"Of course we'll win, Charlie, and then all the hardships our men are suffering will be blotted out for eternity by the days and nights of drinking and the rape of the German wench. Glory is for officers. For their men—firm white flesh like crab meat, preferably still kicking. Or black, or any other colour."
We got ourselves comfortable. Then he launched into his news. He'd been staying with an old flame in Moscow. She had a school-hood friend whose brother was important in government... What he'd told her was absolutely scandalous. It concerned the artistic nature of War Office regulations:
Every cavalry regiment must have not fewer than sixteen trumpeters.
Odd-numbered hussar regiments must have only black horses; even-numbered only greys. Dragoons were to ride chestnuts, and uhlans, bays. Horses with white socks were to be segregated from those with blazes. For important parades irregular white markings were to be painted over.
"Because, said my lady, they're indicative of character flaws— i.e., not to be trusted in a charge, which is ridiculous for Russians to pronounce upon, we who have more flaws than rotten ice. In their defence this brother person had pointed out that the Shi'ite Arabs also dislike white markings, especially white on diagonal legs, which they have a name for—shipraz. Hussein who was the son of the Caliph Ali who was the son-in-law of the Prophet was killed riding a horse with these colours ... I think I did well to remember all that, eh Charlie . . . hey, damn the tea, let's have some wine. This sort of talk is depressing. A few more Brusilovs, that's what we want."
He got a bottle of Crimean wine out of a painted wooden drum and squinted at its label. "I never believe them when they say things like 'First Prize at Paris, 1887.' You don't get sausages saying 'First Prize.' Or cheeses. It's just another example of modern lying ... Well, here's to my godson—long life! Beautiful women! An easy death!"
He was a laughing, corpulent, cork-faced man, short of wind and not agile. Luck, in the form of an inheritance, had favoured him from birth. He'd been repaying it from the moment he discovered he had the knack of amusing people with his stories. He frothed himself up in the manner typical of a Russian landowner with unexpected guests. He was determined to get the news from the War Office off his chest.
"And the battle wardrobe of our Deoprazny Hussars, which we would rate as the elite cavalry of the universe were the bloodlines of its officers and of its horses to be combined, must make one despair. Can we hope to beat the Hun if every officer has to wear white gloves and dress uniform when charging? Can we hope to beat anyone if these officers wear corsets so they'll be slain with a pretty waist and a pouter-pigeon's bosom?" He looked at me slyly. "In some officers the bosom is, ah, pronounced. In fact many have bosoms you could milk, the idle dogs. That's what you get from lying around all day. It's obvious most of them are pederasts. Lev hints at the regimental duties that young Rostov was being lined up for when he was killed. You read the text more carefully next time. War and Sodomy, eh, Charlie! . . . Look, here's a story that'll amuse you—but first: what do you say to a flask of my raisin vodka? You wouldn't consider it too vulgar? . . . These prize-winning wines, I must teach myself not to even go near them. The purest swill in Russia . . .
"So, it was like this. Last month I went to a meeting of our Smolensk zemstvo—full council, everyone very serious. We did our business and were standing around afterwards in this tiny room, almost a cupboard, where we get our reward of a glass of swill. No vodka of course. Strictly forbidden."
Mikhail Baklushin, my godfather, winked at me with a fat pink eye. "Six bottles between forty of us—an outrage, boy!— and naturally we all wanted to get to it first since we were hoarse from speaking nonsense. The man in front of me had his arms going like the devil in the scrimmage and I heard him mutter to the chap on his left, 'Got to get there before Misha. Nothing left otherwise.'
'"Our friend the Popovka Falstaff,' said his companion.
'"How do you mean? He's so fat he's like a toad.'
"'Precisely. Falstaff.'
"Oh, I heard 'flagstaff the first time."
Misha stood himself against the door jamb and thrust out his belly, which was encased in a waistcoat of dark green brocade with four fob pockets. It rode up as he placed his hand flat on the top of his head, and showed through his bursting shirt a slope of grey woollen pantaloons and the fork and buttons of his braces. "Let me see how much I've shrunk in the last year. What I lose in height is rearranged round my waist, that's how it seems to me."
