Blood Ties Page 9

  She had expected some pain. Even her mother's elliptical warnings had indicated some pain was to be forthcoming. Focusing on searching for sensations, she felt only a faint friction, a bare hint of pleasure and slight burning sensation as his organ slipped into her. He was breathing hard above her, his heartbeat accelerated, moving swiftly, as if by frenetic activity he would prove his organ capable of its solemn duty of impregnation. Finally, his movement halted and his body shook with a sudden spasm and a groan escaped his throat. She felt a wetness between her legs, but little more. It was not entirely as she had expected.

  After it was over, she got into bed, comforted by the softness. It was a feather bed with overstuffed down pillows and she sunk into them deeply. She had almost regained her sense of well-being. After all, she was not hurt. She was still quite whole.

  When she awoke, the room was ablaze with electric light and he was kneeling on the bed searching for something. The comforter had exposed the sheets and with it the bare lower part of her body. She was drugged with sleep, but was quickly alert, awaiting what was expected of her.

  "What is it, Charles?"

  He inspected the sheets that lay under her bare buttocks.

  "No blood."

  "Blood?"

  She followed his eyes downward. Why should there be blood, she wondered? There were no injuries. The extent of her ignorance was appalling.

  "Were you a virgin?" He looked at her with curiosity, a look which forever would remind her of Karla. Again she felt confused.

  "A virgin?"

  "There is no blood. Did you feel pain?"

  "No." Actually, it had been very slight, but she was saying things which she assumed he wanted to hear, hoping that she would stumble on the right answers.

  She was still not afraid. His questions were merely odd.

  "Let's go back to sleep."

  She was able to do so quickly, for there was already a haze of dawning light in the room when she awakened. Hands were moving about her body, smoothly caressing and the warmth of his large frame enveloped her. It was a pleasant way to be led into consciousness and she responded to his caresses by moving her own hands along the ridges of his rib cage. He was a muscular man and she felt pleasure in this first real exploratory contact with his body. His actions seemed deliberate, but soothing. He kissed her eyes, played lightly with his tongue in her ears, her neck, finding her lips' attention as he sought them, played along them with his tongue, then moving lower fondled an erect nipple. Like a flower floating on the tranquil tide of a smooth river, she let him lead her, floating with him, the sluices of herself opening to the first taste of lust. Then his hand found the heart of her. It did not linger there. Suddenly his body moved sharply downward, and she paused in the search for her own sensations as she observed him with curiosity. The tongue moved swiftly now over her belly downward, nipping. She was feeling the upward crescendo of an exquisite anticipation and suddenly he was kissing her thighs, moving upward and downward with what seemed like a time-measured ever-spiraling energy. If there was any vestige of modesty, it left her then as her pelvis lurched to meet his lips and she felt the mounting excitement at the central core of her being. For the first time in her life, she was feeling outside of her body, yearning for something that could not yet be articulated.

  Then there was a brief pause. His body had changed position suddenly and something was moving slowly inside of her, filling her. The lips of her sex clasped it, feeling its hardness, sucking it into her. Mindless, she did not notice any anatomical mystery, despite the fact that his head still nudged her thighs. Then what seemed the crest of pleasure turned to a searing, burning pain as the hard thing moved sharply upwards, through her, crashing into something inside and she screamed in pain. Or was it pleasure, for the thing was moving in her like a piston now and the pores of her body had opened, liquifying her. From somewhere inside of her, a voice was pleading for the thing to stop, but it seemed to have no understanding, no ability to receive information, no humanity. How could it? It was merely hard cast rubber, a kind of truncheon.

  It was that realization, that first glimpse of the obscene thing that had violated her, that speared itself into her brain and assured her everlasting hate. Even in her stupid, teenaged ignorance, her empty-headed obtuseness, she could clearly see, even then, the full extent of her captivity. The last musical note had sounded. The little pink lady would never twirl again.

