Crime and Punishment (14 page)

The question of why he had now come to see Razumikhin was troubling him even more than he himself was aware; he kept searching uneasily for some ill-omened significance in this apparently most ordinary of actions.

‘Wait a moment: did I really think I could put everything right just by going to see Razumikhin, find a way out in the person of Razumikhin?’ he wondered to himself in astonishment.

He thought and rubbed his forehead, and it was a strange thing that, after a long spell of reflection, there suddenly occurred to him, almost without being prompted, a certain very peculiar idea.

‘Hm… Razumikhin,’ he suddenly said very calmly, as though he had reached some final decision. ‘I'm going to see Razumikhin, of course I am… only – not right now… I'll go and see him the day after
it
, when
it's
all over and everything's begun anew…’

And suddenly he came to his senses.

‘After
that
?’ he exclaimed, leaping up from the bench. ‘Is
that
going to happen? Is it really going to happen?’

He abandoned the bench and set off, almost at a run: his original intention had been to turn back and go home, but the thought of going home suddenly seemed a horribly repulsive one: there, in his corner, in that horrible cupboard of his, all
this
had been fermenting within him for more than a month now, and he moved wherever his eyes led him.

His nervous trembling had become slightly feverish; he thought he might possibly be catching a chill, for even in this heat he felt cold. Almost unconsciously, prompted by a kind of inner necessity, he began with a kind of effort to scrutinize every object he encountered, as though in desperate quest of some diversion, but this failed to work, and he kept sinking back into his state of brooding. But when, with a sudden start, he raised his head again and looked around him, he immediately forgot what he had been thinking about a moment ago and even what part of town he had been walking through. In this fashion he
traversed the whole of Vasily Island, came out on to the Little Neva, crossed the bridge and turned in the direction of the Islands. At first his tired eyes found the leafy coolness agreeable,
¹
used as they were to the dust and slaked lime of the city, and to its enormous, constricting and oppressive buildings. Here there was neither humidity, nor stench, nor drinking dens. But soon even these new, agreeable sensations gave way to ones that were morbid and irritating. Sometimes he would stop in front of some dacha lavishly adorned with verdure, look through the fence and see, far away on the balconies and terraces, finely dressed women and, in the garden, children running about. He was particularly caught by the flowers; he looked at them longer than at anything else. He also encountered sumptuous carriages, horsemen and horsewomen; he followed them with an inquisitive gaze and forgot about them before they had even disappeared from view. Once he stopped in order to count his money; he turned out to have thirty copecks. ‘Twenty to the policeman, three to Nastasya for the letter – that means I must have given the Marmeladovs forty-seven or fifty copecks yesterday,’ he thought, for some reason totalling it up, but he had soon even forgotten the reason he had pulled the money from his pocket in the first place. As he was passing some sort of eating establishment that looked like a cookshop, it came back to him, and he suddenly felt hungry. Entering the cookshop, he drank a glass of vodka and had a pie with some kind of filling. He finished it as he went on his way. It was a very long time since he had drunk vodka, and it had an instant effect on him, even though he had only had one glass. His legs suddenly grew heavy, and he began to feel a powerful inclination to sleep. He turned back in a homeward direction; but when he reached Petrovsky Island he stopped in complete exhaustion, wandered off the road into the bushes, collapsed into the grass and fell asleep that very same instant.

When one is in a morbid state of health, one's dreams are often characterized by an unusual vividness and brilliance, and also by an extremely lifelike quality. Sometimes the scene that is conjured up is a monstrous one, yet the setting and the entire process of its representation are so lifelike and executed with
details that are so subtle, astonishing, yet correspond in an artistic sense to the integral nature of the whole, that the dreamer himself could never invent them while awake, not even if he were an artist of the order of Pushkin or Turgenev. Dreams such as these – the morbid ones – invariably remain in the memory long afterwards, and have a powerful effect on the individual's deranged and already overstimulated organism.

