The Brothers Karamazov (121 page)

“I’m no poodle,” Gregory grumbled.

“All right, it’s I who am the poodle then!” Mitya cried. “If I have insulted him, I take the insult on myself: I was a brute and I was horrible to him! And I was also horrible to old Aesop . . .”

“Who is Aesop?” the presiding judge asked sternly.

“Well, Pierrot . . . I mean my father, Fyodor Karamazov.”

The presiding judge again admonished Mitya to choose his words more carefully.

“You are harming yourself in the opinion of your judges,” he said.

The defense counsel was just as nimble in dealing with Rakitin. It must be said that Rakitin was one of the witnesses the prosecutor considered extremely important and on whose testimony he reckoned greatly. It sounded as if Rakitin knew a great deal, as if he had seen everything, been everywhere, spoken to everybody, was familiar with every detail of Fyodor Karamazov’s life story and, indeed, of the life stories of all the Karamazovs. It is true, though, that it was only from the accused that he had heard about the envelope with the three thousand rubles in it. He made up for this by describing at great length Mitya’s various exploits at the Capital City Inn, repeating all Mitya’s compromising statements and threats, and telling of the incident between Mitya and Captain Snegirev, whom the accused had dragged out of the tavern by his “back-scrubber.”

But not even Rakitin could shed any light on whether the father still owed the son something in the settlement of Mitya’s mother’s estate and contented himself with a few general scornful remarks to the effect that it was impossible to tell who had cheated whom “in all that Karamazov mess.” He presented the whole tragedy of the accused and of the crime as a product of outdated mores surviving from the days of serfdom and of the chaos prevailing in Russia because of the lack of proper social organization and adequate public services. In short, he was given a chance to say his piece. Indeed, it was as a witness at this trial that Mr. Mikhail Rakitin attracted public attention to himself and was given the opportunity to show the world the stuff he was made of. The prosecutor knew that Rakitin was preparing a magazine article on the true causes behind this crime and later, in his summation, mentioned, as we shall see, some of the ideas contained in that article, which shows that he was already familiar with it. The picture drawn by Rakitin was grim and tragic and it seemed to further strengthen the position of the prosecution. In general, Rakitin’s account seduced the public through the independence of its ideas and the loftiness of its vision. There were even two or three spontaneous bursts of applause at passages in which he denounced serfdom and the chaos Russia was now experiencing in its wake. However, Rakitin, being still very young, made one small slip, on which Fetyukovich at once capitalized. Well aware of his success with the audience and somewhat dazzled by the noble and idealized position he had attained on the wings of his eloquence, he allowed himself to use a rather scornful tone concerning Grushenka, referring to her as “Samsonov’s kept woman.” He would have given anything to take the words back afterward, for it was on them that Fetyukovich caught him. And it all happened because Rakitin had never imagined that the defense counsel could have become so quickly acquainted with the subtlest detail of the situation.

“May I ask you this,” Fetyukovich said with a most amiable and even respectful smile, when his turn came to cross-examine this hostile witness, “you, of course, are the same Mr. Rakitin who wrote the pamphlet 
Life of the Deceased Elder, Father Zosima,
 that was published by the ecclesiastical authorities. I read it quite recently and I found many profound, religious thoughts in it. I enjoyed particularly your pious introduction dedicated to the Bishop. I was really impressed.”

“It wasn’t meant for publication . . . They decided to publish it later . . .” Rakitin muttered, somewhat taken aback. He sounded rather apologetic, almost ashamed.

“Oh, I think it’s wonderful! I’m sure that a thinker of your caliber must approach every social phenomenon with a perfectly open mind and have a very unprejudiced view of things. Thanks to the patronage of the Bishop, your very useful pamphlet was widely circulated and thus has been even more beneficial . . . But what I really meant to ask you was this: you stated in your deposition that you were very well acquainted with Miss Svetlov. Is that correct?”

(It was at the trial, by the way, that I heard Grushenka’s last name for the first time—I had not been aware of it until then.)

“I cannot be held answerable for every person I know . . .” Rakitin replied, at once flushing all over. “You don’t really expect a young man to be responsible for all the people he comes across, do you?”

