'Is that how Pavel occupied himself, then – with writing?'
She glances at him oddly. 'How else did you think?'
He bites back a quick reply.
'With a writer for a father, what do you expect?' she goes on.
'Writing does not go in families.'
'Perhaps not. I am no judge. But he need not have intended to write for a living. Perhaps it was simply a way of reaching his father.'
He makes a gesture of exasperation. I would have loved him without stories! he thinks. Instead he says: 'One does not have to earn the love of one's father.'
She hesitates before she speaks again. 'There is something I should warn you of, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Pavel made a certain cult of his father – of Alexander Isaev, I mean. I would not mention it if I did not expect you will find traces of it in his papers. You must be tolerant. Children like to romanticize their parents. Even Matryona – '
'Romanticize Isaev? Isaev was a drunkard, a nobody, a bad husband. His wife, Pavel's own mother, could not abide him by the end. She would have left him had he not died first. How does one romanticize a person like that?'
'By seeing him through a haze, of course. It was hard for Pavel to see you through a haze. You were, if I may say so, too immediate to him.'
'That was because I was the one who had to bring him up day by day. I made him my son when everyone else had left him behind.'
'Don't exaggerate. His own parents didn't leave him behind, they died. Besides, if you had the right to choose him as a son, why had he no right to choose a father for himself?'
'Because he could do better than Isaev! It has become a sickness of this age of ours, young people turning their backs on their parents, their homes, their upbringing, because they are no longer to their liking! Nothing will satisfy them, it seems, but to be sons and daughters of Stenka Razin or Bakunin!'
'You're being silly. Pavel didn't run away from home. You ran away from him.'
An angry silence falls. When they reach Gorokhovaya Street he excuses himself and leaves her.
Walking up and down the embankment, he broods on what she has said. Without a doubt he has allowed something shameful about himself to emerge, and he resents her for having been witness to it. At the same time he is ashamed of such pettiness. He is caught in a familiar moral tangle – so familiar, in fact, that it no longer disturbs him, and should therefore be all the more shameful. But something else is troubling him too, like the point of a nail just beginning to come through a shoe, that he cannot or does not care to define.
There is still tension in the air when he returns to the apartment. Matryona is out of bed. She is wearing her mother's coat over her nightdress but her feet are bare. 'I'm bored!' she whines, over and over. She pays him no attention. Though she joins them at table, she will not eat. There is a sour smell about her, she wheezes, every now and again she has a fit of harsh coughing. 'You shouldn't be up, my dear,' he remarks mildly. 'You can't tell me what to do, you're not my father!' she retorts. 'Matryosha!' her mother reproves her. 'Well, he isn't!' she repeats, and falls into pouting silence.
After he has retired, Anna Sergeyevna taps at his door and comes in. He rises cautiously. 'How is she?'
'I gave her some of the medicine you bought, and she seems to be more restful. She shouldn't be getting out of bed, but she is wilful and I can't stop her. I came to apologize for what I said. Also to ask about your plans for tomorrow.'
'There is no need to apologize. I was the one at fault. I have made a reservation on the evening train. But it can be changed.'
'Why? You will get your papers tomorrow. Why should anything be changed? Why stay longer than necessary? You don't want to become the eternal lodger, after all. Isn't that the name of a book?'
'The eternal lodger? No, not that I know of. All arrangements can be changed, including tomorrow's. Nothing is final. But in this case it is not in my hands to change them.'
'In whose hands then?'
'In yours.'
'In my hands? Certainly not! Your arrangements are in your hands alone, I have no part in them. We should say goodbye now. I won't see you in the morning. I have to get up early, it's market day. You can leave the key in the door.'
So the moment has come. He takes a deep breath. His mind is quite blank. Out of that blankness he begins to speak, surrendering to the words that come, going where they take him.
'On the ferry, when you took me to see Pavel's grave,' he says, 'I watched you and Matryosha standing at the rail staring into the mist – you remember the mist that day – and I said to myself, "She will bring him back. She is" ' – he takes another breath – ' "she is a conductress of souls." That was not the word that came to me at the time, but I know now it is the right word.'
She regards him without expression. He takes her hand between his.
'I want to have him back,' he says. 'You must help me. I want to kiss him on the lips.'
As he speaks the words he hears how mad they are. He seems to move into and out of madness like a fly at an open window.
She has grown tense, ready to flee. He grips her tighter, holding her back.
'That is the truth. That is how I think of you. Pavel did not arrive here by chance. Somewhere it was written that from here he was to be conducted… into the night.'
He believes and does not believe what he is saying. A fragment of memory comes back to him, of a painting he has seen in a gallery somewhere: a woman in dark, severe dress standing at a window, a child at her side, both of them gazing up into a starry sky. More vividly than the picture itself he remembers the gilded curlicues of the frame.
Her hand lies lifeless between his.
'You have it in your power,' he continues, still following the words like beacons, seeing where they will take him. 'You can bring him back. For one minute. For just one minute.'
He remembers how dry she seemed when he first met her. Like a mummy: dry bones wrapped in cerements that will fall to dust at a touch. When she speaks, the voice creaks from her throat. 'You love him so much,' she says: 'you will certainly see him again.'
He lets go her hand. Like a chain of bones, she withdraws it. Don't humour me! he wants to say.
'You are an artist, a master,' she says. 'It is for you, not for me, to bring him back to life.'
Master. It is a word he associates with metal – with the tempering of swords, the casting of bells. A master blacksmith, a foundry-master. Master of life: strange term. But he is prepared to reflect on it. He will give a home to any word, no matter how strange, no matter how stray, if there is a chance it is an anagram for Pavel.
'I am far from being a master,' he says. 'There is a crack running through me. What can one do with a cracked bell? A cracked bell cannot be mended.'
What he says is true. Yet at the same time he recalls that one of the bells of the Cathedral of the Trinity in Sergiyev is cracked, and has been from before Catherine's time. It has never been removed and melted down. It sounds over the town every day. The people call it St Sergius's wooden leg.
Now there is exasperation in her voice. 'I feel for you, Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she says, 'but you must remember you are not the first parent to lose a child. Pavel had twenty-two years of life. Think of all the children who are taken in infancy.'
'So -?'
'So recognize that it is the rule, not the exception, to suffer loss. And ask yourself: are you in mourning for Pavel or for yourself?'
Loss. An icy distance instals itself between him and her. 'I have not lost him, he is not lost,' he says through clenched teeth.
She shrugs. 'If he is not lost then you must know where he is. He is certainly not in this room.'
He glances around the room. That bunching of shadows in the corner – might it not be the trace of the breath of the shadow of the ghost of him? 'One does not live in a place and leave nothing of oneself behind,' he whispers.