The meal is over, they are drinking their coffee, gazing at the window, already dark, streaked by damp snow. Oleg realizes he cannot possibly leave on this note. He adopts a cheerful tone, as if to evoke a memory, a shared passion.
“You know, I haven’t abandoned that idea of writing something about Catherine and Lanskoy. I’ve often talked to a historian, an old specialist on the Catherine century, Luria. He’s put his finger on a very little known fact: under cover of making a coin collection, Lanskoy was accumulating foreign currency for their traveling expenses …”
Eva has risen to her feet and is now standing with her back against the shelves of a bookcase. The shadow enlarges her eyes, and once again Oleg tells himself that a trace of youth lights up her slightly angular face. She speaks without hiding her bitterness.
“Your historian ought to talk to you about Lanskoy’s death … Yes, I know, there are two possible versions: poison administered by Potemkin’s agents or else an excessive consumption of aphrodisiacs. But what’s even more tragic is what happens after his burial. Catherine is shattered, very close to suicide—for the first time in her life. A woman of fifty-five, incredibly youthful and energetic for her years, she sinks into premature old age. And at this moment they find Lanskoy’s tomb, desecrated. His body dragged out onto the ground, stripped naked. Butchery: his face slashed, his stomach open, his genitalia ripped off … Historians say ‘Macabre’ and hold their noses. And yet here we are touching on the very essence of society. It keeps a vigilant watch on those who try to step aside from the game. Even if we’re talking about a tsarina in love, who no longer wants to play. Such imprudent people are hounded right into their graves … A trip to Italy, you say? It was a dream. Like our wanderings in Leningrad. We believed that the world was going to change, thanks to our films and the way they outwitted the censorship, thanks to the fall of the Wall. But the world is a film set, the parts are allocated, the script is always the same, and the director loathes anyone walking off the set without permission …”
She smiles, puts down her cup, switches on a computer that stands on a long table piled high with books.
“Don’t hold that metaphysical digression against me. It’s our German specialty, as you well know. For me, it’s time to get back to the role that keeps me alive. I’m a translator. The Russian that Catherine used to speak is very useful to me, too. She and Lanskoy used to translate from one language into another. Sometimes from Swedish, Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams. ‘I was walking through a town that seemed so familiar to me. Suddenly I grasped that this was an unknown town …’ That must have been how they pictured the towns on their future journey. Now then. Safe home. I’m so sorry I’m no longer the Catherine of the old days …”
In the night Oleg understands why Eva seems to have grown younger. Playing Catherine in her mature years, she was made up as a woman of fifty, sixty, then seventy. His last memory of her relates to the journey to the Crimea in 1787, when Catherine was fifty-eight: a figure in a long dress between two lines of poplar trees on a road leading to the sea … There is an even more obvious logic: he was then twenty-eight, Eva ten years older. In the eyes of a young man, that made her a woman on the threshold of old age. Now that he is forty-two, a woman in her fifties seems to him almost of the same generation as himself …
He toys with these calculations, half mathematical, half romantic. From time to time he switches on the light, leafs through the notebook in which, before setting off, he had made a note of the trips he planned and the matters he was hoping to discuss with Pfister … Here, for example, are notes on what Luria had told him: Catherine learned that Peter the Great invented a mobile scaffold so as to be able to execute rebellious subjects throughout the whole of Russia—in no time at all the scaffold was set up and heads rolled. The tsarina condemns this itinerant barbarism. Before discovering, toward the end of her life, that in the land of her dear Voltaire the guillotine itself goes on the move. A much more efficient machine than the heavy, chipped execution block of the Russians …
This note, too: after Kiel, he would like to go to Kassel. Some of his ancestors came from that town.
And then, a note in red crayon: not to forget to send a card to Zhurbin’s child in Lugano. He will do it tomorrow.
