The Brothers Karamazov (113 page)

Ivan looked at him in silence. The unexpected tone, quite unprecedentedly scornful, in which the former flunkey was speaking to him was in itself quite amazing. Even the last time Smerdyakov had not spoken to Ivan in that tone.

“So I’m telling you, you have nothing to fear from me. I won’t make any statements about you and, in any case, there’s no evidence that could incriminate you. Just look how your hands are trembling! Go on, go home—
it was not you who killed him!
”

Ivan shuddered. Alyosha’s words earlier in the evening came to his mind.

“I know I didn’t do it . . .” he muttered.

“So you do know?” Smerdyakov interrupted him, but Ivan jumped to his feet and caught him by the shoulder.

“Speak up then, you bastard! I want to know everything!”

Smerdyakov was not in the least frightened. He only riveted his eyes on Ivan’s with infinite hatred.

“If that’s the way it is—it was you who killed him all right,” Smerdyakov hissed.

Ivan sank back into his chair. He seemed to have regained control over himself. A sarcastic smile played on his lips.

“Are you talking about the same thing as last time?”

“Why, you understood very well what I was saying the last time and you understand just as well now.”

“The only thing I understand is that you are insane,” Ivan said.

“Will you never get tired of this game?” Smerdyakov said. “Here we are sitting all alone, without anyone to hear us, so why must you insist on continuing with this comedy? Or are you trying to blame me alone for everything, to get me to believe it myself? It was you who murdered him. It is you who are the principal murderer, and I am only your accomplice, your faithful servant, who just carried out what you ordered me to do.”

“Carried out? Why, did you kill him then?” Ivan cried, feeling himself grow cold.

Something snapped in his brain, an icy shiver shook his whole body. And now Smerdyakov looked at him in real surprise. The genuineness of Ivan’s shock must have been quite unexpected to him.

“Do you mean you really didn’t know?” he mumbled incredulously, grinning twistedly right into Ivan’s face.

Ivan was still gaping at Smerdyakov in silence as if his tongue had become paralyzed. The two lines of the song

*

Vanya, Vanya went to town,

I won’t wait till he comes back . . .

*

echoed in his head.

“I’m seeing all this in a dream . . . There’s a ghost sitting in front of me . . . you’re a ghost,” Ivan muttered.

“There’s no ghost around here, just the two of us and that other one sitting here between us.”

“Who’s that? Who else is here? Where?” Ivan said in alarm, looking quickly around the room, his eyes searching into every corner.

“That other one is Providence in person. It’s right here, near us, but you might just as well give up looking for it—you won’t find it.”

“You lied to me when you said you killed him!” Ivan screamed madly. “Either you’re insane or you’re taunting me the way you did last time!”

Smerdyakov, quite unafraid, watched him intently. He found it incredible that Ivan “didn’t know” and thought he was still trying to convince him, Smerdyakov, “shamelessly to my face,” that he alone was guilty of everything.

“Just a minute,” Smerdyakov said in a weak voice. He pulled his left leg out from under the table and started to roll up his trouser-leg. He had on long white socks and slippers. Unhurriedly he undid his garter and slipped his hand inside his sock, searching for something with his fingers.

Ivan stared at him and suddenly began to shake in convulsive terror.

“Madman!” he howled, leaping up. He reeled back, banging his back against the wall. Then he stood stiffly, as if glued to the wall, and stared at Smerdyakov in speechless terror.

Smerdyakov, not in the least disconcerted by Ivan’s reaction, was still fumbling in the bottom of his sock, apparently trying to get hold of something with his fingers. At last he succeeded and began pulling it out. Ivan saw that it was papers of some sort, some bundle of documents. Smerdyakov pulled it out and put it on the table.

“Here, look,” he said quietly.

“What?” Ivan was shaking.

“Go on, look at it,” Smerdyakov repeated quietly.

Ivan stepped up to the table, took the bundle, and started to unwrap it, but suddenly he let it go and drew his fingers away in horror, as if he had touched something slimy and unbearably revolting.

“Your fingers are trembling so, you’re liable to get a cramp in them,” Smerdyakov commented and began unhurriedly unwrapping the bundle himself. When he removed the wrapping, Ivan saw that it contained three rolls of rainbow-colored hundred-ruble bills.

