Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  ‘I’ll go and see him,’ said Klara, ‘he’ll need comforting.’

  Podtyagin would not let her in at first. When he finally did open the door, Klara groaned aloud when she saw his muzzy, confused expression.

  ‘Have you heard?’ he said with a wistful grin. ‘I am an old idiot. Everything was ready, you see — and then I have to go and —’

  ‘Where did you drop it, Anton Sergeyevich?’

  ‘That’s it: I dropped it. Poetic license: elided passport. “The Trousered Cloud” by Mayakovski. Great big clouded cretin, that’s what I am.’

  ‘Perhaps somebody will pick it up,’ suggested Klara sympathetically.

  ‘Impossible. It’s fate. There’s no escaping fate. I’m doomed not to leave here. It was preordained.’

  He sat down heavily.

  ‘I don’t feel well, Klara. I was so short of breath on the street just now that I thought it was the end. God, I simply don’t know what to do now. Except perhaps kick the bucket.’

  13

  Ganin meanwhile returned to his room and started to pack. From under the bed he pulled out two leather suitcases — one in a check cover, the other bare, tan— colored with pale marks left by labels — and spilled all the contents onto the floor. Then from the shaky, creaking darkness of the wardrobe he took out a black suit, a slender pile of underclothes, a pair of heavy, brass-studded brown boots. From the bedside table he extracted a motley collection of bits and pieces thrown in there at various times: dirty handkerchiefs crumpled into balls, razor blades with rusty stains around their eyelets, old newspapers, picture postcards, some yellow beads like horses’ teeth, a torn silk sock which had lost its twin.

  He took off his jacket, squatted down among all this sad, dusty rubbish and began to sort out what to take and what to destroy.

  First he packed the suit and the clean underwear, then his automatic and a pair of old riding breeches, badly worn around the crotch.

  As he pondered what to take next he noticed a black wallet that had fallen under the chair when he had emptied the suitcase. He picked it up and was going to open it, smiling as he thought of what was in it, but then he told himself that he should hurry up with his packing, so he thrust the wallet into the hip pocket of his trousers and began quickly throwing things at random into the open suitcases: crumpled dirty underclothes, Russian books which God alone knew how he had acquired, and all those trivial yet somehow precious things which become so familiar to our sight and touch, and whose only virtue is that they enable a person condemned to be always on the move to feel at home, however slightly, whenever he unpacks his fond, fragile, human rubbish for the hundredth time.

  Having packed, Ganin locked both suitcases, stood them alongside each other, stuffed the wastepaper basket with the corpses of old newspapers, glanced all round his empty room and went off to settle up with the landlady.

  Sitting bolt upright in an armchair, Lydia Nikolaevna was reading when he entered. Her dachshund slithered off the bed and began thrashing about in a little fit of hysterical devotion at Ganin’s feet.

  Lydia Nikolaevna saddened as she realized that this time he really was about to leave. She liked the tall, relaxed figure of Ganin; she generally tended to grow very used to her lodgers and there was something a little akin to death in their inevitable departures.

  Ganin paid her for the past week and kissed her hand, light as a faded leaf.

  As he walked back down the passage he remembered that today the dancers had invited him to a party and he decided not to go away just yet; he could always take a room in a hotel, even after midnight if necessary.

  And tomorrow Mary arrives,’ he exclaimed mentally, glancing round the ceiling, floor and walls with a blissful and frightened look. ‘And tomorrow I’m going to take her away,’ he reflected with the same inward shudder, the same luxurious sigh of his whole being.

  With a quick movement he took out the black wallet in which he kept the five letters he had received during his time in the Crimea. Now in a flash he remembered the whole of that Crimean winter, 1917 to 1918: the nor’easter blowing the stinging dust along the Yalta seafront, a wave breaking over the parapet onto the sidewalk, the insolent and bewildered Bolshevik sailors, then the Germans in their helmets like steel mushrooms, then the gay tricolor chevrons — days of expectation, an anxious breathing space; a thin, freckled little prostitute with bobbed hair and a Greek profile walking along the seafront, the nor’easter again scattering the sheet music of the band in the park, and then — at last — his company was on the march: the billets in Tartar hamlets where all day long in the tiny barbers’ shops the razor glittered just as it always had, and one’s cheeks swelled with lather, while little boys in the dusty streets whipped their tops as they had done a thousand years ago. And the wild night attack when you had no idea where the shooting was coming from or who was leaping through the puddles of moonlight between the slanting black shadows cast by the houses.

