Crime and Punishment (73 page)

‘Well, if you're going to involve Divine Providence in it, you won't get anywhere,’ Raskolnikov muttered, gloomily.

‘You'd better come to the point and say what it is you want!’ Sonya exclaimed with a look of suffering. ‘There's something you're hinting at again… Have you really only come here in order to torment me?’

She could not hold out any longer, and suddenly broke into bitter weeping. He looked at her in weary gloom. Some five minutes went by.

‘You know, you're right, Sonya,’ he said quietly, at last. He had undergone a sudden change; his air of assumed insolence and impotent challenge had disappeared. Even his voice had suddenly become strained. ‘I told you yesterday that I wouldn't come to ask for forgiveness, and yet very nearly the first thing I
did was to ask you for forgiveness… That remark I made about Luzhin and Providence was meant for myself… It was me asking for forgiveness, Sonya…’

He attempted to smile, but his pale smile betrayed something helpless and unfinished. He inclined his head and covered his face with his hands.

And suddenly a strange, unexpected sensation approaching a caustic hatred of Sonya passed through his heart. As though in fear and wonder at this sensation, he suddenly raised his head and gave her a fixed look; but what he found was her own nervous gaze upon him, anxious to the point of torment; there was love in that gaze; his hatred vanished like a wraith. This was something else; he had mistaken one feeling for another. All this meant was
that
that moment had arrived.

Again he covered his face with his hands and inclined his head towards the floor. Suddenly he grew pale, got up from his chair, looked at Sonya and, without saying anything, like an automaton went over and sat down on her bed.

To him this moment felt horribly similar to the one when he had stood behind the old woman with the axe already freed from its loop, sensing that there was ‘not another moment to be lost’.

‘What's wrong with you?’ Sonya asked, horribly frightened.

He was unable to say anything. He had never, never planned to
declare
it like this, and did not understand what was happening to him. Quietly she went over to him, sat down on the bed beside him and waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her heart was pounding and sinking. It grew unbearable: he turned his dead-pale face towards her; his lips twisted helplessly as he tried to say something. A wave of horror passed through Sonya's heart.

‘What's wrong with you?’ she said again, moving away from him slightly.

‘It's all right, Sonya. Don't be frightened… it's just a lot of rubbish! In the end, it really is rubbish, if one gives it any thought,’ he muttered like a man unconscious and in a fever. ‘Only, why have I come to torment you?’ he added suddenly, looking at her. ‘In the end. Why? I keep asking myself that question, Sonya…’

It was probably true that he had indeed asked himself that question four hours earlier, but now he uttered it in total helplessness, hardly aware of what he was doing and feeling a constant tremor throughout his whole body.

‘Oh, how you're torturing yourself!’ she said with a look of suffering.

‘It's all a lot of rubbish!… Listen, Sonya – this is what it is (for some reason he suddenly smiled, a pale and helpless smile, lasting a couple of seconds). Do you remember what I was trying to tell you last night?’

Sonya waited nervously.

‘On my way out I said that I might be saying goodbye to you forever, but that if I came back today I would tell you… who killed Lizaveta.’

She suddenly began to quiver in every limb of her body.

‘Well, and so I've come to tell you.’

‘So you were in earnest yesterday…’ she whispered with effort. ‘How is it that you know?’ she asked quickly, as though suddenly regaining consciousness.

Sonya had begun to breathe with difficulty. Her face was becoming paler and paler.

‘I just know.’

For a moment she said nothing.

‘Well, have they found
him
?’ she asked timidly.

‘No, they haven't.’

‘Then how do you know about
that
?’ she asked, barely audibly, and again after a silence that lasted almost a minute.

He turned round to face her and gave her a look of the utmost fixedness.

‘Guess,’ he said with his earlier crooked, helpless smile.

Convulsions seemed to pass throughout her entire body.

‘But you’re… why are you… trying to frighten me like this?’ she said, smiling like a child.

‘If I know… then I must be a close acquaintance of
his
,’ Raskolnikov went on, went on relentlessly, continuing to look into her face as though he had not the help to draw his eyes away. ‘He didn't mean… to kill Lizaveta… He… killed her… by accident. He meant to kill the old woman… when she
was alone… and he went there… but then Lizaveta came in… So he killed her… too.’

