Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Podtyagin had been unsuccessful again today, the old man really had no luck. The French had allowed him in, but the Germans for some reason would not let him out. Meanwhile he only had just enough money left to make the journey, and if that foul-up lasted for another week he would have to spend his money on subsistence and then it would not be enough to get him to Paris. As he consumed his soup he described with a cheerless and ponderous jocularity how he had been chased from one department to another, how he had been unable to explain what he wanted, and how finally a tired and exasperated official had bawled him out.

  Ganin looked up and said, ‘Let me come with you tomorrow, Anton Sergeyevich. I have plenty of time to spare. I’ll help you to talk to them.’

  His German was, indeed, good.

  ‘Why, thank you,’ Podtyagin replied, and he again noticed, as he had the day before, the unusual brightness of Ganin’s expression. ‘It’s enough to make one weep, you know. I spent two hours standing in a queue again and came back empty-handed. Thanks, Lyovushka.’

  ‘I expect my wife will be having trouble too,’ Alfyorov began. Something then happened to Ganin which had never happened to him before. He felt an intolerable blush slowly suffusing his face and tickling his forehead, as if he had drunk too much vinegar. Coming to lunch it had not occurred to him that these people, the ghosts of his dream-life in exile, would talk about his real life — about Mary. With horror and shame he recalled that in his ignorance the day before yesterday at lunch he had laughed with the others at Alfyorov’s wife. And somebody might laugh again today.

  ‘She’s very efficient, though,’ Alfyorov was saying meanwhile. ‘She can stand up for herself. She knows how to look after herself, does my little wife.’

  Kolin and Gornotsvetov exchanged looks and giggled. Silently, sullenly, Ganin rolled a bread-ball. He almost got up and went out, but mastered himself. Raising his head he made himself look at Alfyorov, and having looked, was amazed how Mary could have married that person with the sparse little beard and shiny, plump nose. And the thought that he was sitting beside the man who had caressed Mary, who knew the feel of her lips, her jokes, her laugh, her movements, and who was now waiting for her — the thought was terrible, but with it he also felt a certain thrilling pride as he recalled that it had been to him and not her husband that Mary had first surrendered her profound, unique fragrance.

  After lunch he went for a walk, then climbed up onto the top deck of a bus. Down below the streets poured by, little black figures dashed around on the shiny sunlit asphalt, the bus swayed and thundered — and Ganin felt that this alien city passing before him was nothing but a moving picture. As he returned home he saw Podtyagin knocking on Klara’s door and Podtyagin too seemed to him a ghost, something extraneous and irrelevant.

  ‘Our friend is in love with someone again.’ Anton Sergeyevich nodded toward the door as he drank tea with Klara. ‘It’s not you, is it?’

  Klara turned away; her ample bust rose and fell. She could not believe it to be true; it frightened her, she was frightened by the Ganin who rifled other people’s desks, but she was nevertheless pleased by Podtyagin’s question.

  ‘He’s not in love with you, is he, Klarochka?’ he repeated, blowing on his tea and giving her a sidelong glance over his pince-nez.

  ‘He broke it off with Lyudmila yesterday,’ Klara said suddenly, feeling that she could reveal the secret to Podtyagin.

  ‘I thought so,’ the old man nodded, sipping with relish. ‘He wouldn’t be looking so radiant for nothing. Away with the old, on with the new. Did you hear what he suggested to me today? He’s coming with me to the police tomorrow.’

  ‘I shall be seeing her this evening,’ said Klara reflectively. ‘Poor girl. She sounded deathly on the telephone.’

  Podtyagin sighed. ‘Ah, youth. That girl will get over it. No harm done. It’s all for the best. As for me, Klarochka, I shall die soon.’

  ‘Good heavens, Anton Sergeyevich! What nonsense!’

  ‘No, it’s not nonsense. I had another attack last night. At one moment my heart was in my mouth, at the next moment it was under the bed.’

  ‘You poor man,’ said Klara anxiously. ‘You should see a doctor.’

