A TASTE FOR DOSTOEVSKY

BRIAN W. ALDISS

As can be expected from one of Britain’s foremost science-fiction writers, Brian W. Aldiss presents one of the most unusual time-travelling stories yet written.

* * * *

HE was nearly at the spaceship now, had slithered down the crater wall and was staggering across the few feet of broken rock that separated him from safety. He moved with the manic action of someone compensating for light gravity, his gauntleted hands stretched out before him.

He blundered clumsily against the outcropping teeth of rock, and fell on them. The knee joint of his suit snagged first on the rock, bursting wide. Still tumbling, the man grasped at his knee, feebly trying to clamp in the escaping oxygen-nitrogen mixture.

But help was at hand. They had been tracking his progress through the ship’s viewer. The hatch was cycling open. Two men in spacesuits lowered themselves to the lunar surface and hurried over to the fallen figure.

Grasping him firmly, they pulled him back into the ship. The hatch closed on them. The audience applauded vigorously; they loved the old corn.

In the spaceship cabin, relaxing, the two rescuers lit mescahales and sat back. Eddie Moore sprawled on the floor, gasping. It had been a close one that time. He thought they were never coming for him. Slowly he sat up and removed his helmet. The others had gone by then; there were just a few technicians backstage, clearing up.

Still breathing heavily, Moore climbed to his feet and headed for the dressing room. The lunar gravity did not worry him at all—he had lived here ever since his mother died, three years ago.

When he had changed, tucking himself into his ordinary everyday one-piece, he made his way towards the players’ exit. Half-way there, he changed his mind and climbed down through the airlock of the mocked-up twentieth-century rocketship.

Most of the audience had left the big hall now; there were just a few of them at the gallery at the far end, admiring the cleverly recreated lunar landscape. Eddie trudged through the mock pumice, head down, hands in pockets.

Funny the way it wasn’t until the whole moon surface was built over and the artificial atmosphere working that people had recalled the terrific aesthetic pleasure they had derived from the old primeval landscape of the moon—and had been forced to recreate it here out of artificial materials. That was the way things went. They didn’t appreciate his once nightly performance as the dying spaceman; he so fully empathized with his role that he knew one day he would die of oxygen-failure even while breathing it—and then there might be those, the discerning ones, who would hold the name of Eddie Moore dear, and realize that they had once been in the presence of a great artist.

Looking up, he saw that a solitary figure stood on a ridge of rock, staring moodily up at the fake heavens. He identified it as Cat Vindaloo, the Pakistani director of their show, and called a greeting to him.

Cat nodded sourly and altered his position without actually coming any nearer to Moore.

“We went over well tonight,” Moore said.

“They still pay to come and watch,” Cat said.

“Your trouble is, you’re obsessed with being a failure, Cat. Come on, snap out of it. If there’s anything wrong with the show, it is that it’s too realistic. I’d personally like to see less of a dying fall to end with—maybe a grand finale such as they’d have had at the end of last century, with all the crew parading outside the ship, taking a bow.”

As if the words were dragged out of him by compulsion, Cat said, “You’re beginning to over-act again, Eddie.” Moore realized the director was not standing here purely by accident; he knew that Moore, alone of the troupe, often preferred to trudge home the hard way.

“Let me tell you, I’m the only one of the whole damned batch who still throws himself into the part. You can have no idea of the sort of life I lead, Cat! I’m an obsessive, that’s what, like a character out of Dostoevsky. I live my parts. My life’s all parts. Sometimes I hardly know who I really am….” He saw the beginnings of a glazed expression on Cat’s face and grabbed his tunic in an effort to retain his attention. “I know I’ve told you that before, but it’s true! Listen, it gets so bad that sometimes—sometimes I’m you—I mean, I sort of take your role, because I worry about you so much. I mean, I suppose I am basically afraid —it’s silly, I know—afraid you may be going to sack me from the cast. I must tell you this, though of course it’s embarrassing for us both. I—don’t you sometimes feel I am being you?”