It is already past ten o’clock when he wakes. He leaps out of bed, calling himself a fool, realizes he has missed breakfast and probably his train to Kiel as well. At all events, the morning train. He draws back the curtains and all at once his haste calms down. Snow is falling heavily, slowly, a city disappearing beneath the whiteness, and even the appalling motorbike he had spotted beneath his window now looks like a handsome, downy animal … That was the reason for his lethargic sleep: the thick layer of snowflakes deadening all sound, calming all speeds …
Outside, he is dazzled by the snow. He pictures Eva walking along in these white streets, in this hypnotic swirling. With an ease that surprises him, he changes his plans, walks into a florist’s shop looking for a bunch of flowers that might … He’s not quite sure what he’d like to give. The saleswoman in the store shows him a dry, gray woody plant. “Quite soon, in two or three weeks’ time, it’ll be covered in blooms,” she says. He emerges carrying a pot with what would, at a distance, look like a dead shrub protruding from it …
“If she’s not at home,” he says to himself, “I’ll leave it outside her door.”
And at that moment he sees Eva. She is waiting at the streetcar stop in a little crowd of people white with snow. He notices what he had not observed the previous day: the old overcoat she wears and her way of stooping a little, of shielding her face—not from the snowflakes, but from passing stares. Tucked under her arm she is carrying several files in a transparent plastic bag …
“I wanted to give you this before leaving … It’s not much to look at but it’s a shrub that will flower for a long time …” He holds out the plant to her.
The streetcar arrives. Eva hesitates, stammering out thanks, words of farewell, moves to get in, then steps back. Her voice is both firm and offhand. “After all, I can go later … Or even not go at all!”
The streetcar disappears, they remain facing one another, study one another intently, as if recognizing one another at last. Then, without conferring, they walk away from the stop.
“You’re covered in snow …,” says Oleg when they are back at the entrance to the apartment building.
And he sets about brushing the layer of snowflakes off Eva’s shoulders. She does the same for him, knocking away the white crust.
“Well, I’ll leave you now, Eva. I have to go to Kiel …”
“I can take you, if you like. I have a car …”
They sense that a threshold has been crossed—not in their relationship but in their freedom to do what they choose with their lives. Lives that, for all these years, had been concealed beneath a flood of nonsense, pointless waiting, greed, fears. Everything could go either way now. As it could have done one winter’s evening long ago, beside the little Swan Canal …
“Kiel’s really the other end of the world, Eva. Four or five hours in the car …”
“The hardest bit will be digging my old jalopy out of the snow …”
In the apartment she puts the plant in the middle of the room, like a Christmas tree, waters it and begins packing a traveling bag. Then breaks off: “No, if I start making preparations we’ll never get away. Let’s go. We’ll find what we need on the way …”
They set off, conscious that the life they are abandoning is still very close, with a slyly powerful gravitational pull.
They do not so much have to dig the car out as actually locate it again under a white burial mound. Its contours appear, Oleg recognizes the old station wagon he saw long ago at Peterhof … They manage to open it, settle into it, feeling as if they were in an igloo, waiting for the ice on the windows to melt.
“I forget the name of that French actor who always wore eccentric hats,” Eva says. “When they asked him where he
found them, he used to reply: ‘I don’t find them, I hold on to them’ … Rather like this antique of mine.”
The deiced windows reveal a city that seems very different from the one they were looking at an hour ago.
This feeling will increase the farther they travel toward the Baltic. In fact, they will be thinking less and less about the world they have left behind.
In accordance with some statute or other, it was Louis the Fifteenth of France who could authorize Catherine to adopt the title of empress. He was slow to grant her this right. She was a parvenu who irritated him. He did what his mistresses told him and complained of having less power than a colonel. Catherine governed alone and promoted her lovers to the rank of colonel, general, and even king! Louis and the tsarina loathed one another from afar. Catherine egging on the belligerence of the French philosophers: the French king longing to ‘drive Russia back into its cold wastes.’ At Lanskoy’s death Catherine, already devastated, learns of the outrage: her lover’s remains have been desecrated. But Louis suffered a similar tragedy. While he was mourning Madame de Vintimille, the people got hold of her body, tortured it and profaned it …”
As they travel along Oleg is recounting stories from this past he has never managed to tell. A sequence of discrete truths, in the margin of History’s great epic tale. Sometimes Eva intervenes, without taking her eyes off the white lashing against the windshield.
