“The last time it was a room-to-room telephone,” said Martin, making a face: installing the telephone was boring, and when somebody finally did install it, running it from the nursery to his mother’s room, it never worked well, then broke down altogether, and was abandoned, along with other previous gifts from Uncle, such as The Swiss Family Robinson, for instance, which was extremely dull after the real Robinson Crusoe, or the little tin freight cars, which had provoked secret tears of disappointment, for Martin liked only passenger trains.
“Why are you grimacing?” asked Sofia.
He explained, and she said with a laugh, “That’s true, that’s true,” and stopped to think for a moment about Martin’s childhood, about irretrievable, ineffable things, and there was a heartrending charm about this reverie: how quickly everything passes! … Just think—has begun to shave, has clean nails, that smart lilac necktie, that woman. “That woman is very sweet, of course,” said Sofia, “but don’t you think she’s just a little too lively? You shouldn’t get carried away like this. Tell me—no, I prefer not to ask you anything. Only they say she was a terrible flirt in St. Petersburg. And don’t tell me you really like her poetry? That female demonism? She has such an affected way of reciting verse. Is it true you’ve reached the point of—I don’t know, of holding hands, or something like that?”
Martin smiled enigmatically.
“I’m sure there’s nothing between you,” Sofia said slyly, considering with love the twinkling, equally sly eyes of her son. “I’m certain there is nothing. You aren’t old enough yet.”
Martin laughed, she pulled him close, and planted a juicy, greedy kiss on his cheek. All this was taking place at a garden table on the terrace before the hotel, early in the morning. The day promised to be lovely; the cloudless sky still had a hazy cast, as a sheet of gauze paper sometimes covers an exceptionally vivid frontispiece in an expensive edition of fairy tales. Martin carefully removed this translucent sheet, and there, down the white steps, swinging her low hips ever so slightly, wearing a bright-blue skirt across which an orderly ripple ran back and forth as, stepping down with calculated unhurriedness, first one foot and then the other extended the tip of its polished shoe, rhythmically balancing her brocaded handbag and already smiling, her hair parted on one side, came a limpid-eyed, slender-necked woman with large black earrings that also swung in rhythm with her descent. Martin went to meet her, kissed her hand, stepped back, and she, laughing and trilling her “r’s,” greeted Sofia, who sat in a wicker armchair smoking a thick English cigarette, her first after morning coffee.
“You were sleeping so prettily, Alla, that I didn’t want to wake you,” said Sofia, her long, enameled cigarette holder held at a distance and glancing out of the corner of her eye at Martin, who now sat on the balustrade, swinging his legs. Bubbling over with excitement Alla began recounting the dreams she had seen last night, marvelous marble dreams with priests of ancient Greece, whose capacity to appear in dreams Sofia strongly doubted. And the freshly watered gravel glistened moistly.
Martin’s curiosity grew. The rambles on the beach, and the kisses that anyone could spy on began to seem too lengthy a foreword; at the same time his desire for the main text was mixed with anxiety: Martin failed to imagine certain details, and his inexperience alarmed him. The unforgettable day on which Alla said that she was not made of wood, that he must not caress her like that, and that after lunch, when her husband was safely away in the city, and Sofia was enjoying her siesta, she would slip into Martin’s room to show him somebody’s poems—that day was the very same one that opened with the conversation about Uncle Henry and the room-to-room telephone. When, later in Switzerland, Uncle Henry gave Martin a black statuette (a soccer player dribbling the ball) for his birthday, Martin could not understand why, at the very instant his uncle placed that useless object on the table, he pictured with astounding clarity a distant, tender morning in Greece with Alla descending the white stairs. Right after dinner he had gone to his room and begun to wait. Chernosvitov’s shaving brush he hid behind the mirror: somehow its presence encumbered him. From the courtyard came the clang of water pails, the splashing of water, and the sound of guttural speech. The yellow window curtain swelled mellowly, and a spot of sunlight changed its shape on the floor. Instead of circles the flies described parallelograms and trapezoids around the shaft of the ceiling lamp, settling every now and then on the brass. He took off his jacket and collar, lay down supine on the couch, and communed with the thump of his heart. When he heard her light footfalls and the knock on his door, something seemed to snap in the pit of his stomach. “Look, I’ve brought a whole batch,” said Alla in a conniving whisper, but at the moment Martin could not care less about verse. “What a wild boy, goodness, what a wild boy,” she kept whispering as she helped him discreetly. Martin hurried, pursued rapture, overtook it, and she covered his mouth with her hand, saying under her breath “Sh, sh—the people next door …”
“This, at least, is a little object that will stay with you always,” said Uncle Henry in a clear voice, and leaned back, openly admiring the statuette. “At eighteen a person must already think about decorating his future study and, since you’re fond of English games——”
“It’s beautiful,” said Martin, not wishing to hurt his uncle, and ran his fingers over the motionless ball at the tip of the player’s boot.
