“Beg pardon, Stiffy.” I squinted up at him. He was leaning back in his climbing harness, dark against the blue sky and all odd angles like a pterodactyl.
He held up a hand for hush. A message was coming through. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “The Whites are so thick. If it’s important, they have a special group, a letter–numeral mix that they put at the beginning of a cable. It means, ‘Clear the line immediately . . .’ Bloody stupid. Tells everyone to listen . . . Hang on, let’s just see what this is about . . . Feeding prisoners, nothing interesting to us . . . May I go on, sir?”
I nodded.
“I’m not a complete coward, sir. I just don’t want to be trapped in a woman’s vagina, that’s what I’m most afraid of. It’s not as if I haven’t given it a try... Got a moment, have we, sir?”
There followed the history of Stiffy’s sexual experience with women, which he spoke partly to me and partly to the sky and partly towards the birch trees, where Chekhov’s image persisted for me.
The day was a cracker. Listening to Stiffy’s voice from up the telegraph pole made me wonder what God’s voice would be like. Shouting? Smoochy? Cajoling? Probably a wheedling bullying mixture—
“Masturbation’s the best. Wanking’s trumps, that is. That’s why I enjoy listening to folk on the wires. I get all the excitement and have none of the cost. And why I’m telling you this is because I know there’s a battle coming soon but, sir, well, sir, the truth is that I’ll be at my best out of the line of fire. I’ll be worth more to you at my wireless than with a rifle in my hand, and that’s God’s own truth, sir.”
When I said nothing, he called down anxiously, “Have you been listening, sir?”
I said, “You mean you want to be in a bunker? Both you and Joseph?”
“Merely being alive is enough danger for me, sir. You can’t avoid women.”
He unclipped his taps and came down the pole. Kneeling on the ground, he packed them into a canvas satchel with his headphones. “I’d shit myself. You’d think less of me... The thing is, if you’re in a uniform, everyone thinks you’re brave. Well, I’m not.”
“But you still want your share of the gold?”
“I’d die rather than be poor again. Being poor in America is the same as committing a criminal offence. So if it’s all right with you, sir, I’ll earn it by my work on the wireless. I’ll even sleep up a telegraph pole if you want me to. No one’s better at his job than Stiffy.”
I regarded him in silence. Behind me Mrs. D. was shouting at Vaska. They’d got out the bags of Red Army uniforms and were sorting them.
“I’m a confusion, that’s what I am,” Stiffy said. “When I came into the world, some wires were placed in the wrong plugs. I’d like to be like you, sir. You’re like Noah’s blooming pigeon. You always know exactly which direction to go in.”
I didn’t see him as being important in the soldiering line but I didn’t want him to think he could get away with anything. I waited to see what else would come out.
He gave me a quick glance, said, “Early this morning I took down another Elizaveta message. I think it was Glebov himself at the key. A really heavy fist, without any fluency, as if he was reading the Morse off a chart. That was at the start. Then one of the usual senders took over.”
“What did he say?”
“Ah, sir, everything has a price. Working with Captain Jones has taught me that.”
I said, “That’s going to be a bad deal for one of us. Blackmail always is.”
“Only making the suggestion, sir. No real force behind the shot. Only, when we get to Kazan would you remember that it was Stiffy who told you that Glebov had grown a moustache?”
“Hell, Stiffy, that was not expected.”
I had him describe to me the exact circumstances of the message. It turned out to be Glebov and Kreps exchanging cracks about Glebov’s job re-educating the Tsar and his family—having his moustache trimmed regularly as a courtesy to royalty.
“So he’s got to have one, sir, before he can talk like that.”
“Has he? Stiffy, when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas and don’t you forget that. I’ll know about Glebov’s moustache when I get him in my sights and not before. The chances are that he’s sitting there in the Propaganda Bureau having a good laugh at me. Doig-baiting. I’d say he no more has a moustache than a billiard ball has one.”
He continued to watch me.
I said, “More to come, is there?”
