They were carried over to a parked black van and thrown in with a dull grunt, the kind porters make when they’re lifting heavy trunks.
The minister made a gesture and the policemen stood back to let the car speed out. I had just enough time to see the minister lean back in the corner and pull his hat down over his eyes. I have never lost the impression of intense horror I felt at that sight.
CHAPTER 8
I HAD THOUGHT about trying to get myself into the minister’s house by posing as a French valet, a tutor, or a doctor. It was this final choice that prevailed. One of our members in the Swiss delegation recommended me to his superior, who, in all innocence, recommended me to Courilof. Every year when Courilof went to stay in his house in the Iles, and then to the Caucasus, he took a young doctor, preferably foreign, along with him.
I went to the embassy and, with my false passport and letters of recommendation, I managed to achieve my goal more quickly than the real Marcel Legrand might have done. I obtained a letter from the Swiss minister, who guaranteed I was politically sound; the same day, I went to the ministry. There I was received by a secretary who examined my papers and kept them; then he asked me to come back the next day, which I did.
And so there I was the next day, waiting.
Courilof quickly lumbered across the room to shake my hand. I was struck by how different his features appeared when seen close up, compared with how I remembered them. He seemed older, and his face, which in public was as impassive as a block of marble, now looked flabbier, more mottled, softer, made of whitish fat; he had dark circles under his eyes.
I had noticed, the day when we crossed paths near his house, the way he had looked me in the eye without appearing to actually see me, as if he were looking for something behind a glass wall. His forehead and ears seemed enormous. Throughout the few seconds our meeting lasted, I could feel his weary blue eyes staring at me. Later on, I was told that it was a tic of Alexander III, this serious way of staring at someone without blinking. Undoubtedly, the minister was imitating him. But most significantly, he looked as if he were obsessed with one particular idea; beneath his distracted, fixed gaze, it wasn’t fear that you felt, but rather annoyance and confusion.
He asked me a few questions, then asked if I could move into their house in the Iles the following Monday.
“I’ll be there for the month of June,” he said, “then in the Caucasus in autumn…”
I agreed. He gestured to the secretary, who accompanied me to the door. I left.
The following Monday, I was driven to the Iles. Courilof’s house was built at the very edge, in a place called La Fleche, which looked out over the entire coast of Finland; here, the setting sun shimmered all night long during the month of May, bathing everything in its brilliant silvery light. Thin birch trees and miniature firs grew in the spongy soil, full of dark, stagnant water. Never have I seen so many mosquitoes. In the evening, a whitish mist settled around the houses as thick clouds of them flew in from the marshes.
The houses in the Iles were very beautiful. Sometimes, a villa in Nice reminds me of Courilof’s villa, for it was built in the same Italian style, pompous and rococo, the stonework the colour of saffron with foundation walls painted sea green and adorned with great, bow-shaped balconies.
During the civil war, the entire villa was destroyed. I went back there once, I recall, during the 19 October battles against Youdenitch, when I was chief administrator of the army. Our Red Army was camping along the coast. I could find no trace of the house; it had been completely destroyed by the shells. It seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth; water had sprung up everywhere; it was virtually a pond, deep and calm, where you could hear the piercing buzz of those mosquitoes … Breathing in the smell ofthat water gave me a strange sensation.
I lived in that house for a while: it was me, Courilof’s son Ivan, who was ten years old, and his Swiss tutor, Froelich. The minister had been delayed by the Emperor. Then Courilof’s wife and daughter Ina (Irene Valerianovna) arrived, and finally the minister himself.
CHAPTER 9
VALERIAN ALEXANDROVITCH COURILOF arrived one night, quite late. I was already in bed. The sound of the car along the cobblestones in the courtyard woke me up.
