Crime and Punishment (51 page)

With slow, dragging steps, his knees trembling, and for some reason feeling terribly cold, Raskolnikov went back and climbed the stairs to his closet-like room. He took off his cap and put it on the table, and for about ten minutes stood next to it, motionless. Then, in exhaustion, he lay down on the sofa and stretched out on it painfully, uttering a weak moan; his eyes were closed. Thus he lay for about half an hour.

He thought about nothing. To be sure, there were a few vague thoughts or fragments of thoughts, vague notions, without order or coherence – the faces of people whom he had seen back in his childhood or whom he had met somewhere on only one
occasion and had forgotten all about; the belltower of the V. Church; the billiard table of a certain inn, and an officer playing billiards, the smell of cigars in some basement tobacco shop, a drinking den, a back staircase, completely dark, running with slop-water and scattered with eggshells, and from somewhere the ringing of Sunday bells… Objects spun round, changing place with one another, like a whirlwind. Some of them even caught his fancy, and he clutched at them, but they faded, and in general he felt a sense of some heavy weight within him, but it was not excessive. At times it even felt good… He was still affected by a slight shivering, and this too almost felt good.

He heard Razumikhin's voice and hurried footsteps, closed his eyes and pretended he was asleep. Razumikhin opened the door and stood in the threshold for a while as though he were pondering something. Then he quietly stepped into the room and cautiously approached the sofa. Nastasya's whisper was heard:

‘Don't bother him! Let him have his sleep! He can eat later.’

‘Indeed so,’ Razumikhin replied.

Cautiously they both went out and closed the door. About another half hour went by. Raskolnikov opened his eyes and again threw himself back, clasping his hands behind his head…

‘Who is he? Who is this man who's come up from under the ground? Where was he, and what did he see? He saw it all, there's no doubt of it. But where was he standing that day, and where was he looking from? Why has he only surfaced now? And how could he have seen – is that possible?… Hm…’ Raskolnikov went on, quivering, his blood running cold. ‘And the jewel-case Nikolai found behind the door: is that possible, too? Evidence? You miss the one hundred-thousandth hyphen in the text – and there's a piece of evidence the size of an Egyptian pyramid! The fly was on the wall, and it saw! Is that really possible?’

And with loathing he suddenly felt how weak, how physically weak he had grown.

‘I should have thought of this,’ he reflected, with a bitter, ironic smile. ‘How could I have dared, knowing the person I am, knowing
what it would do to me
, to take an axe and bloody
my hands? I should have thought it out in advance… Ah, but I did!…’ he whispered in despair.

At times he would stop dead in the face of some thought:

‘No, those men aren't made like that; the real
overlord
, to whom all things are permitted, ransacks Toulon, commits a massacre in Paris,
forgets
an army in Egypt,
throws away
half a million men in his Moscow campaign and talks his way out at Vilna with a clever remark; and after his death they put up statues to him – and that means that
everything
is permitted to him. No! Men like that don't have bodies but lumps of bronze!’

There was one sudden and extraneous thought which almost set him laughing. ‘Napoleon, the Pyramids, Waterloo – and the disgusting, emaciated widow of a registering clerk, an old crone who lends money and keeps a special trunk under her bed – how could Porfiry Petrovich ever digest that?… How could any of them digest it?… Their sense of aesthetics would get in the way: “Would a Napoleon go crawling under an old woman's bed?” they'd ask. “Go on, don't be so stupid!…”’

At moments he felt he might be delirious: he would lapse into a mood of feverish entrancement.

