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By Root 3116 0

’t think I don’t know the sordid part of the story. Zhenia told me about the times you enticed him to come to your room in the stable and there with the promise of bonbons and sweets you got him to open the buttons of his pants and with your hand caused him intense excitement. There were other lewd things you performed which I can’t even write because I get very faint. He told me that after you did those awful things you were afraid he would tell me and I would denounce you to the police, so you used to give him ten kopeks not to say anything to anybody. He never did at the time this all happened, although once he told me about what went on up there, because he was worried and frightened, but I haven’t breathed a word of it to anyone, not even to my closest neighbors because I was ashamed to say anything, and also because your crime of murder is enough to answer for, and you will probably suffer the tortures of the cursed for that alone. Yet I will honestly and frankly tell you that if people go on making suspicious and vile remarks about me behind my back, I will tell all the facts of the case whether I blush or not to the Prosecuting Attorney who is first of all a gentleman. I will also tell everybody the sordid things you did to my child.

“I will petition the Tsar to defend my good name. Besides losing my child I have led an irreproachable life of toil. I have been an honest person and a pure woman. I have been the best of mothers even though I was a working woman with no time to herself and two people to support. Those who say I didn’t weep for my poor boy at his funeral are saying a filthy lie and I will some day sue someone for libel and character assassination. I looked after my Zhenia as though he were a prince. I attended to his clothes and all of his other needs. I cooked special dishes that he liked most of all, all sorts of pastries and expensive treats. I was a mother and also a father to him since his own weakling of a father deserted me. I helped him with his lessons where I could and encouraged him and said yes when he wanted to be a priest. He was already in a preparatory church school to prepare for the priesthood when he was murdered. He felt to me the way I felt to him—he loved me passionately. Rest assured of that. Mamashka, he said, I only love you. Please, Zheniushka, I begged him, stay away from those evil Jews. To my sorrow he did not follow his mother’s advice. You are my son’s murderer. I urge you as the martyred mother of a martyred child to confess the whole truth at once and clear the evil out of the air so that we can breathe again. If you do, at least you won’t have to suffer so much in the afterworld.

“Marfa Vladimirovna Golov”

The excitement of receiving the letter had increased in the reading and Yakov’s head throbbed at the questions that ran through his mind. Was the trial she had mentioned already on its way or only assumed to be by her? Probably assumed, yet how could he be sure? Anyway the indictment would still have to come, and where was the indictment? What had caused her to write the letter? What were the “wicked insults and insinuations,” and the “suspicious and vile remarks” she referred to? And who was making them? Could it be she was being investigated, yet by whom if not Bibikov? Certainly not Grubeshov, yet why had he let the letter, mad as it was, go through to him? Had she written it with his help? Was it to demonstrate the quality of the witness, to show Yakov what he was up against and thus again to warn or threaten him? To say we assure you she will say these things and more you can never guess, and she will convince a jury of people like her, so why not confess now? They were multiplying the accusations and disgusting motives, and would not rest until they had trapped him like a fly in a gluepot; therefore he had better confess before other means of escape were impossible.

Whatever her reason for sending it the letter seemed close to a confession by her, maybe a sign something else was going on. Would he ever know what? The fixer felt his heartbeat in his ears. He