The People's Act of Love (18 page)

After a time, when I had stopped screaming, still in my cocoon,
it occurred to me that there was no more shelling, and the
nature of the shooting had changed. It seemed incomprehensible
to me that men should still be capable of fighting, but as the
light faded – I opened my eyes for a second now and then – I
could hear them, shouting orders, shouting for help, shooting.
Horses passed at speed, singly and in small groups. I heard
more shelling further away, outbreaks of rifle fire and the screams
of men charging, and an aeroplane overhead. Then it was dark.

I do not know what happened, whether we mistook the
flags, whether the Austrians captured our men and discovered
the signal. I do not know whose shells landed on us, the
Austrians or ours. It does not seem to matter. It did not matter
then. I uncurled myself in the darkness and raised myself on
my knees. Around me I could see the lumps of dead. There
was some movement, a slithering and a twitching. They were
not all dead. I heard a horse’s sick breathing, and then a man’s
voice, murmuring and wheezing. I clasped my hands together,
laid them on Hijaz’s stiff belly, bent my head and prayed to
God to forgive us all.

I could not rid myself of the feeling I had been hit. I took
off my scabbard and gun and all my straps and cast them away.
I took off my jacket and discarded it, with all my documents,
and, Anna, the photographs of you and Alyosha. I remembered
about them later, when it was too late, and regretted it,
but at this time I seemed to have crossed into another world
entirely. I ran my hands over my face, my chest, my back as
best I could, my legs, my middle. There was the dried blood
of others on me, but I had not bled. I was untouched.

I got to my feet, crouching down, and made my way over
to where the man was talking. His was a kind of prayer too,
it seemed to be a list of all the people he knew. I came up to
him and told him who I was and he said he was Yantaryov.
It was one of the troopers who had shielded me on the ride
forward. He asked me if our people had won. I could barely
understand what he meant by these words. I said I did not
know. He asked if our people would come for us and I told
him they would. Yantaryov’s stomach had been cut open. He
must have been in terrible pain, but he did not show it. How
are such men made? He was from the Caspian, I think.
Astrakhan. He asked me where I was wounded and I did not
answer. He asked if I would shoot his horse for him. I told
him his horse was dead. He asked if I would shoot him. He
said he would not live for more than a few hours, which was
true, and it hurt. I said I could not shoot him. It would be a
sin. He said I was right, he apologised, and asked me to fetch
him some water. His canteen was empty so I went to get mine.
As I pulled it out I heard a shot. I ran back to Yantaryov and
found him dead, with his own pistol in his mouth and his hand
on the trigger. A harsh light bloomed in the sky. A flare was
floating down. I dropped to the ground. Machine guns sounded
again. I lay there for a long time, until there were no more
flares. Then, on my hands and knees, I began crawling towards
the woods. I did not know what I was doing or where I was
going. Perhaps I thought that if I was going to be killed I
would like to be closer to the people doing the killing. And
still I thought about shelter and concealment. I did not think
about going back to join the regiment. I was a deserter and
an outlaw, but this did not occur to me then.

There must have been soldiers of one sort or another among
the trees, but without trying to I slipped between them. These were the very first days of the war. I have not followed the
news closely these past months, as you can imagine, but I know
the troops are very inclined to dig themselves in and make
fortifications whenever they can. They move more slowly, more
carefully. The cavalry have dismounted. They have become
wiser. Still they are dying, of course.

I walked for hours, trying to be as quiet as possible and
trying to move deeper into the forest. It was a warm night. I
curled up on a bed of last year’s leaves between two tree roots
and went to sleep. I woke up from a nightmare just when it
was getting light. I had dreamed the events of the battle – battle?
to call it a battle! only killing – just as they had happened, with
one or two details added. One was that you and Alyosha and
the Colonel were there, somehow, but you had your backs to
us: you were watching something else. The other was that as
the shells began to explode I felt as if I was being bitten by
some small, vicious animal, from within, as if it was just about
to burst through my skin. I stood up with a shout in a pattering
of falling leaves and pulled off my vest and ran my hands
over my body. There was no new mark, not even a graze. I
took off my boots and the rest of my clothes and sat naked on
the root, trying to find the wound I was sure was there. I found
nothing. In my heart I was not surprised because I did not feel
as if I had lost anything, blood or flesh. It felt more as if I had
gained something I should not have, which had not been there
before. I had seen the best part of two hundred comrades and
their horses cut down like grass in a few minutes, and I had
escaped without a cut. I should have been on my knees, for
days, thanking God for his mercy. But I did not feel saved. I
felt filthy inside, as if my soul would never be clean again, be
there ever so much fasting and prayer, and a weight which
would never let my soul float free of this world of blind killing.

I heard a branch cracking and I jumped behind the root,
grabbing my clothes. I saw a dark shape moving between the
trees a few hundred metres away. It was a horse, without a
rider. I pulled on my clothes and boots. I became aware of
how thirsty I was and thought of stopping to look for water.
I decided to follow the horse. It was not difficult. The animal
would stop every once in a while. It seemed to be thinking, or
listening. A couple of times it looked back at me. It was not
concerned I was following. When I came closer I saw it was
a cavalry horse. It had one of our regiment’s saddlecloths. I
recognised the beast: Dandy, Trooper Shtekel’s mount. I could
have tried to catch him, but I had no idea of my own to follow,
and I felt so base for Hijaz that I was ready, even eager, to
humble myself before a horse by allowing it to lead me. I did
not see how I could ever presume to ride a horse again, and
I felt a lump in my throat at the thought.

