'I certainly do! I gave him such a dressing-down that he was already out in the passage before he had time to say, "But I thought you were socially conscious." '

Lyudmila had told this story hundreds of times. In the past Viktor had always tried to hurry her on; now, though, he kept asking her to tell him more details.

'You know what?' said Lyudmila. 'It might be something to do with the two tablecloths I sold in the market.'

'I don't think so,' said Viktor. 'Then it would be you they wanted to see.'

'Maybe there's something they want you to sign,' said Lyudmila uncertainly.

Viktor sank into the depths of depression. He kept remembering everything he had come out with during his conversations with Shishakov and Kovchenko. Then he thought back to his student days. How he had talked! He had argued with Dmitry. He had argued – though he had also sometimes agreed – with Krymov. But he had never, for even one minute, been an enemy of the Party, an enemy of Soviet power. Suddenly he remembered some particularly outspoken remark he had once made; he went quite cold at the mere thought of it. And then what about Krymov? He was as pure and dedicated a Communist as anyone. He certainly hadn't had any doubts – he was a fanatic. Yet even he had been arrested. And then there had been those terrible evenings with Karimov and Madyarov.

How strange everything was! Usually, as twilight set in, Viktor was haunted by the thought that he was about to be arrested. His feeling of terror grew more and more oppressive. But when at last the end seemed quite inevitable, he would feel a sense of joy and relief. No, he couldn't make head or tail of it.

And sometimes, thinking about the unjust reception his work had met with, he felt as though he were about to go out of his mind. But when the thought that he himself was stupid and talentless and that his work was nothing more than an obtuse, colourless mockery of reality – when this thought ceased to be a mere thought and became instead a fact of life, then he would all of a sudden feel happy.

He no longer even played with the idea of confessing his faults in public. He was a pitiful ignoramus and, even if he did repent, it wouldn't change anything. He was of no use to anyone. Whether he repented or not, he was of equally little significance to the furious State.

How Lyudmila had changed over these last weeks. She no longer phoned up the house-manager to say: 'I need a locksmith at once.' She no longer initiated a public inquiry on the staircase, demanding: 'Who's emptied their rubbish on the floor again?' Even the way she dressed was somehow nervous. One day she put on an expensive fur coat just to go and buy some oil; another day she wrapped herself up in an old grey dress and put on a coat she had meant to give to the lift attendant long before the war had even begun.

Viktor looked at his wife, wondering what the two of them would be like in ten or fifteen years.

'Do you remember Chekhov's story "The Bishop"? The mother used to take her cow out to graze and tell the other women how her son had once been a bishop. No one believed her.'

'No, I don't remember', said Lyudmila. 'I read it when I was a little girl.'

'Well, read it again,' said Viktor irritably. He had always resented Lyudmila's indifference towards Chekhov; he suspected she hadn't even read most of his stories.

How very strange! The weaker and more helpless he became, the nearer he seemed to a state of complete entropy, the more of a nonentity he felt he had become in the eyes of the caretaker and the girls in the rations office, in the eyes of passport inspectors, personnel managers, laboratory assistants, scientists and friends, even in the eyes of his family, perhaps even in the eyes of Chepyzhin and Lyudmila -then the more certain he felt that Masha loved and treasured him. They didn't see one another, but he knew this for sure. After each new humiliation, after each new blow of fate, he would say, 'Can you see me, Masha?'

And so there he was, sitting next to his wife, talking to her, and all the time thinking his own secret thoughts.

The telephone rang. Its ringing now made Viktor as anxious as if it were the middle of the night and a telegram had arrived with news of some tragedy.

'I know what it is,' said Lyudmila. 'Someone promised to phone me about a job in a co-operative.'

She picked up the receiver. Raising her eyebrows, she said: 'He's just coming.'

'It's for you,' she said to Viktor.

Viktor looked at her questioningly.

She covered the receiver with the palm of her hand and said: 'It's a voice I don't know. I can't think…'

He took the receiver from her.

'Certainly,' he said. 'I'll hold on.'

Now it was Lyudmila's turn to look questioningly at him. He groped on the table for a pencil and scrawled a few letters on a scrap of paper. Very slowly, not knowing what she was doing, Lyudmila made the sign of the cross first over herself and then over Viktor. Neither of them said a word.

'This is a bulletin from all the radio services of the Soviet Union.'

A voice unbelievably similar to the voice that had addressed the nation, the army, the entire world on 3 July, 1941, now addressed a solitary individual holding a telephone receiver.

'Good day, comrade Shtrum.'

At that moment everything came together in a jumble of half-formed thoughts and feelings – triumph, a sense of weakness, fear that all this might just be some maniac playing a trick on him, pages of closely written manuscript, that endless questionnaire, the Lubyanka…

Viktor knew that his fate was now being settled. He also had a vague sense of loss, as though he had lost something peculiarly dear to him, something good and touching.

'Good day, Iosif Vissarionovich,' he said, astonished to hear himself pronouncing such unimaginable words on the telephone.

The conversation lasted two or three minutes.

'I think you're working in a very interesting field,' said Stalin.

His voice was slow and guttural and he placed a particularly heavy stress on certain syllables; it was so similar to the voice Viktor had heard on the radio that it sounded almost like an impersonation. It was like Viktor's imitation of Stalin when he was playing the fool at home. It was just as everyone who had ever heard Stalin speak – at a conference or during a private interview – had always described it.

Perhaps it really was a hoax after all?

'I believe in my work,' said Viktor.

Stalin was silent for a moment. He seemed to be thinking over what Viktor had said.

'Has the war made it difficult for you to obtain foreign research reports?' asked Stalin. 'And do you have all the necessary laboratory equipment?'

With a sincerity that he himself found astonishing, Viktor said: 'Thank you very much, Iosif Vissarionovich. My working conditions are perfectly satisfactory.'

Lyudmila was still standing up, as though Stalin could see her. Viktor motioned to her to sit down. Stalin was silent again, thinking over what Viktor had said.

'Goodbye, comrade Shtrum, I wish you success in your work.'

'Goodbye, comrade Stalin.'

He put down the phone.

There they both were, still sitting opposite each other – just as when they had been talking, a few minutes before, about the tablecloths Lyudmila had sold at the Tishinsky market.

'I wish you success in your work,' said Viktor with a strong Georgian accent.

There was something extraordinary about the way nothing in the room had changed. The sideboard, the piano, the chairs, the two unwashed plates on the table, were exactly the same as when Viktor and Lyudmila had been talking about the house-manager. It was enough to drive one insane. Hadn't their whole lives been turned upside down? Wasn't a new destiny now awaiting them?

'What did he say to you?'