Turgenev himself was entirely at home, however, as I discovered when, on entering Pauline’s villa, we found him taking a late cup of tea in her parlor. He stood, surprised to see us, and greeted us in impeccable French as Pauline tutted at him for being at his leisure with guests arriving. Mistaking him for Pauline’s husband, I greeted him as Monsieur Viardot, and he laughed, if a little ruefully, and corrected me.
Mademoiselle, he said, I am Ivan Turgenev, at your disposal.
Turgenev had already become the beautiful giant I would know him as for the rest of his life, his long white hair and beard giving him a mystical appearance, as if he were the last of a great race, and this mystique was added to by his strangely high voice, startling in a man of his size. He was dressed simply and elegantly in a dark suit and white shirt, as he would be, I would soon see, every day. The white beard, in particular, glowed, lighting his face; but much like Pauline’s, his eyes took you in, though his projected a calm, conquering kindness—of course you will love me, they seemed to say, and I will love you.
He saw my embarrassment at my mistake, and as Pauline introduced me—Lilliet Berne, may I present the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev—he deftly turned the conversation to my toilette, complimenting me on making such an elegant first appearance in their home, and then admired my general’s coat, even inquiring after the fur in my collar. But the sound of my old name had surprised me—now at least I knew whose name was on that paper—and with that, I understood why Pauline had not asked my name at her gate—she had simply greeted me as if we already knew each other, as had I. Nervous, tired, unsure of my French suddenly, with not one wit about me, I touched the collar—I had never once thought of the animal who’d given its life for the coat’s trim—and said, Lapinard? And he laughed, and as soon as he laughed, I knew I had mixed rabbit, lapin, and fox, renard, inventing a word and an animal by my mistake.
Ah, he said. La peinard? Or, better, you should be La Peinard. We should all be les peinards. I apparently already am, he said, gesturing to his teacup as Pauline continued mock-scowling at him and I smiled through my embarrassment. Please, he said, forgive my casual manners and be welcome here.
This pun, la peinard, if it meant anything, meant “the relaxed one,” and this did have the effect of putting me at ease—and Lapinard would become what he called me for as long as I knew him.
I then noticed a giant black pointer dog lying curled on the rug by the sofa. He raised himself up mistrustfully as we talked and fixed me with a glittering eye.
This is Pegasus, and he only loves women, Turgenev warned the tenor, as the dog rose and came over to us and the tenor reached out to pet him. All women except for Pauline, strangely, he added.
Pauline only laughed at this as Pegasus came to me and pushed his nose into my hand.
He has kissed your hand, see? Pauline said. Now you are made welcome as I never will be. Come with me, I’ll show you to your rooms.
And with that, she left her own house through the rear. The tenor and I looked to each other with a surprised smile and then followed her into the garden.
However interesting I had found it that Pauline was a woman composer, I found the mystery of the conjoined houses and lives, the apparent marriage à trois at the heart of this kingdom, even more fascinating as we passed through Pauline’s garden to the gate in her wall and then walked through to Turgenev’s villa from the back.
We climbed a set of stone stairs to a placid terrace lawn, where we found a fountain with a stone Nereid at her ease in the center, water playfully pouring down her face from the tiny dolphin perched on her head. Yellow and red leaves skated on the water’s surface, blown by the wind. We entered through the back door, as if we had been here all along and had only stepped out for the air.
Pauline moved here with much the same authority and ease Turgenev had shown in her parlor. We passed through the main salon, where three men cheerfully greeted us as they struggled to hang a long green velvet curtain across the middle of the room. There will be a performance here in your honor before dinner, Pauline said, as she led us by quickly, a playful smile on her face as we took the stairs.
We came to a stop in the upstairs hall, where our hostess directed each of us to rooms opposite each other with the faintest smile. Dinner will be served after the performance, across the way, she said. We will gather in the salon in approximately two hours. Please refresh yourself, and I will have tea sent up for you both if you’d like to take it here.
