There were other civilians on the train, commercial men of the stamp of Simeonidis moving round the Empire in an attempt to gain an advantage from the situation. One of them, who described himself as a jobbing plunderer, had travelled in China selling suction pumps. In that country, he said, the train-drivers refused to work at night. Passengers had to sleep on the ground or in hostels.
The vast landscape dawdled past under a sandy sky, the colour of an old lion's pelt. A favourite game was to have someone sit towards the back of the wagon and then to bet on how many seconds would pass before that person called out that some agreed landmark had completed the passage from the left hand to the right hand of the open door. Many makhorka stubs were produced from many boots, puffed at and then gambled away in this fashion. (It was remarkable what the soldiers kept in their boots.) We swung our legs over the edge of the wagon, smoked, watched our saliva blister on the metals, cracked lice with our thumbnails, told lies and chaffed the men who were walking. By night it was much the same. Men could sit and gaze for hours at the red bloated moon that seemed to be anchored above the steppe by a hook and cable.
For whatever reason, the grooms had the skill of contemplation. They'd repeat hundreds of homely adages and stories in respectful voices. One I remember concerned an ill-treated wife who was walking home to her parents at night and saw reflected in the village pond a moon with the countenance of the husband who'd been faithless to her. She waded in to strangle him and drowned.
Said Kobi immediately, "Did she cry out, That's my husband and I'm going to kill him, otherwise how did anyone know it was her intention? She might have been wanting to bathe herself."
No one could answer this. "Don't spoil the story," someone said.
Kobi wasn't going to give up. "Well, there must have been someone who heard her. And why didn't that person try to save her?"
"Because it was her husband himself who heard," came a mellow laugh from the shadows.
One young man spent the time composing verse with only one rule of scansion, that every fiftieth line had to rhyme with moon (luna). He charged a friend with remembering the poem as he went along—which that friend was able to do, for the peasant's power of memory comes with his mother's milk. Someone else had a balalaika. Bit by bit this vast, sad epic was set to music. Every night the day's work would trickle away into the velvet darkness of the steppe and there be lost. That was the predominant feeling on the train—lostness. None of those men expected to see their families again.
There was no fixed time for sleeping. Since there was nothing else to do, we slept when we felt like it. On our bedrolls, on the stinking planks, with saddles for pillows.
So I thought nothing of it when I began to feel constantly drowsy and tired. Headaches appeared and then a rash on my chest, and on my palms and soles. My thirst knew no boundaries. I would go round the horse buckets, sticking my head right inside them, lapping at the water or spooning it into my mouth without much regard for all the scum and soggy bits of flotsam. I was the one who was an animal.
I became delirious. I was at the mercy of my mind. I can recall nothing whatsoever from the last five days of the journey. Death would have been completely uneventful.
Twenty-four
The first anyone knew of my coming home was when two of the wretched Smolensk station horse-cabs were sighted shuffling up the drive that winds prettily beside our river. The horses slowed to a walk as they met the gradient where the drive climbs and curves to the gravel sweep outside the Pink House.
Halfway up this slope, which is not severe, is a splendid pair of lime trees, very Russian in habit, that are known as Gog and Magog. Here a track branches off to the stables and carriage houses and grooms' quarters.
My cousin Nicholas, who'd ridden in from the fields only a few moments earlier, was wisping the sweat off his horse with a handful of straw. Timofei, his old groom, had his arms full of the saddle and girths that he was about to put on a fresh horse.
(Elizaveta took a long breath. She was about to start the action.)
Nicholas heard the rattle of the vehicles. Running out into the middle of the stable yard he was just in time to see the cavalcade disappear round the corner of the Pink House. In the first cab were two passengers. In the second was their baggage; and tied by a rope to this cab were two thin and dusty ponies. He jumped onto his mare and cantered bareback in pursuit, cutting the corner at Gog and Magog so that he arrived on the gravel at the same time as the cab-drivers halted.
