“From my tailor,” said Darwin chewing juicily.
“Sonia’s handwriting isn’t too good,” remarked Martin.
“It’s rotten,” agreed Darwin, gulping some coffee. Martin walked around behind him, placed both hands around Darwin’s neck, and started squeezing.
“The bacon went down anyway,” said Darwin in a smugly strained voice.
19
That evening they were both off for London. Darwin spent the night in one of those charming two-room flats provided by clubs for bachelors—and Darwin’s club was one of the smartest and staidest in London, with overstuffed armchairs, glossy magazines, and thick silent rugs. Martin ended up this time in one of the upstairs bedrooms at the Zilanovs’, Nelly being in Reval, and her husband marching on St. Petersburg. When Martin arrived, nobody was at home but Mihail Platonovich Zilanov himself, busy writing in his study. A sturdy, thickset man, with Tartar features and the same dark lusterless eyes as Sonia, he invariably wore cylindrical detachable cuffs and a starched shirt; the shirt front bulged, imparting a dovelike quality to his chest. He was one of those Russians who, upon awaking, first of all pull on trousers with dangling suspenders; who wash only face, nape, and hands in the morning, but wash them most thoroughly, and who regard their weekly bath as an event not devoid of a certain risk. He had done a goodly amount of traveling around in his time, was intensely active in liberal politics, conceived life as a succession of congresses in various cities, had miraculously escaped a Soviet death, and always carried a bulging briefcase. And when someone said meditatively, “What shall I do with these books—it’s raining,” he would wordlessly, instantly, and extremely skillfully swaddle the books in a sheet of newspaper, rummage in his briefcase, produce some string and, in a flash, tie it crosswise around the neat package, a process which the luckless acquaintance, shifting from foot to foot, watched with apprehensive attendrissement. “There you are, sir,” Zilanov would say and, after a hasty good-bye, was off to Riga, Belgrade, or Paris. He always traveled light, with three clean handkerchiefs in his briefcase, and would sit in the railway carriage completely blind to picturesque spots (which the fast train traversed in its trusting efforts to please), immersed in a brochure and making occasional notes in the margin. While marveling at his inattention to landscapes, comforts, and cleanliness, Martin nevertheless admired Zilanov for that plodding dryish courage of his, and every time he saw him could not help recalling that this seemingly unathletic and unfashionable man, who probably played only billiards and perhaps bowls, had escaped from the Bolshevists by crawling through a drainpipe, and had once fought a duel with the Octobrist Tuchkov.
“Welcome,” said Zilanov extending a swarthy hand. “Sit down.” Martin sat down. Zilanov again contemplated the half-filled sheet of paper upon his desk, picked up his pen, imparted to it a hovering flicker directly above the paper before transforming the flicker into the rapid glide of writing, then simultaneously gave the pen its freedom and said, “They should be back any moment now.”
Martin reached for a newspaper lying on a nearby table. It turned out to be a Russian émigré one, published in Paris.
“How’s school?” asked Zilanov, without raising his eyes from the evenly running pen.
“Pretty good,” said Martin, putting down the paper. “How long have they been out?” Zilanov did not answer: the pen was going at full tilt. A few minutes later, though, he spoke again, still not looking at Martin. “Idling away your time, I imagine. Only thing colleges care about here is le sport.”
Martin grinned. Zilanov rapidly thumped a blotter all over the lines he had written and said, “Your mother keeps asking me for additional information, but I don’t know anything more. I wrote her in the Crimea at the time, telling her everything I knew.” Martin cleared his throat.
“Shto vï (what’s that)?” asked Zilanov, who had picked up that bit of bad Russian in Moscow.
“Nothing,” replied Martin.
“I’m referring to your father’s death, of course,” said Zilanov, glancing with dull eyes at Martin. “If you remember, it was I who notified you at the time.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Martin, nodding hurriedly. He always felt embarrassed when strangers—even with the best intentions—spoke to him about his father.
“Our last meeting is as clear in my mind as if it had happened today,” Zilanov went on. “We chanced to meet on the street. I was already in hiding then. At first I did not want to go up to him. But Sergey Robertovich looked so appallingly sick. I remember, he was very concerned about what was happening to you and your mother in the Crimea. And a couple of days later I went to see him, and there they were carrying out the coffin.”
