The People's Act of Love (30 page)

‘Here,’ said Samarin, squatting down so his head was at Alyosha’s level and tapping a small scar on one knuckle. ‘This was awarded to convict first rank Samarin, Kyrill Ivanovich, for meritorious conduct on the march from prison, when he fought off hunger, thirst, cold and wild beasts with nothing but his wits and his faithful knife. Despite having to walk one thousand miles through the tundra and the taiga to reach the nearest settlement, convict Samarin remained cheerful, often stopping to share a joke or a friendly word with a passing elk or deer. Each morning, after a vigorous routine of exercise, he’d sing national songs and recite the catechism. He bathed in running water twice a day, breaking the ice as necessary with rocks and a system of levers of his own devising. In the early days of the march he’d pass the coldest days, when the birds fell dead from the trees, by wrapping his clothes in a
bundle, fastening them to his head and running naked through the snow, performing elementary Greek gymnastics as he went.’

‘What’re Greek gymnastics?’ said Aloyosha. A snowflake landed on the end of his nose and he blew it off with a puff of breath from his pushed-out lower jaw, not taking his eyes off the newcomer.

‘Like this,’ said Samarin, and he straightened up, bent forward, planted his hands on the ground, kicked his legs into the air and balanced on his hands for a moment, head down, feet up, before flexing his elbows and springing upright again.

‘I can do that!’ said Alyosha, dropping his sword and preparing to hurl himself at the snowy mud.

‘Don’t!’ said Anna and ‘Wait!’ said Samarin, at the same time. While Anna laughed Samarin put his hand on Alyosha’s shoulder and said: ‘First you have to learn to tame wolves so they run alongside you in the moonlight and protect you from the blizzards with their bodies, and train bears to bring you fish and berries. You should be able to make beavers fell trees when you make a clicking sound in your throat, like this.’ Samarin’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he clicked in his throat.

‘You’re lying,’ said Alyosha doubtfully. ‘You can’t make them do that.’

‘You can. You can make shoes and clothes from birch bark, sewn with braided reeds and a needle fashioned from a splinter of mammoth ivory. You can drink liquor distilled from birch sap and the juice of rowanberries. And you know how you can make light at night in the taiga?’

Alyosha shook his head. Samarin leaned forward to whisper in his ear: ‘Capture an owl and make it fart.’

Alyosha giggled. ‘Where do you get the flame from?’

‘Pine resin, young fir cones, and marten-skulls,’ said Samarin, counting them off on his fingers. ‘I could show you.’

‘You couldn’t light our stove that way. It’s hard. You need matches.’

‘It’s easier with matches, of course,’ said Samarin.

Alyosha poked in the dirt with the point of the stick. ‘Come onto the roof of the byre,’ he said. Samarin and Anna followed him. With their help the boy dragged the ladder out past the cow Marusya and set it up by the door. Alyosha led the way to the roof, where the fuzz of moss on the boards was already slippery with melted snow. They saw the sky was falling on Yazyk, the grey scourings turning white when they reached the ground and flying across the face of the forest, dimming the perimeters of the world with rushing grains. As the blizzard thickened, the world shrank, and the bell tower of the derelict church, the common grazing and the trees disappeared.

Anna left them there and went indoors to the warmth, the stuffy smell of heated wood, cloth and down. It would be dark soon. She heard Alyosha shouting in the yard and Samarin moaning like a bear that he’d been hit. She went to the kitchen, took a stool and opened the larder. She took a squat half-litre jar down from a high shelf and wiped the dust and cobwebs off. The jar had the dark lustre of a lake on a clear night. She took off the lid and spooned blueberry jam into three dishes. The berries subsided comfortably into the sweet ooze. She glanced over her shoulder and licked the spoon clean, shivering from the tartness of the acid.

Alyosha brought Samarin back, the boy stomping in, bright with cold, shedding straws of packed snow, throwing his hat on a chair, the convict behind him, tall and wary. Anna had lit the lamp in the parlour, and the three of them sat down without speaking. Anna poured tea and handed the man and the boy jam spoons as if she was giving out ten-kopeck prizes.

Out

T
he rail track from Yazyk to the bridge ran level through the trees for seven miles before beginning to climb towards the heights through which the gorge ran. For the first part of the journey Nekovar and Broucek worked the pumping handles on the hand trolley by themselves. Mutz sat in the front between coils of rope, his feet dangling over the edge, one hand on the brake. When they hit the gradient the labour of working the trolley slowed them down. Mutz took off his greatcoat and joined Broucek on the handle, facing the way they were going. Nekovar stood facing them, working the other handle.

