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The troika thundered across the cold wastes, into Siberia. The man in the back looked out impassively, as if what he saw was just another landscape. He was dressed warmly enough, but the wind whipped around him, and Alyosha shivered. He didn’t know if he dreaded this journey or not, and all the events that led up to it seemed to blur in his mind as the kilometers flew by. Ivan had pleaded with him, though of course with Ivan it didn’t seem that way on the outside. Ivan had simply kept on talking about it. “Someone must go to Siberia. Someone must go, and I cannot, not with Katerina and little Maria here. Someone must go and talk to him. I feel certain that he waits for word from us.”
At last Alyosha had gone to his brother and told him that he had secured transportation to Siberia, to the very place where Mitya was now. He did not tell him of the officials who had been bribed to allow it. His brother had recovered from his fever not long after Mitya had been sent to Siberia, and had been married to Katya not long after that. Alyosha had found himself laughing bitterly over the fact as he drank their wine and raised his glass to their happiness. He didn’t truly understand why, but such feelings had taken root in him, and he found the world a dark place, when he truly looked at it. He visited Ivan and Katya as often as he could, and always found them the same; Katya would behave herself for a while, but eventually, they would always quarrel. When they did, Ivan would not raise his voice, and would eventually subside into silence, and he would look at his wife kindly, but Alyosha felt that his eyes were cold and dark. Ivan had been wounded by his fever and would sometimes become pale and wan, and would need to rest in quiet darkness. Alyosha no longer feared for Ivan’s life, but he worried nonetheless.
Before he had left, he had visited his brother and his sister-in-law one more time, and they had spoken to him of unrelated things, and little Maria had climbed onto his lap and clutched his hair and he had smiled at her. He was, and would always be, fond of children. Just as he was stepping through the door to leave them, Katya had come to him with two letters.
“This one,” she said, “is from me, to your brother. There are so many things I would say to him, but this contains all the words that matter. And this other one is from Ivan to your brother. I don’t know what it says, though I wonder. Please give them to Mitka for us, and tell him… tell him he is a fool that he did not escape, when we did so much to arrange it!” She spoke with sudden passion, eyes flaring with old anger. Then her mouth fell slack and it seemed she would weep, but instead she shut her eyes and said more softly, “No, just tell him… to be well.” She turned and fled back into the house, and Alyosha had closed the door quietly behind him.
Now as he listened to the pounding of the troika’s hooves on the hard ground, he found himself laughing again, and he wished he had time to stop the troika and find some patch of grass and splay himself upon it and glory in life and fervently pray, as he had done now and then ever since Zosima’s death. He was remembering so many things: Katya’s words to him about how Ivan loved Mitka dearly and yet hated him, and how in that same conversation he had realized that she spoke also of her own feelings for Mitka. He remembered things that Ivan had said to him; Ivan had spoken of his own frustrations with Mitka’s refusal to run to America. Alyosha felt certain he knew what lay behind that anger; it was the same thing that now drove him to travel to Siberia. Ivan truly did love Mitya, just as he did. It’s always interesting to talk with an intelligent man, Alyosha thought in poor humor. He also remembered his last conversation with Mitya just before his brother was sent away. He had felt even then that his brother would not take his advice, that he would indeed go and bear this heavy cross, even if it killed him. For all Mitenka’s surety in his own Karamazov baseness- how could he fail to run?- Alyosha felt that the other side of that coin was that he would suffer any pain to avoid the shame of running from it. Alyosha sighed. He loved his brother, and secretly approved of his choice, but he had not been lying when he told him to go, to run away, and to take on the lesser suffering. He had not wanted to have to make this journey, and now he could not avoid it. Did he go for Ivan’s sake? For Katya’s? No. It was for himself that he went to his brother, to say all the things that had not been said, and perhaps to ease Mitya’s suffering.
He had gone to see Lise, also, right before he left. He had somehow avoided her gossipy mother and found himself alone with Lise as they had been so many times when she was a young girl. She still looked at him with love, and sometimes even still would giggle at him, but she had become much more a serious girl as she grew. He remembered taking her hand and looking in horror at her blackened fingernails, years ago now, and kissing them. She had looked at him and tears had crept into her eyes. She had proved to be a good friend to him, and they had grown ever closer. She knew him better than most, and when he had told her he was leaving to go and see his brother, she nodded, barely smiling, and had said, “Yes, you should go tell him, but do come back.” He had assured her he would, and she had nodded once more, before finding some new subject that had them both laughing, forgetting about his journey. Now he was surprised that she had seen into him so deeply… but then, her blackened fingers had once told him all he needed to know of her awareness of the strange and deep urges of the heart.
