White Blood

by James Fleming

  It was Nicholas who rode out of the oak trees, my honest, dutiful cousin who would have been ideal for Tolstoy in any story that revolved around the agonisings of a liberal landowner. He'd been to renew his loans and was in his town clothes. He swung his right leg over the pommel and slid to the ground. His horse sighed and shook itself.

  "My dears, you've no idea what a day I've had. The terms my bankers are demanding this year—I might as well go to the Jews,"—he switched his look from me to Liza—"you know, Kugel in Pochtamtskaya. At least they know how to leave a man with his dignity. Whereas a Russian banker will take everything he can get his hands on as security, down to the gravel on one's drive ... So as of today I've got a new motto: Never be gloomy. It's either that or slitting one's wrists ... I met Misha on the way back and invited him over. Tomorrow, I said. We've been living like mice for too long. Let's open some wine and have a laugh for a change . . . That's the sort of day it's been."

  He smiled frankly on us. He had such a decent face that to witness him depressed was to feel depressed oneself. The gap at the top of his two front teeth was wide enough to take an apple pip. It was always a good sign when it was in full view. He made a good-natured shooing gesture to Liza. "We'll catch you up in a moment."

  He took me by the arm. "I didn't want to speak out in front of her . . . My worries, Charlie, they breed like rats. At the mortgage office—that was bad enough, but then—it was the latest news in town: Brusilov has started to fall back. As long as he was victorious, the idea of Russia supreme was in the ascendant. People would say joyfully, 'He's just like his name, bristling and bustling.' That's not what you hear now. You know what it means when they say 'fall back.' It means he's in full retreat. Morale has never been so low. Mutiny in every regiment. The Tsar—hopeless. Feeble when he needs strength, arrogant when he should be tactful. Lets the monk get away with anything, just because the brute tells him his son will live. Such terrible lies! Doesn't it hurt him to tell them? My friends say he never washes and that he's had every single woman at court. He just reaches out. They don't even struggle. It's disgusting, I tell you.

  "The whole thing's boiling up for disaster. You wait and see this winter. St. Peter's got too large to feed except by rail. And who's using all the railway wagons, eh? Exactly. Soldiers, horses, ammunition. Food be damned, unless it's for the horses. The Tsar gets sozzled on wine every night having forbidden his subjects ever to get sozzled on vodka. His German wife lets herself be screwed by that stinking shitpricker of a monk—in the orchid house! Yes! He pushed her up against the glass so he could show off to the gardeners while he had her. Do they think our people are without sensitivities?"

  I told him he was working too hard. He should give more responsibility to the village elder.

  He continued: "So I was riding down the drive and consoling myself with my new motto when I saw you with Elizaveta. She wouldn't have told you so I must. She's had another attack of le grand mal—a fit."

  "That's what the doctors said? When did it happen?"

  "When you were in the desert. I think it comes from the stress of working in the hospital. It's what she says herself. So I've ordered her to go there less often. That was right, wasn't it? I do my duty by everybody. But especially in the case of Elizaveta— our future, Charlie, yours and mine—you see what I'm getting at . . ."

  "Even a blind man could."

  "She can have a thousand fits a day once they're married. Go gently with her, Charlie, that's what I mean. Don't provoke her. Dear Christ, the catastrophe that would be if he backed out . . . Now, we'll pretend we were talking over the farm accounts and which peasants should have loans for the winter."

  She said nothing as Nicholas, plucking shiftily at his short beard, took longer than was necessary to explain our need for privacy. Her eyes were dull from the certain knowledge she was hearing a lie. She rubbed the gooseflesh on her forearms, put on my pullover, and as her dark head burst through and Nicholas at last shut up, said in her rich low voice, "So, Charlie, you said you were determined. True or false?"

  Nicholas looked from me to her and back, but neither of us was giving anything away.

  Twenty-eight

  Together we walked up the slope to the Pink House and the remains of the gory sunset. Nicholas's horse trailed behind us with its head among its hoofs and its eyes closed.

  "Like a plate of raw mince," Liza said, nodding at the sky.

