Turchaninova spent the summer months in the principal town of one of the Volga districts, where she stayed with a friend of hers who was a country schoolmistress. Tyurin also spent the summer in this district where his father owned a house. Turchaninova, her friend, Tyurin and the local doctor often met, exchanged books, argued with one another and got generally worked up about social issues. The Tyurins’ estate bordered on the Liventsov holding where Pyotr Nikolayevich was now manager. As soon as Pyotr Nikolayevich arrived and started to set the place in order, young Tyurin, noticing that the Liventsovs’ peasants seemed to have acquired a spirit of independence and a firm resolve to uphold their rights, began to take an interest in them and often walked down to the village to talk to them, trying to promote the theory of socialism among them, with particular regard to the nationalization of the land.

  When Pyotr Nikolayevich was murdered and the district sessions arrived, the circle of revolutionaries in the district town had a marvellous pretext for agitation in court, and they spoke out their opinions in no uncertain terms. Unfortunately, however, Tyurin’s walks to the village and his conversations with the peasants were alluded to during the court proceedings. His house was searched, some revolutionary pamphlets were discovered, and he was arrested and taken away to St Petersburg.

  Turchaninova followed him to St Petersburg and went to the prison to try to see him, but was not permitted to have a private interview with him; instead, she had to come on the public visitors’ day, and could only catch a glimpse of him through two iron gratings. This meeting increased her sense of outrage still further. Her indignation finally reached its limit when, remonstrating with a handsome young officer of the gendarmes, she discovered that he was willing to offer her some concessions if she would agree to certain proposals he wished to make to her. This sent her into a violent rage against representatives of authority. She went to the chief of police in order to file a complaint. The chief of police repeated what the gendarme had said, that there was nothing they could do and that it was all in the hands of the Minister of the Interior. She sent a petition to the minister, requesting an interview with Tyurin; it was refused. Then she decided she would commit an act of desperation, and bought a revolver.

  22

  The minister received his visitors at the hour he usually set aside for this purpose. Three of his petitioners he avoided; he had a few words with the governor of a province and then went up to a pretty, dark-eyed young woman who was standing with a document in her left hand. A lecherous glint appeared in the minister’s eyes at the sight of such an attractive petitioner but, remembering his status, he assumed a serious countenance.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, drawing closer to her.

  Without replying, she quickly produced her revolver from under her cape and, pointing it at the minister, fired, but missed.

  The minister tried to grab her arm, but she stumbled backwards and fired a second shot. The minister took to his heels. The woman was trembling all over, unable to say a word; then, suddenly, she burst into hysterical laughter. The minister escaped without even a scratch.

  It was Turchaninova. She was thrown into a cell to await trial. Meanwhile the minister, who had received the compliments and commiserations of those in the very highest places and even from the Tsar himself, appointed a commission to investigate the plot that had led to this attempt on his life.

  There was, of course, no plot; but officials of both the civil and the secret police forces zealously applied themselves to the search for all the threads of the non-existent conspiracy, conscientiously earning their salaries and their keep. Getting up early in the morning, before it was light, they conducted search after search, copied documents and books, read diaries and personal letters and made extracts from these in beautiful handwriting on beautiful paper; they cross-examined Turchaninova any number of times, confronting her with witnesses and endeavouring to make her tell them the names of her accomplices.

  The minister was a kindly man at heart and was really sorry for this healthy, attractive Cossack girl, but he told himself that he had grave responsibilities to the state which he must discharge, however painful they might be. And when an old friend of his, who knew the Tyurin family, met him at a court ball and started to ask him about Tyurin and Turchaninova, the minister shrugged his shoulders, crinkling the red ribbon that traversed his white waistcoat, and said: ‘Je ne demanderais pas mieux que de lâcher cette pauvre fillette, mais vous savez - le devoir.’

  And all the while Turchaninova was sitting in her cell awaiting trial, exchanging tapped signals with her fellow prisoners from time to time and reading the books she had been given. On occasion, however, she would suddenly give way to rage and despair, hammering on the walls, screaming and laughing.

  23

  One day, when Maria Semyonovna was on her way home from collecting her pension at the paymaster’s office, she met a teacher she knew.

  ‘Hello, Maria Semyonovna, did you get your pension all right?’ he shouted to her from the opposite side of the street.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ replied Maria Semyonovna. ‘It’ll be enough to fill a few cracks, anyway.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got enough there, you can fill the cracks and still have some over,’ said the teacher, and with a goodbye he walked on.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Maria Semyonovna. As she watched him depart, she ran straight into a tall man with very long arms, whose face wore a stern expression. Approaching her house, she was surprised to see this same long-armed man again. He watched her as she went into her house, stood around for a while outside and then turned on his heels and left.

  At first Maria Semyonovna felt a sensation of fear, but this soon gave way to one of melancholy. None the less, once she was inside and had given sweets to the old man and her scrofulous little nephew Fedya and made a fuss over the dog Treasure, who yelped with joy to see her return, she felt all right again and, giving the pension money to her father, resumed the household chores with which she was never done.

  The man she had bumped into had been Stepan.

