The Brothers Karamazov (35 page)

“I’ve only said how I felt about your plan. Coming from another woman, the whole idea would have sounded twisted and contrived, but in your case that isn’t so. For another woman it would be wrong, but for you it is right. I don’t know how to explain that, but I can see you are absolutely sincere, and that’s why your decision is right.”

“Yes, but perhaps it is right only now, at this particular moment . . .” Mrs. Khokhlakov said, “because of what happened yesterday, because of the insult. Perhaps that’s what makes it right now, but only for now . . .”

She had been trying not to interfere, but could not restrain herself, for she knew she had stumbled on the truth.

“Certainly, certainly,” Ivan said heatedly, as though resenting her interruption, “that might be true for any other woman whose feelings at such a moment would be determined merely by her reaction to what happened the day before, but for a person of Katerina’s character that moment can last a lifetime. What to another person would be just a promise, to Katerina, is a life-long, grim, painful, and perhaps unrelenting duty. And what will keep her going is just that feeling of fulfilled duty. Your life, Katerina, will unroll now in painful contemplation of your own feelings, of your own devotion to duty, of your own grief. Later, however, your suffering will be alleviated and your life will turn into a sweet contemplation of the complete fulfillment of your firm and proud design. Yes, in a sense it is proud and, in any case, it is a madly bold design, but you will have accomplished it against all odds, and the consciousness of that accomplishment will, in the end, give you the most complete satisfaction and reconcile you to all the rest.”

He spoke resolutely with an overtone of impatience, which he apparently did not try to conceal—indeed, perhaps he wanted the others to understand that he didn’t really mean what he was saying and was being derisive.

“Oh, dear, it’s all so wrong!” Mrs. Khokhlakov exclaimed.

“Well, speak, Alexei—what is 
your
 opinion? It is terribly important for me to know what 
you
 think,” Katerina said, suddenly bursting into tears as Alyosha rose from the sofa. “Please, please, pay no attention to this,” she went on, as the tears rolled down her cheeks. “I am most upset after the night I had . . . But with friends such as you and Ivan, I feel secure, for I know . . . I know that neither of you will ever leave me.”

“Unfortunately,” Ivan said, “I’m off to Moscow tomorrow, so I’ll have to leave you, and for a long time too . . . Much as I may want to, I can do nothing about it.”

“You are going to Moscow tomorrow!” Katerina cried, her face suddenly becoming contorted. “But, but that’s just wonderful!”

In a flash her expression changed and her tears vanished without trace. The sudden change in her took place literally in a flash and it completely stunned Alyosha. The weeping, humiliated, heartbroken girl had suddenly turned into a strong, self-possessed woman, in full control of the situation and pleased with the news she had just heard.

“Oh, it isn’t parting from you that makes me so pleased,” she said half apologetically, with a charming, worldly smile, “but I know that a real friend like you cannot have thought that for one moment, of course not! In fact, I’m terribly sad to lose you.”

She rushed up to Ivan, seized his hands, and shook them with great warmth.

“I’m so pleased,” she went on, “because now you will be able to explain my situation personally to my aunt and to Agafia, to tell them all about the horror of my present predicament, concealing nothing from Agafia, but sparing my aunt certain details, which I can leave to your own judgment. You can hardly imagine how miserable I was yesterday and this morning, wondering how I would write them about these unspeakable things! I’d have been quite incapable of conveying it all to them in a letter . . . Now it will be easy for me to write, because you will have explained the circumstances to them beforehand. Oh, I’m so pleased that you’re going! But only for the reason I’ve told you, you must believe me! You yourself, of course, are quite irreplaceable . . . But I must run off and write that letter,” she concluded abruptly, even starting to walk toward the door.

“But what about Alyosha?” Mrs. Khokhlakov cried. “What about his opinion that you were so terribly anxious to hear?”

An irritated and sarcastic note could be detected in her voice.

“I haven’t forgotten it at all,” Katerina said, stopping short. “Besides, why should you be so unfriendly to me at a moment such as this, dear Mrs. Khokhlakov?” she said in deep reproach. “What I’ve said, I’ll say again: I must have his opinion, or even more than that, what I want is for him to decide for me. Whatever he decides—I will abide by. That should show you, Alexei, how anxious I am to hear what you have to say . . . But what’s the matter with you?”

