Master of Petersburg

by J. M. Coetzee

  He pauses. His head is swimming, he is suddenly exhausted. Behind closed eyes he has a vision of Pavel walking towards him. There is a girl at his side, a girl he has chosen to be his bride. Pavel is about to speak, to introduce the girl; and he is about to think to himself: Good, at last all these years of fathering are at an end, at last he has other hands to fall into! He is about to smile at Pavel, in his smile rejoicing but also relief. But who can the bride be? Can she be this tall young woman (nearly as tall as Pavel himself) with the piercing blue eyes?

  He tugs himself loose from the reverie. His own next sentence is already emerging, in what sounds to him like a drone. ‘I have a duty towards him that I cannot evade,’ he is saying.

  That is all. The words come, to an end, dry up. Silence falls, grows longer and longer. He makes an effort to revive the vision of Pavel and his bride, but of all people it is Ivanov who comes instead, or at least Ivanov’s hands: pale, plump fingers emerging like grubs from green woollen mittens. As for the face, it bobs in a sulphurous mist, not keeping still long enough for his gaze to fix on it. The impression he has, however, is of a sly, insistent smile, as though the man knows something damaging to him and wants him to know that he knows.

  He shakes his head, tries to gather his wits. But words seem to have fled him. He stands before the Finn like an actor who has forgotten his lines. The silence lies like a weight upon the room. A weight or a peace, he thinks: what peace there would be if everything were to fall still, the birds of the air frozen in their flight, the great globe suspended in its orbit! A fit is certainly on its way: there is nothing he can do to hold it back. He savours the last of the stillness. What a pity the stillness cannot last forever! From far away comes a scream that must be his own. There will be a gnashing of teeth – the words flash before him; then there is an end.

  When he returns it is as if he has been away in a far country and grown old and grey there. But in fact he is in the room as before, still on his feet, with a hand halfraised. And the two women are there too, in the postures he remembers, though the Finn now has a wary air about her.

  ‘May I sit down?’ he mumbles, his tongue too large for his mouth.

  The Finn makes space and he sits down beside her on the couch, dizzy, hanging his head. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asks.

  He makes no reply. What is it he wants to say, and why is he so tired all the time? It is as though a fog has settled over his brain. If he were a character in a book, what would he say, at a moment like this when either the heart speaks or the page remains blank?

  ‘I cannot tell you,’ he says slowly, ‘how sad and alien I feel in your company. The game you are playing is a game I cannot enter. What engages you, what must have engaged Pavel too, does not engage me. If I must be honest, it repels me.’

  Without a word the tall girl leaves the room. The rustle of her dress and a waft of lavender as she passes awake in him an unexpected flutter of desire. Desire for what? For the girl herself? Surely not – or not only. For youth, rather, for the forever-lost, the freedom of loosened clothes, naked bodies. Even so, his response disturbs him. Why here, why now? Something to do with exhaustion, but perhaps to do with Pavel too – with finding himself in Pavel’s world, Pavel’s erotic surround.

  ‘I have been shown the lists of people marked down for execution,’ he says.

  The Finn observes him narrowly.

  ‘The police are in possession of those lists – I hope you realize that. They took them from Pavel’s room. What I want to ask is: Does each of you simply have a certain number of people to kill, or are there particular persons marked down as yours, yours alone? And, if the latter, are you expected to study these persons before-hand, to familiarize yourselves with their daily lives? Do you spy on them at home?’

  The Finn tries to speak, but he is beginning to come to life, and his voice rises above hers.

  ‘If so, if so, don’t you necessarily grow more familiar with your victims than you want to be? Don’t you become like someone called in from the street, a beggar, for instance, offered fifty kopeks to dispose of an old, blind dog, who takes the rope and ties the noose and strokes the dog to calm it, and murmurs a word or two, and as he does so feels a current of feeling begin to flow, so that from that instant onward he and the dog are no longer strangers, and what should have been a mere job of work has turned into the blackest betrayal – such a betrayal, in fact, that the sound the dog makes as he strings it up, when he strings it up, haunts him for days afterwards – a yelp of surprise: Why you? Wouldn’t it deter you, that thought?’

