The People's Act of Love (20 page)

‘Yes, your Excellency, the fish here is good,’ said Mutz. The officers were staring at their plates while Pelageya Fedotovna spooned grey food into them. Dezort cleared his throat. Kliment began to hum very quietly, looking up at Pelageya Fedotovna when she bent over him. He blinked and made a sad mouth and his eyes flicked from her eyes to her bosom.

The Land Captain spoke again, slowly, without intonation, not looking up.

‘We went to the casino, and bet on the wheel till I’d spent all the money I had with me. I put my two gold cufflinks on the red, and it came up, and the croupier reached into a box and added two cufflinks, so I had four. They were in the shape of acorns. The croupier said it was the Russian box. I said to my wife if she put her ring on a number, and the number came up, they’d give her 36 rings. But she wouldn’t play. She kept her ring, the one I bought on Nevsky Prospekt for 500 roubles, with five diamonds in a cluster round an emerald. She kept the ring. Then I lost the cufflinks.’

‘That’s very funny, your Excellency,’ said Mutz.

Soft acknowledging heh hehs came from the throats of Kliment and Dezort. The Land Captain did not smile or laugh or look up. Had it even been a funny story? Mutz and Dezort tightened in over their plates. Kliment leaned back in his chair, an elbow resting on it. He raked kasha gently with the fork in his other hand.

‘I need some mustard,’ he said.

‘We don’t have any. There hasn’t been mustard since before Lent,’ said Pelageya Fedotovna.

‘I saw some in your kitchen,’ said Lieutenant Kliment. ‘I saw a big pot marked “Mustard”, with yellow stains running down the sides.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘A huge pot of mustard. It smelled good and hot. You must have seen it. Didn’t you see it? You like that hot taste on your tongue, don’t you? I know you do. I know I do. Come on, I’ll show you.’

‘Out of your minds,’ said Pelageya Fedotovna. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves, acting like pigs?’ She licked her lips, smoothed her apron and glanced at Kliment. He got up, stretched, and strolled past her towards the door, whistling. He stopped and turned to bow to the Land Captain. He went out, with Pelageya Fedotovna behind, and the kitchen door closed.

Dezort shoved a rissole into his mouth, put down his fork, folded his hands in front of his plate and leaned forwards to Mutz, who was opposite him. He spoke quietly, switching from Russian to Czech.

‘D’you think Kliment’s going to give her one in the kitchen?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mutz. ‘Do you think he’s going to find any mustard?’

‘You must be shitting yourself thinking what Matula’s going to say when he hears about the shaman.’

‘He knows,’ said Mutz. ‘I sent a message to him last night.’

‘D’you suppose it was the convict who slipped him the booze?’

‘Perhaps. You’ll be hearing his story later, won’t you, unless you’ve got larch needles to count.’ Mutz wondered how long Samarin would take to testify, whether Matula would judge him guilty and shoot him, and how bad he, Mutz, would feel about
not trying to stop him. He was trying to work out how he could get away to see Balashov, and he was weighed down by the feeling which had been with him since he got up at dawn and left Anna Petrovna’s house that he had made a terrible mistake by not waking her up and talking to her about the letter.

‘I wonder what the meat is in these rissoles,’ he said.

‘Any meat, as long as it’s not you know what.’

Mutz rolled a morsel around in his mouth, frowned, wrinkled his nose, swallowed, put down his knife and fork and took a gulp of tea.

‘It’s cat,’ he said.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Dezort. ‘If it’d been horse. I was out all night, trying to find the missing. Lajkurg was one of them, Matula’s mount when we were in Chelyabinsk. Big evil white stallion, put a groom in hospital with his ribs staved in. That was why the train never arrived last night. The commander was so terrified of Matula that he halted short of Yazyk to check everything was still in place. He found the horses were gone, and a man with them. They broke out, or he stole them, somehow. Anyway, the train commander panicked and went back to Verkhny Luk. They sent a telegram about the horses from there.’

‘I thought the telegraph was down.’

Dezort’s eyes widened, as they did instinctively whenever he was about to lie, one of the reasons he would never be a successful officer. ‘It was fixed,’ he said. ‘Now it’s broken again. Matula was talking about the horse yesterday as if we were looking for his only son. What with that and the shaman he’s going to be like the devil.’

‘Someone’s trying to make him happy,’ said Mutz.

‘Oh,’ said Dozent. He sneaked another look at the Land Captain, who had stopped eating, and sat with his head bowed as if asleep, hands flat on the table in front of him.

