The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  ‘I… I’m not crying… Well, greetings!’ he turned abruptly in his chair and started to laugh, but it was not his customary, stiff, jerky laughter, but rather subdued laughter, drawn out, nervous, and tremulous.

  ‘Here we go again… Well, cheer up, cheer up!’ Grushenka continued to humour him. ‘I’m very glad you came, very glad, Mitya; you know I really am delighted! I want him to sit here with us,’ she proclaimed imperiously, apparently addressing the assembled company, though her words were clearly intended for the man on the settee. ‘I insist, I insist! And if he leaves, I leave too, so there!’ she added, her eyes suddenly flashing.

  ‘My queen’s word is law!’ said the Polish gentleman, gallantly kissing Grushenka’s hand. ‘Please join us!’ he said courteously, turning to Mitya. Mitya leapt to his feet and seemed about to deliver another oration, but what came out was quite different.

  ‘Let’s have a drink, my good sir!’ he interjected, instead of launching into a speech. They all burst out laughing.

  ‘Goodness!’ exclaimed Grushenka nervously, ‘I thought he was going to start spouting again. Now listen, Mitya,’ she added assertively, ‘don’t keep jumping up and down, but as for getting some champagne, that’s a splendid idea. I’ll have some myself, can’t stand these liqueurs. But the best thing of all is that you’re here now, it was so boring before… I say, are we going to have a party again? Why don’t you put the money back in your pocket! Where did you get all that money from?’

  Mitya, who was still clutching the wad of crumpled banknotes, which everyone, especially the two Polish gentlemen, had noticed, quickly thrust them back into his pocket in embarrassment. He blushed. At that very moment the proprietor brought in an opened bottle of champagne on a tray with some glasses. Mitya grabbed the bottle, but was so flustered he did not know what to do with it. It was left to Kalganov to take it from him and pour out the champagne.

  ‘It’s not enough, another bottle!’ Mitya shouted to the proprietor and, having forgotten to touch glasses with the gentleman to whom he had so solemnly proposed drinking a toast to friendship, suddenly drained his glass without waiting for anyone else. His whole face had changed suddenly. Instead of the tragic and solemn expression with which he had entered, there was now something almost childlike in his behaviour. All at once he seemed to calm down and become submissive. He regarded everyone meekly and joyfully, often breaking into a nervous giggle, and all the while wearing the grateful expression of a naughty lap-dog that had been pardoned and allowed to come back into the room again. It seemed as though he had forgotten everything, and he kept looking around rapturously, a childlike smile playing on his lips. He kept laughing and looking at Grushenka, and moved his chair right up to her armchair. Little by little he managed to scrutinize the two Polish gentlemen, though he was still puzzled by them. The one on the settee impressed him by his bearing, his Polish accent and, most of all, his pipe. ‘Well, what of it?’ thought Mitya. ‘It’s nice that he smokes a pipe.’ The slightly sagging features of the man, who must have been all of forty, his diminutive nose, his pert, finely trimmed and dyed moustache, did not raise any questions in Mitya’s mind. Even the very poor-quality Siberian toupee, with its ridiculous little sideboards brushed forward at the temples, failed to surprise Mitya unduly. ‘So what if it’s a toupee!’ he mused unconcernedly. On the other hand, the only thing that struck Mitya about the younger gentleman, sitting by the wall and surveying the whole company with an arrogant, defiant air of silent contempt as he listened to the general conversation in the room, was his extraordinary height, in complete contrast to the gentleman on the settee. ‘If he stands up,’ the thought flashed through Mitya’s mind, ‘he’ll be about seven foot.’ The other thing that flashed through his mind was that this tall fellow was probably the friend and stooge of the man on the settee, his ‘bodyguard’ as it were, and that the short gentleman with the pipe was clearly in command. But all this too struck him as being perfectly right and proper. All spirit of rivalry had suddenly evaporated from the lap-dog. Grushenka’s attitude and the ambiguous tone of some of her comments had not sunk in yet; all he understood, and his heart was ecstatic at the thought, was that she was being kind to him, that she had ‘forgiven’ him and had allowed him to sit next to her. He was beside himself with joy to see her take a sip of wine from her glass. The silence of the assembled company suddenly struck him, however, and he began to survey everyone with anxious eyes. ‘What are you waiting for, gentlemen,’ his smiling gaze appeared to be saying, ‘why don’t you get on with it?’

