Master of Petersburg

by J. M. Coetzee

  She unbuckles the suitcase, brings out the white suit. ‘There!’ she says defiantly.

  Nechaev gives the suit a quick glance, spreads it out on the bed, and begins to unbutton his dress.

  ‘Please explain –’

  ‘There is no time. I need a shirt too.’

  He tugs his arms out of the sleeves. The dress drops around his ankles and he stands before them in grubby cotton underwear and black patent-leather boots. He wears no stockings; his legs are lean and hairy.

  Not in the least embarrassed, Matryona begins to help him on with Pavel’s clothes. He wants to protest, but what can he say to the young when they shut their ears, close ranks against the old?

  ‘What has become of your Finnish friend? Isn’t she with you?’

  Nechaev slips on the jacket. It is too long and the shoulders are too wide. Not as well built as Pavel, not as handsome. He feels a desolate pride in his son. The wrong one taken!

  ‘I had to leave her,’ says Nechaev. ‘It was important to get away quickly.’

  ‘In other words you abandoned her.’ And then, before Nechaev can respond: ‘Wash your face. You look like a clown.’

  Matryona slips away, comes back with a wet rag. Nechaev wipes his face. ‘Your forehead too,’ she says. ‘Here.’ She takes the rag from him and wipes off the powder that has caked in his eyebrows.

  Little sister. Was she like this with Pavel too? Something gnaws at his heart: envy.

  ‘Do you really expect to escape the police dressed like a holidaymaker in the middle of winter?’

  Nechaev does not rise to the gibe. ‘I need money,’ he says.

  ‘You won’t get any from me.’

  Nechaev turns to the child. ‘Have you got any money?’

  She dashes from the room. They hear a chair being dragged across the floor; she returns with a jar full of coins. She pours them out on the bed and begins to count. ‘Not enough,’ Nechaev mutters, but waits nevertheless. ‘Five roubles and fifteen kopeks,’ she announces.

  ‘I need more.’

  ‘Then go into the streets and beg for it. You won’t get it from me. Go and beg for alms in the name of the people.’

  They glare at each other.

  ‘Why won’t you give him money?’ says Matryona. ‘He’s Pavel’s friend!’

  ‘I don’t have money to give.’

  ‘That isn’t true! You told Mama you had lots of money. Why don’t you give him half? Pavel Alexandrovich would have given him half.’

  Pavel and Jesus! ‘I said nothing of the kind. I don’t have lots of money.’

  ‘Come, give it to me!’ Nechaev grips his arm; his eyes glitter. Again he smells the young man’s fear. Fierce but frightened: poor fellow! Then, deliberately, he closes the door on pity. ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Why are you so mean?’ Matryona bursts out, uttering the word with all the contempt at her command.

  ‘I am not mean.’

  ‘Of course you are mean! You were mean to Pavel and now you are mean to his friends! You have lots of money but you keep it all for yourself.’ She turns to Nechaev. ‘They pay him thousands of roubles to write books and he keeps it all for himself! It’s true! Pavel told me!’

  ‘What nonsense! Pavel knew nothing about money matters.’

  ‘It’s true! Pavel looked in your desk! He looked in your account books!’

  ‘Damn Pavel! Pavel doesn’t know how to read a ledger, he sees only what he wants to see! I have been carrying debts for years that you can’t even imagine!’ He turns to Nechaev. ‘This is a ridiculous conversation. I don’t have money to give you. I think you should leave at once.’

  But Nechaev is no longer in a hurry. He is even smiling. ‘Not a ridiculous conversation at all,’ he says. ‘On the contrary, most instructive. I have always had a suspicion about fathers, that their real sin, the one they never confess, is greed. They want everything for themselves. They won’t hand over the moneybags, even when it’s time. The moneybags are all that matter to them; they couldn’t care less what happens as a consequence. I didn’t believe what your stepson told me because I had heard you were a gambler and I thought gamblers didn’t care about money. But there is a second side to gambling, isn’t there? I should have seen that. You must be the kind who gambles because he is never satisfied, who is always greedy for more.’

