A little drizzle had fallen while we were with Glebov, so that the cobbles were greasy. I prayed neither of us would slip. Twist an ankle and what next? Would Lili stop and come back to lug me to safety?
She might have. She ran like a champion, stride for stride beside me, skirts hoisted and those strong pink legs pounding away in the corner of my eye. Head and shoulders back, breasts bouncing like coconuts.
Would Glebov keep his word and let me go after what I’d done to him?
My lungs were going like bellows. Every second I expected to be shot. I had the same fear as before, at Smolny: that Glebov would wait until I was a few yards from safety—until I thought I’d got there. Then wallop, and the sky would go black.
Kobi was shouting at us. He was lying on the cobbles by the gatehouse. He had a machine gun set up on a tripod. I thought— he put half a dozen rounds over our head—I thought, the body-guard have come out and we’re bang in his sight line. Lili had the same idea. We swerved left and right simultaneously and Kobi put in a long burst between us, the bullets fanning the air as they passed.
That must have sent them back inside. Then we were through the gateway and standing, gasping, in the shelter of the armoured car.
Boltikov was revving the engine. “Go go go,” I shouted and began to cram Lili into one of the gun turrets, made awkward by the Maxim’s firing handles and the spare wheels stacked at the bottom. Humiliating Glebov had given me a buck. He’d be the laughing stock of the whole 5th Army when the story got around. Dead was best but what I’d done wasn’t bad.
“Who needs sleep?” I said grinning.
“Not this one,” she laughed, showing me her fine young teeth, strong as a hippo’s.
Then Kobi had me by the shoulder with a grip of iron. Annoyed, I tried to throw him off but he had me fast. He was pointing to the church and its bell tower and saying something I couldn’t grasp.
“Don’t piss on me,” I shouted above the noise of the engine. “I know she’s in the church. She’s saying bye-bye to her sins. What do you want, that I ask her along for a river trip?”
“Use your eyes! Up there on the bell platform, what do you see sticking out? Yes, Doig, the Reds have put two field guns up there.”
I couldn’t believe it. Between my leaving for the docks to free the gold and my return to the monastery for Xenia, the Reds had had two three-inch field guns swayed onto the bell-tower platform. Over a ton apiece and then the ammo. Christ, those guys knew how to get things done.
“Where’s the box of Happy Christmas?” I shouted at Kobi. “Charge, fuse—Christ, they’ll shell the whole fucking city to bits unless we get them.”
“I already laid it,” he shouted back. “Charge set and ready to fire.”
“So what’s stopping you?”
“The church’ll go with it.”
“What’s a church?”
“Your woman’s in there.”
He’d stopped shouting. Was looking at me with those notunderstandable oriental eyes. I stared back at him, my head angled forward, like a vulture.
He said casually, “Your woman, your decision, Doig.”
I couldn’t believe it. Within an inch of success and now bitched by the woman who’d betrayed me. I looked to see where Lili was. Not to be seen, fishing around somewhere in the bottom of her turret to make herself comfy.
Should I run across the courtyard and fetch Xenia out? The guard could shoot me on the way there, could shoot both of us on the way back. Would probably aim for my legs, to bring me down so that Glebov could play around with me.
I said to Kobi, “What lengths of fuse have you got?”
“Five minutes and half an hour.”
“Cut me a five.”
Sort of patting me for my decision, he said, “She’ll get to Heaven quicker.” Then he was kneeling on the ground, matches ready.
But I could drive over there in the armoured car to get her and be in no danger at all. They’d be lucky to hit the tyres firing only with rifles.
Kobi called up, “Quick, boss, they’re coming out—they’re going to rush the tower. Yes? Do it now?”
Boltikov opened up on them from the driver’s seat, which made them retreat again. But it wouldn’t be for long. They’d use the other doors, scatter as they burst out, get to the bell tower, cut the Bickford cord and turn the guns on us.
“Is she your mother, for God’s sake? Why are you waiting?” He’d struck another match, was holding it within his cupped hand.
