The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  ‘Yes, brother. It’s a shame,’ said Nekovar. ‘I’d like to see myself on film.’

  ‘It looks likely enough in five hours you’ll be broken beyond any sort of fixing,’ said Mutz, and as he said it, felt he’d only added to their curse by speaking out loud. It was hard again after that moment of ease at the point of execution. His thoughts ran forward and this time did not vanish into the vast anticipation of death. They ran into an impenetrable wall, black, soft to the touch but unyielding, like velvet glued to a granite cliff face. And at the same time there were other thoughts which flew easily over the obstacle, reaching to Anna in the days ahead, and Alyosha, and Broucek, and even Dezort, surviving the Red onslaught, perhaps, but these were strange, pale, through-the-window thoughts, because they were thoughts about what would be after he was gone, and those he had touched would, incredibly, be carrying on without him. Was that what ghosts were? Thoughts about the living in the future, thought about the living by the dead when they were still alive?

  A paunchy man in his fifties with a silver beard, hair coming out of his ears and head in tufts, and a crumpled white coat with dried purple bloodstains over a black suit, entered the wagon carrying a bottle of vodka and three glasses. His face had a bloated, sleepy, refolded look, sulky, like a new-born child’s, as if no amount of indulgence could compensate him for the suffering inflicted on him by the act of his birth. He sat in Bondarenko’s chair, began to fill the glasses, and said: ‘Czechs?’

  ‘Czechs,’ said Mutz.

  ‘I thought they’d shot you already. Dr Samsonov.’ He gave them glasses, and raised his.

  ‘I need a hundred grammes too,’ said Filonov.

  ‘Soldiers don’t drink when they’re on duty, don’t you know that?’ said the doctor. ‘Now. Czechs. Here’s to our acquaintance. I feel very warmly towards you, because I am certain that I will know you for the rest of your lives, short as that is likely to be. To lifelong friendship!’ They raised their glasses and drained them.

  ‘You’re on duty too,’ said Filonov.

  ‘This is prescribed medicine,’ said Samsonov, refilling the three glasses.

  ‘I need medicine,’ said Filonov. ‘I ache all over. I have the fever.’

  ‘Just wind,’ said Samsonov. He raised his glass again and looked expectantly at Mutz.

  ‘Here’s to the Russian telegraph system,’ said Mutz, and they drank to that.

  ‘I’m sorry there’s no food,’ said Samsonov. ‘Was it the hunger that caused the revolution, or the revolution that caused the hunger? I could never work it out.’

  ‘It’s because bloodsuckers like you won’t share what they have that folk go hungry,’ said Filonov.

  Samsonov sighed. ‘I’m a liberal, you know,’ he said. ‘I spent all my life talking to my friends about liberty, about the day the Tsar would be gone, the aristocrats would be gone, the priests would be gone. I longed for it to happen. And now it’s come, I don’t like it.’ He poured fresh glasses and handed them out. Nekovar stood up slowly and offered his glass to Filonov, who took it.

  ‘Oh!’ said the doctor. ‘The condemned man grants the executioner’s request. That’s something I haven’t seen before.’

  ‘TO THE VICTORY OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION!’ yelled Filonov, and drained his glass. The doctor hesitated, then knocked his back. Mutz followed. The doctor’s mouth stretched into a frog shape and he wrinkled his nose. ‘That didn’t go down as well as the other ones,’ he said.

  The door to the telegraph room opened and Bondarenko came back. He pushed gently past Filonov and looked at the doctor, who began to rise from the chair. There was something deliberately guilty about the doctor’s movements, as if he was trying to mimic a servant caught in his master’s library.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Bondarenko. ‘You work here too.’ The doctor sat down and Bondarenko lay on the floor opposite Nekovar and Mutz, head resting on the wall of the wagon. He closed his eyes.

  ‘Did you send it?’ asked Mutz. ‘Comrade Bondarenko?’

  The doctor, still acting his caricature of a doltish retainer, poured another glass of vodka, emptying the bottle, and walked on exaggerated tiptoe, like a marsh bird, to where Bondarenko lay. Bondarenko opened his eyes, looked up, shook his head, and closed his eyes. The doctor tiptoed back, draining the glass as he moved.

