The Man from St. Petersburg Read Online Free PDF

pages. The book seemed explicit and detailed on rheumatism, broken bones and measles, but when it arrived at childbirth it suddenly became impenetrably vague. There was some mysterious stuff about cramps, waters breaking, and a cord which had to be tied in two places, then cut with scissors which had been dipped in boiling water. This chapter was evidently written for people who already knew a lot about the subject. There was a drawing of a naked woman. Charlotte noticed, but was too embarrassed to tell Belinda, that the woman in the drawing had no hair in a certain place where Charlotte had a great deal. Then there was a diagram of a baby inside a woman’s tummy, but no indication of a passage by which the baby might emerge.
    Belinda said: “It must be that the doctor cuts you open.”
    “Then what did they do in history, before there were doctors?” Charlotte said. “Anyway, this book’s no good.” She opened the other at random and read aloud the first sentence that came to her eye. “She lowered herself with lascivious slowness until she was completely impaled upon my rigid shaft. Whereupon she commenced her delicious rocking movements to and fro.” Charlotte frowned, and looked at Belinda.
    “I wonder what it means?” said Belinda.

    Feliks Kschessinsky sat in a railway carriage waiting for the train to pull out of Dover Station. The carriage was cold. He was quite still. It was dark outside, and he could see his own reflection in the window: a tall man with a neat mustache, wearing a black coat and a bowler hat. There was a small suitcase on the rack above his head. He might have been the traveling representative of a Swiss watch manufacturer, except that anyone who looked closely would have seen that the coat was cheap, the suitcase was cardboard and the face was not the face of a man who sold watches.
    He was thinking about England. He could remember when, in his youth, he had upheld England’s constitutional monarchy as the ideal form of government. The thought amused him, and the flat white face reflected in the window gave him the ghost of a smile. He had since changed his mind about the ideal form of government.
    The train moved off, and a few minutes later Feliks was watching the sun rise over the orchards and hop fields of Kent. He never ceased to be astonished at how pretty Europe was. When he first saw it he had suffered a profound shock, for like any Russian peasant he had been incapable of imagining that the world could look this way. He had been on a train then, he recalled. He had crossed hundreds of miles of Russia’s thinly populated northwestern provinces, with their stunted trees, their miserable villages buried in snow and their winding mud roads; then, one morning, he had woken up to find himself in Germany. Looking at the neat green fields, the paved roads, the dainty houses in the clean villages and the flower beds on the sunny station platform, he had thought he was in Paradise. Later, in Switzerland, he had sat on the veranda of a small hotel, warmed by the sun yet within sight of snow-covered mountains, drinking coffee and eating a fresh, crusty roll, and he had thought: People here must be so happy.
    Now, watching the English farms come to life in the early morning, he recalled dawn in his home village—a gray, boiling sky and a bitter wind; a frozen swampy field with puddles of ice and tufts of coarse grass rimed with frost; himself in a worn canvas smock, his feet already numb in felt shoes and clogs; his father striding along beside him, wearing the threadbare robes of an impoverished country priest, arguing that God was good. His father had loved the Russian people because God loved them. It had always been perfectly obvious to Feliks that God hated the people, for he treated them so cruelly.
    That discussion had been the start of a long journey, a journey which had taken Feliks from Christianity through socialism to anarchist terror, from Tambov province through St. Petersburg