Garden of Venus

‘He is standing by the window,’ she kept saying.

‘Who is?’ Rosalia asked. All she wanted was to throw herself into her mother’s arms, to hide her face in her breasts the way she did when she was a child. Instead she could still hear the knife scraping against the bones.

‘He is pointing at his heart.’

Her lips were parched and she drank a few sips of water. ‘I am going with him,’ she said. ‘I have to.’

Rosalia tried to quiet her. The surgeon had assured her the operation was a success. The cancer was removed, all of it. ‘You must be strong, Maman,’ she pleaded. ‘You cannot leave me alone. You cannot leave your only child.’

‘I have to go,’ her mother whispered and closed her eyes. ‘He is waiting for me. He will take me away.’

Seeing that the blood had penetrated the dressing again, Rosalia replaced it with a fresh one. Maman did not open her eyes, but she no longer seemed in pain. Perhaps, Rosalia thought, the crisis had passed. She promised herself not to fall asleep, but the silence and her mother’s calm, soft breaths proved too much. When she woke up, startled, it was still dark. The windowpanes were covered with the white, intricate patterns she loved to watch in Zierniki where the windows froze for most of the winter. Beautiful white ferns, branches of trees with spiked leaves, flowers of tiny petals that reminded her of figures her father drew to amuse her: pentagons, hexagons, octagons.

The room was silent and still. Death she thought was like that. A moment of loss too profound to comprehend. A moment in which love fuses with pain. A moment from which there is no now and no future. Nothing but memories of the past, crumbling and fading with time.

She didn’t have to touch Maman’s face to know she was dead.

Just as she did on winter days in Zierniki, Rosalia breathed at the windowpane. When the ice petals melted, she peered through the hole and saw a boy pass by. He was carrying a lantern carved out of a turnip, slits in its side let out enough light for him to see where he was going.

There were a few other objects in Rosalia’s travelling chest but these would remain unpacked, a testimony to the temporary nature of her stay in this Berlin palace: a small wooden star she had found among her mother’s things; her father’s snuffbox with the Rights of Man engraved on the lid; a black silhouette of Ko?ciuszko’s profile and three sketches of Napoleon in a wreath of oak leaves—her father’s heroes.

These treasures Rosalia kept locked in a mahogany box, underneath her clothes in the trunk. It was a flimsy hiding place. Any of the servant girls might want to go through her things, try on her dresses or petticoats. Smell her rosewater or jasmine oil and dab a few drops on her brow. In St Petersburg handkerchiefs and sheets of paper disappeared routinely. The paper was what the cook used to curl her hair with. ‘If it wasn’t meant to be taken, it wouldn’t be lying around,’ Rosalia had heard Marusya mutter.

Her back hurt from lifting sacks of clothes, from helping the countess stand up. Taking off her shoes and her stockings, she walked about the room, until her aching feet were consoled by the smoothness of the carpet. If only Olga cared to help more, but some people were born to luxury and some were not. ‘It’s your own mother,’ Rosalia was often tempted to say, but never did.

Her most excellent bed, as Frau Kohl—the Graf’s housekeeper—had described it, did not help. It felt too big, too cold. Rosalia turned and tossed around, trying to warm up the clammy sheet, wondering if she should call for another eiderdown. There were noises outside her room; German words exchanged by the footmen; the sounds of doors opening and closing—the life of this palace, temporarily interrupted by their arrival. She recalled Marusya’s talking about strange noises in the maid’s room, like someone’s knocking on the window-pane, and complaining that the room smelled of mice. ‘Perhaps the Count has come for the Mistress,’ the cook had said.

Sophie

She opens the gate. The fence of their Istanbul house is made of staves of wood fastened with wire. The wind pushes her back, and the first rain drops fall on her face. She is thinking of the smooth feel of velvet on her cheek.

‘Quick,’ Mana screams. ‘Upstairs. To your room.’

The front door is hanging open. A doctor is in her parents’ bedroom, bending over her father. Or someone who looks like her father, in spite of the swollen red face, an eyeless face locked in a scowl.

‘Go,’ Mana screams.

