Then a signal was passed in secret, and the charge of horse nails went whoosh through his lower belly.
His sagging corpse was the first we found. Misha, whose only crime was to have enjoyed his life. I told Kobi to get sacking from the gardeners' shed and cover him.
Now I realised why Glebov hadn't burned the Pink House. He wanted me to appreciate the ingenuity and ostentation of his slaughter. It was part of the contest. First he'd get the sitting ducks and then he'd come after me.
We entered the house.
Louis and the cook had been shot in the mouth from in front. They were in the kitchen. No sign of a fight—no upturned chairs even.
In his office Nicholas had fought alone. A dead soldier was in the doorway. Nicholas was lying beside his desk. I pulled his head up by the wheat-coloured hair. His eyes were quiet, thank God. The rifle press in the corner was open and the rest of the weapons gone. Huddled in the corner lay Styopka, the younger stable lad, killed I don't know how but bloodily.
I said to Kobi, 'Pashka,' referring to the stable lad whose grandfather had been swapped for a greyhound. A prearranged signal, an outside door carefully left unlocked, the scurry—the shooting. How else could it have been? I said Pashka because he wasn't among the dead and because of the greyhound. For what a Rykov did seventy-four years ago, five people died that afternoon in the Pink House.
Now I must tell you about the living person we found.
From room to room we hurried, calling for her everywhere. Echoing floorboards, tumbling half-pillaged cupboards, unmade hearths. Death had invaded the Pink House. The mean odour from its glands hung in every doorway. Cold was my bridal mansion, and desolate. Cold, cold, cold and already the cat's saucer of milk was frozen.
Two leather steamer trunks, a marriage gift from Nicholas, stood in our room with their lids thrown back. Full, but not to the very top, waiting for last thoughts—indulgences, luxuries, objects for the sake of their memories. Her empty cup of chocolate was on the mantelshelf. She'd spent the morning packing; fingering everything and wondering about the seasons in Chicago. She would have discussed her wardrobe with Louis. Nicholas wouldn't have told her about Bobinski. He'd have left the body up there until Kobi and I returned. He'd have tried to fob her off with an excuse for having the stable boys in the house. Maybe she'd swallowed it, being distracted by impending exile. Just said good morning to them and returned to her packing.
But where was she?
Kobi came jumping down the attic stairs. He'd been putting a few things in his knapsack. He had in his hand Glebov's bayonet, which he'd drawn out of Bobinski. He ran his thumb and forefinger down the runnel and flicked a clot of blood and tissue into the fireplace. I told him to leave it since it was awkward to carry. But he refused and stuck it through his belt, where it was sure to get in his way.
I stood there looking round the bedroom. Kobi, restless, was for instant action. But I sat down.
He was thinking, I could see it in his face, Why isn't Doig more energetic about her? Why doesn't he rush out and see if he can find her footprints in the snow: after all that stuff tracking horses he can't even do it for his woman—hey, Doig, what's hampering you? Make a stir—hustle—punish the day.
Yes, I was found wanting. I was irresolute in a tight corner and showed lack of experience. No one will ever understand how it was for me as we searched for Lizochka. Never. Whatever the imagination can grip is papier mache compared with reality. We're speaking of the intransigence of fate, that's what everything comes down to in the end. Our individual helplessness, neither more nor less.
Kobi looked to me for orders. I'm not talking here of Kobi the policeman or Kobi the fireman or the janitor, the coastguard, the postman or the nice next-door neighbour who's volunteered to lend a hand. He was a mercenary with a used bayonet stuck in his belt who expected me to know what had to be done at that very moment and not get it wrong. So we'd come out of it alive with Lizochka rescued.
But I was thinking of Misha's testicles blasted over the terrace: of my dead cousin Nicholas: of socialism, which cannot be among the dreams of reason, only the nightmares. I was thinking how to use the remaining daylight and where we'd go when we found her. I was thinking of the continent bristling with anarchy and me, Doig, standing against it. One mortal man versus millions.
