Garden of Venus

‘The bed will be ready soon,’ Rosalia said, but the countess only managed a slight nod.

Outside, in the courtyard, the hooves of the horses made a hollow noise; carriage wheels clattered and squeaked. Soon, Rosalia thought, Pietka would have to spread a straw carpet on the stones to muffle all noise. And he would have to stop singing, as he was doing now.

In Vinnytsia, on the border,

At the foot of a grave mound, on the bank of the Buh River,

Under the walls of the Kalnytsky charterhouse…

This palace in the heart of Berlin would provide some relief. From what she had seen, Rosalia could tell its workings would be flawless. Since their arrival, the marble floor in the entrance hall had already been washed and wiped dry. After mentioning that charpie would be necessary to dress the wounds and that the French surgeon would likely ask for an old mattress, she was reassured both would be procured without delay. Frau Kohl, the Graf’s housekeeper, had also brought a pile of old sheets, well-washed and soft.

Rosalia wiped her mistress’s face with a sponge dipped in warm, lavender-scented water, washing away stale sweat and caked powder. Her underclothes were again stained with blood, dark and clotted with what looked like pieces of chopped liver. Mademoiselle Collard used to complain she was a lady’s maid not a nurse. ‘Neither are you,’ she reminded Rosalia. Her family’s land may have been sequestered by the Russian Tsar, but Rosalia’s father had been a Polish noble and it was her duty to guard her own station in life. It was all too easy to slip down, let herself go. With that Rosalia had to agree, as she retrieved clean undergarments from a travelling trunk and helped the countess change into her lilac dress with little embroidered rosebuds, but then the question remained of who would do it. The maids had their hands full with all the unpacking, mending and ironing. Mademoiselle la Comtesse conveniently managed to vomit every time she caught the whiff of the basin. (‘She has her father’s constitution, Rosalia. Nature cannot be helped,’ the countess said.) Only this morning—having seen the bloodstained undergarments the maids were taking away to be soaked in cold water—she became so agitated that Rosalia had had to give her a double dose of laudanum to calm her down.

‘I don’t want to see anyone but Graf von Haefen,’ the countess whispered, closing her eyes. ‘Let my daughter receive all other visitors.’

‘The French doctor will be here soon,’ Rosalia said. She was trying to foresee what else the surgeon might ask for. If he came from Paris, he would not have assistants. Doctor Bolecki would be of help, but this might not be enough. She wondered if the two grooms were strong enough to hold the countess down. And if they would withstand that much blood and the screaming.

‘I’m so tired, Rosalia,’ the countess whispered.

The pain was never far away, crouching inside her, but it was letting her breathe. It might let her fall asleep again. ‘Mademoiselle Rosalia, you should try to lead her thoughts away from death,’ Graf von Haefen had insisted with great firmness, before leaving. ‘Talk only of what brings her joy.’

The gardener reported that Sophievka was already covered in snow. He had seen icicles hanging from pine trees and from the gnarled branches of the oak tree by the lake. In the greenhouses roses and orchids were blooming and he wished he could send the countess some blooms the way he used to send them to St Petersburg, in a carriage kept warm with braziers. The nettle tree was doing fine and so was the Turkish filbert from Caucasus. He had planted it in complete shade, as instructed.

‘The nettle tree, I was assured,’ the countess said, ‘would not sink in water.’

When her mistress was dressed, Rosalia combed her hair, grey and so much thinned by her illness. Then, from the red travelling case, she took a black wig, a shapely halo of black locks, trying not to pull as she pinned it to her hair.

‘By the summer, you’ll be strong enough. We’ll go there together.’

The countess gave her the most beautiful of her smiles.

Perhaps, Rosalia thought, happiness could only come from such simple moments. From knowing that the touch of her hands calmed the sick and eased their pain. ‘Which is precisely why she would take advantage of you,’ Mademoiselle Collard would warn. ‘She already has two daughters, you know.’ It was in Rosalia’s disposition to take unending duties upon herself, feel responsible for the most insignificant of things. Like the lost charcoals, a whole box of cedar of Lebanon: Olena, the maid who had packed the dinner service at the last stop, was sure she put it in the same box with the silver. ‘Surely,’ Mademoiselle Collard would mock Rosalia’s agitation over this trifle if she were here, ‘she can afford to lose a box of charcoals. Isn’t she rich enough?’

