“No,” said Martin. “Please let me pass.”
“And I say you are Dedman-Akhmet,” insisted the other, quietly but even more grimly, and, in a gleam of moonlight, Martin noticed that he was holding a large revolver in his hand. “All right—stand against the wall,” said the man, his tone no longer threatening, but conciliatory and matter-of-fact. Shadow again engulfed the pale hand and dark weapon, but a glistening speck remained where it had been. Martin was faced with two alternatives. The first was to insist on an explanation; the second, to dodge into the darkness and run. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he said awkwardly and gave his name.
“Against the wall, against the wall,” shouted the man in a treble.
“There isn’t any wall right here,” said Martin.
“I’ll wait until there is,” enigmatically observed the man and, with a crunch of pebbles, either squatted or sat down—it was impossible to tell in the dark. Martin remained standing where he was, feeling a kind of faint itch in the whole left part of his chest, where the now invisible barrel must be pointing.
“One move and I’ll kill you,” murmured the man, and added something unintelligible. Martin stood for a while, and then for a while longer, trying painfully to think what a daredevil, unarmed, would do in his place; he could think of nothing, and suddenly asked:
“Would you like a cigarette? I have some.”
He did not know how this had escaped, and immediately felt ashamed, especially since the offer remained without reply. Then Martin decided that the only means of redeeming his shameful words was to go straight at the man, to knock him down if necessary, but to pass. He thought of the picnic planned for tomorrow, of Lida’s legs, evenly coated with a lacquer-smooth reddish-gold tan, and imagined that perhaps his father was expecting him that night, that perhaps he was making preparations of some kind for their meeting—and here Martin caught himself feeling a strange hostility toward his father, for which he reproached himself for a long time. The sea’s woosh could be heard, with regularly spaced booms; loud crickets engaged in clockwork competitive chirring; and here was this imbecile in the dark. Martin, as he now realized, was protecting his heart with his hand; calling himself a coward one last time, he moved forward abruptly. Nothing happened. He stumbled over the man’s leg, but the latter did not remove it: he was sitting hunched over, head bowed, snoring softly, and giving off a thick, rich reek of wine.
After getting home safely, and enjoying a good night’s sleep, Martin, as he stood next morning on the wisteria-entwined balcony, regretted that he had not disarmed the inert reveler: it would have been nice enigmatically displaying the confiscated revolver. He remained cross with himself because, in his opinion, he had not quite risen to the occasion upon encountering long-awaited danger. How many times, on the highroad of his dreams, wearing a half-mask and jack boots, he had stopped either a stagecoach, or a bulky berlin, or a horseman, and then distributed the merchants’ ducats to the poor! During his term as captain of a pirate corvette he had stood with his back to the mainmast, singlehandedly fighting off the onrush of the mutinous crew. He had been sent into the depths of Africa to search for a lost explorer, and when at last he found him—in the wildwood of a nameless region—he went up to him with a polite bow, flaunting his self-control. He would escape from hard-labor camps across tropical swamplands; walk toward the pole past astonished, erect penguins; astride a lathery steed, with bared saber, he would be the first to burst into insurgent Moscow. And now Martin would catch himself embellishing in retrospect the inept and rather insipid nocturnal incident, which bore no more resemblance to the real life he lived in his fantasies than an incoherent dream does to full, authentic reality. And as sometimes, when recounting a dream, we smooth over, round off, embellish here and there, so as to raise it at least to the level of plausible, realistic absurdity, in exactly the same way Martin, when rehearsing the account of his nighttime encounter (which he did not, however, intend to make public), made the stranger more sober, his revolver more functional, and his own words wittier.
