The silence is heavy, like the blood that has begun to drip onto the floor. They peer at Aleksandra’s pale face. For a second she opens her eyes, perhaps just a reflex.

“She’s not breathing!”

“She’s dead!”

Old Kapitonich ages years in an instant, all the years that have been waiting to catch up with him. Suddenly, all at once. No one there realizes it has happened. He still has enough strength to make the necessary arrangements under the circumstances. He goes to the front door and calls, in a decrepit, trembling voice, for Giorgi, who’s two doors down, waiting for a lovely servant in a trance, and asks him to fetch a doctor. When he hears Kapitonich’s voice and sees how he’s standing, Giorgi thinks it’s for Kapitonich himself.

“What’s wrong, Kapitonich?”

“Hurry, Giorgi, Aleksandra is wounded, didn’t you see those men come in?”

“I was over there, waiting for the beautiful Tatiana, I didn’t see anyone. What happened?”

Kapitonich asks him to do two more things: deliver the news to the Karenins and find a shop that’s open to buy the black cloth they’ll need to hang on the front door. Giorgi bursts into tears when he asks for the black cloth, thinking about lovely Aleksandra, then he wipes his eyes and gets onto the carriage, guiding the horses between fits of tears as he howls, “Aleksandra, I delivered you to your death! Aleksandraaa!”

Kapitonich doesn’t hear Giorgi’s lament because he goes back inside the Karenin Palace to find Vladimir. He’s in the servants’ quarters, tinkering with a figure he made out of tiny pieces of wire for his sister. It’s a little man who lifts his hat when you pull a string. Kapitonich delivers the news gently and sincerely enough to keep him from going into hysterics. The figure Vladimir holds in his hands keeps raising his hat as Vladimir sits there, paralyzed. He refuses to see his sister’s body. After a few minutes, he begins to cry. Kapitonich takes the wire figure from his hands and leaves it on Aleksandra’s nightstand. He has to leave Vladimir alone with his tears so he can open the door for the doctor, who has just arrived.

The doctor sees Kapitonich’s face and is the first to realize how much he has aged. But he doesn’t have a chance to ask him why, because Kapitonich guides him to the kitchen, shuffling along like an old man, and leaves him at the open doorway. No explanation is necessary. Aleksandra lies on the table, her blood dripping onto the floor.

At the same time, Piotr comes singing through the street door, but no one hears him.