‘You came back from a journey? So you were out of town?’
‘Yes, gentlemen, forty versts from here, didn’t you know?’
The prosecutor and Nikolai Parfenovich exchanged glances.
‘Anyway, why not begin your story by describing everything that happened yesterday, starting from early in the morning? For instance, if you could let us know why you had to leave town, and the precise times of your departure and return… and things like that…’
‘I wish you’d asked me this right at the start,’ Mitya burst into a loud peal of laughter. ‘If that’s what you want, we must begin not with yesterday but with the day before, in the early morning, then you’ll understand where I went, and why, and how. The day before yesterday, gentlemen, in the morning I went to our local moneybags Samsonov to borrow from him, against good security, the sum of three thousand roubles—it was an emergency, gentlemen, a sudden emergency…’
‘Allow me to interrupt you,’ the prosecutor cut him short politely, ‘why did you suddenly need that precise amount of money, that is, three thousand roubles?’
‘Ha, gentlemen, I wish you wouldn’t go into all these details: how, when, and why, and why was it precisely this much and not that much, and all that kind of nonsense… that way, it’ll run to more than three volumes plus an epilogue!’
Mitya said all this with the good-natured though impatient familiarity of a man who wishes to reveal the whole truth and is motivated by the very best of intentions.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, as though something had suddenly occurred to him, ‘don’t think that I’m being difficult, but I’m asking you once again: believe me, I feel the deepest respect for you and I appreciate how things stand. Don’t think I’m drunk. I’ve sobered up now. And even if I were drunk, it wouldn’t matter a jot. What I say is:
Sobered up, gained some sense—was no wiser than before,
Had a drink, couldn’t think—but could argue all the more.
Ha-ha! On reflection though, gentlemen, I see that it’s not quite appropriate for me to be cracking jokes with you yet, not till we’ve got things straightened out, anyway. Let me keep my personal dignity. Of course, I appreciate the present difference between us: let’s face it, I’m just a criminal sitting before you now, and most assuredly not your equal, whereas you’re charged with keeping an eye on me: I’m sure you’re not going to give me a pat on the head on account of Grigory, after all, one can’t go around bashing old men’s skulls in with impunity; obviously, you’re going to bring me to book and lock me up for six months, say, perhaps a year in gaol—who knows what the verdict will be—but without loss of my legal rights… I won’t lose my legal rights, will I, Mr Prosecutor? So there, gentlemen, I am aware of the difference between us… But you must agree, too, that you’d be able to trip up the good Lord Himself with questions like: where did you go, how did you go, when did you go, and when did you last blow your nose? If you carry on like that I’ll certainly get confused, and you’ll immediately put everything down, word for word, and then what will happen? Nothing’ll happen! Fair enough, if I’ve started telling lies, I’ll finish, and as for you, gentlemen, educated and magnanimous as you are, you’ll pardon me, I’m sure. But I’ll end with a plea: stop beating about the bush in your interrogation; you see, your official minds are trained to start with something trivial, with something insignificant, such as: how did you sleep, what did you have to eat, when did you spit, and then, having “lulled the criminal into a false sense of security”, to pounce on him with a devastating question: “who did you kill, who did you rob?” Ha-ha! That’s your officialdom for you, that’s your procedure, that’s what all your cunning amounts to! You may be able to catch your yokels out with such tricks, but not me. I wasn’t born yesterday, I’ve served in the army myself, ha-ha-ha! No offence meant, gentlemen, I hope you don’t think I’m being impudent?’ he exclaimed, looking at them in good-natured astonishment. ‘After all, it was Mitka Karamazov who said it, so it goes without saying he can be forgiven, an intelligent person can’t be forgiven, but Mitka can! Ha-ha!’
Nikolai Parfenovich listened, and he too laughed. The prosecutor, who did not laugh, watched Mitya closely, scrutinizing him, never taking his eyes off him, as though unwilling to miss a single word, a single gesture, the least movement or change in his features.
‘But that’s how we started right from the word go,’ responded Nikolai Parfenovich, still laughing, ‘we didn’t try to trip you up with questions about when you got up in the morning and what you had to eat, we went straight to the heart of the matter.’
