Master of Petersburg

by J. M. Coetzee

  It is a painful blow. Roughly he tries to push past Nechaev, but his antagonist blocks the doorway. ‘Don’t shut your ears to what I am saying, Fyodor Mikhailovich! You lost Isaev and we saved him. How can you believe we could have caused his death?’

  ‘Swear it on your immortal soul!’

  Even as he speaks, he hears the melodramatic ring to the words. In fact the whole scene – two men on a moonlit platform high above the streets struggling against the elements, shouting over the wind, denouncing each other – is false, melodramatic. But where are true words to be found, words to which Pavel will give his slow smile, nod his approval?

  ‘I will not swear by what I do not believe in,’ says Nechaev stiffly. ‘But reason should persuade you I am telling the truth.’

  ‘And what of Ivanov? Must reason tell me you are innocent of Ivanov’s death too?’

  ‘Who is Ivanov?’

  ‘Ivanov was the name employed by the wretched man whose job it was to watch the building where I live. Where Pavel lived. Where your woman-friend called on me.’

  ‘Ah, the police spy! The one you made friends with! What happened to him?’

  ‘He was found dead yesterday.’

  ‘So? We lose one, they lose one.’

  ‘They lose one? Are you equating Pavel with Ivanov? Is that how your accounting works?’

  Nechaev shakes his head. ‘Don’t bring in personalities, it just confuses the issue. Collaborators have many enemies. They are detested by the people. This Ivanov’s death doesn’t surprise me in the least.’

  ‘I too was no friend of Ivanov’s, nor do I like the work he did. But those are not grounds for murdering him! As for the people, what nonsense! The people did not do it. The people don’t plot murders. Nor do they hide their tracks.’

  ‘The people know who their enemies are, and the people don’t waste tears when their enemies die!’

  ‘Ivanov wasn’t an enemy of the people, he was a man with no money in his pocket and a family to feed, like tens of thousands of others. If he wasn’t one of the people, who are the people?’

  ‘You know very well that his heart wasn’t with the people. Calling him one of the people is just talk. The people are made up of peasants and workers. Ivanov had no ties with the people: he wasn’t even recruited from them. He was an absolutely rootless person, and a drunkard too, easy prey, easily turned against the people. I’m surprised at you, a clever man, falling into a simple trap like that.’

  ‘Clever or not, I don’t accept such monstrous reasoning! Why have you brought me to this place? You said that you were going to give me proof that Pavel was murdered. Where is the proof? Being here is not proof.’

  ‘Of course it is not proof. But this is the place where the murder happened, a murder that was in fact an execution, directed by the state. I have brought you here so that you can see for yourself. Now you have had your chance to see; if you still refuse to believe, then so much the worse for you.’

  He grips the railing, stares down there into the plummeting darkness. Between here and there an eternity of time, so much time that it is impossible for the mind to grasp it. Between here and there Pavel was alive, more alive than ever before. We live most intensely while we are falling – a truth that wrings the heart!

  ‘If you won’t believe, you won’t believe,’ Nechaev repeats.

  Believe: another word. What does it mean, to believe? I believe in the body on the pavement below. I believe in the blood and the bones. To gather up the broken body and embrace it: that is what it means to believe. To believe and to love – the same thing.

  ‘I believe in the resurrection,’ he says. The words come without premeditation. The crazy, ranting tone is gone from his voice. Speaking the words, hearing them, he feels a quick joy, not so much at the words themselves as at the way they have come, spoken out of him as if by another. Pavel! he thinks.

  ‘What?’ Nechaev leans closer.

  ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body and in life eternal.’

  ‘That isn’t what I asked.’ The wind gusts so strongly that the younger man has to shout. His cloak flaps about him; he grips tighter to steady himself.

  ‘Nevertheless, that is what I say!’

  Though it is past midnight when he gets home, Anna Sergeyevna has waited up. Surprised at her concern, grateful too, he tells her of the meeting on the quay, tells her of Nechaev’s words on the tower. Then he asks her to repeat again the story of the night of Pavel’s death. Is she quite sure, for instance, that Pavel died on the quay?

