J.M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg

Why does it recur now, this image of a man at the water's edge with a dead child in his arms? A child loved too much, a child become the object of such intimacy that it dare not be allowed to live. Murderous tenderness, tender murderousness. Love turned inside out like a glove to reveal its ugly stitching. And what is love stitched from? He calls up the image of the man again, looks intently into the face, concentrating not on the eyes, closed in a trance, but on the mouth, which is working lightly. Not rape but rapine – is that it? Fathers devouring children, raising them well in order to eat them like delicacies afterwards. Delikatessen.

Does that explain Nechaev's vengefulness: that his eyes have been opened to the fathers naked, the band of fathers, their appetites bared? What sort of man must he be, the elder Nechaev, father Gennady? When one day the news comes, as it undoubtedly will, that his son is no more, will he sit in a corner and weep, or will he secretly smile?

He shakes his head as if to rid it of a plague of devils. What is it that is corrupting the integrity of his grieving, that insists it is nothing but a lugubrious disguise? Somewhere inside him truth has lost its way. As if in the labyrinth of his brain, but also in the labyrinth of his body – veins, bones, intestines, organs – a tiny child is wandering, searching for the light, searching to emerge. How can he find the child lost within himself, allow him a voice to sing his sad song?

Piping on a bone. An old story comes back to him of a youth killed, mutilated, scattered, whose thigh-bone, when the wind blows, pipes a lament and names his murderers. One by one, in fact, the old stories are coming back, stories he heard from his grandmother and did not know the meaning of, but stored up unwittingly like bones for the future. A great ossuary of stories from before history began, built up and tended by the people. Let Pavel find his way to my thigh-bone and pipe to me from there! Father, why have you left me in the dark forest? Father, when will you come to save me?

The candle before the icon is nothing but a pool of wax; the spray of flowers droops. Having put up the shrine, the girl has forgotten or abandoned it. Does she guess that Pavel has ceased to speak to him, that he has lost his way too, that the only voices he hears now are devil-voices?

He scratches the wick erect, lights it, goes down on his knees. The Virgin's eyes are locked on her babe, who stares out of the picture at him, raising a tiny admonitory finger.

In the week that has passed since their last intimacy, there has grown up between Anna Sergeyevna and himself a barrier of awkward formality. Her bearing toward him has become so constrained that he is sure the child, who watches and listens all the time, must conclude she wants him gone from the house.

For whose sake are they keeping up this appearance of distance? Not for their own, surely. It can only be for the eyes of the children, the two children, the present one and the absent one.

Yet he hungers to have her in his arms again. Nor does he believe she is indifferent to him. On his own he feels like a dog chasing its tail in tighter and tighter circles. With her in the saving dark, he has an intimation that his limbs will be loosened and the spirit released, the spirit that at present seems knotted to his body at shoulders, hips, and knees.

At the core of his hunger is a desire that on the first night did not fully know itself but now seems to have becomes centred on her smell. As if she and he were animals, he is drawn by something he picks up in the air around her: the smell of autumn, and of walnuts in particular. He has begun to understand how animals live, and young children too, attracted or repelled by mists, auras, atmospheres. He sees himself sprawled over her like a lion, rooting with his muzzle in the hair of her neck, burying his nose in her armpit, rubbing his face in her crotch.

There is no lock on the door. It is not inconceivable that the child will wander into the room at a time like this and glimpse him in a state of – he approaches the word with distaste, but it is the only right word – lust. And so many children are sleepwalkers too: she could get up in the night and stray into his room without even waking. Are they passed down from mother to daughter, these intimate smells? Loving the mother, is one destined to long for the daughter too? Wandering thoughts, wandering desires! They will have to be buried with him, hidden forever from all except one. For Pavel is within him now, and Pavel never sleeps. He can only pray that a weakness that would once have disgusted the boy will now bring a smile to his lips, a smile amused and tolerant.

Perhaps Nechaev too, once he has crossed the dark river into death, will cease to be such a wolf and learn to smile again.

So he is waiting opposite Yakovlev's shop the next evening when Anna Sergeyevna emerges. He crosses the street, savouring her surprise as she sees him. 'Shall we take a walk?' he proposes.

She draws the dark shawl tighter under her chin. 'I don't know. Matryosha will be expecting me.'

Nevertheless they do walk. The wind has dropped, the air is crisp and cold. There is a pleasing bustle about them in the streets. No one pays them any attention. They might be any married couple.

She is carrying a basket, which he takes from her. He likes the way she walks, with long strides, arms folded under her breasts.

'I will have to be leaving soon,' he says.

She makes no reply.

The question of his wife lies delicately between them. In alluding to his departure he feels like a chess-player offering a pawn which, whether accepted or refused, must lead into deeper complications. Are affairs between men and women always like this, the one plotting, the other plotted against? Is plotting an element of the pleasure: to be the object of another's intrigue, to be shepherded into a corner and softly pressed to capitulate? As she walks by his side, is she too, in her way, plotting against him?

'I am waiting only for the investigation to run its course. I need not even stay for the ruling. All I want is the papers. The rest is immaterial.'

'And then you will go back to Germany?'

'Yes.'

They have reached the embankment. Crossing the street, he takes her arm. Side by side they lean against the rail by the waterside.

'I don't know whether to hate this city for what it did to Pavel,' he says, 'or to feel even more tightly bound to it. Because it is Pavel's home now. He will never leave it, never travel as he wanted to.'

'What nonsense, Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she replies with a sidelong smile. 'Pavel is with you. You are his home. He is in your heart, he travels with you wherever you go. Anyone can see that.' And she touches his breast lightly with her gloved hand.

He feels his heart leap as though her fingertip had brushed the organ itself. Coquetry – is that what it is, or does the gesture spring from her own heart? It would be the most natural thing in the world to take her in his arms. He can feel his gaze positively devo'ur her shapely mouth, on which a smile still lingers. And beneath that gaze she does not flinch. Not a young woman. Not a child. Gazing back at him over the body of Pavel, the two of them throwing out their challenges. The flicker of a thought: If only he were not here! Then the thought vanishes around a corner.

From a street-seller they buy little fish-pasties for their supper. Matryona opens the door, but when she sees who is with her mother, turns her back. At table she is in a fretful mood, insisting that her mother pay attention to a long, confused story of a squabble between herself and a classmate, at school. When he intervenes to make the mildest of pleas for the other girl, Matryona snorts and does not deign to answer.