The Brothers Karamazov

Chapter 3: The Soul’s Journey through Torments. The First Torment

And so Mitya was sitting and staring around with wild eyes at those present, without understanding what was being said to him.^[271] Suddenly he rose, threw up his hands, and cried loudly:

“Not guilty! Of that blood I am not guilty! Of my father’s blood I am not guilty ... I wanted to kill him, but I’m not guilty. Not me!”

But no sooner had he cried it than Grushenka jumped out from behind the curtains and simply collapsed at the feet of the police commissioner.

“It’s me, me, the cursed one, I am guilty!” she cried in a heartrending howl, all in tears, stretching her arms out to everyone, “it’s because of me that he killed him...! I tormented him and drove him to it! I tormented that poor old dead man, too, out of spite, and drove things to this! I am the guilty one, first and most of all, I am the guilty one!”

“Yes, you are the guilty one! You are the chief criminal! You are violent, you are depraved, you are the guilty one, you most of all,” screamed the commissioner, shaking his finger at her, but this time he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The prosecutor even seized him with both arms.

“This is entirely out of order, Mikhail Makarovich,” he cried, “you are positively hindering the investigation ... ruining the whole thing ... ,”he was all but choking.

“Measures, measures, we must take measures!” Nikolai Parfenovich, too, began seething terribly, “otherwise it’s positively impossible...!”

“Judge us together!” Grushenka went on exclaiming frenziedly, still on her knees. “Punish us together, I’ll go with him now even to execution!”

“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya threw himself on his knees beside her and caught her tightly in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he shouted, “she’s not guilty of anything, of any blood, or anything!”

He remembered afterwards that several men pulled him away from her by force, that she was suddenly taken out, and that when he came to his senses he was already sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood people with badges. On the sofa across the table from him, Nikolai Parfenovich, the district attorney, sat trying to persuade him to sip some water from a glass that stood on the table: “It will refresh you, it will calm you down, you needn’t be afraid, you needn’t worry,” he kept adding with extreme politeness. And Mitya, as he remembered, suddenly became terribly interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and another with a bright yellow stone, transparent and of a most wonderful brilliance. And for a long time afterwards he recalled with surprise how these rings irresistibly drew his eye even through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that for some reason he was unable to tear himself away and forget them as something quite unsuitable in his position. On the left, at Mitya’s side, where Maximov had been sitting at the start of the evening, the prosecutor now sat down, and to Mitya’s right, where Grushenka had been, a pink-cheeked young man settled himself, dressed in a rather threadbare sort of hunting jacket, and in front of him appeared an inkstand and some paper. He turned out to be the district attorney’s clerk, who had come with him. The police commissioner now stood near the window, at the other end of the room, next to Kalganov, who was sitting in a chair by the same window.

“Drink some water!” the district attorney gently repeated for the tenth time.

“I drank some, gentlemen, I drank some ... but ... come, gentlemen, crush me, punish me, decide my fate!” Mitya exclaimed, staring with horribly fixed, bulging eyes at the district attorney.

“So you positively assert that you are not guilty of the death of your father, Fyodor Pavlovich?” the district attorney asked gently but insistently.

“Not guilty! I’m guilty of other blood, of another old man’s blood, but not of my father’s. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old man, killed him and struck him down ... But it’s hard to have to answer for that blood with this other blood, this terrible blood, which I’m not guilty of ... A terrible accusation, gentlemen, as if you’d stunned me on the head! But who killed my father, who killed him? Who could have killed him if not me? It’s a wonder, an absurdity, an impossibility . . .!”

“Yes, who could have killed him ... ,” the district attorney began, but the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich (the deputy prosecutor, but for the sake of brevity we, too, shall call him the prosecutor), exchanging glances with the district attorney, said, turning to Mitya:

“You needn’t worry about the old servant, Grigory Vasiliev. I can tell you that he is alive, he has recovered, and despite the severe beating inflicted by you, according to his and now to your own evidence, it seems he will undoubtedly live, at least in the doctor’s opinion.”