‘And now he stands before his judges, the arbiters of his fate. Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments when, in the performance of our duty, we ourselves are overcome by something akin to fear of a man—and fear for him also! These are the moments when one is aware of the visceral fear of the criminal who, seeing that everything is already lost, nevertheless still resists, still intends to put up a fight. That is when all his instincts of self-preservation rise up in him and, desperate to save his skin, he regards you with a penetrating gaze full of questioning and anguish, stalking you mentally and scrutinizing you, your face, your thoughts, waiting to see where you will strike next, and instantly devising thousands of plans in his mind—but nevertheless too afraid to speak, too afraid of betraying himself! These humiliating moments, this road to Calvary, this animal instinct for self-preservation, are dreadful, and sometimes they provoke hatred as well as compassion for the criminal even in the investigators! We all witnessed this at the time. At first he was bemused and, in his state of terror, he let out one exclamation which seriously compromised him: “Blood! It serves me right!” But he soon regained control over himself. What to say, how to reply, he still had not decided; the only words he could utter were a bare denial: “I am not guilty of my father’s death!” That was to be his line of defence for the time being; behind it, when the time came, he could erect some other defence, perhaps. Anticipating our questions, he hastened to explain away his initial, compromising exclamation by insisting that he considered himself guilty only of the death of the servant Grigory. “Of that death I am guilty, gentlemen, but who killed my father? Who could have killed him, if not me?” You hear that: he was asking us, us, we who had come to ask him that very question! Note those pre-emptive words, “if not me”, the animal cunning, the naïvety, and the Karamazov impetuosity! “I didn’t kill him, you can put that right out of your heads. I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I really wanted to kill him,” he hastened to admit (oh, he was in such a hurry!), “but I’m innocent, I didn’t kill him!” He concedes that he wanted to commit the murder: “Look how truthful I am, so you should believe me when I say that it wasn’t me who killed him.” It is at such times that a criminal sometimes becomes extraordinarily stupid and naive. And just then the investigators slipped in the most ingenuous of questions: “It wouldn’t be Smerdyakov who killed him, would it?” What happened then was precisely what we expected: he became terribly angry because we had caught him unawares and had forestalled him before he could prepare himself; he wanted to choose the most convenient and advantageous moment to introduce Smerdyakov as plausibly as possible. True to his nature, he immediately went overboard and began to try for all he was worth to convince us that Smerdyakov could not have committed the murder, that he was incapable of killing anyone. But don’t believe him, this is merely his cunning; he had no intention whatever of depriving himself of the Smerdyakov option; on the contrary, he would still point the finger at him—there was simply no one else that he could point to—but he would do that in his own good time; for now, his pitch had been queered. He would not accuse him until the next day perhaps, or even for several days; then, having chosen an opportunity, he would shout: “Don’t forget, I myself more than anyone refused to believe in Smerdyakov’s guilt, but I’m convinced now: he killed him, who else could it have been!” Meanwhile he prsented us with a morose and ill-tempered denial; impetuosity and anger induced him to resort to the wildest and unlikeliest story about peering through his father’s window and then withdrawing discreetly. He was still not aware of all the circumstances, including the nature of the evidence given by Grigory, who had recovered in the meantime. We come to the examination and inspection of his personal effects. The examination enraged him, but it also made him defiant. Of the three thousand roubles, we accounted for only fifteen hundred. And, of course, it was precisely at that moment of sullen silence and non-cooperation that the idea of the makeshift purse first came into his head. Without a shadow of doubt, he himself sensed the whole implausibility of his fiction and was at great pains to make it as credible as possible, to embellish it to such an extent that it would turn into a really plausible explanation. In such instances, the first and foremost task facing the investigators is to prevent the criminal having time to prepare himself, to take him by surprise, so that he will divulge his innermost thoughts in all their revelatory crudity, unlikelihood, and incongruity. And when it comes to making the criminal talk, the only way is—suddenly and as though by chance—to present him with some new fact, some highly significant aspect of the case, for which he could have made no allowance and which he