'I am waiting only for the investigation to run its course. I need not even stay for the ruling. All I want is the papers. The rest is immaterial.'
'And then you will go back to Germany?'
'Yes.'
They have reached the embankment. Crossing the street, he takes her arm. Side by side they lean against the rail by the waterside.
'I don't know whether to hate this city for what it did to Pavel,' he says, 'or to feel even more tightly bound to it. Because it is Pavel's home now. He will never leave it, never travel as he wanted to.'
'What nonsense, Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she replies with a sidelong smile. 'Pavel is with you. You are his home. He is in your heart, he travels with you wherever you go. Anyone can see that.' And she touches his breast lightly with her gloved hand.
He feels his heart leap as though her fingertip had brushed the organ itself. Coquetry – is that what it is, or does the gesture spring from her own heart? It would be the most natural thing in the world to take her in his arms. He can feel his gaze positively devo'ur her shapely mouth, on which a smile still lingers. And beneath that gaze she does not flinch. Not a young woman. Not a child. Gazing back at him over the body of Pavel, the two of them throwing out their challenges. The flicker of a thought: If only he were not here! Then the thought vanishes around a corner.
From a street-seller they buy little fish-pasties for their supper. Matryona opens the door, but when she sees who is with her mother, turns her back. At table she is in a fretful mood, insisting that her mother pay attention to a long, confused story of a squabble between herself and a classmate, at school. When he intervenes to make the mildest of pleas for the other girl, Matryona snorts and does not deign to answer.
She has sensed something, he knows, and is trying to reclaim her mother. And why not? It is her right. Yet if only she were not here! This time he does not suppress the thought. If the child were away he would not waste another word. He would snuff out the light, and in the dark he and she would find each other again. They would have the big bed to themselves, the widow-bed, the bed widowed of a man's body for – how long did she say? -four years?
He has a vision of Anna Sergeyevna that is crude in its sensuality. Her petticoat is pushed high up, so that beneath it her breasts are bared. He lies between her legs: her long pale thighs grip him. Her face is averted, her eyes closed, she is breathing heavily. Though the man coupling with her is himself, he sees all of this somehow from beside the bed. It is her thighs that dominate the vision: his hands curve around them, he presses them against his flanks.
'Come, finish the food on your plate,' she urges her daughter.
'I'm not hungry, my throat is sore,' Matryona whines. She toys with her food a moment longer, then pushes it aside.
He rises. 'Good night, Matryosha. I hope you feel better tomorrow.' The child does not bother to reply. He retires, leaving her in possession of the field.
He recognizes the source of the vision: a postcard he bought in Paris years ago and destroyed together with the rest of his erotica when he married Anya. A girl with long dark hair lying underneath a mustachioed man. gypsy love, read the caption in florid capitals. But the legs of the girl in the picture were plump, her flesh flaccid, her face, turned toward the man (who held himself up stiffly on his arms), devoid of expression. The thighs of Anna Sergeyevna, of the Anna Sergeyevna of his memory, are leaner, stronger; there is something purposeful in their grip which he links with the fact that she is not a child but a fullgrown, avid woman. Fullgrown and therefore open (that is the word that insists itself) to death. A body ready for experience because it knows it will not live forever. The thought is arousing but disturbing too. To those thighs it does not matter who is gripped between them; beheld from somewhere above and to the side of the bed, the man in the picture both is and is not himself.
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.