“You bet I’m not. You can start looking for a madman who’ll take over from me. And you’ll need to find a woman sick enough to play Catherine having an affair with her horse …”
“Don’t you worry, Erdmann. Zara’s already agreed to it. And let’s get this straight. There are going to be no images of bestiality. It’ll all be allusive, but very physical. I know you want to stay pure. It’s the reflex of an egghead who’s afraid of getting his hands dirty. Oh yes, a good little German, with all your lace handkerchiefs. Oh dear! A horse! That stinks! And when the stallion gets a hard-on it’s not a pretty sight. And then, horror of horrors, a naked chick wrapping her arms around it. You’re all the same: you, Zyamtsev, and the rest—cold pasta instead of guts! And that’s why the cute little crap stories that you guys film will be forgotten! When the Marquis de Sade wrote about Catherine he showed her being served by a whole battalion of brutes. Or rather, she was the one who was violating and torturing the men. And Sacher-Masoch? Oh, I’ve read him, too, don’t worry. He has Catherine as a dominatrix, whipping Diderot, who’s dressed up as a monkey. And you’re scared shitless about showing a horse … Right, that’s it. You’re fired! I know who I’m going to hire. A guy who’ll film Catherine being fucked by a rhinoceros if necessary!”
Zhurbin yells that last sentence standing in the doorway of his office—Oleg had already stood up and walked out without saying anything. Zhurbin’s secretary does not react. Two visitors waiting to see him exchange quizzical, but not really uneasy, looks. The Russia of these days blunts all capacity for amazement. The country is run by a president who, at the conclusion of his trips abroad, is frequently brought home dead drunk. So, a rhinoceros …
Returning home on foot, Oleg reflects on this indifference in the face of outrageous events, such as Diderot, naked, being whipped by a woman in thigh boots or indeed a tsarina coupling with her favorite horse … Madness! But as nothing surprises anymore …
In his jacket pocket he comes across the photograph he had forgotten to give back to Zhurbin: his daughter beside a plastic slide.
… Later on he will sense that Zhurbin’s rage was an expression of the inevitable postrevolutionary syndrome. Russia had been stirred by so many hopes during the past ten years! The goal was achieved: political parties proliferated, the economy was privatized, frontiers were opened … And Zhurbin had even been able to organize a dinner very much like the ones to be seen in films made in the West. And yet inwardly he must be asking himself: “What’s the point of all this, if I’m forced to produce this sleazy television series and the only reason for its success is its dreary sensationalism?”
Over the next two days Oleg sees no sign of Tanya. He begins to worry—in this unpredictable country anything could have happened: a bomb attack on a train, a kidnapping … Or maybe another installment of plastic surgery, but what’s left to be chopped?
Tanya reappears on the evening of the third day, avoids his embrace, sets down two suitcases in the entrance hall, and opens them. They are empty.
“Are you going away? And by the way, where have you been?”
He is not sure what tone to adopt, settles for mild grumpiness.
“Yes, I am going away … I can’t take any more, Oleg. You’re never there, always stuck behind your camera. So why don’t you go ahead and marry your Catherine, your great, fat Zara, while you’re about it? You spend more time with her than you do with me …”
“Well, as it happens, I’ve just been fired. So now you may risk seeing a bit too much of me …”
“And then there’s your artistic selfishness! Ready to sacrifice everything for your filming. Well, I’m sick and tired of it! I’ve had enough of being bossed around. I’m not a German, you know!”
Oleg realizes that all the points in her indictment had been prepared in advance—it was just that Tanya had not anticipated his losing his job. The parade of her grievances continues, his work on the series is blamed, even though he no longer has any work. Oleg reiterates this, assures her that their life can now be less frenetic, talks about the New Year holiday, vacations they can take …
The suitcases are filling up, mainly with clothes and cosmetic products. The reproaches take their course, directed at the person he no longer is. The scene seems strangely familiar to him, as if he had already lived through it … But when?
Each case snaps shut with a definitive click.
