The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  ‘Men, I know you are disappointed. I know you are frustrated. I must warn you not to turn your anger against Lieutenant Mutz. He may have cut himself off from his comrades. It is true that should one or more of you catch him in some isolated spot, such as the railway line, it would be impossible, despite a full inquiry, to identify who fired the fatal shot. Do not yield to temptation. That is all.’

  Ferko dismissed the men. Anna Petrovna went over to Matula, who was talking to Dezort and Hanak. The three of them formed a triangle of backs. They knew she was there and ignored her. Hanak’s eyes flicked over to hers and flicked away. He had already sewn Kliment’s torn-off stars onto his shoulders. Anna could see broken threads from the dead man’s coat poking free.

  Anna stood behind Matula and said loudly: ‘I want you to release Mr Samarin.’

  Matula turned round slowly, still talking in Czech to the lieutenants. He nodded, and went back to his conversation. He made her wait ten minutes then came to her, the boy’s mouth smiling falsely and the eyes true to their lack of symptoms of affection, and put his hand heavily on her shoulder. She shrugged it off and pushed it away.

  ‘Will you let him go?’ she said. ‘You can see now that he’s not a killer.’

  ‘But I promised your Jewish friend to keep him locked up till he got back.’

  ‘Lieutenant Mutz is wrong about all sorts of things.’

  ‘Anna Petrovna!’ said Matula, clasping one of her hands in his, and holding it tight when she tried to pull it away. His hands were hot. ‘That’s what I’ve always said! How wonderful that you agree with me.’

  ‘It’s not that I agree with you about anything,’ said Anna, blushing. She managed to snatch her hand away and took a step back. ‘You’ve got to let him go.’

  ‘And have him wander off into the forest? Leave him in the wilderness?’

  Anna looked at the ground. ‘He can stay with me,’ she said. She looked into Matula’s face. ‘I’ll take responsibility for him.’

  Matula licked his lips and nodded, smiling more broadly. ‘This is interesting,’ he said. ‘If I understand correctly, you wish to sever your relationship with the Jew, and replace him with the convict? Are you quite certain? Perhaps you’d rather choose one of my men? I think I can find one who’s never been in jail, and none of them are Yids. There’s a few Catholics in there, mind you, perhaps that’d be more to your taste.’

  Anna’s heart was beating hard and she considered striking Matula. She anticipated the feel of his rough skin and the scar under her hand. She thought of spitting but that took skill. ‘You won’t provoke me,’ she said. ‘I know you already. Mock me all day if you like, but let the man go.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Matula. His smile went. ‘That’s called “bail.” What guarantee do I have that he’s not going to run away before I decide what to do with him?’

  ‘I promise he won’t run.’

  ‘You guarantee it?’

  ‘I’ll make sure.’

  ‘How about this? If he runs, I’ll shoot you.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘Do you think I feel safe as it is?’

  Matula’s smile returned, and his eyes moved, like a machine shifting to the next seam.

  ‘Lieutenant Mutz will be disappointed when he returns today and finds his friend Anna Petrovna living with a convict he doesn’t trust. Or perhaps you’re hoping he won’t come back.’

  ‘If he finds a way to get home to Prague, I hope he doesn’t. D’you think he doesn’t know you’ve been inciting your men to kill him?’

  ‘Cold!’ said Matula. ‘Such busy eyes you have, such blood in your cheeks, and so cold to old Mutzie. Go on, take possession of the unfortunate, and keep him interested, if you don’t want your boy to be an orphan.’

  In

  Anna was made to wait outside the shtab while they brought Samarin out. He didn’t seem surprised that she had obtained his release. He shook her hand and told her he was grateful. She didn’t tell him the terms of his bail, only that he couldn’t leave Yazyk, otherwise there would be unpleasant consequences for her. They walked to her house. The road seemed short and the air less cold. Anna felt clean and light, as if some heavy, sticky stain had been washed off her. She talked in short, cautious phrases about her home town. It was only a night by train from where Samarin had grown up. Samarin’s language was close to her own, closer than the Czechs with their accents, closer than the castrates with their Bible talk, or than the Land Captain and his household with their concerns of class and rank. They were the same age. Samarin asked her why she’d moved to Yazyk after her husband’s death. Anna was frightened and angry for a moment before she understood it was a question that was fair and bound to be asked, and would be asked as often as other strangers came. She told a story about a house which belonged to a dead great uncle, a need for peace and solitude, and a wish to sit out European Russia’s times of trouble.

