The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Andrew R. MacAndrew Read Free Book Online Page B

period of his life that he developed a special knack for making money and holding on to it. He had returned to our town to stay only about three years before Alyosha came. Those who had known him before found him terribly aged, although he was still by no means an old man. His behavior was somehow different, too: it wasn’t that he’d become more dignified, but he was more self-assured, even insolent. This former buffoon, for instance, now took an impudent delight in making buffoons of others. But his depravity with women was as bad as ever, if anything, worse. Within a short time he opened a number of new taverns in the district. It looked as if he was worth a hundred thousand rubles or close to it. Many people in town and throughout the district started borrowing money from him, on good security, of course. Of late, however, he had looked rather bloated and seemed to be losing his hold on himself. He had even slipped into a sort of light-headedness. He was unable to keep his mind on any one thing, but would skip off onto something else. He would become confused, and more and more often he drank himself into a stupor. If it hadn’t been for that same servant Gregory, who looked after him almost like a nanny, and who had also aged considerably, Karamazov might not even have survived. Alyosha’s arrival seemed to restore some of his mental vigor, and even to stir up a scrap of decency that had been buried somewhere in this prematurely aged man.
    “You know what?” he would often say, examining Alyosha’s face closely. “You’re just like her, just like the Crazy Woman.” That was his way of referring to Alyosha’s mother, his late second wife.
    It was Gregory who finally showed Alyosha where the “Crazy Woman” was buried. He took Alyosha to a far corner of our cemetery where he pointed out a cheap but decently kept grave with an iron headstone bearing the name of the deceased, the dates of her birth and death, and even an ancient four-line verse such as is often found on the tombs of lower middle-class folk. Strange as it may seem, the gravestone turned out to be Gregory’s doing. He had it placed on the poor “Crazy Woman’s” grave at his own expense after Mr. Karamazov, whom he had repeatedly plagued about it, finally left for Odessa without doing anything, turning his back not only on his wife’s grave but on all his memories as well.
    Alyosha showed no particular emotion at the sight of his mother’s grave. After listening attentively to Gregory’s dignified and precise account of the erection of the gravestone, he stood there for a while, his head bowed, then walked away without a word. And it was perhaps a whole year before he visited the grave again.
    But when Mr. Karamazov heard about the episode, his reaction was quite unexpected: he all of a sudden donated a thousand rubles to our monastery for requiem masses to be said for the soul of his wife, not for his second wife, though, not for Alyosha’s mother, the poor “Crazy Woman,” but for his first wife Adelaida, the one who used to beat him. Then, later that night, he got drunk and started abusing the monks to Alyosha. Mr. Karamazov had never been a religious man and it may be that until then he had never even placed a five-kopek candle before an icon. But then such characters are sometimes swept up in some unexpected idea or impulse.
    As I mentioned earlier, Karamazov’s face had grown bloated and showed unmistakable traces of the life he led. Besides the heavy, fleshy bags under his eternally insolent, suspicious, mocking little eyes, besides the multitude of tiny wrinkles on his small flabby face, his large, meaty Adam’s apple hung under his sharp chin shaped like a purse, and this somehow gave him a repulsively sensual air. Add to this a long, carnivorous mouth with puffy lips and the black stumps of almost completely decayed teeth, from which saliva sprayed every time he opened his mouth to speak. He often made fun of his appearance