A Vengeful Longing pp-2 Read online

  A Vengeful Longing

  ( Porfiry Petrovich - 2 )

  R. N. Morris

  R. N. Morris

  A Vengeful Longing

  ‘Woe to those who are left only to their own powers and dreams,

  and with a passionate, all too premature, and almost vengeful

  longing for seemliness. .’

  The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky, (translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

  June, 1868

  PART ONE

  Poison

  1

  In an island dacha

  Raisa Ivanovna Meyer was sitting on the veranda of a rented dacha, listening to distant music from a pleasure boat as it filtered through successive screens of foliage. The notes that came to her were fragmented, barely music, but they compelled her attention more than the novel she had been drowsing over. She placed the book down on the marble table and looked up.

  She was irritated, rather than soothed, by the broken strains. If only she could place the tune, then she could relax, and the music would have fulfilled its promise. But it set her nerves on edge, and the wafts of nostalgia that it carried with it only depressed her. Sometimes it seemed to be getting closer, clarifying into something almost recognisable, but immediately it would again recede and disintegrate. Raisa looked at her son, Grisha, as he leant over the circular table, utterly absorbed in the activity of copying the Daily Events section of The Voice. The neatness, indeed the beauty, of Grisha’s script provoked a surge of feeling in his mother: something fiercer, more complicated than pride. Pride was something she could never allow herself. But if she could not be wholly proud of Grisha, she would not be ashamed of him either. So they took their place on the front veranda, and Raisa met the questioning gazes of any passers-by with silent defiance.

  Grisha’s pen moved swiftly, the letters forming with seemingly mechanical perfection. The lines ran true and straight, although the paper was not ruled. It was as if he was painting, not writing, the characters. There was something wonderful in her son’s obsession. It struck her at times as a blessing: a gift, truly, despite its pointlessness. The nib of the pen made little noises of contentment, chuckling scratches, as the ink flowed from it onto the surface of the paper. The absorption in his face frightened her. It was something she could never understand. What it said to her was that his devotion to this task was greater than any other feeling he was capable of. She knew that he needed her; that went without saying. And there were moments when only her clinging embrace was capable of calming and containing him. But this activity, the repeated copying of passages from the day’s newspaper, was the only thing he went to voluntarily. He chose this over her, and she was jealous of it.

  Of course, it was better that he was occupied and quiet than upset in any way, and so most of the time she left him to it. There had been days when she insisted on his laying down his pen to accompany her on a walk along the linden avenue to the orchard. Sometimes he went peaceably, sometimes there were scenes. The greater his agitation, the more determined she would be that he should go with her. Why did she do it? She could not imagine whatever possessed her to initiate these storms. She wondered at her own perversity. Part of it she recognised as a craving for humiliation. But she had no right, really, to parade her son, like the banner of her wickedness. She felt a rush of shame. As it always did, it came down to her shame. Once she had arrived at that, everything fitted into place, and she realised she could have no complaints. Whatever happened, she could not complain.

  This was where she belonged, here on the veranda with Grisha. He was her son, the son she deserved, the son she would always accept without question.

  She looked out along the dusty road. A slight, stooped figure in a dark green civil service coat and cap was walking towards the dacha, carrying a black bag in one hand and a slim box, wrapped in colourful paper, in the other.

  The music from the pleasure boat changed. It became simply the clashing of a cymbal and the boom of a bass drum. There was no hope now of melody.

  Grisha did not look up, not even at his father’s footsteps on the veranda.

  Dr Martin Meyer laid the box on the table without looking at his wife. ‘Eat them quickly, before they melt.’ The wrapping on the box announced Ballet’s Confectioners, Nevsky Prospekt.

  Raisa glanced at her husband as he took off his cap and ran a hand through his damp hair, then pushed the bridge of his wire-rimmed spectacles back up his nose. His face was clean-shaven, but glistened with sweat. He narrowed his eyes as he penetrated the interior of the dacha with an ambiguous gaze, both searching and apprehensive. His mouth was set in a grimace of discomfort.

  ‘Chocolates?’

