by James Meek
‘Why do you do that, and none of your comrades do it?’ she said.
‘Their souls are blind. For the seeing soul, the world is a dark place, but it sees other good souls, moving across the city like lanterns in the night, and it sees the light shining from the houses of God, like this one, the light of God and his son and his angels and saints and martyrs washing out into the street, and the obedient soul’ – he crossed himself again – ‘can drink a little of this light, and when it moves on into the darkness, it carries that light, and shines for others.’
‘You don’t talk like a hussar.’
He laughed. ‘All the hussars are drinkers and gamblers and – and none of the girls have cameras. Why do you take pictures?’
‘Because I’m not good at telling people what I see.’
When they reached Anna’s house Anna asked if she could take his picture. He called his comrades to join him and she looked over her shoulder at them, and shook her head. Just him. He dismounted and stood by his horse and she took his picture. She was lucky to be there, because he was the only man in the world. The others were clay models with bad joints, and needleholes for eyes, and hearts of meat. He was the only one who was alive. She had seen a man slaughtered and left dead on the ground that day. The others were dead too, even standing up and moving. Only this one was living. He bowed and spoke words and mounted his horse and rode away, taking with him something greater in value than all her joys before, and every atom of the world was cowled again when he had gone. She had a little of him in her camera. She ran inside to show it to herself.
A heavy man in a heavy coat and heavy boots was in the hall. Her mother and another shape talked at her. They were excited and loud and explaining. It was the heavy man who was closer and dangerous to the camera. Anna wrapped it in her arms and bent her head over it and backed out towards the door. The heavy man was fast, he put his heavy hands on the camera and pulled. His strength was invincible and he tore the camera out of her, still warm from her body. Anna cried ‘No,’ her throat cracked and her ears rang with her own screaming, her mother and the shape held her while she would have left the ground, rageflung, and torn the heavy man’s head off with her teeth. He took her camera to the back yard, laid it on the ground, and smashed it into pieces with one blow of a sledgehammer.
‘Sweetest darling, what have you been doing? Where have you been with that apparatus? They wanted to arrest you.’ Anna’s mother was terrified beyond tears by her daughter’s anger.
The shape was a policeman. He asked her why she thought a young girl could walk the town alone with a camera, visiting all the lowest, least decent, least loyal vermin and taking their pictures without the authorities noticing, and she should know that only superhuman efforts on his part had allowed the destruction of the camera to be substituted for her imprisonment, trial and likely exile.
Later, after everyone had gone to bed, Anna went out in the dark yard with a lantern. She spent four hours looking for the plate with the cavalryman’s image. She did not find it. She found the mechanism controlling the camera’s aperture and took it with her to bed where she lay for a while, holding the metal iris up to the moon and making its leaves expand and contract so that one moment she was holding a tiny, intense dot of light between her fingers, the next seeing the pattern on the surface of the satellite in all its detail.
Three years later, Anna and the hussar were married. The wedding banquet was held in a meadow at the edge of town and the regiment’s officers performed feats of skill before the guests, snatching scarves from the ground at full gallop, riding standing on the saddle and splicing melons mounted on poles with their sabres.
In the early evening, the colonel of the regiment said to Anna: ‘Madam, your husband is a born horseman. He rides like one of those Tartars who were strapped astride the backs of ponies before they could walk. He handles his sabre better than any guardsman. The enlisted men will follow him. All the same I wonder whether you might not be able to persuade him to take up some other line of work. A woman as beautiful as you shouldn’t find that difficult. I don’t want to have to take him to war.’
‘I don’t want him to go to war,’ said Anna. ‘But he is a lieutenant of the hussars. He is a soldier.’
‘A man can be the perfect soldier, and be tested in his first battle, and fail,’ said the colonel.
‘Do you think my husband is a coward?’
No,’ said the colonel. ‘He is not that. He is brave to be so pious among the hussars. Believing is one thing, we all believe, but to be pious is brave. He’s been mocked for it. When he won’t join a card game for stakes, not because he hasn’t the money but because it’s a sin, he’s been mocked, and he’s not stood for it. He put a man in hospital. Did you know that? No.’
