There is a letter on his bed, propped against the pillow. For a wild instant he thinks it is from Pavel, spirited into the room. But the handwriting is a child's. 'I tried to draw Pavel Aleskandrovich,' it reads (the name misspelled), 'but I could not do it right. If you want to put it on the shrine you can. Matryona."On the reverse is a pencil-drawing, somewhat smudged, of a young man with a high forehead and full lips. The drawing is crude, the child knows nothing about shading; nevertheless, in the mouth and particularly in the bold stare, she has unmistakably captured Pavel.
'Yes,' he whispers, 'I will put it on the shrine.' He brings the image to his lips, then stands it against the candle-holder and lights a new candle.
He is still gazing into the flame when, an hour later, Anna Sergeyevna taps at the door. 'I have your laundry,' she says.
'Come in. Sit down.'
'No, I can't. Matryosha is restless – I don't think she is well.' Nevertheless she sits down on the bed.
'They are keeping us good, these children of ours,' he remarks.
'Keeping us good?'
'Seeing to our morals. Keeping us apart.'.
It is a relief not to have the dining-table between them. The candlelight, too, brings a comforting softness.
'I am sorry you have to leave,' she says, 'but perhaps it will be better for you to get away from this sad city. Better for your family too. They must be missing you. And you must be missing them.'
'I will be a different person. My wife will not know me. Or she will think she knows me, and be wrong. A difficult time for everyone, I foresee. I shall be thinking of you. But as whom? – that is the question. Anna is my wife's name too.'
'It was my name before it was hers.' Her reply is sharp, without playfulness. Again it is borne home to him: if he loves this woman, then in part it is because she is not young. She has crossed a line that his wife has yet to come to. She may or may not be dearer, but she is nearer.
The erotic tug returns, even stronger than before. A week ago they were in each other's arms in this same bed. Can it be that at this moment she is not thinking of that?
He leans across and lays a hand on her thigh. With the laundry on her lap, she bows her head. He shifts closer. Between thumb and forefinger he grips her bared neck, draws her face toward his. She raises her eyes: for an instant he has the impression he is looking into the eyes of a cat, wary, passionate, greedy.
'I must go,' she murmurs. Wriggling loose, she is gone.
He wants her acutely. More: he wants her not in this narrow child's-bed but in the widow-bed in the next room. He imagines her as she lies there now beside her daughter, her eyes open and glistening. She belongs, he realizes for the first time, to a type he has never written into his books. The women he is used to are not without an intensity of their own, but it is an intensity all of skin and nerves. Their sensations are intense, electric, immediate, of the surface. Whereas with her he goes into a body that bleeds, a visceral body whose sensations occur deep within itself.
Is it a feature that can be translated to, or cultivated in, other women? In his wife? Is there a quality of sensation he has been freed to find elsewhere now that he has found it in her?
What treachery!
If he were more confident of his French he would channel this disturbing excitement into a book of the kind one cannot publish in Russia – something that could be finished off in a hurry, in two or three weeks, even without a copyist – ten signatures, three hundred pages. A book of the night, in which every excess would be represented and no bounds respected. A book that would never be linked to him. The manuscript mailed from Dresden to Paillard in Paris, to be printed clandestinely and sold under the counter on the Left Bank. Memoirs of a Russian Nobleman. A book that she, Anna Sergeyevna, its true begetter, would never see. With a chapter in which the noble memoirist reads aloud to the young daughter of his mistress a story of the seduction of a young girl in which he himself emerges more and more clearly as having been the seducer. A story full of intimate detail and innuendo which by no means seduces the daughter but on the contrary frightens her and disturbs her sleep and makes her so doubtful of her own purity that three days later she gives herself up to him in despair, in the most shameful of ways, in a way of which no child could conceive were the history of her own seduction and surrender and the manner of its doing not deeply impressed on her beforehand.
Imaginary memoirs. Memories of the imagination.
Is that the answer to his question to himself? Is that what she is setting him free to do: to write a book of evil? And to what end? To liberate himself from evil or to cut himself off from good?
Not once in this long reverie, it occurs to him (the whole house has fallen into silence by now), has he given a thought to Pavel. And now, here he returns, whining, pale, searching for a place to lay his head! Poor child! The festival of the senses that would have been his inheritance stolen away from him! Lying in Pavel's bed, he cannot refrain from a quiver of dark triumph.
Usually he has the apartment to himself in the mornings. But today Matryona, flushed, coughing drily, heaving for breath, stays away from school. With her in the apartment, he is less than ever able to give his attention to writing. He finds himself listening for the pad of her bare feet in the next room; there are moments when he can swear he feels her eyes boring into his back.
At noon the concierge brings a message. He recognizes the grey paper and red seal at once. The end of waiting: he is instructed to call at the office of Judicial Investigator Councillor P. P. Maximov in connection with the matter of P. A. Isaev.
From Svechnoi Street he goes to the railway station to make a reservation, and from there to the police station. The ante-room is packed; he gives in his name at the desk and waits. At the first stroke of four the desk-sergeant puts down his pen, stretches, douses the light, and begins to shepherd the remaining petitioners out.
'What is this?' he protests.
'Friday, early closing,' says the sergeant. 'Come back in the morning.'
At six o'clock he is waiting outside Yakovlev's. Seeing him there, Anna Sergeyevna is alarmed. 'Matryosha -?' she asks.
'She was sleeping when I left. I stopped at a pharmacy and got something for her cough.' He brings out a little brown bottle.
'Thank you.'
'I have been summoned again by the police in connection with Pavel's papers. I am hoping that the business will be settled once and for all tomorrow.'
They walk for a while in silence. Anna Sergeyevna seems preoccupied. At last she speaks. 'Is there a particular reason why you must have those papers?'
'I am surprised that you ask. What else of himself has Pavel left behind? Nothing is more important to me than those papers. They are his word to me.' And then, after a pause: 'Did you know he was writing a story?'
'He wrote stories. Yes, I knew.'
'The one I am thinking of was about an escaped convict.'
'I don't know that one. He would sometimes read what he was writing to Matryosha and me, to see what we thought. But not a story about a convict.'
'I didn't realize there were other stories.'
'Oh yes, there were stories. Poems too – but he was shy about showing those to us. The police must have taken them when they took everything else. They were in his room a long time, searching. I didn't tell you. They even lifted the floorboards and looked under them. They took every scrap of paper.'