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When he returned for the winter to Switzerland, Martin looked forward to an entertaining correspondence, but Sonia made no mention of Zoorland in her infrequent letters. In one of them, however, she asked him to give her father’s regards to Gruzinov. It turned out that Gruzinov was staying at the Majestic, the hotel that had had such an odd attraction for Martin. But when he skied down to it, he found that Gruzinov had left and would be away for some time. He transmitted Zilanov’s regards to Gruzinov’s wife, a young-looking, brightly dressed lady in her forties, with blue-black hair and a cautious smile that attempted to conceal protruding front teeth always smeared with lipstick. Martin had never seen such exquisite hands as hers. They were small and soft, and adorned with glowing rings. But though everybody considered her attractive, and admired her grace and melodious, caressive voice, Martin’s senses remained unstirred; in fact it irked him to think that, maybe, she was trying to charm him. His suspicions were unfounded. Mrs. Gruzinov was as indifferent to him as to the tall big-nosed Englishman with gray bristly hair on his narrow head and a striped scarf around his neck who took her sleigh-riding.
“My husband won’t be back before July,” she said, and began questioning Martin about the Zilanovs. “Yes, yes. I do pity her mother” (Martin had mentioned Irina). “You know, don’t you, how it all started?” Martin knew. During the civil war, in Southern Russia, Irina, then a quiet, plump, normal though melancholy girl of fourteen, was on a train with her mother: they had had to be content with a bench in a freight car crammed with all sorts of riffraff, and during the long journey two rowdies, ignoring the protests of some of their pals, palpated, pinched, and tickled the child, saying monstrous obscenities to her. Mrs. Pavlov, wearing the smile of helpless horror, and doing her best to protect her, kept repeating, “Never mind, Irochka, never mind—oh please leave the child alone, you should be ashamed of yourselves—never mind, Irochka——” then, on the next train, nearer to Moscow, with similar cries and mutterings, she again cradled her daughter’s head when other roughs, deserters or the like, ejected her corpulent husband by squeezing him through the window with the train going full speed. Yes, he was very fat, and he laughed hysterically, having got stuck halfway through, but finally, with a unanimous heave-ho they succeeded, he disappeared from sight, and there only remained the blind snow driving past the empty window. Miraculously he rejoined his family at some little railway station buried in snow; and, miraculously, too, Irina survived a severe typhoid infection; but she lost the power of speech, and it was only a year later in London that she learned to produce mooing sounds with different intonations and to pronounce “ma-ma” with tolerable clarity.
Martin, who somehow had never paid much attention to Irina, having soon become used to her mental deficiency, now experienced a strange shock as Mrs. Gruzinov added, “That’s how they have in their home a permanent living symbol.” The night of Zoorland seemed to him even darker, its wildwood deeper, and Martin already knew that nothing and nobody could prevent him from penetrating, as a free pilgrim, into those woods, where plump children are tortured in the dark, and a smell of burning and of putrefaction permeates the air. When he returned in the spring to Berlin and to Sonia, he could have almost believed (so crowded with adventures had been his winter-night fantasies) that he had already concluded that solitary and courageous expedition, and now was going to talk and talk about his adventures. As he entered her room, he said (being anxious to express it before the familiar frustrating effect of her lusterless eyes had reasserted itself): “Like this, like this, I shall return some day, and then, ah, then——” “There’ll never be anything,” she exclaimed in the tones of Pushkin’s Naïna (“Hero, I still do not love thee!”). She was even paler than usual, her office work was very fatiguing; at home she wore an old black velvet dress with a narrow leather belt around the hips and backless slippers with frayed pompons. Often after supper she would put on her raincoat and leave, and Martin, after strolling aimlessly from room to room for a time, would leave too and walk slowly to the streetcar stop, hands deep in trouser pockets; at the opposite end of Berlin he would whistle tenderly under the window of a cabaret dancer whom he had met at the tennis club. She flitted