Moving away he eyed his mark. "But Charlie, what a gorgeous tale! Me, old Misha, the tubbiest man in the province, being described as a flagstaff! I said to them, Thank you very much, very witty, but keep the toad at home next time. Good, eh! But pity poor Jack Falstaff, I cry whenever his name enters my mind. They shouldn't have brought him into it. If I have a dream about Jack I cry in my sleep. At the end, where the king cuts his old companion—it's too much for me. To ribbons! Mortally! As if he was carrying a week's shit in his breeches—horrible beyond words—the action of an out-and-out sadist—my pillow's sopping wet when I wake up." He reached over and placed a soft hand on my sleeve. "I am Sir Falstaff, that's the irony of it."
"It was within the power of the king so he did it," I said.
"Exactly! Let's have another little glass together to drink to the feebleness of kings and governments. May they totter and lurch and reel and sway—but not quite fall over. A small staggering government is best for its citizens."
"Short-sighted but not blind."
"Oh rather!" He beamed magnificently at me, a sun rising to its peak. "I'm reading Sherlock Holmes—in English, Charlie, so be proud of me. Very slowly, with the dictionary, in bed every morning. There's some silly woman and it's her line: 'Oh rather!' A bit common is it, like my raisin vodka? Let's get some zakuski or we'll be incapable. Don't be concerned about your men. They'll be hard at it with Vasili."
The reason I decided to return to the Pink House instead of staying with Misha: there was a scrunching frost and the sky glittered like a funfair. It was a night to be out.
Kobi and Timofei were in as bad a way as we were. We stood around pissing into the brittle leaves under Misha's majestic sycamore trees, all of us, swaying, hands in our pockets, hoping for the best.
From the dilapidated carriage that was used as a hen-house a cockerel with a distinctive voice shrieked into the milky night, perhaps supposing dawn had arrived.
"Old Stumpy, a good friend but given to fighting ..." Then Misha said, "Look, we all know that the finest jokes in Russia come from Odessa. So let's go down there and hear something amusing for a change instead of all this talk about bloodshed. Enjoy some warm weather whilst we're about it. Tomorrow— what's wrong with tomorrow, Charlie?" He tucked away his cock and groaned, "But the wine's so awful down there. I mean swill is too polite for the Crimean wines. And the journey . . . the trains are full yet they can spend days doing nothing, just standing at the platform. I heard of a man who took a week to get from Kiev to Odessa. What's gone wrong with our country? What's to be done about it all, boys?"
Kobi said, "Before I came to Smolensk, I never drank."
Timofei was counting the stars in a low voice. "Forty-seven, forty-eight and a tiny speck of a thing which may be something on my eyeball but let's count it anyway—and next to it is number fifty." He turned to Misha. "You know, barin, it's a long time since I had any reason to count to fifty ... As for your question, I don't know what's to be done by us ordinary folk. The people who're making such a nuisance of themselves, they're not our sort." He too shook out his cock and stowed it away in a nest of grey undergarment and cotton wool. "It's God's will, that's what it is."
"Nonsense!" cried Misha, "that's just being defeatist ... So what shall we do now?"
Someone will know why we fell in with his urging that we pay a midnight call on his black Scotch cattle. He was proud of them, their sheds were just round the corner of his house, it was as bright as day, we were drunk—well, those were the reasons, I k
new them all along. But it was stinking cold just the same.
We walked briskly, each of us trailing a stream of vapour. Tallow candles as fat as a man's thigh were on top of the pillars in the shed. Bathed in their dingy yellow glow the cattle looked up at us from their bed of straw, jaws rotating, an expression of total indifference on their faces. We lined our forearms along the top bar of the wooden gate and with the thick turdy smell of the cattle yard in our nostrils, silently construed the differences between man and beast.
Misha said to Timofei, his neighbour on the gate, "You can count to a hundred here if you feel like it."
"They look happy, not like my master's cattle," he said.
"The Count doesn't know how to love them, that's why," Misha replied. "There's no point in having animals unless you love them. They know when they're loved. Then they prosper. The cows come in season regularly and smell attractive to the bulls. Bulls are like us, they need to feel wanted before they give of their best. Then they inseminate the cows deeply and accurately so that when the calves are born they're feeling around for the teat within minutes. But first you have to love them."