Cat did not seem particularly embarrassed, a fact that disconcerted Moore. “I was aware you were unbalanced, Eddie, of course. We all are in this game, and I suppose I may as well confess—since you are bound to forget every word I tell you—that my particularity is suffering any sort of insult people like to heap on me. So that’s why I attract your attentions, I suppose; it’s destiny. But I fail entirely to see how you mean you are being me.”

“If you don’t understand, it’s no good explaining. What I mean to say is that sometimes for days at a time I think myself—though I’m pure English—to be an Indian like you, living in India!”

“I am a Pakistani, Eddie, as I have told you many times. You are choosing your own way to insult me again, aren’t you, taking advantage of the fact that I fundamentally have this degrading urge to be insulted. How can you live like an Indian here ? And why should I care if you do ? Your life is your own to make a fool with if you care to!”

“That I would dispute if you were capable of arguing properly. How far are any of our lives our own ? Where do we live? Who lives us? Which is us? But to pose such philosophical questions to you—pah, it’s laughable! I must be out of my mind!”

“The very truest word I have heard from you for months! You’re mad!”

“Don’t you call me mad!” The two tiny human figures confronted each other in the vast grey reconstructed landscape. Suddenly, one of them flung himself on the other. For a moment, they struggled together and then fell, rolling over and grasping at each other’s throats, lost on the ill-lit and broken plain. They became quieter. Finally one of them rose. He staggered off in the direction of the exit, gaining control of his movements as he went, and then breaking into a run that took him as fast as possible from the scene of the struggle.

* * * *

When he got back to his apartment, he went straight into the little washing cubicle behind the surgery and rinsed his face and hands. He stood there bent at the basin for a long while, soaking his cheeks in cool water. Life was such nonsense that the more serious it grew, the harder it became to take it seriously.

The more he thought about it, the more amused he became. By the time he was drying himself on a fluffy white towel, he was laughing aloud. The moon indeed! The twenty-second century! Funny though it was, this nonsense must be put a stop to, once and for all. Clearly, he must go and see Etienne.

He rolled down his sleeves, walked through the surgery, down the passage, and to the front door. Looking through the two panels of frosted glass, he could see that beyond lay a fine summer’s evening. Although it was almost past nine-teen-fifteen, the sun was still shining brightly, and quite high in the sky. He paused. Just beyond the door he would see the brass plate that announced he was practising as a dentist; and the name on it would be—Vindaloo or Morre? He hesitated. He hoped, Morre.

He opened the door. On the brass panel, polished by the concierge that morning, appeared his name: Morre. He beamed with relief. Beside the panel was a little pasteboard card with his surgery hours and reminders to patients to present their health cards, all neatly written out in French and Flemish.

He strolled down the side street and on to the main road, where the quiet was instantly lost. The garish seaside street carried a lot of through traffic, often international traffic hurrying from France through to Holland or Germany. Taking the undercut, Morre crossed the road and walked a couple of blocks to Etienne’s place. On the way, he stopped at a little flower stall and bought her a posy of blue cornflowers; they would soften the blow of what he had to say.

Etienne lived over a magazine and paperback shop in a flat she shared with two other young Belgian ladies—both happily away on holiday at present. Her pleasant little living room looked over the low dunes and the wide beach to the sea.

“You are very late this evening, Eddie,” she said, smiling as she let him in.

“Perhaps so, but why attack me for it? It’s my misfortune, isn’t it—or so I would have thought it if you had greeted me lovingly!”

“Eddie, don’t be that way! I did not reproach you, my darling!” She stood on tiptoe, as he had noticed she often did. She was short and very shapely, in a little blue dress that went well with the cornflowers. She looked very sexy standing like that.

“Please come off your tiptoes,” he said. “You are trying to fool me.”

“Darling, I was not—and I swear to you, I did not even notice I was on my tiptoes. Does it disturb you to see me on my tiptoes? It’s not usually reckoned as an indecent posture, but if it offends you, I promise I won’t do it again.”

“Now you are trying to humour me! You know nothing maddens me like being humoured! Why can’t you speak to me like a reasonable human being?”

