Текст книги "The Brothers Karamazov"

Here Ippolit Kirillovich unfolded a most detailed picture of Mitya’s preparations, the scene at Perkhotin’s, at the shop, with the coachmen. He cited a quantity of words, phrases, gestures—all confirmed by witnesses—and the picture terribly swayed his listeners’ convictions. What swayed them above all was the totality of the facts. The guilt of this frenzied, turbulent man, who no longer cared about himself, was set forth irrefutably. “There was no longer any reason for him to care about himself,” Ippolit Kirillovich went on. “Two or three times he was on the verge of confessing outright, almost hinted at it, and stopped just short of telling all.” (Here followed the testimony of the witnesses.) “He even shouted to the coachman on the way: ‘Do you know you’re driving a murderer!’ But still he could not tell all: he had first to get to the village of Mokroye, and there finish the poem. What awaits the unfortunate man, however? The thing is that almost from his first moments in Mokroye, he sees and finally perceives fully that his ‘indisputable’ rival is perhaps not so indisputable, and that no congratulations for new happiness and no raised cups would either be wanted or accepted from him. But you already know the facts, gentlemen of the jury, from the court’s investigation. Karamazov’s triumph over his rival turned out to be beyond dispute, and here—oh, here his soul entered quite a new phase, even the most terrible of all his soul has lived through and will yet live through! One can positively admit, gentlemen of the jury,” exclaimed Ippolit Kirillovich, “that outraged nature and the criminal heart revenge themselves more fully than any earthly justice! Moreover, justice and earthly punishment even alleviate the punishment of nature, are even necessary for the soul of the criminal in those moments as its salvation from despair, for I cannot even imagine the horror and the moral suffering of Karamazov when he discovered that she loved him, that for him she rejected her ‘former’ and ‘indisputable’ one, that she was calling him, him, ‘Mitya,’ to renewed life, promising him happiness, and all of that when? When everything was finished for him, and nothing was possible! Incidentally, I shall make one rather important observation in passing, to clarify the true essence of the defendant’s situation at that moment: this woman, this love of his, until the very last minute, even until the very instant of his arrest, remained inaccessible to him, passionately desired but unattainable. Why, why did he not shoot himself right then, why did he abandon his original intent and even forget where his pistol was? It was precisely this passionate thirst for love and the hope of satisfying it right then and there that held him back. In a daze of revelry he fastened himself to his beloved, who reveled with him, more lovely and alluring for him than ever—he would not leave her side, he admired her, he melted away before her. This passionate thirst even managed for a moment to suppress not only his fear of arrest, but the very pangs of his conscience! For a moment, oh, only for a moment! I picture to myself the state of the criminal’s soul at that time as an indisputable slavish submission to three elements that overwhelmed it completely: first, a state of drunkenness, daze and noise, feet pounding, singers wailing, and she, she, flushed with wine, singing and dancing, drunk and laughing to him! Second, the remote, encouraging dream that the fatal ending was still a long way off, was at least not near—perhaps only the next day, only in the morning, would they come and take him. Several hours, then—a long time, terribly long! One can think up a lot in several hours. He felt, as I picture it to myself, something similar to what a criminal feels on his way to execution, to the gallows: he still has to go down a long, long street, and at a slow pace, past thousands of people, then turn down another street, and only at the end of that other street—the terrible square! I precisely think that at the start of the procession the condemned man, sitting in the cart of shame, must feel precisely that there is still an endless life ahead of him. Now, however, the houses are going past, the cart is moving on—oh, that’s nothing, it’s still such a long way to the turn down the second street, and so he still looks cheerfully to right and left at those thousands of indifferently curious people whose eyes are fastened on him, and he still fancies he is the same sort of man as they are. But here comes the turn down the other street—oh, it’s nothing, nothing, still a whole street to go. And no matter how many houses pass by, he will keep thinking: ‘There are still a lot of houses left.’ And so on to the very end, to the very square. So it was then, as I picture it to myself, with Karamazov. ‘They haven’t had enough time yet,’ he thinks, ‘it’s still possible to find some way, oh, there’s still time to invent a plan of defense, to think up a response, but now, now—she’s so lovely now!’ His soul is full of darkness and dread, but even so he manages to set aside half his money and hide it somewhere—otherwise I cannot explain to myself the disappearance of one whole half of the three thousand he had just taken from under his father’s pillow. This was not his first time in Mokroye, he had once spent two days carousing there. He knew that big, old wooden house with all its sheds and porches. I precisely suppose that part of the money disappeared right then, and precisely in that house, not long before his arrest, into some crack, some crevice, under some floorboard, somewhere in a corner, under the roof—but why? You ask why? The catastrophe may come now, and of course we have not thought out how to meet it, we have had no time, and our head is throbbing, and we are drawn to her,but money?—money is necessary in all situations! A man with money is a man everywhere. Perhaps such calculation at such a moment appears unnatural to you? But does he not insist himself that a month earlier, also in a most anxious and fatal moment for him, he set apart half of the three thousand and sewed it into his amulet, and, of course, if that is not true, as we shall presently prove, still the idea is familiar to Karamazov, he did contemplate it. Moreover, when he later insisted to the investigator that he had set apart fifteen hundred in the amulet (which never existed), he perhaps invented this amulet that same instant, precisely because two hours earlier he had set apart half of his money and hidden it somewhere there in Mokroye, just in case, until morning, so as not to keep it with him, on a sudden inspiration. Two abysses, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can contemplate two abysses, and both at the same time. We searched that house and found nothing. Perhaps the money is still there, or perhaps it disappeared the next day and is now with the defendant. In any case, he was arrested at her side, kneeling before her, she was lying on a bed, he was stretching out his hands to her, and was so oblivious of everything at that moment that he did not even hear the approach of those who arrested him. He had no time to prepare any response in his mind. Both he and his mind were caught unawares.

