At the table, sitting sideways in a low chair, was Vronsky, his face hidden in his hands, weeping; at his feet was Lupo, his wolf-like Class III, who at the sight of Alexei Alexandrovich reared back on his haunches and growled warningly. Seeing the husband, Vronsky was so overwhelmed that he sat down again, drawing his head down to his shoulders, as if he wanted to disappear; but he made an effort over himself, got up, and said:
“She is frozen.”
“Frozen? What can that mean?”
“It comes and goes. In some moments she snaps out of it, and is entirely herself, seeming to have no recollection of what has just occurred. Then it begins again: her hair stands on end, her back arches, her eyes roll back into her head, and she is locked into that strange posture. The doctors say they have no idea, that they have seen nothing like it before.”
Vronsky stopped for a moment, and then stammered what was hardest for him to say to the husband: “But as for me, I have seen it. . . .” He trailed off, unable to speak aloud to Alexei Alexandrovich the intimate circumstance in which he had previously seen Anna enter this bizarre altered state.
“I am entirely in your power,” he said instead. “Only let me be here. . . .”
At those words, “Only let me be here,” Karenin’s mind exploded in light and noise, as if a bomb had been detonated in the depths of his cerebral cortex.
“LET ME BE HERE! LET ME BE HERE!”
The Face shouted through Karenin’s mouth, angry and incredulous, and it was then that the struggle began, a struggle between Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin’s true human heart and his hateful mechanical Face, which is to say, between Karenin and himself; a struggle to be fought inside his brain, the crevices and folds of gray matter contested like the rugged hills of a battlefield; a struggle for the soul of a man, and for the future of a nation.
HE WOULD HAVE YOUR FORGIVENESS! YOUR LOVE!
Silence, Karenin thought.
HE STANDS BEFORE YOU WEEPING, AND YOU BID ME BE SILENT!
Be silent!
NO! NEVER! NO! YOU MUST MAKE HIM SUFFER—YOU MUST MAKE THEM ALL SUFFER MUST MUST MUST . . .
And there the battle was nearly lost; indeed, at that moment Karenin even reached out for Vronsky with his mind, even telescoped his oculus toward him, intent for one deadly second on raising him high above the floor of the room and then dashing out his brains. But then from the bedroom came the sound of Anna’s voice saying something.
“She moves!” he cried.
Her voice was lively, eager, with exceedingly distinct intonations. Forgetting in the space of a heartbeat his murderous intentions, Alexei Alexandrovich went into the bedroom, and went up to the bed.
She was lying turned with her face toward him. Her cheeks were flushed crimson, her eyes glittered, her little white hands thrust out from the sleeves of her dressing gown were playing with the quilt, twisting it about. It seemed as though she were not only well and blooming, but in the happiest frame of mind. She was talking rapidly, musically, and with exceptionally correct articulation and expressive intonation.
“Alexei, come here,” Anna began. “I am in a hurry, because I’ve no time, I’ve not long left to live; this is what I wanted to say. Don’t be surprised at me. I’m still the same. . . . But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her: she loved that man, and I tried to hate you, and could not forget about her who used to be. I’m not that woman. Now I’m my real self, all myself.”
And then it happened, exactly what Vronsky had warned him of: Anna’s fragile body snapped into a fearful rigidity, her jaw clenched, her eyes rolled back into her head. And then, as he watched, her entire frame lifted six inches above the drenched mattress, oscillating wildly in the air before him. Alexei looked about desperately, but the doctor with his Class II had left the room. It was just him and her—and, he noticed suddenly, Android Karenina, who looked at him with calm directness from where she stood partially concealed in the drapes, as if to say: This shall pass.
And pass it did; in a matter of seconds, Anna’s body relaxed, her color returned, and she fell back into her place atop the bedspread. She continued speaking, mid-sentence, mid-thought even, apparently having no memory or understanding of the frightful spell.
“There is only one thing I want: forgive me, forgive me quite. I’m terrible, but my nurse used to tell me; the holy martyr—what was her name? She was worse. And I’ll go to Rome; there’s a wilderness, and there I shall be no trouble to anyone, only I’ll take Seryozha and the little one. . . . No, you can’t forgive me! I know, it can’t be forgiven! No, no, go away, you’re too good!” She held his hand in one burning hand, while she pushed him away with the other.
Still, the Face was silent; and Alexei Alexandrovich felt, for the first time in many months—no, in many years—that he was master of his own mind. This realization gave him all at once a new happiness he had never known. He knelt down, and laying his head in the curve of her arm, which burned him as with fire through the sleeve, he sobbed like a little child. She put her arm around his head, moved toward him, and with defiant pride lifted up her eyes.
Vronsky had entered the room, and he now came to the side of the bed, and seeing Anna, hid his face in his hands.
