A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  Zhurbin pretends to be repentant. “I’m sorry, Erdmann. I know that morning she spent in Teplov’s arms is only a piece of gossip. But … after all, it’s included in some of the biographies … In any case, if it’s not true, as they say, it’s a damned good story! Se non è vero … è molto ben trovato. Have a piece of candy. It’s based on wild roses, excellent for the throat … The stove in that episode is an ‘Old Dutch’: fine china tiles with pretty designs on them. The very model my factory is just putting on the market. Do you know how many orders we’ve received since that episode went out? More than five thousand! And we’re in the middle of summer. Imagine if we repeated it, say, in November. No, your film’s not a crude commercial. It’s like this candy. It’s up to us to add the wild rose syrup, or caramel … Or a stove. Would you like an ‘Old Dutch’ stove for your villa? What? You don’t have a villa? Ha, ha, I’m only joking. Just you wait. By episode fifty you’ll be buying yourself a small castle.”

  This conversation marks the fact that a certain stage has been reached: Oleg realizes he has now allowed himself to be integrated into the new life. Work on the scripts has left him no time to be aware of it. But the facts are these. He earns a lot of money, rents a fine apartment a few steps away from the Nevsky Prospekt, and three months before, Tanya returned to live with him. She was the one who called to congratulate him on his success, commenting that their show was “a bit kitschy, but nothing to be ashamed of.” He ends up thinking this himself.

  His reentry into life as other people live it has passed unnoticed thanks to Zhurbin’s great cunning in always pretending to take nothing seriously—neither his factories in all four corners of Russia, nor this series: “It’s good entertainment for all the proletarians who are being exploited by capitalists like me,” he would say. “The cannabis of the people …” This was his way of soothing any reservations Oleg might have. “You mustn’t take all this literally, Erdmann. We’re not here to delve deep into the archives. Otherwise the dust would make the viewers sneeze. So take care!” Oleg resigned himself, recognizing that what he was filming was no worse than any other television series. “The competition,” Zhurbin remarked jokingly, “has ten murders per episode. We have the same number of sex scenes. Make love, not war, ha, ha …”

  The speed at which the weekly episodes had to be filmed caused conscience to be disconnected. Oleg preferred to think of them working with “the sangfroid of true professionals.”

  At the end of September there is this letter from Sweden … “Ingmar Bergman’s written to you. He needs your advice,” jokes Tanya. A card with a view of a fjord, slanting handwriting … A note from Lessya! “I’m thrilled that your series is such a success and your dream has finally been realized.” Oleg cannot tell whether these are words of praise or of mockery. “My dream …” Despite the brevity of the communication there is a perceptible hint of regret—at not being part of the new Russian reality, with its sharp tang of adventure. On the picture of the fjord a little arrow drawn in by pen: the house where the family vacations are spent, a verdant riverbank, everything beautiful, the air pure; tranquillity and affluence reign there … But real life is elsewhere, Lessya must be thinking, in those Russian cities where she left her youth, a world where she feels she will never grow old …

  The next day, early in the morning, he sets off for Peterhof. A space has been hired for half a day of filming, every minute counts. He remembers those long weeks when Kozin had a whole wing of this vast palace at his disposal …

  He leaves his car, walks through the park, which is petrified in a milky pallor. For the exterior scenes it’ll be hopeless, too much mist. OK, they’ll film in a gallery or a salon, what does it matter?

  The silence of the tall trees, the dull gilding of the leaves, the scent of the Baltic close at hand. And this pathway slowly extending, looking as if one could follow it forever. He notices a figure in the distance and it makes him slow down. Memory is more alive than the present. The same park, the silvery white of the hoarfrost and a still unknown woman walking along, all alone in this sleeping kingdom. Eva Sander … Oleg shakes himself, recognizes his actors emerging here and there from the mist. They all arrive on time, with an almost military discipline that will enable them, after this bout of filming, to dash over to another film set to act in a commercial …

  And it has started: Catherine is surprised at the lack of vigor her favorite, Zorich, displays in love. The young man invents imaginary grievances, becomes confused, and finally throws himself at the tsarina’s feet and confesses: he loves another woman …

  Suddenly Oleg stops the filming: “We’ll start again tomorrow. We can’t film with this mist in the park.” The actors gather up their belongings and disperse, uncomplaining.

