Cold Blood (18 page)

Valenty said, “Could be an ambush?”

Kobi got ready to shoot.

Valenty: “Run her down, Excellency? This isn't a refugee train.”

But I'd spotted a mansion house set back among trees and I remembered Uncle Igor saying that he never spent the night at anyone's house unless they had a hundred tons of coal in the backyard. I said to myself, Igor, old duck, come to my aid this day and give these people a hundred tons. No, double it. We'll shift it somehow.

To Valenty I said, “No, but give her a fright.”

I'd no idea precisely where she was standing since I couldn't see round the front of the engine. We could easily have gone a foot too far with a bad result for the lady. But Valenty had taken his side bearings perfectly and when I climbed down I found her anchored to the sleeper, eyes tight shut, the palm of one outstretched arm warding us off, wraiths of steam rising round her as if she were being burned at the stake.

I lifted the brim of the green hat. She had a pinched, narrow face beneath greying hair. She was murmuring a prayer of some sort. Her lips—I couldn't tell if she had a deformity somewhere round her mouth or not. They made a strange shape as she muttered away.

“You can look now,” I said.

Her eyes opened like a blast of phosphorus—small, greeny-blue chips, nothing soft about them. The dog, a poodle, inspected me.

She said, “You've got to help us.”

I said, “Why?”

“We have money.”

“Coal's what I want,” and saying this I took her by the elbow and helped her across the rails to her husband. He bent down and pulled her up by the hand. Russian platforms are low to the ground, but it wasn't dignified.

She straightened, reasserted herself. “Oskar, it's you who must explain matters to the young man.”

He had medals on his chest—good ones, St. Andrew and St. Alexander Nevsky. They swung and clanked as he bowed to me. “Count Oskar Benckendorff at your service, sir, Gustavus Order 1st Class in the Swedish nobility, family resident at this place for two hundred years. My wife—the Countess Delicia, née de Conde. She has always been the braver of us. She was for staying, telling me she'd poke their eyes out. But my instinct for the correct balances in society have prevailed. We are leaving our home. Two hundred years we have worked these lands, two hundred honest years. The present can be so spiteful to older people. But there it is. We must say thank you to the past for what has been good and not become morbid about the bad— not stay growling in our beds. We have decided to travel to Vladivostok. There we shall winter and see how the wind blows. It may be a seven-day wonder, you can never tell in Russia.”

“And I'm to help you?”

“Any assistance, however small... I heard what you said to my wife. Please take our coal. Obviously we cannot carry it.”

I felt sorry for the old boy. He'd seen trouble coming three years before, when Russia had marched on Germany and got pasted at Tannenberg. He'd made it his policy never to have less than three hundred tons of best-quality coal on hand. With that he'd thought he could sit out anything in comfort—could die in peace and quiet and warmth. But it had been the wrong danger he'd foreseen.

It took us the remainder of the day to move that coal. By the end we were filthy. The last ton we used to fire up the mansion boiler and wash ourselves.

What on earth had Oskar and Delicia done in that vast elephant-footed cast-iron tub? Did they have swimming contests? We stripped and piled in two at a time; lathering, laughing,
singing while waves of black water slopped over the Countess's lemon-and-grey-tiled floor and disappeared via a trap and gulley into a gurgling cavern that was very soon rimmed with a scum of coal dust. We were like boys. Three hundred tons! The glee that Joseph's first fart provoked as it echoed eerily off the iron hull was infectious.

While we were at the coal, the Benckendorffs had supervised the loading of their luggage onto the train, then clambered in and sat down with their books. As I'd shovelled, I'd been able to see them reading. They clearly had no idea about survival. Having ploughed through their Dumas they probably reckoned they'd picked up all the tips that were necessary for handling risk and danger. Russia had lots of educated people in that position.

I watched them in the train as I towelled myself dry, thinking how well the Countess had done to trap Oskar, who was clearly a decent gent. When I said that her lips were deformed, I meant that she had a square mouth. One could see how this had come about when one saw the exceptional length of her incisors, which were like planks. The mouth had to be like that, pushing her lips out in a bunch, or she'd never have got to speak. The first time Oskar kissed her must have been out of curiosity. Of course she'd swallowed him whole thereafter.

Joseph's voice called to me up the staircase (which was a very fine double one, bare wood, the risers being made of a much darker wood than the banisters). He'd set out on a tour of the house to evaluate the status of the Benckendorffs vis-à-vis his old employers, the Rykovs. When I found him he was in the conservatory.

In stoking the boiler for the bath, we'd also put heat into the pipes of this long high room of glass and iron. The dank, decadent aroma of warm air mingled with rotting humus was straight from the tropics. There was a memory in all this for me.

Resting my hand on the back of a warped bamboo chair and having in my ear the plink-plink of the tap that fed a little rill of strange cuspidate rock plants, I murmured to Joseph, “The whore on the boat, the boat on the lake . . . that night in Burma—all night I was at her, a great backlog of lust to be worked off. You can have no idea of my frenzy . . . That was
just before I discovered my beetle and became famous. And now this smell—the smell of Burma—the musk of that woman! Oh, Joseph, those were better times! This world we've reached disgusts me.”

“Yes, Excellency.”

“At that time I alone held the key to my future.”

