“Yes there is … Historical truth! That’s what you’ve always been after, isn’t it, Erdmann? …”
“But there was more to her life than all the sex she had!”
“What else was there? A couple of dozen favorites and, at the end, those two gigolos. Obscene? Unaesthetic? Maybe, but it’s the truth. That’s all the world could offer her …”
“OK, I understand. You’re going to accuse the age, that society, of hypocrisy …”
“No, I’m not accusing society!”
“So, who?”
“G-g-god!”
An incredulous whistle freezes on Oleg’s lips. Kozin’s eyes are closed, his bottom lip is pale, he has been chewing on it so much. “An attack of madness,” thinks Oleg. And yet the accusation hits the target: not this “G-g-god,” but a sly fate that turns a woman in search of love into this mass of flesh in the arms of a young upstart.
“But all she had to do was …,” Oleg says to himself and is surprised to realize that the only option available to Catherine was an imperial marriage and giving birth to a dynasty …
Kozin opens his eyes again. They are red and this makes him look like a weary old man. Oleg ventures a conciliatory sally: “You’re right … It’s hopeless. Throughout the whole of her life there wasn’t a single man ready to love her …”
Kozin gets his breath back in fits and starts.
“Wrong! There was … one! That was … L-l-l-l …”
His face is distorted by the effort. Finally he takes out a pencil and scribbles a name on his napkin.
“Lanskoy,” Oleg guesses before the director has traced out even half the letters.
Back from the theater, Dina tells him that Kozin’s wife, who worked at a research institute, was exposed to radiation. The latest tests give scant grounds for hope.
So Kozin has accounts to settle with this “G-g-god …”
Before Dina’s return Oleg had reread his notes. Alexander Lanskoy, favorite from 1780 to 1784. Inconspicuous in the whole list of the lovers. Put in the shade by their brilliance. Orlov and Potemkin violated History. Poniatowski was its victim, but what a victim! Even the Serb, Zorich, only briefly a favorite, did not pass unnoticed—a gambler, a braggart, an adventurer. Others made names for themselves by their greed. Some by their fondness for intrigue. Nothing of this kind with Lanskoy. No monetary covetousness, no whims of a spoiled courtesan, no political designs. Catherine showers praises on him in her letters—but she does that with all her men, including the one-eyed hulk, Potemkin. One difference: after Lanskoy quite a lot of time passes before she takes up with a new companion. The reason for this is simple: in June 1784 young Lanskoy dies, so a kind of mourning period is called for …
Oleg tells Dina about this brief life in the shadows. She listens absentmindedly, then remarks softly: “His wife … Kozin’s wife, saved him. In the sixties he made a film about the corruption of high-ups in the Party in central Asia … It was banned before being edited. He spent a year inside … His wife stood by him. On top of her job as a university teacher, she went to work at the lab with that radioactive stuff … For Kozin, the film about Catherine the Second is a test: the SCCA wants to see if he’s become a good boy … Don’t contradict him too much. This is not a good time to be having fantasies about a man who might have loved our poor Catherine!”
Eva echoes this view: “Let him get on with it. Of course that last scene’s pretty awful. But the fall of a cardboard Bastille wasn’t much better. Yes, ‘a barrel of lies in a drop of truth’ …”
They are walking along, slipping on the fine hail that whitens the sidewalks. Eva has just completed the final two scenes: Catherine in Zubov’s arms and her death agony at the foot of the commode. Grotesque, macabre tiny enclosed spaces, airlessness, Kozin’s sadistic perfectionism … She inhales the chill air coming from the Neva, reaches up with her brow toward the falling ice crystals.
“I felt closer than ever to Catherine,” she says with a sad smile. “The filming was becoming torture and I said to myself: now, at last, this is what she went through. Except that I can take my crinoline off and say adiòs to it!”