The countess, her eyes closed, looked like a waxen figure. It was only the faint warmth of her skin that told Rosalia her mistress was still alive.

Sophie

Her cheeks still smart from her mother’s slaps. One, two, three. A fool. She is a fool. Or a whore. What was she thinking? What was on her mind? Doesn’t she understand anything? Anything at all? Hasn’t she seen and heard what human tongues can do?

The salty taste of blood inside her mouth frightens her. The memory of happiness, of lightness is gone. Instead, she has to face her mother’s fury.

‘What did he do?’ Mana screams and pushes her on her bed. Another slap, weaker than the one before. Her skirt is lifted, her legs spread. She has been damaged, nibbled at and spat out. Tried and left aside. Who will buy damaged goods now? What man in his right mind would pay for what he can have for free? Who would keep a cow if the milk comes for nothing?

Mana is poking inside her, feeling for the damage. How cruel her fingers can be. How rough.

‘Was he hard,’ she asks. ‘Did he put it in all the way?

‘Dou-Dou, I’m talking to you. Answer me, girl.

‘Tell me everything. I’m your mother.

‘It’s for your own good.

‘Plenty of dirty pots in the kitchen that need to be scrubbed. The maid can be let go, the scruffy thing she is, and dirty too. You want dirt? You can scrub the pots with ashes. See how your hands redden from scalding. See how your knuckles grow and crack open. See how they bleed.

‘Is that what you want, girl? Is that what I gave you your life for? Is that why I screamed with pain for the twelve hours you took to be born? Tearing me apart, almost killing me?

‘And for what? A poke from this runt? This good-for-nothing? This high-and-mighty cavalier whose tongue is stronger than his dick. Who now walks around the town in his glory, telling everyone what you let him do.’

In the end Mana’s tears are harder to bear than her anger. Seeing her hide her face in her hands in shame. Hearing her sobs.

‘All I ever wanted for you is now lost.’

Dou-Dou wants to scream that this is not true. Isn’t she still her mother’s beloved daughter as she was a day ago? But her mother only looks at her with unseeing eyes.

‘You do not know the power of the human tongue.’

The sun is caught in Mana’s raven black hair. If angels have faces, that’s how they must look. The shape of the brows enlarging the eyes, the cheeks full and smooth. The lips like cherries, glistening from the tears that have rolled down her cheeks.

‘Is that what you want girl? Is that what I gave you your life for? Is that why I screamed from pain for the twelve hours you took to be born? Tearing me apart so badly that I could have no more children?

‘I’ve always wanted my daughter to do better than I’ve done. Not to waste what God has given her. Not to throw it away. Was it too much to hope for?’

Konstantin Glavani comes back from the tavern. Even from his steps, Dou-Dou can tell that he knows. From the force with which his heels hit the ground. From the way his fist lands on the table. With a thump. With choking anger. Something falls off, rolls, smashing on the floor.

There is a slap, then another one, and a scream. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ he yells. ‘Is that what you teach her? To spread her legs for every loser in Bursa?

‘To be the talk of the town?’

The door opens and Sophie’s body softens like a kitten readying itself for a fall. She is lying on her stomach, sobbing into a pillow and her father is standing beside the bed. His breath is all she hears. In and out, in and out. In his big hand she can see the handle of the whip Konstantin Glavani uses to corral the sheep.

This silence frightens her more than Mana’s screams.

He lifts her skirt, her shift, and exposes her buttocks. If she doesn’t tense them, it will hurt less. The swish of leather through the air comes first, before the spasm, before the warmth of her pee dissolving into the mattress. When the strap touches her skin, she feels another spasm. And another until there is nothing but burning pain.

She doesn’t scream. Her face is buried in the pillow. Tears soak into the embroidered fabric. Mana had stitched these birds singing on branches, their beaks open wide. And the tall cypresses that sway in the wind. She did it in another time when Sophie was but a child and wanted to know about everything. How to make such a bird look real. How to make a thread go through the eye of the needle.

