Mary (7 page)

The opera bass from Petersburg, a gaunt man with a face like a horse, gave forth a cavernal boom; the village school choir, obedient to the melodious flick of a tuning fork, joined in with the refrain.

Amid the hot yellow glare, amid the sounds that took on visible form in the folds of crimson and silvery headscarves, fluttering eyelashes, black shadows on the roof beams shifting whenever there was a puff of the night breeze, amid all this glitter and popular music, among all the heads and shoulders in the large, crowded barn, Ganin saw only one thing: he stared ahead at a brown tress tied with a black bow, slightly frayed at the edges, and his eyes caressed the dark, smooth, girlish sheen of the hair at her temple. Whenever she turned her face sideways to give the girl sitting beside her one of her
rapid smiling glances, he could also see the strong color in her cheek, the corner of a flashing, Tartar eye, the delicate curve of her nostril alternately stretching and tightening as she laughed. Later, when the concert was over, the Petersburg bass was driven away in the local mill owner’s huge car which cast a mysterious light over the grass and then, with a sweep of its beam, dazzled a sleeping birch tree and the footbridge over a brook; and when the crowd of fair vacationists, in a festive flutter of white frocks, drifted away through the blue darkness across the dew-laden clover, and someone lit a cigarette in the dark, holding the flaring match to his face in cupped hands—Ganin, in a state of lonely excitement, walked home, the spokes of his bicycle clicking faintly as he pushed it by the saddle.

In one wing of the manor house, between the larder and the housekeeper’s room, there was a spacious old-fashioned water closet; its window gave onto a neglected part of the garden where in the shade of an iron roof a pair of black wheels surmounted a well, and a wooden water trough ran over the ground between the bare, winding roots of three huge bushy poplars. The window was decorated by a stained-glass knight with a square beard and mighty calves, and he glowed strangely in the dim light of a paraffin lamp with a tin reflector which hung beside the heavy velvet cord. You pulled the cord and from the mysterious depths of the oaken throne there would come a watery rumbling and hollow gurgles. Ganin flung open the casement and installed himself, feet and all, on the window ledge; the velvet cord swung gently and the starry sky between the black poplars made you want to heave a deep sigh. And that moment, when he sat on the window ledge of that lugubrious lavatory, and thought how he would probably never, never get to know the girl with the black bow on the nape of her delicate neck, and waited in vain for a nightingale to start trilling in the poplars as in a poem by Fet—that moment Ganin now rightly
regarded as the highest and most important point in his whole life.

He could not remember when it was he saw her next, whether it was the following day or a week later. At sunset, before evening tea, he had swung himself onto the wedge of sprung leather, had bent forward over the handlebars and ridden off straight into the western glow. He always chose the same circular route, through two hamlets divided by a pine wood, and then along the highway, between fields and back home through the big village of Voskresensk which lay on the river Oredezh, sung by Ryleev a century before. He knew the road by heart, now narrow and flat, with its compact margin running alongside a dangerous ditch, now paved with cobblestones which made his front wheel bounce, elsewhere scored with treacherous ruts, then smooth, pink and firm—he knew that road by feel and by sight, as one knows a living body, and he rode expertly along it, pressing resilient pedals into a rustling void.

The evening sun banded the rough trunks of a pine coppice with red fire; from dacha gardens came the knocking of croquet balls; midges kept getting into one’s mouth and eyes.

Occasionally on the highway he would stop by a little pyramid of roadbuilding stone above which a telegraph pole, its wood peeling in grayish strips, gave off a gentle, desolate hum. He would lean on his bicycle, looking across the fields at one of those forest fringes only found in Russia, remote, serrated, black, while above it the golden west was broken only by a single long lilac cloud from under which the rays spread out like a burning fan. And as he stared at the sky and listened to a cow mooing almost dreamily in a distant village, he tried to understand what it all meant—that sky, and the fields, and the humming telegraph pole; he felt that he was just on the point of understanding it when suddenly his head would start to spin and the lucid languor of the moment became intolerable.

