Garden of Venus

Rain, rain, dear Virgin,

Send snow and waters,

To moisten our vineyards

And our gardens….

The old woman who has the smallpox brings it in a nutshell. Her name is Agalia and she smells of soap and dried mint. Her own children have long left the house, but every one of her daughters sent for her when the grandchildren were old enough.

‘The best smallpox there is,’ Agalia assures the mothers and guests with a serious nod of her head and a smile of satisfaction. ‘Fresh as the morning bloom.’ There is a murmur of consent in the room, followed by sighs of relief. Maria Glavani has chosen well.

Dou-Dou giggles. Diamandi, most favourite of all her cousins, has poked her ribs, having pointed at Agalia’s grey hair. She’s so thin that her plait looks like a rat’s tail.

‘You are a happy one,’ Agalia says. ‘Good. Laughter is like sunshine. It makes everything grow. It makes people love you.’

The children are asked to present their veins. An ancient custom calls for four openings: on the forehead, on each arm and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross. Point to your thigh, Dou-Dou, Mana instructed her, up here. You don’t want a scar on your forehead. You don’t want anything to spoil your face.

Her cousins will all have the sign of the cross, but Sophie does as her mother had said. She turns around and points to the inside of her left thigh. Agalia hesitates for a split second. Then she rips the vein open and puts as much venom inside as she can fit on the head of her needle. ‘It won’t hurt,’ she mutters, but it does.

Sophie watches Agalia’s hands as the old woman takes an empty shell and places it on the wound. Bony hands with freckles, the skin paper thin. Watches as she binds it carefully with a clean strip of cloth.

One by one the children’s veins are opened and the venom is put inside while the mothers and the neighbours watch. Sophie saw a few frowns when she did not present her forehead and her arms to be pierced, but her mother’s laughter and the plates she fills with her best stew have lightened the mood. The women eat with delight, praising the softness of the lamb, the fragrance of the sauce. Maria Glavani is an excellent cook.

There will be singing and dancing, and secrets will be whispered in low voices so that the children would not hear them. In the courtyard, under the olive tree, the women will drink the young wine and laugh until their throats are hoarse. Mana will sing for them and they will dance, bodies swooning to the rhythm of the clapping hands.

The children will play together for the rest of the day, play hide and seek, and tag, chase each other until their mothers tell them to stop. Too much running around could upset the bindings. Seven days will pass and nothing will happen. On the eighth they’ll all come down with a fever.

‘Diamandi is sick already,’ Mana whispers. ‘And Costa and Attis.’

For two days Sophie stays in bed, like all the other children, her fever rising and falling, her head pounding. Mana, smelling of lemon blossom and laurel oil, wipes her forehead with a wet cloth. Cool and dripping with water which flows down her forehead and sinks into her pillow.

Mana sings to her, funny songs in which goats wish to become camels and flies envy the eagles in the sky. Mana’s cool hand on her forehead is an invitation to sleep. A tiny dab of the balm of Mecca on her finger, she rubs around the smallpox wound. It will keep her Dou-Dou beautiful, she says. Her epilda. Her hope for the future. Her only hope.

Thomas

Berlin, Doctor Thomas Lafleur thought, was a grim city, in spite of the profusion of oil lamps swinging on chains, illuminating small circles of the street below. The aftermath of the armies treading through these lands might account for some of this grimness, but Thomas liked to reflect on the universal human capacity for creating misery. He did not assume America would free him from the disgust he felt with the human race, but at least it would give him a chance.

‘Please hurry,’ Ignacy’s letter said, ‘my dear Thomas. The Art as we have learnt it serving the Great Man is unsurpassed here. I need you badly, and so does my new patient. America can wait. I cannot agree it will be such a Great Deliverance as you are trying to convince me, for Human Nature is the same everywhere. To me it looks more like a Great Escape. Graf von Haefen is sending his fastest carriage, so you can judge for yourself how much you are needed here.’

The mention of the fee he could charge for the operation, 50 louis d’or (and more if what I see is any indication Ignacy wrote), has been enough to make Dr Thomas Lafleur subject his body to the torture of travel. Like his colleagues, he may have saved thousands of lives on the battlefields of Europe, but his rewards had been meagre. A small pension of three thousand francs, a position at la Charité, a few anatomical demonstrations, a few lectures at the Val de Grace.

‘Sometimes I think I have dreamt all this,’ he had often told Ignacy. ‘Borodino, Berezina, Kowno, Waterloo. As if it were nothing but a mirage.’

Anticipating Thomas’s wishes, Ignacy had found him simple lodgings in Old Berlin, on Rosenstrasse, two rooms: a bedroom and a small parlour that could easily serve as his study. Frau Schmidt offered services of a maid, breakfast in the morning, and swore that the room would be kept warm if the French doctor were kept longer with his patient. ‘Another of your hiding holes,’ Ignacy had called it, this friend whose relentless lupine energy in the months of the Russian campaign Thomas had envied.

That the rooms looked poor and bare, with their simple poplar furniture and narrow bed, did not bother Thomas. After being tossed around and jolted in the black box of Graf von Haefen’s carriage, he was ready to welcome any place that did not move. Besides he had been an army surgeon long enough not to mind.

