TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 5, Chapter 20[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 20 DEATH The next day the sick man received the sacrament and Extreme Unction. During the ceremony Nikolai Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes fastened on the holy icon that was set out on a card table covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly the parting from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of his intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him without faith, but had grown up because, step by step, the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened his hope by accounts of the marvelous recoveries she had heard of Levin knew all this; and it was agonizingly painful to him to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with difficulty, making the sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin offered prayers, and did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God: `If Thou dost exist, make this man recover' (of course this same thing has been repeated many times), `and Thou wilt save him and me.'
After Extreme Unction the sick man became suddenly much better.
He did not cough once in the course of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty's hand, thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain, and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised himself when his soup was brought, and asked for a cutlet as well. Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken.
`Is he better?' - `Yes, much.' - `It's wonderful.' - `There's nothing wonderful in it.' - `Anyway, he's better,' - they said in a whisper, smiling to one another.
This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a quiet sleep, but he was waked up half an hour later by his cough.
And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself.
The reality of his suffering crushed all hopes in Levin and Kitty, and in the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory even of past hopes.
Without referring to what he had believed in half an hour before, as though ashamed even to recall it, he asked for iodine to inhale in a bottle covered with perforated paper. Levin gave him the bottle, and the same look of passionate hope with which he had taken the sacrament was now fastened on his brother, demanding from him the confirmation of the doctor's words that inhaling iodine worked wonders.
`Isn't Katia here?' he gasped, looking round while Levin reluctantly assented to the doctor's words. `No - then I can say it.... It was for her sake I went through that farce. She's so sweet; but you and I can't deceive ourselves. This is what I believe in,' he said, and, squeezing the bottle in his bony hand, he began breathing over it.
At eight o'clock in the evening Levin and his wife were drinking tea in their room, when Marya Nikolaevna ran in to them breathlessly. She was pale, and her lips were quivering. - `He is dying!' she whispered.
`I'm afraid he will die right away.'
Both of them ran to him. He was sitting raised up, with one elbow on the bed, his long back bent, and his head hanging low.
`How do you feel?' Levin asked in a whisper, after a silence.
`I feel I'm setting off,' Nikolai said with difficulty, but with extreme distinctness, deliberately squeezing the words out of himself.
He did not raise his head, but simply turned his eyes upward, without their reaching his brother's face. `Katia, go away!' he added.
Levin jumped up, and with a peremptory whisper made her go out.
`I'm setting off,' he said again.
`Why do you think so?' said Levin, so as to say something.
`Because I'm setting off,' he repeated, as though he had a liking for the phrase. `It's the end.'
Marya Nikolaevna went up to him.
`You had better lie down; you'd be easier,' she said.
`I shall lie down soon enough,' he pronounced slowly, `when I'm dead,' he said sarcastically, wrathfully. `Well, you can put me down if you like.'
Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but the muscles twitched from time to time on his forehead, as with one thinking deeply and intensely. Levin involuntarily thought with him of what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of all his mental efforts to keep him company, he saw by the expression of that calm, stern face, and by the playing muscle above his brow, that for the dying man there was growing clearer and clearer all that was still as dark as ever for Levin.
`Yes, yes, so,' the dying man articulated slowly at intervals.
`Wait a little.' He was silent again. `Right!' he pronounced all at once reassuringly, as though all were solved for him. `O Lord!' he murmured, and sighed deeply.
Marya Nikolaevna felt his feet. `They're getting cold,' she whispered.
For a long while, a very long while, it seemed to Levin, the sick man lay motionless. But he was still alive, and from time to time he sighed.
