J.M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg

He turns the leaves back. 'I have no parents,' says Sergei to Marfa. 'My father, my real father, was a nobleman exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary sympathies. He died when I was seven. My mother married a second time. Her new husband did not like me. As soon as I was old enough, he packed me off to cadet school. I was the smallest boy in my class; that was where I learned to fight for my rights. Later they moved back to Petersburg, set up house, and sent for me. Then my mother died, and I was left alone with my stepfather, a gloomy man who addressed barely a word to me from one day to the next. I was lonely; my only friends were among the servants; it was from them that I got to know the sufferings of the people.'

Not untrue, not wholly untrue, yet how subtly twisted, all of it! 'He did not like me' -! One could be sorry for the friendless seven-year-old and sincerely wish to protect him, but how could one love him when he was so suspicious, so unsmiling, when he clung to his mother like a leech and grudged every minute she spent away from him, when half a dozen times in a single night they would hear from the next room that high, insistent little voice calling to his mother to come and kill the mosquito that was biting him?

He lays aside the manuscript. A nobleman for a father indeed! Poor child! The truth duller than that, the full truth dullest of all. But who except the recording angel would care to write the full, dull truth? Did he himself write with as much dedication at the age of twenty-two?

There is something overwhelmingly important he wants to say that the boy will now never be able to hear. If you are blessed with the power to write, he wants to say, bear in mind the source of that power. You write because your childhood was lonely, because you were not loved. (Yet that is not the fall story, he also wants to say - you were loved, you would have been loved, it was your choice to be unloved. What confusion! An ape on a harmonium would do better!) We do not write out of plenty, he wants to say – we write out of anguish, out of lack. Surely in your heart you must know that! As for your so-called true father and his revolutionary sympathies, what nonsense! Isaev was a clerk, a pen-pusher. If he had lived, if you had followed him, you too would have become nothing but a clerk, and you would not have left this story behind. (Yes, yes, he hears the child's high voice - but I would be alive!)

Young men in white playing the French game, croquet, croixquette, game of the little cross, and you on the greensward among them, alive! Poor boy! On the streets of Petersburg, in the turn of a head here, the gesture of a hand there, I see you, and each time my heart lifts as a wave does. Nowhere and everywhere, torn and scattered like Orpheus. Young in days, chryseos, golden, blessed.

The task left to me: to gather the hoard, put together the scattered parts. Poet, lyre-player, enchanter, lord of resurrection, that is what I am called to be. And the truth? Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.

I came too late to raise the coffin-lid, to kiss your smooth cold brow. If my lips, tender as the fingertips of the blind, had been able to brush you just once, you would not have quit this existence bitter against me. But bearing the name Isaev you have departed, and I, old man, old pilgrim, am left to follow behind, pursuing a shade, violet upon grey, an echo.

Still, I am here and father Isaev is not. If, drowning, you reach for Isaev, you will grasp only a phantom hand. In the town hall of Semipalatinsk, in dusty files in a box on the back stairs, his signature is still perhaps to be read; otherwise no trace of him save in this remembering, in the remembering of the man who embraced his widow and his child.

The file on Pavel is closed. There is nothing to keep him in Petersburg. The train leaves at eight o'clock; by Tuesday he can be with his wife and child in Dresden. But as the hour approaches it becomes more and more inconceivable that he will remove the pictures from the shrine, blow out the candle, and give up Pavel's room to a stranger.

Yet if he does not leave tonight, when will he leave? 'The eternal lodger' – where did Anna Sergeyevna pick up the phrase? How long can he go on waiting for a ghost? Unless he puts himself on another footing with the woman, another footing entirely. But what then of his wife?

His mind is in a whirl, he does not know what he wants, all he knows is that eight o'clock hangs over him like a sentence of death. He searches out the concierge and after lengthy haggling secures a messenger to take his ticket to the station and have the reservation changed to the next day.

Returning, he is startled to find his door open and someone in the room: a woman standing with her back to him, inspecting the shrine. For a guilty moment he thinks it is his wife, come to Petersburg to track him down. Then he recognizes who it is, and a cry of protest rises in his throat: Sergei Nechaev, in the same blue dress and bonnet as before!

At that moment Matryona enters from the apartment. Before he can speak she seizes the initiative. 'You shouldn't sneak in on people like that!' she exclaims.

'But what are the two of you doing in my room?'

'We have just as much right – ' she begins vehemently. Then Nechaev interrupts.

'Someone led the police to us,' he says. He steps closer. 'I hope not you.'

Beneath the scent of lavender he can smell rank male sweat. The powder around Nechaev's throat is streaked; stubble is breaking through.

'That is a contemptible accusation to make, quite contemptible. I repeat: what are you doing in my room?' He turns to Matryona. 'And you – you are sick, you should be in bed!'

Ignoring his words, she tugs Pavel's suitcase out. 'I said he could have Pavel Alexandrovich's suit,' she says; and then, before he can object: 'Yes, he can! Pavel bought it with his own money, and Pavel was his friend!'

She unbuckles the suitcase, brings out the white suit. 'There!' she says defiantly.

Nechaev gives the suit a quick glance, spreads it out on the bed, and begins to unbutton his dress.

'Please explain – '

'There is no time. I need a shirt too.'

He tugs his arms out of the sleeves. The dress drops around his ankles and he stands before them in grubby cotton underwear and black patent-leather boots. He wears no stockings; his legs are lean and hairy.

Not in the least embarrassed, Matryona begins to help him on with Pavel's clothes. He wants to protest, but what can he say to the young when they shut their ears, close ranks against the old?

'What has become of your Finnish friend? Isn't she with you?'

Nechaev slips on the jacket. It is too long and the shoulders are too wide. Not as well built as Pavel, not as handsome. He feels a desolate pride in his son. The wrong one taken!

'I had to leave her,' says Nechaev. 'It was important to get away quickly.'

'In other words you abandoned her.' And then, before Nechaev can respond: 'Wash your face. You look like a clown.'

Matryona slips away, comes back with a wet rag. Nechaev wipes his face. 'Your forehead too,' she says. 'Here.' She takes the rag from him and wipes off the powder that has caked in his eyebrows.

Little sister. Was she like this with Pavel too? Something gnaws at his heart: envy.

'Do you really expect to escape the police dressed like a holidaymaker in the middle of winter?'

Nechaev does not rise to the gibe. 'I need money,' he says.

'You won't get any from me.'

Nechaev turns to the child. 'Have you got any money?'

She dashes from the room. They hear a chair being dragged across the floor; she returns with a jar full of coins. She pours them out on the bed and begins to count. 'Not enough,' Nechaev mutters, but waits nevertheless. 'Five roubles and fifteen kopeks,' she announces.