Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Lyudmila covered her face and fell back again face downward on the pillow. Her sky-blue quilt began slipping off sideways onto the fluffy white rug. Ganin picked it up and straightened it. Then he walked a couple of times back and forth across the room.

  ‘The maid didn’t want to let me in,’ he said.

  Lyudmila lay buried in the pillow as if dead.

  ‘She’s never been exactly welcoming,’ said Ganin.

  ‘It’s time to turn off the heating. It’s spring,’ he said a little while later. He walked from the door to the white full-length mirror, then put on his hat.

  Lyudmila still did not move. He stood for a little longer, looked at her in silence and then, making a faint sound as though to clear his throat, he left the room.

  Trying to tread quietly, he walked rapidly down the long passage, chose the wrong door and as he swung it open found himself in a bathroom, from which erupted a hairy arm and a leonine roar. He turned sharply around and after a further encounter with the dumpy maid, who was dusting a bronze bust in the hall, began to descend the low stone steps for the last time. The huge casement on the landing was wide open onto the back courtyard, and down in the yard an itinerant baritone was roaring a Russian Volga song in German.

  Listening to that voice, vibrant as springtime itself, and glancing at the colored design on the open windowpane — a bunch of cubic roses and a peacock’s fan — Ganin felt he was free.

  He walked slowly along the street, smoking as he went. The day had a milky chill about it; ragged white clouds rose up before him in the blue space between houses. He always thought of Russia whenever he saw fast-moving clouds, but now he needed no clouds to remind him; since last night he had thought of nothing else.

  The delightful private event which had occurred last night had caused the entire kaleidoscope of his life to shift and had brought back the past to overwhelm him.

  He sat down on a bench in a public garden and at once the gentle companion who had been following him, his gray vernal shadow, stretched out at his feet and began to talk.

  Now that Lyudmila had gone he was free to listen.

  Nine years ago. Summer of 1915, a country house, typhus. Recuperating from typhus was astonishingly pleasant. One lay as though on undulating air; one’s spleen still ached occasionally, it was true, and every morning a hospital nurse, brought specially from Petersburg, wiped one’s furry tongue — still sticky from sleep — with cotton wool soaked in port. The nurse was very short, with a soft bosom and small capable hands; she gave off a damp, cool, old-maidish smell. She loved to use folksy quips and the bits of Japanese which she remembered from the war of 1904. She had a peasant woman’s face the size of a clenched fist, pock-marked, with a tiny nose; not a single hair ever peeped out from under her headdress.

  One lay as though on air. To the left the bed was partitioned off from the doorway by a tawny cane screen with wavy curves. Close to him, in a corner to the right, stood the icon case: swarthy-faced images behind glass, wax candles, a coral crucifix. Of the two windows, the more distant one shone straight ahead, and the head of the bed seemed to be pushing itself from the wall while its foot aimed at that window with its brass knobs, each containing a bubble of sunlight; any moment it might be expected to take off, across the room, out into the deep July sky where puffy, bright clouds slanted upward. The second window, on the right-hand wall, gave on to a sloping pale-green roof: the bedroom was on the second floor and this was the roof of a single-story wing which contained the servants’ quarters and the kitchen. At night the windows were closed on the inside with whitewashed folding shutters.

  The door behind the screen led onto the staircase, while further along the same wall were a gleaming white stove and an old-fashioned washstand with a cistern and a beaklike tap; you pressed a brass pedal with your foot and a thin fountain squirted out of the tap. To the left of the front window stood a mahogany chest of drawers with very stiff drawers, to the right of it a small ottoman.

  The wallpaper was white with bluish roses. Sometimes, in semidelirium, one would fashion people’s profiles out of these roses or wander up and down with one’s eyes, trying not to touch a single flower or a single leaf on the way, finding gaps in the pattern, wriggling through, doubling back, landing in a blind alley and starting one’s journey through the luminous maze all over again. To the right of the bed between the icon case and the side window hung two pictures — a tortoiseshell cat lapping milk from a saucer, and a starling made of real starling’s feathers appliquéd above a drawing of a nesting box. Alongside, by the window frame, was fixed an oil lamp which had a knack of emitting a black tongue of soot. There were other pictures too: above the chest of drawers a lithograph of a barechested Neapolitan boy, and over the washbasin a pencil drawing of a horse’s head with distended nostrils swimming in water.