  Podtyagin smiled. ‘I was joking. On the contrary, I’ve felt far better lately. And there was no attack. I invented it on the spur of the moment just to see your great eyes open still wider. If we were in Russia, Klarochka, some country doctor or a well-to-do architect would be courting you. Tell me — do you love Russia?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Quite so. We should love Russia. Without the love of us émigrés, Russia is finished. None of the people there love her.’

  ‘I’m already twenty-six,’ said Klara, ‘I type all morning, and five times a week I work until six. I get very tired. I’m quite alone in Berlin. What do you think, Anton Sergeyevich — will it go on like this for long?’

  ‘I don’t know, my dear,’ sighed Podtyagin. ‘I’d tell you if I knew, but I don’t. I worked too, I started up a magazine here. And now I’ve got nothing to show for it. I only hope to God I can get to Paris. Life’s more free and easy there. What do you think — will I get there?’

  ‘Why, of course you will, Anton Sergeyevich. Everything will be arranged tomorrow.’

  ‘Life’s freer — and cheaper, apparently,’ said Podtyagin, spooning up an unmelted scrap of sugar and thinking that there was something Russian about that little porous lump, something rather like the melting snow in springtime.

  8

  In the sense of routine Ganin’s day became emptier after his break with Lyudmila, but on the other hand he did not feel bored from having nothing to do. He was so absorbed with his memories that he was unaware of time. His shadow lodged in Frau Dorn’s pension, while he himself was in Russia, reliving his memories as though they were reality. Time for him had become the progress of recollection, which unfolded gradually. And although his affair with Mary in those far-off days had lasted not just for three days, not for a week but for much longer, he did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time in which he relived the past, since his memory did not take account of every moment and skipped over the blank unmemorable stretches, only illuminating those connected with Mary. Thus no discrepancy existed between the course of life past and life present.

  It seemed as though his past, in that perfect form it had reached, ran now like a regular pattern through his everyday life in Berlin. Whatever Ganin did at present, that other life comforted him unceasingly.

  It was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real, much more intense than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin. It was a marvelous romance that developed with genuine, tender care.

  By the second week of August in northern Russia there is already a touch of autumn in the air. Every now and again a small yellow leaf falls from a birch tree; the broad fields, already harvested, have a bright autumnal emptiness. Along the forest’s edge, where an expanse of tall grass spared by the haymakers shows its sheen to the wind, torpid bumblebees sleep on the mauve cushions of scabious flowers. And one afternoon, in a pavilion of the park —

  Yes, the pavilion. It stood on rotting piles above a ravine, reached from either side by two sloping footbridges, slippery with alder aments and fir needles.

  In its small diamond-shaped window frames were panes of different-colored glass: if, say, you looked through a blue one the world seemed frozen in a lunar trance; through a yellow one, everything appeared extraordinarily gay, through a red one, the sky looked pink and the foliage as dark as burgundy. Some of the panes were broken, their jagged edges joined up by a spider’s web. Inside, the pavilion was whitewashed; vacationists who illegally wandered into the estate’s park from their dachas had scribbled in pencil on the walls and on the folding table.

  One day Mary and two of her rather plain girl friends wandered there too. He first overtook them on a path which ran alongside the river, and drove so close that her girl friends l
eaped aside with a shriek. He drove on round the park, cut through the middle and then from a distance through the leaves watched them go into the pavilion. He leaned his bicycle up against a tree and went in after them.

  ‘This is private property,’ he said in a low, hoarse voice. ‘There’s even a notice on the gate saying so.’

  She said nothing in reply, looking at him with her mischievous, slanting eyes. Pointing to one of the faint graffiti he inquired, ‘Did you do that?’

  It said: ‘On the third of July Mary, Lida and Nina sat out a thunderstorm in this pavilion.’

  All three of them burst out laughing and then he laughed too. He sat on the window table, swinging his legs, and noticed with annoyance that he had torn one of his black socks at the ankle. Suddenly, pointing at the pink hole in the silk, Mary said, ‘Look — the sun has come out.’

