Blood Ties (14 page)

They were moving beyond the tennis courts now, continuing
the path which apparently ran through the flower gardens. The perfume in the
air thickened.

"How delicious," Olga said. By now, his humor had
changed. He was angry with himself for probing her as if he were a detective.
Suddenly she stopped, her eyes searching his face.

"He asked me to come. Go to them, he said. Show them
Aleksandr. See for yourself. The boy is, after all, a von Kassel. Never doubt
the power of the blood myth, he said. On my part, I came here detesting you
all. The history of your family is a moral nightmare."

"So the Reds now debate morality."

"No one can defend the indefensible," she said
calmly. He had expected her to snap at him. "Besides I am more an
opportunist than an idealogue."

"Then you're not a dedicated Red?" he asked.

"I'm not a dedicated anything."

The idea rolled in his mind like a lozenge spurting its
juices. It was precisely that quality of dedication that he doubted in himself.

"Well then," he said after a long pause, but
could think of nothing else to say. They had slowed their pace as the path
turned and they were headed back in the direction of the castle. Along the edge
of the path he saw a bench. The wood felt damp and, pausing, he wiped it with
his handkerchief and they sat down. The moon, like a bloated fruit, was rising
high over the tower now. Faintly, in a distant echo, musical sounds floated
over the courtyard.

"They are still at it," Olga observed.

"My brother has been known to remain drunk during an
entire reunion."

There was a long silence as they listened to the sounds of
the night, audible against the faint music.

"Reunion," she whispered. "Reunion. How I
envy you that."

"Envy?"

"No matter what, there is the comfort of belonging. At
least you are an entity. My family is gone."

"And the great family of the Soviets? Surely there is
some consolation in belonging to that."

"I tell myself that every day. Somehow it leaves
something out. Ideology. Patriotism. The bond seems contrived somehow. One
seems to want more."

Perhaps that was what drew him to her. She envied exactly
the thing which he could not find. Her closeness stirred him and he felt his
growing excitement, the attraction articulated.

"But it's your family as well," Albert assured
her. "You have every right to share in its largesse." He had meant it
sincerely, but he felt her stiffen.

"So they've sent you to probe my real motives,"
she said, suddenly defensive. Her attitude confused him.

"I don't understand."

"You think I have come for money."

"It doesn't matter. I hadn't..."

"You think I would ever accept one cent of the von
Kassel blood money."

"Now you're being noble," he snapped. He could
not believe that she could be so far off the mark.

"Noble?"

"We don't spill the blood. The weapons are
manufactured by precious governments like your own, a little band of small men
really, trying to control as many people as they can."

"I'm not justifying them either. I am not happy with conditions."

"Then what makes us so evil? We deal in a commodity,
for which there is an exceeding demand."

"It never troubles you."

"I didn't say that."

Of course it troubled him. How explicit must he be? Why
couldn't she see into his heart?

"Well then." Olga turned to him. "If they
hadn't sent you to probe, then why did you ask me here? Surely not to
argue."

"Frankly, I've had enough argument for one
night." She understood the reference instantly.

"Fair enough," she said. "At least that I
can understand." Pausing, he felt her soften. "She is quite lovely,
though. Will you marry her?"

"No."

"Everyone assumed that she was being exhibited as the
future Baroness Albert von Kassel. I overheard them."

"Sorry to disappoint everyone." Albert was
annoyed now. "I didn't ask you here to discuss my relationship with
Dawn." His voice, which up to now had been modulated barely above a
whisper, rose. "I asked you here to get to know you better. At the dinner,
when we danced..." He felt his tongue tangle. "I felt we could be
close."

In the darkness, he sensed her eyes searching his face.
Embarrassed, he looked toward the castle, its looming bulk silhouetted against
the moonlight. Lights still burned in some of the rooms. The brief
combativeness somehow bonded their kinship. There were only the two of them,
alone under the vast arc of the sky, on top of this ancient mountain. The sense
of aloneness seemed complete. This was why he had asked her, he thought. To
find this.

"Did you love my uncle?" he asked. Was it the
compelling image of her husband and her together that had made him irritable?

"Love?" She seemed amused. "I was eighteen.
He was sixty-six. That is not exactly the stuff of romantic stories."

"Now I really am prying." But he wanted to know.
She must have sensed that, as she continued. So he was not alone in his need
for self-justification.

"Both my parents had died. We would get the flat to
ourselves. It was sound economically. He protected me. He was good to me. I was
a good and faithful wife. And I had his child."

"He did not move you?" The question had popped
out. He was losing all sense of discipline.

"So that's why you never married," she mocked.
"You have a heavy emotional requirement. One would think a man so
successful would be more calculating. I think I have found your Achilles'
heel." She smiled broadly, her teeth capturing the light of the faltering
moon. He watched her lips, moved toward them, but hesitated and moved away. A
light flickered briefly in a castle window, plunging the entire front façade
into darkness.

