Master of Petersburg Read Free

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?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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