We thanked her; she smiled as she took her leave. The tenor stepped into his rooms and winked at me as he closed his door, as if we were fiancés to be kept separate before marriage. With that, to my surprise, I was left alone in the hall.
I went into my rooms and closed the door as well.
§
I’d not been alone once since being presented to the tenor at the end of his Il Trovatore, and the placid cheer I’d worn until now fell off me like a cape. No one to insist I speak to them, no need to remember who I was as I spoke, no need to feign pleasure or interest or knowledge of a language. The advantages to my new circumstances were still making their case to me, but the shock of losing the hopes I’d had from before my capture—my desire to set myself up with a little room, to find a teacher at the Conservatoire, and to wait and find my composer again in the spring—this had stayed trapped within me and still flew along my nerves, electric and unanswered, even as his example of my naïveté mocked me. Worse in some way than the future I’d never have was to contemplate the past I might have prevented.
I was going to bring you here to her before you left, the tenor had said so lightly. I could no longer ignore that little sentence. My escape, my time spent with the Comtesse, the Empress, the escape from Compiègne, all of it for nothing, then, if he told the truth—all of it for nothing, or for one thing. One man.
These rooms, like the rest of what I had seen, were nothing like I’d imagined. At first, I was puzzled to see there was no bed and then understood I was in the sitting room to a small suite. A fireplace glowed with a fire, newly set, blazing crisply. I went to warm myself at it and took in the rest of my surroundings—a dark wood writing desk and chair by one of the two windows and a bedroom with a dressing room, visible through a far doorway. Two green velvet chairs and a small couch kept watch over the fire, with small tables for I did not know what—all of it anticipated a kind of leisurely attitude I could not remember ever having taken toward my life.
The bedroom, set back from the sitting room, was very grand, the bed hidden under a canopy hung with thick velvet brocade drapes of a deeper green than the chairs. Across from the bed was a washstand and vanity with a petite chair and a tassel discretely dangling by the vanity mirror to ring for assistance. At this, I briefly felt the duty to watch out for the lady who would dress herself here until I reminded myself she would be me.
The trunks had already been delivered, set like little coffins in their place beside the dressing room’s armoire.
I found I waited to see if the door would open, the tenor bursting in with plans or demands, or if he would lock me in with a key Pauline had somehow provided him secretly. But the lock stayed silent.
I opened the door and looked out again into the hallway and the stairs, and then to the tenor’s door. The keyhole glowed with the late afternoon light—he was not even so much as watching me through it. I put my ear to the keyhole carefully—an eye might reflect light whereas an ear would not—and the faint murmur of his distant snore told me he was already asleep, taking a nap.
This was how much he believed he did not have to lock my door. And that I would stay as he rested.
I slipped carefully to the top of the stairs.
I was truly a guest, then. A guest of honor, no less, the welcome protégée of the celebrated tenor. Of course. Of course they would make a fuss over him, and of course they would make a fuss over me as well. The performance in our honor! Pauline was greeting me, greeting us both, with even more attention than t
he tenor had predicted, the tenor who seemed delighted at the prospect of joining her Haustheater and the newest endeavors of her famous family troupe. And this confused me—was he really here only to look after me? And yet, if so, why was his door still closed and he asleep?
I could walk out, go downstairs, at will. Ask to take my tea in the parlor.
Leave for the station.
I had already plotted one escape, done as Pauline led us through the garden to our rooms. I could claim exhaustion, stay in my room, and, as the performance began, leave for town with the emerald earrings and the rose pin and find a jeweler there I was sure would give me an excellent price, perhaps even better than in Paris, given the casinos. Between out-of-luck courtesans and suitors eager to impress, I was sure the jewelers here did a brisk trade. I could hire a carriage that might take me directly back to Paris that night, I was sure of it. With the tenor asleep, the temptation, tired as I was, was to leave for the jeweler’s now.
