The Brothers Karamazov

But Ivan did not answer. Alyosha stood at the crossroads under the street-lamp until Ivan disappeared completely into the darkness. Then he turned down the lane and slowly made his way home. He and Ivan lived separately, in different lodgings: neither of them wanted to live in the now empty house of Fyodor Pavlovich. Alyosha rented a furnished room with a family of tradespeople; and Ivan Fyodorovich lived quite far from him, and occupied a spacious and rather comfortable apartment in the wing of a good house belonging to the well-to-do widow of an official. But his only servant in the whole wing was an ancient, completely deaf old woman, rheumatic all over, who went to bed at six o’clock in the evening and got up at six o’clock in the morning. Ivan Fyodorovich had become undemanding to a strange degree during those two months and liked very much to be left completely alone. He even tidied the one room he occupied himself; as for the other rooms in his lodgings, he rarely even went into them. Having come up to the gates of his house, and with his hand already on the bell, he stopped. He felt himself still trembling all over with a spiteful trembling. He suddenly let go of the bell, spat, turned around, and quickly went off again to quite a different, opposite end of town, about a mile and a half from his apartment, to a tiny, lopsided log house, the present lodgings of Maria Kondratievna, formerly Fyodor Pavlovich’s neighbor, who used to come to Fyodor Pavlovich’s kitchen to get soup and to whom Smerdyakov, in those days, used to sing his songs and play on the guitar. She had sold her former house, and now lived with her mother in what was almost a hut, and the sick, nearly dying Smerdyakov had been living with them ever since Fyodor Pavlovich’s death. It was to him that Ivan Fyodorovich now directed his steps, drawn by a sudden and irresistible consideration.

Chapter 6: The First Meeting with Smerdyakov