The Master of Petersburg

  He would like to see her naked, this woman in the last flowering of her youth.

  Not what one would call an educated woman; but will one ever hear Russian spoken more beautifully? Her tongue like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats.

  In the daughter he detects none of the mother’s soft dryness. On the contrary, there is something liquid about her, something of the young doe, trusting yet nervous, stretching its neck to sniff the stranger’s hand, tensed to leap away. How can this dark woman have mothered this fair child? Yet the telltale signs are all there: the fingers, small, almost unformed; the dark eyes, lustrous as those of Byzantine saints; the fine, sculpted line of the brow; even the moody air.

  Strange how in a child a feature can take its perfect form while in the parent it seems a copy!

  The girl raises her eyes for an instant, encounters his gaze exploring her, and turns away in confusion. An angry impulse rises in him. He wants to grip her arm and shake her. Look at me, child! he wants to say: Look at me and learn!

  His knife drops to the floor. Gratefully he fumbles for it. It is as if the skin has been flayed from his face, as if, despite himself, he is continually thrusting upon the two of them a hideous bleeding mask.

  The woman speaks again. ‘Matryona and Pavel Alexandrovich were good friends,’ she says, firmly and carefully. And to the child: ‘He gave you lessons, didn’t he?’

  ‘He taught me French and German. Mostly French.’

  Matryona: not the right name for her. An old woman’s name, the name of a little old woman with a face like a prune.

  ‘I would like you to have something of his,’ he says. ‘To remember him by.’

  Again the child raises her eyes in that baffled look, inspecting him as a dog inspects a stranger, hardly hearing what he says. What is going on? And the answer comes: She cannot imagine me as Pavel’s father. She is trying to see Pavel in me and she cannot. And he thinks further: To her Pavel is not yet dead. Somewhere in her he still lives, breathing the warm, sweet breath of youth. Whereas this blackness of mine, this beardedness, this boniness, must be as repugnant as death the reaper himself. Death, with his bony hips and his inch-long teeth and the rattle of his ankles as he walks.

  He has no wish to speak about his son. To hear him spoken of, yes, yes indeed, but not to speak. By arithmetic, this is the tenth day of Pavel being dead. With every day that passes, memories of him that may still be floating in the air like autumn leaves are being trodden into the mud or caught by the wind and borne up into the blinding heavens. Only he wants to gather and conserve those memories. Everyone else adheres to the order of death, then mourning, then forgetting. If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library. But the very thought of Pavel being forgotten enrages him, turns him into an old bull, irritable, glaring, dangerous.

  He wants to hear stories. And the child, miraculously, is about to tell one. ‘Pavel Alexandrovich’ – she glances toward her mother to confirm that she may utter the dead name – ‘said he was only going to be in Petersburg a little while longer, then he was going to France.’

  She halts. He waits impatiently for her to go on.

  ‘Why did he want to go to France?’ she asks, and now she is addressing him alone. ‘What is there in France?’

  France? ‘He did not want to go to France, he wanted to leave Russia,’ he replies. ‘When you are young you are impatient with everything around you. You are impatient with your motherland because your motherland seems old and stale to you. You want new sights, new ideas. You think that in France or Germany or England you will find the future that your own country is too dull to provide you with.’

  The child is frowning. He says France, motherland, but she hears something else, something underneath the words: rancour.

  ‘My son had a scattered education,’ he says, addressing not the child now but the mother. ‘I had to move him from school to school. The reason was simple: he would not get up in the mornings. Nothing would wake him. I make too much of it, perhaps. But you cannot expect to matriculate if you do not attend school.’

  What a strange thing to say at a time like this! Nevertheless, turning to the daughter, he plunges on. ‘His French was very undependable – you must have noticed that. Perhaps that is why he wanted to go to France – to improve his French.’

