White Blood

by James Fleming

  "That may be the case for men but it has nothing to do with me," said Lydia. "I'm born, I get married, I produce for my husband a bone-idle son, my husband dies and then I die. Mine will be a typical story of our times. Politicians—I blow my nose on them. What can they possibly have to do with a woman's life? You must talk about your chickens instead, Puffsy."

  Misha sighed. He nodded us towards the billiard room, to which there was an entrance from the corner of the drawing room.

  But as we were getting up we heard the tap-tap of Bobinski's stick on the hall tiles. Yesterday he'd stumbled on the stairs and taken a hurt. He limped in, having been attracted by the sound of guests.

  "Were those your chickens I saw looking out of the carriage?" he asked without any preliminaries of greeting, planting himself in front of Misha and thus with his back to Lydia, who was tucked away at the back of her armchair.

  She gave a slight cough. Bobinski whirled round. Full of confusion, he clicked his heels and bowed to the waist, which only had the effect of making us all look at his shoes, which needed a good polish.

  "Mille pardons, Madame." He stuck his bad leg out to one side and struggled down into a kneeling position. "Mille pardons . . . mille pardons, Madame la Comtesse," offering his old dry lips to her hand. Clambering up, he backed out of the room—glancing over his shoulder for the furniture and bowing at every other step, his cheeks pink with embarrassment and his hand pressed to his heart.

  In the doorway he encountered Louis wheeling in the tea trolley.

  "This is like a good farce," laughed Misha. "Don't go on behaving like that, Bobby, for God's sake. She's not the Tsarina, not even a countess, though she'd like to be. She won't have you walk to Siberia. Will you, Mamasha, you'd never do that to Bobby. If it were me, on the other hand . . . Come on, Bobby, come on, stop looking as though you'd never seen a woman before."

  Bobinksi apologised to everyone in turn and was made much of.

  Louis made room for the tea things on the circular morocco-topped magazine table.

  "What, Louis, tea maid now?" Bobinski said, getting his nerve back.

  "The other staff are engaged in the kitchens. Sonja is with Miss Elizaveta. They are discussing the wedding. I thought it better that I myself brought in the tea." Louis addressed himself to Nicholas to save face. Bending down he rotated the plate of madeleines until Lydia Baklushin could reach the one with scarlet and green icing that she'd pointed at.

  Nicholas said to me, "It's so strange, when I don't see Sonja, I don't even think about her. She's the most forgettable person I know."

  The next morning we understood what the closeting of Liza and Sonja had been about. A black motor car arrived flying from its bonnet the insignia of the general staff. Its wheels spun on the loose stones as it ascended the slope by Gog and Magog. The horses were just then being walked out by Pashka and Styopka, the stable boys. Both animals and humans lifted their heads and looked on in silent amazement.

  The car drew up sleekly and wealthily, its fat black tyres making the gravel murmur. The driver opened his passenger's door and stood to attention. I watched as Potocki dismounted, looked around, and stretched.

  It was obvious. He was there to claim my Liza for the Christmas festival. To make her drunk, to devour her, defile her, debauch her at every point of ingress.

  He was in the full uniform of his regiment, the Garde a Cheval: white tunic, white trousers with a wide red stripe down the seam, gleaming calf-length boots. His shoulders were looped with gold and his chest striped with a warrior's ribbons. He was shorter than I remembered, about the same height as Liza, with a baby belly from sitting in an office. An anxious face, clean-shaven. His hair was still electrified but now there was less of it. It was like a horseshoe round his bald crown.

  I don't know where Nicholas was. Skulking somewhere in case Liza threw a fit on the doorstep and bust his bowl of expectations. I myself went out to greet Andrej.

  His eyes were grey, soft yet thorough. We embraced; we sized each other up. I searched his face for the decadence of a gambler. But he was not as Misha had said. He was every bit as decent-looking as one would imagine of a hero and a patriot. I could think of nothing to hold against him, except that he was going to bed my woman for which I hated him so much that I was quivering.

