The People's Act of Love (13 page)

At half past nine the villages passing outside the window, north of Kharkov, turned blue and dark, the old men left their porches, and only lovers, thieves and vagrants stirred the dust of the road. Anna saw a fox crossing a field stop and raise its head, and a moonstruck gelding cantering in circles in a paddock by a river. Anna’s husband went to wash and she pulled down the blind, undressed, put on her nightgown, and let down her hair. When her husband came back he asked if she would like some champagne. She shook her head. Her husband locked the door and they sat down facing each other across the narrow aisle separating the two beds.

‘So,’ said Anna’s husband.

‘So,’ said Anna. They laughed. Anna was trembling. She was afraid of such power. When it seemed there was no limit to happiness, her lover’s face, his limbs, his breathing, his eyes, the gentlest movement of his mouth, or a blink, told her with a stronger dose of joy that the universe was theirs to play with, that all the world was crouched in listening and waiting, that time had stopped its jagged progress and smoothed down a place for them to love on as they chose, that there would be no more history until Anna and her lover said it should begin again.

Anna’s husband put out his hand to touch Anna’s, and she pulled her hand away.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Anna’s husband.

‘Nothing,’ said Anna, out of breath, her heart kicking at her
ribs, trying to crash its way out. ‘I was afraid that if we touched each other, the world would die.’

Anna’s husband got up and sat beside her, putting his arms around her, and the world did not die.

‘Do you believe me?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Do you believe me when I say I love you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I do. If only you could see inside my heart, you’d know how true it is.’

‘I can. I do. I believe.’

‘We touched before.’

‘Yes.’

‘We kissed. We danced. Nobody died.’

Anna smiled and kissed him on the lips and the eyes. ‘I didn’t mean what you think I meant,’ she said. ‘It was better than you think.’

Her husband blushed. ‘Before, I only touched you where I could,’ he said.

‘And no one else? Nowhere else? Really?’

‘No one.’

‘All the girls say, “Ah, hussars, hussars!” I found the only one who’s a monk.’

Anna’s husband smiled and was anxious. ‘Do you know what to do?’ he said.

Anna shook her head and laughed. ‘Do you?’

‘It seems to me I do,’ said her husband, as if surprised. ‘But I can’t remember anyone sitting down and telling me.’

They were both laughing. ‘Shall I turn out the light?’ said Anna’s husband.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t.’ Anna frowned. ‘I’ve seen horses,’ she said.

‘No,’ said her husband. ‘One thing I’m sure of is that it’s not like horses.’

‘But you’re a cavalryman.’

‘No!’ said her husband, over her laughter.

‘Are men like horses in other ways?’ said Anna.

‘I like sugar.’

‘Other ways.’

‘Do you want me to be?’

‘Show me.’

‘You won’t be disappointed if it’s not like a horse?’

‘Show me.’

‘Will you close your eyes?’

Anna shook her head. She let him turn his back on her while he took off his clothes and folded them in a trim pile. He turned round, naked except for a gold crucifix on a chain around his neck, and sat next to her, putting an arm round her shoulders and a hand on her knee. The first man’s penis she had seen budded at the end like a tightly coiled rose no more than an hour away from blooming. She knew where it would go, where it would fit, and wondered if it would bloom inside her, if she would feel the petals unfurl against her tender inner flesh. She asked him and he smiled and said no, there’d be no petals.

‘Pity,’ she said.

‘Seed,’ said her husband.

‘Yes? Ah yes, of course.’ Anna couldn’t take her eyes off it, not that it was beautiful, not that it was ugly, but it was curious, and alive, and part of the only man in the world, and made of that element which had made her afraid to touch him for a reason she couldn’t explain to him, which was that she carried the element, too, and theirs combined might be too strong for the rest of the world. The moment of fear had passed
but she still knew that when people talked about good and evil, darkness and light, they were lying, because they kept the third extreme a secret, the extreme for which love was too weak and silly a word.

‘Can you wait a while?’ Anna asked, laying her cheek on his thigh.

‘If you like,’ he said.

Anna saw how it beat a little, how strong the blood pulsed in it, and stroked the stalk with the tips of her fingers.