He said, “It was painful he was that slow in his transmission. I wanted to start sending myself, to help him, but you’d ordered me never to do that. I played with the dial as I listened. The set was going well. The valves weren’t burning too brightly, weren’t howling at me as they can do in some conditions. Then he finished. ‘Goodbye’—a single stroke. I said to myself, That’s that for the moment. The next thing I knew he’d started up again in cleartext. No cipher, no code. Plain Morse for the whole world to hear.”
“What did he say?”
“‘Are you reading me, Amerikanskiy?’ That was what he sent.”
Forty-four
IN VIEW of this conversation it was vital that no knowledge of our position should reach Glebov. So I didn’t reply to his taunts, set a guard round our encampment and pulled in Blumkin. The Reds had people everywhere. There wasn’t a single Red who was a White on the side but there were lots of Whites who faced both ways, people like Stupichkin. On which side of the line was our plump profiteer? I sent Kobi over. He rode Tornado and returned with Blumkin stumbling along in front as he thrashed idly at him with the reins. I shut him up in Tornado’s wagon. He complained like anything, putting his mouth to a gap in the planks and yelling in a curious high tenor voice, just like Lenin’s. But we fed and watered him well enough so he could have had a great deal more to shout about.
By now everyone knew we were going into action in three days. Of course they were expecting me to come up with orders and plans. Jones’s brown eyes rested on me more snidely than usual. I got the impression he wanted to see what I was up to before committing himself.
Still, he lent me his map of Kazan. He had a set of six-inchers for each of the large towns of central Russia. They came in a polished brown leather pouch that carried the stamp of the Admiralty War Staff, Intelligence Division, London. He was mighty proud of it, not having thought what the Bolsheviks might do to him if they took him prisoner and found the pouch.
This was how I figured it out:
The line from Chirilino entered Kazan at a slant from the north. Trotsky and Kreps would launch their attack from the west, keeping the river on their right flank. There’d be chaos. Therein lay our best chance. We had Bolshevik uniforms. Our armoured car now had a Red Star on its bonnet. Stiffy would use the wireless to lure Glebov to a tryst—and there the deed would be done.
However, I needed somewhere to leave Xenia. It’d be a dangerous time. And I didn’t want to risk Glebov getting hold of her.
I spread the map out. I was immediately attracted by the Zilantov Monastery, which stood on its own hill and had water on two sides. It’d be defensible. It had good access to the Volga through the old Admiralty Quarter. It commanded the neighbouring ground—and would obviously give refuge to a woman. Some old monk would glare at her through the grille—suspiciously, in case a leftist was concealed beneath her headscarf. But she’d have the right words. She always had the right words where God was concerned.
Jones smarmed up to me wanting to hear what the plan was— salients, re-entrants, passwords and the like. “It’ll have to be mighty fine if the six of us are going to get the better of four Red Armies. Is it to be abracadabra and all’s well, is that the idea, Charlie?”
I longed to knock his white teeth flying.
To keep him quiet I put him to work painting the slogan boards we were going to hang on the side of the train if we were likely to run into Reds. “Slay All Bankers,”
“Plunder the Plunderers,” that sort of stuff. On
the coaches themselves I had the Pullman colours painted out and on the goods wagons neutral but heartening messages painted, like sheaves of corn and horses pulling dray wagons and wise men presiding over councils of the people. I wanted it to resemble Trotsky’s train— but not too closely, in case it was Whites we met first.
It was Joseph who took charge of all this. With a Red Army cap on his head, sitting in my uncle’s chrome chair beneath a gnarled apple tree, he did the entire layout, somehow managing to render less potent the nightmare yellow that we’d found a heap of in Blumkin’s stores. “Zobb’s Incredible Circus. Firm Sale. No Return”—that’s what the paint-pot labels said.
His dark locks strayed from beneath the cap and brushed his shoulders. His pencil flitted across the paper with the certainty of a rapier. The tip of his tongue darted in and out as he worked.
I said to him, “That’s what revolution can do to a man, Joseph.”