out onto the balcony, froze for an instant at its parapet, disappeared, flitted out again and tossed him the house key wrapped in paper. In her bedroom Martin drank green crème de menthe and kissed her naked golden-brown back, and, tossing her head, she would tightly contract her shoulder blades. He liked to watch her as she rapidly paced the room setting close together her muscular suntanned legs and furiously reviling always the same theatrical agent; he liked her bizarre little face with its orange-tinted incarnadine, unnaturally thin eyebrows, and smoothly brushed-back hair; and he vainly tried not to think of Sonia. One night in May he emitted his soft whistle with a special trill, but instead of his mistress, an elderly man in braces came out onto the balcony and Martin sighed and walked away. He went back by tram to the Zilanovs’ street and started to walk back and forth between two lamps. Sonia returned past midnight, alone, and while she rummaged in her handbag in search of her keys, Martin approached and asked timidly where she had been. “Won’t you ever leave me alone?” cried Sonia and without waiting for an answer turned her key with a double crunch, and the heavy door swung open, stopped for a moment, banged shut. Then came a time when Martin began to imagine that not only Sonia, but all their common acquaintances, were avoiding him, that he was unwanted, that no one cared for him. He dropped in on Bubnov, and the latter stared at him in an odd way, excused himself, and continued to write. At last—feeling that after a little more of this he would turn into Sonia’s shadow and to the end of his life continue to haunt Berlin’s sidewalks, wasting on a futile passion the important and solemn thing that was ripening in him—Martin decided to have done with Berlin in order to think over in purifying solitude the plan of the expedition. In mid-May 1924, with the ticket for Strasbourg already in his wallet, he went to take leave of Sonia, and, of course, did not find her at home. Amidst the twilight of the room, all in white, sat Irina, seeming to float in the dusk like a ghostly turtle. She did not take her eye off him. He wrote on an envelope, “Polar night decreed in Zoorland,” put it on the pillow in Sonia’s room, got into the waiting taxicab, and, wearing neither overcoat nor hat, with only one bag, left for the station.
36
As soon as the train began to move, Martin revived, regained his gaiety, began to enjoy the excitement of traveling—something that he considered to be a kind of indispensable training. When he transferred to a French train going south by way of Lyon, it seemed to him that he was definitely free of Sonia’s nebulous spells. Beyond Lyon, the southern night gradually spread overhead; the pale rectangles of the reflected coach windows sped along the black bank; in the dirty, insufferably stuffy second-class compartment, Martin’s only companion was a middle-aged Frenchman. The man discarded his coat and in one downward run of his fingers undid all the buttons of his waistcoat; pulled off his cuffs as if screwing off his wrists, and carefully placed the two starched cylinders in the baggage net. He perched on the edge of the seat and swaying—the train was going fast—with lifted chin, he unfastened his collar and tie; and since the tie was of the ready-made variety that unhooked in the back, one again had the impression that here was a man taking himself apart and about to remove his head. The front skin of his neck was as flabby as a turkey’s; he moved his head right and left with relief, then bent over and, grunting, changed from boots to bedroom slippers. With his shirt opened on his curly chest he now looked like a hearty enough fellow who had had one too many: for those fellow travelers in a night coach, with their shiny pale faces and glazed eyes, always appear to be drunk with the carriage’s swaying and heat. From a hamper he produced a bottle of red wine and a large orange; first he took a swallow from the bottle, smacked his lips, forcefully pressed home the squeaking cork, then began to strip the orange with his thumb after biting open the skin on its pate. At this moment his
eyes met those of Martin who had just put down his Tauchnitz on his knee in preparation for a yawn, and the Frenchman spoke. “We’re already in Provence,” he said jovially, one shaggy eyebrow pointing toward the window, in whose mirror-black glass his dim double was peeling an orange too.
“Oui, on sent le sud,” answered Martin.
“You an Englishman?” queried the other tearing in two his peeled gray-tufted orange.
“Correct,” answered Martin. “How did you guess?”
