A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  After that encounter with Kozin he found it impossible to go back into the race. Decline shocks us more than death. Kozin choosing to let himself die slowly, in filth, in full view of the contemptuous looks of others, his long drowning in death, shook Oleg more than a sudden decease would have done …

  He abandoned his oligarchs and one evening answered an advertisement: the magazine No Comment was looking for a photographer.

  This magazine published only photographs with short captions. The pictures, presented in pairs, owed their impact to juxtaposition. The first one, for example, might show an old woman sitting in the snow, holding out her hand—the second, taken in the same street, a private town house where guests were stuffing themselves with caviar. The overcrowded dormitory at a poorhouse, pictured opposite the residence of a minister. Children in rags—and a schoolboy getting out of a luxury car accompanied by a bodyguard …

  Oleg was under no illusions about the effect these contrasting pictures might have. But he was touched by the little team’s enthusiasm. The six journalists had faith, something lacking in this new country where the pressure to succeed forced people to adopt the grim rigidity of robots. He was familiar with the circles oligarchs moved in, which, for the editorial team, made him “our man in the world of the rich.” He did end up believing that their efforts might alert the crowds embarked on a wild stampede toward nothing.

  Every day they received threats. Several times the magazine’s vehicle was torched. The response of the police was predictable: “You bring this trouble on yourselves. You’re lucky they haven’t shot at you.” This “they” implied a lot of people: each issue contained photographs aptly designed to displease the powerful.

  The attack by the hooded men had not greatly surprised them. What was surprising—Oleg would think about this on his hospital bed—was the extremely natural aspect of this evil. Smashing, punching, and, if a woman attracts you, violating her. And, if an idiot gets in the way, sticking a knife in his guts, just to be rid of him. An unthinking brutality, almost devoid of any malice. “After all,” he said to himself, “a wolf tearing open a sheep’s throat doesn’t hate it.” This absence of hatred seemed more distressing than the violence itself.

  “The struggle for survival reduces men to their animal nature.” He has often repeated this. Now he asks himself sharply, “But what can you offer them? What other life? What other goal?”

  The question comes back to him one night, in response to the moaning of the old man with cancer. “What other life?” An image lights up in his mind, between memory and dream: a woman walking along beside tall trees, white with the first snow. A vision that truly does have the clarity of a goal. This beauty, he would like to say, but the notion is driven out by an even more vivid vision: a man walking through a clear night, amid fields. Carrying a violin under his arm …

  Oleg is back in his old room, thinking about those moments as he rediscovers the piles of books, echoes of distant times. His screenplay, the filming, the journey to the Crimea. Twelve years … Wars, crises, revolutions, global disasters and his own petty disasters, breakups, separations, the wound still weeping in his stomach … And the steadfast beauty of that moment: a woman walking beside the sea beneath snow-covered trees.

  The choice is simple: get rid of all these books, get back into the rat race. Or else … He opens a volume. The Seven Years’ War, Russia’s adversary is the Prussia of Frederick the Great, the Empress Elizabeth discovers Catherine has exchanged several letters with him. Is she a German spy? Count Shuvalov and Prince Trubetskoy, who are heading the investigation, succumb to the young princess’s charm. The author of the book claims that she received them together … Always this desire to couple Catherine with several males, to turn her into an animal. The same story was told in connection with the Zubov brothers—they were said to hurl themselves at her, both at the same time, of course.

  He replaces the book on the tomb-like pile of printed matter. Tales of two kinds: some portraying a female in heat, others showing a mistress of political games. Not much choice: sex or the antics of court life … A cage!

  He dreams of a volume buried somewhere in the depths of this sarcophagus of words—the tale of a life lived far away from this prisonlike existence.

  He knows such a story does not exist. Create one? An inspiring plan. But what’s certain now is that it is impossible for him to go back—back into that world the books in the sarcophagus are talking about.

  That same evening he counts his savings: 2,400,000 rubles, enough to keep going for three months or, rather, given the galloping inflation, six weeks. Sufficient time for an attempt to break the bars of the cage.