I could make an excuse, a need to shop for the evening’s event, or affect some eccentric desire to be fulfilled in the town beforehand. By the time the tenor woke, I could be on a train headed anywhere. Though for now there was only one place that mattered.
Still, even as it amused me to think of the Comtesse at the Café Anglais watching as some other woman, fresh from Baden-Baden and dressed in her earrings, walked across the room, I wondered how far I could go before I was stopped. Before the Comtesse discovered my betrayal, before the mechanism she had set in place caught me. To go now, provided I could stay hidden, would turn Paris into a lonely vigil, and me in it with a single task: hoping to see my composer sometime before the spring, otherwise waiting until then for the Bal Mabille to reopen. If I left now, all I would leave with would be my freedom, and only for as long as I remained far from Paris, far from all of France, Germany, Italy—and I was not sure this was enough.
The only real escape, it seemed, was to go through with this to the end.
The house began to fill with the sounds of scales being played on a piano and a woman singer’s voice warming up. I guessed she could only be Pauline.
I returned to my room and closed the door, locking it myself.
§
I opened one of the trunks, curious to see what had been brought from the avenue de l’Opéra and if any of it would be suitable for the evening’s performance. A fragrance of lavender and bay escaped, and I felt a pang of loneliness—this fragrance would always make me lonely. All had been carefully folded in papers and laid with sachets. A deck of cards sat on top, strange to me until I recognized it as the deck Doro and Lucy had used in our games.
I picked the deck up.
Had those two packed this, then? Where were they now?
The hardest part of service is that when you serve you are a custodian of something the master or mistress you serve cannot bear or they would do it and you would not be there. The cooking, the cleaning, the lighting of a fire. The taking off and putting on of clothes. Sometimes you served their loneliness or an exotic appetite, impossible or forbidden until your arrival. Whatever it is, ordinary or obscure, it becomes the center of your life, requiring all of you.
And you must bear it, this thing they cannot bear—and, in turn, bear what you become as you do so.
That first night on the avenue de l’Opéra so long ago, when I crept into the kitchen, lonely, hoping to surprise my maids at cards, I wanted to explain I was no lady to be waited on, even if the three of us were made to pretend it was so—that I was a servant, too. Yet when they let me sit and play, I knew they only humored me, and we played a lonely game. To receive the cards now told me they understood my meaning at last.
I gave the deck a little kiss and set it down on the writing desk.
This would make this easier to bear, but what exactly did I now bear? I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what it was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once. And why was he here, my tenor friend, and not in Paris? Why had he been trained around me this way and I around him? What did he serve that he also could not see?
I went to the window and opened the shutters to see the view. The sun had begun to set, the sky darkening. A stream gleamed silver in the distance, visible at the edge of the meadow that began past Turgenev’s garden wall, but his gardens were blue with shadow.
From here I could see how fine the garden was and the true size of it. The grounds extended well past the corner through which we’d passed—for watching the Nereid fountain as I’d approached, I’d missed the pond below it farther down the hill, lined with stone walls and speckled with golden drifts of new-fallen leaves and, here and there, water lilies. A few leaves still clung to the branches of the trees like tongues of flame to a fire that was almost out.
I no longer felt as if I were onstage in a play unknown to me—I knew this play—this opera—Il Trovatore. From the moment I had left on this journey with the tenor, I knew what Pauline’s letter to him had joked of as we arrived—I was his Leonora-to-be. He wanted me to sing her part opposite him; it was clearly the reason he’d had me brought to see him at the Théâtre-Italien. He had wanted this of me perhaps since he first met me. And I did want to sing it at last, just not to him as my trovatore. I would never sing it to him; I meant to keep the vow I made that night I first knew I would ever want to sing it. And yet this was precisely what he hoped for most. I was not his Leonora, I could never be, but for my own sake I would now need to be. And in the meantime, around us, the world seemed to take on the shape of the opera. Pauline for our Gypsy, and here a garden in which I could hope someday to see my lost love emerge from the trees and serenade me.
