Dark Benediction

“Tell her I am a terrible marksman, but will do better next time,” chuckled Kline. “Good thing the light shows through that skirt, eh, McCoy—or I might have burned the ‘tender demesnes.’ There! Is she still cursing me?”

“Fluently, sir.”

“I must have burned her little white hide. Give her a second to cool off, then ask what division she’s from.”

“Kakovo vy polka?”

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

“She has a very poor memory, sir.”

The major sighed and inspected his nails. They were grubby. “Tell her,” he muttered, “that I think I’ll have her assigned to C company as its official prostitute after our psychosurgeons make her a nymphomaniac.”

McCoy translated. Marya spat. The major wrote.

“Have you been in any battles, woman?” he grunted. “V kakikh srazhyeniyakh vy oochast’vovali?”

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

“She says—”

“Yeah, I know. It was a silly question.” He handed the interpreter her file. “Give these to the sergeant and have him take her up to Purvis. I haven’t the heart to whip information out of a woman. Slim’s queer; he loves it.” He paused, looking her over. “I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her, or for Purvis. That’s all, McCoy.”

The sergeant led her to the Blue Shirts’ tent. “Listen,” he whispered. “I’ll sneak a call to the Red Cross.” He appeared very worried in her behalf.

The pain lasted for several hours. She lay on a cot somewhere while a nurse and a Red Cross girl took blood samples and smears. They kept giving each other grim little glances across the cot while they ministered to her.

“We’ll see that the ones who did it to you are tried,” the Red Cross worker told her in bad Russian.

“I speak English,” Marya muttered, although she had never admitted it to her interrogators, not even to Purvis. “You’ll be all right. But why don’t you cry?”

But she could only cry for Nikolai now, and even that would be over soon. She lay there for two days and waited.

After that, there was General MacAmsward, and a politer form of questioning. The answers, though, were still the same.

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

What quality or quantity can it be, laughably godlike, transubstantially apelike, that abides in the flesh of brutes and makes them men? For General MacAmsward was indeed a man, although he wished to be only a soldier.

There are militarists who love the Fatherland, and militarists who love the Motherland, and the difference between them is as distinct as the difference between the drinkers of bourbon and the drinkers of rye. There are the neo-Prussian zombies in jackboots who stifle their souls to make themselves machines of the Fatherland, but MacAmsward was not one of them. MacAmsward was a Motherland man, and Mother was never much interested in machines. Mother raised babies into champions, and a champion is mightier than the State; never is he a tool of the State. So it was with Rufus MacAmsward, evil genius by sworn word of Porphiry Grigoryevich.

Consider a towering vision of Michael the Archangel carrying a swagger stick. Fresh from the holy wars of Heaven he comes, striding past the rows of white gloved orderlies standing at saber salute, their haloes (M-1, official nimbus) studded with brass spikes. The archangel’s headgear is a trifle rakish, crusted with gold laurel and dented by a dervish devil’s bullet. He ignores the thrones and dominations, but smiles democratically at a lowly cherub and pauses to inquire after the health of his grandmother.

Grandmother is greatly improved.

Immensely reassured, General MacAmsward strides into his quarters and hangs up his hat. The room is in darkness except for the light from a metal wall lamp that casts its glare around the great chair and upon the girl who sits in the great chair at the far end of the room. The girl is toying with a goblet of wine, and her dark hair coils in thick masses about her silk-clad shoulders. The silk came by virtue of the negligence of the general’s ex-wife in forgetting to pack. The great chair came as a prize of war, having been taken from a Soviet People’s Court where it is no longer needed. It is massive as an episcopal throne—a fitting seat for an archangel—and it is placed on a low dais at the head of a long table flanked by lesser chairs. The room is used for staff conference, and none would dare to sit in the great chair except the general—or, of course, a lovely grief-stung maiden.

The girl stares at him from out of two pools of shadow. Her head is slightly inclined and the downlight catches only the tip of her nose. The general pauses with his hand on his hat. He turns slowly away from the hat rack, brings himself slowly to attention, and gives her a solemn salute. It is a tribute to beauty. She acknowledges it with a nod. The general advances and sits in the simple chair at the far end of the long table. The general sighs with fervor, as if he had not breathed since entering the door. His eyes have not left her face. The girl puts down the glass.

“I have come to kill you,” she said. “I have come to nurse you to death with the milk of a murdered child.”

The general winced. She had said it three times before, once for each day she had resided in his house. And for the third time, the general ignored it.

“I have seen to it, my child,” he told her gravely. “Captain Purvis faces court martial in the morning. I have directed it. I have directed too that you be repatriated forthwith, if it is your wish, for this is only common justice after what that monster has done to you. Now however let me implore you to remain with us and quit the forces of godlessness until the war is won and you can return to your home in peace.”

Marya watched his shadowy figure at the far end of the table. He was like Raleigh at the court of Beth, at once mighty and humble. Again she felt the surge of exhilaration, as when she had crawled along the ridge at the river, ducking machine gun fire. It was the voice of Macbeth’s wife whispering within her: Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature’s mischief! It was the power of death in her bosom, where once had been the power of life.

She arose slowly and leaned on the table to stare at him fiercely. “Murderer of my child!” she hissed.

“May God in His mercy—”

“Murderer of my child!”

“Marya Dmitriyevna, it is my deepest sorrow.” He sat watching her gravely and seemed to lose none of his lofty composure. “I can say nothing to comfort you. It is impossible. It is my deepest sorrow.”

“There is something you can do.”

“Then it is done. Tell me quickly.”

“Come here.” She stepped from the table to the edge of the dais and beckoned. “Come to me here. I have secrets to whisper to the killer of my son. Come.”

He came and stood down from her so that their faces were at the same level. She could see now that there was real pain in his eyes. Good! Let it be. She must make him understand. Be must know perfectly well that she was going to kill him. And he must know how. The necessity of knowing was not by any command of Porphiry’s; it was a must that she had created within herself. She was smiling now, and there was a new quickness in her gestures.

“Look at me, high killer. I cannot show you the broken body of my son. I can show you no token or relic. It is all buried in a mass grave.” Swiftly she opened the silk robe. “Look at me instead. See? How swollen I am again. Yes, here! A token after all. A single drop. Look, it is his, it is Nikolai’s.”

MacAmsward went white. He stood like a man hypnotized.

“See? To nourish life, but now to nourish death. Your death, high killer. But more! My son was conceived in love, and you have killed him, and now I come to you. You will give me another, you see. Now we shall conceive him in hate, you and I, and you’ll die of the death in my bosom. Come, make hate to me, killer.”

His jaw trembled. He took her shoulders and ran his hands down her arms and closed them over hers.