The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  ‘You’re right,’ said Samarin. ‘The Mohican had no cause except his own. I said so this morning. What I wonder is this. If not thieving, if not God, is there any cause which would justify a man butchering and eating his companion in the wilderness? We’re not talking about lots here, about those stories of shipwrecked or Arctic explorers who decide by chance among themselves who has to die in order that the others live. We’re talking of a man who not only uses his own brute fighting strength to overpower his companion in order to eat him, but who raises the companion for that purpose, like a farmer fattening a hog.’

  ‘I can’t think of a cause that would justify that. Drink up.’

  Samarin swallowed his drink, gently unlocking his fingers from Anna’s. Anna filled their glasses again. His taking away his hand had startled her and his putting his hand on hers had not.

  Samarin said: ‘Supposing a man, the cannibal, knew that the fate of the world rested on whether he escaped from prison or not. Suppose this. He’s a man so dedicated to the happiness of the future world that he sets himself to destroy all the corrupt and cruel functionaries he can, and break the offices they fester in, till he’s destroyed himself. Suppose he’s realised that politics, even revolution, is too gentle, it only shuffles people and offices a little. It isn’t that he sees the whole ugly torturing tribe of bureaucrats and aristocrats and money-grubbers who make the people suffer. It’s that they fall to him and his kind like a town falls to a mudslide. He’s not a destroyer, he is destruction, leaving those good people who remain to build a better world on the ruins. To say he’s the embodiment of the will of the people is feeble, a joke, as if they elected him. He is the will of the people. He’s the hundred thousand curses they utter every day against their enslavement. To hold such a man to the same standards as ordinary men would be strange, like putting wolves on trial for killing elk, or trying to shoot the wind. You can pity the innocent man he butchers, if he is innocent. But the fact the food comes in the form of a man is accidental damage. It’s without malice. What looks like an act of evil to a single person is the people’s act of love to its future self. Even to call him a cannibal is mistaken. He’s the storm the people summoned, against which not all good people find shelter in time.’

  ‘Was the Mohican like this?’ said Anna.

  ‘I only ask you to imagine the existence of such a man,’ said Samarin. Anna was a little tipsy. She knew that. Her imagination was blurred. Samarin’s imaginary terrorist–revolutionary–cannibal didn’t frighten her as it might have done had she been sober and she’d been able to see him sharp and daylit in her mind, blood around his mouth, looking up. As he spoke to her Samarin’s voice grew warm and quick and his eyes made her important, which she liked more than she disliked the words he spoke.

  ‘Your imaginary cannibal sounds terribly vain,’ she said. She ran the tip of her index finger over Samarin’s knuckles. There was no price to be paid by anyone for such a small act of touch. She began to play with his fingers. ‘Men shouldn’t be making blood sacrifices for things they can’t know, like God, or the people,’ she said.

  ‘Are there to be no ideals?’

  ‘I thought you were the cynical one. Let’s talk about something else. Come through to the parlour.’

  Samarin followed Anna. He asked her: ‘Tell me about Lieutenant Mutz. Is he a friend of yours?’

  The Avakhi

  Mutz woke up from a shallow intricate dream. He was on a hard dirt floor and a fire at his feet was down to embers. He was in an enclosed space; the air was still, there was a faint reflected glow above his head and from either side, and there was a smell of woodsmoke and drying wool.

  ‘He’s awake,’ said Broucek. Mutz put his hands on the ground and pushed himself into a sitting position, with his back to rock and his boots still pointed to the fire. They were in a cave. The fire glowed at the cave mouth. Sitting cross-legged by the fire and staring into it was a man Mutz could not see clearly, but it was not Broucek or Nekovar, who seemed to be on either side of him.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he said.

  ‘The white creature,’ said Broucek. ‘We couldn’t wake you.’

  ‘An aboriginal?’

  ‘Tungus,’ said Nekovar. ‘A boy with pale skin and white hair.’

