War And Peace: Book 12 - CHAPTER XIII

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IN THIS SHED, where Pierre spent four weeks, there were twenty-three

soldiers, three officers, and two civilian functionaries, all prisoners.

They were all misty figures to Pierre afterwards, but Platon Karataev

remained for ever in his mind the strongest and most precious memory, and the

personification of everything Russian, kindly, and round. When next day at dawn

Pierre saw his neighbour, his first impression of something round was fully

confirmed; Platon's whole figure in his French military coat, girt round the

waist with cord, in his forage-cap and bast shoes, was roundish, his head was

perfectly round, his back, his chest, his shoulders, even his arms, which he

always held as though he were about to embrace something, were round in their

lines; his friendly smile and big, soft, brown eyes, too, were round.

Platon Karataev must have been over fifty to judge by his stories of the

campaigns in which he had taken part. He did not himself know and could not

determine how old he was. But his strong, dazzlingly white teeth showed in two

unbroken semicircles whenever he laughed, as he often did, and all were good and

sound: there was not a grey hair in his beard or on his head, and his whole

frame had a look of suppleness and of unusual hardiness and endurance.

His face had an expression of innocence and youth in spite of the curving

wrinkles on it; his voice had a pleasant sing-song note. But the great

peculiarity of his talk was its spontaneity and readiness. It was evident that

he never thought of what he was saying, or of what he was going to say; and that

gave a peculiar, irresistible persuasiveness to his rapid and genuine

intonations.

His physical powers and activity were such, during the first period of his

imprisonment, that he seemed not to know what fatigue or sickness meant. Every

evening as he lay down to sleep, he said: “Let me lie down, Lord, like a stone;

let me rise up like new bread”; and every morning on getting up, he would shake

his shoulder in the same way, saying: “Lie down and curl up, get up and shake

yourself.” And he had, in fact, only to lie down in order to sleep at once like

a stone, and he had but to shake himself to be ready at once, on waking, without

a second's delay, to set to work of some sort; just as children, on waking,

begin at once playing with their toys. He knew how to do everything, not

particularly well, but not badly either. He baked, and cooked, and sewed, and

planed, and cobbled boots. He was always busy, and only in the evenings allowed

himself to indulge in conversation, which he loved, and singing. He sang songs,

not as singers do, who know they are listened to, but sang, as the birds sing,

obviously, because it was necessary to him to utter those sounds, as it

sometimes is to stretch or to walk about; and those sounds were always thin,

tender, almost feminine, melancholy notes, and his face as he uttered them was

very serious.

Being in prison, and having let his beard grow, he had apparently cast off

all the soldier's ways that had been forced upon him and were not natural to

him, and had unconsciously relapsed into his old peasant habits.

“A soldier discharged is the shirt outside the breeches again,” he used to

say. He did not care to talk of his life as a soldier, though he never

complained, and often repeated that he had never once been beaten since he had

been in the service. When he told stories, it was always by preference of his

old and evidently precious memories of his life as a “Christian,” as he

pronounced the word “krestyan,” or peasant. The proverbial sayings, of which his

talk was full, were not the bold, and mostly indecent, sayings common among

soldiers, but those peasant saws, which seem of so little meaning looked at

separately, and gain all at once a significance of profound wisdom when uttered

appropriately.

Often he would say something directly contrary to what he had said before,

but both sayings were equally true. He liked talking, and talked well, adorning

his speech with caressing epithets and proverbial sayings, which Pierre fancied

he often invented himself. But the great charm of his talk was that the simplest

incidents—sometimes the same that Pierre had himself seen without noticing

them—in his account of them gained a character of seemliness and solemn

significance. He liked to listen to the fairy tales which one soldier used to

tell—always the same ones over and over again—in the evenings, but most of all

he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened

to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing

out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments,

friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none; but he loved

and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in

life, and especially so with man—not with any particular man, but with the men

who happened to be before his eyes. He loved his dog, loved his comrades, loved

the French, loved Pierre, who was his neighbour. But Pierre felt that in spite

of Karataev's affectionate tenderness to him (in which he involuntarily paid

tribute to Pierre's spiritual life), he would not suffer a moment's grief at

parting from him. And Pierre began to have the same feeling towards

Karataev.

To all the other soldiers Platon Karataev was the most ordinary soldier; they

called him “little hawk,” or Platosha; made good-humoured jibes at his expense,

sent him to fetch things. But to Pierre, such as he appeared on that first

night—an unfathomable, rounded-off, and everlasting personification of the

spirit of simplicity and truth—so he remained to him for ever.

Platon Karataev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he talked, he

did not know on beginning a sentence how he was going to end it.

When Pierre, struck sometimes by the force of his remarks, asked him to

repeat what he had said, Platon could never recall what he had said the minute

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

There came in, “My own little birch-tree,” and “My heart is sick,” but there was

no meaning in the words. He did not understand, and could not grasp the

significance of words taken apart from the sentence. Every word and every action

of his was the expression of a force uncomprehended by him, which was his life.

But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It had

meaning only as a part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious. His

words and actions flowed from him as smoothly, as inevitably, and as

spontaneously, as the perfume rises from the flower. He could not understand any

value or significance in an act or a word taken separately.

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