White Blood

by James Fleming

  One of us on either side, we raised her from her chair and guided her along the corridor to one of the downstairs bedrooms. Sonja rushed away and returned in a few moments with a fire pan. The hot coals were lolling against each other, sending up acrid fumes. She tipped them into the grate, sprinkled some handfuls of curly birch peelings on top and laid the kindling. Again she rushed out, with a whisk of her drab grey gown. Her strong black shoes sounded prissy on the planked flooring. The side door grated. She was going to pick from the wood stack at the end of the verandah.

  Liza's black eyes were staring up at me, glazed with shock. Her face had a bluish tinge. She was holding her head rigidly. Everything else was trembling violently. Her dress was moving as if she had mice in her underlinen. I pulled up a chair and began to stroke her arms.

  Sonja entered. I continued what I was doing. I said, "Look, she's relaxing. I think it makes her warm. That must help. You must know what this is—her illness?"

  Turning, I looked at her thoroughly, wanting to flatter her since she was an important link to Liza. I saw a woman of about twenty-five with brown, pulled-back hair, a pale jowly face and sloping shoulders. Her breasts hung like bags of wet sand. She had shadows beneath her eyes as big as pennies, indicating troublesome menstruation. There can't have been a plainer woman in Popovka.

  I glanced at her red hands, thought of them hunting out my lice—prising my buttocks apart.

  Her voice was a surprise, being smooth and educated. "It's another fit. It'll go on for several hours like this. That's what she said when she warned me about them."

  "I wonder what brought it on like that," I said.

  Sonja said, "I must see if she needs changing. You have to leave."

  As I was closing the door on my heel, she ran over and pulled it from my grasp. Poking her face into mine, her eyes goggling angrily, she burst out, "How can you ask such a stupid question? You all did it, you're all guilty, you men with your licentious jokes and then your talk about the chances of that"—she paused—"that aristocrat getting killed. Do you think I couldn't hear everything that goes on? You were talking about her as if she were a pig at market. Not once did any of you ask what she thought. What concerned you was the money she was bringing in. I couldn't believe it. I wanted to rush in and stop you. Is she a prostitute? I wanted to put this question to each of you in turn. But I'm only a servant. I've learned to keep myself to myself—and to my mistress. So leave us. You've done enough harm."

  I was astonished that she should speak to me like that. I said as much. But I said it to a closing door.

  Nicholas ran up to get the news. I asked him about Sonja. He didn't know much: the choice had been entirely his sister's. I told him what had passed between us. He wasn't interested. He'd taken Bobinski's words to heart and was considering how best to hurry along Andrej.

  "Oh good, as long as she's being properly looked after." He flicked his fingers and went to the drawing room to write Andrej a touching letter.

  Without Liza and her parlour games (which he adored), Bobinski soon fell asleep. His head was to one side and from the back of his throat came dry, creaking snores. A sheath of white hairs rose from under the collar of his shirt and circled his scrawny neck like the frilled paper round the end of a lamb cutlet. Soft, bent and childlike, he occupied his wing chair. His mouth was soft too, from repeating all the stories he'd heard in his time, stories that probably went back two hundred years to the time of Peter the Great.

  The fire settled in the hearth, the pen scratched, the snores mounted.

  I, however, was considering the assassination of Count Andrej Potocki. Not practically but in general, as a beautiful aspiration. One can have too much of the Goetz mentality, of three courses of virtue at every meal. Goodness is artificial and acquired only with much effort and purpose. A man who is honest with himself is entitled to his full share of sin. Was it a crime to want Potocki dead?

  It was too powerful a question for that somnolent room. I went out and sat in the hall, opposite the big blue and white stove, beneath a thicket of roebuck antlers.

  Thirty

  My leg only needed constant work to become firm again. Kobi and I had been in the habit of walking daily to and from Popovka and through the forest. But with winter came short days and difficult conditions underfoot. I didn't want to slip and crack the bone a second time. I took over an empty room near the kitchen in which to get fit.