  Dr Meyer appeared still distracted by the interior of his dacha, but he had heard his wife and answered her sharply. ‘Don’t I bring you chocolates every Saturday? Why should today be any different?’

  If she was hurt by his bristling temper, Raisa hardly showed it, although perhaps the movement of her head did have something in common with a flinch. ‘It is rather warm today,’ she said quietly to the table.

  At last Dr Meyer tore his eyes away from the inside of the dacha, and lowered them to consider his son’s handiwork. ‘Why do you let him do this?’ he murmured, though still he did not look at Raisa, so that at first she was not sure the question was addressed to her.

  ‘He enjoys it.’

  Dr Meyer frowned self-consciously. It was as if he was waiting for her to see his displeasure, rather than considering what she had said. Raisa Meyer watched her husband closely, though with a detachment that shocked her. His face had once been illuminated by a passionate engagement; at times he had even been capable of impetuosity, as she well knew. Something petty, a kind of wretched, angry unhappiness, had driven out this vitality.

  ‘He enjoys it?’ Dr Meyer gave the word sarcastic emphasis. ‘How can we know what he enjoys or does not enjoy? Besides, this is a compulsion. One does not enjoy a compulsion. We must take steps to break it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is not healthy.’

  ‘Let’s not talk of him as if he were not here.’

  ‘Your sentimental. . interventions. .’ Dr Meyer kept his eyes downcast as he spoke, as though he were scanning his son’s writing for the words that he was struggling to produce, ‘… are not … conducive to. . progress.’

  ‘Sentimental interventions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am his mother.’

  ‘Yes. And so. . you of all people. . must. . should. . be aware. .’ Dr Meyer broke off, pulling away the sheet that Grisha was working on. ‘Just look at this!’ The shock of his sudden deprivation showed in the boy’s whole body, which recoiled as if charged with a spring. His arms flew up and his head began to bob. A kind of grunting moan rose in his throat.

  Raisa watched him with alarm, knowing how this would end. She wanted to smother him in an embrace, to press him into her, for she knew that such complete contact with his mother would be the only thing that would go some way to consoling him for his loss. But she felt oddly constrained in her husband’s presence.

  Dr Meyer read from the sheet: ‘“On the eleventh of June on Vasilevsky Island, the partially decomposed body of an unidentified male was discovered by a party of picnickers.” And this! “A young woman, thought to be a prostitute, hanged herself from the stairwell of an apartment building on Voznesensky Prospekt.” And this! “In Tsarskoe Selo, the retired Collegiate Assessor Zarnitsyn killed his wife with a revolver before turning the weapon on himself. .”’

  ‘It’s your newspaper!’ protested Raisa.

  ‘That has nothing to do with it! Such subjects are not suitable for a child of his. .’ For the first time th
at afternoon, Dr Meyer looked directly at his son. He did not seem to like what he saw. ‘Constitution.’

  ‘It does not matter to him what he copies. It is only important that he copies something.’ Raisa snatched the paper back and returned it to Grisha, placing an arm around his shoulder and pulling him to her tightly. Grisha moaned and resumed his copying.

  Dr Meyer looked down at his wife and son in disbelief. ‘You defy me in this? After everything.’ He broke off. ‘Of course! What should I expect?’ Dr Meyer almost seemed to bow to his wife as he made to go inside. A strange smile settled on his lips. ‘At least do me the favour of consuming the chocolates I have bought for you at considerable expense. Perhaps you will find it possible to obey me in that.’ He lurched towards the open door, his shoe heels clacking on the boards of the veranda, as he fled the possibility of any response.

  A moment later a door slammed inside. She felt the reverberation in the boards beneath her chair.

  Raisa slipped the ribbon off and pulled away the wrapping. She removed the lid from the box and gazed almost with disgust at the gleaming dark spheres. Yes, she would obey him in this. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself. It was this that disgusted her. She was appalled too by the sense that her husband was counting on her greed. She felt little stabs of misery accumulate into a bitter resentment.

  Suddenly she knew that it was within her power not to eat the chocolates. She would not, after all, abase herself in his eyes, in the world’s eyes.

