Master of Petersburg (10 page)

The dog howls again. No hint of empty plains and silver light: a dog, not a wolf; a dog, not his son. Therefore? Therefore he must throw off this lethargy!
Because
it is not his son he must not go back to bed but must get dressed and answer the call. If he expects his son to come as a thief in the night, and listens only for the call of the thief, he will never see him. If he expects his son to speak in the voice of the unexpected, he will never hear him. As long as he expects what he does not expect, what he does not expect will not come. Therefore – paradox within paradox, darkness swaddled in darkness – he must answer to what he does not expect.

From the third floor it had seemed easy to find the dog. But when he reaches street level he is confused. Does the crying come from left or from right, from one of the buildings across the street or from behind the buildings or perhaps from a courtyard within one of the buildings? And which building? And what of the cries themselves, which now seem to be not only shorter and lower but of a different timbre altogether – almost not the same cries, in fact?

He searches back and forth before he finds the alley used by the nightsoil carriers. In a branch of this alley he at last comes upon the dog. It is tethered to a drainpipe by a slim chain; the chain has become wrapped around a foreleg, jerking the leg up awkwardly whenever it tightens. At his approach the dog retreats as far as it can, whining. It flattens its ears, prostrates itself, rolls on its back. A bitch. He bends over it, unwinds the chain. Dogs smell fear, but even in the cold he can smell this dog's rank terror. He tickles it behind the ear. Still on its back, it timidly licks his wrist.

Is this what I will be doing for the rest of my days, he wonders: peering into the eyes of dogs and beggars?

The dog gives a heave and is on its feet. Though he is not fond of dogs, he does not draw back from this one but crouches as its warm, wet tongue licks his face, his ears, licks the salt from his beard.

He gives it a last stroke and gets up. In the moonlight he cannot make out his watchface. The dog tugs at its chain, whining, eager. Who would chain a dog outdoors on a night like this? Nevertheless, he does not set it loose. Instead he turns abruptly and departs, pursued by forlorn howls.

Why me? he thinks as he hurries away. Why should I bear all the world's burdens? As for Pavel, if he is to have nothing else, let him at least have, his death to himself, let his death not be taken from him and turned into the occasion of his father's reformation.

It is no good. His reasoning – specious, contemptible – does not for one moment take him in. Pavel's death does not belong to Pavel – that is just a trick of language. As long as he is here, Pavel's death is his death. Wherever he goes he bears Pavel with him, like a baby blue with cold (‘Who will save the blue baby?' he seems to hear within him, plaintive words that come from he does not know where, in a peasant's singsong voice).

Pavel will not speak, will not tell him what to do. ‘Raise up that least thing and cherish it': if he knew the words came from Pavel he would obey them without question. But they do not.
That least thing
: is the least thing the dog, abandoned in the cold? Is the dog the thing he must release and take with him and feed and cherish, or is it the filthy, drunken beggar in his tattered coat under the bridge? A terrible hopelessness comes over him which is connected – how, he does not know – to the fact that he has no idea what time it is, but whose core is a growing certainty that he will never again go out in the night to answer a dog's call, that an opportunity for leaving himself as he is behind and becoming what he might yet be has passed. I am I, he thinks despairingly, manacled to myself till the day I die. Whatever it was that wavered toward me, I was unworthy of it, and now it has withdrawn.

Yet even in the instant of closing the door upon himself he is aware there is still a chance to return to the alley, unchain the dog, bring it to the entryway to No. 63, and make some kind of bed for it at the foot of the stairs – though, he knows, once he has brought it so far it will insist on following him further, and, if he chains it again, will whine and bark till the whole building is roused.
It is not my son, it is just a dog
, he protests.
What is it to me?
Yet even as he protests he knows the answer: Pavel will not be saved till he has freed the dog and brought it into his bed, brought
the least thing
, the beggarmen and the beggarwomen too, and much else he does not yet know of; and even then there will be no certainty.

