Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  It was already getting dark when he reached the small town where Mary was spending the summer. She was waiting for him at the gates of the public park, as they had agreed, but she had already given up hope of his coming as she had been waiting since six o’clock. When she saw him she stumbled with excitement and almost fell. She was wearing a diaphanous white dress which Ganin did not know. Her black bow had gone, and, in result, her adorable head seemed smaller. There were blue cornflowers in her piled-up hair.

  That night, in the strange stealthily deepening darkness, under the lindens of that spacious public park, on a stone slab sunk deep in moss, Ganin in the course of one brief tryst grew to love her more poignantly than before and fell out of love with her, as it seemed then, forever.

  At first they conversed in a rapturous murmur — about the long time they had not seen each other, about the resemblance of a glowworm that shone in the moss to a tiny semaphore. Her dear, dear Tartar eyes glided near his face, her white dress seemed to shimmer in the dark — and oh, God, that fragrance of hers, incomprehensible, unique in the world!

  ‘I am yours,’ she said, ‘do what you like with me.’

  In silence, his heart thumping, he leaned over her, running his hands along her soft, cool legs. But the public park was alive with odd rustling sounds, somebody seemed to be continuously approaching from behind the bushes, the chill and the hardness of the stone slab hurt his bare knees; and Mary lay there too submissive, too still.

  He stopped; then emitted an awkward short laugh. ‘I keep feeling that someone’s around,’ said Ganin and got up.

  Mary sighed, rearranged her dress — a whitish blur — and stood up, too.

  As they walked back to the park gate along a moon— flecked path, she stooped over the grass and picked up one of the pale green lampyrids they had noticed. She held it upon the flat of her hand, bending over it, examining it closely, then burst out laughing and said in a quaint parody of a village lass, ‘Bless me, if it isn’t simply a cold little worm.’

  It was then that Ganin, tired, cross at himself, freezing in his thin shirt, decided that it was all over, that he was no longer enamored of Mary. And a few minutes later, when he was cycling in the moonlight haze homeward along the pale surface of the road, he knew that he would never visit her again.

  The summer passed; Mary did not write or telephone, while he was busy with other things, other emotions.

  Once again he returned to St Petersburg for the winter, took his final exams — earlier than was normal, in December — and entered the Mikhailov Officer Cadet School. Next summer, in the year of the revolution, he met Mary again.

  It was toward evening and he was standing on the platform at the Warsaw Station. The train taking holidaymakers out to their dachas had just pulled in. While waiting for the bell to ring he started to walk up and down the dirty platform. As he gazed at a broken luggage trolley he was thinking of something different, about the shooting that had taken place the day before on Nevski Avenue; at the same time he was annoyed that he had failed to get through to the family estate by telephone and that he would have to crawl all the way there from the station by droshky.

  When the third bell clanged, he walked over to the only blue coach in the train, started to climb up to its vestibule — and there, looking down on him from above, stood Mary. She had changed in the past year, had grown perhaps slightly thinner and was wearing an unfamiliar blue coat with a belt. Ganin greeted her awkwardly, there was a clanging of buffers and the railway car moved. They remained standing in the vestibule. Mary must have seen him earlier and boarded a blue carriage on purpose, although she always traveled in a yellow one, and now with a second-class ticket she did not want to go inside into a compartment. She was holding a bar of Blighen and Robinson’s chocolate, and at once broke off a piece and offered it to him.

  It made Ganin terribly sad to look at her: there was something odd and timid in her whole appearance; she smiled less and kept turning her head away. On her tender neck there were livid marks, like a shadowy necklace, which greatly suited her. He spouted nonsense, showed her the scratch on his jackboot made by a bullet, talked about politics, while the train clattered on between peat-bogs burning in the tawny torrent of the sunset; the grayish peat smoke drifted gently over the ground, forming what seemed like two waves of mist between which the train clove its way.

