The People's Act of Love (12 page)

Anna looked over her shoulder to the high ground where the Cossacks waited. She saw through their eyes how the men in the open spread and ran black against the field, a ragged, rook solidarity, and she wanted to put it on her second plate. The Cossacks glided off their station, a calm, silent phalanx of horsemen, and when they drew their sabres and rested them on their shoulders, the advancing horses were not alarmed. The regulars had mounted up and held their ground. The chairman of the communists climbed off his crate and his group coalesced around him, except the small woman, who was running with the workers towards the owner’s car, with one end of her banner trailing in the mud where the communist princess had dropped it.

The Jew called to Anna that it was time to leave.

‘Why?’ said Anna. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Those in the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle are too few to be sacrificed in open warfare with the forces of reaction,’ said the chairman. ‘That is the task of the broad mass of the radicalised working class.’

He turned and began to walk quickly towards the town with the other four members of the vanguard. After a few paces, they started to run.

The owner’s car was held fast by a column of workers putting their weight against the radiator. The driver gunned the engine and the tyres churned round. The owner stood up and the crowd mocked his hat and demanded to know the whereabouts of Dr Watson and his Georgian dog, Baskervili. There was laughter and a stone hit the owner on the shoulder. He pulled out a revolver, the crowd jeered, and a man cried: ‘Murderer!’

‘What kind of a murderer am I, you idle fuckers?’ shouted the owner. ‘You’d be dead of the hunger if I hadn’t built this place. Go back to the village if you like it there. I pay you too much. I’ve seen the clothes you wear on holidays. My father was a peasant and a serf and he had all of two shirts. What, are you believing the Jews now when they tell you you’re miserable?’

The crowd asserted that they knew that already, without any help from any Jews, and began to rock the car from side to side. The owner fired in the air, dropped the revolver from the kick of it, and toppled over. The driver pulled himself out over the windscreen and slid into the ruck. The cry went up of Cossacks and the horsemen were among them. It was speed and horse-muscle and horsebreath and harness, and men in dark coats leaning down, losing their grace in the saddle, they struck with the blunt weight of their weapons. Anna looked through the viewfinder of her camera, the rush of fleeing men around her while she stood as still as she could, aware of her feet planted cold square on the stiff ground, she centred on the car turned on its side, the owner stood with his back to it, afraid but curious for an old man with his mouth open and one flap of his Sherlock hat hanging down, a man lay face down nearby, his arm twitching and his scalp spiky with blood, one of the workers had found the gun and cocked it and pointed and fired as comfortably as if he was hanging his coat on a hook, the kick didn’t bother him at all, and the Cossack’s horse was hit through the breast and buckled and went down and another horseman leaned over and with the sharp tip of the sabre drew a line from the man’s forehead to his waist, the line thickened in a second and he fell down with the two sides of the line not together. Anna watched it through the viewfinder as if it was happening only there and when one of the Cossacks tore down the banner
and rode round the blind side of the woman holding it, who looked in the wrong direction, confused, it was tight horsemanship, and the Cossack grabbed the woman’s hair and wound it round his fingers like reins and pulled, and the woman put both hands on her hair and tried to pull it away, and the Cossack was laughing, the woman did not scream or say a word, and Anna pressed the shutter. The Cossack took the back of the woman’s coat in his other hand and dragged her up onto his horse, slinging her over the pommel, face down.

A Cossack put his boot against the camera. Anna looked into his face high up and dark and beating with fighting rage.

‘Eh, báryshnya,’ he said. ‘What’s the apparatus, what’s it for, what are you here? Studentka! What’s the apparatus, eh, clever you, godless studentka?’

‘I’m taking photographs.’

‘What photographs?’

‘Of the things that happen.’

‘Lord, what a clever bitch,’ said the Cossack, and swung back his sabre arm. Anna put her arms round the camera and hunched her head into her shoulders. The Cossack put down his sabre and stepped his horse back. Another horseman was beside Anna, a regular cavalryman, a hussar.

‘Back,’ said the hussar to the Cossack.

‘She was with the scum, your honour,’ said the Cossack. ‘Yid agitators, and these mutineers.’

