The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  Next morning a troop of Red cavalry arrived, their horses painted with mud up to their knees and the riders dirty and haunted, bulked up with sheepskin vests over their greatcoats. Their commander, an Avar called Magomedov in an Astrakhan hat and a Cossack cloak, was jealous of Bondarenko for the congratulatory telegram he had received from Trotsky on capturing Yazyk, and Mutz found himself being taken by Bondarenko as an ally in the argument that began over which parts of the people’s property the two commanders’ people should be quartered in. Magomedov’s political officer Gorbunin excused himself and went off on foot to explore the town. He came upon Anna Petrovna standing on her doorstep in a black overcoat with patched elbows. She was holding a camera.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Your windows are broken.’

  ‘I’m waiting for the carpenter.’

  ‘Gorbunin, Nikolai Yefimovich.’ He nodded.

  ‘Lutova, Anna Petrovna.’

  ‘Peasant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Worker?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Bourgeois parasite?’

  ‘Widowed mother.’

  ‘Your camera?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘Take good pictures?’

  ‘Can do.’

  ‘What d’you think of this?’ Gorbunin took out a flimsy newspaper, four pages printed on a single folded piece of paper. It was called Hooves of the Soviets.

  Anna studied it. The frost made her cheeks pink and, since the doctor had been and reassured her about Alyosha, the shine of curiosity and hunger was in her eyes again.

  ‘It doesn’t have any pictures,’ said Anna.

  ‘It’s my paper,’ said Gorbunin.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘D’you like it here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Prague.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘D’you like me?’

  ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘I like you.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Can you ride?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘A boy. He was hurt, but he’s going to be well soon.’

  ‘Does he ride?’

  ‘He could learn.’

  ‘The paper needs pictures.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to leave Russia?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want work?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘Come and work for me.’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘Photographer.’

  ‘Would there be food?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Clothes?’

  ‘The people provide.’

  ‘And my house?’

  ‘Confiscated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Bourgeois.’

  ‘And if I stay?’

  Gorbunin thought for a moment. ‘Confiscated, definitely.’

  Anna frowned and nodded slowly. ‘Photographer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And school for my boy?’

  ‘There are three teachers in my unit. Including me.’

  ‘What do you teach?’

  ‘Philosophy, French and elementary horsemanship.’

  Anna stared at the man, well built, not tall, in his early forties, with lines around his mouth and eyes suggesting a benign impatience, a life of pondering difficult lessons, and a readiness to laugh. His eyes were black and vertiginous.

  ‘What kind of photographer?’ said Anna.

  ‘You’re the photographer.’

  ‘What did you see last week?’

  Gorbunin came inside to tell her about it and, while he drank tea in her kitchen, Anna began to see pictures between the words of his stories: a very old woman crying over hot bread. Three crows on a corpse. A horseman nailing a picture of Lenin to a church door from the saddle. Shadows of riders on bright new snow. Gorbunin’s face in rusty water. Tracks in the mud around a fallen statue. Two peasants at a fire frightened by a Tartar’s glass eye. A tired girl. An unwashed baby. A mad father. Gold teeth in an old palm. The entrance into hushed cities. Red banners twisting in the wind and mouths open to sing.

  She asked Gorbunin: ‘When would it be?’

  ‘Soon,’ said Gorbunin. ‘Will you come?’

  Anna nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said, and laughed.

  The Czechs buried Matula, Nekovar, Hanak and Horak, the fireman, that morning in graves at a plot close to the station. Later that day a fifth man, Smutny, died of wounds he had received in the fighting. The castrates would not receive, never mind bury in their own graveyard, the body of Balashov. He was in hell, they said, for the mortal sin of killing Matula. His corpse would pollute them. Mutz pointed out to Skripach, their new elder, that by killing Matula Balashov had saved the town, and Skripach nodded and said that it was true.

  ‘Do you think he really believed he was going to hell?’ said Mutz.

  ‘Yes,’ said Skripach. Beside him, Drozdova had been crying.

  ‘Then he made a sacrifice for you and for us so much greater than his life. Are you not ashamed?’

  ‘No,’ said Skripach. ‘He should have remained pure, an angel, and submitted himself to the will of God.’

  ‘But does God not love self-sacrifice?’

  ‘He loves humility more.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ said Mutz.

  ‘You have sense, we have faith,’ said Skripach. ‘There’s no thinking, only belief.’

  Samarin had disappeared.

  Mutz went to see Anna. They kissed each other on the cheek and Anna told him that Alyosha was on the mend.

  ‘You seem happy,’ said Mutz. Her colour was high and her smile came and went.

  ‘In spite of my husband dying, you mean?’ said Anna. ‘I’ve been in mourning for five years, remember.’

  Mutz told her about the castrates and how they wouldn’t take Balashov’s body.

