The clerk is clearly taken aback by his vehemence; other people in the room are watching him curiously too.
'Write my name down and be finished!' he demands.
'I can't just write down a name,' replies the clerk reasonably. 'How do I know it is your name? Show me your passport.'
He cannot restrain his anger. 'You confiscate my passport and now you demand that I produce it! What insanity! Let me see Councillor Maximov!'
But if he expects the clerk to be overawed by Maxim-ov's name, he is mistaken. 'Councillor Maximov is not available. Best if you take a seat and calm down. Someone will attend to you.'
'And when will that be?'
'How can I say? You are not the only person with troubles.' He gestures toward the crowded room. 'In any event, if you have a complaint, the correct procedure is to submit it in writing. We can't get moving until we have something in writing – something to get our teeth into, so to speak. You sound like a cultured person.
Surely you appreciate that.' And he turns to the next in the line.
There is no doubt in his mind that, if he could see Maximov now, he would trade Nechaev for his passport. If he hesitated at all, it would only be because he is convinced that to be betrayed – and betrayed by him, Dostoevsky – is exactly what Nechaev wants. Or is it worse, is there a further twist? Is it possible that behind the all too many insinuations Nechaev has let fall about his, Dostoevsky's, potential for treachery lies an intent to confuse and inhibit him? At every turn, he feels, he has been outplayed, and outplayed, perhaps, because he wants to be outplayed – outplayed by a player who, from the day he met him or even before then, recognized the pleasure he took in yielding – in being plotted against, ensnared, seduced – and harnessed that knowledge to his own ends. How else can he explain this stupid passivity of his, the half-drugged state of his conscience?
Was it the same with Pavel? Was Pavel in his deepest being a son of his stepfather, seducible by the voluptuous promise of being seduced?
Nechaev spoke of financiers as spiders, but at this moment he feels like nothing so much as a fly in Nechaev's web. He can think of only one spider bigger than Nechaev: the spider Maximov sitting at his desk, smacking his lips, looking ahead to his next prey. He hopes that he will make a meal of Nechaev, will swallow him whole and crush his bones and spit out the dry remnants.
So, after all his self-congratulation, he has sunk to the pettiest vengefulness. How much lower can he fall? He recalls Maximov's remark: blessed, in an age like this, the father of daughters. If there must be sons, better to father them at a distance, like a frog or a fish.
He pictures the spider Maximov at home, his three daughters fussing about him, stroking him with their claws, hissing softly, and against him too feels the acutest resentment.
He has been hoping for a speedy answer from Apollon Maykov; but the concierge is adamant that there has been no message.
'Are you sure my letter was delivered?'
'Don't ask me, ask the boy who took it.'
He tries to find the boy, but no one knows where he is.
Should he write again? If the first appeal reached Maykov and was ignored, will a second appeal not seem abject? He is not yet a beggar. Yet the unpleasant truth is, he is living from day to day on Anna Sergeyevna's charity. Nor can he expect his presence in Petersburg to remain unremarked much longer. The news will get around, if it has not already, and when it does, any of half a dozen creditors could initiate proceedings to have him restrained. His pennilessness would not protect him: a creditor might easily reckon that, in the last resort, his wife or his wife's family or even his writer-colleagues would raise the money to save him from disgrace.
All the more reason, then, to get out of Petersburg! He must recover his passport; if that fails, he must risk travelling on Isaev's papers again.
He has promised Anna Sergeyevna to look in on the sick child. He finds the curtain across the alcove open and Matryona sitting up in bed.
'How are you feeling?' he asks.
She gives no reply, absorbed in her own thoughts.
He comes nearer, puts a hand to her forehead. There are hectic spots on her cheeks, her breathing is shallow, but there is no fever.
'Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she says, speaking slowly and without looking at him, 'does it hurt to die?'
He is surprised at the direction her brooding has taken. 'My dear Matryosha,' he says, 'you are not going to die! Lie down, have a nap, and you will wake up feeling better. In just a few days you will be back at school – you heard what the doctor said.'
But even while he speaks she is shaking her head. 'I don't mean me,' she says. 'Does it hurt – you know -when a person dies?'
Now he knows she is serious. 'At the moment?'
'Yes. Not when you are completely dead, but just before that.'
'When you know you are dead?' 'Yes.'
He is overcome with gratitude. For days she has been closing herself off to him, retreating into obtuseness and childishness, indulging her resentments, refusing him the precious memory of Pavel she bears within her. Now she has become herself again.
'Animals don't find it hard to die,' he says gently. 'Perhaps we should take our lesson from them. Perhaps that is why they are with us here on earth – to show us that living and dying are not as hard as we think.'
He pauses, then tries again.
'What frightens us most about dying isn't the pain. It is the fear that we must leave behind those who love us and travel alone. But that is not so, it is simply not so. When we die, we carry our loved ones with us in our breast. So Pavel carried you with him when he died, and he carried me, and your mother. He still carries all of us. Pavel is not alone.'
Still with a sluggish, abstracted air, she says: 'I wasn't thinking of Pavel.'
He is unsettled, he does not understand; but a moment more has to pass before he can appreciate how comprehensively he does not understand.
'Who are you thinking of then?'
'Of the girl who was here on Saturday.'
'I don't know which girl you mean.'
'Sergei Gennadevich's friend.'
'The Finnish girl? You mean because the police brought her? You mustn't lie here worrying about that!' He takes her hand in his and pats it reassuringly. 'Nobody is going to die! The police don't kill people! They will send her back to Karelia, that is all. At worst they will keep her in prison for a while.'
She withdraws her hand and turns her face to the wall. It begins to dawn on him that even now, perhaps, he does not understand; that she may not be asking to be reassured, to be relieved of childish fears – may, in fact, in a roundabout way, be trying to tell him something he does not know.
'Are you afraid she is going to be executed? Is that what you are afraid of? Because of something you know she has done?'
She shakes her head.
'Then you must tell me. I can't guess any further.'
'They have all taken a vow they will never be captured. They vow they will kill themselves first.'
'It's easy to take vows, Matryosha, much harder to keep them, particularly when your friends have deserted you and you are all by yourself. Life is precious, she is right to hold on to it, you mustn't blame her.'
She ruminates again for a while, fiddling abstractedly with the bedsheets. When she speaks, she does so in a murmur, and with her head bent, so that he can barely catch the words: 'I gave her poison.'
'You gave her what?'
She brushes her hair aside, and he sees what she has been hiding: the slightest of smiles.
'Poison,' she says, just as softly. 'Does poison hurt?'
'And how did you do that?' he asks, marking time while his mind races.
'When I gave her the bread. No one saw it.'
He remembers the scene that had affected him so strangely: the old-fashioned curtsy, the offering of food to the prisoner.
'Did she know?' he whispers, his mouth dry.