Upstairs, in her small room, Sophie throws herself on her bed and listens. The doctor’s voice is harsh and commanding. He is calling for water, and he is pounding something. Pounding hard and shouting at Mana who rushes outside and then comes back.

She can smell her own body. A slightly sour smell she breathes in and out. For a moment she feels that she is growing large, her feet are endless and wide, stretching to the edge of the world, but then she moves and the feeling is gone.

She remembers the time when he was proud of her. When he told Mana to dress his daughter in her best dress and to plait her hair with ribbons so that her father could take her with him to the garden where, under the deep shade of almond blossoms, his friends gathered for their evening coffee and sweetmeats.

Her father stood her on the carpet and clapped his hands. She bowed and smiled, eyes stealing swiftly across the faces of the men and back again to her father. From the overgrown lake, right beside them, came a rotting smell of reeds.

Her father took a garland of flowers and put it around her neck. A beautiful garland of reds and yellows, of roses and wild daffodils. She sniffed at the flowers and their scent made her sneeze. ‘A sign,’ her father said. Someone was talking about her now. Right this minute someone was saying her name.

The thought pleased her. The waves of whispers, the eyes of strangers following her.

‘Pray to the Lord,’ her father said, ‘that what they say is always good. Once soiled, a good name is lost forever.’

The men laughed and clapped their hands.

This is what she wants to remember: the wine glasses raised to the sky, toasting her health and her good luck. Toasting her beautiful voice breaking into a song of love. A song sad and sweet. A song she has heard shepherds sing in the fields.

A child thrice blessed. A child kissed by an angel.

Her father carried her home that evening, and she remembers his breath, in which wine and coffee mingled. He carried her in his arms like a princess so that her embroidered slippers would not, Heaven forbid, be soiled. The soft slippers Mana had made out of an old dress she had stopped wearing.

Downstairs the pounding stops and there is silence. She crosses herself three times. She is sorry for all the times she has been angry at him.

In Jerusalem, in the Temple, she cried as the friars lifted up the cross and led the pilgrims to the place where Our Lord suffered and died. She was holding a candle and the wax, melting, scorched her skin, but she did not feel pain. When they reached the Mount of Calvary she fell to her knees, recalling the suffering of Our Lord and those who were with him in these dark moments of pain and despair. Recalling Mary Magdalene, forgiven for her sins, taken back into the heart of the Lord. And then her own heart filled with love and compassion for all human suffering, and she could not think of anything she wanted so much as to lie there, on the holy ground and let her tears soak into the earth.

Mana is standing at the door, her hands hanging loose, her lips moving. There is a drop of sweat rolling down her forehead.

‘It’s Tuesday,’ she hears.

Tuesday is a bad, unlucky day. On a Tuesday, Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks and would from now on be called Istanbul. On a Tuesday the Emperor Constantine turned into marble. Just before he was to be struck down by the Turks, Byzantium’s last Emperor was seized by an angel. The angel, his golden wings shining in the rays of the sun, carried him to a cave near the Golden Gate and turned him into a statue. ‘You will wait here,’ he said, ‘for the time when God our Lord is ready to restore freedom to the Greeks.’

‘Cry, Dou-Dou,’ she says, ‘cry for your father. We are all alone in the world.’

But her own eyes are dry.

In the Istanbul port, where the straits merge with the sea, opaque patterns glide over the water and flocks of shearwaters skim low over the surface, never to rest. The Turks say they are the souls of the damned.

Mana says these tiny birds are the souls of the odalisques the Sultan sent to their deaths. Drowned in the Bosphorus, in brown burlap sacks, their hands tied, their mouths gagged. In this world it is better to be a dog than a woman, Mana says, for she has seen carriages stop for a dog lying in the sun. She has seen servants get out, lift the dog up, and carry it out of the way.

The fishermen come back from the sea with swordfish, red and grey mullet, sea bass, lobsters and mussels. Sprats are caught with a lantern. The light reflected in the water makes the fish blind, she has heard, and they do not see the net.

‘Sing for us, gorgeous,’ the sailors ask.

In the market her mother has shown her how to watch out for bad fish. The stink of decay can be rubbed away with pine tar; dull skin buffed with a piece of rag until it shines. Air can be blown inside the belly to make a catch look bigger and more succulent.

