Zugzwang

by Ronan Bennett

  ‘There’s never a reason. She never accuses me of anything, she doesn’t shout at me or blame me for something. She simply … withdraws. When a daughter rejects her father, the pain is insupportable. I think about Anna every day.’

  ‘You imply there have been previous estrangements.’

  ‘Many,’ he said. ‘Then after a time, she comes to see me and she is suddenly once again the loving daughter I used to have. It’s as if nothing has happened.’ He refreshed our glasses and lit a cigar. ‘Does she talk about me?’

  ‘Psychoanalysis is a deep investigation of one’s past and present. A patient’s father will obviously be discussed in that process.’

  He smiled but his eyes were hard. ‘Deep investigation? What does that mean?’

  ‘When the body is sick, the physician will make a thorough physical examination.’

  ‘And you do the same, mentally speaking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Few of us like the idea of being discussed as systematically as my formulation suggested to Zinnurov. ‘How does she speak of me?’ he asked slowly, doing his best not to appear too interested.

  He seemed for a moment quite helpless so that even had I not been bound by a professional code I would have struggled to answer.

  ‘Your expression gives everything away, Spethmann,’ he said. He straightened in the chair and cleared his throat, getting himself back under control. ‘Give me the name of this police inspector again,’ he said, taking a pen and notebook from his pocket.

  ‘Lychev,’ I said.

  Zinnurov scribbled the name in his notebook. ‘And he is investigating the murders of Gulko and …?’

  ‘Yastrebov.’

  ‘Who is Yastrebov?’

  ‘Lychev claimed to know nothing about him other than his name.’

  ‘And your daughter is Catherine, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Zinnurov closed the notebook and screwed the top back on the pen. He got up. ‘I shall call Maklakov first thing in the morning,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise anything but when I explain things I’m sure the minister will understand.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  We were in the vestibule and the servants were helping me on with my galoshes and overcoat when a tall, thin old man in the dress uniform of the Household Cavalry entered. With his fine white hair and dull blue eyes he looked grandfatherly and wise, an impression not in the least contradicted by the pale scar that ran from eye to jawbone on the left side of his face, or by the fact that he was head of the secret police. I recognised him at once, for Colonel Maximilian Gan, the famous director of the Okhrana, was as well known to Petersburgers as the tsar himself. The atmosphere chilled perceptibly, as if the door through which Gan had entered could not now shut out the biting cold. The servants, all meekness and uncertainty, kept their heads lowered and their eyes down. Gan nodded tersely to Zinnurov before proceeding directly to the smoking room.

  Zinnurov gave me a tight smile. ‘I would be grateful, Spethmann, if you would convey to Anna my deepest desire to see her again. Tell her I will see her wherever she wants, under whatever conditions she sees fit to impose.’

  A small, bald man in a frock coat approached, a barely subdued urgency about his manner. He whispered in Zinnurov’s ear. The Mountain’s features darkened. He dismissed the man, turned to me and said, ‘The terrorists have struck again. Two dynamite bombs. One they threw into the restaurant at the Angleterre, the other into Irinovka Station.’

  ‘I heard an explosion as I arrived,’ I said, ‘but I had no idea. Are there many hurt?’

  ‘Four dead, apparently. All at the Angleterre. We live in dangerous times, Spethmann.’

  As we shook hands, he fixed me with a look and said, ‘I sense that a word from you would carry great weight with Anna. I know you will not let me down.’

  He intended me to understand in no uncertain terms that we had made a deal: he would talk to the minister of the interior on my behalf as long as I talked to Anna on his.

  ‘I will do what I can,’ I said.

  A driver from the club brought me home. The small, dark-blue car followed us all the way. This time I recognised the passenger; Lychev looked pinched and cold. I almost felt sorry for him.

  Seven

  Catherine kissed me on the forehead and sat down at the table. Lidiya asked what she would like to eat and, as usual, Catherine said she was not hungry. Tea would be sufficient. Lidiya clucked disapprovingly.