  While he has been speaking the tall woman has returned. She is kneeling in the far corner of the room now, folding sheets, rolling up a mattress. The Finn, on the other hand, has positively come to life. Her eyes sparkle, she cannot wait to speak. Still he presses on.

  ‘And if a mere dog can do that, what power will the men and women you propose to get rid of not have to haunt you? It seems to me that, however scientifically these enemies of the people are selected, you lack a means of killing them without peril to your soul. For instance: who was set down as Pavel’s first victim? Whom was he allotted to kill?’

  ‘Why do you ask? Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because I intend to go to that person’s house and before the door, on my knees, give thanks that Pavel never arrived.’

  ‘So you are happy that Pavel was killed?’

  ‘Pavel is not dead. He would have died, but by great good fortune he escaped with his life.’

  For the first time the other woman speaks. ‘Won’t you come and sit here, Fyodor Mikhailovich?’ she says, indicating the table near the window, at which there are two chairs.

  ‘My sister,’ explains the Finn.

  ‘Sisters, but not of the same parents,’ says the other. Their laughter is easy, familiar.

  Her accent belongs to Petersburg, her voice is deep. A trained voice. He has a feeling he has met her before. A singer? From his Opera days? Surely she is too young for that.

  He takes one of the chairs; she sits down opposite him. The table is narrow. Her foot touches his; he shifts his foot.

  Though she has her back to the window, he now understands why she is so heavily powdered. Her skin is pitted with smallpox scars. What a shame, he thinks: not a beauty, but a handsome creature all the same.

  Her foot touches his again, rests against it, instep to instep.

  A disturbing excitement creeps over him. Like chess, he thinks: two players across a small table making their deliberate moves. Is it the deliberateness that excites him – the opposite foot lifted like a pawn and placed against his? And the third person, the watcher who does not see, the dupe, looking in the wrong place: does she play her part too? Deliberateness and tawdriness, a tawdriness that has its own thrill. Where could they have learned so much about him, about his desires?

  A singer, a contralto: a contralto queen.

  ‘You knew my son,’ he says.

  ‘He was a follower. A mascot.’

  He is familiar with the term, and it hurts him. A mascot: a hanger-on in student circles, useful for running errands.

  ‘But was he a friend of yours?’

  She shrugs. ‘Friendship is effeminate. We don’t need friendship.’

  Effeminate: strange word for a woman to use! Already he has a feeling he knows more than he wants to know. The foot still rests against his, but now there is something inert about its pressure, inert and lumpish and even threatening. No longer a foot but a boot. Pavel would not be playing these games. The vision of Pavel returns, Pavel walking towards him. The girl at his side, his bride, is obscured. Pavel is smiling, and a glory of a kind breaks from that smile. My friend! he thinks. A fierce love wrings his heart. And this, he thinks, is this what I must have in your place?

  ‘If you don’t need friendship, God save you,’ he whispers.

  He gets up from the table and turns his back on the women. What does he look like, he wonders? There is no mirror. By the time he sits
down again, the tears that had threatened have gone.

  ‘What did you do with my son?’ he asks thickly.

  The woman leans across the table and fixes him with her blue stare. Through the coat of powder, from the craters of the chin, he spies hairs that the razor did not catch. And the eyebrows are too thick over the bridge of the nose. A woman would have had the sense to tell him to pluck them. So is the Finn a boy too, a fat little boy? All at once he is revolted by the pair of them.

  She, or he, is speaking. Nechaev himself – no doubt about that. The disguise is all at once transparent. The memory comes back again with sudden clarity: in the hall of the Peace Congress, during an intermission between sessions, Nechaev all alone in a corner, wolfing down finger-sandwiches, glaring, challenging the roomful of grownups: Yes, laugh if you dare, laugh at the schoolboy! The look on his face that of a boy surprised at stool with his trousers around his knees, vulnerable but defiant. Laugh, but one day I will get my own back!

  He remembers a remark made by Princess Obolenskaya, Mroczkowski’s mistress: ‘He may be the enfant terrible of anarchism, but really, he should do something about those pimples!’

