Android Karenina (48 page)

Vronsky left gloomily, knowing well that further efforts were useless, and that he had to live in Petersburg as though in a strange town, avoiding every sort of relation with his own old circle in order not to be exposed to the annoyances and humiliations, which were so intolerable to him. Even among strangers, he was always aware of the cold and envious stares of those wondering how he was allowed to walk about with his Class III robot. And to this implied question, he had no answer. Why had not these famous Toy Soldiers, who were led of course by none other than Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin himself, come to take away his beloved Lupo?

Indeed, one of the most unpleasant features of his position in Petersburg was that Alexei Alexandrovich and his name seemed to meet him everywhere. He could not begin to talk of anything without the conversation turning on Alexei Alexandrovich; he could not go anywhere without risk of meeting him. So at least it seemed to Vronsky, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger that he is continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything.

Their stay in Petersburg was all the more painful to Vronsky because he perceived all the time a sort of new mood that he could not understand in Anna. At one time she would seem in love with him, and then she would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable, spending hours sitting quietly alone with Android Karenina. She was worrying over something, and keeping something back from him, and did not seem to notice the humiliations that poisoned his existence, and for her, with her delicate intuition, must have been still more unbearable.

The old adage, which Vronsky remembered from his youth, seemed to hold true: You may travel to the moon, but do not be surprised if the world changes while you are gone.

O
NE OF ANNA’S OBJECTS
in coming back to Russia had been to see her son; she understood from letters she had received that Sergey had been told she was dead, and that terrible deception weighed heavily on her heart. From the day she left the moon the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her. And as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her imagination. When Vronsky spied her sitting in quiet counsel with Android Karenina, it was this dream she was speaking of, talking endlessly of Sergey and cuing Memories of the boy day and night. Anna did not even put to herself the question of how to arrange it. It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in the same town with him. But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made distinctly aware of her present position in society—not only her relations with Vronsky, but her possession of one of the few remaining Class Ills on the city streets—and she grasped the fact that to arrange this meeting was no easy matter. To go straight to the house, where she might meet Alexei Alexandrovich, that she felt she had no right to do.

But to get a glimpse of her son out walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she must say to him, she so longed to embrace him, to kiss him.

She decided that the next day, Seryozha’s birthday, she would go straight to her husband’s house and at any cost see her son and overturn the hideous deception with which they were encompassing the unhappy child.

As her plan formed itself in her mind, she went to a toy shop, bought toys; and then crept into Vronsky’s private
chambres d’armory
, while he slept soundly, and carefully removed what she felt were the items necessary for the excursion. She thought over a plan of action. She would go early in the morning at eight o’clock, when Alexei Alexandrovich would be certain not to be up. She carefully explained her intentions to Android Karenina, who instantly and completely understood her desires.

The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, a woman climbed from a hired sledge outside the home of Alexei Karenin and rang at the front entrance.

“Some lady,” grunted the Karenins’ stoic, old
mécanicien
, Kapitonitch, who, not yet dressed, in his dumpy, grey undercoat, peeped out of the window to see a lady in a veil standing close up to the door. Kapitonitch opened the door and was astonished to see the figure of his old mistress, Anna Karenina, covered in her familiar traveling cloak and veil.

Kapitonitch stood perfectly still, a statue of a man with his hand upon the doorknob—for how could he open it? He remembered Anna’s kindness, and he wished for nothing greater than to allow her entrance to what had been her home; but it was Kapitonitch who had buried the poor store clerk in a rutted ditch behind the house.

“Whom do you want?” he asked, affecting a voice as hard as tempered steel.

From behind her veil, Anna, apparently not hearing his words, made no answer.

At the same moment, in the gardens behind the house, the real Anna Karenina—for of course it was Android Karenina standing still and wordless at the front door behind Anna’s veil—the real Anna overleaped the high electrified fence and landed with a bone-rattling thud beside the fountain. Uneasily holding one of Vronsky’s prized regimental smokers before her, she advanced in her stocking feet toward the rear door of the great house that once, a lifetime ago, had been her own. Step after careful step she advanced, not daring to glance up at the bedroom
windows, and instead noticing, a few feet from the back door, a kind of rickety outbuilding she did not recognize.

The large metal door of this shed hung slightly open, glinting in the daylight, and Anna’s curiosity overcame her.

At the front door, noticing the embarrassment of the unknown lady, Kapitonitch went out to her, opened the second door for her, and asked her what she wanted.

Again the woman said nothing.

“His honor’s not up yet,” said Kapitonitch, looking at her attentively. Then, hearing a loud, sharp shriek from the rear of the house—the distressed call of a captured bird? the strangled cry of a woman?—he wheeled sharply about.

*   *   *

Anna hid herself behind the shed, out of which she had rapidly retreated, in horror of what lay inside.
Dear God
, she thought, jamming her thick fox-fur muff into her mouth to muffle the ragged sound of her breathing.

Dear merciful God.

Inside the shed she had seen a long, wooden worktable, lined with human faces. Some were displayed in velvet cases, some scattered haphazardly in a gruesome clutter; faces high-cheeked and fleshy and beadyeyed; whole faces and faces in various states of ghoulish disassembly: here a mouth, there the broad expanse of a forehead, there a pair of eyeballs rolling in a wooden box; half a cheek, the skin peeled back to reveal the tangle of red-black muscle beneath.

Still reeling from the stomach-turning awfulness of such a sight, Anna gave the lock of the house’s rear door a single silenced blast-charge, slipped quietly inside, and stood with her eyes wide, breathing deeply. She had not anticipated that the absolutely unchanged hall of the house where she had lived for nine years would so greatly affect her. Memories
sweet and painful rose one after another in her heart, and for a moment she forgot what she was here for.

