Master of Petersburg (15 page)

For he recognizes an inertia in himself of which Pavel's death is only the immediate cause. He is growing old, becoming day by day what he will at the last undoubtedly be: an old man in a corner with nothing to do but pick over the pages of his losses.

I am the one who died and was buried, he thinks, Pavel the one who lives and will always live. What I am struggling to do now is to understand what form this is in which I have returned from the grave.

He recalls a fellow-convict in Siberia, a tall, stooped, grey man who had violated his twelve-year-old daughter and then strangled her. He had been found after the event sitting by the side of a duckpond with the lifeless body in his arms. He had yielded without a struggle, insisting only on carrying the dead child home himself and laying her out on a table – doing all of this with, it was reported, the greatest tenderness. Shunned by the other prisoners, he spoke to no one. In the evenings he would sit on his bunk wearing a quiet smile, his lips moving as he read the Gospels to himself. In time one might have expected the ostracism to relax, his contrition to be accepted. But in fact he continued to be shunned, not so much for a crime committed twenty years ago as for that smile, in which there was something so sly and so mad that it chilled the blood. The same smile, they said one to another, as when he did the deed: nothing in his heart has changed.

Why does it recur now, this image of a man at the water's edge with a dead child in his arms? A child loved too much, a child become the object of such intimacy that it dare not be allowed to live. Murderous tenderness, tender murderousness. Love turned inside out like a glove to reveal its ugly stitching. And what is love stitched from? He calls up the image of the man again, looks intently into the face, concentrating not on the eyes, closed in a trance, but on the mouth, which is working lightly. Not rape but rapine – is that it? Fathers devouring children, raising them well in order to eat them like delicacies afterwards.
Delikatessen
.

Does that explain Nechaev's vengefulness: that his eyes have been opened to the fathers naked, the band of fathers, their appetites bared? What sort of man must he be, the elder Nechaev, father Gennady? When one day the news comes, as it undoubtedly will, that his son is no more, will he sit in a corner and weep, or will he secretly smile?

He shakes his head as if to rid it of a plague of devils. What is it that is corrupting the integrity of his grieving, that insists it is nothing but a lugubrious disguise? Somewhere inside him truth has lost its way. As if in the labyrinth of his brain, but also in the labyrinth of his body – veins, bones, intestines, organs – a tiny child is wandering, searching for the light, searching to emerge. How can he find the child lost within himself, allow him a voice to sing his sad song?

Piping on a bone
. An old story comes back to him of a youth killed, mutilated, scattered, whose thigh-bone, when the wind blows, pipes a lament and names his murderers. One by one, in fact, the old stories are coming back, stories he heard from his grandmother and did not know the meaning of, but stored up unwittingly like bones for the future. A great ossuary of stories from before history began, built up and tended by the people. Let Pavel find his way to my thigh-bone and pipe to me from there!
Father, why have you left me in the dark forest? Father, when will you come to save me
?

The candle before the icon is nothing but a pool of wax; the spray of flowers droops. Having put up the shrine, the girl has forgotten or abandoned it. Does she guess that Pavel has ceased to speak to him, that he has lost his way too, that the only voices he hears now are devil-voices?

He scratches the wick erect, lights it, goes down on his knees. The Virgin's eyes are locked on her babe, who stares out of the picture at him, raising a tiny admonitory finger.

11

In the week that has passed since their last intimacy, there has grown up between Anna Sergeyevna and himself a barrier of awkward formality. Her bearing toward him has become so constrained that he is sure the child, who watches and listens all the time, must conclude she wants him gone from the house.

For whose sake are they keeping up this appearance of distance? Not for their own, surely. It can only be for the eyes of the children, the two children, the present one and the absent one.

Yet he hungers to have her in his arms again. Nor does he believe she is indifferent to him. On his own he feels like a dog chasing its tail in tighter and tighter circles. With her in the saving dark, he has an intimation that his limbs will be loosened and the spirit released, the spirit that at present seems knotted to his body at shoulders, hips, and knees.

At the core of his hunger is a desire that on the first night did not fully know itself but now seems to have becomes centred on her smell. As if she and he were animals, he is drawn by something he picks up in the air around her: the smell of autumn, and of walnuts in particular. He has begun to understand how animals live, and young children too, attracted or repelled by mists, auras, atmospheres. He sees himself sprawled over her like a lion, rooting with his muzzle in the hair of her neck, burying his nose in her armpit, rubbing his face in her crotch.

There is no lock on the door. It is not inconceivable that the child will wander into the room at a time like this and glimpse him in a state of – he approaches the word with distaste, but it is the only right word – lust. And so many children are sleepwalkers too: she could get up in the night and stray into his room without even waking. Are they passed down from mother to daughter, these intimate smells? Loving the mother, is one destined to long for the daughter too? Wandering thoughts, wandering desires! They will have to be buried with him, hidden forever from all except one. For Pavel is within him now, and Pavel never sleeps. He can only pray that a weakness that would once have disgusted the boy will now bring a smile to his lips, a smile amused and tolerant.

