The Master of Petersburg Read online

  ‘Read them for you?’

  ‘Yes. Give me a reading of them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you say I cannot read. Give me a demonstration of how to read. Teach me. Explain to me these ideas that are not ideas.’

  For the first time since the telegram arrived in Dresden, he laughs: he can feel the stiff lines of his cheeks breaking. The laugh is harsh and without joy. ‘I have always been told,’ he says, ‘that the police constitute the eyes and ears of society. And now you call on me for help! No, I will not do your reading for you.’

  Folding his hands in his lap, closing his eyes, looking more like the Buddha than ever, ageless, sexless, Maximov nods. ‘Thank you,’ he murmurs. ‘Now you must go.’

  He emerges into a crowded ante-room. How long has he been closeted with Maximov? An hour? Longer? The bench is full, there are people lounging against the walls, people in the corridors too, where the smell of fresh paint is stifling. All talk ceases; eyes turn on him without sympathy. So many seeking justice, each with a story to tell!

  It is nearly noon. He cannot bear the thought of returning to his room. He walks eastward along Sadovaya Street. The sky is low and grey, a cold wind blows; there is ice on the ground and the footing is slippery. A gloomy day, a day for trudging with the head lowered. Yet he cannot stop himself, his eyes move restlessly from one passing figure to the next, searching for the set of the shoulders, the lilt to the walk, that belong to his lost son. By his walk he will recognize him: first the walk, then the form.

  He tries to summon up Pavel’s face. But the face that appears to him instead, and appears with surprising vividness, is that of a young man with heavy brows and a sparse beard and a thin, tight mouth, the face of the young man who sat behind Bakunin on the stage at the Peace Congress two years ago. His skin is cratered with scars that stand out livid in the cold. ‘Go away!’ he says, trying to dismiss the image. But it will not go. ‘Pavel!’ he whispers, conjuring his son in vain.

  6

  Anna Sergeyevna

  He has not been to the shop before. It is smaller than he had imagined, dark and low, half beneath street level. YAKOVLEV GROCER AND MERCHANT reads the sign. A bell tinkles when he opens the door. His eyes take a while to adjust to the gloom.

  He is the only customer. Behind the counter stands an old man in a dirty white apron. He pretends to examine the wares: open sacks of buckwheat, flour, dried beans, horsefeed. Then he approaches the counter. ‘Some sugar, please,’ he says.

  ‘Eh?’ says the old man, clearing his throat. His spectacles make his eyes seem tiny as buttons.

  ‘I’d like some sugar.’

  She emerges through a curtained doorway at the back of the shop. If she is surprised to see him, she does not show it. ‘I will attend to the customer, Avram Davidovich,’ she says quietly, and the old man stands aside.

  ‘I came for some sugar,’ he repeats.

  ‘Sugar?’ There is the faintest smile on her lips.

  ‘Five kopeks’ worth.’

  Deftly she folds a cone of paper, pinches the bottom shut, scoops in white sugar, weighs it, folds the cone. Capable hands.

  ‘I have just been to the police. I was trying to get Pavel’s papers returned to me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There are complications I didn’t foresee.’

  ‘You will get them back. It takes time. Everything takes time.’

  Though there is no cause to do so, he reads into this remark a double meaning. If the old man were not hovering behind her, he would reach across the counter and take her hand.

  ‘That is –?’ he says.

  ‘That is five kopeks.’

  Taking the cone, he allows his fingers to brush hers. ‘You have lightened my day,’ he whispers, so softly that perhaps not even she hears. He bows, bows to Avram Davidovich.

  Does he imagine it, or has he somewhere before seen the man in the sheepskin coat and cap who, having dawdled on the other side of the road watching workmen unload bricks, now turns, like him, in the direction of Svechnoi Street?

  And sugar. Why of all things did he ask for sugar?

  He writes a note to Apollon Maykov. ‘I am in Petersburg and have visited the grave,’ he writes. ‘Thank you for taking care of everything. Thank you too for your many kindnesses to P. over the years. I am eternally in your debt.’ He signs the note D.