5
The next day, while passing a soccer ball back and forth with Kolya or searching with Lida, on the shingly beach, for seaside curios (a round pebble with a colored belt, a little horseshoe, grainy and red-brown with rust; pale-green sea-polished fragments of bottle glass that reminded him of his early childhood and Biarritz), Martin wondered at the night’s adventure, doubted that it had really happened, and promoted it more and more decisively into that realm where all that he selected from the world for the use of his soul would take root and begin living a marvelous, independent existence. A wave would swell, boil with foam, and topple rotundly, spreading and running up on the shingle. Then, unable to hold fast, it would slip back to the grumbling of awakened pebbles; and hardly had it receded when a new one, with the same round, joyful splash, would come toppling and stretching out in a transparent stratum to the limit set for it. Kolya was throwing a piece of board he had found for Lady, the fox terrier, to retrieve and she would lift both front paws together and bounce across the water before tensely proceeding to swim. The next wave that came would catch her up and sweep her powerfully back to deposit her in perfect safety on the shore. Then she would drop on the shingle before her the stick wrested from the sea and shake herself violently. While the two boys were bathing in the buff, Lida, who took her dip with her mother and Sofia much earlier in the morning, would retire toward some rocks which she called Ayvazovskian in honor of that painter’s seascapes. Kolya swam with a tumbling motion, Tartar-style, while Martin prided himself on his swift and correct crawl, which he had learned from an English house-tutor during his last summer in the North. However, neither of the boys would swim very far out, and in this connection one of Martin’s sweetest and creepiest daydreams was of a desolate, stormy sea, after a shipwreck, and himself alone in the dark, holding above water a Creole girl with whom he had danced the tango on deck the evening before. After a swim, it was wonderfully pleasant to stretch out naked on the hot stones and, with head tipped back, look at the cypresses, thrust like black daggers deep into the sky. Kolya, a Yalta doctor’s son who had lived all his life in the Crimea, accepted these cypresses, and the ecstatic sky, and the marvelously blue sea with its dazzling metallic scales, as something normal and routine, and it was difficult to draw him into Martin’s favorite games, and transform him into the Creole’s husband, by chance cast up onto the same uninhabited island.
In the evening they would climb along narrow corridors of cypresses to Adreiz. The large, ridiculous villa, with its many stairways, passages, and galleries (so amusingly constructed that sometimes you simply could not tell on what level you were, or having gone up a few steep steps you suddenly found yourself not on the expected mezzanine floor but on the garden terrace), was already shining through with yellow kerosene light, and the sound of voices and the clink of crockery came from the main veranda. Lida would go over to the adult camp. Kolya would gorge himself and immediately go off to bed. Martin sat in the dark on the bottom steps and, consuming cherries out of his hand, hearkened to the gay, brightly lit voices, to Ivanov’s guffaws, Lida’s cozy patter, and an argument between her father and the painter Danilevski, a garrulous stutterer. In general the guests were numerous: giggly girls in bright kerchiefs, officers from Yalta, and panicky elderly neighbors, who had taken en masse to the hills during an incursion of the Reds the previous winter. It was never clear who had brought whom and who was friends with whom, but the hospitality of Lida’s mother, an inconspicuous woman who wore a gorget and spectacles, knew no bounds. Thus one day appeared Arkady Zaryanski, a lanky, deathly pale man who had some connection or other with the theater—one of those absurd people who tour battle-fronts giving poetry recitals with musical accompaniment, arrange performances on the eve of a town’s devastation, run off to buy epaulets and never manage to run far enough, returning instead, puffing happily, with a miraculously obtained top hat for the last act of A Dream of Love. He was b
alding and had a fine, dynamic profile, but en face he turned out to be less handsome: bags swelled beneath the mud-colored eyes, and one incisor was missing. As for his personality, he was a gentle, kind, sensitive man, and, when they all would go out for a walk at night, he would sing in a velvety baritone the romance beginning:
Do you recall our sitting on the seashore,
The sunset’s glow with scarlet striped the sky,
