by James Meek
‘Everything makes sense,’ said Samarin. ‘Except you.’
Balashov laughed. ‘We should go,’ he said.
They walked on in silence until Samarin said: ‘No, I mean it. Really, you are the one who makes no sense.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Balashov, his voice wavering as his throat dried up.
‘You’re not a barber. Unless you’re a very bad barber. Barbers don’t use scalpels and spirit and make their customers bleed like hogs.’
‘Sometimes my hand slips when I’m shaving.’
‘Shaving what? Shaving a throat with a scalpel?’
‘Please, Kyrill Ivanovich, you must understand how far we are from the nearest hospital. Sometimes I carry out small surgical procedures.’
‘I can believe you belong to one of these crackpot Siberian sects. I can believe everyone in your, what was it, Yazyk, does. But you’re too well born to be a barber, or a storekeeper, and you’re too stupid to be a political exile.’
‘Mr Samarin, I’m begging you. You’ve already said how content you are to avoid deep inquiry into other people’s lives, when they do not want their lives inquired into.’
Samarin stopped, turned, and put out his hand to stroke Balashov’s chin. Balashov turned sharply away. ‘I know what you are,’ said Samarin. He sank to his knees, held back his head and laughed at the sky, a full, long, savoured laugh. He levelled his head and looked at Balashov, shaking his head. ‘I know what you are. I know what you’ve done, and I know what you’ve lost. Extraordinary. Do the Czechs know about this? No, obviously not. They probably think you’re just regular crackpots. Well, this is very funny, although I’ll bet the man – man? Boy? – in Verkhny Luk isn’t laughing.’
‘Not lost,’ whispered Balashov.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said: “What we lost.” We lost nothing except a burden, and gained a new life.’
Samarin yawned and nodded. ‘I’m cold,’ he said. ‘As soon as I start thinking about being inside a warm building, I get cold.’ He began to move and Balashov followed, keeping a good ten paces behind, now.
‘What are you going to do?’ said Balashov after a while.
‘I’m headed for Petersburg.’
‘But there are no trains. And there’s fighting in that direc tion down the line.’
‘I’ll just have to persuade your Czechs to put me on one of their trains. Who’s their commander?’
‘His name is Matula,’ said Balashov. ‘But he is not altogether normal. His soul is sick.’
‘It’s curious that you say other people are not normal.’
‘Kyrill Ivanovich, please, whatever you do, don’t speak of our nature aloud in Yazyk. The Czechs, as you say, don’t know. We told them the children of the town were sent away to Turkestan to keep them safe.’
‘Turkestan! You old entertainer. And what about your friend Anna Petrovna? And her son Misha?’
‘Alyosha, not Misha.’
‘So he’s called Alyosha.’
‘Please don’t hurt Anna Petrovna.’
‘Why should I?’ asked Samarin. Up until this point he had been speaking without looking back at Balashov but now he turned. He sounded curious. ‘Is she worth hurting?’
Points of light appeared between the trees ahead.
‘There’s Yazyk,’ said Balashov.
Samarin stopped and looked at the lights.
‘Poor little town,’ he said. ‘Listen. There’s something you’ve got to tell me. Has a Tungus shaman been bothering the people lately? Some native charlatan who wandered out of the woods not long ago on a mangy reindeer, talking prophecies and trying to cadge drinks?’
‘There’s one who sleeps in the yard outside Captain Matula’s shtab.’
‘The devil there is. How many eyes does he have?’
‘One.’
Samarin stepped up to Balashov. ‘One good eye, you mean,’ he said.
‘One good eye, and two bandages, one over his bad eye and one over his forehead. He claims to have a third eye there, but no-one has ever seen it.’
‘Mm,’ said Samarin. ‘Poor fellow. I fear he’s the first on the Mohican’s list.’
‘You should wait here until the morning,’ said Balashov. ‘There are Czech soldiers on the edge of town at night. There’s a curfew. You don’t have a pass.’
‘Give me the bottle,’ said Samarin.
‘It’s not good for drinking, Kyrill Ivanovich.’
