The Master of Petersburg

  His mother the widow. A widow’s son. Widowson.

  What he has been thrusting away, what comes back insistently as he talks, is what he can only call a troll, a misshapen little creature, red-haired, red-bearded, no taller than a child of three or four. Pavel is still running and shouting in the snow, his knees knocking together coltishly. As for the troll, he stands to one side looking on. He is wearing a rust-coloured jerkin open at the neck; he (or it) does not seem to feel the cold.

  ‘ . . . difficult for a child . . .’ She is saying something he can only half attend to. Who is this troll-creature? He peers more closely into the face. With a shock it comes home to him. The cratered skin, the scars swelling hard and livid in the cold, the thin beard growing out of the pock-marks – it is Nechaev again, Nechaev grown small, Nechaev in Siberia haunting the beginnings of his son! What does the vision mean? He groans softly to himself, and at once Anna Sergeyevna cuts herself short. ‘I am sorry,’ he apologizes. But he has offended her. ‘I am sure you have packing to do,’ she says, and, over his apologies, departs.

  12

  Isaev

  He is conducted into the same office as before. But the official behind the desk is not Maximov. Without introducing himself this man gestures towards a chair. ‘Your name?’ he says.

  He gives his name. ‘I thought I was going to see Councillor Maximov.’

  ‘We will come to that. Occupation?’

  ‘Writer.’

  ‘Writer? What kind of writer?’

  ‘I write books.’

  ‘What kind of books?’

  ‘Stories. Story-books.’

  ‘For children?’

  ‘No, not particularly for children. But I would hope that children can read them.’

  ‘Nothing indecent?’

  Nothing indecent? He ponders. ‘Nothing that could offend a child,’ he responds at last.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But the heart has its dark places,’ he adds reluctantly. ‘One does not always know.’

  For the first time the man raises his eyes from his papers. ‘What do you mean by that?’ He is younger than Maximov. Maximov’s assistant?

  ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

  The man lays down his pen. ‘Let us get to the subject of the deceased Ivanov. You were acquainted with Ivanov?’

  ‘I don’t understand. I thought I was summoned here in connection with my son’s papers.’

  ‘All in good time. Ivanov. When did you first have contact with him?’

  ‘I first spoke to him about a week ago. He was loitering at the door of the house where I am at present staying.’

  ‘Sixty-three Svechnoi Street.’

  ‘Sixty-three Svechnoi Street. It was particularly cold, and I offered him shelter. He spent the night in my room. The next day I heard there had been a murder and he was suspected. Only later –’

  ‘Ivanov was suspected? Suspected of murder? Do I understand you thought Ivanov was a murderer? Why did you think so?’

  ‘Please allow me to finish! There was a rumour to that effect going around the building, or else the child who repeated the rumour to me misunderstood everything, I don’t know which. Does it matter, when the fact is the man is dead? I was surprised and appalled that someone like that should have been killed. He was quite harmless.’

  ‘But he was not what he seemed to be, was he?’

  ‘Do you mean a beggar?’

  ‘He was not a beggar, was he?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, no, he wasn’t, but in another manner of speaking, yes, he was.’

  ‘You are not being clear. Are you claiming that you were unaware of Ivanov’s responsibilities? Is that why you were surprised?’

  ‘I was surprised that anyone should have put his immortal soul in peril by killing a harmless nonentity.’

  The official regards him sardonically. ‘A nonentity – is that your Christian word on him?’

  At this moment Maximov himself enters in a great hurry. Under his arm is a pile of folders tied with pink ribbons. He drops these on the desk, takes out a handkerchief, and wipes his brow. ‘So hot in here!’ he murmurs; and then, to his colleague: ‘Thank you. You have finished?’

  Without a word the man gathers up his papers and leaves. Sighing, mopping his face, Maximov takes over the chair. ‘So sorry, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Now: the matter of your stepson’s papers. I am afraid we are going to have to keep back one item, namely the list of people to be, as our friends say, liquidated, which – I am sure you will agree – should not go into circulation, since it will only cause alarm. Besides, it will in due course form part of the case against Nechaev. As for the rest of the papers, they are yours, we have finished with them, we have, so to speak, extracted their honey from them.

