The People's Act of Love (33 page)

‘I see him throw the last of his friend into the water. His hand. He cuts the hand off a dead soldier and buries it. He eats some of the horse. He climbs the bridge. He meets a man on the bridge. They leave. I fetch the hands –’

‘What was he like, this man the avakhi met on the bridge?’

‘Too far to see.’

‘Does he have a name, a name in Russian, the avakhi?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t tell you. He kills me. He promises.’

Mutz reached inside his tunic to his shirt pocket and took out a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil. The edges of the pages were damp but the main part of the paper was dry.

‘Can you make the fire brighter?’ he said.

The albino blew on the embers and put some spiny green twigs on. There was a smell of resin and a crown of small flames poked out of the fire. Mutz got up. His head spun and he almost fell. He recovered and squatted by the fire. He held the open notebook on his knee, steadied it with one hand, and began to sketch with the other. He drew like an engraver, making series of parallel lines, cross-hatching them to make dark areas. Nekovar and Broucek came over to watch. Their mouths were slightly open. The flames reflected from their faces and cast more light on the paper. The albino did not look. He turned away to watch the darkness outside. For a quarter hour nobody spoke. There was the hissing and creaking of boiling resin from the fire, the scurrying sound of Mutz’s pencil and the noise of the men’s breathing.

Mutz finished and buffed the sketch with the edge of his hand.

‘Good,’ said Broucek. ‘It’s good. It’s him.’

Mutz had drawn two heads of Samarin, each three-quarter face, one with his shaven head and no beard, the other with a full growth. He showed it to the albino, who did not look. Mutz touched him on the shoulder. The albino glanced at it and turned his head away as far as it would go.

‘Please look,’ said Mutz. ‘Is this him? Is this the avakhi?’

The albino looked again. He sniffed. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Songs

A
nna sat on the divan, leaving room for another. She put her tumbler and the bottle on the dresser and lit another cigarette. There weren’t many left but she didn’t smoke often. Samarin followed, took the cigarette she offered, bent his body to the match, and sat in an armchair on the other side of the room. A single lamp burned in the corner. It lit them equally but, it seemed to Anna, the play of shadows and surfaces made the light shine more brightly and obliquely on Samarin, emphasising the hollows of his cheeks and eyes. He had chosen to sit apart. Well, there was time. He was her captive. She would take his picture tomorrow. She took a sip of cognac and laughed.

‘What’s it like to be my prisoner?’ she said.

‘Comfortable,’ said Samarin.

What had he asked about? ‘You were asking me about Mutz. Did he say anything about me?’

‘He was upset that I found a photograph of you someone dropped.’

‘He used to visit me. He’d stay overnight.’ Anna held her breath, trying to see if Samarin reacted to this. He didn’t. ‘It’s lonely here for a woman. Do you think I’m a slut?’

‘No.’

‘I like a drink. I like company, sometimes. I like to like myself when I look in the mirror. I sing. So Mutz – he liked me, and that’s the most attractive thing in anyone. He’s kind. He has a
good face. I don’t mean handsome, though he is almost that, and I don’t mean his face expresses good intentions, though it does. You can’t separate the two; perhaps he’d be ugly without the good intentions, and look like an idiot without the well-made features. Perhaps what it means to be civilised is not to force yourself to like people however they look, but to force yourself to stop wondering whether the way they look makes any difference to whether you like them. He’s clever. He knows so much about so many things. Yes, he’s Jewish. Yes, a Jewish soldier in Russia is like a penguin in the desert. You know here, it matters less? Siberia. Any live human being is exotic here. Would I have had the strength to take a Jewish husband to Europe, to deal with the slanders and suspicions of his people and my people and, what, bricks through the window, I suppose? I don’t know. Perhaps that would have made me love him. But I didn’t, not here. I’m not sure why. It’s not that he’s Jewish. He’s not religious. He’s an outsider among the Czechs, but it’s more that he seems German, to them, than Jewish. It doesn’t matter to some of them that he speaks Czech better than they do. They think of him as German. And in some sense, perhaps, they’re right. Even now, even here, he inhabits a place that doesn’t exist any more, an empire of all sorts of languages and nationalities, but where the rules were in German, and they spoke German in the offices, where the trains ran in German. He worked as an engraver in a firm in Prague which printed share certificates in that empire. All in German. I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with German, I mean he was attached to that world of a certain order. Attached in a way we mustn’t be to organisations, but men so often are. His empire was kind to him and he was unhappy that it died. I think he was disappointed that the Austrian empire hadn’t become an Austrian United States. It unsettled me that behind his sense of order, of the right way of doing things, his need to
put everything in its place and understand who was doing what to whom, was this set of laws and manners from a world which no longer existed. I was angry when the Czechs shot the teacher. We called him the teacher, he was an exile who taught Alyosha to read and write and count. Of course Josef was angry too, but he said something I could never forgive him for. He said: “We have such stupid rules.” As if the rules were the point, and not the shooting. Do you see?’

‘Yes, I see,’ said Samarin.

‘He was nice, though. He is nice. He could never talk to Alyosha like you. He lost his whole family when he was a child, in the strangest way. I don’t mean lost as in they died. Lost. Mislaid. His parents and brothers and sisters emigrated to the States when he was very young, and at the last minute he fell ill. His family had their passage booked, they had very little money, they left Josef behind with an uncle and went, with the plan that he would join them later. And the family arrived in America, and disappeared. Who knows what happened to them? Perhaps they died in a fire, or a railway accident. Perhaps letters were mislaid; a misunderstanding of the American way of writing addresses. Ten years after they left, when he was twenty, Josef went to America to look for them. He spent three months searching around Chicago. He didn’t find them. Even so everyone was surprised that he came back to Prague.’

