Part Two · IV

Zosimov was a tall, fat man with a puffy, colorlessly pale, clean-shaven face and straight flaxen hair; he wore spectacles and a big gold ring on a finger swollen with fat. He was about twenty-seven. He was dressed in a loose, stylish, light overcoat and light-colored summer trousers, and in general everything on him was loose, stylish, and brand-new; his linen was impeccable, his watch chain massive. His manner was slow, seemingly languid, and at the same time studiedly casual; pretension, though strenuously concealed, peeped through every minute. Everyone who knew him found him a difficult man, but they said he knew his business.

“I came by your place twice, brother… You see, he’s come to!” cried Razumikhin.

“I see, I see; well, and how are we feeling now, eh?” Zosimov turned to Raskolnikov, looking at him intently and settling himself on the sofa at his feet, where he at once sprawled out as far as possible.

“He keeps moping,” Razumikhin went on. “We just changed his linen, and he almost burst into tears.”

“Understandable; the linen could have waited, if he doesn’t want it… The pulse is splendid. Head still aching a little, eh?”

“I’m well, I’m perfectly well!” Raskolnikov said insistently and irritably, suddenly raising himself on the sofa, his eyes flashing, but at once he fell back on the pillow and turned to the wall. Zosimov watched him intently.

“Very good… everything as it should be,” he said languidly. “Has he eaten anything?”

They told him and asked what could be given.

“Oh, anything can be given… Soup, tea… No mushrooms or cucumbers, naturally, and no beef either, and… well, what’s the use of chattering!…” He exchanged glances with Razumikhin. “Away with the mixture and away with everything; and tomorrow I’ll have a look… Today would do too… well, never mind…”

“Tomorrow evening I’m taking him for a walk!” Razumikhin decided. “To the Yusupov Garden, and then we’ll drop in at the Palais de Cristal.”

“Tomorrow I wouldn’t even move him, but then again… a little… well, we’ll see.”

“Eh, what a nuisance, today I’m having my housewarming, just two steps from here; if only he could come. He could at least lie on the sofa among us! And you’ll be there?” Razumikhin suddenly turned to Zosimov. “Mind you don’t forget, you promised.”

“Maybe, but later. What have you got going there?”

“Oh, nothing, tea, vodka, herring. They’ll serve a pie: just our own crowd.”

“Who, exactly?”

“Oh, all of them from around here, and nearly all new ones, honestly—except maybe my old uncle, and even he’s new: he only arrived in Petersburg yesterday, on some sort of little business of his; we see each other once every five years.”

“Who is he?”

“Oh, he vegetated all his life as a district postmaster… gets a measly pension, sixty-five years old, not worth talking about… I love him, though. Porfiry Petrovich will come: the local examining magistrate… a law-school man. Why, you know him…”

“Is he some kind of relative of yours too?”

“Some very distant kind; but what are you frowning for? Because you two quarreled once, you might not come, is that it?”

“I don’t give a damn about him…”

“So much the better. Well, and then there’ll be students, a teacher, one civil servant, one musician, an officer, Zametov…”

“Tell me, please, what can you or he”—Zosimov nodded at Raskolnikov—“have in common with some Zametov or other?”

“Oh, these fussy ones! Principles!… You’re all on principles, as if on springs; you don’t dare turn around of your own free will; but in my opinion, if a man’s good—that’s the principle, and I don’t want to know anything else. Zametov is a most wonderful man.”

“And he lines his pockets.”

“Well, so he lines his pockets, and the hell with it! So what if he lines them!” Razumikhin cried suddenly, getting somehow unnaturally irritated. “Did I praise him to you for lining his pockets? I said he’s good only in his own way! And if you look straight at people, in every way, then how many good people will be left? Why, I’m sure that for me, guts and all, they’d give you just one baked onion, and that only if they got you thrown in!…”

“That’s too little; I’d give two for you…”

“And I’d give only one for you! Go on, be witty! Zametov is still a boy, I’ll pull his hair yet, because he has to be drawn in, not pushed away. You won’t reform a man by pushing him away, least of all a boy. With a boy you have to be twice as careful. Eh, you progressive blockheads, you don’t understand a thing! You don’t respect a man, you insult yourselves… And if you want to know, he and I have even got a sort of joint business going.”

“I’d like to know what.”

“Why, it’s all about that housepainter, I mean, the painter… We’ll get him off yet! Though now there’s no real trouble anymore. The case is completely, completely obvious now! We’ll just put on a bit more steam.”

