Blood Ties

by Warren Adler

  His fat cousin Adolph sat a few tables away mooning at the boy waiter who had caught his eye previously and who, he was apparently delighted to find, also served the bar until closing.

  "Wonderful hips, don't you think, Siegfried?" Adolph said, interrupting his reflections. The boy had allowed Adolph to caress his thigh, hustling a bigger tip, or more.

  Siegfried remembered the odd looking lady in the lobby earlier. Apparently she had the leverage or courage to stare down Aunt Karla, and that had to be considerable. Something about her nagged at him. An old family retainer? An old mistress? Who knows? The speculation was amusing.

  "Really, you are wasting yourself, you know," Adolph said to the boy in his best sing-songy falsetto, faintly oriental, hinting at his long years, in Hong Kong and China.

  "I have to earn money for tuition, Baron," the boy answered, revealing his needs blatantly. Adolph was overjoyed.

  "Confirmation again, my dear cousin," Siegfried said with a practiced cynical air, "that greed is everywhere. No soul is safe from barter."

  "Except yours," Adolph said huffily. The boy had obviously heard Siegfried's comments and had moved away, busying himself behind the bar polishing glasses. Adolph's nostrils flared in anger.

  "We could do without your comments. Why don't you go to sleep," the fat man said, tossing off his drink.

  Sleep. The terror of the subconscious. These reunions rattled the old phantoms lurking in the shadows. They could suddenly be activated, alive again, ready to inflict the old pain. Better to confront them head on. No amount of booze could stave them off.

  Early in his life, during the English school days, it was only something hinted at, an unworthiness in himself, that had made Siegfried feel alien to his father's obsession. What is he talking about? he had asked himself during long ponderous stories of Estonian days. He had questioned it even then, if only for the reason that it was his father's dream and not his own. But he had had no dream of his own and because of this, may have compounded his own desperation.

  It was Alysha that showed him the maggots that crawled under the von Kassel skin. Alysha, small, blonde, not in the tawny way of Britons, but yellow-white with skin a shade darker than the hair might suggest. He was not yet a womanizer in the present sense. There was more to it than mindless pleasure then, although under a shapeless blouse lay the wonders of full heavy breasts, and beneath the heavy wool skirt well-turned calves tapered into delicate ankles. He was a philosophy student then, eschewing science, which his father had wished he would study. He did not even notice Alysha until his last year, drawn more by the odd color of her hair, its alien quality, than by any other compelling attraction.

  Their relationship was casual, in groups mostly, and it did not occur to him to reach out. In retrospect, he was a serious student, expelling sexual energy furtively in hallways, or brothels and only occasionally in his digs. It was she who moved first. Only then did he realize that she had been watching him for months. He was tall and slim then, conventionally handsome.

  "I know your people are from Estonia," she said one day when their group had seated themselves at random around a table in the pub. He was using "Kassel" then. Actually, it was his father who had excised the "von" to spare him from prejudice. Later he had insisted that it be used again and he had obeyed. By then it hardly mattered. A "von" was a small price to pay for such a cornucopia.

  "How do you know that?" Siegfried had turned to her, seeing her for the first time in a more intimate perspective. Her eyes were not smiling, and the lines on her forehead hinted at some foreboding.

  "I am, too," she said. "Not me. I was actually born in London. But my parents." He had made no secret of his origins by then. The war was over fifteen years. He had admitted during some drunken spree that he was a Baron and some of his cronies even used the title in jest. Except in certain circles, the von Kassels were still relatively obscure, although his father's name was occasionally in the papers associated with some arms deal or other. The family fortunes were just starting to fully recover by then. And he was, of course, being primed to step into the family business. You are the oldest son, his father had intoned. It was hardly something he could ever forget.

  "My grandparents were peasants on your land."

  "How droll," he had replied in a flip Noel Coward way. The prevailing student pose was iconoclastic. The sins of the fathers were there for ridicule only.

  "They were bastards. Murderers. The whole lot of them," she said.

