Then the Finnish girl is at his side. 'Heavens, you are poking your nose into the strangest places!' she remarks good-humouredly. Taking his arm, she guides him as if he were blind first down another flight of stairs, then along an unlit passageway cluttered with trunks and boxes, to a barred door which she opens. They are on the street. She holds out a hand to him. 'So we have an appointment,' she says.
'No. What appointment do we have?'
'Be waiting at the corner of Gorokhovaya on the Fon-tanka this evening at ten o'clock.'
'I won't be there, I assure you.'
'Very well, you won't be there. Or perhaps you will. Don't you have family feeling? You aren't going to betray us, are you?'
She puts the question jokingly, as if it were not really in his power to harm them.
'Because, you know, some people say you will betray us despite everything,' she goes on. 'They say you are treacherous by nature. What do you think?'
If he had a stick he would hit her. But with only a hand, where does one strike such a round, obtuse body?
'It doesn't help to be aware of one's nature, does it?' she continues reflectively. 'I mean, one's nature leads one on, no matter how much one thinks about it. What's the use of hanging a person if it's in his nature? It's like hanging a wolf for eating a lamb. It won't change the nature of wolves, will it? Or hanging the man who betrayed Jesus – that didn't change anything, did it?'
'No one hanged him,' he retorts irritably. 'He hanged himself.'
'The same thing. It doesn't help, does it? I mean, whether you hang him or he hangs himself.'
Something terrible is beginning to loom through this prattle. 'Who is Jesus?' he asks softly.
'Jesus?' It is dusk; they are the only people on this cold, empty back street. She regards him disbelievingly. 'Don't you know Jesus?'
'When you say I am Judas, who is Jesus?'
She smiles. 'It's just a way of speaking,' she says. And then, half to herself: 'They don't understand anything.' Again she proffers a hand. 'Ten o'clock, on the Fontanka. If no one is there to meet you, it means something has happened.'
He refuses the hand, sets off down the street. Behind him he hears a word half-whispered. What is it? Jew? Judas? He suspects it is Jew. Extraordinary: is that where they think the word comes from? But why his fastidiousness about touching her? Is it because she may have known Pavel, known him too well – carnally, in fact? Do they hold their women in common, Nechaev and the others? Hard to imagine this woman as held in common. More likely she who would hold men in common. Even Pavel. He resists the thought, then yields. He sees the Finn naked, enthroned on a bed of scarlet cushions, her bulky legs apart, her arms held wide to display her breasts and a belly rotund, hairless, barely mature. And Pavel on his knees, ready to be covered and consumed.
He shakes himself free. Envious imaginings! A father like an old grey rat creeping in afterwards upon the love-scene to see what is left for him. Sitting on the corpse in the dark, pricking his ears, gnawing, listening, gnawing. Is that why the police-pack hunts the free youth of Petersburg so vengefully, with Maximov, the good father, the great rat, at its head?
He recalls Pavel's behaviour after his marriage to Anya.
Pavel was nineteen, yet obstinately would not accept that she, Anna Grigoryevna, would henceforth share his father's bed. For the year they all lived together Pavel maintained the fiction that Anya was simply his father's companion as an old woman may have a companion: someone to keep house, order the groceries, attend to the laundry. When – perhaps after an evening game of cards – he would announce that he was going to bed, Pavel would not allow Anya to follow him: he would challenge her to rounds of cribbage ('Just the two of us!'), and even when she blushingly tried to withdraw, refuse to understand ('This isn't the country, you don't have to get up at dawn to milk the cows!').
Is it always like this between fathers and sons: jokes masking the intensest rivalry? And is that the true reason why he is bereft: because the ground of his life, the contest with his son, is gone, and his days are left empty? Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers' cashboxes? He shakes his head wearily.
10. The shot tower
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.