Crime and Punishment (20 page)

There was no one on the staircase! Nor anyone in the entrance, either. He walked through it and turned left along the street.

He knew very well, he knew abundantly well that at that very second they were already inside the apartment, that they had been much astonished to find it unlocked, when only just a short time ago it had been locked, that they were looking at the bodies and that it would take them no more than a moment to put two and two together and figure out beyond all question that the murderer had just been there and had managed to hide somewhere, to slip away past them, to flee; they would doubtless also guess that he had been in the empty apartment as they were making their way upstairs. Yet meanwhile he did not dare on any account to quicken his step, even though there were still a hundred yards to go before the first turning. ‘Couldn't I just slip through some gateway and wait on the stairs of some building until it's all clear? No, that would be disastrous. Couldn't I throw the axe away somewhere? Couldn't I hire a cab? Disastrous, disastrous!’

Here at last was the side-street; he lurched along it, more dead than alive; now he was halfway out of danger, and he knew it: he was under less suspicion; what was more, there were a great many people scurrying about, and he was obliterated among them like a grain of sand. But all the torments he had been through had drained him of so much energy that he was scarcely able to move. The sweat was rolling off him in drops; his neck was running with moisture. ‘Look at you – cut to the teeth!’ someone shouted to him when he came out on to the Canal.

He was now in a bad state of diminished consciousness; the further he walked, the worse it became. He did remember, however, that as he came out on to the Canal he was suddenly afraid that there were not enough people about and that he would be more conspicuous here, and nearly turned back into the side-street again. In spite of the fact that he was almost at the point of collapse, he made a detour and went back to his lodgings by a totally different route.

Not fully conscious, he walked through the gateway of the
building where he lived; at least, not until he had begun to climb the stairs did he remember about the axe. He had forgotten a certain vital task: he had to put it back, and in as inconspicuous a manner as possible. It went without saying that by this time he was no longer capable of realizing that possibly by far the best thing he could do was not to put the axe back in its old place at all, but to leave it by stealth, not now but later on perhaps, in some part of another courtyard.

But it all went off without a hitch. The door of the yardkeeper's room was set ajar, but not fixed with the lock, which meant that most probably the yardkeeper was at home. To such a degree had he lost his ability to think straight, however, that he went directly up to the yardkeeper's door and opened it. If the yardkeeper were to have asked him: ‘What do you want?’ he would probably have simply handed him the axe. But the yardkeeper was once again absent, and he managed to put the axe back in its former place under the bench, even screening it with the log as before. No one, not a single soul, did he meet after that on his way up to his room; the landlady's door was closed. Entering his quarters, he threw himself on the sofa, without taking his coat off, just as he was. He did not sleep, but lay in a kind of oblivion. If anyone had come into the room, he would have leapt up instantly with a yell. The rags and tatters of vague thoughts swarmed in his head; but he could not seize hold of a single one of them, could not focus on a single one of them, even though he tried to force himself to…

In this fashion he lay for a very long time. Occasionally he seemed to wake up, and at such moments he would realize that it had been night for a long time now; yet the idea of getting up never entered his head. At last he saw it was light – as good as daylight. He was lying flat-out on the sofa, still paralysed by his recent loss of consciousness. What had reached him were the terrible, desperate cries from the street that he heard regularly every night under his window some time after two o'clock. These it had been that had woken him up just now. ‘Ah! That'll be the drunks coming out of the dens,’ he thought. ‘It's gone two a.m.’ And suddenly he leapt up, as though someone had pulled him off the sofa. ‘What? It's gone two?’ He sat down on the sofa – and then it all came back to him. Suddenly, in a single flash, it all came back.

