For historians Lanskoy is a mere interlude of sweetness in the ongoing struggle of a woman destined to assert herself, to reign, and, in the absence of love, to purchase sex. A transient Prince Charming.
Yet he remains at the tsarina’s side for more than four years. The breakup is not caused by dismissal but by his death.
And it is he who prepares the way for the greatest change in the life of the one he loves—escape.
Oleg remembers Eva Sander. She was fervently attached to this version. A late love affair that Catherine finally comes upon, an unexpected tenderness on the part of a woman who has always contrived to organize her sexual life like a government department.
“What they were living through was so foreign to the way of the world that in order to love one another they had to erase that world. Escape. Be reborn …”
Eva had said this with a passionate conviction that was based on almost nothing. A dozen old maps of Europe and a brief note that historians occasionally quote: a note from Lanskoy to the tsarina in which he talks about “our journey” …
This probably referred to their visit to Finland in 1783, where Catherine met the king of Sweden, Gustav III. The only long journey the two lovers ever undertook.
If Oleg does not abandon the idea of an “escape,” it is because of a calm, steadfast certainty: without the hope of such a secret journey Catherine’s life no longer makes sense. Or at least it makes no more sense than the chronicle of wars, rebellions, and political intrigues, the tangle of bloody, brilliant vanities that goes by the name of History …
He thinks about Zoya, too. Without that February morning long ago, when they met in the entrance hall, all covered in snow, yes, without that dizzy, luminous moment Zoya’s life would be no more than a tale of which no trace remains: a woman fond of drink, a lonely soul heating the water for her tea in a huge kettle, a worker who, one night, had a fatal accident at her place of work. This epitaph and then oblivion.
Almost no trace of that journey exists, although Oleg tries to detect some of them in the intervals between major historical events. Catherine negotiates with Gustav III while the Russian armies are fighting close to the Caspian Sea. But amid all this how does she live? What is the flavor of the hours, what sun shines on the seasons that give a rhythm to her love for Lanskoy?
Often they read together. Catherine no longer hesitates to put on her glasses, which she never did in front of the previous favorites for fear of showing her age. It is also from these years that she begins to wear flowing clothes—not to hide the roundness of her figure, but in the certainty of no longer needing to wear corsets in order to please.
She gets Lanskoy to read over those of her letters she writes in Russian: he corrects the verbs of motion, which are the principal hazard in this language. On the tsarina’s advice, he is learning Italian … In their conversations he often tells her how politics disgust him.
A few scattered clues, from one published account to the next, make it possible to guess at the nature of their love affair: after the highly volatile passions Catherine has always experienced comes a serene harmony of hearts and bodies, the feeling that they have all eternity for their mutual love. “With him, the flow of my days is like a handful of sand I can take up again and again,” she writes. “Before, it was always an hourglass that I would turn over repeatedly, terrified by the way the grains ran through.”
Catherine seems not only rejuvenated but ageless. Lanskoy gives the lie to the insipidity of the portrait a court painter made of him. He matures, his presence gains substance, it is as if he were protecting this woman who is at once so powerful and so vulnerable. “When he gave his arm to the empress,” Catherine’s librarian notes, “Lanskoy walked with his shoulder thrust a little forward, like a shield.”
Oleg pictures the loving couple. They walk through the connecting rooms of the Peterhof Palace, then mount horses, and ride slowly along the Baltic shore in the pale light of a June evening.
The evidence that they may be preparing to go away is tenuous. Lanskoy learns Italian? But then Catherine encouraged all her favorites to speak foreign languages. Nor do the books they read (Algaritti, Voltaire, Swedenborg) offer any indication of their developing an escape plan.
The maps? Placed end to end, the routes underlined in ink that is barely visible could be tracing a journey that would link St. Petersburg with northern Italy. But there is nothing to show that the maps should be brought together in this way.