  He said, "I've heard about your work from Elizaveta. We've both come a long way. One can never tell what's waiting to hatch within one's schoolmates, isn't that so, Charlie? When all this is over you'll come and spend a season with us. Our families—it'll be a good union, me and Liza. I hope I can prove myself worthy of the honour."

  Louis came out of the house with a case in each hand and one tucked beneath his arm. As the driver was stowing them away, Liza walked out in her travelling furs. Behind her was Sonja, pale and with spots round her mouth.

  Sonja asked the driver in a bossy way if he'd got all the suitcases in the car. He opened the luggage compartment and showed her. Liza, her arm through Andrej's, waited until Sonja reported to her. The three of them quickly said goodbye to me, and then to Lydia, who'd just appeared.

  Louis ran out of the house with a furled umbrella, which he handed to Sonja. Liza asked Andrej if she should send Louis to look for her brother. Andrej said they shouldn't waste time. He and Liza got into the back of the car, Sonja into the front. The driver went round checking the doors were properly closed. The car glided down the hill, past Gog and Magog. The last I saw was through the rear window: Andrej unpeeling the fur stole from her neck, which he kissed. Snooping should be abolished, it's so hurtful.

  Thirty-six

  After the festival I went back to Petrograd with Kobi. His widow was only too glad to have him as a wage-earner.

  For my part I was waiting for a miracle. "Where the hell have you been?" That's what I was going to yell at it.

  Returning from the Academy one afternoon in February I was met by my uncle Igor. He'd been waiting to see me turn in at the gates. I walked across the courtyard and past the statue of Diocletian, conscious that he was standing on the steps above me. He led me into the house by the elbow, saying nothing. He pointed to the console table on which the incoming and outgoing post was placed.

  I saw the buff woolly paper of a telegram—a lengthy one.

  It was from Nicholas. Elizaveta was to be married to Count Andrej Potocki in Smolensk Cathedral in five days' time. The bridegroom was going to be staying at the Pink House beforehand. Celebrations would be low-key. The exigencies of war were to blame.

  Kobi scrutinised me as I read it out.

  "Already his sugar-beet money is at work," Igor said, referring to the fact that so long a telegram had been accepted for transmission. "But does it mean no wine, no music, no dancing? Obviously it does."

  For Igor as for Bobinski. The years were rattling on. Every party was their last one, every half chance for amusement had to be snatched. Igor had been peeved to begin with. Now that he had me in front of him he became shrilly voluble. Liza was his god-daughter: she'd had the Rykov pearls off him: she was his heir. She owed him a party. He wanted to polka, he wanted to see all the old measures being stepped before it was too late. "About the war, that's just an excuse and a pretty thin one too. She's ungrateful, that's what it is. She hasn't any time for her elders now that she's hitched up with Potocki."

  He fell to sulking. He shuffled round the palace in his slippers, barking at Joseph and saying repeatedly that he'd have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

  "You're young too, you go off and have your fun. I'll hold out here as best I can."

  I was not huffy. The crisis was at hand. I wanted to be there. I had to be there, to suffer such mortification as was to be my lot. Before my eyes was a tablet and on it was chalked "The price of ambition is suffering." Then I'd get out and start again in another country.

  The next day we said our farewells to Tarasov and drew the last of our pay. I tried him with my white swift. He smiled as if knowing all along that I had something up my sleeve. "How pr
etty it is," he said, trailing his finger down its spine. "You wouldn't credit how many ornithological prodigies I've been offered this month. The last was a white rook. Every Russian knows a rook's as black as sin, yet here was a white one on my desk. What did I do? To the lady I said, No thank you, madam, not even if you gave it to me. I would regard it as an insult to nature to accept the idea that I could ever see a white rook perched in a tree. So I shall thank you and say that I know swifts are black. Let us part as friends, Charlie."

  "Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tarasov," I said, "I accept your decision: one, because you are an honest man and deserve well; two, because it is in keeping with this bad phase in my life. But I must tell you that a white rook is possible and my white swift is genuine. Admit it, you know nothing about ornithology or albinism . . ."

