It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, how those long waves of undulating flesh were appearing and disappearing, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. To be in the sickroom was agony to Levin; not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.
But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the roiling flesh of the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor, and set Tatiana and Socrates and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub, as slow, crossed-wire Karnak was quite useless in this regard. She herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sickroom, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillowcases, towels, and shirts.
The sick man, though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was not angry, but only abashed, and on the whole, as it were, interested in what she was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor to whom Kitty had sent him, and putting back on his layers of prophylactic gear, Levin, on opening the door, came upon the sick man at the instant when, by Kitty’s directions, they were changing his linen. The long, white ridge of his spine, with the huge, prominent shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was bare, and covered in a rough constellation of black and greenish scabs; Marya Nikolaevna and the waiter were struggling with the sleeve of the nightshirt, and could not get the long, limp arm into it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door after Levin, was not looking that way, but the sick man groaned, and she moved rapidly toward him.
“Make haste,” she said.
“Oh, don’t you come,” said the sick man angrily. “I’ll do it myself…”
“What say?” queried Marya Nikolaevna. But Kitty heard and saw he was ashamed and uncomfortable at being naked before her.
“I’m not looking, I’m not looking!” she said, putting the arm in. “Marya Nikolaevna, you come to this side, you do it,” she added.
Levin found a new doctor, not the one who had been attending Nikolai Levin, as the patient was dissatisfied with him. With Socrates and Tatiana secreted away in Levin and Kitty’s room, the new doctor came and sounded the patient; he consulted his II/Prognosis/M4, prescribed medicine, and with extreme minuteness explained first how to take the medicine and then what diet was to be kept to. He advised eggs, raw or hardly cooked, and seltzer water, with warm milk at a certain temperature.
“But what is wrong with him?” asked Levin, wringing his hands.
“It is unquestionably a unique case,” the doctor began, glancing warily at Nikolai’s stomach, where a grotesque convexity was even then fighting upward, like a frog squirming within a mud bank. “I must tell you, however, that as to the nature of his condition, I have not the slightest idea.”
When the doctor and his II/Prognosis/M4 had gone away, the sick man said something to his brother, of which Levin could distinguish only the last words: “Your Katya.” By the expression with which he gazed at her, Levin saw that he was praising her.
“I’m much better already,” he said. “Why, with you I would have gotten well long ago. How nice it is!” he took her hand and drew it toward his lips, but as though afraid she would dislike such contact, he changed his mind, let it go, and only stroked it. Kitty took his hand in both of hers and pressed it.
“Now turn me over on the left side and go to bed,” he said.
CHAPTER 12
THE NEXT DAY the sick man received the sacrament and extreme function from a priest, who stood, with his cross raised before him, a precautionary three feet away from the sickbed. During the ceremony Nikolai Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, rotating in opposite directions from each other, tried but failed to fasten on the holy image that was set out on a card table covered with a colored napkin. For Levin it was agonizingly painful to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated body, wasted and covered in its pattern of sores, making the sign of the cross on his tense, pockedmarked brow, and the prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which could not feel consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover” (of course this same thing has been repeated many times), “and Thou wilt save him and me.” When the priest had gone, Socrates came forth from hiding and Levin loaded his Third Bay with the same hopeful prayer, playing it over and over again.
After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did not cough once in the course of an hour, and no fresh turgescence troubled his midsection. He 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 heated in a primitive I/Warmer/1, 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. Even Karnak emitted a harsh, happy garble, pinpricks of hopeful orange registering in the mud brown of his eyebank.
“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 woken up half an hour later by a violent, wracking cough, accompanied by the abrupt return of the flesh-bulging phenomenon, extending this time from his stomach all along the length of his frame, from his neck down to his thighs. 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.
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 this minute.”