The Brothers Karamazov (19 page)

“Thank God you turned this way—I could hardly prevent myself from calling out to you,” Dmitry said in a hurried, joyful whisper. “Come, climb over here. Hurry! It’s so lucky you came by! I was just thinking about you . . .”

Alyosha was also pleased and was only concerned about how to get over the wattle fence. He tucked up his cassock and, as he leaped with the agility of a street urchin, his brother’s powerful paw caught him by the elbow and helped him over the fence.

“All right, let’s get going now!” Mitya whispered excitedly.

“Where to?” Alyosha whispered back, glancing around him.

They were alone in a smallish garden. The house was at least fifty yards away.

“Why do you have to whisper?” Alyosha asked. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.”

“Whisper? Yes, you’re damned right,” Dmitry suddenly cried in a loud voice. “Why am I whispering? As you can see, I’m all mixed up: I’m here secretly in order to protect a secret. I’ll explain it to you later but, with all this secrecy weighing on me, I even started speaking like a conspirator and, like an idiot, whispering when there’s no need for it at all. Let’s go. But keep your mouth shut until we get there. Oh, I’d like to give you a bear hug, man!

*

Glory to the Highest in the World!

Glory to the Highest in me . . .

*

I was repeating that over and over again just before you came . . .”

The garden covered about three acres. There were trees planted only along the four sides—maples, birches, lime trees, and apple trees—while the center was a grass meadow that produced several hundredweight of hay in the summer. The owner of the garden leased it out for a few rubles every spring. Along the fences, there were also beds of raspberries, gooseberries, and black currants and there were vegetable patches close to the house, but these had obviously been planted not long before.

Dmitry led Alyosha to the corner of the garden farthest from the house. There, in a clump of lime trees, amidst old black currant, elder, and lilac bushes, was an old, tumble-down summer house, its latticed walls blackened and sagging, but with a roof that still offered some protection from the rain. God knows how old the summer house was, although some people said it had been built fifty years before by a retired lieutenant colonel named Alexander von Schmidt, who had owned the house. In any case, by now it was in a state of decay. The floor was rotting, the floorboards loose, and the woodwork musty. In the middle of the summer house was a round green table fixed to the ground and surrounded by green wooden benches on which it was still possible to sit.

Alyosha, who had previously noticed his brother’s excited state, now saw on the table a glass and a half-empty bottle of brandy.

“Yes—it’s brandy!” Dmitry said, bursting into a peal of laughter. “I can hear you thinking: ‘He’s on a binge again!’ But you mustn’t trust appearances, you know:

*

Heed not deceitful, shallow crowds

And cast aside your doubts . . .

*

I’m not on a binge. I’ve just been ‘indulging’ a little, as that piggish friend of yours, Rakitin, puts it, and will still put it even when he becomes a state councillor. Sit down. You know, Alyosha, I’d like to press you to my heart hard enough to crush you, because you’re the only person—do you understand me—you’re the only one I’m really fond of . . .” Dmitry said in strange exaltation.

“Yes, I only care for you and for some slut I’ve fallen in love with, who will drive me to my perdition. But falling in love with someone doesn’t mean loving that person. It’s possible to fall in love and to hate at the same time—I want you to remember that. But now, while I’m feeling good, I’d like to talk to you. So sit down here at the table and I’ll sit next to you, look at you, and talk. You just keep quiet and I’ll do all the talking, because the time has come for me to say what I have to say. But I’ve decided that we really should talk quietly because . . . you never know, there may be some . . . some indiscreet ears around, after all. I’ll explain everything to you: the continuation will follow. Why do you think I was so anxious to see you just now and these few past days? For I’ve been anchored in this spot for five days now. Because you happen to be the one person to whom I want to tell everything, because I must tell it, because I need you, because tomorrow I’m going to leap down from my cloud, because tomorrow my life will end and begin anew. Have you ever dreamt of falling from a mountain straight into a deep hole? Well, I’m about to experience that, and not in a dream. But I’m not afraid and I don’t want you to worry either. Actually, I am afraid, but I sort of enjoy it too. No, enjoy isn’t the right word—I’m sort of enthusiastic about it, you understand? Well, the hell with it—strength of spirit or weakness of spirit or spirits of a female—be that as it may! Let’s glorify nature: look how bright the sun is, and the sky so clear and the leaves so green. It’s still summer and three in the afternoon and it’s so still and quiet . . . Where were you going, Alyosha?”

