第 二百七十六 章 · 第276章

Twenty-three soldiers, three officers, and two officials were confined

in the shed in which Pierre had been placed and where he remained for

four weeks.

When Pierre remembered them afterwards they all seemed misty figures to

him except Platón Karatáev, who always remained in his mind a most

vivid and precious memory and the personification of everything Russian,

kindly, and round. When Pierre saw his neighbor next morning at dawn

the first impression of him, as of something round, was fully confirmed:

Platón’s whole figure—in a French overcoat girdled with a cord, a

soldier’s cap, and bast shoes—was round. His head was quite round, his

back, chest, shoulders, and even his arms, which he held as if ever

ready to embrace something, were rounded, his pleasant smile and his

large, gentle brown eyes were also round.

Platón Karatáev must have been fifty, judging by his stories of

campaigns he had been in, told as by an old soldier. He did not himself

know his age and was quite unable to determine it. But his brilliantly

white, strong teeth which showed in two unbroken semicircles when he

laughed—as he often did—were all sound and good, there was not a gray

hair in his beard or on his head, and his whole body gave an impression

of suppleness and especially of firmness and endurance.

His face, despite its fine, rounded wrinkles, had an expression of

innocence and youth, his voice was pleasant and musical. But the chief

peculiarity of his speech was its directness and appositeness. It was

evident that he never considered what he had said or was going to say,

and consequently the rapidity and justice of his intonation had an

irresistible persuasiveness.

His physical strength and agility during the first days of his

imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue and

sickness meant. Every night before lying down, he said: “Lord, lay me

down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!” and every morning on getting

up, he said: “I lay down and curled up, I get up and shake myself.” And

indeed he only had to lie down, to fall asleep like a stone, and he

only had to shake himself, to be ready without a moment’s delay for some

work, just as children are ready to play directly they awake. He could

do everything, not very well but not badly. He baked, cooked, sewed,

planed, and mended boots. He was always busy, and only at night allowed

himself conversation—of which he was fond—and songs. He did not sing

like a trained singer who knows he is listened to, but like the birds,

evidently giving vent to the sounds in the same way that one stretches

oneself or walks about to get rid of stiffness, and the sounds were

always high-pitched, mournful, delicate, and almost feminine, and his

face at such times was very serious.

Having been taken prisoner and allowed his beard to grow, he seemed to

have thrown off all that had been forced upon him—everything military

and alien to himself—and had returned to his former peasant habits.

“A soldier on leave—a shirt outside breeches,” he would say.

He did not like talking about his life as a soldier, though he did not

complain, and often mentioned that he had not been flogged once during

the whole of his army service. When he related anything it was generally

some old and evidently precious memory of his “Christian” life, as he

called his peasant existence. The proverbs, of which his talk was full,

were for the most part not the coarse and indecent saws soldiers

employ, but those folk sayings which taken without a context seem so

insignificant, but when used appositely suddenly acquire a significance

of profound wisdom.

He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous

occasion, yet both would be right. He liked to talk and he talked well,

adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which

Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay

in the fact that the commonest events—sometimes just such as Pierre

had witnessed without taking notice of them—assumed in Karatáev’s a

character of solemn fitness. He liked to hear the folk tales one of the

soldiers used to tell of an evening (they were always the same), but

most of all he liked to hear stories of real life. He would smile

joyfully when listening to such stories, now and then putting in a word

or asking a question to make the moral beauty of what he was told clear

to himself. Karatáev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre

understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life

brought him in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular

man, but those with whom he happened to be. He loved his dog, his

comrades, the French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt

that in spite of Karatáev’s affectionate tenderness for him (by which

he unconsciously gave Pierre’s spiritual life its due) he would not have

grieved for a moment at parting from him. And Pierre began to feel in

the same way toward Karatáev.

To all the other prisoners Platón Karatáev seemed a most ordinary

soldier. They called him “little falcon” or “Platósha,” chaffed him

good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always

remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded,

eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.

Platón Karatáev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he began

to speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.

Sometimes Pierre, struck by the meaning of his words, would ask him to

repeat them, but Platón could never recall what he had said a moment

before, just as he never could repeat to Pierre the words of his

favorite song: native and birch tree and my heart is sick occurred in

it, but when spoken and not sung, no meaning could be got out of it. He

did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from

their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of

an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he

regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as

part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions

flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance

exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance

of any word or deed taken separately.