‘Broucek, what about these muscles? The shoulder muscles?’ asked Nekovar. ‘Are they important? Do women like them?’ Broucek didn’t answer. ‘Has a woman ever stroked your shoulder muscles before agreeing to sleep with you? Did she become aroused? Did her pupils dilate? Did her breathing become more rapid?’

‘It’s going to snow,’ said Broucek.

‘Maybe,’ said Mutz.

‘Tell me, Broucek,’ said Nekovar. ‘What if the female erotic machinery was wound tight by the pressure of the man’s muscles, so tight that her soft outer hide began to palpitate and heat up with the tension as it strained against the unreleased mechanism, causing the nipples to harden and lubrication to be released into
the mouth of her lower valve, which the rigid male member would then slide easily into, triggering the release of her coiled sexual spring and causing her body and limbs to shake and move with violent energy, which in turn –’

‘Stop,’ said Mutz. ‘Stop the poetry.’

‘No, brother,’ said Nekovar. ‘Just trying to understand from a master how they work.’

‘They’re not alarm clocks,’ said Mutz.

‘I know women are not alarm clocks,’ said Nekovar. ‘I understand how alarm clocks work. I can use alarm clocks. I can repair them. I could even make one. I’m a practical man and I’m trying to improve myself. Do you understand how women work, brother?’

‘No.’

‘Well, brother, not all of us have given up trying.’

‘You frighten the girls in the public houses,’ said Broucek, without malice. ‘Men who wear glasses take them off before they start fondling the girls. But you put a pair of glasses
on
, you roll up your sleeves, and you kneel over them and start turning them this way and that and testing their insides with your finger and seeing how they jump and squeal like you were repairing a broken motorcycle engine.’

‘How else can I understand the mechanism?’

‘It’s not a mechanism!’ said Broucek, beginning, after years of acquiring patience, to lose it.

‘Lads,’ said Mutz. ‘Lads. The tunnel.’

The tunnel leading to the bridge was on a long shallow incline and the trolley built up speed with Nekovar and Broucek resting at the pumping bar. They came out onto the bridge, Mutz pulled on the brake lever and the trolley stopped with a spray of sparks. A cold wind blew down the gorge and the clouds were yellowing. At the mouth of the tunnel were the remains of
a horse. Scavengers had been. Its bones had been stripped clean overnight and the mane and tail left as blood-dirty black tassels on a grinning empty rack.

Nekovar fastened a rope to one of the girders and let the free end fall through the hatch, pulling the coils after it. Mutz went first, leaning back against the rope to slow himself and kicking off the rockface. Halfway down he stopped, stretched his neck to look more closely at the rock, reached out a finger to touch it, nearly lost the rope, regained control and descended to the riverbank. Where the banks steepened and narrowed under the bridge the noise of the river was as loud as the breathing of a million souls together and the currents were chopped and broken into sharp stubby waves.

The bodies lay at the water’s edge near where the trees began. A strip had been cut from Lajkurg’s right foreleg and flies were laying eggs on the carcass. Otherwise the horse was whole and untouched, its very eyes unpecked. Nor had Lukac, the dead soldier, been gnawed by scavengers overnight. He didn’t lie where he’d fallen. His greyed, swelling body lay at right angles to the river, boots touching the water’s edge, arms by his sides. His right hand had been severed, then placed next to the stump, knuckles upwards. On the corpse’s stomach was something wrapped in a rag. Mutz looked back at the bridge. Broucek had come off the end of the rope and Nekovar was halfway down. Mutz signalled to Broucek to unshoulder his gun and watch the forest.

Mutz leaned down and picked up the package. It was damp. He heard Broucek pull back the bolt of his rifle and push a cartridge into the breech. The package was stiff and weighty. Mutz squeezed it. A stench of old meat breathed outwards and the package resisted under his fingers. Mutz opened the cloth. A human thumbnail set in a grey darkening stinking human
thumb pointed at him. Mutz said ‘Fick!’ in his throat and dropped the package. He rubbed his palms furiously on his breeches and washed his hands in the river.

It was a third hand, a putrid half-crab with incurled fingers and the tendons standing out pale under the taut knuckleskin like the yellow core of chicken feet. What had once been the plumpest parts of the hand, what palm readers call the Mount of Venus beneath the thumb and the Mount of Luna on the opposite edge, had been gnawed, the hardened hems of skin patterned ragged by teeth.

Broucek came over and looked down at the half-eaten hand, lying on the shingle, palm up.

