The People's Act of Love (35 page)

‘I have a proposal,’ said Mutz. Bondarenko smiled and looked interested but shook his head and interrupted Mutz when he tried to go on. He began to tell them about the fall of Omsk, two days earlier. Did they know? Comrade Trotsky’s Red Army was triumphant, the Whites were in shameful retreat west towards Irkutsk, and the Revolution had won. Admiral Kolchak’s train, full of drunks, cocaine and loot, was jammed in the middle of a rout spread out over hundreds of miles west into Siberia, with Cossacks sealing off villages to use as their blood playgrounds and leaving with no-one alive, and the rich paying in jewellery by the boxful for a place in a hard car to Vladivostok or China. White officer cadets, whores, impresarios, waiters, spivs, music hall singers, moneychangers, dealers – thousands lay dead of typhus by the rails, and scavengers were stripping them of gold and furs and boots.

‘We understand the Whites are finished and the Reds are winning,’ said Mutz. ‘The Czechs in Yazyk only want to go home. That’s the substance of my proposal.’

‘The Czechs in Yazyk,’ said Bondarenko, with a sadness Mutz didn’t like. The chairman met Mutz’s eyes again and
looked away. Still there was the boundless hope in his eyes. It occurred to Mutz that this hope, which had seemed so seductive, might be no more than the hope he and Nekovar would be men enough to understand why their life or death was the Idea’s to decide, and not his, mere Bondarenko’s.

‘I would like to read you a telegram our Soviet received one month – one month – ago from the Red Army shtab in the Urals,’ he said, taking a piece of paper out of a drawer in the desk. ‘I would like you to tell me if you think this leaves me with any room for doubt. One moment.’ He laid the paper face down on the table, took out his pistol, popped the clip, checked the number of bullets, snapped the clip back in, placed the gun carefully on the baize, its muzzle pointing towards the Czechs, and picked up the piece of paper. Some bitter substance manifested itself in Mutz’s saliva and he swallowed. He tried to read the characters on the telegram as the light shone through it but he could only see the strips of telegraph tape stuck to the paper.

Bondarenko said, very slowly, repeating some words, ‘It reads: “To Bondarenko, chairman, Soviet of the Railway Workers of Verkhny Luk. Concerning Matula’s Czechs in Yazyk. The Yazyk railway spur is of no immediate military importance. However.
However
. Bearing in mind the bestial acts –
bestial acts
– committed by this unit in Staraya Krepost, it is ordered that, at the earliest opportunity, you will liberate Yazyk by force of arms, regardless of the cost in blood to military or civilian persons there. It is further ordered that any Czechs –
any Czechs
– taken prisoner in Yazyk should receive, from you, swift and merciless revolutionary justice, in the form of the death penalty –
death penalty
. Any of Matula’s Czechs attempting to flee or surrender –
flee or surrender
– before you attack are to be dealt with in the same manner.
The
–
same
–
manner
. Signed Trotsky.
Trotsky
!’

‘This is –’ Mutz began. Bondarenko cut him off. ‘Wait.’ He turned the telegram round. ‘There. You both read Russian, don’t you? Read it. Could there be a clearer order? Come along.’ He picked up the pistol and stood up. Mutz and Nekovar were lifted from behind to try to get them to their feet. Both men resisted and had the chairs pulled out from under them so that they fell to the floor.

‘I can’t believe a loyal servant of the people would commit such an act,’ said Mutz.

‘Why?’ said Bondarenko. He sounded offended, disappointed in Mutz’s lack of understanding. ‘Comrade Trotsky is the People’s commissar.’ Mutz heard him reaching into the desk drawers again. He kneeled down by Mutz’s head, which rested on the carpet. His boots creaked. He held something in front of Mutz’s eyes. It was Bublik and Racansky’s Legion identity papers.

‘We shot these ones today already,’ said Bondarenko. ‘We picked them up this afternoon, on our way to the bridge. They told us they were communists, deserters, and they wanted to join us. We had to execute them, though. It’s extraordinary to see the power of the People at work. Your comrades seemed to be good men, yet the Revolution had no use for them. One of them, Racansky I think, told us he’d killed one of his own officers this morning.’

‘Kliment?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t remember. That’s enough talking. Let’s take them outside.’

The Czechs were hoisted to their feet. This time they didn’t struggle. Again Bondarenko led the way and they followed.

‘It looks bad, brother,’ said Nekovar.

