War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [633]
His physical strength and agility in the first period of captivity were such that it seemed he did not understand what fatigue and illness were. Every evening he said as he lay down: “Lord, lay me down like a stone, raise me up like a loaf” in the morning, getting up, he always said, shaking his shoulders in the same way: “Lay down in a curl, got up in a whirl.” And indeed he had only to lie down in order to fall asleep at once like a stone, and he had only to shake himself in order to set about doing something at once, without a second’s delay, the way children, on getting up, take their toys. He knew how to do everything, not very well, but not badly either. He baked, cooked, sewed, planed, cobbled boots. He was always busy and only at night allowed himself to talk, which he liked to do, and to sing. He sang songs not as singers do who know they are being listened to, but as birds do, apparently because it was necessary for him to utter those sounds, as it is necessary to stretch one’s arms or legs; and those sounds were always high, tender, almost feminine, mournful, and his face would be very serious as he sang them.
Having been taken prisoner and grown a beard, he had evidently thrown off everything assumed, alien, soldierly, and involuntarily returned to his former peasant, folkish ways.
“A soldier on leave is an untucked shirt,” he used to say. He talked reluctantly about his time as a soldier, though he did not complain and often repeated that during all his time in the service he had never been beaten once. When he told stories, they were mostly stories from his old, and apparently dear, memories of “Christian,” as he pronounced krestyan, life.8 The proverbs that filled his speech were not those mostly indecent and bold proverbs that soldiers use, but those folk sayings which sound so insignificant taken separately, and which suddenly acquire a profoundly wise significance when spoken aptly.
He often said something completely opposite to what he had said before, but both the one and the other were right. He liked to speak, and spoke well, adorning his speech with endearments and sayings which, it seemed to Pierre, he made up himself; but the main charm of his stories was that, in what he said, the simplest events, sometimes the same that Pierre had seen without noticing them, acquired a character of solemn seemliness. He liked listening to folktales, which one soldier used to tell in the evenings (always the same ones), but most of all he liked listening to stories from real life. He smiled joyfully, listening to such stories, putting a word in and asking questions, tending towards clarifying for himself the seemliness of what he was being told. Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them; but he loved and lived lovingly with everything that life brought his way, especially other people—not any specific people, but those who were there before his eyes. He loved his mutt, his comrades, the French, he loved Pierre, who was his neighbor; but Pierre sensed that, despite all his gentle tenderness towards him (by which he involuntarily gave Pierre’s spiritual life its due), Karataev would not have been upset for a moment to be parted from him. And Pierre was beginning to experience the same feeling towards Karataev.
Platon Karataev was for all the other prisoners the most ordinary of soldiers; they called him “little falcon” or Platosha, teased him good-naturedly, sent him on errands. But for Pierre he remained forever as he had seen him the first night, the unfathomable, round, and eternal embodiment of the spirit of simplicity and truth.
Platon Karataev knew nothing by heart except his prayer. When he began to talk, it seemed he did not know how he was going to finish.