They all stood up, said good-bye, and left.
When they were gone, it seemed a relief to Ivan Ilyich: there was no lie—it had gone with them—but the pain remained. The same pain, the same fear made it so that nothing was harder, nothing was easier. It was all worse.
Again minute followed minute, hour hour, always the same, and always without end, and always more frightening the inevitable end.
“Yes, send Gerasim,” he replied to Pyotr’s question.
IX
LATE THAT NIGHT his wife returned. She came in on tiptoe, but he heard her: he opened his eyes and hastily closed them. She wanted to send Gerasim away and sit with him herself. He opened his eyes and said:
“No. Go away.”
“Are you suffering very much?”
“It makes no difference.”
“Take some opium.”
He agreed and drank it. She left.
Until about three he lay in tormenting oblivion. It seemed to him that they were pushing him painfully into some narrow and deep black sack, and kept pushing him further, and could not push him through. And this thing, which is terrible for him, is being accomplished with suffering. And he is afraid, and yet he wants to fall through, and he struggles, and he helps. And then suddenly he lost hold and fell, and came to his senses. The same Gerasim is sitting at the foot of the bed, dozing calmly, patiently. And he is lying with his emaciated legs in stockings placed on Gerasim’s shoulders; the same candle with its shade, and the same unceasing pain.
“Go away, Gerasim,” he whispered.
“Never mind, I’ll stay, sir.”
“No, go away.”
He took his legs down, lay sideways on his arm, and felt sorry for himself. He waited only until Gerasim went to the next room, and then stopped holding himself back and wept like a child. He wept over his helplessness, over his terrible loneliness, over the cruelty of people, over the cruelty of God, over the absence of God.
“Why have You done all this? Why have You brought me here? Why, why do You torment me so terribly? …”
He did not expect an answer and wept that there was not and could not be an answer. The pain rose up again, but he did not stir, did not call out. He kept saying to himself: “Well, go on, beat me! But what for? What have I done to You? What for?”
Then he quieted down, not only stopped weeping, but stopped breathing, and became all attention: it was as if he were listening not to a voice that spoke in sounds, but to the voice of his soul, to the course of thoughts arising in him.
“What do you want?” was the first clear idea, expressible in words, that he heard. “What do you want? What do you want?” he repeated to himself. “What? Not to suffer. To live,” he replied.
And again he gave himself entirely to such intense attention that even the pain did not distract him.
“To live? To live how?” asked the voice of his soul.
“Yes, to live as I lived before: nicely, pleasantly.”
“As you lived before, nicely and pleasantly?” asked the voice. And he started to go over in his imagination the best moments of his pleasant life. But—strange thing—all those best moments of his pleasant life seemed now not at all as they had seemed then. All—except for his first memories of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant, which one could live with if it came back. But the man who had experienced that pleasure was no more: it was as if the memory was about someone else.
As soon as that began the result of which was he, the Ivan Ilyich of today, all that had then seemed like joys melted away and turned into something worthless and often vile.
And the further from childhood, the closer to the present, the more worthless and dubious were those joys. It began with law school. There had still been some truly good things there: there had been merriment, there had been friendship, there had been hopes. But in the higher grades those good moments had already become more rare. Then, during the initial time of working for the governor, there had again been good moments: these were his memories of love for a woman. Then it all became confused, and there was still less that was good. And further on still less of the good, and the further, the less.
His marriage … so accidental, and the disenchantment, and the smell of his wife’s breath, and the sensuality, the dissembling! And this deadly service, and these worries about money, and that for a year, and two, and ten, and twenty—and all of it the same. And the further, the deadlier. As if I was going steadily downhill, while imagining I was going up. And so it was. In public opinion I was going uphill, and exactly to that extent life was slipping away from under me … And now that’s it, so die!
But what is this? Why? It can’t be. Can it be that life is so meaningless and vile? And if it is indeed so vile and meaningless, then why die, and die suffering? Something’s not right.
“Maybe I did not live as I should have?” would suddenly come into his head. “But how not, if I did everything one ought to?” he would say to himself and at once drive this sole solution to the whole riddle of life and death away from him as something completely impossible.
“What do you want now, then? To live? To live how? To live as you live in court, when the usher proclaims: ‘Court is in session!’ Court is in session, court is in session,” he repeated to himself. “Here is that court! But I’m not guilty!” he cried out angrily. “What for?” And he stopped weeping and, turning his face to the wall, began to think about one and the same thing: why, what for, all this horror?
But however much he thought, he found no answer. And when it occurred to him, as it often did, that it was all happening because he had not lived right, he at once recalled all the correctness of his life and drove this strange thought away.
X
ANOTHER TWO WEEKS went by. Ivan Ilyich no longer got up from the sofa. He did not want to lie in bed and so he lay on the sofa. And, lying almost always face to the wall, he suffered all alone the same insoluble suffering and thought all alone the same insoluble thought. What is this? Can it be true that it is death? And an inner voice replied: Yes, it’s true. Why these torments? And the voice replied: Just so, for no reason. Beyond and besides that there was nothing.
From the very beginning of his illness, from the time when Ivan Ilyich first went to the doctor, his life had divided into two opposite states of mind, which alternated with each other: now there was despair and the expectation of an incomprehensible and terrible death, now there was hope and the interest-filled process of observing the functioning of his body. Now there hung before his eyes a kidney or an intestine that shirked its duty for a time; now there was only incomprehensible, terrible death, from which there was no escape.
These two states of mind had alternated from the very beginning of the illness; but the further the illness went, the more dubious and fantastic became the considerations of the kidney and the more real the awareness of approaching death.
He needed only to recall what he had been three months ago and what he was now, to recall how steadily he had gone downhill, for any possibility of hope to be destroyed.
In the recent time of that solitude in which he found himself, lying face to the back of the sofa, that solitude in the midst of the populous town and his numerous acquaintances and family—a solitude than which there could be none more total anywhere: not at the bottom of the sea, not under the earth—in the recent time of that dreadful solitude, Ivan Ilyich had lived only on imaginings of the past. One after another, pictures of the past appeared to him. They always began with the nearest time and went back to the most remote, to childhood, and there they stayed. If Ivan Ilyich recalled the stewed prunes he had been given to eat that day, he then recalled the raw, shriveled French prunes of his childhood, their special taste, the abundant saliva when it got as far as the stone, and alongside this memory of taste emerged a whole series of memories from that time: his nanny, his brother, his toys. “Mustn’t think about that … too painful,” Ivan Ilyich said to himself and shifted back to the present. A button on the back of the sofa and the puckered morocco. “Morocco’s expensive, flimsy; there was a quarrel over it. But there was another morocco and another quarrel, when we tore our father’s briefcase and were punished, and mama brought us little pies.” And again it stayed with childhood, and again it was painful for Ivan Ilyich, and he tried to drive it away and think of something else.