A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  “He hit the nail on the head, the prince de Ligne. That’s Potemkin, the whole man, before all those carrion-feeding biographers could chop him up into a thousand little Potemkins, miserly, capricious, boastful, and lecherous. A man’s not a man unless he’s complex. And if you try to simplify him, you end up idiotically classifying everyone either as good citizens or as enemies of the people … I once wanted to do a film about one of these complex characters, a central Asian Party boss. They quickly gagged me! And since then the jailers at the SCCA have kept me … Well, I’ll tell you about that some other time. But as for Potemkin … He was after something apart from riches and power. He owned as much land as all the kings of Europe. The festivities at his Tauride Palace outshone Versailles. Tropical gardens beneath the northern sky, Venetian gondolas, vessels his mistresses dipped into for diamonds. He gave the Crimea to Catherine as a birthday present … And he died out in the middle of a steppe—without so much as two kopecks in his pockets to close his eyes with! His genius was to reach the very top by triumphing at all the appallingly complicated games that make up the farce of human existence, and, at the end, to become infinitely simple—a man lying on a bare plain beneath an autumn sky …”

  He has been speaking too loudly, so Oleg can hear him above the noise of the restaurant. People are turning to stare, mocking or disapproving. Oleg quickly proposes a sotto voce toast: “Well then, here’s to Potemkin.”

  Kozin drinks, absentminded, his face torn this way and that as images arise and fade in his mind. Then he concludes: “All that our cinematographic watchdogs will allow him is his debauchery and his great despot’s ugly mug. Oh, and the Potemkin villages, of course! We’ll have to throw him to the wolves. Even your Luria couldn’t help us here …”

  “Luria would talk about Petushkov …”

  “And who’s that?”

  “A young master sergeant, who one day needed to get Potemkin’s signature. A crowd of notables has been waiting in the prince’s antechamber for hours. Potemkin is sunk in one of the moods of black depression that follow his excesses. He’s lounging about in a dressing gown, gloomy and unshaven, refusing to attend to affairs of state. Petushkov, bold to the point of recklessness, jostles ministers, thrusts aside footmen, goes straight up to the prince, introduces himself, holds out all the papers for him to sign. Astounded by so much impudence, Potemkin remains silent. He hesitates, then picks up the pen … Petushkov returns to the antechamber in triumph. ‘He’s done it!’ Everyone crowds round to see the princely signatures … And there’s a Homeric outburst of laughter! All the documents have been signed the same: ‘Petushkov,’ ‘Petushkov,’ ‘Petushkov’ …”

  They leave the restaurant with a shared sense, both gleeful and in earnest, that they are up against an invisible machine, one that watches over every word in their country.

  “Nowadays they’d send Catherine to the gulag,” murmurs Kozin as he shakes Oleg’s hand.

  The night wind brings with it the scent of cold granite and the sea close at hand. Their drunkenness dissipates, giving way to intoxication with the ideas their film will defend.

  At home, already in bed, Dina is studying her part. “It’s the last day for me tomorrow,” she tells him. “In the script I’m fifty now and I’m due to ditch a faithless lover, that pig, Korsakov!”

  Oleg falls asleep unable to banish a smile from his lips: close against him, the empress is already snoring softly.

  Their bodies can be made out through the steam. In the Moorish baths the suitor, the young Korsakov, is being put through his paces by Countess Bruce, “her ladyship, the tester,” as Catherine calls her. He is tall, strong, has shoulders bulging with muscles. The countess, a slender beauty, gains from this contrast. Dark and petite with the build of a gymnast, slim thighs, breasts firm and round. Her hair is tied back, an amber necklace sets off her olive skin.

  Historical facts: Countess Bruce used to test the candidates’ sexual vigor. Without being able to allow herself the least deviation … The actress achieves an ambiguous performance between seduction and refusal. She offers herself, lets herself be embraced then shies away. Suddenly her attitude changes: she continues to expose her flesh as bait, to simper, to grip the applicant’s penis, gauging its strength … Their bodies continue with these restrained exercises, while the looks they exchange are lit up by tender and pained expressions … Finally the action breaks off, as if they had just discovered a hidden meaning in their nakedness, in their embraces …

  Filming resumes: Korsakov becomes Countess Bruce’s lover. Catherine, informed by Potemkin’s spies, conceals her anger beneath mocking disdain, banishes the lovers to Moscow. All they are fit for is to rot in the Asiatic tedium of the former capital.

