A Woman Loved

by Andrei Makine

  “Do you think she clung to the memory of the man who loved her?”

  “I even think she rediscovered this lover again forty years later—in the figure of Alexander Lanskoy. That young Russian officer of Polish descent looked very like Georg Ludwig: the same blond hair, a similar build, the same age. This time Catherine really hoped to go away with the man she loved.”

  “But then why hadn’t she done it before? With Potemkin, or Korsakov …”

  “For a very simple reason: none of her favorites loved her. They were fond of her power, her wealth. Those things didn’t interest Lanskoy … Georg Ludwig wrote one day to the future Catherine the Second: ‘Just one night on the roads of Italy would be worth more, for us, than the thrones of all the kingdoms in the universe.’ And he added: ‘Die Zukunft wird zeigen …’ Yes. The future will prove it.”

  Luria gets up, puts his coat back on again. Oleg walks to the entrance hall with him.

  “That version of the facts may seem too romantic to you. But the evidence exists—those maps, among other things … And besides, it was by thinking about those two lovers escaping to Italy that I managed to survive eight years in the camps …”

  Two bodyguards hurl themselves out of a car and block the sidewalk. The passersby, brought to a standstill, see a man emerging from a restaurant with his arm around the waist of a very young blond woman. Oleg stops, too, waiting for this individual and his companion to settle into their sedan. Such a scene, which a few years ago would have seemed improbable, no longer surprises. A rich man, a youthful mistress, their right to hold up the traffic, heavies keeping inquisitive bystanders at bay. In the old days behavior like that was only permissible if you were a senior Party boss. And even then … Now you just have to have a lot of money. “A historic change,” Oleg says to himself. During his illness History has been signing up a new cast of actors, rewriting the script for its farce … This is the first time he has taken an evening stroll without having to pace himself to match his fatigue. This resumption of his place among his fellow humans in the mild spring warmth sharpens his perception of everything. That man, dressed like a playboy, his girlfriend, a teenager’s face, her lips curled in a contemptuous pout …

  Before getting into the car the man turns his head … Oleg exclaims with impulsive fury: “Hey, Zhurbin, you old son of a bitch! It’s you!”

  One of the bodyguards bounds toward him, but already the “playboy” has turned around and his blasé expression now looks less convincing under the gaze of an old comrade.

  “Erdmann! Didn’t you get my letters? Why not? I wrote to the address where you were living with Tanya … Oh, I get it! She loves me, she loves me not … OK, get in. I’ll drop you off. That way I’ll have time to explain …”

  And that is how, somewhat squeezed between Zhurbin and the young woman, Oleg learns about the existence of a “mega-project.”

  Zhurbin already owns several restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He is part owner of three luxury hotels on the Black Sea coast. His idea, he explains, has the simplicity all ideas of genius do.

  “I’ve just bought a film studio. We’ve already made two excellent thrillers. But the audiences are not coming. Russian audiences like their crooks to be American, as you well know. So I need a project on a grand scale. You know, a TV series people will get hooked on, stars whose faces they recognize in the street. And not only in the street—in my restaurants and hotels! Do you get the idea, Erdmann? Audiences will come to eat in my restaurants hoping to see the young hero from the series at the next table. And they’ll go and stay at one of my hotels so they can say they’ve swum in the very pool where the bimbo from the latest episode was doing the breaststroke … Not bad, eh? I just need a big subject. You once worked on the life of Catherine the Great. That’s who I want! Not the old relic you find in the history books, no. A Catherine who’s been dusted down, a bombshell who explodes in our faces!”

  Oleg learns that his friend’s newfound wealth is based on a number of very diverse enterprises, ranging from the sale of reinforcement steel to eel fisheries in the salt marshes of the Caspian Sea. One of Zhurbin’s businesses makes hair dryers, another, refrigerators, and yet another, furniture and bedding. This only appears to be too many irons in the fire, for the eels are delivered to Zhurbin’s restaurants and the hair dryers hum away in the bedrooms of his hotels, as do the refrigerators. In a word, the Chinese who come to buy his steel also sleep in his beds, dine off his eels in his restaurants, and extract their cans of beer from his fridges.

