A Woman Loved Read online

  The screenplay he envisaged in those days was to have a gaily lighthearted, erotically piquant flavor to it. A setting in the style of Fragonard, the last years of a century that cultivated the art of taking nothing seriously, apart from trifles and trivia. A frivolous, modish world, somewhat rococo, with a touch of “The Rape of the Lock,” a dash of “après nous, le déluge!” A deliciously theatrical existence.

  “Now here’s a chance to redeem yourself. How many plays did Catherine write?”

  (The answer is half a dozen at least, her favorites acted in them, Diderot applauded them …)

  At first Oleg had pictured his film as a sequence of romantic adventures, alternating with melodramatic conspiracies.

  The third chart sets out this politico-erotic trajectory. The list of her lovers and the duration of their remaining “in favor”:

  Saltykov (1752–54)

  Poniatowski (1756–58)

  The Orlov brothers, Grigory and Aleksey (1761–72)

  Vassilchikov (1772–74)

  Potemkin (1774–76)

  Zavadovsky (1776–77)

  Zorich (1777–78)

  Korsakov (1777–79)

  Lanskoy (1780–84)

  Yermolov (1785–86)

  Mamonov (1786–89)

  The Zubov brothers, Platon and Valerian (1789–96)

  At the foot of the list there is a note of some less durable liaisons: Vyssotsky, Bezborodko, Khvostov, Kazarinov …

  Lessya is amazed: “You say she admitted to five lovers? And back in 1774 Potemkin accused her of having had fifteen. He must have been clairvoyant. All those men she would end up loving!”

  This remark introduced the first jarring note into the airy mood of his screenplay. Oleg gave an ironic whistle to dispel any feeling of seriousness. “No, no! She didn’t love them! She just needed a man in her bed, that’s all. And, by the way, her favorites were under no illusions. ‘I was just a kept woman.’ That’s what Vassilchikov, lover number four, said. The tsarina’s pleasures cost the State a fortune! Just look at the figures …”

  The fourth chart shows the sums paid in rewards. Lessya’s eyes open wide: “Vassilchikov got six hundred thousand rubles and Mamonov, the one who left Catherine for a young mistress? Nine hundred thousand! The Orlov brothers seventeen million … Didn’t you put one zero too many? Potemkin, fifty million!”

  “In those days,” explained Oleg, “you could live for a month on a few rubles … Catherine was buying herself pleasure. She didn’t worry too much about questions of morality. The truth is they were less hidebound than we are and not afraid to live life to the full. Hold on, I’ll read you the epitaph she wrote:

  “’Here lies Catherine II, born at Stettin on 21 April 1729. She came to Russia in 1744 to marry Peter III. At the age of fourteen she made a threefold vow—to please her husband, the Empress Elizabeth, and the people. She neglected nothing to achieve this. Eighteen years of solitude left her little choice but to read widely. When she came to the throne, she sought the good of her subjects and strove to give them happiness, freedom, and wealth. She forgave easily and hated nobody. She was compassionate, sociable, good-humored, with a republican soul and a kind heart—and not lacking in friends. Work never tired her, she loved company and the arts.”’

  “A lot of women could identify with that portrait,” Lessya had remarked softly. “I guess even I could …”

  Now he walks through the apartment, remembering those carefree “history exams” and their routine for making “an assault on the front line,” as they called it: these were times when Lessya needed to go to the bathroom. She was nervous of running into a boorish neighbor, or of mistaking the door and disturbing someone who was asleep. He would go with her to spare her from embarrassing encounters. On other occasions they went on a mission to “disable an atomic reactor,” surreptitiously removing a saucepan from the stove where a stew was bubbling away and slipping their coffeepot in its place. If the saucepan’s owner appeared in the corridor they had to put it back hastily on the heat and pretend to be innocently waiting until they could make themselves coffee …

