White Blood

by James Fleming

  Once more the room shook with laughter. This was a vast philosophy they'd hit upon. Eternity was too short to settle such a matter. No matter, the ecstasy of argument was in their eyes, and it would have been dawn before they left if Misha hadn't now given his signal. Louis was standing by the door. Misha motioned to him with his forefinger. Nodding, he slipped out of the room.

  Moments later there was a sharp, pungent, whistling explosion from the terrace, a noise that was all the more shocking for being completely unexpected. A number of people ducked, or anyway cowered.

  Misha called out, "My cannon—my little brass falconetto, last fired for the coronation of His Majesty. Powder by itself, no ball. No risk of injury."

  "I suppose that's what he meant by his falcon," someone said gloomily.

  "The jig's up," declared Fyodor Fyodorovich, the village elder. "On your feet, brethren."

  "What's that good safe joke of yours, Misha?"

  "My cannon, of course."

  Chaffing Louis, patting his head and chucking him under the chin, the couples went out to their wagon. Styopka reeled off to fetch their horse.

  They were carrying their own mounting block, by which the wives had to climb up onto the wagon. They'd done it for the journey down and now it was time to reverse the process. But it was discovered that getting onto the wagon after a banquet of roast boar was by no means the same as getting off it when hungry. There was talk of pulleys and ropes and fat stupid women. The horse was led up and backed between the shafts. The wagon jolted; a lady got a nasty knock on her knee; ancient ill-humours began to surface beneath the flittering moon.

  Suddenly Nicholas, whom everyone believed had retired from the evening, rushed out of the house and shouted, "Off with you, you've had enough out of me." He flapped his hands. "Go away. Go back to your homes. Every single one of you."

  The benches they'd got from the inn were facing backwards. Stoutly the wives sat there in their bundled coats and shawls, watching Nicholas. The injured woman rubbed her knee with a circular movement.

  The driver spoke to Fyodor Fyodorovich, who was sitting on the bench behind him. Fyodor said to Nicholas, "The wedges are still under the wheels. If your honour would throw them up to me it would be the quickest way."

  Nicholas spun on his heel, his mouth working. "You do it," he said to me brusquely. The wagon rumbled off down the drive, a gallery of white unmoving faces staring at me.

  Forty-five

  Nicholas went inside without speaking. Liza and I were alone. The noise of the wagon hung in the night, the stones rattling beneath its iron-shod wheels.

  Ghostly clouds were moving slowly over our heads from behind the house, brushing past the moon. Above the forest there were darker ones waiting, banked up. Not many stars had bothered for our wedding night. But I could see that those looking our way were green with envy.

  She shivered. We turned to go in. On the top floor, we saw a candle approach the window. Behind it was Bobinski's white face, distorted by the imperfections in the glass, like a moon in a rippling pond. Wavering, it looked down on us. Then he drew the single thin curtain.

  She caught me by the lapels. Dark hair, eyes, eyebrows, a wing of shadow falling across her cheek from the porch lantern. "Let's make a start on our children. We've only one lot of fifty years." She tugged at willing me, and folded her body against mine, the whole length, even as far down as her knees, so that she was stitched to me. She said, "You've knees like a gorilla's. Here are the miles they've carried you"—she leaned back and rested against my arms. Her two fingers began walking up the front of my coat—"mile after mile, mile after mile, one mile, two miles, 149,000 miles scowling at the backbone of Mister Goetz in the fierce Charlie Doig way. Grunting. Behind you two ogres shimmers poor Hpung. Then: ho! what beetle can this be looking so dapper?"

  I caught her below the knees and swung her up, tossed her a couple of times to show that I had arms as well, and bore her into the house.

  Misha and Louis were discussing the evening in Louis's pantry. I could see their two profiles and on the table a wine bottle.

  I carried her up the broad staircase to the first-floor landing. "Every girl should experience this once in her lifetime," she said, smiling up at me. "But will it hurt your leg?"

  I denied it.

  She said, "In my father's time this was where all the pensioners would gather to watch what was going on in the family. Strangers and the doctor fascinated them. They were sometimes a great nuisance, like barnyard fowl."

  "Shhh."

