“How strangely you ask and … stare!” the prince observed involuntarily.
“But I like looking at that painting,” Rogozhin muttered after a silence, as if again forgetting his question.
“At that painting!” the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. “At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!”
“Lose it he does,” Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly. They had already reached the front door.
“What?” the prince suddenly stopped. “How can you! I was almost joking, and you’re so serious! And why did you ask me whether I believe in God?”
“Never mind, I just did. I wanted to ask you before. Many people don’t believe nowadays. And is it true (because you’ve lived abroad) what one drunk man told me, that in our Russia, people don’t believe in God even more than in other countries? ‘It’s easier for us than for them,’ he said, ‘because we’ve gone further than they have …’ ”
Rogozhin smiled sarcastically; having uttered his question, he suddenly opened the door and, keeping hold of the handle, waited for the prince to go out. The prince was surprised, but went out. Rogozhin followed him out to the landing and closed the door behind him. The two men stood facing each other, looking as if they had forgotten where they had come to and what they were to do next.
“Good-bye, then,” said the prince, holding out his hand.
“Good-bye,” said Rogozhin, shaking the extended hand firmly but quite mechanically.
The prince went down one step and turned.
“But with regard to belief,” he began, smiling (evidently unwilling to leave Rogozhin like that), and also becoming animated under the impression of an unexpected memory, “with regard to belief, I had four different encounters in two days last week. One morning I was traveling on a new railway line and spent four hours talking on the train with a certain S., having only just made his acquaintance. I had heard a good deal about him before and, among other things, that he was an atheist. He’s really a very learned man, and I was glad to be talking with a true scholar. Moreover, he’s a man of rare courtesy, and he talked with me as if I were perfectly equal to him in knowledge and ideas. He doesn’t believe in God. Only one thing struck me: it was as if that was not at all what he was talking about all the while, and it struck me precisely because before, too, however many unbelievers I’ve met, however many books I’ve read on the subject, it has always seemed to me that they were talking or writing books that were not at all about that, though it looked as if it was about that. I said this to him right then, but it must be I didn’t speak clearly, or didn’t know how to express it, because he didn’t understand anything … In the evening I stopped to spend the night in a provincial hotel where a murder had taken place the night before, so that everyone was talking about it when I arrived. Two peasants, getting on in years, and not drunk, friends who had known each other a long time, had had tea and were both about to go to bed in the same little room. But, during the last two days, one of them had spied the silver watch that the other wore on a yellow bead string, which he had evidently never noticed before. The man was not a thief, he was even honest, and not all that poor as peasant life goes. But he liked the watch so much and was so tempted by it that he finally couldn’t stand it: he pulled out a knife and, while his friend was looking the other way, went up to him cautiously from behind, took aim, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself and, after praying bitterly to himself: ‘Lord, forgive me for Christ’s sake!’—killed his friend with one blow, like a sheep, and took his watch.”20
Rogozhin rocked with laughter. He guffawed as if he was in some sort of fit. It was even strange to look at this laughter coming right after such a gloomy mood.
