Crime and Punishment (24 page)

He'd begun calmly enough, relishing the prospect of pouring out so much venom, but he ended in a breathless frenzy, as earlier with Luzhin.

Razumikhin stood and thought for a minute, and let go of his hand.

‘Clear off, damn you!' he said quietly and almost pensively. ‘Wait!' he roared all of a sudden when Raskolnikov was already walking off, ‘and listen to me. I declare that you are all, to a man, blabberers and blusterers! The first prick of pain and you'll be fussing over it like a hen over an egg! Even here you can't help stealing from foreign authors. There's not a spark of independent life in you! Spermaceti
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is what you're made of, with whey instead of blood! I don't believe a single one of you! Your first priority, whatever the situation, is to avoid seeming human! Wait there, I say!' he shouted with redoubled fury, noticing that Raskolnikov was on the verge of leaving again. ‘Hear me out! As you know, today's my house-warming, the guests might have already arrived, and I left my uncle – I was just over there now – to greet them. Now if you weren't such a fool, a second-hand fool, a triple fool, a walking translation – you see, Rodya, you're a bright spark, I'll give you that, but you're a fool! – now if you weren't such a fool, you'd come over to mine for the evening instead of wearing out your boots for no reason. You might as well, seeing as you can't stay in bed! I'll wheel in the landlord's lovely soft armchair for
you . . . A nice brew, a bit of company . . . If you're not up to it, I'll make up the couch – at least you can lie amongst us . . . Zosimov will be there too. So, are you coming?'

‘No.'

‘Rubbish!' Razumikhin cried impatiently. ‘How can you know? You can't answer for yourself! And you don't understand the first thing about this anyway . . . A thousand times I've fallen out with someone just like this, only to come running back . . . You'll feel ashamed and you'll be back! Just remember, Pochinkov's house, third floor . . .'

‘Carry on like this and you'll end up begging to be beaten, Mr Razumikhin, just for the satisfaction of bestowing your goodness.'

‘Who – me? I'll twist their nose off just for thinking it! Pochinkov's house, Number
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; the apartment of civil servant Babushkin . . .'

‘I won't come, Razumikhin!' Raskolnikov turned and walked off.

‘I bet you will!' shouted Razumikhin after him. ‘Or else you . . . or else I don't want to know you! Hey, wait! Is Zametov in there?'

‘Yes.'

‘You've seen him?'

‘Yes.'

‘And spoken to him?'

‘Yes.'

‘What about? Ah, to hell with you – don't bother. Pochinkov's house, forty-seven, Babushkin's apartment. Don't forget!'

Raskolnikov reached Sadovaya Street and turned the corner. Razumikhin, deep in thought, watched him go. Finally, with a flap of his hand, he went inside, but stopped halfway up the stairs.

‘Damn it!' he continued, almost out loud. ‘What he says makes sense, but it's as if . . . But then, I'm a fool too! Who's to say madmen can't talk sense? Isn't this precisely what Zosimov fears?' He tapped his forehead with his finger. ‘Well, in that case . . . but how could I let him go off on his own? What if he goes and drowns himself? . . . What a blunder! No way!' And he ran back to catch Raskolnikov, but the trail had gone cold. He spat and hurried back with quick steps to the “Crystal Palace”, to quiz Zametov right away.

Raskolnikov went straight on to ——sky Bridge, stopped halfway across, by the railings, rested both elbows on them and gazed out. Since leaving Razumikhin, he'd become so weak that even getting this far had been a struggle. He'd felt like sitting or lying down somewhere, in the street. Leaning over the water, he gazed without thinking at the
sunset's last, pink gleam, at the row of houses darkening in the thickening dusk, at one distant little window, in an attic on the left bank, shining, as if on fire, with a last, momentary ray of sunlight, at the Ditch's darkening water, which, it seemed, he was attentively examining. In the end, red circles began spinning before his eyes, buildings swayed, and everything started spinning and dancing – passers-by, embankments, carriages. He suddenly shuddered, saved from another fainting fit, perhaps, by a wild and hideous vision. He sensed someone standing close by, to his right; he glanced round – and saw a tall woman in a shawl, with a long, yellow, drink-ravaged face and reddish, sunken eyes. She was looking straight at him, but it was obvious she wasn't seeing anything or anybody. Suddenly she leant her right arm on the railing, lifted her right leg and swung it over the bars, then the left leg, and threw herself into the Ditch. The dirty water parted and swallowed up its offering, but a minute later the drowning woman floated to the surface and was carried gently downstream by the current, her head and legs in the water, her back to the sky and her skirt puffed up to one side, like a pillow.