She flung herself down rather prettily in the wide armchair. “Oh, believe me, if you were a reasonable human being, I’d make every effort to talk to you like one. You’re absolutely nuts, aren’t you, Eddie?”

He had a brilliant idea. It would scare the pants off her. “Yes, you have uncovered my secret: I am nuts.” Without undue haste, he lifted up the cornflowers before him and ate them one by one. Then he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. “I am nuts and that is what I wished to talk to you about this evening.”

“I have to go out almost at once, Eddie…” She looked as if she would have liked to faint. When he sat down close to her on the straight-back chair with the tapestry seat that was an heirloom from her old Flemish grandmother, she became rather fixed in expression, and said nothing more.

“What I was going to tell you, Etienne, darling, what I especially came over for, was to say that I feared our engagement must be broken off. It’s not so much that we are not suited, although that is a consideration; it is more that I don’t even seem to know what century I am living in— from which it follows, I suppose, that I don’t even know what country I am living in—which in turn means that I don’t know what language I am speaking, or what my name is. In fact I don’t even know what planet I’m on, whether it’s the Moon, or Earth, or Mars.”

Etienne gestured out of the window towards the beach, where two sand yachts were bowling merrily along.

“Take a look for yourself. Does that look like Mars ? You were born on this coast; you know the North Sea when you see it, don’t you?”

“Don’t interrupt me! Of course I can see it’s the flaming North Sea-“

“Well then, don’t talk so stupid! Look, Eddie, I’ve really had about enough of your nonsense! You come up here every Saturday night and break off our engagement-“

“I do not! I’ve never broken it off before, often though I’ve been tempted to!”

“You do, too! You don’t know what you do do! How do you think I like it? I’ve got my pride you know! I can take emotional scenes as well as the next girl—in fact sometimes I rather think I enjoy them in a kinky sort of way. Maybe I’m the kinky kind-“

He shook a fist under her nose. “No self-analysis, please, at least while I’m speaking! Have you any interest in me or haven’t you ? And who am I ? Who indeed ? Man’s eternal quest for identity—pity I have to carry mine out with such rotten partners.”

“If you’re going to be insulting, you can go, Eddie Morre! I know perfectly well what’s wrong with you, and don’t think I’m not sympathetic just because I don’t show it. You have built up that fine little dentist’s practice just so’s you will have enough money to support me comfortably when we get married, and the overwork has resulted in brain fatigue. Poor Eddie! All you need is a little rest— these fantasies about Mars and the Moon are just phantoms of escape filtering across your over-heated cerebellum, reminding you of the need for rest and quiet. You know how damned quiet it is on Mars.”

Tears filled his eyes. It seemed she really was sympathetic. And perhaps her explanation was correct. He threw his arms round her in perfect forgiveness and attempted to kiss her.

“Do you mind! Your breath stinks of cornflowers!”

The two vast human figures confronted each other in the tiny artificial town-room. Sparked by sudden anger, he grasped her more closely. They struggled. Nobody was there to see a chair tipped over and they rolled on to the floor, arms round each other’s necks. After some while, they were both still. Then one of the figures rose and hurried out of the apartment, slamming the door in haste.

* * * *

Plainly, he was in need of some form of purification. When it was dark, he changed into clean garments and walked down to the burning ghats. The usual crowds of beggars stood and lay in the temple doorway; he gave to them more generously than usual.

Inside the temple, it was stuffy, although a cool breeze moved near the floor, fluttering the tiny lights of the faithful—who were not many this evening, so that they formed only a small cluster of insects in the great dim hallowed interior of the hall.

E. V. Morilal prostrated himself for a long while, his forehead to the stone, allowing his senses to go out amid the generations who had pressed foreheads and feet to this slab in the solemn contortions of devotion. He felt no devotion, only isolation, the opposite of devotion, but the sense of other human beings was some sort of balm.

