9. Nechaev

He is in the streets of the Haymarket the next day when ahead of him he glimpses the plump, almost spherical figure of the same Finnish girl. She is not alone. By her side is a woman, tall and slim, walking so fast that the Finn has to skip to keep up with her.

He quickens his pace. Though for moments he loses sight of them in the crowd, he is not far behind when they enter a shop. As she enters, the tall woman casts a glance up the street. He is struck by the blue of her eyes, the pallor of her skin. Her glance passes over him without settling.

He crosses the street and dawdles, waiting for them to emerge. Five minutes pass, ten minutes. He is getting cold.

The brass plate advertises Atelier La Fay or La Fée, Milliner. He pushes open the door; a bell tinkles. In a narrow, well-lit room, girls in uniform grey smocks sit at two long sewing-tables. A woman of middle age bustles forward to greet him.

'Monsieur?'

'An acquaintance of mine came in a few minutes ago – a young lady. I thought – ' He glances around the shop, dismayed: there is no sign of either the Finn or the other woman. 'I am sorry, I must have made a mistake.'

The two young seamstresses nearest by are giggling at his embarrassment. As for Madame la Fay, she has lost interest. 'It must be students you are thinking of,' she says dismissively. 'We have nothing to do with the students.'

He apologizes again and begins to leave.

'There!' says a voice behind him.

He turns. One of the girls is pointing to a small door on his left. 'Through there!'

He passes into an alleyway walled off from the street. An iron staircase leads to the floor above. He hesitates, then ascends.

He finds himself in a dark passage smelling of cooking. From an upper floor comes the sound of a scratchy violin playing a gypsy tune. He follows the music up two more flights to a half-open garret door, and knocks. The Finnish girl comes to the door. Her stolid face shows no sign of surprise.

'May I speak to you?' he says.

She stands aside.

The violin is being played by a young man in black. Seeing the stranger, he stops in mid-phrase, casts a quick glance toward the tall woman, then picks up his cap and, without a word, leaves.

He addresses the Finn. 'I caught sight of you in the street and followed. Could we speak in private?'

She sits down on the couch but does not invite him to sit. Her feet barely reach the floor. 'Speak,' she says.

'You made a remark yesterday about the death of my son. I would like to know more. Not in any spirit of vengefulness. I am inquiring for my own relief. I mean, in order to relieve myself.'

She regards him quizzically. 'To relieve yourself?'

'I mean I did not come to Petersburg to involve myself in detection,' he continues doggedly; 'but now that you have said what you said about the manner of his death, I cannot ignore it, I cannot push it away.'

He pauses. His head is swimming, he is suddenly exhausted. Behind closed eyes he has a vision of Pavel walking towards him. There is a girl at his side, a girl he has chosen to be his bride. Pavel is about to speak, to introduce the girl; and he is about to think to himself: Good, at last all these years of fathering are at an end, at last he has other hands to fall into! He is about to smile at Pavel, in his smile rejoicing but also relief. But who can the bride be? Can she be this tall young woman (nearly as tall as Pavel himself) with the piercing blue eyes?

He tugs himself loose from the reverie. His own next sentence is already emerging, in what sounds to him like a drone. 'I have a duty towards him that I cannot evade,' he is saying.

That is all. The words come to an end, dry up. Silence falls, grows longer and longer. He makes an effort to revive the vision of Pavel and his bride, but of all people it is Ivanov who comes instead, or at least Ivanov's hands: pale, plump fingers emerging like grubs from green woollen mittens. As for the face, it bobs in a sulphurous mist, not keeping still long enough for his gaze to fix on it. The impression he has, however, is of a sly, insistent smile, as though the man knows something damaging to him and wants him to know that he knows.

He shakes his head, tries to gather his wits. But words seem to have fled him. He stands before the Finn like an actor who has forgotten his lines. The silence lies like a weight upon the room. A weight or a peace, he thinks: what peace there would be if everything were to fall still, the birds of the air frozen in their flight, the great globe suspended in its orbit! A fit is certainly on its way: there is nothing he can do to hold it back. He savours the last of the stillness. What a pity the stillness cannot last forever! From far away comes a scream that must be his own. There will be a gnashing of teeth - the words flash before him; then there is an end.

When he returns it is as if he has been away in a far country and grown old and grey there. But in fact he is in the room as before, still on his feet, with a hand half-raised. And the two women are there too, in the postures he remembers, though the Finn now has a wary air about her.

'May I sit down?' he mumbles, his tongue too large for his mouth.

The Finn makes space and he sits down beside her on the couch, dizzy, hanging his head. 'Is something wrong?' she asks.

He makes no reply. What is it he wants to say, and why is he so tired all the time? It is as though a fog has settled over his brain. If he were a character in a book, what would he say, at a moment like this when either the heart speaks or the page remains blank?

'I cannot tell you,' he says slowly, 'how sad and alien I feel in your company. The game you are playing is a game I cannot enter. What engages you, what must have engaged Pavel too, does not engage me. If I must be honest, it repels me.'

Without a word the tall girl leaves the room. The rustle of her dress and a waft of lavender as she passes awake in him an unexpected flutter of desire. Desire for what? For the girl herself? Surely not – or not only. For youth, rather, for the forever-lost, the freedom of loosened clothes, naked bodies. Even so, his response disturbs him. Why here, why now? Something to do with exhaustion, but perhaps to do with Pavel too – with finding himself in Pavel's world, Pavel's erotic surround.

'I have been shown the lists of people marked down for execution,' he says.

The Finn observes him narrowly.

'The police are in possession of those lists – I hope you realize that. They took them from Pavel's room. What I want to ask is: Does each of you simply have a certain number of people to kill, or are there particular persons marked down as yours, yours alone? And, if the latter, are you expected to study these persons beforehand, to familiarize yourselves with their daily lives? Do you spy on them at home?'

The Finn tries to speak, but he is beginning to come to life, and his voice rises above hers.

'If so, if so, don't you necessarily grow more familiar with your victims than you want to be? Don't you become like someone called in from the street, a beggar, for instance, offered fifty kopeks to dispose of an old, blind dog, who takes the rope and ties the noose and strokes the dog to calm it, and murmurs a word or two, and as he does so feels a current of feeling begin to flow, so that from that instant onward he and the dog are no longer strangers, and what should have been a mere job of work has turned into the blackest betrayal – such a betrayal, in fact, that the sound the dog makes as he strings it up, when he strings it up, haunts him for days afterwards – a yelp of surprise: Why you? Wouldn't it deter you, that thought?'

While he has been speaking the tall woman has returned. She is kneeling in the far corner of the room now, folding sheets, rolling up a mattress. The Finn, on the other hand, has positively come to life. Her eyes sparkle, she cannot wait to speak. Still he presses on.