  ‘You should eat, child,’ Lidiya said.

  ‘I eat when I’m hungry,’ Catherine said. ‘And when I’m not hungry I don’t eat.’

  ‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ Lidiya persisted.

  I signalled her to stop: she would get nowhere. Though she had been with us for eleven years, Lidiya still could not accept Catherine’s eating habits, and much else besides. Elena had been the same, always trying to get Catherine to eat, or dress, or do this or that, and becoming upset when Catherine refused. From the very start, from the moment she could first say yes or no, Catherine knew her own mind. She was a force of nature and once she said no, nothing in the world could make her change her mind. The trick was never to get into a situation in which the only options were yes and no. It was a trick almost entirely impossible to pull off.

  Lidiya accepted my direction with a despairing look – despairing of Catherine, the wilful young woman in sore need of taming, despairing of the father who would never curb her. She poured tea and left us.

  ‘You were out late,’ Catherine said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep. I was worried about you.’

  ‘Since when do daughters worry about their fathers?’

  ‘When their fathers become old.’

  I smiled the weary wise smile of the parent whose offspring still think themselves immune to the passage of time.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I was doing some filing at the office,’ I said.

  ‘Really? I telephoned the office three times last night.’

  ‘Then I went to dinner with Kopelzon.’

  She threw me a sceptical look. ‘Are you sure it was with Kopelzon?’

  ‘Are we in court?’ I asked mildly. ‘Is this a cross-examination?’

  ‘Were you with that woman?’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘You know the one.’

  ‘Why have you taken against Anna Petrovna so violently?’

  ‘I know her kind,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Shallow society women. All they talk about are shoes and dresses, and who’s having an affair with who, and who’s had an invitation to tea with the tsarina at the Peterhof. Do you know who her father is? The Mountain. Did you read his article this morning?’ She tossed the newspaper across the table, reciting, ‘ “First shoot the socialists, behead them and make them harmless, if need be through a bloodbath.” That’s your charming lady friend’s father.’

  It occurred to me to explain to Catherine that because of the Mountain’s good offices she would be spared the trial of presenting herself at police headquarters today.

  ‘I was not at dinner with Anna Petrovna last night,’ I said.

  ‘Do you swear it?’

  ‘I have told you where I was and with whom,’ I said.

  ‘You swore you would never see her again.’

  ‘I know what I swore,’ I said.

  I could see she was debating whether to press the matter. She took a sip of her tea. By the time she put the glass down, she had decided to be bored with this.

  ‘I can’t eat another thing,’ she said.

  She had, not unnaturally, a slender figure – unlike her mother, a gorgeous voluptuary. Her face was small and oval-shaped, framed by white-blonde hair which she wore quite short. Her eyes were huge, frank and careless, and vividly blue. Long, dark lashes fell over them. Her teeth were small and white. Altogether the impression was of a doll, e
xcept that in her delicate features were obvious traces of a fiercely self-contained and independent temperament: the single, dark unbroken line of eyebrow, the strong jaw-line, the mobile mouth equally capable of expressing burning compassion and withering contempt. She had grown up a great deal since Elena’s death. I was proud of her, and would have changed nothing about her even if I could, even if it meant that sometimes she would be more loving of me, or allow me into her life a little more. She lived to herself and most of the time I had no idea what she was doing, whether at the university or in the company of her friends. I did not know who these friends were or anything about their families. I did not know if she had a sweetheart. To ask would be pointless. Just as she used to tell me everything, now she told me only what she wanted me to know, which was very little.

  ‘I’m off,’ she said, patting a napkin unnecessarily to her mouth.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked. ‘At the university?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, with a nonchalant shrug.

  ‘You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if there was anything troubling you?’

