J.M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg

'When you know you are dead?' 'Yes.'

He is overcome with gratitude. For days she has been closing herself off to him, retreating into obtuseness and childishness, indulging her resentments, refusing him the precious memory of Pavel she bears within her. Now she has become herself again.

'Animals don't find it hard to die,' he says gently. 'Perhaps we should take our lesson from them. Perhaps that is why they are with us here on earth – to show us that living and dying are not as hard as we think.'

He pauses, then tries again.

'What frightens us most about dying isn't the pain. It is the fear that we must leave behind those who love us and travel alone. But that is not so, it is simply not so. When we die, we carry our loved ones with us in our breast. So Pavel carried you with him when he died, and he carried me, and your mother. He still carries all of us. Pavel is not alone.'

Still with a sluggish, abstracted air, she says: 'I wasn't thinking of Pavel.'

He is unsettled, he does not understand; but a moment more has to pass before he can appreciate how comprehensively he does not understand.

'Who are you thinking of then?'

'Of the girl who was here on Saturday.'

'I don't know which girl you mean.'

'Sergei Gennadevich's friend.'

'The Finnish girl? You mean because the police brought her? You mustn't lie here worrying about that!' He takes her hand in his and pats it reassuringly. 'Nobody is going to die! The police don't kill people! They will send her back to Karelia, that is all. At worst they will keep her in prison for a while.'

She withdraws her hand and turns her face to the wall. It begins to dawn on him that even now, perhaps, he does not understand; that she may not be asking to be reassured, to be relieved of childish fears – may, in fact, in a roundabout way, be trying to tell him something he does not know.

'Are you afraid she is going to be executed? Is that what you are afraid of? Because of something you know she has done?'

She shakes her head.

'Then you must tell me. I can't guess any further.'

'They have all taken a vow they will never be captured. They vow they will kill themselves first.'

'It's easy to take vows, Matryosha, much harder to keep them, particularly when your friends have deserted you and you are all by yourself. Life is precious, she is right to hold on to it, you mustn't blame her.'

She ruminates again for a while, fiddling abstractedly with the bedsheets. When she speaks, she does so in a murmur, and with her head bent, so that he can barely catch the words: 'I gave her poison.'

'You gave her what?'

She brushes her hair aside, and he sees what she has been hiding: the slightest of smiles.

'Poison,' she says, just as softly. 'Does poison hurt?'

'And how did you do that?' he asks, marking time while his mind races.

'When I gave her the bread. No one saw it.'

He remembers the scene that had affected him so strangely: the old-fashioned curtsy, the offering of food to the prisoner.

'Did she know?' he whispers, his mouth dry.

'Yes.'

'Are you sure? Are you sure she knew what it was?'

She nods. And, recalling now how wooden, how ungrateful the Finn seemed at that moment, he cannot doubt her.

'But how did you lay your hands on poison?'

'Sergei Gennadevich left it for her.'

'What else did he leave?'

'The flag.'

'The flag and what else?'

'Some other things. He asked me to look after them.'

'Show me.'

The child clambers out of bed, kneels, gropes among the bedsprings, and comes up with a canvas-wrapped parcel. He opens it on the bed. An American pistol and cartridges. Some leaflets. A little cotton purse with a long drawstring.

'The poison is in there,' says Matryona.

He loosens the drawstring and pours the contents out: three glass capsules containing a fine green powder.

'This is what you gave her?'

She nods. 'She was supposed to have one around her neck, but she didn't.' Deftly she slips the drawstring around her own neck, so that the purse hangs between her breasts like a medallion. 'If she had had it they wouldn't have caught her.'

'So you gave her one of these.'

'She wanted it for her vow. She would do anything for Sergei Gennadevich.'

'Perhaps. That is what Sergei Gennadevich says, at any rate. Still, if you had not given her the poison it would have been easier for her not to keep the promise to Sergei Gennadevich that is so particularly hard to keep – wouldn't it?'

She wrinkles her nose in an expression he has come to recognize: she is being pushed into a corner and does not like it. Nevertheless, he goes on.

'Don't you think that Sergei Gennadevich deals out death rather too freely? Do you remember the beggar who was killed? Sergei Gennadevich did that, or told someone else to do it, and that person obeyed, just as you have obeyed.'

She wrinkles her nose again. 'Why? Why did he want to kill him?'

'To send a message into the world, I suppose – that he, Sergei Gennadevich Nechaev, is a man not to be trifled with. Or to test whether the person he ordered to do the killing would obey him. I don't know. I can't see into his heart, and I no longer want to.'

Matryona thinks awhile. 'I didn't like him,' she says at last. 'He stank of fish.'

He gives her an unblinking stare, which she candidly returns.

'But you like Sergei Gennadevich.'

Tes.'

What he means to ask, what he cannot bring himself to ask, is: Do you love him? Would you too do anything for him? But she understands his meaning perfecdy well, and has given him his answer. So that there is really only one question left to ask: 'More than Pavel?'

She hesitates. He can see her weighing them, the two loves, one in the right hand, one in the left, like apples. 'No,' she says at last with what he can only call grace, 'I still like Pavel best.'

'Because they couldn't be more different, could they, the two of them. Like chalk and cheese.'

'Chalk and cheese?' She finds the idea funny.

'Just a saying. A horse and a wolf. A deer and a wolf.'

She considers the new similitude dubiously. 'They both like fun – liked fun,' she objects, slipping up on the verb.

He shakes his head. 'No, you make a mistake there. There is no fun in Sergei Gennadevich. There is certainly a spirit of a kind in him, but it is not a spirit of fun.' He bends closer, brushes the wing of hair back from her face, touches her cheek. 'Listen, Matryosha. You cannot hide these from your mother.' He gestures towards the instruments of death. 'I will get rid of them for you as I got rid of the dress. No matter what Nechaev says, you can't keep them. It is too dangerous. Do you understand?'

Her lips part, the corners of her mouth quiver. She is going to cry, he thinks. But it is not like that at all. When she raises her eyes, he is enveloped in a glance that is at once shameless and derisive. She draws away from his hand, tossing her hair. 'No!' he says. The smile she wears is taunting, provocative. Then the spell passes and she is a child as before, confused, ashamed.

It is impossible that what he has just seen has truly taken place. What he has seen comes not from the world he knows but from another existence. It is as though for the first time he has been present and conscious during a seizure; so that for the first time his eyes have been open to where he is when he is seized. In fact, he must wonder whether seizure is any longer the right word, whether the word has not all along been possession - whether everything that for the past twenty years has gone under the name of seizure has not been a mere presentiment of what is now happening, the quaking and dancing of the body a long-drawn-out prelude to a quaking of the soul.