At last he rose and walked through the temple on to the ghats. Here the smells that lingered in the building took on definition: wood smoke, burning unguents, the mouldy Ganges slowly trundling by, bearing its immemorial burden of holiness, disease and filth. As ever, there were a few people, men and women, bathing in their clothes off the steps, calling on their gods as they sank into the brown flood. Morilal went tentatively to the edge of the water, scooping up a handful of the stuff and pouring it on his shaven crown, letting it run pleasurably down into his clothes.

It was all very noisy. There were boats plying on the river, and children and youths shouting on the bridge, some of them with transistor radios.

“Hello! Back in the twentieth century now!” Morilal thought sharply.

Restless, he shuffled back and forth among the funeral pyres, some of which were unlit, awaiting midnight, some of which were almost burnt out, the human freight reduced to drifting ash or a bit of recalcitrant femur. Mourners crouched by most of the biers, some silent, some maintaining an arbitrary wailing. He kept looking for his mother. She had been dead three years; she should have been immolated long ago.

His old friend Professor Chundaprassi was walking slowly up and down, helping himself along with a stick. He nodded to Morilal.

“May I have the honour and pleasure of joining you, professor, if I do not interrupt a chain of meditation ?”

“You interrupt nothing, my friend. In fact, I was about to ask if you would delight me by joining me, but I feared you might be about to engage in a little mourning.”

“No, no, I have only myself to mourn for. You possibly know I have been away for some while?”

“Forgive me, but I was not aware. You recall I greeted you yesterday at the railway station. Have you been away since then?”

Morilal had fallen in with Chundaprassi, walking sedately through the puddles and wet ash; now he stopped in some confusion and gazed into the wrinkled face of his companion.

“Professor—you are a professor, so you understand many things above the powers of ordinary men such as myself—though even as I say ‘ordinary men such as myself’, I am conscious of my own extraordinariness. I am a unique being-“

“Of course, of course, and the point really cannot be too greatly emphasized. No two men are alike! There are a thousand characteristics, as I have always maintained-“

“Quite so, but I’m hardly talking about a characteristic, if you will forgive my being so disagreeable as to interrupt you when you are plainly just embarking on an interesting if somewhat long lecture on human psychology. And forgive me, also, if I seem to be talking rather like a Dostoevsky character—it’s just that lately I’ve been obsessed-“

“Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky?” The professor scratched his head. “Naturally I am familiar with the major writing of the Russian novelist … But I fail momentarily to recall which of his novels is set, even partially, in Benares.”

“You mistake my meaning—unintentionally, I’m sure, since a little sarcasm is positively beyond you. I happen to be in a spot, professor, and if you can’t help, then to hell with you! My trouble is that my ego, or my consciousness, or something, is not fixed in time or space. Can you believe me if I tell you that no more than a couple of hours ago, I was a Belgian dentist at a seaside resort ?”

“Allow me to wish you good night, sir!” The professor was about to turn away when Morilal grasped him by one arm.

“Professor Chundaprassi! Please tell me why you are going so suddenly!”

“You believe you are a white man! A Belgian white man! Clearly you are victim of some dreadful hallucination brought about by reading too much in the newspapers about the colour bar. You’ll be a Negro, next, no doubt! Good night!”

He pulled himself free from Morilal’s grip and tottered hurriedly from the burning ghat.

“I will be a Negro and be damned to you, if I so desire!” Morilal exclaimed aloud.

“Congratulations, sir! You are quite right to exercise your freedom of judgment in such matters!” It was one of the bathers who spoke, a fat man now busily oiling his large and glistening breasts; Morilal had noticed that he was avidly listening to the conversation with the professor and had already taken a dislike to the man.

“What do you know about it ?” he enquired.

“More than you may think! There are many people like yourself, sir, who are able to move from character to character, like birds from flower to flower. I myself, but yesterday, was a beautiful young Japanese lady aged only twenty years with a tiny and beautifully-proportioned body, and a lover of twenty-two of amazing ardour.”

“You are inventing filth, you fat old Bengali!” So saying, he jumped at the man, who tripped him neatly but failed to stand back in time, so that Morilal took him with him as he fell, and they rolled together, hands at each other’s throat, down the slimy steps into the Ganges.

