Leo Tolstoy & Ben Winters

by Android Karenina

  And without asking the hapless servant who opened the door whether the lady was at home, Stepan Arkadyich walked into the hall. Levin followed him, more and more doubtful whether he was doing right or wrong.

  Looking at himself in the I/Reflector/9 in the hallway, Levin noticed that he was red in the face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan Arkadyich up the carpeted stairs to the study.

  Passing through the dining room, a room not very large, with dark, paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyich and Levin walked across the soft carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single lumière with a big, dark shade. On the wall above was a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted on the moon by the doomed Mihailov. Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black, curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; she stood in a confident pose on the arm of a beloved-companion robot, triumphantly and softly looking at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.

  “I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait, in a dark-blue short gown, not in the same position, nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but of course in the picture she had the advantage of the radiant backlight cast by a Class III. Now, in person, and in the New Russia, that enhancement was sadly lacking.

  CHAPTER 5

  SHE HAD RISEN to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him.

  “You will excuse me for being ill at ease,” Anna began. “I neither look nor feel myself since I have lost the company of my beloved-companion, Android Karenina.”

  Levin smiled with pleasure at her unexpected forthrightness: how refreshing to hear someone speak openly of the great collective loss the Russian people had suffered.

  “I am delighted, delighted,” she went on, and upon her lips these simple words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva and for your wife’s sake. . . . I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!”

  She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood.

  “I am settled in Alexei’s study,” she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyich’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as to be able to smoke”—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a I/CigarCase/6 and activated herself a cigarette.

  “Enjoy such luxury while you can, Anna,” her brother said. “Class Ones are now added to the list.”

  “You jest!”

  “Alas, I do not. Ours were junkered only hours ago at the club, by one of those lifelike friends of ours.”

  Anna gritted her teeth, as if to say, I shall accept the New Russia—indeed I must—but I cannot be forced to like it.

  Yes, yes, this is a woman! Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something.

  And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. She sighed, and her face suddenly took a hard expression, looking as if it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.

  In the next moment, this wonderment translated itself into action. When Stiva went out of the room a few steps ahead of Levin, before he could stop to think, he stopped at the doorframe, turned back to Anna, and whispered, urgently and impetuously: “Rearguard.”

  Neither smiling nor frowning, she leaned slightly forward in her chair and replied: “Action.”

  They both stared at the other for a long moment.

  “Well, good-bye,” Anna said at last, rising to take his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. “I am very glad que la glace est rompue.”

  She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.

  “Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.”

  “Certainly, yes, I will tell her. . . .” Levin said, blushing. “And . . . but . . .”

  “Goodnight,” said Anna Arkadyevna with finality.

  CHAPTER 6

  WELL, DIDN’T I TELL YOU?” said Stepan Arkadyich, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.

  “Yes,” said Levin dreamily, his mind racing with thoughts of Anna Karenina and the Golden Hope. “An extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but she has such depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!”

  “Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on people in the future,” said Stepan Arkadyich, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”

  Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin traveled home.

  All the way there, he reeled with excitement, and in particular with anticipation of sharing with Kitty what he had learned: that Anna Karenina, despite the abandonment of Vozdvizhenskoe and the junker army, despite their return to Moscow and the petition to Karenin, remained in her heart a partisan.

  What Levin did not know, what he could not know, was that Vronsky had never told Anna Karenina the code words. On returning home from the Huntshed, he had given her the barest outline of his meeting with Federov, but then they had passed into argument, and from there to reconciliation, and that reconciliation had led them back to Moscow.

  Never had he told her of Federov’s dying exhortation; never had he mentioned the words rearguard or action at all.

  Somehow, Anna knew the words anyway.

  * * *

  At home their new servant, a man named Kouzma, told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and then handed him a neatly folded piece of paper. This was a “letter,” an old-fashioned means of information transmission in which the correspondent commits his thoughts to paper with pen and ink—along with “books” and “newspapers,” it had come back into vogue since the disappearance of monitor-and-communiqué technology. Levin read the letter at once in the hall, and found it was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the latest gleanings from the pit were faulty, that it was fetching o
nly five and a half rubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. Levin scowled. He had been forced, like all other groznium miners, to hire human beings to administer his land in his absence, and they were terrible at it.

  Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.

  “Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.

  “First, as for Vronsky, I fear your assessment was correct: he has decidedly gone to the other side. Still, I do not think he intends to turn us in. For now, anyway, I think we are safe.”

  “Well, and then where did you go?”

  “Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”

  And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once and for all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.

  Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and deceived him.

  “Oh!” was all she said.

  “I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly wished it,” Levin went on.

  “Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him no good.

  “She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said. “And—Kitty—there is more!”

  Again, she said, “Oh?”

