Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  How many times had he sworn to himself that he would break with her tomorrow and had had no trouble in concocting the appropriate things to say, only to fail utterly to visualize that final moment when he would press her hand and leave the room. It was that action — turning round, walking out — which seemed so unthinkable. He belonged to the sort of people who can get whatever they want, achieve, surpass; but he was quite incapable of renunciation or flight — which are, after all, one and the same thing. He was held back by a sense of honor and a sense of pity which blunted the will of a man who at other times was capable of any kind of creative enterprise, any exertion, and who would set about a task eagerly and willingly, cheerfully intent on overcoming everything and winning all.

  He no more knew what kind of external stimulus would give him the strength to break off his three-month-old liaison with Lyudmila than he knew what was needed to get him up from his chair. Only for a very short time had he been genuinely in love — in that state of mind in which Lyudmila had seemed wreathed in a seductive mist, a state of questing, exalted, almost unearthly emotion, as when music plays at the very moment when one is doing something quite ordinary, such as walking from a table to pay at the bar, and gives an inward dancelike quality to one’s simple movement, transforming it into a significant and immortal gesture.

  That music had stopped at the moment one night when on the jolting floor of a dark taxi, he had possessed Lyudmila, and at once it had all become utterly banal — the woman straightening her hat that had slipped down onto the back of her neck, the lights flickering past the window, the driver’s back towering like a black mountain behind the glass partition.

  Now he was obliged to pay for that night with laborious deceit, to continue that night forever, and feebly, spinelessly yield to its creeping shadow that now filled every corner of the room, turning the furniture into clouds. He fell into a vague doze, his forehead propped on the palm of his hand and his legs stretched out stiffly under the table.

  Later in the cinema it was crowded and hot. For a long time, colored advertisements for grand pianos, dresses, perfumes flocked silently across the screen. At last the orchestra struck up and the drama began.

  Lyudmila was unusually cheerful. She had invited Klara to come too because she sensed very well that Klara was attracted to Ganin and she wanted to give pleasure to Klara, and to herself, by flaunting her affair and her ability to conceal it. Klara for her part agreed to come because she knew that Ganin was planning to depart on Saturday; also she was surprised that Lyudmila seemed not to know this — or else she purposely said nothing about it and was going to leave with him.

  Sitting between them, Ganin was irritated because Lyudmila, like most women of her type, talked throughout the film about other things, bending across Ganin’s knees toward her friend, every time dousing him in the chilling, unpleasantly familiar smell of her perfume. It was made worse by the fact that the film was thrilling and excellently done.

  ‘Listen, Lyudmila Borisovna,’ said Ganin, unable to restrain himself any longer, ‘do stop whispering. The German behind me is starting to get annoyed.’

  She gave him a quick glance in the darkness, leaned back and looked at the bright screen.

  ‘I don’t understand a thing. It’s pure rubbish.’

  ‘No wonder you can’t understand it,’ said Ganin, ‘when you spend all the time whispering.’

  On the screen moved luminous, bluish-gray shapes. A prima donna, who had once in her life committed an involuntary murder, suddenly remembered it while playing the role of a murderess in opera. Rolling her improbably large eyes, she collapsed supine onto the stage. The auditorium swam slowly into view, the public applauded, the boxes and stalls rose in an ecstasy of approval. Suddenly Ganin sensed that he was watching something vaguely yet horribly familiar. He recalled with alarm the roughly carpentered rows of seats, the chairs and parapets of the boxes painted a sinister violet, the lazy workmen walking easily and nonchalantly like blue-clad angels from plank to plank high up above, or aiming the blinding muzzles of klieg lights at a whole army of Russians herded together onto the huge set and acting in total ignorance of what the film was about. He remembered young men in threadbare but marvelously tailored clothes, women’s faces smeared with mauve and yellow make-up, and those innocent exiles, old men and plain girls who were banished far to the rear simply to fill in the background. On the screen that cold barn was now transformed into a comfortable auditorium, sacking became velvet, and a mob of paupers a theatre audience. Straining his eyes, with a deep shudder of shame, he recognized himself among all those people clapping to order, and remembered how they had all had to look ahead at an imaginary stage where instead of a prima donna a fat, red-haired, coatless man was standing on a platform between floodlights and yelling himself to insanity through a megaphone.

