The Brothers Karamazov (114 page)

“Go on,” Ivan said. “Tell me what happened that night.”

“Well, you know what happened. So I was lying there and suddenly I heard a voice, as if Mr. Karamazov had let out a shriek. Yes, before that, Gregory had got up and gone out, and then I’d heard him yell and after that there was nothing—just darkness and quiet. I lie there and wait, and my heart’s beating and I just can’t wait. So in the end I get up and go out. And I see, on my left, the window of the master’s bedroom, which gives onto the garden, wide open. So I take a few steps in that direction and listen. I had to find out whether Mr. Karamazov was still there in his room, alive. Then I hear him moving around and moaning. Therefore he’s still alive. ‘Damn it,’ I say to myself. I go up to the window and call out to him: ‘It’s me!’ ‘Ah,’ he says to me, ‘he was here, but he ran away.’ He meant that Mr. Dmitry had been there. ‘He’s killed Gregory,’ he says. ‘Where?’ I sort of whispered to him. ‘In the garden, in that corner over there,’ and now he’s whispering too. ‘Wait,’ I said, and I went into the garden to have a look at Gregory. He was stretched out by the garden wall and, in fact, I stumbled against him. He was unconscious and all covered with blood. So it was a fact that Mr. Dmitry had been there, I thought to myself, and I decided to go through with the whole business then and there, what with Gregory lying there quite unconscious so he wouldn’t know anything even if he did live. The only risk was that Martha might wake up. That occurred to me just then, but I was already so excited and eager to do it that it took my breath away.

“I returned to the master’s bedroom window and I called out to him: ‘Miss Svetlov’s here, sir. She wants to be let in.’ Ah, you should have seen the way he jumped when he heard that, just like a small boy. ‘Is she here? Where?’ and he gasps and moans but still can’t believe she’s there. ‘She’s over there, see. Open the door.’ He looks at me through the window, he believes me and he doesn’t believe me; looks like he’s scared to open, even to me. You know, it’s funny, I suddenly decided to bang that signal on the window frame, the one meaning, she’s here. I did it right in front of his eyes, and although he didn’t seem to believe me before, as soon as he heard the signal, he immediately ran to the door and opened it. I tried to walk in but he barred the way with his body and wouldn’t let me pass. ‘Where is she then?’ He stares at me and I see he’s trembling all over. ‘Ah,’ I say to myself, ‘if he’s so afraid even of me, it won’t be too easy.’ And my legs went all weak with fear that he wouldn’t let me inside the house, or that he’d start shouting, or that Martha would come along, or whatever I thought might happen. I don’t even remember all the things I feared then, but I must have been pretty pale as I stood there in front of him. So I whisper to him: ‘Why, she’s there, right under the window. I thought you saw her yourself.’ ‘So you bring her here,’ he says. ‘Bring her to the door.’ ‘She’s scared,’ I say. ‘She was frightened by the shouting and hid herself in the bushes. Call her yourself from the window of your study.’ So he ran in there, went to the window, put the candle on the window sill. ‘Grushenka,’ he shouted, ‘are you there, Grushenka?’ But although he’s shouting like that, he won’t lean out of the window. Nor will be move away from me, because all of a sudden he doesn’t trust me anymore and is terribly frightened, and so he sticks close to me. ‘There she is—can’t you see?’ I go to the window myself and lean very far out of it. ‘She’s behind that bush, see—she’s laughing at you.’ And now, all of a sudden he believes it. He begins to tremble something terrible and leans his whole body out of the window. He sure must have been in love with her, your father!

“So I got hold of that big iron paperweight, the one he had on his desk, remember—it must’ve weighed a good three pounds—and I let him have it from behind, with the edge of the thing, right on his crown. He didn’t make a sound. He slumped down to the floor and I whacked him again and then once more. It was after I’d hit him the third time that I knew I’d cracked his skull. He fell backward then and lay there with his face turned toward the ceiling. And there was blood all over him. I examined myself: there was no blood on me at all. It never even splashed me. I wiped the paperweight clean and put it back. Then I went to the corner, took the money from behind the icons, and threw the empty packet on the floor and the pink ribbon next to it.