‘What is it, then?’
The colonel gazed at her without saying anything for a few seconds. Then he shrieked in her face: ‘BANG!!!’ and laughed at how she jumped.
‘Forgive me, Anna Petrovna,’ he said. ‘It’s the noise. Your husband joined the army too late to be in the war with the Japanese. He doesn’t know. Have you ever heard a howitzer firing close by, or a shell exploding fifty metres away? It’s not that it’s loud. It’s like a blow. It’s an offence. It’s shock. The sound fills your head, pressing against your skull from the inside. If we were fighting the Turcomans, or some peasant rabble, God forbid, it’d be good old blade work, and your husband would win glory for it. But if it’s Turkey, or Austria, or Germany, my God, it’ll be a thousand heavy guns on each side, all firing at once, two thousand shells a minute, loud enough to scare the devil. I can talk about it, but words tell you nothing about what that noise does to a man’s mind, even if he’s never grazed by so much as a gramme of shrapnel.’
‘But men must get used to it.’
‘We do. We’re soldiers. We’ve got thick heads, full of cotton wadding and kasha.’ He knocked his knuckle on his forehead. ‘But not all of us do. You know we have field exercises, don’t you? With the big guns. Just a few. Exercises. Yes. The thing is – I wish you and your husband every happiness. I love to see my best horsemen win the prettiest brides. There is just this to think about, Anna Petrovna. When the big guns fire, your husband flinches. Flinches every time! So use your charms!’
‘Is there going to be a war?’
‘Not till after the honeymoon! Not soon! Never, perhaps!’ said the colonel, laughing. ‘Damn you!’ he shouted to the wider company, striking the table with his hand. ‘Whose turn to toast?’
Anna’s husband returned to the table.
‘Damn you!’ said the Colonel again, glancing for a moment at Anna. Anna looked at her husband. The colonel banged the table harder. Anna saw her husband flinch.
In the evening husband and wife boarded the express to Crimea. They had a two-berth first class coupé, and the journey was to last twenty five hours. The conductor was tipped well. He made up the beds, and placed a vase of white chrysanthemums and a bottle of champagne on the table under the window. The compartment had electric lights. It was May 15, 1910.
At half past nine the villages passing outside the window, north of Kharkov, turned blue and dark, the old men left their porches, and only lovers, thieves and vagrants stirred the dust of the road. Anna saw a fox crossing a field stop and raise its head, and a moonstruck gelding cantering in circles in a paddock by a river. Anna’s husband went to wash and she pulled down the blind, undressed, put on her nightgown, and let down her hair. When her husband came back he asked if she would like some champagne. She shook her head. Her husband locked the door and they sat down facing each other across the narrow aisle separating the two beds.
‘So,’ said Anna’s husband.
‘So,’ said Anna. They laughed. Anna was trembling. She was afraid of such power. When it seemed there was no limit to happiness, her lover’s face, his limbs, his breathing, his eyes, the gentlest movement of his mouth, or a blink, told her with a stronger dose of joy that the universe was theirs to play wit
h, that all the world was crouched in listening and waiting, that time had stopped its jagged progress and smoothed down a place for them to love on as they chose, that there would be no more history until Anna and her lover said it should begin again.
Anna’s husband put out his hand to touch Anna’s, and she pulled her hand away.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Anna’s husband.
‘Nothing,’ said Anna, out of breath, her heart kicking at her ribs, trying to crash its way out. ‘I was afraid that if we touched each other, the world would die.’
Anna’s husband got up and sat beside her, putting his arms around her, and the world did not die.
‘Do you believe me?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Do you believe me when I say I love you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I do. If only you could see inside my heart, you’d know how true it is.’
‘I can. I do. I believe.’
‘We touched before.’
‘Yes.’
‘We kissed. We danced. Nobody died.’
Anna smiled and kissed him on the lips and the eyes. ‘I didn’t mean what you think I meant,’ she said. ‘It was better than you think.’
