White Blood

by James Fleming

  Fifty-two

  Glebov WAS rarely in the house. Shubrin, on the other hand, was never out of it. After a couple of days we established that he was, by trade, a billiards professional. Tubby and charming, he exercised his skills at the expense of Misha. As I passed I'd hear the click of balls and zing! as the scoring peg was whipped back down the brass rail to zero. Another fifty points to the recruiting officer.

  And he drank.

  "It's so irresponsible of him," Nicholas said. "I know we'd be a nation of alcoholics if we could. It's only the cost and this wretched decree that holds us back. But to behave like that when things are so bad ..."

  "He may belong to a sect that expects the world to end very soon."

  "Next you'll say he knows the date. You're always making fun of me. You deal with him. I'm making myself ill with worry. The war, lawyers, my wife, the peasants, money. It goes on and on. You do something to help for a change . . . Viktor and Elizaveta were always my father's favourites—especially Liza. I was the dunce in the litter. Whatever I did I did wrong. 'Look what a mess you've made of it, Nicholas. Why can't you be like the others.' I'm fated to be the black-and-white terrier that's always trying to copulate with a woman's leg and getting kicked to mince by the husband. It's not nice to know one's that sort of a person. I never asked to be a Rykov. There's only one way to go if you're born at the top."

  "Give it away, cousin, and declare yourself a pauper. Many of our countrymen do. Then they take to the road and become mendicants."

  "That's because they've drunk the money away, not given it. Giving's quite different. What I'm saying is, I was never asked. All parents make this mistake. What we should consider rigorously before conceiving a child is this: would I, the parent, be grateful for the chance to have a life spanning the next seventy years—do they look like being good ones? Are our politicians getting more honest? But of course such questions never get asked except by those who shouldn't be reproducing their type in the first place. Members of our liberal wing are such a grouping. Otherwise what happens is that the man's horny or the woman's on heat and reason goes out of the window. There should be a better way . . . Man should be cleverer than that . . . what, don't you think so . . . yes?"

  His speech sputtered out. I took pity on him. We shared the same blood ... I said, "Come with us to the United States. Liza and I have decided. We're leaving in the spring. Come, Nikolai Borisovich, we'll all go together, a family of good Russians, driven out by desperation. We'd welcome you with us."

  "Who'd buy my land?" It was what he said, quick as snap.

  "A speculator . . . Don't dismiss the idea outright."

  "And I'd be the Rykov who quit. All those serious Americans would talk behind my back and say of me, His great-grandfather saved Russia from Napoleon and he abandoned the entire estate because of some trifling unrest. Look how few years it takes for a family to become degenerate . . . Me leave Russia? That's not much short of impertinence."

  "Steady . . ."

  "You do it. Your father—you're close to being an American . . . Now go and find out what Glebov's doing. He's always disappearing. I've got jobs for him. And for that wastrel Shubrin as well."

  It was Glebov himself who solved the mystery about what he did during the day. At noon, when walking over to the stables, I heard two rifle shots. By dusk he'd sledded home a roebuck and had it on the bench in the game larder.

  "The mighty hunter! Nimrod himself!" exclaimed Louis, nervously watching through the doorway as Glebov knuckled the skin off the animal's dimpling rump, a small figure with bloodied hands and a narrow flensing knife gripped between his teeth.

  The meat was welcome. There were many mouths to be fed. But Glebov never tried to put on a pleasant face when accepting our congratulations. Even when we were eating the venison, he shrugged them off. "It's for the common good. How are we to live otherwise? I learned something about hunting from my father."

  When he made remarks like this it seemed to Liza that he was trailing the coat of his past before us, that beneath everything he was longing to talk about himself. But when she gave him an opening he reverted to the deer and said in a surly tone, "I shot it in the belly, its guts were hanging out."

  I said to him one night, "Why do you take such pains to behave offensively to her?"

  His eyes conceded nothing. "Is it wrong to speak the truth? I say not. We have a special duty towards it. We are the only species on earth that can distinguish between the true and the false. We should remind ourselves of this daily, that we are superior to all other beings."

