The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  She asked him again what the mice meant. He sat next to her and said that they were a symbol of the famine. She asked him why, instead of painting a symbol of the famine, he hadn’t painted the famine. Her father blushed and stood up and threw his hands in the air and shook his head and said she had no idea of the risk he was running, offending such a powerful man as the marshal, even with a symbol. He could be sent into exile in Siberia.

  Anna wiped her eyes, sniffed and frowned. She didn’t want her father to be sent to Siberia, she told him. She said that if he was going to offend the marshal, maybe it would be better to paint pictures of real people on his estates who had died of hunger, so he might be offended all he wanted, but he wouldn’t be able to argue about it. She said that if he wanted to offend the marshal he shouldn’t have painted him as a tall, strong man with piercing eyes and the same rosy cheeks as all the other men and women he painted, he should have painted him as he was, grey-skinned, old-boned and sly. Her father became angry, grabbed her arm, threw her out of the studio and slammed the door.

  A few days later Anna’s father wrapped the painting up and left for an afternoon meeting of the city assembly, where he was going to present it to the marshal, who hadn’t seen it. When Anna saw how frightened he was she became frightened herself. Her father kissed and hugged her and her sister and her mother as if he might never see them again. A fear had penetrated deep into him. Anna realised it was a shard of the outside world which had cut into her father’s heart. She’d never really seen it before, the terrible strength and lack of mercy of the accumulation of all the people you didn’t know which could reach inside you and make you afraid. She’d never seen it, and now she saw it on her father’s face. After that she only saw it on him two other times, when he heard there was a strike at the brewery, and when he heard he was a bad artist. When she saw it she understood that she’d seen it before, that other people had it all the time, men with dusty suits and frayed caps who walked slowly down the streets as if they were afraid to go home, and the absence of it in her father was a sign of how few dealings he had with that world. It made her want to capture it and pursue it. Later when she met her husband she would see in him neither the fear of the carelessness of the great world, nor her father’s deliberate ignorance of it, but a belief in another world still.

  That evening her father didn’t come back, and Anna and her sister and their mother sat up until after midnight drinking tea and playing cards. Anna’s mother told the servants to go to bed and the three of them sat together on the divan, watching the German clock on the wall beside the stove. The girls’ mother ran her fingers through their hair until they told her to stop because she was rubbing their scalps too hard and they fell asleep on their mother’s shoulder after the clock chimed two. At five there was a battering on the door and the house woke up to news. Anna’s father had been arrested by the police, on the orders of the marshal of the nobility, and was being held in the town jail. Anna’s mother grabbed a shawl and hat and dragged her two sleepy daughters into the street. It was May, just getting light, and they ran and strode and tripped through the dusty blue empty streets, watched by slow drunks. Anna stood outside the jail, holding her sister’s hand, listening to her mother argue for hours with the guard at the jail gate, trying to get to see her husband, weeping and waving her handkerchief in the guard’s face and pointing to her children. The guard listened carefully and nodded and turned his moustache to the ground and said and did nothing, while a small crowd of other prisoners’ wives, poorer than Anna’s mother and angry that she was getting all the attention, gathered at the gate. In the end Anna’s mother walked away with her head bowed. She looked at Anna and asked her in a voice hoarse from pleading why she wasn’t crying, it would’ve helped. Then Anna did cry.

  Her father was in prison for two days. He wasn’t sent to Siberia, fined or tried. The marshal of the nobility was hurt by the painting. The accusation was bad, the fact he had not realised he was being accused at first was worse, they were only three mice after all, and everyone else knew he was being accused, because Anna’s father had spent months working his courage up to paint the mice, and had made sure everyone knew what he was about to do. But it was 1905 and the marshal of the nobility was cautious. The council was a nest of liberals, the army used artillery on the streets of Moscow, peasants were setting fire to landlords’ properties. One day there was smoke in the city from where the Black Hundreds were laying into the Yids and smoke from beyond the edge of the city where the blind husk of Kulin-Kalensky’s manor house fumed from its windowholes. The police were playing their own game, and the papers weren’t to be trusted, the editors had lost their proper fear. When the marshal’s own daughter told him that she wasn’t welcome in some of the best houses in town because he had arrested the artist Lutov, he arranged for Anna’s father to be let go.

