Cold Blood (3 page)

Time would strip my memory down to the essentials. Mother—she'd be among the first to go: she'd been a stranger to me even before I broke free.

Papa—a glorious, seething, inventive Muscovite Scotsman, with curly black hair and flashing eyes and a skin so magnetic that my normally placid mother had been unable to resist touching it. He died of bubonic plague in Tashkent, at the age of thirty-nine. Boils, pus, vomit, crying out for help from his family while in the latticed room below, the turbans clacked away at backgammon and shut their ears to his lonely terror.

I was fourteen when this happened. I was caught flat-footed.
It had never occurred to me that people whom one loved could die. At first I was tearful. Then I grew angry. Then it was revealed how completely hopeless Papa had been with money, and I vowed that no one would ever take advantage of me. I would be the opposite of my father: I would devour the world.

His debts were huge. I estimated that had he been caught in the revolving doors of Moscow's Hotel Metropol, where he often took me for lunch, and had all his IOUs, liens, mortgages, pledges, arrangements and fantastic paper schemes for our enrichment been stuffed in around him, only his curls and his laughing brown eyes would have been visible. He was a sober man, the most sober of the many Scotsmen in Moscow. His downfall lay in having a brain like a mushroom cellar and a belief that the world was nice.

So let him abide in my memory forever, central and sturdy on account of his unfulfilled dreams and of the love that we had for each other.

And above him let Elizaveta shine on the highest pinnacle visible to man. Every woman after her would be a lesser experience. Beside her in my imagination—podgy hand tugging at her long blue skirt—must be my impression of how Dan Doig would have turned out at the age of three. Belly, bluster, baby biceps...

At this point I take my leave. Some scenes are too painful, especially those that spring solely from the imagination.

In the hateful month of March, 1917, when all this happened, I was twenty-eight years old. By then I'd had a beetle named after me, catalogued the passerines of Central Asia, survived typhus, had my only family members slain by the Bolsheviks— and been compelled to shoot my wife. If that isn't learning the hard way, I don't know what is.

A
LL THIS
experience, this weight of life, drained me. My Darwinian preoccupations seemed silly. Love, money, position, reward—they were nothing. In that one murderous hour at the Pink House, Glebov had chopped off all the ligaments by which I was bound to society. I was left with one purpose in my life: to kill him. It didn't worry me that he could be anywhere in this huge country of ours. When the Revolution came, there'd be only one place for a top Bolshevik like him— the capital. So I went to St. Petersburg and waited for the storm to break.

Kobi enjoyed mocking me by saying things such as, “There are 155 million people in Russia and you want to find one of them?” But I knew Glebov was alive and I knew he'd show up. He was one of those people you want to see turning green before pronouncing them dead.

We went to the old Rykov Palace off the north end of Nevsky. Joseph, Uncle Igor's house steward, was still hanging on in the hope of better times. A number of pauperous families calling themselves Socialist Revolutionaries had taken the mansion over and stuffed him into a tiny back room. He was forty-three years old, a single man of slight build, with long black ringlets, a thin black face, soft eyes and a certain gracefulness of speech and character.

His narrow face went lopsided with pleasure when he saw me. Waving the SRs away, not even glancing at Kobi, he came right up to me. “Ah, Doig!” he exclaimed, wrapping my name in a great gush of liquory breath. “Back again! Out of the blue! Like an aviator!”

I need to explain something. When my father was wooing Irina Rykov, it was not grasped by the servants that he was just a classy Scottish adventurer. They believed “Doig” to be his title. The word sounded so outlandish that they couldn't believe it to be his name. So they'd always called him Doig, thinking it to be the Scottish version of “Your Excellency” or “Your Worship.” I'd inherited it.

He put his arm through mine and held me tightly. “The family—I never believed I'd see any of you again. The disgrace-fulness of these times”—he thought better of his arm—made as if to withdraw it—ended up by leaving it there. He waved at the leering scum. “Go away, proletariat. Go and learn how to use a toilet.”

To me: “They distrust it and shit on the floor. So long as the weather's cold, one can tolerate such behaviour. But when May comes, there'll be a stink all over the house. Lilac blossom and thawing shit, there's a Russian spring for you... Off you go!
Provalivai—
scram!”

We walked arm in arm into the next huge room. There was no purpose to it. Joseph just wanted to walk somewhere with his arm through mine, to have the contact.

Something lurking in his eyes, he said, “The SR muck say there are soon to be no servants and no masters. We are all to be the same, even you and I, Doig.”

“One of us needs to be the leader. You?”

He sighed. “It would be best if the Germans finished off our armies and put the Kaiser on the throne. They wouldn't stand for any of this nonsense. Doig, if we were to be equal...”

“Joseph?”

“My first wish would be to become your servant again. You will take me with you when you leave?”