  After he had murdered the yard-keeper at the wayside inn, Stepan had not gone home to Moscow. It was a strange thing: the recollection of the murder was in no way disagreeable to him; indeed, he thought about it several times a day. He liked the idea that he could do something of this nature so cleverly and skilfully that no one would ever find him out or prevent him from doing the same again to other people. As he sat in an eating-house in a provincial town sipping tea and vodka, he looked at all the customers with one thought in his head: how to murder them. He went to the house of a man who came from his village and worked as a drayman in order to ask him for a bed for the night. The drayman was out. Stepan said he would wait, and sat talking to the drayman’s wife. Then, when she turned her back to him, leaning over the stove, he had the idea of killing her. Surprised at himself, he gave his head a shake, then took his knife from his bootflap, threw the woman to the ground and cut her throat. The children started to cry, so he killed them too and left the town that same night. Once he was out of town he found a village and slept the night at its inn.

  The following day he came back to the market town, and while he was walking along the street he overheard Maria Semyonovna’s conversation with the teacher. Her gaze frightened him, but all the same he decided he would break into her house and steal the money she had drawn. That night he broke the lock and entered an upstairs room. The younger, married daughter was the first to hear him. She cried out. Stepan immediately cut her throat. The son-in-law woke up and grappled with him. He seized Stepan by the throat and struggled with him for a long time, but Stepan was too strong for him. When he had dealt with the son-in-law, Stepan, agitated now and aroused by the fighting, went behind the partition. In bed behind the partition lay Maria Semyonovna. She sat up and looked at Stepan with meek, frightened eyes and made the sign of the cross over herself. Once again Stepan found her gaze intimidating. He lowered his eyes.

  ‘Where’s the money?’ he asked, without looking up.

  She did not say anything.

  ‘Where’s the money?’ Stepan repeated, showing her the knife.

  ‘What are you doing? You can’t do this.’

  ‘Oh, can’t I?’

  Stepan moved closer to her, getting ready to seize her arms so that she could not stop him, but she offered no resistance and did not raise her arms, merely pressed them to her bosom, gave a deep sigh and said repeatedly: ‘Oh, what a terrible sin! What are you doing? Have mercy on yourself. You think you’re harming others, but it’s your own soul you’re ruining ... O-oh!’ she screamed.

  Stepan could stand her voice and her gaze no longer, and with a cry of ‘I’m not going to waste my breath on you!’ he slashed her throat with his knife. She sank back on to the pillows and began to wheeze, soaking one of the pillows in blood. He turned away and walked through the upstairs rooms, gathering the valuable items together. When he had taken what he wanted, he lit a cigarette, sat down for a while in order to brush down his clothes, and then left the house. He had thought that this murder would pass off with ease, as the previous ones had done, but before he had reached the place where he intended to lodge for the night he suddenly felt so exhausted that he could hardly move a limb. He lay down in a ditch and stayed there for the rest of that night, all the following day and all the next night.

  Part Two

  1

  As he lay in the ditch, Stepan kept seeing Maria Semyonovna’s meek, emaciated and frightened face, and hearing her voice. ‘You can’t do this,’ it kept saying in that peculiar, lisping, plaintive way. And each time it spoke he relived what he had done to her all over again. He began to grow really afraid, and he closed his eyes and flailed his head from side to side in an effort to shake these thoughts and memories out of it. For a moment he would succeed in freeing himself from the memories, but they would be replaced first by one black devil, then by another, followed in turn by yet more black devils, with glowing red eyes, making dreadful faces, and all saying the same thing: ‘You killed her - now kill yourself, or we won’t give you any peace until you do.’ And he would open his eyes and see her again and hear her voice, and he would start feeling sorry for her and experiencing fear and revulsion at himself. Once more he would close his eyes - and once more the devils would appear.

  Towards the evening of the second day he got up and walked to a nearby inn. With much effort he got there, and began drinking. But no matter how much he drank, he could not get drunk. He sat at a table in silence, knocking back glass after glass of vodka. The village policeman entered the inn.

  ‘Who might you be, then?’ asked the policeman.

  ‘Oh, I’m the one who slit everybody’s throats up at Domotvorov’s place the night before last.’

  They bound him hand and foot. After he had been held for a day in the local police station, he was sent to the chief town of the province. The warden of the prison there, recognizing him as the unruly inmate he had once had to deal with in the past, gave him a sour reception.

  ‘You’d better not play any tricks on me now, mind,’ the warden said hoarsely, knitting his eyebrows and making his lower jaw protrude. ‘At the first sign of it I’ll have you flogged to death. You won’t escape from my prison.’

  ‘What would I be doing trying to escape?’ retorted Stepan, looking at the ground. ‘I gave myself up of my own free will.’

  ‘Don’t answer back when I’m around. And look up at a superior when he’s addressing you,’ shouted the warden, and gave him a sock on the jaw.

  Just then Stepan was thinking once more about Maria Semyonovna and hearing her voice inside his brain. He had not heard a word the warden had been saying.

  ‘What?’ he asked, brought back to his senses with a start by the sudden blow on his chin.

  ‘Come on, come on. Forward march. None of your nonsense, now.’

