‘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 Ko?ciuszko 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 Ko?ciuszko, 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