  It had snowed on this particular morning. I was on my way to exercise as I sauntered down the passage past Liza's rooms. I'd never been inside, even as a child. They'd always been her private lair. Whenever she ran there sobbing, we knew the game had been too rough. None of us had dared follow, least of all Andrej Potocki to whom, as a guest and not of our blood, there was a social barrier at the entrance to the family's sleeping quarters. I really don't recall anyone getting into her rooms, even her girlfriends.

  The door was ajar. I thought to get an inkling of what it could be like between us in fifty years' time. There was curiosity—temptation—love—all that was human. I mended my pace, checked behind me for Sonja and stepped smartly in. I released the doorknob silently, fraction by fraction.

  Then I stopped dead. I half-whistled (air without noise). For here was Aladdin's cave.

  Chinese scarlet were the walls, the scarlet of a warlord's banner, a parrot's poll, a northern sunset. A spectacular ripping scarlet from the black planks to the uncomplicated cornice, which was likewise black. These were not ladylike colours, not of the lady I believed I knew. I stared up at the ceiling. In the centre—at the core of the earth—was a sun lapped by curling tongues of flame that had just spat out a galaxy of small white puff balls. Was it smoke? Were they clouds? I was too stunned to choose. What was going on? Scarlet, for the woman who thought her fits were caused by blood and screaming! Perhaps it was her idea of an anti-therapy: that the shock of awakening in her scarlet tank would scare the attacks away. You could see the brushstrokes rippling through the paint, which made me think of waves, and turbulence, and thus my woman's energy.

  So scarlet was it! Go to, Liza! I shouted as if cheering home a racehorse. Go to! Who would have expected it of someone so calm and smooth, with skin like alabaster ... A drum roll of love sounded and beat upon me, filling all the long dry solitary cracks that lay sprawling in my character. Lizochka, dusha moya, my soul, my love!

  Elizaveta! I spoke her name, lingering greedily over those rare, late, gentle consonants.

  I picked the ragged doll off her pillow and strolled into her boudoir, stroking its threadbare locks, which were made from real hair.

  The bookshelves were black as well. Now that I was getting into the swing of her mind, this seemed an entirely proper way to connect the floor to the cornice. Her books were in Russian and French, novels with paper spines the same colour as Nicholas's summer jackets. There were other objects on the shelves: a photograph of my uncle Boris posed before a studio background of a palm tree and an ivy-tendrilled balustrade; a death-edged photograph of Viktor in his cavalryman's uniform; dried fronds in a vase; a lime green porcelain pot, an ivory Buddha, and a group of wooden platters on stands—rough, peasant work, the scenes painted in violent orange tones of villagers performing their daily duties: the fetcher of water, the hewer of wood, the besom lady flicking dust from the tavern door.

  Was I right to discern the Popovka tavern? Might Sonja have done them? Was Liza her patron?

  But now the most serious consideration of all presented itself. It had to be asked. Was I myself too drab for this strong, bright woman?

  It made me giddy just to stand there. Inside my head was a spinning disc of scarlet and black. All was awhirl. The noise of the colours was like Burmese labourers beating out tinplate. Was this what I was going to have to live with? I felt swamped by my surroundings. I flumped into a chair. For I have yet to describe the rest of the furnishings, I mean the curtains, the counterpane on her brass-railed bed, the chair coverings, the carpets on the floor and a couple h
anging on the walls. None were in soothing colours. They were all in the bold rectangled designs of the Caucasus, spangling with reds and blues, blasting broadsides from every corner of the room.

  Who was this woman? Did I know her? Could I ever know her?

  "So what is the answer, then?" I asked myself aloud.

  The door flew open, well enough to have taken the hinges with it. Scuttling at me, fist upraised to strike, was Sonja.

  I saw it in an instant, the slattern's crush on a bold and beautiful woman. I laughed at her, ha ha ha into her buck-toothed rabbity face, which was popping with jealousy. "Are you so pally with her that you've forgotten how to knock?"

  "Brute," she hissed. "You'll never get her." She clenched her hands, her big red knuckles of ham.

  "One of us will—but it won't be you."

