A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  A glass of vodka banishes first the shame, then the need to think. What remains is the childhood memory he carries with him into his sleep. His mother stroking his head, softly singing a lullaby in German, and before he falls asleep he has time to see those objects set out on that night table. He knows them by heart: a cup, a necklace, a book …

  Walking along he discovers just how weak he is—he gets out of breath on the staircases in the subway, then makes an exhausting trek along the railroad track. One last surge of energy, a wager: if he could get as far as the crag-building of his childhood, his life would take off again, would give him back a reason for running, for fighting on.

  The day before he had restored a little order to his room, washed some of his things, left the bottle alone. He unearthed the old maps of Europe, the ones for the “secret journey” he no longer believes in, he thought of sending them to Eva Sander, whose address he has kept. But at the thought of this he was overwhelmed by a feeling of cosmic remoteness. Then he remembered Luria, the historian who had once supported his screenplay … So the parcel of maps went off to him and, calculating his age, Oleg reflected that Luria might well be dead and therefore even more out of reach than the remote galaxy where Eva dwelled …

  At first it seems as if in his exhausted state he has confused the network of streets, his route to the crag-building. The rows of warehouses and run-down housing developments no longer exist. In their place is a forest of concrete pilings, fences around construction sites, sections of walls revealing the interior of a room, the intimacy of a former life ripped open …

  He hurries on, fearing he will come upon his childhood home in ruins as well. He is out of breath, the air smells of steel, the bitter exhaust from trucks, snow mingled with mud. The alleyway that used to lead onto the railroad tracks has turned into a river of earth. The light is already fading. Feeling his way amid fragments of scrap iron, he leaps from one patch of asphalt to the next. The tracks have been taken up, a trench some sixty feet wide has been dug to replace them—probably a future tunnel.

  Finally, through the jungle of steel girders he catches sight of the crag-building: no longer ringed by the rolling stock of trains but by a high metal fence.

  “Even so, there must be a way in,” Oleg says to himself. “The people who live there must have to slip through somewhere …”

  Walking along outside this fence becomes a challenge, he flounders around amid muddy ice, gets out of breath, unbuttons his coat, ignores the lumps of clay clinging to his boots. The fence follows a curve and at each corner appears to offer an opening that would lead to the building whose outline he can see. But, inexplicably, its windows continue to remain on the other side of the barrier … Dusk engulfs the path, he stumbles, his vision blurred with sweat, his breathing raw from the wind … Then he stops, colliding with a pile of old railroad ties, and sits down, exhausted—hearing nothing now beyond the pounding of the blood in his temples. At his feet, behind the fence, a huge cavity opens out, a pit destined to accommodate the foundations for a structure. The nature of the project is spelled out on a sign: “Prestige development, from studios to six-room apartments, penthouses, swimming pools, parking lots, fitness rooms …” He pictures the apartments, how they will be teeming with every modern convenience, children, hugs and kisses, satisfaction fulfilled. All this sited over a hole from which the cold smell of earth, of damp wood—of the grave—will arise. But the happy residents will be unaware of this. Nor will they ever see the old railroad ties where a little boy once hopped along, hurrying to return to an attic half taken up with a model of a castle …

  His return journey is a flight in darkness amid mud. His way is barred by ditches, great steel pipes, rolls of fiberglass. His eyes are hot with tears, tears of disgust at his inability to be anything other than this forty-year-old man, his feet caked with mud, gasping for breath in a way that reaches right down into his chest in a stinging rush. He would like to push this dummy to the limit, make it fall, roll it in the earth soiled with the remnants of lives destroyed. Or knock it out with long drafts of alcohol. Then for a few minutes it could live in harmony with that child of ten who used to walk along, counting the ties, until he reached the crag-building, climbed up, undressed, and crouched down in a little zinc bathtub, beneath a stream of warm water.

  The crag-building, a little zinc tub, a stream of warm water, his father softly whistling a tune … During his illness, recalling this childhood happiness will be the only reality that keeps him in contact with life.

