The Brothers Karamazov (107 page)

“Yes, I suppose you could call it that, but I’m afraid I can’t explain to you what it is exactly.”

“But Rakitin knows. Ah, he knows so much, damn him! He won’t become a monk. He’s planning to go to Petersburg. He’ll become a literary critic and he’ll work for the betterment of mankind. Well, why not? He may do some useful work and make a career for himself. Ah, his kind are great at making careers! But ethics be damned—my goose is cooked, Alexei, you simple man of God! Let me tell you, it does something to my heart when I look at you, for I like you better than anyone. But now you tell me, was there somebody called Karl Bernard?”

“Karl Bernard?”

“No, wait, it wasn’t Karl. I’ve got mixed up . . . Wasn’t it Claude Bernard? Who’s he? A chemist or something?”

“He’s some sort of scientist, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about him. I only know that he’s a scientist. I don’t know in what field.”

“So to hell with him—I don’t know either,” Mitya said angrily. “I suppose he’s one of those smart careerists, like the rest of them. And I’m sure Rakitin will make a career too. Rakitin will slip through a keyhole if he has to, but he’ll get where he wants. Just like Bernard. Ah, all the Bernards! They’re breeding all over the place these days!”

“But what’s the matter with 
you
?” Alyosha insisted.

“Rakitin wants to write an article about me, about my trial; he hopes to start on his journalistic career that way. He told me so himself. Oh, behind it will be the idea that I couldn’t prevent myself from killing because I’m a victim of my environment, and so on and so forth—he explained it all to me. His piece will have socialist overtones, he told me. Well, what the hell do I care—if he wants it to have overtones, it can have them. I don’t give a damn. You know, he hates Ivan and he doesn’t like you too much either. The reason I don’t chase him away is that, despite everything, he’s so intelligent. He thinks a bit much of himself, though, and I said to him today: ‘You can’t despise the Karamazovs, because they’re philosophers rather than scoundrels, just like all real Russian people. But you, with all your learning, you’re no philosopher. You’re just a low-down bastard.’ That made him laugh. Kind of spitefully, though. So I said to him: ‘
De
 “thinkabus” 
non est disputandum
.’ 
De
 thinkabus—don’t you see that that’s funny? At least I was taking a hand at classical quotations like a real scholar!” Mitya roared with laughter.

“But why did you say you were done for?” Alyosha interrupted him.

“Why am I done for? Hm . . . how shall I put it—well, all in all, I’m unhappy about God. That’s why I’m lost.”

“Unhappy about God—what do you mean?”

“Just imagine: there are those nerves in the head, I mean in the brain—damn them!—and those nerves have some kind of little tails which vibrate . . . And whenever I look at something with my eyes, those little tails vibrate and the image appears; it doesn’t appear at once, though. It takes a while, a second maybe, and then there comes a moment, no, I don’t mean a moment—damn the moment—I mean an image, that is, the object or the event or whatever it is. That’s how I perceive things and how I think . . . So I think because of those little tails and not at all because I have a soul, or because I’ve been made in God’s image, which is all nonsense. Rakitin explained all that to me yesterday and it really hit me hard. Science is wonderful, Alyosha—it will produce a new man. I understand all that very well. But I am unhappy about God—I miss Him!”

“That’s something at least. I’m thankful for that,” Alyosha said.

“You think it’s good that I miss God? Why, if I feel like that, it’s just chemistry. Yes, everything’s chemistry! It’s no use, my holy brother, you’ll just have to move out of the way a bit, to make room for chemistry. Rakitin now—he doesn’t like God, doesn’t like Him at all. To people like him, God is a sore spot. But they hide it, they lie, they pretend. ‘Will you,’ I asked him, ‘try to develop these ideas in your literary criticism?’ ‘They won’t let me do it too openly,’ he said, and laughed. ‘But tell me,’ I asked him, ‘what will happen to men? If there’s no God and no life beyond the grave, doesn’t that mean that men will be allowed to do whatever they want?’ ‘Didn’t you know that already?’ he said and laughed again. ‘An intelligent man can do anything he likes as long as he’s clever enough to get away with it. But you, you got caught after you killed, so today you have to rot in prison.’ He’s a real swine to say that to my face; a few months ago I used to throw people like that out of the window. But now I just sit and listen to him. Because he says much that makes sense. And he can write well, too. A week ago he read me an article of his and I copied a sentence out of it. Here it is. Listen to it.” Mitya hurriedly produced a piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket and read aloud: “‘To solve the problem, we must first conceive our individual I as distinct from the reality around us.’ Do you grasp that, Alyosha?”

“No, I don’t grasp it,” Alyosha said, looking at Mitya with great curiosity.

