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

Brahmin blood, only to find when they lay warm and damp in her unhooked perfumed silk and linen that her blood line had gone no further than Pressburg since the Stone Age – believed that when the shaman slept, his spirit roamed the taiga. The captain wanted to know what the shaman had seen, and how he made his spirit mobile, and in which worlds he walked; was it possible that the astral plane visited by European spiritualists was a busy, gossipy, modish place, like a Viennese coffee shop, all fern fronds and delicacies and ostrich feathers, where friends became lovers and lovers glanced at neighbouring tables, and news from the living was a waiter’s murmured call to the telephone; while the shaman’s upper and lower worlds were wide plains where heroes, demons and reindeer raced and fought, places of bloodand iron? When the shaman had first come to Yazyk, looking for a drink, the captain gave him a room and a bunk and a little vodka and ordered him to pass on his shaman secrets, to help the captain establish order over the lands north of the railway, up to the northern ocean, to help a hundred Czechs partake of the mysteries of the larch forests. The shaman had asked for more drink, and then fallen asleep. When he woke up he started coughing blood and called Matula ‘avakhi’, which means ‘demon’ in the Tungus language. He called all the Czechs and Russians avakhi. He said an avakhi had blinded his third eye in the forest and his spirit could no longer see anything. Matula said he’d open his third eye, and ordered him to be chained up to stop him escaping or finding drink until he began to see again, and revealed his secrets.
    Mutz lay down on the bed. There was a shuffling of boots outside the door and he heard Broucek calling his name. Mutz ordered him in.
    In the doorway Broucek stood holding his rifle so that the muzzle bobbed a few centimetres off the floor, fidgeting with his collar with the other hand.
    ‘Humbly report, brother,’ he said. ‘Mr Balashov. Wants to talk to you.’
    ‘You don’t have to say “Humbly report” any more,’ said Mutz. He swung his legs off the bed, sat on the edge and wondered aloud what Balashov was doing out after curfew.
    ‘Mr Balashov is very nervous,’ said Broucek.
    ‘He is nervous.’
    ‘More nervous than usual.’
    ‘Sit down.’
    Broucek sat on the bed next to Mutz, holding onto his rifle muzzle with both hands. He was dark as a gypsy, although he said he wasn’t one, and insisted, without ever getting angryabout it, that no gypsy had ever come close enough to his mother to have contributed to the conception, or to have popped a changeling in the crib. He was tall and moved his height around with shambling grace. His mouth was slung in a permanent half-smile and his big inky eyes looked down on everyone with innocence and interest. He was not witty, he had no stories to tell, and he was not a good liar or flatterer, but in the course of the journey from Bohemia to Siberia he had found how attractive to women he was and, without intending to, had picked up, from them, the language that he could use to charm them. His friend Nekovar, who had devoted his life to identifying what he described as the mechanical basis of female arousal, was constantly badgering him for data. In the meantime, they were a farm hand and a draughtsman made soldiers. On the worst day of their reluctant service, in Staraya Krepost, Broucek had hung back, not wanting to take part, and never noticed how the women’s screams choked into a horror more silent and terrible when they saw the fresh, clean, unlined face of Broucek, beautiful and unworldly, among their tormenters, when the women realised that angels and devils were far closer to each other than they would ever be to them.
    ‘Here’s the new money,’ said Mutz, showing Broucek the billion-crown note. Broucek took it and studied it for a long time.
    ‘There are nine zeroes,’ he said.
    ‘Yes. It’s a billion. We’re all