  ‘However, before I pass them over to you for good, there is one thing further I would like to say, if you will do me the honour of hearing me out.

  ‘If I thought of myself merely as a functionary whose path of duty you have happened to cross, I would return these papers to you without more ado. But in the present case I am not a mere functionary. I am also, if you will permit me to use the word, a well-wisher, someone with your best interests at heart. And as such I have a severe reservation about handing them over. Let me state that reservation. It is that painful discoveries lie in store for you – painful and unnecessary discoveries. If it were possible that you could bring yourself to accept my humble guidance, I could indicate particular pages it would be better for you not to dwell on. But of course, knowing you as I do, that is, in the way one knows a writer from his books, that is to say, in an intimate yet limited way, I expect that my efforts would have only the contrary effect – of whetting your curiosity. Therefore let me say only the following: do not blame me for having read these papers – that is after all the responsibility laid on me by the Crown – and do not be angry with me for having correctly foreseen (if indeed I have) your response to them. Unless there is a surprising turn of events, you and I will have no further dealings. There is no reason why you should not tell yourself that I have ceased to exist, in the same way that a character in a book can be said to cease to exist as soon as the book is closed. For my part, you may be assured my lips are sealed. No one will hear a word from me about this sad episode.’

  So saying, Maximov, using only the middle finger of his right hand, prods the folder across the desk, the surprisingly thick folder that holds Pavel’s papers.

  He rises, takes the folder, makes his bow, and is preparing to leave when Maximov speaks again. ‘If I may detain you a moment longer in a somewhat different regard: you have not by any chance had contact with the Nechaev gang here in Petersburg, have you?’

  Ivanov! Nechaev! So that is the reason why he has been called in! Pavel, the papers, Maximov’s dance of compunctiousness – nothing but a side-issue, a lure!

  ‘I do not see the bearing of your question,’ he replies stiffly. ‘I do not see by what right you ask or expect me to answer.’

  ‘By no right at all! Set your mind at rest – you are accused of nothing. Simply a question. As for its bearing, I would not have thought that so difficult to work out. Having discussed your stepson with me, I reasoned, perhaps you would now find it easier to discuss Nechaev. For in our conversation the other day it seemed to me that what you chose to say sometimes had a double meaning. A word had another word hidden beneath it, so to speak. What do you think? Was I wrong?’

  ‘Which words? What lay beneath them?’

  ‘That is for you to say.’

  ‘You are wrong. I do not speak in riddles. Every word I use means what it says. Pavel is Pavel, not Nechaev.’

  With that he turns and takes his departure; nor does Maximov call him back.

  Through the winding streets of the Moskovskaya quarter he bears the folder to Svechnoi Street, to No. 63, up the stairs to the third floor, to his room, and closes the door.

  He unties the ribbon. His heart is hammering unpleasantly. That there is something unsavour
y in his haste he cannot deny. It is as if he has been conveyed back to boyhood, to the long, sweaty afternoons in his friend Albert’s bedroom poring over books filched from Albert’s uncle’s shelves. The same terror of being caught red-handed (a terror delicious in itself), the same passionate engrossment.

  He remembers Albert showing him two flies in the act of copulating, the male riding on the female’s back. Albert held the flies in his cupped hand. ‘Watch,’ he said. He pinched one of the male’s wings between his fingertips and tugged lightly. The wing came off. The fly paid no attention. He tore off the second wing. The fly, with its strange, bald back, went on with its business. With an expression of distaste, Albert flung the couple to the ground and crushed it.

  He could imagine staring into the fly’s eyes while its wings were being torn off: he was sure it would not blink; perhaps it would not even see him. It was as though, for the duration of the act, its soul went into the female. The thought had made him shudder; it had made him want to annihilate every fly on earth.

