Android Karenina

Chapter 15

ONE OF ANNA’S OBJECTS in coming back to Russia had been to see her son; she understood from letters she had received that Sergey had been told she was dead, and that terrible deception weighed heavily on her heart. From the day she left the moon the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her. And as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her imagination. When Vronsky spied her sitting in quiet counsel with Android Karenina, it was this dream she was speaking of, talking endlessly of Sergey and cuing Memories of the boy day and night. Anna did not even put to herself the question of how to arrange it. It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in the same town with him. But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made distinctly aware of her present position in society—not only her relations with Vronsky, but her possession of one of the few remaining Class Ills on the city streets—and she grasped the fact that to arrange this meeting was no easy matter. To go straight to the house, where she might meet Alexei Alexandrovich, that she felt she had no right to do.
But to get a glimpse of her son out walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she must say to him, she so longed to embrace him, to kiss him.
She decided that the next day, Seryozha’s birthday, she would go straight to her husband’s house and at any cost see her son and overturn the hideous deception with which they were encompassing the unhappy child.
As her plan formed itself in her mind, she went to a toy shop, bought toys; and then crept into Vronsky’s private chambres d’armory, while he slept soundly, and carefully removed what she felt were the items necessary for the excursion. She thought over a plan of action. She would go early in the morning at eight o’clock, when Alexei Alexandrovich would be certain not to be up. She carefully explained her intentions to Android Karenina, who instantly and completely understood her desires.
The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, a woman climbed from a hired sledge outside the home of Alexei Karenin and rang at the front entrance.
“Some lady,” grunted the Karenins’ stoic, old mécanicien, Kapitonitch, who, not yet dressed, in his dumpy, grey undercoat, peeped out of the window to see a lady in a veil standing close up to the door. Kapitonitch opened the door and was astonished to see the figure of his old mistress, Anna Karenina, covered in her familiar traveling cloak and veil.
Kapitonitch stood perfectly still, a statue of a man with his hand upon the doorknob—for how could he open it? He remembered Anna’s kindness, and he wished for nothing greater than to allow her entrance to what had been her home; but it was Kapitonitch who had buried the poor store clerk in a rutted ditch behind the house.
“Whom do you want?” he asked, affecting a voice as hard as tempered steel.
From behind her veil, Anna, apparently not hearing his words, made no answer.
At the same moment, in the gardens behind the house, the real Anna Karenina—for of course it was Android Karenina standing still and wordless at the front door behind Anna’s veil—the real Anna overleaped the high electrified fence and landed with a bone-rattling thud beside the fountain. Uneasily holding one of Vronsky’s prized regimental smokers before her, she advanced in her stocking feet toward the rear door of the great house that once, a lifetime ago, had been her own. Step after careful step she advanced, not daring to glance up at the bedroom windows, and instead noticing, a few feet from the back door, a kind of rickety outbuilding she did not recognize.
The large metal door of this shed hung slightly open, glinting in the daylight, and Anna’s curiosity overcame her.
At the front door, noticing the embarrassment of the unknown lady, Kapitonitch went out to her, opened the second door for her, and asked her what she wanted.
Again the woman said nothing.
“His honor’s not up yet,” said Kapitonitch, looking at her attentively. Then, hearing a loud, sharp shriek from the rear of the house—the distressed call of a captured bird? the strangled cry of a woman?—he wheeled sharply about.
*   *   *
Anna hid herself behind the shed, out of which she had rapidly retreated, in horror of what lay inside. Dear God, she thought, jamming her thick fox-fur muff into her mouth to muffle the ragged sound of her breathing.
Dear merciful God.
Inside the shed she had seen a long, wooden worktable, lined with human faces. Some were displayed in velvet cases, some scattered haphazardly in a gruesome clutter; faces high-cheeked and fleshy and beadyeyed; whole faces and faces in various states of ghoulish disassembly: here a mouth, there the broad expanse of a forehead, there a pair of eyeballs rolling in a wooden box; half a cheek, the skin peeled back to reveal the tangle of red-black muscle beneath.
Still reeling from the stomach-turning awfulness of such a sight, Anna gave the lock of the house’s rear door a single silenced blast-charge, slipped quietly inside, and stood with her eyes wide, breathing deeply. She had not anticipated that the absolutely unchanged hall of the house where she had lived for nine years would so greatly affect her. Memories sweet and painful rose one after another in her heart, and for a moment she forgot what she was here for.
Android Karenina, at the doorstep, her duty discharged, bowed to Kapitonitch and turned to depart; but the old mécanacien, still believing this to be his old mistress, felt a pang of grief that this kind woman, however to blame, should leave without seeing her son. “Stop,” he cried. “Wait a moment.”
There was something in the immediate way she obeyed his order. . . .