Perhaps Nechaev too, once he has crossed the dark river into death, will cease to be such a wolf and learn to smile again.

So he is waiting opposite Yakovlev's shop the next evening when Anna Sergeyevna emerges. He crosses the street, savouring her surprise as she sees him. ‘Shall we take a walk?' he proposes.

She draws the dark shawl tighter under her chin. ‘I don't know. Matryosha will be expecting me.'

Nevertheless they do walk. The wind has dropped, the air is crisp and cold. There is a pleasing bustle about them in the streets. No one pays them any attention. They might be any married couple.

She is carrying a basket, which he takes from her. He likes the way she walks, with long strides, arms folded under her breasts.

‘I will have to be leaving soon,' he says.

She makes no reply.

The question of his wife lies delicately between them. In alluding to his departure he feels like a chess-player offering a pawn which, whether accepted or refused, must lead into deeper complications. Are affairs between men and women always like this, the one plotting, the other plotted against? Is plotting an element of the pleasure: to be the object of another's intrigue, to be shepherded into a corner and softly pressed to capitulate? As she walks by his side, is she too, in her way, plotting against him?

‘I am waiting only for the investigation to run its course. I need not even stay for the ruling. All I want is the papers. The rest is immaterial.'

‘And then you will go back to Germany?'

‘Yes.'

They have reached the embankment. Crossing the street, he takes her arm. Side by side they lean against the rail by the waterside.

‘I don't know whether to hate this city for what it did to Pavel,' he says, ‘or to feel even more tightly bound to it. Because it is Pavel's home now. He will never leave it, never travel as he wanted to.'

‘What nonsense, Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she replies with a sidelong smile. ‘Pavel is with you. You are his home. He is in your heart, he travels with you wherever you go. Anyone can see that.' And she touches his breast lightly with her gloved hand.

He feels his heart leap as though her fingertip had brushed the organ itself. Coquetry – is that what it is, or does the gesture spring from her own heart? It would be the most natural thing in the world to take her in his arms. He can feel his gaze positively devour her shapely mouth, on which a smile still lingers. And beneath that gaze she does not flinch. Not a young woman. Not a child. Gazing back at him over the body of Pavel, the two of them throwing out their challenges. The flicker of a thought:
If only he were not here!
Then the thought vanishes around a corner.

From a street-seller they buy little fish-pasties for their supper. Matryona opens the door, but when she sees who is with her mother, turns her back. At table she is in a fretful mood, insisting that her mother pay attention to a long, confused story of a squabble between herself and a classmate at school. When he intervenes to make the mildest of pleas for the other girl, Matryona snorts and does not deign to answer.

She has sensed something, he knows, and is trying to reclaim her mother. And why not? It is her right.
Yet if only she were not here!
This time he does not suppress the thought. If the child were away he would not waste another word. He would snuff out the light, and in the dark he and she would find each other again. They would have the big bed to themselves, the widow-bed, the bed widowed of a man's body for – how long did she say? – four years?

He has a vision of Anna Sergeyevna that is crude in its sensuality. Her petticoat is pushed high up, so that beneath it her breasts are bared. He lies between her legs: her long pale thighs grip him. Her face is averted, her eyes closed, she is breathing heavily. Though the man coupling with her is himself, he sees all of this somehow from beside the bed. It is her thighs that dominate the vision: his hands curve around them, he presses them against his flanks.

‘Come, finish the food on your plate,' she urges her daughter.

‘I'm not hungry, my throat is sore,' Matryona whines. She toys with her food a moment longer, then pushes it aside.

He rises. ‘Good night, Matryosha. I hope you feel better tomorrow.' The child does not bother to reply. He retires, leaving her in possession of the field.

He recognizes the source of the vision: a postcard he bought in Paris years ago and destroyed together with the rest of his erotica when he married Anya. A girl with long dark hair lying underneath a mustachioed man.
GYPSY LOVE
, read the caption in florid capitals. But the legs of the girl in the picture were plump, her flesh flaccid, her face, turned toward the man (who held himself up stiffly on his arms), devoid of expression. The thighs of Anna Sergeyevna, of the Anna Sergeyevna of his memory, are leaner, stronger; there is something purposeful in their grip which he links with the fact that she is not a child but a fullgrown, avid woman. Fullgrown and therefore open (that is the word that insists itself) to death. A body ready for experience because it knows it will not live forever. The thought is arousing but disturbing too. To those thighs it does not matter who is gripped between them; beheld from somewhere above and to the side of the bed, the man in the picture both is and is not himself.

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.