  In 1762 Catherine’s lovers kill her husband, Peter III. In 1801 the last of the tsarina’s favorites takes part in the assassination of her son Paul I. Men very close to this woman, who have known her caresses, her kisses. With her lips she has touched the mouths of future killers and future victims …

  Thinking about it, Oleg reaches a point where scholarly dissertations about Catherine II become devoid of interest. All the historians are doing is piecing together the logic of her reign. But what ought to be expressed is the monumental absurdity of this woman’s destiny.

  She seeks to relieve the people’s sufferings and what she gets is a devastating uprising. Her republican impulses lead only to an increase of slavery. Toward the end of her life the discordant rhythmic accompaniment for her famous refrain “Voltaire brought me into the world” is the clatter of the guillotine in the sweet France she dreamed of … One of Catherine’s lovers plays with little Paul, the child adores this man, who, later on, will be among his murderers … As it happens, Paul I could have escaped his death. His doctors advise him to “put a curb on nature,” for his wife is weakened by her pregnancies: the tsar has the doorway sealed up between his wife’s bedroom and his own. That exit would have opened up a series of adjoining rooms through which he could have escaped when the conspirators arrived.

  Oleg has spread out his books all around the sofa. Lying there, he gathers up these fragments of absurdity that give the lie to the portentous “march of History.” Born in 1754, Paul lived among men who entered his mother’s bed after killing his father … When Catherine dies in 1796, he gives orders for the remains of Peter III to be exhumed. After thirty-four years in the grave the skeleton is laid to rest at the Winter Palace, alongside Catherine’s body. Paul defies death with sumptuous, macabre madness: his mother’s ex-lovers accompany the two coffins to the imperial burial chamber. The favorites carry the decorations and crown of the man they had killed. This theatrical ceremony exposes the stupidity of men, their bestial appetites, the conceit of their claim to rule the world. Paul feels himself to be God, a sad god, to whom not even the proof that he was right can bring joy. Already present in this funeral procession are the men who will murder him …

  Once Oleg used to seek out the great events of the reign, its remarkable personalities … History of this kind no longer interests him … The real story line is much simpler. It is the tale of a pack of human predators, running around, tearing one another apart, coupling, dying … Some strong and cunning males massacre a weak male, so as to take possession of his female. Nothing more.

  Several books declare that Peter III’s death accords with the logic of History. As for his naive hope that he could walk away with his violin under his arm, this proves that he was simply feebleminded.

  It is as if there is a tacit agreement among the authors to uphold the laws of this world: strength crushes weakness, sex heightens the appetite for domination, dreaming signifies maladjustment, an inability to survive in the social jungle. And because we are civilized people our language cunningly conceals this bestiality thus: the logic of History, the triumph of Reason …

  The arrogance of Reason! The arrogance of historians seeking to use chronology to keep chaos at bay. The arrogance of the “Age of the Enlightenment,” in making man into a god. The arrogance of the enlightened monarchs who h
oped that the veneer of their salons would hold firm over the knotty wood of men’s souls … In one volume Oleg renews acquaintance with one of these arrogant men—Frederick the Great, the great friend of Voltaire, later his sworn enemy. It is war, the Russians sack his residence at Charlottenburg. The prince de Ligne recognizes that his Austrian hussars are not to be outdone: they are wading “knee-deep in porcelain and fine glassware.” A haven of peace designed for tranquil conversations about the benefits of civilization …

  Arrogance, touching in its fervor, in Catherine herself. Her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, will have as their tutor the Swiss citizen Frédéric-César de La Harpe. A republican, a Rousseauistic teacher, and, later on, an admirer of the French Revolution. What better way of elevating the young princes’ minds? A few years after La Harpe has left, Alexander lets the conspirators kill his father, Paul I. Constantine, at the head of his band of thugs, after many acts of violence, seizes a St. Petersburg woman who had previously resisted his advances. Despite the presence of her two children, this young widow is violated by a dozen men. Her limbs are broken, her ligaments severed, and her mouth, when ripped open, reveals fragments of broken teeth. The rapists fling down her corpse in front of her mother’s house …

