White Blood

by James Fleming

  He shrugged, no more than that.

  She said, "Very well. But I shall remember this exchange. Tell me, is the morality of terrorism included in the morality of politics or is it something quite apart—with different rules?"

  "Terrorists can't afford morality. That's a luxury for the bourgeois."

  "Like Einem's chocolates," Nicholas said, yawning. "Enough, I say. My vote goes for a republic with a strong, sensitive tsar at its head."

  We smiled. It was a good way to signal a change of conversation was needed.

  But for some reason Glebov coloured with anger. "Attack me as much as you want. Do it while you have the chance. I've never had any desire to be loved. Other things have always been more important to me."

  "Ohhh ..." I said, fixing him in the eye and drawing out the word to four syllables so that everyone was listening, "is that so? What about 'S'?"

  He started in his seat. For a second I saw in behind his pupils, to his eye-grounds burning with a fierce red glow. Then everything snapped shut. I said to myself, I've got you, Glebov. He looked away, up the table to Misha. Tiny muscles were flickering along his jawline. "What good have you done in the world, then?"

  Sixty-two

  Lists of campaigns won, of government positions, medals, professorships, bridges constructed—the paper's blank. It's not the way I've lived. But I've done a few things I'm proud of, and since you asked, here they are.

  "I've nursed my dying father and taken care of Lydia, my mother. Before her marriage she learned to play the piano to the very highest standard at the Conservatoire. Because I give her constant encouragement she's resumed her playing and now has a numerous and faithful public.

  "I've bred the best cattle in the province, satisfied several women deeply, and made a home for my chickens. As a young man I trained some first-class dogs. I've given amusement to many. And since people remember a good joke or a happy event for months, sometimes for years, I think that should count double. My tailor is most grateful to me. I've never killed anyone, or had a man beaten. So mark me, Glebov. What would I score in your regime?"

  "You are a superfluous man in any progressive society. That's what Stolz would have said."

  "Superfluous? If it weren't for Misha and myself and the work we provide, half the peasants in Popovka would have starved." Nicholas rose angrily from his chair.

  But Misha just lolled there, smiling at Glebov. "Dogs, women, vodka, music, comfortable sofas—can the world possibly mean more? No one goes away empty-handed from Zhukovo. Vasili despairs of me. 'What'll be left for my wages?' He must say that once a week. Because of this my cattle and hens live in the purple while I live in total disorder. My banker has insomnia over me. And if he knew the whole truth, about the tricks I've learned . . . Well, in fact I'm probably worth less than many peasants. I may be worth minus. So, Prokhor Fyodorovich, what are we to say of poverty in your society? Am I to be rescued?"

  "Stolz would have said you'd brought it on yourself. Pleasure on your scale is impossible to excuse."

  "You're such an earnest young man. My behaviour is bound to be disgraceful if you adopt some inhuman standard of austerity. However—look at it another way. Should I not receive a civic honour from the shopkeepers of Smolensk for having kept them going? I'm serious. If the world were full of spend-nothings, how would anyone carry on a business? Trade would cease and money disappear. Life with it. Well, an enjoyable life anyway."

  "That's a good point," Nicholas said, steepling his fingers.

  "Crises rear up in my life every six months, with smoking breath like dragons. But as I said, I've grown clever. I soar above them like the lady who used to ride the trapeze when the circus came to Smolensk whose name was Topf, which she took from her husband, the clown. In the process I hurt no one except an occasional financier, and bring joy to many.

  "I've harmed not one soul in my life except Maria Gorgulov whose hand I begged in marriage and was later obliged by my nerves to release. The meeting that ensued with her papa was a bloody occasion. I've been ashamed of myself ever since. I should have gone through with it and become reconciled to suffering. I say it again, forgive me, Maria Alexandrovna, though you may be dead ... It was no fault of mine that the lady I did marry, died. Buying treatments for her in Germany was the cause of my first acquaintance with the Agricultural Mortgage Corporation.

  "My conscience is clear. In fact—in fact, Prokhor Fyodorovich, I have benefited many. I suppose—you could say—an average guess would be one per week excluding the cattle and chickens. Three thousand total so far in my life. So how am I superfluous?"

