The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

‘I’m not sure,’ said Mutz. ‘Is that what you want it to be like?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t have any property at the moment. I always wanted a grandfather clock. And a piano. And a suit like the ones the English wear to the horse races.’

  ‘You forgot the gramophone.’

  Broucek shrugged. ‘Someone else can have the gramophone. I’d like to get back to see about the clock, though. It’s time. We fought the Reds already. They seem like Russians. So do the Whites. They all seem like Russians. They don’t need us here. They’re killing each other well enough without us. Maybe Masaryk wants to make a Czechoslovakian Empire, like the British and the French have. Maybe he thinks if the English on their little island can have the whole of India, the Czechs and the Slovaks can run Siberia.’

  ‘Not Masaryk,’ said Mutz.

  ‘The captain, is it, then,’ said Broucek.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mutz.

  ‘Some of the others think we should kill him.’

  ‘That would be mutiny.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He pays Smutny, Hanak, Kliment, Dezort and Buchar in dollars to protect him, and they have the Maxim gun.’

  ‘You could lead us out of here. You could get us to Vladivostok without the captain.’

  There was a timid knock on the door.

  ‘Mr Balashov’s outside,’ said Broucek, standing up.

  ‘I’ll see him. You go down and ask Nekovar if the shaman’s all right.’

  ‘Nekovar’s not here, brother. He’s keeping an eye on the locals gathering in the back room of Mr Balashov’s shop.’

  ‘So no-one’s on duty outside the yard?’

  ‘There’s only the shaman in there, and he’s chained, so he can’t get out.’

  ‘What if someone wanted to get in?’ said Mutz.

  They ran out into the dark corridor, past Balashov, who called something after them. Mutz’s boots and Broucek’s beat the floor in the silence of the corridors and on the threshold the soldier’s gunbolt rattled in and out. Outside it had turned colder and begun to rain.

  The two men ran through the archway and approached the shaman’s kennel, a smudge against the wall by the light from Mutz’s window. Mutz’s boot kicked against glass. He squatted down and picked up an empty litre bottle. Remnant raw spirit danced out and stabbed his sinuses. He dropped the bottle into the new mud, coughed and wiped his eyes. It was getting easier to see. The shaman was sitting in the mud with his back against the side of the kennel, his drum over his stomach, and his hands folded over the drum. Mutz shook him by the shoulder. The corroded iron animals and coins and folded tin can lids adorning the shaman’s coat beat their cat’s alley tune. Mutz took a lighter out of his tunic and held the flame to the shaman’s face. The rain was washing bile and blood out of his scraggly beard where they had trickled from his mouth. The shaman coughed and there was a smell of stomach acid and alcohol. His good eye fluttered. It did not open.

  Mutz put his hand on the shaman’s shoulder and shook. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Who gave you the drink?’

  ‘Too far south,’ said the shaman. The words were faint. He spoke good Russian through a strong Tungus accent and a throat roughened by age, illness and alcohol. In his whisper was the bare trace of a voice, like the last redness in the ashes of a fire. The words were not slurred: he sounded more exhausted than drunk.

  ‘Did someone hit you?’ said Mutz. There was a cut in the shaman’s lip.

  ‘I told him I couldn’t see his brother in the other worlds,’ said the shaman. ‘I could only hear him, down there, where it stinks. I heard the brother crying that he wanted his body back.’

  ‘Whose brother?’ Mutz turned to Broucek. ‘Have you any idea what he’s talking about?’

  Broucek shrugged. ‘My father used to get drunk and scream nonsense for hours and nobody asked him what he was talking about.’

  The shaman’s head lolled over to one side and he began coughing and vomiting. Mutz shook his shoulder again.

  ‘We have to get you inside,’ he said.

  Broucek said: ‘You have the key.’

  Mutz felt shame. He began looking in his pockets for the key to the padlock which fastened the shaman to the kennel. The shaman retched into the mud. The reflex seemed to jolt a mild current of life into him and he inhaled and opened his eye.

  ‘Damn,’ said Mutz. ‘Broucek, run back to my room. The key’s on the hook beside my bed. Shaman. Tell me who hit you. Who gave you the spirit?’

  ‘When I had three good eyes, I was a brave warrior,’ said the shaman. ‘In the singers’ stories I was a warrior. They called me Our Man.’

