The People's Act of Love

A Novel

James Meek

• Publisher: Canongate U.S.
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802197818
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

" Doctor Zhivago ... Anna Karenina ... A Hero of Our Time ... The People's Act of Love will remind you of all these books... Magnificent" ( The Washington Post Book World ). Set in a time of great social upheaval, warfare, and terrorism, and against a stark, lawless Siberia at the end of the Russian Revolution, The People's Act of Love portrays the fragile coexistence of a beautiful, independent mother raising her son alone, a megalomaniac Czech captain and his restless regiment, and a mystical separatist Christian sect. When a mysterious, charismatic stranger trudges into their snowy village with a frighteningly outlandish story to tell, its balance is shaken to the core. "The narrative drive is amazing. So is the cold clarity of Meek's imagination." —Stephen King "Meeks builds multiple narratives to a bloody, satisfying, yet unsettling conclusion. People's Act of Love stands not only as a keenly observed historical thriller but as a resonant tale of how one man's moral fervor can turn to horror." — Entertainment Weekly "Meek expertly renders each man's devotion to the task of securing paradise on earth, and exposes the unsettling affinity between the devout servant of God and the cold, calculating murderer." — The New Yorker "Set during the waning days of the Russian revolution, Meek's utterly absorbing novel captivates with its depiction of human nature in all its wartime extremes." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "This ingenious, intricate novel, a meditation on grand ideas that is also a suspenseful page turner, avoids that too-easy wonder Russia often inspires in its admirers." — The New York Times Book Review

Anna Petrovna

Anna Petrovna Lutova was born in 1891 in a town in Voronezh province, on the European steppe, at a time of famine in the land around. Her mother went into labour on a rainy October afternoon and her father rode for the doctor. When the two men came back her father was pale. While the doctor went upstairs to attend to Anna’s mother, her father sat in the kitchen without talking, drinking tumblers of cognac, spilling half of it on the floor because he filled the tumbler to the brim and then his hand shook, and he wouldn’t let the maid pour for him, but looked dumbly into her eyes when she tried to prise the empty glass from his fingers. To find the doctor he had ridden out beyond the edge of town. On the way he passed a family by the roadside, three starvedlooking children with their faces drawn over the teeth and their ears stuck out, asleep on the wet grass, and their parents standing over them, the father with a black jacket over his smock and a flat cap and his hands behind his back, staring into the distance; the mother with her sodden headscarf stuck wrinkled to her forehead moved forward as the horse approached, and shouted to him. She called him ‘sir’ and asked for help. Anna’s father rode on without stopping. Why had the mother and father let their children go to sleep on the soaking ground, with the rain falling on their faces, and the children so weak and malnourished? It worried him and didn’t worry him. On the way back he told the doctor and the doctor looked at him without saying anything until, half a mile further on, he’d stood up in the saddle and turned round and said to Anna’s father: ‘The children died of hunger, probably.’ When they passed the spot the family had gone. The doctor said only the richer peasants were left in the villages, the rest had gone to the cities, or into the woods. People were eating bark and lizards. On the edge of town, they saw the family again, in a cart. The mother and father sat with their backs to the carter. The dead children lay under a piece of canvas with puddles in the folds, and the surface of the puddles puckered as the cartwheels rolled over crossruts and the rain slipped into the water. The parents didn’t look up as Anna’s father and the doctor cantered by.

Anna heard the story for the first time from her father when she was fourteen. Until then she’d believed what she heard from her younger sister, who’d heard it from the maid, that their father was so frightened at the thought of childbirth that he’d got himself drunk in panic. The father she knew only drank on holidays and picnics, or when he was with his friends, and they drank long, serious toasts to each other and to people with strange names like Obri Berdsley and Gustav Klimt, and Anna had been proud that when she was being born her father felt so deeply about it that he reached for the bottle, and crooned a song in the kitchen for his daughter while she was being born, perhaps.

Her father was an artist. He was self-taught and put it about that landscapes were a dead form. He despised photography, calling it corrupt, degenerate, debased, and refused to allow any member of his family to have their picture taken. Whenever they asked, he promised to fetch his sketchbook a little later, although once he’d finished the business that stopped him drawing – smoking, or reading a novel, or writing a letter – he forgot about the sketchbook. He painted portraits of businessmen, intellectuals and the Voronezh aristocrats, and their wives. He approached them to ask whether they would sit for him, rather than the other way round, but the truth was, sometimes they offered to pay. He waved the offers away, thrusting both palms forward forcefully as if he was penning bulls in a stockade, and said: ‘A true artist doesn’t work for money. A true artist doesn’t need money.’ It was true that Anna’s father didn’t need money, because the income from the brewery the family owned in Lipetsk was enough to pay for the upkeep of their house, the family’s clothes, their food, four servants, and the desired things which appeared in the house as the century turned – the bicycle, the gramophone, and electric light.

