The Master of Petersburg Read online

  He shakes himself free. Envious imaginings! A father like an old grey rat creeping in afterwards upon the love-scene to see what is left for him. Sitting on the corpse in the dark, pricking his ears, gnawing, listening, gnawing. Is that why the police-pack hunts the free youth of Petersburg so vengefully, with Maximov, the good father, the great rat, at its head?

  He recalls Pavel’s behaviour after his marriage to Anya. Pavel was nineteen, yet obstinately would not accept that she, Anna Grigoryevna, would henceforth share his father’s bed. For the year they all lived together Pavel maintained the fiction that Anya was simply his father’s companion as an old woman may have a companion: someone to keep house, order the groceries, attend to the laundry. When – perhaps after an evening game of cards – he would announce that he was going to bed, Pavel would not allow Anya to follow him: he would challenge her to rounds of cribbage (‘Just the two of us!’), and even when she blushingly tried to withdraw, refuse to understand (‘This isn’t the country, you don’t have to get up at dawn to milk the cows!’).

  Is it always like this between fathers and sons: jokes masking the intensest rivalry? And is that the true reason why he is bereft: because the ground of his life, the contest with his son, is gone, and his days are left empty? Not the People’s Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers’ cashboxes? He shakes his head wearily.

  10

  The shot tower

  Arriving home, he is met in the passageway by Matryona in a state of great excitement. ‘The police have been here, Fyodor Mikhailovich, they are looking for a murderer!’

  Time stops; he stands frozen. ‘Why should they come here?’ The words come from him but he seems to hear them from afar, the thin words of someone else.

  ‘They are looking everywhere, all through the building!’

  From Anna Sergeyevna he gets a fuller story. ‘They are questioning people about a beggar who has been haunting the neighbourhood. I suppose I must have seen him, but I can’t recall. They say he has been sheltering in this building.’

  He could at this point reveal that Ivanov has spent a night in her apartment, but he does not. ‘What is he accused of?’ he asks instead.

  ‘The police are being very tight-lipped. Matryosha says he killed somebody, but that is pure gossip.’

  ‘It’s not possible. I know the man, I spoke to him at length. He is not a killer.’

  But, as it turns out, it is not just gossip. There has indeed been a crime; the body of the victim, the beggar-man himself, was found in an alley just down the street. This he learns from the concierge, and is shaken. Ivanov: one of those bad-penny faces that turn up at one’s deathbed, or at the graveside; not one to die first.

  ‘Are they sure he didn’t simply perish of cold?’ he asks. ‘Why does it have to be murder?’

  ‘Oh, it’s murder all right,’ replies the old man, with a knowing look. ‘What surprises me is that they are going to all this trouble over a nobody.’

  Over supper Matryona will speak of nothing but the murder. She is overwrought: her eyes glisten, words tumble out of her. As for him, he has his own story to tell, but that must wait till her mother has calmed her and put her to bed.

  When he thinks she is asleep, he begins to tell Anna Sergeyevna of his meeting with Nechaev. He speaks softly, conscious that the whisperings of adults – treacherous, fascinating – can pierce a child’s deepest slumbers.

  Anna recognizes Nechaev’s name, but seems to have only the vaguest idea of who he is. Nevertheless she is ready to advise him, and her advice is firm. ‘You must keep your appointment. You will not be able to rest till you know what really happened.’

  ‘But I know what happened. There is nothing more I need to know.’

  She makes an impatient gesture. His lack of zeal makes no sense to her: she sees it only as apathy. How can he make her understand? To make her understand he would have to speak in a voice from under the waters, a boy’s clear bell-voice pleading out of the deep dark. ‘Sing to me, dear father!’ the voice would have to call, and she would have to hear. Somewhere within himself he would have to find not only that voice but the words, the true words. Here and now he does not have the words. Perhaps – he has an intimation – they may be waiting for him in one of the old ballads. But the ballad is in no book: it is somewhere in the breast of the Russian people, where he cannot reach it. Or perhaps in the breast of a child.

  ‘Pavel is not vengeful,’ he says at last, haltingly. ‘Whoever killed him, it is past, the cord is cut, he is free of that person. I want to be taught by him. I don’t want to be poisoned by vengefulness.’