‘Look at the palm,’ he said. ‘Look at the length of the life line.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Mutz.

‘It means long life and happiness.’

Mutz squatted down by the body of Lukac and studied the original severed hand, the one placed next to Lukac’s wrist. The night’s rain had wettened it yet it was grimier than the arm to which it belonged.

‘Watch the trees,’ said Mutz.

‘What for?’ said Broucek.

‘I don’t know.’

Nekovar came and stood back to back with Broucek. They turned their heads east and west and east and west, sweeping the forest tiered on the escarpments on either bank. The colour and geometry and motion outdetailed all their eyes together, the rowan berries plump scarlet on the branch, the yellow birch leaves flittering their pale and rich sides quickly in the wind, and the clumps of larch needles nodding. Between the colours the darkness did not stir.

‘Did you hear something?’ said Nekovar.

‘No,’ said Mutz. How did you bury a hand?

‘I thought I heard a sound,’ said Broucek. He was afraid. They all were.

A ragged scurf of crystal settled on Nekovar’s sleeve and he said: ‘Son of a bitch.’ The first snow came dark and sparse and barely frozen out of the yellow sky yet soon they were all blotched with it like a quick lichen on their woollen tunics.

‘Someone has been watching this place,’ said Mutz. ‘Lukac didn’t fall standing to attention.’

‘It could have been whoever cut off his hand who laid him out, then left,’ said Nekovar. ‘Hell, I hate to see snow falling on the lately departed.’

‘Someone’s been keeping the wolves from his body, and the crows from his eyes, right up to now,’ said Mutz. ‘Someone’s close.’

‘They didn’t keep scavengers from chewing on that extra hand there, now did they?’ said Nekovar.

‘Wolves don’t wrap their food,’ said Broucek.

‘The most dangerous scavenger here is the same as the most dangerous predator,’ said Mutz, ‘and it’s got teeth enough, and it walks on two legs.’

Mutz and Nekovar fell silent. The snow touched their faces. Broucek whispered the Lord’s Prayer to himself. Their muscles prickled at the sense of being meat for another man. In a dark place in the infinite taiga a cross-legged butcher bowed his crusted jaws to a flayed thigh, fist round separated white kneejoint, fist round separated white hipjoint. And so along more tangled needle-muffled paths through the larch labyrinth until all the choice cuts and soft parts were eaten and only a hand was left for nourishment.

‘God forgive me if I’m showing disrespect for the dead,’ said Nekovar, ‘but if I was a cannibal, and down to the last hand,
and I came across a fresh corpse, and an entire horse, I’d make more of a feast than’s been made here.’

Mutz nodded. Broucek raised his rifle, stopped back, sighted and said: ‘There!’

Mutz and Nekovar followed the line of the gun into the trees above them. They couldn’t see it.

‘A white creature,’ said Broucek. ‘Merciful God, like the devil’s own ghost.’

‘What? A hare? A fox?’ said Mutz.

‘A man, in the shape of a man! Not a hundred metres away. White, with red eyes.’

‘How could you see his eyes?’

‘I can see,’ said Broucek. ‘I can’t help but see well, I was born to it.’

They all saw the movement then. It was a quick paleness from shadow to shadow, large and lightmoving.

‘Don’t shoot,’ said Mutz. ‘Not until we know what it is.’

‘What if there are ten of them?’ said Nekovar.

A chip of stone snapped out of a rock close to where Mutz was standing and the air gasped with the passage of a bullet. After a moment they heard the shot. Mutz, Nekovar and Broucek ran for the cover of the trees. Two more shots followed them to the birches.

‘On the bridge,’ said Broucek. ‘Reds.’

Mutz could see two or three figures moving along the bridge, but they were just faint black motions through the thickening snow.

‘Can you tell?’

‘I can see their pointed hats. Red stars,’ said Broucek. ‘I could take one out at least.’ He lifted his gun.

‘Don’t,’ said Mutz.

‘They’re taking the trolley.’

Mutz watched the trolley creep away from them towards the far end of the bridge, as if under its own power. The Reds were at most fifteen minutes from Yazyk by train, an hour by horse. Who knew what they wanted from the town? How easily he had come to think of Bolshevism as an invincible force whose plans were unknowable to its enemies, but which knew its own will perfectly. It was about will, the desire to struggle which migrated from cause to cause, leader to leader, people to people, without anyone being able to hold it. In the Reds, though, will had found a long resting place, able to lift up a giant made of millions of people which would walk the earth, shedding dead like hairs as it advanced, and sprouting new believers to replace them.