  She got off at the first station and for a long time he stared from the carriage platform after her departing blue figure, and the further away she went the clearer it became to him that he could never forget her. She did not look round. Out of the dusk came the heavy and fluffy scent of racemosa in bloom.

  As the train moved off he went inside. There it was dark, the conductor having thought it unnecessary to light the lamp wicks in empty compartments. He lay down on his back on the striped cover of the couchlike seat and through the open door and the corridor window he watched thin wires rising through the smoke of burning peat and the dark gold of the sunset. There was something strange and spooky about traveling in this empty, rattling coach between streams of gray smoke, and curious thoughts passed through his head, as though this had all happened at some time before — as though he had lain there as now, his hands pillowing the back of his neck, in the drafty, clattering darkness, and the same smoky sunset had amply and sonorously swept past the windows.

  He never saw Mary again.

  10

  The noise grew louder, flooded in, a pale cloud enveloped the window, a glass rattled on the washstand. A train had passed by and now the empty expanse of the railway tracks could be seen again fanning out from the window. Berlin, gentle and misty, toward evening, in April.

  That Thursday at twilight, when the noise of the trains sounded hollower than ever, Klara came to see Ganin in a high state of agitation to give him a message from Lyudmila: ‘Tell him,’ Lyudmila had said, ‘tell him this: that I’m not one of those women that men can just drop. I’m the one who does the dropping. Tell him I don’t want anything from him, I’m not making any demands, but I think it was filthy of him not to have answered my letter. I wanted to break it off with him in a friendly way, to suggest that even if we don’t love each other any more we can simply be friends, but he couldn’t even be bothered to ring me up. Tell him, Klara, that I wish him luck with his German girl and that I know he won’t be able to forget me as quickly as he may think.’

  ‘Where on earth did she get the German girl from?’ said Ganin, making a face, when Klara, without looking at him and talking in a low, rapid voice, had delivered her message. ‘Anyway, why does she have to involve you in this business? It’s all very tiresome.’

  ‘You know, Lev Glebovich,’ Klara burst out, dousing him with one of her moist looks, ‘you really are heartless. Lyudmila thinks nothing but good of you, she idealizes you, but if she knew all about you —’ Ganin looked at her with amiable astonishment. Embarrassed, Klara dropped her glance.

  ‘I only gave you the message because she asked me to,’ Klara said quietly.

  ‘I must leave,’ Ganin said after a silence. ‘This room, these trains, Erika’s cooking — I’m fed up with it all. Besides, I’m nearly out of money and I shall have to work again soon. I’m thinking of leaving Berlin for good on Saturday, going south, to some sea port.’

  He clenched and unclenched his fist and lapsed into pensiveness.

  ‘I don’t know, though — there’s one circumstance — You’d be amazed if you knew what has just occurred to me. An extraordinary, incredible plan! If it comes off I’ll be out of this town by the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Really, what a strange man he is,’ thought Klara, with that aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place.

  Ganin’s glassy black pupils dilated, his thick eyelashes gave his eyes a warm, downy look and a serene smile of contemplation lifted slightly his upper lip, baring the white expanse of his glistening, even teeth. His dark eyebrows,
which reminded Klara of scraps of expensive fur, alternately met and parted, and soft furrows came and went on his smooth forehead.

  Noticing Klara’s stare, he blinked, passed his hand across his face and remembered what he had been intending to say to her. ‘Yes. I’m going, and that will end everything. Simply tell her that Ganin is leaving and wants her not to think ill of him. That’s all.’

  11

  On Friday morning the dancers sent round the following note to the other four lodgers:

  Because:

  1. Mr Ganin is leaving us.

  2. Mr Podtyagin is preparing to leave.

  3. Mr Alfyorov’s wife is arriving tomorrow.

  4. Mlle Klara is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday and

  5. The undersigned have obtained an engagement in this city — because of all this a celebration will be held tonight at 10 p.m. in room April 6th.

