Chapter 16
AS INTENSELY AS ANNA had longed to see her son, and as long as she had been thinking of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the least expected what had occurred. The man now living in that house—the man with trembling jaw and destructive oculus, who kept a collection of half-built human faces in a shed—this man was not the same man who once had been her husband. On getting back to her lonely rooms in the hotel, she could not for a long while understand why she was there. “Yes, it’s all over, and I am again alone,” she said to herself, and without taking off her hat she sat down in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing her eyes on a I/Hourprotector/47 standing on a table between the windows, she tried to think.
She thought of the sympathy that Kapitonitch had shown in letting her into the home, and what it had cost him; she thought of Sergey’s words: “Only the deserving . . .” She had lost her son now, forever; and how much longer before Android Karenina, too, was torn from her—never to return?
The II/Governess/143 brought the baby to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her fat little hands, and with a smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish with a float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds of her embroidered skirt, making them rustle. It was impossible not to smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for her to clutch, crowing and prancing all over; impossible not to offer her a lip, which she sucked into her little mouth by way of a kiss. And all this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made her dance, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but at the sight of this child it was plainer than ever to her that the feeling she had for her could not be called love in comparison with what she felt for Seryozha. And she was forever—not physically only, but spiritually—divided from him, and it was impossible to set this right.
She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and cued happy Memories of Sergey on Android Karenina’s monitor. In the last and best Memory, Sergey was playing in a white smock, sitting astride a chair, trying to solve a I/Puzzle/92 depicting a Huntbear, working with frowning eyes and smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression.
That was the last Memory in the series, and after it, by chance, came one of Vronsky on the moon performing a lighthearted gravity-reduced dance with his longish hair tucked inside his glass helmet. “Oh, here he is!” she said, regarding the Memory of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery. She had not once thought of him all morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.
“But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?” she asked of Android Karenina, forgetting she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her. The II/Footman/74 returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg. He’s not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me, she thought. He’s not coming so that I could tell him everything, but coming with Yashvin. And all at once a strange idea came to her:
“Android Karenina,” she asked, “what if he has ceased to love me?” The Class Ill’s eyebank bubbled a warm, empathetic lavendar, and she held out her arms to comfort her mistress. But it was no use; in going over the events of the last few days, Anna saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea: the fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms in Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were trying to avoid meeting her face to face.
“But he ought to tell me so. I must know that it is so. If I knew it, then I would know what I should do!” she said to the robot, who in response reset her monitor to the previous sequence, hoping with the Memories of Sergey to reverse her mistress’s melancholy humor. But Anna was caught in this frightening way of thinking, utterly unable to picture to herself the position she would be in if she were convinced of his not caring for her. She thought he had ceased to love her, she felt close to despair, and consequently she felt exceptionally alert. She left Android Karenina and went to her room alone, and as she dressed, she took more care over her appearance than she had done all those days, as though he might, if he had grown cold to her, fall in love with her again because she had dressed and arranged her hair in the way most becoming to her.
She heard the bell ring before she was ready. When she went into the drawing room it was not he, but Yashvin, who met her eyes. Vronsky was watching the Memory of Sergey, and he made no haste to look round at her.
“We have met already,” she said, putting her little hand into the huge hand of Yashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of keeping with his immense frame and coarse face. “We met last year at The Cull. Shut that off,” she said, indicating sharply to Android Karenina to dim the Memory, and glancing significantly at Vronsky’s flashing eyes. “Were the matches good this year?”
Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at the clock, Yashvin asked her whether she would be staying much longer in Petersburg, and unbending his huge figure reached after his cap.
“Not long, I think,” she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky.
“So then we shan’t meet again?”
“Come and dine with me,” said Anna resolutely, angry, it seemed, with herself for her embarrassment, but flushing as she always did when she defined her position before a fresh person. “The dinner here is not good, but at least you will see him. There is no one of his old friends in the regiment Alexei cares for as he does for you.”
“Delighted,” said Yashvin with a smile, from which Vronsky could see that he liked Anna very much.
Yashvin said good-bye and went away; Vronsky stayed behind.
“Are you going too?” she said to him.
“I’m late already,” he answered. “Run along! I’ll catch you up in a moment,” he called toYashvin.
She took him by the hand, and without taking her eyes off him, gazed at him while she ransacked her mind for the words to say that would keep him.
“Wait a minute, there’s something I want to say to you,” and taking his broad hand she pressed it on her neck. “Oh, was it right my asking him to dinner?”
“You did quite right,” he said with a serene smile that showed his even teeth, and he kissed her hand.
“Alexei, Petersburg is strange now—it is lonely and strange without the Class Ills,” she said, pressing his hand in both of hers. “Soon ours will be taken from us as well. We will be safer in the provinces, Alexei, safer and happier.”
“I cannot agree with you, dear, given what Yashvin was telling me only just before you came in. These aliens, these so-called Honored Guests, rampage everywhere outside the cities; they say that now, when a person falls ill, his family packs up and flees as rapidly as possible, because soon a large, beaked reptile with dozens of eyeballs will burst forth from inside him and join the hordes. Yashvin says it is quickly becoming very like a full-scale invasion, and speaks as though the provinces will soon be entirely overrun.”
“Alexei, I am miserable, and scared. Where can we go? And when?”
“Soon, soon. You wouldn’t believe how disagreeable our way of living here is to me too,” he said—but then he drew away his hand, and turned his face away.
He is happy that there are these aliens in the woods, she thought bitterly. Happy for a reason to keep us here.
“Well, go, go!” she said in a tone of offense, and she walked quickly away from him.