  All day long the bed kept gliding into the hot windy sky and when one sat up one saw the tops of the lime trees, sungilt from above, telephone wires on which swifts perched, and part of the wooden canopy over the red sandy drive where it led up to the front porch. Wonderful sounds came from outside — twittering, distant barking, a creaking pump.

  One lay and floated and thought how one would soon be getting up: flies played in a pool of sun; and from Mother’s lap by one’s bedside a ball of colored silk, as though alive, jumped down and gently rolled across the amber-yellow parquet.

  In this room, where Ganin had recuperated at sixteen, was conceived that happiness, the image of that girl he was to meet in real life a month later. Everything contributed to the creation of that image — the soft— tinted prints on the walls, the twittering outside the window, the brown face of Christ in the icon case, and even the washstand’s diminutive fountain. The burgeoning image gathered and absorbed all the sunny charm of that room, and without it, of course, it would never have grown. It was after all simply a boyish premonition, a delicious mist, but Ganin now felt that never had such a premonition been so completely fulfilled. All Tuesday he wandered from square to square, from café to café, his memories constantly flying ahead like the April clouds across the tender Berlin sky. People sitting in the cafés supposed that this man staring so fixedly ahead must have some deep grief; on the street he carelessly bumped into people and once a fast car braked hard and swore, having nearly hit him.

  He was a god, re-creating a world that had perished. Gradually he resurrected that world, to please the girl whom he did not dare to place in it until it was absolutely complete. But her image, her presence, the shadow of her memory demanded that in the end he must resurrect her too — and he intentionally thrust away her image, as he wanted to approach it gradually, step by step, just as he had done nine years before. Afraid of making a mistake, of losing his way in the bright labyrinth of memory, he re-created his past life watchfully, fondly, occasionally turning back for some forgotten piece of trivia, but never running ahead too fast. Wandering around Berlin on that Tuesday in spring, he recuperated all over again, felt what it was like to get out of bed for the first time, felt the weakness in his legs. He looked at himself in every mirror. His clothes seemed unusually clean, singularly ample, and slightly unfamiliar. He walked slowly down the wide avenue leading from the garden terrace into the depths of the park. Here and there the earth, empurpled by the shadows of leaves, broke into molehills that looked like heaps of black worms. He had put on white trousers and lilac socks, dreaming of meeting someone, not yet knowing who it would be.

  Reaching the end of the avenue, where a white bench gleamed amid the dark greenery of fir needles, he turned back, and now far ahead in a gap between the lindens could be seen the orange-red sand of the garden terrace and the glittering panes of the veranda.

  The nurse went back to Petersburg; leaning out of the carriage for a long while she waved her dumpy little arm and the wind worried her wimple. The house was cool, with spreads of sunlight here and there on the floor. Two weeks later he was already riding himself to exhaustion on his bicycle and playing R
ussian skittles in the evening with the son of the cowman. After another week the event he had been waiting for happened. And where is it all now?’ mused Ganin. ‘Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again — never. I once read about the “eternal return.” But what if this complicated game of patience never comes out a second time? Let me see — there’s something I don’t grasp — yes, this: surely it won’t all die when I do? Right now I’m alone in a foreign city. Drunk. My head’s buzzing from beer laced with cognac. I have tramped my fill. And if my heart bursts, right now, then my whole world bursts with it? Cannot grasp it.’

  He found himself again in the tiny public garden of the same square, but now the air had grown chilly, the pale sky had dimmed in a vesperal swoon.

  ‘Four days left: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And I might die any moment.’

  ‘Pull yourself together!’ he mumbled abruptly, knitting his dark brows. ‘Enough of that. Time to go home.’