  To gorge on chocolates that were melting unappetisingly, on a day when it was too hot really to eat anything: she would not do it. The sense of rebellion that came from this decision liberated her. She looked down at the spreading bulk of her own body, and felt that she had taken a stand against the enemy that her life had become. She did not smile but she bowed her head, in solemn self-respect.

  She heard footsteps approaching from inside, and looked up to see Polina, flushed in the face, carrying the samovar. The girl’s youthful, lithe figure mocked her, as did the heedless beauty of her features. Raisa felt her resolve desert her as she looked at her maid.

  Self-pity took its place. It was hard to believe that she herself had once been just as slim. She even began to feel sorry for Polina, knowing that the day would come when she too would lose her figure and her looks. It was not pleasing to realise that she found this thought oddly consoling.

  Polina laid the samovar down heavily. She bowed her head in a kind of curtsy, without meeting her mistress’s eyes. The box of chocolates was thrust in front of her.

  ‘Will you not have one, Polina?’

  ‘No thank you, Raisa Ivanovna.’

  ‘You must help us out. We have to eat them all before they melt.’

  The girl wrinkled her nose in an expression of distaste. Raisa was mortified. She felt the existence of a different hierarchy from that of social class, one in which the privileges of youth outranked all others. Now all she wanted was for Polina to be gone, taking her haughty disapproval with her.

  And so, she pushed the first chocolate whole into her mouth. It liquefied instantly, filling her mouth with the cloying cream of its praline centre.

  Raisa kept her eyes on Polina as she worked her mouth around the chocolate. As she swallowed the soft globule of sweetness, she became aware of a slight, bitter aftertaste. Even so, her hand went back to the box. And quickly, the aftertaste gave way to a pleasant and addictive tingle, an eager craving in her mouth. She appeased it with a second chocolate that dissolved as quickly as the first.

  ‘Chocolates, Grisha!’ She shook the box at her son.

  Grisha looked up from his copying. An immense smile spread over his face when he saw the chocolates. Raisa took it in eagerly.

  ‘Chocolats!’

  ‘Oui, chocolats!’ Raisa was teaching her son French. She had been surprised at how quickly, and delightedly, he had picked it up. To realise that there was another way of referring to the world, that the objects around him could be dressed in different words, seemed to have opened a door in his mind. Her husband had watched with a vague, suspicious disapproval, but so far had said nothing.

  ‘Chocolat!’ repeated Grisha, the word bubbling through the sweet it named, now reduced to a sticky mush in his mouth. Raisa did not dare look at her maid, knowing the disgust she would find on her face.

  ‘Shall I serve the tea, Raisa Ivanovna?’

  Raisa nodded, still without looking at Polina. The slight bitterness that she had noticed before had returned. She looked at the box, as if to confirm that they had indeed come from the usual confectioner’s.

  Polina passed her a glass of tea. Her heels stomped sternly on the veranda.

  ‘Will there be anything else?’

  Raisa shook her head, as she hurried another chocolate into her mouth. Polina took her noisy disapproval back inside.

  The maid’s departure was liberating. Raisa and Grisha devoured the chocolates in an absorbed frenzy of consumption.

  Raisa stared at the box, empty now apart from one remaining chocolate. It shamed and depressed her to look at it. To leave it was almost worse than to eat them all: the solitary chocolate exposed her weakness. But her self-disgust was becoming physical.

  All she could taste now was the bitterness. She looked at her son. His expression was uncertain, almost fearful.

  ‘Ho-cla!’ he said, seemingly unable to form the word correctly.

  The tingling had spread from her throat over the whole of her mouth, even numbing her lips and tongue. She felt that if she tried to speak, she wouldn’t be able to. She began to be aware of a hot, parched sensation. She sipped her tea, but couldn’t taste it.

  Raisa noticed the look of panic on her son’s face. His hands went to his throat. ‘Grisha? Are you all right?’

  He gasped harshly, trying to expel his fear, the flesh of his soft palate grating in a desperate hawking.

  Raisa felt the tingling intensify into a fire in the flesh of her mouth and throat, as a numbness spread through her chest and out from her stomach. Her heart began to palpitate wildly.