  Oleg does the same thing now, thrusting aside a mighty kettle. And for the thousandth time he seeks to fathom how the airy frivolity of his original concept could have given birth to this palace swarming with murdered tsars, bloodthirsty court favorites, madmen, traitors, sadistic women … True, he has read a great deal since those days and a whole network of subtext has tunneled its way underneath the chronology shown by those charts. “Peter III is overthrown, then killed, by men loyal to Catherine …,” the red felt-tip pen noted. A tsar loathed by the people, a puppet more German than Russian, gets bumped off by officers smitten with Catherine. A scene halfway between farce and pathos: one sword thrust and the puppet collapses like a bundle of rags …

  But it did not happen like that. Peter has enough time to realize he is going to be killed. Invited to a dinner among the men who will murder him, the tsar still clings to a little hope. Then one of the officers insults him, slaps his face. Peter does not respond, aware they are looking for a pretext … He is defenseless, confronted by these hefty men, all fired up with wine. A moment of confusion, briefly the killers hesitate … And then they begin baying for his blood: the tsar is knocked down, they hit him, they squeeze his throat. He still has enough strength to crawl toward the door on all fours. This only sharpens the brutes’ appetites. They finish him off, beating his face to a pulp … Before the funeral, this tattered mask is restored by a painter. The very artist who had painted a portrait of the young couple: Catherine and Peter, tenderly holding hands …

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I took your place!” Oleg removes his coffeepot and puts the kettle back on the heat. Zoya protests gently: “No, no. I’m not in a hurry …” She sits down facing the window, goes into a dream, seems to be hoping for someone to appear outside. But outside there is just a tiny yard surrounded by high walls, a bare tree, white with hoarfrost …

  A mad notion occurs to him: why not talk to Zoya about Catherine II! Yes, come right out and say to her: “This must have happened to you at some time: a person interests you, you dig deep into their past … And all of a sudden you realize that the truth about them doesn’t lie inside their life … but far away from it …”

  He walks back to his room mentally repeating these words. Confess his woes to poor Zoya? He must be losing his marbles. Lessya was right, he ought to concoct a straightforward historical movie: an insipid Peter III, whose wife is a nymphomaniac regicide, who makes humanistic speeches to please Voltaire. And then, hey presto, a peasants’ revolt, a forest of gallows, and instead of an enlightened young tsarina—a fat German woman on the Russian throne, choosing handsome athletes for her pleasure.

  Oleg drinks his coffee with his eyes fixed on the charts. Poniatowski, Orlov, Potemkin … The mirror rises and falls. The alcove attracts young bodies, consumes them, tosses them aside.

  He knows there is something missing from these texts in red felt-tip pen. A reference to be added there, as a footnote, in among those alcoves, wars, murders, and fortunes … a word or two about the thousands of Germans Catherine II brought into Russia’s endless spaces. Not princes and magnates but ordinary people, artisans, soldiers, farmers. Hans Erdmann, one of Oleg’s ancestors, was among them. A stonecutter who came from Magdeburg. And on his mother’s side the settlers came from Kassel. One of his ancestors made musical boxes, telescopes, lorgnettes. And magic lanterns …

  Instead of carrying the load on his shoulder, Oleg has adopted a different grip: he takes the full weight on his back and walks along, bent double, to avoid the dead flesh pressing against his cheek.

  For six months at the Leningrad slaughterhouse he has felt as if he were carrying corpses rather than animal carcasses. Now it is all routine: the air thick with blood, the flaccid feel of the meat, the equanimity of the workers as they slaughter, eviscerate, cut up … Working there one night out of three earns him enough to live on and time for writing.<
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  The job is exhausting and filthy, but at a certain level of tiredness his muscles perform automatically, leaving his mind clear to reflect calmly. By day he is forever repeating: “Lessya’s changed,” analyzing in detail everything that is no longer the same about their relationship. During his nights at the slaughterhouse, all this analysis makes him smile.

  His first short film had been released a year earlier … The criticisms were disproportionately violent, given that it was a modest thirty-five-minute film. “A false and glamorized view of the Great Patriotic War,” “an ideologically dubious standpoint” … Bassov, the teacher who had overseen his work, was nearly expelled from the Party. Oleg was bracing himself for the grim plight of a director banned from filming. Then events took a sudden turnaround: his film, he was told, had just been viewed in Moscow, at the Ministry of Defense, the minister himself liked it, and, what’s more, other members of the Politburo were of the same opinion!