But my jungle experiences were too difficult for a native of St. Petersburg. Either that or they were so far removed from the present as to be completely without meaning to him. “Indeed, but Excellency, look up there! To join the Emperor!”

He was pointing up at a pedestal of which I could see only the base on account of a cascade of bright green ferns, ledge upon ledge of them. Moving to a different angle, I saw it was a bust of Louis XVI (it said so on the plinth). Looking farther down that gallery of weird spiked plants and bulbous stems and lianas writhing like tortured snakes up into the metal cross ties of the roof, I discovered the Count owned an entire avenue of French monarchs.

Joseph said, “We could get four more heads on the front of the loco.”

I said, “Do what you want,” and sitting down at a small round bamboo table, I put my fists to my head.

The Benckendorffs had lived easefully on their estate for two hundred years amid the public duties of the provinces and the customary sins of the wealthy. Now they were leaving—were sitting in a Pullman carriage with a white poodle named Kiki and were boiling to be gone.

Already they'd forgotten their comfortable bed, the names of their gardeners and how the conservatory smelt. They'd probably forgotten what they had for breakfast. What was important to them was the future. The calculation having been made, they'd discarded this entire section of the past—had done it mutually, looking into each other's eyes, like a suicide pact.

Should I be dealing with Elizaveta in the same way? Should I say, “That's it, my darling,” dust off my palms and abandon her? Was her memory becoming a drag? A nuisance—even a danger to us as we searched Russia for Glebov?

The thought was so loathsome that I cried out and knuckled my temples.

I went out into the clean summer's day. Standing on the terrace I drew in chestfuls of our Russian air. If I forsook Elizaveta, I forsook Russia. It was not what I wanted, I knew that now. My cousin Nicholas and my godfather Misha Baklushin had both been right. I'd tried to persuade them to leave before it was too late. They'd wracked themselves, wept torrents—and refused. Because the world could never contain a second Russia, and they knew it. I'd cursed Elizaveta for baulking at exile, oh how I'd shouted at her on that last night. Yet she too had been right. And all my countrymen and women who'd tarry too long would be right also. Exile was for shirkers. I would follow my heart, would avenge my bride with Glebov's blood or be killed doing so.

It was my answer.

Boldly down the carriage drive I now went, the train in front of me. Oskar's reddish, tobacco-soaked moustaches and the rat-like incisors of Delicia were pressed against the window, urging me to hurry. Kiki jumped off the Countess's lap onto the table and began to yap at me. Her breath made an oval of smoke on the pane. The cockatoo tuft on her head quivered from her efforts. Oskar's blond-haired hand angrily scooped the creature onto the floor and he tried a smile on me.

Going straight into the Pullman, I said to her, “Lady, that dog is your death sentence. Without it a Bolshevik might let you go. With it you're sunk. My advice is to throw it out or give it to Valenty for the firebox. You wouldn't hear even a squeak.”

I left her scowling. The way her mouth was shaped she couldn't clamp her lips. She tied them up into a sort of knot and shook them at me.

Joseph had taken me at my word and with Boltikov had pressed Oskar's men into their service. One was pushing the heads of four French kings in a barrow and behind him another two were making heavy weather of a consignment of pictures in large gilt frames. I waited until they were aboard, until the pistons were hissing and the wheels tugging. Then I went and lay down. Xenia was gone, cooking us a meal. I slumped across the bed feeling unhappy again. Maybe finding Glebov was an impossible task, like everyone said.

I was in some halfway house between sleep and waking when
I heard footsteps, not Xenia's, coming down the corridor. The Countess's knuckles rattled on the door like Spandau fire. Her voice had the metallic screech of a shipyard in full employment.

“I wish to protest. It is my right. Even in these illegal times, every person has the right to protest... I know you're in there.”

A pause—and the handle began to whip back and forth. She was using both hands on it.

“Under our noses did they do it! Even as we watched they stole our property. It is an outrage. I shall inform the Governor of the province. I shall demand full compensation in the courts. Or you can take us to Vladivostok for nothing. I don't mind. Do you hear me, you inside?”

My unhappiness redoubled. If she couldn't forget the busts and pictures, which she'd abandoned in any case, how was I ever to forget Elizaveta? Everything seemed hopeless, and not just hopeless but intrinsically bad, like a piece of meat that is rotten through to the centre of the bone.

I leapt off the bed. “Woman”—I was at the door attacking it. The bronze turnlock came away in my fingers as I hurled it open. “Woman,” I roared, gripping the throat latch of her coat and twitching her up till she was on tiptoes and her jaw horizontal. I bent my face towards hers. Her eyes had become tiny, folded around with loose skin. From somewhere in there she fluttered the lids at me. I said, “Don't play games with me, French baggage, you'd left those things forever, chucked them away. What are you talking about?”

She closed her eyes, showing me her lilac eyeshadow. Her lips began to slither around. She hung there in my grip. I thought, I'm becoming a true beast, that's what this life without hope is doing to me.

She whispered, “I
adore
masterful men,” and as the train rocked, she pressed her loins against mine and showed me the tip of her tongue, which had a grain like the back of a Burmese river slug, whose pink and fleshy young I have often eaten. I said, “Keep it for the Reds,” pushed her away and went to feel sorry for myself with Xenia.