Sophie

Diamandi’s skin is as smooth as a fresh fig. ‘Catch me,’ she cries to him and reaches for the first branches of the oak tree at the edge of the meadow where the sheep graze. He is still standing, unsure of what he should do. After all, she is but a girl with scabs on her knees. Thick scabs she likes to tear off, impatient for the new pink skin underneath. She is but a girl, even if she can swim like a fish and steer a kaiak better than many boys he could name.

Even if she can outrun him. Make him gasp for breath. Make him pant right behind her like a dog.

‘Catch me, Diamandi.’

He makes the first cautious step toward the tree, his tanned hands reach toward the lowest of the branches. Then there is a snap of a twig. A curse. The sound of a body heaving up, pushing through the leaves. She is halfway up already where the branches are thinner, her hands grabbing, testing their strength. ‘Like a squirrel,’ Mana has said, in a voice half angry and half approving. A squirrel is agile and cheeky. Digs out bulbs and cuts the stems of flowers. A squirrel mocks the fat tabby who stalks it in hope of a skirmish.

From the top of the tree Bursa looks small and forlorn. Even the big houses of the rich seem insignificant, their gardens but patches of greenery, really no different to her mother’s small kitchen garden. The garden where the flowers are only allowed on the edges, for the soil is too valuable for ornaments.

‘Come on, Diamandi.’

He is right behind her, and gaining speed. His body is wiry and strong. Stronger than hers, even if not that fast. Her cousin is a ferryman and a shepherd. He is older by seven months, fourteen already, while she is still only thirteen and has not yet bled like a woman.

He wrestles with other boys, pins them to the ground, breathes in their faces until they squirm. His eyes are flashing with victory. He will not let her win that easily. He will hold her down, if he has to.

‘Dou-Dou!’

There is pleading in his voice and the promise of tenderness.

‘Dou-Dou!’

She stops right before reaching to the thinnest of the top branches that could still sustain her weight. She waits until Diamandi comes right behind her and orders her to climb down. ‘Right this minute,’ he says and his hand rests on her behind. Just for a moment, for a split second, but enough to make her skin hot and tingly.

‘You are crazy. Your mother would scratch my eyes out if anything happened to you.’

‘Then let’s see who can climb down first,’ she says.

She can feel his eyes on her as she climbs down. A tricky old tree. But she knows which of the branches are rotten through and would not support her. She trusts her strong hands. Her legs can wrap themselves around a branch and hold her. She does not mind the scratches on her skin. The thin trails of blood, the bruises. ‘A bit of pain always sweetens the pleasure,’ Mana says, laughing, her white teeth even and small. Her father’s eyes narrow at such moments. His fingers drum on the edge of the table, a funny rhythm, a staccato of sounds that end as suddenly as they started. There is something heavy in the air, a promise of a storm. She has often heard that her father is a jealous man, and that her mother gets nothing more than what is her due.

‘You are not to do it ever again,’ Diamandi says. What a voice he has, this boy-man. Pretending to be angry and yet wanting her to defy him. Daring her to shake her head and laugh in his face. Daring her to tell him he is nothing but a boy.

He has jumped off the last branch and is now holding her down. His hands are cool and dry. There is a smell of dried grass around him and of fresh milk. She wriggles away.

To this lithe, olive-skinned boy she is a mystery, the half-wild creature of his dreams. The wind is now cool against her cheeks. ‘I’ll race you,’ she cries and runs until, by the olive grove, he pulls her down onto the soft grass, kisses her lips and pushes his tongue through her teeth. The air is again sweet with blossoms, moist with the sea, and she is shivering.

‘I love you more than my own soul,’ he whispers, and for now she believes him.

Rosalia

Two tall German grooms who had brought the big empire bed trimmed with white satin asked where Rosalia wanted it. ‘By the wall,’ she said and pointed to the place far enough from the windows so that the light would not disturb the invalid. The grooms nodded and lifted the bed again. They had already removed the Persian carpets and, once the bed was in place, they would hang a thick curtain of garnet velvet that could be drawn across the room.

Countess Potocka was resting, waiting for the necessary transformations of the grand salon. (The Blue Room suggested by the Graf had proved too draughty.) In the afternoon light, her pallor was turning ashen. Her eyes, wide, liquid and filled with pain, followed Rosalia as she placed a bowl of fresh figs by the makeshift bedside. The countess reached and touched Rosalia’s hand.

‘Merci, ma fleur,’ she whispered.

Graf von Haefen had sent basketfuls of delicacies from his Potsdam estate; figs, pineapples, oranges from his greenhouses, fish from his ponds, venison from his forests. ‘Which Madame won’t even try,’ Marusya had said. Rosalia had to admit that flowers would please her mistress better. Roses in particular and orchids.

Only a few days before, at a roadside inn, the countess still had enough strength to make a few long-awaited decisions about Sophievka, her beloved garden right outside Uman. Since Dr Horn’s insistence that surgery alone could stop the haemorrhaging, there was no more talk of moving to the Uman palace for the summer (another disappointment that had to be endured). But the countess asked Rosalia to copy the drawings of the mountain ash that she wanted her chief gardener to plant in the spring. Sturdy and resistant, I am assured it will withstand most severe frosts, the countess dictated. A bed of purple irises, a symbol of a great orator and a great leader, was to be planted around the marble bust of Prince Joseph Poniatowski. New paths were to be charted. Make them lead to a vista, or a building. Otherwise a wanderer would turn back in disappointment. The giant oak by the river was not to be touched. Don’t trim the branches, a human hand has no right to correct such beauty. An oak once wounded, loses its primal force and will always grow slowly.