David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (40 page)

A
FEW DAYS
passed, and the story of the elderly Jewess began to bear bitter fruit. I don’t know if it was because Courilof’s sadness over the death of the prince was magnified by his anxiety over his own fate. I don’t think so: he was too wrapped up in himself to realise how very useful the elderly man had been to him, how the prestige of Nelrode’s name was enough to put an end to certain conspiracies against him. Nevertheless, around that time, on several occasions he would say: “He was faithful to his friends. He was a loyal man, you could count on his word. That is very rare in life, young man… You’ll see.”

If he still had any illusions, however, the arrival of the first anonymous letters quickly made them vanish.

Up until then, Dahl’s fears of displeasing the prince had kept him from campaigning against the minister, whose post he desired for himself. With the prince gone, the game began.

Dahl rushed to tell everyone at court that the Minister of Education had been threatened by an elderly Jewess from Lodz with scandalous revelations about “the beautiful Margot’s past.”

“She used to live in Lodz, when she was a second-rate actress in a touring company,” Dahl said. “This woman, a former midwife, had secretly given her an abortion, and after learning of Margot’s excellent marriage, she had come to St. Petersburg to blackmail the minister.” As proof, he pointed to the sum of money that Courilof had, in fact, sent to the old Jewess. Suddenly all the old stories about Marguerite Eduardovna resurfaced; they had been discreetly whispered around the city at the time of her marriage, and now they were openly discussed. Without a doubt, some of them were true, based entirely on fact; no one could deny her youthful indiscretions or her affair with Nelrode. Public opinion deemed it scandalous.

“An ugly, filthy business,” said Dahl in disgust.

They were saying that she still had lovers, protected by Courilof, as he himself had been protected by his predecessor: “It’s her good nature. She happily uses her great influence over her husband to protect her former lovers and numerous admirers in the two most prestigious regiments in the army, the Horse-guards and the Preobrazhensky Guards.”

That, however, was partly true. But they also accused her of being the mistress of Hippolyte, Courilof’s nephew, whom she couldn’t stand; and, finally, of procuring young girls for her elderly husband, because she was “a loving wife.” That was just as absurd as the rumour Fanny spread about “the infamous orgies in the house at the Iles.”

I was truly astonished that anyone who actually knew the minister could believe such idle gossip. Poor Courilof—pious, conscientious, cowardly, and prudent—was entirely incapable of carrying out such deeds. Nevertheless, he wasn’t a man of “flawless morals,” as Froelich would have put it. Courilof’s private life was as uneventful as any ordinary Swiss citizen’s, but it probably hadn’t always been that way. He was hot-blooded and extremely passionate. These days he no longer indulged himself, and hadn’t for many years—undoubtedly due to religious scruples and because he had to be prudent. But he found it particularly odious to see his enemies guessing the secret weaknesses he forced himself to overcome. I was never able to understand one element of his character: a mixture of sincere puritanism and deceitfulness. As for the rest—well, I found him quite transparent.

After a while, the press got hold of the widow Aarontchik’s story. The extreme right accused Courilof of “liberalism,” of “giving in to revolutionary ideas,” because he had given money to the mother of a suspicious Jew. On the other hand, revolutionary newspapers edited abroad reported that this woman’s son had been murdered by policemen, agents provocateurs paid by Courilof, in order to destroy papers that might compromise the careers of certain highly placed members of the teaching profession.

The Emperor allowed it to continue. He hated Courilof, as much as such a weak man could experience any strong feelings. He’d heard details of certain unfortunate things his minister had
said; he guessed that Courilof wished to one day see Grand Duke Michael, the Emperor’s brother, on the throne. (Prince Alexis, heir to the throne, hadn’t been born yet, but the Emperor and Empress had an unshakable belief that they would one day have a son.)

Finally, owing to Courilof’s regular tactlessness, he had a falling out with his colleague from the Home Office as well; its director could not forgive Courilof for having criticised one of his men. Morning, noon, and night, masses of letters and newspapers from varying political affiliations landed on Courilof’s desk; all of them hostile to him.