  "And a duty to women also? Manners?"

  He leered at me, as if bragging about some bestial act he'd just forced Liza to perform. "She's old enough, isn't she? Men and women, what's the difference?"

  He was daring me to strike him; trying me; tapping my character with his hammer to see where it was weakest. He had this way of arguing that was impossible to counter. Taken piece by piece, his propositions were simple and logical. Morality couldn't deny them—in fact melted into their arms. It was the impression in total that was so disagreeable, of a man who scorned every aspect of civilisation, by which I mean the accepted way of doing things.

  To Nicholas and Misha he was curt and polite at the same time. "But Charlie, he couldn't leave even if I ordered him to," Nicholas said, referring to the snow. "Anyway, why should I? He's our butcher. He's keeping us alive. Just because you've got a brand new bride you're on the lookout for insults. Don't be so spiky!"

  But it was intolerable the way Glebov was behaving. To me—his knowingness, the veiled insults, the challenges, his stealthiness around the house so that I could never be certain he wasn't behind my shoulder. To Lizochka—the way he looked at her body was enough. He seemed to have a hundred eyes in his head, all of them making her feel uncomfortable.

  His presence grew on me. I began to disobey my own rule and to be rude to him, at which he sparkled. So I took Kobi away from his widow in Popovka and had him come and live in the Pink House, up in the attic with Glebov and Shubrin. I told him to follow Glebov everywhere. "Spy on him. Threaten him with your shadow," I said.

  Fifty-three

  The bad weather continuing, Popovka was severed from the rest of the world for several days while snowflakes floated down from heaven like paper saucers. By the stable boys at our end and the villagers from the other, the woodland track between the village and the Pink House was sufficiently cleared. But that was all that could be done. It began to get on our nerves.

  This particular morning, the drawing-room fire was reduced to a mere wisp. Snow must have been building up on the chimney head and preventing it drawing. Puffs of defeated smoke began to return and spread round the room, making us cough. Irritably I rang for Louis and told him to send someone up with a ladder.

  Presently the two stable boys appeared outside, Louis pointing upwards and showing them what was needed. First they had a good look at us through the window. Then they set about extending the ladder and getting it balanced. Pashka shouted to Louis to come back and anchor the ladder while they went up. But Louis said it wasn't his place and came in. Pashka sent Styopka up. The ladder flexed as he climbed. Pashka leant against the bottom rungs and gazed into the drawing room, angling his head to see into all the corners, to see what each of us was doing.

  There came a shout from Styopka—a question—an answer— and Pashka followed him up.

  Soon pats of snow and semicircular sections of ice fell hissing into the hearth, making the ashes billow out. Misha and Liza moved to chairs at the back of the room. Louis came in carrying dust sheets.

  "Too late," said Misha. But Louis spread them anyway.

  "Shall we try a few snowballs down it?" It was the younger, Styopka who was speaking. "A bit of fun?" We could hear him with astonishing clarity. It was what snow does to noise.

  "Slates'd be better. Maybe kill one of them, the lazy robbers."

  "Why do you call them that? The Count pays me. Who else would?"

>   "Pennies, what they can't be bothered to pick up. If it's any good it's theirs, if it's not it's ours. That's the law. Speak against it and you're put away."

  "Shh! You shouldn't be talking like that."

  "You go to prison and disappear. Rot away slowly, like shit on a cold day. Remember the monk? He was a peasant like us. Then he got too grand, and under the ice he went. That's Russia. That's the sort of country they want us to die for."

  He spat down the chimney. He must have nearly put his head down it for the noise was like a cap detonating. Some soot trickled into the hearth.

  "Our family's been here since the beginning. We remember everything. Are we meant to forget the injuries done to us? Never! says Mamasha, not till the seas run dry and not even then. You'd think that too if your father was exchanged for a greyhound."

  "You're right there, Pashka. You don't have to be clever to know that."

