The Brothers Karamazov (24 page)

“What do you mean, would not have sinned? You’re saying wicked things and you’ll go straight to hell for it. They’ll roast you there like mutton,” Mr. Karamazov declared.

It was just at this moment that Alyosha walked in. As we have seen, Mr. Karamazov was overjoyed at the arrival of his youngest son.

“This is just your subject, your subject exactly,” he chuckled gleefully, inviting Alyosha to sit down and listen.

“As for the mutton, sir, that’s not so. I won’t get into trouble for it there. I couldn’t if there’s true justice,” Smerdyakov declared sententiously.

“What do you mean ‘if there’s true justice’?” Mr. Karamazov said, gaily egging him on and nudging Alyosha with his knee.

“He’s just no good, that’s what!” Gregory suddenly blurted out, glaring at Smerdyakov.

“Don’t you be in such a hurry to call me names, Mr. Gregory,” Smerdyakov parried with quiet self-assurance. “You’d better try to work it out for yourself. If I happen to be in the hands of Christ’s enemies and they demand that I curse the name of God and renounce my holy baptism, my reason tells me that I have the right to do it, and that there would be no sin in doing so.”

“You’ve already said that. Don’t just keep repeating it again and again—prove it!” Mr. Karamazov said challengingly.

“Just listen to the miserable cook!” Gregory hissed scornfully.

“Again, don’t be in too much of a hurry to call me names instead of trying to reason things out, Mr. Gregory, because the moment I say to my captors,‘No, I’m no Christian and I curse my God,’ I at once become anathema by God’s highest judgment and am banned from the Church, just as if I was a heathen—all that not within a second of when I say it, but the moment I think it; before a quarter of a second has passed after I’ve thought it, I’m already excommunicated from the Church. Isn’t that right, Mr. Gregory?”

He obviously enjoyed addressing old Gregory, although he was really answering Mr. Karamazov’s questions. He was very well aware of this, but he pretended it was Gregory who had asked them.

“Ivan!” Mr. Karamazov shouted. “Lean over—I want to whisper something in your ear. It’s for your benefit that he’s putting all this on,” he whispered. “He wants your appreciation, so tell him you appreciate it.”

Ivan listened expressionlessly to his father’s excited whisper.

“Wait, Smerdyakov, hold your tongue a moment,” Mr. Karamazov shouted loudly again. “Lean close to me once again, Ivan.”

Ivan bent toward him again, looking perfectly serious.

“I love you as much as Alyosha, you know. Don’t think I don’t love you. Have some brandy?”

“All right,” Ivan said and, looking closely at his father, he thought: “Well, you have quite a load on now.” But all the time he watched Smerdyakov with great curiosity.

“You’re anathema and you’re damned already!” Gregory exploded suddenly again. “And how dare you argue after that, you scum, when . . .”

“Stop that, Gregory, don’t keep abusing him like that,” Mr. Karamazov interrupted him.

“Why don’t you wait a short moment, Mr. Gregory, and hear what I have to say, because I haven’t finished yet. Because at the very moment when God damns me, at that exact, precise moment, it’s just the same as if I’d become a heathen and my baptism is taken away from me and no longer counts. Don’t you agree at least with that?”

“Come, my boy, get to the point quickly,” Mr. Karamazov urged, sipping his brandy with relish.

“Well then, if I’m no longer a Christian, it’s not a lie I told my torturers when they asked me whether I was a Christian or not. Because by that time God Himself had stripped me of my Christianity, just for having thought it, before I even said one word to them. And if I was already stripped of it, how could they accuse me in the other world of renouncing Christ since, before I could renounce Him, I had already been deprived of my baptism? It’s the same as for a pagan Tartar: who could hold him responsible, even in heaven, Mr. Gregory, for not having been born a Christian, and who would want to punish him for that, since no one can strip two hides off the same ox? Besides, God Almighty Himself, even if He decides to punish the Tartar after he dies (since it’s impossible not to punish him at all), would give him only a very small punishment, considering that a Tartar cannot be blamed for having been brought into this world by infidel parents. For how could God Almighty treat a Tartar, who was brought before Him, like a Christian? That would be just like God Almighty telling an untruth. And how could the ruler of heaven and earth tell a lie, even one single lie?”

Gregory stood there dumbfounded, staring at the speaker with his eyes popping out of his head. He had not followed very well what Smerdyakov was saying, but then he suddenly grasped what it was all about and stood there, looking like a man who had butted his forehead against a wall in the dark. Mr. Karamazov took the last sip of his brandy and burst into a shrill laugh.