Mutz leaned closer to Dezort. ‘You know why the commander never brought his train to Yazyk,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t because he was afraid of Matula. Even Matula wouldn’t dare take on a train, yet. It was because everyone down the line from here hates him.’

‘He’s a good soldier.’

‘Are you ready to die for him?’

‘I want to go home, of course. But there’s time, isn’t there?’

‘Are you ready to shoot the men when they tell you they’re not going to fight any more, they want to go home?’

‘It won’t come to that. The Legion is strong. The Whites are strong. The English and French and Americans and Japanese, they’re with us, aren’t they? They are. I know they are.’

‘The Legion isn’t an army,’ said Mutz. ‘It’s fifty thousand travellers waiting on a platform for a delayed train home.’

‘You shouldn’t be so unpatriotic, Mutz. You know I don’t hold with that talk about how you’re a filthy Yid but you make it easy for the people who talk that way. Some of the men believe you speak with a German accent.’

‘Dezort, you do understand the Whites are doomed, don’t you? They’ve lost their Tsar, the only cause they care about is revenge, and what they want most of all is to curl up by the fire, have servants bring them a hot meal, have a good long sleep, and wake up to find everything the way it was before. The trouble is that all the servants can think about is killing them.’

Dezort’s eyes shifted. He pressed the corner of his moustache into his mouth with his finger. He bit on a bristle and uprooted it.

‘That’s all a long way from here,’ he said.

‘The Reds have already broken through the Urals. Once they take Omsk, they’ll be here in days. They remember us. They

know who we are and all the things Matula made us do. They’ve already made a film about what we did at Staraya Krepost.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I don’t know how you put up with this. Don’t you have a wife in Budujovice?’

‘Yes,’ said Dezort. ‘I don’t think about her as much as I used to. I can’t really remember what she looks like, to be honest. You know it’s funny you should be so keen to leave when you’ve been seeing that widow at the crossroads.’

‘There’s nothing between us,’ said Mutz. ‘Except common courtesy.’

Dezort pursed his lips, regarded Mutz, and laughed. ‘You’re such a pompous arse,’ he said.

There was a yelp from the kitchen, a crashing of pans and swearing from Pelageya Fedotovna and Kliment. Kliment came back to the dining room, buttoning his tunic, and sat down. He was out of breath. He smoothed his hair with his hand.

‘What’s funny?’ he said, shovelling kasha into his mouth.

‘Mutz is having trouble with the widow,’ said Dezort.

‘What made him think she’d be interested in a Jew?’

‘Did you find the mustard?’ said Dezort.

‘Yes,’ said Kliment, smacking his lips. ‘It was hotter than I expected. And just when I’m about to’ – he glanced at the Land Captain, motionless with bowed head at the end of the table – ‘when I’m about to finish the matter, she screams and kicks out, and I think she’s really liking it, and I see this flash of black and orange fur and blood. A sable! Can you believe it? A sable got into the kitchen and bit her on the thigh while we were, you know. What a place. Even the small beasts are vicious. Tiny little teeth, but sharp. Like a damn wolf. I thought they ate, you know, pine cones. Mutz, you should write something about it for
Czechoslovakian Daily.
’

‘Maybe it was rabid,’ said Mutz.

Kliment blinked, opened his mouth, dropped his fork and tore at the fastenings on his tunic. The cloth bulged and strained as the crazed creature inside slithered around Kliment’s torso. Kliment jumped up, one hand down the back of his neck, the other up under the front of the tunic, twisting and arching and baring his teeth. A length of fur and urchin muscle streaked out and dived under the dresser behind Kliment.

Mutz stopped laughing, stood to attention and called out the command. Dezort snapped up and Kliment clicked his heels together, holding his tunic closed with one hand and his thumb on the seam of his breeches with the other. Red-haired Matula stood gazing at them from the doorway, the Land Captain’s wife behind his shoulder.

Matula’s dark eyes were set deep in his face. The skin around his eyes was lined and the flesh coarsely flayed by heat and cold and fevers and jaundices and scurvies gone by. He had a crooked, cross-marked scar from a badly stitched wound slanting across his chin. Only his mouth had been immune to all the frosts and bloodshed of five years’ campaigning. His lips were soft and full, red like a boy’s, as if he’d put them away for safekeeping when he went into battle or in winter, as if they’d never been stretched in a yell in a charge, as if they’d never been pressed or bitten when his tongue had told men to kill captives, as if he kept them for feasts, games and kisses. His eyes had seen it all. He was 24 years old.