The Frenchman, chewing juicily, shrugged one shoulder: “It was not very hard,” he said, swallowed, and, after a look of inspection, pointed a hairy finger at the Tauchnitz. Martin smiled indulgently. “And I’m from Lyon,” the Frenchman continued. “I’m in the wine business. I have to travel a lot but I like to be moving about. One gets to see new places, new people—the world, quoi. I have a wife and a small daughter,” he added, wiping with a bit of newspaper the tips of his spread-out fingers. Then, contemplating Martin again, his battered bag and wrinkled trousers, and concluding that a British milord would hardly be traveling second class, he observed with an anticipatory nod: “You’re a traveler?” Martin understood that this was a mere abbreviation for “commercial traveler.”
“Yes, I am indeed a traveler,” he answered, diligently imitating a British accent, “but in a wider sense of the word. I am traveling very far.”
“But you are in the commerce?”
Martin shook his head.
“Then you’re doing it for pleasure?”
“If you like,” said Martin.
The Frenchman ruminated in silence; presently he asked, “At the moment, you’re going to Marseille, aren’t you?”
“Yes, probably to Marseille. Not all my preparations are completed, yet.”
The Frenchman nodded but was visibly puzzled.
“In such cases,” Martin went on, “preparations must be made with the greatest care. I spent close to a year in Berlin where I had hoped to obtain some essential information, and you can’t imagine——”
“My nephew is an engineer,” the Frenchman hopefully interposed.
“Oh no, I am not concerned with technology, that was not why I visited Germany. But, as I was saying: You can’t imagine how difficult it is to ferret out that sort of information. The fact is I’m planning to explore a certain remote, almost inaccessible region. It has been reached by a few adventurers, but how to find them, how to make them talk? What do I have? Only a map,” and Martin pointed to his valise, which indeed contained, besides his silk shirts and collapsible tub, a map on a scale of a vershok to a verst, acquired in Berlin at the former Military Headquarters. There followed a silence. The train clattered and swayed.
“I always affirm,” the Frenchman said, “that our colonies have a great future. Naturally, yours do too, and you have so many of them. One of my friends spent ten years in the tropics and he says he would gladly go back. He told me once how he saw monkeys using a fallen tree trunk to cross a river, each holding the tail of the one in front—it was devilishly drôle—holding tails! holding tails!”
“Colonies are something else again,” said Martin. “I’m not planning to go to our colonies. My trail will take me through perilous places, and—who knows—I may not be able to return.”
“Is that a scientific expedition or something?” asked the Frenchman squashing a yawn with his back teeth.
“Partly. But—how shall I put it?—science, knowledge—all that is not the main point. The main point, the main purpose is——No, I really don’t know how to explain.”
“I know, I know,” said the Frenchman wearily. “You, les Anglais, are fond of wagers, of records” (his “records” sounded like a drowsy growl). “Who wants a bare rock in the sky? Or—good Lord, how sleepy one gets on a train!—or icebergs or whatever one calls them—or, indeed, the North Pole? Or those marshes where one perishes from malaria?”
“Yes, you may have put your finger on it. And yet even that, even le sport, is not all. There are besides—how shall I say?—glory, love, tenderness for the soil, a thousand rather mysterious feelings.”
The Frenchman gaped and then, moving forward, lightly slapped Martin on the knee. “One is mocking me, eh?” he commented good-naturedly. “Oh no, not at all!” “Come,” he said leaning back in his corner. “You are too young to roam the Saharas. With your permission, I’ll now put out the light and take a nap.”
