The People's Act of Love (21 page)

‘Anna Petrovna knows the men want to leave, sir,’ said Mutz.

‘She’s a horrible snob, Anna Petrovna, with no taste,’ said Elizaveta Timurovna, folding her arms and leaning forward. She wrinkled her nose and showed her two front teeth. ‘It’s not as if she’s from Petersburg. Poor woman. She thought she’d come to Siberia to lord it over folk even more provincial than she is, but she’s hardly equipped for that, is she, with those tight drab clothes and those ridiculous hems almost up to her knees. You’d think she was proud of how skinny and flat chested she is. The way the bones stick out of her cheeks. She acts like she’s an intellectual and she doesn’t even have a piano in the house, let alone a gramophone. I don’t suppose she can play anything except that guitar she has, and I know she can’t paint as well as me. We used to have her round to play cards, and for dances, I mean she’s not a peasant, after all, and she was always yawning and looking out of the window when
someone was telling a story. She has such an infuriating manner. The way she moved, and turned her head when you talked to her, so slowly, as if what we were saying wasn’t important and she had all the time.’

‘She looks like that actress from the Charlie Chaplin film we saw in Kiev,’ said Dezort.

‘I believe it’s pronounced Shaplá,’ said Elizaveta Timurovna, who had never seen a film. ‘Sharlí Shaplá.’

‘
The Immigrant
?’ said Mutz.

‘Maybe …’ said Dezort, frowning.

‘She looks nothing like Edna Purviance, if that’s who you mean.’

‘Purviance! She does!’

‘Come on, Dezort,’ said Kliment. ‘You can’t even remember what your wife looks like.’

‘I was hoping she looked like someone,’ said Dezort. ‘Someone I did remember.’

Elizaveta Timurovna screamed and pointed at a cocking, nervy set of fangs and glittering eyes and damp nostrils which keeked out from under the dresser behind Kliment and Dezort. Kliment drew his Mauser, turned, balanced his chair on a single leg, and with his arm held straight fired twice at the sable’s face. The rounds penetrated the floor and a bitter incendiary smell hazed out from the gun. For seconds the room was half-deaf.

‘Did you kill it?’ said Elizaveta Timurovna with her eyes closed and her hands over her ears.

‘No,’ said Kliment, laying the gun on the table. ‘It’s sly. But I will. And then I’ll eat it.’

‘Leave the beast alone,’ said Matula.

Without a word Kliment put the gun in his holster, buttoned it and sat the chair down on four legs.

There was silence for a time while Matula ate. Mutz and Kliment looked at each other and looked away. Dezort watched Elizaveta Timurovna, who was manicuring her nails with a file and her teeth.

‘Lieutenant Mutz,’ said Matula, ‘Do you believe that a shaman’s soul lives in a tree in the forest, and that when the shaman dies, wherever he is, the tree falls?’

‘No, but when a shaman gets drunk, I’m sure all the trees start swaying.’

‘Heh,’ said Matula. He picked up crumbs from his plate and put them onto his tongue with the tip of his finger. ‘Good. Mutzie. You could have tried to keep the booze away from him, couldn’t you?’

‘I was working on the new money, as you ordered, sir.’

‘Oh yes. Money. For some people, I suppose, it’s money. Mutz, you don’t understand – your people don’t understand, you don’t feel what we Slavs do, what the shaman does. The sense of the forest. We Slavs all have part of our soul lodged in the forest. Did you know that the Tungus make their fighting bows out of mammoth ivory?’

‘We’re eating cat, sir,’ said Mutz. ‘There are only a hundred of us and no one is going to help. The Bolsheviks are coming. They’ll kill us. We have to leave.’

‘The forest will protect us,’ said Matula. ‘Our destiny makes us invincible here. It’s a coming together of our European learning and our Asiatic forest souls. Why didn’t you take better care of the shaman, Mutz? Eh? He was my guide, he was going to rally the clans.’

‘He was very fond of alcohol.’

‘He saw into the underworld and overworld!’ said Matula, raising his voice, his lips like angel’s and his eyes void. He bent down, swept his hand under the dresser and pulled out the
sable by the throat. The beast danced from his fist, lips so far drawn back there seemed more teeth than head. It yanked itself into a c-shape, trying to get purchase on Matula’s wrist with all and any clawing limbs. Matula stretched his arm out towards Mutz and jabbed towards Mutz’s head with the sable’s mouth. The animal’s jaws were sticky with foam.

‘What was his final prophecy?’ shouted Matula.

‘He was murdered, I believe, sir,’ said Mutz, moving his head to dodge the snapping little fangs and claws. ‘The political convict, Samarin, warned us that a killer had come among us from the north.’

