The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  Gradually the breathing and the talking in tongues lessened and, without speaking, the celebrants walked to and fro across the warehouse, embracing and kissing each other on the cheek. Some drank tea. The movement began again. One after another, like Balashov, they began to spin, and the whisper of the hems in the air and their breathing and the gentle beat of their moving feet were like a crowd of children running through a wheatfield, trying not to be heard. Balashov rose and spun again, drifting to the middle of the room. An eagle-like woman, with a heavy brow, hooked nose and broad shoulders, was beside him and one by one the others fell or fainted or stopped spinning and stumbled back to the edges. After a time only Balashov and the eagle-like one were left, their faces and bodies half transparent, fogged with speed, spinning with the hands of their outstretched arms crossing, like wheels of a marvellous engine, joined but not touching, in unity and harmony. A sharp sound came from the eagle-like one, arcing out into the roofbeams, and she spun away from Balashov and began to slow down until she stopped and stood still, upright, bright with sweat, hair slicked and wild like a egret, dress sticking to her flat, smooth chest. Was she a woman?

  ‘Brothers and sisters, Christ that you are,’ said the eagle. ‘I have flown to a high place, in an emerald aeroplane, to the eyes of God. Angels dressed me in a coat of leather, white as snow, and diamond pilot’s goggles, and a leather helmet, like pilots wear, only white. I flew for many hours through the darkness until I could see, far away, the great, bright eyes of God burning, like two Londons in the night. As I grew closer I could see the million electric lamps of heaven, millions upon millions of shining lights, and the sound of angels singing from a hundred thousand gramophones. God’s words pass to earth through telephone wires as thin as spiders’ silk, my friends, as numerous as all the hairs on all the heads in Russia, and the angels most favoured of the Lord drive golden cars, with tyres of pearl, and horns of silver. I flew my emerald aeroplane across the face of God, and far below, on a green hill, by a river of electricity, I saw Jesus Christ our Saviour talking to our Christ, our angel, our brother Balashov. I see him returning now, brothers and sisters, I see Gleb Alexeyevich returning from heaven, with his news, with his messages from God. He is coming back! He is here!’

  The cryback came from the wall shadows: ‘He is here!’

  ‘Brothers and sisters,’ said Balashov. Sweat dripped from his chin. He was swaying and blinking and slurring his words. He inhaled slowly, a long, deep breath, and let it out. He steadied and smiled. The smile turned to an inlooking blankness, as if his spirit was too leaky a vessel to hold happiness for long.

  ‘Yes,’ said Balashov faintly. ‘Yes, I have been there and spoken with our friend, our brother, the son of God, he who cares for the white doves.’

  ‘He cares for us,’ came the murmur back from the wall shadows. ‘Not for the dead ones, the crows.’

  ‘He told me that heaven’s time is different and that the years should be counted as hours. We’ve been living in Yazyk through the hours of night, but the dawn is about to break.’

  ‘Amen!’

  The responses from the wall shadows brought Balashov further in from where he had been. His voice strengthened. ‘In the first hour,’ he said, ‘the Tsar’s commissioners came to our village and tried to conscript those among the white doves who had been men. By the grace and love of God, we made them understand we did not fight, and they left.’

  ‘A season on earth is but an hour in heaven,’ came the mutterback.

  ‘In the second hour, the ones calling themselves socialist revolutionaries came, praised our virtue, admired our life in common, and took our chickens.’

  The wall shadows laughed.

  ‘In the third hour, the Tsar’s men came drunk and called us traitors, unbelievers, they beat the brothers and sisters, they made us kiss icons and drink vodka, and took our horses and left. The Land Captain and his household went with them.’

  ‘Wolves! To steal from the angels!’

  ‘In the fourth hour, the influenza came to the village while we were weak from labouring without horses, and twelve of us moved to live with Christ always.’

  ‘He knows his own!’

  ‘In the fifth hour, the ones calling themselves Bolsheviks came, with their red banner, told us to rejoice that the Tsar, our enemy, was dead, and that now we were free to live as we chose under communism. We told them that we had always lived a life in common. They laughed, took all the food and cutlery they could carry, and left.’

