The Man from St. Petersburg (11 page)

Peoples without political organization, and therefore less depraved than ourselves, have perfectly understood that the man who is called “criminal” is simply unfortunate; and that the remedy is not to flog him, to chain him up, or to kill him, but to help him by the most brotherly care, by treatment based on equality, by the usages of life among honest men.

Feliks was vaguely aware that a customer had come into the shop and was standing close to him, but he was concentrating on Kropotkin.

No more laws! No more judges! Liberty, equality and practical human sympathy are the only effective barriers we can oppose to the antisocial instincts of certain among us.

The customer dropped a book and he lost his train of thought. He glanced away from his pamphlet, saw the book lying on the floor beside the customer’s long skirt and automatically bent down to pick it up for her. As he handed it to her he saw her face.

He gasped. “Why, you’re an angel!” he said with perfect honesty.

She was blond and petite, and she wore a pale gray fur the color of her eyes, and everything about her was pale and light and fair. He thought he would never see a more beautiful woman, and he was right.

She stared back at him and blushed, but he did not turn away. It seemed, incredibly, that she found something fascinating in him, too.

After a moment he looked at her book. It was
Anna Karenina
. “Sentimental rubbish,” he said. He wished he had not spoken, for his words broke the spell. She took the book and turned away. He saw then that there was a maid with her, for she gave the book to the maid and left the shop. The maid paid for the book. Looking through the window, Feliks saw the woman get into a carriage.

He asked the bookseller who she was. Her name was Lydia, he learned, and she was the daughter of Count Shatov.

He found out where the Count lived, and the next day he hung around outside the house in the hope of seeing her. She went in and out twice, in her carriage, before a groom came out and chased Feliks off. He did not mind, for the last time her carriage passed she had looked directly at him.

The next day he went to the bookshop. For hours he read Bakunin’s
Federalism, Socialism and Antitheologism
without understanding a single word. Every time a carriage passed he looked out of the window. Whenever a customer came into the shop his heart missed a beat.

She came in at the end of the afternoon.

This time she left the maid outside. She murmured a greeting to the bookseller and came to the back of the shop, where Feliks stood. They stared at one another. Feliks thought: She loves me; why else would she come?

He meant to speak to her, but instead he threw his arms around her and kissed her. She kissed him back, hungrily, opening her mouth, hugging him, digging her fingers into his back.

It was always like that with them: when they met they threw themselves at one another like animals about to fight.

They met twice more in the bookshop and once, after dark, in the garden of the Shatov house. That time in the garden she was in her nightclothes. Feliks put his hands under the woolen nightgown and touched her body all over, as boldly as if she were a street girl, feeling and exploring and rubbing; and all she did was moan.

She gave him money so that he could rent a room of his own, and thereafter she came to see him almost every day for six astonishing weeks.

The last time was in the early evening. He was sitting at the table, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, reading Proudhon’s
What Is Property?
by candlelight. When he heard her footstep on the stairs he took his trousers off.

She rushed in, wearing an old brown cloak with a hood. She kissed him, sucked his lips, bit his chin and pinched his sides.

She turned and threw off the cloak. Underneath it she was wearing a white evening gown that must have cost hundreds of rubles. “Unfasten me, quickly,” she said.

Feliks began to undo the hooks at the back of the dress.

“I’m on my way to a reception at the British Embassy; I only have an hour,” she said breathlessly. “Hurry, please.”

In his haste he ripped one of the hooks out of the material. “Damn, I’ve torn it.”

“Never mind!”

She stepped out of the dress, then pulled off her petticoats, her chemise and her drawers, leaving on her corset, hose and shoes. She flung herself into his arms. As she was kissing him she pulled down his underpants.

She said: “Oh, God, I love the smell of your thing.”

When she talked dirty it drove him wild.

She pulled her breasts out of the top of her corset and said: “Bite them. Bite them hard. I want to feel them all evening.”