  ‘Does he speak Russian?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man by the fire. Now that Mutz could see him more clearly he could see he was as Samarin had described him, between a boy and a man, and hair as white as the moon. A pair of home-made goggles, the eyepieces covered in some dark woven filament, was pushed up on his forehead, and he wore a deerskin coat, leggings and boots. He held an old muzzle-loading rifle across his knees.

  ‘We were trying to rouse you,’ murmured Nekovar in Mutz’s ear. ‘And somebody started dropping larch cones on us. We look up, and see the aboriginal’s head, poking out of the rocks. Broucek was all for shooting him but I stopped him. I could see it was a Tungus, not some forest monster, and just a lad, and excuse me for saying so, but you weren’t going to last without warmth and shelter, brother. So I asked him if he had a fire. He reached down his hand and pulled me up into an opening in the rocks above that ledge where we got stuck. Even Broucek hadn’t seen it in the dark. Between the three of us we managed to haul you up there and then it was an easy hundred-metre climb to his cave.’

  ‘The Reds will see the fire,’ said Mutz. He felt weak, but clear-headed and grievously hungry. His bones ached as the warmth returned. That was foolish, forgetting his coat. He wasn’t built as solidly as Broucek and Nekovar to begin with, and there was nothing to be done about that, except to be cleverer. He was grateful to them but the gratitude was a burden, too.

  ‘The cave faces the other way,’ said Nekovar.

  ‘We’re grateful,’ said Mutz, raising his voice to speak to the albino. ‘Do you have any food?’

  The albino reached down and passed over a dirty cotton drawstring pouch with dried reindeer meat in. Mutz chewed some. It was too hard to chew; it might as well have been cow hide. He let it sit in his mouth and soften and sucked it every so often. It was a reminder of food.

  ‘Your shaman’s dead,’ said Mutz.

  ‘I know,’ said the albino.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You just told me.’

  Broucek laughed.

  ‘Wait,’ said Mutz, putting his hand on Broucek’s shoulder and continuing to speak to the albino. ‘You travel with him, don’t you? I don’t want to trouble you with questions, but there’s something here about another man which is important to us. Why were you and the shaman travelling so far south, separately?’

  ‘Our Man leaves me in the forest. He goes ahead, to the town. One month, he tells me.’

  ‘Yazyk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For drink?’

  ‘Not only. He wants a horse. He says: “Come in a month.”’

  ‘What did he mean, he wanted a horse?’

  ‘He sees them, and he wants one. He wants to reach the Upper World. The deer, he says, are too slow for me. I’m too big, he says. I need a horse to ride to the Upper World, me and the drink together. He says: “If I haven’t returned in a month, come and get my body.”’

  ‘But you could have gone together.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Of the avakhi.’

  ‘All Europeans are avakhi to you, aren’t they?’

  ‘No!’ The albino looked up from the fire, and the red of his eyes took the glow of the embers. ‘This is not a name like for all of you. This one is avakhi. This one is a demon. He is from the Lower World. We see him. We see him, and he hunts us.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘In the forest.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘He kills his friend. He kills him, and bleeds him. He hangs him up on the tree. He takes off his friend’s clothes. He cuts him open from here to here, ta
kes out his liver, and eats it while it is still warm, like he kills a deer.’

  Nekovar and Broucek shifted in the back of the cave and invoked the protection of God and all the saints.

  ‘Was there a fight?’ said Mutz.

  ‘No. We follow them and see it all. But he sees us.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘The two are walking together downstream, by the river. They eat all the food they carry on their backs. They are hungry. They don’t know how to hunt. The avakhi falls behind. Both of them walk slowly. They are tired. The avakhi lifts his head. The other European does not see it. The avakhi pulls out a knife. The other does not see it. The avakhi is not tired. He makes it seem he is. He jumps forward, once, like a dog, again, like a bear. The sound of his feet on the ground makes the other look round. He sees the avakhi. He raises his hands. The avakhi is on him. One arm pulls his head back. The other arm draws the knife across his throat. All the blood is let out. The weight of the avakhi’s body throws the other to the ground. The avakhi licks his knife. He hangs the corpse of his friend against a tree trunk. He butchers him. He cuts up every part. He hangs it all high in a birch tree to dry, the jointed legs and arms and the meat cut from the ribs. While it dries he lives off the innards of his friend. He buries the head and ribs. We watch him for days. He is not afraid. He thinks no people are near him. He lights fires.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ said Mutz.