  "Not with the black stripes. Order of St. George, that's what it is," said Nicholas crisply. "How many of them does Andrej have by now—half a dozen?"

  Timofei had been watching out for him and came stumping down the track from the stables, walking on the sides of his boots, ankles and knees bending outwards. Nicholas tossed him the reins of his horse. "There you are, old fellow. Give it an extra bowl of mash tonight. I'll take the chestnut tomorrow." He hesitated. "No, I'll come with you and see if Fyodor Fyodorovich has started to thrash out the straw yet."

  The groom was bent over feeling the horse's legs.

  "Devil take it, Timofei, why do you always nanny me so? Their legs should be made of wood so I could ride them as I wanted. Don't glare at me like that, old fellow. Never be gloomy, that's my new motto. You should copy me. What would you do if I purchased a motor car? I wouldn't need you, would I? Think about that."

  Timofei said scornfully, "You won't get a motor car as you no more like modern than I do."

  They walked off chatting, the horse also more cheerful now that the stables were in sight.

  "So, what else did you get out of Igor?" I asked Liza lightly. "The diamonds? Some nice rubies?"

  "So that's why you want me?"

  "Of course."

  "What a way you have with the ladies, Mister Doig . . . You're still determined? I could hear bits of what Nicholas was saying. Outdoor men speak loudly."

  "Do you mind?"

  "His telling you—no. Having le grand mal—most certainly. The hospital doctors said, Sorry, we just don't know . . . What happens? Describe it, you ask? The first thing is the screaming around me in the hospital. It disturbs me intensely. I think of pain and somehow this spreads from a single human (which is me) to a village, to an army, to the nation and I see them all running away from it, trying to shake it out of their heads. The worst for screaming is when there's just been a major battle. We're always low in anaesthetics. Sometimes we have none. The surgeon has to make a choice. To one man he says in effect, You will scream. To another, You need not. The men don't know what the surgeon's decision means to them. But I do, and I start to feel the pain for them. Also there is the fact that I'm involved in causing them that pain. That's when I had the last fit. I know all the moves my mind will make as I walk up and down the rows of the wounded."

  "Did you roll around—foam?"

  "Don't, Charlie."

  "Just curious. Isn't it better to have it out?"

  "So it doesn't frighten me any more? Thanks."

  The black belly of the night was pushing the evening sky down into the trees—tatters of pink and pearl, salmon and its skin. Venus watched beadily from somewhere just above Popovka as Russia, so unimaginably huge, so wooded and rivered, so heavy, so clumsy, so cruel, rolled onto its side and snuggled down.

  Wood smoke was drifting through the air. From the pleasure grounds the haunting song of a flycatcher bobbled to and fro, gorgeously defiant among the vulgar chimes of the blackbirds going to roost.

  In the desert at this hour rocks crack like bullwhips as they start to cool, and the soil, relaxing, shudders and sighs.

  We were standing shoulder to shoulder.

  "Listen—the flycatcher."

  "The little trickling noise?" She sighted down my forefinger as I pointed in the direction of the bird. She closed her fingers round my wrist, trying to keep my hand steady. (The way she did that, one finger after another, like a piano exercise, not seizing or snatching.) I inclined my head so I could brush my cheek against her hair, angled it to kiss the warm, furry nape of her neck.
Her fingers tightened on my wrist.

  What happened next was that I heard the unsurpassable sound of Monochamus galloprovincialis whirring—steaming— bellowing—up the hill behind me. I whipped round. I didn't push Liza away, or knock her, or shove her. I never saw her stumble. Believe me, history. It's true I heard her cry out, but by then I'd committed myself to the timber beetle. Its wings were going like mad, its long gangly legs splayed out like a crane fly's. Huge, wand-like antennae, longer than the creature itself, were scenting the dusk, looking for love, for the greatest story there's ever been.

  "Like us, Lizochka, like us!"—I stretched out my hand for her as the beetle bustled away into the darkness.

  But she was ten yards away. Anger had her, she was beating at the air with her fists and shouting—"I piss myself, that's what I do. I slobber down my chin, I collapse and the hot piss runs down my legs and out onto the floor for everyone to see and I writhe around and have to be restrained. Put in a jacket— yes! like a lunatic. I'm repulsive, that's what I'm like when I have a fit. You wanted to know. You asked. I'm telling you."

