The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  A wolf howled from far off in the forest behind them. Another joined, and a third. Some of the sentries turned. None got up. Mutz put his hand on Nekovar’s shoulder. They looked at each other and nodded. Mutz took off his belt and holster with his pistol and gave them to the albino, who strapped them on with unexpected swiftness, and looked like a ghostly buccaneer. Nekovar gave his gun to Broucek and shyly embraced him. Mutz took out his once-white handkerchief. Nekovar produced and unfolded a piece of paper with what looked like a design sketch of an electrically-driven artificial woman on it. Raising these surrender flags above their heads, they climbed round the outcrop and out into the open snowfield, in full view of the sentries. The moon shone down bright.

  No-one noticed them. Mutz drew a deep breath of freezing air and shouted: ‘Don’t shoot! We want to talk! Don’t shoot!’

  As his voice rolled across the snow, echoing slightly off the flank of the train, the sentries rose black and indignant. Mutz heard a snickering of rifle bolts froing and toing and the Red soldiers were running towards them, coat skirts billowing, rifles held out in front of them as if they were farmers running the devil to ground with pitchforks. Mutz suppressed the instinct to run and duck. He shouted ‘Don’t shoot!’ again, and Nekovar added his voice.

  A dozen Russians hemmed them in. They wore assorted civilian caps and shapkas and had red armbands over the sleeves of their greatcoats, which were British issue. Swollen and grim with entitlement, several were shouting at the Czechs to stretch their hands up even higher. Others were demanding to know who they were. Numerous hands were searching them, reaching into their pockets, removing documents, Matula money, photographs. One of the Reds grabbed Nekovar’s paper and a sub-crowd formed around it, frowning deeply. Among them all, one wearing a sheepskin jacket, a leather cap and military boots began to push the mob back. He called the soldiers comrades, requested order, and asked Mutz and Nekovar if they were unarmed.

  He led Mutz and Nekovar to the open door of one of the passenger cars. The mob of sentries followed them while their chief climbed up and went inside the car. The soldiers kept their distance from the Czechs. Some had bayonets fixed to their rifles. Their faces showed suspicion and curiosity. They were as eager to kill as they were to talk. Either would serve. There were women among them.

  ‘We’re Czechs,’ said Mutz. ‘From Yazyk, up at the end of the line.’

  ‘Interventionists,’ said one of the Reds.

  ‘White filth.’

  ‘Counter-revolutionaries.’

  ‘Are they bourgeois?’

  ‘Factionalists!’

  ‘How can they be factionalists?’ said a lanky Red in a squirrel-skin shapka, shoving a rival in the shoulder. Some of the Reds laughed. Vapour rose from their mouths.

  ‘Are you communists?’ asked Nekovar.

  ‘Communists!’ said several and deep ‘Yeses,’ rumbled round the semicircle.

  ‘We’re railways workers,’ said one.

  ‘That’s a military secret!’

  ‘Yes, shut up, you fool.’

  ‘I’m proud to be a communist, and a railway worker,’ said a white-bearded man with a well-oiled rifle, addressing them all, as if it were a meeting, and it was his turn to speak. None of the younger Reds was inclined to shut him up. ‘I worked thirty years in the railway, and they gave me nothing, and the boss talked to me like a child, and they took my son to the war, and he never came back. They gave me a bad house. Small. Damp. They hated to part with their money, parasites. My wife caught cold and died. It was a shame.’

  ‘Right, Styopa ’Xandrovich. Speak it.’

  Styopa Alexandrovich crept forward towards Mutz and Nekovar, pushed his face into theirs, and jabbed at them with his finger. He had no teeth. ‘This is a People’s train,’ he said. ‘This,’ – he slapped his rifle – ‘this is a People’s gunbarrel. The People – that’s us. It’s been published so.’

  ‘We shot our bosses. They were swine.’

  ‘Shut up, Fedya.’

  ‘God save Red Lenin!’ A brawl broke out when the lanky one heard this.