‘Drowned herself! Drowned herself!' yelled dozens of voices. People came running, both embankments were strewn with spectators, and a crowd gathered on the bridge all around Raskolnikov, pushing him and pressing against him from behind.

‘That's our Afrosinyushka, that is!' a woman wailed somewhere close by. ‘Save her! Pull her out, good fathers!'

‘Boat! Boat!' the crowd shouted.

But a boat was no longer required. A policeman ran down the steps to the Ditch, threw off his greatcoat and boots and dived into the water. He had an easy job of it: the woman had been carried to within a few feet of the steps. He grabbed hold of her clothing with his right hand and with his left managed to seize a pole held out to him by a colleague; the woman was pulled out there and then. She was laid on the granite-slabbed steps. She came round quickly, lifted her head, sat up and started sneezing and snorting, senselessly wiping her wet dress with her hands. She said nothing.

‘Drank herself blind, fathers,' wailed that same woman's voice, next to Afrosinyushka now. ‘Only t'other day she tried to do herself in, and we had to take the noose off her. I was only going to the shop just now, left my wee girl to keep an eye on 'er – and look! She's trading class, fathers – we're neighbours, second house from the end, over there . . .'

The crowd was breaking up, the policemen were still attending to the rescued woman, someone shouted something about the bureau . . . Raskolnikov watched it all with a strange mixture of indifference and detachment. It began to disgust him. ‘No, it's too vile . . . water . . . not worth it,' he muttered to himself. ‘Nothing's going to happen,' he added. ‘No use waiting. What was that about the bureau? . . . So why's Zametov not there? It's open till ten . . .' He turned his back to the railing and looked around him.

‘So what's it to be? Well, why not?' he said decisively, left the bridge and set off in the direction of the bureau. His heart felt hollow, desolate. He'd no wish to think. Even his anguish had passed, with not a trace of the energy he'd felt before when he left his room ‘to put an end to it all!' Total apathy had taken its place.

‘Well, it's one way out!' he thought, walking at a gentle, sluggish pace along the bank of the Ditch. ‘I really will end it, because I want to . . . But is it actually a way out? Never mind! I'll have my one square yard – heh-heh! Still, a funny sort of end! And is it the end? Will I tell them or won't I? Oh . . . damn this! I'm tired. If only I could lie down or sit down somewhere! It's all so stupid, that's the most shameful thing. But so what? Ugh, such stupid thoughts . . .'

The bureau was straight ahead, second left: a stone's throw away. But on reaching the first turning he stopped, thought for a moment, turned into the lane and went the long way round, along two streets – aimlessly, perhaps, or perhaps in order to buy himself some more time, even if it was only a minute. He walked with his eyes fixed to the ground. Suddenly it was as if somebody whispered something into his ear. He raised his head and saw that he was standing by
that
house, right next to the gates. Since
that
evening,
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he'd never been here or even walked past.

An irresistible, inexplicable urge was drawing him on. He turned in, went straight under the arch, took the first entrance on the right and started climbing the familiar stairs to the fourth floor. The narrow, steep stairwell was very dark. He paused on each landing and looked around curiously. On the first-floor landing the window frame had been removed entirely. ‘It wasn't like that before,' he thought to himself. And here was the second-floor apartment where Mikolai and Mitka had been working. ‘Locked, and the door's freshly painted; so now it's being let.' Now the third floor . . . and the fourth . . . ‘Here!' Bewilderment seized him: the door to this apartment was wide open;
there were people inside; he could hear voices. It was the last thing he'd expected. After a moment's hesitation he climbed the last steps and entered the apartment.