  A childish response to an act he did not understand, an act he feared because everyone around him, whispering, grinning, seemed to hint that he too, one day, would be required to perform it. ‘I won’t, I won’t!’ the child wants to pant. ‘Won’t what?’ reply the watchers, all of a sudden wide-eyed, nonplussed – ‘Goodness, what is this strange child talking about?’

  The folder contains a leather-bound diary, five school exercise books, twenty or twenty-five loose pages pinned together, a packet of letters tied with string, and some printed pamphlets: feuilletons of texts by Blanqui and Ishutin, an essay by Pisarev. The odd item is Cicero’s De Officiis, extracts with French translation. He pages through it. On the last page, in a handwriting he does not recognize, he comes upon two inscriptions: Salus populi suprema lex esto, and below it, in lighter ink, Talis pater qualis filius.

  A message, messages; but from whom to whom?

  He takes up the diary and, without reading, ruffles through it like a deck of cards. The second half is empty. Still, the body of writing in it is substantial. He glances at the first date. 29 June 1866, Pavel’s name-day. The diary must have been a gift. A gift from whom? He cannot recall. 1866 stands out only as the year of Anya, the year when he met and fell in love with his wife-to-be. 1866 was a year in which Pavel was ignored.

  As if touching a hot dish, alert, ready to recoil, he begins to read the first entry. A recital, and a somewhat laboured one at that, of how Pavel spent the day. The work of a novice diarist. No accusations, no denunciations. With relief he closes the book. When I am in Dresden, he promises himself, when I have time, I will read the whole of it.

  As for the letters, all are from himself. He opens the most recent, the last before Pavel’s death. ‘I am sending Apollon Grigorevich fifty roubles,’ he reads. ‘It is all we can afford at present. Please do not press A.G. for more. You must learn to live within your means.’

  His last words to Pavel, and what petty-minded words! And this is what Maximov saw! No wonder he warned against reading! How ignominious! He would like to burn the letter, to erase it from history.

  He searches out the story from which Maximov read aloud to him. Maximov was right: as a character, Sergei, its young hero, deported to Siberia for leading a student uprising, is a failure. But the story goes on longer than Maximov had led him to believe. For days after the wicked landowner has been slain, Sergei and his Marfa flee the soldiers, sheltering in barns and byres, abetted by peasants who hide them and feed them and meet their pursuers’ questions with blank stupidity. At first they sleep side by side in chaste comradeship; but love grows up between them, a love rendered not without feeling, not without conviction. Pavel is clearly working up to a scene of passion. There is a page, heavily crossed out, in which Sergei confesses to Marfa, in ardent juvenile fashion, that she has become more to him than a companion in the struggle, that she has captured his heart; in its place there is a much more interesting sequence in which he confides to her the story of his lonely childhood without brothers and sisters, his youthful clumsiness with women. The sequence ends with Marfa stammering her own confession of love. ‘You may . . . You may . . .’ she says.

  He turns the leaves back. ‘I have no parents,’ says Sergei to Marfa. ‘My father, my real father, was a nobleman exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary sympathies. He died when I was seven. My mother married a second time. Her new husband did not like me. As soon as I was old enough, he packed me off to cadet school. I was the smallest boy in my class; that was where I learned to fight for my rights. Later they moved back to Petersburg, set up house, and sent for me. Then my mother died, and I was left alone with my stepfather, a gloomy man who addressed barely a word to me from one day to the next. I was lonely; my only friends were among the servants; it was from them that I got to know the sufferings of the people.’

  Not untrue, not wholly untrue, yet how subtly twisted, all of it! ‘He did not like me’ – ! One could be sorry for the friendless seven-year-old and sincerely wish to protect him, but how could one love him when he was so suspicious, so unsmiling, when he clung to his mother like a leech and grudged every minute she spent away from him, when half a dozen times in a single night they would hear from the next room that high, insistent little voice calling to his mother to come and kill the mosquito that was biting him?

  He lays aside the manuscript. A nobleman for a father indeed! Poor child! The truth duller than that, the full truth dullest of all. But who except the recording angel would care to write the full, dull truth? Did he himself write with as much dedication at the age of twenty-two?