Her husband blushed. ‘Before, I only touched you where I could,’ he said.
‘And no one else? Nowhere else? Really?’
‘No one.’
‘All the girls say, “Ah, hussars, hussars!” I found the only one who’s a monk.’
Anna’s husband smiled and was anxious. ‘Do you know what to do?’ he said.
Anna shook her head and laughed. ‘Do you?’
‘It seems to me I do,’ said her husband, as if surprised. ‘But I can’t remember anyone sitting down and telling me.’
They were both laughing. ‘Shall I turn out the light?’ said Anna’s husband.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t.’ Anna frowned. ‘I’ve seen horses,’ she said.
‘No,’ said her husband. ‘One thing I’m sure of is that it’s not like horses.’
‘But you’re a cavalryman.’
‘No!’ said her husband, over her laughter.
‘Are men like horses in other ways?’ said Anna.
‘I like sugar.’
‘Other ways.’
‘Do you want me to be?’
‘Show me.’
‘You won’t be disappointed if it’s not like a horse?’
‘Show me.’
‘Will you close your eyes?’
Anna shook her head. She let him turn his back on her while he took off his clothes and folded them in a trim pile. He turned round, naked except for a gold crucifix on a chain around his neck, and sat next to her, putting an arm round her shoulders and a hand on her knee. The first man’s penis she had seen budded at the end like a tightly coiled rose no more than an hour away from blooming. She knew where it would go, where it would fit, and wondered if it would bloom inside her, if she would feel the petals unfurl against her tender inner flesh. She asked him and he smiled and said no, there’d be no petals.
‘Pity,’ she said.
‘Seed,’ said her husband.
‘Yes? Ah yes, of course.’ Anna couldn’t take her eyes off it, not that it was beautiful, not that it was ugly, but it was curious, and alive, and part of the only man in the world, and made of that element which had made her afraid to touch him for a reason she couldn’t explain to him, which was that she carried the element, too, and theirs combined might be too strong for the rest of the world. The moment of fear had passed but she still knew that when people talked about good and evil, darkness and light, they were lying, because they kept the third extreme a secret, the extreme for which love was too weak and silly a word.
‘Can you wait a while?’ Anna asked, laying her cheek on his thigh.
‘If you like,’ he said.
Anna saw how it beat a little, how strong the blood pulsed in it, and stroked the stalk with the tips of her fingers.
‘Does it always stand like that?’ she said.
‘No,’ said her husband. ‘Only for you.’
‘Only for me!’ she laughed, and kissed the bud. ‘Can you make it lie down?’
‘Not now.’
‘Oh. But it’s just for me? It’s mine?’
‘Yes. It’s yours.’
‘That’s very generous,’ she whispered, absently stroking his gift with her fingers and looking into his eyes. ‘I don’t know what I can give you in return.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’ He crossed himself, kissed his crucifix, murmured a prayer, and opened her nightdress.
‘I want everything you have,’ he said. ‘I want you all, all that you were, all that you are, and all that you will be.’
‘Take it,’ said Anna. ‘I’ll take what’s mine.’ And she took.
Not long after their honeymoon, the regiment was posted to Kiev. Anna gave birth to a son, Alexei, Alyosha, Lyosha, Lyosh. It seemed safe for her to buy a camera, and she began to make portraits, sometimes for a little money, sometimes for nothing, because a face interested her. She never spent less than a day with those she photographed, sometimes weeks. She persuaded her husband to let her photograph him nude, and made self-portraits. She and her husband fought, over his insistence on church attendance and observing the fasts and holy days, and her absences with her camera in a village or a stranger’s house, but they were among the happiest couples. Neither cared what other officers or other artists thought of them, and Anna never lost her curiosity, or her husband his desire and sureness, when they exchanged gifts.
