The People's Act of Love (2 page)

Samarin opened the pamphlet and began to read. He read for a long time. At first, Katya watched him with the kind of wonder that shows on people’s faces when somebody says something out loud which corresponds to their most deeply buried thoughts; equally, it could have been what shows when one person makes a lewd proposition to another much earlier than expected in their courtship. After a while, however, Katya’s blue eyes narrowed and the last patch of red faded from her smooth white face. She turned away from Samarin, took off her hat, brushed the gleaming blonde wisps from her forehead, took one of his cigarettes and began to smoke, hunched over her forearm.

‘“The nature of the true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism, any sentimentality, rapture or enthusiasm,”’ read Samarin. ‘“It has no place either for personal hatred or vengeance. The revolutionary passion, which in them becomes a habitual state of mind, must at every moment be combined with cold calculation. Always and everywhere they must be not what the promptings of their personal inclinations would have them be, but what the general interest of the revolution prescribes.”’

‘Listen to this part, Katya: “When a comrade gets into trouble, the revolutionary, in deciding whether they should be rescued or not, must think not in terms of their personal feelings but only of the good of the revoutionary cause. Therefore
they must balance, on the one hand, the usefulness of the comrade, and on the other, the amount of revolutionary energy that would necessarily be expended on their deliverance, and must settle for whichever is the weightier consideration.”’

‘What does this strange document have to do with me?’ said Katya.

‘There’s a story of a plan to entrust you with a device, and a target.’

‘You should mind your own business,’ said Katya.

‘Don’t take it. I believe the intention is to spend you, and mark you down as a cheap loss.’

Katya gave a short, thin laugh. ‘Read more,’ she said.

Samarin read: ‘“The revolutionary enters into the world of the state …”’

Blowing out smoke and looking into the distance, Katya interrupted him. ‘“The revolutionary enters into the world of the state, of class and of so-called culture, and lives in it only because he has faith in its speedy and total destruction,”’ she recited. ‘“He is not a revolutionary if he feels pity for anything in this world. If he is able to, he must face the annihilation of a situation, of a relationship or of any person who is part of the world – everything and everyone must be equally odious to him. All the worse for him if he has family, friends and loved ones in this world; he is no revolutionary if he can stay his hand.”’ There. Now if you’re working for the police you can blow your whistle.’

‘I’m not working for the police,’ said Samarin. He folded the pamphlet and tapped it on his knee. ‘I could have lost this, with the poetry, couldn’t I? You memorised the Catechism of a Revolutionary. That was clever.’ He lowered his head a little and turned his mouth in a smile that failed to take. It came out as a grimace. Katya tossed her cigarette stub in the weeds
and leaned forward to catch the expression of doubt in his face, an expression she’d barely seen before. Samarin turned his head away slightly, Katya leaned further forward, Samarin twisted away, Katya twisted after him, Katya’s breath was on Samarin’s cheek for a moment, then he straightened up and looked around. Katya made a little sound at the back of her mouth, scorn and amusement and discovery all at once. She put a hand on his shoulder and he returned to her, looking into her eyes from almost no distance. It was so close that they could tell whether they were looking into the filaments of the other’s iris, or into the black ports of the other’s pupils, and wonder what significance either had.

‘It’s a curious thing,’ said Katya, ‘but I feel I’m looking at the true you for once.’ Her voice was the voice of closeness, not a whisper but a lazy, effortless murmur, a cracked purr. With one finger Samarin traced the almost invisible down on her upper lip.

‘Why is it so unbearable?’ said Samarin.

‘What?’ said Katya.

‘To look into the looking part of the one who’s looking at you.’

‘If you find it unbearable,’ said Katya, ‘don’t bear it.’

‘I won’t,’ said Samarin. He put his lips on hers. Their eyes closed and they put their arms around each other. Like a feint, their hands moved decorously across each other’s backs the more eagerly they kissed. It was on the edge of violence, on the edge of teeth and blood, when they heard shouting in the distance and Katya pushed him away and they sat watching each other, breathing deeply and sullen, like opium eaters over laudanum they’d spilled squabbling.

