Katerina Ivanovna had asked him to go to Ozernaya Street; his brother Dmitry’s place was on the way to it, in a side-street which was close to Ozernaya Street. Even though he did not expect to find his brother in, Alyosha decided to call on him anyway, before continuing on to the Staff Captain’s. He suspected that the former might even now be attempting to hide from him but, come what may, he had to find him. Time was running out, moreover, and the thought of the starets’s life slowly ebbing away had been preying on his mind constantly ever since he left the monastery.
In Katerina Ivanovna’s account there was one detail that had aroused his curiosity: when she mentioned the young schoolboy, the Staff Captain’s son, who had run crying at his father’s side, it had occurred to Alyosha even then that this boy was very probably the same schoolboy who had bitten his finger while he was questioning him as to how he might have offended him. Now he was almost convinced of this, though he did not quite know why. Having become absorbed in other matters, he stopped brooding and decided not to think about the ‘calamity’ he had just caused, nor to torture himself with remorse, but to be positive and to tackle each situation as it arose. This decision finally restored all his good humour. Feeling hungry as he turned into the side-street on his way to Dmitry’s, he reached into his pocket and took out the bread roll he had taken at his father’s and ate it. He felt better.
Dmitry was not in. The occupants of the little house—an old carpenter, his aged wife, and their son—looked at him with suspicion. ‘He’s not slept here the last three nights,’ replied the old man in answer to Alyosha’s persistent questioning, ‘maybe he’s gone away.’ Alyosha realized that the old man had been told what to say. In response to his question as to whether Dmitry might be at Grushenka’s or perhaps hiding again at Foma’s (Alyosha mentioned these details intentionally), the whole family looked at him with apprehension. ‘It seems that they want to protect him,’ Alyosha thought, ‘they’re on his side—that’s a good sign.’
At last he found Mrs Kalmykova’s house on Ozernaya Street, a decrepit and lopsided building with only three windows looking on to the street, and with a dirty yard in the middle of which stood a solitary cow. The entrance from the yard led into a hall; to the left lived the landlady and her daughter, both aged and both apparently deaf. In reply to his question, repeated several times, regarding the Staff Captain, one of them, realizing at last that it was the tenants who were being sought, pointed across the hall to a door in a separate wing of the house. The Staff Captain’s accommodation consisted of a single room. Alyosha was just about to grasp the iron latch to open the door when he was struck by the odd silence which reigned on the other side. And yet he knew from what Katerina Ivanovna had told him that the retired Staff Captain had a family: ‘They’re either asleep, or perhaps they’ve heard me coming and are waiting for me to open the door; I’d better knock first,’ which he did. There was a reply, not immediately, but about ten seconds later.
‘Who’s there?’ enquired a loud, overtly aggressive voice.
Alyosha opened the door and stepped over the threshold. He found himself in a fairly spacious room full of people and cluttered with all kinds of household belongings. To the left was a large Russian stove. A line with various rags hanging on it had been strung across the room from the stove to the window on the left. Two beds with knitted counterpanes stood to the left and right, one along each wall of the room. On the left-hand bed was a stack of four chintz-covered pillows, arranged in decreasing order of size. Only one very small pillow lay on the other bed on the right. In the corner nearest the door was a small area screened off with a curtain or a bed-sheet, also slung over a line suspended between the two abutting walls. Behind this curtain was another bed, made up on a bench extended by a chair. A plain, rectangular, rustic table had been moved from the corner nearest the door to the middle window. The three windows, each containing four small, discoloured, and greenish panes, were shut tight, making it rather stuffy and dark in the room. On the table stood a frying-pan containing the remains of fried eggs, a half-eaten piece of bread, and a bottle of vodka with a few dregs left in the bottom. A woman of refined appearance, wearing a print dress, was sitting on a chair by the bed on the left. Her face was very emaciated and sallow; her deeply sunken cheeks told one at a glance how very ill she was. But what struck Alyosha most of all was the look in the poor woman’s eyes—intensely enquiring, but at the same time terribly disdainful. Up to the moment that she opened her mouth to speak, and all the time that Alyosha was in conversation with the head of the household, she kept turning her large brown eyes from one speaker to the other with the same degree of enquiry and disdain. Next to the woman, by the left-hand window, stood a young, rather plain-faced girl with thin, reddish hair, dressed cheaply but neatly. She inspected Alyosha with disapproval as he entered. Beside the bed on the right sat another wretched female. She was a very pathetic creature, also young—about twenty—but hunchbacked, her legs, as Alyosha learned later, completely wasted and useless. Her crutches rested close by, against the corner between the bed and the wall. The wretched girl looked at Alyosha; her exquisitely beautiful and kind eyes were full of meek resignation. At the table, finishing off the fried eggs, sat a man of about forty-five, short of stature, gaunt, frail, with reddish hair and a thin, reddish beard which looked for all the world like a loofah (this comparison, especially the word ‘loofah’, immediately flashed through his mind the moment he set eyes on him, Alyosha later recalled). It was evidently he who had called out, ‘Who’s there?’ because there was no other man in the room. But as Alyosha entered he literally shot up from the bench on which he was sitting at the table and, hastily wiping his mouth on a ragged napkin, darted up to Alyosha.
