White Blood

by James Fleming

  Mine was a biscuit-coloured animal with teeth like yellow doors that I named Bathsheba. White donkeys were unpopular in these parts. The colour was thought to indicate a lack of stamina, like chestnut in a horse. Kobulov said that anyone seen riding one would instantly be labelled a Baghdadi, meaning metropolitan and effete. Bathsheba's hide was as stiff as buckram. Clouds of dust rose from her flanks whenever I thrashed her. She carried me for almost two years, my feet never far from the ground.

  Her heats—she was quite regular—were torrid affairs of thankfully short duration. The moans with which she attempted to pierce the desert's stony heart had a tragic quality, a sort of I-might-die-you-know tone. In vain did she cock her ears for the trumpet call of male ardour, flap her stumpy tail, and scent the wind for a suitor to whom she could present her pink, primed, pear-drop keyhole. Because she was so regular I was always able to get her away from company when it mattered.

  Her ears arched inwards. The length of a young carrot would have covered the distance between them at their tips. The hairs on the outside were mouse. On the left ear they disguised an immense dry wart. Within they were pale and downy, very near to white.

  When the sun was searing the back of my neck (no degrees was common in August) and rock-shimmer was creating extraordinary mirages in the desert, like undulating sheets of glass or mica, I would sometimes take an easy leaning on her withers. The heat, the glare, the dust, the monotonous joggle of her action would make my mind reel. Looking out through the archway of her ears I often glimpsed Elizaveta. It was her eyes, always her strong black eyes that the genie granted me first. Then would come the dark hair en brosse, the tendrils of leftover hair on the nape of her neck, her trim bold figure—but one can only dream of so much when astride a moke.

  Thirteen

  An hour's riding and we were beyond the melon patches and tiny vegetable fields of Kattikurgan. A little farther on we left the bund of its main irrigation ditch and entered the desert.

  The sky was dull. Once out of shelter the wind's yellow tongue assailed us, making the saxaul bushes whistle and the bundles of dead blow-weed scamper like rabbits. My cheeks stung with the grit it was carrying. Goetz put on a pair of dust spectacles.

  The big Russian forty-verst map is a secretive document. It did not even hint at the many settlements and villages that we later happened across. It allowed that Europe was on our left and China on our right, but that I knew anyway since I was following true north on the compass.

  I don't know how intelligent birds really are: how apt their judgement is, even in their speciality. Oftentimes I have thought my imitation of their song to be terrible and have been embarrassed to hear myself. But so long as I remained in concealment I found they'd come in the end. The fools! As I said to Goetz, would you stand for it if a Martian came croaking up to you and said he was I?

  And the birds of the Zarafshan swamps, perhaps tired after flying a thousand miles from India, are as gullible as the rest. Phut! A three-foot blowpipe is a cheap way to kill a bird. Skinning it also becomes easier than when it's been shot.

  The ball, which is the size of a marble and is best made of a dense soil such as clay, must fit snugly in the pipe or windage will occur causing it to deviate from true. If you've been waiting motionless for a couple of hours among sand flies and mosquitoes for the particular specimen of Sykes's warbler that you need to complete your age sequence, you do not want windage. The air must be stored in both mouth and lungs and produced from those places simultaneously. It is not enough to be pop-cheeked like a cherub; the air will simply be insufficient. The correct noise when the ball leaves the pipe is round and dull, nothing like the cork from a bottle. Anything suggestive of a guitar being strummed is the sound of windage.

  Another tip is this: keep the pipe on a level plane when you take aim. The vertical distance between its line of fire and the line from your eye will then always be constant and you'll be able to correct your aim easily. Move your head rather than the pipe.

  Phut!—the target drops, upon a muddy slope, in front of its friends. The limp bundle of feathers is plainly in their view. For a moment the considering heads eye the corpse. Then they quickly resume the search for seeds, or insects, or the pallid spindly worms that inhabit the ooze of the Zarafshan. Of grieving there is none, or inquisitiveness or investigation. What counts is food, not death.

