Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  ‘Relax,’ said Ganin. ‘You’ll be all right in a moment.’

  Podtyagin breathed and groaned, wriggling his large bare crooked toes. Ganin put a blanket round him, gave him some water to drink and opened the window wider.

  ‘Couldn’t — breathe,’ said Podtyagin laboriously. ‘Couldn’t get into your room — too weak. Didn’t want — die alone.’

  ‘Just relax, Anton Sergeyevich. It will be daylight soon. We’ll call a doctor.’

  Podtyagin slowly wiped his brow with his hand and began to breathe more evenly. ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘Gone for a while. I had no more of my drops left. That’s why it was so bad.’

  ‘And we’ll buy you some more drops. Would you like to move over into my bed?’

  ‘No, I’ll sit here a while and then go back to my room. It’s gone now. And tomorrow morning —’

  ‘Let’s put it off until Friday,’ said Ganin. ‘The visa won’t run away.’

  Podtyagin licked his dried lips with his thick, rough tongue. ‘They’ve been waiting for me in Paris for a long time, Lyovushka. And my niece hasn’t got the money to send me any for the journey. Oh, dear!’

  Ganin sat on the window ledge (in a flash he wondered where it was that he had sat like this not long ago — and in a flash he remembered: the stained-glass interior of the pavilion, the white folding table, the hole in his sock).

  ‘Please put the light out, my dear fellow,’ Podtyagin asked him. ‘It hurts my eyes.’

  Everything seemed strange in the semidarkness: the noise of the first trains, the large, gray ghost in the armchair, the gleam of water spilled on the floor. And it was all much more mysterious and vague than the deathless reality in which Ganin was living.

  9

  It was morning and Kolin was making tea for Gornotsvetov. On that day, Thursday, Gornotsvetov had to leave town early in order to see a ballerina who was engaging a troupe. Everyone in the house, therefore, was still asleep when Kolin shuffled into the kitchen for hot water, wearing a remarkably dirty little kimono and battered boots on bare feet. His round, unintelligent, very Russian face with its snub nose and languorous blue eyes (he saw himself as Verlaine’s ‘half Pierrot and half Gavroche’) was puffy and shiny, his uncombed blond hair fell across his forehead, the untied laces of his boots pattered against the floor with a noise like fine rain. Pouting like a woman, he fiddled with the teapot and then began to hum quietly and intensely. Gornotsvetov was finishing dressing: he put on his polka-dotted bow tie, and lost his temper over a pimple which he had just nicked while shaving and which was now oozing pus and blood through a thick layer of powder. His features were dark and very regular, and long curled eyelashes gave his brown eyes a clear, innocent expression. He had short, black, slightly frizzled hair; he shaved the back of his neck like a Russian coachman and had grown sideburns which curved past his ears in two dark strips. Like his companion he was short, very thin, with highly developed leg muscles but narrow in the chest and shoulders.

  They had made friends comparatively recently, had danced in a Russian cabaret somewhere in the Balkans and had arrived in Berlin two months ago in search of their theatrical fortune. A particular nuance, an odd affected manner set them somewhat apart from the other lodgers, but in all honesty no one could blame this harmless couple for being as happy as a pair of ringdoves.

  Kolin, left alone in their untidy room after his friend had gone, opened a manicure case and, crooning softly, began to pare his fingernails. Although not remarkable for his cleanliness, he kept his nails in excellent condition.

  The room reeked of Origan perfume and sweat; a ball of haircombings floated in the washbasin water. Ballet dancers pranced in photographs on the walls; on the table lay a large open fan and a dirty starched collar.

  Having admired the coral varnish of his nails, Kolin carefully washed his hands, smeared his face and neck with sickly-sweet toilet water and threw off his dressing gown. Naked, he took a few steps on his points, did a little entrechat, quickly dressed, powdered his nose, and made up his eyes. Then, having fastened all the buttons of his gray, close-fitting topcoat, he went out for a walk flicking the tip of his fancy cane regularly up and down.

  At the front door, as he returned home for lunch, he overtook Ganin, who had just bought some medicine for Podtyagin. The old man was feeling better; he was doing a little writing and walking about his room, but Klara, by agreement with Ganin, had decided not to let him out of the house that day.

