A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  He knew no blinding inspiration. Simply from the jumble of pages there suddenly emerged a clear grasp of what he must write. He recalled the words of his teacher, Bassov: “You’re not going to treat us to an animated cartoon?”

  On the contrary, precisely that! To compress the farce of History, to extract from it a series of sketches, of masquerades. A great mirror rises up, there on a bed a breathless lover can be seen, the mirror descends and the tsarina, all flushed with love, signs treaties, receives Casanova, Diderot, Potemkin …

  Within a fortnight the screenplay was completed. And, as if she had guessed as much, Lessya came to see him in his little room in the communal apartment. The echo of their evenings together in the old days was poignant: the woman he loved sitting there on a sofa piled high with books, the smell of coffee …

  “Erdmann, you’d better go hang yourself. It’s crazy!”

  That was her verdict, but Lessya attached scant importance to it, her life was by now so far removed from this little room.

  The next night at the slaughterhouse was tough: carcasses of horses, bloody burdens, and the sight of a tub into which the workmen hurled viscera. A dark, glistening magma that looked as if it were moving. “Men fight to dominate their fellow men,” he thought, “to grow rich, to win the most beautiful women. Death comes and what remains of all they desired or hated, all they have been, is this pulp … The idea’s not a new one, but I now have this tub here in front of my eyes. And Lessya so alive within me …”

  And the memory returned of his girlfriend’s words in November, on that last evening of their love: “You should film what Catherine was not … A misty night, the frail mildness that comes before winter …”

  He made a sudden decision: when he left the slaughterhouse that morning he went to Zyamtsev’s place. A sleepless night is a bad counselor, it caused him to picture an encounter happening as easily as in a dream: as Lessya emerges from the apartment building, he speaks to her, she understands him …

  She came down with Zyamtsev and they were heading straight for Oleg, as if they wanted to call out to him, pursue him. The courtyards between Leningrad apartment buildings are famously labyrinthine. Keeping his head down, he beat a retreat, restraining himself from running, turning this way and that. The two lovers were following him relentlessly, seeking to corner him and make fun of the childish way he had waited under their window … Out of breath, he finally came to a halt, realized that nobody was hounding him, found himself in front of a little unofficial garbage dump stacked up against a brick wall. To one side stood a chair with a battered seat. He sat down without thinking, realized his knees were shaking. A cat walked by, stared at him, incredulous. Oleg broke into a laugh, on the brink of tears … “Just look at me sitting here on the Polish throne Catherine had installed in her privy. And on November 4, 1796, they’ll find her on the floor beside this desecrated relic. Dying. She’s had a dizzy spell just as she was relieving herself. Two days later she’ll be in her death throes. Death, decomposition. That tub of viscera. That’s all there is in life, my dear Lessya. Violence, the absurdity of desire, the drama of love affairs. And the tub …”

  He got up, seeing a woman walking over to the wall, a bucket of garbage in her hand.

  Back at home he found a letter from Bassov, his teacher. “I’ve read your screenplay. We need to talk about it …” As a postscript, the acronym Bassov had invented—“datdot”: “don’t attempt to discuss on telephone.” Oleg reflected on the censorship, the telephone tapping, and all the prohibitions Lessya’s friends used to rail against. He now perceived that the impossibility of expressing oneself was not just about this. What was even harder to talk about was a misty night, an avenue of bare trees at the approach of winter, the silence of a woman who felt herself to be someone quite other than the famous tsarina whose name she bore.

  Going to see Bassov is quite an expedition: subway, suburban train, a rickety bus jolting along amid wooded hills. Finally this housing development of dachas belonging to “representatives of the creative intelligentsia,” the official term that makes Oleg smile. (What about the uncreative intellectuals?) For these “representatives” it is simply a vacation resort for the summer. Bassov, on the other hand, stays there all the year round, having nowhere to live in Leningrad.

  Three years before he had married a young actress, a student of his. It was the euphoria of love alone that helped this sixty-year-old remain blind. Once she became the joint owner of the square feet allocated to him in Leningrad the lady demanded a divorce and brought in her boyfriend. Bassov, a director of films in which rugged heroes grappled with evil, found himself destitute in real life. He made appeals to moral conscience, to honesty! And then grasped that for this girl such an apartment was the chance of a lifetime. “Oh well, I guess she could have poisoned me,” he said, tickled by his own brittle wit. He made a gallant last stand—delivered a homily on the glory of art and the squalor of mercenary calculations—and then went off to live in his dacha.

