A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  A Woman Loved

  Also by Andreï Makine

  A Hero’s Daughter

  Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

  Once Upon the River Love

  Dreams of My Russian Summers

  The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

  Requiem for a Lost Empire

  Music of a Life

  The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

  The Woman Who Waited

  Human Love

  The Life of an Unknown Man

  Brief Loves That Live Forever

  A Woman

  Loved

  A Novel

  Andreï Makine

  Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

  With an introduction by Francine Prose

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © Éditions du Seuil, January 2013

  English translation copyright © 2015 by Geoffrey Strachan

  Introduction © 2015 by Francine Prose

  First published in the United States of America in 2015 by Graywolf Press.

  First published as Une femme aimée by Éditions du Seuil, Paris.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-711-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-342-1

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2015

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014960050

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover images: Getty Images

  French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch

  for GD

  Introduction

  Beginning Andreï Makine’s novel A Woman Loved, we might briefly imagine that we have been plunged into the midst of a racy historical drama, a bodice ripper about the Empress Catherine of Russia, and her many lovers. A mirror keeps rising and lowering to show us her boudoir: a theatrical device, we may think, until we realize that it actually is a theatrical device.

  The amours of the Russian empress are not only a matter of history but also the stuff of fantasy, specifically a fantasy that a screenwriter named Oleg Erdmann is trying to turn into a script for a film that is worth filming and that can be filmed—given the cultural climate in which he lives. This is the pre-glasnost Soviet Union, where the censors decide about art, and where the artists who run afoul of them can be in serious danger.

  As Oleg wrestles with the complexities of the empress’s long and, as they say, colorful career, he also tries to figure out what sort of person she was and how to structure what he wants to say—and what can be said, on film. Meanwhile the world around him could hardly be less like the world he is describing, unless we include the often nonsensical and capricious dictates of government, of political and personal power, the inequities and abuses that persist from era to era. The empress lived in lavish style, while Oleg is sharing a Leningrad communal apartment with an increasingly disaffected girlfriend and several other unfortunate citizens. To pay the rent for this paradise he has a job moving carcasses of meat in a slaughterhouse.

  Andreï Makine was born and raised in Russia, but lives in France and writes in French. So it could be said that he brings a Franco-Russian perspective to a universal subject: a soul in torment. Predictably, nothing goes quite right for Oleg as he attempts to bring his vision to the screen. Less predictably, the society in which he lives changes dramatically, and things began to go very right—or are they merely going wrong in a different direction?

  Deftly translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, Makine’s novel moves so rapidly, and so amusingly, that only gradually do we realize how many complex and weighty themes Makine has chosen to address. Among the most interesting of these is the question of why artists are attracted to the subjects that engage them, why a writer (a screenwriter, in this case) is drawn to a particular character and that character’s life—out of the endless number of subjects and lives that could have been chosen. As the novel progresses, we come to understand that Oleg’s interest in the Empress Catherine goes deeper and is more complicated than we—and even he—have realized: that his fascination with the Russian ruler reflects his own most profound feelings about his origins, his heritage, his childhood.

  Makine is also very good on the ways in which life informs art, and vice versa; how the victories and failures of Oleg’s professional and romantic career change his views on the empress’s reign and her love affairs. “Once more he is struck to notice how easily life and performance blend into one another, creating an intermediary world in which everyone is acting out the role of themselves, while at the same time cribbing from his fellow human beings.”

  In the latter sections of the novel, Communism has fallen; the dictator and the Politburo have been replaced by the oligarch and the gangster. “Political parties proliferated, the economy was privatized, frontiers were opened.” Figures from Oleg’s former existence reappear with new jobs and in new guises. Once more Oleg is given a chance to bring Catherine’s life to the screen—this time to the small screen, in the form of a sensational and exploitative television series—and the new set of difficulties and challenges he faces mirror the problems besetting the larger society. The dilemmas that Oleg has been confronting all along, among them the question of what constitutes historical truth, take on a wholly new and unexpected dimension. And his new understanding of the nature of love answers at least some of the mysteries that have confounded him all along.

  What’s remarkable is how much depth, how much complication—and how much history—Makine has packed into a novel about a man who wants only to make a film about a famous and notorious woman who claimed for herself the freedoms that so puzzle, intrigue—and elude—her smart, sympathetic, beleaguered cinematic biographer. And what stays with us is the intelligence and the depth of feeling with which Makine has portrayed the victories and compromises that sustain the unlikely and inspiring union of art, life, and love.

  Francine Prose

  Translator’s Note

  Andreï Makine was born and brought up in Russia, but A Woman Loved, like his other novels, was written in French. The book is set mainly in Russia (but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy). The author employs some Russian words in the French text, which I have retained in this English translation. These include shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps), izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs), kolkhoznik (a worker on a collective farm in the former Soviet Union), Politburo (the principal policy-making committee of the Soviet Communist Party), gulag (the system of Soviet corrective labor camps, of which the Kolyma complex was the most notorious), apparatchik (a member of the Soviet Communist Party administration, or apparat), and dacha (a country house or cottage, typically used as a second or vacation home).

