The People's Act of Love (23 page)

‘I didn’t know if you were feeding the prisoner properly,’ she said. ‘You didn’t take care of the last one.’

Elizaveta Timurovna tutted and whooshed. In the corner Bublik studied the tin of sprats and muttered: ‘Bourgeois.’

‘I thought you carried only kosher food, Anna Petrovna,’ said Matula, speaking very fast. ‘Did we lose a shaman? Yes we did. Mutz’s department. Keeps losing things. Shamans, horses, trust o’ the men. Don’t know if the prisoner will get time to eat. Maybe find him guilty in a minute. Ping! That way we’ll all share Anna Petrovna’s lunch. Loaves and fishes.’

‘Sir,’ said Mutz. ‘We should go in.’

The ten of them filed into Yazyk’s old courtroom, a small chamber with a dock, two rows of chairs, and a larger, padded chair, with armrests, set on a dais raised a few inches off the floor. Matula went up to the big chair, prodded it, sprawled in it, took out his pistol, closed an eye, sighted on the dock, laid the pistol on his lap, and waved to Mutz. Mutz nodded to Nekovar to fetch the prisoner. The others sat down. After a minute of silent shifting and coughing, double footsteps were heard and Samarin walked into the room, trailed by Nekovar covering his back with a rifle. Samarin looked around, nodded
to the assembled company, wished them good morning, to which Anna answered with a smile and Bublik with a formal greeting, brother. Samarin seemed about to take an empty seat in the front row opposite Matula but Mutz stepped over, took his elbow, and led him to the dock. Samarin appeared surprised but walked amiably to his place and stood there, looking around without blinking. His eyes fixed on Anna’s for a moment and he smiled at her. She felt the blood burn in her cheeks like a girl’s.

‘In the –’ began Mutz. Matula interrupted him.

‘Is there something wrong with you?’ said Matula.

‘It’s my hair,’ said Samarin.

‘You don’t have any hair.’

‘That’s the problem,’ said Samarin. Anna, Nekovar and Dezort laughed. Twice Samarin had tossed his head like a horse bothered by flies, or a man with a severe twitch. ‘They shaved my head this morning. It’s hard to get used to not having long hair after nine months. It’s hard to get used to being clean. I’m grateful to Sergeant Bublik’ – he nodded to Bublik, who grunted – ‘and Private Racansky, who provided me with hot water and clothes and put my hair on the fire.’

Matula nodded and Mutz began again. ‘In the name of the provisional administration of Yazyk, on behalf of Captain Matula, I open this hearing into the circumstances of Mr Samarin’s arrival in town last night, without any documents, at approximately the same time as the death of a shaman. Sir, would you please tell us your full name, your date of birth, your place of permanent residence, and your occupation?’

‘Am I entitled to a lawyer?’ asked Samarin.

‘No,’ said Matula.

‘Am I on trial? Am I accused of something?’

‘You’re accused of having an undefined personality,’ said Matula. He ballooned his cheeks, exhaled, leaned his forehead
forward on the muzzle of his pistol and scratched with his eyes closed. He was slowing down. He straightened up and looked lazily at Samarin. ‘Look, old boy,’ he said. ‘The woods are full of Red spies, and we haven’t the foggiest who you are. Mutz here thinks you slipped the shaman a litre of alcohol –’

‘Sir, I’m just –’

‘Don’t interrupt, y’damn Yid! And Mr Mutz thinks you’re a menace to society. There’s also the matter of my beautiful brave horse, who is dead, and whom somebody tried to …’ Matula began to breathe heavily. The breaths became louder and louder until Matula burst out: ‘EAT!’ He let his head loll back and ran the muzzle of his pistol to and fro along his lower lip. ‘I’m the law in this part of Siberia,’ he said quietly. ‘We want to hear your story. If I like it – I don’t say believe it, I say like it – I’ll probably let you go. If I don’t, you’ll have long enough to regret not making up a better one before you get to try your act on the crows.’

The River

‘M
y name is Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin,’ the convict began. ‘I was born on the third of February, 1889, in Karelia, and after the death of my parents went to live with my uncle in Raduga, near Penza. I was a student there until I was arrested in 1914. I have no other profession. I don’t know what has happened to my family and our house. There have been many changes, I believe.’

