The People's Act of Love (11 page)

She got up before dawn one morning to photograph fishermen in small boats, bilges awash with tiny silver fish like pools of mercury, before the sun had burned the mist off the river. She set up the camera on the family balcony to photograph the carrying of the cross through the town, the priests blinded by dust whipped up by a summer wind, their black and white vestments snapping with a sound like a city of geese rising at once from a field, and a crazed indigent in a ragged black suit without a shirt or shoes skipping and hopping backwards in front of the procession, his head lifted up to the golden cross, hands alternately held out towards it and rubbed together as if it was a fire and pressed to the sides of his head. He tripped and fell on his back and the procession stepped over him. Some of the priests kicked him as they passed and one placed the sole of his boot squarely on the chest of the sicksouled one. Eventually he was hauled to the side of the road, bleeding from the corner of his mouth, by a party of nuns, who laid him carefully in the gutter and hurried on after the cross. After a few minutes the lunatic roused himself and followed the dust cloud on all fours.

One day in the autumn of 1907 Anna went to take pictures of a group of students who had set up a swimming, mushroom-gathering and skating club. They swam, skated and gathered mushrooms, but only to hide from the police their discussions of communism. Anna had heard of communism, the word was in the air, but was unsure what it was; she had an idea it was an austere, worthy, artistic–philosophical sect, perhaps with vegetarian tendencies, whose members lived in huts in forest clearings – serious people, long-bearded intellectual men in peasant smocks, women in plain black dresses, who spent their time discussing how the world could be made a better place and, although they were from good and prosperous families, growing and cooking
their own food and even doing their own laundry, although how they managed to have enough time for discussion without servants to do all that work was a mystery. Perhaps the women did the laundry and the cooking and the potato harvesting, leaving the men free to organise themselves for discussion. Anna didn’t read newspapers, only novels, and poetry. Much of the time when she was reading Alexander Blok she didn’t understand what he meant to say but she loved the light, the colours and the space, formless yet intricate, which his words seemed to open a prospect to, and left a longing with her. She asked the students if communism had anything to do with Marxism. A lanky student with glasses and straggling collar-length hair, with thin wrists coming out from the cuffs of an old canvas coat several sizes too small for him, looked at her as if she had asked how many days there were in the week, before beginning, with growing pleasure, to explain. Anna interrupted and asked if he knew a man named Lutov.

‘I know the name Lutov,’ said the student. ‘He says he’s an artist. I’ve seen his pictures. He uses debased bourgeois forms. His style is very primitive. He paints archetypes of pretty women and pretty men. He speaks about himself like a revolutionary, as if he’d placed a bomb under the Tsar’s pillow, but so far as anyone knows he’s never done so much as handed out a leaflet. He’s a parasitic rentier, anyway, he lives off the blood of the workers at some factory he owns. He spends most of his time trying to seduce girls who hang around with Marxists. You’re just his type. You should be careful.’

Anna followed the communists to a meeting they’d organised at a dyeworks near the docks. The workers had downed tools after one of their number was drowned in a vat of coal tar and his brother was sacked for taking a day off for the funeral without asking. There were six in the party that strode along a cobbled lane to the plant not long after dawn. The lanky one
with the hand-me-down clothes, the chairman of the club, went ahead, carrying a bundle of leaflets, a pot of paste and a brush in a leather satchel over his shoulder. Behind him was a stout, well-fed boy in a black leather cap and a new black leather coat, his face pocked by some childhood malady. He had tightened the belt of the coat so fiercely, with an uncompromising knot that could not be untied except by sitting down and working a spike into it, that he resembled a figure of eight. He had a notebook and pencil in one hand. He was intending to write an article for the underground magazine
Young Social Democrat of
South Russia
. A small woman in a brown coat with fair hair tied in a bun and no hat, her skin pale and smooth as wax, her eyes big and watery blue, carried a rolled-up banner made of red cloth. She walked with quick, short steps and her head slightly bowed, as if she was late and expected to be punished. This emphasised the power and grace of the woman next to her, a tall, beautiful communist princess in an Astrakhan coat, wearing a grubby peasant’s cap on her short black hair like the season’s must have from Vienna. She had fawn skin, high cheekbones and finely narrowed eyes. Her grandmother was a Buryat. She carried a purse in her gloved hand, and occasionally turned to smile at Anna, who was toiling in the rear with the bipod and plates over one shoulder and the camera on a strap over the other. Alongside Anna was a man with a sweet, bristly face, a Jew in an old black bearskin hat that had gone spiky in the raw air, carrying an empty crate. He was trying to explain Marxism to her as they hurried along, and she was trying to listen and understand and at the same time work out what it would be like to be seduced by her father, and what seduction meant, and what it was about the process, when it happened in novels, that made men treat the women so badly afterwards.