“These byways of history always loop back on themselves. You remember in Kozin’s film: Peter the Third is a good violinist but Catherine disparages his musical gift. Then, at the end of her life she has to endure her young lover Zubov scraping away with his bow—like the grating of badly oiled hinges …”
Oleg smiles, happy to be rediscovering the shared language they spoke in the old days. “When he lost the throne Peter asked to be allowed to leave for Germany with his violin under his arm. They killed him. You know, it could well have been the same violin that Zubov later tormented …”
That evening they reach the Baltic, drive along the eastern shore of the Bay of Kiel, pass through Laboe, and stop away from the street lighting. The snow continues falling into the silvery depths of the sea, in great, slow flakes.
“They probably stood over there,” Oleg says softly. “Two children who knew nothing beyond that moment. The future tsar and tsarina. Twenty years later the little boy who watched the snow falling would be the man beaten to death, strangled and disfigured by the lovers of the woman who was the little girl he held hands with … It’s a scene that haunts me. The beauty of that moment and then a tidal wave of absurdities—plots, conquests, rebellions, massacres, in a word, History. Everyone understands the madness of this mode of existence and yet in every generation it starts all over again. Just imagine: at this very moment, over there, across the bay, stand two children thrilled by this swirling whiteness. In ten years’ time they’ll be recruited to join in the games this world plays, its greed, its lies, its ugliness …”
Eva takes his arm and shakes it gently.
“And yet you’ve already written two films without ever talking about the beauty those children experienced. You’ve told what happened after that moment—the alcoves, the wars, people’s rapacious desires … History … How can you expect all that not to be repeated if no one dares to say that another life is possible?”
Again they have a sense of a frontier crossed, a time unfolding differently. Sitting there in the car, they remain still, conscious that returning to Berlin, going back to life as it was before, is now impossible. Eva talks in apologetic tones.
“Don’t think I’m reproaching you for lacking courage. I once told you about my Italian friend, Aldo Ranieri, who wrote a screenplay based on Catherine’s life. We began filming but Aldo was very weak from his illness, the producer abandoned us and … At all events we didn’t manage to tell anything other than the well-known story of her reign: coup d’état, conspiracies, favorites … One day Aldo had the idea of filming the things that were not a part of that whole farce. Like that moment at Kiel … And also Lanskoy’s love … We shot the first few scenes and that was when the producer cut off our supplies … Over the past few years I’ve had a great longing to watch that unfinished film again. Aldo’s sister kept a copy of it at her house, near Ravenna …”
Oleg thinks of the scene he had never succeeded in working into a film: the tsarina and Lanskoy planning their itinerary for a secret journey …
“You know, Eva, I’ve brought the maps you gave me, yes, ‘Lanskoy’s maps’ … They cover northern Italy, maybe as far as Ravenna. I have a visa that’s valid for a month. We have time to go there …”
Eva laughs softly, closes her eyes, runs a hand across her brow.
“Before that I have to translate the complete works of Pushkin in order to be able to pay for the gas and everything else …”
“Listen, I’m not trying to pass myself off as a Russian oligarch, but Catherine has made me almost rich. That terrible series of Zhurbin’s has made me quite well off. I’ve even bought myself a very expensive Italian suit that I’ve never really worn: Zhurbin says when I put it on my sexual identity becomes uncertain. To cut a long story short, I’ve brought the maximum amount of currency it’s possible to take out of Russia: ten thousand dollars. I’ve got at least eight left. That ought to see us through …”
That evening at the hotel, they study the photocopies of the maps, stuck together in a continuous sequence, so that there, at the heart of a Europe that no longer exists, a sinuous line appears, a dream two centuries old.
