The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense (39 page)

“He committed his first murder in the following circumstances: He was carting some sacks of sugar from the harbour one autumn night when he noticed that a man was walking behind the cart and had made a rent in the sack and was filling his pockets with the sugar. Merkouloff got down, rushed at him, gave him a blow on the temple, and the man fell down.

“‘Well,’ said Merkouloff, ‘I gave him another kick and began fixing the torn sack while all the time he lay under my feet, his face turned upwards, his eyes and mouth wide open. I felt frightened, so I knelt down and took his head in my hands, but it rolled from one side to the other, as heavy as lead, while his eyes seemed to wink at me and his nose bled all over my hands. I jumped up, crying: “My God, I’ve killed him.”’

“Merkouloff then went off to the police-station, whence he was sent to prison.

“‘Sitting in prison,’ he said,’and watching the criminals around me, I seemed to be looking at everything through a fog—I just couldn’t take things in. I felt terrified, could not sleep or eat, but kept thinking: “How is it, how can it be? A man was walking along the road, I struck him—and—no more man. What does it mean? The soul—where is it? It isn’t as though he were a sheep or a calf—he could do this and that and believed in God, no doubt; also, although his nature might have been different, he was just the same kind of being as I am. And I—don’t you see?—crossed his life, killed him as though he were a beast, no more. If it’s like that, why, then it might happen to me too any day: I might get a blow—and it’s all up with me!” So terrified was I by such thoughts, sir, that I seemed to hear the very hairs on my head growing.’

“While telling his story, Merkouloff looked me straight in the face, but although his light eyes were motionless, I seemed to see the twinkle of dark fear in his grey pupils. He had folded his hands together, placed them between his knees, and was pressing them hard. For this unpremeditated crime he got a very mild punishment: his preliminary confinement was discounted and he was sent off to a monastery for penitence.

“‘Over there,’ Merkouloff continued, ‘they appointed a little old monk to look after me. He was to teach me how to live. He was such gentle little man, who spoke of God in the finest way possible. A very fine character, he was; and like a father to me, always addressing me as: “My son, my son.” Listening to him, I could not help asking myself sometimes: “Why, O God, is man so defenceless?” Then I would say to the monk, “Take yourself, Father Paul; you love God and He, most probably, loves you, too—yet I have merely to strike a blow at you and you’ll die like a fly. Where then shall the gentle soul go? And the matter doesn’t lie in your soul—it lies in my evil thought: I can kill you at any moment. And as a matter of fact my thought is not even an evil one. I can kill you very gently, very softly—allow you to say a prayer first, then kill you. How do you explain that?” —But he couldn’t, he only kept saying: “It’s the Devil who rouses the beast in you. He’s always goading you.” I told him that it made no difference to me who was goading me; all I wanted him to teach me was how to avoid being goaded. “I’m not a beast,” I told him, “there’s nothing of the beast in me; it is only my soul that is frightened for itself.”

“‘“Pray,” he said to me; “pray until you are exhausted.” I did so, I got thin doing so, my temples went grey, although I was only twenty-eight at the time. But prayer could not still my fear; even during prayer I went on thinking: “Dear God, why is it? Here I can cause the death of any man at any moment, and any man can kill me at any moment he wants to! I can go to sleep and someone can draw a knife across my throat, or bring down a brick or a log on my head. Or any heavy weight. There are so many ways of doing it!”… These thoughts prevented me from sleeping, terrified me. At first I used to sleep with the novices, and as soon as one of them stirred, I’d jump up and shout out: “Who’s fiddling about? Keep quiet, you hounds!” Everybody was afraid of me and I was afraid of everybody. They complained about me and I was sent off to the stables. There I grew quieter, with the horses—they’re only soulless beasts. But all the same I only closed one eye when I slept. I was frightened.’

“After his penitence was over Merkouloff got another job as a driver, and lived in the market gardens outside the town, in a sober, detached way.

