White Blood

by James Fleming

  "What do you think he is?"

  "I thought of Bobinski when I saw him gather the men around and make them his speech. I thought of a school."

  "A propagandist then—an agitator?"

  "Or someone pretending to be an agitator. A police agent would be possible."

  "A brave one."

  "But Potocki was a man of importance. The stupidest man in Popovka knew his name. The police would rejoice to catch the gang." Again Kobi nodded to himself.

  I said, "They executed the woman Sonja for it. They've been seen to do that much."

  "A woman—nothing. The whole gang—a sensation."

  We took a few turns round the terrace, where the barrel of Misha's cannon was starting to drip. The wind was rising. Flecks of snow were flying off the trees. Soon rafts of the stuff would be sliding to the ground.

  I said to Kobi, "He might be both. You know how it is with the Third Section. They create a riot themselves so that they can then carry out a general policy of repression. The only thing that's certain is that he's not what he says he is."

  "He's dangerous."

  "Yes."

  There was a terrible calm in Kobi's voice: "Let me kill him. Today, as he returns. I left him with his troop of soldiers. One bullet. No one will hear in this wind."

  "Police agents are always on a roster somewhere."

  "You forget, Doig. There's a war going on. His blood would dry quickly."

  Fifty-six

  Shubrin saddled his pony and left that afternoon. Glebov didn't return from the forest. Kobi was after him.

  There was nothing to enliven our dinner. The increasing wind made the shutters pull at their bolts. Strange roars and whistles came from the gaps round the inner sets of windows. Draughts cut across the room like scythes, and the carpets rose by an inch. A small portrait of Nicholas's mother, which in the Russian manner he'd hung beside what he said was a Caravaggio (a huge dark and furious thing of a man being robbed by footpads) fell to the floor taking a chunk of plaster with it. Bang! It entered our morose silence and our jaws fell silent.

  I'd never known the woman, even as a child. People had ceased to remember her within a month of her falling from her horse. Her portrait was without charm: a green and white woman wearing a mousy hat and gazing out of the window— past a vase of lilac-coloured tulips on the sill—at hills and trees vaguely indicated on the horizon. Italy, perhaps.

  I'd have put it out of its misery, burned it. Better no mother than that one.

  Nicholas exclaimed with dismay, "Mamasha!" He rose quickly from his chair and picking it up inspected the picture tenderly for tears, and damage to the frame. He tucked it under his arm— glared round as if challenging one of us to shout "Good riddance!" When no one spoke he left, showing me as he closed the door a face so wretched I believed he could be thinking of suicide.

  I told Lizochka this and went after him. But all he did was turn on me and bark, "Why are you following me? Do you want my mother as well as my sister?"

  As I was standing there nonplussed in the corridor, Kobi came out of the kitchen. He was soaked through. He left a pond at every footstep as he waddled towards me. Quickly I asked him for the news. Glebov had vanished off the face of the earth. Shubrin had left the district completely—had ridden into Smolensk. Kobi had nothing further to report.

  When I returned to the dining room, Bobinski had gone to his room. Misha was on his feet, stretching. "Tomorrow I'll go back to Zhukovo. It'll have forgotten what I look like. Vasili and his sons will come for my cannon and the chickens. Tomorrow or the next day."

  The wind was causing puffs of smoke to backfire from the hall stove, like wisps of grey hair from beneath an old lady's bonnet. Every timber in the house seemed to be vibrating as Lizochka and I walked up the stairs to our room.

  Our bedhead was an immense affair of carved wood clasping in its centre a blue padded lozenge dented and discoloured by a century of distinguished heads. In the wall behind it was a metal shaft connecting a weathervane on the roof to a disc and a brass needle in the vestibule, so that anyone could read the direction of the wind and thus assess the temperature of the day without having to set foot outside the house. It must have been for the benefit of visiting mariners.

  The vane was a dolphin with an arched neck. In a breeze it would oscillate with an indolent motion as though sporting among the seas of a warmer climate. But now . . . with every gust it twisted, rattled and screamed like a cat with its tail on fire. It was only a foot from our heads. A sinner being toasted in hell would have been quieter.