It, too, was being done up; there were workmen inside; he felt almost shocked. For some reason he'd imagined finding everything just as he'd left it, with even the corpses, perhaps, still lying in their same positions on the floor. Instead: bare walls, no furniture. Strange! He went over to the window and sat on the sill.

There were only two workmen, both young lads, one far younger than the other. They were hanging up new wallpaper – white, with lilac flowers, in place of the yellow, frayed and worn paper that had been there before. For some reason, Raskolnikov was terribly put out by this; he looked at the new wallpaper with hostility, as though sorry to find everything so changed.

The lads must have dawdled after work and were now hurriedly rolling up their paper and preparing to go home. They barely noticed Raskolnikov's appearance. They were talking about something. Raskolnikov folded his arms and began to listen.

‘So she comes to see me one morning,' the older lad was saying to the younger one, ‘bright and early, all tarted up. “And what d'you think you're doing,” I say, “meloning and lemoning
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about in front of me?” “What I want, Tit Vasilych,” she says, “is to be at your beck and call from this day on.” Well, blow me down! And my, how she was dressed: a magazine, if ever there was!'

‘What's a magazine, ol' man?' asked the young lad. Evidently, he was the ‘ol' man's' pupil.

‘A magazine, sonny, is lots of pictures, all coloured in, that get to our tailors every Saturday in the post, from abroad, to tell people how to dress – the male sex no less than the females. Drawings, if you like. The male sex is nearly always shown in them fur-collar frock coats, but in the female department – blimey, gorgeous tarts like you wouldn't believe!'

‘This city of Peter's got it all!' shouted the younger one enthusiastically. ‘Excepting Mum and Dad, of course!'

‘Everything, sonny, 'cept that,' decreed the other sententiously.

Raskolnikov got up and went to the other room, where the box, the bed and the chest of drawers had been before; now the room seemed horribly small without furniture. The wallpaper was still the same, but the space in the corner where the icon-case had once stood was clearly
marked on it. He had a look and went back to his little window. The older workman was studying him out of the corner of his eye.

‘What are you wanting, sir?' he suddenly asked.

Instead of replying Raskolnikov stood up, went out to the landing, grabbed hold of the little bell and tugged. The same bell, the same tinny sound! He tugged it a second time, and a third; he listened hard, remembering. The excruciatingly awful, hideous sensation of before was coming back to him ever more clearly and vividly; he shuddered with each ring, and found it ever more pleasurable.

‘So what are you after? Who are you?' the workman shouted, coming out towards him. Raskolnikov went back inside.

‘I want to rent an apartment,' he said. ‘I'm having a look round.'

‘Digs aren't rented out at night. Anyway, you should've come with the caretaker.'

‘The floor's been washed. Will it be painted?' continued Raskolnikov. ‘So there's no blood?'

‘What blood?'

‘An old woman was murdered here, with her sister. There was a big puddle right here.'

‘What sort of man are you?' shouted the workman uneasily.

‘Me?'

‘Yes.'

‘You'd like to know, would you? . . . Let's go to the bureau, then I'll say.'

The workmen looked at him in bewilderment.

‘It's late, sir, we should be gone by now. Come on, Alyoshka, time to lock up,' said the older workman.

‘All right, let's go!' Raskolnikov replied indifferently and went out first, walking slowly down the stairs. ‘Hey, caretaker!' he shouted when he came out under the arch.

Several people were standing right by the building's main entrance, gawking at passers-by: both caretakers, a woman, a tradesman in a dressing gown and someone else. Raskolnikov went straight up to them.

‘What d'you want?' one of the caretakers asked.

‘Been to the bureau?'

‘Just now. What d'you want?'

‘Are they at their desks?'

‘Yeah.'

‘And the assistant was there?'

‘For a bit. Well, what d'you want?'

Raskolnikov didn't reply and stood alongside them, deep in thought.

‘Came to look at the digs,' said the older workman, walking up.

‘What digs?'

‘Where we're working now. “Why's the blood been washed off?” he says. “There was a murder here,” he says, “and I've come to rent the place.” Then he starts ringing the bell, nearly tears the thing off. “Let's go to the bureau,” he says. “I'll prove it all there.” A right pest.'