I went over to the window. The servants were still holding the car door open as Courilof got out, helped by a secretary; he seemed to be having trouble walking and he crossed the courtyard with slow, heavy steps that pounded the ground. When he reached the stairs, he stopped, pointed to his luggage, and gave some orders I couldn’t make out. I watched him. At that point in time, I never grew weary of watching him … I think that fishermen who have waited patiently for a very long time at the river’s edge and finally feel their line bend and tremble in their hands, then reel in their salmon or sterlet, must have the same feeling as they contemplate their dazzling catch twitching and sparkling at their feet.
Courilof had been inside the house for a long time, yet I stood there for a long time, feverishly dreaming of the moment when I would see him dead by my hand.
That night, I didn’t go back to bed; I was reading when a servant came in.
“Come downstairs at once,” he said. “His Excellency isn’t well.”
I went down to the minister’s bedroom. As I got closer to the door, I heard a voice barely recognisable as Courilof’s, a kind of continuous cry, interspersed with groans and sighs: “My God! My God! My God!…”
“Hurry up,” the servant urged. “His Excellency is very bad.”
I went in. The room was in total disorder. I saw Courilof stretched out on his bed, completely naked; a candle lit up his fat, yellowish body. He was thrashing around from side to side, undoubtedly trying to find a position that wasn’t painful; but every movement caused him to cry out in anguish. When he saw me, he started to speak but suddenly a flood of dark vomit shot out of his mouth. I looked at his yellow cheekbones, the harsh circles under his narrowed eyes. He pointed to the region near his liver; his hand was shaking as he watched me, his large eyes wide open. I tried to examine it, but his abdominal wall was covered in fat; nevertheless, I noticed the abnormal thinness of his rib-cage and legs in contrast to his enormous stomach.
His wife, kneeling behind him, was holding his head in both hands.
“His liver?” I asked.
She nodded towards a syringe of morphine on the table that had been prepared for him.
“Professor Langenberg normally looks after His Excellency, but he’s away,” she murmured.
I injected the morphine and put hot compresses over the area around his liver. Courilof fell into a fitful sleep, interspersed with groans.
I kept changing the compresses for nearly an hour. He had stopped groaning, but sighed deeply every now and then. There was no hair at all on his body, but it was covered in a whitish fat, like wax. I noticed a little gold icon on his chest, hanging from his neck on a silk ribbon. The entire room—very large and dark, irregularly shaped, with dark green, almost black carpeting— was covered from top to bottom in images of the Virgin and saints, like a chapel. An enormous icon in a gold frame took up one entire corner of the room; it contained a statue of the Black Madonna—her hair was studded with gemstones, her face sorrowful and unattractive. The tapestries were lit up in places by little shimmering lights cast by the lamps in the icons; I counted three of them above the bed, lined up one on top of the other, in the folds of a billowing curtain.
His wife hadn’t moved; she continued holding his rigid, yellowish head ever so carefully, as if he were a sleeping child. I told her she should leave him, as he was unconscious. She didn’t reply, didn’t even seem to hear me, just clasped his tilted head even more tightly. He was breathing with difficulty, his mouth open and nostrils dilated, his wide pale eyes burning beneath his lowered eyelids.
“Valia … my love; Valia, my darling…” she whispered.
I watched her closely. She looked exhausted; her face, free of make-up, was the face of an old woman… but she mus
t have been beautiful once. She possessed an extraordinary mixture of the ridiculous and the pathetic. Her hair was arranged in little gold ringlets, like a child’s; her mouth, lined with deep, fine wrinkles, looked like the tiny cracks found on paintings. Circles around her eyes formed a kind of dark ring near the sockets; perhaps it was this that gave her such a deep, weary expression.
“Do you think he’s cold?” she murmured. “When he’s in pain like this, he can’t even stand the feel of sheets on his body.”
I went to get a blanket and covered his naked body; he was starting to shake with cold and fever. I was being very gentle, but I couldn’t help brushing against the area around his liver. He let out a kind of bestial moan, and, though I don’t know why, it moved me.
“There, there,” I said. “It’s gone now.”
