“What fun to stare when a great big bear”—and Sonia echoed Vadim, who had long since become chummy with her (but prudently omitted the punch line after “tiny bitch”)—“vedyot za ruchku malen’kuyu suchku,” while Teddy, who did not understand Russian, cocked his head to inquire, “What does ‘malenxus’ mean?”
Whereupon everybody laughed, and no one would explain, and he began addressing Sonia thus, “Have some more peas, malenxus.”
“Jittery, jittery?” Vadim asked Martin.
“Don’t be silly,” replied Martin. “I didn’t sleep well last night and that means muffing today. They have three international-class players, and we have only two.”
“Can’t stand soccer,” declared Teddy. Darwin upheld him. Both were Etonians, and Eton had its own special ball game in place of soccer.
26
Martin was in fact jittery, and considerably so. He kept goal for Trinity; his team, after a keen struggle, had reached the finals, and that day was to meet St. John’s for the Cambridge University championship. Martin was proud that he, a foreigner, had made the first team, and, for his brilliant play, had qualified for the title of College Blue entitling him to wear a splendid light-blue blazer. He would now recollect with pleasant amazement his childhood days in Russia when, curled up in a soft hollow of the nursery night, and having abandoned himself to reveries that would imperceptibly bear him off into sleep, he would see himself as a crack footballer. It was enough for him to close his eyes and picture a soccer field or, say, the long, brown, diaphragm-joined cars of an express that he was driving himself, and his mind would gradually catch the rhythm, grow blissfully serene, be cleansed, as it were, and, sleek and oiled, slip into oblivion. Instead of a train, going full tilt (gliding through bright-yellow birch forests, then above foreign cities, across bridges that spanned streets, and on, southward, through tunnels which had their own sudden daybreak, and along the shore of a dazzling sea), it might be an airplane, a race car, a bobsleigh, taking a sharp turn in a whirl of flying snow, or else simply a forest path along which you run and run. As he reminisced, Martin noted a certain peculiarity about his life: the property that his reveries had of crystallizing and mutating into reality, as previously they had mutated into sleep. This seemed to him a guarantee that the new series of reveries he had recently evolved—about an illegal, clandestine expedition—would also grow solid and be filled with life, as his dreams about soccer matches had grown solid and incarnate, those dreams in which he used to luxuriate so lengthily, so artfully, when, afraid to reach the delicious essence too quickly, he would dwell in detail on the pregame preparations—pulling on the stockings with the colored tops, putting on the black shorts, tying the laces of the robust boots.
He grunted and unbent. It was warm changing near his fireplace, and this helped in a way to dilute the tremor of his excitement. The celestial blazer buttoned snugly over the white V-necked sweater. How worn were his goalkeeper’s gloves! There; he was ready. His clothes lay all around where he had discarded them. He gathered everything up and carried it into the bedroom. Compared with the warmth of the woolen sweater his bare-kneed legs felt wonderfully cool in their roomy, light shorts. “Whew!” he said as he entered Darwin’s room, “you can’t say I didn’t change fast.”
“Let’s go,” said Sonia, getting up from the sofa.
Teddy gave her a beseeching look. “I beg a thousand pardons,” he implored, “but, believe me, I can’t come with you, I am expected elsewhere.”
He left. Vadim also left, promising to cycle over to the playing fields later.
“Maybe it really isn’t so interesting after all,” said Sonia, addressing Darwin. “Perhaps we might as well not go?”
“No, no, we’ll go by all means,” said Darwin with a smile, giving Martin a squeeze on the shoulder. As the three of them set out along the street, Martin noticed that Sonia never looked at him once, and yet this was the first time he had appeared before her in soccer array.
“Let’s walk a little faster,” he said, “or else we may be late.”
“No great harm in that,” said Sonia, stopping in front of a shop window.
“All right, I’ll go on ahead,” said Martin and, thumping firmly with the rubber cleats of his boots, took a short cut through an alley and strode off toward the pitch.
