Anna Karenina

‘Still busy with the farming. Precisely in backwaters,’ said Katavasov. ‘And we in the city see nothing but the Serbian war. Well, what’s my friend’s attitude? Surely something unlike other people’s?’

‘No, not really, the same as everyone else’s,’ Kitty replied, looking with some embarrassment at Sergei Ivanovich. ‘I’ll send for him, then. And we have papa with us. He came from abroad not long ago.’

And, giving orders that Levin be sent for and that her dust-covered guests be taken to wash, one to the study, the other to Dolly’s former room, and that lunch be prepared for them, she ran out to the balcony, exercising her right to move quickly, which she had been deprived of during her pregnancy.

‘It’s Sergei Ivanovich and Katavasov, a professor,’ she said.

‘Ah, it’s hard in such heat!’ said the prince.

‘No, papa, he’s very nice, and Kostya loves him very much,’said Kitty, smiling, as if persuading him of something, having noticed the mocking look on her father’s face.

‘Oh, don’t mind me.’

‘Go to them, darling,’ Kitty said to her sister, ‘and entertain them. They met Stiva at the station. He’s well. And I’ll run to Mitya. Poor thing, I haven’t nursed him since breakfast. He’s awake now and must be crying.’ And, feeling the influx of milk, she went with quick steps to the nursery.

Indeed, it was not that she guessed (her bond with the baby had not been broken yet), but she knew for certain by the influx of milk in her that he needed to be fed.

She knew he was crying even before she came near the nursery. And he was indeed crying. She heard his voice and quickened her pace. But the quicker she walked, the louder he cried. It was a good, healthy, but hungry and impatient voice.

‘Has he been crying long, nanny?’ Kitty said hurriedly, sitting down on a chair and preparing to nurse him. ‘Give him to me quickly. Ah, nanny, how tiresome you are - no, you can tie the bonnet afterwards!’

The baby was in a fit of greedy screaming.

‘That’s not the way, dearie,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna, who was almost always there in the nursery. ‘He must be tidied up properly. Coo, coo!’ she sang over him, paying no attention to the mother.

The nanny brought the baby to the mother. Agafya Mikhailovna followed them, her face melting with tenderness.

‘He knows me, he does. It’s God’s truth, dearest Katerina Alexandrovna, he recognized me!’ Agafya Mikhailovna out-shouted the baby.

But Kitty did not listen to what she said. Her impatience kept growing along with the baby’s.

Owing to that impatience, it was a long time before matters were put right. The baby grabbed the wrong thing and got angry.

Finally, after a desperate, gasping cry and empty sucking, matters were put right, mother and baby simultaneously felt pacified, and both quieted down.

‘He’s all sweaty, too, poor little thing,’ Kitty said in a whisper, feeling the baby. ‘Why do you think he recognizes you?’ she added, looking sideways at the baby’s eyes, which seemed to her to be peeping slyly from under the pulled-down bonnet, at his regularly puffing cheeks and his hand with its red palm, with which he was making circular movements.

‘It can’t be! If he recognized anyone, it would be me,’ Kitty said in response to Agafya Mikhailovna’s observation, and she smiled.

She smiled because, though she had said he could not recognize anything, she knew in her heart that he not only recognized Agafya Mikhailovna but knew and understood everything, knew and understood much else that no one knew and which she, his mother, had herself learned and begun to understand only thanks to him. For Agafya Mikhailovna, for his nanny, for his grandfather, even for his father, Mitya was a living being who required only material care; but for his mother he had long been a moral creature with whom she had a whole history of spiritual relations.

‘Once he wakes up, God willing, you’ll see for yourself. I do like this, and he just beams all over, the darling. Beams all over, like a sunny day,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna.

‘Well, all right, all right, we’ll see then,’ whispered Kitty. ‘Go now, he’s falling asleep.’

VII

Agafya Mikhailovna tiptoed out; the nanny lowered the blind, chased away the flies from under the muslin bed curtain and a hornet that was beating against the window-pane, and sat down, waving a wilting birch branch over the mother and baby.

‘Ah, this heat, this heat! If only God would send a little rain,’ she said.