“And now he stands before his judges, before the arbiters of his fate. Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments when, in the exercise of our duty, we ourselves feel almost afraid before man, and afraid for man! These are the moments when one contemplates the animal terror of the criminal who already knows that all is lost but is still struggling, still intends to struggle with you. These are the moments when all the instincts of self-preservation rise up in him at once, and, trying to save himself, he looks at you with a piercing eye, questioning and suffering, he catches you and studies you, your face, your thoughts, waiting to see from which side you will strike, and instantly creates thousands of plans in his tremulous mind, but is still afraid to speak, afraid he will let something slip. These humiliating moments of the human soul, this journey through torments, this animal thirst for self-salvation, are terrible and sometimes evoke trepidation and commiseration even in an investigator! And so we then witnessed all that. At first he was stunned, and in his terror let drop a few words that gravely compromised him: ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it !’ But he quickly restrained himself. What to say, how to answer—none of this is prepared in him yet, but what is prepared in him is one unsubstantiated denial: ‘I am not guilty of my father’s death! ‘ That is our fence for the time being, and there, behind the fence, perhaps we can set up something, some sort of barricade. He hastens to explain his first compromising exclamations, forestalling our questions, by saying he considers himself guilty only of the death of the servant Grigory. ‘That blood I am guilty of, but who killed my father, gentlemen, who killed him? Who could have killed him if not IVDo you hear that? He asks us, us, who came to him with the very same question! Do you hear that little phrase—’if not I’—running ahead of itself, its animal cunning, its naivety, its Karamazovian impatience? It was not I who killed him, do not even think it was I: ‘I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to admit (he is in a hurry, he is in a terrible hurry! ), ‘and yet I am not guilty, it was not I who killed him! ‘ He concedes to us that he wanted to kill him, as if to say: you see how sincere I am, so you can all the sooner believe that I did not kill him. Oh, in such cases the criminal sometimes becomes incredibly careless and credulous. And here, quite inadvertently, as it were, the investigators suddenly asked him a most guileless question: ‘Could it be Smerdyakov who killed him?’ And the result was just as we expected: he became terribly angry that we had forestalled him and caught him unawares before he had time to prepare, to choose and catch the moment when it would be most plausible to bring up Smerdyakov. As is his nature, he at once rushed to the extreme and began assuring us with all his might that Smerdyakov could not have killed him, was incapable of killing him. But do not believe him, it was only a ruse: by no means, by no means was he giving up Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he still meant to bring him forward, because who else could he bring forward, but he would do it at some other moment, since for the time being the thing was spoiled. He would bring him forward only the next day, or even in a few days, picking the moment when he would cry out to us: ‘You see, I myself rejected Smerdyakov more than you did, you remember that yourselves, but now I, too, am convinced: it was he who killed him, it could not be anyone else!’ And with us, meanwhile, he falls into a gloomy and irritable denial, his anger and impatience prompting him, however, to a most inept and implausible explanation of how he looked into his father’s window and then respectfully went away from the window. The main thing being that he does not yet know the circumstances, the scope of the evidence given by the recovered Grigory. We proceed to the examination and search of his person. The examination angers him, but also encourages him: the full three thousand is not found, only fifteen hundred. And, of course, only in this moment of angry silence and denial does the idea of the amulet jump into his head for the first time in his life. He himself undoubtedly sensed the utter incredibility of his invention, and he was at pains, at terrible pains, to make it more credible, to spin a whole plausible novel out of it. In such cases the first thing, the chief task of the investigators is to keep the criminal from preparing himself, to take him by surprise so that he speaks out his cherished ideas in all their revealing ingenuousness, implausibility, and inconsistency. And it is possible to make the criminal speak only by unexpectedly, inadvertently, as it were, informing him of some new fact, some circumstance of the case that has colossal significance, but that he previously had no notion of and could in no way have foreseen. We had kept this fact in readiness, oh, long in readiness: it was the evidence of the recovered servant Grigory about the open door through which the defendant had fled. He had completely forgotten about this door, and it never occurred to him that Grigory could have seen it. The effect was colossal. He jumped up and suddenly shouted to us: ‘It was Smerdyakov who killed him, Smerdyakov!’