Around the wooden chalet grew dense firs; fog hid the mountains. Hot, tawny Greece was indeed left far behind. But how vibrant the emotion of that proud, festive day: I have a mistress! What a conspiratorial air the blue couch had had later that evening! At bedtime Chernosvitov as usual scratched his shoulder blades, assumed weary attitudes, then creaked in the dark, requested that winds should not go free, and at last snored, whistling through his nose, while Martin thought, ah, if only he knew.… And then, one day, when by all rights her husband ought to have been in the city, and in his and Martin’s room Alla was rearranging her dress (having already “taken a peek into paradise,” as she put it), while Martin, sweaty and disheveled, was searching for a cufflink dropped in that same paradise, suddenly, with a powerful nudge at the door, Chernosvitov came in and said, “So that’s where you are, my dear. I forgot, of course, to take Spiridonov’s letter with me. Fine muddle that would have been.”
Alla ran her hand over her wrinkled skirt and asked with a frown, “Has he signed yet?”
“That old bastard Bernstein keeps dawdling,” said Chernosvitov, digging in a suitcase. “If they want to delay payment, they can damn well get out of the mess by themselves, the swine.”
“Don’t forget the postponement, that’s the main thing,” said Alla. “Well, have you found it?”
“Damn his mother to mucking hell,” muttered Chernosvitov, rummaging through some envelopes. “It’s got to be here. It can’t have got lost, after all.”
“If it is lost, then the whole thing has fallen through,” she said with displeasure.
“Dawdling, dawdling,” muttered Chernosvitov. “That’s no way to do business. It’s enough to drive you nuts. I’ll be very glad if Spiridonov refuses.”
“Now, don’t you get upset like that, it’ll turn up,” said Alla, but she, too, was visibly disturbed.
“Here it is, thank heavens!” cried Chernosvitov, and scanned the paper he had found, while his jaw hung loose with concentration.
“Don’t forget to mention the postponement,” Alla reminded him.
“Righto,” said Chernosvitov and hurried out of the room.
This business conversation left Martin somewhat perplexed. Neither husband nor wife had pretended: they had really quite forgotten that he was present, absorbed as they were by their problems. Alla, however, immediately resumed her previous mood, joked about the inefficiency of Greek door locks that opened all by themselves, and shrugged off Martin’s alarmed question, “Oh, don’t worry, he didn’t notice anything.” That night Martin could not get to sleep for a long time, and, with the same perplexity, kept listening to
the complacent snoring. When, three days later, he sailed with his mother for Marseille, the Chernosvitovs came to see them off at Piraeus; they stood on the pier, arm in arm, and Alla was smiling and waving a mimosa branch. The day before, though, she had shed a tear or two.
10
Upon her, upon that frontispiece, which, after the removal of the gauze paper, had proved to be a little coarse, a little too gaudy, Martin replaced the haze and through it the colors reassumed their mysterious charm.