‘I told you to give it to me.’ Samarin’s voice had altered. It sounded more as it had in the darkness of the tunnel, an older voice quite shorn of anything of a passionate man’s highs and lows.
‘I – I don’t feel inclined to give you the bottle, Kyrill Ivanovich.’
‘You’re not a fighter.’
‘No, but you should not take the bottle if I don’t want to give it to you. You said you were not a criminal.’
Samarin’s hand darted inside his coat and pulled out his knife. He pressed it against Balashov’s cheek. ‘Give me the bottle before I finish what you started.’
Balashov put the bag on the ground, bending away from the knifeblade carefully, brought out the bottle and gave it to Samarin.
‘Now I’ve got no good reason to kill you,’ said Samarin. ‘You’ll say nothing about meeting me tonight, as if it didn’t happen. I’ll say nothing about what you were up to in Verkhny Luk. We never met. I hope that’s understood. What’s on the other side of those trees?’
‘A meadow.’
Samarin kicked away, ran through the trees and disappeared into the dark meadow, with Balashov calling after him to wait, and not to hurt Anna Petrovna. He heard Samarin’s voice calling once, his younger voice: ‘Comedian!’
Mutz
Lieutenant Josef Mutz, of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, sat at a table in his room, engraving with a skew chisel on a piece of cherry wood by the light of a kerosene lamp. Every minute or so he brought his nose close to the wood before consulting a smudged newspaper clipping with a photograph of Thomas Masaryk. He blew on the engraving and pressed it against an ink stamp. He took a small, rectangular piece of blue paper from a pile in front of him. On the paper, in Russian, Czech and Latin, were printed the words ‘First Slav–Socialist–Siberian Bank of Yazyk: One Billion Crowns’, and the number in figures. Mutz breathed on the woodcut and pressed it onto a blank area of the paper. An image of the first president of Czechoslovakia dried into the note. Masaryk’s glasses came out smudged but the fine detail on the wrinkles round his eyes was there, and under the beard, Mutz had caught the faraway smile with which, for decades, the president had listened while fools talked. Mutz took a fine-pointed gouge and worked over the spectacles again. It was important that Masaryk didn’t look as if he was wearing dark glasses. In Mutz’s mint the eyes of good men would always be seen.
The lieutenant’s mint was made of a large printer’s tray set on its side to form pigeonholes, with a backgammon board nailed horizontally to the bottom, stained with the indelible brains of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Chupkin, whose head had been punctured by a sniper just when Mutz had been about to beat him, as he always did, although Chupkin refused to recognise any previous defeat, a stubbornness which had permeated his nerve cells and made scrubbing at the mess with sand and water as futile as trying to change his mind about the role of the bourgeoisie in the class struggle when he was still alive. The board held Mutz’s chisels and gouges. The pigeonholes contained the short history of inflation in Yazyk under Czechoslovakian martial law, notes from one to 100 million crowns and the wooden plates to go with them. There were not many one-crown notes left. They had lasted a whole two months, while Mutz had been able to hold Matula to a standard, tying the value of money printed to the amount of food in the district. They were worn to limp softness and had lost all worth. Mutz took out the one-crown plate and ran his fingertips over the grooves. It was so long since it had been used that the ink had dried and left no mark. Mutz set down a fresh blank, ink
ed the plate and printed a new copy. The image he had devised for the one-crown note was a woman representing Liberty. The word ‘Liberty’ was written underneath the woman, who might otherwise have been mistaken for someone famous, or at least someone in particular rather than a symbol, because he hadn’t shown her full length, storming the barricades, but only her head and shoulders. Her head was bare, with a mass of long kinked hair bound at the back. She had a pointed nose, and her upper lip was fuller than the lower, finely outlined and a fraction upturned. She was gazing out of the note at the bearer with round dark eyes which she had used for so long to devour the world, and laugh in delight at the comedy of it, that even when there was nothing left to laugh at she hadn’t been able to make them look away.