  It would be easy to arrange a discreet meeting. But he does not want to compromise his old friend. Maykov, ever generous, will understand, he tells himself: I am in mourning, and people in mourning shun company.

  It is a good enough excuse, but it is a lie. He is not in mourning. He has not said farewell to his son, he has not given his son up. On the contrary, he wants his son returned to life.

  He writes to his wife: ‘He is still here in his room. He is frightened. He has lost his right to stay in this world, but the next world is cold, as cold as the spaces between the stars, and without welcome.’ As soon as he has finished the letter he tears it up. It is nonsense; it is also a betrayal of what remains between himself and his son.

  His son is inside him, a dead baby in an iron box in the frozen earth. He does not know how to resurrect the baby or – what comes to the same thing – lacks the will to do so. He is paralysed. Even while he is walking down the street, he thinks of himself as paralysed. Every gesture of his hands is made with the slowness of a frozen man. He has no will; or rather, his will has turned into a solid block, a stone that exerts all its dumb weight to draw him down into stillness and silence.

  He knows what grief is. This is not grief. This is death, death coming before its time, come not to overwhelm him and devour him but simply to be with him. It is like a dog that has taken up residence with him, a big grey dog, blind and deaf and stupid and immovable. When he sleeps, the dog sleeps; when he wakes, the dog wakes; when he leaves the house, the dog shambles behind him.

  His mind dwells sluggishly but insistently on Anna Sergeyevna. When he thinks of her, he thinks of nimble fingers counting coins. Coins, stitches – what do they stand for?

  He remembers a peasant girl he saw once at the gate of the convent of St Anne in Tver. She sat with a dead baby at her breast, shrugging off the people who tried to remove the little corpse, smiling beatifically – smiling like St Anne, in fact.

  Memories like wisps of smoke. A reed fence in the middle of nowhere, grey and brittle, and a wisp of a figure slipping between the reeds, flat, without weight, the figure of a boy in white. A hamlet on the steppes with a stream and two or three trees and a cow with a bell around its neck and smoke trailing into the sky. The back of beyond, the end of the world. A boy weaving through the reeds, back and forth, in arrested meta-morphosis, in purgatorial form.

  Visions that come and go, swift, ephemeral. He is not in control of himself. Carefully he pushes paper and pen to the far end of the table and lays his head on his hands. If I am going to faint, he thinks, let me faint at my post.

  Another vision. A figure at a well bringing a pan to his lips, a traveller on the point of departing; over the rim, the eyes already abstracted, elsewhere. A brush of hand against hand. Fond touch. ‘Goodbye, old friend!’ And gone.

  Why this plodding chase across empty country after the rumour of a ghost, the ghost of a rumour?

  Because I am he. Because he is I. Something there that I seek to grasp: the moment before extinction when the blood still courses, the heart still beats. Heart, the faithful ox that keeps the millwheel turning, that casts up not so much as a glance of puzzlement when the axe is raised on high, but takes the blow and folds at the knees and expires. Not oblivion but the moment before oblivion, when I come panting up to you at the rim of the well and we look upon each other for a last time, knowing we are alive, sharing this one life, our only life. All that I am left to grasp for: the moment of that gaze, salutation and farewell in one, past all arguing, past all pleading: ‘Hello, old friend. Goodbye, old friend.’ Dry eyes. Tears turned to crystals.

&nb
sp; I hold your head between my hands. I kiss your brow. I kiss your lips.

  The rule: one look, one only; no glancing back. But I look back.

  You stand at the wellside, the wind in your hair, not a soul but a body rarefied, raised to its first, second, third, fourth, fifth essence, gazing upon me with crystal eyes, smiling with golden lips.

  Forever I look back. Forever I am absorbed in your gaze. A field of crystal points, dancing, winking, and I one of them. Stars in the sky, and fires on the plain answering them. Two realms signalling to each other.

  He falls asleep at the table and sleeps through the rest of the afternoon. At suppertime Matryona taps at the door, but he does not waken. They have supper without him.

  Much later, after the child’s bedtime, he emerges dressed for the street. Anna Sergeyevna, seated with her back to him, turns. ‘Are you going out then?’ she says. ‘Will you have some tea before you go?’

