The Blue-Eyed Shan (16 page)

The boy Olevskoy loved to watch the mowing too, and to sit with the peasants sharing their breakfast, their oatcakes and cold tea. And to sit with his father at dinner. Monsieur Grandin had no place at their table, and ate in solitary state, served in his own room by Prohor. At dinner Olevskoy's father saw to the boy's real education: czars and sabers and true geography, the borders of the Romanov empire, and what Kalmucks were, and Cossacks, and where Kamchatka was, and why an Olevskoy never beat an animal or a servant or—and the vehemence of this command persisted long after he had broken it—struck a woman.

Women came soon enough, but first love was first love, and for Olevskoy it was the colt Kalita. For three or four years, while women remained only an odd species of soprano subordinate, Olevskoy's nuzzles, kisses and gifts went to the colt. Before boy or colt was grown they were become one. Olevskoy père was reluctant. “This is a stallion of blood and not a gelding, nor a slug.”

“He loves me,” the boy said, and the man knew he was right and shortly gave in. The boy overheard his father say to Monsieur Grandin, “The colt is Bucephalus, and the boy Alexander,” and by then the boy knew what that meant, and was proud. He and Prohor made the rounds of their villages in all seasons, through snow and mud and over dry, dusty summer roads, Olevskoy breathing not air but the mingled essence of forest and field and horse and youth, of sun and wind and hay.

For a year or two of these rounds he was a shy boy, haughty at first to mask his timidity before these square, stolid peasants and their plump daughters. Some of the peasants lived in wooden shacks, others in mud huts that almost dissolved away in spring. Afternoons, in the great house, he was formally presented to counts, lawyers, rich merchants, the provincial governor, district councillors. Evenings he rode out, and the round young women swarmed about him, and he grew warm in the saddle; he was thirteen. Eventually, after a frustrating English lesson with Monsieur Grandin, whose English was that of Calais and not London, he rode out with Prohor, wordlessly bound for the village they had come, with reason, to frequent, and at dusk, in the matted hay, the girl Katya, blond and green-eyed, panted in his face after he had flung up her skirts and found his way, hot, direct and bursting, to the core of her. He persuaded her then, with soft words and a coin, to disrobe, and in the last light she stood before him, breasts immense, thighs glowing, eyes modest, her hands twitching with the need to cover her golden triangle, to shield her bosom.

He took her again. He lay propped on his elbows ecstatic at this miracle, this moist heat,
he was within her
! This was the mystery! His blood roared. She squeezed, shifted, pulsed, and he took his rhythm from her. The sheer rapture of it took entire possession of him. He thought he might swoon, faint away. The world ceased to exist, only this warm flesh, the silky grip of hers on his, the sweet odor of her and hay and heaven, the gathering, scalding rush and the final suicidal conquest of the woman, the field, all Russia. All that he was, he gave freely in that moment.

Prohor snickered and teased as they trotted home. “By God,” Nikolai Andreevich said like a man, “there is nothing like it!” From that day their rides were more than proprietary visits. There were Katya and Varya and Masha and more, and one night at table his father said gently. “Go easy, boy. Monsieur Grandin tells me you scarcely heed him. Women are well enough in their way, but there is more to manhood than that.”

Olevskoy tried to answer but only blushed.

His father laughed fondly and proudly. “You're a handsome young devil. You had better let me tell you a bit about all this.” And he did so, as Olevskoy recovered from his confusion and returned to his beef, listening carefully, enthralled, nodding assent or comprehension, blushing slightly again at certain clauses of technical advice, and catching his father's serious tone and manner when the elder prince, this noble and titanic father, this personification of all northern kings, said, “Tumble all the village girls you like, my boy, but if you betray a lady, I'll flay you alive. I'll lash the skin off your back. Do you understand me? You are an Olevskoy.”

“A prince,” the boy said proudly.

“Anybody can be a prince,” his father rebuked him. “Half Russia is princes and the other half counts. But you are an Olevskoy. And if you cannot pay proper tribute to God and Russia and your ancestors, then you are nothing. It is our fathers' fathers who made this land, and dedicated it to God, and all this”—with a wave encompassing table, great house, Sobolyevo—“we must deserve. Do you understand? We must earn it each day. And there is no such thing as a small betrayal. If you allow yourself once to be less than an Olevskoy, you will never again be an Olevskoy. Others may believe that you are, but you will know that you are not. And if you are not an Olevskoy, then you are nothing.”