One evening Oleg realizes that his investigations have already taken up two months and it is only the memory of Eva Sander that drives him to continue. The idea of a tsarina abandoning everything, the wonderful madness of such an escape, is exhilarating. But he can now see where it comes from: Eva and her Italian friend, Aldo Ranieri, their love illuminated by the legend of Catherine and Lanskoy.
The jealousy he feels makes him smile: that was all so long ago! Walks through a city that was still called Leningrad, the filming, the Crimea … Since then the Berlin Wall has fallen, Germany has been reunified, and Eva must be quietly continuing her career as an actor. Has she any memory of an “artistic assistant” she convinced about Catherine’s secret journey? A madman who, for the thousandth time, is leafing through these dusty volumes, in search of a word whose resonance would evoke the sound of hoofbeats on a road at night?
The next morning he is woken by the whine of a saw. He glances out the kitchen window: the building opposite seems to be swaying. No, it is the tree at the center of the courtyard; it shudders, traces a great curve in the air, and falls, throwing up a cloud of snow.
Dressing in haste, he goes down, shouts, as if something could still be done to negate this fall. Four men look at him with relaxed contempt. “Was that tree in someone’s way?” he asks, aware that his voice does not carry. A scornful grin: “Well, it ain’t in no one’s way now. And if you don’t like it, buster, I can give you a bit of a trim yourself.” The man holding the saw spits out his cigarette butt. The others erupt into guffaws. And they begin cutting up the trunk … An hour later two big four-wheel-drives are parked where the tree stood. Oleg hates the build of these vehicles: they are like great beasts confident of their right to run you over. “The clatter of hoofbeats on a road at night …,” he says to himself as he crosses the courtyard.
At the central library in St. Petersburg his inquiries provoke contrasting reactions: admiration for his obstinacy and the wariness a fanatical scholar always attracts. The staff member who hands over the document he has requested informs him he will be consulting materials nobody has looked at since September 24, 1932!
The memoirs of a nephew of the favorite, Yermolov … Lanskoy dies on June 25, 1784. After an exceptionally long period of solitude—eight months—Catherine chooses as her lover Alexander Yermolov, who acquires the nickname at court of the “White Negro,” on account of his blond curly hair and thick lips. Catherine buys back the deceased man’s decorations from Lanskoy’s family in order to give them to the new favorite. The nephew relates this incident and also the excursion he took part in. It is a fine Midsummers’ Day at Peterhof. The empress walks on Yermolov’s arm, a little retinue accompanies them. A violin can be heard and the sound of a melodious voice. Two Italians: a blind old man playing, a youth singing. Yermolov throws them money. The courtiers grumble about these barefoot beggars who have one hand on their hearts and the other in your pocket. They are still at a distance when the youth’s voice suddenly rings out with passionate force: “Il prim’ amore non si scorda mai …” The empress laughs, everyone follows suit, mocking these Italians who, beneath their hot sun, cheerfully experience their “never forgotten” first love every day of the week … Suddenly they realize Catherine is weeping … The next day Yermolov is dismissed.
In front of the library building stands the statue of Catherine II. Oleg has studied it a hundred times, scanning the bronze contours for the key to the mystery of this woman … There she stands, a symbol of power, of Reason, of the inevitability o
f History. Around her are the men who supported her in her titanic endeavors. No trace of Lanskoy. A pigeon is asleep on Potemkin’s head.
In the courtyard at his apartment building Oleg is already getting used to the presence of huge vehicles where the tree stood. “History on the move,” he says to himself. “The boorishness we call the logic of progress …” There are lights on in the windows of the building opposite, workmen can be seen tearing down wallpaper. These former communal dwellings are being transformed into luxury apartments.
From the kitchen Oleg glances outside, as Zoya used to do: the two four-wheel-drives, sawdust, a cement mixer grinding away at the base of the wall. A life forging ahead—oblivious of the shade of a slightly drunk woman sitting at this window, her gaze lost in the slow fluttering of the snowflakes.
He understands it more clearly than ever: to write the history of a life or a reign you have to sacrifice those eyes fixed on the falling snow. And to sacrifice, too, the daydream two lovers hid from everybody, that secret journey across Europe.