  A sudden, sharp cry from Grisha. He jumped up. The wrought-iron chair behind him fell over. The crash of the chair was strangely distant and muffled. He clutched one hand to his mouth. The fist of the other was pummelling his belly.

  A thick, dark liquid seeped through his fingers. He took his hand away. His body shook in a violent convulsion that ended in a loud retch. His neat pages were covered in a viscous murky puddle.

  Grisha turned a distraught face on his mother. For a moment, there was an edge of outrage to it, as when any child seeks out its parent to explain the unfairness of the world. But that gave way to simple fear.

  ‘Oh, Grisha,’ began Raisa, stretching out a consoling hand. But the nausea hit her now. A systemic convulsion took hold of her and her own vomit chased the words out of her mouth.

  A high-pitched keening came from somewhere. It seemed to answer the pain Raisa was feeling, but she was not aware of making the sound: it was as though something inside her was being stretched and twisted and squeezed by iron hands.

  And where was Grisha now? The table and the chairs on the veranda swam and merged, and somewhere in this swirl of detail was her son. Her eye picked out the discarded ribbon of the chocolates. Then she was aware of a fist beating down upon something solid and smooth.

  Raisa’s heart now felt as though it had been filled with mercury, her pulse laboured and erratic. Her breathing came unevenly, her lungs no longer certain what was expected of them. She felt a sudden hot weight in her bowels. A liquid gurgling came from Grisha.

  ‘Mama!’ Her vision came and went. She saw eyes, his eyes, fearful and imploring.

  ‘It’s. . all. . right. . Grisha.’ She was amazed how clearly she was able to think as she recognised the panic in her own voice.

  Raisa reached out towards where she believed her son’s hand must be. She could see a hand, but it divided into two hands, which circled one another in her failing vision. She gra
bbed for one of the hands but pulled only air towards her. Her hand went flying. She had no control over any part of herself. She watched her hand smash into the samovar. Strange, she did not feel its heat, or even its hardness. The samovar toppled over and fell apart with a loud clatter.

  Raisa sank to her knees. It was as if a heavy weight was pushing down on her shoulders, and her legs were just not up to it. Grisha now was lying on his back, writhing.

  ‘Martin!’ It was as if the name was the articulation of her pain. She broke it down and cried it out again, at a higher, fiercer pitch: ‘Marrrr-tin!’

  She was aware of the girl, Polina, at the door, tried hard to focus on her. Horror quickly settled in Polina’s face.

  ‘Get my husband,’ Raisa managed, gripping the table edge. Then, more sharply, as she felt herself unable to control her bowels: ‘Get my husband!’

  But Polina did not move. It seemed she could not take her eyes off the spectacle before her. At first she was dumbstruck by it, her mouth gaping idiotically. Then, when finally she stirred herself to act, it was to close her eyes, throw back her head, and scream. She screamed for a long time, a high, steady note, as clear and hard as steel.

  2

  The new recruit

  ‘I have come to see Porfiry Petrovich.’

  Alexander Grigorevich Zamyotov, chief clerk of the Haymarket District Police Bureau in Stolyarny Lane, remained bent over the case notes he was sorting. He was reluctant to lift his face into the full force of the stench that permeated the receiving hall.

  There was a light tapping on the counter. Zamyotov froze, but still did not look up.

  ‘My dear sir, respectfully, I request. .’

  ‘Respectfully?’ Zamyotov slowly straightened himself at last, wincing and blinking through the eye-watering smell. He subjected the clean-shaven young man before him to a withering scrutiny. The young man was crisply turned out in a brand-new civil service uniform, with a single-breasted coat of bottle green. Its nine silver buttons shone in admonition of Zamyotov’s own dull buttons, one of which hung by a loose thread. ‘Is it respectful to hammer thus?’ Zamyotov rapped his knuckles angrily on the counter. ‘Can you not see that I am engaged in important police duties here? I am not at the beck and call of the likes of you, even if you have come straight from the outfitters.’ Zamyotov’s face contorted into an impressive sneer, marred only by a slight pursing of his lips.