Marguerite Eduardovna did her best to remove them, but by some strange fate, despite all the precautions she took, every one landed in her husband’s hands. He never read them in front of us and, sometimes, openly threw them away. But he couldn’t prevent his gaze from immediately moving towards the title of the item underlined in blue pencil. He would gesture for one of the servants and say, “Burn this filth.”

And as they collected up the scattered papers, he stared at the pages with burning curiosity. His large, pale eyes almost popping out of his head, he looked like an animal strangled by two strong hands, being choked to death. Finally, when the servant left, carrying away the stack of letters, Courilof would turn towards us and say: “Dinner’s ready! Come along!”

The children spoke quietly, but he remained silent, looking at each of us absent-mindedly, without actually seeing us; sometimes, he couldn’t control the way his lips trembled slightly. He then spoke quickly, enunciating each word in a hateful, scornful manner, his voice growing more and more scathing and shrill. At other times, he fell into a deep dream, sighed, gently reached out to his son who sat at his side, and stroked his hair.

On those days, he was more patient and in a better mood than usual. He resigned himself to putting up with the boiling hot compresses that Langenberg had ordered me to place on his liver. It was as if he were offering his physical pain up to God and asking in return that he quash his enemies.

I
WENT INTO
his room every morning to treat him, as soon as he was awake. He was stretched out on a chaise-longue in front of the open window, wearing a scarlet silk dressing-gown that made his cheeks look pale and puffy. For some time now, his wild beard had been going grey. The yellowish colour of his skin, the deep purple bags under his eyes, and the two delicate bruises that appeared at the sides of his nose were evidence of the progress of his disease. He had lost weight, he was melting away; his heavy, yellowish flesh hung on him like a piece of oversized clothing. This was obvious only when he was naked; once he was dressed, his uniform, with its decorations across his chest, became a kind of imaginary breast-plate.

It was obvious that Langenberg’s hot compresses had about as much effect on his cancer as they would on a corpse.

Every morning, his son came to see him. He would hold the boy, stroke him, gently place his large hand on the boy’s forehead, push his hair back, lightly pull his long ears. He treated him with deep and unique tenderness; he seemed afraid of hurting him, of touching him too roughly. But then he would say, “Just look at how strong he is, don’t you think, Monsieur Legrand? Off you go, my boy …”

With his daughter, the public Courilof re-emerged: cold, impassive, giving orders without raising his voice. In spite of myself, I felt an aversion to Irene Valerianovna. But I liked the married couple, the Killer Whale and his old tart; they moved me, I don’t know why.

Now, as I write, I walk back and forth, remembering; it remains impossible for me to explain, even to myself, how I could intimately understand these two people. Could it be because I lived in an abstract world all my life, in a “glass cage”? For the first time, I saw human beings: unhappy people with ambitions, faults, foolishness. But I haven’t got time to think
about those things! I just want to concentrate on what happened back then, that moment buried in my memory … Anything is better than sitting and doing nothing, waiting to die. Look at the work done by the Party: what Karl Marx brought to the workers, the translations of Lenin’s writings, the Communist Doctrine, all doled out in instalments to the local Bolshevik middle classes! I did what I could. But I’m ill, I’m tired of it all. These old memories are less tiring. They numb me, preventing my memory from lingering on futile recollections ofwar and conquest, on everything that will never again return—at least, not for me.

I recall that Courilof went to the court one day around that time, when some foreign sovereign or other notable was there to be received. Courilof could hardly stand up: two servants dressed him, flitting around him and pinning his decorations on his chest, stuffing him into his dress uniform. He wore a kind of corset that tied at the back, to support the diseased portion of his body underneath his clothes. I was in the next room and could hear him panting in pain as they tightened the corset.

He got into the carriage, looking stiffand pompous, sparkling with gold. They left.

He came back around dusk; when I heard Marguerite Eduar-dovna scream, I immediately rushed out. I thought he’d passed out. He didn’t get out of the car himself but rather was carried out by servants and brought to the house. To my great surprise, this relatively calm and patient man flew into a rage when one of the servants accidentally knocked against his arm, started swearing and hitting him.