  Our bedroom, which was over the hall, was the room traditionally reserved for important guests. Lamps were burning in the alcoves on either side of the door. I pushed the door with my toe and closed it with my heel. Cream beeswax candles filled the room with their warm light. A blue hyacinth from Misha's hothouse was on her dressing table. The fire had declined to an even glow. Louis had had the warming pans removed from the huge feathery bed just before we came up. Dried lavender stalks had been stripped into the coals. Their perfume was everywhere.

  "Better than the smell of lamb cutlets," I said.

  "Hurry," she said. "With us it's every moment that counts."

  I let her down. We knelt and prayed before the ikons. Then I snuffed the candles and started to unclothe Mrs. Doig in front of the fire.

  Had he bored a peephole in the floor, this is what the person in the room above would have seen, starting at the double windows and working towards the bed.

  The wooden shutters had ducks and geese carved in them that admitted pokings of the sky's milky grey light. They didn't extend far into our room. The man upstairs would have cursed as they petered out at the marble washstands.

  Next he would have hit a strip of darkness. But he couldn't have failed to notice the gleam of what lay beyond and would have passed through it eagerly, thus arriving at the pool of licking firelight in which we lay. There he'd have witnessed the clumsy haste with which I mounted for the first time the woman who was now my wife.

  Forty-six

  On moments when time stands still: in the souls of all women when their children are born. At the news of unseasonal deaths or of deaths encompassed by strangers. At visions and conversions—Saul on the dusty highway to Damascus; Pierre Bezukhov seeing Moscow afresh, through the eyes of a man who had visited the bottom of the pit and survived; Bernadette at Lourdes. Blindingly, evoking in one marvellous instant some previous journey of the being—upon the first sight of a painting, at a singular phrase of music, at the drift of long-forgotten perfume, at all unexpected revelations of beauty and thus of truth. At the onslaught of genius, at the unlocking of a conundrum.

  At the capture of Wiz, in that steamy post office in western Burma, let me not omit that.

  On the crocus-strewn hill above the battlefield of Balaclava, when Elizaveta, in her long blue skirt and tennis shoes, conquered me.

  Time halts in its tracks and our selfishness with it at all such moments. The minutes, the hours, even the days are suspended by whatever god deals with these practical aspects of magic. To say that they are then dangled over our heads ready to be dropped when things have turned for the worse is to be cynical. Magic exists. It is before us every hour of the day. Nature itself is a crawling, fluttering, hopping, humming encyclopaedia of magic. And nothing that I have mentioned can surpass the magic of the moment at which a man first enters the body of the woman he loves.

  "And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour."

  If infinity were possible to grasp, that was my opportunity, on the brown bearcubs' skin before the embers of the fire on my wedding night. I was afloat in space, at large amid the constellations, circling effortlessly on a rocket fuelled by happiness. Hulking over her, pressing into her body with my thick haunches, I splashed her with tears of joy that I was unable to control. I called her twenty-five names that were new and beautiful. I kissed her loving eyes incessantly, and her strong-boned nose and her warm mouth a
nd her chin and her ears until my lips were bruised. The other noises we made were the practical ones of loving—pleasure, disbelief, a slapping stream, plunkety-plunk. At my discharge I let out a shuddering cry of triumph for I knew, in exactly the same way as a convert is assured of his faith, that my steaming bolus of sperm had spied her egg and was, even before I finished shouting her name, zooming towards it like a torpedo. I strained against her thighs, so firm, so white. I kept my eyes closed and counted out loud to fifty, when I was sure they'd fused. Her fingers were spread across my buttocks, pulling me into her, making doubly certain.

  Thus was Dan Doig conceived. Proudly we smiled on each other in the firelit darkness.

  "One word, one meaning." We spoke the words simultaneously, kissed and clambered into our enormous lavender-scented bed.

  Forty-seven

  She moved, stealthily, so as not to awaken me. I was a thousand miles away, dreaming of Goetz being carried in his sedan chair along the hill track in Burma. But he'd grown much larger, and his hairy nostrils were trained on me like gun barrels. I woke with a start. "Is it time? Dawn?"

  "I have to do something, my darling. Go back to sleep."

  "Where are you going?" I grabbed her arm.

  "To piss."

  "Why didn't you say so?" By now I was quite awake.