Mutz found his mind was having difficulty accommodating what was taking place. It was used to counting imaginary paces
forward into possible futures and returning with the news of what it had seen. Now his imagination sent messenger after messenger forward down the only possible road and none of them came back. How was it possible to prepare for death if you couldn’t imagine it? Now that his life was measured in minutes he wished Anna could know what had happened to him. To his surprise, no prayer was budding in him, no god. He was very frightened of his consciousness dripping into death’s ocean and being not. It wasn’t like sleep. Mutz didn’t feel brave, or proud, but the chairman was so amiable that he knew there was no point in begging for his life. What he found most unexpected was the anger he felt towards himself for not returning to Yazyk to warn Anna and the Czechs and the castrates. That was a place his imagination could go, too easily, Anna’s precious life, the life in her that was so much greater than an ordinary person’s life, being ended, in pain and fear. He wouldn’t die peacefully.

‘How long before you attack Yazyk, Comrade Bondarenko?’ he asked.

‘A couple of hours,’ said Bondarenko, without turning round. ‘It’ll be quick.’

Cannibals

S
amarin played his song twice more, at Anna’s insistence, and refused to play it a fourth time. He put the guitar down carefully so that it leaned against the dresser and wasn’t between them. Anna had heard the song before but Samarin had made it a part of his life.

They sat and looked at each other for moments. Anna’s heart beat hard. She longed to put out her hand, clasp the back of his head and kiss him, stroking him with her other hand, and wondered why he couldn’t see the longing and readiness in her face, and act. Had the good looks walked away one recent night, even an hour ago? Was she old? Was she foolish? A change came over Samarin’s face. He smiled and it was a younger, more eager Samarin, a liberation, Anna saw at once, more real than any he had experienced in escaping from the White Garden or being let out of Matula’s jail. An inner prison had set him free, and he was astonished by it, and the world outside looked the brighter for coming to him so unexpectedly.

‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked.

‘You,’ he said. ‘I’m falling into your curiosity. Such a great demand to be satisfied.’

Anna shrugged. ‘So fall,’ she said hoarsely.

He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, putting his hands on her waist. Their heads tilted and their tongue tips
touched. Anna put her hands on the sides of Samarin’s head and held it a few inches away from hers. Her eyes moved across his face. So much at once. His head was warm and she felt his pulse beating. His eyes stayed fixed on hers.

‘What are you doing?’ she whispered.

‘What you want me to do,’ he said.

‘Can you know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘So simple.’

‘You know, it’s been a very long time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ve forgotten. Perhaps all women are like you. But I don’t think I have. I don’t think they are.’

‘You kept looking at me in the courtroom today,’ said Anna. ‘You were looking at me all the time. I felt you knew me.’

‘I know you,’ said Samarin. ‘I’ll know you more.’

Anna kissed him again. She heard feet on the stairs and Alyosha crying for her.

‘Wait,’ she said, and went up the stairs to meet her boy.

‘I’m cold,’ said Alyosha. ‘Can I sleep with you?’

‘Of course you’re cold, running around out of bed without any slippers on,’ said Anna. ‘Mama’s not going to bed yet. Don’t tell me the stove’s gone out already?’ But it had. The little stove in the corner of Alyosha’s room, which Anna lit when the sun went down, to give out its warmth slowly while the boy slept, had to be brought back to life, and Alyosha tucked in again. Anna laid the kindling hastily and at first the logs didn’t catch. She scolded Alyosha for a pest.

‘Stay with me,’ said Alyosha. ‘The stove downstairs will be out by now.’

‘Your head’s full of nonsense,’ said Anna, more harshly than she’d meant. She got up from the stove, which had finally caught, and leaned over him. He was fast asleep, his cheek
squashed on his hand. He must have spoken in his sleep. Would he dream of a sharp-tongued mother, turning her back on him? Well, let him. He would hear worse things in his life. Still, it troubled her. She kissed him and went downstairs.

Samarin was standing, looking at the photographs which hung on the wall on either side of her father’s painting of Balashov. Some she had taken in her home town as a girl; others were from Ukraine.

‘Did you make these?’ said Samarin.

‘Yes.’ For a moment, she hoped for praise. But that wasn’t Samarin’s manner. He felt his interest was praise enough, and she found that it was.

‘Who are these people?’ He was looking at a photograph of a peasant family at a railway station in 1912. It was winter. The father and mother, wrapped in ragged layers, were bowed like hills over a baby lying in among bundles, their thick fingers tightening the baby’s swaddling. In the foreground, a girl, sitting on another bundle, turned away from the baby and stared into the camera lens, her face hopeless and proud, her eyes wide and uninterested and rimmed with a circle of dirt. She looked hungry.

