Sweet Love, Survive

by Susan Johnson

  “Since when does heart have anything to do with it, Apollo? You know damn well it’s a different piece of female anatomy that you’re interested in. So tell us the name of your society hussy in case you reach Paradise before us.”

  “The lady’s name,” said Apollo in an unmistakably honeyed voice that did nothing to hide his lethal thoughts, “is not open to comment.” He fixed a cool eye on the Baku Moslem who had offended him.

  Never in anyone’s experience had Apollo been so discreet. His reticence suggested someone’s protected daughter, at the very least, was the cause of his absence—a delicious virgin, no doubt. Formerly, of course. With those sorts of deductions racing through everyone’s minds, Apollo’s response was a foregone conclusion. A dozen pairs of eyes rested on him.

  “I would appreciate a retraction of your remarks, Shamkhal.” The smile suddenly vanished from Apollo’s face, and with it all his cultivated graces. Skull, flesh, and muscle, every fluent line and stark shade of Apollo’s face betrayed the mountain savage. There was a cruel edge to his voice in the formal use of surname enunciated in frigid accents. Damn Moslems, anyway, Apollo thought irritably, keeping their women in cages like dumb animals. A lady who enjoyed lovemaking had never seemed less of a lady in Apollo’s opinion, and he was quite ready to defend his convictions with his kinjal.

  Apollo’s reputation with kinjal, the prescribed weapon for duels in the Caucasus, was formidable. Mahomet Shamkhal, brave against ordinary standards, wasn’t foolhardy. He’d rather die in a cavalry charge or expire worn out by his harem than be cut to pieces with Apollo’s mountain dagger. Mountain duels were to the death, there were no half measures.5 But more than anything else, more even than Apollo’s notorious reputation as a dueling opponent, the supreme confidence in his voice convinced Mahomet. There were flashes of unguarded violence in Apollo that it didn’t pay to provoke. Mahomet decided the name of the aristocratic whore wasn’t worth his life.

  Having withstood the pale gaze for as long as self-respect demanded, Mahomet shrugged and said smoothly, “Of course. Retracted, by all means.”

  “Thank you,” said Apollo with simplicity, quite calmly and quite unlike his habitual response to a challenge. More than one mind decided that whoever the aristocratic tart was, she certainly had a soothing effect on their quick-tempered friend.

  A blood-letting had been only narrowly averted. A quiet sigh wafted around the table; tempers were always short the morning after a carouse, and one never knew how far the demands of honor would go. The irregular troop was diverse in religion, culture, and language, but all the men were warriors, imbued with a warrior’s sense of affront.

  Apollo, stretching casually, broke the uneasy silence, inquiring in a once again pleasant tone, “Is Peotr up yet?”

  A curly-haired subaltern found his tongue first. “Breakfasting with Zadia.”

  “You know how possessive Zadia is with him,” declared someone halfway down the table.

  “Haven’t seen him since we arrived,” a third voice added.

  Apollo had considered himself beyond conscience after so many years of taking his pleasure with a great variety of women, but it pleased him momentarily not to have cuckolded a faithful husband. To view Peotr as even passingly faithful was ludicrous, but with Kitty, somehow, it had seemed different. Apollo didn’t want his thoughts of her tangled up with disturbing implications of ruining some happy marriage. Peotr obviously had enjoyed himself outside the conjugal bonds in his usual manner these last three days; Apollo need have no fear of having pleasured himself with someone’s dearly beloved wife. In fact, if his conscience needed salving—and it bothered him briefly that the notion even crossed his mind—it was perfectly clear the pleasuring had been mutual. There. That neatly disposed of any faint stirrings of scruples. He closed his mind to the issue.

  So a half hour later, when Peotr finally came down from Zadia’s boudoir, Apollo had no problem at all looking him straight in the eye.

  “Good morning, Peotr.”

  “Apollo!” Peotr smiled warmly. “So you’re back. Found a friendly bed en route to Zadia’s, eh? Was she good?” Peotr winked cheerfully, his spirits ebulliently refreshed after three days of Zadia’s sympathetic expertise.

  “Of course.” Apollo smiled. “Would I stay so long if she wasn’t?”

  “So. Recuperated, then?”

  “Admirably.”

