Crime and Punishment (68 page)

Raskolnikov did not learn about his mother's death for some time, even though correspondence with Petersburg had been established from the very beginning of his confinement in Siberia. It was arranged through Sonya, who wrote a punctual letter to Petersburg once a month, addressing it to Razumikhin, and once a month received a punctual reply. At first her letters struck Dunya and Razumikhin as a little dry and unsatisfactory; but in the end both came to the conclusion that
there could be no better way of writing them, because from them the fullest and most precise picture began to emerge of the fate of their unfortunate brother. Sonya's letters were filled with the most ordinary reality, with the simplest and clearest description of all the conditions of Raskolnikov's life in penal servitude. There was nothing here about her hopes, no conjectures about the future, no account of her own feelings. Instead of attempts to explain his mental state and his whole inner life, there were facts and facts alone: his own words, detailed reports about the state of his health, accounts of what he wanted at their last meeting, what he asked for, what instructions he gave her, and so on. All these reports were set out in the minutest detail. In the end, the image of the unfortunate brother emerged all by itself, precisely and clearly delineated; here, there could be no scope for error: just one true fact after another.

But Dunya and her husband could draw scant comfort from these reports, especially at the beginning. Sonya kept writing that he was always sullen, untalkative and barely interested in the news she passed on to him whenever she received a letter; that he would sometimes ask about Mother; and that when, seeing that he was already guessing the truth, she finally told him about her death, she found, to her astonishment, that even this did not appear to affect him greatly, or so it seemed from the outside. She wrote, among other things, that however self-absorbed he might have become and however much he might have closed himself off from everyone, his attitude towards his new life was straightforward and simple; he understood his situation perfectly well, expected no sudden improvements, entertained no frivolous hopes (as others in his situation are so prone to do) and found almost nothing to surprise him about his new surroundings, which were so different from anything he had known before. His health, she wrote, was satisfactory. He would go out to work without trying to shirk it and without going out of his way to find more. He barely noticed the food, but it was so bad, except on Sundays and holidays, that in the end he willingly took some money from Sonya to make his own tea once a day; as for everything else, he asked her not to go to any trouble, assuring her that all this concern for him only served to annoy him. Sonya added that he lived in a dormitory with everyone else; that she had not seen the barracks from the inside, but inferred that they were cramped, horrid and unhealthy; that he slept on a plank bed, spreading thick felt beneath him, and refused to try anything
else. But it was not on account of any preconceived plan or intention that he lived in this coarse and beggarly way; no, it was simply because of his inattentive, indifferent attitude to his own fate. Sonya wrote quite bluntly that not only did he show no interest in her visits, especially at the beginning, he even became almost annoyed with her, was untalkative and even rude; in the end, though, these meetings became a habit for him and almost a need, to the point that he became quite despondent when she was taken ill for a few days and was unable to visit. They saw each other on rest days at the prison gates or in the guardhouse, where he would be summoned to her for a few minutes; on weekdays, when he was out working, she would come to find him in the workshops or at the brick factories or in the sheds on the bank of the Irtysh. As for her own news, Sonya informed them that she had even managed to make some acquaintances and patrons in the town; that she had taken up sewing and that since there was barely a single seamstress in the whole town she had become indispensable in many homes; the only thing she omitted was that through her Raskolnikov, too, had come under the authorities' protection, his workload had been lightened, and so on. Eventually (after Dunya detected a particular note of anxiety and alarm in Sonya's most recent letters), news arrived that he was shunning everyone, that the convicts in the prison had not taken kindly to him, that he was silent for days at a time and was becoming very pale. Suddenly, in her last letter, Sonya wrote that he had fallen very seriously ill and was laid up in hospital, in the convict ward . . .

He'd been sick for some time; but it wasn't the horror of convict life, the forced labour, the food, the shaven head or the patched-together clothes that broke him: oh, what were all these torments and hardships to him? In fact, he was glad to have work to do: exhausting himself physically, he at least earned himself a few hours' untroubled sleep. And what did the food matter to him – this cabbage soup without meat, only cockroaches? Many times as a student, in his previous life, he hadn't even had that. His clothing was warm and well suited to his way of life. He couldn't even feel his shackles. Was he to be ashamed of his shaven head and his half-and-half jacket?
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Before whom? Before Sonya? Sonya was afraid of him. Was he to feel ashamed before
her
?

And why not? He felt ashamed even before Sonya, whom he tormented in return with his rudeness and disdain. But it wasn't his shaven head and his shackles he was ashamed of: it was his pride that had been badly wounded; it was this that had made him ill. Oh, if only he could have blamed himself, how happy he would have been! He could have put up with anything then, even shame and disgrace. But he judged himself harshly, and his hardened conscience failed to find any especially dreadful guilt in his past, except perhaps for the kind of simple
blunder
that might have happened to anyone. What shamed him was precisely the fact that he, Raskolnikov, had come to grief so blindly, so hopelessly, so stupidly, by some decree of blind fate, and now he had to submit and resign himself to the ‘absurdity' of such a decree, if he wanted to give himself any peace at all.

