The People's Act of Love (39 page)

‘Like God,’ said Mutz. ‘Or fairies.’

‘He said it!’ said the doctor to Bondarenko, pointing at Mutz. ‘Not me!’

Bondarenko was not troubled. ‘A man will never find God or the Devil outside his head, no matter where he looks,’ he said. ‘But he’ll find the unfairness of other men everywhere. Am I right, Comrade Filonov?’

‘Used to pray all the time,’ said Filonov. ‘Morning to night. Kiss the icon, keep all the feasts, fast like a saint. Father and grandfather the same. And the little priest, a whoring thieving
drunk, give him half my wages for candles, and to say prayers for the family. Wife has a kid. Boy. Beauty, strong and fair, like a golden bear cub. Good church name for the boy, Mefody. Priest wants a rouble for the christening. Haven’t got it. Winter, family need clothes. Food a bit short. Priest says no rouble, no christening. Can’t have boy not christened, already owe my friends half a year’s wages, get an advance in wages off the workshop boss, pay the priest, christen the boy. Boy gets ill. Need money for the doctor. Friends skint. Boss says you owe us your wages already. Try the priest. Church full of gold, face on him like a railway clock, eats for five, keeps his own cook, electric light in the house. Taken my life blood for years. Father, I say, lend us a rouble for the doctor. Can’t, he says. Why not, I say, after all I’ve given you. It’s not my money, he says, it’s God’s. Boy dies. Folk in the workshop knock up a small steel coffin out of corroded boiler plates. Priest’s there in the churchyard at the grave. Don’t worry about the money for the funeral, he says. You can pay me later.’

The doctor opened his mouth to speak. He saw Filonov raise his hand and said nothing.

The clock hand twitched forward. Mutz wondered if he could be shot in his sleep, and whether that would be better for him. He wasn’t troubled about looking brave. He didn’t want to die in an hour’s time, and it seemed that he was going to. How much time did he need to live? He didn’t need a year. He didn’t even need a month. A week would be good. He could do a lot in a week. He could help many people and uncover many secrets, knowing he was going to die in seven days, and people would remember him when he was dead, and think well of him. And then, in that last hour, he would realise that he needed another week. Nobody was ever ready to die in an hour.

‘Chairman Bondarenko,’ he said. ‘Would it be possible to send one more telegram? Not in code. A simple question. You could address it to all Russian police departments. Perhaps after I die your investigators will be able to make use of the answer to establish the true history of the marvellous revolutionary of Yazyk, Samarin. There is, or was, a thief and a robber who goes by the klichka Mohican. Could you send a telegram, asking the Russian police, White or Red, what they know about him? Somebody may answer.’

‘We have no police,’ said Bondarenko. ‘Communists don’t steal from each other.’

‘Will you send the telegram?’

‘No.’

Mutz nodded slowly and folded his arms across his chest. He looked down at Nekovar, who had fallen back to sleep, and seemed to be smiling. The doctor had gone quiet, head resting on the table. It seemed to Mutz that at this moment it was important to remember, yet all he could think about was who would remember him. It was six months since he had received a letter from his uncle in Prague. His family was gone. Nekovar would die with him. Anna would wonder what happened to him, but not for long. For some reason he most desired to be remembered by Alyosha. There was something deeply honourable and fine about being someone else’s childhood memory. He would never be a father now, but those men who cannot be fathers can be fathers for an hour, or a minute. All of a sudden he felt, for the first time, something he had only apprehended with his intellect and prejudices before, the misery of Balashov and Anna, the husband and wife, the father and mother, living a mile apart, separated forever and by a universe by a single stroke of the knife. He felt it without condemnation of Balashov, without jealous anger towards
Anna. The worldy demons of war and guilt and religion and self-loathing which had inspired his contempt for Balashov were the same as those which had driven the gelding knife onto the cavalryman. Were he, Mutz, to live, the most important thing would be bringing together those two whom he had tried to drive apart. Not that he was going to live. He found himself staring at his corpse in the snow, amazed at its lack of movement, that this wonderful machine could be so simply stopped. He fell asleep.

A curious sound woke him, of paper fluttering close to his head. He sensed daylight before his eyes opened and his soul dived inside him. He opened his eyes. It was morning. Bondarenko was standing over him, waving a telegram in his face.

‘Wake up, beauty,’ said Bondarenko. ‘You’ve got work.’

