Part Four · IV
And Raskolnikov went straight to the house on the canal where Sonya lived. The house was three stories high, old, and painted green. He found the caretaker and got from him vague directions as to where Kapernaumov the tailor lived. Having found, in a corner of the courtyard, the entrance to a narrow and dark staircase, he climbed at last to the second floor and came out onto the gallery that ran around it on the courtyard side. While he was wandering in the dark, puzzled as to where the entrance to Kapernaumov’s might be, suddenly, three steps away from him, some door opened; he caught hold of it mechanically.
“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice asked anxiously.
“It’s me… to see you,” answered Raskolnikov, and went into a tiny entry. There, on a chair with a sagging seat, a candle stood in a bent brass candlestick.
“It’s you! Lord!” Sonya cried weakly, and stood rooted to the spot.
“Which way to your room? In here?”
And Raskolnikov, trying not to look at her, quickly went into the room.
A minute later Sonya too came in with the candle, set the candle down, and stood before him herself, completely at a loss, all in an inexpressible agitation and visibly frightened by his unexpected visit. Suddenly color rushed into her pale face, and tears even came into her eyes… She felt sick, and ashamed, and sweet… Raskolnikov turned away quickly and sat down on a chair by the table. In a fleeting glance he managed to take in the room.
It was a large room, but extremely low, the only one the Kapernaumovs let out; the locked door to their rooms was in the wall on the left. On the opposite side, in the wall on the right, there was yet another door, always locked tight. Beyond it there was already another, neighboring apartment, under another number. Sonya’s room looked somehow like a shed; it had the shape of a very irregular quadrangle, and this gave it something misshapen. The wall with three windows, looking out on the canal, cut across the room somehow at a slant, so that one corner, terribly acute, ran off somewhere into the depths, and in the weak light it could not even be properly made out; while the other corner was much too hideously obtuse. In the whole of this large room there was almost no furniture at all. In the corner, on the right, stood the bed; beside it, nearer the door, a chair. Along the same wall as the bed, right by the door into the other apartment, stood a plain deal table covered with a little blue cloth; by the table, two wicker chairs. Then, against the opposite wall, near the acute corner, stood a small chest of drawers of plain wood, as if lost in the emptiness. That was all there was in the room. The yellowish, scuffed, and worn-out wallpaper had turned black in all the corners; it must have been damp and full of fumes here in winter. The poverty was visible; there were not even curtains at the bed.
Sonya silently looked at her guest, who was examining her room so attentively and unceremoniously, and at last even began to tremble with fear, as though she were standing before the judge and arbiter of her fate.
“I’m late… Is it eleven yet?” he asked, still not raising his eyes to her.
“It is,” Sonya murmured. “Oh, yes, it is!” she suddenly hurried on, as if that were her whole way out. “The landlords’ clock struck just now… and I heard it myself… It is.”
“I have come to you for the last time,” Raskolnikov went on gloomily, though even now it was only the first time. “Perhaps I won’t see you again…”
“You… are going away?”
“I don’t know… everything tomorrow…”
“So you won’t be at Katerina Ivanovna’s tomorrow?” Sonya’s voice trembled.
“I don’t know. Everything tomorrow morning… That’s not the point: I came to say one thing…”
He raised his pensive gaze to her and suddenly noticed that he was sitting while she was still standing before him.
“Why are you standing? Sit down,” he said suddenly, in a changed, quiet, and gentle voice.
She sat down. For a minute he looked at her kindly and almost with compassion.
“How thin you are! Look at your hand! Quite transparent. Fingers like a dead woman’s.”
He took her hand. Sonya smiled weakly.
“I’ve always been like this,” she said.
“Even when you lived at home?”
“Yes.”
“Well, of course!” he said abruptly, and the expression of his face and the sound of his voice suddenly changed again. He looked around once more.
“You rent this from Kapernaumov?”
“Yes, sir…”
“They’re there, behind the door?”
“Yes… They have the same kind of room too.”
“All in one?”
“In one, sir.”
“I’d be afraid in your room at night,” he observed gloomily.
“The landlords are very good, very kind,” Sonya answered, still as if she had not come to herself and could not collect her wits, “and all the furniture, and everything… everything is theirs. And they’re very kind, and the children come to see me often too…”
“The ones who stammer?”
