The People's Act of Love by James Meek Page B

unfortunate.’
    ‘What are you doing out after curfew? I don’t mind, you understand, but you might have been shot.’
    ‘I was visiting friends on the edge of town. I wanted to see you. I’m afraid Anna Petrovna is in danger. I wanted to ask if you would send some men to guard her house tonight.’ He nodded at the shaman. ‘Poor man. Something new and unpleasant has entered our town.’
    ‘What makes you think Anna Petrovna is in danger?’
    ‘God told me. One of the Tungus will come to fetch the shaman’s body. You should put him in a cold cellar meantime. But please, I implore you, send a soldier to watch Anna Petrovna’s house.’
    ‘I’ll go,’ said Mutz. ‘Come with me.’
    ‘No!’ said Balashov loudly. When he said it, for an instant, another man entered his face and looked out of it, as different from the familiar Balashov as a wound is from a scar. ‘No,’ he said more quietly, the other man spinning down to nothing. A smile opened and closed and he put his hands on the lieutenant’s sleeve. He said: ‘Anna Petrovna won’t allow me – has asked me not to approach the house on account of a longstanding disagreement between us. She’s a good woman, she’s respectable and honest, with a young son, she’s a widow, widowed in the war. But you know her, don’t you?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Mutz.
    ‘You know what a good woman she is.’
    ‘Yes. She is.’ Mutz watched Balashov’s smile coming and going, then a fit of blinking and a frown as a memory came forward.
    ‘You put her face on your money,’ said Balashov.
    ‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘It was a mistake. I should have asked her first. She was upset. I saw her at the gate, watching us when we first came into town. I remembered her face. Faces stay with me. Well, I’ll go there, anyway. Go home now.’
    Balashov thanked him and left. Mutz and Broucek enclosed the shaman in two sacks and carried him down to a dank, chilly basement storeroom, where they laid him on a bed of straw and smashed crates, in a greater nest of junk, broken furniture and rusted metal parts. Mutz was used to seeing the dead look uninhabited, husks of life, but the shaman looked like something else. Preoccupied, perhaps. As if he truly believed in what he said he could do, walk in the spirit world, and had died focusing on the last big jump there. All he had ever done was to turn his dreams into words. What else was there? It was when people tried to turn their dream words to deeds that things became difficult. Something new and unpleasant. Mutz had never seen Balashov lie so perilously before. ‘I’m going to join Nekovar for a while,’ said Mutz. ‘You go to Anna Petrovna’s. I’ll see you there later.’
    Broucek smiled and nodded.
    ‘Do you like her?’ asked Mutz, feeling a sudden churning in his guts. Broucek grinned and shrugged. ‘She’s nice,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t talk to her,’ said Mutz. He wondered if Broucek could see his face changing colour by the light of the lamp. ‘I’m ordering you, understand? See she’s all right, wait for me outside her door, and leave her alone.’
    Broucek looked hurt and embarrassed. He nodded again and trotted up the stairs.

BALASHOV
    M utz stood on the threshold of the shtab. There was no light in any window and the sound of the rain on the roof had risen to a roar. He put on his cap and an English poncho and went outside. The square was hidden in the rain and the dark; the derelict church, Balashov’s store, the abandoned offices of the pelt broker and the dairy cooperative, the houses, the statue of Alexander III, the kiosks where the Russians sold smoked fish, sunflower seeds, tracts and journals and month-old newspapers, and, lately, personal effects, watches and jewellery and ornaments. Mutz stepped forward, off the little patch of cobbles, into the mud, a layer of liquid, a hard layer below, and between them a layer as lubricious as grease. The ground gave off a thick smell of liberated dust and he felt the