How she cried! She’s unhinged, or haven’t you noticed? Yes, she is. One minute she’s fretting like a little girl about getting everything right for tomorrow, the food and all the rest . . . the next she’s wringing her hands, coughing up blood, crying, suddenly banging her head against the wall, in complete despair. Then she calms down again and it’s you she always counts on: she says you’re her helper now and she’ll borrow some money somewhere and go off to her town, with me, and set up a boarding school for girls of noble birth and put me in charge, and we’ll begin a completely new and beautiful life; and she kisses me, hugs me and comforts me; and she truly believes in these fantasies of hers – yes she does! And how could anyone contradict her? And what did she do today except scrub, clean, mend, drag the washing tub into the room with her feeble arms, puff and pant and collapse on her bed? Never mind that we went to the market in the morning to buy shoes for Polechka and Lenya,11 because theirs have fallen apart, only we didn’t have enough money for them, nowhere near enough, and she’d chosen such a sweet pair of boots – you’ve no idea what good taste she has . . . She started crying there and then, in the shop, right in front of the merchants . . . How pitiful she looked!’
‘Well, now it makes sense why you . . . live like this,’ said Raskolnikov with a sour grin.
‘But don’t you pity her, too? Don’t you?’ Sonya flung back at him. ‘After all, you gave away all you had, I know you did, without having even seen anything. But if you had seen it all – O Lord! And how many times I’ve made her cry! How many! Even only last week! Shame on me! Only a week before his death. How cruel that was! And how many times have I done that? So many! And how painful it’s been to spend all day remembering!’
Sonya even wrung her hands as she spoke, from the pain of the recollection.
‘You – cruel?’
‘Me, me! I’d just come in,’ she continued, crying, ‘and Father said: “Read to me, Sonya, I’ve got a bit of a headache, read to me . . . There’s the book,” – he had some book or other, he’d got it from Andrei Semyonych, from Lebezyatnikov, who lives right here and was always getting these funny little books. And I said, “I have to go” – I just didn’t want to read and I’d come by mainly to show Katerina Ivanovna some collars; Lizaveta, the clothes-dealer, had brought me some collars and cuffs on the cheap, nice, new embroidered ones. Katerina Ivanovna took a fancy to them, tried them on and looked at herself in the mirror, and liked them even more: “Give them to me, Sonya,” she said. “Please.” Please, she said, that’s how much she wanted them. But what would she do with them? She’d remembered happier days, that’s all! There she was looking at herself in the mirror and admiring herself, but she’s not had one dress to call her own, not a single thing, for how many years now? And you won’t catch her asking anyone for anything. She’s proud. She’d sooner give away the last thing she has, but here she was asking – that’s how much she liked them! But I was sorry to give them away. “What good are they to you, Katerina Ivanovna?” That’s what I said: “What good?” That was the last thing I should ever have said to her! What a look she gave me; how miserable she was when I refused her and how pitiful it was to see her like that! Miserable not because of the collars, but because I’d refused. I could see. Oh, what I’d do to take all those words back . . . Shame on me . . . But anyway . . . it’s all the same to you!’
‘You knew this Lizaveta?’
‘Yes . . . Why, did you?’ Sonya asked in return, with some surprise.
‘Katerina Ivanovna’s consumptive – a bad case; she’ll be dead soon,’ said Raskolnikov after a pause, ignoring the question.
‘Oh, no, no, no!’ And Sonya, making an unconscious