V. Not You, Not You!

On the way to Ivan’s he had to pass the house where Katerina Ivanovna had her lodgings. There was light in the windows. He suddenly stopped and decided to go in. He had not seen Katerina Ivanovna for more than a week. But it now occurred to him that Ivan might be with her just then, especially on the eve of such a day. Having rung and gone in onto the staircase, dimly lit by a Chinese lantern, he saw a man coming down from above, in whom, as they drew level, he recognized his brother. So he was already on his way out from Katerina Ivanovna’s.

“Ah, it’s only you,” Ivan Fyodorovich said dryly. “Well, goodbye. Are you going to see her?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t advise it; she is ‘agitated,’ and you’ll upset her even more.”

“No, no!” a voice suddenly shouted from above, from a door that had flown open in an instant. “Alexei Fyodorovich, have you come from him?”

“Yes, I’ve been with him.”

“Did he send me any message? Come in, Alyosha, and you, Ivan Fyodorovich, you must come back, you absolutely must. Do you hear me!”

Such an imperious note rang in Katya’s voice that Ivan Fyodorovich, after hesitating for an instant, nonetheless decided to go up again together with Alyosha.

“She was eavesdropping!” he whispered irritably to himself, but Alyosha caught it.

“Allow me to keep my coat on,” said Ivan Fyodorovich, entering the drawing room. “I won’t even sit down. I won’t stay more than a minute.”

“Sit down, Alexei Fyodorovich,” said Katerina Ivanovna, remaining standing herself. She had changed little in this time, but her dark eyes were flashing with an ominous fire. Alyosha remembered afterward that she had seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful at that moment.

“Well, what message did he give you?”

“Only one thing,” said Alyosha, looking straight into her face, “that you should spare yourself and not testify at the trial about what…” he faltered a little, “what happened between you… at the time of your very first acquaintance… in that town…”

“Ah, that’s about the bow to the ground for that money!” she took him up, laughing bitterly. “Well, is he afraid for himself or for me—eh? He said I should spare—whom? Him or myself? Tell me, Alexei Fyodorovich.”

Alyosha was looking at her intently, trying to understand her.

“Both yourself and him,” he said quietly.

“That’s just it,” she rapped out somehow spitefully, and suddenly blushed. “You don’t know me yet, Alexei Fyodorovich,” she said menacingly, “and I don’t know myself yet either. Perhaps you will want to trample me underfoot after tomorrow’s examination.”

“You will testify honestly,” said Alyosha, “that is all that’s needed.”

“A woman is often dishonest,” she ground out. “Only an hour ago I was thinking that I was afraid to touch that monster… as if he were a viper… and yet no, he is still a human being to me! But did he kill? Was it he who killed?” she suddenly exclaimed hysterically, turning quickly to Ivan Fyodorovich. Alyosha understood at once that she had already asked Ivan Fyodorovich this very question, perhaps only a minute before he came, and not for the first time either but for the hundredth, and that it had ended in a quarrel.

“I have been to see Smerdyakov… It was you, Ivan, you who convinced me that he is a parricide. You were the only one I believed!” she went on, still addressing Ivan Fyodorovich. He grinned as though with an effort. Alyosha started at hearing that intimate you. He could never have suspected such relations between them.

“Well, but that’s enough,” Ivan snapped. “I’ll go. I’ll come tomorrow.” And turning at once, he walked out of the room and went straight onto the staircase. Katerina Ivanovna suddenly seized Alyosha by both hands with a sort of imperious gesture.

“Go after him! Catch up with him! Don’t leave him alone for a minute,” she whispered quickly. “He’s out of his mind. Don’t you know he’s gone out of his mind? He has a fever, a nervous fever! The doctor told me, go, run after him…”

Alyosha jumped up and rushed after Ivan Fyodorovich. Ivan had not gone even fifty paces.

“What do you want?” he suddenly turned to Alyosha, seeing him catching up. “She told you to run after me because I’m mad. I know it by heart,” he added irritably.

“She is mistaken, of course, but she’s right that you are ill,” said Alyosha. “I was looking at your face just now at her house; you have a very sick face, very, Ivan!”