“Of course not, of course not, I understand that perfectly!” Fetyukovich exclaimed with feigned embarrassment, as if he were trying to apologize for his grossness. “It is quite natural that you, just like any other young man, might be interested in knowing a young and beautiful woman who readily entertained the local young élite . . . However, I would like you to clear up the following point for me: we know that a couple of months ago Miss Svetlov was anxious to meet the youngest of the Karamazovs and that she had promised to pay you twenty-five rubles if you brought him to her in his monastic attire. We also know that the meeting in question took place on the very day that was to end in the catastrophe which led to the present trial. So, on that same day, you took Alexei Karamazov to Miss Svetlov’s house—and received twenty-five rubles from her for that service? I would like to hear what you have to say about it.”

“It was a kind of joke . . . I don’t see, though, why it should concern you . . . I took the money, planning to give it back to her later.”

“So you did take the money? But you still haven’t returned it, have you?”

“That is nonsense,” Rakitin muttered. “I can’t answer that sort of question . . . Besides, of course, I’ll give it back.”

The presiding judge intervened, but the defense counsel announced that he was through with Mr. Rakitin, and Mr. Rakitin stepped down from the witness box rather deflated. The impression created by his lofty, altruistic flights was spoiled and, as he was leaving, Fetyukovich accompanied him with a gaze that seemed to say: “Well, well, well, so that’s how high-minded the witnesses for the prosecution are!”

I remember that here, too, Mitya could not keep quiet. Enraged by Rakitin’s tone when he spoke of Grushenka, Mitya suddenly cried out from his place: “You Bernard!” Then, after Rakitin had been excused, the presiding judge asked the accused whether he wished to comment on his testimony. Mitya shouted in a resounding voice:

“He’s been borrowing money from me while I’ve been in prison, and he’s a contemptible Bernard and a careerist who doesn’t believe in God and who has deceived the Bishop!”

Obviously Mitya was called to order again, but that took care of Rakitin completely.

Captain Snegirev did not fare any better as a witness, but for quite a different reason. He appeared in dirty, tattered clothes and muddy shoes and, despite all precautions and a preliminary examination by medical experts, he turned out to be quite seriously drunk. When asked about the insult he had suffered at Mitya’s hands, he refused to answer.

“May God forgive him,” Snegirev said. “Ilyusha didn’t want me to complain. God will make it up to me some time . . .”

“Who told you that? Who are you referring to?”

“To my son, to Ilyusha. He said to me: ‘Papa, papa, ah, the way he treated you!’ He said that by the stone. And now he’s dying.”

Snegirev began to sob and all of a sudden threw himself at the feet of the presiding judge. He was quickly led out amidst the laughter of the audience. The effect the prosecutor had hoped to achieve by his testimony was completely lost.

The defense counsel continued to use every possible trick and he astounded everybody by his intimate knowledge of the minutest detail of the case.

For instance, under direct examination, the testimony of the innkeeper at Mokroye, Trifon, created an impression extremely unfavorable to Mitya. He almost proved by counting on his fingers that, during his first wild party at Mokroye, Mitya 
must
 have spent “three thousand rubles, or just short of that figure but something very close to it.” He dwelt on the sums Mitya had squandered on the gypsy girls, and, as to “our lousy” peasants, he didn’t toss them each just half-ruble pieces, but twenty-five-ruble bills! And all the money they stole from him—they didn’t give him receipts for it, so we’d never know how much it was.

“The villagers are all thieves,” Trifon said. “They don’t care about saving their souls . . . And you should have seen the money the village women got out of him! They’re rich now, believe me. They’ll never go hungry no more!”

In short, Trifon claimed to remember every item of Mitya’s expenses and to have added them up in his mind, “like on my abacus.” And so Mitya’s claim that he had spent only fifteen hundred rubles that night and sewed the rest up in the rag appeared quite untenable. “I saw the three thousand in his hands with my own eyes. I’m pretty used to handling money and can tell!” the innkeeper insisted, trying hard to please “the authorities.”