‘What was the last thing the shaman said, I asked you?’

‘He said: “Everyone will have a horse.”’

‘Ah!’ said Matula, grinning and settling back in his seat. ‘You see?’ He scratched the fur on the sable’s head as if it was a favourite old dog. ‘You see? He knew the horses were arriving. He saw it. He had all three eyes still working, whatever he said. He would have told you if he was going to be murdered, Mutz. He would have known. He must have hidden the alcohol in his kennel. That was careless of you, Lieutenant. There’ll have to be some kind of disciplinary action taken. Kliment, go and tell your Pelageya Fedotovna to sharpen my sabre. I’ll be riding today.’

‘Am I going to meet your famous horse at last?’ said Elizaveta Timurovna.

‘It wouldn’t be interesting,’ said Matula.

‘But I’d love to.’

‘I mean it wouldn’t be interesting for the horse.’

In the kitchen a blade scraped on a sharpening stone. Kliment came back.

‘Hanak’s coming,’ he said. He glanced at Mutz, out of view of Matula, and shook his head. The sable squeaked and gurgled
as Matula stroked it, he was nodding and smiling, the innocent happiness of scarlet lips and the eyes dead, basalt.

‘Sounds like she’s putting a beautiful edge on that blade, Kliment. This is going to be a good day.’

Sergeant Hanak knocked, saluted in the doorway, came forward, kneeled down by Matula and began whispering in his ear. At the same time he put a tin caddy of Chinese tea on the table in front of the captain. Matula did not appear to move while Hanak spoke. His hand stopped stroking the sable’s head, though he still held it fast by the throat with his other hand, and it still kicked and swung, now with less force. Matula stared forward, a partner statue to the silent unmoving Land Captain at the opposite end of the table. As Hanak whispered on, tears formed in Matula’s eyes and trickled out like dew condensing on granite. His boy’s lips wrinkled and trembled and he pressed them tight. Hanak finished his report and stood up. Matula breathed in deeply and exhaled over his body’s attempts to cry.

‘They’re all gone,’ he said. ‘Lajkurg is dead. All the mounts but one are dead, and the fifth is missing. They found them in the river. Someone’s cut a strip of flesh from my horse, a strip to chew on, and strolled on. Who could be so wicked? Lajkurg. Meat for human vermin with a knife.’

‘We’ll find them and kill them,’ said Kliment.

‘What happened to the missing man?’ said Mutz.

Elizaveta put her hand on Matula’s shoulder. Matula pushed it off, stood up with his teeth clenched and with a groan of rage and pain dashed the sable’s skull against the white tablecloth. It splintered like a crabshell and flecks of blood and brain landed on Elizaveta Timurovna and Kliment. Matula dropped the ragged corpse on the floor and pressed his fists into his eyes, muttering. Pelageya Fedotovna came in with the
sabre, carried in a dishcloth. Matula saw her and took the sabre, seized Pelageya Fedotovna by the collar and held her close, staring into her face.

‘Oh God,’ she said, and closed her eyes and turned her face away. Matula held the sharpened blade six inches from her cheek, then let her go and sat down. He dismissed Hanak, lifted the bloody tablecloth, opened the tea caddy and shook out a little of the white powder it contained onto the dark polished tabletop. Delicately holding the sabre, he used it to rake the powder into lines. He laid the weapon across his knees, took out a handkerchief, blew his nose, put the handkerchief away, produced a silver straw, snorted a couple of lines and passed the straw to Elizaveta Timurovna.

‘What happened to the missing man?’ said Mutz.

‘Dead. In the river,’ said Matula. ‘Somebody cut off his hand. There are some queer vermin in the woods.’

Elizaveta Timurovna blinked rapidly, giggled, ran her finger under her nose and passed the straw to Kliment. ‘Music!’ she said. ‘I’ll wind the gramophone. I love music at breakfast in autumn when the trees are falling asleep. Why don’t we all stay indoors and sing? Everyone should sing.’ She began to sing
Black Eyes
. A congealing bead of sable blood and brain stood on her forehead.

‘Mutz,’ said Matula, taking the straw back from Kliment as he seemed about to offer it to Dezort. ‘You like to judge. I’m putting you in charge of the investigation. When you can tell me who tried to eat my horse, and we’ve skewered him from arsehole to eyeball, we can leave. I give you my word.’

‘I’ll hold you to it.’

‘Of course you will. That’s your way. Be careful, Mutz. We worry about you. You seem alone. You seem like a man in the crowd in Vienna, but without the crowd, and without Vienna.’