  It is a ludicrous charge. He thinks of Anya in Dresden scrimping to keep the child fed and clothed. He thinks of his own turned collars, of the holes in his socks. He thinks of the letters he has written year after year, exercises in self-abasement every one of them, to Strakhov and Kraevsky and Lyubimov, to Stellovsky in particular, begging for advances. Dostoëvski l’avare – preposterous! He feels in his pocket and brings out his last roubles. ‘This,’ he exclaims, thrusting them beneath Nechaev’s nose, ‘this is all I have!’

  Nechaev regards the out-thrust hand coolly, then in a single swooping movement snatches the money, all save a coin that falls and rolls under the bed. Matryona dives after it.

  He tries to take his money back, even tussles with the younger man. But Nechaev holds him off easily, in the same movement spiriting the money into his pocket. ‘Wait . . . wait . . . wait,’ Nechaev murmurs. ‘In your heart, Fyodor Mikhailovich, in your heart, for your son’s sake, I know you want to give it to me.’ And he takes a step back, smoothing the suit as if to show off its splendour.

  What a poseur! What a hypocrite! The People’s Vengeance indeed! Yet he cannot deny that a certain gaiety is creeping into his own heart, a gaiety he recognizes, the gaiety of the spendthrift husband. Of course they are something to be ashamed of, these reckless bouts of his. Of course, when he comes home stripped bare and confesses to his wife and bows his head and endures her reproaches and vows he will never lapse again, he is sincere. But at the bottom of his heart, beneath the sincerity, where only God can see, he knows he is right and she is wrong. Money is there to be spent, and what form of spending is purer than gambling?

  Matryona is holding out her hand. In the palm is a single fifty-kopek coin. She seems unsure to whom it should go. He nudges the hand toward Nechaev. ‘Give it to him, he needs it.’ Nechaev pockets the coin.

  Good. Done. Now it is his turn to take up the position of penniless virtue, Nechaev’s turn to bow his head and be scolded. But what has he to say? Nothing, nothing at all.

  Nor does Nechaev care to wait. He is bundling up the blue dress. ‘Find somewhere to hide this,’ he instructs Matryona – ‘not in the apartment – somewhere else.’ He hands her the hat and wig too, tucks the cuffs of his trousers into his trim little boots, dons his coat, pats his head distractedly. ‘Wasted too much time,’ he mutters. ‘Have you –?’ He snatches a fur cap from the chair and makes for the door. Then he remembers something and turns back. ‘You are an interesting man, Fyodor Mikhailovich. If you had a daughter of the right age I wouldn’t mind marrying her. She would be an exceptional girl, I am sure. But as for your stepson, he was another story, not like you at all. I’m not sure I would have known what to do with him. He didn’t have – you know – what it takes. That’s my opinion, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘And what does it take?’

  ‘He was a bit too much of a saint. You are right to burn candles for him.’

  While he speaks, he has been idly waving a hand over the candle, making the flame dance. Now he puts a finger directly into the flame and holds it there. The seconds pass: one, two, three, four, five. The look on his face does not change. He could be in a trance.

  He removes his hand. ‘That’s what he didn’t have. Bit of a sissy, in fact.’

  He puts an arm around Matryona, gives her a hug. She responds without reserve, pressing her blonde head against his breast, returning his embrace.

  ‘Wachsam, wachsam!’ whispers Nechaev meaningfully, and, over her head, wags the burned finger at him. Then he is gone.

  It takes a moment to make sense of the strange syllables. Even after he has recognized the word he fails to understand. V
igilant: vigilant about what?

  Matryona is at the window, craning down over the street. There are quick tears in her eyes, but she is too excited to be sad. ‘Will he be safe, do you think?’ she asks; and then, without waiting for an answer: ‘Shall I go with him? He can pretend he is blind and I am leading him.’ But it is just a passing idea.

  He stands close behind her. It is almost dark; snow is beginning to fall; soon her mother will be home.

  ‘Do you like him?’ he asks.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘He leads a busy life, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Mm.’

  She barely hears him. What an unequal contest! How can he compete with these young men who come from nowhere and vanish into nowhere breathing adventure and mystery? Busy lives indeed: she is the one who should be wachsam.

  ‘Why do you like him so much, Matryosha?’

  ‘Because he is Pavel Alexandrovich’s best friend.’