‘You have to leave,’ said Katya. She nodded at the pamphlet. ‘There. In there. Do you know Chapter 2, Item 21?’

Samarin began leafing through it, but before he could find it, Katya began to recite it, pausing to gulp breaths: ‘“The sixth, and an important category is that of women. They should be divided into three main types: first, those frivolous, thoughtless and vapid women who we may use as we use the third and fourth categories of men; second, women who are ardent, gifted, and devoted, but do not belong to us because they have not yet achieved a real, passionless, and practical revolutionary understanding: these must be used like the men of the fifth category; and, finally there are the women who are with us completely, that is, who have been fully initiated and have accepted our programme in its entirety. We should regard these women as the most valuable of our treasures, whose assistance we cannot do without.”’

It was months before Samarin saw Katya again. One morning he waited for her at the station. The university had a poor library and at intervals the authorities would send railway wagons, fitted out with bookshelves and desks, from Penza to give the students access to specialist titles. Samarin had all the books he needed at home but in the hottest days of May, when the railway library came, he was outside. Katya arrived, wearing a white dress and no hat and carrying a large, almost empty satchel. Her pale skin had burned and she was thinner and more anxious. She looked as if she had been sleeping badly. There was a hot wind and the poplars were hissing in their row beyond the station. Samarin called to Katya but she didn’t turn round. She went into the library wagon.

Samarin sat on a bench on the station platform, watching the wagon. Something was burning in town, there was black smoke spreading over the roofs. The wind was so strong and hot there was bound to be a storm but the sky was clear, just the smoke spreading. Samarin sat on the bench and watched the students
come and go. The bench was in the shade of the station roof and sheltered from the wind but planks in the roof began to rattle. The students were moving through clouds of dust, their eyes closed, the women bunching their skirts with one hand and holding their hats with the other. Samarin could smell the smoke from the burning. The trees would rustle and then roar like a waterfall. When there were no students still waiting outside in the wind Samarin began counting the ones coming out. He could smell the burning. The clouds were coming. They were thick and they heaved while he watched them. No one else was left on the platform. The air stank of dust and smoke and ozone. It became very dark. The sky was a low roof. The last of the students came running out of the wagon. Samarin got up and called to him. The student ran round the wagon and across the rails and off towards the fields with his collar turned up. He turned round once without stopping and looked at Samarin. It was a message from the future. He’d seen something he didn’t want to see again and all he wanted was to look Samarin in the face once more, to be able to say: ‘I saw Samarin that day.’

Katya was the only one who hadn’t come out. Samarin went over to the wagon. The reading room was empty and the desks were clear except for the copy of
Essentials of Steam
Katya had been using and some of her notes. She’d written a poem. ‘She loved like suicides love the ground they fall towards,’ she’d written,

It stops them, embraces them and ends their pain,

But she was falling over and over, jumping,

Hitting the ground, dying and falling through again.