“I never expected it, I never imagined it . . .” Alyosha said bitterly.

“Imagined what? What are you trying to say?”

“When Ivan said he was leaving for Moscow, you actually exclaimed with delight and then started explaining that, of course, it wasn’t his departure that made you so happy, that, on the contrary, you were sorry he was leaving, that you were losing a friend . . . But you were just saying those words for the effect. You didn’t mean them. You were acting, acting as if you were in a comedy, on the stage . . .”

“Comedy? On the stage? What are you talking about?” Katerina cried out in amazement. She knit her brows and her face reddened darkly.

“Yes, you may have assured him that you were sorry to lose a friend, but you still insisted on telling him to his face that you were happy he was leaving,” Alyosha said, breathing with difficulty. He was standing by the table and did not sit down again.

“I really don’t understand you—what actually do you mean?”

“I don’t know too well myself . . . It’s as if I had suddenly seen something. I know I can’t express it properly, but I’ll say it all the same,” Alyosha went on in the same trembling, faltering voice. “What I suddenly saw . . . I saw that perhaps you never loved Dmitry . . . not even at the beginning . . . And he, Dmitry, he may never have loved you either . . . also not even at the beginning . . . he may have just respected you. I really don’t know how I dare tell you all this, but somebody ought to tell you the truth . . . because no one here wants to tell the truth . . .”

“What truth?” Katerina shouted, on the verge of hysterics.

“This truth,” Alyosha said, feeling that he was jumping off a roof. “Call Dmitry here at once—I’ll get him for you if you’re willing—and when he gets here, allow him to take your hand and Ivan’s and to join your hands together. Because you’re tormenting Ivan simply because it’s he you really love, and the reason you’re making him suffer is that your feeling for Dmitry is unhealthy and twisted, it’s a false love . . . you’ve simply talked yourself into it . . .”

Alyosha broke off and fell silent.

“You . . . you . . . you’re a holy little fool! That’s all you are,” Katerina cut him off, her face turning ashen and her lips twisting in rage.

Suddenly Ivan began to laugh and stood up, hat in hand.

“You’re mistaken, Alyosha, my dear boy,” he said, looking at his brother with an expression that Alyosha had never seen on his face before: there was a youthful sincerity in it and a feeling too strong to conceal. “Katerina has never loved me. She’s known all along that I loved her, although I never told her. But she never loved me. Nor have I ever been her friend, not for one single day: she’s a proud woman who has no need of my friendship. She has kept me by her side to use me as an instrument of continuous revenge. She has avenged herself by making me pay for all the insults she has borne from Dmitry all this time, ever since their first meeting, for even their very first encounter weighed on her heart like an insult. And that is the kind of person she is. All I did was listen to her tell me about her love for him. So now I’m leaving, but I want you to know, Katerina, that the truth is that you love him, and only him. And the more he insults you, the more you’ll love him. That’s where your twist really lies. You love him just the way he is, you love his insulting you. And if he changed and treated you decently, you’d grow cool toward him at once and stop loving him. But you need him in order to constantly admire your heroic loyalty to him while you reproach him for his unfaithfulness. And all this because you’re so proud! I’m still young and I’ve loved you too much . . . I know I really should not have told you all this, that it would have been much more dignified for me just to get out of your life. And it would have been less humiliating for you. But, anyway, I’m going far away and I won’t come back. And it’s for good. I have no wish to sit and watch you perversely enjoying your heartbreaking predicament. I don’t know what more I can say to you. Good-by then, Katerina. You mustn’t be angry with me because I am punished a hundred times more severely than you, punished by the simple fact that I’ll never see you again. Good luck to you. I don’t want your hand. You knew too well what you were doing when you were tormenting me for me to forgive you at this moment. Eventually I shall forgive you, but right now I don’t want to shake your hand. And ‘
den Dank, Dame, begehr’ ich nicht
,’ ” he added with his crooked grin, thus quite unexpectedly revealing the fact that he too had read and reread Schiller often enough to remember passages by heart, something that, before this, his brother Alyosha would never have believed. Ivan walked out of the room without even taking leave of Mrs. Khokhlakov, the mistress of the house. Alyosha threw up his hands in despair.

