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 Paveclass="underline" 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.'