Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [56]
Levin felt that in his soul, in the very bottom of his soul, his brother Nikolai, despite the ugliness of his life, was not more in the wrong than those who despised him. He was not to blame for having been born with an irrepressible character and a mind somehow constrained. But he had always wanted to be good. ‘I’ll tell him everything, I’ll make him tell everything, and I’ll show him that I love him and therefore understand him,’ Levin decided to himself as he drove up, past ten o‘clock, to the hotel indicated as the address.
‘Upstairs, numbers twelve and thirteen,’ the doorman replied to Levin’s inquiry.
‘Is he at home?’
‘Must be.’
The door of No. 12 was half open, and through it, in a strip of light, came thick smoke from bad and weak tobacco and the sound of an unfamiliar voice. But Levin knew at once that his brother was there; he heard his little cough.
As he walked in, the unfamiliar voice was saying:
‘It all depends on how reasonably and conscientiously the affair is conducted.’
Konstantin Levin looked through the door and saw that the speaker was a young man with an enormous shock of hair, wearing a quilted jacket, and that a young, slightly pockmarked woman in a woollen dress without cuffs or collar35 was sitting on the sofa. His brother could not be seen. Konstantin’s heart was painfully wrung at the thought of his brother living among such alien people. No one heard him, and Konstantin, taking off his galoshes, was listening to what the gentleman in the quilted jacket was saying. He spoke about some sort of enterprise.
‘Well, devil take the privileged classes,’ his brother’s voice spoke, coughing. ‘Masha! Get us something for supper and serve some wine, if there’s any left, or else send for some.’
The woman got up, stepped out from behind the partition, and saw Konstantin.
‘Some gentleman’s here, Nikolai Dmitrich,’36 she said.
‘Who does he want?’ Nikolai Levin’s voice said crossly.
‘It’s me,’ replied Konstantin Levin, stepping into the light.
‘Me who?’ Nikolai’s voice repeated still more crossly. He could be heard quickly getting up, snagging on something, and then Levin saw before him in the doorway the figure of his brother, so familiar and yet so striking in its wildness and sickliness, huge, thin, stoop-shouldered, with big, frightened eyes.
He was still thinner than three years ago when Konstantin Levin had last seen him. He was wearing a short frock coat. His arms and broad bones seemed still more huge. His hair had become thinner, the same straight moustache hung over his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and naïvely at the man coming in.
‘Ah, Kostya!’ he said suddenly, recognizing his brother, and his eyes lit up with joy. But in the same second he glanced at the young man and made the convulsive movement with his head and neck that Konstantin knew so well, as if his tie were too tight on him; and a quite different, wild, suffering and cruel expression settled on his emaciated face.
‘I wrote to both you and Sergei Ivanych that I don’t know and don’t wish to know you. What do you, what do the two of you want?’
He was quite different from the way Konstantin had imagined him. The most difficult and worst part of his character, that which made communication with him so hard, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he thought about him; and now, when he saw his face, and especially that convulsive turning of the head, he remembered it all.
‘I don’t want anything from you,’ he replied timidly. ‘I simply came to see you.’
Nikolai was apparently softened by his brother’s timidity. He twitched his lips.
‘Ah, just like that?’ he said. ‘Well, come in, sit down. Want some supper? Masha, bring three portions. No, wait. Do you know who this is?’ he said to his brother, pointing to the gentleman in the sleeveless jacket. ‘This is Mr Kritsky, my friend from way back in Kiev, a very remarkable man. He’s being sought by the police, of course, because he’s not a scoundrel.’
And he looked round, as was his habit, at everyone in the room. Seeing