  Ganin’s doppelgänger also stood and clapped, over there, alongside the very striking-looking man with the black beard and the ribbon across his chest. Because of that beard and his starched shirt he had always landed in the front row; in the intervals he munched a sandwich and then, after the take, would put on a wretched old coat over his evening dress and return home to a distant part of Berlin, where he worked as a compositor in a printing plant.

  And at the present moment Ganin felt not only shame but also a sense of the fleeting evanescence of human life. There on the screen his haggard image, his sharp uplifted face and clapping hands merged into the gray kaleidoscope of other figures; a moment later, swinging like a ship, the auditorium vanished and now the scene showed an aging, world-famous actress giving a very skillful representation of a dead young woman. ‘We know not what we do,’ Ganin thought with repulsion, unable to watch the film any longer.

  Lyudmila was whispering to Klara again — something about a dressmaker and some stuff for a dress. The drama came to an end and Ganin felt mortally depressed. A few moments later, as they were pushing their way toward the exit Lyudmila pressed close to him and whispered, ‘I’ll ring you at two tomorrow, sweetie.’

  Ganin and Klara saw her home and then set off together back to their pension. Ganin was silent and Klara tried painfully to find a topic. ‘Are you going to leave us on Saturday?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I really don’t,’ Ganin replied gloomily.

  As he walked he thought how his shade would wander from city to city, from screen to screen, how he would never know what sort of people would see it or how long it would roam round the world. And when he went to bed and listened to the trains passing through that cheerless house in which lived seven Russian lost shades, the whole of life seemed like a piece of film-making where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.

  Ganin could not sleep. A nervous tingling ran through his legs and the pillow tormented his head. Then in the middle of the night his neighbor Alfyorov started to hum a tune. Through the thin wall he could hear him shuffling across the floor, first near then moving away, while Ganin lay there in anger. Whenever a train rattled past, Alfyorov’s voice blended with the noise, only to surface again — tum-ti-tumn, tum-ti, tum-ti-tum.

  Ganin could bear it no longer. He pulled on his trousers, went out into the passage and thumped on the door of room i with his fist. In his wanderings Alfyorov happened at that moment to be right beside the door, and he flung it open so unexpectedly that Ganin gave a start of surprise.

  ‘Please come in, Lev Glebovich.’

  He was wearing shirt and underpants, his blond beard was slightly ruffled — presumably from puffing away at his songs — and his pale blue eyes were alive with happiness.

  ‘You’re singing,’ said Ganin, frowning, ‘and it’s keeping me awake.’

  ‘Come in for heaven’s sake, don’t hang about there in the doorway,’ fussed Aleksey Ivanovich, putting his arm round Ganin’s waist in a well-meant but clumsy gesture. ‘I’m so sorry if I annoyed you.’

  Ganin went reluctantly into the room. It contained very little, yet was
very untidy. Instead of standing at the desk (that oaken monster with the inkwell shaped like a large toad) one of the two kitchen chairs seemed to have wandered off in the direction of the washbasin but had stopped halfway there, having obviously stumbled over the turned-up edge of the green carpet. The other chair, which stood beside the bed and served as a bedside table, had disappeared under a black jacket whose collapse seemed as heavy and shapeless as if it had fallen from the top of Mount Ararat. Thin sheets of paper were scattered all over the wooden wilderness of the desk and over the bed. Ganin noticed from a casual glance that on these sheets were pencil drawings of wheels, squares, done without the least technical accuracy, simply scribbles to pass the time. Alfyorov himself, in his woollen underpants — which make any man, be he built like Adonis or elegant as Beau Brummel, look extraordinarily unattractive — had started pacing up and down again amidst the ruins of his room, occasionally flipping his fingernail against the green glass shade of the table lamp or the back of a chair.

