Android Karenina (36 page)

At first Levin, in answer to Kitty’s question of how he could have seen her last year in the carriage, told her how he had been coming home from the smeltworks along the highroad and had met her.

*   *   *

Over time the evening’s conversation turned from cold robotics to warm human passions. Turovtsin, another of the party, as a means of drawing attention away from the Robot Question, about which he knew nothing, mentioned an acquaintance involved in an intrigue.

“You heard, perhaps, about Pryatchnikov?” said this Turovtsin, warmed up by the champagne he had drunk. “Vasya Pryatchnikov,” he said, with a good-natured smile on his damp, red lips, addressing himself principally to the most important guest, Alexei Alexandrovich, “they told me today he fought a duel with Kvitsky at Tver, and has killed him.”

Just as it always seems that one bruises oneself on a sore place, so Stepan Arkadyich felt now that the conversation would by ill luck fall every moment on Alexei Alexandrovich’s sore spot. Small Stiva, as attuned as his master to conversational nuance, brought himself up short in his round of bustling, flashing with alarm at Oblonsky. Together they would have contrived to pull the brother-in-law away, but Alexei Alexandrovich himself inquired, smiling neutrally from behind his mask:

“What did Pryatchnikov fight about?”

“His wife. Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and blasted him!”

“Ah!” said Alexei Alexandrovich indifferently, and lifting his eyebrows, he went into the drawing room, and the rest of the party resumed their conversation.

“How glad I am you have come,” Dolly Oblonsky, Stiva’s wife, said to Karenin with a frightened smile, meeting him in the outer drawing room. “I must talk to you. Let’s sit here.”

“Sit sit,”
echoed her Class III, Dolichka.
“Oh do, sit.”

Alexei Alexandrovich, with the same expression of indifference given him by his lifted eyebrows, sat down beside Darya Alexandrovna, and smiled affectedly.

“It’s fortunate,” he said, “especially as I was meaning to ask you to excuse me, and to be taking leave. I have to start tomorrow.”

Darya Alexandrovna was firmly convinced of Anna’s innocence, and she felt herself growing pale and her lips quivering with anger at this frigid, unfeeling man, wreathed by the eldritch gleam of his silvery half-face, who was so calmly intending to ruin her innocent friend.

“Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, with desperate resolution looking him in the face, “I asked you earlier about Anna, but you made me no answer. How is she?”

“She is, I believe, quite well, Darya Alexandrovna,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich, not looking at her.

“Alexei Alexandrovich, forgive me, I have no right . . . but I love Anna as a sister, and esteem her; I beg, I beseech you to tell me what is wrong between you? What fault do you find with her?”

Alexei Alexandrovich frowned, and almost closing his eyes, dropped his head, and was at once confronted by the caustic hissing of the Face.

HOW DARE SHE

“Quiet! Please!” he cried aloud, and balled a fist against his forehead; Dolly stared back at him tremulously.

“I presume that your husband has told you the grounds on which I consider it necessary to change my attitude toward Anna Arkadyevna?” he said, not looking her in the face.

“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, I can’t believe it!” Dolly said, clasping her bony hands before her with a vigorous gesture. She rose quickly, and laid her hand on Alexei Alexandrovich’s sleeve. “We shall be disturbed here. Come this way, please.”

HOW DARE SHE
began the Face again, but Dolly’s agitation had an effect on Alexei Alexandrovich. He got up and followed her to the schoolroom. They sat down to a table covered with an old sheet of acetate, cut in slits by I/Penknife/4s; at such “writing tables” did children play at the old game, a mere amusement since the time of the Tsars, of “learning one’s letters.”

“I don’t, I don’t believe it!” Dolly began, trying to catch his glance, which avoided her.

“One cannot disbelieve facts, Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, with an emphasis on the word “facts.”

“But what has she done?” said Darya Alexandrovna. “What precisely has she done?”

“She has forsaken her duty, and deceived her husband. That’s what she has done,” said he.

“No, no, it can’t be! No, for God’s sake, you are mistaken,” said Dolly, putting her hands to her temples and closing her eyes.

Alexei Alexandrovich smiled coldly, with his lips alone, meaning to signify to her and to himself the firmness of his conviction; but this hot defense, though it could not shake him, reopened his wound. He began to speak with greater heat.

“It is extremely difficult to be mistaken when a wife herself informs her husband of the fact—informs him that eight years of her life, and a son, all that’s a mistake, and that she wants to begin life again,” he said angrily, with a snort.

“Anna and sin—I cannot connect them, I cannot believe it!”

“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, now looking straight into Dolly’s kindly, troubled face, and feeling that his tongue was being loosened in spite of himself, “I would give a great deal for doubt to be still possible. When I doubted, I was miserable, but it was better than now. When I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope, and still I doubt of everything. I am in such doubt of everything that I even hate my son, and sometimes do not believe he is my son. I am very unhappy.”

He had no need to say that. Darya Alexandrovna had seen that as soon as he glanced into her face; and she felt sorry for him, and her faith in the innocence of her friend began to totter.

Karenin’s inner voice for once was silent, and he was glad for that—he could bear, he thought, this woman’s childish pity, but not the ruthless disdain of the Face.

“Oh, this is awful, awful! But can it be true that you are resolved on a divorce?”

“I am resolved on extreme measures. There is nothing else for me to do.”

“Nothing else to do, nothing else to do . . . ,” Dolly echoed, with tears in her eyes.

“Nothing else? Nothing?”
came the third echo, this from Dolichka, parroting her mistress in sad, mechanical tones.

