And now, on top of that, the unflappable Kapitonich had uttered a worried “Heavens!” like another sparrow falling from its nest, half-formed. Sergei looked up. If it hadn’t been for Kapitonich, the Countess Vronskaya’s servants would have entered the house without Sergei setting eyes on them. But the countess’s plans came to fruition, thanks to Kapitonich’s unwitting aid. That’s how Sergei came face-to-face with this perfect image of Anna Karenina, looking more like herself than she did in real life, her face uncovered, her lovely neck and shoulders partially bared by her Italian dress, her thick, curly, black hair, her eyes, her magnificent mouth expressing intelligence, honesty, passion, her skin like old marble, a color unknown in those climes.

The portrait, the woman, walked along without touching the ground; she didn’t float through the air, because from her waist to the ground, she appeared to wear a pair of trousers belonging to the dark suit of the man who was carrying her. She looked like a huge woman with a short pair of man’s legs. Immobile from the waist up, her legs took nervous steps. The servant was walking like that because of the awkwardness of carrying the portrait and his moral burden, aware of the countess’s wicked intentions to hurt the boy.

Once upon a time, Sergei had played a game pretending to be one person with Marietta (his nanny). They used men’s clothes: a shirt that buttoned from the waist to the neck and a pair of shoes. Sergei wore the shirt back to front, the opening at his back, but he didn’t put his arms in the sleeves; he put his hands in the shoes and used them to lean on a chair.

Marietta hid behind Sergei and put her arms through the shirt. She’d move her arms and he’d move his “feet,” talking and singing. It was hilarious because of the disproportions: Sergei looked like some kind of strange dwarf. Anna split her sides laughing—that’s another thing Tolstoy forgot: Karenina loved to laugh.

The creature formed by the framed painting and its bearer appeared to parody the game Sergei played with Marietta, except that it didn’t look like a dwarf: it was his mother from the waist up, larger than life, wearing a pair of tiny trousers. It was grotesque, causing Kapitonich to utter “heavens” and plunging Sergei into pain and horror.

The boy who was ashamed to miss his mother—who nursed the secret of his grief in private, who struggled with both the reality that she was dead and that death would come for him, too, especially if she came for him—was confronted by her in the light of day at the front door of his house. She appeared, her very self (apart from someone else’s legs), the dead become death.