From the third floor it had seemed easy to find the dog. But when he reaches street level he is confused. Does the crying come from left or from right, from one of the buildings across the street or from behind the buildings or perhaps from a courtyard within one of the buildings? And which building? And what of the cries themselves, which now seem to be not only shorter and lower but of a different timbre altogether – almost not the same cries, in fact?
He searches back and forth before he finds the alley used by the nightsoil carriers. In a branch of this alley he at last comes upon the dog. It is tethered to a drainpipe by a slim chain; the chain has become wrapped around a foreleg, jerking the leg up awkwardly whenever it tightens. At his approach the dog retreats as far as it can, whining. It flattens its ears, prostrates itself, rolls on its back. A bitch. He bends over it, unwinds the chain. Dogs smell fear, but even in the cold he can smell this dog's rank terror. He tickles it behind the ear. Still on its back, it timidly licks his wrist.
Is this what I will be doing for the rest of my days, he wonders: peering into the eyes of dogs and beggars?
The dog gives a heave and is on its feet. Though he is not fond of dogs, he does not draw back from this one but crouches as its warm, wet tongue licks his face, his ears, licks the salt from his beard.
He gives it a last stroke and gets up. In the moonlight he cannot make out his watchface. The dog tugs at its chain, whining, eager. Who would chain a dog outdoors on a night like this? Nevertheless, he does not set it loose. Instead he turns abruptly and departs, pursued by forlorn howls.
Why me? he thinks as he hurries away. Why should I bear all the world's burdens? As for Pavel, if he is to have nothing else, let him at least have his death to himself, let his death not be taken from him and turned into the occasion of his father's reformation.
It is no good. His reasoning – specious, contemptible – does not for one moment take him in. Pavel's death does not belong to Pavel – that is just a trick of language. As long as he is here, Pavel's death is his death. Wherever he goes he bears Pavel with him, like a baby blue with cold ('Who will save the blue baby?' he seems to hear within him, plaintive words that come from he does not know where, in a peasant's singsong voice).
Pavel will not speak, will not tell him what to do. 'Raise up that least thing and cherish it': if he knew the words came from Pavel he would obey them without question. But they do not. That least thing: is the least thing the dog, abandoned in the cold? Is the dog the thing he must release and take with him and feed and cherish, or is it the filthy, drunken beggar in his tattered coat under the bridge? A terrible hopelessness comes over him which is connected – how, he does not know – to the fact that he has no idea what time it is, but whose core is a growing certainty that he will never again go out in the night to answer a dog's call, that an opportunity for leaving himself as he is behind and becoming what he might yet be has passed. I am I, he thinks despairingly, manacled to myself till the day I die. Whatever it was that wavered toward me, I was unworthy of it, and now it has withdrawn.
Yet even in the instant of closing the door upon himself he is aware there is still a chance to return to the alley, unchain the dog, bring it to the entryway to No. 63, and make some kind of bed for it at the foot of the stairs – though, he knows, once he has brought it so far it will insist on following him further, and, if he chains it again, will whine and bark till the whole building is roused. It is not my son, it is just a dog, he protests. What is it to me? Yet even as he protests he knows the answer: Pavel will not be saved till he has freed the dog and brought it into his bed, brought the least thing, the beg-garmen and the beggarwomen too, and much else he does not yet know of; and even then there will be no certainty.
He gives a great groan of despair. What am I to do? he thinks. If I were only in touch with my heart, might it be given to me to know? Yet it is not his heart he has lost touch with but the truth. Or – the other side of the same thought – it is not the truth he has lost touch with at alclass="underline" on the contrary, truth has been pouring down upon him like a waterfall, without moderation, till now he is drowning in it. And then he thinks (reverse the thought and reverse the reversal too: by such Jesuitical tricks must one think nowadays!): Drowning under the falls, what is it that I need? More water, more flood, a deeper drowning.
Standing in the middle of the snow-covered street, he brings his cold hands to his face, smells the dog on them, touches the cold tears on his cheeks, tastes them. Salt, for those who need salt. He suspects he will not save the dog, not this night nor even the next night, if there is to be a next night. He is waiting for a sign, and he is betting (there is no grander word he dare use) that the dog is not the sign, is not a sign at all, is just a dog among many dogs howling in the night. But he knows too that as long as he tries by cunning to distinguish things that are things from things that are signs he will not be saved. That is the logic by which he will be defeated; and, feeling its iron hardness, he is at his wits' end, like a dog on a chain that breaks the teeth that gnaw it. And beware, beware, he reminds himself: the dog on the chain, the second dog, is nothing in itself, is not an illumination, merely an animal likeness!
With his fists bunched in his pockets, his head bowed, his legs stiff as rods, he stands in the middle of the street feeling the dog's spittle turn to ice on his beard.
Is it possible that at this moment, in the shadowed doorway of No. 63, someone is lurking, watching him? Of the body of the watcher he cannot be sure; even the patch of lighter gloom that he thinks of as the face could be no more than a fleck on the wall. But the longer he stares at it, the more intently a face seems to be staring back at him. A real face? His imagination is full of bearded men with glittering eyes who hide in dark passages. Nevertheless, as he passes into the pitch darkness of the entryway, the sense of another presence becomes so acute that a chill runs down his back. He halts, holds his breath, listens. Then he strikes a match.
In a corner crouches a man, blinking against the light. Though he has a woollen scarf wound around his head and mouth and a blanket over his shoulders, he recognizes the beggar he confronted in the church portico.
'Who are you?' he says, his voice cracking. 'Can't you leave me alone?'
The match goes out. He strikes another.
The man shakes his head firmly. A hand emerges from under the blanket and pushes the scarf aside. 'You can't order me,' he says. There is a smell of putrid fish in the air.
The match goes out. He starts to climb the stairs. But tediously the paradox comes back: Expect the one you do not expect. Very well; but must every beggar then be treated as a prodigal son, embraced, welcomed into the home, feasted? Yes, that is what Pascal would say: bet on everyone, every beggar, every mangy dog; only thus will you be sure that the One, the true son, the thief in the night, will not slip through the net. And Herod would agree: make sure – slay all the children without exception.
Betting on all the numbers – is that still gambling? Without the risk, without subjecting oneself to the voice speaking from elsewhere in the fall of the dice, what is left that is divine? Surely God knows that, and will have mercy on the gambler-at-heart! And surely the wife who, when her husband kneels before her and confesses he has gambled away their last rouble and beats his breast and kisses the hem of her dress – the wife who raises him and wipes away his tears and without a word departs to pawn her wedding-ring and returns with money ('Here!') so that he can go back to the gaming-room for the one last bet that will redeem all – surely such a woman is touched with the divine, a woman who stakes on the man who has nothing left, a woman who, when even the wedding-ring is pawned and lost, goes out a second time into the night and comes back with the money for another stake!