Martin had no idea what exactly he served as an example of, but the abbé apparently understood Uncle Henry’s paradoxes and smiled commiseratingly. Sometimes Martin was so irritated by talk of this kind that he was ready to say something rude to his uncle—who was also, alas, his stepfather—but would stop in time, for he had noticed the look that appeared on his mother’s face whenever Henry waxed eloquent at dinner. That look contained a faint trace of friendly raillery, and a certain sadness, and a mute appeal to forgive the crank, and yet something else inexpressible but very wise. Martin would keep still, mentally answering Uncle Henry like this, for example: “It’s not true that I devoted my time to trifles at Cambridge. It’s not true that I did not learn anything. Columbus, before trying to take hold of his east ear across his west shoulder, traveled to Iceland incognito to gather certain information, knowing that the sailors there were a canny and far-ranging breed. I, too, plan to explore a distant land.”
30
His mother did not pester him with the tedious talk of which Uncle Henry was so fond; she did not inquire what occupation he would choose, feeling as she did that all this would somehow work out by itself. She was satisfied with the happiness at hand—of his being with her now, healthy, broad-shouldered, tanned; of his slamming away at tennis, speaking in a bass voice, shaving daily, and making young, bright-eyed Madame Guichart, a local merchant’s wife, blush as red as a poppy. Sometimes she wondered when Russia would at last snap out of the evil dream, when the striped pole of the frontier gate would rise and everyone return and resume his former place, and, goodness, how the trees have grown, how the house has shrunk, what sorrow and joy, what a smell of earth! In the mornings she would wait for the postman just as avidly as during her son’s years at Cambridge, and now, when a letter came for Martin (and it was not often), in an office envelope, addressed in a spidery hand and bearing a Berlin postmark, she felt the keenest joy and, snatching the letter, hurried to his room. Martin still lay in bed, very tousled, sucking on a cigarette with his hand at his chin. He saw in the mirror the sun-bright wound of the opening door, and that special expression on his mother’s pink, freckled face: by the fold of her lips, tightly compressed but ready to spread into a smile, he could tell there was a letter.
“Nothing for you today,” Mrs. Edelweiss would lightly say, holding one hand behind her back, but her son’s impatient fingers were already reaching out, and, beaming, she would press the envelope to her chest, and both would laugh. Then, not wishing to spoil his enjoyment, she would go to the window, lean out on its sill, cupping her face in her hands, and gaze with a feeling of complete happiness at the mountains, and in particular at one distant, rosy peak that was visible only from this window. Martin, who had consumed the letter in one gulp, pretended to be considerably happier than he actually was, so that his mother imagined those letters from the little Zilanov girl to be full of tenderness, and would probably have felt sadly hurt if she ever got to read them. She remembered the Zilanov girl with strange clarity: a black-haired, pale little thing who was always sick with an inflamed throat or convalescing after one, her neck either bandaged or yellow from iodine. She remembered how she had once taken ten-year-old Martin to a Christmas party at the Zilanovs’ St. Petersburg flat, and little Sonia was wearing a lacy white dress with a broad silk sash around the hips. As for Martin, he did not remember this at all; there had been many Christmas parties, and they merged in his memory. Only one thing remained very vivid, for it had recurred every time: his mother saying it was time to go home, and thrusting her fingers inside the collar of his sailor suit from behind to see if he was not too sweaty after all the running, while he, with a huge gold-papered cracker, kept trying to wrench himself free, but his mother’s grip was tenacious, and presently his overpants (which reached nearly to his armpits) were being pulled on, and on went his overshoes and fur coat, with its tight-closing hook at the throat and the hideously tickly Caucasian hood, and next minute there was the streetlamps’ frosty rainbow running across the window of the close carriage. It thrilled Martin to note that the expression of his mother’s eyes was the same now as then, that now, too, she touched his neck when he came home after tennis, and that she brought Sonia’s letter with the same tenderness as she had once brought, in its long cardboard box, an air rifle ordered from England.
