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On the cold fingers folded to his chest he counts the days again. Ten. This is what it feels like after ten days.
Poetry might bring back his son. He has a sense of the poem that would be required, a sense of its music. But he is not a poet: more like a dog that has lost a bone, scratching here, scratching there.
He waits till the gleam of light under the door has gone out, then quietly leaves the apartment and returns to his lodgings.
During the night a dream comes to him. He is swimming underwater. The light is blue and dim. He banks and glides easily, gracefully; his hat seems to have gone, but in his black suit he feels like a turtle, a great old turtle in its natural element. Above him there is a ripple of movement, but here at the bottom the water is still. He swims through patches of weed; slack fingers of water-grass brush his fins, if that is what they are.
He knows what he is in search of. As he swims he sometimes opens his mouth and gives what he thinks of as a cry or call. With each cry or call water enters his mouth; each syllable is replaced by a syllable of water. He grows more and more ponderous, till his breastbone is brushing the silt of the river-bed.
Pavel is lying on his back. His eyes are closed. His hair, wafted by the current, is as soft as a baby's.
From his turtle-throat he gives a last cry, which seems to him more like a bark, and plunges toward the boy. He wants to kiss the face; but when he touches his hard lips to it, he is not sure he is not biting.
This is when he wakes.
Following old habit, he spends the morning at the little desk in his room. When the maid comes to clean, he waves her away. But he does not write a word. It is not that he is paralysed. His heart pumps steadily, his mind is clear. At any moment he is capable of picking up the pen and forming letters on the paper. But the writing, he fears, would be that of a madman – vileness, obscenity, page after page of it, untameable. He thinks of the madness as ru
In the afternoon he returns to Svechnoi Street, to Pavel's room. He closes the i
He takes off his own clothes and puts on the white suit. Though the jacket is loose and the trousers too long, he does not feel clownish in it.
He lies down and crosses his arms. The posture is theatrical, but wherever impulse leads he is ready to follow. At the same time he has no faith in impulse at all.
He has a vision of Petersburg stretched out vast and low under the pitiless stars. Written in a scroll across the heavens is a word in Hebrew characters. He ca
A gate has closed behind his son, a gate bound sevenfold with bands of iron. To open that gate is the labour laid upon him.
Thoughts, feelings, visions. Does he trust them? They come from his deepest heart; but there is no more reason to trust the heart than to trust reason.
From somewhere to somewhere I am in retreat, he thinks; when the retreat is completed, what will be left of me?
He thinks of himself as going back into the egg, or at least into something smooth and cool and grey. Perhaps it is not just an egg: perhaps it is the soul, perhaps that is how the soul looks.
There is a rustling under the bed. A mouse going about its business? He does not care. He turns over, draws the white jacket over his face, inhales.
Since the news came of his son's death, something has been ebbing out of him that he thinks of as firmness. I am the one who is dead, he thinks; or rather, I died but my death failed to arrive. His sense of his own body is that it is strong, sturdy, that it will not yield of its own accord. His chest is like a barrel with sound staves. His heart will go on beating for a long time. Nevertheless, he has been tugged out of human time. The stream that carries him still moves forward, still has direction, even purpose; but that purpose is no longer life. He is being carried by dead water, a dead stream.
He falls asleep. When he wakes it is dark and the whole world is silent. He strikes a match, trying to gather his fuddled wits. Past midnight. Where has he been?
He crawls under the covers, sleeps intermittently. In the morning, on his way to the washroom, smelly, dishevelled, he runs into A
'If you don't mind, I will stay here in Pavel's room till I leave,' he goes on. 'It will only be for a few days.'
'We can't discuss it now, I'm in a hurry,' she replies. Clearly she does not like the idea. Nor does she give her consent. But he has paid, there is nothing she can do about it.
All morning he sits at the table in his son's room, his head in his hands. He ca
At moments like this he ca
It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air.
Sitting at the table, his eyes closed, his fists clenched, he wards the knowledge of death away from Pavel. He thinks of himself as the Triton on the Piazza Barberini in Rome, holding to his lips a conch from which jets a constant crystal fountain. All day and all night he breathes life into the water. The tendons of his neck, caught in bronze, are taut with effort.