‘Does it always stand like that?’ she said.

‘No,’ said her husband. ‘Only for you.’

‘Only for me!’ she laughed, and kissed the bud. ‘Can you make it lie down?’

‘Not now.’

‘Oh. But it’s just for me? It’s mine?’

‘Yes. It’s yours.’

‘That’s very generous,’ she whispered, absently stroking his gift with her fingers and looking into his eyes. ‘I don’t know what I can give you in return.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’ He crossed himself, kissed his crucifix, murmured a prayer, and opened her nightdress.

‘I want everything you have,’ he said. ‘I want you all, all that you were, all that you are, and all that you will be.’

‘Take it,’ said Anna. ‘I’ll take what’s mine.’ And she took.

Not long after their honeymoon, the regiment was posted to Kiev. Anna gave birth to a son, Alexei, Alyosha, Lyosha, Lyosh. It seemed safe for her to buy a camera, and she began to make portraits, sometimes for a little money, sometimes for nothing, because a face interested her. She never spent less than a day with those she photographed, sometimes weeks. She persuaded her husband to let her photograph him nude, and made self-portraits. She and her husband fought, over his
insistence on church attendance and observing the fasts and holy days, and her absences with her camera in a village or a stranger’s house, but they were among the happiest couples. Neither cared what other officers or other artists thought of them, and Anna never lost her curiosity, or her husband his desire and sureness, when they exchanged gifts.

When the Austrians attacked Serbia, and the Tsar mobilised the army, Anna told her husband that she would not let him go to war. She warned him that she would hire men to bind him, lock him in a trunk, and ship him to a neutral country. He laughed, and then stopped laughing, and then began to believe that she meant it. The war would be too loud, she said. One night he kissed Alyosha many times, while Anna wasn’t looking, and told him to be a good man, and take care of his mother when his father wasn’t home, and to fear God. He couldn’t lie, so he told Anna he was afraid his comrades would think he was a coward if he asked for a posting in the rear, and Anna believed his anxiety that night was over that. He left the house when she was still asleep, and by the time she reached the station, the regiment’s train had left. Three weeks later, a telegram came to say that her husband was missing in action.

Anna put her camera away, dressed in black, and sat in a room with the shutters closed, not speaking or crying until they brought Alyosha to her, when she began to weep for the world, losing the only man in it. Her mind was empty. She wept for days and then stopped, wondering why she was still alive when there was nothing inside her any more. Her husband had been right: there was a hell, and she and, for some reason, her son, had slipped into it, and all she could do was to try to protect him while he was there. She began a kind of life without colour, except Alyosha, and few words, except for Alyosha.

Four months after the telegram, a thick envelope arrived for Anna, with many pages folded inside. She sat in a locked room reading it alone, until there was a short scream and after a few minutes she walked into the kitchen, where the cook was talking to a soldier. Anna was smiling. She asked for a large, sharp knife, and the cook gave her one. The soldier managed to take it from her before she did herself serious injury, but there was blood. The cook went into hysterics; Anna was unconscious on the floor, bleeding. The soldier ran for a doctor. Being drunk, he took a long time, and by the time he came back with the doctor, Anna and Alyosha had disappeared, together with some of their things. There were fears for the lives of mother and son. Anna was thought to have gone insane, although there was ridicule for the soldier’s claim that rather than trying to cut her wrists, or plunge the knife into her heart, she had begun to cut off one of her breasts. The alarm ended one day when it became known that both Anna and Alyosha were alive and well. In a letter to the family lawyer, Anna apologised for the distress she had caused, and gave assurances that her wound had been treated and was not serious. She gave instructions regarding property and goods and seemed to be in full possession of her wits. She did not explain why she had chosen to settle with her son several thousand miles away to the east, in Siberia, near the river Yenisey, in a small town called Yazyk.