  He sees a doctor visiting, an elderly woman whose weariness he can sense. “They earn nothing these days, these local doctors,” he thinks in his listless state, but he lacks the strength to thank her or to feel indignation. He remains silent, too, in the presence of Zhenya, his neighbor, not from ingratitude, but on account of the cough that is choking him. She brings him broth and he notices her three children poking their heads in at the door, curious to see the dying man their mother is feeding. Oleg remembers that during his years of success he had never once given a thought to Zhenya, forgotten here in this communal cavern. The idea pains him more than the burning in his chest.

  There is also an old man whom he recognizes through the mists of the fever and whose face, at first, makes him weep. It is Luria, leaner and paler than the man who, long ago, made his stand against the State Committee …

  Half alive and lethargic as he is, Oleg recognizes the already springlike chill given off by the coat Luria hangs up on the door and the faintly smoky aroma of the tea he prepares, boiling up water in Zoya’s antique kettle …

  These comradely actions recall the collective life of the old days, though Oleg always detested its poverty. What he is experiencing now is the lingering echo of that life: the humble, patient solidarity of the losers.

  He is too weak to carry on a conversation. Besides, Luria says little, thanks him for the old maps of Europe (“Lanskoy’s maps”), advises a diet of honey. For Oleg, the taste of this honey merges into the stirrings of life being reborn.

  One evening, amid the drowsiness of his illness, a troop of shadows appears, processing across the wall opposite his bed. Men in frock coats, women in crinolines … It takes Oleg a moment to guess the source of this theater of phantoms: Luria has managed to repair the magic lantern. The historian murmurs a commentary, in an ironic and mysterious voice, like someone embellishing a tale of adventure. On the wall the silhouettes of a man and a woman in each other’s arms: “The abbé de Boismont in bed with a duchess. Suddenly they hear the husband’s footfalls: ‘Pretend to be asleep,’ whispers the abbé. The duke appears beside the adulterous woman’s bed. ‘Hush,’ the abbé orders him. ‘I call on you to bear witness!’ The duke is dumbfounded. ‘Witness? But …’ The abbé gives him no time to react: ‘Silence! Let me explain. Yesterday the duchess claimed she slept so lightly that a fly could rouse her. I wagered her fifty louis d’or that I myself could slip into her bed without disturbing her dreams. She laughed in my face. But you can see for yourself that my arrival has not disturbed her sleep at all.’ The duke sighs: ‘What a ridiculous wager …’ The abbé gets dressed and, before leaving, persuades the duke to agree that the duchess shall not be told. The next morning he returns. The duke bears witness to what he saw during the night and, like a gentleman, pays out fifty louis to the winner of the bet … who has cuckolded him.”

  There may have been other stories projected on the wall, but this is the first one Oleg has grasped completely, without interrupting it by his coughing fits. The first that makes him laugh.

  The shadows get up to more of their little games. June 1770, the comtesse de Valentinois prepares her guests for a somewhat special dinner party: with each new dish the diners will remove one item of clothing. After dessert those who are now naked will indulge in the pleasures of their choice … Excitement takes hold of the table companions, a menu of a dozen dishes offers them the prospect of catching the object of their desire in the act of shedding all her—or his—petals.
With the crème caramel the countess’s own beautiful breasts make their appearance and she bares all just as half a dozen of the men have stripped naked as old Adam. Madame de Valentinois, if a memoir of the time is to be believed, “made of her own flesh a dessert a great deal more tasty than the crème caramel these gentlemen had just been savoring.”

  No, Luria is not just trying to cheer him up. These shadows remind Oleg of his original screenplay about Catherine. The tsarina watched France with a feverish mixture of jealousy, fascination, and wounded pride. Paris was the looking glass in which she studied herself every day, closely observing the fashions, the currents of thought, and the art of seduction … Her correspondents kept her abreast of the city’s latest gossip, her secret agents unmasked for her the plots that were being hatched at Versailles. As for the diplomatic briefings being sent to the French Embassy in St. Petersburg, she was aware of their contents before the ambassador himself. She knew all about the vortex of mistresses around Louis XV, about the adolescent girls groomed for the king’s pleasure in his Parc-aux-Cerfs hideaway at Versailles …

  On the wall a man with a wig is pursuing the silhouette of a woman. Luria comments: “They’ve wagged their tongues so much about Catherine’s sexual appetite. But was the old king’s taste for very young girls any more moral? Take a look at this character: Lebel, the footman who ‘tried out’ the king’s future mistress, Madame du Barry. Always two yardsticks, a double standard. In Catherine’s case, people blush. Would you credit it? She has Countess Bruce, the ‘tester,’ check out the favorites for their sexual vigor. While Lebel’s ‘trial run’ is held to be an elegant amorous exploit.”

