‘Ugh! Ow! Ouch!’ the Tatar grunted, and then with a sudden upward jerk of his broad, swarthy, sunburnt face he bared his white teeth and started writhing convulsively, his cries building up into one long ringing, piercing scream. On the other table, which had a lot of people standing round it, a big, well-built man lay supine with his head flung back. There was something about the colour of the curls and the shape of the head that seemed strangely familiar to Prince Andrey. Several of the dressers were holding him tight and bearing down on his chest. One of his big chubby white legs was constantly on the move, jerking convulsively all over the place. This man was a shuddering mass, sobbing and choking. Two doctors, one of them pale and trembling, were working silently on the other, gory leg. The doctor in spectacles finished dealing with the Tatar, who soon had a coat thrown round him, and came over to Prince Andrey, wiping his hands.
He took one glance at his face and quickly turned away.
‘Don’t just stand there. Get him undressed!’ he roared at the dresser. His earliest, remotest recollections of childhood came back to Prince Andrey as the dresser, with his sleeves rolled-up, moved quickly to undo his buttons and take off his clothes. The doctor bent down over the wound, probed it, and gave a deep sigh. Then he signalled to somebody. And the terrible agony in his stomach made Prince Andrey lose consciousness. When he came round, the broken splinters of his thigh-bone had been removed, the bits of torn flesh cut away, and the wound bandaged. Water was sprinkled on his face. Just as Prince Andrey opened his eyes the doctor bent over him, kissed him on the lips without saying anything, and hurried away.
After all the pain he had endured Prince Andrey now felt blissfully at peace; he had not felt like this for a very long time. The nicest and happiest moments of his life, especially his earliest childhood, when he had been undressed and put to bed, and his nurse had sung lullabies over him, and he had burrowed down under the pillows feeling happy just to be alive, floated through his imagination, and instead of seeming like past events they seemed like the here and now.
The other doctors were still working on the wounded man whose head had struck Prince Andrey as somehow familiar; they were lifting him now and trying to calm him down.
‘Show me . . . Oh! Ooh! . . . Oooh!’ The man was scared stiff, moaning in agony and racked with sobs. These moaning sounds made Prince Andrey feel like crying too. Whether it was because he was dying an inglorious death, or because he was sorry to let go of life, or because of the memories of his lost childhood, or because he was in pain, and many others were too, and this man was moaning so pathetically, he wanted to cry, to break down like a child in tears of innocence and something near to happiness.
They showed the wounded man his amputated leg, still wearing its boot and covered with coagulated blood.
‘Oh! Oo-ooh!’ He was sobbing like a woman. The doctor who had been standing beside him, blocking the view, now moved away.
‘My God! What’s all this? What’s
He knew this wreck of a man who was moaning so pathetically, the poor devil who had just had his leg off: it was Anatole Kuragin. It was Anatole who was being propped up and encouraged to have a drink of water, though his trembling, swollen lips could not get a hold on the rim of the glass. Anatole took a deep breath, gagging and sobbing. ‘Yes, it’s him. Yes, and that man is somehow connected with me, closely and painfully connected,’ thought Prince Andrey, with no clear grasp of what he was looking at. ‘What kind of contact is there between that man and my childhood, my life?’ he wondered, and could find no answer. And suddenly another unexpected memory from that childhood world of innocence and love flashed through his mind. He remembered Natasha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and slender arms, and her startled, happy face, so eager for ecstatic pleasure, and in his heart he felt a pang of love and tenderness stronger and deeper than ever before. Now he recalled the point of contact between him and this man who was peering vaguely across at him through tears welling up in his swollen eyes. Everything came back to him, and his heart filled with a blissful surge of passionate pity and love for this man.
It was all too much for Prince Andrey; he broke down in tears of love and tenderness for his fellow men, himself, his own silly misdoings and everybody else’s. ‘Sympathy and love, for our brothers, those who love us and those who hate us, for our enemies. Yes, the kind of that love God preached on earth, that Marie told me about and I could not understand – that’s why I was so sorry to let go of life, that’s what would have been left for me if I had lived. But now it’s too late. I know it is.’
CHAPTER 38
