CHAPTER 11

AS THE HOURS and then days passed, Levin found he could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to be with the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see or distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelled the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. While Kitty directed her full attention and sympathy to the dying man, and Socrates anxiously circumnavigated the room, Levin’s mind wandered, like a landowner traveling the acres of his life. He surveyed all that was pleasurable, like his pit-mining operation and his beloved Kitty, and he surveyed all those tracts causing him concern: the mysterious, wormlike mechanical monsters rampaging the countryside; the circuitry adjustment protocol, which seemed to Levin an inexplicable and unjustified exercise of state power against the citizenry; and worst of all, the unspeakable illness eating his dear brother alive.

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.