For that initial second he thought he was going insane. A terrible coldness had seized him; but the coldness was also due to the fever which had begun in him a long time ago, while he had been asleep. Now he was suddenly attacked by an ague so violent that his teeth nearly leapt from his mouth, so violently did they chatter, and his entire body started to shake. He opened the door and began to listen: everyone in the building was fast asleep. In amazement he examined first himself, and then every aspect of the room, unable to comprehend how he could possibly have come in the evening before and not have set the door on its hook, but simply thrown himself on the sofa with all his clothes on – even his hat: it had rolled to the floor, where it lay
near his pillow. ‘If anyone had come in, what would they have thought? That I was drunk, but…’ He rushed to the window. There was quite a lot of light now, and he quickly began to examine himself all over, from head to toe, all his clothes, to see if there were any marks. But he could not do it like that: shaking with ague, he began to take off all his things and examine them thoroughly. He ransacked everything, everything, right down to the last thread, the last scrap of cloth and, lacking confidence in himself, repeated the examination some three times. But it was all right, there seemed not to be any marks; only his trouser-ends, in the place where they hung down and rubbed the ground, retained some thick traces of coagulated blood. He grabbed hold of his large folding knife and pared the rubbed ends. There seemed not to be anything else that required attention. Suddenly he remembered that the purse and the objects he had stolen from the old woman's chest were all of them still in his pockets, and had been there all this time! It had taken him until now to think of removing them and hiding them away! He had not even remembered about them just then, as he had been examining his clothes! What was wrong with him? In an instant he fell on them, taking them out and hurling them on to the table. When he had removed them all, even turning the pockets inside out in order to make sure there was nothing left in them, he carried the whole pile to the far corner of the room. There, right in the very corner, down at the bottom, the wallpaper was torn in one place where it had peeled away from the wall: he immediately began to cram everything into this hole, under the paper – in it went! ‘All hidden from sight, the purse as well!’ he thought with relief, getting up on his knees and looking stupidly at the corner, with its hole that was now bulging out more than ever. Suddenly he recoiled in horror. ‘Good God!’ he whispered in despair. ‘What's the matter with me? Do you call that hidden? Are those things anywhere near hidden?’ As a matter of fact, the discovery of those objects had not been a part of his calculations; he had supposed there would be only money, and for that reason had not prepared a hiding-place in advance. ‘But now, now what have I got to laugh about?’ he thought. ‘My sanity really is deserting me!’ In a state of utter exhaustion he
sat down on the sofa, and instantly an unbearable ague began to make him shake and shiver once more. Mechanically he pulled towards him the old winter overcoat that was lying beside him on the chair; it was the overcoat he had had as a student, a warm one, but by this time it was in rags. He covered himself with it, and was at once embraced by sleep and delirium. He lost consciousness.

Not more than about five minutes later he leapt up again and once more, in an instantaneous, sudden frenzy, rushed over to his clothes. ‘How could I have fallen asleep again, when nothing's been done! I knew it, I knew it: I haven't even taken the loop out from under the armpit yet! I forgot it, I could forget a thing like that! A piece of incriminating evidence like that!’ He tugged the loop out and quickly began to tear it into shreds, stuffing them into the linen under his pillow. ‘Some bits of torn canvas can't possibly arouse any suspicion; surely not, surely not!’ he repeated, standing in the middle of the room and beginning to look around him again with a focus of attention that was intensified to the point of pain, surveying the floor and all the other parts of the room, in an agony lest he had forgotten something. A certainty that everything, even his memory, even the simple faculty of reason, was deserting him had begun to torment him unendurably. ‘What, is it really beginning now, is this the punishment beginning? Yes, yes, I knew it!’ It was true: the parings of his trouser-ends which he had cut away were strewn all over the floor, in the middle of the room, for the first person who walked in to observe! ‘What on earth's the matter with me?’ he exclaimed again, like a lost soul.

A strange thought suddenly came into his head: what if all his clothes were covered in blood, what if there were many stains, only he could not see them, could not find out where they were, because his reason had grown feeble, broken apart… his mind grown darkened… Suddenly he remembered that there had been blood on the purse, too. ‘Ah! That means there must be blood in my pocket, too, because I shoved the purse into it while it was still wet!’ In a flash he turned out the pocket, and in its lining discovered, as he had known he would – traces of blood, whole stains! ‘That means my reason hasn't yet deserted me
entirely, if I could remember and think of it on my own it means I still have my wits about me and my memory intact!’ he reflected in triumph, breathing a deep, joyful sigh with the whole of his lungs. ‘It's just weakness brought on by my fever, the delirium of a moment,’ he told himself, as he ripped the lining away in its entirety from the left pocket of the trousers. At that moment a ray of sunlight illuminated his left boot; on the sock that was peeping out through the crack at the front of the boot he thought he saw marks. He kicked off his boots: ‘Yes, there are marks! The whole toe of the sock is saturated in blood.’ He must have stepped in that puddle without noticing at the time… ‘But now what can I do about it? Where am I going to put this sock, the bits of my trouser-ends, the pocket lining?’

