As he was getting into bed, Viktor remembered his conversation with Sokolov about Chepyzhin and said in a loud, angry voice: 'Homo lackeyus!'

'Who do you mean?' asked Lyudmila, who was already in bed, reading a book.

'Sokolov. He's a born lackey.'

Lyudmila put a finger in her book to mark the page and said, without even turning her head:

'Soon you'll be thrown out of the Institute – and all for a few fine words. You're so irritable, you're always telling everyone what to do… You've already quarrelled with everyone else and now you want to quarrel with Sokolov. Soon no one will even set foot in our house.'

'No, Lyuda darling, that's not it at all. How can I explain? Don't you understand? The same fear as before the war, the same fear over every word, the same helplessness… Chepyzhin! Lyuda, we're talking about a great man. I thought the whole Institute would be seething, but the only person who said anything was the old caretaker. And then that strange remark Postoev made to Sokolov: "What matters is that we're both Russians." Why, why on earth did he say that?'

He wanted to have a long talk with Lyudmila; he wanted to share all his thoughts with her. He was ashamed at being so preoccupied with things like rations. He had grown dull. Why? Why had he somehow become older now that they were back in Moscow? Why had these trivialities, these petty-bourgeois concerns suddenly become so important? Why had his spiritual life in Kazan been so much deeper and purer, so much more significant? Why was it that even his scientific work – and his joy in it – was now contaminated with vanity and pettiness?

'It's all very difficult, Lyuda. I'm not well. Lyuda? Why don't you say anything?'

Lyudmila was asleep. Viktor laughed quietly. It seemed amusing that one woman should lose sleep over his troubles and another fall asleep while he talked about them. He could see Marya Ivanovna's thin face before him. He repeated what he had just said to his wife.

'Don't you understand? Masha?'

'Goodness, what nonsense gets into my head!' he said to himself as he fell asleep.

What nonsense indeed.

Viktor was very clumsy with his hands. If the electric iron burnt out or the lights fused, it was nearly always Lyudmila who sorted things out. During their first years together, Lyudmila had found this helplessness of Viktor's quite endearing; now, however, she found it irritating. Once, seeing him putting an empty kettle on the burner, she snapped: 'What's the matter with you? Are your hands made of clay or something?'

While they were assembling the new apparatus in the laboratory, these words of Lyudmila's came back to him; they had upset him and made him angry.

Markov and Nozdrin now ruled the laboratory. Savostyanov was the first to sense this. At one of their meetings he announced: 'There is no God but Professor Markov, and Nozdrin is his prophet!'

Markov's reticence and arrogance had quite disappeared. Viktor was amazed at his bold thinking, delighted by the ease with which he could solve any problem as it came up. He was like a surgeon applying his scalpel to a network of blood-vessels and nerve-fibres. It was as though he were bringing some rational being to life, some creature with a quick and penetrating mind of its own. This new metallic organism, the first in the world, seemed endowed with a heart and feelings, seemed able to rejoice and suffer along with the people who had made it.

In the past Viktor had been a little amused by Markov's unshake-able conviction that his work, the apparatus he had set up, was of more importance than the works of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or the futile occupations of a Buddha or a Mohammed.

Tolstoy had doubted the value of his own enormous labours. Tolstoy, a genius, had been unsure whether what he did was of any use to anyone. Not so the physicists. They had no doubts. And Markov least of all.

Now, however, this assurance of Markov's no longer made Viktor laugh.

Viktor also loved to watch Nozdrin working away with a file, a screwdriver or a pair of pliers, or sorting through skeins of flex as he helped the electricians wire up the apparatus.

The floor was covered in bundles of wire and thin leaves of matt blueish lead. On a cast-iron platform in the middle of the hall stood the main part of the new apparatus, patterned with small circles and rectangles that had been punched out of the metal. There was something heart-breakingly beautiful about the apparatus, this huge slab of metal that would allow them to study the nature of matter with fantastic refinement.

In the same way, one thousand or two thousand years ago, a small group of men had gathered together on the shore of the sea to build a raft, lashing thick logs together with ropes. Their workbenches and winches had been set up on a sandy beach and pots of tar were boiling over fires. Soon they would set sail.

In the evening the builders of the raft had left; they had once again breathed in the scent of their homes, felt the warmth of their hearths and listened to the laughter and curses of their women. Sometimes they had got drawn into domestic quarrels, shouting, threatening their children and arguing with their neighbours. But in the warm darkness of night the sound of the sea had come back to them; their hearts beat faster as they dreamed of travelling into the unknown.

Sokolov usually watched the progress of the work in silence. Often Viktor caught his eye and saw the seriousness and intentness of his gaze; it seemed then that nothing had changed and that there was still something good and important between them.

He longed to talk to Sokolov. It really was very strange. All these humiliating emotions unleashed by the allocation of rations, all these petty thoughts about the exact measure of the authorities' esteem for you. But there was still room in his soul for what did not depend on the authorities, on some prize or other, on his professional recognition or lack of it.

Once again those evenings in Kazan seemed young and beautiful, almost like pre-revolutionary student gatherings. As long as Madyarov could be trusted… How peculiar, though! Karimov suspected Madyarov, and Madyarov Karimov. They were both trustworthy! Viktor was sure of it. Unless, in the words of Heine, 'They both stank'.

Sometimes he remembered a strange conversation he had once had with Chepyzhin. Why, now he was back in Moscow, were the things he recalled so trivial and insignificant? Why did he think so often of people he had no respect for? And why were the most talented people, the most trustworthy people, unable to help him?

'It is odd,' Viktor said to Sokolov. 'People come from all the different laboratories to watch the new apparatus being assembled. But Shishakov hasn't once honoured us with his presence.'

'He's very busy.'

'Of course, of course,' Viktor agreed hurriedly.

Now that they were in Moscow, it was impossible to have a sincere, friendly conversation with Sokolov. It was as though they no longer knew each other.

Viktor no longer tried to seize every pretext for an argument with Sokolov. On the contrary, he tried to avoid arguments. But this was difficult; sometimes arguments seemed to flare up of their own accord.

Once Viktor ventured:

'I've been thinking of our talks in Kazan… By the way, do you know how Madyarov is? Does he write?'

Sokolov shook his head.

'I don't know. I don't know anything about Madyarov. I told you that we stopped seeing one another. I find it increasingly unpleasant to even think of those conversations. We were so depressed that we tried to lay the blame for temporary military setbacks on entirely imaginary failings in the Soviet State itself. And what we thought of as failings have now shown themselves to be strengths.'

'Like 1937, for example?'

'Viktor Pavlovich, for some time now you've been trying to turn every conversation of ours into an argument.'