The Brothers Karamazov (52 page)

“If we hurry, sir. Shall we harness up?”

“All right, be quick. Tell me, is anyone among you going to town tomorrow?”

“Why, yes, sir. Mitry here will be going.”

“You’re Mitry? Well, could you do something for me, then? Would you go to see my father—Mr. Karamazov—and tell him that I couldn’t go to Chermashnya? Could you do that for me?”

“Why, of course, I’ll do it, sir. We’ve all known Mr. Karamazov for a long, long time.”

“Well, here’s a tip for you, because he may not give you one,” Ivan said, laughing gaily.

“You’re right there, sir. He certainly won’t,” Mitry said, laughing too. “Thank you, sir, I’ll be sure to do it.”

At seven o’clock in the evening Ivan boarded the train and was on his way to Moscow. “I’m through with the past now, through with it once and for all, and I don’t want to hear of it ever again, not a word, not an echo. I’m moving into a new world. I’ll see new places and never look back.” But instead of exultation, everything inside him grew suddenly dark and a deep despair, such as he had never known before, enveloped his heart. He sat up all night, thinking as the train rumbled on, and only toward daybreak, as they were entering the Moscow suburbs, did he suddenly feel as if he were emerging from a haze. “I’m a despicable beast,” he whispered.

*

In the meantime Mr. Karamazov, having seen his son off, felt very pleased. For two whole hours he felt almost happy and kept sipping his brandy. But then something very annoying and unpleasant happened in the house, making Mr. Karamazov terribly anxious and distraught. Smerdyakov, who had gone to fetch something or other in the cellar, slipped on the first step and fell all the way down the stairs. It was lucky that Martha, at least, happened to be in the yard at the time and heard him. She did not see him fall, but she heard him cry out. It was a very strange cry, quite unique, but familiar to her—it was the cry of an epileptic falling in a fit. It was impossible to establish whether Smerdyakov had suffered the attack while he was going down to the cellar, which of course would have resulted in the unconscious man’s falling headlong, or whether it was the fall that had triggered the epileptic attack, to which, as everyone knew, Smerdyakov was prone. When they reached him, he was already writhing on the cellar floor at the foot of the steps, his body twisted by convulsions, his mouth frothing. At first they were sure he had broken bones, but it turned out that “God had preserved him,” as Martha put it, and nothing so disastrous had happened. It was very difficult to get him up the steep cellar steps, but neighbors were asked to give a hand and somehow Smerdyakov was brought out. Mr. Karamazov was present during these rescue operations and even helped a bit, looking very frightened and bewildered.

The patient did not regain consciousness. The spasms would stop for a while, but they kept returning again and again and everyone surmised that this would be a repetition of what had happened the year before, when Smerdyakov had fallen from the attic. They remembered that, then, they had put ice on his head and, since there was still some ice in the cellar, Martha did the same now. In the evening Mr. Karamazov sent for Dr. Herzenstube, who came right away, examined the patient very thoroughly (for he was the most thorough and attentive doctor in the whole province, an elderly and respectable gentleman), and diagnosed it as an “exceptionally severe attack.” He said it “could be dangerous,” that for the moment he did not understand completely what it was, but that if the remedies he prescribed now proved useless, he would prescribe others when he returned the next morning. They then carried Smerdyakov to the servants’ cottage and put him to bed in the room next to the one occupied by Gregory and Martha.

And after that, all day long, it was disaster after disaster for Mr. Karamazov. Martha cooked the dinner and, compared with Smerdyakov’s soups, her master complained, her soup tasted like slops, and, he said, the chicken was so tough he couldn’t chew it. Martha answered these bitter, albeit justified, reproaches by pointing out that the hen had been an old hen and that she herself was not a trained chef like Smerdyakov. The next blow to Mr. Karamazov came when he learned in the evening that Gregory, who had been suffering pains for the past two days, was now completely laid up with severe pains in his back. Mr. Karamazov finished his tea in a great hurry and locked himself in earlier than usual. He was in a state of terrible suspense and anxiety. This was because, this night, he really expected Grushenka to come. At least, Smerdyakov had assured him that very morning that “tonight Miss Grushenka promised almost certainly to come.” The heart of the restless old man pounded unevenly in his chest as he wandered through his deserted rooms, listening to every sound. He really had to keep his ears open now. Dmitry might be lying in wait for her somewhere, so as soon as she knocked on the window (Smerdyakov had told him two days ago that he had explained to her where and how to knock) he would have to let her in at once, without wasting a second, for who knew what might happen otherwise? And what if she became frightened and ran away without waiting? . . . Mr. Karamazov was tense and worried, but never before had his heart basked in sweeter expectations: why, it was almost certain now that this time, at last, she would come!