Ivan walked on without stopping. Alyosha followed him.

“And do you know, Alexei Fyodorovich, how people go mad?” Ivan asked in a voice that had suddenly become quite quiet, no longer irritable at all, in which there sounded all at once the most simple-hearted curiosity.

“No, I don’t; I suppose there are many different kinds of madness.”

“And can one observe in oneself that one is going mad?”

“I think one cannot watch oneself clearly in such a case,” Alyosha answered in surprise. Ivan fell silent for half a minute.

“If you want to talk to me about something, change the subject, please,” he suddenly said.

“Oh, before I forget, here is a letter for you,” Alyosha said timidly, and, taking Liza’s letter out of his pocket, he held it out to him. They had just come up to a streetlamp. Ivan at once recognized the hand.

“Ah, that’s from that little demon!” He laughed spitefully and, without opening the envelope, suddenly tore it into several pieces and threw them to the wind. The scraps flew away.

“Not sixteen yet, I believe, and already offering herself!” he said with contempt, and strode on down the street.

“What do you mean, offering herself?” exclaimed Alyosha.

“The way depraved women offer themselves, of course.”

“What are you saying, Ivan, what are you saying?” Alyosha stood up for her sorrowfully and hotly. “She’s a child, you’re insulting a child! She is ill, she’s very ill herself, perhaps she too is going out of her mind… I couldn’t not give you her letter… On the contrary, I wanted to hear something from you… so as to save her.”

“There’s nothing for you to hear from me. If she’s a child, I’m not her nanny. Be quiet, Alexei. Don’t go on. I don’t even think about it.”

Again they were silent for a minute or so.

“Now she’ll spend the whole night praying to the Mother of God to show her what to do at the trial tomorrow,” he suddenly began again, sharply and spitefully.

“You… you mean Katerina Ivanovna?”

“Yes. Is she to appear as Mitenka’s savior or his destroyer? That’s what she’ll be praying about, for light to dawn on her soul. She doesn’t know yet herself, you see, she hasn’t had time to prepare. She takes me for a nanny too, she wants me to lull her to sleep!”

“Katerina Ivanovna loves you, brother,” Alyosha said with a sad feeling.

“Perhaps. Only I’m not keen on her.”

“She is suffering. Then why do you say to her… sometimes… such words that she has hope?” Alyosha went on with timid reproach. “I know you’ve given her hope, after all; forgive me for speaking like this,” he added.

“I can’t do what ought to be done here, break it off and tell her straight out!” Ivan said irritably. “We have to wait until they pronounce sentence on the murderer. If I break with her now, then out of revenge on me she’ll ruin that scoundrel at the trial tomorrow, because she hates him and knows she hates him. It’s all lies here, lies upon lies! But now, as long as I haven’t broken with her, she still hopes and won’t ruin that monster, knowing how I want to pull him out of trouble. And when will that cursed verdict ever come!”

The words “murderer” and “monster” echoed painfully in Alyosha’s heart.

“But how can she ruin our brother?” he asked, pondering Ivan’s words. “What can she testify that could ruin Mitya outright?”

“You don’t know that yet. She has a certain document in her hands, in Mitenka’s own hand, which proves mathematically that he killed Fyodor Pavlovich.”

“That cannot be!” exclaimed Alyosha.

“Why can’t it? I read it myself.”

“There can be no such document!” Alyosha repeated ardently. “It cannot be, because he is not the murderer. It was not he who killed father, not he!”

Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly stopped.

“Who is the murderer, then, in your view?” he asked, apparently somehow coldly, and a note that was even haughty sounded in the tone of the question.

“You know yourself who,” Alyosha said quietly and penetratingly.

“Who? That fable about that crazy epileptic idiot? About Smerdyakov?”

Alyosha suddenly felt that he was trembling all over.

“You know yourself who,” broke from him helplessly. He was gasping for breath.

“But who, who?” Ivan cried, almost ferociously now. All his restraint had suddenly vanished.

“I know only one thing,” Alyosha said, still almost in a whisper. “It was not you who killed father.”