“Now that I like! No, that’s the best yet!” he cried out spasmodically, nearly breathless. “The one doesn’t believe in God at all, and the other believes so much that he even stabs people with a prayer … No, that, brother Prince, couldn’t have been made up! Ha, ha, ha! No, that’s the best yet!…”
“The next morning I went out for a stroll about town,” the prince went on, as soon as Rogozhin paused, though laughter still twitched spasmodically and fitfully on his lips, “and I saw a drunken soldier staggering along the wooden sidewalk, all in tatters. He comes up to me: ‘Buy a silver cross, master. I’m asking only twenty kopecks. It’s silver!’ I see a cross in his hand—he must have just taken it off—on a worn light blue ribbon, only it’s a real tin one, you could see it at first glance, big, eight-pointed, of the full Byzantine design. I took out twenty kopecks, gave them to him, and put the cross on at once—and I could see by his face how pleased he was to have duped the foolish gentleman, and he went at once to drink up his cross, there’s no doubt of that. Just then, brother, I was under the strongest impression of all that had flooded over me in Russia; before I understood nothing of it, as if I’d grown up a dumb brute, and I had somehow fantastic memories of it during those five years I spent abroad. So I went along and thought: no, I’ll wait before condemning this Christ-seller. God knows what’s locked away in these drunken and weak hearts. An hour later, going back to my hotel, I ran into a peasant woman with a nursing baby. She was a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. And the baby smiled at her, as far as she’d noticed, for the first time since it was born. I saw her suddenly cross herself very, very piously. ‘What is it, young woman?’ I say. (I was asking questions all the time then.) ‘It’s just that a mother rejoices,’ she says, ‘when she notices her baby’s first smile, the same as God rejoices each time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner standing before him and praying with all his heart.’ The woman said that to me, in almost those words, and it was such a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought, a thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child—the main thought of Christ! A simple peasant woman! True, she’s a mother … and, who knows, maybe this woman was that soldier’s wife. Listen, Parfyon, you asked me earlier, here is my answer: the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there’s something else here that’s not that, and it will eternally be not that; there’s something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and they will eternally be talking not about that. But the main thing is that one can observe it sooner and more clearly in a Russian heart, and that is my conclusion! That is one of the first convictions I’ve formed about our Russia. There are things to be done, Parfyon! There are things to be done in our Russian world, believe me! Remember, there was a time in Moscow when we used to get together and talk … And I didn’t want to come back here at all now! And this is not at all, not at all how I thought of meeting you!… Well, no matter!… Farewell, goodbye! God be with you!”
He turned and went down the stairs.
“Lev Nikolaevich!” Parfyon cried from above, when the prince had reached the first landing. “That cross you bought from the soldier, are you wearing it?”
“Yes.”
And the prince stopped again.
“Show me.”
Again a new oddity! The prince thought a little, went back up, and showed him the cross without taking it from his neck.
“Give it to me,” said Rogozhin.
“Why? Or do you …”
The prince seemed unwilling to part with this cross.
“I’ll wear it, and you can wear mine, I’ll give it to you.”
“You want to exchange crosses? Very well, Parfyon, if so, I’m glad; we’ll be brothers!”21
The prince took off his tin cross, Parfyon his gold one, and they exchanged them. Parfyon was silent. With painful astonishment the prince noticed that the former mistrust, the former bitter and almost derisive smile still did not seem to leave the face of his adopted brother—at least it showed very strongly at moments. Finally Rogozhin silently took the prince�
�s hand and stood for a while, as if undecided about something; in the end he suddenly drew the prince after him, saying in a barely audible voice: “Come on.” They crossed the first-floor landing and rang at the door facing the one they had just come out of. It was promptly opened. An old woman, all bent over and dressed in black, a kerchief on her head, bowed silently and deeply to Rogozhin. He quickly asked her something and, not waiting for an answer, led the prince further through the rooms. Again there were dark rooms, of some extraordinary, cold cleanness, coldly and severely furnished with old furniture in clean white covers. Without announcing himself, Rogozhin led the prince into a small room that looked like a drawing room, divided by a gleaming mahogany partition with doors at either end, behind which there was probably a bedroom. In the corner of the drawing room, near the stove, in an armchair, sat a little old woman, who did not really look so very old, even had a quite healthy, pleasant, and round face, but was already completely gray-haired and (one could tell at first sight) had fallen into complete senility. She was wearing a black woolen dress, a big black kerchief around her neck, and a clean white cap with black ribbons. Her feet rested on a footstool. Next to her was another clean little old woman, a bit older, also in mourning and also in a white cap, apparently some companion, who was silently knitting a stocking. The two looked as if they were always silent. The first old woman, seeing Rogozhin and the prince, smiled at them and inclined her head affectionately several times as a sign of pleasure.