“She could have said adiòs in Russian, got rid of that idiot Zubov, and lived more appropriately for her age …”
“Oh sure … All she had to do was lie down and die while softly crooning to herself, is that it? People forget that she was a woman. Count Ségur called her ‘that woman who was a great man’ and Ligne, making her masculine, ‘Catherine le Grand.’ As if all the greatness in her came from her suppressed masculinity …”
“They were fine compliments! They emphasized her strong personality, her singularity …”
“Her loneliness, more than anything. Yes, a woman, very alone, who had two kinds of men for company: brutes who treated her like a female of the species and striplings for whom she became a mother figure. And when she just wanted to be a woman in love, people talked about her ‘uterine rages,’ her ‘insatiable vagina’ … They watched out for the least sign of aging in her. At the first wrinkle, a hue and cry! ‘Her bosom’s sagging,’ ‘those full Russian garments no longer hide the breadth of her hips,’ and other charming observations …”
“The biographers are equally hard on the men, Eva …”
“Maybe … But tell me, what does the word courtier mean?
“Mm … Well, it’s a man at the court …”
“And courtesan?”
“Well, let’s say, a woman of … light morals.”
“OK, a whore. And a ladies’ man, like Potemkin?”
“A Don Juan.”
“And a woman with an eye for men?”
“Well, yes … a harlot.”
“A man of reputation is a celebrity and a woman with a reputation is inevitably a slut … Language always gives the game away about the laws of this world. And our ‘Catherine le Grand’ could do nothing about it, because those laws did not anticipate her particular case: a woman who sought to be loved. You’d have to imagine her meeting … yes, a man sufficiently apart from this world …”
“Imagine a man …” The idea is at odds with Kozin’s determination to make a realist film. He needs to be certain the cast are acting out historical events.
This is their understanding as they set off for the Crimea. The itinerary: Leningrad—Kiev—Black Sea, follows that of Catherine in 1787. Oleg shares a compartment with “Potemkin” and “Ségur.” One of them is leafing through satirical magazines, the other is attempting to pick up a female passenger from the next coach …
This is a surreal jaunt. The scenes that take place in the Crimea have already been filmed—on location near Leningrad! The Russo-Turkish war, Potemkin’s traveling harem … All Kozin needs now is a little local color: “We’re going in November, the tsarina was there in May. But at the seaside fall and spring look the same …”
In fact, a whole host of unlikely elements will create the illusion of reality. Such is the nature of the art …
On the second day of their outward journey at about noon, the train stops, a station building can be seen, the empty streets of a small town. Suddenly the howl of a siren makes the air throb, drowning out the sound of voices and doors slamming on the train. One minute, two minutes, five …
The silence that follows transforms the significance of every action. “Ségur” runs along the corridor, imitating a newsboy: “Extra, extra! Read all about it!” Then, lowering his voice: “Brezhnev is dead!” The copy of Pravda he is waving bears the date November 11, 1982.
Brezhnev was a figure hated, ridiculed in hundreds of comic anecdotes, loved for his kindly appearance. He embodied an era—the later years of the Soviet Empire—an era that has just ended. Is this a cause for rejoicing or concern? Which one of the patriarchs in the Politburo will take the place of the deceased? Andropov, the former head of the KGB? And what kind of touch on the tiller will be given: back toward the past, toward Stalin? Or toward a future almost as alarming as the past?
All this is said
, repeated, whispered, shouted from the rooftops. Oleg allows himself to be drawn into the debates, relishes speculating, then grows weary of it, withdraws, watches the forests striding past the windows … For months the cast have been acting out History and now History has caught up with them.
Eva is pestered, they are waiting for her predictions, as a Berliner, from East Berlin, to be sure, but someone who has traveled in Europe. She confesses that she has mislaid her crystal ball … Oleg winks at her, they weave their way through the groups of debaters, go to the restaurant car.
