Android Karenina (33 page)

“It is . . . it is inside . . . ,” his brother’s voice called elusively.

“What . . . what do you mean, inside?” Levin replied “What is inside?”

Nikolai thrashed in the sheets; he was not awake, but talking from the depths of some consuming nightmare.

“It is inside me . . . deep inside . . . get it out . . . please . . . please, brother . . .”

Levin shuddered, withdrew behind the screen, and huddled tremulously with Socrates. The question of how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question presented itself: death.

Through the night, Nikolai continued to moan and shudder and call out from the depths of his slumbering consciousness.

“Inside . . . it is inside me. . . .”

T
HE KARENINS, HUSBAND AND WIFE
, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexei Alexandrovich, though consumed with preparations for the next and most delicate phase of his cherished Project, made it a rule to see his wife every day so that the servants would have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexei Alexandrovich’s house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it.

The position was one of misery for all three, and not one of them would have been equal to enduring this position for a single day if it had not been for the expectation that it would change, that it was merely a temporary, painful ordeal which would pass over. Alexei Alexandrovich hoped that this passion would pass, as everything does pass, that everyone would forget about it, and his name would remain unsullied. Anna, on whom the position depended, and for whom it was more miserable than for anyone, endured it because she not merely hoped, but firmly believed, as she repeatedly expressed to Android Karenina, that it would all very soon be settled and come right. Vronsky, against his own will or wishes, followed her lead, hoped too that something, apart from his own action, would be sure to solve all difficulties.

*   *   *

Vronsky had that winter endured and survived a particularly brutal and long-lasting inter-regimental Cull, one intended to prepare the ranks for a new and quite serious threat to the Motherland, the details of which were murky, but for which the Ministry demanded all soldiers hone their readiness. Vronsky had advanced as his reward to the rank of colonel, and as part of his new responsibilities, he was dispatched by his superior officer to spend a week entertaining a foreign prince—an assignment that promised at first some mild amusement, but ended up being the most tedious of chores. The prince’s tastes ran to the most excessive and wearisome form of indulgence, and all week long Alexei Kirillovich was obliged to partake in flute after flute of champagne, to sit through long games of Flickerfly, and to attend the robot-human diversions known as metal-flesh, officially illegal but widely enjoyed during such “stag nights.”

When the visitor had at last departed, and Vronsky’s time was his own again, Vronsky arrived home to find a note from Anna. She wrote, “I am ill and unhappy. I cannot come out, but I cannot go on longer without seeing you. Come in this evening. Alexei Alexandrovich goes to the Ministry at seven and will be there till ten.” Thinking for an instant of the strangeness of her bidding him come straight to her, in spite of her husband’s insisting on her not receiving him, he decided to go.

After having some lunch, he lay down on the sofa and cued Lupo’s monitor to display a soothing Memory to aid him in falling off to sleep. He did not know how long he slept, but at some point he became aware that time had passed, and that Lupo’s monitor still glowed on—and as Vronsky gazed with heavy lids at the screen, he saw that the images had grown distorted and unsettling. Here was Anna being sucked again into that horrid godmouth; here she was in theVrede Garden, encased in the translucent sheath, drifting upward toward some uncertain doom. And here, at the Grav Station, the two of them together, watching the charred and battered body, curtained in burlap, lifted from the magnet bed. . . .

“Lupo!” Vronsky screamed, sitting up in a wild panic, and the Class III looked chastened and confused, for apparently the strange images had played unbidden. He hurried to cue a new Memory, but it was too late;Vronsky’s rest had become impossible.

“What queer maltuning is this!” muttered Vronsky darkly, rising from the sofa drenched in sweat, and glanced at his watch. He rang up his servant, dressed in haste, and went out onto the steps, trying to shake from his head the sequence of alarming Memories, worried too about being late.

As he drove up to the Karenins’ entrance he looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A high, narrow carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the entrance. He recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” muttered Vronsky, “and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no matter; I can’t hide myself,” and with that manner peculiar to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of, Vronsky got out of his sledge, his thumb tracing anxious circles on the hilt of his hot-whip, and went to the door. The door opened, and the II/Porter/7e62, a rug draped in the grip of its end-effector, called the carriage.

And then, suddenly, in the doorway, Vronsky almost ran up against Alexei Alexandrovich. The gas jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face, half-concealed beneath the gleaming alloy mask and the black hat, the white cravat brilliant against the beaver of the coat. Karenin’s fixed, dull eye was fastened upon Vronsky’s face.

A long moment passed, and Vronsky bowed—or rather, he began to bow, and stopped short, feeling himself unable to do so. Lupo swiveled his big silver head unit back and forth, now with trepidation at Alexei Karenin, now with fear and uncertainty at his master. Vronsky, thinking in one confused moment that it was fear, or even social awkwardness, that held him in his place, tried again to bow; it was then he realized that his body was held fast, seemingly wrapped in thick blankets of invisible force.

The telescopic eye starkly obtruded from Alexei Alexandrovich’s face as the man stood chewing his lips, directed straight at him. The invisible grip tightened slowly, constricting about Vronsky’s body like a snake . . . and then sliding him, slowly at first and then quickly, toward the heavy oaken front door. Lupo whimpered and huddled weakly in the opposite corner. Vronsky felt he was a piece of furniture set on rollers, only he moved not in the strong grips of II/Porter/7e62s, but was propelled instead by some invisible push radiating from Anna’s queer husband. Karenin stood, calm and composed, staring at him through that lenticular eye like a jeweler examining a stone, as Vronsky smashed with terrible force into the door.

