Crime and Punishment (21 page)

‘What about some tea? Do you want some? I'll bring it for you; there's still some left…’

‘No… I shall go; I'll go there right now,’ he muttered, getting to his feet.

‘You don't look to me as though you could get downstairs.’

‘I'll go…’

‘It's up to you…’

She followed the yardkeeper out of the room. Immediately he rushed to the light in order to examine the sock and the trouser-ends: ‘There are some stains, but they're not very noticeable; the blood's all covered in dirt and grime, it's got discoloured. If one didn't know in advance, one would never see it. That means that Nastasya can't have noticed anything – she was too far away, thank God!’ Then with trepidation he broke the seal on the summons and began to read it; it took him a long, long time to do so, and at last he understood. It was an ordinary summons from the local police authority, requesting him to report to the district superintendent's bureau that very same morning at nine-thirty.

‘When has this ever happened before? I never have any dealings with the police! And why today all of a sudden?’ he thought in tormented wonderment. ‘O Lord, let it be over quickly!’ He nearly dropped to his knees in order to pray, but then burst out laughing – not at the notion of praying, but at himself. He quickly began to dress. ‘If the game's up, it's up, and there's nothing I can do about it. Why don't I put the sock on?’ he thought, suddenly. ‘It'll get even more dirt on it that way, and
the marks will disappear.’ As soon as he put it on, however, he tore it off again in revulsion and horror. But, having done so, he remembered that he had no others, and he picked it up and put it back on – and burst out laughing once more. ‘This is the way it is in story-books, it's all relative, all just for form's sake,’ he thought fleetingly, in some remote periphery of his mind, and he trembled in every limb. ‘I mean, look, I've put it on! That's what it has come to – I've put it on!’ His laughter was, however, instantly replaced by despair. ‘No, I'm not strong enough…’ he thought. His legs were trembling. ‘With terror,’ he muttered to himself. His head was spinning and aching with fever. ‘It's a ruse! They're using cunning in order to lure me there, and then they'll knock me for six,’ he went on to himself, as he started to go downstairs. ‘The worst of it is that I'm almost delirious… I may go and say something stupid…’

As he was going downstairs he remembered that he had left all the gold objects in the hole behind the wallpaper. ‘They may easily make a search of the place while I'm gone,’ he reflected, and came to a halt. But he was suddenly overcome by such despair and by such cynicism with regard to his own downfall, if one may use such an expression, that he waved his hand in impatience and continued his descent.

‘Just let it be over quickly!…’

Outside the heat was once again unbearable; not a single drop of rain all these days. Again the dust, brick and lime, again the stench from the little shops and drinking dens, again at every moment the drunks, the Finnish pedlars and the cabs that were practically falling to bits. The sun was glaring brightly into his eyes, making them hurt, and his head had begun to go round with a will – the usual sensation of a person in a fever who suddenly comes out to the street on a bright, sunny day.

When he reached the turning into
yesterday
'
s
street, he glanced along it in an agony of anxiety, to
that
house… and immediately looked away.

‘If they ask me about it I may tell them,’ he thought, as he approached the building that housed the bureau.

The bureau was only about a quarter of a verst from where he lived. It had recently been transferred to new quarters on the
fourth floor of a new building. He had once been briefly in the old quarters, but that had been a very long time ago. As he walked in through the entrance-way he saw a staircase to the right, down which a muzhik was coming with a book in his hand. ‘That'll be a yardkeeper; that means the bureau's up there,’ and he began to climb the staircase on the off-chance that this was the right one. He did not want to have to ask anyone the way.

‘I shall go in, get down on my knees and tell them everything,’ he thought as he went on up to the fourth floor.

The staircase was small, narrow, steep and awash with dirty water. All the doors of all the kitchens of all the apartments on all four floors were open on to this staircase and remained so all day. This produced a terrible, airless heat. Coming up and down the stairs were yardkeepers with house-books under their arms, police clerks and various tradespeople of both sexes – the callers. The door into the bureau itself was also open wide. He went in and halted in the vestibule. Some muzhiks were standing around there, waiting. Here too the airless heat was extreme and, in addition, from the newly decorated rooms there was a nauseating stink of paint that had not yet dried, and had been ground in rotten drying-oil. Having waited for a bit, he decided to move on, into the next room. All the rooms were tiny and low-ceilinged. A terrible impatience kept drawing him further and further. No one paid any attention to him. In the second room some scribes sat copying, dressed only slightly better than he was himself, a strange-looking bunch. He turned to one of them.

