The Master of Petersburg

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 David-ovich,' 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 metamorphosis, 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.

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.

He can no longer deny it: a gap is opening between himself and the dead boy. He is angry with Pavel, angry at being betrayed. It does not surprise him that Pavel should have been drawn into radical circles, or that he should have breathed no word of it in his letters. But Nechaev is a different matter. Nechaev is no student hothead, no youthful nihilist. He is the Mongol left behind in the Russian soul after the greatest nihilist of all has withdrawn into the wastes of Asia. And Pavel, of all people, a foot-soldier in his army!

He remembers a pamphlet entitled 'Catechism of a Revolutionary,' circulated in Geneva as Bakunin's but clearly, in its inspiration and even its wording, Nechaev's. 'The revolutionary is a doomed man,' it began. 'He has no interests, no feelings, no attachments, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed in a single and total passion: revolution. In the depths of his being he has cut all links with the civil order, with law and morality. He continues to exist in society only in order to destroy it.' And later: 'He does not expect the least mercy. Every day he is ready to die.'

He is ready to die, he does not expect mercy: easy to say the words, but what child can comprehend the fullness of their meaning? Not Pavel; perhaps not even Nechaev, that unloved and unlovely young man.

A memory of Nechaev himself returns, standing alone in a corner of the reception hall in Geneva, glaring, wolfing down food. He shakes his head, trying to expunge it. 'Pavel! Pavel!' he whispers, calling the absent one.

A tap at the door. Matryona's voice: 'Suppertime!'

At table he makes an effort to be pleasant. Tomorrow is Sunday: he suggests an outing to Petrovsky Island, where in the afternoon there will be a fair and a band. Matryona is eager to go; to his surprise, Anna Sergeyevna consents.

He arranges to meet them after church. In the morning, on his way out, he stumbles over something in the dark entryway: a tramp, lying there asleep with a musty old blanket pulled over him. He curses; the man gives a whimper and sits up.

He arrives at St Gregory's before the service is over. As he waits in the portico, the same tramp appears, bleary-eyed, smelly. He turns upon him. 'Are you following me?' he demands.

Though they are not six inches apart, the tramp pretends not to hear or see. Angrily he repeats his question. Worshippers, filing out, glance curiously at the two of them.

The man sidles off. Half a block away he stops, leans against a wall, feigns a yawn. He has no gloves; he uses the blanket, rolled into a ball, as a muff.

Anna Sergeyevna and her daughter emerge. It is a long walk to the park, along Voznesensky Prospekt and across the foot of Vasilevsky Island. Even before they get to the park he knows he has made a mistake, a stupid mistake. The bandstand is empty, the fields around the skaters' pond bare save for strutting gulls.

He apologizes to Anna Sergeyevna. 'There's lots oi time, it's not yet noon,' she replies cheerfully. 'Shall we go for a walk?'

Her good humour surprises him; he is even more surprised when she takes his arm. With Matryona at her other side they stride across the fields. A family, he thinks: only a fourth required and we will be complete. As if reading his thoughts, Anna Sergeyevna presses his arm.

They pass a flock of sheep huddled in a reed thicket. Matryona approaches them with a handful of grass; they break and scatter. A peasant boy with a stick emerges from the thicket and scowls at her. For an instant it seems that words will pass. Then the boy thinks better of it and Matryona slips back to them.

The exercise is bringing a glow to her cheeks. She will be a beauty yet, he thinks: she will break hearts.

He wonders what his wife would think. His indiscretions hitherto have been followed by remorse and, on the heels of remorse, a voluptuous urge to confess. These confessions, tortured in expression yet vague in point of detail, have confused and infuriated his wife, bedevilling their marriage far more than the infidelities themselves.

But in the present case he feels no guilt. On the contrary, he has an invincible sense of his own lightness.

He wonders what this sense of Tightness conceals; but he does not really want to know. For the present there is something like joy in his heart. Forgive me, Pavel, he whispers to himself. But again he does not really mean it.