  ‘Please,’ said Mutz. ‘Try to understand what I’m asking you. You must tell me who did this to you.’

  ‘No,’ said the shaman. ‘He’ll pursue Our Man to the Upper World. He is a cruel demon. He is an avakhi.’ The shaman’s hand darted into his pouch, pulled out a dry dark fragment, slipped it between his lips and began to chew. ‘Our Man’ll die soon. He’s leaving.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Mutz. ‘We’ll take care of you inside. Wait a little while, just until we fetch the key.’

  ‘Our Man can’t see where he’s going now, but he can smell larches, and hear a branch creaking where a rope’s pulling on it, and smell a birch bark coffin swinging in the wind on the end of the rope.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Mutz. ‘Live! Heal yourself. You’ve lived through worse nights than this. What did he say to you, the demon?’

  The shaman’s voice changed; it had the same barely voiced whisper, but without the accent, and a harsh sneer added, as if he had recorded the demon’s voice on an acetate disk. ‘You whoring son of a bitch,’ said the shaman in the demon’s voice. ‘What did you come here for? D’you think I’m going to believe your whoring shaman visions and hang myself?’ The demon’s voice crackled through the shaman’s in a distorted European laugh. ‘Folk love blind fortune tellers. They think the less they see, the more they know.’

  ‘I can find and punish this man if you help me,’ said Mutz. ‘Did you know him? Did you meet him before?’

  The shaman breathed deeply in and out and shivered violently several times. In his own voice, he said: ‘Leaving.’

  Mutz heard the sound of Broucek running back. ‘There’s Broucek with the key,’ he said. ‘Soon we’ll have you inside, out of the rain.’

  The shaman put one of his hands palm down in the mud and made a sweeping stroke through it. ‘No deer to carry Our Man to the Upper World, and no horse,’ he said. ‘This mud is soft. Push Our Man through it to the river, push him out into the water, and let the current take him north.’

  Broucek splashed up and Mutz grabbed the key from him and unlocked the padlock.

  ‘The keel slides through the mud and floats free,’ whispered the shaman. There was a sound in his throat like an injured bird in fallen leaves. ‘In the future,’ he said, ‘everyone will have a horse.’ His head fell forward. Mutz lifted his head back, tugged at his jaw to open his mouth a little and held the back of his hand against it. He waved the lighter back and forth in front of the shaman’s good eye, and sought a pulse with his other hand.

  ‘Is he dead?’ said Broucek.

  ‘Yes. He drank himself free,’ said Mutz. ‘How does a chained man get hold of a litre of alcohol in the middle of the night in a town like this?’

  Mutz looked at the shaman’s face, tattooed lengthwise on each cheek and aged with lines crossways as deep and sharp as anything he could cut with a fine engraving gouger. The shaman’s other eye was an empty socket, lost to a bear, which the shaman had considered an honourable loss. On his forehead was the deerskin band covering his third eye, which he said was also blind, but which none of the Czechs had seen. He fought and shouted if anyone touched it. Mutz pushed the band up over the dead man’s scalp. The third eye was a swelling on his forehead, bone hard under flesh, with a picture of an eye tattooed on it. The tattoo was old, and deformed, as if it had been bestowed on the shaman when he was still young and the bone lump
had yet to grow. Over it someone had made a recent, cruder tattoo, cut with a knife point. It was a word: LIAR.

  They carried the shaman to the building in his own coat. As they passed through the rain the alcohol stink faded and they smelled wet rusting iron. They laid him down on the tiles at the foot of the stairs. Balashov was waiting there. He cried out to God when he saw the corpse.

  ‘Was he stabbed?’ he said.

  ‘Why do you think he was stabbed?’ said Mutz.

  ‘Sometimes outlaws come in from the forest. Convicts without a home. Men who have become like beasts.’

  ‘Have you any reason to think there’s a convict in Yazyk now?’

  Balashov shook his head.

  ‘You don’t sell spirit in your store, do you?’ said Mutz.

  ‘Respected lieutenant, as you know, this is a dry town. Our beliefs.’

  ‘Yes, your obscure beliefs. Not even for medicinal purposes?’

  ‘Are they so obscure?’

  ‘Obscure. Yes. All I know is you don’t use the church, you believe in God, you don’t drink or eat meat, you always find a way to turn a straight question, and we never see your children.’