Anna grew up with the scent of oil paint and canvas and freshly planed wood that breathed out when the door to the studio opened, with the sitters who stalked up the creaking stairs, the landowners who came in from their country houses with frayed hems and dandruff, smelling of damp, the middling bureaucrats stiff in mail-order new uniforms, the tall beautiful women, sometimes in twos, sometimes alone, rustling with hurried grace towards the light that filled the upper floor. After weeks, Anna’s father would let her into the studio and show her the painting, and she was astonished at how her father changed his subjects, how the red veins disappeared from the cheeks of the landowners and their noses became sharper, how the bulge in their stomach migrated north to their chests, how the beautiful women became younger and their waists thinner than they really were, how shifty-eyed bureaucrats with dead faces came to look out from their portraits filled with wisdom and a yearning to do good for humankind which you never caught if you saw them on the street. When she was a child Anna thought her father’s clients must be very grateful to him for smoothing out all their wrinkles, spots, lumps, warts and squints, for taking so much hair away from women’s faces and putting so much on men’s heads, for making, in fact, all the women and all the men look almost exactly the same as each other, so that none of them would be jealous. She thought they must pay highly for their portraits, in gold maybe.

One afternoon, a few weeks before Anna’s fifteenth birthday, her father called her into his studio to show her his portrait of the local marshal of the nobility. Despite his fondness for contemporary art, in his own work Anna’s father was conservative. His subjects were dressed formally and always stood against a dark background, so dark that it was hard to tell whether it represented night, or a curtain, or simply a brisk coat of plain black paint. Perspective was provided by objects in the foreground, like a skull, or books, or a globe, lying on a table, on which the subject’s fingers rested delicately. Anna recognised the marshal by the quantity of medals and orders her father had detailed on his chest. On the table her father had painted three harvest mice which seemed to have starved to death. Their ribs stuck out, their haunches were wizened and the skin was stretched over their skulls, their mouths open in agony. He had never painted anything so real or so ugly. Anna saw that her father was excited, and nervous. The paint was almost dry but he was still wearing his smock. He hadn’t come down to lunch that day, they hadn’t seen him at breakfast, he hadn’t even been in to kiss his daughters goodnight the previous evening. There were specks of paint in his beard and rings of weariness and anxiety around his eyes.

Anna knew her father wanted her to ask about the mice, so she did. He told her about the dead children he had seen on the day she was born, and how the marshal of the nobility, who was the biggest landowner in the area, had sold all the grain he had in storage and shipped it overseas while his tenants were dying of hunger, and then had tried to stop other aristocrats and townspeople raising money for famine relief, for fear they might think abroad that there was a famine. Anna looked at the painting, and looked at her father, smiling and frowning and blinking and chewing the end of a paintbrush. Her first thought was that it was very inconsiderate of other children to die on her birthday. Her second thought was that the marshal of the nobility, whom she had seen going stiffly up the stairs to the studio a week before, who had smiled and nodded at her, a small man with grey skin and heavily oiled white whiskers, was a monster. She sat down on the table where her father mixed his paints and a tear dribbled down each cheekbone. Her father put his brush down, put his hands on her shoulders, parted the hair from her face, kissed her on the forehead and told her not to worry, he probably wouldn’t be arrested. This did not make sense to Anna, who was crying because it seemed to her a grievous way to disappear from her family’s memory, dead and nameless under a tarpaulin in the rain, and she felt responsible, and ashamed that she hadn’t been there to help.

She asked him again what the mice meant. He sat next to her and said that they were a symbol of the famine. She asked him why, instead of painting a symbol of the famine, he hadn’t painted the famine. Her father blushed and stood up and threw his hands in the air and shook his head and said she had no idea of the risk he was running, offending such a powerful man as the marshal, even with a symbol. He could be sent into exile in Siberia.