In driving through Germany from north to south, they occasionally deviate from the itinerary on the maps, passing through towns Oleg has heard his parents speak of. Towns where his ancestors had roots and that they left, one day, at the invitation of a Russian tsarina. “All this on account of that little princess who decided to come to Russia …”
Often the facade of a palace, lit by a low sun, strikes him as grievously familiar. Yes, he has seen it before! Neither in a photograph nor in a film, but in the fanciful terraces of the model constructed by his father. He remembers that voice, all of whose inflections, touching bursts of enthusiasm and hidden sorrows he can now fathom: “I told you about that beautiful forest at Reinhardswald. Sababurg Castle is there. Look. I’m just building it …” His father begins humming: “So hab ich dieses Schloss erbaut …” He breaks off, studies his son with distraught compassion. “You know this castle without ever having been there. When you were little your mother used to tell you stories. And they all happened at Sababurg …”
At Kassel, in the window of an antique shop near their hotel, Oleg sees an old magic lantern, very similar to the relic preserved for generations by the Erdmann family. Characters in wigs revolving in a slow repetition of scenes for which there can be no development, no outcome … What strikes him is the madness of this haunting little ring of tiny figures within the narrow confines of the glass lantern: the world of human beings is no different! The same merry-go-round that conceals the preparations for wars, the coming to fruition of slaughter. The great park Eva takes him to was landscaped on top of the ruins of the town of Kassel, flattened by bombing. With a bewilderment that chokes him, Oleg tells himself that before that catastrophe the magic lantern’s little figures used to revolve like this, and that, after it, once the mechanism was rewound, they would be ready to go through their paces all over again. And that what these snow-laden trees in their beauty are hiding is, in truth, ruins, broken lives, thousands of dead …
Their journey seems to him to be a mad undertaking, a ridiculous attempt to resist the earth’s rotation. He senses the same doubt in Eva. Back in their room, before taking off their coats, they stand there facing one another, at a loss, waiting for an admission of failure to be made. Then, suddenly, they put their arms around one another in an awkward embrace, silent, as if seeking to shield one another from an explosion … And that night, their first night of intimacy, Oleg grasps that love can also be this protective tend
erness, one that holds grief at bay, one whose very essence is the gleam of snow coming from the window, as well as the trembling fingers of this sleeping woman’s hand. A very simple certainty: the goal of their journey was this somnolent city, this room looking out over the tall, white trees, the bluish resonance of the dark shadow on the woman’s hand where his lips brush against it.
From Stuttgart Eva calls her translation agency, succeeds in negotiating more time. Oleg makes several vain attempts to reach Zhurbin. Finally he calls Tanya on her cell phone and she exclaims: “So that’s it then. You’ve gone back to your Teutonic roots!” This observation is followed by a yell: “But this call is costing me a million! Your Zhurbin’s been arrested. They’re charging him with misappropriation of funds … Ciao!” A fairly run-of-the-mill charge, Oleg thinks, and one that will enable the “hunters” to carve up all the businesses Zhurbin has been running.
He tells Eva that Zhurbin has been jailed, talks about the child who lives in Lugano, the little girl to whom, when in Berlin, he forgot to send a postcard. “We could go and see her,” suggests Eva. “It’s almost on our route. Provided the Swiss don’t block your entry. You don’t have a visa …”
They cross the border early in the morning, with Oleg hiding under a pile of clothes on the backseat. “If they find you, pretend to be asleep,” Eva advises. “After all, you don’t have your pockets stuffed with watches …”
Once in Switzerland they decide to pass through the country without spending a night there, still on account of this lack of a visa. They drive on, relieving one another at the wheel and taking turns sleeping, and succeed in reaching Lugano around three o’clock in the afternoon. “We ought to buy the little girl a gift,” suggests Eva. Oleg remembers Zhurbin telling him about the child communicating with fishes. They buy two fish, fairly ordinary, but swimming around quite energetically in a transparent plastic pouch, into which, apart from the water, the salesman has put a little pondweed.
A Woman Loved Page 22