  "It could have been five minutes ago, even though it was seventy-four years. The Count said to his friend, 'That's a fine dog you've got in your carriage. Let's see it take that hare.' When it did, he looked around his fields and said, 'You have that man over there and I'll keep the dog.' In the evening the Count rode up to the shed where my grandfather was with his milk cow and said he was to leave next morning, at six o'clock. Eight days' walk to get there. The whole family went. The cow died in a ditch—it was before the grass came. They were away for three years and a month. The greyhound was still living when they got back. My grandfather was permitted to take it for walks ... I'd have fucking strangled it! To be bartered for a dog!"

  "But what a time ago it was, Pashka. All those years that you said. Nothing like it has happened in Popovka since, or in any of the villages around."

  "That's being simple. What matters is that my mama's father was exchanged for a greyhound. I'll remember it for a thousand years and so will my kids. If the Tsar himself offered me money to forget it, I'd refuse."

  "Are you sure he hadn't done something wrong?"

  "His only crime was to be standing there when the Count looked round."

  "There must have been something, Pashka."

  "I swear, not a kopeck. He was a fine, strong worker. Steady in the field, never missed a day. Everyone liked to work at his side, you ask your father."

  "Oh I know what he'll say. That they were all good workers in his time, that we're nothing but lazy scoundrels . . . Should we put a slate on top to stop the snow getting in?"

  "How would the smoke get out, idiot?"

  The ladder began to shake again as Pashka and Styopka descended.

  Liza caught my eye. "America," said her lips, noiselessly.

  Fifty-four

  Ignorant clodhoppers," Nicholas said. "If they weren't, they'd have gone to the city to advance themselves, wouldn't they? What they're doing is what they have the intelligence to do. Eh, Misha? Tell me if that's not true."

  But that wasn't what we'd heard. For us it had been the speaking voice of history booming down the chimney. Misha and I drew off into the billiard room, Liza following.

  (Shubrin, as a joke, had balanced a block of chalk on the tip of each cue in the stand.)

  We played without attention, careless about angles and not scoring. The story about the greyhound had disturbed us. The conversation soon came round to the topic uppermost in Misha's mind: the events of 1905, which had occurred when I was an apprentice to Goetz, a world away.

  "In general, the moment that weapons become cheap enough the peasants will obtain them and use them against our class of person. By peasants I mean also the deprived, the disaffected and the professionally unhappy, of which every nation has a group, customarily amongst the intelligentsia. But the peasants are the most numerous.

  "At the time of that rebellion the army and the police had the situation under control. There was no surplus of rifles and therefore nothing being sold cheaply. So it got nowhere. But in the provinces where the harvest had failed there was serious unrest. People were starving. The night skies were red from the flames of burning manor houses."

  He continued: "Arkady Drutskoy was the cousin of my dead wife. He had an Arab stallion that he'd bought from Zimmermann, who goes to Constantinople every year to pick through what's been sent in by the tribes. It was a Koheilan, as pure as the finest gold. It was called Baghdad. Under fifteen hands, of exquisite beauty and temperament. All the peasants for miles around brought their primitive eel-striped mares to be covered by this stallion so that they might have more vigorous and valuable foals. They paid nothing. They even got free stabling for their mares during the period of their covering.

  "One morning these peasants decided to join the revolution. They marched against Arkady. Not to his manor house—not at first, that is—but to his stables.

  "They went straight to see if Baghdad was in its box. It was. They took it out. They ate it.

  "It's true, Charlie. They slit its throat, skinned it and cooked it immediately over a fire in the stable yard. It was the first action of their revolt.

  "Why eat the horse at that point? Isn't it more rational to make it cover all the mares you want and then eat it? I'm not saying it was wrong to have eaten it: they were undoubtedly desperate people. But it was stupid. Anyone with sense would have taken Baghdad for his own profit and eaten one of Arkady's ploughing horses, which are enormous and would have fed a host. I always thought it was the reactionaries who behave stupidly—but no."

