The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

‘I dreamed about politicians,’ Alyosha mumbled. He yawned.

  ‘Politicians? What politicians?’

  ‘Striped ones.’

  ‘Ah. Striped.’

  ‘With long hair, and long fingernails, and red eyes, like Germans.’

  ‘Why do you think the Germans have red eyes?’

  ‘And then papa came with his horse and the other hussars and they chopped off their heads.’

  ‘You need fresh dreams. Come on, beauty. Mama needs your help. Wash your face.’

  Anna brought the other saucepans upstairs, taking out the eggs, and set a basin down among them. She took off her clothes and squatted naked in the basin. Alyosha stood over her and scooped water out of the saucepans with a jug. He poured water over her in a thick dribble, making it stream down on either side of her backbone.

  ‘Aim for the mole,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ said Alyosha.

  ‘Mutiny?’

  ‘Why do I have to?’

  ‘Good sailors … ?’

  ‘… aren’t wailers!’ huffed the boy.

  Anna stood up and Alyosha handed her the soap. He watched until she slid her hand into the dark fuzz between her legs, when he turned away, took a wooden hussar out of the pocket of his nightgown and made it gallop through the air. After a while, she called in a whisper for him to rinse her. He filled the jug and moved towards her. She looked at him, shapes of lather shifting down her skin, and she was thin. She sank down again at his approach and lowered her eyes, waiting for the water.

  ‘What do you think of Lieutenant Mutz?’ she said as the water came down.

  ‘Don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘But …’ Anna didn’t know but what. Mutz couldn’t talk to Alyosha. Shy with children.

  ‘I asked him to show me his gun,’ said Alyosha. ‘He said he couldn’t. He said it was forbidden.’

  ‘Thank you, Lyosha. Go down and get your breakfast.’

  Anna dried herself, shivering in the cold of the upper storey, and put on a clean petticoat and drawers and black stockings. She looked in the wardrobe without hope. It wasn’t that things were old, or unfashionable, she had no idea what fashionable was or where it was being decided these days, only that things couldn’t change. She put on a dark green calico dress and a brown cardigan and tied up her hair. If a coat of feathers and a white jockey’s cap had materialised in the wardrobe, she would have put them on. She brushed her hair. She should have washed it, but there wasn’t time. She forced herself to look in the mirror. Pale. She liked her eyes still. A mark, a blotch: too bad. Only to see how much she cared, whether she cared at all, she sharply pulled out the little drawer where she kept her old cosmetics case. The drawer came free and fell on the floor. The kohl brush was stuck fast in the time-baked hardness of black in there, the last lipstick had dried to a pumice nub, and there would have been enough grains of powder fast against the rim of the compact to dab a single spot on her forehead. She did care, it turned out, but not for long. The house was full of short treats of self-pity she could console herself with if she wanted.

  She licked her forefinger and smoothed her eyebrows. An alternative past formed in her head, without her bidding it, of her running after the Communists, instead of staying to photograph the strikers, twelve years before. Never meeting the sweet cavalryman who would turn into a Siberian eunuch. At the time, the Communists had seemed like cowards. Now the memory, clearer than it had ever been, of their young, quick, wise feet on the mud made her sick with regret. Their goal meant nothing to her and their journey had no clarity. Yet she could feel the heat of their purpose now in a way she had not then, their sense of tearing through a barrier into a new world. Anna did not believe in new worlds, but knew she could not help wanting to be with men and women who did. Hidden in among the fleeing Communists of her memory was a false shadow, a man who had not been there and whom she had never seen, Samarin, turned up like a misplaced token of the choice she had not made.

  She went downstairs, took a few mouthfuls of kasha and tea, put a loaf and a tin of sprats in a string bag, kissed Lyosha goodbye, put on her boots and a black hat, and left. Just before she closed the door, she caught sight of Kristina’s face, gazing at her as if struck by the peculiarity of a stranger. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ said Kristina, absent, like a medium.

  Scraps of ragged yellow-bottomed clouds were breaking up the sunlight over Yazyk. Standing water flashed and slunk into shade in the cart ruts on the road to the square. Anna wrapped the cardigan round her against the breeze. The road was broad but the black log houses shouldered each other as if they were crowded onto an island, as if the infinite space of Siberia was an ocean that might engulf them, or at least drive them mad, if they did not stay within armlinking distance of each other to brace. And yet they were mad; that was why they had come. The castrates had no heirs.

