Raskolnikov catches himself planning a visit to Razumihin not today but on the day after It, when everything will begin afresh. The thought shocks him awake. Lessons, a shared farthing, even boots would not be what he wants now. He jumps from the bench, wanders the city in fever, counts his last thirty copecks, drinks vodka in a tavern, and falls asleep in the bushes on Petrovsky Ostrov.
His dream returns him to childhood, walking with his father past a rowdy tavern toward the graveyard church with the green cupola, the rice pudding with raisins in a cross, and the little brother's stone. Drunken Mikolka hitches a broken mare to an oversized cart and shouts that it is his property. The crowd laughs. Two lads run with whips. Mikolka cries hit her in the eyes. The boy runs beside the horse, feels a cut across his own face, and kisses the dead mare's bleeding head when she collapses under shaft and crowbar. His father says the peasants are drunk and brutal and that it is not their business. One woman seizes the boy's hand to lead him away; he tears free and runs back. Mikolka finishes the mare with a shaft, then a crowbar, while the cart still sings. The child wakes gasping.
Horrified, Raskolnikov asks whether he could really take an axe to a woman's skull. Granted the month's reasoning is clear as arithmetic, he still insists he could never do it. He prays to renounce that accursed dream, crosses the bridge, and whispers Freedom, freedom, as if an abscess in his heart had broken.
Then, without reason, he routes through the Hay Market and overhears a huckster tell Lizaveta to come tomorrow at seven, when her sister will be alone. He goes home like a man condemned, feeling everything suddenly and irrevocably decided. If he had to wait whole years for a suitable opportunity, he could not reckon on a more certain step. The old woman would be at home and entirely alone, without dangerous inquiries. He walks home like a man already counted toward seven the next evening.
Coming Up in Chapter 6
Later he will learn why the huckster asked Lizaveta: ordinary dealer work, household goods, a fair price. Then a student in a tavern will speak the same arithmetic already living in his head, and an officer will ask whether he would kill the old woman himself.