  Anna’s father came home in triumph, tenderly embraced his family, and left after an hour for a banquet in his honour held by the leading liberals of the town, where he was praised in speeches as the lion of democracy, and in toasts his name was joined so often to the urgency of a constitution and the establishment of an elected parliament that he came to believe the three were part of a whole, and that one without the others would be meaningless. Over the weeks and months which followed this idea faded from the minds of all the banqueteers except Anna’s father, who continued to believe that of all the heroism shown in the struggle for freedom in 1905, his had been the most extraordinary. His family saw little of him, and dust gathered on his palette and brushes, while he smoked poods of tobacco and drank Turkish coffee with liberals and revolutionaries in dark restaurants and stuffy conspiratorial flats. He met the revolutionary Tsybasov, recovering from the wounds he got fighting Cossacks in Odessa, on the run from the police, likely to be hanged if caught, a scar across his jaw where a sabre had almost sliced his head in half. When Anna’s father greeted him as a right-thinking warrior who had done almost as much for the cause as he had, Tsybasov – who at the age of sixteen had addressed a revolutionary congress in Vienna, without notes, for an hour – was so astonished that he couldn’t think of a reply. Anna’s father began spending time at a house that acted as a night school for young women who wanted to learn about Marxism. He was able to talk about Marx to them with more eloquence and conviction than they could muster because he wasn’t hampered by any knowledge of the great thinker’s writings. Some of the Marxist girls were not much older than Anna.

  One sultry evening the following summer Anna’s sister’s head began to hurt. She became feverish and her nose bled. She lay in bed for ten days, coughing blood, raving and twisting in damp coils of linen. The doctor found a rash on her torso and diagnosed typhus. They sent telegram after telegram to Anna’s father, who had taken a cottage in Crimea for July, intending to deepen his study of Marx, but it must have been mislaid, because by the time he returned to Voronezh, his younger daughter was hardly moving. Her hoarse, shallow breaths were the loudest sound in the quiet room where she lay. Anna met her father at the door, they embraced, and they walked upstairs hand in hand to the room. Anna’s mother was sitting in a hard chair next to her youngest, talking to her about a ball she’d been to in St Petersburg, and the silk dress she wore. Her daughter’s eyes were closed and her lips, slightly open, had a thin crust of foam. When her husband came in, Anna’s mother looked up and looked away again, without stopping what she was saying, as if a stranger, a stranger with a reason to be there but still a stranger, had come in. Anna’s father leaned down, put his hand on his daughter’s forehead and spoke her name several times. She didn’t move. Anna’s father sighed slowly and deeply, furrowed his brow, and said: ‘I must paint her.’

  He fetched the easel and a blank square of canvas and began to make a charcoal sketch. Anna watched him. He kept glancing from the sketch to his daughter as if it would be to the life. The figure on the canvas was standing up, though, like all her father’s subjects. Anna saw a child version appearing of all the
women her father painted, slim, with long, thin arms and legs that curved this way and that as if they were made of rope, pale lips, waves of liquid hair, a little upturned nose and enormous black eyes, while Anna’s sister was plump, with a flat nose, small brown eyes and red lips, and fine fair hair that seemed to try to fly apart even when it was lashed into pigtails.

  ‘Papa,’ Anna said. ‘Papa. I know what we should do. We need to take her photograph. I can run for Zakhar Dmitryevich. You don’t have time to paint.’

  Her father looked up at her, dropped his materials, pinched her round the top of her arm and pulled her out of the room, closing the door. He asked her what she meant by saying that there was no time. Was she saying her sister was going to die? Wasn’t she ashamed?