Watch out, Mana says. You have already bled like a woman. Men can pick that scent. Men can tell.

She likes the sight of them. The young men with olive skin, shirts stained with grease, open at the chest. Their muscles tense as they pull on the ropes.

‘I won’t,’ she laughs and hurries away.

For a Christian woman the streets of Istanbul are fraught with danger. Even if she casts her eyes down and follows her mother, quickly, without looking. Even if she promises herself not to stare at the rich, handsome cavaliers who come to the district of Phanar where the Greek merchants’ wives lounge on their verandas, attended by servant girls. Men whose steps are light and sprightly. Whose embroidered belts are fastened with broad golden clasps. Whose horses prance and neigh, impatient with restraint imposed on them by their riders’ hands. Men whose eyes are on the prowl.

She has seen the Janissaries with white feathers on their heads, and the royal gardeners dressed in their habits of different colours so that from afar they looked like flowers themselves. She has seen the Aga of the Janissaries in a robe of purple velvet lined with silver tissue. His horse was led by two slaves. Next to him was the Kilar Aga, the chief eunuch of the Seraglio in a deep yellow cloth lined with sable. The Sultan was mounted on a horse whose saddle was studded with jewels.

She often thinks of fate. Fate that can push her any which way, make her a slave or a queen, a lady or a whore. Lady Fate whose breath she feels right behind her, tickling the skin on her neck. Lady Fate, blind, fickle and full of spite.

Or is it benevolence.

Help yourself so God can help you, Mana says.

‘Look at yourself, Dou-Dou.’

This is her aunt who says she could be her sister. Whose dresses are made of Genoan damask and silk. Whose rings catch the rays of the sun and reflect them back with a rainbow of colours. ‘These, my little Dou-Dou, are real diamonds.’

Aunt Helena, Mana’s younger sister, hardly hides her annoyance at their hungry eyes trailing after her clothes, after the food on the table, after the trinkets with which she adorns herself. Aunt Helena with her sweet voice and the scent of roses around her, with hands soft and white.

‘Look at yourself,’ Sophie hears and watches how her cheap, coarse dress drops down, how her aunt’s fingers gently release the hooks of her petticoats, the folds of her chemise. How nothing obstructs the sight of her body. The shapely breasts, the belly button, the mound of black curls below. ‘Move your hips, Dou-Dou,’ Aunt Helena whispers into her ear, the hot air of her breath tickling. ‘Slowly, slowly. Don’t shake too much.’

She sways her hips, shy at first, cautious. But she likes what she sees, she likes this nymph, this slender, beautiful girl framed by the gilded mirror. Standing beside this aunt of hers, her mother’s sister who now braids a string of pearls into her long hair. Is this the way Eve felt in the Garden of Eden when she saw her own reflection in the mirror of still water?

‘You are so beautiful, Dou-Dou. You can have everything you want. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, girl.’

She turns her back to the mirror and looks over her shoulder. Her back is smooth and flexible. She can bend as easily as she climbed the branches of the oak tree in Bursa. She can kneel on the floor and let her body fall backwards, into a graceful curve, and then come back, slowly, her eyes locked on her own image.

‘You are worthy of a king’s bed.’

The longing in her is like an ill wind that makes the air clammy with heat, filled with dust, unbearable. There has to be a release to all this want that has gathered in her. In the mirror her own eyes stare back at her. Two black coals of desire.

She lowers her eyes, as if she were ashamed of her own beauty, and her aunt claps her hands and laughs. ‘Perhaps, I don’t need to teach you that much after all,’ she says.

From the big mahogany chest of drawers, Aunt Helena takes out her best cashmere shawl, the one on which there is a flower on a stem, its roots dangling in the air. Long tendrils, clean of soil, no longer hidden in the earth. Such is the taste of the true ladies, her aunt says. They like botanicals. Botanicals, the word itself sounds different, more worldly than mere plants or flowers.

Soft and silky to the touch, the shawl envelops her with misty warmth, a promise of a caress.

‘For a woman, nothing, my little Dou-Dou, works better than a bit of mystery.’

A length of gauze replaces the cashmere shawl. Her aunt drapes it over her hair, around her waist. There is something flowery about the girl in the mirror now. A promise of lightness and fragrance of petals.