  They talked about thunderstorms, about the people living in the dachas, about his having had typhus, about the funny student at the military hospital and about the concert.

  She had adorable mobile eyebrows, a dark complexion with a covering of very fine, lustrous down which gave a specially warm tinge to her cheeks; her nostrils flared as she talked, emitting short laughs and sucking the sweetness from a grass stalk; her voice was rapid and burry, with sudden chest tones, and a dimple quivered at her open neck.

  Then toward evening he escorted her and her friends to the village and as they walked down a green, weed— grown forest path, at the spot where stood a lame bench, he told them with a very straight face, ‘Macaroni grows in Italy. When still small it’s called vermicelli. That means Mike’s worms in Italian.’

  He arranged to take them all boating next day; but she appeared without her companions. At the rickety jetty he unwound the clanking chain of the rowboat, a big heavy affair of mahogany, removed the tarpaulin, screwed in the rowlocks, pulled the oars out of a long box, inserted the rudder pintle into its steel socket.

  From some distance came the steady roar of the sluice gates at the water mill; one could distinguish the foamy folds of the falling water and the russet-gold sheen of pine logs that floated near.

  Mary sat at the rudder. He pushed off with a boat hook and slowly started to row along the park shore where dense alder shrubs cast reflections like black eye-spots upon the water and many dark-blue demoiselle dragonflies flittered about. Then he turned into the middle of the river, weaving between the islets of algal brocade, while Mary, holding both ends of the tiller rope in one hand, dangled the other in the water trying to pull off the shiny yellow heads of waterlilies. The rowlocks creaked at every stroke of the oars and as he leaned back, then stretched forward, Mary, facing him in the stern, alternately moved away and drew closer in her navy-blue jacket, open over a light blouse that breathed with her.

  The river now reflected the terra cotta of the left— hand bank, overgrown at the top with fir and racemosa. Names and dates had been cut in the red steep, and in one place ten years ago someone had carved a huge face with prominent cheekbones. The right bank sloped gently, with purple patches of heather between dappled birch trees. And then cool darkness enveloped the boat under a bridge; from above came the heavy beat of hooves and wheels and, as the boat glided out, the dazzling sun flashed on the tips of the oars, and displayed the haycart crossing the low bridge and a green slope crowned by the white pillars of a boarded-up Alexandrine country mansion. Then a dark wood came down to the water’s edge on both banks, and with a gentle rustle the boat sailed into the reeds.

  No one at home knew about it, and life went on its dear, familiar summertime way hardly touched by the distant war which had now been in progress for a whole year. Linked to a wing by a gallery, the old greenish-gray wooden house with stained-glass windows in its twin verandas gazed out toward the fringe of the park, and at the orange, pretzel-shaped pattern of garden paths which framed the black-earth luxuriance of the flowerbeds. In the drawing room with its white furniture the marbled tomes of old bound magazines lay on the rose-embroidered tablecloth, the yellow parquet spilled out of a tilted mirror in an oval frame, and the daguerreotypes on the walls seemed to listen whenever the white upright piano tinkled into life. In the evening the tall blue-coated butler in cotton gloves carried a silk-shaded lamp out onto the veranda, and Ganin would come home to drink tea and to gulp cold curds-and-whey on that lighted veranda, with the rush mat on the floor and the black laurels beside the stone steps leading into the garden.

  He now saw Mary every day on the far side of the river where the deserted white mansion stood on a green hill and where there was another park, larger and wilder than the one around the ancestral house.

  In front of that other mansion, under the lime trees, on a broad terrace above the river, stood some benches and a round iron table with a hole in its center to drain off the rainwater. From there one could see far below a second bridge crossing a green-scummed bend in the river and the road leading up to Voskresensk. This terrace was their favorite spot.

