Master of Petersburg Page 21

  Christ on Calvary overwhelms him too. But the figure before him is not that of Christ. In it he detects no love, only the cold and massive indifference of stone.

  This presence, so grey and without feature – is this what he must father, give blood to, flesh, life? Or does he misunderstand, and has he misunderstood from the beginning? Is he required, rather, to put aside all that he himself is, all he has become, down to his very features, and become as a babe again? Is the thing before him the one that does the fathering, and must he give himself to being fathered by it?

  If that is what must be, if that is the truth and the way to the resurrection, he will do it. He will put aside everything. Following this shade he will go naked as a babe into the jaws of hell.

  An image comes to him that for the past month he has flinched from: Pavel, naked and broken and bloody, in the morgue; the seed in his body dead too, or dying.

  Nothing is private any more. As unblinkingly as he can he gazes upon the body-parts without which there can be no fatherhood. And his mind goes again to the museum in Berlin, to the goddess-fiend drawing out the seed from the corpse, saving it.

  Thus at last the time arrives and the hand that holds the pen begins to move. But the words it forms are not words of salvation. Instead they tell of flies, or of a single black fly, buzzing against a closed windowpane. High summer in Petersburg, hot and clammy; from the street below, noise, music. In the room a child with brown eyes and straight fair hair lying naked beside a man, her slim feet barely reaching to his ankles, her face pressed against the curve of his shoulder, where she snuggles and roots like a baby.

  Who is the man? The body is as perfectly formed as a god’s. But it gives off such marmoreal coldness that it is impossible a child in its grasp could not be chilled to the bone. As for the face, the face will not be seen.

  He sits with the pen in his hand, holding himself back from a descent into representations that have no place in the world, on the point of toppling, enclosed within a moment in which all creation lies open at his feet, the moment before he loosens his grip and begins to fall.

  It is a moment of which he is becoming a connoisseur, a voluptuary. For which he will be damned.

  Restlessly he gets up. From the suitcase he takes Pavel’s diary and turns to the first empty page, the page that the child did not write on because by then he was dead. On this page he begins, a second time, to write.

  In his writing he is in the same room, sitting at the table much as he is sitting now. But the room is Pavel’s and Pavel’s alone. And he is not himself any longer, not a man in the forty-ninth year of his life. Instead he is young again, with all the arrogant strength of youth. He is wearing a white suit, perfectly tailored. He is, to a degree, Pavel Isaev, though Pavel Isaev is not the name he is going to give himself.

  In the blood of this young man, this version of Pavel, is a sense of triumph. He has passed through the gates of death and returned; nothing can touch him any more. He is not a god but he is no longer human either. He is, in some sense, beyond the human, beyond man. There is nothing he is not capable of.

  Through this young man the building, with its stale-smelling corridors and blind corners, begins to write itself, this building in Petersburg, in Russia.

  He heads the page, in neat capitals, THE APARTMENT, and writes:

  He sleeps late, rarely rising before noon, when the apartment has grown so hot that the bedsheets are soaked with his sweat. Then he stumbles to the little washroom on the landing and splashes water over his face and brushes his teeth with his finger and stumbles back to the apartment. There, unshaven, straggle-haired, he eats the breakfast his landlady has set out for him (the butter by now melted, gnats floating in the milk); and then shaves and puts on yesterday’s underwear, yesterday’s shirt, and the white suit (the trouser-creases sharp as a knife from being pressed under the mattress all night), and wets his hair and slicks it down; and then, having prepared for the day, loses interest, loses motive power: sits down again at the table still cluttered with the breakfast things and falls into a reverie, or sprawls about, picking his nails with a knife, waiting for something to happen, for the child to come home from school.

  Or else wanders around the apartment opening drawers, fingering things.

  He comes upon a locket with pictures of his landlady and her dead husband. He spits on the glass and shines it with his handkerchief. Brightly the couple stare at each other across their tiny prison.

  He buries his face in her underclothes, smelling faintly of lavender.

  He is enrolled as a student at the university but he attends no lectures. He joins a kruzhok, a circle whose members experiment with free love. One afternoon he brings a girl back to his room. It occurs to him that he ought to lock the door, but he does not. He and the girl make love; they fall asleep.

  A noise wakes him. He knows they are being watched.

  He touches the girl and she is awake. The two of them are naked, beautiful, in the pride of their youth. They make love a second time.