Bublik and Racansky had found him a peasant smock and breeches, but they hadn’t been able to help him with boots, or a coat. He wore the same broken boots he’d arrived in, and a blanket over his shoulders. As he talked he took it off, folded it and hung it on the edge of the dock. His head and face were shaven. He quickly lost the habit of tossing his non-existent hair out of his eyes, but it seemed to Anna that he was humbled and made wary by the stripping of the hair. While he spoke, he had a way of turning to each of the people in the room in turn, and widening his eyes at them. ‘You, at least, will know what I’m talking about.’ He left no-one out, even Skachkov the Land Captain, who didn’t look in his direction once and showed no sign of listening. He let his eyes linger longer on Anna, and she was happy to let her eyes meet his, until it became a contest, and she lost, or rather didn’t want it to be a contest; she looked away first.

‘You told me last night that you’d been arrested on suspicion
of being a terrorist. That you had a bomb,’ said Mutz. ‘I’d like –’

‘Mutz, Mutz, Mutz,’ said Matula, with his free hand over his eyes. He massaged the bridge of his nose and his pistol hand twitched. ‘Let the man tell his story. Don’t interrupt again. My spirits are very turbulent now.’

Mutz, who had been standing between Matula and the dock, pressed his lips together and stepped back to lean against the far wall. Samarin began to look from face to face. ‘With your permission, respected ladies and gentlemen, officers and men of the Czech Legion, Your Excellency, Comrade Bublik,’ he said. ‘In a few admirably concise words, Lieutenant Mutz has recounted the reasons for my arrest, and mentioned the bomb which I stole in order to protect a young friend from the consequences of her naivety. I propose to explain to you something of what I suffered in the prison camp to which I was sent, the White Garden, and the reasons for, and manner of, the escape which brought me here. Before I begin, I must repeat the warning I gave the lieutenant last night. I’m certain that the man who facilitated my escape, the thief I know only by his klichka, the Mohican, has pursued me to this first place of sanctuary from the wilderness. I’m certain that he is here, now, in Yazyk. I’m certain that he was responsible for the death of the shaman, and the mutilation – Captain Matula, I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear of this despicable act – of your horse. Whatever my fate, you must all see to your locks and your weapons. The Mohican … no. Everything is not where it should be. Friends. Let me start with the river, the great middle river, the Yenisey.’

As Samarin told his story, making his careful rounds of the listeners, Anna wondered at how alive and guileless his pleading eyes seemed against the ugliness of the events he described.
She became aware that she had already decided he was innocent, and wouldn’t change her mind; innocent, that is, of what Mutz was trying to chip out of him. She was surprised that she had reached a judgement so quickly, and realised there was nothing so convincing as a man who could feel all the richness of the world – its worst, so, presumably, if it could happen, its best as well – without losing his soul to any one part of it, and becoming attached to that part. Convincing was wrong. Perhaps what she had in mind was endearing. Sometimes, as he talked, when he parted with his listeners for a moment and seemed to dive within himself to fetch up memories, or when his voice changed and out of his mouth came the argot and pitch of the other convicts, she felt it was for her; that this was a man not only bargaining for his life but taking her with him, to show her what it was like to be him.

‘When I reached the railhead at Yeniseysk with my escorts, I still thought I was going to be exiled to a village in the hinterland,’ said Samarin. ‘I could imagine the kind of place they were sending politicals, somewhere a couple of days’ journey downriver, and you could probably make it to the railhead by cart, or by sledge in winter. There’d be a row of houses along the water’s edge, with a jetty and grazing land and the forest behind. There’d be a store where aboriginals and trappers would come for drink and supplies. I’d be given a room in a peasant’s house, next door to the cowshed, and light chores, chopping wood, teaching people to read, drinking tea with whoever fancied himself as the local liberal, keeping them company over samogon in winter, arguing over reports from Europe in old newspapers, going for walks in the forest, making notes for articles about the flora and fauna. They’d expect me to try to escape. It wouldn’t be difficult. I’d just walk out. But I wasn’t going to escape. I was glad not to have been hanged. I didn’t
want to touch a bomb again. The empires were destroying themselves in the war in the west. They were tearing each other apart better than a lone terrorist could, and they were far away, on the other side of the Urals, with three wide rivers between them and me. I’d wait it out. Sitting on my box on the wharf, while my escorts were comparing papers with the local police, I dreamed I was going to be like the young Tolstoy, and Siberia was going to be my Caucasus. Some old dyadya would take me hunting in the forest, I’d have an affair with a local girl, my skin would get so tough in the heat and the cold I wouldn’t feel the mosquitoes any more except to help me know I was alive. This was five years ago, a little later in the year than now, but the sun was still out, the Yenisey was flowing in front of me, it was wide and slow. I saw fish snapping at the surface. There was time.