  ‘I’m terribly glad you’ve dropped in at last,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t sleep either. Just think — my wife’s coming on Saturday. And tomorrow’s Tuesday already. Poor girl, I can just imagine what agony she’s been through in that accursed Russia of ours!’

  Ganin, who had been glumly trying to decipher a chess problem drawn on one of the pieces of paper lying around on the bed, suddenly looked up. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘She’s coming,’ Alfyorov replied with a bold flick of his nail.

  ‘No, not that. What did you call Russia?’

  ‘Accursed. It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know — the epithet struck me as curious.’

  ‘Now, Lev Glebovich’ — Alfyorov suddenly stopped in the middle of the room — ‘it’s time you stopped playing at being a Bolshevik. You might think it very amusing, but what you do is very wrong, believe me. It’s time we all admitted frankly that Russia is done for, that our “saintly” Russian peasantry has turned out to be nothing but gray scum — as might have been expected, by the way — and that our country is finished for good.’

  Ganin laughed. ‘Quite, quite, Aleksey Ivanovich.’

  Alfyorov wiped his gleaming face from top to bottom with his palm and suddenly smiled a wide, dreamy smile. ‘Why aren’t you married, old chap, eh?’

  ‘Never had the chance,’ Ganin replied. ‘Is it fun?’

  ‘Delightful. My wife is adorable. A brunette, you know, with such lively eyes. Still very young. We were married in Poltava in 1919, and in 1920 I had to emigrate. I’ve some photos in the desk drawer — I’ll show them to you.’ Crooking his fingers underneath it, he pulled open the wide drawer.

  ‘What were you in those days, Aleksey Ivanovich?’ Ganin inquired without curiosity.

  Alfyorov shook his head. ‘I don’t remember. How can one remember what one was in a past life — an oyster maybe, or a bird, let’s say, or perhaps a teacher of mathematics? In any case our old life in Russia seems like something that happened before time began, something metaphysical or whatever you call it — that’s not quite the word — yes, I know: metempsychosis.’

  Ganin looked at the photograph in the open drawer without much interest. It was the face of a tousled young woman with a merry, very toothy mouth. Alfyorov leaned over his shoulder. ‘No, that’s not my wife, that’s my sister. She died of typhus, in Kiev. She was a nice, jolly girl, very good at playing tag.’

  He produced another photograph.

  ‘And that’s Mary, my wife. Poor snapshot, but quite a good likeness all the same. And here’s another, taken in our garden. Mary’s the one sitting, in the white dress. I haven’t seen her for four years. But I don’t suppose she’s changed much. I really don’t know how I’ll survive till Saturday. Wait! Where are you going, Lev Glebovich? Do stay!’

  Ganin, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, was walking toward the door.

  ‘What’s the matter, Lev Glebovich? Did I say something that offended you?’

  The door slammed shut. Alfyorov was left standing alone in the middle of his room.

  ‘Really! How rude,’ he mumbled. ‘What’s bitten him?’

  3

  That night, as every night, a little old man in a black cape plodded along the curb down the long deserted avenue, poking the point of a gnarled stick into the asphalt as he looked for cigarette-ends — gold, cork or plain paper — and flaking cigar butts. Occasionally, braying like a stag, a motorcar would dash by or something would happen which no one walking in a city ever notices: a star, faster than thought and with less sound than a tear, would fall. Gaudier, gayer than the stars were the letters of fire which poured out one after another above a black roof, paraded in single file and vanished all at once in the darkness.

  ‘Can — it — be — possible,’ said the letters in a discreet neon whisper, then the night would sweep them away at a single velvet stroke. Again they would start to creep across the sky: ‘Can — it —’

  And darkness descended again. But the words insistently lit up once more and finally, instead of disappearing at once, they stayed alight for a whole five minutes, as had been arranged between the advertising agency and the manufacturer.