Her father stops and turns her over. ‘Look at me,’ he says. ‘See the man who can’t look his friends in the eye. Who has to listen in silence as his daughter’s name is dragged in filth. The man whose daughter is a whore.’

She looks at him. He is standing above her, big body swaying, his breath smelling of wine and roasted lamb. Red blotches have sprung up on his neck, his mouth is twisted into a grimace of disgust. She remembers that his fingers can bend a horseshoe. He will not be made the laughing-stock of Bursa. He will not allow his daughter to disgrace his name. He will kill her first, and then kill himself.

‘A brood mare.’

He lifts his hand in the air. A big hand, calloused and reddened, with chapped skin on the knuckles. Will her neck snap with a crack, like that of a chicken?

She fixes her eyes on him. Everything can happen now. Everything is nestled in such moments, the malice, the revenge, the pain. The hand falls down slowly, limp, alongside his body. It clenches into a fist and then relaxes, defeated.

How does one escape the power of human tongues?

She has heard of a man slashing his daughter’s face with a razor. Of burning her cheeks with hot coals to scar her beauty. Her father keeps looking at her, forcing himself to keep looking, until, in an instant, he turns on his heel, and walks away. The door slams after him, and she wipes the tears from her eyes and cheeks. There is a pitcher of water and a basin her mother has left for her, and she splashes cold water on her face. Then she squats over the basin and washes the place between her legs, still wet from her pee. Where the strap hit her, she can feel needles of pain in a web of punishment, the memory of her defeat.

Konstantin Glavani announces that they are leaving Bursa.

She watches his quick, determined steps, listens to the stomping of his heels on the floor. Outside, the earth smells of camomile, lemon blossom, and laurel. Her friends are in the fields, running or riding horses. Or making bonfires on the edge of the river. Diamandi is there too, but she won’t see him. She is not allowed to leave the house of shame.

The stories flow, thicker and more poisonous each day. The stories men whisper in low, lusty whispers. The stories women repeat with gasps of disbelief. There will be no end to them now, no end to the malice of lashing tongues. The torrent of gossip will follow her until the day God pleases to call her to His presence and account for her sins. An egg once broken cannot be made whole again.

Konstantin Glavani is pacing the room. He has been punished for the sins of the flesh, for marrying beneath himself. For being a fool and closing his ears to the words of the wise. Slash her throat, people tell him. Make her kneel in the dust and cut your daughter’s throat. Make her bellow like a heifer when she sees a knife raised above her head.

What a fool he has been for thinking that God has blessed him when his daughter was born. For thinking his little Dou-Dou would be the light of his soul, the blessing of his old age. For thinking that he, a father of but one child, would sit in her garden one day and rock his grandchildren on his knees.

This is not what God in His wisdom has prepared for him. The sins of women are bred in the bone, working their silent way from the day a woman is born until the day she dies. He should have known that this daughter of his would be his Gehenna. The day she was born he should have sprinkled ashes on his head.

Women are like bitches in heat, bringing nothing but trouble, but Diamandi is no better. Diamandi is a traitor. A man of no honour, no family loyalty. For what he has done to his own cousin, for bragging to his friends about it, he should be hung from the tree. Or branded on his forehead like the liar he is. But Konstantin Glavani is not a murderer. He is not a Turk. He is a Christian man. A Greek. A man of honour. If he were a lesser man, he could have dug out some dirt too. Everyone knows what Diamandi’s elder brother is doing. A barber, his father says. Working for a Turk, a man from Istanbul who calls himself a philosopher. A worshipper of Sodom who carries his lovers’ powdered filth in the box around his neck.

‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,’ he says.

Has he forgiven her?

Mana is listening, too, her silence dark, furtive. There is a black bruise around her left eye and her neck has red blotches on it. Her eyes rest on Sophie, tell her to keep quiet, to wait it all through.

Yes, this daughter of his is his burden, but Konstantin Glavani will not refuse it.