  Mutz tried again. ‘Comrade –’

  ‘Yes, I sent it. Sleep, Czechs. Should they not sleep, comrade Doctor?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, nodding, trying to shake a last drop from the bottle into his glass. ‘If they sleep soundly, they’ll know their fate in a moment. And if they dream, their dream minutes’ll pass like years, and it’ll seem to them that they lived whole lives in the hours till dawn. That’s where I live, anyway.’

  Mutz turned to Nekovar. ‘Brother,’ he said, and frowned, and smiled. ‘Now I know what brother means. Please don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Like what, brother?’

  ‘Like you’re more worried about me than yourself. What’s your first name?’

  ‘Best not to remind you, brother. When we go back to the others, you’ll have to be calling me by my family name again, and you’ll feel bad.’

  ‘You can’t think we’ll leave here alive.’

  ‘I do, brother. I’ve got faith in that spark that’s travelling down the wire. It’s a thin wire, brother, and it’s long, but that spark, she goes fast, like light. She’s a wonderful messenger. She doesn’t feel the cold, she doesn’t get tired, and she doesn’t get hungry. She’s here and she’s there, fifty miles away, almost at the same time. Don’t worry, brother. The message is already there.’

  ‘But the operators have to pass it on.’

  ‘I can’t answer for them, brother. But they’re only there to serve the spark, the messenger. Who are they to stop it?’

  Mutz was nauseous from the drink and lack of food, his temples beat with blood, his eyes hurt and his limbs ached. He was falling asleep. He could have tried to stay awake, to savour the last hours. Only there was nothing to savour in this stinking, stuffy carriage. He could tell from the sound of Bondarenko’s breathing that the chairman had already drifted off. The doctor was hunched over the table, his face nestled in his folded arms. Filonov was still awake, but now he leaned against the carriage wall, resting the butt of his rifle on the floor. It was 10.15 in Moscow, 2.15 in the morning here. Anna would be in her deepest sleep.

  ‘Nekovar,’ said Mutz. He saw the sparks flashing between the hills, darting from horizon to horizon in the darkness of Siberia. ‘I know how women work. I can explain. Are you listening? They need to believe you’re sending them a message. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a code they don’t understand. They need to believe it’s important, and that you depend on them to pass it on. Do you understand, Nekovar?’ Nekovar, far away on an ice floe, did not answer.

  Mutz woke up. The telegraph was clicking like teeth. The clock read one: five a.m. in Yazyk. Everyone except the guards was asleep, and the guards were dozing. Mutz got up. ‘Comrade Bondarenko!’ he shouted. ‘The telegraph! A reply!’ The wagon stirred. Filonov lifted his rifle and pointed it at Mutz. Bondarenko yawned, blinked, rubbed his scalp with the pads of his fingers and rose. He looked at Mutz, nodded and walked slowly towards the telegraph room. Nekovar got up. It seemed to Mutz he could smell dawn coming, and a southern wind through the larch needles.

  ‘The spark!’ said Nekovar.

  Bondarenko came back with paper tendrils streaming from his fists. He looked at Mutz and shook his head. ‘Local reports,’ he said. ‘Messages from Verkhny Luk on the local circuit. Filonov, your wife’s had a boy.’ Filonov blushed and grinned. ‘Glory …’ he began, and stopped and looked down at the ground. When he looked up he had mastered the grin, and looked serious. ‘No church names,’ he said. ‘This one’ll be to Marx, Engels, Lenin, the October Revolution, and Trotsky. Melort!’

  ‘Melort,’ said Bondarenko. He nodded. ‘A good name, reflecting our socialist reality. Glory i
ndeed.’

  ‘If you have a grandson,’ said the doctor, waking up and speaking through curtains of phlegm, ‘He can be Melort Melortovich.’

  Filonov walked over and struck the doctor hard on the ear with the back of his hand. The doctor cried out and teetered but did not fall. A glass fell from the table and rolled across the carpet without breaking. Bondarenko glanced up from reading the tapes. ‘Doctor, I told you,’ he said, without heat. ‘Don’t sneer at working people. Your class only ever sneered, up and down, and at each other. Your time’s finished. If you sneer at the modern men of action, they’ll hit you, because you’re in the way. Comrade Filonov, perhaps Rosa would be a better name.’

  Everyone looked at him.

  ‘I misread the tape. It’s a girl.’

