Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 20
“No, not the least!” Nikolay answered, vexed at the question. “Tell him to send
me a doctor.”
Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was still in the same condition.
The sense of longing for his death was felt by everyone now at the mere sight of
him, by the waiters and the hotel-keeper and all the people staying in the hotel, and
the doctor and Marya Nikolaevna and Levin and Kitty. The sick man alone did not
express this feeling, but on the contrary was furious at their not getting him doctors,
and went on taking medicine and talking of life. Only at rare moments, when the
opium gave him an instant’s relief from the never-ceasing pain, he would sometimes,
half asleep, utter what was ever more intense in his heart than in all the others: “Oh,
if it were only the end!” or: “When will it be over?”
His sufferings, steadily growing more intense, did their work and prepared him
for death. There was no position in which he was not in pain, there was not a minute
in which he was unconscious of it, not a limb, not a part of his body that did not
ache and cause him agony. Even the memories, the impressions, the thoughts of this
body awakened in him now the same aversion as the body itself. The sight of other
people, their remarks, his own reminiscences, everything was for him a source of
agony. Those about him felt this, and instinctively did not allow themselves to move
freely, to talk, to express their wishes before him. All his life was merged in the one
feeling of suffering and desire to be rid of it.
There was evidently coming over him that revulsion that would make him look
upon death as the goal of his desires, as happiness. Hitherto each individual desire,
aroused by suffering or privation, such as hunger, fatigue, thirst, had been satisfied
by some bodily function giving pleasure. But now no physical craving or suffering
received relief, and the effort to relieve them only caused fresh suffering. And so all
desires were merged in one–the desire to be rid of all his sufferings and their source,
the body. But he had no words to express this desire of deliverance, and so he did
not speak of it, and from habit asked for the satisfaction of desires which could not
now be satisfied. “Turn me over on the other side,” he would say, and immediately
after he would ask to be turned back again as before. “Give me some broth. Take
away the broth. Talk of something: why are you silent?” And directly they began to
talk he would close his eyes, and would show weariness, indifference, and loathing.
On the tenth day from their arrival at the town, Kitty was unwell. She suffered
from headache and sickness, and she could not get up all the morning.
The doctor opined that the indisposition arose from fatigue and excitement, and
prescribed rest.
After dinner, however, Kitty got up and went as usual with her work to the sick
man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled contemptuously when
she said she had been unwell. That day he was continually blowing his nose, and
groaning piteously.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Worse,” he articulated with difficulty. “In pain!”
“In pain, where?”
“Everywhere.”
466