  “Unlike some of this troop, I see.” Colonel Radachek’s splendid dark eyes swept the room, taking in the full array of health and vigor—or lack thereof. “I suggest extra coffee or tea, gentlemen, for those whose heads or stomachs rebel at the thought of hours in the saddle. It’s only eight o’clock, and I know the war shouldn’t start before ten, but unfortunately Wrangel’s a purist, not a sybarite. We leave in an hour. First to the depot at Divnoie. From there we entrain for Kharkov. The Savage Division is being used to guard the troop trains retreating south, since the Green guerilla bands are becoming bolder and attacking troop and Red Cross trains. It’s up to us to serve as rearguard. In an hour, men.” Turning to Apollo, he said, “Come into the library. We’ll check the newest front on the maps. I talked to headquarters earlier this morning.”

  Minutes later Zadia joined them in the library, gliding in gracefully in a familiar cloud of jasmine scent, a pretty diversion in peach organdy and silk. She was tall, auburn-haired, fair-skinned, and although in her thirties had preserved the vivid, arresting sparkle of her youth. Ever since Apollo could remember she had reminded him of a glittering butterfly.

  “Ah, Apollo. We missed you.” The warmth in her voice was that of an old friend.

  “And I missed you, Zadia,” Apollo replied, moving forward to greet her with a kiss. “Forgive me for not arriving sooner, but, unfortunately, events—”

  “Apollo has an uncanny ability when it comes to the comforts of home,” Peotr cut in teasingly from the Chinese lacquered desk where he was unrolling a much used map. “I swear, if there’s a pretty woman anywhere in the vicinity, he’ll find her.”

  “I have constantly to fight for my reputation,” Apollo mockingly retorted, his smile angelic.

  “He does have a way about him,” Zadia agreed with a sunny glance, her arms linked comfortably in Apollo’s.

  “Thanks to you, Zadia, my sweet,” Apollo observed sportively. “You taught me everything I know.”

  Zadia looked at him fondly, reaching up in a motherly gesture to push aside a wave of sun-streaked hair falling low on his forehead. “I had a very good teacher myself, years ago.” She smiled knowingly. “By the way … how’s your father?”

  “Well. Safe in France, working out his excess energy on the polo fields. Which reminds me. I’ve instructions to urge you to leave soon, and I am also commissioned to reextend Papa’s offer for assistance. Old friends are the best friends, Papa says, and you’re always welcome at Chambord.”

  “Soon, Apollo. I’m—”

  “If you two can break away from family nostalgia,” Peotr interrupted, “we’ve a war to fight. Come here, Apollo, and look at the advances Budenny’s been making near Manych.”

  5

  The next two weeks were a nightmare. The unit had just disembarked at Kharkov when the entire front crumbled. The Whites were evacuating the town immediately; the Savage Division was to cover the retreat. The Greens, increasing like mildew with the imminence of the White collapse, kept up steady pressure on the trains, attacking nightly with their guerilla bands that swept down in large masses, harassing, devastating, blowing up track, their machine guns and field artillery mounted on small gerrymandered tachankas6 lethal to anything in their way. They would send up flares and then in rushing waves ride alongside the tracks, firing into the trains—hospital trains, troop trains, civilian carriages, none were immune. Night after night the attacks continued, the guerillas relentless in their hatred of Red and White alike, interested only in plunder and personal gain. The officers of the Savage Division took turns snatching sleep when they could in the dayti
me, but no one had had more than three hours of rest at a stretch for a fortnight now.

  The double track was completely blocked with southbound trains moving at a snail’s pace, locomotive to caboose, extending the entire two hundred miles from Kharkov to Rostov. On the route south were constant reminders of less fortunate southbound trains: trains tipped over, looted, burned, with charred corpses showing the success of a guerilla raid.

  Human misery was everywhere, so prevalent, so awful and tragic that one became anesthetized as a survival mechanism. Dead bodies littered the sidings and roadways—civilian refugees, women, and children dead by the hundreds; soldiers crippled, maimed, dead; all broken by the weapons of war, by starvation, by subzero temperatures, but most of all by the typhus epidemic that raged throughout war-torn Russia. The unsanitary conditions in the ravaged land were especially conducive to the disease-carrying louse. Bathing was difficult—there was no wood to heat water, even if one could find the time to indulge in the luxury—but primarily the typhus virus had been spread like wildfire by the crowded conditions in the refugee-and troop-packed trains and the hopelessly overrun seaport towns.

