Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  'Well, now it makes sense why you . . . live like this,' said Raskolnikov with a sour grin.

  'But don't you pity her, too? Don't you?' Sonya flung back at him. 'After all, you gave away all you had, I know you did, without having even seen anything. But if you had seen it all - O Lord! And how many times I've made her cry! How many! Even only last week! Shame on me! Only a week before his death. How cruel that was! And how many times have I done that? So many! And how painful it's been to spend all day remembering!'

  Sonya even wrung her hands as she spoke, from the pain of the recollection.

  'You - cruel?'

  'Me, me! I'd just come in,' she continued, crying, 'and Father said: "Read to me, Sonya, I've got a bit of a headache, read to me . . . There's the book," - he had some book or other, he'd got it from Andrei Semyonych, from Lebezyatnikov, who lives right here and was always getting these funny little books. And I said, "I have to go" - I just didn't want to read and I'd come by mainly to show Katerina Ivanovna some collars; Lizaveta, the clothes-dealer, had brought me some collars and cuffs on the cheap, nice, new embroidered ones. Katerina Ivanovna took a fancy to them, tried them on and looked at herself in the mirror, and liked them even more: "Give them to me, Sonya," she said. "Please." Please, she said, that's how much she wanted them. But what would she do with them? She'd remembered happier days, that's all! There she was looking at herself in the mirror and admiring herself, but she's not had one dress to call her own, not a single thing, for how many years now? And you won't catch her asking anyone for anything. She's proud. She'd sooner give away the last thing she has, but here she was asking - that's how much she liked them! But I was sorry to give them away. "What good are they to you, Katerina Ivanovna?" That's what I said: "What good?" That was the last thing I should ever have said to her! What a look she gave me; how miserable she was when I refused her and how pitiful it was to see her like that! Miserable not because of the collars, but because I'd refused. I could see. Oh, what I'd do to take all those words back . . . Shame on me . . . But anyway . . . it's all the same to you!'

  'You knew this Lizaveta?'

  'Yes . . . Why, did you?' Sonya asked in return, with some surprise.

  'Katerina Ivanovna's consumptive - a bad case; she'll be dead soon,' said Raskolnikov after a pause, ignoring the question.

  'Oh, no, no, no!' And Sonya, making an unconscious movement, grabbed him by both hands, as if pleading that it be no.

  'But it's better if she does die.'

  'No, not better, not better, not better at all!' she mechanically repeated in horror.

  'And what about the children? What will you do with them, unless you take them in yourself?'

  'Oh, how do I know?' cried Sonya in near despair and clutched her head. Evidently, the thought had already crossed her mind, too, many a time, and all he'd done was startle it back to life.

  'And what if now, while Katerina Ivanovna's still alive, you get sick and are taken off to hospital, what then?' he persisted mercilessly.

  'But what are you saying? That's just not possible!' - and Sonya's face twisted with terror.

  'Why's it not possible?' Raskolnikov went on with a harsh grin. 'You're not insured, are you? So what'll become of them? They'll end up on the streets together, the whole lot of them; she'll be coughing and begging and banging her head against a wall somewhere, like today, and the children will be crying . . . Then she'll collapse, be taken off to the police station, then the hospital, and die, while the children . . .'

  'Oh, no! . . . God won't allow it!' was all that escaped Sonya's constricted chest. She listened, looking at him beseechingly and folding her arms in dumb entreaty, as if everything depended on him.

  Raskolnikov got up and began pacing the room. A minute or so passed. Sonya stood there with her arms and head hanging down, in terrible anguish.

  'Can't you save a bit? Put something aside for a rainy day?' he asked, suddenly halting in front of her.

  'No,' whispered Sonya.

  'Of course not! But have you tried?' he added, almost mockingly.

  'Yes.'

  'And it didn't last! Well, of course! Why even ask?'

  He started pacing the room again. Another minute passed.

  'You don't earn every day, I suppose?'

  Sonya became even more embarrassed and the colour rushed to her face once more.

  'No,' she whispered with excruciating effort.

  'Polechka will go the same way, I expect,' he suddenly said.

  'No, no! That's impossible! No!' shrieked Sonya in desperation, as if she'd been stabbed. 'God would never allow anything so dreadful!'

  'But He often does.'

  'No, no! God will protect her, God!' she kept saying, beside herself.

  'But what if there is no God?' replied Raskolnikov, almost with a sort of malicious glee, then laughed and looked at her.

  An awful change had suddenly come over Sonya's face: it began twitching convulsively. She glanced at him with unspeakable reproach. She was on the point of saying something, but couldn't get her words out and merely dissolved into bitter sobs, covering her face with her hands.

  'You say Katerina Ivanovna is unhinged - the same thing's happening to you,' he said after a pause.

  Some five minutes passed. He was still walking back and forth, in silence and without so much as a glance in her direction. Eventually, he walked up to her, eyes flashing. He grabbed her shoulders with both hands and looked straight into her weeping face. His gaze was dry, inflamed, piercing; his lips trembled violently . . . Suddenly he bent right down and, falling to the floor, kissed her foot. Sonya recoiled in horror, as from a madman. And, indeed, a madman was just what he resembled.