  I ran over to her but she palmed me away. "That's what you did to me just then—because a silly beetle was flying past. You know why I agreed to Andrej? Because I want intelligent company for my life, and protection when I'm ill. With Andrej I'll have children. I'll be the mother I've never known. I'll bring up my family decently and in comfort. What better ambition could a woman have? Not just now but ever since time started for us."

  "How was I to know it wasn't another Wiz? I make steady money from him. Already I have more fame than most men when they die."

  "Most civilians."

  "Oh, so it's back to bold brave Andrej and no one else counts, is it?"

  "You're a remarkable fellow, too. Is that enough?"

  "Mine's the only star to follow. Throw him over, Lizochka. He's a dirty little man."

  "Too late, Charlie Doig. I saw what I'd become a moment ago. A life on the move is a life of danger. Something would happen to you. Then I'd be desperate. I can't abide the thought of being an old woman and lonely and poor."

  "It's the money. You were always after it," I said harshly.

  "I was born within earshot of it. It makes a handsome sound. "Why would any woman consent to live where she can't hear it? You can't embarrass me that way."

  We'd wandered off course, into the pleasure grounds, though I didn't recall bending to unlatch the hooped, rusty, waist-high gate for her. The night was opening up its shop. Stars were rising out of her hair, springing up like sparklers to form a tiara for her dark head. A baby moon clothed her, its silvery light fluttering between the trees and making a pool round our shadows which it had sketched, all squashed up, upon the old lawn tennis court.

  I said, "We'd make a good team, Lizochka. Better as man and wife than as friends."

  I was trying the affectionate tone, as between cousins—which of course we were.

  "He is to be my husband," she said simply. "I have a good bargain to offer the man who can afford me. There's no point not being honest with oneself. I shall bear him as many children as he wants, make a worthy home for him and be faithful. My temper is medium—"

  "How often?"

  "Badly, once a year. I could do better if I had to. But I think there's a minimum that's natural. Not to lose it at all would be inhuman. Andrej—I haven't discovered about him yet. There'll be faults, we may be sure, just as our Lord Christ made us."

  Our quarrel had withdrawn out of sight. I forbore from reminding her how he'd pushed her on the swing—from in front, to admire her silken groove, to estimate angles, depth, fertility, consequences. Count Andrej Potocki with his riches, his bravery, his electrified hair and his Order of St. George, first class. Damn him to hell! Damn him and his luck and his sugar beet!

  My head went back and my nose went up and I said, "I'll win you somehow. This is rubbish about family comforts and dying adored. You're a far bolder woman than that. We were made for each other."

  It was all so obvious to me. I felt like a lion-tamer or a daredevil pilot when introduced to a beautiful woman who's in love with the same risks as he is. What else can they do but strip off their clothes and fall on each other? No alternative has yet been found. Caxton, railways, the Gatling gun, by none of these has the human race been so advanced as it has by men and women falling on each other.

  I started to speak along these lines but Louis came out and called for us. I placed my heart in a jar and with a light, confident finger tapped down the lid, which was perforated so that my love could breathe.

  In the hall the gigantic blue-glazed stove was knocking out the heat. Liza took off my pullover and smoothed down the tufts of her dark hair. With a wan smile she handed it to me. Standing there, I had this extra thought: add stuntman to the list and she and I will couple furiously in the air, like a pair of white swifts, and produce a prodigy who'll be named Daniel Doig. Oh my heart, my young heart! How I heard it going— sizzling! I put my arms round her waist and swept her up. "Ouf!" she gasped as I swung her round. She didn't know what to do with her hands at first. Then she made them into fists and beat at me—seriously, lips compressed and her eyes hard.

  I brought her back to the floor. I said, "That was for Daniel, our first child," keeping my arms around her.

  She had to smile, though she tried not to. "You should come and work in the hospital. Optimism is always needed there." Then that maid of hers, Sonja, appeared and they went off to the kitchens together to see what could be found when Misha came.

