White Blood

by James Fleming

  Then Kobi, with a tisk! of impatience, interrupted me by flinging horse blankets over the bodies. I went round straightening them. He began to spade in the spoil with short vigorous strokes.

  My godfather, my cousin, Louis, my wife—I'd closed their eight eyes within the space of an hour.

  Elizaveta: the light, furry consonants still tripped along my tongue as if nothing had happened, making me choke. My wife of just six days chased like an animal and raped in chorus by Glebov and his thugs to prove that the day of the common man had arrived. To inaugurate an era. Tortured and raped to death on behalf of a theory. Why not some worn and echoing harridan if that was the price fate wished to exact?

  Kobi was spading lumps of dung onto them, and soon the thin red worms would be crawling down their throats, and this was being done on account of the possibility that rule by the common man would turn out to be more virtuous than rule by any other group of men. For this chance, which was no thicker than a cigarette paper, my Elizaveta had suffered a death as hideous as Christ's. For this she'd been compelled to die, for a whim, for nothing more substantial than the gossip of philosophers—

  And it was I who'd done it. The slender nine-inch barrel— her braced jaw and tensing shoulders—then the spreading stain of ruby red. O my bold and bonny girl! She'd held steady for me, no jibbing, no last-minute change of mind. I believe it the greatest service I could have done her—that any man could do for his wife.

  The rasp of Kobi's breathing, the flicker of the candle flame, the stillness of the frosty night, the thud of dung on my love's face and hands and on her cruelly mistreated body, of which our son, Dan Doig, was part—

  I put back my head and howled. Grief poured out of me in bucketfuls. I buried my face in my hands, I shook both fists at my paltry God, I roared, I bellowed, I screamed her name and seizing a spade went snarling at the muck with teeth bared up to the gums, seeing Glebov's belly spread below me and clubbing it and carving at it with the side of the spade. I had thought before to say a prayer over them. But why should I have acted the saint? I didn't want to be a saint. I wanted to capture Glebov and slit him open and cut his balls off and crucify him. What else should I have wanted to do?

  Wach auf! That's what Goetz would have shouted at me. Wake up! Stop prating and do something! I whacked her grave level with the back of the spade.

  "May Christ have mercy on these men afterwards," Kobi said, referring to what we'd do when we caught Glebov.

  Seventy-four

  I replenished the Luger, taking the rounds back up to eight. Kobi wiped the bayonet on a scrap of hessian and stuck it in his belt. He wanted to talk about the question of our new horses while we stood beside the grave but I thought that to discuss departure was breaking faith with the deceased and took him to the shed where the sleighs were stored.

  The moon was up. It was a risk I took, that Glebov might return to burn the house. But my greater opinion was that he and his men would be riding like hell to put miles beneath their belts. Strung out with a rolling rearguard, that was how I reckoned it, what I'd have done in his place. Avoiding habitation. Not stopping tonight. Pushing on, pushing on.

  I wasn't in a hurry now. The longer we left them the less vigilant they'd be. By the second night they'd need sleep. That was when I planned to be on their tail. Tickling them, getting them worried.

  They were eight, including Pashka. No one likes a traitor. He'd served his purpose. I couldn't see how he'd last long. Say seven, then, of whom one had been wounded.

  We pulled the sleigh back to the Pink House. We found where Nicholas had cached his reserve supply of ammunition; loaded it on with food and quilts. Then we harnessed up and ran it through the bitter early night down past the old gates and up the track to Popovka.

  The village was as silent as the grave. Not even the dogs were out. The windows of the small wooden houses were shuttered tight. The place stank of complicity. They knew what had been going on, probably in advance. Thick greedy peasant knowledge, as secret as incest. Already they'd be carving up Nicholas's fields, bidding out his threshing stacks, his cattle, his implements, carpets, furniture, saddlery, anything that was useful.

  Luck was with us for the moon was still low and one side of the street was deep in shadow. Despite being greased, the sleigh runners made a gritty scraping noise on the ice. We unharnessed and left it for later. Like wraiths we stole through the ribbon of dark, past the hovels hushed in guilt.