  Also: the striking hoopoe (I can never see its crest without also seeing Achilles in his helmet) is the stinkiest nester in the universe, far worse than any of the fish-eating birds. Why? Are they alone in having no sense of smell? Or are they alone in not caring? What advantage accrues to them thereby?

  There are birds that migrate through the Himalayas at fifteen thousand feet. Why not fly round them or through lower passes and avoid overworking their tiny lungs?

  Perhaps it is a mistake to suppose that they should be intelligent in the same way that we are. Perhaps it is we who are the dunces. Their brains are capable of putting into effect unassisted exercises in navigation, harmony and athletics that in a human being would make that person a god. Yes, a god and no less than a god. But we suppose ourselves superior because we have souls and consciences. Neither has ever been seen. But we are sure we have them and that they distinguish us from the lower orders.

  I wet my lips for another treacherous love song:

  Tsweep, tsweep

  Cherry do, cherry do, cherry do . . .

  Phut! I can hear the sound yet. It is a reminder of the halo of glory with which I crowned myself, of the itch of purpose that kept me at it, of the time I swanned round Turkestan in the certainty that the Orlov Medal was mine for the taking, that the two-handled golden urn that went with it in perpetuity was already on my mantelshelf.

  Fourteen

  Then war was declared. For us it happened in the following manner.

  With winter came the intense, scorching cold of a continental climate. A thin sun by day, deep frosts by night. Our Skyproof tent would stand up by itself even after we'd knocked the pegs out of the ground. Instinctively Goetz and I crept in from the desert to get snugger with humanity.

  We made camp about a mile outside Bokhara. The city still closed its gates every night. We did our collecting right up to the base of its mud brick walls, from which the sentries would watch us.

  On this tinsel-bright morning of December I'd gone to shoot a couple of mallard for our dinner. The air was like glass and perfectly still. I could make out the fissures zigzagging up the dun wall. Below the turrets that jutted out at regular intervals were black streaks of ordure. On the ramparts were the Emir's soldiers in tunics that were an unmilitary shade of green—pistachio is what I recall. I could see their belt buckles glitter, I could see the cigarette the sergeant was smoking, I could hear him scolding one of his men, even though he was quarter of a mile away.

  There were many swampy holes, old clay pits, round the city that the wildfowl loved. The second duck I shot fell out in the water. I waded in to retrieve it, up to my waist, feeling with my feet for snags and thinking about Guinea-worm disease, which is a killer in Bokhara.

  Cold! It was cold enough for Judas that morning. My scrotum was on guard, was as tight as a walnut.

  But I was going to get that mallard. It was my dinner.

  Suddenly there was an inkling of jewellery bobbing in the corner of my eye. The men of Bokhara wear raiment of every strong colour. But this man I looked up to see riding above me on the bund was like a garden. He could only be the Emir. On his head was a turban of crustacean green, a little pointed, a little oniony, and below his deep collar, which was a red shade, his robes fell away in cascades, each fold or pleat having different angles of pink and green stripes. His horse, an Arab stallion, was tripping along vainly, hot-hoofed and half dancing as he held it on a longish rein. Its bridle was leafed with silver and the saddlecloth embroidered in gold. It curved its neck, fiddled noisily with its bit and trumpeted white steam from its glaring nostrils. The Emir's robes came down to his an
kles. His stirrups were like leather coal scuttles. He rode very upright in his saddle. As the animal capered along the top of the bund, the clean winter light flew off the Emir's costume in all directions and dazzled me. I stood in the pool holding the wet mallard by the neck and shading my eyes, the better to perceive the extra-ordinariness of this man and his horse that so filled the barrel of the low winter sun.

  Among and around the horse's legs were four or five rough-coated dogs with good bone at the shoulder. They were to flush the game. It was their day out. They knew it: shivered, trembled, looked piteous for all the time their master was halted. A few yards behind them a man on foot held a leash of three feathery salukis for the chase. Last rode the hawksman, in a plain white robe, carrying on his gauntleted right wrist the red-hooded killer, a goshawk.

  They stopped, this gay cavalcade, and looked down at me. Their dust hovered and settled.

