Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [255]
‘Listen, though,’ Stepan Arkadyich asked Levin one day, after he came back from the country where he had arranged everything for the young people’s arrival, ‘do you have a certificate that you’ve been to confession?’
‘No, why?’
‘You can’t go to the altar without it.’
‘Ai, ai, ai!’ Levin cried. ‘I bet it’s a good nine years since I last prepared for communion.1 I never thought of it.’
‘You’re a fine one!’ Stepan Arkadyich said, laughing. ‘And you call me a nihilist! This won’t do, however. You’ve got to confess and take communion.’
‘But when? There are only four days left.’
Stepan Arkadyich arranged that as well. And Levin began to prepare for communion. For Levin, as an unbeliever who at the same time respected the beliefs of others, it was very difficult to attend and participate in any Church rituals. Now, in the softened mood he found himself in, sensitive to everything, this necessity to pretend was not only difficult for him but seemed utterly impossible. Now, in this state of his glory, his blossoming, he had either to lie or to blaspheme. He felt himself unable to do either the one or the other. But much as he questioned Stepan Arkadyich whether it might not be possible to get the certificate without going to confession, Stepan Arkadyich declared that it was impossible.
‘And what is it to you - two days? And he’s such a sweet, intelligent old fellow. He’ll pull this tooth of yours before you notice it.’
Standing through the first liturgy, Levin tried to refresh in himself his youthful memories of the strong religious feeling he had experienced between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. But he could see at once that it was utterly impossible for him. He tried to look at it as a meaningless, empty custom, like the custom of paying visits; but he felt that he could not do that either. With regard to religion, Levin, like most of his contemporaries, was in a very uncertain position. He could not believe, yet at the same time he was not firmly convinced that it was all incorrect. And therefore, being unable either to believe in the meaningfulness of what he was doing or to look at it indifferently as at an empty formality, he experienced, all through this time of preparation, a feeling of awkwardness and shame at doing what he himself did not understand and therefore, as his inner voice kept telling him, something false and bad.
During the services, he first listened to the prayers, trying to ascribe a meaning to them that did not disagree with his views, then, feeling that he could not understand and had to condemn them, he tried not to listen, but occupied himself with his own thoughts, observations and memories, which during this idle standing in church wandered with extreme vividness through his head.
He stood through the liturgy, vigil and compline, and the next day, getting up earlier than usual, without having tea, went to the church at eight o‘clock in the morning to hear the morning prayers and confess.
There was no one in the church except a begging soldier, two little old women and the clergy.
A young deacon, the two halves of his long back sharply outlined under his thin cassock, met him and, going over to a little table, began at once to read the prayers. As the reading went on, and especially at the frequent and rapid repetition of the same words, ‘Lord have mercy,’ which sounded like ‘Lordamerse, Lordamerse,’ Levin felt that his mind was locked and sealed and should not be touched or stirred now, otherwise confusion would come of it, and therefore, standing behind the deacon, without listening or fathoming, he went on having his own thoughts. ‘Amazing how much expression there is in her hand,’ he thought, recalling how they had sat at the corner table the day before. They found nothing to talk about, as almost always during that time, and she, placing her hand on the table, kept opening and closing it, and laughed as she watched its movement. He recalled kissing that hand and afterwards studying the merging lines on its pink palm. ‘Again “Lordamerse,”’ thought Levin,