  ‘He used to read a lot,’ says the mother. ‘Sometimes the lamp would be burning in his room all night.’ Her voice remains low, even. ‘We didn’t mind. He was always considerate. We were very fond of Pavel Alexandrovich – weren’t we?’ She gives the child a smile that seems to him like a caress.

  Was. She has brought it out.

  She frowns. ‘What I still don’t understand . . .’

  An awkward silence falls. He does nothing to relieve it. On the contrary, he bristles like a wolf guarding its cub. Beware, he thinks: at your own peril do you utter a word against him! I am his mother and his father, I am everything to him, and more! There is something he wants to stand up and shout as well. But what? And who is the enemy he is defying?

  From the depths of his throat, where he can no longer stifle it, a sound breaks out, a groan. He covers his face with his hands; tears run over his fingers.

  He hears the woman get up from the table. He waits for the child to retire too, but she does not.

  After a while he dries his eyes and blows his nose. ‘I am sorry,’ he whispers to the child, who is still sitting there, head bowed over her empty plate.

  He closes the door of Pavel’s room behind him. Sorry? No, the truth is, he is not sorry. Far from it: he is in a rage against everyone who is alive when his child is dead. In a rage most of all against this girl, whom for her very meekness he would like to tear limb from limb.

  He lies down on the bed, his arms tight across his chest, breathing fast, trying to expel the demon that is taking him over. He knows that he resembles nothing so much as a corpse laid out, and that what he calls a demon may be nothing but his own soul flailing its wings. But being alive is, at this moment, a kind of nausea. He wants to be dead. More than that: to be extinguished, annihilated.

  As for life on the other side, he has no faith in it. He expects to spend eternity on a river-bank with armies of other dead souls, waiting for a barge that will never arrive. The air will be cold and dank, the black waters will lap against the bank, his clothes will rot on his back and fall about his feet, he will never see his son again.

  On the cold fingers folded to his chest he counts the days again. Ten. This is what it feels like after ten days.

  Poetry might bring back his son. He has a sense of the poem that would be required, a sense of its music. But he is not a poet: more like a dog that has lost a bone, scratching here, scratching there.

  He waits till the gleam of light under the door has gone out, then quietly leaves the apartment and returns to his lodgings.

  During the night a dream comes to him. He is swimming underwater. The light is blue and dim. He banks and glides easily, gracefully; his hat seems to have gone, but in his black suit he feels like a turtle, a great old turtle in its natural element. Above him there is a ripple of movement, but here at the bottom the water is still. He swims through patches of weed; slack fingers of water-grass brush his fins, if that is what they are.

  He knows what he is in search of. As he swims he sometimes opens his mouth and gives what he thinks of as a cry or call. With each cry or call water enters his mouth; each syllable is replaced by a syllable of water. He grows more and more ponderous, till his breastbone is brushing the silt of the river-bed.

  Pavel is lying on his back. His eyes are closed. His hair, wafted by the current, is as soft as a baby’s.

  From his turtle-throat he gives a last cry, which seems to him more like a bark, and plunges toward the boy. He wants to kiss the face; but when he touches his hard lips to it, he is not sure he is not biting.

  This is when he wakes.

  Following old habit, he spend
s the morning at the little desk in his room. When the maid comes to clean, he waves her away. But he does not write a word. It is not that he is paralysed. His heart pumps steadily, his mind is clear. At any moment he is capable of picking up the pen and forming letters on the paper. But the writing, he fears, would be that of a madman – vileness, obscenity, page after page of it, untameable. He thinks of the madness as running through the artery of his right arm down to the fingertips and the pen and so to the page. It runs in a stream; he need not dip the pen, not once. What flows on to the paper is neither blood nor ink but an acid, black, with an unpleasing green sheen when the light glances off it. On the page it does not dry: if one were to pass a finger over it, one would experience a sensation both liquid and electric. A writing that even the blind could read.