Mutz didn’t understand, but it seemed like a new world. Nekovar stirred beside him. They stood up.

‘Comrade Trotsky gave the good word. He never sleeps,’ said Bondarenko. ‘It came ten minutes ago. You’ve got till this time tomorrow to deliver Matula to us, dead or alive. You should leave now. You’ll have to walk. Two comrades will escort you as far as our forward posts.’

Mutz could not speak. The rush of joy was poisoned by the prospect of cold treachery. It was good and bad to be alive, as it always had been, but this was a steep time of being thrown up and flung down again. He and Nekovar began to move towards the door.

‘Wait,’ said Bondarenko. He went to his desk and picked up a block of newspapers tied tightly with string. ‘These are your propaganda sheets, I think. They might help you.’

‘Yes,’ said Mutz, taking the bale in his arms. Nekovar was staring at them. The top of the front page could be seen under the wrapping.

‘Do you see what it says, brother?’ said Nekovar. ‘Good orders from Prague.’

‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘Good orders from Prague.’

‘They remembered us,’ said Nekovar.

Bondarenko put his hand in his pocket and took out another telegram, folded in four. He gave it to Mutz. Mutz looked at it, and looked at Bondarenko. Bondarenko shone with optimism.

‘I carried out your other request,’ he said. ‘To help you. Now you’re with us. Because you will come to believe that ours is the only truth.’

Mutz unfolded the telegram and read it.

+++ EX PANOV IRKUTSK + ATT MUTZ YAZYK + RE MOHICAN +
ESP DANG CRIM-POL ACTIVIST +

MOHICAN IS MEMBR REVY ORG RNS + BANK ROBS ODESSA
1911 ORENBURG 1911 ALASKA 1912

+ BOMBS PETERSBURG 1911 KIEV 1912 + MURD FAMILY GEN
BODROV 1913 + BELVD RESP 10 OTH ASSNS +

SENT DEATH 1913 + ESCAPED + LAST KNOWN ORGING
REVOLUTIONY CELLS PRUSS FRONT 1914 + DOB 10 AUG 1889
VOLGA REG +

REAL NAME +

SAMARIN, KYRILL IVANOVICH +

ENDS +++

The Locomotive

A
lyosha was a little out of breath, trying to keep up with Samarin, who had a long, quick stride, and Samarin was holding his hand, clasping it in his rough warm palm. The man’s feet crunched in the papery snow on the road and the boy’s pattered in a light fast rhythm with him, two paces for each of his. They walked up the road from the house towards the station. Samarin rose above Alyosha, a mountain of swinging bones in wool. The man didn’t look down. The light around them was clean and blue. The hollow scrape of crows sounded from the murk at the forest’s edge and a cat did honour to the sun in the carpenter’s garden, bowing and narrowing its eyes.

‘Mama will be up soon,’ said Alyosha.

‘What, you don’t want to see the locomotive?’ said Samarin. He looked down for a moment, without breaking his stride.

‘I do,’ said Alyosha.

‘We can have breakfast at any time, but they only fire the train up once a day, early in the morning.’

‘Why?’

‘To be sure it works, naturally.’

Alyosha didn’t reply to this. It was a great revelation to him that it was possible to have breakfast at any time. He knew he really had woken up this morning. The sting of cold on his cheek wasn’t to be felt dreaming. Only: he had run over Yazyk lengthways and crosswise, inch by inch, over the years, and
no-one had taken him on the road he was walking down now. He had run and walked and been carried past these houses many times, but with Samarin, it was a new road, which had started when he woke up to find Samarin standing over him, watching him sleep. When Alyosha opened his eyes, Samarin had grinned at him, put his finger to his lips, bent down and lifted him out from under the quilt, and Alyosha felt like a loaf, hot and fresh from the oven. Whispering ‘This isn’t for girls. This is what the boys do when the girls are sleeping,’ Samarin had carried him like that downstairs to the kitchen, where his clothes were waiting. When Samarin carried him downstairs the stair hadn’t creaked as it had when Mutz left their house in the mornings. Mutz was clumsier, and secretive, and never wanted to play, or talk. When Alyosha had woken up the first thing he saw was another expression on Samarin’s face, not the grin. It had been like looking in the mirror. Like catching himself in the mirror when he was concentrating on something important.