  Samarin said nothing to suggest he disbelieved her and they walked on in silence. Anna Petrovna turned to him, watched him for a second, and turned away. He asked her what it was.

  ‘Nothing. I’ll tell you later,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll forget.’

  ‘It’s foolish.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I expected you to be more impatient to be free. To make me understand how much you want to be away from here. To be more angry.’

  ‘I could be angry. Do you want me to be?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘As far as I understand, your house is to be my new jail, and you’re to be my new jailer. Is that right?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Anna Petrovna, and laughed.

  ‘An experienced convict, when he’s moved to a new prison, will say and do as little as possible until he’s explored the new surroundings and found out how tough the guards are. That’s any convict, including the dangerous ones.’

  ‘Are you dangerous?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Samarin. Anna glanced at him to see if he was smiling, but if he was it was hidden.

  A wet, icy presence touched the back of Anna’s neck, in among the soft down between the tendons, where the spine begins. It was snowing. A flake landed on her eye and she blinked and kept her eyes open though it stung. She lifted her head to watch the grey bits come spinning out of the white sky towards them. A piece of snow rested on her mouth. She licked it off and tasted the grainy, rainy, travelled taste of cloud.

  They went into the yard through the back gate. Alyosha was striking poses and mimicking the clash of steel with a wooden sabre in his hand, a peeled stick with a crosspiece he had lashed on himself. Anna called to him and he ignored her. She called again more sharply. He turned, ran towards them, and with his arm stretched out touched Samarin’s breastbone with the tip of his sabre.

  ‘Surrender!’ he said.

  Samarin put his hands in the air.

  ‘Coward!’ said Alyosha.

  Anna took him by the shoulders and pushed him away, scolding him for being rude.

  ‘This is Kyrill Ivanovich, a student,’ she said. ‘He’ll be staying with us for a time. He’s walked here from the Arctic. He escaped from a very cruel prison camp. So behave yourself. Be nice to him.’

  Alyosha looked into Samarin’s face. His pride didn’t know what to do with this information. ‘My father fought in the cavalry,’ he informed Samarin. ‘He died near Ternopol. They sent us a telegram. He killed seven Germans before they cut him down. There should’ve been a medal but it never came. Some of the Czechs have medals. Do you have a medal?’

  ‘Here,’ said Samarin, squatting down so his head was at Alyosha’s level and tapping a small scar on one knuckle. ‘This was awarded to convict first rank Samarin, Kyrill Ivanovich, for meritorious conduct on the march from prison, when he fought off hunger, thirst, cold and wild beasts with nothing but his wits and his faithful knife. Despite having to walk one thousand miles through the tundra and the taiga to reach the nearest settlement, convict Samarin remained cheerful, often stopping to share a j
oke or a friendly word with a passing elk or deer. Each morning, after a vigorous routine of exercise, he’d sing national songs and recite the catechism. He bathed in running water twice a day, breaking the ice as necessary with rocks and a system of levers of his own devising. In the early days of the march he’d pass the coldest days, when the birds fell dead from the trees, by wrapping his clothes in a bundle, fastening them to his head and running naked through the snow, performing elementary Greek gymnastics as he went.’

  ‘What’re Greek gymnastics?’ said Aloyosha. A snowflake landed on the end of his nose and he blew it off with a puff of breath from his pushed-out lower jaw, not taking his eyes off the newcomer.

  ‘Like this,’ said Samarin, and he straightened up, bent forward, planted his hands on the ground, kicked his legs into the air and balanced on his hands for a moment, head down, feet up, before flexing his elbows and springing upright again.

  ‘I can do that!’ said Alyosha, dropping his sword and preparing to hurl himself at the snowy mud.

