The Brothers Karamazov (104 page)

“I suppose they will. But I don’t think you’ll be well enough to appear in court.”

“Oh, I can sit up very well . . . But you’re confusing me by interrupting me this way! Ah, that beastly crime, then the trial, then they all leave for Siberia, while other people get married, and it all happens so quickly, so quickly, and everything changes and then everybody is old and there’s only the grave before them. But good, who cares. I feel tired now. You know, Katya, 
cette charmante personne
, she’s disappointed all my expectations. She’s decided to follow your brother Dmitry to Siberia, while your other brother, Ivan, will follow her and live in some town not too far away, and so they’ll go on tormenting one another. It all drives me nearly mad. And the worst of it all is the scandal: it has been in all the newspapers in Moscow and Petersburg. Millions of articles have been written about it. And do you know—they have even got me into it; one newspaper said that I was ‘a very dear friend’ of your brother’s. Just imagine that, and I won’t repeat the horrid phrase they used!”

“That’s quite incredible! What did it say? What newspaper?”

“Wait, I’ll show it to you. I received it yesterday. It’s in that Petersburg paper called 
Rumors
. It started coming out this year. I liked the idea of reading about all sorts of rumors and subscribed to it. But, my God, now I’m sorry I ever set eyes on that sheet; I never expected it would carry that sort of rumor! Here, you see the marked place—read it.” And she handed Alyosha a newspaper which she had under her pillow.

She was not just upset. She seemed crushed and it is quite possible that everything had become entangled and mixed up in her head. The news item in question was quite typical of its kind and could, of course, have upset her considerably, had she been able to concentrate on anything at all. But in the state she was in, her mind could not rest longer than a second on any particular subject. The next moment it would skip to something completely different, and she would even forget about the newspaper altogether.

Alyosha was well aware that the news of the dreadful crime had spread all over Russia, carrying all sorts of rumors in its wake. He had read, during the past two months, true facts and the wildest inventions about Dmitry and about the other Karamazovs, even about himself. One report, for instance, said that, after his brother’s crime, Alyosha was so horrified that he entered a monastery and became a hermit. Another newspaper disputed that report and explained that, in reality, almost the opposite was true: after the crime, Alyosha had “fled” the monastery in the company of the elder Zosima, the two of them having stolen the monastery’s funds.

The item Mrs. Khokhlakov had handed Alyosha now bore the dateline of Skotoprigonievsk, which, alas, is the name of our town (I have tried to avoid mentioning it all this time), and was entitled “Touching the Karamazov Affair.” It was very brief and actually did not even mention Mrs. Khokhlakov or, for that matter, anyone else by name at all. It only said that the accused at the forthcoming scandalous trial was a former army captain, an impudent loafer, a reactionary who approved of the institution of serfdom and was mostly famous for his affairs with “bored and lonely ladies,” and that one of these, “a pining widow who had convinced herself that she was still young” but who actually had “a grown-up daughter,” had become so enamored of him that only two hours before the commission of the crime she had offered him three thousand rubles on condition that he leave with her at once for the gold mines. But the monster had thought he would rather kill his father than drag himself to the Siberian gold mines with a bored forty-year-old lady “of fading charms.” And, as was to be expected, the playful report ended with an indignant moral indictment both of parricide in general and of the institution of serfdom, which had recently been abolished.

Alyosha read the report with curiosity, then folded the newspaper, and handed it back to Mrs. Khokhlakov.

“Well, who else could that be but me?” she started, prattling on again. “Why, didn’t I suggest to him about an hour before the crime that he leave for the gold mines? But now, all of a sudden, they make me offer him my ‘fading charms’ as well! You don’t imagine, do you, that that was why I suggested he go gold mining? It’s a deliberate and vicious distortion! May the Almighty forgive that correspondent for those ‘fading charms,’ as I forgive him, for let me tell you, I know who that correspondent is! It’s your friend Rakitin, of course!”

“That could well be,” Alyosha said, “although I’ve heard nothing about it.”

“It’s not just that it could be he—it 
is
 he! Why, didn’t you know that I turned him out of my house?”

“I think I heard that you’d asked him not to come to your house anymore, but I don’t know what it was all about. I was never told—in any case you never told me . . .”

