Mary (10 page)
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 family 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.
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.
ten
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.”
eleven
On Friday morning the dancers sent round the following note to the other four lodgers:
Because:
- Mr. Ganin is leaving us.
- Mr. Podtyagin is preparing to leave.
- Mr. Alfyorov’s wife is arriving tomorrow.
- Mlle. Klara is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday
and - 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.