  The historical references in the text include the famous Nevsky Prospekt, one of the main streets in St. Petersburg (
formerly Leningrad), which lies on the river Neva; Peterhof, the palace and park, with commanding views of the Baltic, built by Peter the Great in 1723 on the outskirts of St. Petersburg; and “Potemkin villages,” sham villages reputedly built for Catherine the Great’s tour of the Crimea in 1787 on the orders of her chief minister, Prince Grigory Potemkin.

  I am indebted to many people, and to the author in particular, for advice, assistance, and encouragement during the preparation of this translation. To all of them my thanks are due, notably to Jennifer Anderson, Thompson Bradley, Edward Braun, Mary Byers, June Elks, Scott Grant, Martyn Haxworth, Wayne Holloway, Barbara Hughes, Russell Ingham, Ann Mansbridge, Damian Nussbaum, Geoffrey Pogson, Pierre Sciama, Simon Strachan, Susan Strachan, and John Weeks, and my editor at Graywolf Press, Katie Dublinski.

  GS

  A Woman Loved

  I

  The great mirror falls like a sash window. The woman who has just pressed the lever smiles: always a tense moment. What if the frame hit the floor with a crash and the glass shattered? But there is padding at the point of contact, and now the world is cut in two. On this side a white-and-gold salon. On the other, hidden by the mirror, a vaulted recess, a candle, a naked man breathing heavily …

  A chamberlain sidles into the salon. “Majesty, the chancellor is here.” The woman is already seated at a desk, pen in hand. Beneath her long dress, her body is sated with love. “Ask him to come in!”

  She gets up to greet an elderly man with watery eyes, whose frame is too massive for those slender calves in their white stockings.

  “Prince, I hope you’ve come to report that order has been restored in the governance of Kazan …”

  The audience ended she rushes over to the lever. The mirror rises to reveal the alcove … The man whose embrace she had interrupted had a powerful, scarred body. The new secret guest is svelte; his mouth forms a sweetly petulant line … He is uttering a cry of pleasure at the moment when the chamberlain coughs outside the door before announcing another visitor. The woman breaks free, adjusts her dress, arranges her hair. The mirror falls, hiding the curve of the recess …

  “His Excellency, the English ambassador, Sir Robert Gunning.”

  She crosses to an armchair where a cat lies sleeping, drives it away with a swift caress.

  “Come and sit by the fire, Your Excellency. You will not be used to our Russian hoarfrosts …”

  The Englishman leaves. The mirror rises again. The lover now has tight curls, blond like an albino, with thick lips. At the court he is known as “the White Negro.” The woman gives herself to him with expert deftness … The man is on the brink of orgasm when there is a discreet cough in the antechamber.

  “Majesty, Field Marshal Suvorov.”

  “Dear Alexander Vassilievich! They tell me the sultan is in retreat from our victorious armies. So, when shall we lay siege to Constantinople?”

  The alcove opens up. An almost timid lover. It feels to the woman as if she were possessing him, and at the same time teaching him how to possess her …

  “His Excellency, the French ambassador, Monsieur de Breteuil!”

  She remains seated with an indifferent air and, as she allows the man to approach her, fiddles with a pinch of snuff.

  “So, Monsieur le Baron, it seems your court persists in thinking my hatred does you more honor than my friendship?”

  The mirror rises: a very young lover weeps, stammering out grievances, then calms down, like a comforted child.

  “Majesty, His Majesty, the King of Sweden!”

  As she talks with the king the salt from her lover’s tears is still on the woman’s lips …

  “Majesty, Monsieur Diderot!”

  “Dear friend! You philosophers merely work on paper, which is long-suffering. While I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is a good deal more irritable and ticklish …”

  Diderot gets carried away, gesticulates, makes prophetic pronouncements, departs.

  The woman makes the mirror rise once more. Her lover is laughing. “Did he beat you black and blue again, that lout of a Frenchman?” She presses against him, smothers his laughter with a kiss. “No. I take refuge behind a little table now …”

  “The Right Honorable, the Count of Cagliostro!”

  “Great Tsarina! I have had this alloy smelted deep within the fire-vomiting bowels of Vesuvius. It possesses rejuvenating virtues …”

  The mirror rises, descends, rises again … The president of the Academy, Princess Dashkova. Lever pressed. Giacomo Casanova, agent of the Inquisition. Lever pressed. Prince Paul, her unloved son. Lever pressed. Count Bobrinsky, her illegitimate son. Lever pressed. The marquis d’Ormesson. Lever pressed. The comte de Saint-Germain. Lever pressed.

