Master of Petersburg

by J. M. Coetzee

  As he says these words, he seems to realize he has gone too far. Lamely he corrects himself. ‘Your anger and your grief, I mean. So that he will not have died for nothing.’

  Light a flame: it is too much! He turns to go. But Nechaev grips him, holds him back. ‘You can’t leave yet!’ he says through gritted teeth. ‘How can you abandon Russia and return to a contemptible bourgeois existence? How can you ignore a spectacle like this’ – he waves a hand over the cellar – ‘a spectacle that can be multiplied a thousandfold, a millionfold across this country? What has become of you? Is there no spark left in you? Don’t you see what is before your eyes?’

  He turns and looks across the damp cellar-room. What does he see? Three cold, famished children waiting for the angel of death. ‘I see as well as you do,’ he says. ‘Better.’

  ‘No! You think you see but you don’t! Seeing is not just a matter of the eyes, it is a matter of correct understanding. All you see are the miserable material circumstances of this cellar, in which not even a rat or a cockroach should be condemned to live. You see the pathos of three starving children; if you wait, you will see their mother too, who to bring home a crust of bread has to sell herself on the streets. You see how the poorest of our black poor of Petersburg have to live. But that is not seeing, that is only detail! You fail to recognize the forces that determine the lives to which these people are condemned! Forces: that is what you are blind to!’

  With a finger he traces a line from the floor at his feet (he bends to touch the floor; his fingertip comes away wet) out through the dim window into the heavens.

  ‘The lines end here, but where do you think they begin? They begin in the ministries and the exchequers and the stock exchanges and the merchant banks. They begin in the chancelleries of Europe. The lines of force begin there and radiate out in every direction and end in cellars like this, in these poor underground lives. If you wrote that you would truly awaken the world. But of course’ – he gives a bitter laugh – ‘if you wrote that you would not be allowed to publish. They will let you write stories of the mute sufferings of the poor to your heart’s content, and applaud you for them, but as for the real truth, they would never let you publish it! That is why I am offering you the press. Make a start! Tell them about your stepson and why he was sacrificed.’

  Sacrificed. Perhaps his mind has been wandering, perhaps he is just tired, but he does not understand how or for whom Pavel was sacrificed. Nor is he moved by this vehemence about lines. And he is in no mood to be harangued. ‘I see what I see,’ he says coldly. ‘I don’t see any lines.’

  ‘Then you might as well still be blindfolded! Must I give you a lesson? You are appalled by the hideous face of hunger and sickness and poverty. But hunger and sickness and poverty are not the enemy. They are only ways in which real forces manifest themselves in the world. Hunger is not a force – it is a medium, as water is a medium. The poor live in their hunger as fish live in water. The real forces have their origin in the centres of power, in the collusion of interests that takes place there. You told me you were frightened that your name might be on our lists. I assure you again, I swear to you, it is not. Our lists name only the spiders and bloodsuckers who sit at the centres of the webs. Once the spiders and their webs are destroyed, children like these will be freed. All over Russia children will be able to emerge from their cellars. There will be food and clothes and housing, proper housing, for everyone. And there will be work to do – so much work! The first work will be to raze the banks to the ground, and the stock exchanges, and the government ministries, raze them so thoroughly that they will never be rebuilt.’

  The children, who at first had seemed to be listening, have lost interest. The smallest has slid sideways and fallen asleep in his sister’s lap. The sister younger than Matryona, but also, it strikes him, duller, more acquiescent. Has she already begun to say yes to men?

  Something about their silent watching seems odd too. Nechaev has not spoken to them since they arrived, or given any sign of so much as knowing their names. Specimens of urban poverty – are they more to him than that? Must I give you a lesson? He remembers Princess Obolenskaya’s malicious remark: that young Nechaev had wanted to be a schoolmaster, but had failed the qualifying examinations, and had then turned to revolution in revenge against his examiners. Is Nechaev just another pedagogue heart, like his mentor Jean-Jacques?