"Not for me," said Kobi.
"And you have to love them also for their effect on the landscape. Nicholas's are so many colours that they say nothing to the eye. But mine, shining solid black against the green of summer . . . They're my harem of Nubian princesses."
At that moment there jumped up from the pen on the far side of the shed Vasili's eldest son, whose turn it was to be the nightwatchman. He'd been sleeping in the straw alongside the cattle. He came nervously towards us, brushing himself down. Misha shouted at him not to bother. He halted, scratching. He said it was time to put the tar on the old cow's hurt. He was speaking to himself really, still full of sleep.
We turned round, reversing our positions by leaning back against the gate and putting our elbows on the top rail.
The moon was blazing down on us. The shadows were sharper than the sharpest silhouette. I could make out the loose thread hanging from a cuff button of my greatcoat. I was taught that black and white were the only colours possible by moonlight. But the blues I could see! There were half a dozen shades of it, the adjacent blues of plums, of damsons, of blackberries—an orchard of blues, without even counting the murky blue of Timofei's coaching coat. And in the middle reaches of the sky, on the edge of the moon's main force, there hung another blue— a haze, like a veil, that was the colour of paraffin. Ah! The breath of wonderment came from our mouths like smoke. The ancient wooden manor house of Zhukovo, the cattle sheds with their eccentric brickwork, the stars like hay seeds—"Russia, oh my beloved," I heard again my exiled mother's lament. Such beauty! Our voices were stilled by it. Misha took his hat off and held it over his heart.
In front of us, in the yard, were six great elmwood troughs. Kobi was the first to notice. Pointing at them he said, "I can see six moons." We hoisted ourselves off the gate and walked over.
The water had frozen after the moon came up and trapped its reflection beneath the ice. Six moons, one for each trough, glittered at us. Straw and stalks of hay that had been floating on the surface were caught in the ice. The moon appeared to be chewing them. Each moon had a slightly different expression according to the way its ice had formed: bland, scarred, or wrinkled like the skin of a pudding.
"Drowned," said Misha, "full fathom five."
Timofei bent right down, putting his hands on his knees. "I'm not going to be tricked. I'm not a simple. It's the moon shining off the ice. Drowned, barin! You're making fun of me." He put his hat back on, stretched and yawned. "Drowned! You rich people know the funniest things to say."
We'd warmed up a bit. The drink was starting to rise again, like scum. We swayed back to the house and our carriage. The old horse's whiskers were individually frosted and stood out like a sparse white bush or like the painting in Popovka church of Christ's crown of thorns. He was a wonderfully patient animal that day.
I said to Timofei it was a crime to have left him out in the cold when we were all enjoying ourselves. He said it didn't matter, the mud on his coat would have kept him as warm as he wanted to be. He climbed onto the box.
Kobi and I got inside. But Misha had something private to say to me. I stepped down, nearly missing the step. We went into the porch where the housekeeper had left a night candle.
"I didn't want to speak where there was any chance the men might hear. The apropos is—your fellow—the Oriental, Antonio— well, I didn't have it directly from him—of course not—but in a round-the-sugar-bush way I learned that you were—ah—my dear godson, friend, neighbour—that you were interested in Elizaveta. Which is good—excellent—except that she is already affianced. Therefore, something has to be done to clear the way for you. Now, this is the point: what you have to understand is that this Potocki is as slippery as a pig's foreskin. He beats his women, he beats his soldiers, he beats his servants. Gambles. Owes his creditors a fortune. Land will soon start walking away from him if he can't keep the Jews happy. I hear these things, Charlie. I can't resist listening . . . So, take a sword to him and hack him down into the gutter. We, the citizens of Popovka, will applaud. That's what I wanted to say!"
"But if that's how it is for him, why doesn't he go after an heiress?"