could in no way have foreseen. We had such a fact ready and waiting, indeed, we had it ready and waiting for some considerable time. It was the servant Grigory’s evidence about the open door through which the accused had left. He had forgotten all about that door, and it had not even occurred to him that Grigory could have seen it. The effect was shattering. He leapt to his feet and shouted at us: “Smerdyakov killed him, it was Smerdyakov!” And so he presented his central, his fundamental argument in its most implausible form, because Smerdyakov could only have committed the murder after he had struck Grigory down and had run away. When we informed him, however, that Grigory had noticed that the door was open before he fell, and that as he was leaving his bedroom he had heard Smerdyakov groaning behind the partition, Karamazov was absolutely devastated. My esteemed and talented colleague Nikolai Parfenovich told me afterwards that he was moved to tears with pity for the accused at that moment. And it was precisely then that the accused, to save the situation, came up with the absurd tale about that infamous makeshift purse, as if to say: you want to hear a tall story—here it is! Gentlemen of the jury, I have already told you why I consider the whole of this story about the money sewn up in a purse a month before the crime to be not only an absurdity, but also the most improbable fabrication, such as could only have been devised in a case like this. Even if one were to try, for a wager, to find or imagine anything less plausible, one could not really come up with anything to beat it. The jubilant storyteller can always be confounded and caught out on details, the same details with which reality abounds and which are always ignored as unimportant and trivial by hapless, compulsive fable-mongers, and which in fact never so much as enter their heads. Their minds are otherwise occupied at such moments, their minds are busy constructing a grandiose structure—how dare anyone bother them with such trivia! But that is precisely how they are caught! The accused is confronted with a question: “So, would you mind telling us where you got the material for the makeshift purse, who made it for you?” “I made it myself.” “But where did you get the material, if you please?” The accused is indignant, he regards this as almost an offensive question, and, would you believe it, genuinely so, quite genuinely so! But they are all like that. “I tore it from a shirt.” “Splendid. That means that tomorrow we can look forward to finding this shirt with a piece missing from it.” And, let us be clear, gentlemen of the jury, if we had found this shirt (and, if it had existed, how could we have failed to find it in a suitcase or a chest of drawers?)—it would have served as evidence, tangible evidence confirming the truth of his statement!” But he is unable to grasp this. “I don’t know, perhaps it wasn’t from a shirt… I stitched it up in my landlady’s nightcap.” “What nightcap?” “I took it, it was lying around at her place, a scrap of calico.” “And are you quite sure of this?” “No, I wouldn’t say I was quite sure…” And he gets flustered, really angry about it, and yet can you imagine anyone forgetting such a thing? In the direst moments of human life, say when a man is on the way to the place of execution, it is precisely this kind of detail which sticks in his memory. He will forget everything: but a green roof which he sees on the way, or a crow perched on a roadside cross—that he will not forget. When he was making the purse, he hid himself from the rest of his household; surely he would not have forgotten how shamefully he cowered there, needle in hand, lest someone should come in and expose him; he would have be
en jumping up to run behind the partition at the least knock (there is a partition in his lodgings)… But, gentlemen of the jury, why am I telling you all this, all these details, these trivialities!’ Ippolit Kyrillovich exclaimed suddenly. ‘Well, for the same reason that the accused has, right up to this very minute, stubbornly refused to recognize all this for the nonsense that it is! During the whole of these two months, ever since that fateful night, he has clarified nothing, he has not offered a single realistically coherent detail in addition to his former fanciful evidence: “These are mere details—you must accept my word!” What are we, jackals thirsting for human flesh? Give us one single piece of evidence in favour of the accused, and we shall be overjoyed—but it must be real, factual evidence, not conjectures derived from the expression on the defendant’s face by his own brother, or that brother’s assertion that, in striking his chest, he was actually indicating the purse, and all this observed in the dark. We would be delighted to obtain such evidence, we would not hesitate to drop the charges. Now, however, justice demands that we persist, we cannot withdraw any charges.’ At this stage, Ippolit Kyrillovich began his summing-up. He had worked himself up into a passion, he lamented the shedding of blood, the blood of a father, murdered by his own son, ‘with the base intention of committing a theft’. He emphasized the tragic and dreadful nature of this chain of events. ‘And no matter what you may hear from our talented—and rightly famous—counsel for the defence,’ Ippolit Kyrillovich was unable to resist the comment, ‘no matter how colourful and moving the words with which he will assault your sensibilities, try to remember nevertheless that, at this moment, you are in the hallowed temple of justice. Remember that you are the custodians of truth, the custodians of holy Russia, her foundations, her family life, all that she holds sacred! Yes, you are representing contemporary Russia here, and your verdict will reverberate not just in this hall alone, but throughout Russia, and the whole of Russia will stop to listen to her custodians and judges, and she will be either heartened or saddened by your verdict. Do not torment Russia, therefore, or betray her expectations; the fateful troika is galloping at full pelt, maybe to its doom. Many hands have long reached out throughout the whole of Russia in an attempt to stop its wild, lurching course. And even if other nations step aside to make way for its breakneck progress, then, in all likelihood, this is not out of respect, as the poet would have wished, but out of sheer terror—note this well! Out of terror or perhaps out of disgust, and we should thank our lucky stars that they do step aside, for in order to save themselves and their enlightened civilization, they might fail to step aside, and instead form a solid wall across the path of the charging apparition, thus putting an end to our galloping depravity! We have already heard these threatening voices from Europe. Do not tempt them, do not augment their ever-increasing hatred by passing a verdict acquitting a son of murdering his own father…’
In a word, Ippolit Kyrillovich, after an impassioned speech, finished on a deeply emotional note, and it must be owned that the effect on his listeners was overwhelming. He himself left the hall hurriedly as soon as he finished speaking, and, as I have mentioned, nearly fainted in the next room. The audience did not applaud, but the serious-minded amongst them were well satisfied. It was only the ladies who were not particularly impressed, though even they had been fascinated by his eloquence, the more so since they were not really worried about the outcome and put all their trust in Fetyukovich: ‘He’ll take the floor at last, and of course he’s bound to win!’ People kept glancing at Mitya; he had sat silent throughout the prosecutor’s speech, arms folded, teeth clenched, staring at the floor. Only occasionally, mostly when Grushenka was mentioned, had he raised his head to catch what was being said. When the prosecutor came to speak of Rakitin’s comments about her, an angry, contemptuous smile had appeared on his face and he had said audibly: ‘Bernards, the lot of you!’ When Ippolit Kyrillovich described how he had interrogated and grilled him in Mokroye, he had raised his head and listened avidly. At one point in the speech he had seemed on the point of jumping to his feet and shouting something, but he had managed to control himself and merely shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. The closing stages of this speech, in particular that part which dealt with the methods employed by the prosecutor during the interrogation of the accused in Mokroye, were later the subject of some debate and amusement locally at the expense of Ippolit Kyrillovich: ‘The man couldn’t resist bragging about his talents.’ The session was adjourned, but only for a very short period—a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes at the most. Snatches of conversation were heard from the spectators. I remember a few of them.
‘A solid performance!’ one gentlemen, standing with a group, said with a frown.
‘Too much psychology for my taste,’ came another voice.
‘But it was all perfectly true, you have to agree!’
‘Summed it all up pretty neatly, didn’t he?’
‘Summed us up pretty well, too,’ a third voice joined in. ‘Do you remember the bit at the beginning of the speech about us all being like Fyodor Pavlovich?’
‘And that bit at the end. Only he went rather over the top.’
‘Pretty obscure in places too.’
‘He got carried away a little.’
‘It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, I tell you.’
‘Skilful, though. The man had been dying to say all that for a long time, he-he!’
‘I wonder what the defence will say?’
From another group:
‘He needn’t have insulted that chap from St Petersburg, though, with all that stuff about assaulting sensibilities: do you remember?’
‘Yes, that wasn’t too clever.’
‘He was too eager.’
‘Excitable sort of chap.’
‘It’s all right for us to laugh, but what about the defendant?’
‘Yes, poor old Mitya.’
‘Yes, I wonder what the defence counsel’s going to say?’
From a third group:
‘Who’s that woman with the lorgnette, the fat one sitting at the end of the row?’
‘She’s the wife of a general, divorced now, though. I know her.’
‘Fancies herself, doesn’t she? Lorgnette indeed!’
The Karamazov Brothers Page 109