  We reached the church. There we ducked into the space behind the hanging post of the big wooden gates.

  Opposite was the inn.

  Not a glimmer, not a tallow rush of candlelight could I make out. But at the back a dog was kennelled. The second time it barked I caught a glimpse of a bundled figure sneaking in at the door beside the water butts. The third time I turned to Kobi.

  He'd already gone, a ghost with flat eyes. I saw him flitting down the lane to the left of the inn so as to get up to the back of the water butts. Had there been a wind that night you'd have mistaken him for the shadow of a moving branch.

  Then I lost him. I never saw him get into position. But the dog barked.

  I levered a bullet up the spout. The bolt was smooth in my fingers, the action like butter. I took a deep breath. Then I pelted across the street and went up the two steps and shoulder first through the door.

  But I'd been clumsy. They'd heard the rattle of my boots on the ice. Some of them were on their feet trying to get clear of the benches. All the men of the village must have been there, rows of beards and secrets. Candle stubs had been placed in the wall recesses and shielded by black card. There was a homespun rostrum and a clerk with a ledger. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and sweat—fresh, rancid sweat. Fear too was in that smell, sweat and guilt and fear together.

  The stench of all their shit smacked me across the face. It was good. It was justice that they knew shame. Traversing my rifle across them, I laughed terribly. The shaggy, veinous faces stared up at me, close-packed ranks of them.

  I said, "Count me in. I'll give a hundred roubles for the red carpet in his dining room."

  I said, " I'm a cash buyer, boys, you can trust me."

  No one spoke. They didn't want my sarcasm. What they wanted was to hear the bare bright details of my business. So I said, "Alright, cunts, tell me who's got the best horses in the village."

  Their beards curled with relief and their faces went lopsided and sly. They were thinking, Thank God, it's not about the killings, we can talk this one out. I saw the change. Cunning sprouted like mushrooms in the darkened cellars of their eyes. I began to hear movements among them, of their feet and clothing as they shifted their buttocks or uncrossed their ankles. They were relaxing. One of them even raised his drinking horn.

  I recognised the man from our wedding feast. Fawning, he'd had Nicholas give him a tour of the Rykov family photographs. Later he'd sat opposite me and got drunk. It was he who'd told me that Sonja had been hanged.

  Picking on him I said, "Well, who? Give me the name."

  Of a sudden there was a displacement of bodies towards the back, a heaving of shoulders and elbows in the semi-darkness. The door slammed, the one that led out to the water butts.

  "Pashka, your stable boy, Excellency," called out a voice. "He's been bad all day with the trots."

  "Silence!" I roared. I held up my hand. I didn't want them to miss it by their jabbering.

  A man with concrete in his ears mightn't have heard his scream—no one else. It cut through the night like a hatchet. And when one breath had been exhausted, another started up, at a higher pitch.

  I fixed that wedding guest in his shifty eye and pursued it everywhere as he tried to evade me. Having trapped it I grinned, wolfed, at him. "Tell me your name. I want to think how your balls hang, how well you'd take the knife."

  The scream rose to a peak, turned into a whimper and finished, with a thud and a long gurgling sigh. Those wooden walls were thin and we could hear every bubble in his throat as the
boy died beside the water butts. I was still grinning at the peasant. I waved the sights across his stomach.

  "Was he a eunuch anyway? Then he'd scarcely have felt it. Still, not much fun when you've had the trots. Poor little Pashka."

  "Pashka was his son, Excellency," called out a brave voice.

  "Then you're Pappy Pashka and now there's only one set of balls left in the family. What a day you've all had."

  "Semyon Andreyevich," the man said in a rush, half rising and trying to bow to me but getting tangled between the bench and the table, "he always has the best riding horses, Excellency. He keeps them in the barn in the orchard on the left going to Zhukovo . . . Your worship, we had nothing to do with it. The creature Glebov and his speechifying—"

  He was pulled down onto the bench. Other voices rushed up at me to say they'd been away the whole day—tending a sick cow, seeing relatives, gathering firewood.

