Android Karenina (58 page)

But still she was glad she had sent the communiqué. At this moment Anna was positively admitting to herself that she was a burden to him, that he would relinquish his freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that she was glad he was coming. Let him weary of her, but he would be here with her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.

She was sitting in the drawing room, and as she read she listened to the sound of the wind outside, every minute expecting the carriage to arrive. The farm was silent, with the cold and complete silence of an estate populated only by robots, who in their nightly Surcease made not even the smallest sound. Only one companion robot at Vozdvizhenskoe still had its human, and that was Android Karenina; now she brought tea, warmed on her own groznium core.

At last Anna heard the unmistakable
whomp
of Frou-Frou Deux’s big paws kicking up dirt in the covered entry. Android Karenina looked up, her eyebank flickered; Anna, flushing hotly, got up; but instead of going down, as she had done twice before, she stood still. She suddenly felt ashamed of her duplicity, but even more she dreaded how he might meet her. All feeling of wounded pride had passed now; she was only afraid of the expression of his displeasure.

She remembered that her child had been perfectly well again for the last two days. She felt positively vexed with her for getting better from the very moment her communiqué was dispatched. Then she thought of him, that he was here, all of him, with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And forgetting everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.

“Well, how is Annie?” he said timidly from below, looking up to
Anna as she ran down to him.

He was sitting on a chair pulling off his warm overboots.

“Oh, she is better.”

“And you?” he said, shaking himself.

She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never taking her eyes off him.

“Well, I’m glad,” he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress, which he knew she had put on for him. All was charming, but how many times it had charmed him! And the stern, stony expression that she so dreaded settled upon his face.

“Well, I’m glad. And are you well?” he said, wiping his damp beard with his handkerchief and kissing her hand.

“Never mind,” she thought, “only let him be here, and so long as he’s here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me.”

The evening was spent happily and gaily; he told her about the tête-à-tête, about meeting Federov, about Konstantin Dmitrich, and the hope-bomb. Anna knew how by adroit questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure—his own success. She told him of everything that interested him at home; and all that she told him was of the most cheerful description. But late in the evening, Anna, seeing that she had regained complete possession of him, wanted to erase the painful impression of the glance he had given her for her communiqué.

She said: “Tell me frankly, you were vexed upon viewing my communiqué, and you didn’t believe me?”

As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his feelings were toward her, he had not forgiven her for that.

“Yes,” he said, “the communiqué was so strange. First, Annie ill, and then you thought of coming yourself.”

“It was all the truth.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”

“Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see.”

“Not for one moment. I’m only vexed, that’s true, that you seem
somehow unwilling to admit that there are duties . . .”

“The duty of traipsing about, of drinking and smoking cigars with Levin in a Huntshed!”

“But we won’t talk about it,” he said.

“Why not talk about it?” she said.

“I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up. Tomorrow, for instance, I shall have to make a tour of our far perimeters, make sure the fencing is secure.”

“Another reason to abandon me.”

“Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? If we are going to maintain a fortified rebel camp in defiance of the Ministry, in the heart of an alien-beset wilderness, there will always be challenges and responsibilities that take me outside the doors of this house. But don’t you know that I can’t live without you?”

“If so,” said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, “it means that you are sick of this life. . . . Yes, you will come for a day and go away, as men do. . . .”

“Anna, that’s cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life. . . .”

But she did not hear him.

“If you have more such invitations, I will go with you. If you travel to inspect fortifications, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we must separate or else live together.”

Vronsky saw the opening he had been looking for, saw a route to the life he had imagined. “Then perhaps, perhaps, Anna, this world we have created is not, after all, a permanently sustainable one.”

Somehow, Android Karenina knew the direction this conversation would take even before her mistress did. Placing the tea things gently on an end table, Android Karenina opened her arms and patted her lap for Lupo; his silvery hide blackened here and there from the hope-bomb fire, the proud wolf padded over and climbed into the robot’s embrace.

“If we only applied for amnesty—begged the Ministry for forgiveness, asked your husband for a divorce. You and I can be together . . . forever. Be a part of the future of our nation. Be married, and be together, not crouched in the dirt outside society, but within it.“

KNOWING THE DIRECTION THIS CONVERSATION WOULD TAKE, ANDROID KARENINA OPENED HER ARMS AND PATTED HER LAP FOR LUPO

“Together,” Anna said slowly. Her mind was spinning; suddenly, she desired only to have these questions decided.

