Arriving home, he is met in the passageway by Matryona in a state of great excitement. 'The police have been here, Fyodor Mikhailovich, they are looking for a murderer!'
Time stops; he stands frozen. 'Why should they come here?' The words come from him but he seems to hear them from afar, the thin words of someone else.
'They are looking everywhere, all through the building!'
From Anna Sergeyevna he gets a fuller story. 'They are questioning people about a beggar who has been haunting the neighbourhood. I suppose I must have seen him, but I can't recall. They say he has been sheltering in this building.'
He could at this point reveal that Ivanov has spent a night in her apartment, but he does not. 'What is he accused of?' he asks instead.
'The police are being very tight-lipped. Matryosha says he killed somebody, but that is pure gossip.'
'It's not possible. I know the man, I spoke to him at length. He is not a killer.'
But, as it turns out, it is not just gossip. There has ' indeed been a crime; the body of the victim, the beggar-man himself, was found in an alley just down the street. This he learns from the concierge, and is shaken. Ivanov: one of those bad-penny faces that turn up at one's deathbed, or at the graveside; not one to die first.
'Are they sure he didn't simply perish of cold?' he asks. 'Why does it have to be murder?'
'Oh, it's murder all right,' replies the old man, with a knowing look. 'What surprises me is that they are going to all this trouble over a nobody.'
Over supper Matryona will speak of nothing but the murder. She is overwrought: her eyes glisten, words tumble out of her. As for him, he has his own story to tell, but that must wait till her mother has calmed her and put her to bed.
When he thinks she is asleep, he begins to tell Anna Sergeyevna of his meeting with Nechaev. He speaks softly, conscious that the whisperings of adults – treacherous, fascinating – can pierce a child's deepest slumbers.
Anna recognizes Nechaev's name, but seems to have only the vaguest idea of who he is. Nevertheless she is ready to advise him, and her advice is firm. 'You must keep your appointment. You will not be able to rest till you know what really happened.'
'But I know what happened. There is nothing more I need to know.'
She makes an impatient gesture. His lack of zeal makes no sense to her: she sees it only as apathy. How can he make her understand? To make her understand he would have to speak in a voice from under the waters, a boy's clear bell-voice pleading out of the deep dark. 'Sing to me, dear father!' the voice would have to call, and she would have to hear. Somewhere within himself he would have to find not only that voice but the words, the true words. Here and now he does not have the words. Perhaps – he has an intimation – they may be waiting for him in one of the old ballads. But the ballad is in no book: it is somewhere in the breast of the Russian people, where he cannot reach it. Or perhaps in the breast of a child.
'Pavel is not vengeful,' he says at last, haltingly. 'Whoever killed him, it is past, the cord is cut, he is free of that person. I want to be taught by him. I don't want to be poisoned by vengefulness.'
There is more he might say, but cannot, now. That Pavel has no interest in the retelling of the story of how he fell. That Pavel is above all lonely, and in his loneliness needs to be sung to and comforted, to be reassured that he will not be abandoned at the bottom of the waters.
A silence falls between himself and the woman. It is the first time since Sunday they have been alone together. She looks tired. Her shoulders slump, her hands are slack, there are creases at her throat. Older than his wife, it comes home to him again: not quite of another generation, but almost so. He wishes he did not have to see it. He has too recently come from Nechaev, youthful, demonic in his energy, as all the lesser demons are youthful.
On an impulse he takes her hand. She looks up with surprise.
'I am not urging you to vengeance,' she says slowly. 'Of course you are right about Pavel: he did not have a vengeful nature. But he did have a sense of what was right and just. Keep your appointment. Find out what you can. Otherwise you will never have peace.'
He is still holding her hand. From it he feels a pressure, answering his, that he can only call kindly.
'Justice,' he reflects. 'A large word. Can one really draw a line between justice and vengefulness?' And, when she seems uncomprehending: 'Isn't that the originality of Nechaev – that he calls himself the People's Vengeance, not the People's Justice? At least he is honest.'