“Yes, sir… He stammers, and he’s lame too. And his wife too… It’s not that she stammers, but it’s as if she can’t say everything out. She’s kind, very. And he used to be a house serf. And there are seven children… and only the oldest one stammers, and the others are just sickly… but they don’t stammer… But how do you know about them?” she added with some surprise.
“Your father told me everything that time. He told me everything about you… And about how you went out at six o’clock and came back after eight, and about how Katerina Ivanovna knelt by your bed.”
Sonya was embarrassed.
“I think I saw him today,” she whispered hesitantly.
“Whom?”
“Father. I was walking along the street, near here, on the corner, after nine, and it was as if he was walking ahead of me. And it really seemed to be him. I was going to stop in at Katerina Ivanovna’s…”
“You were out walking?”
“Yes,” Sonya whispered abruptly, embarrassed again and lowering her eyes.
“Katerina Ivanovna all but beat you, didn’t she, when you were living at your father’s?”
“Oh, no, what are you saying, what are you saying, no!” Sonya looked at him even with a kind of fright.
“So you love her?”
“Her? But how co-o-ould I not!” Sonya drew out plaintively, suddenly clasping her hands in anguish. “Oh! you… her… If you only knew. She’s just like a child… Her mind is just as if it were deranged… from grief. And how intelligent she was… how magnanimous… how kind! You don’t know anything, anything… oh!”
Sonya said this as if in despair, agitated and suffering, and wringing her hands. Her pale cheeks flared up again, and torment showed in her eyes. It was plain that something had been terribly stirred in her, that she terribly wanted to express something, to speak, to defend. A sort of insatiable compassion, if one may put it so, was suddenly depicted in every feature of her face.
“Beat me! But what are you saying! Lord, beat me! And even if she did beat me, what of it! Well, what of it? You don’t know anything, anything… She’s so unhappy, oh, so unhappy! And sick… She’s looking for justice… She’s pure. She believes so much that there must be justice in everything, and she demands it… And you could torture her, but she wouldn’t do anything unjust. She doesn’t notice herself how it’s all impossible, for things to be just among people, and she gets irritated… Like a child, like a child! She’s just, she is just!”
“And what will become of you?”
Sonya looked at him questioningly.
“They’re left on your hands now, aren’t they. True, it was all on you before too, and the late man would come to you, of all people, to beg for drink for his hangover. Well, and now what will happen?”
“I don’t know,” Sonya said sadly.
“Will they stay there?”
“I don’t know, they owe money on that apartment; only they say the landlady said today that she wants to put them out, and Katerina Ivanovna says she won’t stay a minute longer herself.”
“Why is she so brave? Is she counting on you?”
“Oh, no, don’t talk like that!… We are one, we live as one,” Sonya suddenly grew agitated again and even irritated, exactly as if a canary or some other little bird had got angry. “And what is she to do? Well, what, what is she to do?” she kept asking, growing heated and agitated. “And how much, how much she cried today! Her mind is wandering, didn’t you notice? It is wandering; one minute she’s fretting like a little girl that everything should be decent tomorrow, that there should be food and everything… the next she’s wringing her hands, spitting blood, crying, and suddenly she starts beating her head against the wall, as if in despair. And then she’s comforted again, she’s counting on you for everything: she says you’ll be her helper now, and that she’ll borrow a little money somewhere and go to her own town, with me, and set up a boarding school for girls of good family, and take me as the supervisor, and a whole new, beautiful life will begin for us, and she kisses me, hugs me, comforts me, and she believes it so! she believes those fancies so! Well, how can anyone contradict her? And all day today she herself has been washing, cleaning, mending, she dragged the washtub into the room herself, with her weak little strength, and got out of breath, and just fell onto the bed; and this morning she and I went to the market rows, to buy shoes for Polechka and Lenya, because theirs have all fallen apart, only we didn’t have enough money by our reckoning, we were very short, and she picked out such sweet little boots, because she has taste, you don’t know… She started crying right there in the shop, in front of the shopkeepers, because there wasn’t enough… Oh, how pitiful it was to see.”
“Well, it’s understandable, after that, that you… live like this,” Raskolnikov said with a bitter smile.
“And don’t you feel sorry? Don’t you feel sorry?” Sonya flared up again. “Why, I know that you gave your last money yourself, without even having seen anything yet. And if you had seen everything, oh Lord! And how many, many times I brought her to tears! And just last week! Oh, me! Only a week before his death. I acted cruelly! And how many, many times I did that. Oh, how painful it was to remember all day today!”
