The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  Mutz had foreseen a humble man, still shocked from the knife five years before, gone simple, and had foreseen his own abhorrence after reading Balashov’s letter carrying on into the daylight to make his persuasion of the castrate more perfect. He had expected to be able to dominate him. It was not going well. Without any right on his side, Balashov was shaming him. Mutz was even beginning to be sorry that he had not known him better earlier. But the roaring of events in Mutz’s ears was becoming so loud that only by clinging to his plans could he remain sane. He was obliged to make his request.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he said. ‘I see you know about me and Anna Petrovna. That makes what I’m about to ask you easier.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to tell your wife to leave, and to take your son with her.’

  ‘Easier?’

  ‘It’s not enough to tell her that she’s free. You’ve got to beg her to leave you if she refuses to go.’

  ‘Anna is my wife, and Alyosha is my son,’ said Balashov steadily. ‘Why should I beg them to leave if they don’t want to go?’ He lifted his chin up and Mutz saw a light come on in his eyes. Where was the humility?

  ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but haven’t you been ridiculous enough already?’ said Mutz. He heard his voice thin and heighten as he lost his temper. ‘The only reason for them to stay here is you, and you’ve done all you can to fail as a husband and a father. You ran away from your family, and you mutilated yourself so you could never love or make love to a woman again. Can you really not understand that nothing except Anna Petrovna’s pity keeps her here? Why do you need that? Why do you need her, now? Why do you need a child? You’re not a man any more, and a wife and child are man’s things. You’ve got to tell them to leave and you’ve got to tell them never to come back.’

  ‘I shall not! I shall not. I didn’t make Anna come here, and I shan’t tell her to go. You men,’ Balashov said, his body tightening with pride and anger, ‘You men, you have that burden between your legs, that heavy sour fruit and that little poisonous tree-trunk, and you think that without it, there’s no love.’ His voice grew calmer. His face grew placid and he looked into Mutz’s eyes, almost smiling, severe and sure. ‘Do you truly believe that this world is such an awful place that love can be taken out of it with a knife? D’you think surgeons could remove it? I disgust you. But do you not disgust yourself if you believe you need to be led by a stiffness in a stick in your loins, and a fever, to love your son, or your friends, or a woman?’

  ‘This is sophistry,’ said Mutz, blushing, humiliated in a way he couldn’t name. ‘There are kinds of love …’

  ‘Your kisses will always have teeth in them.’

  Why had Mutz thought a man who carried ideas to such extremes of execution would ever be persuaded by rational argument? He said: ‘They’re not safe here. You heard the Red guns. I don’t see Matula surrendering Yazyk without fighting. The town will be destroyed. Anna and Alyosha will be caught here and killed.’

  Balashov wasn’t listening. He was waiting for Mutz to finish, his eyes shining now, righteous. ‘If you loved my wife,’ he said, ‘instead of trying to steal her, perhaps you could protect her. If I were a man, that’s what I would do.’

  The Legion

  Anna Petrovna stood by the salt fish kiosk in the square, waiting for Matula to finish holding his parade so that she could ask for Samarin to be released. She was cold. Kira Amvrosevna, the fish lady, had lent her a shawl.

  ‘That’s how they’ll look on Judgement Day,’ said Kira, resting her full self on her forearm and judging fish with the point of her knife, bobbing from flank to flank. The scaly grey fish-skin was rough with salt. The fish were thin as parchment and tough as green wood. ‘All the sinners. All the fornicators and deceivers, all the great liars. All these unkinlike halfwit outsiders with guns. Christ’ll thread string through their skulls and hang ’em up in racks like fish, with their mouths hung open and their eyes wide and not believing. And then there’ll be such a judging. You’d better make sure you’re clean inside, Anna Petrovna, cause Christ’s going to gut you with his gutting knife, and judge you on what he finds in there.’

  ‘Leave me in peace,’ said Anna.

  They heard the sound of the guns beating at the world. ‘Lord,’ said Kira. ‘The end time’s nigh. That’s how it sounds.’