  Twenty-nine

  Bobinski must have had a patronymic but the use of it had withered away during the course of his fifty-five years at the Pink House, together with his hair but not his appetite, which astounded everyone because he was a thin, pale man of fragile appearance, something like a papyrus. He'd taught French and English to three generations of Rykovs, plus a little botanical Latin for farming purposes.

  Louis was the newcomer in the house. Uncle Boris had rescued him from a footman's job in Moscow. Once a year he returned to France to see his mother. He was comfortably built with a head of strong brown hair, an eagle's-wing moustache and a soupy complexion.

  Between him and Bobinski there was constant skirmishing. It was Louis who'd started to call the tutor Bobka and then Bobby.

  In the event Misha Baklushin couldn't come to the feast as he was bedridden with a strained rib. The only guest, therefore, was Bobinski. He came down the stairs into the hall punctually at five thirty. Louis headed him off as he advanced upon the drawing room. The discussion, which echoed off the marble tiles in the hall, concerned whether Bobinski should be announced by Louis as he went in.

  "You, my fat friend, should remember always the butler's adage: Be seen and not heard,"—and with these words Bobinski entered the drawing room, wheeling round and shutting the door on Louis in one rapid movement, the tails of his frock coat swirling up to show the shiny backside to his trousers.

  He was in exceptional form. He reminisced freely and wittily about Nicholas's father and grandfather, drank all the wine he was offered without seeming greedy, ate splendidly, and made fun of Louis.

  Louis's dark eyes watched him forking through the warty, parsley-speckled dumplings.

  "Now, Count, as for the marriage of your half-sister to Potocki . . ." Bobinski said, taking his time as he chose a couple of dumplings and steered them into a harbour of red cabbage that he'd prepared with a view to spooning the whole lot out together.

  "Depeche-toi, Bobby," said Louis. He flexed his fingers and sprang the dish—made it hop. A little jet of gravy spurted over the tutor's cuff, which he affected not to notice.

  "... would it not be advisable to have something arranged unconditionally?" he said. "To—ah—encourage haste in the proceedings?" Louis laid his free hand on the back of Bobinski's chair and stifled a yawn.

  "Monsieur, you just watch your step when Count Andrej arrives. Manners like that and he'll have you sent to a military school wh
ere the peasants are whipped until they learn how to be proper waiters. Now take your hand off my chair immediately . . . Count, once you have a date you can arrange for the choir. Of course you'll use the cathedral. . . really, my advice would be to press the gentleman . . . the longer it's left the greater the chance of him being killed too soon."

  "Please, Bobby," Liza said. "And you're the one who's always speaking of the importance of manners."

  Even Nicholas frowned.

  But Bobinski plunged on. "We must snap him up. These awful days will end and when they do families like yours will need money more than ever before. The losses! Think of the horses we've already had taken. It'd be a crime to let him escape merely through acting too casually." Turning to Liza, "You must be like Desdemona, my child, and talk him out of patience. Make yourself ever more alluring. Yes—ah—knock it out of him."

  Louis came out from behind his butlering screen. "If Count to be killed tomorrow, he should have the lady today. No mistake he should. Get baby started."

  I looked across the table at Liza. She was sitting quietly with her eyes turned down. I thought her face unnaturally white.

  Bobinski said to Nicholas, "A war is being fought. He could be killed while we're sitting here."

  "No need to tell me" Nicholas flared. "I've lost my brother. I've told Andrej he can have her whenever it suits him. What more can I do? We don't want to press him so much that he takes us for some petit bourgeois."

  "But the choir," persisted Bobinski. "Your sister deserves the best in the province. You don't want to be landed with the old growlers."

  It was the corner of her mouth that I first noticed—jagging, twitching. She stiffened. Her eyeballs, prominent anyway, were staring at a point on the wall behind me. I jumped out of my chair and ran to her side. I placed my hand on the point of her shoulder. I could feel her quivering, vibrating like a telegraph wire. Urgently I broke into another speech from Bobinksi and told Louis to fetch Sonja. I'd been hearing her washing glasses in Louis's pantry.