“Excellency?” He was sketching out the lettering for the last board: “Anarchy: Does the Shoe Fit?”
“Releases the spirits of the downtrodden, brings forth genius. You and Stiffy. Maybe neither of you would have discovered your talents without a revolution. We’ve come a long way since I walked in off Nevsky and told you Elizaveta had been murdered.”
He laid down his pencil, took off his Red Army cap and stretched like a free man.
“Tomorrow we could be dead, Joseph. Be shot in the stomach like Alexander Pushkin and linger—hang on for days calling out for God to make an end of us—screaming, smelling our own gangrene—our souls rotting.”
“It’d be God’s will.” Joseph raised the pencil to his eye to estimate proportions. “He cannot be defied.”
“You afraid?” As a man he was so slight, so precariously based, that it was easy to think of him as dead.
He laid down his pencil. “Excellency, when I was twelve and a footman at Count Noselov’s, I was afraid I’d never earn enough money to get me as far as the point of death. Years and years I’d have to survive and I didn’t see how I could possibly do it. When I was your uncle’s butler I was afraid something awful would happen to me, like dropping a piece of his china, and I’d slip back to being a footman. When the revolutionists barged into the palace I was so afraid of having a bayonet stuck in me that I walked around with my breath drawn in to make my stomach disappear. I now understand that God made me to be some sort of artist and not a servant at all. This too makes me afraid. Even the Bolsheviks need servants. But who needs an artist? So now I ask myself, how shall I, Joseph Culp, ever get to the end? What I think, Excellency, is that fear is part of all our lives. So tomorrow will be no different from any other day.”
“You’re braver than you make out. Remember our walk to Smolny, to see Lenin?”
“Doig, the Reds have organiziert as no Russian force has ever had before. This devil called Trotsky, this Jew, has every tenth man in a regiment shot if an attack isn’t pressed home. In a charge they run towards the enemy shouting ‘Karl Marx! Karl Marx!’ because they’ve been told his name’ll protect them from the bullets.” He spat. “Like savages.”
“That the bullets’ll bounce back off them, is that what you’re saying? Where did you learn this?”
“I speak to lower people than you. Such people believe what Trotsky tells them because of the rewards he promises. The beautiful women get sent to the transport wagons at the rear but the rest are available on the spot. The soldier-peasants infect them and give them babies they don’t want. They destroy the lives of women who are completely innocent of any malevolence. They do it just so they can empty their balls and boast afterwards. Svoloch—scum. They deserve to be boiled alive.” He spat again. “Doig, I don’t want gold.”
“What’s it to be then?”
“I want my old mother to come back and see how her sorrow turned out. That German watch-repairer who was my father ran away. That was her first sorrow. But I was her greatest sorrow because after I left she had nothing. Barin, what I would like most in the world would be for her to sit up alive and see the drawing that I’d do of her.”
He rose and taking up my uncle’s chrome chair, moved down to the next carriage to be painted. It was Tornado’s. I saw Blumkin eyeing us from his spyhole.
“Elizaveta,” I said, “let’s do one for her. In scarlet.” It’d been her best colour, always. The walls of her room, her dancing shoes, innumerable scarves, even the frames of her glasses.
Joseph shouted to Vaska to count the remaining tins of paint. We still had an over-supply of the yellow and only a few pots of scarlet. He said, “What we’ll have is a sky filled with thunder. And in the blackest part of the thunder we’ll paint in red— Excellency, would it be in order to put ‘For Elizaveta’?”
As the painting started, Blumkin began to shout abuse at us. We would see first his blabbering mouth and then one eye (which looked brown against the wood even though it was in fact blue) as he gauged the effect of his words.
“The paint’s got harmful chemicals in it,” he said eventually, more soberly, squeezing his lips and his chipped tooth up against the chink between the planks. “That’s how I got it cheap. Pyotr Stefanovich Malkevich—do you remember his case? He had a factory down in Rostov. The police got suspicious after some of his workers died. They found he was putting something illegal into his paint to make it go further. When they began to look into his affairs, they discovered that he was keeping three wives, each one living in a different part of his mansion. Then it turned out that one of the Mrs. Malkevichs was also married to a man called Zobb who owned the biggest circus in the province, had ten dancing bears, four hairy women, all from Albania, a gorilla that could talk in Chinese—”
“Shut your trap, old man,” said Joseph.