“Instead of asking me to prophesy,” she says, “they should have remembered my death agony in the film. Catherine dies on November sixth, 1796. And within two days everything changes. Zubov, the favorite who terrorized the court and humiliated Paul, the heir to the throne, is on his knees before the tsar, begging for mercy. Paul the First pardons him, but in his worst nightmares could not have imagined that five years later this same Zubov would be in the ranks of his assassins! After that, anyone who can read the future in tea leaves is clever indeed …”
… Several years later Oleg will still remember that lunch with Eva. The USSR will no longer exist, the Berlin Wall will have come down. But when he tries to define what has not changed since then he will call to mind the silvery gleam over the fields, the autumn sunlight on the bare forests, and the tender look in the eyes of a woman smiling and talking about tea leaves.
“I’d like to show you my old maps,” Eva says, as they are leaving the restaurant car.
A dozen sheets of coarse paper. Oleg spreads them out on his bunk bed. The European part of Russia, Poland, Prussia, Brandenburg, northern Italy. Germany is, as yet, nothing more than a scattering of principalities, Italy a patchwork. Europe at the end of the eighteenth century …
That evening in the actors’ coach the atmosphere heats up. As at a wake, they are drinking. Oleg finds Eva in the open area at the rear of the last car in which Kozin has managed to install his troupe, to protect them from the curiosity of passersby. She is standing right at the back of the train, where one can see the rails unwinding, the tracks dividing at the switches, and coming together again. The coach sways and the snow flurries increase the feeling of an ocean swell.
They remain silent, mesmerized by the swirling flight of the white masses. From time to time they hear a door slam, tipsy laughter.
“Why did you agree to act in this film?”
The moment has come when he can question her so directly. A whole era is on the brink of keeling over!
She answers him without taking her eyes off the snow, as it lashes over the track. “I told this half-truth to my friends in Berlin. Oh, the Soviet cinema, a great tradition, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and company … But I’ve no need to lie to you. What interests me is to see how Kozin will fail …”
“That’s a bit masochistic, acting in it while thinking it’ll be a flop …”
“I’m not talking about a flop for audiences. People will like it, I’m sure. But that’s a secondary consideration. Kozin’s real originality lies in this admission: even if we lived lives on as grand a scale as Catherine, we’d still always lack what is essential … I discovered this when I was a young libertarian who wanted to live to the limits of what is humanly possible. One day, at a secondhand book store I stumbled on a biography of Catherine the Great. It was a sobering shock. Beside this giant figure I felt ridiculous. From the depths of her eighteenth century she challenged me: a feminist who appoints the young Princess Dashkova to be president of the Academy—can you picture that in France under Louis the Fifteenth? An autocrat who proclaims her republican sympathies …”
“And proposes to publish Diderot’s Encyclopédie in Russia …”
“Yes, a very great reign … But if you look at the personal side of that glorious life—a disaster! A whole stable full of lovers greedy for honors, an old age rekindled by young Romeos supplying ejaculations for cash. And then that grotesque death at the foot of a commode.”
“And does this sad life have no redeeming feature?”
“There’s nothing sad about this life. It’s prodigious! Young as I was, I realized I would never experience one-thousandth of what Catherine experienced, as regards fame, wealth, and pleasure. Even with plenty of love affairs and great films to my credit, I would be small potatoes beside her. For a dozen years or so I managed to forget her. And then one day I encountered a descendant of the Lanskoy family … She was eighty and lived in Berlin. One evening we met at a library: I was doing research for a part in a historical movie—I’m not a novice, you see—and this lady was returning a book … She was the one who gave me those old maps …”
“Oh yes, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy. But Catherine never set foot outside Russia. So …”
“So are we forbidden to dream of a secret journey?”
“There’s no historical evidence for it, Eva …”
“Well, what about Paul’s tour. He got himself styled ‘Prince of the North,’ and toured round Europe with his young wife? And Joseph the Second of Austria, who crossed the continent under the name of ‘Count Falkenstein’? And, above all, Catherine’s grandson, Alexander the First: in 1825 he dies, too discreetly for a tsar, and …”
“And reappears in Siberia! It’s an old legend.”
