The Brothers Karamazov (86 page)

“Allow me, just a second,” the prosecutor interrupted politely. “Would you tell us now why you urgently had to have precisely that sum: three thousand rubles, that is?”

“Oh, gentlemen, can’t you stop worrying about all these unimportant details—all these hows and whens and whys, and how was it I had to have so much money rather than so much and all that kind of ridiculous stuff. It would take three big volumes to write it all down, and even then you’d still have to add an epilogue to it!” Mitya said this with the good-natured, gruff impatience of one eager to cooperate fully in order to get to the whole truth. “Please, gentlemen, please forgive me for my impatience,” he added quickly, checking himself, “and once again, believe me, I have the utmost respect for your competence and fully realize the gravity of the situation. And I’m not drunk—I have completely sobered up now. Besides, even if I were drunk, it wouldn’t make that much difference. With me, you know, it’s like this: when I sober up, I get wise and stupid, and when I’m drunk, I get stupid and wise. Yes, that’s how I am, ha-ha! I see, however, that it’s not fitting for me to joke with you, gentlemen; that is, not until things are cleared up. I am entitled, however, to my self-respect too. I see very well the present gap between us: I am a criminal in your eyes and so you cannot possibly consider me your equal, and it is your duty to keep me under control. And, of course, I cannot expect you to pat me on the back for what I did to Gregory, for one cannot be allowed to go around breaking old men’s heads with impunity. I suppose I will be tried for that and get perhaps six months, perhaps a year; I don’t really know what the sentence for something like that is. I only hope it won’t entail loss of civil rights, will it, Mr. Prosecutor? You see, gentlemen, I am well aware of the difference that exists between us . . . You, however, must admit, too, that even God himself would be befuddled by questions like ‘Where did you turn? Why did you turn that way? How did you turn that way? And what did you step on when you turned?’ All right, so I’ll get mixed up and contradict myself and you’ll quickly write it down. Where will that get you? Nowhere, believe me.

“And now, since you’ve allowed me to get all that off my chest, I’ll go on to the end, hoping only that you, highly educated and honorable gentlemen that you are, will bear with me. And now I want to end, gentlemen, with a plea: Please, gentlemen, try to unlearn once and for all the prescribed methods for conducting interrogations! They’ve taught you to start with some completely trivial and apparently irrelevant detail—how, for instance, I got up, what I had for breakfast, how and where I spat; and then, ‘when the prisoner is off guard,’ you are supposed to stun him with, ‘Whom did you murder? Whom did you rob?’ Isn’t that the way you’re supposed to operate? Isn’t that the trick they teach you? It may work perhaps with some peasant, gentlemen, but I assure you it’s wasted on me. Why, I know the ropes. I have some experience, after all! And please do not think this is insolence on my part. You are not really angry with me, are you?” Mitya added, looking at them with a strangely good-humored smile. “Why, coming from that hooligan Mitya Karamazov, it should be excusable! Of course, if any intelligent man talked like that, it would be quite another matter!”

Nelyudov laughed too, as he listened to him. The prosecutor did not laugh. He listened with great interest to everything Mitya said, never taking his eyes off him, as if he were afraid to miss a single word, the slightest movement, the faintest tremor of a facial muscle.

“But you must admit,” Nelyudov said, still laughing, “that we didn’t start by trying to catch you off your guard, by asking you how you woke up and what you had for breakfast . . . In fact, I dare say we started with pretty substantial matters, didn’t we?”

“I understood and appreciated that, just as I also appreciate your present patience, kindness, and generosity. The three of us here, we are honorable men, and I would like everything to be based on the mutual trust of well-bred, educated gentlemen linked by the common bond of honor. In any case, allow me to regard you as my best friends at this moment of my life when I am in this humiliating position. I hope you will not consider this impertinent on my part, gentlemen?”

“Quite the contrary, Mr. Karamazov, you express it very well,” Nelyudov assented with approving dignity.

“And so to hell with all those little tricks, gentlemen!” Mitya cried enthusiastically. “Otherwise, God knows where we will wind up.”

“I accept your very sensible advice without reservation,” the prosecutor suddenly intervened. “I don’t think, however, that I will take back my last question, because I do feel it is essential for us to find out why you needed precisely three thousand rubles, why just that figure.”