or tell an Armenian joke in the darkness, and in the darkness someone would laugh. On meeting him for the first time, Martin, with amazement and even with a certain horror, recognized in him the drunk who had invited him to stand against the wall and be shot, but apparently Zaryanski remembered nothing, so that Dedman’s identity remained unclear. Zaryanski was an outstanding drinker, and got violent when in his cups, but the revolver, which reappeared one day—during a picnic on the mountain plateau above Yalta, on a night steeped in moonlight, cricket-chirr, and muscatel wine—turned out to have an empty cylinder: for a long time Zaryanski went on shouting, threatening, and mumbling, talking of some fatal love of his; they covered him with amilitary greatcoat, and he went to sleep. Lida sat close to the campfire with her chin propped on her hands, and with shiny, dancing eyes, reddish brown from the flames, watched the escaping sparks. Presently Martin stood up, stretched his legs, ascended a dark turfy slope, and walked to the edge of the precipice. Right under his feet he saw a broad black abyss, and beyond it the sea, which seemed to be raised and brought closer, with a full moon’s wake, the “Turkish Trail” spreading in the middle and narrowing as it approached the horizon. To the left, in the murky, mysterious distance, shimmered the diamond lights of Yalta. And when Martin would turn, he saw the flaming, restless nest of the fire a short distance away, and the silhouettes of people around it, and someone’s hand adding a branch. The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray with stars, made one’s head spin, and suddenly Martin again experienced a feeling he had known on more than one occasion as a child: an unbearable intensification of all his senses, a magical and demanding impulse, the presence of something for which alone it was worth living.
6
That moon’s scintillating wake enticed one in the same ways as had the forest path in the nursery picture, and the clustered lights of Yalta amid the extensive blackness of unknown composition and properties reminded him too of a childhood impression: aged nine, wearing only his nightshirt, with chilled heels, he knelt at a sleeping-car window; the Sud Express hurtled across the French countryside. Sofia, having put her son to bed, had joined her husband in the dining car; the maid was sound asleep in the upper berth. It was dark in the narrow compartment; only the blue fabric of the night lamp’s flexible shade let some light through; its tassel swayed, and panels creaked softly. Having wriggled out from under the sheet, he had crawled along the blanket to the window and raised the leathern curtain—for this he had to undo a button, after which the curtain slid smoothly up. He shivered with cold, and his knees ached, but he could not tear himself away from the window, beyond which the oblique hillsides of night rushed past. It was then that he suddenly saw what he now remembered on the Crimean plateau—a handful of lights in the distance, in a fold of darkness between two black hills: the lights would hide and reappear, and then they came twinkling from a completely different direction, and abruptly vanished, as if somebody had covered them with a black kerchief. Soon the train braked and stopped in darkness. Strangely disembodied noises became audible within the car: monotonous speech, coughing; then his mother’s voice passed down the corridor; and, deducing that his parents were returning from the dining car and might look in on the way to the adjacent compartment, Martin slipped quickly back into bed. A little later the train began to move, but then stopped for good, emitting a long, softly sibilant sigh of relief, and simultaneously pale stripes of light passed slowly across the dark compartment. Martin once again crawled over to the window: he saw a lighted station platform; a man passed trundling an iron baggage cart with a muffled clatter, and on the cart was a crate with the mysterious inscription “FRAGILE.” Several midges and one large moth circled around a gas lantern; shadowy people shuffled along the platform conversing about unknown things as they went; then there was a jangle of buffers and the train glided off. Lamps passed and disappeared; a small structure, brightly lit inside and housing a row of levers, appeared and also passed. The train rocked gently as it switched tracks, everything grew dark beyond the window, and once again there was only the rushing night. And again, out of nowhere, no longer between two hills but somehow much closer and more tangible, the familiar lights spilled forth, and the engine emitted a long, plaintive whistle as if it, too, was sorry to leave them behind. Then came a sharp bang, and an oncoming train shot past—and vanished as if it had never existed. The undulating black night resumed its smooth course and the elusive lights gradually thinned into nothingness.