  The warden had been expecting disorderly behaviour, machinations with other convicts, escape attempts. But of all this there was none. Whenever the orderly or the warden himself looked in through the peephole in the door of Stepan’s cell, they would see him sitting on a sack that had been stuffed with straw, his head propped in his hands, constantly whispering something to himself. When he was questioned by the court investigator he again behaved differently from other prisoners. He seemed absent-minded, seemed not to hear the questions he was asked or, if he did take them in, was so truthful in his replies that the examining magistrate, who was used to battling with ingenuity and subterfuge on the part of the defendants who appeared before him, now experienced a feeling akin to that of someone climbing a flight of stairs in the dark and suddenly putting his foot into empty space. Knitting his eyebrows and fixing his eyes straight in front of him, Stepan confessed to all the murders he had committed in the most unaffected, business-like tone of voice, doing his utmost to remember all the details: ‘He came out,’ said Stepan, describing the first murder, ‘without any shoes or socks on, and stood in the doorway, so I gashed him once, and he croaked, and then I went straight to work on his missus ...’ - and so it went on. When the public procurator made his rounds of the prison cells and asked Stepan if he had any complaints to make or if there was anything he lacked, Stepan answered that he had everything he wanted and that no one had mistreated him. The procurator, having gone a few steps down the stinking corridor, stopped for a moment and asked the warden who was accompanying him what the behaviour of this convict was like in general.

  ‘He baffles me,’ replied the warden, gratified that Stepan had praised the treatment he had received. ‘He’s been with us nearly two months now, and he’s been a model of good behaviour. All I’m scared of is that he’s got something up his sleeve. He’s a plucky chap, and incredibly strong.’

  2

  For the first month he spent in prison Stepan was incessantly tormented by the same thing: he saw the grey wall of his cell, heard the sounds of the prison - the buzz of voices in the communal cell below him, the footsteps of the sentry in the corridor, and the ticking of the clock - and in addition he saw her, with her meek gaze, the gaze that had vanquished him the first time he had encountered her in the street, with her scraggy, wrinkled throat which he had cut with his knife, and her sweet, plaintive, lisping voice saying: ‘You think you’re harming others, but it’s your own soul you’re ruining. You can’t do this!’ Then the voice would die away and the three black devils would reappear. They would reappear irrespective of whether his eyes were open or closed. When they were closed, the devils appeared more distinctly. When they were open, the devils would fuse with the doors and the walls and gradually disappear, only to re-emerge from three different directions, making leering faces and saying over and over again: ‘Kill yourself, kill yourself. You can make a noose, you can start a fire.’ At this point Stepan would begin to shiver, and he would start reciting what prayers he knew - ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Our Father’ - and initially this seemed to help. As he said these prayers, he would begin to remember his past life: he would remember his father and mother, his village, Wolf the family dog, his grandfather lying on top of the stove, the upturned benches on which he had tobogganed in the snow with the other boys; then he would remember the girls and their songs, and then the horses, and how they had been stolen, how they had caught the horse thief and how he, Stepan, had finished him off with a stone. And then his first prison term would come back to him, and he would remember the fat yard-keeper, the drayman’s wife and her children, and then again he would remember her. And he would feel hot all over, he would throw off his prison dressing-gown, leap up from his bunk and begin to pace up and down his cramped cell with rapid strides, like a wild beast in a cage, turning abruptly whenever he reached the damp, sweating walls. And again he would recite his prayers, only now they were to no avail.

  On one of those long, autumn evenings, when the wind was howling and whistling in the chimneys, he sat down on his bunk, having had enough of pacing his cell, and knew that it was no use struggling any longer, that the devils had won, and he submitted to them. For a long time now he had had an eye on the stovepipe. If he were to wind some thin twine or thin strips of cloth round it, it would hold. But it would have to be done cleverly. He set to work and spent two days cutting long strips of cloth from the sack he slept on (when the orderly came in he covered the bed with his dressing-gown). He tied the strips together in double knots so that they would support the weight of his body. While he was engaged in this task, his mental anguish ceased. When everything was ready he made a noose, put it round his neck, climbed on to the bed and hanged himself. But his tongue had only just started to protrude when the strips of cloth broke and he fell to the ground. The noise brought the orderly running in. The medical orderly was sent for, and Stepan was taken away to the hospital. By the next day he had fully recovered, and he was discharged from hospital and taken, not to his solitary cell, but to the communal one.

  In the communal cell he lived with twenty other prisoners as if he were alone: he saw no one, spoke to no one and suffered again from his former mental anguish. He suffered particularly when all the men were asleep except for him, and he would see her again as of old, hear her voice, and then witness once again the appearance of the black devils with their terrible eyes, mocking and tormenting him.

  Once again, as formerly, he said his prayers, and once again they were to no avail.

  On one occasion when, after he had prayed, she appeared to him again, he began to pray to her instead; he prayed to her soul, begging it to let him go, to forgive him. And when, towards morning, he collapsed on to his tattered sack, he fell fast asleep, and as he slept she appeared to him again in his dreams with her scraggy, wrinkled, cut throat.