  I saw Lizochka before me, I saw her beauty and her agony, and I shot Pappy Pashka through the chest from five yards, the rifle resting on my hip. His head dropped instantly but he went on sitting there, wedged upright by his friends. The perfume of cordite—the inviting curve of the trigger—their treacherous cowering faces—I put a second and third shot into their yowling, nowhere in particular, browning the pack. I could have done with a machine gun, hosing them down from right to left and back again. You read about people being insane with grief. This I was not. They'd collaborated in the torture and violation of my wife. They should pay for it as brutally as was possible. Liza, an innocent, had paid one price. Why shouldn't the guilty pay a greater one?

  What punishment would be crueller than her suffering? Could Kobi and I burn these people alive? I glared at them through the hanging gun-smoke. Was the timber dry enough? How would we manage to keep them enclosed?

  A tiny sidling advancing movement took place in the corner of my eye. The shadows were creeping forward. They'd seen me work the bolt. They knew it wasn't a repeater. The animals were working up to rush me.

  Spinning round I shot the nearest and leapt for the door. Kobi came running down the lane. He got off his magazine while I was reloading. Someone inside the inn slammed the door. I put a couple more shots through it for good measure. Then we went quickly up the moonlit road to the barn, walking side by side with our rifles at the ready.

  The horses were as stated. Kobi saddled them while I stood guard. But I didn't think the peasants would try anything. That we departed taking our troubles with us would be the main thing. Good peasants, good cowards. I could never have handled them if they'd banded together at the start.

  Kobi led out the horses, two to ride and one with a pack-saddle. They hadn't been out all winter and were bored and fresh. "We curvetted down the main street like vaqueros and loaded our supplies off the sleigh. The villagers let out their curs to harass us. Seeing us ride out down the Zhukovo road, they rushed barking and snapping at our horses' hoofs. Chuckling, Kobi shot a couple of the nearest, which did for that game as the others stopped to fight over which should eat them.

  The largest of the dogs, a mastiff with cropped ears, seized a smaller one by the lappet of its under-throat and began dragging it out of the way, despite the latter's stiffened legs. The others were knotted snarling around the corpses, but these two were alone and silent. Seeing the technique of the mastiff made me understand why its ears had been cropped. The peasants also tethered their hot bitches overnight in the woods to have them covered by wolves.

  I said to Kobi, "We'll service Glebov with the bayonet. We'll do that first."

  "Like the stable boy," he said with satisfaction. "But that's not what killed him."

  We rode on, saying nothing but thinking about it.

  The moon had painted the fields with an aluminium sheen. This was ground that had been awarded to my great-grandfather for having saved Russia. Now we ourselves were riding away to be saved not from the French but from our own people. In the atlas of my mind I laid out all the Russia I knew, its valleys, forests, plains, cities, villages. I was above it, looking over the edge of my cockpit like a fighter pilot. The cold may have had something to do with the intensity of this trance. It had frozen the muscles of my face so that my skin was a suit of armour in which only my eyes had life. Two worlds were operating for me simultaneously. In the existing one I was the passenger on a well-fed horse fiddling along an icy road: in my imagination I was hovering on the brink of the clouds.

  I saw a myriad plumes of smoke and cinders from our manor houses. I saw the shots, the stabbings, the field executions, all the acts of revenge: the Pink House repeated five thousand times. I saw baby aristocrats having their brains dashed out, held like chickens by their podgy ankles. I saw the future. I saw bloody chaos. I saw it as clearly as any mad woman saw Christ chopping wood in heaven, for on my behalf it had been written across the sky in leaping flames. No one with a drop of Russian blood in their veins can be mistaken over a signal like that.

  Kobi spoke to me. I awoke. And I found that what was left in my mind was one sole consideration: how do I get out of this with my skin in one piece. Liza wasn't there, nor my boy Dan Doig grown cold in her womb. I'd been instantly faithless. Already I'd forsaken the only woman God had made for me while she was still twitching in her putrid grave. I rode on through the pitiless moonlight.

  Seventy-five

  One live hen was all that remained at Zhukovo. Feathers and carcasses were everywhere. Had they eaten them raw?