The servant, who had a simple, kind face beneath the cap of his uniform, went white with terror and stood motionless, as if he were at attention, looking straight ahead. His wide, horrified eyes fixed on his master, with the same dumbfounded look you see in cattle.

Courilof seemed struck himself at the sound of his own slap. He stopped. I could see his lips moving, as the look on the valet’s face rekindled his fury. He shook his fist, shouted “Get out of here, you good-for-nothing bastard!,” let out a thunderous curse in Russian, then collapsed; he didn’t actually faint, he just fell into a heap like an animal dying of rabies. His neck moved
like a bull’s does when it’s trying to shake off the sharp spears digging into its flanks. He got up with great difficulty. Pushing us away, he staggered up the stairs. Marguerite Eduardovna and I followed him up to his room. He tore off his collar. He couldn’t stop whimpering. It wasn’t until he was in bed and his wife was stroking his forehead that he began to calm down. I left them like that: she sat at his bedside, talking to him quietly; he had his eyes closed, his entire face twitching nervously.

I thought he would want me to stay that night to keep an eye on him, as he always did when he was ill; but he seemed afraid he might say something he shouldn’t. He didn’t send for me. Only his wife stayed by his side.

When I saw her the next day, I asked about the minister’s health. She made an effort to smile. “Oh! It was nothing,” she said over and over again. “It was nothing, nothing at all… “

She shook her head, her lips trembling, then looked straight at me with her deep, wide eyes. “If only he could rest for a few months… We could go and live in Paris for a while … Paris, in the spring, when the chestnut trees are in bloom … Don’t you think! Do you know Paris?”

She fell silent.

“Men are ambitious,” she said suddenly, with a sigh.

Later, I found out what happened when Courilof saw the Emperor at court; at least, I heard what Courilof’s enemies were saying. The Emperor had received his minister while nervously fiddlingwith the pencils on his desk. This was how people close to him knew they had fallen from favour. When they arrived, before saying a word to them and without looking up, Nicolas II would start automatically arranging the files and other items on his desk.

Rumour had it that the Emperor had said, word for word: “You know that I do not meddle in your private life, but you could at least try to avoid scandals.”

Later on, it occurred to me that the Emperor wouldn’t have needed to say even that much; his disapproval would have been infinitely more subtle, less obvious, perhaps barely visible to the naked eye, a hint of coldness in his voice, the Empress looking away…

The next day, someone mentioned the visit of the foreign sovereign in front of me.

“His Majesty deigned to forget I was there,” Courilof said bitterly. “He failed to introduce me to the king.”

There was a silence. Everyone understood what that meant. In fact, for some time now, the Killer Whale’s position had been precarious. A strange joy ran through me.

“Well, to hell with it!” I thought. “Let him go away, let him give up his job as minister and live in peace until the cancer kills him!”

The idea of killing this man filled me with repulsion and horror. He was a blind creature already living in the shadow of death; his face looked ghostly, yet he was still preoccupied with vain dreams and futile ambitions. How many times during that period did he say over and over again: “Russia will forget my enemies, but she will not forget me.”

It seemed strange, grotesque even, to think that he had already forgotten about the men who owed their deaths to his inability to give lucid orders in time; or to the system of espionage he had instituted. He still believed posterity would judge him by his good deeds, that posterity would be forced to choose between him, that bastard Dahl, and the rest of the other idiots!

I remember… We were sitting on a bench in the garden: Courilof, his wife, and his daughter, who listened to him without really paying attention, her delicate, childlike face closed and impenetrable. You could tell she was very far away for the moment, in a day-dreaming world where worries about her father had no place. When he’d stopped talking, she continued to play absent-mindedly with the long gold necklace she wore. He turned, looked at her, and frowned sadly in annoyance. Little Ivan was running about, calling the dogs; you could hear him panting; he was fat and easily became short of breath.

I watched thick clouds of mosquitoes rise above the dark waters in the bay. Everyone around me seemed just like those mosquitoes; they hovered over the marshes, restless in the wind, tormenting people, only to disappear, the devil knows why!