Kobi bounced the knapsack on his shoulders. He fingered the bayonet. His look said, Come on, Doig, why are we waiting? Fighting, the best medicine on the market: no disease too complex.
But I did not know where Liza was. I could not even think where she might be. I was paralysed by the hugeness of Glebov's evil and by the chaos around me. Where should we start? How could the two of us accomplish anything against these forces?
The past being easier, I said to Kobi, "We must bury the dead."
"Why?"
"Because it's our custom."
"What about your woman? Have you gone crazy?"
Kobi was right to pressure me, to try to jolt me out of my despair. For I was at the far end of hope, where there is no shelter.
His face was hard. Someone had pulled on a thread that drew in his cheeks and made them gaunt. I couldn't help but be conscious of the belligerence of this young, lean, impatient Asiatic.
"I don't have to stay with you. Times like these are good for my sort. Pay me out or make a move. Blood of Christ, Doig, what's happened to you?"
It was with a snarl that he spoke, following it with more harsh things, striking blows at my pessimism. He bundled me out of it. You could say it was Kobi who reminded me that the future has to be lived as well. He pushed me in front of him up the steep attic stairs and we began, ripping through the small brown-timbered rooms, through their wardrobes and the roof space, anywhere she might be hiding.
Seventy-one
We found nothing, despite searching that shameful house from top to bottom. "Where next?" said Kobi. Then I thought: did she go to her scarlet room to smoke a pipe to settle her nerves, to assist her into exile? In this other smoke-wreathed world might she have glimpsed disaster riding in from the forest—started from her reverie—fled?
It took some time to narrow it down so that we knew what we were looking for. The imprint in the snow of her travelling brogues is what I'm talking about. She was ready for me, you see, ready and waiting. For me. But it was Glebov who turned up.
These shoes of hers: small, neat, tan-and-white. Unworn and so having an action that would have been a little stiff. That Andrej had bought for her trousseau and had since been lying tissue-papered in their pale pink box labelled Yteb, 14 rue Royale, VIIIe arr., Paris. And there the box and the strewn paper had been all the time I was sitting like a lummox in the bedroom chair. On the floor beside me, staring up into my stupid face.
A gritty sleet was blowing, scurrying over the hard snow in waves. I thought, But are those shoes too low? Will her feet get cold and damp?
This was as we followed her tracks from the front door and then squirrel-like through the bushes to the lane leading to the stables.
My love had run like a flying deer, in a cloak tossed over her shoulders that trailed as she ran, grazing the snow-dust with a fan-shaped ripple such as the wings of a crowing cockerel makes. Or any bird leaves in the snow when it stretches a wing to cleanse itself of its lice.
Here were her marks as boldly she went.
Boldness is the image I like, in her swishing cloak. Not sniggling timidly from corner to peeping corner but boldly, I repeat myself, boldly down the lane to the stable ran my bride, Dan Doig bumping in her belly.
To saddle a horse and ride for Popovka. To find me, who was late. To receive the protection that was her due.
Thus she ran to the stables, to the place where I was not.
They killed Nicholas and Louis and the cook. They bound Misha to his cannon and fired the cartridge of horse nails through him. When did she start running?
He saw her. Someone looking from a window saw her go a-leaping in her cloak and travelling brogues. If not
Glebov then another, who shouted through the hollow house, "There she goes, mine to have first."
Whooping the pack had hunted her down. We saw where their huge leather-shod trotters overlay hers.
She heard the shout of discovery, flung a quick glance over her shoulder. What sort of fear did she experience? Did she call out for me? The sun knew. It would have been up there, its bloodshot eye clamped to the keyhole. Oh yes it knew, it knew well enough what was going on. Yet it had done nothing to help her, just sat on the top of the bare-branched trees and watched. I should have shot it down. I should have lifted up my Austrian rifle and shot its belly open as they did to Misha and brought it squealing to the ground and if it still lived, have kicked it to death in the stable yard and sliced up its tripes and fed them to the pigs. This is what I wanted to do to the sun as I ran down that snowy lane to the stables.