Raskolnikov had a terrible dream. It was a dream about his childhood, back in the little town where they had lived. He was about seven years old and he was taking a walk, on a holiday, towards evening, somewhere beyond the outskirts with his father. It was a grey sort of day, overcast and humid, and the locality looked exactly the way it had survived in his memory; even in his memory it had become far more indistinct than it was now in his dream. The little town stood in an exposed position, as on the palm of someone's hand, with not a willow in sight; somewhere very far away, right on the edge of the horizon, a patch of forest showed up black. At a few yards’ remove from the town's last kitchen garden stood a drinking-house, a very large drinking-house that had always produced in him the most unpleasant sensations, amounting almost to fear, whenever he walked past it on those outings with his father. There was always such a crowd in there, there was so much yelling, laughter and foul language, so much hoarse and ugly singing, and such frequent fighting; there were always so many drunken and frightening characters lounging about outside… When they encountered them, he would always press up close against his father, trembling all over. The road passed close to the drinking-house; it was a country road, always dusty, and its dust was always so black. On it went, winding and twisting, and after some three hundred yards or so it veered off to the right, skirting the town cemetery. In the middle of the cemetery stood a stone church with a green onion dome; a couple of times a year he would visit the church with his father and mother for mass, when burial rites were performed in memory of his grandmother, who had died long ago, and whom he had never seen. On these occasions they always took with them some
kut'ya
²
on a white dish wrapped in a napkin, and the
kut'ya
was the sugary sort, made of rice, with raisins pressed into it in the form of a cross. He loved this church with its old icons, most of them without mountings, and the old priest with his trembling head. Beside his grandmother's tomb, on which there lay a funerary slab, was the little grave of his younger brother who had died at the age of six months, whom he also had never known at all and of whom he had no memory; he had, however, been told that he had had a younger brother, and every time he visited the cemetery he would cross himself above the little grave in religious awe, bowing down to it and kissing it. And this was what he dreamt: he and his father were walking along the road to the cemetery, and passing the drinking-house; he was holding his father's hand, and looking over at the drinking-house with fear. Something special was going on, and it drew his attention: on this occasion, too, there seemed to be the sound of festive merrymaking, a dressed-up crowd of artisans’ wives and peasant women, their husbands and all kinds of riff-raff. They were all drunk and singing songs, and by the entrance to the drinking-house stood a cart – but it was a strange sort of cart. It was one of those big ones that are usually drawn by great cart-horses, and are used for transporting goods and wine-barrels. He had always liked watching those enormous cart-horses with their long manes and brawny legs, moving at a tranquil, measured pace as they hauled along an entire mountain of goods with not a shadow of strain, as though they actually found it easier to move when they had such a load to haul than when they did not. It was a strange thing, however, that in the present instance one of these massive carts had been harnessed up to a small, thin, greyish peasant jade, one of the kind which – he had often seen this – sometimes overstrain themselves when hauling a tall load of hay or firewood, particularly if the cart gets bogged down in the mire or in a rut, and which the muzhiks always beat so viciously, so viciously with their knouts, sometimes even about the muzzle and the eyes, and the sight of this would always make him feel so sorry, so sorry that he would almost burst into tears, and his mother would take him away from the window. But all of a sudden it had started to get very noisy: out from the drinking-house, drunk as lords, shouting, singing,
brandishing balalaikas, came some big muzhiks in red and blue shirts, their
armyaks
³
thrown over their shoulders. ‘Come on, get in, the lot of you!’ one of them shouted – a man still young, with a fat neck and a meaty face that was as red as a carrot. ‘I'll take you all, get in!’ Instantly, however, there was a burst of laughter and exclamations.

‘That old jade'll never make it!’

‘Come off it, Mikolka, have you lost your brains, or what? Harnessing that little filly to that great cart!’

‘That little grey mare must be all of twenty by now, lads!’

‘Get in, I'm going to take you all!’ Mikolka said, leaping into the cart first, taking the reins and standing up at full height on the front-board. ‘Matvey went off with the bay this morning,’ he shouted from the cart, ‘and this little filly's fair breaking my heart; I feel like doing her in, she eats her oats and gives nothing back. Get in, I say! I'll fly there at the gallop! I'll
make
her gallop!’ And he picked up his knout, preparing with satisfaction to flog the little grey mare.

