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truth!’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Used? I am not using you! Nothing could be further from my mind!’
    â€˜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 He is the Mongol left behind in the Russian soul after the greatest nihilist of all has withdrawn into the wastes of Asia.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