Android Karenina (29 page)

“A corrupt woman,” he concluded aloud, sitting in his study, alone but not alone, in the darkest hours of that night.

YOU ALWAYS KNEW IT AND ALWAYS SAW IT
.

“I tried to deceive myself to spare her.”

SPARE HER? FOR WHAT REASON? TO WHAT PURPOSE?

Alexei Alexandrovich had never been so glad for the presence of his metal-thinking attachment, his
secret
beloved-companion—for it could bluntly address those things he could think but never express. Its mechanical eye showed him dark mysteries, and its voice demanded he acknowledge life’s darker truths.

“I made a mistake in linking my life to hers, but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy.”

BUT SHE . . . SHE MUST BE MADE UNHAPPY.

Everything relating to her and her son, toward whom his sentiments were as much changed as toward her, ceased to interest him. The only thing that interested him now was the question of in what way he could best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and thus with most justice, extricate himself from the mud with which she had spattered him in her fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and useful existence.

Even as he processed these perfectly rational thoughts, even congratulating himself on his ability to remain logical in the grip of emotional distress, his body, guided by the vicious impulses of the Face, obeyed a different course. Alexei Alexandrovich strode briskly into the bedroom while siding onto his ring finger, just above his wedding ring, a small silver burn-circle—an ingenious groznium-based device of his own invention—and set about incinerating his wife’s possessions with cruel efficiency.

“I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman has committed a crime,” he said, and, leveling his hand carefully, blasted
Anna Karenina’s ancient and stately armoire to splinters with the burn-circle.

“I have only to find the best way out of the difficult position in which she has placed me.”

He aimed at and destroyed her birch-wood dressing table.

“And I shall find it.”

YOU SHALL FIND IT INDEED.

Moving rapidly, deeply inhaling the sharp, pleasing scent of burnt furniture mixed with perfumes and bedside lotions, he felt that he could think clearly for the first time in a long time. In his study Alexei Alexandrovich walked up and down twice, then stopped at the household’s expensive and stately freestanding monitor. He bent his head on one side, thought a minute, and began to dictate a communiqué, without pausing for a second.

“At our last conversation,”
he began,
“I notified you of my intention to communicate to you my decision in regard to the subject of that conversation. Having carefully considered everything, I am contacting you now with the object of fulfilling that promise. My decision is as follows. Whatever your conduct may have been, I do not consider myself justified in breaking the ties in which we are bound by a Higher Power, and the beneficence of the Ministry. The family cannot be broken up by a whim, a caprice, or even by the sin of one of the partners in the marriage, and our life must go on as it has done in the past. This is essential for me, for you, and for our son. I am fully persuaded that you have repented and do repent of what has called forth the present letter, and that you will cooperate with me in eradicating the cause of our estrangement, and forgetting the past. In the contrary event, you can conjecture what awaits you and your son. I trust that you understand.”

“Yes, time will pass—time, which arranges all things, and the old relations will be re-established,” Alexei Alexandrovich announced to the Face, which fairly cackled its pleasure at the implied threat Alexei had leveled at his wife: to be subject to his will, or be destroyed. “So far reestablished, that is, that I shall not be sensible of a break in the continuity
of my life. She is bound to be unhappy, but I am not to blame, and so I cannot be unhappy.”

Having completed and transmitted his communiqué, he returned to the bedchamber, slipping back on his burn-circle as he went. With calm deliberateness Alexei Alexandrovich destroyed the four-post bed in which he and his wife had lain together so many times. The sheets of silk and linen easily took to flame, and Alexei Alexandrovich, tucking his fleshy hand comfortably into the crook of his arm, watched the fire grow—the Face whispering
GOOD GOOD GOOD
as the bed was consumed into ash.

T
HOUGH ANNA HAD OBSTINATELY
and with exasperation contradicted Vronsky when he told her their position was impossible, at the bottom of her heart she regarded her own position as false and dishonorable, and she longed with her whole soul to change it.