"Apparently, you had no requirements in that
direction," he said, testing the observation.

"All right then," she said. "Marrying
Wolfgang was a practical consideration. We are, above all, a pragmatic people.
I had my job. I am a translator."

"But marriage?"

"He wanted a child," she chuckled. "At first
I was amused. I must admit I had no desire for children. None at all. Besides,
I thought it impossible at his age, which proved my utter ignorance of
biology." The ensuing silence illustrated her sense of personal delicacy.
Although he detested the image she released, he was flattered by the intimacy.

"The conception was not the only miracle," Olga
said crisply. "Suddenly I had something to love, something that I owned,
that was mine. You have got to live in a society like ours to know how
important that is. Wolfgang was, of course, ecstatic. A son. A von
Kassel."

"But he hated us."

"I wonder," she mused. "Perhaps he hated
himself."

"He was staking a claim."

"That as well."

"The old fox," Albert said.

"You can't blame him for that," she sighed.
"Without him, you would all have been ended in 1919. Talk about
obsessions. All his life, he had wondered why he had saved the family."

"Saved us?"

Was she mocking him, he wondered? The night of the fire had
always been the centerpiece of the von Kassels' recent history. The hanging of
his grandfather. The saving of his father's life by Petya, the nursemaid. Their
flight to the forest.

"Burning your house was not enough. They were
determined to kill your family. Wolfgang painted a frightening picture of their
thirst for revenge. In the end, he prevailed. He resigned his leadership in the
Estonian Party and went off to Russia. He was able to exploit internal strife
within the Party. They were ready to hunt your father and the others down and
kill them like dogs. He traded his leadership for their lives. They let them
live. A few days later the Estonian nationalists took power. And the von
Kassels were able to rebuild."

"They never told me."

"The family does not know."

"Why didn't he tell them?"

Olga shivered. A cool wind had risen and he put his arm
around her. She allowed it to linger for a moment, then stood up.

"I had better go. Aleksandr rises early."

They started to walk again along the gravelled path. In the
clear air, he heard the throaty laughter of a woman. Dawn. Then silence as they
hurried toward the palace entrance. Pausing under the light, Albert turned
toward her.

"Thank you," he said.

"For what?"

"For being honest."

She smiled. "It was you who wanted to talk."

He wanted to hold her in his arms, but held back. Looking
into her eyes, he saw a mirror of his own doubt.

"Perhaps it is an endless river."

She looked at him for a long moment, a probing puzzled
investigation. Then she turned and went into the lobby. Watching her disappear,
he remained motionless long after she had gone.

Endless river! They were his father's words.

Siegfried sat in the little bar just off the lobby. Once it
had been a small chapel and the arched windows had been carefully embellished
with stained glass, crude, repetitive depictions of a naked Christ on the cross
under a floating halo. At some moment during the castle's conversion to a
hotel, before the Baron had bought it, some malevolent historian of the ancient
Order made the decision to put Christ in the bar room. It had not in any way
inhibited alcoholic diversions and many a toast had been offered in its
direction.

He had been feeling alternately edgy, exhilarated, nervous
and tranquil throughout the evening. Now he was being reflective, sipping and
sniffing his brandy from a deep ballooned glass, assembling and reassembling
the images of the evening in his mind.

Dawn had amused him, so obviously using him as a device to
upset the indifferent Albert. Apparently his brother's interests lay elsewhere,
in the direction of the enigmatic Olga. He laughed into his glass. He would be
happy to be Dawn's instrument. It would considerably lighten the burden of this
insufferable reunion. Any diversion was welcome.

His fat cousin Adolph sat a few tables away mooning at the
boy waiter who had caught his eye previously and who, he was apparently
delighted to find, also served the bar until closing.

"Wonderful hips, don't you think, Siegfried?"
Adolph said, interrupting his reflections. The boy had allowed Adolph to caress
his thigh, hustling a bigger tip, or more.

Siegfried remembered the odd looking lady in the lobby
earlier. Apparently she had the leverage or courage to stare down Aunt Karla,
and that had to be considerable. Something about her nagged at him. An old
family retainer? An old mistress? Who knows? The speculation was amusing.

"Really, you are wasting yourself, you know,"
Adolph said to the boy in his best sing-songy falsetto, faintly oriental,
hinting at his long years, in Hong Kong and China.

"I have to earn money for tuition, Baron," the
boy answered, revealing his needs blatantly. Adolph was overjoyed.

"Confirmation again, my dear cousin," Siegfried
said with a practiced cynical air, "that greed is everywhere. No soul is safe
from barter."

"Except yours," Adolph said huffily. The boy had
obviously heard Siegfried's comments and had moved away, busying himself behind
the bar polishing glasses. Adolph's nostrils flared in anger.

