Part Five · II

It would be hard to state exactly the reasons why the idea of this senseless funeral dinner had taken root in Katerina Ivanovna’s disordered head. Nearly ten roubles, in fact, had been thrown away on it, out of the twenty-odd she had received from Raskolnikov for Marmeladov’s funeral as such. Perhaps Katerina Ivanovna considered herself bound, before the dead man, to honor his memory “properly,” so that all the lodgers, and Amalia Ivanovna in particular, would know that he had been “not only no worse than any of them, but maybe a good deal better, sir,” and that none of them had the right “to turn up their noses” at him. Perhaps what weighed most of all here was that peculiar pride of the poor, owing to which, at certain social rites obligatory in our way of life for one and all, many poor people strain themselves to the last of their strength and spend their last saved-up kopecks, only to be “no worse than others” and so that those others should not somehow “look down on” them. It is also very likely that Katerina Ivanovna wanted, precisely on this occasion, precisely at the moment when she seemed to have been abandoned by everyone in the world, to show all these “worthless and nasty lodgers” not only that she “knew how to live and how to entertain,” but that she had not been brought up for such a lot at all, that she had been brought up in a “noble, one might even say aristocratic, colonel’s house,” and had certainly not been prepared for sweeping the floor herself and washing the children’s rags at night. These paroxysms of pride and vanity sometimes visit the poorest and most beaten-down people and at times turn in them into an irritable, uncontrollable need. And Katerina Ivanovna, besides, was not one of the beaten-down: circumstances could kill her outright, but to beat her down morally, that is, to cow her and subdue her will, was impossible. Then too, Sonechka had very good grounds for saying of her that her mind was becoming unhinged. Positively and conclusively this could not yet be said, it is true, but in fact lately, all through this last year, her poor head had been too tormented not to be at least partly damaged. An advanced stage of consumption, as the doctors say, also contributes to the derangement of the mental faculties.