“It’s all here, the whole three thousand. You needn’t bother to count it. You can take it.” He nodded at the money.

Ivan sank back into his chair. He was livid.

“You frightened me with that sock of yours,” he said, grinning strangely.

“Is it possible then, really possible, that you didn’t know until now?” Smerdyakov asked again.

“I didn’t . . . I thought it was Dmitry. Mitya, Mitya, oh, God!” He clutched his head with his hands. “Tell me now, tell me, did you do it alone, or was Dmitry in on it with you?”

“No, I did it only with you. It was you and me who killed him. Mr. Dmitry is completely innocent of it.”

“All right, all right . . . We’ll talk about me later . . . Why am I trembling like this? I can’t even talk . . .”

“You used to be brave before and you used to say that everything is permitted, but you’re certainly frightened now,” Smerdyakov said in wonderment. “Would you like me to order some lemonade for you? It would refresh you perhaps. But we’d better hide this,” he said, pointing to the money.

He got up to call Maria Kondratiev and ask her to prepare some lemonade, but first he tried to find something to cover the money with, so that she wouldn’t see it. First he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, but it was all wet and slimy. Then he took the big book in the yellow cover that Ivan had noticed and put it on top of the bills. It was entitled 
The Sayings of Father Isaac, the Syrian
, which fact Ivan took in without thinking.

“I don’t want any lemonade,” Ivan said, “and we’ll talk about me later. Sit down now and tell me how you did it. Tell me everything . . .”

“You’d better take off your overcoat or you’ll perspire too much . . .”

Ivan noticed only now that all this time he had been wearing his overcoat in the overheated room. Almost ripping it off, he threw it down on the bench.

“Go on, please—tell me.”

He seemed calmer now. He was confident that now Smerdyakov would tell him 
everything
.

“You mean, how I did it?” Smerdyakov sighed. “It was done in the most natural way. I just followed your words . . .”

“We’ll discuss my words later,” Ivan interrupted him, but this time in a firm, calm voice, apparently having regained full control over himself. “What I want now is a detailed account of how you did it, in proper order. Don’t leave out anything. Above all, I want every little detail. Please.”

“So when you left, I fell down the cellar stairs . . .”

“Was it a real epileptic fit or were you shamming it?”

“Of course I was shamming it. I shammed everything. I went down those stairs with no trouble at all, to the very bottom, then I lay down, and once I was lying down I started to scream and yell and writhe until they carried me out of there.”

“Wait, wait! Tell me this: were you still putting it on when you were in the hospital too?”

“No sir, not there. The next morning, before they got me to the hospital, I had a genuine attack; it was the worst I’d had in years, and I don’t remember anything of the next two days.”

“Good, good. Please go on.”

“So they put me in my bed, you know, behind that partition. I knew they’d put me there because whenever I was sick, Martha would make me spend the night next to their room, behind that partition. She’s always been nice to me, ever since I was born. So at night I kept on moaning, quiet-like, as I was waiting for Mr. Dmitry to arrive.”

“Waiting for him to come to see you?”

“Why to see me? No, just come to the house. I had no doubt whatsoever that he’d come that night, because with me not giving him any information about what was going on, he’d climb over the fence to find out for himself. I knew he could get over that fence and that he’d come.”

“And what if he hadn’t come?”

“Then nothing would have happened at all. I wouldn’t have done it without him coming.”

“All right, all right . . . Speak clearly, don’t hurry and, above all, don’t leave anything out.”

“I expected he’d kill old Mr. Karamazov. I was just about sure he would because . . . well, I’d brought him to that point beforehand. And above all, I’d told him about those signals. With his suspiciousness and with the anger piled up inside him during the few days before, I was sure he’d use the signals to get inside the house. That looked pretty sure and I was reckoning on it.”

“Just a moment,” Ivan said, “do you realize that if he had killed him, he’d have taken the money too. I’m sure you must have thought of that. So I don’t see what you would have got out of it.”