  In the afternoon he returns to Svechnoi Street, to Pavel’s room. He closes the inner door to the apartment and props a chair against it. Then he lays the white suit out on the bed. By daylight he can see how grimy the cuffs are. He sniffs the armpits and the smell comes clearly: not that of a child but of another man, fullgrown. He inhales it again and again. How many breaths before it fades? If the suit were shut up in a glass case, would the smell be preserved too?

  He takes off his own clothes and puts on the white suit. Though the jacket is loose and the trousers too long, he does not feel clownish in it.

  He lies down and crosses his arms. The posture is theatrical, but wherever impulse leads he is ready to follow. At the same time he has no faith in impulse at all.

  He has a vision of Petersburg stretched out vast and low under the pitiless stars. Written in a scroll across the heavens is a word in Hebrew characters. He cannot read the word but knows it is a condemnation, a curse.

  A gate has closed behind his son, a gate bound seven-fold with bands of iron. To open that gate is the labour laid upon him.

  Thoughts, feelings, visions. Does he trust them? They come from his deepest heart; but there is no more reason to trust the heart than to trust reason.

  From somewhere to somewhere I am in retreat, he thinks; when the retreat is completed, what will be left of me?

  He thinks of himself as going back into the egg, or at least into something smooth and cool and grey. Perhaps it is not just an egg: perhaps it is the soul, perhaps that is how the soul looks.

  There is a rustling under the bed. A mouse going about its business? He does not care. He turns over, draws the white jacket over his face, inhales.

  Since the news came of his son’s death, something has been ebbing out of him that he thinks of as firmness. I am the one who is dead, he thinks; or rather, I died but my death failed to arrive. His sense of his own body is that it is strong, sturdy, that it will not yield of its own accord. His chest is like a barrel with sound staves. His heart will go on beating for a long time. Nevertheless, he has been tugged out of human time. The stream that carries him still moves forward, still has direction, even purpose; but that purpose is no longer life. He is being carried by dead water, a dead stream.

  He falls asleep. When he wakes it is dark and the whole world is silent. He strikes a match, trying to gather his fuddled wits. Past midnight. Where has he been?

  He crawls under the covers, sleeps intermittently. In the morning, on his way to the washroom, smelly, dishevelled, he runs into Anna Sergeyevna. With her hair under a kerchief, in big boots, she looks like any market-woman. She regards him with surprise. ‘I fell asleep, I was very tired,’ he explains. But it is not that. It is the white suit, which he is still wearing.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I will stay here in Pavel’s room till I leave,’ he goes on. ‘It will only be for a few days.’

  ‘We can’t discuss it now, I’m in a hurry,’ she replies. Clearly she does not like the idea. Nor does she give her consent. But he has paid, there is nothing she can do about it.

  All morning he sits at the table in his son’s room, his head in his hands. He cannot pretend he is writing. His mind is running to the moment of Pavel’s death. What he cannot bear is the thought that, for the last fraction of the last instant of his fall, Pavel knew that nothing could save him, that he was dead. He wants to believe Pavel was protected from that certainty, more terrible than annihilation itself, by the hurry and confusion of the fall, by the mind’s way of etherizing itself against whatever is too enormous to be borne. With all his heart he wants to believe this. At the same time he knows that he wants to believe in order to etherize himself against the knowledge that Pavel, falling, knew everything.

  At moments like this he cannot distinguish Pavel from himself. They are the same person; and that person is no more or less than a thought, Pavel thinking it in him, he thinking it in Pavel. The thought keeps Pavel alive, suspended in his fall.

  It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air.

  Sitting at the table, his eyes closed, his fists clenched, he wards the knowledge of death away from Pavel. He thinks of himself as the Triton on the Piazza Barberini in Rome, holding to his lips a conch from which jets a constant crystal fountain. All day and all night he breathes life into the water. The tendons of his neck, caught in bronze, are taut with effort.

  4

  The white suit

  November has arrived, and the first snow. The sky is filled with marsh-birds migrating south.