Wines in the plural and of many different sorts there were not, nor was there Madeira: that had been an exaggeration, but there was wine. There was vodka, rum, and Lisbon wine, all of the vilest quality, but all in sufficient quantity. Of dishes, besides the kutya, the sweet funeral grain, there were three or four (among them bliny, the funeral pancakes), all from Amalia Ivanovna’s kitchen, and on top of that two samovars were set going at once for the tea and punch intended for after dinner. Katerina Ivanovna had seen to the purchases herself, with the help of one lodger, some pitiful little Pole who lived at Mrs. Lippewechsel’s God knows why, who at once attached himself to Katerina Ivanovna as her errand boy and had spent all of yesterday and all of this morning running about headlong with his tongue hanging out, apparently taking particular pains that this last circumstance should be noticed. Over every trifle he came running every minute to Katerina Ivanovna herself, he even ran to look for her in the Gostiny Dvor arcade, he kept calling her “Pani Khorunzhina,”¹ and in the end she was sick to death of him, though at first she had said that without this “obliging and magnanimous” man she would have been utterly lost. It was in the nature of Katerina Ivanovna’s character to dress up the first comer as quickly as possible in the finest and brightest colors, to praise him so that he would sometimes even feel ashamed, to invent in his praise various circumstances that had never existed at all, to believe in their reality herself quite sincerely and wholeheartedly, and then suddenly, all at once, to be disenchanted, to cut him off, spit on him, and throw out by the scruff of the neck the person whom only a few hours before she had literally worshiped. By nature she had a laughing, cheerful, and peaceable disposition, but from continual misfortunes and failures she had come to wish and demand so furiously that everyone should live in peace and joy and not dare to live otherwise, that the slightest discord in life, the very least failure, would at once drive her almost into a frenzy, and in a single moment, after the brightest hopes and fancies, she would begin cursing fate, tearing and flinging whatever came to hand, and beating her head against the wall. Amalia Ivanovna too had suddenly, for some reason, acquired extraordinary importance and extraordinary respect in Katerina Ivanovna’s eyes, solely perhaps because this funeral dinner had been undertaken and Amalia Ivanovna had resolved with all her heart to take part in all the bother: she had taken it on herself to lay the table, provide the linen, the dishes, and so on, and cook the food in her own kitchen. Katerina Ivanovna had given her full authority in everything and left her in her place when she herself set off for the cemetery. And indeed everything had been prepared in splendid style: the table was laid even rather cleanly, the dishes, forks, knives, wineglasses, tumblers, cups—all this, of course, was gathered from here and there, of every style and size, from various lodgers, but everything was in its place by the appointed hour, and Amalia Ivanovna, feeling that she had done her job admirably, met the returning party even with a certain pride, all dressed up, in a cap with new mourning ribbons and a black dress. This pride, though deserved, for some reason displeased Katerina Ivanovna: “really, as if they couldn’t even have laid a table without Amalia Ivanovna!” The cap with the new ribbons displeased her too: “Could it be, heaven forbid, that this stupid German woman was proud of being the landlady and of having agreed out of charity to help her poor lodgers? Out of charity! I ask you! At the table of Katerina Ivanovna’s papa, who had been a colonel and very nearly a governor, places were sometimes laid for forty, and some Amalia Ivanovna, or rather Ludwigovna, wouldn’t have been let even into the kitchen there…” Katerina Ivanovna, however, resolved for the time being not to voice her feelings, though she decided in her heart that Amalia Ivanovna absolutely must be taken down a peg this very day and reminded of her proper place, or else God knows what she would start imagining about herself; for the moment she merely treated her coldly. Another unpleasantness also partly contributed to Katerina Ivanovna’s irritation: of the lodgers invited to the funeral, hardly anyone had come to the funeral except the little Pole, who had managed after all to run over to the cemetery too; whereas to the funeral dinner, that is, to the eating, the most insignificant and poorest of them had turned up, many of them not even quite sober, just riffraff of some sort. The older and more substantial ones had all, as if on purpose, as if by agreement, stayed away. Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, for instance, the most substantial, one might say, of all the lodgers, had not appeared, and yet only yesterday evening Katerina Ivanovna had already managed to tell everyone in the world, that is, Amalia Ivanovna, Polechka, Sonya, and the little Pole, that he was a most noble, most magnanimous man, with the most enormous connections and with a fortune, a former friend of her first husband, received in her father’s house, and that he had promised to use every means to obtain a considerable pension for her. Let us note here that if Katerina Ivanovna did boast of anyone’s connections and fortune, it was without any self-interest, without any personal calculation, quite disinterestedly, from the fullness of her heart, so to speak, solely for the pleasure of extolling the one she praised and adding still more to his worth. After Luzhin, and probably “following his example,” “that nasty scoundrel Lebezyatnikov” had not come either. “And what does that one think of himself? He was invited only out of charity, and then only because he shares a room with Pyotr Petrovich and is his acquaintance, so it was awkward not to invite him.” Nor had a certain lady of high tone come, with her “overripe maiden,” her daughter, who, though they had been living only about two weeks in Amalia Ivanovna’s rooms, had several times already complained of the noise and shouting that rose from the Marmeladovs’ room, especially when the deceased came home drunk, which had of course already become known to Katerina Ivanovna through Amalia Ivanovna herself, when the latter, quarreling with Katerina Ivanovna and threatening to throw out the whole family, had shouted at the top of her lungs that they were disturbing “noble lodgers whose feet they were not worth.” Katerina Ivanovna had now made a point of deciding to invite this lady and her daughter, “whose feet she was supposedly not worth,” all the more since until now, at chance meetings, the lady had haughtily turned away—so that she would know, then, that here “people think and feel more nobly, and invite without remembering wrongs,” and so they would see that Katerina Ivanovna was used to a very different lot in life. This was certainly to be explained to them at table, as was the governorship of her late papa, while at the same time it would be indirectly remarked that there had been no call to turn away at meetings and that it had been extremely stupid. The fat lieutenant colonel (actually a retired staff captain) did not come either, but it turned out that he had been “dead to the world” since yesterday morning. In a word, the only ones who came were: the little Pole; then one shabby little clerk without a word to say, in a greasy tailcoat, with pimples and a repulsive smell; then also one deaf and almost totally blind little old man, who had once served in some post office or other and whom someone, from time immemorial and for no known reason, had been keeping at Amalia Ivanovna’s. There also came one drunken retired lieutenant, in reality an official of the commissariat, with the most indecent and loud guffaw and, “just imagine,” without a waistcoat! One fellow sat straight down at the table without so much as a bow to Katerina Ivanovna, and finally one individual, having no clothes, was about to appear in a dressing gown, but that was so very improper that through the efforts of Amalia Ivanovna and the little Pole they managed after all to lead him out. The little Pole, however, had brought with him two other little Poles, who had never lived at Amalia Ivanovna’s at all and whom no one had ever seen in the rooms before. All this irritated Katerina Ivanovna extremely unpleasantly. “For whom, after that, had all the preparations been made?” Even the children, to save room, had not been seated at the table, which took up the whole room as it was, but had been given places in the back corner on a trunk, the two little ones put on a bench, while Polechka, as the big girl, was to look after them, feed them, and wipe their little noses “as one does for well-born children.” In a word, Katerina Ivanovna had no choice but to receive everyone with redoubled dignity and even with haughtiness. Some of them she looked over especially sternly and loftily invited to sit down at the table. Considering for some reason that Amalia Ivanovna must answer for all those who had not come, she suddenly began treating her extremely offhandedly, which the latter at once noticed and was extremely piqued by. Such a beginning boded no good end. At last they sat down.