  ‘Why should we?’

  ‘Then why did you watch him?’

  ‘The shaman didn’t see a creature from the Lower World before. Not without mushrooms. Maybe he’ll drop something we can use. It’s not our business when a man eats his friend. If he wants to eat one of us, it’s different. Then we offer him to buy a deer instead. There are many deer nearby. The avakhi can’t smell them. This is strange, for an avakhi.’

  Mutz felt the stillness of the Czechs on either side of him. They had been surprised and properly nauseated at the revelation of an act of cannibalism in their boundless, temporary Siberian parish, but they were used to it already. It was like a story in the yellow press, always lit up as something that had never happened before, and being modern, progressive men, Nekovar and Broucek had enjoyed that lighting for a moment, and now they were ready for something else, because the novelties of this age of wonders came with the assurance that just as such things had never happened before, they were certain to happen again. What made him ask more questions, when he was so feverish, dizzy and hungry, aching like a rheumatic? So perhaps it wasn’t the Mohican who had tried to eat Samarin, but Samarin who had successfully escaped the penal colony with the Mohican in his belly. Deep within himself Mutz turned in shame from the discovery that he considered it a tiny increment of advantage for his class, the intellectual eating the criminal, rather than the other way round. Still he yearned to prove Samarin’s guilt. The structures of Russia had altered, fractured and collapsed, but not so far that they could not rig up a tribunal to try a cannibal, at least. Where three gathered together, be they a rabbi, a Cossack and a Bolshevik, be they a castrate, a widow and a Czech Jewish officer, they could agree that nothing justified that. Could they not? Samarin was safely under lock and key until Mutz returned but now he might be able to persuade Matula he should remain imprisoned. If the Reds held off. What was attractive was the opportunity to show Anna Petrovna what kind of a man the student convict was: a liar, a murderer, and a maneater. The lying would hurt her most. Again, he recognised the malice in himself, and the endless reckoning of scores and balances, and recoiled from it. Was a man to be admired because he recognised the wickedness latent in himself, and knew to keep it hidden, and mainly contained, or did right conduct demand that the wickedness should not even be there? Burn it out. Like Balashov. Not that. That was not the place where it rested. Not there.

  ‘How did he find you were watching him?’ said Mutz.

  ‘One morning he’s not there, at his camp where he sleeps, where he feeds on human guts. Sometimes at night we see him waving fire at wolves. Now he’s not moving. We don’t see him. We see his friends’ limbs and chest meat hanging. The meat is dry now. When the wind blows the pieces move. Our Man says he’ll eat mushrooms. When he eats the mushrooms he sees the avakhi clearly. He eats mushrooms and we wait. It’s morning. Our Man is singing. I’m listening to his song. I eat a mushroom. We’re travelling together, Our Man and me, down the road that leads to the Lower World. We meet the avakhi’s friend. He’s angry, because he’s cut into pieces. “Look!” he says. “My arms are here, my legs are there, my head and chest are buried, my heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and other guts are all eaten. All I have is being eaten, and what’s left is food for the wolves and crows. My spirit goes naked into the Lower World.” Just then there’s a sound like the sky breaking open and the avakhi is standing over us.’

  ‘Was it a dream?’ said Mutz. ‘I want to understand. You took hallucinogenic mushroom and dreamed that you were in your hell, seeing the ghost of the dead man. Was Samarin – was the avakhi in your dream, or was he real?’