* * * *

He dragged himself out of the river. For a while, as he lay on the bank with his head throbbing, he thought he had experienced another epileptic fit. Something of the chequered past came back to him, and he dragged himself up.

He was lying half out of a shallow stream, under a stone bridge. As he got to his feet, he saw the stream cut through a small country town. The place seemed to be deserted: so empty and so still that it looked almost like an artificial place. Slowly, he walked forward, down the curving street, staring at the small stone houses with their gardens neat and unmoving in the thin sun.

By the time he reached the other end of the street, where the buildings stopped and the fields began again, he had seen nobody. The only movement had come from an old cat, stuffily walking down a garden path. As he looked back the way he had come, he saw that he had just passed an unpretentious building bearing the sign POLICE STATION. For several minutes, he stared at it, and then moved briskly towards it, opened the door and marched in.

A portly man with a grey moustache that drooped uncomfortably over his lips sat reading a newspaper behind a counter. He wore a green uniform. When the door opened, he looked up, nodded politely and put down his paper.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“I want to report a murder. In fact, I want to report three murders.”

“Three murders! Are you sure?”

“Not really. I don’t know whether I killed the persons concerned or not, but it must be worth checking. There was a friend of mine, a producer, and my fiancee, and a poor black man in India. I can give you their names. At least, I think I can remember. Then there’s the time and place …”

His voice died. He could see it was going to be difficult. His impulse had been to enlist help; perhaps it had not been a wise impulse. And had he ever been anyone else, or had it all been the product of a fever?

The policeman slowly came round the counter, adjusting his face until it was absolutely without expression.

“You seem to have some very interesting ideas, sir, if I may say so. You wouldn’t mind if I ask you a question before you go any further? Good. You say you don’t know whether you killed these unknown persons or not ?”

“I—I get blackouts. I am never myself. I seem to work through a lot of different people. You’d better assume I did kill them.”

“As you like, sir. Which brings me to my next question. How do you mean, one of them was a black man from India?”

“It was as I said. He was very black. No offence meant— it’s just a fact. Quite an amusing man, now I come to think of it, but black.”

“His clothes were black, sir?”

“His clothes were white. He was black. His skin. Good heavens, man, you stare at me—I suppose you know that the people of India are pretty dark?”

The policeman stared at him with blank astonishment. “Their skins are dark, you say?”

“Am I offending you in some way? I didn’t invent the idea, don’t forget! As sure as the good Lord took it into his head to make you and me this rather unattractive pink-white-grey tone, he made the Indians more or less brown and the Negroes more or less black. You do know that Negroes are black, I suppose?”

The policeman banged his fist on the desk. “You are mad! By golly, you are mad! Negroes are as white as you are.”

“You mean the Negroes in Africa?”

“Negroes anywhere! Whoever heard of a black Negro?”

“The very word means black. It’s from a Latin root or something.”

“From a Greek root meaning tall!”

“You liar!”

“You simpleton!” The policeman leant over and grabbed his newspaper, smoothed it out angrily with his fists. “Here, this will show you! I’ll make you admit your stupidity, coming in here and playing your pointless jokes on me! An intellectual, I can see!”

He ruffled through the paper. Moore caught a glimpse of its title The Alabama Star and stared up incredulously at the policeman. For the first time, he realized the man’s features were distinctly negroid, though his skin was white and his hair fair and straight. He emitted a groan of fright.

“You a Negro?”

“Course I am. And you look at this news item—FIRE IN NEGRO UNIVERSITY. See that picture. See any negro there with black skin ? What’s got into you ?”

“You may well ask, and I wish you’d stop grasping my shirt like that—it feels as if you have some chest hair with it, thanks. I’m not trying to play a joke on you. I must be in—well, I must be in some sort of an alternate universe or something. Hey, perhaps you are kidding me! Do you really mean people in Africa and India and so on have skins the same colour as us?”

“How else could they be any other colour ? Ask yourself that!”

“They were where I come from.”

“Now, how could they be ? Just how could they be ?”

“I don’t know! It’s a matter of history. Some races are white, some yellow, some brown, some black.”