The next day another “historic” event! New banknotes arrive to replace the old ones. The population was given twenty-four hours to change their money. Deep in his archives, Oleg became aware of this too late. He had little money left, in any case. Thousands of retired people, not very robust when it comes to elbowing their way up to the desk, lost all their savings.
This financial swindle is only one detail of the great postsocialist rummage sale. But it is from this day that Oleg abdicates. “My phone is off the hook,” he says to himself. This phrase applies to everything he wants to avoid contact with: the frenzied rush of people in the street, the noise of the cement mixer, the potbellied owners of four-wheel-drives, television programs (an expert demonstrates how monetary reform will save Russia). He would also like to break the link with himself, with the prudent “ego” urging him to get out there and resume his place in the rat race, to go back to making short films for the new rich …
And yet he still believes in a life in which a tsarina abandons her throne and escapes with the man she loves. One in which a woman stares out at a great tree at the winter’s end amid the swirling snow.
Going back to those old books was simply an attempt to rediscover his youth, he knows this. When he was writing his screenplay he was twenty-six (Lessya, their days on the beaches of the Gulf of Finland …), now he has just celebrated his fortieth birthday. Well, not exactly celebrated … A call from Tanya: “So have you worked out your problems with organized crime? Who? Me? I’ve got too much to do this week … I’ll call you … Happy birthday, anyway!”
Nostalgia is deceptive. There was nothing very wonderful about those years when they were filming. He recalls the contortions Kozin used to go through to foil the censorship. The boldness of what they dared to show now seems derisory. Anything can be written about Catherine, you can portray her as a monster or a humanist, show her being served by a horde of lovers—there is no SCCA to wield its scissors.
This freedom has an unexpected effect: it removes the desire to explore her life. A tsarina struggling between power and sex, it’s not a hard nut to crack. Unthinkable now to write a screenplay in which she was planning to escape so as not to be the woman everybody thought they knew.
If he still regrets that past, it is for the passion with which he dreamed of showing that other Catherine …
He rediscovers the past by going to sell his books. The transaction is simple: one volume brings in enough to live on for a day … Time stands still amid these shelves collapsing under piles of yellowed pages. The bookseller does not seem to have changed since the days when he used to come here in search of texts about Catherine. She is pale and thin, her hair held back by a band that looks like the faded fabric of a bookmark. “What people are really buying these days,” she explains, “is fine bindings. You know, they furnish a room …” Oleg has often seen these “books furnishing a room” at the homes of oligarchs. Indeed, one of them had been saved by the thickness of such volumes when an attempt was made on his life: he used to show his visitors an encyclopedia riddled with fragments of metal …
From this bookshop outside of time, Oleg goes to another place hidden away from the world. In an alley behind the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, “the sailors’ church,” an Armenian grocery store where, from time immemorial, they have been selling the same kinds of food. Big, highly spiced olives, salted cucumbers, unleavened bread, dried meat, and brandy in bottles with labels that have passed unchanged through all wars and revolutions …
Drunkenness comes slowly, in drowsy waves, and the slices of dried meat take time to reveal their flavor. His memories soar above the confusion of the past, no longer becoming snagged on a thousand brambles, resentments, and regrets. He smiles, a draft of Armenian brandy helps him to remain aloft above his life, levitating.
Vestiges he believed sunk without trace rise to the surface. That fragment the censors cut from Kozin’s film: Catherine talking about the Russians. “The universe has never produced an individual more male, more self-possessed, more frank, more human, more generous than the Russian … By his nature far removed from any kind of deception and artifice, his directness and honesty find all such devices abhorrent …” In Kozin’s film, this exuberant praise was presented as a voice-over, behind images of the massacres during the Pugachev rebellion. The censors had spotted the hidden irony … Another memory—that mound sixty feet high starting to belch fire. An imitation of Vesuvius during one of the parties at Peterhof. Always these Italian echoes. The theater at the Hermitage is copied from that at Vicenza. A whole area between St. Petersbsurg and Moscow is covered with canals, to become a “Russian Venice.” And that Barber of Seville by Paisiello, which Catherine listens to in Lanskoy’s company …
The evening always ends with Oleg encountering that pair of lovers! They return to remind him of the appointment he has failed to keep. Two souls in torment whose suffering he had no means of assuaging.
