The People's Act of Love (14 page)

‘Age?’

‘About thirty, I’d guess.’

‘How hopeless you are at finding things out. What does he look like? Is he clever? He must be starving after wandering in the forest. No wonder the ones who made a revolution were prisoners. I would’ve been a revolutionary if they’d put me in prison.’

‘If you mean the Bolsheviks, the ones who made a revolution weren’t prisoners,’ said Mutz. ‘They were exiles. It’s not the same. As far as his looks are concerned, he looks like a matinee idol.’

Anna hit his knuckles with a teaspoon. ‘Don’t make fun of me,’ she said.

‘He’s tall, and thin,’ said Mutz. ‘I saw him change. I saw him as a convict, beaten and exhausted. And then he was something else. In a moment. A persuader. Someone who takes action, who makes others do it.’

‘Go on,’ said Anna. Mutz had paused. He felt reluctant to say any more about Samarin, and regretted what he’d already said.

‘How do we know which was the true Samarin, and which was him performing?’ he said.

‘Maybe both of them were really him.’

‘Maybe neither of them were.’

‘You don’t like him,’ said Anna.

Mutz recognised it was true, but didn’t want to admit it.
‘You can go and see him tomorrow if you like,’ he said. ‘There’ll be a hearing in front of Matula. Samarin will have to account for himself. You’ll have to get Matula’s permission.’

‘Fu!’

‘It’s up to you.’

Anna fidgeted with her ring. ‘I’ll come,’ she said. ‘I’ll take him some food.’

Mutz buried his face in the cup and felt a pleasant inner surge which he couldn’t identify but which was related to the photograph in his pocket.

‘So you don’t know Samarin?’ he said.

Anna looked at him without understanding. He felt helplessly, remotely tender towards her, like someone at a conjuring show who sees another member of the audience, who has been enjoying herself, made fearful when the conjuror calls her up on stage. He recognised the surge now, when it was too late: malice. Now she could only ask why, and he would have to tell her.

‘He was carrying a photograph of you.’ Mutz took it out and gave it to Anna. She went pale when she saw it and put her hand to her mouth.

‘Where did the convict get this?’

‘He said he found it in the street. You didn’t lose it, did you?’

‘Not in Siberia. Have you seen Gleb Alexeyevich tonight?’

‘Balashov? Yes. He was worried about you, for some reason.’

‘Did you see him before or after this Samarin was arrested?’

‘After. Yes, after. Why?’

Anna put the picture down, planted her elbows on the table and ran her fingers through her hair, staring ahead of her without focusing.

‘Anna, I’m sorry – I feel as if I’ve done you some wrong,’ said Mutz. He reached out to touch her shoulder.

‘Don’t,’ she said, moving his hand away gently.

‘Perhaps there’s no need to tell me.’

‘This photograph was my husband’s. He always carried it. I thought it’d been lost when he died, in his last battle. It’s the only print. I broke the negative. I haven’t seen it for five years.’

‘Anna, please – if you say you don’t know Samarin, I believe you. I don’t want to make you think about your husband.’

Anna was nodding, not listening to him. He’d grown so used to her refusal to talk about what had happened between the death of her husband and the Czechs’ arrival in Yazyk that to see her now, brooding on an old photograph and events in her life that he knew nothing about, made him feel just partly loved once, that all their night whisperings and jokes and confidences and shared memories, even the sounds and movements she made with him in bed, were abridged, altered for an uninitiated lover.

‘But whatever you can tell me,’ said Mutz, hopelessly. The more distracted she was the more he wanted her to desire him again.

Anna looked up, smiled in an empty way, and took Mutz to the parlour. The enclosure of her warm palm and fingers, the remote pull of her body, replaced the present for him. Leading him by the hand, sitting him down in the divan, darting forward, kissing him on the mouth, darting back, laughing, then him finding her mouth and running his hand under her skirt and between her thighs, that was how it had begun, under that ugly painting of her husband in full hussar’s uniform, with the black mourning band across the corner. Now this was like a clumsy rehearsal long after the final performance. He found himself alone on the divan, watching Anna sitting at the writing desk on the other side of the room, laying the photograph on her lap, then lifting it to her face, fascinated. Her mouth opened a little and she frowned as she held the picture at a distance, brought it slowly closer, moved it away again.