  On walking upstairs to the landing of the pension, he met Alfyorov, who, hunched in his voluminous overcoat and pursing his lips with concentration, was inserting a key into the keyhole of the lift.

  ‘I’m going out to buy a newspaper, Lev Glebovich. Like to join me?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Ganin, and went on to his room.

  But as he grasped the door handle he stopped. A sudden temptation overcame him. He heard Alfyorov getting into the lift, heard the machine go down with its laborious dull din and heard the clang as it reached the bottom.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he thought, biting his lip. ‘Hell, I’ll risk it.’

  Fate willed it that five minutes later Klara knocked on Alfyorov’s door to ask him whether he had a postage stamp. The yellow light showing through the frosted glass upper panels of his door suggested that Alfyorov must be in his room.

  ‘Aleksey Ivanovich,’ began Klara, simultaneously knocking and opening the door slightly, ‘do you have —’

  She stopped short in amazement. Ganin was standing by the desk and hastily shutting the drawer. He looked round, teeth flashing, gave the drawer a push with his hip and straightened up.

  ‘Good God,’ Klara murmured, and backed out of the room.

  Ganin quickly strode after her, turning out the light and slamming the door as he went. Klara leaned against the wall in the semidarkness of the passage and looked at him with horror, pressing her chubby hands to her temples.

  ‘Good God,’ she repeated in the same low voice. ‘How could you —’

  With a slow rumble, panting after its exertions, the lift was rising again.

  ‘He’s coming back,’ whispered Ganin, with an air of mystery.

  ‘Oh, I won’t give you away,’ exclaimed Klara bitterly, her shining wet eyes fixed upon him. ‘But how could you? He’s no better off than you are, after all. No, it’s like a nightmare.’

  ‘Let’s go to your room,’ said Ganin with a smile. ‘I’ll explain if you like.’

  She detached herself from the wall and with head bowed led him to room April 5. There it was warm and smelled of good perfume; on the wall was a copy of Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead, and on the table a framed photograph — Lyudmila’s face, very much retouched.

  ‘We’ve quarreled.’ Ganin nodded toward the photograph. ‘Don’t ask me in if she comes to see you. It’s all over.’ Klara sat down with her feet up on a couch, wrapping herself in a black shawl.

  ‘This is all nonsense, Klara,’ he continued, sitting down beside her and leaning on his outstretched arm. ‘Surely you don’t really think I was stealing money, do you? Although of course I wouldn’t like Alfyorov to find out that I was poking about in his desk.’

  ‘But what were you doing? What else could it be?’ Klara whispered. ‘I didn’t expect this of you, Lev Glebovich.’

  ‘What a funny girl you are,’ said Ganin. He noticed that her big, kind, somewhat prominent eyes were just a little over-bright, that her shoulders were rising and falling rather too excitedly under her black shawl.

  ‘Come, come.’ He smiled. ‘All right then, let’s suppose I’m a thief, a burglar. But why should it upset you so much?’

  ‘Please go,’ said Klara softly, turning her head away. He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

  When the door had closed behind him, Klara burst into tears and wept for a long time, the big shiny tears welling up rhythmically between her eyelashes and trickling in long drops down her cheeks, aglow with sobbing.

  ‘Poor dear,’ she muttered. ‘What life has brought him to! And what can I say to him?’

  There came a light tap on the wall from the dancers’ room. Klara blew her nose hard and listened. The tap was repeated, velvety-soft and feminine: it was obviously Kolin tapping. Then there was a burst of laughter, someone exclaimed, ‘Alec, oh Alec, stop it,’ and two voices started a muffled, intimate conversation.