  This shadow theater does not seek to clear the tsarina’s name but to situate her once more in the Europe of her age. And at that time the quintessence of Europe was French.

  “And now we have this plump gentleman, let’s say he’s the regent of France, Philippe d’Orléans. He’s with his mistress, Madame de Parabère, the archbishop of Cambrai, and the famous financier John Law. A paper is brought for the regent to sign. But he’s so drunk he can’t manage the pen. So he holds it out to Madame de Parabère: ‘Sign, whore!’ She declines the honor. Then, to the archbishop: ‘Sign, pimp!’ The latter abstains. Finally, to Law: ‘Sign, thief!’ Law refuses. The regent sums up: ‘See how well the kingdom is governed: by a whore, a pimp, a thief, and a drunkard!’”

  Luria removes the cardboard silhouettes, switches off the lantern. “Tales like these were, if you like, as much the political background to Catherine’s life as the chatter on television is for us today. We rub our eyes when we see someone like Potemkin neglecting the business of the empire on account of a hangover. How shameful! But he would have been perfectly familiar with the anecdote of Philippe d’Orléans making fun of himself. Oh and, by the way, Catherine one day got word of a new diversion for the Parisian aristocracy: the magic lantern! Oh yes. Except that these were plates of glass on which painters depicted scenes of debauchery. The blue films of their day. One of these performances at the home of the marquise de Travenart caused a scandal: the beautiful nudes her magic lantern projected on the walls bore a strong resemblance to Marie Antoinette … Before we judge Catherine we must always remember the background to that apocalypse of joy … Right, I’m leaving you now. Here’s your doctor. And eat more honey, Catherine adored it. See you tomorrow.”

  One day Luria talks to him about Kozin’s film, about the scene where, in flashback, we see Peter the Great witnessing the beheading of his unfaithful mistress, Marie Hamilton. The tsar goes up onto the scaffold and picks up the head that has just been cut off …

  “The film turns that execution into the symbol of Russian history. Just think, Peter the First picks up the severed head and kisses it on the mouth! Horror! Barbarism! Slavic savagery! Kozin forgets that Peter didn’t stop at that kiss. We’re in the eighteenth century and he is passionate about science. After kissing the lips that are starting to turn pale, the tsar flourishes the head and gives a learned lecture on the functioning of the blood vessels now dangling down from the severed neck. Yes, an anatomy lesson, right there on the scaffold!”

  Oleg feels a debater’s energy awakening within him. Luria’s argument was there to provoke him.

  “But, hold on, that’s just what Kozin did show. That’s all there is in our history—tyranny combined with a hunger for scientific progress. Space rockets invented by scientists whom Stalin kept locked up in laboratories that were prisons! Violence plus utopia, a very Russian formula. Peter the Great often employed it …”

  “And what would you say about this other execution, perpetrated in the name of a utopia? A woman receives a sword blow in the back of her neck and, barely alive, is forced to walk over the bodies of the victims who have preceded her. She’s finished off with pike thrusts and then they amuse themselves by undressing her and washing her, the better to mutilate her body. One of her legs is thrust into the mouth of a cannon, her breasts are ripped off, her genitals reduced to pulp. Finally she’s beheaded and her head, with the hair curled by a hairdresser, is presented to her best friend. Yes, you’ve guessed it. We’re not talking about the customs of Russians under Ivan the Terrible, but the pastimes of citizens in a highly civilized country. This was how, in the twilight years of her life, Catherine learned of the death of the princess de Lamballe, the friend of Marie Antoinette. So the Russians invented nothing. It’s a shame Kozin didn’t allude to that French looking glass Catherine used to glance at in alarm …”