Martin kept nodding, searching agonizingly for a way to change the subject. Zilanov was telling him all this for the third time, and, on the whole, the narrative was a rather pale one. Zilanov turned over the sheet. His pen quivered and started again. To kill time Martin again reached for the newspaper, but just then the front-door lock clicked and from the entrance hall came the sound of voices, of shuffling feet, and Irina’s awful cackling laugh.
20
Martin went out to greet them, and, as generally happened when he encountered Sonia, he instantly had the sensation that he stood in relief against a dark background. The same thing had happened on her last visit to Cambridge (she had come with her father, who had tormented him with questions about the age of various colleges and the number of books in the Library, while she and Darwin kept quietly laughing about something or other), and it came upon him again now, that strange torpor. His light-blue necktie, the sharp points of his soft collar, his double-breasted suit, all seemed to be in order, and yet Martin had the impression, under Sonia’s impenetrable gaze, that he was dressed shabbily, that his hair was badly brushed, that he had shoulders like a furniture mover’s, and that the roundness of his face was the shape of stupidity. No less repulsive were his big knuckles, which had reddened and grown swollen of late, what with his goalkeeping and his boxing lessons. The solid sense of contentment somehow related to the strength in his shoulders, the coolness of sleekly shaven cheeks, the reliability of a recently filled tooth, all of it vanished instantly in Sonia’s presence. And what appeared particularly silly to him was the way his eyebrows petered out: they were thick only at their starting point and then, templeward, took on a look of surprised sparseness.
Supper was served. Mrs. Pavlov, a pudgy and dour lady who resembled her sister (but smiled even more seldom than she), kept a habitual and discreet eye on Irina, seeing to it that her daughter ate decorously, without leaning on the table too much and without licking her knife. Zilanov arrived a moment later, rapidly and energetically inserted a corner of his napkin under his collar and, half-rising in his chair, snatched from clear across the table a roll which he immediately sliced and buttered. His wife was reading a letter from Reval, and, as she read, saying to Martin, “Help yourself.” On his left Irina fidgeted, scratched her armpit, and uttered sounds of endearment addressed to her cold mutton. On his right sat Sonia, and the way she had of taking salt with the tip of her knife, her short black hair with its harsh gloss, and the dimple on her pale cheek ineffably irritated him. After supper there came a telephone call from Darwin, who suggested they go dancing. Sonia played coy for a while, then agreed. Martin went to change and was already pulling on his silk socks, when Sonia told him through the door that she was tired and would not go after all. Half an hour later Darwin arrived, very gay, very big and elegant, his top hat cocked, with tickets to a very expensive ball in his pocket. Martin told him that Sonia had wilted and gone to bed, whereupon Darwin drank a cup of tepid tea, gave an almost natural yawn, and said that in this world everything was for the best. Martin knew that he had traveled to London for the sole purpose of seeing Sonia, and when Darwin, in his un-needed top hat and opera cloak, went off whistling down the empty dark street, Martin felt very hurt for him. He softly closed the front door and went upstairs to his bedroom. Sonia slipped ou
t into the passage to meet him, wearing a kimono and looking very short in heelless bedroom slippers.
“Is he gone?” she asked.
“Really rotten of you,” Martin commented under his breath without stopping.
“You could have stopped him,” she said after him, adding quickly, “I know what—I’ll go down and ring him up and go dancing, that’s what I’ll do.”
Without answering, Martin slammed his door, angrily brushed his teeth, yanked open his bed as if he wanted to throw somebody out of it, and, dispatching the light with a murderous twist of his fingers, pulled the covers over his head. But a few minutes later the thickness of the blanket did not prevent him from hearing Sonia’s steps hurrying up the passage and her door shutting—was it possible that she had actually been downstairs and telephoned? He listened attentively, and, after a new period of silence, there were her footsteps again, only now they had a different, lighter, almost ethereal sound. Martin could not restrain himself. He stepped out into the corridor and caught sight of Sonia hopping downstairs in a flamingo-colored frock, a fluffy fan in one hand and something bright encircling her black hair. She had left her door open and the light on. In her room there remained a cloudlet of powder, like the smoke following a shot; a stocking, killed outright, lay under a chair; and the motley innards of the wardrobe had spilled onto the carpet.