  Just two days ago Apollo had seen an entire hospital train sitting silently on a siding outside Debaltsevo. The patients, lying on the stacked bunks, were visible through the windows but not a sound issued from the line of thirty carriages. He found out later from a doctor at Kupyansk that everyone on that hospital train had died—patients, nurses, doctors. That evening, at a small depot north of Taganrog, they had seen what looked to be a pack of gray wolves slowly approaching the train, only to discover, as the shadow materialized through the blowing snow and gloom, that it was a group of soldiers in their gray hospital gowns crawling toward the train. Victims of wounds and typhus, they had been left behind in the retreat, believed to be too ill to survive the journey. With their last ounce of strength, on hands and knees, they had crawled from the hospital to the depot.

  With the retreat it seemed as if mercy had left and the heavens had crashed.

  What ate at one’s soul in lucid moments was the unutterable calmness with which such horror was accepted by the mind. In the five and a half years since Russia had entered the Great War, Apollo’s life had been so inundated by gruesomeness—by battle, by tales and eyewitness accounts of death, bestiality, massacre—that another death, a hundred deaths, even a thousand, scarcely caused a ripple in his mental receptors. Perhaps it was an act of God, for certainly there was going to be no hiatus in death before Rostov.

  By the time they reached Taganrog, the railway depot for Rostov, everyone was exhausted by days of steady skirmishes and sleeplessness. Several of the cavalry officers were wounded, but none seriously, a telling enough indication of their skill in the hard-fought retreat. Everyone was looking forward to Christmas in Taganrog; a time to rest, recoup, and mostly drink to forget.

  No sooner did they reach the northern suburbs than Peotr bid adieu, his heavy saddlebags slung over one shoulder. “I’ve hitched a ride with Sergei to Baku. He managed to requisition some gas for his Niewport.” When Apollo’s eyebrows lifted, Peotr added, “Don’t ask me where. Bon Noël, mon ami. I’ve two full days with Suata and the children.”

  “I see,” Apollo said slowly, digesting this remarkable turn of events and realizing upon further contemplation that he didn’t see at all. Leaving one’s wife alone at Christmastime was a bit too blasé even for his hardened conscience—but it was none of his business, Apollo decided with his usual cool pragmatism. Wishing Peotr a Joyeux Noël in return, he refrained from asking the obvious question about Kitty. “My best to Suata,” he added, pouring himself another drink from the cognac bottle he’d been saving since Niiji. Everyone had taken to their habitual form of relaxation since Taganrog had been sighted, and several groups of men were at ease on the banquettes that had so often served as beds on the journey south from Kharkov.

  Peotr nodded happily. “Thanks, I’ll relay the message.”

  “And to Mirza and Alina, too, of course.”

  Peotr’s mouth widened into a beaming smile. “You should see Mirza, Apollo. He’s almost six now and rides a horse like he was born in the saddle. Since you saw him last year he’s grown another three inches.”

  “And Alina,” Apollo teased, “does she ride like an Amazon?” Alina was only five, but on Apollo’s visit to Baku a year ago, little Alina, darkly beautiful and dainty as a Dresden doll, was determined to keep up with her older brother.

  Peotr laughed aloud. “Damned if she doesn’t. On that point Suata and I have finally agreed. Suata, as you know, was raised in the Moslem ways, but I won’t allow my daughter to be reared in that restricted fashion. Alina does exactly what Mirza does, causing Suata to frequently throw up her hands in dismay at such unladylike behavior.”

  “Sensible of you to insist, Peotr,” Apollo said. “That sort of harem training has to be a thing of the past. Good God, it’s the twentieth century.”

  “That’s what I said to Suata.” Peotr grinned. “She finally came ’round to my way of thinking.”

  Like any well-trained, harem-raised wife, Apollo thought. That precise lack of independence Peotr deplored for his daughter, that harem-schooled acquiescence and emphasis on male-pleasing, was exactly what he found gratifying and lovable in Suata. Evidently Peotr had never seen the discrepancy, too heedlessly self-centered to perceive the incongruity. Although Apollo and Peotr had been friends for years, Apollo recognized that Peotr generally put his own pleasure and comfort first, though in a blithely innocent way, like an unassuming child, egotistically certain that the world centered on him.

