The Karamazov Brothers Page 17

  ‘Drive on!’ Ivan yelled angrily to the driver.

  ‘What was that for? What’s the matter with you? Why did you have to do that to him?’ Fyodor Pavlovich remonstrated, but the calash had already gathered speed. Ivan Fyodorovich gave no reply.

  ‘Well, I never!’ Fyodor Pavlovich said again, after a couple of minutes’ silence, eyeing his son disapprovingly. ‘This monastery visit was all your idea, you encouraged me and talked me into it, so why are you so angry?’

  ‘I wish you’d stop ranting, can’t we have some peace for a change!’ Ivan Fyodorovich cut him short.

  Fyodor Pavlovich fell silent again for a couple of minutes.

  ‘Could do with a tot of brandy now,’ he remarked gravely. But Ivan Fyodorovich did not reply.

  ‘You’ll have some too when we get home, won’t you?’

  Ivan Fyodorovich continued to maintain his silence.

  Fyodor Pavlovich waited another couple of minutes or so.

  ‘I’m taking Alyosha away from the monastery all the same, however disagreeable that may be to you, my esteemed Karl von Moor.’

  Ivan Fyodorovich shrugged his shoulders disdainfully, turned his head away, and fixed his eyes on the road. No one spoke for the rest of the journey.

  BOOK THREE

  Sensualists

  1

  IN THE SERVANTS’ QUARTERS

  FYODOR PAVLOVICH KARAMAZOV’S house, though by no means in the centre of the town, was not exactly on the outskirts either. It was a single-storey building with a mezzanine, painted grey, with a red metal roof. The exterior was pleasing, if somewhat dilapidated. However, it would stand for a long time yet, and was spacious and comfortable. It had many odd little rooms, glory-holes, and unexpected staircases. It was overrun with rats, but Fyodor Pavlovich was not unduly bothered. ‘Well, they help to relieve the boredom when you’re here by yourself of an evening.’ For it was actually his habit to send the servants to the outhouse to sleep, and to lock himself alone inside the main house for the night. The outhouse stood, spacious and solid, in the yard; Fyodor Pavlovich had had a kitchen installed there, although there was a kitchen in the main house too; he disliked the smell of cooking, and food was brought across the yard in winter and summer alike. The house had been built for a large family and could have accommodated five times as many occupants and servants. But at the time of our story only Fyodor Pavlovich and Ivan Fyodorovich lived in the house, while there were only three servants, old Grigory, his wife Marfa, and a young man called Smerdyakov, in the outhouse. It is necessary to say a little more about these three servants. Of Grigory Vasilyevich Kutuzov we have already said enough. He was a steadfast, unyielding, stubborn man, who always went straight to the point so long as it seemed to him, for some (often quite illogical) reason, to be indisputably on the side of truth. In short, he was honest and incorruptible. For example, just after the emancipation of the serfs, his wife Marfa Ignatyevna, despite her lifelong unquestioning obedience to her husband, had pestered him incessantly to leave Fyodor Pavlovich, go to Moscow, and set himself up there in some kind of small business (they had a little money put by); but Grigory decided once and for all that the woman was talking rubbish, as all women do, and that to leave their old master, no matter what he was like, would not be right, because ‘it is our duty to stick by him’.

  ‘If you understand what duty is!’ he remarked to Marfa Ignatyevna.

  ‘I understand about duty, Grigory Vasilyevich, but what duty do we have to make us stay here? That I don’t understand at all,’ Marfa Ignatyevna answered obstinately.

  ‘All right, you don’t understand, but that’s how it’s going to be. From now on you can keep quiet.’