  Charles had actually apologized in his own icy arrogant manner. Then he simply disappeared into the bathroom and brought her a warm moist towel, performing the ablutions on her. She didn't care by then. Her humiliation was complete, although the petals of her outward life closed quickly around it like an insect-eating plant. So he had opened her up by force, a thing that his own body could not achieve.

  They spent two weeks in this honeymoon idyll. Aside from the odd nocturnal meanderings where apparently the submission of her body to his will was an expected consequence of becoming a von Kassel, he was polite, even solicitous. She still responded to material blandishments and he had apparently carried with him a treasure trove of gifts—a set of diamond earrings, a diadem of jewels that had once belonged to his mother and had been reset in a modern mode. Every day there was a delivery of fresh-cut flowers and all evening dinners began with caviar and champagne, as if the palate was too delicate to use without first coating it with these delicacies.

  If there was talk, Helga could barely remember it. Only repetitive themes that spilled out from him as if memorized and periodically regurgitated, mostly about von Kassels.

  "You are a von Kassel now," he had assured her. But her own family pride prompted a pouting challenge.

  "But I was a Hohenzollern first."

  "That too," he agreed. "Von Kassels have also been sprinkled with Romanovs and Hapsburgs." She could not understand why he rarely smiled, and efforts to play with him seemed blunted by his somber moods. Papers were delivered early and he usually spent the mornings reading them, making brief comments to her at lunch about the state of the war. She had little interest in such matters, preferring instead to concern herself with their future plans. Since he traveled so much, they would set themselves up first in his sister's house in Baden-Baden, at least until their family began. She would want company, and Karla, he assured her, was excellent company. She detested the idea, but, like the other, buried her protest under layers of acquiescence.

  It amazed her, especially now, how swiftly the old angers bubbled to the surface. Time had reversed the path of anger from them to herself. How she detested her earlier being, the vacuous unquestioning dullness of her eighteen-year-old self. She knew nothing. Nothing! And now, with her body puffed and swollen with age and abuse, her mind was lean, supple, honed at last to its full potential, the cells of her brain stuffed with insight, wisdom, and the knowledge that sparks courage, truth and ... She hesitated. Revenge was not worthy of the way she perceived herself now. She got up from the lumpy bed, drawing her old bathrobe around her and moved to the closed dust-speckled window. With heavy, slightly arthritic fingers, she rubbed a space in the pane and peered out into the darkness. Stars were glistening above her. It was all she could see. The music had stopped. Occasionally a muted sound of a human voice reached her.

  Standing in the arched entrance, she had very briefly searched the faces of the guests. Which were her children? But she had turned too quickly, fearful that the sight of them would dissipate her courage. She needed the full measure of it now. She was finished with defeat. Konrad. The name articulated whispered a mist onto the pane. Konrad, she spoke, calmly. Your sons are here.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Baron was surprised at the durability of his aging carcass. He had worried about not being able to find the strength for this dinner. Now he was delighted with himself, feeling some security, too, in the knowledge that he might be able, after all, to sustain himself for the duration of the reunion.

  He watched Albert spinning around the dance floor with his br
other's wife. He had been surprised at the youth of the woman. Wolfgang always had a romantic spirit, the urge to fantasize and idealize. So where did it get him? In the end, there was only the von Kassels. He peered into the face of little Aleksandr. The resemblance was clear. There was even a hint of his grandfather. The irony warmed him.

  The old Baron was forever the standard of his life, the measure of his being. How sharply the images of his old grandfather returned. Of course, Charles thought, he lives in me.

  Perhaps it was the absence of place, the Estonian lands, endless along the shores of the blue lake, that stoked these flames of memory. Again he could smell the sweet salt-tinged Baltic breeze sweeping nightly into Tallinn, where they spent the season in their grand house in the Domberg. There the Baltic Germans reigned supreme, content to savor their God-given rewards. Again he could hear the hooves of von Kassel horses, backs gripped by von Kassel rulers, sweeping through the villages on horseback, villages where every man, woman, and child was von Kassel chattel, property to be bartered, no different from animals.