  The film was called Return in a Dream. In 1941 a young architect goes off to the war and for five years sees nothing but devastated cities, flattened by bombing. In Russia, in Poland, in Germany. The sites whose architecture he had once studied now present a vision of broken pillars, shattered domes … On his return he finds his native town on the Volga completely wiped out. Beneath the rubble of his own house—there is a portfolio filled with drawings: airy arcades, galleries open to the sky …

  What must have moved Oleg’s “defenders” at the Ministry of Defense was the sight in that film of a young soldier lost amid the ruins … As they themselves had been forty years before …

  The reaction of these elderly leaders, while it saved Oleg, also brought home to him the extent to which the government of the country belonged to another era.

  Thus, against all expectation, he acquired this singular status: after a spell among artists on the blacklist, he found himself basking in the protection of the Kremlin! Bassov, his teacher, was exultant. “Your film woke up the drowsy old men in the Politburo! Some of your laurels belong on my bald head. But this is where it gets serious. For your next film, don’t pick the wrong story …”

  Bassov used the word story in the sense of “subject,” “scenario.” But Oleg already had in mind the story of a little German princess who one day became the empress of Russia.

  He had met Lessya during those mad days of anguish and triumph. In his little world of young filmmakers, she occupied a special place: her father worked at the Soviet Embassy in Sweden, and she had made a name for herself working on a film magazine. Their love affair was no doubt colored by the unexpected success of Oleg’s film, but also by the light of an early spring and, a few months later, the celebrations for the Moscow Olympic Games …

  This image stuck in his memory: July 1980, dazed by sunlight and love, they lay there in his room, vaguely listening to snatches from a neighbor’s television as it gave the results of the sporting events. A warm wind, the sounds and smells of a big city at night. Above the bed the chart setting out the story of Catherine II’s life. “You’re going to make a great film!” Lessya had whispered and he felt like an athlete being cheered on by a woman he loves.

  “Go and get the last three, Erdmann. There’s still room in the truck.”

  The foreman’s voice rouses him from his daydream, propelling him toward the blocks where the carcasses are stacked up. Under pressure the flesh has the elasticity of a body recently alive.

  The ease with which a living creature is destroyed never ceases to surprise him. At one moment a young animal stood there breathing in the fresh air, then its skull was smashed by a blow from a poleax and now here is this meat, which will feed the voracious appetite of a big city. Oleg stoops, picks up the carcass, carries it, sets it down. Pick up, carry, unload. Gradually the torpid state arrives where his thoughts settle down, in a simple, bare, stark world …

  His short film has given him a choice between two enviable identities: either that of rebellious filmmaker or, following his unhoped-for success, artist protected by the regime. Some were of the opinion that, like a fool, he had failed to cash in on this stroke of luck. This was because he was a spineless provincial hick, said Zyamtsev, the ringleader of a little group of friends Lessya spent time with. And so a consensus was formed: Erdmann was a Siberian peasant, gullible enough to think he was going to get a second helping of luck. The Oleg Erdmann Lessya loved was one who was empowered by that double destiny of his. If he reneged on it, he would become a different person.

  “Hey, Erdmann, another for number two!”

  Absentmindedly he nods, grasps a carcass, carries it to exit number 2. There he flexes his knees like a weight lifter and with an abrupt straightening of his whole body, heaves the burden onto a pile of flesh.

  This place is a long way from the hall where the living tissue becomes dead meat. Over the top of the perimeter wall nocturnal facades can be seen. People are asleep, or talking late into the night, or else making love. With no thought of the death that fills these trucks …

  Oleg always tries to prolong this moment of relief at exit 2. Here he feels liberated from all identity: he is no longer the carrier of carcasses, nor the filmmaker inspired by a crazy project … And, above all, not that Russo-German mutant, a “German from the Volga region,” according to the official records.