  There is a certain nervousness about her. But the hand that passes him the cup is steady.

  She does not invite him to sit down. He drinks his tea in silence, standing before her.

  There is something he wants to say, but he is afraid he will not be able to get it out, or will even break down again in front of her. He is not in control of himself.

  He puts down the empty cup and lays a hand on her shoulder. ‘No,’ she says, shaking her head, pushing his hand away, ‘that is not how I do things.’

  Her hair is drawn back under a heavy enamelled clasp. He loosens the clasp and lays it on the table. Now she does not resist, but shakes her hair till it hangs loose.

  ‘Everything else will follow, I promise,’ he says. He is conscious of his age; in his voice he hears no trace of the erotic edge that women would once upon a time respond to. Instead there is something to which he does not care to give a name. A cracked instrument, a voice that has undergone its second breaking. ‘Everything,’ he repeats.

  She is searching his face with an earnestness and intentness he cannot mistake. Then she puts aside her sewing. Slipping past his hands, she disappears into the curtained alcove.

  He waits, unsure. Nothing happens. He follows her and parts the curtains.

  Matryona lies fast asleep, her lips open, her fair hair spread on the pillow like a nimbus. Anna Sergeyevna has half unbuttoned her dress. With a wave of the hand and a cross look in which there is nevertheless a touch of amusement, she orders him out.

  He sits down and waits. She emerges in her shift, her feet bare. The veins on her feet stand out blue. Not a young woman; not an innocent surrendering herself. Yet her hands, when he takes them, are cold and trembling. She will not meet his eyes. ‘Fyodor Mikhailovich,’ she whispers, ‘I want you to know I have not done this before.’

  She wears a silver chain around her neck. With his finger he follows the loop of the chain till he comes to the little crucifix. He raises the crucifix to her lips; warmly and without hesitation she kisses it. But when he tries to kiss her, she averts her head. ‘Not now,’ she whispers.

  They spend the night together in his son’s room. What happens between them happens in the dark from beginning to end. In their lovemaking he is struck above all by the heat of her body. It is not at all as he had expected. It is as if at her core she were on fire. It excites him intensely, and it excites him too that they should be doing such fiery, dangerous work with the child asleep in the next room.

  He falls asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night he wakes with her still beside him in the narrow bed. Though he is exhausted, he tries to arouse her. She does not respond; when he forces himself on her, she becomes like a dead thing in his arms.

  In the act there is nothing he can call pleasure or even sensation. It is as though they are making love through a sheet, the grey, tattered sheet of his grief. At the moment of climax he plunges back into sleep as into a lake. As he sinks Pavel rises to meet him. His son’s face is contorted in despair: his lungs are bursting, he knows he is dying, he knows he is past hope, he calls to his father because that is the last thing left he can do, the last thing in the world. He calls out in a strangled rush of words. This is the vision in its ugly extremity that rushes at him out of the vortex of darkness into which he is descending inside the woman’s body. It bursts upon him, possesses him, speeds on.

  When he wakes again it is light. The apartment is empty.

  He passes the day in a fever of impatience. Thinking of her, he quivers with desire like a young man. But what possesses him is not the tight-throated douceur of twenty years ago. Rather, he feels like a leaf or a seed in the grip of a headlong force, a winged seed drawn up into the highest windstream, carried dizzily above the oceans.

  Over supper Anna Sergeyevna is self-possessed and distant, confining her attention to the child, listening single-mindedly to the rambling narrative of her day at school. When she needs to address him, she is polite but cool. Her coolness only inflames him. Can it be that the avid glances he steals at the mother’s throat, lips, arms pass the child entirely by?

  He waits for the silence, that will mean Matryona has gone to bed. Instead, at nine o’clock the light next door is extinguished. For half an hour he waits, and another half-hour. Then with a shielded candle, in his stockinged feet, he creeps out. The candle casts huge bobbing shadows. He sets it down on the floor and crosses to the alcove.