'Is he? Is that what the people want to be told: that it is vengeance they are after, not justice? I don't think so. Why should the people take Nechaev seriously? Why should anyone take him seriously – a student, an excitable young man? What power does he have, after all?'
'Not the power of life, but the power of death, certainly. A child can kill as dead as a man can, if the spirit is in him. Perhaps that again is Nechaev's originality: that he speaks what we dare not even imagine about our children; that he gives a voice to something dumb and brutal that is sweeping through young Russia. We close our ears to it; then he comes with his axe and makes us hear.'
Her hand, that has been a living thing, has suddenly grown lifeless. A woman of feeling, he thinks, releasing it. Like her daughter. And perhaps as easily hurt.
He wants to embrace her, wants to take her in his arms and repair whatever is fractured. He ought to stop this talk, which only repels and estranges her. But he does not.
'After all, you will never recruit people to your cause by invoking a spirit that is alien to them, or means nothing to them. Nechaev has disciples among the young because a spirit in them answers to the spirit in him. Of course that is not how he explains it. He calls himself a materialist. But that is just fashionable jargon. The truth is, he has what the Greeks called a demon. It speaks to him. It is the source of his energy.'
Again he thinks: Now I must stop. But the dry, deathly words keep coming. He knows he has lost touch with her.
'The same demon must have been in Pavel, otherwise why would Pavel have responded to his call? It's nice to think that Pavel was not vengeful. It's nice to think well of the dead. But it just flatters him. Let us not be sentimental – in ordinary life he was as vengeful as any other young man.'
She gets to her feet. He believes he knows the words she is going to speak, and, if only for form's sake, is ready to defend himself. You call yourself Pavel's father, but I do not believe you love him – that is what he expects. But he is wrong.
'I know nothing about this anarchist Nechaev, I can only accept what you tell me,' she says; 'but as I listen it is hard to tell which of you, you or Nechaev, desires it more that Pavel should belong to the party of vengeance. I am nothing to Pavel, I am certainly not his mother, but I owe it to him – to him and his memory -to protest. You and Nechaev should fight your battles without dragging him in.'
'Nechaev is not an anarchist. That is the mistake people keep making. He is something else.'
'Anarchist, nihilist, whatever he is, I don't want to hear any more of it! I don't want strife and hatred brought into my home! Matryona is excited enough as it is; I don't want her further infected.'
'Not an anarchist, not a nihilist,' he continues doggedly. 'By giving him labels you miss what is unique about him. He does not act in the name of ideas. He acts when he feels action stirring in his body. He is a sensualist. He is an extremist of the senses. He wants to live in a body at the limits of sensation, at the limits of bodily knowledge. That is why he can say everything is permitted – or why he would say so if he were not so indifferent to explaining himself.'
He pauses. Again he believes he knows what she wants to say; or rather, knows what she wants to say even when she herself does not: And you? Are you so different?
'Why do you think he chooses the axe?' he says. 'If you think of the axe, if you think of what it means – ' He throws up his hands in despair. He cannot decently produce the words. The axe, instrument of the people's vengeance, weapon of the people, crude, heavy, unanswerable, swung with the full weight of the body behind it, the body and the life's-weight of hatred and resentment stored up in that body, swung with dark joy.
A silence falls between them.
'There are people to whom sensation does not come by natural means,' he says at last, more evenly. 'That is how Sergei Nechaev struck me from the beginning – as a man who could not have a natural connection with a woman, for instance. I wondered whether that might not underlie his manifold resentments. But perhaps that is how it will be in the future: sensation will not come by the old means any longer. The old means will be used up. I mean love. Love will be used up. So other means will have to be found.'
She speaks. 'That is enough. I don't want to talk any more. It is past nine. If you want to go – '
He rises, bows, leaves.
At ten o'clock he is at the rendezvous on the Fontanka.
A high wind blows scuds of rain before it and whips up the black waters of the canal. The lamp-posts along the bare embankment creak in a concert of jangling. From roofs and gutters comes the gurgle of water.
