J.M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg

'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?'

He does not accompany them home, but has his evening meal at an inn. In a back room there is a card game going on. He watches for a while, and drinks, but does not play. It is late when he returns to the darkened apartment, the empty room.

Alone, lonely, he allows himself a twinge of longing, not unpleasant in itself, for Dresden and the comfortable regularity of life there, with a wife who jealously guards his privacy and organizes the family day around his habits.

He is not at home at No. 63 and never will be. Not only is he the most transient of sojourners, his excuse for staying on as obscure to others as to himself, but he feels the strain of living at close quarters with a woman of volatile moods and a child who may all too easily begin to find his bodily presence offensive. In Matryona's company he is keenly aware that his clothes have begun to smell, that his skin is dry and flaky, that the dental plates he wears click when he talks. His haemorrhoids, too, cause him endless discomfort. The iron constitution that took him through Siberia is beginning to crack; and this spectacle of decay must be all the more distasteful to a child, herself finical about cleanliness, in whose eyes he has supplanted a being of godlike strength and beauty. When her playmates ask about the funereal visitor who refuses to pack his belongings and leave, what, he wonders, does she reply?

You were pleading: when he thinks of Anna Sergeyevna's words he flinches. To have been an object of pity all the time! He goes down on his knees, rests his forehead against the bed, tries to find his way to Yelagin Island and to Pavel in his cold grave. Pavel, at least, will not turn on him. On Pavel he can rely, on Pavel and Pavel's icy love.

The father, faded copy of the son. How can he expect a woman who beheld the son in the pride of his days to look with favour on the father?

He remembers the words of a fellow-prisoner in Siberia: 'Why are we given old age, brothers? So that we can grow small again, small enough to crawl through the eye of a needle.' Peasant wisdom.

He kneels and kneels, but Pavel does not come. Sighing, he clambers at last into bed.

He awakes full of surprise. Though it is still dark, he feels as if he has rested enough for seven nights. He is fresh and invincible; the very tissues of his brain seem washed clean. He can barely contain himself. He is like a child at Easter, on fire for the household to wake up so that he can share his joy with them. He wants to wake her, the woman, he wants the two of them to dance through the apartment: 'Christ is risen!' he wants to call out, and hear her respond 'Christ is risen!' and clash her egg against his. The two of them dancing in a circle with their painted eggs, and Matryosha as well, in her nightdress, stumbling sleepy-eyed and happy amid their legs; and the ghost of the fourth one too, weaving between them, clumsy, big-footed, smiling: children together, newborn, released from the tomb. And over the city dawn breaking, and the roosters in the yards crowing their welcome of the new day.

Joy breaking like a dawn! But only for an instant. It is not merely that clouds begin to cross this new, radiant sky. It is as if, at the moment when the sun comes forth in its glory, another sun appears too, a shadow sun, an anti-sun sliding across its face. The word omen crosses his mind in all its dark, ominous weight. The dawning sun is there not for itself but to undergo eclipse; joy shines out only to reveal what the annihilation of joy will be like.

In a single hasty movement he is out of bed. The next few minutes stretch before him like a dark passage down which he must scurry. He must dress and get out of the apartment before the shame of the fit descends; he must find a place out of sight, out of the hearing of decent people, where he can manage the episode as best he can.

He lets himself out. The corridor is in pitch darkness. Stretching out his arms like a blind man, he gropes his way to the head of the stairs and, holding to the banister, taking one step at a time, begins to descend. On the second-floor landing a wave of terror overtakes him, terror without object. He sits down in a corner and holds his head. His hands are smelly from something he has touched, but he does not wipe them. Let it come, he thinks in despair; I have done all I can.

There is a cry that echoes down the stairwell, so loud and so frightful that sleepers are woken by it. As for him, he hears nothing, he is gone, there is no longer time.

When he wakes it is into darkness so dense that he can feel it pressing upon his eyeballs. He has no idea where he is, no idea who he is. He is a wakefulness, a consciousness, that is all. It is as if he has been born a minute ago, born into a world of unrelieved night.