Then, on the big transatlantic liner, where everything was clean, polished, and spacious, which had a store selling toilet articles, a picture gallery, and a barber shop, and whose passengers danced the two-step and the fox-trot at night on the deck, he thought with rapt nostalgia about that amiable woman, with the touchingly hollow chest and the clear eyes, and about the way her fragile frame crunched in his embrace, causing her to say softly, “Ouch, you’ll break me.” Meanwhile Africa drew close, the purple strip of Sicily passed by on the northern horizon, then the ship glided between Corsica and Sardinia, and all these patterns of torrid land that existed somewhere around, somewhere near, but passed by unseen, captivated Martin with their disembodied presence. During the night journey from Marseille to Switzerland he thought he recognized his beloved lights among the hills, and, even though it was no longer a train de luxe but a plain express, jolty, dark, grimy with coal dust, the magic was strong as ever: those lights, those wails in the night. From Lausanne they drove by car to the chalet situated about a thousand meters higher in the mountains and Martin, who was sitting beside the chauffeur, every now and then would look back smiling at his mother and uncle, who both wore large motoring goggles and both held their hands in their laps clasped the same way. Henry Edelweiss had remained a bachelor, wore a bushy mustache, and certain intonations of his, and his way of fiddling with a toothpick or a nail file, reminded Martin of his father. On greeting Sofia at the Lausanne station Uncle Henry broke into tears, covering his face with his hand, but later, in the restaurant, he calmed down and, in his somewhat pompous French, began talking about Russia and his trips there in the past. “How fortunate,” he said to Sofia, “how very fortunate that your parents did not live to see that terrible revolution. I remember perfectly the old princess, with her white hair. How fond she was of poor, poor Serge,” and, at the recollection of his cousin, azure tears again welled in Henry’s eyes.
“Yes, my mother was fond of him, it’s true,” said Sofia, “but then she was fond of everybody and everything. But tell me, how do you find Martin,” she hastily continued, trying to take Henry’s mind off melancholy subjects, which, in his soft-mustached mouth, took on a shade of unbearable sentimentality.
“Yes, yes, he looks like him,” nodded Henry. “The same forehead, the same fine——”
“But hasn’t he grown up?” quickly interrupted Sofia. “And, you know, he has already been in love, passionately——”
Uncle Henry passed on to political matters. “That revolution,” he asked rhetorically, “how long can it last? Yes, nobody knows. Poor, beautiful Russia is perishing. Perhaps the firm hand of a dictator will put an end to the excesses. But many beautiful things—your lands, your devastated lands, your country mansion, burned down by the rascally mob—to all that you can bid adieu.”
“How much does a pair of skis cost here?” asked Martin.
“I don’t know,” replied Uncle Henry with a sigh. “I have never indulged in that English sport. By the way, you speak French with a British accent. That is bad. We’ll have to change all that.”
“He’s forgotten a lot,” Sofia interceded for her son. “The last few years Mlle. Planche no longer gave him lessons.”
“Dead,” said Uncle Henry with feeling. “One more death.”
“No, no,” smiled Sofia. “Whatever gave you that idea? She married a Finn and is living peacefully in Vyborg.”
“In any case this is all very sad,” said Uncle Henry. “I wanted so much for Serge to come here with you one day. But one never obtains what one longs for, and God alone knows what is to come. If you have assuaged your hunger and are sure you don’t want anything more, we can start.”
The road was brightly sunlit and had many turns; a wall of rock with thorny bushes blooming in its cracks rose on the right, while on the left there was a precipice and a valley where water in crescents of foam ran down over ledges; then came dark conifers clustering in close ranks now on one side, now on the other; mountains loomed all around, imperceptibly changing position; they were greenish with streaks of snow; grayer ones looked out from behind their shoulders, and far beyond there were giants of an opaque violet whiteness, and these never moved, and the sky above them seemed faded in comparison with the bright-blue patches between the tops of the black firs under which the car passed. Suddenly, with a sensation still new to him, Martin remembered the dense fir fringe of their park in Russia as seen through a lozenge of blue glass on the veranda. And when, stretching his slightly vibrating legs and feeling a transparent humming in his head, he got out of the car, he was struck by the fresh rough smell of earth and melting snow, and by the rustic beauty of his uncle’s house. It stood by itself half a kilometer from the nearest hamlet, and the top balcony offered one of those marvelous views that are even frightening in their airy perfection. The same Russian vernal blue sky looked into the window of the neat little WC, with its odor of wood and resin. All around, in the garden with its bare, black platbands and white apple bloom, and in the fir forest right behind the orchard, and on the dirt road leading to the village, there was a cool, happy silence, a silence that knew something, and Martin felt a little dizzy, perhaps from this silence, perhaps from the smells, or perhaps from the newfound blissful immobility after the three-hour drive.