  Anna fetched a cigarette and matches out of her purse. Supposing Alyosha had inherited his father’s terror at the sound? So much the better if he learned now never to go for a soldier. Her hands shook as she lit the cigarette. In her imagination she had already put Samarin in their house as a shield. He couldn’t protect them against all the warriors but he could be an envoy of the lights of cities beyond the forest, the noise and chatter and thinking there. She didn’t think of touching him. She didn’t think of them touching. Well, perhaps she did, if thinking of stroking his cheek with her fingertips was touching, while he looked into her eyes.

  ‘You’ll not be smoking that filth here,’ said Kira.

  ‘Let me smoke quietly.’

  ‘You’ll end up like this,’ said Kira, waving one of the fish in her face.

  A bugle sounded from the roof of the shtab. Metal parts clinked with purpose up above and the barrel of the Maxim gun poked out over the edge of the guttering. Smutny and Buchar were preparing to cover the parade. Czech soldiers began to drift towards the shtab from all corners of the square. One of them walked slowly past Anna, watching her cigarette. She thought he had a limp, but it wasn’t that. He only had one boot.

  ‘You’ve lost a boot,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said the soldier. ‘I found one.’

  She held out her cigarette to him and he took it and walked on.

  When the Czechs were assembled they formed a curved, notched line outside the shtab. At the time they left Prague in 1914 there had been 171 of them. They had lost Hruby, Broz, Krejci, Makovicka, Kladivo and Kral in Galicia in 1916, when they were still taking orders from the Austrians, and the Russians attacked. The Russians shot Navratil when they captured the company, because they thought he was going to throw a grenade, though he was just reaching for his water bottle. Slezak and Bures died of their wounds on the way to the prison camp. The company buried them in a little cemetery near the Dnieper. The company was put to work on a farm outside Moscow and Hlavacek was murdered when the foreman found him in bed with his wife. The three Kriz brothers, acrobats, were taken off to a Turkoman circus, and Ruzicka, a carpenter, got a job in the city. The Russians cut the rations, and Chalupnik was executed for stealing a cow. There was some fever in the barracks, and the company lost Stojespal and Kolinsky. The company left for Kiev to join the Czech Legion, but Tesarik, Rohlicek, Zaba, Boehm and Kaspar said they didn’t want to fight with the Russians against their own people, and they stayed behind as prisoners of war. In February 1917, when the Russians had their first revolution, and nobody knew who was in charge, there wasn’t much bread to be had. The younger Cerny died of the fever, followed by Lanik and Zito. Dragoun and Najman froze to death on the second night, they’d hidden a bottle of brandy and went onto the roof to drink it so they wouldn’t have to share it, they fell asleep up there and there was a bad frost. The company had to lever them off with crowbars when they stopped near Chernigov. Kratochvil, Jedlicka, Safar, Kubes and Vasata, who always took an interest in politics, set up a soviet in the last wagon and uncoupled it from the rest of the train in the night. When the company reached Kiev and joined a new regiment things got better for a while, the Ukrainians were good to them. Bilovsky made a girl from Brovary pregnant and was given an honourable discharge when her father gave Matula his best horse, and Vrzala started sneaking out to the casinos at night and became a cocaine dealer. By the time they reached the front they were fatter and not so ill. The Russians put the company into their offensive. The older Cerny took a bullet as they came out of the trenches and went down without a sound. Matula was calling out to the company that it could fight i
ts way back to Bohemia, and every time he looked at someone they would fall down dead, and he ran forward, and the company followed him, and Matula told Mutz not to crouch, he was setting a bad example, and Mutz stood up straight. Everyone stood up straight, and Strnad took so many bullets in the neck that his head popped back like the stopper on a beer bottle. Besides Cerny and Strnad the company buried Vavra, Urban, Mohelnicky, Vlcek, Repa, Precechtel, Ruzicka, Prochazka, Zahradnik, Vavrus and Svobodnik. Knedlik and Kolar died later of their wounds. Then the Bolshevik revolution occurred, and the Russians in Kiev asked the company if it would help them fight the Bolsheviks, and Kadlec was shot by a woman in a leather coat. The Ukrainians took over, and the company helped them get food from villages on the left bank of the Dnieper. After the company shot some peasants, Buchta and Lanik said their comrades were dirty reactionary sons of bitches, and went over to the Bolsheviks. Biskup and Pokorny, who kept complaining that they weren’t being paid, went off to rob a bank in Odessa, and it was said they became rich and crossed the Black Sea, and ended up in Batumi, with three Adzharian girls each, and a big house by the sea, and little black pigs running about among the palm trees in their yard. It was also said they were hanged.