Sophie laughs. She preens and coos, and kneels in front of the mirror. She bows her head in a sweet gesture of submission her eyes deny. For the girl in the mirror is no longer a girl; she is a young, beautiful woman. A woman who likes her own boldness. A woman who likes the brightness of her own eyes; the flash of her beautiful white teeth; the dimple in her cheeks, and the pink nipple peeking from underneath the white gauze.

‘I’ll teach you to dance,’ her aunt whispers into her ear. ‘The Oriental dance.’

Thomas

Right after his arrival in Berlin, Thomas took a brisk walk, past an old church with twin spires and a red roof. Rosenstrasse was a narrow street, lit only by the light coming through the windows. A night watchman with a horn under his belt gave him a quick, cautious look, his sabre catching the reflection of the light. The insides of the houses were hidden behind curtains, lace, muslin, silk screens that kept secrets well. Sometimes Thomas could get a glimpse of someone moving inside, like a figure in a shadow play or magic lantern.

In his letter Ignacy had mentioned the patient was a rich Polish countess who had just arrived from St Petersburg. Countess Potocka, once the most beautiful belle of Europe, in search of a healer. She is unable to travel to Paris, so Paris will have to come to her. After all, my friend, you too will profit from a change of place and a good dose of forgetting.

‘Please, the best of friends,’ Thomas muttered in response. ‘Don’t.’

In spite of his fur-lined cape and high boots, the leather soles squeaking as he walked, he could not warm up. The air was clammy. The whiff of the sewers made him cringe. As he almost stepped onto gobbets of horses’ dung, he heard a woman and a man quarrelling behind one of the impenetrable windows. The woman’s voice was whiny, drowning the man’s complaints in a barrage of reproaches. Then the doors of the house opened and the man stepped out. Tall, lanky, tattered leather jacket on his back. The door slammed. ‘Du blöde Hure,’ the man yelled at the closed windows and walked away.

Thomas followed the man from a distance, hoping he would lead him to a neighbourhood tavern where he could have a beer and drown the constant stutter of the carriage wheels in his head, but when the man walked into a dim alley Thomas decided to turn back. This time he took a different direction and in one of the windows, its curtains parted to allow for a glimpse inside, he saw the glow of red and blue lanterns, golden tassels, scarlet ottomans. Two young women in low-cut gowns sat at a small table staring at cards, laid out in a cross. Beside them stood two glasses of clear yellow liqueur.

Sex was the need of a body. A fundamental need, Thomas stressed when he lectured to his students at Val de Grâce, that kept the disintegration of life at bay. He was not entirely convinced by Dr Brown’s theory that the flow of life needed to be controlled, boosted or dampened according to need. ‘The word need,’ he liked to warn his students, ‘is the problem. How would one know one’s true needs?’ Such doubts, of course, did not trouble Dr Brown. In London he was known to lecture with a glass of whisky in one hand and a bottle of laudanum in another, taking sips from one or the other.

For Thomas, the sight of the corpse stretched on the metal table was enough to renounce vain discussions and hypotheses. Life and death, he told his students, should be observed and examined without preconceived notions. Ars medica tota in observationibus, as Laennec had repeated ad nauseam. There was always something theatrical about that first incision. A moment pregnant with revelation, best approached in expectant silence. ‘Gentlemen, watch and take note. Refraining, if you can, from idle speculations.’ Ignoring the flicker of impatience in some of the eyes set on him, Thomas would perform his magic. His arm slightly raised, aware of the glitter of steel, he would wordlessly bend over the corpse and cut the skin without further declarations, defeated by the eagerness of youth.

One of the women in the window must have noticed him, for her hand slid down her neck in a well rehearsed gesture, inside her frilled décolletage, revealing full breasts. It was only then that Thomas realised with embarrassment that he was staring at her, the mute cause of her performance to which a smile was now added, tongue lingering over the bottom lip. Quickly he wrapped his cloak around him and turned away, walking down the dark alley as if pursued, though he could hear nothing but the pounding of his own heels on the pavement.

