The Brothers Karamazov (134 page)

“But then, days pass and my client’s father does not pay him the three thousand rubles. Indeed, instead of paying it back to him, he apparently decides to use that money to seduce the woman his son loves. And so my client says to himself: ‘If father doesn’t give me that money, it’ll be as if I’d stolen Katerina’s money.’ And he decides to take the fifteen hundred rubles sewn in the rag, hand it to Miss Verkhovtsev, and say to her: ‘I may be a scoundrel, but a thief I am not!’ So we have here a second reason impelling him to hold on jealously to the money sewn in the bag, not to open the bag, and certainly not to fish out one hundred-ruble bill after another. Why should you, gentlemen, refuse to recognize that my client has a sense of honor? Because he certainly has a sense of honor. Perhaps it is a distorted and a misguided one, but it is undoubtedly a sense of honor, a passionate sense of honor, and he has demonstrated it! Then, however, things become more complicated. His pangs of jealousy reach their highest pitch and the same two questions arise more and more tauntingly in the fevered brain of the accused, namely: ‘Should I give that money back to Katerina, and, if I do, where will I find the money to take Grushenka away from here?’ And if he drank so much and raged so violently in the taverns during that month, it was probably because he himself felt the dilemma so unbearable. And it was those two questions that, in the end, were to drive him to despair. At one point, he sent his youngest brother to ask their father, for the last time, to give him that three thousand, but he couldn’t wait for the answer, broke into the house, and gave his father a beating in the presence of witnesses. And then the hope of getting the three thousand was gone, for he knew his father would never give it to him after the beating. Later that evening, my client pounded the upper part of his chest—where the bag with the bills was hanging—in the presence of his brother, swearing to him that he still had the means to save himself from being a despicable blackguard, but admitting that he would remain a blackguard, because he lacked the strength and determination to use that means. And why, may I ask you, does the prosecutor choose to disbelieve Alexei Karamazov’s testimony, which sounded so honest, sincere, and straightforward? Why, instead of that, does he ask us to believe in some money concealed in a crevice in a dungeon of the Castle of Udolpho?

“Then, on that same evening, after his conversation with his brother, my client wrote that fatal letter, which is, indeed, the main, the most damning, evidence that he is guilty of premeditated murder and robbery! He writes in it: ‘I will beg everybody for the money and if they turn me down, I’ll kill father and take the envelope tied with a pink ribbon that he keeps under his mattress. Provided Ivan has left!’ Well then, this is a complete program of the crime, so how can he not be the murderer? And everything was later carried out according to this plan offered to us in writing, the prosecution claims.

“But, in the first place, this letter was written by someone who was very drunk and in a state of great nervous tension. In the second place, I repeat once again, what he writes here about the envelope he knows only from what Smerdyakov has told him, because he himself has never set eyes on it. And in the third place, while it is an indisputable fact that he wrote this letter, it is not at all an indisputable fact that everything happened just as the letter says it will, because my client did not rush to his father’s place to commit a coldly premeditated robbery; he was spontaneously driven there by insane jealousy.

“‘Fine, fine,’ they may object to this, ‘but still, when he got there, he killed his father and took the money.’

“But I would like to question this too: was it really he who killed his father? As for the charge of robbery, I can only dismiss it with indignation, because no one has the right to prefer such a charge without having shown us exactly what was stolen. That goes without saying! Furthermore, I would like to study the question of whether my client killed his father without robbing him. Has this really been proven? Or is it nothing but a piece of fiction, like all the rest?”

Chapter 12: No Murder Either

YOU MUST be very careful, gentlemen of the jury,” Fetyukovich went on; “a human life is at stake here, and we must all be very careful. We have heard the prosecutor admit that, up to the very last moment, until this very day in fact, he hesitated about whether he should charge my client with cold-blooded, premeditated murder. In fact, he continued to hesitate until that ‘drunken’ letter was produced in court, which made him decide, ‘It all happened just as described there!’