  ‘That is what I was told,’ she answers. ‘What else was I to believe? Pavel went out in the evening without mentioning where he was going. The next morning there was a message: he had had an accident, I should come to the hospital.’

  ‘But how did they know to inform you?’

  ‘There were papers in his pockets.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I went to the hospital and identified him. Then I let Mr Maykov know.’

  ‘But what explanation did they give you?’

  ‘They did not give me an explanation, I had to give them an explanation. I had to go to the police and answer questions: who he was, where his family lived, when I had last seen him, how long he had lived with us, who his friends were – on and on! All they would tell me was that he was already dead when he was found, and that it had happened on Stolyarny Quay. That was the message I sent Mr Maykov. I don’t know what he then told you.’

  ‘He used the word misadventure. No doubt he had spoken to the police. Misadventure is the word they use for suicide. It was a telegram, so he could not elaborate.’

  ‘That is what I understood. I mean, that is what I understood had happened. I have never understood why he did it, if he did it. He gave us no warning. There was no hint that it was coming.’

  ‘One last question. What was he was wearing that night? Was he wearing anything strange?’

  ‘When he went out?’

  ‘No, when you saw him . . . afterwards.’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. There was a sheet. I don’t want to talk about it. But he was quite peaceful. I want you to know that.’

  He thanks her, from his heart. So the exchange ends. But in his own room he cannot sleep. He remembers Maykov’s belated telegram (why had he taken so long?). Anya had been the one to open it; Anya it was who came to his study and pronounced the words that even tonight beat in his head like dull bells, each pealing with its full and final weight: ‘Fedya, Pavel is dead!’

  He had taken the telegram in his hands, read it himself, staring stupidly at the yellow sheet, trying to make the French say something other than what it said. Dead. Gone forever from a world of light into the prison of the past. With no return. And the funeral already taken care of. The account settled, the account with life. The book closed. Dead matter, as the printers say.

  Mésaventure: Maykov’s code-word. Suicide. And now Nechaev wants to tell him otherwise! His inclination, his wholehearted inclination, is to disbelieve Nechaev, to let the official story stand. But why? Because he detests Nechaev – his person, his doctrines? Because he wants to keep Pavel, even in retrospect, out of his clutches? Or is his motive shabbier: to dodge as long as possible the imperative that he seek justice for his son?

  For he recognizes an inertia in himself of which Pavel’s death is only the immediate cause. He is growing old, becoming day by day what he will at the last undoubtedly be: an old man in a corner with nothing to do but pick over the pages of his losses.

  I am the one who died and was buried, he thinks, Pavel the one who lives and will always live. What I am struggling to do now is to understand what form this is in which I have returned from the grave.

  He recalls a fellow-convict in Siberia, a tall, stooped, grey man who had violated his twelve-year-old daughter and then strangled her. He had been found after the event sitting by the side of a duckpond with the lifeless body in his arms. He had yielded without a struggle, insisting only on carrying
the dead child home himself and laying her out on a table – doing all of this with, it was reported, the greatest tenderness. Shunned by the other prisoners, he spoke to no one. In the evenings he would sit on his bunk wearing a quiet smile, his lips moving as he read the Gospels to himself. In time one might have expected the ostracism to relax, his contrition to be accepted. But in fact he continued to be shunned, not so much for a crime committed twenty years ago as for that smile, in which there was something so sly and so mad that it chilled the blood. The same smile, they said one to another, as when he did the deed: nothing in his heart has changed.

  Why does it recur now, this image of a man at the water’s edge with a dead child in his arms? A child loved too much, a child become the object of such intimacy that it dare not be allowed to live. Murderous tenderness, tender murderousness. Love turned inside out like a glove to reveal its ugly stitching. And what is love stitched from? He calls up the image of the man again, looks intently into the face, concentrating not on the eyes, closed in a trance, but on the mouth, which is working lightly. Not rape but rapine – is that it? Fathers devouring children, raising them well in order to eat them like delicacies afterwards. Delikatessen.