  And the lines. He is still not sure what Nechaev means by lines. He does not need to be told that bankers hoard money, that covetousness makes the heart shrivel. But Nechaev is insisting on something else. What? Strings of numbers passing through the window-paper and striking these children in their empty bellies?

  His head is spinning again. Give you a lesson. He draws a deep breath. ‘Do you have five roubles?’ he asks.

  Nechaev feels distractedly in his pocket.

  ‘This little girl’ – he nods toward the child – ‘If you were to give her a good wash and cut her hair and put a new dress on her, I could direct you to an establishment where tonight, this very night, she could earn you a hundred roubles on your five-rouble investment. And if you fed her properly and kept her clean and didn’t overuse her or allow her to get sick, she could go on earning you five roubles a night for another five years at least. Easily.’

  ‘What –?’

  ‘Hear me out. There are enough children in the cellars of Petersburg, and enough gentlemen on the streets with money in their pockets and a taste for young flesh, to bring prosperity to all the poor folk of the city. All that is required is a cool head. On the backs of their children the cellar-folk could be raised into the light of day.’

  ‘What is the point of this depraved parable?’

  ‘I don’t speak in parables. Like you, I am outraged by the suffering of innocents. I do not mistake you, Sergei Gennadevich. For a long while I was not prepared to believe that my son could have been a follower of yours. Now I begin to understand what he saw in you. You were born with the spirit of justice in you, and it is not yet stifled. I am sure that if this child, this little girl here, were to be enticed into an alley by one of our Petersburg libertines, and if you were to come upon them – if you had been keeping a guardian eye on her, for instance – you would not hesitate to plunge a knife into the man’s back to save her. Or, if it is too late to save her, at least to revenge her.

  ‘This is not a parable: it is a story about children and their uses. With the aid of a child the streets of Petersburg could be rid of a bloodsucker, perhaps even a bloodsucking banker. And in due course the dead man’s wife and children might be turned out on the streets too, thus bringing about a further measure of levelling.’

  ‘You swine!’

  ‘No, you misplace me in the story. I am not the swine, I am not the man who is stuck like a swine in the alley. I say again: not a parable but a story. Stories can be about other people: you are not obliged to find a place for yourself in them. But if the spirit of justice does not permit you to ignore the suffering of innocent children, even in stories, there are many other ways of punishing the spiders who prey upon them. One does not have to be a child, for instance, to lead a man into a dark alley. One need only shave off one’s beard and powder one’s face and put on a dress and be careful to hug the shadows.’

  Now Nechaev smiles, or rather bares his teeth. ‘This is all out of one of your books! It is all part of your perverse make-believe!’

  ‘Perhaps. But I still have a question to ask. If you are free today to dress up and be whom you wish and follow the promptings of the spirit of justice (a spirit still, I believe, resident in your heart), what will be the state of affairs tomorrow, once the tempest of the people’s vengeance has done its work and everyone has been levelled? Will you still be free to be whom you wish? Will each of us be free to be whom we wish, at last?’

  ‘There will be no more need for that.’

  ‘No need for dressing up? Not even on carnival days?’

  ‘This is a stupid conversation. There wi
ll be no need for carnival days.’

  ‘No carnival days? No holidays?’

  ‘There will be days of recreation. People will have a choice of resting or going into the country to help with the harvest.’

  ‘Yes, I have heard of harvest days. No doubt we will sing while we work. But I return to my question. What of me, what of my place in your utopia? Shall I still be allowed to dress up like a woman, if the spirit takes me, or like a young dandy in a white suit, or will I be allowed only one name, one address, one age, one parentage?’

  ‘That is not for me to say. The people will give you their answer. The people will tell you what you are allowed.’

  ‘But what do you say, Sergei Gennadevich? For if you are not one of the people, who are you and what future do you have? Shall I still have the freedom to pass myself off as whomever I wish – as a young man, for instance, who spends his idle hours dictating lists of people he doesn’t like and inventing bloodthirsty punishments for them, or as the storekeeper whose job it is to order sawdust for the basket under the guillotine? Shall I be as free as that? Or should I bear in mind what I heard you say in Geneva: that we have had enough Copernicuses, that if another Copernicus were to arise he should have his eyes gouged out?’

