Chapter 5: Not You! Not You!
On the way to Ivan he had to pass by the house where Katerina Ivanovna was staying. There was light in the windows. He suddenly stopped and decided to go in. It was more than a week since he had seen Katerina Ivanovna. But it just occurred to him that Ivan might be with her now, especially on the eve of such a day. He rang and was starting up the stairs, dimly lit by a Chinese lantern, when he saw a man coming down in whom, as they drew near each other, he recognized his brother. He was then just leaving Katerina Ivanovna’s.
“Ah, it’s only you,” Ivan Fyodorovich said drily. “Well, good-bye. Are you coming to see her?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t recommend it; she’s ‘agitated,’ and you will upset her even more.”
“No, no!” a voice suddenly cried from above, from the instantly opened door. “Alexei Fyodorovich, are you coming from him?”
“Yes, I was just there.”
“Did he ask you to tell me anything? Come in, Alyosha, and you, Ivan Fyodorovich, you must, must come back. Do you hear me!”
Such an imperious note sounded in Katya’s voice that Ivan Fyodorovich, after hesitating a moment, decided after all to go upstairs again with Alyosha.
“She was eavesdropping!” he whispered irritably to himself, but Alyosha heard it.
“Allow me to keep my coat on,” Ivan Fyodorovich said as he entered the drawing room. “And I won’t sit down. I won’t stay more than a minute.”
“Sit down, Alexei Fyodorovich,” Katerina Ivanovna said, while she herself remained standing. She had changed little during this time, but her dark eyes gleamed with an ominous fire. Alyosha remembered afterwards that she had seemed extremely good-looking to him at that moment.
“Well, what did he ask you to tell me?”
“Only one thing,” Alyosha said, looking directly in her face, “that you should spare yourself and not give any evidence in court ... ,” he faltered a little, “of what happened between you ... at the time of your first acquaintance ... in that town...”
“Ah, about bowing down for the money!” she joined in with a bitter laugh. “And what, is he afraid for himself or for me—eh? He said I should spare— but whom? Him, or myself? Tell me, Alexei Fyodorovich.”
Alyosha was watching intently, trying to understand her.
“Both yourself and him,” he spoke softly.
“So!” she snapped somehow viciously, and suddenly blushed. “You do not know me yet, Alexei Fyodorovich,” she said menacingly, “and I do not know myself yet. Perhaps you will want to trample me underfoot after tomorrow’s questioning.”
“You will testify honestly,” said Alyosha, “that’s all that’s necessary.”
“Women are often dishonest,” she snarled. “Just an hour ago I was thinking how afraid I am to touch that monster ... like a viper ... but no, he’s still a human being for me! But is he a murderer? Is he the murderer?” she exclaimed hysterically, all of a sudden, turning quickly to Ivan Fyodorovich. Alyosha understood at once that she had already asked Ivan Fyodorovich the same question, perhaps only a moment before he arrived, and not for the first but for the hundredth time, and that they had ended by quarreling.
“I’ve been to see Smerdyakov ... It was you, you who convinced me that he is a parricide. I believed only you, my dear!” she went on, still addressing Ivan Fyodorovich. The latter smiled as if with difficulty. Alyosha was startled to hear this “my dear.” He would not even have suspected they were on such terms.[298]
“Well, enough, in any case,” Ivan snapped. “I’m going. I’ll come tomorrow.” And turning at once, he left the room and went straight to the stairs. Katerina Ivanovna, with a sort of imperious gesture, suddenly seized Alyosha by both hands.
“Go after him! Catch up with him! Don’t leave him alone for a minute!” she whispered rapidly. “He’s mad. Did you know he’s gone mad? He has a fever, a nervous fever! The doctor told me. Go, run after him...”
Alyosha jumped up and rushed after Ivan Fyodorovich. He was not even fifty paces away.
“What do you want?” he suddenly turned to Alyosha, seeing that he was catching up with him. “She told you to run after me because I’m crazy. I know it all by heart,” he added irritably.
“She’s mistaken, of course, but she’s right that you are ill,” said Alyosha. “I was looking at your face just now, when we were there; you look very ill, really, Ivan!”
Ivan walked on without stopping. Alyosha followed him.
“And do you know, Alexei Fyodorovich, just how one loses one’s mind?” Ivan asked in a voice suddenly quite soft, quite unirritated now, in which suddenly the most ingenuous curiosity could be heard. “No, I don’t know; I suppose there are many different kinds of madness.”
“And can one observe oneself losing one’s mind?”
“I think it must be impossible to watch oneself in such a case,” Alyosha answered with surprise. Ivan fell silent for half a minute.
“If you want to talk to me about something, please change the subject,” he said suddenly.
“Here, so that I don’t forget, is a letter for you,” Alyosha said timidly, and, pulling Liza’s letter from his pocket, he handed it to him. Just then they came up to a streetlamp. Ivan recognized the hand at once.
“Ah, it’s from that little demon!” he laughed maliciously, and, without unsealing the envelope, he suddenly tore it into several pieces and tossed them to the wind. The scraps flew all over.
“She’s not yet sixteen, I believe, and already offering herself!” he said contemptuously, and started down the street again.
“What do you mean, offering herself?” Alyosha exclaimed.
“You know, the way loose women offer themselves.”
“No, no, Ivan, don’t say that!” Alyosha pleaded ruefully and ardently. “She’s a child, you’re offending a child! She’s ill, she’s very ill; she, too, may be losing her mind ... I had no choice but to give you her letter ... I wanted, on the contrary, to hear something from you ... to save her.”
“You’ll hear nothing from me. If she’s a child, I’m not her nanny. Keep still, Alexei. Don’t go on. I’m not even thinking about it.”
They again fell silent for a minute or so.
“She’ll be praying all night now to the Mother of God, to show her how to act at the trial tomorrow,” he suddenly spoke again, sharply and spitefully.
“You ... you mean Katerina Ivanovna?”
“Yes. Whether to come as Mitenka’s savior, or as his destroyer. She will pray for her soul to be illumined. She doesn’t know yet, you see, she hasn’t managed to prepare herself. She, too, takes me for a nanny, she wants me to coo over her!”
“Katerina Ivanovna loves you, brother,” Alyosha said sorrowfully.
“Maybe. Only I don’t fancy her.”
“She’s suffering. Why, then, do you ... sometimes ... say things to her that give her hope?” Alyosha went on, with timid reproach. “I know you used to give her hope—forgive me for talking like this,” he added.
“I cannot act as I ought to here, break it off and tell her directly!” Ivan said irritably. “I must wait until they pass sentence on the murderer. If I break off with her now, she’ll take vengeance on me by destroying the scoundrel in court tomorrow, because she hates him and she knows she hates him. There are nothing but lies here, lie upon lie! But now, as long as I haven’t broken off with her, she still has hopes, and will not destroy the monster, knowing how much I want to get him out of trouble. Oh, when will that cursed sentence come!”
The words “murderer” and “monster” echoed painfully in Alyosha’s heart.
“But in what way can she destroy our brother?” he asked, pondering Ivan’s words. “What testimony can she give that would destroy Mitya outright?”
“You don’t know about it yet. She has hold of a document, in Mitenka’s own hand, which proves mathematically that he killed Fyodor Pavlovich.”
“That can’t be!” Alyosha exclaimed.
“Why can’t it? I’ve read it myself.”
“There can be no such document!” Alyosha repeated hotly. “There cannot be, because he is not the murderer. It was not he who murdered father, not he!”
Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly stopped.
“Then who is the murderer, in your opinion ?” he asked somehow with obvious coldness,[299] and a certain haughty note even sounded in the tone of the question.
“You know who,” Alyosha said softly, and with emotion.
“Who? You mean that fable about the mad epileptic idiot? About Smerdyakov?”
Alyosha suddenly felt himself trembling all over.
“You know who,” escaped him helplessly. He was breathless.
“Who? Who?” Ivan cried almost fiercely now. All his reserve suddenly vanished.
“I know only one thing,” Alyosha said, still in the same near whisper. “It was not you who killed father.”
“‘Not you’! What do you mean by ‘not you’?” Ivan was dumbfounded.
“It was not you who killed father, not you!” Alyosha repeated firmly.
The silence lasted for about half a minute.
“But I know very well it was not me—are you raving? “ Ivan said with a pale and crooked grin. His eyes were fastened, as it were, on Alyosha. The two were again standing under a streetlamp.
“No, Ivan, you’ve told yourself several times that you were the murderer.”
“When did I ... ? I was in Moscow ... When did I say so?” Ivan stammered, completely at a loss.
“You’ve said it to yourself many times while you were alone during these two horrible months,” Alyosha continued as softly and distinctly as before. But he was now speaking not of himself, as it were, not of his own will, but obeying some sort of irresistible command. “You’ve accused yourself and confessed to yourself that you and you alone are the murderer. But it was not you who killed him, you are mistaken, the murderer was not you, do you hear, it was not you! God has sent me to tell you that.”
They both fell silent. For a whole, long minute the silence continued. They both stood there looking into each other’s eyes. They were both pale. Suddenly Ivan began shaking all over and gripped Alyosha hard by the shoulder.
“You were in my room!” he uttered in a rasping whisper. “You were in my room at night when he came ... Confess ... you saw him, didn’t you?”
“Who are you talking about ... Mitya?” Alyosha asked in bewilderment.
“Not him—devil take the monster!” Ivan shouted frenziedly. “Can you possibly know that he’s been coming to me? How did you find out? Speak!”
“Who is he? I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Alyosha murmured, frightened now.
“No, you do know ... otherwise how could you ... it’s impossible that you don’t know ...”
But suddenly he seemed to check himself. He stood and seemed to be thinking something over. A strange grin twisted his lips.
“Brother,” Alyosha began again, in a trembling voice, “I’ve said this to you because you will believe my word, I know it. I’ve spoken this word to you for the whole of your life: it was not you! Do you hear? For the whole of your life. And it is God who has put it into my heart to say this to you, even if you were to hate me forever after ...”
But Ivan Fyodorovich had now apparently managed to regain control of himself.
“Alexei Fyodorovich,” he spoke with a cold smile, “I cannot bear prophets and epileptics, messengers from God especially, you know that only too well. From this moment on I am breaking with you, and, I suppose, forever. I ask you to leave me this instant, at this very crossroads. Besides, your way home is down this lane. Beware especially of coming to me today! Do you hear?”
He turned and walked straight off, with firm steps, not looking back.
“Brother,” Alyosha called after him, “if anything happens to you today, think of me first of all...!”
But Ivan did not answer. Alyosha stood at the crossroads under the street-lamp until Ivan disappeared completely into the darkness. Then he turned down the lane and slowly made his way home. He and Ivan lived separately, in different lodgings: neither of them wanted to live in the now empty house of Fyodor Pavlovich. Alyosha rented a furnished room with a family of tradespeople; and Ivan Fyodorovich lived quite far from him, and occupied a spacious and rather comfortable apartment in the wing of a good house belonging to the well-to-do widow of an official. But his only servant in the whole wing was an ancient, completely deaf old woman, rheumatic all over, who went to bed at six o’clock in the evening and got up at six o’clock in the morning. Ivan Fyodorovich had become undemanding to a strange degree during those two months and liked very much to be left completely alone. He even tidied the one room he occupied himself; as for the other rooms in his lodgings, he rarely even went into them. Having come up to the gates of his house, and with his hand already on the bell, he stopped. He felt himself still trembling all over with a spiteful trembling. He suddenly let go of the bell, spat, turned around, and quickly went off again to quite a different, opposite end of town, about a mile and a half from his apartment, to a tiny, lopsided log house, the present lodgings of Maria Kondratievna, formerly Fyodor Pavlovich’s neighbor, who used to come to Fyodor Pavlovich’s kitchen to get soup and to whom Smerdyakov, in those days, used to sing his songs and play on the guitar. She had sold her former house, and now lived with her mother in what was almost a hut, and the sick, nearly dying Smerdyakov had been living with them ever since Fyodor Pavlovich’s death. It was to him that Ivan Fyodorovich now directed his steps, drawn by a sudden and irresistible consideration.
Chapter 6: The First Meeting with Smerdyakov
This was now the third time that Ivan Fyodorovich had gone to talk with Smerdyakov since his return from Moscow. The first time he had seen him and spoken with him after the catastrophe was immediately upon the day of his arrival; then he had visited him once more two weeks later. But after this second time, he stopped his meetings with Smerdyakov, so that now he had not seen him, and had scarcely heard anything about him, for more than a month. Ivan Fyodorovich had returned from Moscow only on the fifth day following his father’s death, so that he did not even find him in his coffin: the burial took place just the day before he arrived. The reason for Ivan Fyodorovich’s delay was that Alyosha, not knowing his precise address in Moscow, had resorted to Katerina Ivanovna to send the telegram, and she, being equally ignorant of his actual address, had sent the telegram to her sister and aunt, reckoning that Ivan Fyodorovich would go to see them as soon as he arrived in Moscow. But he had gone to see them only on the fourth day after his arrival, and, having read the telegram, he at once, of course, came flying back here. The first one he met was Alyosha, but after talking with him, he was greatly amazed to find that he refused even to suspect Mitya and pointed directly to Smerdyakov as the murderer, contrary to all other opinions in our town. Having then met with the police commissioner and the prosecutor, having learned the details of the accusation and the arrest, he was still more surprised at Alyosha, and ascribed his opinion to his highly aroused brotherly feeling and compassion for Mitya, whom, as Ivan knew, Alyosha loved very much. Incidentally, let us say just two words once and for all about Ivan’s feelings towards his brother Dmitri Fyodorovich: he decidedly disliked him, and the most he occasionally felt for him was compassion, but even then mixed with great contempt, reaching the point of squeamishness. The whole of Mitya, even his whole figure, was extremely unsympathetic to him. Katerina Ivanovna’s love for him Ivan regarded with indignation. Nonetheless he also met with the imprisoned Mitya on the day of his arrival, and this meeting not only did not weaken his conviction of Mitya’s guilt, but even strengthened it. He found his brother agitated, morbidly excited. Mitya was verbose, but absentminded and scattered, spoke very abruptly, accused Smerdyakov, and was terribly confused. Most of all he kept referring to those same three thousand roubles that the deceased had “stolen” from him. “The money was mine, it was mine,” Mitya kept repeating, “even if I had stolen it, I’d be right.” He contested almost none of the evidence against him, and when he did interpret facts in his favor, again he did so quite inconsistently and absurdly—generally as though he did not even wish to justify himself at all before Ivan or anyone else; on the contrary, he was angry, proudly scanted the accusations, cursed and seethed. He merely laughed contemptuously at Grigory’s evidence about the open door, and insisted it was “the devil who opened it.” But he could not present any coherent explanation of this fact. He even managed to insult Ivan Fyodorovich in this first meeting, telling him abruptly that he was not to be suspected or questioned by those who themselves assert that “everything is permitted.” Generally on this occasion he was very unfriendly to Ivan Fyodorovich. It was right after this meeting with Mitya that Ivan Fyodorovich went to see Smerdyakov.
