The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  ‘In the beginning, when I arrived at the camp, they had a kitchen hut. A group of prisoners who’d got in with the guards cooked the food, baked the bread, and doled it out inside. They fed us twice a day, bread, kasha, soup and tea, sometimes a bit of sausage on the Prince’s birthday or some saint’s day. The guards were fed there too, but they sat down inside, and we took ours back to our barracks to eat. When the shortages began the first thing was that the soup got thinner and there wasn’t so much kasha on your plate. They put sawdust, ashes and bits of dried moss into the bread flour to make the bread go further. The bread was grey and the loaves didn’t hold together properly. When they tried to cut them they’d crumble like rotten wood. Sometimes you wouldn’t get a slice of bread so much as a handful of flakes and crumbs.

  ‘I began to be an object of trade. I belonged to Matchstick, and he began to sell me. Either he’d sell me as a slave, to work an extra half-shift for a buyer, or he’d sell my ration. One day he sold both. It nearly killed me. Sixteen hours with the pick in the snow, and nothing but hot water at the end of it. I put straw from my mattress in the water. I know it sounds absurd, but there was nothing else to thicken it with. The next day I ate and worked a normal shift but I carried the deficit with me for months. I can still feel the missing meal now. My salvation was Machinegun, or so it seemed. Authorities like him never felt the shortages; they were always looking for amusements. I heard he couldn’t read and I offered to teach him, to read to him, if he would buy me from Matchstick. He made the purchase. I still had to work my twelve hours but no more, and I had a better chance of eating. Machinegun liked to have the books on a shelf by his bed and I’d read to him. He liked Pushkin and the Book of Revelation. He was sentimental. He was from the Caucasus, Svanetia, he wore the grey skullcap. He robbed banks. He stole a machine gun from a unit in Kutaisi and fixed it to the back of a four-horse hearse. He called ammunition caviar, and the gun the mother-fish, the sturgeon. He’d come riding into dusty Mengrelian squares, pull the tarpaulin off and cock the gun, screaming “She’s going to spawn!”, and everyone would run out of the bank, they’d throw the money out of the windows, but it was no good, once he’d announced it, he couldn’t stop until he’d emptied every last bullet he had into the bank. When they caught him he was bathing naked with the gun in an earthenware tub full of olive oil. He offered to go to the war with it, to kill Germans. He said: “Only I can make the mother fish spawn.” They separated them, sent him to the White Garden and took the gun to the war without him. And it never did work, though they said it was because it was the wrong kind of oil. I wanted to read to him from Bakunin. I thought he’d like Bakunin. But he only wanted to hear about the last trumpet and The Prisoner. You know, Pushkin.

  We are birds, we are dying; time, brother, time!

  There, beyond clouds, where the white mountains climb

  There, where the land takes the blue of the sea

  There, where only the wind walks, and me.

  ‘The first couple of times I read it to him he shed a few tears, hugged me, kissed me and went to sleep. The third time the flesh on his face seemed to harden to stone while I read it. He lay on the bunk without moving, his eyes wide open, for a long time after I finished. He got up and began walking up and down the barracks. He put his fists together and shook them and started making noises as if he was firing the machine gun. He paced from one end to another, the noises getting louder, and each time when he reached me he looked at me. He stopped, screamed “She’s going to spawn!” and hit me in the face with his two fists together. He was a big man, I went down straight away, he sat astride me and was battering his knuckles against my face, my neck, my chest, making this sound in his throat akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh-akh, foam and phlegm dripping off his lip. I think he … well, he stopped suddenly and fell forward on top of me, his stubble combing the bloody curls of my beard. He had never had a wife, and he was missing his gun very badly.