‘All my Siberian princes are here,’ he said, and sat down at the head of the table, at the far end from the Land Captain. ‘All my knights of the taiga. What territories should I give you? I’ve decided that you should all marry Russian women, and raise dynasties. Except Lieutenant Mutz. He should marry a Jewish woman, and raise money.’

Kliment and Dezort laughed. Elizaveta Timurovna smiled and lost her smile and smiled again. She fidgeted with her hair and sucked her lip and looked at Matula. She had on a white summer dress she’d once worn to picnics. It still had the creases and the odour of being kept in a trunk for years. There was blood in her cheeks and the newly polished-up gleam of sexual desire in her look. She’d tied a white satin ribbon round her neck. She sat next to Matula and didn’t turn to her husband.

‘There’s a rat under the dresser,’ said Matula.

‘It’s a sable, sir,’ said Dezort. ‘Mutz thinks it might be mad. It bit Pelageya Fedotovna on the leg.’

‘I must be mad, then,’ said Matula. ‘I bit a woman this morning. I’d bite her again.’ He grinned at Elizaveta Timurovna and brushed his fingers over her thigh under the table. She squirmed away and giggled. Pelageya Fedotovna came into the room, limping, and served Matula. Everyone watched her.

‘Can I have some more tea?’ said Kliment.

Pelageya Fedotovna gave him a look like murder and limped over to fetch his cup.

‘Does it hurt?’ said Kliment, looking up at her with his mouth twitching.

She pressed her lips together, put the cup down, put her hands on her hips, then spat at him and hobbled from the room, crying. A small gob sank into Kliment’s tunic. Dezort laughed and Kliment started to get up. Matula pushed him back in his seat.

‘Sit down,’ said Matula. ‘You deserved it. Didn’t he, Mutz?’

‘Why are you asking me, sir?’

‘You’re always passing judgement on people. That’s what you are, isn’t it, a judge? I mean we know you were only an engraver in Prague but with us you’re a judge. You’re here to tell us when we do right and wrong. It’s funny, I don’t know
who appointed you, it wasn’t me, but you’ve been very busy judging us, making lists of all our sins and crimes.’

‘I’ve made no lists, sir.’

‘Oh, I know, it’s all in your head. And you don’t pass any judgements, either, do you, it’s in the way you look at us. It’s the strangest thing, when I’m trying to keep us alive, and your comrades in arms are trying to keep themselves happy, we’re always turning round and seeing you looking at us with that expression of disgust. You’re thinking about what punishment, aren’t you, like a judge. Do you know what I mean, Lieutenant Kliment?’

‘Yes. Or like a policeman. As if he’s not on our side at all. As if he’s on the side of some law he’s carrying with him from another country.’

‘You passed a judgement on Lieutenant Kliment there, Mutz,’ said Matula. ‘I saw you. Your judgement was: guilty of taking advantage of a serving girl. You never heard his defence, either.’

Matula had his fists resting on the edge of the table. He lifted them, opened them up, and shook them for emphasis as he smiled with his boy’s mouth and watched Mutz with his old eyes.

‘You’ve been judging us for a few years now, Lieutenant Mutz,’ he said. ‘When are you going to pass sentence? Isn’t it time?’

‘We’re in Siberia,’ said Mutz. ‘I think that’s sentence enough, sir.’

‘Ah! You don’t deny you’re judging us. Mmm. But what do we think, gentlemen, madam, shouldn’t a judge be more virtuous than the people he’s judging?’

‘The captain’s right,’ said Kliment, rocking back on his chair. The sable scrabbled under the dresser, testing the walnut with its claws.

‘Is it right you should be judging comrades who’re courting Russian women, paying them compliments, bringing them presents, and touching their innermost, tenderest, softest’ – he looked at Elizaveta Timurovna – ‘most moist and delectable … hearts … ?’

‘Oh! My heart!’ breathed Elizaveta Timurovna.

‘… when you’re trying to seduce a widow, what’s her name, Lutova, yourself?’

‘That’s what I said!’ shouted Dezort.

‘I’m not seducing anyone,’ said Mutz.

‘You’re trying your double-damnedest Hebraic-cabalistic best,’ said Matula. ‘You’re ready to send poor old Kliment to the gallows for the maid, and there you are singing Yid love songs in your widow’s ear, telling her you love her, and all the time planning how to escape to Vladivostok.’

‘That’s what I told him!’ shouted Dezort.