  ‘Crows!’

  ‘In the sixth hour, the Czechs and a Jew came. They searched our homes, took our food, and began to kill and eat our cattle. They shot the teacher. The Land Captain returned. The Czechs promised to leave. They stayed.’

  Silence in the wall shadows.

  ‘The seventh hour is coming. The seventh hour is winter, and we are hungry, even though we share.’

  ‘The angels share!’

  ‘But the seventh hour is the dawn. He told me. The Czechs and the Jew will leave, and no more will come, and we will have milk and bread again, and send butter to market. The sun will rise on Yazyk, and the train will come weekly without soldiers. This will be next, brothers and sisters, and we must pray and be patient. No more Tsar’s men, no more revolutionaries, no more red banners, no more westerners. We shall live our life in common for all eternity, here on earth as in heaven, without sin, restored to that state of Adam and Eve before the fall.’

  ‘We have mounted the white horse!’

  ‘Yes, sister. We must pray and be patient. Last night in Verkhny Luk I helped a young man mount the white horse and find salvation. He wept and held my shoulders while he bled, praying and thanking God for the strength to find salvation. Look, on my shoulder, the marks of his fingers! Afterwards he stood and threw the keys to hell into the fire alone. You see, even without sin, even without children, our numbers are growing. Patience, it will be soon, by the first hard frosts, they will all be gone.’

  ‘The widow too,’ said a woman’s voice from the wall shadow. It was not a response, or a question. It was the eagle. She spoke as to weave her prophecy in with Balashov’s.

  ‘The widow,’ said Balashov, looking down at the floor and wiping his palms on his smock. ‘Christ said nothing to me about the widow. She lives here. In heaven, their names weren’t mentioned, sister. Friends! It’s late. A psalm, then let the needy make their petitions, and our closing prayer.’

  Balashov opened his mouth and sang:

  My wonderful Eden

  How bright was my day

  My soul and my comfort

  In paradise lay

  I lived there with God

  Immortal, as one;

  He loved me as closely

  As his own true son.

  ‘Amen!’ came the cryback from the wall shadows. And: ‘Immortal!’

  Mutz heard footsteps behind him and squirmed round, flailing his boots and arms like an overturned beetle in the darkness. His wet poncho became hopeless batwings in his panic, and he bit his lips together to stop himself crying out. His right foot connected with something mobile in space which, horror, took hold of the bootsole and would not let go.

  ‘Brother!’ whispered Nekovar. ‘You must go back to the shtab. They’ve caught a doubtful character sneaking about. Outsider, brother. Knife on him the size of a sabre.’

  The Convict

  One of the rooms in the shtab had been made into a cell. Several times Matula’s enforcers had brought Czech soldiers there to hurt them when they complained too often about not going home. Every once in a while, as now, the forest and the railway, a single track spur off the main Trans-Siberian one hundred miles to the south, threw up the scraps and peelings of war’s kitchen. A Cossack deserter from Omsk had been in, purging himself of alcohol and tearfully repenting his rapes and burnings. They let him go after a few weeks and he walked back into the forest. Perhaps he was still there. Perhaps he had walked out in a different place, with a different name and a
different history. It was a good time for that. There was a Hungarian who claimed to be an ex-prisoner of war trying, like the Czechs, he said in broken German, to go home. Matula judged him a spy and shot him personally. There was socialist revolutionary Putov, who claimed he was visiting relatives. Eager young fellow, pleasant company, with big eyes and sleeves over his knuckles. He had wandered off somewhere. And the fur-buyer from Perm. They had no excuse to lock him up. He was as Russian as black bread and vodka, and he had papers. But there was no way Matula could persuade him to stay otherwise, and Matula wanted to talk to him about the mysteries and wealth of the taiga. So he put him in the cell for a week, then sent him on his way with a sack of salt red fish and an ugly birch bark nativity scene by way of an apology.

