20. Stavrogin

A cloud of smoke hangs over the city. Ash falls from the sky; in places the very snow is grey.

All morning he sits alone in the room. He knows now why he has not gone back to Yelagin Island. It is because he fears to see the soil tossed aside, the grave yawning, the body gone. A corpse improperly buried; buried now within him, in his breast, no longer weeping but hissing madness, whispering to him to fall.

He is sick and he knows the name of his sickness. Nechaev, voice of the age, calls it vengefulness, but a truer name, less grand, would be resentment.

There is a choice before him. He can cry out in the midst of this shameful fall, beat his arms like wings, call upon God or his wife to save him. Or he can give himself to it, refuse the chloroform of terror or unconsciousness, watch and listen instead for the moment which may or may not arrive – it is not in his power to force it -when from being a body plunging into darkness he shall become a body within whose core a plunge into darkness is taking place, a body which contains its own falling and its own darkness.

If to anyone it is prescribed to live through the madness of our times, he told Anna Sergeyevna, it is to him. Not to emerge from the fall unscathed, but to achieve what his son did not: to wresde with the whisding darkness, to absorb it, to make it his medium; to turn the falling into a flying, even if a flying as slow and old and clumsy as a turtle's. To live where Pavel died. To live in Russia and hear the voices of Russia murmuring within him. To hold it all within him: Russia, Pavel, death.

That is what he said. But was it the truth or just a boast? The answer does not matter, as long as he does not flinch. Nor does it matter that he speaks in figures, making his own sordid and contemptible infirmity into the emblematic sickness of the age. The madness is in him and he is in the madness; they think each other; what they call each other, whether madness or epilepsy or vengeance or the spirit of the age, is of no consequence. This is not a lodging-house of madness in which he is living, nor is Petersburg a city of madness. He is the mad one; and the one who admits he is the mad one is mad too. Nothing he says is true, nothing is false, nothing is to be trusted, nothing to be dismissed. There is nodiing to hold to, nothing to do but fall.

He unpacks the writing-case, sets out his materials. No longer a matter of listening for the lost child calling from the dark stream, no longer a matter of being faithful to Pavel when all have given him up. Not a matter of fidelity at all. On the contrary, a matter of betrayal -betrayal of love first of all, and then of Pavel and the mother and child and everyone else. Perversion: everything and everyone to be turned to another use, to be gripped to him and fall with him.

He remembers Maximov's assistant and the question he asked: 'What kind of book do you write?' He knows now the answer he should have given: 'I write perversions of the truth. I choose the crooked road and take children into dark places. I follow the dance of the pen.'

In the mirror on the dressing-table he catches a quick glimpse of himself hunched over the table. In the grey light, without his glasses, he could mistake himself for a stranger; the dark beard could be a veil or a curtain of bees.

He moves the chair so as not to face the mirror. But the sense of someone in the room besides himself persists: if not of a full person then of a stick-figure, a scarecrow draped in an old suit, with a stuffed sugar-sack for a head and a kerchief across the mouth.

He is distracted, and irritated with himself for being distracted. The very spirit of irritation keeps the scarecrow perversely alive; its mute indifference to his irritation doubles his irritation.

He paces around the room, changes the position of the table a second time. He bends towards the mirror, examines his face, examines the very pores of his skin. He cannot write, he cannot think.

He cannot think, therefore what? He has not forgotten the thief in the night. If he is to be saved, it will be by the thief in the night, for whom he must unwaveringly be on watch. Yet the thief will not come till the householder has forgotten him and fallen asleep. The householder may not watch and wake without cease, otherwise the parable will not be fulfilled. The householder must sleep; and if he must sleep, how can God condemn his sleeping? God must save him, God has no other way. Yet to trap God thus in a net of reason is a provocation and a blasphemy.

He is in the old labyrinth. It is the story of his gambling in another guise. He gambles because God does not speak. He gambles to make God speak. But to make God speak in the turn of a card is blasphemy. Only when God is silent does God speak. When God seems to speak God does not speak.

For hours he sits at the table. The pen does not move. Intermittently the stick-figure returns, the crumpled, old-man travesty of himself. He is blocked, he is in prison.

Therefore? Therefore what?

He closes his eyes, makes himself confront the figure, makes the image grow clearer. Across the face there is still a veil, which he seems powerless to remove. Only the figure itself can do that; and it will not do so before it is asked. To ask, he must know its name. What is the name? Is it Ivanov? Is this Ivanov come back, Ivanov the obscure, the forgotten? What was Ivanov's true name? Or is it Pavel? Who was the lodger who had this room before him? Who was P. A. I., owner of the suitcase? Did the P. stand for Pavel? Was Pavel Pavel's true name? If Pavel is called by a false name, will he ever come?

Once Pavel was the lost one. Now he himself is lost, so lost that he does not even know how to call for help.

If he let the pen fall, would the figure across the table take it up and write?

He thinks of what Anna Sergeyevna said: You are in mourning for yourself.

The tears that flow down his cheeks are of the utmost clarity, almost saltless to the taste. If there is a purging going on, what is being purged is strangely pure.

Ultimately it will not be given him to bring the dead boy back to life. Ultimately, if he wants to meet him, he will have to meet him in death.

There is the suitcase. There is the white suit. Somewhere the white suit still exists. Is there a way, starting at the feet, of building up the body within the suit till at last the face is revealed, even if it is the ox-face of Baal?

The head of the figure across the table is slightly too large, larger than a human head ought to be. In fact, in all its proportions there is something subtly wrong with the figure, something excessive.

He wonders whether he is not touched with a fever himself. A pity he cannot call in Matryona from next door to feel his brow.

From the figure he feels nothing, nothing at all. Or rather, he feels around it a field of indifference tremendous in its force, like a cloak of darkness. Is that why he cannot find the name – not because the name is hidden but because the figure is indifferent to all names, all words, anything that might be said about it?

The force is so strong that he feels it pressing out upon him, wave upon silent wave.

The third testing. His words to Anna Sergeyevna: I was sent to live a Russian life. Is this how Russia manifests itself – in this force, this darkness, this indifference to names?

Or is the name that is dark to him the name of the other boy, the one he repudiates: Nechaev? Is that what he must learn: that in God's eyes there is no difference between the two of them, Pavel Isaev and Sergei Nechaev, sparrows of equal weight? Is he going to have to give up his last faith in Pavel's innocence and acknowledge him in truth as Nechaev's comrade and follower, a restless young man who responded without reserve to all that Nechaev offered: not just the adventure of conspiracy but the soul-inflating ecstasies of death-dealing too? As Nechaev hates the fathers and makes implacable war on them, so must Pavel be allowed to follow him?