  There is more he might say, but cannot, now. That Pavel has no interest in the retelling of the story of how he fell. That Pavel is above all lonely, and in his loneliness needs to be sung to and comforted, to be reassured that he will not be abandoned at the bottom of the waters.

  A silence falls between himself and the woman. It is the first time since Sunday they have been alone together. She looks tired. Her shoulders slump, her hands are slack, there are creases at her throat. Older than his wife, it comes home to him again: not quite of another generation, but almost so. He wishes he did not have to see it. He has too recently come from Nechaev, youthful, demonic in his energy, as all the lesser demons are youthful.

  On an impulse he takes her hand. She looks up with surprise.

  ‘I am not urging you to vengeance,’ she says slowly. ‘Of course you are right about Pavel: he did not have a vengeful nature. But he did have a sense of what was right and just. Keep your appointment. Find out what you can. Otherwise you will never have peace.’

  He is still holding her hand. From it he feels a pressure, answering his, that he can only call kindly.

  ‘Justice,’ he reflects. ‘A large word. Can one really draw a line between justice and vengefulness?’ And, when she seems uncomprehending: ‘Isn’t that the originality of Nechaev – that he calls himself the People’s Vengeance, not the People’s Justice? At least he is honest.’

  ‘Is he? Is that what the people want to be told: that it is vengeance they are after, not justice? I don’t think so. Why should the people take Nechaev seriously? Why should anyone take him seriously – a student, an excitable young man? What power does he have, after all?’

  ‘Not the power of life, but the power of death, certainly. A child can kill as dead as a man can, if the spirit is in him. Perhaps that again is Nechaev’s originality: that he speaks what we dare not even imagine about our children; that he gives a voice to something dumb and brutal that is sweeping through young Russia. We close our ears to it; then he comes with his axe and makes us hear.’

  Her hand, that has been a living thing, has suddenly grown lifeless. A woman of feeling, he thinks, releasing it. Like her daughter. And perhaps as easily hurt.

  He wants to embrace her, wants to take her in his arms and repair whatever is fractured. He ought to stop this talk, which only repels and estranges her. But he does not.

  ‘After all, you will never recruit people to your cause by invoking a spirit that is alien to them, or means nothing to them. Nechaev has disciples among the young because a spirit in them answers to the spirit in him. Of course that is not how he explains it. He calls himself a materialist. But that is just fashionable jargon. The truth is, he has what the Greeks called a demon. It speaks to him. It is the source of his energy.’

  Again he thinks: Now I must stop. But the dry, deathly words keep coming. He knows he has lost touch with her.

  ‘The same demon must have been in Pavel, otherwise why would Pavel have responded to his call? It’s nice to think that Pavel was not vengeful. It’s nice to think well of the dead. But it just flatters him. Let us not be sentimental – in ordinary life he was as vengeful as any other young man.’

  She gets to her feet. He believes he knows the words she is going to speak, and, if only for form’s sake, is rea
dy to defend himself. You call yourself Pavel’s father, but I do not believe you love him – that is what he expects. But he is wrong.

  ‘I know nothing about this anarchist Nechaev, I can only accept what you tell me,’ she says; ‘but as I listen it is hard to tell which of you, you or Nechaev, desires it more that Pavel should belong to the party of vengeance. I am nothing to Pavel, I am certainly not his mother, but I owe it to him – to him and his memory – to protest. You and Nechaev should fight your battles without dragging him in.’

  ‘Nechaev is not an anarchist. That is the mistake people keep making. He is something else.’

  ‘Anarchist, nihilist, whatever he is, I don’t want to hear any more of it! I don’t want strife and hatred brought into my home! Matryona is excited enough as it is; I don’t want her further infected.’

  ‘Not an anarchist, not a nihilist,’ he continues doggedly. ‘By giving him labels you miss what is unique about him. He does not act in the name of ideas. He acts when he feels action stirring in his body. He is a sensualist. He is an extremist of the senses. He wants to live in a body at the limits of sensation, at the limits of bodily knowledge. That is why he can say everything is permitted – or why he would say so if he were not so indifferent to explaining himself!’

