But then he would feel anxious and tormented again. How would Lyudmila and Nadya make a living without him? By teaching? By renting out a room? But that would immediately bring in the house management committee and the police. There'd be interrogations, fines, searches at night…

How wise, how powerful, how threatening all these officials suddenly appeared – these house managers, district police-inspectors, housing inspectors, secretaries of personnel departments! To a man with no place in the world, even a slip of a girl at a desk in a rations office seems endowed with a vast, unshakeable power.

A sense of fear, indecisiveness and helplessness hung over Viktor all day long. But this feeling was by no means unchanging and uniform; on the contrary, each part of the day had its own particular melancholy, its own particular terror. Early in the morning, after the warmth of his bed, when the windows were still veiled by a cold, opaque semi-darkness, he felt like a helpless child faced with some awesome power that was about to crush him; he wanted to burrow under the blankets, curl up, screw up his eyes and keep absolutely still.

Later on in the morning he would think sadly about his work, longing to go into the Institute again. He felt then that he was someone useless, stupid and talentless.

It was as though the State, in its fury, was able to take away not only his freedom and peace of mind, but even his intelligence, his talent and his belief in himself. It had transformed him into a grey, stupid, miserable bourgeois.

Before lunch he would come to life for a while and even feel quite cheerful. But immediately afterwards his melancholy would return -as empty, thoughtless and tedious as ever.

The worst moments of terror came as twilight set in. Viktor had become terrified of the dark, as terrified as Stone Age man caught at dusk in the middle of a forest. His terror grew as he sat there and mulled over his memories. Out there in the darkness beyond the window a cruel and inevitable fate was watching. Any moment now he would hear a car in the street, a ring at the door, and then the scraping and squeaking of boots here in the room. There was nowhere he could escape to… And then suddenly, with a flash of joy and anger, Viktor no longer cared…

'It was all very well for those nobles who criticized the Tsarist regime,' he told Lyudmila. 'If one of them fell into disfavour, he just got into his carriage and left the capital for his estate in Penza. Everything was waiting for him – his neighbours, the park, all the joys of the country. He could go out hunting or sit down and write his memoirs. I wonder how those Voltairians would have got on with two weeks' redundancy pay and a reference in a sealed envelope that wouldn't even get them a job as a janitor.'

'Don't worry, Vitya,' said Lyudmila. 'We'll survive. I'll work at home. I'll do embroidery and make painted scarves. Or I might work as a laboratory assistant. I'll find a way of feeding you.'

Viktor kissed her hands. She couldn't understand why his face had taken on such a guilty, martyred expression, why a look of such pitiful entreaty should suddenly have come into his eyes.

Viktor paced up and down the room, singing the words of an old romance under his breath: '… he lies forgotten, quite alone…'

When Nadya heard about Viktor's idea of volunteering for the front, she said: 'There's one girl I know, Tonya Kogan, whose father volunteered. He was a specialist in Ancient Greek. He ended up in a reserve regiment near Penza, cleaning latrines. He was very shortsighted; once the captain came in and he swept some rubbish straight at him. The captain gave him a punch that burst his ear-drum.'

'Very well,' said Viktor. 'I won't sweep rubbish at captains.'

These days, Viktor talked to Nadya as though she were an adult. Never before, it seemed, had he got on so well with her. She had taken to coming home straight after school; Viktor thought it was because she didn't want to cause him anxiety and felt very moved. When she talked to him now, she no longer had that mocking look in her eyes; instead, they took on an expression of warmth and seriousness.

One evening Viktor got dressed and set off for the Institute; he wanted to look in through the windows. Perhaps the lights would be on for the second shift? Perhaps Markov had already finished installing the new apparatus?

Suddenly he felt afraid of meeting someone he knew and turned into a side-street. It was dark and deserted. He felt strangely happy. The snow, the night sky, the cool fresh air, the trees and their dark branches, the narrow strip of light escaping through the black-out curtain of a one-storey wooden house – everything was so beautiful. He was breathing in the night air, he was walking down a quiet side-street and no one was looking at him. He was alive, he was free. What more did he need? What more could he want? Then Viktor returned home and his happiness evaporated.

At first he had waited anxiously for Marya Ivanovna to get in touch. The days passed and she still didn't ring. Everything had been taken away from him – his work, his honour, his peace of mind, his belief in himself. Could they really have taken away the last refuge of all-love?

There were moments when he would sit there in despair, his head in his hands, thinking that it was impossible for him to go on living without her. Sometimes he would mutter: 'Well then, well then.' Or he would ask himself: 'Does anyone need me?'

There was, however, one glimmer of brightness at the bottom of his despair – he and Marya Ivanovna had behaved honourably. They had suffered themselves, but they hadn't tormented anyone else. But Viktor knew very well that these thoughts – whether resentful, resigned or philosophical – had very little to do with his deepest feelings. His anger with Marya Ivanovna, his self-mockery, his sorrowful acceptance of the inevitable, his thoughts about his conscience and his duty to Lyudmila – all these were simply a way of combating despair. When he remembered her eyes and her voice, he was overwhelmed by longing for her. Would he never see her again?

When he could no longer bear his sense of loss, his sense of the finality of their separation, he turned to Lyudmila, feeling quite ashamed of himself as he did so, and said: 'You know, I keep worrying about Madyarov. Do you think he's all right? Does anyone know what's happened to him? Maybe you ought to phone Marya Ivanovna after all. What do you think?'

What was most surprising of all was that Viktor went on working. This didn't, however, diminish his anxiety, his grief, or his longing for Marya Ivanovna. His work didn't help him combat grief and terror; he didn't turn to it for relief from his gloom and despair. His work was more to him than just a psychological prop: he worked simply because he was unable not to.

41

Lyudmila told Viktor that she had met the house-manager; he wanted Viktor to call on him in his office.

They tried to guess what he might want. Was it about their excess living space? Viktor's out-of-date passport? Or was it a check-up by the Military Commissariat? Or perhaps some informer had told them that Yevgenia had been living there without being registered?

'You should have asked,' said Viktor. 'Then we wouldn't be sitting here racking our brains like this.'

'Of course I should,' agreed Lyudmila. 'But I was quite taken aback. All he said was: "Ask your husband to come round. He can come in the morning now he no longer goes to work." '

'Heavens! They already know everything.'

'Of course they do. They're all spying on us – the janitors, the lift attendants, the neighbours' daily helps… What's there to be surprised about?'

'Yes, you're right. Do you remember the young man with a Party membership card who came round before the war? The one who asked you to keep an eye open and tell him who visited the neighbours?'