‘What do you want?’

He held up the summons he had received from the bureau.

‘Are you a student?’ asked the scribe, glancing at the summons.

‘Yes, an ex-student.’

The scribe let his eyes pass over him, but without a flicker of curiosity. He was an extremely rumpled-looking man, with some fixed idea in his gaze.

‘It's no good asking him, because he couldn't care less,’ Raskolnikov thought.

‘Go in there and see the clerk,’ said the scribe, pointing ahead to the very furthest room.

He went into this room (the fourth in sequence), which was cramped and full to overflowing with members of the public – people dressed slightly better than those in the other rooms. Among these callers were two ladies. One was in mourning; dressed in widow's weeds, she sat on the other side of the clerk's desk, facing him, while she wrote down something he was dictating to her. The other lady, who was very plump and had a reddish-purple, blotched complexion, a stately woman, most opulently attired, with a brooch at her bosom the size of a saucer, stood to one side and was waiting for something. Raskolnikov thrust his summons towards the clerk. The clerk gave it a fleeting glance, told him to wait and continued his business with the lady in mourning.

His breath came more easily now. ‘It's definitely not about the other!’ Gradually his spirits began to revive, and he inwardly exhorted himself to have courage and gather his thoughts.

‘The slightest stupid mistake, the slightest little indiscretion and I may easily give myself away entirely! Hm… it's a pity there's no air in here,’ he went on. ‘It's so stuffy… My head is getting even dizzier… and my mind, too…’

He was experiencing a terrible sense of disorder that affected his whole being. He was afraid he would lose control of himself. He tried to fasten his attention on something, think about something – anything at all – that had nothing whatever to do with all this, but failed completely. The clerk, on the other hand, he found intensely interesting: he wanted to guess everything by his features, penetrate the very heart of his being. This clerk was a young man of about twenty-two; he had a swarthy, mobile physiognomy that made him look older than his years, and he was fashionably, even foppishly dressed: his hair was parted at the back of his head, thoroughly combed and pomaded, and there were a large number of rings and signets on his white, scrubbed fingers, and gold chains on his waistcoat. With one of the foreign visitors to his room he had even exchanged a word or two in French, and quite passably at that.

‘Luiza Ivanovna, you'd better sit down,’ he said cursorily to
the overdressed reddish-purple lady, who was still standing as if she did not dare to sit down, even though there was a chair beside her.

‘
Ich danke
,’ she said quietly, lowering herself on to the chair with a silken, swishing sound. Her light-blue dress with its white lace trimmings spread around the chair like a balloon, taking up practically half the room. There was a smell of perfume. But the lady was plainly abashed at taking up half the room and at smelling so strongly of perfume, in spite of the fact that she was smiling in a way that was timorous and brazen at the same time, though with obvious uneasiness.

The lady in mourning finally completed what she was doing and began to get up. Suddenly, with a certain amount of clamour, an officer made an extremely dashing entrance, swinging his shoulders in a peculiar way with every step he took, threw his cap with its cockade on to the desk and sat down in one of the armchairs. The opulent lady fairly leapt up from her chair at the sight of him, and began to drop curtsies with a singular enthusiasm; but the officer paid her not the slightest attention, and she did not dare to sit down again while he was there. He was a lieutenant, the superintendent's auxiliary, with a horizontal reddish moustache that jutted out in both directions and a face that was extremely small-featured and expressed nothing much except a certain insolence. He gave Raskolnikov a sidelong glance that was tinged with indignation: those clothes he was wearing were really in a shocking state, yet in spite of his humiliating position his bearing was not in keeping with his clothes; Raskolnikov, caught off his guard, had cast too long and direct a look at him, so that the officer had taken offence.