  An hour later he seeks out Zhurbin in his office. To rule out any compromise, he declares in an almost threatening voice: “Ivan, I’m stopping there. Hire somebody else. As far as I’m concerned, I’m through with this Catherine the Great shambles!”

  He suddenly notices a visitor standing just inside the door. Zhurbin is on his feet with an opened package in his hand. With a vague gesture he invites Oleg to sit down, then, turning to the man: “OK, Sasha. Do the same as before. Put in a complaint to the police, but say nothing to our colleagues. We don’t want to alarm them …”

  Sasha goes out. Oleg returns to the assault. “It’s best for us to leave it there, Ivan. It’s becoming a total mess! Catherine never accused Zorich of being sexually inadequate. And he never told Catherine he was going to marry one of her maids of honor. That doesn’t come till later, with Mamonov in 1789. And we’re in 1778 …”

  He expects a retort, a volley of arguments. But Zhurbin reacts mildly, as if in order to make quite sure: “But I thought we’d agreed about that scene. And in any case … All Catherine’s lovers deceived her. So, Zorich or Mamonov, what’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that tomorrow I’m supposed to be filming this hybrid of Zorich and Mamonov in the arms of his wife. And you know what follows: Catherine’s henchmen tie him up and rape his young wife in front of his eyes. It’s a total lie, but …”

  “But you agreed to put it in the script …”

  “Well, I don’t agree anymore!”

  Oleg stands up, towering over his friend as he crouches in his boss’s chair. Zhurbin’s arguments are easy to predict, the same as in their last dispute: the series cannot be made without these shock images, the public at large is not interested in dusty archives …

  Zhurbin is silent, absently he smooths out the brown wrapping paper with his hands. Surprised by this lack of reaction, Oleg leans forward to see the contents of the box …

  “My goodness! That’s some gift!”

  The sight of the rag doll is so striking that he emits a whistle. An old-fashioned toy that Zhurbin is removing from the wrapping in a somewhat hesitant manner. The doll has been ripped open and the cotton stuffing is colored red …

  “I receive several of these every month. They’re generally toy bears, ripped open, with my name written on them in felt pen. The red is paint, but one day there was blood as well. And on this one it’s no longer my name. It’s my daughter’s …”

  He talks in a toneless voice, his eyes fixed on the parcel. His marriage, the birth of a child who is somewhat … His voice falters. She’s not “feebleminded,” he spits the word out bitterly, no, she just has an unusual attitude, no sense of danger, no awareness that people are not all brimming with goodwill … His wife died two years before, hit by a car. No, nothing suspicious, apparently. Although …

  “That’s the hardest thing at the moment. You have to expect anything, at any time, coming from anyone. And this doll, I don’t know where they found it. It’s very old. My sister had one like that when we were children …”

  He puts the doll back in the box, begins wrapping it in paper, as if he wanted to hide the contents. The telephone rings, Zhurbin’s tone of voice changes midsentence: “Who? … Yes … But of course, m
y dear friend, I’ll be with you in just a minute …”

  Oleg hastens to ask the question he knows he should have asked long ago.

  “So why this series, Ivan? Was it just to sell your ‘Old Dutch’ stoves? A page of advertising would have been enough …”

  Zhurbin clears his throat, tries to smile.

  “This’ll make you laugh, but I was hoping to convey a message. In this new country where people no longer have any idea what men are capable of, one where they can threaten a child, kill her, a child like my daughter, who’s even more frail than the rest … Yes, I said to myself, we must show that it’s all been tried before: violence, wealth, sex, power … Catherine tested it to the hilt: wars, authority, the flesh. There’s nothing new about catharsis. Yes, the viewer who sees this theater of cruelty and desire will see that it’s a path that doesn’t lead to anywhere very much. A tsarina has a whole army of lovers, she owns the fattest slice of the planet, and she dies unnoticed, at the foot of her commode. I thought people would make the connection: here’s a life where you can kill, seek pleasure, dominate others and it’s all empty, because there’s something else that we need to be looking for …”

  “But what ‘else,’ Ivan?”