He raked them all together in one hand and stood in the middle of the room. ‘Should I hide them in the stove? But the stove's the first place they'll start rummaging about in. Burn them? But what with? I don't even have any matches. No, I'd better take them somewhere outside and throw them away. Yes, the best thing to do is throw them away!’ he repeated, sitting down on the sofa again. ‘And right now, this minute, without delay!…’ Instead, however, his head sank back on the pillow again; again the unendurable ague sent its icy chill through him; again he pulled the overcoat about him. And for a long time, several hours, he kept telling himself in his dreams: ‘Come on, you must take the stuff right now and throw it all away out of sight somewhere, quickly, quickly!’ Several times he tried to get off the sofa and stand up, but was unable to. At last a loud knock at the door woke him.

‘Come on, open up – are you alive or dead? He's still snoozing!’ Nastasya shouted, beating her fist against the door. ‘Whole days on end he snoozes, like a hound-dog! That's what he is – a hound-dog! Open up, can't you? It's nearly eleven o'clock!’

‘Perhaps he's not in,’ a man's voice said.

‘Ah! That's the yardkeeper's voice… What does he want?’

He leapt up into a sitting position on the sofa. His heart was beating so violently that it actually hurt him.

‘Here – who's been setting the door on the hook?’ Nastasya said in an affronted tone of voice. ‘Would you believe it – he's
started locking himself in now! Is he scared they'll come and take him away, or something? Open up, stupid-head, wakey-wakey!’

‘What do they want? Why is the yardkeeper there? They know everything. Should I put up a fight or open the door? I'd better open the door! I may as well take a chance…’

He raised himself on one elbow, leaned forward and took the door off the hook.

The entire room was of such dimensions that it was possible to take the door off the hook without getting out of bed.

It was as he had supposed: Nastasya and the yardkeeper were standing there.

For some reason he thought Nastasya was looking him over in a strange sort of way. He glanced at the yardkeeper with a challenging and desperate air. The yardkeeper silently extended towards him a grey, double-folded document sealed with bottle-green sealing-wax.

‘It's a summons, from the bureau,’ he said, handing him the document.

‘What bureau?…’

‘It means the police want to see you, in their bureau. You know what bureau I mean.’

‘The police!… Why?…’

‘Don't ask me. If they want you, you go.’ The yardkeeper gave him an attentive look, cast his eyes about and turned on his heel to go.

‘I think you're quite ill, aren't you?’ Nastasya observed, not taking her eyes off him. The yardkeeper also turned his head round for a moment. ‘He's had a fever since yesterday,’ she added.

He made no reply and continued to hold the document without unsealing it.

‘No, don't you get up,’ Nastasya went on, moved to pity, and seeing that he was lowering his legs off the sofa. ‘If you're ill, don't go; there's no hurry. What's that in your hand?’

He looked: in his right hand he was holding the pared-off bits of trouser-end, the sock and the remnants of the lining he had torn out of his pocket. Yes, he had slept with them like that. Thinking about this later on, he remembered that, half regaining
consciousness in his fever, he had squeezed all these things in his hand as tightly as he could, and then fallen back to sleep again.

‘Look at him – been out rag-collecting, and now he sleeps with his rags as though they were treasure.’ And Nastasya went off into fits of her morbidly nervous laughter. In a flash he shoved everything under the overcoat and fixed the coat intently with his gaze. Even though he was very far from being able to think coherently at that moment, he nevertheless sensed that this was not the way people behave with someone who is about to be arrested. ‘But… the police?’