‘The old woman is rubbish!’ he thought, heatedly and with violence. ‘It's possible that the old woman was a mistake, but she's not what it's all about, in any case! The old woman was just an illness… I wanted to get my stepping-over done as quickly as possible… It wasn't a person but a principle that I killed! I killed the principle, but I didn't step over it, I remained on this side of it… All I was able to do was to kill. And the way it's turning out, it seems I didn't even manage to do that… The principle? Why was that imbecile Razumikhin calling the socialists such rude names just now? They're hardworking, businesslike people; they occupy themselves with the “common happiness”… No, life has been given me once and it won't come along again: I don't want to wait for “universal happiness”. I want to live my own life, too, otherwise I'd do better not to live at all. I mean, look, all I want is not to have to walk past a hungry mother, clutching my rouble in my pocket as I await the advent of “universal happiness”, as though to say: “
J'apporte ma pierre à l'édifice nouveau
¹
of ‘universal
happiness’, and that gives me peace of mind!” Ha, ha! Why have you let me slip past? I mean, I'm only going to live once, and I also want to… Oh, I'm an aesthetic louse, that's what!’ he added suddenly, bursting into laughter like a crazy man. ‘Yes, that's what I am, a louse,’ he continued, battening on to the idea with malicious joy, rummaging about in it, playing with it and amusing himself with it, ‘if only because of the fact that, for one thing, I'm now arguing that I'm a louse; and because, for another, throughout the whole of the past month I've been pestering all-beneficent Providence by asking it to be a witness that I wasn't undertaking my project in order to gratify my own fleshly lust, but that I had in mind a splendid and agreeable aim – ha, ha! And because, for yet another, that I proposed to observe the greatest possible degree of fairness in its execution – weighing, measuring and employing all the operations of arithmetic: of all the lice I could find I selected the most useless one and, having squashed it, proposed to take from it exactly as much as I needed in order to make my first step, no more and no less (and consequently what was left would have gone to a monastery, according to the terms of her will – ha, ha!)… And finally I'm a louse because, because,’ he added, grinding his teeth, ‘because I myself am possibly even more loathsome and disgusting than a squashed louse, and
knew in advance
that I'd tell myself this only
after
I'd squashed it! Is there anything that will stand comparison with a monstrous plan such as that? Oh, the vulgarity of it! Oh, the baseness!… Oh, how well I understand “the prophet”, with his sword, on horseback: Allah commands and “trembling” mortals must obey!
²
He's right, he's right, “the prophet”, when he mounts a d-decent-sized battery across some street somewhere and blasts away at righteous and sinners alike, without even bothering to explain! “Obey, trembling creatures, and –
do not desire
, because that is no business of yours!”… Oh, never, never will I forgive that old woman!’

His hair was soaked with sweat, his lips, which had been quivering, were parched, his motionless gaze was fixed upon the ceiling:

‘My mother, my sister – how I have loved them! Why now do
I hate them? Yes, I hate them, physically hate them, cannot endure their presence close to myself… Just a while ago I went up to my mother and gave her a kiss, I remember… That I could have embraced her, thinking that if she found out, then… could I really have told her then? I'm capable of it… Hm!
She
must be the same as I am,’ he added, thinking with an effort, as though he were struggling with the delirium that was enveloping him. ‘Oh, how I hate that old woman now! If she came back to life, I think I'd kill her again! Poor Lizaveta! Why did she have to go and turn up when she did?… I say, that's strange, I wonder why I hardly even think about her, as though I'd never even killed her?… Lizaveta! Sonya! Poor, meek souls with meek eyes… Dear souls!… Why aren't they crying? Why aren't they moaning?… They're sacrificing everything… their gaze is so meek and quiet… Sonya, Sonya! Tranquil Sonya!…’

