The Idiot (42 page)

He turned and went down the staircase.

‘Lev Nikolayevich!’ Parfyon shouted to him from the top of the stairs when the prince had reached the first half-landing.

‘That cross you bought from the soldier, are you wearing it?’

‘Yes, I am.’

And the prince stopped again.

‘Bring it here and show it to me.’

Again, more strangeness! He thought for a moment, then went back up and showed him the cross, without removing it from his neck.

‘Give it to me,’ said Rogozhin.

‘Why? Surely you’re not ...’

The prince was reluctant to part with the cross.

‘I’ll wear it, and I’ll give you mine, for you to wear.’

‘You want to exchange crosses? Very well, Parfyon, if that’s what you want, I’ll be glad to; we’ll be brothers.’

The prince took off his tin cross, Parfyon his gold one, and they exchanged them. Parfyon said nothing. With painful surprise, the prince noticed that the earlier mistrust, the earlier bitter and almost mocking smile still seemed to linger on the face of his sworn brother, for at certain moments, at least, it was still strongly evident. At length, in silence, Rogozhin took the prince’s hand and stood for a while as if hesitating about something; then he suddenly pulled the prince after him, saying in a barely audible voice: ‘Come on!’ They crossed the first floor landing and rang the bell of the door that faced the one from which they had emerged. It was quickly opened to them. A little old woman, hunched and all in black, her head bound with a kerchief, bowed deeply and silently to Rogozhin; he asked her some rapid question and, not stopping for an answer, led the prince further through the interior of the apartment. Again there was a sequence of dark rooms that displayed a peculiar, cold cleanliness, coldly and severely furnished with old furniture that was covered by clean, white sheets. Without any announcement, Rogozhin led the prince straight into a small room, similar to a drawing room, divided by a gleaming mahogany partition, with two doors at the sides, behind which there wa
s probably a bedroom. In a corner of the drawing room, by the stove, in an armchair, sat a little old woman who did not look all that old, and even had a rather healthy, pleasant, round face, but was already completely grey-haired and (one could tell at first glance) had lapsed into complete childish senility. She wore a black woollen dress, with a large black kerchief at her neck, and a clean white cap with black ribbons. Her feet were supported by a footstool. Beside her was another small, clean old woman, a little older than her, also dressed in mourning and also in a white cap, who must have been some kind of poor retainer, silently knitting a stocking. They probably both spent all their time in silence. At the sight of Rogozhin and the prince, the first old woman smiled to them and inclined her head affectionately several times as a sign of pleasure.

‘Mother,’ said Rogozhin, kissing her hand, ‘this is my great friend, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin; he and I have exchanged crosses; he was like a brother to me in Moscow at one time, and did a lot for me. Bless him, Mother, as you would bless your own son. Wait now, old one, do it like this, like this, let me set your hand ...’

But before Parfyon could take hold of her, the old woman raised her right hand, set three of her fingers together and devoutly made the sign of the cross over the prince three times. Then she nodded to him again in affectionate tenderness.

‘Well, come along then, Lev Nikolayevich,’ said Parfyon. ‘That was the only reason I brought you here.’

When they emerged on to the staircase again, he added:

‘I mean, she doesn’t understand anything of what’s said, and she didn’t understand my words, but she blessed you; that means she herself wanted to ... Well, goodbye, it’s time for you and I to go our separate ways.’

And he opened his door.

‘But let me at least embrace you in farewell, you strange man!’ exclaimed the prince, looking at him with tender reproach, and made to embrace him. But no sooner had Parfyon raised his arms than he at once lowered them again. He could not bring himself to do it, and turned away in order to avoid the prince’s eyes. He did not want to embrace him.

‘Don’t worry! Though I took your cross, I won’t cut your throat for your watch!’ he muttered indistinctly, beginning a strange laugh. But all of a sudden his entire face was transformed: he turned horribly pale, his lips began to tremble, his eyes lit with fire. He raised his arms, embraced the prince tightly and, gasping for breath, said:

‘Then take her, if that’s what fate decrees! She’s yours! I yield! ... Remember Rogozhin!’