When the Austrians attacked Serbia, and the Tsar mobilised the army, Anna told her husband that she would not let him go to war. She warned him that she would hire men to bind him, lock him in a trunk, and ship him to a neutral country. He laughed, and then stopped laughing, and then began to believe that she meant it. The war would be too loud, she said. One night he kissed Alyosha many times, while Anna wasn’t looking, and told him to be a good man, and take care of his mother when his father wasn’t home, and to fear God. He couldn’t lie, so he told Anna he was afraid his comrades would think he was a coward if he asked for a posting in the rear, and Anna believed his anxiety that night was over that. He left the house when she was still asleep, and by the time she reached the station, the regiment’s train had left. Three weeks later, a telegram came to say that her husband was missing in action.
Anna put her camera away, dressed in black, and sat in a room with the shutters closed, not speaking or crying until they brought Alyosha to her, when she began to weep for the world, losing the only man in it. Her mind was empty. She wept for days and then stopped, wondering why she was still alive when there was nothing inside her any more. Her husband had been right: there was a hell, and she and, for some reason, her son, had slipped into it, and all she could do was to try to protect him while he was there. She began a kind of life without colour, except Alyosha, and few words, except for Alyosha.
Four months after the telegram, a thick envelope arrived for Anna, with many pages folded inside. She sat in a locked room reading it alone, until there was a short scream and after a few minutes she walked into the kitchen, where the cook was talking to a soldier. Anna was smiling. She asked for a large, sharp knife, and the cook gave her one. The soldier managed to take it from her before she did herself serious injury, but there was blood. The cook went into hysterics; Anna was unconscious on the floor, bleeding. The soldier ran for a doctor. Being drunk, he took a long time, and by the time he came back with the doctor, Anna and Alyosha had disappeared, together with some of their things. There were fears for the lives of mother and son. Anna was thought to have gone insane, although there was ridicule for the soldier’s claim that rather than trying to cut her wrists, or plunge the knife into her heart, she had begun to cut off one of her breasts. The alarm ended one day when it became known that both Anna and Alyosha were alive and well. In a letter to the family
lawyer, Anna apologised for the distress she had caused, and gave assurances that her wound had been treated and was not serious. She gave instructions regarding property and goods and seemed to be in full possession of her wits. She did not explain why she had chosen to settle with her son several thousand miles away to the east, in Siberia, near the river Yenisey, in a small town called Yazyk.
The Widow
Mutz walked east off the square towards the little bridge that led to Anna Petrovna’s and, further on, to the rail depot. There were lights on in some of the houses he passed, blotches of buttermilk brightness behind double glass and window boxes. He wondered where the Russians got the kerosene from. Not from the Legion. They shared, no doubt. They were good at sharing, these ones. It wasn’t so much even that they shared their goods, their kerosene and their axeheads and their potatoes, but that they shared their time, as well. The square was a swamp, but here on one of Yazyk’s four streets, he was walking on a pavement of logs solidly bedded and up off the mud level. That wasn’t the work of one man, or of convicts. And what were they reading now, by the light of their lamps, behind those thick black log walls and tiny white-framed windows? The Bible, of course. Perhaps they were pickling, perhaps embalming, towers of cucumbers in brine and dill, or perhaps they were patching elbows and knees by that light, but no, most likely they were too excited after the service not to read the Word, to reach for it, open it up and gorge on it. Mutz, who was not religious, had once tried to read the whole book from beginning to end, Apocrypha and all. He stalled; he skimmed, he skipped. The Old Testament had some good stories but seemed like a forgery contrived to make Jews look absurd, ranting, cranky warriors with a vaudeville God on squeaky wheels, while the New kept slipping back from humility and simplicity into some machination involving cash, or ecclesiastical administration, or miracles in exchange for faith. He had apprehended all the same that its contradictions and ambiguities and vastness might attract those who were dissatisfied with the world as it was, in particular, its most tiring feature, that it kept changing. Here was a whole world that never changed, and could be compared against the real one. For such, the Bible was bottomless; that which you did not understand, demanded to be read and reread for that very reason; that which you understood, you kept coming back to, for there was an unchanging truth, when out there in the darkness all was chaos. Mutz wondered if the shaman had ever read the Bible, then remembered he was illiterate.