The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  ‘He was upset that I found a photograph of you someone dropped.’

  ‘He used to visit me. He’d stay overnight.’ Anna held her breath, trying to see if Samarin reacted to this. He didn’t. ‘It’s lonely here for a woman. Do you think I’m a slut?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I like a drink. I like company, sometimes. I like to like myself when I look in the mirror. I sing. So Mutz – he liked me, and that’s the most attractive thing in anyone. He’s kind. He has a good face. I don’t mean handsome, though he is almost that, and I don’t mean his face expresses good intentions, though it does. You can’t separate the two; perhaps he’d be ugly without the good intentions, and look like an idiot without the well-made features. Perhaps what it means to be civilised is not to force yourself to like people however they look, but to force yourself to stop wondering whether the way they look makes any difference to whether you like them. He’s clever. He knows so much about so many things. Yes, he’s Jewish. Yes, a Jewish soldier in Russia is like a penguin in the desert. You know here, it matters less? Siberia. Any live human being is exotic here. Would I have had the strength to take a Jewish husband to Europe, to deal with the slanders and suspicions of his people and my people and, what, bricks through the window, I suppose? I don’t know. Perhaps that would have made me love him. But I didn’t, not here. I’m not sure why. It’s not that he’s Jewish. He’s not religious. He’s an outsider among the Czechs, but it’s more that he seems German, to them, than Jewish. It doesn’t matter to some of them that he speaks Czech better than they do. They think of him as German. And in some sense, perhaps, they’re right. Even now, even here, he inhabits a place that doesn’t exist any more, an empire of all sorts of languages and nationalities, but where the rules were in German, and they spoke German in the offices, where the trains ran in German. He worked as an engraver in a firm in Prague which printed share certificates in that empire. All in German. I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with German, I mean he was attached to that world of a certain order. Attached in a way we mustn’t be to organisations, but men so often are. His empire was kind to him and he was unhappy that it died. I think he was disappointed that the Austrian empire hadn’t become an Austrian United States. It unsettled me that behind his sense of order, of the right way of doing things, his need to put everything in its place and understand who was doing what to whom, was this set of laws and manners from a world which no longer existed. I was angry when the Czechs shot the teacher. We called him the teacher, he was an exile who taught Alyosha to read and write and count. Of course Josef was angry too, but he said something I could never forgive him for. He said: “We have such stupid rules.” As if the rules were the point, and not the shooting. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Samarin.

  ‘He was nice, though. He is nice. He could never talk to Alyosha like you. He lost his whole family when he was a child, in the strangest way. I don’t mean lost as in they died. Lost. Mislaid. His parents and brothers and sisters emigrated to the States when he was very young, and at the last minute he fell ill. His family had their passage booked, they had very little money, they left Josef behind with an uncle and went, with the plan that he would join them later. And the family arrived in America, and disappeared. Who knows what happened to them? Perhaps they died in a fire, or a railway accident. Perhaps letters were mislaid; a misunderstanding of the American way of writing addresses. Ten years after they left, when he was twenty, Josef went to America to look for them. He spent three months searching around Chicago. He didn’t find them. Even so everyone was surprised that he came back to Prague.’

  Anna stopped, taken by a feeling she’d been talking too much. She was on the way to being drunk and Samarin was sitting there with deep listening eyes, which seemed to get deeper the more she filled them with her rambling thoughts. She would have another drink, and so would he. He would sort her many stories into one. He had that power. She got up and refilled his glass and her own, and sat back down. She crossed her legs and uncrossed them to make him look at her legs, and he did. She wondered if he was really clean. She wondered if she cared.

  ‘It was strange you finding that photograph,’ she said. ‘I made a present of it to one of the local men. Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov. He runs the store on the square. He pestered me for a picture for so long, and then he went and lost it.’

  Samarin nodded. ‘You were generous to let him have such a photograph.’

  Anna blushed and said quickly: ‘Balashov’s sweet, but very devout. You do know they’re not really Orthodox in this town, don’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I’m sorry I don’t have a gramophone. We should have some music.’

  ‘You have a guitar over there.’