Raskolnikov came in almost at the very moment they returned from the cemetery. Katerina Ivanovna was terribly glad of him, first, because he was the only “educated guest” among all the guests and, “as everyone knows, in two years he was to occupy a professor’s chair at the university here,” and second, because he at once and respectfully apologized to her for having been unable, despite every wish, to be at the funeral. She simply pounced on him, seated him at the table beside her on her left (Amalia Ivanovna sat on her right), and despite the incessant bustle and worry over seeing that the food was properly served and everyone got some, despite the agonizing cough that kept interrupting and choking her every minute and seemed to have taken particularly deep root in these last two days, she kept turning to Raskolnikov and in a half whisper hurried to pour out before him all the feelings that had built up in her and all her just indignation at the failed funeral dinner; and her indignation often gave way to the merriest, most uncontrollable laughter at the assembled guests, but chiefly at the landlady herself.

“It’s all that cuckoo’s fault. You understand who I’m talking about: her, her!” and Katerina Ivanovna nodded toward the landlady. “Look at her: she’s goggling, she feels we’re talking about her, but she can’t understand, and her eyes are bulging. Ugh, the owl! Ha-ha-ha!… Khee-khee-khee! And what does she mean to show with that cap of hers! khee-khee-khee! Have you noticed, she wants everyone to think she’s patronizing me and doing me an honor by being present? I asked her, as a decent woman, to invite better people, and especially the deceased’s acquaintances, and look whom she’s brought: clowns of some sort! slatterns! Look at that one with the dirty face: a sort of snot on two legs! And these little Polacks… ha-ha-ha! Khee-khee-khee! Nobody, nobody has ever laid eyes on them here, and I never have; now why have they come, I ask you? Sitting there side by side, so proper. Panie, hey!” she suddenly shouted to one of them. “Have you had some bliny? Have some more! Drink some beer, beer! Wouldn’t you like some vodka? Look: he’s jumped up, he’s bowing, look, look: they must be absolutely starving, poor things! Never mind, let them eat. At least they don’t make noise, only… only, really, I’m afraid for the landlady’s silver spoons!… Amalia Ivanovna!” she suddenly turned to her, almost aloud. “If your spoons should happen to get stolen, I am not answerable for them, I warn you in advance! Ha-ha-ha!” she went off again, turning back to Raskolnikov, again nodding at the landlady, and delighted with her sally. “She didn’t understand, again she didn’t understand! Sitting there with her mouth open, look: an owl, a real owl, a screech owl in new ribbons, ha-ha-ha!”