Misha placed his hands on my shoulders. "My dear child, what other heirs does your uncle Igor have? Do you take Potocki for a cretin?" He shook me gently, swaying me to and fro. "Get her for yourself, Charlie. You're our sort, not that Polish scoundrel. The Lord Christ preserve us from all Poles . . . Oh, it would make me so happy. Liza's such a—a—lollipop. 'Bending down to the lad's height, Holmes said: "I'll give you sixpence if you go into that shop and tell the man in the skullcap you've come for the purple lollipop."' Adorable! I adore the sound of your English words. Of course Holmes never said anything so silly. I made it up. I just wanted an excuse to say 'lollipop' and have someone hear me who could understand."
He gave a terrific snort. "For God's sake get her, Charlie. Russia will never have seen a party like the one we'll have . . . I must go and lie down. Happiness, it upsets me so very much." He flung his arms around my neck and we embraced and kissed each other on the lips.
Thirty-three
But the next event, most horrible: Goetz was dead. We reached Petrograd two days later. I walked into the porter's lodge at the Academy and handed the man my card. He knew immediately who I was. And the very first thing he said in response was this: "Your old friend Goetz has gone to the stars."
His death had been natural. He'd signed up as an ambulance driver, had got out to shovel snow and had dropped in his footprints from a heart attack. The head of the Academy, Tarasov, had come down from his office to tell the porter. It had been among the obituaries in the quarterly Proceedings of the Natural History Society, a copy of which had reached them from London. My name had been mentioned extensively, which was how the porter knew about me.
He saw I was troubled. The wet snow was sliding off Uncle Igor's mackintosh cape. He took it from me and hung it up. Then he ushered me into his sanctum and invited me to sit beside his tiny coal fire until I was composed.
So it had come to this, the sorry world. My mentor, the repository of so much wisdom wrung from so many unrepeatable experiences, Hartwig Goetz, the survivor of malaria, snake bites, earthquakes, floods, hernias, overturned rafts and a charging elephant, had absconded with his genius to the kingdom of the greatest naturalist of them all. Memories knocked into me, stumbling over each other as they jostled for focus. Dead, my heavy humourless friend with his sun helmet and black elasticated stockings, with his weakness for brandy, with his piercing comprehension of beauty and thus of magic. Dead!
"Old stories coming back," Kobi said with sympathy. He was in the doorway watching me. I'd often talked to him about Goetz. He knew everything that had happened between us, from our first meeting at the Darwin Club to the breakfast in Samarkand when he resigned. He had Hpung's murder by heart.
"He
was fearless. He'd risk anything, suffer any illness if it added to human knowledge. The museums should club together to put up a statue of him. He saved them millions. Faked-up firsts, faked-up variants, fake bones, fake feathers, fake faeces— Kobi, he could even tell fake shit from real. When I was starting with him, we got two tins of the stuff from a museum in California—don't look like that, it is so. Someone was pretending there was an unknown bird in Alaska and wanted money to track it down. Whenever there was an argument, the message went out: send for Goetz! A true and honourable man."
"Your best friend?"
"Friendship—it wasn't like that. I loved him." I said the words spontaneously, as they arose.
"All the world lives squashed up in a tent like happy friends. One night a gale blows it away. Then war." He gave me a funny squinting look, maybe apologising for the elegance of his philosophy.
I spread my hands before the fire. The old question returned with a vengeance: had I ever, even once, called him Hartwig? Had we ever had one intimate conversation—uncovered ourselves—been as close as that? Yet I loved him. Now dead, a rickle of grumpy bones in a hole in Silesia. Was there some odour about me that meant I could never bind with those I loved? Grim Jesus, what a morning.
There were intrusive voices. It was Tarasov, come to take us upstairs to his office.
The wide staircase echoed to our footfall. Corpses of curled-up woodlice, the yellow mouthpieces of Kapral cigarettes and portions of leaves strewed the marble on either side of the carpet. At least half the lustres in the chandelier weren't working. The pipes were cold and the windowpanes spiky with bursts of frost. Tarasov was wearing gloves.
I said, "Where are all your people?"
"I have two porters left, both old men. The rest have been taken for the war. So far as the office staff are concerned, we have reached an agreement: they need come in only on the days I permit heating, of which there are two each week. By this method the work of the Academy goes slowly forward and my people are free to labour at staying alive. Coal, firewood, food, decent clothes for their children—such things are not found these days without a search. Often without prior information. I myself—but we must all make sacrifices. I shan't bore you."
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