  ‘How kind of them,’ said Podtyagin with a smile as he went out of the house with Ganin, who had agreed to accompany him to the police station. ‘Where are you going when you leave Berlin, Lyovushka? Far away? Yes, you’re a bird of passage. When I was young I longed to travel, to swallow the whole wide world. Well, it’s damn well happened —’

  He hunched himself against the fresh spring wind, turned up the collar of his well-kept dark gray overcoat with its huge bone buttons. He still felt a debilitating weakness in the legs, an aftereffect of his heart attack, but today he derived a certain cheerful relief from the thought that now he would most likely have done with all the fuss about his passport and that he might even get permission to leave for Paris the very next day.

  The vast purple-red building of the central police headquarters faced onto four streets. It was built in a grim but extremely bad Gothic style with dim windows and a highly intriguing courtyard forbidden to the public; an impassive policeman stood at the main portal. An arrow on the wall pointed across the street to a photographer’s studio, where in twenty minutes one could obtain a miserable likeness of oneself: half a dozen identical physiognomies, of which one was stuck onto the yellow page of the passport, another one went into the police archives, while the rest were probably distributed among the officials’ private collections.

  Podtyagin and Ganin entered a wide gray corridor. At the door of the passport department stood a little table where an ancient bewhiskered official issued numbered tickets, occasionally casting a schoolmasterly glance over his spectacles at the small polyglot crowd of people.

  ‘You must stand in the queue and get a number,’ said Ganin.

  ‘And I never did that before,’ the old poet replied in a whisper. ‘I just used to go straight in through the door.’

  When he received his ticket a few minutes later he was delighted, and looked even more like a fat guinea pig than ever.

  In the bare, stuffy, sunlit room where officials sat at their desks behind a low partition, there was another crowd which appeared to have come for the sole purpose of staring at those lugubrious scribes.

  Ganin pushed his way through, with Podtyagin snuffling along trustfully after him.

  Half an hour later, having handed in Podtyagin’s passport, they moved over to another desk; again a queue, a crush of people, somebody’s bad breath and, at last, for the price of a few marks the yellow sheet of paper was returned, now adorned with the magic stamp.

  ‘Now off we go to the consulate,’ grunted Podtyagin joyfully as they left the redoubtable-looking though in reality rather dreary building. ‘It’s in the bag now. How do you manage to talk to them so calmly, my dear Lev Glebovich? It was such agony for me when I went before! Come on, let’s go on the top deck of the bus. What a joy this is — I’m actually in a sweat, you know.’

  He was the first to clamber up the twisting staircase. The conductor on the top deck banged on the iron side with his hand and the bus moved off. Houses, signboards, sunlight on shop windows floated by.

  ‘Our grandchildren will never understand all this nonsense about visas,’ said Podtyagin, reverentially examining his passport. ‘They’ll never understand that there could be so much human anxiety connected with a simple rubber stamp. Do you think,’ he added anxiously, ‘that the French really will give me a visa now?’

  ‘Of course they will,’ said Ganin. ‘After all, they told you that permission had been given.’

  ‘I think I’ll leave tomorrow,’ Podtyagin smiled. ‘Let’s go together, Lyovushka. It’ll be fine in Paris. No, you just look what a mug I have here.’

  Ganin glanced over his arm at the passport with its photograph in the corner. The photograph was quite remarkable: a dazed, bloated face swam in a grayish murk.

  ‘I have no less than two passports,’ Ganin said with a smile. ‘One Russian, which is real but very old, and a Polish one, forged. That’s the one I use.’

  As he paid the conductor, Podtyagin put down the yellow document on the seat beside him, selected 40 pfennigs from the several coins in his hand and glanced up at the conductor.

  ‘Genug?’

  He then looked sideways at Ganin.

  ‘What did you say, Lev Glebovich? Forged?’

  ‘Certainly. My first name really is Lev, but my surname is not Ganin at all.’

  ‘What do you mean, my dear fellow?’ Podtyagin goggled in amazement and suddenly clutched at his hat — a strong wind was blowing.