  'Please, what are you doing? Before me?' she muttered, turning white, and her heart clenched with pain.

  He immediately got to his feet.

  'I bowed not to you, but to all human suffering,' he uttered almost wildly and moved off to the window. 'Listen,' he added, returning to her a minute later, 'I told one offensive individual earlier on that he wasn't worth your little finger . . . and that I did my sister an honour today by seating her next to you.'

  'Oh, you shouldn't have said that to him! And she heard it?' Sonya shrieked in fright. 'Sit with me? An honour? But I . . . have no honour . . . I'm a great, great sinner! Oh, you should never have said that!'

  'It wasn't your dishonour or your sin that made me say it, but your great suffering. You are a great sinner, it's true,' he added in near ecstasy, 'and above all you are a sinner for having destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. If that's not a horror, what is? To live in this filth, which you loathe so much, and at the same time to know yourself (if you only open your eyes) that no one is being helped by your actions and no one is being saved! But what I'd really like to know,' he said in near frenzy, 'is how your saintly feelings can abide the contrast of something so shameful and abject? It would be more just, a thousand times more just and more reasonable, to throw yourself off a bridge and end it all!'

  'And what will become of them?' asked Sonya feebly, with a look full of suffering, and yet, it seemed, quite unsurprised by his suggestion. Raskolnikov looked at her strangely.

  Her eyes alone told him everything. It was true, then: this thought had occurred to her, too. Perhaps, in her despair, she'd considered it many times, how to end it all, and so seriously that now she was barely surprised by his suggestion. She didn't even notice the cruelty of his words (nor, of course, did she notice the meaning of his reproaches or the particular view he took of her shame - he could see that). But he understood perfectly well what monstrous pain the thought of her dishonourable and shameful plight had caused her, and not just now. What on earth, he wondered, could have kept her from ending it all? Only then did he fully grasp what these poor little orphaned children meant to her, and this pitiful, half-crazed, consumptive Katerina Ivanovna, forever banging her head against the wall.

  Yet nor could he fail to see that Sonya, with the character she had
and with that bit of education she'd somehow received, could never remain as she was. He couldn't help wondering: how, if throwing herself off a bridge was beyond her strength, could she have remained in this plight for so long, far too long, and not gone mad? He understood, of course, that Sonya's plight was a random social phenomenon, albeit, sadly, a far from isolated or exceptional one. But this very randomness, together with her smattering of education and her whole previous life, might well have killed her the moment she set out on this disgusting path. What had sustained her? Not depravity, surely? It was obvious that disgrace had touched her in a purely mechanical way; real depravity had not yet penetrated her heart, not even a drop. He could see it: here she was standing before him . . .

  'She can take one of three paths,' he thought. 'She can throw herself into the Ditch, end up in the madhouse or . . . or finally, plunge into the depravity that stupefies the mind and petrifies the heart.' He found this last thought more disgusting than anything, but he was already a sceptic, he was young, theoretical and, by that token, cruel, so it was impossible for him not to believe that the third path - depravity - was the most likely.

  'But can this really be true?' he exclaimed to himself. 'Can this creature, who still retains her purity of spirit, eventually allow herself to be sucked into this foul, stinking pit? Can this process really have already begun, and can it be that the only reason she has held out until now is that she no longer finds vice so disgusting? No, no, that's just impossible!' he exclaimed, like Sonya before. 'No, it's the thought of sin that's kept her from the Ditch until now, and that lot . . . And if she still hasn't gone mad . . . But who's to say she hasn't? Is she really in her right mind? To talk the way she talks? To reason the way she reasons? To perch above her ruin, right over the stinking pit that's already sucking her in, and wave her hands, and stop up her ears when she's being warned of danger? What is she expecting, a miracle? Yes, that must be it. Aren't these all signs of insanity?'

  He paused stubbornly on this thought. This solution pleased him more than any other. He began to study her more closely.

  'So you pray to God a lot, Sonya?' he asked.

  Sonya said nothing. He stood next to her, waiting for an answer.

  'What would I be without God?' she whispered quickly and vigorously, glancing at him with a sudden flash of her eyes, then squeezing his hand firmly in hers.

  'Just as I thought!' Raskolnikov said to himself.

  'And what does God do for you?' he asked, probing further.

  Sonya was silent for a long time, as if unable to reply. Her weak little chest heaved with emotion.

  'Be quiet! Don't ask! You aren't worthy!' she suddenly shrieked, with a stern and angry look.

  'Just as I thought!' he kept saying to himself.

  'He does everything!' she whispered quickly, lowering her eyes once more.

  'So that's the solution! And that's how to explain it!' he decided to himself, examining her with avid curiosity.

  With a new, strange, almost sick feeling he studied this pale, thin, irregular, angular little face, these meek, pale-blue eyes capable of blazing with such fire, with such stern and vigorous feeling, this little body, still quivering with indignation and anger, and all this struck him as more and more strange, almost impossible. 'Holy fool! Holy fool!'12 he kept saying to himself.

  There was a book lying on the chest of drawers. He noticed it every time he paced the room; now he picked it up and looked at it. It was the New Testament in Russian translation.13 It was an old book, well-thumbed, bound in leather.