Book VI: A Russian Monk

Chapter 1: The Elder Zosima And His Guests

WHEN, FULL of fear and anxiety, Alyosha entered the elder’s cell, he stopped, somewhat amazed: instead of the sick, dying man, perhaps already unconscious, he had expected, he found the elder sitting up in a chair. Although he looked weak and exhausted, he seemed gay and cheerful and was engaged in a quiet conversation with the guests who sat around him. In fact, he had left his bed a quarter of an hour before Alyosha’s arrival. The visitors had gathered in his cell earlier, waiting for him to awaken, for Father Paisii had positively assured them that “the teacher will get up once more to talk to those dear to his heart, as he promised he would this morning.” In this promise, as in any other the dying elder had ever made, Father Paisii believed so completely that, had he seen Father Zosima unconscious and no longer breathing after he had promised to get up and say good-by to him, he would have distrusted even death itself and expected the dying man to regain consciousness and carry out his promise. That morning, before lapsing into sleep, the elder had told him: “I shall not die before enjoying one more talk with you, my dear ones, before once more looking at your dear faces and once more pouring out my soul to you.” Those who had come to hear this last talk of the elder’s were his oldest, most devoted friends. There were four of them, including the senior monks Father Joseph, Father Paisii, and Father Mikhail, who was the prior of the hermitage. Mikhail was neither very old nor very learned; he was a man of humble origin but of strong character and simple, unshakable faith; his exterior was forbidding, concealing the great tenderness of his heart as if he were ashamed of it. The fourth was Brother Anfim, a simple monk, very old and almost illiterate, who came from a very poor peasant family; he was a quiet, gentle man, who seldom spoke to anyone, the meekest of the meek, who always looked as if he had been frightened by something great and awesome that was too much for his intelligence to grasp. The elder loved this constantly trembling man and always treated him with great respect, but it is possible that he knew no one with whom he had exchanged fewer words, despite the fact that once upon a time the two of them had wandered all over holy Russia together. That had been very long before, perhaps as much as forty years, when Zosima had just started his hard monastic life in a poor and little-known monastery near Kostroma, and when, shortly afterward, he had accompanied Brother Anfim on his wanderings to collect alms for their poor monastery.

All of them, the host and the guests, were sitting in the elder’s second room, the narrow little cell where his bed was, so there was hardly enough room for the four chairs (the novice Porfiry was also present, but he remained standing). It was beginning to grow dark and the light in the room came from the lamps and wax candles burning before the icons. When Father Zosima saw Alyosha, who had stopped with an embarrassed look in the doorway, he smiled joyfully and stretched out his hand to him.

“Good evening, quiet one. I’m glad to see you have come, my dear boy; I knew you would come.”

Alyosha went over to him, bowed very low, and began to weep. Something tore at his heart—he felt his soul quivering within him and he could hardly control his sobs.

“Come, come, it’s a little soon to weep for me,” the elder said, smiling and placing his right hand on Alyosha’s head. “Look, I’m sitting here talking to my friends and I may live for another twenty years yet, as that nice kind woman wished for me yesterday—the one from Vyshegorie with the baby girl, Lizaveta, in her arms. May God bless them both, the mother and little Lizaveta.” Zosima crossed himself. “Porfiry,” he said, turning to the novice, “did you take her offering where I told you?”

