The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  Mutz could not speak. The rush of joy was poisoned by the prospect of cold treachery. It was good and bad to be alive, as it always had been, but this was a steep time of being thrown up and flung down again. He and Nekovar began to move towards the door.

  ‘Wait,’ said Bondarenko. He went to his desk and picked up a block of newspapers tied tightly with string. ‘These are your propaganda sheets, I think. They might help you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mutz, taking the bale in his arms. Nekovar was staring at them. The top of the front page could be seen under the wrapping.

  ‘Do you see what it says, brother?’ said Nekovar. ‘Good orders from Prague.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘Good orders from Prague.’

  ‘They remembered us,’ said Nekovar.

  Bondarenko put his hand in his pocket and took out another telegram, folded in four. He gave it to Mutz. Mutz looked at it, and looked at Bondarenko. Bondarenko shone with optimism.

  ‘I carried out your other request,’ he said. ‘To help you. Now you’re with us. Because you will come to believe that ours is the only truth.’

  Mutz unfolded the telegram and read it.

  +++ EX PANOV IRKUTSK + ATT MUTZ YAZYK + RE MOHICAN + ESP DANG CRIM-POL ACTIVIST +

  MOHICAN IS MEMBR REVY ORG RNS + BANK ROBS ODESSA 1911 ORENBURG 1911 ALASKA 1912

  + BOMBS PETERSBURG 1911 KIEV 1912 + MURD FAMILY GEN BODROV 1913 + BELVD RESP 10 OTH ASSNS +

  SENT DEATH 1913 + ESCAPED + LAST KNOWN ORGING REVOLUTIONY CELLS PRUSS FRONT 1914 + DOB 10 AUG 1889 VOLGA REG +

  REAL NAME +

  SAMARIN, KYRILL IVANOVICH +

  ENDS +++

  The Locomotive

  Alyosha was a little out of breath, trying to keep up with Samarin, who had a long, quick stride, and Samarin was holding his hand, clasping it in his rough warm palm. The man’s feet crunched in the papery snow on the road and the boy’s pattered in a light fast rhythm with him, two paces for each of his. They walked up the road from the house towards the station. Samarin rose above Alyosha, a mountain of swinging bones in wool. The man didn’t look down. The light around them was clean and blue. The hollow scrape of crows sounded from the murk at the forest’s edge and a cat did honour to the sun in the carpenter’s garden, bowing and narrowing its eyes.

  ‘Mama will be up soon,’ said Alyosha.

  ‘What, you don’t want to see the locomotive?’ said Samarin. He looked down for a moment, without breaking his stride.

  ‘I do,’ said Alyosha.

  ‘We can have breakfast at any time, but they only fire the train up once a day, early in the morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To be sure it works, naturally.’

  Alyosha didn’t reply to this. It was a great revelation to him that it was possible to have breakfast at any time. He knew he really had woken up this morning. The sting of cold on his cheek wasn’t to be felt dreaming. Only: he had run over Yazyk lengthways and crosswise, inch by inch, over the years, and no-one had taken him on the road he was walking down now. He had run and walked and been carried past these houses many times, but with Samarin, it was a new road, which had started when he woke up to find Samarin standing over him, watching him sleep. When Alyosha opened his eyes, Samarin had grinned at him, put his finger to his lips, bent down and lifted him out from under the quilt, and Alyosha felt like a loaf, hot and fresh from the oven. Whispering ‘This isn’t for girls. This is what the boys do when the girls are sleeping,’ Samarin had carried him like that downstairs to the kitchen, where his clothes were waiting. When Samarin carried him downstairs the stair hadn’t creaked as it had when Mutz left their house in the mornings. Mutz was clumsier, and secretive, and never wanted to play, or talk. When Alyosha had woken up the first thing he saw was another expression on Samarin’s face, not the grin. It had been like looking in the mirror. Like catching himself in the mirror when he was concentrating on something important.

  ‘Kyrill Ivanovich,’ said Alyosha. ‘Can you wake somebody up just by looking at them?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Samarin.

  ‘And you didn’t wake Mama, all the same.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where did you sleep last night?’

  ‘In a safe place.’

  ‘With Mama?’

  ‘Oho. You’ll be a prosecutor, then, not a cavalryman, or an engineer.’

  ‘I want to be a prisoner,’ said Alyosha.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can escape.’