“I related these ‘legends’ to an Italian friend. You must know his films, though he only made a few. Aldo Ranieri. I showed him those maps. The idea of a secret journey fired him up. We wrote a screenplay but … As you know, it’s the same old story: on one side of the Berlin Wall the censorship is political, on the other side it’s financial. Especially as a film was just coming out about the tsarina and her orgies. Alongside scenes of a Catherine with silicone implants being serviced by Charles Atlas types who went under the names of Orlov and Potemkin, our dreamer, Lanskoy looked a little pale … This setback played its part in Aldo’s death, making him less determined in his fight against cancer … But in any case he was aware of the flaws in our project. In our script this journey became a mere escapade. But they were going away, not just for a change of scene, but to change their whole lives …”
The train crosses a bridge and the thunder of the wheels drowns out their words. The river is so wide that it looks like a geological fault separating two continents. When the noise subsides, Oleg takes on the role of devil’s advocate, without conviction.
“But, honestly, do you find it likely, this incognito flight across Europe by Catherine and Lanskoy?”
Eva gives a little laugh, both sad and affectionate: “A year ago, when you were working on the screenplay, would you have found this conversation of ours likely? And this way of talking about our own lives through the intermediary of a woman who, one day, believed that she was loved?”
The door in the corridor slams—“Poniatowski” and “Ségur” appear and, making operatic bows, invite them to join a “funeral dinner.” Oleg turns them away, promising to join their crazy celebration very soon …
Outside the window the snow still whirls, the track slips away to infinity. He must dare to give a reply to this silent woman, admit all that is between them now.
The noise from the dinner is increasingly invasive, the corridor is filled with laughter and the white tempest sweeps that still-unspoken admission away into the past. The moment when it might have been possible to put it into words has flashed by, somewhat like a little railroad station buried in snow. As it hurtles through in a frenzy, the train will never stop there now.
… Later on everyone will say that from that day forward, time bolted. At Kiev the news breaks: the country will be governed by Andropov, the man from the KGB. People shudder, a return to Stalinesque dictatorship is predicted … And people would be very surprised to learn that this future tyrant is no more than a sick old man who has only a year to live and who, from the brink of his own death, will embark on reforms soon to be taken forward by a certain Gorbachev.
“Who would have found it likely?” Oleg will often think, remem
bering Eva’s words.
He is to be one of the victims, not of the tyrant people fantasize, but of the panic that overcomes the bureaucrats of film. They remember that earlier screenplay of his, lacking in ideological correctness … The swiftness of the punitive action taken will be commensurate with their fear: the day after his arrival in the Crimea Oleg will learn that his post as artistic assistant has been canceled and that, as a consequence, he simply has to return to Leningrad.
The last image he will retain of Eva Sander will be this moment of filming: a woman walking along a path lined with tall white poplars, a great wind glutted with sunlight, a feeling of the sea beyond the gilded rippling of the foliage. In the film these leaves, dried out by autumn, will be taken for the dazzle of spring.
III
Oleg spends the first few days after his operation noting the subtle details of the new times in which he must learn to live.
From his hospital bed he can hear the sounds of the television set where the patients gather at the far end of the corridor. Matches with hysterical commentaries, films in which the dialogue, without the picture, seems even more stupid, news programs. And this way of addressing other people: no longer “comrade” but gospodin—“mister”! An archaic title, resuscitated as a clear mark of the end of the Soviet era.
And this wailing, an unceasing death rattle, involuntary for a long time now: an old man “singing a duet with his cancer,” as one of the nurses muttered. Evidently the dying man needs painkillers, but there’s a shortage of drugs and injections are expensive. “He’ll have to grease the doctor’s palm,” the man in the next bed to Oleg explains. “Thirty dollars and you’re on cloud nine …”
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