They have one more night together, after which the gate closes. She comes to his room late and without warning. Again, through her, he passes into darkness and into the waters where his son floats among the other drowned. 'Do not be afraid,' he wants to whisper, 'I will be with you, I will divide the bitterness with you.'

He wakes sprawled across her, his lips to her ear.

'Do you know where I have been?' he whispers.

She eases herself out from under him.

'Do you know where you took me?' he whispers.

There is an urge in him to show the boy off to her, show him in the springtime of his powers, with his flashing eyes and his clear jaw and his handsome mouth. He wants to clothe him again in the white suit, wants the clear, deep voice to be heard again from his chest. 'See what a treasure is gone from the world!' he wants to cry out: 'See what we have lost!'

She has turned her back to him. His hand strokes her long thigh urgently, up and down. She stops him. 'I must go,' she says, and gets up.

The next night she does not come, but stays with her daughter. He writes her a letter and leaves it on the table. When he gets up in the morning the apartment is empty and the letter still there, unopened.

He visits the shop. She is at the counter; but as soon as she sees him she slips into the back room, leaving old Yakovlev to attend to him.

In the evening he is waiting on the street, and follows her home like a footpad. He catches her in the entryway.

'Why are you avoiding me?'

'I am not avoiding you.'

He takes her by the arm. It is dark, she is carrying a basket, she cannot free herself. He presses himself against her, drawing in the walnut scent of her hair. He tries to kiss her, but she turns away and his lips brush her ear. Nothing in the pressure of her body answers to him. Disgrace, he thinks: this is how one enters disgrace.

He stands aside, but on the stairway catches up with her again. 'One word more,' he says: 'Why?'

She turns toward him. 'Isn't it obvious? Must I spell it out?'

'What is obvious? Nothing is obvious.'

'You were suffering. You were pleading.'

He recoils. 'That is not the truth!'

'You were in need. It is nothing to be ashamed of. But now it is finished. It will do you no good to go on, and it does me no good either to be used in this way.'

'Used? I am not using you! Nothing could be further from my mind!'

'You are using me to get to someone else. Don't be upset. I am explaining myself, not accusing you. But I don't want to be dragged in any further. You have a wife of your own. You should wait till you are with her again.'

A wife of your own. Why does she drag his wife in? My wife is too young! - that is what he wants to say – too young for me as I am now! But how can he say it?

Yet what she says is true, truer than she knows. When he returns to Dresden, the wife he embraces will be changed, will be infused with the trace he will bring back of this subtle, sensually gifted widow. Through his wife he will be reaching to this woman, just as through this woman he reaches – to whom?

Does he betray what he is thinking? With a sudden angry flush, she shakes his hand from her sleeve and climbs the stairs, leaving him behind.

He follows, shuts himself in his room, and tries to calm himself. The pounding of his heart slows. Pavel! he whispers over and over, using the word as a charm. But what comes to him inexorably is the form not of Pavel but of the other one, Sergei Nechaev.

He can no longer deny it: a gap is opening between himself and the dead boy. He is angry with Pavel, angry at being betrayed. It does not surprise him that Pavel should have been drawn into radical circles, or that he should have breathed no word of it in his letters. But Nechaev is a different matter. Nechaev is no student hothead, no youthful nihilist. He is the Mongol left behind in the Russian soul after the greatest nihilist of all has withdrawn into the wastes of Asia. And Pavel, of all people, a foot-soldier in his army!

He remembers a pamphlet entitled 'Catechism of a Revolutionary,' circulated in Geneva as Bakunin's but clearly, in its inspiration and even its wording, Nechaev's. 'The revolutionary is a doomed man,' it began. 'He has no interests, no feelings, no attachments, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed in a single and total passion: revolution. In the depths of his being he has cut all links with the civil order, with law and morality. He continues to exist in society only in order to destroy it.' And later: 'He does not expect the least mercy. Every day he is ready to die.'

He is ready to die, he does not expect mercy: easy to say the words, but what child can comprehend the fullness of their meaning? Not Pavel; perhaps not even Nechaev, that unloved and unlovely young man.

A memory of Nechaev himself returns, standing alone in a corner of the reception hall in Geneva, glaring, wolfing down food. He shakes his head, trying to expunge it. 'Pavel! Pavel!' he whispers, calling the absent one.

A tap at the door. Matryona's voice: 'Suppertime!'

At table he makes an effort to be pleasant. Tomorrow is Sunday: he suggests an outing to Petrovsky Island, where in the afternoon there will be a fair and a band. Matryona is eager to go; to his surprise, Anna Sergeyevna consents.

He arranges to meet them after church. In the morning, on his way out, he stumbles over something in the dark entryway: a tramp, lying there asleep with a musty old blanket pulled over him. He curses; the man gives a whimper and sits up.

He arrives at St Gregory's before the service is over. As he waits in the portico, the same tramp appears, bleary-eyed, smelly. He turns upon him. 'Are you following me?' he demands.

Though they are not six inches apart, the tramp pretends not to hear or see. Angrily he repeats his question. Worshippers, filing out, glance curiously at the two of them.

The man sidles off. Half a block away he stops, leans against a wall, feigns a yawn. He has no gloves; he uses the blanket, rolled into a ball, as a muff.

Anna Sergeyevna and her daughter emerge. It is a long walk to the park, along Voznesensky Prospekt and across the foot of Vasilevsky Island. Even before they get to the park he knows he has made a mistake, a stupid mistake. The bandstand is empty, the fields around the skaters' pond bare save for strutting gulls.

He apologizes to Anna Sergeyevna. 'There's lots oi time, it's not yet noon,' she replies cheerfully. 'Shall we go for a walk?'

Her good humour surprises him; he is even more surprised when she takes his arm. With Matryona at her other side they stride across the fields. A family, he thinks: only a fourth required and we will be complete. As if reading his thoughts, Anna Sergeyevna presses his arm.

They pass a flock of sheep huddled in a reed thicket. Matryona approaches them with a handful of grass; they break and scatter. A peasant boy with a stick emerges from the thicket and scowls at her. For an instant it seems that words will pass. Then the boy thinks better of it and Matryona slips back to them.

The exercise is bringing a glow to her cheeks. She will be a beauty yet, he thinks: she will break hearts.

He wonders what his wife would think. His indiscretions hitherto have been followed by remorse and, on the heels of remorse, a voluptuous urge to confess. These confessions, tortured in expression yet vague in point of detail, have confused and infuriated his wife, bedevilling their marriage far more than the infidelities themselves.

But in the present case he feels no guilt. On the contrary, he has an invincible sense of his own lightness.

He wonders what this sense of Tightness conceals; but he does not really want to know. For the present there is something like joy in his heart. Forgive me, Pavel, he whispers to himself. But again he does not really mean it.