  "Because you take resources from the general wealth and squander them on your own whims. You're a robber, stripping the country for your own inexcusable pleasures . . . These are the arguments and theories that were being bandied around in my regiment by Stolz. It was impossible not to hear them."

  "He means you don't work, that's the problem for Glebov," said Nicholas loudly.

  "Not for me, for the Stolzes," he protested.

  Misha said, "Why should I? Did anyone in the Bible do proper work? Not one of them. They all dabbled at fishing and carpentry, amateurs like Nicholas here. If I worked my men wouldn't have jobs. I don't object to work in principle. But I've never tried it: everyone knows I'd lose money for them. Would that be in order for Stolz, to be industrious yet a bungler at the same time?"

  "Attitude is the key to it all. One must kill desire. One must derive enjoyment only from work. This is the first stage on the road to perfection, they said. The state, our mother, cannot be responsible for loungers. Loungers are a negative influence."

  We stared at him. Nicholas leaning, one foot on the floor and the other tucked up behind him against the wall; Misha, caught in the act of raking through the nut bowl for a walnut; Bobinski, Lizochka and myself. We stared at him in disbelief—and began to laugh.

  Misha wiped the tears from his eyes. "That's me gone to Siberia."

  "What can you have been thinking of, Glebov, when you said that?" For the first time that evening Nicholas was at his ease.

  Glebov had been picking mechanically at a wart on his thumb. Abruptly, with surprise, he looked up, at the circle of our laughing faces. His eyes narrowed. Then he relaxed and joined in. "Those aren't my thoughts, Count, God forbid! It's what we heard from the agitators—the bolsheviki. One day the talk would be 'The Crushing of Privilege', the next day 'The Just Distribution of Wealth.' Imagine! Now you know where Stolz and his sort got their ideas from."

  He seized the wine bottle and went round the table filling our glasses. "To money! Enjoyment! To the selfish gratification of lusty pleasures!" His forehead was damp with sweat, likewise the shelf of his upper lip, which was composed of blue hairy fat.

  Sixty-three

  Outside of Glebov we were friends and family gathered in an old mansion on the evening after the Tsar's abdication. The wine was circulating. Snow had started to fall again. The trees were humming in the blizzard, and spits were coming down the chimney and making the fire hiss.

  I was showing off my wife. If you'd stuck a compass point in Smolensk and drawn a six-inch circle on the small map you wouldn't have found one comparable example of womanhood. Elizaveta Doig! Mine and mine alone! A rattling good mind and jiggling buttocks. Top woman—and in love with me.

  I was too happy, too unconcerned. We all were. We were isolated from the war and politics, I suppose from mankind itself. We could afford to be theorists and to poke fun at Glebov.

  "To money! To enjoyment!" we shouted, raising our glasses to him.

  My Lizochka excused herself and went up to bed. Glebov's eyes followed her trembling pantaloons to the door.

  Misha said, "Apropos money, I was once asked what noise I thought best represented the concept of wealth. This man had read the phrase 'a roar like a waterfall of kopecks' and wanted my opinion. No, I said, for me it's the sigh of a silk chemise descending to a lady's ankles. He was at first startled. Then he asked with a smile, 'Rustle?
' Too harsh, I said. It was a sigh, both of the chemise and of fate, who'd seen it all before. It transpired he was on his third wife. How foolish we are—one-horned beasts of really very limited intelligence.

  "God, I get so drunk on these winter nights of ours . . .

  "Maybe I am superfluous. What's the opposite, Prokhor Fyodorovich? Perhaps I have a little bit of that too, just enough to redeem me. Let me think, what do I do that's vital ... If I had my doves painted red, would that help when Stolz comes? Or my white shoes that I love so much . . . Oh yes, you shot him, so you did. Rat-a-tat-tat . . .