“‘Not you’! What do you mean, not you?” Ivan was dumbfounded.

“It was not you who killed father, not you!” Alyosha repeated firmly.

The silence lasted for half a minute.

“But I know myself that it wasn’t me, are you raving?” said Ivan, with a pale, twisted grin. His eyes seemed to fasten on Alyosha. Both of them were standing by the streetlamp again.

“No, Ivan, you yourself have told yourself several times that you are the murderer.”

“When did I say it?… I was in Moscow… When did I say it?” Ivan murmured, completely lost.

“You have said it to yourself many times, when you were left alone in these terrible two months,” Alyosha went on as before, quietly and distinctly. But he was speaking now as if beside himself, as if not of his own will, obeying some irresistible command. “You have accused yourself and confessed to yourself that the murderer is none other than you. But it was not you who killed, you are mistaken, you are not the murderer, do you hear me, not you! God has sent me to tell you this.”

Both fell silent. This silence stretched out for a whole long minute. Both stood and kept looking into each other’s eyes. Both were pale. Suddenly Ivan began to shake all over and seized Alyosha firmly by the shoulder.

“You were at my place!” he said in a grinding whisper. “You were at my place at night, when he came… Confess… you saw him, you saw him?”

“Whom do you mean… Mitya?” Alyosha asked in bewilderment.

“Not him, the devil take the monster!” Ivan howled in a frenzy. “Do you really know that he comes to see me? How did you find out, tell me!”

“Who is he? I don’t know whom you mean,” Alyosha murmured, frightened now.

“No, you do know… otherwise how could you… it can’t be that you don’t know…”

But suddenly he seemed to restrain himself. He stood as though thinking something over. A strange grin twisted his lips.

“Brother,” Alyosha began again in a trembling voice, “I have said this to you because you will believe my word, I know that. I have said this word to you for all your life: not you! Do you hear, for all your life. And it was God who laid it on my soul to say this to you, even if from this hour you should hate me forever…”

But Ivan Fyodorovich, apparently, had already managed to master himself completely.

“Alexei Fyodorovich,” he said with a cold grin, “I cannot abide prophets and epileptics; messengers of God especially, as you know only too well. From this moment I break with you, and, I think, forever. I ask you to leave me this very minute, at this very crossroads. And in any case your road to your lodgings lies down this lane. Take particular care not to come to my place today! Do you hear?”

He turned and, with a firm stride, walked straight on without looking back.

“Brother,” Alyosha shouted after him, “if anything happens to you today, think of me before anything else!…”

But Ivan did not answer. Alyosha stood at the crossroads by the streetlamp until Ivan had vanished completely into the darkness. Then he turned and walked slowly home down the lane. Both he and Ivan Fyodorovich lodged separately, in different lodgings: neither of them had wanted to live in Fyodor Pavlovich’s deserted house. Alyosha rented a furnished room from a family of tradespeople; Ivan Fyodorovich lived rather far from him and occupied spacious and fairly comfortable quarters in the wing of a good house belonging to an official’s widow who was not badly off. But in the whole wing he was waited on by only one ancient, completely deaf old woman, all rheumatism, who went to bed at six o’clock in the evening and got up at six o’clock in the morning. In these two months Ivan Fyodorovich had become strangely undemanding and very much liked being left completely alone. He even tidied the room he occupied himself, and he seldom so much as went into the other rooms of his quarters. Reaching the gate of his house and already taking hold of the bell handle, he stopped. He felt that he was still trembling all over with a spiteful trembling. Suddenly he let go of the bell, spat, turned back, and walked quickly off again to the quite different, opposite end of town, some two versts from his lodgings, to a tiny, lopsided little log house where Marya Kondratyevna lodged, Fyodor Pavlovich’s former neighbor, who used to come to Fyodor Pavlovich’s kitchen for soup and to whom Smerdyakov had sung his songs and played the guitar that time. She had sold her former little house and now lived with her mother in what was almost a peasant cottage, and the sick, almost dying Smerdyakov had settled with them ever since Fyodor Pavlovich’s death. It was to him that Ivan Fyodorovich was now heading, drawn by one sudden and irresistible consideration.