The People's Act of Love Read Online Free PDF

on. ‘Once I was lost in the forest for a week,’ said Balashov. ‘It was this time of year. At night I was terrified of the wild beasts but I didn’t dare light a fire in case outlaws saw it. I lay in a blanket in the dark after walking all day, trying not to fall asleep till I thought my eyes were aboutto bleed from the pain of it. Sometimes I heard wolves. The silence was worse. You would long to hear frogs, or an owl, even though they sound like souls begging to be allowed to move on, and instead an hour would pass in silence and then there was a rustling nearby and you would think of the teeth of the beast snatching at your leg and jerking you out of the stillness and you screaming and pleading but knowing the animal couldn’t understand you and had no good or evil in it to reason with. Even in the midst of the fear and the pain of staying awake I began to see that the horror in the beast when it came would be all within me. I would feel cruelty and the pain of a death alone in the wilderness but it wouldn’t be of the wolf’s making, the wolf is only part of God’s workings, and God is good; all the horror of it I was carrying with me, as fear, and the wolf would take that from me and there would be nothing between me and God any longer.’
    ‘What if it wasn’t a wild beast? What if it was another man?’ said Samarin quietly.
    ‘That couldn’t have been so terrible. Up to the very moment of death you’d hope they would save you from the horror in themselves, that they’d change their minds. You’d believe they were mistaken. But the beasts didn’t come that time, nobody came in the night. In the end I fell asleep, and instead of nightmares, the dreams I had were beautiful, of paradise and the memory of an eternity of joy. When I woke up, when I realised I’d woken up, I was miserable, as if the one I loved the most had died. I walked through the day and the memory of the dream would fade until by night I was terrified again. One evening I saw the lights of a village and I knew I was safe. But a new terror came up in me, stronger than the old one. I was afraid that all the nightmares I hadn’t dreamed in my time in the wilderness would come to me at once in the first night of sanctuary.’
    Samarin stopped and came close to Balashov. His breath touched Balashov’s face. ‘Did they?’ he whispered. ‘Did that happen?’
    ‘No!’ said Balashov, trying to pull his face back from Samarin’s hot breath. ‘They never came.’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Samarin. ‘Of course not. Good. On.’
    The two men walked out of the tunnel into the smell of the larches on either side of a cutting. A clouded night had come and there was nothing to be seen but a sheen where the rails were and the faint black serration of the trees against the sky. A flock of geese flew overhead, crying like a shutterhinge in the wind. Samarin’s broken boots made a slithering, flapping sound on the track bedding.
    ‘What year is it?’ said Samarin.
    ‘1919.’
    ‘There’s still a war, I suppose.’
    ‘It’s a different kind of war. One where you can’t understand who is on which side. In the old war, the one against the Germans and the Austrians, it was ours against theirs. Now it’s more ours against ours. There are Whites and there are Reds. The Whites are for the Tsar – he’s dead now, the Reds killed him – and the Reds are for everybody being equal.’
    ‘What are you for, Gleb Alexeyevich?’
    Balashov was silent for a long time. Eventually he said, in a stretched voice: ‘Everybody is equal before God.’
    ‘But how do you live that?’
    ‘What kind of a convict are you?’
    Samarin, who was in front, stopped and turned round. The moon had risen behind the clouds and a bare ration of light daubed the men’s faces in infant shadows. Samarin’s face had lost its animation and settled into an empty stillness.
    ‘I thought in Siberia people referred to us as “unfortunates,”’ he said.
    Balashov took a