  Ganin took the first letter out of the bundle — a single, thick, oblong leaf with a drawing in the top left-hand corner that showed a young man in a blue tail coat holding behind his back a bouquet of pale flowers and kissing the hand of a lady, as delicate as he, with ringlets down her cheeks, wearing a pink, high-waisted dress.

  That first letter had been forwarded to him from St Petersburg to Yalta; it had been written just a little over two years after that blissful autumn.

  ‘Lyova, I’ve been in Poltava for a whole week now, hellishly boring. I don’t know if I shall ever see you again, but I do so want you not to forget me.’

  The handwriting was small and round, and looked exactly as if it were running along on tiptoe. There were strokes under the letter ‘m’ and above the letter ‘m’ for clarity; the final letter of each word tailed off in an impetuous flick to the right; only in the letter ‘ß’ at the end of a word did the bar bend touchingly downward and to the left, as though Mary retracted the word at the last moment; her full stops were very large and decisive, but there were few commas.

  ‘Just think, I’ve been looking at snow for a week, white cold snow. It’s cold, nasty and depressing. And suddenly like a bird the thought darts through one’s mind that somewhere far far away there are people living another completely different life. They’re not stagnating as I am in the sticks, on a small farm.

  ‘No, it’s really too awfully dull here. Write me something, Lyova. Even the most absolute trifles.’

  Ganin remembered getting this letter, remembered walking up a steep stony path on that distant January evening, past Tartar picket fences hung here and there with horses’ skulls, remembered how he sat beside a rivulet pouring in thin streams over smooth white stones, and stared through the countless, delicate and amazingly distinct bare branches of an apple tree at the mellow pink of the sky, where the new moon glistened like a translucent nail clipping, and beside it, by the lower horn, trembled a drop of brightness — the first star.

  He wrote to her the same night — about that star, about the cypresses in the garden, about the donkey whose roaring bray came every morning from the Tartar yard behind the house. He wrote affectionately, dreamily, recalling the wet catkins on the slippery footbridge of the pavilion where they first met.

  In those days letters took a long time on the way — the answer did not come until July.

  ‘Thank you very much for your good, sweet, “southern” letter. Why do you write that you still remember me? And you’ll not forget me? No? How lovely!

  ‘Today it’s so nice and fresh, after a thunderstorm. As at Voskresensk — remember? Wouldn’t you like to wander round those familiar places again? I would — terribly. How lovely it was to walk in the rain through the park in autumn. Why wasn’t it sad then in bad weather?

  ‘I’m going to stop writing for a while and go for a walk.

  ‘I never did manage to finish the letter yesterday. Isn’t that awful of me? Forgive me, Lyova dear, I promise I won’t do it again.’

  Ganin dropped his han
d with the letter and for a moment sat lost in thought. How well he remembered those merry mannerisms of hers, that husky little laugh when she apologized, that transition from a melancholy sigh to a look of ardent vitality!

  ‘For a long time I was worried not knowing where you were and how you were,’ she wrote in the same letter. ‘Now we mustn’t break off the little thread which links us. There’s so much I want to write and ask you, but my thoughts wander. I’ve seen and lived through a lot of unhappiness since those days. Write, write for God’s sake, write often and more. All the very best for now. I’d like to say goodbye more affectionately, but perhaps I’ve forgotten how to after all this time. Or perhaps there’s something else holding me back?’

  For days after getting that letter he was full of a trembling happiness. He could not understand how he could have parted from Mary. He only remembered their first autumn together — all the rest, those torments and tiffs, seemed so pale and insignificant. The languorous darkness, the conventional sheen of the sea at night, the velvety hush of the narrow cypress avenues, the gleam of the moonlight on the broad leaves of magnolias — all this only oppressed him.