Here the laughter again turned into an unbearable cough, which lasted five minutes. A little blood was left on the handkerchief; drops of sweat stood out on her forehead. She silently showed the blood to Raskolnikov and, having barely caught her breath, at once began whispering to him again with extraordinary animation and with red spots on her cheeks:

“Look, I gave her the most delicate, one might say, commission of inviting that lady and her daughter, you understand whom I mean? Here one had to behave in the most delicate of manners, to act in the most skillful way, and she managed things so that this out-of-town fool, this stuck-up creature, this worthless provincial, just because she’s some sort of major’s widow and has come to petition for a pension and wear out the hem of her skirt in government offices, because at fifty-five she pencils her brows and paints herself white and red (that’s well known)… and a creature like that not only did not see fit to come but did not even send an apology, if she couldn’t come, as the most ordinary politeness requires in such cases! I can’t understand why Pyotr Petrovich hasn’t come either? But where is Sonya? Where has she gone? Ah, here she is at last! Well, Sonya, where have you been? It’s strange that even at your father’s funeral you’re so unpunctual. Rodion Romanych, let her sit beside you. Here’s your place, Sonechka… take whatever you like. Have some of the aspic, that’s best. They’ll bring the bliny in a moment. Have the children been given some? Polechka, have you got everything there? Khee-khee-khee! Well, all right. Be a good girl, Lenya, and you, Kolya, don’t swing your little legs; sit the way a well-born child should sit. What are you saying, Sonechka?”

Sonya hastened at once to convey to her Pyotr Petrovich’s apologies, trying to speak loudly so that everyone could hear, and using the most choicely respectful expressions, which she had even deliberately made up in Pyotr Petrovich’s name and embellished on her own. She added that Pyotr Petrovich had asked her particularly to say that as soon as he possibly could he would come at once to talk over business in private and come to an agreement about what could be done and undertaken further, and so on, and so on.

Sonya knew that this would pacify and soothe Katerina Ivanovna and flatter her, and above all—her pride would be satisfied. She sat down beside Raskolnikov, giving him a hasty bow, and glanced at him fleetingly, with curiosity. For the rest of the time, though, she somehow avoided both looking at him and speaking to him. She even seemed somehow absent, though she kept looking straight into Katerina Ivanovna’s face to please her. Neither she nor Katerina Ivanovna was in mourning, for lack of dresses; Sonya had on some brown one, on the dark side, and Katerina Ivanovna her only dress, a cotton print, darkish, with stripes. The news about Pyotr Petrovich went off without a hitch. Having listened gravely to Sonya, Katerina Ivanovna inquired with the same gravity how Pyotr Petrovich’s health was. Then at once, and almost aloud, she whispered to Raskolnikov that it really would be strange for a respected and substantial man like Pyotr Petrovich to find himself in such “extraordinary company,” despite all his devotion to her family and his old friendship with her papa.

“That’s why I’m especially grateful to you, Rodion Romanych, for not disdaining my bread and salt, even in such surroundings,” she added almost aloud. “However, I’m sure it was only your particular friendship for my poor late husband that moved you to keep your word.”

Then once more she surveyed her guests proudly and with dignity, and suddenly, with particular solicitude, inquired loudly across the table of the deaf old man: “Wouldn’t he like some more of the roast, and had he been given any Lisbon?” The old man did not answer and for a long time could not understand what he was being asked, though his neighbors, for a laugh, even began shoving him. He only looked around with his mouth hanging open, which fired the general merriment still more.

“What a blockhead! Look, look! And why did they bring him? As for Pyotr Petrovich, I was always sure of him,” Katerina Ivanovna went on to Raskolnikov, “and of course he is not like…” sharply and loudly, and with an extremely stern look, she turned to Amalia Ivanovna, so that the latter even grew timid, “not like those dressed-up draggletails of yours, whom Papa wouldn’t have taken into his kitchen as cooks, while my late husband, of course, would have been doing them an honor by receiving them, and only out of his inexhaustible kindness at that.”

