Dancing with Kings. Eva Stachniak

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.

       Sophie

      She opens the gate. The fence of their Istanbul house is made of staves of wood fastened with wire. The wind pushes her back, and the first rain drops fall on her face. She is thinking of the smooth feel of velvet on her cheek.

      ‘Quick,’ Mana screams. ‘Upstairs. To your room.’

      The front door is hanging open. A doctor is in her parents’ bedroom, bending over her father. Or someone who looks like her father, in spite of the swollen red face, an eyeless face locked in a scowl.

      ‘Go,’ Mana screams.

      Upstairs, in her small room, Sophie throws herself on her bed and listens. The doctor’s voice is harsh and commanding. He is calling for water, and he is pounding something. Pounding hard and shouting at Mana who rushes outside and then comes back.

      She can smell her own body. A slightly sour smell she breathes in and out. For a moment she feels that she is growing large, her feet are endless and wide, stretching to the edge of the world, but then she moves and the feeling is gone.

      

      She remembers the time when he was proud of her. When he told Mana to dress his daughter in her best dress and to plait her hair with ribbons so that her father could take her with him to the garden where, under the deep shade of almond blossoms, his friends gathered for their evening coffee and sweetmeats.

      Her father stood her on the carpet and clapped his hands. She bowed and smiled, eyes stealing swiftly across the faces of the men and back again to her father. From the overgrown lake, right beside them, came a rotting smell of reeds.

      Her father took a garland of flowers and put it around her neck. A beautiful garland of reds and yellows, of roses and wild daffodils. She sniffed at the flowers and their scent made her sneeze. ‘A sign,’ her father said. Someone was talking about her now. Right this minute someone was saying her name.

      The thought pleased her. The waves of whispers, the eyes of strangers following her.

      ‘Pray to the Lord,’ her father said, ‘that what they say is always good. Once soiled, a good name is lost forever.’

      The men laughed and clapped their hands.

      This is what she wants to remember: the wine glasses raised to the sky, toasting her health and her good luck. Toasting her beautiful voice breaking into a song of love. A song sad and sweet. A song she has heard shepherds sing in the fields.

      A child thrice blessed. A child kissed by an angel.

      Her father carried her home that evening, and she remembers his breath, in which wine and coffee mingled. He carried her in his arms like a princess so that her embroidered slippers would not, Heaven forbid, be soiled. The soft slippers Mana had made out of an old dress she had stopped wearing.

      

      Downstairs the pounding stops and there is silence. She crosses herself three times. She is sorry for all the times she has been angry at him.

      In Jerusalem, in the Temple, she cried as the friars lifted up the cross and led the pilgrims to the place where Our Lord suffered and died. She was holding a candle and the wax, melting, scorched her skin, but she did not feel pain. When they reached the Mount of Calvary she fell to her knees, recalling the suffering of Our Lord and those who were with him in these dark moments of pain and despair. Recalling Mary Magdalene, forgiven for her sins, taken back into the heart of the Lord. And then her own heart filled with love and compassion for all human suffering, and she could not think of anything she wanted so much as to lie there, on the holy ground and let her tears soak into the earth.

      Mana is standing at the door, her hands hanging loose, her lips moving. There is a drop of sweat rolling down her forehead.

      ‘It’s Tuesday,’ she hears.

      Tuesday is a bad, unlucky day. On a Tuesday, Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks and would from now on be called Istanbul. On a Tuesday the Emperor Constantine turned into marble. Just before he was to be struck down by the Turks, Byzantium’s last Emperor was seized by an angel. The angel, his golden wings shining in the rays of the sun, carried him to a cave near the Golden Gate and turned him into a statue. ‘You will wait here,’ he said, ‘for the time when God our Lord is ready to restore