  ‘Given what the police did to your son,’ Nechaev is saying, ‘I am surprised you are not incensed. As the Gospels say, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’

  ‘You wretch, that is not in the Gospels! What are you saying about Pavel? And why are you dressed up in this ridiculous costume?’

  ‘Surely you don’t believe the suicide story. Isaev didn’t kill himself – that’s just a fiction put out by the police. They can’t use the law against us, so they perpetrate these obscene murders. But of course you must have your doubts – why else would you be here?’

  All the man’s affected softness has gone: the voice is his own. As he paces back and forth the blue dress swishes. What is underneath it, trousers or bare legs? What must it be like to walk about with one’s legs naked yet hidden, brushing each other?

  ‘Do you think we are not all in danger? Do you think I want to creep about in disguise in my own city, the city where I was born? Do you know what it is like to be a woman by yourself on the streets of Petersburg?’ His voice rises, anger taking him over. ‘Do you know what you have to listen to? Men dog your footsteps whispering filth such as you cannot imagine, and you are helpless against it!’ He collects himself. ‘Or perhaps you can imagine it only too well. Perhaps what I describe is only too familiar to you.’

  The Finn has taken a bowl of potatoes on her lap, which she is peeling. Her face is peaceful; more than ever she looks like a little grandmother. ‘It’s getting colder,’ she remarks.

  Mad, both of them! he thinks. What am I doing here? I must find my way back to Pavel!

  ‘Kindly repeat . . . Kindly repeat what you were saying about my son,’ he says.

  ‘Very well, let me tell you about your son. The official verdict will be that he killed himself. If you believe that, you are truly gullible, criminally gullible. Weren’t you a revolutionary yourself in the old days, or am I mistaken? Surely you must be aware that the struggle has never ceased. Or have you made a separate peace? Those in the forefront of the struggle continue to be hunted down and tortured and killed. I would have expected you to know this and write about it. Particularly because people will never read the truth about your son and others like him in our shameful Russian press.’

  Nechaev’s voice becomes lower, more intense. ‘What happened to your son can happen to me any day, or to other of our comrades. You say you know nothing about it. But go into the streets, go to the markets and the taverns where the people gather, and you will find that the people know. Somehow they know! And when the day of judgment comes, the people will not forget who suffered and died for them, and who did not lift a hand!’

  Christ in his wrath, he thinks: that is who he models himself on. The Christ of the Old Testament, the Christ who scourged the usurers out of the temple. Even the costume is right: not a dress but a robe. An imitator; a pretender; a blasphemer.

  ‘Don’t threaten me!’ he replies. ‘By what right do you speak in the name of the people? The people aren’t vengeful. The people don’t spend their time scheming and plotting.’

  ‘The people know who their enemies are, and the people don’t waste tears on them when they meet their end! As for us, at least we know what has to be done and are doing it! Perhaps you used once to know, but now all you can do is mumble and shake your head and cry. That is soft. We aren’t soft, we aren’t crying, and we aren’t wasting our time on clever talk. There are things that can be talked about and things that can’t, that just have to be done. We don’t talk, we don’t cry, we don’t endlessly think on the one hand and on the other hand, we just do!’

  ‘Excellent! You just do. But where do you get your instructions? Is it the voice of the people you obey, or just your own voice, a little disguised so that you need not recognize it?’

  ‘Another clever question! Another waste of time! We are sick and tired of cleverness. The days of cleverness are numbered. Cleverness is one of the things we are going to get rid of. The day of ordinary people is arriving. Ordinary people aren’t clever. Ordinary people just want the job done. And once the job is done, it is ordinary people who will decide what is going to be what, and whether any more cleverness is going to be allowed!’

  ‘And whether clever books and that kind of thing are going to be allowed!’ chimes in the Finn, animated, even excited.

  Is it possible, he thinks with disgust, that Pavel could have been friends with people like these, people ever-eager to whip themselves into frenzies of self-righteousness? This place is like a Spanish convent in the days of Loyola: well-born girls flagellating themselves, rolling about in ecstasies, foaming at the lips; or fasting, praying for hours on end to be taken into the arms of the Saviour. Extremists all of them, sensualists hungering for the ecstasy of death – killing, dying, no matter which. And Pavel among them!