  A man jumped down from the train. The crunch of his boots in the snow and the track bedding silenced the other Reds and they stepped back several paces. The brawling ceased.

  The chairman of the Verkhny Luk Railway Workers’ Soviet was in his early twenties, with a full, neat blonde moustache. Even in the moonlight Mutz could see he was looking at him with an extraordinary degree of hope in his eyes; not hope that Mutz was going to provide something he needed, but immense hope that every new man and woman he met would turn out to be an early messenger of the new society he was expecting, no matter how many times he was disappointed.

  He was Comrade Bondarenko, in a black leather coat, with a pistol, loving being young in a revolution, and knowing it, hence some newsreel gestures. The other Reds liked him for seeming young and good-looking and unsullied, even though he had led them in an enterprise which ended in the execution of rail administrators loyal to the Whites, or loyal to the old order of property, at least. Mutz saw the Reds looking at Bondarenko as if he was the repository of their virtue, their guarantee that their honour would be returned to them, intact, when the killing days were over.

  Bondarenko ordered Mutz’s and Nekovar’s hands to be tied behind their backs, which was done eagerly and without viciousness. Bondarenko climbed back inside the train, and Mutz and Nekovar were pushed up after him, with an armed man each behind them. This group shuffled through the passenger car down the corridor leading past the coupé compartments. The sliding doors of the compartments were open. The wagon was overheated. It smelled of bad tobacco, men’s feet, thin soup and old wound dressings. In the compartments men could be seen smoking, playing cards, reading newspapers, arguing about politics, and sleeping the enviable sleep of the exhausted, limbs cast about as they first stopped. One compartment held sick and wounded. Two bare-chested men, one with a bandaged skull, the other with a bandaged arm, lay in blankets to their waists, one hand behind their heads, staring out at those passing by with the particular beady attentiveness of the wounded irregular.

  Mutz and Nekovar were led into a room fashioned from half a car. There were beige blinds over the windows and a thin green carpet which had been new recently. It was rucked up and tracked with black mud and crumbs of snow. Technical maps of the central Siberian rail network were pinned to blackboards and there was an empty draughtsman’s table. In the far corner, by a door marked NO ENTRY, was a desk with a green baize surface. A lamp on the desk was reflected in the captured turmoil of varnished walnut. There were dirty tea glasses and a half-eaten apple on a crumpled piece of newspaper on the desk, and more newspapers in stacks, some freshly printed by the look of them, on the floor near the desk, alongside an open crate containing hand grenades wrapped in straw. A clock on the wall showed 8.45. Bondarenko’s takeover of the old railway bosses’ staff car was deliberately careless. He wanted to show how little he cared for the bourgeois trappings of the old bureaucracy, without ruling out the possibility he might need them in future. It was not, Mutz sensed as the chairman sat in the padded swivel chair behind the desk, that Bondarenko was cynical; more that he was humble and trusting enough before the wisdom of the People to know that he did not know what, exactly, they would expect a new order to look like once their war was won. Mutz was reminded of Balashov, but perhaps the pious warrior whom Anna had first met in Europe before the war.

  ‘I have a proposal,’ said Mutz. Bondarenko smiled and looked interested but shook his head and interrupted Mutz when he tried to go on. He began to tell them about the fall of Omsk, two days earlier. Did they know? Comrade Trotsky’s Red Army was triumphant, the Whites were in shameful retreat west towards Irkutsk, and the Revolution had won. Admiral Kolchak’s train, full of drunks, cocaine and loot, was jammed in the middle of a rout spread out over hundreds of miles west into Siberia, with Cossacks sealing off villages to use as their blood playgrounds and leaving with no-one alive, and the rich paying in
jewellery by the boxful for a place in a hard car to Vladivostok or China. White officer cadets, whores, impresarios, waiters, spivs, music hall singers, moneychangers, dealers – thousands lay dead of typhus by the rails, and scavengers were stripping them of gold and furs and boots.

  ‘We understand the Whites are finished and the Reds are winning,’ said Mutz. ‘The Czechs in Yazyk only want to go home. That’s the substance of my proposal.’