  Lizochka was sprawled across me, her head on my chest. Between the screams of the shaft, I said, "Dusha moya, I insist we make definite plans for leaving before that thing drives me insane. Which day, at what time on that day, with how many cases. I'll need to go to Moscow to see what vessels are intending to sail."

  "If the agents know."

  "This'll be a rough trip. Not like going to Baden-Baden. No hatboxes, couchettes, sliced salami for breakfast, tickets in a folder."

  "Shouldn't we wait until you get a reply from your Mister Joiner—Norman?"

  "I'll cable him then."

  "Charlie—must we do anything as drastic as this? Smolensk is my friend. I know the people, the churches, the tram conductors, the colours of the river—everything there is to it. I get frightened thinking of what lies between here and Chicago."

  "You won't have time to be frightened. We'll be on the move the whole time."

  "I'm just telling you what's cosy for me now that we're married. I'm like any wife, I want to nest. Anyway, there's no point in cabling Norman. The telegraphists do nothing but play cards and plot. Misha told me. Why don't—why don't we wait until there's a new government before deciding?"

  "If it's a decent one why would we want to leave? A rotten one and we ought to have left in advance. Stop procrastinating."

  "The novelty of America is the only good reason for going there. We could write to our friends and get them to join us. America as a toy, think of it—"

  "A toy! Sweet Mother of God—"

  "Charlie, I'm very comfortable here. It's my home. I'm beginning to agree with Misha. It'd be good for Daniel to be born in the land of his forefathers."

  She was exasperating in that sort of mood. The unexpected was the only thing of which she could never tire. If it didn't exist she would invent it, and by a perilous line of reasoning come to believe her invention. Perverse she was, and neurotic and tantalising. But never common. I loved her.

  Going back to her remark about the telegraph, I said, "Maybe there's a point and maybe not. But I'll try it, tomorrow. I'll ride into the city and hand my cable to the manager in person. Tell him I'll wait until it's been transmitted."

  "Fold it in two and insert a present," my love said drowsily, as if she was indifferent to the whole affair.

  It was getting too much for me. I said, maybe shouting, "Are we going or not? What's got into you?"

  "I'm just being realistic," she said. "We wouldn't be the only ones. There'd be a swarm. If you're the boss of a garments factory in Chicago, are you going to be in a hurry to hire a naturalist? Norman is important to us."

  "That's more like it," I said. "That's being positive."

  "What was wrong with it before? Everything I said was completely valid . . . That noise the shaft's making—what's the name of the composer everyone's so wild about? He conducted his own music in Smolensk last year. It sounds like him. What was he called? It doesn't matter. It'll wait until tomorrow."

  She braced her palm against my chest and pushed herself off, back into her own territory. "So long as we do something by the end of the week . . . Nicholas won't press us . . . We could stay here as long as we wanted . . . Now, Dan Doig, it's the sandman for you and me . . ."

  A rustling noise came from her throat, despite the wailing inside the wall space. When she put her mind to it, she could sleep through anything.

  I thought, somewhere there'll be a panel in the wall t
o get at this machine and oil it. I dressed roughly by the light of my candle and went up to the attics. Bobinski's room was directly above ours. Perhaps there was an entry point there.

  Narrow stairs, entering the attic corridor nearer one end than the other. Small bedrooms and box rooms on either side. Four rooms down, on my right, Kobi was sleeping—or would have been if I hadn't given him a night off to rod his widow. On my left was Glebov's room, wherever he might be. Next to it, candlelight showing beneath the door, was Bobinski.

  I went in. He was asleep, the side of his face resting on his folded and prayerful hands, the flickering flame chasing shadows around his papery skull. Innocence, not a maggot left in that withered frame.

  The knotty old varnished pine boards were unbroken across walls and ceiling. Above the bed was a print of the Repin picture of slaves hauling a barge up the Volga. I leaned over Bobinski's dreaming head and tilted it—just in case. There was no panel. If anything the shaft was louder here than in our room.