He gives a great groan of despair.
What am I to do?
he thinks. If I were only in touch with my heart, might it be given to me to know? Yet it is not his heart he has lost touch with but the truth. Or – the other side of the same thought – it is not the truth he has lost touch with at all: on the contrary, truth has been pouring down upon him like a waterfall, without moderation, till now he is drowning in it. And then he thinks (reverse the thought and reverse the reversal too: by such Jesuitical tricks must one think nowadays!): Drowning under the falls, what is it that I need? More water, more flood, a deeper drowning.

Standing in the middle of the snow-covered street, he brings his cold hands to his face, smells the dog on them, touches the cold tears on his cheeks, tastes them. Salt, for those who need salt. He suspects he will not save the dog, not this night nor even the next night, if there is to be a next night. He is waiting for a sign, and he is betting (there is no grander word he dare use) that the dog is not the sign, is not a sign at all, is just a dog among many dogs howling in the night. But he knows too that as long as he tries by cunning to distinguish things that are things from things that are signs he will not be saved. That is the logic by which he will be defeated; and, feeling its iron hardness, he is at his wits' end, like a dog on a chain that breaks the teeth that gnaw it. And beware, beware, he reminds himself: the dog on the chain, the second dog, is nothing in itself, is not an illumination, merely an animal likeness!

With his fists bunched in his pockets, his head bowed, his legs stiff as rods, he stands in the middle of the street feeling the dog's spittle turn to ice on his beard.

Is it possible that at this moment, in the shadowed doorway of No. 63, someone is lurking, watching him? Of the body of the watcher he cannot be sure; even the patch of lighter gloom that he thinks of as the face could be no more than a fleck on the wall. But the longer he stares at it, the more intently a face seems to be staring back at him. A real face? His imagination is full of bearded men with glittering eyes who hide in dark passages. Nevertheless, as he passes into the pitch darkness of the entryway, the sense of another presence becomes so acute that a chill runs down his back. He halts, holds his breath, listens. Then he strikes a match.

In a corner crouches a man, blinking against the light. Though he has a woollen scarf wound around his head and mouth and a blanket over his shoulders, he recognizes the beggar he confronted in the church portico.

‘Who are you?' he says, his voice cracking. ‘Can't you leave me alone?'

The match goes out. He strikes another.

The man shakes his head firmly. A hand emerges from under the blanket and pushes the scarf aside. ‘You can't order me,' he says. There is a smell of putrid fish in the air.

The match goes out. He starts to climb the stairs. But tediously the paradox comes back:
Expect the one you do not expect
. Very well; but must every beggar then be treated as a prodigal son, embraced, welcomed into the home, feasted? Yes, that is what Pascal would say: bet on everyone, every beggar, every mangy dog; only thus will you be sure that the One, the true son, the thief in the night, will not slip through the net. And Herod would agree: make sure – slay all the children without exception.

Betting on all the numbers – is that still gambling? Without the risk, without subjecting oneself to the voice speaking from elsewhere in the fall of the dice, what is left that is divine? Surely God knows that, and will have mercy on the gambler-at-heart! And surely the wife who, when her husband kneels before her and confesses he has gambled away their last rouble and beats his breast and kisses the hem of her dress – the wife who raises him and wipes away his tears and without a word departs to pawn her wedding-ring and returns with money (‘Here!') so that he can go back to the gaming-room for the one last bet that will redeem all – surely such a woman is touched with the divine, a woman who stakes on the man who has nothing left, a woman who, when even the wedding-ring is pawned and lost, goes out a second time into the night and comes back with the money for another stake!

Does the woman upstairs, the woman whose name he seems for the moment to have forgotten, whom he even confuses with that
Gnädige Frau
his landlady in Dresden, have the touch of this divinity upon her? He does not know the first thing about her, only the last and most secret thing: how she gives herself. From how a woman gives herself can a man guess how she will give herself to the god of chance? Is such a woman marked by abandon, an abandon that does not care where it leads, to pleasure or to pain, that uses the sensual body only as a vehicle, and only because we cannot live disembodied? Is there a form of lovemaking she stands for in which bodies press against and into and through each other into a darkness in which nothing can be heard but the flapping of bedsheets like wings?