All was almost ready. All this lacked for was the composer, in a mask and cape, singing below my window, the tenor hidden and waiting to challenge him to a duel.
Our little tragedy.
If this were an opera, I knew, it would end with my being forced to play the role I had vowed not to play as the audience reflected on the hubris of my vow.
Victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat.
Before I could ever hope to fear that an opera role would control my life if I took it up, I feared this role already controlled me, choosing me before I chose it, as if the opera hid some god of the ancients inside it, determined to make me his plaything. This was no punishment, no price to be paid, this hand was not my mother’s God, nor her ghost, nor did it seem providential—the spiritual mechanisms I knew or feared previously were not engaged here. This was something else altogether, determined and intent on its own satisfactions.
Whatever the tenor wanted from me by way of making me his Leonora, on stage with him or in life, it seemed all of this was a mask for some other force now grinning out from behind him.
I had gotten more than Fate’s attention, then—I was its plaything.
It is a peculiar thing to reach this conclusion, that a god has taken your life in hand. The sensation is not what people might imagine; it is not magic, nor is it a haunting, nor is it a miracle—there’s no storm of roses, no whistle that can put a raging ocean to sleep, no figure in the mirror besides your own. Instead, the terms are stark. You may or may not leave with your life. You sense your world changed into a stage set for something done to teach only you. You do not feel mad, only very alone, for the scale of the event is so ridiculous no one else will believe you and so no one else will help you—and to say aloud what you are going through will sound like madness, and your god wants this. Your god wants you to be abandoned by all others, for your god has done this so he can be alone with you, and he is waiting.
But even then I knew, as puny as you are, your one consolation, should you be chosen by Fate, is that the god who chose you will feel the need to speak with you at the end.
No god teaches a lesson without this.
All of this, of course, is a prelude to some final transformation, one that begins in earnest once you push away thoughts of lessons and gods and th
eir desires, and tell yourself you are mad to believe it and thus place yourself the more firmly in its grasp. But this last I did not yet know, and so I told myself I was mad to believe any of it, to even think of it, and I opened the window as if, in doing so, I could let all of these thoughts out.
The wind came in instead, so fiercely that the fire guttered behind me and the wind and sudden smoke together conspired and brought more tears to my eyes, but this time I let them stay—the wind slammed the shutters against the walls and threatened to shatter the glass if I let go for even a moment. The noise was such that I feared someone would come to see what the matter was, and yet I hoped they would not, for now I gave in and fully wept. There was a pleasure to it, even to the wind blowing through my suite, the smoke, and the banging shutters—all of me, for a moment, aligned, was honest, an emotion and my reaction matched. This consoled me, and as I sank into it, I found the grief beneath it, submerged until now, some deeper colder current underneath.
The woods below beckoned. They looked as if they led all the way to those other woods—as if, were I to enter, I could follow them and emerge on the other side of that mountain in that other garden, that last night in Compiègne—where I could slip down the days between now and then as if they were the backstairs to the world and to time itself, where I might find my composer coming on his way here to my window. Drawn in by the same power that had put me here, until he stood, below my window, in a salute.
How we all want to be Leonora. To go to the garden and find the love we thought lost to us singing his way out of the dark, having survived the war.
How had Leonora done this, living on just a single memory of one love over the years while another suitor made his case to her daily there in her own castle? I had been braver in Paris, with my fantasies of returning to him at the Bal Mabille, but now, by the edge of the Black Forest, I foundered. I wanted to see him that very night. While I did not know how to leave this room, I did not know how to stay, either. I knew it would destroy me to go to him that night as I wanted to, uncertain even of finding him; but the thought of staying here and thus somehow fating him to be the one to come here and die at the tenor’s hands, sealing him into this strange game of destiny, wasn’t this sending him to his death? And my own?
The Queen of the Night Page 28
