The Brothers Karamazov (56 page)

He spoke with fervor and looked at me mysteriously, as if asking something of me.

“As to every man being answerable for everybody and everything, not just for his own sins,” he went on, “you are absolutely right about it, and the way you succeeded in grasping that idea so fully, all at once, is really remarkable. It is true that when men understand that idea, the kingdom of God will no longer be a dream but a reality.”

“But when do you expect that to happen?” I cried bitterly. “When will it come about, if ever? Perhaps it’s just a dream and nothing more.”

“So you don’t believe yourself,” he answered, “in the things you preach to others. Let me tell you, then, that this dream, as you call it, will most certainly come true. You may rest assured of that, but it will not happen immediately, because everything that happens in the world is controlled by its own set of laws. In this case, it is a psychological matter, a state of mind. In order to change the world, man’s way of thinking must be changed. Thus, there can be no brotherhood of men before all men become each other’s brothers. There is no science, no order based on the pursuit of material gain, that will enable men to share their goods fairly and to respect each other’s rights. There will never be enough to satisfy everyone; men will always be envious of their neighbors and will always destroy one another. So to your question when heaven on earth will come about, I can only promise you that it will come without fail, but first the period of man’s isolation must come to an end.”

“What isolation?” I asked him.

“The isolation that you find everywhere, particularly in our age. But it won’t come to an end right now, because the time has not yet come. Today everyone asserts his own personality and strives to live a full life as an individual. But these efforts lead not to a full life but to suicide, because, instead of realizing his personality, man only slips into total isolation. For in our age mankind has been broken up into self-contained individuals, each of whom retreats into his lair, trying to stay away from the rest, hiding himself and his belongings from the rest of mankind, and finally isolating himself from people and people from him. And, while he accumulates material wealth in his isolation, he thinks with satisfaction how mighty and secure he has become, because he is mad and cannot see that the more goods he accumulates, the deeper he sinks into suicidal impotence. The reason for this is that he has become accustomed to relying only on himself; he has split off from the whole and become an isolated unit; he has trained his soul not to rely on human help, not to believe in men and mankind, and only to worry that the wealth and privileges he has accumulated may get lost. Everywhere men today are turning scornfully away from the truth that the security of the individual cannot be achieved by his isolated efforts but only by mankind as a whole.

“But an end to this fearful isolation is bound to come and all men will understand how unnatural it was for them to have isolated themselves from one another. This will be the spirit of the new era and people will look back in amazement at the past, when they sat in darkness and refused to see the light. And it is then that the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens . . . But until that day we must keep hope alive, and now and then a man must set an example, if only an isolated one, by trying to lift his soul out of its isolation and offering it up in an act of brotherly communion, even if he is taken for one of God’s fools. This is necessary, to keep the great idea alive.”

It was in such intense discussions that we spent our evenings, one after another. I even gave up a great deal of my social life and stayed mostly at home. Besides, I was no longer as much in fashion as I had been. I say that without bitterness, because people still treated me with cheerful warmth, but it is a fact that fashion is quite a queen in society. As to my mysterious and constant visitor, I was filled with tremendous admiration for him, for, beyond being enthralled by his intellectual powers, I vaguely felt that he was nurturing certain plans within him and that he was preparing something very important. Possibly he also appreciated the fact that I never asked him about his secret, never made hints about it. In the end, however, I felt that he himself was longing to tell me something. This became quite apparent about a month after he had started visiting me.

“Do you know,” he said to me, “people in town are getting quite curious about us, particularly about my coming to visit you so often. But never mind, they’ll have an explanation soon enough now.”

There were times when he would suddenly become visibly agitated and, in those instances, he would almost always just get up and leave. At other times, he would look at me penetratingly at great length and I was certain that he was about to announce something very important but, instead, his expression would suddenly change and he would start discussing something that was not secret and that we had discussed before. He also started complaining of frequent headaches. And once, after he had talked at great length and with great feeling, he suddenly turned very pale, his face became twisted, and he stared at me fixedly.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him. “You’re not feeling well?” He had told me earlier that he had a headache.

“I . . . I want you to know . . . I have killed someone.”

He smiled as he said it, but his face was pale as chalk. Why did he have to smile like that? That was the first thought that flashed through my head, even before I had fully taken in what he was saying. Then I felt myself turning pale.

“What are you saying?” I cried.

“You see,” he answered, a faint smile still playing on his lips, “how hard it was for me to utter that first word. But now that I’ve torn myself loose, I think I’ll be able to go on . . .”

I did not believe him at first. In fact, when he left me that day, I still didn’t believe him; it was only after he had come to see me three days in a row and told me all about it in great detail that I finally came to believe him. I thought at first that he was mad and imagining it all, but in the end, with great amazement and great chagrin, I became convinced.

He had committed a great and horrible crime fourteen years before. He had murdered the rich widow of a landowner, a young and beautiful woman who had a house in town. He fell deeply in love with her, told her of his love, and tried to persuade her to marry him. But she already loved another man, a distinguished, high-ranking army officer; he was away at the time on active service, but she expected him back soon. So she rejected his proposal and asked him not to visit her. He stopped visiting her house, but then one night, taking advantage of his familiarity with the layout of the place, he entered the house through the garden and by the roof, with reckless disregard for the risk of being caught. But the most daring crimes are often the most successful. He entered the attic through a skylight and made his way down the attic stairs, knowing that the servants, through carelessness, often left the door at the bottom of the stairs unlocked. And that night they had. From there, he made his way in darkness to the lady’s bedroom, where a lamp was burning before the icon. By sheer chance, her two maids had slipped unnoticed out of the house, without permission, to attend some birthday party down the street. As for the rest of the servants, they slept in the servants’ quarters in the basement, near the kitchen.

