The People's Act of Love (15 page)

You knew the officer I spent most time with, of course,
Chernetsky, the one who was always trying to prove he had
Mongol blood, even though he was blond, with blue eyes. We
went on picnics together, didn’t we? There was a meadow by
the river with rushes and flowers. He spilled wine on your
dress and pretended he was going to shoot himself. We laughed
a lot, I remember. I should say you and Chernetsky and someone
I once was laughed a lot. I suppose I don’t laugh so much
now I’m an angel. Only for joy, not for mockery.

There was another man in the regiment I did not tell you
about. His name was Chanov. He was the farrier. He was short,
thin and strong, with a tanned face and high cheekbones and
a moustache that never grew beyond a few curly hairs. You
could not say how old he was, or whether the wrinkles that
radiated out across his face from the bridge of his nose were
caused by age or the sun or both. He was from Siberia. He
worked at the forge from first light to dusk and sometimes
into the night, and that, together with the fact that he knew everything there was to know about horses, saved him from
punishment for his caprices. He would never salute an officer,
so they kept him hidden when a general came to visit, and he
refused to go to delousing with the rest of the men, when everyone
would strip in a hut and be sprayed and showered. He’d
leave the barracks and come back a few hours later with some
spravka from a private bathhouse in town, saying that he’d
been sprayed and showered there. He seldom spoke. I had
heard rumours about him before I met him, that he was a
former convict who had served ten years’ hard labour for murder,
that he had lost his whole family in the famine, and that he
was not Orthodox, or Jewish, or Catholic, or a Muslim, but
a member of one of those queer mystical sects you read about.
They said he was a khlyst, a flagellant, that he beat himself
and whirled around like a top in secret ceremonies which ended
in orgies. I knew he was a vegetarian, and didn’t drink, which
is a mark of these non-conformists, but he was also to be seen
at every Orthodox church service.

I first saw him from a distance, when I was leading Hijaz
for an early morning walk with the rest of the squadron around
a paddock next to his forge. The forge and anvil were in a
covered yard out front and we could hear and see him banging
away at a shoe there. It was a frosty morning and it was
hard to make him out through the mist of men and horses’
breath but I was watching him and the red glow of the forge.
The hammering stopped and I saw him stand up and look
directly at me, following me with his eyes as I walked on. I
felt as if some concealment had been taken off me by the silencing
of the hammer, as if the sound of Hijaz’s hooves on the
hard turf and his breathing and the clink of his harness had
drawn Chanov’s attention, even though all of us were making
the same sounds. When a crow cawed, and other men and
horses passed between me and the blacksmith’s line of sight, I
felt grateful for the concealment. A few seconds later, however,
I came into view from the smithy again and he was still watching
me. He didn’t take up his hammer again until I led Hijaz
out of the paddock. Do you remember, Anna, when we first
met, I talked about seeing good souls from far away, like lights
in the darkness? I know now that this is what Chanov was
looking for. At the time, I was afraid of him. I avoided any
dealings with him until one day when all my troopers were
busy and Hijaz shed a shoe and I had to go to him myself.

He put the horse into the care of his underlings, took off
his apron and asked whether I would do him the honour of
taking tea. He spoke formally to me, as a sergeant to an officer,
and sincerely, but there was an expression on his face, and
a tone in his voice, which was not subordinate. He was leading
me, and I was following on tamely, as me leading Hijaz
out of his stall in the morning.

We went to a workroom with a work bench running down
the middle, a single slab of oak notched and scored, and a
tangle of black iron hanging from the walls, with some shine
of steel and brass. There was a stove at the back and plank
benches on ammunition crates and a nicely-wrought iron table.
It had been made by one of the apprentices, Chanov said. He
poured tea into glasses fitted inside cupholders fashioned from
thin sheets of brass cut and filed into patterns, then rolled into
shape to fit the glasses. More detail was engraved onto the
brass and the etched lines had tarnished, making them stand
out against the gleam of the polished metal. I asked Chanov
if they were made by the apprentices too, and he said no, he
had made them. I held them up to look more closely. There
were human figures. They had a lumpy, pagan look to them,
with big heads and small bodies. There was a tree, with fruit.
I understood what it was. It was the Garden of Eden, and
God was there under the Tree, talking to Adam and Eve! I
was so stricken with the passions that I started to turn the cup
round quickly, as if I was reading a book, and spilled the tea
on the floor, with the glass after it, which smashed.

Chanov cleaned it up, shushed away my apologies, and gave
me a fresh glass. He told me not to worry, and not to be afraid.
He had heard that I was pious, and loyal to the Gospels, and
had wanted to meet me. He came from a town called Yazyk, in
Siberia, between Omsk and Irkutsk. He had never been a convict,
and he had no family; he was an orphan, had been adopted by
the Yazyk blacksmith, and had inherited his trade on his death.
He was not a flagellant, but like all the inhabitants of Yazyk,
he did belong to a sect. He would not tell me about it, except
that he, and the other members of the congregation, were already
living in Heaven, in Paradise, here on Earth.