  Those who gained from this were his students. He devoted more time to them, motivated by the passionate altruism of bruised souls. His selflessness extended to his support for an ideologically suspect short film, Return in a Dream, by a certain Oleg Erdmann …

  This time the teacher receives him ceremoniously. A long handshake, his eyes screwed up as a sign of complicity. This is how you greet your fellow gladiator before he enters the lists.

  “What a cat among the pigeons of Russian history!” He gestures at the manuscript lying on his desk. “She’s a bombshell, your Catherine the Great … Hold on, I’ll make some tea. Take this chair. They’ll soon be strapping you into an electric chair, you’ll see.”

  An anxious wait for his verdict and, outside the window, a February day, a snowy somnolence, nature’s mild indifference toward all the frenzy of human plans.

  The previous year, when talking to Bassov about Catherine, Oleg received this advice: “Drive her from her throne!” When he looked puzzled the teacher explained: “Show the woman in her. She took off her crown when she made love, didn’t she? Search the streets for a look, a face, gestures that might be hers. Find a woman who might be Catherine in any period. An ice cream seller, a gym instructor … Try to fall in love with a present-day Catherine the Second.” Keeping his eyes peeled, his ears cocked, Oleg would walk through the city, comparing passing women with the stereotyped portrait of Catherine. And in addition, the more he studied the empress’s life, the more the young, frivolous figure took on serious, tragic features. Beyond the princess disporting herself beside the Neva there appeared a mature woman, at the same time more powerful and more vulnerable. There were perceptible similarities between her and women he came across—the fluttering of tired eyelids in a railroad station ticket office, a tourist speaking in husky tones close by the Hermitage, a voluptuous and supple gait … All this, made flesh, and disturbingly real, was Catherine. Bassov had been right: Oleg fell in love with her, set about defending her. Her sexual appetite? Just picture a young woman hungry for love who has been married off to that poor Peter, incapable of the least carnal act! Regicide? It was a duel rather than a murder: Peter was planning to get rid of her and to give the crown to his mistress, Vorontsova …

  Bassov brings some tea, a pot of jam, bread. He moves slowly, only embarking on conversation after he has poured tea for Oleg and drunk a long draft.

  “What concentrated fire, your screenplay, phew!” he mutters, with a snort. Then, staring straight at him, he blurts out: “This submachine gun style of writing is very effective!”

  He snorts again and continues in somewhat grumpy tones: “I wouldn’t have staked a ruble on that technique! You promised me you’d not do a Walt Disney. And, goddamnit, it works! Like that vignette based on a Polish caricature: Catherine drinking blood—that of the Warsaw insurgents, I guess—and gobbling male genitalia, those of her favorites … Oh yes and that alcove! The mirror comes down. The lover’s hidden. And there’s the empress, cool as a cucumb
er, receiving Casanova or Diderot … The whole masquerade of History in a few shots. So, Poniatowski, whose father was a footman, becomes a prince, then king of Poland, and, at the very end, the king of the commode! And Potemkin? A fabulously rich potentate who dies on a bare steppe under the open sky. A soldier closes his eyes with copper coins … And Voltaire? What a base flatterer! You don’t mention Catherine’s hatred of the French Revolution. We just see a footman carrying off the bust of Voltaire, to hide it in the attic at the Winter Palace …”

  Ensconced in his armchair, Bassov first acts out Potemkin, lying there in the middle of the steppe, then the footman, carrying the bust of the philosopher hugged to his stomach.

  “The high point, of course, is Catherine’s love life. A hundred lovers! Take a minute for each of her favorites and you’d have no time left to film anything else. Happily your animated cartoon cuts to the chase: power and sex. And Catherine is the one who dominates all these males. She’s the one who fucks them!”

  Bassov waves a clenched fist in what is intended as a manly gesture, but, on the lips of a cuckold this paean of praise for female libertinism does not ring true. His face takes on a disillusioned look.