"We could do without your comments. Why don't you go
to sleep," the fat man said, tossing off his drink.

Sleep. The terror of the subconscious. These reunions
rattled the old phantoms lurking in the shadows. They could suddenly be
activated, alive again, ready to inflict the old pain. Better to confront them
head on. No amount of booze could stave them off.

Early in his life, during the English school days, it was
only something hinted at, an unworthiness in himself, that had made Siegfried
feel alien to his father's obsession. What is he talking about? he had asked
himself during long ponderous stories of Estonian days. He had questioned it
even then, if only for the reason that it was his father's dream and not his
own. But he had had no dream of his own and because of this, may have
compounded his own desperation.

It was Alysha that showed him the maggots that crawled
under the von Kassel skin. Alysha, small, blonde, not in the tawny way of
Britons, but yellow-white with skin a shade darker than the hair might suggest.
He was not yet a womanizer in the present sense. There was more to it than
mindless pleasure then, although under a shapeless blouse lay the wonders of
full heavy breasts, and beneath the heavy wool skirt well-turned calves tapered
into delicate ankles. He was a philosophy student then, eschewing science,
which his father had wished he would study. He did not even notice Alysha until
his last year, drawn more by the odd color of her hair, its alien quality, than
by any other compelling attraction.

Their relationship was casual, in groups mostly, and it did
not occur to him to reach out. In retrospect, he was a serious student,
expelling sexual energy furtively in hallways, or brothels and only
occasionally in his digs. It was she who moved first. Only then did he realize
that she had been watching him for months. He was tall and slim then,
conventionally handsome.

"I know your people are from Estonia," she said one day when their group had seated themselves at random around a
table in the pub. He was using "Kassel" then. Actually, it was his
father who had excised the "von" to spare him from prejudice. Later
he had insisted that it be used again and he had obeyed. By then it hardly
mattered. A "von" was a small price to pay for such a cornucopia.

"How do you know that?" Siegfried had turned to
her, seeing her for the first time in a more intimate perspective. Her eyes
were not smiling, and the lines on her forehead hinted at some foreboding.

"I am, too," she said. "Not me. I was
actually born in London. But my parents." He had made no secret of his
origins by then. The war was over fifteen years. He had admitted during some
drunken spree that he was a Baron and some of his cronies even used the title
in jest. Except in certain circles, the von Kassels were still relatively
obscure, although his father's name was occasionally in the papers associated
with some arms deal or other. The family fortunes were just starting to fully
recover by then. And he was, of course, being primed to step into the family
business. You are the oldest son, his father had intoned. It was hardly
something he could ever forget.

"My grandparents were peasants on your land."

"How droll," he had replied in a flip Noel Coward
way. The prevailing student pose was iconoclastic. The sins of the fathers were
there for ridicule only.

"They were bastards. Murderers. The whole lot of
them," she said.

He watched her face. Surely she wasn't serious. His
perspective on the family history was more heroic.

"My parents tell me you were the cruelest bastards of
the bunch."

"Me?" He looked at her with mock innocence. It
was a collective indictment in her mind. He had no doubts about her seriousness
now. "Yes. You look like good peasant stock." He squeezed her arm
through a thick sweater, then reached out, hand under chin. "Let's see
your teeth." He caught the flash of anger. She pushed his hand away, but
the gesture had attracted the attention of others.

"He deserves it, Alysha," someone said. There was
laughter. A blush reddened her skin and he sensed her deep embarrassment.

"I hadn't realized how deep it was," Siegfried
said.

"It is very deep," she replied. Finally, the
others turned away and they were alone in their intimacy.

"In my family you grow up with it," she said.
"I had only mentioned it casually last weekend, a family party. You cannot
imagine the hate. It put a pall on the festivities. Uncles, cousins. Down into
my generation."

"Well," he smiled, his interest stirred by then.
The touch of her hand had moved him. "You, finally threw us out."

"It was too late by then. The damage had been
done." Despite her obvious effort to calm herself, the flush did not fade
from her pale skin.

"But in the end we lost our land," he said,
determined to mollify her.

"One old uncle had even been bullwhipped by your
grandfather. And his own father had been tortured and then killed." She
paused and her lower lip trembled. "'When you, see him, spit on him,' my
uncle said, as he kissed me goodbye."

"They have long memories, your people," he said.
But the humor had gone out of him. He wanted to embrace her, understanding her
anguish.

"Are you going to?"

"To what?"

"Spit on me."

The flush deepened and she stood up, mumbling a farewell to
the group, trying to be casual, surely churning inside. He followed her out. It
was winter. There was a deep chill in the air, and, although it was only
mid-afternoon, night was coming on. She walked swiftly, head down, her hair
flowing on the eddy of an angry breeze.