  Then the Czechs in the west said the Legion had to move to fight the Germans on the western front, and the only way to do that was to go round the world, to travel along the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok and across the Pacific and across America and across the Atlantic to France, so the Legion started moving east. When Trotsky tried to take the Legion’s weapons, Matula and the other officers thought they were going to hand them over to the Germans, and started to fight them, and the Legion took over the whole of the Trans-Siberian, and for a while the only free Czechoslovakia was six thousand miles long and two metres wide and stretched from the Urals to the Pacific. The company was in Irkutsk when the fighting started, and the railway workers were very Red. The company spent the summer fighting them in the railway tunnels and on Lake Baikal. Skounic, Marek and Zaba died when a train was derailed by partisans, and Brada was wounded in the fighting in the forest and died of gangrene. Myska went over to the Reds. When the company captured him later, Matula shot him in the head. In autumn Red partisans ambushed the company on the Baikal shore and killed Vasata and Martinek. Matula became angry and the company went to a town called Staraya Krepost. Matula ordered all the factory workers and their families out into the square and the company shot dozens of the men. After that Kubec and Koupil deserted. The Reds put up posters saying Matula was a bloodthirsty butcher and an enemy of the people. They raided the company’s billets and Benisek was killed, but the Socialist Revolutionaries turned up and helped it drive the Reds away. By that time Baikal had frozen over and the company heard that the partisans were crossing the ice. It went after them but couldn’t find them in the darkness and the ice began to break up because it had frozen early. At dawn the company found that Hajek had drowned, and while it was counting the frostbite cases the Reds opened up from the shore, killing Zikan and Noha and Smid. Matula was hit in the chest and his throat and windpipe was filling up with blood and he couldn’t breathe and Mutz punched a hole in his throat with the point of his knife, saving him. Jahoda led the men off the ice, and he went down when they reached the shore, and Mutz carried Matula. The second bullet seemed to have passed directly through Matula’s heart, but somehow failed to kill him. It was after that the company was posted to Yazyk. With Kliment’s murder, there were 101 left.

  When they marched to the station in Prague in 1914 they had worn new uniforms of stormcloud-coloured cotton and new boots, their badges and buckles had been bright, and even though they hadn’t believed in the sense of what they were doing, they had bothered to keep in formation, both because mutiny was too big a single step then from where they were and because, in summer, fresh, unblooded, in the streets with girls watching, marching had seemed a kind of dancing.

  In a Siberian rail halt in autumn, five years later, mutiny hung from the branches, too ripe even to need to pick, it was falling. The soldiers’ uniforms were cut with loot and patches, darned with stolen string, a Cossack’s breeches under an English khaki tunic, American shirts stained with blood, wine and the yolk of raw eggs sucked warm from the straw they’d been grabbed from two years before and their ends finely punched with bayonet tips, a belt buckle made in Khiva and carried to the snows of the north by a railwayman who died at the controls of his locomotive as it ground from Central Asian spring to still winter in the months between revolutions, one entire Czech uniform, as handed out by the quartermaster in Bohemia when its wearer was still a citizen of the now dead Austro-Hungarian Empire, but a deception, since every sleeve and hem and quarter had been replaced since it was new, and nothing remained of the original but the idea of its old identity. A hundred men carried fragments of two dozen armies, some ancient and vanished, some formed and dissipated in a month in the edgeless continent of grass, snow and stones between Europe and Manchuria, when a charismatic gambler, generous and violent and ambitious in an occasional way, would walk into a store in some town without paved roads, dump a sagging bag of assorted gold on the counter, and request scarlet-trimmed billowing horsemen’s gear and lance pennants and mane-ribbons for a cohort of arbitrary warriors and their mounts, and within a month, after a single raid or vodka-bout or quarrel, the finery would be sold on or lying bloodied and frozen in mud, only ready to be taken. Some of Matula’s men’s rifles had the first orange lines of rust; all had places where the varnish had worn off the wood. Their hats were a bestiary of hide, wool and fur. One soldier, Private Habadil, had swapped his watch – his own, not booty – in Omsk for a cap resembling the scalp of a balding old man with long red hair which, the vendor swore, was from a kind of man-beast which lived in the mountains of Altai. The boots they wore reported years on the move and dread of a sixth winter, leather wrinkled like great-grandfathers, makeshift re-solings of wood, truck tyre, bark, all trailing straw and rags and scraps of felt or fur stuffed inside for warmth, though it was not yet cold in Yazyk. A hundred men with 945 toes between them, the balance lost to frostbite, and 980 fingers; 199 eyes; 198 feet; 196 hands; stomachs scored by microbes; one in ten syphilitic, one in ten consumptive, and most tasting the first foul tang of scurvy.

