The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  I could not rid myself of the feeling I had been hit. I took off my scabbard and gun and all my straps and cast them away. I took off my jacket and discarded it, with all my documents, and, Anna, the photographs of you and Alyosha. I remembered about them later, when it was too late, and regretted it, but at this time I seemed to have crossed into another world entirely. I ran my hands over my face, my chest, my back as best I could, my legs, my middle. There was the dried blood of others on me, but I had not bled. I was untouched.

  I got to my feet, crouching down, and made my way over to where the man was talking. His was a kind of prayer too, it seemed to be a list of all the people he knew. I came up to him and told him who I was and he said he was Yantaryov. It was one of the troopers who had shielded me on the ride forward. He asked me if our people had won. I could barely understand what he meant by these words. I said I did not know. He asked if our people would come for us and I told him they would. Yantaryov’s stomach had been cut open. He must have been in terrible pain, but he did not show it. How are such men made? He was from the Caspian, I think. Astrakhan. He asked me where I was wounded and I did not answer. He asked if I would shoot his horse for him. I told him his horse was dead. He asked if I would shoot him. He said he would not live for more than a few hours, which was true, and it hurt. I said I could not shoot him. It would be a sin. He said I was right, he apologised, and asked me to fetch him some water. His canteen was empty so I went to get mine. As I pulled it out I heard a shot. I ran back to Yantaryov and found him dead, with his own pistol in his mouth and his hand on the trigger. A harsh light bloomed in the sky. A flare was floating down. I dropped to the ground. Machine guns sounded again. I lay there for a long time, until there were no more flares. Then, on my hands and knees, I began crawling towards the woods. I did not know what I was doing or where I was going. Perhaps I thought that if I was going to be killed I would like to be closer to the people doing the killing. And still I thought about shelter and concealment. I did not think about going back to join the regiment. I was a deserter and an outlaw, but this did not occur to me then.

  There must have been soldiers of one sort or another among the trees, but without trying to I slipped between them. These were the very first days of the war. I have not followed the news closely these past months, as you can imagine, but I know the troops are very inclined to dig themselves in and make fortifications whenever they can. They move more slowly, more carefully. The cavalry have dismounted. They have become wiser. Still they are dying, of course.

  I walked for hours, trying to be as quiet as possible and trying to move deeper into the forest. It was a warm night. I curled up on a bed of last year’s leaves between two tree roots and went to sleep. I woke up from a nightmare just when it was getting light. I had dreamed the events of the battle – battle? to call it a battle! only killing – just as they had happened, with one or two details added. One was that you and Alyosha and the Colonel were there, somehow, but you had your backs to us: you were watching something else. The other was that as the shells began to explode I felt as if I was being bitten by some small, vicious animal, from within, as if it was just about to burst through my skin. I stood up with a shout in a pattering of falling leaves and pulled off my vest and ran my hands over my body. There was no new mark, not even a graze. I took off my boots and the rest of my clothes and sat naked on the root, trying to find the wound I was sure was there. I found nothing. In my heart I was not surprised because I did not feel as if I had lost anything, blood or flesh. It felt more as if I had gained something I should not have, which had not been there before. I had seen the best part of two hundred comrades and their horses cut down like grass in a few minutes, and I had escaped without a cut. I should have been on my knees, for days, thanking God for his mercy. But I did not feel saved. I felt filthy inside, as if my soul would never be clean again, be there ever so much fasting and prayer, and a weight which would never let my soul float free of this world of blind killing.

  I heard a branch cracking and I jumped behind the root, grabbing my clothes. I saw a dark shape moving between the trees a few hundred metres away. It was a horse, without a rider. I pulled on my clothes and boots. I became aware of how thirsty I was and thought of stopping to look for water. I decided to follow the horse. It was not difficult. The animal would stop every once in a while. It seemed to be thinking, or listening. A couple of times it looked back at me. It was not concerned I was following. When I came closer I saw it was a cavalry horse. It had one of our regiment’s saddlecloths. I recognised the beast: Dandy, Trooper Shtekel’s mount. I could have tried to catch him, but I had no idea of my own to follow, and I felt so base for Hijaz that I was ready, even eager, to humble myself before a horse by allowing it to lead me. I did not see how I could ever presume to ride a horse again, and I felt a lump in my throat at the thought.

  After about a mile there was a crashing to our right and I saw the familiar dark muzzle of the grey, Lyotchik. I couldn’t remember the rider. He was dead, I supposed, and felt awkward for not remembering. Nothing seemed strange to me now and we went forward together, two horses leading a man through the forest. After about an hour I smelled woodsmoke and we came to a clearing with a charcoal burners’ hut. Four men sat on logs by a small fire. Smoke came from the hut too. When we entered the clearing one of the four, a man I recognised, got up and took the bridles of the horses, nodding at me. The three others looked at me. I recognised them all. I went over and Chanov asked me if I would like to sit down opposite him. I sat and asked for a drink of water. One of the apprentices brought me a cupful, and another when I emptied the first.