He has already sold all his cattle. For a song. For a quarter of what the herd is worth, but such is the ruth-lessness of those who know he cannot afford to wait. The house will be rented to a distant cousin. An honest man, even if a bit slow in the head. They are going to Jerusalem, to the Holy Grave. The three of them, together. To beg God Almighty for forgiveness.

When their journey is over, they will not come back here. They will go to Istanbul where no one knows them. Where, with the money he got for his cattle, Konstantin Glavani will buy a position with the Istanbul police. He will be in charge of Christian butchers in the district of Pera, and there no one will dare spit after him when he walks the streets.

Rosalia

In the room Frau Kohl has chosen for her, on account of its closeness to the grand salon, Rosalia took out her dresses from the travelling trunk, gave each a vigorous shake, and put them in the wardrobe which smelled of varnish. That’s also where she placed her dark grey overcoat, but even then the wardrobe was only half filled. The three hats and two bonnets went on the top shelf. Her petticoats and chemises filled only one of the five drawers.

‘An operation,’ the countess had said, ‘cannot be on a Tuesday.’

‘If there is an operation,’ Dr Bolecki had said. The examination had been a short one, the smile on his face forced.

From the bottom of the trunk Rosalia took out the miniatures of her parents, Jakub and Maria Romanowicz, and placed them on the small table beside her bed. The silver-framed miniatures had been painted right before the Ko?ciuszko Insurrection of 1794 and the final defeat, before the day the word Poland had been erased from the map of Europe. The painter was not skilled. The expression of the two pairs of eyes were identical, as if mere copies of each other. Both her parents were looking ahead with melancholy, as if they could already see the future.

‘It is that Tuesday is a bad day,’ the countess had said.

‘Will it hurt much,’ Olga asked. The way she bit her lower lip touched Rosalia more than the sobs she sometimes heard at night; a sign that Olga too feared the worst. Perhaps because the sobbing was invisible.

In the miniature her father was in the Ko?ciuszko uniform, a white peasant sukmana, a cravat tied in a bow under his chin, a symbol of Equality and Freedom for all Poles. His face was clean-shaven and, like Ko?ciuszko, he was not wearing a wig. Her mother’s black hair was parted in the middle. It encircled her white, porcelain face and dissolved into the background. A string of pearls was woven in her hair and she was holding a fan with which she covered her chest. Rosalia remembered that fan. When it was flicked open, Artemis appeared. The goddess with a leopard’s skin on her shoulders, its limp paws hanging behind her like a train. Where was it now? Lost in one of their many moves, forgotten perhaps in one of the trunks Aunt Antonia was keeping for her in the dusty attic in Zierniki.

You have already turned twenty-six, Rosalia, and I shall never believe you are foolish enough to trust your mother’s misguided hopes. Did she really think that being Count Potocki’s godchild would give her some special rights? That it would make the count’s wife take special care of her orphan? Sometimes I think it best your dear father had not lived to see this.

Two years before, on such an October night as this one, Rosalia had listened as her mother moved about her bedroom. Drawers opened and closed; the floorboards creaked. The smell of burning paper wafted through the doors. For a moment it seemed that she could hear sobs but, when she rose from her bed and listened, what she took for crying turned out to be the sound of wind in the chimney.

‘The matter has to be treated most seriously, Madame Romanowicz,’ the surgeon said. He looked pale in his black suit and drops of perspiration appeared on his forehead. He wiped them off with a chequered handkerchief. ‘Most seriously, Madame,’ he repeated. Her mother’s eyes had a vacant look Rosalia didn’t like. The examination had been short. The breast was swollen, the tumour had grown to the size of a plum. Time had already been lost, too much time. The surgeon spoke of women who withdrew from the world suffering only a trusted nurse to come and wash the fetid running sores as their breasts were eaten away, drowning in filth.

He would not reveal the date of the operation. He never did. All he could do was to offer a warning of two hours at the most, for anything longer would only be the source of undue agitation. He would need old linen, charpie, old undergarments freshly laundered. Soft. An old armchair. No carpet. Nothing that could be splattered with blood and would be hard to wash. ‘But first, Madame Romanowicz will have to sign a permission. This is of utmost importance. Without it I cannot proceed.’

