“Enough, Sergei, she’s your sister. This is why I didn’t mention it earlier. To avoid a scene. We’re picking her up, and that’s final!”
Giorgi maintains their steady pace.
Time seems to slow down. Oblivious to what’s happening on the avenue, Sergei sighs. “Farewell, concert!”
“Such drama! Don’t grit your teeth, stop grinding them this second, you’ll crack them!”
“I’m not grinding them.”
“Of course you are, even when you speak. Stop it! Relax! We’re on our way!”
“I’m not going to the concert.”
“Enough. You’re coming. You have to come,” and she adds, in her high, confident voice, “Onward, Giorgi! Onward! To Mademoiselle Anya’s!” The coach speeds up again, and Claudia picks up where she left off, without changing her tone of voice. “I’ve noticed how badly you’re treating your teeth, as if they’re responsible for these ridiculous fits you throw about Anya. Ridiculous! She’s a sweetheart. Calm down, Sergei, it’s all right. I asked her to be ready for us. I told her we’d stop by at 7:20 (so I lied a little). Everything’s fine. I know you well, you wouldn’t want to arrive too early. You’re the only person in all St. Petersburg who goes to the concert for the music.”
When the carriage stops, the door to the Karenin Palace opens like a jack-in-the-box, and out springs Anya. Sergei catches a glimpse of Kapitonich, the old hall porter, as the door closes.
“I heard you coming!” Anya says as she gets into the carriage, smiling. “I wanted to show my sister-in-law how grateful I am, I was waiting right by the front door with my muff and my hat on, ready to go…. I’m so easily distracted. Aleksandra was asking me to let her do the most absurd thing…. I refused, of course.”
Anya’s cheeks are burning, as if she’s been sitting next to the fire. Sergei greets her with a curt nod, regarding her out of the corner of his eye.
Claudia asks, “Aleksandra, your lady’s maid? The one whose patron is Princess Elizaveta Narishkina? The one who … ?”
Anya interrupts impatiently. “Yes, that Aleksandra, the one who worked for Narishkina, the tsarina’s lady-in-waiting.”
“What did Aleksandra ask you?”
“You know, Aleksandra is the girl who—”
“Yes, yes, I’m saying I know exactly who she is, don’t you remember I recommended her to you when Marietta left?”
“Indeed! An inspired suggestion! She’s a jewel, she’s always pleasant and willing, unlike most servants these days, slow, two-faced, lazy…. She was asking for the evening off without any advance notice. Going out tonight, of all nights, imagine that, and returning tomorrow at dawn.”
“You should have let her go, what difference does it make to you?” Sergei says.
“That’s more easily said than done, Sergei! Who’ll dress me if she’s out? Impossible. Tomorrow is Sunday. I can’t set foot outside the house without dressing properly, and without her I’m sunk. Plus, I can’t do my own hair.”
Without looking at her, Sergei mutters, “Who dresses you? You’re a big girl! You can’t dress yourself? And what’s that expression, ‘do my own hair’? ‘Do’ my own hair!”
Claudia changes the subject. “How was your day?”
“I saw two motorcars go by!”
“They’re called automobiles,” Sergei corrects her, tersely.
Claudia continues. “What did you do today?”
“I went to the Eliseev shop….”
“Weren’t you just there yesterday?” Sergei interjects. “You could stay home, you know.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday! It’s easy for you to say, I’m home all alone….”
As if she’s thinking aloud to herself, Claudia blurts out, “I don’t even want to think about what your pantry looks like.”
“Neither do I,” Anya responds, speaking frankly. “I leave that to the help.”
“You can’t do that, Anya. They’ll steal from you, things aren’t like they used to be, you think you’re living in your grandparents’ time….”
“I’m no good at organizing. That’s what the help is for.”
Anya and Claudia continue chatting for the remainder of the short distance to the theater; it’s impossible to get a word in edgewise. Sergei stops listening. He goes back to thinking about the letter from the tsar and the impossibility of getting out of the predicament. He’s so caught up that he doesn’t realize he’s missing his favorite thing about the concert, the delicious and childlike anticipation of what’s to come.