“Uncover your face—look at him! He’s a saint,” she said. “Oh! uncover your face, do uncover it!” she said angrily. “Alexei Alexandrovich, do uncover his face! I want to see him.”
Alexei Alexandrovich, never moving a muscle, focused his attention on the other man, and making use of that invisible fog of controlling force, which he had previously used to dominate and threaten, gently tugged Vronsky’s hands away from his face to reveal his timid expression. Just as on the night they had encountered each other in the doorway, the one man was controlling the other without physical power, but with the force of the mind; but now, the control was firm but gentle, like that of a loving father, guiding the hands of his son.
“Now give him your hand,” Anna demanded. “Forgive him.”
Alexei Alexandrovich gave Count Vronsky his hand.
“Thank God, thank God,” Anna said. “Now everything is ready. Now—”
And again she locked, and arched, and her spine grew rigid like a bridge of steel as her body floated several inches above the mattress. For some minutes they stood that way: Vronsky and Karenin with their hands clasped, still and solemn as supplicants at her bedside. Until at last Android Karenina motored over from the window glowing lavender and placed a gentle palm across Anna’s forehead.
Anna recovered from the attack, but immediately fell into a deep sleep.
* * *
On the third day, Anna was continuing to suffer these occasional and inexplicable attacks; the doctor, even with the help of a prototype II/Prognosis/5 that Alexei Alexandrovich requisitioned from the Ministry ofWellness & Recovery, could not discern what was causing the attacks. That day Alexei Alexandrovich went into the boudoir where Vronsky was sitting, and closing the door sat down opposite him.
“Alexei Alexandrovich,” said Vronsky, feeling that a statement of his position was coming, “I can’t speak, I can’t understand. Spare me! However hard it is for you, believe me, it is more terrible for me.”
He would have risen, but Alexei Alexandrovich took him by the hand, and said:
“I beg you to hear me out; it is necessary. I must explain my feelings, the feelings that have guided me and will guide me, so that you may not be in error regarding me. You know I had resolved on a divorce, and had even begun to take proceedings. I won’t conceal from you that in the beginning of this I was in uncertainty, I was in misery; I will confess that I was pursued by a desire to revenge myself on you and on her. I will go so far as to say that a certain part of me wanted . . . more than divorce. Wanted revenge. To cause you pain. To clutch at your insides and squeeze until I felt the blood burst from your brain, and your very lungs burst within you like two bags of rotten refuse.”
Vronsky shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“Howeve
r . . . when I got the communiqué, I came here with the same feelings; I will say more, I longed for her death. I wished that I could—never mind. But . . .” He paused, pondering whether to disclose or not to disclose his feeling to him. “But I saw her and forgave her. And the happiness of forgiveness has revealed to me my duty. I forgive completely. I would offer the other cheek, I would give my cloak if my coat were taken. I pray to God only not to take from me the bliss of forgiveness!”
A tear stood in his one human eye, and the luminous, serene look impressed Vronsky.
“This is my position: you can trample me in the mud, make me the laughingstock of the world, but I will not abandon her, and I will never utter a word of reproach to you,” Alexei Alexandrovich went on. “My duty is clearly marked for me; I ought to be with her, and I will be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it would be better for you to go away.”
He got up, and sobs cut short his words. Vronsky too was getting up, and in a stooping, not yet erect posture, looked up at him from under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich’s feeling, but he felt that it was something higher and even unattainable for him with his view of life.
The Face was silent, but not vanquished. It dwelled in hidden chambers, biding its time, analyzing opportunities. Waiting.
CHAPTER 10
ON GETTING HOME, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without undressing, lay down flat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his head on them. His head was heavy.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence of a healthy man who, if he is tired and sleepy, will go to sleep at once. And the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he began to drop off into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness had begun to meet over his head, when all at once—it was as though a violent shock of electricity had passed over him. He started so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone.
“You can trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexei Alexandrovich’s words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna’s face with its burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexei Alexandrovich had mysteriously pulled his hands away from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the sofa in the same position and shut his eyes.
“To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut he saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as it had been on the memorable evening before the Cull.
“That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? How can we be reconciled?” he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat these words. This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and memories, which he felt were thronging in his brain. Not Memories, but memories—he remembered as a child remembers. Again in extraordinarily rapid succession his best moments rose before his mind, and then his recent humiliation. “Take away his hands,” Anna’s voice said. He felt the strange force remove the hands from his face, and felt the shame-stricken and idiotic expression of his face. He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: “I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it.”
“What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said quietly to Lupo, who shook his thickly whiskered head unit in an energetic no.
“What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot themselves?”
Lupo growled with worry; his mechanical tail stood straight back; the hair bristled up and down the ladder of his spine.
“No, I must sleep!” Vronsky moved the cushion up, and pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes shut. He jumped up. “That’s all over for me,” he said, pacing, Lupo pacing behind him. “I must think what to do. What is left?”