“Yes, sir, he liked a drink, sir; he liked that, sir, he’d have a drink, sir!” the retired commissariat man suddenly shouted, draining his twelfth glass of vodka.

“My late husband did indeed have that weakness, and everyone knows it,” Katerina Ivanovna suddenly fastened on him, “but he was a kind and noble man, who loved and respected his family; the only bad thing was that out of kindness he trusted all sorts of depraved people too much, and God knows whom he didn’t drink with, people who weren’t worth the soles of his shoes! Imagine, Rodion Romanovich, they found a gingerbread cockerel in his pocket: he’s walking along dead drunk, and still he remembers the children.”

“A cock-er-el? Were you pleased to say: a cock-er-el?” shouted the commissariat gentleman.

Katerina Ivanovna did not honor him with an answer. She fell to thinking about something and sighed.

“There, I’m sure you think, like everyone, that I was too strict with him,” she went on, turning to Raskolnikov. “But it’s not so! He respected me, he respected me very, very much! He was a man with a good soul! And at times I felt so sorry for him! He’d be sitting in the corner looking at me, and I’d feel so sorry for him, I’d want to be tender with him, and then you think to yourself: ‘Be tender with him, and he’ll just get drunk again’; it was only by strictness that he could be held back at all.”

“Yes, sir, there was hair-pulling, sir, there was, sir, more than once, sir,” the commissariat man bellowed again, and poured another glass of vodka down into himself.

“Not just hair-pulling, a broom would come in useful too with certain fools. I’m not talking about the deceased now!” Katerina Ivanovna snapped at the commissariat man.

The red spots on her cheeks burned brighter and brighter, her chest was heaving. Another minute and she was ready to make a scene. Many were giggling; many evidently found this pleasant. People began nudging the commissariat man and whispering something to him. Obviously they wanted to set the two of them at each other.

“And a-a-allow me to ask, what might that be in regard to, ma’am,” the commissariat man began, “that is, at whose… noble expense… you were pleased just now… But never mind! Nonsense! A widow! A poor little widow! I forgive… I pass!” And he knocked back another vodka.

Raskolnikov sat and listened silently and with disgust. As for eating, he only picked, out of politeness, at the morsels Katerina Ivanovna kept heaping on his plate every minute, and only so as not to offend her. He was watching Sonya intently. But Sonya was growing more and more anxious and troubled; she too sensed that the funeral dinner would not end peacefully, and followed Katerina Ivanovna’s mounting irritation with fear. She knew, among other things, that the chief reason the two out-of-town ladies had treated Katerina Ivanovna’s invitation with such contempt was she, Sonya. She had heard from Amalia Ivanovna herself that the mother had even been offended by the invitation and had posed the question: “How could she possibly seat her daughter beside that young person?” Sonya sensed that Katerina Ivanovna somehow already knew this, and an insult to her, Sonya, meant more to Katerina Ivanovna than an insult to herself personally, to her children, to her papa; in a word, it was a mortal insult, and Sonya knew that Katerina Ivanovna would not rest now “until she had proved to those draggletails that they were both…” and so on, and so on. As if on purpose, someone passed Sonya a plate from the other end of the table, with two hearts pierced by an arrow molded on it out of black bread. Katerina Ivanovna flared up and at once remarked loudly across the table that whoever had passed it was of course “a drunken ass.” Amalia Ivanovna, who also sensed something bad coming, and was at the same time wounded to the depths of her soul by Katerina Ivanovna’s haughtiness, in order to turn the company’s unpleasant mood in another direction and, while she was at it, to raise herself in the general esteem, suddenly began, apropos of nothing, to tell how a certain acquaintance of hers, “Karl from the chemist’s,” had been riding in a cab at night and that “the cabman him vanted to kill and Karl wery, wery begged him that he not kill, and cried, and the hands folded, and got frighten, and from fear the heart him pierced.” Katerina Ivanovna, though she smiled, at once remarked that Amalia Ivanovna should not tell anecdotes in Russian. The latter was offended still more and retorted that her “Vater aus Berlin vas wery, wery important man and all the time vent vith the hands about in pockets.” Katerina Ivanovna, who loved to laugh, could not hold out and burst into terrible laughter, so that Amalia Ivanovna was already losing the last of her patience and barely restraining herself.