“Spin in a circle,” Kapitonitch ordered, squinting with suspicion as the woman did so immediately. “Put your hands in the air. Wiggle your fingers.” At each command, the woman demonstrated automatic—that is, robotic—obedience.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Android Karenina?”
“Turn around. Slowly” said the real Anna, from where she now stood, directly behind Kapitonitch, the smoker still drawn and leveled shakily at his head. But as he turned, Kapitonitch drew a weapon of his own: a small, metallic hand cannon, as long again as the length of his arm, and aimed directly at her head.
Of course the mécanicien of this household is armed, thought Anna. Of course.
“Oh, Madame Karenina,” said Kapitonitch sadly, and unlike Anna’s, his hand did not shake.
For a long moment they stared at each other, weapons drawn. On the stoop Android Karenina, her veil now drawn back, regarded the scene in terrified silence, her eyebank fluttering double-time as she calculated her odds of disarming Kapitonitch without harm to her mistress. Anna offered a silent prayer that, if she were fated to die here, Providence would allow her to see her dear son once more before it was all over.
But it was not Providence that saved her, it was human kindness; so often, one comes dressed in the clothing of the other. “I cannot shoot you, Madame Karenina. Please come in, your Excellency,” he said to her.
She tried to say something, but her voice refused to utter any sound; with a guilty and imploring glance at the old man she went with light, swift steps up the stairs. Bent over, and his galoshes catching on the steps, Kapitonitch ran after her, imploring in an urgent whisper that she not tarry.
Anna mounted the familiar staircase, not understanding what the old man was saying.
“This way, to the left, if you please. Excuse its not being tidy. Your husband’s in the old parlor now,” the mécanicien said, panting. “Excuse me, wait a little, your Excellency; I’ll just see,” he said, and overtaking her, he opened the high door and disappeared behind it. Anna stood still, waiting. “He’s only just awake,” Kapitonitch reported, coming out.
“Do be quick, madame,” he said again. “Please. He will not be happy to find you here. Most unhappy indeed.”
And at the very instant the mécanicien said this, Anna caught the sound of a childish yawn. From the sound of this yawn alone she knew her son and seemed to see him living before her eyes.
“Let me in; go away!” she said, and went in through the high doorway, Android Karenina heeling her closely. On the right of the door stood a bed, and sitting up in the bed was the boy. His little body bent forward with his nightshirt unbuttoned, he was stretching and still yawning. The instant his lips came together they curved into a blissfully sleepy smile, and with that smile he slowly and deliciously rolled back again.
“Seryozha!” she whispered, going noiselessly up to him. Android Karenina glowed warmly, suffusing the scene with delicate pinks of joy.
When Anna was parted from her Sergey, and all this latter time when she had been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as he was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he was not even the same as when she had left him; he was still further from the four-year-old tot, more grown and thinner. How thin his face was, how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had changed since she left him! But it was he, with his head, his lips, his soft neck and broad little shoulders.
“Seryozha!” she repeated just in the child’s ear.
He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tangled head from side to side as though looking for something, and opened his eyes. Slowly and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother standing motionless before him, and just behind her the comforting familiar figure of her beloved-companion.
All at once he smiled a blissful smile, and shutting his eyes, rolled not backward but toward her into her arms.
“Seryozha! My darling boy!” she said, breathing hard and putting her arms round his plump little body.
“Mother!” he said, wriggling about in her arms so as to touch her hands with different parts of him. “I know,” he said, opening his eyes; “it’s my birthday today. I knew you’d come. I’ll get up right now.”
And saying that he fell back asleep.
Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs, so long now, that were thrust out below the quilt, those short-cropped curls on his neck, which she had so often kissed. She touched all this and could say nothing; tears choked her.
“What are you crying for, mother?” Seryozha said, waking completely up. “Mother, what are you crying for?” he cried in a tearful voice.
“I won’t cry . . . I’m crying for joy. It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I won’t, I won’t,” she said, gulping down her tears and turning away. “Come, it’s time for you to dress now,” she added after a pause, and, never letting go his hands, she sat down by his bedside on the chair, where his clothes were ready for him.
“How do you dress without me? How . . .” she tried to begin talking simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away.
“I don’t have a cold bath, Papa didn’t order it. Why, you’re sitting on my clothes!”
And Seryozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and smiled.
“Mother, darling, sweet one!” he shouted, flinging himself on her again and hugging her. It was as though only now, on seeing her smile, he fully grasped what had happened.
“I don’t want that on,” he said, taking off her hat. And as it were, seeing her afresh without her hat, he fell to kissing her again. “Why do you carry a smoker? Mother!”
“But what did you think about me?You didn’t think I was dead?”
“They said you were killed! By a koschei that came upon you in the marketplace, while you shopped for apples.”
“Not so!”
“They said it attached itself at the base of your spine, and then burrowed all the way up to your brain.”
“No, indeed, my darling!”