  ‘I believed in God less than any of them but I was the only one who believed I deserved to live. Not just wanted, but deserved, as if there was someone else to make the choice. They felt that. They were curious. It provoked them. They wondered who the someone else was. They wanted to take me to pieces. They wanted to feel inside me. Machinegun said: “What makes you think you’re better than us?” I said “I don’t, all men are the same.” He looked into my eyes for a long time and told me to undress. He said “We’ll see if all men are the same.” Two days later I woke up on the floor of the barracks. I could hardly see but he was there, I could make out his boots and his fat knees bulging out over the toecaps as he squatted there, looking at what he’d done to me. He said what was that you were saying, it was interesting, about the proletariat. He said: “Under socialism, will I get to have my own machine gun?” I told him that, according to my understanding of socialist dogma, all workers would have full and equal access to the means to defend their homes and workplaces. He said: “Yes, but will I get to rob banks?” I told him there’d be no need to rob banks in future. He spat and said I didn’t know what he did and didn’t need and left me there.

  ‘After that Machinegun didn’t beat me so often but he still stole my food. At night when he couldn’t sleep he’d kneel by my bed, put his hand under the blanket and stroke my ribs, running his fingertips in the troughs between them, rubbing the pit where my stomach’d been with the palm of his hand, kneading the hollow from hipbone to hipbone like a baker smearing dough. He said: “Do you want to know what I’m doing?” I said “No.” He said: “I’m feeling for your heart.” I lay still on my back and let him do it. I wanted to ask him for bread. I was afraid to. His fingers were rough and warm and down through the bones and flesh I could feel him shaking as he wept. Sometimes his tears fell on my face and I opened my mouth. He couldn’t see in the darkness that I was drinking them. In the morning he’d take half my ration. He took food from the others too, not so much. He said to me: “Who is it that looks after you, Intelligent?” and I said: “No-one.” He said: “You’re not a saint, are you, God wouldn’t have saints who don’t believe in him.” “No,” I said. “Why d’you think you deserve to live, then?” he said. “It must be the proletariat.” I said I couldn’t eat the proletariat. He said: “Well you wouldn’t have to eat it all,” and he laughed. I tried to laugh too, thinking he might leave me more bread. I noticed how much quieter Machinegun had become, part of the general murderous quietness over the camp as the food ran out and the guards began to disappear. The convicts and the garrison were starving. You could see the bird of hunger roosting on them, waiting for the hunger to hatch out, a mildewed mother bird waiting for a brood of white skulls to peck their way blindly out of these shrivelled heads.

  ‘We heard about the revolutions, and the peace with Germany, and how there was fighting across the country. Usually when there’s a revolution they empty the prisons, don’t they? Not the White Garden. We were too far away to be remembered. The Prince decided he would wait. Perhaps he thought he’d be safer there. He tailored the news for us. He took delivery of a box of news in midsummer and doled it out through the cold season, bulking it out with lies to keep his prisoners down and his guards loyal. Somewhere, in some chancery in Petrograd, some minister or revolutionary or minister-revolutionary must have signed orders dissolving the camp, setting the political prisoner, me, free at least. And the minister went out to dinner, because the White Garden is very far away from Petrograd, over the Urals and along the Trans-Siberian and up, up, up to the very edge of the world, and he wasn’t going to deliver the order himself. So maybe it got lost. Maybe it came down the telegraph wire and got stopped where the wire was cut by partisans, or got incinerated in a battle in a city along the way, or was used by a looter to roll a cigarette in, or was just blown away by the wind, and went flying through the trees in the taiga and got stuck in the branches of a stunted larch and made into the lining for a squirrel’s nest. So two years ago we heard there’d been a revolution but the revolutionaries were loy
al to the Tsar and to the war, so we were still prisoners. Then last year we heard the revolutionaries weren’t loyal to the Tsar and the war, but they were about to be destroyed by the Whites, who were, so we were still prisoners. And because Russia was now at war with itself, rather than Germany, there would be even less food.

  ‘There were many days I thought would be my last, and on one, I was stopped by Machinegun and Redhead outside the kitchens. I had their bread and mine: one full ration altogether, and that adulterated with whalebone meal from skeleton parts the Tungus had hauled down from the northern ocean and flogged the camp for a crate of rifles and ammunition a month before.