A Mongolian stepped out, totally disregarding him. This man reached inside the cab and took out a leather gun-case. He marched over and deposited it to one side of the front door. He returned, hauled me out of the cab and supported me to a bench. By this stage Louis, Nicholas's butler, had arrived and was standing speechless in his green apron, hands on hips. The small Mongolian pointed a forefinger at Louis and then at me, indicating he should look after me.
Here Elizaveta allowed herself a modest digression.
It was 1916, at the peak of our brief, ripe, Russian summer. Death and the demands of economy had reduced the attic lodgers to a single person, Bobinski, the old tutor. It was he, on the lookout as ever for a novelty, who'd spotted the two cabs coming up the drive beside the river. His head went back and forth as leaning from the window of his attic room he followed Kobi's movements to the door and then Nicholas's movements towards Kobi. I was recognised. The questions among the female house servants at that moment were, so Bobinski reported to Elizaveta: who was the Asiatic and when was he going to have a bath and get his hair cut as then he'd be really quite handsome.
She smiled down on me. "I don't expect you ever thought of Kobi as handsome." Then she continued.
Nicholas said to Kobi: "Who the devil are you?"
In his slightly accented Russian, Kobi replied, "We've come from Samarkand, both us and the ponies. Doig is ill to his boots. I work for him. Help me get him into a bed."
That, as Elizaveta explained to me a week after the event, was how the play opened, the prologue. Later she discovered more. Kobi had nursed me to Moscow, worrying that I was going to die at any moment and be pitched off the train. He'd been in as much of a fever as I had. (But of a different nature, she added, reverting momentarily to her nursing profession.) At Moscow he lugged me and the horses and the baggage across to Brest Station. Whenever there was any sign of trouble with soldiers or officials he waved my papers at them saying, "On the service of the Tsar, make way there." With the last of my funds he got the whole caboodle to Smolensk. But where to go then and how to get there? He had no address, only the name Rykov and the feeling he should be looking for a large house. He marched over to the cab rank, took the first driver who seemed to know what he was talking about and promised him that Nicholas would pay.
"He has a genius for something," Elizaveta said.
"Adventure," I replied. "He'd be happiest trying to ride a comet."
I was in the quarantine room, where last I'd been as a child with mumps. The window was open at the bottom by a foot and the tan blinds lowered to halfway. The July sun was entering straight from the garden, bearing all the remembered sounds and odours from my youth. Outside I knew it to have burning northern vigour. But here, inside the room, it had become lazy. Everything around me was soft and drowsy, as summer should be, like a love poem, or a meadow before the haymakers get to it. By my bed was a glass goblet and in it nodded harebells from the field, as blue as the heavens.
She left my side and sat down at the small desk beside the window to write a letter. Her hair was as short as I remembered it and her voice as grave. The sunlight bouncing off the Fantin-Latour that had taken over the wall outside was dyed with the faint, most delicate pink of its petals, which it brushed across her left cheek. The right one was in shadow, blocked off from the sun by her strong nose, which was that of a Saracen as well as her father Boris.
No calligrapher was Liza. Her pen ripped across the page like a fretsaw, dealing out troughs and pinnacles ruth
lessly. After about ten lines she had to change the nib. She wrote with her head at a slight angle. She was wearing a white blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves; long grey skirt; black belt and stockings and shoes. She'd been at a hospital meeting in the morning in Smolensk, driving herself the eight miles there and back in her neat little gig. Sitting bolt upright, I was sure. Not a slumping girl, this.
The scent from the rose was exquisite. It had colonised the room. Every particle of the air was charged with it, and the sheets, and Liza's skin when she bent over me with the medicine spoon.
I wanted this woman. I wanted her wholly for my own.
A small china bowl of potpourri was on her desk. She stirred it with the end of her pen, dribbled some through her fingers. "A woman friend told Nicholas about this rose and then bought one for him, having it sent from Paris. His wife is the stupidest woman I know. Helene said that accepting the rose from this woman was tantamount to adultery and went back to her parents in Moscow, taking their two boys."
"And Nicholas, what did he do?"
