“What is it exactly that you want from me?” he said, moving in his chair and snapping his pince-nez.
“A definite settlement, Alexei Alexandrovich, some settlement of the position. I’m appealing to you”-not as an injured husband, Stepan Arkadyich was going to say, but afraid of wrecking his negotiation by this, he changed the words-“not as a statesman”-which, truly, did not sound apropos-“but simply as a man, and a good-hearted man and a Christian. You must have pity on her,” he said.
As Oblonsky spoke, Karenin very slowly and with great care unscrewed his right index finger, laid it down on the desk, and screwed in its place a sleek, cruel-looking attachment. It was the approximate length of a finger, but made of solid black metal.
“That is, in what way precisely?” Karenin answered finally. He flexed the obsidian phalangeal and its tip glowed to life, a deep, menacing red. Stiva edged backward in his chair.
“Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!-I have been spending all the winter with her-you would have pity on her. Her position is awful, simply awful!”
“I had imagined,” answered Alexei Alexandrovich in a higher, almost shrill voice, “that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had desired for herself. I have allowed them to return… let them carry on unmolested…” And here his voice seemed to transform, taking on again the booming, echoing roar.
“AND YET THEY SEND THIS WORM, THIS COWERING SPECIMEN OF HUMANITY, TO PLEAD FOR FAVORS? FOR FORGIVENESS?”
Karenin threw back his head and barked a high, shrill laugh.
“HERE IS YOUR ANSWER. TELL THEM THEY SHALL BE DESTROYED. TELL THEM I POSSESS THE POWER TO DESTROY THEM AT MY WILL, AND THIS IS MY INTENTION. TELL THEM THEY MAY RUN IF THEY CHOOSE. COWER AS THEY MIGHT, STILL I SHALL DESTROY THEM.”
“Oh, Alexei Alexandrovich, for heaven’s sake, don’t let us indulge in recriminations!” responded Stepan Arkadyich, somewhat feebly.
He shot a glance at the door, considered leaving now before the conversation proceeded further; but he really was in need of the position on the Grav committee.
“I think it’s a bit too late for that,” said Karenin, his regular, human voice back again. “Ah, wonderful. Our guest has arrived. Levitsky!”
The Toy Soldier had returned, his hand clutched on the quivering elbow of a short, stout man with a mass of red curls topped by a crumpled hat in the English style.
“I… I…”
“Bow, man, before the Tsar.”
Stepan Arkadyich was astonished all over again. He had not heard the ancient honorific “Tsar” used in his lifetime, and nor, he knew, had his father, nor his father’s father: not since the dawn of the Age of Groznium and the ascendance of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration.
Karenin accepted the unfamiliar title as his due, gestured magisterially as Levitsky cowered before him.
“Alexei?” ventured Oblonsky.
“I suppose this matter is ended. I consider it at an end,” answered Alexei Alexandrovich calmly, though the door of the room banged open and shut on its own, while the stained-glass window imploded in a cloud of pulverized glass. Levitsky yelped in terror.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t get hot!” said Stepan Arkadyich, touching his brother-in-law’s knee and then instantly pulling his hand away, repulsed by the cold, steely feeling of the other man’s body; was there any part of him left that was human?
“Sir? Sir?” began the terrified Levitsky, and the Toy Soldier silenced him with a swift boot to the stomach. Alexei Alexandrovich rose from his chair and held his red, gleaming fingertip aloft, as if examining it in the sunlight.
Oblonsky swallowed hard.
“The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me,” Alexei Alexandrovich said to him suddenly.
“Open your eyes!” barked the Toy Soldier to Levitsky.
“No… please…”
“Open!”
“My only interest now is in the life of the nation,” Karenin continued, crossing the room to Levitsky, while the Toy Soldier grasped his chin to hold it steady. “In the protection of the nation. That is my vision.”
He raised his red-tipped finger to the newsman’s eyes, and Stepan Arkadyich fled the room.
CHAPTER 11
IN ORDER TO CARRY THROUGH any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of summer-especially that terrible summer, with the city streets beset by aliens, who had begun to brazenly burst into people’s homes in search of human prey. But of late there had been no agreement between Anna and Vronsky and so they went on staying in Moscow, in their state of limbo, expecting any day to hear that they had been granted amnesty and permission to marry-or that their appeal had been denied and they would be punished. Neither of them gave full utterance to their sense of grievance, but they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on every pretext to prove this to one another.
It was during this time that it became obvious to Anna that Vronsky had turned his attentions to other women. In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing-love for women; and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was lessening; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part of his love to other women or to another woman-and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Without an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was jealous of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want to marry, for whose sake he would break with her.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of suspense she had endured in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of Alexei Alexandrovich, the loss of Android Karenina-she put it all down to Vronsky. If he had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her position, and would have rescued her from it. For her being in Moscow and not back at Vozdvizhenskoe, he was to blame too. He could not live buried in the country as she would have liked to do. He must have society, and he had put her in this awful position, the bitterness of which he would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from her son, and from her beloved-companion, for whom her heart ached more with each passing day. She woke from nightmares of Android Karenina singing sadly to her, singing a melancholy song of love and betrayal. Waking with cold sweat drying along her spine, Anna told herself that Android Karenina had no Vox-Em, could not sing, and even more so that she had no heart with which to love or be loved.
Even Vronsky’s rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been there of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel.