They lived like that, in suspense, had a son, Oleg, born in 1954, to whom Marta, who died three years later, managed to give what no ordinary child would have received in so short a time—the certain knowledge of having a mother who loved him as no one else would ever love him.
Oleg was six years old when his father went to live in the attic of that crag-building. Triplets had been born in the family of an old regimental comrade of his, and Sergei had handed over his own room in a communal apartment and moved into this “studio apartment” where the newborn babies would not have survived.
In his teens Oleg knew the humiliation of having to admit where he lived. Little by little he forged a status for himself that was admittedly not very flattering but less ludicrous: he claimed he had been born in a small town in Siberia and therefore could not hope for decent accommodation. All things considered, being saddled with the nickname “Siberian peasant” was less hard to bear than being addressed as “German scum.”
And besides, this invention brought him closer to his mother, to the memory of her bedside table: what he always saw there as a child was a tiny pearl necklace, a porcelain cup, a well-worn book and … There his memory faltered over an object whose position he could recall without being able to picture it. He often told himself that if only he had been able to call its appearance to mind, his mother would have seemed much more present to him. More alive …
“Mica simulates stained glass very well. This will be a copy of the Liboriuskapelle, a masterpiece of High Gothic style that stands in Creuzburg …”
Oleg was listening to his father as he sliced off a layer of mica with a fine blade. Inside the model a lamp shone upon an object that resembled a fragment of coral. Oleg did not dare to ask the why and wherefore of its presence among the columns. His father seemed to him too frail to be brought back to reality.
Only once did Oleg dare to put the question to him that for years he had been burning to ask: “What if you’d been on the other side, Papa, in a German regiment, and they’d ordered you to burn a village … Would you have done it?” An outburst of fury, a shout of laughter, a shrug of the shoulders … Oleg could have imagined any one of those reactions. But not this shaking face that crumpled into little wrinkles of pain and became reduced to eyes, silently weeping.
A week later his father tripped on a crosstie, fell, dislocated an arm. That evening Oleg found him sitting beside the track, moaning softly, oblivious of the passing trains. He took him up to the studio apartment, heated some water, washed the little old man in the zinc bathtub … His father fell asleep holding his hand and it was just as he was beginning to drop off that, in his soft and somewhat ironic old man’s voice, he murmured: “When I think that all this has happened to us because of a little German princess …” Oleg recognized the formula the Erdmanns were given to repeating from time to time, when commenting on their Russian destiny.
His father died at the end of the following year, while Oleg was doing his military service.
In the years ahead, at the most taxing moments, the young man would recall their family saying with a smile: “Well, what do you know? This is all happening to me because of that little German girl who became Catherine the Great.”
II
“One of your characters steals a hundred rubles from a stocking maker. Logically these would have been copper coins, given the low prices of the goods. Well, at that time a kopeck coin weighed two-thirds of an ounce. So those hundred rubles would have weighed some two hundred and twenty pounds. The sum could have been made up of silver coins, which would have reduced the weight by, let us say, three-quarters. Running with a bag weighing fifty-five pounds on your back is possible, in principle. But with all that for ballast your hero swims across the Neva!”
Luria adjusts his glasses, peering down at a thick notebook with dog-eared pages. Oleg is surprised to find he is holding his breath, which irritates him, and he stirs on his chair to shake off this frozen posture of a prisoner in the dock.
His teacher, Bassov, had forecast correctly—the members of the State Committee for Cinematic Art, the famous SCCA, have given the floor to an “expert”: this Luria, a lean man with a harsh, testy expression. “A shabby academic,” thinks Oleg. “They’ve brought him out from an attic so he can delight in humiliating an ignoramus …”
His method is effective: without criticizing the screenplay from an artistic point of view, Luria attacks a particular sequence, demonstrates it is based on factual errors. The “judges” appear to be delighted. They are just as Bassov had described them: bureaucrats of the cinema with very little footage to their credit and all the more eager to denigrate the work of others. Oleg recognizes the types his teacher had described: four old dinosaurs who see the danger of formalism lurking everywhere, a trio of bleak apparatchiks and a group of young upstarts, dressed in Western style … Luria resumes his speech for the prosecution.
