Читать книгу Dancing with Kings - Eva Stachniak - Страница 12

In the room Frau Kohl has chosen for her, on account of its closeness to the grand salon, Rosalia took out her dresses from the travelling trunk, gave each a vigorous shake, and put them in the wardrobe which smelled of varnish. That’s also where she placed her dark grey overcoat, but even then the wardrobe was only half filled. The three hats and two bonnets went on the top shelf. Her petticoats and chemises filled only one of the five drawers.

‘An operation,’ the countess had said, ‘cannot be on a Tuesday.’

‘If there is an operation,’ Dr Bolecki had said. The examination had been a short one, the smile on his face forced.

From the bottom of the trunk Rosalia took out the miniatures of her parents, Jakub and Maria Romanowicz, and placed them on the small table beside her bed. The silver-framed miniatures had been painted right before the Kościuszko Insurrection of 1794 and the final defeat, before the day the word Poland had been erased from the map of Europe. The painter was not skilled. The expression of the two pairs of eyes were identical, as if mere copies of each other. Both her parents were looking ahead with melancholy, as if they could already see the future.

‘It is that Tuesday is a bad day,’ the countess had said.

‘Will it hurt much,’ Olga asked. The way she bit her lower lip touched Rosalia more than the sobs she sometimes heard at night; a sign that Olga too feared the worst. Perhaps because the sobbing was invisible.

In the miniature her father was in the Kościuszko uniform, a white peasant sukmana, a cravat tied in a bow under his chin, a symbol of Equality and Freedom for all Poles. His face was clean-shaven and, like Kościuszko, he was not wearing a wig. Her mother’s black hair was parted in the middle. It encircled her white, porcelain face and dissolved into the background. A string of pearls was woven in her hair and she was holding a fan with which she covered her chest. Rosalia remembered that fan. When it was flicked open, Artemis appeared. The goddess with a leopard’s skin on her shoulders, its limp paws hanging behind her like a train. Where was it now? Lost in one of their many moves, forgotten perhaps in one of the trunks Aunt Antonia was keeping for her in the dusty attic in Zierniki.

You have already turned twenty-six, Rosalia, and I shall never believe you are foolish enough to trust your mother’s misguided hopes. Did she really think that being Count Potocki’s godchild would give her some special rights? That it would make the count’s wife take special care of her orphan? Sometimes I think it best your dear father had not lived to see this.

Two years before, on such an October night as this one, Rosalia had listened as her mother moved about her bedroom. Drawers opened and closed; the floorboards creaked. The smell of burning paper wafted through the doors. For a moment it seemed that she could hear sobs but, when she rose from her bed and listened, what she took for crying turned out to be the sound of wind in the chimney.

‘The matter has to be treated most seriously, Madame Romanowicz,’ the surgeon said. He looked pale in his black suit and drops of perspiration appeared on his forehead. He wiped them off with a chequered handkerchief. ‘Most seriously, Madame,’ he repeated. Her mother’s eyes had a vacant look Rosalia didn’t like. The examination had been short. The breast was swollen, the tumour had grown to the size of a plum. Time had already been lost, too much time. The surgeon spoke of women who withdrew from the world suffering only a trusted nurse to come and wash the fetid running sores as their breasts were eaten away, drowning in filth.

He would not reveal the date of the operation. He never did. All he could do was to offer a warning of two hours at the most, for anything longer would only be the source of undue agitation. He would need old linen, charpie, old undergarments freshly laundered. Soft. An old armchair. No carpet. Nothing that could be splattered with blood and would be hard to wash. ‘But first, Madame Romanowicz will have to sign a permission. This is of utmost importance. Without it I cannot proceed.’

The note from the surgeon came as they were sitting down to breakfast. Today at ten o’clock. The maid brought it on a tray, perched against the coffee pot.

‘I’ve made my peace with God. There is nothing else for you to do,’ Maman said. She had been to confession, she took communion and asked for extreme unction. Seeing the alarm in Rosalia’s eyes, she assured her that the last rites had been known to heal the sick.

She won’t die, Rosalia repeated to herself, registering the progress of fear. In Zierniki, in winter, she had seen ducks imprisoned by ice in the pond. At first they were still able to move, until the ice thickened and refused to crack. Then to free them, the grooms had to hack at the ice with an axe and take the birds to the warm kitchen to thaw.

I won’t let her, she repeated over and over again. I won’t.

When the doctor arrived with three assistants, all dressed in black, Maman emerged from her room in a light batiste nightdress. If she were afraid, Rosalia could not see it. Her voice was steady and her eyes dry.

‘I want all the women to leave,’ the surgeon said. The maid scurried in the direction of the kitchen and closed the door. Her muffled sobs reached them a moment later.

‘I’m a soldier’s daughter,’ Rosalia said. ‘Let me stay.’

The surgeon glared at her as if she were creating difficulties, but she met his eyes without flinching.

‘If you faint, no one will have the time to attend you,’ he said sharply.

‘I won’t faint,’ she replied. Maman looked at her with relief.

Bare of furniture, with just the armchair in the middle covered with three white, freshly laundered sheets, the parlour looked bigger and far too bright. The wallpaper was darker where the picture and the oval mirror had hung. The ceiling, Rosalia saw, needed a fresh coat of paint. Her mother’s hand when she held it was cold and dry but then, without warning, perspiration broke out.

‘When you were giving birth, Madame,’ the surgeon asked. ‘Did you scream?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Then I want you to scream – scream as much as you can.’