“Ah, but he’d never have found the money. It was I, of course, who told him the money was under the mattress. But it wasn’t true, see? Mr. Karamazov used to keep that money in a box on the table and that was where it was. But then I advised him to hide it in the corner behind the icons where no one would ever look for it, especially if they were in a hurry, and he took my advice, because I was the only person he really trusted in all the world. And so this package had been there behind those icons ever since. It would have been really stupid to keep the money under the mattress. It would have been less safe there than in the box, where at least it was locked. But in town everybody came to believe that he kept the money under his mattress, which is quite a stupid notion. So you see, if Mr. Dmitry had done the killing, he would have had to run away empty-handed, afraid of every noise and rustle, as murderers always are, or otherwise he’d have been arrested. So in that case, too, I could have got into Mr. Karamazov’s bedroom the next morning, or even that same night, and picked up the money from behind the icons, and they would have accused Mr. Dmitry of stealing it too. I could at least hope that I’d be able to pull that one off.”

“But what if he hadn’t killed him but just beaten him up?”

“If he hadn’t killed him, I wouldn’t have dared to take the money, of course, and it would have stayed where it was. But even so, there was a chance that he’d beat him unconscious and that would give me enough time to pick up the money and then tell Mr. Karamazov that it was Mr. Dmitry who’d taken it after he’d beaten him up.”

“Wait, I’m getting a bit mixed up. Couldn’t Dmitry have killed him, then, while you only took the money?”

“No, it wasn’t Mr. Dmitry who killed him. You see, I still could have told you that it was him, but I don’t want to lie to you now because . . . well, because even if you really didn’t understand until now—and I can see that you weren’t just pretending that you didn’t so as to blame me alone for everything, to my own face—you’re still guilty in every way, because you knew about it and left me to take care of the killing while you left town, knowing very well what was going to happen. And that’s why I want to prove it to you this evening: it is you who are the principal murderer and, although I did the killing, I’m not the principal one. Yes, you are the true and rightful murderer!”

“But why, why am I the murderer?” Ivan cried, unable to restrain himself any longer and forgetting that he had told Smerdyakov they would not discuss his own role in the murder until later. “Oh, God, is it because of the Chermashnya business? Wait! Tell me, then, why did you need my consent if, to you, my departure for Chermashnya meant consent anyway? What explanation do you have for that now?”

“But I had to have full assurance of your consent because that way I knew you’d never kick up a fuss about the missing three thousand if something went wrong and they suspected me, instead of Mr. Dmitry, or even just thought I was his accomplice. On the contrary, you’d come to my defense that way . . . And later, once you’d come into possession of your inheritance, you’d have rewarded me for my services for the rest of my life, because, after all, you wouldn’t have received anything if he’d married Miss Svetlov before dying. You’d have inherited exactly zero rubles.”

“I see, so you were planning to blackmail me later, too, for the rest of my life,” Ivan growled through his teeth. “But what would have happened if, instead of leaving then, I’d gone and reported you to the police?”

“What could you have told them, though? That I was advising you to leave for Chermashnya, perhaps? That’s just silly. Besides, after I advised you to go, you could have either left or stayed. Now, if you’d stayed, nothing would have happened, for I’d have known then that you weren’t interested in the business and I’d have dropped it. But by leaving, you were assuring me that you wouldn’t dare be a witness for the prosecution against me and that you’d allow me to keep the three thousand. And you could never have accused me in court, because if you had, I’d have told them everything—oh, not that I killed him and stole the money, that I certainly wouldn’t have told them—but that you had tried to incite me to kill and to rob and that I had refused. So you see why I wanted your consent then? It was so you couldn’t push me around later. For what evidence do you have against me now? I, on the other hand, had something against you after I found out how badly you wanted your father’s death. And take my word for it: the public would believe me and it’d mean shame and disgrace for you to the end of your life.”

“So you think I wanted it so very, very badly?” Ivan said through his teeth.

“I’m sure you wanted it that badly, because it was by giving me your consent that you made it possible for me to go ahead,” Smerdyakov said, looking with assurance straight into Ivan’s face.

Otherwise, he spoke in a low, tired voice and was in a very weak state. But there was something inside him that was driving him on and inflaming him. Obviously he had something on his mind, and Ivan was aware of it.