‘Kyrill Ivanovich,’ said Alyosha. ‘Can you wake somebody up just by looking at them?’

‘Why not?’ said Samarin.

‘And you didn’t wake Mama, all the same.’

‘No.’

‘Where did you sleep last night?’

‘In a safe place.’

‘With Mama?’

‘Oho. You’ll be a prosecutor, then, not a cavalryman, or an engineer.’

‘I want to be a prisoner,’ said Alyosha.

‘Why?’

‘So I can escape.’

They came to the station. The sound of the locomotive came like an old dog breathing from the far side of the yellow station
buildings. A group of three Czechs with their hands in their pockets turned from their conversation towards Samarin and Alyosha, and picked up their rifles by the muzzles from where they leaned against the wall.

‘Wait here,’ said Samarin, letting go Alyosha’s hand. Alyosha watched as Samarin went over to talk to the Czechs. The Czechs were suspicious. They followed Samarin’s hand pointing towards him, then asked Samarin more questions. Alyosha knew Samarin had spent the night in his mother’s room. He had only hoped the man would share something of the strange and frightening dance which Mama and men performed there at night. Sometimes it sounded as if it might hurt, but she was kinder and happier the next day. Perhaps Samarin would tell him about it later.

Samarin beckoned to him and he walked up. The Czechs looked down at him, two smiling, one still suspicious. They asked him if he wanted to see the locomotive, in their bad Russian. Stupid! Samarin had just told them, hadn’t he? There was so much repetition among the adults. He nodded. One of the Czechs put his hand on the small of Alyosha’s back and was making to push him forward towards the train.

‘I want to go with Uncle Kyrill,’ said Alyosha, as Samarin had told him. Samarin wanted to see the locomotive too. He was interested. He knew about steam. After a few minutes’ more consultation, the three of them went together, Samarin leading Alyosha by the hand, the Czech soldier alongside them, with his rifle slung over his shoulder.

The locomotive was a dark green brute hissing with possibility. It smelled of smoke and oil. Had men made such clever work? It seemed to have come out of a crack in the ground, ready to drag the station and all Yazyk back to the hell-mouth, houses and men and roads rocking and slithering with it. But this engine wasn’t hitched to anything, except a tender piled
above the lip with fresh quartered logs and a single bare flat car. There were two men inside the engine, Czechs again, suspicious again, but of anyone entering their domain of steam, not because it was the Russian prisoner and the widow’s boy. Samarin lifted him up to the footplate and climbed up himself. The Czech soldier stood below, a few yards away, watching.

The engineer nodded at Samarin, looked down at Alyosha without changing his expression, and went back to his dials and levers. The fireman glanced up and resumed passing logs from the tender into the furnace. His bare forearms shone red when they fell into the furnace light. The heat pressed against Alyosha’s skin.

‘Here’s the fire,’ said Samarin. ‘And here is the wood.’

Alyosha took a log from the tender and handed it to the fireman when he turned from the furnace. The fireman gestured to the open door of the furnace and Alyosha threw the log in. His hand felt scorched where it came closest to the heat.

Samarin started explaining how the locomotive worked, how important the temperature of the furnace was, the gauge that showed steam pressure, the regulator that sent the steam to drive the wheels, the brake, and the little glass tube that showed how much water there was in the machine’s great snout, and which must never be empty. As he talked, telling Alyosha about different sorts of engines in America and Africa and England, the engineer began grunting one-syllable affirmations. After a time he joined in with the explanations.

Samarin said he was surprised the crew didn’t carry weapons.

‘There’s a pistol!’ said Alyosha, before the engineer could reply, pointing to a Mauser in an open holster hanging from a hook near the engineer’s head.

‘Thank you, Alyosha,’ said Samarin. ‘I didn’t see that. Now, I wonder where the whistle is.’

‘Here,’ said the engineer. He bent down, picked Alyosha up and presented him to a length of chain, dull with dried oil, looped down from the roof of the cab.

‘Can I pull it?’ said Alyosha.

‘Pull it,’ said the engineer. Alyosha’s hand closed round the chain and he pulled. Nothing happened and he pulled harder till he felt, within the guts of the machine, a valve opening and the power trembling through the chain against his palm. The locomotive uttered its long hoarse shriek. Alyosha felt strong, as if the engine was carrying his own cry of loneliness and longing out over the taiga.