The Brothers Karamazov (118 page)

“I was there when the Word who died on the cross ascended into heaven bearing on His bosom the soul of the penitent thief. I heard the joyful cries of the cherubim singing and shouting hosannah and the thunderous, rapturous shouts of the seraphim that shook heaven and all creation. And I swear to you by all that is holy that I longed to join the choir and shout, ‘Hosannah’ with the rest! The word was forming in my throat and almost escaped from my lips, for, as you may well know, I’m very sensitive and artistically receptive. But then my common sense, which is my most unhappy feature, kept me within my assigned limits and I missed the opportune moment. Because, I thought, what would happen after I shouted, ‘Hosannah’? Everything in the world would be extinguished and there would be no more happenings. And so it was only out of my sense of duty and in deference to my public image that I stifled the good impulses within me and remained in my assigned position, to take care of the dirty work. Somebody claims all the honor for good works, leaving me nothing but the foul play. But I did not covet the honor of living a life of deceit, for I am not vainglorious. So why must I be the only creature in the world condemned to the curses of all decent people, even to be kicked by them, for when I assume human form I must face all the consequences of it too? Why, I know for sure that there is a secret there, a secret they’ll never reveal to me, for if I found out what it was all about, I might very well start shouting, ‘Hosannah!’ and the indispensable minus sign would disappear, reasonableness would rule the world, and it would be the end of everything, including the newspapers and magazines, for who would think of subscribing to them then? I know, though, that in the end I’ll reconcile myself, complete my quadrillion too, and learn the secret. But until that happens, I’ll have to go on sulking and continue, very much against my own grain, to spell the doom of thousands so that one may be saved. How many souls, for instance, had to be destroyed, how many reputations ruined for the sake of the righteous Job, over whom I was so utterly swindled long ago! As long as I do not know the secret, though, two truths exist for me: one truth is theirs over there, of which I still know nothing, and the other truth is my own. And I am still not sure which of the two is worse . . . Have you fallen asleep?”

“How could I help it?” Ivan moaned in pain. “All that is stupid in me, everything that I have outgrown, that I have rehashed in my brain over and over again, all those rotting rejects—you’re offering it all to me as if it were something new!”

“So again I’ve failed to please you! And I was hoping even my artistic presentation would charm you: don’t you think the cries of hosannah in heaven lend quite a literary touch? And after that, without transition, I switched to a sarcastic tone 
à la
 Heine. Don’t you think that rather effective?”

“No, I’ve never been such a flunkey! So how could my soul have begotten a flunkey like you?”

“My dear friend, I know a sweet, charming young Russian gentleman, a thinker and a great lover of literature and the elegant arts, the promising author of a poem called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ . . . Well, he’s the one I had in mind.”

“I forbid you to mention ‘The Grand Inquisitor’!” Ivan cried, blushing violently in shame.

“Well, and what about ‘The Geological Upheaval’? That’s quite a poem, I must say!”

“Shut up or I’ll kill you!”

“
You
—kill 
me?
 Oh no, you’ll just have to excuse me and hear me out. This is a treat for me and that’s why I came. Oh, I love the aspirations of my ardent young friends, trembling with eagerness to live! When you were about to come here last spring, you thought to yourself: ‘There are new people there who plan to destroy everything and start once again with cannibalism. Ah, the stupid fools, they ought to consult me first, for I don’t believe they have to destroy anything, except man’s idea of God—that would be the way to start. Then the blind fools would achieve their goal! Once every member of the human race discards the idea of God (and I believe that such an era will come, like some new geological age), the old world-view will collapse by itself without recourse to cannibalism. And the first thing to disintegrate will be the old morality, for everything will be new and different. Men will unite their efforts to get everything out of life that it can offer them, but only for joy and happiness in this world. Man will be exalted spiritually with a divine, titanic pride and the man-god will come into being. Extending his conquest over nature beyond all bounds through his will and his science, man will constantly experience such great joy that it will replace for him his former anticipation of the pleasures that await him in heaven. Everyone will know that he is mortal, that there is no resurrection for him, and will accept his death with calm and dignity, like a god. He will understand, out of sheer pride, that there is no point in protesting that life lasts only a fleeting moment and he will love his brother man without expecting any reward for it. Love will satisfy only a moment in life, but the very awareness of its momentary nature will concentrate its flames, which before were diffused and made pale by the anticipation of eternal life beyond the grave . . .’ And so on and so forth. Very sweet!”

