“I’m so glad you’ve come, Karamazov!” he exclaimed, holding out his hand to Alyosha. “It’s terrible here. Really, it’s hard to watch. Snegiryov is not drunk, we know for certain he’s had nothing to drink today, but it’s as if he were drunk ... I’m a strong man, but this is terrible. Karamazov, if I’m not keeping you, one more question, may I, before you go in?”
“What is it, Kolya?” Alyosha stopped for a moment.
“Is your brother innocent or guilty? Was it he who killed your father, or was it the lackey? As you say, so it will be. I’ve lost four nights’ sleep over this idea.”
“The lackey killed him, my brother is innocent,” Alyosha replied.
“That’s just what I say!” the boy Smurov suddenly cried.
“Thus he will perish an innocent victim for truth!” exclaimed Kolya.”But though he perish, he is happy! I am ready to envy him!”
“What do you mean? How can you be? And why?” exclaimed the surprised Alyosha.
“Oh, if only I, too, could some day offer myself as a sacrifice for truth!” Kolya said with enthusiasm.
“But not for such a cause, not with such disgrace, not with such horror!” said Alyosha. “Of course ... I should like to die for all mankind, and as for disgrace, it makes no difference: let our names perish. I respect your brother!”
“And so do I!” another boy suddenly and quite unexpectedly called out from the crowd, the same boy who had once announced that he knew who had founded Troy, and, just as he had done then, having called it out, he blushed up to his ears like a peony.
Alyosha went into the room. In a blue coffin decorated with white lace, his hands folded and his eyes closed, lay Ilyusha. The features of his emaciated face were hardly changed at all, and, strangely, there was almost no smell from the corpse. The expression of his face was serious and, as it were, pensive. His hands, folded crosswise, were especially beautiful, as if carved from marble. Flowers had been placed in his hands, and the whole coffin was adorned inside and out with flowers, sent at daybreak from Liza Khokhlakov. But flowers had also come from Katerina Ivanovna, and, as Alyosha opened the door, the captain, with a bunch of flowers in his trembling hands, was again strewing them over his dear boy. He barely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, nor did he want to look at anyone, not even at his mad, weeping wife, his “mama,” who kept trying to stand up on her bad legs and have a closer look at her dead boy. But Ninochka had been picked up in her chair by the children and moved close to the coffin. She was sitting with her head pressed to it, and must also have been quietly weeping. Snegiryov’s face looked animated but, as it were, bewildered, and at the same time embittered. There was something half crazed in his gestures, in the words that kept bursting from him. “Dear fellow, dear old fellow!” he exclaimed every moment, looking at Ilyusha. He had had the habit, when Ilyusha was still alive, of calling him tenderly: “Dear fellow, dear old fellow!”
“Papa, give me flowers, too, take one from his hands, that white one, and give it to me!” the mad “mama” asked, sobbing. Either she liked the little white rose in Ilyusha’s hand very much, or else she wanted to take a flower from his hands as a keepsake, for she began tossing about, reaching out for the flower.
“I’m not giving anything, not to anybody!” Snegiryov exclaimed hard-heartedly. “They’re his flowers, not yours. It’s all his, nothing’s yours!”
“Papa, give mother the flower!” Ninochka suddenly raised her face, wet with tears.
“I won’t give anything, to her least of all! She didn’t love him. She took his little cannon away from him that time, and he ... gave it to her,” the captain suddenly sobbed loudly, remembering how Ilyusha had let his mother have the little cannon. The poor, mad woman simply dissolved in quiet tears, covering her face with her hands. Finally, seeing that the father would not let the coffin go from him, but that it was time to carry it out, the boys suddenly crowded around the coffin and began to lift it up.
“I don’t want him buried in the churchyard!” Snegiryov suddenly cried out. “I’ll bury him by the stone, by our stone! Ilyusha told me to! I won’t let you take him!”
Previously, too, over the past three days, he had been saying that he would bury him by the stone; but Alyosha, Krasotkin, the landlady, her sister, all the boys intervened.
“What an idea, to bury him by some heathenish stone, like some hanged man,” the old landlady said sternly. “The ground in the churchyard has the cross on it. They’ll pray for him there. You can hear singing from the church there, and the deacon is so clean-spoken and literal when he reads, it will all reach him every time, as if they were reading right over his grave.”
The captain finally waved his hands as if to say: “Take him wherever you like!” The children picked up the coffin, but as they carried it past his mother, they stopped in front of her for a moment and set it down, so that she could say her farewells to Ilyusha. But, suddenly looking so closely at that dear little face, which for the past three days she had only seen from a distance, she began suddenly shaking all over, wagging her gray head back and forth hysterically above the coffin.