While still on the train, flying back from Moscow, he kept thinking about Smerdyakov and his last conversation with him the evening before his departure. There was much in it that perplexed him, much that seemed suspicious. But when he gave his evidence to the investigator, Ivan Fyodorovich kept silent about that conversation for the time being. He put everything off until he had seen Smerdyakov. The latter was then in the local hospital. In reply to Ivan Fyodorovich’s insistent questions, Dr. Herzenstube and Dr. Varvinsky, whom Ivan Fyodorovich met in the hospital, stated firmly that Smerdyakov’s falling sickness was indubitable, and were even surprised at the question: “Could he have been shamming on the day of the catastrophe?” They gave him to understand that the fit was even an exceptional one, that it had persisted and recurred over several days, so that the patient’s life was decidedly in danger, and that only now, after the measures taken, was it possible to say affirmatively that the patient would live, though it was very possible (Dr. Herzenstube added) that his reason would remain partially unsettled “if not for life, then for a rather long time.” To Ivan Fyodorovich’s impatient asking whether “that means he’s now mad?” the reply was “not in the full sense of the word, but some abnormalities can be noticed.” Ivan Fyodorovich decided to find out for himself what these abnormalities were. In the hospital he was admitted at once as a visitor. Smerdyakov was in a separate ward, lying on a cot. Just next to him was another cot taken up by a local tradesman, paralyzed and all swollen with dropsy, who was obviously going to die in a day or two; he would not interfere with the conversation. Smerdyakov grinned mistrustfully when he saw Ivan Fyodorovich, and in the first moment even seemed to become timorous. That at least is what flashed through Ivan Fyodorovich’s mind. But it was a momentary thing; for the rest of the time, on the contrary, Smerdyakov almost struck him by his composure. From the very first sight of him, Ivan Fyodorovich was convinced beyond doubt of his complete and extremely ill condition: he was very weak, spoke slowly, and seemed to have difficulty moving his tongue; he had become very thin and yellow. All through the twenty minutes of the visit, he complained of a headache and of pain in all his limbs. His dry eunuch’s face seemed to have become very small, his side-whiskers were disheveled, and instead of a tuft, only a thin little wisp of hair stuck up on his head. But his left eye, which squinted and seemed to be hinting at something, betrayed the former Smerdyakov. “It’s always interesting to talk with an intelligent man”—Ivan Fyodorovich immediately recalled. He sat down on a stool at his feet. Smerdyakov painfully shifted his whole body on the bed, but did not speak first; he kept silent, and looked now as if he were not even particularly interested.
“Can you talk to me?” Ivan Fyodorovich asked. “I won’t tire you too much.”
“I can, sir,” Smerdyakov murmured in a weak voice. “Did you come long ago, sir?” he added condescendingly, as though encouraging a shy visitor.
“Just today ... To deal with this mess here.”
Smerdyakov sighed.
“Why are you sighing? You knew, didn’t you?” Ivan Fyodorovich blurted right out. Smerdyakov remained sedately silent for a while.
“How could I not know, sir? It was clear beforehand. Only who could know it would turn out like this?”
“What would turn out? Don’t hedge! Didn’t you foretell that you’d have a falling fit just as you went to the cellar? You precisely indicated the cellar.”
“Did you testify to that at the interrogation?” Smerdyakov calmly inquired.
Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly became angry.
“No, I did not, but I certainly shall testify to it. You have a lot to explain to me right now, brother, and let me tell you, my dear, that I shall not let myself be toyed with!”
“And why should I want to toy like that, sir, when all my hope is in you alone, as if you were the Lord God, sir!” Smerdyakov said, still in the same calm way, and merely closing his eyes for a moment.
“First of all,” Ivan Fyodorovich began, “I know that a falling fit cannot be predicted beforehand. I’ve made inquiries, don’t try to hedge. It’s not possible to predict the day and the hour. How is it, then, that you predicted both the day and the hour to me, and the cellar on top of that? How could you know beforehand that you would fall in a fit precisely into that cellar, unless you shammed the fit on purpose?”
“I had to go to the cellar in any case, sir, even several times a day, sir,” Smerdyakov drawled unhurriedly. “Just the same as I fell out of the attic a year ago, sir. It’s certainly true, sir, that one can’t predict the day and the hour of a falling fit, but one can always have a presentiment.”
“But you did predict the day and the hour!”
“Concerning my falling fit, sir, you’d best inquire of the local doctors, sir, whether it was a real one or not a real one—I have nothing more to tell you on that subject.”
“And the cellar? How did you foresee the cellar?”
“You and your cellar, sir! As I was going down to the cellar that day, I was in fear and doubt; and mostly in fear, because, having lost you, I had no one else in the whole world to expect any protection from. And there I was climbing down into that cellar, thinking: ‘It will come now, it will strike me, am I going to fall in or not?’ and from this same doubt I was seized by the throat by this same inevitable spasm, sir ... well, and so I fell in. All these things and all the previous conversation with you, sir, on the eve of that day, in the evening by the gate, sir, how I informed you then of my fear and about the cellar, sir—all that I gave out in detail to mister Dr. Herzenstube and the investigator, Nikolai Parfenovich, and he wrote it all into the record, sir. And the local doctor, Mr. Varvinsky, he especially insisted to them all that this happened precisely from the thought, that is, from this same insecurity, ‘am I going to fall, or not?’ And there it was waiting to get me. And they wrote down, sir, that it certainly must have happened like that, that is, for the sole reason of my fear, sir.”
Having said this, Smerdyakov drew a deep breath, as though suffering from fatigue.
“So you stated all that in your evidence?” Ivan Fyodorovich asked, somewhat taken aback. He had been about to scare him with the threat of reporting their earlier conversation, when it turned out that he had already reported everything himself.
“What should I be afraid of? Let them write down all the real truth,” Smerdyakov said firmly.
“And you told them every word of our conversation at the gate?”
“No, not really every word, sir.”
“And that you could sham a falling fit, as you boasted then—did you tell them that?”
“No, I didn’t say that either, sir.”
“Now tell me, why were you sending me to Chermashnya then?”
“I was afraid you’d leave for Moscow; Chermashnya is closer, after all, sir.”
“Lies! You were asking me to leave yourself: go, you said, get out of harm’s way.”
“I said it out of sole friendship for you then, and heartfelt devotion, anticipating calamity in the house, sir, feeling pity for you. Only I pitied myself more than you, sir. That’s why I said: get out of harm’s way, so you’d understand that things were going to be bad at home, and you’d stay to protect your parent.”
“You should have been more direct, fool!” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly flared up.
“How could I be more direct then, sir? It was just fear alone speaking in me, and besides you might have been angry. Of course I might have been wary lest Dmitri Fyodorovich cause some scandal and take away that same money, because he regarded it as if it was his, but who could know it would end with such a murder? I thought he would simply steal those three thousand roubles that were lying under the master’s mattress, in an envelope, sir, but he went and killed him. And you, too, how could you possibly have guessed, sir?”
“But if you yourself say it was impossible to guess, how could I have guessed it and stayed? Why are you confusing things?” Ivan Fyodorovich said, pondering.
“You could have guessed just because I was sending you to Chermashnya, and not to Moscow, sir.”
“What could be guessed from that?”
Smerdyakov seemed very tired and again was silent for about a minute.
“Thereby you could have guessed, sir, that if I was dissuading you from Moscow to Chermashnya, it meant I wanted your presence closer by, because Moscow is far away, and Dmitri Fyodorovich, seeing you were not so far away, wouldn’t be so encouraged. Besides, in case anything happened, you could come with greater swiftness to protect me, for I myself pointed out Grigory Vasilievich’s illness to you, and also that I was afraid of the falling sickness. And having explained to you about those knocks by which one could get in to the deceased, and that through me they were all known to Dmitri Fyodorovich, I thought you would guess yourself that he would be certain to commit something, and not only would not go to Chermashnya, but would stay altogether.”
“He talks quite coherently,” Ivan Fyodorovich thought, “even though he mumbles; what is this unsettling of his faculties Herzenstube was referring to?”
“You’re dodging me, devil take you!” he exclaimed, getting angry.
“And I must admit that I thought you had already guessed it quite well then,” Smerdyakov parried with a most guileless air.
“If I had guessed, I would have stayed!” Ivan Fyodorovich shouted, flaring up again.
“Well, sir, and I thought you’d guessed everything, and were just getting as quick as possible out of harm’s way, so as to run off somewhere, saving yourself out of fear, sir.”
“You thought everyone was as much a coward as you?”
“Forgive me, sir, I thought you were like I am.”
“Of course, I should have guessed,” Ivan was agitated, “and indeed I was beginning to guess at some loathsomeness on your part ... Only you’re lying, lying again,” he cried out, suddenly recalling. “Do you remember how you came up to the carriage then and said to me: ‘It’s always interesting to talk with an intelligent man’? Since you praised me, doesn’t it mean you were glad I was leaving?”
Smerdyakov sighed again and yet again. Color seemed to come to his face.
“If I was glad,” he said, somewhat breathlessly, “it was only for the reason that you agreed to go not to Moscow but to Chermashnya. Because it’s closer, after all; only I spoke those words then not as praise but as a reproach, sir. You failed to make it out, sir.”
“Reproach for what?”
“That anticipating such a calamity, sir, you were abandoning your own parent and did not want to protect us, because they could have hauled me in anytime for that three thousand, for having stolen it, sir.”
“Devil take you!” Ivan swore again. “Wait: did you tell the district attorney and the prosecutor about those signals, those knocks?”
“I told it all just as it was, sir.” Again Ivan Fyodorovich was inwardly surprised.
“If I was thinking of anything then,” he began again, “it was only of some loathsomeness on your part. Dmitri might kill, but that he would steal—I did not believe at the time ... But I was prepared for any loathsomeness on your part. You told me yourself that you could sham a falling fit—why did you tell me that?”
“For the sole reason of my simple-heartedness. And I’ve never shammed a falling fit on purpose in my life, I only said it so as to boast to you. Just foolishness, sir. I loved you very much then, and acted in all simplicity.”
“My brother accuses you directly of the murder and the robbery.”
“And what else has he got left to do?” Smerdyakov grinned bitterly. “And who will believe him after all that evidence? Grigory Vasilievich did see the open door, and there you have it, sir. Well, what can I say, God be with him! He’s trembling, trying to save himself...”
He was calmly silent for a while, and suddenly, as if realizing something, added:
“There’s this, sir, yet another thing: he wants to shift the blame, so that it was my doing, sir—I’ve heard that already, sir—but just take this other thing, that I’m an expert at shamming the falling sickness: but would I have told you beforehand that I could sham it if I really had any plot against your parent then? If I was plotting such a murder, could I possibly be such a fool as to tell such evidence against myself beforehand, and tell it to his own son, for pity’s sake, sir! Does that resemble a probability? As if that could happen, sir; no, on the contrary, not ever at all, sir. No one can hear this conversation between us now, except that same Providence, sir, but if you informed the prosecutor and Nikolai Parfenovich, you could thereby ultimately defend me, sir: because what kind of villain is so simple-hearted beforehand? They may well consider all that, sir.”
“Listen,” Ivan Fyodorovich, struck by Smerdyakov’s last argument, rose from his seat, interrupting the conversation, “I do not suspect you at all and even consider it ridiculous to accuse you ... on the contrary, I am grateful to you for reassuring me. I am leaving now, but I shall come again. Meanwhile, good-bye; get well. Perhaps there’s something you need?”
“I’m grateful in all things, sir. Marfa Ignatievna doesn’t forget me, sir, and assists me in everything, if there’s ever anything I need, according to her usual goodness. Good people visit every day.”
“Good-bye. Incidentally, I won’t mention that you know how to sham ... and I advise you not to testify to it,” Ivan said suddenly for some reason.
“I understand ver-ry well, sir. And since you won’t testify about that, sir, I also will not report the whole of our conversation by the gate that time ...”
What happened then was that Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly went out, and only when he had already gone about ten steps down the corridor did he suddenly feel that Smerdyakov’s last phrase contained some offensive meaning. He was about to turn back, but the impulse left him, and having said “Foolishness!” he quickly walked out of the hospital. He felt above all that he was indeed reassured, and precisely by the circumstance that the guilty one was not Smerdyakov but his brother Mitya, though it might seem that it should have been the opposite. Why this was so, he did not want to analyze then, he even felt disgusted at rummaging in his feelings. He wanted sooner to forget something, as it were. Then, during the next few days, when he had more closely and thoroughly acquainted himself with all the evidence weighing against him, he became completely convinced of Mitya’s guilt. There was the evidence of the most insignificant people, yet almost astounding in itself, Fenya’s and her mother’s, for example. To say nothing of Perkhotin, the tavern, Plotnikov’s shop, the witnesses at Mokroye. Above all, the details weighed against him. The news of the secret “knocks” struck the district attorney and the prosecutor almost to the same degree as Grigory’s evidence about the open door. In reply to Ivan Fyodorovich’s question, Grigory’s wife, Marfa Ignatievna, told him directly that Smerdyakov had been lying all night behind the partition, “less than three steps from our bed,” and that, though she herself was a sound sleeper, she had awakened many times hearing him moaning there: “He moaned all the time, moaned constantly.” When he spoke with Herzenstube and told him of his doubts, that Smerdyakov did not seem mad to him at all but simply weak, he only evoked a thin little smile in the old man. “And do you know what he is especially doing now?” he asked Ivan Fyodorovich. “He is learning French vocables by heart; he has a notebook under his pillow, and someone has written out French words for him in Russian letters, heh, heh, heh!” Ivan Fyodorovich finally dismissed all doubts. He could not even think of his brother Dmitri now without loathing. One thing was strange, though: Alyosha kept stubbornly insisting that Dmitri was not the murderer, and that “in all probability” it was Smerdyakov. Ivan had always felt that Alyosha’s opinion was very high for him, and therefore he was quite puzzled by him now. It was also strange that Alyosha did not try to talk with him about Mitya, and never began such conversations himself, but merely answered Ivan’s questions. This Ivan Fyodorovich noticed very well. However, at the time he was much diverted by an altogether extraneous circumstance: in the very first days after his return from Moscow, he gave himself wholly and irrevocably to his fiery and mad passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich’s, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake. But, all the same, even now I cannot pass over in silence that when Ivan Fyodorovich, as I have already described, leaving Katerina Ivanovna’s with Alyosha at night, said to him: “But I don’t fancy her,” he was lying terribly at that moment: he loved her madly, though it was true that at times he also hated her so much that he could even have killed her. Many causes came together here: all shaken by what had happened with Mitya, she threw herself at Ivan Fyodorovich, when he returned to her, as if he were somehow her savior. She was wounded, insulted, humiliated in her feelings. And here the man who had loved her so much even before—oh, she knew it only too well—had appeared again, the man whose mind and heart she always placed so far above herself. But the strict girl did not sacrifice herself entirely, despite all the Karamazovian unrestraint of her lover’s desires and all his charm for her. At the same time she constantly tormented herself with remorse for having betrayed Mitya, and in terrible, quarreling moments with Ivan (and there were many of them), she used to tell him so outright. It was this that, in talking with Alyosha, he had called “lie upon lie.” Of course there was indeed much lying here, and that annoyed Ivan Fyodorovich most of all ... but of all that later. In short, he almost forgot about Smerdyakov for a time. And yet, two weeks after his first visit to him, the same strange thoughts as before began tormenting him again. Suffice it to say that he began asking himself constantly why, on his last night in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, before his departure, he had gone out silently to the stairs, like a thief, and listened for what his father was doing down below. Why had he recalled it later with such loathing, why had he suddenly felt such anguish the next morning on the road, why had he said to himself on reaching Moscow: “I am a scoundrel”? And then it once occurred to him that because of all these tormenting thoughts, he was perhaps even ready to forget Katerina Ivanovna, so strongly had they suddenly taken possession of him again! Just as this occurred to him, he met Alyosha in the street. He stopped him at once and suddenly asked him a question:
“Do you remember when Dmitri burst into the house after dinner and beat father, and I then said to you in the yard that I reserved ‘the right to wish’ for myself—tell me, did you think then that I wished for father’s death?”