  ‘It’s out of tune.’

  ‘We could tune it.’

  ‘I play very badly.’

  Samarin rose, picked up the guitar by the neck, swung the body into the crook of his arm, and ran his thumb across the strings. He came over and handed it to Anna.

  ‘It’s perfectly in tune,’ he said. ‘When you mentioned music, you must have wanted me to bring it to you. Play.’

  ‘Well, sit down,’ said Anna, nodding at the empty place in the divan beside her and setting the instrument on her lap. She played the open strings one by one and fiddled with the tuning keys. She felt his weight settling into the divan and blushed.

  ‘I play very badly,’ she said again.

  ‘Everyone plays badly,’ he said. She glanced at him. He sat leaning against the corner of the back of the divan with his hands behind his head, watching her and smiling. A small silver fish swam ticklishly up from her womb to her breast, leaving a trail of effervescence. She tried to hide from him the light of permission in her eyes and pressed her teeth gently into her lower lip to stop herself smiling too much.

  She began to pluck the strings. It was a man’s song she played for Alyosha and now she tried to sing it more gently, without the heavy marching rhythm.

  The Most Honourable

  Leavetaking, Esquire

  We’ve been brothers long enough

  To know which one’s a liar

  Letter in an envelope

  No, wait, don’t pull it out

  Death’ll give me longer

  To see what love’s about

  The Most Honourable

  Dearest Lady Luck

  Sometimes you arrive in time,

  Sometimes you get stuck.

  An ounce of lead in your heart?

  Hear your trigger finger’s doubt:

  Death’ll give me longer

  To see what love’s about.

  The Most Honourable

  Your Majesty, Abroad

  When you hug them tight like that

  I know that you’re a fraud

  I see your nets of finest silk

  Wait, just hear me out:

  Death’ll give me longer

  To see what love’s about.

  Anna stopped and bowed her head and laughed. ‘There are more verses, but I can’t remember,’ she said, while Samarin smiled and clapped. Anna presented the guitar to him.

  ‘Now you play,’ she said.

  ‘I only know one song,’ said Samarin.

  ‘Well, it must be good.’ Anna grinned. ‘Play!’

  Samarin rested the guitar on his knees and began to play,

  without any delaying business of tuning or strumming or fingers wandering up and down the fretboard. Samarin’s song wasn’t major or minor. She didn’t know which key it was in. The key of earnest came into her head and she smiled.

  Samarin sang:

  To say the name of one star is enough

  Among the worlds where night allows no spark

  It’s not because this star’s the one I love

  Because to me, all other stars are dark

  It’s not because this star’s the one I love

  Because to me, all other stars are dark

  And if
my heart is heavy in the night

  I have another praise of her to give

  It’s not because with her there is more light

  But that with her, I don’t need light to live

  It’s not because with her there is more light

  But that with her, I don’t need light to live.

  Anna jumped up and clapped, sat down and ran her hand quickly over the side of Samarin’s head and his shoulder.

  ‘Another one!’ she said.

  ‘I told you, I only know that one.’

  ‘Play it again!’

  The Reds

  The Czechs slept in shifts around the fire for two hours each. When Nekovar woke him Mutz tried to curl up and turn away from the shaking hand. His head and his body felt as if they were falling apart from each other through surfaceless space. Nekovar persisted and Mutz sat upright. His eyes seemed to have been salted and he was nauseous. The cold from outside the cave touched his neck insolently and the dizziness subsided. He told Nekovar to sleep and moved closer to the fire. The albino had brought more wood. Mutz piled it on. Outside it had begun to snow again. Broucek slept under his coat, resting his head on a rock for a pillow, and looked content. The albino cushioned his head with his clasped hands. Even asleep, he seemed to be awaiting a blow. Had the shaman ill-treated him? Mutz studied his own heart, the only instrument at his disposal for divining the morals of the dead, and concluded that the shaman had not. He wondered at how they, the Czechs, had treated the shaman so badly, and cared so little that he’d died, as if it had been his weakness for drink that had killed him, as if he had killed himself. You looked at the faces of the shaman and the albino, you knew their stories, how they sometimes feasted and were sheltered in furs, no doubt, but were sometimes cold and hungry and hunted and were hunted in the Siberian forest. And you thought: they’re used to it. But that was how those who suffered less always thought about those who suffered more, that they were used to it, that they no longer felt it as you did. Nobody ever got used to it. All they learned to do was to stop letting it show.