The Widow

M
utz walked east off the square towards the little bridge that led to Anna Petrovna’s and, further on, to the rail depot. There were lights on in some of the houses he passed, blotches of buttermilk brightness behind double glass and window boxes. He wondered where the Russians got the kerosene from. Not from the Legion. They shared, no doubt. They were good at sharing, these ones. It wasn’t so much even that they shared their goods, their kerosene and their axeheads and their potatoes, but that they shared their time, as well. The square was a swamp, but here on one of Yazyk’s four streets, he was walking on a pavement of logs solidly bedded and up off the mud level. That wasn’t the work of one man, or of convicts. And what were they reading now, by the light of their lamps, behind those thick black log walls and tiny white-framed windows? The Bible, of course. Perhaps they were pickling, perhaps embalming, towers of cucumbers in brine and dill, or perhaps they were patching elbows and knees by that light, but no, most likely they were too excited after the service not to read the Word, to reach for it, open it up and gorge on it. Mutz, who was not religious, had once tried to read the whole book from beginning to end, Apocrypha and all. He stalled; he skimmed, he skipped. The Old Testament had some good stories but seemed like a forgery contrived to make Jews look absurd, ranting, cranky warriors
with a vaudeville God on squeaky wheels, while the New kept slipping back from humility and simplicity into some machination involving cash, or ecclesiastical administration, or miracles in exchange for faith. He had apprehended all the same that its contradictions and ambiguities and vastness might attract those who were dissatisfied with the world as it was, in particular, its most tiring feature, that it kept changing. Here was a whole world that never changed, and could be compared against the real one. For such, the Bible was bottomless; that which you did not understand, demanded to be read and reread for that very reason; that which you understood, you kept coming back to, for there was an unchanging truth, when out there in the darkness all was chaos. Mutz wondered if the shaman had ever read the Bible, then remembered he was illiterate.

He crossed the bridge and saw Anna Petrovna’s house. He stopped. There was nothing to force him to go in. There was much to encourage him to turn back and go to bed. It was late, ten o’clock perhaps, although who knew? The time signal from Irkutsk only came as often as the telegraph line was up. Tomorrow he would have to account to Matula for the death of the shaman, and the captain would still be looking for the missing horses. Anna Petrovna didn’t care if he came or not. Did she? The doubt hurt and intimidated him. Less painful than approaching her house before she’d yielded to him, but then it had been a pain of being alive, and this was not that. He’d shared her bed seven times, four times until first light, three creeping away while it was still dark, feeling the walls and the furniture with his fingertips, trying not to wake Alyosha, hearing Anna smothering laughter when he made a floorboard creak, and then making the board creak on purpose just to hear her laugh. After the seventh time she told him she wouldn’t let him stay any more. No, couldn’t, that was what she said, and never explained.

A dog barked. Mutz began to count to ten. If the dog barked again before he finished, he’d go forward. He reached ten. The dog didn’t bark. He walked forward, as he’d known he would. He was prisoner enough already without being a prisoner of dogs.

He walked to the back of the house, went through the gate and across the yard and entered by the unlocked back door, into the warm, bright kitchen. Broucek sat at the head of the small table, hands clasped around a cup of tea, his rifle leaning in the corner like a broom. Anna was sitting facing the door in a dark blue dress. She smiled and greeted Mutz and didn’t unfold her arms. Broucek put the cup down and got to his feet. Mutz closed the door behind him. He shouldn’t have come.

Anna got up, came round the table to him and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Broucek was telling me about the visitor,’ she said.

Mutz looked at Broucek. ‘Since when did you speak Russian so well?’ he asked.

Broucek grinned and shrugged, picked up his rifle and slung it over his shoulder.

‘Don’t fuss,’ said Anna to Mutz. ‘People find ways to talk. Sit down.’

Mutz sat down in Broucek’s place. The wooden chair was warm. Broucek drained his cup, thanked Anna Petrovna, touched his cap to Mutz, who nodded, and left.

‘I wouldn’t call him a visitor,’ said Mutz. Anna put a cup in front of him and he raised it to his mouth with both hands. He realised he was mimicking Broucek and lowered it without drinking.

‘Well, tell me,’ said Anna, sitting back down and leaning forward. Mutz tried to concentrate. How strange that the more
time you spent thinking about a face, the more you were shocked to see it.

‘His name is Samarin. Kyrill Ivanovich.’

‘From?’

‘Somewhere west of the Urals, originally. Black earth country. Near Penza, I think.’