A moment later she pulled away from him. She lay on her back on the bed. Where the corset ended, moisture glistened in the sparse blond hair between her thighs.

She spread her legs and lifted them into the air, opening herself to him. He gazed at her for a moment, then fell on her.

She grabbed his penis with her hands and pushed it inside her greedily.

The heels of her shoes tore the skin of his back and he did not care.

“Look at me,” she said. “Look at me!”

He looked at her with adoration in his eyes.

An expression of panic came over her face.

She said: “Look at me, I’m coming!”

Then, still staring into his eyes, she opened her mouth and screamed.

“Do you think other people are like us?” she said.

“In what way?”

“Filthy.”

He lifted his head from her lap and grinned. “Only the lucky ones.”

She looked at his body, curled up between her legs. “You’re so compact and strong, you’re perfect,” she said. “Look how your belly is flat, and how neat your bottom is, and how lean and hard your thighs are.” She ran a finger along the line of his nose. “You have the face of a prince.”

“I’m a peasant.”

“Not when you’re naked.” She was in a reflective mood. “Before I met you, I
was
interested in men’s bodies, and all that; but I used to pretend I wasn’t, even to myself. Then you came along and I just couldn’t pretend anymore.”

He licked the inside of her thigh.

She shuddered. “Have you ever done this to another girl?”

“No.”

“Did you use to pretend, as well?”

“No.”

“I think I knew that, somehow. There’s a look about you, wild and free like an animal; you never obey anyone, you just do what you want.”

“I never before met a girl who would let me.”

“They all wanted to, really. Any girl would.”

“Why?” he said egotistically.

“Because your face is so cruel and your eyes are so kind.”

“Is that why you let me kiss you in the bookshop?”

“I didn’t
let
you—I had no choice.”

“You could have yelled for help, afterward.”

“By then all I wanted was for you to do it again.”

“I must have guessed what you were really like.”

It was her turn to be egotistical. “What am I really like?”

“Cold as ice on the surface, hot as hell below.”

She giggled. “I’m such an actor. Everyone in St. Petersburg thinks I’m so
good
. I’m held up as an example to younger girls, just like Anna Karenina. Now that I know how bad I really am, I have to pretend to be twice as virginal as before.”

“You can’t be twice as virginal as anything.”

“I wonder if they’re all pretending,” she resumed. “Take my father. If he knew I was here, like this, he’d die of rage. But he must have had the same feelings when he was young—don’t you think?”

“I think it’s an imponderable,” Feliks said. “But what
would
he do, really, if he found out?”

“Horsewhip you.”

“He’d have to catch me first.” Feliks was struck by a thought. “How old are you?”

“Almost eighteen.”

“My God, I could go to jail for seducing you.”

“I’d make Father get you out.”

He rolled over on to his front and looked at her. “What are we going to do, Lydia?”

“When?”

“In the long term.”

“We’re going to be lovers until I come of age, and then we’ll get married.”

He stared at her. “Do you mean that?”

“Of
course
.” She seemed genuinely surprised that he had not made the same assumption. “What else could we do?”

“You want to marry me?”

“Yes! Isn’t that what you want?”

“Oh,
yes
,” he breathed. “That’s what I want.”

She sat up, with her legs spread on either side of his face, and stroked his hair. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

Feliks said: “You never tell me how you manage to get away to come here.”

“It’s not very interesting,” she said. “I tell lies, I bribe servants and I take risks. Tonight, for example. The reception at the embassy starts at half past six. I left home at six o’clock and I’ll get there at a quarter past seven. The carriage is in the park—the coachman thinks I’m taking a walk with my maid. The maid is outside this house, dreaming about how she will spend the ten rubles I will give her for keeping her mouth shut.”

“It’s ten to seven,” Feliks said.

“Oh, God. Quick, do it to me with your tongue before I have to go.”

That night Feliks was asleep, dreaming about Lydia’s father—whom he had never seen—when they burst into his room carrying lamps. He woke instantly and jumped out of bed. At first he thought students from the university were playing a prank on him. Then one of them punched his face and kicked him in the stomach, and he knew they were the secret police.