“So let me say, once again, that the accused rushed off to try to find out where 
she
 was. This is an absolutely indisputable fact. If she had been at home, he would have stayed with her and certainly would not have carried out the ‘program’ outlined in his ‘drunken’ letter. But as it happened, he dashed off to his father’s place, unexpectedly, spontaneously, and the chances are that he did not even remember about his ‘drunken’ letter at all. On his way, he snatched up that pestle. Yes, you have heard a whole psychological theory constructed around that brass pestle: why the accused was bound to view the pestle as a weapon, what prompted him to snatch it up as one snatches up a weapon, and so on and so forth. Now, I wonder what would have happened if that pestle had not been lying there in full sight, but had been put away in the cupboard? Then it would not have caught the eye of the accused and he would have rushed off to his father’s unarmed and, perhaps, would not have killed anyone at all. So, how can the pestle be considered proof that there was premeditation, that is, that my client armed himself with it in order to kill his father? Certainly, argues the prosecution, but this man, who had been shouting in every tavern that he wanted to kill his father, two days before the murder, when he wrote that letter, behaved in an unusually quiet manner and picked only one quarrel with some shop-assistant, because, we are told, ‘Karamazov could not help picking a quarrel with someone.’

“To this, I would like to answer that a person contemplating committing a murder, especially a murder that is to follow a carefully prepared plan, would certainly not pick quarrels even with shop-assistants, and would probably stay out of taverns altogether, for a man who is about to carry out such a plan, as a rule, tries to be as inconspicuous and quiet as possible; he wishes to be neither seen nor heard; his attitude is, ‘Forget me altogether,’ and this is more a matter of instinct than calculation. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, psychology does cut both ways, and we, too, know how to interpret psychology!

“As to all those drunken threats during that month, well, every one of you must have heard children and drunks threaten each other often enough, saying, ‘I’ll kill you!’—a threat that is not usually carried out. As a matter of fact, the ‘drunken’ letter itself could be just a written form of that same angry, drunken outcry: ‘I’ll kill you all, the whole lot of you!’ Why couldn’t it be just that? Why should you think of it as ‘the fatal letter,’ rather than as ‘the ridiculous letter’? The only reason I can see is that the body of my client’s murdered father was found in his house, while a witness saw my client fleeing, armed, through the garden and then was struck down by him himself. And that is supposed to prove that everything took place exactly according to the plan explained in the letter, so that it is a fatal and not a ridiculous letter.

“And now, thank God, we have come to the real point. ‘He was in the garden,’ we are told, ‘hence he is the murderer.’ It is on this proposition, ‘He 
was
 there, hence he 
is
,’ that the whole case of the prosecution rests. But what if I decide to challenge their ‘hence’? What if I say: even if he were there, 
hence nothing
. Oh, I readily concede that the accumulation of facts and the collection of coincidences is quite impressive, but I suggest you examine each fact separately, without being influenced by their combined implications. Let us examine, for instance, the prosecution’s refusal to conceive the possibility that the accused may simply have run away from under his father’s window. Do you remember the sarcasm in which the prosecution indulged, about the filial ‘respect’ and ‘discretion’ that are supposed to have suddenly come over the accused? And what if my client did feel something of that sort, although what he felt could be described more aptly as a wave of pious decency. ‘It was as if my mother had interceded for me with God,’ was the way the accused described it, and so, the moment he was satisfied that Miss Svetlov was not there, he just ran away.

“‘But he couldn’t be sure of it, just by looking in the window!’ the prosecutor replies, and to this, in turn, I answer, ‘Why couldn’t he?’ Fyodor Karamazov opened the window when he heard the agreed signal and he may very well have let out an exclamation, a cry that would have fully convinced the accused that Miss Svetlov was not there. Why must you believe that everything happened exactly as the prosecution suggests it happened, as it stubbornly wishes to believe? In real life, thousands of things may have happened that would have escaped the scrutiny of the subtlest fiction writer.