Sonya was even wringing her hands as she spoke, from the pain of the memory.
“You, cruel?”
“Yes, I, I! I came that time,” she went on, crying, “and the late man says: ‘Read to me, Sonya,’ he says, ‘my head aches somehow, read to me… here’s a little book’—some little book he had, he got it from Andrei Semyonych, from Lebezyatnikov, he lives here, he was always getting such funny books. And I say: ‘It’s time for me to go,’ and so I didn’t want to read, and I had stopped in to see them mainly to show Katerina Ivanovna some collars; Lizaveta, the peddler woman, had brought me some collars and cuffs cheap, pretty ones, new, and embroidered. And Katerina Ivanovna liked them very much, she put them on and looked at herself in the mirror, and she liked them very, very much: ‘Give them to me, Sonya,’ she says, ‘please.’ She said please, and she wanted them so badly. And where would she wear them? It was just that: the old, happy times came back to her! She looks at herself in the mirror, admires herself, and she has no dresses at all, none at all, no things at all, for so many years now! And she never asks anyone for anything; she’s proud, she’d sooner give away her last thing herself, and here she asked—that’s how much she liked them! And I grudged giving them to her. ‘What do you need them for, Katerina Ivanovna?’ I say. That’s just what I said, ‘what for.’ That was the one thing I shouldn’t have said to her! She gave me such a look, and it was so hard, so hard for her that I refused, and it was so pitiful to see… And it wasn’t the collars that made it hard, but that I refused, I could see. Oh, it seems I would take it all back now, do it all over, all those words before… Oh, I… but what!… it’s all the same to you!”
“You knew this Lizaveta, the peddler?”
“Yes… But did you know her?” Sonya asked in turn, with some surprise.
“Katerina Ivanovna has galloping consumption; she will die soon,” said Raskolnikov, after a silence, not answering the question.
“Oh, no, no, no!” And with an unconscious gesture Sonya seized him by both hands, as if begging that it not be so.
“But it would be better, after all, if she dies.”
“No, not better, not better, not better at all!” she kept repeating, frightened and unthinking.
“And the children? Where will you take them then, if not to your place?”
“Oh, I just don’t know!” Sonya cried almost in despair, and clutched her head. It was plain that this thought had already flashed through her mind many, many times, and he had only startled it up again.
“Well, and if you fall ill now, while Katerina Ivanovna is still alive, and they take you to the hospital, what will happen then?” he insisted mercilessly.
“Oh, what are you saying, what are you saying! That simply can’t be!” And Sonya’s face was twisted with terrible fright.
“How can’t it be?” Raskolnikov went on with a harsh smile. “You’re not insured, are you? Then what will become of them? They’ll go out into the street, the whole flock of them, she’ll cough and beg and beat her head against a wall somewhere, as she did today, and the children will cry… And then she’ll collapse, they’ll take her to the police station, to the hospital, she’ll die, and the children…”
“Oh, no!… God won’t allow it!” burst at last from Sonya’s constricted breast. She listened, looking at him imploringly and clasping her hands in mute entreaty, as though everything depended on him.
Raskolnikov got up and began to walk about the room. A minute passed. Sonya stood with her arms and her head hanging, in terrible anguish.
“And can’t you save? Put something aside for a rainy day?” he asked, suddenly stopping in front of her.
“No,” Sonya whispered.
“Of course not! And have you tried?” he added, almost mockingly.
“I have.”
“And it fell through! Well, of course! Why even ask!”
And again he walked about the room. Another minute passed.
“You don’t earn every day?”
Sonya was more embarrassed than before, and the color rushed to her face again.
“No,” she whispered with an agonizing effort.
“The same thing will probably happen with Polechka,” he said suddenly.
“No! no! It can’t be, no!” Sonya cried out loudly, like a desperate woman, as if she had suddenly been stabbed with a knife. “God, God won’t allow such a horror!…”
“Yet he allows it for others.”
“No, no! God will protect her, God!…” she kept repeating, beside herself.
“But maybe there is no God at all,” Raskolnikov answered, even with a sort of malicious glee, laughed, and looked at her.
Sonya’s face suddenly changed terribly: spasms ran over it. She looked at him with inexpressible reproach, was about to say something, but could not utter anything, and only suddenly began to sob bitterly, bitterly, covering her face with her hands.
