The People's Act of Love (28 page)

Three heavy bumps sounded to the west, sharp blows on the hollow world. Artillery was being fired about fifteen miles away. Nobody had heard the sound here before. Mutz crumpled the papers he held in his hand into a ball, dropped the ball on the ground, lit a match, and squatted down to see that the papers burned through to black flakes which he trod into the mud.

Mutz began walking back to Yazyk, stupefied by the variety of menace and idiotism he had met since yesterday. In one quiet attic of his mind a man was trying to think while all around him the neighbours were jumping out of windows, setting themselves on fire and garrotting each other. He didn’t trust Matula; trust, with the captain, was something which only applied retrospectively. You trusted that he had not killed you, rather than that he would not.

Halfway down the road Mutz came across Balashov foraging on the border of a copse. Balashov stepped out to meet him and shook his hand.

‘I wanted to speak with you,’ he said. ‘I pretended to be looking for mushrooms. I was afraid of Matula. I’m sorry about your friend.’

‘Kliment? He wasn’t a friend, but thank you.’

‘What should I tell my congregation? A murder like this seems more terrible in the midst of a war. Did you hear the guns?’

‘Yes,’ said Mutz, looking into his face for echoes, sneaking
a peek into his eyes, as if the key to his deed of harm was to be found floating there in formaldehyde. ‘The Reds must have taken Verkhny Luk and shunted up some heavy ordnance to frighten us.’ He paused. They were shy men. Mutz had found lust and fear of shrapnel were helpful against shyness, and he found them helpful now. He said: ‘You’ve heard the big guns before, Gleb Alexeyevich. Anna Petrovna told me.’

‘I know.’

‘She let me read your letter. Does that make you angry?’

‘No.’

‘Does anything make you angry?’

Balashov made the small laugh that some people do when they are remembering the worst things that have happened to them. ‘When you ask questions like that, I feel as if I’m on a stage in front of an audience of professors.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you have patronymics?’

‘Patronymics?’

‘Like I’m Gleb Alexeyevich, Gleb the son of Alexei. I feel more comfortable – you speak Russian very well, I’d like to be able to use your first name and patronymic. Your titles sound unholy. Pan this and lieutenant that.’

‘My father’s name is Josef.’

‘May I call you Josef Josefovich?’

‘If you like,’ said Mutz, feeling outmanoeuvred in a gentle way.

‘Josef Josefovich, I wanted to speak to you about promises. Hear me through. It is not a market, where promises are weighed and some are worth more than others, and the promise breaker can be taken to court. Not in this world, at least. You can only ask and hope. I broke a promise made before God to my wife, but we have made promises since. I promised her that I would
not help others do what I was helped to do. I promised that I would not wield the knife. I promised that I would never go to her home without her invitation, and to do everything I could to prevent Alyosha finding out who I was. She promised that she would never tell anyone what I had done. I am hurt that she has broken this promise, whether or not you or she feel I have any right to be hurt. But I do not believe a promise broken once is useless. It becomes a promise in two parts, held by two people, and I do not see that either of you have any reason to break it further.’

Mutz blushed and felt a tenderness for Balashov in that, beyond his concern for his secret, there was a deeper fear that he would be laughed at.

‘Anna Petrovna made another promise, Josef Josefovich,’ said Balashov, folding his hands behind his back and looking Mutz in the eye. Mutz wished he had not told him his father’s name, at least not the real one. Regret made Balashov colder. ‘About men.’

‘She promised she would not see other men?’

‘She promised she would.’

‘Ah.’

‘There is nothing I can do about it. About you, or any other man. I do not want it to happen, I know it is happening, and there is nothing I can do.’

Mutz had foreseen a humble man, still shocked from the knife five years before, gone simple, and had foreseen his own abhorrence after reading Balashov’s letter carrying on into the daylight to make his persuasion of the castrate more perfect. He had expected to be able to dominate him. It was not going well. Without any right on his side, Balashov was shaming him. Mutz was even beginning to be sorry that he had not known him better earlier. But the roaring of events in Mutz’s ears was
becoming so loud that only by clinging to his plans could he remain sane. He was obliged to make his request.

‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he said. ‘I see you know about me and Anna Petrovna. That makes what I’m about to ask you easier.’

‘What?’

‘You have to tell your wife to leave, and to take your son with her.’

‘Easier?’

‘It’s not enough to tell her that she’s free. You’ve got to beg her to leave you if she refuses to go.’

‘Anna is my wife, and Alyosha is my son,’ said Balashov steadily. ‘Why should I beg them to leave if they don’t want to go?’ He lifted his chin up and Mutz saw a light come on in his eyes. Where was the humility?

‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but haven’t you been ridiculous enough already?’ said Mutz. He heard his voice thin and heighten as he lost his temper. ‘The only reason for them to stay here is you, and you’ve done all you can to fail as a husband and a father. You ran away from your family, and you mutilated yourself so you could never love or make love to a woman again. Can you really not understand that nothing except Anna Petrovna’s pity keeps her here? Why do you need that? Why do you need her, now? Why do you need a child? You’re not a man any more, and a wife and child are man’s things. You’ve got to tell them to leave and you’ve got to tell them never to come back.’

‘I shall not! I shall not. I didn’t make Anna come here, and I shan’t tell her to go. You men,’ Balashov said, his body tightening with pride and anger, ‘You men, you have that burden between your legs, that heavy sour fruit and that little poisonous tree-trunk, and you think that without it, there’s no love.’
His voice grew calmer. His face grew placid and he looked into Mutz’s eyes, almost smiling, severe and sure. ‘Do you truly believe that this world is such an awful place that love can be taken out of it with a knife? D’you think surgeons could remove it? I disgust you. But do you not disgust yourself if you believe you need to be led by a stiffness in a stick in your loins, and a fever, to love your son, or your friends, or a woman?’

‘This is sophistry,’ said Mutz, blushing, humiliated in a way he couldn’t name. ‘There are kinds of love …’

‘Your kisses will always have teeth in them.’

Why had Mutz thought a man who carried ideas to such extremes of execution would ever be persuaded by rational argument? He said: ‘They’re not safe here. You heard the Red guns. I don’t see Matula surrendering Yazyk without fighting. The town will be destroyed. Anna and Alyosha will be caught here and killed.’

Balashov wasn’t listening. He was waiting for Mutz to finish, his eyes shining now, righteous. ‘If you loved my wife,’ he said, ‘instead of trying to steal her, perhaps you could protect her. If I were a man, that’s what I would do.’

The Legion

A
nna Petrovna stood by the salt fish kiosk in the square, waiting for Matula to finish holding his parade so that she could ask for Samarin to be released. She was cold. Kira Amvrosevna, the fish lady, had lent her a shawl.

‘That’s how they’ll look on Judgement Day,’ said Kira, resting her full self on her forearm and judging fish with the point of her knife, bobbing from flank to flank. The scaly grey fish-skin was rough with salt. The fish were thin as parchment and tough as green wood. ‘All the sinners. All the fornicators and deceivers, all the great liars. All these unkinlike halfwit outsiders with guns. Christ’ll thread string through their skulls and hang ’em up in racks like fish, with their mouths hung open and their eyes wide and not believing. And then there’ll be such a judging. You’d better make sure you’re clean inside, Anna Petrovna, cause Christ’s going to gut you with his gutting knife, and judge you on what he finds in there.’

‘Leave me in peace,’ said Anna.

They heard the sound of the guns beating at the world. ‘Lord,’ said Kira. ‘The end time’s nigh. That’s how it sounds.’

Anna fetched a cigarette and matches out of her purse. Supposing Alyosha had inherited his father’s terror at the sound? So much the better if he learned now never to go for a soldier. Her hands shook as she lit the cigarette. In her imagination she had already put Samarin in their house as a shield. He
couldn’t protect them against all the warriors but he could be an envoy of the lights of cities beyond the forest, the noise and chatter and thinking there. She didn’t think of touching him. She didn’t think of them touching. Well, perhaps she did, if thinking of stroking his cheek with her fingertips was touching, while he looked into her eyes.

‘You’ll not be smoking that filth here,’ said Kira.

‘Let me smoke quietly.’

‘You’ll end up like this,’ said Kira, waving one of the fish in her face.

A bugle sounded from the roof of the shtab. Metal parts clinked with purpose up above and the barrel of the Maxim gun poked out over the edge of the guttering. Smutny and Buchar were preparing to cover the parade. Czech soldiers began to drift towards the shtab from all corners of the square. One of them walked slowly past Anna, watching her cigarette. She thought he had a limp, but it wasn’t that. He only had one boot.

‘You’ve lost a boot,’ she said.

‘No,’ said the soldier. ‘I found one.’

She held out her cigarette to him and he took it and walked on.