Memories of his nights with her flood back with sudden fullness, and everything that was tangled in him grows straight, pointing like an arrow to her. Desire in all its luxuriousness overwhelms him.
She
, he thinks:
she is the one, it is she whom I want. Therefore
 . . .

Therefore, smiling to himself, he hurries back down the stairs and gropes his way to the corner where the man, the hireling, the spy, has made his nest. ‘Come,' he says, speaking into the dark, ‘I have a bed for you.'

‘This is my post, I must stay at my post,' replies the man pawkily.

But nothing can impair his good spirits now. ‘The one for whom you are waiting will come, even to the third floor, I assure you. He will knock at the door and wait with patience and refuse to go away.'

There is a long scuffling and a rustling of paper. ‘You don't have another light, do you?' says the man.

He strikes a match. Hastily the man stuffs things into a bag and stands up.

Stumbling in the dark like two drunkards, they climb the stairs. At the door of his room he whispers to the man to be quiet and takes his hand to guide him. The hand is unpleasantly pudgy.

Inside, he lights the lamp. It is hard to judge the stranger's age. His eyes are youthful; but in his thin ginger hair and freckled scalp there is something tired and old, and his way of holding himself is that of someone worn down by years and by disgrace.

‘Ivanov, Pyotr Alexandrovich,' says the man, drawing his heels together, making a little bow. ‘Civil servant, retired.'

He gestures toward the bed. ‘Take it.'

‘You must be wondering,' says the man, testing the bed, ‘how someone of my background comes to be a watcher (that is what we call it in our line: watching).' He lies down, stretches out.

He has a disagreeable presentiment that he has tangled himself with one of those beggars who, unable to juggle or play the violin, feel they must repay alms with the story of their life. ‘Please keep your voice down,' he says. ‘And take off your shoes.'

‘You are the man whose son was killed, aren't you? My deepest condolences. I know some of what you are feeling. Not all, but some. I have lost two children myself. Swept away. Meningetic fever, that is the medical term. My wife has never recovered from the blow. They could have been saved if we had had the money to pay for good doctors. A tragedy; but who cares? Tragedy is all around us nowadays. Tragedy has become the way of the world.' He sits up. ‘If you will heed my advice, Fyodor Mikhailovich (you don't mind, do you?), if you will take a word of advice from someone who has been, so to speak, through the mill, you will give in to your grief. Cry like a woman. That is the great secret of womankind, that gives them the advantage over fellows like us. They know when to let go and cry. We don't, you and I. We bottle it up inside us till it becomes like the very devil! And then we go and do something stupid, just to be rid of it for an hour or two. Yes, we do something stupid that we regret forever afterwards. Women aren't like that because women have the secret of tears. We must learn from the fair sex, Fyodor Mikhailovich, we must learn to cry! See, I'm not ashamed to cry: three years, next month, since tragedy struck, and I'm not ashamed to cry!'

And indeed, tears are rolling down his cheeks. He wipes them away with his cuff, but more flow. He seems to have no trouble in talking while he cries. In fact, he seems quite cheerful. ‘I believe I will grieve for my lost babies for the rest of my days,' he says.

As Ivanov prattles on about his ‘babies,' his attention wanders. Is it simply because he is known to be a writer that people tell him their stories? Do they think he has no stories of his own? He is exhausted, the headache has not gone away. Sitting on the only chair, with birds already beginning to chirp outside, he is desperate to sleep – desperate, in fact, for the bed he has given up. ‘We can talk later,' he interrupts testily. ‘Go to sleep now, otherwise what is the point of this . . .' He hesitates.

‘Of this charity?' fills in Ivanov slyly. ‘Is that what you wanted to say?'

He does not reply.

‘Because, let me assure you, you need not be ashamed of charity,' the fellow continues softly, ‘indeed not. Just as you need not be ashamed of grief. Generous impulses, both of them. They seem to bring us low, these generous impulses of ours, but in truth they exalt us. And He sees them and records each one of them, He who sees into the crevices of our hearts.'