Anna stopped, taken by a feeling she’d been talking too much. She was on the way to being drunk and Samarin was sitting there with deep listening eyes, which seemed to get deeper the more she filled them with her rambling thoughts. She would have another drink, and so would he. He would sort her many stories into one. He had that power. She got up and refilled his glass and her own, and sat back down. She crossed her legs and uncrossed them to make him look at her legs, and he did.
She wondered if he was really clean. She wondered if she cared.

‘It was strange you finding that photograph,’ she said. ‘I made a present of it to one of the local men. Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov. He runs the store on the square. He pestered me for a picture for so long, and then he went and lost it.’

Samarin nodded. ‘You were generous to let him have such a photograph.’

Anna blushed and said quickly: ‘Balashov’s sweet, but very devout. You do know they’re not really Orthodox in this town, don’t you?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘I’m sorry I don’t have a gramophone. We should have some music.’

‘You have a guitar over there.’

‘It’s out of tune.’

‘We could tune it.’

‘I play very badly.’

Samarin rose, picked up the guitar by the neck, swung the body into the crook of his arm, and ran his thumb across the strings. He came over and handed it to Anna.

‘It’s perfectly in tune,’ he said. ‘When you mentioned music, you must have wanted me to bring it to you. Play.’

‘Well, sit down,’ said Anna, nodding at the empty place in the divan beside her and setting the instrument on her lap. She played the open strings one by one and fiddled with the tuning keys. She felt his weight settling into the divan and blushed.

‘I play very badly,’ she said again.

‘Everyone plays badly,’ he said. She glanced at him. He sat leaning against the corner of the back of the divan with his hands behind his head, watching her and smiling. A small silver fish swam ticklishly up from her womb to her breast, leaving a trail of effervescence. She tried to hide from him the light of
permission in her eyes and pressed her teeth gently into her lower lip to stop herself smiling too much.

She began to pluck the strings. It was a man’s song she played for Alyosha and now she tried to sing it more gently, without the heavy marching rhythm.

The Most Honourable

Leavetaking, Esquire

We’ve been brothers long enough

To know which one’s a liar

Letter in an envelope

No, wait, don’t pull it out

Death’ll give me longer

To see what love’s about

The Most Honourable

Dearest Lady Luck

Sometimes you arrive in time,

Sometimes you get stuck.

An ounce of lead in your heart?

Hear your trigger finger’s doubt:

Death’ll give me longer

To see what love’s about.

The Most Honourable

Your Majesty, Abroad

When you hug them tight like that

I know that you’re a fraud

I see your nets of finest silk

Wait, just hear me out:

Death’ll give me longer

To see what love’s about.

Anna stopped and bowed her head and laughed. ‘There are more verses, but I can’t remember,’ she said, while Samarin smiled and clapped. Anna presented the guitar to him.

‘Now you play,’ she said.

‘I only know one song,’ said Samarin.

‘Well, it must be good.’ Anna grinned. ‘Play!’

Samarin rested the guitar on his knees and began to play,

without any delaying business of tuning or strumming or fingers wandering up and down the fretboard. Samarin’s song wasn’t major or minor. She didn’t know which key it was in. The key of earnest came into her head and she smiled.

Samarin sang:

To say the name of one star is enough

Among the worlds where night allows no spark

It’s not because this
star’s
the one I love

Because to me, all other stars are dark

It’s not because this
star’s
the one I love

Because to me, all other stars are dark

And if my heart is heavy in the night

I have another praise of her to give

It’s not because with her there is more light

But that with her, I don’t need light to live

It’s not because with her there is more light

But that with her, I don’t need light to live.

Anna jumped up and clapped, sat down and ran her hand quickly over the side of Samarin’s head and his shoulder.

‘Another one!’ she said.

‘I told you, I only know that one.’

‘Play it again!’

The Reds

T
he Czechs slept in shifts around the fire for two hours each. When Nekovar woke him Mutz tried to curl up and turn away from the shaking hand. His head and his body felt as if they were falling apart from each other through surfaceless space. Nekovar persisted and Mutz sat upright. His eyes seemed to have been salted and he was nauseous. The cold from outside the cave touched his neck insolently and the dizziness subsided. He told Nekovar to sleep and moved closer to the fire. The albino had brought more wood. Mutz piled it on. Outside it had begun to snow again. Broucek slept under his coat, resting his head on a rock for a pillow, and looked content. The albino cushioned his head with his clasped hands. Even asleep, he seemed to be awaiting a blow. Had the shaman ill-treated him? Mutz studied his own heart, the only instrument at his disposal for divining the morals of the dead, and concluded that the shaman had not. He wondered at how they, the Czechs, had treated the shaman so badly, and cared so little that he’d died, as if it had been his weakness for drink that had killed him, as if he had killed himself. You looked at the faces of the shaman and the albino, you knew their stories, how they sometimes feasted and were sheltered in furs, no doubt, but were sometimes cold and hungry and hunted and were hunted in the Siberian forest. And you thought: they’re used to it. But that was how those who
suffered less always thought about those who suffered more, that they were used to it, that they no longer felt it as you did. Nobody ever got used to it. All they learned to do was to stop letting it show.

Once inflamed, the conscience puts out a steady heat, and guilt spreads. Mutz thought of Balashov, and felt another wave of nausea at how he had demanded he persuade his wife and child to leave his town forever. If he got back to Yazyk he would ask Balashov’s forgiveness. He would do more. He would ask Balashov’s advice. Who better to ask about Anna than her husband, who had loved her as a man, and now, as he claimed, loved her still, as a not-man? He would go to Balashov, humbly, and ask about love. They laughed at Nekovar, searching for the secret which would set women’s sexual machinery in motion, but in his way, Nekovar was ahead of Mutz; at least he was asking.