Master of Petersburg Read online

  There is a letter on his bed, propped against the pillow. For a wild instant he thinks it is from Pavel, spirited into the room. But the handwriting is a child’s. ‘I tried to draw Pavel Aleskandrovich,’ it reads (the name misspelled), ‘but I could not do it right. If you want to put it on the shrine you can. Matryona.’ On the reverse is a pencil-drawing, somewhat smudged, of a young man with a high forehead and full lips. The drawing is crude, the child knows nothing about shading; nevertheless, in the mouth and particularly in the bold stare, she has unmistakably captured Pavel.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispers, ‘I will put it on the shrine.’ He brings the image to his lips, then stands it against the candle-holder and lights a new candle.

  He is still gazing into the flame when, an hour later, Anna Sergeyevna taps at the door. ‘I have your laundry,’ she says.

  ‘Come in. Sit down.’

  ‘No, I can’t. Matryosha is restless – I don’t think she is well.’ Nevertheless she sits down on the bed.

  ‘They are keeping us good, these children of ours,’ he remarks.

  ‘Keeping us good?’

  ‘Seeing to our morals. Keeping us apart.’

  It is a relief not to have the dining-table between them. The candlelight, too, brings a comforting softness.

  ‘I am sorry you have to leave,’ she says, ‘but perhaps it will be better for you to get away from this sad city. Better for your family too. They must be missing you. And you must be missing them.’

  ‘I will be a different person. My wife will not know me. Or she will think she knows me, and be wrong. A difficult time for everyone, I foresee. I shall be thinking of you. But as whom? – that is the question. Anna is my wife’s name too.’

  ‘It was my name before it was hers.’ Her reply is sharp, without playfulness. Again it is borne home to him: if he loves this woman, then in part it is because she is not young. She has crossed a line that his wife has yet to come to. She may or may not be dearer, but she is nearer.

  The erotic tug returns, even stronger than before. A week ago they were in each other’s arms in this same bed. Can it be that at this moment she is not thinking of that?

  He leans across and lays a hand on her thigh. With the laundry on her lap, she bows her head. He shifts closer. Between thumb and forefinger he grips her bared neck, draws her face toward his. She raises her eyes: for an instant he has the impression he is looking into the eyes of a cat, wary, passionate, greedy.

  ‘I must go,’ she murmurs. Wriggling loose, she is gone.

  He wants her acutely. More: he wants her not in this narrow child’s-bed but in the widow-bed in the next room. He imagines her as she lies there now beside her daughter, her eyes open and glistening. She belongs, he realizes for the first time, to a type he has never written into his books. The women he is used to are not without an intensity of their own, but it is an intensity all of skin and nerves. Their sensations are intense, electric, immediate, of the surface. Whereas with her he goes into a body that bleeds, a visceral body whose sensations occur deep within itself.

  Is it a feature that can be translated to, or cultivated in, other women? In his wife? Is there a quality of sensation he has been freed to find elsewhere now that he has found it in her?

  What treachery!

  If he were more confident of his French he would channel this disturbing excitement into a book of the kind one cannot publish in Russia – something that could be finished off in a hurry, in two or three weeks, even without a copyist – ten signatures, three hundred pages. A book of the night, in which every excess would be represented and no bounds respected. A book that would never be linked to him. The manuscript mailed from Dresden to Paillard in Paris, to be printed clandestinely and sold under the counter on the Left Bank. Memoirs of a Russian Nobleman. A book that she, Anna Sergeyevna, its true begetter, would never see. With a chapter in which the noble memoirist reads aloud to the young daughter of his mistress a story of the seduction of a young girl in which he himself emerges more and more clearly as having been the seducer. A story full of intimate detail and innuendo which by no means seduces the daughter but on the contrary frightens her and disturbs her sleep and makes her so doubtful of her own purity that three days later she gives herself up to him in despair, in the most shameful of ways, in a way of which no child could conceive were the history of her own seduction and surrender and the manner of its doing not deeply impressed on her beforehand.

  Imaginary memoirs. Memories of the imagination.

  Is that the answer to his question to himself? Is that what she is setting him free to do: to write a book of evil? And to what end? To liberate himself from evil or to cut himself off from good?

  Not once in this long reverie, it occurs to him (the whole house has fallen into silence by now), has he given a thought to Pavel. And now, here he returns, whining, pale, searching for a place to lay his head! Poor child! The festival of the senses that would have been his inheritance stolen away from him! Lying in Pavel’s bed, he cannot refrain from a quiver of dark triumph.

  Usually he has the apartment to himself in the mornings. But today Matryona, flushed, coughing drily, heaving for breath, stays away from school. With her in the apartment, he is less than ever able to give his attention to writing. He finds himself listening for the pad of her bare feet in the next room; there are moments when he can swear he feels her eyes boring into his back.

  At noon the concierge brings a message. He recognizes the grey paper and red seal at once. The end of waiting: he is instructed to call at the office of Judicial Investigator Councillor P. P. Maximov in connection with the matter of P. A. Isaev.

