Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [285]
‘Go, go!’ she said, giving him a timid, guilty look.
He silently went out the door and straight away ran into Marya Nikolaevna, who had learned of his arrival and had not dared to enter his room. She was exactly the same as he had seen her in Moscow: the same woollen dress with no collar or cuffs, the same kindly, dull, pockmarked face, grown slightly fuller.
‘Well, what? How is he?’
‘Very bad. Bedridden. He’s been waiting for you. He... Are you... with your wife?’
Levin did not understand at first what made her embarrassed, but she explained it to him at once.
‘I’ll leave, I’ll go to the kitchen,’ she managed to say. ‘He’ll be glad. He’s heard, and he knows her and remembers her from abroad.’
Levin understood that she meant his wife and did not know what to answer.
‘Let’s go, let’s go!’ he said.
But just as he started off, the door of his room opened and Kitty peeked out. Levin flushed from shame and vexation with his wife for putting herself and him in this painful situation; but Marya Nikolaevna flushed even more. She shrank all over and flushed to the point of tears, and, seizing the ends of her kerchief with both hands, twisted them in her red fingers, not knowing what to say or do.
For the first moment Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the look Kitty gave this, for her, incomprehensible and terrible woman; but it lasted only an instant.
‘Well? How is he?’ she turned to her husband and then to her.
‘We really can’t start talking in the corridor!’ Levin said, turning crossly to look at a gentleman who, as if on his own business, was just then walking down the corridor with a jerky gait.
‘Well, come in then,’ said Kitty, addressing Marya Nikolaevna, who had now recovered; but she added, noticing her husband’s frightened face, ‘or else go, go and send for me later,’ and returned to the room. Levin went to his brother.
He had in no way expected what he saw and felt there. He had expected to find the same state of self-deception that, he had heard, occurs so often with consumptives and that had struck him so strongly during his brother’s visit in the autumn. He had expected to find the physical signs of approaching death more definite - greater weakness, greater emaciation - but still almost the same condition. He had expected that he himself would experience the same feeling of pity at losing his beloved brother and of horror in the face of death that he had experienced then, only to a greater degree. And he had been preparing himself for that; but he found something else entirely.
In a small, dirty room, with bespattered painted panels on the walls, divided by a thin partition behind which voices could be heard, in an atmosphere pervaded with a stifling smell of excrement, on a bed moved away from the wall, lay a blanket-covered body. One arm of this body lay on top of the blanket, and an enormous, rake-like hand was in some incomprehensible way attached to the long arm-bone, thin and straight from wrist to elbow. The head lay sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the sweaty, thin hair on the temples and the taut, as if transparent, forehead.
‘It cannot be that this terrible body is my brother Nikolai,’ Levin thought. But he came nearer, saw the face, and doubt was no longer possible. Despite the terrible change in the face, Levin had only to look into those living eyes raised to him as he entered, notice the slight movement of the mouth under the matted moustache, to realize the terrible truth, that this dead body was his living brother.
The shining eyes looked sternly and reproachfully at the brother coming in. And that look at once established a living relation between