And turning his back on the prince, not looking at him, he hurriedly went inside and slammed the door behind him.

It was late now, almost half-past two, and the prince did not find General Yepanchin at home. Leaving his card, he decided to go to ‘The Scales’ hotel and ask if Kolya was there; if he were not there, he would leave him a note. At ‘The Scales’ he was told that Nikolai Ardalionovich ‘went out this morning, sir, but when he left he gave advance notice that if anyone should come asking for him she should be informed that he might perhaps be back by three o’clock, sir. If he did not turn up by half-past three, it would mean he had gone to Pavlovsk by train, to Mrs Yepanchin’s dacha, sir‘, and would be ‘having his dinner there, sir.’ The prince sat down to wait and, since he was there, ordered dinner.

Kolya did not appear by half-past three, nor even by four. The prince went out and set off mechanically wherever his eyes led him. There are sometimes beautiful days at the beginning of summer in St Petersburg - bright, hot and quiet. As luck would have it, this was one of those infrequent days. For a while the prince wandered aimlessly. He was not very well acquainted with the city. From time to time he would stop at crossroads, in front of certain houses, on squares, on bridges; once he went into a patisserie to rest. At times he studied the passers-by with great curiosity; but more often he noticed neither the passers-by, nor precisely where he was going. He was in a tormented state of tension and anxiety, and at the same time he felt an extraordinary need for solitude. He wanted to be alone and to give himself up to this agonizing tension quite passively, without seeking the slightest relief. With revulsion he declined to settle the questions that had flooded into his soul and heart. ‘Well, none of this is my fault, is it?’ he muttered to himself, almost unaware of what he was saying.

By six o‘clock he found himself on the platform of the railway station at Tsarskoye Selo. Solitude had soon become unendurable to him; a new, violent impulse enveloped his heart, and for a moment the gloom in which his soul languished was illumined by bright light. He bought a ticket for Pavlovsk and impatiently hurried to be off; but, of course, he was being followed, and it was for real, not the fantasy he had perhaps been inclined to think it was. As he was almost on the point of boarding the train, he suddenly threw the ticket he had just bought to the floor and left the station again, troubled and reflective. Later, in the street, he suddenly seemed to remember something, as if he had become aware of something, something very strange that had probably been worrying him for a long time. He suddenly caught himself doing something he had been doing for a long time, but had not noticed until this moment: for several hours now, even at ‘The Scales’, or even before ‘The Scales’, perhaps, he would find himself suddenly looking for something around him. And he would for
get about it for quite a while, half an hour, even, and then suddenly look round anxiously once again, searching around him.

But no sooner had he noticed this morbid and hitherto quite unconscious movement that had possessed him for so long, than there suddenly flickered through his mind another memory that interested him exceedingly: he remembered that at the moment when he noticed that he was constantly searching around him, he was standing on the pavement outside the window of a shop, examining the things displayed in it with great curiosity. Now he wanted to ascertain without fail whether he had really stood, only five minutes ago, perhaps, in front of the window of this shop, or whether he had imagined it, got something mixed up. Did this shop and these things in its window really exist? For he did feel in a particularly ill state of mind today, almost the same state of mind that had affected him before at the beginning of the fits that had accompanied his earlier illness? He knew that in the time before those fits occurred he could be extraordinarily absent-minded, often mixing up objects and people, if he looked at them without particularly close attention. But there was also a particular reason why he so very much wanted to ascertain whether he had been standing in front of the shop at that time: among the articles displayed in the shop window was something he had looked at and even valued at sixty silver copecks, he remembered that, in spite of all his absent-mindedness and anxiety. Consequently, if that shop existed and that object really was displayed there among the others, then he must have stopped because of it. That meant that this object was of such powerful interest to him that it had attracted his attention even at the very time when he was in such a severe state of disturbance after leaving the railway station. He walked, looking almost in anguish to the right, his heart pounding with uneasy impatience. But here was that shop, he had found it at last! He had only gone a quarter of a mile from the shop when it had occurred to him to go back. And here was that object costing sixty copecks; ‘of course, sixty copecks, it couldn’t cost more than that,’ he confirmed now, laughing. But it was a hysterical laugh; he felt very wretched. He now clearly recalled that precisely here, standing in front of this window, he had suddenly turned round, exactly as earlier, when he had caught Rogozhin’s eyes on him. Having made sure that he was not mistaken (of which, however, he had been quite certain before), he turned his back on the shop and quickly walked away from it. He must think all this over as soon as possible, without fail; now it was clear that he had not imagined it at the station either, that something real and certainly connected with all his earlier unease had undoubtedly happened to him. But a kind of overwhelming inner revulsion again overcame him: he did not feel like thinking anything over, and he did not do so; he began to reflect about something else altogether.