‘I understand, I understood and appreciated that, and I appreciate your kindness towards me even more, unparalleled kindness, worthy of the noblest of souls. Here we are, three decent people gathered together, so why not let’s do everything on the basis of mutual trust, as befits educated and unprejudiced people bound by ties of social background and honour. In any case, allow me at this particular moment in my life, at this moment when my honour is impugned, to regard you as my best friends. Surely you won’t be offended by this, gentlemen, you won’t, will you?’
‘Quite the contrary, you expressed it all so eloquently, Dmitry Fyodorovich,’ Nikolai Parfenovich acquiesced with a pompous air of approval.
‘As for trivialities, gentlemen, let’s dispense with all those irrelevant trivialities,’ exclaimed Mitya exultantly, ‘otherwise we’ll end up in one hell of a mess, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I’m only too willing to follow your very sensible advice,’ the prosecutor suddenly butted in, turning to Mitya, ‘but all the same, I’d rather you answered my question. It’s absolutely essential for us to know precisely why you needed such a sum, that is, why exactly three thousand roubles?’
‘Why indeed? Well, for this and that… well, to settle a debt.’
‘What debt—to whom?’
‘That I positively decline to disclose, gentlemen! You see, not because I couldn’t say, or because I dare not, or because I’m afraid to—it’s a pretty insignificant and trivial matter, anyway—but I decline to say, because there’s a principle involved here: it’s my personal life, and I shan’t let anyone intrude in my personal life. That’s my principle. Your question has nothing to do with the matter in hand, and anything that has nothing to do with the matter in hand belongs to my personal life! I wanted to repay a debt, I wanted to repay a debt of honour, but to whom—I’m not telling.’
‘By your leave, we shall note that down,’ said the prosecutor.
‘Feel free. Go ahead and put it all down: say that I’ll never, ever bring myself to disclose it, never. You can add, too, gentlemen, that I would even consider it dishonourable to disclose the details. You certainly seem to have all the time in the world for note-taking.’
‘My dear sir, let me warn you and remind you once more, in case you haven’t realized it,’ said the prosecutor in a tone of the utmost gravity, ‘that you have every right not to answer any of the questions now being put to you, and that we, conversely, have no right to exact any answers from you if you yourself, for whatever reason, don’t wish to reply. This has to be a matter for your personal judgement. Nevertheless, in circumstances such as these we feel duty-bound to draw your attention to this fact and to warn you of the full extent of the harm which you may inflict upon yourself by withholding this or that piece of evidence. That said, please continue.’
‘Gentlemen, I’m not angry… I…’, Mitya mumbled, somewhat disconcerted by the admonition, ‘you see, gentlemen, this same Samsonov, to whom I went on that occasion…’
Of course, we shall not go into any great detail regarding what the reader knows already. Mitya was eager to tell everything, down to the minutest detail, but at the same time to get it over and done with as soon as possible. But the evidence was being recorded as it unfolded, and consequently he was continually being asked to stop. Dmitry Fyodorovich objected to this, but complied; he was irritated but, for the time being, he managed to keep his temper. True, from
time to time he would call out: ‘Gentlemen, this would drive the Lord God Himself to devilry,’ or: ‘You know, gentlemen, all you’re doing is upsetting me for nothing!’, but even during such outbursts his affable and expansive mood did not change. Thus he recounted how he had been duped by Samsonov two days previously. (He was quite sure now that he had been duped on that occasion.) The sale of his watch for six roubles to pay for the trip, about which the prosecutor and magistrate had hitherto known nothing, immediately attracted their attention and, to Mitya’s extreme annoyance, it was deemed necessary to record all the details as further confirmation of the fact that even two days before he had hardly a kopeck to his name. By now, Mitya was beginning to feel despondent. Then, having described his visit to Lurcher, the night he had spent in the fume-filled hut, and so on, he reached the point in his story at which he returned to the town and then, without any additional prompting, he began of his own accord to recount in great detail his pangs of jealousy about Grushenka. They