  ‘Turkestan,’ murmured Balashov. ‘We sent them to Turkestan in a special train, you know … while the troubles …’ He rubbed his mouth and ran his hand through his hair as he looked down at the dead man. ‘Who would give him spirits? Perhaps they didn’t mean to hurt him. Only to be kind to another unfortunate.’

  ‘What are you doing out after curfew? I don’t mind, you understand, but you might have been shot.’

  ‘I was visiting friends on the edge of town. I wanted to see you. I’m afraid Anna Petrovna is in danger. I wanted to ask if you would send some men to guard her house tonight.’ He nodded at the shaman. ‘Poor man. Something new and unpleasant has entered our town.’

  ‘What makes you think Anna Petrovna is in danger?’

  ‘God told me. One of the Tungus will come to fetch the shaman’s body. You should put him in a cold cellar meantime. But please, I implore you, send a soldier to watch Anna Petrovna’s house.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Mutz. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘No!’ said Balashov loudly. When he said it, for an instant, another man entered his face and looked out of it, as different from the familiar Balashov as a wound is from a scar. ‘No,’ he said more quietly, the other man spinning down to nothing. A smile opened and closed and he put his hands on the lieutenant’s sleeve. He said: ‘Anna Petrovna won’t allow me – has asked me not to approach the house on account of a longstanding disagreement between us. She’s a good woman, she’s respectable and honest, with a young son, she’s a widow, widowed in the war. But you know her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mutz.

  ‘You know what a good woman she is.’

  ‘Yes. She is.’ Mutz watched Balashov’s smile coming and going, then a fit of blinking and a frown as a memory came forward.

  ‘You put her face on your money,’ said Balashov.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘It was a mistake. I should have asked her first. She was upset. I saw her at the gate, watching us when we first came into town. I remembered her face. Faces stay with me. Well, I’ll go there, anyway. Go home now.’

  Balashov thanked him and left. Mutz and Broucek enclosed the shaman in two sacks and carried him down to a dank, chilly basement storeroom, where they laid him on a bed of straw and smashed crates, in a greater nest of junk, broken furniture and rusted metal parts. Mutz was used to seeing the dead look uninhabited, husks of life, but the shaman looked like something else. Preoccupied, perhaps. As if he truly believed in what he said he could do, walk in the spirit world, and had died focusing on the last big jump there. All he had ever done was to turn his dreams into words. What else was there? It was when people tried to turn their dream words to deeds that things became difficult. Something new and unpleasant. Mutz had never seen Balashov lie so perilously before. ‘I’m going to join Nekovar for a while,’ said Mutz. ‘You go to Anna Petrovna’s. I’ll see you there later.’

  Broucek smiled and nodded.

  ‘Do you like her?’ asked Mutz, feeling a sudden churning in his guts. Broucek grinned and shrugged. ‘She’s nice,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t talk to her,’ said Mutz. He wondered if Broucek could see his face changing colour by the light of the lamp. ‘I’m ordering you, understand? See she’s all right, wait for me outside her door, and leave her alone.’

  Broucek looked hurt and embarrassed. He nodded again and trotted up the stairs.

  Balashov

  Mutz stood on the threshold of the shtab. There was no light in any window and the sound of the rain on the roof had risen to a roar. He put on his cap and an English poncho and went outside. The square was hidden in the rain and the dark; the derelict church, Balashov’s store, the abandoned offices of the pelt broker and the dairy cooperative, the houses, the statue of Alexander III, the kiosks where the Russians sold smoked fish, sunflower seeds, tracts and journals and month-old newspapers, and, lately, personal effects, watches and jewellery and ornaments. Mutz stepped forward, off the little patch of cobbles, into the mud, a layer of liquid, a hard layer below, and between them a layer as lubricious as grease. The ground gave off a thick smell of liberated dust and he felt the weight of water striking his shoulders. His boot went deep into the edge of a rut as he crossed the square and he tugged to pull it out. It came with a snap of air audible over the rain. It took several minutes to reach the other side. Mutz stopped at the corner of a barn-sized log building raised on piles, with a sign across the gable. It was too dark to read it, but he knew what it said: G. A. Balashov – Goods – Groceries. The store, with windows on either side of the door, was shuttered up. Mutz climbed the steps to the door and knocked on it gently. He put his ear to the door, listened for a while, and walked back down to the square.