“You say Katerina Ivanovna’s mind is wandering; your own mind is wandering,” he said after some silence.
About five minutes passed. He kept walking back and forth, silently and without glancing at her. At last he went up to her; his eyes were flashing. He took her by the shoulders with both hands and looked straight into her weeping face. His gaze was dry, inflamed, sharp, his lips were trembling violently… Suddenly he bent down quickly, all of him, and, dropping to the floor, kissed her foot. Sonya recoiled from him in horror, as from a madman. And indeed he looked like a complete madman.
“What are you doing, what are you doing? Before me!” she murmured, turning pale, and suddenly her heart was wrung so painfully, painfully.
He got up at once.
“It was not to you I bowed down, I bowed down to all human suffering,” he said somehow wildly, and walked away to the window. “Listen,” he added, coming back to her a minute later, “earlier today I told a certain offender that he was not worth your little finger… and that I had done my sister an honor today by seating her beside you.”
“Oh, how could you say that to them! And in front of her?” Sonya cried out in fright. “Sit with me! An honor! Why, I am… dishonored… I’m a great, great sinner! Oh, how could you say that!”
“It was not for the dishonor and the sin that I said it of you, but for your great suffering. And that you are a great sinner, that is so,” he added almost rapturously, “and you are a sinner most of all because you have killed and betrayed yourself for nothing. How is that not a horror! How is it not a horror that you live in this filth, which you hate so much, and at the same time know yourself (you have only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it and not saving anyone from anything! Tell me, then, at last,” he said, almost in a frenzy, “how can such shame and such baseness exist in you side by side with other, opposite and holy feelings? Why, it would be more just, a thousand times more just and more sensible, to throw yourself headfirst into the water and finish it all at once!”
“And what will become of them?” Sonya asked weakly, looking at him with suffering, but at the same time as if not at all surprised at his suggestion. Raskolnikov looked at her strangely.
He read everything in that one look of hers. So she really had had this thought herself already. Perhaps many times and seriously she had considered in despair how to finish it all at once, and so seriously that now she was almost not even surprised at his suggestion. She did not even notice the cruelty of his words (the meaning of his reproaches and his particular view of her shame she, of course, did not notice either, and that was visible to him). But he understood fully to what monstrous pain the thought of her dishonorable and shameful position had tormented her, and for a long time now. What, what could have stopped her resolve, he thought, to finish it all at once, until now? And only then did he understand fully what these poor little orphaned children meant to her, and that pitiful, half-mad Katerina Ivanovna, with her consumption and her beating her head against the wall.
But nonetheless it was again clear to him that Sonya, with her character and with the education, such as it was, that she had received, could not under any circumstances remain like this. All the same it was a question for him: why had she been able to remain in such a position for so very long and not gone mad, if she was not strong enough to throw herself into the water? Of course, he understood that Sonya’s position was an accidental phenomenon in society, though, unfortunately, far from a solitary or exceptional one. But this very accidentalness, this certain degree of development, and her whole previous life might, it would seem, have killed her at once at the first step on that loathsome road. What, then, was sustaining her? Surely not depravity? All this shame had obviously touched her only mechanically; real depravity had not yet penetrated by a single drop into her heart: he saw this; she stood before him in plain sight…
“There are three roads for her,” he thought: “to throw herself into the canal, to end up in a madhouse, or… or, finally, to throw herself into depravity, which stupefies the mind and turns the heart to stone.” The last thought was the most repulsive of all to him; but he was already a skeptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel, and so he could not help believing that the last way out, that is, depravity, was the most likely of all.
“But can it be true,” he exclaimed to himself, “can it be that this creature too, who has still kept her purity of spirit, will in the end be drawn consciously into this vile, stinking pit? Can it be that this drawing in has already begun, and that she has been able to endure until now only because vice no longer seems so repulsive to her? No, no, it cannot be!” he exclaimed, as Sonya had just now. “No, what has kept her from the canal until now is the thought of sin, and they, those… And if she has not gone mad until now… But who said that she has not gone mad already? Is she in her right mind? Can a person talk as she does? Can a person in her right mind reason as she does? Can a person sit over her own ruin, right over the stinking pit into which she is already being drawn, and wave her hands and stop her ears when she is told of the danger? What is she, waiting for a miracle? Most likely so. Aren’t all these signs of madness?”