  ‘He has been regaling us with a lot of fibs and making us all laugh,’ began Kalganov, motioning to Maksimov, as though he had guessed Mitya’s thoughts.

  Mitya quickly turned his gaze on Kalganov and then immediately on Maksimov.

  ‘Fibs?’ he gave a short, staccato laugh, evidently amused.

  ‘Yes. Imagine, he insists that in the ‘twenties, apparently, the whole of our cavalry got married to Polish women, but that’s absolute nonsense, isn’t it?’

  ‘To Polish women?’ repeated Mitya, perfectly delighted.

  Kalganov understood Mitya’s relationship with Grushenka only too well, and he also had a pretty good idea about the Polish gentleman, but none of this was of particular interest to him, perhaps even of no interest whatsoever, for what interested him most of all was Maksimov. He and Maksimov happened to be at the inn quite by chance, and had met the Poles there for the first time. As for Grushenka, he had met her before and had even visited her with somebody once; on that occasion she had found him quite unattractive. But now she kept looking at him very tenderly; before Mitya’s arrival she had even been cuddling up to him, but he had remained somewhat unresponsive. He was a young man, not more than twenty, stylishly dressed, with a pleasant pale complexion and a magnificent head of light-brown hair. And set in this pale face was a pair of wonderful light-blue eyes with an intelligent, at times unfathomable expression, surprising in one so young, and yet the young man sometimes talked and looked round as unselfconsciously as a child. On the whole he seemed very unpredictable, even capricious, though obviously kind. Occasionally his face reflected something stubborn and obstinate: he would be looking at you and listening, but all the while he would be preoccupied exclusively with his own thoughts. He could be lethargic and pacific one minute and flare up the next, often for the most trivial of reasons.

  ‘Imagine, I’ve been travelling with him for the last four days,’ he continued in his slightly drawling voice, which seemed perfectly natural, however, without any affectation. ‘Ever since your brother pushed him off the calash and sent him flying, remember? He intrigued me a lot on that occasion, and I took him with me to the village, but he tells fibs all the time, and it’s becoming embarrassing. We’re on our way back…’

  ‘The pan saw not Polish lady and is saying things which cannot be,’ the gentleman with the pipe observed to Maksimov.

  The gentleman with the pipe spoke reasonable Russian, at least far better than he pretended to. If he used Russian words, he distorted them to sound like Polish.

  ‘I was married to a Polish lady myself, you know,’ chortled Maksimov.

  ‘So you served in the cavalry, did you?’ Kalganov butted in. ‘You were talking about the cavalry. So you’re a cavalryman?’

  ‘Well, of course he isn’t a cavalryman! Ha-ha!’ shouted out Mitya, who was listening avidly and kept turning his inquisitive gaze on whomever happened to be talking, as though expecting to hear goodness knows what.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Maksimov, facing him, ‘what I meant was that in Poland the fillies… the pretty ones… only have to dance a single mazurka with one of our lads… she only has to dance one mazurka with him, and she’ll be on his lap, like a kitten… milky-white, yes, sir… and her Polish daddy and her Polish mummy would just look on and allow it to happen… allow it all to happen… and next morning the uhlan would be back, offering his hand… that’s right, sir… offering his hand, he-he!’ Maksimov ended with
a chuckle.

  ‘Pan is blackguard!’ the tall man on the chair suddenly grunted, and crossed his legs. An enormous greasy boot with a thick, grimy sole caught Mitya’s eye. On the whole, the clothes of both gentlemen were rather grubby.

  ‘So it’s blackguards now! Does he have to be so insulting!’ Grushenka suddenly lost her temper.

  ‘Pani Agrippina,* pan widział ν polskim kraju chłopki, a nie szlachetne panie’ (My lady Agrafena, the gentleman saw country wenches in Poland, but not fine ladies), observed the man with the pipe, turning towards Grushenka.

  ‘Możesz na to rachować,’ (That you can be sure of), the tall man on the chair remarked contemptuously.

  ‘There we go again! Why don’t you let him speak! Why interrupt when people are talking? At least they’re fun,’ Grushenka snapped back.

