“So you don’t believe in God, then?” Ivan grinned hatefully.

“Well, how shall I put it—that is, if you’re serious...”

“Is there a God, or not?” Ivan cried again with fierce insistence.

“Ah, so you are serious? By God, my dear, I just don’t know—there’s a great answer for you!”

“You don’t know, yet you see God? No, you are not in yourself, you are me, me and nothing else! You are trash, you are my fantasy!”

“Let’s say I’m of one philosophy with you, if you like, that would be correct. Je pense donc je suis,^[314] I’m quite sure of that, but all the rest around me, all those worlds, God, even Satan himself—for me all that is unproven, whether it exists in itself, or is only my emanation, a consistent development of my I, which exists pre-temporally and uniquely ... in short, I hasten to stop, because you look as if you’re about to jump up and start fighting.”

“Better tell me some funny anecdote!” Ivan said sickly. “There is an anecdote, and precisely on our subject—that is, not an anecdote but more of a legend. You reproach me with unbelief: ‘You see, but you don’t believe.’ But, my friend, I am not alone in that, all of us there are stirred up now, and it all comes from your science. While there were still just atoms, five senses, four elements, well, then it all still stayed together anyhow. They had atoms in the ancient world, too. But when we found out that you had discovered your ‘chemical molecule,’ and ‘protoplasm,’ and devil knows what else—then we put our tails between our legs. A real muddle set in; above all—superstition, gossip (we have as much gossip as you do, even a bit more); and, finally, denunciations as well (we, too, have a certain department where such ‘information’ is received) .^[315] And so there is this wild legend, which goes back to our middle ages—not yours but ours—and no one believes it except for two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchants’ wives—that is, again, not your merchants’ wives but ours. Everything that you have, we have as well; I’m revealing one of our secrets to you, out of friendship, though it’s forbidden. This legend is about paradise. There was, they say, a certain thinker and philosopher here on your earth, who ‘rejected all—laws, conscience, faith,’^[316] and, above all, the future life. He died and thought he’d go straight into darkness and death, but no—there was the future life before him. He was amazed and indignant: ‘This,’ he said, ‘goes against my convictions.’ So for that he was sentenced ... I mean, you see, I beg your pardon, I’m repeating what I heard, it’s just a legend ... you see, he was sentenced to walk in darkness a quadrillion kilometers (we also use kilometers now), and once he finished that quadrillion, the doors of paradise would be opened to him and he would be forgiven everything.”

“And what other torments have you got in that world, besides the quadrillion?” Ivan interrupted with some strange animation.

“What other torments? Ah, don’t even ask: before it was one thing and another, but now it’s mostly the moral sort, ‘remorse of conscience’ and all that nonsense. That also started because of you, from the ‘mellowing of your mores.’^[317] Well, and who benefited? The unscrupulous benefited, because what is remorse of conscience to a man who has no conscience at all? Decent people who still had some conscience and honor left suffered instead ... There you have it—reforms on unprepared ground, and copied from foreign institutions as well—nothing but harm! The good old fire was much better. Well, so this man sentenced to the quadrillion stood a while, looked, and then lay down across the road: ‘I don’t want to go, I refuse to go on principle! ‘ Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights—you’ll get the character of this thinker lying in the road.”

“And what was he lying on?” “Well, there must have been something there. Or are you laughing?”

“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange animation. He was listening now with unexpected curiosity. “Well, so is he still lying there?”

“The point is that he isn’t. He lay there for nearly a thousand years, and then got up and started walking.”

“What an ass!” Ivan exclaimed, bursting into nervous laughter, still apparently trying hard to figure something out. “Isn’t it all the same whether he lies there forever or walks a quadrillion kilometers? It must be about a billion years’ walk!”

“Much more, even. If we had a pencil and paper, we could work it out. But he arrived long ago, and this is where the anecdote begins.”

“Arrived! But where did he get a billion years?”

“You keep thinking about our present earth! But our present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, let’s say, got covered with ice, cracked, fell to pieces, broke down into its original components, again there were the waters above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun—all this development may already have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the same way, to the last detail. A most unspeakable bore...”

“Go on, what happened when he arrived?”

“The moment the doors of paradise were opened and he went in, before he had even been there two seconds—and that by the watch, the watch (though I should think that on the way his watch would long ago have broken down into its component elements in his pocket)—before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion kilometers, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In short, he sang ‘Hosannah’ and oversweetened it so much that some persons there, of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first: he jumped over to the conservatives a bit too precipitously. The Russian character. I repeat: it’s a legend. Take it for what it’s worth. That’s the sort of ideas current among us on all these subjects.”

“Caught you!” Ivan cried out with almost childish glee, as if he had now finally remembered something. “That anecdote about the quadrillion years— I made it up myself! I was seventeen years old then, I was in high school ... I made up that anecdote then and told it to a friend of mine, his last name was Korovkin, it was in Moscow ... It’s such a typical anecdote that I couldn’t have gotten it from anywhere. I almost forgot it ... but now I’ve unconsciously recalled it—recalled it myself, not because you told it to me! Just as one sometimes recalls a thousand things unconsciously, even when one is being taken out to be executed ... I’ve remembered it in a dream. You are my dream! You’re a dream, you don’t exist!” “Judging by the enthusiasm with which you deny me,” the gentleman laughed, “I’m convinced that you do believe in me all the same.”

“Not in the least! Not for a hundredth part do I believe in you!”

“But for a thousandth part you do believe. Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest. Admit that you do believe, let’s say for a ten-thousandth part ...”

“Not for one moment!” Ivan cried in a rage. “And, by the way, I should like to believe in you!” he suddenly added strangely.

“Aha! Quite a confession, really! But I am kind, I will help you here, too. Listen, it is I who have caught you, not you me! I deliberately told you your own anecdote, which you had forgotten, so that you would finally lose faith in me.”

“Lies! The purpose of your appearance is to convince me that you are.”

“Precisely. But hesitation, anxiety, the struggle between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such a torment for a conscientious man like yourself, that it’s better to hang oneself. Precisely because I knew you had a tiny bit of belief in me, I let in some final disbelief, by telling you that anecdote. I’m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so. A new method, sir: when you’ve completely lost faith in me, then you’ll immediately start convincing me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality—I know you now; and then my goal will be achieved. And it is a noble goal. I will sow just a tiny seed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow—and such an oak that you, sitting in that oak, will want to join ‘the desert fathers and the blameless women’;^[318] because secretly you want that verry, ver-ry much, you will dine on locusts, you will drag yourself to the desert to seek salvation!”