  He watched her face. Surely she wasn't serious. His perspective on the family history was more heroic.

  "My parents tell me you were the cruelest bastards of the bunch."

  "Me?" He looked at her with mock innocence. It was a collective indictment in her mind. He had no doubts about her seriousness now. "Yes. You look like good peasant stock." He squeezed her arm through a thick sweater, then reached out, hand under chin. "Let's see your teeth." He caught the flash of anger. She pushed his hand away, but the gesture had attracted the attention of others.

  "He deserves it, Alysha," someone said. There was laughter. A blush reddened her skin and he sensed her deep embarrassment.

  "I hadn't realized how deep it was," Siegfried said.

  "It is very deep," she replied. Finally, the others turned away and they were alone in their intimacy.

  "In my family you grow up with it," she said. "I had only mentioned it casually last weekend, a family party. You cannot imagine the hate. It put a pall on the festivities. Uncles, cousins. Down into my generation."

  "Well," he smiled, his interest stirred by then. The touch of her hand had moved him. "You, finally threw us out."

  "It was too late by then. The damage had been done." Despite her obvious effort to calm herself, the flush did not fade from her pale skin.

  "But in the end we lost our land," he said, determined to mollify her.

  "One old uncle had even been bullwhipped by your grandfather. And his own father had been tortured and then killed." She paused and her lower lip trembled. "'When you, see him, spit on him,' my uncle said, as he kissed me goodbye."

  "They have long memories, your people," he said. But the humor had gone out of him. He wanted to embrace her, understanding her anguish.

  "Are you going to?"

  "To what?"

  "Spit on me."

  The flush deepened and she stood up, mumbling a farewell to the group, trying to be casual, surely churning inside. He followed her out. It was winter. There was a deep chill in the air, and, although it was only mid-afternoon, night was coming on. She walked swiftly, head down, her hair flowing on the eddy of an angry breeze.

  "I'm not defending them," he said, catching up to her. "I'm me. Not them." It was the first time he could remember that he had voiced such family heresy. You are a von Kassel. They are you and you are them. She slowed her pace. There was something happening between them, and he often wished that he might have relived that moment and headed in a different direction. Was the die already cast? Long before they had ever met.

  "I won't apologize," she said, stopping finally, vapors clouding her words.

  "No," he said, touching her upper arm again. This time she did not shrink away. "I guess you wouldn't."

  "And I won't spit on you."

  "I would understand that."

  Yes, he would understand that. He also knew that from that moment, he would never love another woman.

  Becoming lovers was inevitable, inexorable. It nagged at him from the beginning that his role might merely have been symbolic. The enemy conquered at last. Alysha was a virgin, which offered more symbolism, and although she was a willing, hungering participant, he felt that she was goading him to rape. Which he confessed to her when the pain had gone. She had screamed, gripping him until he could barely breathe, not stopping until she had transferred her pain. Her blood had soaked the sheets under them. Ignoring it, yet knowing it was there, they stayed locked in each other's arms for hours, the beating of their hearts in tandem.r />
  All their couplings would be like this, frenetic, and they would grip each other as if the pressure of the flesh would take root, meld together. Was it pleasure or pain? Love or hate? In rational moments they would search for explanations.

  "Maybe my people wanted to be conquered, wanted to be punished. Took pleasure in it. Maybe that was their destiny."

  "Can't you be you and not them?"

  "I am me," she would protest. "Very much me." Siegfried loved to bury his head between her large breasts. Sometimes his lips would rarely leave her nipple, feeling it harden and expand under his tongue's energy. They had felt reverence for each other's flesh, mystical, as if their bodies were made to share dark secrets known only to them.

  "My beautiful Baron," she would say passionately, lying sideways, head to toe, holding his erected penis in her fingers, lavishing it with the love of her mouth, talking to it, as if it were the real face of him.

  "My beautiful Baron." Sometimes a tear would fall on it, different in its touch.