He had no idea where he might meet her or overtake her, at what turn of the road, in this copse or the next. She lived in Voskresensk and would go out for a walk in the deserted sunny evening at exactly the same time as he. Ganin noticed her from a distance and at once felt a chill round his heart. She walked briskly, blue-skirted, her hands in the pockets of her blue serge jacket under which was a white blouse. As Ganin caught up with her, like a soft breeze, he saw only the folds of blue stuff stretching and rippling across her back, and the black silk bow like two outstretched wings. As he glided past he never looked into her face but pretended to be absorbed in cycling, although a minute earlier, imagining their meeting, he had sworn that he would smile at her and greet her. In those days he thought she must have some unusual, resounding name, and when he found out from the same student that she was called Mary he was not at all surprised, as though he had known it in advance—and that simple little name took on for him a new sound, an entrancing significance.

“Mary,” Ganin whispered, “Mary.” He took a deep breath and held it, listening to the beating of his heart. It was about three o’clock in the morning, the trains did not run, and as a result the house seemed to have come to a standstill. On the chair, its arms flung out like a man struck rigid in the middle of a prayer, there hung in the darkness the vague white shape of his cast-off shirt.

“Mary,” Ganin repeated again, trying to put into those two syllables all the music that they had once held—the wind, the humming of telegraph poles, the happiness—together with another, secret sound which gave that word its very life. He lay on his back and listened to his past. And presently from the next room came a low, gentle, intrusive tu-tu- tu-tu-: Alfyorov was looking forward to Saturday.

seven

On the morning of the following day, Wednesday, Erika’s rufous paw thrust itself into room April 2 and dropped a long mauve envelope onto the floor. With indifference Ganin recognized the big, sloping, very regular handwriting. The stamp had been stuck on upside down, and in one corner Erika’s fat thumb had left a greasy imprint. Perfume permeated the envelope, and it occurred to Ganin in passing that scenting a letter was like spraying perfume on one’s boots to cross the street. He filled his cheeks, blew out the air and pushed the unopened letter into his pocket. A few minutes later he took it out again, turned it around in his hands and threw it onto the table. Then he walked across the room a couple of times.

All the doors in the
pension
were open. The sounds of the morning housework mingled with the noise of the trains which took advantage of the drafts to rush through all the rooms. Ganin, who stayed at home in the mornings, generally swept up his own rubbish and made his bed. Now he suddenly realized that this was the second day that he had not cleaned up his room. He went out into the passage to look for a broom and a duster. Carrying a bucket, Lydia Nikolaevna scuttered past him like a mouse, and as she went by she asked, “Did Erika give you your letter?”

Ganin nodded in silence and picked up a long-handled brush that was lying on the oak chest. In the hall mirror he saw the reflection of the inside of Alfyorov’s room, the door of which was wide open. Inside that sunny room—the weather that day was heavenly—a slanting cone of radiant dust passed across the corner of the desk, and with agonizing clarity he imagined the photographs which had first been shown to him by Alfyorov and which later he had been examining alone with such excitement when Klara had disturbed him. In those photos Mary had been exactly as he remembered her, and now it was terrible to think that his past was lying in someone else’s desk.

The reflection in the mirror vanished with a slam as Lydia Nikolaevna, pattering down the corridor with her diminutive steps, pushed the door shut.

Floorbrush in hand, Ganin returned to his own room. On the table lay a mauve rectangle. By a rapid association of thought, evoked by that envelope and by the reflection of the desk in the mirror, he remembered those very old letters which he kept in a black wallet at the bottom of his suitcase, alongside the automatic pistol that he had brought with him from the Crimea.

He scooped up the long envelope from the table, pushed the window open wider with his elbow and with his strong fingers tore the letter crosswise, then tore up each portion and threw the scraps to the wind. Gleaming, the paper snowflakes flew into the sunlit abyss. One fragment fluttered onto the windowsill, and on it Ganin read a few mangled lines:

ourse, I can forg
ove. I only pra
hat you be hap

He flicked it off the windowsill into the yard smelling of coal and spring and wide-open spaces. Shrugging with relief, he started to tidy his room.

Then one after another he heard his fellow lodgers returning for lunch, heard Alfyorov laugh aloud and Podtyagin softly mutter something. And a little while later Erika appeared in the passage and gave the gong a despondent bang.