He shook himself from his reverie when he felt the troika slowing, stopping. The coachman told him that this was the house he had given the address to, in the little town not far from the prison settlement. Grusha had sent a reply to his letter, telling him to stop there and find her before he went to his brother. Now, he saw light behind the windows of the small house, and before he had even reached the door, Grusha had rushed out to meet him. As they embraced, he marveled at the change in her. She had aged; though her hair was still the deep brown he remembered, it seemed somehow not to shine as it once did, and her face was gray and lined.
“Alyosha… dear Alyosha… It has been three years!” she said, and he wondered whether she meant since they had met last, or since Mitya had been sent away. She had followed her beloved as closely as she was able. True, they would not let her visit him, but she was as near to him as she could be, and sometimes he would write to her. Always, she told Alyosha, the letters were the same; it always boiled down to, ‘I’m alive, I’m thinking of you, I love you, wait for me.’
“And I will wait for him,” she said, softly and with determination. “I will. But it is hard, Alexei!” Her eyes did not fill with tears; he suspected she had already used up her share of them. Still, he embraced her again as she led him into the house. Inside it was nothing as he would have expected. Every surface was plain and bare, and she kept only the necessities of life. She poured them tea from the samovar and they sipped it in silence on her threadbare couch.
“It’s good to see you, Agrafena.” Alyosha said at last. “I know you will wait for him, and when he is allowed to come to you at last, I know you will be happy, both of you.” He touched her hand gently, and she gripped his in return as if drawing strength from him. They said few other words. Alyosha told her of Ivan and Katya and little Maria, and her mouth was set in a hard line when he did, but she said nothing.
“I should be going. They’re expecting me tonight.” He said, rising to leave. Grusha also gave him a letter to give to Mitya, and he stuck it in his pocket with a sigh. Three letters he carried now to give to his brother, and he still had not decided how to say what he wished to say. He climbed back into the carriage, and again stared out into the distance.
As they approached the prison gates, he took all three letters from his pocket. None of them were sealed, only folded into paper envelopes. He had been resisting the urge to do so for days, and now all honor and all resolve failed him, and he drew the pages from them one by one. First, Katya’s. He read through it quickly, three pages of reproach and bitterness. Why did you not run? You know Grusha will wait for you; I would have also. What will she do for twenty years? I worry about her; she is my sister in wickedness as she said, and so I feel for her. Alyosha read past these words, and wanted, briefly, to tear up the pages and throw them to the wind. Then, the last words: No, forget all I’ve said. Just remember what I promised. I love you, forever, Mitya. Live, and come home one day. Ivan and I will welcome you in ours. He carefully folded the pages again and returned them to the envelope. Then, Ivan’s letter, a single page. The first paragraph was just news of his life, of the birth of his child with Katya, and about their new house, and how he had recovered from his fever. The next paragraph, much shorter, said only this: I miss you, brother. I hope you have made the right choice, for it does not seem so to me. I wish I could see you again, and speak to you. I love you.
At last he came to Grusha’s letter, and as he pulled it from its envelope he found he could not read it. The woman’s gray face and tired eyes would haunt him if he did, and he shoved it hastily back in his pocket, unread.
They had arrived. He waded through officialities of getting in to see his brother, hardly noticing the sea of suffering humanity, and only truly opening his eyes when he found his brother before him, in a little shack certainly built for such an illicit purpose as visitors.
Mitya was thin and his clothes were ragged, but his face lit up in a look of pure joy when he saw Alyosha. Alyosha recognized that expression that he had seen on his brother so rarely, and only after his arrest, after the “dream of the wee one” that he had spoken of so fervently. This was passion, in his brother, of the purest kind.
Alyosha threw the letters down on the table before him, and at last knew what he would say; nothing at all. His passion was not so pure, and needed no words. He took his brother in his arms, held him, put his hands to the beloved face, and kissed him, again and again, not stopping until the guards called to him.
He pulled away from Mitya at last, and Mitya looked at him with a soft, loving expression. “Will you come again, Alyosha?”
“Yes, tomorrow, brother.”
Alyosha could find bribery quite to his taste, for such a cause as this.