Read The People's Act of Love for Free Online

a storm and the cloth of the coat’d get caught in the barbs, and when they found the body and took it down they wouldn’t be able to pick all the threads off the wire, and the wire’d fall and rust but the threads’d be there, my outline, a sign that some man ran against the wire, some time, and it’d be some tiny atom of the future better world, the memory of a man running through the darkness to his death, not lying down to let the snow cover him.’
    ‘God was surely watching over you to bring you here,’ said Balashov.
    ‘God didn’t bring me here,’ said Samarin. ‘A man brought me here. The man who is following me now. The Mohican. Have you heard his name?’
    ‘No. I mean, I know the novel, of course.’
    ‘This Mohican is no older than you or me, and he has the respect of all the great thieves, from Odessa to Sakhalin. They’re afraid of him. The Mohican climbs over bodies to get where he wants to go just as lightly as you’re stepping on those sleepers there. Even in prison, he was the freest man I ever met. The ties that form at once between two people, whether they’re brothers or complete strangers like us, don’t exist for him. He doesn’t deal in honour, or duty, or obligation, or care.’
    ‘And yet he took you with him when he escaped.’
    ‘Yes. He took me for food. We ran in January, when there is nothing to eat in the taiga, let alone the tundra, and the deer herders are too far south. He took me with him intending to slaughter, butcher and eat me, like a pig.’
    ‘God have mercy on us.’
    ‘What could be better than food that walks alongside you, carries your goods, and keeps you company until the day you eat it?’
    ‘Christ in Heaven, Kyrill Ivanovich, did he try?’
    ‘He tried. I ran. I’m a day ahead of him, I reckon.’
    ‘But if he made it this far, why would he need to…there’s not much food in Yazyk, but…’
    Samarin laughed and punched Balashov on the shoulder. ‘Gleb Alexeyevich, you should be in the music hall! You’re funny! Is that a train?’
    The tracks were singing. A grey stroke of light flickered across the sky to the east, from the direction the men were heading. Balashov and Samarin stepped off the tracks, which ran along an embankment. The tracks sang louder and hissed and trembled. The train had a searchlight mounted on a pintle on a flat car. It came round the curve in the track, heading west, with two white lamps shining from the locomotive, trailing red sparks, and the searchlight sweeping the trees, blinding the owls and driving the panic-stricken martens miles away from the line on either side. As it came past Samarin began to run. Balashov shouted at him to stop. There was a flash of light and a report. Samarin jumped, grabbed at a chain hanging from one of the wagons, lifted his feet off the ground, swung for a fraction of a second, then fell and slid down the embankment, rolling into a coil of limbs in bracken at the foot. Balashov came over and pulled him to his feet.
    ‘Your hand is cut,’ said Balashov.
    ‘Let me put some of that spirit on,’ said Samarin. Balashov hesitated. ‘I had a swig earlier.’
    ‘I know,’ said Balashov. ‘I smelled it on your breath.’ He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, soaked it in spirit and cleaned the cut. He asked Samarin if he had heard the gunshot. ‘I think the bullet broke a branch over there,’ he said, nodding at the trees. ‘You were lucky. As I said, you can’t understand who’s on which side now. The old war didn’t end cleanly. There were remnants everywhere in Russia, leftovers, like the Czechs. Russia took them prisoner in the old war, when they didn’t have a country of their own. Now they do, and they’re trying to get back to it, but they’ve got caught up in this new war. They’re White, officially. But half of them are Red. There are thousands of them all over Siberia. They’ve taken over the whole of the Trans-Siberian railway, can you imagine? None of it makes