White Blood

by James Fleming

  Nicholas bent his sunburned face over mine and kissed me on the cheeks and on my lips. His were chapped and salty. "I can't believe my luck. All my problems with Helene are at an end. Andrej'll see me right—or make her see reason." He gave a menacing little grunt. Then, "I'll be able to buy a new bull, perhaps more land. Get that leg of yours a bit better and you'll be strong enough to walk around with me. There are a couple of meadows I've always had my eye on . . ."

  He ran his hand through his thick wheaten hair. Laughing boyishly, "Don't go telling Liza what I said. But you have to admit, it's come at a good time ... A fairy tale!"

  "When's the wedding, then?"

  "Whenever he wants her," he said in a hoarse whisper.

  Twenty-six

  Events must have space to develop. No good ever came of pressing them too closely. When they're ready they'll let you know. At that point the art of dealing with them lies in having a sense of promptness.

  So I let the affair between Andrej and Elizaveta take its course, which was entirely by an exchange of letters. Timofei, the coachman, would fetch the mail from Smolensk two or three times a week. Sometimes Louis brought Andrej's letters to the drawing room when I was there with her. She never rejoiced to have them: would inspect the envelope carefully, as if the handwriting was that of a stranger. I pretended to be indifferent, though naturally I was delighted. Time was on my side. Mightn't he try another adventure and get a bullet in the throat?

  My leg mended fast. I spent the tail of the summer naturalising around the Pink House and showing Kobi the lie of the land. He was bunking in Popovka, the village of about forty families that serves the Pink House.

  Let me give you an idea of the geography.

  Popovka is eight miles from Smolensk. To get there from the railway station you go past the market and over the Dniepr on the ancient, five-span bridge. Care must be exercised since there's barely room for two carriages to pass and it's a long way down to where the pleasure steamers are berthed. Through the gateway in Boris Godunov's walls, up Suborny Hill with the cathedral on the left and so on past monuments and history until one hits off the Popovka road beside the Roman Catholic church in Molokhovskaya Place. Then the eight miles: either dusty or muddy but always rutted, curling through undulating, heavily wooded countryside, the road being wide enough for a farm cart and no more. This area is the forest of Popovka.

  It belongs mostly to Nicholas, a straggling swathe of oak, ash, chestnut, birch and willow, all self-seeded. In winter it appears hollow and sinister: dark gallows frames edged with snow. Ravens circle. Crows dip their heads and issue their echoing cemetery calls from the tops of dead trees. There are wolves, foxes and deer.

  The only timber of value, a section of planted fir that abounds with red squirrels, is owned by Nicholas's neighbour, Mikhail Baklushin.

  At mile four there is a wayside shrine to St. Nicholas, patron saint of travellers. The flowers are tended by every passer-by.

  At regular intervals woodmen's tracks disappear into the forest.

  About a mile before the village of Popovka, upon turning a corner, the forest ceases for a space and there one finds Zhukovo, an oasis of verdant pasture with the only decent soil in the area, a nice dark loam to a depth of three or four feet. (Elsewhere there's a shallow mixture of clay and sand with a sour yellow colour that doesn't drain readily and is hard on both the ploughmen and their oxen.) At Zhukovo there's a nice old timbered manor house, cottages and a herd of gleaming black Scotch cattle.

  These spend the winter in a long barn. The side giving onto the road has been artfully constructed of different coloured bricks to suggest a Greek colonnade.

  Mikhail Baklushin, the owner of Zhukovo, is my godfather. He's a rotund, jolly, surprising man known to every person around as Misha. One of his ancestors had the good fortune to own a brickworks at the time of Napoleon's invasion. A boast of Misha's is that the Baklushins and the kings of Sweden are the only families in Europe to have lived for a hundred years off the fat of Napoleon. He's referring to the profits his great-grandfather made when Moscow was rebuilt.

