The People's Act of Love (3 page)

The locomotive came over the bridge, a dark green beast streaked with pale corrosion, like malachite, creeping across the thin span with a string of cattle wagons in tow. The whistle sounded down the gorge and the weight of the train bore down on rotting sleepers with the groan of wood and the scream of unlubricated iron and steel. It crawled on as if there were many ways to choose instead of one and flakes of soot and pieces of straw drifted through the air towards the river. One of the wagons was rocking from side to side and above the noise of the engine and the train there was a hacking sound as if someone was taking an axe to a plank.

The door of the wagon shot open and a man in army breeches and a white shirt was in the doorway, with his back to the outside, holding on with one hand and trying to catch the bridle of a horse with the other. The horse was rearing up and flailing at the man with its forelegs. There were more horses behind, their heads lunging madly towards the light. The man fell from the wagon as it rocked towards the river and toppled over the rail. He fell fifty metres into rocky shallows. His limbs worked
as he fell, as if he was trying at the same time to fly, to land feet first, and to brace himself for the moment of impact. His eyes were open and so was his mouth but he did not scream. His cheeks were stretched back and he hit the water belly down. The water lifted white skirts high around him and when they came down again the man was not moving, beached on gravel, lapped by quiet eddies at the river’s edge.

The horses, five of them, tumbled out of the wagon after the man. They were caught between the moving train and the low rusted guardrail of the bridge. One fell off the edge of the bridge immediately, landing on the edge of the river close to the fallen man with a crack on the water like a mine going off. The others fought for space on the bridge parapet. One stocky chestnut got dragged forward by a wagon, her harness caught by a projecting hook, and was hauled trotting and skipping and struggling against the mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the bridge, where her neck was broken.

The three surviving horses tried to shuffle to safety between the train and the rail. There was only space for them to move in single file, and barely that, but one of the three, a big skinny coal black horse, was trying to go in the opposite direction to the others. It reared up and its feet came down on the horse blocking its way, a bay. The black one got its balance back and reared again. The bay pushed forward and the black one ended up on top, its legs hung over the neck of the other.

While the bay and the black were locked together, like punch drunk boxers, the train must have given the third horse, a white stallion, a shove, or it had gone mad, because it charged the guard rail and dived head first over the edge into the river. It was roped together with the bay and the bay was snatched out from underneath the black horse and went down after. Bay and white flew down, so unlike Pegasus, graceless in the air,
their limbs frozen, and smacked thunderously into the skin of water over river pebbles.

The survivor, the black horse, took a few paces back, stopped and cantered forward, against the motion of the train, back the way it had come. The space between the guard rail and the wagons widened as the horse moved on and it picked up speed as the last wagon swung across the bridge. The wagon disappeared into the tunnel and the horse was gone west at a gallop through the bracken and deep grass by the railside.

The man by the river stood still and listened until he could hear no sound from the train. He unbound his boots, took off both pairs of trousers and went out into the river to the place where he had thrown the package. The water came up to his thin white thighs. He searched for an hour, slowly, scanning the clear waters pace by pace, back and forwards. Twice he reached down and closed his hand round a pale stone.

He came out, sat down and put his boots and trousers back on. ‘A fool then,’ he said aloud.

He walked along the water’s edge till he came to the base of the bridge. The bay was still alive, its head flailing in a shimmering cloud of mosquitoes, the rest of it paralysed with the water rushing round it, a great soft warm rock of flesh. The soldier who fell from the train and another of the horses were washed up on the shore. The soldier was dead. His breeches were of fine material and his boots were imported. There was nothing in his pockets. The man took off the boots and tried them on. He couldn’t get his feet into them. He put the boots back on the corpse, turned the body over face down and took a knife out of his pocket. It was a single long, thin, rectangular piece of steel, sharpened to an edge along one side and with a strip of felt tied round the end for a handle. He went over to one of the dead horses, the white one, cut away a strip of
hide from the leg, cut off a strip of flesh and put it in his mouth. He went over to the edge of the trees, picked a handful of sorrel leaves and squatted down, chewing the raw meat and leaves, looking round and watching the soldier. When he had finished he drank water from the river. He pressed his ear against the stanchion of the bridge and listened.