He was thinking of the sixty kopeks the cheerful woman had given him for someone who was even poorer than herself. Such donations are usually a self-imposed penance and are always paid out of money earned by the person’s own labor. The elder had sent Porfiry that same day to a widow with many children, whose house had recently been destroyed by fire and who had been forced to go out and beg to keep her family alive. Porfiry answered quickly that he had done as he had been told and had handed the widow the money from “an anonymous well-wisher.”

“Come, get up, my sweet boy,” the elder said to Alyosha. “Let me look at you. Have you been at home with your family, and did you see your brother?”

It struck Alyosha as very strange that the elder should ask him in such a matter-of-fact way about one particular brother. But which brother did he mean? It must have been for the sake of that brother that the elder had sent him away both that day and the day before.

“I saw one of my brothers,” Alyosha said.

“I mean the one who was here yesterday, the oldest one, the one before whom I bowed to the ground yesterday.”

“That one—I saw him yesterday, but I couldn’t find him today.”

“You must find him tomorrow. It is urgent. Leave everything else and find him. If you do, you may still be able to prevent something horrible from happening. It was to his future great ordeal that I bowed yesterday.”

He stopped and seemed to be deliberating about something. Father Joseph, who had witnessed the elder bowing to Dmitry the day before, exchanged glances with Father Paisii. Alyosha could not hold back a question.

“Father and teacher,” he said in great agitation, “your words are so obscure. What is the ordeal that is awaiting him?”

“Do not try to know . . . Yesterday I glimpsed something very frightening—I read his whole future in a look in his eye . . . Yes, at one moment he looked at me and my heart was filled with horror at what that man was preparing for himself. In the course of my life, I have seen that expression once or twice before on men’s faces; it was an expression that seemed to foreshadow the doom awaiting them, a doom that, alas, came to pass. If I sent you to him, Alexei, it was because I thought that your face, the face of his brother, could perhaps save him. But everything and all our destinies are in the hands of God. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ You must remember that. As to you, Alexei, many a time in my life have I blessed you for your face—know that.” The elder smiled gently. “This is what I think your life will be: you will leave these walls, but in the world outside you will still be like a monk. There will be many who will oppose you, but even your enemies will love you. Life will bring you many hurts and pains, but it is in them that you will find happiness, and you will bless your life and make other men bless their lives, which is the most important thing. Well, that’s how I see you.

“Fathers and teachers,” the elder then said, turning to his visitors with a warm smile, “never until this day, not even to him, have I revealed why the face of this youth is so dear to my heart. But I will tell you now. His face is like a reminder and a prophecy to me. At the dawn of my life, when I was still a very small boy, I had an older brother who died in his youth, before my eyes, when he was only seventeen. And later, in the course of my life, I realized that this brother was like a sign to me, like a message from above, for if he had not come into my life, if he had not existed, I do not believe I would ever have taken monastic orders and followed a path that is so precious to me. And now the face that first appeared to me in my childhood has made a second appearance as I near the end of my life, as if it were a reminder. It is strange, fathers and teachers—although Alexei’s face bears only a limited resemblance to my brother’s, I have felt the resemblance in spirit to be so great that to me he has often been that other boy, my brother, coming to me mysteriously as I reach the end of my journey, to remind me of the past and to inspire me. I have even been surprised at this strange, dreamy feeling in me.

“Did you hear, Porfiry?” The elder addressed himself now to the novice who attended him. “Many times I have seen a hurt look in your eyes because you felt I loved Alexei more than you. So now you know the explanation. But I want you to know that I love you, too, and that many times I have felt deeply unhappy because you were hurt. To you now, my dear guests, I would like to talk about that youth, my brother, because nothing in my life has been more important, more prophetic, and more touching . . . I feel deeply moved now, and at this minute I can see in a glance my whole life, as though I were living it all over again . . .”