“Mama, cross him, bless him, kiss him,” Ninochka cried to her. But she kept wagging her head like an automaton, and then, silently, her face twisted with burning grief, she suddenly began beating her breast with her fist. They moved on with the coffin. Ninochka pressed her lips to her dead brother’s mouth for the last time as they carried it past her. Alyosha turned to the landlady as he was leaving the house and tried to ask her to look after those who were staying behind, but she would not even let him finish:
“I know, I know, I’ll stay with them, we’re Christians, too.” The old woman wept as she said it.
It was not a far carry to the church, no more than about three hundred paces. The day had become clear, calm; it was frosty, but not very. The church bells were still ringing. Snegiryov, fussing and bewildered, ran after the coffin in his old, short, almost summer coat, bare-headed, with his old wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand. He was in some sort of insoluble anxiety, now reaching out suddenly to support the head of the coffin, which only interfered with the bearers, then running alongside to see if he could find a place for himself. A flower fell on the snow, and he simply rushed to pick it up, as if God knows what might come from the loss of this flower.
“The crust, we forgot the crust of bread,” he exclaimed suddenly, terribly alarmed. But the boys reminded him at once that he had taken the crust earlier, and that it was in his pocket. He at once snatched it out of his pocket and, having made sure, calmed down.
“Ilyushechka told me, Ilyushechka,” he exclaimed at once to Alyosha, “he was lying there one night, and I was sitting by him, and he suddenly told me: ‘Papa, when they put the dirt on my grave, crumble a crust of bread on it so the sparrows will come, and I’ll hear that they’ve come and be glad that I’m not lying alone.’”
“That’s a very good thing,” said Alyosha, “you must do it more often.”
“Every day, every day!” the captain babbled, brightening all over, as it were.
At last they arrived at the church and set the coffin down in the middle of it. The boys all placed themselves around it and stood solemnly like that through the whole service. It was a very old church and rather poor, many of the icons were without settings, but one somehow prays better in such churches. During the liturgy Snegiryov seemed to calm down somewhat, though at times the same unconscious and, as it were, bewildered anxiety would break out in him: he would go up to the coffin to straighten the covering or the fillet,[362] and when a candle fell from the candle stand, he suddenly rushed to put it back and spent a terribly long time fussing with it. Then he calmed down again and stood quietly at the head of the coffin looking dumbly anxious and, as it were, perplexed. After the Epistle he suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing beside him, that the reading had not been done right, but he did not explain what he meant. During the Cherubic Hymn he began to sing along, but stopped before the end and, kneeling down, touched his forehead to the stone floor of the church and remained lying like that for quite a long time. At last they began the funeral service; candles were distributed. The demented father began fussing about again, but the deeply moving, tremendous singing over the coffin awakened and shook his soul. He suddenly somehow shrank into himself and began weeping in quick, short sobs, stifling his voice at first, but towards the end sobbing loudly. When it came time to take leave of the dead and cover the coffin, he threw his arms around it as if to keep them from covering Ilyushechka, and began quickly, greedily, repeatedly kissing his dead boy on the mouth. They finally talked with him and were about to lead him down the steps when he suddenly reached out swiftly and snatched several flowers from the coffin. He looked at them and it was as if some new idea dawned on him, so that he seemed to forget the main thing for a moment. Gradually he fell into reverie, as it were, and did not resist when they lifted the coffin and carried it to the grave. It was just outside, in the churchyard, right next to the church, an expensive one; Katerina Ivanovna had paid for it. After the usual ritual, the gravediggers lowered the coffin. Snegiryov, with his flowers in his hand, leaned so far over the open grave that the boys caught hold of his coat in alarm and began pulling him back. But he no longer seemed to understand very well what was happening. When they began filling in the grave, he suddenly began pointing anxiously at the falling earth and even tried to say something, but no one could make it out, and he suddenly fell silent himself. Then he was reminded that he had to crumble the crust of bread, and he became terribly excited, pulled out the crust, and began crumbling it, scattering the pieces over the grave: “Fly down, birds, fly down, little sparrows!” he muttered anxiously. One of the boys tried to suggest to him that it must be awkward to crumble the bread with flowers in his hand, and that he should let someone else hold them for a time. But he would not give them up, even suddenly became afraid for his flowers, as if they wanted to take them from him altogether, and, after looking at the grave, as if making sure that everything had now been done and the crust had been crumbled, he suddenly, unexpectedly, and even quite calmly, turned and slowly walked home. Soon, however, his pace quickened, he was hurrying, almost running. The boys and Alyosha did not lag behind.