Master of Petersburg (28 page)
Read Master of Petersburg Online
Authors: J M Coetzee
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.
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.
âDo that again,' the girl will whisper.
âDo what?'
âThat!' she whispers, flushed with desire.
âFirst say the words,' he says, and makes her say them. âLouder,' he says. Saying the words excites the girl unbearably.
He remembers Svidrigailov: âWomen 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.
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 â 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 â 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. âCan I come in?' she says in a husky voice.
âIs your throat still sore?'
âMm.'
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?
âPavel used to sit like that when he was writing,' she says. âI thought you were Pavel when I came in.'
âI am in the middle of something,' he says. âDo 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.
âDo you like your name?' he says quietly, after a while.
âMy own name?'
âYes. Matryona.'
âNo, 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.'
âI have another name for you. Dusha.' He writes the name at the head of the page, shows it to her. âDo you like it?'
She does not answer.
âWhat really happened to Pavel?' he says. âDo you know?'
âI think . . . I think he gave himself up.'
âGave himself up for what?'
âFor the future. So that he could be one of the martyrs.'
âMartyrs? What is a martyr?'
She hesitates. âSomeone who gives himself up. For the future.'
âWas 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.
âYou must go now,' he says. âI have work to do.'
He heads the next page
THE CHILD
, and writes:
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.
âThat letter â 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.
âIs the letter from Maria?' asks the child.
âWait and you will hear.'
âBut why did they laugh at her? Why shouldn't someone want to marry her?'
âBecause 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.'
âAn epidemic?'
âYes. 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.'
âThis suit?'
âYes, this suit. By the time it was ready, everyone knew what was up â 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.'
âSo were you her admirer all the time?'
âNo, 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.'
âAnd will you go back and see her?'
âI 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.'
âIs that what she says in the letter â that she is coming here?'
âYes.'
âBut why â?'
âWhy did I do it? For a joke. Summer in the country is so boring â 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 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.
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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Epub ISBN: 9781409029991
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Vintage Books, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at
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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 Vintage 2004
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