After about a mile there was a crashing to our right and I
saw the familiar dark muzzle of the grey, Lyotchik. I couldn’t
remember the rider. He was dead, I supposed, and felt awkward
for not remembering. Nothing seemed strange to me now and
we went forward together, two horses leading a man through
the forest. After about an hour I smelled woodsmoke and we
came to a clearing with a charcoal burners’ hut. Four men sat
on logs by a small fire. Smoke came from the hut too. When
we entered the clearing one of the four, a man I recognised, got
up and took the bridles of the horses, nodding at me. The three
others looked at me. I recognised them all. I went over and
Chanov asked me if I would like to sit down opposite him. I
sat and asked for a drink of water. One of the apprentices
brought me a cupful, and another when I emptied the first.

I told Chanov he had been missed. He said he could not
take part in that. He pointed to the direction from which I had come when he said ‘That’. He asked where the regiment
was and I told him they were mostly dead. He nodded and
said that it would still be called a victory.

I asked him what he meant. He said they who commanded,
the Tsar, his marshals, the great capitalists and financiers, did
not reckon in the lives of individual men, any more than they
reckoned in single roubles or single American dollars. In their
affairs and at the gambling table they would lose thousands
to win millions; and if they lost millions, they had millions
more. So it was with spending their men. A regiment of one
thousand souls was a little stake. But I must understand the
truth that was hidden even from the Tsar: that he and his
commanders and nobles and capitalists, and the Kaiser, and
the Austrian Emperor, and the King of England, and the
President of France, and all their rich and powerful courts and
general staffs and bourses, they too were only stakes, laid by
a greater player in a greater game. Chanov asked me if I felt
the presence of that greater hand. I said I did. Chanov asked
if I knew who it was. I said: ‘Is it Satan?’ Chanov said ‘Yes,
it is the Enemy.’ Chanov said Satan had stirred mankind in
this war as his best-worked combination to spite God. The
Devil had worked on us for decades to bring it to this, and it
had been easy, because he held all men on his keychain. Satan
was an evil moon, and he could tug at the seed in men and
turn it to his purpose as the moon turns the tides.

‘
But not you,’ I said.

‘Not me,’ replied Chanov. ‘I am not a man. I have remade
myself into the likeness and form of an angel. I have taken the
Keys of Hell which hung upon me and have thrown them into
the furnace. By doing this I have returned to that Paradise
God made for man in the Beginning, and I dwell there.’ Chanov
said that God had told him to cross the Urals before the
foretold war and join the army so as to find even a few souls
there who would understand the prison they were in, and how
they might release themselves. I should think of him, he said,
as an angel who had journeyed into Hell, and who would send
back as many pure souls as could be found there, and could
recognise their own nature well enough to agree to go.

I asked him how it was possible for a man to live in Paradise
and Earth at the same time, and he said the Paradise of the
White Doves – that was what he called the castrates – was like
a ship, of the Earth but floating free of it, touching land at
certain places yet never remaining there, outside the laws and
boundaries of any mortal territory.

I asked him how God spoke to them, and he said: ‘We turn.’
He touched one of the apprentices on the shoulder and the man
got up and stood on a flat rock near the edge of the clearing.
He stretched his arms out horizontally on either side and began
to turn on one foot, quickly reaching such a speed that his body
blurred, like a top, and he lost the appearance of a man. He
looked to be of a lighter substance than the still world around
him. I thought he might rise from the rock and begin to float
up into the trees. A second apprentice walked over to him and,
after some minutes spinning, the figure slowed, returned to its
Earthly substance, and fell, sodden with sweat and with eyes
closed, mumbling and smiling, into the arms of his fellow.

Chanov asked if I would tell him about the killing and
although it was hard for me I told him everything in as much
detail as I could. He asked if I had been injured and I said no,
I had not, and I could not understand why God had chosen
me out of all my comrades to leave the field unharmed. Yet,
as I told Chanov, I felt as if I was carrying a burden with me
from the field of the dead, which would keep me chained to
the moments of the killing forever.

And Chanov asked: ‘Do you know the name and the place
of that burden?’ I looked at him and I understood what the
burden was, and I put my hand on it, and I felt it hung there
like a tumour. There was fear in me, but it was a fear that I
believe came from my body, while in my soul I felt the dawning
of a great joy, and a clear vision came to me of myself
standing on a vessel tied to a burning land, and a sword cutting
the rope that moored the vessel, and me floating free onto the
peace of the waters. I thought of you, too, and Alyosha. You
were not in that vision. It was as if you were in some other
world altogether, some Russia that lay on the other side of the
killing, somewhere I could not cross back to. The joy was rising
in me, and the fear too, but the joy always greater. God had
saved me for this, I understood; a trial. How else would I have
found Chanov?