Cold Blood (26 page)

“Stupichkin, the prison governor,” said Jones. “Probably has to sign a report to say he's seen them go into the pit.”

Stupichkin's guard waved us forward and we stepped into line behind the carts.

Stiffy was sweating like a brook, his cheeks the colour of wallpaper paste. Jones was upright and silent, chewing on something. Smichov was the talkative one among us. By counting the corpses he could see, which was in effect the top layer, and multiplying by the vertical number of layers, he was trying to establish how many Reds had been executed.

Conversationally he remarked, “Look how many horizontal strokes there are in bodies when a pile of them's lying flat. Two arms and two legs for each to start with. Then the lines that originate from their boots—if they've been left with them. Even their hair makes lines. A photographer notices these details— hey, HEY, watch out, that bastard's still alive!”

It was a man in the second cart who'd chosen this moment to be resurrected. A clenched and bloody fist was rammed into the air. A second or two later—groans, very deep, from the bottom of the scale, as of a cow calving. Tousled hair appeared over the side as he strove to raise himself: bandaged forehead, eyes as blue as gentians, nose, mouth, beard—they appeared in turn, his face streaming blood except for those eyes, which were of so startling a blue that they might have been screwed in by a jeweller.

He hauled himself up. The blood, somebody's blood, was down his neck and down the front of a once white shirt. Backwards and forwards he swayed, bubbles of blood forming at his mouth as he attempted to speak.

The carts bumped to a halt. The fellow was jolted off balance. He slumped forward over the side of the cart, his body folded at the waist and hanging down—his arms in their white martyr's shirt, his long dirty brown hair, the loose end of the bandage round his head, all of them pointing at the dust.

Smichov had his tripod up in a tick, I never knew it could
be done so fast. He came out from under his black cloth and started shouting, “Yes! Yes! Kiss the cart, whore! Your last kiss before you get to the Devil's arse.” Running over to the man, he seized him by his hair and started to crash his face into the side of the cart—one, two: one, two, rhythmically. “Watch his teeth fly out, boys! You over there,”—to one of the carters— “get ready for a catch.”

He paused in his rhythm to speak to the wretch. “Have I broken your nose, Mr. Lenin? Pray pardon, for I am but a clumsy boorjoi.” The bloodied face, in which only the eye surrounds were white, which Smichov was holding up by the hair to speak to, suddenly convulsed. A spout of blood flew from his mouth, spattering Smichov's linen trousers. He jumped back: “You filthy Red traitor... you dirty little sod, you... Look what you've done to me.”

The man somehow raised his head. I could see right into his mouth, could see the struggle his tongue was having to get the words out, all its knots and contortions:

“Long live the people of Russia! All power to the Soviets!”

And then, even more extraordinarily, this so-called corpse shook his head and, by pressing his hands flat against the top rail of the cart, started to push himself erect.

Kneeling on the bodies beneath him, he faced me. I had the impression that it was me alone he was speaking to. “
Svoboda! Ravenstvo! Bratsvo!
Believe nothing else! I shall not die!”

“Oh yes, you will,” cried a soldier, clambering up the mound of slippery corpses.

“My strength is greater than the sun, my words are a library, the force that is within me will never perish...”

Now the soldier was balancing above him, feeling for a foothold. The setting sun was directly behind the soldier. He was in its very centre and thus was turned from a shoddy conscript into a statue of black marble in which no feature of his face was discernible. He stood poised, magnified by the sun. His rifle was at an angle above his head, the butt readied to club the man beneath him. The military cap, the vindictive nose, the thick spraddled legs wound round with puttees, they were above me—then down they came and there commenced the barbaric pounding at the man's skull and the sounds arising
from this, which included not even one small prayer or sigh of regret but consisted solely of thuds ranging from hard to soft and interspersed among them the unceasing and stupid oaths of the soldier.

I looked away. Each blow was terrible. The man must have died immediately. But still the blows rained down. I heard someone retch behind me. Turning I saw Stiffy sitting on the ground with his hands over his ears. Jones—I can't remember.

But beside me Smichov was egging the soldier on, driving his fist into the palm of his hand. At the end he said to me, “Do you know what the Reds did to that man's family, in front of his very eyes? If you did, you wouldn't blame him. No one could.”

The soldier climbed down grinning. The carters returned to their tumbrils. We started off again to the burial pits.

Behind followed Stupichkin in his black box, like a priest.

The flies arrived in their millions. Their noise was unbelievable. A roar, that was how it reached me.

We came to a stinking rivulet coated with a yellow mousse of foam from the brickworks. The carter cracked some grisly joke as we hopped up beside him to save getting our feet wet, but I couldn't understand his accent. Laughing, he pointed with his whip at the sleek, waterlogged shapes of dead rats drifting beneath the foam as the passage of our wheels stirred it up.

At the top of the bank was one of Strabinsk's slums. Pyedogs came slinking out from underneath the huts. They were after the human blood, to get their fill of protein. No one made any attempt to keep them away. When the horses began to trot, so did the dogs, their loose, ringwormed dugs jiggling in time to the slapping hoofs. It would have been comical if it hadn't been so disgusting.