‘A monk come to ask for alms for the monastery,’ the girl who was standing in the left-hand corner said in a loud voice. ‘He knew who to come to!’ But the man who had rushed up to Alyosha instantly swung round on his heels towards her and replied in an agitated, strained voice:
‘Not so, Varvara Nikolavna, not true, you’re mistaken!’ And then, suddenly turning towards Alyosha, he asked: ‘May I be so bold as to ask, sir, what induced you to visit this… hovel?’
Alyosha regarded the man attentively, for he had never seen him before. There was something awkward, impatient, and irascible about him. Although it was obvious that he had just been drinking, he was by no means drunk. The expression on his face was arrogant in the extreme, but at the same time—and this was strange—unmistakably timid. He seemed like a man who had been tyrannized for a long time and had suffered a great deal, but who had suddenly decided that enough was enough, and wished to give vent to his feelings; or, better still, a man who was simply itching to deal you a blow, but was terribly afraid of being struck first. His manner of speaking and the intonation of his rather shrill voice revealed a warped sense of humour, now vicious, now submissive, sporadic, and faltering. When he uttered the word ‘hovel’ he appeared to shake all over, his eyes bulged, and he approached Alyosha so closely that the latter instinctively took a step back. The man was wearing a very poor-quality dark, patched, and stained nankeen coat. His very light-coloured check trousers, of a style no longer in fashion, were of a very thin material, rumpled at the bottom and consequently seeming too short for him, as though he had outgrown them.
‘I’m… Aleksei Karamazov…’, said Alyosha in response.
‘I’m perfectly well aware of that,’ the man immediately snapped back, making it clear that he knew only too well who Alyosha was. ‘Staff Captain Snegiryov, at your service; all the same, I’d still like to know what exactly induced you to…’
‘I just thought I’d call on you. As a matter of fact, there was something I wanted to tell you… If only you’d allow me…’
‘In that case here’s a chair sir, pray be seated. That’s what they used to say in the old-time comedies: “Pray be seated…”, and with a sudden gesture the Staff Captain grabbed an empty chair (a plain, rustic, hard chair) and plac
ed it almost in the middle of the room; then, pulling up a similar chair for himself, he sat down opposite Alyosha, face to face, so that their knees almost touched.
‘Staff Captain Nikolai Ilyich Snegiryov, sir, retired from one of the Russian army’s finest regiments of the line, fallen upon hard times, but Staff Captain notwithstanding. Or should I say perhaps, Staff Captain “Three bags full, sir”, rather than Snegiryov, the “Three bags full, sir” having come at quite the wrong time of life. One is obliged to eat humble pie in deprivation.’
‘Quite so, quite so,’ Alyosha smiled. ‘But, does this sort of thing happen more by design or by accident?’
‘As God is my witness, quite by accident. All my life I resisted, never once was I known to kowtow to anyone. Then disaster struck, and before I could say Jack Robinson, I was “Three bags full, sir”. It’s all a matter of divine providence. I see you take a keen interest in what’s going on in the world about you. Still, I wonder how I could have excited your curiosity, unable as I am in my circumstances to offer any hospitality.’