  Mutz could not sleep. The telegraph chattered without a break. The clock had no second hand. The minute hand moved wastefully on, jumping a minute at a time. It was hard not to watch it. Bondarenko was sitting on the floor, slowly, sleepily going through the tapes. Mutz looked from the clock to Bondarenko and back again. He should beg Bondarenko to go and sit by the telegraph, but hopelessness had taken over. It was as if someone else was going to be shot, and he, Mutz, was dead already, and this wagon would be his afterlife. Was that the first change in the light, the blueing of darkness? The paper tape rustled in Bondarenko’s hand, the doctor snored, the telegraph chattered, and all the wonder of the world and the life of the world was squeezed into the silent two-millimetre jump of a clock hand under glass. An hour and forty five minutes remained. Without conscious effort on his part, Mutz felt a change come over him, a wakefulness and an awareness return. He no longer felt tired. The nausea had gone and his senses sharpened. He saw and smelled and felt and heard more details at once than he was used to sense in a day. The smudge of fingerprints on the vodka bottle, the bright brass jackets of Filonov’s cartridges, the delicate scrape of two edges of telegraph tape rubbing together, the tiny gaps between the planking floor under the carpet he was sitting on, the smell of drying boot leather, the way Nekovar’s jaw jutted out when he slept. He remembered how Samarin had described the Mohican, his control over himself and his ability to see the life that had passed and the life now and the life to come as a single whole picture, his actions strokes in that picture which no-one else could understand until it was finished.

  ‘Doctor,’ he said. ‘Doctor, wake up. Doctor. Wake up, doctor. Please. Doctor. Listen. It’s important. Do you think that a man can be so in control of himself, of his passions, that he can sit in secret inside himself, like a pilot inside a vessel, and steer himself in any direction he chooses, make it seem to others that he is any kind of man he wants to seem?’

  ‘Oh God,’ said the doctor. ‘So many dead, and my head hurts so badly, and you talk about this.’

  ‘Suppose,’ said Mutz, ‘Suppose a man appeared, at different times, as a strong, merciless, murdering cannibal, and as an intelligent, sympathetic, attractive young student? Would it mean he was a lunatic, or would it mean the very opposite, that he was in perfect control of his external appearance?’

  ‘I was always hungry as a student,’ said the doctor with difficulty. ‘I could have eaten the dean of anatomy whole. He had meat on him.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Mutz.

  Without looking up from his tapes, Bondarenko spoke in a quiet, optimistic voice: ‘Still, why shouldn’t a student be a cannibal, or a cannibal be a student?’

  ‘A good way to study anatomy,’ said the doctor.

  Bondarenko looked up at Mutz. He rubbed his eyes and ran his tongue over his teeth. ‘You think too much in the old way,’ he said. ‘Such men do exist, and one day all men will be like that, but not in the way you say. This inner pilot will not be secret. Secrets are for capitalists and bourgeois parasites. Communist man will be the master of his passions, and he’ll have no reason to keep that secret. He’ll be proud. He’ll navigate through the life of the world exactly as he chooses, exactly as the will of the People chooses; his chosen course, and the People’s course, will move closer and closer until it becomes impossible to tell them apart.’

  ‘But why should they be eating each other?’ said Mutz.

  ‘Nobody said they would,’ said Bondarenko.

  ‘If the life of the many is more important than the life of the one,’ said Mutz, ‘why would they not? Why wouldn’t one man make a sacrifice of another, and eat him, for the sake of the people?’

  Bondarenko thought for a while. ‘There would have to be a very good reason,’ he said.

  ‘Sweet reason!’ said the doctor.

  ‘And, of course, a plenary meeting of the relevant Soviet, with a vote.’

  ‘Reason, justice and cannibalism,’ said the doctor. ‘Utopia!’

  ‘These are your writing desk fantasies,’ said Bondarenko, smiling in turn at Mutz and the doctor. ‘They only go to show why your class is living out its last days. After the revolution, all the wealth will be shared fairly, and no-one will ever be hungry again. You’re like children. You’ve never seen equality, so you don’t believe in it. But of course it’s not possible if you don’t believe in it first.’

  ‘Like God,’ said Mutz. ‘Or fairies.’

  ‘He said it!’ said the doctor to Bondarenko, pointing at Mutz. ‘Not me!’

  Bondarenko was not troubled. ‘A man will never find God or the Devil outside his head, no matter where he looks,’ he said. ‘But he’ll find the unfairness of other men everywhere. Am I right, Comrade Filonov?’