He assumed they were arresting him on account of Lydia, and he was terrified for her. Would she be publicly disgraced? Was her father crazy enough to make her give evidence in court against her lover?

He watched the police put all his books and a bundle of letters in a sack. The books were all borrowed, but none of the owners was foolish enough to put his name inside. The letters were from his father and his sister, Natasha—he had never had any letters from Lydia, and now he was thankful for that.

He was marched out of the building and thrown into a four-wheeled cab.

They drove across the Chain Bridge and then followed the canals, as if avoiding the main streets. Feliks asked: “Am I going to the Litovsky prison?” Nobody replied, but when they went over the Palace Bridge he realized he was being taken to the notorious Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and his heart sank.

On the other side of the bridge the carriage turned left and entered a darkened arched passage. It stopped at a gate. Feliks was taken into a reception hall, where an army officer looked at him and wrote something in a book. He was put in the cab again and driven deeper into the fortress. They stopped at another gate and waited several minutes until it was opened from the inside by a soldier. From there Feliks had to walk through a series of narrow passages to a third iron gate which led to a large damp room.

The prison governor sat at a table. He said: “You are charged with being an anarchist. Do you admit it?”

Feliks was elated. So this was nothing to do with Lydia! “Admit it?” he said. “I boast of it.”

One of the policemen produced a book which was signed by the governor. Feliks was stripped naked, then given a green flannel dressing gown, a pair of woolen stockings and two yellow felt slippers much too big.

From there an armed soldier took him through more gloomy corridors to a cell. A heavy oak door closed behind him, and he heard a key turn in the lock.

The cell contained a bed, a table, a stool and a washstand. The window was an embrasure in an enormously thick wall. The floor was covered with painted felt, and the walls were cushioned with some kind of yellow upholstery.

Feliks sat on the bed.

This was where Peter I had tortured and killed his own son. This was where Princess Tarakanova had been kept in a cell which flooded so that the rats climbed all over her to save themselves from drowning. This was where Catherine II buried her enemies alive.

Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned here, Feliks thought proudly; so had Bakunin, who had been chained to a wall for two years. Nechayev had died here.

Feliks was at once elated to be in such heroic company and terrified at the thought that he might be here forever.

The key turned in the lock. A little bald man with spectacles came in, carrying a pen, a bottle of ink and some paper. He set them down on the table and said: “Write the names of all the subversives you know.”

Feliks sat down and wrote: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Peter Kropotkin, Jesus Christ—

The bald man snatched away the paper. He went to the door of the cell and knocked. Two hefty guards came in. They strapped Feliks to the table and took off his slippers and stockings. They began to lash the soles of his feet with canes.

The torture went on all night.

When they pulled out his fingernails, he began to give them made-up names and addresses, but they told him they knew they were false.

When they burned the skin of his testicles with a candle flame, he named all his student friends, but still they said he was lying.

Each time he passed out they revived him. Sometimes they would stop for a while and allow him to think it was all over at last; then they would begin again, and he would beg them to kill him so that the pain would stop. They carried on long after he had told them everything he knew.

It must have been around dawn that he passed out for the last time.

When he came round he was lying on the bed. There were bandages on his feet and hands. He was in agony. He wanted to kill himself, but he was too weak to move.

The bald man came into the cell in the evening. When he saw him, Feliks began to sob with terror. The man just smiled and went away.

He never came back.

A doctor came to see Feliks each day. Feliks tried without success to pump him for information: Did anyone outside know that Feliks was here? Had there been any messages? Had anyone tried to visit? The doctor just changed the dressings and went away.

Feliks speculated. Lydia would have gone to his room and found the place in disarray. Someone in the house would have told her the secret police had taken him away. What would she have done then? Would she make frantic inquiries, careless of her reputation? Would she have been discreet, and gone quietly to see the Minister of the Interior with some story about the boyfriend of her maid having been jailed in error?