  Mutz carried a lantern down the unlit corridor leading to the cell. It was dank and chilly in the night cold after the rain. The light from the lantern raced up and down the corridor as the lantern swung. It flashed on eyes and belt buckles ahead. The voices of Racansky and Bublik, the captors, rumbled. At night in these bare corridors, with parquet floors long since worn clean of varnish, with whitewashed walls and high damp ceilings, any two people talking together sounded like a conspiracy.

  ‘Look, Racansky,’ said Bublik as Mutz approached. ‘Illumination is for the officers. Now, there’s a metaphor for the class struggle.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Mutz. ‘But I’m not going to give you the lantern.’

  ‘Even the prisoner has a candle,’ said Racansky.

  ‘We gave him ours,’ said Bublik. ‘Rightly.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I believe we’re in the presence of greatness, comrade Jew-lieutenant, sir. His name is Samarin. A political prisoner. Escaped from a place up north. I think he may be a Bolshevik. A revolutionary!’

  ‘And you like that.’

  ‘What good honest man doesn’t? The alliance of soldiers, peasants and workers –’

  ‘Then why did you lock him up?’

  There was silence. Bublik cleared his throat and fidgeted with the safety catch of his rifle.

  ‘Matula,’ said Racansky.

  ‘I know,’ said Mutz. ‘When are you going to make a revolution against him?’

  ‘A revolution without lanterns?’ shouted Bublik. He gave Mutz the thumb-between-the-fingers. ‘You’d be next against the wall, comrade bourgeois.’

  ‘He’s all right, Tomik,’ muttered Racansky.

  ‘In the revolution, nobody is all right,’ said Bublik to the floor.

  Mutz opened his mouth, then closed it. He desired some form of address for these men. To that extent he was still hiding under the ruins of the empire that he had lived in, and which had died. He had a weakness for categories. Most people did. He was the comrade-jew-lieutenant-sir. He knew what a risk it was to hug old categories to you in days of revolution and civil war and new countries, yet could not resist. He opened his mouth again. ‘My …’ Bublik looked up. ‘… co-functionaries.’ Bublik’s eyes narrowed and his whiskers seemed to twist back, like a cat’s ears. He was contemptuous, but he couldn’t help liking the phrase. ‘Did you search him?’

  ‘He has the dirt of a man on him,’ said Bublik.

  ‘He stinks,’ said Racansky. ‘And he’s got lice.’

  ‘We’ll get him cleaned up,’ said Mutz. ‘What did you find?’

  The lantern was guided to a foul rag laid on the floor. On it was a length of metal fashioned into a rough knife, a rolled-up scroll of bark, some lengths of string made from the guts of an animal, and a cardboard wallet.

  ‘Not much, is it,’ said Racansky.

  Mutz opened the wallet and took out the photograph. His guts lurched. ‘This was in his possession? Does he know Anna Petrovna?’

  Bublik and Racansky crowded into the light to see the photograph. ‘We didn’t realise it was her,’ said Racansky. ‘He said he’d found it in the street.’

  Mutz picked up the scroll and unrolled it. On it was scrawled, in slovenly capitals, ‘I AM DYING HERE. K.’ He put the scroll and wallet in his pocket and asked if Samarin had said anything else.

  Bublik put his face close to Mutz’s and grinned. ‘Somebody tried to eat him,’ he said.

  Mutz took the key to the cell and turned it in the lock. ‘I’ll leave it open,’ he said to the soldiers. ‘Watch for trouble.’

  ‘If you lay a hand on him, you’ll have us to answer to,’ said Racansky.

  Mutz entered the cell and closed the door behind him. He looked down at the prisoner, who had fixed the candle to the end of the iron cot and was sitting cross-legged under its light, on the floor, reading an old copy of Czechoslovakian Daily. They were all old by the time they reached Yazyk.

  ‘Do you read Czech?’ asked Mutz, in Russian.

  Samarin looked up. ‘Do you have any cigarettes?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  Mutz put his hands in his pockets and regarded the prisoner. Samarin’s thin, used face brandished disdain and an impatient, turning mind. His eyes reached out; they could touch, stroke, poke or claw at what they saw.