“You know, that’s my one desire. But for that . . .”

“We must get a divorce. I will. . . “Anna lowered her head and sighed. “I will send him a communiqué tonight. I see I cannot go on like this . . . but tomorrow I will ride out with you to inspect the fortifications.”

“You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you,” said Vronsky, smiling.

But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.

She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.

If so, it’s a calamity!
that glance told her. It was a moment’s impression, but she never forgot it.

That night, Anna dictated a communiqué to her husband asking him about a divorce, and begging amnesty for herself and for Count Vronsky. A reply came almost immediately, granting only that their petition would be considered, and that only on one condition.

When the moment came, Lupo sat perfectly upright, looking straight ahead like a soldier, while Android Karenina lowered her head unit slightly, not wanting to make a difficult moment more difficult for her beloved mistress. Vronsky and Anna looked at each other, and then at Lupo and Android Karenina, and then reached forward. . . .

*    *    *

Anna went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an answer from Alexei Alexandrovich, and after that the divorce, they now established themselves together like married people.

I
T WAS ALEXEI ALEXANDROVICH
who decided to defer judgment in the case of Anna Arkadyevna Karenina and Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, but really the decision was made by his Face. Once again that malevolent, whispering cranial presence found it convenient to let the question simmer like a slow-boiling pot, to keep it alive and so to torture Karenin.

So for months after their return to Moscow, Vronsky and Anna heard nothing from the Ministry in response to their request for amnesty—only waited, and suffered from the silence hanging over them.

But Alexei Alexandrovich’s festering displeasure was not limited in its effects on his wife and her companion.

All of Russia suffered with them.

*    *    *

When the Class II robots were impounded as the Class Ills had been, the Levins had been three months in Moscow. Kitty would have preferred to enter her period of confinement still living in the family manse, on the slopes of the old groznium pit in Pokrovskoe, but Levin was determined to keep his promise made to the dying Federov, and so moved their household to the city. He did not however attempt to dictate
to his wife what would be best; rather, he shared with her the fervency of his desire to support the building resistance against the Ministry’s changes to Russian life, and by his passion Kitty was convinced.

Kitty and Levin, with some self-consciousness, called their vision of Russia’s future, a future in which their poor beloved-companions could come home, their “Golden Hope,” and they felt proud and romantic about their shared determination to make this vision a reality.

The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined to bed. But she was still up and about; there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. Dolly, her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy; the doctor, whose trusted II/Prognosis/M4 had been collected by Toy Soldiers, was equally anxious if not more so. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy. She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing already, and she brooded blissfully over this feeling.

The child was not by now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this manner of life for Kitty was that her husband was different here than where she loved him to be, and as he was in the country.

She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country. In town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, certain that at any moment some friend or stranger would approach and call him into action with the mysterious shibboleth that Federov had taught him. At home in the country, knowing himself distinctly to be in his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was never unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, afraid of being found out, protecting his inmost thoughts, peering seekingly into the eyes of
strangers. As though always afraid of missing something, though as yet he had nothing to do. And she felt sorry for him. She saw him not from without, but from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that was the only way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes she inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the city; sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order his life here so that he could be satisfied with it.

One obvious example to Kitty was that Levin had, his whole life, hated the gentlemen’s clubs frequented by Stepan Arkadyich and his associates, but now Levin felt it was necessary that he spend time in them. If there were “fellow travelers” to be found, he felt sure, this is where he would find them. Kitty had no choice therefore but to give her blessing. But whiling away hours with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky’s type—she knew now what that meant: it meant drinking and going somewhere after drinking. She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in the society of young women, and that she could not wish for. Should he stay at home with her, her mother, and her sisters? But much as she liked and enjoyed their conversations forever on the same subjects, she knew it must bore him. And what good would such hours be, spent in the dull company of her and her sisters? It would not advance their Golden Hope. What was there left for him to do?

One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever happened between them here. Whether it was that their conditions were different, or that they had both become more careful and sensible in that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow from jealousy, which they had so dreaded when they moved from the country.

One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of view, did indeed happen—that was Kitty’s meeting with Vronsky.

The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with her
father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky. The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was that at the instant when she recognized him—in his civilian dress, with no hot-whip at his thigh, no bristling steel-grey wolf at his side—when she saw the features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush (she felt it) overspread her face. But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who purposely began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished, she was perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if necessary, exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and more than that, to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation and smile would have been approved by her husband, whose unseen presence she seemed to feel about her at that instant.