The rifle had turned out to be not quite as he had expected, not matching exactly its foredream, just as now the letters from Sonia were not the kind he would have liked. She wrote, as it were, in abrupt jerks, without a single mystery-breathing phrase, and he had to be content with such remarks as “I often recall good old Cambridge,” or “Best of everything, my dear little flower, give me your paw to shake.” She told him that she had an office job—typing and shorthand—that they were having a very difficult time with Irina—constant hysterics—that her father had not got anywhere with his Russian-language newspaper and was now setting up a publishing business—books by émigré writers—that there was never a penny in the house—which was rather sad—that they had many friends—which was lots of fun—that the streetcars in Berlin were green, and that Berliners played tennis in braces and starched collars. Martin’s endurance lasted all through summer, fall, and winter; then, in mid-April 1923, on his twenty-first birthday, he announced to Uncle Henry that he was leaving for Berlin. The latter looked dour, and said with displeasure, “To me, mon ami, that seems devoid of all sense. You will always have time to see Europe. In point of fact, I was going to take you and your mother to Italy next autumn. But you can’t go on loafing forever. In short, I was going to suggest that you try your youthful powers in Geneva.” (Martin knew full well what was meant: several times already this dismal subject had crept stealthily forth; it concerned some commercial firm or other belonging to the Petit brothers, with whom Uncle Henry had business relations.) “That you try tes jeunes forces,” Uncle Henry repeated. “In this cruel age, in this very practical age, a young man must learn to earn his bread and elbow his way through life. You have a solid knowledge of the English language. Foreign correspondence in the world of affairs is a most interesting thing. As for Berlin—— Your German has not much improved, has it? I can’t see what you are going to do there.”
“Suppose I do nothing,” Martin said gloomily.
Uncle Henry looked at him with surprise. “That’s a bizarre answer. I don’t know what your father would have thought of an answer like that. I think he would be as astonished as I am that a young man full of sap and health despises all work. Please understand,” he hastily added, noticing that Martin had reddened unpleasantly, “I am not being stingy—je ne suis pas mesquin. I am rich enough, thank God, to provide for you—I make a duty and a joy of it—but it would be folly not to take a job. Europe is passing through an unbelievable crisis, and a man can lose a fortune in the twinkling of an eye. That’s the way it is, and you can’t do a thing about it.”
“I don’t need your money,” Martin said softly and rudely. Uncle Henry pretended not to hear, but tears welled in his eyes.
“Don’t you have any ambition at all? Don’t you ever think about making a career? We Edelweisses always knew how to work. Your grandfather began as a poor tutor—teaching French à des princes russes. When he proposed to your grandmother her parents threw him out of the house. And back he comes a year later, the director of an export company, and then, obviously, all obstacles were swept away.”
“I don’t need your money,” repeated Martin, even more softly. “And as for Grandfather, that’s nothing but a silly family legend, and you know it.”
“What’s the matter with him, what’s the matter with him?” Uncle Henry muttered in fright. “What right do you have to offend me like this? What wrong have I done you? I, who have always——”
“The short of the matter is that I’m going to Berlin,” Martin interrupted, and left the room, trembling.
31
That evening there was a reconciliation, embraces, noseblowing, emotional throat-clearing�
��but Martin stood his ground. His mother, who sensed his longing to see Sonia, proved to be an ally, and smiled bravely as he got into the car.
