Master of Petersburg

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘That is a great deal to ask of an old woman, to look after a sick child. Particularly when she and Matryosha don’t get on. Why isn’t it enough to tell Matryosha not to open the door to strangers?’

  ‘Because you are not aware of the extent of Nechaev’s power over her.’

  She gets up. ‘I don’t like this,’ she says. ‘I don’t see why we need to discuss my daughter in the middle of the night.’

  The atmosphere between them is suddenly as icy as it has ever been.

  ‘Can’t I so much as mention her name without you getting irritable?’ he asks despairingly. ‘Do you think I would bring the matter up if I didn’t have her welfare at heart?’

  She makes no reply. The door opens and closes.

  19

  The fires

  The plunge from renewed intimacy to renewed estrangement leaves him baffled and gloomy. He veers between a longing to make his peace with this difficult, touchy woman and an exasperated urge to wash his hands not only of an unrewarding affair but of a city of mourning and intrigue with which he no longer feels a living connection.

  He is tumbling. Pavel! he whispers, trying to recover himself. But Pavel has let go his hand, Pavel will not save him.

  All morning he shuts himself up, sitting with his arms locked around his knees, his head bowed. He is not alone. But the presence he feels in the room is not that of his son. It is that of a thousand petty demons, swarming in the air like locusts let out of a jar.

  When at last he rouses himself, it is to take down the two pictures of Pavel, the daguerreotype he brought with him from Dresden and the sketch Matryona drew, to wrap them together face to face and pack them away.

  He goes out to make his daily report to the police. When he returns, Anna Sergeyevna is home, hours earlier than usual, and in a state of some agitation. ‘We had to close the shop,’ she says. ‘There have been battles going on all day between students and the police. In the Petrogradskaya district mainly, but on this side of the river too. All the businesses have closed – it’s too dangerous to be out on the streets. Yakovlev’s nephew was coming back from market in the cart and someone threw a cobblestone at him, for no reason at all. It hit him on the wrist; he is in great pain, he can’t move his fingers, he thinks a bone is broken. He says that working-men have begun to join in. And the students are setting fires again.’

  ‘Can we go and see?’ calls Matryona from her bed.

  ‘Of course not! It’s dangerous. Besides, there’s a bitterly cold wind.’

  She gives no sign of remembering what passed the night before.

  He goes out again, stops at a tea-house. In the newspapers there is nothing about battles in the streets. But there is an announcement that, because of ‘widespread indiscipline among the student body,’ the university is to be closed until further notice.

  It is after four o’clock. Despite the icy wind he walks eastward along the river. All the bridges are barred; gendarmes in sky-blue uniforms and plumed helmets stand on guard with fixed bayonets. On the far bank fires glow against the twilight.

  He follows the river till he is in sight of the first gutted and smouldering warehouses. It has begun to snow; the snowflakes turn to nothing the instant they touch the charred timbers.

  He does not expect Anna Sergeyevna to come to him again. But she does, and with as little explanation as before. Given that Matryona is in the next room, her lovemaking surprises him by its recklessness. Her cries and pantings are only half-stifled; they are not and have never been sounds of animal pleasure, he begins to realize, but a means she uses to work herself into an erotic trance.

  At first her intensity carries itself over to him. There is a long passage in which he again loses all sense of who he is, who she is. About them is an incandescent sphere of pleasure; inside the sphere they float like twins, gyrating slowly.

  He has never known a woman give herself so unreservedly to the erotic. Nevertheless, as she reaches a pitch of frenzy he begins to retreat from her. Something in her seems to be changing. Sensations that on their first night together were taking place deep within her body seem to be migrating toward the surface. She is, in fact, growing ‘electric’ in the manner of so many other women he has known.

  She has insisted that the candle on the dressing-table remain lit. As she approaches her climax her dark eyes search his face more and more intently, even when her eyelids tremble and she begins to shudder.

  At one point she whispers a word that he only half-catches. ‘What?’ he demands. But she only tosses her head from side to side and grits her teeth.