  But then who can tell what it really is that flickers up there in the dark above the houses — the luminous name of a product or the glow of human thought; a sign, a summons; a question hurled into the sky and suddenly getting a jewel-bright, enraptured answer?

  And in those streets, now as wide as shiny black seas, at that late hour when the last beer-hall has closed, and a native of Russia, abandoning sleep, hatless and coatless under an old mackintosh, walks in a clairvoyant trance; at that late hour down those wide streets passed worlds utterly alien to each other: no longer a reveler, a woman, or simply a passer-by, but each one a wholly isolated world, each a totality of marvels and evil. Five hackney droshkies stood on the avenue alongside the huge drumlike shape of a street pissoir: five sleepy, warm, gray worlds in coachman’s livery; and five other worlds on aching hooves, asleep and dreaming of nothing but oats streaming out of a sack with a soft crackly sound.

  It is at moments like this that everything grows fabulous, unfathomably profound, when life seems terrifying and death even worse. And then, as one swiftly strides through the night-time city, looking at the lights through one’s tears and searching in them for a glorious, dazzling recollection of past happiness — a woman’s face, resurgent after many years of humdrum oblivion — all of a sudden, in one’s mad progress, one is politely stopped by a foot passenger and asked how to get to such and such a street; asked in an ordinary voice, but a voice which one will never hear again.

  4

  Waking late on Tuesday morning, he felt some ache in his calves and, leaning his elbow on his pillow, he sighed once or twice, startled and amazed with the delight of it as he remembered what had happened that night.

  The morning was a gentle, smoky white. The windowpanes shook with a businesslike rumble.

  With a determined sweep he jumped out of bed and started shaving. Today this gave him a particular pleasure. People who shave grow a day younger every morning. Ganin felt that today he had become exactly nine years younger. Softened by flakes of lather, the bristles on his taut skin steadily crepitated as they fell to the little steel ploughshare of his safety razor. As he shaved Ganin moved his eyebrows and then, as he stood in the bathtub and doused his body in cold water from a jug, smiled with joy. He brushed his damp black hair, dressed quickly and went out.

  None of the other lodgers spent their mornings in the pension except for the dancers, who usually did not get up until lunchtime. Alfyorov was away to see a friend with whom he was starting up some business, Podtyagin had gone to the police station to try and obtain his exit visa, while Klara, already late for work, was waiting for a tramcar on the corner, clutching to her chest a paper bag of oranges.

  Very calmly Ganin climbed up to the second floor of a familiar house and pulled the bell-ring. Opening the door but with
out removing the chain, a maid peeped out and said that Fräulein Rubanski was still asleep.

  ‘I don’t care, I must see her,’ said Ganin, and, pushing his hand into the gap, he unlatched the chain himself.

  The maid, a pallid thickset girl, muttered indignantly, but Ganin elbowed her aside with the same firmness, marched into the semiobscurity of the corridor and knocked on a door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ came Lyudmila’s slightly hoarse morning voice.

  ‘It’s me. Open.’

  She pattered across the floor on bare feet, turned the key and, before looking at Ganin, ran to the bed and jumped back under the bedclothes. From the tip of her ear it was obvious that she was smiling, waiting for Ganin’s approach.

  But he stayed in the middle of the room and stood there for some time, clinking the small change in his mackintosh pockets.

  Lyudmila suddenly turned onto her back and, laughing, opened her thin, bare arms. Morning did not suit her; her face was pale and puffy and her yellow hair stood on end.

  ‘Well, come here,’ she pleaded and closed her eyes. Ganin stopped clinking his money.

  ‘Look, Lyudmila,’ he said quietly. She sat up, her eyes open wide.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  Ganin stared hard at her and replied, ‘Yes. It seems I’m in love with somebody else. I’ve come to say goodbye.’

  She blinked her sleep-clogged eyelashes and bit her lip.

  ‘That’s all, really,’ said Ganin. ‘I’m very sorry, but it can’t be helped. Let’s say goodbye now. I think it will be better like that.’