  ‘I don’t bother them, pani,’ the man with the toupee remarked weightily, fixing Grushenka with a long stare, and, after a pregnant pause, resumed sucking on his pipe.

  ‘I say, our Polish friend is quite right,’ Kalganov was getting excited again, as though they were talking about God only knows what. ‘After all, he hasn’t been to Poland, so how can he talk about the place? You didn’t get married in Poland, did you? Or perhaps you did?’

  ‘No, sir, in the Smolensk district. The point is she’d been brought out, my wife-to-be, that is, sir, by this uhlan, together with her lady-mother, her auntie, another female cousin, and a grown-up son, straight out of Poland… he brought them straight out and deposited them on my doorstep, he did, bless him. He was one of our regular Lieutenants, a very nice young man. He intended to marry her himself at first, but he didn’t in the end, because she turned out to have a limp…’

  ‘So you married her with a limp?’ exclaimed Kalganov.

  ‘Yes, sir. They both rather took advantage of me over that, they concealed it from me. I thought she was just hopping… she kept hopping all the time, and I thought it was just her cheerful nature…’

  ‘Overjoyed at the prospect of getting married to you?’ Kalganov burst out in a childishly clarion voice.

  ‘Yes, sir, overjoyed. But the explanation turned out to be quite different. Later, after the wedding, when the ceremony was all over, she confessed to me that very same night, and she was ever so sorry, she said, she’d jumped over a puddle in her younger days and that was how she’d hurt her foot, he-he!’

  Kalganov simply doubled up with laughter and nearly fell across the settee. Grushenka began to laugh too. As for Mitya, he was in raptures.

  ‘This time, you know, he’s telling the whole truth, this time he isn’t fibbing at all!’ Kalganov shrieked, turning to Mitya. ‘And, you know, he’s been married twice—that was his first wife he was telling us about—his second wife, would you believe it, ran off, and she’s alive to this day, how about that?’

  ‘Well I never!’ Mitya turned abruptly towards Maksimov with an expression of the utmost astonishment on his face.

  ‘Yes, sir, ran off, I did suffer that inconvenience,’ Maksimov affirmed modestly. ‘With a monsieur. And what was worst of all, the first thing she did was to get me to assign my whole estate, village and all, to her. “You’re an educated man,” was how she saw it, “you’ll never be short of a meal.” And that’s how I got duped. A venerable bishop once observed to me: “One of your wives had a limp, and the other one was unusually fleet of foot.” He-he!’

  ‘Listen to that, just listen!’ said Kalganov, bursting with excitement. ‘Even if he is fibbing—and he does fib a lot—then he only does it to give pleasure to others—surely there’s nothing nasty in that, is there? You know, I really love him for that sometimes. He’s nasty all right, but he’s not malicious with it, if you know what I mean. Wouldn’t you say so? Some people might behave nastily for a reason, in order to gain some advantage, but he does it just for the hell of it, without trying… Imagine, he pretends for instance (last night he argued about it for the whole journey) that Gogol wrote his Dead Souls with him in mind.* If you remember, one of the characters is a landowner, Maksimov, whom Nozdryov thrashes, and he’s subsequently prosecuted “for causing landowner Maksimov a personal affront with birches while in a state of inebriation”—do you remember? Well then, picture the scene—he pretends it was him, and that he was the one who got birched! Can you imagine anything like it? Chichikov was travelling around in the early ‘twenties at the very latest, so the dates don’t tally at all. He couldn’t have been birched then. Obviously he couldn’t, could he?’

  It is hard to see why Kalganov should have got so worked up, but his excitement was genuine. Mitya was beginning to share his enthusiasm wholeheartedly.

  ‘So what if he was birched!’ he shouted out with a burst of laughter.

  ‘It wasn’t exactly what you would call a birching,’ interjected Maksimov unexpectedly.

  ‘What do you mean? Either you were birched or you weren’t!’

  ‘Która godzina, panie?’ (What time do you make it, sir?) the pipe-smoking gentleman enquired of the tall man on the chair, with a yawn. The latter shrugged his shoulders: neither of them had a watch.

  ‘Why don’t you two have a chat and let the others carry on talking. If you’re bored, it doesn’t mean the others have to keep quiet,’ Grushenka retorted angrily again, evidently trying deliberately to provoke them. Something seemed to dawn on Mitya for the first time. This time the Polish gentleman responded with evident annoyance.