  Does that explain Nechaev’s vengefulness: that his eyes have been opened to the fathers naked, the band of fathers, their appetites bared? What sort of man must he be, the elder Nechaev, father Gennady? When one day the news comes, as it undoubtedly will, that his son is no more, will he sit in a corner and weep, or will he secretly smile?

  He shakes his head as if to rid it of a plague of devils. What is it that is corrupting the integrity of his grieving, that insists it is nothing but a lugubrious disguise? Somewhere inside him truth has lost its way. As if in the labyrinth of his brain, but also in the labyrinth of his body – veins, bones, intestines, organs – a tiny child is wandering, searching for the light, searching to emerge. How can he find the child lost within himself, allow him a voice to sing his sad song?

  Piping on a bone. An old story comes back to him of a youth killed, mutilated, scattered, whose thigh-bone, when the wind blows, pipes a lament and names his murderers. One by one, in fact, the old stories are coming back, stories he heard from his grandmother and did not know the meaning of, but stored up unwittingly like bones for the future. A great ossuary of stories from before history began, built up and tended by the people. Let Pavel find his way to my thigh-bone and pipe to me from there! Father, why have you left me in the dark forest? Father, when will you come to save me?

  The candle before the icon is nothing but a pool of wax; the spray of flowers droops. Having put up the shrine, the girl has forgotten or abandoned it. Does she guess that Pavel has ceased to speak to him, that he has lost his way too, that the only voices he hears now are devil-voices?

  He scratches the wick erect, lights it, goes down on his knees. The Virgin’s eyes are locked on her babe, who stares out of the picture at him, raising a tiny admonitory finger.

  11

  The walk

  In the week that has passed since their last intimacy, there has grown up between Anna Sergeyevna and himself a barrier of awkward formality. Her bearing toward him has become so constrained that he is sure the child, who watches and listens all the time, must conclude she wants him gone from the house.

  For whose sake are they keeping up this appearance of distance? Not for their own, surely. It can only be for the eyes of the children, the two children, the present one and the absent one.

  Yet he hungers to have her in his arms again. Nor does he believe she is indifferent to him. On his own he feels like a dog chasing its tail in tighter and tighter circles. With her in the saving dark, he has an intimation that his limbs will be loosened and the spirit released, the spirit that at present seems knotted to his body at shoulders, hips, and knees.

  At the core of his hunger is a desire that on the first night did not fully know itself but now seems to have becomes centred on her smell. As if she and he were animals, he is drawn by something he picks up in the air around her: the smell of autumn, and of walnuts in particular. He has begun to understand how animals live, and young children too, attracted or repelled by mists, auras, atmospheres. He sees himself sprawled over her like a lion, rooting with his muzzle in the hair of her neck, burying his nose in her armpit, rubbing his face in her crotch.

  There is no lock on the door. It is not inconceivable that the child will wander into the room at a time like this and glimpse him in a state of – he approaches the word with distaste, but it is the only right word – lust. And so many children are sleepwalkers too: she could get up in the night and stray into his room without even waking. Are they passed down from mother to daughter, these intimate smells? Loving the mother, is one destined to long for the daughter too? Wandering thoughts, wandering desires! They will have to be buried with him, hidden forever from all except one. For Pavel is within him now, and Pavel never sleeps. He can only pray that a weakness that would once have disgusted the boy will now bring a smile to his lips, a smile amused and tolerant.

  Perhaps Nechaev too, once he has crossed the dark river into death, will cease to be such a wolf and learn to smile again.

  So he is waiting opposite Yakovlev’s shop the next evening when Anna Sergeyevna emerges. He crosses the street, savouring her surprise as she sees him. ‘Shall we take a walk?’ he proposes.

  She draws the dark shawl tighter under her chin. ‘I don’t know. Matryosha will be expecting me.’

  Nevertheless they do walk. The wind has dropped, the air is crisp and cold. There is a pleasing bustle about them in the streets. No one pays them any attention. They might be any married couple.

