yes, he had seen through her pale, luminous skin no longer fresh and supple; through her parched lips folding as if ready to grant him secrets revealed to no one else. You will be my saviour, her eyes said. There will be no one else, but you and me. You have all my attention, all my loyalty. Nothing and nobody else matters.
‘I’ve dismissed Doctor Horn, my Russian doctor. He was not helping me at all.’
‘Are you in much pain?’ Thomas asked, piqued by the casual reference to a hapless man who had, undoubtedly, tried his best.
The countess stopped smiling. Her beautiful eyes were dry.
‘They say that my womb is rotting, Doctor, and it hurts. Is that what you want me to describe to you?’
‘But Madame la Comtesse,’ Ignacy protested. ‘Courage! You are in the best of hands.’
‘Let Doctor Lafleur decide,’ the countess said.
The nurse stepped forward, placing her hand on the patient’s arm with a gesture of appropriation. A firm, steady gesture meant as a warning.
‘Madame slept well last night,’ she said. Her voice was pleasant, her French just slightly foreign. Foreign, Thomas would reflect later only because, in spite of its flawlessness, he could attach it to no specific region or city. ‘But today she complained of pain in her back. On both sides.’
A bit over twenty, the thought flashed through his mind, still considering the possibility (however slight) of an operation. Good solid constitution. There was no frailty about her, no threat of fainting spells. She would not be a nuisance.
‘Rosalia, my dear,’ the countess said. ‘Send everyone away. Let the doctor examine me.’
‘Everyone,’ she added, seeing how her daughter hesitated. ‘Only Rosalia and Dr Lafleur will stay. No one else.’
The countess was, indeed, in the last stages of the disease that had been ravaging her for years: her face a wax mask over the skull; her arms, hands transparent. Thomas could almost see the tendons clinging to her bones. She had prepared herself carefully for this visit. Her clothes were of embroidered velvet, the kind maids were told to be careful with for their wages would never pay for the damage carelessness might inflict on the fabric. He had noted that the dress had been hastily altered to fit a thinning body. The lingering smell of musk and wild roses told him that she had bathed and oiled her body for this encounter.
As she stood up, she tried to hold herself straight, but the effort it required was obvious. Even in her slippers, flat and soft, she rested her arm on the day bed, to steady herself. The nurse jumped forward to hold her, but the countess shook her head.
Her eyes were now following his every move. She was, he decided, studying him very carefully: the way he stood, sat down, opened his bag, assembled his stethoscope.
He began to establish her medical history, the way he had been examining his patients at la Charité. She said she was fifty, but even though traces of obvious beauty were still visible, he could see she was not telling the truth. Closer to sixty, he would say.
‘How many children have you had, Madame?’
‘Ten.’
‘How many are still alive?’
‘Six.’
‘How old were you when your first child was born?’
‘Is it important?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your medical history is important.’
‘I was seventeen.’
‘Were there any complications?’
‘No, my children came easily to this world. They didn’t cause me trouble then.’
He asked if she remembered her childhood diseases, and she laughed. ‘In my childhood, Doctor, there were two kinds of diseases: those you survived and those you did not.’
‘How many of them did you survive?’
‘My mother told me of two times I was near death with fever. She prayed for me and the fever went away. I also had measles.’
He proceeded to ask her about her diet, her sleeping patterns, the ease of her bodily functions. She was frank and unembarrassed by his questions, a fact he noted with some pleasure for many female patients shied away from telling him about their bowel movements and gas. Many times it was their relatives who had to provide the information he needed for diagnosis. Countess Potocka said she ate very little, having lost her appetite quite some time ago. She was thirsty most of the time but couldn’t drink more than a few sips of water and found the simplest tasks tiring. The nurse was smoothing the folds of her patient’s dress, nodding as if to confirm her words.
‘When did you begin feeling the first symptoms?’
‘Five years ago,’ she said, ‘I was losing weight, but I didn’t think much of it. And blood.’
Blood stained her undergarments, but the Russian doctor maintained that this was normal for a woman of her age, clearly not a point of concern. It was as if her menses returned, she continued, and she felt a slight pain in her belly. At that time it was more of a thought rather than a feeling.
But this pain began bothering her. That mere thought, uneasiness, soon became a constant companion. She woke up aware of it, and it was with her until the time she fell asleep. This pain began interfering with her days, forcing her to come home earlier from a ball, a soirée, or even stay in bed for a day.