“I was on my way to father’s . . . But I wanted to see Katerina first . . .”

“Her and father! Good God, what a coincidence! Why do you think I was waiting for you? Why did I want to see you so badly? Why did I yearn, thirst, and hunger to meet you in every recess of my soul and even with every one of my ribs? It was precisely to send you on my behalf to father and Katerina, so that I could have done with both of them. I wanted to send an angel to them. I could send anyone, but I wanted an angel as my messenger. And now it turns out that you’re on your way to see her and father.”

“Did you really want to send me?” Alyosha cried with a pained expression.

“Wait a minute! You knew it—I can see from your face that you understood everything right away. No, don’t say anything just now. Don’t be sorry for me and don’t weep!”

Dmitry stood up, held a finger to his forehead, and for a moment stood there deep in thought.

“It was she who asked you to come,” he said. “She must have sent you a note or something . . . Why would you go to see her otherwise?”

“Here it is,” Alyosha said, taking Katerina’s note out of his pocket.

Mitya read it quickly.

“And you decided to take the short cut! Ah, good God, what a coincidence! And, like a pretty goldfish, you’ve landed in the net of an old good-for-nothing fisherman. In that case, Alyosha, I’ll make a clean breast of everything, for there must be someone who knows the whole truth. I’ve already told it to the angel in heaven and now I’ll tell it to the angel on earth. Because you are an angel on earth, Alyosha. You’ll hear me out, you’ll understand, and you’ll forgive. And that is just what I need—for someone who is better than me to forgive me. Listen, what if two human beings suddenly sever all their ties with the earth and take off for another, extraordinary world—or at least one of the two does—and if, before taking off, he asks another man to do something for him that people usually only ask on their deathbed—could the other man refuse him, especially if he is a friend and a brother?”

“I’ll do whatever you want me to, but please tell me what it is. What is it?”

“What’s the hurry, Alyosha? There’s plenty of time now—the whole world has turned a corner and started on a new course. Ah, Alyosha, it’s such a pity you don’t really know what exaltation is! But what am I talking about? How can I tell 
you
 that 
you
 don’t know what exaltation is? How stupid of me! ‘Be generous, O man!’ Who wrote that?”

Alyosha decided to wait as long as necessary. He realized that it was here that he was needed the most. Mitya was lost in his thoughts, his elbows on the table and his head resting on one hand. They both remained silent for a while.

“Alyosha,” Mitya said after a while, “you’re the only person in the world who won’t laugh at me . . . I would like to start my confession with Schiller’s ‘Hymn to Joy,’ but I don’t know it in German, except that it’s called 
An die Freude
. Now don’t go imagining that I’m talking like this just because I’m drunk. That’s not so. Brandy is brandy, but it would take two bottles to make me drunk—

*

A ruddy-faced Silenus

On his stumbling donkey.

*

But as it is, I’m no Silenus. I haven’t even drunk a quarter of a bottle. But I’m strong and silent because I’ve made a final and irrevocable decision. You must forgive the bad pun, since you’ll have to forgive me many other things much worse than that today. Don’t worry, I’m not just talking nonsense. I’m getting to the point now and you won’t have to pull words out of me . . .”

He raised his head, thought a second, then started to recite with great emotion:

*

Shivering naked in a cave

Hid a frightened troglodyte.

Like a devastating wave,

Roamed the nomads through the night.

Armed with spear, the hunter crept,

Stalking tirelessly a boar.

In despair, poor strangers wept,

Washed up on this barren shore.

*

Down Olympia’s great height,

On her kidnapped daughter’s trail,

Wandered Ceres and caught sight

Of the world in grim travail,

Where men offer gods no haven

No respect for things divine,

Selfish, wicked, mean, and craven,

Fail to worship at their shrine.

*

From the fields no flowers gay,

From the grapes no gen’rous flood,

Only smoldering corpses lay

On the altars stained with blood . . .