  She is carrying a basket, which he takes from her. He likes the way she walks, with long strides, arms folded under her breasts.

  ‘I will have to be leaving soon,’ he says.

  She makes no reply.

  The question of his wife lies delicately between them. In alluding to his departure he feels like a chess-player offering a pawn which, whether accepted or refused, must lead into deeper complications. Are affairs between men and women always like this, the one plotting, the other plotted against? Is plotting an element of the pleasure: to be the object of another’s intrigue, to be shepherded into a corner and softly pressed to capitulate? As she walks by his side, is she too, in her way, plotting against him?

  ‘I am waiting only for the investigation to run its course. I need not even stay for the ruling. All I want is the papers. The rest is immaterial.’

  ‘And then you will go back to Germany?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They have reached the embankment. Crossing the street, he takes her arm. Side by side they lean against the rail by the waterside.

  ‘I don’t know whether to hate this city for what it did to Pavel,’ he says, ‘or to feel even more tightly bound to it. Because it is Pavel’s home now. He will never leave it, never travel as he wanted to.’

  ‘What nonsense, Fyodor Mikhailovich,’ she replies with a sidelong smile. ‘Pavel is with you. You are his home. He is in your heart, he travels with you wherever you go. Anyone can see that.’ And she touches his breast lightly with her gloved hand.

  He feels his heart leap as though her fingertip had brushed the organ itself. Coquetry – is that what it is, or does the gesture spring from her own heart? It would be the most natural thing in the world to take her in his arms. He can feel his gaze positively devour her shapely mouth, on which a smile still lingers. And beneath that gaze she does not flinch. Not a young woman. Not a child. Gazing back at him over the body of Pavel, the two of them throwing out their challenges. The flicker of a thought: If only he were not here! Then the thought vanishes around a corner.

  From a street-seller they buy little fish-pasties for their supper. Matryona opens the door, but when she sees who is with her mother, turns her back. At table she is in a fretful mood, insisting that her mother pay attention to a long, confused story of a squabble between herself and a clas
smate at school. When he intervenes to make the mildest of pleas for the other girl, Matryona snorts and does not deign to answer.

  She has sensed something, he knows, and is trying to reclaim her mother. And why not? It is her right. Yet if only she were not here! This time he does not suppress the thought. If the child were away he would not waste another word. He would snuff out the light, and in the dark he and she would find each other again. They would have the big bed to themselves, the widow-bed, the bed widowed of a man’s body for – how long did she say? – four years?

  He has a vision of Anna Sergeyevna that is crude in its sensuality. Her petticoat is pushed high up, so that beneath it her breasts are bared. He lies between her legs: her long pale thighs grip him. Her face is averted, her eyes closed, she is breathing heavily. Though the man coupling with her is himself, he sees all of this somehow from beside the bed. It is her thighs that dominate the vision: his hands curve around them, he presses them against his flanks.

  ‘Come, finish the food on your plate,’ she urges her daughter.

  ‘I’m not hungry, my throat is sore,’ Matryona whines. She toys with her food a moment longer, then pushes it aside.

  He rises. ‘Good night, Matryosha. I hope you feel better tomorrow.’ The child does not bother to reply. He retires, leaving her in possession of the field.

  He recognizes the source of the vision: a postcard he bought in Paris years ago and destroyed together with the rest of his erotica when he married Anya. A girl with long dark hair lying underneath a mustachioed man. GYPSY LOVE, read the caption in florid capitals. But the legs of the girl in the picture were plump, her flesh flaccid, her face, turned toward the man (who held himself up stiffly on his arms), devoid of expression. The thighs of Anna Sergeyevna, of the Anna Sergeyevna of his memory, are leaner, stronger; there is something purposeful in their grip which he links with the fact that she is not a child but a fullgrown, avid woman. Fullgrown and therefore open (that is the word that insists itself) to death. A body ready for experience because it knows it will not live forever. The thought is arousing but disturbing too. To those thighs it does not matter who is gripped between them; beheld from somewhere above and to the side of the bed, the man in the picture both is and is not himself.