  She looked wildly around to see what I'd been up to. "If you've so much as touched any of her belongings ..."

  I saw that she had a rip in her brown woollen stockings. It started at her ankle and disappeared up her skirt. "In the woods, were you? Cold, I'd say. A girl'd need a good reason."

  "You're just trying to avoid answering," she said, "... sir."

  I pointed above her ankle. The wool had burst and I could plainly see the clumps of her dark hair.

  She pressed her skirt against her bottom, arched her back and looked down. In doing this she showed me a long streak of a dusty, greenish colour as if she'd been leaning against a tree. What would she be doing in the forest at this time of the morning, at this season, with snow on the ground? I watched her face intently.

  She said nothing but folded her lips resolutely over her long teeth, as if by concealing them she was able to conceal the deceit that was all over her face.

  I jumped up and before she could stop me pressed the back of my hand against her cheek to get the temperature. "So what were you doing out there, you lying bitch?"

  She tried to hold out on me, trading blinks. But in my life as a naturalist I have often had to wait for more timid creatures than her to come to my call. I bided my time, swinging my foot to annoy her. Presently I noticed perspiration gathering at her hairline.

  "Soon you'll be sweating like a June bride."

  She started. What sort of nerve was that I'd hit? "You have no authority to enter her room. She would have told me."

  "You should stick to being a lady's maid."

  Then she played her ace. "I know when they're getting married." She uncovered those teeth, cocking her lips into a foxy little smile of triumph.

  "When?"

  Of course she didn't reply, but continued her horrible smile, her eyes boring into me. "If I'm excused from questioning, I'll come back to do my duties when you've gone, sir." She made me an exaggerated curtsy, using both hands to spread her skirt.

  "How did you find out? Did she tell you herself?"

  "She isn't alone in it. There is also her lover, the aristocrat."

  What was it about her? That half-educated accent, the false servility, the shrewdness, the hint that she had information concerning Potocki that none of us had access to—what was going on?

  I said, "You haven't told me what you were doing in the woods."

  "That's my business. And don't think you can get the Count to dismiss me. Only she can do that—my mistress." With a brisk nod of her head she was gone, leaving me halfway out of my chair, boiling with anger, my eyes bulging like a bulldog's testicles.

  Thirty-one

  A war was destroying men of all nationalities, stoking its furnaces with their corpses, ramming them in, each man's head up the arse of the one in front and their grey toes sticking through the grating for the rats to chew. Being especially consumed were my countrymen, who'd been driven back on all fronts—by the Austrians, by the Germans, and by other nations whom they'd traditionally despised.

  Somewhere close to the above there was living in a smart and appropriate billet my boyhood chum, my rival. I wanted him in that furnace with all the others. Alternatively I desired that someone would come forward with proof that he had hereditary dementia. Or was in the final stages of syphilis—the nose and a doctor's ticket on the same salver. It was with absolute sincerity that I longed for his death. I scanned the newspaper like a hound.

  It was our only source of information. Nicholas also read it avidly, in the evening, sometimes aloud to Liza. The censor's office in Smolensk was a benign one: victories were not inflated and reverses not shovelled under the carpet. The paper would therefore speak of temporary retreats for tactical purposes, temporary bread queues in Petrograd, and temporary agitators whom they termed bolsheviki. This suited Nicholas, who had put himself in an impossible situation, that of being suspicious of good news and crushed by bad. He would himself act as a second censor when reading to Liza and would thus usually tell her nothing but pap.

  One evening she taxed him about his right to do this. She was old enough to be married off: was she not old enough to make political judgements for herself?

  His reply was typically obtuse. "If you believe that only terrible things can happen then they will. That's why we have censors, to smooth everything out and remove the rubbish. A steady progression of events is what people want, especially women. Nothing too sudden." He lowered his voice and leaned towards her on the sofa so as to make everything confidential and realistic. "There's any number of psychologists who support censorship. The most reputable men in their field, actually."

  "Name them."

  He opened and closed his mouth like a fish. His little blond beard quivered. Of course he couldn't. I doubt if he could have named a single psychologist in Russia.