“I understand, Father,” he said, but even that night he suffered doubt. His father worshipped only three things: God, family and Russia. And it seemed to Olevskoy that he too worshipped only three things, but that they were Russia, horses and fornication.

Russia, horses and fornication. And now there was no more Russia and no more cavalry and he lay in a decrepit American truck with a soiled Chinese adolescent. The Russia he loved had vanished forever, and its princes drove taxis in Paris and boasted, “Jé parrle sans accieng parce que jé vieng dé Pétersbourgg.” The horses he loved were now light, medium and heavy tanks, weapons carriers, armored cars and jeeps. The fornication he loved at least bore some resemblance to the original.

He crawled to the flap and peered out at gray-green China. Not even silvery-jade; only gray-green. A light rain. The road muddy but passable. Late afternoon. L'heure de l'apéritif. So many late afternoons. So many gray-green late afternoons.

He let fall the flap and crawled to his kits and crates. Life without ritual was chaos: he poured what he hoped was fifty cubic centimeters of Scotch whisky into his canteen cup, and added one hundred of water. “You. Hsiao-chi. Want a whisky?”

“Yes. Whisky.” Her voice was frail but, thank God, pleasant. She seemed to be enjoying her excursion. Travel broadens one so. Cela change les idées. He mixed her a highball in a tin mug. “Long life and prosperity,” he said.

She echoed him. It was perhaps optimistic. He sipped and grew benevolent. He was fond of alcohol, and his smile was unconscious, involuntary, ancient habit. He sat beside the reclining girl, his back to the driver's cab, and patted her without malice. Russia, horses and fornication, and the greatest of these is fornication. There would surely be women in Pawlu. If Pawlu was only three bamboo huts by a mud flat, there would be women, and one would be the most desirable; if there were only two, one would be preferable to the other. Perhaps his little Hsiao-chi would be an exotic beauty in Pawlu.

“Where we will both be princes,” Yang had said back in Kunming, in that hotel suite with hot water. For one insane moment, his mind outracing reality and creating possibilities, worlds, destinies, Olevskoy had made a fantasy of desertion, a dash south, one jeep, perhaps a squad, to the Tonkin border; but Lin Piao had Nanning and was halfway to Mengtzu and would surely head him off, and already he was curious about Pawlu, and how General Yang would achieve this promotion to prince, and his hand and cup had barely paused while these landscapes and flights unreeled, so he drank up and let suspicion and discontent darken his face. “Pawlu?”

“Trust me. Remember, I am Yang Yu-lin and I have given you Kunming and a hotel suite de grand luxe, and you even have a woman and a case of Johnnie Walker Red.”

“You could be Yang Yu-lin in Tonkin too,” Olevskoy said, and knew instantly how wrong he was.

“I'm afraid not,” Yang had said. “You forget: I was scarcely permitted to be Yang Yu-lin in Paris, where at least I was a young and exotic specimen. Allow me to doubt that colonial officials in Hanoi will take this faded Oriental to their hearts. I can read your own desires: the French culture you know and love, the colonel of cavalry, the polyglot adventurer, soldier of fortune, prince—tu saurais un succès fou. But I would only be another damned Chink. You know what the French used to call masturbating?”

Olevskoy knew but shook his head.

“‘Polishing the Chinaman.' No, Nicky. Trust me. Pour us more whisky. And for this delightful creature as well. Ma chère Marquise! Tout va bien au château?”

Yang Yu-lin was born in Peking, the son of a treasury official and principal wife, and his earliest memory was of the crowded execution ground, and many stern men wearing queues, and pale severed heads goggling at him from the mud. A few years later he saw Boxers' bodies on the ramparts. One red-clad corpse clutched a crossbow; much of the head and right shoulder had been blown off by Western artillery, but the futile left hand clutched a crossbow. Yang Yu-lin also saw the Bengal Lancers enter Peking, after the Boxers had been put down with great carnage, and he resolved then that one day he would be a soldier and expel the foreigner from China. Being only eight years old, he also resolved to ask his father for a pony and a ma-fu, or groom, so that one day he might ride well enough to be a Bengal Lancer.