"He hasn't changed. Moaned about his boys, the last of the male Rykovs etcetera etcetera. Otherwise not very much. His suspicion now is that she's working up to request that he divorce her. That's much more of a worry to him. He'd have to raise another loan on the estate."
"Not worth the Fantin-Latour then."
She shrugged. "Helene's not the woman he thought she was . . . But it makes wonderful potpourri." Again she trickled the petals through her fingers. "It's the rose from which confetti is made."
This was how she introduced to me the subject of her fiance, Count Andrej Potocki.
Twenty-five
Thinking I felt a flea, I said to her, "I thought you got them all?"
"Yes, Sonja and I between us. You were in a coma. We washed you and hunted out all your little friends, both crawling and hopping. Nicholas said we were wasting our time, that you were certain to die. It was louse typhus that you had. I see a lot of it—in the morgue, dead men. Count yourself lucky, Charlie Doig."
"Who's Sonja?"
"My maid."
She went back to her writing. "I must finish this letter. It's to our patron, the Grand Duchess. I'm complaining of the shortage of beds and medicines. Things are so bad that we have to lay the men out in the garden. In the winter, imagine it . . . That's what we were talking about this morning." She took care with her signature and printed her name in capitals beneath it. She blotted it, briskly made the blue silk ties of her letter folder into a bow, and put it under her arm.
I said, "Why did you come here to write it?"
"I thought you'd be asleep. Sometimes I need the calm of this room."
"No other reason?"
"No. You wanted me to say, so that I could be with you?"
"I believed myself to be favoured."
"I won't talk about it. Whatever I say you'll think badly of me—that I'm doing it just for the money. You've got to remember the circumstances—my age, and the fits I used to get. I need the solidity of marriage."
She had her hand on the doorknob. I said, "I remember Andrej. He used to look up your knickers when you were on the swing— when you were just a girl. He's a pervert. Your life will be a misery. Ask Nicholas if you don't believe me."
But the moment I said this I knew I was wrong. Nicholas would have bitten his tongue off sooner than do anything to obstruct an alliance with the wealthy family of Potocki.
She said sharply, "At least he's a fighting man," and left before I could defend myself.
All those Potockis came from the Polish borderlands. Andrej's father had been a famous friend of my uncle Boris. Whenever he went to Moscow to transact his business he'd leave his son and daughter at the Pink House. Andrej was slight, sinewy, reserved, brainy. He'd sit on the bank watching Viktor, Nicholas and myself attempt the construction of a tree house and then with a few key words state the correct procedures. He had a mass of black tousled hair that he never combed. He pretended it was electric. We never made fun of this absurd claim for a very good reason: if you watched his head when he was arguing at full stretch, you could swear its individual hairs were vibrating. It was obvious that each fibre was growing directly out of his brain and that he was telling the truth.
His particular ally among us was Viktor.
They joined the same line regiment of cavalry when the war broke out. We can imagine the two friends jangling down the summer road in 1914 to thrash the Hun; pennants fluttering, lances buttoned, squadron by squadron of colour-matched chargers, for that was how the chief of staff, an amateur water-colourist, liked it. Viktor was killed at Tannenberg on the first day. As if to avenge him, Andrej did more than survive. He came out of the battle unscarred, his ears ringing with the roar of glory.
Time and again in those days of chaos he risked his life to extricate his dwindling command from one tight corner after another. Despite his efforts to break out he was driven back into the forest and there surrounded by the Germans. He had barely a hundred able-bodied troopers left. He called them together—beneath a gigantic oak tree according to Louis, who had all the biographical details of the hateful romancer—and asked if they were of a mind to surrender in the morning, "as if we were common foot rabble." His men, who liked nothing better than to have a column of infantry choke on their dust as they trotted past them, growled their dissent.
That night it rained and thundered, which in August means rain on the Burmese scale bucketing out of an inkbag sky. When it was at its blackest, Andrej led his men in single file out of the forest and straight through the German lines; dismounted, the horses' hoofs muffled and their muzzles bound with strips torn from the soldiers' shirt tails.