  Kozin bullies Dina, makes her perform the scene of the deceived empress over and over again. Catherine learning of the betrayal: “That young man thinks he’s a sultan …” Being left alone, as her favorite’s carriage drives off beside the Neva and disappears … At the umpteenth take Dina is at her breaking point. Oleg is angry with Kozin, for her performance is excellent: jealousy, bitterness, hatred changing into contempt. What more could one imagine? Dina’s lips tremble, a drop of moisture glistens on her eyelashes … Kozin nods. Catherine has just become the very way he imagined her.

  That night Oleg catches Dina weeping in her sleep. She who’s forever laughing and joking … A young woman who has aged thirty years over two months of filming. And whom he has continued to love from one age to the next.

  “Better still, I’ve loved a Catherine more true than the real thing. Art is a concentration of reality. That was Maxim Gorky’s dictum: in a novel steel is steelier than in real life. Yes, Dina has been more Catherine than the tsarina herself!”

  He smiles, surveys her profile with its lightly rounded brow. Dina’s breathing becomes plaintive. He slips his hand into the young woman’s hair—her bad dream will be banished by the arrival of a fearless knight on horseback …

  This is how actors inspire intensely real dreams in us. Take the actor who plays Potemkin. He travels to the film set on the subway, smoking cheap cigarettes and then, under the camera’s eye, is transformed into an arrogant lord, a blasé lover. At every moment of his performance he is the essence of Potemkin. We are all much more complex than the little selves we cling to. And actors’ selves have the ability to migrate from one character to another. Hence the egocentricity of artists. They are uncertain of their own identity …

  The power of this “steelier than steel” in art also applies to the laconic verbal exchanges Kozin requires in the film. Grigory Orlov wants to compel Catherine to marry him. He is the one who put her on the throne! The tsarina knows that, once married, she would lose all her power. In the end Orlov obliges her to submit the marriage plan to the Council of State. The chancellor, Count Nikita Panin, rises to his feet and firmly declares: “The empress is free to marry Prince Orlov. But Lady Orlov will never be our empress.” He tilts his head proudly back and his wig leaves a trace of powder on the wooden paneling of the wall. A member of the council goes up to it and presses his brow against this patch of white. The others do the same, as if pledging an oath.

  If History can be acted out in this way, does it have the weighty import that is attributed to it? Maybe it is no more than a stage set, upon which wars, conspiracies, dramas of love, the marriages of tsars, and the fading of glory are all played out.

  The next day their filming marks time: the East German actress has been delayed in Berlin. (“I expect she’s having drinks with Marlon Brando,” they joke on the set.) While they are waiting a decision is made to “let the kids do their scene”—Alexander and Constantine, Catherine’s grandsons. The tsarina made little overalls for them herself. Kozin wants to show her wielding a needle.

  The actors feel as if they are having a day out in the country and the setting lends itself to this: they are a long way from Leningrad in a wing of the Peterhof Palace, surrounded by its great park. The weather is still summery, al
l these princes and ministers abandon their wigs and go for a swim in the Gulf of Finland. “It’s all right, Kozin. If your Marlene Dietrich does show up we’ll be back by the time she’s got her makeup on.”

  The filming has a “summer camp” aspect to it: the cast have been bused out there, actors squabbling like kids, lost costumes, hilarious mistakes—like the eye patch that one-eyed Potemkin accidentally sometimes wears over his left eye, sometimes over his right …

  Dina stops by to take her leave of the cast. Kozin has a word with her about some scenes that need to be shot again, just three very short sequences. “Oh sure, don’t tell me. The three Russo-Turkish wars!” she says, with a laugh. For her filming is really over and this departure of the “young Catherine” adds to the end-of-term feeling.

  “Why don’t we go for a boat trip? Right now, like tourists!”