  Half-catches. Nevertheless he knows what it is: devil. It is a word he himself uses, though he cannot believe in the same sense as she. The devil: the instant at the onset of the climax when the soul is twisted out of the body and begins its downward spiral into oblivion. And, flinging her head from side to side, clenching her jaw, grunting, it is not hard to see her too as possessed by the devil.

  A second time, and with even more ferocity, she throws herself into coupling with him. But the well is dry, and soon they both know it. ‘I can’t!’ she gasps, and is still. Hands raised, palms open, she lies as if in surrender. ‘I can’t go on!’ Tears begin to roll down her cheeks.

  The candle burns brightly. He takes her limp body in his arms. The tears continue to stream and she does nothing to stop them.

  ‘What is wrong?’

  ‘I haven’t the strength to go on. I have done all I can, I am exhausted. Please leave us alone now.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Yes, we, us, both of us. We are suffocating under your weight. We can’t breathe.’

  ‘You should have said so earlier. I understood things quite differently.’

  ‘I am not blaming you. I have been trying to take everything upon myself, but I can’t any more. I have been on my feet all day, I got no sleep last night, I am exhausted.’

  ‘You think I have been using you?’

  ‘Not using me in that way. But you use me as a route to my child.’

  ‘To Matryona! What nonsense! You can’t believe that!’

  ‘It’s the truth, clear for anyone to see! You use me as a route to her, and I cannot bear it!’ She sits up in the bed, crosses her arms over her naked breasts, rocks back and forth miserably. ‘You are in the grip of something quite beyond me. You seem to be here but you are not really here. I was ready to help you because of . . .’ She heaves her shoulders helplessly. ‘But now I can’t any longer.’

  ‘Because of Pavel?’

  ‘Yes, because of Pavel, because of what you said. I was ready to try. But now it is costing me too much. It is wearing me down. I would never have gone so far if I weren’t afraid you would use Matryosha in the same way.’

  He raises a hand to her lips. ‘Keep your voice down. That is a terrible accusation to make. What has she been saying to you? I would not lay a finger on her, I swear.’

  ‘Swear by whom? By what? What do you believe in that you can swear by? Anyway, it has nothing to do with laying fingers, as you well know. And don’t tell me to be quiet.’ She tosses the bedclothes aside and searches for her gown. ‘I must be by myself or I will go mad.’

  An hour later, just as he is falling asleep, she is back in his bed, hot-skinned, gripping herself to him, winding her legs around his. ‘Don’t pay attention to what I said,’ she says. ‘There are times when I am not myself, you must get used to that.’

  He wakes up once more during the night. Though the curtains are drawn, the room is as bright as if under a full moon. He gets up and looks out of the window. Flames leap into the night sky less than a mile away. The fire across the river rages so hugely that he can swear he feels its heat.

  He returns to the bed and to Anna. This is how he and she are when Matryona finds them in the morning: her mother, wild-haired, fast asleep in the crook of his arm, snoring lightly; and he, in the act of opening his eyes on the grave child at the door.

  An apparition that could very well be a dream. But
he knows it is not. She sees all, she knows all.

  20

  Stavrogin

  A cloud of smoke hangs over the city. Ash falls from the sky; in places the very snow is grey.

  All morning he sits alone in the room. He knows now why he has not gone back to Yelagin Island. It is because he fears to see the soil tossed aside, the grave yawning, the body gone. A corpse improperly buried; buried now within him, in his breast, no longer weeping but hissing madness, whispering to him to fall.

  He is sick and he knows the name of his sickness. Nechaev, voice of the age, calls it vengefulness, but a truer name, less grand, would be resentment.

  There is a choice before him. He can cry out in the midst of this shameful fall, beat his arms like wings, call upon God or his wife to save him. Or he can give himself to it, refuse the chloroform of terror or unconsciousness, watch and listen instead for the moment which may or may not arrive – it is not in his power to force it – when from being a body plunging into darkness he shall become a body within whose core a plunge into darkness is taking place, a body which contains its own falling and its own darkness.