“I wish you all the success you deserve. I guess it’s the one thing in life you care about …”
That’s it. He’s got it. This scene of a breakup is modeled on those in films made in the West! The suitcases, the ping-pong of the dialogue, the tone of voice adopted by the woman as she walks out. All those psychological dramas have gone to their heads, they’ve been convinced that this is how couples in civilized countries tear themselves apart … The cinema is one hell of a brainwashing device! Or rather, one for laundering people’s emotions …
“If there’s any stuff I’ve forgotten, don’t throw it out straightaway … No, the cases aren’t heavy. I’m off. Bye!”
From his window Oleg sees Tanya opening the trunk of a four-wheel-drive. The windows are smoked glass, it’s impossible to make out the face of the man at the wheel. Is he hiding? Or has Tanya told him not to show himself? Just a driver? Or the man she’s going to live with?
“He’s the one she’s had her face lifted and her breasts inflated for …” Oleg realizes that he’s never known this new body of hers, never kissed the rictus of the reshaped mouth. A new costume change for a richer, more brilliant life, one that calls for these fleshy lips, a smooth skin, a firm bosom …
“Maybe she’s even found herself an oligarch,” he thinks, with a smile. “Yes, the tycoon who long ago sent in his henchmen to beat up the journalists at No Comment. Or, if not him, one of Zhurbin’s competitors, the one who’s going to be emasculated one day by a marksman! Everything’s possible in this country. Absolute freedom …!”
He gives a little laugh, moves to close the wardrobe doors: bare hangers, empty plastic bags … Standing on tiptoe, he feels at the back of the highest shelf—nothing. In her haste, Tanya has gone off with the gift he had planned to give her at Christmas …
At the start of their argument he had been expecting her to insist on his leaving the two-bedroom apartment they were renting together. This idea had given him a feeling of relief as he pictured himself back in his room in the communal apartment, as in the old days. That place, for all its poverty, seems endowed with a truth that cannot be found elsewhere.
On the evening of December 31, Oleg accompanies Luria to the station. Given the date, the trip the old man is undertaking is a somewhat odd one: he will be seeing the new year in somewhere amid the frozen lands that lie between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Luria has obtained permission to visit the prison at Butyrka …
“This crucial moment when it’s possible to consult the archives from the Stalin era, this blessed reprieve for historians, will soon come to an end,” he explains. “Yeltsin will emerge from his alcoholic coma and a turn of the screw will be given, by him, or by his successor … The head of the prison administration, to whom I wrote, a liberal, advised me to come on January first, when the prison bosses are resting after the holiday …”
They arrive at the station very early, Luria is afraid of being late for a departure he has been looking forward to for such a long time. “Ever since they let me out,” he remarks, as he and Oleg pace up and down in the station hall.
He laughs softly: “No, it’s not that I wanted to go back to jail. Just to return there as a free man, to figure out how threescore men could remain standing there for long hours in a cell four by twelve feet, without a breath of air. Yes, just to see that cell …”
He breaks off, embarrassed at having inflicted this past life from the camps on Oleg. “Let’s go out. Maybe the train’s already there …”
The platform is deserted and there surely will be few passengers. Who would want to spend New Year’s
Eve in a railroad car?
“Why not tell me about your Catherine? Where have you got to in her adventures?”
Oleg sighs: “Sadly, Catherine has left me. Serious aesthetic differences with my producer.”
“So her trip with Lanskoy has been scrapped? I was hoping you might find a way—on film—of letting them escape to Italy …”
“But that would have been even more fanciful than the regiments of guardsmen parading through her alcove. Lanskoy died and Catherine quickly found consolation in the arms of Yermolov … When you’re sitting on the throne do you really want to escape?”