Instead of being glad for his friend, Martin felt very hurt. All was still, except for the heavy snores that came from the master bedroom. “God damn her,” he muttered, and for a while debated with himself whether he too should join them at the ball—after all, there were three tickets. He saw himself dashing up the sumptuous stairs, wearing his pumps with flat bows, his dinner jacket and silk shirt with the frilled front (as sported by the dandies that year). The flame of music shot from the open doors. The resilient, tender caress of a girl’s soft leg, which keeps giving way and yet pressing against you, the fragrant hair by your very lips, a cheek that leaves its powder on your silk lapel—all these immemorial and tender banalities stirred Martin deeply. He enjoyed dancing with a fair stranger, enjoyed the vacuous, chaste talk, through which you listen closely to that bewitching, vague something going on inside you and inside her, which will last a couple of bars more and then, finding no resolution, will vanish forever and be utterly forgotten. But while the bond of bodies is still unbroken, the outlines of a potential love affair begin to form, and the rough draft already comprises everything: the sudden silence between two people in some dimly lit room; the man carefully placing with trembling fingers on the edge of an ashtray the just-lit but impedient cigarette; the woman’s eyes slowly closing as in a filmed scene; and the rapt darkness, and in it a point of light, a glossy limousine traveling fast through the rainy night, and suddenly, a white terrace and the dazzling ripple of the sea, and Martin softly saying to the girl he has carried off, “Your name—what’s your name?” Leafy shadows play on her luminous dress. She gets up, she goes away. The rapacious croupier rakes in Martin’s last chips, and he has nothing left but to thrust his hands into the empty pockets of his dinner jacket and descend slowly into the casino garden and, then, sign on as a longshoreman—and there she is again, aboard someone else’s yacht, sparkling, laughing, flinging coins into the water.
“Funny thing,” said Darwin one night, as he and Martin came out of a small Cambridge cinema, “it’s all unquestionably poor, vulgar, and rather implausible, and yet there is something exciting about all that flying foam, the femme fatale on the yacht, the ruined and ragged he-man swallowing his tears.”
“It’s nice to travel,” said Martin. “I’d like to travel a lot.”
This fragment of conversation, surviving by chance from one April night, came back to Martin when, at the beginning of summer vacation, already in Switzerland, he received a letter from Darwin in Tenerife. Tenerife—God, what a lovely, emerald word! It was morning. Marie, with disastrously deteriorated looks and an oddly bloated appearance, was kneeling in a corner, wringing out a floor rag into a pail. Large white clouds glided above the mountains, catching on the peaks, and from time to time some smoky filaments would descend the slopes, on which the light changed continuously with the ebb and flow of the sun. Martin went out into the garden, where Uncle Henry, wearing a monstrous straw hat, was talking with the village curé. When the curé, a small man with glasses, which he kept adjusting with the thumb and little finger of his left hand, made a low bow and, with a rustle of his black cassock, walked off by the shiny white wall and climbed into his cabriolet hitched to a fat, pinkish-white horse all speckled with mustard, Martin said, “It’s wonderful here, and I adore this region, but, perhaps, just for a few weeks, I would like to take a trip somewhere—the Canary Islands, for instance.”
“What folly, what folly,” answered Uncle Henry with fright, and his mustache bristled slightly. “Your mother, who waited for you so anxiously, who is so happy that you are staying with her until October—and suddenly you leave …”
“We could all go together,” said Martin.
“Quelle folie,” Uncle Henry repeated. “Later, when you finish your studies, I’ll have no objection. I have always believed that a young man should see the world. Remember that your mother is only now recovering from the shocks she suffered. No, no, no.”
Martin shrugged and, with his hands in the pockets of his shorts, wandered off along the trail that led to the waterfall. He knew his mother was waiting for him there by the larch-shaded grotto: that was the agreement. She would go out walking very early and, not wanting to wake Martin, would leave him a note: “By the grotto at ten” or “Near the spring on the road to Ste. Claire.” However, even though he knew she was waiting, Martin suddenly changed direction, left the trail and started upward across the heather.