The word “childlike,” in reference to Sergei, is meaningful. He had been a happy child. He had a poet’s soul, at least until she was gone, and to make things even more difficult, he was no longer an only child. His hair lost its curl, the color of his eyes changed, his gaze—which had been identical to his father’s—acquired the restlessness of his mother’s.
And something else happened too. Ever since he was little, his father had felt that he wasn’t speaking to his son, but to a fictitious child, when he looked at him. Partly out of politeness, and even more out of fear, Sergei pretended to be that imaginary child. Then, when Anna died, Sergei became that child, the one he thought his father believed he was, a fictitious child. Slowly he became a man, and although he tried his best not to be a poet, perhaps something of the poet’s nervous anxiety remained.
5. The Tsar’s Letter
The letter that Sergei and Claudia Karenin receive from the tsar’s desk that day announces the emperor’s desire to possess the portrait of Anna Karenina by the “great master” Mikhailov, which, according to Karenin’s will, belongs to Sergei.
Mikhailov painted it on commission at Vronsky’s behest, when the lovers were living in Italy. The painter finished the canvas quickly (he was in a hurry to pay some household debts), but that didn’t diminish its quality. It was magnificent, or so it was rumored, but no one apart from Tolstoy and a handful of others had had the opportunity to view it at leisure. And that was nearly three decades ago, because after Vronsky’s death, Countess Vronskaya (Vronsky’s mother) took the portrait down and had it stored facing the wall. And that’s how it remained, facing a wall all this time, except on one occasion.
The note from the desk of the tsar ends by announcing his intention to acquire the portrait for the collection at the New Hermitage. Succinct, it’s more an order than a request.
6. In the Theater
The Karenins’ carriage stops in front of the Mariinsky Theater. The streetlamps illuminate the tiny, quivering snowflakes. Unlike the ones that had glittered in the morning sunlight, these acquire the dull, dusky colors of trampled snow as they fall, a muddy mess churned up by wheels, horses’ hooves, sleigh runners, drops of kerosene and motor oil, and the tread of pedestrians. Claudia gets out, her eyes on the ground; the mess makes her heart sink. We shouldn’t have come, she thinks, and her eyes cloud and glaze over, as if a film of dirty snow has covered them, too, as if she’s seen the hangman pass by.
“It’s January 8, 1905.” Why is she saying the date aloud, is it to disguise her thoughts?
Anya repeats after her, “1905, 1905, I like 1905!”
Sergei looks up at the streetlamps. The light disperses the negative thoughts weighing him down. Anya scans the ground, looking for a place to step, realizing that she’s going to ruin her shoes. “It looks as though a crowd has passed through,” she says. “You’d think Pavlova was performing!”
Sergei replies sarcastically, “See the Broomstick perform? Not I, little sister!” The Karenin siblings don’t rate the new star highly because of her technical imperfection and her sentimental interpretation. “She’s an absurd beauty.” “There’s no soul in the way she dances.”
A dark-green Mercedes limousine stops in front of the theater. It’s Prince Orlov’s, but the tsar likes to borrow it. A grouchy chauffeur sits at the wheel; a streetlamp shines on his face when the door is opened for the passenger.
In the lobby an old usher recognizes them immediately, calling to S
ergei by his name—and quoting a few things he said in the past—and to the women by their surname, taking their coats, hats, muffs, snow boots, and Sergei’s cane. He doesn’t give them a claim check in return. “Just ask for Fyodor, I’ll bring you your things.” When Prince Orlov sees them, he nods and immediately turns his back; the Karenins just keep walking. The third bell rings just as they pass through the door to their box.
The bright candelabras and the lively bustle in the audience restore Claudia’s spirits. Anya takes the seat in the center of the front row, between the couple, which further irritates Sergei. They’re in the fifth box on the dress circle—baignoire five. All eyes are on radiant Anya, her gorgeous curly hair, thick and dark; her elegance; her dense black eyelashes; her skin the color of old marble; her gray eyes set against the eye-catching shade of her dress, a reddish purple that’s all the rage. She’s the spitting image of her mother, though no one would have thought so when she was little. If she differs in any way, it’s that in her features and movements you can see Tolstoy’s inspiration for creating her—he once met Pushkin’s oldest daughter, whose great-grandfather was an African, the Moor of St. Petersburg. When he notices people glancing at his sister, Sergei imagines what they’re whispering. “Poor thing!” “And so pretty!” “She’s exactly like her mother!” He’s livid.