But still I hesitated. How would it be in years to come with two dead women on my card? Oh yes, I could say in conversation, I was caught up in the Bolshevik Revolution, I know what hard decisions are like. But what would I say to myself at night, when I was alone?
“Yes or no. Wake up, Doig.”
They’d got hold of a machine gun: put a burst through the gateway, making us go to ground. Could I actually get to her now, even in an armoured car?
My head sank. I said in a low voice, “Blow the church then,” not wishing to mention her—to be explicit.
“Thank God!” Leaning swiftly forward, he lit the fuse. I watched the tiny smouldering glow set out. In five minutes, so long as the fuse hadn’t got damp—
“Wait!” I couldn’t help myself.
He looked up at me angrily. “Is one woman worth more than the lives of all of us here?”
My foot was poised to grind the spark into the cobbles. He flicked the fuse away, jumped up and grabbed me. Before I could say a word, he had one arm bent up behind my back and locked there, almost pulling the ball out of my shoulder. I heard the hiss of steel and felt his knifepoint below my ear. “We’ll watch the fuse together, boss.”
The decision was out of my hands. Suddenly I was tired, tired as a dog, tired beyond the point of argument.
You want to know how slow time can go? Try watching a five-minute fuse.
Kobi was right. Of course he was right. Either the guns were blown up or they were turned on us. A pea-brain could have worked it out. So why had it taken me so long? Because the very first thing I thought of was her head flying through the air and once you have that in mind for your lover, you have memories and regrets and images of joy that are so conflicting that everything must be delayed while they’re sorted out.
I stood stock-still, Kobi’s knife touching the big vein.
Watching the fuse smoulder was like watching a worm having its tail eaten away by old age. Kobi kept the knife there the whole time.
Not moving, just watching the fuse, I said to him, “Lili still down at the bottom of the turret?”
“Yes.”
Pray God she didn’t surface and start bellowing for Mama. She was in the best place in view of Mama’s circumstances.
I thought, What if I saw Xenia come to the door of the church—right there, not a hundred yards away, in her pink satin dress and white hose and elbow gloves and lime-green shoes? What if she was scared by all the firing—saw the armoured car—waved for me to come and rescue her? Would I be able to forgive her enough?
And thus I got myself into the position of begging the fuse to hurry. Even that’s too soft a word. What I wanted most was to go down on hands and knees and fan the little snivelling trail of smoke until the spark fairly crackled. I’d have done anything to shorten those five interminable minutes simply because I was too tired to deal with any more of that type of question. A man should be able to kill his wife if that was the best thing for her. He should be able to agree to the death of a treacherous lover if the alternative is mass slaughter. Whoever has to make such decisions should not be penalised. But no man should be given both an Elizaveta and a Xenia to deal with.
I had no prayers suitable for the occasion—no God prayers, I mean. I could do nothing but watch the fuse, watch Boltikov’s bullets pocking the wall of the dormitory building and hope that Xenia was up to her smutch in a conversation with her Maker. Sin, I whispered, have her list her sins starting with the man who came into Zilberstein’s shop, tha
t’ll take a fair bit of time—
Then miraculously the fuse was up to the little nick I’d taken as a marker. I said to Kobi, “Let’s move!” and broke away from him. I hammered on the hull for Boltikov to get going and jumped onto the running board. The thugs must have been watching the car. As the wheels started to turn, they came pouring into the courtyard, firing at us as they ran. But we were away, went crashing down the hill into Archangelskiy Street, rounded the bend at its foot on two wheels and didn’t stop until we were in cover, down by the little Kazanka river.
I had to say something to her—to defend myself. By her death, maybe a hundred or a thousand lives would be saved. But it was I who’d passed sentence, I who’d taken on the mantle of executioner. No matter that she’d done the dirty on me.
“Xenia, only about fifteen seconds of your life remain...” that was how I started, and so it came to pass that while I was speaking to her and she was speaking to God up she went, my erstwhile peacheroo, and of the manner of her death I say only that better cannot exist if that’s the way your mind turns. God and bed were her main delights. To have died hand in hand with God was the more fitting of the two.