  “But he does, in the final scenes. The taking of the Bastille, the freeing of prisoners …”

  “Yes, a total of seven were held there. That’s all. Under Louis the Sixteenth their meals consisted of three dishes and a choice of wine. A few years later, in the hell of the revolutionary prisons, such treatment would have seemed like a dream of paradise. As for the prison where I met your father, the famous Butyrka in Moscow, there were over sixty of us detainees crammed in there, standing up, in a cell four feet by twelve. Packed in so tightly against one another that we had to take it in turns to breathe, if I can put it like that: one of us breathing in to take advantage of the little space left by his neighbor breathing out. Soon there was not a breath of air left in that dungeon. Your father asked two fellows to lift him up and he managed to break the glass in a skylight close to the ceiling. His hand bled a good deal but we were able to survive. My limbs were shattered after the interrogations, your father let me lean on his shoulder. That vertical torture lasted more than twenty-four hours. And as always, in that kind of situation, there was an element of black humor. They accused Sergei Erdmann, your father, a German, of being a member of a Zionist organization. And me, a Jew, of being an agent of the German spy services. They’d unearthed letters I once exchanged with a professor in Tübingen …”

  Luria breaks off but his hands go on moving as if he were still telling the story of this life long ago to someone invisible. Oleg feels a sudden surge of deeply painful sympathy. And realizes he is cured, he is once more capable of sharing in other people’s sufferings.

  He gets up, goes to the kitchen, makes some tea. Outside it is a spring evening, the air is faintly blue, there is drizzle, gilded by the sunset. Zhenya’s children are playing near the four-wheel-drives parked in the courtyard. A window opens, a man with a shaven head yells out. They scatter … The smallest of them stops, dazzled by a late ray of sunlight, slanting down, that has contrived to slip into this dark courtyard.

  Back in his room Oleg sees Luria bent over the maps spread out on the sofa. “Lanskoy’s maps.”

  “I didn’t mean to bore you with that stuff about prison,” Luria remarks softly. “But here’s the question that diverted me from my profession as a historian. There came a time, maybe when I was about thirty, when I began to feel a bit of a fool: I was spending my life recording the follies and atrocities committed by our beloved fellow human beings. What an enviable vocation! That was when I began to turn my attention to the circulation of money under Cathe
rine the Second. A neutral, technical subject and one that absolved me from heaping upon the tsarina all the insults a good Soviet historian was supposed to bestow onto her: upholder of slavery, autocrat, Russian Messalina … When I read your screenplay the question I had sought to repress came back to me in all its impertinence. Who is to blame for the torrent of grandiose crimes that are called ‘historical events’?”

  “Is there really one guilty party to be singled out?”

  “Yes. Us.”

  “You mean, humanity?”

  “No! Us. You, me, thinkers, historians, artists. We who accept this caricature of Catherine: a debauched woman on the throne, the seducer of French philosophers, Bonaparte in skirts …”

  “So there’s a hidden side to her that people try to obliterate …”

  “Well, there are these maps and the mystery of them. And archive documents that bear witness to the preparations Catherine and Lanskoy undertook for their escape. But above all, if you believe in this plan, then Catherine’s life appears in a different light.”

  “Agreed. An unknown life. But how could Kozin have shown it in his film, since no historian speaks of it? I made no mention of it in my screenplay …”

  “I’m no screenwriter, but I’d begin like this: the start of winter, a German town, a coach with four horses is about to depart. Standing in front of the carriage, a young man of twenty-four and a young girl of fourteen. The future Catherine the Great and her uncle Georg Ludwig, her first love. History separates them: the girl will go on to win the throne of Russia. Her beloved departs for Italy. Snow, the sound of hoofbeats, and in the girl’s loving imagination we see the road Georg Ludwig will follow, valleys, mountains, sleepy villages, and, finally, on the far side of the Alps, the first breath of spring in Italy. The light of a country she will never see during her glorious reign …”