When they had finally disappeared Martin fastened the window shade and lay down. He awoke very early. The train’s motion seemed smoother and more relaxed, as if it had become accustomed to the rapid pace. When he unfastened the shade he felt a momentary dizziness, for the ground was running past in the opposite direction, and the early ash-pale light of the clear sky was unexpected too, and absolutely new to him were the terraced, olive-covered slopes.
From the station they went to Biarritz in a hired landau along a dusty road bordered by dusty brambles, and since Martin saw blackberries for the first time in his life, and the station was for some reason called “The Negress,” he was full of questions. Today, at the age of sixteen, he kept comparing the Crimean sea with the ocean in Biarritz: yes, the Biscay waves were higher, and the breakers more violent, and the fat Basque baigneur in his perennially wet bathing suit (“That’s a killing profession,” his father used to say) would take Martin by the hand and lead him into shallow water; then they would both turn their backs to the surf and a huge, roaring wave would rush upon them from behind, drowning and overturning the entire world. On the first, mirrorlike strip of beach a swarthy-faced woman with gray wisps of hair on her chin would meet those who had finished bathing and throw a fluffy beach towel over one’s shoulders. Further on, in a cabin that smelled of tar, an attendant would help you yank off the clammy and clingy bathing suit and would bring a tub of hot, almost boiling water, where you had to immerse your feet. Then, when Martin and his parents had dressed, they would sit on the beach—Mother, with her big white hat, under a frilly white umbrella; Father also under an umbrella, but a cream-colored masculine one; and Martin, in striped jersey and sunbrowned straw hat with “H.M.S. Indomitable” on the ribbon around its crown. His pants rolled all the way up, he would build a sand castle surrounded by moats. A waffle man, wearing a beret, would come by and turn with a grinding noise the handle of the red tin cask that contained his wares, and those large, curved chunks of waffle, mixed with flying sand and sea salt, remained among the most vivid memories of that period. Behind the beach, on the stone promenade, inundated by the waves on stormy days, a pert, well-rouged, far from young flower woman would insert a carnation in the buttonhole of Father’s white jacket, while Father kindly and comically observed the procedure of insertion, thrusting out his lower lip and pressing the folds of his chin against the lapel.
It was a shame, at the end of September, to leave the happy seaside and the white villa with its gnarled fig tree that refused to yield even one ripe fruit. On the way home they stopped in Berlin, where boys on roller skates, and even an occasional adult with a briefcase under his arm, would clatter by along the asphalt of streets. And then there were marvelous toy shops (locomotives, tunnels, viaducts), and tennis courts in the outskirts of the city, on the Kurfürstendamm, and the starry-night ceiling of the Wintergarten, and a trip to the pine woods of Charlottenburg on a cool, clear day, in a white electric cab.
At th
e frontier where one had to change trains Martin realized that he had forgotten in his compartment the penholder with the tiny glass lens, in which, when held up to your eye, a mother-of-pearl and blue landscape would flash into being; but during supper at the station (hazel hen with lingonberry sauce) the sleeping-car attendant brought it, and Father gave him a ruble. Snow and frost met one on the Russian side of the border, a whole mountain of logs swelled up on the tender, the crimson Russian locomotive was equipped with a fan-shaped snowplow, and abundant white steam flowed, curling, from the huge smokestack. The Nord-Express, russified at Verzhbolovo, retained the brown facings of its cars, but now became more sedate, wide-flanked, thoroughly heated, and, instead of gathering full speed right away, took a long time to gain momentum after a stop. It was pleasant to perch on one of the flap seats in the blue-carpeted corridor, and the fat lantern-jawed attendant, in his chocolate-colored uniform, stroked Martin on the head in passing. White fields stretched outside; here and there leafless sallows stuck up out of the snow. By a crossing gate stood a woman in felt boots, holding a green flag; a peasant, who had jumped down from his sledge, shielded with his mittens the eyes of his backing nag. And at night he saw something wonderful: past the black, mirrory window flew thousands of sparks—arrowlike flourishes of a fire-tipped pen.
Glory Page 3