  ‘The Czechs in Yazyk,’ said Bondarenko, with a sadness Mutz didn’t like. The chairman met Mutz’s eyes again and looked away. Still there was the boundless hope in his eyes. It occurred to Mutz that this hope, which had seemed so seductive, might be no more than the hope he and Nekovar would be men enough to understand why their life or death was the Idea’s to decide, and not his, mere Bondarenko’s.

  ‘I would like to read you a telegram our Soviet received one month – one month – ago from the Red Army shtab in the Urals,’ he said, taking a piece of paper out of a drawer in the desk. ‘I would like you to tell me if you think this leaves me with any room for doubt. One moment.’ He laid the paper face down on the table, took out his pistol, popped the clip, checked the number of bullets, snapped the clip back in, placed the gun carefully on the baize, its muzzle pointing towards the Czechs, and picked up the piece of paper. Some bitter substance manifested itself in Mutz’s saliva and he swallowed. He tried to read the characters on the telegram as the light shone through it but he could only see the strips of telegraph tape stuck to the paper.

  Bondarenko said, very slowly, repeating some words, ‘It reads: “To Bondarenko, chairman, Soviet of the Railway Workers of Verkhny Luk. Concerning Matula’s Czechs in Yazyk. The Yazyk railway spur is of no immediate military importance. However. However. Bearing in mind the bestial acts – bestial acts – committed by this unit in Staraya Krepost, it is ordered that, at the earliest opportunity, you will liberate Yazyk by force of arms, regardless of the cost in blood to military or civilian persons there. It is further ordered that any Czechs – any Czechs – taken prisoner in Yazyk should receive, from you, swift and merciless revolutionary justice, in the form of the death penalty – death penalty. Any of Matula’s Czechs attempting to flee or surrender – flee or surrender – before you attack are to be dealt with in the same manner. The – same – manner. Signed Trotsky. Trotsky!’

  ‘This is –’ Mutz began. Bondarenko cut him off. ‘Wait.’ He turned the telegram round. ‘There. You both read Russian, don’t you? Read it. Could there be a clearer order? Come along.’ He picked up the pistol and stood up. Mutz and Nekovar were lifted from behind to try to get them to their feet. Both men resisted and had the chairs pulled out from under them so that they fell to the floor.

  ‘I can’t believe a loyal servant of the people would commit such an act,’ said Mutz.

  ‘Why?’ said Bondarenko. He sounded offended, disappointed in Mutz’s lack of understanding. ‘Comrade Trotsky is the People’s commissar.’ Mutz heard him reaching into the desk drawers again. He kneeled down by Mutz’s head, which rested on the carpet. His boots creaked. He held something in front of Mutz’s eyes. It was Bublik and Racansky’s Legion identity papers.

  ‘We shot these ones today already,’ said Bondarenko. ‘We picked them up this afternoon, on our way to the bridge. They told us they were communists, deserters, and they wanted to join us. We had to execute them, though. It’s extraordinary to see the power of the People at work. Your comrades seemed to be good men, yet the Revolution had no use for them. One of them, Racansky I think, told us he’d killed one of his own officers this morning.’

  ‘Kliment?’

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t remember. That’s enough talking. Let’s take them outside.’

  The Czechs were hoisted to their feet. This time they didn’t struggle. Again Bondarenko led the way and they followed.

  ‘It looks bad, brother,’ said Nekovar.

  Mutz found his mind was having difficulty accommodating what was taking place. It was used to counting imaginary paces forward into possible futures and returning with the news of what it had seen. Now his imagination sent messenger after messenger forward down the only possible road and none of them came back. How was it possible to prepare for death if you couldn’t imagine it? Now that his life was measured in minutes he wished Anna could know what had happened to him. To his surprise, no prayer was budding in him, no god. He was very frightened of his consciousness dripping into death’s ocean and being not. It wasn’t like sleep. Mutz didn’t feel brave, or proud, but the chairman was so amiable that he knew there was no point in begging for his life. What he found most unexpected was the anger he felt towards himself for not returning to Yazyk to warn Anna and the Czechs and the castrates. That was a place his imagination could go, too easily, Anna’s precious life, the life in her that was so much greater than an ordinary person’s life, being ended, in pain and fear. He wouldn’t die peacefully.