  He stirred. A tremor deepened the wrinkles in his forehead. He twitched the coarse grey blankets up to his chin. I puffed out his candle. That was the way that fires happened.

  The wind was racing down the corridor. Shielding the flame of my candle, I went along to Glebov's room.

  His blood would dry quickly.

  The bed was carefully made. His better uniform was on a hanger on a wooden peg. Two shirts were folded on a chair. The top one was cotton, good quality—too good to belong to a soldier or to a police agent. I looked round the spartan room. Was it you who blew up Potocki and my infirm uncle? Then Kobi should have found you and shot you like a rabid fox, his boot on your neck as he squeezed the trigger.

  But why would he want to come back? Was it to get Nicholas or Misha? Then why so complex a ruse as this, why not a bomb from a safe distance? It didn't tally. It would be bravura on an operatic scale to have wormed his way into the Pink House as his victim's guest.

  So maybe there was no connection with Andrej's murder and it really was coincidence that he'd fallen in with Shubrin and they'd pitched up with us.

  Then what was he up to in the forest, consorting with deserters?

  Nothing was wholly clear to me. Thinking of my wife: Kill him then. Kill him and clear out.

  On the coarse drugget by the bed stood his indoor slippers, neatly. (They were ours.) He was reading Notes From the House of the Dead, using as a bookmark the visiting card of M. Neumann, Furrier, with a Moscow address. A relative? Friend? Dupe? A small sum of money in kopecks stood in three tidy columns on the small table.

  "I despise money," he'd said to Misha one evening in the drawing room.

  "So do I," Misha answered. "Especially the brass coinage."

  "What did he say to that?" I asked Misha later.

  "Looked at me as a scientist might, as you might look at a beetle. Wondering where exactly the pin should go in my thorax. Not a drop of humour to the man."

  I remembered that exchange as I stood there. The room was without humour or odour.

  Idly I opened the table drawer, its only one. Two pairs of rolled-up socks, woollen underlinen both short and long, and a silver Maria Theresa dollar, obviously a good-luck charm. Beneath the clothes was a plain envelope, unsealed. I flicked it open with my thumb and drew out ten blue sheets, folded once, of small black handwriting.

  Fifty-seven

  Let's call it a letter, though it had none of the usual formalities. The thoughts commenced in mid-flight:

  The hairs that grow on your upper arms are a continuation of those on your back and those that crawl down your shoulders. They cease at your elbows. Temporarily, for they start once more as we get closer to your wonderful hands. The hairs go along your fingers as far as the nails. There may be men in Russia with hairy elbows. I don't know. You're the only man I've known. When you first covered me it was like being under a black horsehair mattress. But then I found your buttocks, which were only downy. I like that thick black hair against my skin. I wish I could be a virgin again and have you master me, ordering me about as I lay there like a white slug not knowing what to do or what you might like. Your hair excites me. I expect you can hear the change in my breathing as you move against my smooth skin. One reason is obvious. The other is that as I squirm I'm imagining that I'm being done by a caveman who's killed in order to get me. I'm worth blood! I'm the reward! I know this man'll stop at nothing in our lovemaking. It's that, together with your hair, that excites me and makes me act as I do. You are him, Prokhor Fyodorovich. You are my caveman and I tremble every time you swaddle me with your black animal pelt.

  I sat down on the pile of Glebov's folded shirts.

  Some of the sexual details that followed were frank for a woman. All were written in the same matter-of-fact style, in the same tight, secretive writing. I had the idea of an active volcano being explored by a pioneer who descends into the steam, peering and prodding with his alpenstock whereupon the volcano snaps tight its jaws. Poor prisoner Glebov! Yes, that was what I felt. So intense was this lady, whom I saw at a break in page four signed herself "S," that for a moment I pitied him.

  Should she shave her pudenda? Would he like her a stone fatter? (If so she hoped it would be laid down on her breasts and not hang off her arse.) Did he like her best unbathed? Would he like to enter her by the moon-hole? It had become very fashionable, she said, during the monk Rasputin's tenure at the court. He wasn't to feel that he was obliged to have her that way. She just wished to feed her man's every desire and share in his pleasure thereby.