  When he was inside her, he wanted to be engulfed, swallowed into her body, and when the pleasure came it was something that transcended the physical, evolving into spirit, pleasure into soul. Had it really happened like that? Or had the years merely changed the calibration in the memory bank of his brain?

  He was not a rebel then. He could accept, as a condition of belonging, the von Kassel obsession of blood and destiny. And yet, somehow, there had been this gap in the idea of it and Siegfried could rationalize the presumption that now, since the land had gone, mixing with the peasants was simply an obsolete taboo. Besides, loving Alysha, he felt, could negate all those old hates and stupidities. Love conquers all.

  "My people will hate you as long as they live," Alysha warned whenever he broached the possibility of marriage.

  "I will prove to them that I am different."

  "Not to them. Never! You cannot imagine how they have handed down the testimony of your family's atrocities from generation to generation. They will never forget the pain of their ancestors."

  "And we ... my father, will never let us forget the glory of his."

  "Of yours? ... not glory ... beastliness."

  "Then why do you love me?" he would ask, since it defied the rational explanation of her hatred for the von Kassels. She could never answer that question. Of course not. Who could answer that question?

  "They will never let me have you," she would sigh.

  "What would they have to say about it?"

  She would shrug. But hatred bonds kinship. He knew that. Once, on a brief holiday in Baden-Baden he had broached the subject obliquely.

  "I know this Estonian girl. British actually. The family is from our old neighborhood." They were sitting in his father's ornate study and his eyes had deliberately concentrated on exploring the garden through a window, watching a tiny bird building a nest in a nearby limb. His father was reading a paper in the chair, glasses perched on the end of his nose, an oddly comforting middle class pose. He remembered how his breath had caught.

  "Animals," his father had mumbled. "Good dray horses."

  "Not for breeding though?"

  "Excellent for breeding," his father mumbled without looking up.

  "With von Kassels?" Siegfried had forced his eyes from the little bird. Over the rim of his glasses, his father's met his.

  "Are you mad?"

  "Just trying to get your attention."

  "Well you've succeeded."

  "Good for play, though," he had said, his heart heavy, masking the sarcasm. But the bitterness had already filled him. What utter nonsense, he told himself. His father smiled.

  "Yes. Good for that."

  Countless rapes, Alysha had said. They abused us, murdered us, tortured us. They treated us like animals. By then she could not bring herself to say "you." His father was them, even in the peaceful repose that his image in the study suggested. Nothing on earth could ever reconcile them, make possible their union. Even then, he was without courage.

  Nature's forces did not heed the admonition. It was not that the seed was carelessly spilled. That would be a simplification. It was more like a joint defiance, a magnetic necessity. Because there was a sense of doom about them, they could revel in explosive ecstasies, defying nature as well, by pressing their demands on each other's flesh beyond its obvious boundaries.

  "Did you expect we could escape it?" she asked him one day. Her eyes were swollen. She had been crying.

  "What now?"

  "We have to kill it."

  He had protested, knowing that it was a display of bravado, since he too was desperately frightened.

  "I won't allow it," he would shout, during a week of indecision. "We'll go away. Go to America. Start new again."

  "Give up the great von Kassel legacy?" she would counter, the words heavy with sarcasm and pain. "All that history. All that wealth. For me. The little peasant. Dilute the blood of the great von Kassels?"

  "I want you." He would engulf her, gorge himself with her, again and again. Her tears, and his, were an anachronism. Still, knowing that, they could not escape it.

  Siegfried wondered now if she wasn't simply an apparition. He sensed no other knowledge of her, other than her flesh, her hatred of von Kassels, her origins and ancestry. If she had dreams and aspirations, he could not remember. But he did remember the terror of his anguish. She had disappeared, was nowhere to be found, nor had she left any word with the school authorities. He had even called her parents in London on some pretext and they had told him that she was at Cambridge, to try her there.

  It was the bottom of his life. Whatever he had, his future, all the bits and pieces that could motivate a life, disintegrated in that week. He would have taken his life. Again he lacked the courage for even that. Alysha returned a week later, pale, daunted, defeated.