  Sneaking up behind him, Kolin gripped Ganin’s arm above the elbow. Ganin turned round.

  ‘Ah, Kolin. Had a good stroll?’

  ‘Alec’s away,’ said Kolin as he climbed the stairs beside Ganin. ‘I’m terribly worried, I hope he’s going to get that engagement.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Ganin, who was always at a complete loss for conversation with him.

  Kolin laughed. ‘Alfyorov got stuck in the lift again. Now it’s not working.’

  He ran the knob of his cane along the banisters and looked at Ganin with a shy smile. ‘May I sit in your room for a bit? I’m so bored today.’

  ‘Don’t imagine you can make eyes at me just because you’re bored,’ Ganin mentally snapped at him as he opened the door of the pension, but aloud he said, ‘Unfortunately I’m busy at the moment. Some other time.’

  ‘What a pity,’ drawled Kolin, following Ganin inside and pulling the door after him. The door did not shut, as someone had thrust in a large brown hand from behind and a deep bass Berlin voice boomed, ‘One moment, gentlemen.’

  Ganin and Kolin looked round. A stout, mustachioed postman crossed the threshold.

  ‘Does Herr Alfyorov live here?’

  ‘First door on the left,’ said Ganin.

  ‘Thank you,’ sang out the postman and knocked on the door he had been shown.

  It was a telegram.

  ‘What is it? What is it? What is it?’ Alfyorov babbled feverishly, twisting it in his clumsy fingers. He was so excited that at first he was unable to read the glued-on strip of faint, uneven letters: arriving saturday 8 a.m. Suddenly Alfyorov understood, sighed and crossed himself.

  ‘Thank the Lord. She’s coming.’

  Smiling broadly and stroking his bony thighs, he sat down on the bed and started to rock backward and forward. His watery eyes were blinking rapidly, a slanting shaft of sun gilded his little dung-colored beard.

  ‘Sehr gut,’ he muttered to himself. ‘The day after tomorrow! Sehr gut. What a state my shoes are in! Mary will be amazed. Still, we’ll survive somehow. We’ll rent a nice cheap little flat. She’ll decide. Meanwhile we’ll live here for a bit. Thank goodness there’s a door between the two rooms.’

  A short while later he went out into the passage and knocked at his neighbor’s.

  Ganin thought, ‘Why can’t they leave me alone today?’

  Coming straight to the point, Alfyorov began as he surveyed the room all around, ‘I say, Gleb Lvovich, when are you thinking of leaving?’

  Ganin looked at him with irritation. ‘My first name is Lev. Try and remember.’

  ‘But you are leaving on Saturday, aren’t you?’ Alfyorov asked, thinking to himself, ‘We’ll have to place the bed differently. And the wardrobe must be moved away from the communicating door.’

  ‘Yes, I’m leaving,’ Ganin replied, and again, as at lunch the day before, he felt acutely embarrassed.

  ‘Well, that’s splendid,’ Alfyorov put in excitedly. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Gleb Lvovich.’

  And with a final glance round the room he went noisily out.

  ‘Idiot,’ muttered Ganin. ‘To hell with him. What was I thinking about so delightfully just now? Ah, yes — the night, the rain, the white pillars.’

  ‘Lydia Nikolaevna! Lydia Nikolaevna!’ Alfyorov’s oily voice called loudly from the corridor.

  ‘There’s no getting away from him,’ thought Ganin angrily. ‘I won’t lunch here today. Enough!’

  The street asphalt gave off a violet gloss, the sun tan
gled with the wheels of motorcars. Near the beer-hall there was a garage and from the gaping gloom of its entrance came a tender whiff of carbide. And that chance exhalation helped Ganin to remember more vividly yet the rainy Russian late August and early September, the torrent of happiness, which the specters of his Berlin life kept interrupting.

  Straight out of the bright country house, he would plunge into the black, bubbling darkness and ignite the soft flame of his bicycle lamp; and now, when he inhaled that smell of carbide, it brought back everything at once: the wet grasses whipping against his moving leg and wheel spokes; the disk of milky light that imbibed and dissolved the obscurity, the different objects that emerged from it — now a wrinkled puddle, or a glistening pebble, then the bridge planks carpeted with horse dung, then, finally, the turnstile of the wicket, through which he pushed, with the rain— drenched pea-tree hedge yielding to the sweep of his shoulder.

