The Brothers Karamazov полностью

At last he found Mrs. Kalmykov’s house on Lake Street, a decrepit, lopsided little house, with only three windows looking out onto the street, and a dirty courtyard, in the middle of which a cow stood solitarily. The entry to the front hall was through the courtyard; on the left side of the hall lived the old landlady with her elderly daughter, both apparently deaf. In reply to his question about the captain, repeated several times, one of them finally understood that he was asking for the tenants and jabbed with her finger across the hall, pointing at the door to the front room. Indeed, the captain’s lodgings turned out to be just a peasant cottage. Alyosha already had his hand on the iron door-pull when he was suddenly struck by the unusual silence behind the door. Yet he knew from what Katerina Ivanovna had told him that the retired captain was a family man: “Either they’re all asleep, or perhaps they heard me come and are waiting for me to open the door. I’d better knock first,” and he knocked. An answer came, though not at once but perhaps even ten seconds later.

“Who are you?” someone shouted in a loud and forcedly angry voice.

Alyosha then opened the door and stepped across the threshold. He found himself in a room that was rather spacious but extremely cluttered both with people and with all kinds of domestic chattels. To the left was a big Russian stove. From the stove to the window on the left, across the entire room, a line was strung, on which all sorts of rags were hanging. Along the two walls to left and right stood beds covered with knitted blankets. On one of them, the left one, was erected a pile of four cotton-covered pillows, each one smaller than the next. On the other bed, to the right, only one very small pillow could be seen. Further, in the front corner, there was a small space closed off by a curtain or a sheet, also thrown over a line stretched across the corner. Behind this curtain could be glimpsed another bed, made up against the wall on a bench with a chair placed beside it. A simple, rectangular wooden peasant table had been moved from the front corner to the middle window. The three windows, each with four small, green, mildewed panes, were very dim and tightly shut, so that the room was rather stuffy and none too bright. On the table sat a frying pan with the remains of some fried eggs in it, a bitten piece of bread, and, in addition, a half-pint bottle with the faint remnants of earthly blessings at the bottom. On a chair by the left bed sat a woman who looked like a lady, wearing a cotton dress. Her face was very thin and yellow; her extremely sunken cheeks betrayed at first glance her sickly condition. But most of all Alyosha was struck by the look in the poor lady’s eyes—an intensely questioning, and at the same time terribly haughty, look. And until the moment when the lady herself began to speak, all the while Alyosha was talking with the husband, she kept looking in the same haughty and questioning way, with her large brown eyes, from one speaker to the other. Next to this lady, at the left window, stood a young girl with a rather homely face and thin, reddish hair, poorly, though quite neatly, dressed. She eyed Alyosha with disgust as he came in. To the right, also near the bed, sat yet another female person. This was a very pitiful creature, also a young girl, about twenty years old, but hunchbacked and crippled, with withered legs, as Alyosha was told later. Her crutches stood nearby, in the corner, between the bed and the wall. The remarkably beautiful and kind eyes of the poor girl looked at Alyosha with a sort of quiet meekness. At the table, finishing the fried eggs, sat a gentleman of about forty-five, small, lean, weakly built, with reddish hair, and a thin red beard rather like an old whiskbroom (this comparison, and particularly the word whiskbroom, for some reason flashed through Alyosha’s mind at first glance, as he later recalled). Obviously it was this same gentleman who had shouted, “Who are you?” from behind the door, since there was no other man in the room. But when Alyosha entered, he all but flew from the bench on which he was sitting at the table, and, hastily wiping his mouth with a tattered napkin, rushed up to Alyosha.

“A monk begging for the monastery—he’s come to the right place!” the girl standing in the left corner meanwhile said loudly. But the gentleman who had run up to Alyosha immediately turned on his heel to her, and in an excited, somehow faltering voice, answered her:

“No, ma’am, Varvara Nikolaevna, that’s not it, you’ve got it wrong! Allow me to ask in my turn, sir,” he suddenly wheeled around to Alyosha again, “what has urged you, sir, to visit ... these depths?”