Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [206]
He was sitting on his bed in the dark, crouching, hugging his knees and thinking, holding his breath from the strain of it. But the more he strained to think, the clearer it became to him that it was undoubtedly so, that he had actually forgotten, overlooked in his life one small circumstance - that death would come and everything would end, that it was not worth starting anything and that nothing could possibly be done about it. Yes, it was terrible, but it was so.
‘Yet I am still alive. And what am I to do now, what am I to do?’ he said in despair. He lit the candle, got up carefully, went over to the mirror and began to examine his face and hair. Yes, there were grey hairs on his temples. He opened his mouth. The back teeth were beginning to go bad. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, good and strong. But Nikolenka, who was lying there breathing with the remains of his lungs, had also had a healthy body once. And he suddenly remembered how as children they had gone to bed at the same time and had only waited for Fyodor Bogdanych to leave before they started throwing pillows at each other and laughing, laughing irrepressibly, so that even the fear of Fyodor Bogdanych could not stop this overflowing and effervescent consciousness of life’s happiness. ‘And now this crooked and empty chest ... and I, not knowing what will become of me or why ...’
‘Kha! Kha! Ah, the devil! What’s this pottering about, why aren’t you asleep?’ his brother’s voice called to him.
‘I don’t know, just insomnia.’
‘And I slept well, I don’t sweat now. Look, feel the shirt. No sweat?’
Levin felt it, went behind the partition, put out the candle, but did not sleep for a long time. He had just partly clarified the question of how to live, when he was presented with a new, insoluble problem - death.
‘So he’s dying, so he’ll die towards spring, so how can I help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I even forgot there was such a thing.’
XXXII
Levin had long ago observed that when things are made awkward by people’s excessive compliance and submission, they are soon made unbearable by their excessive demandingness and fault-finding. He felt that this was going to happen with his brother. And indeed, brother Nikolai’s meekness did not last long. The very next morning he became irritable and diligently applied himself to finding fault with his brother, touching the most sensitive spots.
Levin felt himself guilty and could do nothing about it. He felt that if they both had not pretended but had spoken, as the phrase goes, from the heart - that is, only what they both actually thought and felt - they would have looked into each other’s eyes, and Konstantin would have said only, ‘You’re going to die, to die, to die!’ and Nikolai would have answered only, ‘I know I’m going to die, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ And they would have said nothing else, if they had spoken from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, and therefore Konstantin tried to do what he had tried to do all his life without succeeding, and what, in his observation, many could do so well, and without which it was impossible to live: he tried to say what he did not think, and kept feeling that it came out false, that his brother noticed it and was annoyed by it.
On the third day, Nikolai provoked his brother to tell him his plans again and began not only to condemn them, but deliberately to confuse them with communism.
‘You’ve just taken other people’s thought and distorted it, and you want to apply it where it’s inapplicable.’
‘But I’m telling you, the two have nothing in common. They deny the justice of property, capital, inheritance, while I, without denying this main stimulus’ (Levin was disgusted with himself for using such words, but, ever since he had become involved in his work, he had inadvertently begun to use non-Russian words more and more often), ’‘only want to regulate labour.’
‘That’s the point, that you’ve taken other people’s thought, lopped off everything that gives it force, and