‘I’m so tired, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I cannot stand up without feeling faint.’
Thomas ascertained that the first haemorrhage had been almost five years before. The treatments did not work. The dismissed Russian doctor bled her for five consecutive days, told her she had too much heat in her and that she needed cold baths. She was advised to take a water cure in Carlsbad, which she did. The haemorrhaging did not stop.
Thomas turned away as the nurse helped the countess take off her heavy velvet dress.
‘I’m ready,’ she said and when he turned back she was wearing nothing but a light, batiste nightgown. He asked her to lie down on the bed.
All there was to know, the evidence of her life was here, written on her body. He could see stretchmarks from pregnancies, dry patches of skin on her thighs and breasts. In her youth she must have been agile; the muscles, even in their deterioration, still preserved a shadow of their strength.
Her breasts were still relatively full and smooth. Obviously she did not breastfeed her ten children. On her thin thighs there were scars. A series of cuts on one, three burnt patches on the other. Two scars on the inside of her knees clearly were smallpox inoculations—round hollow pockmarks, whiter than the skin around them. He could also see scars on her back, long, white traces of something sharp slashing the skin. She closed her eyes often as he was examining her and breathed with difficulty.
Her disfigured, chafed belly was hardened by the mass growing over her uterus. Fixed. That realization alone was the death sentence. If it were mobile, he might have attempted an operation, but he would never operate on a fixed tumour. He agreed with Le Dran that cancer had commenced locally and was later spread by the lymphatic vessels to the lymph nodes and then into the general circulation. That’s why when he performed mastectomies, Thomas made sure that he dissected the associated lymph nodes in the axilla.
He put no faith whatsoever in various remedies that promised to dissolve the tumour. He had also seen disastrous effects of caustic pastes. As far as research into cancer was concerned he hadn’t seen much of value. Bernard Peyrilhe extracted fluid from a breast cancer and then injected it into a dog. But all he achieved was that the animal howled so much that his housekeeper objected and the dog had to be drowned.
‘The pain,’ the countess whispered. ‘It’s keeping me awake at night.’
He placed the stethoscope to her chest. Her lungs, he could tell, were clear. The difficulty with breathing was a sign of the general weakness of the body. Her pulse was fast and weak.
‘The bleeding,’ the nurse interrupted, ‘has never stopped.’ The pad she removed quickly from between the countess’s legs was stained with dark blood. He asked to see it and noted that the discharge was caked, clotted thick.
The children who died in infancy, Thomas ascertained, had no abnormalities. The countess had had the mercury cure a few times, but he could see no other evidence of syphilis than her weakened heart. When he pressed a fingernail on her index finger, he could see a pulsating vein, a sign of dilated aorta. This, however, was not what was killing her.
‘The pain,’ the countess repeated.
It was this pain that had made the journey impossible to continue and had forced them to stop here, in this Berlin palace so kindly offered by an old family friend. This pain took up all her thoughts, made travelling impossible.
‘It’s in my bones, Doctor. It is in my womb. I cannot move without crying.’
Carefully he disassembled his stethoscope, and put it back inside its leather case. He wished Ignacy had not been ordered out of the room with the others, leaving him alone to pronounce his diagnosis. The nurse, no matter how capable, would not be of much help at the moment of truth. He expected a fainting spell, a fit of screaming. This was the time to talk of God, of afterlife, of grace and repentance. Of fate and resignation. Not his kind of talk.
‘Please, Doctor,’ the countess said. ‘I want to know.’
Ignacy would not agree with me, Thomas thought. What right do we have to take hope away, he would ask. Why cut off the flow of the vital force? Deprive the body of its only defence. But hope, as far as Thomas was concerned, was a fickle notion. He had come to value facts over feelings and so far, he had had little reason to doubt the wisdom of such an approach.
‘I cannot offer you any hope, Madame la Comtesse,’ he said, finally, defying Ignacy’s voice in his head. ‘The tumour emerges out of the womb. It feeds on your body. It is fixed. I cannot operate.’
She was silent. Her eyes followed the movement of his lips. The nurse, he had noticed, grasped the countess’s hand in hers. Two hands, one strong and smooth, the other like a claw of some starving bird.
‘Cancer is like an invasion,’ he went on. ‘Your body has fought bravely, but the battle has been lost.’ Encouraged by her calmness he told her that before death came she could expect a few better days. She would have more energy, not enough to walk, but clearly enough to take an account of her life and prepare herself for the end. He did not avoid her eyes as he said all this. Their beauty urged him on.
