A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  They walk through the park. The silence is evocative of an evening in winter. As the path turns a corner Oleg notices a foreign car whose gray color, overlaid with hoarfrost, is reminiscent of worn velvet. He recalls having seen a station wagon of this type in a film from the sixties. They climb into it as if they were about to drive off. Eva leaves the door open. The smell of coffee mingles with the bitterness of the air …

  “It’s not as strong as Catherine’s,” she says. “One of her favorites, who wanted a sip of her brew, had a fainting fit. But take care, all the same. This coffee’s been keeping me awake all through the night …”

  She smiles and her eyes betray traces of the weariness of that night and the reflection of a road stretching to infinity in the glow of headlights.

  “You’ve come from Berlin?”

  Believing he knows the answer, Oleg feels foolish at not managing to avoid such a trite question.

  “No … I’ve been in Italy. I thought I’d be here on time for the filming, but one always underestimates the vigilance of the customs officers in our fellow socialist countries. At the Polish frontier it took long enough. But then, gaining access to Soviet territory … I guess I should have worked in a James Bond movie first!”

  For people living on their side of the Berlin Wall humor serves as a password.

  A minibus carrying the most senior of the actors from Leningrad arrives at the entrance to the park, all the “doddering dignitaries,” as Dina calls them. And a few of the dowagers, who, in the film, like museum exhibits, represent the last remnants of the era of Peter the Great. One of them is stepping down painfully, supported by Kozin.

  “I hope your director hasn’t replaced me as Catherine by that lady. Good, I’ll go and make my incompetent motorist’s excuses to him. Men like hearing that women are hopeless drivers …”

  They go to meet the others and very soon, as if through the drowsiness that is catching up with her, Eva softly observes: “On a frosty day like this the tsarina should be left to quietly stitch overalls for her grandchildren.”

  That first encounter brings together everything that he will observe during the filming when Eva Sander is on the set. She will remain simple, with very little of the star about her, even vaguely disappointing the actors, who had pictured her sitting next to a Hollywood hero in a limousine! Hidden beneath the energy of her performance, Oleg will perceive a certain detachment, moments when, though present, she is far away. He alone will be able to see her again as that unknown woman walking along beneath the trees white with hoarfrost.

  The aspirant Mamonov is instructed by Potemkin to hand a watercolor painting to Catherine: a pastoral landscape. He brings back an ambiguous verdict. “Design pretty, but coloration mediocre,” is what the empress has written on the verso of the sheet of paper. This Mamonov, a Kalmuck of Asian origin, has yellowish skin. Potemkin is preparing to look for another man when Catherine comes to reassure him: the design (his muscles, his physical vigor …) is exceptional, so let’s forget the “coloration,” that Asiatic flesh tint.

  Oleg has checked: several historical accounts confirm the trick with the watercolor.

  It is the first scene in which Eva Sander has acted. The minimal style she deploys is highly professional. “Economy of gesture,” notes Oleg. “Vocal effects under control. Instead of the lasciviousness of a debauched old woman, just the flaring of her nostrils, a she-wolf scenting her prey …”

  Two or three times Kozin repeats his sign of approval: a thread in the eye of a needle. Then he abandons the gesture. Eva gives the impression that she is not so much playing a part as recounting an experience of her own. Often she suggests filming a sequence again when she is unhappy with a detail, or when another actor has not won her “needle and thread.”

  Oleg tries to translate into words of admiration what Kozin would express if he were not tongue-tied. “Gorky would have spoken of ‘steely steel.’ Well, you are a Catherine to the power of ten!”

  Eva replies coolly: “I’m just Catherine as you imagined her. I’m simply playing that Catherine.”

  He had chosen a bad moment: they are about to film the tsarina going into the alcove where Mamonov awaits her—a body overwhelmingly brutal in its maleness. Their embrace is paced by the dancing of the erotic miniatures on the walls. The breathing of the lovers blends in with a voice-over—one of Catherine’s letters in which she speaks about Mamonov: “… a most excellent heart, combined with a richly courteous spirit … admirably educated … with a great penchant for poetry …” The man’s thick arms can be seen, straining fiercely, the ugly strength of them. And a woman, this aged Catherine, offering her body—a body still beautiful but palpably frail—to a young lover, somewhat crude in the way he possesses her, bending her to his pleasure, thrusting her aside after the climax.