  From Svechnoi Street he goes to the railway station to make a reservation, and from there to the police station. The ante-room is packed; he gives in his name at the desk and waits. At the first stroke of four the desk-sergeant puts down his pen, stretches, douses the light, and begins to shepherd the remaining petitioners out.

  ‘What is this?’ he protests.

  ‘Friday, early closing,’ says the sergeant. ‘Come back in the morning.’

  At six o’clock he is waiting outside Yakovlev’s. Seeing him there, Anna Sergeyevna is alarmed. ‘Matryosha –?’ she asks.

  ‘She was sleeping when I left. I stopped at a pharmacy and got something for her cough.’ He brings out a little brown bottle.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I have been summoned again by the police in connection with Pavel’s papers. I am hoping that the business will be settled once and for all tomorrow.’

  They walk for a while in silence. Anna Sergeyevna seems preoccupied. At last she speaks. ‘Is there a particular reason why you must have those papers?’

  ‘I am surprised that you ask. What else of himself has Pavel left behind? Nothing is more important to me than those papers. They are his word to me.’ And then, after a pause: ‘Did you know he was writing a story?’

  ‘He wrote stories. Yes, I knew.’

  ‘The one I am thinking of was about an escaped convict.’

  ‘I don’t know that one. He would sometimes read what he was writing to Matryosha and me, to see what we thought. But not a story about a convict.’

  ‘I didn’t realize there were other stories.’

  ‘Oh yes, there were stories. Poems too – but he was shy about showing those to us. The police must have taken them when they took everything else. They were in his room a long time, searching. I didn’t tell you. They even lifted the floorboards and looked under them. They took every scrap of paper.’

  ‘Is that how Pavel occupied himself, then – with writing?’

  She glances at him oddly. ‘How else did you think?’

  He bites back a quick reply.

  ‘With a writer for a father, what do you expect?’ she goes on.

  ‘Writing does not go in families.’

  ‘Perhaps not. I am no judge. But he need not have intended to write for a living. Perhaps it was simply a way of reaching his father.’


  He makes a gesture of exasperation. I would have loved him without stories! he thinks. Instead he says: ‘One does not have to earn the love of one’s father.’

  She hesitates before she speaks again. ‘There is something I should warn you of, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Pavel made a certain cult of his father – of Alexander Isaev, I mean. I would not mention it if I did not expect you will find traces of it in his papers. You must be tolerant. Children like to romanticize their parents. Even Matryona –’

  ‘Romanticize Isaev? Isaev was a drunkard, a nobody, a bad husband. His wife, Pavel’s own mother, could not abide him by the end. She would have left him had he not died first. How does one romanticize a person like that?’

  ‘By seeing him through a haze, of course. It was hard for Pavel to see you through a haze. You were, if I may say so, too immediate to him.’

  ‘That was because I was the one who had to bring him up day by day. I made him my son when everyone else had left him behind.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate. His own parents didn’t leave him behind, they died. Besides, if you had the right to choose him as a son, why had he no right to choose a father for himself?’

  ‘Because he could do better than Isaev! It has become a sickness of this age of ours, young people turning their backs on their parents, their homes, their upbringing, because they are no longer to their liking! Nothing will satisfy them, it seems, but to be sons and daughters of Stenka Razin or Bakunin!’

  ‘You’re being silly. Pavel didn’t run away from home. You ran away from him.’

  An angry silence falls. When they reach Gorokhovaya Street he excuses himself and leaves her.

  Walking up and down the embankment, he broods on what she has said. Without a doubt he has allowed something shameful about himself to emerge, and he resents her for having been witness to it. At the same time he is ashamed of such pettiness. He is caught in a familiar moral tangle – so familiar, in fact, that it no longer disturbs him, and should therefore be all the more shameful. But something else is troubling him too, like the point of a nail just beginning to come through a shoe, that he cannot or does not care to define.

  There is still tension in the air when he returns to the apartment. Matryona is out of bed. She is wearing her mother’s coat over her nightdress but her feet are bare. ‘I’m bored!’ she whines, over and over. She pays him no attention. Though she joins them at table, she will not eat. There is a sour smell about her, she wheezes, every now and again she has a fit of harsh coughing. ‘You shouldn’t be up, my dear,’ he remarks mildly. ‘You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my father!’ she retorts. ‘Matryosha!’ her mother reproves her. ‘Well, he isn’t!’ she repeats, and falls into pouting silence.

  After he has retired, Anna Sergeyevna taps at his door and comes in. He rises cautiously. ‘How is she?’

  ‘I gave her some of the medicine you bought, and she seems to be more restful. She shouldn’t be getting out of bed, but she is wilful and I can’t stop her. I came to apologize for what I said. Also to ask about your plans for tomorrow.’

  ‘There is no need to apologize. I was the one at fault. I have made a reservation on the evening train. But it can be changed.’

  ‘Why? You will get your papers tomorrow. Why should anything be changed? Why stay longer than necessary? You don’t want to become the eternal lodger, after all. Isn’t that the name of a book?’

  ‘The eternal lodger? No, not that I know of. All arrangements can be changed, including tomorrow’s. Nothing is final. But in this case it is not in my hands to change them.’

  ‘In whose hands then?’