  “I thought you’d be the one to know that …”

  A secretary puts her head around the door, whispers a visitor’s name. Oleg takes his leave and goes. In the subway he tells himself that next time he absolutely must talk to Zhurbin about the old maps on which Catherine and Lanskoy had traced the route for a secret journey.

  The episode portraying the rape of the young bride is broadcast a week later. Brutal images, nudity, rapid switches between harsh lighting and the dark shadows of soldiers. At one moment the camera cuts away: in among some cushions, a rag doll with its sad smile …

  The series hauls itself up to number two in the ratings, a whisker behind the Argentinian series The Rich Weep Too. Zhurbin avoids congratulating Oleg on this achievement.

  Oleg meets Luria in a little local café that it takes him awhile to recognize. Precisely because the place has not changed. All the restaurants have been adopting fashions that are thought of as Western, making a show of a “design”—sometimes cold and metallic, sometimes overloaded with deep red velvet and mirrors. Here they still serve the ravioli he so often used to eat with Eva Sander after their wanderings …

  “And still at affordable prices for us poor casualties from the wreck of the Communist paradise,” murmurs Luria, winking at Oleg. “Although in your case you’ve made a very successful transition into capitalism. Bravo! I’ve seen several episodes of your series, a fine example of the recycling of the historic past by mass culture …”

  Oleg puts down his spoon, heaves a sigh, tries to avoid Luria’s smiling gaze.

  “I feel really ashamed! But … I had no choice. Zhurbin, my producer, is no … Tarkovsky. For him film has to make money, so it has to please the greatest number. Of course, I shouldn’t have filmed that rape. Catherine’s reputation’s bad enough as it is. But how can you show historic truth without both light and shadow?”

  Luria nods in a manner both ironic and understanding.

  “Eat up, otherwise your ravioli will get cold. As for ‘historic truth,’ how can you show what doesn’t exist?”

  Oleg thinks he must have misheard. “No, I meant, the history that really happened …”

  “No one knows what ‘really happened.’ We know facts, dates, who was involved. Historians put forward interpretations. Some of them think they are God Almighty and insist on their view being recognized as beyond dispute. In my youth I myself saw the October Revolution as a final liberation of humanity! Since then 1917 has been rewritten so many times … Absolute horror for some, a promise of paradise for others. Maybe up there in the autumn sky there’s a god who could read Stalin’s mind when he was signing off lists of people to be shot. Maybe … But we poor mortals can only speculate. Did the Seven Years’ War start because Frederick the Great nicknamed his dog ‘Pompadour’? Or was Elizabeth trying to punish the Prussian for his arrogance? Did Maria Theresa really want whatever part of Bohemia it was?”

  “Yes, but in the series, I simply invent certain scenes, like Catherine sending in a squad of rapists …”

  “You’re making a work of fiction … I once came upon a very serious mistake in an old novel. Well, that’s how it seemed to me, because it concerned the circulation of money, my pet subject as a historian. In the middle of the fifteenth century, somewhere on the frontier between France and Spain, the hero dug up a chest filled with gold. The author specified that they were doubloons. What an idiot! Those doubloons, double gold coins, were minted much later, after the wealth of the Incas had been pillaged by the conquistadors, when gold became plentiful, and the Spaniards could indulge in this lavish currency. I was seething with rage, until I finally admitted that for readers of a book these mysterious ‘gold doubloons’ would be much more exciting than a simple heap of coins, which are the same from one novel to the next …”

  “So why film history? We’ve made at least thirty episodes! Wars against the Turks, the Poles, the Prussians, the Persians, peasant revolts, people having their tongues cut out, conspiracies … And that alcove that’s beginning to make my head spin. We have to work so fast I confuse one actor with the next … What’s the point of this masquerade?”

  “You’ve given the answer yourself: to show just how hollow the masquerade of history is. And to make people understand that a life does exist beyond all this circus …”

  “You mean the escape Catherine and Lanskoy were planning? But there’s very little evidence …”

  “Among my notes from long ago I’ve unearthed a piece of evidence … monetary evidence, if I may call it that. Yes, it’s my numismatic penchant, as usual. In the spring of 1784, Lanskoy makes an inventory of his coin collection, all the biographers speak of this passion of his. But, to judge from his account book, he was chiefly collecting the currencies that circulated in the countries we saw on your old maps: Poland, the German principalities, Italy. You don’t have to be psychic to surmise that this was money that would be used to pay for the costs of a journey. Apologies for showing you the financial underpinning for this beautiful dream, but the detail is revelatory: they wanted to travel incognito. Russian currency would have given them away …”

  Before leaving, already out in the street, Luria says softly on a note of somewhat melancholy encouragement: “In the old days we had to hoodwink our beloved Soviet censors in order to introduce dissident ideas into a film. These days the censorship is commercial. Use our old methods. This series is meant to entertain the masses, but you can always find a moment to express what seems to you to be an essential truth. It’s even more exciting than our battle with the SCCA, do you remember that?”