  Once inflamed, the conscience puts out a steady heat, and guilt spreads. Mutz thought of Balashov, and felt another wave of nausea at how he had demanded he persuade his wife and child to leave his town forever. If he got back to Yazyk he would ask Balashov’s forgiveness. He would do more. He would ask Balashov’s advice. Who better to ask about Anna than her husband, who had loved her as a man, and now, as he claimed, loved her still, as a not-man? He would go to Balashov, humbly, and ask about love. They laughed at Nekovar, searching for the secret which would set women’s sexual machinery in motion, but in his way, Nekovar was ahead of Mutz; at least he was asking.

  He would make friends with Balashov. His enemies were Matula and Samarin, the twin poles of madness in Yazyk. Nothing could move forward while Matula prevented the Czechs going home and Anna remained infatuated with Samarin. It did not seem possible that a woman whose husband had castrated himself for God’s sake would tolerate a lover who had murdered and eaten a fellow-convict. Mutz realised he was smiling. Those who commit the most extreme acts always laid themselves open not only to the most extreme punishments but also to the most extreme ridicule. The war was hardly over in Europe and already jokes about demobilised men whose balls had been blown to bits by bullets and shrapnel were flying round the northern hemisphere. What would the wives of such men do? In some ways, they were in a worse position than Anna Petrovna. No, it was not really very funny. And was it not possible that her husband’s self-mutilation had inoculated her, in some sense, to the terrors that would grasp the imaginations of others at the story of cannibalism in the forest? Samarin might argue that, compared to Balashov’s brutality to himself and his family in the name of a high ideal, his killing and eating of the Mohican was self-preservation. A criminal such as the Mohican could have been hanged. Somewhere west of Vladivostok and east of San Francisco a subscription society would exist of enthusiasts campaigning for criminals to be eaten. More modern, and less wasteful. In America they grilled them with electricity. No. It was not the cannibalism itself. It was what Samarin did afterwards, as described through the drug state of the albino, when he saw him standing over them in the daylit forest in the form of a demon on the fields of ash and clinker in the Tungus underworld. He carved letters onto a man’s forehead. Mutz had seen them himself. Mutz had seen how Samarin was able to alter his front, how he had all his moods on a dial and hid the mood of the dialler. Still it was hard to credit him with such savagery. And if Samarin had killed and consumed the Mohican to secure his escape from the White Garden, who had murdered Kliment, and carved the letter on his forehead? Could there have been a third man in the forest?

  All such questions of men and women known to Mutz now lay on the far side of an element which had altered since he had last encountered it, the Reds. Back in 1918 the Reds had been men who possessed an Idea. Now the Idea itself possessed men, and armoured trains, and land. From the little Mutz knew, men who had once possessed the Idea were still arguing about what the Idea was; and that was something the Idea, now that it possessed men and armoured trains and land of its own, was unlikely to tolerate for long.

  He was awake. He shook Nekovar, Broucek and the albino. He asked the albino if he would come with them to Yazyk to collect the body of the shaman. The albino nodded sleepily.

  ‘There’s something we have to do first,’ said Mutz. He looked at Broucek and Nekovar. The trust in their faces was terrifying. ‘We have to go down to the Reds.’

  ‘They’ll string you up,’ said Broucek. ‘Shouldn’t we go back to Yazyk first?’

  ‘You’ll do what Lieutenant Mutz tells you,’ said Nekovar.

  Mutz said: ‘We can slip past them now, and back to Yazyk, but we can’t escape from Yazyk without them. They hold the bridge.’

  Broucek was thinking about it, still trusting, not avoiding Mutz’s eyes, but waiting for more.

  ‘They could attack Yazyk when they like, and kill us all,’ said Mutz. ‘We haven’t the means to stop them, except to talk to them.’

