The Brothers Karamazov (131 page)

“This is how I imagine Karamazov must have felt. ‘They can’t have found out anything yet, and by the time they do, I’ll manage to think up something . . . But now, now . . . ah, she’s so beautiful!’ Deep down, he feels frightened and bewildered, but he still manages to count off half the sum he has on him and hide it somewhere—for I can find no other explanation of what happened to half the three thousand rubles he had taken a few hours earlier from under his father’s pillow.

“It was not the first time the accused had been in Mokroye; he had been there once before and had reveled for two days and nights. He knew that big wooden inn very well, with all its barns, sheds, and verandahs. For I believe he hid a part of the money there shortly before his arrest, stuffed it into some hole, some chink under the floorboards, or in a little corner under the roof. And why did he hide it? That’s obvious: disaster could descend on him at any moment after all, and he still hadn’t had time to think up a plan of defense, because his head was throbbing and he could not think of anything but 
her.
 But money, he would need money in any case, for, in order to feel like a man, a man must have money. You may think that it is unlikely that a man like that would be so calculating at such a moment. But let me remind you that he himself tried to assure us that he had, a month earlier, at another moment of crisis, divided three thousand rubles in two and sewn up half the sum in a little bag. And although that is untrue, as we shall prove, it shows that the idea was not alien to Karamazov and that, indeed, it had occurred to him. I would suggest, moreover, that when he later tried to assure the examining magistrate that he had sewn fifteen hundred rubles up in a bag a month before, he was able to invent that story about the little bag so quickly—the little bag that never really existed—precisely because a couple of hours earlier he had taken half the money he had on him and hidden it somewhere in the Mokroye inn until morning, so as not to have it on him, because he had suddenly had a feeling that something might happen after all. Two abysses, gentlemen of the jury, you must remember that Karamazov was capable of contemplating two abysses at the same time! We have searched the house, but have found nothing. Perhaps the money is still there. Perhaps it vanished from there the next day and is now again in the possession of the accused. In any case, when arrested, he was with his lady love; actually he was kneeling before her with his hands stretched out to her, as she lay on the bed, and he was so oblivious of everything else at that moment that he did not even hear those who had come to arrest him. And he had no ready answers—both he and his reason had been taken by surprise.

“Now he is facing his judges, facing the men who will determine his fate. There are moments, gentlemen of the jury, when our duty terrifies us, when we are frightened to face the man whose fate we must decide, when we are afraid for that man! These are the moments when we recognize in the accused the animal terror that seizes him when he realizes that all is lost, although he continues to fight back because his instinct for self-preservation has been aroused. As he is trying to save himself, he looks at you so intently, with such questioning and suffering eyes; he studies your faces and expressions; he tries to guess your thoughts; he tries to anticipate from which side the blow will fall and forms thousands of plans in his throbbing brain, but he is still afraid to talk, afraid to give himself away . . . These are humiliating moments for a man to experience; it is a calvary, it is an animal yearning to escape—it is all so horrible that it makes you shudder and fills you with compassion, for there is compassion for the criminal, even in the investigating magistrate! And, in this case, we all felt it.

“At first he was dumbfounded, terror-stricken, and in his panic he blurted out some highly compromising words and phrases like, ‘Blood!’ and, ‘Serves me right!’ But he soon managed to take hold of himself. He had not yet thought out what to say, how to answer our questions, but he was ready for us with his stubborn denial: ‘I did not kill my father!’ This was his first line of defense, his first barricade, and behind that barricade he hoped to be able to build another where he could make a stand. He started by explaining that his first compromising outcries had referred to Gregory, because he believed he was guilty of Gregory’s death—‘That, I admit, I am responsible for. But who could have killed father, 
since it was not me?
 Who could it possibly have been?’ You understand, he is asking this of us, of us who have come to ask him that very question! And I want you to note the form of his question, in which the assumption, ‘
Since
 it was not me,’ is taken for granted. Note the animal cunning of it, combined with the naivety and the impulsiveness characteristic of a Karamazov. He is telling us he did not kill his father and we should not for a second think that he could have done such a thing, although he goes on to admit that the idea of killing his father had occurred to him and had tempted him. Yes, he admits that at once, urgently, but then adds: ‘Although I wanted to kill him, it was not I who killed him.’ So he makes a concession to us: he felt like killing his father. This, he believes, will make him seem sincere and make us believe he is telling the truth when he assures us that, nevertheless, he did not do it.