He went over to the soldier and picked up his right hand. He looked back upriver the way he had come, placed the soldier’s wrist on a stone washed by a thin stream of water and cut off his hand, sawing through the ligaments and parting the joints by pressure rather than the sharpness of the blade. Blood darkened the stone, clouded out into the waters and swirled away into the current.

The man let the soldier’s arm fall into the river, took the severed hand and ran into the woods. He walked for a mile away from the river and dug a hole with his hands through the mud and leafmould and earth. He buried the hand and covered it up. He returned to the river, cleaned his hands and began to climb the rocks up to the railway tunnel.

His toes with jagged broken toenails clawed out through the ends of the boots and when the way became steep he took the boots off and rammed them into the pockets of the outer coat. Thirty metres up there was a stanchion founded on the rock but the last ten metres up to it were steep, sheer almost, with no bushes to hold. The man stood on a ledge, breathing hard, the dying sun in the west hot on his back through the thick coat-cloth, and tracked the cracks in the rock with his eyes. He took the first handhold, stretching his left arm out straight up, and hauled his right foot up to a lip of rock. He crawled up limb by limb until the rock became smooth and the crack he had seen curving up to within reach of the stanchion turned out to be the shadow of a downfacing leaf of sandstone. He was pressed against
the rock with his arms and legs splayed out like a newborn creature trying to suckle and embrace a stone mother vast beyond the scope of his senses. He had climbed too high to let go and fall. There was a vein of quartz slanting up towards the stanchion. The man felt the rock about to leave him. He made a sound, half grunt, half sob, and grabbed for the quartz with the fingernails of his right, then his left hand, getting half the purchase he needed from the translucent bulge to stop him falling, and the rest from his toenails. The long hard right big toenail scraped down the rock a couple of centimetres and slotted into a hidden crack. All the man’s weight slid back onto the brittle plectrum for an instant before he used it to shove himself back up and, in the moment before the nail tore off, snatch the rusted iron spar of the bridge stanchion with one hand. He hung for several seconds, then got hold with the other hand and pulled himself up so that his feet were resting on the metal.

He climbed up the stanchion. It was easy, like a ladder. The pain beat with his pulse while he climbed. There was a hatchway at the top onto the walkway by the line. He went through and sat on the painted metal plates. The sun was about to sink behind the trees. He lay down along a smooth stretch of metal between rivets and closed his eyes.

He heard feet moving on the stone chips bedding the sleepers and turned his head towards the sound, not getting up. The clouds had cleared and the sky in the west was orange with the skyline torn by the black pines and the twin humps of blasted rock on either side of the cutting. The being coming was on foot and alone, about thirty metres down the line, a small, broad, dark form moving slowly in the twilight. The man stood up and spread his arms out. ‘Brother!’ he shouted. The approaching form stopped. ‘Don’t be afraid! I’m alone, without weapons!’

The other figure took a few steps closer.

‘Come on, let’s not frighten each other.’ The two men came near enough to see each other’s faces. The man from the west had a hat and an overcoat and downy fuzz on his chin. He was carrying a carpet bag.

The man who had climbed up said: ‘I’ve been gathering berries. Samarin, Kyrill Ivanovich.’ He held out his hand.

‘Balashov, Gleb Alexeyevich.’ His hand was long, cool and soft-skinned. Samarin’s was rougher, hot and chapped. Both men were about the same age; thirty.

Samarin sat on the rail and lashed his boots on. Balashov watched him, holding the bag in front of him with both hands.

‘Why are you walking?’ said Samarin. ‘Are the trains too fast?’

‘There are no trains any more. Only military ones. It’s forbidden to travel on them.’

‘I saw a train.’

‘That was a military train. A Czech train. The Czechs shoot at you if you try to climb onto them.’

‘Czechs? Is this still Siberia?’

‘Siberia.’

Samarin looked carefully at Balashov, as if trying to work out whether he was a liar, or an idiot. Balashov cleared his throat and looked away. He squeezed the handle of the bag till the leather creaked. He looked round, behind him, over the edge of the bridge, craning his neck. He cried out, dropped the bag and grasped the guard rail. When the bag hit the ground it fell on its side and objects spilled out of it. Balashov paid no attention.