He dwelt stubbornly on this thought. This way out even pleased him more than any other. He began to look at her more intently.
“So you pray to God a great deal, Sonya?” he asked her.
Sonya was silent; he stood beside her and waited for an answer.
“What would I be without God?” she whispered quickly, energetically, glancing up at him for an instant with suddenly flashing eyes, and she pressed his hand hard with her hand.
“Just as I thought!” he thought.
“And what does God do for you in return?” he asked, probing further.
Sonya was silent for a long time, as if she could not answer. Her weak little breast was heaving with agitation.
“Be quiet! Don’t ask! You’re not worthy!…” she cried suddenly, looking at him sternly and wrathfully.
“Just as I thought! just as I thought!” he kept repeating insistently to himself.
“He does everything!” she whispered quickly, lowering her eyes again.
“There’s the way out! There’s the explanation of the way out!” he decided to himself, examining her with greedy curiosity.
With a new, strange, almost painful feeling he peered into that pale, thin, and irregular, angular little face, into those meek blue eyes that could flash with such fire, with such stern, energetic feeling, into that small body still trembling with indignation and anger, and all of it seemed to him more and more strange, almost impossible. “A holy fool! a holy fool!” he kept repeating to himself.
On the chest of drawers lay a book. Every time he walked back and forth he had noticed it; now he picked it up and looked. It was the New Testament in Russian translation. The book was old, secondhand, in a leather binding.
“Where’s this from?” he called to her across the room. She was still standing in the same place, three steps from the table.
“It was brought to me,” she answered, as if reluctantly and without glancing at him.
“Who brought it?”
“Lizaveta brought it, I asked her to.”
“Lizaveta! Strange!” he thought. Everything about Sonya was becoming somehow stranger and more wonderful to him with every minute. He carried the book over to the candle and began leafing through it.
“Where is the part about Lazarus?” he asked suddenly.
Sonya kept her eyes stubbornly on the floor and did not answer. She was standing a little sideways to the table.
“Where is the raising of Lazarus? Find it for me, Sonya.”
She glanced at him sidelong.
“You’re not looking in the right place… in the fourth gospel…” she whispered sternly, without moving toward him.
“Find it and read it to me,” he said, sat down, leaned his elbow on the table, propped his head on his hand, and stared gloomily to one side, prepared to listen.
“In three weeks or so, to the seventh verst,1 you are most welcome! I think I’ll be there myself, if nothing worse happens,” he muttered to himself.
Sonya stepped hesitantly toward the table, having listened distrustfully to Raskolnikov’s strange wish. She took the book, however.
“Haven’t you ever read it?” she asked, glancing at him across the table, from under her brows. Her voice was growing sterner and sterner.
“Long ago… When I was at school. Read!”
“And haven’t you heard it in church?”
“I… haven’t been going. And do you go often?”
“N-no,” Sonya whispered.
Raskolnikov smiled.
“I understand… So you won’t go to your father’s funeral tomorrow?”
“I will. I was there last week too… I had a memorial service said.”
“For whom?”
“For Lizaveta. She was killed with an ax.”
His nerves were growing more and more irritated. His head began to spin.
“Were you friends with Lizaveta?”
“Yes… She was just… she used to come… rarely… she couldn’t. We used to read together and… talk. She will see God.”
These bookish words sounded strange to him, and here was something new again: some mysterious meetings with Lizaveta, and both of them holy fools.
“A man could turn holy fool himself here! it’s catching!” he thought. “Read!” he exclaimed suddenly, insistently and irritably.
Sonya still hesitated. Her heart was pounding. Somehow she did not dare to read to him. He looked almost in torment at the “unhappy madwoman.”
“What do you want it for? You don’t believe, do you?…” she whispered quietly and somehow breathlessly.
“Read! I want you to!” he insisted. “You read to Lizaveta!”
Sonya opened the book and found the place. Her hands were trembling, her voice failed her. Twice she began, and still the first syllable would not come out.
“Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany…” she pronounced at last, with an effort, but suddenly, at the third word, her voice rang out and broke, like a string drawn too tight. Her breath was cut off, and her chest grew tight.
