They take the little ferryboat to Yelagin Island, which he has not visited in years. But for two old women in black, they are the only passengers. It is a cold, misty day. As they approach, a dog, grey and emaciated, begins to lope up and down the jetty, whining eagerly. The ferryman swings a boathook at it; it retreats to a safe distance. Isle of dogs, he thinks: are there packs of them skulking among the trees, waiting for the mourners to leave before they begin their digging?
At the gatekeeper's lodge it is Anna Sergeyevna, whom he still thinks of as the landlady, who goes to ask directions, while he waits outside. Then there is the walk through the avenues of the dead. He has begun to cry. Why now? he thinks, irritated with himself. Yet the tears are welcome in their way, a soft veil of blindness between himself and the world.
'Here, Mama!' calls Matryona.
They are before one mound of earth among many mounds with cross-shaped stakes plunged into them bearing shingles with painted numbers. He tries to close his mind to this one number, his number, but not before he has seen the 7s and the 4s and has thought: Never can I bet on the seven again.
This is the moment at which he ought to fall on the grave. But it is all too sudden, this particular bed of earth is too strange, he cannot find any feeling for it in his heart. He mistrusts, too, the chain of indifferent hands through which his son's limbs must have passed while he was still in Dresden, ignorant as a sheep. From the boy who still lives in his memory to the name on the death certificate to the number on the stake he is not yet prepared to accept the train of fatality. Provisional, he thinks: there are no final numbers, all are provisional, otherwise the play would come to an end. In a while the wheel will roll, the numbers will start moving, and all will be well again.
The mound has the volume and even the shape of a recumbent body. It is, in fact, nothing more or less than the volume of fresh earth displaced by a wooden chest with a tall young man inside it. There is something in this that does not bear thinking about, that he thrusts away from him. Taking the place of the thought are galling memories of what he was doing in Dresden all the time that, here in Petersburg, the procedure of storing, numbering, encasing, transporting, burying was following its indifferent course. Why was there no breath of a presentiment in the Dresden air? Must multitudes perish before the heavens will tremble?
Among images that return is one of himself in the bathroom of the apartment on Larchenstrasse, trimming his beard in the mirror. The brass taps on the washbasin gleam; the face in the mirror, absorbed in its task, is the face of a stranger from the past. Already I was old, he thinks. Sentence had been pronounced; and the letter of sentence, addressed to me, was on its way, passing from hand to hand, only I did not know it. The joy of your life is over: that is what the sentence said.
The landlady is scraping a small hole at the foot of the mound. 'Please,' he says, and gestures, and she moves aside.
Unbuttoning his coat, unbuttoning his jacket, he kneels, then pitches awkwardly forward till he lies flat upon the mound, his arms extended over his head. He is crying freely, his nose is streaming. He rubs his face in the wet earth, burrows his face into it.
When he gets up there is soil in his beard, in his hair, in his eyebrows. The child, to whom he has paid no attention, stares with wondering eyes. He brushes his face, blows his nose, buttons his clothes. What a Jewish performance! he thinks. But let her see! Let her see one is not made of stone! Let her see there are no bounds!
Something flashes from his eyes toward her; she turns away in confusion and presses against her mother. Back to the nest! A terrible malice streams out of him toward the living, and most of all toward living children. If there were a newborn babe here at this moment, he would pluck it from its mother's arms and dash it against a rock.
Herod, he thinks: now I understand Herod! Let breeding come to an end!
He turns his back on the pair of them and walks off. Soon he has left behind the newer quarter of the graveyard and is roaming among the old stones, among the long-dead.
When he returns the bird's-foot has been planted.
'Who is going to take care of it?' he asks sullenly.
She shrugs. The question is not for her to answer. It is his turn now, it is for him to say: I will come every day to tend it, or to say: God will take care of it, or else to say: No one is going to take care of it, it will die, let it die.
The little white flowers toss cheerfully in the breeze.
He grips the woman's arm. 'He is not here, he is not dead,' he says, his voice cracking.
'No, of course he is not dead, Fyodor Mikhailovich.' She is matter-of-fact, reassuring. More than that: she is, at this moment, motherly, not only toward her daughter but toward Pavel too.
Her hands are small, her fingers slim and rather childish, yet her figure is full. Absurdly, he would like to lay his head on her breast and feel those fingers stroke his hair.
The innocence of hands, ever-renewed. A memory comes back to him: the touch of a hand, intimate in the dark. But whose hand? Hands emerging like animals, without shame, without memory, into the light of day.
'I must make a note of the number,' he says, avoiding her eyes.
'I have the number.'
Where does his desire come from? It is acute, fiery: he wants to take this woman by the arm, drag her behind the gatekeeper's hut, lift her dress, couple with her.
He thinks of mourners at a wake falling on the food and drink. A kind of exultation in it, a brag flung in the face of death: Us you do not have!
They are back at the jetty. The grey dog slinks cautiously up to them. Matryona wants to stroke it but her mother discourages her. There is something wrong with the dog: an open, angry sore runs up its back from the base of its tail. It whimpers softly all the time, or else drops suddenly on its hindquarters and attacks the sore with its teeth.
I will come again tomorrow, he promises: I will come alone, and you and I will speak. In the thought of returning, of crossing the river, finding his way to his son's bed, being alone with him in the mist, there is a muted promise of adventure.
3. Pavel
He sits in his son's room with the white suit on his lap, breathing softly, trying to lose himself, trying to evoke a spirit that can surely not yet have left these surroundings.
Time passes. From the next room, through the partition, come the hushed voices of the woman and child and the sounds of a table being laid. He puts the suit aside, taps on the door. The voices cease abruptly. He enters. 'I will be leaving now,' he says.
'As you can see, we are about to have supper. You are welcome to join us.'
The food she offers is simple: soup, and potatoes with salt and butter.
'How did my son come to lodge with you?' he asks at a certain point. Still he is careful to call him my son: if he brings forth the name he will begin to shake.
She hesitates, and he understands why. She could say: He was a nice young man; we took to him. But was is the obstacle, the boulder in her path. Until there is a way of circumventing the word in all its starkness, she will not speak it in front of him.
'A previous lodger recommended him,' she says at last. And that is that.
She strikes him as dry, dry as a butterfly's wing. As if between her skin and her petticoat, between her skin and the black stockings she no doubt wears, there is a film of fine white ash, so that, loosened from her shoulders, her clothes would slip to the floor without any coaxing.
He would like to see her naked, this woman in the last flowering of her youth.