  ‘Let’s go, brother,’ said Nekovar. ‘Only let’s be sure we know why we’re going. The Reds aren’t all that’s stopping us leaving.’

  ‘No,’ said Mutz. ‘I’m glad you understand that. Do you understand, Broucek?’

  Broucek was silent for a long time. Then he said: ‘I’ll kill him for you. I don’t mind. It’d be like shooting a mad dog.’

  ‘You’re not doing this for me,’ said Mutz. ‘Don’t ever think it’s for me.’ Even though it was. How easy treachery was when more than one man was already thinking of the same way of betrayal, and they opened their hearts at the same moment. Now he was seeing into Matula’s soul because he was acquiring one like it. The convenience of a time and place between war and law, when a gun and a word was all it took to make a problem go away. How natural it had seemed to save Matula’s life on the ice. How natural it seemed now to sell his carcass to the Reds. Mutz had a screaming urge to jump back inside the borders of a sensible nation, or an empire, such as he had once lived in, and slam the door on anarchy like this. But he could only do that now by making the anarchy wilder. Moses! The last thing you needed in the wilderness was ten commandments. That was for later.

  The snow was falling in sparse, heavy, damp flakes. Mutz still had Nekovar’s coat. It was unpleasant to leave the cave but the snow was not deep and the white ground made for easier navigation. They followed the albino down a shallow slope for a mile till they came to an outcrop above the railway line, a few hundred yards from the mouth of the tunnel. They could look down from the rocks to the line without being easily seen. The Red train stretched in dark rest from the tunnel. A squat dense apparatus poked up off a flat car coupled to the front of the locomotive: their artillery piece. Behind the locomotive tender were freight cars, flat cars with machine guns behind sandbags, and passenger wagons with windows, some dark, some showing lamplight. Mutz could smell coal smoke from the stoves in each wagon. Sentries i
n groups of three sat in greatcoats around small fires, rifles across their knees. The closest was a hundred yards away.

  Mutz beckoned the others up.

  ‘They’re not ready to move,’ whispered Nekovar. ‘They’re just keeping the locomotive from freezing, but it’s not fired up. It’d take them two hours. They’ll probably move at first light.’

  ‘What are the wires for?’ said Broucek. ‘There are wires leading from the train to the telegraph line.’

  ‘They must have a telegraph aboard the train,’ said Nekovar.

  ‘Maybe they have a restaurant too,’ said Broucek.

  ‘I’ll bet they’ve got Red tarts on board,’ murmured Nekovar. ‘Communism’s all about equal shares for all, isn’t it, lieutenant, brother?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘Or they could just shoot you.’

  They divided the party. Broucek and the albino would stay back, hidden, while Mutz and Nekovar went to parley. If the negotiators were well met, Broucek and the albino would leave and wait for them in a derelict railwayman’s hut up the line, halfway to Yazyk. Mutz looked down at the train a last time. The snow had stopped falling and it was colder. Perforated clouds wound over the moon. The snow on the ground and on the branches of the trees was beginning to crust and glitter. The solid riveted bulk of the train and the circle of bright fires around it stretched out from the tunnel, out from the planetary web of rails and telegraph wires, like the feeler of the world’s intelligence, groping in the darkness and chaos of Samarin’s and Balashov’s and Matula’s void for something it might have lost. It was reaching for Mutz. In London and Paris and New York they saw the Reds as an anarchic, destructive, turbulent menace which demanded to be controlled. Here in the dark forest, looking into the circle of lights, Mutz saw only a new order, a new empire, coming to take its place among the old, and how he wanted to be inside the circle, and not outside, with the maneaters, handmade angels, narcophilic visionaries and Bohemian warlords. And how it was tearing him apart to know that Anna was outside that circle, and though she would hate this desolate place of madness as much as her wisdom told her, she found a source in it she couldn’t do without. Even when the order of the new state flowed around her, as it was bound to, she would never tolerate for long a man who fled from the extremes they had encountered here so eagerly, who sought, even worse, to explain the extreme, and to cure it.