“So you must have heard it from him, right? Why, does he sound angry with me? Does he say bad things about me?”

“Yes, he does say bad things about you, but then he says bad things about everybody. But he never told me why you’d asked him not to come back. Besides, I see him very seldom now. And, you know, we’re not friends.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll tell you everything and, since it can’t be helped, I’ll have to make a little confession, for it may be that I could be blamed for something, too. But that’s only a very small point and I don’t even know whether I could really be reproached for it. You see, Alyosha dear,” she said, suddenly looking very playful, as a mysterious little smile appeared on her lips, “you see, I suspect, Alyosha, and I’m telling you this as if I were your mother . . . actually, no, just the contrary, as if you were my father, for my feeling like a mother toward you wouldn’t fit very well here . . . Well, anyway, let’s say that I feel as if I were confessing to the elder Zosima, and that’s the truest comparison I can think of. It fits perfectly, and that’s why I called you a hermit when you came in today . . . Well, then, that poor young man, that Rakitin—oh, Lord, I can’t really hold it against him, and, although I’m angry and furious with him, I’m really not all that angry—in short, that rather thoughtless young man suddenly decided he had fallen in love with me. I noticed it only later, all of a sudden, but for about a month he’d been coming to see me almost every day, although I’d known him for quite a long time even before that. So I never gave it a thought when, to my great surprise, I began noticing certain signs . . . And perhaps you know, too, that for a couple of months now I’ve been receiving a very nice, well-mannered, serious young man who works here as a civil servant—Peter Perkhotin. I believe you’ve met him here yourself. Don’t you think he’s a charming, serious young man? Well, he comes to see me every other day—I wouldn’t mind if it was every day—and he’s always so nicely and neatly dressed. Oh, I love young people in general, Alyosha, young men like you, but Peter Perkhotin has the mind of a statesman almost and is so modest and unpresuming at the same time; I must, I must, put in a word for him with his superiors! He is a future member of the diplomatic corps, I’m certain! And you know, on that terrible night, when he came here, he practically saved my life! Your friend Rakitin, on the other hand, always wore those horribly ugly boots when he came to see me and he had the appalling habit of stretching his legs out in front of him when he sat down, over the carpet, you know . . . So, to make a long story short, he started making all kinds of hints about the way he felt and once, upon leaving, he gave my hand an awfully hard squeeze. But the moment he pressed my hand like that, my foot started to ache . . . Rakitin had, of course, met Peter Perkhotin in my house and he always tried to say something unpleasant to him, to growl at him or something. I watched them sometimes and I couldn’t help being secretly amused at the way they carried on with each other. Now, one day I was alone at home. Mikhail Rakitin came in and he showed me a short poem he’d written about my sore foot. Wait a second—how did it go? It started, I believe,

*

Little foot so nice and stout,

Look, it’s swollen, what a shame!

*

or something like that, for, you know, I have the most appalling memory for verse, but I have it somewhere and I’ll show it to you later. It was really charming and it was not just about the foot; there was something edifying in it as well, a really most enchanting thought, but I’ve forgotten right now what it was—just the thing for an album! Of course, I thanked him for the poem and he seemed very flattered. And just then Mr. Perkhotin came in and Mr. Rakitin at once became as gloomy as a stormy night. I saw clearly that Mr. Perkhotin had interfered with his plans, for I think that Mr. Rakitin was about to tell me something after he had read me his poem. I felt it coming, but just then Peter Perkhotin came in. So I showed Mr. Perkhotin the poem without, of course, telling him who had written it. I’m sure he immediately guessed who it was; he won’t admit it to this day, but he’s just pretending. Well, when he’d read it, he laughed and started to criticize the poem. ‘This is an awful poem,’ he said, ‘sounds as if it was written by a divinity student or someone like that.’ And you should have heard the way he went on, taking the poem to pieces! And your friend Rakitin, instead of just laughing it off, became absolutely livid with rage . . . I actually thought the two of them would come to blows. ‘I wrote that poem,’ he said. ‘I wrote it as a joke, for I consider poetry writing a despicable occupation. However, my poem is good. Your Pushkin gets a whole monument just for writing about ladies’ feet, whereas my poem contains an ideological message as well. As to you,’ he said to Perkhotin, ‘you’re an advocate of serfdom; there’s not one single humanitarian impulse in you; progress has never touched you; you’re nothing but an official and you accept graft!’