When he saw her sleeping, his passion for her flared up. But at once it was superseded by a frantic, vengeful, jealous rage. Without knowing what he was doing, as if drunk, he went up to the bed and plunged a knife straight into her heart. She never even made a sound. Then, with cold and diabolical deliberation, he arranged things so that suspicion should fall on the servants. He was not too squeamish to take her purse, to open her chest of drawers with the keys he found under her pillow, and to take things an ignorant servant would be likely to take—ready cash and the larger gold articles—while leaving untouched infinitely more valuable securities and smaller but ten times more costly jewelry. He also took something of personal, sentimental value to him, but we will come to that later.

The sinister scheme completed, he left the house just as he had entered it, and neither on the following day when they found the victim, nor at any time after that, did anyone have the slightest suspicion as to who the real murderer was. Nor did anyone know about his love for the victim, for he had always been a taciturn and uncommunicative man and had never had a close friend to whom he might have confided his passion. People thought he was just an acquaintance of the victim, and not even a very close acquaintance, for he had not visited her during the last two weeks she was alive.

Suspicion fell at once on a servant named Peter, a serf of hers, whom, it was known (for she had said so herself), she had intended to send into the army to meet the recruitment quota for her serfs. She had picked him because he was single and also because she had been dissatisfied with his behavior, and he was aware of this. People in the tavern had heard him, when drunk, declare angrily that one day he would kill her. Then, for a couple of days before the murder, he had been away from the house without permission, and no one knew where he had been during that time. And on the day after the murder, they found him dead drunk outside town. His knife was in his pocket and somehow the palm of his right hand was smeared with blood. He said he had had a nosebleed, but they did not believe him. The two maids admitted that they had gone out to a party and left the entrance door unlocked while they were out. There were quite a few more such clues, which led to the arrest and trial of the innocent servant. However, a few days after the trial had started, the accused became ill with a fever and died in the prison hospital without regaining consciousness. And that closed the case, since the judges, the police authorities, and the public all agreed that the murderer was the dead serf. So the rest was left to the will of God, and that is when the punishment began.

My mysterious visitor, now my friend, admitted to me that, at first, his conscience had not bothered him in the least. He suffered, though, for having killed the woman he loved, simply because she was not there anymore and, by killing her, he had killed his love while his passion still ran in his veins. But he never gave a thought at the time to the fact that he had shed innocent blood and taken the life of a human being. The thought that his victim would have become the wife of another man was unbearable to him, so for a long time he felt that, in conscience, he could not have acted differently. True, the arrest of the servant weighed on him heavily, but the man’s illness and sudden death released his conscience from that burden, for, he reasoned at the time, the man did not die from shock or fright caused by his arrest but from a cold he had contracted, probably on the night of the murder, after which he had been found sprawled dead drunk on the damp ground. As to the things he had taken from her room, he was not in the least bothered by them since he had not intended to steal them but had taken them only to divert suspicion from himself. Besides, the value of the items he had taken did not amount to much and, in order to allay his conscience completely in this respect, he soon afterward donated first an equivalent and then a considerably larger sum to the alms house that had just been founded in town. He did this just to appease his conscience and, strangely enough, he found that it was, indeed, appeased, and for quite some time.

At the same time he gave himself over feverishly to his work, took upon himself a particularly difficult and time-consuming assignment, to which he devoted all his time for a couple of years, and, being a man of strong will, he almost succeeded in forgetting what had happened, for, whenever he was somehow reminded of it, he made an effort to drive it from his mind. Then he went in for philanthropy on a large scale, donated an immense amount of money to charities in our town, became known in the capitals, and was elected to national charity committees in Moscow and in Petersburg.

In the end, however, he started brooding; he gradually became aware of the burden weighing on his conscience and then realized he was not strong enough to bear that burden. About that time he met a beautiful and sensible girl; he was attracted to her and soon married her, hoping that her company would put an end to his lonely brooding. He hoped that devoting himself to his new obligations toward his wife and future children would lift the old anxiety from him once and for all. But the marriage had just about the opposite effect. During the very first month, he became bothered by the thought of what would happen if his wife, who loved him, knew the truth. And, when she told him of her first pregnancy, he became very upset. “Giving a life after having taken a life,” flashed through his mind. The child was born, and then more children. “How can I,” he wondered, “love them, bring them up, and teach them about good and evil, when I have shed blood?” The children were beautiful, he longed to fondle them, but was prevented by the thought: “I have no right even to look into their innocent eyes because of what I am.” And finally he became haunted by his victim, by the young life he had destroyed, by the blood crying out for justice. Dreadful dreams started to torment him. But, being a man of strong character, he bore his ordeal in silence for a long time. “I shall atone for my crime with my secret suffering,” he thought hopefully. But his hope was vain, for the longer it lasted, the more excruciating was his ordeal. Although people were rather intimidated by him because of his stern and forbidding appearance, they respected him highly for his charitable work. Yet the more they respected him, the more painful it was for him. He told me that he often thought of killing himself. Then, instead, he conceived another idea, an idea that at first seemed quite impossible to him but that little by little became such an obsession that he could no longer dismiss it. What he wanted to do was to come out, face the people of the town, and announce publicly that he was a murderer. For three years he carried that idea within him, and carried it in many different ways in his dreams and musings. Finally, he became convinced that, by confessing his crime publicly, he would heal the wound in his soul and find peace forever. But at the same time he was gripped by terror: how could he make himself do it? Then something happened that, he felt, made it possible for him. That something was my duel.