  I told Chanov he had been missed. He said he could not take part in that. He pointed to the direction from which I had come when he said ‘That’. He asked where the regiment was and I told him they were mostly dead. He nodded and said that it would still be called a victory.

  I asked him what he meant. He said they who commanded, the Tsar, his marshals, the great capitalists and financiers, did not reckon in the lives of individual men, any more than they reckoned in single roubles or single American dollars. In their affairs and at the gambling table they would lose thousands to win millions; and if they lost millions, they had millions more. So it was with spending their men. A regiment of one thousand souls was a little stake. But I must understand the truth that was hidden even from the Tsar: that he and his commanders and nobles and capitalists, and the Kaiser, and the Austrian Emperor, and the King of England, and the President of France, and all their rich and powerful courts and general staffs and bourses, they too were only stakes, laid by a greater player in a greater game. Chanov asked me if I felt the presence of that greater hand. I said I did. Chanov asked if I knew who it was. I said: ‘Is it Satan?’ Chanov said ‘Yes, it is the Enemy.’ Chanov said Satan had stirred mankind in this war as his best-worked combination to spite God. The Devil had worked on us for decades to bring it to this, and it had been easy, because he held all men on his keychain. Satan was an evil moon, and he could tug at the seed in men and turn it to his purpose as the moon turns the tides.

  ‘But not you,’ I said.

  ‘Not me,’ replied Chanov. ‘I am not a man. I have remade myself into the likeness and form of an angel. I have taken the Keys of Hell which hung upon me and have thrown them into the furnace. By doing this I have returned to that Paradise God made for man in the Beginning, and I dwell there.’ Chanov said that God had told him to cross the Urals before the foretold war and join the army so as to find even a few souls there who would understand the prison they were in, and how they might release themselves. I should think of him, he said, as an angel who had journeyed into Hell, and who would send back as many pure souls as could be found there, and could recognise their own nature well enough to agree to go.

  I asked him how it was possible for a man to live in Paradise and Earth at the same time, and he said the Paradise of the White Doves – that was what he called the castrates – was like a ship, of t
he Earth but floating free of it, touching land at certain places yet never remaining there, outside the laws and boundaries of any mortal territory.

  I asked him how God spoke to them, and he said: ‘We turn.’ He touched one of the apprentices on the shoulder and the man got up and stood on a flat rock near the edge of the clearing. He stretched his arms out horizontally on either side and began to turn on one foot, quickly reaching such a speed that his body blurred, like a top, and he lost the appearance of a man. He looked to be of a lighter substance than the still world around him. I thought he might rise from the rock and begin to float up into the trees. A second apprentice walked over to him and, after some minutes spinning, the figure slowed, returned to its Earthly substance, and fell, sodden with sweat and with eyes closed, mumbling and smiling, into the arms of his fellow.

  Chanov asked if I would tell him about the killing and although it was hard for me I told him everything in as much detail as I could. He asked if I had been injured and I said no, I had not, and I could not understand why God had chosen me out of all my comrades to leave the field unharmed. Yet, as I told Chanov, I felt as if I was carrying a burden with me from the field of the dead, which would keep me chained to the moments of the killing forever.

  And Chanov asked: ‘Do you know the name and the place of that burden?’ I looked at him and I understood what the burden was, and I put my hand on it, and I felt it hung there like a tumour. There was fear in me, but it was a fear that I believe came from my body, while in my soul I felt the dawning of a great joy, and a clear vision came to me of myself standing on a vessel tied to a burning land, and a sword cutting the rope that moored the vessel, and me floating free onto the peace of the waters. I thought of you, too, and Alyosha. You were not in that vision. It was as if you were in some other world altogether, some Russia that lay on the other side of the killing, somewhere I could not cross back to. The joy was rising in me, and the fear too, but the joy always greater. God had saved me for this, I understood; a trial. How else would I have found Chanov?

  And Chanov said that to those who were not White Doves, the crows, he called them, it seemed that the misery and wickedness of the world was divided into a million parts, that they were not linked. That anger, and greed, and lust, and warlikeness, and the ambition that tramples others, and lying for gain, and selfishness, and the sadness that comes even to the rich in the evening, were not all part of that same Devil’s urge. They were blind. Why did man make war and heap up riches and lust after women if not for the same itching of his seed, urging him on? Had I not seen in the faces of the Hussars as they rode to war, driving their innocent beasts to destruction, that same insatiable hunger which I had seen in them at the gaming table and as they coveted the goods and women of others? The Devil’s keychain was too strong for the Lord’s Commandments to hold. The very form of the Keys to Hell showed that they were of the Curse of the Serpent and the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; a trunk and two fruit. Only by destroying them could a man escape, and the Enemy had made them so dear to us. Had I not thought, when he showed me his angel’s body in the stream, that he had made a greater sacrifice than if he had cut off his hands, or cut his throat? Had I not thought that?