“Mama,” said Rogozhin, kissing her hand, “this is my great friend, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin; he and I have exchanged crosses; he was like a brother to me in Moscow for a time, and did a lot for me. Bless him, mama, as you would your own son. Wait, old girl, like this, let me put your hand the right way …”
But before Parfyon had time to do anything, the old woman raised her right hand, put three fingers together, and piously crossed the prince three times. Then once more she nodded her head gently and tenderly.
“Well, let’s go, Lev Nikolaevich,” said Parfyon, “I only brought you for that …”
When they came back out to the stairs, he added:
“See, she doesn’t understand anything people say, and she didn’t understand any of my words, yet she blessed you. That means she wanted to herself … Well, good-bye, it’s time for us both.”
And he opened his door.
“But let me at least embrace you as we part, you strange man!” cried the prince, looking at him with tender reproach and trying to embrace him. But Parfyon no sooner raised his arms than he lowered them again at once. He could not resolve to do it; he turned away so as not to look at the prince. He did not want to embrace him.
“Never fear! Maybe I did take your cross, but I won’t kill you for your watch!” he muttered unintelligibly, suddenly laughing somehow strangely. But suddenly his whole face was transformed: he turned terribly pale, his lips quivered, his eyes lit up. He raised his arms, embraced the prince tightly, and said breathlessly:
“Take her, then, if it’s fate! She’s yours! I give her up to you!… Remember Rogozhin!”
And, leaving the prince, not even looking at him, he hastily went to his rooms and slammed the door behind him.
V
IT WAS LATE, almost half-past two, and the prince did not find Epanchin at home. Having left his card, he decided to go to the Scales Hotel and ask there for Kolya; if he was not there, he would leave him a note. At the Scales he was told that Nikolai Ardalionovich “had left in the morning, sir, but on his way out had alerted them that, if someone should ask for him, they should tell him that he might be back at three o’clock, sir. And if he was not there by half-past three, it would mean that he had taken the train to Pavlovsk, to Mrs. Epanchin’s dacha, sir, and would be having dinner there.” The prince sat down to wait and meanwhile ordered dinner for himself.
Kolya did not come back either by half-past three or even by four o’clock. The prince went out and walked mechanically wherever his eyes took him. At the beginning of summer in Petersburg there occasionally occur lovely days—bright, hot, still. As if on purpose, this day was one of those rare days. For some time the prince strolled about aimlessly. He was little acquainted with the city. He stopped occasionally at street corners in front of some houses, on the squares, on the bridges; once he stopped at a pastry shop to rest. Occasionally he would start peering at passersby with great curiosity; but most often he did not notice either the passersby or precisely where he was going. He was tormentingly tense and uneasy, and at the same time felt an extraordinary need for solitude. He wanted to be alone and to give himself over to all this suffering tension completely passively, without looking for the least way out. He was loath to resolve the questions that overflowed his soul and heart. “What, then, am I to blame for it all?” he murmured to himself, almost unaware of his words.
By six o’clock he found himself on the platform of the Tsarskoe Selo railway. Solitude quickly became unbearable to him; a new impulse ardently seized his heart, and for a moment a bright light lit up the darkness in which his soul anguished. He took a ticket for Pavlovsk and was in an impatient hurry to leave; but something was certainly pursuing him, and this was a reality and not a fantasy, as he had perhaps been inclined to think. He was about to get on the train when he suddenly flung the just-purchased ticket to the floor and left the station again, confused and pensive. A short time later, in the street, it was as if he suddenly remembered, suddenly realized, something very strange, something that had long been bothering him. He was suddenly forced to catch himself consciously doing something that had been going on for a long time, but which he had not noticed till that minute: several hours ago, even in the Scales, and perhaps even before the Scales, he had begun now and then suddenly searching for something around him. And he would forget it, even for a long time, half an hour, and then suddenly turn again uneasily and search for something.
