4
Everyone was well. You could hardly call it illness when Ivan Ilyich occasionally complained of a strange taste in his mouth and something that felt not quite right on the left side of his stomach.
But the mild discomfort began to increase, turning into something that was not yet quite a pain but an awareness of a permanent heaviness in his side and a poor state of mind. This poor state of mind grew stronger and stronger, beginning to spoil the light, pleasant, and proper way of life just established in the Golovin household. Husband and wife began quarreling more and more often, and soon the lightness and pleasantness of their life fell away and even propriety was barely maintained. Once again the arguments grew frequent. Once again only a few islands remained, and not many of those either, where husband and wife could still come to terms without an explosion.
And now Praskovya Feodorovna could say with some justification that her husband had a difficult character. With habitual exaggeration she maintained that he’d always had a horrible temper and she certainly needed her sweet nature to put up with it for twenty years. The truth was that now he started the quarrels. He always began carping just before dinner, often exactly when he started eating, during the soup course. He would notice a chipped dish, or something wrong with the food, or his son putting his elbows on the table, or his daughter’s hairstyle. And he blamed Praskovya Feodorovna for everything. At first she objected and said unkind things back, but once or twice he became so enraged as dinner began, she realized it must be a constitutional disorder prompted by food and restrained herself, not answering back but only hurrying to get through the meal. Praskovya Feodorovna considered her self-restraint remarkably virtuous. Having decided her husband’s appalling character made her life a misery, she grew sorry for herself. And the more she pitied herself, the more she loathed her husband. She started wishing he would die, but could not wish for that because then there would be no salary. And that made him even more irritating. She thought she was dreadfully unfortunate precisely because even his death could not save her. She was irritable, she concealed her irritation, and her hidden irritation aggravated his irritation.
After one scene when Ivan Ilyich was particularly unfair, he admitted in the subsequent explanations that he certainly was irritable but that was because of his illness. She told him that if he was ill then he should get treatment and insisted on his going to see an eminent doctor.
He went. Everything was as he expected; everything was done in the way it is always done. The waiting, and the pomp on entry, a charade played out by the doctor and familiar to him because it was the same as he recognized in himself in court, the tapping, and the listening, the questions requiring preordained and self-evidently futile replies, and the meaningful look which proclaimed, come, come sir, just rely on us and we’ll sort it all out—we know perfectly well how to settle matters, one way will do for all, whoever they may be. It was all exactly as it was in court. Just as he put on a show in court for the man on trial, so the doctor put on a show for him.
The doctor said that such and such indicates that you have this and that inside, but if this isn’t confirmed by the analysis of so-and-so and so-and-so, then we must assume you to have such and such and this and that. If, however, we assume so-and-so then . . . and so on. For Ivan Ilyich only one question was important: was his condition dangerous or not? But the doctor ignored this irrelevant question. From the doctor’s point of view it was an idle speculation not requiring resolution: the only thing was to weigh up the probabilities of a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or a disease of the blind gut.24 It was not Ivan Ilyich’s life that was in question, but the rival merits of the floating kidney and blind gut. And under Ivan Ilyich’s eyes the doctor brilliantly found in favor of the floating kidney, with the one reservation that the investigation of the urine might provide new evidence, which would justify reassessment. All this was exactly what Ivan Ilyich had done himself a thousand times, dealing with defendants in this dazzling manner. The doctor made his summing-up just as brilliantly, looking over his spectacles triumphantly and even gaily at the accused. From the doctor’s summing-up Ivan Ilyich drew the conclusion that things were bad. For the doctor and quite probably for everyone, it didn’t matter a damn, but for him it was bad. And this conclusion struck Ivan Ilyich painfully, arousing in him a feeling of intense pity for himself and great bitterness against the doctor, who was so indifferent to a question of such importance.
But he said nothing, stood up, put his money on the desk, and said with a sigh, “I imagine we sick people often ask you irrelevant questions. . . . By and large, is it a dangerous illness or not?”
With one eye the doctor looked at him sternly through his spectacles, as though to say: prisoner in the dock, if you do not confine yourself to the questions put to you, I will be obliged to require your removal from the court.
“I have already told you what I deem necessary and appropriate,” said the doctor. “Further evidence will come from the analysis.” And the doctor bowed.