But she may not have called aloud for me. She had to get every inch of speed up that she could: there was her puff to think about. But in prayer form she would have called for a horse saddled and waiting, and she would have called for me, wishing me to gallop round the corner with the Cossacks and wishing to hear the sudden crack of my Mannlicher.
How far away were we when she called, I and that moronic carthorse?
We were running side by side. Kobi had the bayonet in his hand.
What else?
The sun in its purpletude, the snow-laden buildings before us, and the dancing sleet. The Tsar gone and Russia swaying. No woodsmoke curling from the tall iron pipe of the saddle-room chimney, no snickering of horses being groomed, no stable boys staggering beneath the yoke of wooden water buckets.
A scene deserted except for Elizaveta running, her heart like a stone, hope dead within her. Glebov and his venereal gang gaining on her with every stride, running at the crouch, panting, their red tongues like spears.
Seventy-two
They'd had her on the dung-riddled straw of the stable floor. Had her in chorus, then chucked her cloak over her. Of course they'd stripped her, what do you expect. Her neck and shoulders were bleeding from their mauling. Her hair was matted with straw and slobber. They'd probably quarrelled over who'd get her shoes. But not over who went first.
Sternly she lay there. Rigid, her unblinking eyes fastened on the cobwebbed window through which the sun was prying. A worm of blood was crawling from the corner of her mouth. I told Kobi to get out.
Kneeling I spat on my handkerchief and started to bathe her bruised face.
She turned it towards me—let it roll to my side. Her dark eyes examined mine incuriously. "You're late. No America today." Her voice was weak. More blood spilled from her mouth, which I wiped.
She said, "You'll be alone."
I did what I could. Calmly and steadily. There was no point in letting my feelings out. There was no point in having any. I had to deal with what was and consider what was possible. With small murmurs I cleaned her face and ears and wondered how her mind had been affected.
She kept her eyes on me like a dog, even when I moved her chin so that I could get behind her ears, where there was dried filth and blood.
But when I started to clean one shoulder she screamed. Horribly, gapingly she screamed and I saw they'd knocked her teeth about and that her mouth was swimming in raw blood. I tried to get her sitting up so I could drain it out. However, she screamed and fought me.
Kobi came back in, the callow mercenary attracted by human disaster. He stood there watching me grapple with her. Then saying nothing he tapped me on the arm and when I looked up with anger he pointed down, to the side of her shin, above the knob of the ankle bone. The cloak had slipped. As Liza fell back whimpering I raised its corner.
I'm a naturalist. My professional life has been spent killing insects, birds and a small number of mammals. I've prepared these specimens to museum standards and described them in my reports. I'm trained to tell of things as they are.
What Glebov had done: with his men holding her he'd cut with a razor a strip of skin about an inch wide from her ankle to the top of her thigh. He'd done it on both legs. Then he'd peeled the strips off.
You know why? To adorn his revenge for Sonja. To parody Andrej Potocki's regimental trousers, those of the Garde a Cheval: white with a blood-red stripe. That was his reason.
Her ribboned flesh was weeping. Straw was sticking to it. Quickly I covered her up. Kobi fetched a horse blanket and laid it over her cloak. By chance the initial "R" and the golden Rykov wolf embroidered at the corner was next to her throat.
In English I said, "Lord, save this woman, Elizaveta Doig."
I sat back on my heels, holding her hand. I considered everything in the most rational manner that a husband is capable of. To be specific: the fact of night falling fast, her physical condition, the low outside temperature, the whereabouts of Glebov who was perhaps waiting to make a further attack, and the problem of getting her alive to Smolensk. What then? The hospital—a deathtrap. Corpses piled up on the lawn every morning like cordwood. I repeat, two strips of skin measuring one inch by thirty had been torn from her. Flayed—is that descriptive enough? I don't want to talk about the other thing. This woman—my wife of six days—naked under a horse blanket on the freezing stable floor—on the edge of insanity—in agony— with no drugs anywhere near—or telephone.
