Master of Petersburg (2 page)

‘Here, Mama!' calls Matryona.

They are before one mound of earth among many mounds with cross-shaped stakes plunged into them bearing shingles with painted numbers. He tries to close his mind to this one number,
his
number, but not before he has seen the 7s and the 4s and has thought: Never can I bet on the seven again.

This is the moment at which he ought to fall on the grave. But it is all too sudden, this particular bed of earth is too strange, he cannot find any feeling for it in his heart. He mistrusts, too, the chain of indifferent hands through which his son's limbs must have passed while he was still in Dresden, ignorant as a sheep. From the boy who still lives in his memory to the name on the death certificate to the number on the stake he is not yet prepared to accept the train of fatality.
Provisional
, he thinks: there are no final numbers, all are provisional, otherwise the play would come to an end. In a while the wheel will roll, the numbers will start moving, and all will be well again.

The mound has the volume and even the shape of a recumbent body. It is, in fact, nothing more or less than the volume of fresh earth displaced by a wooden chest with a tall young man inside it. There is something in this that does not bear thinking about, that he thrusts away from him. Taking the place of the thought are galling memories of what he was doing in Dresden all the time that, here in Petersburg, the procedure of storing, numbering, encasing, transporting, burying was following its indifferent course. Why was there no breath of a presentiment in the Dresden air? Must multitudes perish before the heavens will tremble?

Among images that return is one of himself in the bathroom of the apartment on Larchenstrasse, trimming his beard in the mirror. The brass taps on the washbasin gleam; the face in the mirror, absorbed in its task, is the face of a stranger from the past. Already I was old, he thinks. Sentence had been pronounced; and the letter of sentence, addressed to me, was on its way, passing from hand to hand, only I did not know it.
The joy of your life is over:
that is what the sentence said.

The landlady is scraping a small hole at the foot of the mound. ‘Please,' he says, and gestures, and she moves aside.

Unbuttoning his coat, unbuttoning his jacket, he kneels, then pitches awkwardly forward till he lies flat upon the mound, his arms extended over his head. He is crying freely, his nose is streaming. He rubs his face in the wet earth, burrows his face into it.

When he gets up there is soil in his beard, in his hair, in his eyebrows. The child, to whom he has paid no attention, stares with wondering eyes. He brushes his face, blows his nose, buttons his clothes. What a Jewish performance! he thinks. But let her see! Let her see one is not made of stone! Let her see there are no bounds!

Something flashes from his eyes toward her; she turns away in confusion and presses against her mother. Back to the nest! A terrible malice streams out of him toward the living, and most of all toward living children. If there were a newborn babe here at this moment, he would pluck it from its mother's arms and dash it against a rock. Herod, he thinks: now I understand Herod! Let breeding come to an end!

He turns his back on the pair of them and walks off. Soon he has left behind the newer quarter of the graveyard and is roaming among the old stones, among the long-dead.

When he returns the bird's-foot has been planted.

‘Who is going to take care of it?' he asks sullenly.

She shrugs. The question is not for her to answer. It is his turn now, it is for him to say: I will come every day to tend it, or to say: God will take care of it, or else to say: No one is going to take care of it, it will die, let it die.

The little white flowers toss cheerfully in the breeze.

He grips the woman's arm. ‘He is not here, he is not dead,' he says, his voice cracking.

‘No, of course he is not dead, Fyodor Mikhailovich.' She is matter-of-fact, reassuring. More than that: she is, at this moment, motherly, not only toward her daughter but toward Pavel too.

Her hands are small, her fingers slim and rather childish, yet her figure is full. Absurdly, he would like to lay his head on her breast and feel those fingers stroke his hair.

The innocence of hands, ever-renewed. A memory comes back to him: the touch of a hand, intimate in the dark. But whose hand? Hands emerging like animals, without shame, without memory, into the light of day.

‘I must make a note of the number,' he says, avoiding her eyes.

‘I have the number.'

Where does his desire come from? It is acute, fiery: he wants to take this woman by the arm, drag her behind the gatekeeper's hut, lift her dress, couple with her.

He thinks of mourners at a wake falling on the food and drink. A kind of exultation in it, a brag flung in the face of death: Us you do not have!

They are back at the jetty. The grey dog slinks cautiously up to them. Matryona wants to stroke it but her mother discourages her. There is something wrong with the dog: an open, angry sore runs up its back from the base of its tail. It whimpers softly all the time, or else drops suddenly on its hindquarters and attacks the sore with its teeth.

I will come again tomorrow, he promises: I will come alone, and you and I will speak. In the thought of returning, of crossing the river, finding his way to his son's bed, being alone with him in the mist, there is a muted promise of adventure.

3

He sits in his son's room with the white suit on his lap, breathing softly, trying to lose himself, trying to evoke a spirit that can surely not yet have left these surroundings.

Time passes. From the next room, through the partition, come the hushed voices of the woman and child and the sounds of a table being laid. He puts the suit aside, taps on the door. The voices cease abruptly. He enters. ‘I will be leaving now,' he says.

‘As you can see, we are about to have supper. You are welcome to join us.'

The food she offers is simple: soup, and potatoes with salt and butter.

‘How did my son come to lodge with you?' he asks at a certain point. Still he is careful to call him
my son:
if he brings forth the name he will begin to shake.

She hesitates, and he understands why. She could say: He was a nice young man; we took to him. But
was
is the obstacle, the boulder in her path. Until there is a way of circumventing the word in all its starkness, she will not speak it in front of him.

‘A previous lodger recommended him,' she says at last. And that is that.

She strikes him as dry, dry as a butterfly's wing. As if between her skin and her petticoat, between her skin and the black stockings she no doubt wears, there is a film of fine white ash, so that, loosened from her shoulders, her clothes would slip to the floor without any coaxing.

