The Brothers Karamazov (36 page)

“But she was crying,” Alyosha said. “She’s suffered one more humiliation here.”

“Pay no attention to women’s tears, Alexei; when it comes to that, I’m always against women, always for men.”

“Mother, you’re spoiling him, ruining him,” Lise’s thin little voice came from behind the door.

“No, no, it is I who am to blame for everything. I feel dreadfully guilty,” Alyosha repeated disconsolately, feeling so infinitely ashamed of what he had told Katerina that he hid his face in his hands.

“Just the opposite, you acted like an angel, yes, like an angel, and if I have to repeat it a thousand times to convince you, I will.”

“Mother, how did he act like an angel?” Lise’s voice was heard again.

“Watching what was going on, I somehow suddenly thought it was Ivan she loved, so I said those stupid things. And I don’t know what will happen to her now . . .” Alyosha said, apparently without having heard Lise.

“Happen to whom? To whom?” Lise cried. “Mother, what are you trying to do, to kill me? I’m asking you something and you won’t even answer me!”

At that moment a maid rushed in.

“Miss Katerina is not well . . . She’s crying, ma’am . . . hysterics . . .”

“What’s happening?” Lise shouted now in real alarm. “If someone is going to have hysterics, it will be me, not her!”

“For heaven’s sake, Lise, don’t carry on like that or it’ll really be the end of me. You’re still too young to know everything that grown-ups know, but I’ll be back and I’ll tell you as much of it as possible . . . Hysterics is a good sign, Alexei. I’m delighted that she has hysterics. That’s just what she needed. On these occasions I’m always against women, against their tears and hysterical outbursts. Julia, run along and tell her I’m coming at once. As to Ivan’s walking away as he did, she has only herself to blame. But he won’t leave town. Lise, for heaven’s sake, stop that screaming! I’m sorry, you’re right, it wasn’t you, it was I who was screaming. Please forgive your poor mother—she’s been rather carried away! Did you notice, Alexei, how young Ivan looked when he walked out of the room just now, when he said what he had to say and just strolled out? I used to think of him as the learned, scholarly type, but this time he acted so impulsively, so youthfully, displaying such a lack of experience, and all that is so good, so marvelous, so wonderful! Yes, he was wonderful, he reminded me of you . . . And that German line he quoted—it was so much like you! But I must run along now, Alexei, I really must. And you, please hurry and do that errand for her and come back as quickly as possible. You need anything, Lise? And please don’t hold up Alexei. He’ll see you a little later, when he gets back.”

Finally Mrs. Khokhlakov ran out. Before leaving, Alyosha wanted to open wide the door that separated him from Lise.

“No, don’t do that now! Never! It’s too late now!” Lise shouted. “Talk to me through the door. And tell me, what did you do to be suddenly promoted to angel? That’s the only thing I want to know.”

“I did something utterly idiotic. Good-by, Lise.”

“Don’t you dare walk out on me just like that!”

“There’s something that makes me very unhappy, Lise, terribly unhappy, but I’ll be back anyway.”

And he rushed out.

Chapter 6: Heartbreak In A Hovel

ALYOSHA REALLY had something to make him seriously unhappy, unhappy as he had seldom been before. He had pushed himself forward, and he had blundered—blundered in a matter involving love and the emotions connected with it. “But what do I really understand about these things, what kind of judge am I in these affairs?” he repeated to himself for the hundredth time, the very thought making him blush. “Oh, I’m so ashamed . . . but that’s nothing—being ashamed is only the punishment I deserve—the real trouble is that I’ll cause others new unhappiness . . . And when I think that the elder sent me out to reconcile and unite people! Is that the way to unite them?” He remembered his idea of Dmitry uniting Ivan’s and Katerina’s hands, and again he felt ashamed. “Although I was sincere in what I said, I’ll have to be a bit more intelligent in the future,” he concluded, and his conclusion did not even make him smile.

To carry out Katerina’s errand, Alyosha had to go to Lake Street and it so happened that Dmitry lived nearby, in a sidestreet that gave onto Lake Street. Alyosha decided to stop at his brother’s first, although he didn’t expect to find Dmitry at home. He suspected Dmitry would avoid him now, but he felt he had to find him at any cost. Time was running out, and the thought of the dying elder had never left him for a minute, not even a second, since he had left the monastery.