‘Thank you, Doctor Lafleur,’ she said when he put the rest of his instruments back into his leather coffer. ‘For telling me the truth.’
‘I’m truly sorry. All I can do is to try to diminish the pain.’
The countess closed her eyes.
‘I want to be alone now,’ she said.
Sophie
She is standing behind Mana, waiting for Monsieur Charles Boscamp, the internuncio of the Polish mission in Istanbul. The study in the mission building is a big, bright room with an enormous gilded desk in the centre. The portrait of the Polish King hangs above it. In it, the King is holding a map and is looking at an hourglass. As if he didn’t have time for all he wanted to do, for his face is sad and withdrawn. There are wrinkles of sorrow on his forehead. In his eyes she sees an uncertainty that makes her wonder what has he seen in his life to doubt like that.
Don’t touch anything, Carlo has warned her. It is for him that Mana reddens her lips with carmine, and makes them shiny with walnut leaves. It is hard to tell if he is a guard, a valet, or a butler in this house, for he is vague describing his duties; but sometimes he makes it sound as if the internuncio could not take a step without consulting him. For weeks Carlo has been a frequent visitor to their house, growing more and more alarmed by Sophie’s presence. The Sultana has been making inquiries, sending her spies to find out where her little ungrateful wisdom lived. No house in Istanbul would be safe for long.
‘Don’t show your face to anyone,’ Carlo has warned her every time, bringing his gifts of food and wine. Right from my master’s pantry, he always says, drawing their attention to the internuncio’s fine tastes. What he doesn’t see, he doesn’t miss, he also says. It is this master who will be Sophie’s salvation, her escape. Carlo has told him a story of a beautiful girl from Phanar who has to be saved from the ardour of a young, penniless pasha. It is Aunt Helena who lives in Phanar not them, but a little stretching of the truth never hurt anyone. A daughter of a friend of his, an honest Greek widow who wishes only for her daughter’s well-being. ‘A girl,’ he said, ‘worthy of a king’s bed.’
The internuncio is still not ready to see them, even if it is long past midday. The annual mission party to celebrate the King’s name day ended at dawn. Everyone had been there. The Russians, the French, the English. Diplomats and men of stature and importance. The whole house still smells of roasted meat and melted wax. Over a hundred candles, Carlo has said, all burnt to the very end.
Mana has placed a shawl over Sophie’s head. ‘We won’t let him see you right away,’ she whispers in her daughter’s ears. ‘Stand straight, but don’t look at him. Keep your eyes down.’
But Sophie cannot stop herself from looking. After the Harem, this is the most beautiful room she has ever seen. The walls are painted the blue of the sea and have its luminous shine. The glass in the window sparkles. On the shelves, there are rows of books bound in leather. Has the internuncio read them all? What sort of things are in them? Tales of other worlds, of ships sailing through seas and oceans? The maps on the desk are spread wide, their ends kept from rolling up by two white rocks, studded with white crystals.
She doesn’t even know the names of the lands drawn so beautifully on these maps. Her own ignorance angers her, for she can imagine another woman, a woman who can walk through such rooms with ease, who can talk about the books she has read and journeys she has taken.
‘Look down,’ Mana whispers, pinching her elbow.
The internuncio is not as she imagined him. She thought he would be big, with strong hands, ramrod straight. Instead he is small and sinewy with rouged, wrinkled cheeks. Like an apple stored for the winter. She doesn’t like his stained and crooked teeth either.
His name may be Charles Boscamp, but, even in her mind, she cannot bring herself to call him anything but the internuncio.
‘Better be right,’ the internuncio says to Carlo who towers over his master. There is no anger in this voice though. No tension. No, he is not quite as she imagined him, but his clothes are rich. A green velvet dressing-gown embroidered with gold, white stockings and silver clasps on his shoes. The powder from the wig has spilled over on his vest. His valet should be told to be more careful. She is trying to keep her eyes down, the way her mother told her to, but cannot stop watching him.
There is an air of importance around the internuncio, in the force of his steps, the upward curve of his spine. In the way he wrings his hands, which are the white perfumed hands of a noble. She can imagine him riding, his legs spurring a horse on to greater effort. She can imagine him touching her.
She likes that thought.
