Cold Blood (2 page)

“I know what I said, but the fact is that it's a beetle, not a tiger,” she wrote and had me do something tamer, with a butterfly net.

She was right, and in another sense too. I should have been content to be a name on a museum label, should have allowed the idea of smallness to find a home with me. All my troubles have stemmed from that, my troubles, my joys, my loves.

O
N THE
strength of Wiz, I was appointed in the summer of 1914 to document the passerines—birds that perch— of Russian Central Asia. Skins of every species that bred there were to be obtained. The expedition was mine, Goetz being over fifty by then and crabbier than ever.

Disaster struck immediately. Thereafter they followed each other like sheep.

First: the European war broke out, causing old Hartwig Fartwig Goetz to remember the Germanness of his soul. He deserted me: presented me with all his collecting equipment, stepped onto a train in Bokhara and went to a patriot's death.

Next: the Academy of Sciences stopped sending me money. The Tsar had none to spare because of the cost of the war.

Shortly after this, I broke my leg.

These sufferings were not sufficient. As soon as I was better I abandoned the passerines and set out across Russia to the Pink House, Popovka, province of Smolensk, the home of my mother's family, the Rykovs. For company I had a young Mongolian who'd attached himself to me as a bodyguard. His name was Kobi.

The train I was on contained only recruits and their lice. I caught typhus, or “tif” as it's known with us. An inch of my life was all that remained by the time Kobi got me to the Pink House. An inch, as close as that: a few dozen breaths away from the mortician's trolley, which in my case would have been a shove out of a military wagon with a heavy boot.

But I pulled through, my will to live being stronger than the tif.

When I awakened in the Pink House, the hot summer sun was streaming through the open windows, I could smell the greenish scent of the Fantin-Latour that had been growing against the wall when I was a boy and was still growing there, and my cousin Elizaveta was writing a letter at a desk by the window. A bee came off the rose and loitered noisily half in and half out of the room.

She spoke to it: “Kind and gentle bee, keep your distance, for here we have tif.”

I called out. She came to my bedside. Her dark, finely boned face bent over me. I said weakly, “What have you done with your hair, then, Lizochka?”

Smiling at me, who was her patient, from the bottom of her black eyes: “Four days a week I nurse our wounded soldiers in the hospital. None of us are allowed to keep our hair because of the lice. So we are alike, you and I, Charlinka.”

And I, who had until then treated women as a hobby, fell instantly in love. There was nothing of the dewy-eyed, walks-in-the-wood romance about it. The love I had for Elizaveta Rykov was gross. It concerned one thing only: complete possession of her, inside and out, until the day I died.

However, she was already affianced. The man was one of our most dashing young officers, a real idol. He had all a soldier's advantages: medals, fame, rank and, not least, the wardrobe of a colonel in the Garde à Cheval, which included trousers tight enough to make a maiden gasp.

Still, I went for her. Stuck my chin out and tightened my arse.

And I won her, led her from the altar as mine. She declared that her heart had belonged to me all along.

For seven days this woman was my bride—was Mrs Doig. Black hair, black eyes, brainy, angular, a small refined bosom— of greater beauty than is comfortable for most men. There can't have been a woman like her in the entire province of Smolensk, probably not in Russia itself. I'll bet you could have searched the ballrooms and apple orchards from Vladivostok to the Baltic and not found her equal. She had to be in the top twelve of Europe itself for beauty, intelligence and domesticity.

That I, who am imperfect, should have been found acceptable by such a woman filled me to bursting with pride. She was
the sun, the moon and the milk of the stars, she was the purest treasure in existence. Sobbing with love, I'd dip my head between her sleek breasts and go back and forth kissing their nipples and murmuring of rubies, garnets and the rest of them until I ran out of words. Her eyes were jet, her skin like alabaster and her navel was folded like a cowrie.

Exclaiming, I would explore every inch of her as we lay on the bear cubs' skin in front of the bedroom fire.

One night towards the end we were on the bearskin, she naked except for the Rykov pearls. My great-uncle Igor had given them to her. They were famous throughout Russia, the largest weighing three ounces.