“‘I lived like a man in a dream,’ he told me. ‘Just kept silent and avoided people. The other drivers used to ask me: “Why are you living so gloomily, Vassili? Are you preparing to take the cowl?” What should I want to take the cowl for? There are men in cloisters as well as outside them—and wherever there are men there is fear. I looked at people and thought: “God help you! Uncertain are your lives and you have no protection against me, just as I have none against you!” Just think, sir, how hard it was for me to live with such a weight on my heart.’”

Sviatoukhine sighed and adjusted the small black silk cap on his bald skull that shone like an old, bleached bone.

“At that moment, at those very words, Merkouloff smiled; and that unexpected, uncalled-for smile twisted and distorted his well-cut face so acutely that I was instantly convinced that the man was a fiend. Most probably he killed all his victims with precisely that smile. I experienced a most uncanny feeling. He continued with something like vexation in his voice:

“‘So I went on walking about like a hen with an egg, the egg being rotten and I knowing it. The moment is bound to come when the egg inside me will burst, and what will happen to me then? I don’t know—I daren’t guess what it will be—but I can guess that it will be something terrible.’

“I asked him whether he had ever thought of committing suicide. He was silent for a moment, his eyebrows moved, and he answered: ‘I can’t remember—no—I don’t think I ever have.’… Then he turned to me, wonderingly, with a look of inquiry in his eyes, and said, I think quite sincerely: ‘How is it I never thought of that? That’s a curious thing.…’

“He struck his knee with the palm of his hand, glanced vaguely at a corner of the court, and muttered pettishly:

“‘Yes, yes, but don’t you see, I didn’t want to give my soul a free hand. I was so tormented in my heart with curiosity regarding other people and in the shameful cowardice of that soul of mine. I forgot about myself. As to my soul, it was just musing: what if I kill this fellow—what will happen then?’

“Two years later Merkouloff killed the half-witted girl Matreshka, the daughter of a gardener. He told me about her murder in a somewhat hazy manner, as though he himself hardly understood the motives of the crime. One could gather from his words that Matreshka was slightly crazy.

“‘She used to have a kind of fits which blotted out her reason: she’d throw down her work of digging flower-beds or weeding and walk along smiling, with her mouth open, as though somebody unseen were beckoning to her to come. She’d knock against trees, hedges and walls, attempting to pass through them. One day she stepped on an upturned rake and hurt her foot; blood was flowing from the wound in a stream, but she still walked along, feeling no pain—didn’t even wince. She was an ugly girl, very fat, and inclined to debauchery, owing to her silliness. She used to accost the peasants, and they, of course, took advantage of her silliness. She pestered me, too, with her attentions, but I had other things to think about. What fascinated me in her was the fact that nothing affected her: whether she fell into a ditch or down from a roof, she came up safe and sound. Anyone else would have sprained their foot or broken a bone, but nothing happened to her. She was all bruised and scratched, of course, but was as tough as could be. She seemed to live in absolute security.

“‘I killed her in public, on a Sunday. I was sitting on a bench at the gate and she began to be amiable to me in a nasty manner—so I just struck her with a faggot. She rolled down and never moved. I glanced at her—she was dead. I sat down on the ground beside her and burst out crying: “God, oh God, what is the matter with me? Why this weakness, this helplessness?”’

“He spoke jerkily, as though in a delirium, for some time harping on the helplessness of men, and all the time a sullen fear shone in his eyes. His dry, ascetic face darkened as he said, hissing through his teeth:

“‘Just you think, sir; here, at this very minute, I can strike you down dead! Just think of that! Who can forbid me to do it? What’s to stop me? Nothing at all—nothing.…’

“He was punished for the murder of that girl by three years of prison—the mildness of the punishment being due, he explained, to the skill of his advocate—whom he did not hesitate to vilify: ‘A young one, with dishevelled hair, a bawler. He kept on saying to the jury: “Who could possibly say a bad word against this man? Not one of the witnesses has been able to. Moreover it is admitted that the dead woman was half-witted and debauched.” Oh, those lawyers! It’s all tomfoolery, waste of time. I’ll be defended from myself
before
the crime if you like, but once I’ve committed it I don’t want anyone to help me. You can hold me while I stand still, but once I have started running you can’t catch me! If I run I will go on running until I fall down with exhaustion. But prison!—tomfoolery, an idle man’s job, too.