“They said when you were found, your face was so mutilated, it was almost impossible to recognize it.”
Anna’s eyelashes fluttered furiously, as she attempted to conceal her dismay at the wishful thinking that had clearly gone into that particular detail of the story Karenin had concocted for Seryozha.
“I never believed it,” the boy said.
“You didn’t believe it, my sweet?”
“I knew, I knew!” he repeated his favorite phrase, and snatching the hand that was stroking his hair, he pressed the open palm to his mouth and kissed it. He afforded a sweet glance, too, to Android Karenina, who issued a small hum of pleasure and tried in vain to straighten his mess of childish curls with her slender phalangeals.
“You must go,” said Kapitonitch from the door, a note of desperation in his voice. “He must not discover you here. I should not have permitted it. Please, madame.” But neither mother nor son would permit their reunion to be interrupted.
The old mécanicien shook his head, and with a sigh he closed the door. “I’ll wait another ten minutes,” he said to himself, clearing his throat and wiping away tears. “I have made a mistake. A terrible mistake.”
Anna could not say good-bye to her boy, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood. “Darling, darling Kootik!” she used the name by which she had called him when he was little, “you won’t forget me? You . . . ,” but she could not say more.
“Of course not, mother,” he responded simply. And then, seeming to think of something suddenly, he said, “She has not been collected for circuitry adjustment?”
“Not yet, dear son, not yet.”
“Oh. Then are you among the deserving?”
“What?
“Father says only the deserving ones will have their Class Ills returned to them after their circuits have been properly adjusted. Only the deserving are to own robots from now on.”
Anna’s eyes widened in bafflement. “And who has your father spoken of, as being amongst the ‘deserving?’”
Seryozha thought for a moment, and then let out a gale of childish laughter. “Why, he himself, I suppose! None other than he!”
How often afterward she thought of words she might have said. But now she did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. She only trembled, and clutched dearly at Android Karenina like a drowning woman clutches at a lifeboat. Seryozha only understood that his mother was unhappy and loved him. He knew that his father would wake soon, and that his father and mother could not meet, or the consequences would be disastrous. Android Karenina pulled on her mistress’s arm, as it was past time for them to depart, but silently Seroyzha pressed close to her and whispered, “Don’t go yet. He won’t come just yet.”
The mother held him away from her to see what he was thinking, what to say to him, and in his frightened face she read not only that he was speaking of his father, but, as it were, asking her what he ought to think about his father.
“Seryozha, my darling,” she said, “you must temper his hatred with your goodness. You are the only human thing he has left.”
“I fear him!” he cried in despair through his tears, and, clutching her by the shoulders, he began squeezing her with all his force to him, his arms trembling with the strain.
“My sweet, my little one!” said Anna, and she cried as weakly and childishly as he.
“No . . . please . . . sir . . . no . . .” came a cry from just beyond the door. Anna had only time to reflect how the voice of a man as strong as Kapitonitch could be reduced, in a moment of terror and desperation, to one like that of a frightened child—when the door flew open with a sharp clatter, and the body of the mécanicien came flying into the room. The corpse slammed into the wall above Sergey’s head and slid down the wall, leaving a slick of blood below the colorful tapestry hanging above the boy’s bed.
Sergey wailed like a bobcat and buried his head in his mother’s arms. Android Karenina threw a protective arm around her mistress, and the three of them huddled together, cowering from the tall and dramatic figure of Alexei Karenin, who stood trembling, filling the doorway with his imposing frame.
A long moment passed, before he let out a scream of primal rage. His eyes—one human, one rotating with a dead buzz in his silver half-face—glared from the doorway at the huddled band, and the dread oculus slowly extended toward them, its minute click foretelling some dire and inalterable fate.
Anna, though in her mind she prayed frantically for the safety of her son, was outwardly as silent as Android Karenina.
Only Sergey spoke, opening his young, pink lips and forming a single word: “Father . . .”
And even as Alexei Alexandrovich’s cruel mechanical eye quivered in its metal socket; even as he stood with stiffened spine and clenched fists in the doorway; even as every inch of his body seemed to strain with hatred and the desire to destroy; even so, his natural eye softened, and his mouth went slack and moist. From somewhere within him, a single, small word welled up and fought its way to freedom.
“Go.”
Anna hurriedly rose, but in the rapid glance she flung at him, taking in his whole figure in all its details, feelings of repulsion and hatred for him and jealousy over her son took possession of her. How could she go? How could she leave her dear Sergey with this monster?
But Android Karenina, calculating options at lightning speed, knew that there could be no other choice: if they did not go quickly, all would die. The loyal machine-woman lifted her mistress bodily over her shoulder, as a mother carries a sleeping child to bed, and together they fled the house. Anna had not time to undo, and so carried back with her, the parcel of toys she had chosen the day before in a toy shop with such love and sorrow.