  ‘She is going to die,’ said Anna, looking down at the floor. ‘And she’ll be buried and we won’t have a single photograph to remember what she really looked like.’

  Her father went white. He slapped her across the cheek, the first time he had hit her, and told her she was an ignorant little fool. Did she think a mess of chemicals on paper, a gimmick of light and mirrors, could reach into her sister’s soul and see her true nature? Was she so cold, did she have so little feeling, that she couldn’t understand how her sister’s father, who had watched her grow from a baby, who shared his daughter’s blood, who had a gift with pen and brush so powerful it had shaken the political foundations of southern Russia, would paint a picture of her in which all her breathing, beating, singing life would be captured for ever, more vitally than a cheap gimcrack contraption for peasants and soldiers to celebrate their ugliness and cheap clothes?

  Anna’s cheek stung. She was surprised that she didn’t cry. She kept her hands clasped behind her back and looked up into her father’s face. In wonder she realised her words had caused him far more pain than his hand had left on her face. He was blinking and breathing hard. She wanted to hurt him some more. She said: ‘All your portraits look the same.’

  Her father raised his hand to strike her again and she squeezed her eyes shut and hunched her head into her shoulders. The blow didn’t come and when she opened her eyes she saw he had let his hand fall and was trembling. He screamed at her that she was a monster, that she could not be his daughter, and told her to go to her room.

  The door opened and Anna’s mother came out. ‘She’s died,’ she said.

  When the funeral was over Anna’s father went back to Crimea. Up to the time he left he wouldn’t speak to her and it was years before she saw him again. Anna’s birthday came a couple of weeks after the funeral. Anna’s mother came into her room as the sky lightened, while she thought her daughter was asleep, carrying a large, heavy parcel wrapped in cream paper. As soon as her mother had gone out Anna went to open it. It was a French camera, in a hinged wooden box lined with velvet with a handle like a suitcase. Besides the camera the box contained a folding bipod, flasks of chemicals, different lenses, a cable with a plunger for pressing the shutter at a distance, and a thick book called Principles of Photography, all trim in velvet pockets.

  Anna’s first picture showed her standing at the dressing table in her room, with sunlight coming from behind the camera, shining through tall windows. It was early afternoon and the sun falling on Anna was high, bright and hot. In her inexperience and eagerness she hadn’t thought about the light and shade and in the picture she floated in a dazzling parallelogram that leaned away from the darkness of the unlit room around, where dim lumps and corners slunk formless to the edges of the paper. Her white dress was so overexposed that it was impossible to make out any detail or texture and in the picture it seemed to shine with a light of its own. She was sixteen. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and her face came out clearly. She was holding the shutter cable behind her back and having pressed it tried very hard to keep still for a long time in case the exposure came out as a blur. Her head was raised. She looked proud and happy, looking down on the world with eyes moist from the effort of keeping them open in the sun without blinking and lips only just held together as she tried not to laugh.

  Anna took over part of the cellar for a darkroom, persuaded her mother to pay for a black felt curtain to be hung from ceiling to floor in the corner behind the pickle barrels, and frightened everyone with the smell of her chemicals and her yelling at anyone who tried to push through the screen when she was developing pictures. She took down her father’s oil paintings of her that hung throughout the house, new paintings for each year of her life, and put them on the bonfire of leaves the gardener made in November. Her mother watched and frowned from the window and didn’t try to stop her, but the gardener refused to burn them, and said he would take them to his brother in the country, which is how they ended up in a market stall, and fetched a poor price, and disappeared. In their place Anna put up self portraits and photographs of her mother. She wanted to put a picture of the servants in the hallway but her mother objected and insisted it hang in the scullery. Anna went to the cemetery and took a picture of her sister’s grave in the first snows, with a sticky lees of crystals cast on the gravel at the base of the stone, and a bunch of dried, frostbitten chrysanthemums wedged in the angle as if seeking shelter. She had it put in a black frame with a black ribbon across one corner and wanted to hang it instead of her father’s last painting of her sister but her mother shook her head, so Anna put it on her dressing table.