  ‘Well, that’s the way it was,’ ruminated Ganin. ‘About three years ago. Partisan detachment. In Poland. And so on. Thought I’d break through to St Petersburg and raise a rebellion. Now it’s quite convenient and rather fun having this passport.’

  Podtyagin suddenly looked away and said glumly, ‘I dreamed about St Petersburg last night, Lyovushka. I was walking along the Nevski. I knew it was the Nevski, although it looked nothing like it. The houses had sloping angles as in a futurist painting, and the sky was black, although I knew it was daytime. And the passers-by were giving me strange looks. Then a man crossed the street and took aim at my head. He’s an old haunter of mine. It’s terrible — oh terrible — that whenever we dream about Russia we never dream of it as beautiful, as we know it was in reality, but as something monstrous — the sort of dreams where the sky is falling in and you feel the world’s coming to an end.’

  ‘No,’ said Ganin, ‘I only dream about the beautiful things. The same woods, the same country house. Sometimes it’s all rather deserted, with unfamiliar clearings. But that does not matter. We have to get out here, Anton Sergeyevich.’

  He went down the spiral staircase and helped Podtyagin to step onto the pavement.

  ‘Just look at the way that water sparkles,’ Podtyagin remarked, breathing laboriously, and pointed at the canal with all five fingers stretched.

  ‘Careful — mind that bicycle,’ said Ganin. ‘There’s the consulate over there on the right.’

  ‘Please accept my sincere thanks, Lev Glebovich. If I’d been on my own I’d never have got through all that red tape. It’s a great relief to me. Farewell, Deutschland.’

  They entered the consulate building. As they went up the stairs Podtyagin began searching in his pockets.

  ‘Come on,’ said Ganin, turning round.

  But the old man kept searching.

  12

  Only four of the lodgers had turned up for lunch.

  ‘I wonder why our friends are so late?’ said Alfyorov cheerfully. ‘I suppose they’ve had no luck.’

  He positively breathed joyful expectation. On the previous day he had been to the station and found out the exact time of arrival of the morning fast train from the north: 8:05. Today he had cleaned his suit, bought a pair of new cuffs and a bunch of lily-of-the-valley. His financial affairs appeared to have put themselves right. Before lunch he had sat in a café with a gloomy, clean-shaven gentleman who had offered him what was undoubtedly a money-making proposition. His mind, used as it was to figures, was now preoccupied with one single figure, made up of a unit and a decimal fraction: eight point zero five. This was the percentage of h
appiness which fate had temporarily allotted to him. And tomorrow — he screwed up his eyes, sighed and imagined how early tomorrow morning he would go to the station, how he would wait on the platform, how the train would come rushing in —

  After lunch he disappeared, as did the dancers, who went out surreptitiously, as excited as two women, to buy little delicacies.

  Only Klara stayed at home. Her head ached and the thin bones of her fat legs were hurting, which was unfortunate, as today was her birthday. ‘I’m twenty-six today,’ she thought, ‘and tomorrow Ganin is leaving. He is bad, he deceives women and he is capable of committing a crime. He can look me calmly in the eyes even though he knows I saw him just about to steal money. Yet he’s wonderful and I think about him literally all day. And there’s no hope whatsoever.’

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was paler than usual; beneath a lock of chestnut hair low down on her forehead she had broken out in a faint rash, and there were shadows under her eyes. She could not stand the glossy black dress which she wore day in, day out; there was a very obvious darn on the seam of her dark, transparent stocking; and one of her heels was crooked.

  Podtyagin and Ganin returned around five o’clock. Klara heard their footsteps and looked out. Pale as death, his overcoat open and holding his collar and tie in his hand, Podtyagin walked silently past into his room and locked the door behind him.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Klara in a whisper.

  Ganin clicked his tongue. ‘He lost his passport, then he had an attack. Right here, in front of the house. I could hardly drag him upstairs. The lift’s not working, unfortunately. We’ve been searching all over town.’