“Oh, in these instances, a criminal often becomes very credulous and thoughtless. And so, as if by chance, he was asked, in the simplest and most direct way, whether it might not have been Smerdyakov. His reaction was just what we had anticipated: he was very annoyed that we should have brought Smerdyakov up before he had and thus caught him off balance. For he had been waiting to bring in Smerdyakov at the moment he felt would be most effective for his defense. And, in keeping with his temperament, he at once went to the opposite extreme and started assuring us that Smerdyakov could not have possibly killed his father, that, indeed, a man like that would be quite incapable of ever killing anyone. But don’t believe he was sincere—it was just a trick on his part. He had not given up his plans for implicating Smerdyakov: he would still use him, for there was no one else he could use, but he would do it later, because for the time being that move had been spoiled for him. He might wait to bring in Smerdyakov for a day or two and, when the right moment came, he would exclaim: ‘You see, I rejected the possibility of Smerdyakov being the murderer even more strongly than you did, but now I have come around and am convinced that he did it and no one else!’ And in the meantime, Karamazov denies with gloomy irritation all involvement in the crime, becomes angry and impatient, and, in his anger, offers us a completely incredible story of how he looked into his father’s window and then, quietly and discreetly, withdrew. It is important to note that, at this point, he still knew nothing about Gregory’s recovery and about how damaging the old servant’s testimony would be.

“He was then searched and examined. The search angered him but also gave him courage, because, with what money there was on him, it was possible to account for only fifteen hundred rubles, and not for the whole three thousand. And it was certainly at this point that he first conceived the story of how the fifteen hundred rubles came out of the little bag in which he had sewn it a month earlier and which he had worn around his neck. Obviously, he was well aware that his story was incredible, for he tried desperately to make it more credible and devised a whole complicated account that seemed, at least to him, quite plausible. In such cases, the main job of the investigators is not to give the suspect a chance to prepare himself, to try and catch him napping, to make him blurt out his most intimate thoughts, which will be revealing in their naivety, improbability, and inconsistency. The way to make a suspect talk is by revealing to him, accidentally as it were, some new fact that is very important in the case, but that he had not suspected until then and could not possibly have foreseen. And we had such a fact ready for him, a fact we had been keeping to ourselves until then. It was Gregory’s deposition to the effect that he had noticed that the door of the house leading into the garden was open, the door out of which the accused must have come. He had completely forgotten about that door and it had never occurred to him that Gregory could have seen it. The revelation about the door produced a colossal effect on him. He leaped to his feet and shouted: ‘It was Smerdyakov who killed him, it was Smerdyakov!’ And so he played his secret card; he produced his basic argument in his defense in its most improbable form, for Smerdyakov could have killed the victim 
only after
 Karamazov had felled Gregory and escaped over the fence. When we told the accused that Gregory had seen the door open 
before
 he had been knocked out, indeed, immediately after he had left his room and had heard Smerdyakov moaning behind the partition, the accused appeared to be utterly crushed. My able colleague, the talented examining magistrate Nelyudov, told me later that, at that moment, he felt so immensely sorry for Karamazov that he was almost moved to tears.

“And it was at this juncture that the accused, trying desperately to mend his fences, hurriedly told us about that little bag around his neck, as if to say: ‘All right, then, if that’s how it is, I’ll have to tell you the whole truth now!’ I have already explained, gentlemen of the jury, why I consider this story about the money sewn up in the rag a month before to be not only a fabrication, but the most unlikely fabrication that a man could have come up with under the circumstances. I would even bet that no one could have invented anything more incredible if he had tried deliberately. Even a triumphant novelist can be confounded and reduced to ashes by the infinity of details in real life; but people who are forced to make up stories under duress never even think of little, seemingly irrelevant details. They cannot be bothered about these things at such moments, their minds are completely absorbed in creating an overall story and they cannot bear to be interrupted and asked about insignificant details! And this is how they get caught.