  ‘The only advantage of starvation was that it had taken all pride from me. I kneeled in the snow in front of them, holding the bread to my chest, and bowed so that my forehead was touching Machinegun’s boot. I bowed again and again, hitting his boot with my forehead, as I’d seen the peasants do to the tax collector, and begged him to let me keep my bread. I called him nice, lord, your excellency, the bravest and most honourable man in all the Caucasus, the finest machinegunner in the world, I said I was a stinking turd who wished only to serve him, who’d give him my life, unworthy as I was, I wasn’t fit for him to walk on, I was the poorest, weakest sinner in Creation, who deserved to crawl with worms and snakes and beetles for the rest of my days, dragging myself along with my hands, praying for forgiveness and for the everlasting glory of the great Sergei Machinegun Gobechia, a hero and a saint, if only he’d grace me with a drop of his infinite mercy, if with one simple act he’d earn the final adoration of a man who already loved and worshipped him as a god among men, if he’d allow me to keep a few crumbs of the bread I humbly brought him from the kitchen, to be repaid a thousand times over in gold and blood and any other measure when the war and his unjust imprisonment had run their course.

  ‘While I was saying this Redhead was pulling my head back by the hair and Machinegun, not saying anything, was prising the bread from my fingers. They took it all and walked away. I saw a couple of crumbs on the ground, picked them up and set them to rest on my tongue. I raised my tongue gently to the roof of my mouth and let the crumbs melt there. I began to look for other crumbs on the ground. I became aware of a change.

  ‘A man was looking at me from about twenty yards away. He was standing next to the space between two huts from where Machinegun’s boots stuck out, horizontal. He had a grey face. We all had grey faces but his was the grey of a veil blowing across the outlines of wisdom carved in stone, not the grey of starved hopeless flesh. His smile was like a beckoning finger, like pity. He looked fed, thoughtful and gentle. I went over and looked down at Machinegun lying there with his throat cut. The Mohican said: “He stole your bread,” and gave me a full bread ration and a piece of sausage. As I stuffed it in my mouth and felt the world and my pain again I grieved for Machinegun. He’d shot and beaten people because he couldn’t talk to them. Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators. And he’d spoken to me for longer, and more painfully, than anyone.

  ‘The Mohican said to me: “I understand. Because I understand and I understand you understand, I have to look after you. Everyone has their place, and you weren’t supposed to die here.”

  ‘The Mohican said: “I spoke to him in his own language.”

  ‘The great thieves think of themselves as a people apart, like aristocrats, living and breathing honour, obsessed with fashion, their own fashion and nobody else’s. They see the non-thieves as a kind of game animal whose only honour is to be hunted by thieves. They divide women into five kinds. Their mothers; grandmothers; child-bearers; concubines; and whores. They’re vain, brave, pitiless and sentimental. They love to spend the money they steal on roses, perfume and gold for women they don’t know. They’ll bet everything they have on anything they can, their lives on which icicle’ll drop first. Their clothes are worth more than their houses, they hate progress, they think the world was always the way it is, and should stay that way. They’d rather die than swallow an insult. I learned this in the White Garden. I thought the Mohican was one of these. I was wrong.

  ‘He was a thief, and they honoured him for that. He’d robbed a gold barge, and killed soldiers. He was handy with a gun and a knife. There was a story that he’d broken out of jail in Bukhara and killed all the guards, every one, and a story that he’d dynamited the home of a businessman in Taganrog, burying the whole family, and they even said he’d done a bank in Alaska and crossed to Chukotka with an Eskimo dog team. He was more dangerous than the other thieves because he didn’t have their sentimentality and their longing for a court to flatter them. He felt the human passions. No, he didn’t feel them. He handled them. He felt their quality and sniffed them and tasted them and rubbed them against his cheek, but they didn’t lodge in him. He was like someone who could feel the agony of poison but couldn’t be killed by it no matter how much he drank. So he could feel pity flood through his body watching a child looking at him out of the window of a house he had wired with explosive, and still close the circuit, because the pity left no mark as it passed through. What was most terrible about him was his certainty. For such a man, you’d think, life would be a game. When there’s nothing to strive for, no irresistible human desires, you play. He wasn’t playing. With him, it was like the difference between writing and drawing. We live our lives like writing. The pen moves over the paper in regular lines. The past is written and can be read, the future is blank, and the pen must stay in the word that is being written now. The Mohican lives like drawing. He draws one stroke after the other, but the strokes can be anywhere on the paper. When you watch, the strokes look disjointed and meaningless, but in his mind he sees the whole picture, complete. Complete until his death. He’s just filling it in. That’s what you are to the Mohican. A stroke in his picture. You could be on the edge or in the middle, you could be a cut throat and a tiny detail or a single look that fills the whole foreground. Only he knows, but he does know. He knows his own order of things.

