David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (34 page)

I dined at Madame Schroder’s place where she talked to me about Courilof’s wife; she’d known her when she was twenty, “when she sang ‘Girofle-Girofla’ in the little cabarets on the Iles. Afterwards, she became Prince Nelrode’s mistress before meeting His Excellency.”

“Does Courilof know that the prince received the lady’s favours before him?” I asked.

But Madame Schroder told me that this circumstance, for some unknown reason, had made them even closer. She was still talking when Fanny came in, to tell us that in the city soldiers had opened fire and several young men and women had been wounded and killed. I have never seen, on a human face, a greater look of hatred than I saw on Fanny’s face that day; her green eyes were blazing. Even I was deeply moved.

When we left, the city was utterly silent, as if it had been crushed. Several times since then I have experienced that extraordinary silence: it is the most definite sign that a revolution
is about to begin. On that particular night, there were a few small revolts in the factories and textile works, immediately suppressed with extreme violence.

We walked through almost the entire city, hearing nothing except the sound of iron shutters quickly closing in front of the shops. Only a few remained open; a single lantern placed on the ground faintly lit them up.

The gates were closed in front of the great rectangular courtyard of the university, but just as we were arriving, a small group of men carrying stretchers went inside. We slipped in behind them and the gates shut again. The university buildings were as dark as night. Suddenly a light shone from one of the rooms; you could see it through the tall windows of the lecture halls shimmering faintly in the clear night. I don’t know why, but it looked inexplicably sinister.

We hid behind the high columns and remained there, motionless, spellbound, in spite of the very real danger, for the police continually rushed past us.

On the other side of the street, the houses were locked and dark. Just as we were about to leave, blending in with people who were coming and going, a car sped past and we recognised Courilof.

One of the guards went over to open the car door for him, but Courilof gestured that he wasn’t getting out. They exchanged a few words; even though I was quite close to them, I couldn’t make out anything. In the moonlight, as pure and clear as the rising sun, I could see the tall, motionless shape of the minister; his face was so cold and harsh that it didn’t even look human.

At that moment, we heard footsteps coming from inside the courtyard and the men carrying the stretchers came out. There were eight of them, I think. As they passed in front of the car, they stopped and pulled back the sheets.

A man was standing next to Courilof; I can still picture him, short and pale with a big yellowish moustache and a nervous tic that made his upper lip twitch. He wrote down the names of the victims on a register as the stretcher bearers handed him notebooks, identity papers, passports, all undoubtedly found in the victims’ clothes.

For a second, I could see their young faces, their closed eyes, and that unforgettable look of secret, profound scorn that corpses have a few hours after they die, when the traces of suffering and terror have faded.

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.

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.

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 must 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.