“What a screech owl!” Katerina Ivanovna at once began whispering again to Raskolnikov, almost in high spirits. “She meant to say he walked with his hands in his pockets, and it came out that he went about in people’s pockets, khee-khee! And have you noticed, Rodion Romanovich, mark it once and for all, that all these Petersburg foreigners, that is, the Germans mainly, who come to us from God knows where, are all stupider than we are! Now you must agree, can anyone really tell how ‘Karl from the chemist’s from fear the heart pierced,’ and that he (the sniveler!), instead of tying up the cabman, ‘the hands folded and cried and wery begged.’ Ah, the dimwit! And she actually thinks it’s very touching, and doesn’t suspect how stupid she is! In my opinion that drunken commissariat man is a good deal cleverer than she is; at least you can see he’s a sot who has drunk away the last of his wits, but these people are all so prim, so serious… Look at her sitting there, eyes bulging. She’s angry! She’s angry! Ha-ha-ha! Khee-khee-khee!”

Now in high spirits, Katerina Ivanovna at once got carried away into various details and suddenly began talking about how, with the help of the pension she would obtain, she would without fail open a boarding school for young ladies of good family in her native town of T… Raskolnikov had not yet been told of this by Katerina Ivanovna herself, and she at once got carried away into the most alluring details. No one knew how, but there suddenly turned up in her hands that very “certificate of merit” the late Marmeladov had told Raskolnikov about, explaining to him in the tavern that Katerina Ivanovna, his spouse, had danced with a shawl at her graduation from the institute “before the governor and other persons.” This certificate of merit was evidently now meant to serve as evidence of Katerina Ivanovna’s right to open a boarding school herself; but above all it had been kept in readiness for the purpose of finally cutting down “both those dressed-up draggletails,” in case they came to the funeral dinner, and proving to them plainly that Katerina Ivanovna came from a most noble, “one might even say aristocratic, house, a colonel’s daughter, and surely better than certain adventuresses, of whom so many have multiplied lately.” The certificate of merit at once went from hand to hand among the drunken guests, which Katerina Ivanovna did not prevent, because it really did state, en toutes lettres, that she was the daughter of a court councillor and holder of an order,² and consequently was in fact very nearly a colonel’s daughter. Fired up, Katerina Ivanovna at once launched into all the details of the beautiful and tranquil life to come in T…: of the gymnasium teachers she would invite to give lessons in her boarding school; of one venerable old man, the Frenchman Mangot, who had taught French to Katerina Ivanovna herself at the institute and was still living out his days in T… and would surely come to her for the most reasonable fee. At last it came to Sonya too, “who would go to T… together with Katerina Ivanovna and help her there in everything.” But here suddenly someone snorted at the end of the table. Though Katerina Ivanovna at once tried to make it seem that she disdainfully failed to notice the laughter that had arisen at the end of the table, she at once, deliberately raising her voice, began speaking with animation of Sofya Semyonovna’s undoubted abilities to serve as her assistant, “of her meekness, patience, self-sacrifice, nobility, and education,” whereupon she patted Sonya on the cheek and, half rising, warmly kissed her twice. Sonya flushed, and Katerina Ivanovna suddenly burst into tears, remarking about herself then and there that “she was a weak-nerved fool and much too upset, and it was time to finish, and since the food was finished, the tea ought to be served.” At that very moment Amalia Ivanovna, by now thoroughly offended that she had taken not the slightest part in the whole conversation and that no one was even listening to her, suddenly ventured on a last attempt and, with secret anguish, made bold to impart to Katerina Ivanovna one extremely sensible and profound observation, to the effect that in the future boarding school particular attention must be paid to the young ladies’ clean linen (die Wäsche) and that “must absolute vun such goot lady (die Dame) be, vat nice about the linen looks,” and second, “that all young girls secretly by