  ‘In January, not long after the Mohican started feeding me, the White Garden came apart. The last boats had left five months earlier with the guards who’d been able to buy a place on them. We’d been cut off since then, and the river ice wouldn’t break up till the end of May at the earliest. In the camp, for most of the year, the guards and the commandant were just as much prisoners as we were. Where could they go? The mountains and glaciers were a wall to the north, and even if they could have been crossed, there was nothing on the other side except more tundra and the Arctic ocean. Sure, you could walk across the river ice and head south, or even walk along the river to the first settlement. But you’d freeze to death, or starve, before you got there. The camp didn’t have horses or trucks. There were the Tungus. They might sell you deer to ride on. But they didn’t come to Putorana till spring, and you couldn’t be sure of finding them if you went looking for them, or of them finding you, or even of reaching the tree line. A couple of guards had set out in November to try their luck. We watched them walking across the river, climbing up the far bank and wading through the snowfields on the other side. There was a tilt to the land there, and in the few hours of light we could see them moving slowly through the snow, up to their waists. Nobody had expected the snow to be so soft and deep in that place. When the light went they still hadn’t reached the ridge, and then a blizzard came down, and the next day the track they’d made was covered, and perhaps they were too. I don’t know that the Tungus would have helped them. They were losing a lot of deer to Russian marauders, Cossacks, Red partisans, whatever, people who didn’t expect to have to pay.

  ‘The chaos was outside. I was protected. I’d never felt so safe and comfortable. The Mohican had a screened-off area to himself in one of the barrack blocks, with four bunks, a table and chairs, a dresser and some crockery. He had his own stove, and sheets hung across the window. He’d sit there and smoke and play cards with other thieves and guards, while I sat on the top bunk, reading
or writing. They ignored me. They brought the Mohican food. He’d put it to one side and they’d play. When they left he’d divide everything up and give me half.

  ‘“Eat every crumb, Intelligent,” he said, as if I needed to be told. I stopped working; he told me not to go. “Keep the stove going,” he said. “You’re not going to die here.” For weeks, that was all I did. Read, slept, put logs on the stove, listened to the sound of the wind outside and to their talk as they played cards. My ribs faded into a solid covering of flesh and my stomach swelled, my thighs became wider than my knees for the first time in months. For a short time it was bliss. Later it wasn’t so good. When you’re tired and cold and hungry, you’ve got nothing to think about except how to appear to be doing the most work while doing the least, how to get food and how to steal warmth. When the weariness and the cold and the hunger go away you begin to think about other things. You have time to dream, and the dreams become a torture. All the useless passions come dribbling back into your heart, fear of dying, hatred of the authorities who imprisoned you, loneliness, even pride.

  ‘The Mohican and I didn’t talk. We had nothing to share with each other. He slept, but he never rested. His mind was always working, but he never stopped to think. He was always active and all I had was free time. I watched him sometimes, trying to catch him in a moment between cards or sleep or sharpening his knife, believing there had to be instants when he’d be so disturbed by a memory that he’d have to stop, or frown, or when a thought he hadn’t provided for nudged his mind and it showed on his face. I never caught him. He never did a superfluous thing. How many men can you say that about? No scratching, finger-drumming, whistling, yawning, chin-rubbing, lip-biting, hesitation in his speech. When he used his eyes, it was to a purpose, he never stared out of the window or at the wall or the ceiling to settle his mind while he dreamed awake and worked things out in his head. I decided he was a great man. Yes, his eyes. A fish looking up through clear ice at the afternoon sky would see that light and that mystery. At cards it took him a second to scan his hand and he was done with looking at the cards, what would he do with his eyes then? All that interested him was watching the other men round the table. He found a lot to see in their faces. He wasn’t thinking about anything else when he was studying them, just them.