“I did think so,” Alyosha answered softly.
“You were right, by the way, there was nothing to guess at. But didn’t you also think then that I was precisely wishing for ‘viper to eat viper’—that is, precisely for Dmitri to kill father, and the sooner the better ... and that I myself would not even mind helping him along?”
Alyosha turned slightly pale and looked silently into his brother’s eyes.
“Speak!” Ivan exclaimed. “I want with all my strength to know what you thought then. I need it; the truth, the truth!” He was breathing heavily, already looking at Alyosha with some sort of malice beforehand.
“Forgive me, I did think that, too, at the time,” Alyosha whispered, and fell silent, without adding even a single “mitigating circumstance.”
“Thanks!” Ivan snapped, turned from Alyosha, and quickly went his way. Since then, Alyosha had noticed that his brother Ivan somehow abruptly began to shun him and even seemed to have begun to dislike him, so that later Alyosha himself stopped visiting him. But at that moment, just after that meeting with him, Ivan Fyodorovich, without going home, suddenly made his way to Smerdyakov again.
Chapter 7: The Second Visit to Smerdyakov
Smerdyakov had already been discharged from the hospital by then. Ivan Fyodorovich knew his new lodgings: precisely in that lopsided little log house with its two rooms separated by a hallway. Maria Kondratievna was living in one room with her mother, and Smerdyakov in the other by himself. God knows on what terms he lived with them: was he paying, or did he live there free? Later it was supposed that he had moved in with them as Maria Kondratievna’s fiance and meanwhile lived with them free. Both mother and daughter respected him greatly and looked upon him as a superior person compared with themselves. Having knocked until the door was opened to him, Ivan Fyodorovich went into the hallway and, on Maria Kondratievna’s directions, turned left and walked straight into the “good room” occupied by Smerdyakov. The stove in that room was a tiled one, and it was very well heated. The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper, all tattered, it is true, and behind it, in the cracks, cockroaches swarmed in terrible numbers, so that there was an incessant rustling. The furniture was negligible: two benches along the walls and two chairs by the table. But the table, though it was a simple wooden one, was nevertheless covered by a tablecloth with random pink designs. There was a pot of geraniums in each of the two little windows. In the corner was an icon stand with icons. On the table stood a small, badly dented copper samovar and a tray with two cups. But Smerdyakov was already finished with his tea and the samovar had gone out ... He himself was sitting at the table on a bench, looking into a notebook and writing something with a pen. A bottle of ink stood by him, as well as a low, cast-iron candlestick with, incidentally, a stearine candle. Ivan Fyodorovich concluded at once from Smerdyakov’s face that he had recovered completely from his illness. His face was fresher, fuller, his tuft was fluffed up, his side-whiskers were slicked down. He was sitting in a gaily colored quilted dressing gown, which, however, was rather worn and quite ragged. On his nose he had a pair of spectacles, which Ivan Fyodorovich had never seen on him before. This most trifling circumstance suddenly made Ivan Fyodorovich even doubly angry, as it were: “Such a creature, and in spectacles to boot!” Smerdyakov slowly raised his head and peered intently through the spectacles at his visitor; then he slowly removed them and raised himself a little from the bench, but somehow not altogether respectfully, somehow even lazily, with the sole purpose of observing only the most necessary courtesy, which it is almost impossible to do without. All of this instantly flashed through Ivan, and he at once grasped and noted it all, and most of all the look in Smerdyakov’s eyes, decidedly malicious, unfriendly, and even haughty: “Why are you hanging about here,” it seemed to say, “didn’t we already settle everything before? Why have you come again?” Ivan Fyodorovich could barely contain himself:
“It’s hot in here,” he said, still standing, and unbuttoned his coat.
“Take it off, sir,” Smerdyakov allowed.
Ivan Fyodorovich took his coat off and threw it on a bench, took a chair with his trembling hands, quickly moved it to the table, and sat down. Smerdyakov managed to sit down on his bench ahead of him.
“First of all, are we alone?” Ivan Fyodorovich asked sternly and abruptly. “Won’t they hear us in there?”
“No one will hear anything, sir. You saw yourself: there’s a hallway.”
“Listen, my friend, what was that remark you came out with as I was leaving you at the hospital, that if I said nothing about you being an expert at shamming the falling sickness, then you also would not tell the district attorney about the whole of our conversation at the gate that time? What whole? What could you mean by that? Were you threatening me or what? Have I entered into some league with you or what? Am I afraid of you or what?”
Ivan Fyodorovich uttered this quite in a rage, obviously and purposely letting it be known that he scorned all deviousness, all beating around the bush, and was playing an open hand. Smerdyakov’s eyes flashed maliciously, his left eye began winking, and at once, though, as was his custom, with measure and reserve, he gave his answer—as if to say, “You want us to come clean, here’s some cleanness for you.”
“This is what I meant then, and this is why I said it then: that you, having known beforehand about the murder of your own parent, left him then as a sacrifice; and so as people wouldn’t conclude anything bad about your feelings because of that, and maybe about various other things as well—that’s what I was promising not to tell the authorities.”
Though Smerdyakov spoke unhurriedly and was apparently in control of himself, all the same there was something hard and insistent, malicious and insolently defiant in his voice. He stared boldly at Ivan Fyodorovich, who was even dazed for the first moment.
“How? What? Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m perfectly in my mind, sir.”
“But did I know about the murder then?” Ivan Fyodorovich cried out at last, and brought his fist down hard on the table. “What is the meaning of ‘various other things’? Speak, scoundrel!”
Smerdyakov was silent and went on studying Ivan Fyodorovich with the same insolent look.
“Speak, you stinking scum, what ‘various other things’?” the latter screamed.
“And by ‘various other things’ just now, I meant that maybe you yourself were even wishing very much for your parent’s death then.”
Ivan Fyodorovich jumped up and hit him as hard as he could on the shoulder with his fist, so that he rocked back towards the wall. In an instant his whole face was flooded with tears, and saying, “Shame on you, sir, to strike a weak man!” he suddenly covered his eyes with his blue-checkered and completely sodden handkerchief and sank into quiet, tearful weeping. About a minute passed.
“Enough! Stop it!” Ivan Fyodorovich finally said peremptorily, sitting down on the chair again. “Don’t drive me out of all patience.”
Smerdyakov took the rag from his eyes. Every line on his puckered face spoke of the offense he had just endured.
“So, you scoundrel, you thought I was at one with Dmitri in wanting to kill father?”
“I didn’t know your thoughts then, sir,” Smerdyakov said in an injured voice, “and that was why I stopped you then, as you were coming in the gate, in order to test you on that same point, sir.”
“To test what? What?”
“Precisely that same circumstance: whether you did or did not want your parent to be killed soon.”
What aroused Ivan Fyodorovich’s indignation most of all was this insistent, insolent tone, which Smerdyakov stubbornly refused to give up.
“You killed him!” he exclaimed suddenly. Smerdyakov grinned contemptuously. “That I did not kill him, you yourself know for certain. And I’d have thought that for an intelligent man there was no more to be said about it.”
“But why, why did you have such a suspicion about me then?”
“From fear only, sir, as you already know. Because I was in such a state then, all shaking from fear, that I suspected everybody. And I decided to test you, sir, because I thought that if you, too, wanted the same thing as your brother, then it would be the end of the whole business, and I’d perish, too, like a fly.”
“Listen, you said something else two weeks ago.”
“It was the same thing I had in mind when I spoke with you in the hospital, only I thought you’d understand without so many words, and that you yourself didn’t want to talk straight out, being a most intelligent man, sir.”
“Is that so! But answer me, answer, I insist: precisely how could I then have instilled such a base suspicion about myself into your mean soul?”
“As for killing—you, personally, could never have done it, sir, and you didn’t want to do it either; but as for wanting someone else to kill—that you did want.”
“And he says it so calmly, so calmly! But why should I want it, why in hell should I have wanted it?”
“What do you mean, why in hell, sir? What about the inheritance, sir?” Smerdyakov picked up venomously and even somehow vindictively. “After your parent, you, each of you three good brothers, would then get nearly forty thousand, and maybe even more, sir, but if Fyodor Pavlovich was to marry that same lady, Agrafena Alexandrovna, she would surely transfer all the capital to herself, right after the wedding, because she’s not at all stupid, sir, so that your parent wouldn’t even leave you two roubles, for all three of you good brothers. And was marriage so far off, sir? Only a hair’s breadth, sir: the lady had only to beckon to him with her little finger, and he’d have run after her to church at once with his tongue hanging out.”
Ivan Fyodorovich painfully managed to restrain himself.
“All right,” he said at last, “you see I didn’t jump up, I didn’t beat you, I didn’t kill you. Go on: so, according to you, I meant brother Dmitri to do it, I was counting on him?”
“How could you not count on him, sir; if he killed him, then he’d be deprived of all rights of nobility, of rank and property, and be sent to Siberia, sir. And then his share, sir, after your parent, would be left for you and your brother, Alexei Fyodorovich, equally, sir, meaning not forty then but sixty thousand for each of you, sir. So you surely must have been counting on Dmitri Fyodorovich!”
“What I suffer from you! Listen, scoundrel: if I had been counting on anyone then, it would most certainly have been you and not Dmitri, and, I swear, I even did anticipate some sort of loathsomeness from you ... at the time ... I remember my impression!”
“And I, too, thought for a moment then that you were counting on me as well,” Smerdyakov grinned sarcastically, “so that you thereby gave yourself away even more to me, because if you were anticipating on me and you left all the same, it was just as if you told me thereby: you can kill my parent, I won’t prevent you.”
“Scoundrel! So that’s how you understood it!”
“It was all from that same Chermashnya, sir. For pity’s sake! You were going to Moscow, and refused all your parent’s pleas to go to Chermashnya, sir! And after just one foolish word from me, you suddenly agreed, sir! And why did you have to agree to Chermashnya? If you went to Chermashnya instead of Moscow for no reason, after one word from me, then it means you expected something from me.”
“No, I swear I did not!” Ivan yelled, gnashing his teeth.
“What do you mean ‘no,’ sir? On the contrary, after such words from me then, you, being your parent’s son, ought first of all to have reported me to the police and given me a thrashing, sir ... at least slapped me in the mug right there, but you, for pity’s sake, sir, on the contrary, without getting the least bit angry, at once amicably fulfilled everything exactly according to my rather foolish word, sir, and left—which was altogether absurd, sir, for you ought to have stayed to protect your parent’s life ... How could I not conclude?”
Ivan sat scowling, leaning convulsively with both fists on his knees.
“Yes, it’s a pity I didn’t slap you in the mug,” he grinned bitterly. “I couldn’t have dragged you to the police then—who would have believed me, and what did I have to show them? But as for your mug ... ach, it’s a pity it didn’t occur to me; though beating is forbidden, I’d have made hash out of your ugly snout.”
Smerdyakov looked at him almost with delight.
“In the ordinary occasions of life,” he spoke in that complacently doctrinaire tone in which he used to argue about religion with Grigory Vasilievich and tease him while they were standing at Fyodor Pavlovich’s table, “in the ordinary occasions of life, mug-slapping is indeed forbidden by law nowadays, and everyone has stopped such beatings, sir, but in distinctive cases of life, not only among us but all over the world, be it even the most complete French republic, beatings do go on all the same, as in the time of Adam and Eve, sir, and there will be no stop to it, sir, but even then, in a distinctive case, you did not dare, sir.”
“What are you doing studying French vocables? “ Ivan nodded towards the notebook on the table. “And why shouldn’t I be studying them, sir, so as to further my education thereby, supposing that some day I myself may chance to be in those happy parts of Europe.”
“Listen, monster,” Ivan’s eyes started flashing, and he was shaking all over, “I am not afraid of your accusations, give whatever evidence you like against me, and if I haven’t beaten you to death right now, it is only because I suspect you of this crime, and I shall have you in court. I shall unmask you yet!”
“And in my opinion you’d better keep silent, sir. Because what can you tell about me, in view of my complete innocence, and who will believe you? And if you begin, then I, too, will tell everything, sir, for how could I not defend myself?”
“Do you think I’m afraid of you now?”
“Maybe in court they won’t believe all the words I was just telling you, sir, but among the public they will believe, sir, and you will be ashamed, sir.”
“So once again: ‘It’s always interesting to talk with an intelligent man’— eh?” Ivan snarled.
“Right on the mark, if I may say so, sir. So be intelligent, sir.”
