Master of Petersburg Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    He waits till the gleam of light under the door has gone out, then quietly leaves the apartment and returns to his lodgings.
    During the night a dream comes to him. He is swimming underwater. The light is blue and dim. He banks and glides easily, gracefully; his hat seems to have gone, but in his black suit he feels like a turtle, a great old turtle in its natural element. Above him there is a ripple of movement, but here at the bottom the water is still. He swims through patches of weed; slack fingers