White Blood

by James Fleming

  But Slype, though having a cumbersome figure and not obviously quick on his feet, got there first. He darted inside my punch and belted me round the ribs, drove me right back, and ended by kneeing me in the meat of my Russian balls. I fell forward, choking, fearing he'd shoved them all the way up and blocked my larynx.

  "That'll learn you, Johnny foreigner," he said, pulling me up by my hair. He towed me inside through the French windows and there he and Muriel thrashed me in relays with his knottiest cane.

  That Sunday afternoon I dressed in mufti, settled up with Morfet and walked out.

  By chance it was Mother's name day. Her friends had just left the house in Fulham. She was a little flown on that sweet white wine that we Russians do love and greeted me as if I'd been no farther than to fetch the daily newspaper.

  "My father's farm horses, we were speaking of them, you missed that part," she started, even as we embraced.

  "Because yesterday I read in the paper that a woman had left all her money to her parrot. 'What use is that?' I said. Vasilisa Leonovna said, 'The English have no real idea about love. It's all a pretence, even with their animals. From what they say you'd think they take them into their beds at night. But in fact that happens only in their books.' And I said—but your hands are so cold, darling, put some more coal on the fire and sit close up to it—I said: My father always gave our horses a holiday on their patron saints' days. Florus and Laurus, such sweet names— the saints. The peasants took them down to the river in a double line and scrubbed them clean from top to toe. They stood shivering with pleasure and let themselves be washed everywhere, even round their private places, even the stallions. Then the men tied different coloured ribbons to their manes and tails so they'd know they were loved, and turned them loose in the meadows for the rest of the day. The sunlight coming through the crooked alder trees always struck the water in flakes of gold. The men, who were naked of course, would ride one horse and lead two more. The horses never fought. They knew it was their holiday. The white of those men when they took their clothes off! Like snow! This is how it was with us at my home in Smolensk province, at the Pink House, Popovka. That's what we were chatting about, just a moment ago . . ."

  The moment of tipsy rapture ceased as suddenly she looked at me afresh. I clearly saw the question spring into her eyes.

  She sat down heavily on an upright chair. "Dismissed?"

  Not waiting for an answer, she poured herself another glass. "Oh my heart, my poor Russian heart, how it's had to suffer." Then she drained it.

  I must explain. Her family name, Rykov, means only one thing to a Russian—money. It was actually her grandfather, the financier, and not Kutuzov who beat Napoleon in i8iz. For what battles can a general win if he can't afford an army? A title, entry to Tsar Alexander's levee, and estates in Smolensk and the Crimea were awarded to our Founder by his grateful sovereign: wealth on a vast and barbaric scale. When he died he was the owner of eighteen thousand serfs.

  Much good has this done us, the Smolensk Rykovs. For reasons now atomised in history, the Founder bequeathed all that was portable of his fortune to the Crimean branch—Uncle Igor's lot. The strongbox of deeds, the ropes of emeralds, the famous Rykov pearls, the cartloads of bullion, the carpets, the pictures, the furniture, all too easily I can see them trundling across the steppe to the Crimea on wagons flanked by troops of Cossack outriders. To my grandfather at Smolensk there was left the huge forest of Popovka and its untamable pigs, too many acres of poor ploughing ground, and a rambling wooden manor called by everyone the Pink House on account of the colour of the wooden columns that flanked a rose-covered verandah very suitable for invalid chairs and children's games. We often holidayed there, travelling down from Moscow. We'd be welcomed by the stationmaster, and then whisked away by my uncle Boris's coachman whose tall hat brushed against the leaves of the chestnut trees as we drove through the Popovka forest.