On the opposite platform a train has arrived from the North and is spilling out its stream of passengers. Old friends reunited, relatives calling out to one another, suitcases put down in the snow and, above all, the joy of a festive dinner in prospect …
Luria smiles: “At a certain moment all the tsars wanted to escape. Take Ivan the Terrible … People picture him clinging to the Kremlin like a burr to a dog’s coat. Wrong! In the first place, he wants to move the capital a long way from Moscow, to Vologda—just where that train has come from. Then he runs away to a monastery, refusing to govern. And ultimately he’s obsessed with the idea of marrying the queen of England and settling in London. The diplomatic moves made in this direction are well known. And then there’s Peter the Great, who spends half his reign abroad …”
“That couldn’t be said of Catherine. She never really left Russia and clung to her scepter with both hands …”
“Well, that, Oleg, was because she frequently nearly lost it. If I try to snatch your bag from you, you’re instinctively going to tighten your grip. Catherine has the same reflex … But the throne weighed heavily on her. Hence her reforms for redistributing the ruler’s load. And also those favorites. Yes, yes. They were there to relieve her of part of the burden. After Lanskoy’s death she withdraws—for long months. That, too, was a way of running away …”
“Not everyone had this urge toward renunciation. When Paul the First is killed, and the murderers are still in the palace, his spouse bellows in her maternal tongue: ‘Ich will regieren!’ Yes, she’s eager to reign.”
“Those who’ve once tasted of this fruit become much more inclined to hold back. When Peter the Third is driven out by Catherine, he asks only to be allowed to leave, his violin under his arm and his dog at his heels. And Catherine’s grandson, Alexander the First. How many times did he not curse his responsibility as an autocrat! He stages his own death and goes on the run disguised as a peasant. A legend? Perhaps … But it says a good deal about the state of mind that has always prevailed in Russia. Alexander the Second wanted to abdicate after giving the Russians their constitution. And he would have done so if he’d not died in a bomb attack. And Nicholas the Second? They’ve told us thousands of times how powerful the Bolshevik revolutionaries were. Bullshit! In February 1917 the tsar was at the head of an army of fifteen million soldiers who believed he was God … At that level of power, I believe an irresistible desire to disappear must arise, to be nothing after having been everything. If you don’t detect this desire in Catherine, you’ve not understood her. People don’t understand that she was a woman who had come close to the limit of what life can offer in terms of power, glory, pleasure … Yes, everything. And this everything suddenly seems so incomplete, compared with … how did you put it? A snowy morning, a woman walking along beside the Baltic … But the cinema is interested in History on a grand scale and not in such daydreaming, wouldn’t you say?”
The train comes in at a slow, muffled pace, as if the rails, covered in thick snowflakes, were muting the clatter of the wheels. The passengers scattered across the platform are few, adrift in this last night of the year.
Oleg goes with Luria to his car, climbs in, puts his suitcase on the luggage rack. Back down on the platform he sees a face smiling through the window, a hand gesture: “Don’t wait for the train to leave!” Luria’s features have a strangely youthful look.
In the subway Oleg thinks over their conversation: a snowy morning, a woman walking along beside the sea … He guesses that Luria, too, is driven by an old dream: tomorrow he will walk out of the prison, stroll along snow-covered alleys in a town drowsy after a night of celebration—a stranger exploring another life.
Without the bustle of all the filming it seems as if time has come to a halt. Early in January, after the days of holiday, life runs out of steam and the empty hours restore Oleg to himself. He decides to watch his series under the conditions of an ordinary viewer: an armchair, a drink, a healthy desire to be entertained …
A bad start! In a scene from the Russo-Turkish war, to save money, the same actors sometimes appear as Turks, sometimes as Catherine’s brave warriors. There is a lapse that gives him a shock: one of the Turks, now a Russian, has forgotten to change his boots! Oh well, he’s only in shot for a second … On the other hand that janissary’s eye as he goes in to the attack, high as a kite on opium, excellent! And Zara’s not bad, either, especially when she gives up squinting languidly, trying to look like a sex symbol.