  ‘You are raving. You are not Copernicus.’

  ‘You are right, I am not Copernicus. When I look up into the heavens I see only the stars that watched over us when we were born and will watch over us when we die, no matter how we disguise ourselves, no matter how deep the cellars in which we hide.’

  ‘I am not hiding, I have simply merged with the invisible people of this city and with the conditions that produced me. Except that you cannot see those conditions.’

  ‘May I be frank? You are speaking nonsense. I may not see lines and numbers in the sky, but I am not blind.’

  ‘None so blind as he who will not see! You see children starving in a cellar; you refuse to see what determines the conditions of those children’s lives. How can you call that seeing? But of course, you and the people who pay you have a stake in starving, hollow-eyed children. That is what you and they like to read about: soulful, hollow-eyed children with piping little voices. Well, let me tell you the truth about hunger. When they look at you, do you know what these hollow-eyed children see? Ask them! I’ll tell you. They see fat cheeks and a juicy tongue. These innocents would fall upon you like rats and chew you up if they did not know you were strong enough to beat them off. But you prefer not to recognize that. You prefer to see three little angels on a brief visit to earth.

  ‘The more I talk to you, Fyodor Mikhailovich, the less I understand how you could have written about Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov was at least alive, until he came down with the fever or whatever it was. Do you know how you strike me now? As an old, blinkered horse going round and round in a circle, rolling out the same old story day after day. What right have you to talk to me about dressing up? You couldn’t dress up to save your life. You are nothing but a dry old man, a dry old workhorse near the end of its life. Isn’t it time you tried to share the existence of the oppressed instead of sitting at home and writing about them and counting your money? But I see you are beginning to fidget. I suppose you want to hurry home and get this cellar and these children down in a notebook before the memory fades. You sicken me!’

  He pauses, comes closer, peers. ‘Do I go too far, Fyodor Mikhailovich?’ he continues more softly. ‘Am I overstepping the bounds of decency, uncovering what should not be uncovered – that we have seen through you, all of us, your stepson too? Why so silent? Has the knife come too close to the bone?’ He brings the scarf out of his pocket. ‘Shall we put on the blindfold again?’

  Close to the bone? Yes, perhaps. Not the accusation itself but the voice he hears behind it: Pavel’s. Pavel complaining to his friend, and his friend storing up the words like poison.

  Dispiritedly he pushes the scarf aside. ‘Why are you trying to provoke me?’ he says. ‘You didn’t bring me here to show me your press, or to show me starving children. Those are just pretexts. What do you really want from me? Do you want to put me in such a rage that I will stamp off and betray you to the police? Why haven’t you quit Petersburg? Instead of making your escape like a sensible person, you behave like Jesus outside Jerusalem, waiting for the arrival of an ass to carry you into the hands of your persecutors. Are you hoping I will play the part of the ass? You fancy yourself the prince in hiding, the prince and the martyr, waiting to be called. You want to steal Easter from Jesus. This is the second time you tempt me, and I am not tempted.’

  ‘Stop changing the subject! We are talking about Russia, not about Jesus. And stop trying to put the blame on me. If you betray me it will only be because you hate me.’

  ‘I don’t hate you. I have no cause.’

  ‘Yes you do! You want to strike back at me because I open people’s eyes to what you are really like, you and your generation.’

  ‘And what are we really like, I and my generation?’

  ‘I will tell you. Your day is over. Only, instead of passing quietly from the scene, you want to drag the whole world down with you. You resent it that the reins are passing into the hands of younger and stronger men who are going to make a better world. That is what you are really like. And don’t tell me the story that you were a revolutionary who went to Siberia for your beliefs. I know for a fact that even in Siberia you were treated like one of the gentry. You didn’t share the sufferings of the people at all, it was just a sham. You old men make me sick! The day I get to be thirty-five, I’ll put a bullet through my brains, I swear!’

