第19章

"What have you still to do?"

"What have I to do? I've done everything except chopping the logs for tomorrow.""Then hold my legs up a bit higher, can you?""Of course I can.Why not?" and Gerasim raised his master's legs higher and Ivan Ilych thought that in that position he did not feel any pain at all.

"And how about the logs?"

"Don't trouble about that, sir.There's plenty of time."Ivan Ilych told Gerasim to sit down and hold his legs, and began to talk to him.And strange to say it seemed to him that he felt better while Gerasim held his legs up.

After that Ivan Ilych would sometimes call Gerasim and get him to hold his legs on his shoulders, and he liked talking to him.

Gerasim did it all easily, willingly, simply, and with a good nature that touched Ivan Ilych.Health, strength, and vitality in other people were offensive to him, but Gerasim's strength and vitality did not mortify but soothed him.

What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and the only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.He however knew that do what they would nothing would come of it, only still more agonizing suffering and death.This deception tortured him --their not wishing to admit what they all knew and what he knew, but wanting to lie to him concerning his terrible condition, and wishing and forcing him to participate in that lie.Those lies --lies enacted over him on the eve of his death and destined to degrade this awful, solemn act to the level of their visitings, their curtains, their sturgeon for dinner -- were a terrible agony for Ivan Ilych.And strangely enough, many times when they were going through their antics over him he had been within a hairbreadth of calling out to them: "Stop lying! You know and Iknow that I am dying.Then at least stop lying about it!" But he had never had the spirit to do it.The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing room defusing an unpleasant odour) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long.

He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position.Only Gerasim recognized it and pitied him.

And so Ivan Ilych felt at ease only with him.He felt comforted when Gerasim supported his legs (sometimes all night long) and refused to go to bed, saying: "Don't you worry, Ivan Ilych.I'll get sleep enough later on," or when he suddenly became familiar and exclaimed: "If you weren't sick it would be another matter, but as it is, why should I grudge a little trouble?" Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case and did not consider it necessary to disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master.Once when Ivan Ilych was sending him away he even said straight out:

"We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?"-- expressing the fact that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.

Apart from this lying, or because of it, what most tormented Ivan Ilych was that no one pitied him as he wished to be pitied.

At certain moments after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he would have been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a sick child is pitied.He longed to be petted and comforted.he knew he was an important functionary, that he had a beard turning grey, and that therefore what he long for was impossible, but still he longed for it.and in Gerasim's attitude towards him there was something akin to what he wished for, and so that attitude comforted him.Ivan Ilych wanted to weep, wanted to be petted and cried over, and then his colleague Shebek would come, and instead of weeping and being petted, Ivan Ilych would assume a serious, severe, and profound air, and by force of habit would express his opinion on a decision of the Court of Cassation and would stubbornly insist on that view.This falsity around him and within him did more than anything else to poison his last days.