‘Can’t you see she’s a respectable girl?’

‘Your honour, respectable girls don’t carry cameras.’

‘Do we cut girls’ throats now because they have cameras?’

‘Da nu, bárin,’ laughed the Cossack. Half his mouth was gold and his nose was broken and he was a goodlooking red tanned southern boy. ‘Bit of the blunt edge of a little sabreling, nothing terrible,’ he said. ‘Something for her to remember us by.’

The hussar looked down at Anna, and her face burned and then went cold, because she understood that before that time she had never pleased anyone in the way that she pleased the young horseman, and yet she’d not spoken, and she didn’t know what it meant, to delight a man only by the way she appeared, to be looked at as if time was running backwards and he’d come face to face with his dearest memory before she was a memory, knowing her completely in the first instant and unknowing her in a life.

‘I can take you home,’ he said.

She nodded, and he dismounted and helped her up. She sat side saddle, and the hussar led her off towards his comrades, who were coming to meet them with a spare mount.

Anna looked over her shoulder, she saw the soldiers from the gate and the owner and driver righting the car, and two of the workers who couldn’t have been workers turning the dead workers over with the toes of their boots and searching their pockets, when the cut one rolled over his insides spilled, and the Cossacks in a mounted huddle around the shot horse, a yelp from the girl with the banner as she struggled for a second and the struggling stopped. Anna could see her hair hanging down, light against the dark multicoloured mud.

‘Let the woman go!’ called Anna.

‘She’ll be fine,’ they shouted back. ‘The Ataman has six daughters of his own. Just a little conversation about what she was doing. Ask for her tomorrow.’

The hussars and Anna started on the roads from the river into town. They rode past a tiny chapel, not much more than a small barn with a tower and a crooked dome. There was a gilded cross on top of the dome. The rest was bleached, unpainted planks, like a missionary church on an Arctic shore, built of driftwood. Alone of the horsemen, the hussar who had
come between her and the cossack, who now rode beside her, bobbed his head and crossed himself, moving his lips in prayer. He crossed himself twice.

‘Why do you do that, and none of your comrades do it?’ she said.

‘Their souls are blind. For the seeing soul, the world is a dark place, but it sees other good souls, moving across the city like lanterns in the night, and it sees the light shining from the houses of God, like this one, the light of God and his son and his angels and saints and martyrs washing out into the street, and the obedient soul’ – he crossed himself again – ‘can drink a little of this light, and when it moves on into the darkness, it carries that light, and shines for others.’

‘You don’t talk like a hussar.’

He laughed. ‘All the hussars are drinkers and gamblers and – and none of the girls have cameras. Why do you take pictures?’

‘Because I’m not good at telling people what I see.’

When they reached Anna’s house Anna asked if she could take his picture. He called his comrades to join him and she looked over her shoulder at them, and shook her head. Just him. He dismounted and stood by his horse and she took his picture. She was lucky to be there, because he was the only man in the world. The others were clay models with bad joints, and needleholes for eyes, and hearts of meat. He was the only one who was alive. She had seen a man slaughtered and left dead on the ground that day. The others were dead too, even standing up and moving. Only this one was living. He bowed and spoke words and mounted his horse and rode away, taking with him something greater in value than all her joys before, and every atom of the world was cowled again when he had gone. She had a little of him in her camera. She ran inside to show it to herself.

A heavy man in a heavy coat and heavy boots was in the hall. Her mother and another shape talked at her. They were excited and loud and explaining. It was the heavy man who was closer and dangerous to the camera. Anna wrapped it in her arms and bent her head over it and backed out towards the door. The heavy man was fast, he put his heavy hands on the camera and pulled. His strength was invincible and he tore the camera out of her, still warm from her body. Anna cried ‘No,’ her throat cracked and her ears rang with her own screaming, her mother and the shape held her while she would have left the ground, rageflung, and torn the heavy man’s head off with her teeth. He took her camera to the back yard, laid it on the ground, and smashed it into pieces with one blow of a sledgehammer.

‘Sweetest darling, what have you been doing? Where have you been with that apparatus? They wanted to arrest you.’ Anna’s mother was terrified beyond tears by her daughter’s anger.