  ‘Used to pray all the time,’ said Filonov. ‘Morning to night. Kiss the icon, keep all the feasts, fast like a saint. Father and grandfather the same. And the little priest, a whoring thieving drunk, give him half my wages for candles, and to say prayers for the family. Wife has a kid. Boy. Beauty, strong and fair, like a golden bear cub. Good church name for the boy, Mefody. Priest wants a rouble for the christening. Haven’t got it. Winter, family need clothes. Food a bit short. Priest says no rouble, no christening. Can’t have boy not christened, already owe my friends half a year’s wages, get an advance in wages off the workshop boss, pay the priest, christen the boy. Boy gets ill. Need money for the doctor. Friends skint. Boss says you owe us your wages already. Try the priest. Church full of gold, face on him like a railway clock, eats for five, keeps his own cook, electric light in the house. Taken my life blood for years. Father, I say, lend us a rouble for the doctor. Can’t, he says. Why not, I say, after all I’ve given you. It’s not my money, he says, it’s God’s. Boy dies. Folk in the workshop knock up a small steel coffin out of corroded boiler plates. Priest’s there in the churchyard at the grave. Don’t worry about the money for the funeral, he says. You can pay me later.’

  The doctor opened his mouth to speak. He saw Filonov raise his hand and said nothing.

  The clock hand twitched forward. Mutz wondered if he could be shot in his sleep, and whether that would be better for him. He wasn’t troubled about looking brave. He didn’t want to die in an hour’s time, and it seemed that he was going to. How much time did he need to live? He didn’t need a year. He didn’t even need a month. A week would be good. He could do a lot in a week. He could help many people and uncover many secrets, knowing he was going to die in seven days, and people would remember him when he was dead, and think well of him. And then, in that last hour, he would realise that he needed another week. Nobody was ever ready to die in an hour.

  ‘Chairman Bondarenko,’ he said. ‘Would it be possible to send one more telegram? Not in code. A simple question. You could address it to all Russian police departments. Perhaps after I die your investigators will be able to make use of the answer to establish the true history of the marvellous revolutionary of Yazyk, Samarin. There is, or was, a thief and a robber who goes by the klichka Mohican. Could you send a telegram, asking the Russian police, White or Red, what they know about him? Somebody may answer.’

  ‘We have no police,’ said Bondarenko. ‘Communists don’t steal from each ot
her.’

  ‘Will you send the telegram?’

  ‘No.’

  Mutz nodded slowly and folded his arms across his chest. He looked down at Nekovar, who had fallen back to sleep, and seemed to be smiling. The doctor had gone quiet, head resting on the table. It seemed to Mutz that at this moment it was important to remember, yet all he could think about was who would remember him. It was six months since he had received a letter from his uncle in Prague. His family was gone. Nekovar would die with him. Anna would wonder what happened to him, but not for long. For some reason he most desired to be remembered by Alyosha. There was something deeply honourable and fine about being someone else’s childhood memory. He would never be a father now, but those men who cannot be fathers can be fathers for an hour, or a minute. All of a sudden he felt, for the first time, something he had only apprehended with his intellect and prejudices before, the misery of Balashov and Anna, the husband and wife, the father and mother, living a mile apart, separated forever and by a universe by a single stroke of the knife. He felt it without condemnation of Balashov, without jealous anger towards Anna. The worldy demons of war and guilt and religion and self-loathing which had inspired his contempt for Balashov were the same as those which had driven the gelding knife onto the cavalryman. Were he, Mutz, to live, the most important thing would be bringing together those two whom he had tried to drive apart. Not that he was going to live. He found himself staring at his corpse in the snow, amazed at its lack of movement, that this wonderful machine could be so simply stopped. He fell asleep.

  A curious sound woke him, of paper fluttering close to his head. He sensed daylight before his eyes opened and his soul dived inside him. He opened his eyes. It was morning. Bondarenko was standing over him, waving a telegram in his face.

  ‘Wake up, beauty,’ said Bondarenko. ‘You’ve got work.’

  Mutz didn’t understand, but it seemed like a new world. Nekovar stirred beside him. They stood up.

  ‘Comrade Trotsky gave the good word. He never sleeps,’ said Bondarenko. ‘It came ten minutes ago. You’ve got till this time tomorrow to deliver Matula to us, dead or alive. You should leave now. You’ll have to walk. Two comrades will escort you as far as our forward posts.’