Android Karenina (60 page)

Well, lean pretend as well,
thought Levin. He quickly took the offered hand, and pressed it warmly. “I’m very, very glad,” he said.

“Do you know, he has never met Anna?” Stepan Arkadyich said to Vronsky. “And I want above everything to take him to see her. Let us go, Levin!”

“Really?” said Vronsky, turning back to the other men, who were busily scouring the cabinets for a set of the old-fashioned wooden dice. “She will be very glad to see you.”

A
S THE CARRIAGE DROVE
out into the street, Levin felt it jolting over the uneven road, and heard the angry shout of their sledge driver, who had only just learned to drive it, and had nothing like the smooth touch of a II/SledgeDriver/6. Levin saw in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the shops, and began to think over his actions, and to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna. What would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyich gave him no time for reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he scattered them.

“How glad I am,” he said, “that you should know her! You know Dolly has long wished for it. And Lvov’s been to see her, and often goes. Though she is my sister,” Stepan Arkadyich pursued, “I don’t hesitate to say that she’s a remarkable woman. But you will see. Her position is very painful, especially now.”

“Why especially now?”

“Vronsky and Anna have applied to her husband for amnesty and divorce, after their ill-conceived adventure in Vozdvizhenskoe. They have assurances that Karenin has received their request and is considering it, but not a word has yet been heard from that worthy. And so they wait, in rather exquisite agony, for a reply. As soon as the divorce is over, she will marry Vronsky. Well, then their position will be as regular as mine, as yours.

“But the point is she has been for three months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for some resolution. She goes out
nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do you understand, she doesn’t care to have people come as a favor. But you’ll see how she has arranged her life—how calm, how dignified she is. To the left, in the crescent opposite the church!” shouted Stepan Arkadyich, leaning out of the window.

“I beg of you not to yell at me!” the red-faced sledge driver implored, nearly banking the carriage as he jerked it into the turn.

The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyich rang loudly at the entrance where sledges were standing.

And without asking the hapless servant who opened the door whether the lady was at home, Stepan Arkadyich walked into the hall. Levin followed him, more and more doubtful whether he was doing right or wrong.

Looking at himself in the I/Reflector/9 in the hallway, Levin noticed that he was red in the face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan Arkadyich up the carpeted stairs to the study.

Passing through the dining room, a room not very large, with dark, paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyich and Levin walked across the soft carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single
lumière
with a big, dark shade. On the wall above was a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted on the moon by the doomed Mihailov. Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black, curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; she stood in a confident pose on the arm of a beloved-companion robot, triumphantly and softly looking at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.

“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably
addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait, in a dark-blue short gown, not in the same position, nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but of course in the picture she had the advantage of the radiant backlight cast by a Class III. Now, in person, and in the New Russia, that enhancement was sadly lacking.

S
HE HAD RISEN
to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him.

“You will excuse me for being ill at ease,” Anna began. “I neither look nor feel myself since I have lost the company of my beloved-companion, Android Karenina.”

Levin smiled with pleasure at her unexpected forthrightness: how refreshing to hear someone speak openly of the great collective loss the Russian people had suffered.

“I am delighted, delighted,” she went on, and upon her lips these simple words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva and for your wife’s sake. . . . I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!”

She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood.

“I am settled in Alexei’s study,” she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyich’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as to be able to smoke”—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a I/CigarCase/6 and activated herself a cigarette.

“Enjoy such luxury while you can, Anna,” her brother said. “Class Ones are now added to the list.”

“You jest!”

“Alas, I do not. Ours were junkered only hours ago at the club, by one of those lifelike friends of ours.”

Anna gritted her teeth, as if to say,
I shall accept the New Russia—indeed I must—but I cannot be forced to like it.

Yes, yes, this is a woman!
Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something.

And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. She sighed, and her face suddenly took a hard expression, looking as if it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.

In the next moment, this wonderment translated itself into action. When Stiva went out of the room a few steps ahead of Levin, before he could stop to think, he stopped at the doorframe, turned back to Anna, and whispered, urgently and impetuously: “Rearguard.”

Neither smiling nor frowning, she leaned slightly forward in her chair and replied: “Action.”

They both stared at the other for a long moment.

“Well, good-bye,” Anna said at last, rising to take his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. “I am very glad
que la glace est rompue.”

She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.

“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.”

“Certainly, yes, I will tell her. . . .” Levin said, blushing. “And . . . but . . .”

“Goodnight,” said Anna Arkadyevna with finality.

W
ELL, DIDN’T I TELL YOU?”
said Stepan Arkadyich, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.

“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, his mind racing with thoughts of Anna Karenina and the Golden Hope. “An extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but she has such depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!”

“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on people in the future,” said Stepan Arkadyich, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”

Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin traveled home.

All the way there, he reeled with excitement, and in particular with anticipation of sharing with Kitty what he had learned: that Anna Karenina, despite the abandonment of Vozdvizhenskoe and the junker army, despite their return to Moscow and the petition to Karenin, remained in her heart a partisan.

What Levin did not know, what he could not know, was that Vronsky had never told Anna Karenina the code words. On returning home from the Huntshed, he had given her the barest outline of his meeting with Federov, but then they had passed into argument, and from there to reconciliation, and that reconciliation had led them back to Moscow.

Never had he told her of Federov’s dying exhortation; never had he mentioned the words
rearguard
or
action
at all.

Somehow, Anna knew the words anyway.

*    *    *

At home their new servant, a man named Kouzma, told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and then handed him a neatly folded piece of paper. This was a “letter,” an old-fashioned means of information transmission in which the correspondent commits his thoughts to paper with pen and ink—along with “books” and “newspapers,” it had come back into vogue since the disappearance of
monitor-and-communiqué
technology. Levin read the letter at once in the hall, and found it was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the latest gleanings from the pit were faulty, that it was fetching only five and a half rubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. Levin scowled. He had been forced, like all other groznium miners, to hire human beings to administer his land in his absence, and they were terrible at it.

Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been
left alone.

“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.

“First, as for Vronsky, I fear your assessment was correct: he has decidedly gone to the other side. Still, I do not think he intends to turn us in. For now, anyway, I think we are safe.”

“Well, and then where did you go?”

“Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”

And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once and for all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.

Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and deceived him.

“Oh!” was all she said.

“I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly wished it,” Levin went on.

“Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him no good.

“She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said. “And—Kitty—there is more!”

Again, she said, “Oh?”

“Anna Karenina, unlike Vronsky, remains
one of us!
She responded to the code word immediately and appropriately. I am convinced that she holds our views on the necessary changes that must come to society. Think how useful she could be. . . .”

But Kitty hardly responded as Levin had anticipated.

“Yes, of course, her involvement is very much to be celebrated,” said Kitty coldly, when he had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”

Disappointed that his co-conspirator should take such little interest in his exciting discovery of Anna’s allegiances, he told her about the letter from Sokolov. Then, believing in her calm tone, he went to change his coat.

Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.

“What? What is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.

“You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went . . . to her of all people! No, we must go away. . . . I shall go away tomorrow.”

It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid her. One thing he did confess to with more sincerity was that by living so long in Moscow, leading a life of nothing but conversation, eating, and drinking, he was degenerating. And in the meantime, he was hardly progressing in his efforts on behalf of the Golden Hope. If anything, telling Kitty of his one significant advance in that goal acted to dampen his wife’s zeal for the enterprise. She now seemed to feel that if resistance meant alliance with Anna Karenina, it might be best to abandon their resistance.