  The scene is clear (sex and power) and yet this new Catherine, even more than before, looks like a woman still hoping to be loved …

  Absorbed by this notion, Oleg fails to notice Eva leaving the set and coming toward him. She seems to regret her curt tone just now. “It’s a very good idea, those frescoes in the alcove! They spared me from having to sumo wrestle with Mamonov. Marilyn’s partner in Some Like It Hot used to say smothering her in kisses was a real chore, comparable to kissing Hitler. With Mamonov, given his elephantine build, I think it might be more like Hermann Goering … I’ve been rereading the script. Especially your marginal notes. It’s incredible what you know about St. Petersburg! There are two or three places I’d really like to take a look at …”

  Their wanderings swiftly take them away from the center of the city. Eva seems more interested in remote districts that were covered in forest in Catherine II’s time. Oleg leads her there with very little notion of what she finds fascinating about all the industrial buildings and canals polluted with hydrocarbons.

  One evening in the north of the city, they find themselves in a network of roads and railroad tracks that he knows well—that mountain crag of an apartment building from his childhood is not far away.

  “This is an odd itinerary for a tourist,” he remarks. “If you were from West Germany the KGB would soon be on our tail. They’ve made plenty of films here around that theme: a woman from the West who claims to be a lover of Russian architecture and is seen prowling around the gates of an arms factory …”

  She smiles and turns up her jacket collar to look like a secret agent.

  “Yes, I know … I had a part in a film like that when I was young. A factory worker who caught an engineer, a traitor to the socialist fatherland, in the act of photographing a top-secret thingamajig made in their factory …”

  “OK, but, as we don’t have a camera …”

  “My father had one when he came over here.”

  “Your father? In Leningrad?”

  Eva starts walking more quickly, looking as if she really did want to throw any surveillance off the scent. Her voice becomes impersonal. Suddenly Oleg realizes she is speaking in German.

  “During the war my father spent two years doing aerial reconnaissance above Leningrad. He was not a pilot, he was a photographer. Using his intelligence the Luftwaffe bombed the city … At the end of 1943 he was taken prisoner by a Soviet unit. He was employed as a builder on the construction sites in the city he had been observing from his plane. When he was finally released he settled in East Germany, in Rostock, where he was born. His conscience was clear: he had not taken part in any massacres. His work as a photographer had been clean, technical … He went back to the same trade after his return and, up to his retirement, he took countless pictures that were useful for the country’s industry. When I was young I turned this father of mine into a cross between Adolf Hitler and one of those German shepherd dogs. Our generation needed these symbolic scapegoats … When I confronted him angrily he always remained calm. ‘I was a soldier. I obeyed orders. I didn’t kill anyone. And I worked for four years rebuilding Russian cities. I spent my life working for the good of the German Democra
tic Republic …’ He was the worst caricature of a German: a robot taking orders from other robots … A year before his death we became closer. He was ill and his second wife, who was younger than him, had left him. For some time now I had stopped regarding him as a war criminal. He was the one who brought up this past again. ‘You were right, I was a robot … But one day I … I did fail to obey orders. I’d observed a railroad junction from my plane. Trains being boarded by children and old people. As sure as anything, they were being evacuated. It was my duty to photograph the spot, but I didn’t do it. And they didn’t bomb the place … You know, I’ve never been back into the Soviet Union, but I’d really like to take another look at that district.”’

  They scramble across the railroad track, walk beside a canal. Eva smiles: “Now you know the object of my espionage …”

  Five minutes later they are climbing up into the attic of the crag-building. It is a clear evening and through the transom of the garret there is a good view of the station building, the storage yards, the trains at a standstill … Eva spends a long time studying this bleak location, which has the look of an old black-and-white photograph. Then she turns toward the model of the palace that occupies a good third of the room …

  Oleg begins talking in German about that former life of his and discovers that it no longer chokes him with pain at every word.