There was something in Katerina’s errand that aroused Alyosha’s curiosity: when she had mentioned the captain’s young son who had run behind his humbled father crying, it had suddenly occurred to Alyosha that it might be the same child who had later bitten his finger when Alyosha was trying to find out how he could possibly have wronged him. Now Alyosha was almost sure that it must be the same boy, although he did not know why he was so sure. Distracted by this thought, he decided not to think of the “mess” he had made of things and, instead of torturing himself with remorse, to try and do what he had to do now as best he could and just hope that things would take care of themselves. This thought cheered him up completely. As he was turning into Dmitry’s street, he suddenly realized that he was hungry. He took out of his pocket the French roll he had taken at his father’s and ate it as he walked. That made him feel even stronger.

Dmitry was not in. The owner of the small house—an old carpenter, who lived there with his wife and son—examined Alyosha suspiciously.

“He’s been out for two days—hasn’t even come home to sleep,” the old man told him. “He’s out of town, perhaps,” was all he would answer to Alyosha’s insistent questioning, and Alyosha understood that the man was answering according to instructions he had received.

“Isn’t he at Grushenka’s, or perhaps hiding at Foma’s again?” he asked, deliberately showing them he knew of these confidential matters, but the landlord only stared at him in alarm. “They must like him,” Alyosha thought. “They’re trying to help him. That’s good.”

It took Alyosha a while to find Kalmykov’s house on Lake Street, where Captain Snegirev lived. It was a ramshackle, sagging little house that had only three windows giving onto the street and a grimy courtyard in the back, in the middle of which stood a lonely cow. The entrance was from the yard and it led into a passage. In a room on the left of the passage lived the very ancient landlady, Mrs. Kalmykov, and her daughter, who was also already an old woman, both of them apparently deaf. He had to ask them several times about Captain Snegirev before one of them understood that he was asking for their tenants and pointed out to him a quite clean little wooden hut in the yard. It was, indeed, nothing more than a hut. Alyosha took hold of the iron latch to open the door but stopped: he was suddenly struck by the complete silence inside. From Katerina’s words, he had gathered that Snegirev lived here with his whole family. “They may all be asleep just now,” he thought, “or perhaps they heard me coming and are waiting for me to knock. I’d better knock before I go in.” He knocked and received an answer but not right away. Indeed, it took perhaps as much as ten seconds.

“Who’s there?” someone asked in a loud, harsh voice.

Alyosha opened the door and stepped in. He found himself in a wooden cabin, quite spacious hut terribly crowded with both people and all sorts of household junk. To the left was a big Russian stove. A clothes line, tied across the room between the stove and the window on the left, was hung with all sorts of ragged washing. Along two of the walls were beds covered with knitted blankets. On the bed on the left was a heap of pillows in black calico cases, each smaller than the next. On the bed on the right, there was only one little pillow. The far corner was screened off by a curtain, or rather a sheet, hanging on another clothes line that stretched across the angle formed by the walls. Behind that screen could be seen another bed, made of a bench and a chair tied together. A square wooden peasant table had been moved out of that corner and was now under the middle window. The three windows, each divided into four small panes which were greenish with mildew, let in little light and, since they were tightly closed, there was no air and the room was dark and stuffy. On the table was a frying pan with the remains of some fried eggs in it, a half-eaten slice of bread, and a half bottle with only the dregs of the joy-giving stuff it had contained.

A woman, who wore a cheap calico dress but who looked as if she might be a lady, sat on a chair by the bed on Alyosha’s left. Her face was very thin and her skin had a yellowish tinge. Her cheeks were so sunken that one could see at first glance that she was very sick. But what struck Alyosha most was the look the poor lady gave him—it was questioning and at the same time immensely scornful. And, till the moment she spoke herself, during the whole time that Alyosha was talking to the captain, her large brown eyes kept shifting from Alyosha to her husband and back with the same questioning, scornful look in them. By the window, next to the woman, stood a rather plain-looking girl with thinnish red hair, poorly but quite neatly dressed. When Alyosha entered, she too gave him a look of unconcealed disgust. On his right, also sitting beside a bed, was another girl—a pitiful creature of about twenty. She was a hunchback and, as Alyosha learned later, her legs were withered. Her crutches leaned against the wall behind her bed. The extraordinarily beautiful, gentle eyes of the crippled girl looked at Alyosha with infinite serenity.