“I went out into the garden. I was trembling something terrible. I went straight to the apple tree that has a hollow in it—you know the one I mean—I’d kept a rag and some paper there for some time for just that purpose. I wrapped the money in the paper and the paper in the rag, and I stuffed it deep into the hollow, where it stayed for the whole two weeks I was in the hospital.

“So after I’d put the money in the hollow, I went back to the cottage and got into my bed, and then I started worrying: ‘If Gregory dies,’ I think to myself, ‘there will be trouble for me. If he comes to, though, I’ll be in the clear, for he’ll be witness that Mr. Dmitry did come, so they’ll be sure that it was he who did the killing and took the money too.’ And I got myself all worked up, worrying about Gregory, and was so impatient to know that I started moaning louder and louder, to wake Martha up. Finally she did wake up. She got up and was about to rush in to me, but when she saw Gregory wasn’t there, she ran out into the garden and then I heard her scream . . . Well, then the whole thing got going and I was no longer worried.”

Smerdyakov finished talking. Ivan had been listening all the time in complete silence. He had hardly stirred or taken his eyes off him. Smerdyakov, on the other hand, had looked away most of the time, casting only occasional sidelong glances at Ivan. By the time he had come to the end of his account, he was obviously very agitated and was breathing with considerable difficulty. His face was sweating. It was impossible to tell, however, whether it was remorse or something else that had put him into that state.

“Wait,” Ivan said slowly, trying to work something out. “What about that door? If father opened the door only to let you in, how could Gregory have seen it open before you even got there? Because he was there before you, wasn’t he?”

It should be noted that Ivan asked this question in a very friendly tone that was quite different from the way he had spoken to Smerdyakov before; he no longer sounded in the least irritated, and if someone had noiselessly opened the door and watched them for a while unobserved, he would certainly have got the impression that these two men were having a friendly discussion about something quite usual, albeit extremely interesting.

“That door that Gregory saw open,” Smerdyakov said with a contorted grin, “he just imagined it all. Let me tell you, he’s not a man, that one, but a stubborn mule. He never saw it open, but he’s convinced himself that he did and nothing will make him budge from that now. It was just a windfall for you and me that he invented that story, because that is what will pin Mr. Dmitry down for good.”

“Listen,” Ivan said, again looking as if he were groping for something and losing the thread, “there were many things I wanted to ask you, but I’ve forgotten . . . I keep forgetting things and getting mixed up somehow . . . Ah yes, tell me this for one thing: Why did you open the package in the room there and leave the wrapping on the floor? Why didn’t you take it wrapped up as it was? When you were telling me about it, it sounded as though you considered that the proper way to do things. But what was the point of it? I don’t see.”

“Well, I had a good reason for that. You see, why should someone who is in the know and is familiar with everything, such as me, for instance, someone who has seen the money before and who perhaps even helped put it into that envelope and watched how it was sealed and addressed—why should someone like that, if he happened to be the murderer, open the envelope, especially if he was in a great hurry, when he already knew for sure that the money was in there? So, if the one who took it was in my position, for instance, he’d just stuff the whole thing in his pocket and get out of there as quick as he could. But it’s not very likely that Mr. Dmitry would act that way, is it? He only knew of that package from what he’d been told. He’d never seen it himself and so, when he took it from under the mattress, he’d be likely to tear it open to check whether it really contained the money he was after and then just toss the envelope away, in too much of a rush to stop and think that the envelope could be used as evidence against him later, seeing as he’s no experienced thief. Obviously, he’d never stolen anything like this before, being a gentleman by birth, and if he decided to steal now, he didn’t think it was stealing but taking back something that was rightfully his, as he announced beforehand all over town—he even bragged that he’d come and take away from his father what was really his. When the prosecutor questioned me, I didn’t tell him that openly as I have just now; I sort of brought it up by accident-like, as if I didn’t understand it myself, making as if he’d worked it out all by himself without my suggesting it, and that prosecutor gentleman was really drooling when he caught my hint.”

“Is it possible that you thought it all out so thoroughly at that moment?” Ivan cried out in wide-eyed amazement, staring at Smerdyakov as if in awe.

“No, how could I think all that out in a hurry? It had all been thought out in advance.”

“Well, then . . . then the devil himself must have helped you to pull it all off!” Ivan cried, still looking at him in amazement. “No, you aren’t stupid at all—you’re much, much more intelligent than I ever could have imagined.”