  ‘How long before you attack Yazyk, Comrade Bondarenko?’ he asked.

  ‘A couple of hours,’ said Bondarenko, without turning round. ‘It’ll be quick.’

  Cannibals

  Samarin played his song twice more, at Anna’s insistence, and refused to play it a fourth time. He put the guitar down carefully so that it leaned against the dresser and wasn’t between them. Anna had heard the song before but Samarin had made it a part of his life.

  They sat and looked at each other for moments. Anna’s heart beat hard. She longed to put out her hand, clasp the back of his head and kiss him, stroking him with her other hand, and wondered why he couldn’t see the longing and readiness in her face, and act. Had the good looks walked away one recent night, even an hour ago? Was she old? Was she foolish? A change came over Samarin’s face. He smiled and it was a younger, more eager Samarin, a liberation, Anna saw at once, more real than any he had experienced in escaping from the White Garden or being let out of Matula’s jail. An inner prison had set him free, and he was astonished by it, and the world outside looked the brighter for coming to him so unexpectedly.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘I’m falling into your curiosity. Such a great demand to be satisfied.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘So fall,’ she said hoarsely.

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, putting his hands on her waist. Their heads tilted and their tongue tips touched. Anna put her hands on the sides of Samarin’s head and held it a few inches away from hers. Her eyes moved across his face. So much at once. His head was warm and she felt his pulse beating. His eyes stayed fixed on hers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she whispered.

  ‘What you want me to do,’ he said.

  ‘Can you know that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So simple.’

  ‘You know, it’s been a very long time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ve forgotten. Perhaps all women are like you. But I don’t think I have. I don’t think they are.’

  ‘You kept looking at me in the courtroom today,’ said Anna. ‘You were looking at me all the time. I felt you knew me.’

  ‘I know you,’ said Samarin. ‘I’ll know you more.’

  Anna kissed him again. She heard feet on the stairs and Alyosha crying for her.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, and went up the stairs to meet her boy.

  ‘I’m cold,’ said Alyosha. ‘Can I sleep with you?’

  ‘Of course you’re cold, running around out of bed without any slippers on,’ said Anna. ‘Mama’s not going to bed yet. Don’t tell me the stove’s gone out already?’ But it had. The little stove in the corner of Alyosha’s room, which Anna lit when the sun went down, to give out its warmth slowly while the boy slept, had to be brought back to life, and Alyosha tucked in again. Anna laid the kindling hastily and at first the logs didn’t catch. She scolded Alyosha for a pest.

  ‘Stay with me,’ said Alyosha. ‘The stove downstairs will be out by now.’

  ‘Your head’s full of nonsense,’ said Anna, more h
arshly than she’d meant. She got up from the stove, which had finally caught, and leaned over him. He was fast asleep, his cheek squashed on his hand. He must have spoken in his sleep. Would he dream of a sharp-tongued mother, turning her back on him? Well, let him. He would hear worse things in his life. Still, it troubled her. She kissed him and went downstairs.

  Samarin was standing, looking at the photographs which hung on the wall on either side of her father’s painting of Balashov. Some she had taken in her home town as a girl; others were from Ukraine.

  ‘Did you make these?’ said Samarin.

  ‘Yes.’ For a moment, she hoped for praise. But that wasn’t Samarin’s manner. He felt his interest was praise enough, and she found that it was.

  ‘Who are these people?’ He was looking at a photograph of a peasant family at a railway station in 1912. It was winter. The father and mother, wrapped in ragged layers, were bowed like hills over a baby lying in among bundles, their thick fingers tightening the baby’s swaddling. In the foreground, a girl, sitting on another bundle, turned away from the baby and stared into the camera lens, her face hopeless and proud, her eyes wide and uninterested and rimmed with a circle of dirt. She looked hungry.