Lead: Vronsky tries to forget Anna after her violent suicide, but he has become desperate.
In the end it was the music that brought him back to thinking of her: the same dissonant melody from their last night at the opera together. Someone was whistling it.
In a quick sigh Vronsky breathed out his pipe smoke through his large, white teeth and glanced around the train car, half expecting her to appear with the one whistling the music, dressed in the same gown she'd worn at the opera that night, while knowing this was a delusion. Of course it was. Down at the end of the train car, crammed against the rear door with its open window for flicking cigarette ashes, stood a man, a common Hussar by his uniform. It was he who was whistling the tune. Around him were other eagerly smoking soldiers, laughing and trading loud jokes, disgusting and indecent to Vronsky.
The whistler's teeth were yellowed, and Vronsky saw as the man smiled bawdily that two of the teeth were missing. Must be a peasant. Such a diet, with teeth like that, thought Vronsky, turning away, suddenly unable to stand looking at the man, when moments before he'd been so eager to see someone who had also heard the opera, who had perhaps also been there the same night as he and Anna.
Vronsky stared out the window next to his seat. Their train, bearing an entire regiment of soldiers, was hurtling forward into the west, Crimea-bound, across the cresting Ukrainian hills and past glittering little lakes. Just now the spring sun was setting, like spilled orange paint pouring out over the hilltops, like blood. Yes, how like blood it was. So much blood, so much everywhere. How had he ever thought he could forget her?
"It's a beautiful sunset, yes?" asked the soldier sitting next to him.
"What? Oh, yes, yes."
The soldier, an older man with bold dark eyes, sighed, mournfully it seemed. "I often think of my beautiful mother at these times," he said. "Just as the sun is setting, the clouds coming up and over and swallowing up the sun. Then everything becomes black, and isolated. And it's night. And then I want my mother, and some kvas." He laughed wryly, and reaching into his coat lifted out a small flask filled with amber liquid, and jolted a sip back into his mouth.
The older man, Nicolas Podkova, a Pole who had joined the regiment at Belgorod, had become an acquaintance of Vronsky's. Together had they traded basic ancestral information and small talk. Podkova claimed aristocratic ties, and had about him a sense of high taste and good breeding—located somewhere around his well-groomed hands and tidy neckerchief—that made Vronsky sure he was an equal.
The other day though Vronsky had almost turned and shaken the man's shoulders until his bold dark eyes rolled back in their sockets. We may never return from Crimea, Vronsky, Podkova had remarked with a wry smile and another swig of the flask.
Of course we won't. Vronsky knew. But it wasn't something that was to be spoken of. The glory, that was to be considered and dwelled upon, and only that. About this he had, however, remained silent.
"Do you know," said Podkova, now in a casual, musing tone. "Sometimes on nights like these, where it gets dark so suddenly, I remember the strangest people. I met a man once. In Zamosc, in the Jewish quarter. On a dark, muddy night I met him in the pub. I remember that night because it was so damp that my coat didn't dry even after I hung it in front of the fire at the pub. The man was small, and he had dark, curly hair. Obviously a dirty Jew. He asked me to play cards with him, and he bought me drinks because it was his birthday, he said. What a rum that was. I still remember it. Really it was a fine rum," he mused. Shadows began sinking around them both. "The man must have been wealthy to afford that kind of rum. It was from the West Indies. I've never tasted the like.
"We were playing cards and drinking and having a sporting good time. I was winning. And then, on the last trick, he cheated, I swear that he did, and swept me. So, before I knew it," and here the man stopped and took another tip of his liquor. "Ah," he said in satisfaction. "Well, I let him win. We packed up and left the pub not long after. And right as we were there in front of the pub, and him hailing a taxi, I pushed him out in the middle of the road in front of a fast-trotting curricle. It was dark and muddy, mind you, and the man just—slipped. Really it was almost instantly that he died. The horse was a big fellow, you know? It didn't last long. I ended up in dispute with the civil court of Zamosc—a witness accused me of murder—but I won, in the end. He was a dirty Jew, what do you expect?"
The sun had set. In the fast-whizzing darkness outside, beyond the trembling, frail image of Vronsky's wide-eyed face looking back at him, all Vronsky could picture were the disgusting pools of mud and blood that must have formed, surely they did form, on the street outside the pub in Zamosc, and in between those sharp, cold railroad tracks. It was, he saw, as if Anna had not jumped onto those tracks at all. He, Vronsky, had pushed her.
"Excuse me," said Vronsky, standing. He pushed past Podkova's sharp knees into the aisle. "Need some fresh air."
Down the aisle he strode, pushing past the small crowd by the rear door until only one person blocked him. It was the man with the yellowed teeth, the one who had loudly whistled the melody from the opera.
The Hussar, who was rather short and slight, flashed him a smile. "Need something, my lord?" asked the Hussar mockingly.
"Yes, I'd like to step out on the platform for some air and a smoke. Would you please move," said Vronsky, with a vicious edge to his voice.
"I'd like to see you try to make me, my lord. No, really, it would be quite a laugh. I'm a Hussar, you know. The fiercest sort of soldier there is. You know the saying goes—"
Vronsky shoved the man out of the way and thrust open the door, releasing a blast of cool evening air into the cabin. "Excuse me, chap, but this was my spot and my door!" The Hussar lunged at Vronsky, but Vronsky pushed him down and slipped out the door onto the short deck, shutting the door behind him. He could hear the Hussar screeching inside. "I'll kill you for this! I will! I swear!" A moment later, Vronsky could hear him laughing and cursing with his friends.
Vronsky stood on the rocking deck, the noise of the train and the whirring wind grinding against the tracks almost splitting his eardrums, the shaking of the train jolting up even into his jawbone. He looked up at the sky, utterly dark except for a few stars. It too was shaking with the overwhelming rhythm of the train. It was as if this rhythm had gripped the countryside, the sky, all the universe, and was shaking it again and again. Into Vronsky's heart it shook, as he stood there clutching his pipe and looking up, and thinking about Anna. I would have never left if I'd known what you were about to do, he told her in his heart. Yet here he was, leaving, leaving behind her mangled body in its coffin in the ground outside Moscow, in her husband's plot. Leaving it to go to Crimea, and fight in a war against an enemy that was not really his.
But, it seemed, he could not leave her memory. So it was that he wanted to here end his life, just as she had ended hers. Fitting, it seemed, somehow, and a cruel way to die. Perhaps he would not die immediately. Better to throw himself from the front of the train, but that was impossible. He turned his eyes downward to the tracks swiftly flicking past, flying away back from the grip of the eager train wheels. And he calculated—To the right would be best, those rocks look jagged, far as I can tell, but to the left might be a lake, it was hard to make it out though, and if he missed he could be maimed for life. But if he missed he would twist around—he could see himself lying on the cool, fuzzy spring ground with the train disappearing into the distance—and wrangle his revolver out of its holster, and shoot himself in the head. Successfully, this time.
He looked back up at the wobbling sky. The stars were coming out. There is no priest, he realized, to administer holy unction to me. Who would give it as I lay there dying in the dark.
It must be true, he thought, watching the stars. I must still believe in God.
When I lay dying, he continued, on the fields of Crimea—perhaps in the barnyard of a fellow Slav—I will have to ask a priest to come administer holy unction to me.
With one last look at the stars, he jumped.