"And he will not look after himself," Katy puts in sternly.
"Why don't you look after yourself? How can you go on like this? God helps those who help themselves, my dear man. Give my regards to your family and make my excuses for not coming. One of these days, before I go abroad, I'll come to say good-bye. Without fail. I'm off next week."
I came away from Katy's irritated, frightened by the talk about my illness and discontented with myself. "And why," I ask myself, "shouldn't I be attended by one of my colleagues?" Instantly I see how my friend, after sounding me, will go to the window silently, think a little while, turn towards me and say, indifferently, trying to prevent me from reading the truth in his face: "At the moment I don't see anything particular; but still, cher confrère, I would advise you to break off your work...." And that will take my last hope away.
Who doesn't have hopes? Nowadays, when I diagnose and treat myself, I sometimes hope that my ignorance deceives me, that I am mistaken about the albumen and sugar which I find, as well as about my heart, and also about the anasarca which I have noticed twice in the morning. While I read over the therapeutic text-books again with the eagerness of a hypochondriac, and change the prescriptions every day, I still believe that I will come across something hopeful. How trivial it all is!
Whether the sky is cloudy all over or the moon and stars are shining in it, every time I come back home I look at it and think that death will take me soon. Surely at that moment my thoughts should be as deep as the sky, as bright, as striking ... but no! I think of myself, of my wife, Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general. My thoughts are not good, they are mean; I juggle with myself, and at this moment my attitude towards life can be expressed in the words the famous Arakheev wrote in one of his intimate letters: "All good in the world is inseparably linked to bad, and there is always more bad than good." Which means that everything is ugly, there's nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I have lived out must be counted as lost. I surprise myself in these thoughts and try to convince myself they are accidental and temporary and not deeply rooted in me, but I think immediately:
"If that's true, why am I drawn every evening to those two toads." And I swear to myself never to go to Katy any more, though I know I will go to her again to-morrow.
As I pull my door bell and go upstairs, I feel already that I have no family and no desire to return to it. It is plain my new, Arakheev thoughts are not accidental or temporary in me, but possess my whole being. With a bad conscience, dull, indolent, hardly able to move my limbs, as though I had a ten ton weight upon me, I lie down in my bed and soon fall asleep.
And then—insomnia.