The Blue-Eyed Shan

by Becker, Stephen;

  Furthermore, Hsiao-chi—in time he had asked her name—was physically grimy.

  And a bridge was out, its sheet-metal tracks torn up for shacks or pots or crude plows; for two days the battalion bivouacked and bickered and reluctantly learned construction.

  And bandits were reported to the west.

  In five days the column had managed ninety miles; Olevskoy could have doubled that with horses. His headache was chronic; he announced himself unfit for active duty and retired to his vehicle.

  He was at any rate traveling first-class, as became a prince. He and his paramour were the only passengers in a light canvas-covered truck; they reclined on mattresses, were warm between quilts and messed from the same cauldrons and pans as the general staff, Yang, Wei and Ho.

  Even this relative luxury he found insufficient. True luxury, he decided, was a hot bath. In his truck were Scotch whisky and American cigarettes, the practiced endearments of a mistress, and the privacy due his rank and lineage; all he desired was a hot bath. Perhaps this Pawlu was a famous hot spring. He would bathe twice a day. Perhaps Pawlu was the capital of a utopian Asiatic hot-bath culture, its secret jealously guarded these many centuries, its borders patrolled and approaches barred by a corps of barbered and perfumed tribesmen in immaculate silk robes, the sensual refinements of its spas administered by bevies of adolescent girls in gauze trousers.

  They would be infinitely preferable to his present rancid companion, who was, he conceded, considerably better than no body at all. He simply refrained from mouthing her, while allowing her to relieve him a variety of childish ways. He spent his days and nights lolling, drinking, smoking and remembering. He gave himself over to an orgy of recollection. The present was impossible. The future was opaque. In the distant past lay all that he loved.

  His first memory was of his father weeping. Even now his heart and mind could almost relive the shock of that enormity, and of the sudden jabber that broke through the tears: his father, Prince Andrei Alexeevich Olevskoy, tall as a tree, broad as a barn, straight fair hair like a tumbled sheaf of wheat, weeping silently, tears gushing from Arctic eyes down ruddy cheeks like twin glaciers thawing over sandstone, and then, “Port Arthur! Mukden! Tsushima!” The god had crushed the boy in a wracking, clumsy embrace. Olevskoy was confused about the spate of words that followed but could recall, “Ce sont des animaux, mon fils, des animaux, ces Japonais!” And then a babble of warnings, admonitions, instructions, the gist of which was that these Japanese must—if not now, then in the boy’s lifetime—be exterminated, or at least reduced to serfdom and slavery before they destroyed the Christian world.

  The boy was appalled. He was four years old and his world was Sobolyevo, the Olevskoy estate, and beyond Sobolyevo were places like Berezhov and St. Petersburg and ultimately a vast and glorious land called Russia; and that vast and glorious land had been invaded, overcome, perhaps overrun, by treacherous, dwarfish creatures from some other world. “Remember! Remember!” the god had cried, and the boy had stammered, “Oui, Papa! Oui!” All his life “Tsushima!” had rung in his memory like a curse.

  Well, Olevskoy had not done badly. He had exterminated a few Japanese in his time. He had also killed Russians, at least one Czech in a brawl over a Siberian woman, innumerable Chinese for unremembered reasons, and a variety of less defined people in a variety of places and uniforms—Muslim Communists from the northwest, Mongolians, assorted tribesmen, uncomprehending women and children trapped and annihilated like insects by the fumigatory techniques of modern war.

  It was not precisely what his father had expected, but neither had his father expected to lose Sobolyevo, and his peasants, and finally his life. Olevskoy remembered Sobolyevo with a fierce ache that thirty-three years had not assuaged. There was a bridge crossing the brook that fed the pond: “No carp,” his father said, “they’re trash fish and eat the trout. Good only for French kings, formal gardens and enclosed fountains.” Olevskoy fils, the little prince, dashed across the bridge with old nurse Marya screeching after him and her son Prohor, a year older than Olevskoy, stocky and powerful, pig-eyed already, light brown hair cropped to a centimeter, panting, “Go easy, boy. If you tumble and bleed she catches hell,” and a bit later it was not “boy” but “Nikolai Andreevich.” It was Prohor he would always remember staggering into the great hall under towering armfuls of quartered logs, Prohor with whom, each spring, he had spurred a pony on that glorious day, the real hinge of the year, when it was permitted to ride after dinner; when the sun lingered; when mangy brown earth swelled through the falling snow; when roads became bogs; when flocks of kids and lambs, already weeks old, appeared as if by magic on greening hillsides.

  Little Olevskoy also loved the barns on summer evenings. Once at dusk, when half the cattle in the west meadow were down for the night and the other half hesitantly ending their graze on the cool swatches of lush summer grass, Prohor had called him out to the horse barn. The two of them raced, nine years old, ten, and in the dreamy yellow lantern light of the high barn that smelled of sweet hay and rich manure his father and old Uncle Pyotr, Prohor’s father—“uncle” the affectionate title—were standing vigil over a straining mare, down and sweaty. “It’s the off forefoot,” Uncle Pyotr said. Enormous shadows swayed on the walls, the stalls, the high beams.

  Olevskoy pere asked, “Will you go in?”

  “I must,” said Uncle Pyotr. “Should the boy see?”

  “He is old enough.” And to the boy Andrei Alexeevich said, “The foal is badly presented. Come closer.

  Olevskoy saw the mare’s vulva, distended, a tiny muzzle and a tiny hoof peeping out. He saw blood and was momentarily queasy; slime. “At birth,” his father was saying, “the forehoofs should be together, directly beneath the lower jaw. You’ve seen the lambs come. But one foreleg has gone awry. Do you understand?”

  Olevskoy understood. He nodded over and over, unaware that he was nodding, eyes wide, one hand tight on Prohor’s arm. His father gestured; Uncle Pyotr dipped both hands into a bucket, washed them and his forearms, and knelt. He inserted his right hand, groped, and entered further, to the elbow. The mare stirred, tried to heave, whickered once. Uncle Pyotr probed. Olevskoy was breathless. The foal’s muzzle oozed, sticky, glistening. It will die, the boy told himself. It cannot breathe. It is already dead. Oh Lord God let it live.

  Uncle Pyotr grunted and tugged. Bracing his left hand on the mare’s rump, he tugged; “Ah,” he said. Slowly his arm emerged, slick, dribbling. “Ah.” A last quick tug, and beside the first hoof the boy saw a second, and suddenly the foal’s head surged out, and two forelegs, and in another moment—Olevskoy could never be sure that he had not heard a sucking pop!—a tiny wet horse slithered to the straw. The mare’s flanks heaved.

  Olevskoy père knelt quickly. “A colt. Another son for Rurik.”

  Uncle Pyotr sloshed water between the mare’s hind legs. “Now, if she doesn’t take infection.”

  “Yes,” murmured Olevskoy père. “Always that.”

  Uncle Pyotr glanced quickly at the prince and away. A few years later, when the boy understood that his mother had died of puerperal fever, he recalled that glance.

  The men and boys stepped back. The mare struggled, half rose, collapsed beside the colt; wearily, patiently, she licked at her foal.

  “We’ll see how she cleans out,” Olevskoy père said.

  “The quicker the better,” Uncle Pyotr said. “I’ll plaster her then with comfrey.”

  Prohor too was entranced. Young Olevskoy was fascinated by this colt; he marveled at the blaze, like Rurik’s. The colt wrinkled his muzzle; his ears quivered. Olevskoy fell in love. “Papa,” he whispered.

  “Yes, boy?”

  “Will he be mine?”

  The prince laid a tender hand on the boy’s head. “Do you want him?”

  “I love him,” Olevskoy whispered.

  “Then he shall be yours.”

  And he was; and that was a better night than winter nights with his tutor, Monsie
ur Grandin, who had a tic; when he corrected the boy a corner of his mouth quirked, as if in apology or fear. “A moins qu’il nnn’y ait une guerre! N’oubliez jamais ce ne! Avant qu’il ne pleuve!”

  So Olevskoy never forgot that ne, and only ten years old read stories in both French and Russian, learning each language from the other, stories of war and of peace, one of them about Cossack country and raids and skirmishes, by a count and not merely a scribbler, and he remembered that count’s death too. Olevskoy père, reading a letter in the shiny old leather-covered wooden chair, a throne beside the fire, reared back snorting and said, “So! Lev Nikolayevich is dead in Astapovo! Count Tolstoy! Some count! Mikhail Kirilovich says here the old man used to sit in the gardens at Yasnaya Polyana with flies wandering his face, and tell people, ‘They are God’s creatures as well as I and have the same right to a free and unfettered existence as I.’ Mischa goes on. ‘Free, yes, but not on my face. What would it have cost him to give a small, kindly wave and simply make them fly somewhere else? It would have cost him being Tolstoy.’ Well, God rest him. He was a fine buck in his youth, but I tell you, these last years he was not only a fool but a pain in the backside.” (Five years later Olevskoy, fourteen and infatuated with Prince Bolkonsky, with Count Vronsky, with Anna and above all with Natasha, blushed to recall his father’s words. And four years after that, wading an icy river with Semenov after a disastrous skirmish against a mob of Reds near Irkutsk, he had in midstream recalled that judgment, and thanked his father for it, and wished Tolstoy and all such sanctimonious populists in hell.)

