The Brothers Karamazov (117 page)

“Does that mean that even you don’t believe in God?” Ivan asked with a grin of hatred.

“Well, how shall I put it . . . If you asked the question seriously . . .”

“Does God exist or not?” Ivan insisted fiercely.

“Oh, you meant it seriously then. Well, I really don’t know. There, I have made a great revelation.”

“You don’t know? And you’re supposed to have seen God! No, you’re not an independent agent at all—you are 
me
 and nothing else. You are nonsense, a figment of my imagination!”

“Well, I’d rather put it this way: you and I, we have the same philosophy. That would be a much fairer statement. 
Je pense, donc je suis
, that is something I know for certain. As for the rest—all those worlds, God, and even Satan himself—I’m not sure whether all that exists independently or is merely a passing and subjective emanation of myself . . . But I think I’d better stop there, because you look as if you were about to attack me.”

“Oh, you’d better tell me an anecdote,” Ivan said miserably.

“As a matter of fact, I have an anecdote in mind, one just on our theme, although it’s really a legend rather than an anecdote. You accused me just now of disbelief, of seeing and still not believing. But you must understand, my dear fellow, that it’s not just me; we’re all rather confused over there, and all because of your sciences. As long as there were still atoms, the five senses, the four elements, well, it all fitted together somehow. For there were atoms in the ancient world too. But when we heard in our world beyond that you had discovered the ‘chemical molecule,’ ‘protoplasm,’ and God knows what, we all had our tails between our legs. There was terrible confusion among us and, above all, an upsurge of superstition and gossip (for there is as much gossip in our nether world as there is in yours, in fact a bit more) and also denunciations, because we, too, have an institution where denunciations of one’s neighbors can be handed in. So here is the grim legend I started to tell you, that dates from the Middle Ages (our Middle Ages, not yours) and that no one believes except our equivalents of your two-hundred-pound merchants’ wives. By the way, everything you have here, we have too. I reveal this to you out of friendship, because we aren’t supposed to tell.

“This legend now, it’s about heaven. Once there was on your earth a thinker and philosopher who rejected everything—laws, conscience, religion, and, above all, a future life. So when he died, he expected to plunge right into blackness and nothingness, but what did he find instead but future life. He was very surprised and quite outraged. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is in complete disagreement with my convictions.’ So they condemned him for that . . . I want you to understand that I’m telling you something that I was told myself, just a legend . . . So they sentenced him to walk a quadrillion kilometers on foot through the darkness (because we have the metric system now), and when he had finished walking that quadrillion kilometers, the gates of heaven would be opened to him and everything would be forgiven him . . .”

“And what other ordeals do you have in your world besides such quadrillion-kilometer walks?” Ivan asked with peculiar eagerness.

“What ordeals? Ah, I wish you hadn’t asked me that. Before, we had all kinds, but nowadays they are mostly of a moral nature, like a guilty conscience and all that sort of nonsense. That, too, was influenced by your humanization of mores. Of course, the principal beneficiaries are those who have no conscience at all and so obviously cannot be tormented by guilt. On the other hand, the decent ones, who still have a conscience and a sense of honor, suffer the most . . . This, of course, is the result of adopting reforms when the ground is unprepared, especially when the reforms are copied from abroad and alien institutions are transplanted. Nothing but harm can result from such reforms. The good old hell fire was much better . . .

“To go back to our legend, the man who had been condemned to that long walk stood about for a while and then lay down in the road and said: ‘No, I won’t walk that far; it’s against my principles!’ Now, if you take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sat pouting in the whale’s belly for three days and nights, you’ll understand the character of that thinker who lay down in the road.”

“What did he lie on there?”

“I’m sure there was something to lie on. But aren’t you trying to pull my leg?”

“I take my hat off to him!” Ivan cried with the same peculiar animation; he was listening eagerly to his visitor now. “Is he still lying there to this day, then?”

“No, he isn’t, and that’s what’s so interesting about it. He lay there for a thousand years, but then he got up and started walking.”

“What an ass!” Ivan laughed nervously. He thought intently for a moment. “But what’s the difference—walk a quadrillion kilometers or lie there eternally? Why, it would take him a billion years to cover that distance anyway.”