  'Where did you get this?' he shouted to her across the room. She was still standing in the same place, three paces away from the table.

  'I was brought it,' she replied, with apparent reluctance and without looking at him.

  'Who brought it?'

  'Lizaveta. I asked her to.'

  'Lizaveta? How strange!' he thought. Everything about Sonya was becoming stranger and more wondrous to him with each minute that passed. He brought the book into the candlelight and began leafing through it.

  'Where's the bit about Lazarus?' he suddenly asked.

  Sonya looked doggedly at the floor and didn't reply. She stood at a slight angle to the table.

  'You know, the raising of Lazarus - where is it? Look it up for me, Sonya.'

  She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye.

  'You're looking in the wrong place . . . It's the fourth Gospel . . . ,' she whispered sternly, still not moving towards him.

  'Find it and read it to me.' He sat down, rested his elbows on the table, propped his head in his hand and sullenly stared off to the side, preparing to listen.

  'Another three weeks,' he muttered to himself, 'and they'll be showing her round the asylum! I'll be there, too, if nothing worse happens first.'

  Sonya took a hesitant step towards the table, having listened with mistrust to Raskolnikov's strange request. But she still took the book.

  'You mean you've never read it?' she asked, glancing at him across the table from beneath her brow. Her voice was becoming sterner and sterner.

  'Ages ago . . . back at school! Read it!'

  'And you never heard it in church?'

  'I . . . didn't go. Do you go often?'

  'N-no,' whispered Sonya.

  Raskolnikov grinned.

  'I see . . . So I suppose you won't be going to bury your father tomorrow?'

  'I will. I went last week, too . . . for a memorial service.'

  'Whose?'

  'Lizaveta's. She was murdered with an axe.'

  His nerves were on edge. His head began to spin.

  'Were you friendly with Lizaveta?'

  'Yes . . . She was a just person . . . She came by . . . not often . . . She couldn't. We read together and . . . talked. She will see God.'14

  They sounded strange to him, these bookish words, and now another surprise: mysterious meetings with Lizaveta, one holy fool and another.

  'Watch you don't become one yourself! It's catching!' he thought. 'Read!' he suddenly exclaimed in an insistent, irritated tone.

  Sonya still wavered. Her heart was thumping. Somehow she didn't dare read to him. In near agony he watched the 'wretched lunatic'.

  'Why are you asking? You're not a believer, are you?' she whispered softly, even gasping.

  'Read! I want you to!'15 he insisted. 'You read to Lizaveta, didn't you?'

  Sonya opened the book and found the place. Her hands were trembling and her voice failing. Twice she began, but not one syllable came out.

  'Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany . . . ,'16 she eventually uttered, with great difficulty, but suddenly, from the third word, her voice twanged and then snapped, like a string stretched too far. She couldn't breathe and her chest tightened.

  Raskolnikov partly understood why Sonya could not bring herself to read to him, and the more he understood it, the more rudely and irritably he seemed to insist on the reading. He understood far too well how painful it was for her now to disclose and display what was hers. He realized that these feelings really did constitute, as it were, her true and perhaps already long-held secret, perhaps ever since her girlhood, in that family, with that unhappy father and grief-crazed stepmother, amid hungry children and hideous shouting and scolding. But he had also now learned, beyond any doubt, that though she was distressed and terribly scared of something as she prepared to read, she herself had an excruciating desire to do so, despite all her distress and apprehension, and precisely to him, for him to hear right now - 'come what may!' . . . He read this in her eyes, understood it from her rapturous excitement . . . She mastered herself, suppressed the guttural spasm that cut her short at the beginning of the verse, and continued reading from John, Chapter 11. Eventually, she reached verse 19:

  'And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary sat in the house. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my
brother would not have died. And even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you."'

  She stopped again at this point, in shame-faced anticipation that her voice might once again quiver and snap . . .

  'Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?" She said to him,'

  (catching her breath, as if in pain, Sonya read on in a clear and forceful voice, as though confessing her faith for all to hear)

  '"Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world."'

  She was about to stop and steal a glance at him, but hastily pulled herself together and carried on reading. Raskolnikov sat and listened, without moving or turning around, resting his elbows on the table and looking off to the side. She read as far as verse 32.

  'Then Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet, saying to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled; and he said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus wept. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"'

  Raskolnikov turned to face her and looked at her in excitement: yes, just as he thought! She was already shaking all over with real, genuine fever. He'd been expecting this. She was drawing closer to the words describing the very greatest, utterly unprecedented miracle and great rapture had seized her. Her voice rang as clear as metal, strengthened by audible exultation and joy. The lines ran together in front of her - her eyes had gone dark - but she knew it all by heart. On reaching the last verse, 'Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man...', she conveyed, in lowered, fervent, passionate tones, all the doubts, reproaches and abuse of the disbelieving blind Jews, who now, in a minute's time, as if thunder-struck, would fall, start sobbing and believe . . . 'And he, he - also blinded and disbelieving - he, too, will now hear, he too will believe, yes, yes! Right here, now,' she dreamt, and shook in joyful anticipation.