‘I heard the badly oiled door of the steamship company office open and not close. Someone had come out and was standing in the doorway, watching me, a fat man in a steamship uniform, wrinkling his eyes and fiddling with beads. He studied me for a minute and without lifting his feet he turned round into the darkness of the office and called to someone I couldn’t see: “We could send them the political.”

‘Nobody answered for a while. Then I heard a voice, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying. The fat man looked at me and said: “What does your father do?”

‘I told him he’d been an architect before he died.

‘“No rank,” said the man to the inside of the office, and he spat. He said to me: “They must think you’re a great threat to society to have exiled you when they’re so short of cannon fodder for the Germans. I doubt anyone cares what we do with you.”

‘They put me on a steam launch with my guards. The launch
was carrying a geologist and a crew of three: the captain, the engineer and the deck hand. They chained me by my ankle to a rail and left me and the guards to sleep on the deck overnight. In the morning we headed north with the current. I asked where they were taking me. The crew wouldn’t say. The geologist said it was a state secret. For the first few nights we stopped at settlements on the riverbank. Each time I thought they’d let me off and leave me, but the same thing always happened. A crowd with their dogs and cows waiting for us beyond the jetty, watching the boat being moored as if they were seeing a lost child come back, and hardly believing it. Then the geologist, the crew and the guards got off, and I stayed where I was, chained up like a dog, with a blanket and some dried fish and water, and only the stars and the frost for company. I could see the lamps shining in the windows of the cabins of the settlement, and hear them singing and toasting while they welcomed the guests with vodka. Sometimes the guards brought me extra food. Sometimes a villager would bring me tea or kasha or a piece of sausage, usually the old ones who’d been exiled themselves, or young ones whose parents had. They asked me about myself, and about politics, and about the war. They all had sons and brothers at the front. They’d end up shaking their heads, muttering “Lord My God” and wandering away, and I’d try to sleep in the cold, with the sound of the water on the hull, and no other sound once the singers and their beasts had fallen asleep.

‘The settlements thinned out and disappeared as we got further north. The trees and the nights became shorter and ice on the deck wouldn’t melt till the afternoon. The geologist, Bodrov, became excited. He was always in the prow of the boat. Whenever there were cliffs he would beg the captain to stop. He had his little hammer in his hand, he wanted to take
samples. The captain shook his head. The closer we got to the Arctic, the quieter the captain grew, except to call down to the engineer for more power. He was afraid the river would freeze over and the boat would be trapped before it could return south. The quieter the captain became, the more Bodrov would talk. He shouted out one night when the northern lights appeared, like a shower of dust falling through a gap in the field of stars, and put his arms round the shoulders of my guards when they ran to see what was happening. He told them what makes the aurora, and counted off the names of the stars making up the constellations. One day we saw a Tungus mounted on a deer the size of a horse, watching us from the edge of the forest, holding a fish spear, and Bodrov began waving and shouting at him. The man turned his mount round and disappeared into the darkness between the trees. When we crossed the Arctic circle, Bodrov brought out a bottle of French brandy and got us all to drink a toast to the honour of the north star, and he sang student songs about how “our goal’s the pole, boys, those Tungus girls make lovely wives, we’ll live in a tent, we won’t pay any rent and we’ll eat snow all our lives.”

‘The captain drank his brandy, went to the water bucket, chucked it over the side, brought it up full and threw it over Bodrov. We all felt the sting of the cold on our cheeks. The captain said: “That’s the being of this river. It flows north. It’s cold like death and it is death. This is the desert where nothing grows. No-one should be made to live here.”

‘Bodrov wiped the water from his eyes, and was confused for a moment, but then he laughed and rubbed his face till it was red. “Look at your river!” he said. “Full of fish! The air’s full of birds and the forest of elk and sable. A few thousand Tungus with spears and axes, living in wigwams, they live well
here, and you civilised men go running south at the first sign of frost. The rocks are full of gold, diamonds, platinum, rubies, there’s copper and nickel, there’s seas of coal and lakes of oil. Lakes of oil to light the world!” He was taking off his clothes while he said this, and he dived into the river and surfaced grinning, shaking his fists above his head. The captain swore, stopped the boat and threw him a rope. If they’d left him in he would have been dead in a couple of minutes. They took him below with a blanket round him, shivering. The captain looked at me and said again: “No-one should be made to live here.”