  ‘Don’t!’ said Anna and ‘Wait!’ said Samarin, at the same time. While Anna laughed Samarin put his hand on Alyosha’s shoulder and said: ‘First you have to learn to tame wolves so they run alongside you in the moonlight and protect you from the blizzards with their bodies, and train bears to bring you fish and berries. You should be able to make beavers fell trees when you make a clicking sound in your throat, like this.’ Samarin’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he clicked in his throat.

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Alyosha doubtfully. ‘You can’t make them do that.’

  ‘You can. You can make shoes and clothes from birch bark, sewn with braided reeds and a needle fashioned from a splinter of mammoth ivory. You can drink liquor distilled from birch sap and the juice of rowanberries. And you know how you can make light at night in the taiga?’

  Alyosha shook his head. Samarin leaned forward to whisper in his ear: ‘Capture an owl and make it fart.’

  Alyosha giggled. ‘Where do you get the flame from?’

  ‘Pine resin, young fir cones, and marten-skulls,’ said Samarin, counting them off on his fingers. ‘I could show you.’

  ‘You couldn’t light our stove that way. It’s hard. You need matches.’

  ‘It’s easier with matches, of course,’ said Samarin.

  Alyosha poked in the dirt with the point of the stick. ‘Come onto the roof of the byre,’ he said. Samarin and Anna followed him. With their help the boy dragged the ladder out past the cow Marusya and set it up by the door. Alyosha led the way to the roof, where the fuzz of moss on the boards was already slippery with melted snow. They saw the sky was falling on Yazyk, the grey scourings turning white when they reached the ground and flying across the face of the forest, dimming the perimeters of the world with rushing grains. As the blizzard thickened, the world shrank, and the bell tower of the derelict church, the common grazing and the trees disappeared.

  Anna left them there and went indoors to the warmth, the stuffy smell of heated wood, cloth and down. It would be dark soon. She heard Alyosha shouting in the yard and Samarin moaning like a bear that he’d been hit. She went to the kitchen, took a stool and opened the larder. She took a squat half-litre jar down from a high shelf and wiped the dust and cobwebs off. The jar had the dark lustre of a lake on a clear night. She took off the lid and spooned blueberry jam into three dishes. The berries subsided comfortably into the sweet ooze. She glanced over her shoulder and licked the spoon clean, shivering from the tartness of the acid.

  Alyosha brought Samarin back, the boy stomping in, bright with cold, shedding straws of packed snow, throwing his hat on a chair, the convict behind him, tall and wary. Anna had lit the lamp in the parlour, and the three of them sat down without speaking. Anna poured tea and handed the man and the boy jam spoons as if she was giving out ten-kopeck prizes.

  Out

  The rail track from Yazyk to the bridge ran level through the trees for seven miles before beginning to climb towards the heights through which the gorge ran. For the first part of the journey Nekovar and Broucek worked the pumping handles on the hand trolley by themselves. Mutz sat in the front between coils of rope, his feet dangling over the edge, one hand on the brake. When they hit the gradient the labour of working the trolley slowed them down. Mutz took off his greatcoat and joined Broucek on the handle, facing the way they were going. Nekovar stood facing them, working the other handle.

  ‘Broucek, what about these muscles? The shoulder muscles?’ asked Nekovar. ‘Are they important? Do women like them?’ Broucek didn’t answer. ‘Has a woman ever stroked your shoulder muscles before agreeing to sleep with you? Did she become aroused? Did her pupils dilate? Did her breathing become more rapid?’

  ‘It’s going to snow,’ said Broucek.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mutz.

  ‘Tell me, Broucek,’ said Nekovar. ‘What if the female erotic machinery was wound tight by the pressure of the man’s muscles, so tight that her soft outer hide began to palpitate and heat up with the tension as it strained against the unreleased mechanism, causing the nipples to harden and lubrication to be released into the mouth of her lower valve, which the rigid male member would then slide easily into, triggering the release of her coiled sexual spring and causing her body and limbs to shake and move with violent energy, which in turn –’

  ‘Stop,’ said Mutz. ‘Stop the poetry.’