  They came to the station. The sound of the locomotive came like an old dog breathing from the far side of the yellow station buildings. A group of three Czechs with their hands in their pockets turned from their conversation towards Samarin and Alyosha, and picked up their rifles by the muzzles from where they leaned against the wall.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Samarin, letting go Alyosha’s hand. Alyosha watched as Samarin went over to talk to the Czechs. The Czechs were suspicious. They followed Samarin’s hand pointing towards him, then asked Samarin more questions. Alyosha knew Samarin had spent the night in his mother’s room. He had only hoped the man would share something of the strange and frightening dance which Mama and men performed there at night. Sometimes it sounded as if it might hurt, but she was kinder and happier the next day. Perhaps Samarin would tell him about it later.

  Samarin beckoned to him and he walked up. The Czechs looked down at him, two smiling, one still suspicious. They asked him if he wanted to see the locomotive, in their bad Russian. Stupid! Samarin had just told them, hadn’t he? There was so much repetition among the adults. He nodded. One of the Czechs put his hand on the small of Alyosha’s back and was making to push him forward towards the train.

  ‘I want to go with Uncle Kyrill,’ said Alyosha, as Samarin had told him. Samarin wanted to see the locomotive too. He was interested. He knew about steam. After a few minutes’ more consultation, the three of them went together, Samarin leading Alyosha by the hand, the Czech soldier alongside them, with his rifle slung over his shoulder.

  The locomotive was a dark green brute hissing with possibility. It smelled of smoke and oil. Had men made such clever work? It seemed to have come out of a crack in the ground, ready to drag the station and all Yazyk back to the hell-mouth, houses and men and roads rocking and slithering with it. But this engine wasn’t hitched to anything, except a tender piled above the lip with fresh quartered logs and a single bare flat car. There were two men inside the engine, Czechs again, suspicious again, but of anyone entering their domain of steam, not because it was the Russian prisoner and the widow’s boy. Samarin lifted him up to the footplate and climbed up himself. The Czech soldier stood below, a few yards away, watching.

  The engineer nodded at Samarin, looked down at Alyosha without changing his expression, and went back to his dials and levers. The fireman glanced up and resumed passing logs from the tender into the furnace. His bare forearms shone red when they fell into the furnace light. The heat pressed against Alyosha’s skin.

  ‘Here’s the fire,’ said Samarin. ‘And here is the wood.’

  Alyosha took a log from the tender and handed it to the fireman when he turned from the furnace. The fireman gestured to the open door of the furnace and Alyosha threw the log in. His hand felt scorched where it came closest to the heat.

  Samarin started explaining how the locomotive worked, how important the temperature of the furnace was, the gauge that showed steam pressure, the regulator that sent the steam to drive the wheels, the brake, and the little glass tube that showed how much water there was in the machine’s great snout, and which must never be empty. As he talked, telling Alyosha about different sorts of engines in America and Africa and England, the engineer began grunting one-syllable affirmations. After a time he joined in with the explanations.

  Samarin said he was surprised the crew didn’t carry weapons.

  ‘There’s a pistol!’ said Alyosha, before the engineer could reply, pointing to a Mauser in an open holster hanging from a hook near
the engineer’s head.

  ‘Thank you, Alyosha,’ said Samarin. ‘I didn’t see that. Now, I wonder where the whistle is.’

  ‘Here,’ said the engineer. He bent down, picked Alyosha up and presented him to a length of chain, dull with dried oil, looped down from the roof of the cab.

  ‘Can I pull it?’ said Alyosha.

  ‘Pull it,’ said the engineer. Alyosha’s hand closed round the chain and he pulled. Nothing happened and he pulled harder till he felt, within the guts of the machine, a valve opening and the power trembling through the chain against his palm. The locomotive uttered its long hoarse shriek. Alyosha felt strong, as if the engine was carrying his own cry of loneliness and longing out over the taiga.

