As he asks the question, as he allows Pavel his first taste of hatred and bloodlust, he feels something stir in himself too: the beginnings of a fury that answers Pavel, answers Nechaev, answers all of them. Fathers and sons: foes: foes to the death.

So he sits paralysed. Either Pavel remains within him, a child walled up in the crypt of his grief, weeping without cease, or he lets Pavel loose in all his rage against the rule of the fathers. Lets his own rage loose too, like a genie from a bottle, against the impiety and thankless-ness of the sons.

This is all he can see: a choice that is no choice. He cannot think, he cannot write, he cannot mourn except to and for himself. Until Pavel, the true Pavel, visits him unevoked and of his free will, he is a prisoner in his own breast. And there is no certainty that Pavel has not already come in the night, already spoken.

To Pavel it is given to speak once only. Nonetheless, he cannot accept that he will not be forgiven for having been deaf or asleep or stupid when the word was spoken. What he listens for, therefore, is Pavel's second word. He believes absolutely that he does not deserve a second word, that there will be no second word. But he believes absolutely that a second word will come.

He knows he is in peril of gambling on the second chance. As soon as he lays his stake on the second chance, he will have lost. He must do what he cannot do: resign himself to what will come, speech or silence.

He fears that Pavel has spoken. He believes that Pavel will speak. Both. Chalk and cheese.

This is the spirit in which he sits at Pavel's table, his eyes fixed on the phantasm opposite him whose attention is no less implacable than his own, whom it has been given to him to bring into being.

Not Nechaev – he knows that now. Greater than Nechaev. Not Pavel either. Perhaps Pavel as he might have been one day, grown wholly beyond boyhood to become the kind of cold-faced, handsome man whom no love can touch, even the adoration of a girl-child who will do anything for him.

It is a version that disturbs him. It is not the truth, or not yet the truth. But from this vision of Pavel grown beyond childhood and beyond love – grown not in a human manner but in the manner of an insect that changes shape entirely at each stage of its evolution – he feels a chill coming. Confronting it is like descending into the waters of the Nile and coming face to face with something huge and cold and grey that may once have been born of woman but with the passing of ages has retreated into stone, that does not belong in his world, that will baffle and overwhelm all his powers of conception.

Christ on Calvary overwhelms him too. But the figure before him is not that of Christ. In it he detects no love, only the cold and massive indifference of stone.

This presence, so grey and without feature – is this what he must father, give blood to, flesh, life? Or does he misunderstand, and has he misunderstood from the beginning? Is he required, rather, to put aside all that he himself is, all he has become, down to his very features, and become as a babe again? Is the thing before him the one that does the fathering, and must he give himself to being fathered by it?

If that is what must be, if that is the truth and the way to the resurrection, he will do it. He will put aside everything. Following this shade he will go naked as a babe into the jaws of hell.

An image comes to him that for the past month he has flinched from: Pavel, naked and broken and bloody, in the morgue; the seed in his body dead too, or dying.

Nothing is private any more. As unblinkingly as he can he gazes upon the body-parts without which there can be no fatherhood. And his mind goes again to the museum in Berlin, to the goddess-fiend drawing out the seed from the corpse, saving it.

Thus at last the time arrives and the hand that holds the pen begins to move. But the words it forms are not words of salvation. Instead they tell of flies, or of a single black fly, buzzing against a closed windowpane. High summer in Petersburg, hot and clammy; from the street below, noise, music. In the room a child with brown eyes and straight fair hair lying naked beside a man, her slim feet barely reaching to his ankles, her face pressed against the curve of his shoulder, where she snuggles and roots like a baby.

Who is the man? The body is as perfectly formed as a god's. But it gives off such marmoreal coldness that it is impossible a child in its grasp could not be chilled to the bone. As for the face, the face will not be seen.

He sits with the pen in his hand, holding himself back from a descent into representations that have no place in the world, on the point of toppling, enclosed within a moment in which all creation lies open at his feet, the moment before he loosens his grip and begins to fall.

It is a moment of which he is becoming a connoisseur, a voluptuary. For which he will be damned.

Restlessly he gets up. From the suitcase he takes Pavel's diary and turns to the first empty page, the page that the child did not write on because by then he was dead. On this page he begins, a second time, to write.

In his writing he is in the same room, sitting at the table much as he is sitting now. But the room is Pavel's and Pavel's alone. And he is not himself any longer, not a man in the forty-ninth year of his life. Instead he is young again, with all the arrogant strength of youth. He is wearing a white suit, perfectly tailored. He is, to a degree, Pavel Isaev, though Pavel Isaev is not the name he is going to give himself.

In the blood of this young man, this version of Pavel, is a sense of triumph. He has passed through the gates of death and returned; nothing can touch him any more. He is not a god but he is no longer human either. He is, in some sense, beyond the human, beyond man. There is nothing he is not capable of.

Through this young man the building, with its stale-smelling corridors and blind corners, begins to write itself, this building in Petersburg, in Russia.

He heads the page, in neat capitals, the apartment, and writes:

He sleeps late, rarely rising before noon, when the apartment has grown so hot that the bedsheets are soaked with his sweat. Then he stumbles to the little washroom on the landing and splashes water over his face and brushes his teeth with his finger and stumbles back to the apartment. There, unshaven, straggle-haired, he eats the breakfast his landlady has set out for him (the butter by now melted, gnats floating in the milk); and then shaves and puts on yesterday's underwear, yesterday's shirt, and the white suit (the trouser-creases sharp as a knife from being pressed under the mattress all night), and wets his hair and slicks it down; and then, having prepared for the day, loses interest, loses motive power: sits down again at the table still cluttered with the breakfast things and falls into a reverie, or sprawls about, picking his nails with a knife, waiting for something to happen, for the child to come home from school.

Or else wanders around the apartment opening drawers, fingering things.

He comes upon a locket with pictures of his landlady and her dead husband. He spits on the glass and shines it with his handkerchief. Brightly the couple stare at each other across their tiny prison.

He buries his face in her underclothes, smelling faintly of lavender.

He is enrolled as a student at the university but he attends no lectures. He joins a kruzhok, a circle whose members experiment with free love. One afternoon he brings a girl back to his room. It occurs to him that he ought to lock the door, but he does not. He and the girl make love; they fall asleep.

A noise wakes him. He knows they are being watched.

He touches the girl and she is awake. The two of them are naked, beautiful, in the pride of their youth. They make love a second time.