*

It must be pointed out here that this last talk of the elder’s with those who came to see him on the last day of his life has been partly recorded and preserved. It was written down from memory by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov a few days after the elder’s death. However, it cannot be vouchsafed that this is an exact record of what the elder said on that occasion, for it is impossible to ascertain whether Alexei did not add elements from his previous conversations with his teacher. Moreover, in this record, the elder seems to be talking without interruption, as if presenting his life to his friends in the form of a story, while, according to other, later accounts, this is not quite the way it happened, since the conversation that evening was general and, although the guests did not interrupt the elder very often, they did occasionally make comments and even told of their own experiences. And finally, in the state he was in, the elder could not possibly have carried on such a long monologue, for he breathed with difficulty, his voice faltered, and he even had to lie down and rest several times, although he never actually went to sleep and his guests never left their seats. Once or twice the conversation was interrupted by readings from the New Testament. Father Paisii did the reading.

It is remarkable also that none of the visitors expected the elder to die that night, especially because, on that last evening of his life, he had emerged from the deep sleep into which he had fallen during the day looking full of new and unexpected vigor that sustained him through his long talk with his friends. This last burst of fervor kept him in a state of great animation. But it did not last, for his life was suddenly cut off. But we will come to that later.

For now, I must warn the reader that I have decided to omit the details of the conversation and to limit myself to the elder’s story as written down by Alexei Karamazov. That will make it shorter and less tiresome, although, I repeat, Alyosha must have expanded it somewhat with things the elder had told him in their previous conversations.

Chapter 2: From The Life Of The Deceased Monk And Priest, The Elder Zosima, As Taken Down From His Own Words By Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

A. The Youth Who Was Elder Zosima’s Brother

BELOVED FATHERS and teachers, I was born in a faraway Northern province, in the town of V. My father was a gentleman by birth, but he was neither wealthy nor socially prominent. He died when I was only two and I do not remember him at all. He left my mother a small, wooden house and some money, not very much, but enough for her and her children to live on without privation. There were only two of us: my older brother Markel and myself, Zinovy. Markel was eight years older than I. He was impulsive and short-tempered. But he was really very kind and he never teased me. He was a strangely silent boy, especially at home with mother, me, and the servants. He was a good student, but at school always kept aloof from the other boys, although he did not quarrel with them or, at least, that is how our mother remembered it. About six months before he was to die (he was already seventeen at the time) he started visiting a man who led a very isolated life in our town, a man who had been exiled from Moscow for what amounted to free-thinking. This exile was a quite well-known scholar and he had once taught philosophy at the university. Somehow he got to like Markel and received him in his house. The boy spent whole evenings there throughout the winter, until the exile was summoned back to Petersburg, to take an appointment for which he had petitioned and, since he had some protectors, had now received. In the meantime Lent had begun, but Markel refused to fast. He made fun of it and even became rude. “All that is delirium,” he said, “because there is no such thing as God.” He really horrified our mother and the servants, and me too, for, even though I was just nine years old, I was very frightened when I heard him say that. Our servants were serfs—there were four of them—and they had been bought in the name of a landowner we knew. I still remember my mother selling one of the four, our cook Afimya, a lame elderly woman. Mother received sixty rubles for her and hired a free woman in her place . . .

Well, in the sixth week of Lent, my brother became seriously ill. His health had always been very poor; he was weak in the chest, had a frail constitution, and was predisposed to consumption. He was rather tall, very thin and frail, but his face was extremely handsome. He may have caught cold, but whatever it was, the doctor told mother that he now had galloping consumption and would not live through the spring. Mother wept all the time and then, very gradually, so as not to alarm him, she started to beg my brother to fast and to take holy communion, for he was still on his feet. He became very angry and said rude things about the Church. But then he thought about it and understood it all: he was dangerously ill and his mother was asking him to fast and to confess and to take the sacrament while he still had some strength left in him. He had known all along that his health was very bad and, the year before, he had even told our mother and me: “I’m not here for long. I don’t think I’ll last out another year.” And now it was as if he had prophesied it himself. Three days later Holy Week began, and on the Tuesday morning my brother started fasting and went to church. “Actually, I’m only doing it for your sake,” he told our mother. “I want you to be happy and to stop worrying.” Mother wept from joy then and also from grief, because she said to herself that his end must be near, to have brought about such a change in him. And it was not many times that he went to church. He soon had to take to his bed, so he confessed and took the sacrament at home.