He takes shelter in a doorway, growing more and more testy. If I catch cold, he thinks, it will be the last straw. He catches cold easily. Pavel too, ever since childhood. Did Pavel catch cold while he was living with her} Did she nurse him herself, or was that left to Matryona? He imagines Matryona coming into the room with a steaming glass of lemon tea, stepping gingerly to keep the glass steady; he imagines Pavel, his hair dark against the white of the pillow, smiling. 'Thank you, little sister,' says Pavel in a hoarse boy's-voice. A boy's life, in all its ordinariness! With no one to overhear him, he lowers his head and groans like a sick ox.
Then she is before him, inspecting him curiously -not Matryona but the Finn. 'Are you unwell, Fyodor Mikhailovich?'
Embarrassed, he shakes his head.
'Then come,' she says.
She conducts him, as he feared she would, westward along the canal toward Stolyarny Quay and the old shot tower. Raising her voice above the wind, she chatters amicably. 'You know, Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she says, 'you did yourself no credit by talking about the people in the way you did this afternoon. We were disappointed in you – you, with your background. After all, you did go to Siberia for your beliefs. We respect you for that. Even Pavel Alexandrovich respected you. You shouldn't be relapsing now.'
'Even Pavel?'
'Yes, even Pavel. You suffered in your generation, and now Pavel has sacrificed himself too. You have every right to hold your head up with pride.'
She seems quite able to chatter while keeping up a rapid trot. As for him, he has a pain in his side and is breathing hard. 'Slower,' he pants.
'And you?' he says at last. 'What of you?'
'What of me?'
'What of you? Will you be able to hold your head up in the future?'
Under a crazily swinging lamp she stops. Light and shadow play across her face. He was quite wrong to dismiss her as a child playing with disguises. Despite her shapeless form, he recognizes now a cool, womanly quality.
'I don't expect to be here long, Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she says. 'Nor does Sergei Gennadevich. Nor do the rest of us. What happened to Pavel can happen to any of us at any time. So don't make jokes. If you make jokes about us, remember you are joking about Pavel too.'
For the second time this day he has an urge to hit her. And it is clear that she senses his anger: in fact, she pokes out her chin as if daring him to strike. Why is he so irascible? What is coming over him? Is he turning into one of those old men with no control over their temper? Or is it worse than that: now that his succession is extinct, has he become not only old but a ghost, an angry, abandoned spirit?
The tower on Stolyarny Quay has stood since Petersburg was built, but has long been disused. Though there is a painted sign warning off trespassers, it has become a resort for the more daring boys of the neighbourhood, who, via a spiral of iron hoops set in the wall, climb up to the furnace-chamber a hundred feet above ground level, and even higher, to the top of the brick chimney.
The great nail-studded doors are bolted and locked, but the small back door has long ago been kicked in by vandals. In the shadow of this doorway a man is waiting for them. He murmurs a greeting to the Finn; she follows him in.
Inside, the air smells of ordure and mouldering masonry. From the dark comes a soft stream of obscenities. The man strikes a match and lights a lamp. Almost under their feet are three people huddled together in a bed of sacking. He looks away.
The man with the lamp is Nechaev, wearing a grenadier officer's long black cloak. His face is unnaturally pale. Has he forgotten to wash off the powder?
'Heights make me dizzy, so I'll wait down here,' says the Finn. 'He will show you the place.'
A spiral staircase winds up the inner wall of the tower. Holding the lamp on high, Nechaev begins to climb. In the enclosed space their footsteps clatter loudly.
'They took your stepson up this way,' says Nechaev. 'They probably got him drunk beforehand, to make their task easier.'
Pavel. Here.
Up and up they go. The well of the tower beneath them is swallowed in darkness. He counts backwards to the day of Pavel's death, reaches twenty, loses track, starts again, loses track again. Can it be that so many days ago Pavel climbed these very stairs? Why is it that he cannot count them? The steps, the days – they have something to do with each other. Each step another day subtracted from Pavel's sum. A counting up and a counting down proceeding at the same time – is that what is confusing him?