I was impatient and as stiff as a guardsman. She wanted to see how long I could hold out. Laughing, she lassoed my cock and garlanded it with the pearls so that it gleamed in the firelight like an elephant's tusk. This led her to thinking how tall our children would be. I said I'd have to measure her. Smiling— fireglow in her eyes, it was what she'd been hoping for—she reclaimed the cock-hot pearls (which had certainly seen nothing of the like when owned by homosexual Uncle Igor) and laid them out of harm's way. She reached back with her arms, right over her head. Using the top knuckle of my thumb as an inch measure, I started off at the ball of her heel. I went slowly, paying no attention to her squeals and giggles as I passed over dells and dimples, plains, forests and peaks. Up her neck I went and over her determined chin and nibbling lips. I balanced like a mountaineer on the ridge of her nose, made a detour to take in her upstretched arms and on reaching her fingertips and kissing them, one by one—

“How many?” she whispered, by then not interested in my answer.

I sat back on my heels. Now it was her turn to wait. She placed both hands round my cock and tried to draw me down.

“How many do you think?” I said.

“A thousand, I don't care.”

“Seventy-five inches to your fingertips. When you raise your arms like that, you're taller than I am.”

Squirming beneath me: “What's important... do you want me to beg? Come down here, Charlinka.”

I looked at her long white body on the bearskin. I smoothed my palms over her flat stomach. She made way and I entered her with a rush, the deepest penetration in the entire history of love.

We were one person that night, when Dan Doig was conceived. She declared that the thud of my sperm hitting her egg travelled all the way up her spine. She'd felt it in her brain. More than just a tingle, she said: a definite crackle, like electricity.

To celebrate Dan's conception, she refastened the pearls round her neck. They grazed my chest as she smiled down at me, leaning on her elbow, tracing the grooves between my ribs with her forefinger.

“It was as though you fertilised me in two places simultaneously. Mighty Doig!”

All the happiness that had been lying around in the world unused was ours. It was drawn to us by the force of our love. I had only to put out my hand to feel it surrounding and protecting us like a soft warm billowy paradise.

H
OW THE
gods must have detested our bliss. “Break them,” they roared. “Do it properly this time. Leave nothing to chance.”

The man they sent to do this was Prokhor Fedorovich Glebov. Pretending to be a Tsarist officer, he sought refuge in the Pink House just as our honeymoon and a week-long blizzard began. We were duped, all of us—my cousin Nicholas, his servants, my godfather Misha Baklushin, my wife. One night he murdered her ancient tutor in the room above ours. I was woken by the scream. He rode away into the forest, trailing his coat, inviting me to follow him. He was joined by a gang of deserters. Kobi tracked them through the snow. I shot and killed a man, believing him to be Glebov. It was not. Too late did I realise the depth of his deception. By the time I got back, he'd done his butchering.

He did it on behalf of Bolshevism, in the name of the common man. To compensate for the bad deal that this wretch has received from history.

It took Kobi and me two days to catch him. What I wanted to do was to cut off his eyelids so that he'd be unsleeping for the remainder of his life. Why not? Kobi wouldn't have given it a second thought. Not one person in humanity would have blamed me.

I did not. Instead, because I suddenly visualised his eyelids fluttering on the palm of my hand, I handed him over to some wounded White officers to let them torture him as they wished. When a couple of Zeppelins bombed their hospital wagons, he escaped. Even with a broken leg, the slippery bastard managed to crawl away and hide.

I have often pondered over that failure of mine to kill Glebov. I'm not a fastidious person. No one has ever called me nice. It's not in my born nature. I'm a vital, pushing, obstinate man. I have pride. I have ambition. I have a whole range of the minor qualities. But I am not and do not wish to be thought nice.

My uncle Igor had been a generous, unassuming, would-be pederast, the epitome of niceness. His fate—to be blown up in his carriage as he passed through the forest of Popovka. My cousin Nicholas had been almost unbearably nice. Elizaveta, Misha, Bobinski, Louis, all those slaughtered in the Pink House had been nice. Decent, honourable people, well suited to a civilised existence. And now? Dead. All these nice people were dead and gone, swept out of the way by swine like Glebov, by people indoctrinated to act without scruple or mercy.

So why did I risk staying in Russia? What did I want that I couldn't get in another country with a fraction of the danger?

Vengeance. Nothing could be clearer. I had one mortal enemy, this man Glebov. Never again would I let him escape. I would be his nemesis. I would hunt him as a dog hunts a rat, and when I'd caught him, I'd kill him with terrible finality. Then I'd get out of the country.

I'd find my way to America, where I had high standing at the Field Museum. If the war had made collecting impossible I'd take up accountancy. I'd force myself to learn their obscure language and their runes: buy a suit and become their ally. The sense of being a Rykov, even of being a Russian, would be moulted and a bright new Doig would step forth, a respectable fellow, an all-round good person.