“Don’t think I’m only paying attention to monetary matters. But that is the field in which your screenplay departs the furthest from historical truth. For example, the scene where Peter the Third throws rubles to the ground that are freshly minted with his image. According to you, this gesture derives from his short temper. But in reality the tsar is furious with the hairstyle the engraver saw fit to adorn him with: a wig with curls, in the French fashion. A fatal choice, for he detests Louis the Fifteenth of France. You make a similar blunder with Cagliostro. According to you, he promises Catherine that he’ll transmute iron into gold. This is an unlikely conversation. She considers Cagliostro to be a charlatan and later pours scorn on him in a stage comedy, The Deceiver. On the other hand, one practical idea of the ‘wizard’s’ is a roaring success in Russia. One day Potemkin learns that someone has stolen the buttons from all his soldiers’ uniforms. The inquiry produces nothing. Cagliostro puts forward a chemist’s explanation: these buttons are made of tin and in the coldest weather this metal disintegrates into dust. This is known as ‘tin plague.’ The Italian advises them to replace it with an alloy of zinc and copper—brass. From now on the Russian army buttons itself up ‘Cagliostro fashion.’ As you can see, a little precision would do no harm to your artistic imagination. Now let us move on to much graver concerns …”
Oleg forces himself to look his “judges” in the eye. Their faces are wreathed in smiles, condescending …
In the historian’s voice a note of glee can be detected as he prepares for an imminent coup de grâce.
“Now then … Catherine’s son, the future Paul the First. According to you when he goes to Paris and Rome, he needs interpreters. Wrong! Paul, who has been denigrated by his biographers, spoke at least eight languages. Next. Catherine, in the company of Mamonov, listens to Vivaldi. Most improbable. The tsarina doesn’t like music. She really doesn’t have an ear for it. Rather than virtuoso musicians, she prefers eccentrics who play the piano with their noses or their toes … Next: in 1796 the Swedish king Gustav the Fourth breaks off his engagement to Alexandra, Catherine’s granddaughter. You rightly insist on the grief this causes the tsarina, the shock hastens her death. But the reason for the refusal is quite different. For form’s sake, Gustav insists that his fiancée should convert to Protestantism. But the truth is that he is appalled by the licentiousness that prevails at the court: Catherine, at the age of almost seventy, is sharing her bed with the Zubov brothers, who are twenty-eight and twenty-four, respectively … Next: the ‘Potemkin villages’: a persistent cliché. This is a sham that never happened. Yes, as the tsarina made her tour the peasants prettified their izbas. Yes, they built landing stages where Catherine came ashore during her journey by river to the Crimea and residential staging posts where she spent the night. But all this went no further than the usual triumphal arches, red carpets, and garlands of flowers. And there’s another legend you give credence to: Catherine’s lesbian relationships. This rumor is due to a misunderstanding. One night at a masked ball Catherine accosts a young officer whom she’d be happy to take back to her alcove. Bu
t, as it happens, this is a young woman concealed behind the mask. However, when it comes to the homosexual relationship between Casanova and Lunin, you draw some kind of veil of silence around it. Yet that kind of physical intercourse was quite commonplace at the time … And then you must look to your language! ‘General N. has been wounded in his privates,’ says one of your heroes. In Catherine’s century they’d have said: ‘A sword thrust has made a eunuch of him!”’
There is a hiss of glutinous satisfaction in the sniggering of the jury.