By sun-up they were safe. It was too wet to get a fire going: they lounged naked in a clearing while their clothes dried. Then they rode north-east—waveringly, for the terrain was complicated by the forest and a succession of large lakes. They met other stragglers. Within a week Andrej had gathered five hundred men. All went well until they reached a lake far wider and longer than any they'd met so far. The scouts rode for a day in each direction without being able to see its end. Mosquitoes came off its swampy margins in clouds; Lithuanian mosquitoes with thoraxes the size of thimbles. Every species of noxious insect was present beside that lake. Horses and men went wild from their biting. But how should they pass it, on the east or the west? Andrej's only map showed the concept of the lake but no solution. He tossed a coin. Tails—the eagle. He gave the order to march west.
Nicholas, who was telling me the story as he couldn't trust Louis to get it right, continued: "Appalling. As bad as having to cross the Pripyat marshes. Not an acre of decent country the whole way. Brackish, quaking mudflats. Then thick willow scrub, then a vast bay to be traipsed round with a dead sort of river going into it that the men had to wade across with the water up to their armpits and bubbles of poisonous air coming to the surface with every footstep. Horrible black water. Insects like piranhas, night and day.
"At length they reached the end, which was marked by a small bald hill. They'd had their eye on it for miles because a hill was extraordinary in that region. Andrej was determined to climb to its summit, to impose himself on it, to take his revenge for what they'd suffered from the mud, the insects and the dense reed-like grasses that grew to eight or nine feet and had leaves with edges that could draw blood.
"His Zeiss binoculars magnified ten times with a lens size of forty millimetres. Through them he saw below—for the land fell away quite sharply—a splendid mediaeval manor house, timbered authentically with numerous shingled roofs that were interrupted by rows of triangular dormers in the attics. He could make out the marks where a moat had been filled in. On all sides of the house were lawns and allees. He had to crawl forward to see the stables and offices, which were directly below him.
"There were figures moving round—-soldiers. On studying them more closely he saw they were German officers. He'd stumbled across a rest area for the cream of the German officer class
, a free brothel for the victors of Tannenberg. It was to the east that he should have turned.
"He counted two croquet lawns and six lawn tennis courts. A class for athletics was taking place. Young women in gloves and carrying parasols were watching from benches. He saw a croquet player invite one of them to take his shot. He took up a stance immediately behind her. As she struck the ball he gave her a terrific buffet with his loins, at which all his friends laughed. In a thick flowerbed, some tall white flowers were being smashed to pieces by two, maybe more, bucking bodies. He contrasted all this with the condition of his own troops. His plan was complete by the time he squirmed backwards towards his men, who were without exception hungry and angry.
"There was never the smallest difficulty with the engagement. The guards were killed at their posts and the telegraph operator shot neatly, head over heels, as he ran to his wooden operations hut. You can imagine the rest. Where Andrej was most artful, one could say merciless, was in getting his men away sober. They took with them the six most senior Germans. After a couple more weeks and a few skirmishes—the Huns going insane when they discovered what he'd done, you understand— he arrived at our own lines. He rode up to the chief who was soaping his balls standing in a canvas field-bath, saluted and said, 'I've brought you General A, Colonels B, C, and D and a couple of also-rans. Potocki reporting back for duty, sir!,' fairly roaring the word "sir" at this suddy, stupefied, hairy-bellied old pink man.
"Don't you see it, Charlie? A ready-made hero exactly when we needed him. Perfect! Our little playmate was whisked back to St. Peter—damned if I'll call it Petrograd—to be paraded round the capital. Got an immediate transfer to the general staff—to the Garde a Cheval. Absolutely top of the pile. And now—for God's sake don't go and tell him about her fits. He hasn't an idea. I tell you, it's as big a coup as old Rykov's. Five thousand acres of sugar beet plus pin money plus jewellery. All she has to do in return is wear nice clothes, feed his friends and bear his children. That hospital stuff she does, it'll have to go and no bad thing either. I wouldn't let my cattle near it."
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