“Alyosha, Alyosha, my boy, what do you say to that? Ah, what a casuist he has turned out to be! Ivan, I bet he picked it up from the Jesuits somehow. Ah, it smacks of the Jesuits, Smerdyakov. Who taught you all that? But you’re talking nonsense, you casuist. It’s all false, false, false! Don’t weep, Gregory—we will at once annihilate his argument, reduce it to dust and ashes. Now, you tell me, Balaam’s ass—let’s assume then that you’re in the hands of your captors and, whichever way you put it, you do renounce your faith at a given point, whether in words or in thought, and just as you said yourself, at that very instant you become anathema. Surely you don’t expect them to pat you on the back in the other world for being anathema, or do you? What do you say to that, my beautiful Jesuit? Let’s hear it!”

“Within myself I’ve renounced my faith—that’s for sure. But I still say there’s no special sin in it, or if there is it can only be a very ordinary sin.”

“But why is it only a ‘very ordinary sin’?”

“You’re lying, you . . . damn you!” Gregory hissed.

“Try to reason it out for yourself, Mr. Gregory,” Smerdyakov went on solemnly and imperturbably, the magnanimous winner of a debate lecturing his routed opponent. “It says in the Scriptures that if you have as much as a grain of faith and if you ask a mountain to move into the sea, it will do so at once and without delay, the second you ask it. So, Mr. Gregory, since you’re a believer and I’m an unbeliever—for which you keep reproaching me—why don’t you try asking the mountain to slide not even all the way into the sea (because there’s no sea anywhere near here) but just down into our stinking little river, the one that runs behind our garden. If you do, you’ll see for yourself that nothing will move, that everything will remain where it is, even though you shout all you want, and that should prove that you too, Mr. Gregory, do not have the true faith, which you like to reproach others for lacking. And again, if we remember that in our times, not just you but absolutely everybody is without faith, everybody from the most important people down to the lowliest peasants, and that there is no one who could make the mountain slide into the sea, except perhaps one or at the most two men, seeking salvation secretly somewhere in the Egyptian desert where we couldn’t even find them—well then, if nobody has faith, does it follow that God will damn the whole population of our earth, except maybe those two men in the desert, and that with all His infinite mercy He will forgive no one? And, therefore, I too hope that, even after having doubted once, I will be forgiven when I shed tears of repentance.”

“Wait, wait!” Mr. Karamazov shrieked in a transport of delight. “So, after all, you do believe there are two fellows who can move mountains, right? I want you to take note of that, Ivan, to write it down: it’s so typically Russian!”

“You’re quite right that it’s typical of the national character,” Ivan said with an approving smile.

“Good, you agree then! It must be true if you agree! What about you, Alyosha my boy? You agree too, don’t you? This is typical of the way Russian people believe, isn’t it?”

“No, Smerdyakov’s faith isn’t Russian,” Alyosha answered quietly and firmly.

“I wasn’t talking about faith in general, but about that particular trait, about those two hermits, about just that small detail which is so completely Russian—it’s typically Russian, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that detail is very Russian,” Alyosha said, and smiled.

“Those words of yours, Balaam’s ass, are worth their weight in gold, and I’ll see to it that you get a gold piece today. But as for the rest, you’re full of wind and nonsense. For your information, you fool, the reason we generally lack faith is that we refuse to give it serious thought. We’re much too busy. First of all, we’re too much involved in our personal affairs; and secondly, God hasn’t given us enough time for it: with twenty-four hours in the day we can’t even get enough sleep, let alone repent our sins. But when you give up your faith under torture, you do it at a time when you have nothing else to do but think about that faith of yours, and that is just the proper time to stand up for it! And so it does constitute a sin, doesn’t it, my good man?”

“It does, Mr. Gregory, it does,” Smerdyakov said, again addressing Gregory instead of Mr. Karamazov, “but if you look at it, you’ll find that that only makes it easier on you. Why, if I truly believed at that moment, it would be a real sin for me to renounce my faith and to accept the faith of the infidel Muslims. But then it would never even come to torture, because I’d only have to say to that mountain, you know, ‘Move, come over here and crush my captors,’ and it would come at once and crush them like cockroaches, and I’d just walk off unharmed, praising and glorifying my God. But what if I’d already tried all that and called out to the mountain to come and crush my captors and the mountain hadn’t even budged? Tell me, please, how could I have helped doubting, especially at a moment of such deadly danger? Even without that, I know I won’t be admitted straight into the kingdom of heaven (the mountain not moving when I ask it to shows that they don’t believe very much in my faith up there, and so I can’t expect too great a reward when I get there), and so what good would it do me if, on top of that, I allowed those people to flay me alive without getting anything in return for my pains? Because, even if I called out to the mountain to move when the infidels were already half way through skinning me, even then it wouldn’t budge an inch. Besides, at a moment like that, a person could not only begin doubting, but might very well lose his reason as well and be completely unable to think after that. So if I can’t win either way, who can blame me too much for at least trying to keep my hide on my back? And therefore, trusting in our Lord’s mercy, I hope I’ll be entirely forgiven . . .”

