Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [290]
‘Yes, that woman, Marya Nikolaevna, couldn’t have arranged it all,’ said Levin. ‘And... I must admit that I’m very, very glad you came. You’re such purity that ...’ He took her hand and did not kiss it (to kiss that hand in this presence of death seemed improper to him) but only pressed it with a guilty air, looking into her brightened eyes.
‘It would be so painful for you alone,’ she said, and raising her arms high so that they hid her cheeks, blushing from pleasure, she twisted her braids on the back of her head and pinned them up. ‘No,’ she went on, ‘she didn’t know... Fortunately, I learned a lot in Soden.’
‘Can there have been such sick people there?’
‘Worse.’
‘For me the terrible thing is that I can’t help seeing him as he was when he was young... You can’t imagine what a lovely youth he was, but I didn’t understand him then.’
‘I believe it very, very much. I do feel that I would have been friends with him,’ she said, and became frightened at what she had said, turned to look at her husband, and tears came to her eyes.
‘Yes, would have been,’ he said sadly. ‘He’s precisely one of those people of whom they say that they’re not meant for this world.’
‘However, we’ve got many days ahead of us, it’s time for bed,’ said Kitty, looking at her tiny watch.
XX
DEATH
The next day the sick man took communion and was anointed. During the rite, Nikolai Levin prayed fervently. His big eyes, directed at an icon set on a card table covered with a flowery napkin, expressed such passionate entreaty and hope that Levin was terrified to look at them. Levin knew that this passionate entreaty and hope would make it still harder for him to part with life, which he loved so much. Levin knew his brother and the train of his thought; he knew that his unbelief had come not because it was easier for him to live without faith, but because his beliefs had been supplanted step by step by modern scientific explanations of the phenomena of the world, and therefore he knew that his present return was not legitimate, accomplished by way of the same thinking, but was only temporary, self-interested, done in the mad hope of recovery. Levin also knew that Kitty had strengthened that hope by accounts of extraordinary healings she had heard of. Levin knew all that, and it was tormentingly painful for him to look at those pleading eyes filled with hope, that emaciated hand rising with difficulty to make the sign of the cross on the taut skin of the forehead, at the protruding shoulders and the gurgling, empty chest that could no longer contain the life that the sick man was asking for. During the sacrament Levin also prayed and did what he, as an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God: ‘If You exist, make it so that this man is healed (for that very thing has been repeated many times), and You will save him and me.’
After the anointing the sick man suddenly felt much better. He did not cough even once for a whole hour, smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand, thanking her tearfully, saying that he was well, that there was no pain anywhere and that he felt appetite and strength. He even sat up by himself when soup was brought for him and also asked for a cutlet. Hopeless as he was, obvious as it was from one look at him that he could not recover, during this hour Levin and Kitty shared the same excitement, happy yet fearful of being mistaken.
‘He’s better.’ ‘Yes, much.’ ‘Amazing.’ ‘Not amazing at all.’ ‘He’s better, anyhow,’ they said in a whisper, smiling at each other.
This illusion did not last long. The sick man fell peacefully asleep, but half an hour later was awakened by coughing. And suddenly all hope vanished in those around him and in himself. The actuality of suffering destroyed it without question, along with all memory of former hopes, in Levin, in Kitty and in the sick man himself.
Not even mentioning what he had believed half an hour earlier, as if it were embarrassing even to remember