Another terrible minute went by. They both stared at each other.

‘So you can't guess, then?’ he asked suddenly, with the sensation of a man throwing himself from a steeple.

‘N-no,’ Sonya whispered, barely audibly.

‘Then have a proper look.’

And as soon as he said this, a certain earlier, familiar sensation suddenly turned his soul to ice: he looked at her, and suddenly in her face he saw the face of Lizaveta. He had a vivid memory of the expression on Lizaveta's features as he had approached her with the axe and she had backed away from him towards the wall with her hand held out in front of her and a look of utterly childish terror in her eyes, exactly as little children do when they begin to be frightened of something, stare motionlessly and apprehensively at the frightening object, move backwards and, stretching out one little hand, prepare to burst into tears. Almost the same thing took place now with Sonya: it was with the same kind of helplessness and fear that she looked at him for a time and then suddenly, holding out her left hand, rested her fingers slightly, the merest fraction, on his chest and began to get up from the bed, backing further and further away from him, as her gaze fastened on him ever more motionlessly. Her horror suddenly found its way to him, too: the same fear was displayed in his face, and he began to look at her in the same way, almost with the same
childish
smile.

‘Have you guessed?’ he whispered at last.

‘O merciful Lord!’ The words tore from her breast in a terrible wail. Helplessly she collapsed on to the bed, her face to the pillows. A moment later, however, she quickly got up, moved towards him, seized both his hands and, gripping them tightly with her slender fingers that were like a vice, again began to look into his face motionlessly, as though her eyes had been glued there. This last, desperate look was an attempt on her part to seek out and catch some last glimpse of hope. But there was no hope: there remained not the slightest shadow of doubt – it was all
true
! Even afterwards, later on, when she remembered
that moment, she had a strange, uncanny feeling: how was it she had been able to perceive with such
immediacy
that there was no shadow of doubt? After all, she could not very well have said that she had had a premonition about something of that kind, could she? And yet now, when he had only just told her about it, she suddenly felt it was precisely
that
that she
had
had a premonition about.

‘Enough, Sonya, enough! Don't torture me!’ he begged her in a voice of martyred suffering.

He had never, never planned to reveal it to her like this, but
that was how it had happened
.

Almost unaware of what she was doing, she leapt up and, wringing her hands, got as far as the middle of the room; but she quickly came back and sat down beside him again, almost touching him shoulder to shoulder. Suddenly, as though she had been cut to the marrow, she shuddered, uttered a cry and, without knowing for what reason, fell on her knees in front of him.

‘What is it, what have you gone and done to yourself?’ she said despairingly and, jumping up from her knees, she threw herself on his neck, embracing him and gripping him as hard as she could in her arms.

Raskolnikov started back and looked at her with a sad smile: ‘You're a strange one, Sonya,’ he said. ‘You put your arms round me and kiss me after I've told you a thing like
that
. You don't know what you're about.’

‘There's no one, no one in the whole world more unhappy than you are now,’ she exclaimed in a kind of frenzy, oblivious to his remarks, and suddenly burst into violent sobs, as if she were having a fit of hysteria.

A sensation he had not experienced for a long time came flooding into his soul like a wave and instantly softened it. He did not resist the sensation: two tears rolled from his eyes and hung on his lashes.

‘So you're not going to leave me, Sonya?’ he said, looking at her almost with hope.

‘No, no; I'll never leave you, no matter where you go!’ Sonya cried aloud. ‘I'll follow you, I'll follow you everywhere! O
merciful God!… Oh, how unlucky I am!… Why, why didn't I meet you earlier? Why didn't you come before? O merciful Lord!’

‘Well, here I am.’

‘But only now! Oh, what can we do now?… Together, together,’ she repeated as though in a trance, embracing him again, ‘we'll go and do penal servitude together!’ A spasm ran through him, and his earlier, hate-filled and almost supercilious smile forced itself to his lips.

‘I may not be willing to go and do penal servitude yet, Sonya,’ he said.

Sonya gave him a quick look.