  "Tell me what you'll do for old people when you're on the throne. Everyone should have a housekeeper and a Vasili, that's obvious. Make the bankers pay for them, that's my advice. Make them pay for free coal and firewood as well. Haul them in and shoot them if they don't hand over the money in those neatly tied boxes that haberdashers sell collars in. They're swine. You can never get the better of a banker. Take that fellow Kugel. He knows nothing whatsoever about my cattle, about how my bull mopes when he's left by himself—just stands there lashing his tail, his eyes tiny with resentment . . . But he knows their value as if they were in his own field. Charlie, I was being truthful when I said I was drunk. It's the relief at finding myself still alive . . . Superfluous, eh." He looked around for somewhere to lie down.

  Bobinski said to Glebov, "One can understand the general desire of idealists to do good. But it would be a great mistake to abolish poverty. The sight of it disturbs the emotions of people who are rich. It's healthy that they be disturbed for it shows they're still sensitive."

  "A pin could do it as easily," Glebov said.

  "One could try to abolish it but one should fail," Bobinski said. "Poverty makes a good teacher, both for those going up and those coming down."

  "A teacher one could well do without," sneered Glebov. "My father was a poor man. My mother worked herself to death for us children. She became phthisic, started coughing her lungs up on the kitchen table, into the bacon rinds she was sending us to school with ..."

  I pushed one of the easy chairs from the hall into the room and positioned it near the fire for Misha. He fell into it with a wallop. "My dear, pray cease your morbid tale. Your family does not have exclusive ownership of grief. Shall we move on? Let us consider agricultural matters, Prokhor Fyodorovich . . . Shall I tell you why I call my chickens the Hapsburgs? Because they're so inbred. Until ten years ago, no one in Popovka had bought a new cockerel for centuries. Then I did. You see, if they're less dotty they won't get their legs scythed off so frequently. Swish swish they'll hear and start hopping— leaping—skipping—flying perhaps. But even now they always hang around just too long. Like the Romanovs. Have the world perfected by the time I wake up. That's all." He closed his eyes, snorting, and fondling his stomach.

  Nicholas yawned. "Let's speak freely with each other. What would you call yourself, Prokhor: utopianist—liberal reformer— Christian democrat?"

  He never quite answered the question, this was another trick of Glebov's. He said, "The principal question is whether great events descend on us according to some law of historical gravity or whether we can coerce them into happening. I belong to the party of coercion. I'm an optimist. I don't believe in fate, or God."

  He lit the stub of a makhorka like a common soldier and began to smoke it furiously, snatching staccato puffs. "This sitting around and waiting isn't for me. One must propel history, kick it in front of one down the street. What matters are deeds. Rifles, horses, artillery, sacrifice"—his cigarette was burning its cardboard holder and making an unpleasant smell. He ground it into the carpet with his boot—"so that everyone in our motherland who has suffered injustice can bathe in the sweetest champagne in the shop, which is revenge. The pink champagne of revenge, by which the mighty are lowered and society is reborn."

  He paused and looked at us. "That's the typical speech of an agitator. I can reproduce their arguments word for word I heard them so often in my regiment."

  "Such realism is commendable," Bobinski said acidly.

  "The question you should have asked is how much history can be speeded up—the difference humans can make when they act as one," Glebov said.

  "That's what anarchists believe," Bobinski said flatly. "No discussions, no Duma, just guns and bombs and wholesale change. You're one of them."

  "I was repeating the arguments I heard from Stolz. They're not my beliefs, old fellow."

  "No. I've been watching you. Everything has been a pretence until your speech just now. It rang true. Your eyes gave you away. They were those of a believer. You're halfway to being a common terrorist. I can smell it."

  "Your own shite's what you're smelling. What would I be doing here if I were a bolshevik? Watch what you say, old Bobby fellow."

  "Revenge of some sort. Red champagne."

  "Live long enough, old Bobby, and you may find out."

  "Prokhor Fyodorovich Glebov, the eel beneath the rock," Bobinski said quietly.

  They stared at each other. Leaning forward I hissed into Glebov's ear, "Revenge for your wife. For Sonja, whom they hanged. That's why you're here."

  His head whipped round like a snake's. Misha was snoring in his chair. Nicholas had gone to his office. Louis—somewhere. There were just the three of us.

  Bobinski said to him, "Go and convert someone else. You give my nerves goose pimples."