  And so it was; they didn’t leave, and Fyodor Pavlovich agreed to pay them a small wage, which he did. Grigory also knew that he had an undoubted influence on his master. He felt this, and it was true. Fyodor Pavlovich, that cunning and obstinate buffoon, resolute ‘in certain matters’ as he himself said, was to his own astonishment utterly weak-willed in some other ‘matters’. He himself knew what these matters were, and admitted he was certainly afraid of many things. There are certain situations in this life in which you have to have your wits about you, and in such situations it is difficult to survive without someone who is loyal, and Grigory was loyal in the extreme. There were many times throughout his life when Fyodor Pavlovich could have had his nose thoroughly bloodied, but Grigory always came to his rescue, although every time he would lecture his master afterwards. But it was not only the prospect of a bloody nose that frightened Fyodor Pavlovich: there were more important situations, of great delicacy and complexity, when Fyodor Pavlovich himself would probably have been quite unable to express that indefinable need for someone close and faithful which he inexplicably began to perceive in himself at unexpected moments. These were almost painful occasions; debauched in the extreme and, in his sensuousness, often as cruel as some evil insect, Fyodor Pavlovich would from time to time, in moments of drunkenness, experience a spiritual terror and a moral torment which had an almost physical effect upon him. ‘My soul simply trembles in my throat at such times,’ he would say. At these moments he loved to have at his side, nearby—not necessarily in the same room, but in the outhouse—someone who was loyal and steadfast, quite unlike himself, not debauched, but who nevertheless witnessed all these acts of debauchery and knew all his secrets, but who out of loyalty would tolerate everything and, most important, would neither reproach him nor ever scold him, then or in the future, and if the need arose would protect him—from whom? From someone unknown, but terrible and dangerous. The essential thing was that it had to be another person, someone familiar and friendly, who could be summoned at the painful moment to look him straight in the eyes and perhaps exchange a word or two, even on some quite unconnected matter, and if that person was not angry, all well and good, one’s heart would feel somehow lighter, and if he was angry, then one was sadder. It even happened—though extremely rarely—that Fyodor Pavlovich would wake Grigory at night and summon him to the house at once. And he would come, and Fyodor Pavlovich would start to talk about the most trivial everyday matters and would soon dismiss him, sometimes even with gibes and mockery, then shrug his shoulders, retire to bed, and sleep the sleep of the just. Something of this sort happened when Alyosha arrived. Alyosha’s attitude, ‘seeing everything and judging nothing’, affected him profoundly. He brought in addition something quite unprecedented—a complete absence of contempt towards him, the old man, but on the contrary an endless capacity for affection and an absolutely natural and straightforward attachment to him, however little he might deserve it. For the old profligate, the man without a family, all this came as a great surprise; to him who had hitherto loved only ‘filth’, it was totally unexpected. After Alyosha’s departure, he admitted to himself that he had come to understand something which until then he had not wished to understand.

  I have already mentioned at the beginning of my story that Grigory hated Adelaida Ivanovna, Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife and the mother of his eldest son, Dmitry Fyodorovich, but that on the other hand he would defend the second wife, the klikusha Sofya Ivanovna, against her own husband and against all who might be inclined to say anything nasty or disrespectful about her. His sympathy for this unhappy woman had reached such a pitch of religious fervour that even twenty years later he could not bear the slightest hint of a slur upon her name and would immediately take the offender to task. Outwardly, Grigory was cold, dignified, and reserved, inclined to make weighty and considered pronouncements. It would also have been impossible to tell at first sight whether he loved his meek, submissive wife, whereas, truth to tell, he did love her, and she of course understood this. Not only was Marfa Ignatyevna not stupid, but she was perhaps cleverer than her husband—more sensible in worldly matters, at any rate—and yet she submitted meekly and uncomplainingly to him from the very beginning of their marriage and unquestioningly respected him for his spiritual superiority. Remarkably, throughout
their life together they talked very little to each other about anything, except perhaps the most necessary daily matters. The imposing and dignified Grigory kept his affairs to himself and brooded over his worries alone, and Marfa Ignatyevna had long since understood once and for all that he had absolutely no need of her advice. She felt that her husband valued her silence and thus recognized that she had a brain. He never beat her, except on one occasion, and then only lightly. In the first year of the marriage of Adelaida Ivanovna and Fyodor Pavlovich, all the girls and women of the village had assembled (this was still in the time of serfdom) in the courtyard of the manor to sing and dance. ‘In the Meadows’ had just started when Marfa Ignatyevna, then still a young girl, leapt in front of the singers and flung herself into a ‘Russian’ dance, flaunting herself, dancing not like the peasant women but like she had danced when she had been a domestic servant with the wealthy Miusovs, in their private theatre, where actors were trained by a dancing-master from Moscow. Grigory saw his wife dancing, and an hour later, in their hut, taught her a lesson by pulling her around a little by the hair. And that was the one and only beating, and Marfa Ignatyevna was never beaten again for the rest of her life—and never danced again.