At the table was the man who had been eating the fried eggs. He was about forty-five, small and puny, with reddish hair and a thin reddish goatee that looked very much like a bast back-scrubber; the comparison, and particularly the word “back-scrubber,” flashed across Alyosha’s mind as soon as he saw the Captain. This, apparently, was the man who had shouted, “Who’s there?” when Alyosha had knocked at the door, since there was no other man in the room.

As soon as Alyosha walked in, the man literally leapt up from his chair and, hurriedly wiping his mouth with a tattered napkin, flew across the room up to Alyosha.

“Some monk taking up a collection for his monastery,” the red-haired girl standing in the corner said in a loud voice, but the man who had rushed up to Alyosha turned sharply on his heels toward her and said emotionally in a strangely faltering voice:

“No, Barbara, you’re all wrong, completely off the mark!” Then, turning just as abruptly back to Alyosha, he said: “Now perhaps you would be kind enough to explain what brings you to these lower depths?”

Alyosha was watching him closely. It was the first time he had ever seen the man. There was something awkward about him. He looked as if he was very irritable, as if he was always in too much of a hurry. Although it was obvious that he had had something to drink recently, he was by no means drunk. His face wore an extremely arrogant look and yet, at the same time, was unmistakably full of fear. He looked like a man who had been persecuted for a long time but was still capable of jumping up at any moment to assert himself. Or, even more, like a man who would love to hit you but was terribly afraid that you might decide to hit him. In his words and in the inflections of his rather strident voice could be detected a sort of cracked, fool’s humor, now wicked, now timorous, never maintaining the same tone and constantly breaking off. He asked Alyosha the question about coming to the “lower depths” trembling and with his eyes popping, and he stepped up so close to him that Alyosha instinctively took a step back. This gentleman wore a thin topcoat, stained and patched. His trousers were of a very light checkered material such as no one wore anymore, and they were so crumpled below the knees that they didn’t reach his shoes, so that it looked as if he had grown out of them, like a growing boy.

“I am . . . my name is Alexei Karamazov,” Alyosha said in answer to his question, but the man interrupted him at once.

“I am aware of that already,” the man snapped, anxious to let Alyosha know unmistakably that he knew who he was. “Well, I am Captain Snegirev. But I would still like to know exactly what it was that inspired you to . . .”

“I just thought I’d like to come and see you . . . I would actually like to talk to you but, of course, only if you will allow me . . .”

“In that case here’s a chair, please be seated, sir. That’s how they invite people to sit down in good old-fashioned plays: ‘Please be seated,’ they say,” and the captain quickly grabbed an empty wooden chair (a plain wooden peasant chair without upholstery), put it almost in the middle of the room, then took another such chair for himself, and sat down on it facing Alyosha, again so close that their knees almost touched.

“So, I am Nikolai Ilyich Snegirev, former captain in the Russian infantry, and still a former army captain, all my disgraces notwithstanding. Actually, perhaps I should have introduced myself as Captain Downtrodden rather than Captain Snegirev because I have come to sound very much like a downtrodden man, which is something that we acquire when we’re down on our luck, a tone acquired through humiliation . . .”

“I suppose that’s true,” Alyosha said with a smile, “but I’m not too sure whether one acquires it involuntarily or deliberately. What do you think?”

“As God is my witness, I acquired it involuntarily. I never sounded like a downtrodden man before and suddenly, lo and behold, that’s just what I started sounding like. This should be decided, I would say, by some higher authority. I see that you’re interested in such worldly questions. But I still wonder how I could possibly arouse your curiosity, for, after all, I live in an environment that is hardly suitable for receiving visits.”

“I wanted to talk to you about . . . about that other business.”

“What ‘other’ business?” Snegirev interrupted impatiently.

“About your incident with my brother Dmitry,” Alyosha said in an embarrassed tone.

“What incident do you have in mind? Are you referring to the incident involving my back-scrubber, by any chance?” he said, jerking his chair forward so that this time their knees actually bumped.