Mana is talking fast, assuring the internuncio of her beloved daughter’s meek nature and good humour. Dou-Dou will not be a burden to a gentleman. There is not a trace of moodiness in her, or anger. She is sweetness itself. She is love and devotion and purity, so unlike these French ladies she hears so much about, brought up to speak their minds and put their wants ahead of anyone else’s. Dou-Dou’s heart is filled with nothing but the desire to please. She knows how to be grateful.
‘She is my daughter,’ Mana says. ‘My beloved Sophie. You will not be sorry.’
The internuncio looks at her sharply, as if doubting all these words. She keeps her eyes down, fixed on the clasps of his brown leather shoes. She crosses her arms across her chest and trembles.
‘Is that what you really want, child,’ the internuncio asks. He has lifted her chin up. His finger is soft and warm. Dry like a handful of sand. His eyes are blue, like the sky over Bursa, the whites reddened by last night’s excitement. Can she really make these eyes see nothing but her?
She doesn’t say anything. Her chin rests heavily on his finger. Her hands clutch at the shawl that covers her breasts.
His lips are thin and pale, but there is a smile on them. A smile of pleasure.
He touches her lips, slowly, lingering over their shape. He parts them gently with his finger and touches her teeth. There is a taste to his skin, bitter, pungent but not unpleasant.
‘Leave her then,’ the internuncio sighs. He is so close to her that she catches a sour whiff penetrating his shield of musk and snuff.
‘Not now, My Illustrious Lord. Not yet,’ Mana says. ‘The girl is suffering from her menses and our Lord forbids a woman to lie with a man at a time like that. Wait a few days and I’ll bring her back to you, clean and scrubbed.’
Her mother is not leaving anything to chance. There will be a deposit of 1500 piastrs made with Kosta Lemoni in Phanar, the spice merchant who will keep the money in trust for Sophie, her daughter’s dowry to be paid to her on the day she stands at the altar beside her groom. There will be assurances for the rides in a carriage, and the new dresses, and shawls Dou-Dou likes so much. She could keep all the gifts he might give her: the dresses, the rings, the pendants.
‘Do you want my soul too, woman,’ the internuncio laughs, but Sophie can tell he is not angered by her mother’s shrewdness. He is a man of honour, he assures Mana. He will do what is right.
‘If she pleases me though,’ he says, his finger raised in the air as if he were warning her that not all is settled yet.
‘A virgin,’ Mana answers boldly, ‘needs a good teacher. Then she will learn how to please.’
He likes that. His laughter rings out, shaking his belly up and down, bringing moisture to his eyes.
He takes a small ring from his finger and slips it into Mana’s hand. They examine it later, carefully. Note the thickness of gold, and the shine of the small sapphire. The colour, Mana would tell her later as if Sophie hadn’t noticed it herself, of his eyes.
The crimson robe is wrapped tightly around him. Crimson, he will tell her later, is the colour of the Polish nobles.
The internuncio is sitting in a gilded armchair, a glass of wine in hand, legs spread. ‘Come,’ he says and she walks slowly, her eyes cast down. Slowly, holding her legs together, just the way Mana has shown her. Inside her, her mother’s fingers have slid a pessary made from a lamb’s bladder. She is not to upset it by too sudden a movement. A vial of dove’s blood is hidden in a secret pocket in the fold of her shift. When he is asleep beside her, she is to quietly spill the blood on the sheets. She takes small steps, her hips swaying gently.
‘Closer,’ he says. Her feet are bare, the skin tingling at the smoothness and richness of the carpet.
Her head is spinning with her mother’s words. Don’t look him in the eye. Hold your head down. Smile, don’t laugh. There will be time for laughter later. There will be time for dancing and for rejoicing when your future is assured. Not now, not yet.
‘He is a libertine,’ Aunt Helena has said. ‘For such a man there is nothing sweeter than corrupting innocence.’
Now her shift is lying on the floor. Her naked body is covered with a sheet, so white that it shines. Her hair has been beautifully braided and pinned high, revealing the nape of her neck. Her eyes have been kohled, lips reddened. At the hammam her mother has helped her scrape the hair off her legs and made a special nourishing face mask from an egg yolk and honey. Her skin when she touches it is smooth.
‘Closer. You are not afraid, are you?’ he asks, rising from the chair, putting his glass aside. There is another glass of wine on the side table, filled to the brim. It’s for her. She is to drink it with him. To pleasure. To love. To the good times.