“What painter is this?”

“What, didn’t I tell you? Or didn’t I? Oh, right, I only told you the beginning… about the murder of the old woman pawnbroker, the civil servant’s widow… well, now the painter has got mixed up in it too…”

“Why, I heard about that murder before you did, and I’m even interested in the case… partly… for a certain reason… and I read about it in the papers! But…”

“They killed Lizaveta too!” Nastasya suddenly blurted out, addressing Raskolnikov. She had stayed in the room the whole time, pressed close by the door, listening.

“Lizaveta?” Raskolnikov murmured in a barely audible voice.

“Why, Lizaveta, the peddler woman, don’t you know her? She used to come downstairs here. She even mended a shirt for you.”

Raskolnikov turned to the wall, where on the dirty yellow wallpaper with little white flowers he picked out one clumsy white flower with some sort of brown lines on it and began examining it: how many little leaves it had, what notches there were on the leaves, and how many lines? He felt that his arms and legs had gone numb, as if paralyzed, but he did not even try to move and kept staring stubbornly at the flower.

“Well, so what about the painter?” Zosimov interrupted Nastasya’s chatter with a sort of particular displeasure. She sighed and fell silent.

“Why, they’ve put him down as the murderer too!” Razumikhin went on hotly.

“Some evidence, or what?”

“Evidence, the devil! Though, as a matter of fact, it is on the evidence, only this evidence is no evidence, that’s what needs proving! It’s exactly the way they first picked up and suspected those, what’s their names… Koch and Pestryakov. Pah! How stupidly it’s all done, it makes you sick even as an outsider! Pestryakov may drop in on me today… By the way, Rodya, you already know about this business, it happened before your illness, exactly the day before you fainted at the police office, when they were talking about it there…”

Zosimov looked at Raskolnikov with curiosity; Raskolnikov did not stir.

“You know what, Razumikhin? Looking at you, I see what a busybody you are, though,” remarked Zosimov.

“Never mind that, we’ll get him off all the same!” cried Razumikhin, banging his fist on the table. “What’s the most galling thing here? It’s not that they lie; lying can always be forgiven; lying is a fine thing, because it leads to the truth. No, what’s annoying is that they lie and then bow down to their own lies. I respect Porfiry, but… What, for instance, threw them off first of all? The door was locked, and when they came back with the caretaker it was unlocked: well, that means Koch and Pestryakov did the killing! That’s their logic for you.”

“Don’t get excited; they were simply detained; they couldn’t very well… By the way: I’ve met that Koch; it turned out he used to buy up unredeemed pledges from the old woman? Eh?”

“Yes, some sort of crook! He buys up promissory notes too. An entrepreneur. The devil take him! What I’m so angry about, do you understand? I’m angry at their decrepit, banal, hidebound routine… And here, in this one case, a whole new path could be opened. From the psychological data alone you can show how to get onto the true trail. ‘We have facts,’ they say! But facts aren’t everything; at least half the business is how you know how to handle the facts!”

“And do you know how to handle the facts?”

“Well, you can’t keep quiet when you feel, feel it in your fingertips, that you could help the case, if only… Eh!… Do you know the case in detail?”

“I’m waiting to hear about the painter.”