  Glebov eyed us in turn. He tilted his blue chin, he aimed his charred nostrils straight at me. "I shall have left by breakfast. Revenge is as tasty as a good thigh of ham. It was a saying of Stolz. I remember it well."

  "You're a cocky little shit," Bobinski said.

  "Know many of them do you, old Bobby?"

  Liza called for me down the stairs, worried.

  Sixty-four

  I was HOT with argument. To cool my head before going up to her, I fetched a tray from Louis's pantry and began to load it with glasses. Bobinski had the same idea. We'd had enough of Glebov.

  He sat and watched me, smoking. It was his way of showing his superiority. He wanted to accrue advantages over me step by step, to belittle—to dominate—to thus arrive at a position where he could utterly conquer me. His sitting there so pat was a part of this.

  I took the tray to the pantry.

  Between the two rooms the corridor made an elbow. Because Nicholas was saving up to pay off Helene, there was only one candle to light the corridor. It was at the pantry end. The darkness of the elbow was made more so by the state of the panelling, which was stained to the colour of mahogany by soot and smoke.

  I unloaded the tray and started back.

  The darkness at the elbow was thicker than before. I saw it in an instant and knew it for Glebov. I had the candle at my back. He'd have got a clear image of me against the light. Smoothly I wheeled round as if I'd forgotten something, dumped the tray—and charged back down the corridor, head levelled, like a bison. I rammed him in the lard—got my forearm across his throat—prised him off the floor—whacked him up against the panelling. With my left hand I groped and caught him, root, balls and cords all in my strong fist.

  "Look at my wife again like that and I'll pull it off."

  His teeth flashed below me. I was looking down onto his bald patch. "You'll need a winch."

  I yanked him up by the root, onto his toes. Wisps of candlelight crept in between us. He balanced himself on tiptoe, arms limp, not attempting to struggle. Quite passive: it seemed to me smirking, even though I was squeezing him like a wet cloth. That was when I realised how confident he was.

  More than ever I wanted to destroy him. I wished him to disappear from my life. He was hanging there, chin on my forearm, eyes glinting. I said, "A rope'd stretch your spine. You'd gain inches. Become a big boy."

  Liza called again for me from the top of the stairs, an edge to her voice.

  "Low-hanging fruit, ready for the basket . . ." he murmured.

  Again she called, sounding to be on the verge of hysteria. "Charlie, wher
e are you?"

  "Shall I come with you, Charlinka? She's the sort that needs two men."

  I brought my knee up. He'd been expecting it. As I whipped my hand away he clamped his thighs so that I scarcely shook him.

  I shouted to her that I was coming. I pushed him away—sent him flying to the floor. He picked himself up and shrugged his coat straight. His face was gleaming with sweat. He made a cutting motion with scissored fingers. "Snip, snip, what one does to ripe grapes."

  Halfway up the stairs I turned. He was in the vestibule, putting on his snow cape and boots. I ran back down, hope being the idiot that it is. In his slimy purring voice, "No, it's tomorrow I leave. Now be obedient, Charlie. Take your little wand up to madamochka."

  She and I quarrelled. I said we must get out the next day. Pack a saddlebag each, sew the jewellery into our clothes—and escape. Glebov had chalked a cross on our gate.

  "What harm have we ever done him?"

  "Sonja. His wife."

  "You're guessing."

  "He admitted it."

  "She was a virgin. She hated men. We had no secrets."

  "You mean you didn't, not by the time she'd finished with you. She was a spy and a nymphomaniac."

  "They used torture on her."

  "That doesn't prevent her having been Glebov's wife. It's why he's here. To get the lot of us. Revenge. Loot. The abdication's like a starting pistol. Don't argue, woman, just begin packing."

  "Well then, how exactly are we to get out?" She went over and folded back the inside shutter. She held the candle against the window. "Look at it. There'll be two feet of snow by the morning."

  We argued about the weather. I pointed out that it was actually freezing hard and below a certain temperature it became meteorologically impossible to snow. She said, What did an Englishman know about winter? We set about the virginity and character of Sonja, about Glebov, about the reason for her fits reappearing, about my giving her so little time to prepare for exile—