“And finally, there are two scenes without any basis in truth. First of all, no serving maid of Catherine’s was ever immured and certainly not walled up alive. A pure invention by historians for ideological purposes. And what is more, the faithless favorite Mamonov and his wife never suffered any reprisals. The raping of the young bride is an ancient piece of gossip that we owe to the antiroyalist propaganda of 1917. Quite the contrary, it is Catherine who marries off the two lovers. And, by the irony of fate, it is Mamonov, quickly disillusioned by the routine of married life, who begs the tsarina to reinstate him in her alcove …”
The hawk-like nose dives deeply into his notes once more, and already sotto voce exchanges between the members of the SCCA can be heard. In a moment of distraction, Oleg pictures Lessya … To win her back he could renounce everything! As a matter of fact, in order to please these judges, he has already cut the empress’s “equine love affair” from the screenplay.
A new nuance enters the historian’s tones—a certain sympathy for his victim: “The subject is a complex one. Pushkin himself put forward contradictory opinions about the tsarina. ‘A Tartuffe in petticoats,’ he called her. ‘A debauched old woman.’ And then he declaims: ‘Russia, your glory died with Catherine!’ The Empress Elizabeth should be mentioned, she was the one who invited this young German woman to St. Petersburg. The facts are known. Elizabeth is a capricious and tormented individual who never sleeps in the same bedroom on two consecutive nights and never wears the same gown twice, a mentally disturbed person whose whims everyone dreads. Catherine lives there as a prisoner: her letters are read. When she goes out she is closely watched. And yet Elizabeth is no monster. She’s the one who abolishes the death penalty in Russia. What other monarch in Europe could boast of such a thing at the time? However, when she dies, and the victims of her reign return from Siberia, a whole crowd of mutes appears: their tongues had been cut out, a common punishment … And before Elizabeth? The Tsarina Anne. Condemned men blessed her when beheading with the ax replaced impaling. And Peter the Great? He loved torture, especially with the strappado. Catherine put an end to that madness. And also to the law that legitimized the torturing of children from the age of twelve upward. To push this limit up to the age of seventeen, she has to do battle with the Holy Synod, which, doubtless out of pure Christian charity, was opposed to the change. Similar laws, one might mention in passing, existed in Stalin’s time …”
Slumped on his chair like a boxer reeling under blows, Oleg realizes that Luria’s attacks are no longer aimed at his screenplay. A glance at the “judges”: the faces have lost their mocking satisfaction. This Luria, brought in to demolish his screenplay, has ventured outside the role imposed on him. He dares to refer to inventions “by historians for ideological purposes,” and goes so far as to compare Peter I with Stalin!
“Of course heads were rolling in other countries as well. You mention the execution of the Frenchman, Damiens, who tried to stab Louis the Fifteenth. The way in which Damiens’s body was dismembered, such sophistication by far outstrips the skills of the Russian executioners. As for the Holy Synod advocating the torture of children, let us recall that in 1756 in Mainz, in Germany, two dangerous witches were burned, one aged seven and the other, five: I mention Germany, Catherine’s native land. Examples from Spain could be even more illuminating …”
Luria puts aside his notebook, seizes a glass, drinks deeply. A clearing of the throats falters out from the jury: several members of the committee are preparing to speak. The historian gives them no time to do so.
“Thanks to Catherine, even humor changes in Russia. Elizabeth, jealous of the beauty of young women, had her own way of handing out compliments: ‘Oh what a pretty little neck! How I should love to see it on a block …’ At Catherine’s court such a ‘witticism’ would have seemed perfectly barbaric.”
Oleg guesses at Luria’s tactic: to throw the “judges” off balance, in order to be able to continue. No, he’s not a pedant intoxicated by his role as a worldly lecturer. He’s a man staking his all, grasping the chance to speak freely. And asking himself: “If I don’t do it now, faced with these custodians of authorized thought, who will do it? And when?”
“Catherine’s Great Instruction, the manifesto of her reforms, lays the foundations for a state where human dignity is respected. Twenty years before the French Revolution the tsarina brings together a legislative commission where nobles sit alongside peasants. And when one of the nobles starts denigrating the people’s deputies he is made to apologize to them in public!”
“So, how would it be if we returned to the subject in hand, Comrade Luria?”
A mixture of restrained anger and benevolent condescension can be detected in the voice of the president of the jury.
