War And Peace

There he is now, lying on a low chair in his velvet, fur-lined cloak, with his head propped up on a thin, pale hand. His chest looks terribly hollow, and his shoulders are hunched. His lips are compressed, his eyes are gleaming, and on his pale forehead a line keeps coming and going. There is a rapid tremor just noticeable in one of his legs. Natasha knows he is fighting against unbearable pain. ‘What kind of pain is it? What’s it all about? What can he feel? Oh the agony!’ Natasha is thinking.

He had become aware of her watching him, looked up and started speaking with no smile on his face.

‘The only awful thing,’ he had said to her, ‘would be to bind yourself for ever to a suffering invalid. It would be an everlasting torment.’ And he had given her the most searching look – a look she could still remember. Natasha had replied, as always, without giving herself time to think of a proper response. She had said, ‘It can’t go on like this. Things will be different. You’re going to get better. You’ll be completely well again.’

She was seeing him now as she had seen him then, and reliving all she had felt at the time. She remembered the long, sad, severe look he had levelled at her when he heard those words, and she took in all the reproach and the despair contained in his long stare.

‘I agreed with him,’ Natasha told herself now, ‘that it would be awful if he never recovered from his suffering. I only said it because it would have been so awful for him, but he took it the wrong way. He thought it would be awful for me. At that time he wanted to go on living. He was afraid of dying. And I was so clumsy and stupid in the way I said it. That wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking something quite different. If I had told him what I was thinking about I would have said, “Even if he stayed like that, dying, dying away before my eyes, I’d have been much happier than I am now.” Now I have nothing . . . nobody . . . Did he know? No, he didn’t, and he never will. And now it will never, never be possible to put things right.’

And there he was saying the same words again, but this time Natasha imagined herself coming out with a different answer. She stopped him, and said, ‘Awful for you, but not for me. You must know that without you there is nothing left in my life, and suffering with you is the greatest possible happiness.’ And now he was taking her hand and squeezing it, just as he had done on that terrible evening four days before his death. And in her imagination she was pouring out other words of tenderness and love, which might have been said at the time and were coming out now . . . ‘I love you! . . . Darling . . . I do love you!’ she was saying, wringing her hands convulsively, and gritting her teeth with bitter ferocity . . .

And then she was swept by a wave of bitter-sweet sorrow, and her eyes were filling with tears, but all at once she asked herself who she was talking to. Where was he, and what was he now?

And again her whole mind was clouded with an arid and harsh uncertainty. Again, with an anxious furrowing of her brow she stared fixedly ahead, searching for where he was. And for a moment she seemed to be on the brink of penetrating the mystery . . . But at the very instant when the unfathomable depths seemed to be clearing, she was shocked out of her reverie by a painfully loud rattling of the door-handle. Her maid, Dunyasha, rushed straight in with panic in her eyes, showing no concern for Natasha.

‘Please miss, come quickly and see your father,’ said Dunyasha, looking unusually agitated. ‘Something terrible has happened . . . It’s young Count Petya . . . a letter,’ she gasped out, choking and sobbing.

CHAPTER 2

This was a time when Natasha’s general feeling of alienation was at its worst with her own family members, from whom she felt particularly estranged. All her own family, her father and mother and Sonya, were so close to her, so normal and ordinary, that their every word and feeling seemed like a desecration of the world she had been living in of late. It was worse than indifference; she looked on them with outright hostility. She could hear what Dunyasha was saying about little Petya, and something terrible that had happened, but she wasn’t taking it in.

‘Terrible? Nothing terrible could have happened to them, surely. It’s easy for them . . . all the old routine. Everything goes on in the same old way,’ Natasha was saying to herself.

Just as she got to the drawing-room door her father came hurrying out of the countess’s room. His face was crumpled and wet with tears. He had clearly rushed out to give vent to the sobs that were choking him. He took one look at Natasha, waved his arms in despair, and broke down in a bout of violent, convulsive sobbing that completely distorted his soft, round face.