Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

Iván Ilých walked away, went to his own room, lay down, and began musing: ‘The kidney, a floating kidney.’ He recalled all the doctors had told him of how it detached itself and swayed about. And by an effort of imagination he tried to catch that kidney and arrest it and support it. So little was needed for this, it seemed to him. ‘No, I’ll go to see Peter Ivánovich again.’ [That was the friend whose friend was a doctor.] He rang, ordered the carriage, and got ready to go.

‘Where are you going, Jean?’ asked his wife, with a specially sad and exceptionally kind look.

This exceptionally kind look irritated him. He looked morosely at her.

‘I must go to see Peter Ivánovich.’

He went to see Peter Ivánovich, and together they went to see his friend, the doctor. He was in, and Iván Ilých had a long talk with him.

Reviewing the anatomical and physiological details of what in the doctor’s opinion was going on inside him, he understood it all.

There was something, a small thing, in the vermiform appendix. It might all come right. Only stimulate the energy of one organ and check the activity of another, then absorption would take place and everything would come right. He got home rather late for dinner, ate his dinner, and conversed cheerfully, but could not for a long time bring himself to go back to work in his room. At last, however, he went to his study and did what was necessary, but the consciousness that he had put something aside – an important, intimate matter which he would revert to when his work was done – never left him. When he had finished his work he remembered that this intimate matter was the thought of his vermiform appendix. But he did not give himself up to it, and went to the drawing-room for tea. There were callers there, including the examining magistrate who was a desirable match for his daughter, and they were conversing, playing the piano, and singing. Iván Ilých, as Praskóvya Fëdorovna remarked, spent that evening more cheerfully than usual, but he never for a moment forgot that he had postponed the important matter of the appendix. At eleven o’clock he said good-night and went to his bedroom. Since his illness he had slept alone in a small room next to his study. He undressed and took up a novel by Zola, but instead of reading it he fell into thought, and in his imagination that desired improvement in the vermiform appendix occurred. There was the absorption and evacuation and the re-establishment of normal activity. ‘Yes, that’s it!’ he said to himself. ‘One need only assist nature, that’s all.’ He remembered his medicine, rose, took it, and lay down on his back watching for the beneficent action of the medicine and for it to lessen the pain. ‘I need only take it regularly and avoid all injurious influences. I am already feeling better, much better.’ He began touching his side: it was not painful to the touch. ‘There, I really don’t feel it. It’s much better already.’ He put out the light and turned on his side … ‘The appendix is getting better, absorption is occurring.’ Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn and serious. There was the same familiar loathsome taste in his mouth. His heart sank and he felt dazed. ‘My God! My God!’ he muttered. ‘Again, again! And it will never cease.’ And suddenly the matter presented itself in a quite different aspect. ‘Vermiform appendix! Kidney!’ he said to himself. ‘It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and … death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone but me that I’m dying, and that it’s only a question of weeks, days … it may happen this moment. There was light and now there is darkness. I was here and now I’m going there! Where?’ A chill came over him, his breathing ceased, and he felt only the throbbing of his heart.

‘When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall I be when I am no more? Can this be dying? No, I don’t want to!’ He jumped up and tried to light the candle, felt for it with trembling hands, dropped candle and candlestick on the floor, and fell back on his pillow.

‘What’s the use? It makes no difference,’ he said to himself, staring with wide-open eyes into the darkness. ‘Death. Yes, death. And none of them know or wish to know it, and they have no pity for me. Now they are playing.’ (He heard through the door the distant sound of a song and its accompaniment.) ‘It’s all the same to them, but they will die too! Fools! I first, and they later, but it will be the same for them. And now they are merry … the beasts!’

Anger choked him and he was agonizingly, unbearably miserable. ‘It is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!’ He raised himself.