Mutz had done nothing to stop what happened at Staraya Krepost. Like others among the Czechs, he’d stood back, watched or turned away, listened to the screams and wanted so much for them to stop that it was almost as if they already had, when really they had only begun. He’d divided the events of two hours into hundreds of tiny pieces and squeezed them into niches spread across the whole sprawl of his memory, so he never had to put them together. Afterwards he’d saved Matula’s life, which was one of the reasons Matula hated him. But every time Matula referred to him as a judge he was daring him to remember everything the captain had done and said that day. Matula wanted to know who’d mutilated his horse and how the shaman had died but for now they were only shadow investigations for the one into Matula himself, the one he couldn’t order Mutz to open but believed he was fated to, the one he desperately wanted Mutz to begin because he couldn’t allow him to finish it and would thus have the reason he craved to kill him.

‘It’s time to listen to the convict’s account, sir,’ said Mutz. Matula said nothing. The sun had disappeared. The sky had thickened and lowered. A smell of woodsmoke made Dezort shiver. The remains of the food were beginning to stink. Elizaveta Timurovna was sitting on the floor next to the gramophone, winding the handle and singing the opening bars of
Black Eyes
over and over again. Kliment put his head down on the table, stroking his flared nostrils across the surface, feeling for grains of cocaine. Matula sat back with his sabre across his knees, mouth twitching like a child’s dreaming of sideless laughter in the days of play before knowing, his eyes as untelling as any two stones.

Without moving or drawing breath, not looking up, the Land Captain, who had been still and quiet for an hour, started to speak.

‘We were too forgiving,’ he said. ‘We were too gentle. We were too fearful of the rankless when they should have been afraid of us. When this chaos is finished and we drive out the foreigners we’ll know what to do. It doesn’t matter who rules, whether it’s a prince of the blood or a Marxist, as long as they’re Russian, and as long as the peasants fear them as they should have feared us. Fear should shine on them like light, a sun of fear rising in the morning and fear warming their backs in the afternoon and an electric fear shining on them at night, a clear bright fear, so that even if the new ruler dies and is replaced by another weakling, the terror will stay with them and their children for generations, and even when the source of the fear is gone, they’ll still be looking for it, like people who cannot live without it.’

The Tribunal

A
nna Petrovna woke up. It was light outside. The sun was on the cowshed roof. She felt with her fingers at the red indentations in her cheeks where they had rested on her knuckles. It was cold. The stove had gone out. She combed her hair with her fingers and walked through to the parlour. There was a grey light there from the small windows and she could see her husband’s letter lying on the divan. She breathed in sharply, snatched it up, folded it and returned it to the desk drawer. Mutz had gone. Could he have so misunderstood her that he’d gone upstairs and sneaked into her bed? She went to look. No. She found the key to the front door on the floor, went out squinting into the chilly brightness, and found the yard gate open. He really had left. She hadn’t intended to drive him away by showing him the letter, but it must have frightened him.

She went into the kitchen, raked the ashes from the stove grate, shovelled them into the bucket, took a curly handful of birch bark kindling, heaped it on the grate, topped them with twigs, put a couple of logs on top, and lit the closest frayed tongue of parchment. It seized the flame, spat and wriggled hot and yellow into the centre of the pyre. Anna Petrovna half-closed the stove door and listened to the roar as it drew. She found her dislike of Mutz, which up till then she had denied, or at least tried to pretend wasn’t there, taking on a shape and
a name: Order. Too great a concern that things should be in one place rather than another. Too wonderful a passion for categories and analysis. Even when he told her he loved her, tra-la-la, it was neither love nor even a desire he couldn’t control to put it inside her. It was a love that measured, stood back with its hands on its hips and shook its head, marvelled, and went off to write it up for a thick journal.

Anna went to the pump, filled two pails with water and hauled them to the kitchen, wincing at the discord of the muscles across her shoulderblades. She filled four saucepans with water and set them on the stove. She put on more logs. The iron of the stove was ticking with the heat. It had been more than his splendid, enlightened, rational Jewish–German mind could cope with that her husband had gone from tasselled hussar to holy castrate by an act of will. All he’d been able to do was run. When he could have asked her. And she would have told him yes, how deep and true and pure was her hate for Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov, and how contemptible the castrate cult, and what a good man he was, and what a desiring, devoted lover he’d been. It was beyond Mutz’s understanding that a woman could hold all these in her mind at once. Let him run. They’d all be gone, the Czechs, and seeing the photograph had woken her up, at least: it was long past time for her and Alyosha to go back to European Russia, whatever the Reds were up to there. Going with Mutz had been a substitute for leaving Yazyk, and sharing with him her reason for staying now made it easier to get away.