“Of course I will,” I said, and he began to weep, out of gratitude that the family had returned and come to his rescue. He steered the talk round to Elizaveta, wanting to know why she wasn't with me. Pretty soon there was no alternative but to go to his room and drown our sorrows. We polished off the Plymouth gin that he'd salvaged and moved on to vodka. We could have had the remains of Uncle Igor's claret but I said it was important to transfer between drinks of the same colour.

Joseph lit a tiny mouse of a fire. After a bit he grew reckless and put on all the coal he had. It became warm. He slipped his braces and took off his shirt. The armpits of his woollen vest were a strong yellow—gamboge. He said, “But you have to tell me this at least: did she suffer?”

“Worse than Christ.”

“You cannot leave me to imagine it. We must share, as we share in the agony of Our Lord.”

“She was seized by a bunch of deserters and raped in chorus on the floor of the stable. A Bolshevik called Glebov was behind it. He wanted to ingratiate himself with Lenin by carrying out an act of class warfare. Also there was this, that his own woman had been hanged as a Bolshevik saboteur. After they'd raped her, they razored a strip of flesh off each leg, from thigh to ankle. That was to mock the officer class, because the trousers of the Garde à Cheval are white with a blood-red stripe. She was in agony when I found her. The hospital—miles away—no drugs—it was a nightmare. She begged me to—and I did. I shot her. Now you know.”

Joseph collapsed into the ghastly chrome chair my uncle had bought from an American catalogue. His mouth buckled. He bawled—howled, the tears cascading through the hollows of his gaunt cheeks.

To begin with we weren't really tight, just high on misfortune. Then things got too much for us. We wept, we drank, we slept and night became day again. Still we continued drinking.

For some period of the second day, I got loose. Kobi came in pursuit. He captured me dancing down the centre of Nevsky. I was insane with grief and liquor. Elizaveta was in my arms. I had her ass tight in my hand. I was kissing her, pinching her, engulfing her in my arms. Her black eyes were bright with love for me—for having spared her the agony of a slow death.

Then Kobi leaned out of a horse-drawn cab and, catching me on the lurch, scooped me inside.

When I sobered up, the desire to capture Glebov and bake him alive occupied my entire being. I thought of nothing else, day and night.

However, Kobi was out of harmony with me. He didn't drink—thought poorly of my bender. He hankered for the
open road, a fast horse and a true rifle. What grabbed him was the idea of being a mercenary. It was rumoured that General K. I. Muraviev was recruiting in the capital for the civil war that he could see coming.

One day Kobi said to me, “Muraviev'd give me five thousand to see me ride into his camp. You give me five thousand and I'll stay with you. Five thousand or that's it.”

I looked him over. Waiting was so alien to him.

I said, “He's not going to want you without a horse.”

“You can get that for me as well.” He was hot about it. The drying spittle was a white rind on his lips.

I said, “Listen, Genghis, why would I want to do either of these things for you? You remember what the Lux cinema was offered to me for? Brand new? Red plush seats, electric organ from Germany, the screen, American cash register, carpeting, spittoons, a list of fittings as long as your arm plus the usherettes and their uniforms. How much?”

“Don't make fun of me.”

“Four thousand cash. And you want me to give you five thousand plus a horse? Have a pull at your ears. It'll stretch your brains and make them go farther.”

“You can do more with a horse than a cinema,” he said.

“You mean eat it? But then it's gone. You're worse off than ever.”

“The girlies are probably terrorists,” he said, beginning to sulk. “You can't escape in a cinema, you can't ride it away, you can't . . .” His bravado sputtered out.

And then events shut him up with absolute finality. For on the morning of Easter Monday, Joseph, who'd gone out early to queue for bread, came running down the corridor to the room he and I were sharing. Came flying, small quick bounds, like a man about to jump a barrier. I slipped out of my old Rykov campaign cot and threw open the door.

“What is it?”

“Posters, all over the city they say. One's even been pasted over the day's services at the cathedral.” He gulped, getting his breath back.

“For Kerensky, for the generals, for the Tsar—which?”

“Worse, the worst possible.”

“The Bolsheviks?”

“Doig, they've let him back in. LENIN ARRIVES TODAY. MEET HIM! That's what the posters say.”

Kobi had taken over the space beneath the stairs for sleeping quarters. Hearing our voices, he crawled out to join us. I said, “You'll get your war now, that's for sure.”

With the trace of a sneer he said, “Will the Bolsheviks put up posters for Glebov as well when he hits town?”

I said, “Lenin means power. Power's the pogey bait for all these fanatics. Glebov'll turn up.”

Joseph put in: “To think that Lenin dares arrive on Easter Monday! Has he no sense of shame? Does he suppose that God doesn't know what he's planning? Who does he think he is?”

“Your new Messiah,” Kobi said drily.