In the present: pointless, purposeless anxiety; in the future: an endless sacrifice by which nothing was to be gained – this was what the world had in store for him. And what did it matter that in eight years' time he'd only be thirty-two and life could begin again? Why live? What would he have to live for? To aim for? Live to exist? But hadn't he been prepared even before, on a thousand occasions, to give up his existence for an idea, a hope, even a fantasy? Existence alone had never been enough for him; he'd always wanted more. And perhaps the only reason he'd considered himself a man to whom more was permitted than to others was the very strength of his desires.

If only fate could bring him remorse – burning remorse that breaks the heart into pieces, that drives away sleep; the kind of remorse whose dreadful torments yield visions of the noose, the whirlpool! Oh, how glad he would have been! Torments and tears – that, too, is life. But he felt no remorse about his crime.

At least then he could have raged at his own stupidity, just as before he had raged at the hideous, idiotic deeds that brought him to prison. But now that he was here, in prison,
at liberty
, he reconsidered all his previous deeds, all over again, and found them not nearly as stupid and hideous as they had seemed to him during that fateful time, before.

‘How, how,' he thought, ‘was my idea any more stupid than all the other ideas and theories that have swarmed around, colliding with one another, since the beginning of time? You need only take an independent, broad view of things, free from the usual influences, and my idea, needless to say, won't seem remotely . . . strange. Oh, men of wisdom, who deny everything
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except money – why do you stop halfway?

‘Really, what is it about my deed that they find so hideous?' he asked himself. ‘That it was evil? What does that mean – an “evil deed”? My conscience is untroubled. Yes, of course, a criminal act has been committed; yes, of course, the letter of the law has been violated and blood's been shed – so take my head for the letter of the law . . . and that's your lot! And, of course, plenty of humanity's benefactors, who never inherited power but grabbed it for themselves, should also have been executed after taking their very first step. But those people coped with the step that they took, which is why
they are right
, but I couldn't cope with mine, so I had no right to take it.'

That was the only crime he acknowledged: that he hadn't coped and had turned himself in.

Another thought also brought him pain: why hadn't he killed himself back then? Why had he stood over the river and preferred to turn himself in? Was the desire to live really so strong, was it really so hard to overcome? Hadn't Svidrigailov overcome it, despite his fear of death?

He tormented himself with this question, incapable of understanding that even then, standing over the river, he might already have sensed a deep falsehood in himself and his convictions. He couldn't understand that this premonition might have been the herald of a future breaking point in his existence, his future resurrection, his future view of life.

He was more inclined to see in all this only the dull yoke of instinct, which it was not for him to break, and over which he, yet again, was unable to step (being weak and worthless). Observing his fellow prisoners he was astonished at how much they, too, loved life, how they all cherished it! In fact, he had the impression that in prison life is loved, valued and cherished even more than at liberty. What dreadful hardships and torments some of them had endured – for instance, the tramps! Could one single ray of sunshine really mean so much to them, or a thick forest, or a cold spring in the back of beyond, which the tramp spotted some two years before and which, like a lover, he yearns to see again and dreams about, with green grass all around, a bird singing in the bush? Looking deeper, he saw instances yet harder to explain.

In the prison, in his immediate surroundings, there was, of course, much that he failed to notice, and didn't even wish to notice. He lived with eyes lowered: looking up seemed loathsome, unbearable. In the end, though, much began to astonish him, and almost against his will
he began to notice things that previously he hadn't even suspected. In general, what astonished him most was the dreadful, unbridgeable gulf that lay between him and all these commoners. He and they seemed to belong to different nations. He and they looked at each other with mistrust and hostility. He knew and understood the general causes of this separation; but never before had he acknowledged that these causes might really be so deep, so potent. There were Polish convicts,
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too; political criminals. They considered the commoners to be nothing more than ignoramuses and slaves, and looked down on them with contempt; but Raskolnikov could not: to him it was clear that these ignoramuses were in many ways far more intelligent than those very same Poles. There were Russians, too, whose contempt for the peasants knew no bounds – one former officer and two seminarians; their error did not escape Raskolnikov either.

He himself was disliked and shunned by everyone. Eventually, he even began to be hated. Why? He did not know. The ones who looked down on him, who mocked him and mocked his crime, were far more criminal than he.

‘You're gentry!' they'd say to him. ‘What was a gentry boy like you doing with an axe?'
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In the second week of Lent his turn came to prepare for the Sacraments, along with everyone else in his barracks. They all went to the church together to pray.
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One day an argument flared up. Why? He himself did not know. But they fell on him all at once in a frenzy.

‘Atheist! You don't believe in God!' they shouted at him. ‘You should be killed!'

He'd never spoken with them about God or faith, but they wanted to kill him for his atheism; he said nothing in reply. One convict was on the point of throwing himself on him in sheer fury; Raskolnikov waited for him calmly and in silence: his eyebrows did not stir; not one muscle twitched on his face. A guard managed to put himself between him and the murderer just in time – or blood would have been shed.

