3. Pavel

He sits in his son's room with the white suit on his lap, breathing softly, trying to lose himself, trying to evoke a spirit that can surely not yet have left these surroundings.

Time passes. From the next room, through the partition, come the hushed voices of the woman and child and the sounds of a table being laid. He puts the suit aside, taps on the door. The voices cease abruptly. He enters. 'I will be leaving now,' he says.

'As you can see, we are about to have supper. You are welcome to join us.'

The food she offers is simple: soup, and potatoes with salt and butter.

'How did my son come to lodge with you?' he asks at a certain point. Still he is careful to call him my son: if he brings forth the name he will begin to shake.

She hesitates, and he understands why. She could say: He was a nice young man; we took to him. But was is the obstacle, the boulder in her path. Until there is a way of circumventing the word in all its starkness, she will not speak it in front of him.

'A previous lodger recommended him,' she says at last. And that is that.

She strikes him as dry, dry as a butterfly's wing. As if between her skin and her petticoat, between her skin and the black stockings she no doubt wears, there is a film of fine white ash, so that, loosened from her shoulders, her clothes would slip to the floor without any coaxing.

He would like to see her naked, this woman in the last flowering of her youth.

Not what one would call an educated woman; but will one ever hear Russian spoken more beautifully? Her tongue like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats.

In the daughter he detects none of the mother's soft dryness. On the contrary, there is something liquid about her, something of the young doe, trusting yet nervous, stretching its neck to sniff the stranger's hand, tensed to leap away. How can this dark woman have mothered this fair child? Yet the telltale signs are all there: the fingers, small, almost unformed; the dark eyes, lustrous as those of Byzantine saints; the fine, sculpted line of the brow; even the moody air.

Strange how in a child a feature can take its perfect form while in the parent it seems a copy!

The girl raises her eyes for an instant, encounters his gaze exploring her, and turns away in confusion. An angry impulse rises in him. He wants to grip her arm and shake her. Look at me, child! he wants to say: Look at me and learn!

His knife drops to the floor. Gratefully he fumbles for it. It is as if the skin has been flayed from his face, as if, despite himself, he is continually thrusting upon the two of them a hideous bleeding mask.

The woman speaks again. 'Matryona and Pavel Alex-androvich were good friends,' she says, firmly and carefully. And to the child: 'He gave you lessons, didn't he?'

'He taught me French and German. Mostly French.'

Matryona: not the right name for her. An old woman's name, the name of a little old woman with a face like a prune.

'I would like you to have something of his,' he says. 'To remember him by.'

Again the child raises her eyes in that baffled look, inspecting him as a dog inspects a stranger, hardly hearing what he says. What is going on? And the answer comes: She cannot imagine me as Pavel's father. She is trying to see Pavel in me and she cannot. And he thinks further: To her Pavel is not yet dead. Somewhere in her he still lives, breathing the warm, sweet breath of youth. Whereas this blackness of mine, this beardedness, this boniness, must be as repugnant as death the reaper himself. Death, with his bony hips and his inch-long teeth and the rattle of his ankles as he walks.

He has no wish to speak about his son. To hear him spoken of, yes, yes indeed, but not to speak. By arithmetic, this is the tenth day of Pavel being dead. With every day that passes, memories of him that may still be floating in the air like autumn leaves are being trodden into the mud or caught by the wind and borne up into the blinding heavens. Only he wants to gather and conserve those memories. Everyone else adheres to the order of death, then mourning, then forgetting. If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library. But the very thought of Pavel being forgotten enrages him, turns him into an old bull, irritable, glaring, dangerous.

He wants to hear stories. And the child, miraculously, is about to tell one. 'Pavel Alexandrovich' – she glances toward her mother to confirm that she may utter the dead name – 'said he was only going to be in Petersburg a little while longer, then he was going to France.'

She halts. He waits impatiently for her to go on.

'Why did he want to go to France?' she asks, and now she is addressing him alone. 'What is there in France?'

France? 'He did not want to go to France, he wanted to leave Russia,' he replies. 'When you are young you are impatient with everything around you. You are impatient with your motherland because your motherland seems old and stale to you. You want new sights, new ideas. You think that in France or Germany or England you will find the future that your own country is too dull to provide you with.'

The child is frowning. He says France , motherland, but she hears something else, something underneath the words: rancour.

'My son had a scattered education,' he says, addressing not the child now but the mother. 'I had to move him from school to school. The reason was simple: he would not get up in the mornings. Nothing would wake him. I make too much of it, perhaps. But you cannot expect to matriculate if you do not attend school.'

What a strange thing to say at a time like this! Nevertheless, turning to the daughter, he plunges on. 'His French was very undependable – you must have noticed that. Perhaps that is why he wanted to go to France -to improve his French.'

'He used to read a lot,' says the mother. 'Sometimes the lamp would be burning in his room all night.' Her voice remains low, even. 'We didn't mind. He was always considerate. We were very fond of Pavel Alexandrovich – weren't we?' She gives the child a smile that seems to him like a caress.

Was. She has brought it out.

She frowns. 'What I still don't understand…'

An awkward silence falls. He does nothing to relieve it. On the contrary, he bristles like a wolf guarding its cub. Beware, he thinks: at your own peril do you utter a word against him! I am his mother and his father, I am everything to him, and more! There is something he wants to stand up and shout as well. But what? And who is the enemy he is defying?

From the depths of his throat, where he can no longer stifle it, a sound breaks out, a groan. He covers his face with his hands; tears run over his fingers.

He hears the woman get up from the table. He waits for the child to retire too, but she does not.

After a while he dries his eyes and blows his nose. 'I am sorry,' he whispers to the child, who is still sitting there, head bowed over her empty plate.

He closes the door of Pavel's room behind him. Sorry? No, the truth is, he is not sorry. Far from it: he is in a rage against everyone who is alive when his child is dead. In a rage most of all against this girl, whom for her very meekness he would like to tear limb from limb.

He lies down on the bed, his arms tight across his chest, breathing fast, trying to expel the demon that is taking him over. He knows that he resembles nothing so much as a corpse laid out, and that what he calls a demon may be nothing but his own soul flailing its wings. But being alive is, at this moment, a kind of nausea. He wants to be dead. More than that: to be extinguished, annihilated.

As for life on the other side, he has no faith in it. He expects to spend eternity on a river-bank with armies of other dead souls, waiting for a barge that will never arrive. The air will be cold and dank, the black waters will lap against the bank, his clothes will rot on his back and fall about his feet, he will never see his son again.