  If to anyone it is prescribed to live through the madness of our times, he told Anna Sergeyevna, it is to him. Not to emerge from the fall unscathed, but to achieve what his son did not: to wrestle with the whistling darkness, to absorb it, to make it his medium; to turn the falling into a flying, even if a flying as slow and old and clumsy as a turtle’s. To live where Pavel died. To live in Russia and hear the voices of Russia murmuring within him. To hold it all within him: Russia, Pavel, death.

  That is what he said. But was it the truth or just a boast? The answer does not matter, as long as he does not flinch. Nor does it matter that he speaks in figures, making his own sordid and contemptible infirmity into the emblematic sickness of the age. The madness is in him and he is in the madness; they think each other; what they call each other, whether madness or epilepsy or vengeance or the spirit of the age, is of no consequence. This is not a lodging-house of madness in which he is living, nor is Petersburg a city of madness. He is the mad one; and the one who admits he is the mad one is mad too. Nothing he says is true, nothing is false, nothing is to be trusted, nothing to be dismissed. There is nothing to hold to, nothing to do but fall.

  He unpacks the writing-case, sets out his materials. No longer a matter of listening for the lost child calling from the dark stream, no longer a matter of being faithful to Pavel when all have given him up. Not a matter of fidelity at all. On the contrary, a matter of betrayal – betrayal of love first of all, and then of Pavel and the mother and child and everyone else. Perversion: everything and everyone to be turned to another use, to be gripped to him and fall with him.

  He remembers Maximov’s assistant and the question he asked: ‘What kind of book do you write?’ He knows now the answer he should have given: ‘I write perversions of the truth. I choose the crooked road and take children into dark places. I follow the dance of the pen.’

  In the mirror on the dressing-table he catches a quick glimpse of himself hunched over the table. In the grey light, without his glasses, he could mistake himself for a stranger; the dark beard could be a veil or a curtain of bees.

  He moves the chair so as not to face the mirror. But the sense of someone in the room besides himself persists: if not of a full person then of a stick-figure, a scarecrow draped in an old suit, with a stuffed sugar-sack for a head and a kerchief across the mouth.

  He is distracted, and irritated with himself for being distracted. The very spirit of irritation keeps the scarecrow perversely alive; its mute indifference to his irritation doubles his irritation.

  He paces around the room, changes the position of the table a second time. He bends towards the mirror, examines his face, examines the very pores of his skin. He cannot write, he cannot think.

  He cannot think, therefore what? He has not forgotten the thief in the night. If he is to be saved, it will be by the thief in the night, for whom he must unwaveringly be on watch. Yet the thief will not come till the householder has forgotten him and fallen asleep. The householder may not watch and wake without cease, otherwise the parable will not be fulfilled. The householder must sleep; and if he must sleep, how can God condemn his sleeping? God must save him, God has no other way. Yet to trap God thus in a net of reason is a provocation and a blasphemy.

  He is in the old labyrinth. It is the story of his gambling in another guise. He gambles because God does not speak. He gambles to make God speak. But to make God speak in the turn of a card is blasphemy. Only when God is silent does God speak. When God seems to speak God does not speak.

  For hours he sits at the table. The pen does not move. Intermittently the stick-figure returns, the crumpled, old-man travesty of himself. He is blocked, he is in prison.

  Therefore? Therefore what?

  He closes his eyes, makes himself confront the figure, makes the image grow clearer. Across the face there is still a veil, which he seems powerless to remove. Only the figure itself can do that; and it will not do so before it is asked. To ask, he must know its name. What is the name? Is it Ivanov? Is this Ivanov come back, Ivanov the obscure, the forgotten? What was Ivanov’s true name? Or is it Pavel? Who was the lodger who had this room before him? Who was P. A. I., owner of the suitcase? Did the P. stand for Pavel? Was Pavel Pavel’s true name? If Pavel is called by a false name, will he ever come?

  Once Pavel was the lost one. Now he himself is lost, so lost that he does not even know how to call for help.

  If he let the pen fall, would the figure across the table take it up and write?

  He thinks of what Anna Sergeyevna said: You are in mourning for yourself.