“Oh, right! Well, listen to the story: exactly on the third day after the murder, in the morning, while they were still fussing over Koch and Pestryakov—even though those two had accounted for every step they took: the obviousness of it screams!—suddenly a most unexpected fact turns up. A certain peasant, Dushkin, who keeps a tavern right across from that very building, comes to the police office and brings a jeweler’s case with gold earrings in it and tells a whole tale: ‘There come running to me, the day before yesterday, toward evening, sometime after eight’—the day and the hour! you follow?—‘a workman, a painter, who’d already been dropping in on me during the day, Mikolai, and he brung me this here box with gold earrings and little stones, and asked two roubles on them in pawn, and when I asked him where he got it, he said he picked it up off the sidewalk. I didn’t question him no more about it’—this is Dushkin talking—‘but brought him out a ticket—a rouble, that is—because, says I, if he don’t pawn it with me he’ll pawn it with somebody else, it’s all the same, he’ll drink it up, so let the thing better stay with me: the farther you put it, the nearer you get it, and if something comes out or rumors start going round, then I’ll bring it in.’ Well, naturally he’s telling old wives’ tales, he lies like a horse, because I know this Dushkin, he’s a pawnbroker himself and a fence, and he didn’t filch a thirty-rouble article off Mikolai in order to ‘bring it in.’ He simply got scared. Well, the devil with it, listen; Dushkin goes on: ‘And this here peasant, Mikolai Dementyev, I’ve knowed since he was a little shaver, from our province and district, Zaraisk, on account of we’re Ryazan folk ourselves. And Mikolai, he ain’t a drunkard, but he takes a drop, and it was known to us that he was working in that very building, painting, together with Mitrei, and him and Mitrei are from the same parts. And when he got the ticket he changed it right off, drank two glasses at one go, took his change, and left, and I didn’t see Mitrei with him at that time. And the next day we heard that Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta Ivanovna had been killed with an ax, and we used to know them, sir, and then a misdoubt come over me about the earrings—because it was known to us that the deceased lent money on things. I went to their building and started finding out careful-like, on the quiet, and first off I asked: is Mikolai here? And Mitrei told me Mikolai had gone on a spree, come home at dawn, drunk, stayed home about ten minutes, and gone out again, and Mitrei hadn’t seen him since and was finishing the work alone. And their work is on the same stairs as the murdered ones, on the second floor. Hearing all that, we didn’t let on nothing to nobody then’—this is Dushkin talking—‘and we found out everything we could about the murdering and went home still in that same misdoubt of ours. And this morning, at eight o’clock’—that is, it’s on the third day, you understand?—‘I see Mikolai come in, not sober, but not what you’d call very drunk either, he can follow what’s said. He set down on the bench, says nothing. And besides him, at that time, there was only one outside person in the tavern, and another one asleep on the bench, an acquaintance, and two of our boys, sir. “Have you seen Mitrei?” I ask. “No,” he says, “I ain’t.” “And he wasn’t here?” “He wasn’t,” he says, “not since the day before yesterday.” “And where’d you spend last night?” “Over on the Sands,” he says, “with the Kolomna fellows.” “And where,” I says, “did you get them earrings that time?” “Why, I found them on the sidewalk,” and he says it sort of not natural, and not looking. “And did you hear,” I says, “that such and such happened, that very evening and at that hour, on them stairs?” “No,” he says, “I ain’t heard,” but he’s listening with his eyes popping out, and all of a sudden he went white as chalk. So I’m telling him, and I look, and he grabs his cap and starts getting up. Then I wanted to hold him: “Wait, Mikolai,” I says, “won’t you have a drink?” And I winked at the boy to hold the door, and I’m coming out from behind the counter: and how he bolts from me, and out into the street, and running, and into the alley—that’s the last I saw of him. Then I was settled in my misdoubt, because it’s his sin, sure as can be…’”

“I should say so!…” said Zosimov.

“Wait! Listen to the end! Naturally, they rushed headlong to hunt for Mikolai: Dushkin was detained and searched, Mitrei too; they turned the Kolomna fellows inside out as well—only suddenly, the day before yesterday, they bring in Mikolai himself: he was detained near the ——sky Gate, at a coaching inn. He’d come there, taken off his cross, a silver one, and asked for a shot of vodka for the cross. They gave it to him. A few minutes later a peasant woman went to the cowshed and saw through a crack: in the shed next door he had tied his sash to a beam, made a noose, stood on a block of wood, and was about to put the noose around his neck; the woman screamed at the top of her lungs, people came running: ‘So that’s what you are!’ ‘Take me,’ he says, ‘to such-and-such a precinct, I’ll confess to everything.’ Well, with all due honors they presented him at such-and-such a precinct, that is, here. Well, this and that, who, how, how old—‘twenty-two’—and so on and so forth. Question: ‘When you were working with Mitrei, didn’t you see anyone on the stairs, at such-and-such an hour?’ Answer: ‘Sure, folks might have gone by, but we didn’t take no notice.’ ‘And didn’t you hear anything, any noise or the like?’ ‘We didn’t hear nothing in particular.’ ‘And did you know, Mikolai, on that very day, that such-and-such a widow had been murdered and robbed, with her sister, on such-and-such a day and hour?’ ‘I don’t know nothing about it, never heard tell of it. First I heard of it from Afanasy Pavlych, on the third day, in the tavern.’ ‘And where did you get the earrings?’ ‘Found them on the sidewalk.’ ‘Why didn’t you show up for work with Mitrei the next day?’ ‘On account of I went on a spree.’ ‘And where did you go on your spree?’ ‘Oh, here and there.’ ‘Why did you run away from Dushkin?’ ‘On account of we got awful scared then.’ ‘What were you scared of?’ ‘That they’d convict me.’ ‘How could you be scared of that, if you feel yourself in no way guilty?…’ Well, believe it or not, Zosimov, that question was put, and literally in those words, I know it for a positive fact, it was reported to me accurately! How about that? How about that?”