‘I came… about that incident…’
‘What incident?’ the Staff Captain interrupted impatiently.
‘That encounter of yours with my brother Dmitry Fyodorovich,’ Alyosha replied awkwardly.
‘Now I wonder what encounter would that have been, sir? You don’t mean to say …? So you’ve come about that loofah, that bathhouse loofah business?’ He thrust himself forward so violently that their knees actually touched. He pursed his lips tightly.
‘What loofah?’ mumbled Alyosha.
‘He’s come to complain to you about me, papa,’ cried a familiar child’s voice from the corner behind the curtain. ‘I bit his finger earlier today!’
The curtain parted, and in the corner under the icons Alyosha saw his former adversary lying on the makeshift bedding arranged on the bench and chair. The boy was covered with his little coat and an old quilt. It was obvious that he was not well and, judging by his burning eyes, was feverish. Now he regarded Alyosha without any fear, as if to say: ‘I’m in my own home, you can’t touch me.’
‘What’s all this about your finger being bitten?’ the Staff Captain began to rise from his chair. ‘Did he bite your finger?’
‘Yes. He and some boys were throwing stones at one another in the street; it was six against one. I went up to him, and he threw a stone at me too, then another one hit me on the head. I asked him what I’d done to deserve that. Then he rushed at me and bit my finger very painfully, I can’t think why.’
‘I’ll give him a hiding this minute, sir! I’ll whip him straight away, sir.’ The Staff Captain had now risen fully from his chair.
‘But I’m not complaining at all, I’m simply telling you what happened… I certainly don’t want you to punish him. Besides, he looks ill to me…’
‘And did you really think I was going to give him a hiding? That I’d take my little Ilyushechka and whip him in front of you just to satisfy you? Would you like me to do it right away?’ the Captain asked, turning on Alyosha as though intending to attack him. ‘I’m very sorry about your delicate little finger, sir, but before I whip my Ilyushechka, you wouldn’t like me to hack off four of my fingers with this knife before your very eyes for your righteous satisfaction, would you? Four should be enough I think to gratify your desire for revenge, sir, you wouldn’t ask for the fifth one too, would you?…’ He stopped suddenly, as though choking. Every line on his face was twitching, and there was an extraordinary challenge in his eyes. He seemed frantic.
‘Now I think I understand everything,’ Alyosha said softly and sorrowfully, without getting up from his seat. ‘So, your boy, your good little boy, loves his father and attacked me, the brother of the man who humiliated you… Now I understand,’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘But my brother Dmitry Fyodorovich is sorry for what he did, I know that, and if only he could come to you, or, better still, meet you where it all occurred, he would ask your forgiveness in front of everyone… should you want him to do so.’
‘So, first he pulls my beard and then he asks to be forgiven… All over and done with, is that it?’
‘Oh no, on the contrary, he’ll do anything you want, you only have to say!’
‘So, were I to ask His Highness to kneel in front of me in the Stolichny Gorod* or on the square, he’d do it?’
‘Yes, indeed he would.’
‘You touch me deeply, sir. I’m almost in tears and, I have to admit, deeply moved. It’s almost more than I can bear. Allow me to complete the introductions: my family, my two daughters, and my son—my brood. If I die, who’s going to love them? And while I’m alive, who, other than they, would love a miserable wretch like me? It’s a wonderful thing the Lord has done for the likes of me. For it needs be that even a beggar such as me should be vouchsafed someone to love him…’
‘Oh, that’s perfectly true!’ exclaimed Alyosha.
‘Enough of this nonsense!’ the girl by the window exclaimed, unexpectedly turning to her father with an expression of contempt and disgust. ‘Just because some idiot’s turned up, you don’t have to demean yourself.’
‘Now, now, Varvara Nikolavna, there’s no need for that,’ her father observed, and though his voice was authoritative he continued to look at her approvingly. ‘It’s in her character, bless her,’ he said, turning to Alyosha again.