“‘I came out from prison dazed—unable to understand anything. People walked past, drove past, worked, built houses, and all the time I kept thinking: “I can kill any man I choose and any man can kill me. Very terrible, this is.” And it seemed as though my arms were growing, growing; becoming a stranger’s arms. I started drinking, but I couldn’t keep it up, it made me sick. As soon as I had had a drop too much I began to cry—hid in a dark corner and cried: “I am not a man but a maniac, there’s no life for me.” I drank—and didn’t get drunk, and was worse than a drunkard when sober. I began to growl, growled at everyone, frightened people away, and was terrified of them. I kept thinking all the time: “Either he’ll go for me, or I’ll go for him.”

“‘And so I went on walking about, like a fly on a window-pane: the glass might break at any moment and I’d fall through, falling God knows where.

“‘My boss, Ivan Kirilich, I killed for the same reason—curiosity. He was a cheerful, kind-hearted man, and wonderfully brave. When his neighbour’s house was on fire he acted like an immortal hero—crawled right inside the flames to fetch out the old nurse, then back again for the nurse’s trunk, just because she was crying for it. A happy man was Ivan Kirilich, God rest his soul. It is true that I tortured him a bit. The others I killed at once, but I tortured Ivan—I waited to see whether he would be frightened or not. Well, he had a weak constitution and was strangled very rapidly. People came running up at his cries, and wanted to beat and tie me up. But I said to them: “You’d better tie up my soul, not my hands, you fools!”’

“Merkouloff finished his story, wiped the perspiration from his face, and said, rather breathlessly:

“‘You must punish me severely, your Honour, punish me with death, or else—what is the good of it all? I can’t live with people, even in jail. I’ve got a crime against my soul. I’m fed up with it and afraid that I’ll want to begin testing it again—and then more people will have to suffer for it.… You must put me away, sir, you must.…’”

Blinking with his dying eyes, the judge continued:

“He put himself away of his own accord—strangled himself in his cell, in a rather peculiar way—with the chains he was manacled with—the devil knows how! I didn’t see it myself, but I was told about it by the governor of the prison. The latter said it needed great willpower to kill oneself in such a painful and unhandy manner. That’s what he said: ‘unhandy.’”

Then, closing his eyes, Sviatoukhine murmured:

“It was probably I who inspired Merkouloff with the idea of suicide.… Ye-es.… There, my dear friend, there’s a simple Russian peasant for you, but all the same … Ye-es.… What do you think of it?”

BORIS SOKOLOFF

THE CRIME OF DR. GARINE

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Boris Sokoloff (1893–1979) devoted most of his life to biology and medicine, following his early years as a prominent socialist philosopher and writer. A prodigy, he published his first scientific study,
The Physiology of Protozoa
, at seventeen, and graduated from the University of St. Petersburg with a Doctor of Science degree at twenty. He was a professor of biology when the revolution broke out in 1917. Initially a member of forces that brought down the czar and a deputy of the convention which drafted the All-Russian Constitution, he did not agree with the Bolsheviks and fought against them. He was captured and sentenced to death but, as a doctor, was useful and transferred from one prison to another until he escaped from Russia, landing in Europe, where he worked in London, Brussels, Prague and Paris before moving permanently to America at the invitation of the Rockefeller Institute. He also worked at Sloan-Kettering, the University of Washington Cancer Research Center and was the head of the Cancer Research Laboratory at Florida Southern University. He was the editor of the scientific journal
Growth
and was the author of 27 books, mostly on cancer and other scientific subjects.

“The Crime of Dr. Garine” was first published in Russia in 1927 and in the U.S. in a collection titled
The Crime of Dr. Garine
(New York, Covici-Friede, 1928). Although not known as a fiction writer, the publisher evidently regarded it as a significant book because it bears an introduction by Theodore Dreiser, one of the most important authors in America at that time.