  The boy Olevskoy loved to watch the mowing too, and to sit with the peasants sharing their breakfast, their oatcakes and cold tea. And to sit with his father at dinner. Monsieur Grandin had no place at their table, and ate in solitary state, served in his own room by Prohor. At dinner Olevskoy’s father saw to the boy’s real education: czars and sabers and true geography, the borders of the Romanov empire, and what Kalmucks were, and Cossacks, and where Kamchatka was, and why an Olevskoy never beat an animal or a servant or—and the vehemence of this command persisted long after he had broken it—struck a woman.

  Women came soon enough, but first love was first love, and for Olevskoy it was the colt Kalita. For three or four years, while women remained only an odd species of soprano subordinate, Olevskoy’s nuzzles, kisses and gifts went to the colt. Before boy or colt was grown they were become one. Olevskoy père was reluctant. “This is a stallion of blood and not a gelding, nor a slug.”

  “He loves me,” the boy said, and the man knew he was right and shortly gave in. The boy overheard his father say to Monsieur Grandin, “The colt is Bucephalus, and the boy Alexander,” and by then the boy knew what that meant, and was proud. He and Prohor made the rounds of their villages in all seasons, through snow and mud and over dry, dusty summer roads, Olevskoy breathing not air but the mingled essence of forest and field and horse and youth, of sun and wind and hay.

  For a year or two of these rounds he was a shy boy, haughty at first to mask his timidity before these square, stolid peasants and their plump daughters. Some of the peasants lived in wooden shacks, others in mud huts that almost dissolved away in spring. Afternoons, in the great house, he was formally presented to counts, lawyers, rich merchants, the provincial governor, district councillors. Evenings he rode out, and the round young women swarmed about him, and he grew warm in the saddle; he was thirteen. Eventually, after a frustrating English lesson with Monsieur Grandin, whose English was that of Calais and not London, he rode out with Prohor, wordlessly bound for the village they had come, with reason, to frequent, and at dusk, in the matted hay, the girl Katya, blond and green-eyed, panted in his face after he had flung up her skirts and found his way, hot, direct and bursting, to the core of her. He persuaded her then, with soft words and a coin, to disrobe, and in the last light she stood before him, breasts immense, thighs glowing, eyes modest, her hands twitching with the need to cover her golden triangle, to shield her bosom.

  He took her again. He lay propped on his elbows ecstatic at this miracle, this moist heat, he was within her! This was the mystery! His blood roared. She squeezed, shifted, pulsed, and he took his rhythm from her. The sheer rapture of it took entire possession of him. He thought he might swoon, faint away. The world ceased to exist, only this warm flesh, the silky grip of hers on his, the sweet odor of her and hay and heaven, the gathering, scalding rush and the final suicidal conquest of the woman, the field, all Russia. All that he was, he gave freely in that moment.

  Prohor snickered and teased as they trotted home. “By God,” Nikolai Andreevich said like a man, “there is nothing like it!” From that day their rides were more than proprietary visits. There were Katya and Varya and Masha and more, and one night at table his father said gently. “Go easy, boy. Monsieur Grandin tells me you scarcely heed him. Women are well enough in their way, but there is more to manhood than that.”

  Olevskoy tried to answer but only blushed.

  His father laughed fondly and proudly. “You’re a handsome young devil. You had better let me tell you a bit about all this.” And he did so, as Olevskoy recovered from his confusion and returned to his beef, listening carefully, enthralled, nodding assent or comprehension, blushing slightly again at certain clauses of technical advice, and catching his father’s serious tone and manner when the elder prince, this noble and titanic father, this personification of all northern kings, said, “Tumble all the village girls you like, my boy, but if you betray a lady, I’ll flay you alive. I’ll lash the skin off your back. Do you understand me? You are an Olevskoy.”

  “A prince,” the boy said proudly.