And nothing in the whole of Nature
Did he deign to bless.*
It ought to be in the feminine: did she deign to bless. But allow me to introduce you to my wife. This is Arina Petrovna, a lady with no legs you might say, about forty-three, got some movement in the legs still, but not much. She’s from a humble background. Arina Petrovna, cheer up: this is Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov. Stand up, Aleksei Fyodorovich.’ He took him by the arm and quickly helped him up, with a strength that belied his apparent frailty. ‘You’re being introduced to a lady, you must stand up, sir. It’s a different Karamazov, mother, not the one who… hm, you know what I mean, but his brother, who’s kindness itself. Permit me, Arina Petrovna, permit me, mother, to kiss your hand first.’
And he kissed his wife’s hand respectfully, even tenderly. The girl by the window indignantly turned her back on the scene; his wife’s disdainful, questioning expression suddenly relaxed into one of total friendliness.
‘How do you do, please sit down, Mr Chernomazov,’* she said.
‘Karamazov, mother, Karamazov,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘We’re only simple people, sir.’
‘Well, Karamazov or what have you, but for me it’s Chernomazov… Do sit down, and why ever did he make you stand up? “Lady with no legs”, he says—well, I do have legs, but they’re swollen like tree-trunks, while the rest of me is withered. I used to be nice and plump, but now I’m as thin as a rake…’
‘We’re just simple people, sir, just simple people,’ the Captain reiterated.
‘Papa, oh papa!’ said the hunchbacked girl, who had kept silent until then, and suddenly buried her face in her handkerchief.
‘Buffoon!’ the girl by the window blurted out.
‘Now you understand the situation?’ the woman said, spreading out her arms and pointing towards her daughters. ‘It’s like clouds; the clouds will drift past and we’ll have music again. When we belonged to the military, we used to have lots of visitors like him. No, bless you, I shan’t make an issue of this. Whoever loves, let him go on loving. Along comes the deacon’s wife and says: “Aleksander Aleksandrovich is an excellent man, but Nastasya Petrovna”, she says, “is a fiend out of hell.” “Well,” I reply, “each to his own, but as for you, small though you are, you stink to high heaven.” “And you,” she says, “you must be kept under.” “You swarthy hag,” say I to her, “you haven’t come to teach me how to suck eggs, have you?” “I’m letting in some fresh air,” she says, “but you’re fouling it.” “Well,” I replied, “ask any of the gentlemen officers if my breath smells or what.” And this has been preying on my mind ever so much since then;
I was sitting here the other day, just as I am now, and in comes that very same General, large as life, who was here at Easter. “Your highness,” I say to him, “may a lady of breeding be permitted to let in a breath of fresh air?” “Yes,” he replies, “you ought to open a window or the door a little, it’s awfully stuffy in here.” It’s always the same! And what’s wrong with my breath? Corpses smell even worse. “I’ll not foul your air,” I say, “I’ll order me a pair of boots and leave you, so there.” My dears, my beloved ones, don’t blame your poor old mother! Nikolai Ilyich, my dear, haven’t I looked after you well, all I’ve got left is Ilyushechka, who comes home after school full of love for me. He brought me an apple the other day. Forgive your poor old mother, my dears, forgive me, my beloved ones, forgive me, alone that I am… and how come, suddenly, none of you can stand the smell of my breath?’
And the poor creature began to weep, tears streaming down her face. The Staff Captain was at her side in a trice.
‘Mother, mother darling, that’ll do, that’ll do! You’re not alone. Everyone loves you, everyone adores you!’ and he again began to kiss both her hands and gently stroke her face with the palms of his hands; picking up a napkin, he started dabbing her face. Alyosha felt tears beginning to prick in his own eyes. ‘Well, sir, you’ve seen it all, you’ve heard everything, haven’t you?’ He suddenly turned to Alyosha with some vehemence, pointing with his hand at the hapless, crazed woman.
‘I have, I have indeed,’ Alyosha muttered.
‘Papa, papa! You’re not going with him… Don’t go, papa!’ the little boy cried out, raising himself up in bed slightly, his burning eyes fixed upon his father.
‘It’s about time you stopped making an exhibition of yourself and ceased your stupid antics that never lead to anything!…’ Varvara Nikolavna called out from her corner, stamping her foot and utterly beside herself with anger.
The Karamazov Brothers Page 32