  Most children, I think, would answer yes as a matter of course, if only to effect the quickest possible exit from their meddlesome parent. Catherine, being Catherine, appeared to give the question serious consideration. She pursed her lips. That dark line of eyebrow came down in a frown.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I might. But in any case there’s nothing troubling me.’

  She was at the door when I said, ‘Do you know anyone called Yastrebov?’

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  I studied her face carefully. She was telling the truth. I knew my daughter well enough to be able to tell.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  And then she was gone. I smiled to myself. I was in awe of her and, after Zinnurov’s promise of last night, I could afford a little sentimentality about my daughter.

  I picked up the newspaper. The Mountain’s article was in response to the recent wave of bomb attacks. The death toll from last night’s, at the Angleterre and the Irinovka Station, had risen to seven; many more had been horribly wounded. There was also an interview with Maklakov, who sounded quite defensive. In spite of the latest outrages, the minister of the interior insisted, the police were having great success in breaking up the terrorist gangs. Only yesterday a senior member of the Bolshevik underground, a Georgian named Dzhugashvili, had been captured in the capital. Although Maklakov would not confirm it, the newspaper attributed the arrest to the Okhrana spy codenamed King who had infiltrated the Party’s highest echelons.

  I laid the newspaper down and went to my study to collect some books. The telephone rang.

  ‘I spoke to Maklakov just now,’ Zinnurov said in a hearty voice. ‘Once I’d explained your difficulty and vouched for you, he was entirely sympathetic. You will not be troubled by Inspector Lychev again.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Tell Anna I will see her anywhere at any time.’

  He left a number where I could reach him. I waited a minute before picking up the telephone again. I asked to speak to Madame Ziatdinov.

  ‘I wanted to thank you for arranging the interview with your father,’ I said when Anna came to the telephone.

  ‘Was he able to help?’

  ‘More than I dared hope.’

  ‘I’m so glad. I was awake half the night worrying about you and Catherine.’

  For some long moments there was only the furred hum and crackle of the telephone line. Though we disguise our hopes with ambiguous meanings, men and women know when what they are really talking about is the thing between men and women.

  ‘I would like to see you,’ I said.

  Another pause, the business of men and women and its implications working through her mind.

  ‘I have some things to do today,’ she said, ‘but I’ll be free by six o’clock.’

  We arranged to meet on Admiralty Prospect. When we said goodbye I was aware of a generalised feeling of pleasure in my groin, as though someone had inadvertently brushed against me. This impulse, this utterly unnerving and commanding impulse. I would be fifty on my next birthday. How little we grow. And how marvellous we grow so little, in this aspect of our lives at least.

  I went to the window. Across the river smoke was already rising from the chimneys of the great grey factories of the Vyborg. A gentle snow was falling. I decided to drive to the office.

  My first appointment that morning was with none other than Gregory Vasilevich Petrov. As Petrov was champion of the city’s poor (and hero to Catherine) so he was reviled as a demagogic opportunist by supporters of the autocracy like Zinnurov and the Baltic Barons. There were plenty of rabble-rousers in St Petersburg at that time, but what made Petrov especially loathed was his combination of oratory, impertinence and scathing quick wit – he was by far the most entertaining deputy in the Duma. His enemies’ constant disparagement only enhanced his reputation among the workers and students, in spite of his manifest – and, to some, troubling – contradictions: he professed himself the authentic voice of the destitute and oppressed, yet seemed addicted to expensive restaurants, the theatre and the opera. He dressed in nothing but the finest clothes, paid scrupulous attention to his toilette and revelled in the company of glamorous young women. He had verve and imagination. He was a law unto himself. He was mustachioed, vain, arrogant and clever. He was rarely punctual and often failed to turn up at all for his appointments. I was mildly surprised when Minna announced his arrival, but I was also pleased, for he was never less than interesting.