  Oleg was thinking of taking the train back to Leningrad, but Dina carries him off. They run toward the jetty and catch the last ferry of the day. On the deck there is just a small group of senior citizens, all agog with having caught a distant view of a film being shot: “There were aristocrats from past times in costumes embroidered with gold!”

  The boat passes a beach where the “aristocrats from past times” are now splashing about.

  “History, as a film set,” Oleg says to himself, recalling those images that once flashed through his mind at night. He feels an urge to explain this to Dina, to bring her out of her reckless childishness.

  “They should mount the camera on this boat,” she murmurs. “It’s all a ready-made film set …” She was the first to say it, as if already sensing what he was about to say to her. “And look, that’s a movie too. Well, a totally crazy film …”

  On the far shore a vast industrial building ornamented with neon letters: “The Party’s plans are the people’s plans!”

  Dina laughs, Oleg tentatively follows suit. No, she’s not the rather foolish young woman he has always, feeling vaguely superior, imagined her to be.

  “But if that’s an illusion, Dina, what’s the point of the films we make? And the part you’re playing as Catherine? Is all that just more fooling around?”

  She smiles, affectionately contrite.

  “No … But when you’re an actor you’ve got to give a good performance of this phony world …”

  “Right, ape all the Potemkins and Orlovs who act at being great men. Act the tsarina who acted at being the Semiramis of the North …”

  With a brisk movement, Dina gives him a little slap on the forehead.

  “Excuse me. I was just killing a mosquito … Yes, you’re right … Except that if the actors manage to get right inside these phony characters, we can then see what lies beyond them …”

  “But what is this mysterious ‘beyond’? Does Catherine belong on a shrink’s couch? I don’t get it …”

  These questions come to him out of pique at having allowed Dina to say something he had been unable to put into words himself. She answers him in tones of unaccustomed melancholy.

  “It was just a way of showing where the frontier lies. Our lives, this film, that neon sign on the building over there … And beyond all this … A September evening, this last boat of the day … Imagine a woman walking beside the sea, over there beneath the trees. She’s alone. She’s looking at the gray skyline of the Baltic here. She’s the empress of an immense country, but she’s also quite simply a woman who’s just been abandoned by a man. A woman who, at this moment …”

  The siren of a liner sailing up the Neva sounds with deafening force. Dina’s words are drowned out, the truth her lips are speaking is obliterated.

  The café where she takes him is decorated with life preservers and model ships—the harbor is not far away. They order cocktails that have maritime names, too: a “Caribbean,” an “Arctic” … in fact, they are vodka colored with liqueurs … “To kid us we are out at sea …,” murmurs Dina, and they laugh, happy to have regained their carefree mood.

  Between two outbursts of laughter his girlfriend confides, with a pained smile: “I’m sick of all the dreary ideas our egghead friends are always brooding on. They hate the old bastards who run the country, that’s understandable—the censorship, the police everywhere. But the upshot is they become even more boring than the Politburo! They’re preaching against the regime, but they’re still preaching … I just want to relax without having to think too much. And if that’s an illusion, too bad! … Here’s to you and to the end of my hard labor! Do you think it was fun playing Catherine the way Kozin fantasized her?”

  They drink, kiss, remain for a moment with their brows touching. Oleg has removed his glasses and with his myopic vision he makes out the tiny wrinkles on this well-loved face. Dina pulls away, smiles: “I haven’t got my lovely tsarina’s makeup on any longer …”

  That night, making love, they are as lighthearted as actors going mad after the end of filming. Dina is in her element—a life lived as a masked ball, all teasing and frivolity. “Hold on, let me show you Catherine giving herself to Orlov. Ah, ah …” She hurls herself at Oleg, feigning an erotic swoon. “And now, with Potemkin …”

  By the end of it this sexual exuberance becomes a little strained. Dina falls asleep in the middle of a caress, a caress that Oleg, wearily, feels obliged to prolong. This sad, empty feeling is due, Oleg prefers to believe, to their earlier debate: illusion, truth, the impossibility of being understood. His whole childhood was spent in the shadow of that distressing fantasy, the model his father continued to construct in the hope of who knows what revelation …

  Dina groans, wakes up, apologizes.