I put my hand on his forehead and wiped away the perspiration. My hands were cold and his forehead was burning hot. I knew it must have felt good to him. I slowly stroked his head and face again; I looked at him.
“Are you feeling better, Valia, my darling?” his wife said quietly.
“Leave him,” I said again. “He’s sleeping.”
She raised his head and carefully put it down on the pillow. I took a flask of vinegar, wet my hands, started stroking his face again. He lay stretched out in front of me; despite his suffering, his pale face retained its cold, harsh expression.
The servant had remained in the room, standing in a corner, dozing off. “Should I go back and get Professor Langenberg?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, do,” said Madame Courilof quickly. “Hurry, hurry up.”
I went over to the open window and sat down on the ledge where I could smoke and breathe more comfortably. It was already morning and the first cars were driving past.
A while later, Courilof sat up and gestured for me to come over.
“They’ve gone to get Professor Langenberg,” I said.
“Thank you. You did a good job. You seem to know what you’re doing.”
He spoke to me in French, in a gentle, emotional tone of voice. He must have been suffering horribly; his face was grey and he had dark circles under his eyes. His wife leaned over him; she stroked his cheek gently and remained standing next to his bed, watching him carefully.
He told me I could examine him; I did so very gently and when he asked me questions, I told him I thought he’d been working too hard. I was struck by the terrible condition in which I found almost all of his organs. He looked as if he were made of steel, and his demeanour—his girth, his height—made him look like a giant. However, his lungs were congested, his heartbeat irregular and quick; there wasn’t a single muscle beneath this mass of flesh.
I carefully returned to the area around his liver; I thought I could feel an abnormal growth, but he stopped me, growing even paler: “Don’t, please,” he said.
He pointed to the right side of his body. “Here, over here. There’s a sharp pain, like someone’s cutting me with a razor.”
The way he’d moved had obviously caused him more pain. He groaned, angrily clenching his teeth: he was so accustomed to controlling everything with certain gestures, a certain look, that he unconsciously used the same methods when dealing with illness and death.
A little while later, he seemed calmer and started talking again. He spoke quietly, said his life was difficult and that he felt very tired. He sighed several times, waving his large hand about. It was shaking slightly.
“You don’t understand, you don’t know this country, but we’re going through hard times,” he said. “Everyone’s authority has been weakened. People loyal to the Emperor have a heavy burden to bear.”
The longer he spoke, the more he began to use pompous and affected language. There was a strange contrast between his moralistic words and the old, weary expression on his face, where you could still see tears in his eyes from the pain he was suffering.
He stopped talking. “Go and get some rest, Marguerite,” he whispered to his wife.
She gave him a long kiss on the forehead and went out.
I followed her, and as I walked past her, I looked at her face with curiosity.
“He has a problem with his liver… doesn’t he?” she asked with a look of fear and anguish on her exhausted face.
“Undoubtedly.”
She hesitated, then said quietly: “You’ll see, that Langenberg … These doctors, these Russians, I don’t trust them… If he weren’t a minister, things would certainly be very different! But they hide behind each other so no one takes any responsibility. They’re afraid, they’re never around when you need them!”
She spoke quickly, in a guttural Parisian accent, half swallowing her words. She shook her odd-looking golden hair, staring at me with wide, tired eyes. “Are you French?”
“No, Swiss.”
“Ah!” she said. “That’s a shame.” She thought for a moment in silence. “But… you do know Paris?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m from Paris,” she said, looking at me with pride. And her eyes and teeth automatically lit up with a dazzling smile. “I’m a Parisian!”
We’d reached the staircase. I stood back to let her pass; she gathered up her flowing robe, placed her foot on the first step— it was still pretty, shapely with a high arch, and she was wearing gold, high-heeled slippers. She was about to go up the stairs when a servant, who was walking through the hallway, dropped a tray full of porcelain.