Ivan Fyodorovich stood up all trembling with indignation, put his coat on, and no longer replying to Smerdyakov, not even looking at him, quickly left the cottage. The fresh evening air refreshed him. The moon was shining brightly in the sky. A terrible nightmare of thoughts and feelings seethed in his soul. “Go and denounce Smerdyakov right now? But denounce him for what: he’s innocent all the same. On the contrary, he will accuse me. Why, indeed, did I go to Chermashnya then? Why? Why?” Ivan Fyodorovich kept asking.”Yes, of course, I was expecting something, he’s right ... “And again for the hundredth time he recalled how, on that last night at his father’s, he had eavesdropped from the stairs, but this time he recalled it with such suffering that he even stopped in his tracks as if pierced through: “Yes, that is what I expected, it’s true! I wanted the murder, I precisely wanted it! Did I want the murder, did I ... ? I must kill Smerdyakov...! If I don’t dare kill Smerdyakov now, life is not worth living...!” Without going home, Ivan Fyodorovich then went straight to Katerina Ivanovna and frightened her by his appearance: he seemed insane. He told her the whole of his conversation with Smerdyakov, down to the last little detail. He could not be calmed, no matter how she talked to him; he kept pacing the room and spoke abruptly, strangely. Finally he sat down, put his elbows on the table, rested his head in both hands, and uttered a strange aphorism:
“If it was not Dmitri but Smerdyakov who killed father, then, of course, I am solidary with him, because I put him up to it. Whether I did put him up to it—I don’t know yet. But if it was he who killed him, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am a murderer, too.” Hearing this, Katerina Ivanovna silently rose from her seat, went to her desk, opened a box standing on it, took out a piece of paper, and placed it before Ivan. This piece of paper was the same document of which Ivan Fyodorovich later told Alyosha, calling it “a mathematical proof” that brother Dmitri had killed their father. It was a letter to Katerina Ivanovna, written by Mitya in a drunken state the same evening he had met Alyosha in the fields on his way back to the monastery, after the scene in Katerina Ivanovna’s house when Grushenka had insulted her. Then, having parted with Alyosha, Mitya rushed to Grushenka; it is not known whether he saw her or not, but towards nightfall he turned up at the “Metropolis” tavern, where he got properly drunk. Once drunk, he called for pen and paper, and penned an important document against himself. It was a frenzied, verbose, and incoherent letter— precisely “drunk.” It was the same as when a drunken man comes home and begins telling his wife or someone in the house, with remarkable ardor, how he has just been insulted; what a scoundrel his insulter is; what a fine man, on the contrary, he himself is; and how he is going to show that scoundrel—and it is all so long, long, incoherent, and agitated, with pounding of fists on the table, with drunken tears. The paper they gave him for the letter in the tavern was a dirty scrap of some ordinary writing paper, of poor quality, on the back of which some bill had been written. Apparently there was not space enough for drunken verbosity, and Mitya not only filled all the margins with writing, but even wrote the last lines across the rest of the letter. The content of the letter was as follows:
Fatal Katya! Tomorrow I will get money and give you back your three thousand, and farewell, woman of great wrath, but farewell, too, my love! Let us end it! Tomorrow I’ll try to get it from all people, and if I don’t get it from people, I give you my word of honor, I will go to my father and smash his head in and take it from under his pillow, if only Ivan goes away. I may go to hard labor, but I will give you back the three thousand. And—farewell to you. I bow to you, to the ground, for I am a scoundrel before you. Forgive me. No, better not forgive, it will be easier for me and for you! Better hard labor than your love, for I love another, and you’ve found out too much
. about her today to be able to forgive. I will kill my thief. I will go away from you all, to the East, so as not to know anyone. From her as well, for you are not my only tormentor, but she is, too. Farewell!
P.S. I am writing a curse, yet I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One string
is left, and it sings. Better to tear my heart asunder! I will kill myself, but that dog first. I’ll tear the three thousand from him and throw it to you. Though I’m a scoundrel before you, I am not a thief! Wait for the three thousand. Under the dog’s mattress, with a pink ribbon. I am not a thief, but I will kill
my thief. Katya, don’t look contemptuous: Dmitri is not a thief, he is a murderer! He’s killed his father and ruined himself in order to stand up and not have to endure your pride. And not to love you. P.P.S. I kiss your feet, farewell!
P.P.P.S. Katya, pray to God they give me the money. Then there won’t be blood on me, but otherwise—blood there will be! Kill me!
Your slave and enemy, D. Karamazov.
When Ivan finished reading the “document,” he stood up, convinced. So his brother was the murderer, and not Smerdyakov. Not Smerdyakov, and therefore not he, Ivan. This letter suddenly assumed a mathematical significance in his eyes. There could be no further doubt for him now of Mitya’s guilt. Incidentally, the suspicion never occurred to Ivan that Mitya might have done the murder together with Smerdyakov; besides, it did not fit the facts. Ivan was set completely at ease. The next morning he recalled Smerdyakov and his jeers merely with contempt. A few days later he was even surprised that he could have been so painfully offended by his suspicions. He resolved to despise him and forget him. And so a month passed. He no longer made any inquiries about Smerdyakov, but a couple of times he heard in passing that he was very ill and not in his right mind. “He’ll end in madness,” the young doctor, Varvinsky, once said of him, and Ivan remembered it. During the last week of that month, Ivan himself began to feel very bad. He had already gone to consult the doctor from Moscow, invited by Katerina Ivanovna, who arrived just before the trial. And precisely at the same time his relations with Katerina Ivanovna intensified to the utmost. The two were some sort of enemies in love with each other. Katerina Ivanovna’s reversions to Mitya, momentary but strong, now drove Ivan to perfect rage. It is strange that until the very last scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s, which we have already described, when Alyosha came to her from seeing Mitya, he, Ivan, had never once heard any doubts of Mitya’s guilt from her during that whole month, despite all her “reversions” to him, which he hated so much. It was also remarkable that, though he felt he hated Mitya more and more every day, he understood at the same time that he hated him not because of Katya’s “reversions” to him, but precisely because he had killed their father! He himself felt it and was fully aware of it. Nevertheless, some ten days before the trial, he went to Mitya and offered him a plan of escape—a plan apparently already conceived long ago. Here, apart from the main reason prompting him to take such a step, the cause also lay in a certain unhealing scratch left on his heart by one little remark of Smerdyakov’s, that it was supposedly in his, Ivan’s, interest that his brother be convicted, because then the amount of the inheritance for himself and Alyosha would go up from forty to sixty thousand. He decided to sacrifice thirty thousand from his own portion to arrange for Mitya’s escape. Coming back from seeing him then, he felt terribly sad and confused: he suddenly began to feel that he wanted this escape not only so as to sacrifice the thirty thousand to it, and thus heal the scratch, but also for some other reason. “Is it because in my soul I’m just as much a murderer?” he asked himself. Something remote, but burning, stung his soul. Above all, his pride suffered greatly all that month, but of that later ... When, after his conversation with Alyosha, he stood with his hand on the bell of his apartment and suddenly decided to go to Smerdyakov, Ivan Fyodorovich was obeying some peculiar indignation that suddenly boiled up in his breast. He suddenly recalled how Katerina Ivanovna had just exclaimed to him in Alyosha’s presence: “It was you, you alone, who convinced me that he” (that is, Mitya) “is the murderer!” Recalling it, Ivan was dumbfounded: never in his life had he assured her that Mitya was the murderer, on the contrary, he had actually suspected himself before her when he came to her from Smerdyakov. On the contrary, it was she, she who had then laid the “document” before him and proved his brother’s guilt! And suddenly it was she who exclaimed: “I myself went to see Smerdyakov!” Went when? Ivan knew nothing of it. So she was not so sure of Mitya’s guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What, what precisely did he tell her? Terrible wrath began burning in his heart. He did not understand how he could have missed those words of hers half an hour ago and not shouted right then. He let go of the bell and set out for Smerdyakov. “This time maybe I’ll kill him,” he thought on the way.
Chapter 8: The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov
He was only halfway there when a sharp, dry wind arose, the same as early that morning, and fine, thick, dry snow began pouring down. It fell on the earth without sticking to it, the wind whirled it about, and soon a perfect blizzard arose. We have almost no streetlamps in the part of town where Smerdyakov was living. Ivan Fyodorovich strode through the darkness without noticing the blizzard, finding his way instinctively. His head ached and there was a painful throbbing in his temples. His hands were cramped, he could feel it. Some distance from Maria Kondratievna’s house, Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly met with a solitary drunk little peasant in a patched coat, who was walking in zigzags, grumbling and cursing, and then would suddenly stop cursing and begin to sing in a hoarse, drunken voice:
Ah, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg And I’ll not wait for him![300]
But he stopped each time at the second line, again began cursing someone, and then struck up the same song again. Ivan Fyodorovich had long been feeling an intense hatred for him, before he even thought about him, and suddenly he became aware of him. He at once felt an irresistible desire to bring his fist down on the little peasant. Just at that moment they came abreast of each other, and the little peasant, staggering badly, suddenly lurched full force into Ivan. The latter furiously shoved him away. The little peasant flew back and crashed like a log against the frozen ground, let out just one painful groan: “O-oh!” and was still. Ivan stepped up to him. He lay flat on his back, quite motionless, unconscious. “He’ll freeze!” Ivan thought, and strode off again to Smerdyakov.
Still in the hallway, Maria Kondratievna, who ran out with a candle in her hand to open the door, began whispering to him that Pavel Fyodorovich (that is, Smerdyakov) was very, very sick, sir, not sick in bed, sir, but as if he’s not in his right mind, sir, and even told her to take the tea away, he didn’t want any.
“What, is he violent or something?” Ivan Fyodorovich asked rudely.
“Oh, no, it’s the opposite, he’s very quiet, sir, only don’t talk to him for too long ... ,” Maria Kondratievna begged.
Ivan Fyodorovich opened the door and stepped into the room.
It was as well heated as the last time, but some changes could be noticed in the room: one of the side benches had been taken out, and a big, old leather sofa of imitation mahogany had appeared in its place. A bed had been made up on it, with quite clean white pillows. On the bed sat Smerdyakov, wearing the same dressing gown. The table had been moved in front of the sofa, so that there was now very little space in the room. On the table lay a thick book covered in yellow paper, but Smerdyakov was not reading it, he seemed to be sitting and doing nothing. He met Ivan Fyodorovich with a long, silent look, and was apparently not at all surprised at his coming. His face was changed, he had become very thin and yellow. His eyes were sunken, his lower eyelids had turned blue.
“But you really are sick?” Ivan Fyodorovich stopped. “I won’t keep you long, I won’t even take my coat off. Is there anywhere to sit?”
He went around the table, moved a chair up to it, and sat down. “So you stare and say nothing? I’ve come with just one question, and I swear I won’t leave without an answer: did the lady Katerina Ivanovna come to see you?”
There was a long silence during which Smerdyakov kept looking calmly at Ivan, but suddenly he waved his hand and turned his face away from him.
“What is it?” Ivan exclaimed.
“Nothing.”
“What nothing?”
“So she came, so what do you care? Leave me alone, sir.”
“No, I won’t leave you alone! Tell me, when was it?”
“I even forgot to remember about her,” Smerdyakov grinned contemptuously, and suddenly turned his face to Ivan again, fixing him with a sort of wildly hateful look, the same look as he had at their meeting a month earlier.
“You seem to be sick yourself, your face is all pinched, you look awful,” he said to Ivan.
“Never mind my health, answer the question.”
“And why have your eyes become yellow? The whites are quite yellow. Are you suffering greatly or what?”
He grinned contemptuously, and suddenly laughed outright.
“Listen, I said I won’t leave here without an answer!” Ivan cried in terrible irritation.
“Why are you bothering me, sir? Why are you tormenting me?” Smerdyakov said with suffering.
“Eh, the devil! I don’t care about you. Answer the question and I’ll leave at once.”
“I have nothing to answer you!” Smerdyakov dropped his eyes again.
“I assure you I shall make you answer!”
“Why do you keep worrying?” Smerdyakov suddenly stared at him, not so much with contempt now as almost with a sort of repugnance. “Is it because the trial starts tomorrow? But nothing will happen to you, be assured of that, finally! Go home, sleep peacefully, don’t fear anything.”
“I don’t understand you ... what could I have to fear tomorrow?” Ivan spoke in surprise, and suddenly some sort of fear indeed blew cold on his soul. Smerdyakov measured him with his eyes.
“You don’t un-der-stand?” he drawled reproachfully. “Why would an intelligent man want to put on such an act?”
Ivan gazed at him silently. The unexpected tone in which his former lackey now addressed him, full of quite unheard-of arrogance, was unusual in itself. There had been no such tone even at their last meeting.
“I’m telling you, you have nothing to fear. I won’t say anything against you, there’s no evidence. Look, his hands are trembling. Why are your fingers moving like that? Go home, it was not you that killed him.”
Ivan gave a start; he remembered Alyosha.
“I know it was not me ... ,” he began to murmur.
“You know?” Smerdyakov picked up again.
Ivan jumped up and seized him by the shoulder.
“Tell all, viper! Tell all!”
Smerdyakov was not in the least frightened. He merely fastened his eyes on him with insane hatred.
“Well, it was you who killed him in that case,” he whispered furiously.
Ivan sank onto his chair as if he had just figured something out. He grinned maliciously.
“You’re still talking about that? The same as last time?”
“But last time, too, you stood there and understood everything, and you understand it now.”
“I understand only that you are crazy.”
“Doesn’t a man get tired of it? Here we are, just the two of us, so what’s the use of putting on such an act, trying to fool each other? Or do you still want to shift it all onto me, right to my face? You killed him, you are the main killer, and I was just your minion, your faithful servant Licharda,[301] and I performed the deed according to your word.”
“Performed? Was it you that killed him?” Ivan went cold.
Something shook, as it were, in his brain, and he began shivering all over with cold little shivers. Now Smerdyakov in turn looked at him in surprise: he probably was struck, at last, by the genuineness of Ivan’s fear.
“You mean you really didn’t know anything? “ he murmured mistrustfully, looking him in the eye with a crooked grin.
Ivan kept staring at him; he seemed to have lost his tongue.
Ah, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg And I’ll not wait for him—
suddenly rang in his head.
“You know what: I’m afraid you’re a dream, a ghost sitting there in front of me,” he murmured.
“There’s no ghost, sir, besides the two of us, sir, and some third one. No doubt he’s here now, that third one, between the two of us.”
“Who is it? Who is here? What third one?” Ivan Fyodorovich said fearfully, looking around, his eyes hastily searching for someone in all the corners.
“That third one is God, sir, Providence itself, sir, it’s right here with us now, sir, only don’t look for it, you won’t find it.” “It’s a lie that you killed him!” Ivan shouted in a rage. “You’re either crazy, or you’re taunting me like the last time!”
Smerdyakov kept watching him inquisitively, as before, with no trace of fear. He still could not manage to get over his mistrust, he still thought Ivan “knew everything” and was merely pretending in order to “shift it all onto him, right to his face.”
“Just a moment, sir,” he finally said in a weak voice, and suddenly pulled his left leg from under the table and began rolling up his trouser. The leg turned out to have a long white stocking on it, and a slipper. Unhurriedly, Smerdyakov removed the garter and thrust his hand far down into the stocking. Ivan Fyodorovich stared at him and suddenly began shaking with convulsive fear.
“Madman!” he shouted, and, jumping quickly from his seat, he reeled backwards so that his back struck the wall and was as if glued to it, drawn up tight as a string. He looked at Smerdyakov with insane horror. The latter, not in the least disturbed by his fear, kept fishing around in his stocking as if he were trying to get hold of something and pull it out. Finally he got hold of it and began to pull. Ivan Fyodorovich saw that it was some papers, or a bundle of papers. Smerdyakov pulled it out and placed it on the table.
“Here, sir,” he said softly.
“What?” Ivan answered, shaking.
“Take a look, if you please, sir,” Smerdyakov said, just as softly.
Ivan stepped to the table, took the bundle, and began to unwrap it, but suddenly jerked his hands back as if he had touched some loathsome, horrible viper.