  He pauses. Again he believes he knows what she wants to say; or rather, knows what she wants to say even when she herself does not: And you? Are you so different?

  ‘Why do you think he chooses the axe?’ he says. ‘If you think of the axe, if you think of what it means –’ He throws up his hands in despair. He cannot decently produce the words. The axe, instrument of the people’s vengeance, weapon of the people, crude, heavy, unanswerable, swung with the full weight of the body behind it, the body and the life’s-weight of hatred and resentment stored up in that body, swung with dark joy.

  A silence falls between them.

  ‘There are people to whom sensation does not come by natural means,’ he says at last, more evenly. ‘That is how Sergei Nechaev struck me from the beginning – as a man who could not have a natural connection with a woman, for instance. I wondered whether that might not underlie his manifold resentments. But perhaps that is how it will be in the future: sensation will not come by the old means any longer. The old means will be used up. I mean love. Love will be used up. So other means will have to be found.’

  She speaks. ‘That is enough. I don’t want to talk any more. It is past nine. If you want to go –’

  He rises, bows, leaves.

  At ten o’clock he is at the rendezvous on the Fontanka. A high wind blows scuds of rain before it and whips up the black waters of the canal. The lamp-posts along the bare embankment creak in a concert of jangling. From roofs and gutters comes the gurgle of water.

  He takes shelter in a doorway, growing more and more testy. If I catch cold, he thinks, it will be the last straw. He catches cold easily. Pavel too, ever since childhood. Did Pavel catch cold while he was living with her? Did she nurse him herself, or was that left to Matryona? He imagines Matryona coming into the room with a steaming glass of lemon tea, stepping gingerly to keep the glass steady; he imagines Pavel, his hair dark against the white of the pillow, smiling. ‘Thank you, little sister,’ says Pavel in a hoarse boy’s-voice. A boy’s life, in all its ordinariness! With no one to overhear him, he lowers his head and groans like a sick ox.

  Then she is before him, inspecting him curiously – not Matryona but the Finn. ‘Are you unwell, Fyodor Mikhailovich?’

  Embarrassed, he shakes his head.

  ‘Then come,’ she says.

  She conducts him, as he feared she would, westward along the canal toward Stolyarny Quay and the old shot tower. Raising her voice above the wind, she chatters amicably. ‘You know, Fyodor Mikhailovich,’ she says, ‘you did yourself no credit by talking about the people in the way you did this afternoon. We were disappointed in you – you, with your background. After all, you did go to Siberia for your beliefs. We respect you for that. Even Pavel Alexandrovich respected you. You shouldn’t be relapsing now.’

  ‘Even Pavel?’

  ‘Yes, even Pavel. You suffered in your generation, and now Pavel has sacrificed himself too. You have every right to hold your head up with pride.’

  She seems quite able to chatter while keeping up a rapid trot. As for him, he has a pain in his side and is breathing hard. ‘Slower,’ he pants.

  ‘And you?’ he says at last. ‘What of you?’

  ‘What of me?’

  ‘What of you? Will you be able to hold your head up in the future?’

  Under a crazily swinging lamp she stops. Light and shadow play across her face. He was quite wrong to dismiss her as a child playing with disguises. Despite her shapeless form, he recognizes now a cool, womanly quality.

  ‘I don’t expect to be here long, Fyodor Mikhailovich,’ she says. ‘Nor does Sergei Gennadevich. Nor do the rest of us. What happened to Pavel can happen to any of us at any time. So don’t make jokes. If you make jokes about us, remember you are joking about Pavel too.’

  For the second time this day he has an urge to hit her. And it is clear that she senses his anger: in fact, she pokes out her chin as if daring him to strike. Why is he so irascible? What is coming over him? Is he turning into one of those old men with no control over their temper? Or is it worse than that: now that his succession is extinct, has he become not only old but a ghost, an angry, abandoned spirit?

  The tower on Stolyarny Quay has stood since Petersburg was built, but has long been disused. Though there is a painted sign warning off trespassers, it has become a resort for the more daring boys of the neighbourhood, who, via a spiral of iron hoops set in the wall, climb up to the furnace-chamber a hundred feet above ground level, and even higher, to the top of the brick chimney.