‘I don’t know,’ said Anna. ‘I took their picture. I don’t know what happened to them. There were a lot of peasants passing through the station that year. The harvests failed in the new lands. I don’t know where they were going.’

‘No-one should have to run when harvests fail, should they?’ said Samarin. ‘They should be able to call on a scourge to destroy those who have money but don’t feed them.’ Anna saw the old Samarin re-emerging and felt a jump of fear. It was Samarin who changed the subject. ‘There’s no photograph of your husband,’ he said.

‘The painting,’ said Anna quickly. ‘It’s a poor likeness. My
father was a bad artist. Besides, my husband met me when I was taking pictures of a demonstration. He stopped a Cossack from beating me, or killing me. The photographs have him in them in that way.’

‘And no pictures of the people of Yazyk.’

‘I have some. But they don’t care to have their picture taken.’

‘They are very devout, you said, like Balashov, and not Orthodox. Wasn’t that what you said? And the other thing you said was that you knew people who had shed their own flesh and blood for God. I thought that was a very unusual expression. Is Balashov one of these men?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Anna hopelessly. He knew but she was obliged to pretend. The comfort was that he wasn’t using his knowledge to torment her, and that he didn’t know Balashov was her husband. There was a tenderness in his inquiries; it wasn’t a greed for prurient details or a stroke for advantage. He was trying to gently slide open her mind and climb inside. Part of her was aware that she felt so well about his questioning because she wanted to touch him, to kiss him again and begin to play with his body, but she wouldn’t pay attention to that part of her.

Samarin said: ‘Is Balashov a castrate?’

Anna nodded, hating to hear the word in Samarin’s mouth. It wasn’t the way he said it, but the word spoken out loud by a man, in particular this man at this moment. It struck her like a fist in her belly, and she remembered how much the whole Gleb had meant to her once and how much she had seemed to mean to him, and how it hadn’t been only an act against her, how it hadn’t been only a preference for God over her, mocking their lovemaking and their child as young sinners’ follies like cards and duelling; but how it had been an act which almost killed in her the hope that there existed men worthy of
the love women gave them, a hope already crippled by her realisation that her father was a fool.

‘What does it matter to you whether he’s a castrate or not?’ she said. ‘Let the man rue it in peace.’ She sat on the divan, lips pressed together, and watched her fingers on her lap, playing with her ring.

‘I don’t ask for intimate knowledge of Balashov or any of those folk,’ said Samarin, sitting down next to her and leaning towards her. His animation excited her and his desire to keep talking about the castrates made her dislike him. ‘But you can’t be surprised that I wonder. You live here. You forget how many people west of the Urals think there never were castrates, or that they died out a century ago. It shows there’s hope.’

‘Hope?’ said Anna, looking up. She laughed. She hadn’t heard anything so funny for a long time.

‘Hope to think that modern man will make such sacrifices for something they believe in, for more than something they can reach out and touch. That not everything is a transaction.’

For a moment Anna felt all the weight drain out of her, leaving her as light and empty and sad as a single Chinese lantern, rocking in the wind. She began to speak and with the first sound from her mouth her face reddened and she began to cry, and as she raised her voice against the tears she became angry.

‘Hope,’ she said. ‘Hope! Some clown ends his manhood in the forest with a knife when he gets the word from God. Yes, he thinks he’s a fine man, standing there with a cupful of blood draining out through his fingers, he thinks he’s done a bold thing. He’s made his covenant with that thirsty old swine in Heaven. But Heaven is such a long way away, so far, d’you know, Kyrill Ivanovich? It’s such a long way to go, and by the time you get there, the blood’s not hot any more, it’s all dried up, and you can’t put them back, and you say to God, “Look!
Look what I did for you!” And God says: “Thank you.” And you look round and you see all the heads bowed around him, all the millions who’ve brought him their blood sacrifices, and you know what? God doesn’t have the time. And you think, “What if I hadn’t?” What if I’d stayed with the people I know, what if I’d stayed with the people I’d loved, instead of going all that way with my mean little sacrifice for God, who doesn’t need it? Would that not have been a better and a harder sacrifice? Too late! Your cannibal. Too late! To build a shining future on the meat of his companion? Do you really think a man can eat another and it not leave its mark on every act he does thereafter, and in every consequence of every act? Do you really think the stink of that one betrayal isn’t going to spread to all the acts of all the anarchists he inspires?’