  The fire had died out. By contrast the light coming through the shutter holes was stronger. She got out the chamber pot and took it over to the window. She stood, naked, looking through one of the holes. "I don't like what I see of tomorrow. Snow or rain, perhaps both. Let's not move from here, Charlinka."

  The luminous glow of night was coming through the shutters. I could just pick out the wolf of the Rykovs loping round the contour of the pot, one heraldically raised paw stretched towards the handle.

  She squatted. My buttock (by which I mean her buttock on my side of the pot) bulged over the rim thus obscuring the ears of the wolf. I don't know how this happens with women. Standing she had such neat, contained buttocks. I'm just reporting what I observed. This was our first night together and some things were strange to us both, especially to my virgin queen.

  "It's so cold over here," she said. "Snow not rain." She frowned in concentration as the urine hissed out of her.

  "Not so hard, Lizochka, for God's sake! You might dislodge it."

  She scampered back. I raised her side of the blankets. She dived into my tent and my arms. "Men, you're so stupid," she grumbled happily.

  We talked of our love and going to America—whether we'd try to get Misha to come with us. "He'll never leave when his hyacinths are blooming. He might say yes, but he'd back out at the last minute. Later in the year and it's the fruit season and then his pet hydrangeas." She folded herself more cosily into my side. "He'd be heartbroken without snow. He adores watching it fall. He's too old, too settled, too Russian. There's only one way he's going to leave Zhukovo."

  We lay there, my bride and I, all toasty in the warmth of our love. Outside it was snowing. We could tell by the silence.

  We discussed Kobi. I said he'd never get on over there: the language, and him being such a rough diamond. I said a bit more about him—her breathing grew rough. She was asleep.

  But I—my brain had switched to Alert. The room seemed like a furnace. And when I did fall asleep it was to another sequence of unpleasant dreaming. Before it had been Goetz. Now that we'd talked of going to America I had to rehearse that journey as well. For some reason I ordained that it should not be via Train No. 7 to Odessa but through Germany we must travel, to an emigrant steamer departing for America from Bremen. I saw the three of us being crammed into a train packed with Jews, fugitives like ourselves, and the German delousing cubicles where we were robbed of our money and papers. I observed closely the prison-camp conditions in steerage. I wept in fury to see my Lizochka brought so low.

  At the last I saw our dead child being pitched overboard, flicked off a mat into a choppy sea of cucumber green. Doig, the chaplain called him, the surname alone, for he was only one of a number of children who'd died in the night.

  It should have been a relief when I awoke, sweating, but the taste of my dream remained. The dawn of a Russian winter was in the room. It had washed my bride's gentle face with a repulsive mealy colour. I crept to the window and peered out through one of the ducks carved in the shutter. A ledge of snow was on the sill. On the ground there must have been six inches. It was still snowing, wet, lazy flakes the size of a tablespoon head. Mist was halfway down the trees, drifting across them. Everything about the house was quiet. I had the feeling of abandonment, that Liza and I were the only people remaining.

  I gazed down at her, the mother of my child. Then I stole out and went along the corridors to my bachelor room, where my ordinary clothes still were.

  The terrace plants, the herbs and thyme, which had perked up since the last spell of weather, had once again been clumped by the snow. The barrel of Misha's falconetto was moulded in white, except in the shelter of its mouth where there was only a dusting. A wren had been in not long before. The triangles of its spidery toes were clean and clear. It had alighted on the tip of the barrel, leaned over to have a peek inside—and hopped down. Peering out at winter with knowing eyes, it had defecated and left.

  Snow is so destructive of the well-balanced mind. On the one hand it builds up resentment because of the personal restrictions it imposes—and on the other astonishment at its power and beauty. The Russian mind has been formed around the properties of snow.

  There was no birdsong. They were mostly staying up at roost, puffing out their breast feathers to make extra layers of insulation. Why should they waste their energy on getting about? Wait until it warms up a bit, until the earth rolls an hour or two nearer the sun when a little judicious activity might yield a meal. Be sensible, not like man. If one had to be a bird on a day like this, best to be one of Misha's cripples, shuffling round a warm hay shed never knowing what titbit might next fall to one's beak.