  ‘Is that true?’ he objects mildly. ‘I think I am Pavel Alexandrovich’s best friend. I will go on being his friend when everyone else has forgotten him. I am his friend for life.’

  She turns away from the window and regards him oddly, on the point of saying something. But what? ‘You are only Pavel Alexandrovich’s stepfather’? Or something quite different: ‘Do not use that voice when you speak to me’?

  Pushing the hair away from her face in what he has come to recognize as a gesture of embarrassment, she tries to duck under his arm. He stops her bodily, barring her way. ‘I have to . . .’ she whispers – ‘I have to hide the clothes.’

  He gives her a moment longer to feel her powerlessness. Then he stands aside. ‘Throw them down the privy,’ he says. ‘No one will look there.’

  She wrinkles her nose. ‘Down?’ she says. ‘In . . .?’

  ‘Yes, do as I say. Or give them to me and go back to bed. I’ll do it for you.’

  For Nechaev, no. But for you.

  He wraps the clothes in a towel and steals downstairs to the privy. But then he has second thoughts. Clothes among the human filth: what if he is underestimating the nightsoil collectors?

  He notices the concierge peering at him from his lodge and turns purposefully toward the street. Then he realizes he has come without his coat. Climbing the stairs again, he is all at once face to face with Amalia Karlovna, the old woman from the first floor. She holds out a plate of cinnamon cakes as if to welcome him. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she says ceremoniously. He mutters a greeting and brushes past.

  What is he searching for? For a hole, a crevice, into which the bundle that is so suddenly and obstinately his can disappear and be forgotten. Without cause or reason, he has become like a girl with a stillborn baby, or a murderer with a bloody axe. Anger against Nechaev rises in him again. Why am I risking myself for you, he wants to cry, you who are nothing to me? But too late, it seems. At the instant he accepted the bundle from Matryona’s hands, a shift took place; there is no way back to before.

  At the end of the corridor, where one of the rooms stands empty, lies a heap of plaster and rubble. He scratches at it halfheartedly with the toe of his boot. A workman stops his trowelling and, through the open door, regards him mistrustfully.

  At least there is no Ivanov to follow him around. But perhaps Ivanov has been replaced by now. Who would the new spy be? Is this very workman paid to keep an eye on him? Is the concierge?

  He stuffs the bundle under his jacket and makes for the street again. The wind is like a wall of ice. At the first corner he turns, then turns again. He is in the same blind alley where he found the dog. There is no dog today. Did the dog die the night he abandoned it?

  He sets the bundle down in a corner. The curls, pinned to the hat, flap in the wind, both comical and sinister. Where did Nechaev get the curls – from one of his sisters? How many little sisters does he have, all itching to snip off their maiden locks for him?

  Removing the pins, he tries in vain to tear the hat in two, then crumples it and stuffs it up the drainpipe to which the dog had been tied. He tries to do the same with the dress, but the pipe is too narrow.

  He can feel eyes boring into his back. He turns. From a second-floor window two children are staring down at him, and behind them a shadowy third person, taller.

  He tries to pull the hat out of the pipe but cannot reach it. He curses his stupidity. With the pipe blocked, the gutter will overflow. Someone will investigate, and the hat will be found. Who would push a hat up a pipe – who but a guilty soul?

  He remembers Ivanov again – Ivanov, called Ivanov so often that the name has settled on him like a hat. Ivanov was murdered. But Ivanov was not wearing a hat, or not a woman’s hat. So the hat cannot be traced to Ivanov. On the other hand, might it not be Ivanov’s murderer’s hat? How easy for a woman to murder a man: lure him down an alley, accept his embrace against a wall, and then, at the climax of the act, search his ribs and sink a hatpin into his heart – a hatpin, that leaves no blood and only a pinprick of a wound.

  He goes down on his knees in the corner where he tossed the hatpins, but it is too dark to find them. He needs a candle. But what candle would stay alive in this wind?

  He is so tired that he finds it hard to get to his feet. Is he sick? Has he picked up something from Matryona? Or is another fit on its way? Is that what it portends, this utter exhaustion?