  Alyosha found that, when violent, unexpected events occur suddenly, it becomes difficult, a moment later, to remember the precise order in which they occurred, no matter how vivid the memory of each separate event. Inside the sound of the whistle came another sound, sharp, breaking out of the shriek. More than a sound, a blow to his ears, a clap, an explosion. Alyosha also saw a hand pulling the gun out of the holster. It must have been Samarin’s hand, and the sound of the gun being fired must have come afterwards. The Czech soldier could only have fallen to the ground, like a suitcase bursting open, as a result of the gun being fired at him, and this could only have been before Alyosha saw the gun, held by Samarin, pointed at the engineer. Yet all these things seemed to have happened simultaneously, and they danced together like freaks in the stage of Alyosha’s mind, the muzzle pointed, the dead Czech soldier, the shot that killed him, the speed of Samarin’s hand reaching to take the gun, the whistle. For the next few moments time melted and Alyosha could only watch the freak show of shocks dancing in his mind, even while he was aware of other things happening, of Samarin ordering the engineer to put him down, of the engineer lowering him to the footplate floor, of Samarin telling the fireman to stoke for his life, of Samarin telling the engineer to raise pressure. Samarin didn’t shout. His eyes moved across the crew and at the yard around and back, swift and angled, like insects on a pond. He told Alyosha to jump off the locomotive. Alyosha pressed his back against the tender and wrapped his arm around a metal bracing strut.

  ‘Jump!’ said Samarin. ‘Don’t disobey me. I shall not turn round again.’ Alyosha shook his head. He was afraid and he knew Samarin was the centre of this terrible new trouble and he found that he wanted to be there, in the centre, with the trouble, and not watching the trouble come towards him or move away.

  ‘The devil,’ said Samarin. ‘Stoke!’ He kicked the fireman. The furnace was roaring. ‘Your pressure’s good!’ said Samarin. ‘Poshli!’

  The engineer and fireman were pale and frightened. It showed in their silence and delicate motions. The engineer took the brake off and moved the regulator. Vapour crashed on metal and the locomotive began to move.

  ‘Jump!’ said Samarin. He reached behind him without looking to take hold of Alyosha. Alyosha squeezed his body away from the clutching hand. The fireman was throwing logs into the furnace now with a broadheaded shovel and the light from the doorway shone white and hot like the summer sun. It sounded a river roar and the old greased parts of the big engine stretched and hauled and tumbled and the pistons sucked and bellowed steam.

  ‘Where are we going?’ called the engineer.

  ‘Nowhere,’ said Samarin, and with two powerful movements of his leg, one to wind the spring and one to release, he pushed the engineer off the footplate. The Czech vanished, and it was Samarin’s hand on the regulator. Alyosha’s instinct was to rush forward to the doorway to see what had happened to the engineer. It was far to fall without warning, and it seemed to him that they were moving fast now. But he only gripped the strut more tightly because he understood that Samarin would throw him off the train too if he saw a chance. As long as he pressed himself back in the corner, he was safe. Samarin was watching the controls, had the gun pointed at the fireman, and moved his head every few seconds to look out the window. From where he stood Alyosha could see moments of birch and larch passing in the precise autumn light. They were already beyond Yazyk. It was almost a year since he had travelled by train, and never like this. He had a growing hollow of worry in his stomach that he was getting too far beyond his mother’s reach, and at the same time the wind from the open doorway, the crash of steam and the quick tall back of the fearful, clever man in front of him promised a place to be safe that consisted of always running towards a far-off destination that could not be known or seen but was good and existed. Alyosha had only ever known one centre, to which everything returned: home, roof, mother. Now there was the centre of speed, journey, leader.

  Samarin looked quickly over his shoulder at Alyosha. ‘Are you still here?’ he said. ‘Devil. I told you to jump. I’ll throw you off the first bridge if you don’t.’

  ‘You killed the Czech soldier,’ said Alyosha, full of wonder.

  ‘I don’t need a boy with me to count heads. Stoke, filth!’ To the fireman.

  ‘Who are you really?’ said Alyosha.

  ‘Destruction.’

  ‘Destruction of what?’

  ‘Of everything that stands in the way of the happiness of the people who will be born after I’m dead.’

  ‘What about Mama?’

  ‘She doesn’t mean anything to me, Alyosha, and nor do you. Everything in the world is broken now and can’t be mended.’

  Dread came to Alyosha. He said: ‘Did you hurt Mama?’

  Samarin turned round and stared at Alyosha. His eyes were more terrible in their anger than any punishment. ‘No,’ he said.