There the bell tower went, not ding-dong ding-dong but a vast crashing roar, and there Xenia went, shoes separately, and there the two field guns went. Up, up and away, all of them to better times.
First had been the tremor, the church and tower shivering. Then the explosion itself, huge but dull, from somewhere in its bowels. Then the core of the church had risen, it seemed in one piece, into the unsuspecting sky. The golden onions, cross erect, had climbed to God. They’d halted—wavered—toppled inwards upon themselves, and then the whole brute force of the explosion had taken over and a black column of smoke had shot out and debris and saintly relics and God knows who else beside Xenia had blossomed out in looping arches—exactly like a cherry tree in April. And then the noise smote us, making us duck. We looked goofily at each other, our ears ringing.
Lili appeared with eyes as big as cartwheels.
There was no time to take her for a sedating walk or anything like that. I said to her straight out, “Lili, your mother was in that building, praying. She’ll be dead. I’m sorry. I couldn’t get her out.”
Up there in the turret, looking down at me: “Did you try?”
“There were two field guns in the bell tower. We had to destroy them. The bodyguard knew that—had a similar idea, to get to the dynamite before we detonated it and then to turn the guns on us. On you and me, Lilenka.”
“So you tried?”
“No one could have crossed the courtyard.”
“But you tried? You tried to help my mother?”
“Yes, I tried to help her.” It was what she wanted to hear. She gave me a fraction of a smile, tears somewhere in the background. “Maybe she wouldn’t have left with you anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Not if she was praying hard for your soul.”
“Why’d she do that?” I knew we were wasting time but this was a conversation I wanted out of the way.
“After all the wrong she did you? You know what she was like better than I do. She sent me away to grow up.”
“You did it fast. Oh Lilenka, you hold the record for growing up.”
She started to cry, shaking her head, the tears flying off her cheeks onto the machine gun. It was good. We respected her for it.
Our pale hero, Boltikov, the only one of us who was a parent, climbed up and clasped her tightly with his good arm, drying her face off with a rag and both of them starting to laugh at the streaks of oil on her cheeks.
Kobi was beside me. He said, “Before I saw the guns in the tower, I heard Tornado trying to smash his stall down, to get out. I let him go. I drove him across the courtyard and out under the gatehouse arch. He knew me and wanted to stay. But I wouldn’t let him. Outside he has a chance. So handsome a horse always does.”
“You are soft, Kobi,” I said, laughing and crying because suddenly I’d been touched with a needle to the heart that Xenia was dead because of me and yet an hour earlier this hard-hearted man, my accomplice in her death, had thought so well of the animal kingdom that he’d driven a horse to its freedom. It was perverse but so was everything else around me.
What I suddenly yearned for was to find the war ended, to hear Tornado trumpet and looking up to see him galloping towards us with Xenia clamped to his neck, his hoofs plocking through the dampened dust and his one good eye shining like a coal from his black-and-white clown’s face.
I embraced Kobi, drawing him into me and holding him there as I would have a woman, by his bony ribs.
He pulled back, examined my face with his hands on my shoulders. I had no idea what was going on behind his oriental eyes. My race—my whiteness—barred me from knowledge of all the pulses that had brought him from orphanhood in Mongolia to my side at this spot, below the smoking monastery of Zilantov. They were fixed on me, those sombre, diamond-shaped eyes, asking the least-known question of all, the one by which men’s hearts speak to each other.
“Ty moi brat— welcome, brother,” I said, and we embraced again.
The shooting had stopped throughout Kazan as all parties pondered the significance of the explosion. Rooks were circling above the monastery’s grove of cottonwoods in a frenzy, folding their wings and diving into the smoke. They would have suffered too. Their nests, maybe even their ancestral nests, the views they’d been brought up with as fledglings, their family members... It was always the weakest that suffered.
Sweet Lord, what a business it was! Just staying alive—
“You’re knackered, Doig. I’ll get us there.”
That sounded so good, like silence to a dying man. I thanked Kobi and described the contingency plan if Shmuley and Mrs. D. weren’t at the agreed meeting place. He and Boltikov got together to plan the safest route to the Volga.