  He has moved into Pavel’s room and within days has become part of the life of the building. The children no longer stop their games to stare when he passes, though they still lower their voices. They know who he is. Who is he? He is misfortune, he is the father of misfortune.

  Every day he tells himself he must go back to Yelagin Island, to the grave. But he does not go.

  He writes to his wife in Dresden. His letters are reassuring but empty of feeling.

  He spends his mornings in the room, mornings of utter blankness which come to have their own insidious and deathly pleasure. In the afternoons he walks the streets, avoiding the area around Meshchanskaya Street and the Voznesensky Prospekt where he might be recognized, stopping for an hour at a tea-house, always the same one.

  In Dresden he used to read the Russian newspapers. But he has lost interest in the world outside. His world has contracted; his world is within his breast.

  Out of consideration for Anna Sergeyevna he returns to the apartment only after dusk. Till called to supper he stays quietly in the room that is and is not his.

  He is sitting on the bed with the white suit on his lap. There is no one to see him. Nothing has changed. He feels the cord of love that goes from his heart to his son’s as physically as if it were a rope. He feels the rope twist and wring his heart. He groans aloud. ‘Yes!’ he whispers, welcoming the pain; he reaches out and gives the rope another twist.

  The door behind him opens. Startled, he turns, bent and ugly, tears in his eyes, the suit bunched in his hands.

  ‘Would you like to eat now?’ asks the child.

  ‘Thank you, but I would prefer to be by myself this evening.’

  Later she is back. ‘Would you like some tea? I can bring it to you.’

  She brings a teapot and sugar-bowl and cup, bearing them solemnly on a tray.

  ‘Is that Pavel Alexandrovich’s suit?’

  He puts the suit aside, nods.

  She stands at arm’s length watching while he drinks. Again he is struck by the fine line of her temple and cheekbone, the dark, liquid eyes, the dark brows, the hair blonde as corn. There is a rush of feeling in him, contradictory, like two waves slapping against each other: an urge to protect her, an urge to lash out at her because she is alive.

  Good that I am shut away, he thinks. As I am now, I am not fit for humankind.

  He waits for her to say something. He wants her to speak. It is an outrageous demand to make on a child, but he makes the demand nevertheless. He raises his eyes to her. Nothing is ve
iled. He stares at her with what can only be nakedness.

  For a moment she meets his gaze. Then she averts her eyes, steps back uncertainly, makes a strange, awkward kind of curtsy, and flees the room.

  He is aware, even as it unfolds, that this is a passage he will not forget and may even one day rework into his writing. A certain shame passes over him, but it is superficial and transitory. First in his writing and now in his life, shame seems to have lost its power, its place taken by a blank and amoral passivity that shrinks from no extreme. It is as if, out of the corner of an eye, he can see clouds advancing on him with terrific speed, stormclouds. Whatever stands in their path will be swept away. With dread, but with excitement too, he waits for the storm to break.

  At eleven o’clock by his watch, without announcing himself, he emerges from his room. The curtain is drawn across the alcove where Matryona and her mother sleep, but Anna Sergeyevna is still up, seated at the table, sewing by lamplight. He crosses the room, sits down opposite her.

  Her fingers are deft, her movements decisive. In Siberia he learnt to sew, out of necessity, but he cannot sew with this fluid grace. In his fingers a needle is a curiosity, an arrow from Lilliput.

  ‘Surely the light is too poor for such fine work,’ he murmurs.

  She inclines her head as if to say: I hear you, but also: What do you expect me to do about it?

  ‘Has Matryona been your only child?’

  She gives him a direct look. He likes the directness. He likes her eyes, which are not soft at all.

  ‘She had a brother, but he died when he was very young.’

  ‘So you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know.’

  What does she mean? That an infant’s death is easier to bear? She does not explain.

  ‘If you will allow me, I will buy you a better lamp. It is a pity to ruin your eyesight so early.’