Oleg is surprised to find he doesn’t altogether dislike the series. Catherine’s journey to the Crimea in 1787 is almost a triumph. Especially if you think that to film a convoy of eighty barges all he had available was two launches hastily decorated and gilded! The illusion is convincing: veritable floating palaces, three thousand passengers, musicians, banquets, riverbanks covered in “Potemkin villages” and lit up by fireworks. On board, the fine flower of Europe: the inevitable prince de Ligne, the French, English, and Austrian ambassadors, the wretched king of Poland, Poniatowski, Emperor Joseph II of Austria … The whole vast public relations campaign—“Catherine II, Semiramis of the North, the Scythian Cleopatra, the liberal tsarina, heiress of the Enlightenment, quoting Voltaire and Diderot amid the steppes of the Khanate of the Tatars!” The triumph of Europe over Asia, of science over ignorance, of humanism over barbarism, of Reason over superstition and so on. All this within the exquisitely delicate setting of a salon: the guests exchanging the latest news from Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, amusing themselves with rhyming verse, their gluttony satisfied thanks to an endless stream of cooks; they indulge in escapades and make picturesque discoveries on trips ashore, like that of the three Tatar women who had removed their veils and were splashing one another in a stream and whom the prince de Ligne and Joseph II spied hiding in a bush. “Mahomet was right to impose the veil on them,” observes the prince, noting these naiads’ meager charms …
Oleg smiles—the viewers will guffaw at the sight of the three formidably mustached ugly ducklings. The whole narrative aims only to provide such moments of laughter, relief, excitement, and fear, and, then again, of mild relaxation, for this is like the tales in the Thousand and One Nights, comic, cruel, bawdy, repetitive in its countless adventures … In the end, much like the history of mankind. So, Zhurbin was not wrong.
On the contrary, he’s completely wrong! For there is this scene Oleg managed to add: Catherine and her guests are strolling through an oriental market, dazzled by the variety of colors, deafened by all the languages that match them, elated by the sunlight. The tsarina pauses—amid the vivid abundance of spices, fruits, and fabrics, one particular merchant’s display is modest: lace that resembles the fronds of hoarfrost you see on windowpanes in the depths of winter. A man and his adolescent daughter offer the tsarina collars, table mats, headdresses … they speak Italian. Catherine thanks them, moves swiftly on.
The sequence lasts ten seconds. Oleg is certain that not one viewer will have grasped the point of it. For the journey to the Crimea, three years after Lanskoy’s death, marks a new stage. Catherine has forgotten their plan of escape. She is once more living in the present, in a mood of affirmation, of triumph. Europe has been seduced, Turkey beaten, and the chaos of Russia brought to heel. And the young favorite, Mamonov, is evidently naively in love with his sovereign. This visit to the Crimea is an apotheosis! Suddenly, this appearance of th
e Italians is a reminder of those two riders leaving St. Petersburg one night in June …
“But that belongs in a different film,” Oleg says to himself. “Or rather, a different life. One she dreamed of but did not have time to live …”
He switches channels several times, notes that his own series is far from being the worst that this garbage dump has to offer. After watching some political discussions (one speaker throws his orange juice in his opponent’s face), a few game shows, sports matches, and other series, he hits upon a more serious program: filmmakers talking about the artistic revolution of recent years. One of them asserts: “My film, Little Vera, destroyed the USSR aesthetically. For the first time in seventy years the cinema showed the act of sex …”
Oleg switches off the television. So a pair of bare buttocks brought down the Soviet empire … What strikes him is not even the stupidity of such claims, but the fact that freedom is measured by the animal brutality a woman is subjected to. True enough, since Little Vera there has been progress. Zhurbin dreams of coupling Catherine with a horse …
That evening he spends several hours in his old room in the communal apartment. Among the drafts still lying around here and there, he finds a copy of the lines Catherine and Lanskoy read together. A text by Swedenborg, the thinker who fascinated them, a scholar, a mystic, and the son of that bellicose Sweden whose warlike shadow had often threatened St. Petersburg. The fragment was translated by Lanskoy: “I was walking in the streets of a familiar town and I knew perfectly well that I was wide awake, I saw everything around me with an ordinary gaze. But at the end of that walk I suddenly became aware that I was in an unknown town …”
These words allow Oleg to appreciate how naive he had been in the days when he was hoping to use them in his film: a June evening, the two lovers looking out over the Baltic and reading these pages from the Journal of Dreams. An “unknown” town giving rise to their plan for an escape.
A Woman Loved Page 19
