She hesitates. He can see her weighing them, the two loves, one in the right hand, one in the left, like apples. 'No,' she says at last with what he can only call grace, 'I still like Pavel best.'

'Because they couldn't be more different, could they, the two of them. Like chalk and cheese.'

'Chalk and cheese?' She finds the idea funny.

'Just a saying. A horse and a wolf. A deer and a wolf.'

She considers the new similitude dubiously. 'They both like fun – liked fun,' she objects, slipping up on the verb.

He shakes his head. 'No, you make a mistake there. There is no fun in Sergei Gennadevich. There is certainly a spirit of a kind in him, but it is not a spirit of fun.' He bends closer, brushes the wing of hair back from her face, touches her cheek. 'Listen, Matryosha. You cannot hide these from your mother.' He gestures towards the instruments of death. 'I will get rid of them for you as I got rid of the dress. No matter what Nechaev says, you can't keep them. It is too dangerous. Do you understand?'

Her lips part, the corners of her mouth quiver. She is going to cry, he thinks. But it is not like that at all. When she raises her eyes, he is enveloped in a glance that is at once shameless and derisive. She draws away from his hand, tossing her hair. 'No!' he says. The smile she wears is taunting, provocative. Then the spell passes and she is a child as before, confused, ashamed.

It is impossible that what he has just seen has truly taken place. What he has seen comes not from the world he knows but from another existence. It is as though for the first time he has been present and conscious during a seizure; so that for the first time his eyes have been open to where he is when he is seized. In fact, he must wonder whether seizure is any longer the right word, whether the word has not all along been possession -whether everything that for the past twenty years has gone under the name of seizure has not been a mere presentiment of what is now happening, the quaking and dancing of the body a long-drawn-out prelude to a quaking of the soul.

The death of innocence. Never in his life has he felt more alone. He is like a traveller on a vast plain. Overhead the storm-clouds gather; lightning flashes on the horizon; darkness multiplies, fold upon fold. There is no shelter; if once he had a destination, he has long since lost it; the longer the clouds mass, the heavier they grow. Let it all break! he prays: what is the use of delaying?

It is six o'clock and the streets are still thronged when he hastens out bearing his parcel. He follows Gorokhovaya Street to the Fontanka Canal, and joins the press of people crossing the bridge. Midway he stops and leans over the ledge.

The water is frozen over by now, all but a ragged channel in the centre. What a clutter there must be under the ice on the canal-bed! With the spring thaw one could trawl a veritable harvest of guilty secrets here: knives, axes, bloodstained clothing. Worse too. Easy to kill the spirit, harder to dispose of what is left after that. The burial service and its incantations directed, if the truth be told, not at the soul but at the obstinate body, conjuring it not to arise and return.

Thus, gingerly, like a man probing his own wound, he readmits Pavel to his thoughts. Under his blanket of earth and snow on Yelagin Island, Pavel, unappeased, still stubbornly exists. Pavel tenses himself against the cold, against the aeons he must outlast till the day of the resurrection when tombs shall be riven open and graves yawn, gritting his teeth as a bare skull does, enduring what he must endure till the sun will shine on him again and he can slacken his tensed limbs. Poor child!

A young couple have paused beside him, the man with his arm around the woman's shoulders. He edges away from them. Beneath the bridge the black water courses sluggishly, lapping around a broken crate festooned with icicles. On the ledge he cradles the canvas parcel, tied with string. The girl glances at him, glances away. At that instant he gives the parcel a nudge.

It falls on to the ice just to one side of the channel and lies there in full view of everyone.

He cannot believe what has happened. He is directly over the channel, yet he has got it wrong! Is it a trick of parallax? Do some objects not fall vertically?

'Now you're in trouble!' says a voice to his left, startling him. A man in a workman's cap, old, greybearded, winks broadly. What a devil's-face! 'Won't be safe to step on for another week at least, I'd say. What do you think you're going to do now?'

Time for a fit, he thinks. Then my cup will be full. He sees himself convulsing and foaming at the mouth, a crowd gathering around, and the greybeard pointing, for the benefit of all, to where the pistol lies on the ice. A fit, like a bolt from heaven to strike the sinner down. But the bolt does not come. 'Mind your own business!' he mutters, and hurries away.

18. The diary

This is the third time he has sat down to read Pavel's papers. What makes the reading so difficult he cannot say, but his attention keeps wandering from the sense of the words to the words themselves, to the letters on the paper, to the trace in ink of the hand's movements, the shadings left by the pressure of the fingers. There are moments when he closes his eyes and touches his lips to the page. Dear: every scratch on the paper dear to me, he tells himself.

But there is more to his reluctance than that. There is something ugly in this intrusion on Pavel, and indeed something obscene in the idea of the Nachlass of a child.

Pavel's Siberian story has been spoilt for him, perhaps forever, by Maximov's ridicule. He cannot pretend that the writing itself is not juvenile and derivative. Yet it would take so little to breathe life into it! He itches to take his pen to it, to cross out the long passages of sentiment and doctrine and add the lifegiving touches it cries out for. Young Sergei is a self-righteous prig who needs to be distanced, seen more humorously, particularly in his solemn disciplining of his body. What draws the peasant girl to him can surely not be the promise of connubial life (a diet of dry bread and turnips, as far as he can see, and bare boards to sleep on) but his air of holding himself ready for a mysterious destiny. Where does that come from? From Chernyshevsky, certainly, but beyond Chernyshevsky from the Gospels, from Jesus – from an imitation of Jesus as obtuse and perverted in its way as that of the atheist Nechaev, gathering together a band of disciples and leading them out on errands of death. A piper with a troop of swine dancing at his heels. 'She will do anything for him,' said Matryona of the swine-girl Katri. Do anything, endure any humiliation, endure death. All shame burnt away, all self-respect. What went on between Nechaev and his women in the room above Madame la Fay's? And Matryona – was she being groomed for the harem too?

He closes Pavel's manuscript and pushes it aside. Once he begins to write on it he will certainly turn it into an abomination.

Then there is the diary. Paging through it, he notices for the first time a trail of pencil-marks, neat little ticks that are not in Pavel's hand and can therefore only be in Maximov's. For whom are they intended? Probably for a copyist; yet in his present state he cannot but take them as directives to himself.

'Saw A. today,' reads the ticked entry for November 11, 1868, almost exacdy a year ago. November 14: a cryptic 'A.' November 20: 'A. at Antonov's.' Each reference to 'A.' from there onward has a tick beside it.

He turns the pages back. The earliest 'A.' is on June 6, save for May 14, where there is an entry, 'Long talk to – -,' with a tick and a question-mark beside it.