  “Now, here’s the problem … The technique of an animated cartoon is perfect for dealing with simple situations. Count Orlov setting out to hunt a bear single-handed, then servicing the tsarina with equal energy. And when the Tsar Peter begins to annoy them, these lovebirds bump him off. It’s all clear—predators massacre a weak herbivore. But … I’ve read Catherine’s letters to her correspondent in Paris, Melchior Grimm. The catch is that she idolizes her lovers. Like a starry-eyed young girl, she’s forever saying the same thing: this Korsakov, this Mamonov, this Yermolov, this … well, every one of them is a total masterpiece, a lofty soul, an unequaled intelligence … She believes it. Her heart is won. She’s in love!”

  This exalted observation, “She’s in love!,” arouses Oleg. Hitherto he has allowed himself to be lulled by the words of praise, sweet music after months of setbacks and mockery. At last he has been understood, appreciated, given a seal of approval by a master.

  “And then, her letters to Potemkin,” Bassov continues. “‘My dear heart, my little sweet soul, the master of my life’s breath …’ simpering endearments, sugary billing and cooing, agreed. There’s nothing original in this babble of words. But there are deeds. Once Potemkin falls ill Catherine watches over him as if he were her own son! And that’s something your animated cartoon could never show, because …”

  At this moment Oleg knows that, through the tsarina’s life, Bassov is talking about himself: his young wife had left him instead of “watching over him like her son.”

  “Catherine had just as much affection for Orlov. The rejected lover grows old, loses his wits, is sunk in solitude and squalor. And it’s she, the empress, who goes to his house to feed him, to care for him. To wash him! Filming a bitch who gets herself a new male every day is easy, a Disney cartoon suffices. But now try showing this German woman rolling up her sleeves and giving an old Russian madman a bath! …”

  Outside the window a bird perches on a snow-covered sorbus tree. They both watch the bullfinch moving with drowsy slowness toward a cluster of red …

  “Your screenplay is reinforced concrete,” Bassov concludes. “But take care. The slugs on the State Committee know how to find cracks where they can slither in. Given the novelty of the project, things are bound to get hot. Especially since your protectors at the Kremlin will already have forgotten you. Comrade Alzheimer has a seat on the Politburo …”

  He snatches up a brochure, leafs through it …

  “Listen carefully … the SCCA, the State Committee for Cinematic Art, always calls in an outside expert. In your case it’s bound to be a historian. I’ve managed to get his name: Luria. He’s the one who’ll be lighting the bonfire under your feet. Now there are three historians called Luria in Leningrad. Well, these days there are only two. The first, who was denounced as a Trotskyist, was shot in ’37. The second Luria is an absolute bastard. At the end of the thirties he gave up history to devote himself to modern political theory, or more precisely, to singing Stalin’s praises. Stalinist Retort to the Betrayers of Socialist Culture is his magnum opus. After Stalin’s death this Luria number two went through contortions that would make a yogi’s eyes water: he revealed himself to be a sworn enemy of Stalinism … The third Luria is much more mysterious. There’s a gap in his résumé between 1948 and 1956 … You’ll know his publications: articles on microscopic subjects. He discusses the fiduciary system of paper money in the reign of Catherine the Second: a real ‘mass market’ topic … This particular Luria sounds to me like a cast-iron pedant. He’s the one you really need to be wary of. As for the jury … Four or five doddery old men, born about 1900, who still think Eisenstein was a dangerous formalist. A trio of apparatchiks who can smell subversion everywhere. A few castrated yes-men. And a small pack of young upstarts who will fan the flames …”

  Oleg clears his throat to lighten his voice dulled by the tension: “And … the dice aren’t loaded from the start?”

  Bassov, like an old skeptic philosopher, heaves a sigh: “Everything’s loaded from the start, my good friend. Talent is trampled underfoot. Mediocrity reigns supreme. Cowardice takes the place of judgment. But …”

  He realizes his pupil needs practical advice, encouragement.

  “But … You’ve won already! The screenplay exists and, as Bulgakov said, manuscripts don’t burn. Unlike their authors, I might add … So, take heart! And by the way … Don’t hold my personal digressions against me. It’s hard at my age to feel like an old lover with no tsarina who wants to share his solitude …”

  At the moment of saying good-bye Bassov murmurs petulantly: “And look, I know you cherish it like the apple of your eye, but do me a favor. Drop the horse!”