  Some of her musings had a political tinge. (She imagined for a paragraph that she and Glebov were building a hut in their exile settlement in Siberia. A bee got caught in her hair: shrieking, she let go of the apron in which she'd been holding the nails, whereupon he'd had to teach her a lesson, right there, on the sweet-smelling but clogging sawdust.)

  Many were religious: palm fronds, pilgrimages, angels of love, poverty itself a reward. It was wild stuff, the ecstasy of the divine. One might have supposed it written under the influence of a drug.

  I sat on, warming Glebov's shirts, the wind rattling the doors and the ten blue pages stirring in my hand. Were they written by his wife, whom he'd told us had just been killed? Were they fake—a decoy, or ciphered for some key words in that apocalyptic tangle? He'd gone to no pains to hide them. I folded them carefully along their crease and replaced them.

  I thought of the book he was reading. I looked round his monkish cell.

  Glebov! I was closing in on him.

  "I'll shoot his balls off," I said and picked up the candle-holder.

  Then I heard the footsteps on the stairs—wavering, teetering. They halted. A lumpy dragging sound took their place. He couldn't make it. He was coming up on hands and knees. He was drunk.

  I blew out the candle and positioned myself behind the door. The Luger was in my room. I had nothing. But he was a small man, a dwarf, and drunk.

  It was eerie listening to him crawling up the steep, narrow staircase. He was like some creature from the swamp out for a kill: slithery, determined, breathing hard.

  At the top of the staircase he paused, trying to remember which way his room was. The thin boards of the corridor wall trembled; he was hauling himself up off the floor. Blind hands fended him off the walls as he approached. He got to Bobinski's room. His fingers scrabbled along the woodwork like mice. His footsteps—six inches back for twelve forward.

  He stopped. He was thinking, is this Bobby's room or mine?

  The night was bat-black dark, the wind roaring and whistling down the corridor like a locomotive in a tunnel. The weather-vane continued to shriek in Bobinski's room. I could see nothing. I flexed my fingers and wondered at what height his neck would enter the room. Was he so far gone he wouldn't be alarmed if I fumbled him? I thought of his fat neck. I brought it to the front of my mind, a pale hairy stub containing the repulsive life of Prokhor Glebov. I posed it for my chopping hand. No! Too hit or miss. I picked the places for m
y thumbs. Cheesewire would be better, and a hook to take the strain—

  "Help me. Charlie, please—"

  I crashed open the door. Her nightdress was dark blue but black was the stronger colour at midnight. The sob wrenched my heart from its lining. I stuck out my hand and felt for her. "Where? Say where, quickly—quickly."

  The noise came from my left, farther away than I'd expected. It was of snow sliding down a roof, hastening as it went. I threw myself forward to catch her. Too late, she was heaped on the brown linoleum floor, crying, and it was her foot I had hold of first, a slipper with a pompom. Her ankle was bare. I made my way up her body, which was shivering like a quicksand beneath her nightdress. I found her face, cold and running in tears. She clung to me, arms of steel round my neck, mouthing gibberish. Bed was where she had to be. I pushed her down. I burst into Bobby's room and took his candle and matches, knocking the chair over as I did.

  How could it have happened? Why had the disease chosen to visit her at this point, at the pinnacle of our happiness?

  I got her downstairs to our room. She clutched my hands as I tilted to her mouth the dark bottle of elixir that Pflob, the apothecary, had made up for her. She gulped at it greedily.

  It contained morphine. I don't know to what strength he had mixed it, I forgot to ask him. It quickly dulled her senses and let everything that had been at war within her fall back into place. She told me once that having a bad fit was like having church bells pounding in the cortex of her brain—jarring, jangling, clashing, so close to her soul as to push her to the edge of annihilation.

  But this had been a minor attack with none of the humiliations that were possible. In half an hour she was breathing smoothly again. She wanted to speak about it, to exorcise it. She was lying in the centre of our bed, bolstered behind the shoulders so that she could lean against the blue padded bedhead in comfort. Her face was haunted in the candlelight. Deep shadows were around her eyes and in the lee of her nose.