  Throughout, he is aware of the door open a crack, and the child watching. His pleasure is acute; it communicates itself to the girl; never before have they experienced such dark sweetness.

  When he takes the girl home afterwards, he leaves the bed unmade so that the child, exploring, can familiarize herself with the smells of love.

  Every Wednesday afternoon from then on, for the rest of the summer, he brings the girl to his room, always the same girl. Each time, when they depart, the apartment seems to be empty; each time, he knows, the child has crept in, has watched or listened, is now hiding somewhere.

  ‘Do that again,’ the girl will whisper.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘That!’ she whispers, flushed with desire.

  ‘First say the words,’ he says, and makes her say them. ‘Louder,’ he says. Saying the words excites the girl unbearably.

  He remembers Svidrigailov: ‘Women like to be humiliated.’

  He thinks of all of this as creating a taste in the child, as one creates a taste for unnatural foods, oysters or sweetbreads.

  He asks himself why he does it. The answer he gives himself is: History is coming to an end; the old account-books will soon be thrown in the fire; in this dead time between old and new, all things are permitted. He does not believe his answer particularly, does not disbelieve it. It serves.

  Or he says to himself: It is the fault of the Petersburg summer – these long, hot, stuffy afternoons with flies buzzing against the windowpanes, these evenings thick with the hum of mosquitoes. Let me last through the summer, and through the winter too; then when spring comes I will go away to Switzerland, to the mountains, and become a different person.

  He takes his meals with his landlady and her daughter. One Wednesday evening, pretending high spirits, he leans across the table and ruffles the child’s hair. She draws away. He realizes he has not washed his hands, and she has picked up the after-smell of lovemaking. Colouring, covered in confusion, she bends over her plate, will not meet his eye.

  He writes all of this in a clear, careful script, crossing out not a word. In the act of writing he experiences, today, an exceptional sensual pleasure – in the feel of the pen, snug in the crook of his thumb, but even more in the feel of his hand being tugged back lightly from its course across the page by the strict, unvarying shape of the letters, the discipline of the alphabet.

  Anya, Anna Snitkina, was his secretary before she was his wife. He hired her to bring his manuscripts into order, then married her. A fairy-girl of a kind, called in to spin the tangle of his writing into a single golden thread. If he writes so clearly today, it is because he is no longer writing for her eyes. He is writing for himself. He is writing for eternity. He is writing for the dead.

  Yet at the same time that he sits here so calmly, he is a man caught in a whirlwind. Torrents of paper, fragments of an old life torn loose by the roar of the upward spiral, fly all about him. High above the earth he is borne, buffeted by
currents, before the grip of the wind slackens and for a moment, before he starts to fall, he is allowed utter stillness and clarity, the world opening below him like a map of itself.

  Letters from the whirlwind. Scattered leaves, which he gathers up; a scattered body, which he reassembles.

  There is a tap at the door: Matryona, in her nightdress, for an instant looking startlingly like her mother. ‘Can I come in?’ she says in a husky voice.

  ‘Is your throat still sore?’

  ‘Mm.’

  She sits down on the bed. Even at this distance he can hear how troubled her breathing is.

  Why is she here? Does she want to make peace? Is she too being worn down?

  ‘Pavel used to sit like that when he was writing,’ she says. ‘I thought you were Pavel when I came in.’

  ‘I am in the middle of something,’ he says. ‘Do you mind if I go on?’

  She sits quietly behind him and watches while he writes. The air in the room is electric: even the dustmotes seem to be suspended.

  ‘Do you like your name?’ he says quietly, after a while.

  ‘My own name?’

  ‘Yes. Matryona.’

  ‘No, I hate it. My father chose it. I don’t know why I have to have it. It was my grandmother’s name. She died before I was born.’

  ‘I have another name for you. Dusha.’ He writes the name at the head of the page, shows it to her. ‘Do you like it?’

  She does not answer.

  ‘What really happened to Pavel?’ he says. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘I think . . . I think he gave himself up.’

  ‘Gave himself up for what?’

  ‘For the future. So that he could be one of the martyrs.’

  ‘Martyrs? What is a martyr?’

  She hesitates. ‘Someone who gives himself up. For the future.’

  ‘Was that Finnish girl a martyr too?’

  She nods.