“It turned out they were in it together, Zobb and Malkevich, and shared the woman. Mrs. Zobb-Malkevich’s name was Grishka. I saw a photograph of her. It surprised me that two men should desire her. It was how I got his paint, after he was sent to prison...”
Vaska walking past, I told him to get a piece of wood and nail it over Blumkin’s hole. “Nail it to his tongue if he argues,” I added.
Joseph remarked, “A storyteller, like every stationmaster I’ve ever known.”
Mrs. D. came marching through the grass in bare feet. She’d got hold of a pretty green summer frock that ended just below the knee. She had a healthy skin. Everything in her strong round face shone with the pleasure of life.
“When do you want to try the uniforms?” she asked.
I’d told her to sort them by size and rank and sew up any bullet holes. If Stupichkin had executed a general who stood six foot two in his socks and had a forty-two-inch chest then that was the uniform for me. Any medals in the pockets, I’d have those as well. I didn’t want to look sloppy: didn’t want to wear trousers that trailed behind me on the ground, like Lenin’s.
“Got something for me then?” I asked.
She really had a lovely bloom to her cheeks that day. Her lips were pink and full. It was clear that mean thoughts and deeds refused to come near her. How could she have fallen for that spiv of a husband?
Smiling, she saluted me: “Destiny calls, Colonel Doig.”
Forty-five
TWO RED Vereys over a green one. Shmuleyvich, whose watch it was, lumbered down the train to waken me. Midnight exactly. He hadn’t seen the flares themselves but he’d seen their reflection off the clouds. Like the aurora borealis, especially the green flare, which had left a flat stain in the sky for a good two minutes.
“It spooked me,” said the big man, “until I realised it must have been hanging from a parachute. I wouldn’t have done that. Every minute it was up there was a minute for the Whites to have target practice.”
I said for him to get some sleep and call everyone at dawn.
“Thank God you didn’t ask him about the coal situation or he’d be here still,” said my drowsy love, moving away from me.
“No coal, no hole—putting one’s pole in th
e coal-hole—any hole’s a goal—a man could go on for a long time on those lines,” I murmured into her ear, pulling her back so that I was right in there behind her power-station buttocks, my cock nestled up against her smutch and growing hard. But it was no good, for soon she was gruntling away as she dreamed of corsets and whalebones and of swanking through her shop with a tape measure round her neck.
I tried a few things to get her interested but they came to nothing. That was a pity for I was keen to have her, that midnight of 5 September 1918. Here’s why, nothing to do with carnality.
The fact is, when a man’s keyed up for some great ordeal, he’s restless. He doesn’t want to read a book or discuss a famous picture. Appreciation of form and beauty must wait for settled times. What he wants to do is to hop onto a woman and get busy inside her. It’s the combination of solace and power that he’s after, the one in case he gets killed, the other to put him in the mood for victory. Only a woman can give him this. Only her incomparable organ, the one that’s of the greatest importance to the world, far more than any other, including eyes and ears and even the digestive processes, can bring peace to a man’s soul.
Say what you want but that’s how it is, that’s man for you.
God save all women! God bless and protect them and make them perfect and have them ready for when we return.
So I said to myself, despite my frustration. Then some other eve-of-battle considerations started to spin through my mind and before I knew it, I was having a hard time getting to sleep.
What part would the Czechs play? All sorts of stories were on the go about their armoured trains. Reinforced concrete behind the armour-plating—field guns being fired off flatbeds— machine-gun turrets that swivelled through a complete circle— five hundred men per train, each of them desperate—what the hell would I do if they set upon me? How was I to convey to them in their troublesome language that I wasn’t after all the gold, just one bargeful?
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