  Anna took her camera to the market and photographed old peasant women in curdstained aprons standing with their big knuckles resting on the counter on either side of ruined white castles of tvorog, their eyes deep and sceptical behind red cheekbones. Some pulled the edge of their headscarves over their faces and shooed her away and set up a cry that she was putting the evil eye on them. Others laughed and asked Anna to send them a copy, and when she asked for their address, they called themselves Aunt and gave their first names and the names of their villages. Anna took pictures of a work gang loading sacks of grain onto barges on the Don, they all stopped what they were doing and arranged themselves shyly into two sweating lines, and none of them knew whether to fold their arms or to hold the lapels of their jackets or to put their hands behind their backs, they kept moving and sniggering and nudging each other and whispering like girls, till they grew bolder and began asking whether she was married, and would she like to dance, and could they take her on the river, and by the end they were all laughing and singing her songs and capering on one leg until the foreman appeared from a shed where he’d been napping and scolded them back to work.

  She got up before dawn one morning to photograph fishermen in small boats, bilges awash with tiny silver fish like pools of mercury, before the sun had burned the mist off the river. She set up the camera on the family balcony to photograph the carrying of the cross through the town, the priests blinded by dust whipped up by a summer wind, their black and white vestments snapping with a sound like a city of geese rising at once from a field, and a crazed indigent in a ragged black suit without a shirt or shoes skipping and hopping backwards in front of the procession, his head lifted up to the golden cross, hands alternately held out towards it and rubbed together as if it was a fire and pressed to the sides of his head. He tripped and fell on his back and the procession stepped over him. Some of the priests kicked him as they passed and one placed the sole of his boot squarely on the chest of the sicksouled one. Eventually he was hauled to the side of the road, bleeding from the corner of his mouth, by a party of nuns, who laid him carefully in the gutter and hurried on after the cross. After a few minutes the lunatic roused himself and followed the dust cloud on all fours.

  One day in the autumn of 1907 Anna went to take pictures of a group of students who had set up a swimming, mushroom-gathering and skating club. They swam, skated and gathered mushrooms, but only to hide from the police their discussions of communism. Anna had heard of communism, the word was in the air, but was unsure what it was; she had an idea it was an austere, worthy, artistic–philosophical sect, perhaps with vegetarian te
ndencies, whose members lived in huts in forest clearings – serious people, long-bearded intellectual men in peasant smocks, women in plain black dresses, who spent their time discussing how the world could be made a better place and, although they were from good and prosperous families, growing and cooking their own food and even doing their own laundry, although how they managed to have enough time for discussion without servants to do all that work was a mystery. Perhaps the women did the laundry and the cooking and the potato harvesting, leaving the men free to organise themselves for discussion. Anna didn’t read newspapers, only novels, and poetry. Much of the time when she was reading Alexander Blok she didn’t understand what he meant to say but she loved the light, the colours and the space, formless yet intricate, which his words seemed to open a prospect to, and left a longing with her. She asked the students if communism had anything to do with Marxism. A lanky student with glasses and straggling collar-length hair, with thin wrists coming out from the cuffs of an old canvas coat several sizes too small for him, looked at her as if she had asked how many days there were in the week, before beginning, with growing pleasure, to explain. Anna interrupted and asked if he knew a man named Lutov.

  ‘I know the name Lutov,’ said the student. ‘He says he’s an artist. I’ve seen his pictures. He uses debased bourgeois forms. His style is very primitive. He paints archetypes of pretty women and pretty men. He speaks about himself like a revolutionary, as if he’d placed a bomb under the Tsar’s pillow, but so far as anyone knows he’s never done so much as handed out a leaflet. He’s a parasitic rentier, anyway, he lives off the blood of the workers at some factory he owns. He spends most of his time trying to seduce girls who hang around with Marxists. You’re just his type. You should be careful.’