Hardly had the house disappeared from view when Martin changed places with the chauffeur. Holding the wheel delicately, almost tenderly, as if it were something alive and precious, and watching the powerful car gobble up the road, he experienced nearly the same sensation as when, in childhood, seated on the floor with his feet resting on the piano pedals, he would hold the stool with its round, revolving seat between his legs and handle it like a steering wheel, taking splendid curves at full speed, pushing the pedal again and again (which made the piano hum), and slitting his eyes against the imaginary wind. Then, in the German express, where, between the corridor windows, hung small maps of regions the train did not pass through, Martin relished the journey, eating chocolate, smoking, poking his cigarette butt under the metal lid of the ashtray, filled with the remains of cigar. It was night by the time he neared Berlin. Looking from the train onto the wet lighted streets he relived his childhood impression of Berlin, whose fortunate inhabitants could enjoy daily, if they wished, the sight of trains with fabulous destinations, gliding across a black bridge over a humdrum thoroughfare; in this respect Berlin differed from St. Petersburg, where railroad operations were concealed like a secret rite. A week later, though, when his eyes had got used to the city, Martin was already powerless to reconstruct that perspective from which its features had seemed familiar. It was as when you meet someone you have not seen for years: first you recognize his figure and voice; then you look more closely, and there, before your eyes, the transformation imperceptibly wrought by time is run through in quick display. Features alter, likeness deteriorates, and you have before you a stranger, looking smug after having devoured his own young and fragile double, whom it will henceforth be hard to picture, unless chance comes to the rescue. When Martin deliberately visited in Berlin that intersection, that square, which he had seen as a child, there was nothing that gave him the least shiver of excitement, but on the other hand, a chance whiff of coal or automobile exhaust, a certain special pale hue of the sky seen through a lace curtain, or the shudder of the windowpanes awakened by a passing truck, instantly brought back the essence of city, hotel, and drab morning, part of an image that Berlin had once impressed upon him. The toy shops on the once elegant Friedrichstrasse had thinned out and lost their sparkle, and the locomotives in their windows looked smaller and shabbier. The pavement of this street had been torn up, and shirt-sleeved workmen were drilling, and digging deep smoky holes, so that you had to pick your way over planking, and sometimes even across loose sand. In the Panopticon of Waxworks on the Unter den Linden the man in a shroud, energetically climbing out of his grave, and the Iron Maiden, that instrument of strong and hard torture, had lost their ghoulish charm. Martin went to the Kurfürstendamm to look for that enormous roller-skating rink that he remembered so well, with its rumble of wheels, instructors in red uniforms, band shell, slightly salty mocha cake served in the encircling boxes, and the pas de patineurs that he used to dance to any kind of music, flexing now his right, now his left skate-shod leg (and what a spill he took once!), only to find a dozen years had been enough to abolish it completely. The Kurfürstendamm itself had changed too, maturing growing longer, and somewhere—perhaps beneath a new building—lay the grave of a twenty-court tennis establishment, where Martin had been a couple of times with his mother, who would accompany her underhand service with a bright-voiced “Play!” and whose skirt would rustle as she ran. Now, without even leaving the city limits, he could reach the Grunewald, where the Zilanovs lived, to learn from Sonia that it was pointless to go to Wertheim’s for his shopping, and that it was by no means obligatory to visit the Wintergarten, under whose fabulous star-dusted black ceiling tight-corseted Prussian officers sat at lighted tables in the boxes, while on stage twelve bare-legged girls sang with brassy voices and undulated with linked arms from right to left and back again, kicking up twelve white legs, and little Martin had uttered a soft exclamation of surprise upon recognizing in them the demure, pretty English misses who, like him, went skating daily at the wooden rink.