“Much longer than that even—I could calculate it for you if you gave me a pencil and a piece of paper. But, anyway, he finished his walk long ago, and that’s really where the amusing story starts.”

“How could he have finished? Where did he get the billion years to do it in?”

“You say that because you’re thinking of our present earth. But you must understand that our present earth has repeated itself perhaps as many as a billion times: it died out, got covered with ice, cracked, broke to pieces, decomposed into its original component elements; and again there was just water above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun—the process can repeat itself infinitely and always in the same way, over and over again, to the minutest detail. It’s all a huge, intolerable bore . . .”

“So what happened when he finally finished his walk?”

“No sooner had they opened the gates of heaven to him and he had stepped in, before he had spent two seconds there as timed by his watch (although I think his watch would have dissolved into its component elements ages before he got there), before, as I was saying, he had spent two seconds there, he declared that, for the sake of those two seconds, it would have been worth walking not just one quadrillion miles but a quadrillion quadrillions raised to the quadrillionth power! In other words, he sang his hosannah, and rather overdid it, for some people with a prouder way of thinking would not shake hands with him at first, feeling he had joined the conservative camp a bit too hurriedly. That’s the Russian temperament for you! I repeat, it’s just a legend and I tell it to you for what it’s worth. It gives you an idea of the sort of notions we still have over there about all these matters.”

“I’ve caught you now!” Ivan cried with a sort of childish glee, as though he had just remembered something that he had been trying hard to recall. “That story about the quadrillion—I invented it myself: I was seventeen at the time and a high school student in Moscow . . . I invented that story and told it to a classmate by the name of Korovkin . . . The story is peculiar enough that I couldn’t have taken it from anywhere. I’d forgotten about it, but now it’s come back to me unconsciously, so it was not really you who told it to me. It’s just like the thousands of things that people who are being taken to be executed may unconsciously remember . . . I’ve remembered it in my dreams. So you are my dream. You’re a dream and you don’t really exist!”

“Judging by the vehemence with which you deny my existence, it would seem that, despite everything, you still believe in me,” the gentleman said laughingly.

“Not in the slightest! I haven’t the hundredth part of a grain of faith in you.”

“Well, perhaps only a thousandth then. But, you know, homeopathic doses are the strongest perhaps. Admit that you believe at least to a ten-thousandth part . . .”

“Not for a moment!” Ivan cried furiously, but then added in a strange tone: “But, actually, I would really have liked to believe in you.”

“Aha, that is quite an admission! But I’m a nice fellow and I’ll help you out. Let me tell you this: it was I who caught you, not you me, just now! I deliberately told you your own story, that you had forgotten, to make you stop believing in me for good.”

“You’re lying now, since the goal of your appearing is to convince me that you exist.”

“Precisely. But the hesitation, the worrying, the conflict between belief and disbelief—all that can cause such torment to a man with a conscience that at times he’d rather hang himself. Now, I lead you in turns between belief and disbelief and, in doing so, I’m pursuing a certain goal. It’s a new method. For the moment you disbelieve in me completely, you’ll start trying to convince me to my face that I’m not a dream, that I really exist. I already know you well enough—that is how I’ll achieve my goal. And my goal is a noble one: I will cast into you just a tiny seed of belief and it will grow into an oak, and such an oak that, sitting on it, you will long to join ‘the hermits in the wilderness and the immaculate virgins,’ because that is what you are really secretly longing for: to wander in the desert, feed on locusts, and save your soul.”

“Are you working so hard, then, to save my soul, you scoundrel?”

“Why not? Everyone must do good deeds once in a while. But I can see that you’re furious.”

“Ah, you buffoon! But tell me, have you ever tried to tempt those who feed on locusts, pray in the desert for seventeen years, and are overgrown with moss?”

“I’ve done practically nothing but that, my friend. One can forget this and all the other worlds when one works on such a person, because he is really a gold mine: in some cases his soul may be worth a whole constellation, that is, of course, in our special accounting system. A victory in such a case is priceless! And some of those fellows, I assure you, are in no way less sophisticated than you are and, although you may not believe it, they’re capable of visualizing such depths of belief and disbelief at the same time that there are moments when it looks as if the fellow is within a hair’s breadth of plunging head over heels into the abyss.”

