The Books that Devoured my Father by Afonso Cruz

Author:Afonso Cruz [Costa, Margaret Jull]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912868322
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2020-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

One day, when Raskolnikov didn’t have enough money to pay his rent, he killed two women, Aliona Ivanovna and Lizaveta. The former was a miserly woman (like Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), but nothing justifies killing her, only Raskolnikov’s desperate, criminal impulse, well, that, of course, and his theories, which placed him above the law (as long as his intentions were good: and in this case, Raskolnikov said that the old woman was a real miser and the world would be a better, much better, infinitely better place without her). The second woman he killed was called Lizaveta, and she was Aliona Ivanovna’s half-sister. She died because she was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As the story went on, he began to feel remorse. He began to be troubled by his conscience and finally gave himself up to the police so as to receive the punishment he deserved. He felt that punishment would help soothe his guilty conscience, which would not let him rest after his crime. He was sentenced and exiled to Siberia where he lived in harsh conditions for several years. However, he wanted to suffer as a way of ridding himself of those feelings of remorse. It seems to me to be a psychological mechanism. We want to suffer when we have committed some dark deed. We want to be made to pay for that. We are complicated creatures who live by very simple rules.

I tried to make out what would have happened to Raskolnikov after his punishment, when he came out of prison. I read the pencilled notes my father had written in the margins. On the last page there was a sheet of paper folded in four, and on it was the name of a city, an address and a carefully drawn map. It showed the route from the station to a street marked in red ink. The name of the city was Vladivostok. I consulted an atlas to find out, more or less, where that place was. It wasn’t exactly near our house.

I decided that the following day, I would cross Siberia and go to Vladivostok, even if that meant arriving home late for supper.

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