The Brothers Karamazov (116 page)

Ivan laughed.

“You insult me and then you laugh. That’s a good sign. In general, though, you’re much more amiable with me than you were last time and I know very well why: it’s because of that great resolution of yours.”

“Don’t you talk about my resolution!” Ivan cried fiercely.

“I understand, I understand—
c’est noble, c’est charmant!
 Tomorrow, you’ll go to the defense of your brother and make the sacrifice of your person . . . 
c’est chevaleresque
.”

“Shut up or I’ll kick you!”

“If you did, I’d be delighted in a way, because it would prove that you’d come to believe I really exist. For no one would think of kicking a phantom. But seriously, although I don’t particularly mind your abuse, I still think you could be a bit more polite, even toward me. Why do you keep on using offensive words like ‘idiot’ and ‘flunkey’?”

“Because by abusing you, I abuse myself.” Ivan laughed again. “You’re me with a different face; you keep telling me what I think and are unable to tell me anything new.”

“If our thoughts happen to agree, that does me great honor,” the gentleman replied tactfully.

“But they happen to be my worst and, above all, my most stupid and vulgar thoughts. Yes, you’re awfully stupid really. No, after all, I can’t stand you! But what can I do to get rid of you, what can I do?” Ivan said angrily through clenched teeth.

“In spite of all, my friend, I’ll continue to behave like a gentleman, and I would greatly appreciate it if you treated me like one,” the visitor said in a burst of mild, obviously flexible pride, typical of a sponger. “I am poor and, although I cannot really claim to be very honest, it is usually an accepted convention in decent society that I am a fallen angel. Well, even if it is possible that I was once an angel, it must have been so long ago that I should not be blamed for having forgotten by now what it was like. So now I am just trying to maintain my reputation as a respectable man while trying to make a living somehow or other and being a congenial companion. I am sincerely fond of men and in many respects I’ve been slandered. When I stay among people for any length of time, I come to feel, after a while, as though I were really alive, and I enjoy that most of all. It’s because, just like you, I suffer from that obsession with the fantastic, and that’s why I appreciate your earthly realism so much. On your earth, everything is so clearly delineated, everything can be expressed in a neat formula, and your geometry is so precise, while where I come from everything is an indeterminate equation. While I walk about here on earth, I keep daydreaming. I love imagining things. And also, while on earth, I become superstitious. No, please don’t laugh. Believe me, that is what I like most about being on earth—the fact that it makes me superstitious. And while I’m here, I adopt all your habits. For instance, I’ve become very fond of going to the public baths: I love to steam myself with your merchants and priests. My fondest wish is to be able to incarnate myself once and for all into some two-hundred-pound merchant’s wife and to believe seriously in all those things that she believes in. My ideal is to go to church, light a candle, and offer up a prayer with the utmost sincerity. I swear this is true. That would be the end of my torments . . . And another thing I’ve come to like down here is taking care of my precious health. Last spring, for instance, there was a smallpox epidemic; well, I went to the Foundling Dispensary and had myself vaccinated. Ah, you cannot imagine how good it made me feel! That day I even donated ten rubles to the Rescue Fund for Our Slav Brothers Abroad . . . But you aren’t even listening! You know, you don’t seem to be quite yourself today.” The visitor remained quiet for a moment and then added: “I know that you went to see that doctor yesterday . . . Well, how is your health? What did he tell you?”

“Idiot!” Ivan snapped.

“I know, I know, you yourself are so clever! You cannot manage without being offensive! I wasn’t really worried for you; I just asked to be polite. So don’t answer if you don’t feel like it. You know, there’s a lot of rheumatism going around . . .”

“Idiot!” Ivan snapped again.

“You just keep repeating that word again and again . . . But, you know, last year I had such a dreadful attack of rheumatism that I can’t forget the misery it caused me . . .”

“What? A devil with rheumatism?”

“Why not? When I assume human form, I accept all the inconveniences connected therewith! 
Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto
.”

“What? 
Satan sum et nihil humanum
 . . . That’s quite clever for the devil!”

“I’m delighted to have pleased you at last.”

“Wait, you didn’t get that from me!” Ivan suddenly stopped, struck by this fact. “It never even occurred to me . . . Strange!”

