The People's Act of Love (25 page)

‘We heard about the revolutions, and the peace with Germany, and how there was fighting across the country. Usually when there’s a revolution they empty the prisons, don’t they? Not the White Garden. We were too far away to be remembered. The Prince decided he would wait. Perhaps he thought he’d be safer there. He tailored the news for us. He took delivery of a box of news in midsummer and doled it out through the cold season, bulking it out with lies to keep his prisoners down and his guards loyal. Somewhere, in some chancery in Petrograd, some minister or revolutionary or minister-revolutionary must have signed orders dissolving the camp, setting the political prisoner, me, free at least. And the minister went out to dinner, because the White Garden is very far away from Petrograd, over the Urals and along the Trans-Siberian and up, up, up to the very edge of the world, and he wasn’t going to deliver the order himself. So maybe it got lost. Maybe it came down the
telegraph wire and got stopped where the wire was cut by partisans, or got incinerated in a battle in a city along the way, or was used by a looter to roll a cigarette in, or was just blown away by the wind, and went flying through the trees in the taiga and got stuck in the branches of a stunted larch and made into the lining for a squirrel’s nest. So two years ago we heard there’d been a revolution but the revolutionaries were loyal to the Tsar and to the war, so we were still prisoners. Then last year we heard the revolutionaries weren’t loyal to the Tsar and the war, but they were about to be destroyed by the Whites, who were, so we were still prisoners. And because Russia was now at war with itself, rather than Germany, there would be even less food.

‘There were many days I thought would be my last, and on one, I was stopped by Machinegun and Redhead outside the kitchens. I had their bread and mine: one full ration altogether, and that adulterated with whalebone meal from skeleton parts the Tungus had hauled down from the northern ocean and flogged the camp for a crate of rifles and ammunition a month before.

‘The only advantage of starvation was that it had taken all pride from me. I kneeled in the snow in front of them, holding the bread to my chest, and bowed so that my forehead was touching Machinegun’s boot. I bowed again and again, hitting his boot with my forehead, as I’d seen the peasants do to the tax collector, and begged him to let me keep my bread. I called him nice, lord, your excellency, the bravest and most honourable man in all the Caucasus, the finest machinegunner in the world, I said I was a stinking turd who wished only to serve him, who’d give him my life, unworthy as I was, I wasn’t fit for him to walk on, I was the poorest, weakest sinner in Creation, who deserved to crawl with worms and snakes and beetles for the rest of my days, dragging myself along with my hands,
praying for forgiveness and for the everlasting glory of the great Sergei Machinegun Gobechia, a hero and a saint, if only he’d grace me with a drop of his infinite mercy, if with one simple act he’d earn the final adoration of a man who already loved and worshipped him as a god among men, if he’d allow me to keep a few crumbs of the bread I humbly brought him from the kitchen, to be repaid a thousand times over in gold and blood and any other measure when the war and his unjust imprisonment had run their course.

‘While I was saying this Redhead was pulling my head back by the hair and Machinegun, not saying anything, was prising the bread from my fingers. They took it all and walked away. I saw a couple of crumbs on the ground, picked them up and set them to rest on my tongue. I raised my tongue gently to the roof of my mouth and let the crumbs melt there. I began to look for other crumbs on the ground. I became aware of a change.

‘A man was looking at me from about twenty yards away. He was standing next to the space between two huts from where Machinegun’s boots stuck out, horizontal. He had a grey face. We all had grey faces but his was the grey of a veil blowing across the outlines of wisdom carved in stone, not the grey of starved hopeless flesh. His smile was like a beckoning finger, like pity. He looked fed, thoughtful and gentle. I went over and looked down at Machinegun lying there with his throat cut. The Mohican said: “He stole your bread,” and gave me a full bread ration and a piece of sausage. As I stuffed it in my mouth and felt the world and my pain again I grieved for Machinegun. He’d shot and beaten people because he couldn’t talk to them. Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators. And he’d spoken to me for longer, and more painfully, than anyone.

‘The Mohican said to me: “I understand. Because I understand
and I understand you understand, I have to look after you. Everyone has their place, and you weren’t supposed to die here.”