  Etcetera until darkness came and it was time to get ourselves to Nicholas Station and onto a train for Smolensk.

  But when we got to Znamenskaya we found nothing had moved since midday. The usual array of stories was on the go. A wagon carrying munitions for the front had slipped a coupling and overturned. No, it had been carrying cattle—or horses. They were careering, terrified, all over the tracks. Troops had been called in to shoot them, in the dark . . . No, it was just normal incompetence: the station's coal bunkers were empty.

  Silently Kobi and I sat at the station bar, drinking, watching and listening.

  We were not alone in our predicament. Entire families were trying to travel. Not just parents and their children but aunts, uncles, servants—all the outliers. Perhaps, I thought to myself, when these conglomerates succeed in leaving the city there'll be no one left in Petrograd with their surnames. Whole units of tribal existence dispersed around the globe . . .

  I asked one man how long he'd been there. He sighed: "Since two, when we had hot soup in the restaurant. But with the Lord's help we shall leave soon. To Odessa. And then? The United States of—. I can't bring myself to say it. It's too presumptuous. God knows how we'll get there."

  For the young children the excitement of the occasion had vanished. They'd long since given up going to look at the board. Morosely they sat sucking their thumbs. They said nothing. Their dulled eyes regarded those who passed with curiosity but no fear. They were plump bourgeois children, ignorant about a land of wolves except in fairy tales.

  Not so the unmarried aunts and uncles who were living on the fringe of the family. They had no illusions. It was flight, nothing less. They never strayed far from the parents and covertly watched them like hawks in case the train should suddenly arrive and they were forgotten in the stampede: in case there wasn't room for everyone and the question arose of sacrifice.

  These were not poor people. What I was seeing were the middle sections of the mercantilist class, educated people who had some communal instinct for when the incompetence of government had become, like a disease, untreatable. As the owners of capital they'd learnt to be on the lookout for jealousy, to keep constantly under review the most vital commandment of all: get out in time. Some would say it shows confidence to move one's family from one land to another. But that was not what I saw or felt at Nicholas Station that night.

  The overhead station clock moved inexorably forward. Disillusioned, the groups made their arrangements for the night: shoved the aunts and uncles and servants to the perimeter and assigned the bench, their thickest rugs and mama's patient lap to the first-born son. But even as they dozed they were straining their ears. What was going on in the marshalling yard? Would they ever get to hear the longed-for chuff and toot from Train No. 7? Fantasies perverted the rationalism of their well-ordered minds—and kept the cold at bay: the winter sun in Odessa, the famous jokes of its citizens, the theatres, boulevards, seaside promenades, hairdressers, cafes and especially the shining brass plate at 1, Kazarmenny Pereulok where resided Mr. J. H. Grout, the Consul of the United States of America, a country so fabled that even to admit aloud that it was one's destination was considered unlucky.

  There were quite a few of us at the bar: army officers, commercial travellers, humbug men working the carriages with their five-kopeck tricks. We drank bad-temperedly, swapped lies, and coarsely chaffed the tarts plying their trade from the shadows. None of us expected trains to arrive at that time of night, be turned round and sent out again. We were men of the world. We were used to dealing with practicalities. A railway timetable was a theory, nothing more. What really concerned us was this: had the bolsheviks so completely infiltrated the railways that they could grab a munitions wagon whenever they wished?

  Kobi was on my left. A Lieutenant Borisholov was on my right. The question arose yet again. (The station was eerie without the roar of locomotives. Our human voices filled only a portion of it.) A middleman in toiletries said, "I don't believe it. If they could control the railways so effectively they'd close them down with strikes. I would. Then our armies couldn't be supplied. Finish! Which of us could say what the result might be—the Tsar might be forced out ..."

  "Keep to the railways, my friend," growled Borisholov, "or we might start thinking you're a radical too."

  Turning to me he said, "So many civilians have no idea of reality. All they want to do is lock the door and pull the blankets over their heads. The truth is that the bolsheviks are playing with us. I've seen what they did to an officer who became unpopular for making his men carry out his orders. They stripped him and tied him to the branch of a tree by one ankle—better sport like that. Got hold of his free leg and stretched him open. Then they cut his testicles off. I was the one who found him."