I sat down.
A heron creaked past, legs trailing. On the hill the rooks babbled. I thought, Did Glebov go up in smoke too? But the effort of thinking was too great and I found that the idea of his death by other than my own hand gave me no pleasure.
Sixty-five
NOTHING HAD changed, that was my first thought on awakening. There was still a babbling noise close by, and the sky above me was still so vast. That feeling of space, of endless cornfields, of vistas, of skies, trees and lakes—of eternity itself, is what we call prostor. No Russian has ever believed that prostor can be experienced when one is dead. So I had to be alive.
Moreover, there was a lilting motion beneath me, and when I sat up to investigate, I found I could move easily.
I was facing the stern of the barge, on its deck. A mattress was beneath me, a pillow under my head, a light quilt over me. A mile away down the deck, Shmuleyvich was doing something at the stern. We were stationary, lazing beneath the sweep of a huge willow tree.
Shmuley looked up and saw me sitting there. He waved and shouted.
“Good morning, General!” It was Lili, from the window in the back of the wheelhouse. I was beneath it, where somebody could keep an eye on me.
Mrs. D. was in there with her. Something had fouled the steering. They’d put into the bank. Shmuley had stripped and gone over the side to free it.
He and the women began a shouted conversation down the length of the barge about my health. I wasn’t yet in command of my complete senses. I could think only that Xenia was dead and that beneath these eighty feet of planking were thirty tons of the Tsar’s gold. How could it be otherwise if we had possession of both the barge and our lives and Kazan was no longer in sight?
I called up to the ladies, “Is it there? Have you checked— seen, touched it?”
They smiled on me as if I were a baby. I loved Mrs. D. Everything went well when she was around. She was so solid, so enduring. Look how she’d nurtured that worthless husband for so long, there was steadfastness for you. She was grinning down at me, had her arm round Lilenka’s shoulders. Two warm faces in the w
indow, in the sun. I loved them both.
“Everyone present and correct?” Again they smiled on me. It was stunning—that we’d come through such an ordeal losing only three of us. Marvelling, I fell back with a shout. That all this should have happened to me by the age of thirty!
Then Mrs. D. was kneeling at my side with her medical bag, asking if I was all right. She took up my wrist. Moaning softly, I feasted my eyes on her bosom.
“Stop pretending,” she said commandingly, at which Lilenka, watching us from above, giggled.
She tapped my chest, got out her stethoscope. In an ominous voice, “Did your father have heart problems?”
“He died of the plague,” I said, looking up into her masterful eyes.
“Be serious.”
“I am.” (By rolling back my eyeballs, I could see Lili still leaning out of the wheelhouse.) “What have you found wrong?”
“It should be lub-dup, lub-dup, the four valves snapping shut in pairs. But with you... Your heart is scored. In normal times I’d send you to a hospital for examination.”
I sat up sharply, knocking her stethoscope away. “Scored? My heart scored? It’s more than scored, Annushka, it’s stencilled. Your people in the hospital, they’d find Elizaveta to begin with and then Xenia—and God knows who’s yet to come. Let’s work out how much space there is. How big’s my heart, the area that’ll take a chisel?”
She gave me the steely eye. “Don’t be frivolous. For a long time I’ve wanted to speak to you about your attitude. It’s morally pernicious. You’ll end up lonely and cynical if you continue down that road. I’ve seen it a dozen times in my professional life. You’ll take to drink. A temperate existence is what everyone should aim for. I’m keeping Lili away from you—”
“Waste of time. She’s a goner.”
“—under lock and key if necessary. And you, Charlie—” She broke off in a sudden bunch of smiles and started patting her hair. Looking up, I knew why: padding down the deck towards us was Yuri Shmuleyvich. Thick mud-streaked legs, everything mud-streaked, big furry stomach, swinging arms—it was how he approached, swatting aside the sprays of brown and jaded willow leaves. Love was written in capitals across his black and bristling face as he advanced upon her.
Cold Blood Page 31