But when the witness was handed over to Fetyukovich for cross-examination, the lawyer made only a token attempt to refute his testimony and, instead, brought up another incident from Mitya’s first wild party at Mokroye a month before his arrest: at that time Timofei the coachman and another man named Akim had found in the passage a hundred-ruble bill that Mitya had dropped when he was drunk, and had given it to the innkeeper, who had given them one ruble each.

“Well,” Fetyukovich wanted to know, “did you return the hundred rubles to Mr. Karamazov?”

Trifon tried hard to deny the story, but after the two men had been called in to repeat their account, he finally admitted it, although he insisted that he had at once given the hundred rubles back to Mr. Karamazov, who of course, he remarked, could not possibly remember it, “on account of the state he was in at that time.” However, since the witness had first repeatedly denied an incident which he later admitted to, his whole testimony lost much of its credibility and the inn-keeper’s honesty was put very much in question.

The same discrediting technique was applied to the Poles, who came in with haughty and arrogant airs, declared that they were “servants of the Crown,” that the accused “had tried to buy their honor for three thousand rubles,” and that they themselves had seen him holding in his hands “large sums of money.” Pan Musijalowicz used a number of Polish words and expressions, and when he saw that this seemed to impress the presiding judge and the prosecutor, he was inspired to switch to Polish almost entirely. But Fetyukovich made short shrift of their reputations too. He had the inn-keeper recalled to the stand and, despite the man’s obvious ill-will, made him testify to Pan Wrublewski’s substituting a deck of marked cards for the one Trifon had given him and Pan Musijalowicz’s cheating when dealing. And this was also confirmed by Kalganov when he was called, so the Poles left disgraced, accompanied by laughter.

And the same pattern was maintained with all the more dangerous witnesses. In every case, Fetyukovich succeeded in casting aspersions on their reputations and they looked a bit ridiculous when he was through with them. The jurists and the connoisseurs admired his nimbleness, although, as I said before, they were not sure how it could change the situation for, despite everything, the case for the prosecution seemed more and more clear cut. But the self-confidence and calm of that “great magician” made them wonder: a lawyer of his caliber would never have bothered to come all the way from Petersburg, to return with nothing to show for his efforts. He certainly did not seem to be that sort of a man.

Chapter 3: The Medical Experts And A Pound Of Nuts

THE TESTIMONY of the medical experts was of little help to the accused. Actually, as became obvious later, Fetyukovich had never expected much from it. Primarily, it had been Katerina’s idea and it was she who had insisted on bringing in the Moscow luminary. The defense, of course, could lose nothing by it and with luck might even derive some advantage from it. As it turned out, it contributed a touch of comedy because of the differences in the experts’ opinions. The three medical experts were the famous Moscow practitioner, our old Dr. Herzenstube, and Varvinsky, a young doctor who had moved to our town quite recently. The latter two had also appeared as ordinary witnesses for the prosecution.

The first expert to testify was seventy-year-old Dr. Herzenstube, a sturdily built old man of medium height with a gray crown of hair surrounding a bald dome. He was greatly liked and esteemed in our town. He was a conscientious physician, a kindly, pious man, a member either of the Herrnhuter Society or the Moravian Brethren, I’m not sure which. He had lived in our town for many years and had always behaved with great dignity. He was a good and humane man, who gave his medical services free to the poor, visiting them in their huts and hovels, and even leaving them money to buy the medicines he prescribed. But, for all his kindness, he was as stubborn as a mule. Once he had got an idea into his head, it was quite hopeless to try and make him change his mind. By the way, everybody in town knew that, within two or three days of his arrival in town, the famous Moscow doctor had indulged in some extremely disparaging remarks about Dr. Herzenstube’s professional competence. This came about because, although the Moscow luminary charged at least twenty-five rubles a visit, people were anxious to take advantage of his presence in town and rushed to consult him. Otherwise, of course, they were all Dr. Herzenstube’s regular patients. But the Moscow doctor turned out to be sharply critical of Herzenstube’s treatments, and after a few days, when he saw a patient for the first time, the doctor would begin by saying something like: “Well, well, hm . . . looks as if Dr. Herzenstube has been trying one of those treatments of his own on you? Ha-ha!” Obviously, it wasn’t long before Dr. Herzenstube heard about this.