In the next moment, the force that had held him relaxed like an unclenching fist, and he lay on the ground in a numb heap, pain radiating from where his back had banged into the heavy wood of the door, drinking in great, heaving gasps of sweet air.

Without a word, Alexei Karenin stepped over him, lifted his hand to his hat, and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the carriage, pick up the rug and the opera glass at the window, and disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, sweat was pouring off his body, and his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.

“What a position!” he said to Lupo, trotting at his heels. “If he would fight fair, would stand up for his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or baseness . . . He puts me in the position of playing false, which I never meant and never mean to do. . . .”

He trailed off, then added darkly: “How in blazes did he
do
that?”

He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of Anna Karenina’s retreating footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him, and was now going back to the drawing room.

“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the tears came into her eyes. “No, if things are to go on like this, the end will come much, much too soon.”

“What is it, dear one?”

“What? I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours. . . . You met him?” she asked, when they had sat down at the table in the lamplight. “You’re punished, you see, for being late.”

“Such punishment,” he replied, rubbing at the small of his back, where he could feel the first tender blossom of the angry bruise to come. “seems rather excessive. Wasn’t he to be at the Ministry?”

“He had been and come back, and was going out somewhere again.”

“Never mind, never mind,” Vronsky said, and she looked a long while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as he really was.

W
HERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
With that foreign prince still?” She knew every detail of his existence. He was going to say that he had been up all night and had dropped asleep, but looking at her thrilled and rapturous face, he was ashamed. He said he had had to go to report on the prince’s departure.

“But it’s over now? He is gone?”

“Thank God it’s over! You wouldn’t believe how insufferable it’s been for me.”

“Why so? Isn’t it the life all of you, all young men, always lead?” she said, knitting her brows, taking up the end of a length of the crochet yarn slowly spooling from a giant ball in Android Karenina’s torso. She began drawing the hook out of it, without looking at Vronsky.

“I gave that life up long ago,” he said, wondering at the change in her face, and trying to divine its meaning. “And I confess,” he said, with a smile, showing his thick, white teeth, “this week I’ve been, as it were, looking at myself in a glass, seeing that life—the endless Flickerfly, the metal-flesh, and all—and I didn’t like it.”

She held the work in her hands, but did not crochet, and looked at him with strange, shining, and hostile eyes.

“How disgusting you are, you men! How is it you can’t understand that a woman can never forget that,” she said, getting more and more angry, and so letting him see the cause of her irritation. “Especially a woman who cannot know your life? What do I know? What have I ever known?” she asked. “What you tell me. And how do I know whether you tell me the truth?”

“Anna, you hurt me. Don’t you trust me? Haven’t I told you that I haven’t a thought I wouldn’t lay bare to you?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, evidently trying to suppress her jealous thoughts. “But if only you knew how wretched I am! I believe you, I believe you. . . . What were you saying?”

Vronsky could not at once recall what he had been going to say. These fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent with her, horrified him, and, however much he tried to disguise the fact, made him feel cold toward her, although he knew the cause of her jealousy was her love for him. How often he had told himself that her love was happiness; and now she loved him as a woman can love when love has outweighed for her all the good things of life—and he was much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he had thought himself unhappy, but happiness was before him; now he felt that the best happiness was already left behind. She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this, he felt
that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now, when it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.

She turned away from him, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzling white in the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff. The soft machine hum of the yarn’s rapid unspooling filled the silence.

“I don’t understand your husband in the least,” said Vronsky. “He toys with us, literally toys; if he has the power to destroy me with a glance, why not employ that power? How can he put up with our unsettled position? He feels it, that’s evident.”

“He?” she said sneeringly. “He’s perfectly satisfied.”

“What are we all miserable for, when everything might be so happy?”

“Only he is not happy. Don’t I know him, the falsity in which he’s utterly steeped? He’s not a man, not a human being—he’s a machine. At least, and you must understand me, Alexei, because I mean it sincerely: There is some struggle within him between the man and the machine. For now at least the human part of him still lives and thrives, and it is that and nothing else that prevents him from destroying you and me together. Oh, if I’d been in his place, I’d long ago have killed, have torn to pieces a wife like me. He doesn’t understand that I’m your wife, that he’s outside, that he’s superfluous. . . . Don’t let’s talk of him!”

“You’re unfair, very unfair, dearest,” said Vronsky, trying to soothe her. “But never mind, don’t let’s talk of him. Tell me what you’ve been doing? What is the matter? What has been wrong with you, and what did the doctor say?”

She looked at him with mocking amusement. Evidently she had hit on other absurd and grotesque aspects of her husband and was awaiting the moment to give expression to them.

But he went on:

“I imagine that it’s not illness, but your condition. When will it be?”

The ironical light died away in her eyes, but a different smile, a consciousness of something, he did not know what, and of quiet melancholy, came over her face. Android Karenina buzzed swiftly and silently to a side table and poured her a glass of cool water.

“You say that our position is miserable,” Anna said, “That we must put an end to it. If you knew how terrible it is to me, what I would give to be able to love you freely and boldly! I should not torture myself and torture you with my jealousy. . . . And it will come soon, but not as we expect.”