  Through the window Apollo caught sight of a frantically waving aviator across the snow-covered railway tracks. “There’s Sergei, waving at you to hurry.”

  Peotr shifted his saddlebags. “Right. I’m off, then. I see the Red Cross nurses are here in force. I’ll leave you to your life of depravity, and with your recent boudoir history common gossip—Apollo’s eyes came up in a startled action, and then he realized Peotr was speaking only in general terms—“the Red Crosses are probably drawing lots for you already.” Peotr smiled at Apollo amiably.

  His composure restored, Apollo quipped, “And you’re leaving them all to me?”

  “This time, mon ami. This time, they’re all yours. I suggest you take a break in your drinking and eat a hearty meal. You’ll need your strength. See you in four days.” A smile spread across his swarthy face. “Provided there’s anything left of you.”

  Apollo looked squarely at Peotr, his expression pure as a nun at prayer. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably spend the holiday alone with a good book.”

  Peotr’s brows lifted dramatically. “Ha!” he said succinctly. Halfway out the train door he paused, turned, and said, “Let’s hope they don’t evacuate Taganrog before I get back.” Then, shrugging, he added, “Although, come to think of it, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad either.”

  Everyone knew by now that Red victory was imminent. A sense of impending doom had settled upon the retreating army and refugees alike. As officers, though, both Apollo and Peotr, along with the entire division, would follow orders until there were no more issued. All the years of military training in the elite Guard regiments had left their mark. No one would desert the cause, no matter how hopeless it was, but just the same, everyone knew it was only a matter of time now. The front was dangerously close to Ekaterinodar and Rostov. If they could not be held, it would be full-scale panic to the seaports. Already the six-hour train journey to Novorossiisk took over four days. What would happen when all of South Russia tried to retreat via the southbound train?

  After Peotr left, Apollo stood in the doorway of the railway carriage, his thoughts alive to an intoxicating situation: Peotr’s wife was spending Christmas alone. Very tempting, he mused, his eyes ranging over the hundreds of railway cars drawn up in the snowy yards north of the depot.7 Damnably tempting. He could talk one of his pilot friends into lending him a plane for a day or so. Apollo ha
d learned to fly at fourteen, while other boys his age were learning to drive their first motor cars, and soon after that he’d driven his parents to near apoplexy by insisting on flying his own plane in the treacherous cross-currents of the Caucasus mountain valleys near their aul. In less than two hours, he thought with a spoiled child’s relish for excitement, he could be at Aladino. That would give him almost four days—provided he could keep the plane that long—to be with Kitty. They were both alone for Christmas. Why not?

  Apollo turned from the doorway and was halfway down the corridor to his compartment to pack before the unpleasant answer materialized. For a long moment he stood arrested in the corridor, then swinging around with an exasperated gesture he struck both fists on the inlaid mahogany paneling. “Damn.” What sort of explanation could he give for Peotr’s absence when the unit was obviously on Christmas leave? The truth, of course, was out of the question. Your husband has a mistress plus a family. Always unpleasant news to a wife.

  Pushing away from the wall, he thought, Oh, hell. He’d make up some kind of story. He resumed his long-legged stride down the corridor. Some plausible explanation could be fabricated before he reached Astrakhan. Wartime was chaos at best, anyway.

  Apollo paused, his hand on the doorlatch, contemplating a facile lie, and in that brief moment hardheaded pragmatism began reversing his spontaneous decision to see Kitty. All the unwonted practical considerations flooded into his mind. Remember, she’s your best friend’s wife. Regardless of Peotr’s behavior, there is no excuse for you to become even more ungentlemanly than you already are. Perhaps more pertinent, why renew a relationship with no future? It would be even harder this time to say good-bye. God knows it was hard enough—for some unknown reason—last time.

  Much as Apollo wanted to see Kitty, he realized, with a grimace of astonishment, that he found the thought of treating her with the careless expediency of an erotic interlude distasteful. For a man who prided himself on the laudable merit of erotic interludes, this was a staggering conclusion. And what settled the issue in the end was not the moral or ethical considerations, but the uneasy recognition that Countess Kitty Radachek had become a constant image in his mind of late, a disturbing, devouring, never-diminishing focus of desire. This preoccupation, this decided preference for a specific woman—there were no reference points in his previous experience to explain it. He didn’t know what love was. He certainly didn’t admit to himself he could be in love.