Mary (11 page)

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.

twelve

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 happiness 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.”

“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.”

thirteen

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
and above the letter
for clarity; the final letter of each word tailed off in an impetuous flick to the right; only in the letter
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.