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!)

Young men in white playing the French game, croquet, croixquette, game of the little cross, and you on the greensward among them, alive! Poor boy! On the streets of Petersburg, in the turn of a head here, the gesture of a hand there, I see you, and each time my heart lifts as a wave does. Nowhere and everywhere, torn and scattered like Orpheus. Young in days, chryseos, golden, blessed.

The task left to me: to gather the hoard, put together the scattered parts. Poet, lyre-player, enchanter, lord of resurrection, that is what I am called to be. And the truth? Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.

I came too late to raise the coffin-lid, to kiss your smooth cold brow. If my lips, tender as the fingertips of the blind, had been able to brush you just once, you would not have quit this existence bitter against me. But bearing the name Isaev you have departed, and I, old man, old pilgrim, am left to follow behind, pursuing a shade, violet upon grey, an echo.

Still, I am here and father Isaev is not. If, drowning, you reach for Isaev, you will grasp only a phantom hand. In the town hall of Semipalatinsk, in dusty files in a box on the back stairs, his signature is still perhaps to be read; otherwise no trace of him save in this remembering, in the remembering of the man who embraced his widow and his child.

13. The disguise

The file on Pavel is closed. There is nothing to keep him in Petersburg. The train leaves at eight o'clock; by Tuesday he can be with his wife and child in Dresden. But as the hour approaches it becomes more and more inconceivable that he will remove the pictures from the shrine, blow out the candle, and give up Pavel's room to a stranger.

Yet if he does not leave tonight, when will he leave? 'The eternal lodger' – where did Anna Sergeyevna pick up the phrase? How long can he go on waiting for a ghost? Unless he puts himself on another footing with the woman, another footing entirely. But what then of his wife?

His mind is in a whirl, he does not know what he wants, all he knows is that eight o'clock hangs over him like a sentence of death. He searches out the concierge and after lengthy haggling secures a messenger to take his ticket to the station and have the reservation changed to the next day.

Returning, he is startled to find his door open and someone in the room: a woman standing with her back to him, inspecting the shrine. For a guilty moment he thinks it is his wife, come to Petersburg to track him down. Then he recognizes who it is, and a cry of protest rises in his throat: Sergei Nechaev, in the same blue dress and bonnet as before!

At that moment Matryona enters from the apartment. Before he can speak she seizes the initiative. 'You shouldn't sneak in on people like that!' she exclaims.

'But what are the two of you doing in my room?'

'We have just as much right – ' she begins vehemently. Then Nechaev interrupts.

'Someone led the police to us,' he says. He steps closer. 'I hope not you.'

Beneath the scent of lavender he can smell rank male sweat. The powder around Nechaev's throat is streaked; stubble is breaking through.

'That is a contemptible accusation to make, quite contemptible. I repeat: what are you doing in my room?' He turns to Matryona. 'And you – you are sick, you should be in bed!'

Ignoring his words, she tugs Pavel's suitcase out. 'I said he could have Pavel Alexandrovich's suit,' she says; and then, before he can object: 'Yes, he can! Pavel bought it with his own money, and Pavel was his friend!'

She unbuckles the suitcase, brings out the white suit. 'There!' she says defiantly.