Ivan sat there with his hands pressed over his ears, his eyes downcast. He was trembling all over. The visitor went on.

“The whole question, my thinker thought, was whether such a time would ever come. If it did come, then everything would be solved and mankind would be all right. But since, because human stupidity is so deeply ingrained, it could not come to pass for at least a thousand years, every thinking man who already recognized the truth could arrange his life as he pleased in accordance with the new principles, without waiting. In that sense, ‘everything was permitted’ to him. Furthermore, even if such a time never did come, since God and immortality still would not exist, the new man might become the man-god, even if he were the only one in the whole world, and, of course, in that new capacity, he might, if the need arose, jump without scruple over every barrier of the old moral code devised for the man-slave. There is no law for God, for whatever stand God takes is right. Wherever I stand thereby becomes the most important spot . . . So everything is permitted and that’s all there is to it! That is all very nice. But if you have made up your mind to break the rules, why do you still need the stamp of righteousness? But our modern Russian man is so constituted that he wouldn’t dare cheat, even if he were allowed to, because he has come to love truth so much . . .”

The visitor had obviously been carried away by his eloquence, his voice rising higher and higher as he glanced ironically at his host. But he did not have a chance to finish his speech as Ivan suddenly seized a glass from the table and hurled it at the speaker.

“Ah, mais c’est bête enfin!”
 the visitor exclaimed, jumping up from his seat and flicking drops of tea from his clothes. “What’s come over you? Did you suddenly remember Luther’s inkpot? You say I am your dream and then you proceed to throw glasses at your dream! That’s more like a woman’s logic! And, you know, I suspected as much: you were just pretending to stop up your ears—you were listening . . .”

There was a sudden loud knocking at the window. Ivan leapt up from the sofa.

“You’d better open it,” the visitor said. “It’s your brother Alyosha and he has a most unexpected piece of news for you—I can guarantee you that!”

“Shut up, you fake. I knew it was Alyosha before you opened your mouth. I felt he’d come and obviously he wouldn’t come for nothing, so he must have some news for me!”

Ivan was in a state of frenzy.

“So let him in. Go and let him in! There’s a blizzard outside and he’s your brother. 
Monsieur sait-il le temps qu’il fait? C’est à ne pas mettre un chien dehors
 . . .”

The knocking continued. Ivan wanted to rush to the window but it was as if his legs and arms had suddenly been fettered. He tried desperately to break those fetters, but in vain. The knocking grew louder and louder. Finally the fetters broke and Ivan leaped up. He looked wildly around him. The two candles were almost burnt out. The glass he had just tossed at his visitor was standing before him and there was no one sitting opposite him on the sofa. The knocking at the window continued, but it was not at all as loud as it had seemed to him through his dream; in fact, it was a rather subdued, although insistent, knocking.

“It was not a dream. I swear it was not a dream. It all really happened!” Ivan cried, rushing to the window and opening it.

“Alyosha, what are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you not to come here again!” he shouted angrily at his brother. “Tell me in two words what you want of me, just two words, do you understand!”

“An hour ago Smerdyakov hanged himself,” Alyosha said from outside.

“Go to the door. I’ll let you in,” Ivan said, and went to open the door.

Chapter 10: It Was He Who Said That

ALYOSHA TOLD Ivan that, a little more than an hour before, Maria Kondratievna had come running over to his lodgings to tell him that Smerdyakov had killed himself. “I went into his room to clear away the tea things,” she had told Alyosha, “and there he was, hanging from a nail on the wall.” When Alyosha asked her if she had told the police, she said she had not because she had hurried directly to him and “had run all the way.” She was trembling like a leaf and seemed completely out of her mind. Alyosha had then gone back to her house with her and found Smerdyakov still hanging from the wall. There was a note on the table saying: “I am putting an end to my life of my own free will and no one should be blamed for it.” Alyosha, leaving the note on the table, went straight to the police inspector and told him all he knew, and from there, “I came straight here to tell you,” he said, looking intently into Ivan’s face. And all the while he had been telling Ivan about Smerdyakov, he had never taken his eyes off him, so struck was he by Ivan’s strange expression.