  He's unmarried, wears foreign suits with off-white shoes and has made it his business to rescue from the peasants all the chickens mutilated when they're scything their hay. He can't bear to see the fowl hopping around the street growing thinner and thinner. An old carriage is placed outside his house for their convenience.

  He reads Sherlock Holmes in bed and rises late. Then he puts on a bright silk dressing gown and goes out to feed his chickens and speak to them. This procedure is easily visible from the road. He's been doing it for so long that when he's ill and can't go out, it's noticed and commented on instantly.

  His housekeeper is a younger sample of the Bobinski tutor type: educated, impoverished, and without ambition. They have a good relationship, Misha and this man.

  A famous incident once occurred concerning Misha. He had a brainwave, which he explained as follows: from then on every word spoken on his farm during the working day was to have one meaning only. This would promote simplicity, accuracy of speech and purpose, and thus an increase in profits, which he would share with Vasili, his long-serving stockman.

  "'One word, one meaning', that's the name of the decree," he said to Vasili as they stood in the kitchen. "Keep notes of it, now. I'll be asked to describe it in a book one day." He had quite a bit more to say about the system and all the time, according to Vasili, he kept dabbing behind his ears and round his neck with an apple-scented handkerchief.

  Uncle Boris was speechless with laughter. "Millions are now within Misha's reach. Loaf is no longer going to mean to idle round in Misha's pay, cow is only to mean a creature with four legs and four udders, bull—"

  "We know about that, my dear," said Mother.

  "And mortgage is only to mean debt," said my father George, who was the most professional borrower of all, though we didn't realise it at the time. "Why don't we try Misha's game for the day and see if we become happier—eliminate what's superfluous, straighten it all out. 'One word, one meaning.' Is that to be our slogan until the dinner gong ... ? Yes, my darling? I see you wrinkling your nose." This he said to my mother, grinning. Then, "Boris, what are we to do about our ladies? What on earth's to happen to the female race in Misha's crisp new world?"

  "That's enough, George," said my mother. "We can concentrate if you make it worthwhile for us. But what will it solve? Haven't you enough happiness as it is? And the arguments you men will get up to—I can't bear to think about them. It's a silly idea."

  Mother's remarks put my father in his place. Instead a boy was sent round to Misha inviting him to English tea (by which uncle Boris meant staying for a couple of days) so that he could give us a talk about his heroic plan. This was for the sake of politeness.

  However, the boy was detained in Popovka and reached Zhukovo too late. Misha had departed to catch a train to Moscow.

  Twenty-seven

  The reason the message failed to get to Misha can be stated simply—the tavern. The highway stops in Popovka. Tracks do continue through the forest to the next village but the road itself ceases. The tavern operates as a sort of turnstile for anyone entering or leaving the village. It butts onto the road so intimately that a horseman can be handed his drink from the window.

  The boy was spotted as he ambled past sitting sideways on a carthorse. A man shouted out of the window, "Where to?"

  "Zhukovo. To Misha's."

  "What for?"

  "'One word, one meaning'—the barin is going to explain it." Of course he was hauled in for questioning.

  Everyone with business at Popovka or at the Pink House is observed as he passes the tavern. His apparel, wealth, temper, class, company, probable length of visit, all are noted and recorded in Popovka's collective memory. And when he leaves the enclave, this also is noted.

  Whenever my parents and I were driven to the train at Smolensk, I would shrink back from the window and try not to be seen from the tavern. I hated the silent scru
tiny from behind the small square panes of oil paper; the dulled and bearded faces staring at the coach dashing past. In fact I never entered the place until now, when Kobi and I would feel thirsty on our strolls. The pine walls and ceiling were blackened by tobacco smoke and the years of conspiring that had taken place since it last burned down. The darkness was striking even on a sunny day. The light admitted by the oil paper was grey and gritty. You'd never have been able to tell the colour of a man's gloves as he rode past. But the topers would have had a good enough notion of what he signified from the way he sat his horse.

  Opposite the tavern are the church, the priest's house and an unwalled cemetery. The church descends in three levels from its golden cupola to the porch, which has a large wooden gate onto the road.