After her initial blazing and agonizing sense of compassion for the unhappy man the terrible idea of the murder struck her again. In his altered tone of voice she suddenly thought she could hear the murderer. She stared at him in amazement. As yet she knew nothing, neither why this thing had happened nor what its reason had been. And again she could not believe it. Him, him the murderer? Was it really possible?

‘But what's happening? Where am I?’ she said in deep bewilderment, as though she had not yet regained consciousness. ‘How, how could you,
a man like you
… do a thing like this?… What's happening?’

‘Oh, I did it so I could rob her. Stop it, Sonya!’ he replied almost wearily, and even with a certain annoyance.

Sonya froze as though she had been stunned, but suddenly shouted:

‘You were hungry! You did it… did you do it to help your mother? Was that it?’

‘No, Sonya, no,’ he muttered, turning away and lowering his head. ‘I wasn't as hungry as that… I really did want to help my mother, but… even that's not quite correct… don't torment me, Sonya!’

Sonya clasped her hands in dismay.

‘But is this all really, really true? Merciful Lord, what kind of truth is it? Who could ever bring himself to believe it?… And how, how could you give away the last copeck you had, yet murder someone in order to rob her? Ah!…’ she cried suddenly,
'that money you gave Katerina Ivanovna… was that the money you… O merciful Lord, was it really
that
money?…’

‘No, Sonya,’ he hurriedly interrupted. ‘It wasn't that money, put your mind at rest! That money had been sent to me by my mother through a certain merchant, and I was ill when I received it, the same day that I gave it away… Razumikhin saw it… he accepted it in my name… that money was my own, my own, really mine.’

Sonya was listening to him in bewilderment, doing her utmost to make some sense of it all.

‘But as for
that
money… I actually don't even know whether there was any money there,’ he added quietly and as though he were reflecting about something. ‘I took her purse, the chamois-leather one, off her neck… it was a full purse, stuffed tight… but I didn't look inside it; I probably didn't have time… Well, and the objects, all those cufflinks and chains – I buried all those things the following morning together with the purse under a building-block in a backyard on V— Prospect… It'll all still be there now…’

With her whole attention, Sonya listened.

‘Well, but then why… why did you say you did it in order to rob her, if you didn't take anything?’ she asked quickly, clutching at a straw.

‘I don't know… I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to take that money or not,’ he said, again as though he were reflecting about something, and suddenly, coming back to himself again, gave a brief, quick, ironic smile. ‘That was a stupid thing I blurted out just now, wasn't it?’

For a moment the thought flashed through Sonya's head: ‘What if he's mad?’ But she abandoned it instantly: no, this was something else. She could make nothing, nothing of it!

‘Look, Sonya,’ he said suddenly, with a kind of inspiration. ‘Look, I'll tell you this: if the only reason I'd killed her was because I was hungry,’ he went on, emphasizing each word and gazing at her in a way that was mysterious, but sincere, ‘I'd be…
happy
now! That's what I want you to know!… And why, why should it
mean so much to you?’ he cried out a moment later with something almost akin to despair. ‘Why should it mean so much to you that I confessed to having done something evil just now? I mean, why is this stupid victory over me so important to you? Oh, Sonya, do you think that's why I came to see you just now?’

Sonya again tried to say something, but no words came.

‘I asked you to come with me yesterday because you're all I have left.’

‘Come with you where?’ Sonya asked, timidly.

‘Oh, not in order to go stealing and murdering, you needn't be scared, that's not the purpose,’ he said with a caustic smile. ‘We're different sorts of people. And you know, Sonya, I've only just realized now
where
it was I was asking you to accompany me yesterday! When I asked you yesterday I still didn't know that. I asked you for one purpose, and it's for one purpose that I've come to see you: I want to ask you not to abandon me. You won't abandon me, Sonya?’

She gripped his hand tightly.

‘Oh, why, why did I tell her?’ he exclaimed in despair a moment later, looking at her in infinite torment. ‘I mean, there you are, Sonya, sitting there, waiting for me to explain, I can see that; but what can I say to you? Why, you won't understand any of it, you'll just wear yourself away with suffering… all because of me! I mean, look: there you go crying and putting your arms round me again – well, why are you doing that? Because I couldn't hold out on my own and went running off to someone else in order to unburden myself: “You suffer, too, and then I'll feel better!” And you can love a villain like that?’