  Upon him bursts the thought of Pavel’s last moment, of the body of a hot-blooded young man in the pride of life striking the earth, of the rush of breath from the lungs, the crack of bones, the surprise, above all the surprise, that the end should be real, that there should be no second chance. Under the table he wrings his hands in agony. A body hitting the earth: death, the measure of all things!

  ‘Prove to me . . .’ he says. ‘Prove what you say about Pavel.’

  Nechaev leans closer. ‘I will take you to the place,’ he says, enunciating each word slowly. ‘I will take you to the very place and I will open your eyes for you.’

  In silence he gets up and stumbles to the door. He finds the staircase and descends, but then loses the way to the alley. He knocks at random on a door. There is no answer. He knocks at a second door. A tired-looking woman in slippers opens it and stands aside for him to enter. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I just want to know the way out.’ Without a word she closes the door.

  From the end of the passage comes the drone of voices. A door stands open; he enters a room so low-ceilinged that it feels like a birdcage. Three young men are lounging in armchairs, one reading aloud from a newspaper. A silence falls. ‘I’m looking for the way out,’ he says. ‘Tout droit!’ says the reader, waving a hand, and returns to his newspaper. He is reading an account of a skirmish between students and gendarmes outside the Faculty of Philosophy. He glances up, sees the intruder has not stirred. ‘Tout droit, tout droit!’ he commands; his companions laugh.

  Then the Finnish girl is at his side. ‘Heavens, you are poking your nose into the strangest places!’ she remarks good-humouredly. Taking his arm, she guides him as if he were blind first down another flight of stairs, then along an unlit passageway cluttered with trunks and boxes, to a barred door which she opens. They are on the street. She holds out a hand to him. ‘So we have an appointment,’ she says.

  ‘No. What appointment do we have?’

  ‘Be waiting at the corner of Gorokhovaya on the Fontanka this evening at ten o’clock.’
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  ‘I won’t be there, I assure you.’

  ‘Very well, you won’t be there. Or perhaps you will. Don’t you have family feeling? You aren’t going to betray us, are you?’

  She puts the question jokingly, as if it were not really in his power to harm them.

  ‘Because, you know, some people say you will betray us despite everything,’ she goes on. ‘They say you are treacherous by nature. What do you think?’

  If he had a stick he would hit her. But with only a hand, where does one strike such a round, obtuse body?

  ‘It doesn’t help to be aware of one’s nature, does it?’ she continues reflectively. ‘I mean, one’s nature leads one on, no matter how much one thinks about it. What’s the use of hanging a person if it’s in his nature? It’s like hanging a wolf for eating a lamb. It won’t change the nature of wolves, will it? Or hanging the man who betrayed Jesus – that didn’t change anything, did it?’

  ‘No one hanged him,’ he retorts irritably. ‘He hanged himself.’

  ‘The same thing. It doesn’t help, does it? I mean, whether you hang him or he hangs himself.’

  Something terrible is beginning to loom through this prattle. ‘Who is Jesus?’ he asks softly.

  ‘Jesus?’ It is dusk; they are the only people on this cold, empty back street. She regards him disbelievingly. ‘Don’t you know Jesus?’

  ‘When you say I am Judas, who is Jesus?’

  She smiles. ‘It’s just a way of speaking,’ she says. And then, half to herself: ‘They don’t understand anything.’ Again she proffers a hand. ‘Ten o’clock, on the Fontanka. If no one is there to meet you, it means something has happened.’

  He refuses the hand, sets off down the street. Behind him he hears a word half-whispered. What is it? Jew? Judas? He suspects it is Jew. Extraordinary: is that where they think the word comes from? But why his fastidiousness about touching her? Is it because she may have known Pavel, known him too well – carnally, in fact? Do they hold their women in common, Nechaev and the others? Hard to imagine this woman as held in common. More likely she who would hold men in common. Even Pavel. He resists the thought, then yields. He sees the Finn naked, enthroned on a bed of scarlet cushions, her bulky legs apart, her arms held wide to display her breasts and a belly rotund, hairless, barely mature. And Pavel on his knees, ready to be covered and consumed.