  She passed four castrates sweating together to raise a heavy new starlinghouse on the open patch of grass and goose-grazing in front of Mikhail Antonovich’s house. She knew them all by name. They nodded and greeted her soberly as she went past. Bogomil Nikonovich, driving a lean cow, last of his herd, raised his hat and uncovered a head hairless as a pumpkin. He said good morning, and glanced at Anna Petrovna’s legs.

  She was the crazy one. She could barely remember the fable her husband had spun for his fellow castrates about why she had come. It had mentioned photography, and widowhood, and a hysterical yearning for tranquillity, and could only have sounded to the community like the generous defence of a woman who’d lost her wits. She was Satan’s niece, yet they tolerated her. She smoked; she drank; she ate meat; she never prayed; she was a fornicator; she didn’t believe amputating and mutilating sex organs would turn the amputees into angels. She cared more about her son than about her neighbour. She was greedy and selfish with her time. She didn’t seek perfection or paradise. She loved the world more than she yearned for heaven or feared hell. She wouldn’t look to the Bible for life rules any more than she would to Nicholas Nickleby. She was out of control. She was no devil’s family, she was the Enemy herself. And how courteous they were to this mad, evil woman who lived in their midst. To the castrates, she was as sick in her soul as the poor ranters in the cities, who could be brought to all fours and a bloody face by any group of small boys; yet here they could not give her even the ranters’ pleasure of martyrdom. How they could teach the cities to pity their outcasts with dignity.

  As she approached the square, she saw a man coming out of Timofei Semyonovich’s house with an empty wicker basket. He wore a flat black cap and a black jacket over a peasant smock and breeches. It was Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov. Meeting her husband always began badly and ended badly. He saw her and came to meet her. They stood two yards apart, greeted each other formally, and did not kiss. The rules had been clear from the day she arrived in Yazyk, in the late spring of 1915.

  ‘The Czechs told me I had to go to the hearing,’ he said. ‘As the leader of the congregation.’

  ‘I’m going too,’ she said. ‘It’s a kind of distraction.’

  Balashov looked at her with real sorrow for her soul. It was sincere and troubled. It disgusted her. ‘Captain Matula might shoot him at the end,’ he said.

  ‘Then he’d go to heaven.’

  ‘He’s an atheist. I suppose.’

  ‘Then he’s in for a lovely surprise when he gets there.’

  They began walking towards the square. Balashov asked about Alyosha.

  ‘He dreams about his gallant dead father,’ said Anna.

  ‘His father is not dead,’ said Balashov humbly. ‘Only changed.’

  ‘Pretty word, that,’ said Anna. She could never capture, in advance, the simplicity with which he could sour her thoughts. It was the simplicity itself. Her husband’s affected manner of using a chaste little flock of words for each wild lurch of his broken mind. ‘You say “changed” as if it was a leaf changing colour. Not a knife hacking at your body. It bleeds. It scars. It hurts.’

&nb
sp; ‘Life hurts. The more you live, the more it hurts.’

  ‘That isn’t true.’ Anna couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. The thought of the leaf changing shifted to the railway carriage on their wedding night and the bud that didn’t open, and that sprang to the night a year after her arrival in Yazyk when she’d drunk half a bottle of cognac by herself and run out of the house, along this same road, to the room where her husband slept, snatched the covers off him and tried to rape him, fumbling to pull his remnant sappy stick into her sex, and not the scars or the absence or that it wouldn’t harden which had driven her out of there tearily screaming but the submissiveness of his body and the low monotonous indistinct mumble of his prayers.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said, stopping. ‘Go on. I’ll ignore you there.’

  Balashov nodded and walked on without a word. It was impossible to believe that he didn’t know what would anger her most.

  ‘I told Mutz about you,’ she called after him. ‘I broke my promise.’

  Balashov faltered without stopping, looked at her over his shoulder, said: ‘I’m very sorry,’ and continued on his way.

  ‘Why did you lie to me about the photograph?’ she shouted. ‘You said in your letter you left them all behind on the battlefield. Why did you lie to me?’