‘The Mohican said: “I spoke to him in his own language.”

‘The great thieves think of themselves as a people apart, like aristocrats, living and breathing honour, obsessed with fashion, their own fashion and nobody else’s. They see the non-thieves as a kind of game animal whose only honour is to be hunted by thieves. They divide women into five kinds. Their mothers; grandmothers; child-bearers; concubines; and whores. They’re vain, brave, pitiless and sentimental. They love to spend the money they steal on roses, perfume and gold for women they don’t know. They’ll bet everything they have on anything they can, their lives on which icicle’ll drop first. Their clothes are worth more than their houses, they hate progress, they think the world was always the way it is, and should stay that way. They’d rather die than swallow an insult. I learned this in the White Garden. I thought the Mohican was one of these. I was wrong.

‘He was a thief, and they honoured him for that. He’d robbed a gold barge, and killed soldiers. He was handy with a gun and a knife. There was a story that he’d broken out of jail in Bukhara and killed all the guards, every one, and a story that he’d dynamited the home of a businessman in Taganrog, burying the whole family, and they even said he’d done a bank in Alaska and crossed to Chukotka with an Eskimo dog team. He was more dangerous than the other thieves because he didn’t have their sentimentality and their longing for a court to flatter them. He felt the human passions. No, he didn’t feel them. He handled them. He felt their quality and sniffed them and tasted them and rubbed them against his cheek, but they didn’t lodge in him. He was like someone who could feel the agony of poison but couldn’t be killed by it no matter how much he drank. So he could feel pity flood through his body
watching a child looking at him out of the window of a house he had wired with explosive, and still close the circuit, because the pity left no mark as it passed through. What was most terrible about him was his certainty. For such a man, you’d think, life would be a game. When there’s nothing to strive for, no irresistible human desires, you play. He wasn’t playing. With him, it was like the difference between writing and drawing. We live our lives like writing. The pen moves over the paper in regular lines. The past is written and can be read, the future is blank, and the pen must stay in the word that is being written now. The Mohican lives like drawing. He draws one stroke after the other, but the strokes can be anywhere on the paper. When you watch, the strokes look disjointed and meaningless, but in his mind he sees the whole picture, complete. Complete until his death. He’s just filling it in. That’s what you are to the Mohican. A stroke in his picture. You could be on the edge or in the middle, you could be a cut throat and a tiny detail or a single look that fills the whole foreground. Only he knows, but he does know. He knows his own order of things.

‘In January, not long after the Mohican started feeding me, the White Garden came apart. The last boats had left five months earlier with the guards who’d been able to buy a place on them. We’d been cut off since then, and the river ice wouldn’t break up till the end of May at the earliest. In the camp, for most of the year, the guards and the commandant were just as much prisoners as we were. Where could they go? The mountains and glaciers were a wall to the north, and even if they could have been crossed, there was nothing on the other side except more tundra and the Arctic ocean. Sure, you could walk across the river ice and head south, or even walk along the river to the first settlement. But you’d freeze to death, or starve, before you got there. The camp didn’t have horses
or trucks. There were the Tungus. They might sell you deer to ride on. But they didn’t come to Putorana till spring, and you couldn’t be sure of finding them if you went looking for them, or of them finding you, or even of reaching the tree line. A couple of guards had set out in November to try their luck. We watched them walking across the river, climbing up the far bank and wading through the snowfields on the other side. There was a tilt to the land there, and in the few hours of light we could see them moving slowly through the snow, up to their waists. Nobody had expected the snow to be so soft and deep in that place. When the light went they still hadn’t reached the ridge, and then a blizzard came down, and the next day the track they’d made was covered, and perhaps they were too. I don’t know that the Tungus would have helped them. They were losing a lot of deer to Russian marauders, Cossacks, Red partisans, whatever, people who didn’t expect to have to pay.

‘The chaos was outside. I was protected. I’d never felt so safe and comfortable. The Mohican had a screened-off area to himself in one of the barrack blocks, with four bunks, a table and chairs, a dresser and some crockery. He had his own stove, and sheets hung across the window. He’d sit there and smoke and play cards with other thieves and guards, while I sat on the top bunk, reading or writing. They ignored me. They brought the Mohican food. He’d put it to one side and they’d play. When they left he’d divide everything up and give me half.