Anna wiped her eyes, sniffed and frowned. She didn’t want her father to be sent to Siberia, she told him. She said that if he was going to offend the marshal, maybe it would be better to paint pictures of real people on his estates who had died of hunger, so he might be offended all he wanted, but he wouldn’t be able to argue about it. She said that if he wanted to offend the marshal he shouldn’t have painted him as a tall, strong man with piercing eyes and the same rosy cheeks as all the other men and women he painted, he should have painted him as he was, grey-skinned, old-boned and sly. Her father became angry, grabbed her arm, threw her out of the studio and slammed the door.

A few days later Anna’s father wrapped the painting up and left for an afternoon meeting of the city assembly, where he was going to present it to the marshal, who hadn’t seen it. When Anna saw how frightened he was she became frightened herself. Her father kissed and hugged her and her sister and her mother as if he might never see them again. A fear had penetrated deep into him. Anna realised it was a shard of the outside world which had cut into her father’s heart. She’d never really seen it before, the terrible strength and lack of mercy of the accumulation of all the people you didn’t know which could reach inside you and make you afraid. She’d never seen it, and now she saw it on her father’s face. After that she only saw it on him two other times, when he heard there was a strike at the brewery, and when he heard he was a bad artist. When she saw it she understood that she’d seen it before, that other people had it all the time, men with dusty suits and frayed caps who walked slowly down the streets as if they were afraid to go home, and the absence of it in her father was a sign of how few dealings he had with that world. It made her want to capture it and pursue it. Later when she met her husband she would see in him neither the fear of the carelessness of the great world, nor her father’s deliberate ignorance of it, but a belief in another world still.

That evening her father didn’t come back, and Anna and her sister and their mother sat up until after midnight drinking tea and playing cards. Anna’s mother told the servants to go to bed and the three of them sat together on the divan, watching the German clock on the wall beside the stove. The girls’ mother ran her fingers through their hair until they told her to stop because she was rubbing their scalps too hard and they fell asleep on their mother’s shoulder after the clock chimed two. At five there was a battering on the door and the house woke up to news. Anna’s father had been arrested by the police, on the orders of the marshal of the nobility, and was being held in the town jail. Anna’s mother grabbed a shawl and hat and dragged her two sleepy daughters into the street. It was May, just getting light, and they ran and strode and tripped through the dusty blue empty streets, watched by slow drunks. Anna stood outside the jail, holding her sister’s hand, listening to her mother argue for hours with the guard at the jail gate, trying to get to see her husband, weeping and waving her handkerchief in the guard’s face and pointing to her children. The guard listened carefully and nodded and turned his moustache to the ground and said and did nothing, while a small crowd of other prisoners’ wives, poorer than Anna’s mother and angry that she was getting all the attention, gathered at the gate. In the end Anna’s mother walked away with her head bowed. She looked at Anna and asked her in a voice hoarse from pleading why she wasn’t crying, it would’ve helped. Then Anna did cry.

Her father was in prison for two days. He wasn’t sent to Siberia, fined or tried. The marshal of the nobility was hurt by the painting. The accusation was bad, the fact he had not realised he was being accused at first was worse, they were only three mice after all, and everyone else knew he was being accused, because Anna’s father had spent months working his courage up to paint the mice, and had made sure everyone knew what he was about to do. But it was 1905 and the marshal of the nobility was cautious. The council was a nest of liberals, the army used artillery on the streets of Moscow, peasants were setting fire to landlords’ properties. One day there was smoke in the city from where the Black Hundreds were laying into the Yids and smoke from beyond the edge of the city where the blind husk of Kulin-Kalensky’s manor house fumed from its windowholes. The police were playing their own game, and the papers weren’t to be trusted, the editors had lost their proper fear. When the marshal’s own daughter told him that she wasn’t welcome in some of the best houses in town because he had arrested the artist Lutov, he arranged for Anna’s father to be let go.