‘Life is so short, Dou-Dou, so fleeting. Shouldn’t we suck the pleasure out of each moment?’
Nodding, she takes one more step toward him. She takes the glass in her hand and sips the wine slowly, avoiding his eyes. One small sip after another. The wine smells of oak and berries. It is heavy, with a tinge of sweetness.
‘Is it good?’ he asks.
She nods. She can hardly stop her eyes from darting to the sides. The internuncio’s bed is big. The four posts rise almost to the ceiling. Underneath she can see a white chamber pot, covered with a lid.
The wine dizzies her. She giggles and puts the empty glass back on the table. The room is hot and she feels drops of sweat gather and roll slowly down her back. The internuncio fills the glass again, but he is not asking her to drink, so she doesn’t reach for it.
She closes her eyes, just like Mana told her to do, when he parts the edges of the sheet and stares at her for a long, long time. He is muttering something in a language she doesn’t understand. He sniffs her like a dog might, nose close to her skin, tickling her. There is a grimace of displeasure on his face.
‘Your odour,’ he says. ‘Too strong for my taste.’
She reaches for the second glass of wine and drinks it fast. Then, standing straight, she lets the sheet fall down from her body. It’s her beauty that needs to speak now. The shine in her eyes, their brightness. The purity of her skin. She takes his hand in hers and kisses it. Kisses it again and again.
His hand caresses her breasts, her belly. Then it slides down, touches the mound of Venus. She shivers.
The internuncio calls it Mon Plaisir.
The robe unwraps. He is naked, his belly protruding, over a patch of grey curly hair. He turns his back to her and makes a few steps to lie on his bed. His bottom is sagging. ‘Turn your eyes away,’ Mana has said. ‘Tell him you are afraid. Tell him he is too big for you. That he will break you inside and make you scream.’
But she has no time to say anything for he sits on the edge of the bed and motions to her to come to him. He is smiling, his eyes narrow, like folds of fabric. The vein on his temple has thickened and darkened.
She sits beside him on the bed and waits.
‘Come on, girl,’ he says. ‘Hasn’t your mother taught you what to do? Should I have taken her instead?’
She shakes her head and crosses her arms, as if to cover her breasts. In his voice there is a note of anger, but perhaps she only thinks it is.
‘Do what I tell you then,’ he says.
She is thinking of the pessary inside her. What if it slips out. What if he puts his own hand there and retrieves it, calling her a liar. Sending her back to her mother. The orders are a relief, for at least she knows what to do to please him.
‘Lie down.’
He is a traveller in the land of Venus, he tells her, a true Explorer, for whom the sight of a Foreign Land is always welcome. A Land with all its Harbours, Bays, Rocks, Beacons and Caverns. Especially a Land not Ploughed before. A Land for which Directions have to be established. A Harbour which has to be thoroughly assessed to assure the safety of his precious cargo. Its Waters explored with Proper Instruments that will measure its width and depths.
Just do what he wants you to do, Mana has said. Make him happy.
The candles in the room make the shadows dance on the ceiling. She tries not to look at his sagging skin. His Instrument and his precious Stones are of excellent order, he assures her. She should thank her lucky stars.
She thinks of Diamandi’s smooth olive skin and the strength of his boyish arms. She thinks of their run across the fields, their mad run of desire.
She can smell the wine on his breath, or is it hers. Somewhere in the back of her mind questions hammer. What if she is not pleasing him? What if she is not what he has expected? What if she doesn’t know what a man wants?
He is grunting, crushing her with the weight of his body. He has pushed himself into her, as if he were squeezing in something soft and lifeless. His hands rest upon her breasts, pinching her nipples.
Her scream pleases him.
But it is only when he wakes up in the morning, when he pats her buttocks and tells her that the Fortifications were not very strong after all, not a match for his Vigorous Attack, and when he sees the blood on the sheets that she knows she has not disappointed him at all. He will not send her back to her mother.
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.’
They slash her dresses with razors. They smash the glass she keeps near her bed. They spit on her, on her bed, on the sheets folded neatly in the closet and smear it with something foul. Then they leave as suddenly as they have come. She hears their footsteps on the stairs, their braying laughter, their whistles of triumph. She gathers herself up, wipes the blood from her face, wraps herself in a blanket, and runs away to her mother.