The note from the surgeon came as they were sitting down to breakfast. Today at ten o’clock. The maid brought it on a tray, perched against the coffee pot.

‘I’ve made my peace with God. There is nothing else for you to do,’ Maman said. She had been to confession, she took communion and asked for extreme unction. Seeing the alarm in Rosalia’s eyes, she assured her that the last rites had been known to heal the sick.

She won’t die, Rosalia repeated to herself, registering the progress of fear. In Zierniki, in winter, she had seen ducks imprisoned by ice in the pond. At first they were still able to move, until the ice thickened and refused to crack. Then to free them, the grooms had to hack at the ice with an axe and take the birds to the warm kitchen to thaw.

I won’t let her, she repeated over and over again. I won’t.

When the doctor arrived with three assistants, all dressed in black, Maman emerged from her room in a light batiste nightdress. If she were afraid, Rosalia could not see it. Her voice was steady and her eyes dry.

‘I want all the women to leave,’ the surgeon said. The maid scurried in the direction of the kitchen and closed the door. Her muffled sobs reached them a moment later.

‘I’m a soldier’s daughter,’ Rosalia said. ‘Let me stay.’

The surgeon glared at her as if she were creating difficulties, but she met his eyes without flinching.

‘If you faint, no one will have the time to attend you,’ he said sharply.

‘I won’t faint,’ she replied. Maman looked at her with relief.

Bare of furniture, with just the armchair in the middle covered with three white, freshly laundered sheets, the parlour looked bigger and far too bright. The wallpaper was darker where the picture and the oval mirror had hung. The ceiling, Rosalia saw, needed a fresh coat of paint. Her mother’s hand when she held it was cold and dry but then, without warning, perspiration broke out.

‘When you were giving birth, Madame,’ the surgeon asked. ‘Did you scream?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Then I want you to scream—scream as much as you can.’

The operation was performed in absolute silence. The doctor seated Maman in the armchair, gave her a glass of wine cordial to drink, and covered her face with a cambric handkerchief. Then he motioned to the tallest assistant who placed a pillow under her head and positioned himself behind. The other two assistants silently came to stand on each side of the armchair, holding her arms. Her mother motioned to them that it was not necessary, but when, through the fine mesh of the handkerchief, she saw the glitter of steel she tried to stand up. The men held her so fast that she flinched.

Nothing, no past memory of love would ever equal this moment when Rosalia could feel her mother’s fingers clutch hers like clamps and saw her knuckles becoming white. It did not seem odd that her own body registered her mother’s pain. That this pain united them, sealed them to each other. That together, she with a clear eye and her mother through the mesh of her handkerchief, they watched as the surgeon made the sign of incision in the air, with a straight line from top to bottom of the breast, a cross and a circle. That they shuddered together when the blade cut horizontally, nearly in the direction of the rib, a little below the nipple. That the scream that came, came from them both.

The two assistants on either side pressed their fingers on the arteries, and the surgeon began the cleaning, his hand separating the tumour from the skin and muscles, cutting off the cancerous tissue. Blood splattered his hands and arms. There were a few drops of it on his face. When Rosalia heard the blade scraping the breast bone, she could feel her mother’s hand loosening her grip. Maman had fainted and for a moment something close to panic overtook her until she reminded herself that, unconscious, her mother was free from pain.

The procedure took twenty minutes. There were operations that could be performed well and fast, but this was not one of them. The whole of the diseased structure had to be removed, the surgeon said afterwards, and he could not afford to miss anything. ‘I can amputate in under two minutes,’ he said. ‘But with this, no half measures will do. If the reoccurrence of the mischief is to be prevented…’

Rosalia was so hopeful then. The surgeon assured her that the operation had gone well and showed her how to dress the wound, applying a large, thick compress of charpie to the sutures and binding it on with a flannel roller. It didn’t take long for blood to appear through all the bandages. Maman’s face had lost all its colour and her limbs all life. The assistants carried her to her bed, and Rosalia was told to change her dressings every two hours and watch for signs of infection, for the weakening of the body.

At midnight her mother opened her eyes, but she did not seem to know where she was.