  Once, when they had met there on a sunny evening after a rainstorm, they noticed a swinish phrase scribbled on that garden table. Some village rowdy had linked their names by a short, crude verb, which moreover he had misspelled. The inscription had been done in indelible pencil and was slightly blurred by rain. Twigs, leaves and the chalky vermicules of bird-droppings were also sticking to the tabletop.

  And since the table belonged to them, since it was sacred, sanctified by their meetings, they began calmly and without a word to rub out the damp scribble with tufts of grass. And when the whole surface had turned a ridiculous lilac color and Mary’s fingers looked as if she had just been picking bilberries, Ganin, turning away and staring hard through narrowed eyes at a yellowy-green, warm, flowing something which at normal times was linden foliage, announced to Mary that he had been in love with her for a long time.

  In those first days of love-making they kissed so much that Mary’s lips grew swollen, and her neck, so warm under her hair-bow, bore tender vampire marks. She was an amazingly cheerful girl, who laughed not so much from mockery as from sheer humor. She loved jingles, catchwords, puns and poems. A song would stick in her head for two or three days, then it would be forgotten and a new one would take possession. During their first few meetings, for instance, she kept on soulfully repeating in her burry voice:

  Vanya’s arms and legs they tied

  Long in jail was he mortified

  and then she would say with her husky, crooning laugh, ‘Lovely song!’ Around that time the last wild raspberries, rain-soaked and sweet, were ripening in the ditches. She was unusually fond of them, in fact she was more or less permanently sucking something — a stalk, a leaf, a fruit drop. She carried Landrin’s caramels loose in her pocket, stuck together in lumps with bits of rubbish and wool sticking to them. She used a cheap, sweet perfume called ‘Tagore.’ Ganin now tried to recapture that scent again, mixed with the fresh smells of the autumnal park, but, as we know, memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

  For a moment Ganin stopped recollecting and wondered how he had been able to live for so many years without thinking about Mary — and then he caught up with her again: she was running along a dark, rustling path, her black bow looking in flight like a huge Camberwell Beauty. Suddenly Mary pulled up, gripped him by the shoulder, lifted her foot and started to rub her sand-dusted shoe against the stocking of her other leg, higher up, under the hem of her blue skirt.

  Ganin fell asleep lying dressed on top of his bedcover; his reminiscences had blurred and changed into a dream. The dream was odd and most precious, and he would have remembered it if only he had not been woken at dawn by a strange noise that sounded like a peal of thunder. He sat up and listened. The thunder turned out to be an incomprehensible groaning and shuffling outside the door; somebody was scraping at it. Gleaming very faintly in the dim dawn air, the door handle was suddenly pressed down and flicked up again, but
although it was unlocked the door stayed shut. In pleasurable anticipation of adventure, Ganin slipped off his bed and, clenching his left fist in case of need, he flung open the door with his right hand.

  In a sweeping movement, like a huge soft doll, a man fell prone against his shoulder. This was so unexpected that Ganin almost hit him, but he at once sensed that the man had only fallen on him because he was incapable of standing up. He pushed him aside toward the wall and fumbled for the light.

  In front of him, leaning his head against the wall and gasping for air with his mouth wide open, stood old Podtyagin, barefoot, wearing a long nightshirt open at his grizzled chest. His eyes, bare and wild without their pince-nez, were unblinking, his face was the color of dry clay, the large mound of his stomach heaved beneath the taut cotton of his nightshirt.

  Ganin immediately realized that the old man had been overcome by another heart attack. He supported him, and Podtyagin, moving his putty-colored legs with difficulty, tottered to a chair, collapsed into it and threw back his head; his gray face had now broken out in a sweat.

  Ganin dipped a towel into his jug and pressed its heavy, wet folds to the old man’s bare chest. He had a feeling that any moment all the bones in that big tense body might snap with a sharp crack.

  Podtyagin took a breath and expelled the air with a whistle. It was not just a breath, but a tremendous pleasure which immediately caused his features to revive. With an encouraging smile Ganin continued to press the wet towel to his body and to rub his chest and sides.

  ‘B — better,’ the old man breathed.