  ‘I’m sorry we have to lock you up,’ said Mutz. ‘Strange as it may seem to you, we have the jurisdiction here, and since you have no papers, we have to look more closely into your story.’

  ‘It’d be easier to put me on the next train to St Petersburg,’ said Samarin.

  ‘It’s two thousand miles to Petrograd, and they’re shelling the Omsk suburbs,’ said Mutz. ‘You know that, don’t you?’ He crossed the room and sat on the cot. By the light of the candle he saw a tiny movement in Samarin’s hair and he shifted further up the mattress. The straw stuffing wheezed under his weight.

  ‘When I was arrested, it was still called Petersburg,’ said Samarin.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘In 1914. I was tried and reached the labour camp at the White Garden in 1915. I broke out in January. Nine months ago. I’ve been walking for nine months.’

  ‘There’ll be a hearing of your story tomorrow,’ said Mutz. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions now.’

  ‘Well?’ said Samarin. He coughed, hawked and spat into the corner, put his forearm on his knee, and rested his head on it. Mutz saw that he was not just tired. He had been crushed in five years among convicts, and in the wilderness. The life of his old bright, quick mind had flickered up, deceiving Mutz when he first saw him, but now the emptiness was slipping back; he had seen the hollowing out of convicts before, when the emptiness is not an absence of vitality, but vitality is a occasional desperate trick to hide the emptiness.

  ‘How did you cut your hand?’

  ‘It’s full of sharp edges out there. A jagged branch.’

  ‘Do you know anything about a Tungus shaman with a deformed forehead?’ said Mutz.

  Samarin shrugged. ‘I met one like that in the forest a few months ago. The circumstances were difficult.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Another convict was trying to butcher me.’

  ‘Yes. The attempt at cannibalism. And not since then? Did you bring any alcohol into town this evening?’

  Samarin lifted up his head and laughed. Mutz half-stood in surprise. It was as if he had been standing in the hallway of a cold, dark house, having a shouted conversation with a half-asleep, muttering voice upstairs, when suddenly the owner had thrown open the door, put on the lights and lit the stove. It was not that he had misjudged Samarin but that he had not been talking to him until now.

  ‘Lieutenant Mutz,’ said Samarin, getting up and looking down at his interrogator with one hand in his pocket and the other stroking his bearded chin. ‘Before you ask, they told me your name, the comrades. Don’t you think this is all rather topsy-turvy? Here I am, a student in my own country, a convict only by definition of a tyranny which has now been overthrown, along with the laws under which I was arrested. Yet I am being incarcerated by you. Who are you? A Jewish officer, commissioned by the army of an empire which no longer exists, now serving a country which you’ve never visited, because it’s only a yea
r old, and it’s three thousand miles away. It seems to me that I should be locking you up, and asking you what you are doing here.’

  Mutz looked up at Samarin, who stood over him with arms folded and eyebrows raised. He was tall, and looked cleaner, somehow. Clapping came from the corridor outside and Bublik cried ‘Bravo!’ Mutz felt himself falling into a well of sadness. He studied his boots, pursed his lips, and said: ‘Well. I intend to go to Prague when I can, of course. What’s the significance of this scroll?’

  He took the scrap of bark out of his pocket. Samarin snatched it away from him and held it into the flame of the candle. It burned so fast he dropped it and trod it out.

  ‘That was nothing,’ he said quickly. ‘In the White Garden the convicts would throw these out of the punishment block. I don’t need to be reminded of that. I didn’t know I had it in my pocket.’

  ‘For eight months?’

  ‘K … who was K? Kabanchik, I believe it was. A good thief, if it comes to getting in and out through a small, high window.’

  ‘What about the photograph?’

  ‘As I explained to the young Czechs out there, I came into the town from the north, along a stream, and after I passed the first farm, when the path becomes a road, I found the wallet lying on the ground.’

  ‘In the dark.’

  ‘I have good eyesight.’

  ‘Do you know the woman in the photograph?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Well, do you know her?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘I do.’ He rubbed his forehead with the fingers of his right hand. ‘I’m not a policeman. I’m not a detective.’