The People's Act of Love (34 page)

He would make friends with Balashov. His enemies were Matula and Samarin, the twin poles of madness in Yazyk. Nothing could move forward while Matula prevented the Czechs going home and Anna remained infatuated with Samarin. It did not seem possible that a woman whose husband had castrated himself for God’s sake would tolerate a lover who had murdered and eaten a fellow-convict. Mutz realised he was smiling. Those who commit the most extreme acts always laid themselves open not only to the most extreme punishments but also to the most extreme ridicule. The war was hardly over in Europe and already jokes about demobilised men whose balls had been blown to bits by bullets and shrapnel were flying round the northern hemisphere. What would the wives of such men do? In some ways, they were in a worse position than Anna Petrovna. No, it was not really very funny. And was it not possible that her husband’s self-mutilation had inoculated her, in some sense, to the terrors that would grasp the imaginations of others at the
story of cannibalism in the forest? Samarin might argue that, compared to Balashov’s brutality to himself and his family in the name of a high ideal, his killing and eating of the Mohican was self-preservation. A criminal such as the Mohican could have been hanged. Somewhere west of Vladivostok and east of San Francisco a subscription society would exist of enthusiasts campaigning for criminals to be eaten. More modern, and less wasteful. In America they grilled them with electricity. No. It was not the cannibalism itself. It was what Samarin did afterwards, as described through the drug state of the albino, when he saw him standing over them in the daylit forest in the form of a demon on the fields of ash and clinker in the Tungus underworld. He carved letters onto a man’s forehead. Mutz had seen them himself. Mutz had seen how Samarin was able to alter his front, how he had all his moods on a dial and hid the mood of the dialler. Still it was hard to credit him with such savagery. And if Samarin had killed and consumed the Mohican to secure his escape from the White Garden, who had murdered Kliment, and carved the letter on his forehead? Could there have been a third man in the forest?

All such questions of men and women known to Mutz now lay on the far side of an element which had altered since he had last encountered it, the Reds. Back in 1918 the Reds had been men who possessed an Idea. Now the Idea itself possessed men, and armoured trains, and land. From the little Mutz knew, men who had once possessed the Idea were still arguing about what the Idea was; and that was something the Idea, now that it possessed men and armoured trains and land of its own, was unlikely to tolerate for long.

He was awake. He shook Nekovar, Broucek and the albino. He asked the albino if he would come with them to Yazyk to collect the body of the shaman. The albino nodded sleepily.

‘There’s something we have to do first,’ said Mutz. He looked at Broucek and Nekovar. The trust in their faces was terrifying. ‘We have to go down to the Reds.’

‘They’ll string you up,’ said Broucek. ‘Shouldn’t we go back to Yazyk first?’

‘You’ll do what Lieutenant Mutz tells you,’ said Nekovar.

Mutz said: ‘We can slip past them now, and back to Yazyk, but we can’t escape from Yazyk without them. They hold the bridge.’

Broucek was thinking about it, still trusting, not avoiding Mutz’s eyes, but waiting for more.

‘They could attack Yazyk when they like, and kill us all,’ said Mutz. ‘We haven’t the means to stop them, except to talk to them.’

‘Let’s go, brother,’ said Nekovar. ‘Only let’s be sure we know why we’re going. The Reds aren’t all that’s stopping us leaving.’

‘No,’ said Mutz. ‘I’m glad you understand that. Do you understand, Broucek?’

Broucek was silent for a long time. Then he said: ‘I’ll kill him for you. I don’t mind. It’d be like shooting a mad dog.’

‘You’re not doing this for me,’ said Mutz. ‘Don’t ever think it’s for me.’ Even though it was. How easy treachery was when more than one man was already thinking of the same way of betrayal, and they opened their hearts at the same moment. Now he was seeing into Matula’s soul because he was acquiring one like it. The convenience of a time and place between war and law, when a gun and a word was all it took to make a problem go away. How natural it had seemed to save Matula’s life on the ice. How natural it seemed now to sell his carcass to the Reds. Mutz had a screaming urge to jump back inside the borders of a sensible nation, or an empire, such as he had
once lived in, and slam the door on anarchy like this. But he could only do that now by making the anarchy wilder. Moses! The last thing you needed in the wilderness was ten commandments. That was for later.

The snow was falling in sparse, heavy, damp flakes. Mutz still had Nekovar’s coat. It was unpleasant to leave the cave but the snow was not deep and the white ground made for easier navigation. They followed the albino down a shallow slope for a mile till they came to an outcrop above the railway line, a few hundred yards from the mouth of the tunnel. They could look down from the rocks to the line without being easily seen. The Red train stretched in dark rest from the tunnel. A squat dense apparatus poked up off a flat car coupled to the front of the locomotive: their artillery piece. Behind the locomotive tender were freight cars, flat cars with machine guns behind sandbags, and passenger wagons with windows, some dark, some showing lamplight. Mutz could smell coal smoke from the stoves in each wagon. Sentries in groups of three sat in greatcoats around small fires, rifles across their knees. The closest was a hundred yards away.