  Leaning over me, Kobi asked, "How did you get enough revenge?"

  Borisholov eyed him. "Is he with you?"

  "Yes."

  "We shot the first twenty of his regiment that we got hold of. No trial. In public. Singly. I expect it did no good but we felt better for it. The soldiers who castrated the man had probably slipped away into the forest. It's what they do. The colonel reports them as missing in action or not returned from leave, anything that can't be blamed on him. The word 'leave' is in itself a joke. The men laugh in your face when you mention it. What happens when they go home? They find another man screwing their wife and they can't even get drunk properly. Drink is the only other pleasure they know. Drink as in annihilation."

  "Yet you're going back to the front," I said.

  Borisholov thumped his glass down on the zinc for more. "It's safer. I can sense through my skin what's happening around me. Here you can never tell. Your enemy may be the man from whose kiosk you've bought a newspaper all your life. There could be a sniper hiding behind this chimney stack—or that one. If you're a soldier you can't help thinking how simple that'd be . . . This wine was pissed by a fox. I've got something better in my pocket. Tell your fellow to watch our stuff and you and I'll go for a walk."

  The night passed, not cosily at all. Towards dawn a number of things happened.

  Thirty-seven

  The first concerned the station clock, which had stopped during the night. At six o' clock the morning shift of porters started. People began to be about—I mean a clear distinction could now be made between those hurrying off to do a day's work and the class of night folk who haunt every station in Europe, who position themselves close to the toilets and cannot even think about sleep until dawn.

  Three men from the new shift, each of them carrying a fifteen-foot section of wooden ladder balanced against his shoulder blade, walked with careful steps down the central platform. They hooked the sections together and extended it to rest against the girder to one side of the clock. One leaned back against it, his arms folded. They were waiting for a fourth party.

  A number of passengers gathered about them to observe proceedings. Never had anyone known a clock in Russia receive such prompt attention. I heard a woman say it was a sure sign of confidence that the trains would soon be running normally.

  The clock had two faces. Some men in the group began to discuss the mechanics of the piece. Did the whole thing split in
two or did each face open independently?

  Borisholov said wearily, "One man will hold the ladder while his mate climbs it to examine the parts that are usually faulty. He'll call down to the foreman who'll walk slowly back to the supervisor's office. The latter will send for an engineer and someone who understands the electrical components. A total of twelve people will have been involved by the time the clock is again working . . . Hey, look over there, look what's come to exalt our lowly company."

  I turned to where he was pointing. To my astonishment there was the tall figure of my uncle Igor floating onto the concourse followed by his steward and two footmen, each escorting a porter with a heaped barrow of luggage. He was wearing a silk top hat; a dark, close-fitting, ankle-length overcoat; full make-up, tight black leather gloves and galoshes. Round his neck was a silver fox, in his hand a cane.

  "By the four brothers of Christ," breathed Borisholov, his jaw hanging, "and his good-for-nothing sisters . . ."

  Igor halted and looked about, tapping his cane petulantly. His steward was holding the tickets, the ends of the pink pasteboard showing between his gloved fingers like the tongue of a sleeping hound. Nonplussed by the silence, the party stood there.

  Borisholov nudged me. "Are they begging for disaster? There's rioting in the street and they expect to get away with looking like Louis the something?" He straightened himself and shouted out, "Hey old man, made your will?"

  I said to him, "That's my uncle." I walked over to Igor, who hadn't heard Borisholov. He showed no surprise that I was still there. He'd had a change of mind. Not about Liza—he was still convinced of her ingratitude—but about the need to see all his relations before it was too late. He'd cabled Nicholas to keep his favourite room for him.

  The rouge was brilliant on his cheeks. Beneath the yellow-green light of the gas lamps it was the colour of a special geranium. The bristle round the curve of his jaw was layering into a soft white pelt, the whiskery stuff of an old man. From beneath his dyed eyebrows he glared around at the waiting passengers and the man up the ladder at the clock.