listened to him in silent concentration, taking particular note of the fact that he had already, some time before, selected a vantage point in the grounds of Marya Kondratyevna’s house, behind Fyodor Pavlovich’s property, from where he could keep a lookout for Grushenka, and also that he was being kept informed by Smerdyakov: all this was duly noted and recorded. He spoke passionately and at length of his jealousy, and though he was inwardly ashamed of exposing, so to speak, his most intimate feelings to ‘general opprobrium’, he managed to overcome his shame in the interests of truth. While he talked, the dispassionate severity reflected in the ever-observant eyes of the magistrate, and especially of the prosecutor, finally deeply unnerved him. The thought flashed through his mind: ‘This youngster Nikolai Parfenovich, to whom I was talking nonsense about women only a few days ago, and this feeble prosecutor simply don’t deserve to be told all this. What humiliation! “Surrender, suffer, and be still”,’* he concluded his train of thought with a quote from a poem, then he took a grip upon himself once more and continued his account. When he got to the part about Mrs Khokhlakova he even cheered up, and was on the point of telling a curious but irrelevant little anecdote about that lady’s recent activities, when the magistrate stopped him and suggested politely that he should concentrate on ‘more pertinent matters’. Describing his despair, he came to the moment when, leaving Mrs Khokhlakova’s, he had thought “I’ll get the three thousand even if I have to knife someone,” and here they stopped him again and recorded ‘wanted to knife someone’. Mitya let them do so, without uttering a word. Finally he came to the point in the story where he suddenly discovered that Grushenka had deceived him by leaving Samsonov’s immediately after he had left her there, despite the fact that she herself had told him she was going to stay with the old man till midnight. ‘The fact that I didn’t kill that Fenya there and then was only because I was in too much of a hurry’, he blurted out suddenly. This, too, was carefully recorded. Mitya waited a little in grim silence, and was about to recount how he had run to his father’s garden, when the investigator suddenly stopped him and, opening his large briefcase, which was lying nearby on the settee, produced the brass pestle from it.
‘Do you recognize this object?’ he asked, showing it to Mitya.
‘Oh yes!’ replied Mitya, with a sad smile. ‘How could I not? Let’s have a look… To hell with it, no need!’
‘You forgot to mention it,’ observed the magistrate.
‘Blast it! I wouldn’t have concealed it from you on purpose, you’d have found out about it one way or another, don’t you think? It just slipped my memory.’
‘Would you oblige us by recounting how you came to acquire this weapon.’
‘Certainly I’ll oblige you, gentlemen.’
And Mitya recounted how he had picked up the pestle and run off.
‘Well, what was your intention when you armed yourself with such a weapon?’
‘Intention? There wasn’t any! I just grabbed it and ran.’
‘Why then, if you had no intention?’
Mitya was seething with annoyance. He looked hard at the ‘youngster’, and smiled at him with gloomy hostility. The fact was that he was feeling more and more ashamed of having spoken so openly and emotionally of his jealousy to ‘these people’.
‘Who cares about the pestle?’ he blurted out.
‘Even so.’
‘All right, I grabbed it to ward off the dogs. Well, it was dark… well, just in case…’
‘And on previous occasions when you left the house at night, did you take some kind of a weapon with you, too, if you are so afraid of the dark?’
‘Oh, my God! Gentlemen, it’s absolutely impossible to talk to you!’ exclaimed Mitya at the end of his tether, and turning flushed with anger to the clerk, he shouted with a note of hysteria in his voice: ‘Write down immediately… immediately… “I grabbed the pestle and ran off to kill my father… Fyodor Pavlovich… with a blow on the head!” Well, are you satisfied now, gentlemen? Do you feel better?’ He stared provocatively at the magistrate and the prosecutor.
‘We are only too well aware that you made that declaration in a fit of pique’, the prosecutor replied dryly, ‘and because you resent the questions we are putting to you, which you consider trivial, but which in fact are very important.’
‘Have a heart, gentlemen! All right, I took the pestle… So what, why do people pick things up in such circumstances? I don’t know what for. I grabbed it and ran. That’s all there is to it. Do me a favour, gentlemen, passons,* or I swear you shan’t get another word out of me!’
