Free Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee

of much the same age. For a while we lived together, the three of us, in an apartment on Meshchanskaya Street. It was not a happy time for Pavel. He felt a certain rivalry with my wife. In fact, when I told him she and I were engaged, he went to her and warned her quite seriously that I was too old for her. Afterwards he used to refer to himself as the orphan : “The orphan would like another slice of toast,” “The orphan has no money,” and so forth. We pretended it was a joke, but it wasn’t. It made for a troubled household.’
    â€˜I can imagine that. But one can sympathize with him, surely. He must have felt he was losing you.’
    â€˜How could he have lost me? From the day I became his father I never once failed him. Am I failing him now?’
    â€˜Of course not, Fyodor Mikhailovich. But children are possessive. They have jealous phases, like all of us. And when we are jealous, we make up stories against ourselves. We work up our own feelings, we frighten ourselves.’
    Her words, like a prism, have only to be shifted slightly in their angle to reflect a quite different meaning. Is that what she intends?
    He casts a glance at Matryona. She is wearing new boots with fluffy sheepskin fringes. Stamping her heels into the damp grass, she leaves a trail of indented prints. Her brow is knitted in concentration.
    â€˜He said you used him to carry messages.’
    A stab of pain goes through him. So Pavel remembered that!
    â€˜Yes, that is true. The year before we were married, on her name-day, I asked him to take a present to her from me. It was a mistake that I regretted afterwards, regretted deeply. It was inexcusable. I did not think. Was that the worst?’
    â€˜The worst?’
    â€˜Did Pavel tell you of things that were worse than that? I would like to know, so that when I ask forgiveness I know what I have been guilty of.’
    She glances at him oddly. ‘That is not a fair question, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Pavel went through lonely spells. He would talk, I would listen. Stories would come out, not always pleasant stories. But perhaps it was good that it was so. Once he had brought the past into the open, perhaps he could stop brooding about it.’
    â€˜Matryona!’ He turns to the child. ‘Did Pavel say anything to you –’
    But Anna Sergeyevna interrupts him. ‘I am sure Pavel didn’t,’ she says; and then, turning on him softly but furiously: ‘You can’t ask a child a question like that!’
    They stop and face each other on the bare field. Matryona looks away scowling, her lips clamped tight; Anna Sergeyevna glares.
    â€˜It is getting cold,’ she says. ‘Shall we turn back?’

7
    Matryona
    He does not accompany them home, but has his evening meal at an inn. In a back room there is a card game going on. He watches for a while, and drinks, but does not play. It is late when he returns to the darkened apartment, the empty room.
    Alone, lonely, he allows himself a twinge of longing, not unpleasant in itself, for Dresden and the comfortable regularity of life there, with a wife who jealously guards his privacy and organizes the family day around his habits.
    He is not at home at No. 63 and never will be. Not only is he the most transient of sojourners, his excuse for staying on as obscure to others as to himself, but he feels the strain of living at close quarters with a woman of volatile moods and a child who may all too easily begin to find his bodily presence offensive. In Matryona’s company he is keenly aware that his clothes have begun to smell, that his skin is dry and flaky, that the dental plates he wears click when he talks. His haemorrhoids, too, cause him endless discomfort. The iron constitution that took him through Siberia is beginning to crack; and this spectacle of decay must be all the more distasteful to a child, herself finical about cleanliness, in whose eyes he has supplanted a being of