  Oleg gets up, begins to pace up and down in the corridor. The episode of the rape is rarely told by the biographers. They never draw parallels between this brutality and the fine ideas of La Harpe, Voltaire, and the doctrines that at that time proclaimed the sacredness of man and liberty. La Harpe returns to Switzerland, just as Catherine is receiving an account from her ambassador in Paris of the revolution in progress. One detail gives her food for thought: the severed heads have their hair curled before being handed over to the victims’ relatives. The natural goodness of mankind …

  As he reads the accounts of wars, Oleg increasingly experiences nausea. “Austria lost thirty thousand men and two hundred million florins. Russia lost two hundred thousand men and two hundred million rubles. The Turks lost three hundred thousand men and two hundred million piastres …”

  One voice approves of this obscenity—Voltaire! He begs Catherine to confirm to him that fifteen thousand Turks have just been shot down. “Thus,” he says, “my happiness will be complete.”

  You have to read between the lines to discover the truth about this philosophy teacher of the tsarina’s. Then you catch Voltaire busy writing letters of denunciation, aimed at sending to the Bastille a young writer who dares to criticize him. He goes to bookshops with the police: the books he disapproves of will be seized, the bookshops closed, the printers put in prison. The hatred he exudes finally comes to annoy Catherine herself. “War is an ugly thing, Monsieur,” she replies to this humanist exhorting her to massacre the Turks.

  At the end of a month comes this astonishment: how could he ever have been enthusiastic about all this tomfoolery? One country invades another. This king bumps off his rival. A royal mistress conspires for a war to break out. Frederick the Great nicknames his favorite dog “Pompadour.” Furious, the marquise de Pompadour engineers the alliance between France and Austria. The result is the Seven Years’ War, the war “of the three petticoats,” Pompadour, Elizabeth of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austria. Frederick is defeated by these ladies—the Austrian hussars wade “knee-deep in porcelain and fine glassware.” But Elizabeth dies, Peter III comes to the Russian throne and rescues Frederick, whom he idolizes. For the Russians, this tsar needs to be toppled. Catherine accomplishes this task and … And the story continues—a bloody farce with endless new developments. It leads to nothing other than perpetual repeat performances of killings, political juggling acts, utopias, petty intrigues …

  And as for the sequel to all this madness, Oleg can see it on television: a specialist explains the war in Chechnya by Catherine II’s refusal, in her day, to invade the Caucasian provinces. Houses burned, corpses of soldiers … Then the news bulletin is interrupted by a commercial: “Villas on the Baltic coast with full access to a private golf course.”

  He goes to the kitchen to make himself coffee. In the corridor a woman is scurrying along with a big, steaming cooking pot. Zhenya, who lives with her three children in a room nine by twelve feet. “A villa” … Oleg says to himself. Zhenya’s husband was jailed for four years after stealing a chicken from a refrigerated truck.

  While he is looking for matches Oleg discovers an old kettle in a closet … In the old days he often used to see it on the stove. Its owner was Zoya, a woman in her fifties of whom he knows nothing. When did she leave that communal apartment? And where did she go? He has an almost fond memory of those evenings when he would see Zoya sitting, looking out of the window, adrift in a time where no one could reach her … Her fine face was worn with weariness, she had very bright eyes, as if washed by a shower of rain. “Your boozy neighbor,” his girlfriend Lessya used to call her, somewhat scornfully …

  The following day he sees Zhenya, dressing her children to take them to school. She is shouting, hitting them, threatening them. “Just you wait till your dad comes home from his travels …” Oleg asks her if she knew Zoya.