  The Emir laughed—marvellously white teeth, like icing on top of his beard. I, dripping and freezing, laughed back. We exchanged greetings and then, leaning forward in his saddle, he spoke seriously, too fast for me to catch it all. "Was it about cholera? Kobulov? What exactly was he saying? He pointed to his soldiers. He read a newspaper. He fashioned a universe with his pink and green striped arms. He traversed a machine gun. I understood—it was war.

  "When?" I shouted.

  "August in your calendar," he replied. He listed the countries that were fighting. He spread wide his fabulous arms. "But what can we do?"

  "Leave them to it."

  He laughed again. Then he gave a command and they rode on their way. The man with the salukis hitched his robes round his waist, and set off at a loose lollop, his long golden thighs easily keeping pace with the horsemen. A chieftain and his retinue, man and his oldest friends, off for a day of sport in the desert, coursing the hare and hawking the marsh pheasants in the same way as generations had done before them, unchanged in any detail for five hundred years, since Genghiz Khan brought them the stirrup and made everything possible.

  Away it went into the sand and scrub, that colour plate from the book of history. Away, away, with never a backward glance.

  As it happened, that was the last occasion we touched Bokhara for ten weeks. I wanted to complete our survey of the western, and relatively barren, section of the desert before the spring migration arrived from India. When eventually we did return, the pulse merchant from whom we always bought our supplies plucked at my sleeve. There was a man in the city looking for me, sent by the railwayman—meaning Kobulov.

  The message had passed through many hands since leaving the Crimea: Count Igor Rykov, my great-uncle and the possessor of the Rykov fortune, was dying.

  Fifteen

  Elizaveta came for me at the station in Eupatoria in Igor's Astro-Daimler. It was eleven years since we'd last seen each other, at the farewell party on the platform when Mother and I went to London, into exile. I looked her over critically as she swung her long legs out of the car, carefully placed an olive slipper into the dust, brushed aside the chauffeur's arm, and with a cousinly smile—half friend, half duty—kicked off into the decreasing space between us.

  We embraced with a slight reserve. I hunched over her, being six inches taller.

  I said, "How is the old bastard?"

  Smiling she replied, "Alive and well. He only wanted attention. He takes care to get nothing but curable diseases. I'm afraid you've wasted your journey."

  We took our places in the car. Presuming he would find a fellow enthusiast in another man, the chauffeur slid back the window and rattled off for my benefit the owners of every car in the Crimea and the models they possessed. The governor of Simferopol had a forty-horsepower Braun, made in Vienna; the police chief in Kerch had a yellow Panhard Levassor . . . There were twenty-two altogether, of which he'd driven all but three. He chattered away, glancing at me in the mirror every time he told a joke to make certain that I'd understood it.

  She stayed silent. Even if she'd wanted to make a speech it'd have been difficult against that competition. It can't possibly have been all she said during the journey to the villa but this is the line I remember: "So, you've grown up, Charlie. Thank God."

  She was being Igor's hostess, also representing her absent brother, Nicholas the progressive farmer. She'd made herself at home in Igor's Imperial villa, cast off her grey nurse's uniform and surrendered to the gentle spring sunshine of the Crimea.

  The loquacious chauffeur drove us along the winding coast road, under the archway surmounted by the iron Rykov wolf, between the light pink clumps of oleander, to the severe door of the villa. He took my bag from the dicky, set it down and drove away.

  She said in a superior way, as if she was matron of the spa, "It's time for their siesta. You'll have to carry it yourself. On no account awaken our uncle. It's the only time he can sleep."

  Uncle Igor was my gaunt, stooping, mauve-cheeked great-uncle. Four times a year he would call on us when we were living in Moscow, travelling between his Crimean lands and his palace in St. Petersburg. Nanny Agafya told me proudly that he was a "plutoman." But I never saw anyone so miserable. Central to his health were an ivory enema syringe and large round blue pills for his faltering heart. A relay team of messenger boys scuttled continuously between the pharmacy and our apartment bearing small packages labelled "MEDICINES—URGENT." The only people to relish his visits were the servants, to each of whom he gave on his departure a solid gold five-rouble piece for their troubles, which were considerable.