“Your fingers are trembling, sir, you’ve got a cramp,” Smerdyakov observed, and he slowly unwrapped the bundle himself. Under the wrapping were found three packets of iridescent hundred-rouble bills.
“It’s all there, sir, all three thousand, no need to count it. Have it, sir,” he invited Ivan, nodding towards the money. Ivan sank onto the chair. He was white as a sheet.
“You frightened me ... with that stocking ... ,” he said, grinning somehow strangely.
“Can it possibly be that you didn’t know till now?” Smerdyakov asked once again.
“No, I didn’t. I kept thinking it was Dmitri. Brother! Brother! Ah!” he suddenly seized his head with both hands. “Listen: did you kill him alone? Without my brother, or with him?”
“Just only with you, sir; together with you, sir, and Dmitri Fyodorovich is as innocent as could be, sir.” “All right, all right ... We’ll get to me later. Why do I keep trembling. . . I can’t get a word out.”
“You used to be brave once, sir, you used to say ‘Everything is permitted,’ sir, and now you’ve got so frightened!” Smerdyakov murmured, marveling. “Would you like some lemonade? I’ll tell them to bring it, sir. It’s very refreshing. Only I must cover that up first, sir.”
And he nodded again towards the money. He made a move to get up and call for Maria Kondratievna from the doorway to make some lemonade and bring it to them, but, looking for something to cover the money with, so that she would not see it, he first pulled out his handkerchief, but, as it again turned out to be completely sodden, he then took from the table that thick, yellow book, the only one lying on it, the one Ivan had noticed as he came in, and placed it on top of the bills. The title of the book was The Homilies of Our Father among the Saints, Isaac the Syrian.[302] Ivan Fyodorovich read it mechanically.
“I don’t want any lemonade,” he said. “We’ll get to me later. Sit down and tell me: how did you do it? Tell everything ...”
“You should at least take your coat off, sir, or you’ll get all sweaty.”
Ivan Fyodorovich, as though he had only just thought of it, tore his coat off and threw it on the bench without getting up.
“Speak, please, speak!”
He seemed to calm down. He waited, with the assurance that Smerdyakov would now tell him everything.
“About how it was done, sir?” Smerdyakov sighed. “It was done in the most natural manner, sir, according to those same words of yours.”
“We’ll get to my words later,” Ivan interrupted again, not shouting as before, but uttering the words firmly and as if with complete self-possession. “Just tell me in detail how you did it. Step by step. Don’t leave anything out. The details, above all, the details. I beg you.”
“You left, and then I fell into the cellar, sir...”
“In a falling fit, or were you shamming?”
“Of course I was shamming, sir. It was all a sham. I went quietly down the stairs, sir, to the very bottom, and lay down quietly, sir, and after I lay down, I started yelling. And I kept thrashing while they were taking me out.”
“Wait! You were shamming all the while, even later, and in the hospital?”
“By no means, sir. The very next day, in the morning, still before the hospital, a real one struck me, and such a strong one, there hasn’t been one like it for many years. I was completely unconscious for two days.”
“All right, all right, go on.”
“They put me on that cot, sir, and I knew it would be behind the partition, sir, because on every occasion when I was sick, Marfa Ignatievna always put me for the night behind the partition in her room, sir. She’s always been tender to me since my very birth, sir. During the night I kept moaning, only softly, sir. I kept expecting Dmitri Fyodorovich.”
“Expecting what, that he’d visit you?”
“Why would he visit me? I expected him to come to the house, for I had no doubt at all that he would arrive that same night, for, being deprived of me and not having any information, he would surely have to get to the house over the fence, as he knew how to, sir, and commit whatever it was. “
“And what if he didn’t come?”
“Then nothing would happen, sir. I wouldn’t dare without him.”
“All right, all right ... speak more clearly, don’t hurry, and above all— don’t omit anything!”
“I was expecting him to kill Fyodor Pavlovich, sir ... that was bound to be, sir. Because I’d already prepared him for it ... in those last few days, sir ... and the main thing was that those signals became known to him. Given his suspiciousness and the rage he’d stored up over those days, he was sure to use the signals to get right into the house, sir. It was sure to be. I was just expecting him, sir.”
“Wait,” Ivan interrupted, “if he killed him, he’d take the money and go off with it; wouldn’t you have reasoned precisely that way? What would you get out of it then? I don’t see.”
“But he never would have found the money, sir. I only instructed him that the money was under the mattress. But it wasn’t true, sir. At first it was in the box, that’s how it was, sir. And then I instructed Fyodor Pavlovich, since he trusted only me of all mankind, to transfer that same package with the money to the corner behind the icons, because no one would ever think of looking there, especially if he was in a hurry. And so that package lay there in the corner, behind the icons, sir. And to keep it under the mattress would even be ridiculous, the box at least had a lock on it. And everyone here now believes it was under the mattress. Foolish reasoning, sir. And so, if Dmitri Fyodorovich committed that same murder, then, having found nothing, he would either run away in a hurry, sir, afraid of every rustle, as always happens with murderers, or he’d be arrested, sir. So then, either the next day, or even that same night, sir, I could always get behind the icons and take that same money, sir, and it would all have fallen on Dmitri Fyodorovich. I could always hope for that.”
“Well, and what if he didn’t kill him, but only gave him a beating?”
“If he didn’t kill him, then of course I wouldn’t dare take the money, and it would all be in vain. But there was also the calculation that he might beat him unconscious, and meanwhile I’d have time to take the money, and then afterwards I would report to Fyodor Pavlovich that it was none other than Dmitri Fyodorovich who had beaten him and carried off the money.”
“Wait ... I’m getting confused. So it was Dmitri who killed him after all, and you just took the money?”
“No, it wasn’t him that killed him, sir. Look, even now I could tell you he was the murderer ... but I don’t want to lie to you now, because. . .because if, as I see now, you really didn’t understand anything before this, and weren’t pretending so as to shift your obvious guilt onto me right to my face, still you are guilty of everything, sir, because you knew about the murder, and you told me to kill him, sir, and, knowing everything, you left. Therefore I want to prove it to your face tonight that in all this the chief murderer is you alone, sir, and I’m just not the real chief one, though I did kill him. It’s you who are the most lawful murderer!”
“Why, why am I the murderer? Oh, God!” Ivan finally could not bear it, forgetting that he had put off all talk of himself to the end of the conversation. “Is it still that same Chermashnya? Wait, speak, why did you need my consent, if you did take Chermashnya for consent? How will you explain that now?”
“Being confident of your consent, I’d know you wouldn’t come back and start yelling because of that lost three thousand, in case the authorities suspected me for some reason instead of Dmitri Fyodorovich, or that I was Dmitri Fyodorovich’s accomplice; on the contrary, you’d protect me from the others .. . And the inheritance, when you got it, you might even reward me sometime later, during the whole rest of your life to come, because, after all, you’d have had the pleasure of getting that inheritance through me, otherwise, what with marrying Agrafena Alexandrovna, all you’d get is a fig.”
“Ah! So you intended to torment me afterwards, all the rest of my life!” Ivan growled. “And what if I hadn’t left then, but had turned you in?”
“What could you turn me in for? That I put you up to Chermashnya? But that’s foolishness, sir. Besides, after our conversation you could either go or stay. If you stayed, then nothing would happen, I’d simply know, sir, that you didn’t want this business, and I wouldn’t undertake anything. But since you did go, it meant you were assuring me that you wouldn’t dare turn me over to the court and would forgive me the three thousand. And you wouldn’t be able to persecute me at all afterwards, because in that case I’d tell everything in court, sir, that is, not that I stole or killed—I wouldn’t say that—but that it was you who put me up to stealing and killing, only I didn’t agree. That’s why I needed your consent then, so that you couldn’t corner me with anything afterwards, sir, because where would you get any proof of that, but I could always corner you, sir, by revealing how much you desired your parent’s death, and I give you my word—the public would all believe me, and you’d be ashamed for the rest of your life.”
“So I did, I did desire it, did I?” Ivan growled again.
“You undoubtedly did, sir, and by your consent then you silently allowed me that business, sir,” Smerdyakov looked firmly at Ivan. He was very weak and spoke softly and wearily, but something inner and hidden was firing him up, he apparently had some sort of intention. Ivan could sense it.
“Go on,” he said to him, “go on with that night.”
“So, to go on, sir. I lay there and thought I heard the master cry out. And before that, Grigory Vasilievich suddenly got up and stepped out and suddenly shouted, and then all was still, dark. So I was lying there waiting, with my heart pounding, I could hardly stand it. Finally I got up and went, sir—I saw the master’s left window to the garden open, so I took another step to the left, sir, to listen whether he was alive in there or not, and I heard the master stirring about and groaning, which meant he was alive, sir. Ech, I thought! I went up to the window, called to the master: ‘It’s me,’ I said. And he called to me: ‘He was here, he was here, he ran away! ‘ That is, Dmitri Fyodorovich, sir. ‘He killed Grigory!’ ‘Where?’ I whispered to him. ‘There, in the corner,’ he pointed, also in a whisper. ‘Wait,’ I said. I went to have a look in the corner, and stumbled over Grigory Vasilievich, lying near the wall, all covered with blood, unconscious. ‘So it’s true, Dmitri Fyodorovich was here,’ jumped into my mind at once, and I at once decided to finish it all right then and there, sir, since even if Grigory Vasilievich was still alive, he wouldn’t see anything while he was unconscious. The only risk was that Marfa Ignatievna might suddenly wake up. I felt it at that moment, only this desire got such a hold on me, it even took my breath away. I went up to the master’s window again and said: ‘She’s here, she’s come, Agrafena Alexandrovna is here, she wants to get in.’ He got all startled, just like a baby. ‘Here where? Where?’ he kept gasping, and he still didn’t believe it. ‘She’s standing right here,’ I said, ‘open up! ‘ He looked at me through the window, believing it and not believing it, but he was afraid to open the door—it’s me he’s afraid of, I thought. And here’s a funny thing: I suddenly decided to knock those same signals on the window, right in front of his eyes, meaning Grushenka was there: he didn’t seem to believe words, but as soon as I knocked the signals, he ran at once to open the door. He opened it. I tried to go in, but he stood and blocked my way with his body. ‘Where is she, where is she?’ he looked at me and trembled. Well, I thought, that’s bad, if he’s so afraid of me! And my legs even went limp from fear that he wouldn’t let me in, or would shout, or else that Marfa Ignatievna would come running, or whatever, I don’t remember anymore, but I must have stood pale in front of him then. I whispered to him: ‘But she’s there, right there, under the window,’ I said, ‘how is it you didn’t see her? ‘ ‘Bring her here, bring her here! ‘ ‘But she’s afraid,’ I said, ‘she got scared by the shouting, she’s hiding in the bushes, go and call her yourself from the study,’ I said. He ran there, went up to the window, put a candle in the window. ‘Grushenka,’ he called, ‘Grushenka, are you here?’ He called her, but he didn’t want to lean out the window, he didn’t want to move away from me, from that same fear, because he was very afraid of me and therefore didn’t dare move away from me. ‘But there she is,’ I said (I went up to the window and leaned all the way out), ‘there she is in the bushes, smiling to you, see?’ He suddenly believed it, he just started shaking, because he really was very much in love with her, sir, and he leaned all the way out the window. Then I grabbed that same cast-iron, paperweight, the one on his desk—remember, sir?—it must weigh all of three pounds, and I swung and hit him from behind on the top of the head with the corner of it. He didn’t even cry out. He just sank down suddenly, and I hit him one more time, and then a third time. The third time I felt I smashed his skull. He suddenly fell on his back, face up, all bloody. I looked myself over: there was no blood on me, it didn’t splatter, I wiped the paperweight off, put it back, went behind the icons, took the money out of the envelope, dropped the envelope on the floor, and that pink ribbon next to it. I went out to the garden shaking all over. I went straight to that apple tree, the one with the hole in it—you know that hole, I’d chosen it long ago, there was already a rag and some paper in it, I’d prepared it long ago; I wrapped the whole sum in paper, then in the rag, and shoved it way down. And it stayed there for more than two weeks, that same sum, sir, I took it out later, after the hospital. I went back to my bed, lay down, and thought in fear: ‘Now if Grigory Vasilievich is killed altogether, things thereby could turn out very badly, but if he’s not killed and comes round again, then it will turn out really well, because he’ll be a witness that Dmitri Fyodorovich was there, and so it was he who killed him and took the money, sir.’ Then I began groaning, from doubt and impatience, in order to waken Marfa Ignatievna the sooner. She got up finally, was about to rush to me, but as soon as she suddenly saw that Grigory Vasilievich wasn’t there, she ran out, and I heard her screaming in the garden. So then, sir, that all started for the whole night, and I no longer worried about it all.”
The narrator stopped. Ivan had listened to him all the while in deathly silence, without stirring, without taking his eyes off him. And Smerdyakov, as he was telling his story, merely glanced at him occasionally, but most of the time looked aside. By the end he had evidently become agitated himself and was breathing heavily. Sweat broke out on his face. It was impossible to tell, however, whether he felt repentant or what. “Wait,” Ivan picked up, putting things together. “What about the door? If he only opened the door for you, then how could Grigory have seen it open before you? Because he did see it before you?”
Remarkably, Ivan asked this in a most peaceful voice, even in quite a different tone, not at all angry, so that if someone had opened the door at that moment and looked in at them from the doorway, he would certainly have concluded that they were sitting and talking peaceably about some ordinary, though interesting, subject.
“Concerning the door, and that Grigory Vasilievich supposedly saw it open, he only fancied it was so,” Smerdyakov grinned crookedly. “Because he is not a man, let me tell you, but just like a stubborn mule, sir: he didn’t see it, but he fancied he saw it—and you’ll never be able to shake him, sir. It was just a great piece of luck for you and me that he thought it up, because Dmitri Fyodorovich will undoubtedly be thoroughly convicted after that.”
“Listen,” Ivan Fyodorovich said, as if he were beginning to get lost again and were trying hard to figure something out, “listen ... I wanted to ask you many other things, but I’ve forgotten ... I get confused and forget everything ... Ah! Tell me just this one thing: why did you open the envelope and leave it there on the floor? Why didn’t you simply take it, envelope and all ... ? As you were telling it, it seemed to me you were speaking of the envelope as if that was how it should have been done ... but why, I don’t understand ...”
