The Brothers Karamazov

Having said this, Mitya again sat down on his chair. Grushenka rose a little, looked towards the icon, and piously crossed herself.

“Glory be to God!” she said in an ardent, emotional voice, and turning to Nikolai Parfenovich before sitting down, she added: “What he has just said, you must believe! I know him: when he babbles, he babbles, whether it’s for fun or out of stubbornness, but if it’s something against his conscience, he will never deceive you. He will speak the truth directly, you must believe that!”

“Thank you, Agrafena Alexandrovna, you have given my soul new courage!” Mitya responded in a trembling voice.

To the questions about yesterday’s money she replied that she did not know how much there was, but had heard him say to many people yesterday that he had brought three thousand with him. And with regard to where he had got the money, he had told her privately that he had “stolen” it from Katerina Ivanovna, to which she had replied that he had not stolen it and that the money must be given back tomorrow. To the prosecutor’s insistent question as to which money he said he had stolen from Katerina Ivanovna—yesterday’s, or the three thousand spent there a month ago—she stated that he was speaking of the money from a month ago, that that was how she had understood him.

Grushenka was finally dismissed, Nikolai Parfenovich impetuously announcing to her that she could even return to town at once, and that if he, for his part, could be of any assistance to her, for example, in connection with the horses, or if, for example, she wished to be accompanied, then he ... for his part . . .

“I humbly thank you,” Grushenka bowed to him, “I’ll go with that little old man, the landowner, I’ll take him back with me, but meanwhile I’ll wait downstairs, with your permission, until you decide here about Dmitri Fyodorovich.”

She went out. Mitya was calm and even looked quite encouraged, but only for a moment. Some strange physical powerlessness was gradually overwhelming him. His eyes kept closing with fatigue. The interrogation of the witnesses finally came to an end. They moved on to the final editing of the transcript. Mitya got up, went from his chair to the corner, near the curtain, lay down on a large chest covered with a rug, and was asleep in a second. He had a strange sort of dream, somehow entirely out of place and out of time. It seemed he was driving somewhere in the steppe, in a place where he had served once long ago; he is being driven through the slush by a peasant, in a cart with a pair of horses. And it seems to Mitya that he is cold, it is the beginning of November, and snow is pouring down in big, wet flakes that melt as soon as they touch the ground. And the peasant is driving briskly, waving his whip nicely, he has a long, fair beard, and he is not an old man, maybe around fifty, dressed in a gray peasant coat. And there is a village nearby— black, black huts, and half of the huts are burnt, just charred beams sticking up. And at the edge of the village there are peasant women standing along the road, many women, a long line of them, all of them thin, wasted, their faces a sort of brown color. Especially that one at the end—such a bony one, tall, looking as if she were forty, but she may be only twenty, with a long, thin face, and in her arms a baby is crying, and her breasts must be all dried up, not a drop of milk in them. And the baby is crying, crying, reaching out its bare little arms, its little fists somehow all blue from the cold.

“Why are they crying? Why are they crying?” Mitya asks, flying past them at a great clip.

“The wee one,” the driver answers, “it’s the wee one crying.” And Mitya is struck that he has said it in his own peasant way: “the wee one,” and not “the baby.” And he likes it that the peasant has said “wee one”: there seems to be more pity in it.

“But why is it crying?” Mitya insists, as if he were foolish, “why are its little arms bare, why don’t they wrap it up?”

“The wee one’s cold, its clothes are frozen, they don’t keep it warm.”

“But why is it so? Why?” foolish Mitya will not leave off.

“They’re poor, burnt out, they’ve got no bread, they’re begging for their burnt-down place.”

“No, no,” Mitya still seems not to understand, “tell me: why are these burnt-out mothers standing here, why are the people poor, why is the wee one poor, why is the steppe bare, why don’t they embrace and kiss, why don’t they sing joyful songs, why are they blackened with such black misery, why don’t they feed the wee one?”