  It is this ill-defined status that must have displeased Lessya. By dint of writing about Catherine, Oleg was increasingly identifying with ghosts two centuries old. With a childish prince, the future Peter III, who lined up his little soldiers on the floor of a salon in the palace. One night, these little figures, carved from starch, attracted a gluttonous rat. One of the corporals was devoured. Peter summoned a court-martial, built a little gallows, and the rat was judged and hanged.

  In the early days Oleg could only laugh at this childish behavior. Later he came to believe he could detect a logic in it less absurd than it at first appeared. And that was when a quarrel came to mar his happy life with Lessya.

  “Are you going to spend your life doing postmortems on rats?” she exclaimed. “So now it’s a great philosophical debate: why did Peter the Third send a rat to the gallows? In your original synopsis everything was clear, remember? Catherine marries an idiot, for want of anything better, and gets rid of him at the first opportunity. OK, this fellow loved his little soldiers, brought his dogs into the marriage bed, got drunk with his servants and taught them to do the goose step, Prussian style. And what else? Oh yes! He couldn’t have sex on account of his foreskin! So are you going to unveil a treatise on circumcision now? Is that it?”

  Oleg remembers vainly attempting to justify himself: Peter III was far from being the idiot described by the historians. It was more that he was maladjusted, weak, a dreamer. And the world always punishes weak dreamers.

  Lessya hooted with laughter. “So he was a little Hamlet, your softy? OK! You stick with your craziness! But do you know what? This stuff about rats and foreskins, I’ve had enough of it!”

  And she walked out, leaving him distraught, amid his pages of draft text …

  They were to meet again the following evening. It was the same group of young artists, a lot of laughter and drink, dancing, some of it sensual, some of it unbridled. And around him the mocking whispers: “the Siberian peasant” … An arm brushed against his face in the throng and knocked off his glasses. He crouched down, began feeling for them on the floor amid the prancing feet. With his hazy vision, he caught sight of Lessya from below. A man was thrusting her away, then pulling her toward him, to the crazy rhythm of the music, they were laughing … They would soon be sure to notice him, there on all fours, with his blurred vision, feverishly fumbling around on the floor. Suddenly he thought of Peter: the tsar has fallen, the killers’ heavy boots are clattering around before they strike, as he crawls there, surrounded by yelling and stinking breath …

  His glasses, minus one lens, had ended up under an armchair. He put them on and made his way to the door, braving the looks that followed h
im. He glimpsed Lessya’s face with a mixture of myopic haziness and sharp clarity.

  “Hey, Erdmann, you savage! No eating raw pig! You’re not in the wilds of Siberia now …”

  It takes Oleg a moment to snap back to reality. It is Ivan Zhurbin, the young actor, calling out to him. The one who had said: “You’re going to make a TV series in three hundred and a half episodes!” Yes, the indomitable Zhurbin … What they have in common is their status as provincials. As well as the fact of being hard up. Ivan showed him how to repair his shoes with leather from an old suitcase and it was thanks to him that Oleg secured this job at the slaughterhouse.

  The sky is still dark, it’s seven o’clock in the morning and after a sleepless night the notion seems bizarre: here is his redheaded friend with his somewhat boyish grin about to take over the same job of carrying dead meat … The foreman’s summons can already be heard. “Hey! Zhurbin, you goddamned shirker, come and load up! Otherwise I’ll take two hours off you …”

  Oleg moves away. An icy sidewalk, a streetcar stop, and, despite his drowsiness, this hallucinatory clarity: rocked by the swaying of the streetcar, he reviews Catherine’s life with the intimacy of a memory of his own. Yes, those spectacles he dropped, his fumblings amid the dancers’ feet—the confusion that reminded him of how Peter III crawls around as Catherine’s officers prepare to kill him …

  The passing of the streetcar causes some snow to fall from a branch. He has time to see a brief, iridescent flurry. And he conjures up what is seen by the little German princess, aged ten, as she holds the hand of a young prince, barely older than herself. The children are watching great snowflakes falling over the sea at Kiel, where they meet for the first time in 1739. Twenty-three years later this boy, now the Russian emperor, is beaten to death by the lovers of his wife, that same little girl who once held his hand beneath a slow swirl of snow.