“Ah, what a pity,” Alyosha exclaimed with feeling, “that I didn’t know about the relations between you before, or I’d have come long ago and asked you to go and see him with me. Would you believe that he talked about you in his fever, in delirium, when he was sick? I didn’t even know how dear you were to him! And can it be, can it be that you never found that Zhuchka? His father and all the boys were searching all over town. Would you believe that three times, since he got sick, I’ve heard him say in tears to his father: ‘I’m sick because I killed Zhuchka, papa, God is punishing me for it’—and he won’t give up the idea! If only we could find that Zhuchka now and show him that she’s not dead, that she’s alive, he might just be resurrected by the joy of it. We’ve all had our hopes on you.”
“Tell me, what reason did you have to hope that I would find Zhuchka— that is, that precisely I would be the one to find her?” Kolya asked with great curiosity. “Why did you count precisely on me and not on someone else?”
“There was some rumor that you were looking for her, and that when you found her, you would bring her. Smurov said something like that. Most of all, we keep trying to assure him that Zhuchka is alive, that she’s been seen somewhere. The boys found a live hare someplace, but he just looked at it, smiled faintly, and asked us to let it go in the fields. And so we did. Just now his father came home and brought him a mastiff pup, he also got it someplace, he wanted to comfort him, but it seems to have made things even worse ...”
“Another thing, Karamazov: what about his father? I know him, but how would you define him: a buffoon, a clown?” “Ah, no, there are people who feel deeply but are somehow beaten down. Their buffoonery is something like a spiteful irony against those to whom they dare not speak the truth directly because of a long-standing, humiliating timidity before them. Believe me, Krasotkin, such buffoonery is sometimes extremely tragic. For him, now, everything on earth has come together in Ilyusha, and if Ilyusha dies, he will either go out of his mind from grief or take his own life. I’m almost convinced of it when I look at him now!”