He stood up, apparently intending to walk about the room for a while. He was filled with a dreadful anguish. But the table barred his way and, to get out, he’d have had to squeeze himself through the narrow gap between it and the wall, so he gave it up and sat down again. Perhaps it was the fact that he could not satisfy his impulse to stretch his legs that suddenly irritated him and brought back his rage.

“Listen to me, you miserable dog!” he screamed frantically. “Can’t you understand that, if I haven’t killed you yet, it’s only because I want you alive in court tomorrow. May God be my witness,” Ivan shouted, raising his hand, “that, although I may have secretly wished my father’s death, I am nowhere near as guilty as you imagine and perhaps I didn’t really mean to maneuver you into doing it. No, no, I didn’t, I didn’t! But never mind that. I’ll bring it all up in court tomorrow. I have decided now! I’ll tell them everything. I’ll let them know that the two of us were involved in it together. And whatever you may say against me there, whatever you may bring up, I’ll face up to it, and I want you to understand that I’m not afraid of anything you may tell them. I’ll confirm it myself. But I want you, too, to confess everything in court; you must, you must—we shall go together, and that’s how it’s going to be!”

Ivan ended on a solemn, forceful note and it was obvious from his burning eyes that this was final.

“You’re sick now, very sick, the whites of your eyes are completely yellow.” There was no sarcasm in Smerdyakov’s words; if anything there was even a note of sympathy.

“We’ll go and tell them together!” Ivan said again. “And if you refuse, it won’t make any difference—I’ll confess anyway.”

Smerdyakov seemed to think for a while in silence.

“Nothing like that will happen. You won’t tell them,” he declared with finality.

“You really don’t understand me,” Ivan cried reproachfully.

“You’ll be too ashamed to admit everything. Besides, you’ll be wasting your time, because I will certainly say that I never told you anything of the sort and that either you’re very sick with one of those diseases—and you look it now—or you’ve grown so sorry for your dear brother that you’ve decided to sacrifice yourself to save him and invented all these accusations against me, because, anyway, all your life you’ve always looked upon me as if I was some bug and not human at all. I ask you, then, who will ever believe you when you haven’t got one single bit of evidence to prove it?”

“But that money you showed me just now. You did so to convince me, of course.”

Smerdyakov took the book about Isaac the Syrian off the money and put it aside.

“You can take this money away with you,” Smerdyakov said with a sigh.

“Of course I’ll take it. But why are you giving it to me, since that was what you killed him for?”

Ivan looked at him greatly puzzled once more.

“I don’t want it,” Smerdyakov said in a quivering voice, waving his hand scornfully. “I did have an idea once that I’d use that money to start a new life in Moscow, or even better, abroad—it was just some kind of fancy I had—but I did it above all simply because ‘everything is permitted.’ And the truth is, I learned that from you; you taught me many things at that time, things like, since there is no infinite God, there’s no such thing as virtue either and there’s no need for it at all. You were right there. And that’s the way I understood it.”

“I see you worked it all out yourself,” Ivan said with a crooked grin.

“Under your guidance.”

“But now, have you decided to believe in God, after all, since you’re giving me this money?”

“No, I don’t believe in God,” Smerdyakov whispered.

“So why are you giving it to me?”

“Ah, why don’t you let that be?” Smerdyakov again dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “You’re the one who said that everything was permitted, so why are you so worried now? You even talk about going and accusing yourself! Ah, but nothing will come of it—you won’t do it,” Smerdyakov decided again with assurance.

“You’ll see!”

“It’s impossible. You’re very, very intelligent. You love money, I know that. And you like people to honor and respect you, because you’re very proud. You also like women too much. Yes, and what you like most of all is to live in comfort and security without having to bow to anyone for it. So it doesn’t seem likely that you’ll want to cover yourself with shame and disgrace by accusing yourself in court tomorrow. Of all his sons, you’re the one who’s most like the late Mr. Karamazov—your soul and his, they’re just the same!”

“You 
are
 clever!” Ivan looked dumbfounded for a second, then the blood rushed to his face. “I used to think you were stupid. You meant that seriously just now,” he said, looking at Smerdyakov with new eyes.