  Duty kept him in Yalta — the civil war was under way — but there were moments when he decided to give up everything to go and look for Mary among the farms of the Ukraine.

  There was something touching and wonderful about the way their letters managed to pass across the terrible Russia of that time — like a cabbage white butterfly flying over the trenches. His answer to her second letter was very delayed, and Mary simply could not understand what had happened, as she was convinced that where their letters were concerned the usual obstacles of those days somehow did not exist.

  ‘It must seem strange to you that I’m writing to you despite your silence — but I don’t believe, I refuse to believe, that you still don’t want to reply to me. You haven’t replied, not because you didn’t want to but simply because — well, because you couldn’t, or because you hadn’t time or something. Tell me, Lyova, doesn’t it seem funny to remember what you once said to me — that loving me was your life, and if you couldn’t love me you wouldn’t be alive? Yes, how everything passes, how things change. Would you like to have what happened all over again? I think I’m feeling rather too depressed today...

  ‘But today it is spring and mimosa for sale

  At all corners is offered today.

  I am bringing you some; like a dream, it is frail —

  ‘Nice little poem, but I can’t remember the beginning or the end and I forget who wrote it. Now I shall wait for your letter. I don’t know how to say goodbye to you. Perhaps I’ve kissed you. Yes, I suppose, I have.’

  Two or three weeks later came her fourth letter:

  ‘I was glad to get your letter, Lyova. It is such a nice, nice letter. Yes, one can never forget how much and how radiantly one loved. You write that you would give your whole future life for a moment from the past — but it would be better to meet and verify one’s feelings.

  ‘Lyova, if you do come, ring up the local telephone exchange and ask for number 34. They may answer you in German: there is a German military hospital here. Ask them to call for me.

  ‘I was in town yesterday and had some “fun.” It was very gay, with lots of music and lights. A very amusing man with a little yellow beard made a play for me and called me “the queen of the ball.” Today it’s so boring, boring. It’s such a pity that the days go by so pointlessly and stupidly — and these are supposed to be the best, the happiest years of our life. It looks as if I shall soon turn into a hypocrite — I mean, hypochondriac. No, that mustn’t happen.

  ‘Let me get rid of the shackles of love

  And let me try to stop thinking!

  Replenish, replenish the glasses with wine —

  Let me keep drinking and drinking!

  ‘Quite something, isn’t it?

  ‘Write to me as soon as you get my letter. Will you come here and see me? Impossible? Well, too bad. Perhaps you can, though? What nonsense I’m writing: to come all the way here just to see me. What conceit! — don’t you think?

  ‘Just now I read a poem in an old magazine: “My Little Pale Pearl” by Krapovitsky. I like it very much. Write and tell me absolutely everything. I kiss you. Here’s something else I’ve read — by Podtyagin:

  ‘The full moon shines over forest and stream,

  Look at the ripples — how richly they gleam!’

  ‘Dear Podtyagin,’ mused Ganin. ‘How strange. Goodness, how strange. If someone had told me then I should meet him, of all people.’

  Smiling and shaking his head, he unfolded one last letter. He had received it the day before leaving for the front line. It had been a cold January dawn on board ship, and he had felt queasy from drinking coffee made from acorns.

  ‘Lyova, my darling, my joy, how I waited and longed for your letter. It was so hard and painful to write you such restrained letters. How can I have lived these three years without you, how have I managed to survive and what was there to live for?

  ‘I love you. If you come back I’ll plague you with kisses. Do you remember:

  ‘Write to them that my little boy Lyov

  I kiss as much as I can,

  That an Austrian helmet from Lvov

  To bring for his birthday I plan

  But a separate note to my father —

  ‘Goodness, where has it gone, all that distant, bright, endearing — Like you, I feel that we shall meet again — but when, when?