  Gleb halted, turned round and said, not raising his voice: ‘I was ashamed of myself for keeping it.’

  ‘Ashamed? To be carrying a photograph of your wife? Is that why you left it lying in the street?’

  ‘I’m sorry. May I have the picture back?’

  Anna looked around for a stone to throw at him. She failed to see one and when she looked back Gleb had continued on his way. She couldn’t tolerate watching him. She stood on the log pavement by the mud road, nowhere to sit and nothing to lean against and nothing to see that she hadn’t seen, and felt abominably lonely.

  After a few minutes she walked to the administrative building and into the courtyard, where the shaman’s hut looked as forlorn and cursed as a dead man’s boots. She had seen him a few times, tried to talk to him once with the thought of using one of her last remaining plates to photograph him. He had kept his legs crossed, chained ankle over unchained, and his arms folded, shaken his head, and refused to look at her. Perhaps he’d thought she would be intimidated by the distance and untouchability of a man of esoteric religion. Some states even Siberian shamans could not dream themselves into; these demanded black earth peasants, or nice, well brought-up, bourgeois boys from the European provinces.

  A cluster of people stood a little distance from the hut, chatting with their hands in their pockets and smoking, as if they were about to go into the theatre after an interval. They turned to look at Anna. There were the Czechs, in their little factions. Mutz looked as if he had been about to speak to her husband when she arrived and he saw her. If she thought of Mutz, and she did quite often, it was with that just disturbed look on his face, and her occasional marriage fantasies always ended with her trying to call him away from some finicky labour he was engaged in under a big lamp in a faraway room. He was shadowed by Sergeant Nekovar, the clever craftsman who had fixed Anna’s heating, asked her some odd questions about whether a woman’s heart was like a stove, and saw in Mutz both a fellow-artisan and the only officer as determined as most of the soldiers to leave Siberia as soon as possible. Sergeant Bublik, who called himself a communist yet had never dared desert to join the Reds, stood apart in a corner. Skachkov, the Land Captain, still the civil authority of Yazyk on a piece of paper somewhere in the White chancellery in Omsk, but in no other way; the destruction of the old order, the death of the Tsar and the seizure of the town by the Czechs had struck him like a stroke, after he had spent so long successfully denying to himself and to external inquiries that the town was, as rumour had it, almost exclusively inhabited by apostate monsters, executors of a sin too grotesque to name. He could still walk, talk, eat and drink without assistance, but every day he would sit behind his desk in his office, the big desk with the little desk in front of it at right angles for the visitors who never called, and stare into space, trembling, clearing his throat sometimes, adjusting a stack of old documents in front of him so that their edges were exactly in line.

  At the centre of the group was Matula. The town was so much his toy that Anna was surprised he hadn’t become bored with it. Was there really enough fate in Yazyk for him? He seemed to feed off the sense of accumulated darkness under the millions of trees in the forest around, counting shadows as others counted gold. He had his retinue, Sergeant Hanak, whose jaw and nose came forward together, like a dog’s, the helpless Lieutenant Dezort, and Skachkov’s wife, Elizaveta Timurovna, Matula’s mistress, who could never forgive Anna for failing to take offence when she snubbed her. The only one missing was the odious Kliment. Matula and Elizaveta Timurovna were giggling together. They seemed drunk, in a strange, speeded up way. Matula asked Anna Petrovna if she’d brought her lunch.

  ‘I didn’t know if you were feeding the prisoner properly,’ she said. ‘You didn’t take care of the last one.’

  Elizaveta Timurovna tutted and whooshed. In the corner Bublik studied the tin of sprats and muttered: ‘Bourgeois.’

  ‘I thought you carried only kosher food, Anna Petrovna,’ said Matula, speaking very fast. ‘Did we lose a shaman? Yes we did. Mutz’s department. Keeps losing things. Shamans, horses, trust o’ the men. Don’t know if the prisoner will get time to eat. Maybe find him guilty in a minute. Ping! That way we’ll all share Anna Petrovna’s lunch. Loaves and fishes.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Mutz. ‘We should go in.’

