His heart rejoiced. And when eventually despite everything he was arrested, he laughed and boasted at his trial, saying that when it was in paunchy old Krasnopuzov’s possession the money had never done any good, in fact the owner didn’t know how much he’d got, ‘Whereas I put the stuff into circulation and helped good folk with it’.
And his defence was so cheerful and good-hearted that the jury almost acquitted him. He was sentenced to be exiled.
He thanked the court and gave advance warning that he intended to escape.
XIV
The telegram which Sventitsky’s widow sent to the Tsar produced no effect whatever. The committee which dealt with petitions decided initially that they would not even report it to the Tsar, but then one day when the Tsar was at luncheon and the conversation turned to the Sventitsky case, the chairman of the petitions committee who was at table with the sovereign informed him about the telegram they had received from the wife of the murdered man.
‘C’est très gentil de sa part,’11 remarked one of the ladies of the Imperial family.
The Tsar merely sighed, shrugged his shoulders beneath their epaulettes and said ‘The law is the law.’ And he held up his glass, into which a chamber-footman poured some sparkling Moselle. Everyone tried to look as though they were impressed by the wisdom of the sovereign’s remark. And nothing further was said about the telegram. And the two peasants – the old man and the young man – were hanged with the assistance of a Tatar executioner, a cruel and bestial murderer who had been summoned from Kazan especially for the purpose.
The old man’s wife wanted to dress her husband’s body in a white shirt, white foot-cloths and new shoes, but she was not allowed to do so and both men were buried in a single grave outside the fence of the cemetery.
*
‘Princess Sofya Vladimirovna was telling me that he is a most wonderful preacher,’ said the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress one day to her son. ‘Faites-le venir. Il peut prěcher à la cathédrale.’12
‘No, it would be better to have him preach to us here,’ said the Tsar, and he gave orders that the elder Isidor should be invited to come to the court.
All the generals and highest officials were assembled in the court chapel. A new and unusual preacher was something of an event.
A small grey-haired, thin old man came out and cast his eye over them all. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,’ he said, and began his sermon.
To begin with all was well, but the further it went, the worse it became. ‘Il devenait de plus en plus aggressif,’13 as the Empress put it immediately afterwards. He fulminated against everyone and everything. He referred to the death penalty. He said that the need for the death penalty was a symptom of bad government. Could it really be permissible, in a Christian country, to kill people?
They all looked at one another, all of them concerned exclusively about the impropriety of the sermon and about how disagreeable it was for the sovereign, but no one said anything out loud. When Isidor had said ‘Amen’ the Metropolitan went up to him and asked him to come and have a word with him in private.
After his talk with the Metropolitan and the Chief Procurator of the Synod the old man was sent straight back to a monastery – not to his own monastery, but to the one at Suzdal, where the Father Superior and commandant of the prison was Father Misail.
XV
They all pretended that there had been nothing disagreeable about Father Isidor’s sermon, and no one made any mention of it. Even the Tsar felt that the elder’s words had left no impression in his mind, nevertheless on two occasions later that day his thoughts turned to the execution of the two peasants and to the telegram sent by Sventitsky’s widow appealing for their pardon. That afternoon there was a parade, followed by a drive to an outdoor fěte, then a reception for ministers, then dinner, and in the evening the theatre. As usual the Tsar fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow. That night he was wakened by a terrible dream: in a field stood a gallows with corpses dangling from it, and the corpses were sticking out their tongues, and the tongues protruded further and further. And someone was shouting ‘This is your doing, this is your doing.’ The Tsar woke up sweating and started to think. For the first time ever he started to think about the responsibility which lay upon him, and all the things the little old man had said came back to him …
But he could see the human being within himself only as if from a great distance, and he was unable to yield to the simple demands of the human being within him because of all the other demands coming at him from all sides as Tsar; and to acknowledge the demands of the human being within as taking precedence over those of the Tsar – that was beyond his strength.
XVI
After serving his second term in prison Prokofy [Proshka], that lively, proud, dandified young fellow, had come out an utterly broken man. When he was sober he simply sat about doing nothing, and however much his father shouted and swore at him, he went on living an idle life consuming the family’s bread, and furthermore whenever he got the chance he would steal things and take them off to the tavern to get drunk on the proceeds. He lounged about, coughing, hawking and spitting. The doctor whom he went to consult listened to Prokofy’s chest and shook his head.
‘What you need, my lad, is what you haven’t got.’
‘I know that, it’s what I’ve always needed.’
‘You need to drink plenty of milk, and you mustn’t smoke.’
‘But it’s Lent now, and anyway we don’t have a cow.’
One night that spring he could not get to sleep the whole night, he felt rotten and he was longing for a drink. There was nothing in the house for him to get his hands on and sell. He put on his fur hat and went out. He walked down the street until he came to where the clergy lived. Outside the deacon’s house there was a harrow standing propped up against the wattle fence. Prokofy went over, slung the harrow up on to his back and walked off with it to Petrovna at the inn. ‘Maybe she’ll give me just a little bottle of vodka for it.’ He had not gone far before the deacon came out on to the porch of his house. It was now fully light, and he could see Prokofy making off with his harrow.
‘Hey, what are you up to?’
The deacon’s servants came out, seized Prokofy and threw him in the lock-up. The Justice of the Peace sentenced him to eleven months in prison.
Autumn came round. Prokofy was now transferred to the prison hospital. He was coughing all the time, fit to tear his lungs out. And he could not get warm. Those other patients must have been in better shape than he was, because they were not shivering. Prokofy, though, kept on shivering day and night. The warden was trying to economize on firewood and did not heat the prison hospital until November each year. Prokofy suffered physical agonies, but what he suffered spiritually was worse than anything. Everything seemed to him disgusting and he hated everybody: the deacon, the warden who refused to heat the hospital, the orderly, and the patient next to him who had a red, swollen lip. He also conceived a deep hatred for the new convict who was brought in to join them. This convict was Stepan. He had developed a severe inflammation of the head and had been transferred to the hospital and placed in a bed alongside Prokofy. To begin with Prokofy detested him, but later he became so fond of Stepan that his main aim in life was to have a chance of talking to him. It was only after talking to him that the pain in Prokofy’s heart was ever eased.
Stepan was constantly telling the other patients about the most recent murder he had committed and about the effect it had had on him.
‘She didn’t scream or anything like that,’ he would tell them, ‘she just said “Here you are, cut my throat. It’s not me you should feel sorry for, it’s yourself.’ ”