But he had only just noted to himself this morbid and till then quite unconscious movement, which had come over him so long ago, when there suddenly flashed before him another recollection that interested him extremely: he recalled that at the moment when he noticed that he kept searching around for something, he was standing on the sidewalk outside a shopwindow and looking with great curiosity at the goods displayed in the window. He now wanted to make absolutely sure: had he really been standing in front of that shopwindow just now, perhaps only five minutes ago, had he not imagined it or confused something? Did that shop and those goods really exist? For indeed he felt himself in an especially morbid mood that day, almost as he had felt formerly at the onset of the fits of his former illness. He knew that during this time before a fit he used to be extraordinarily absentminded and often even confused objects and persons, unless he looked at them with especially strained attention. But there was also a special reason why he wanted very much to make sure that he had been standing in front of the shop: among the things displayed in the shopwindow there had been one that he had looked at and that he had even evaluated at sixty kopecks, he remembered that despite all his absentmindedness and anxiety. Consequently, if that shop existed and that thing was actually displayed among the goods for sale, it meant he had in fact stopped for that thing. Which meant that the thing had held such strong interest for him that it had attracted his attention even at the very time when he had left the railway station and had been so painfully confused. He walked along, looking to the right almost in anguish, his heart pounding with uneasy impatience. But here was the shop, he had found it at last! He had been five hundred paces away from it when he decided to go back. And here was that object worth sixty kopecks. “Of course, sixty kopecks, it’s not worth more!” he repeated now and laughed. But he laughed hysterically; he felt very oppressed. He clearly recalled now that precisely here, standing in front of this window, he had suddenly turned, as he had earlier, when he had caught Rogozhin’s eyes fixed on him. Having made sure that he was not mistaken (which, incidentally, he had been quite sure of even bef
ore checking), he abandoned the shop and quickly walked away from it. All this he absolutely had to think over quickly; it was now clear that he had not imagined anything at the station either, and that something absolutely real had happened to him, which was absolutely connected with all his earlier uneasiness. But some invincible inner loathing again got the upper hand: he did not want to think anything over, he did not think anything over; he fell to thinking about something quite different.
He fell to thinking, among other things, about his epileptic condition, that there was a stage in it just before the fit itself (if the fit occurred while he was awake), when suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause. But these moments, these glimpses were still only a presentiment of that ultimate second (never more than a second) from which the fit itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable. Reflecting on that moment afterwards, in a healthy state, he had often said to himself that all those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the “highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “So what if it is an illness?” he finally decided. “Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?” These vague expressions seemed quite comprehensible to him, though still too weak. That it was indeed “beauty and prayer,” that it was indeed “the highest synthesis of life,” he could not doubt, nor could he admit of any doubts. Was he dreaming some sort of abnormal and nonexistent visions at that moment, as from hashish, opium, or wine, which humiliate the reason and distort the soul? He could reason about it sensibly once his morbid state was over. Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness—if there was a need to express this condition in a single word—self-awareness and at the same time a self-sense immediate in the highest degree. If in that second, that is, in the very last conscious moment before the fit, he had happened to succeed in saying clearly and consciously to himself: “Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!”—then surely this moment in itself was worth a whole life.22 However, he did not insist on the dialectical part of his reasoning: dullness, darkness of soul, idiocy stood before him as the clear consequence of these “highest moments.” Naturally, he was not about to argue in earnest. His reasoning, that is, his evaluation of this moment, undoubtedly contained an error, but all the same he was somewhat perplexed by the actuality of the sensation. What, in fact, was he to do with this actuality? Because it had happened, he had succeeded in saying to himself in that very second, that this second, in its boundless happiness, which he fully experienced, might perhaps be worth his whole life. “At that moment,” as he had once said to Rogozhin in Moscow, when they got together there, “at that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.23 Probably,” he had added, smiling, “it’s the same second in which the jug of water overturned by the epileptic Muhammad did not have time to spill, while he had time during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah.”24 Yes, in Moscow he and Rogozhin had often gotten together and talked not only about that. “Rogozhin just said I was like a brother to him then; he said it today for the first time,” the prince thought to himself.
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