They reach the head of the stairs and emerge on to a broad steel deck. His guide swings the lantern around. 'This way,' he says. He glimpses rusty machinery.
They emerge high above the quay, on a platform on the outside of the tower bounded by a waist-high railing. To one side a pulley mechanism and chain-hoist are set into the wall.
At once the wind begins to tug at them. He takes off his hat and grips the railing, trying not to look down. A metaphor, he tells himself, that is all it is – another word for a lapse of consciousness, a not-being-here, an absence. Nothing new. The epileptic knows it all: the approach to the edge, the glance downward, the lurch of the soul, the thinking that thinks itself crazily over and over like a bell pealing in the head: Time shall have an end, there shall be no death.
He grips the rail tighter, shakes his head to chase away the dizziness. Metaphors – what nonsense! There is death, only death. Death is a metaphor for nothing. Death is death. I should never have agreed to come. Now for the rest of my life I will have this before my eyes like ghost-vision: the roofs of St Petersburg glinting in the rain, the row of tiny lamps along the quayside.
Through clenched teeth he repeats the words to himself: I should not have come. But the nots are beginning to collapse, just as happened with Ivanov. I should not he here therefore I should be here. I will see nothing else therefore I will see all. What sickness is this, what sickness of reasoning?
His guide has left the lantern inside. He is intensely aware of the youthful body beside his, no doubt strong with a wiry, untiring kind of strength. At any moment he could grasp him about the waist and tip him over the edge into the void. But who is he on this platform, who is him?
Slowly he turns to face the younger man. 'If it is indeed the truth that Pavel was brought here to be killed,' he says, 'I will forgive you for bringing me. But if this is some monstrous trick, if it was you yourself who pushed him, I warn you, you will not be forgiven.'
They are not twelve inches apart. The moon is obscured, they are lashed by gusts of rain, yet he is convinced that Nechaev does not flinch from him. In all likelihood his opponent has already played the game through from beginning to end, in all its variations: nothing he can say will surprise him. Or else he is a devil who shrugs off curses like water.
Nechaev speaks. 'You should be ashamed to talk like that. Pavel Isaev was a comrade of ours. We were his family when he had no family. You went abroad and left him behind. You lost touch with him, you became a stranger to him. Now you appear from nowhere and make wild accusations against the only real kin he had in the world.' He draws the cloak tighter about his throat. 'Do you know what you remind me of? Of a distant relative turning up at the graveside with his carpet-bag, come out of nowhere to claim an inheritance from someone he has never laid eyes on. You are fourth cousin, fifth cousin to Pavel Alexandrovich, not father, not even stepfather.'
It is a painful blow. Roughly he tries to push past Nechaev, but his antagonist blocks the doorway. 'Don't shut your ears to what I am saying, Fyodor Mikhailovich!
You lost Isaev and we saved him. How can you believe we could have caused his death?'
'Swear it on your immortal soul!'
Even as he speaks, he hears the melodramatic ring to the words. In fact the whole scene – two men on a moonlit platform high above the streets struggling against the elements, shouting over the wind, denouncing each other – is false, melodramatic. But where are true words to be found, words to which Pavel will give his slow smile, nod his approval?
'I will not swear by what I do not believe in,' says Nechaev stiffly. 'But reason should persuade you I am telling the truth.'
'And what of Ivanov? Must reason tell me you are innocent of Ivanov's death too?'
'Who is Ivanov?'
'Ivanov was the name employed by the wretched man whose job it was to watch the building where I live. Where Pavel lived. Where your woman-friend called on me.'
'Ah, the police spy! The one you made friends with! What happened to him?'
'He was found dead yesterday.'
'So? We lose one, they lose one.'
'They lose one? Are you equating Pavel with Ivanov? Is that how your accounting works?'
Nechaev shakes his head. 'Don't bring in personalities, it just confuses the issue. Collaborators have many enemies. They are detested by the people. This Ivanov's death doesn't surprise me in the least.'
