J.M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg

At first her intensity carries itself over to him. There is a long passage in which he again loses all sense of who he is, who she is. About them is an incandescent sphere of pleasure; inside the sphere they float like twins, gyrating slowly.

He has never known a woman give herself so unreservedly to the erotic. Nevertheless, as she reaches a pitch of frenzy he begins to retreat from her. Something in her seems to be changing. Sensations that on their first night together were taking place deep within her body seem to be migrating toward the surface. She is, in fact, growing 'electric' in the manner of so many other women he has known.

She has insisted that the candle on the dressing-table remain lit. As she approaches her climax her dark eyes search his face more and more intently, even when her eyelids tremble and she begins to shudder.

At one point she whispers a word that he only half-catches. 'What?' he demands. But she only tosses her head from side to side and grits her teeth.

Half-catches. Nevertheless he knows what it is: devil. It is a word he himself uses, though he cannot believe in the same sense as she. The devil: the instant at the onset of the climax when the soul is twisted out of the body and begins its downward spiral into oblivion. And, flinging her head from side to side, clenching her jaw, grunting, it is not hard to see her too as possessed by the devil.

A second time, and with even more ferocity, she throws herself into coupling with him. But the well is dry, and soon they both know it. 'I can't!' she gasps, and is still. Hands raised, palms open, she lies as if in surrender. 'I can't go on!' Tears begin to roll down her cheeks.

The candle burns brightly. He takes her limp body in his arms. The tears continue to stream and she does nothing to stop them.

'What is wrong?'

'I haven't the strength to go on. I have done all I can, I am exhausted. Please leave us alone now.'

'Us?'

'Yes, we, us, both of us. We are suffocating under your weight. We can't breathe.'

'You should have said so earlier. I understood things quite differently.'

'I am not blaming you. I have been trying to take everything upon myself, but I can't any more. I have been on my feet all day, I got no sleep last night, I am exhausted.'

'You think I have been using you?'

'Not using me in that way. But you use me as a route to my child.'

'To Matryona! What nonsense! You can't believe that!'

'It's the truth, clear for anyone to see! You use me as a route to her, and I cannot bear it!' She sits up in the bed, crosses her arms over her naked breasts, rocks back and forth miserably. 'You are in the grip of something quite beyond me. You seem to be here but you are not really here. I was ready to help you because of…' She heaves her shoulders helplessly. 'But now I can't any longer.'

'Because of Pavel?'

'Yes, because of Pavel, because of what you said. I was ready to try. But now it is costing me too much. It is wearing me down. I would never have gone so far if I weren't afraid you would use Matryosha in the same way.'

He raises a hand to her lips. 'Keep your voice down. That is a terrible accusation to make. What has she been saying to you? I would not lay a finger on her, I swear.'

'Swear by whom? By what? What do you believe in that you can swear by? Anyway, it has nothing to do with laying fingers, as you well know. And don't tell me to be quiet.' She tosses the bedclothes aside and searches for her gown. 'I must be by myself or I will go mad.'

An hour later, just as he is falling asleep, she is back in his bed, hot-skinned, gripping herself to him, winding her legs around his. 'Don't pay attention to what I said,' she says. 'There are times when I am not myself, you must get used to that.'

He wakes up once more during the night. Though the curtains are drawn, the room is as bright as if under a full moon. He gets up and looks out of the window. Flames leap into the night sky less than a mile away. The fire across the river rages so hugely that he can swear he feels its heat.

He returns to the bed and to Anna. This is how he and she are when Matryona finds them in the morning: her mother, wild-haired, fast asleep in the crook of his arm, snoring lightly; and he, in the act of opening his eyes on the grave child at the door.

An apparition that could very well be a dream. But he knows it is not. She sees all, she knows all.

A cloud of smoke hangs over the city. Ash falls from the sky; in places the very snow is grey.

All morning he sits alone in the room. He knows now why he has not gone back to Yelagin Island. It is because he fears to see the soil tossed aside, the grave yawning, the body gone. A corpse improperly buried; buried now within him, in his breast, no longer weeping but hissing madness, whispering to him to fall.

He is sick and he knows the name of his sickness. Nechaev, voice of the age, calls it vengefulness, but a truer name, less grand, would be resentment.

There is a choice before him. He can cry out in the midst of this shameful fall, beat his arms like wings, call upon God or his wife to save him. Or he can give himself to it, refuse the chloroform of terror or unconsciousness, watch and listen instead for the moment which may or may not arrive – it is not in his power to force it -when from being a body plunging into darkness he shall become a body within whose core a plunge into darkness is taking place, a body which contains its own falling and its own darkness.

If to anyone it is prescribed to live through the madness of our times, he told Anna Sergeyevna, it is to him. Not to emerge from the fall unscathed, but to achieve what his son did not: to wresde with the whisding darkness, to absorb it, to make it his medium; to turn the falling into a flying, even if a flying as slow and old and clumsy as a turtle's. To live where Pavel died. To live in Russia and hear the voices of Russia murmuring within him. To hold it all within him: Russia, Pavel, death.

That is what he said. But was it the truth or just a boast? The answer does not matter, as long as he does not flinch. Nor does it matter that he speaks in figures, making his own sordid and contemptible infirmity into the emblematic sickness of the age. The madness is in him and he is in the madness; they think each other; what they call each other, whether madness or epilepsy or vengeance or the spirit of the age, is of no consequence. This is not a lodging-house of madness in which he is living, nor is Petersburg a city of madness. He is the mad one; and the one who admits he is the mad one is mad too. Nothing he says is true, nothing is false, nothing is to be trusted, nothing to be dismissed. There is nodiing to hold to, nothing to do but fall.

He unpacks the writing-case, sets out his materials. No longer a matter of listening for the lost child calling from the dark stream, no longer a matter of being faithful to Pavel when all have given him up. Not a matter of fidelity at all. On the contrary, a matter of betrayal -betrayal of love first of all, and then of Pavel and the mother and child and everyone else. Perversion: everything and everyone to be turned to another use, to be gripped to him and fall with him.

He remembers Maximov's assistant and the question he asked: 'What kind of book do you write?' He knows now the answer he should have given: 'I write perversions of the truth. I choose the crooked road and take children into dark places. I follow the dance of the pen.'

In the mirror on the dressing-table he catches a quick glimpse of himself hunched over the table. In the grey light, without his glasses, he could mistake himself for a stranger; the dark beard could be a veil or a curtain of bees.

He moves the chair so as not to face the mirror. But the sense of someone in the room besides himself persists: if not of a full person then of a stick-figure, a scarecrow draped in an old suit, with a stuffed sugar-sack for a head and a kerchief across the mouth.