  ‘No, brother,’ said Nekovar. ‘Just trying to understand from a master how they work.’

  ‘They’re not alarm clocks,’ said Mutz.

  ‘I know women are not alarm clocks,’ said Nekovar. ‘I understand how alarm clocks work. I can use alarm clocks. I can repair them. I could even make one. I’m a practical man and I’m trying to improve myself. Do you understand how women work, brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, brother, not all of us have given up trying.’

  ‘You frighten the girls in the public houses,’ said Broucek, without malice. ‘Men who wear glasses take them off before they start fondling the girls. But you put a pair of glasses on, you roll up your sleeves, and you kneel over them and start turning them this way and that and testing their insides with your finger and seeing how they jump and squeal like you were repairing a broken motorcycle engine.’

  ‘How else can I understand the mechanism?’

  ‘It’s not a mechanism!’ said Broucek, beginning, after years of acquiring patience, to lose it.

  ‘Lads,’ said Mutz. ‘Lads. The tunnel.’

  The tunnel leading to the bridge was on a long shallow incline and the trolley built up speed with Nekovar and Broucek resting at the pumping bar. They came out onto the bridge, Mutz pulled on the brake lever and the trolley stopped with a spray of sparks. A cold wind blew down the gorge and the clouds were yellowing. At the mouth of the tunnel were the remains of a horse. Scavengers had been. Its bones had been stripped clean overnight and the mane and tail left as blood-dirty black tassels on a grinning empty rack.

  Nekovar fastened a rope to one of the girders and let the free end fall through the hatch, pulling the coils after it. Mutz went first, leaning back against the rope to slow himself and kicking off the rockface. Halfway down he stopped, stretched his neck to look more closely at the rock, reached out a finger to touch it, nearly lost the rope, regained control and descended to the riverbank. Where the banks steepened and narrowed under the bridge the noise of the river was as loud as the breathing of a million souls together and the currents were chopped and broken into sharp stubby waves.

  The bodies lay at the water’s edge near where the trees began. A strip had been cut from Lajkurg’s right foreleg and flies were laying eggs on the carcass. Otherwise the horse was whole and untouched, its very eyes unpecked. Nor had Lukac, the dead soldier, been gnawed by scavengers overnight. He didn’t lie where he’d fallen. His greyed, swelling body lay at right angles to the river, boots touching the water’s edge, arms by his sides. His right hand had been severed, then placed next to the stump, knu
ckles upwards. On the corpse’s stomach was something wrapped in a rag. Mutz looked back at the bridge. Broucek had come off the end of the rope and Nekovar was halfway down. Mutz signalled to Broucek to unshoulder his gun and watch the forest.

  Mutz leaned down and picked up the package. It was damp. He heard Broucek pull back the bolt of his rifle and push a cartridge into the breech. The package was stiff and weighty. Mutz squeezed it. A stench of old meat breathed outwards and the package resisted under his fingers. Mutz opened the cloth. A human thumbnail set in a grey darkening stinking human thumb pointed at him. Mutz said ‘Fick!’ in his throat and dropped the package. He rubbed his palms furiously on his breeches and washed his hands in the river.

  It was a third hand, a putrid half-crab with incurled fingers and the tendons standing out pale under the taut knuckleskin like the yellow core of chicken feet. What had once been the plumpest parts of the hand, what palm readers call the Mount of Venus beneath the thumb and the Mount of Luna on the opposite edge, had been gnawed, the hardened hems of skin patterned ragged by teeth.

  Broucek came over and looked down at the half-eaten hand, lying on the shingle, palm up.

  ‘Look at the palm,’ he said. ‘Look at the length of the life line.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Mutz.

  ‘It means long life and happiness.’

  Mutz squatted down by the body of Lukac and studied the original severed hand, the one placed next to Lukac’s wrist. The night’s rain had wettened it yet it was grimier than the arm to which it belonged.

  ‘Watch the trees,’ said Mutz.

  ‘What for?’ said Broucek.