  God had not blessed them with children; there had been one child, but it died. Grigory loved children—he did not hide the fact, and indeed was not afraid to show it. When Adelaida Ivanovna ran off, he led the three-year-old Dmitry Fyodorovich by the hand to his own house, where he spent nearly a year looking after him, combing his hair himself and even washing him in the washtub. Then he took charge of Ivan Fyodorovich and Alyosha until the day he got his face slapped, but I have already related all this. His own child gladdened him with hope only while Marfa Ignatyevna was pregnant. When it was born, he was overcome by grief and horror. The fact was, the boy was born with six fingers on one hand. Seeing this, Grigory was so horrified that he not only fell silent right up to the day of the christening, but deliberately went out into the garden to brood. It was spring, and he spent three whole days digging beds in the kitchen garden. The third day was the day of the christening; Grigory by this time had pondered what to do. Coming into the hut where the clergy and guests had congregated, the last being Fyodor Pavlovich, who was acting as godfather, he suddenly announced that the child ‘shouldn’t be christened at all’; he uttered this quietly, without elaboration, just let the words slip out, and stared dully at the priest.

  ‘Why ever not?’ enquired the priest in good-humoured amazement.

  ‘Because it’s… a monster,’ muttered Grigory.

  ‘What do you mean—a monster, what kind of a monster?’

  Grigory remained silent for a while.

  ‘It’s an abomination of nature…’, he muttered indistinctly but very firmly, obviously not wishing to elaborate further.

  They all laughed, and of course the poor child was christened. Grigory prayed conscientiously at the font, but did not change his opinion about the infant. However, he did not interfere, but for the whole two weeks that the sickly infant lived he almost never glanced at him, refused to look at him, and most of the time kept away from the hut. But when after two weeks the child died of thrush, he laid him in the coffin himself, gazed at him in deep sorrow, and when they had filled in his shallow little grave, stayed kneeling before it, his head bowed to the ground. From that time and for many years afterwards, he never once referred to his child, and Marfa Ignatyevna never mentioned their child in his presence, and if she had occasion to talk of her ‘little one’ with others, she did so in a whisper even when Grigory Vasilyevich was not there. Marfa Ignatyevna noticed that, from the time of the burial, he began to immerse himself most of the time in ‘religious matters’, took to reading the Lives of the Saints, for the most part in silence and when he was alone, and for this purpose always put on his big, round, silver-framed spectacles. He rarely read aloud, except perhaps at Lent. He loved the Book of Job and, having obtained from somewhere a collection of the sayings and sermons of ‘our blessed Father Isaac the Syrian’,* read them painstakingly for many years, understood practically nothing in them, and yet perhaps precisely for that reason valued and cherished the book all the more. Recently he had begun to listen with great interest to the doctrines of the flagellants, having an opportunity to do so locally, and had clearly been greatly influenced by them, but he had not seen fit to change his faith. Being so steeped in ‘religious matters’, of course, lent his face even greater gravity.

  He had, perhaps, a natural leaning towards mysticism. And then, as though by destiny, the appearance on this earth of his six-fingered infant and his subsequent death coincided exactly with another extremely strange, unexpected, and peculiar event which was ‘imprinted’, as he later expressed it, on his very soul. It happened that on the very day the six-fingered child was buried, Marfa Ignatyevna had been woken in the night by what sounded like the crying of a newborn infant. She was frightened and woke her husband. He listened and concluded that it was more like someone groaning, ‘probably a woman’. He got up and dressed; it was quite a warm May night. Going out to the porch, he could clearly hear that the groans were coming from the garden. But the gate between the garden and the yard was locked at night, and there was no other entrance, for a stout, high fence ran all round the garden. Grigory retraced his steps, lit a lantern, took the key to the garden gate, and, ignoring the hysterical terror of his wife, who remained convinced that she was hearing a child’s voice and that it was probably her own son crying and calling for her, entered the garden without a word. There he clearly perceived that the groans were coming from their bathhouse in the garden, not far from the gate, and that it was indeed a woman groaning. Opening the bathhouse door, he beheld a sight that held him rooted to the spot: the idiot girl who wandered the streets and was known to the whole town as ‘Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya’* had got into the bathhouse and had just given birth to a child. The child was lying at her side, and she was dying beside it. She said nothing, for she could not speak anyway. But all this will require its own explanation.