And wherever the sad stare

Of the goddess still did light,

It met sorrow, wild despair,

Man’s humiliating plight.

*

Mitya suddenly burst into sobs and seized Alyosha by the hand.

“Yes, my friend, yes—humiliating plight, humiliation, to this very day! Man’s fate on earth is terrifying—there’s so much trouble everywhere! I don’t want you to take me for an unthinking brute with an army officer’s commission, who spends his time soaking up cognac and sleeping with loose women. No, sir, I hardly ever stop thinking about man’s humiliation unless . . . unless I’m deluding myself now. But I hope to God I’m not deluding myself and, believe me, I’m not trying to make myself out better than I really am. And the reason I think so much about man’s humiliation is that I’m such a humiliated man myself, you know . . .

*

Raising up his soul from vileness

Reaching for his human worth,

Man must enter an alliance

With eternal Mother Earth . . .

*

But what makes it hard for me is that I don’t know how I could possibly enter that eternal alliance with Mother Earth. I don’t kiss Mother Earth, I don’t plow her soil . . . Should I, then, become a peasant, a shepherd, or what? I go on and on, and I don’t know where I’ll find myself next—in stench and disgrace or in light and joy. And that’s where the main trouble lies: everything in this world is a puzzle. Whenever I’ve sunk into the deepest shame of depravity—and that has happened to me more often than anything else—I’ve always recited that poem about the goddess Ceres and man’s fate. But has it reformed me? No—because I’m a Karamazov, because if I must plunge into the abyss, I’ll go head first, feet in air. I’ll even find a certain pleasure in falling in such a humiliating way. I’ll even think that it’s a beautiful exit for a man like me. And so, in the very midst of my degradation, I suddenly intone a hymn. Even if I must be damned, even if I am low and despicable, I must still be allowed to kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded; and even if I may be following in the devil’s footsteps, I am still Your son, O Lord, and I love You, and feel the joy without which the world cannot be.

Joy eternal pours its fires

In the soul of God’s creation,

And its sparkle then inspires

Life’s mysterious fermentation.

Joy fills with light the plants’ green faces,

Regulates the planets’ runs,

Fills immeasurable spaces

With innumerable suns.

All things drink with great elation

Mother Nature’s milk of joy,

Plant and beast and man and nation

Sweetness of her breast enjoy.

To man prostrated in the dust,

Joy brings friends and cheering wine;

Gives the insects sensual lust,

Angels—happiness divine.

“But that’s enough poetry! The tears are pouring from my eyes, so let me weep. Maybe people would laugh at me for being so stupid and ridiculous if they saw me now, but I know you won’t laugh. In fact, I see your eyes are glistening . . . So enough poetry. Now I’d like to tell you something about insects—the ones endowed with sensuality by God’s eternal joy:

Gives the insects sensual lust . . .

“I’m just such an insect, Alyosha, and that verse applies specifically to me. All we Karamazovs are such insects and one lives in you too, my angel brother, and it will stir up storms in your blood too. Storms, because sensuality is a storm, even more than a storm. Beauty is a terrifying thing! It’s so frightening because it’s indefinable and it’s indefinable because God has surrounded us with nothing but riddles. Here the shores of a river meet, incompatibilities coexist. I am not an educated man, brother, but I have been thinking about this a great deal. There are so many mysteries; so many riddles that weigh man down to the ground. He is expected to solve them somehow or other and to climb dry out of the water. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? What I really can’t bear, though, is that a man with a noble heart and a superior intelligence may start out with the Madonna as his ideal and end up with Sodom as his ideal. It is even worse for one already striving for his Sodom ideal, who has not renounced his Madonna ideal, which still sets his heart ablaze, as it did when he was young and innocent. Yes, sir, a man’s range of feelings is wide, too wide even, and if I had my way, I’d narrow it quite a bit. It’s a hell of a situation, you know: what the head brands as shameful may appear as sheer beauty to the heart. But can there be beauty in Sodom? Yes and, believe me, it is precisely there that beauty lies for most men. Weren’t you aware of that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only frightening but a mystery as well. That’s where God and the devil join battle, and their battlefield is the heart of man. But actually, everyone always talks about his own particular trouble. Now I’m getting to the point, listen to me.”