When the Czechs were assembled they formed a curved, notched line outside the shtab. At the time they left Prague in 1914 there had been 171 of them. They had lost Hruby, Broz, Krejci, Makovicka, Kladivo and Kral in Galicia in 1916, when they were still taking orders from the Austrians, and the Russians attacked. The Russians shot Navratil when they captured the company, because they thought he was going to throw a grenade, though he was just reaching for his water bottle. Slezak and Bures died of their wounds on the way to the prison camp. The company buried them in a little cemetery near the Dnieper.
The company was put to work on a farm outside Moscow and Hlavacek was murdered when the foreman found him in bed with his wife. The three Kriz brothers, acrobats, were taken off to a Turkoman circus, and Ruzicka, a carpenter, got a job in the city. The Russians cut the rations, and Chalupnik was executed for stealing a cow. There was some fever in the barracks, and the company lost Stojespal and Kolinsky. The company left for Kiev to join the Czech Legion, but Tesarik, Rohlicek, Zaba, Boehm and Kaspar said they didn’t want to fight with the Russians against their own people, and they stayed behind as prisoners of war. In February 1917, when the Russians had their first revolution, and nobody knew who was in charge, there wasn’t much bread to be had. The younger Cerny died of the fever, followed by Lanik and Zito. Dragoun and Najman froze to death on the second night, they’d hidden a bottle of brandy and went onto the roof to drink it so they wouldn’t have to share it, they fell asleep up there and there was a bad frost. The company had to lever them off with crowbars when they stopped near Chernigov. Kratochvil, Jedlicka, Safar, Kubes and Vasata, who always took an interest in politics, set up a soviet in the last wagon and uncoupled it from the rest of the train in the night. When the company reached Kiev and joined a new regiment things got better for a while, the Ukrainians were good to them. Bilovsky made a girl from Brovary pregnant and was given an honourable discharge when her father gave Matula his best horse, and Vrzala started sneaking out to the casinos at night and became a cocaine dealer. By the time they reached the front they were fatter and not so ill. The Russians put the company into their offensive. The older Cerny took a bullet as they came out of the trenches and went down without a sound. Matula was calling out to the company that it could fight its way back to Bohemia, and every time he looked at someone they would fall down dead, and he
ran forward, and the company followed him, and Matula told Mutz not to crouch, he was setting a bad example, and Mutz stood up straight. Everyone stood up straight, and Strnad took so many bullets in the neck that his head popped back like the stopper on a beer bottle. Besides Cerny and Strnad the company buried Vavra, Urban, Mohelnicky, Vlcek, Repa, Precechtel, Ruzicka, Prochazka, Zahradnik, Vavrus and Svobodnik. Knedlik and Kolar died later of their wounds. Then the Bolshevik revolution occurred, and the Russians in Kiev asked the company if it would help them fight the Bolsheviks, and Kadlec was shot by a woman in a leather coat. The Ukrainians took over, and the company helped them get food from villages on the left bank of the Dnieper. After the company shot some peasants, Buchta and Lanik said their comrades were dirty reactionary sons of bitches, and went over to the Bolsheviks. Biskup and Pokorny, who kept complaining that they weren’t being paid, went off to rob a bank in Odessa, and it was said they became rich and crossed the Black Sea, and ended up in Batumi, with three Adzharian girls each, and a big house by the sea, and little black pigs running about among the palm trees in their yard. It was also said they were hanged.

Then the Czechs in the west said the Legion had to move to fight the Germans on the western front, and the only way to do that was to go round the world, to travel along the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok and across the Pacific and across America and across the Atlantic to France, so the Legion started moving east. When Trotsky tried to take the Legion’s weapons, Matula and the other officers thought they were going to hand them over to the Germans, and started to fight them, and the Legion took over the whole of the Trans-Siberian, and for a while the only free Czechoslovakia was six thousand miles long and two metres wide and stretched from the
Urals to the Pacific. The company was in Irkutsk when the fighting started, and the railway workers were very Red. The company spent the summer fighting them in the railway tunnels and on Lake Baikal. Skounic, Marek and Zaba died when a train was derailed by partisans, and Brada was wounded in the fighting in the forest and died of gangrene. Myska went over to the Reds. When the company captured him later, Matula shot him in the head. In autumn Red partisans ambushed the company on the Baikal shore and killed Vasata and Martinek. Matula became angry and the company went to a town called Staraya Krepost. Matula ordered all the factory workers and their families out into the square and the company shot dozens of the men. After that Kubec and Koupil deserted. The Reds put up posters saying Matula was a bloodthirsty butcher and an enemy of the people. They raided the company’s billets and Benisek was killed, but the Socialist Revolutionaries turned up and helped it drive the Reds away. By that time Baikal had frozen over and the company heard that the partisans were crossing the ice. It went after them but couldn’t find them in the darkness and the ice began to break up because it had frozen early. At dawn the company found that Hajek had drowned, and while it was counting the frostbite cases the Reds opened up from the shore, killing Zikan and Noha and Smid. Matula was hit in the chest and his throat and windpipe was filling up with blood and he couldn’t breathe and Mutz punched a hole in his throat with the point of his knife, saving him. Jahoda led the men off the ice, and he went down when they reached the shore, and Mutz carried Matula. The second bullet seemed to have passed directly through Matula’s heart, but somehow failed to kill him. It was after that the company was posted to Yazyk. With Kliment’s murder, there were 101 left.