War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [700]
After she felt herself deserted by Princess Marya and solitary in her grief, Natasha spent most of her time alone in her room, sitting with her legs tucked up at the corner of the sofa, and, while tearing or kneading something with her thin, tense fingers, stared with an intent, fixed gaze at whatever her eyes rested on. The solitude exhausted her, tormented her; but it was necessary for her. The moment someone came in, she quickly got up, changed her position and the expression of her gaze, and took up a book or some sewing, waiting with obvious impatience for whoever had troubled her to leave.
It kept seeming to her that she was just on the point of understanding, of penetrating, that terrible, overwhelming question at which her inner gaze was directed.
At the end of December, Natasha, in a black woollen dress, her braid carelessly done up in a knot, thin and pale, was sitting with her legs tucked up at the corner of the sofa, tensely crumpling and smoothing out the ends of her sash, and looking at a corner of the door.
She was looking there, where he had gone, to the other side of life. And that side of life, of which she had never thought before, which before had seemed so far off and unbelievable, was now closer and dearer, more comprehensible, to her than this side of life, where everything was either emptiness and ruin, or suffering and offense.
She was looking there, where she knew he was; but she could not see him otherwise than as he had been here. She saw him again as he had been in Mytishchi, at the Trinity, in Yaroslavl.
She saw his face, heard his voice, and repeated his words and the words she had said to him, and sometimes she invented new words for herself and for him, which might have been said then.
Here he is lying in an armchair in his velvet coat, his head propped on his thin, pale hand. His chest is terribly sunken, and his shoulders are hunched. His lips are firmly compressed, his eyes glitter, and a wrinkle springs up and then disappears on his pale forehead. One of his legs trembles rapidly, barely noticeably. Natasha knows that he is struggling with tormenting pain. “What is this pain? Why pain? What is he feeling? How it hurts him!” thinks Natasha. He noticed her attention, raised his eyes, and, without smiling, began to speak.
“One thing is terrible,” he had said, “it is to bind yourself forever to a suffering man. That is eternal torment.” And he had looked at her—Natasha could see it now—with a searching gaze. Natasha, as always, had answered then before she had time to think of what answer she would give: “It cannot go on like this, it won’t be, you’ll get well—completely.”
She now saw him anew and lived through all she had felt then. She remembered his prolonged, sad, stern gaze at those words, and understood the meaning of the reproach and despair in that prolonged gaze.
“I agreed,” Natasha now said to herself, “that it would be terrible if he was left suffering always. I said it then only because it would be terrible for him, but he understood it differently. He thought it would be terrible for me. He still wanted to live then—he was afraid of death. And I said it to him so crudely, so stupidly then. I didn’t think that. I thought quite differently. If I had said what I thought, I would have said: let him be dying, dying all the time before my eyes, I would still be happy compared to what I am now. Now…There’s nothing, nobody. Did he know that? No. He didn’t know, and he’ll never know. And now it will never, never be possible to put it right.” And again he was saying the same words to her, but now, in her imagination, Natasha answered him differently. She stopped him and said: “Terrible for you, but not for me. You know that for me there is nothing in life without you, and to suffer with you is the best happiness for me.” And he took her hand and pressed it as he had pressed it on that terrible evening, four days before his death. And in her imagination she said other tender, loving things to him, which she might have said then, and which she