  In the days that follow, they resume their excursions after filming, now going back to the city as Catherine saw it and whose construction she, to a great extent, initiated. A St. Petersburg that the eye must extricate from the later architectural strata—as one chips out crystals from within a layer of rock … This crystallized deposit of the eighteenth century is well known to Eva. Oleg is even introduced to several new “mysteries of St. Petersburg,” as she calls them with a smile. “At number nine, that’s Prince Naryshkin’s house. That’s where Diderot stayed …”

  But what is truly mysterious is simply to pause at one of these spots, unmindful of the glamour of History, only aware, as they are now, of the coppery autumn light glinting on the granite of the little Swan Canal and the buildings that look uninhabited. To linger there, no longer thinking about the empress, just picturing the woman crossing this footbridge, two centuries ago, on a cool, luminous October evening, suffused with the sharp tang of the Baltic.

  “It’s a good thing she’s old enough to be your mother, otherwise I’d die of jealousy!” Dina pulls a face, acting the part of a tragic actress tormented by the pangs of love betrayed. Then she bursts out laughing. “Besides, that Sander woman is too fat. She’s like an old opera singer. Actually, no, I’m talking nonsense. After all, she’s only thirty-nine. And in any case, she’s meant to be well padded. Catherine filled out a lot toward the end of her life. When she was young the tsarina was like me: wasp waist, lily-white complexion. I remember reading that when she got to Russia she made fun of the Empress Elizabeth: ‘Her bosoms spill over the edges of the coins she’s engraved on.’ Except that, as she grew older, Catherine caught up with her …”

  A month earlier Dina had been offered the leading role in a stage play, that of a young revolutionary infuriated by her comrades’ cowardice. A fiery, ferocious character—and this now rubs off on Dina. Even in their private moments she continues speaking in the tones of her part. The way she takes off her blouse has changed—this is how you bare your breast to a firing squad. Oleg sometimes feels he is making love to an unknown woman … And 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 their fellow human beings.

  He talks about this one day to Eva … She has just finished filming the party thrown by Potemkin at his Tauride Palace in April 1791. Gondolas, gardens like paradise, three thousand guests, silks, gold, jewels. The prince’s hat is overloaded with diamonds—Potemkin sheds it and his footman proceeds, bearing this weighty headgear aloft, like a reliquary. In a few months’ time Potemkin will die. His hypersensitive intuition warns him of this. At the height of the festivities he bursts into tears, kneels at the feet of the tsarina—she who has made him into more than a tsar, she, whom he had made into Catherine the Great …

  That evening Oleg meets Eva again. Caught in the rain, they take refuge in a café, “a real Soviet café,” she remarks, finding the poverty of the district touching, very different from the restaurants on the Nevsky Prospekt. They talk about the dishes Potemkin’s guests gorged themselves on and about his weeping fit. “Pure histrionics!” Oleg insists. “Unconscious histrionics that became second nature to him!” replies Eva. “Where do the Russians get this passion for acting from?”

  In Eva’s tones Oleg notices a tentative distancing: on the one hand the Russians, on the other, herself and him, the Germans. He tries to smooth over this distinction.

  “A love of acting isn’t an exclusively Russian foible … At Catherine’s court everyone wrote plays. And everyone acted in them: Poniatowski, Orlov, Ségur … France infected the Russians with the alexandrines of her verse drama. The tsarina herself composed several stage plays. No longer any boundary between living and acting out a life. After all, Potemkin tried out every possible role: tycoon, monk, libertine, student of sacred texts, pimp, writer of delicate love letters … And as for Pugachev, that true Cossack and fake Peter the Third, that was some performance!”

  “Yes … But why this desire to change your identity the whole time?”