The internuncio is shocked and very sorry. This is what his note says. He sends his own doctor to bleed her and clean the wounds. She has a fever and her body is rattled with shivers. ‘Tell my master,’ she says in a low whisper, ‘that I’ll die thinking of him.’
The doctor says she won’t die. ‘No one has ever died from a few scratches. Your bones are intact. You’ve just had a bad fright. Nothing more.’
Mana is sobbing in the corner, cursing her fate and her daughter’s misfortune. She doesn’t want to accuse anyone, but wouldn’t her daughter be safer within the Mission’s compound. Where she is now, anyone can find her. Only the other day someone came asking about a Greek girl called Sophie. A man with a red beard and shifty eyes. A sign that the Sultana has not forgotten.
By the time the internuncio comes to see her, it is already dark. The invalid is washed and bandaged, her breath is uneven, her forehead hot. ‘If she dies,’ Mana says, ‘I’ll never forgive myself.’
The internuncio is uneasy. He touches her forehead as a father might, checking how his daughter is feeling.
‘I thought I could trust you with my only child.’
‘Poor Dou-Dou,’ he says. In his voice there is something she could take for concern. When he raises the covers to check the bruises on her body, he is really looking at her.
He calls the doctor and takes him to another room. She can hear their raised voices, a barrage of questions followed by long explanations. When the two men emerge from the room, the internuncio smiles. To Mana he says that he will make sure Sophie gets the best of care. Two of his own servants will be at her disposal, day and night. She will have meals brought from his own kitchen.
‘Am I like Lais?’ she asks.
‘Only you won’t die,’ he tells her, holding her hand. ‘The doctor tells me you have a strong constitution. That it would take much more to kill you.’
She asks him to tell her about Poland.
He tells her of palaces with green lawns and hundreds of servants, hurrying around. Of carriages speeding through the streets, of balls where women of quality dance polonaises and mazurkas. Of tableaux vivants in which the court’s most beautiful ladies appear in the costumes of nymphs or muses.
What do they do?
Nothing. They pose as if a painter painted them. Let everyone admire their beauty. The themes of these tableaux often illustrate a saying or a proverb. Or an old story. Amor bending his golden locks over sleeping Psyche, Danae showered with golden rain.
She asks about the King. Do men tremble when they see him?
He laughs. In Poland, kings are elected and therefore weak. Their powers are limited by the golden freedom of the nobles. Liberum veto, he tells her. Remember that. It means that one Polish noble can stop the law, one Polish noble can break the Sejm for his own private reason. One Polish noble can oppose the king’s wish.
‘Eat, drink, and loosen your belt,’ he says, ‘that’s what the Poles care about.’
She listens.
He is not Polish by birth. His is a complicated story, he warns as if she were unable to understand anything of importance. He was born in Holland but his parents were French Huguenots. That of course would not mean anything to her, would it, but as any intelligent person would know, they had had to flee France to keep their heads on their shoulders. Having lost their estate, his parents could give him little more than his education. This he put to a good use, serving the Prussian King for seven years, and then moving on, to Poland, where the Polish King, then newly elected, recognized his outstanding qualities.
‘That’s why I became Polish, my little Dou-Dou. I thought it far superior to becoming Prussian.’
She doesn’t know when he jokes and when he is telling the truth. The Prussian court, he likes to say, is so enamoured with thrift that guests leave the table hungry and grey stuffing sticks out from the cushions of gilded chairs.
‘Can one just become Polish?’
He laughs. Not ‘just’. Not everyone. A foreign man has to prove his worth, document his belonging to the gentry class. It takes years of patient pleading, of favours bestowed on those with influence. But he has done all this. He even has a new Polish name now, Lasopolski, which means ‘coming from a Polish forest’.
She looks at him with pride.
A foreign woman, he says, reading the question in her eyes, has an easier path before her. All she has to do is marry a Polish noble.
He pinches her cheek as he says it, laughing at the thought. ‘Let this not turn your pretty head,’ he warns her. ‘Your father was a cattle trader. You should be happy with what you’ve got.’
She gives him a mischievous smile and nods.
In her dreams Poland is very close by, a place she stumbles upon almost by chance. She knows it is Poland for everyone speaks in a strange language she doesn’t understand, and she bows and asks to be taken to the King. ‘He will know who I am,’ she repeats. ‘The King,’ she says slowly, and makes the sign of a crown over her head. The people stare at her for a long time, nodding, but not moving at all.