  ‘Well then, we’ll bury him ourselves, on the edge of the forest. I know a place,’ said Anna. ‘The wind always drives waves of leaves over it in autumn, tides of leaves. You and me and Broucek. You’ll make time, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll say something. What shall I say? I know that look! You think I should be more sad, more respectful of his sacrifice. I’ll say: “Once I had a husband and a lover and Alyosha had a father and that man died. Gleb Balashov couldn’t replace that man and he didn’t try. Sometimes he reminded me of my husband, and perhaps, sometimes, I reminded him of a woman he had loved, an equal length of time ago, but we could only keep our distance, and it was killing me. I’m sorry Gleb Balashov is dead, and I’m glad that on the last day of his life he tried to change into something more like a man of mine, the one I loved in 1914. But I don’t intend to mourn for another five years because a man sets aside his vicious religion for my sake in his last few hours. Gleb, you’re not in hell or heaven, you’re at peace now, asleep. We remember you.’

  Mutz nodded, fidgeting with a telegram, rolling it and smoothing it. He looked out of the window. He didn’t want to look at Anna. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, now.

  ‘Will you and Alyosha come with me to Prague?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t, Josef. I’m so sorry. I’m going to work as a photographer with the communists.’ She glanced at him guiltily. Even though he’d expected it, she saw how shocked he was. She truly had been so resolved the day before to go with him. Was a mood so profound still a coat you wore for a day and changed? What was her real nature, when she could not, like Samarin, see all her selves at once and choose?

  ‘I knew yesterday that you’d change your mind, even though you believed what you were saying yourself,’ said Mutz. ‘But I’m surprised how much it hurts.’

  ‘Josef,’ said Anna, able to look at hi
m now. ‘It isn’t attractive to protect yourself by having doubts. Perhaps if you hadn’t doubted me yesterday I wouldn’t be doubting myself now.’

  They sat in silence for a while. Mutz could feel what he now recognised as love shining over into friendship and wondered whether, if they lived in the same town long enough, the memories of that new tamer feeling might smother the older and it come to seem that there had never been anything else.

  They talked for a while about the things they had done together, about Anna’s face on Matula’s money, about what a communist Russia might be like. Mutz asked if he could sleep on Anna’s divan. He slept for four hours, then went to see about the digging of a grave for Balashov. In the late afternoon Mutz and Broucek carried the body of Gleb Alexeyevich in a sheet to the grave, followed by Anna, and they interred him. They placed the photograph of Anna which Samarin had stolen from him over his heart. Mutz had hoped Anna would offer it to him, but she didn’t think of it, and he didn’t ask. Anna made her funeral oration as she had rehearsed it, but with less anger, and, at the last moment, opened the shroud to see her husband’s face before the earth covered it.

  In Yazyk over the next few days Bondarenko and Gorbunin, in their different ways, tried to explain the nature of their new liberties to the castrates, and how under communism everything belonged to all people equally, while the castrates explained to them how they lived a life in common already, as demonstrated by the speed with which they combined to rebuild the houses damaged in the fighting. The villagers kept their dairy herd hidden. The Land Captain and his wife were made examples of as the only available representatives of the oppressor class. Their home was seized and they were thrown out. Their maid, Pelageya Fedotovna, was given a red armband and the task of turning the building into a House of Culture.

  One day, a winter’s day in earnest, when a short blizzard had lifted the temperature above minus ten, Mutz held the Czechs’ last parade at the station, close to their repaired locomotive, which had built up steam and had a borrowed carriage with broken windows attached. The Land Captain and his wife, former people to the Reds, were already on board. They hoped to emigrate. Mutz read out to the survivors of Matula’s company the telegram appointing him acting captain till they reached Czechoslovakia. When he said the word ‘Czechoslovakia’ one of the Czechs began to sob. Mutz did not read out the final sentence of the telegram, advising him that on arrival in Prague he would be returned to his proper rank of corporal and would be expected to account for the unit’s actions at Staraya Krepost.

  ‘Let’s go, brothers,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving.’

  He had wondered if anyone would raise a cheer. No-one did. He stood by the steps to the carriage to count the men off as they boarded. No man could be left behind now. To his surprise and embarrassment, as the first man shuffled through the silencing powdery snow to the steps, he stopped, embraced Mutz, shook his hand, and said: ‘Thanks, brother,’ before embarking. So it was with each of them, a long, tight embrace, a word of gratitude, sometimes a handshake, sometimes a kiss, a salute from one or two of the old fashioned. The last to pass was Broucek.

  ‘Did you arrange that?’ said Mutz.

  ‘They wouldn’t have done it just because I asked them, brother,’ said Broucek. ‘They like you, and they’re grateful.’

  Mutz was the last to board. He looked down the station road, in case anyone should come running up it towards him, begging him to stay, or to take them with him, but he had already said goodbye to her, and she wasn’t coming. He climbed up the steps and closed the carriage door. When the train began to move the Czechs did cheer, then, screaming and drumming their feet and rifle butts on the floor and beginning to laugh and tell stories as if they were already growing back into their homeland.