There are some sequences of action where one by one all the options are closed off except that which is the worst. Once this is accepted, the end has been reached. Nothing else is possible. No more can be said.
Kobi squatted beside me. "It's a kindness to animals."
I didn't respond.
He undid the holster flap at my belt. He handed me the Luger, butt first. Its long barrel was impossible to conceal. "What's good for animals is good for us."
Lizochka was watching. She looked from the revolver to my face. Her eyes were tranquil. Blood was coming from her mouth again. She said to me, "Never be afraid of alone," slurring the words.
She looked at Kobi, at me, at the world surrounding her. Maybe she was seeing the future as well. "Charlie Doig, my own Charlinka. Let me go to your God and mine."
Her lips moved but to me it seemed nothing moved except her soul, which I could see shining through her eyes. I mean from behind them, like a torch held at the back of a piece of soft brown velvet.
This smile, which came only from the eyes, was her legacy to me. It had such a luminous intensity that I knew she was lost. Well, I say lost because it's a placid little word that's not going to upset anyone, but stolen would be better and looted would be best. My wife was looted in the name of a socialist Utopia.
She smiled on me and thus said farewell. It was the smile of someone who has got to the far side of suffering and can make out a new shoreline.
This was the certainty that I drew from her smile.
"Don't be afraid," she whispered. Her eyes took up the message, pleading with me.
"Elizaveta Rykov, Lizochka, Lizinka, love of my life—Mrs. Doig ..." I could say no more. She smiled on me again. She made as if to bring her hand up to stroke my cheek. I caught it, I kissed it, I kissed every inch of my bride's face.
I withdrew my hand—sat back—and she gave up. I saw the surrender take place. Her eyes, one moment as bright as street lamps, the next—gone. I'll tell you what I thought of: two ghost ships with full black sails glimpsed driving through the sea-fog very close to the rocks. The death of her soul, that's what I witnessed as I knelt beside her.
Seventy-three
We buried them by candlelight, in the stable dung heap. It was the only place soft enough to dig. Kobi opened up the crust with the bayonet. We went down as far as the rot. Steam rose into our faces, and the tang of decomposing horse shit. Our breath, which seemed to be suspended in the frosty air like clouds of mould spores, hung around the yellow candle flame.
Misha was last since he was the heaviest. Kobi tied a rope to the wheel arch of the barrow and we trundled him off the terrace and down the rutted lane, pulling and pu
shing in tandem.
When death becomes a commonplace it ceases to terrify. I wish to declare that the physical act of burying these people was a method of obtaining some portion of freedom from them. I would point to the laying out of their limbs, straightening them up, folding their arms across the breast as befitted, and wedging the head so that the closed eyes looked in the direction of heaven. These contacts, the last, were most important and intimate to me.
I had never really touched Misha before, even though I loved him. Hugged him—yes, a thousand times. But I'd never been able to touch any part of him that I wished. And now I had to arrange his slack limbs I found myself doing so with the tenderness of a woman. I was grateful for the chance to help him in this service. Wasn't I alive and he not? I wept quietly as I prepared him—and over Nicholas also. Here was a man who'd tapped the rail of every hurdle erected for him by life. Yet in the manner of his death he'd achieved something given to few: death resisting injustice. As we dropped him in beside Louis, his hair flopping and obscuring his face, he ceased to be a failure. I saw that he was made for death. He excelled at it, reposing so nobly in the pit with the candle flame and our stooping shadows fluttering above him. I thought, Why did I always consider him such a hopeless oaf? I'd been mistaken, had used the wrong measure. Dropping to my knees I kissed my fingertips, reached down and laid them on the cold slab of his forehead. "Forgive me, Nicholas."
Speaking his name aroused in my mind an association with the Tsar. I bowed my head. Burying Nicholas was like burying the history of Russia. The whole cruel stupid magnificent parade was what I'd laid in the pit.
White Blood Page 31