The operation was performed in absolute silence. The doctor seated Maman in the armchair, gave her a glass of wine cordial to drink, and covered her face with a cambric handkerchief. Then he motioned to the tallest assistant who placed a pillow under her head and positioned himself behind. The other two assistants silently came to stand on each side of the armchair, holding her arms. Her mother motioned to them that it was not necessary, but when, through the fine mesh of the handkerchief, she saw the glitter of steel she tried to stand up. The men held her so fast that she flinched.

Nothing, no past memory of love would ever equal this moment when Rosalia could feel her mother’s fingers clutch hers like clamps and saw her knuckles becoming white. It did not seem odd that her own body registered her mother’s pain. That this pain united them, sealed them to each other. That together, she with a clear eye and her mother through the mesh of her handkerchief, they watched as the surgeon made the sign of incision in the air, with a straight line from top to bottom of the breast, a cross and a circle. That they shuddered together when the blade cut horizontally, nearly in the direction of the rib, a little below the nipple. That the scream that came, came from them both.

The two assistants on either side pressed their fingers on the arteries, and the surgeon began the cleaning, his hand separating the tumour from the skin and muscles, cutting off the cancerous tissue. Blood splattered his hands and arms. There were a few drops of it on his face. When Rosalia heard the blade scraping the breast bone, she could feel her mother’s hand loosening her grip. Maman had fainted and for a moment something close to panic overtook her until she reminded herself that, unconscious, her mother was free from pain.

The procedure took twenty minutes. There were operations that could be performed well and fast, but this was not one of them. The whole of the diseased structure had to be removed, the surgeon said afterwards, and he could not afford to miss anything. ‘I can amputate in under two minutes,’ he said. ‘But with this, no half measures will do. If the reoccurrence of the mischief is to be prevented…’

Rosalia was so hopeful then. The surgeon assured her that the operation had gone well and showed her how to dress the wound, applying a large, thick compress of charpie to the sutures and binding it on with a flannel roller. It didn’t take long for blood to appear through all the bandages. Maman’s face had lost all its colour and her limbs all life. The assistants carried her to her bed, and Rosalia was told to change her dressings every two hours and watch for signs of infection, for the weakening of the body.

At midnight her mother opened her eyes, but she did not seem to know where she was.

‘He is standing by the window,’ she kept saying.

‘Who is?’ Rosalia asked. All she wanted was to throw herself into her mother’s arms, to hide her face in her breasts the way she did when she was a child. Instead she could still hear the knife scraping against the bones.

‘He is pointing at his heart.’

Her lips were parched and she drank a few sips of water. ‘I am going with him,’ she said. ‘I have to.’

Rosalia tried to quiet her. The surgeon had assured her the operation was a success. The cancer was removed, all of it. ‘You must be strong, Maman,’ she pleaded. ‘You cannot leave me alone. You cannot leave your only child.’

‘I have to go,’ her mother whispered and closed her eyes. ‘He is waiting for me. He will take me away.’

Seeing that the blood had penetrated the dressing again, Rosalia replaced it with a fresh one. Maman did not open her eyes, but she no longer seemed in pain. Perhaps, Rosalia thought, the crisis had passed. She promised herself not to fall asleep, but the silence and her mother’s calm, soft breaths proved too much. When she woke up, startled, it was still dark. The windowpanes were covered with the white, intricate patterns she loved to watch in Zierniki where the windows froze for most of the winter. Beautiful white ferns, branches of trees with spiked leaves, flowers of tiny petals that reminded her of figures her father drew to amuse her: pentagons, hexagons, octagons.

The room was silent and still. Death she thought was like that. A moment of loss too profound to comprehend. A moment in which love fuses with pain. A moment from which there is no now and no future. Nothing but memories of the past, crumbling and fading with time.

She didn’t have to touch Maman’s face to know she was dead.

Just as she did on winter days in Zierniki, Rosalia breathed at the windowpane. When the ice petals melted, she peered through the hole and saw a boy pass by. He was carrying a lantern carved out of a turnip, slits in its side let out enough light for him to see where he was going.

There were a few other objects in Rosalia’s travelling chest but these would remain unpacked, a testimony to the temporary nature of her stay in this Berlin palace: a small wooden star she had found among her mother’s things; her father’s snuffbox with the Rights of Man engraved on the lid; a black silhouette of Kościuszko’s profile and three sketches of Napoleon in a wreath of oak leaves – her father’s heroes.

These treasures Rosalia kept locked in a mahogany box, underneath her clothes in the trunk. It was a flimsy hiding place. Any of the servant girls might want to go through her things, try on her dresses or petticoats. Smell her rosewater or jasmine oil and dab a few drops on her brow. In St Petersburg handkerchiefs and sheets of paper disappeared routinely. The paper was what the cook used to curl her hair with. ‘If it wasn’t meant to be taken, it wouldn’t be lying around,’ Rosalia had heard Marusya mutter.

Her back hurt from lifting sacks of clothes, from helping the countess stand up. Taking off her shoes and her stockings, she walked about the room, until her aching feet were consoled by the smoothness of the carpet. If only Olga cared to help more, but some people were born to luxury and some were not. ‘It’s your own mother,’ Rosalia was often tempted to say, but never did.

Her most excellent bed, as Frau Kohl – the Graf’s housekeeper – had described it, did not help. It felt too big, too cold. Rosalia turned and tossed around, trying to warm up the clammy sheet, wondering if she should call for another eiderdown. There were noises outside her room; German words exchanged by the footmen; the sounds of doors opening and closing – the life of this palace, temporarily interrupted by their arrival. She recalled Marusya’s talking about strange noises in the maid’s room, like someone’s knocking on the windowpane, and complaining that the room smelled of mice. ‘Perhaps the Count has come for the Mistress,’ the cook had said.