Anna, my dearest, I am a plain writer, I do not have the
power of a St John or a St Paul to tell you how true and
convincing the farrier seemed to me about such fantastic happenings.
I have always listened patiently to holy fools and the kind
of ranting preacher you meet in crowded cities, but I would
not stop to hear a man declare that Heaven had already been
made on Earth. Yet Chanov made me stop. He spoke with
such certainty, looking into my eyes and smiling in such a sweet,
warm, joyful way, beating out the rhythm of his speech with
graceful movements of his hands so unlike the flailing of his
limbs at the anvil. His voice was calm, yet with a rhythm to
it, as if he was singing.

Of course I asked him how we could enter Paradise in this
way, without dying, and he grew more serious, and said everyone
had to make the journey alone. The only way was to burn
the Keys of Hell, he said. He picked up a piece of coal, opened
the stove, and threw the coal into the red embers, where it
instantly began to burn. He ran hot water from the samovar
over his fingers to clean the coal dust off.

I asked what the Keys of Hell were, and he said we would
talk on another day, and returned to his anvil. I stayed by the
stove for a time, turning the empty cupholder round in my
hands. I had hoped he would give it to me, as a solid token
of a promise that there was more than I knew.

As it happened, I did not see the farrier for many months
after that. There were manoeuvres, I had leave – we went to
visit your mother, you remember – and, when I went to speak
to him, the apprentices told me he was busy in the workshop.
I began to wonder if the apprentices were not also dwelling in
Paradise. They had something of another world about them;
smooth skin and soft voices and ageless faces. As you can imagine,
I spent a lot of time wondering how men could live in
Paradise and at the same time appear to be dwelling among
us, among the lies and the dirt and the cruelty, the disappointments
and the ugliness. I was tormented by questions,
and I said nothing to you. I do not know why. Perhaps I had
been given foreknowledge of what was to happen, that it would
separate us. Perhaps it was the word ‘alone’ which made me
afraid to even mention the farrier to you. But I was very eager.
You may have sensed it. I felt I was about to be entrusted with
a secret power.

One night in midsummer, when the regiment was on field
exercises near Poltava, I was dozing in my tent. One of my
troopers came in and said there was someone to see me. I put
on my boots and went out. One of the apprentices was there.
Instead of saluting he put his hand on my shoulder and started
to whisper something in my ear about Hijaz, who I had sent
to be shoed earlier. Before he could finish the trooper grabbed
him and knocked him unconscious with a blow to the face,
saying that he would teach him respect for his betters. I asked
the trooper if he knew what he had done, and the trooper
looked at me as if I was mad. I realised that while to me it
seemed the trooper had sent himself directly to Hell by striking
an angel, or an inhabitant of Paradise at least, in the life
of the army the trooper’s action was normal, and I could not
go against them now. I told the trooper to take the apprentice
to the doctor. I think he knocked a tooth out. I went off
towards the encampment of the farriers.

Their tents and carts were some distance away, on the edge
of a wood. The field forge and anvil were set out under an
awning to protect the farriers from the sun and one of the
other apprentices was working there. I asked about Hijaz. He
pointed to a stockade where a number of horses were penned
and said Hijaz was ready and I could collect him after I had
seen Chanov, if that suited me. I nodded, not able to speak
with my heart beating so fast, and the apprentice put down
his tools and led me through to the back of his workplace.

The awning was pitched right up against the first of the
trees. They were beeches, slim and grey and tall. I followed
the apprentice a little way into the forest. It was about ten
o’clock. The sun had just gone down but it was still light. The
apprentice led me towards a tent which had been pitched over
a stream; the canvas was held firm on either bank, but the
water flowed straight down the centre line of the tent, and
the poles were set in the gravel bed of the brook. The apprentice
asked if I would like to take off my boots and I took them
off and unwrapped the footcloths and stepped into the cold
water, which ran round my ankles. The apprentice left and I
walked upstream into the tent.

Chanov sat in front of me on a canvas stool. The legs of the
stool, and his own bare feet, were in the water, which spurted
round him with a pleasant rushing sound. I had thought so much
about this meeting, and prepared so many questions and answers,
yet his first remark to me was quite unexpected. He asked why
Hijaz was an entire. You know what an entire is, do you not,
Anna? A stallion which has not been castrated. I hesitated and
stammered that he was a good horse, obedient, strong, willing,
fast when I asked for it. He had been wilful sometimes as a youngster,
but I had coaxed him out of it with discipline, fairness and
love, as a master of horsemanship does. Besides, the Hussars disapproved
of geldings. They thought they lacked fire in the charge.

I hoped the blacksmith would start to say something I could
understand, but instead he nodded and asked something even
more strange, about whether I thought a horse could sin. I
said I had never thought about it before, but no, I supposed
a horse could not, no animal could.