  Matula came towards them, his sabre stuffed bare into his belt, Dezort a few paces behind. Sergeant Ferko called the men to attention. They spat, sneezed, sniffed, coughed, scraped their feet together and humped their rifles over their shoulders so they leaned every way. Ferko and Matula exchanged salutes and Matula spoke, looking the men in the eye one by one. In turn each looked away, or down at their feet. Some even closed their eyes rather than contemplate the druggy charm of the captain’s lips and the carcass soul in his eyes.

  ‘Men,’ said Matula. ‘Comrades. Friends. We have fought together for five years. We have fought for the Emperor of the Austrians against the Emperor of the Russians. We have fought for the Emperor of the Russians against the Emperor of the Austrians. We have fought for the White Terror of the monarchists against the Red Terror of the Bolsheviks. We have fought with Socialist Revolutionaries and Cossacks against Cossacks and Socialist Revolutionaries. I can say to you, with pride, that not once have we compromised our ideals.

  ‘We have fought together for five years. We have fought for others. It is time we fought for ourselves. I know you are tired. I know you do not feel like fighting any more. I know you want to go home.’

  The men had been silent throughout, but when Matula said the word “home”, the quality of their quietness changed, it stiffened and tightened. It braced. It became important not to let it break.

  ‘I could suggest to you that instead of going home to Europe, we make a home here,’ said Matula. ‘I could remind you of what opportunities there are for enterprising men in this empty land, so little colonised and so carelessly looked after by our fellow Slavs, the Russians. I could persuade you that our own new country in crowded Europe, the country named Czechosl
ovakia, will need to have its empire and its colonies, as other great, civilised, modern white European nations do. But you want to go home. You want to return to that small, safe, green homeland. I am your commander, and I say: I shall not stop you. Even though no order has come from President Masaryk to leave, even though it would be shameful to desert this rich virgin land where we have spilled so much blood, I shall not stop you going home.

  ‘My men, there is, however, one obstacle to your departure. It is an officer of this company, Lieutenant Josef Mutz. He is not here. He has set off towards Verkhny Luk on an errand, and we can only pray that no harm comes to him along the way. Lieutenant Mutz is of the opinion that on no account must we leave Yazyk until we receive an explicit order to evacuate. I have tried to reason with him: I pointed out how eager you were to leave. He looked at me with an expression – I would not say cold, I would not say bureaucratic, I would not say officious – evil would be putting it strongly, heartless, likewise – anyway, he warned me that he would personally denounce to the general staff in Omsk and Vladivostok any attempt by any soldier or officer to leave Yazyk until the order came to do so. I was surprised at his harshness. True, he is not like us; his first language was German, not Czech; he is of that race which killed Christ our Lord upon the cross, and persists in carrying out its mysterious private rituals; in the hardest hours of our campaigns he has hung back and watched from a distance, as if secretly preparing a dossier for use against us at a future tribunal; but I had never thought badly of him before. No doubt, according to the letter of our new military code, which he seems, strangely, to know better than us, he is correct, even if his stubbornness violates every rule of natural justice. Men, the fact exists: we cannot leave Yazyk while Lieutenant Mutz is alive, that is, while he thinks the way he does. Therefore, in the meantime, let us carry out our duties here a little longer. In the first place, that means defending this place against the Red menace, whose artillery you may have heard. Do not be concerned: I can assure you that the local reds only have three shells, and they have used them all. Perhaps, in defending Yazyk, we’ll learn to love the forest and its bounty.