Mutz beckoned the others up.

‘They’re not ready to move,’ whispered Nekovar. ‘They’re just keeping the locomotive from freezing, but it’s not fired up. It’d take them two hours. They’ll probably move at first light.’

‘What are the wires for?’ said Broucek. ‘There are wires leading from the train to the telegraph line.’

‘They must have a telegraph aboard the train,’ said Nekovar.

‘Maybe they have a restaurant too,’ said Broucek.

‘I’ll bet they’ve got Red tarts on board,’ murmured Nekovar. ‘Communism’s all about equal shares for all, isn’t it, lieutenant, brother?’

‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘Or they could just shoot you.’

They divided the party. Broucek and the albino would stay back, hidden, while Mutz and Nekovar went to parley. If the negotiators were well met, Broucek and the albino would leave and wait for them in a derelict railwayman’s hut up the line, halfway to Yazyk. Mutz looked down at the train a last time. The snow had stopped falling and it was colder. Perforated clouds wound over the moon. The snow on the ground and on the branches of the trees was beginning to crust and glitter. The solid riveted bulk of the train and the circle of bright fires around it stretched out from the tunnel, out from the planetary web of rails and telegraph wires, like the feeler of the world’s intelligence, groping in the darkness and chaos of Samarin’s and Balashov’s and Matula’s void for something it might have lost. It was reaching for Mutz. In London and Paris and New York they saw the Reds as an anarchic, destructive, turbulent menace which demanded to be controlled. Here in the dark forest, looking into the circle of lights, Mutz saw only a new order, a new empire, coming to take its place among the old, and how he wanted to be inside the circle, and not outside, with the maneaters, handmade angels, narcophilic visionaries and Bohemian warlords. And how it was tearing him apart to know that Anna was outside that circle, and though she would hate this desolate place of madness as much as her wisdom told her, she found a source in it she couldn’t do without. Even when the order of the new state flowed around her, as it was bound to, she would never tolerate for long a man who fled from the extremes they had encountered here so eagerly, who sought, even worse, to explain the extreme, and to cure it.

A wolf howled from far off in the forest behind them. Another joined, and a third. Some of the sentries turned. None got up. Mutz put his hand on Nekovar’s shoulder. They
looked at each other and nodded. Mutz took off his belt and holster with his pistol and gave them to the albino, who strapped them on with unexpected swiftness, and looked like a ghostly buccaneer. Nekovar gave his gun to Broucek and shyly embraced him. Mutz took out his once-white handkerchief. Nekovar produced and unfolded a piece of paper with what looked like a design sketch of an electrically-driven artificial woman on it. Raising these surrender flags above their heads, they climbed round the outcrop and out into the open snowfield, in full view of the sentries. The moon shone down bright.

No-one noticed them. Mutz drew a deep breath of freezing air and shouted: ‘Don’t shoot! We want to talk! Don’t shoot!’

As his voice rolled across the snow, echoing slightly off the flank of the train, the sentries rose black and indignant. Mutz heard a snickering of rifle bolts froing and toing and the Red soldiers were running towards them, coat skirts billowing, rifles held out in front of them as if they were farmers running the devil to ground with pitchforks. Mutz suppressed the instinct to run and duck. He shouted ‘Don’t shoot!’ again, and Nekovar added his voice.

A dozen Russians hemmed them in. They wore assorted civilian caps and shapkas and had red armbands over the sleeves of their greatcoats, which were British issue. Swollen and grim with entitlement, several were shouting at the Czechs to stretch their hands up even higher. Others were demanding to know who they were. Numerous hands were searching them, reaching into their pockets, removing documents, Matula money, photographs. One of the Reds grabbed Nekovar’s paper and a sub-crowd formed around it, frowning deeply. Among them all, one wearing a sheepskin jacket, a leather cap and
military boots began to push the mob back. He called the soldiers comrades, requested order, and asked Mutz and Nekovar if they were unarmed.

He led Mutz and Nekovar to the open door of one of the passenger cars. The mob of sentries followed them while their chief climbed up and went inside the car. The soldiers kept their distance from the Czechs. Some had bayonets fixed to their rifles. Their faces showed suspicion and curiosity. They were as eager to kill as they were to talk. Either would serve. There were women among them.

‘We’re Czechs,’ said Mutz. ‘From Yazyk, up at the end of the line.’