Raskolnikov partly understood why Sonya could not bring herself to read to him, and the more he understood it, the more rudely and irritably, as it were, he insisted on the reading. He understood too well how hard it was for her now to betray and expose everything that was her own. He understood that these feelings did indeed constitute, as it were, her real and perhaps long-standing secret, perhaps ever since her girlhood, back in the family, beside her unhappy father and her stepmother driven mad with grief, amid hungry children, hideous shouts, and reproaches. But at the same time he now knew, and knew for certain, that although she was in anguish and terribly afraid of something as she now began to read, at the same time she herself had a tormenting wish to read, in spite of all her anguish and all her fears, and to read to him precisely, so that he would hear, and without fail now—“whatever might come of it afterward!”… He read this in her eyes, understood it from her rapturous agitation… She mastered herself, suppressed the spasm in her throat that had cut off her voice at the beginning of the verse, and went on reading the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John. Thus she read on to the nineteenth verse:
“And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in their grief over their brother. Martha, when she heard that Jesus was coming, went out to meet him; but Mary sat at home. Then Martha said to Jesus: Lord! if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”
Here she stopped again, bashfully sensing that her voice would tremble and break again…
“Jesus says to her: Your brother will rise again. Martha said to him: I know that he will rise again in the resurrection, on the last day. Jesus said to her: I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? She says to him:
(and as if drawing breath with pain, Sonya read distinctly and with force, exactly as if she herself were confessing it for all to hear:)
Yes, Lord! I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”
She was about to stop, began quickly to raise her eyes to him, but quickly mastered herself and began to read further. Raskolnikov sat and listened motionless, without turning around, his elbow on the table and looking to one side. They read on to the thirty-second verse.
“Then Mary, when she came to where Jesus was and saw him, fell down at his feet; and said to him: Lord! if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus, when he saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her weeping, was grieved in spirit himself and was troubled. And he said: Where have you laid him? They say to him: Lord! come and see. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said: See how he loved him. And some of them said: Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind, have kept this man too from dying?”
Raskolnikov turned to her and looked at her with agitation: yes, so it was! She was already trembling all over in a real, genuine fever. He had expected this. She was approaching the word about the greatest and unheard-of miracle, and a feeling of great triumph seized her. Her voice became ringing as metal; triumph and joy sounded in it and strengthened it. The lines blurred before her, because her eyes were growing dark, but she knew by heart what she was reading. At the last verse, “Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind…,” lowering her voice, she conveyed hotly and passionately the doubt, the reproach, and the blasphemy of the unbelieving, blind Jews, who now, in a minute, would fall as if struck by thunder, would sob and believe… “And he, he—who is also blinded and unbelieving—he too will hear now, he too will believe, yes, yes! right now, this minute,” she dreamed, and she trembled with joyful expectation.
“Jesus, again grieving within himself, comes to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus says: Take away the stone. Martha, the sister of the dead man, says to him: Lord! by now he stinks; for he has been four days in the tomb.”
She struck the word four forcefully.
“Jesus says to her: Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God? So they took the stone away from the cave where the dead man lay. And Jesus lifted up his eyes to heaven and said: Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me; but I said this for the sake of the people standing here, that they may believe that you have sent me. Having said this, he cried out with a loud voice: Lazarus! come out. And the dead man came out,
(she read loudly and rapturously, trembling and growing cold, as if she were seeing it with her own eyes):
bound hand and foot with burial cloths; and his face was bound about with a cloth. Jesus says to them: Unbind him; let him go.
Then many of the Jews who had come to Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him.”2
She read no further and could not read further; she closed the book and quickly got up from her chair.
“That is all about the raising of Lazarus,” she whispered abruptly and sternly, and stood motionless, turned away to one side, not daring and as if ashamed to raise her eyes to him. Her feverish trembling still went on. The candle end had long been guttering in the bent candlestick, dimly lighting, in this beggarly room, the murderer and the harlot, strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book. Five minutes or more went by.
“I’ve come about a matter,” Raskolnikov said suddenly, loudly and frowning, got up, and went over to Sonya. She silently raised her eyes to him. His gaze was especially stern, and a kind of wild resolve was expressed in it.
“Today I abandoned my family,” he said, “my mother and sister. I won’t go to them now. I’ve broken everything off there.”
“Why?” Sonya asked, as if stunned. Her meeting earlier with his mother and sister had left an extraordinary impression on her, though one unclear to herself. She heard the news of the break almost with horror.
“Now I have only you,” he added. “Let us go together… I have come to you. We are cursed together, and together we shall go!”