"I'm not defending them," he said, catching up to
her. "I'm me. Not them." It was the first time he could remember that
he had voiced such family heresy. You are a von Kassel. They are you and you
are them. She slowed her pace. There was something happening between them, and
he often wished that he might have relived that moment and headed in a
different direction. Was the die already cast? Long before they had ever met.

"I won't apologize," she said, stopping finally,
vapors clouding her words.

"No," he said, touching her upper arm again. This
time she did not shrink away. "I guess you wouldn't."

"And I won't spit on you."

"I would understand that."

Yes, he would understand that. He also knew that from that
moment, he would never love another woman.

Becoming lovers was inevitable, inexorable. It nagged at
him from the beginning that his role might merely have been symbolic. The enemy
conquered at last. Alysha was a virgin, which offered more symbolism, and
although she was a willing, hungering participant, he felt that she was goading
him to rape. Which he confessed to her when the pain had gone. She had
screamed, gripping him until he could barely breathe, not stopping until she
had transferred her pain. Her blood had soaked the sheets under them. Ignoring
it, yet knowing it was there, they stayed locked in each other's arms for
hours, the beating of their hearts in tandem.

All their couplings would be like this, frenetic, and they
would grip each other as if the pressure of the flesh would take root, meld
together. Was it pleasure or pain? Love or hate? In rational moments they would
search for explanations.

"Maybe my people wanted to be conquered, wanted to be
punished. Took pleasure in it. Maybe that was their destiny."

"Can't you be you and not them?"

"I am me," she would protest. "Very much
me." Siegfried loved to bury his head between her large breasts. Sometimes
his lips would rarely leave her nipple, feeling it harden and expand under his
tongue's energy. They had felt reverence for each other's flesh, mystical, as
if their bodies were made to share dark secrets known only to them.

"My beautiful Baron," she would say passionately,
lying sideways, head to toe, holding his erected penis in her fingers,
lavishing it with the love of her mouth, talking to it, as if it were the real
face of him.

"My beautiful Baron." Sometimes a tear would fall
on it, different in its touch.

When he was inside her, he wanted to be engulfed, swallowed
into her body, and when the pleasure came it was something that transcended the
physical, evolving into spirit, pleasure into soul. Had it really happened like
that? Or had the years merely changed the calibration in the memory bank of his
brain?

He was not a rebel then. He could accept, as a condition of
belonging, the von Kassel obsession of blood and destiny. And yet, somehow,
there had been this gap in the idea of it and Siegfried could rationalize the
presumption that now, since the land had gone, mixing with the peasants was
simply an obsolete taboo. Besides, loving Alysha, he felt, could negate all
those old hates and stupidities. Love conquers all.

"My people will hate you as long as they live,"
Alysha warned whenever he broached the possibility of marriage.

"I will prove to them that I am different."

"Not to them. Never! You cannot imagine how they have
handed down the testimony of your family's atrocities from generation to
generation. They will never forget the pain of their ancestors."

"And we ... my father, will never let us forget the
glory of his."

"Of yours? ... not glory ... beastliness."

"Then why do you love me?" he would ask, since it
defied the rational explanation of her hatred for the von Kassels. She could
never answer that question. Of course not. Who could answer that question?

"They will never let me have you," she would
sigh.

"What would they have to say about it?"

She would shrug. But hatred bonds kinship. He knew that.
Once, on a brief holiday in Baden-Baden he had broached the subject obliquely.

"I know this Estonian girl. British actually. The
family is from our old neighborhood." They were sitting in his father's
ornate study and his eyes had deliberately concentrated on exploring the garden
through a window, watching a tiny bird building a nest in a nearby limb. His
father was reading a paper in the chair, glasses perched on the end of his
nose, an oddly comforting middle class pose. He remembered how his breath had
caught.

"Animals," his father had mumbled. "Good
dray horses."

"Not for breeding though?"

"Excellent for breeding," his father mumbled
without looking up.

"With von Kassels?" Siegfried had forced his eyes
from the little bird. Over the rim of his glasses, his father's met his.

"Are you mad?"

"Just trying to get your attention."

"Well you've succeeded."

"Good for play, though," he had said, his heart
heavy, masking the sarcasm. But the bitterness had already filled him. What
utter nonsense, he told himself. His father smiled.

"Yes. Good for that."

Countless rapes, Alysha had said. They abused us, murdered
us, tortured us. They treated us like animals. By then she could not bring
herself to say "you." His father was them, even in the peaceful
repose that his image in the study suggested. Nothing on earth could ever
reconcile them, make possible their union. Even then, he was without courage.

Nature's forces did not heed the admonition. It was not
that the seed was carelessly spilled. That would be a simplification. It was
more like a joint defiance, a magnetic necessity. Because there was a sense of
doom about them, they could revel in explosive ecstasies, defying nature as
well, by pressing their demands on each other's flesh beyond its obvious
boundaries.