The Brothers Karamazov (41 page)

*

A force irresistible

Ties me to my darling.

Lord have mercy

On both of us,

On both of us,

On both of us.

*

The voice stopped. This high-pitched tenor was a lackey’s, and the manner of singing and dragging out the words was a lackey’s manner. Then Alyosha heard a woman’s voice, caressing, coy, and blatantly affected.

“Why haven’t you been to see us for so long? Is our company too dull for you?”

“Not at all,” the man said politely but with marked dignity.

It was obvious that he was in a strong position and the woman was making a play for him.

“Sounds like Smerdyakov,” Alyosha thought, “and she must be the landlady’s daughter, the one who came back from Moscow and who has a dress with a train and goes to father’s house to get a bowl of soup from Martha.”

“I love verses, especially nice ones like those,” the woman said. “But why have you stopped? Please go on.”

The voice started to sing again:

*

By the crown of the Tsar,

May my darling prosper.

Lord have mercy

On both of us,

On both of us,

On both of us.

*

“Last time, it came out even better: you sang it ‘May my dearest keep well,’ and that made it kind of warmer, more tender; you must have forgotten it today.”

“Poetry is rubbish anyway,” Smerdyakov snapped.

“Oh no, I don’t go along with you there. I like a nice verse.”

“As long as it’s verse, it’s nonsense. Think for yourself: have you ever heard people talking to each other in verse? And if we tried to talk to one another in verse all the time, even if the higher authorities ordered us to, how much do you think we’d be able to say? No, poetry, that’s not a serious thing.”

“You’re so clever about everything,” the woman’s voice said with even more ingratiating tenderness. “How do you manage to think about all those things?”

“That’s nothing compared with what I might have known if it hadn’t been for the bad luck that’s haunted me ever since my birth. I would have liked to kill in a duel the man who called me a bastard just because I was born fatherless to Reeking Lizaveta. And there were so many who threw that in my face in Moscow. I guess they must have learned of it from Gregory. He reproaches me for having rebelled against my birth. ‘You,’ he says, ‘tore her open when you came out.’ Well, I don’t know about tearing her open, but I certainly would rather have been killed in her womb than been brought into this world. I’ve heard in the market place, and your mother, most inconsiderate of my feelings, also told me, that Lizaveta went around with her hair standing on end and that she was just a
wee bit
 over four feet; she dragged out those words, although she could perfectly well have said a wee bit in the ordinary way. I guess she was trying to move me to tears, imagining that a peasant could be stirred to tears by it because it is, so to speak, a peasant’s way of feeling. Can a Russian peasant resent an educated person? No, he can’t, because he’s too ignorant to have any feelings at all. But ever since I was a small child, whenever I heard people say a 
wee bit
 like that, I felt like smashing my head against a wall. I hate Russia and everything about it, Maria.”

“If you’d been a young army officer, a dashing hussar, or something of that sort, you’d have drawn your sword and rushed off to fight for Russia.”

“I not only have no wish to be an army officer, Maria, I’d like to do away with soldiers altogether.”

“But what would happen if the enemy attacked us? Who’d defend us then?”

“There’s no need to. In 1812 Napoleon I, the French emperor, the father of the present Napoleon, invaded Russia, and it would have been better if he’d conquered us right then, because those French are a clever nation and it would have been a good thing if they’d annexed our stupid country. Things would have been quite different around here today, believe me!”

“As if they were so much better over there in those countries than we are here! Let me tell you, I wouldn’t exchange some of our handsome Russian men for three young Englishmen even,” the woman said, probably accompanying these words with a languorous look.

“Well, that’s a matter of personal preference.”

“But you yourself, you look like a foreigner. You look like a regular foreign gentleman. I have to tell you that, even if it makes me blush.”

“If you want to know the truth, I can tell you, when it comes to vice, people are the same all over, whether in this country or over there. They’re all low scoundrels; the only difference is that over there they swagger around in shiny patent leather boots, while our native scoundrels are poor and filthy and stink, and it doesn’t bother them in the least. What the Russian people need is flogging, as Mr. Karamazov said yesterday, and he was right, crazy as he is with those sons of his.”

“But you told me you had great respect for his son Ivan, didn’t you?”