  2

  LIZAVETA SMERDYASHCHAYA

  THERE was one particular circumstance that deeply shocked Grigory, finally confirming an earlier disquieting and quite sickening suspicion that he had been harbouring. This Lizaveta was extremely short in stature, ‘two arshins* and a bit’, as many of the pious old women of the town affectionately recalled after her death. At the age of twenty her face was healthy, full, and ruddy, but clearly that of an idiot; the expression in her eyes, though submissive, was fixed and unpleasant. All her life, summer and winter alike, she went barefoot and wore the same hempen shirt. Her almost black hair, extremely thick and as frizzy as sheep’s wool, covered her head like an enormous cap. Besides, it was always spattered with earth and dirt and matted with leaves, splinters, and wood-shavings, for she always slept on the ground, in the mud. Her father, a homeless townsman named Ilya, ailing and ruined by drink, had eked out a living for many years by doing odd jobs for a certain well-to-do family, also living in our town. Lizaveta’s mother had long since died. Ilya, always ill and evil-tempered, beat Lizaveta mercilessly whenever she came home. But she rarely came home, because she was regarded all over the town as a holy simpleton and lived on alms. Ilya’s masters and even Ilya himself, as well as many sympathetic townspeople, mainly merchants and their wives, had tried more than once to dress Lizaveta more decently than just in a shirt, and in winter they clothed her in a sheepskin coat and shod her feet in boots; but invariably, having obediently submitted to being dressed, she went off somewhere, generally into a church porch, and quickly took off all that she had been given—be it kerchief, skirt, sheepskin, or boots—left everything there, and went off barefoot and wearing just a shirt as before. Once it happened that the new governor of our province, on a visit of inspection to our little town, felt his finer feelings sorely offended on seeing Lizaveta, and although he understood, as had been explained to him, that she was a ‘holy simpleton’, nevertheless insisted that
for a young girl to wander the streets in nothing but a shirt was an offence against decency, and that a stop should be put to it. But the governor left and Lizaveta stayed as she was. Eventually her father died, and as an orphan she became even dearer to the devout amongst the townspeople. In fact, everyone seemed to love her, even the boys did not tease or insult her, and the boys in our town, especially the schoolboys, are a mischievous lot. She went into strangers’ houses and no one drove her out; on the contrary, everyone made a fuss of her and gave her coins. Whenever someone handed her a coin she would take it and immediately deposit it in some collection-box at the church or the prison. If someone in the market gave her a bagel or a bun, she would invariably go and give it to the first child she met, or else she would stop one of our wealthiest ladies and offer it to her; and the lady would accept it with delight. She herself ate only dark rye bread and water. She would go and sit down in a smart shop with expensive goods on display, and money lying about, and the proprietors never worried about her, knowing that even if they left thousands of roubles lying around and forgot about her, she would not touch a kopeck. She rarely entered a church, but slept either in church porches or, having climbed over a wattle fence—we still have many wattle rather than wooden fences to this day—in someone’s kitchen garden. At home, that is to say at the house of the people with whom her deceased father had lived, she would turn up about once a week, and in winter she would come back every day, but only for the night, which she would spend either in the porch or in the cowshed. People marvelled at her, wondering how she could endure such a life, but she was used to it; although small, she had extraordinary strength and resilience. Some of the gentry even suggested that she did all this from pride, but somehow this did not appear likely; she could not pronounce a single word, the best she could do was to move her tongue to utter an inarticulate sound—what pride was there in that? Now it so happened (quite a while ago, it was) that one bright warm September night by the light of a full moon, at a very late hour for our town, a drunken gang of young bucks, five or six in all, were making their way home by the backs of the houses. On either side of the path were wattle fences and behind them kitchen gardens belonging to the houses. The way led across a bridge over the large, stinking pond that we sometimes dignified with the name of ‘river’. Beside the wattle fence, our gang saw Lizaveta sleeping among the nettles and burdock. The tipsy gentlemen stood over her roaring with laughter and began to mock her in a most indecent fashion. One lordling suddenly took it into his head to ask an utterly stupid question on an impossible theme. ‘Could anyone—anyone at all—regard such an animal as a woman—now for instance?