On his way to lunch he overtook Klara, who gave him a frightened look. And Ganin smiled such a beautiful, kind smile that Klara thought: “So what if he is a thief—there’s no one like him.” Ganin opened the door, she lowered her head and walked past him into the dining room. The others were already sitting at their places, and Lydia Nikolaevna, holding an enormous ladle in her tiny withered hand, was sadly pouring out soup.

Podtyagin had been unsuccessful again today; the old man really had no luck. The French had allowed him in, but the Germans for some reason would not let him out. Meanwhile he only had just enough money left to make the journey, and if that foul-up lasted for another week he would have to spend his money on subsistence and then it would not be enough to get him to Paris. As he consumed his soup he described with a cheerless and ponderous jocularity how he had been chased from one department to another, how he had been unable to explain what he wanted, and how finally a tired and exasperated official had bawled him out.

Ganin looked up and said, “Let me come with you tomorrow, Anton Sergeyevich. I have plenty of time to spare. I’ll help you to talk to them.”

His German was, indeed, good.

“Why, thank you,” Podtyagin replied, and he again noticed, as he had the day before, the unusual brightness of Ganin’s expression. “It’s enough to make one weep, you know. I spent two hours standing in a queue again and came back empty-handed. Thanks, Lyovushka.”

“I expect my wife will be having trouble too,” Alfyorov began. Something then happened to Ganin which had never happened to him before. He felt an intolerable blush slowly
suffusing his face and tickling his forehead, as if he had drunk too much vinegar. Coming to lunch it had not occurred to him that these people, the ghosts of his dream-life in exile, would talk about his real life—about Mary. With horror and shame he recalled that in his ignorance the day before yesterday at lunch he had laughed with the others at Alfyorov’s wife. And somebody might laugh again today.

“She’s very efficient, though,” Alfyorov was saying meanwhile. “She can stand up for herself. She knows how to look after herself, does my little wife.”

Kolin and Gornotsvetov exchanged looks and giggled. Silently, sullenly, Ganin rolled a bread-ball. He almost got up and went out, but mastered himself. Raising his head he made himself look at Alfyorov, and having looked, was amazed how Mary could have married that person with the sparse little beard and shiny, plump nose. And the thought that he was sitting beside the man who had caressed Mary, who knew the feel of her lips, her jokes, her laugh, her movements, and who was now waiting for her—the thought was terrible, but with it he also felt a certain thrilling pride as he recalled that it had been to him and not her husband that Mary had first surrendered her profound, unique fragrance.

After lunch he went for a walk, then climbed up onto the top deck of a bus. Down below the streets poured by, little black figures dashed around on the shiny sunlit asphalt, the bus swayed and thundered—and Ganin felt that this alien city passing before him was nothing but a moving picture. As he returned home he saw Podtyagin knocking on Klara’s door and Podtyagin too seemed to him a ghost, something extraneous and irrelevant.

“Our friend is in love with someone again.” Anton Sergeyevich nodded toward the door as he drank tea with Klara. “It’s not you, is it?”

Klara turned away; her ample bust rose and fell. She could
not believe it to be true; it frightened her, she was frightened by the Ganin who rifled other people’s desks, but she was nevertheless pleased by Podtyagin’s question.

“He’s not in love with you, is he, Klarochka?” he repeated, blowing on his tea and giving her a sidelong glance over his pince-nez.

“He broke it off with Lyudmila yesterday,” Klara said suddenly, feeling that she could reveal the secret to Podtyagin.

“I thought so,” the old man nodded, sipping with relish. “He wouldn’t be looking so radiant for nothing. Away with the old, on with the new. Did you hear what he suggested to me today? He’s coming with me to the police tomorrow.”

“I shall be seeing her this evening,” said Klara reflectively. “Poor girl. She sounded deathly on the telephone.”

Podtyagin sighed. “Ah, youth. That girl will get over it. No harm done. It’s all for the best. As for me, Klarochka, I shall die soon.”

“Good heavens, Anton Sergeyevich! What nonsense!”

“No, it’s not nonsense. I had another attack last night. At one moment my heart was in my mouth, at the next moment it was under the bed.”