'I too was no friend of Ivanov's, nor do I like the work he did. But those are not grounds for murdering him! As for the people, what nonsense! The people did not do it. The people don't plot murders. Nor do they hide their tracks.'
'The people know who their enemies are, and the people don't waste tears when their enemies die!'
'Ivanov wasn't an enemy of the people, he was a man with no money in his pocket and a family to feed, like tens of thousands of others. If he wasn't one of the people, who are the people?'
'You know very well that his heart wasn't with the people. Calling him one of the people is just talk. The people are made up of peasants and workers. Ivanov had no ties with the people: he wasn't even recruited from them. He was an absolutely rootless person, and a drunkard too, easy prey, easily turned against the people. I'm surprised at you, a clever man, falling into a simple trap like that.'
'Clever or not, I don't accept such monstrous reasoning! Why have you brought me to this place? You said that you were going to give me proof that Pavel was murdered. Where is the proof? Being here is not proof.'
'Of course it is not proof. But this is the place where the murder happened, a murder that was in fact an execution, directed by the state. I have brought you here so that you can see for yourself. Now you have had your chance to see; if you still refuse to believe, then so much the worse for you.'
He grips the railing, stares down there into the plummeting darkness. Between here and there an eternity of time, so much time that it is impossible for the mind to grasp it. Between here and there Pavel was alive, more alive than ever before. We live most intensely while we are falling – a truth that wrings the heart!
'If you won't believe, you won't believe,' Nechaev repeats.
Believe: another word. What does it mean, to believe? I believe in the body on the pavement below. I believe in the blood and the bones. To gather up the broken body and embrace it: that is what it means to believe. To believe and to love – the same thing.
'I believe in the resurrection,' he says. The words come without premeditation. The crazy, ranting tone is gone from his voice. Speaking the words, hearing them, he feels a quick joy, not so much at the words themselves as at the way they have come, spoken out of him as if by another. Pavel! he thinks.
'What?' Nechaev leans closer.
'I believe in the resurrection of the body and in life eternal.'
'That isn't what I asked.' The wind gusts so strongly that the younger man has to shout. His cloak flaps about him; he grips tighter to steady himself.
'Nevertheless, that is what I say!'
Though it is past midnight when he gets home, Anna Sergeyevna has waited up. Surprised at her concern, grateful too, he tells her of the meeting on the quay, tells her of Nechaev's words on the tower. Then he asks her to repeat again the story of the night of Pavel's death. Is she quite sure, for instance, that Pavel died on the quay?
'That is what I was told,' she answers. 'What else was I to believe? Pavel went out in the evening without mentioning where he was going. The next morning there was a message: he had had an accident, I should come to the hospital.'
'But how did they know to inform you?'
'There were papers in his pockets.'
'And?'
'I went to the hospital and identified him. Then I let Mr Maykov know.'
'But what explanation did they give you?'
'They did not give me an explanation, I had to give them an explanation. I had to go to the police and answer questions: who he was, where his family lived, when I had last seen him, how long he had lived with us, who his friends were – on and on! All they would tell me was that he was already dead when he was found, and that it had happened on Stolyarny Quay. That was the message I sent Mr Maykov. I don't know what he then told you.'
'He used the word misadventure. No doubt he had spoken to the police. Misadventure is the word they use for suicide. It was a telegram, so he could not elaborate.'
'That is what I understood. I mean, that is what I understood had happened. I have never understood why he did it, if he did it. He gave us no warning. There was no hint that it was coming.'
'One last question. What was he was wearing that night? Was he wearing anything strange?'
'When he went out?'
'No, when you saw him… afterwards.'
'I don't know. I can't remember. There was a sheet. I don't want to talk about it. But he was quite peaceful. I want you to know that.'
He thanks her, from his heart. So the exchange ends. But in his own room he cannot sleep. He remembers Maykov's belated telegram (why had he taken so long?). Anya had been the one to open it; Anya it was who came to his study and pronounced the words that even tonight beat in his head like dull bells, each pealing with its full and final weight: 'Fedya, Pavel is dead!'