  "It's dead." Those were her first words as she crumbled in his arms, like watered clay. But she had only come to collect her things. Soon after, he went down to a London clinic and had himself sterilized. At least with him, the von Kassels would end once and for all. He had never had any regrets about that. Not once. Nor had he ever seen Alysha again. Years later, a mutual friend said she had gone to Australia and it had moved him, but only briefly.

  Naturally, he had not told his father of his sterilization. It was, in a way, Heather's only weapon against him, but even Heather was practical. Without their share, she couldn't have her horses, and no progeny from her loins could match the beauty and joy of a foaling mare. As a breeder, she supervised all the artificial impregnations. Yet something about the process set her own juices running and for days after, she was all squiggly and insatiable, a roaring fuck. Secretly, he bet, she wanted to be fucked by a horse, a long-cocked stud. He wondered if she ever fantasized over it.

  She had been into horses even before their marriage when she was simply a doe-eyed virgin, distantly related to the royal family, which was a plus to the Baron. Your mother was a Hohenzollern, you know, he had reminded them more than once, the single reference he had ever made to their mysteriously dead mother.

  Siegfried's concentration was deflected by a swift movement beside him, the flash of silver, a jingle. Adolph had held his key out and the boy had taken it, putting it quickly in his pocket. His cheeks suddenly appeared puffed, like the cat that swallowed the canary.

  "Lovely hips," Adolph cooed. He sat back, relieved, and sipped his drink.

  "So the claim is staked?"

  "Jealous."

  He had felt his bent for malice rise again, when Dawn moved into the room, squinting into the semidarkness. As if on cue, the lone violinist accelerated his tune, and Dawn unconsciously picked up the beat as she spotted him and swept into the room. Her presence startled him and he stood up to greet her, taking her hand and placing it on his lips.

  "Such gallantry," she said with faint sarcasm. Adolph, also stood in greeting, obviously annoyed that a new customer would extend his conquest's stay. She sat down next to Siegfried and he
ordered her a drink.

  "Couldn't sleep?" Siegfried asked. He could surmise her agitation and state of mind. It was quite obvious that she was in the process of being rejected. He put an arm around her bare shoulders. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of another woman in the archway, a brief shadow, disappearing quickly. It was Olga. He restrained a chuckle. So Albert, too, is active tonight, he thought, with odd pleasure.

  "He's being infuriating," she said, downing her drink too quickly.

  "He can get that way."

  "You saw him with the Russian woman."

  "My aunt."

  "My aunt, my ass."

  "But she is. It says so in the fine print. Crafty old horny Wolfgang. But then, I suppose the condition runs in the family." She turned toward him with mock seriousness, then laughed. The alcohol had moved quickly.

  "I'd leave right now, if I could."

  "So would I."

  "I think this whole thing is absurdly decadent. Obsessions with the past. The whole dirty business. Freaks, the lot of them." She lifted her chin toward Adolph. "A prime example."

  "He's an aberration really. The Baron refuses to acknowledge it. Besides, Adolph is quite efficient. He runs a perfectly marvelous profit center in Hong Kong." He raised his voice. "Don't you Adolph?" But Adolph was absorbed with stroking his new conquest's chest. Caution had disappeared with rising lust and too much alcohol. Siegfried shrugged. "Otherwise engaged."

  She ordered another drink. Her eyes looked into the semidarkness as she drifted into her own thoughts.

  "Odd that these things don't end simultaneously. I could actually see it fading, like water running swiftly out of the bathtub. A blissful few months, then the plug was pulled. Who pulled that plug, do you suppose?" It seemed an oddly obscene reference and he let it pass. He was thinking now only of seducing her.

  "He's brilliant actually," Siegfried soothed. "But he hasn't exactly been one for permanent relationships. And he's tremendously put-upon. The business requires enormous energies. Everything depends on him. He's preoccupied. Simply chalk it up to experience and move on."

  "To where?" she said, filling with self-pity.