The more educated a person is the less he understands about survival. He thinks that because the learning of it is arduous, the fact of it must therefore be sophisticated. There is nothing sophisticated about survival. The next breath, that little puff, that colourless, weightless, invisible essence, that's what counts. What comes after it? Not known by any soul—and in fact unknowable. But at least one is alive: at least one can hope that the next instalment will bring an improvement. The pye-dogs
knew that. The aristos and musicians in the shot-up train— they did not.

What about Stupichkin, how much did he know about survival? Beyond caring, if he was the age that Jones said. I looked over at his carriage. Some of the yellow foam was still on the spokes of its wheels. A panel in the side was open. He was staring at me, his face a glimmer of white in the back.

The soldier sitting beside the driver beckoned to me, making it clear that I and no one else was intended. I walked over.

Stupichkin's sallow face peered at me from beneath secret eyelids. He laid his hand on the sill: nothing but bone to his wrist, then a ruffle and a sleeve of pink-striped seersucker. He said in a soft, careful voice, “I know who you are. Misha Baklushin was your godfather. You buried him.”

“I wish that it weren't true, Excellency, but it is.”

“His mother, Lydia, the pianist—I was married to her once. Your father—Pushkin, as we called him. I knew him too. Come to my quarters when this business is over. I have some information for you.”

T
HE COLUMN
moved on, closer to the burial pit. Walking beside Stiffy, I said, “Chin up.” But he was done for. His scalp had caught the sun earlier in the day. He had a white handkerchief over his head knotted at its four corners. He shambled along, stooping and dreadful.

I said, “Don't be so anxious. You'll soon be someone else.”

The pye-dogs continued to lap at the blood dripping from the carts. Not bothering with the frame for its toes, Smichov whipped up his tripod and took a photo of them. “I'll sell it to Muraviev's paper with the caption, ‘Dogs and Bolsheviks sup from the same bowl.' They'll enjoy that in town.”

“You'll be eating those dogs soon,” I said. “Wouldn't surprise me at all.”

“Not a chance. Killing the Little Father was a terrible error. People will really turn against the Reds now. I give them a fortnight, a month at the most. Our armies'll roll them back like carpets—into the sea, into Poland, Germany, I don't mind where. We'll send their heads bowling down the streets, lots of choppedoff heads with those filthy ink-stained beards their sort grow to show they're not women. But they are. They're red cunts, that's what they are, useless to everybody. Now let me get these photographs done so I can go and have my dinner.”

In no other country of the world is human life valued so cheaply. The proof was in front of me in those pits. And it was in the odour that rose from them, of decomposing flesh. Once experienced, the smell of rotting humans is impossible to forget simply because of the associations that accompany it.

I thought, one slip and I could be down there with them.
It wouldn't have to be my slip. Someone a bit drunk, someone who took me for a Romanov prince, someone who wanted to try out a new pistol or someone who just hated me on sight: for any of those reasons I could be down there in the swelter.

Or stuffed into a hole in the forest, at any rate tossed out of life.

Elizaveta—I took a deep breath. It was what I'd done to her. What Glebov had started and I'd finished. I'd shot her through the temple, aiming for that mole, from three paces. It hadn't been Glebov who'd squeezed the trigger. It was I. But it was he who'd loaded the pistol and pointed it.

That was how it stood between us, between the three of us you could say—four, if you counted Death itself.

Yes, you had to count Death as a person. He was always there, behind the screen or not, whichever he chose. Watch in hand, tapping out the seconds left. Striking through names on the register—address, occupation, collar size, the lot: mopping his brow and thinking about humping his girlfriend, Time. The two of them, deadly conspirators. Barren, thank God, like Lenin. There were some people in the world of whom a single example was quite sufficient.

Harden up, Charlie, I said. Nothing is wretched unless you think it is.

I looked down at the pit before me. It was no wonder the priests were so powerful in Russia. Not much religion was needed to believe that what lay down there was a mass of sins, writhing and spitting like snakes, trying to crawl out and get among the population. I offered thanks that Xenia wasn't with me. No woman should have to face such a scene. The bodies, the dogs, Smichov the twizzle-moustached photographer getting copy for the newspaper—for the benefit of posterity, detailing what men were capable of.

It was awful what was happening. I swore that from now on I'd treat Xenia with unfailing compassion. In fact all women, until I died. Their burden of responsibility was too great. It wasn't their fault that from their wombs came forth tyrants and the like, real monsters screaming for power from the word go.
But of course it was they who got the blame, the fathers waltzing away scot-free. And accepted it, went staggering beneath its weight for the rest of their lives.

So on behalf of womanhood I'd take Xenia to Odessa and make her Mrs. Doig. The children we'd have would be beautiful. I'd do my share of raising them. They'd call me Papa, slide their trusting hands into mine as we walked, get me to tell them stories—

“Watch your heels,” shouted a carter. He unfastened the traces and knocked out the backboard pins. The cart tipped up. The bodies slithered out of their own accord.

Stiffy stood on the brink of the pit, peering down expressionlessly. Jones was with Smichov, setting up the camera and getting it clear about the shots he wanted. Smichov had lit a yellow
makhorka
and was taking huge puffs from it, drawing his cheeks right in as if he were an underwater swimmer. He queried something with Jones, making a new camera angle with his hands.