War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [692]
Karataev looked at Pierre with his kind, round eyes, now veiled with tears, and was evidently calling him over, wanting to say something. But Pierre was too afraid for himself. He pretended that he had not seen his look and hurriedly walked away.
When the prisoners started off again, Pierre looked back. Karataev was sitting at the edge of the road, by the birch, and two Frenchmen were saying something over him. Pierre did not look any longer. He went limping up the hill.
From behind, where Karataev had been sitting, came the sound of a shot. Pierre heard the shot clearly, but the moment he heard it, he recalled that he had not finished the calculation, begun before the marshal passed, of how many marches there remained to Smolensk. And he started to count. Two French soldiers, one of them holding a smoking gun in his hand, ran past Pierre. Both were pale, and the expression of their faces—one of them glanced timidly at Pierre—had something in it similar to what he had seen in the young soldier at the execution. Pierre looked at the soldier and remembered how, two days before, this soldier had burned his shirt while drying it over the campfire, and how everybody had laughed at him.
A dog began to howl behind, in the place where Karataev had been sitting. “What a fool, what’s it howling about?” thought Pierre.
Like him, his soldier comrades, walking beside Pierre, did not turn to look at the place from which the shot had been heard and then the howling of the dog; but there was a stern look on all their faces.
XV
The depot, and the prisoners, and the marshal’s train stopped in the village of Shamshevo. They all crowded in a mass by the campfires. Pierre went up to the fire, ate some roasted horsemeat, lay down with his back to the fire, and fell asleep at once. He slept again the same sleep as he had slept in Mozhaisk after the battle of Borodino.
Again the events of reality combined with dreams, and again someone, he himself or some other person, spoke thoughts to him, and even the same thoughts that had been spoken to him in Mozhaisk.
“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one’s suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.”
“Karataev!” Pierre recalled.
And suddenly a long-forgotten, meek old teacher, who had taught him geography in Switzerland, emerged in Pierre’s mind as if alive. “Wait!” said the old man. And he showed Pierre a globe. This globe was a living, wavering ball of no dimensions. The entire surface of the ball consisted of drops tightly packed together. And these drops all moved and shifted, and now merged from several into one, now divided from one into many. Each drop strove to spread and take up the most space, but the others, striving to do the same, pressed it, sometimes destroying, sometimes merging with it.
“This is life,” said the old teacher.
“How simple and clear it is,” thought Pierre. “How could I not have known before?”
“In the center is God, and each drop strives to expand in order to reflect Him in the greatest measure. It grows, merges, and shrinks, and is obliterated on the surface, goes into the depths, and again floats up. Here he is, Karataev, see, he spread and vanished. Vous avez compris, mon enfant?”*731 said the teacher.
“Vous avez compris, sacré nom?”†732 shouted the voice, and Pierre woke up.
He raised himself and sat up. A Frenchman was squatting by the fire, having just shoved a Russian soldier aside, and was roasting some meat on a ramrod. His sleeves were rolled up, and his sinewy, hairy,