The Brothers Karamazov (38 page)

“Pretty badly, for he was quite exasperated at the time. But everything is clear now—he did it to avenge you, because I’m a Karamazov. But I wish you had seen him in that rock-throwing battle with the other boys. That’s very dangerous—he could get killed. They’re just silly children, but a rock could very well break somebody’s skull.”

“Certainly, and he has already been hit, not in the head but in the chest, just above the heart. He has a bruise there today, from a stone. He came in moaning and crying, and now he’s ill.”

“But, you know, he attacks first . . . They told me that he had slashed a boy, Krasotkin, with his penknife.”

“I heard about that too, and it’s a bad business. His father is a local government official and that may cause us quite a bit of trouble.”

“If I were you, I’d keep him at home for a while, until he quiets down a bit, until his anger passes . . .”

“Anger, sir! That’s just the right word! There’s great anger in that little boy. And you still don’t know all of it. Allow me to explain the following point to you. After that incident, the schoolboys started taunting him by shouting, ‘Back-scrubber.’ Schoolboys are a merciless breed. Taken individually, they may be little angels, but in a crowd they’re completely without pity. So they started taunting him and it aroused his sense of honor. Another boy with less character would have resigned himself and just become ashamed of his father, but this one decided to stand up for his father, one against the world. He wants to defend his father and uphold truth and justice. What he went through while he was kissing your brother’s hand and begging him to let go of his papa, only God and I know, no one else. And that’s the way our children—I mean, not your children, but the children of the likes of me, honorable but despised men—learn the truth about life by the time they’re nine. Rich people may never find out about these things as long as they live, but my Ilyusha knew the truth the second he kissed that hand on the square. And at the very moment it was revealed to him, the truth maimed him in such a way that he’ll never recover . . .”

The captain spoke heatedly and again as if in a fever, striking the open palm of his left hand with his right fist, as if trying to illustrate how the truth had hit his boy.

“That night he became feverish and delirious,” he went on, “and the following day he hardly spoke to me. I noticed that he looked at me now and then out of the corner of his eye, but mostly he looked out of the window and pretended to be busy with his schoolwork, although I knew very well he did not have his mind on his lessons. The next day I drank quite a bit in my misery and, I confess, there are many things I don’t remember. My wife, too, started crying that day—I must say that I love my wife very much—so I drank up the last kopeks we had in the house. You mustn’t despise me for that, my dear sir, because in Russia drunks are the kindest people and the kindest people are drunks. So I lay there, pretty drunk, and I don’t remember much of what Ilyusha was like that day, but that was the day when the schoolboys started taunting him from the early morning on: ‘Back-scrubber,’ they shouted, ‘your father was dragged out of the inn by his back-scrubber and you ran along behind begging for him.’ Next day he came back from school looking terrible, all pale in the face.‘What’s the matter, Ilyusha?’ I asked him. He wouldn’t answer. Anyway, it was impossible to do much talking in my house because my wife and daughters would always interfere, especially since the girls had found out everything the very first day, and Barbara was already making remarks like, ‘What else could one expect to happen to a clown and a buffoon? Nothing sensible, for sure.’ ‘How right you are, Barbara, my daughter, you can’t expect anything sensible from such people,’ I told her, and for that time I got out of it that way.

“Well, in the evening I took my son out for a walk. I must tell you at this point that the two of us had been going out for a walk every evening before that, following roughly the path that you and I are taking now; from our gate to that big rock over there, see the one by the fence where the town pasture begins. It’s a deserted spot and very nice. So I was walking hand in hand with Ilyusha, as we usually did, me holding his tiny hand with his fingers so thin and cold—because, you know, his chest is weak. ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘papa . . .’ ‘What is it, my boy?’ ‘The things he did to you, papa,’ he says, and I saw how his eyes flashed. ‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘Don’t make up with him, papa, don’t. The boys at school say that he gave you ten rubles to make it up to you.’ ‘No, Ilyusha,’ I told him, ‘I’ll never accept money from him now, not for anything.’ He began to tremble all over then, and the next thing I knew, there he was kissing my hand again. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘I want you to challenge him to a duel, papa, because the boys at school are teasing me—they say you’re a coward and won’t dare to challenge him to a duel and, instead, will accept ten rubles from him.’ ‘I can’t challenge him to a duel, Ilyusha,’ I told him, and I explained to him briefly why I couldn’t, just as I’ve told you. He heard me out. ‘Papa,’ he said then, ‘still, you mustn’t make up with him. When I grow up, I’ll challenge him to a duel myself, and I’ll kill him!’ His eyes sparkled and flashed when he said that. Well, whatever the facts, I felt that being his father, it was my duty to tell him what I thought was right: ‘It’s a sin, you must remember,’ I said, ‘to kill people, even in a duel.’ ‘Then, papa,’ he said, ‘when I grow up and fight him, I’ll knock his sword out of his hand with my sword, throw myself at him, knock him down, raise my sword over him, and tell him that I could kill him if I wanted, but that I forgive him.’