His eyes were flashing. “Like a half-wit!” Sonya thought in her turn.
“Go where?” she asked in fear, and involuntarily stepped back.
“How should I know? I know only that it’s by the same road, I know it for certain—and that’s all. One goal!”
She looked at him and understood nothing. She understood only that he was terribly, infinitely unhappy.
“None of them will understand anything if you talk to them,” he went on, “but I have understood. I need you, that’s why I came to you.”
“I don’t understand…” Sonya whispered.
“You’ll understand later. Haven’t you done the same thing? You too have stepped over… were able to step over. You have laid hands on yourself, you have destroyed a life… your own (it’s all the same!). You could have lived by spirit and reason, and you’ll end up on the Haymarket… But you can’t endure it, and if you remain alone you’ll go mad, like me. You’re already like a madwoman even now; so we must go together, by the same road! Let us go!”
“Why? Why are you saying this!” said Sonya, strangely and rebelliously stirred by his words.
“Why? Because it’s impossible to stay like this—that’s why! One must at last reason seriously and directly, and not cry like a child and shout that God won’t allow it! Well, what will happen if they really do take you to the hospital tomorrow? She is out of her mind and consumptive, she’ll die soon, and the children? Won’t Polechka perish? Haven’t you seen children here, on the street corners, whose mothers send them out to beg for alms? I have found out where these mothers live and in what surroundings. There children can’t remain children. There a seven-year-old is depraved and a thief. And yet children are the image of Christ: ‘Of such is the kingdom of God.’ He commanded us to honor and love them, they are the humanity of the future…”
“What, then, what is to be done?” Sonya kept repeating, weeping hysterically and wringing her hands.
“What is to be done? Break what must be broken, once and for all, and that’s all: and take the suffering upon oneself! What? You don’t understand? You’ll understand later… Freedom and power, and above all power! Over all trembling creatures and over the whole anthill!… That is the goal! Remember it! This is my parting word to you! Perhaps I’m talking to you for the last time. If I don’t come tomorrow, you’ll hear about everything yourself, and then remember these words I’m saying now. And someday, later, years from now, with life, perhaps you will understand what they meant. But if I do come tomorrow, I will tell you who killed Lizaveta. Good-bye!”
Sonya shuddered all over with fright.
“But do you know who killed her?” she asked, turning cold with horror and looking at him wildly.
“I know, and I will tell… You, only you! I have chosen you. I won’t come to you to ask forgiveness, I will simply tell you. I chose you long ago to tell this to, back when your father was talking about you and when Lizaveta was alive, I thought of it then. Good-bye. Don’t give me your hand. Tomorrow!”
He went out. Sonya looked at him as at a madman; but she herself was as if out of her mind, and she felt it. Her head was spinning. “Lord! how does he know who killed Lizaveta? What did those words mean? It’s frightening!” But at the same time the thought did not enter her head. Not at all! Not at all!… “Oh, he must be terribly unhappy!… He has abandoned his mother and sister. Why? What happened? And what does he intend? What was it he said to her? He kissed her foot and said… said (yes, he said it clearly) that he can no longer live without her… Oh Lord!”
Sonya spent the whole night in fever and delirium. At times she jumped up, cried, wrung her hands, then sank again into feverish sleep, and she dreamed of Polechka, Katerina Ivanovna, Lizaveta, the reading of the Gospel, and him… him, with his pale face, with his burning eyes… He is kissing her feet, crying… Oh Lord!
Behind the door on the right, behind that very door which separated Sonya’s apartment from the apartment of Gertruda Karlovna Resslich, there was an in-between room, long empty, which belonged to Madame Resslich’s apartment and was let out by her, as was announced by little signs on the gates and little papers stuck on the windowpanes facing the canal. Sonya had long been accustomed to regard this room as uninhabited. And yet, all this time, Mr. Svidrigailov had stood by the door in the empty room and, hidden, had been eavesdropping. When Raskolnikov went out, he stood a while, thought, went on tiptoe to his own room, adjoining the empty one, got a chair, and noiselessly carried it right up to the door that led into Sonya’s room. The conversation had seemed to him entertaining and significant, and he had liked it very, very much—liked it so much that he even carried the chair over so that in the future, tomorrow for instance, he would not again be subjected to the unpleasantness of standing a whole hour on his feet, but could settle himself more comfortably, so as to get full enjoyment in every respect.