  He had seen his father whip a broad muscled peasant's back in the center of one of the villages, watching the welts cut into the flesh and the blood seep like jelly out of the open wounds. All the villagers watched, mutely, as if the enforcement were for their own good as well. The peasant, broad-faced and salivating, but not uttering a sound, had stolen some of the von Kassel horses and had sold them to Russian peasants at the other end of the lake.

  Tears of anger had rolled down his father's cheeks, adding fury to the whip's lash. The poor man was desperately trying to prove his worthiness, but it was clear to his son, even then, that despite the peasant's pain, the greater hurt was inside the man who held the whip. Therein lay his father's flaw. Compassion could never interfere with command. To rule was to know the power of fear.

  On their estates, well guarded by what amounted to a small army, were warehouses stocked with arms. Every vintage was represented, rifles honed in England, pistols from Belgium, cannon cast in the Krupp works in Essen and carted East, left on some bloody battlefield to be bartered for profit by arms scavengers. The von Kassels always provided a ready market for such goods.

  Once, when he was very small, one of the powder warehouses exploded and the villagers and the family gathered from the von Kassel lands to watch the fireworks, a spectacular ear-splitting performance, the sounds of which could still reverberate in his memory.

  "That sound is power," his grandfather, whose hand he held, had whispered, his eyes aglow with wonder at the miraculous spectacle. A week later the warehouse was still exploding. Perhaps it was his grandfather's favoritism that had charged Wolfgang's resentment. The old Baron might still have been in his prime at the time, somewhere around 1910. He could remember the dates by the stamps burned into the wooden arms crates that lined the hard mud floors of the warehouses. In those days men in resplendent uniforms arrived, sometimes in coaches pulled by arrogant horses, sitting for hours around the huge table over which hung a giant chandelier lit by hundreds of candles. The room, Charles remembered, was lined with baroque-framed mirrors and the resplendent men, beefy faced and heavily moustached, could watch themselves as they bargained with his grandfather as he and Karla and Wolfgang observed the spectacle in night clothes from the head of the stairs.

  In the night, sometimes in the tunnel of drugged sleep, he could hear the sounds that had punctuated his youth, like a repetitive musical phrase. Wagon wheels along bumpy trails, the naying of hungry sweated horses, the jangle of metal against leather, swords of rank swatting high leather riding boots, the curses of wagon drivers, and the sharp bark of throaty military orders in many languages. The language of the household was German—both as code to keep their matters private from the servants and as an insistent reminder of their origins—but tutors had taught him Russian, German, English, and French.

  There was a room in the house, part of the old section then used to quarter servants, a stone and brick configuration with high ceilings and small arched windows built for defensive purposes. But the room was filled with objects of the Teutonic Order—banners, musky and faded with time; suits of armor, shields, spears, odd ominous metal weapons, spiked heavy balls, massive axes, weapons of destruction far more frightening than the shiny samples of modern warfare that filled the special showing rooms in the von Kassel warehouses.

  But these were merely the trinkets of family history. Other tangible symbols abounded. A family cemetery surrounded by a high spiked gate, sprinkled then with more than three hundred gravestones, the dates barely visible. Familiar von Kassel names abounded on the stones: Charles, Albert, Wolfgang, Siegfried, Rudi, Fredrick. The cemetery, like the museum room, was immaculately kept, the retainers who watched over them having inherited the job from generation to generation.

  There were other symbols, too, some beyond explanation, except through the oral history of a family legend. A stone marker on a knoll at the edge of the lake, about ten feet high, a rounded phallic shape, icy to the touch in summer and winter. He had learned about that from Petya, his Estonian nurse. She was a perpetually scolding woman, with whom he had been inseparable during the first seven years of his life. He was never out of her sight. He could recall being the object of some ridicule by his brother and sister because of Petya's concern.