  Misha's housekeeper was lying dead across the threshold. Vasili and his sons had been slain. Glebov's men had killed and skinned a bullock. Only the tail had been rejected. Every other part had been butchered and packed away on the horses. The trail of dripped blood was black in the moonlight. We followed it into the forest. Seven men mounted and four horses with the plunder.

  The cold was at the outer extremity of the word. The air felt hollow—desiccated, its juices frozen out of it. "When I dropped a riding gauntlet it fell as rapidly as if it had contained a five-pound weight or been made of iron. My cheeks and ears were paralysed, despite being scarved, and my lips were shapeless. I had to concentrate in order to form a word. Barrels of snot could have been running out of my nose and I'd never have known. The hairs up my nose were frozen, so that breathing was like inhaling red hot needles. My spit froze in mid-air and tinkled onto the ground like a piece of broken glass. Spurting blood would have been petrified into slabs in mid-air. Only the inside of my thighs, which were close to the vast furnace of my horse, were warm.

  We slept for four hours in Misha's hay barn. His watchdogs woke us, fighting over the bullock skin, which one was hauling across the cattle yard. We saddled and mounted in darkness.

  We rode roughly north and west. Kobi led. I had the pack-horse on a rein. The cold tickled the horses' noses as well as ours. It was good that Glebov wasn't hunting us. You can't stop a horse sneezing. Nor can the sound be disguised.

  It is not the case that frost is silent. When as severe as it was now, it can freeze the sap in certain species of tree and thereby cause it to expand to the point of bursting the trees. The forest was alive with groans and sighs and the sudden splinter of falling boughs.

  Dawn rose pink and smokey. For a while it became warm enough to snow. It fell meanly, in small hard pellets, and continued for a couple of hours, sufficient to coat everything with fresh tinsel.

  Occasionally we came across a summer grazing meadow, a stretch of blistering whiteness that hurt our eyes. Find me the man who can say what lies beneath a surface of fresh snow and I'll kiss between each of his ten toes—the man who can say for sure, who'll put his neck at risk. I had no intention of chancing the horses on these innocent-looking plains. We kept well back among the trees.

  I was right about his rolling rearguard. Usually one man but sometimes two, at intervals of about a mile. The history of these outposts was abundantly clear from the quantity of tobacco shreds and sunflower seed husks strewn upon the snow. Also from the piss-holes, which were no
t extensive, and tawny from insufficient nourishment.

  We went slowly. Out of the night, out of nowhere I was going to take Glebov.

  In the middle of the morning we found where they'd stopped. Why? No fire had been lit. A quarrel—to consult—had Glebov harangued them? There was no clue.

  Here and there, in clearings, were the ruins of tiny snow-mantled farmhouses. A raven kept us company for a bit. Some tracks—iced-over lakes—woodmen's huts.

  The forest stretched before us throughout that day. At some stage we'd meet either the Dniepr or the railway or the Moscow road. They were bunched together hereabouts. What worried me was if he got to the railway before us; walked his horse up the ramp of a military train and vanished.

  I caught up with Kobi. "We'll do it tonight."

  He stood up in the stirrups to ease his crotch. "How?"

  "He'll have to let them sleep. They're deserters, not after medals."

  "Three men sleeping, three as sentries, one wounded. How do we work that?"

  A straight-line pursuit of the enemy offers only an approach up the arsehole, which is always nailed tight in these circumstances. It's from the side one must attack, or better still from in front. In that way one can assail the neck, the ribs, the armpit, the entire extent of the thorax, whatever has been left unguarded. To do this one must deviate. And to deviate successfully one must make the correct assumptions about the other man's speed and intended line of march, about how he thinks.

  I was wary. He'd made a fool of me before. But either you have the nerve to play the king or you should watch from the stalls.

  "Wait and see." It was my father's well-worn phrase that I gave Kobi in reply. It was ages since I'd had Pushkin's likeness in my mind. I thought, I'll slice away Glebov's balls and nail him naked to a tree and his balls to another, and that'll even the balance between me and Russia, which has slain all whom I've loved.