OH BUT THERE IS SOMETHING
, came the brutal dead whisper of the Face.

OH BUT THERE IS.

DIVORCE HER? YOU MUST Kl—

“No! It is enough!!” said Karenin, with a force shocking to Dolly. “I shall divorce her, and that is all!”

“No, it is awful! She will be no one’s wife, she will be lost!”

“What can I do?” said Alexei Alexandrovich, raising his shoulders and his eyebrows. “I am very grateful for your sympathy, but I must be going,” he said, getting up.

“No, wait a minute. You must not ruin her. Wait a little; I will tell you about myself. I was married, and my husband deceived me; in anger and jealousy, I would have thrown away everything, I would myself. . . But I came to myself again; and who did it? Anna saved me. And here I am living on. The children are growing up, my husband has come back to his family, and feels his fault, is growing purer, better, and I live on. . . . I have forgiven it, and you ought to forgive!”

Alexei Alexandrovich heard her, but her words had no effect on him now. All the hatred of that day when he had resolved on a divorce had sprung up again in his soul. He shook himself, and said in a shrill, loud voice:

“Forgive I cannot, and do not wish to, and I regard it as wrong. You must understand that divorce is not the worst I can do to her, but the best she might hope for. I have done everything for this woman, and she has trodden it all in the mud to which she is akin. I am not a spiteful man, I have never hated anyone, but I hate her with my whole soul, and
I cannot even forgive her, because I hate her too much for all the wrong she has done me!”

“Love those who hate you. . . .” Darya Alexandrovna whispered timorously.

When he spoke in response his natural speaking voice was displaced with the cruel rasp of the Face, speaking out from his mouth.

“NO,”
he said.
“HATE THEM MORE.”

And turning on his heel, he left Dolly there to shudder and to whisper to Dolichka, exactly as others had whispered before: “What is he?”

Meanwhile Karenin himself gathered his coat and hat and stopped at the door, glaring icily at the two old intellectuals, who still sat over their drained bowls of soup, parsing the question of robot intelligence.

“I might humbly suggest, gentlemen, you spend too much effort debating these ancient and intricate questions. In short order, the issue will be . . . let us say . . . moot.”

And then, Alexei Alexandrovich quietly took leave and went away.

W
HEN THE GROUP
finished eating and rose from the table, Levin would have liked to follow Kitty into the drawing room, but he was afraid she might dislike this as too obviously paying her attention. He remained in the little ring of men, taking part in the general conversation, and without looking at Kitty, he was aware of her movements, her looks, and the place where she was in the drawing room.

“I thought you were going toward the piano,” he said, at last approaching her. “That’s something I miss in the country—music.”

She rewarded him with a smile that was like a gift. “What do they want to argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Levin. “It generally happens that one argues hotly simply because one can’t make out what one’s opponent wants to prove.”

And with that the two in the drawing room, with their beloved-companions standing back a deferential distance, closed their eyes against the discussion in the other room, and felt at once that all the world was theirs alone. Kitty, going up to a game table, sat down, and, taking up a mini-blade, began drawing diverging circles over the new acetate surface.

They began on another of the subjects that had been started at dinner—the liberty and occupations of women. Levin was of the opinion of Darya Alexandrovna that a girl who did not marry should find a woman’s duties in a family: that
of petite mécanicienne
, maintaining the Class Is of the household.

“No,” said Kitty, blushing, but looking at him all the more boldly with her truthful eyes, “a girl may be so positioned that she cannot live in the family without humiliation, while she herself. . .”

At the hint he understood her.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes—you’re right, you’re right!”

Socrates and Tatiana exchanged a knowing look, and then both enacted an exceedingly rare gesture, in tacit acknowledgment of the powerful mood of intimacy blossoming between their respective masters: reaching up at the same moment beneath their chins, they put themselves in Surcease.

A silence followed. She was still tracing shapes with the blade on the table. Kitty’s eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of happiness.

“Ah! I’ve scratched figures all over the acetate!” she said, and, laying down the little blade, she made a movement as though to get up.

“What! Shall I be left alone—without her?” he thought with horror, and he took the knife. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting down to the table. “I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.”

He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.

“Please, ask it.”

“Here,” he said, and he carved the initial letters:
w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t.
These letters meant:
When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?
There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; among the thousands of miraculous innovations groznium had gifted to the Russian people, mind-reading remained as impossible as it was in the time of the Tsars.

But Levin looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him,
Is it what I think?

“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.

“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the
n
that stood for
never.

“It means
never”
she said, “but that’s not true!”

He quickly laid down another sheet of acetate, gave her the blade, and stood up. She scratched:
t, i, c, n, a, d.

Dolly was completely relieved of the depression caused by her conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich when she caught sight of the four figures Tatiana and Socrates in their meaningful Surcease; Kitty with the penknife in her hand, with a shy and happy smile looking upward at Levin; and his handsome figure bending over the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the next on her.

He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant:
Then I could not answer differently.

He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.

“Only then?”

“Yes,” her smile answered.

“And n . . . and now?” he asked.

“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!” she etched the initial letters:
i, y, c, fa, fw, h.
This meant:
if you could forget and forgive what happened.
He snatched the knife with nervous,
trembling fingers, and wrote the initial letters of the following phrase:
I have nothing to forget and forgive; I have never ceased to love you.

She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.

“I understand,” she said in a whisper.

He sat down and scratched out a long phrase, requiring him to roll out a third sheet of acetate. She understood it all, and without asking him, “Is it this?” took the blade and at once answered.

For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he scratched out three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer,
Yes.