  Presently, through the streams of the night, there became visible the slow rotation of columns, washed by the same gentle whitish beam of his bicycle lamp; and there on the six-columned porch of a stranger’s closed mansion Ganin was welcomed by a blur of cool fragrance, a blend of perfume and damp serge — and that autumnal rain kiss was so long and so deep that afterward great luminous spots swam before one’s eyes and the broad-branching, many-leaved, rustling sound of the rain seemed to acquire new force. With rain-wet fingers he opened the little lantern’s glass door and blew out the light. Out of the darkness a humid and heavy pressure of gusty air reached the lovers. Mary, now perched on the peeling balustrade, caressed his temples with the cold palm of her little hand and he could make out in the dark the vague outline of her soggy hairbow and the smiling brilliance of her eyes.

  In the whirling blackness the strong, ample downpour surged through the limes facing the porch and drew creaks from their trunks, which were banded with iron clasps to support their decaying might. And amid the hubbub of the autumn night, he unbuttoned her blouse, kissed her hot clavicle; she remained silent — only her eyes glistened faintly, and the skin of her bared breast slowly turned cold from the touch of his lips and the humid night wind. They spoke little, it was too dark to speak. When at last he struck a match to consult his watch, Mary blinked and brushed a wet strand of hair from her cheek. He flung his arm around her while impelling his bicycle with one hand placed on its saddle, and thus they slowly walked away in the night, now reduced to a drizzle; first there was the descent along the path to the bridge, and then the farewell there, protracted and sorrowful, as though before a long separation.

  And on the black stormy night, when on the eve of his return to St Petersburg for the beginning of the school year they met for the last time on their pillared porch, something dreadful and unexpected occurred, a portent perhaps of all the desecrations to come. The rain that night was particularly noisy and their meeting especially tender. Suddenly Mary cried out and jumped down from the balustrade. By the light of a match Ganin saw that the shutter of one of the windows giving onto the porch was open, and that a human face, its white nose flattened, was pressed against the inside of the black windowpane. It moved and slithered away, but both of them had had time to recognize the carroty hair and gaping mouth of the watchman’s son, a foulmouthed lecher of about twenty who was always crossing their path in the avenues of the park. In one furious leap Ganin hurled himself at the window, shattered the glass with his back and crashed into the icy dark. With this momentum his head butted a powerful chest, which gasped at the blow. Next moment they were grappling and rolling across the echoing parquet, bumping into dead pieces of furniture draped in dust covers. Freeing his right hand, Ganin began to slam his rocklike fist into the wet face which he suddenly found underneath him. He did not get up until the powerful body, which he had pinned to the floor, suddenly went slack and began to groan. Breathing hard, bumping against soft corners in the dark, he reached the window and climbed back onto the porch to find the sobbing, terrified Mary; he noticed then that something warm and tasting of iron was trickling out of his mouth and that his hands were cut by glass splinters. The next morning he left for St Petersburg, and on the way to the station, in the closed carriage rolling along with a soft, muffled rumble, through the window he saw Mary walking on the edge of the road with her girl friends. The coachwork, lined with black leather, hid her immediately, and since he was not alone in the coupé he did not dare glance back through the oval rear peeper.

  On that September day fate gave him an advance taste of his future parting from Mary, his parting from Russia.

  It was a testing ordeal, a mysterious prevision; there was a peculiar sadness about the rowan trees, flame-red with fruit, receding one after another into the gray overcast, and it seemed incredible that next spring he would see those fields again, that lone boulder, those meditative telegraph poles.

  At home in St Petersburg everything seemed newly clean, bright and positive, as it always does when one returns from the country. School began again; he was in the penultimate form; he neglected his studies: The first snow fell, and the cast-iron railings, the backs of the listless horses and the barge-loads of firewood were covered with a thin layer of downy white.