“‘But Gregory saw that the door was open; therefore the accused must have been inside the house, and therefore he must be the murderer . . .’ Now let us talk about that door a little, gentlemen of the jury. I want you to note that only one witness has testified here that the door was open, a witness who was at the time in a state that renders the reliability of his testimony very questionable . . . But, all right, let us assume that it was open and that the accused denied it and lied, claiming that it was closed out of an instinct of self-preservation, which would be quite understandable under the circumstances. Let us also assume that he had been inside the house. Well, what of that? It still would not necessarily follow that he had killed his father. He could break into the house, dash through the rooms, push his father out of his way, even hit him. But once he saw that Miss Svetlov was not there, he could flee, happy that he had not committed murder. The prosecutor has painted a grim and horrifying picture of the state the accused was in, in Mokroye, when he discovered that she loved him, when a new life was beckoning to him, while he knew that he could no longer aspire to love, because his father’s bloodstained body was now in his way, and beyond that body lay, not his happiness, but his ordeal. The prosecutor, however, allowed my client love and then proceeded, in his usual way, to give us a psychological description of the mental state of the accused: he was drunk, we were told, he was like a criminal who is being taken to his execution but feels he still has a lot of time ahead of him, etc., etc. But didn’t you, Mr. Prosecutor, create, for your purposes, a fictional character who is quite unlike the accused? Is my client really so callous and inhuman as to think only of love and of avoiding justice, if he is really guilty of his father’s murder? My answer to that is no, no, and no! I feel absolutely convinced that, the moment she had revealed her love to him, asked him to go away with her and live in a new happiness, the body of the murdered father behind him would have doubled, trebled, his urge to kill himself, and he would certainly have killed himself if he had been his father’s murderer! Oh, he certainly would not have forgotten where he had left his pistols! I know the accused well enough to say that he is not the wooden, heartless creature the prosecutor is trying to portray him as! He would certainly have killed himself if he had killed his father. However, he had not killed him, precisely because ‘his mother had interceded for him,’ and so he was not guilty of spilling his father’s blood. That night in Mokroye, he was unhappy and worried about the old servant Gregory; he was praying that the old man would regain his senses and live, that the blow he had struck him would not prove fatal, and that he—my client—would not be held responsible for that death. And why shouldn’t we accept that explanation of what happened? What proof do we have that the accused did not tell us the truth?

“‘But there is the corpse,’ they will remind us. ‘If the accused rushed out of the house without killing his father, who did kill him?’

“As I have said before, the whole argument of the prosecution is based on this: ‘If not he, then who? We see no one else who could have done it, except him.’ After that, the prosecutor counted off on his fingers the five persons who had been on the premises during the night. I will agree with him that, of the five, three can be eliminated from the start: the victim himself, Gregory, and his wife Martha. That leaves us with my client and Smerdyakov. And at this point the prosecutor exclaims dramatically that my client only accused Smerdyakov because there was not a sixth person about, for had there been a sixth person, or even only the ghost of a sixth person, Karamazov would have dropped his accusations against Smerdyakov and accused the ghost, because he was ashamed of suggesting that Smerdyakov might have been the murderer . . . But what is there to prevent me, gentlemen of the jury, from reversing that argument and saying that, with only the two of them as possible suspects, the only reason my client is accused of the crime is that, except for Smerdyakov, they have not found anyone who could be accused of it? And I submit that the prosecutor can find no one else to suspect only because he had, from the start, arbitrarily decided not to suspect Smerdyakov. It is a fact that, besides the accused, his two brothers, and Miss Svetlov, no one else has declared openly that he believes Smerdyakov to be the murderer. Isn’t it a fact, though, that there is a certain vague feeling among the people of your town, a certain dissatisfaction with the results of the investigation, some sort of expectation of further developments and discoveries? And then there is a certain peculiar combination of circumstances which, however, I must admit, does not enable me to draw any clear conclusions. First, there was that epileptic seizure that took place on the very day of the murder, a fit whose genuineness the prosecutor felt impelled to defend so strongly, for reasons that are best known to him alone. Then there was Smerdyakov’s sudden suicide, just on the eve of the trial. And lastly, there was the equally unexpected testimony of the accused’s brother Ivan, who, until then, had believed the accused guilty, but who now produced that money in court, and who accused Smerdyakov of being the murderer. Oh, I agree with the court and the prosecution that Ivan Karamazov was feverish and that his testimony could have been a desperate attempt, perhaps conceived in a feverish state, to save his brother by blaming a dead man for the crime. But still, once again Smerdyakov’s name has been brought in, and I find something rather suspicious about this. I have the impression that something has remained unsaid here, something is still unfinished. And perhaps there will be something more to be said about it. But let us leave it for the time being.