  I cannot remember a time when the priest wasn't loathed by the villagers. This was a long-standing emotion directed mostly at his office. But of course it caught him as well.

  Popovka has one street. The houses are two-roomed and built of wood. In cold weather the owners hang a second set of windows on hooks on the inside and stuff the gap between them with oddments of wool, paper and fur. The year that Uncle Boris had a clear-out every one of these windows was crammed with the brittle yellow pages of obsolete French novels.

  Behind the houses are the vegetable patches, kennels and sheds for geese and chickens. The wealthier peasants, those who are farming in league with Nicholas, have wooden stockades in which they secure their livestock from wolves in winter. The timbers are never sawn to a uniform height. Seen against a frosty sunset, their top line goes up and down like a piano score.

  Everything is too sunk in tradition to achieve any progress, that's Nicholas's habitual complaint. "They won't kill pigeons in case they kill the Holy Spirit, and Fyodor Fyodorovich told me last year he would never consent to use a mechanical reaper as it would be dishonourable to his horses. Many believe that the yield from the rye has nothing to do with good husbandry but everything to do with the dark spots that appear on the sun. They say these have a regular cycle, and reel off the years of the bumper crops to me. Of course the upshot of all this is that the harvest is preordained and there's no point in working at all. I say to them, Why then should I try to teach you? Is it to be scythes and pitchforks until we die?"

  Liza, reporting this to me, commented: "The fact is that they're far better capitalists than he is. Nicholas cannot bring himself to be professionally greedy. He's not poor enough, there's too much of the aristocrat still in him. He's weighed down by his conscience and the eighteen thousand serfs that the Founder owned. The peasants know this and exploit it. When he does his accounts he rushes into me exclaiming, 'But where's it all gone, sister? I'm bleeding money'

  "But he continues to let them have land at stupidly low rents, even though every spring they run whining to him, trundling their paunches before them, saying they've got no seed corn to plant as they had to eat it in the winter to stay alive. 'Oh, barin, your honour, a loan for a twelvemonth ... I swear by the Mother of Christ . . .'"

  Such is Popovka.

  The road continues from the village for half a mile, when it arrives at a turning circle of cobbles. These aren't rounded sea cobbles but sliced ones, as that's how the stone hereabouts shatters when addressed with a sledgehammer. Between them grow clumps of a lovely pinky-purple scabious. I've seen as many as two hundred arguses at a time drinking from the puddles and feeding on the plant—a wonderful twitching brown carpet. Even the surrounding air was spangling, as if it had been polished by all those butterfly wings.

  The only exit from the cobbled circle is through the great archway that the Founder built to commemorate his patriotism and acumen, which is a rare combination and well deserves a monument. It is crowned by the Rykov wolf. "Think Well" is the family motto.

  Beside the archway is the gatekeeper's lodge.

  The road to the Pink House is well bottomed, good for any weight. It curves round the shoulder of the high ground on which Popovka stands and then dips between the oaks until it comes out into a pleasant river valley that's four fields long and two fields wide, the fields having been laid out methodically to measure ten English acres apiece. In spring the road's rich in primroses and dog violets. The male brimstones, in their high yellow livery, guard their territories with darting vigour.

  I'm asking you to visualise yellows and greens above all other colours, and the corrugated boles of oak trees as you're rattled down the drive. You're sitting behind Timofei who's wearing his best hat, his station one, which is like the black funnel of a steamer. The colours of April appear all the brighter because Lent is done with and laughter has been reborn.

  The river—let us be generous and call it a river and not something lesser—is slow and oily and as wide as a strong catapult shot. Frogs, herons, and by summer the grey migrating cranes, make it their home. It's exactly as Mother remembered it, where the stable horses come to be washed on the name day of their patron saints.

  A humpbacked stone bridge takes the drive across it. Then it loops back along the side of the river before heading up into the bowl at the top of the valley where the Founder planted his settlement. On both sides it's shaded by poplars. The eight English fields, which are reserved for the exclusive use of the horses on the estate, are on the left of the drive. Count a mile from the lodge to the Pink House, two miles from Popovka.