But perhaps the most unexpected thing about this new, much expanded, postwar Berlin, so peaceful, rustic and bumbling, compared to the compact and elegant city of Martin’s childhood, was the free-mannered, loud-voiced Russia that chattered everywhere, in the trams, in the shops, on street corners, on the balconies of apartment houses. Some ten years before, in one of his prophetic daydreams (and any person with a lot of imagination has prophetic daydreams occasionally—such is the statistics of daydreams), Martin, a schoolboy in the secure St. Petersburg of 1913, imagined himself in years to come as an exile, and felt tears rising when, on the strange dim railway platform of his reverie, he unexpectedly encountered—whom?—a compatriot, sitting on a trunk, on a night of shiverings and delays, and what a marvelous talk they had! For the roles of these fellow exiles he simply chose Russians he had noticed during that earlier trip abroad: a family in Biarritz, complete with governess, tutor, clean-shaven valet, and brown dachshund; a fascinating fair-haired lady at the Kaiserhof in Berlin; or, in the corridor of the Nord-Express, an old gentleman in a black skullcap, whom Martin’s father had identified, in a whisper, as “the writer Boborykin.” Then, having selected for them appropriate costumes and speeches, he would dispatch them to meetings with himself in the remotest parts of the world. Today, in 1923, that chance fantasy (the consequence of Heaven knows what children’s book) found full incarnation, marked even by some overplaying. When the fat, heavily made-up Russian lady in the tram hung with blatant dejection from her strap, and volleyed over her shoulder some resounding Russian to her companion, an old man with a gray mustache, “Astounding, really astounding, how not one of these ill-bred foreigners offers his seat,” Martin jumped up and, with a radiant smile, repeating what he had rehearsed in his boyhood fantasies, exclaimed, “Pozhaluysta!” and, instantly growing pale from the experienced thrill, clutched the strap in his turn. The peaceable Germans whom the lady had called ill-bred were all tired, hungry working people, and the gray sandwiches they chewed in the streetcar, even if they did irritate Russians, were indispensable. For real dinners were expensive that year of monstrous inflation, and, when Martin changed a dollar note in the tram, instead of investing that dollar in real estate, the conductor’s hands would shake with amazement and joy. Martin earned his American valuta in a special way, which made him very proud. True, the labor was arduous. Ever since May, when he had stumbled upon that job (thanks to Kindermann, a charming Russian-German, who for a couple of years already had been teaching tennis to whatever wealthy clients turned up), and until mid-October, when he left to spend the winter with his mother, and then again in the spring of 1924, Martin worked almost daily from early morning to sunset, holding five balls in his left hand (Kindermann managed to hold six) and sending them one by one across the net with an identical smooth stroke of his racket, while the tense, middle-aged pupil (male or female) on the other side of the net swung diligently and as often as not did not hit anything. At first Martin would get so tired, his right shoulder would ache and his feet burn so badly, that as soon as he had earned his five or six dollars he would go to bed. His hair grew lighter and his skin darker from the sun, so that he seemed a negative of himself. His landlady, a major’s widow from whom he concealed his profession so as to seem more mysterious, supposed that the poor fellow—like many cultured people, alas—was obliged to work as a laborer, lugging rocks, for instance (hence the suntan), and was embarrassed about it, as would be any refined person. In the evening, with genteel sighs, she would treat him to sausage that her daughter sent from their Pomeranian estate. The lady was six feet tall, with a ruddy complexion, used cologne on Sundays and kept a parrot and a tortoise in her room. She considered Martin an ideal roomer: he was seldom at home, did not receive guests, and never used the bath (the latter was amply replaced by the shower at the tennis club and
the lake in Grunewald). This bath was plastered with the landlady’s hair on the inside, anonymous rags dried on a clothesline overhead, and an old, dusty, rusted bicycle leaned against the opposite wall. Moreover, it was no easy task getting there: one had to follow a long, dark corridor, with an extraordinary number of corners and piled full of all sorts of junk. Martin’s room, on the other hand, was not bad at all, and had its amusing side. It contained such objects of luxury as an upright piano, locked tight from time immemorial, and a massive, complicated barometer that had stopped working a couple of years before the war, while on the green wall above the couch, like a constant, benevolent reminder, the same naked old chap armed with a trident rose out of his Böcklinian waves as he did—although in a plainer frame—on the wall of the Zilanovs’ parlor.
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The first time Martin visited them and saw their cheap, dingy flat, consisting of four rooms and a kitchen, where a strange Sonia with a different hairdo sat on the table, swinging her legs in their darned-up stockings, sniffling, and peeling potatoes, Martin realized that he could expect nothing but sorrows from Sonia, and that his Berlin trip was pointless. Everything about her was unfamiliar: the bronze-colored sweater, the exposed ears, the stuffy voice—she was in the throes of a bad cold, and the skin was red around her nostrils; she would stop peeling to blow her nose, give a dejected grunt, and slice off a new spiral of brown skin with her knife. For supper they had buckwheat groats with margarine instead of butter. Irina came to table holding a kitten from which she was inseparable and greeted Martin with a joyous and dreadful laugh. Both mothers had aged during the past year and had grown to resemble each other even more. Only Zilanov was still his old self, and cut into the bread as mightily as ever.
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