‘Interventionists,’ said one of the Reds.

‘White filth.’

‘Counter-revolutionaries.’

‘Are they bourgeois?’

‘Factionalists!’

‘How can they be factionalists?’ said a lanky Red in a squirrel-skin shapka, shoving a rival in the shoulder. Some of the Reds laughed. Vapour rose from their mouths.

‘Are you communists?’ asked Nekovar.

‘Communists!’ said several and deep ‘Yeses,’ rumbled round the semicircle.

‘We’re railways workers,’ said one.

‘That’s a military secret!’

‘Yes, shut up, you fool.’

‘I’m proud to be a communist, and a railway worker,’ said a white-bearded man with a well-oiled rifle, addressing them all, as if it were a meeting, and it was his turn to speak. None of the younger Reds was inclined to shut him up. ‘I worked thirty years in the railway, and they gave me nothing, and the boss talked to me like a child, and they took my son to the war,
and he never came back. They gave me a bad house. Small. Damp. They hated to part with their money, parasites. My wife caught cold and died. It was a shame.’

‘Right, Styopa ’Xandrovich. Speak it.’

Styopa Alexandrovich crept forward towards Mutz and Nekovar, pushed his face into theirs, and jabbed at them with his finger. He had no teeth. ‘This is a People’s train,’ he said. ‘This,’ – he slapped his rifle – ‘this is a People’s gunbarrel. The People – that’s us. It’s been published so.’

‘We shot our bosses. They were swine.’

‘Shut up, Fedya.’

‘God save Red Lenin!’ A brawl broke out when the lanky one heard this.

A man jumped down from the train. The crunch of his boots in the snow and the track bedding silenced the other Reds and they stepped back several paces. The brawling ceased.

The chairman of the Verkhny Luk Railway Workers’ Soviet was in his early twenties, with a full, neat blonde moustache. Even in the moonlight Mutz could see he was looking at him with an extraordinary degree of hope in his eyes; not hope that Mutz was going to provide something he needed, but immense hope that every new man and woman he met would turn out to be an early messenger of the new society he was expecting, no matter how many times he was disappointed.

He was Comrade Bondarenko, in a black leather coat, with a pistol, loving being young in a revolution, and knowing it, hence some newsreel gestures. The other Reds liked him for seeming young and good-looking and unsullied, even though he had led them in an enterprise which ended in the execution of rail administrators loyal to the Whites, or loyal to the old order of property, at least. Mutz saw the Reds looking at Bondarenko as if he was the repository of their virtue,
their guarantee that their honour would be returned to them, intact, when the killing days were over.

Bondarenko ordered Mutz’s and Nekovar’s hands to be tied behind their backs, which was done eagerly and without viciousness. Bondarenko climbed back inside the train, and Mutz and Nekovar were pushed up after him, with an armed man each behind them. This group shuffled through the passenger car down the corridor leading past the coupé compartments. The sliding doors of the compartments were open. The wagon was overheated. It smelled of bad tobacco, men’s feet, thin soup and old wound dressings. In the compartments men could be seen smoking, playing cards, reading newspapers, arguing about politics, and sleeping the enviable sleep of the exhausted, limbs cast about as they first stopped. One compartment held sick and wounded. Two bare-chested men, one with a bandaged skull, the other with a bandaged arm, lay in blankets to their waists, one hand behind their heads, staring out at those passing by with the particular beady attentiveness of the wounded irregular.

Mutz and Nekovar were led into a room fashioned from half a car. There were beige blinds over the windows and a thin green carpet which had been new recently. It was rucked up and tracked with black mud and crumbs of snow. Technical maps of the central Siberian rail network were pinned to blackboards and there was an empty draughtsman’s table. In the far corner, by a door marked NO ENTRY, was a desk with a green baize surface. A lamp on the desk was reflected in the captured turmoil of varnished walnut. There were dirty tea glasses and a half-eaten apple on a crumpled piece of newspaper on the desk, and more newspapers in stacks, some freshly printed by the look of them, on the floor near the desk, alongside an open crate containing hand grenades wrapped in straw. A clock on
the wall showed 8.45. Bondarenko’s takeover of the old railway bosses’ staff car was deliberately careless. He wanted to show how little he cared for the bourgeois trappings of the old bureaucracy, without ruling out the possibility he might need them in future. It was not, Mutz sensed as the chairman sat in the padded swivel chair behind the desk, that Bondarenko was cynical; more that he was humble and trusting enough before the wisdom of the People to know that he did not know what, exactly, they would expect a new order to look like once their war was won. Mutz was reminded of Balashov, but perhaps the pious warrior whom Anna had first met in Europe before the war.