  She looked at him icily. "You should stick to what you know about."

  This was a slap across the chops. He flushed, but said nothing.

  She went on to say that he'd changed the Rykov motto from "Think Well" to "Think Stupidly." Didn't it feel like a second visitation of the jacquerie of '05? Did he want to have the house burned round their ears? Shouldn't they do something? Couldn't they at least think of doing something?

  "What sort of thing?"

  "Going to the Crimea—to Uncle Igor?" She was looking at him without flinching.

  It was too much. She was questioning his position as head of the house. He crimsoned, he bridled and foamed, and standing straddled above her roared about duty and deserting the colours at the hour of greatest danger. There was more, to do with Potocki and getting rid of a deadweight from his house—at last. He was crude beyond belief, being angry because she'd said what he ought to have been saying.

  She went upstairs. We heard her calling for Sonja. Then and there she had Timofei drive her into the city, in the middle of the night. In the morning she sent word to Nicholas that she'd work at the hospital until her wedding and then leave the Pink House forever.

  "I never knew she had such a temper," he said to me after reading her note.

  Now there were just the two of us. At breakfast he'd put on a good show of cheerfulness. But after he'd ridden out he'd retire to his office and give himself over completely to gloom. His motto was sent to the graveyard. By evening he'd be completely addled. He'd go to the far end of the drawing room to immerse himself in the paper. He'd go along the print with his finger, pulling nervously at pieces of his beard. He kept a wind-up Konig phonograph down there. At his worst moments he'd listen to the Stabat Mater of Palestrina, groaning, with his head between his hands.

  I understood now how it had been for Liza before I came back from Turkestan. How had she endured his moods and his history lectures, his inane remarks, even his clopping farmer's tread along the corridor? It was time to shake myself up. Popovka did not have good prospects for me at present. What was I to aim for? It seemed to me I should start with the Academy, and the sooner I did this the quicker the improvement would be.

  Straightway I walked through the snow to get Kobi. He'd found a widow in Popovka and was living with her. "Tigerman" was what they called him for he was lithe, leathery and had a
dangerous look from the manner in which his diamond-shaped eyes appraised you, as if he were a hangman estimating your weight.

  I went to the widow's house and told Kobi to get ready. We were going to go to Petrograd and pay a call on the Academy. "Try our hand at some business again," I said.

  "Don't take him away for too long," said the widow, sensually. She watched Kobi as he strapped on his belt with its Sheffield steel knife, then fluttered around him, helping with his coat, finding his boots.

  "You'll take care of any money they give him, won't you," she said to me. "If something happened, I don't know how I'd live . . . Those poor soldiers of ours, having to put themselves up to be killed for fifty kopecks a month. Fifty! For a loaf of bread! Barin, you're a clever man, can we be sure the Lord Christ will make them all heroes up there?"

  "Shut your mouth, Mother," Kobi said. He put on his greatcoat and fur hat. "Even the mention of fifty kopecks a month makes me ill. I wouldn't sell my spit for that . . . What fools there are to be found." He hoisted his knapsack and nodded to me that he was ready.

  Thirty-two

  But we never got past Zhukovo that day. We were only a hundred yards down the road from Misha's house when we met the man himself coming back from Moscow. His red face shone from his carriage like Christmas.

  "News! Hot from the press! Come and share it with me."

  I demurred. He insisted—he implored—even his coach-horse joined in by bowing its neck and scraping at the road gravel.

  "Look, there you are!" he said.

  "It's hungry. It wants to get out of the traces and have a good roll. The horse has got nothing to do with it, Misha."

  But this is provincial Russia we're speaking of. What was the Academy compared to neighbourliness? Timofei backed our carriage the whole way down that hundred yards to show off his skill with horses and we piled out amid a squabble of Misha's mutilated chickens who came instantly to his whistle, the halt and the one-eyed alike.

  Both sides of his porch were stacked with firewood, splashed with white fusillades of chicken shit where they'd roosted. He led me into the pleasant, chintzy drawing room while his housekeeper got the samovar ready.