  “And soon, I guess, they’re going to be watching films produced by your studios,” jokes Oleg.

  Zhurbin laughs, happy to be able to relax, no longer acting the part of an aggressive, domineering millionaire: “And what’s more, I’ve just bought a whole lot of shares in a big liquor factory, in Kiev …”

  This expression, “bought a whole lot of shares,” often recurs as he is talking. Oleg imagines him being shared out, divided up into dozens of little Zhurbins, lively, nimble, altering according to the functions they have to carry out, then becoming joined together again into one massive whole, protected by bodyguards. Everyone in this new country is fragmented, among a variety of professions and types of status, and wears several masks. Beneath the tycoon’s front that Zhurbin puts on, Oleg occasionally detects a frailty: a lost, bewildered look that reminds him of a dog he once saw as a child, escaping from the wagon where they were cramming in stray animals to be put down.

  This fragmented life of Zhurbin’s is visibly trying to knit itself together again in a cinematic “mega-project” that will bring back memories of his years as an actor at the start of his career.

  The ease with which the series is launched leaves Oleg with a feeling of intoxication, weightlessness. No SCCA to be consulted, no ideological inquisition to be undergone. Absolute freedom! He is almost unsettled by this. So this new life, as a compensation for its ruthlessness, offers this emancipation … To make a series all they need is sufficient finance, and this will be provided by the steel and the eels!

  Before Oleg has written a word of the shooting script, Zhurbin’s staff are already recruiting a cast of actors. Following the collapse of the state film studios, unemployment is rife in the profession. Oleg is panic-stricken: these former stars are prepared to take part in a series for which not one line of a treatment exists. Zhurbin reassures him: “You know Catherine’s life by heart! Create a basic outline, that’s all we need. And don’t forget, it’s a TV series: this week we film, and next week it’s on people’s screens. Sure! We’re not back in the good old Soviet days when you needed ten rubber stamps from the censor for every scrap of dialogue. Go ahead, get going! I don’t want the two of us to find ourselves back lugging pigs’ carcasses around!”

  Oleg is not sure whether Zhurbin’s urgings are giving him confidence or, on the contrary, inhibiting him. Grudgingly, he recognizes that his friend offers him one last chance to find himself a place amid the whirlwind of the new times.

  He discovers that they are liberated not only from censorship but also from the straitjacket imposed by the length of a film. Kozin had a hundred minutes to tell Catherine’s life, he has this marathon of television episodes, a series, which, if it is successful, will keep running indefinitely. “Three hundred and a half episodes, if you like,” declares Zhurbin, remembering his old joke. “Festina lente: make haste slowly. Fire out one episode a week, but be thrifty with your ammo. In a year’s time I hope Catherine will still be up there galloping on her favorite horse, Orlik, and choosing lovers! Tomorrow I want to see you with the script for the opening scenes. Good luck!”

  Oleg knows what scene the series will open with: a girl of fourteen watching a carriage disappearing in the distance as the snow falls. The future Catherine II separated from the love of her youth …

  Zhurbin reads the first pages of the draft in his office. Oleg, both nervous and excited at the same time, looks around at the heavy furnishings, the profusion of statuettes, p
ictures, books in fine bindings. Everything he used to see in the homes of oligarchs in earlier times. The only original detail, a huge aquarium in which the famous eels from the salt marshes are swimming sinuously … Without breaking off from reading, Zhurbin suggests: “Put a chair in front of the window and stand on it. You can see the Admiralty spire … Breathtaking, isn’t it?”

  Standing on the chair, Oleg catches sight of the gilded spire and, looking down, the seething throng in the street, an old woman beside a kiosk, counting small coins in her palm …

  “OK, get down, Erdmann. We need to have a talk, man to man.”