  I omitted to say that a large reason the river deserves to be called that is because it's the residence of swans. We've inspected each other on numerous occasions when I've been exercising my wasted leg muscles: I with frank admiration for their stately way of going, they flirtatiously, glancing sideways at me with their languorous, red-lidded eyes.

  "Now, a swan that also had eyelashes would have the world at its feet," I remarked to Liza one evening. "Imagine if it decided to eat in a restaurant. Even a waiter would run to its table—would sprint."

  We'd been looking for chanterelles—idly, because the woods were well picked and it was getting late in the season. Now we were walking beside the river. Andrej was visiting the Riga front. Out of sight is out of mind.

  She was strolling with her arms folded across her breast. "There's only one restaurant left in Smolensk now. I went there with our new director yesterday. Nobody came to our table for half an hour. He said after a while, 'I believe these waiters would be quite happy to kill us.' What do you say—do you agree with that, Charlie?"

  "Isn't that the dream of all waiters in our country? Our advantage is that we're intelligent enough to realise that when it's a question of us or them, it's we who must shoot first. Their sense of class will make them hesitate—fatal. We don't have any inhibitions of that sort. Survival is the only proper measure of cleverness."

  "Survival . . ." She stored the word away.

  "Perhaps that's how waiters feel everywhere in the world. For all we know they may be yearning to pluck the lid off the chafing dish, pick up the revolver concealed below the potatoes and go, Bang, that'll teach you."

  At that moment we reached the bridge. Our escort of swans gave us come-hither winks as dark as melted chocolate and paddled on, taking the central span of the bridge where the current was strongest. I touched the balustrade with my finger (it marked my goal). We turned together. And there it was, one of those damned queer things of that year.

  For in looking towards the house, up the broad, slightly rising valley, we saw that the whole land before us, the fields, the grazing carriage horses, the wings of forest on either side and the forest behind the house, had been set ablaze by an immense bank of flaming clouds. As far as the eye could see, the sky was on fire. From Popovka to Warsaw, from east to opulent west, molten metal was pouring from the mouth of the sun, yawning as it prepared for night.

  We stood in stupefaction. The swans came back through the bridge to find out what had happened to us and were instantly feathered in flamingo pink.

  Liza cried, "Look at Xylophone, Charlie—quick! Pink as a trout! . . . Oh my—pink one side and
grey the other! Do you suppose the other horses are wondering what's wrong with her? Are they asking, 'Has she a disease? Do we want to be in the same harness?'"

  She looked at me, her face made radiant by the evening glow. Love roared gurgling into the chamber of my heart and flooded it. All that had been brewing since we sat above the battlefield of Balaclava among the wild crocuses rose to the surface, forcing the stopper out.

  I grabbed her by the ears and pulled on them. "Marry me instead. He's disgusting. You'd be backing a loser. Be honest with yourself."

  She considered me. Our strong noses were inches apart.

  "You might as well say yes now. I'm going to get you sooner or later. I'm determined."

  She took back her ears with a flick of her head. In her face there were three parts of curiosity to every two of amusement, in which I also include an air of confidence such as is natural for a beautiful woman being wooed. "You can tell our grandchildren, He almost pulled my ears off when he proposed. It hurt so much that I gave in. To become Mrs. Doig was less painful."

  "Love, what of that?"

  "You're saying that I don't love you? Don't be ridiculous. Why else do you think I want to marry you? Do I have to spell out the word 'stars' before you can see them?"

  "So I have to imagine love, is that it? Well, I don't have to with Andrej. He bombards me with it: jewels, money, furs, smaller gifts—"

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Trinkets for the castle—horses, coaches and so on. Bric-a-brac you might call them."

  Now she was laughing at me. I wound myself up—but just then we heard a horse trotting down the drive. I dropped my hands and turned.