to Valya, our tutor Sutkin was to be the public prosecutor and I the
judge.
The offender, wearing a wig, a blue tail-coat, shoes with bows on them
and knee-length stockings, sat in the dock, coolly cleaning his nails with
a broken pencil. Every now and then he would pass a remote
supercilious eye over the public and the members of the court. That
must have been his idea of how Eugene Onegin would have borne
himself in similar circumstances.
Old Mrs Larina and her daughters and the nurse sat in the witnesses'
room (what used to be the teachers' room). They, on the contrary, were
all in a dither, especially the nurse, who was remarkably youthful and
pretty for her years. Counsel for the defence was excited too. He kept
nervously tapping a bulky file with documents. The material evidence-
two old pistols-lay on the table before me. At my back I could hear the
producers whispering hurriedly among themselves.
'Do you plead guilty?' I asked Grisha. 'Guilty of what?'
'Of murder under guise of a duel,' the producers prompted in a
whisper.
'Of murder under guise of a duel,' I said, adding, after consulting the
charge-sheet, 'of the poet Vladimir Lensky, aged eighteen.'
'Never!' Grisha said haughtily. 'One has to distinguish between a
duel and murder.'
'In that case, we shall proceed to examine the witnesses,' I said.
'Citizeness Larina, what evidence can you give in this affair?'
At rehearsal this had gone off smoothly, but here everyone felt that it
did not work. Everyone except Grisha, who was quite in his element. At
one moment he produced a comb and started to groom his side-burns,
the next he tried to stare at the members of the court out of
countenance, or tossed his head proudly with a defiant smile. When the
witness, old Mrs Larina, spoke about Onegin having been treated in
their home like one of the family, Grisha covered his eyes with one hand
and placed the other on his heart to show how he was suffering. He
acted wonderfully and I noticed that the female witnesses, especially
Tatiana and Olga, just couldn't keep their eyes off him. I don't blame
Tatiana-after all, she was in love with him in the story-but Olga, now,
she was completely out of character. The audience, too, had eyes only
for Grisha and no one paid the slightest attention to us.
I called the next witness—Tatiana. My, she talked nineteen to the dozen!
She was absolutely unlike Pushkin's Tatiana, and the only point of
resemblance, if there was one, were the curls falling to her shoulders
and the heel-length gown. To my question whether she considered
Onegin guilty of murder, she gave the evasive reply that Onegin was an
egoist.
I called on the defence counsel, and from then on everything was
topsy-turvy. For one thing, because the defence counsel talked sheer
drivel. Secondly, because I had caught sight of Katya.
85
Of course, in four years she had changed a lot. But her hair, worn in
plaits, had the same ringlets on the forehead. She screwed her eyes up in
the same old independent way and had the same purposeful nose-I
think I should have recognised her by that nose if she lived to a
hundred.
She was listening attentively to Valya. It was our biggest mistake,
giving the defence to Valya, whose only interest in life was zoology. He
started off with the very strange statement that duels were to be
observed also in the animal kingdom, but nobody considered them as
murder. Then he warmed to the subject of rodents and became so
carried away that you kept wondering how he would find his way back
to the defence of Eugene Onegin. Katya, though, was listening to him
with interest. I knew from former years that when she began to chew on
her plait, it meant she was interested. She was the only girl who took no
notice of Grisha.
Valya finished rather abruptly, and then came the prosecutor's turn.
He was as dull as ditch-water. He spent a whole blessed hour trying to
prove that although it was the nineteenth-century society of landowners
and bureaucrats who had killed Lensky, nevertheless Eugene Onegin
was fully responsible for this murder, 'since all duels are murder,
premeditated murder'.
To cut a long story short, the prosecutor held that Eugene Onegin
should be sentenced to ten years' imprisonment with confiscation of his
property.
Nobody had expected such a demand, and laughter broke out in the
hall. Grisha sprang to his feet proudly, I gave him permission to speak.
Actors are said to feel the mood of an audience. That is what Grisha
must have felt, because he led off, shouting at the top of his voice, in
order, as he afterwards explained, to 'enthuse the audience'. This he
failed to do. His speech had one fault—you couldn't tell whether he was
speaking for himself or for Onegin. Onegin would hardly have said that
'even today his hand would not falter in sending a bullet into Lensky's
heart'.
Anyway, everyone drew a sigh of relief when he sat down, wiping his
brow and very pleased with himself.
'The court is retiring to confer.'
'Hurry up, you fellows.'
'What a bore.'
'Dragging it out.'
These comments were perfectly justified, and we decided, by tacit
consent, to rush through our verdict. To my astonishment, the majority
of the members of the court agreed with the public prosecutor. Ten
years with confiscation of property. It was clear that Eugene Onegin had
nothing to do with it. The sentence was intended for Grisha, who had
bored everyone to death, everyone except the witnesses Tatiana and
Olga. But I said that it was not fair: Grisha had acted well and without
him the whole show would have been a wash-out. We agreed on five
years.
'Stand!' the usher called. The members of the court filed in.
Everyone stood up. I read the sentence.