“Some idea! And you say this arrangement happened in history. When?”

“I didn’t say that! It happened way back … well, I don’t know when.”

“I suppose your men originated from different coloured apes, huh?”

“No, I think it all happened later than that… Stone Age, maybe…. Honestly, now you confront me with it, I must admit I don’t exactly know when the arrangement came about or how. It does sound a bit unlikely, doesn’t it ?”

“Anyone who could dream up the idea of men all different colours—wow! You must be a real nut! I suppose like it’s allegorical, with the good people being white and the bad black?”

“No, no, not at all—though I admit a few of the white saw it like that. Or did I invent it all, the whole colour question? Perhaps it’s all another facet of my guilt, an awful phantasm I have thrown up from the depths of my mind, where I did the murders. They can’t have any subjective reality, either. Wait! 1 remember! I’m nearly there! Fyodor Dostoevsky, I’m coming!”

Hurriedly, he punched the policeman in the chest and braced himself for the reciprocal blow….

* * * *

He was tramping through the sand, ankle deep even in the main street of this shabby town. In the side streets, the sand climbed almost to the eaves of the shoddy wooden houses. Among the houses were buildings that he identified after a moment’s thought as mosques; they were no more than huts with wooden minarets added. There were Tartars here, moving slowly in their costumes of skin, some leading the two-humped camels of Bactria behind them through the street.

The man with whiskers and a stoop was just ahead of him. Morovitch drew level and looked sideways. He recognized the beetling brow and the haunted eyes, set deep in their sockets.

“Second Class Soldier of the Line Dostoevsky?” he asked.

Dostoevsky stared back at him. “I’ve not seen you in Semiplatinsk before. Are you with the Seventh Siberian Battalion?”

“The correct answer to that, operatively, is no. I—well, sir, if I could talk to you for a moment… the fact is …”

“It’s not a message from Marya Dmitrievna, is it?” Dostoevsky asked impatiently, his face pale.

“No, no, nothing so banal. In fact, I have come from the future to speak to you. Please, cannot we go to your room?”

Dostoevsky led the way in a sort of daze, shaking his head and muttering. He was still serving out his exile in Siberia, no longer as a convict but as a humble soldier in the army. His present home, to which he led Morovitch, was of the simplest, a poor room in one of the small wooden houses, containing little more than a bed, a table and one chair, and a round iron stove that could scarcely heat the flimsy room when the cruel winter came round again.

Humbly, Dostoevsky offered the intruder the chair, sat down on the bed himself, and produced some tobacco so that he and the visitor might roll themselves cigarettes and smoke together.

He passed a hand wearily over his face. “Where do you say you come from ? You’re not—not a Decembrist ?”

“I am from what to you is the future, sir. In my age, my race recognizes you as one of the great novelists of the world, by virtue of your profound insight into the guilt always lingering in the human mind. You are one of the supreme artists of suffering.”

“Alas, I can write no more! The old ability has gone!”

“But even now you must be gathering together your notes on prison life for the book you will call The House of the Dead. Turgenev will say the bath-house scene is pure Dante. It will be read and remembered long after you are dead, and translated far beyond the bounds of your native Russia. And greater masterpieces of guilt and suffering will follow.”

Dostoevsky hid his face in his hands. “No more! You will silence me forever if you speak thus, whether I believe it or not. You talk like the voices inside me, when another attack is coming upon me.”

“I travelled back to you from the far future through a series of epileptic hosts. Others of my kind travel back through other illnesses—it is a matter of what we specialize in. I plan to travel slowly back through the generations to Julius Caesar, and beyond that … but you are a very important landmark on my way, for you are integral to the whole philosophy of my race, honoured sir! Indeed, you might say you were one of the founders of our philosophy.”

The writer rubbed the back of his neck in discomfort and shuffled his rough boots on the floor, unable to look straight at Morovitch. “You keep saying ‘our race’ and ‘our kind’, but what am I to understand by that? Are you not Morovitch?”

