He waits for her to say something. He wants her to speak. It is an outrageous demand to make on a child, but he makes the demand nevertheless. He raises his eyes to her. Nothing is veiled. He stares at her with what can only be nakedness.
For a moment she meets his gaze. Then she averts her eyes, steps back uncertainly, makes a strange, awkward kind of curtsy, and flees the room.
He is aware, even as it unfolds, that this is a passage he will not forget and may even one day rework into his writing. A certain shame passes over him, but it is superficial and transitory. First in his writing and now in his life, shame seems to have lost its power, its place taken by a blank and amoral passivity that shrinks from no extreme. It is as if, out of the corner of an eye, he can see clouds advancing on him with terrific speed, stormclouds. Whatever stands in their path will be swept away. With dread, but with excitement too, he waits for the storm to break.
At eleven o'clock by his watch, without announcing himself, he emerges from his room. The curtain is drawn across the alcove where Matryona and her mother sleep, but Anna Sergeyevna is still up, seated at the table, sewing by lamplight. He crosses the room, sits down opposite her.
Her fingers are deft, her movements decisive. In Siberia he learnt to sew, out of necessity, but he cannot sew with this fluid grace. In his fingers a needle is a curiosity, an arrow from Lilliput.
'Surely the light is too poor for such fine work,' he murmurs.
She inclines her head as if to say: I hear you, but also: What do you expect me to do about it?
'Has Matryona been your only child?'
She gives him a direct look. He likes the directness. He likes her eyes, which are not soft at all.
'She had a brother, but he died when he was very young.'
'So you know.'
'No, I don't know.'
What does she mean? That an infant's death is easier to bear? She does not explain.
'If you will allow me, I will buy you a better lamp. It is a pity to ruin your eyesight so early.'
She inclines her head as if to say: Thank you for the thought; I will not hold you to your promise.
So early: what does he mean?
He has known for some time that when the words that come next come, he will not try to stop them. 'I have a hunger to talk about my son,' he says, 'but even more of a hunger to hear others talk about him.'
'He was a fine young man,' she offers. 'I am sorry we knew him for a short time only.' And then, as if realizing this is not enough: 'He used to read to Matryona at bedtime. She looked forward to it all day. There was a real fondness between them.'
'What did they read?'
'I call to mind The Golden Cockerel and Krylov. He taught her some French poems too. She can still recite one or two.'
'It's good that you have books in the house.' He gestures toward a shelf on which there must be twenty or thirty volumes. 'Good for a growing child, I mean.'
'My husband was a printer. He worked in a printer's shop. He read a lot, it was his recreation. These are only a few of his books. Sometimes the apartment would be overflowing, while he was alive. There was no space for all of them.' She hesitates. 'We have a book of yours. Poor Folk. It was one of my husband's favourites.'
There is a silence. The lamp begins to flicker. She turns it down and lays aside her sewing. The farther corners of the room sink into shadow.
'I had to ask Pavel Alexandrovich not to invite friends to his room in the evenings,' she says. 'I regret that now. It was after they kept us awake, talking and drinking late into the night. He had some quite rough friends.'
'Yes, he was democratic in his friendships. He could speak to ordinary people about things close to their hearts. Ordinary people have a hunger for ideas. He never spoke down to them.'
'He didn't speak down to Matryosha either.'
The light grows dimmer, the wick begins to smoke. A salve of words, he thinks, rubbed over the sore places. But do I want to be healed?
'He was a serious person, despite his youth,' he presses on. 'He thought about Russia, about the conditions of our existence here. He was concerned about things that matter to ordinary folk.'
There is a long pause. Tribute, he thinks: I am paying tribute, however lamely, however belatedly, and trying to extort tribute from her too. And why not!
'I have been wondering about something you said the other day,' she says ruminatively. 'Why did you tell me that story about Pavel oversleeping?'
'Why? Because, unimportant as it may seem now, it marred his life. Because of his late sleeping I had to remove him from school, from one school after another. That was why he did not matriculate. So in the end he found himself here in Petersburg on the fringes of student society, where he had no real business, where he did not properly belong. It was not just sluggishness. Nothing would wake him – shouting, shaking, threats, pleas. It was like trying to wake a bear, a hibernating bear!'
'I understand that. Some children never settle down at school. But I meant something else. Forgive me for saying so, but what struck me when you told the story was how angry with him you still seemed to be.'
'Of course I was angry! His mother died, you must remember, when he was fifteen. It was not easy to bring him up alone. I had better things to do than to coax a boy of that age out of bed. If Pavel had finished his schooling like everyone else, none of this would have happened.'
'This?'
He waves an arm impatiently, as if to dismiss the apartment, the city of Petersburg, even the great dark canopy of the night above them.
She gives him a quiet, steady look; and under that look it begins to come home to him what he has said. A trembling overtakes him, starting in his right hand. He gets up and paces across the room, clasping his hands behind him. Something is on its way, something whose name he is trying to avoid. He tries to speak, but his voice emerges strangled. I am behaving like a character in a book, he thinks. But even jeering at himself does not help. His shoulders heave. Soundlessly he begins to cry.
In a book, the woman would respond to his grief with a surge of pity. This woman does not. She sits at the table in the flickering light, her head averted, her sewing in her lap. It is late, there is no one to see them, the child is sleeping.
Damn the heart, he tells himself! Damn this emotionalism! The touchstone is not the heart and how the heart feels, but death and how the dead boy feels!
At this moment the clearest of visions comes to him, a vision of Pavel smiling at him, at his peevishness, his tears, his histrionics, at what lies behind the histrionics too. The smile is not of derision but on the contrary of friendliness and forgiveness. He knows! he thinks: He knows and does not mind! A wave of gratitude and joy and love passes over him. Now there is sure to be a fit! he thinks too, but does not care. No longer holding back the tears, he feels his way back to the table, buries his head in his arms, and lets loose howl after howl of grief.
No one strokes his hair, no one murmurs a consoling word in his ear. But when at last, fumbling for his handkerchief, he raises his head, the girl Matryona is standing before him observing him intently. She wears a white nightdress; her hair, brushed out, lies over her shoulders. He cannot fail to notice the budding breasts. He tries to give her a smile, but her expression does not change. She knows too, he thinks. She knows what is false, what is true; or else by staring deep enough means to know.
He collects himself. Through the last of the tears his gaze locks on to hers. In that instant something passes between them from which he flinches as though pierced by a red-hot wire. Then her mother's arm enfolds her; a whispered word passes; she withdraws to her bed.