—and thus revealed his cherished, his basic idea in its most implausible form, for Smerdyakov could have committed the murder only after he himself had struck Grigory down and run away. But when we told him that Grigory had seen the door open before he fell, and, on going out of his bedroom, had heard Smerdyakov groaning behind the partition—Karamazov was truly crushed. My collaborator, our esteemed and witty Nikolai Parfenovich, told me later that at that moment he pitied him to the point of tears. And this is the moment when, to make things better, he hastens to tell us about the notorious amulet: very well, I’ll tell you my story! Gentlemen of the jury, I have already made known to you why I consider all this invention about money sewn into an amulet a month earlier not only an absurdity, but also the most implausible contrivance that could have been hit upon in this situation. If one bet on whether anything more implausible could be said or imagined, even then it would be impossible to invent anything worse than that. Here, above all, the triumphant novelist can be brought up short and demolished by details, those very details in which reality is always so rich, and which are always neglected by such unfortunate and unwilling authors, as if they were utterly insignificant and unnecessary trifles, if indeed they even occur to them. Oh, they cannot be bothered with that at the moment, their mind creates only the grandiose whole—and then someone dares suggest such a trifle to them! But that is where they get caught! The defendant is asked the question: ‘Well, would you mind telling us where you got the cloth for your amulet, and who sewed it for you?’ ‘I sewed it myself.’ ‘And where did you get the cloth?’ The defendant is now offended, he considers it almost offensively trifling, and believe me, he is sincere, sincere! But they are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt.”Splendid, sir. That means that tomorrow we will find among your linen this shirt with a piece torn from it.’ And, understand, gentlemen of the jury, that if only we had actually found this shirt (and how could we not have found it in his suitcase or chest of drawers, if such a shirt indeed existed?)—it would be a fact, a tangible fact in favor of the truth of his testimony! But this he is unable to understand. ‘I don’t remember, maybe it wasn’t from my shirt, I sewed it up in my landlady’s bon-net.”What sort of bonnet?”I took it from her, it was lying about, an old calico rag.”And you remember that firmly?”No,notfirrnly . . .’And he is angry, angry, and yet just think: how could one help remembering? In a man’s most terrible moment, say, when he is being taken to his execution, it is precisely such trifles that stick in his memory. He will forget everything, but some green roof that flashes by on the way, or a jackdaw sitting on a cross—that he will remember. For he was hiding from the rest of the household while he sewed his amulet, he must remember the humiliation he suffered, needle in hand, for fear someone would come in and catch him; how at the first knock he would jump up and run behind the partition (there is a partition in his apartment) ... But, gentlemen of the jury, why am I telling you all this, all these details, these trifles!” Ippolit Kirillovich suddenly exclaimed. “Precisely because the defendant has stubbornly insisted on all this absurdity up to this very minute! In the two whole months since that fatal night, he has not explained anything, he has not added even one real, clarifying circumstance to his earlier fantastic testimony; as if to say, that is all just trifles, you must believe me on my honor! Oh, we are glad to believe, we are eager to believe, even on his honor! What are we, jackals, eager for human blood? Give us, point out to us at least one fact in the defendant’s favor, and we shall be glad—but a real, tangible fact, not his own brother’s conclusion based on the defendant’s facial expression, or pointing out that when he was beating himself on the chest, he must certainly have been pointing to the amulet, and in the dark no less. We shall be glad of this new fact, we shall be the first to renounce our accusation, we shall hasten to renounce it. But now justice cries out, and we insist, we cannot renounce anything.” Here Ippolit Kirillovich moved on to the finale. He was as if in a fever, crying out for the spilt blood, the blood of a father murdered by his son “with the base purpose of robbery.” He pointed firmly to the tragic and crying totality of the facts. “And whatever you are about to hear from the defendant’s renowned and talented attorney,” Ippolit Kirillovich could not refrain from saying, “whatever eloquent and moving words, aimed at your emotions, will resound here, remember still that at this moment you are in the sanctuary of our justice. Remember that you are the defenders of our truth, the defenders of our holy Russia, of her foundations, of her family, of all that is holy in her! Yes, here, at this moment, you represent Russia, and your verdict will resound not only in this courtroom but for all of Russia, and all of Russia will listen to you as to her defenders and judges, and will be either heartened or discouraged by your verdict. Then do not torment Russia and her expectations, our fateful troika is racing headlong, perhaps to its destruction. And all over Russia hands have long been held out and voices have been calling to halt its wild, impudent course. And if so far the other nations still stand aside for the troika galloping at breakneck speed, it is not at all, perhaps, out of respect, as the poet would have it, but simply from horror—mark that—from horror, and perhaps from loathing for her. And still it is good that they stand aside, but what if they should suddenly stop standing aside, and form into a solid wall before the speeding apparition, and themselves halt the mad course of our unbridledness, with a view to saving themselves, enlightenment, and civilization! We have already heard such anxious voices from Europe. They are already beginning to speak out. Do not tempt them, do not add to their ever-increasing hatred with a verdict justifying the murder of a father by his own son . . .!”