Chapter 8: Over Brandy

THE DEBATE ended suddenly. Mr. Karamazov, who had been in such a happy mood, frowned strangely. He frowned and gulped down his glass of brandy. And that was one glass too much.

“Ah, get out of here, you bunch of Jesuits!” he shouted at the servants. “On your way, Smerdyakov! I’ll send you the gold piece I promised you, but I want you out of here now. And you, Gregory, don’t whimper. Go to Martha—she’ll make you feel better and put you to bed. These animals won’t give one a chance to relax in peace after dinner.”

Now Mr. Karamazov’s voice became peevish and irritated. The servants left the room at once.

“Smerdyakov comes and hangs around every day after meals now,” he added, turning to Ivan. “I think it’s you he’s so interested in—what did you do to impress him so much?”

“I didn’t do anything at all,” Ivan said, “and I don’t know why he should think so highly of me. As for me, I think he’s a flunkey and a yokel, but also a forerunner of progress, raw material for the coming era.”

“Forerunner of progress?”

“Eventually there’ll be better material too, but some of it will be of this quality. First there will be the likes of him, then there’ll be better ones.”

“And when will that be?”

“When the fuse is lighted. But perhaps it will fizzle out before anything happens. For the moment, the masses are none too eager to listen to what cooks like him have to say.”

“That’s just it, my boy. Balaam’s ass broods in silence and then, all of a sudden, he comes out with God knows what.”

“He just stores up ideas,” Ivan said with a crooked grin.

“You see, I know very well he hates me, just as he hates everybody, including you, even though you have the impression that he thinks highly of you. And he certainly despises our poor Alyosha here. But the good thing about him is that he won’t steal, doesn’t talk much, and won’t gossip about what goes on in this house, and he bakes a good meat pie. But why should we bother to talk about him—the hell with him.”

“Yes, he’s certainly not worth it.”

“And as to the ideas he may get into his head—well, I’ve always been of the opinion that the best way of handling the ordinary Russian is to flog him: he’s a scoundrel and there’s no need to be sorry for him. Thank God he still gets his birching occasionally. Russia is rich in birch. If the Russian forests were destroyed, it would be the end of Russia. I’m all for clever people. Now we’ve stopped flogging them, our peasants who have sense enough have started flogging themselves. And they’re doing the right thing. For whatever you sow, you shall reap, or however the saying goes . . . In any case—you shall reap. Russia is just a nasty mess. Ah, my friend, if only you knew how I hate Russia . . . That is, not Russia, but all these birchings, floggings, although, yes, I must say I loathe Russia too. 
Tout cela c’est de la cochonnerie
. You know what I like? I like wit.”

“You’ve just emptied another glass. I think you’ve had enough to drink.”

“Not yet: one more and then another one and that will be all. But I was trying to say something when you interrupted me. Once, passing through Mokroye, I asked an old peasant about flogging. ‘What we like best of all,’ he told me, ‘is to have girls sentenced to be flogged and then to flog them. We let our lads do the flogging. For the girl the lad flogs today he’ll marry tomorrow. So,’ he said, ‘it suits the girls too.’ Talk of the Marquis de Sade! But whatever you say, it 
is
 witty! Wouldn’t it be nice if we all went to have a look too? Well, what do you say, Alyosha, my pet? Why, you’re blushing! Don’t be so bashful, my child. What a shame I didn’t stay for lunch at your father superior’s—I could have told them about those Mokroye girls being flogged. All right, Alyosha, don’t be angry with me because I offended your father superior. It makes me furious, though, when I think of it: if God exists, then no doubt I’ve sinned and I’ll answer for it; but if there is no God, I didn’t offend them nearly enough, those holy fathers of yours. If there’s no God, chopping off their heads wouldn’t be sufficient, for they’re holding up progress. Will you believe me, Ivan, if I tell you I take it as a personal offense? No, I can see by your eyes that you don’t believe me. You believe those who say I’m nothing but a buffoon. What about you, Alyosha, do you believe I’m more than just a buffoon?”