  The tears that flow down his cheeks are of the utmost clarity, almost saltless to the taste. If there is a purging going on, what is being purged is strangely pure.

  Ultimately it will not be given him to bring the dead boy back to life. Ultimately, if he wants to meet him, he will have to meet him in death.

  There is the suitcase. There is the white suit. Somewhere the white suit still exists. Is there a way, starting at the feet, of building up the body within the suit till at last the face is revealed, even if it is the ox-face of Baal?

  The head of the figure across the table is slightly too large, larger than a human head ought to be. In fact, in all its proportions there is something subtly wrong with the figure, something excessive.

  He wonders whether he is not touched with a fever himself. A pity he cannot call in Matryona from next door to feel his brow.

  From the figure he feels nothing, nothing at all. Or rather, he feels around it a field of indifference tremendous in its force, like a cloak of darkness. Is that why he cannot find the name – not because the name is hidden but because the figure is indifferent to all names, all words, anything that might be said about it?

  The force is so strong that he feels it pressing out upon him, wave upon silent wave.

  The third testing. His words to Anna Sergeyevna: I was sent to live a Russian life. Is this how Russia manifests itself – in this force, this darkness, this indifference to names?

  Or is the name that is dark to him the name of the other boy, the one he repudiates: Nechaev? Is that what he must learn: that in God’s eyes there is no difference between the two of them, Pavel Isaev and Sergei Nechaev, sparrows of equal weight? Is he going to have to give up his last faith in Pavel’s innocence and acknowledge him in truth as Nechaev’s comrade and follower, a restless young man who responded without reserve to all that Nechaev offered: not just the adventure of conspiracy but the soul-inflating ecstasies of death-dealing too? As Nechaev hates the fathers and makes implacable war on them, so must Pavel be allowed to follow him?

  As he asks the question, as he allows Pavel his first taste of hatred and bloodlust, he feels something stir in himself too: the beginnings of a fury that answers Pavel, answers Nechaev, answers all of them. Fathers and sons: foes: foes to the death.

  S
o he sits paralysed. Either Pavel remains within him, a child walled up in the crypt of his grief, weeping without cease, or he lets Pavel loose in all his rage against the rule of the fathers. Lets his own rage loose too, like a genie from a bottle, against the impiety and thanklessness of the sons.

  This is all he can see: a choice that is no choice. He cannot think, he cannot write, he cannot mourn except to and for himself. Until Pavel, the true Pavel, visits him unevoked and of his free will, he is a prisoner in his own breast. And there is no certainty that Pavel has not already come in the night, already spoken.

  To Pavel it is given to speak once only. Nonetheless, he cannot accept that he will not be forgiven for having been deaf or asleep or stupid when the word was spoken. What he listens for, therefore, is Pavel’s second word. He believes absolutely that he does not deserve a second word, that there will be no second word. But he believes absolutely that a second word will come.

  He knows he is in peril of gambling on the second chance. As soon as he lays his stake on the second chance, he will have lost. He must do what he cannot do: resign himself to what will come, speech or silence.

  He fears that Pavel has spoken. He believes that Pavel will speak. Both. Chalk and cheese.

  This is the spirit in which he sits at Pavel’s table, his eyes fixed on the phantasm opposite him whose attention is no less implacable than his own, whom it has been given to him to bring into being.

  Not Nechaev – he knows that now. Greater than Nechaev. Not Pavel either. Perhaps Pavel as he might have been one day, grown wholly beyond boyhood to become the kind of cold-faced, handsome man whom no love can touch, even the adoration of a girl-child who will do anything for him.

  It is a version that disturbs him. It is not the truth, or not yet the truth. But from this vision of Pavel grown beyond childhood and beyond love – grown not in a human manner but in the manner of an insect that changes shape entirely at each stage of its evolution – he feels a chill coming. Confronting it is like descending into the waters of the Nile and coming face to face with something huge and cold and grey that may once have been born of woman but with the passing of ages has retreated into stone, that does not belong in his world, that will baffle and overwhelm all his powers of conception.