‘There are horses down there!’ he said. ‘Injured!’

‘They’re dead,’ said Samarin. ‘They fell from one of the wagons in the train. I saw them fall.’

‘Poor beasts. Are you sure? I should go down. Perhaps one of them is still alive. When will men start leaving the horses
out of their wars?’ He looked at Samarin as if he hoped for an answer.

Samarin laughed. ‘You won’t get down there. I almost killed myself climbing up. Well, you have me. All this time I’ve been gathering berries and the first man I meet when I come out of the forest is someone who cares more about the horses who went to war than the men who went with them. It’s like the Englishwoman who went to hell and saw millions of the damned being tormented by demons while they loaded burning hot coals onto donkey carts with their bare hands, and she said: “Oh, those poor donkeys!”’

‘Horses don’t go to war,’ said Balashov. ‘Men take them.’

‘There’s another dead horse up there,’ said Samarin, nodding towards the mouth of the tunnel.

Balashov turned, drew in breath, and ran towards where the dead chestnut lay, about fifty metres away. Samarin watched him go and when he saw him bend over the animal and place his hand on its neck he squatted down by Balashov’s bag. A small, heavy, bound roll of canvas had spilled out of it. There was a loaf, a jar of pickled peppers with a Chinese label, and a pamphlet called
Nine Secret Ways To End Sorrow
. Looking over his shoulder to check on Balashov, Samarin opened the canvas roll. A set of surgical instruments was there, a whole crooked jaw of points and blades and scissors in cosy gums of cloth. Samarin rummaged comfortably inside the bag and found a litre bottle of raw spirit, which he sniffed at and took a swig from. He took out a large cloth, once white, now stiff with dried blood. He pushed it back in the bag together with the pamphlet and took out the last item, a dog-eared cardboard wallet the size of an envelope, fixed shut with a piece of elastic. He opened the wallet and pulled a photograph from a greaseproof paper pocket inside. It was the portrait of a young woman,
not a stiff Sunday-best provincial studio shot but something intimate, real and close; she was resting her head on her hand and perhaps looking too intently into the camera lens – it was too dark to be sure, or make out details. The back of the picture was blank. He put wallet and photo inside his outer coat, set the bag upright, put the bottle, the roll and the cloth back in, and began cramming the bread and peppers into his mouth. He ate quickly, with his head bowed and his eyes lowered.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Samarin, chewing, when Balashov returned. ‘The food fell out of your bag. I was hungry. Here.’ He handed Balashov the remains of the loaf with one hand while draining the brine out of the pickle jar into his mouth with the other.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Balashov. He waved the crust away. ‘Your health. It’s only an hour’s walk to Yazyk.’

‘Can I get an express to Petersburg from there?’

‘You’ve been gathering berries a long time.’

‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

‘I told you. There are no trains,’ said Balashov. He was looking inside the bag. His hands fluttered against the inner sides like a trapped bird, getting madder. ‘Did you see a cardboard wallet? It had a photograph inside.’

‘A wallet?’ said Samarin. ‘No, I don’t believe so. Who was the picture of?’

‘Anna Petrov-but you wouldn’t know her, of course.’

‘Anna Petrovna! Your wife?’

‘No, I have no wife.’ Balashov was on his hands and knees, searching the track bedding. It was almost completely dark by now. ‘An acquaintance, that’s all. She asked me to take it to Verkhny Luk in relation to some documents but … nobody is giving out documents now.’

‘What a pity you’ve lost it! And what a pity I can’t see it. Anna Petrovna. That’s the kind of name that allows you to
imagine any kind of woman, doesn’t it, Gleb Alexeyevich? Blonde pigtails, short red hair, a young student, an old babushka, maybe with a limp, maybe without. On a name like that you can draw your own picture. It’s not like, I don’t know, Yevdokiya Filemonovna, who could only be a brunette, with warts and a big bosom. Anna Petrovna. A highly moral person, probably. Or is she a bit of a slut, I wonder?’

‘No!’ said Balashov. ‘She’s the widow of a cavalry officer, she has a young son, and she is of the highest possible moral character.’