  In the dim light he makes out Anna Sergeyevna on the farther side of the bed, her back to him, her arms gracefully above her head like a dancer’s, her dark hair loose. On the near side, curled with her thumb in her mouth and one arm cast loosely over her mother, is Matryona. His immediate impression is that she is awake, watching him, guarding her mother; but when he bends over her, her breathing is deep and even.

  He whispers the name: ‘Anna!’ She does not stir.

  He returns to his room, trying to be calm. There are perfectly sound reasons, he tells himself, why she might prefer to keep to herself tonight. But he is beyond the reach of his own persuading.

  A second time he tiptoes across the room. The two women have not stirred. Again he has the uncanny feeling that Matryona is watching him. He bends closer.

  He is not mistaken: he is staring into open, unblinking eyes. A chill runs through him. She sleeps with her eyes open, he tells himself. But it is not true. She is awake and has been awake all the time; thumb in mouth, she has been watching his every motion with unremitting vigilance. As he peers, holding his breath, the corners of her mouth seem to curve faintly upward in a victorious, bat-like grin. And the arm too, extended loosely over her mother, is like a wing.

  They have one more night together, after which the gate closes. She comes to his room late and without warning. Again, through her, he passes into darkness and into the waters where his son floats among the other drowned. ‘Do not be afraid,’ he wants to whisper, ‘I will be with you, I will divide the bitterness with you.’

  He wakes sprawled across her, his lips to her ear.

  ‘Do you know where I have been?’ he whispers.

  She eases herself out from under him.

  ‘Do you know where you took me?’ he whispers.

  There is an urge in him to show the boy off to her, show him in the springtime of his powers, with his flashing eyes and his clear jaw and his handsome mouth. He wants to clothe him again in the white suit, wants the clear, deep voice to be heard again from his chest. ‘See what a treasure is gone from the world!’ he wants to cry out: ‘See what we have lost!’

  She has turned her back to him. His hand strokes her long thigh urgently, up and down. She stops him. ‘I must go,’ she says, and gets up.

  The next night she does not come, but stays with her daughter. He writes her a letter and leaves it on the table. When he gets up in the morning the apartment is empty and the letter still there, unopened.

  He visits the shop. She is at the counter; but as soon as she sees him she slips into the back room, leaving old Yakovlev to attend to him.

  In the evening he is waiting on the
street, and follows her home like a footpad. He catches her in the entryway.

  ‘Why are you avoiding me?’

  ‘I am not avoiding you.’

  He takes her by the arm. It is dark, she is carrying a basket, she cannot free herself. He presses himself against her, drawing in the walnut scent of her hair. He tries to kiss her, but she turns away and his lips brush her ear. Nothing in the pressure of her body answers to him. Disgrace, he thinks: this is how one enters disgrace.

  He stands aside, but on the stairway catches up with her again. ‘One word more,’ he says: ‘Why?’

  She turns toward him. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Must I spell it out?’

  ‘What is obvious? Nothing is obvious.’

  ‘You were suffering. You were pleading.’

  He recoils. ‘That is not the truth!’

  ‘You were in need. It is nothing to be ashamed of. But now it is finished. It will do you no good to go on, and it does me no good either to be used in this way.’

  ‘Used? I am not using you! Nothing could be further from my mind!’

  ‘You are using me to get to someone else. Don’t be upset. I am explaining myself, not accusing you. But I don’t want to be dragged in any further. You have a wife of your own. You should wait till you are with her again.’

  A wife of your own. Why does she drag his wife in? My wife is too young! – that is what he wants to say – too young for me as I am now! But how can he say it?

  Yet what she says is true, truer than she knows. When he returns to Dresden, the wife he embraces will be changed, will be infused with the trace he will bring back of this subtle, sensually gifted widow. Through his wife he will be reaching to this woman, just as through this woman he reaches – to whom?

  Does he betray what he is thinking? With a sudden angry flush, she shakes his hand from her sleeve and climbs the stairs, leaving him behind.

  He follows, shuts himself in his room, and tries to calm himself. The pounding of his heart slows. Pavel! he whispers over and over, using the word as a charm. But what comes to him inexorably is the form not of Pavel but of the other one, Sergei Nechaev.