I could clearly hear the shatter of crockery and the young girl’s nervous, shrill scream. Madame Courilof, stiff and white as a sheet, seemed frozen to the spot. I tried to reassure her but she wasn’t listening to me; she just stood there, pale and motionless. Only her lips quivered, turning her face into a grotesque grimace that was horrible to behold.
I opened the sitting-room door, pointed to the servant kneeling on the floor, cleaning up the shards. Only then did a bit of colour return to her cheeks.
She sighed deeply and went upstairs without saying a word. On the landing, as we were parting, she forced herself to smile. “I live under the constant threat of a terrorist attack,” she said to me. “My husband is well respected by the people … but…”
She didn’t finish her sentence, just lowered her head and walked quickly away. Later on, every time the minister was late, I would see her lean out the window, undoubtedly expecting to see a stretcher with a dead body on it being carried down the path. The sound of any unfamiliar footsteps or voices in the house made her start in the same way; a deathly pallor would come over her face—the miserable expression of a hunted animal waiting for the deadly blow, but not knowing how or when it would come.
After the minister was assassinated, I can recall with perfect clarity hiding in the room next to where his body was laid out. When she came in, she looked almost at peace; her eyes were dry. She seemed free at last.
CHAPTER 10
THE NEXT DAY, Courilof called me in while Langenberg was there.
Langenberg was a large man, Germanic looking and blond, with a sharp, square beard and a cold, ironic, piercing expression behind his spectacles. His cold, damp hands made Courilof’s body shiver nervously when he touched him; I could see it from where I sat at the foot of the bed.
Langenberg seemed to enjoy Courilof’s reaction; he examined his fat, trembling body, turning it over with a smug look on his face that annoyed me.
“It’s all right, it’s all right.”
“Do I have to stay in bed?”
“Just for a few days… not for too long. Do you have a lot to do at the moment?”
“My line of work doesn’t allow for breaks,” said Courilof, frowning.
As he was leaving, Langenberg took me aside. “When you examined him, did you feel a growth?” he said.
I told him I had no doubt about it. He nodded several times. “Yes, yes.”
“It’s cancerous,” I said.
“Well,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders, “I don’t know… It’
s certainly a small tumour, that’s for sure … If it weren’t Courilof, if it were some ordinary person … ein Kerl… I could operate and remove it, which would give him a few more years to live … But Courilof! The idea of taking on such responsibility!”
We walked up and down the bright little entrance hall in front of the bedroom.
“Does he know?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “What good would that do? He’s consulted any number of doctors, all of whom suspect the same thing but refuse to operate on him. Courilof!” he repeated. “You don’t understand, my boy, you don’t know this country!”
He prescribed a diet and some treatments and left.
The attack lasted about ten days, and I slept in a room adjoining Courilof’s, so I could hear him if he called for me. This part of the house was constantly full of the minister’s staff, secretaries who brought him files and letters. I watched them wait their turn, shudder and walk over to the closed door; I could hear as they questioned each other in hushed voices: “What kind of a mood is he in today?”
One of them, a low-ranking staff member whose duties required him to see the minister several times a day, surreptitiously crossed himself when he went into the bedroom. He was rather old, as I recall, dignified and well groomed, with a pale face, tense with anxiety. Courilof, however, almost always spoke in the same tone of voice, measured and polite, cold and curt, hardly moving his lips. He was rarely impatient, but when he was, his voice was barely recognisable from where I waited in the next room. He would hurl abuse in a harsh, breathless voice, then stop suddenly, sigh, and wave them away, exclaiming: “Get out! Go to hell!”
One day, I was standing in the doorway when Madame Courilof noticed a female visitor I’d seen on several occasions. She had one of those pale, ordinary faces that are attractive and hold your attention because of certain clear-cut features; her deep-set eyes had a tragic look about them. She stood as straight as a steel beam, and her hair had white streaks in it and rippled over her forehead; she had large teeth, wore a grey cloth dress with a stiff triple collar decorated with lace, all of which gave her a strange and striking appearance. I didn’t know her name, but I’d seen her treated with the utmost respect.