“I don’t either. It’s obscure and involved, but it’s also clever. ‘Everybody writes like that these days,’ Rakitin told me, ‘because the environment demands it.’ So I guess they’re afraid of the environment . . . He also writes poetry, the animal. Ah, he wrote a poem about Mrs. Khokhlakov’s foot, ha-ha-ha!” Mitya roared with laughter.

“I’ve heard about it.”

“Did you hear the poem?”

“No.”

“I have it and I’ll read it to you. You don’t know—there’s a whole story behind it. Oh, he’s such a fraud! About three weeks ago he came here and started teasing me. ‘You poor slob,’ he said to me, ‘you’ve got yourself into this mess for a mere three thousand. Watch me now—I’ll get myself a hundred and fifty thousand by marrying a widow, and I’ll buy myself a mansion in Petersburg.’ And he went on to tell me how he was courting Mrs. Khokhlakov, who’s never been too bright and who now, at forty, has run out of what little brains she had. ‘She’s very sentimental too, and that’s how I’ll get her,’ he said. ‘I’ll marry her, take her to Petersburg, and start publishing a newspaper there.’ And I could see he was drooling as he said it. Only, of course, it wasn’t Mrs. Khokhlakov’s charms that made him drool like that but the hundred and fifty thousand. And he convinced me that he’d pull it off all right; every day he told me about the progress he was making. ‘She’s biting at the bait!’ he’d say, beaming with joy. But then, all of a sudden, he was given the boot! Turned out that good old Peter Perkhotin beat him to it! Ah, I could have kissed that idiot woman for having kicked Rakitin out!

“Well, it was while he was coming here to see me that he composed that poem. And he felt he had to apologize. ‘It’s the first time I’ve dirtied my hands with poetry! But I’m doing it for a useful cause, for once I get hold of that imbecile’s capital I’ll make it work for the public good.’ That kind always has the public good as a motive to justify every abomination. And when he’d finished the poem, he said: ‘It’s an improvement on Pushkin, whom you all admire so much, because I at least have managed to show some concern for intellectual ideas in this ridiculous piece, while Pushkin, who was supposed to be such a talented man, just wrote about ladies’ legs and feet and nothing else and then was so terribly proud of his poems!’ Ah, the swollen heads these people have! So here it is. He called it ‘Wishes for the Recovery of the Sore Little Foot of the Object of My Devotion.’ He can be quite funny sometimes. So here goes:

*

Little foot so nice and stout,

Look, it’s swollen, what a shame!

Doctors came and fussed about,

Bandaged now, it’s all aflame.

*

But let Pushkin celebrate

Ladies’ feet instead of me.

Heads that will not cerebrate,

That’s more worrying, you see!

*

Thoughts, though few, seemed on the way,

Now have fled from all this pain.

Help be soon at hand, I pray,

For fair lady’s foot and brain.

*

“He’s certainly a pig, but it comes off quite playfully, don’t you think? And he did manage to put in a good word for ‘thoughts’ as well. But you should have seen how furious he was after she kicked him out! He was actually gnashing his teeth with rage!”

“He’s already taken his revenge on her,” Alyosha said. “He’s sent a story about her to a newspaper.”

And Alyosha told him briefly about the item that had appeared in 
Rumors
.

“Yes, I’m sure it’s his doing,” Mitya said, frowning. “I know about that kind of news item. There’s been so much dirt published already—about Grusha, for instance, and also about the other one, about Katya . . . hm . . .”

He walked up and down the room, looking worried.

“I can’t stay long, Mitya,” Alyosha said after a silence; “tomorrow is a terrible, crucial day—the judgment of God will be passed on you . . . You really amaze me, Mitya—how can you, under these circumstances, talk about all sorts of nonsense instead of the trial that you’re about to face?”

“Why should you be amazed?” Mitya said heatedly. “Or do you expect me to keep talking about that reeking bastard, the murderer? Don’t you think we’ve sufficiently covered the subject as it is? I don’t want to talk about Reeking Lizaveta’s son anymore! God will kill him, you’ll see, so forget him now!”

In great agitation, Mitya walked over to Alyosha and unexpectedly kissed him. His eyes were burning.

