Levin listened and thought and could not think of anything to say. Nikolai probably felt the same. He began asking his brother about his affairs, and Levin was glad to talk about himself, because he could talk without pretending. He told his brother his plans and activities.
His brother listened but obviously was not interested.
These two men were so dear and close to each other that the slightest movement, the tone of the voice, told them both more than it was possible to say in words.
Now they both had one thought - Nikolai’s illness and closeness to death - which stifled all the rest. But neither of them dared to speak of it, and therefore everything else they said, without expressing the one thing that preoccupied them, was a lie. Never had Levin been so glad when an evening ended and it was time to go to bed. Never with any stranger, on any official visit, had he been so unnatural and false as he had been that day. And his awareness of and remorse for this unnaturalness made him more unnatural still. He wanted to weep over his beloved dying brother, and he had to listen and keep up a conversation about how he was going to live.
As the house was damp and only one room was heated, Levin had his brother sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen.
His brother lay down and may or may not have slept, but, being a sick man, tossed, coughed and grumbled something when he was unable to clear his throat. Sometimes, when his breathing was difficult, he said, ‘Ah, my God!’ Sometimes, when phlegm choked him, he said vexedly, ‘Ah! the devil!’ Levin lay awake for a long time, listening to him. His thoughts were most varied, but the end of all his thoughts was one: death.
Death, the inevitable end of everything, presented itself to him for the first time with irresistible force. And this death, which here, in his beloved brother, moaning in his sleep and calling by habit, without distinction, now on God, now on the devil, was not at all as far off as it had seemed to him before. It was in him, too - he felt it. If not now, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, then in thirty years - did it make any difference? And what this inevitable death was, he not only did not know, he not only had never thought of it, but he could not and dared not think of it.
‘I work, I want to do something, and I’ve forgotten that everything will end, that there is - death.’
He was sitting on his bed in the dark, crouching, hugging his knees and thinking, holding his breath from the strain of it. But the more he strained to think, the clearer it became to him that it was undoubtedly so, that he had actually forgotten, overlooked in his life one small circumstance - that death would come and everything would end, that it was not worth starting anything and that nothing could possibly be done about it. Yes, it was terrible, but it was so.
‘Yet I am still alive. And what am I to do now, what am I to do?’ he said in despair. He lit the candle, got up carefully, went over to the mirror and began to examine his face and hair. Yes, there were grey hairs on his temples. He opened his mouth. The back teeth were beginning to go bad. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, good and strong. But Nikolenka, who was lying there breathing with the remains of his lungs, had also had a healthy body once. And he suddenly remembered how as children they had gone to bed at the same time and had only waited for Fyodor Bogdanych to leave before they started throwing pillows at each other and laughing, laughing irrepressibly, so that even the fear of Fyodor Bogdanych could not stop this overflowing and effervescent consciousness of life’s happiness. ‘And now this crooked and empty chest ... and I, not knowing what will become of me or why ...’
‘Kha! Kha! Ah, the devil! What’s this pottering about, why aren’t you asleep?’ his brother’s voice called to him.
‘I don’t know, just insomnia.’
‘And I slept well, I don’t sweat now. Look, feel the shirt. No sweat?’
Levin felt it, went behind the partition, put out the candle, but did not sleep for a long time. He had just partly clarified the question of how to live, when he was presented with a new, insoluble problem - death.
‘So he’s dying, so he’ll die towards spring, so how can I help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I even forgot there was such a thing.’
XXXII
Levin had long ago observed that when things are made awkward by people’s excessive compliance and submission, they are soon made unbearable by their excessive demandingness and fault-finding. He felt that this was going to happen with his brother. And indeed, brother Nikolai’s meekness did not last long. The very next morning he became irritable and diligently applied himself to finding fault with his brother, touching the most sensitive spots.