  “I’ve studied the language Catherine uses … What’s astonishing is how often she used the word theater.” For her everything was theater: diplomacy, wars, the airs and graces of her courtiers … And even love. A drama acted out by her lovers …”

  “So, was there nothing beyond this playacting?”

  They feel as if they have come within a hair’s breadth of a truth much deeper than the mysteries of a particular reign. Oleg remembers the threshold he had already come close to when talking to Lessya. “Film what Catherine was not,” she had said. And that remark of Dina’s too: picture Catherine walking along in the streets of a town in Italy …

  He now says this to Eva, getting into a bit of a muddle, translating the odd word into German.

  “Kozin has always stressed this drama behind the drama. The bacchanalia of Catherine and her favorites, the bombastic farce of History, the antics of fashionable society, and suddenly, extreme simplicity, humanity naked beneath the sky … And, above all, the fact that you just cannot simulate love!”

  “But wait a minute, Oleg. You said that for the tsarina love was simply a theatrical performance.”

  “Yes, a drama she acts in and applauds at the same time: I love and I am loved! Age will make her more humble, she will often quote Louis the Fourteenth, who wrote to Madame de Maintenon: ‘Love me or, at least, act as if you loved me …’ Catherine’s whole life took place in this ‘as if.”’

  “So, no man ever loved her?”

  Mentally Oleg runs through the list of favorites.

  “No … At least not any of the ones who’ll be seen in the film … Passionate declarations, fine erotic performances, but nothing that might go beyond such playacting.”

  Eva speaks softly, perhaps afraid the sound of her voice might distort the truth that suddenly seems so clear to her: “She lived up to the limits of the games humans play, at the peak of what you and I can imagine in terms of power, riches, sexual pleasure. These limits were her daily fare. So she must certainly have wanted to go beyond them and …”

  “Escape!”

  They say it as one. To exclude the noise in the room they have drawn closer—the consistency of the space between them, now restricted, has changed: it has the density of a shared revelation.

  Years later all Oleg will retain of this is the memory of an intimacy being born. He will even know why, that evening, this affection did not find expression. “I was still with Dina. And after all, Eva Sander was a star. And there was the difference
in our ages …” Circumspect reasoning of the kind men console themselves with when they have missed an essential opportunity. And yet it will suffice for him to encounter some echo of that time (yes, that autumn light on the granite beside the little Swan Canal) to relive the immediacy of the perception that united them at that moment. “Escape!”

  What also keeps the two of them from growing any closer is a fit of madness that overcomes Kozin—his sudden decision to change the ending of the film. The working script shows the elderly empress in tears: her favorite, Mamonov, has just left her … And then the Bastille falls! A panoramic shot: the smoke of the explosions, a crowd of prisoners liberated … Kozin calls this version “a barrel of lies in a drop of truth, the censors’ favorite dish.”

  It no longer suits him. The story will not now end in 1789, but in 1796, with Catherine’s death. Her last couplings with the Zubov brothers will be shown and the climax will be the scene where she faints at the foot of her commode, the Polish throne installed in her privy.

  Aghast, Oleg argues that the film will overrun the prescribed length, that it will be difficult to find two good actors at the drop of a hat capable of playing the roles of the two bad lovers … But Kozin’s decision seems to be final.

  Eva accepts this revised scenario without flinching. Grayish makeup transforms her into an old woman. Her gait becomes more ponderous, her hands shake, she has a whining voice. She is no longer a she-wolf on the alert for prey, she is an old bitch following the scent from habit. Kozin has lost nothing of his feeling for detail: the mirror that hides the alcove now moves aside on its track with a long-drawn-out, sinister grating sound …

  “C-c-come on. W-we’re g-going f-for a d-drink.”

  As Oleg knows, a half bottle of strong drink is the dose that begins to loosen the knots in Kozin’s discourse. Seated at the table, he is quick to put pressure on Kozin, to get him to admit the reasons for his about-face: “We’ve made every effort to extricate the tsarina from her image as a sexual obsessive. And now you’re showing a shameless grandmother going to bed with little whippersnappers aged twenty! There’s no longer any logic to the film …”