Free Gentlemen by Michael Northrop Page A

no? He is in utter turmoil, literally feverish. Does he regret what he did, or does he just fear getting caught? Anyone?”
    I looked around to see if maybe someone had read enough of the book to know. You could usually tell. They might not have their hand up but they probably wouldn’t be looking down and avoiding Haberman’s eyes when he asked the question. Turned out, I was the only one with his head out of the gopher hole, so I got called on.
    â€œMr. Benton, what do you think?”
    â€œBoth,” I said, just guessing.
    â€œInteresting,” he said, looking at me like we were playing poker. “Murder is a complicated business, wouldn’t you say?”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “I guess.”
    â€œIndeed. There is the act, the bloody, bloody act itself, and then there is the aftermath. Dostoyevsky is interested in the latter more than the former. He is interested in the actions of the killer only insofar as they tend to illuminate the mind of the killer. To illuminate and to agitate. After all, the act itself, well, he gets that out of the way relatively quickly. It is almost offhanded, his treatment of it. What’s he really interested in? Mr. Benton, care to extend your hot streak?”
    I shrugged.
    â€œNo?” he continued.
    He turned around, showing us his back and picking up a piece of chalk.
    â€œHe is interested in…” and we could hear the chalk scratching and squeaking on the board. He turned around and moved to the side in a little hop, and we could see that he’d written CONSEQUENCES in big block letters.
    â€œAnd above all,” he said, turning back to the board.
    This time he wrote, even bigger: CONSCIENCE.
    He was sort of worked up now.
    â€œLet’s talk about that for a moment, shall we? To Raskolnikov, his acute awareness of what he has done is a sort of personal hell. It afflicts him. Is it all in his mind, though? Isn’t it just an idea? Like the ones we put on the board yesterday?”
    I could still see bits and pieces of those words on the board, where they’d escaped Haberman’s sloppy erasing.
    â€œLike crime? Like punishment?” Haberman said.
    Like watermelon.
    Haberman sat down on the corner of his desk. He was still for a moment, taking the pulse of the class. He did that every once in a while, and when he did, he was like a bug with its antennas up. He noticed everything, the whispers in the back, the movements off to the side, and the energy level of the room, which right now was like a balloon deflating. He frowned.
    â€œOf course, a faraway, long-ago St. Petersburg is just an idea to you as well,” he said. “Perhaps that is causing the trouble. Let’s say it’s not Russia but the United States, not St. Petersburg but right here, in this school. Let’s say a murder is committed in this very room, between classes. A student is suddenly missing. It’s as if a hole has opened up in the school, but it isn’t a hole, it’s a murder.”
    And right there, my ears pricked up. Maybe he was just trying to get our attention, make it personal, but it’s a weird thing to say. Haberman was looking off to my right. I figured he was looking at Mixer, because Mixer looked down right then, like there was suddenly something interesting on his desk. Haberman went on, and as he did, he swept his eyes over the class and started looking at me. Standing above us and scanning the room like that, he sort of reminded me of that big, fiery eye from the Lord of the Rings movies.
    â€œThat’s a problem, isn’t it?” he was saying. “Can you see that now? It is no longer a problem for the victim, who is dead after all and beyond caring, but it is a problem for those left behind. As Dostoyevsky writes: ‘God give peace to the dead, the living have still to live.’ It is a problem for the victim’s family. It is a problem for the victim’s friends,” said