Samarin closed the book, went to the door of the librarian’s office and pressed his ear against the wood. The wagon
was creaking in the wind so loudly that he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t tell if he could hear whispers on the other side of the door or if it was the wind and the roaring of the trees. A gust caught sand and straw and sent them pattering along the wagon chassis like a flood of rats flowing through the wheels. Samarin moved away from the door and heard a woman cry out. It came from outside. He ran out of the wagon into the dust and looked up and down the platform. There was no one. He could hear bells from a fire brigade in the town. He heard the woman cry out again, as if not from fear or pleasure or anger, just for the sake of making a sound, like a wolf or a raven. It was a long way away. A stone hit Samarin in the shoulder, and another on his head, and one on his cheek, drawing blood. He covered his head with his arms and ran under the platform roof. The sound of the wind was drowned out by a sound like cannonballs being poured onto the town from an inexhaustible bunker and the air turned white. The hailstorm lasted two minutes and when it ended the remnants of leaves hung from the trees like rags. The ground was ankle-deep in ice. Samarin saw the door of the wagon open and Katya climb down with a satchel on her back. Something heavy inside it weighed the satchel down. She looked up and saw him. Samarin called her name and she began to run away down the line. He moved after her. She slipped in the hail and fell and he came up to her. She was lying in the ice, half on her back, half on her side. Samarin knelt down and she looked up at him as if he’d come to her in the morning to wake her up after nights and days of sleep. She touched the cut on his cheek and slowly drew back her fingertip with the smudge of blood on. She was beginning to shiver with the cold. She asked Samarin: ‘Where to?’ Where to. Samarin took her hands and pulled her up out of the softening hail. She was dripping wet
and shivering. She took a few steps away from him, took off the satchel, looked inside it, held it against her chest and laughed. Samarin told her to give it to him. She went on laughing and ran away down the track. Samarin ran after her and caught her round the waist and she fell face forward. She was strong and she tried to cover the satchel with her body. Samarin wrestled with her, trying to turn her over, his shins wet in the ice, his knees against her thighs, his hands delving in under her to where she held the satchel against her belly. He smelled her hair and the wet cotton of her dress, and her soft strong middle twisted in his hands like a fish. He drove his right hand in between her legs and his left hand up to her breast and without crying out she let go of the satchel, squirmed round and tore at his hands with hers, their soft chill palms on his knuckles. He seized the satchel, rolled away from her and stood up.

‘Give it back,’ she said, lying still, looking at him.

Samarin opened the satchel. There was an explosive device in it. He took it out and threw the satchel to her. Katya began to shiver.

‘Better me than you,’ said Samarin.

‘Romantic,’ said Katya in a flat voice. ‘You’ve failed before you’ve begun.’

‘My throwing arm is stronger.’

‘You’ll throw it in the river. You’ll never use it.’

‘Why not?’ said Samarin, smiling, looking at the heavy package weighing down his hand. ‘It’s better than plans.’

Katya stood up, the melted ice leaving dark streaks down the crumpled front of her dress. Fragments of hail hung from the ends of her hair. She looked down, began to brush herself, then stopped and looked at Samarin. A change came across her face. It became warm, hungry and interested. She came up
to Samarin, pressed her body against him, wrapped her arms round him and kissed him on the lips.

‘Do you really like me so much?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said, and leaned his mouth to hers. Katya grabbed the bomb from his distracted hand, hooked his ankle with her toe, snatched him off his footing, and ran away before he could catch her.

Two weeks later, she was arrested and charged with conspiring to commit an act of terrorism.

The Barber and the Berry Gatherer

I
n the middle of October nine years later, in that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk, a tall, slender man wearing two coats and two pairs of trousers came walking from the north towards the railway. He followed the river, walking through the wild garlic and rowans and birches on the rocks above the rapids in the couple of miles before the bridge. His ears stuck out from coiling tails of dark hair reaching to his collar and his tongue slipped from the tangled beard to moisten his lips. He looked straight ahead and walked steadily, not stumbling, not like one who knew the way so much as one who had walked for months towards the white sun and was intending to walk onwards until killed or blocked. He ducked down and with his right hand touched a piece of string keeping his boots together. He kept his left forearm pressed tight against his chest.

He was a few hundred yards from the line when he heard the whistle of a locomotive. There was no wind and the trees shuddered from the sound to the horizon. His certainty and direction were sent awry and he looked around him with his mouth open, licking his lips. He squinted up at the bright grey sky and began to breathe deeply. The whistle went again and the man smiled and made a noise which could have been a part of a word or him having forgotten how to laugh and trying all the same.

When the whistle sounded for the third time, closer, the man ran forward, round a bend in the river, and saw the bridge. His face closed and he ran to the water’s edge. He squatted down and with his right hand scooped up water and splashed it over his face and drank some. He looked quickly at the bridge and behind him through the trees and let his left hand relax and pulled a package out from inside his coat. It was wrapped in a linen rag. He took a heavy stone and stuffed it into the cloth and tied two ends of the cloth tight in a knot. Stretching his arm back he hurled the package out and it disappeared into the water of the river. He put his hands into the water and washed them, took them out and shook them, rolled up the sleeves of his coats above the wrists and washed his hands again.