The People's Act of Love by James Meek Read Free Book Online

been used that the ink had dried and left no mark. Mutz set down a fresh blank, inked the plate and printed a new copy. The image he had devised for the one-crown note was a woman representing Liberty. The word ‘Liberty’ was written underneath the woman, who might otherwise have been mistaken for someone famous, or at least someone in particular rather than a symbol, because he hadn’t shown her full length, storming the barricades, but only her head and shoulders. Her head was bare, with a mass of long kinked hair bound at the back. She had a pointed nose, and her upper lip was fuller than the lower, finely outlined and a fraction upturned. She was gazing out of the note at the bearer with round dark eyes which she had used for so long to devour the world, and laugh in delight at the comedy of it, that even when there was nothing left to laugh at she hadn’t been able to make them look away.
    Mutz looked at Liberty for a time, his face burning. Heworked his neck, cold fingertips on the warm muscles, put the one-crown note in his shirt pocket and the one billion-crown note between his lips, got up and began clearing the clutter from his bed. He laid mammoth teeth, white lumps the size of bricks, on the floor, stacked specimen boxes containing mounted Siberian moths on a shelf, put a sheaf of Bolshevik propaganda cartoons in chronological order and slotted the draft of an account of the geology of the upper Yenisey into the library of notes in a trunk by the door. He lay on the bed and held the billion-crown note up to the light. No watermark. In Prague now they’d be using new Czechoslovakian money, with watermarks. With fewer zeroes. One day, let it be soon, a hundred men in ragged uniforms would disembark from a train in Prague and march towards the pub, and for the men in new suits and women in new dresses stopping in the street to stare the war would have ended a long time ago, and they would be embarrassed by these armed soldiers marching among their fashions, insisting like madmen that they’d been fighting for Czechoslovakia in Siberia. And the men of Captain Matula’s company of the Czech Legion would walk into the pub, quiet, licking their lips, and try to pay for a drink with the Imperial money they’d carried in their pockets for five years, across Eurasia and America and the Atlantic, and the landlord would shake his head, and show them the new money, the Czechoslovakian money, didn’t they have any of that? And one of them would dig in his pocket again and bring out a wrinkled billion-crown note from the first Slav–Socialist–Siberian Bank of Yazyk, and whack it on the bartop, and demand one hundred beers. And the landlord would serve them, perhaps out of pity, perhaps out of fear, perhaps because for a moment he might see his customers lined up in scruffy parade in a town on the steppe on the other side of the world, waiting to go home.
    Mutz heard voices from the yard below his window, whereCaptain Matula kept the shaman chained to a kennel. It was almost midnight. Mutz got up and opened the window. He was on the upper storey of the Czech shtab, which had been Yazyk’s administrative building. The only other light, apart from his own, was the sentry’s lantern, which hung on a hook in the archway leading to the yard. He saw the silhouette of Sergeant Nekovar in the archway. Nekovar turned round and moved out of sight.
    Mutz called down to the shaman. He couldn’t see him but heard a body slithering in the mud and a chain clink.
    The shaman coughed through deep curtains of phlegm and said: ‘Everyone will have a horse.’
    ‘Have you been drinking?’ said Mutz.
    There was silence, and the cough, and in it the answer: ‘No.’
    ‘Sleep then,’ said Mutz, and closed the window. Captain Matula was jealous of the shaman’s dreams. The captain – who had attended seances in Prague before the war and seduced a black-eyed medium with hair the colour of Carpathian rock oil, believing her to be of