“Well, when was that?” Ivan Ilyich would ask with vexation. “Once at Pyotr Ivanovich’s.”
“And last night with Shebek.”
“Anyway I couldn’t sleep from pain.”
“Whatever the reasons, you’ll never get well like this, and you’re tormenting us.”
Praskovya Fyodorovna’s external attitude to her husband’s illness, which she voiced to others and to him, was that Ivan Ilyich himself was to blame for the illness and that this whole illness was a new unpleasantness he was causing his wife. Ivan Ilyich felt that this came from her involuntarily, but that did not make it easier for him.
In court Ivan Ilyich noticed or thought he noticed the same strange attitude towards himself: now it seemed to him that he was being eyed like someone who would soon have to vacate his post; now his colleagues suddenly began to joke in friendly fashion about his anxieties, as if that terrible and dreadful unheard-of thing that was sitting in him and ceaselessly gnawing at him and inexorably drawing him somewhere was a most pleasant subject for jokes. Schwartz especially irritated him with his playfulness, vitality, and comme il faut–ishness, which reminded Ivan Ilyich of himself ten years ago.
Friends would come for a game, sit down. They dealt, flexing the new cards, sorting diamonds with diamonds, seven of them. His partner bid no trump and opened with two diamonds. What more could one wish for? It should all go cheerfully, briskly—a grand slam. And suddenly Ivan Ilyich feels that gnawing pain, that taste in his mouth, and it seems wild to him that at the same time he should rejoice at a grand slam.
He looks at Mikhail Mikhailovich, his partner, striking the table with a sanguine hand and refraining, politely and indulgently, from picking up the tricks, but moving them towards Ivan Ilyich, so as to give him the pleasure of collecting them without taking the trouble to reach out his hand. “Does he think I’m so weak that I can’t reach that far?” Ivan Ilyich thinks, forgets about the trumps and double trumps his own, and loses the slam by three tricks, and most terrible of all is that he sees how Mikhail Mikhailovich suffers and it makes no difference to him. And it is terrible to think why it makes no difference to him.
Everyone sees that it is hard for him, and they say: “We can quit if you’re tired. Get some rest.” Rest? No, he is not the least bit tired, and they play out the rubber. Everyone is gloomy and silent. Ivan Ilyich feels that it is he who has cast this gloom over them, and he cannot disperse it. They eat supper and go home, and Ivan Ilyich is left alone with the consciousness that his life is poisoned for him and poisons life for others, and that this poison is not weakening but is permeating his whole being more and more.
And with this consciousness, along with physical pain, along with terror, he had to go to bed and often not sleep from pain for the better part of the night. And the next morning he had to get up, dress, go to court, talk, write, and if he did not go, stay at home with the same twenty-four hours in a day, every one of which was torture. And he had to live alone on the brink of disaster like that, without a single human being who could understand and pity him.
V
SO A MONTH went by, then two. Before the New Year his brother-in-law came to their town and stayed with them. Ivan Ilyich was in court. Praskovya Fyodorovna had gone shopping. Going into his study, he found his brother-in-law there, a healthy, sanguine fellow, unpacking his suitcase. On hearing Ivan Ilyich’s footsteps, he raised his head and looked at him silently for a moment. That look revealed everything to Ivan Ilyich. The brother-in-law opened his mouth to gasp, but checked himself. This movement confirmed everything.
“What, have I changed?”
“Yes … there’s a change.”
And much as he tried after that to bring his brother-in-law around to talking about his external appearance, the brother-in-law would say nothing. Praskovya Fyodorovna came home, and the brother-in-law went to her. Ivan Ilyich locked the door and started looking in the mirror—full face, then profile. He picked up his portrait with his wife and compared it with what he saw in the mirror. The change was enormous. Then he bared his arms to the elbow, looked, pulled his sleeves down, sat on the ottoman, and turned darker than night.
“Don’t, don’t,” he said to himself, jumped to his feet, went to the desk, opened a brief, started reading it, but could not. He unlocked the door, went to the reception room. The door to the drawing room was shut. He went up to it on tiptoe and started listening.
“No, you’re exaggerating,” Praskovya Fyodorovna was saying.
“How ‘exaggerating’? Don’t you see—he’s a dead man, look in his eyes. No light. What’s wrong with him?”
“Nobody knows. Nikolaev” (this was another doctor) “said something, but I don’t know. Leshchetitsky” (this was the famous doctor) “said on the contrary …”
Ivan Ilyich stepped away, went to his room, lay down, and began to think: “A kidney, a floating kidney.” He remembered all that the doctors had told him, how it had detached itself, and how it floats. By an effort of imagination he tried to catch this kidney and stop it, fasten it down; so little was needed, it seemed to him. “No, I’ll go to see Pyotr Ivanovich again.” (This was the friend who had the doctor friend.) He rang the bell, ordered the horse harnessed, and made ready to go.
“Where are you off to, Jean?” his wife asked with an especially sad and unusually kind expression.
This unusual kindness angered him. He gave her a dark look.
“I must go to see Pyotr Ivanovich.”
He went to see his friend who had the doctor friend. And with him to the doctor. He found him in and had a long conversation with him.
On examining the anatomical and physiological details of what, in the doctor’s opinion, was going on inside him, he understood everything.
There was a little thing, a tiny little thing, in the appendix. This could all be put right. Strengthen the energy of one organ, weaken the functioning of another, absorption would take place, and all would be put right. He was a little late for dinner. He dined, talked cheerfully, but for a long while could not go and get busy. Finally he went to his study and at once sat down to work. He read briefs, worked, but the awareness that he had put off an important, intimate matter, which he would take up once he had finished, never left him. When he finished work, he remembered that this intimate matter was the thought of his appendix. But he did not give in to it, he went to the drawing room for tea. There were guests; they talked, played the piano, sang; there was the examining magistrate, their daughter’s desired fiancé. Ivan Ilyich spent the evening, as Praskovya Fyodorovna remarked, more cheerfully than others, but never for a moment did he forget that he had put off the important thought of his appendix. At eleven o’clock he said good-night and went to his room. He had slept alone since the time of his illness, in a small room by his study. He went there, undressed, took a novel by Zola but did not read it, and thought. In his imagination the desired mending of the appendix was taking place. Absorption, ejection, restoration of the correct functioning. “Yes, that’s all so,” he said to himself. “One need only assist nature.” He remembered about his medicine, got up, took it, and lay on his back, waiting to feel the beneficial effect of the medicine and how it killed the pain. “Just take it regularly and avoid harmful influences; even now I feel a little better, a lot better.” He began to touch his side—it did not hurt. “Yes, I don’t feel it, truly, it’s already much better.” He put out the candle and lay on his side … The appendix was mending, absorbing. Suddenly he felt the old familiar, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn, quiet, serious. In his mouth the same familiar vileness. His heart shrank, his head clouded. “My God, my God!” he said. “Again, again, and it will never stop.” And suddenly he pictured the matter from an entirely different side. “The appendix! The kidney!” he said to himself. “This is not a matter of the appendix or the kidney, but of life and … death. Yes, there was life, and now it is going, going, and I cannot hold it back. Yes, why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everybody except me that I’m dying and it is only a question of the number of weeks, days—right now, maybe. Once there was light, now there’s darkness. Once I was here, and now I’ll be there! Where?” Cold came over him, his breath stopped. He heard only the pounding of his heart.