‘Go on, get in, why don't you?’ people laughed in the crowd. ‘You heard him – he's going to fly there at the gallop!’

‘I'll bet that mare hasn't galloped in ten years.’

‘Well, she's going to now!’

‘Don't spare her, lads, take knouts, all of you, have them ready!’

‘That's right! Flog her!’

Roaring with laughter and cracking jokes, they all piled into Mikolka's cart. Six of them got in, and there was room for even more. They took a fat, red-cheeked peasant woman with them. She was dressed in bright red calico, with a
kichka
and beads, and
koty
⁴
on her feet; she was cracking nuts and laughing softly to herself. The people in the crowd that surrounded them were also laughing, and indeed, how could they fail to laugh? A wretched little mare like that going to pull such a load at a gallop? Two of the lads in the cart at once picked up knouts in order to lend Mikolka a hand. At the cry of ‘Gee-up!’ the little jade began to tug with all her might, but not only was she unable to set off at a gallop – she could barely manage to move forward at all; her legs skittered about underneath her as she whinnied
and cowered under the blows from the three knouts that rained down on her to no effect whatsoever. The laughter in the cart and among the crowd doubled in intensity, but Mikolka lost his temper and began to flog the little mare even harder, as though he really believed he could make her gallop.

‘Let me have a go, lads!’ a young fellow who had now got a taste for the thing shouted from the crowd.

‘Get in! All of you, get in!’ Mikolka shouted. ‘She'll take us all. I'll flog her!’ And he lashed her and lashed her until he hardly knew what he was doing in his frenzy.

‘Papa, Papa!’ he cried to his father. ‘Papa, what are they doing? Papa, they're beating the poor little horse!’

‘Come along, come along!’ said his father. ‘They're drunk, playing mischief, the fools; come along, don't look!’ And he tried to draw him away, but he broke loose from his father's arms and, beside himself, ran over to the little horse. But by this time the little horse was in a bad way. It would gasp, stop moving, start tugging again, and then nearly fall down.

‘Flog her to death!’ cried Mikolka. ‘It's come to that. I'll do it myself!’

‘What's the matter, wood-devil? Not got a Christian heart in you?’ an old man called from the crowd.

‘Have you ever seen a little jade like that pull such a load?’ another man added.

‘You'll do her in!’ shouted a third.

‘Leave me alone! She belongs to me! I'll do as I like with her. More of you get in! All of you! I'll damn well make her gallop!…’

Suddenly a loud volley of laughter rang out, drowning everything: the little mare, unable to endure the intensified rain of blows, had begun an ineffectual kicking of her hindlegs. The old man could not repress a bitter smile. It was true enough: a wretched little mare like that, yet she could still kick!

Two more lads in the crowd each took another knout and ran over to the little horse in order to whip its flanks. One lad ran to either side.

‘Whip her on the muzzle, on the eyes, on the eyes!’ Mikolka shouted.

‘A song, lads!’ someone shouted from the cart, and everybody in the cart joined in. A song with dubious words rang out, a tambourine rattled, and there was whistling during the refrains. The woman went on cracking nuts and laughing softly to herself.

… He was running alongside the little horse, now he was a few steps ahead of it, he could see it being whipped across the eyes, right across the eyes! He was crying. His heart rose up within him, his tears flowed. One of the lads who were doing the whipping caught him on the face with his knout; he felt nothing; screaming, his hands working convulsively, he rushed towards the grey-haired old man with the grey beard who was shaking his head and condemning the whole scene. One of the peasant women took him by the arm and tried to lead him away; but he tore himself free and ran back to the little horse once more. Even though by this time it was at its last gasp, it was beginning to kick again.

‘What the hell's the matter with you?’ Mikolka shrieked in a fury. He threw down the knout, leaned over and hauled from the bottom of the cart a long, thick cart-shaft, took hold of one end of it in both hands, and with an effort proceeded to brandish it over the little grey mare.