On the way home from the Cull she had told her husband the truth in a moment of excitement, and in spite of the agony of the moment, she was glad of it. After her husband had left her, she told herself that she was glad, that now everything was made clear, and at least there would be no more lying and deception. It seemed to her beyond doubt that her position was now made clear forever. It might be bad, this new position, but it would be clear; there would be no indefiniteness or falsehood about it. That evening she saw Vronsky, but she did not tell him of what had passed between her and her husband, though, to make the position definite, it was necessary to tell him.

When she woke up the next morning, Android Karenina was seated with perfect poise at her bedside, having completed her morning
routines, and gazing down with calm beneficence upon her mistress; as Anna opened her eyes she saw the Class III there, silhouetted against the day’s first light—they stared at one another, eyes into faceplate, sharing one brief intense moment before Android Karenina rose to fetch her mistress’s dressing gown.

In the perfect serenity of the new day, the words she had spoken to her husband seemed to her so awful that she could not conceive now how she could have brought herself to utter those strange, coarse words, and could not imagine what would come of it. But the words were spoken, and Alexei Alexandrovich had gone away without saying anything. “I saw Vronsky and did not tell him,” she said to Android Karenina, as the Class III slipped her gown over her porcelain shoulders.

“At the very instant he was going away I would have turned him back and told him, but I changed my mind, because it was strange that I had not told him the first minute. Why was it I wanted to tell him and did not tell him?” In answer to this question Android Karenina issued a light, empathetic whistle and tidied the bedclothes.

Anna’s position, which had seemed to her simplified the night before, suddenly struck her now as not only not simple, but as absolutely hopeless. She felt terrified at the disgrace, of which she had not ever thought before. When she thought of what her husband would do, the most terrible ideas came to her mind. She had a vision of being turned out of the house, of her shame being proclaimed to all the world. She asked herself where she should go when she was turned out of the house, and she could not find an answer.

When she thought of Vronsky, it seemed to her that he did not love her, that he was already beginning to be tired of her, that she could not offer herself to him, and she felt bitter against him for it. It seemed to her that the words that she had spoken to her husband, and had continually repeated in her imagination, she had said to everyone, and everyone had heard them. She could not bring herself to look those of her own household in the face. She could not bring herself
to call her II/Maid/76, and still less go downstairs and see her son and his II/Governess/D145.

As she fretted and paced about her room, her anxiety deepened into a distinct feeling of dread, reminding her powerfully and unpleasantly of her feeling at the Moscow Grav station, watching the body of the man lifted from the tracks. Android Karenina then beeped gently, signaling receipt of a communiqué, and Anna, trembling, bid her play it. Just moments before, she had regretted that she had spoken to her husband, and wished for nothing so much as that those words could be unspoken. And here this communiqué regarded them as unspoken, and gave her what she had wanted. But the communiqué seemed to her more awful than anything she had been able to conceive.

“He’s right!” she said to Android Karenina, when the communiqué had played through and dimmed away. “Of course, he’s always right; he’s a Christian, he’s generous! Yes, vile, base creature! And no one understands it except me, except
us
, and no one ever will; and I can’t explain it. They say he’s so religious, so high-principled, so upright, so clever; but they don’t see what I’ve seen. They don’t know how he has crushed my life for eight years, crushed everything that was living in me—he has not once even thought that I’m a live woman who must have love. They don’t know how at every step he’s humiliated me, and been just as pleased with himself.”

Android Karenina took on a crimson glow, moving to darker and darker shades of crimson, her coloring embodying her mistress’s wild flush of emotion.

“Haven’t I striven, striven with all my strength, to find something to give meaning to my life? Haven’t I struggled to love him, to love my son when I could not love my husband? But the time came when I knew that I couldn’t cheat myself any longer, that I was alive, that I was not to blame, that God has built me so that I must love and live. And now what does he do? If he’d killed me, if he’d killed him, I could have borne anything, I could have forgiven anything; but, no, he . . . How was it I didn’t guess what he would do? He’s doing just what’s characteristic of
his mean character. He’ll keep himself in the right, while me, in my ruin, he’ll drive still lower to worse ruin yet. . . .”