“That I did for a certain reason, sir. Because if it was a man who knew and was familiar, like me, for example, who had seen that money himself beforehand, and maybe wrapped it in the envelope himself, and watched with his own eyes while it was sealed and addressed, then why on earth would such a man, if, for example, it was he who killed him, unseal the envelope after the murder, and in such a flurry besides, knowing quite for certain anyway that the money was sure to be in that envelope, sir? On the contrary, if the thief was like me, for example, he’d simply shove the envelope in his pocket without opening it in the least, and make his getaway as fast as he could, sir. Now Dmitri Fyodorovich is quite another thing: he knew about the envelope only from hearsay, he never saw it, and so supposing, for example, he took it from under the mattress, he’d open it right away to find out if that same money was really there. And he’d throw the envelope down, having no time by then to consider that he was leaving evidence behind, because he’s an unaccustomed thief, sir, and before that never stole anything obviously, because he’s a born nobleman, sir, and even if he did decide to steal this time, it was not precisely to steal, as it were, but only to get his own back, since he gave the whole town preliminary notice of it, and boasted out loud beforehand in front of everybody that he would go and take his property back from Fyodor Pavlovich. In my interrogation, I told this same thought to the prosecutor, not quite clearly, but, on the contrary, as if I were leading him to it by a hint, as if I didn’t understand it myself, and as if he had thought it up, and not that I’d prompted him, sir—and Mr. Prosecutor even started drooling over that same hint of mine, sir ...”
“But can you possibly have thought of all that right there on the spot?” Ivan Fyodorovich exclaimed, beside himself with astonishment. He again looked fearfully at Smerdyakov.
“For pity’s sake, sir, how could I have thought it all up in such a flurry? It was all thought out beforehand.”
“Well ... well, then the devil himself helped you!”Ivan Fyodorovich exclaimed again. “No, you’re not stupid, you’re much more intelligent than I thought ...”
He rose, obviously intending to walk about the room. He was in terrible anguish. But as the table was in his way and he could barely squeeze between the table and the wall, he merely turned on the spot and sat down again. Perhaps it irritated him suddenly that he had not managed to walk about, for he suddenly shouted almost in his former frenzy:
“Listen, you wretched, despicable man! Do you understand that if I haven’t killed you so far, it’s only because I’m keeping you to answer in court tomorrow. God knows,” Ivan held up his hand, “perhaps I, too, was guilty, perhaps I really had a secret desire that my father ... die, but I swear to you that I was not as guilty as you think, and perhaps I did not put you up to it at all. No, no, I did not! But, anyway, I shall give evidence against myself tomorrow, in court, I’ve decided! I shall tell everything, everything. But we shall appear together! And whatever you say against me in court, whatever evidence you give—I accept, and I am not afraid of you; I myself shall confirm it all! But you, too, must confess to the court! You must, you must, we shall go together! So it will be!”
Ivan said this solemnly and energetically, and one could tell just from his flashing eyes that it would be so.
“You’re sick, I see, sir, you’re very sick, sir. Your eyes, sir, are quite yellow,” Smerdyakov said, but without any mockery, even as if with condolence.
“We shall go together!” Ivan repeated, “and if you won’t go, I alone shall confess anyway.”
Smerdyakov was silent for a while, as if he were pondering.
“None of that will be, sir, and you will not go, sir,” he finally decided categorically.
“You don’t know me!” Ivan exclaimed reproachfully. “It will be too shameful for you, sir, if you confess everything about yourself. And moreover it will be useless, quite useless, sir, because I will certainly say right out that I never told you any such thing, sir, and that you’re either in some sort of sickness (and it does look that way, sir), or else you really pitied your brother so much that you were sacrificing yourself, and you invented all that against me since you’ve considered me like a fly all your life anyway, and not like a man. And who will believe you, and what evidence, what single piece of evidence have you got?”
“Listen, you showed me that money, of course, in order to convince me.”
Smerdyakov removed Isaac the Syrian from the money and set it aside.
“Take the money with you, sir, take it away,” Smerdyakov sighed.
“Of course I shall take it away! But why are you giving it back to me, if you killed because of it?” Ivan looked at him in great surprise.
“I’ve got no use at all for it, sir,” Smerdyakov said in a trembling voice, waving his hand. “There was such a former thought, sir, that I could begin a life on such money in Moscow, or even more so abroad, I did have such a dream, sir, and even more so as ‘everything is permitted.’ It was true what you taught me, sir, because you told me a lot about that then: because if there’s no infinite God, then there’s no virtue either, and no need of it at all. It was true. That’s how I reasoned.”
“Did you figure it out for yourself?” Ivan grinned crookedly.
“With your guidance, sir.”
“So now you’ve come to believe in God, since you’re giving back the money?”
“No, sir, I haven’t come to believe, sir,” whispered Smerdyakov.
“Why are you giving it back then?”
“Enough ... it’s no use, sir!” Smerdyakov again waved his hand. “You yourself kept saying then that everything was permitted, so why are you so troubled now, you yourself, sir? You even want to go and give evidence against yourself ... Only there will be nothing of the sort! You won’t go and give evidence!” Smerdyakov decided again, firmly and with conviction.
“You’ll see!” said Ivan.
“It can’t be. You’re too intelligent, sir. You love money, that I know, sir, you also love respect, because you’re very proud, you love women’s charms exceedingly, and most of all you love living in peaceful prosperity, without bowing to anyone—that you love most of all, sir. You won’t want to ruin your life forever by taking such shame upon yourself in court. You’re like Fyodor Pavlovich most of all, it’s you of all his children who came out resembling him most, having the same soul as him, sir.”
“You’re not stupid,” Ivan said as if struck; the blood rushed to his face. “I used to think you were stupid. You’re serious now!” he remarked, suddenly looking at Smerdyakov in some new way.
“It was your pride made you think I was stupid. Do have the money, sir.”
Ivan took all three packets of bills and shoved them into his pocket without wrapping them in anything.
“I’ll show them to the court tomorrow,” he said.
“No one there will believe you, sir, seeing as you’ve got enough money of your own, now, so you just took it out of your box and brought it, sir.”
Ivan rose from his seat.
“I repeat to you, that if I haven’t killed you, it’s only because I need you for tomorrow, remember that, don’t forget it!”
“Well, so kill me, sir. Kill me now,” Smerdyakov suddenly said strangely, looking strangely at Ivan. “You won’t dare do that either, sir,” he added, with a bitter smirk, “you won’t dare do anything, you former brave man, sir!”
“Until tomorrow!” Ivan cried, and made a move to go.
“Wait ... show it to me one more time.”
Ivan took the money out and showed it to him. Smerdyakov looked at it for about ten seconds.
“Well, go,” he said, waving his hand. “Ivan Fyodorovich!” he suddenly called after him again.
“What is it?” Ivan turned, already walking out.
“Farewell, sir!”
“Until tomorrow!” Ivan cried again, and walked out of the cottage.
The blizzard was still going on. He walked briskly for the first few steps, but suddenly began staggering, as it were. “It’s something physical,” he thought, and grinned. It was as if a sort of joy now descended into his soul. He felt an infinite firmness in himself: the end to his hesitations, which had tormented him so terribly all through those last days! The decision was taken, “and now will not be changed,” he thought with happiness. At that moment he suddenly stumbled against something and nearly fell. Having stopped, he made out at his feet the little peasant he had struck down, who was still lying in the same spot, unconscious and not moving. The blizzard had all but covered his face. Ivan suddenly pulled him up and took him on his back. Seeing light in a cottage to the right, he went over, knocked on the shutters, and when the tradesman who owned the house answered, asked him to help him carry the peasant to the police station, with the promise that he would give him three roubles at once for it. The tradesman got ready and came out. I will not describe in detail how Ivan Fyodorovich then managed to achieve his goal and get the peasant installed in the police station and have him examined immediately by a doctor, while he once again provided liberally “for the expenses.” I will say only that the affair took him almost a whole hour. But Ivan Fyodorovich was left feeling very pleased. His thoughts were expanding and working. “If my decision for tomorrow had not been taken so firmly,” he suddenly thought with delight, “I would not have stayed for a whole hour arranging things for the little peasant, I would simply have passed him by and not cared a damn whether he froze ... I’m quite capable of observing myself, incidentally,” he thought at the same moment, with even greater delight, “and they all decided I was losing my mind!” As he reached his house, he stopped all at once under a sudden question: “And shouldn’t I go to the prosecutor right now at once and tell him everything? “ He resolved the question by turning towards his house again: “Tomorrow everything together!” he whispered to himself, and, strangely, almost all his joy, all his self-content vanished in a moment. And as he entered his room, something icy suddenly touched his heart, like a recollection, or, rather, a reminder, of something loathsome and tormenting that was precisely in that room now, presently, and had been there before. He sank wearily onto his sofa. The old woman brought him the samovar, he made tea, but did not touch it; he dismissed the woman till morning. He sat on the sofa feeling dizzy. He felt himself sick and strengthless. He was beginning to fall asleep, but got up nervously and paced the room to drive sleep away. At moments he fancied that he seemed delirious. But it was not sickness that occupied him most of all; when he sat down again he began looking around from time to time, as if searching for something. This happened several times. Finally his eyes focused intently on one spot. Ivan grinned, but an angry flush covered his face. He sat where he was for a long time, his head propped firmly on both hands, but still looking sideways at the former spot, at the sofa standing against the opposite wall. Apparently something there, some object, irritated him, troubled him, tormented him.
Chapter 9: The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare
I am not a doctor, but nevertheless I feel the moment has come when it is decidedly necessary for me to explain to the reader at least something of the nature of Ivan Fyodorovich’s illness. Getting ahead of myself, I will say only one thing: he was, that evening, precisely just on the verge of brain fever, which finally took complete possession of his organism, long in disorder but stubbornly refusing to succumb. Though I know nothing of medicine, I will venture the suggestion that he had indeed succeeded, perhaps, by a terrible effort of will, in postponing his illness for a time, hoping, of course, to overcome it completely. He knew he was not well, but he was loath to be ill at that time, during those approaching fatal moments of his life; he had to be personally present, to speak his word boldly and resolutely, and “vindicate himself to himself. “ However, he did once visit the new doctor who had come from Moscow, invited by Katerina Ivanovna owing to a fantasy of hers, which I have already mentioned above. The doctor, having listened to him and examined him, concluded that he was indeed suffering from something like a brain disorder, as it were, and was not at all surprised at a certain confession that he made to him, though not without repugnance. “In your condition hallucinations are quite possible,” the doctor decided, “though they should be verified ... but generally it is necessary to begin serious treatment without a moment’s delay, otherwise things will go badly.” But Ivan Fyodorovich, having left the doctor, did not follow up this sensible advice, and treated the idea of treatment with disregard: “I’m up and about, I’m still strong enough, if I collapse it’s another matter, then anyone who likes can treat me,” he decided, with a wave of the hand. And so he was sitting there now, almost aware of being delirious, and, as I have already said, peering persistently at some object on the sofa against the opposite wall. Someone suddenly turned out to be sitting there, though God knows how he had got in, because he had not been in the room when Ivan Fyodorovich came back from seeing Smerdyakov. It was some gentleman, or, rather, a certain type of Russian gentleman, no longer young, qui frisait la cinquantaine,[303] as the French say, with not too much gray in his dark, rather long, and still thick hair, and with a pointed beard. He was wearing a sort of brown jacket, evidently from the best of tailors, but already shabby, made approximately three years ago and already completely out of fashion, such as no well-to-do man of society had been seen in for at least two years. His linen, his long, scarflike necktie, all was just what every stylish gentleman would wear, but, on closer inspection, the linen was a bit dirty and the wide scarf was quite threadbare. The visitor’s checkered trousers fitted perfectly, but again they were too light and somehow too narrow, of a style no one wore any longer, as was the soft, downy white hat the visitor had brought with him, though it was entirely the wrong season. In short, he gave the appearance of decency on rather slender means. The gentleman looked as though he belonged to the category of former idle landowners that flourished in the time of serfdom; had obviously seen the world and decent society, had once had connections and perhaps had them still, but, after the gay life of his youth and the recent abolition of serfdom, had gradually fallen into poverty and become a sort of sponger, in bon ton, as it were, knocking about among good old acquaintances, and received by them for his easy, agreeable nature, and also considering that he was, after all, a decent man, who could even be invited to sit at the table in any company, though, of course, in a humble place. Such spongers, gentlemen of agreeable nature, who can tell a story or two and play a hand of cards, and who decidedly dislike having any tasks thrust upon them, are usually single, either bachelors or widowers, and if they have children, the children are always brought up somewhere far away, by some aunts, whom the gentleman hardly ever mentions in decent company, as though somewhat ashamed of such relations. They gradually become estranged from their children altogether, occasionally receiving letters from them on their birthday or at Christmas, and sometimes even answering them. The unexpected visitor’s physiognomy was not so much good-humored as, again, agreeable and ready, depending on the circumstances, for any amiable expression. He did not have a watch, but he had a tortoiseshell lorgnette on a black ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand there was displayed a massive gold ring with an inexpensive opal. Ivan Fyodorovich was spitefully silent and did not want to begin talking. The visitor sat and waited precisely like a sponger who had just come down from upstairs, from the room assigned to him, to keep his host company at tea, but was humbly silent, since the host was preoccupied and scowling at the thought of something; but who was ready for any amiable conversation as soon as the host would begin it. Suddenly his face seemed to express some unexpected concern.
“Listen,” he began to Ivan Fyodorovich, “forgive me, it’s just a reminder: didn’t you go to Smerdyakov to find out about Katerina Ivanovna? Yet you left without finding out anything about her, you must have forgotten...”
“Ah, yes!” suddenly escaped from Ivan, and his face darkened with worry, “yes, I forgot ... Anyway, it’s all the same now, all till tomorrow,” he muttered to himself. “As for you,” he turned irritably to his visitor, “I’d have remembered it myself in a moment, because that’s exactly what has been causing me such anguish! Why did you have to come out with it? Do you think I’ll simply believe you prompted me and not that I remembered it myself?”
“Don’t believe it then,” the gentleman smiled sweetly, “what good is faith by force? Besides, proofs are no help to faith, especially material proofs. Thomas believed not because he saw the risen Christ but because he wanted to believe even before that.[304] Spiritualists, for example ... I like them so much ... imagine, they think they’re serving faith because devils show their little horns to them from the other world. ‘This,’ they say, ‘is a material proof, so to speak, that the other world exists.’ The other world and material proofs, la-di-da! And, after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also a proof of God? I want to join an idealist society and form an opposition within it: ‘I’m a realist,’ I’ll say, ‘not a materialist,’ heh, heh!”
“Listen,” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly got up from the table. “I seem to be delirious now ... and of course I am delirious ... you can lie as much as you like, it’s all the same to me! You won’t put me into a rage, as you did last time. Only I’m ashamed of something ... I feel like pacing the room ... I sometimes don’t see you, and don’t even hear your voice, as last time, but I always guess what you’re driveling, because i( is I, I myself who am talking, and not you! Only I don’t know whether I was asleep last time or actually saw you. I am now going to wet a towel with cold water and put it to my head, and maybe you’ll evaporate.”
Ivan Fyodorovich went to the corner, took a towel, carried out his intention, and with the wet towel on his head began pacing up and down the room.
“I’m glad we can be so informal with each other,” the visitor tried to begin.