  On all fours, raising his head, sniffing the air like a wild animal, he tries to concentrate his attention on the horizon inside himself. But if what is taking him over is a fit, it is taking over his senses too. His senses are as dull as his hands.

  14

  The police

  He has left his key behind, so has to knock at the door. Anna Sergeyevna opens it and stares in surprise. ‘Have you missed your train?’ she asks. Then she takes in his wild appearance – the shaking hands, the moisture dripping from his beard. ‘Is something wrong? Are you ill?’

  ‘Not ill, no. I have put off my departure. I will explain everything later.’

  There is someone else in the room, at Matryona’s bedside: a doctor evidently, young, cleanshaven in the German fashion. In his hand he has the brown bottle from the pharmacy, which he sniffs, then corks disapprovingly. He snaps his bag shut, draws the curtain to across the alcove. ‘I was saying that your daughter has an inflammation of the bronchi,’ he says, addressing him. ‘Her lungs are sound. There is also –’

  He interrupts. ‘Not my daughter. I am only a lodger here.’

  With an impatient shrug the doctor turns back to Anna Sergeyevna. ‘There is also – I cannot neglect to say this – a certain hysterical element present.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that as long as she is in her present excited state we cannot expect her to recover properly. Her excitement is part of what is wrong with her. She must be calmed down. Once that has been achieved, she can be back in school within days. She is physically healthy, there is nothing wrong with her constitution. So as a treatment I recommend quiet above all, peace and quiet. She should stay in bed and take only light meals. Avoid giving her milk in any of its forms. I am leaving behind an embrocation for her chest and a sleeping-draught for use as required, as a calmative. Give her only a child’s dose, mind you – half a teaspoon.’

  As soon as the doctor has left he tries to explain himself. But Anna Sergeyevna is in no mood to listen. ‘Matryosha says you have been shouting at her!’ she interrupts him in a tense whisper. ‘I won’t have that!’

  ‘It’s not true! I have never shouted at her!’ Despite the whispering he is sure that Matryona, behind the curtain, overhears them and is gloating. He takes Anna Sergeyevna by the arm, draws her into his room, closes the door. ‘You heard what the doctor said – she is overexcited. Surely you cannot believe every word she says in that state. Has she told you the entire story of what happened here this morning?’

  ‘She says a friend of Pavel’s called and you were very rude to him. Is that what you are referring to?’

  ‘Yes
–’

  ‘Then let me finish. What goes on between you and Pavel’s friends is none of my business. But you also lost your temper with Matryosha and were rough with her. That I won’t stand for.’

  ‘The friend she refers to is Nechaev, Nechaev himself, no one else. Did she mention that? Nechaev, a fugitive from justice, was here today, in your apartment. Can you blame me for being cross with her for letting him in and then taking sides with him – that actor, that hypocrite – against me?’

  ‘Nevertheless, you have no right to lose your temper with her! How is she to know that Nechaev is a bad person? How am I to know? You say he is an actor. What about you? What about your own behaviour? Do you act from the heart all the time? I don’t think so.’

  ‘You can’t mean that. I do act from the heart. Once upon a time I may not have, but now I do – now above all. That is the truth.’

  ‘Now? Why all of a sudden now? Why should I believe you? Why should you believe yourself?’

  ‘Because I do not want Pavel to be ashamed of me.’

  ‘Pavel? Pavel has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I don’t want Pavel to be ashamed of his father, now that he sees everything. That is what has changed: there is a measure to all things now, including the truth, and that measure is Pavel. As for losing my temper with Matryona, I am sorry, I regret it and will apologize to her. As you must know, however’ – he spreads his arms wide – ‘Matryona does not like me.’

  ‘She does not understand what you are doing here, that is all. She understood why Pavel should be living with us – we have had students before – but an older lodger is not the same thing. And I am beginning to find it difficult too. I am not trying to eject you, Fyodor Mikhailovich, but I must admit, when you announced you were leaving today, I was relieved. For four years Matryona and I have lived a very quiet, even life together. Our lodgers have never been allowed to disturb that. Now, ever since Pavel died, there has been nothing but turmoil. It is not good for a child. Matryona would not be sick today if the atmosphere at home were not so unpredictable. What the doctor said is true: she is excited, and excitement makes a child vulnerable.’