  “Anybody can be a prince,” his father rebuked him. “Half Russia is princes and the other half counts. But you are an Olevskoy. And if you cannot pay proper tribute to God and Russia and your ancestors, then you are nothing. It is our fathers’ fathers who made this land, and dedicated it to God, and all this”—with a wave encompassing table, great house, Sobolyevo—“we must deserve. Do you understand? We must earn it each day. And there is no such thing as a small betrayal. If you allow yourself once to be less than an Olevskoy, you will never again be an Olevskoy. Others may believe that you are, but you will know that you are not. And if you are not an Olevskoy, then you are nothing.”

  “I understand, Father,” he said, but even that night he suffered doubt. His father worshipped only three things: God, family and Russia. And it seemed to Olevskoy that he too worshipped only three things, but that they were Russia, horses and fornication.

  Russia, horses and fornication. And now there was no more Russia and no more cavalry and he lay in a decrepit American truck with a soiled Chinese adolescent. The Russia he loved had vanished forever, and its princes drove taxis in Paris and boasted, “Jé parrle sans accieng parce que jé vieng dé Pétersbourgg.” The horses he loved were now light, medium and heavy tanks, weapons carriers, armored cars and jeeps. The fornication he loved at least bore some resemblance to the original.

  He crawled to the flap and peered out at gray-green China. Not even silvery-jade; only gray-green. A light rain. The road muddy but passable. Late afternoon. L’heure de l’apéritif. So many late afternoons. So many gray-green late afternoons.

  He let fall the flap and crawled to his kits and crates. Life without ritual was chaos: he poured what he hoped was fifty cubic centimeters of Scotch whisky into his canteen cup, and added one hundred of water. “You. Hsiao-chi. Want a whisky?”

  “Yes. Whisky.” Her voice was frail but, thank God, pleasant. She seemed to be enjoying her excursion. Travel broadens one so. Cela change les idées. He mixed her a highball in a tin mug. “Long life and prosperity,” he said.

  She echoed him. It was perhaps optimistic. He sipped and grew benevolent. He was fond of alcohol, and his smile was unconscious, involuntary, ancient habit. He sat beside the reclining girl, his back to the driver’s cab, and patted her without malice. Russia, horses and fornication, and the greatest of these is fornica
tion. There would surely be women in Pawlu. If Pawlu was only three bamboo huts by a mud flat, there would be women, and one would be the most desirable; if there were only two, one would be preferable to the other. Perhaps his little Hsiao-chi would be an exotic beauty in Pawlu.

  “Where we will both be princes,” Yang had said back in Kunming, in that hotel suite with hot water. For one insane moment, his mind outracing reality and creating possibilities, worlds, destinies, Olevskoy had made a fantasy of desertion, a dash south, one jeep, perhaps a squad, to the Tonkin border; but Lin Piao had Nanning and was halfway to Mengtzu and would surely head him off, and already he was curious about Pawlu, and how General Yang would achieve this promotion to prince, and his hand and cup had barely paused while these landscapes and flights unreeled, so he drank up and let suspicion and discontent darken his face. “Pawlu?”

  “Trust me. Remember, I am Yang Yu-lin and I have given you Kunming and a hotel suite de grand luxe, and you even have a woman and a case of Johnnie Walker Red.”

  “You could be Yang Yu-lin in Tonkin too,” Olevskoy said, and knew instantly how wrong he was.

  “I’m afraid not,” Yang had said. “You forget: I was scarcely permitted to be Yang Yu-lin in Paris, where at least I was a young and exotic specimen. Allow me to doubt that colonial officials in Hanoi will take this faded Oriental to their hearts. I can read your own desires: the French culture you know and love, the colonel of cavalry, the polyglot adventurer, soldier of fortune, prince—tu saurais un succès fou. But I would only be another damned Chink. You know what the French used to call masturbating?”

  Olevskoy knew but shook his head.

  “‘Polishing the Chinaman.’ No, Nicky. Trust me. Pour us more whisky. And for this delightful creature as well. Ma chère Marquise! Tout va bien au château?”

  Yang Yu-lin was born in Peking, the son of a treasury official and principal wife, and his earliest memory was of the crowded execution ground, and many stern men wearing queues, and pale severed heads goggling at him from the mud. A few years later he saw Boxers’ bodies on the ramparts. One red-clad corpse clutched a crossbow; much of the head and right shoulder had been blown off by Western artillery, but the futile left hand clutched a crossbow. Yang Yu-lin also saw the Bengal Lancers enter Peking, after the Boxers had been put down with great carnage, and he resolved then that one day he would be a soldier and expel the foreigner from China. Being only eight years old, he also resolved to ask his father for a pony and a ma-fu, or groom, so that one day he might ride well enough to be a Bengal Lancer.