The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Death of Iván Ílich/Chapter 9
IX.
His wife returned late in the night. She entered on tiptoe, but he heard her. He opened his eyes and hastened to shut them again. She wanted to send Gerásim away and to sit up with him. He opened his eyes, and said:
"No, go."
"Do you suffer very much?"
"It makes no difference."
"Take some opium."
He consented, and took some. She went away.
Until about three o'clock he was in agonizing oblivion. It seemed to him that he with his pain was being shoved somewhere into a narrow, black, and deep bag, and shoved farther and farther, without coming out of it. And this terrible act was accompanied by suffering. And he was afraid, and wanted to go through the bag, and fought, and helped along. And suddenly he tore away, and fell, and woke up.
The same Gerásim was sitting at his feet on the bed, drowsing calmly and patiently. But Iván Ilích was lying, his emaciated, stockinged feet resting on Gerásim's shoulders, and there was the same candle with the shade, and the same uninterrupted pain.
"Go away, Gerásim," he whispered.
"Never mind, sir, I will sit up."
"No, go."
He took off his feet, and lay down sidewise on his arm and began to feel pity for himself. He just waited for Gerásim to go to the adjoining room, and no longer restrained himself, but burst out into tears, like a child. He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the cruelty of men, the cruelty of God, the absence of God.
"Why hast Thou done all this? Why didst Thou bring me to this? Why, why dost Thou torment me so terribly?"
He did not expect any answer, and was weeping because there was no answer and could be none. The pain rose again, but he did not stir, did not call. He said to himself:
"Go on, strike me! But for what? What have I done to Thee? For what?"
Then he grew silent and stopped not only weeping, but also breathing, and became all attention: it was as though he listened, not to the voice which spoke with sounds, but to the voice of his soul, to the train of thoughts which rose in him.
"What do you want?" was the first clear expression, capable of being uttered in words, which he heard.
"What do you want? What do you want?" he repeated to himself. "What? Not to suffer. To live!" he answered.
And again he abandoned himself wholly to attention, to such tense listening, that his pain even did not distract him.
"To live? To live how?" asked the voice of his soul.
"To live as I used to live before, well,—pleasantly."
"As you lived before, well and pleasantly?" asked a voice. And he began in imagination to pass in review the best minutes of his pleasant life. But, strange to say, all these best minutes of his pleasant life now seemed to him to be different from what they had seemed to be before,—all of them, except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really agreeable, with which it would be possible to live if life should return; but the man who had experienced those pleasant sensations was no more; it was like a recollection of somebody else.
As soon as there began that which resulted in the present man, in Iván Ilích, everything which then had appeared as joys now melted in his sight and changed into something insignificant and even abominable.
And the farther away from childhood and nearer to the present, the more insignificant and doubtful were the joys. This began with the law school. There had been there something truly good; there had been there merriment, friendship, hopes. But in the upper classes these good minutes had happened more rarely; those were the recollections of the love of woman. Then all got mixed, and there was still less of what was good. Farther on there was still less of what was good, and the farther, the less.
"The marriage—so sudden, and the disenchantment, and the odour from my wife's mouth, and sensuality, and hypocrisy! And this dead service, and these cares about the money, and thus passed a year, and two, and ten, and twenty,—all the time the same. The farther, the deader. It was as though I were going evenly down-hill, imagining that I was going up-hill. And so it was. In public opinion I went up-hill,—and just in that proportion did my life vanish under me.—And now it is all done,—go and die!
"So what is this? Why? Impossible. It cannot be that life should be so senseless and so abominable! And if it has indeed been so abominable and meaningless, what sense is there in dying, and in dying with suffering? Something is wrong.
"Perhaps I did not live the proper way," it suddenly occurred to him. "But how can that be, since I did everything that was demanded of me?" he said to himself, and immediately he repelled from himself this only solution of the whole enigma of life and of death, as something totally impossible.
"What do you want now? To live? To live how? To live as you live in the court, when the bailiff proclaims, 'The court is coming!' The court is coming, the court is coming!" he repeated to himself. "Here is the court! But I am not guilty!" he shouted in anger. "For what?" And he stopped weeping and, turning his face to the wall, began to think of nothing but this one thing: "Why, for what is all this terror?"
But, no matter how much he thought, he found no answer. And when the thought occurred to him, and it occurred to him often, that all this was due to the fact that he had not lived in the proper way, he immediately recalled all the regularity of his life, and dispelled this strange thought.