The People's Act of Love by James Meek Page A

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’sblood, 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 into her father’s face. In wonder she realised her words had caused him far more pain than his hand had left on her face. He was blinking and breathing hard. She wanted to hurt him some more. She said: ‘All your portraits look the same.’
    Her father raised his hand to strike her again and she squeezed her eyes shut and hunched her head into her shoulders. The blow didn’t come and when she opened her eyes she saw he had let his hand fall and was trembling. He screamed at her that she was a monster, that she could not be his daughter, and told her to go to her room.
    The door opened and Anna’s mother came out. ‘She’s died,’ she said.
    When the funeral was over Anna’s father went back to Crimea. Up to the time he left he wouldn’t speak to her and it was years before she saw him again. Anna’s birthday came a couple of weeks after the funeral. Anna’s mother came into her room as the sky lightened, while she thought her daughter was asleep, carrying a large, heavy parcel wrapped in cream paper. As soon as her mother had gone out Anna went to open it. It was a French camera, in a hinged wooden box lined with velvet with a handle like a suitcase. Besides the camera the box contained a folding bipod, flasks of chemicals, different lenses, a cable with a plunger for pressing the shutter at a distance, and a thick book called Principles of Photography , all trim in velvet pockets.
    Anna’s first picture showed her standing at the dressing table in her room, with sunlight coming from behind the camera, shining through tall windows. It was early afternoon and the sun falling on Anna was high, bright and hot. In her inexperience and eagerness she hadn’t thought about the light and shade and in the picture she floated in a dazzling parallelogram that leaned away from the darkness of the unlit room around, where dim lumps and corners slunk formless to the edges of the paper. Her white dress was so overexposed that it was impossible to make out any detail or texture and in the picture it seemed to shine with a light of its own. She was sixteen. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and her face came out clearly. She was holding the shutter cable behind her back and having pressed it tried very hard to keep still for a long time in case the exposure came out as a blur. Her head was raised. She