Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [205]
Nikolai said that he had come to receive the money and, above all, to visit his own nest, to touch the soil, in order to gather strength, as mighty heroes do, for future action. Despite his increasing stoop, despite his striking thinness in view of his height, his movements were, as usual, quick and impetuous. Levin led him to his study.
His brother changed with particular care, something he had never done before, combed his sparse, straight hair and, smiling, went upstairs.
He was in a most gentle and cheerful mood, as Levin had often remembered him in childhood. He even mentioned Sergei Ivanovich without anger. Seeing Agafya Mikhailovna, he joked with her and asked about the old servants. The news of the death of Parfen Denisych had an unpleasant affect on him. Fear showed in his face, but he recovered at once.
‘Well, he was old,’ he said and changed the subject. ‘So, I’ll live with you for a month or two, and then - to Moscow. You know, Miagkov has promised me a post, and I’ll be going into the service. Now I’ll arrange my life quite differently,’ he went on. ‘You know, I sent that woman away.’
‘Marya Nikolaevna? Why, what for?’
‘Ah, she’s a nasty woman! She caused me a heap of troubles.’ But he did not say what those troubles were. He could not say that he had chased Marya Nikolaevna out because the tea was weak, and above all because she looked after him as if he were an invalid. ‘And then in general I want to change my life completely now. I’ve certainly committed some follies, like everybody else, but money is the least thing, I’m not sorry about it. As long as there’s health - and my health, thank God, has improved.’
Levin listened and thought and could not think of anything to say. Nikolai probably felt the same. He began asking his brother about his affairs, and Levin was glad to talk about himself, because he could talk without pretending. He told his brother his plans and activities.
His brother listened but obviously was not interested.
These two men were so dear and close to each other that the slightest movement, the tone of the voice, told them both more than it was possible to say in words.
Now they both had one thought - Nikolai’s illness and closeness to death - which stifled all the rest. But neither of them dared to speak of it, and therefore everything else they said, without expressing the one thing that preoccupied them, was a lie. Never had Levin been so glad when an evening ended and it was time to go to bed. Never with any stranger, on any official visit, had he been so unnatural and false as he had been that day. And his awareness of and remorse for this unnaturalness made him more unnatural still. He wanted to weep over his beloved dying brother, and he had to listen and keep up a conversation about how he was going to live.
As the house was damp and only one room was heated, Levin had his brother sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen.
His brother lay down and may or may not have slept, but, being a sick man, tossed, coughed and grumbled something when he was unable to clear his throat. Sometimes, when his breathing was difficult, he said, ‘Ah, my God!’ Sometimes, when phlegm choked him, he said vexedly, ‘Ah! the devil!’ Levin lay awake for a long time, listening to him. His thoughts were most varied, but the end of all his thoughts was one: death.
Death, the inevitable end of everything, presented itself to him for the first time with irresistible force. And this death, which here, in his beloved brother, moaning in his sleep and calling by habit, without distinction, now on God, now on the devil, was not at all as far off as it had seemed to him before. It was in him, too - he felt it. If not now, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, then in thirty years - did it make any difference? And what this inevitable death was, he not only did not know, he not only had never thought of it, but he could not and dared not think of it.
‘I work, I want to do something, and I’ve forgotten