  The albino nodded. ‘Yes. He is with us there in the Lower World. He’s angry. He is real. Eating his companion’s guts has made him blind in the Lower World and he cannot see his companion’s spirit there. He shouts at us. He waves his knife. His jaws are stained with blood. His teeth are sharp and black. His breath stinks of meat. He is as high as the sky. His knife is the size of a tree. It cuts the sun when he lifts it. Red clouds bleed from the sun. He says he’ll kill us. He cannot see what we can see. He listens while Our Man tells the journey of his companion’s spirit into the Lower World. He listens to Our Man tell how sad his companion’s spirit is to be in the Lower World without a body. Our Man says to the avakhi: “Your friend is standing next to you. He is asking if he can have his body back. He says: “Take my arms and legs and chest meat off the tree, dig up my head and my ribs, and sew them together.”

  ‘The avakhi becomes more angry. His nails are like rusty picks. His teeth are like icicles. He takes Our Man. He pushes him to the ground. He kneels on his chest. He cuts in his forehead with his knife. He cuts the word LIAR in your language. Our Man cries. His third eye is blinded. The avakhi says that he kills us both if he sees us again. We leave the Lower World by separate paths. “Come for me in a month,” Our Man says. “If I haven’t returned. Now I need a horse to reach the Upper World.” When I leave the Lower World, when the mushroom is finished, the avakhi is gone. He takes his meat with him. Our Man is gone. He cannot find the Upper World, you see. He’s blind to it now. He cannot get there without a horse.’

  ‘Did you see the avakhi by the river here?’ said Mutz.

  ‘I see him throw the last of his friend into the water. His hand. He cuts the hand off a dead soldier and buries it. He eats some of the horse. He climbs the bridge. He meets a man on the bridge. They leave. I fetch the hands –’

  ‘What was he like, this man the avakhi met on the bridge?’

  ‘Too far to see.’

  ‘Does he have a name, a name in Russian, the avakhi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. He kills me. He promises.’

  Mutz reached inside his tunic to his shirt pocket and took out a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil. The edges of the pages were damp but the main part of the paper was dry.

  ‘Can you make the fire brighter?’ he said.

  The albino blew on the embers and put some spiny green twigs on. There was a smell of resin and a crown of small flames poked out of the fire. Mutz got up. His head spun and he almost fell. He recovered and squatted by the fire. He held the open notebook on his knee, steadied it with one hand, and began to sketch with the other. He drew like an engraver, making series of parallel lines, cross-hatching them to make dark areas. Nekovar and Broucek came over to watch. Their mouths were slightly open. The flames reflected from their faces and cast more light on the paper. The albino did not look. He turned away to watch the dar
kness outside. For a quarter hour nobody spoke. There was the hissing and creaking of boiling resin from the fire, the scurrying sound of Mutz’s pencil and the noise of the men’s breathing.

  Mutz finished and buffed the sketch with the edge of his hand.

  ‘Good,’ said Broucek. ‘It’s good. It’s him.’

  Mutz had drawn two heads of Samarin, each three-quarter face, one with his shaven head and no beard, the other with a full growth. He showed it to the albino, who did not look. Mutz touched him on the shoulder. The albino glanced at it and turned his head away as far as it would go.

  ‘Please look,’ said Mutz. ‘Is this him? Is this the avakhi?’

  The albino looked again. He sniffed. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Songs

  Anna sat on the divan, leaving room for another. She put her tumbler and the bottle on the dresser and lit another cigarette. There weren’t many left but she didn’t smoke often. Samarin followed, took the cigarette she offered, bent his body to the match, and sat in an armchair on the other side of the room. A single lamp burned in the corner. It lit them equally but, it seemed to Anna, the play of shadows and surfaces made the light shine more brightly and obliquely on Samarin, emphasising the hollows of his cheeks and eyes. He had chosen to sit apart. Well, there was time. He was her captive. She would take his picture tomorrow. She took a sip of cognac and laughed.

  ‘What’s it like to be my prisoner?’ she said.

  ‘Comfortable,’ said Samarin.

  What had he asked about? ‘You were asking me about Mutz. Did he say anything about me?’