21
The slope became steeper and steeper, the sun was scorching, flies kept trying to get at his lips and eyes. Upon reaching a circular birch grove, he rested, smoked a cigarette, pulled up his sports stockings tighter, and resumed the ascent, munching on a birch leaf. The heather was crunchy and slippery. Now and then he caught his foot in the low thornbushes. At the top of the incline gleamed an amassment of rocks, between which ran a crevice. It fanned out toward him, and was filled with fine debris that came into motion as soon as he stepped upon it. This way could not serve to reach the peak, so Martin began to climb straight up the face of the rocks. Occasionally some root or moss patch at which he clutched detached itself from the stone, and feverishly he would seek a support with his foot, or else it was his foothold that gave, and he would be left hanging by his hands and have to pull himself painfully up. The peak was almost within reach when he suddenly slipped and started to slither down, clutching at shrublets of rough flowers; he lost his grip, felt a burning pain as his knee scraped against the rock, attempted to embrace the steepness that was gliding up and past him—and abruptly salvation bumped against his soles.
He found himself on a cornice; to the right it narrowed and merged with the cliff, but to the left it could be seen going on for a few yards before turning a corner—what then happened to it remained unknown. His ledge recalled the stage setting of nightmares. He stood, pressing closely to the rock against which he had bruised his chest on the way down, and dared not unglue himself from it. With an effort glancing over his shoulder, he saw under his heels a prodigious precipice, a sun-illumined abyss with, in its depths, several outdistanced firs running in panic after the descending forest, and still further down the steep meadows and the tiny, ivory white hotel. “So that’s what its message was,” thought Martin with a superstitious shiver. “I’ll fall, I’ll perish, that’s what it’s watching for. That—that——” It was equally terrifying to look down the precipice or up the vertical cliff above him. A width of bookshelf underfoot and a knobby spot in the rock wall to which his fingers clung was all that Martin retained of the solid world to which he was used.
He experienced faintness, dizziness, sickening fear, yet at the same time he observed
himself from the outside, noting with odd lucidity his open-collared flannel shirt, his clumsy clinging position on the ledge, the thistle ball that had attached itself to his stocking and the entirely black butterfly that fluttered by with enviable casualness like a quiet little devil and began to rise along the rock face; and though there was no one around to make showing off worth while, Martin began to whistle; then he vowed to himself that he would pay no attention to the invitation of the abyss and began to displace his feet slowly, as he moved to the left. Ah, if only one could see what the cornice did after it turned that corner! The rock wall seemed to push against his breast, crowding him toward the precipice, whose impatient breath he felt on his back. His nails dug into the stone, the stone was hot, the tufts of flowers were of an intense blue, a lizard traced a quick incomplete figure eight and froze again, flies tickled his face. Every now and then he had to stop, and he heard himself complaining to himself—I cannot any more, I cannot—and when he caught himself doing that, he began to produce with his lips a rudimentary tune, a fox-trot or the “Marseillaise,” then moistened his lips and, again complaining, resumed his sidewise progress. There remained only a yard or so to the turn when something began to spill from under his shoe sole; he could not help turning his head, and in the sunny void the white spot of the hotel started to rotate slowly. Martin closed his eyes and stopped short, but then he controlled his nausea and began to move again. At the turn he said rapidly “Please, I beg you, please,” and his request was immediately granted: beyond the turn the shelf widened, became a platform, and beyond was the already familiar scree and the heather-covered slope.
There he caught his breath. His entire body ached and vibrated. His nails had become dark red as if he had been picking strawberries; the knee he had barked was smarting. The danger that he had just experienced seemed to him far more real than the one into which he had blundered in the Crimea. Now he felt proud of himself but this pride suddenly lost all its flavor when Martin asked himself if he could again perform, this time deliberately, what he had performed accidentally. In a few days he gave in, climbed again up the heather-grown steeps, but when he reached the platform from where the cornice started, he could not make himself step on it. This angered him, he tried to incite himself, he taunted his own cowardice, imagined Darwin looking at him with a mocking smile—stood there for a while, then shrugged and turned back, doing his best to ignore the ruffian who was raging within him. Again and again, to the very end of vacation, that rowdy made irruptions and would riot so offensively that finally Martin decided not to walk up that mountain any more to avoid being tormented by the sight of the narrow shelf which he dared not tread.
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