Anna remembered how hot the light had been. A friend had arranged for her to use one of the new electric spotlights at Kiev Opera before it had been fitted. An enormous, focused, burning lamp shining on her face in a tiny, stuffy room. She’d kept switching it on and off to stop her skin being scorched and to stop the room becoming intolerably close. Of all the exposures and poses, this had been the only one which worked. That was why she’d been smiling: she knew she’d got it, the moment when of all the many possible truths of light and shade and skin and eyes, she’d found the one that humbled the others. She’d given the picture to her husband just before the war began. She wondered if it was only tonight that other men had seen it.

‘What do you think?’ she asked Mutz, knowing he would praise her skill.

‘A brilliant work of art,’ said Mutz, eagerly.

‘What did the convict say? Samarin? What did he make of it?’

Mutz paused, wondering why Anna cared. Anna noticed that he paused. Mutz said: ‘Beauty.’

‘“Beauty”? He said that?’

‘He said it as if it was your job. As if you were the village beauty, going about your rounds.’

‘Hm. Arrogance! D’you think I’m the village beauty, Josef?’

Mutz feared invitations for easy praise from the women he loved. Anna listened while he hestitated. She wondered if Mutz had represented the convict accurately; if not, why not? An educated young Russian man come among them, like a messenger from a more normal world.

‘Was that all he said?’ she asked. Again, Mutz hesitated, for longer this time. Not all, then.

‘He asked me to pass on his compliments, and said that your picture will outlive us,’ said Mutz.

Anna nodded and tried not to let Mutz see how delighted this made her. She failed. She was surprised herself that she cared so much. She was surprised she found it so difficult, so inconvenient, that Mutz still yearned for her. She looked down again at the five-year-old photograph of herself lying on the writing desk, the picture her husband had carried, and like a reflex her thumb touched her teeth. That was the instant she realised that inside the desk she held a terrible power to resolve this. It hadn’t occurred to her to use it before: it hadn’t occurred to her it was something she could use, that it was anything other than a curse.

Mutz saw. He saw the quick little movement of her touching her teeth with the tip of her thumb, held there for a few seconds, then the thumb slowly lowered as the thought settled in her, and she turned to look at him, as if to make sure he was still there. Mutz felt foolish – his mind volunteered a recording of him imploring Anna to come to Prague with him – then grief, then dread. Something fearful was about to happen. He was ready to do anything to delay it, but he had no idea what to do. Tell a story? Run from the house? Stride over to Anna and kiss her, even if she struggled? Beg?

‘Josef,’ said Anna. ‘I never told you what you wanted to know, why I was here, and why I stopped seeing you in the old way.’

She was taking out a key. She was unlocking a drawer in the desk. Mutz knew that she was planning to introduce some evil into his life that she had protected him from before and that he would never be able to get rid of. He got up. ‘Anna,’ he said. He took a few steps forward, and stopped. ‘Anna. My darling. Please. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be now.’

Anna paid no attention. She was reaching into the drawer and pulling out a thick bundle of paper. She turned to Mutz.

‘When you read this, you’ll see why I came here, but perhaps not why I stayed,’ she said. She gave a sob, and shook her head, smiled and went on. ‘He built this secret, but it was me who locked myself in, as if I could ever live there, as if I could
change
it. What a fool! As for you, Josef, of course it makes what we did a disgrace, but hardly compared to his own. At times I’ve pitied him and despised him, at times felt shame at myself, and our affair was in one of the despising times, but it wasn’t just the pity coming back which made me stop with you.’ She paused. ‘Listen to me. I sound so earnest. Like him. But that isn’t a bad thing, is it? Is it?’

‘No,’ said Mutz. Every cell in his body felt misaligned.

‘The most important thing,’ said Anna, ‘is that Alyosha doesn’t know. If possible, I don’t want him ever to know. Is that clear? Do you promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘He likes you. I think you like him, don’t you? But you never talk to him. Anyway. Take it. I don’t want to be here while you’re reading it. Will you read it?’