“Rakitin could never understand this,” he said with strange fervor, “but I know you’ll understand it right away. And that’s why I was longing for you to come today. You see, I’ve wanted to tell you many things since I’ve been behind these leprous walls, but I felt I couldn’t bring up the most important thing; I felt the time hadn’t come yet. And so I’ve waited until the very last moment to bare my soul before you. You know, in these past two months, it’s as if I’d found a new man in myself, as if a new man had arisen in me! That man was locked inside me, but he would never have come out if it hadn’t been for this terrible blow of fate. It’s frightening! What does it matter if I spend the next twenty years in the mines, knocking out the ore with a hammer? That’s not what I’m afraid of. What I’m terribly afraid of is that this new man within me may desert me! I’m sure I could find, underground in the mines there, a true human heart within another convict, a murderer working next to me, and I could befriend him, for in the mines, too, people can live and love and suffer! It would be possible to bring back to life a heart that had long been dead and frozen. I could work on it for years, and finally, out of that infernal den, a soul would emerge that was noble for having known suffering. Thus I might restore an angel to life and bring back a hero! There are many of them, and we all bear the responsibility for them! Otherwise, why should I have dreamt about that ‘babe’ at such a moment? And so I will go to Siberia because of that ‘babe,’ since every one of us is responsible for everyone else. We bear the guilt for all the ‘babes,’ because we are all children, small or grown-up, we are all ‘babes.’ I’ll go and suffer for all of them, because someone, after all, has to pay for all the others. I didn’t kill father, but I accept the guilt and I must suffer. I’ve understood all this here, behind these leprous walls . . . And just think, there are so many of them over there, under the ground, hammering away. Oh, I realize, we’ll all be wearing chains and we’ll be deprived of our freedom. But then, in our great misery, we shall arise again and know the joy without which a man cannot live and God cannot exist, because God gives us joy and giving it is His great privilege. Oh Lord, may man dissolve in prayer! But what would I do there, underground, without God? No, Rakitin is lying. And even if they succeed in banning God from the earth, we will meet Him under the earth. It is not possible for a convict to do without God, even less possible than it is for a free man. And we, the underground men, we shall sing from the entrails of the earth a tragic hymn to God, God in whom there is joy! So long live God and His joy! I love Him!”

Mitya delivered this wild speech almost breathlessly. He had turned pale, his lips were quivering, tears rolled down his cheeks.

“No,” he began again, “there’s so much in life and there’s life underground, too. You cannot even imagine how much I want to live now, Alyosha, how much I long to exist and be conscious of my existence, and it has only dawned on me since I’ve been here behind these leprous walls. Rakitin cannot understand that. All he cares about is building a house and letting the tenants in. That’s why I was longing for you to come. Besides, what is suffering, after all? I’m not afraid of it, however painful it may be. I used to be afraid of it, but I’m not any longer. And do you know what—I may not even defend myself at the trial . . . There’s so much strength in me that I feel I will overcome everything. I’ll bear every ordeal I must bear, as long as I can say to myself at any moment I choose: ‘I am!’ Through a thousand agonies, I am; writhing on the rack, I am! I’m locked in a cell, yes, but I am still alive. I can see the sun, and if I can’t see the sun, I know there is the sun. And knowing there is the sun is already living. The trouble, though, Alyosha, my angel, is that all those philosophies of theirs just about kill me! Ah, damn those philosophies . . . And you know, Ivan, he . . .”

“What about Ivan?” Alyosha tried to interrupt, but Mitya didn’t even hear him.

“You see, I never had any doubts before, but they were all hidden inside me. And perhaps it was because all those ideas were raging within me without my even being aware of their existence that I drank, behaved wildly, and beat people up; without knowing it, I was trying to drown out and silence those doubts. But Ivan is no Rakitin. There’s an idea hidden inside Ivan. Our brother Ivan is a sphinx. He doesn’t speak. He won’t open up. But God torments me. And what if there is no God? What if Rakitin is really right and God is just a fiction created by men? Then, if there is no God, man becomes master of the earth and of the universe. That’s great. But then, how can a man be virtuous without God? That’s the snag, and I always come back to it. For whom will man love then? Whom will he be grateful to? Whom will he praise in his hymns? Rakitin just laughs and says that one can love mankind without God. But I feel you have to be a piece of slime to say that. I can’t see it at all. Solving the problem of existence is easy for Rakitin: ‘If you wanted to do something useful today, you could, for instance, fight for people’s civil rights or even maintain the price of beef at a reasonable level; that would be a simpler and more direct way of manifesting your love for mankind than playing with all kinds of philosophical theories.’ So I said to him: ‘But if there’s no God, you’d jerk up the price of beef yourself if you knew how to, and if you had a chance, if you could, you’d fleece people to make a ruble of profit on each kopek.’ That made him angry. But what’s virtue then? You tell me, Alexei. We, for instance, may think that virtue is one thing while the Chinese may believe it’s something quite different. Isn’t virtue something relative then? It’s a pretty tricky question! I hope you won’t laugh at me if I tell you that this question has prevented me from falling asleep for two nights in a row. You know, I’m surprised that some people can go through life without even wondering about these things. Ah, vanity! Well, Ivan has no God. He has an idea. His idea is too big for me to understand. And he won’t talk. I suspect he’s a Freemason. I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me. I was trying to slake my thirst for understanding at his spring, but he wouldn’t talk. Only once did he say something.”