In this chalet Martin lived until late fall. It was presumed that he would enter the University of Geneva that very winter; however, after a lively exchange of letters with friends in England, Sofia sent him to Cambridge. Uncle Henry did not immediately reconcile himself to this: he disliked the English, whom he considered a cold, perfidious nation. On the other hand the thought of the expenses the famous university required not only did not sadden him, but, on the contrary, was tempting. Fond as he was of economizing on trifles, clenching a penny in his left hand, he willingly wrote large checks with the right, especially when the expense was an honorable one. Sometimes, rather touchingly, he would feign eccentric pigheadedness, slapping the table with his palm, puffing out his mustache, and shouting, “If I do it, I do it because it gives me pleasure!” With a sigh Sofia would slip the bracelet watch from Geneva on her wrist, while moist-eyed Henry would dig in his pocket for a voluminous handkerchief, trumpet once, twice, and then smooth his mustache to the right and to the left.
With the onset of summer the cross-marked sheep were herded higher into the mountains. A babbling metallic tinkling, of unknown origin and from an unknown direction, would gradually become audible. Floating nearer, it enveloped the listener, giving him an odd tickling sensation in the mouth. Then, in a cloud of dust, came flowing a gray, curly, tightly packed mass of sheep rubbing against each other, and the moist, hollow tinkle of the bells, which delighted all of one’s senses, mounted, swelled so mysteriously that the dust itself seemed to be ringing as it billowed above the moving backs of the sheep. From time to time one of them would get separated from the rest and trot past, whereupon a shaggy dog would drive it back into the flock; and behind, gently treading, walked the shepherd. Then the tintinnabulation would change timbre, and once more grow hollower and softer, but for a long time it would hang in the air together with the dust. “Nice, nice!” murmured Martin to himself, hearing the tinkle out to the end, and continued on his favorite walk, which began with a country lane and forest trails. The fir grove abruptly thinned out, lush green meadows appeared, and the stony path sloped down between hawthorn hedges. Occasionally a cow with wet pink nose would stop on its way up in front of him, twitch its tail and with a lurch of the head move on. Beh
ind the cow came a spry little old woman with a stick, who glanced malevolently at Martin. Further down, surrounded by poplars and maples, stood a large white hotel, whose owner was a distant relative of Henry Edelweiss.
In the course of that summer Martin grew still sturdier, his shoulders broadened, and his voice acquired an even, deep tone. At the same time he was in a state of inner confusion, and feelings he did not quite understand were evoked by such things as the country coolness of the rooms, so keenly perceptible after the outdoor heat; a fat bumblebee knocking against the ceiling with a chagrined droning; the paws of the fir trees against the blue of the sky; or the firm brown bolete found at the edge of the forest. The imminent journey to England excited and gladdened him. His memory of Alla Chernosvitov had reached its ultimate perfection, and he would say to himself that he had not sufficiently appreciated the happy days in Greece. The thirst she had quenched, only to intensify it, so tormented him during that alpine summer that at night he could not go to sleep for a long time, imagining, among numerous adventures, all the girls awaiting him in the dawning cities, and occasionally he would repeat aloud some feminine name—Isabella, Nina, Margarita—a name still cold and untenanted, a vacant, echoing house, whose mistress was slow to take up residence; and he would try to guess which of these names would suddenly come alive, becoming so alive and familiar that he would never again be able to pronounce it as mysteriously as now.
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