  “The fat one who was always on the bottle? Yes, we used to talk sometimes at the stove … Well, anyhow, no one knows how it happened. Sure, that train driver should have been on the lookout … But as she drank …”

  The death is recounted in between the clips around the ear Zhenya hands out to her sons. The “fat one who was always on the bottle” worked on the railroad and was knocked down by a train—between one swig of vodka and the next, so they said. Did she have any family? “In two years, no one came to see her … And, do you know, you’re the first person to ask me about her. OK. I’ve got to go now …”

  Oleg settles on his sofa swamped by books. Thousands of pages spelling out every step Catherine took. Compared with this plethora, Zoya’s life is not even a shadow. The memory of a face, the echo, now silent, of a voice. And these scraps recounted by Zhenya: a woman who drank, worked at night, and failed to dodge a train. That’s all there is—nothing more!

  His rebellion is physically violent, a challenge in the face of death. “No! There was also that morning!”

  … Yes, a morning in February. A first spell of milder weather, snow that, as it fell against one’s face, seemed filled with warmth. They met in the entrance hall, both of them returning from their night work: he at the slaughterhouse, Zoya at her railroad depot. Their coats were caked in snow. With somewhat clumsy gestures they each knocked the snowflakes off the other’s clothing. Oleg saw this woman’s face, which, on account of a sleepless night, was still unburdened with the cares of the day. She must have seen the same distant dreaminess in his own eyes … They parted, Zoya went to put her kettle on the stove, Oleg went back to his drafts. “That woman’s beautiful,” he said to himself. “What a shame that …” He had no time to clarify this regret. There on his worktable were his typewriter, the pages of his screenplay, the little pocket mirror Lessya had looked at herself in, a few weeks before, as she put on lipstick … “That’s funny,” he thought, already in ironic mode, “Zoya looks quite like Catherine around 1780.” And he brushed aside any vague tenderness for a woman whose beauty he had always ignored …

  He leafs through the pages of the books spread out at his feet and suddenly, with a mixture of joy and amazement, he realizes that, thanks to that moment in February, Zoya’s life is infinitely better known to him than that of the tsarina. That one morning, with its scent of snow and the spring, is more real than all these historical summaries. And it is the tsarina, entombed in her sarcophagus of words, of whom we are totally ignorant, for not one of these volumes captures the freshness of a winter’s morning as Catherine one day lived it.

  They become lovers in the spring of 1780. Alexander Lanskoy is twenty-two, Catherine fifty. Unlike the previous favorites, Lanskoy turns out to be selfless. He does not angle for titles or seek jobs for his family. Intrigues bore him, he is indifferent to the influence he might have. At the apex of an em
pire that dominates half of Europe and half of Asia, he seems impervious to the reach of such power, setting little store by the history that is dictated by the caliber of cannons. He seems sincerely fond of this woman who is still beautiful and lively and maintains a very strict physical discipline. The other favorites, once at the palace, felt like prisoners and veered off into power games, plots, and debauchery at the first opportunity. Lanskoy is only happy in his long těte-à-tětes with Catherine, their walks along the pathways of the Peterhof, their evenings beside the Baltic …

  It looks as if he loves this woman … which is both logical and totally impossible. Logical, since every favorite owes it to himself to declare his passion to the empress. Impossible, given that these men are not made to last—very soon they start to throw their weight around and try to turn their own whims into the policies of the State, deceive the tsarina, and then, overnight, disappear from her life. A letter of dismissal, a parting gift (land, serfs, gold), and a ban on appearing at court. Often a new favorite takes over the empty apartments the following day.

  With Lanskoy it all happens differently. Catherine sees him for the first time in December 1779, but only the following spring does she invite him to the palace. The rhythm of the tsarina’s life is changing.

  This new lover appears to be calming the fever of the great reign. At last Catherine can catch her breath. This doubtless relates to her age, to her physical ripeness. Furthermore, during these years she has reached the stage of a “cruising flight,” when her power, firmly established, weighs less heavily upon her. The peasant revolts are in the past, the conspirators have laid down their arms, disdainful Europe has finally accepted this vast country that can still be reproached for its Asiatic ponderousness, but must now be reckoned with. Catherine’s creation is like a bronze statue that has just been removed from its mold: it still needs to be cleaned and polished, but the sculptor knows that the essential work has been done.