“So you see, my good sir, how he’d worked it all out in his little head in those two days; he must have been thinking up that scene of revenge, sword in hand, for two days and nights and I suppose that was what he was raving about when he was feverish. But the trouble is, he has started coming back from school badly beaten up. I learned about it all the day before yesterday . . . As a matter of fact, I think you’re right, I won’t send him to school anymore. I learned then that he was at war with the rest of his class, that he provokes them because he has become bitter against them and his heart is afire. I’ve become really frightened for him. Well, we walked on for a while and then suddenly he says, ‘Isn’t it true, papa, that the rich are the most powerful people on earth?’ ‘Right, Ilyusha, there’s nothing in this world more powerful than the rich.’ ‘You know what, papa, I will get rich, become an officer, and rout all enemies. The Tsar will decorate me, and when I come here no one will dare to . . .’ He didn’t say what no one would dare to do, didn’t finish, and his lips were still quivering as before. ‘Our town, papa,’ he said, ‘is a bad town, isn’t it, papa?’ ‘It’s none too good,’ I said to him, ‘it’s none too good.’ ‘So let’s move to another town, papa, a good one, where people know nothing about us.’ ‘We’ll do that, Ilyusha, we’ll move as soon as we have saved up a bit of money.’ I was glad to find something to take his thoughts off those painful things. So we began talking about that other town where we would move and about buying ourselves a horse and buggy. We’d put mother and the girls in the buggy and cover them with blankets, and the two of us would walk alongside; now and then he would climb into the carriage too, for a ride and a rest, while I would have to walk all the way, because we had to think of the horse. And that was how we’d move, we decided. He loved the idea, especially that we’d have our own horse and he could drive it. It’s a fact that every Russian boy comes into the world thinking about a horse . . . So we chatted for a long time and I was sure that I had distracted him. That was two days ago.

“But last night it was something else again. He had left for school in the morning and had come back looking very, very gloomy. In the evening I took his hand and we went out for our walk. He kept silent, wouldn’t talk to me. A wind came up, clouds came over the sun, it smelled of autumn, and it was getting rather dark. We walked in silence, feeling very sad, both of us. ‘Well, what about discussing that trip of ours a bit?’ I said, hoping to resume our previous night’s talk. He didn’t answer and I only felt his fingers giving a little jerk in my hand. It looked bad. ‘Something else must have happened,’ I thought. So we reached the big rock—we were just at the point where we are now, as a matter of fact. I sat down here on this rock. And over us kites were flying; they were rustling and crackling in the air, lots of them, maybe as many as thirty. It’s the season for kite-flying now, it so happens. ‘It’s time we flew our last year’s kite, Ilyusha, don’t you think? I’ll fix it up if you’ll tell me where it is.’ Still no answer from him. And he stands sideways to me, looking away . . .

“Just then, there was a burst of wind and sand started flying in all directions. Suddenly my Ilyusha flew to me and threw his arms around my neck, hugging me as hard as he could. You know how it is with children who are proud and silent and who have been holding back their tears for a long time—if something happens that’s too much for the child to bear and the tears finally break through, they don’t simply flow, they pour from their eyes in streams. And my whole face was wet from those warm tears. He sobbed and shivered and clung to me desperately as I sat on this stone. ‘Papa, my papa, ah, the way he treated you!’ I couldn’t stand it and burst into sobs too and we sat there, the two of us, hugging one another and sobbing. ‘Ilyusha,’ I kept saying, ‘oh, my Ilyusha . . .’ And no one saw us then, no one except God, and I only hope that He will put it into my service record; if so, you can thank your dear brother for me, Mr. Alexei Karamazov, but I’m afraid I won’t give my boy a whipping even to satisfy you.”

At the end, he had slipped back into his bitter tone with its clownish twist. But Alyosha felt that the captain trusted him now and that he would not have told anyone else what he had just told him. This encouraged Alyosha, who was himself on the verge of tears.

“Ah, I would like so much to make friends with your boy,” he said, “if only you could help me . . .”

“Why, yes, just as you wish . . .” the captain muttered.