“Ivan,” he cried suddenly, “you must be terribly ill—you’re staring at me as if you didn’t understand what I was saying.”

“It’s a good thing you came,” Ivan said dreamily, as if he hadn’t heard Alyosha’s last exclamation. “But, you know, I knew that he’d hanged himself.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know from whom. But I did know about it. Did I really know? Yes, he told me. He was telling me just now, in fact . . .”

Ivan was standing in the middle of the room, still talking in the same dreamy voice, his eyes downcast.

“Who is 
he
?” Alyosha asked, instinctively looking around.

“He just slipped away.” Ivan raised his eyes and smiled. “He was scared of you, the gentle dove, the pure cherub . . . You know, Dmitry calls you ‘the cherub.’ The cherub . . . The thunderous shout of rapture of the seraphim . . . What is a seraph? Perhaps a whole constellation . . . But, on the other hand, a whole constellation may be a mere chemical molecule . . . Do you know if there’s a constellation of the Lion and the Sun? Is there such a constellation?”

“Sit down, Ivan, please, here on the sofa,” Alyosha said, frightened. “You’re feverish. Lie down. Put your head on the pillow. Right. Would you like a wet towel on your head? It might help.”

“Give me that towel over there . . . I threw it on that chair, see?”

“There’s nothing there, but don’t worry, I’ll find it. Here it is.” He found the clean, folded, untouched towel by the wash basin in the far corner of the room. Ivan looked at the towel in surprise. Memory was apparently returning to him.

“Wait,” he said, sitting up on the sofa, “about an hour ago I took that towel from over there, wet it, and held it against my head. Then I threw it down over here . . . How could it possibly be dry already? I know there was no other towel here.”

“You wet the towel and held it to your head, you say?”

“Yes, and I was pacing the room with it on my head, about an hour ago . . . Why are these candles burnt down so low? What time is it?”

“It’s almost twelve.”

“No, no, no! It was not a dream!” Ivan shouted suddenly. “He was here and he sat over there, on that other sofa. When you knocked on the window, I threw the glass at him . . . Here, this glass here. Wait, I did sleep before that, but this was not a dream. It has happened to me before. I have dreams now, Alyosha, but I’m not asleep when I dream them; I’m awake, I walk around and talk and can see everything, but I’m asleep. But he was here and he sat on that sofa . . . He’s terribly stupid, Alyosha, unbelievably stupid.”

Ivan laughed. He suddenly stood up and started pacing the room.

“Who’s stupid? Who is it you’re talking about, Ivan?” Alyosha asked in anguish.

“The devil. He has started coming here. He’s visited me twice, maybe even three times. He teased me, saying I resented his being such a lowly devil and not Satan in person with scorched wings, surrounded by thunder and lightning. But he’s no Satan—he just talks nonsense. He’s just a fraud, a petty devil. He goes to the public baths. If you undressed him you’d find a yard-long, smooth brown tail, like a Great Dane’s . . . You must be cold, Alyosha, with all that snow outside. Would you like some tea, perhaps? What? It’s cold? Shall I order some boiling water? 
C’est à ne pas mettre un chien dehors
 . . .”

Alyosha went over to the wash basin and wet the towel. He persuaded Ivan to sit down, and wrapped the wet towel around his head. Then he sat down next to him.

“What was it you were telling me about Lise earlier this evening?” Ivan began again, now feeling very talkative. “I like Lise. I believe I said something nasty about her to you. I lied to you—I like her . . . But I’m more worried about Katya tomorrow than anything else. I’m afraid for the future. She’ll throw me over tomorrow and trample me underfoot. She imagines that I’m trying to ruin Mitya because I’m jealous over her. Yes, that’s what she thinks! But that’s not true. And tomorrow I will face my ordeal, but I won’t hang myself. No, I shan’t hang myself, Alyosha, because, you know, I could never deprive myself of life. Perhaps it’s because I’m too contemptible. I’m not a coward, though. It’s because I’m too eager to live. But how did I know that Smerdyakov had hanged himself? Yes, it was 
he
 who told me.”