  It was through Petya that odd family legends were fed into his mind. God knows where she had heard them. Most of them were distorted by an underling's perception, which was understandable, except to a child's imagination. Perhaps she had made them up. She was under twenty at the time, and he could resummon the smell of her, the taste of her mouth, the feel of her soft breath, the sight of her fleshed body, her blue eyes, the color of the lake, slanted, hinting that the Mongols had moved further west than history had recorded. Her voice was low, throaty, as if she feared to raise it.

  "Speak up, Petya. I can't hear you," his mother would cry at her in exasperation. He could never understand that since he could hear every word clearly. In his mother's presence, she always kept her eyes lowered when she addressed her, fearful perhaps that she would reveal the independent spirit to which Charles was secretly exposed.

  "Here. Right here," Petya had told him slapping the phallic stone. "The first von Kassel stuck his sword on this spot and proclaimed this his land for all time."

  "Where did he come from?" the little boy, Charles, had asked, certain that he had dropped from the heavens.

  "From the West," Petya pointed, her back to the blue lake.

  "Why did they come?"

  "For God," she had said, looking skyward. "To bring us God."

  "And did they?"

  Her slant eyes looked about her nervously and she bent down putting her mouth against his ear.

  "They were the servants of the devil," she hissed. The little boy had shivered, and his lips trembled too much for him to speak.

  "The devil told them: Go East, Knights. Pile the corpses until they reach the heavens. Bathe the land in blood."

  The little boy had moved closer to her skirts, and she enveloped him in her arms.

  "And it was all that spilled blood that made the rivers and the lakes."

  "But the lake is blue," the little boy had protested, finding courage in the woman's closeness.

  "The blood of Estonians is blue," she said.

  It was to be a fatal explanation for Petya, for the little boy would remember it.

  Dinner at the von Kassels' was always a formal family event. A huge dining room opened out to a garden at one end and a parlor at the other. There were never less than twenty for dinner and sometimes up to fifty.

  Until his death, the old Baron had sat at the head of the table. Events at that stage of his life seemed more vivid to Charles, perhaps because it was the zenith of the family's old way of life, the golden age. That time was the standard by which he judged his own life. He had never lost the clarity of the image. The huge candled chandelier, steam wafting from plates piled high with foods, all pr
oducts of the family lands, voices ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of the meal, the eye-boggling display of uniforms, the elaborate coiffures of the ladies, the heavy scent of perfume laced with the tempting smells of the food; he could replicate them in his memory until tears of loss and pain ran down his cheeks.

  Dominating the etched memory, was his grandfather's ridged and bearded face. The beard was white and smartly trimmed and the face lined deeply, tanned by the outdoors, the eyes shining and intense, the nostrils always flared with excitement. His own father aped the old man in carriage and dress, down to the trimmed beard, blond, golden in some light. In appearance they were more like brothers than father and son, tall and straight, rigid even in repose as if the slightest waffle in their posture might indicate a weakening in the von Kassel chain. They both wore suits made in the finest tailoring shops of London where they visited frequently since that was the center of the world of arms manufacturing at that time. When they were gone the family was ensconced in their big mansion on the Domberg in Tallinn.

  It was at the dinners that the history of the von Kassels was verbalized. Huge tapestries decorated the rooms, depicting scenes of Teutonic glory. The Order had been founded in the twelfth century, an amalgamation of Knights Templar who had exhausted themselves in the crusades and a new group of zealous young men who burned with the passion of conversion and the lust for spoils and adventure. The battle scenes depicted both their victories and defeats.

  Yet the tapestries seemed to glorify the defeats somewhat more than the victories, as if death for the Order's cause offered the highest form of salvation. The most famous, the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410, in which the Knights were slaughtered by the Poles, was depicted in three tapestries hung in the household. Among the others, the largest depicted the defeat of the Knights by Alexander Nevsky on the frozen lake Peipus near Novgorod in 1242. The theme of the tapestries was the central raison d'être of the von Kassel legacy, in which defeats were transitory. The only permanence was survival.