There were others moving among them and alongside them,
workers, a thickening drift as they approached the clammy gathering-space in front of the locked factory gates. Standing on brown weeds and half-melted, half-frozen mud and puddles stained by brilliant chemicals were two hundred men, gathered into groups around pairs of the eloquent among them, disputing what they should do. There were footsoldiers at the gates, a group of a dozen mounted Cossacks on a rise between the workers and the river, and in the lee of a half-built brick shed closer to the town, a troop of regular cavalry, watching and smoking and conversing. Anna and the communists followed the chairman to a large man in a woollen coat and a bowler hat with a scrap of red cloth tied around his upper arm.

The two men shook hands and the workers’ elder nodded at the other students. His gaze lingered on the women for longer and his eyes narrowed and he turned to the chairman and looked back at the women and nodded again and began to talk to the main communist. He was many years older than the tall student but at some earlier time he had passed through a barrier to understanding and he looked and talked to the chairman not as a worker to a student or a self-taught man to a university-lettered one or as a man who had fought with his fists and sired children to a pale near-virgin who until recently had lived with his comfortably-off family, but as a man with a problem talking to a specialist who offered a solution. The rest of the strikers hushed their champion rhetoricians and moved towards the group. The two women unfurled the red banner and stretched it out. Men’s lips moved as the literate among them spelled the words painted in white, which read: For All Workers – Respect, Dignity, Justice. The Jew set the crate down in the mud and the chairman stepped onto it, putting him head and shoulders above the crowd. He gave his bundle of leaflets to the elder who started handing them out. Silence
fell over the strikers as they looked up at the young communist, and there was a sense of reverent expectation, such as the practitioners and celebrants of old religions imagine occurred in the miracleworking early days of a faith, when the word was about to be preached for the first time, but when rumour of its efficacy had gone before it. The faint murmur of engines came from the factory, a horse whinnied, and men suppressed their coughs.

When the chairman spoke, in an insistent voice that carried far, diving and soaring like a lark over a hayfield, it seemed to the strikers that he knew their suffering, could name them and describe them, as if he’d been watching them for months, hovering invisible at their shoulders while they tended stills and vats and furnaces. He was acquainted with their trade, and considered them admirable men. He called them respected workers, comrades, brothers. He knew how little they were paid; what long hours they worked; how those who were injured were turned out of the gates without a kopeck to bide them over, and on certain occasions, pursued beyond the gate by bailiffs for damage they were supposed to have done to machinery with their mangled limbs and crushed skulls; how the owner addressed them with familiarity, as if they were serfs or small children; how most of what he paid out in wages the owner took back in rents for the rat-and roach-ridden barracks where the workers and their families lived, and most of what was left in takings at the company shop; how the owner’s son had raped one of the workers’ daughters, and gone unpunished, with the family given a few gold roubles and sent far away, to Kharkov, and warned never to return; of the owner’s latest vile crime, after the drowning, when the victim’s brother had held the drowning man’s hand for a moment with the pulse still beating before he died, and how when he defied
the owner over the funeral the owner had seized him in a frenzy and struck him about the head and beaten him with a pole till the blood poured from his ears, and had to be held back, else there would have been two corpses, and again, no prosecutor would touch the case.