“At this point I began to shout, imploring them to stop it. But Peter, who is not one to be easily intimidated as you know, suddenly assumed a pose of outraged dignity, gave Mr. Rakitin such a sarcastic look, and started to apologize: ‘Oh, I had no idea you had written it! If I had known, I would never have said all those things. I would have praised your poem, for I have heard it said that poets are an irritable lot.’ And he kept mocking him in that most dignified, apologetic way. He told me later himself that he was being sarcastic, but at the time I thought he meant what he was saying seriously . . .

“And as I was lying here on my sofa, just as I am now, Alexei, I suddenly thought to myself: ‘Shouldn’t I ask Mikhail Rakitin to leave my house immediately, because he is being insulting, shouting like this at my guest?’ And would you believe it, I just closed my eyes and tried to make up my mind whether it would or would not be the right thing to do. I got all worked up about it and my heart was even palpitating, believe it or not, as I tried to decide whether to scream or not. One voice said to me: ‘Interfere now. Raise your voice. Shout!’ And another voice said: ‘No, don’t shout!’ But the moment the second voice said that, I did scream, and then I fainted. That, of course, caused a terrible commotion. Suddenly I recovered, got up, and said to Mikhail Rakitin: ‘It pains me greatly to tell you this, but I have decided I no longer wish to receive you in my house.’

“And that was how I threw him out, Alexei! Oh, I know very well, I ought not to have done it. For I was lying when I said I was angry with him. I wasn’t really. It simply struck me that it would make such an effective scene, my telling him that . . . And, you know, it came off very naturally, because somehow I started to cry, and then I cried more during the next few days, until one day after dinner I suddenly completely forgot about the whole thing. And so he hasn’t been to see me for two weeks now and I started wondering whether he’d ever come back. That was yesterday . . . But then in the evening I received that sheet, 
Rumors
, read it, and gasped. Who else could have written it? I bet when he left here that day, he went directly home, sat down, wrote it and sent it off, and they printed it. You see, all this happened two weeks ago . . . But Alyosha dear, it’s terrible—this isn’t at all what I wanted to tell you about . . . But I can’t help it, things just get said by themselves whether I want them to or not . . .”

“I’m afraid I have very little time. I must leave in time to visit my brother,” Alyosha mumbled apologetically.

“Yes, yes, now you’ve reminded me of what I had to tell you. Listen, what does it mean—temporary insanity?”

“What temporary insanity?”

“Legal temporary insanity. The kind of insanity for which everything can be forgiven.”

“I don’t quite understand what it is you want to know.”

“This is what I want to know: you know that Katya—ah, she’s such a delightful, wonderful person, although I no longer know with whom she is in love . . . Recently she was sitting with me and I kept probing her about it, but it proved quite useless, especially since now she talks to me only about trivial matters. I mean, for instance, she inquires about such things as my health, and even her tone has become so . . . you know. So I said to myself, ‘If that’s the way she wants it, it’s all right with me . . .’ Ah yes, as I was telling you, that doctor, he came in connection with this temporary insanity business. You’ve heard about that doctor, haven’t you? Ah yes, how could you help knowing about the doctor who can recognize when people are mad when you invited him here yourself? Although it wasn’t you actually, was it? It was Katya. Katya does everything! Now, consider this: a man sits there, and he’s not mad at all, but then suddenly he has this temporary insanity. He knows what’s going on and remembers it later, but nevertheless he’s temporarily insane. So that’s the explanation: what happened to your brother Dmitry was just this temporary insanity. It was right after the judiciary reforms that they found out about temporary insanity, and this is one of the beneficial results of our new judicial system. That doctor came to see me and he questioned me at length about that evening, you know, about the gold mines . . . He wanted to know what Dmitry was like at the time. And how else could I describe his state but as temporary insanity? He came, he shouted, ‘Give me three thousand rubles. I want three thousand right now!’ And after that, he left and suddenly committed the murder. And for that very reason, they’ll have to acquit him: he was resisting it, but he couldn’t help himself and he killed.”