  There is something overwhelmingly important he wants to say that the boy will now never be able to hear. If you are blessed with the power to write, he wants to say, bear in mind the source of that power. You write because your childhood was lonely, because you were not loved. (Yet that is not the full story, he also wants to say – you were loved, you would have been loved, it was your choice to be unloved. What confusion! An ape on a harmonium would do better!) We do not write out of plenty, he wants to say – we write out of anguish, out of lack. Surely in your heart you must know that! As for your so-called true father and his revolutionary sympathies, what nonsense! Isaev was a clerk, a pen-pusher. If he had lived, if you had followed him, you too would have become nothing but a clerk, and you would not have left this story behind. (Yes, yes, he hears the child’s high voice – but I would be alive!)

  Young men in white playing the French game, croquet, croixquette, game of the little cross, and you on the green-sward among them, alive! Poor boy! On the streets of Petersburg, in the turn of a head here, the gesture of a hand there, I see you, and each time my heart lifts as a wave does. Nowhere and everywhere, torn and scattered like Orpheus. Young in days, chryseos, golden, blessed.

  The task left to me: to gather the hoard, put together the scattered parts. Poet, lyre-player, enchanter, lord of resurrection, that is what I am called to be. And the truth? Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.

  I came too late to raise the coffin-lid, to kiss your smooth cold brow. If my lips, tender as the fingertips of the blind, had been able to brush you just once, you would not have quit this existence bitter against me. But bearing the name Isaev you have departed, and I, old man, old pilgrim, am left to follow behind, pursuing a shade, violet upon grey, an echo.

  Still, I am here and father Isaev is not. If, drowning, you reach for Isaev, you will grasp only a phantom hand. In the town hall of Semipalatinsk, in dusty files in a box on the back stairs, his signature is still perhaps to be read; otherwise no trace of him save in this remembering, in the remembering of the man who embraced his widow and his child.

  13

  The disguise

  The file on Pavel is closed. There is nothing to keep him in Petersburg. The train leaves at eight o’clock; by Tuesday he can be with his wife and child in Dresden. But as the hour approaches it becomes more and
more inconceivable that he will remove the pictures from the shrine, blow out the candle, and give up Pavel’s room to a stranger.

  Yet if he does not leave tonight, when will he leave? ‘The eternal lodger’ – where did Anna Sergeyevna pick up the phrase? How long can he go on waiting for a ghost? Unless he puts himself on another footing with the woman, another footing entirely. But what then of his wife?

  His mind is in a whirl, he does not know what he wants, all he knows is that eight o’clock hangs over him like a sentence of death. He searches out the concierge and after lengthy haggling secures a messenger to take his ticket to the station and have the reservation changed to the next day.

  Returning, he is startled to find his door open and someone in the room: a woman standing with her back to him, inspecting the shrine. For a guilty moment he thinks it is his wife, come to Petersburg to track him down. Then he recognizes who it is, and a cry of protest rises in his throat: Sergei Nechaev, in the same blue dress and bonnet as before!

  At that moment Matryona enters from the apartment. Before he can speak she seizes the initiative. ‘You shouldn’t sneak in on people like that!’ she exclaims.

  ‘But what are the two of you doing in my room?’

  ‘We have just as much right –’ she begins vehemently. Then Nechaev interrupts.

  ‘Someone led the police to us,’ he says. He steps closer. ‘I hope not you.’

  Beneath the scent of lavender he can smell rank male sweat. The powder around Nechaev’s throat is streaked; stubble is breaking through.

  ‘That is a contemptible accusation to make, quite contemptible. I repeat: what are you doing in my room?’ He turns to Matryona. ‘And you – you are sick, you should be in bed!’

  Ignoring his words, she tugs Pavel’s suitcase out. ‘I said he could have Pavel Alexandrovich’s suit,’ she says; and then, before he can object: ‘Yes, he can! Pavel bought it with his own money, and Pavel was his friend!’