The fact that she’s the spitting image of their mother is the main reason Sergei can’t bear to be near Anya. He feels betrayed every time he sees her; when Anya’s around, everyone thinks immediately of the Karenina and pegs them both as her children. But the truth is, though her presence magnifies the effect, it doesn’t change the way people think. Whether he’s with Anya or not, Sergei’s a marked man because he’s the son of that lovely woman who killed herself. Even the box they’re sitting in is the very same one that his mother occupied in a famous passage of the novel that bears her name.
Sergei occupies the very same seat that his mother did when, accompanied by Princess Varvara (of the questionable reputation), she attended the theater in defiance of the way she had been ostracized for living with Vronsky. It was the very same concert where Madame Kartasova spat out “I’m ashamed to sit next to her.” Today’s letter has made him hypersensitive, and everything from the dirty snow outside the theater to the box that reminds him of Kartasova sharpens the pain of that insult, flagellating him, as if it had been directed at him. It’s like a menacing cloud that burns and asphyxiates him.
But more than anything else, it’s Anya that’s upsetting him. Because she looks so much like Anna, it’s like a megaphone is repeating, You’re Karenina’s son; she fell in love with Vronsky and abandoned you. And what did she see in Vronsky? You saw something, his bald spot, you saw it from the window in your wet nurse Marietta’s room.
Anya had exacerbated his father’s sadness, and even worse, she was a constant reminder that he and Anya had been written by Tolstoy. That’s what he really can’t bear.
What’s wrong? Sergei? Claudia asks with a pointed look (because Anya is sitting between them). She also says, Stop heaving such deep sighs, calm down!
I don’t know why my heart’s so heavy, Sergei replies silently with an anxious look.
When the lights go down and the music starts, Sergei still feels the same; he can’t enjoy what he’s hearing. I’m sunk, he tells himself once more, I’m utterly and completely sunk, as if he’s in his own personal opera, now sharp, now serious, now quick, now slow, sunk, sunk! It’s as if Sergei’s composing his own aria.
Anya is listening without hearing a thing. The music has a pleasant effect on her, apart from the fact that, paradoxically, it makes her both more sociable and more withdrawn. She deals with these contradictory impulses by picking up the mother-of-pearl opera glasses she inherited from her mother. The opera glasses and the relative stillness of the audience conspire to engross her in her own thoughts.
She moves the opera glasses in time with the orchestra, raising or lowering them in time with the strings, woodwinds, and percussion. Her predilection is for people who don’t come from a novel, and of these, she prefers the least significant, the ones who focus their energy and concentration on experiencing every last detail. Anya’s opera glasses linger on the tsar’s doctor or his personal secretary, their wives, the hangers-on who hold unimportant government posts, the progeny of wealthy merchants, or the dilettantes who chase trends, or the visiting travelers. Over the years she’s also learned to discern the ones who, like her brother, her mother, her father by blood, and her father by law, were born as characters, imagined by their authors, partly stolen from reality or flights of fancy as the pen flew across the page, but she’s much more interested in the people born of a womb.
The opera glasses are an ideal tool; she feels closer without being close enough to hear what they’re saying. Unlike her mother, she doesn’t read anything but bodice rippers; she has no thirst for knowledge, no intellectual curiosity. But though she’s frivolous and canny, she’s not deaf, and she has a dark side that affords her a deep appreciation of certain composers.