“Fool,” Ivan laughed, “what, should I call you ‘sir’ or something? I feel fine now, only there’s a pain in my temple ... and in the top of my head ... only please don’t philosophize, as you did last time. Tell some pleasant lies, if you can’t clear out. Gossip, since you’re a sponger, go ahead and gossip. Why am I stuck with such a nightmare! But I’m not afraid of you. I will overcome you. They won’t take me to the madhouse!”
“C’est charmant—sponger! Yes, that is precisely my aspect. What am I on earth if not a sponger? Incidentally, I’m a little surprised listening to you: by God, it seems you’re gradually beginning to take me for something real, and not just your fantasy, as you insisted last time ...”
“Not for a single moment do I take you for the real truth,” Ivan cried, somehow even furiously. “You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only I don’t know how to destroy you, and I see I’ll have to suffer through it for a while. You are my hallucination. You are the embodiment of myself, but of just one side of me ... of my thoughts and feelings, but only the most loathsome and stupid of them. From that angle you could even be interesting to me, if I had time to bother with you...”
“I beg your pardon, I’m going to catch you now: earlier, under the street-lamp, when you jumped on Alyosha and shouted: ‘You learned it from him! How do you know that he has been coming to me?’ You were thinking of me then. It means that for one little moment you believed, you did believe that I really am,” the gentleman laughed softly.
“Yes, that was a lapse of character ... but I couldn’t believe in you. I don’t know whether I was asleep or awake the last time. Perhaps I only saw you in my sleep and not in reality at all.” “And why were you so severe with him today, with Alyosha, I mean? He’s a dear boy; I owe him one for the elder Zosima.”
“Shut up about Alyosha! How dare you, you lackey!” Ivan laughed again.
“You laugh while you’re abusing me—a good sign. By the way, you’re much more amiable with me today than you were last time, and I know why: that great decision...”
“Shut up about my decision!” Ivan cried ferociously.
“I understand, I understand, c’est noble, c’est charmant, you go to defend your brother tomorrow, and you sacrifice yourself ... c’est chevaleresque.”[305]
“Shut up or I’ll kick you!”
“I’d be glad of it in a way, because my goal would then be achieved: if it comes to kicks, that means you must believe in my realism, because one doesn’t kick a ghost. Joking aside: it’s all the same to me, abuse me if you like, but still it would be better to be a bit more polite, even with me. Fool, lackey— what sort of talk is that?”
“By abusing you, I’m abusing myself!” Ivan laughed again. “You are me, myself, only with a different mug. You precisely say what I already think ... and you’re not capable of telling me anything new!”
“If my thoughts agree with yours, it only does me honor,” the gentleman said with dignity and tact.
“You just pick out all my bad thoughts, and above all the stupid ones. You are stupid and banal. You are terribly stupid. No, I can’t endure you! What am I to do, what am I to do!” Ivan gnashed his teeth.
“My friend, I still want to be a gentleman, and to be accepted as such,” the visitor began in a fit of some sort of purely spongerish, good-natured, and already-yielding ambition. “I am poor, but ... I won’t say very honest, but ... in society it is generally accepted as an axiom that I am a fallen angel. By God, I can’t imagine how I could ever have been an angel. If I ever was one, it was so long ago that it’s no sin to have forgotten it. Now I only value my reputation as a decent man and get along as best I can, trying to be agreeable. I sincerely love people—oh, so much of what has been said about me is slander! Here, when I move in with people from time to time, my life gets to be somewhat real, as it were, and I like that most of all. Because, like you, I myself suffer from the fantastic, and that is why I love your earthly realism. Here you have it all outlined, here you have the formula, here you have geometry, and with us it’s all indeterminate equations! I walk about here and dream. I love to dream. Besides, on earth I become superstitious—don’t laugh, please: that is precisely what I like, that I become superstitious. Here I take on all your habits: I’ve come to love going to the public baths, can you imagine that? I love having a steam bath with merchants and priests. My dream is to become incarnate, but so that it’s final, irrevocable, in some fat, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant’s wife, and to believe everything she believes. My ideal is to go into a church and light a candle with a pure heart—by God, it’s true. That would put an end to my sufferings. I’ve also come to love getting medical treatment here: there was smallpox going around this spring, so I went to the foundling hospital and had myself inoculated against smallpox—if only you knew how pleased I was that day: I donated ten roubles for our brother Slavs ... ![306] But you’re not listening. You know, you seem rather out of sorts tonight,” the gentleman paused for a moment. “I know you went to see that doctor yesterday ... well, how is your health? What did the doctor say?”
“Fool!”snapped Ivan.
“And aren’t you a smart one! So you’re abusing me again? I’m just asking, not really out of sympathy. You don’t have to answer. And now this rheumatism’s come back ...”
“Fool,” Ivan repeated.
“You keep saying the same thing, but I caught such rheumatism last year that I still remember it.”
“The devil with rheumatism?”
“Why not, if I sometimes become incarnate? Once incarnate, I accept the consequences. Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto.”[307]
“How’s that? Satan sum et nihil humanum ... not too bad for the devil!”
“I’m glad I’ve finally pleased you.”
“And you didn’t get that from me,” Ivan suddenly stopped as if in amazement, “that never entered my head—how strange...”
“C’est de nouveau, n’est-ce pas?[308] This time I’ll be honest and explain to you. Listen: in dreams and especially in nightmares, well, let’s say as a result of indigestion or whatever, a man sometimes sees such artistic dreams, such complex and real actuality, such events, or even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details, beginning from your highest manifestations down to the last shirt button, as I swear even Leo Tolstoy couldn’t invent; and, by the way, it’s not writers who occasionally see such dreams, but quite the most ordinary people, officials, journalists, priests. . . There’s even a whole problem concerning this: one government minister even confessed to me himself that all his best ideas come to him when he’s asleep. Well, and so it is now. Though I am your hallucination, even so, as in a nightmare, I say original things, such as have never entered your head before, so that I’m not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am merely your nightmare and nothing more.”
“Lies. Your goal is precisely to convince me that you are in yourself and are not my nightmare, and so now you yourself assert that you’re a dream.” “My friend, today I’ve adopted a special method, I’ll explain it to you later. Wait, where was I? Oh, yes, so I caught a cold, only not here, but there ...”
“There where? Tell me, are you going to stay long, couldn’t you go away?” Ivan exclaimed almost in despair. He stopped pacing, sat down on the sofa, rested his elbows on the table again, and clutched his head with both hands. He tore the wet towel off and threw it aside in vexation: obviously it did not help.
“Your nerves are unstrung,” the gentleman remarked, with a casually familiar and yet perfectly amiable air, “you’re angry with me even for the fact that I could catch cold, whereas it happened in the most natural way. I was then hurrying to a diplomatic soirée at the home of a most highly placed Petersburg lady, who had designs on a ministry. Well, evening dress, white tie, gloves—and yet I was God knows where, and to get to your earth I still had to fly through space ... of course it only takes a moment, but then a sun’s ray takes a full eight minutes, and, imagine, in a dinner jacket, with an open vest. Spirits don’t freeze, but when one’s incarnate, then ... in short, it was flighty of me, I just set out, and in those spaces, I mean, the ether, the waters above the firmament,[309] it’s so freezing cold ... that is, don’t talk about freezing— you can’t call it freezing anymore, just imagine: a hundred and fifty degrees below zero! You know how village girls amuse themselves: they ask some unsuspecting novice to lick an axe at thirty degrees below zero; the tongue instantly sticks to it, and the dolt has to tear it away so that it bleeds; and that’s just at thirty below, but at a hundred and fifty, I suppose, if you just touched your finger to an axe, there would be no more finger, that is ... that is, if there happened to be an axe ...”
“And could there happen to be an axe?” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly interrupted, absently and disgustedly. He was trying with all his might not to believe in his delirium and not to fall into complete insanity.
“An axe?” the visitor repeated in surprise.
“Yes, what would an axe be doing there?” Ivan Fyodorovich cried with a sort of fierce and persistent stubbornness.
“What would an axe be doing in space? Quelle idée! If it got far enough away, I suppose it would begin flying around the earth, without knowing why, like a satellite. The astronomers would calculate the rising and setting of the axe, Gattsuk would introduce it into the calendar,[310] and that’s all.”
“You are stupid, you are terribly stupid!” Ivan said cantankerously. “Put more intelligence into your lies, or I won’t listen. You want to overcome me with realism, to convince me that you are, but I don’t want to believe that you are! I won’t believe it!!”
“But I’m not lying, it’s all true; unfortunately, the truth is hardly ever witty. You, I can see, are decidedly expecting something great from me, and perhaps even beautiful.[311] That’s a pity, because I give only what I can...”
“Stop philosophizing, you ass!”
“How philosophize, when my whole right side was numb, and I was moaning and groaning. I called on the entire medical profession: they diagnose beautifully, they tell you all that’s wrong with you one-two-three, but they can’t cure you. There happened to be one enthusiastic little student: even if you die, he said, at least you’ll have a thorough knowledge of what disease you died of! Then, too, they have this way of sending you to specialists: we will give you our diagnosis, they say, then go to such and such a specialist and he will cure you. I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there’s a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don’t treat left nostrils, it’s not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there’s a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril. What is one to do? I resorted to folk remedies, one German doctor advised me to take a steam bath and rub myself with honey and salt. I did it, only for the chance of having an extra bath: I got myself all sticky, and to no avail. In desperation I wrote to Count Mattei in Milan; he sent me a book and some drops, God help him. And imagine, what cured me was Hoff ‘s extract of malt! I accidentally bought some, drank a glass and a half, and could even have danced—everything went away. I was absolutely determined to thank him publicly in the newspapers, the feeling of gratitude was crying out in me, but, imagine, that led to another story: not one publisher would take it! ‘It would be too retrograde, no one will believe it, le diable n’existe point.’[312] They advised me to publish it anonymously. Well, what good is a ‘thank you’ if it’s anonymous? I had a laugh with the clerks: ‘In our day,’ I said, ‘what’s retrograde is believing in God; but I am the devil, it’s all right to believe in me. ‘ ‘We understand,’ they said, ‘who doesn’t believe in the devil? But all the same we can’t do it, it might harm our tendency. Or perhaps only as a joke?’ Well, I thought, as a joke it wouldn’t be very witty. So they simply didn’t publish it. And would you believe that it still weighs on my heart? My best feelings, gratitude, for example, are formally forbidden solely because of my social position.”
“Up to his neck in philosophy again!” Ivan snarled hatefully.
“God preserve me from that, but one can’t help complaining sometimes. I am a slandered man. Even you tell me I’m stupid every other minute. It shows how young you are. My friend, the point is not just intelligence! I have a naturally kind and cheerful heart,’and various little vaudevilles, I, too . . .’ You seem to take me decidedly for some gray-haired Khlestakov,[313] and yet my fate is far more serious. By some pre-temporal assignment, which I have never been able to figure out, I am appointed ‘to negate,’ whereas I am sincerely kind and totally unable to negate. No, they say, go and negate, without negation there will be no criticism, and what sort of journal has no ‘criticism section’? Without criticism, there would be nothing but ‘Hosannah.’ But ‘Hosannah’ alone is not enough for life, it is necessary that this ‘Hosannah’ pass through the crucible of doubt, and so on, in the same vein. I don’t meddle with any of that, by the way, I didn’t create it, and I can’t answer for it. So they chose themselves a scapegoat, they made me write for the criticism section, and life came about. We understand this comedy: I, for instance, demand simply and directly that I be destroyed. No, they say, live, because without you there would be nothing. If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen. Without you there would be no events, and there must be events. And so I serve grudgingly, for the sake of events, and I do the unreasonable on orders. People take this whole comedy for something serious, despite all their undeniable intelligence. That is their tragedy. Well, they suffer, of course, but ... still they live, they live really, not in fantasy; for suffering is life. Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in it—everything would turn into an endless prayer service: holy, but a bit dull. And me? I suffer, and still I do not live. I am an x in an indeterminate equation. I am some sort of ghost of life who has lost all ends and beginnings, and I’ve finally even forgotten what to call myself. You’re laughing ... no, you’re not laughing, you’re angry again. You’re eternally angry, you want reason only, but I will repeat to you once more that I would give all of that life beyond the stars, all ranks and honors, only to be incarnated in the soul of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant’s wife and light candles to God.”
“So you don’t believe in God, then?” Ivan grinned hatefully.
“Well, how shall I put it—that is, if you’re serious...”
“Is there a God, or not?” Ivan cried again with fierce insistence.
“Ah, so you are serious? By God, my dear, I just don’t know—there’s a great answer for you!”
“You don’t know, yet you see God? No, you are not in yourself, you are me, me and nothing else! You are trash, you are my fantasy!”
“Let’s say I’m of one philosophy with you, if you like, that would be correct. Je pense donc je suis,[314] I’m quite sure of that, but all the rest around me, all those worlds, God, even Satan himself—for me all that is unproven, whether it exists in itself, or is only my emanation, a consistent development of my I, which exists pre-temporally and uniquely ... in short, I hasten to stop, because you look as if you’re about to jump up and start fighting.”
“Better tell me some funny anecdote!” Ivan said sickly. “There is an anecdote, and precisely on our subject—that is, not an anecdote but more of a legend. You reproach me with unbelief: ‘You see, but you don’t believe.’ But, my friend, I am not alone in that, all of us there are stirred up now, and it all comes from your science. While there were still just atoms, five senses, four elements, well, then it all still stayed together anyhow. They had atoms in the ancient world, too. But when we found out that you had discovered your ‘chemical molecule,’ and ‘protoplasm,’ and devil knows what else—then we put our tails between our legs. A real muddle set in; above all—superstition, gossip (we have as much gossip as you do, even a bit more); and, finally, denunciations as well (we, too, have a certain department where such ‘information’ is received) .[315] And so there is this wild legend, which goes back to our middle ages—not yours but ours—and no one believes it except for two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchants’ wives—that is, again, not your merchants’ wives but ours. Everything that you have, we have as well; I’m revealing one of our secrets to you, out of friendship, though it’s forbidden. This legend is about paradise. There was, they say, a certain thinker and philosopher here on your earth, who ‘rejected all—laws, conscience, faith,’[316] and, above all, the future life. He died and thought he’d go straight into darkness and death, but no—there was the future life before him. He was amazed and indignant: ‘This,’ he said, ‘goes against my convictions.’ So for that he was sentenced ... I mean, you see, I beg your pardon, I’m repeating what I heard, it’s just a legend ... you see, he was sentenced to walk in darkness a quadrillion kilometers (we also use kilometers now), and once he finished that quadrillion, the doors of paradise would be opened to him and he would be forgiven everything.”
“And what other torments have you got in that world, besides the quadrillion?” Ivan interrupted with some strange animation.
“What other torments? Ah, don’t even ask: before it was one thing and another, but now it’s mostly the moral sort, ‘remorse of conscience’ and all that nonsense. That also started because of you, from the ‘mellowing of your mores.’[317] Well, and who benefited? The unscrupulous benefited, because what is remorse of conscience to a man who has no conscience at all? Decent people who still had some conscience and honor left suffered instead ... There you have it—reforms on unprepared ground, and copied from foreign institutions as well—nothing but harm! The good old fire was much better. Well, so this man sentenced to the quadrillion stood a while, looked, and then lay down across the road: ‘I don’t want to go, I refuse to go on principle! ‘ Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights—you’ll get the character of this thinker lying in the road.”