  Zhurbin leaves his director’s chair, gestures to Oleg to join him on a semicircular sofa, pours them each a whiskey. He takes a deep breath as he prepares to speak, but his cell phone rings and his stern expression softens. “No, no, my little fish,” he murmurs softly, “I’m not with my accountant. I’m with an old friend … Yes, he’s almost as brilliant as me. He’s going to write us a great script … Yes, all about the tsarina, like I told you … You’re right, honey, it’s very difficult. Things are hard right now, but my pal is a very gifted fellow. I’m going to tell him what to do and he’ll do a super great job, I promise you. You’re going to be glued to your screen, my little eel … OK, love you. See you tonight …”

  For a few moments his face retains a radiant and rather foolish expression. In it Oleg seems to see the reflection of the young blond woman from the other evening. “You know, I can’t tell you how sweet she is …” Zhurbin smiles, lost in a dream. Then he pulls himself together.

  “Your script, Erdmann, it’s no good at all! No, now listen. These chaste farewells in the snow, your little Catherine having a fainting fit—the viewers are going to start channel surfing! They’d rather see any old garbage of game shows. No. I’m not a total ignoramus, contrary to what you think. I’ve read books about Catherine’s youth and I know that, as a teenager, she was already obsessed by sex. Look, I’m not inventing anything, I’ve read her Memoirs, I’ve got them here, right in front of me. And it’s down there in black and white: she used to straddle a cushion and ride up and down, thrashing about, working herself up until she was exhausted. And you’re asking us to believe she spent her time reading fairy stories for little choirgirls with her uncle Georg Ludwig? It’s perfectly clear she slept with him. Yes, at the age of fourteen, so what? She loved him carnally with all the passion of the future nymphomaniac she was. That’s what we have to film! Otherwise you’ll just be doing another Kozin—a Soviet-style movie where the screen goes dark every time the lovers start to kiss. No, my friend, the State Committee’s finished. Now, if the stars of the picture kiss, it goes right through to the orgasm. And no coitus interruptus, thank you very much!”

  Oleg has a powerful urge to get up and walk out, slamming the door, but he stays, does not argue, listens. He senses that there is a lot of truth in what Zhurbin is saying. Yes, in the old days censorship forced them to sacrifice scenes that, in close-up or in long shot, touched upon the sexual act. Why avoid them now?

  He almost manages to be convinced. And then, suddenly, he understands what has given him pause. The daylight is fading, Zhurbin switches on a lamp. Oleg notices that his old friend’s hair is no longer red but gray and that occasionally a shadow of distress flits across his authoritarian expression, just as it did in the eyes of that stray dog that had escaped being put down.

  He will rewrite the first episode: the Lutheran tediousness of a tiny German principality, a princess precociously aroused, scenes of her making love in her uncle’s arms and suddenly—a letter comes from Russia! Destiny calls. The Empress Elizabeth is inviting the lovesick young woman to the court of St. Petersburg.

  When it is shown it attracts a more-than-average audience. “Our little Catherine has cut herself a good slice of the ratings pie!” Zhurbin exclaims delightedly. “You see, I’ve simply adhered to Lenin’s principles: art must be accessible to the popular masses … We’ll meet tomorrow and talk about episode two.”

  Their meetings always follow the same lines: Zhurbin reads through the text with sighs of vexation, there’s a shouting match in which Oleg is accused of being a gutless intellectual and Zhurbin of being an oligarch whose brain is stuffed with goose fat. Finally, after three glasses of whiskey, a reconciliation, based as much on their old friendship as on this certainty: Zhurbin knows that only Oleg will be capable of giving this jumble of scenes the logic of a narrative in the space of a few days, while Oleg admits that Zhurbin’s brain, “stuffed” as it is, enables them to stay in touch with economic reality, yes, always the “shares” on which the survival of their characters on the screen depends.

  The greatest surprise comes from the actors: Oleg finds them unbelievably disciplined, devoid of all caprice. On the set with Kozin, he remembers, a colorfully easygoing atmosphere prevailed, actresses would burst into tears, railing against the director’s “tyrannical” demands, actors flew into rages, threw their wigs on the ground, threatened to walk off the set. And in the breaks between takes, mockery could be heard, teasing and laughter, directed now at the fat actor playing “Potemkin” for being unable to mount his horse, now at “Catherine” for stumbling on the steps of her throne … Here there is nothing like that: they work fast, do exactly what Oleg asks of them, never venturing to improvise. The tension is perceptible. One senses that they are watching one another closely, conscious of their good fortune in having found a series to act in, apprehensive of the idea that they could be replaced, thrust back into the unemployment where so many of their former colleagues are stagnating. “Freedom of artistic creation …,” Oleg says to himself, unable to banish a sly uneasiness.