There was one other question to which he could find no answer: why had they all become so fond of Sonya? She never sought their approval and they saw her rarely, sometimes only when they were out working, when she came to him for no more than a minute. And yet they all already knew her, knew that she'd
followed him
, knew how she lived and where she lived. She gave them no money, did them no
special favours. Only once, at Christmas, did she bring alms for the entire prison: pies and white buns. But little by little closer ties began to form between them and Sonya: she wrote letters for them to their families and posted them. At their request these relatives, on arriving in town, would leave things for them with Sonya, even money. Their wives and lovers knew her and called on her. And whenever she appeared at the place where Raskolnikov was working or met a party of convicts going out to work they all doffed their caps and bowed. ‘Dear Sofya Semyonovna, dear mother, gentle, merciful mother!' these coarse, branded convicts would say to this skinny little creature. She smiled and returned their bows and they all liked it when she smiled at them. They even liked her gait, turned around to watch her walk away and praised her; they even praised her for being so little, and could never praise her enough. Some even went to her to be treated when they were sick.

He spent the whole of the last period of Lent and Easter Sunday laid up in hospital. Recovering, he recalled what he'd dreamt while feverish and delirious. In his sickness he'd imagined the entire world condemned to some terrible, unheard-of pestilence, advancing on Europe from deepest Asia. Everyone was to die, apart from the few, very few, who'd been chosen. New trichinae
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had appeared, microscopic beings that were entering human bodies. But these beings were spirits, endowed with intelligence and will. People who took them into their bodies immediately became possessed and went mad. But never, ever had people thought themselves as intelligent and as certain of the truth as those who had been infected. Never had they considered their verdicts, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Entire villages, entire towns and peoples were being infected and driven to madness. Everyone was panicking and no one could understand anyone else; each man thought that he and he alone possessed the truth, and found the sight of others a torment; he beat his breast, wept and wrung his hands. No one knew whom to bring to justice and how, couldn't agree what was bad and what was good, whom to charge and whom to acquit. People were killing one another out of meaningless spite. They mobilized entire armies, but no sooner did these armies set out than they began to tear themselves to pieces; breaking rank, the soldiers attacked, hacked, stabbed, bit and ate each other. In towns, the tocsin was sounded from dawn till dusk: everyone was summoned, but who was doing the summoning and
why? No one knew and everyone was panicking. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because every man had his own ideas, his own solutions, and agreement was impossible; agriculture ceased. Here and there people gathered in groups, agreed on something, swore not to split up – then immediately embarked on something completely different from what they themselves had just proposed, began blaming, fighting and killing each other. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence
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grew and spread, further and further. In the whole world there were only a few survivors; these were the pure and the chosen, those destined to begin a new race of people and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one, anywhere, had seen these people, nor heard their words and voices.

Raskolnikov was tormented by the fact that this meaningless delirium echoed so sadly and so agonizingly in his memory; that the impression left by these fevered daydreams was taking so long to pass. It was already the second week after Easter, spring, the days warm and clear; in the prisoners' ward the windows (barred, with a guard below them) stood open. For the entire duration of his illness, Sonya had only been able to visit him twice; each time she'd had to beg for permission. Nevertheless, she came often to the hospital courtyard, especially towards evening, sometimes just to stand in the yard for a minute or two and look up at the windows of the ward, if only from afar. Once, towards evening, when he'd almost completely recovered, Raskolnikov fell asleep; waking up, he happened to go to the window and suddenly caught sight of Sonya in the distance, by the hospital gates. She was standing there as though she were waiting for something. At that moment, something seemed to pierce his heart; he shuddered and hastily retreated from the window. Sonya did not come the next day, or the day after that. He noticed how anxiously he was waiting for her. Finally, he was discharged. Entering the prison, he learned from the convicts that Sofya Semyonovna had fallen ill and was staying at home.

Deeply worried, he sent someone to find out how she was. Her illness, he was soon told, was not dangerous. Learning in her turn of his concern and distress, Sonya sent him a note in pencil, telling him that she felt a great deal better, that it was just a bit of cold and that she would come to see him at work very, very soon. When he read this note, his heart throbbed with pain.

Another clear, warm day. Early that morning, at about six, he went out to work on the river bank, in a shed where a kiln was set up for baking and pounding alabaster. Only two other workers went out with him. One of the convicts took a guard and went back with him to the fortress to fetch a tool; the other began preparing firewood and loading the kiln. Raskolnikov went outside, sat down on the logs stacked up by the shed and looked out at the broad, deserted river. A wide vista opened up from the tall bank. The sound of singing just reached him from the other side. Over there, on the sun-drenched, boundless steppe, the black dots of nomadic yurts were faintly visible. Over there was freedom; over there lived people quite unlike the ones living here; over there time itself seemed to have stopped, as if the ages of Abraham and his flocks had not yet passed. Raskolnikov sat and watched, neither moving nor looking away; his thoughts shaded into daydreams and contemplation; he wasn't thinking about anything, yet something troubled and tormented him.