Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [172]
She stopped and looked at the tops of the aspens swaying in the wind, their washed leaves glistening brightly in the cold sun, and she understood that they would not forgive, that everything and everyone would be merciless to her now, like this sky, like this greenery. And again she felt things beginning to go double in her soul. ‘I mustn’t, I mustn’t think,’ she said to herself. ‘I must get ready to go. Where? When? Whom shall I take with me? Yes, to Moscow, on the evening train. Annushka and Seryozha, and only the most necessary things. But first I must write to them both.’ She quickly went into the house, to her boudoir, sat down at the desk and wrote to her husband:
After what has happened, I can no longer remain in your house. I am leaving and taking our son with me. I do not know the laws and therefore do not know which of the parents keeps the son; but I am taking him with me, because I cannot live without him. Be magnanimous, leave him with me.
Up to that point she wrote quickly and naturally, but the appeal to his magnanimity, which she did not recognize in him, and the necessity of concluding the letter with something touching, stopped her.
‘I cannot speak of my guilt and my repentance, because...’
Again she stopped, finding no coherence in her thoughts. ‘No,’ she said to herself, ‘nothing’s needed,’ and, tearing up the letter, she rewrote it, removing the mention of magnanimity, and sealed it.
The other letter had to be written to Vronsky. ‘I have told my husband,’ she wrote, and sat for a long time, unable to write more. It was so coarse, so unfeminine. ‘And then, what can I write to him?’ she said to herself. Again a flush of shame covered her face. She remembered his calm, and a feeling of vexation with him made her tear the sheet with the written phrase into little shreds. ‘Nothing’s necessary,’ she said to herself. She folded the blotting pad, went upstairs, told the governess and the servants that she was going to Moscow that day, and immediately started packing her things.
XVI
In all the rooms of the country house caretakers, gardeners and footmen went about, carrying things out. Wardrobes and chests of drawers were opened; twice they ran to the shop for more string; newspapers lay about on the floor. Two trunks, several bags, and some tied-up rugs were taken out to the front hall. Her carriage and two hired cabs stood by the porch. Anna, having forgotten her inner anxiety in the work of packing, was standing at the table in her boudoir packing her travelling bag when Annushka drew her attention to the noise of a carriage driving up. Anna looked out the window and saw Alexei Alexandrovich’s courier on the porch, ringing at the front door.
‘Go and find out what it is,’ she said, and with a calm readiness for anything, her hands folded on her knees, she sat in the armchair. A footman brought a fat envelope with Alexei Alexandrovich’s handwriting on it.
‘The courier has been ordered to bring a reply,’ he said.
‘Very well,’ she said, and as soon as the man went out, she tore open the letter with trembling fingers. A wad of unfolded bank notes in a sealed wrapper fell out of it. She freed the letter and began reading from the end. ‘I have made the preparations for the move, I ascribe importance to the fulfilment of my request,’ she read. She skipped further back, read everything and once again read through the whole letter from the beginning. When she finished, she felt that she was cold and that a terrible disaster, such as she had never expected, had fallen upon her.
She had repented in the morning of what she had told her husband and had wished for only one thing, that those words might be as if unspoken. And here was a letter recognizing the words as unspoken and granting her what she had wished. But now this letter was more terrible for her than anything she could have imagined.
‘He’s right!