CHAPTER 2

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? With that foreign prince still?” She knew every detail of his existence. He was going to say that he had been up all night and had dropped asleep, but looking at her thrilled and rapturous face, he was ashamed. He said he had had to go to report on the prince’s departure.

“But it’s over now? He is gone?”

“Thank God it’s over! You wouldn’t believe how insufferable it’s been for me.”

“Why so? Isn’t it the life all of you, all young men, always lead?” she said, knitting her brows, taking up the end of a length of the crochet yarn slowly spooling from a giant ball in Android Karenina’s torso. She began drawing the hook out of it, without looking at Vronsky.

“I gave that life up long ago,” he said, wondering at the change in her face, and trying to divine its meaning. “And I confess,” he said, with a smile, showing his thick, white teeth, “this week I’ve been, as it were, looking at myself in a glass, seeing that life—the endless Flickerfly, the metal-flesh, and all—and I didn’t like it.”

She held the work in her hands, but did not crochet, and looked at him with strange, shining, and hostile eyes.

“How disgusting you are, you men! How is it you can’t understand that a woman can never forget that,” she said, getting more and more angry, and so letting him see the cause of her irritation. “Especially a woman who cannot know your life? What do I know? What have I ever known?” she asked. “What you tell me. And how do I know whether you tell me the truth?”

“Anna, you hurt me. Don’t you trust me? Haven’t I told you that I haven’t a thought I wouldn’t lay bare to you?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, evidently trying to suppress her jealous thoughts. “But if only you knew how wretched I am! I believe you, I believe you. . . . What were you saying?”

Vronsky could not at once recall what he had been going to say. These fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent with her, horrified him, and, however much he tried to disguise the fact, made him feel cold toward her, although he knew the cause of her jealousy was her love for him. How often he had told himself that her love was happiness; and now she loved him as a woman can love when love has outweighed for her all the good things of life—and he was much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he had thought himself unhappy, but happiness was before him; now he felt that the best happiness was already left behind. She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this, he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now, when it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.

She turned away from him, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzling white in the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff. The soft machine hum of the yarn’s rapid unspooling filled the silence.

“I don’t understand your husband in the least,” said Vronsky. “He toys with us, literally toys; if he has the power to destroy me with a glance, why not employ that power? How can he put up with our unsettled position? He feels it, that’s evident.”

“He?” she said sneeringly. “He’s perfectly satisfied.”

“What are we all miserable for, when everything might be so happy?”

“Only he is not happy. Don’t I know him, the falsity in which he’s utterly steeped? He’s not a man, not a human being—he’s a machine. At least, and you must understand me, Alexei, because I mean it sincerely: There is some struggle within him between the man and the machine. For now at least the human part of him still lives and thrives, and it is that and nothing else that prevents him from destroying you and me together. Oh, if I’d been in his place, I’d long ago have killed, have torn to pieces a wife like me. He doesn’t understand that I’m your wife, that he’s outside, that he’s superfluous. . . . Don’t let’s talk of him!”

“You’re unfair, very unfair, dearest,” said Vronsky, trying to soothe her. “But never mind, don’t let’s talk of him. Tell me what you’ve been doing? What is the matter? What has been wrong with you, and what did the doctor say?”

She looked at him with mocking amusement. Evidently she had hit on other absurd and grotesque aspects of her husband and was awaiting the moment to give expression to them.

But he went on:

“I imagine that it’s not illness, but your condition. When will it be?”

The ironical light died away in her eyes, but a different smile, a consciousness of something, he did not know what, and of quiet melancholy, came over her face. Android Karenina buzzed swiftly and silently to a side table and poured her a glass of cool water.

“You say that our position is miserable,” Anna said, “That we must put an end to it. If you knew how terrible it is to me, what I would give to be able to love you freely and boldly! I should not torture myself and torture you with my jealousy. . . . And it will come soon, but not as we expect.”

And at the thought of how it would come, she seemed so pitiable to herself that tears came into her eyes, and she could not go on. She laid her hand on his sleeve.

“It won’t come as we suppose. I didn’t mean to say this to you, but you’ve made me. Soon, soon, all will be over, and we shall all, all be at peace, and suffer no more.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, understanding her.

“You asked when? Soon. And I shan’t live through it. Don’t interrupt me!” and she made haste to speak. “I know it; I know for certain. I shall die; and I’m very glad I shall die, and release myself and you.”

Tears dropped from her eyes; Vronsky bent down over her hand and began kissing it, trying to hide his emotion, which, he knew, had no sort of grounds, though he could not control it.

“Yes, it’s better so,” she said, tightly gripping his hand. “That’s the only way, the only way left to us.”

In the melancholy stillness that followed, Lupo suddenly jumped to his feet, his hyper-attuned sensors mistaking some distant twig crack or carriage rumble for the sound of Karenin’s returning footfalls.

Vronsky recovered himself, and lifted his head. “How absurd! What absurd nonsense you are talking!”

“No, it’s the truth.”

“What, what’s the truth?”

“That I shall die. I have—I have had a dream.”

“A dream?” repeated Vronsky, recalling the quasi-Memories which had confronted him on Lupo’s monitor earlier in the day.

“Yes, a dream,” she said. “It’s a long while since I dreamed it. I dreamed that I ran into my bedroom, that I had to get something there, to find out something; you know how it is in dreams,” she said, her eyes filling with horror. “And in the bedroom, the corner, stood something.”

“Oh, what nonsense! How can you believe . . .”

But she would not let him interrupt her. What she was saying was too important to her. “And the something turned round, and I saw it was a man with a disheveled beard, in some sort of dirty white coat, little, and dreadful looking. I wanted to run away, but he bent down over the sack, and was fumbling there with his hands. . . .”

She showed how he had moved his hands. There was terror in her face. And Vronsky felt the same terror filling his soul.

“He was fumbling and kept talking quickly, quickly in French, you know: Il faut le battre, le groznium, le brayer, le pétrir. . . . And in my horror I try to wake up, and wake up . . . but wake up still in the dream. And I began asking myself what it meant. And it is Android Karenina, who in reality never speaks, it is she who answers me: ‘In childbirth you’ll die, mistress, you’ll die. . .’ And I woke up.”

“What nonsense, what nonsense!” said Vronsky; but he felt that there was no conviction in his voice. He risked a glance at Android Karenina, the real one, standing in the room with them, to see her reaction to what her mistress had just revealed. But something in her eyebank’s expression, in the tilt of her head unit, spoke to her anguish at having been, even in a dream, a source of pain to her beloved mistress.

“But don’t let’s talk of it,” Anna said. “Let’s have tea, stay a little now; it’s not long I shall—”

But all at once she stopped. The expression of her face instantaneously changed. On her face was a look of soft, solemn, blissful attention. He could not comprehend the meaning of the change. She was listening to the stirring of the new life within her.