In Paris, in Rue de Clairmont, Minou expected him on Fridays. Dressed in black lace, with her smooth breasts pushed up by her corset, she smiled gently and poured a glass of red wine for him the moment he walked in. There was a pleasant smell of lavender and he liked her room, in spite of its garish combination of red and black, the lowered blinds and the smoky lamp. Minou didn’t try to talk or pretend he was anything but a paying client. She washed in front of him and made love with a pleasant efficiency that both excited and released him from desire. He paid her well, and his demands were simple. When the lovemaking was over, he liked to watch her comb her long, reddish hair. Thomas suspected she dyed it with henna. Redheads made more money, he had heard. She came from St-Malo; her father and her two brothers were sailors.

‘A sailor,’ Ignacy once said to him in response to a statement long forgotten. ‘You know what they say of sailors’ wives? Femme de marin-femme de chagrin.’

It was ten o’clock by the time Thomas returned to his lodgings. His landlady was in the living room with her embroidery hoop. In her heavy dress, plaited hair arranged into a tight bun, she looked the embodiment of domesticity. She offered him tea, but he made a lame excuse and rushed up the stairs to his rooms.

Upstairs, he poured cold water from the jug into a porcelain basin, took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He didn’t think of himself as handsome or well-built, in spite of Minou’s protestations to the contrary. She liked his ruddy skin and brown eyes, and, with an air of fake ease, swore that his nose was ‘aquiline’. Where did she get a word like this, he wondered. In the mirror he could see that his hair was thinning already. He was not as tall as Ignacy and far thinner, but his body had the sturdiness of generations of peasants, and could carry him in the saddle for hours.

He lay down on the hard, narrow bed and closed his eyes. He thought of a young woman, a girl he healed once, at la Charité. She was not older than fifteen, with red, lush curls and little freckles all over her face. She was writhing in pain, her lips livid and bleeding from the pressure of her crooked teeth biting into flesh. He had ascertained that the patient was brought by a young man who had left as soon as he could, without leaving his name or address. When he examined the girl, he found a pig’s tail pushed into her anus. The nun who had helped him undress her, averted her eyes. Someone had tried to remove it, but the hair on the tail had got stuck in her flesh. The girl was bleeding and her anus was filled with pus.

Thomas inserted a small tube around the tail and extracted it. He didn’t take the girl’s money. He didn’t warn her against continuing her trade. He didn’t tell her how often he saw women with their private parts torn, with broken glass stuck in their vaginas. He figured she knew all that. She cried and thanked him in her thick, Breton accent. He kept her at la Charité for a few days until her wound began to show the signs of healing. Then he let her go.

Sophie

The plague is stalking the streets of Istanbul, this city of golden towers, of mosques and minarets, of crescents, kiosks, palaces and bazaars. At street corners bodies of the diseased are being burnt, together with all their possessions. The smoke has already filled the air, spilled into every street, lodged deep into the fibres of everyone’s clothes. Whole sections of Istanbul have been cordoned off, though people say that well-placed bakshish can do wonders. Announcements in Turkish and in Greek forbid all contacts with foreigners, especially visits to the foreign missions. Any Greek woman caught with a foreigner would be beaten in public. Forty lashes to the heels of her feet.

Maria Glavani is carrying cloves of garlic in a sash around her neck and blue beads to ward off the evil eye. She never leaves the house without the holy picture of St Nicholas to whom she prays until her knees turn red and sore. In the mornings, when she comes back home smelling of liquor and men, she washes her hands and face with water to which she adds a few spoonfuls of vinegar.

‘You stay inside!’

Mana’s voice is harsh, impatient. The lines on her face are deepening, no matter how diligently she massages them every day. Sophie does not like these frenzied preparations, the ironing of dresses, the pinning of hair. The slaps when she is too slow or clumsy; when a hem is ripped; a pin misplaced; a line of kohl smudged. But after Mana leaves, the silence of their small house chokes Sophie. In her empty bed she hugs herself. What comes back to her is the smell of smoke and vinegar mixed with her own sweat. Everything that has happened in her life so far seems to have curled up in her, poised and waiting for release.

Death does not frighten her. In the street she does not turn her eyes away from the burning bodies. This is not the way she will die. She knows that. A fortune-teller told her once that she would die after a long life, without pain. Far away from home, but among those who loved her.