  Sometimes Elizaveta's family would ask to stay when Igor was in residence. Mother was firm: the head of the family must have his privacy. So I would just observe her when she came from her hotel for a meal. Surreptitiously I would consider the nuances floating around her that my youthful comprehension couldn't penetrate.

  "It can happen like that," Mother said airily when I taxed her about Elizaveta's slimness and her dark features, both so different in character from the pink and stalwart Russianness of her brothers.

  "A throwback probably," said Father, who was reading the Textiles Gazette in his armchair. "Egypt is the future, you know." He lowered the paper, which had a picture of a new ginning machine on the front. I was bent forward studying it, trying to figure out what did what. "Just think of her as a normal cousin, Charlie, that's the easiest." He started reading again. "Yes, Egypt by gosh, how they could grow the stuff with a bit of training."

  Whack, they closed the lid on her ancestry, and there I was content to leave it. What her father, my uncle Boris, had got up to as a widower had no relevance to my life. But was she content to return the favour and leave me with my secret? Oh no. She was always a pest—a great scratcher of other people's scabs, no sense of fair play at all.

  She knew, because her brothers had told her, about the competition I was having with my parents' toilet—a Doulton: "The Simplicitas—factories in Paisley and Lambeth." She knew what I was after, to trace the entire course of those fat, black, Gothic letters in a oner. No short cuts, no cessation of flow to restore the pressure, and no skimping when my faltering arc came to tackle the "y" of Paisley, which had as many loops as an anaconda. Every letter had to be faithfully described. I would drink tanks of water in advance, until I was red in the face.

  Nicholas and his brother Viktor, who would sometimes squeeze in with me as invigilators, had informed her all about the Simplicitas and the defeats that my sharp, boyish stream had suffered.

  So when Uncle Igor had departed and all the Smolensk lot came to stay, what was the first thing she did? Bang bang bang on the toilet door, rattling its polished brass knob, poking around in the keyhole with something from her hair.

  "How far have you got? Why are you groaning like that, have you burst something? Shall I get a maid to go for the doctor?"— all in her screech that told everyone what I was up to.

  She was a skinny, noxious girl, Elizaveta of Smolensk. She told on me when I kicked about the mounds of carefully raked leaves in the Alexandrovsky Gardens. She
spat into my boiled egg when I reached over for the toast. She ripped the heroic frontispiece from my favourite book, With Clive in India, Henty's best, which Papa had just given me for my birthday. Her behaviour was abominable from the very first day I met her. Cousin, ha!

  And while I'm trawling through the charge sheet, let me recount the incidents at Brest Station, at our farewell party.

  It was winter. Apart from travelling on Train No. 1, the train for diplomats and couriers, Mother's principal conditions for agreeing to go to England were an entirely new wardrobe, five thousand roubles in the scarlet hundred series, each note to be ironed, and a party for le tout Moscou on the station concourse. Of course my father went along with this. He may have had, as my mother once alleged, une main baladeuse, but he also loved her profoundly.

  Everyone my parents had ever known was there. The party grew noisier and noisier. Elizaveta was in the thick of it. She hopped and squealed, stamped on a cake with her fur-trimmed bootee to see how far the cream would fly, and miscounted our trunks to make us panic—so demurely, with such cat-eyed innocence: "Tetushka, auntie, weren't there meant to be seventeen of the big ones?" She told the porters we were English aristocrats—baron-lords, she said, and ripe for mulcting. She shrieked with laughter when their gangmaster pursued Papa for a larger tip. She told everyone about me and the Simplicitas. And all the while she was preparing those immense, make-believe tears, as if she really cared that I was leaving.

  How I loathed her that evening! How I was yearning to strangle her, inch by lynching inch, with a tourniquet fashioned from the chic pink scarf to which her age did not entitle her. Alone and glowering in a corner, I was making plans for her death via a cauldron of simmering tar into which I was about to lower her slim girliness, by the ankles, upside down, drawers round her head, when suddenly, as she was on the point of screaming—