“Why I needed it? For one thing and another . . . all right, to pay back a debt.”

“To whom?”

“That I absolutely refuse to answer. And I refuse, not because I cannot answer it, or dare not, or because I’m afraid of something, for it’s really completely unimportant. I won’t answer it as a matter of principle—it’s my private life. That question is irrelevant to the case at hand and, being irrelevant, it becomes my private business. I wanted to pay back a debt, a debt of honor. But I won’t tell you to whom.”

“Allow me to have this written down,” the prosecutor said.

“Please do, by all means, write down that I won’t answer it. You may even put down that I would consider it dishonorable to answer, since I see that you have lots of time to waste writing things down.”

“Let me remind you once again,” the prosecutor said in a rather severe tone, “of your right not to answer any question we ask you now, and, for our part, we have no right whatsoever to extort answers from you if, for any reason whatever, you elect to withhold them. In this, you must follow your own judgment entirely. But we are also duty-bound in a case such as this to warn you of the harm you may do yourself by refusing to answer this or that particular question. And now, please go on.”

“I don’t really resent your asking me that, gentlemen, I . . .” Mitya muttered, somewhat put off by the admonition. Then he went on with his story. “You see, that Samsonov to whose house I went . . .”

Of course, we shall not repeat here what the reader already knows. Mitya was anxious to tell everything with the utmost accuracy and in all possible detail. But he was also in a tremendous hurry. As his evidence was being taken down, he continually had to be interrupted and asked to wait. He often protested, but still good-humoredly. Now and then, of course, he would let out an exclamation such as, “But, gentlemen, that would make God himself lose patience!” or, “Don’t you see that you’re just exasperating me this way!” But otherwise, he was still in an effusively friendly mood. And so he got through telling them about Samsonov making such a fool of him (for by now Mitya had no doubt at all that Samsonov had deliberately sent him on a fool’s errand). When he came to the sale of his watch for six rubles, of which his interrogators had not even heard, the story elicited great interest and, to Mitya’s immense indignation, they insisted on having it written down in great detail, as they felt it would further establish the fact that at that time Mitya had no money whatsoever. Little by little, Mitya grew somber. He went on, however, describing his trip to see the Hound, including the account of the night spent in the forester’s smoke-filled hut and all that. Then he described his return to town and, without requiring any prompting, depicted the agonies of jealousy he had gone through because of Grushenka. They listened to him attentively and took special note of the fact that Mitya had, quite some time before, established an “observation post” at the back of Maria Kondratiev’s garden, next to his father’s house, from which he reckoned to intercept Grushenka. They were also very interested to hear that it was Smerdyakov who kept Mitya informed of what went on inside old Karamazov’s house, and the clerk had to write it all down in detail. Of his jealousy, Mitya spoke excitedly and at great length and, although he felt inwardly that it was rather humiliating to expose his intimate feelings to public scrutiny, he overcame his reluctance in order to make his account as true as possible. The stern, detached gaze of the two pairs of eyes fixed on him, particularly the prosecutor’s, gradually discouraged him. “Neither Nelyudov, that boy with whom only a few days ago I exchanged those stupid remarks about women, nor that consumptive prosecutor really deserves my trust in telling them all these things,” Mitya now thought mournfully. “Resign yourself to your disgrace—this shame and horror you must face!” Mitya somehow summed up his feelings in this rhyme and forced himself to go on with his statement. When he came to his visit to Mrs. Khokhlakov, he became gay again and, laughing, was about to tell them an anecdote concerning that lady which had recently been going around town, although it had no connection with the case. But the examining magistrate politely suggested that Mitya stick to the point. Finally, Mitya told them of his despair upon leaving Mrs. Khokhlakov’s and of his thinking: “I must get the three thousand, even if I have to kill someone to get it!” At that point he was stopped and the clerk was told to write down that Mitya was “thinking of killing someone.” Mitya allowed them to write it down without saying a word. At the point in the story when Mitya found out that Grushenka had tricked him and left Samsonov’s house right after him, although she had told him she would stay there until almost midnight, Mitya blurted out: “If I didn’t kill Fenya when she told me that, it was only because I was in too great a hurry.” And that was carefully noted down, too. Mitya waited gloomily until the clerk had finished writing and then was about to tell them about his climbing over the fence into his father’s garden, when the examining magistrate suddenly opened a large briefcase that lay next to him on the sofa and drew out the brass pestle.