  The young Catherine and one of her first lovers, Saltykov, show no reluctance over what the shooting script requires of them: a wild coupling on an island in a fisherman’s cottage lashed by the waves of the Baltic. The scene is improbable, as any one of her biographers would agree. But they perform, agree to be filmed naked, simulate a noisy, ferocious orgasm …

  It is Zhurbin who wants this scene. Oleg argued against it, quoting the history books: that trip to an island, in an icy rainstorm, was unsuited to volcanic passion. “Just let Saltykov pay court to Catherine a little. Then they can act out their love later on …” The reply is unequivocal, spelling out the whole thrust of the series: “Erdmann, the viewers are not going to wait till episode twenty-five for Catherine’s orgasm. They need one now! And when it comes to episode twenty-five, don’t you worry, there’ll be more. Otherwise they’ll be watching another series on a different channel. Yes, my friend, art, these days, is just as simple as that.”

  The next day they are at loggerheads again: at the height of the coup d’état Catherine goes into hiding at an inn on the road to St. Petersburg. There is a shortage of beds, she sleeps squeezed up against her young friend, the Princess Dashkova. Zhurbin rubs his hands, they are going to have a carnal relationship! Oleg is up in arms, hotly rejects the legend of Catherine’s bisexuality, and ends up feeling that he sounds like a Soviet prude. To avoid moralizing he invokes physiology: Catherine is pregnant. “But we’re not going to show her belly!” retorts Zhurbin. Oleg sticks to his guns. “But the inn’s full of soldiers …” “Better still. Intimacy between the two girls will be all the more spicy!” Finally, Oleg plays his last card: that night, all the historians agree, Dashkova was suffering from severe influenza. Zhurbin’s logic leaves him speechless. “At your age, Erdmann, you ought to know that a touch of flu has never stopped a pair of chicks from making out!”

  The stunning foolishness of the assertion vaguely comforts Oleg. Zhurbin does not falsify the facts of history, but he exaggerates them, lays it all on with a trowel, he wants everything to be shown. Does the Countess Bruce test the future favorites for Catherine? Well then, the famous Moorish baths will be seen on the screen, a naked woman arousing a young man, gripping his penis to assess his virility, avoiding his embraces until finally, no longer holding back, he throws himself upon her and t
akes her by force, forgetting the tsarina …

  After this episode, transmitted during the first week of May, their show is hailed in a long article in a film magazine. The one Lessya worked on in the old days, Oleg notes.

  Oleg is not aware of the moment when his work becomes what Zhurbin calls “Stakhanovite filmmaking.” He contrives to film a number of episodes in advance and thus no longer has the feeling of writing with the guillotine blade of the current week’s episode hanging over him.

  Then, in June, their series rises to number three in the ratings … A morning in winter. Catherine gets up well before dawn, as was her custom, and in front of the stove she would like to see lit she encounters a giant carrying an armful of logs. “Who are you, my good sir?” The tsarina addresses all her servants as equals. “The stoker of Your Majesty’s stoves, my Little Mother Empress,” the giant replies, using this droll but historically accurate form of address. “Excellent. Go ahead and stoke away, it’s very cold this morning!” The man lights a big fire, checks the draft, is about to leave. Catherine stops him. “Wait, I’m really shivering.” He piles in more logs, the flames roar, the stove is red-hot. “I’m frozen,” the tsarina insists. “I need warmth …” The heating specialist throws up his hands in despair and suddenly guesses. The woman stands there, pretending to tremble: he folds her in an embrace … At the first orgasm she names him “Lieutenant.” At the second, “Captain.” Finally, at the third, overwhelmed, she promotes him to the rank of colonel, grants him a title, and awards him an estate on lands taken from the Turks. He will now bear the name of Teplov, Milord Warmingpan …