“Well, no, but all the same, there is evidence.”

“I’m not talking about the evidence now, I’m talking about the question, about how they understand their own essence! Well, the devil!… Well, so they squeezed him and squeezed him, pressed him and pressed him, and he confessed: ‘I didn’t find it on the sidewalk, says he, I found it in the flat where me and Mitrei was painting.’ ‘How so?’ ‘Why, just so, that me and Mitrei was painting the whole day, till eight o’clock, and we was getting ready to leave, and Mitrei took a brush and smeared paint on my mug, he smeared paint right in my mug, and ran off, and me after him. And I’m running after him, and hollering at the top of my lungs; and as I’m coming off the stairs into the gateway, I run smack into the caretaker and some gentlemen, and how many gentlemen was with him I don’t recollect, and the caretaker cussed me for it, and the other caretaker cussed me too, and the caretaker’s woman come out and cussed us too, and a gentleman was coming into the gateway with a lady, and he cussed us too, on account of me and Mitka was lying across the way: I grabbed Mitka by the hair and threw him down and started pounding him, and Mitka got me by the hair too, from under me, and started pounding me, and we done it not out of spite, but out of all love, that is, playing. And then Mitka got loose and ran off into the street, and me after him, but I didn’t catch him and went back to the flat alone—on account of it needed tidying up. I started gathering things and waiting for Mitrei, maybe he’d come back. And by the door to the entry, behind the wall, in the corner, I stepped on the box. I look, there it lies, wrapped in paper. I took the paper off, I see these teeny little hooks, we undid the little hooks—and in the box there’s earrings…’”

“Behind the door? It was lying behind the door? Behind the door?” Raskolnikov suddenly cried, looking at Razumikhin with a clouded, frightened gaze, and slowly raised himself on the sofa, leaning on his hand.

“Yes… why? What’s the matter with you? What’s got into you?” Razumikhin also rose from his seat.

“Nothing!…” Raskolnikov answered barely audibly, sinking back onto the pillow and again turning to the wall. Everyone was silent for a moment.

“He must have dozed off and was talking half asleep,” Razumikhin said at last, looking questioningly at Zosimov; Zosimov made a slight negative sign with his head.

“Well, go on,” said Zosimov, “what next?”

“What next? As soon as he saw the earrings, he at once forgot both the apartment and Mitka, grabbed his cap, ran to Dushkin, and, as we know, got a rouble from him, and lied to him that he’d found it on the sidewalk, and at once went off on a spree. And about the murder he confirms what he said before: ‘I don’t know nothing about it, never heard tell of it, only heard about it on the third day.’ ‘And why haven’t you come forward till now?’ ‘From fear.’ ‘And why did you want to hang yourself?’ ‘From thinking.’ ‘What thinking?’ ‘That they’d convict me.’ Well, that’s the whole story. Now, what do you think they made of it?”

“What’s there to think, there’s a trail, of a kind, but there is one. A fact. They can’t very well let your painter go free?”

“But they’ve flat out put him down as the murderer now! They don’t have any doubts at all anymore…”

“Oh, you’re exaggerating; you’re getting excited. Well, and the earrings? You must admit yourself that if on that very day and hour the earrings from the old woman’s trunk come into Nikolai’s hands—you must admit yourself that they had to get there somehow? That’s no small thing in such an investigation.”

“How they got there! How they got there?” cried Razumikhin. “And can you, a doctor, you, who are obliged first and foremost to study man and have the opportunity, sooner than anyone else, to study human nature—can you really not see, from all these data, what kind of nature this Nikolai is? Can you really not see from the very first that everything he testified under questioning is the holiest truth? They came into his hands exactly the way he testified. He stepped on the box and picked it up!”

“The holiest truth! But he admitted himself that he lied the first time?”