  In the Pink House there lived my uncle and his three children: Viktor, Nicholas and Elizaveta, whom I always vaguely knew to be less than a normal cousin. In addition, in the honeycomb of the attics, there existed in a curious twilight all those whom Uncle Boris didn't have the heart to send packing—dotty old tutors, officers on half pay, friends down on their luck and a job lot of men and women calling themselves relatives when in fact their connection to the Rykovs was only by marriage. They were all of a certain age. Whist, bezique, canasta—those were their favourites to pass the time. On a Sunday they'd sometimes play one of the tempestuous Russian games like terz or stoss. The rumpus! But here's a sad thing. None had any money (it was why they were there). Yet it was vital to have some form of wagering in order to give vent to the force of life, to prove to each other what they might easily have been had fate been merciful. Listening at the door of their communal sitting room we heard the most outlandish bets being placed: "I bet my oak wood at Semipensk," or "I bet Byron, the borzoi who killed a wolf by himself," or "my bureau with two secret drawers" or "my dower house" or "the smaller of my carriages," all of which were possessions they'd either frittered away or had invented for the pleasure to be had from describing them in meticulous and wistful detail. They boasted about their mythical estates, argued about the fabulosities of ancient Greece with a sacred, greasy, purple-bound copy of Herodotus as judge, got drunk when they could and lounged around with fingers crossed that their host's diminishing patrimony would last them out.

  Except for the drink and funeral expenses, all costs were borne by my uncle Boris. It is true that he attempted to recoup some of these by charging for the laundry, which was done by his servants. But I think only token sums were involved.

  Very Russian. I heard of nothing like it in England. Had my uncle thrown them out or charged them a rent he would have been ostracised from society. As a Rykov it was his duty to protect unfortunates.

  From this household Mother was summoned by the bugle of love to become Mrs. Doig. So she says, but I think my uncle gave her a good shove in the direction of the dark and energetic Scottish cotton-broker who was clearly on the way up. For it is as well known in Moscow as elsewhere that the Scots are destined to own the world.

  In this way I was conceived and born, and in this way my parents and I entered the golden era that commenced with my father's elevation to a partnership and was punctured a few months later by the mandibles of Xenopsylla cheops. The entire story of our line of Rykovs from 1812 onwards was thus reduced to Mother sitting sorrowfully in a narrow house in London which had a toilet no closer than the end of the garden, and me, her son who'd just walked out of school.

  "Where's your trunk?" she demanded, not really caring.

  I was seventeen. Mother was tiddly. By the time I got her to bed she'd have relived three generations of her family history for my benefit. So much of disappointment and failure floundering in her bloodstream, and her eyes red with the pain of exile. Things were complicated. They needed to get easier for me.

  Emphatically I sliced the air with the side of my hand. "What's important is to keep everything simple, to have one idea at a time and think of nothing else until it's done." She looked at me pityingly, knowing little of my dreams and my hours with Zincke. "By the end of the week I'll have a job."

  "When necessity speaks, it demands," she said, quoting our proverb.

  Then she reverted to the pensioners living in the Pink House, describing how they'd come tumbling out of their rooms in dressing gowns and curling oriental slippers the moment carriage wheels sounded on the gravel. "To inspect, to carry away a new painting in their minds, to hear the news shouted out by the coachman. The two-wheeled cart that we used to carry out the dead was pushed by hand and made a very different sound. For this someone would go to every room waking people up. They'd hang out of the upstairs windows, unwigged and unpomaded, hair all over the place like washerwomen. Who'd gone aloft? One of them or one of us? Or was it only a servant? They were like the doves that lived above the stables," my mother continued fondly. "When the grooms went round fi
lling the mangers from their sacks of corn, they suddenly became bright-eyed and attentive."

  That evening, which as I've said was her name day, she went round the Pink House for me room by room, always in the past tense, knowing that for her the epoch had ended. I refused to open another bottle. She took to drinking tea in the Russian manner. Her nostalgia faded. I told her something of what I intended. The hours passed congenially.

  In a pause I caught her looking at me tartly and soberly. "My little son, malenki, go then into the world and be an honour to your father." She rose and standing behind me put her palms on my shoulders and smoothed the cloth outwards with a soft, motherly movement. "Honour, it's so important after a reverse," she murmured as I reached up to grasp her hands. "It makes everything level again, sometimes a bit more than level."

  Five

  I applied for a job at the British Museum. They were putting together a massive new catalogue of their bird collection. I didn't get it—my youth. However, instead of retiring downcast, I stood my ground and said to Mr. Agg, a big boisterous man, "But I can whistle a very good song thrush for you, sir." I gave him a couplet:

  Kweeu quip qui chipiwi,

  Tiurru chirri quiu—qui qui.