He would like to see her naked, this woman in the last flowering of her youth.

Not what one would call an educated woman; but will one ever hear Russian spoken more beautifully? Her tongue like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats.

In the daughter he detects none of the mother's soft dryness. On the contrary, there is something liquid about her, something of the young doe, trusting yet nervous, stretching its neck to sniff the stranger's hand, tensed to leap away. How can this dark woman have mothered this fair child? Yet the telltale signs are all there: the fingers, small, almost unformed; the dark eyes, lustrous as those of Byzantine saints; the fine, sculpted line of the brow; even the moody air.

Strange how in a child a feature can take its perfect form while in the parent it seems a copy!

The girl raises her eyes for an instant, encounters his gaze exploring her, and turns away in confusion. An angry impulse rises in him. He wants to grip her arm and shake her. Look at me, child! he wants to say: Look at me and learn!

His knife drops to the floor. Gratefully he fumbles for it. It is as if the skin has been flayed from his face, as if, despite himself, he is continually thrusting upon the two of them a hideous bleeding mask.

The woman speaks again. ‘Matryona and Pavel Alexandrovich were good friends,' she says, firmly and carefully. And to the child: ‘He gave you lessons, didn't he?'

‘He taught me French and German. Mostly French.'

Matryona: not the right name for her. An old woman's name, the name of a little old woman with a face like a prune.

‘I would like you to have something of his,' he says. ‘To remember him by.'

Again the child raises her eyes in that baffled look, inspecting him as a dog inspects a stranger, hardly hearing what he says. What is going on? And the answer comes: She cannot imagine me as Pavel's father. She is trying to see Pavel in me and she cannot. And he thinks further: To her Pavel is not yet dead. Somewhere in her he still lives, breathing the warm, sweet breath of youth. Whereas this blackness of mine, this beardedness, this boniness, must be as repugnant as death the reaper himself. Death, with his bony hips and his inch-long teeth and the rattle of his ankles as he walks.

He has no wish to speak about his son. To hear him spoken of, yes, yes indeed, but not to speak. By arithmetic, this is the tenth day of Pavel being dead. With every day that passes, memories of him that may still be floating in the air like autumn leaves are being trodden into the mud or caught by the wind and borne up into the blinding heavens. Only he wants to gather and conserve those memories. Everyone else adheres to the order of death, then mourning, then forgetting. If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library. But the very thought of Pavel being forgotten enrages him, turns him into an old bull, irritable, glaring, dangerous.

He wants to hear stories. And the child, miraculously, is about to tell one. ‘Pavel Alexandrovich' – she glances toward her mother to confirm that she may utter the dead name – ‘said he was only going to be in Petersburg a little while longer, then he was going to France.'

She halts. He waits impatiently for her to go on.

‘Why did he want to go to France?' she asks, and now she is addressing him alone. ‘What is there in France?'

France? ‘He did not want to go to France, he wanted to leave Russia,' he replies. ‘When you are young you are impatient with everything around you. You are impatient with your motherland because your motherland seems old and stale to you. You want new sights, new ideas. You think that in France or Germany or England you will find the future that your own country is too dull to provide you with.'

The child is frowning. He says
France, motherland
, but she hears something else, something underneath the words: rancour.

‘My son had a scattered education,' he says, addressing not the child now but the mother. ‘I had to move him from school to school. The reason was simple: he would not get up in the mornings. Nothing would wake him. I make too much of it, perhaps. But you cannot expect to matriculate if you do not attend school.'

What a strange thing to say at a time like this! Nevertheless, turning to the daughter, he plunges on. ‘His French was very undependable – you must have noticed that. Perhaps that is why he wanted to go to France – to improve his French.'

‘He used to read a lot,' says the mother. ‘Sometimes the lamp would be burning in his room all night.' Her voice remains low, even. ‘We didn't mind. He was always considerate. We were very fond of Pavel Alexandrovich – weren't we?' She gives the child a smile that seems to him like a caress.

Was
. She has brought it out.

She frowns. ‘What I still don't understand . . .'

An awkward silence falls. He does nothing to relieve it. On the contrary, he bristles like a wolf guarding its cub. Beware, he thinks: at your own peril do you utter a word against him! I am his mother and his father, I am everything to him, and more! There is something he wants to stand up and shout as well. But what? And who is the enemy he is defying?

From the depths of his throat, where he can no longer stifle it, a sound breaks out, a groan. He covers his face with his hands; tears run over his fingers.

He hears the woman get up from the table. He waits for the child to retire too, but she does not.

After a while he dries his eyes and blows his nose. ‘I am sorry,' he whispers to the child, who is still sitting there, head bowed over her empty plate.

He closes the door of Pavel's room behind him. Sorry? No, the truth is, he is not sorry. Far from it: he is in a rage against everyone who is alive when his child is dead. In a rage most of all against this girl, whom for her very meekness he would like to tear limb from limb.

He lies down on the bed, his arms tight across his chest, breathing fast, trying to expel the demon that is taking him over. He knows that he resembles nothing so much as a corpse laid out, and that what he calls a demon may be nothing but his own soul flailing its wings. But being alive is, at this moment, a kind of nausea. He wants to be dead. More than that: to be extinguished, annihilated.

As for life on the other side, he has no faith in it. He expects to spend eternity on a river-bank with armies of other dead souls, waiting for a barge that will never arrive. The air will be cold and dank, the black waters will lap against the bank, his clothes will rot on his back and fall about his feet, he will never see his son again.

On the cold fingers folded to his chest he counts the days again. Ten. This is what it feels like after ten days.

Poetry might bring back his son. He has a sense of the poem that would be required, a sense of its music. But he is not a poet: more like a dog that has lost a bone, scratching here, scratching there.