…’ They all declared with disdainful loathing that it was impossible. But Fyodor Pavlovich happened to be among the group, and he immediately came forward and declared that it was indeed possible to regard her as a woman, very much so, that in fact one could even consider her a particularly tasty morsel, and so on and so forth. It is true that at this time he tended to overplay his clownish role, he loved to show off and amuse the gentlemen, aspiring to be their equal, but in fact appearing to them utterly crude. He had also just received from St Petersburg the news of the death of his first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, and while still in mourning was drinking and rampaging so much that some in the town, even the most dissolute, were revolted by the mere sight of him. The gang, of course, laughed at this unexpected point of view; one of them even began to egg Fyodor Pavlovich on, but the rest just spat more and more profusely, although still finding it all highly amusing, and finally they all went their separate ways. Fyodor Pavlovich swore afterwards that he had left with them, and perhaps he had, no one will ever know for sure, but five or six months later the whole town began to talk with extreme and unfeigned revulsion about the fact that Lizaveta was pregnant, and to rack their brains as to whose was the sin, who was the sinner. And just then the curious rumour suddenly spread through the town that the culprit was in fact Fyodor Pavlovich. Where did this rumour come from? By this time only one member of that merry gang was still in the town, and he was by now a middle-aged, respectable state councillor, with a family of grown-up daughters, who was certainly not going to start gossiping, even if there was anything in it; the other members of the gang, about five of them, had all gone to other parts of the country by now. But the finger pointed straight at Fyodor Pavlovich and continued to do so. Of course, he did not exactly admit to anything, but neither did he deny the accusations: after all, he was not going to start trading words with shopkeepers and parvenus. At the time, he was haughty and conversed only with his own set, the civil servants and gentry who found him so amusing. And Grigory stood by his master with all his strength and might, and not only defended him against all this slander but also argued and remonstrated on his behalf and persuaded many people to change their minds. ‘She’s the guilty one, she’s just a slut,’ he would say with conviction; the culprit, he suggested, was none other than ‘Karp the Screw’ (a fearsome convict who, as was well known locally, had escaped from the provincial gaol at about that time and gone to earth in our town). This surmise seemed plausible; people remembered Karp, and recollected in particular that on those very nights in the early autumn he had indeed been roaming about the town and had robbed three people. Not only did this whole incident and all the conjecture not diminish the sympathy felt generally for the poor simpleton, but people began increasingly to take her under their wing. Kondratyeva, the widow of a prosperous merchant, even went so far as to take Lizaveta into her own home at the end of April to shelter her until she gave birth. She was guarded closely, but it turned out that on the evening of the last day, despite all vigilance, Lizaveta managed to creep out of Kondratyeva’s house and turned up in Fyodor Pavlovich’s garden. How she had managed to climb the high, stout garden fence in her condition remains something of a mystery. Some maintained that she had been carried over, others that she had been ‘spirited’ over. Most probably, though, it had all happened in some contrived but perfectly natural manner, and Lizaveta, skilled as she was at climbing wattle fences to sleep in other people’s gardens, had somehow managed to scale Fyodor Pavlovich’s fence and then, in spite of her condition, jump down into the garden, hurting herself as she did so. Grigory rushed in to Marfa Ignatyevna and urged her to go and help Lizaveta, while he himself ran for the old midwife, a townswoman who lived nearby. The child was saved, but Lizaveta died towards dawn. Grigory carried the newborn infant into the house, sat his wife down, and put it in her arms so that she could hold it to her breast. ‘A child of God, an orphan, is everyone’s kin, but especially ours. Our dead little one has sent him, and he is born of the devil’s son and a righteous woman. Attend to him and stop crying.’ So Marfa Ignatyevna reared the child. He was christened Pavel, and everyone, including themselves, began spontaneously to call him by the patronymic Fyodorovich. Fyodor Pavlovich raised no objection and even found it all highly amusing, although he continued strenuously to deny any involvement on his part. In the town, people were pleased that he had taken in the foundling. Later Fyodor Pavlovich even devised a surname for the foundling: he called him Smerdyakov,* after his mother’s nickname, Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya. Thus this Smerdyakov became Fyodor Pavlovich’s second servant and, until the beginning of our story, lived in the outhouse together with the old couple Grigory and Marfa. He was assigned the duties of a cook. I should really have said more about him in particular, but I am ashamed to have engaged the reader’s attention for so long in describing such nondescript servants, and so I shall now return to my tale, in the hope that further information about Smerdyakov will somehow or other be revealed naturally as my story unfolds.