The shape was a policeman. He asked her why she thought a young girl could walk the town alone with a camera, visiting all the lowest, least decent, least loyal vermin and taking their pictures without the authorities noticing, and she should know that only superhuman efforts on his part had allowed the destruction of the camera to be substituted for her imprisonment, trial and likely exile.

Later, after everyone had gone to bed, Anna went out in the dark yard with a lantern. She spent four hours looking for the plate with the cavalryman’s image. She did not find it. She found the mechanism controlling the camera’s aperture and took it with her to bed where she lay for a while, holding the metal iris up to the moon and making its leaves expand and contract so that one moment she was holding a tiny, intense
dot of light between her fingers, the next seeing the pattern on the surface of the satellite in all its detail.

Three years later, Anna and the hussar were married. The wedding banquet was held in a meadow at the edge of town and the regiment’s officers performed feats of skill before the guests, snatching scarves from the ground at full gallop, riding standing on the saddle and splicing melons mounted on poles with their sabres.

In the early evening, the colonel of the regiment said to Anna: ‘Madam, your husband is a born horseman. He rides like one of those Tartars who were strapped astride the backs of ponies before they could walk. He handles his sabre better than any guardsman. The enlisted men will follow him. All the same I wonder whether you might not be able to persuade him to take up some other line of work. A woman as beautiful as you shouldn’t find that difficult. I don’t want to have to take him to war.’

‘I don’t want him to go to war,’ said Anna. ‘But he is a lieutenant of the hussars. He is a soldier.’

‘A man can be the perfect soldier, and be tested in his first battle, and fail,’ said the colonel.

‘Do you think my husband is a coward?’

No,’ said the colonel. ‘He is not that. He is brave to be so pious among the hussars. Believing is one thing, we all believe, but to be pious is brave. He’s been mocked for it. When he won’t join a card game for stakes, not because he hasn’t the money but because it’s a sin, he’s been mocked, and he’s not stood for it. He put a man in hospital. Did you know that? No.’

‘What is it, then?’

The colonel gazed at her without saying anything for a few seconds. Then he shrieked in her face: ‘BANG!!!’ and laughed at how she jumped.

‘Forgive me, Anna Petrovna,’ he said. ‘It’s the noise. Your husband joined the army too late to be in the war with the Japanese. He doesn’t know. Have you ever heard a howitzer firing close by, or a shell exploding fifty metres away? It’s not that it’s loud. It’s like a blow. It’s an offence. It’s shock. The sound fills your head, pressing against your skull from the inside. If we were fighting the Turcomans, or some peasant rabble, God forbid, it’d be good old blade work, and your husband would win glory for it. But if it’s Turkey, or Austria, or Germany, my God, it’ll be a thousand heavy guns on each side, all firing at once, two thousand shells a minute, loud enough to scare the devil. I can talk about it, but words tell you nothing about what that noise does to a man’s mind, even if he’s never grazed by so much as a gramme of shrapnel.’

‘But men must get used to it.’

‘We do. We’re soldiers. We’ve got thick heads, full of cotton wadding and kasha.’ He knocked his knuckle on his forehead. ‘But not all of us do. You know we have field exercises, don’t you? With the big guns. Just a few. Exercises. Yes. The thing is – I wish you and your husband every happiness. I love to see my best horsemen win the prettiest brides. There is just this to think about, Anna Petrovna. When the big guns fire, your husband flinches. Flinches every time! So use your charms!’

‘Is there going to be a war?’

‘Not till after the honeymoon! Not soon! Never, perhaps!’ said the colonel, laughing. ‘Damn you!’ he shouted to the wider company, striking the table with his hand. ‘Whose turn to toast?’

Anna’s husband returned to the table.

‘Damn you!’ said the Colonel again, glancing for a moment at Anna. Anna looked at her husband. The colonel banged the table harder. Anna saw her husband flinch.

In the evening husband and wife boarded the express to
Crimea. They had a two-berth first class coupé, and the journey was to last twenty five hours. The conductor was tipped well. He made up the beds, and placed a vase of white chrysanthemums and a bottle of champagne on the table under the window. The compartment had electric lights. It was May 15, 1910.