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

saw that he was not just tired. He had been crushed in five years among convicts, and in the wilderness. The life of his old bright, quick mind had flickered up, deceiving Mutz when he first saw him, but now the emptiness was slipping back; he had seen the hollowing out of convicts before, when the emptiness is not an absence of vitality, but vitality is a occasional desperate trick to hide the emptiness.
    ‘How did you cut your hand?’
    ‘It’s full of sharp edges out there. A jagged branch.’
    ‘Do you know anything about a Tungus shaman with a deformed forehead?’ said Mutz.
    Samarin shrugged. ‘I met one like that in the forest a few months ago. The circumstances were difficult.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘Another convict was trying to butcher me.’
    ‘Yes. The attempt at cannibalism. And not since then? Did you bring any alcohol into town this evening?’
    Samarin lifted up his head and laughed. Mutz half-stood in surprise. It was as if he had been standing in the hallway of a cold, dark house, having a shouted conversation with a half-asleep, muttering voice upstairs, when suddenly the owner had thrown open the door, put on the lights and lit the stove.It was not that he had misjudged Samarin but that he had not been talking to him until now.
    ‘Lieutenant Mutz,’ said Samarin, getting up and looking down at his interrogator with one hand in his pocket and the other stroking his bearded chin. ‘Before you ask, they told me your name, the comrades. Don’t you think this is all rather topsyturvy? Here I am, a student in my own country, a convict only by definition of a tyranny which has now been overthrown, along with the laws under which I was arrested. Yet I am being incarcerated by you. Who are you? A Jewish officer, commissioned by the army of an empire which no longer exists, now serving a country which you’ve never visited, because it’s only a year old, and it’s three thousand miles away. It seems to me that I should be locking you up, and asking you what you are doing here.’
    Mutz looked up at Samarin, who stood over him with arms folded and eyebrows raised. He was tall, and looked cleaner, somehow. Clapping came from the corridor outside and Bublik cried ‘Bravo!’ Mutz felt himself falling into a well of sadness. He studied his boots, pursed his lips, and said: ‘Well. I intend to go to Prague when I can, of course. What’s the significance of this scroll?’
    He took the scrap of bark out of his pocket. Samarin snatched it away from him and held it into the flame of the candle. It burned so fast he dropped it and trod it out.
    ‘That was nothing,’ he said quickly. ‘In the White Garden the convicts would throw these out of the punishment block. I don’t need to be reminded of that. I didn’t know I had it in my pocket.’
    ‘For eight months?’
    ‘K…who was K? Kabanchik, I believe it was. A good thief, if it comes to getting in and out through a small, high window.’
    ‘What about the photograph?’
    ‘As I explained to the young Czechs out there, I came into the town from the north, along a stream, and after I passed the first farm, when the path becomes a road, I found the wallet lying on the ground.’
    ‘In the dark.’
    ‘I have good eyesight.’
    ‘Do you know the woman in the photograph?’
    ‘Should I?’
    ‘Well, do you know her?’
    ‘Do you?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Mutz. ‘I do.’ He rubbed his forehead with the fingers of his right hand. ‘I’m not a policeman. I’m not a detective.’
    ‘It’s fine. Don’t worry,’ said Samarin. ‘And the truth is that I didn’t have light to see the picture by, before your men took it from me. May I see it now?’
    Mutz took the photograph out and gave it to Samarin, who sat down on the cot and held it in the candlelight by the thumb and first finger of each hand, pincering the white border with his black, broken nails to avoid smudging the print. It was the same Anna Petrovna as Mutz’s engraving on the Czechs’