“Listen to me, listen carefully: the caretaker, and Koch, and Pestryakov, and the other caretaker, and the first caretaker’s wife, and the townswoman who was sitting with her in the caretaker’s lodge at the time, and Court Councillor Kryukov, who at that very minute had got down from a cab and was coming into the gateway arm in arm with a lady—all of them, that is, eight or ten witnesses, unanimously testify that Nikolai had pinned Dmitry to the ground, was lying on top of him and pounding him, and Dmitry had grabbed him by the hair and was pounding him too. They’re lying across the way and blocking the passage; they’re being cursed from all sides, and they, ‘like little kids’ (the witnesses’ literal expression), are lying on top of each other, squealing, fighting, and laughing, both of them laughing their heads off, racing each other, with the funniest faces, and chasing each other, just like children, they ran out into the street. You heard that? Now note this carefully: the bodies upstairs were still warm, you hear, warm, that’s how they were found! If they had done the killing, or only Nikolai, and on top of that had robbed the trunks by breaking them open, or only had some part in the robbery, then allow me to ask you just one question: does such a state of mind, that is, squeals, laughter, a childish fight in the gateway—square with axes, with blood, with fiendish cunning, with caution, with robbery? They’ve just killed, only some five or ten minutes before—because that’s how it comes out, the bodies are still warm—and suddenly, leaving the bodies and the apartment unlocked, and knowing that people have just gone up there, and leaving the loot, they roll around in the passage like little kids, laughing, drawing everyone’s attention to themselves, and there are ten unanimous witnesses to that!”

“Strange, of course! Certainly impossible, but…”

“No, brother, not ‘but,’ but if the earrings, which turned up in Nikolai’s hands on the same day and hour, really do constitute an important factual piece of evidence against him—one that is, however, directly explained by his testimony, and therefore still disputable evidence—then the exculpatory facts have to be taken into consideration too, all the more since they are irrefutable facts. And what do you think, given the character of our jurisprudence, will they accept, or are they capable of accepting, such a fact—based solely on a psychological impossibility alone, on a state of mind alone—as an irrefutable fact that demolishes all the incriminating and material facts, whatever they may be? No, they won’t accept it, they won’t accept it for anything, because, they say, the box was found and the man tried to hang himself, ‘which could not have happened if he didn’t feel himself guilty!’ That’s the capital question, that’s what I’m getting excited about! Understand!”

“Yes, I can see you’re getting excited. Wait, I forgot to ask: what proves that the box with the earrings actually came from the old woman’s trunk?”

“That’s been proved,” answered Razumikhin, frowning and as if reluctantly. “Koch recognized the article and pointed out the pledger, and he positively proved that the article was his.”

“That’s bad. Now another thing: did anyone see Nikolai at the time when Koch and Pestryakov went upstairs, and can’t that be proved somehow?”

“That’s just it, nobody saw him,” Razumikhin answered with vexation. “That’s just what’s bad; even Koch and Pestryakov didn’t notice them when they went upstairs, though their testimony wouldn’t mean very much now anyway. ‘We saw,’ they say, ‘that the apartment was open, that there must have been work going on in it, but we didn’t pay attention as we passed, and we don’t remember exactly whether the workmen were there at that moment or not.’”

“Hm. So the only exoneration there is, is that they were pounding each other and laughing. Granted, that’s strong proof, but… Let me ask you now: how do you yourself explain the whole fact? How do you explain his finding the earrings, if he really did find them the way he testifies?”

“How do I explain it? What’s there to explain: the thing is clear! At least the road along which the case must be pursued is clear and proven, and it was precisely the box that proved it. The real murderer dropped those earrings. The murderer was upstairs when Koch and Pestryakov were knocking, and he was sitting behind the bolt. Koch made a fool of himself and went downstairs; then the murderer slipped out and ran downstairs too, because he had no other way out. On the stairs he hid from Koch, Pestryakov, and the caretaker in the empty apartment, at precisely the moment when Dmitry and Nikolai had run out of it, stood behind the door while the caretaker and the others went upstairs, waited till the footsteps died away, and went downstairs as calm as you please, at exactly the moment when Dmitry and Nikolai had run out into the street, and everyone had dispersed, and no one was left in the gateway. Maybe somebody even saw him, but didn’t notice him; there are plenty of people passing by. And he dropped the box out of his pocket when he was standing behind the door, and didn’t notice he’d dropped it, because he had other things on his mind. And the box clearly proves that he stood precisely there. That’s the whole trick!”

“Clever! No, brother, that’s clever. That’s cleverest of all!”

“But why, why?”

“Because it all fits together too neatly… and is too well woven… just like in the theater.”

“E-ekh!” Razumikhin was beginning to exclaim, but at that moment the door opened and in came a new person, unknown to anyone present.