  ‘Pani, ja nic nie mówię przeciw, nic nie powiedziałem’ (Madam, I didn’t raise any objections, I didn’t say anything).

  ‘Well, all right. And you, carry on with your story,’ Grushenka urged Maksimov. ‘Why have you all stopped talking?’

  ‘There’s nothing much to tell, it’s all rather silly,’ Maksimov resumed, clearly delighted and play-acting a little. ‘Anyway, Gogol portrays it all as an allegory, because all the names he chooses are allegorical. Let’s face it, Nozdryov wasn’t Nozdryov, he was Nosov; as for Kuvshinnikov—that’s quite wrong, because he was Shkvornyov. Whereas Fenardi* really was Fenardi, only he wasn’t Italian, he was Russian—Petrov actually—and Mamselle Fenardi really was a pretty little thing, all shapely legs and stockings, the way she twirled round in her little short skirt with spangles, but only for four minutes, mind, not four hours… and she had them all licking their chops…’

  ‘But why were you birched, why did they birch you?’ Kalganov howled in exasperation.

  ‘On account of Piron,’* replied Maksimov.

  ‘Who’s Piron?’ shouted Mitya.

  ‘On account of the famous French writer Piron, sir. We were all drinking wine at the time with the gentry at the tavern, during that fair I told you about. I’d been invited along, and the very first thing I did was to start reciting epigrams: “Is that you, Boileau? What a ridiculous attire!”* And Boileau replies that he’s on his way to a masked ball, to the bathhouse that is, he-he, and they all took it personally. Whereupon I recited another one, very well known to all educated people, a really biting one, sir:

  You’re Sapho, I’m Phaon, that I will attest,

  But when it comes to getting to the coast,

  You’re as clueless as the rest.*

  They became even more offended and began to swear at me most indecently, and just at that moment, as bad luck would have it, in order to save the situation I went and recited another very erudite anecdote about Piron, about the way he was not allowed to join the French Academy, and how, to avenge himself, he wrote his own epitaph for his tombstone:

  Ci-gît Piron qui ne fut rien

  Pas même académicien.*

  That’s when they gave me a birching.’

  ‘But what on earth for?’

  ‘For my erudition. There’s all manner of things a man can be birched for,’ concluded Maksimov in a subdued, schoolmasterish tone of voice.

  ‘Hey, enough of this, I think it’s all quite boring, I don’t want to listen, I thought it was going to be fun,’ Grushenka cut him short. Mitya looked
startled and stopped laughing immediately. The tall Polish gentleman stood up and, hands behind his back, began to pace up and down the room with the bored and supercilious air of a man who has found himself in the wrong company.

  ‘Just look at him pacing up and down!’ said Grushenka, giving him a contemptuous look. Mitya began to fret, all the more so as he noticed the gentleman on the settee beginning to eye him with irritation.

  ‘Sir,’ Mitya shouted out, ‘let’s drink, my dear sir! You too, sir—both of you gentlemen!’ And he immediately took three glasses and poured champagne into them.

  ‘To Poland, panowie, I drink to your Poland, here’s to Poland!’

  ‘Bardzo mi to miło, panie, wypijem’ (I’d be delighted, sir, let’s drink), said the man on the settee, with benign gravity, and picked up his glass.

  ‘And the other pan too, what’s his name, I say, Your High-and-Mightiness, pick up your glass!’

  ‘Pan Wrublewski,’ prompted the man on the settee.

  Mr Wrublewski ambled up to the table, but remained standing as he took the glass.

  ‘To Poland, gentlemen, hurrah!’ Mitya proclaimed, raising his glass.

  All three of them downed their drinks. Mitya immediately grabbed the bottle and refilled the glasses.

  ‘Now to Russia, gentlemen, and friendship!’

  ‘Pour me one, too,’ said Grushenka, ‘I want to drink to Russia as well.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Kalganov.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind either… to old Granny Russia then, the dear old girl,’ chortled Maksimov.

  ‘Everyone’s having a drink!’ Mitya exclaimed. ‘Landlord, some more bottles!’

  The three remaining bottles that Mitya had brought with him were produced. Mitya filled the glasses.