When the orchestra begins its second piece, Claudia ceases following two or three different scores in her head, as is her habit. Wagner succeeds where her husband never does. Perhaps if she’d had a child, it would play the role Wagner does, but the child would have had to be troubled, because Wagner troubles her. He disrupts her natural calm, but instead of resisting, she gives herself over to the feeling entirely, teary and submissive as she never would be otherwise. She doesn’t often cry, but with Wagner she has a hard time holding back her tears. If she had known they were going to play one of his pieces, perhaps she wouldn’t have come to the concert, but she didn’t look at the program, she was going to the concert. She was there to make Sergei happy (he adores music) and to keep Anya company, to get her out of the house. The arrival of the tsar’s letter made the occasion even more appealing.
Claudia is not as beautiful as Anya and lacks that something special (or “exotic”) that would make her a true beauty—something her sister-in-law has in spades—but she is hardly ugly; she has fair skin and thin, straight hair. Anya is lively, but her happiness is always tinged with bitterness, whereas Claudia is naturally happy, and she wears her happiness with beauty and grace.
Today, the difference in their temperaments diminishes under Wagner’s influence, because Wagner is Anya’s musical passion. For the duration of the piece, she removes the opera glasses from her eyes, and her excitement makes her even more beautiful, while Claudia seems distracted, far away.
It would be impossible to describe all the differences between the two women, because we would have to enumerate each and every one of their characteristics. But there’s one difference that must be emphasized: Anya is a fictional character and Claudia isn’t. Anya’s cradle was made of ink, Claudia’s had sheets from Seville. Still, it bears noting that Anya is different from other fictional characters because she barely appears in the novel in which she was born, and that gives her personality more breadth. Certain facts are incontrovertible: her mother never loved her the way she loved Sergei, her biological father hardly knew her, her adoptive one (her brother’s father) felt tenderly toward her and wanted to protect her from the moment she was born—when she cried because the wet nurse didn’t have enough milk, it was Karenin who got upset—but her very being also made him feel bitter, frustrated, and humiliated. These combinations of affection and hostility, tenderness and betrayal, and the fact that she’s fictional (though only slightly so) make her a rarity: she’s almost real.
7. What Giorgi, the Karenins’ Coachman, Did
Giorgi, the coachman, heads toward Claudia and Sergei Karenin’s palace. People call the building “Seryozha,” which means “Little Sergei”; wagging tongues claim it was anonymously donated to Karenina’s son, but that’s a pack of lies, because it was bought with Claudia’s dowry.
No sooner has the carriage come to a halt than a woman gets in, her face hidden by a veil.
“Thank you,
Giorgi. Thanks.”
“The master and his wife nearly didn’t go.”
“Why? They had another argument?”
“Same as ever.”
“Are you sure you’ve got time to give me a ride?”
“Aleksandra, I’m not going to let you go alone. You have no idea what you’re getting into….”
“Giorgi, I know I asked you to do me a favor, but I don’t want to create problems for you. And I do know what I’m doing.”
“You asked me a very big favor. I’d do anything for you. Especially if you’ll marry me.”
“But Giorgi, you’re already married!”
“Just a little. Not in St. Petersburg….”
“You’re married. Shush.”
“Well, I have to go anyway, I have another mission. I’m giving someone else a ride.”
They take the first eastbound street, and then turn northward. Two blocks farther on, Giorgi stops the carriage. He opens the door.
“Aleksandra, this is the other passenger going to the Haven. Now we’ll get going.” He modifies his tone of voice, as if he were speaking to his employer. “Good evening, Clementine.”
Clementine sits down opposite Aleksandra, as far from her as possible, and pays her no attention whatsoever. She’s bundled in her cape and lost in her own thoughts. Aleksandra, by contrast, observes her with curiosity whenever the streetlights allow. Her clothing is most unusual; the cloak made of scraps is clearly secondhand. Clementine crosses her legs, and Aleksandra sees that under her dress, she’s wearing tight long johns down to her ankles, like puttees.
The carriage heads southeast, toward the industrial part of St. Petersburg. It picks up speed, despite the narrowness of the streets, and leaves the city center behind.
Clementine is fully absorbed putting her thoughts in order. But when the carriage stops on a brightly lit corner, she notices Aleksandra scrutinizing her—Aleksandra’s thinking the same thing she thought when Clementine got into the carriage, Another one of Giorgi’s lady friends, men really are good for nothing.
The Book of Anna Page 3