“
C’est du nouveau, n’est-ce pas?
 Well, this time I’ll be honest with you and let you in on it. Listen, in dreams and particularly in nightmares, caused perhaps by indigestion or whatever, a man may think up such artistic creations, such complex and realistic visions, events or even a whole world of events woven into a plot full of such astounding details that Leo Tolstoi himself could not invent them. And yet people who have such dreams don’t have to be novelists but can be the most ordinary civil servants, newspapermen, priests, or anything . . . It creates, in fact, a most interesting problem: once, for instance, I heard a member of the government say that his best ideas came to him when he was asleep. Well, we are facing that problem now, too. I may be a hallucination of yours, but, just as in a nightmare, I can say original things that have never even occurred to you and I don’t necessarily have to repeat your old ideas, even if I am nothing but a nightmarish figment of your imagination.”

“You’re only trying to trick me now. Your aim is to convince me that you’re an independent creature and not just a nightmarish vision, but now you suddenly say yourself that you’re a phantom.”

“My dear fellow, the line of approach I have adopted today is quite different, and I’ll explain it to you later. Now, where had I got to? Ah, yes, I caught a cold, but not here on earth. It was over there still . . .”

“Where is ‘there’? Tell me, rather, how long will you stay here? Couldn’t you leave now?” Ivan cried, almost in despair. He stopped walking, sat down on the sofa again, put his elbows on the table, and held his head tightly between his hands. He had tossed away the wet towel—apparently it had not done him any good.

“Your nerves are really upset,” the visiting gentleman remarked in a casually familiar tone, but sounding quite friendly and concerned. “You even resent the fact that I could catch a cold, although really it happened in the most natural way. I was in a great hurry, that day, to get to a diplomatic reception given by a prominent Petersburg lady, who was trying to get a ministerial post for her husband. So I had to dress in white tie, tails, gloves, the whole lot, as you can well imagine, although I was God knows how far away at the time and had to cross quite a bit of outer space to get to your earth. Of course, it is just a matter of a moment, but you must remember that it takes eight whole minutes for a ray of light to travel from the sun to the earth, and I had to cross space in tails, which means an open waistcoat. I agree, of course, that spirits do not freeze, but I had already assumed human form. Well, I decided, ‘Ah, let’s go,’ and I went whizzing through space, through the ether, the fluids up there, and really it was freezing! I don’t even think that freezing describes it at all; just imagine, the temperature there was one hundred and fifty degrees below freezing, centigrade! You know the practical joke so loved by village girls: they dare a naive young boy to lick an axe at a temperature of thirty below, and, of course, the stupid fellow then takes the axe away along with the bleeding skin from his tongue. So at a hundred and fifty below, I bet that if you touched an axe, not even with your tongue but just with your finger, you’d never see that finger again, if, of course, you happened to come across such a thing as an axe in outer space.”

“Could there be an axe there, though?” Ivan asked absent-mindedly, his face twisted in disgust. He was desperately trying not to succumb completely to his delirious visions.

“An axe?” the visitor asked him in a surprised tone.

“Yes, I want to know what would happen to an axe there?” Ivan cried, suddenly filled with fierce determination.

“What would happen to an axe in space? 
Quelle idée!
 If it got far enough from the earth, I suppose it would start circling the earth without having any idea of why it was doing so—it would become a sort of satellite. Astronomers would calculate the hours of the axe-set and the axe-rise and Gatsuk would add the data to the calendar, and I suppose that would be that.”

“You’re too stupid, really, too hopelessly stupid,” Ivan said cantankerously. “You’ll have to invent something more intelligent to tell me or I won’t listen to you. You’re trying to overcome my disbelief in you and convince me that you exist by means of realism. But I don’t want to believe, and there’s nothing that will make me believe, in you!”

“But I wasn’t even inventing anything; what I was telling you was the truth. It’s simply unfortunate that the truth is hardly ever exciting. I can see clearly now that you’re expecting something great, perhaps even something beautiful, of me. It’s an awful shame, because I can’t deliver more than there is in me.”

“Ah, don’t start philosophizing now, you fool!”