  There was a strange sound in the cab, as if a thin metal rod had snapped in two. Other delicate breakages sounded down the length of the engine. The fireman inexplicably sagged forward in the act of shovelling logs into the furnace, pushing the handle in up to his hands. His gloves began to blacken and smoke and Alyosha saw that his side, just under his ribs, was darkening with seeping liquid from a tear in the cloth of his coat. Except it wasn’t only the cloth which was torn. It seemed impossible, but a ragged part of the fireman himself seemed to have come loose as well, and from the dark entrance under that strip of cloth and flesh his lifeblood was flowing.

  Samarin pulled the fireman away from the furnace and let him lie in the back corner opposite Alyosha.

  ‘Machine guns,’ said Samarin, going back to the controls. ‘Keep low.’

  Alyosha crouched down onto the floor of the cab. He looked over at the fireman. His flesh seemed to be turning grey already, and his eyes were closed. The ease with which life could be taken from him was astonishing. Alyosha could hear the sound of the machine guns. They sounded far away, another thing altogether from the little clanging of metal against metal when the bullets struck the locomotive. How strange that those small sharp metal taps could stop a life of tens of years, all that talking and moving.

  Samarin, looking ahead down the line, shouted something Alyosha could not hear and sounded the whistle, two or three times. The locomotive smashed into an obstacle on the line. Every bolt and plate shuddered and the train continued on. The sound of the guns grew louder. There was an explosion nearby, a blast that seemed to pass through Alyosha’s head, leaving it light and empty, ears singing. The locomotive thundered on. Samarin began adding logs to the furnace. The guns were still firing.

  A bullet struck the inside of the cab and something touched Alyosha on the shoulder. He felt an outrageous, unreasonable pain unfold in him and he was frightened. He knew part of him had been pierced by flying metal and he wondered if he would go still and turn grey like the fireman, and what would happen to the part of him that wasn’t still. The space between his chest and his clothes was filling with something warm and wet, which must be his blood.

  ‘Kyrill Ivanovich,’ he said, and was surprised at how faint and thin his voice was. Samarin wouldn’t hear it. When he spoke, his whole body glowed with pain, but now he was angry and afraid and he screamed. ‘Kyrill Ivanovich!’
It was loud, and he was crying, and frightened and in pain as he was, he still felt a little ashamed and babyish when he saw Samarin turn round and look down at him. Samarin was angry with him, he could see. Samarin put a hand over his eyes, struck the instrument panel with his fist, and dropped to his knees, bringing his head so low that it touched the floor. Then he lifted it and turned to Alyosha, touched him and spoke his name. Alyosha tried to answer but though his lips moved he couldn’t make a sound. It was hard to keep his eyes open. Samarin kept saying his name and the guns kept firing and there were more explosions. Alyosha heard the sound of the brakes being applied, felt the locomotive slow down and stop and then, after what seemed like a long time, with bullets hammering the train from end to end, it began to move back towards Yazyk. Alyosha felt cold. Waves rolled over him, pushing him deeper under each time, until he went still.

  The Nature Of The Burden

  Anna woke with the wonderful feeling bad sleepers have when they know they have slept well, as if they have stolen something and got away with it. At these times, the memories of what led up to such deep sleep keep their distance for a few seconds, and those few seconds are perhaps the only time the world can ever be said to show mercy. She heard the whistle of a train in the distance and wondered if that was what had woken her. She remembered something extraordinary, dangerous and lovely had occurred. She remembered a broad hard bud had entered her and filled her. A man had kissed her with desire and she had pulled at his sex to get it inside her more quickly. What a long hunger satisfied once! She stretched and pedalled her legs under the quilt, and wondered where it was he’d gone, and what time it was. It was light outside, bright light. It was surprising Alyosha hadn’t been in to see her. Could he have hauled Samarin out into the garden to play at cavalrymen already? She smiled, it was likely. A sense of being part of threeness crept into her, and she knew how perilous that was, because it couldn’t last, but there would be more hours yet together. She got up and splashed her face. The noise of her hands in the water of the basin met a different silence, one that seemed cold and did not beat. It was the silence of one. Anna’s mouth dried in a moment and in her dressing gown she ran into the corridor and saw that Alyosha was not in his room. She heard shooting in the distance. Aloud she spoke God’s name she did not believe in, over and over, while she ran downstairs. She shouted for Alyosha in the kitchen, in the yard, and ran out across the frozen ground, out of the gate until the splash of a tear on her foot made her realise she had no shoes or stockings on. She drew in breath till her lungs hurt and let it out in a scream that tore the flesh of her throat, ‘ALYOSHA!’