  He twirled the butt of his cue and potted a ball with such power that it jumped out of the pocket. "Arkady had his front door stove in with a battering ram which was one of his own oaks. He'd had to watch it being cut down, knowing full well what its purpose would be . . . You might prefer not to listen," he said, turning to Liza.

  "I'm a nurse. I've seen more horrible things than you have or ever will, if God remains our friend."

  "It won't—affect you?" I asked.

  "Bring on a fit?" She kissed me, put her arm through mine. "You've cured me, cured me forever." She extended a hand for dancing and we did a little Scottish sort of fling and leap, she singing, "'Oh, Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling, Charlie is my darling, the bold chevalier . . .' Your father used to sing that to you. Remember? I do. He loved you very much. Dear Pushkin, what a figure he cut!"

  Misha said, "At times like these we must be able to remember our Pushkins and Borises. Without family affections life is a waste of time. My greatest regret is that my wife was unable to have children."

  Liza smiled across at me.

  "I promise to be quiet," she said, sitting down on a wooden chair that was painted dark green and had red swallow-tailed butterflies curling up its slender, curved legs. She pressed her knees together, placed her hands on them—arms and back quite straight. "You get another shot, Misha. It's a new rule for today."

  He took longer than usual chalking his cue.

  "Go on, friend. I'll be twenty-seven on my next birthday," she said.

  "Here is another case, that of a lady in the province of Saratov with whom I was once intimate. I'll go straight to the point: the revolutionaries gave my old lover Nyusha thirty minutes to pack one suitcase for each of her children. One suitcase—thirty minutes! Exquisitely cruel! You have to admire their knowledge of psychology. Thirty seconds—easy. You cram a book into your pocket, woollens and money into your case and run. If they give you a day—another easy one. But thirty minutes! A fraction of time in which to select from the possessions of eight or ten generations. How could a woman do it—could you, Lizochka?— with a peasant standing over you in his sour sheepskin coat, thumbs in his belt, making comments about your choice, slowing you down, picking things out of your case saying 'That's not worth taking anywhere,' making you so nervous you scarcely dare breathe—could you? An impossible task, I say."

  I said: "An exceptional man would have seen it coming and dug a hole somewhere and buried the best of his objects. Done it at night. Told no one. Run his sheep over the place afterwards to conceal the marks."
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  "Who can say what's coming?" Misha demanded hotly. "Do you have this power? Have you dug a hole?"

  "No."

  "Thirty seconds, that was the best one," Liza said. "Grab what's useful and start at the beginning again. Ancestral memones are like millstones that sink all but the really strong-willed. Look at Nicholas."

  "Well, I say you're wrong," Misha said. "I think of my dear friends Arkady and Nyusha and their children and I weep for them. Oh, I know I weep for everything. I see it in your faces— ha ha ha, the old fool, his tears don't count for a kopeck. But think of the agony—twenty-eight minutes . . . twenty-nine . . . thirty! The suitcase is slammed shut by the peasant—perhaps chalked, because he's heard that that's what officials do—and now you have the torture of going round the house and saying farewell to all your old friends—the rejects. They hang their heads. They whisper to you, 'I'm not good enough, even after two and a half centuries, mille fois pardon.' I'd rather be led out and shot in my own garden than suffer as Nyusha did. What would sleep be without my grandfather's bed? Or a walk without my aunt Maria's promenade cane that has the painted head of a cockerel? Horrible, horrible, horrible. It'd be no life at all."

  He cut savagely at his ball and sent it whistling round the table. "I'd say to them, 'I'm bound to die anyway. So shoot me now. Put me against the old brick wall in front of the peach tree that always has leaf-curl and has never given a fruit to anyone. I'll stand for you. I'm too fat to jump around or run away.' That's what I'd say to the brutes. To continue living would be worse than the alternative, of which none of us knows the truth. It may actually be very pleasant."

  I was in a cavernous armchair of cracked brown leather. Liza was on her green pinch-legged chair. The room belonged to Misha, the only one of us standing, and to his thoughtful, baritone voice that filled every inch of space with his emotions, up to the cornices.