“Ivan!” he called after his brother like a lost child. “Come back, Ivan! No, no, I know he’ll never come back now! Nothing, nothing will bring him back now, I know it,” he cried sorrowfully. “It’s all my fault. I started it all! Ivan spoke wickedly, in anger. It was ugly, unfair, and unkind . . . He must come back here . . .” Alyosha kept crying out, like one demented.

Katerina walked out of the room.

“You have nothing to reproach yourself for, Alyosha. You were absolutely marvelous and quite angelic,” Mrs. Khokhlakov whispered enthusiastically into the ear of a very dejected Alyosha. “I shall do everything in my power to prevent your brother Ivan from leaving town . . .”

To Alyosha’s great distress, her face was beaming with joy. Katerina suddenly reappeared. She held two rainbow-colored hundred-ruble notes in her hand.

“I’d like to ask you a great favor, Alexei,” she said in a calm, even voice, as though nothing had happened. “About a week ago—yes, I believe it was just a week ago—in a fit of temper, Dmitry did something that was very unfair and very ugly. There’s a rather disreputable tavern in this town where Dmitry met that retired army captain whom your father was using for some business errands. Dmitry lost his temper for some reason or other and seized the man by the beard, dragging him outside in front of everybody. Then for a long time he pulled him along the street in that humiliating manner. I am told that the captain’s son, a boy who attends the local school, still a child, saw it and, running alongside them, cried aloud, begging Dmitry to let go of his father, asking people in the street to interfere. But they only laughed. Forgive me, Alexei, but I cannot help getting very angry when I think of such disgraceful behavior . . . It is one of those things that only a man like Dmitry Karamazov could do . . . in a fit of anger, or carried away by his passions. I can’t even describe it properly. I can’t find the right words. Well, I made inquiries about the victim of the offense and I found out that he’s very poor and that his name is Snegirev. He got into some trouble in the army and was forced to resign his commission. I’m afraid I don’t know any more about it, but I do know that, burdened by an unhappy family, sick children, and, I believe, a mad wife, he has slipped into dire misery. He has been living in this town for a long time now, working at odd jobs. Lately he worked as a copying clerk somewhere, but they didn’t pay him. When I saw you . . . I mean, I wonder whether you . . . Forgive me, I find it so hard to express myself. What I’m trying to say is that I wanted to ask you, dear, kind Alexei, to go to the house where Captain Snegirev lives, I mean, to see him under some pretext—oh, it’s so difficult to say it—well, very tactfully, very delicately, as you and you only can do” (Alyosha turned very red at this point), “and try to give him these two hundred rubles. I’m sure he’ll accept, I mean, that you’ll succeed in persuading him to accept it . . . Or perhaps we could put it this way: it’s not an attempt to conciliate him, to stop him from lodging a complaint—I understand he was thinking of suing Dmitry—it’s simply out of sympathy, out of a desire to help him. It’s from the woman to whom Dmitry is engaged to be married, not from Dmitry himself . . . I’m sure you’ll find a much better way of giving it to him than I could myself. He lives in Kalmykov’s house on Lake Street . . . Do me this favor, Alexei, I beseech you . . . And now, now I feel—I feel rather tired. Good-by.”

She turned and again vanished behind the heavy curtain, so quickly that Alyosha didn’t even have time to answer her, although he had things to say to her. He wanted to ask her to forgive him, to tell her that it was he who was to blame for everything, to say anything, whatever came to mind, because his heart was full to the brim and he felt he could not leave without saying something. But Mrs. Khokhlakov seized him by the hand and it was she who led him out. And just as she had before, she stopped him in the hall.

“She’s proud—doing violence to herself . . . But she’s kind and wonderful and generous,” she said in a half whisper. “I like her so much, especially at certain moments. And now I am once again happy with the way things are. You don’t know about it, my dear Alexei, but we’ve had a whole plot hatched here, all of us—both her aunts, myself, and even Lise—and for a whole month we’ve been doing our utmost and praying that she should break with your favorite brother Dmitry, who doesn’t love her and doesn’t even want to have anything to do with her. We want her to marry Ivan instead, a cultured and responsible young man who is deeply in love with her. Yes, we hatched a real plot, and that’s perhaps the reason I haven’t left town.”