“But now I want to talk to you about something else. Please listen to me,” Alyosha went on excitedly. “I have a message for you. That same brother of mine, Dmitry, has also insulted his fiancée, a highly respectable girl of whom you may have heard . . . I have the right to tell you about the humiliation he inflicted on her, indeed, it is my duty to do so, because, when she learned about what he had done to you and about your difficult circumstances, she asked me today, just an hour or so ago in fact, to . . . well, she wanted me to give you this from her, from her personally, not from Dmitry, who has broken with her. Nor is it from me, his brother, or from anyone but her, her alone. She beseeches you to accept it—both you and she have been harmed by the same man; indeed, she thought of you only after she had been insulted just as badly—I mean hurt as deeply—as you were . . . She is like a sister trying to help her brother . . . She asked me to persuade you to accept this two hundred rubles as coming from a sister who knows how hard up her brother is. And no one will ever learn of it, there’ll be no wicked gossip . . . So here is the two hundred rubles, and, believe me, you must take it, for otherwise . . . otherwise it would mean that everyone has to be everyone else’s enemy in the world. But you know that all men must be brothers. You’re a magnanimous man, you must understand these things, you must . . .”

And Alyosha handed the captain the two brand new, rainbow-colored hundred-ruble bills. They were standing by the big rock, near the wattle fence, and there was no one else near. The sight of the bills seemed to affect the captain very strangely. He shuddered, taken completely by surprise. The possibility of such an outcome had never occurred to him. He hadn’t expected financial assistance from any quarter, and such a substantial sum was beyond his wildest dreams. He took the bills and held them in his hand for almost a whole minute without saying a word, and a completely new expression appeared on his face.

“Is this for me? Two hundred rubles? My God—I haven’t seen so much money in four years! And she says she feels a sister to me? Good Lord! But is it true, is it?”

“I swear that everything I’ve told you is the truth,” Alyosha said emotionally.

The captain turned deep red.

“But tell me, my dear friend, tell me this: wouldn’t you despise me yourself, Mr. Karamazov, if I accepted this money? No, wait, please, listen to me . . .” he rattled on hurriedly, touching Alyosha with one hand and then the other, “listen to me . . . you were saying, in order to persuade me, that it was like a sister sending it to a brother, but inside, you yourself . . . wouldn’t you feel disgusted if I accepted?”

“Of course I wouldn’t! I swear by my salvation! And no one else will ever hear about it. We’ll be the only ones to know, the three of us, and one more lady who is a very close friend . . .”

“Never mind the lady, I want you to listen to me, Alexei Karamazov. The time has come when you must hear what I have to tell you, because otherwise you won’t even be able to understand what this two hundred rubles means to me,” the poor man went on, gradually working himself up into a state of wild exuberance. He seemed to be completely over-whelmed and spoke in a great hurry as if afraid he wouldn’t have time to say everything he had on his mind.

“Besides the fact that this money would be honestly acquired from a highly respected and saintly sister, I would be able to get medical treatment for my wife and Nina—you know, my hunchback daughter. Once Dr. Herzenstube came and examined them both, just out of sheer kindness; he examined them for a whole hour and then said: ‘You know, I can make no sense out of it.’ Nevertheless, he prescribed some mineral water that they have in the pharmacy here for my wife, and I’m sure it would do her good. He also prescribed medicinal foot baths for her. Now, a bottle of mineral water costs thirty kopeks and she’d have to drink perhaps as many as forty bottles. So I took the prescription and put it on the shelf where the icons are and just left it lying there. And for Nina, he prescribed hot baths with a special solution in them, twice a day—morning and evening—but how could I possibly provide her with such a treatment in my mansion, without a maid, without help, without a bathtub, and without even water? And my Nina suffers from rheumatic pains, which I haven’t told you about yet; at night her whole right side aches so badly she can’t help moaning, although the angel tries very hard not to wake us up . . . We eat whatever we can get, but even so she insists on taking only what is left over, something that one would throw to a dog otherwise, as if she felt, ‘I’m not worthy to receive even that much and to deprive you of it, because I’m a useless cripple and a burden to you all.’ But she is wrong. We need her badly because it is thanks to her meekness that God tolerates us and, without her constant angelic kindness, our house would have become a real hell; she makes us all gentler, even Barbara. But please don’t misjudge Barbara either, because she, too, is an angel in her own way and because she, too, has a hard life. She came home in the summer with sixteen rubles that she had earned by giving lessons. She had put that money aside to pay for her return trip to Petersburg in September. But then we took her money and spent it, so she couldn’t go back to Petersburg. Besides, she cannot go away because she does all the work for us at home—we have harnessed her and saddled her and she pulls us like a draft horse: she looks after us all, mends the clothes, does the laundry, sweeps the floors, puts her mother to bed, which is very hard, because mother is very whimsical, tearful—because mother is crazy!