Android Karenina, at the doorstep, her duty discharged, bowed to Kapitonitch and turned to depart; but the old
mécanacien
, still believing this to be his old mistress, felt a pang of grief that this kind woman, however to blame, should leave without seeing her son. “Stop,” he cried. “Wait a moment.”

There was something in the immediate way she obeyed his order. . . .

“Spin in a circle,” Kapitonitch ordered, squinting with suspicion as the woman did so immediately. “Put your hands in the air. Wiggle your fingers.” At each command, the woman demonstrated automatic—that is,
robotic
—obedience.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Android Karenina?”

“Turn around.
Slowly”
said the real Anna, from where she now stood, directly behind Kapitonitch, the smoker still drawn and leveled shakily at his head. But as he turned, Kapitonitch drew a weapon of his own: a small, metallic hand cannon, as long again as the length of his arm, and aimed directly at her head.

Of course the mécanicien of this household is armed
, thought Anna.
Of course.

“Oh, Madame Karenina,” said Kapitonitch sadly, and unlike Anna’s, his hand did not shake.

For a long moment they stared at each other, weapons drawn. On the stoop Android Karenina, her veil now drawn back, regarded the scene in terrified silence, her eyebank fluttering double-time as she calculated her odds of disarming Kapitonitch without harm to her mistress. Anna offered a silent prayer that, if she were fated to die here, Providence would allow her to see her dear son once more before it was all over.

But it was not Providence that saved her, it was human kindness; so often, one comes dressed in the clothing of the other. “I cannot shoot you, Madame Karenina. Please come in, your Excellency,” he said to her.

She tried to say something, but her voice refused to utter any sound; with a guilty and imploring glance at the old man she went with light, swift steps up the stairs. Bent over, and his galoshes catching on the steps, Kapitonitch ran after her, imploring in an urgent whisper that she not tarry.

Anna mounted the familiar staircase, not understanding what the old man was saying.

“This way, to the left, if you please. Excuse its not being tidy. Your husband’s in the old parlor now,” the
mécanicien
said, panting. “Excuse me, wait a little, your Excellency; I’ll just see,” he said, and overtaking her, he opened the high door and disappeared behind it. Anna stood still, waiting. “He’s only just awake,” Kapitonitch reported, coming out.

“Do be quick, madame,” he said again.
“Please.
He will not be happy to find you here. Most unhappy indeed.”

And at the very instant the
mécanicien
said this, Anna caught the sound of a childish yawn. From the sound of this yawn alone she knew her son and seemed to see him living before her eyes.

“Let me in; go away!” she said, and went in through the high doorway, Android Karenina heeling her closely. On the right of the door stood a bed, and sitting up in the bed was the boy. His little body bent forward with his nightshirt unbuttoned, he was stretching and still yawning. The instant his lips came together they curved into a blissfully sleepy smile, and with that smile he slowly and deliciously rolled back again.

“Seryozha!” she whispered, going noiselessly up to him. Android Karenina glowed warmly, suffusing the scene with delicate pinks of joy.

When Anna was parted from her Sergey, and all this latter time when she had been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as he was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he was not even the same as when she had left him; he was still further from the four-year-old tot, more grown and thinner. How thin his face was, how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had changed
since she left him! But it was he, with his head, his lips, his soft neck and broad little shoulders.

“Seryozha!” she repeated just in the child’s ear.

He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tangled head from side to side as though looking for something, and opened his eyes. Slowly and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother standing motionless before him, and just behind her the comforting familiar figure of her beloved-companion.

All at once he smiled a blissful smile, and shutting his eyes, rolled not backward but toward her into her arms.

“Seryozha! My darling boy!” she said, breathing hard and putting her arms round his plump little body.

“Mother!” he said, wriggling about in her arms so as to touch her hands with different parts of him. “I know,” he said, opening his eyes; “it’s my birthday today. I knew you’d come. I’ll get up right now.”

And saying that he fell back asleep.

Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs, so long now, that were thrust out below the quilt, those short-cropped curls on his neck, which she had so often kissed. She touched all this and could say nothing; tears choked her.

“What are you crying for, mother?” Seryozha said, waking completely up. “Mother, what are you crying for?” he cried in a tearful voice.

“I won’t cry . . . I’m crying for joy. It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I won’t, I won’t,” she said, gulping down her tears and turning away. “Come, it’s time for you to dress now,” she added after a pause, and, never letting go his hands, she sat down by his bedside on the chair, where his clothes were ready for him.

“How do you dress without me? How . . .” she tried to begin talking simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away.

“I don’t have a cold bath, Papa didn’t order it. Why, you’re sitting on my clothes!”

And Seryozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and smiled.

“Mother, darling, sweet one!” he shouted, flinging himself on her again and hugging her. It was as though only now, on seeing her smile, he fully grasped what had happened.

“I don’t want that on,” he said, taking off her hat. And as it were, seeing her afresh without her hat, he fell to kissing her again. “Why do you carry a smoker? Mother!”

“But what did you think about me?You didn’t think I was dead?”

“They said you were killed! By a koschei that came upon you in the marketplace, while you shopped for apples.”

“Not so!”

“They said it attached itself at the base of your spine, and then burrowed all the way up to your brain.”

“No, indeed, my darling!”

“They said when you were found, your face was so mutilated, it was almost impossible to recognize it.”

Anna’s eyelashes fluttered furiously, as she attempted to conceal her dismay at the wishful thinking that had clearly gone into that particular detail of the story Karenin had concocted for Seryozha.

“I never believed it,” the boy said.