  ‘I love you. Come to me. Your letter was such a joy that I still can’t regain my senses for happiness

  ‘Happiness,’ Ganin repeated softly, folding all five letters into an even batch. ‘That’s it — happiness. We’re going to meet again in twelve hours’ time.’

  He stood motionless, preoccupied with secret, delicious thoughts. He had no doubt that Mary still loved him. Her five letters lay in his hand. Outside it was quite dark. The knobs on his suitcases gleamed. The desolate room smelled faintly of dust.

  He was still sitting in the same position when voices were heard outside the door and suddenly, without knocking, Alfyorov strode into the room.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said without showing any particular embarrassment. ‘I somehow thought you’d already gone.’

  His fingers playing with the folded letters, Ganin stared vacantly at Alfyorov’s little yellow beard. The landlady appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Lydia Nikolaevna,’ Alfyorov went on, twitching his neck and crossing the room with a proprietorial air. ‘We must get this damn thing out of the way, so that we can open the door into my room.’

  He tried to move the wardrobe, grunted and staggered back helplessly.

  ‘Let me do it,’ Ganin suggested cheerfully. Thrusting the black wallet into his pocket he stood up, walked over to the wardrobe and spat on his hands.

  14

  The black trains roared past, shaking the windows of the house; with a movement like ghostly shoulders shaking off a load, heaving mountains of smoke swept upward, blotting out the night sky. The roofs burned with a smooth metallic blaze in the moonlight; and a sonorous black shadow under the iron bridge awoke as a black train rumbled across it, sending a chain of light flickering down its length. The clattering roar and mass of smoke seemed to pass right through the house as it quivered between the chasm where the rail tracks lay like lines drawn by a moonlit fingernail and the street where it was crossed by the flat bridge waiting for the next regular thunder of railway carriages. The house was like a specter you could put your hand through and wriggle your fingers.

  Standing at the window of the dancers’ room, Ganin looked out onto the street: the asphalt gleamed dully, black foreshortened people walked hither and thither, disappearing into shadows and re-emerging in the slanting light reflected from shop windows. In an uncurtained window of the house opposite, sparkling glass and gilded frames could be seen in the bright amber gap. Then an elegant black shadow pulled down the blinds.

  G
anin turned around. Kolin handed him a quivering glassful of vodka.

  The room was lit by a somewhat pale unearthly light, because the ingenious dancers had shrouded the lamp in a scrap of mauve silk. On the table, in the middle of the room, bottles gave off a violet-colored gleam, oil glistened in open sardine tins, there were chocolates in silver wrappings, a mosaic of sausage slices, glazed meat patties.

  Sitting at the table were Podtyagin, pale and morose, with beads of sweat on his large forehead; Alfyorov, sporting a brand new shot-silk tie; Klara in her eternal black dress, languid and flushed from drinking cheap orange liqueur.

  Gornotsvetov, without a jacket and wearing a soiled silk shirt with an open collar, was sitting on the edge of the bed tuning a guitar which he had somehow obtained. Kolin kept constantly on the move pouring out vodka, liqueurs, pale Rhine wine, his fat hips wriggling comically while his trim torso, gripped by a tight blue jacket, remained almost motionless as he moved.

  ‘What — not drinking?’ he pouted, asking the conventional reproachful question as he raised his melting glance to Ganin.

  ‘Yes — why not?’ said Ganin, sitting down on the window ledge and taking the light, cold wineglass from the dancer’s trembling hand. Tossing it down, he glanced round the people sitting at the table. All were silent — even Alfyorov who was much too excited by the fact that in eight or nine hours’ time his wife would arrive.

  ‘The guitar’s in tune,’ said Gornotsvetov as he adjusted a key and plucked the string. He struck a chord, then damped the twanging sound with his palm.

  ‘Why aren’t you singing, gentlemen? In Klara’s honor. Come along now. “Like a fragrant flower —”’

  Grinning at Klara and raising his glass with mock gallantry, Alfyorov leaned backward in his chair — at which he nearly fell over, as it was a revolving stool without a back — and made an effort to sing in a false, affected little tenor, but no one else joined in.