  Oleg shakes his hand, walks away, slipping and sliding over the snow.

  Drop the horse … There is a horse in the screenplay, one that is referred to in talk of Catherine’s sexual extravagances. A myth, no doubt, except that in a storage room at the Hermitage, an obliging member of the staff did show a wooden confection for restraining the horse, whose genital vigor the empress, in thrall to her lewd appetites allegedly, sought to enjoy … In France the revolutionary tribunal accused Marie Antoinette of succumbing to depravity in the company of her very young son. In Russia, to discredit the tsars, they failed to come up with anything better than these equine cavortings. In its grotesque enormity this calumny is almost anodyne compared with the infamy that was directed against the French queen …

  In the train Bassov’s verdict seems to him spot on: his project will never be approved by the SCCA jury. With fatalistic glee, Oleg resolves to present the manuscript to the judges with “the horse” included. Yes, he’ll have the chutzpah to leave it in!

  The “horse” came up again a week later …

  His friend Zhurbin had got them two small parts in a film. “You stooge around for two or three hours and end up earning what you get for five nights at the slaughterhouse. Not bad, eh?”

  The scene to be filmed is short: some “revolutionary sailors,” guns in hand, faces smeared with black (“I look like a chimney sweep,” Oleg says to himself), are supposed to invade a palace.

  The director is not happy with the way they attack. First he finds them too slow, then he bawls them out for galloping along “like a pack of monkeys in rut” …

  To be an authentic son of the people Oleg has removed his glasses. Without his being able to identify them, his foggy gaze lights on a couple standing close to the camera. The umpteenth assault by the sailors has been judged acceptable. The actors put down their weapons, begin removing their makeup … As he puts his glasses back on, Oleg gives a start: at the other end of the studio the director is talking to Valentin Zyamtsev and Lessya. Having arrived in the middle of the filming they must have seen this shortsighted sailor bounding up the staircase …

 
; “Hi, Erdmann. This must make a change from your work at the slaughterhouse!” Zyamtsev pats him on the shoulder. “I guess Stanislavsky never knew that to prepare for the role of a sailor you need to train with pigs’ carcasses, eh?”

  It was Lessya’s laughter that sounded the most disdainful: “Oh, and apart from the pigs, how’s your Catherine the Second screenplay coming along? Have you finished episode a hundred and fifty yet?”

  The director gives Oleg a pitying look: “A screenplay about Catherine? Deadly!”

  Oleg is just about to move off when Lessya calls out to him in a voice whose mocking chill freezes him: “So where’s she got to with her sleeping around, your Cathy? Who’s her boyfriend now? Korsakov? Or is it Lanskoy?” And in a muttered aside, she adds: “Filthy sow! She had the hots for all of them …!”

  There are hoots of laughter; a smutty remark made by a woman generally gives rise to wild hilarity in men. Oleg feels the flush rising to his neck. He sees Zhurbin on the far side of the studio coming toward them. And just then he makes this unpremeditated reply: “No, Lessya. We’ve moved on from pigs. What Catherine prefers now is studs, especially tall, dark ones. And, do you know …”

  She slaps him, hitting him more on his brow than his cheek. His glasses fly off. Zhurbin makes a dive, falls, catches them, and exclaims: “What a save!” He gets up, hands Oleg his glasses, mutters a brief “There you go again!” and accosts Zyamtsev: “As for you, Valentino, why don’t you get yourself a sailor’s uniform and join the assault with the rest of us, instead of writing dumb screenplays like that? …” And to the director: “OK, chief. When do we get our dough?”

  In the street night has fallen. “It’s just like coming out after a movie,” remarks Zhurbin. “Except that we were in the movie …” His voice is a little mournful. “Don’t let it upset you, Erdmann. Women, men, love … that’s all a big movie, too. At the time you feel sad, but when it’s all over, you don’t even remember the actors’ names … Well, so long then! Don’t throw yourself in the Griboyedov Canal. It’s too dirty. Tomorrow at the slaughterhouse we’ll try to grab some calf’s liver. OK?”