  I told him I had, and told him I was ready. He told me I was not ready. We repeated these words many times to each other until I asked what the Book said. Chanov recited the words of Matthew: ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ And he recited from John: ‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.’

  I stood up and begged him to take me with him to Paradise. He stood, and put his hand on my shoulder, and shook his head, and said he could not. I asked him again. After I had asked him many times he asked me if I truly wanted this and I said I did, the joy and fear still growing in me. He led me to the charcoal burner’s hut, stopping every pace to ask again if I was certain.

  Inside the hut it was very hot. An open furnace glowed red, and there was a wooden chair on the dirt floor. Chanov told me to remove my clothes. He told me that at any time I could stop before the cutting by shouting: ‘I refuse!’

  I heard a knife being sharpened outside. For a moment the fear surged and then I thought that compared to what I had seen in the killing, what my comrades had suffered and would suffer, this was little. Chanov sat me in the chair and bade me open my legs. He told me that for now, he would only cut the fruit, and not the trunk. This was called the First Seal, and Mounting the Skewbald Horse; Mounting the White Horse came later. He said that when he had done, I must take them and throw them in the fire.

  The apprentices came in. The one who had turned was still smiling and looked a little glassy-eyed. One of them was carrying a short, sharp knife, which he gave to Chanov, a white towel, and an open bottle of spirit, which he placed on the ground.

  The four men kneeled in front of me and began to pray. At intervals I was given responses to make. Anna, these I cannot tell you; they are the most secret words. The men stood. One of the apprentices held my arms behind my back; the other two held the ankles of my open legs. Chanov bent over me, lifted my member with his left hand, and brought the knife down quickly with the other. In that one moment, it seemed God turned his face away, and the fear smothered the joy. I thought about Alyosha, and I was glad I had helped bring him into the world, and I thought about you and I on the train to Crimea after we were married, and how you had laid claim to a part of me, and I had given it to you, and how I was breaking faith with that. The knife was very sharp. It cut through the skin and tubes to the wood of the chair in less than a second, long before I began to feel pain. I do not think I screamed. I tried not to, for some reason. Perhaps I had done my screaming against Hijaz’s dead neck. I felt the apprentices release me, the warm gush of blood between my thighs, the shock of spirit poured over the wound, and the towel handed me to press against it. Then Chanov put the sac he had just amputated into the palm of my free hand, a warm familiar part of me that was no longer part of me. I walked to the furnace and threw it in, where it crackled and disappeared in the flames. I fell.

  Anna, it is done, and it cannot be undone. I have much more to tell you and will write again soon. I wanted you to know, although I was not supposed to tell you anything. I wanted you to know. Do not tell Alyosha yet. But I wanted you to know I am a deserter, and an angel, I have been castrated and I am happy.

  With the pure remains of my love for you,

  Do not be angry for ever,

  Your legal husband

  Former lieutenant Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov

  Yazyk

  20 December 1914

  Mutz finished reading and put down the letter on the divan. He looked up at the portrait of the man he now knew to be Balashov, Anna’s father’s wedding present. It bore no resemblance to the storekeeper of Yazyk, of course, but that had been the father’s talent. Something to show Alyosha. Mutz had never felt so soiled as after reading Balashov’s confession. He shuddered with the sense of the blade, which it was impossible not to feel severing that same thin tie of flesh between his own legs. He stood up, flexed his fingers, looked around without knowing what for. He was sweating and he swallowed several times, wondering if he was about to vomit. He should go in to speak to Anna Petrovna, but he couldn’t bear to look on the bitch’s face. The cold sweat rolled over him in a wave as he heard his mind come up with that phrase, as if from some unknown country inside himself: the bitch’s face. It was the first flame of an anger that began to burn into him from different directions, knocking him back on the divan, immobilising him, while his skin, his whole body, went hot with it. Anger towards himself for not seeing that this was a community of skoptsy, of castrates, wa
s the least of it. The rage flamed in from the beast-stupid, ignorant, blind literal-mindedness of Balashov, the petulant tantrum of the action, the impossibility of a sane mind like Mutz’s ever spanning the distance between the two extremes, between the greatest harm and pain, and the silliest joke, a man could execute with his own body. The rage flamed in from the self-delusion and naiveté of Anna Petrovna, trusting in the sanity of a hussar obsessed with God, and letting him go to war. It burned hottest from her selfishness in following the madman here to the edge of the world, as if they could in any sense still be husband and wife, letting her son languish in an unnecessary exile, and, after allowing him, Mutz, to believe she was in love with him, revealing her eunuch jester as if he could be even a partial reason for her sudden coldness.

  Mutz felt he needed to hit something. There was no reason for him to stay. He strode out through the front door of the house, slamming it behind him, out onto the road and towards the bridge. Just before the bridge was a cluster of rowan trees and he seized the trunk of one and shook it, yelling, till the berries pattered into the wet weeds around him. One of the branches cracked and the violence of the sound made him stop and try to remember why he had gone to Anna Petrovna’s. Samarin’s murderous thief. The cannibal.