  They're hard to copy, song thrushes. Not one note is exactly the same as another. He looked interestedly at me.

  "Again. More boldly this time, as if you were trying to attract a mate."

  I remembered the instructions for reciting poetry I'd had from my tutor in Moscow. "Deep goes with melancholy, a light voice with high clouds, with daffodils and with anecdotes when drinking lemonade after tennis. Don't fall away at the end of a line."

  It came out even better the second time. I did five seconds for him.

  "What's that in your accent?"

  I told him, Russian.

  "Useful. Go to the Darwin Club in Little Russell Street. A Mrs. Mason will answer the door. Ask her if Goetz is back from Africa. Whether the answer is yes or no, in due course present yourself to him with my compliments. Good day to you, young Ivan."

  The Club is the building with the cracked stucco immediately to the right of the church. Every bird and butterfly collector, every dealer in these, every insect man, plantsman, big-game hunter, taxidermist and observer of the natural sciences, whether amateur or paid, whether from America, India or Europe, knows his way to the Darwin. It smells like a smuggler's den: pipe tobacco, gun oil, leather, westward ho. In the cramped hall are steamer trunks in tiers, each emblazoned with scarred P&O labels the colour of the azure seas: Shanghai, Valparaiso, Jesseltown, Addis Ababa via Aden and Djibouti. When the Indian butterfly season ends in April you have to turn sideways to get between the cliffs of baggage and thus approach the cubbyhole where Mrs. Mason reigns and her husband has an under-lordship as porter and handyman.

  Thither I went hotfoot, having the picture in my mind of a rugged and misanthropic naturalist who took meals by himself and read as he ate. In this I was mainly correct.

  Goetz, Hartwig Goetz, born in Berlin forty-three years before. What can I say about him that has not already been said in the Darwin Club, where he was loathed?

  I have followed his obdurate, bat-like ears, his bobbing pith helmet and his mountainous calves, always encased in black elastic-topped stockings, for a very great distance. Round the Canary Islands for Agg and the Museum's bird collection we marched. Then came a gruelling two-year expedition to Cayenne after those startlingly blue butterflies, the morphos. Goetz had a collector, von Berlepsch. We had to find for him every one of the species, from adonis to perseus to rhetenor, in each of their biological states. It was hard going, mostly through jungle. The snakes were as thick as branches and the mosquitoes the size of moths. Leeches also were present. But you can tie them in knots and pop them, so they were fun to a young man.

  In Burma they were smaller and darker and less amusing.

  What I'm saying is that I've shared everything with Goetz, including a number of tropical diseases. I've eaten with the same knife and fork and I've drunk from the same metal beaker water that was humming with confervae. (In the better villages a trout or somesuch is maintained in the well to clean up the algae and insects.) I've shared the same lime green Skyproof campaign tent off and on for eight years. Lying sweatily alongside his hulk I've listened to his dreams and to his nightmares and also become acquainted with his most intimate disorders. I've known this man through good times and bad.

  He was squat, powerful and taciturn in any language except that of science. Natural history was a holy cause to him. Collecting informs the public about our past, increases the general store of knowledge and provides a record of any species that may become extinct, that was his line whenever he could be prevailed upon to lecture. To take life in the interests of science was perfectly acceptable. The greatest moral crime a naturalist could commit was to make something appear to be other than it was: a little staining of a bird's plumage or some minor alteration to its anatomy, instances of cheating that both perverted the beauty bestowed on the creature by God and ruined it for science. He understood nothing of compromise. Truth was his gospel. He was welded to it from the navel to the forehead.

  Truth is indeed the capital point in natural history. Someone like Goetz is necessary to root out the fakes. But a man's personality suffers when he becomes addicted to it, as was the case with Goetz. It shone from within his skull with a glow that was intolerably pious. He had a saying: that one can never be wounded by the truth, it's only lies that prick. I pointed to some difficulties judging which was which. But he would have none of that sort of talk. Truth, he said, puffing the ominous bundle of consonants at me with fierce sincerity, was as unmistakable as a fir tree on an iceberg.