“Do you recognize this object?” he asked Mitya.

“I certainly do,” Mitya said with a mournful grin. “Say, let me have a look at it . . . Ah, no, I don’t want to really. The hell with it!”

“How is it you forgot to mention it?” Nelyudov inquired.

“What the hell! Do you think I wanted to conceal it from you? I could not have managed to keep it out of my story anyway, as you can well imagine! It just slipped my memory now.”

“Would you be so kind as to tell us exactly how you got it?”

“I will be so kind, gentlemen.”

And he told him how he had taken the pestle and dashed off.

“But what exactly was your purpose in picking up this implement?”

“Purpose? I didn’t have any particular purpose. I just grabbed it and dashed out.”

“But why would you take it with you without any purpose?”

Mitya was boiling with resentment. He glared at “that boy Nelyudov” and snorted in gloomy disgust. He felt more and more ashamed of himself for having told “these people” so sincerely and in such soul-searching detail about his pangs of jealousy over Grushenka.

“I don’t give a damn about the pestle!” he barked.

“Nevertheless?”

“To keep the dogs away, if you want—anything. It was dark. Who knows what could happen . . .”

“Did you customarily take some such object along with you when you went out after dark?”

“Ah, the hell with you! What’s the good of trying to talk to people like you!” Mitya cried. He had reached the last degree of irritation. He turned to the clerk; his face very red with anger, and with a strange, shrill note vibrating in his voice, he said:

“Now write this down at once! ‘I grabbed that pestle for the purpose of killing my father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, by smashing his head with it.’ All right, gentlemen, are you satisfied now? Will that put your minds at rest?”

He glared challengingly at his interrogators.

“We understand very well,” the prosecutor said drily, “that the statement you have just made is the result of your irritation with us, your exasperation at questions that you consider trivial but that happen to be really quite essential.”

“Ah, but what do you expect me to tell you? Let’s say I took the pestle . . . Well, sometimes people snatch up an object under such circumstances. I don’t know why—I just took it and ran out of the house, and that’s all there is to say. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, gentlemen. Don’t go on like this or I swear I won’t tell you anything more.”

He sat with his elbows on the table, his head resting on his hand. He turned his profile to them, staring at the wall and trying to overcome the despair mounting in him. He was longing to get up and announce that he would not tell them another word, “even if they lead me off to be executed.”

“You see, gentlemen,” he said suddenly, doing violence to himself, “when I listen to you I get the impression I’m dreaming . . . There’s one particular dream I keep having again and again; it haunts me . . . In that dream, someone is pursuing me, someone of whom I am terribly afraid. He is pursuing me at night, searching for me in the dark. I hide from him, behind a door or a cupboard. I feel humiliated at having to hide from him, but the worst of it is that he knows very well where I am and only pretends he doesn’t, just so that he can savor my terror a little longer . . . And that’s what you’re doing now. That’s the way it feels to me.”

“So that’s the sort of dreams you have?” the prosecutor inquired.

“Yes, that’s the sort of dreams I have.” Mitya smiled wryly. “Wouldn’t you like that noted down too?”

“N-no. I don’t think that will be necessary. It’s interesting, though.”

“But now it’s not a dream. It’s realism, gentlemen, the realism of real life! I am the wolf and you are the hunters, and you’re hunting me down.”

“I do not believe your comparison is very accurate,” Nelyudov said in a very soft voice.

“Oh, it’s accurate enough, pretty accurate!” Mitya cut in heatedly. But then, apparently relieved by having released the anger that had been accumulating inside him, he gradually regained his good humor and became friendlier and friendlier as he went on. “You have good grounds, gentlemen, for distrusting a suspected criminal as he tries to ward off your stinging questions. But you have no right to distrust an honorable man or the honorable impulses of his heart—I’m not afraid to speak like this of myself. No, no, gentlemen, you have no right to dismiss that!