  A moment to express an essential truth … Oleg pictures it with great simplicity: a light night at the start of summer, a road leading out of St. Petersburg, the silhouettes of two riders, the dull sound of horses’ hooves.

  The conversation with Luria liberates him, Oleg no longer has to wage war on Zhurbin. More favorites in the alcove, more Russians and Turks making mincemeat of one another, one more dinner with Potemkin and his mistresses, spooning precious stones out of crystal vases, yes, the “dessert” the prince paid for with the hundred thousand rubles he had received from the latest favorite …

  The filmed series that Zhurbin desires certainly presents the most eye-catching aspects of history. But not gratuitous inventions. The books speak of the Princess Golitsyn, a debauched woman who boasts of three hundred guardsmen on her list of conquests. Her story is generally alluded to in a footnote. Zhurbin demands a whole scene: a mishmash of uniforms open on hairy chests, sweating nude bodies, swords feverishly unbuckled, sounds of spurs, hoarse breathing …

  After the ball the Empress Elizabeth has her dress cut off her so as to undress more quickly. In the film the fabric snipped away by the scissors opens out onto an exuberant body with gre
at, heavy breasts. Her haste is all of a piece with her desire to be with her lovers. Their frolics are filmed through peepholes cut in a door to which two adolescents have their eyes glued: the future Peter III and Catherine.

  It transpires that Peter is homosexual. His admiration for Frederick the Great is thus not military but amorous, and that is what drives Peter to come to his rescue when the “three petticoats” were giving him a hard time in the Seven Years’ War …

  Oleg no longer argues. He adopts the most direct style possible, filming now “with a handheld bazooka,” as Zhurbin puts it. The speed they work at lays bare what a perfectionist cinematographer would have covered up: history, too, is made with a bazooka, in its improbably farcical twists and turns. Zhurbin wants the viewers to learn the cause of Peter III’s impotence: phimosis. “Broadly speaking, his foreskin is strangling the glans of his peepee …,” he observes, lapsing into nursery language. Peter’s friends, including Saltykov, who is cuckolding him, beg the future tsar on their knees to have an operation. Saltykov is the most ardent advocate of such a circumcision—he has just made Catherine pregnant and can already see himself being banished to Siberia. Once operated on, Peter could be recognized as the father …

  That scene accentuates the farcical humor of what passes for History on a grand scale. A gang of buddies in a pickle from sleeping around, a schoolboy prank, a vaudeville comedy that will soon lead to bloody coups d’état, vile betrayals, wars, tortures, banishment …

  The new episode is a great success, bringing the ratings close to those for the series The Rich Weep Too. The word phimosis enjoys a brief hour of glory, especially as a way of casting aspersions on a man’s virility. Several times Oleg overhears the oath “you pathetic little phimosis” in altercations between teenagers. “Our series is educating the populace,” declares Zhurbin with a laugh.

  There is, of course, plenty of posturing, a lot of showy costumes, crude eroticism, but in his great historical circus Zhurbin knows how to capture hidden nuances. Is the Empress Elizabeth suspicious and vindictive? When young, she was despised by the court of the fearsome Tsarina Anne. With the nervous fervor of a debutante she attends a grand dinner. Her gown, her only party frock, will dazzle the guests. She walks into the vast, brilliantly lit hall … A moment of silence and then peals of laughter break out: the fabric of the tablecloth is the same as that of Elizabeth’s gown! Her enemies had consulted her dressmaker … Later on, once she comes to the throne, she will own fifteen thousand dresses and after each ball they will cut her sumptuous costume off her. Countess Lopukhina, who had chosen the fabric for the tablecloth, will have her tongue cut out …