nights no novel read.” Katerina Ivanovna, who really was upset and very tired, and was by now completely sick of the funeral dinner, at once “cut off” Amalia Ivanovna, saying that she was “talking rubbish” and understood nothing; that worrying about die Wäsche was the business of the linen-keeper and not of the directress of a boarding school for young ladies of good family; and as for the reading of novels, that was simply an indecency even to speak of, and she asked her to be quiet. Amalia Ivanovna flared up and, turning spiteful, remarked that she had only “goot vished” and that she had “wery much goot vished,” and that “for the apartment long time no Geld vas paid.” Katerina Ivanovna at once “put her in her place,” saying that she was lying when she said she had “goot vished,” because only yesterday, while the deceased was still lying on the table, she had been tormenting her about the rent. To this Amalia Ivanovna very logically remarked that she “those ladies invited, but those ladies not came, because those ladies noble ladies are and cannot come to not-noble lady.” Katerina Ivanovna at once “underlined” to her that since she was a slattern, she could not judge what true nobility was. Amalia Ivanovna could not bear it and at once declared that her “Vater aus Berlin vas wery, wery important man and vith both hands about in pockets vent and did all the time so: poof! poof!” and, to portray her Vater more convincingly, Amalia Ivanovna leaped up from her chair, thrust both hands into her pockets, puffed out her cheeks, and began making some vague sounds with her mouth resembling poof-poof, amid the loud guffaws of all the lodgers, who were deliberately egging Amalia Ivanovna on with their approval, sensing a fight. But this Katerina Ivanovna could endure no longer, and at once, for all to hear, she “rapped out” that Amalia Ivanovna had perhaps never had any Vater at all, that Amalia Ivanovna was simply a drunken Petersburg Finn and had surely been a cook somewhere before, and perhaps something worse. Amalia Ivanovna turned red as a lobster and shrieked that maybe it was Katerina Ivanovna who “never no Vater had; but she had Vater aus Berlin, and so long frock coat vore, and did all the time: poof, poof, poof!” Katerina Ivanovna remarked with contempt that her origins were known to everyone and that this very certificate of merit stated in printed letters that her father was a colonel; whereas Amalia Ivanovna’s father (if she had any father at all) was surely some Petersburg Finn who sold milk; but most likely there had been no father at all, since to this day it was not known what Amalia Ivanovna’s patronymic was: Ivanovna or Ludwigovna? Here Amalia Ivanovna, thoroughly enraged and banging her fist on the table, began shrieking that she was Amal-Ivan, and not Ludwigovna, that her Vater “vas named Johann and he vas Bürgermeister,” and that Katerina Ivanovna’s Vater “never at all vas Bürgermeister.” Katerina Ivanovna rose from her chair and sternly, in an apparently calm voice (though she was very pale and her chest was heaving deeply), remarked to her that if she dared even one more time “to put her wretched little Vater on the same footing as her papa, then she, Katerina Ivanovna, would tear the cap off her head and trample it underfoot.” Hearing this, Amalia Ivanovna began running around the room, shouting with all her might that she was the landlady and that Katerina Ivanovna “this minute must out of apartment move”; then she rushed for some reason to gather the silver spoons from the table. An uproar and a crash arose; the children began to cry. Sonya rushed to hold Katerina Ivanovna back; but when Amalia Ivanovna suddenly shouted something about a yellow ticket, Katerina Ivanovna pushed Sonya away and made for Amalia Ivanovna to carry out her threat about the cap then and there. At that moment the door opened, and on the threshold of the room there suddenly appeared Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin. He stood surveying the whole company with a stern, attentive gaze. Katerina Ivanovna rushed to him.

Notes

1. 1. Polish for “Madame Cornet’s wife” (a khorunzhy was a junior officer, a cornet or ensign): the little Pole flatters her with a gentry-style title.

2. 2. A court councillor stood seventh in the Table of Ranks, equal to a lieutenant colonel in the army; “holder of an order” (kavaler) means he had been decorated. Hence “very nearly a colonel’s daughter.”