  “I was in a palace. Walking along corridors, opening doors … There were great bay windows, lots of light … And no way out! It was terrible … Ever since we started filming I haven’t been able to get this idea out of my head. She was never able to escape! Yes, she traveled around, down the Volga and in the Crimea. But Catherine never left Russia. She remained in her empire, as if it was a prison. Her courtiers would write to her from Paris, from Rome, from Venice … But I just can’t picture her walking in the streets of a little Italian town one morning. And what’s more, no man ever did suggest escaping to her …”

  The first morning of frost has transformed the park. Oleg has come ahead of the rest of the crew before the day dawned, and this cold whiteness hypnotizes him—how, beneath the hoarfrost, will they get their bearings, recognize the groves, the pathways, the streams?

  The previous day Kozin had asked him to prepare the shots they were going to film—the scenes they would now be planning to shoot, given that the East German actress, the “older Catherine,” has still not arrived. The task seemed a simple one: to select places where the tsarina’s grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, now several years older, used to play, go fishing with nets, cut down trees …

  He had pictured them under a summer sun—now it is hard to imagine them running around on these frozen slopes. Two princes educated according to the philosophical precepts of the century, little Voltaireans in a Rousseauistic setting. Alexander is destined to shine as an enlightened monarch. Constantine (a prophetic name) will occupy the throne of Constantinople: as a child he had a Greek nurse, so that, along with her milk, he might imbibe the great Byzantine dream. Meanwhile they are two restless little boys who speak a mixture of Russian and French, have a passion for military parades, and play with their exuberant grandmother’s favorite.

  This white morning keeps Oleg from thinking about their lively games and the sounds of laughter … He reflects on the courses taken by the lives of the two children. Alexander: a dreamy adolescent, a young man teeming with humanistic plans for his empire, but also the betrayer, who will let the conspirators kill his father, Paul I, in 1801. War against Napoleon, defeats, Moscow burned, victories, Paris conquered by the Cossacks, a life overloaded with romantic adventures and undermined by feelings of guilt toward the father he did not seek to save. Constantine: a spoiled child who becomes a capricious brut
e and a contemptuous despot. Drunken orgies, both soldiers and civilians beaten up, rapes, murders …

  “So what was the point of it all?” Oleg catches himself whispering the question. Two little boys at play, two adolescent dreamers, two men who wage wars, lie, betray, kill … And then, nothing more. This silvered plain, the gold of the leaves beneath the ice, the mist of his breath. Nothing more. “What was the point of it all?”

  In the distance, beneath a row of old trees, a dark smudge, hazy at first, then slipping into the rhythm of a figure walking. A workman, to judge from his blue overalls, a plumber coming to protect the fountains against the frost. Or rather a female worker, her hair loosely plaited into a braid, a bag carried on her shoulder, blue overalls … No, they are jeans, a jacket, and a scarf around her neck. A tourist who’s lost her way?

  The woman approaches him, smiles, a little embarrassed. “I’m looking for Mikhail Kozin … Or someone from his crew. I have reached Peterhof, haven’t I?”

  The accent is noticeable—there is a muted hardness about the consonants. But the great surprise is that the stranger’s name (“I’m Eva Sander,” she introduces herself) does not tally at all with the person they were expecting. The “older” Catherine II … The actors had pictured a star arriving in a private jet, bombarded by flash photographers … They had dreamed up a variety of mocking explanations for the delay: “Her plane was diverted to the Seychelles … A Hollywood studio’s just asked her to play Cleopatra …”

  But now here is this woman. A pale, slightly angular face, big gray eyes in which the white of the trees and the sky’s dull light are reflected.

  He explains the situation. Behind their conversation, the language whose echoes he detects in Eva’s words strikes deep chords within him. German, which, in his infancy, he heard his mother speaking, or rather singing, at his bedside.

  “I can speak German, if you like,” he suggests.

  She laughs softly: “I mustn’t forget my Russian. Catherine made such efforts to learn it … Would you like some coffee? I have a thermos …”