Mutz looked at Liberty for a time, his face burning. He worked his neck, cold fingertips on the warm muscles, put the one-crown note in his shirt pocket and the one billion-crown note between his lips, got up and began clearing the clutter from his bed. He laid mammoth teeth, white lumps the size of bricks, on the floor, stacked specimen boxes containing mounted Siberian moths on a shelf, put a sheaf of Bolshevik propaganda cartoons in chronological order and slotted the draft of an account of the geology of the upper Yenisey into the library of notes in a trunk by the door. He lay on the bed and held the billion-crown note up to the light. No watermark. In Prague now they’d be using new Czechoslovakian money, with watermarks. With fewer zeroes. One day, let it be soon, a hundred men in ragged uniforms would disembark from a train in Prague and march towards the pub, and for the men in new suits and women in new dresses stopping in the street to stare the war would have ended a long time ago, and they would be embarrassed by these armed soldiers marching among their fashions, insisting like madmen that they’d been fighting for Czechoslovakia in Siberia. And the men of Captain Matula’s company of the Czech Legion would walk into the pub, quiet, licking their lips, and try to pay for a drink with the Imperial money they’d carried in their pockets for five years, across Eurasia and America and the Atlantic, and the landlord would shake his head, and show them the new money, the Czechoslovakian money, didn’t they have any of that? And one of them would dig in his pocket again and bring out a wrinkled billion-crown note from the first Slav–Socialist–Siberian Bank of Yazyk, and whack it on the bartop, and demand one hundred beers. And the landlord would serve them, perhaps out of pity, perhaps out of fear, perhaps because for a moment he might see his customers lined up in scruffy parade in a town on the steppe on the other side of the world, waiting to go home.
Mutz heard voices from the yard below his window, where Captain Matula kept the shaman chained to a kennel. It was almost midnight. Mutz got up and opened the window. He was on the upper storey of the Czech shtab, which had been Yazyk’s administrative building. The only other light, apart from his own, was the sentry’s lantern, which hung on a hook in the archway leading to the yard. He saw the silhouette of Sergeant Nekovar in the archway. Nekovar turned round and moved out of sight.
Mutz called down to the shaman. He couldn’t see him but heard a body slithering in the mud and a chain clink.
The shaman coughed through deep curtains of phlegm and said: ‘Everyone will have a horse.’
‘Have you been drinking?’ said Mutz.
There was silence, and the cough, and in it the answer: ‘No.’
‘Sleep then,’ said Mutz, and closed the window. Captain Matula was jealous of the shaman’s dreams. The captain – who had attended seances in Prague before the war and seduced a black-eyed medium with hair the colour of Carpathian rock oil, believing her to be of Brahmin blood, only to find when they lay warm and damp in her unhooked perfumed silk and linen that her blood line had gone no further than Pressburg since the Stone Age – believed that when the shaman slept, his spirit roamed the taiga. The captain wanted to know what the shaman had seen, and how he made his spirit mobile, and in which worlds he walked; was it possible that the astral plane visited by European spiritualists was a busy, gossipy, modish place, like a Viennese coffee shop, all fern fronds and delicacies and ostrich feathers, where friends became lovers and lovers glanced at neighbouring tables, and news from the living was a waiter’s murmured call to the telephone; while the shaman’s upper and lower worlds were wide plains where heroes, demons and reindeer raced and fought, places of blood and iron? When the shaman had first come to Yazyk, looking for a drink, the captain gave him a room and a bunk and a little vodka and ordered him to pass on his shaman secrets, to help the captain establish order over the lands north of the railway, up to the northern ocean, to help a hundred Czechs partake of the mysteries of the larch forests. The shaman had asked for more drink, and then fallen asleep. When he woke up he started coughing blood and called Matula ‘avakhi’, which means ‘demon’ in the Tungus language. He called all the Czechs and Russians avakhi. He said an avakhi had blinded his third eye in the forest and his spirit could no longer see anything. Matula said he’d open his third eye, and ordered him to be chained up to stop him escaping or finding drink until he began to see again, and revealed his secrets.
Mutz lay down on the bed. There was a shuffling of boots outside the door and he heard Broucek calling his name. Mutz ordered him in.