Ivan Ilyich went out slowly, drearily took his place in the sleigh, and drove home. For the entire journey he went over everything the doctor had said, incessantly trying to translate all those tangled, obscure technical terms into plain language and to decipher from them the answer to his question: it is bad—but is it very bad for me or not so bad yet? And it seemed to him that the implication of everything the doctor had said was that it was very bad. Everything in the streets seemed sad to Ivan Ilyich. The coachmen were sad, the houses were sad, the passersby and the shops were sad. And that dull, gnawing pain that never eased seemed to take on a different, more serious significance from the doctor’s obscure pronouncements. Ivan Ilyich attended to it with a new feeling of heaviness.
He drove home to tell his wife. She was going to hear him out, but in the middle of his account his daughter came in with her hat on: she was about to go out with her mother. With an effort she sat down to listen to this tedious stuff, could not contain herself for long, and her mother stopped listening.
“Well, I’m delighted,” said Praskovya Feodorovna. “Now mind you take the medicine properly. Give me the prescription and I’ll send Gerasim to the chemist.” And she went to put her coat on.
He had not paused for breath while she was in the room, and sighed heavily when she left.
“Well, who knows,” he said. “Maybe it really is nothing much.”
He began taking the medicines and followed the doctor’s directions, which changed after the urine analysis. But then, immediately, there was some sort of muddle over the analysis and consequent instructions. The doctor could not be reached, and it turned out that Ivan Ilyich was not doing what the doctor had ordered. Either the doctor had forgotten something, or lied about something, or concealed something from him.
Nevertheless, Ivan Ilyich began following the instructions meticulously, and even found some comfort in this at first.
After the visit to the doctor Ivan Ilyich’s main occupation became the precise fulfillment of his recommendations about hygiene, taking his medicine, and the attentive observation of his pain and all his bodily functions. His chief interests were people’s ailments and people’s health. When others spoke in his presence about sicknesses, deaths, recoveries, and particularly about illnesses similar to his own, he tried to hide his anxiety, listening intently, questioning closely, and finding similarities to his own condition.
The pain grew no less, but Ivan Ilyich made great efforts forcibly to persuade himself that he felt better. And he was able to deceive himself so long as nothing upset him. But as soon as there was a disagreement with his wife, or something went wrong at work, or he had a bad hand at cards, he promptly felt the full force of the disease. In the past he met failure with sanguine expectation—I can put it right in a trice, I’ll get the better of him, I’ll wait for success, for a grand slam. But now with every failure he lost heart and despaired. He said to himself, “I was just getting better; the medicine was finally beginning to work—and now this dratted misfortune, this damned unpleasantness. . . .” And he raged against the mishap, or the people responsible for it who were killing him, and he could feel his own anger killing him but was unable to restrain himself. You might think he should have realized that his fury against people and circumstances aggravated his illness and consequently he should avoid paying attention to any unpleasantnesses, but his reasoning went the opposite way—he said he needed peace of mind, scrutinized everything that might disrupt his peace of mind, and the slightest disruption infuriated him. His situation was exacerbated by reading medical textbooks and seeking advice from doctors. The deterioration continued so smoothly he was able to deceive himself when he compared one day to the next—there was little difference. But when he asked for medical advice it seemed to him that everything was getting worse, and very quickly, too. And yet he continued to consult the doctors, regardless.