  Though rats would be a danger to them. They too like warmth. But there never has been a day in history when rats were other than a danger. They are too similar to men: besotted by fighting, either for food or for the moist raptures of Miss Laycock—the monosyllable. Was it twelve times an hour, was that how often Zincke had estimated their virility?

  In this mood of mine, which was fundamentally joyful and made irritable only by a restless sleep and a horrible dream, I passed among the trees in the pleasure grounds—white pillars decapitated by the mist—and suddenly the thought swirled into my mind that by impregnating Lizochka and therefore renewing the line of Doig, I had at last, conclusively, avenged my father.

  It was fourteen years ago, to the month, that he'd died by the agency of a rat.

  Well!

  I immediately felt more cheerful. I blew my nose into the snow and reviewed the necessity of shaving. I'd take the girl her breakfast in bed—withhold it if she argued—have a go for twins—and then know a lower peak of sensuality, eating warm new bread with cunty fingers. It was how twins were conceived, in separate sessions? She was tall enough to carry them without difficulty. Thinking about Dan and his brother curled up inside her, I looked round to see if the kitchen fires had been lit.

  They had not, so I continued. I was walking down what we'd always known as the archery lawn. It was wedge-shaped with summer borders of hollyhocks, delphiniums and lupins on either side. At the end of the taper a white wooden gate led into what Uncle Boris used to call his "mature" garden, meaning an area of shrubs and ornamental trees that the gardeners didn't have to bother about. It was on the archery lawn that Andrej had again been the hound, shouting to his sister, who was collecting for us, that there were no more arrows to come and then shooting one, zippety-zip, into the turf at her heel.

  No, Andrej, that was not a nice thing to have done. Thank you for scooting off to heaven. We both know that Liza is better off with me.

  I pushed the gate open, creating a pleat of snow on the far side
on which it stuck. In front was the wellingtonia, the first in Russia, that had been planted by Uncle Boris's father, Konstantin, to commemorate the great man's dying. Patches of shaggy rufous bark stuck out from the plastered snow. I walked through the archway hewn in it with downcast eyes, awarding marks to Andrej for each aspect of his behaviour and then marking myself for it. Of course it was a false exercise, for I had no intention that he would turn out superior.

  I noticed that my friend the wren had preceded me here also. Again the spinsterish toe marks—but oh, when one thought about it, what lustrous eyes the birdie had! And it so tiny, no heavier than a green muscatel grape! Eyes sharp enough to be enlisted for the Inquisition! Much sharper than my girl's—I thought: will she squeal when I lay my frozen hands on her, and so I came into that part of the garden that led downhill to the great swathe of rhododendrons and the rusted manorial gates that marked the boundary of the pleasure grounds.

  Again I looked back at the chimneys. There was still no sign of life. I decided I'd walk as far as the ford.

  It was the hinge that I heard first, as taut as a scream.

  I stood stock-still. Snowflakes settled on my eyelashes. But not a single part of me moved.

  A horse snickered. Thump—that was its punishment.

  I reckoned he was about thirty yards away, on the other side of the rhododendrons. I could see nothing of him. All I had to go by were the sounds. There are people like that, never silent, noise growing parasitically on them like a fungus. I waited.

  Then—the swirling of a string of phlegm round his back teeth—gathering it into a ball—and the rasping thwap of spit.

  I hated this man immediately. I sensed it for mockery, that mustering of a whitey-grey, tobacco-streaked plug, for contempt of all who lived within the pale marked by those gates. Riding into the garden of another man at dawn wasn't something done on a whim—for an excursion.

  Straightaway I was like an animal protecting its young. Liza was waking and stretching, feeling the warmth on my side of the bed to judge how long I'd been up. Soon she'd be emptying the pot, folding back the shutters, lighting a lamp or two, estimating the day, thinking about that breakfast . . . and I was at the bottom of the garden listening to the sounds of an unknown man on horseback who if he desired could be in her bedroom while I was still floundering through the snow. I had no hesitation. I hated him for trespassing on my honeymoon, for defiling the home of my love, for being invisible—a threat. I hated him absolutely. He was a danger to me. I could smell the stink coming off his animal groin. I didn't need to know why he was here or anything about his appearance, his nature, his religion or his political views. That he was, was enough. I rammed the hatred into my heart and pressed it down with my thumbs until it had filled every wrinkle of the sac.