“But we are at the very heart of the subject, Comrade President. Audiences will find the past evoked by Comrade Erdmann very topical. Catherine’s advocacy of banning torture. The presumption of innocence imposed on courts. And the freedom of the press? She creates journals and expresses her opinions in them …”
His words provoke an indignant hiss that modulates into the shrill, nasal tones of one of the young “judges.”
“You seem to worship this great humanist. But it was she who added to the enslavement of the peasants …”
Luria picks up the thread, imitating his contradictor’s tones: “… while being convinced that serfdom ought to be abolished. She does not dare do it—’the nobles would sooner see me hanged,’ she says. That’s not just a figure of speech: her enemies are waiting in the wings. Catherine signs a decree that confirms the privileges of the nobility. ‘But I wept as I signed it,’ she confesses. We shouldn’t forget that Catherine confronts men who make a habit of plotting and killing. Catherine succeeds in taming them …”
“Especially in her private alcove …,” guffaws the president with contrived mirth, which the SCCA members join in and amplify.
“Yes, Comrade President, her body was a weapon in the political struggle, there among the wild beasts. Comrade Erdmann describes these creatures well. And also the moments when Catherine hopes that she is loved. Let us now imagine a film that answers this one question: out of all these men who took advantage of this exceptional woman, was there a single one who loved her?”
Luria’s voice fades. It seems as though he is softly voicing a truth that is new to himself … The “judges” hasten to intervene.
“Wait a minute, we’re not going to turn this woman who slaughtered peasants into a Madame Bovary!”
“Agreed about the alcove. But there are also all those fabrications you were denouncing, Comrade Luria!”
The historian seems at a loss, too deeply sunk in his own reverie … But he quickly bounces back with the energy of a seasoned debater.
“You’re quite right to mention the alcove in question. Comrade Erdmann speaks of pulleys raising the mirror up above this love nest. In point of fact it was on runners: the mirror was slid to one side. A little factual error, easily corrected. But as for the ‘fabrications’ you mention, do they really need to be corrected? For two centuries these legends have been recounted in the history books. Why not film them? Why not show Catherine as our collective awareness sees her: a nymphomaniac who attracts all the officers of her guard to her bed, a jealous woman who does have a serving maid walled in, a vindictive woman who sends her soldiers to rape a rival.”
“But wait a minute, Professor! There can be no place in our cinema for the mad
ness of this historically inaccurate perspective!”
The president bangs on the table with both hands: his cuff links emit a brief, forlorn tinkling sound. Luria’s smile seems to take this plaintive sound into account.
“I agree about that, Comrade President. Especially as this ‘historically inaccurate perspective’ includes that notorious horse of hers. Yes, the stallion whose sexual potency was said to have been employed to satisfy the tsarina’s vile instincts. Let us congratulate Comrade Erdmann on his restraint in refusing to make use of that fanciful tale …”
The SCCA jury, which had so far been under the thumb of the president, erupts into a mixture of laughter, protests, fragments of arguments. The most unbridled are the four graybeards—they chuckle, pull faces, wave their arms about, imitate a stallion pawing the ground. The young Johnny-come-latelies curl their lips in grimaces of disgust. The others teeter between severity and lewd merriment, trying to spot which way the president’s mood will go. The latter utters a dirty old man’s guffaw, then tenses up, reprimands the old men, who are now neighing like horses. His voice is heard above the turmoil: “Comrades Luria and Erdmann, I suggest you wait in the corridor!”
Oleg leaves first, the historian joins him, his arms piled high with his notes. The corridor is empty. The noise of the voices on the other side of the door calms down, drowned by the president’s ponderous tones. Luria winks at Oleg: “The enemy is disoriented. That’s all I could do …”
“It’s already a great deal … There was I, expecting a summary execution!”
“I pounced on minor mistakes, so the jury might focus on them and let politically risky matters through … But the most important thing is this hidden subject: a woman surrounded by an army of lovers but who’s never been loved. Were you setting your sights on this paradox?”
A Woman Loved Page 7