  These last words come out with such petulant force that he cannot hide a smile; Nechaev himself colours in confusion.

  ‘I hope you have a chance to be a father before then, so that you will know what it is like to drink from this cup.’

  ‘I will never be a father,’ mutters Nechaev.

  ‘How do you know? You can’t be sure. All a man can do is sow the seed; after that it has a life of its own.’

  Nechaev shakes his head decisively. What does he mean? That he does not sow his seed? That he is vowed to be a virgin like Jesus?

  ‘You can’t be sure,’ he repeats softly. ‘Seed becomes son, prince becomes king. When one day you sit on the throne (if you haven’t blown out your brains by then), and the land is full of princelings, hiding in cellars and attics, plotting against you, what will you do? Send out soldiers to chop off their heads?’

  Nechaev glowers. ‘You are trying to make me angry with your silly parables. I know about your own father, Pavel Isaev told me – what a petty tyrant he was, how everyone hated him, till his own peasants killed him. You think that because you and your father hated each other, the history of the world has to consist of nothing but fathers and sons at war with each other. You don’t-understand the meaning of revolution. Revolution is the end of everything old, including fathers and sons. It is the end of successions and dynasties. And it keeps renewing itself, if it is true revolution. With each generation the old revolution is overturned and history starts again. That is the new idea, the truly new idea. Year One. Carte blanche. When everything is reinvented, everything erased and reborn: law, morality, the family, everything. When all prisoners are set free, all crimes forgiven. The idea is so tremendous that you cannot understand it, you and your generation. Or rather, you understand it only too well, and want to stifle it in the cradle.’

  ‘And money? When you forgive the crimes, will you redistribute the money?’

  ‘We will do more than that. Every so often, when people least expect it, we will declare the existing money worthless and print fresh money. That was the mistake the French made – to allow the old money to go on circulating. The French did not have a true revolution because they did not have the courage to push it all the way through. They got rid of the aristocrats but they didn’t eliminate the old way of thinking. In our schools we will teach the people’s way of thinking, that has been repressed all this time. Everyone will
go to school again, even the professors. The peasants will be the teachers and the professors will be the students. In our schools we will make new men and new women. Everyone will be reborn with a new heart.’

  ‘And God? What will God think of that?’

  The young man gives a laugh of the purest exhilaration. ‘God? God will be envious.’

  ‘So you believe?’

  ‘Of course we believe! What would be the point otherwise? – one might as well set a torch to everything, turn the world to ash. No; we will go to God and stand before his throne and call him off. And he will come! He will have no choice, he will have to listen. Then we will all be together on the same footing at last.’

  ‘And the angels?’

  ‘The angels will stand around us in circles singing their hosannas. The angels will be in transports. They will be freed as well, to walk on the earth like common men.’

  ‘And the souls of the dead?’

  ‘You ask so many questions! The souls of the dead too, Fyodor Mikhailovich, if you like. We shall have the souls of the dead walking the earth again – Pavel Isaev too, if you like. There are no bounds to what can be done.’

  What a charlatan! Yet he no longer knows where the mastery lies – whether he is playing with Nechaev or Nechaev with him. All barriers seem to be crumbling at once: the barrier on tears, the barrier on laughter. If Anna Sergeyevna were here – the thought comes unbidden – he would be able to speak the words to her that have been lacking all this time.

  He takes a step forward and with what seems to him the strength of a giant folds Nechaev to his breast. Embracing the boy, trapping his arms at his sides, breathing in the sour smell of his carbuncular flesh, sobbing, laughing, he kisses him on the left cheek and on the right. Hip to hip, breast to breast, he stands locked against him.

  There is a clatter of footsteps on the stairs. Nechaev struggles free. ‘So they are here!’ he exclaims. His eyes gleam with triumph.

  He turns. In the doorway stands a woman dressed in black, with an incongruous little white hat. In the dim light, through his tears, it is hard to tell her age.