  He wonders whether Pavel had grown used to speaking in formulas too, by the end. For the first time it occurs to him that Pavel might be better dead. Now that he has thought the thought, he faces it squarely, not disowning it.

  A war: the old against the young, the young against the old.

  ‘You must go now,’ he says. ‘I have work to do.’

  He heads the next page THE CHILD, and writes:

  One day a letter arrives for him, his name and address written out in slow, neat block letters. The child takes it from the concierge and leaves it propped against the mirror in his room.

  ‘That letter – do you want to know who sent it?’ he remarks casually when he and she are next alone together. And he tells her the story of Maria Lebyatkin, of how Maria disgraced her brother Captain Lebyatkin and became the laughing-stock of Tver by claiming that an admirer, whose identity she coyly refused to disclose, was asking for her hand.

  ‘Is the letter from Maria?’ asks the child.

  ‘Wait and you will hear.’

  ‘But why did they laugh at her? Why shouldn’t someone want to marry her?’

  ‘Because Maria was simple, and simple people should not marry for fear they will bear simple children, and the simple children will then have simple children themselves, and so forth, till the whole land is full of simple people. Like an epidemic.’

  ‘An epidemic?’

  ‘Yes. Do you want me to go on? It all happened last summer while I was visiting my aunt. I heard the story of Maria and her phantom admirer and decided to do something about it. First of all I had a white suit made, so that I would look gallant enough for the part.’

  ‘This suit?’

  ‘Yes, this suit. By the time it was ready, everyone knew what was up – in Tver news travels fast. I put on the suit and with a bunch of flowers went calling on the Lebyatkins. The captain was mystified, but his sister wasn’t. She had never lost her faith. From then on I called every day. Once I took her for a walk in the forest, just the two of us. That was the day before I set off for Petersburg.’

  ‘So were you her admirer all the time?’

  ‘No, that’s not how it was. The admirer was just a dream she had. Simple people can’t tell the difference between dreams and the real thing. They believe in dreams. She thought I was the dream. Because I behaved, you know, like a dream.’

  ‘And will you go back and see her?’

  ‘I don’t think so. In fact, certainly not. And if she comes looking for me, you must be sure not to let her in. Say I have changed lodgings. Say you don’t know my address. Or give her a false address. Make one up. You’ll recognize her at once. She is tall and bony and her teeth stick out, and she smiles all the time. In fact she’s a kind of witch.’

  ‘Is that what she says in the letter – that she is coming here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why –?’

  ‘Why did I do it? For a joke. Summer in the country is so boring – you have no idea how boring.’

  It takes him no more than ten minutes to write the scene, with not a word blotted. In a final version it would have to be fuller, but for present purposes this is enough. He gets up, leaving the two pages open on the table.

  It is an assault upon the innocence of a child. It is an act for which he can expect no forgiveness. With it he has crossed the threshold. Now God must speak, now God dare no longer remain silent. To corrupt a child is to force God. The device he has made arches and springs shut like a trap, a trap to catch God.

  He knows what he is doing. At the same time, in this contest of cunning between himself and God, he is outside himself, perhaps outside his soul. Somewhere he stands and watches while he and God circle each other. And time stands still and watches too. Time is suspended, everything is suspended before the fall.

  I have lost my place in my soul, he thinks.

  He picks up his hat and leaves his lodgings. He does not recognize the hat, has no idea whose shoes he is wearing. In fact, he recognizes nothing of himself. If he were to look in a mirror now, he would not be surprised if another face were to loom up, staring back blindly at him.

  He has betrayed everyone; nor does he see that his betrayals could go deeper. If he ever wanted to know whether betrayal tasted more like vinegar or like gall, now is the time.

  But there is no taste at all in his mouth, just as there is no weight on his heart. His heart, in fact, feels quite empty. He had not known beforehand it would be like this. But how could he have known? Not torment but a dull absence of torment. Like a soldier shot on the battlefield, bleeding, seeing the blood, feeling no pain, wondering: Am I dead already?

  It seems to him a great price to pay. They pay him lots of money for writing books, said the child, repeating the dead child. What they failed to say was that he had to give up his soul in return.

  Now he begins to taste it. It tastes like gall.

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  Copyright © J.M. Coetzee 1994

  J.M. Coetzee has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg in 1994

  First published by Vintage in 1999

  Published by Vint
age 2004

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library