He put his elbow on the table and leant his head on one hand. He was sitting sideways to them, staring at the wall, at odds with himself. In truth, he would dearly have loved to stand up and announce that he would not say another word, ‘you can sentence me to death if you wish.’
‘You see, gentlemen,’ he took a grip on himself with difficulty, ‘you see, I keep listening to you, and I get the feeling… you see, I sometimes have this dream… a dream, and I have it often, it keeps recurring, that someone’s chasing me, someone I’m dreadfully scared of, he’s chasing me in the dark, at night, looking for me, and I’m hiding somewhere, behind a door or a cupboard, in abject fear, but the main thing is that he knows perfectly well where I’m hiding, and he’s only pretending not to know where I am so as to torment me that much longer, so as to enjoy my terror… You’re doing that to me now! That’s what it feels like!’
‘You have such dreams?’ enquired the prosecutor.
‘Yes, I have… You wouldn’t like to put it down, would you?’ Mitya said with a wry smile.
‘No, no need, but all the same, you do have pretty curious dreams.’
‘It’s no longer a dream now! Reality, gentlemen, just stark reality! I’m the wolf and you’re the hunters, let the chase commence.’
‘You’re making a fatuous comparison…’, began Nikolai Parfenovich unctuously.
‘Not fatuous at all, gentlemen, not fatuous!’ Mitya expostulated again, though his sudden outburst appeared to have eased his inner tension and he was beginning to mellow with every word. ‘You can refuse to believe a criminal or a prisoner in the dock whom you’re torturing with your questions, but a man of honour, gentlemen, the noblest stirrings of his heart (yes, I dare to proclaim it!)—no! Him you must not disbelieve… you have no right even… but—
heart, be still,
Surrender, suffer and be still!
Well, shall I continue?’ he broke off gloomily.
‘By all means,’ replied Nikolai Parfenovich.
5
THIRD TORMENT
ALTHOUGH, when Mitya resumed speaking, his tone was harsh, he was clearly trying even harder not to forget or omit a single detail from his story. He recounted how he had jumped over the fence into his father’s garden, how he had approached the window, and, finally, his feelings as he stood by the window. Speaking clearly and deliberately, he described the fear that had gripped him during those moments in the garden, when he w
as so anxious to discover whether Grushenka was with his father or not. But the amazing thing was that, on this occasion, both the prosecutor and the magistrate listened to him with the utmost detachment, their faces impassive, and they asked far fewer questions. Mitya could discern nothing from the expression on their faces. ‘They’ve lost their temper and are annoyed with me,’ he thought, ‘what the hell!’ However, he noticed that when he recounted how he had finally plucked up courage to give the signal that would inform his father that Grushenka had come and that he should open the window, the prosecutor and the magistrate ignored the word ‘signal’ completely, as though they did not even understand its relevance to the matter. Having finally reached the point where, catching sight of his father leaning out of the window, he had flown into a rage and pulled out the pestle from his pocket, Mitya suddenly stopped, apparently intentionally. He sat staring at the wall, knowing full well that their eyes were riveted on him.
‘Well,’ said the magistrate, ‘you pulled out the weapon… and then what happened?’
‘Then? Then I killed him… I struck him across the temple and split his skull open… That’s what you think, isn’t it?’ his eyes flashed suddenly. All the rage that had almost subsided suddenly flared up again in his soul with the utmost violence.
‘That’s our version,’ echoed Nikolai Parfenovich, ‘what’s yours?’
Mitya lowered his eyes, and for a long time did not say a word.
‘My version, gentlemen, my version is this,’ he began softly, ‘whether it was someone’s tears, or perhaps my mother interceded with the good Lord, or perhaps the Holy Spirit descended on me at that moment—I do not know—but the devil was vanquished. I turned away from the window and ran towards the fence… My father took fright and, recognizing me for the first time, cried out and jumped back from the window—I remember it very well. I was already making a beeline for the fence… and that’s where Grigory caught up with me, when I was already on top of the fence…’
The Karamazov Brothers Page 72