She recalled the words from the communiqué:
You can conjecture what awaits you and your son. . . .
“That’s a threat to take away my child, or worse, and Heaven knows he, he who sits in the Higher Branches, may do as he wishes! And he has been . . . has been . . .”

Android Karenina nodded, and Anna knew that her beloved-companion understood: Karenin had been changing, in ways as impossible to describe as they were to ignore.

“He doesn’t believe even in my love for my child,” Anna continued bitterly, “Or he despises it, just as he always used to ridicule it. He despises that feeling in me, but he knows that I won’t abandon my child, that I can’t abandon my child, that there could be no life for me without my child, even with him whom I love; but that if I abandoned my child and ran away from him, I should be acting like the most infamous, basest of women. He knows that, and knows that I am incapable of doing that.”

She recalled another sentence in the communiqué:
Our life must go on as it has done in the past. . . .
“That life was miserable enough in the old days; it has been awful of late. What will it be now? And he knows all that; he knows that I can’t repent that I breathe, that I love; he knows that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he wants to go on torturing me. I know him; I know that he’s at home and is happy in deceit, like a fish swimming in the water. No, I won’t give him that happiness. I’ll break through the spiderweb of lies in which he wants to catch me, come what may. Anything’s better than lying and deceit.

“But how? My God! My God! Was ever a woman so miserable as I am . . .?”

Anna collapsed in tears, and Android Karenina gathered her up and held her close, and Anna’s tears poured into the metal lap of her only friend.

I
N SPITE OF VRONSKY’S
apparently frivolous life in society, he was a man who hated irregularity. He liked to know, for instance, that all of his weapons were in proper working order at all times, and particularly when (according to the rumor currently making the regimental rounds) the Ministry’s Department of War was preparing to deploy them against some new, unnamed threat. So he would shut himself up alone and go through each weapon, from grip to muzzle, to satisfy himself that all was in proper working order. This he called his day of reckoning
or faire la lessive.

On waking up the day after the Cull, Vronsky put on a white linen coat, and without shaving or taking his bath, he distributed about him all the different pieces of weaponry he used, whether frequently or infrequently. Lupo padded in happy circles in a square of sunlight on the floor of the room, ready to be of use if needed, prepared even to act as a moving target if his master was in a mood to practice his aim.

As he worked, Vronsky considered the complexities of his life. Every man who knows the minutest details of the conditions surrounding him cannot help imagining that the complexity of these conditions, and the difficulty of making them clear, is something exceptional and personal, peculiar to himself, and never supposes that others are surrounded by just as complicated an array of personal affairs as he is. So indeed it seemed to Vronsky. And not without inward pride, he thought that any other man would long ago have been in difficulties, would have been forced to some dishonorable course, if he had found himself in such a difficult position. But Vronsky felt that now especially it was essential for him to
clear up and define his position if he were to avoid getting into difficulties. As he thought, he bent over his work table.

What Vronsky attacked first were the small arms, the special favorite pieces he kept on his person, and for which he was known. These amounted to: the smokers, which sat with pride on his belt, one jutting forth from each hip; the smoldering hot-whip that coiled around his upper thigh in its transparent skin; and the gleaming crackle dagger tucked into his handsome, black leather boot.

He found all in excellent condition: the smokers unloaded their sizzling streams at the rate of sixteen’a’second, twice the regimental standard. At the pressure of his thumb on the hilt, the hot-whip leaped to life like an extension of his arm, and snapped across the length of the room in all directions. The crackle dagger he hurled with deadly accuracy into the far corner of his lodgings, propelling it into the body of a raccoon, which had picked the wrong moment to emerge from hiding behind the wastepaper basket.