  “Anna Karenina, unlike Vronsky, remains one of us! She responded to the code word immediately and appropriately. I am convinced that she holds our views on the necessary changes that must come to society. Think how useful she could be. . . .”

  But Kitty hardly responded as Levin had anticipated.

  “Yes, of course, her involvement is very much to be celebrated,” said Kitty coldly, when he had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”

  Disappointed that his co-conspirator should take such little interest in his exciting discovery of Anna’s allegiances, he told her about the letter from Sokolov. Then, believing in her calm tone, he went to change his coat.

  Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.

  “What? What is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.

  “You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went . . . to her of all people! No, we must go away. . . . I shall go away tomorrow.”

  It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid her. One thing he did confess to with more sincerity was that by living so long in Moscow, leading a life of nothing but conversation, eating, and drinking, he was degenerating. And in the meantime, he was hardly progressing in his efforts on behalf of the Golden Hope. If anything, telling Kitty of his one significant advance in that goal acted to dampen his wife’s zeal for the enterprise. She now seemed to feel that if resistance meant alliance with Anna Karenina, it might be best to abandon their resistance.

  They talked till three o’clock in the morning, and as the hours passed the thrill he had felt about Anna, about the resistance and the Golden Hope, steadily dimmed in his breast. Only at three o’clock were they sufficiently reconciled to be able to go to sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  AFTER TAKING LEAVE of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. Oh, how she missed her dear Android Karenina at such times as these, when her mind was unsettled, her soul aflutter, her thoughts muddy and indistinct. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both.

  But what had he meant by that strange word he spoke so urgently, and how had she known how to respond to it? Her response, her understanding, had clearly resonated with him. Somehow she had known the exact right thing to say—but how? How had she known?

  As one troubling thought departed another arrived, like Gravs at a station. This one was connected to Vronsky, and Anna’s growing sense of the dislocation between them. If I have so much effect on others, on this Levin, who loves his home and his wife, why is it he is so cold to me? . . . not cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us apart now. Here we sit in Moscow, waiting to hear of our fate. Soon we shall be proper members of this new Russian society. So why is he not here? Why wasn’t he here all the evening?

  She heard Vronsky’s abrupt chime at the door and hurriedly dried her tears, and affected composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had not come home as he had promised—displeased only, and not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.

  “Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly. “You will hardly believe it, but they have smashed up all the Class Ones! All will be gone within the week. I think your husband and his compatriots mean to drain every vestige of technology from the nation—next they’ll have the Tsars back, and Russia will end up as some sort of vast agrarian monarchy, complete with horse races and peasants threshing wheat.”

  He laughed, but Anna remained composed.

  “Stiva has been here and Levin.”

  “Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?” he said, sitting down beside her.

  “Very much.”

  Anna did not mention the puzzling business with the code words. Instead she changed the subject, inquiring after Vronsky’s louche friend, Yashvin.

  “He was winning—seventeen thousand, when the Toy Soldiers showed up and vaporized the tables. Some others were planning to make do with hand-carved dice, I don’t know who found them or where, when at last I got Yashvin away. He had really started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.”

  “So what did you stay for?” she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes to him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. “You told Stiva you were staying on to get Yashvin away. And you have left him there.”

  The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on his face too.

  “In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message; and secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the chief point, I wanted to stay, and I stayed,” he said, frowning. “Anna, what is it for, why?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over toward her, and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.

  She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings; it was as though the tactics of combat they had studied together at Vozdvizhenskoe were now being turned upon one another.

  “Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?” she said, getting more and more excited. “Does anyone contest your rights? But you want to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.”

  His
hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more obstinate expression.

  “For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,” she said, watching him intently and suddenly finding the right word for that expression that irritated her, “simply obstinacy. For you it’s a question of whether you keep the upper hand of me, while for me . . .” Again she felt sorry for herself, and she almost burst into tears. “If you knew what it is for me! When I feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile to me, if you knew what this means for me! If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!” And she turned away, hiding her sobs.

  “But what are you talking about?” he said, horrified at her expression of despair, and again bending over her, he took her hand and kissed it. “What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid the society of women?”

  “Well, yes! If that were all!” she said.

  “Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression of despair. “What wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort, as now, Anna!” he said.

  “It’s nothing, nothing!” she said. “I don’t know myself whether it’s the solitary life, my nerves . . . . Come, don’t let us talk of it.” She spoke in a conciliatory manner now, imploring that he tell her more about the Toy Soldiers and the Class Is. They marveled together at the changes overtaking society, asked each other how long it would take before the Ministry would makes its decision about them. Neither spoke the name Alexei Alexandrovich, though both knew it was he in particular, and not the Higher Branches in general, who would make this decision.

  They talked this way, as if both stood in the same corner of the world, facing their uncertain fate together. But in his tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that he did not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with which she had been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his—and still less from her own—heart.