He dozed off; he thought it strange that he could not remember how he had ended up in the street. It was already late in the evening. The twilight was thickening, the full moon was shining brighter and brighter; but the air was somehow particularly suffocating. Crowds of people were passing through the streets; artisans and people who had been on business were going home, others were loitering about at a loose end, there was a smell of dust, slaked lime and stagnant water. Raskolnikov walked along, sad and preoccupied: he was very well aware of having come out with some plan, of there being something he had to do and do quickly, but what it was he had forgotten. Suddenly he stopped, and saw that on the opposite pavement a man stood, waving to him. He crossed the street towards him, but suddenly the man swung round and walked on as though nothing had happened, his head lowered, not turning round and showing no sign of having beckoned to him. ‘Steady on – was he beckoning to me?’ Raskolnikov wondered, and began to catch the man up in any case. Before he had gone ten paces, he suddenly realized who it was – and felt a shock of fear: it was the artisan from earlier in the day, still wearing the same dressing-gown, and still as bent and hunched as ever. Raskolnikov walked behind him at a distance; his heart was thumping: they turned off into a lane – still the man did not turn round. ‘Does he know I'm walking
behind him?’ Raskolnikov wondered. The artisan walked in through the gateway of a certain large apartment building. Raskolnikov quickly approached the gateway and began to stare in, wondering if the man would turn round and beckon to him. Sure enough, having passed through the archway and emerged into the courtyard, he suddenly turned round and again seemed to wave to him. Raskolnikov immediately walked through the archway, but when he reached the courtyard the artisan was no longer there. That could only mean he had gone up the first staircase. Raskolnikov leapt after him. Sure enough, two flights further up someone's regular, unhurried footsteps could be heard. It was strange – the staircase looked somehow familiar. There was the window on the first floor; sadly and mysteriously the moonlight shone through its panes; here was the second floor. Aha! This was the apartment where the workmen had been painting… How had he not recognized it at once? The footsteps of the man walking up ahead of him died away: ‘He must have stopped, or hidden somewhere.’ Here, now, was the third floor; ought he to go any further? What silence there was in here – it was terrifying… But on he went. The noise of his own footsteps frightened and disturbed him. God, how dark it was! The artisan was doubtless lurking in a corner somewhere up here. Ah! There was the apartment with its door open on to the landing; he thought for a moment, then went inside. In the hallway it was very dark and empty, not a living soul, as though everything had been moved out of it; quietly, on tiptoe, he moved on into the sitting room: the whole room was brightly lit by moonlight; everything was as it had been before: the chairs, the mirror, the yellow sofa and the pictures in their frames. An enormous, round, copper-red moon was looking straight in through the windows. ‘It's the moon that's making this silence,’ Raskolnikov thought. ‘What it's doing just now is trying to obtain the answer to a riddle.’ He stood and waited, waited for a long time, and the more silent the moon, the more violently his heart thumped, until it actually started to become painful. And all the while the silence deepened. Suddenly there was a momentary, dry crack, like the sound of a breaking splinter, and then everything sank into stillness again. A fly that had
woken up suddenly swooped and beat against the windowpane, buzzing plaintively. Just then, hanging on the wall in the corner, between the little cupboard and the window, he caught sight of what looked like a woman's housecoat. ‘What's that housecoat doing there?’ he thought. ‘I mean, it wasn't there before…’ He crept up to it and realized that there was apparently someone hidden behind it. Cautiously, with one hand, he moved the housecoat out of the way and saw there was a chair in the corner there, and that on the chair the old woman was sitting, all doubled up and her head hanging down, so that, no matter how hard he looked, he could not see her face – but it was her. He stood over her: ‘She's scared!’ he thought, stealthily freed the axe from its loop and struck the old woman across the crown of the head with it, once, twice. But it was strange: she did not move at all at the blows, as though she were made of wood. In fear he stooped closer to her, began to examine her, but she inclined her head even lower. Then he bent right down to the floor and began to look up at her from below, looked and froze: the old woman was laughing – fairly shaking with quiet, inaudible laughter, exerting the utmost control in order that he would not hear. He suddenly fancied that the bedroom door opened the merest slit, and that in there there were more people laughing and whispering. He was overcome by rabid fury: with all his might he began to hack the old woman about the head, but with each blow of the axe the laughter and whispering from the bedroom was getting louder and louder and the old woman was swaying about all over with silent cackling. He rushed to escape, but the hallway was now full of people, the doors of the other apartments on that flight were wide open, and on the landing, on the staircase and wherever one gazed below there were people, their heads pressed together, all looking – but all of them keeping out of the way and waiting, uttering no word… His heart contracted, his legs would not move, they were rooted fast… He attempted to scream and – woke up.

He took a deep, hard breath. But it was strange – the dream did not yet appear to be over: the door of his room was wide open, and on the threshold a man who was a complete stranger to him stood examining him fixedly.

Raskolnikov had not yet managed to get his eyes completely open, and for a moment he closed them again. He lay on his back and did not move. ‘Is this still my dream, or isn't it?’ he wondered, and once again imperceptibly opened his eyelids the merest fraction in order to take a look: the stranger was still standing there, continuing his intent scrutiny of him. Suddenly, he stepped cautiously over the threshold, closed the door carefully after him, waited for a moment – never once taking his eyes off Raskolnikov – and quietly, without fuss, sat down on the chair next to the sofa; he placed his hat by his side, on the floor, leaned on his cane with both hands, and lowered his chin on to them. It was clear that he was prepared to wait for a long time. As far as Raskolnikov could make out through the blinking of his eyelashes, this man was of advancing years, square-built and with a thick, light-coloured, almost white beard…