He pours himself more brandy, hoping that another drink will banish these phantoms … No, they are still there—a bright night in June, Catherine’s bedroom is suffused with a bluish light. The tsarina is seated, naked, on the edge of the bed. She has let down her hair, Lanskoy strokes her hair and her back, which shivers gently at his caress …
The tenderness he pictures is so intense that Oleg closes his eyes, lost amid the beauty of this nocturnal moment. This is what Kozin should have filmed. It was at such moments that the lovers spoke to one another of their desire to escape.
He hastens to erase the vision of the journey they dreamed of. A night in June? Not possible! At the end of June 1784 Lanskoy falls ill. The historians offer two versions, both equally tempting to writers of fiction. The first: Potemkin learns of Catherine’s plan to marry Lanskoy and decides to crush the marriage. The second: seeking to satisfy the tsarina’s sexual cravings, Lanskoy overdoses on aphrodisiacs, cantharides in particular. But since in Russia this “Spanish fly” is prepared in a vinegar base, the ulcerating effect of the brew combines with the toxicity of the cantharides.
In this death, fate went into overdrive, as if History did not wish to give Catherine any chance. If Potemkin’s poison had not worked, Lanskoy was destined to be poisoned by his own hand …
Drunkenness no longer ensures that his detached flight soaring in memory over the past can continue. Again Oleg sees a night in June, the two lovers, their tenderness. And all at once—death.
After a month this mode of existence ceases to seem contemptible, something that had distressed him at first. That was when he made an effort to get back into the race. The magazine No Comment still existed, but the photographs of rich and poor were no longer juxtaposed. On the contrary, each pictorial indictment of poverty went hand in hand with an article praising the philanthropic activities of a tycoon …
Next he made another attempt to become involved in making films glorifying oligarchs. But in this field, too, the situation had changed. The new rich no longer wanted to
flaunt their wealth—the documentaries now showed them visiting the old people’s homes they were funding. Filming these gangster benefactors would have been even more hypocritical than celebrating the bandits gloating selfishly about their worldly success.
Most of all, what Oleg realized was that there were limits to the freedom of maneuver offered by the cut and thrust of this new life: step on other people or be downtrodden yourself. For a time, thanks to the Armenian brandy, he still managed to keep his distance from the general melee.
One day, recognizing himself as one of the “downtrodden” becomes a matter of indifference to him. The sale of a book pays for a little food and the torpor of the drink, a familiar sequence of visions that makes possible that road where a couple are riding along on horseback through the night … For a time he can inhale the cool of the air in the pathway they are following and … And then reality takes over: the horseman dies and his mistress once more becomes that aging tsarina who loves power, honors, flesh …
This merry-go-round of ghosts finally leads to a palace constructed from little scraps of wood, the model his father made. The pain of this memory is sharp: Oleg fills a glass and knocks it back, attempting to fend off an even more tormenting recollection: his mother’s night table, the cup, a little pearl necklace, a book with a worn cover … And at the center that empty space where his memory has never succeeded in identifying the trinket that nevertheless was definitely there, registered by his childish gaze.
The empty space in his memory grows larger every day, a pale expanse blotting out well-loved faces. Sometimes a remnant of pride shakes him: look at me, Oleg Erdmann in this room that smells of dirty clothes and tobacco, me, waiting in line to buy a cheap bottle of drink, now that the Armenian’s brandy is too dear, me selling my typewriter and seeing it on display, like a prehistoric object, in the window of a store that sells computers! Me … But after all, I’m just part and parcel of that string of losers who are out on the streets selling the pathetic relics of their lives, a spoon, a pair of shoes, a tarnished military medal …
A Woman Loved Page 14