“I’m not philosophizing. How could I, anyway, when my whole right side is numb and I can’t move without moaning and groaning? I have consulted every medical luminary and find they have no trouble in recognizing my complaint. They have every symptom at their finger tips, and they’re absolutely incapable of curing it. Once I came across an enthusiastic young medical student. ‘Even if you should die,’ he told me, ‘at least you’ll know the disease that killed you!’ And then they have that way, nowadays, of sending you off to a specialist: ‘I can only diagnose your trouble,’ a doctor will tell you, ‘but if you go to see such and such a specialist, he’ll know how to cure it.’ I tell you, the old doctor who could cure you of every illness has all but vanished and you find nothing but specialists these days, and they even advertise in the newspapers. If you have something the matter with your nose, for instance, they’ll send you to Paris where, they say, there is the foremost nose specialist in Europe. So you go to Paris. The specialist looks inside your nose and announces: ‘Well, all right, I’ll take care of your right nostril, but I really don’t handle left nostrils; for that you’ll have to go to Vienna where there’s a great left-nostril specialist. He’ll look into it when we’ve finished here.’ So what can we do about it? Use home remedies like the one a German doctor recommended to me: to go to a public baths, rub myself with salt and honey, and steam myself. I followed his advice just because I’m so fond of steam-baths, but I just got myself sticky all over without the slightest benefit. In my despair I wrote to Count Mattei in Milan and he sent me a book and some drops—I can’t even blame him for it! But then, you know what happened—Hoff’s malt extract cured me! I bought a little bottle of the stuff by chance, drank half of it, and the complaint literally vanished—I could go and dance if I wanted to! So I decided to write a letter of appreciation to the newspapers—that’s how grateful I felt! But then—and this is another curious story—not one single newspaper would publish my letter. ‘It would sound too unenlightened,’ the editors insisted. ‘No one would believe it, since 
le diable n’existe point!
 You’d better,’ they advised me, ‘send it in anonymously.’ But what sort of appreciation would it be, I ask you, if I sent it anonymously? So I tried pleading with those bureaucrats: ‘What’s unenlightened, nowadays, is to believe in God, but it’s all right to believe in me, the devil!’ ‘We sympathize with you completely and agree that everybody really believes in the devil, but nevertheless it just cannot be done. Unless you want to do it in the form of a joke?’ But I didn’t think it would be a very funny joke, so I gave up. And, you know, I still feel depressed about it. The best feelings I’m capable of, such as gratitude, are forbidden to me, just because of my official social position.”

“There you go philosophizing again!” Ivan said with hatred.

“God forbid that I should philosophize, but how can I help complaining now and then? I have been slandered most awfully, you know. You, for instance, keep calling me stupid. That only shows how young you still are. My dear fellow, let me tell you—intelligence isn’t everything. By nature, I’m a very kindly, cheerful person, you know, who can also enjoy all sorts of amusing social farces. You seem to have definitely taken me for a gray-haired version of Gogol’s Khlestakov, but my function is a much more serious one. By some predestination that goes back to primeval times, by a decree that I could never make any sense of, I have been designated to be the Negator, despite my kindly nature and the fact that I’m really very poorly fitted for ‘negation.’ ‘Never mind,’ my protests were brushed aside, ‘there must be negation, because without it there would be no criticism. You understand,’ I was told, ‘it would be just like having a magazine without a criticism section. It would be nothing but one uninterrupted hosannah. And in life, sheer hosannah is not enough, for things must be tested in the crucible of doubt, and so on and so forth.’ I don’t really have to go into all that, for I didn’t create the world, and I’m not responsible for it. Anyway, they had to have a scapegoat, so they made me write my column of criticism and that made life possible. We understand this comedy. I, for instance, demand annihilation for myself. ‘No,’ they told me, ‘you just have to live, because without you there would be nothing. For if everything on earth was reasonable, nothing would ever happen; there would be no happenings without you and we must have happenings.’ And so here I am, serving under protest so as to make it possible for things to happen, and acting against reason on superior orders. And people take all this comedy seriously, even people endowed with indisputable intelligence. And that’s their tragedy. Of course they suffer, but that still doesn’t prevent them from living, and living a real, not an imaginary, life, because suffering 
is
 life. What joy would there be in life if there were no suffering? Everything would become one endless hymn of thanks to God, which would be very holy but rather dull too. Well, and what about me? I suffer, but I go on living. I am the 
x
 in an indeterminate equation. I am a phantom who has lost the beginning and the end and who has even forgotten his name. You’re laughing . . . No, you aren’t laughing, you’re angry again. You’re always angry, for all you’re interested in is intelligence. So let me remind you again that I’d exchange all my life in starry space, all my titles and honors, to be incarnated into a two-hundred-pound merchant lady and light candles to God.”