His mind rapidly ran through his life apart from his love of Anna. “The regiment? The court? Destroying koschei?” He could not come to a pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there was no reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat, undid his belt, and uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely, walked up and down the room. “This is how people go mad,” he repeated, “and how they shoot themselves . . . to escape humiliation,” he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched teeth he approached his full-length mirror, and unholstered his twin smokers. For two minutes, his head bent forward with an expression of an intense effort of thought, he stood with the smokers in his hand, motionless, thinking.
“Of course,” he announced at last—as though a logical, continuous, and clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion. In reality this “of course,” which seemed convincing to him, was simply the result of exactly the same circle of memories and images through which he had passed ten times already during the last hour—memories of happiness lost forever. There was the same conception of the senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. Even the sequence of these images and emotions was the same.
“Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images. With a minute and yet decisive flick of his thumbs he sent the smokers to life, and felt the pleasant, familiar sensations of their barrels glowing in his palms.
Lupo began to protest, barking madly—“Yelpyelpyelp!”—charging in circles at the foot of his master; with the unseeing determination of the sleepwalker, Vronsky crouched down on his knees and flicked the mighty wolf into Surcease. Lupo was stopped in mid-motion, a forepaw raised in desperation, a gleaming silver statue of unavailing loyalty.
Pulling one of the smokers to the left side of his chest, and clutching it vigorously with his whole hand, as it were, squeezing it in his fist, he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the hot zap of the shot, but a violent blow on his chest sent him reeling.
He tried to clutch at the edge of the table, dropped the smokers, staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking about him in astonishment. The groznium plating of his uniform had of course absorbed 80 or more percent of the blast, exactly as it was designed to do. “Idiotic!” he cried.
Meanwhile, the 20 percent of unabsorbed smoker blast was ricocheting wildly around the room.
He heard the sound of the subsequent explosion, as the smoker stream landed in the worst possible place: the trunk of munitions in the opposite corner of the room. The Disrupter, its feather trigger activated by the force of the smoker stream, exploded to life, and the whole room began to shake violently; next the six-load of glowbombs erupted one after the other, a string of deafening, concussive explosions. Vronsky clutched at his forehead and ducked under the settee, grasping with desperate fingers for Lupo, exposed in the center of the room, helpless in Surcease.
He cowered there, his chest throbbing, covering his beloved-companion with his body, until the firestorm abated. When Vronsky looked up from the floor, he could barely recognize his room: the bent legs of the table, the wastepaper basket, and the tiger-skin rug, all of it a smoking ruin. He breathed with difficulty through scorched lungs, stumbled for the exit, smelled the terrible odor of his own singed hair and skin.
“I’ve got you, old friend,” he muttered raggedly to Lupo, shielding his eyes against the smoke with one hand while with the other he flicked his beloved-companion back to life.
“I’ve got you.”
CHAPTER 11
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THE MISTAKE MADE by Alexei Alexandrovich—that, when preparing to see his wife, he had overlooked the possibility that her repentance might be sincere, and he might forgive her, and she might not die—this mistake was, two months after his return from Moscow, brought home to him in all its significance. But the mistake made by him had arisen not simply from his having overlooked that contingency, but also from the fact that until that day of his interview with his dying wife, he had not known his own heart. At his sick wife’s bedside he had for the first time in his life given way to that feeling of sympathetic suffering always roused in him by the sufferings of others, and hitherto looked on by him with shame as a harmful weakness. And pity for her, and remorse for having desired her death, and most of all, the joy of forgiveness made him at once conscious, not simply of the relief of his own sufferings, but of a spiritual peace he had never experienced before. In the profound silence of the Face’s unexpected disappearance, he suddenly felt that the very thing that was the source of his sufferings had become the source of his spiritual joy; that what had seemed insoluble while he was judging, blaming, and hating had become clear and simple when he forgave and loved.
He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and her remorse. He forgave Vronsky, and pitied him, especially after reports reached him of his desperate action. He felt more for his son than before. And he blamed himself now for having taken too little interest in him. But for the little newborn baby he felt a quite peculiar sentiment, not of pity, only, but of tenderness. At first, from a feeling of compassion alone, he had been interested in the delicate little creature, who was not his child, and who was cast on one side during her mother’s illness, and would certainly have died if he had not troubled about her, and he did not himself observe how fond he became of her. He would go into the nursery several times a day until the child got quite used to his presence. Sometimes for half an hour at a stretch he would sit silently gazing at the saffron-red, downy, wrinkled face of the sleeping baby in its I/Perambulator/9, watching the movements of the frowning brows, and the fat little hands with clenched fingers that rubbed the little eyes and nose. At such moments particularly, Alexei Alexandrovich had a sense of perfect peace and inward harmony, and saw nothing extraordinary in his position, nothing that ought to be changed.
Leo Tolstoy & Ben Winters Page 29
