So saying, Maximov, using only the middle finger of his right hand, prods the folder across the desk, the surprisingly thick folder that holds Pavel's papers.
He rises, takes the folder, makes his bow, and is preparing to leave when Maximov speaks again. 'If I may detain you a moment longer in a somewhat different regard: you have not by any chance had contact with the Nechaev gang here in Petersburg, have you?'
Ivanov! Nechaev! So that is the reason why he has been called in! Pavel, the papers, Maximov's dance of compunctiousness – nothing but a side-issue, a lure!
'I do not see the bearing of your question,' he replies stiffly. 'I do not see by what right you ask or expect me to answer.'
'By no right at all! Set your mind at rest – you are accused of nothing. Simply a question. As for its bearing, I would not have thought that so difficult to work out. Having discussed your stepson with me, I reasoned, perhaps you would now find it easier to discuss Nechaev. For in our conversation the other day it seemed to me that what you chose to say sometimes had a double meaning. A word had another word hidden beneath it, so to speak. What do you think? Was I wrong?'
'Which words? What lay beneath them?'
'That is for you to say.'
'You are wrong. I do not speak in riddles. Every word I use means what it says. Pavel is Pavel, not Nechaev.'
With that he turns and takes his departure; nor does Maximov call him back.
Through the winding streets of the Moskovskaya quarter he bears the folder to Svechnoi Street, to No. 63, up the stairs to the third floor, to his room, and closes the door.
He unties the ribbon. His heart is hammering unpleasandy. That there is something unsavoury in his haste he cannot deny. It is as if he has been conveyed back to boyhood, to the long, sweaty afternoons in his friend Albert's bedroom poring over books filched from Albert's uncle's shelves. The same terror of being caught red-handed (a terror delicious in itself), the same passionate engrossment.
He remembers Albert showing him two flies in the act of copulating, the male riding on the female's back. Albert held the flies in his cupped hand. 'Watch,' he said. He pinched one of the male's wings between his fingertips and tugged lightly. The wing came off. The fly paid no attention. He tore off the second wing. The fly, with its strange, bald back, went on with its business. With an expression of distaste, Albert flung the couple to the ground and crushed it.
He could imagine staring into the fly's eyes while its wings were being torn off: he was sure it would not blink; perhaps it would not even see him. It was as though, for the duration of the act, its soul went into the female. The thought had made him shudder; it had made him want to annihilate every fly on earth.
A childish response to an act he did not understand, an act he feared because everyone around him, whispering, grinning, seemed to hint that he too, one day, would be required to perform it. 'I won't, I won't!' the child wants to pant. 'Won't what?' reply the watchers, all of a sudden wide-eyed, nonplussed – 'Goodness, what is this strange child talking about?'
The folder contains a leather-bound diary, five school exercise books, twenty or twenty-five loose pages pinned together, a packet of letters tied with string, and some printed pamphlets: feuilletons of texts by Blanqui and Ishutin, an essay by Pisarev. The odd item is Cicero 's De Officiis, extracts with French translation. He pages through it. On the last page, in a handwriting he does not recognize, he comes upon two inscriptions: Salus populi suprema lex esto, and below it, in fighter ink, Talis pater qualis filius.
A message, messages; but from whom to whom?
He takes up the diary and, without reading, ruffles through it like a deck of cards. The second half is empty. Still, the body of writing in it is substantial. He glances at the first date. 29 June 1866, Pavel's name-day. The diary must have been a gift. A gift from whom? He cannot recall. 1866 stands out only as the year of Anya, the year when he met and fell in love with his wife-to-be. 1866 was a year in which Pavel was ignored.
As if touching a hot dish, alert, ready to recoil, he begins to read the first entry. A recital, and a somewhat laboured one at that, of how Pavel spent the day. The work of a novice diarist. No accusations, no denunciations. With relief he closes the book. When I am in Dresden, he promises himself, when I have time, I will read the whole of it.
As for the letters, all are from himself. He opens the most recent, the last before Pavel's death. 'I am sending Apollon Grigorevich fifty roubles,' he reads. 'It is all we can afford at present. Please do not press A.G. for more. You must learn to live within your means.'
His last words to Pavel, and what petty-minded words! And this is what Maximov saw! No wonder he warned against reading! How ignominious! He would like to burn the letter, to erase it from history.
He searches out the story from which Maximov read aloud to him. Maximov was right: as a character, Sergei, its young hero, deported to Siberia for leading a student uprising, is a failure. But the story goes on longer than Maximov had led him to believe. For days after the wicked landowner has been slain, Sergei and his Marfa flee the soldiers, sheltering in barns and byres, abetted by peasants who hide them and feed them and meet their pursuers' questions with blank stupidity. At first they sleep side by side in chaste comradeship; but love grows up between them, a love rendered not without feeling, not without conviction. Pavel is clearly working up to a scene of passion. There is a page, heavily crossed out, in which Sergei confesses to Marfa, in ardent juvenile fashion, that she has become more to him than a companion in the struggle, that she has captured his heart; in its place there is a much more interesting sequence in which he confides to her the story of his lonely childhood without brothers and sisters, his youthful clumsiness with women. The sequence ends with Marfa stammering her own confession of love. 'You may… You may…' she says.
He turns the leaves back. 'I have no parents,' says Sergei to Marfa. 'My father, my real father, was a nobleman exiled to Siberia for his revolutionary sympathies. He died when I was seven. My mother married a second time. Her new husband did not like me. As soon as I was old enough, he packed me off to cadet school. I was the smallest boy in my class; that was where I learned to fight for my rights. Later they moved back to Petersburg, set up house, and sent for me. Then my mother died, and I was left alone with my stepfather, a gloomy man who addressed barely a word to me from one day to the next. I was lonely; my only friends were among the servants; it was from them that I got to know the sufferings of the people.'
Not untrue, not wholly untrue, yet how subtly twisted, all of it! 'He did not like me' -! One could be sorry for the friendless seven-year-old and sincerely wish to protect him, but how could one love him when he was so suspicious, so unsmiling, when he clung to his mother like a leech and grudged every minute she spent away from him, when half a dozen times in a single night they would hear from the next room that high, insistent little voice calling to his mother to come and kill the mosquito that was biting him?
He lays aside the manuscript. A nobleman for a father indeed! Poor child! The truth duller than that, the full truth dullest of all. But who except the recording angel would care to write the full, dull truth? Did he himself write with as much dedication at the age of twenty-two?
There is something overwhelmingly important he wants to say that the boy will now never be able to hear. If you are blessed with the power to write, he wants to say, bear in mind the source of that power. You write because your childhood was lonely, because you were not loved. (Yet that is not the fall story, he also wants to say -you were loved, you would have been loved, it was your choice to be unloved. What confusion! An ape on a harmonium would do better!) We do not write out of plenty, he wants to say – we write out of anguish, out of lack. Surely in your heart you must know that! As for your so-called true father and his revolutionary sympathies, what nonsense! Isaev was a clerk, a pen-pusher. If he had lived, if you had followed him, you too would have become nothing but a clerk, and you would not have left this story behind. (Yes, yes, he hears the child's high voice -but I would be alive!)