  To the right of Balashov’s store was a narrow gap between it and the next building. Mutz walked through the gap, through soaking clumps of dandelion, nettles and chickweed. The store was bigger than it seemed from the square. After a couple of small windows the wall stretched back, blank, for some thirty five or forty metres. The rain had stopped and halfway along, from inside the building, Mutz heard a faint beating, a sound between a drum and a pulse, and something else so indistinct and subtle he took it at first for a tinnitus in his own ears. He’d been to the seashore, near Trieste, when he was twenty. The sound was like that.

  A steam whistle cried three times from the forest and the searchlight on Captain Matula’s train beat at the darkness beyond the roofs of Yazyk. In the back yards neighbouring Balashov’s, roped curs raised their heads and barked back. Mutz reached the far end of Balashov’s store. At the back of the building was a compound surrounded by a high, solid wooden fence. Sergeant Nekovar stood against the fence, stubby and thwarted as a shrub, the last of the rain dripping off the ends of his moustache.

  ‘Humbly report, brother, they’re all in there,’ whispered Nekovar. ‘Rotating and pronouncing and prophesying. Three hundred and forty nine individuals, two hundred and ninety one males, fifty eight females.’

  ‘Can I go up?’

  Nekovar knelt down and brought up a retractable ladder which he extended and set up against the side of the building. Its components moved with greased silence and the metal rungs were solidly joined in place. Mutz shook his head.

  ‘When you get to the top,’ whispered Nekovar, ‘lean forward and you find a handle. Pull it very gently towards you and a trap opens in the roof. Push the door upwards. It swivels. Climb in and you’ll see a small slit of light where I’ve cut a port for you to look through. The floor of the roof space is strong but move quietly or they might hear you.’ He sounded bored with his skill.

  ‘How did you do all this without anyone noticing?’ whispered Mutz, angry for some reason he didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m a practical man,’ whispered Nekovar. Oh he was bored. Give him something difficult to do.
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  Mutz began climbing the ladder. Nekovar held the foot. As Mutz reached the top the ladder swayed and bent with his weight but did not seem about to topple. Gripping the ladder with one hand, Mutz reached forward blindly, expecting to touch the wet planking of the roof. His fingers found cold, rain-smeared metal. The handle was in his fist. He pulled, pushed, the hatch opened, and warmth and dryness puffed out, and the smell of Balashov’s store, salt fish, cheap tea, dill and vinegar, sawdust, kerosene, mothballs and freshly cut wood. Mutz stepped off the ladder and into the roof space.

  The beating sound was clearer. It was the stroke of a foot stamping on timber. Mutz heard the shudder and the rasp and the pain and the many lungs now in the sound of the sea. It was a gathering of people, breathing together. He saw the light where Nekovar had cut his spyhole. He moved towards it as softly as he could in his boots, lay down, and looked through it into the warehouse at the back of Balashov’s store. A form turned in space. On either side of the warehouse were lamps and men and women swaying and breathing through their mouths, heads held back, eyes closed, hands knotted together in prayer, but there was a space around the form that spun, a ring of awe and dimness between the breathing circle and the white cloth turning. It would be a man, only a man altered to become a silent turbine, just the beat of his right foot on the floor and the hiss of the edge of his smock cutting the air. The arms were stretched out, the left heel pivoted on the floor as if fixed and oiled, the smock billowed up, and he spun, too fast to see his face, though Mutz believed it was Balashov. The smock and breeches were eyeburning white, turning so fast it seemed like a shimmer standing still, a spinning seed caught between the tree and the ground, held there whirling in a meeting of winds.

  A woman fell to the floor, crying out words in a language Mutz didn’t know, and lay there twitching and shaking her head from side to side. A man Mutz recognised from the street stepped forward and began to turn like Balashov. The breathing began to fall into time with the beat of Balashov’s foot as he spun. The assembly breathed louder, filling and emptying lungs to their limit in a second. Two more people fainted and a man screamed about the spirit. The second spinner collapsed on the floor, shook his head, got to his feet, staggered like a drunk, and prepared to spin again. Balashov whirled on, then he fell, and was caught by two worshippers. He lay in their arms. His eyes were open, but very far away.