He had taken the telegram in his hands, read it himself, staring stupidly at the yellow sheet, trying to make the French say something other than what it said. Dead. Gone forever from a world of light into the prison of the past. With no return. And the funeral already taken care of. The account settled, the account with life. The book closed. Dead matter, as the printers say.
Mésaventure: Maykov's code-word. Suicide. And now Nechaev wants to tell him otherwise! His inclination, his wholehearted inclination, is to disbelieve Nechaev, to let the official story stand. But why? Because he detests Nechaev – his person, his doctrines? Because he wants to keep Pavel, even in retrospect, out of his clutches? Or is his motive shabbier: to dodge as long as possible the imperative that he seek justice for his son?
For he recognizes an inertia in himself of which Pavel's death is only the immediate cause. He is growing old, becoming day by day what he will at the last undoubtedly be: an old man in a corner with nothing to do but pick over the pages of his losses.
I am the one who died and was buried, he thinks, Pavel the one who lives and will always live. What I am struggling to do now is to understand what form this is in which I have returned from the grave.
He recalls a fellow-convict in Siberia, a tall, stooped, grey man who had violated his twelve-year-old daughter and then strangled her. He had been found after the event sitting by the side of a duckpond with the lifeless body in his arms. He had yielded without a struggle, insisting only on carrying the dead child home himself and laying her out on a table – doing all of this with, it was reported, the greatest tenderness. Shunned by the other prisoners, he spoke to no one. In the evenings he would sit on his bunk wearing a quiet smile, his lips moving as he read the Gospels to himself. In time one might have expected the ostracism to relax, his contrition to be accepted. But in fact he continued to be shunned, not so much for a crime committed twenty years ago as for that smile, in which there was something so sly and so mad that it chilled the blood. The same smile, they said one to another, as when he did the deed: nothing in his heart has changed.
Why does it recur now, this image of a man at the water's edge with a dead child in his arms? A child loved too much, a child become the object of such intimacy that it dare not be allowed to live. Murderous tenderness, tender murderousness. Love turned inside out like a glove to reveal its ugly stitching. And what is love stitched from? He calls up the image of the man again, looks intently into the face, concentrating not on the eyes, closed in a trance, but on the mouth, which is working lightly. Not rape but rapine – is that it? Fathers devouring children, raising them well in order to eat them like delicacies afterwards. Delikatessen.
Does that explain Nechaev's vengefulness: that his eyes have been opened to the fathers naked, the band of fathers, their appetites bared? What sort of man must he be, the elder Nechaev, father Gennady? When one day the news comes, as it undoubtedly will, that his son is no more, will he sit in a corner and weep, or will he secretly smile?
He shakes his head as if to rid it of a plague of devils. What is it that is corrupting the integrity of his grieving, that insists it is nothing but a lugubrious disguise? Somewhere inside him truth has lost its way. As if in the labyrinth of his brain, but also in the labyrinth of his body – veins, bones, intestines, organs – a tiny child is wandering, searching for the light, searching to emerge. How can he find the child lost within himself, allow him a voice to sing his sad song?
Piping on a bone. An old story comes back to him of a youth killed, mutilated, scattered, whose thigh-bone, when the wind blows, pipes a lament and names his murderers. One by one, in fact, the old stories are coming back, stories he heard from his grandmother and did not know the meaning of, but stored up unwittingly like bones for the future. A great ossuary of stories from before history began, built up and tended by the people. Let Pavel find his way to my thigh-bone and pipe to me from there! Father, why have you left me in the dark forest? Father, when will you come to save me?
The candle before the icon is nothing but a pool of wax; the spray of flowers droops. Having put up the shrine, the girl has forgotten or abandoned it. Does she guess that Pavel has ceased to speak to him, that he has lost his way too, that the only voices he hears now are devil-voices?
He scratches the wick erect, lights it, goes down on his knees. The Virgin's eyes are locked on her babe, who stares out of the picture at him, raising a tiny admonitory finger.