  Mutz stood in the corridor watching Yazyk disappear. The train moved slowly, jolting and shrieking. They passed the smashed trolley. Samarin had never been found. It didn’t seem likely he would return to trouble Yazyk. Why should he? His desperation to escape the town and travel west suggested that he and the likeminded had already decided to work to destroy the new Red order. Unless the same spirit of destruction had decided that it could find its best outlet within, rather than against, the communists. Why assassinate a few bureaucrats, after all, if you could terrorise and exterminate them as a class, hundreds of thousands of them? Within such horrors, there was a deeper mystery, that the subversive himself was being subverted, that the very spirit of destruction was being gnawed at from within, that the same hideous mind which could so perfectly imagine an Arctic labour camp which did not yet exist was travelling to a real White Garden with equal ruthlessness but for a quite different reason, a reason which concerned a particular woman he knew, and would do anything to reach.

  ‘I miss Nekovar,’ said Broucek, standing next to Mutz.

  ‘It is cold,’ said Mutz, without thinking.

  ‘Not just because he’d fix the heating in here. Being with a woman will never be so satisfying, knowing he won’t be there later to ask me questions all day long about how it works.’ Broucek hesitated. ‘Don’t think about the widow, brother. I know a place in Irkutsk which’ll help you forget.’ Broucek began to list the bordellos and dance halls on their route, which they might visit while they were crawling their way east along the Trans-Siberian through the great White rout, through Krasnoyarsk, to Irkutsk by Lake Baikal, through the Yablonov mountains just north of Mongolia, skirting the Chinese border along the River Amur, to the Sea of Japan. It might be months before they reached Vladivostok, and their journey would still only be half done.

  ‘I’m worried about crossing America by train,’ said Broucek. ‘What if we have to fight our way, like here?’

  ‘I don’t think we will.’

  ‘Isn’t it the same? I’ve read about it. I’ve seen films. Flat plains and forests, Indians instead of Tungus, snow and heat, Rockies instead of Urals, cowboys for Cossacks. Don’t they have Reds in America, brother?’

  ‘Yes. But they aren’t roaming Colorado in armoured trains.’

  They passed Develchen, the albino, moving north, away from the tracks, leading Omar through fetlock-deep snow. The shaman’s body was lashed to the horse. Of all Mutz’s persuasions, getting the Reds to part with the stallion for the albino had been the hardest. The horse wouldn’t survive long. It didn’t matter. Mutz was unsure exactly what the albino intended, but the shaman’s burial would consist of the shaman being suspended from a tall larch in a cocoon of birch bark, and being left to swing. Was it that Omar, too, would be wrapped in bark and hung alongside the shaman? And that this would be the shaman’s mount, the steed he’d craved, on which he would fly to the Upper World, outpacing reindeer and his own drunkenness? With his talismans singing in the astral wind, his three eyes aglow like forges, a drum in one hand, a bottle of moonshine in the other and the smoky froth of chewed mushroom on his gums, the spirit of Balashov’s horse would carry the shaman where he wanted to go, by his will and against theirs, to the Upper World, to laugh in the face of the gods.

  Acknowledgements and Notes

  I am indebted to two books in particular for my knowledge of the sect of castrates, known in Russian as ‘skoptsy’. They are La Secte Russe Des Castrats, a French translation of the 1929 work by Nikolai Volkov, with its excellent introduction by Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, Communistes Contre Castrats; and Khlyst, by Alexander Etkind. The castrate hymn towards the end of the novel is taken from the former work. Repressed as it was by the Soviet authorities, the sect appears to have survived into the mid-20th century. Ingerflom refers to a Russian book published in 1974, Iz Mira Religioznovo Sektantsva (From The World Of Religious Sects), whose author, A. I. Klebanov, met castrates in 1971 in Tambov, Crimea and the North Caucasus. A 1962 issue of the Soviet academic journal Nauka I Religiya (Science And Religion) carries an article, Fragments Of A Wrecked Ship, describing a number of acts of religious castration carried out since the end of the Second World War.

  Judging by recent conve
rsations with Czechs about it, the story of the Czechoslovak Legion is not widely known in the Czech Republic today outside academic circles, at least not by the younger generation. Most historians of the Russian civil war refer to it in passing but the only full account I have come across in English is a 1991 monograph by John Bradley, The Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, 1914-1920. He reports that a convoy of Japanese ships carrying the last of 67,739 members of the Legion left Vladivostok on 2 September, 1920, bringing their Siberian odyssey to an end. Readers familiar with Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk may know that he (Hasek) was one of those Czechs who took part in the civil war in Russia, but on the side of the Reds, not with the Legion. His exploits in Russia form the basis of the short stories collected as The Red Commissar and translated by Sir Cecil Parrott.

  The practice among escaping Russian and Soviet convicts of taking a naïve companion with them for food is documented. An entry in Jaques Rossi’s Gulag Handbook under the heading korova (cow) begins: ‘A person designated to be eaten; suspecting nothing, any novice criminal, invited by his elders to join them in an escape, is fit for this role … if, during their flight, the escapees’ food supplies are exhausted, without prospect of renewal, the “cow” will be slaughtered …’ Rossi notes that the practice predated the Soviet Gulag system, being recorded in a Russian medical journal as early as 1895. It was Ruben Sergeyev, in the Guardian’s Moscow office, who first told me about this.