‘What's your business?’ he bawled, doubtless astonished that a ragged fellow such as this had not been reduced to nothing by his lightning-charged gaze.

‘I was told to report… I got a summons…’ Raskolnikov managed to reply.

‘It's about the exaction proceedings for the recovery of funds from him, from the
student
,’ the clerk said, beginning to bustle about as he stopped working on his document. ‘Here!’ And he
threw Raskolnikov the book, pointing out the relevant place. ‘Read that!’

‘Funds? What funds?’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘But that means it's definitely not about the other!’ And he shuddered with relief. He suddenly began to feel terribly, inexpressibly lighthearted. All his cares seemed to lift from his shoulders.

‘And what time does it say you were supposed to be here, my dear sir?’ the lieutenant bawled, for some unknown reason growing more and more outraged. ‘You're down for nine, but it's after eleven now!’

‘I was only served the summons a quarter of an hour ago,’ Raskolnikov answered loudly over his shoulder, suddenly also losing his temper in spite of himself and even taking a certain pleasure in it. ‘It ought to be enough that I've come at all, since I'm ill and have a fever.’

‘Be so good as not to shout, will you?’

‘I'm not shouting, I'm talking quite softly; it's you who are shouting at me – but I'm a student and won't allow people to shout at me.’

This made the assistant so livid that for a moment he was incapable of speech, and all that happened was that some spittle came flying from his lips. He leapt up from his seat.

‘Be si-i-i-lent! You're in a government bureau. None of your r-r-rudeness, sir!’

‘You're in a government bureau, too,’ Raskolnikov exclaimed, ‘and what's more, by shouting and by smoking that cigarette you're letting us all down.’ Having said this, he felt an inexpressible sense of enjoyment.

The clerk looked at them with a smile. The quick-tempered lieutenant was visibly taken aback.

‘That's not your concern, sir!’ he cried, at last, in an unnaturally loud voice. ‘And now kindly be so good as to make the statement that's required of you. Show him, Aleksandr Grigoryevich. We've had complaints about you! You don't pay your bills. Crikey, a fine, upstanding young fellow you are, and no mistake!’

But Raskolnikov was no longer listening; he had greedily snatched up the document, in search of a speedy resolution of
the problem. He read it through once, and then a second time, but understood nothing.

‘What's this?’ he asked the clerk.

‘It's a document demanding funds from you in acknowledgement of debt – an exaction note. You must either pay it in full with all due penalties, including those for late payment, or else file a written statement saying when you will be able to pay it, and you must also undertake not to leave the capital nor to sell or conceal any property you may possess. The creditor, on the other hand, is empowered to sell your property, and to take proceedings against you in accordance with the law.’

‘But I… don't owe anyone anything!’

‘That's no concern of ours. All we know is we've received an overdue and legally protested acknowledgement of debt in the sum of a hundred and fifteen roubles, issued by you some nine months ago to the collegiate assessor's widow Zarnitsyna, and discharged by her in transfer to the court councillor Chebarov, and we've called you in so you can file your statement.’

‘But, I mean, she's my landlady!’

‘So, what if she is?’

The clerk smiled at him with a look of pitying condescension which was accompanied by one of a certain triumph, as if this were some new conscript who had only just begun to face life under fire, and as though to say: ‘Well, what do you feel like now?’ But what, what did he care now about acknowledgements of debt and exaction notes? Did all that warrant even a moment's anxiety now, even a moment's attention? He stood, read, listened, answered, even asked questions himself, but did it all mechanically. An exultant sense of self-preservation, of having escaped from the danger that had been crushing him – that was what filled the whole of his being at that moment, and it contained no predictions, no analysis, no plans or guesses about the future, no doubts and no questions. It was a moment of total, spontaneous, purely animal joy. But at that very moment there occurred in the bureau something akin to thunder and lightning. The lieutenant, still in a state of complete shock from the lack of respect he had been shown, burning with anger, and evidently wishing to bolster up his damaged self-esteem,
descended like all the gods of war upon the unfortunate ‘opulent lady’ who had been looking at him, ever since he had come in, with a thoroughly stupid smile.