‘“Eat every crumb, Intelligent,” he said, as if I needed to be told. I stopped working; he told me not to go. “Keep the stove going,” he said. “You’re not going to die here.” For weeks, that was all I did. Read, slept, put logs on the stove, listened to the sound of the wind outside and to their talk as they played cards. My ribs faded into a solid covering of flesh and my stomach swelled, my thighs became wider than my knees for the first
time in months. For a short time it was bliss. Later it wasn’t so good. When you’re tired and cold and hungry, you’ve got nothing to think about except how to appear to be doing the most work while doing the least, how to get food and how to steal warmth. When the weariness and the cold and the hunger go away you begin to think about other things. You have time to dream, and the dreams become a torture. All the useless passions come dribbling back into your heart, fear of dying, hatred of the authorities who imprisoned you, loneliness, even pride.

‘The Mohican and I didn’t talk. We had nothing to share with each other. He slept, but he never rested. His mind was always working, but he never stopped to think. He was always active and all I had was free time. I watched him sometimes, trying to catch him in a moment between cards or sleep or sharpening his knife, believing there had to be instants when he’d be so disturbed by a memory that he’d have to stop, or frown, or when a thought he hadn’t provided for nudged his mind and it showed on his face. I never caught him. He never did a superfluous thing. How many men can you say that about? No scratching, finger-drumming, whistling, yawning, chin-rubbing, lip-biting, hesitation in his speech. When he used his eyes, it was to a purpose, he never stared out of the window or at the wall or the ceiling to settle his mind while he dreamed awake and worked things out in his head. I decided he was a great man. Yes, his eyes. A fish looking up through clear ice at the afternoon sky would see that light and that mystery. At cards it took him a second to scan his hand and he was done with looking at the cards, what would he do with his eyes then? All that interested him was watching the other men round the table. He found a lot to see in their faces. He wasn’t thinking about anything else when he was studying them, just them.

‘I don’t know how long this life went on. The camp outside
was a murmur with shouts and the sound of axes on wood. One of the last pieces to come back to me when I was fully fed was the sense of how far I was from the world, but I was dealing with that by letting myself go a little mad, imagining I was an Arctic explorer, trapped in a ship in the ice, waiting for the relief expedition to come. The whole camp had been mad for years, a deeper madness and getting deeper with the hunger, but I’d forgotten that, otherwise I might have realised that when the sun flashed over the horizon for the first time since November, the light would cut straight to the convicts’ brain stems, crack their nerves like a chisel, and bring the White Garden to an end.

‘On the morning the sun came back, I sat by the window eating bread and cheese and reading Edward Bellamy. Something came through the window, a clenched fist, all bloody torn knuckle and shrivelled veins and tendons, the arm behind trailing rags and freezing air. The skin was alive, blue grey, transparent, covering wasted muscle. The noise of breaking glass and the punch of cold and the sight of the red rips in the grey skin came in a moment, I threw the book away, stood up and stepped back. The human talon closed around the food and snatched, severing an artery in the arm as it pulled back through the jagged hole in the window which I saw because I lifted the sheet and saw the camp outside in the first light for the first time in so long. I saw the man who’d broken the window to snatch my food, the blood dripping out of his sleeve and turning to red ice when it hit the ground, him not noticing and pushing the food into his mouth, which had shrunken over his teeth so there were no lips, only a hole and teeth. The cheeks had shrunk, too, his cheekbones jutted out over his cheeks and the skin had become thin and tight over his forehead, his eyes were dead and deep in dark pits, it was a skull
with the unupholstered skin of a dead man sewn onto it. While I was staring at him another convict, another moving skeleton, tried to take the food from him. They fell fighting onto the snow, labouring at killing each other with the last strength they had, going for each other’s eyes with their thumbs, legs pedalling away for advantage though they were hardly thicker than the bones inside them. They didn’t speak or scream while they fought, I could just hear them breathing.