Leo Tolstoy - Leo Tolstoy - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 4)

His brother dressed with particular care—a thing he never used to do—combed his scanty, lank hair, and, smiling, went upstairs.

He was in the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin often remembered him in childhood. He even referred to Sergey Ivanovitch without rancor. When he saw Agafea Mihalovna, he made jokes with her and asked after the old servants. The news of the death of Parfen Denisitch made a painful impression on him. A look of fear crossed his face, but he regained his serenity immediately.

“Of course he was quite old,” he said, and changed the subject. “Well, I’ll spend a month or two with you, and then I’m off to Moscow. Do you know, Myakov has promised me a place there, and I’m going into the service. Now I’m going to arrange my life quite differently,” he went on. “You know I got rid of that woman.”

“Marya Nikolaevna? Why, what for?”

“Oh, she was a horrid woman! She caused me all sorts of worries.” But he did not say what the annoyances were. He could not say that he had cast off Marya Nikolaevna because the tea was weak, and, above all, because she would look after him, as though he were an invalid.

“Besides, I want to turn over a new leaf completely now. I’ve done silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money’s the last consideration; I don’t regret it. So long as there’s health, and my health, thank God, is quite restored.”

Levin listened and racked his brains, but could think of nothing to say. Nikolay probably felt the same; he began questioning his brother about his affairs; and Levin was glad to talk about himself, because then he could speak without hypocrisy. He told his brother of his plans and his doings.

His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested by it.

These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in words.

Both of them now had only one thought—the illness of Nikolay and the nearness of his death—which stifled all else. But neither of them dared to speak of it, and so whatever they said— not uttering the one thought that filled their minds—was all falsehood. Never had Levin been so glad when the evening was over and it was time to go to bed. Never with any outside person, never on any official visit had he been so unnatural and false as he was that evening. And the consciousness of this unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it, made him even more unnatural. He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly loved brother, and he had to listen and keep on talking of how he meant to live.

As the house was damp, and only one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen.

His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep, tossed about like a sick man, coughed, and when he could not get his throat clear, mumbled something. Sometimes when his breathing was painful, he said, “Oh, my God!” Sometimes when he was choking he muttered angrily, “Ah, the devil!” Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him. His thoughts were of the most various, but the end of all his thoughts was the same— death. Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which was here in this loved brother, groaning half asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself too, he felt that. If not today, tomorrow, if not tomorrow, in thirty years, wasn’t it all the same! And what was this inevitable death—he did not know, had never thought about it, and what was more, had not the power, had not the courage to think about it.

“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten—death.”

He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact—that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so.

“But I am alive still. Now what’s to be done? what’s to be done?” he said in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously and went to the looking-glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was left of lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. “And now that bent, hollow chest…and I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore…”

“K…ha! K…ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why don’t you go to sleep?” his brother’s voice called to him.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sleepy.”

“I have had a good sleep, I’m not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my shirt; it’s not wet, is it?”

Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question presented itself—death.

“Why, he’s dying—yes, he’ll die in the spring, and how help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I’d even forgotten that it was at all.”

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Levin had long before made the observation that when one is uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their touchiness and irritability. He felt that this was how it would be with his brother. And his brother Nikolay’s gentleness did in fact not last out for long. The very next morning he began to be irritable, and seemed doing his best to find fault with his brother, attacking him on his tenderest points.

Levin felt himself to blame, and could not set things right. He felt that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it is called, from the heart—that is to say, had said only just what they were thinking and feeling—they would simply have looked into each other’s faces, and Konstantin could only have said, “You’re dying, you’re dying!” and Nikolay could only have answered, “I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” And they could have said nothing more, if they had said only what was in their hearts. But life like that was impossible, and so Konstantin tried to do what he had been trying to do all his life, and never could learn to do, though, as far as he could observe, many people knew so well how to do it, and without it there was no living at all. He tried to say what he was not thinking, but he felt continually that it had a ring of falsehood, that his brother detected him in it, and was exasperated at it.

The third day Nikolay induced his brother to explain his plan to him again, and began not merely attacking it, but intentionally confounding it with communism.

“You’ve simply borrowed an idea that’s not your own, but you’ve distorted it, and are trying to apply it where it’s not applicable.”

“But I tell you it’s nothing to do with it. They deny the justice of property, of capital, of inheritance, while I do not deny this chief stimulus.” (Levin felt disgusted himself at using such expressions, but ever since he had been engrossed by his work, he had unconsciously come more and more frequently to use words not Russian.) “All I want is to regulate labor.”