  The ten of them filed into Yazyk’s old courtroom, a small chamber with a dock, two rows of chairs, and a larger, padded chair, with armrests, set on a dais raised a few inches off the floor. Matula went up to the big chair, prodded it, sprawled in it, took out his pistol, closed an eye, sighted on the dock, laid the pistol on his lap, and waved to Mutz. Mutz nodded to Nekovar to fetch the prisoner. The others sat down. After a minute of silent shifting and coughing, double footsteps were heard and Samarin walked into the room, trailed by Nekovar covering his back with a rifle. Samarin looked around, nodded to the assembled company, wished them good morning, to which Anna answered with a smile and Bublik with a formal greeting, brother. Samarin seemed about to take an empty seat in the front row opposite Matula but Mutz stepped over, took his elbow, and led him to the dock. Samarin appeared surprised but walked amiably to his place and stood there, looking around without blinking. His eyes fixed on Anna’s for a moment and he smiled at her. She felt the blood burn in her cheeks like a girl’s.

  ‘In the –’ began Mutz. Matula interrupted him.

  ‘Is there something wrong with you?’ said Matula.

  ‘It’s my hair,’ said Samarin.

  ‘You don’t have any hair.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ said Samarin. Anna, Nekovar and Dezort laughed. Twice Samarin had tossed his head like a horse bothered by flies, or a man with a severe twitch. ‘They shaved my head this morning. It’s hard to get used to not having long hair after nine months. It’s hard to get used to being clean. I’m grateful to Sergeant Bublik’ – he nodded to Bublik, who grunted – ‘and Private Racansky, who provided me with hot water and clothes and put my hair on the fire.’

  Matula nodded and Mutz began again. ‘In the name of the provisional administration of Yazyk, on behalf of Captain Matula, I open this hearing into the circumstances of Mr Samarin’s arrival in town last night, without any documents, at approximately the same time as the death of a shaman. Sir, would you please tell us your full name, your date of birth, your place of permanent residence, and your occupation?’

  ‘Am I entitled to a lawyer?’ asked Samarin.

  ‘No,’ said Matula.

  ‘Am I on trial? Am I accused of something?’

  ‘You’re accused of having an undefined personality,’ said Matula. He ballooned his cheeks, exhaled, leaned his forehead forward on the muzzle of his pistol and
scratched with his eyes closed. He was slowing down. He straightened up and looked lazily at Samarin. ‘Look, old boy,’ he said. ‘The woods are full of Red spies, and we haven’t the foggiest who you are. Mutz here thinks you slipped the shaman a litre of alcohol –’

  ‘Sir, I’m just –’

  ‘Don’t interrupt, y’damn Yid! And Mr Mutz thinks you’re a menace to society. There’s also the matter of my beautiful brave horse, who is dead, and whom somebody tried to …’ Matula began to breathe heavily. The breaths became louder and louder until Matula burst out: ‘EAT!’ He let his head loll back and ran the muzzle of his pistol to and fro along his lower lip. ‘I’m the law in this part of Siberia,’ he said quietly. ‘We want to hear your story. If I like it – I don’t say believe it, I say like it – I’ll probably let you go. If I don’t, you’ll have long enough to regret not making up a better one before you get to try your act on the crows.’

  The River

  ‘My name is Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin,’ the convict began. ‘I was born on the third of February, 1889, in Karelia, and after the death of my parents went to live with my uncle in Raduga, near Penza. I was a student there until I was arrested in 1914. I have no other profession. I don’t know what has happened to my family and our house. There have been many changes, I believe.’

  Bublik and Racansky had found him a peasant smock and breeches, but they hadn’t been able to help him with boots, or a coat. He wore the same broken boots he’d arrived in, and a blanket over his shoulders. As he talked he took it off, folded it and hung it on the edge of the dock. His head and face were shaven. He quickly lost the habit of tossing his non-existent hair out of his eyes, but it seemed to Anna that he was humbled and made wary by the stripping of the hair. While he spoke, he had a way of turning to each of the people in the room in turn, and widening his eyes at them. ‘You, at least, will know what I’m talking about.’ He left no-one out, even Skachkov the Land Captain, who didn’t look in his direction once and showed no sign of listening. He let his eyes linger longer on Anna, and she was happy to let her eyes meet his, until it became a contest, and she lost, or rather didn’t want it to be a contest; she looked away first.