“I have infested Morovitch. We are parasitic—I am merely distorting his life a little, as I have distorted the lives of those I infested on my way back to you. Ah, the emotions I have stirred! How you would relish them, Fyodor Mikhaylovich! I have been in all kinds of persons and in all kinds of worlds, even in those that lie close in the probability spectrum to Earth—to some where man never formed himself into nationalities, to one where he had never divided into races with different coloured skin, to one where he never managed to gain supremacy over his fellow animals! All, all those worlds, absolutely stuffed with suffering! If you could see them you might think you yourself had created them.”

“Now you mock me! I can create nothing, unless I have created you. Forgive me if that sounds insulting, but I have a fever on me today, which induces me to doubt somewhat your reality. Perhaps you’re part of my fever.”

“I’m real enough! My race—you see I use the term again, but I would find it difficult to define it to you. You see, there are more millions of years ahead than you could comprehend, and in those long periods man changes very radically. In my time, man is first dependent on a milk-meat animal he breeds—a sort of super-cow—and then entirely parasitic upon it. Over a millennia, he develops an astounding freedom and can travel parasitically back through the generations, enjoying the suffering of all, like a silverfish boring back through the pages of a large and musty volume: a silverfish who can read, sir, if you follow my image. You see—I let you into the secret!”

Dostoevsky coughed and stubbed out his ragged cigarette. He sat uncomfortably on the narrow bed, crossing and recrossing his legs. “You know I cannot believe what you say … Yet, tell me no secrets! I already know enough for one man; I’m burdened with knowledge about which I often ask myself, What good is it ? And if it is true, as you say, that I have understanding of some of the dark things in the human heart, that’s only because I have been forced— though often I myself was the forcer—to look into the dark things in my own heart. And I have tried to reach truth; you are admitting, aren’t you, that you distort the lives you—well, if I say ‘infest’, it is your own word, isn’t it?”

“We get more fun … A couple of days ago, I caused a Belgian dentist to jilt his girl friend. Maybe he even murdered her! We live on the dark passions. The human race always had a morbid tendency that way, you know, so don’t think of us as too abnormal. Most literature is just gloating over the sorrows and sins of others—of which you are one of the supreme and most honoured exponents.”

There were little flies that flipped down from the stained walls and landed persistently on the hands and faces of the two men. Dostoevsky had rolled himself another cigarette and drew heavily on it, looking less as if he enjoyed it than as if he supposed it might defeat the flies. He spoke ramblingly. “You have the case all wrong, sir. Forgive me if I criticize by remarking that your attitude seems very perverted and vile to me. I have never revelled in suffering, I hope …” He shook his head. “Or perhaps I have, who knows? But you must leave me, for I feel remarkably ill of a sudden, and in any case, as I say, you are wrong.”

Morovitch laughed. “How can millions of years of evolution be ‘wrong’ in any sense? Man is what he is, becomes what he is from what he was. Strong emotions are a permanent need.” He rose. Dostoevsky, out of politeness, rose too, so that for a moment they stood very close together, staring into each other’s eyes.

“I shall come back to see you tomorrow,” Morovitch said. “And then I shall leave this ignorant tribesman and infest—well, sir, it will be the greatest connoisseur’s treat possible from our point of view—I shall infest you, and finally gain new insights into what suffering is like. It was so as to apply, as it were, the gilt to the gingerbread, that I called first, so that I may know you inside and out.”

Dostoevsky began to laugh, but it broke at once, changing into a cough. “I see you are, as you claim, an illness.”

“Tomorrow, I will be part of your illness. Goodbye, sir, and thank you for your courtesy and evident disbelief— until tomorrow!”

He turned towards the door, on which the writer had hung a battered painting of a woman. As he did so, Dostoevsky bent quickly down and snatched up the poker from its resting place beside the stove. With a mighty swing, he brought it down across the man’s unprotected head, much as Raskolnikov would one day be described as bringing down the hatchet on the old lady’s head in Crime and Vunishment. With scarcely a groan, Morovitch sank to the floor, one arm sprawling out across the crumpled bed.

Dostoevsky put the poker down. Then he began to tremble.