“You may ask the suspect, for instance, such details as where he got the material, or the rag, in which the money was supposedly sewn, and who did the sewing for him. ‘I sewed it myself.’ ‘But what about the material?’ Now he gets offended at being asked such a trivial question and becomes genuinely angry. ‘I tore it off an old shirt of mine,’ he says. ‘Very good, then, tomorrow I will find among your shirts one with a piece torn off it.’ And, of course, gentlemen, had we found such a shirt among his clothes or in his suitcase—for how could we fail to find it if it existed?—it would be a piece of evidence, something tangible that would have confirmed the suspect’s words. But then he changes his statement: he is not sure, he now thinks he used an old bonnet of his landlady’s rather than a piece torn off his own shirt. ‘What sort of a bonnet was it?’ ‘I don’t know, some piece of old calico junk . . .’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘No, I’m not sure,’ and he loses his temper. But, I ask you, how could he have forgotten something like that, if it had been true? It is the most terrible moments of their lives that people remember best. A man is likely to remember the tiniest details when, for instance, he is being taken to the place of execution: he may forget everything else, but he will always remember a green roof on which his eyes fell, or a jackdaw sitting on the cross of a tombstone. If he had really sewn up that little bag himself, he would have clearly remembered his humiliating fear that he might be surprised by someone in the house with the needle in his hands; he would have remembered how, when he heard someone outside the door of his room, he had hurried behind the screen, for there happens to be a screen in his room.

“But why do you think, gentlemen of the jury, that I am bothering to tell you about all sorts of details the accused would have remembered if his story had been true?” the prosecutor suddenly asked in a loud voice. “Well, I’ll tell you. It is because, up to this very moment, the accused still maintains that this preposterous explanation of his is true! And now that two months have passed since the fateful night, he still has not been able to offer us one single explanation; he has not added one single fact that would support his fantastic stories; he merely snaps impatiently at us for pestering him with irrelevant and petty details, and demands that we take his word for whatever he wishes to tell us! Oh, we would be only too happy to believe him, we are longing to believe him on nothing but his word of honor, because we are not jackals thirsting for human blood! All we want is one fact, one single fact, that would suggest the accused’s innocence; we would welcome it. But it must be a real, tangible fact, not a conclusion based on the expression on the accused’s face as judged by his brother, or the assertion that when the accused was smiting his breast he was actually pointing at his little bag with the bills in it, an assertion made by that same brother—and, mind you, all that breast-smiting is supposed to have taken place in the dark. As soon as we are given one fact, we will be delighted and will withdraw our accusations; indeed, we will do so at once. But as of this moment, justice cries out for satisfaction, and we cannot withdraw anything at all.”

The prosecutor reached the finale of his peroration here. As if in a fever, he demanded dramatically that the son be made to pay for shedding his father’s blood “with the base motive of robbery.” He pointed to the tragic coincidence of the available facts.

“And whatever you may now hear from the celebrated defense counsel, so justly famed for his talents,” the prosecutor was unable to refrain from adding, “whatever eloquent and heartbreaking words are aimed at your emotions, you must never for a moment forget that you are performing the sacred duty of administering justice, that you are champions of the truth and defenders of our holy Russia, of her foundations, of her institution of the family, and of everything that she holds sacred! Yes, you represent Russia now, and your verdict will be heard not only in this courtroom, but all over the country, and all Russia will be either strengthened or let down by this verdict of yours! So do not let Russia down, do not disappoint her expectations, for the troika of our fate may be carrying us headlong to our doom! For many years now, people in Russia have been wringing their hands beseechingly and begging us to stop this madly galloping troika. And if other nations are still getting out of the way of our onrushing troika, it is not at all out of awe, as the poet would like us to believe, but simply out of fear, and I want you to note that. Yes, people draw back because they are afraid, or perhaps because they are horrified and disgusted. Even so, we are very lucky that they do draw back, for they could decide to stand their ground and face this streaking apparition like a solid wall. They would then force the crazy gallop of our unbridled passions to a stop in the name of their own salvation, in the name of enlightenment and civilization! An alarmed rumbling of voices has, indeed, already reached us from Europe. And it is growing louder. So do not provoke them, do not cause their hatred for us to grow by acquitting a son who has killed his father!”