  Museum curators, who had only to deal with him from a great distance, venerated him. Mrs. Mason had to store his correspondence in her desk when he was 'out' for it was far too much for his pigeonhole. But the Darwin couldn't stand his zealous-ness. The members regarded me with amazement that I continued to team up with him. The fact is that he was the finest naturalist in the world. I was happy to slave for him if I learnt thereby.

  Six

  Snakes'll be the worst of it," said Norman Joiner, the Chicago museum fellow who'd bought the duplicate morphos from our Cayenne trip. "So shake your boots out in the morning."

  "Ja, ja," said Goetz sarcastically. We were having tea in the safety of Norman's London hotel. Goetz was guzzling marmalade cake.

  "We'll pay you by time," Norman went on. "None of this so-many-dollars-a-specimen stuff. That's old-fashioned, little better than slavery. Ten dollars a day for top-notchers like you two. Split it as you will. Portering and expenses on top. Huh, boys?"

  This was a neat commercial question. To capture a first or some grand exotic was the dream of all of us who were interested in money. (Goetz was not, having this great regard for the truth.) Taking a salary removed the risk of finding nothing. But also the potential gain, for all that was caught belonged to the sponsor.

  I thought, Burma, not much worked over, eh? So I told Norman he could pay Goetz a salary if that was what suited them both. But for my part I'd take a chance and work by results. He offered me the standard scale that pertains amongst the dealers. I looked at him pityingly. I said, "You want to have me expose my life and health to the climate of Burma and pay me in pennies?" I rose in my chair. We then agreed a scale of payments per species that was more favourable to me, plus some additional clauses that were new to him. Ours is a pretty passive profession when dealing with these office types. The greatest aim of Darwin Club members is to get into the field, add something to knowledge and revel in nature's beauty. So after this negotiation Norman looked upon me with respect.

  But he kept quiet about the rainfall in the mountains to the south of Manipur. I should have done my homework better and pushed up my prices.

  To make the position clear: one inch of rain dispenses a weight equivalent to one hundred tons falling evenly over an acre. Multiply that by two hundred,
which was the annual rainfall where we were working. Multiply it again by a squillion raindrops, imagine a good proportion of these hammering daily on your pith helmet and you'll marvel that we didn't go off our chumps. No stately English pitter-patter this. Those raindrops were as thick and long and grey as engine pistons. Down they came, day in and day out, flattening the slope of our helmets and slogging the wits out of our earholes. Stop! you bellow, because bellowing is the only way to assert your individuality amid the racket. Sun—dry land—send them before we drown! And suddenly you find it has stopped and you're shouting into a porridge of steamy silence and the porters are on the point of bolting, sahib having gone doolally.

  No wonder Goetz knew suffering. They were not the conditions for an older man. Nor for a Russian brought up amidst snow and wolves. Listen, Yankee fellow: the snakes, the leeches, the wild porkers, the impenetrable barriers of bamboo, the bats, the mosquitoes, the slugging rain, we gave them all a chance to look kindly upon your servants. For that sort of money we were prepared to strive, and did so. But next time you send a team to Burma, hire some guys with fins or a gang of natives whose webbed toes will let them ascend the slithery mud trails without succumbing to the torments of Sisyphus. We tried, by God we did, for there was abundant and fascinating material to be had: Gould's thrushes, laughing thrushes, that funny tree-haunting family, the sibias, the little blue niltavas that are half robin and half flycatcher, dippers that built their nests in December—ten years would not have been enough if Norman had wanted a book. And had Goetz taken a white-headed form of the black bulbul, damnably shy and so rarissima, that he stalked for two weeks, he would have been the toast of the Field Museum.

  But we were humans and our quarry had no sympathy for the frailty of that species. They made no allowance for our powder getting damp or for our swollen cartridges refusing to fit in our guns. They didn't notice how our energy was sapped by the humidity. The water that our Sanitas tablets failed to purify didn't affect their guts one little bit. As blithely as ever they led their lives. We, however, declined.