  Oleg Erdmann turns a pocket mirror over and over in his hand. The back is made of black leather: the dark alcove. The glass: the salon where the empress receives visitors.

  The reflection cuts into segments the cramped room where he lives: a sofa, an old wardrobe, shelves groaning under the weight of books. On the worktable a typewriter’s metallic grin. Three leaves of paper, with sheets of carbon paper between them—the text of his …

  “Of my utter madness,” he says to himself, anticipating the judgments that will be passed on his screenplay. The worst would be simple contempt. “So, young man, you’ve been browsing through a few pamplets about the life of Catherine the Second, have you?”

  “Well, more than any of you ever have!” Oleg whispers defiantly, challenging the scorn of an imaginary jury. He has read and made notes on everything. He knows the empress’s life better than … better than he knows his own! The notion astounds him. But it’s true, he no longer knows what he was doing on, say, March 22, 1980. Nor on the day before, nor the day after. These dates, still so recent, have been completely erased. It’s easier to reconstruct the empress’s life at two centuries’ distance.

  So, what is she doing, already in the early scenes? Well, of course! Taking snuff. With her left hand, the other is reserved for people to kiss … And then there’s that occasional table she puts between herself and Diderot. When he gets excited the philosopher starts thumping her on the knees. “I’m covered in bruises,” she complains with a laugh … Breteuil? Catherine has little time for him, as for most of the French diplomats. In 1762 she asks him to finance the coup d’état that is being prepared. Versailles refuses. London foots the bill. Result: a quarrel with France, juicy contracts for England … One of the visitors to the alcove is “Scarface”—Aleksey Orlov, as reckless as his brother, Grigory, the current lover. One night, taking advantage of his resemblance to Grigory, Aleksey manages to slip into the young tsarina’s bed. The darkness facilitates the fraud. At the height of their transports, Catherine comes across the scars on the man’s face … And Cagliostro? He dupes the simple souls of St. Petersburg, converses with spirits, offers elixirs of youth … Catherine banishes him, she has no love of charlatans or Freemasons. Or maybe she is jealous of his wife, the ravishing Seraphina? The Italian departs in the style of a true magician: at midnight twelve carriages ride out through each of the city’s twelve gates. Each of them contains one Cagliostro and one Seraphina. And in the travelers’ register, at every one of the barriers, the sorcerer’s signature … Who else? Count Bobrinsky, the son of Catherine and Grigory Orlov. The child is born just before the coup d’état. He must be hidden from the tsar. Wrapped in a beaver fur (bobr is the Russian for “beaver”), he is spirited away to safety … The comte de Saint-Germain, the adventurer, arrives in Russia in the spring of 1762. To take part in the plot? The marquis d’Ormesson is one of the rare Frenchmen to find favor in the empress’s eyes, is he not the cousin of Louis-François d’Ormesson, who opposed the opening of the Estates General in France in 1789, predicting catastrophe? When Giacomo Casanova comes to Russia he buys himself a female serf, nicknames her “Zaire,” and, wonder of wonders! he falls for her. While at the same time cheating on her with a handsome army officer, Lunin, much to Catherine’s amusement.
She prefers Giacomo’s brother, Francesco, the painter whose brush immortalizes Potemkin’s victories … And then there is her unloved son, Paul! A sickly child who changes the cards on the place mats before dinner so he can be seated next to his mother … A mother who signs peace treaties, receives Diderot, corresponds with Voltaire, defeats the Turks (which delights the author of Candide). And who, at intervals, walks over to the great mirror and presses a lever …

  “That’s going to make it like a Brazilian soap opera,” one of his fellow students teased him one day. “A TV series in three hundred and a half episodes.” Confused, Oleg faltered: “Why ‘and a half’?” The other burst out laughing. “Well, you’ll need half an hour at least just to list all of Katie’s lovers!”

  Mockery did nothing to alter his resolve. Oleg wanted to know everything about Catherine: how she spent her time (she worked fifteen hours a day), how she dressed—very simply—her restrained tastes in food, her fads (the snuff she took, her intensely strong coffee). He knew her political views, what she read, the personalities of the people she corresponded with, her carnal cravings (the “uterine rage” derided by so many biographers), her custom of rubbing her face with ice every morning, her passion for the theater, her preference for riding astride a horse rather than sidesaddle …

  Yes, everything about Catherine. Except that often this “everything” seemed strangely incomplete.

  Perhaps the key to the enigma could be found in the naive observation that this ultracerebral woman from time to time let slip: “The real problem in my life is that my heart cannot survive for a single moment without love …”

  “Were you asleep or what? I rang ten times! It was your boozy neighbor who let me in … Aha, I see our scriptwriter’s been writing about his flighty Katie. May I read your masterpiece? Come on, wake up, Erdmann! Give me a kiss! Make me a coffee, you mummified zombie …!”