J.M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg

He takes one of the chairs; she sits down opposite him. The table is narrow. Her foot touches his; he shifts his foot.

Though she has her back to the window, he now understands why she is so heavily powdered. Her skin is pitted with smallpox scars. What a shame, he thinks: not a beauty, but a handsome creature all the same.

Her foot touches his again, rests against it, instep to instep.

A disturbing excitement creeps over him. Like chess, he thinks: two players across a small table making their deliberate moves. Is it the deliberateness that excites him – the opposite foot lifted like a pawn and placed against his? And the third person, the watcher who does not see, the dupe, looking in the wrong place: does she play her part too? Deliberateness and tawdriness, a tawdriness that has its own thrill. Where could they have learned so much about him, about his desires?

A singer, a contralto: a contralto queen.

'You knew my son,' he says.

'He was a follower. A mascot.'

He is familiar with the term, and it hurts him. A mascot: a hanger-on in student circles, useful for running errands.

'But was he a friend of yours?'

She shrugs. 'Friendship is effeminate. We don't need friendship.'

Effeminate: strange word for a woman to use! Already he has a feeling he knows more than he wants to know. The foot still rests against his, but now there is something inert about its pressure, inert and lumpish and even threatening. No longer a foot but a boot. Pavel would not be playing these games. The vision of Pavel returns, Pavel walking towards him. The girl at his side, his bride, is obscured. Pavel is smiling, and a glory of a kind breaks from that smile. My friend! he thinks. A fierce love wrings his heart. And this, he thinks, is this what I must have in your place?

'If you don't need friendship, God save you,' he whispers.

He gets up from the table and turns his back on the women. What does he look like, he wonders? There is no mirror. By the time he sits down again, the tears that had threatened have gone.

'What did you do with my son?' he asks thickly.

The woman leans across the table and fixes him with her blue stare. Through the coat of powder, from the craters of the chin, he spies hairs that the razor did not catch. And the eyebrows are too thick over the bridge of the nose. A woman would have had the sense to tell him to pluck them. So is the Finn a boy too, a fat little boy? All at once he is revolted by the pair of them.

She, or he, is speaking. Nechaev himself – no doubt about that. The disguise is all at once transparent. The memory comes back again with sudden clarity: in the hall of the Peace Congress, during an intermission between sessions, Nechaev all alone in a corner, wolfing down finger-sandwiches, glaring, challenging the roomful of grownups: Yes, laugh if you dare, laugh at the schoolboy! The look on his face that of a boy surprised at stool with his trousers around his knees, vulnerable but defiant. Laugh, but one day I will get my own back!

He remembers a remark made by Princess Obolen-skaya, Mroczkowski's mistress: 'He may be the enfant terrible of anarchism, but really, he should do something about those pimples!'

'Given what the police did to your son,' Nechaev is saying, 'I am surprised you are not incensed. As the Gospels say, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'

'You wretch, that is not in the Gospels! What are you saying about Pavel? And why are you dressed up in this ridiculous costume?'

'Surely you don't believe the suicide story. Isaev didn't kill himself – that's just a fiction put out by the police. They can't use the law against us, so they perpetrate these obscene murders. But of course you must have your doubts – why else would you be here?'

All the man's affected softness has gone: the voice is his own. As he paces back and forth the blue dress swishes. What is underneath it, trousers or bare legs? What must it be like to walk about with one's legs naked yet hidden, brushing each other?

'Do you think we are not all in danger? Do you think I want to creep about in disguise in my own city, the city where I was born? Do you know what it is like to be a woman by yourself on the streets of Petersburg?' His voice rises, anger taking him over. 'Do you know what you have to listen to? Men dog your footsteps whispering filth such as you cannot imagine, and you are helpless against it!' He collects himself. 'Or perhaps you can imagine it only too well. Perhaps what I describe is only too familiar to you.'

The Finn has taken a bowl of potatoes on her lap, which she is peeling. Her face is peaceful; more than ever she looks like a little grandmother. 'It's getting colder,' she remarks.

Mad, both of them! he thinks. What am I doing here? I must find my way back to Pavel!

'Kindly repeat… Kindly repeat what you were saying about my son,' he says.

'Very well, let me tell you about your son. The official verdict will be that he killed himself. If you believe that, you are truly gullible, criminally gullible. Weren't you a revolutionary yourself in the old days, or am I mistaken? Surely you must be aware that the struggle has never ceased. Or have you made a separate peace? Those in the forefront of the struggle continue to be hunted down and tortured and killed. I would have expected you to know this and write about it. Particularly because people will never read the truth about your son and others like him in our shameful Russian press.'

Nechaev's voice becomes lower, more intense. 'What happened to your son can happen to me any day, or to other of our comrades. You say you know nothing about it. But go into the streets, go to the markets and the taverns where the people gather, and you will find that the people know. Somehow they know! And when the day of judgment comes, the people will not forget who suffered and died for them, and who did not lift a hand!'

Christ in his wrath, he thinks: that is who he models himself on. The Christ of the Old Testament, the Christ who scourged the usurers out of the temple. Even the costume is right: not a dress but a robe. An imitator; a pretender; a blasphemer.

'Don't threaten me!' he replies. 'By what right do you speak in the name of the people? The people aren't vengeful. The people don't spend their time scheming and plotting.'

'The people know who their enemies are, and the people don't waste tears on them when they meet their end! As for us, at least we know what has to be done and are doing it! Perhaps you used once to know, but now-all you can do is mumble and shake your head and cry. That is soft. We aren't soft, we aren't crying, and we aren't wasting our time on clever talk. There are things that can be talked about and things that can't, that just have to be done. We don't talk, we don't cry, we don't endlessly think on the one band and on the other hand, we just doF

'Excellent! You just do. But where do you get your instructions? Is it the voice of the people you obey, or just your own voice, a little disguised so that you need not recognize it?'

'Another clever question! Another waste of time! We are sick and tired of cleverness. The days of cleverness are numbered. Cleverness is one of the things we are going to get rid of. The day of ordinary people is arriving. Ordinary people aren't clever. Ordinary people just want the job done. And once the job is done, it is ordinary people who will decide what is going to be what, and whether any more cleverness is going to be allowed!'

'And whether clever books and that kind of thing are going to be allowed!' chimes in the Finn, animated, even excited.

Is it possible, he thinks with disgust, that Pavel could have been friends with people like these, people ever-eager to whip themselves into frenzies of self-righteousness? This place is like a Spanish convent in the days of Loyola: well-born girls flagellating themselves, rolling about in ecstasies, foaming at the lips; or fasting, praying for hours on end to be taken into the arms of the Saviour. Extremists all of them, sensualists hungering for the ecstasy of death – killing, dying, no matter which. And Pavel among them!