Anna’s father came home in triumph, tenderly embraced his family, and left after an hour for a banquet in his honour held by the leading liberals of the town, where he was praised in speeches as the lion of democracy, and in toasts his name was joined so often to the urgency of a constitution and the establishment of an elected parliament that he came to believe the three were part of a whole, and that one without the others would be meaningless. Over the weeks and months which followed this idea faded from the minds of all the banqueteers except Anna’s father, who continued to believe that of all the heroism shown in the struggle for freedom in 1905, his had been the most extraordinary. His family saw little of him, and dust gathered on his palette and brushes, while he smoked poods of tobacco and drank Turkish coffee with liberals and revolutionaries in dark restaurants and stuffy conspiratorial flats. He met the revolutionary Tsybasov, recovering from the wounds he got fighting Cossacks in Odessa, on the run from the police, likely to be hanged if caught, a scar across his jaw where a sabre had almost sliced his head in half. When Anna’s father greeted him as a right-thinking warrior who had done almost as much for the cause as he had, Tsybasov – who at the age of sixteen had addressed a revolutionary congress in Vienna, without notes, for an hour – was so astonished that he couldn’t think of a reply. Anna’s father began spending time at a house that acted as a night school for young women who wanted to learn about Marxism. He was able to talk about Marx to them with more eloquence and conviction than they could muster because he wasn’t hampered by any knowledge of the great thinker’s writings. Some of the Marxist girls were not much older than Anna.

One sultry evening the following summer Anna’s sister’s head began to hurt. She became feverish and her nose bled. She lay in bed for ten days, coughing blood, raving and twisting in damp coils of linen. The doctor found a rash on her torso and diagnosed typhus. They sent telegram after telegram to Anna’s father, who had taken a cottage in Crimea for July, intending to deepen his study of Marx, but it must have been mislaid, because by the time he returned to Voronezh, his younger daughter was hardly moving. Her hoarse, shallow breaths were the loudest sound in the quiet room where she lay. Anna met her father at the door, they embraced, and they walked upstairs hand in hand to the room. Anna’s mother was sitting in a hard chair next to her youngest, talking to her about a ball she’d been to in St Petersburg, and the silk dress she wore. Her daughter’s eyes were closed and her lips, slightly open, had a thin crust of foam. When her husband came in, Anna’s mother looked up and looked away again, without stopping what she was saying, as if a stranger, a stranger with a reason to be there but still a stranger, had come in. Anna’s father leaned down, put his hand on his daughter’s forehead and spoke her name several times. She didn’t move. Anna’s father sighed slowly and deeply, furrowed his brow, and said: ‘I must paint her.’

He fetched the easel and a blank square of canvas and began to make a charcoal sketch. Anna watched him. He kept glancing from the sketch to his daughter as if it would be to the life. The figure on the canvas was standing up, though, like all her father’s subjects. Anna saw a child version appearing of all the women her father painted, slim, with long, thin arms and legs that curved this way and that as if they were made of rope, pale lips, waves of liquid hair, a little upturned nose and enormous black eyes, while Anna’s sister was plump, with a flat nose, small brown eyes and red lips, and fine fair hair that seemed to try to fly apart even when it was lashed into pigtails.

‘Papa,’ Anna said. ‘Papa. I know what we should do. We need to take her photograph. I can run for Zakhar Dmitryevich. You don’t have time to paint.’

Her father looked up at her, dropped his materials, pinched her round the top of her arm and pulled her out of the room, closing the door. He asked her what she meant by saying that there was no time. Was she saying her sister was going to die? Wasn’t she ashamed?

‘She is going to die,’ said Anna, looking down at the floor. ‘And she’ll be buried and we won’t have a single photograph to remember what she really looked like.’

Her father went white. He slapped her across the cheek, the first time he had hit her, and told her she was an ignorant little fool. Did she think a mess of chemicals on paper, a gimmick of light and mirrors, could reach into her sister’s soul and see her true nature? Was she so cold, did she have so little feeling, that she couldn’t understand how her sister’s father, who had watched her grow from a baby, who shared his daughter’s blood, who had a gift with pen and brush so powerful it had shaken the political foundations of southern Russia, would paint a picture of her in which all her breathing, beating, singing life would be captured for ever, more vitally than a cheap gimcrack contraption for peasants and soldiers to celebrate their ugliness and cheap clothes?

Anna’s cheek stung. She was surprised that she didn’t cry. She kept her hands clasped behind her back and looked up int...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Samarin
• The Barber and the Berry Gatherer
• Mutz
• Balashov
• The Convict
• Anna Petrovna
• The Widow
• The Husband
• Matula
• The Tribunal
• The River
• The White Garden
• The Fields
• The Legion
• In
• Out
• Causes
• The Avakhi
• Songs
• The Reds
• Cannibals
• In Dark Heaven
• At Mutz’s Execution
• The Locomotive
• The Nature Of The Burden
• Declarations
• Samarin’s Request
• Tripping The Demons
• The Gift Horse
• Among The Worlds
• Acknowledgements and Notes