  The great nail-studded doors are bolted and locked, but the small back door has long ago been kicked in by vandals. In the shadow of this doorway a man is waiting for them. He murmurs a greeting to the Finn; she follows him in.

  Inside, the air smells of ordure and mouldering masonry. From the dark comes a soft stream of obscenities. The man strikes a match and lights a lamp. Almost under their feet are three people huddled together in a bed of sacking. He looks away.

  The man with the lamp is Nechaev, wearing a grenadier officer’s long black cloak. His face is unnaturally pale. Has he forgotten to wash off the powder?

  ‘Heights make me dizzy, so I’ll wait down here,’ says the Finn. ‘He will show you the place.’

  A spiral staircase winds up the inner wall of the tower. Holding the lamp on high, Nechaev begins to climb. In the enclosed space their footsteps clatter loudly.

  ‘They took your stepson up this way,’ says Nechaev. ‘They probably got him drunk beforehand, to make their task easier.’

  Pavel. Here.

  Up and up they go. The well of the tower beneath them is swallowed in darkness. He counts backwards to the day of Pavel’s death, reaches twenty, loses track, starts again, loses track again. Can it be that so many days ago Pavel climbed these very stairs? Why is it that he cannot count them? The steps, the days – they have something to do with each other. Each step another day subtracted from Pavel’s sum. A counting up and a counting down proceeding at the same time – is that what is confusing him?

  They reach the head of the stairs and emerge on to a broad steel deck. His guide swings the lantern around. ‘This way,’ he says. He glimpses rusty machinery.

  They emerge high above the quay, on a platform on the outside of the tower bounded by a waist-high railing. To one side a pulley mechanism and chain-hoist are set into the wall.

  At once the wind begins to tug at them. He takes off his hat and grips the railing, trying not to look down. A metaphor, he tells himself, that is all it is – another word for a lapse of consciousness, a not-being-here, an absence. Nothing new. The epileptic knows it all: the approach to the edge, the glance downward, the lurch of the soul, the thinking that thinks itself cra
zily over and over like a bell pealing in the head: Time shall have an end, there shall be no death.

  He grips the rail tighter, shakes his head to chase away the dizziness. Metaphors – what nonsense! There is death, only death. Death is a metaphor for nothing. Death is death. I should never have agreed to come. Now for the rest of my life I will have this before my eyes like ghost-vision: the roofs of St Petersburg glinting in the rain, the row of tiny lamps along the quayside.

  Through clenched teeth he repeats the words to himself: I should not have come. But the nots are beginning to collapse, just as happened with Ivanov. I should not be here therefore I should be here. I will see nothing else therefore I will see all. What sickness is this, what sickness of reasoning?

  His guide has left the lantern inside. He is intensely aware of the youthful body beside his, no doubt strong with a wiry, untiring kind of strength. At any moment he could grasp him about the waist and tip him over the edge into the void. But who is he on this platform, who is him?

  Slowly he turns to face the younger man. ‘If it is indeed the truth that Pavel was brought here to be killed,’ he says, ‘I will forgive you for bringing me. But if this is some monstrous trick, if it was you yourself who pushed him, I warn you, you will not be forgiven.’

  They are not twelve inches apart. The moon is obscured, they are lashed by gusts of rain, yet he is convinced that Nechaev does not flinch from him. In all likelihood his opponent has already played the game through from beginning to end, in all its variations: nothing he can say will surprise him. Or else he is a devil who shrugs off curses like water.

  Nechaev speaks. ‘You should be ashamed to talk like that. Pavel Isaev was a comrade of ours. We were his family when he had no family. You went abroad and left him behind. You lost touch with him, you became a stranger to him. Now you appear from nowhere and make wild accusations against the only real kin he had in the world.’ He draws the cloak tighter about his throat. ‘Do you know what you remind me of? Of a distant relative turning up at the graveside with his carpet-bag, come out of nowhere to claim an inheritance from someone he has never laid eyes on. You are fourth cousin, fifth cousin to Pavel Alexandrovich, not father, not even stepfather.’