  Klara thought how tomorrow, as always, she would have to go to work and hammer the keys until six o’clock, watching the mauve-colored line of type as it poured onto the page with a dry, staccato rattle; or how, if there was nothing to do, she would read, propping her borrowed and shamefully tattered book on her black Remington. She made herself some tea, listlessly ate her supper, then undressed, languidly and very slowly. Lying in bed she heard voices in Podtyagin’s room. She heard somebody come in and go out, then Ganin’s voice saying something unexpectedly loudly and Podtyagin answering in a low, depressed voice. She remembered that the old man had gone again today to see about his passport, that he suffered badly from heart trouble, that life was passing: on Friday she would be twenty-six. On and on went the voices — and it seemed to Klara she dwelt in a house of glass that was on the move, swaying and floating. The noise of the trains, although particularly audible on the other side of the corridor, could also be heard in her room, and her bed seemed to rise and sway. For a moment she visualized Ganin’s back as he leaned over the desk and looked around over his shoulder, baring his bright teeth. Then she fell asleep and had a nonsensical dream: she seemed to be sitting in a tramcar next to an old woman extraordinarily like her Lodz aunt, who was talking rapidly in German; then it gradually turned out that it was not her aunt at all but the cheerful marketwoman from whom Klara bought oranges on her way to work.

  5

  That evening Anton Sergeyevich had a visitor. He was an old gentleman with a sandy moustache clipped in the English fashion, very dependable-looking, very dapper in his frock coat and striped trousers. Podtyagin was regaling him with Maggi’s bouillon when Ganin entered. The air was tinged blue with cigarette smoke.

  ‘Mr Ganin — Mr Kunitsyn.’ Anton Sergeyevich, breathing heavily, his pince-nez twinkling, gently pushed Ganin into an armchair.

  ‘This, Lev Glebovich, is my old schoolfellow who once wrote cribs for me.’

  Kunitsyn grinned. ‘That’s so,’ he said in a deep, rounded voice. ‘But tell me, my dear Anton Sergeyevich, what time is it?’

  ‘Still early, time to sit a while yet.’

  Kunitsyn stood up, pulling down his waistcoat. ‘I can’t, my wife’s expecting me.’

  ‘In that case I have no right to detain you.’ Anton Sergeyevich spread his hands and glanced sidelong through his pince-nez at his visitor. ‘Please give my regards to your wife. I haven’t the pleasure of knowing her, but give her my regards all the same.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kunitsyn. ‘Delighted. Goodbye. I believe I left my coat in the hall.’

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ said Podtyagin. ‘Please excuse me, Lev Glebovich, I’ll be back in a moment.’

  Alone, Ganin settled more comfortably in the old green armchair and smiled reflectively. He had called on the old poet b
ecause he was probably the only person who might understand his disturbed state. He wanted to tell him about many things — about sunsets over a highroad in Russia, about birch groves. He was, after all, that same Podtyagin whose verses were to be found beneath little vignettes in old bound volumes of magazines like The World Illustrated and The Pictorial Review.

  Anton Sergeyevich returned, gloomily shaking his head. ‘He insulted me,’ he said, sitting down at the table and drumming on it with his fingers. ‘Oh, how he insulted me.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Ganin.

  Anton Sergeyevich took off his pince-nez and polished it with the edge of the tablecloth.

  ‘He despises me, that’s what’s the matter. Do you know what he said to me just now? He gave me one of his cold, sarcastic little smiles and he said, “You’ve been spending your time scribbling poetry and I haven’t read a word of it. If I had read it I would have wasted the time when I could have been working.” That’s what he said to me, Lev Glebovich; I ask you — is that an intelligent thing to say?’

  ‘What is he?’ asked Ganin.

  ‘Deuce knows. He makes money. Ah, well. You see, he’s a person who —’

  ‘But what’s there to feel insulted about? He has one talent, you have another. Anyway, I’ll bet you despise him too.’

  ‘But Lev Glebovich,’ Podtyagin fretted, ‘am I not right to despise him? It’s not that which is so awful — the awful thing is that a man like him dares to offer me money.’

  He opened his clenched fist and threw a crumpled banknote onto the table.

  ‘And the awful thing is that I took it. Look and admire — twenty marks, God damn it.’

  The old man seemed to quiver all over, his mouth was opening and shutting, the little gray beard under his lower lip twitching, his fat fingers drumming on the table. Then he sighed with a painful wheezing sound and shook his head.