“And what was he lying on?” “Well, there must have been something there. Or are you laughing?”
“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange animation. He was listening now with unexpected curiosity. “Well, so is he still lying there?”
“The point is that he isn’t. He lay there for nearly a thousand years, and then got up and started walking.”
“What an ass!” Ivan exclaimed, bursting into nervous laughter, still apparently trying hard to figure something out. “Isn’t it all the same whether he lies there forever or walks a quadrillion kilometers? It must be about a billion years’ walk!”
“Much more, even. If we had a pencil and paper, we could work it out. But he arrived long ago, and this is where the anecdote begins.”
“Arrived! But where did he get a billion years?”
“You keep thinking about our present earth! But our present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, let’s say, got covered with ice, cracked, fell to pieces, broke down into its original components, again there were the waters above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun—all this development may already have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the same way, to the last detail. A most unspeakable bore...”
“Go on, what happened when he arrived?”
“The moment the doors of paradise were opened and he went in, before he had even been there two seconds—and that by the watch, the watch (though I should think that on the way his watch would long ago have broken down into its component elements in his pocket)—before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion kilometers, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In short, he sang ‘Hosannah’ and oversweetened it so much that some persons there, of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first: he jumped over to the conservatives a bit too precipitously. The Russian character. I repeat: it’s a legend. Take it for what it’s worth. That’s the sort of ideas current among us on all these subjects.”
“Caught you!” Ivan cried out with almost childish glee, as if he had now finally remembered something. “That anecdote about the quadrillion years— I made it up myself! I was seventeen years old then, I was in high school ... I made up that anecdote then and told it to a friend of mine, his last name was Korovkin, it was in Moscow ... It’s such a typical anecdote that I couldn’t have gotten it from anywhere. I almost forgot it ... but now I’ve unconsciously recalled it—recalled it myself, not because you told it to me! Just as one sometimes recalls a thousand things unconsciously, even when one is being taken out to be executed ... I’ve remembered it in a dream. You are my dream! You’re a dream, you don’t exist!” “Judging by the enthusiasm with which you deny me,” the gentleman laughed, “I’m convinced that you do believe in me all the same.”
“Not in the least! Not for a hundredth part do I believe in you!”
“But for a thousandth part you do believe. Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest. Admit that you do believe, let’s say for a ten-thousandth part ...”
“Not for one moment!” Ivan cried in a rage. “And, by the way, I should like to believe in you!” he suddenly added strangely.
“Aha! Quite a confession, really! But I am kind, I will help you here, too. Listen, it is I who have caught you, not you me! I deliberately told you your own anecdote, which you had forgotten, so that you would finally lose faith in me.”
“Lies! The purpose of your appearance is to convince me that you are.”
“Precisely. But hesitation, anxiety, the struggle between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such a torment for a conscientious man like yourself, that it’s better to hang oneself. Precisely because I knew you had a tiny bit of belief in me, I let in some final disbelief, by telling you that anecdote. I’m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so. A new method, sir: when you’ve completely lost faith in me, then you’ll immediately start convincing me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality—I know you now; and then my goal will be achieved. And it is a noble goal. I will sow just a tiny seed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow—and such an oak that you, sitting in that oak, will want to join ‘the desert fathers and the blameless women’;[318] because secretly you want that verry, ver-ry much, you will dine on locusts, you will drag yourself to the desert to seek salvation!”
“So, you scoundrel, you’re troubling yourself over the salvation of my soul?”
“One needs to do a good deed sometimes, at least. But I see you’re angry with me, really angry!”
“Buffoon! And have you ever tempted them, the ones who eat locusts and pray for seventeen years in the barren desert, and get overgrown with moss?”
“My dear, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and all worlds, and clings to such a one, because a diamond like that is just too precious; one such soul is sometimes worth a whole constellation—we have our own arithmetic. It’s a precious victory! And some of them, by God, are not inferior to you in development, though you won’t believe it: they can contemplate such abysses of belief and disbelief at one and the same moment that, really, it sometimes seems that another hair’s breadth and a man would fall in ‘heel-over-headed,’ as the actor Gorbunov says.”[319]
“So, what? They put your nose out of joint?” “My friend,” the visitor observed sententiously, “it’s sometimes better to have your nose put out of joint than to have no nose at all, as one afflicted marquis (he must have been treated by a specialist) uttered not long ago in confession to his Jesuit spiritual director. I was present—it was just lovely. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he said, beating his breast. ‘My son,’ the priest hedged, ‘through the inscrutable decrees of Providence everything has its recompense, and a visible calamity sometimes brings with it a great, if invisible, profit. If a harsh fate has deprived you of your nose, your profit is that now for the rest of your life no one will dare tell you that you have had your nose put out of joint.’ ‘Holy father, that’s no consolation!’ the desperate man exclaimed. ‘On the contrary, I’d be delighted to have my nose put out of joint every day of my life, if only it were where it belonged!’ ‘My son,’ the priest sighed, ‘one cannot demand all blessings at once. That is to murmur against Providence, which even here has not forgotten you; for if you cry, as you have just cried, that you would gladly have your nose put out of joint for the rest of your life, in this your desire has already been fulfilled indirectly; for, having lost your nose, you have thereby, as it were, had your nose put out of joint all the same ...”
“Pah, how stupid!” cried Ivan.
“My friend, I merely wanted to make you laugh, but I swear that is real Jesuit casuistry, and I swear it all happened word for word as I’ve told it to you. That was a recent incident, and it gave me a lot of trouble. The unfortunate young man went home and shot himself that same night; I was with him constantly up to the last moment ... As for those little Jesuit confessional booths, that truly is my pet amusement in the sadder moments of life. Here’s another incident for you, from just the other day. A girl comes to an old priest, a blonde, from Normandy, about twenty years old. Beautiful, buxom, all nature—enough to make your mouth water. She bends down and whispers her sin to the priest through the little hole. ‘What, my daughter, can you have fallen again so soon ... ?’ the priest exclaims.’O Sancta Maria, what’s this I hear? With another man now? But how long will it go on? What shame! ‘ ‘Ah, mon père,’ the sinner replies, bathed in tears of repentance, ‘ça lui fait tant de plaisir, et à moi si peu de peine!’[320] Well, just imagine such an answer! At that even I backed off: it was the very cry of nature, which, if you like, is better than innocence itself. I remitted her sin on the spot and turned to leave, but I had to come back at once: I heard the priest arranging a rendezvous with her for that evening through the hole; the old man was solid as a rock, but he fell in an instant! It was nature, the truth of nature, claiming its own! What, are you turning your nose up again, are you angry again? I really don’t know how to please you . . .” “Leave me, you’re throbbing in my brain like a persistent nightmare,” Ivan groaned painfully, powerless before his apparition. “I’m bored with you, it’s unbearable, agonizing! I’d give a lot to be able to get rid of you!”
“I repeat, moderate your demands, don’t demand ‘all that is great and beautiful’[321] of me, and we shall live in peace and harmony, you’ll see,” the gentleman said imposingly. “Indeed, you’re angry with me that I have not appeared to you in some sort of red glow, ‘in thunder and lightning,’ with scorched wings, but have presented myself in such a modest form. You’re insulted, first, in your aesthetic feelings, and, second, in your pride: how could such a banal devil come to such a great man? No, you’ve still got that romantic little streak in you, so derided by Belinsky.[322] It can’t be helped, young man. This evening, as I was getting ready to come to you, I did think of appearing, for a joke, in the form of a retired Regular State Councillor who had served in the Caucasus, with the star of the Lion and Sun pinned to my frock coat, but I was decidedly afraid, because you’d have thrashed me just for daring to tack the Lion and Sun on my frock coat, instead of the North Star or Sirius at least.[323]And you keep saying how stupid I am. But, my God, I don’t make any claims to being your equal in intelligence. Mephistopheles, when he comes to Faust, testifies of himself that he desires evil, yet does only good.[324] Well, let him do as he likes, it’s quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the only man in all of nature who loves the truth and sincerely desires good. I was there when the Word who died on the cross was ascending into heaven, carrying on his bosom the soul of the thief who was crucified to the right of him, I heard the joyful shrieks of the cherubim singing and shouting ‘Hosannah,’ and the thundering shout of rapture from the seraphim, which made heaven and all creation shake. And, I swear by all that’s holy, I wanted to join the chorus and shout ‘Hosannah’ with everyone else. It was right on my lips, it was already bursting from my breast ... you know, I’m very sensitive and artistically susceptible. But common sense—oh, it’s the most unfortunate quality of my nature—kept me within due bounds even then, and I missed the moment! For what—I thought at that same moment—what will happen after my ‘Hosannah? Everything in the world will immediately be extinguished and no events will occur. And so, solely because of my official duty and my social position, I was forced to quash the good moment in myself and stay with my nasty tricks. Someone takes all the honor of the good for himself and only leaves me the nasty tricks. But I don’t covet the honor of living as a moocher, I’m not ambitious. Why, of all beings in the world, am I alone condemned to be cursed by all decent people, and even to be kicked with boots, for, when I become incarnate, I must occasionally take such consequences as well? There’s a secret here, I know, but they won’t reveal this secret to me for anything, because then, having learned what it’s all about, I might just roar ‘Hosannah,’ and the necessary minus would immediately disappear and sensibleness would set in all over the world, and with it, of course, the end of everything, even of newspapers and journals, because who would subscribe to them? I know that I will finally be reconciled, that I, too, will finish my quadrillion and be let in on the secret. But until that happens I sulk and grudgingly fulfill my purpose: to destroy thousands so that one may be saved. For instance, how many souls had to be destroyed, and honest reputations put to shame, in order to get just one righteous Job, with whom they baited me so wickedly in olden times! No, until the secret is revealed, two truths exist for me: one is theirs, from there, and so far completely unknown to me; the other is mine. And who knows which is preferable ... Are you asleep?”
“What else?” Ivan groaned spitefully. “Everything in my nature that is stupid, long outlived, mulled over in my mind, flung away like carrion—you are now offering to me as some kind of news!”
“Displeased again! And I hoped you might even be charmed by such a literary rendition: that ‘Hosannah’ in heaven really didn’t come out too badly, did it? And then that sarcastic tone, à la Heine,[325] eh? Don’t you agree?”
“No, never have I been such a lackey! How could my soul produce such a lackey as you?”
“My friend, I know a most charming and dear young Russian gentleman: a thinker and a great lover of literature and other fine things, the author of a promising poem entitled ‘The Grand Inquisitor’... It was him only that I had in mind.”
“I forbid you to speak of ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’” Ivan exclaimed, blushing all over with shame.
“Well, and what about the ‘Geological Cataclysm’? Remember that? What a poem!”
“Shut up, or I’ll kill you!”
“Kill me? No, excuse me, but I will have my say. I came in order to treat myself to that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my friends—fervent, young, trembling with the thirst for life! ‘There are new people now,’ you decided last spring, as you were preparing to come here, ‘they propose to destroy everything and begin with anthropophagy. Fools, they never asked me! In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, one need only destroy the idea of God in mankind, that’s where the business should start! One should begin with that, with that—oh, blind men, of no understanding! Once mankind has renounced God, one and all (and I believe that this period, analogous to the geological periods, will come), then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without anthropophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Man, his will and his science no longer limited, conquering nature every hour, will thereby every hour experience such lofty delight as will replace for him all his former hopes of heavenly delight. Each will know himself utterly mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he should not murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother then without any reward. Love will satisfy only the moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will increase its fire, inasmuch as previously it was diffused in hopes of an eternal love beyond the grave’ ... well, and so on and so on, in the same vein. Lovely!”
Ivan was sitting with his hands over his ears, looking down, but his whole body started trembling. The voice went on:
“‘The question now,’ my young thinker reflected, ‘is whether or not it is possible for such a period ever to come. If it does come, then everything will be resolved and mankind will finally be settled. But since, in view of man’s inveterate stupidity, it may not be settled for another thousand years, anyone who already knows the truth is permitted to settle things for himself, absolutely as he wishes, on the new principles. In this sense, “everything is permitted” to him. Moreover, since God and immortality do not exist in any case, even if this period should never come, the new man is allowed to become a man-god, though it be he alone in the whole world, and of course, in this new rank, to jump lightheartedly over any former moral obstacle of the former slave-man, if need be. There is no law for God! Where God stands—there is the place of God! Where I stand, there at once will be the foremost place ... “everything is permitted,” and that’s that! ‘ It’s all very nice; only if one wants to swindle, why, I wonder, should one also need the sanction of truth? But such is the modern little Russian man: without such a sanction, he doesn’t even dare to swindle, so much does he love the truth...”
The visitor spoke, obviously carried away by his own eloquence, raising his voice more and more, and glancing sidelong at his host; but he did not manage to finish: Ivan suddenly snatched a glass from the table and flung it at the orator.
“Ah, mais c’est bête enfin!”[326] the latter exclaimed, jumping up from the sofa and shaking the spatters of tea off himself. “He remembered Luther’s inkstand![327] He considers me a dream and he throws glasses at a dream! Just like a woman! I knew you were only pretending to stop your ears and were really listening...” Suddenly there came a firm, insistent knocking on the window from outside. Ivan Fyodorovich jumped up from the sofa.
“Listen, you’d better open,” the visitor cried, “it’s your brother Alyosha with the most unexpected and interesting news, I guarantee it!”
“Shut up, deceiver, I knew it was Alyosha without you, I had a presentiment of him, and of course he hasn’t come for no reason, of course he has ‘news’!” Ivan exclaimed frenziedly.
“But open, open to him. There’s a blizzard out there, and he’s your brother. Monsieur sait-il le temps qu’il fait? C’est à ne pas mettre un chien dehors ... “[328]
The knocking continued. Ivan wanted to rush to the window; but something seemed suddenly to bind his legs and arms. He was straining as hard as he could to break his bonds, but in vain. The knocking on the window grew stronger and louder. At last the bonds broke and Ivan Fyodorovich jumped up from the sofa. He looked around wildly. The two candles were almost burnt down, the glass he had just thrown at his visitor stood before him on the table, and there was no one on the opposite sofa. The knocking on the window continued insistently, but not at all as loudly as he had just imagined in his dream, on the contrary, it was quite restrained.
“That was no dream! No, I swear it was no dream, it all just happened!” Ivan Fyodorovich cried, rushed to the window, and opened it.
“Alyosha, I told you not to come!” he cried fiercely to his brother. “Make it short: what do you want? Make it short, do you hear?”
“Smerdyakov hanged himself an hour ago,” Alyosha answered from outside.
“Come to the porch, I’ll open at once,” Ivan said, and he went to open the door for Alyosha.