Free Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee Page B

arm but the arm is trapped under his body. Stupidly he tries to tug it free. There is a bad smell, his clothes are damp. Like ice forming in water, memories begin at last to coagulate: who he is, where he is; and together with memory an urgent desire to get away from this place before he is discovered in all his disgrace.
    These attacks are the burden he carries with him through the world. To no one has he ever confessed how much of his time he spends listening for premonitions of them, trying to read the signs. Why am I accursed? he cries out within himself, pounding the earth with his staff, commanding the rock to yield an answer. But he is not Moses, the rock does not split. Nor do the trances themselves provide illumination. They are not visitations. Far from it: they are nothing – mouthfuls of his life sucked out of him as if by a whirlwind that leaves behind not even a memory of darkness.
    He rises and gropes his way down the last flight of stairs. He is shivering, his whole body is cold. Dawn is breaking as he emerges into the open. It has been snowing. Over the fallen snow lies a haze of pulsing scarlet. The colour is not in the snow but in his eyes; he cannot get rid of it. An eyelid twitches so irritatingly that he claps a cold hand over it. His head aches as though a fist were clenching and unclenching inside it. His hat is lost somewhere on the stairway.
    Bareheaded, in soiled clothes, he trudges through the snow to the little Church of the Redeemer near Kameny Bridge and shelters there till he is sure Matryona and her mother have gone out. Then he returns to the apartment, warms water, strips naked, and washes himself. He washes his underwear too, and hangs it in the washroom. Fortunate for Pavel, he thinks, that he did not have to suffer the falling sickness, fortunate he was not born of me! Then the irony of his words bursts in upon him and he gnashes his teeth. His head thunders with pain, the red haze still colours everything. He lies down in his dressing-gown, rocks himself to sleep.
    An hour later he awakes in an angry and irritable mood. Cones of pain seem to go back from his eyes into his head. His skin is like paper and tender to the touch.
    Naked under his dressing-gown, he pads through Anna Sergeyevna’s apartment, opening cupboards, looking through drawers. Everything is in order, neat and prim.
    In one drawer, wrapped in scarlet velveteen, he finds a picture of a younger Anna Sergeyevna side by side with a man whom he takes to be the printer Kolenkin. Dressed in his Sunday best, Kolenkin looks gaunt and old and tired. What kind of marriage could it have been for this intense and darkly handsome young woman? And why is the picture stuck away in a drawer? Putting it back, he deliberately smudges the glass, leaving his thumbprint over the face of the dead man.
    As a child he used to spy on visitors to the household and trespass surreptitiously on their privacy. It is a weakness that he has associated till now with a refusal to accept limits to what he is permitted to know, with the reading of forbidden books, and thus with his vocation. Today, however, he is not inclined to be charitable to himself. He is in thrall to a spirit of petty evil and knows it. The truth is, rummaging like this through Anna Sergeyevna’s possessions while she is out gives him a voluptuous quiver of pleasure.
    He closes the last drawer and roams about restlessly, not sure what next to do.
    He opens Pavel’s suitcase and dons the white suit. Hitherto he has worn it as a gesture to the dead boy, a gesture of defiance and love. But now, looking in the mirror, he sees only a seedy imposture and, beyond that, something surreptitious and obscene, something that belongs behind the locked doors and curtained windows of rooms where men in wigs and skirts bare their rumps to be flogged.
    It is past midday and his head still aches. He lies down, pressing an arm across his eyes as if to ward off a blow. Everything spins; he