37
Darkness. Almost at once the Frenchman began to snore. “Yes, he did believe I was English. Ong sahng le soude. Like this I shall travel north, exactly like this, in a coach that one cannot stop—and after that, after that——” He began to follow a forest path, the path unwound, kept unwinding, but sleep did not come to meet him. Martin opened his eyes. Good idea to lower the window. A mild night flooded his face and straining his eyes Martin leaned out, but invisible dust flew into his eyes, speed blinded him; he drew back his head. A cough resounded in the darkened compartment. “No, no. Be so kind,” said a cross voice. “I have no desire to sleep under the stars. Close it, close it.” “Close it yourself,” said Martin. He stepped out into the lighted corridor and walked past the compartments where one could guess the jumbled presence of slumbering, helpless, half-undressed bodies, wheezes and sighs, mouths opened fish-fashion, a sinking head jerking up again, a soft foot right next to a stranger’s nose. Making his way from one vestibule to another across the grind of connecting plates, Martin passed through two third-class coaches. The sliding doors of some of the compartments stood open; in one of them gray-blue soldiers were noisily playing cards. Further on, in the corridor of a sleeping car, Martin stopped at a half-lowered window, and recalled, with exceptional clarity, his childhood journey through Southern France: that strapontin seat by the window, that cloth loop which permitted him to drive the train, that lovely melody in three languages—especially: pericoloso. He reflected what a strange, strange life had fallen to his lot, it seemed as if he had never left a fast train, had merely wandered from car to car—and one was occupied by young Englishmen, among whom was Darwin in the act of solemly taking hold of the emergency cord; in the other were Alla and her husband; or else the Crimean crowd; or snoring Uncle Henry; or the Zilanovs, her father with his eternal newspaper, and Sonia, her velvet-dark eyes staring through the window. “And then I’ll continue on foot, on foot,” muttered Martin excitedly—a forest, a winding path—what huge trees! Here, in this sleeping car, his childhood must have traveled, must have shivered, as it undid the button of the leathern blind; and if one followed the blue corridor a little farther, one would get to the dining car where his parents had supper, and there would be on the table the same mock-up of a chocolate bar in a violet wrapping, and over the door a helical ventilator would shimmer in a garden of ads. At that moment, in response to his recollections, Martin saw through the window what he had seen as a child—a necklace of lights, far away, among dark hills. Someone seemed to pour them from one hand into the other, and pocket them. While he looked, the train began to slow down, and Martin told himself that if it stopped, he would get off and go in search of those lights. A station platform drifted into sight, then the moonlike disk of a clock, and the train came to a halt exhaling a sigh. Martin dashed back to his coach, twice burst into the snoring dark of a wrong compartment, found the right one, snapped on the light, and the Frenchman half-rose from his seat rubbing his eyes with his fists. Martin jerked down his valise, and snatched up his Tauchnitz. In his haste he failed to notice that the train had begun to move again, and therefore very nearly fell when he jumped down onto the gliding platform. A long row of windows passed by, and were gone. Nothing remained except empty rails with the glitter of coal dust between them.
Still panting, Martin traversed the platform. A porter who was pushing a luggage cart with a big box labeled “Fragile” said to him gaily, with the metallic accent peculiar to Provence: “You woke up at the right moment, Monsieur.” “Tell me,” Martin inquired, “what’s in that box?” The
porter looked at it as if he had only just noticed its presence, and read out the address: “Museum of Natural Science.” “Ah yes, a collection of insects, no doubt,” said Martin, and walked toward the little group of tables at the entrance of the dimly lit buffet.
The air was velvety and warm; around a milky white arc light swirled pale midges and one ample dark moth with hoary margins. A six-foot poster adorned the wall: it was an attempt on the part of the War Department to picture for the benefit of young men the allurements of military service: in the foreground, a valiant French soldier; in the back, a date palm, a dromedary, and a burnoosed Arab; and in the corner, two opulent forms in charshafs.
The platform was deserted. A little way down stood some cages with sleeping hens. On the farther side of the rails one could make out a tangle of black bushes. The air smelled of coal, juniper, and urine. A dusky old woman looked out of the buvette, and Martin asked for an apéritif whose delightful name he had seen advertised. A workman in blue sat down at the next table and fell asleep with his head on his arm.
“There is something I would like to know,” said Martin to the woman. “Just before the train stopped, I saw lights in the distance.” “Where? Was it there?” she asked pointing in the direction from which the train had arrived. Martin nodded. “That could only have been Molignac,” she said. “Yes, Molignac. A small village.” Martin paid and walked with his bag toward the exit. A dark square, plane trees, a row of ghostly houses and a narrow street. He had already turned into it when he realized he had forgotten to look at the station sign, and now did not know the name of the town where he chanced to be. It thrilled him pleasantly. Who knows—perhaps, by some caprice of space, he was already beyond the Zoorland border, in the uncertain night, and presently would be challenged.
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