If only I had my life over again, he thinks; if only I were young! And perhaps also: If only I had the use of the life, the youth that Pavel threw away!

And what of the woman at his side? Does she regret the impulse by which she gave herself to him? Had that never happened, today's outing might mark the opening of a proper courtship. For that is surely what a woman wants: to be courted, wooed, persuaded, won! Even when she surrenders, she wants to give herself up not frankly but in a delicious haze of confusion, resisting yet unresisting. Falling, but never an irrevocable falling. No: to fall and then come back from the fall new, remade, virginal, ready to be wooed again and to fall again. A playing with death, a play of resurrection.

What would she do if she knew what he was thinking? Draw back in outrage? And would that be part of the play too?

He steals a glance at her, and in that instant it comes home to him: I could love this woman. More than the tug of the body, he feels what he can only call kinship with her. He and she are of the same kind, the same generation. And all of a sudden the generations fall into place: Pavel and Matryona and his wife Anna ranked on the one side, he and Anna Sergeyevna on the other. The children against those who are not children, those old enough to recognize in their lovemaking the first foretaste of death. Hence the urgency that night, hence the heat. She in his arms like Jeanne d'Arc in the flames: the spirit wrestling against its bonds while the body burns away. A struggle with time. Something a child would never understand.

'Pavel said you were in Siberia.'

Her words startle him out of his reverie.

'For ten years. That is where I met Pavel's mother. In Semipalatinsk. Her husband was in the customs service. He died when Pavel was seven. She died too, a few years ago – Pavel must have told you.'

'And then you married again.'

'Yes. What did Pavel have to say about that?'

'Only that your wife is young.'

'My wife and Pavel are of much the same age. For a while we lived together, the three of us, in an apartment on Meshchanskaya Street. It was not a happy time for Pavel. He felt a certain rivalry with my wife. In fact, when I told him she and I were engaged, he went to her and warned her quite seriously that I was too old for her. Afterwards he used to refer to himself as the orphan: "The orphan would like another slice of toast," "The orphan has no money," and so forth. We pretended it was a joke, but it wasn't. It made for a troubled household.'

'I can imagine that. But one can sympathize with him, surely. He must have felt he was losing you.'

'How could he have lost me? From the day I became his father I never once failed him. Am I failing him now?'

'Of course not, Fyodor Mikhailovich. But children are possessive. They have jealous phases, like all of us. And when we are jealous, we make up stories against ourselves. We work up our own feelings, we frighten ourselves.'

Her words, like a prism, have only to be shifted slightly in their angle to reflect a quite different meaning. Is that what she intends?

He casts a glance at Matryona. She is wearing new boots with fluffy sheepskin fringes. Stamping her heels into the damp grass, she leaves a trail of indented prints. Her brow is knitted in concentration.

'He said you used him to carry messages.'

A stab of pain goes through him. So Pavel remembered that!

'Yes, that is true. The year before we were married, on her name-day, I asked him to take a present to her from me. It was a mistake that I regretted afterwards, regretted deeply. It was inexcusable. I did not think. Was that the worst?'

'The worst?'

'Did Pavel tell you of things that were worse than that? I would like to know, so that when I ask forgiveness I know what I have been guilty of.'

She glances at him oddly. 'That is not a fair question, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Pavel went through lonely spells. He would talk, I would listen. Stories would come out, not always pleasant stories. But perhaps it was good that it was so. Once he had brought the past into the open, perhaps he could stop brooding about it.'

'Matryona!' He turns to the child. 'Did Pavel say anything to you – '

But Anna Sergeyevna interrupts him. 'I am sure Pavel didn't,' she says; and then, turning on him softly but furiously: 'You can't ask a child a question like that!'

They stop and face each other on the bare field. Matryona looks away scowling, her lips clamped tight; Anna Sergeyevna glares.

'It is getting cold,' she says. 'Shall we turn back?'