  Petrov collapsed on the couch like a man who has swum from the shipwreck to the shore. Although in public he demonstrated the energy of a man possessed, whenever I saw him he was exhausted. As far as I could tell he never rested. When not making speeches in the Duma, he was leading strikers against the police. When not locked in smoke-filled rooms arguing with comrades as they went line by line through their latest manifesto, he was in the arms of some young lover. He was perpetually in motion as if, like a bicyclist, motion alone kept him upright.

  ‘You missed our last three sessions,’ I said.

  ‘I was in Krakow,’ he said. ‘There was a meeting.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘A Party meeting. I can’t tell you any more than that, except that it was important and I couldn’t miss it. You know there are areas of my life I can’t go into.’

  Petrov was a member of the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democrats. The Party was notorious, barely legal in Russia and subject to police surveillance and repression. In the absence of Lenin, its exiled leader, Petrov was its de facto chief. The strains involved in this alone would account for his mental and physical exhaustion, but in Petrov’s case there was something else. Something tormented his soul. He wanted to tell me, to tell someone, and yet he could not. As with Anna, as with all my resistant patients, I had fallen back on the principal ally of psychoanalysts everywhere – time; I was never in a hurry.

  ‘On the last occasion we met,’ I reminded him, ‘you said you were at the end of your tether, that you couldn’t go on. How do you feel today?’

  ‘The same.’

  There was a long silence, which he declined to disturb.

  I said, ‘Have you been eating properly? Sleeping?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with eating or sleeping,’ he answered impatiently.

  ‘What does it have to do with?’

  He jabbed a finger at me. ‘How would it be if I went to the people I represent and they told me all about their problems – how they couldn’t survive on their wages, how they lived twenty to a room and had no clean water, how rats swarmed over their children at night? How would it be if they told me all this and all I could say was: “What colour are the rats?” ’

  ‘You have not told me your problems.’

  ‘Are you deaf? I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted and I’m depressed.’

  ‘These are symptoms –’ I s
tarted to say.

  ‘Enough! Enough!’

  His eyes were raging and red, veins throbbed at his temple. For a moment I think he considered hitting me. Whenever I saw Petrov, I had the sense of wrestling with a violent man made all the more aggressive by his shame at finding himself in a psychoanalyst’s office. He was a leader of men, he was openly contemptuous of the very science he hoped would relieve his suffering. Men who have grappled with extreme hardship from their earliest youth – as Petrov had – often armour themselves against the unhappiness that is their lot by developing an omnipotent sense of their own invulnerability. He had always battled his way out of trouble, fighting enemies tooth and nail; but the greatest enemy was in his own subconscious and the battle he had now to fight was with himself.

  I stared at him fixedly; with Petrov I had to be firmer than with most of my other patients. He heaved a weary sigh and collapsed again on the couch.

  ‘If …,’ he began, ‘if … let us say … a man is married and has children. If that man loves his wife, is devoted to her and to their children. And it is a pure love, one built on excitement and enchantment but also on years of shared experience and mutual respect. Yet that same man conceives a similar pure love for another woman. It would be difficult for him, yes? You agree?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He would be torn. Confused. Depressed. Would he not?’

  ‘Are you in such a situation?’

  ‘I feel as if I am.’

  ‘You are married and you have children.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Do you have a mistress?’

  ‘I have many women friends.’

  ‘Do you have sexual relations with your women friends?’

  ‘It’s no secret,’ he said defiantly. ‘So what?’

  ‘Is it a secret you keep from your wife?’

  ‘She doesn’t ask and I don’t tell her.’

  ‘How do you think she would feel were she to know?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  ‘You imply she would be upset.’

  ‘To put it mildly.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  He sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. ‘My dream is to have a little house out in the country,’ he said, ‘by a lake or a river, where I could fish, and the sun would be shining and the children would play and in the evenings we would sit down together for dinner and there would only be us, the family – my family. Nothing else, no one else. A simple meal, a light breeze, deer and rabbits running over the fields. And I would sleep for ten hours and wake refreshed and content, and the day would start all over again, the sun shining and the children playing.’