He began to reflect, among other things, about the fact that in his epileptic condition there was a certain stage almost immediately before the fit itself (if the fit came when he was awake) when, amidst the sa
dness, the mental darkness, the pressure, his brain suddenly seemed to burst into flame at moments, and with an extraordinary jolt all his vital forces seemed to be tensed together. The sensation of life and of self-awareness increased almost tenfold at those moments, which had a duration like that of lightning. The mind, the heart were flooded with an extraordinary light; all his unrest, all his doubts, all his anxieties were as if pacified at once, were resolved into a kind of higher calm, full of a serene, harmonious joy and hope, full of reason and the final cause. But these moments, these flashes were still merely the presentiment of that final second (never more than a second), with which the fit itself began. That second was, of course, unendurable. Reflecting about that moment afterwards, now in a condition of health, he often told himself: that after all, those gleams and lightning flashes of higher self-perception and self-awareness and consequently of ‘higher existence’ were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal condition, and, if that were so, then it was not higher existence at all, but, on the contrary, must be reckoned among the very lowest. And yet he reached, at last, an exceedingly paradoxical conclusion: ‘What does it matter if it’s an illness, then?’ he decided, at last, ‘what does it matter that it’s an abnormal tension, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, recalled and examined in a condition of health, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony and beauty, yields a hitherto unheard-of and undreamed-of sense of completeness, proportion, reconciliation and an ecstatic, prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?’ These nebulous expressions seemed to him very clear, though too weak. But that it was really ‘beauty and prayer’, that it really was ‘the highest synthesis of life’, of that he could be in no doubt, nor could he allow any doubts. After all, these were not, were they, some visions he dreamed at that moment, as induced by hashish, opium or wine, degrading the reason and distorting the soul, abnormal and non-existent? About this he was able to form a sane judgement when the morbid condition was at an end. For these moments were simply an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness - if that condition had to be expressed in a single word - of self-awareness and at the same time of a self-perception in the highest degree direct. If in that second, that is, in the very last conscious moment before the fit, he had time clearly and consciously to say to himself: ‘Yes, for this moment one could give up one’s whole life!’ - then, of course, that moment was in itself worth the whole of one’s life. However, he did not insist on the dialectical part of his conclusion: stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy stood before him as the vivid consequence of those ‘highest moments’. He would not, of course, have argued this seriously. In the conclusion, that is, in his evaluation of that moment, without doubt, there was an error, but the reality still disturbed him. What indeed was he to do with the reality? After all, this same thing had happened before, he himself had managed to tell himself in that very second that that second, because of the boundless happiness fully experienced by him, might be worth the whole of his life. ‘In that moment,’
as he once said to Rogozhin, in Moscow, at the time of their meetings there, ‘in that moment I somehow begin to understand the extraordinary phrase
“there should be time no longer”.
¹
Probably’, he added, smiling, ‘that is the very second that was not long enough for water to be spilled from the epileptic Mahomet’s overturned water-jug, though in that very second he was able to survey all the habitations of Allah.’ Yes, in Moscow he had met Rogozhin often and talked not only about this, but about other things as well. ‘Rogozhin said earlier that I was a brother to him then; today was the first time he said that,’ the prince thought to himself.