His father had other plans for him. The boy was bright, personable, even handsome with that round face, that joyous youthful smile. He was, furthermore, of a generous and outgoing disposition, the result perhaps of affectionate coddling by his mother, the second and third wives, the ma-fu and a household staff of fourteen considered—so exalted were treasury officials—superior to independent shopkeepers. His father had learned much in the treasury—for example, that money was good, that foreigners were powerful, and that you won a man's esteem, as you did the world's, by admiring his or its expressions of humble altruism while facilitating his or its murders, rapes and thefts. The necessary shifts and contrivances required an education of manifold and complex aspects.

Yang Yu-lin was consequently tutored by a motley faculty that slipped in and out of his life at confusing intervals: a seedy scholar who had failed the fifth-level Civil Service examinations, a musician who prepared for each lesson with a full hour of silent meditation, a Scottish lady as outlandish as a penguin, a French former sergeant given over to opium, an aged archer formerly of the Empress's guard, a calligrapher who fabricated his own brushes and ground his own ink.

And when the time came, Yang Yu-lin was enrolled in a foreign university in Peking, a Roman Catholic institution run by Frenchmen and their Chinese minions. Its Catholicism was incidental. Yang's father had no doctrinal prejudices; worshipping his own ancestors, conferring with Confucius and communing with Lao-tzu, being, in short, an ignorant and barbarous reactionary, he believed, like so many educated and civilized liberals, that the various forms of Christianity were so many childhood diseases—discommoding, itchy and to be suffered for no more than three weeks.

What he wanted for his son was entrèe to the European world. The authorities seemed to understand that, and even to sympathize; when Yang the elder explained to the headmaster, or Father Superior, that the Yangs were not Roman Catholic, nor even Christian, he was vouchsafed a haunting reply: “Oh, ca va. Nous avons même un Anglais,” which was translated, “Oh, never mind about that. We even have an English boy here.” His perplexity was lifelong.

So at twenty-one Yang Yu-lin spoke, read and wrote Mandarin Chinese, a little Scots English, some Latin and much French, and had studied world history, physiology, government, economics (including the mysterious Marx) and French literature, not to mention the New Testament, Saint Augustine and papal history. He knew himself an upper bourgeois, a flunky trained to perpetuate an unjust world, and happily acknowledged the budding socialist deep within him—that was his dark secret, and for the moment, the time and place, Peking in 1913, he kept it locked away.

His father expected that ultimately he would become an ambassador, perhaps even president of a unified China—one Sun Yat-sen, a monomaniac and not a Pekinger, had established a republic, whatever that was, in remote Canton. Yang the elder had no faintest notion of what this republic's “Three People's Principles” might be (something to do with the worm people, in the old phrase, the ordinary people, the millions of coolies and peasants and beggars, people who did not even pay taxes). But whatever a republic was, whatever China might become, it was clear that his son, Yang Yu-lin, must play a major part in its history. Yang Yu-lin exemplified the Confucian ideal, the superior man, the prince; why, the boy was even expert with the bow and arrow!

At twenty-two Yang Yu-lin shocked his father almost into the grave by journeying to Canton and joining the army of the new China as a subaltern. At twenty-four Yang Yu-lin was promoted to first lieutenant and sent, at the head of a company of coolies, to France, where a mysterious war was in progress. The war was mysterious because it consisted principally of hundreds of thousands of men living in trenches, rising sporadically from those trenches to attack other men in other trenches, and dying by tens of thousands in their tracks. It was soon obvious to Yang that a whole generation of Europe's best, its most intelligent and compassionate, its most loyal and patriotic, those who cared most and therefore accepted their obligations, was simply being murdered, and with them was dying Europe's future.

Yang's coolies dug trenches, unloaded cargo from vessels and trains, were referred to as “labor battalions” and earned pennies a day. Their officers earned more, were often gratified by references to “our glorious Chinese allies,” and became objets d'art, or at least knicknacks, in the salons of Paris. Yang himself knew an enormous success. He was taller than average, for one thing, and thus was never patted on the head by a hostess; he had begun to fill out and consequently to resemble a traditional warrior, unlike some of his fellow officers who were scrawny and jittery by nature, with marked tendencies to drop forks and duel steaks with fish knives.