The chairman had captured them; he paused; the workers were still now as well as silent. He went on, adding gestures to his words, clenching his fists and shaking his forearms, punching his open left hand, rocking back and spreading his arms wide, pouncing like a cat, crouching down and sweeping his outstretched arm in a flat arc across the crowd’s heads, planting his hands on his hips and cocking his head to one side and then leaning forward and stabbing his finger into their faces, you, and you, and you, all of us. Anna, making space among men’s shoulders, in the smell of damp and tobacco fixed into the cloth of their coats, lowered her head to the viewfinder of the camera and in a window of light in darkness saw the chairman straighten up, lean back and look around the crowd, nodding as he smoothed the world of air with his hands. She moved the camera down until only the chairman’s shoe and trouser leg appeared in one corner of the picture and the viewfinder was filled with the faces of three of the workers. At that instant, one was shouting out, his eyes on fire between his cap and his beard, the word he shouted, True! not to be recorded on the gelatin and silver nitrate of Anna’s plate, but his rage to be witnessed forever, another worker was staring up at the chairman with a face full of silent wonder, as if one of the apostles had walked into the city out of the forest, and revealed that from this day, all rumoured, dreamed of and reported marvels would be witnessed by the common man, and more besides; while the third man, not yet ready to believe, nor ready to lead the sceptics’ party, but always ready to laugh, was looking to
one side, looking for the crack in the spell he could prise open with a joke. Anna pressed the shutter, pulled out the plate and replaced it with a fresh one.

The chairman spoke on, louder, more confident and with new wonders to ease the workers. He had astonishing knowledge of the owner’s finances and explained how much it cost to make the dye, and how much the dyes sold for, and how the owner pocketed the difference. He explained how the difference belonged to the workers, since it was they who made the dyes, not the owner – did he have the skills to make them? Were his hands ever stained with vitriol or carmine? No! They were stained with blood only, workers’ blood. The owner was a parasite, not a maker of necessary, useful or beautiful things, a man who had gained the power to steal the fruits of the workers’ labour not by skill but by exchanging his humanity, his natural good-heartedness, for the chance to sit with that tiny gang of bandits who ran the banks, the capitalists, and take a share.

Somebody called out that the banks were run by Yids. Others cried Aye. The chairman looked into the eyes of the chorus one by one and spoke on with a voice that was on their side and at the same time made their side so much more magnificent than they had imagined. Jews, Russians, Tatars, Germans, Poles; it was not the kind of blood that mattered, but whether you were one of those that drank it, or one of those that had it drunk.

‘That’s what the Yids do,’ said the dissenter. ‘They kill Christians and drink their blood. They do it in secret.’

The elder told him to shut up and not be a fool.

‘The capitalists and their newspapers tell you these fairy tales to keep your eyes from the true secret, the greatest and most terrible secret,’ said the chairman. He lowered his voice slightly,
and even the breathing and coughing in the crowd stopped and the workers shuffled closer to the centre. Far away there was a clinking of metal as the Cossacks adjusted their gear.

‘The secret is that there are many of you, and few of them. You are strong, they are weak. When the workers in a single factory rise up, as you have done, they tremble, and they don’t fall. But what if all the factories stopped, and not just the factories, but the peasants, and the soldiers? And not just in Russia, but in Germany, and France, and England, and America? This is the secret they do not want you to know: you are not alone. They speak of the people. The people is you, the people is in you and you are in the people; the people is a terrible force, stronger than armies because without the people there is no army, stronger than money because without the people money has nothing to buy, stronger than love, because without the love of the people there can be no true love. The people is you. The people is all-powerful. Znachit, you are all-powerful. Look! Look, brothers!’

The chairman pointed towards the gates of the factory. The soldiers had opened them to allow the owner’s car to drive out. Despite the cold the black car was open and the crowd could see the owner sitting in the back, in the middle, bulked in squirrel fur and his own fat and muscle, with an English hat on his head, like the one worn by the English detective Sherlock Holmes. His seat was set high and as the car rolled over the folded waste he looked like a king mounted on a beetle. Such was the spell the chairman cast that it seemed he had summoned the owner from the safety of the factory by an arcane invocation of the people whose power he knew, and some of the workers slipped back from the crate, expecting the two men to face each other in a duel whose fantastic nature they could not foresee. Many more ran towards the car, which
turned for the road into town but moved too slowly and was set to be headed off.