In the doorway Broucek stood holding his rifle so that the muzzle bobbed a few centimetres off the floor, fidgeting with his collar with the other hand.
‘Humbly report, brother,’ he said. ‘Mr Balashov. Wants to talk to you.’
‘You don’t have to say “Humbly report” any more,’ said Mutz. He swung his legs off the bed, sat on the edge and wondered aloud what Balashov was doing out after curfew.
‘Mr Balashov is very nervous,’ said Broucek.
‘He is nervous.’
‘More nervous than usual.’
‘Sit down.’
Broucek sat on the bed next to Mutz, holding onto his rifle muzzle with both hands. He was dark as a gypsy, although he said he wasn’t one, and insisted, without ever getting angry about it, that no gypsy had ever come close enough to his mother to have contributed to the conception, or to have popped a changeling in the crib. He was tall and moved his height around with shambling grace. His mouth was slung in a permanent half-smile and his big inky eyes looked down on everyone with innocence and interest. He was not witty, he had no stories to tell, and he was not a good liar or flatterer, but in the course of the journey from Bohemia to Siberia he had found how attractive to women he was and, without intending to, had picked up, from them, the language that he could use to charm them. His friend Nekovar, who had devoted his life to identifying what he described as the mechanical basis of female arousal, was constantly badgering him for data. In the meantime, they were a farm hand and a draughtsman made soldiers. On the worst day of their reluctant service, in Staraya Krepost, Broucek had hung back, not wanting to take part, and never noticed how the women’s screams choked into a horror more silent and terrible when they saw the fresh, clean, unlined face of Broucek, beautiful and unworldly, among their tormenters, when the women realised that angels and devils were far closer to each other than they would ever be to them.
‘Here’s the new money,’ said Mutz, showing Broucek the billion-crown note. Broucek took it and studied it for a long time.
‘There are nine zeroes,’ he said.
‘Yes. It’s a billion. We’re all going to be billionaires.’
‘A billion is a lot.’
‘It’s a hell of a lot. It’s a thousand millions.’
‘A thousand millions!’
‘Yes!’
‘When I was working on the farm in Bohemia we got ten crowns. Ten!’ Broucek grinned and his hands sprang fingers. ‘You could buy all sorts of things with ten crowns. Kilo of coffee, or playing cards, or a handkerchief, or a bottle of cognac, or a pair of boots, or a day ticket to Hradec Kralove, or a newspaper, or an English hat, or an axe, or a mousetrap, or a mouth organ, or a bunch of carnations, or a bag of oranges. And the last time we were paid we each got, how much?’
‘Five hundred million crowns.’
‘Yes. And there wasn’t anything to buy, except sunflower seeds, and they cost a hundred million for a packet. Maybe it’s because Siberia is so big. Maybe that’s it. Like the same thing happens with the miles as happens with the money. In Bohemia if you travel ten miles everything changes. Here you go thousands of miles and everything looks the same. Flat, with birches and crows. Is that Masaryk in the picture?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve drawn him well. When’s he going to bring us home, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
Broucek sniffed and leaned forward to scratch his nose on the tip of the rifle muzzle. ‘Must be fine for him in Prague,’ he said. ‘He’ll be in the castle now. He shouldn’t have left us here in Siberia, should he. Maybe he’s forgotten us.’
‘No, said Mutz. ‘But you know. When the French and the British and the Americans got together and decided how to carve up the Empire, everyone who wanted a bit of it had to bring something to the table. Something valuable, like gold, or coal, or blood. And Masaryk didn’t have any gold or coal to offer.’
‘Didn’t he?’ said Broucek. ‘I thought he was rich.’
‘Not in those things.’
‘So it’s blood, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Our blood.’
‘Yes.’
‘We fought the Germans. Wasn’t that enough blood for them?’
‘That was good, but now that the Germans are beaten, the French and the British and the Americans are worried about the Reds.’
‘Because they killed the Tsar.’
‘More because they want to divide all the property up and share it out.’
‘Yes, I heard that,’ said Broucek, nodding. ‘It sounds like a good idea. Isn’t that what Czechoslovakia is going to be like when we get back?’