Chapter 100 — Anna Karenina

Levin runs halfway down the stairs and catches a cough he knows. He hopes he is mistaken, then sees a long bony figure and still prays the man removing his fur cloak is not his brother Nikolay. Levin loves Nikolay, yet their meetings always torture him. After Agafea Mihalovna's marriage hint and his stalled writing, he wanted a cheerful outsider, not the one person who can read him completely.

Shame turns to pity at the sight. Nikolay is more emaciated than ever, a skeleton under skin, smiling with a submissive humility that tightens Levin's throat. He has come for his share of the property sale, about two thousand roubles, and to stay in the old nest and renew his strength. He dresses with unusual care, jokes with Agafea, mourns Parfen Denisitch, and announces he has left Marya Nikolaevna and plans Moscow service through Myakov.

Evening conversation becomes a duet of evasion. Both men think only of Nikolay's illness and approaching death, yet every spoken sentence avoids it. Levin talks plans; Nikolay listens without interest. Never has Levin felt so false, longing to weep while continuing to perform vitality. He puts Nikolay in his own heated bedroom behind a screen. Lying awake, Levin confronts death in his brother's cough and in himself: gray temples, decaying teeth, childhood pillow fights beside a chest now hollow. The question of how to live had barely sharpened when a harder question arrived. Why help a dying man when he had forgotten that everything ends?