Karenin got up quickly and went to meet her, looking not at her eyes, but above them at her forehead and hair. He went up to her, took her by the hand, and asked her to sit down.
“I am very glad you have come,” he said, sitting down beside her, and obviously wishing to say something, he stuttered. Several times he tried to begin to speak, but stopped.
SPEAK, MAN. SPEAK! SO STEELY IN THE HALLS OF POWER, SO WEAK IN HIS OWN PRIVATE CHAMBERS…
The silence lasted for some time. “Is Seryozha quite well?” he said, and not waiting for an answer, he added: “I shan’t be dining at home today, and I have got to go out directly.”
“I had thought of going to Moscow,” she said.
“No, you did quite, quite right to come,” he said, and was silent again.
Seeing that he was powerless to begin the conversation, she began herself.
“Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, looking at him and not dropping her eyes under his persistent gaze at her hair, “I’m a guilty woman, I’m a bad woman, but I am the same as I was, as I told you then, and I have come to tell you that I can change nothing.”
“I have asked you no question about that,” he said, all at once, resolutely and with hatred looking her straight in the face, and the Face again pulsed and radiated wild colors, venom traveling along its veins. “That was as I had supposed.” Under the influence of anger he apparently regained complete possession of all his ability to speak. “But as I told you then, and have written to you,” he said in a thin, shrill voice, “I repeat now, that I am not bound to know this. I ignore it. Not all wives are so kind as you, to be in such a hurry to communicate such agreeable news to their husbands.” He laid special emphasis on the word “agreeable,” and Anna thought she noticed that his voice changed as he said it, darkening dramatically in pitch and tone: AGREEABLE.
“I shall ignore it so long as the world knows nothing of it, so long as my name is not disgraced. And so I simply inform you that our relations must be just as they have always been, and that only in the event of your compromising me I shall be obliged to take steps to secure my honor.”
“But our relations cannot be the same as always,” Anna began in a timid voice, looking at him with dismay.
When she saw once more those composed gestures, heard that shrill, childish, and sarcastic voice, her aversion for him extinguished her pity for him, and she felt only afraid, but at all costs she wanted to make clear her position.
“I cannot be your wife while I…,” she began.
He laughed a cold and malignant laugh, and she felt a jab of sharp pain inside her mind, as if a knitting needle had been thrust between the lobes of her brain. She gave out a choked sob of pain, and Android Karenina, obeying her programmed impulses, reached out to place a comforting arm across her mistress’s shoulders.
Karenin then spoke: “The manner of life you have chosen is reflected, I suppose, in your ideas. I have too much respect or contempt, or both… I respect your past and despise your present… that I was far from the interpretation you put on my words.”
Anna sighed and bowed her head.
“Though indeed I fail to comprehend how-with the independence you show,” he went on, getting hot, “announcing your infidelity to your husband and seeing nothing reprehensible in it, apparently-you can see anything reprehensible in performing a wife’s duties in relation to your husband.”
“Alexei Alexandrovich! What is it you want of me?”
TO REPENT OF HER UNFAITHFULNESS.
TO GROVEL AT YOUR FEET .
TO SUBMIT TO YOUR WILL, OR PAY THE ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCE FOR HER REFUSAL!
Alexei Alexandrovich screamed out loud, and the little drawing-room table flew up into the air and spiraled over their heads to smash against the opposite wall. Anna whirled round in fright as a vase of flowers on the other side of the room suddenly exploded, as if shot; the door, which she had left ajar, slammed violently closed and the mechanism of the lock noisily engaged.
Anna turned back and gaped at Alexei Alexandrovich, who took a deep, labored breath as if trying to overmaster himself. Finally the room was still, and while Anna trembled, her husband calmly and coldly expressed his wishes. “I want you not to meet that man here, and to conduct yourself so that no one in the world, not even a robot, can find fault with you. Not to see him: that’s not much, I think. And in return you will enjoy all the privileges of a faithful wife without fulfilling her duties. That’s all I have to say to you. Tonight I am not dining at home.” He folded his arms across his chest and turned away.
“Alexei?”
He looked back.
“Is it possible… for me to…” She looked with evident uncertainty to the heavy oaken door.
LEAVE IT .
LET HER STAY UNTIL SHE ROTS .
But Alexei Alexandrovich only shook his head slightly, and the lock disengaged, and the door swung open. Immediately, she got up, and signaled to Android Karenina that they would leave. Bowing in silence, Alexei Alexandrovich let them pass before him, visibly composed but inwardly as miserable and confused as she.
Only the Face was pleased, for in every such encounter it gained exponentially in power and control.
Over the man-over the woman-over them all.
CHAPTER 11
ONE AFTERNOON, TOWARD THE END of the spring extraction season, Levin and Socrates were in the living room, engaged in an intense discussion about the giant koschei that plagued the countryside around Provokovskoe. More and more peasants had reported hearing the dreaded tikkatikkatikka echoing through the woods at night; some spoke of friends who had gone out hunting and not returned; Levin spoke to one man who told personally of his battle with one of the robotic monsters, of how he narrowly escaped its tremendous gathering maw. Socrates had determined through rigorous analysis of recovered metallic shreds that the things were indeed of the same mechanical infrastructure as the small wormlike koschei that had plagued the countryside last season-but how they had grown so large, and so prevalent, especially after the Ministry had determined them exterminated, remained an open question.
While Socrates mulled this question yet one more time, charting out the various possibilities with branching mathematical precision in the chambers of his mind, Levin had a seemingly unrelated recollection that nevertheless chilled him to the bones: of Countess Nordston, Kitty’s foolish friend, speaking of her belief in the Honored Guests-extraterrestrial beings who, supposedly, would one day come to redeem the human race.
“In three ways,” she had said. “They will come for us in three ways.”
Turning over this gnomic phrase in his mind, wondering what connection it could have to the question of the wormlike koschei, Levin did not at first hear the sound of a long, wrenching cough coming from the front hall. But he heard it indistinctly through the sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken. Then he caught sight of a long, bony, familiar figure, followed by a squat, rattling metal shadow, and now it seemed there was no possibility of mistake; and yet he still went on hoping that this tall man taking off his fur cloak and coughing was not his brother, Nikolai, accompanied by his woeful Class III, Karnak.
Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture. Levin was confused and anxious about the koschei, and had not seen his beloved Kitty since the day he spotted her, waking gently in her carriage, and he was in a troubled and uncertain humor; meeting with his ailing brother in such a state seemed particularly difficult. Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humor, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do.