The dream always ends before she can see the King, for when she starts running toward him, the distance between them never diminishes, as if she were running, on soft legs that sink into the ground.
When she is alone in the Polish mission she goes to the internuncio’s study to look at the King’s portrait. In His presence she practises her curtsying and gentle bows of the head. She looks into his blue eyes and says things like, ‘My soul thirsts for you, Sire.’ Or ‘The light of your eyes is too bright for your humble servant, My Lord.’ She says it in her new voice, which is sweet and lingering, thick like honey dripping from a spoon.
One day as she is practising what she thinks of as her manners the internuncio surprises her. Having hidden himself behind the door, he cracks with laughter and tells her that she is ludicrous, a true spectacle.
His hand is pinching her bottom as he says that. ‘Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself, Dou-Dou?’ he asks. ‘Forgetting your place? Your god-given station in life?’
‘The King,’ the internuncio says, ‘is in need of a bath attendant à la Turque.’
When she enters his study he is sprinkling sand over the letter he has just finished writing. He motions to her to sit and begins to read it out.
Massages given by men resembles torture so that one has to be a Turk or a devil to enjoy them. Those who had experienced such baths here say similar things one hears in Warsaw about male and female cooks, i.e. that the latter are cleaner and it is better to be served by them when it comes to the main dish. It is only in the company of a pleasant woman who can bathe, massage, and dry the body of her companion in so many ways, that one can imagine the delights promised by Muhammad to his faithful Muslims. I know of a girl from Phanar, sixteen years of age, who would please Your Majesty highly. I could arrange for her to travel to Warsaw as soon as I received word from Your Majesty.
Without thinking she rises and throws her arms around his neck. She covers his face with kisses. She jumps up and down with joy.
The internuncio likes being able to speak French to her. The true language of the salons, he says, of intelligent conversations. She will now take French lessons. Every day for three hours. If she doesn’t make progress, he will whip her.
‘I’ll take any punishment,’ she says meeting his eye, ‘if it comes from my master.’
‘What an eager girl you are?’ he murmurs, but she can hear from his voice that her exuberance pleases him. ‘Perhaps I should be a bit jealous?’
Jealousy, Mana says, is a good sign.
That day—when she prepares to give him his daily release—he pulls her toward him and places a kiss on her lips. A long, lingering kiss that she will remember for a long time for it tells her that—perhaps—she is not as worthless to him as he wants her to believe.
In the weeks that follow she can’t hide her excitement. When she is alone she likes to imagine herself in Warsaw, this city filled with palaces and green lawns. In her dream, the King is brought to the hammam by his attendants, but he waves them away and enters it alone. He is naked but for a thick towel wrapped around his body, a towel she will peel off. His skin is soft and perfumed, his hands slender. A bath pavilion she imagines covered with tiles. Musicians are cleverly hidden in tunnels, and they fill the royal bath chamber with delightful music. Warmed by the fire, her hands are soothing and strong. Around her she imagines jars with the scents of jasmine and musk. The King is tired after the long day of ruling. He talks to her, his only real friend. He tells her of all the people who want something from him, who make his life a misery. With each motion of her hands, she melts his tensions and soothes his sadness. She alone is different, the King says. She alone understands him, makes him laugh. She alone brings life back into his heart.
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Eva Stachniak
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: An alluring, exotic novel based on the life of the famous and much-painted courtesan, La Belle Phanariote. Perfect for fans of Painting Mona Lisa.‘Stories precede her. Whispers of delighted amusement at her exotic beauty, her mysterious past. Some swear she has been a Sultan’s odalisque. Others that she is a Greek princess. Princes praise her exquisite manners and her pleasing ways. And the King of Poland leads her in the polonaise.’Sophie, the Countess Potocki, is travelling with her entourage from St Petersburg to Paris, to consult with French doctors, when she stops at the Berlin palace of her friend, the Graf von Haefen.There, her whole extraordinary life during one of the most turbulent periods of European history comes back to haunt her – the many strands of her life, the many roles in which she has presented herself, the many biographies she has made up, the many lovers and protectors she has cherished and deceived. And still she continues to attempt to manipulate the lives of those around her.Brilliantly written, cleverly constructed with a strong cast of characters, both real and fictional, and vivid scenes, Garden of Venus is an alluring, sensuous and exotic saga which will delight readers of Tracy Chevalier, Philippa Gregory and Isabelle Allende.