  ‘In yours.’

  ‘In my hands? Certainly not! Your arrangements are in your hands alone, I have no part in them. We should say goodbye now. I won’t see you in the morning. I have to get up early, it’s market day. You can leave the key in the door.’

  So the moment has come. He takes a deep breath. His mind is quite blank. Out of that blankness he begins to speak, surrendering to the words that come, going where they take him.

  ‘On the ferry, when you took me to see Pavel’s grave,’ he says, ‘I watched you and Matryosha standing at the rail staring into the mist – you remember the mist that day – and I said to myself, “She will bring him back. She is”’ – he takes another breath – ‘“she is a conductress of souls.” That was not the word that came to me at the time, but I know now it is the right word.’

  She regards him without expression. He takes her hand between his.

  ‘I want to have him back,’ he says. ‘You must help me. I want to kiss him on the lips.’

  As he speaks the words he hears how mad they are. He seems to move into and out of madness like a fly at an open window.

  She has grown tense, ready to flee. He grips her tighter, holding her back.

  ‘That is the truth. That is how I think of you. Pavel did not arrive here by chance. Somewhere it was written that from here he was to be conducted . . . into the night.’

  He believes and does not believe what he is saying. A fragment of memory comes back to him, of a painting he has seen in a gallery somewhere: a woman in dark, severe dress standing at a window, a child at her side, both of them gazing up into a starry sky. More vividly than the picture itself he remembers the gilded curlicues of the frame.

  Her hand lies lifeless between his.

  ‘You have it in your power,’ he continues, still following the words like beacons, seeing where they will take him. ‘You can bring him back. For one minute. For just one minute.’

  He remembers how dry she seemed when he first met her. Like a mummy: dry bones wrapped in cerements that will fall to dust at a touch. When she speaks, the voice creaks from her throat. ‘You love him so much,’ she says: ‘you will certainly see him again.’

  He lets go her hand. Like a chain of bones, she withdraws it. Don’t humour me! he wants to say.

  ‘You are an artist, a master,’ she says. ‘It is for you, not for me, to bring him back to life.’

  Master. It is a word he associates with metal – with the tempering of swords, the casting of bells. A master blacksmith, a foundry-master. Master of life: strange term. But he is prepared to reflect on it. He will give a home to any word, no matter how strange, no matter how stray, if there is a chance it is an anagram for Pavel.

  ‘I am far from being a master,’ he says. ‘There is a crack running through me. What can one do with a cracked bell? A cracked bell cannot be mended.’

  What he says is true. Yet at the same time he recalls that one of the bells of the Cathedral of the Trinity in Sergiyev is cracked, and has been from before Catherine’s time. It has never been removed and melted down. It sounds over the town every day. The people call it St Sergius’s wooden leg.

  Now there is exasperation in her voice. ‘I feel for you, Fyodor Mikhailovich,’ she says, ‘but you must remember you are not the first parent to lose a child. Pavel had twenty-two years of life. Think of all the children who are taken in infancy.’

  ‘So –?’

  ‘So recognize that it is the rule, not the exception, to suffer loss. And ask yourself: are you in mourning for Pavel or for yourself?’

  Loss. An icy distance instals itself between him and her. ‘I have not lost him, he is not lost,’ he says through clenched teeth.

  She shrugs. ‘If he is not lost then you must know where he is. He is certainly not in this room.’

  He glances around the room. That bunching of shadows in the corner – might it not be the trace of the breath of the shadow of the ghost of him? ‘One does not live in a place and leave nothing of oneself behind,’ he whispers.

  ‘No, of course one does not leave nothing behind. That is what I told you this afternoon. But what he left is not in this room. He has gone from here, this is not where you will find him. Speak to Matryona. Make your peace with her before you leave. She and your son were very close. If he has left a mark behind, it is on her.’

  ‘And on you?’
r />   ‘I was very fond of him, Fyodor Mikhailovich. He was a good and generous young man. As your son, he did not have an easy life. He was lonely, he was unsure of himself, he had to struggle to find his way. I could see all of that. But I am not of his generation. He could not speak to me as he could to Matryona. He and she could be children together.’ She pauses. ‘I used to get the feeling – let me mention it now, since we are being frank with each other – that the child in Pavel was put down too early, before he had had enough time to play. I don’t know whether it occurred to you. Perhaps not. But I am still surprised at your anger against him for something as trivial as sleeping late.’

  ‘Why surprised?’

  ‘Because I expected more sympathy from you – from an artist. Some children dream at night, others wait for the morning to do their dreaming. You should think twice about waking a dreaming child. When Pavel was with Matryona the child in him had a chance to come out. I am glad now that it could happen – glad he did not miss it.’

  An image of Pavel comes back to him as he was at seven, in his grey checked coat and ear-muffs and boots too large for him, galloping about in the snow, shouting crazily. There is something else looming too in the corner of the picture, something he thrusts away.

  ‘Pavel and I first laid eyes on each other in Semi-palatinsk when he was already seven years old,’ he says. ‘He did not take to me. I was the stranger he and his mother were coming to live with. I was the man who was taking his mother away from him.’