Mutz nodded. He couldn’t speak.

‘I’ll be in the kitchen,’ said Anna, and went out.

Mutz took the papers and began to read the neat lines of handwriting.

The Husband

M
y dearest Anna, my star,

I have burned dozens of pages – nothing can be
left for others to see – trying to find a way to tell
you about the way I have changed, and at last, here is the
telling I have settled on. It will seem confused and perhaps
there will be parts you cannot understand. In the beginning I
thought I would not tell you everything, but I have decided
not to hide anything from you, no matter how hard it is for
me to write and how hard it will be for you to read. The words
are for you, and they are for me, too. Even now when so much
is written and read and forgotten, in the writing of a thing, it
becomes in some way sacred.

Did you think I was dead? I am sorry. Yes, for that, I am
sorry, and I beg you to forgive me. I can see your beloved face
all twisted up in crying for me being dead, and I want to be
there and show you that I am alive, more than alive, far more!
So I am sorry for that. When I tell you how I have changed, I
understand that you may wish I had died. (Don’t be frightened.)
What you must understand is that I cannot ask your forgiveness
for what I have done, because I can only ask your
forgiveness for sins, and what I have done is not a sin before
God. On the contrary it is an escape from sin. My regret is
not for the way I have changed but that it took so long before
I found out how I should change. And I regret that I have had to leave you and Alyosha behind. Now I understand how it
must feel to be saved from a shipwreck when your loved ones
have not been saved, when you know they are still treading
the cold water out there, shouting for help but not knowing
from where it might come. I should tell you that we, those
among whom I live now, call our community a ‘ship’. Anna,
I live among angels here. It seems natural for me to write
that, and to tell you that I am an angel, too, but when I read
the words I have just written, I remember that you might
think I have gone out of my mind. So I must tell you everything,
without shame or fear.

It was never a secret to you that I was a strong believer,
that I believed in the truth of every word of the Gospels, that
when the words of apostles and prophets seemed to contradict
each other, it was my own lack of wisdom which made me fail
to understand them. I think you knew how I believed in
Paradise, the state of Heaven and of Earth, too, before Adam
and Eve tasted the Forbidden Fruit. That was the Paradise I
imagined, Eden, not Heaven, where you and I and God would
walk together in the forest, talking, and you and I would ride
alongside angels across a boundless meadow. I do not think
you knew how much it troubled me how unlike Eden our
world is, and how unlike angels you and I were. I hated to
see how so many of the peasants expected they would live so
badly forever; how they drank and beat each other and went
hungry, how their babies would stop breathing at their mothers’
breasts from disease or famine, and how they could travel
hundreds of miles through black mud to kiss a famous icon.
I hated to see how our factories were taking peasants and turning
them into parts in a machine. I hated the way everyone
lied; the lawyers lied as their profession, the bureaucrats lied
about how honest they were, the priests lied about being good
,
the doctors lied about being able to heal the sick, the journalists lied about all the other liars. I hated the way people
hurt their horses. They seem more dignified than us, closer to
the horses of Eden than we are to the man and woman of
Eden. They manage to be what we cannot be, proud and humble
at the same time. The Colonel loved horses. He treated them
well and made his men treat them well. He was killed, by the
way, did you know? When I saw the Hussars for the first time
I wanted to be one of them. Their horses and their clothes
were so beautiful, and even their faces – they seemed more
made for love than for war. Fierce love, a love that wanted to
conquer, but love all the same, and I was only seventeen, it
was the kind of love I wanted to carry to the world sewn on
a banner. I was very ignorant and foolish. I really thought
there would be no more wars, and if there were, somehow,
those beautiful Hussars and their beautiful horses would be
too fine to spoil with bullets. And it was only later that I found
out how many of the Hussars were drunkards and gamblers
and brutes to women. Anyway at that time I believed the Tsar
to be especially close to God, in a way none of the priests I
met were, and to serve the Tsar seemed to be a way to serve
God as becoming a monk was not. Besides, if I had become
a monk, I would never have been able to be with you
.