“And what happened? Did you always leave empty-handed with your nose in the air?”

“My friend,” the visitor said in a sententious tone, “it is better to leave empty-handed with your nose in the air than to lose your nose, as was observed recently by an ailing marquis (he must have been treated by a specialist) to his confessor, a Jesuit father. I witnessed the confession and found it absolutely enchanting. ‘Give me back my nose!’ the marquis said, smiting his breast. ‘My son,’ the Jesuit said, dodging the issue, ‘in its inscrutable way, Providence sees to it that everything is compensated for and an apparent disaster may result in a great, albeit hidden, benefit. And if stern fate has deprived you of your nose now, then, for one thing, no one will be able to tell you in the future that you’ve had your nose pulled!’ ‘But, Holy Father, that’s no comfort to me!’ the marquis cried in despair. ‘I would be delighted to have my nose pulled every day if necessary, as long as it was in its proper place!’ ‘My son,’ the Jesuit father sighed, ‘you may not claim all benefits at the same time, because that is murmuring against Providence, which has not forgotten you even in this case. For if you repine, as you were repining just now, and declare that you would be glad to have your nose pulled every day of your life, your wish has indirectly been fulfilled because, having lost your nose, you have had it permanently pulled off, as it were . . .’ ”

“Ah, how stupid can you be!”

“I only wanted to make you laugh, but I swear that that is authentic Jesuit casuistry and that it happened exactly as I told you. It happened quite recently and it gave me a great deal of trouble. The unhappy young man went home and shot himself that very night. I was there with him up to the very last moment . . . As to the Jesuit confessional, it is, indeed, one of my sweetest distractions in the sad moments of my existence. Let me tell you of another instance that occurred only a few days ago. A blonde, twenty-year-old Norman girl comes to an old Jesuit father. A buxom, natural beauty—makes you drool just to look at her. She bends down and whispers her sins to the priest through that little grill. ‘What are you saying, my daughter—already? You’ve fallen again?’ the Jesuit exclaims. ‘Oh, Sancta Maria, and not even with the same man! How long will this continue, tell me? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ ‘
Ah, mon père
,’ the sinner answered him, the tears flowing down her cheeks, ‘
ça lui fait tant de plaisir et à moi si peu de peine!
’ What do you think of that answer! Well, I gave up on her: that was a true cry of nature, purer, if you will, than innocence itself! And so I absolved her sin and was about to leave when I heard the old Jesuit arranging, through that little grill of the confessional, to meet her later. Just think—that old man, hard as flint, and there he fell in the twinkling of an eye! The truth is, though, that nature took its due! Why are you screwing up your nose again—are you still angry? Well, I am really at a loss how to please you . . .”

“Leave me alone. You’re just hammering on my brain like a persistent nightmare,” Ivan moaned in pain, feeling helpless before his apparition. “You bore me. You bore me mercilessly, unbearably! I would give anything to get rid of you.”

“I repeat: all you have to do is to moderate your demands, stop expecting great and sublime things of me, and you’ll see how nicely we’ll get along,” the visitor said admonishingly. “In reality, you resent my not having come to you surrounded by a red glow, in thunder and lightning and with scorched wings, but appearing, instead, in such modest attire. First, your esthetic feelings are offended and, secondly, your pride is hurt. You feel that a great and brilliant fellow like you was entitled to something better than such a trite, vulgar devil. Yes, I see you have that romantic streak that Belinsky was already ridiculing quite a while ago. Well, young man, I cannot help you really. When I was about to come to you, I first thought of coming, as a joke, in the guise of a retired high government official, who had served in the Caucasus, wearing the star of the Lion and of the Sun on my frock-coat. But then I thought you might assault me for having put on only the Lion and the Sun and not the North Star and Sirius as well. And then, you keep telling me I’m stupid. But, good God, I have absolutely no pretensions to being your equal in intelligence. When Mephistopheles appeared to Faust, he introduced himself as one who wished evil but did only good. Well, that’s his business, but in my case it’s just the opposite. I am perhaps the only one in all creation who loves truth and wishes good.