“But he said I’m a stinking flunkey. He thinks I might rise up against the way things are, but he’s dead wrong there: if only I had a bit of ready cash, I’d clear out of here right away. And take the other son, Dmitry: that one behaves much worse than any flunkey I’ve ever seen, and he doesn’t have any more brains or any more money than a flunkey, and he isn’t any good at anything, but that doesn’t prevent everybody around from treating him like a gentleman and respecting him. I’m just a cook, of course, but with some luck I could perhaps get myself a restaurant in Moscow, in the Petrovka district, or somewhere around there, because I know something special about cooking that none of them in Moscow knows, except for the foreigners. Now again, Dmitry, who doesn’t have a kopek to his name, can challenge the son of the most important count in all Russia to a duel, if he wants, and the fellow would accept his challenge. But why is he better than me? Is it because he’s stupider than I am and has managed to pour lots of money down the drain with nothing to show for it?”

“I think duels are very nice,” the woman remarked surprisingly.

“In what way are they nice?”

“It’s brave and frightening, especially if they’re young officers firing at one another with their pistols because of some lady. It’s a lovely picture! I wish they’d let ladies come and watch those duels. I’d love to see one!”

“It’s all right as long as it’s you who’s aiming the pistol, but when it’s the other fellow who’s taking good aim at your mug, you feel pretty stupid, you know. You wouldn’t stay and watch, Maria, you’d be in a big hurry to get out of there.”

“And what about you? Would you run away too? I can’t believe it!”

Smerdyakov ignored this. After a minute of silence, the guitar resounded again and the falsetto drawled the final verse of the song:

*

Cost me what it may,

I shall get away,

Be merry and gay.

For the capital I’ll leave,

Never again grieve,

Have no cause to grieve.

*

At that moment something quite unforeseen happened: Alyosha suddenly sneezed. The two on the bench fell silent. Alyosha got up and went over to them. There was Smerdyakov, with his hair pomaded, perhaps even curled, wearing a pair of glittering patent leather shoes. The guitar lay on the bench beside him. Maria, the daughter of the landlady, was wearing a light blue dress with a six-foot train. She was still quite young and might have been described as pretty if her face had not been so very round and so terribly freckled.

“Do you know whether my brother Dmitry will be back soon?” Alyosha asked in as casual a tone as he could muster.

Smerdyakov rose slowly from the bench. Maria, too, got up.

“I am not informed as to the whereabouts of Mr. Dmitry,” Smerdyakov said quietly, in a measured, scornful tone. “I am not employed to look after him, am I?”

“I simply asked in case you happened to know,” Alyosha explained.

“I know nothing of Mr. Dmitry’s whereabouts, nor do I want to know.”

“But he told me that it was you who kept him informed of what was going on in my father’s house and that you’d promised to let him know when Miss Grushenka came.”

Smerdyakov, slowly raising his eyes, looked imperturbably at Alyosha.

“But what about you, Mr. Alexei? How did you get in here? I know the gate was locked more than an hour ago,” he said, looking intently at Alyosha.

“I climbed over the fence in the sidestreet and came directly to the summer house. I hope you’ll forgive me,” he said, addressing Maria, “I was trying to catch my brother. I must see him urgently.”

“Oh, we don’t mind at all. How could we!” she said, flattered by Alyosha’s politeness. “Anyway, that’s how Mr. Dmitry gets in when he comes here—sometimes we don’t even know it and he’s already sitting in the summer house.”

“It’s terribly important that I see him now—I had hoped to find him here or to find out from you where he was. It is extremely important for him.”

“I’m afraid he doesn’t tell us of his comings and goings, sir,” Maria murmured.

“And even though I was here as a guest,” Smerdyakov said, “Mr. Dmitry kept pestering me even here, asking me questions all the time about my master, like what’s going on in the house, who comes, who leaves, and whether I haven’t anything else to report. Twice he even threatened to kill me.”

“What do you mean, to kill you?”

“Why, that’s nothing so special for a man of Mr. Dmitry’s character. You saw for yourself yesterday the sort of a man he is. ‘If,’ he said to me, ‘you let Miss Grushenka into the house and she spends the night there, you’ll be the first I’ll kill.’ I’m very scared of him, and if I wasn’t even more scared of complaining to the police, I’d have done it long ago. One can never tell what a man like Mr. Dmitry might do.”