  Mary did not move to St Petersburg until November. They met under the same arch where Liza dies in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. Soft oversized snowflakes came down vertically in the gray, mat-glass air. At this, their first meeting in St Petersburg, Mary seemed subtly different, perhaps because she was wearing a hat and a fur coat. From that day began the new, snowbound era of their love. It was difficult to meet, long walks in the frost were agonizing, and finding a warm place to be alone in museums and cinemas was most agonizing of all. No wonder that in the frequent piercingly tender letters which they wrote to each other on blank days (he lived on the English Quay, she on Caravan Street) they both recalled the paths through the park, the smell of fallen leaves, as being something unimaginably dear and gone forever: perhaps they only did it to enliven their love with bittersweet memories, but perhaps they truly realized that their real happiness was over. In the evenings they rang each other up, to find out if a letter had been received, or where and how to meet. Her amusing grasseyement was even more attractive on the telephone; she would say truncated little poems, laugh warmly, and press the mouthpiece to her breast, and he imagined he could hear her heart beating.

  They talked like this for hours.

  That winter she wore a gray fur coat which made her look slightly plumper, and suede spats put on over her thin indoor shoes. He never saw her suffering from a cold, or even looking chilly. Frost or driving snow only vivified her, and in an icy snowstorm in some dark alleyway he would bare her shoulders; the snowflakes tickled her, she would smile through wet eyelashes, press his head to her, and a miniature snowfall would drop from his astrakhan cap onto her naked breast.

  These meetings in the wind and frost tortured him more than her. He felt that their love was fraying and wearing thin as a result of these incomplete trysts. Every love demands privacy, shelter, refuge — and they had no such refuge. Their families did not know each other; their secret, which at first had been so wonderful, now hindered them. He began to feel that all would be well if she became his mistress, even if only in furnished rooms — and this thought somehow persisted in his mind apart from his feelings of desire, which were already weakening under the torment of their meager contacts.

  So they roamed all winter, reminiscing about the countryside, dreaming of next summer, occasionally quarreling in fits of jealousy, squeezing each other’s hands under the shaggy but scrimp rugs of cab drivers’ sleighs; then early in the new year Mary was taken away to Moscow.

  Strangely enough, this parting was a relief for Ganin.

  He knew that in the summer she was planning to return to a cottage on his parents’ land in the province of St Petersburg. At first he thought about it a lot, imagined a new summer, new meetings, wrote her the same piercing letters and then began to write less often, and when his fami
ly moved to their country estate in mid-May he stopped writing altogether. Simultaneously he found time to make and break a liaison with an elegant and enchanting blond lady whose husband was fighting in Galicia.

  Then Mary returned.

  Her voice crackled weakly from a great distance, a noise hummed in the telephone as in a seashell, at times an even more distant voice on a crossed line kept interrupting, carrying on conversations with someone else in the fourth dimension — the telephone in their country house was an old one with a hand crank — and between Mary and him lay thirty miles of roaring darkness.

  ‘I’ll come to see you,’ Ganin shouted into the receiver. ‘I’m saying I’ll come. On my bicycle. It’ll take a couple of hours.’

  ‘— didn’t want to stay at Voskresensk again. D’you hear? Papa refused to rent a dacha at Voskresensk again. From your place to this town it’s thirty —’

  ‘Don’t forget to bring those boots,’ interrupted a low, unconcerned voice.

  Then Mary was heard again through the buzzing, in miniature, as if she were speaking from the wrong end of a telescope. And when she had vanished altogether Ganin leaned against the wall and felt that his ears were burning.

  He set off at about three o’clock in the afternoon, in an open-necked shirt and football shorts, rubber-soled shoes on his sockless feet. With the wind behind him he rode fast, picking out the smooth patches between sharp flints on the highway, and he remembered how he used to ride past Mary last July before he even knew her.

  After ten miles or so his back tire burst, and he spent a long time repairing it, seated on the edge of a ditch. Larks sang above the fields on both sides of the road; a gray convertible sped by in a cloud of gray dust, carrying two military men in owlish goggles. The tire mended, he pumped it up hard and rode on, aware that he had not allowed for this and was already an hour behind time. Turning off the highway he rode through a wood along a path shown to him by a passing muzhik. Then he took another turning, but a wrong one this time, and continued for a long while before getting back onto the right road again. He rested and had a bite to eat in a little village, and then, when he only had some eight miles to go, he ran over a sharp stone and once more the same tire expired with a whistle.