That month he went to another eminent specialist, and that eminence said almost the same as the first one but posed the questions slightly differently. The advice of this eminence only intensified Ivan Ilyich’s doubts and fears. A friend of a friend—a very good doctor—diagnosed his illness completely differently, and even though he promised recovery, his questions and hypotheses further confused Ivan Ilyich and confirmed his doubts. A homeopath identified his illness in yet another way and gave him some medicine, which Ivan Ilyich took in secret for a week. But when he felt no improvement after a week he lost faith in that cure and all the others, and fell into even profounder gloom. On one occasion a lady of his acquaintance told him about healing icons. Ivan Ilyich caught himself listening attentively and crediting her facts. This episode frightened him. “Can I really have gone so weak in the head?” he thought. “What rubbish! It’s all nonsense. I mustn’t give in to hypochondria. I must choose one doctor and keep strictly to his course of treatment. That’s what I’ll do. There’s an end of it. I’ll stop thinking and stick strictly to one cure till the summer. And then we’ll see. Enough of this dithering.” It was easy to say, and impossible to do. The pain in his side kept wearing him down and seemed to be getting steadily more sustained and severe. The taste in his mouth grew more and more peculiar; it felt to him as though some revolting smell was coming out of his mouth, and his strength and appetite were both diminishing. He could not deceive himself: something terrifying, new, and incomparably significant—more significant than anything in Ivan Ilyich’s previous life—was taking place inside him. And he was the only one who knew about it. Everyone around him did not understand, or did not want to understand, and thought that everything in the world was going on as usual. This was what tormented Ivan Ilyich more than anything. The people at home—principally his wife and daughter, who were caught up in a positive whirl of visits—understood nothing, as he could see, and were irritated by how demanding and cheerless he was, as though this were his fault. Even though they tried to disguise it, he could see that he was a hindrance to them, but that his wife had worked out a definite response to his illness and stuck to it in spite of anything he might say or do. Her approach went like this: “You know,” she would say to their acquaintances, “Ivan Ilyich can’t follow a course of treatment strictly, like any other self-respecting person. One day he takes the drops and eats what he’s ordered, and goes to bed in good time, and the next day, if I don’t keep an eye on him, he forgets to take anything, eats sturgeon (which is against the doctor’s orders), and, what’s more, stays up for a game of vint till one in the morning.”
“Oh come, when was that?” Ivan Ilyich says in vexation. “Only once, at Piotr Ivanovich’s.”
“And yesterday at Shebek’s.”
“What difference did that make? I couldn’t sleep for pain.”
“What nonsense. Whatever you say, you’ll never get well like this—you’ll just go on making us miserable.”
Praskovya Feodorovna’s attitude to her husband’s illness, which she expressed quite openly to others and himself, was that Ivan Ilyich was to blame for his illness and the whole illness was a new unpleasantness he was inflicting on his wife. Ivan Ilyich felt that she let this slip involuntarily, but it made matters no easier for him.
At court Ivan Ilyich also noticed, or thought he noticed, the same curious attitude toward him. Sometimes he thought people were eyeing him like a man soon to vacate his post, and then his friends would suddenly start teasing him for being morbid—as though that terrible, terrifying, unheard-of thing infesting him from within, incessantly sucking away at him and irresistibly dragging him off somewhere, were the most delightful topic for a joke. He was particularly irritated by Schwartz’s lively, comme-il-faut playfulness, which reminded Ivan Ilyich of himself ten years ago.
His friends would come over for a game of cards, and sit down. The new packs were fanned, shuffled, and dealt; Ivan Ilyich sorted his hand into suits. Seven diamonds. His partner said, “No trumps,” and led with the two of diamonds. What more could he want? Delightful, capital it should have been—they would make a grand slam. And suddenly Ivan Ilyich feels that pain sucking away at him, that taste in his mouth, and it seems grotesque to him that in the midst of this he could feel pleased by a grand slam.
He steals a glance at his partner, Mikhail Mikhailovich, who raps the tabletop with an energetic hand and courteously, indulgently restrains himself from snatching up the tricks, moving them across to Ivan Ilyich instead, giving him the pleasure of collecting them without incommoding himself, barely stretching out his hand. “What does he think I am, so feeble I can’t even stretch my hand out?” thinks Ivan Ilyich. And he forgets the trumps,25 trumps his partner’s winning card, misses the grand slam by three tricks, and—which is worse than everything—sees how upset Mikhail Mikhailovich is, while he doesn’t care. And it is dreadful to think what it is that makes him not care.
Everyone sees it is difficult for him, and they say, “Why don’t we stop, if you’re tired? Have a rest.” A rest? No, no, he’s not in the least tired; they must finish the rubber. Everyone is silent and gloomy. Ivan Ilyich feels as though he has let this misery loose on them and can’t dispel it. They dine together and go their ways, and Ivan Ilyich is left alone in the knowledge that his life is poisoned and poisons the lives of others and that this poison does not diminish, but permeates his whole existence more and more profoundly.
With this knowledge, and with his physical pain, and with his terror beyond that, he had to go to bed and often lie most of the night sleepless from pain. And then in the morning he had to get up again, get dressed, drive off to court, speak and write, or, if he did not go to work, he had to sit out those twenty-four hours of every day at home, of which every minute was a torment. And he had to live in this way, on the very edge of destruction, without a single being who might understand and pity him.
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