Eva Stachniak - Garden of Venus

‘Of course, by all means, you should consult another doctor,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m not God.’

‘But Thomas,’ Ignacy’s face was red, either with exertion or embarrassment, he couldn’t tell. ‘Are you that sure?’

From the corner of his eye he could see Rosalia lean forward as if she wanted to defend him. A thought flashed through his mind: I wonder why she is not married.

‘Yes,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m that sure.’

He had to repeat the same words a few minutes later when the Potocki coachman drove them through the Berlin streets, swearing at the horses in either Russian or Ukrainian, Thomas couldn’t tell.

‘I’m not saying you should have operated, Thomas, but you should’ve given her hope,’ Ignacy said with an impatient gesture.

‘I didn’t think she wanted false hope. And I don’t believe in lying.’

‘This is but one way of looking at it, my truth-loving friend,’ Ignacy said, obviously vexed. He was breathing with difficulty. ‘Now, she will let some charlatan take advantage of her.’

‘That I cannot stop,’ Thomas said, preparing for a long tirade, but nothing else followed.

They kept silent until the carriage reached Ignacy’s home. Ignacy alighted but did not continue his reproaches. He didn’t wish him good day either. Thomas watched until his friend’s ample figure disappeared behind the front door. Disappointed. There would be no influence in the Russian court for him now, Thomas thought not without some malice.

As the Potocki’s carriage rolled on the cobblestones toward Rosenstrasse, Thomas tried to talk to the coachman and find out where he was from, a task rendered difficult by the fact that they only had a few French and German words in common. His name was Pietka and he was a Cossack.

‘Zaporozhian,’ he said with pride. The skin encircling his eyes had a sallow tint. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the street. ‘No good. No life.’

Thomas would have liked to learn what a Cossack considered life, but Pietka’s French ended there. As he spat onto the ground, his teeth, Thomas noticed, were black with decay.

‘Uman,’ Pietka said. ‘Beautiful. Doctor know where?’

‘Poland,’ Thomas asked. ‘Russia?’ He was trying to recall what Ignacy had explained so often. The shifting borders of the east. The changing of hands, loyalties, the trajectories of hope and despair. Ukraine, once the easternmost Polish province, now part of the Russian Empire. Poland no longer on the map of Europe, partitioned by her neighbours. Who did this Cossack side with?

‘Ukraine?’ he said now. The name caused a vigorous nod of Pietka’s head and a torrent of words, fleeting, like a melody. He must have touched on something he was not aware of. He did not know what to say next.

When Thomas made his first step toward Frau Schmidt’s pension, the Cossack turned to him and said, ‘People here. No heart!’ He cracked his whip and was gone.

You have to make him jealous, Mana has said. That’s why a man would want to keep you; to stop others from having you.

She tells her internuncio of a man who lives across the street and who stares at her every day. An Armenian banker, millionaire and the director of the Padishah’s mint. He clicks his tongue at her. He has sent his servant to her three times already. If she agrees to come to him, he would give her a purse filled with cekins.

‘What did you say to that,’ he asks.

‘That my master takes good care of me.’

But the man is insistent. Every time he catches her eye, he shows her something new to tempt her. A ruby as big as a nut. A diamond that glitters in the sun like the stars in heaven.

‘And you didn’t take it?’ the internuncio asks.

She shakes her head and says that nothing on this earth, no diamond, no ruby, no sapphire would ever make her turn away from her beloved master.

‘You shameless liar,’ the internuncio says and pinches her cheeks. ‘Confess right away. You are waiting for me to leave.’

‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘he has parted the folds of his anteri and pulled out his own jewel.’

‘How big was it,’ the internuncio asks, and she whispers right into his ear that it was big enough to bring Saint Mary Magdalene to fall again.

His ensembles are embroidered with silver or gold threads. She likes the feel of velvet, the thin cambric of his shirts. He wants her to walk around the room barefoot. Sometimes he asks her to put her feet on a pillow for he likes to touch her toes.

He tells her strange and wonderful things. Tells her of that other Greece, the Greece he calls the land of wisdom and true culture. In that other Greece, men possessed true nobility of spirit. They were heroes and valiant warriors, their bodies as perfect as their minds and hearts. He also tells her about the women he calls haetteras, women so wise that the famous philosophers thronged to see them.

‘It is the art of conversation, my Dou-Dou, that distinguishes common souls from people of quality. Every woman knows how to spread her legs, but not everyone has learnt how not to bore.’

She listens to his every word.

The Greek women of today, he tells her, are but pale replicas of these other women, Lais and Phryne, women of quick minds and beauty seasoned with wisdom and refinement. He tells her that his heart bleeds when he thinks of modern Greeks; slaves, their hearts cowardly, unworthy of the glory of their ancestors.

How, he asks her, can a handful of lazy Turks keep with pistols and daggers the descendants of the ancient race who bore Homer and Scio in submission?

How could the descendants of such a noble race have sunk to the level of thieves and whores? He has been to miserable Greek villages littered with fragments of ancient pillars that once adorned an ancient temple. The peasants shamefully hide these traces of the past glory, as relics of pagan rites they wish no part of. In one of these villages, he tells her, he once saw a piece of white marble that bore the inscription: C. MARCIVS. MARSVS/V. F. SIBI. ET. SVIS. Covered with mud and manure it paved an ignorant peasant’s barn.

Had he not been taught to admire Grecian courage, wisdom, and talents, he might look upon the meanness of her race with less emotion. The victors from Marathon, Salamis, Platea, he says in an accusing voice, while his hand pats her buttocks, cringe at the feet of their Turkish masters. He tells her how, at the Isthmean Games, Titus Quinctius announced to the Greeks that they were free, but that was nothing but a ruse—a trap into which they all fell when they began shouting for joy. For the true freeman needs no trumpet to declare that he is free. His looks, his expression are the heralds of his own independence.

‘Does your little head understand any of this, Dou-Dou?’

He tells her that when beautiful Lais moved from her native Sicily to Greece, princes, lords, speakers, philosophers, all rushed to see and admire her. But then a few common women, jealous of her beauty, murdered her in the temple of Aphrodite, forty years before the birth of Christ.

She thinks about it for a while. About jealousy that can kill. About a knife plunged into a woman’s heart.

‘The art of conversation,’ he says, ‘is the most powerful of arts. It alone can open the doors of palaces.’

‘What did they talk about, these ancient haetteras .’

‘Philosophy, art, literature. They enjoyed exchanging arguments, civilised dispute. Things, my little Dou-Dou, you have no idea of and never will. Things far too complicated for you.’

‘Tell me,’ she asks.

‘Tell you what,’ he laughs at her eagerness, but he is not displeased. Clearing his throat he says: ‘La Mettrie contends that all we imagine comes from our senses: no senses, no thoughts; a few sensations of the body—a few notions in the mind. Do you understand?’