“‘I’ll pound you in a mortar’—that’s what Mr. Dmitry said to him the other day,” Maria chimed in.

“Well, if he said in a mortar, then it must have been just talk,” Alyosha said. “But I’ll speak to him about that too, if I manage to find him now.”

“This is what I can tell you, Mr. Alexei, but no more than this,” Smerdyakov said, apparently having made up his mind. “I come to visit my neighbors here and there’s no reason I shouldn’t, is there? On the other hand, your other brother, Mr. Ivan, sent me very early this morning to Mr. Dmitry’s place on Lake Street, to tell Mr. Dmitry—he gave me no letter to deliver—to be at the inn on the square today without fail and that they’d eat lunch together there. I got to Mr. Dmitry’s place at eight in the morning, but his landlord told me he’d already left. ‘He was here but he’s left now’—that’s exactly what they told me. Looks to me like there’s some kind of plot between them. But perhaps Mr. Dmitry is at the inn by now with his brother, because Mr. Ivan didn’t come home for lunch today and so your father, Mr. Karamazov, had lunch all by himself and is having his nap now. But I beg you never to mention me or what I’ve just told you to Mr. Dmitry, because he’d kill me for much less, I’m sure.”

“Ivan asked Dmitry to meet him at the inn for lunch today?” Alyosha asked quickly.

“Yes, sir, just as I said.”

“The Capital City Inn?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s very probable,” Alyosha cried excitedly. “Thank you very much, Smerdyakov. I think I’ll go over there right away.”

“But please don’t give me away, Mr. Alexei, remember.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll pretend to have gone there by chance.”

“Wait, I’ll unlock the gate for you,” Maria cried.

“Don’t bother, it’s quicker this way. I’ll climb over the fence again.”

Alyosha was quite shocked by the news and hurried off to the inn. He felt it would be awkward to go into the inn in his cassock, but he could inquire downstairs whether his brothers were there and ask them to come down to see him. But as he approached the inn, a window opened and Ivan himself called out to him: “Alyosha, could you come in here please. I’d very much appreciate it if you would.”

“I’d like to very much . . . But what about the way I’m dressed?”

“That’s all right, I’m in a private room. Come in and I’ll come downstairs to meet you.”

A minute later Alyosha was sitting at the table with Ivan. Ivan was alone. He was having lunch.

Chapter 3: The Brothers Get Acquainted

IVAN WAS not really in a private room, however. He had merely been given a table by a window that was screened off from the rest of the dining room so that they could not be seen by the other customers. This was the first dining room off the entrance and it had a bar along one wall. The waiters kept dashing back and forth to the bar. There was only one other customer, an old retired army officer who was having tea at a table in a corner. But the usual tavern noises could be heard clearly from the other rooms: calls for the waiters, the opening of beer bottles, the clinking of billiard balls, the droning of an organ . . . Alyosha knew that Ivan hardly ever came to this inn, that in general he had no liking for such places, and that, consequently, he must have come especially to meet Dmitry. But Dmitry was not there.

“Let me order some fish soup for you, or anything you like,” Ivan said, apparently extremely pleased that Alyosha was there. “You can’t possibly subsist on tea alone,” he added.

He himself had finished eating and was drinking tea.

“All right, order me some fish soup and then tea. I’m quite hungry,” Alyosha said cheerfully.

“And what about some cherry jam? They have some here. Remember how much you liked it when you were little and we lived at Polenov’s?”

“How can you remember that? Good, get me cherry jam too. I still like it.”

Ivan rang for the waiter and ordered fish soup, tea, and jam.

“I remember everything, Alyosha. I remember you up to the age of eleven. I was fifteen then. Fifteen and eleven—that much difference in age makes it impossible for two brothers to be very close. I’m not even sure whether I had any affection for you then. When I left for Moscow, I don’t believe I ever thought of you during the first few years. Then, when you came to Moscow yourself, I remember meeting you only once and I can’t even recall on what occasion. And now I’ve been living here for more than three months and we’ve hardly spoken two words to each other. Well, I’m leaving tomorrow and I was just thinking that I’d like to see you before I went, to say good-by to you, when all of a sudden I saw you walking along.”