Quite a lot of spectators had turned out, owing partly to the fine day, with its pale-blue wintry sky and brisk air. Martin went on into the pavilion, where the other players had already gathered. Armstrong, the team captain, a lanky fellow with a clipped mustache, smiled shyly as he told Martin for the hundredth time that he ought to wear knee guards. A moment later all eleven players trotted single-file out of the pavilion, and Martin felt a beloved blend of impressions: the sharp smell of the damp turf, its resilience underfoot, thousands of people in the stands, the black bare spot in front of the goal, and the thud of the ball kicked around by the other team. The referee brought out and placed within the white circle of the field’s hub a brand-new light-yellow ball. The players got into position and the whistle blew. At that instant Martin’s nervousness vanished and, calmly leaning against the left upright, he glanced around in search of Darwin and Sonia. The action was taking place at the opposite end of the pitch, and he could revel in the cold air, in the mat green of the turf, in the chatter of the people standing just behind the goal net, and the glory of feeling that his boyhood dream had come true, that the red-haired chap over there, the St. John’s captain, who was receiving and passing the ball with such exquisite accuracy, had recently played against Scotland, and that there was somebody in the crowd for whom it was worth making a special effort. In childhood years sleep would overtake him just in those opening minutes of the game, for Martin would get so engrossed in the details of the preface that he never got to the main part of the text. Thus he would protract the delight, postponing to another, less sleepy night the game itself, bright and swift, with the pounding of feet getting closer and now he could hear the panting of the attack as the redhead broke loose—and there he came, his shock of hair bobbing, and then his fabled toe drove the ball whistling just above the ground toward the corner of the goal, but the custodian with a full-length dive succeeded in stopping that bolt, and now the ball was already in his hands and, eluding the nearest opponents, Martin sent it, with all the force of his thigh and calf, in a resounding punt that curved over the field to the roar of the stands.
During the short half-time interval the players sprawled on the ground, sucking on lemons, and when the teams changed goals, Martin, from his new position, tried again to make out Sonia and Darwin in the crowd. There was not much time for gawking, though, for the play immediately grew heated, and he constantly had to crouch on the alert. Several times, all doubled over, he caught cannonballs; several times he fisted high shots away; and thus he kept his goal virgin to the end of the game, smiling with joy when, a second before the final whistle, the opposing goalie fumbled the slippery ball, whereupon Armstrong promptly tapped it into the net.
Everything was over, the spectators flooded the field, and still he was unable to spot Sonia and Darwin. Somewhere beyond the grandstand, among the departing crowds, he noticed Vadim on his bike, weaving cautiously and tooting with his lips. “They decamped quite a while ago,” he said in answer to Martin’s question, “right after half-time, and, you know——” here followed some quip about Darwin which Martin, however, did not hear to the end, as at that moment Philpott, one of his teammates, squeezed by on a chugging red motorcycle and offered him a lift. Martin got on behind and Philpott accelerated. “Might as well not have managed to turn that last one over the bar,” thought Martin, wrinkling his face against the motley wind. He felt depressed and bitter, and when he had dismounted at the corner of his lane and was walking home, he ruminated with revulsion over the preceding day and Rose’s craftiness, and felt even more hurt. “They must be having tea somewhere,” he muttered, but just in case looked into Darwin’s room. Sonia was reclining on the
couch, and at the moment he entered, her hand went up in a clutching flick, trying to catch a clothes moth as it flew past.
“And Darwin?” asked Martin.
“Alive. Went out for some pastries,” she answered, malevolently following with her eyes the uncaught, whitish speck.
“Shame you didn’t stay to the end,” said Martin, sinking into the abyss of an armchair. “We won. One to nothing.”
“You ought to wash up,” she remarked. “Just look at your knees. They’re a sight! And you’ve tracked something black in here.”
“All right. Just let me recover my breath.” He breathed deeply several times and got up with a tired grunt.
“Wait a minute,” said Sonia. “You’ve got to hear this, you’ll die laughing. He just offered me his hand and heart. Of course, I knew it would happen—kept ripening and finally burst.” She stretched and glanced darkly at Martin, whose eyebrows had gone up. “Intelligent expression you have,” she said, and, looking away, she continued, “I simply don’t understand what he expected. Very nice chap, etcetera, but a log, a log of real English oak. I’d die of boredom in a week. There it is, flying around again, that moth.”
Martin cleared his throat and said, “I don’t believe you. I know you said yes.”
“You’re crazy!” shouted Sonia, sitting up and slapping the couch with both hands. “How can you imagine such a thing?”
“Darwin is intelligent, perceptive, anything but a log,” Martin said in a strained voice.
She gave the couch another blow. “But he isn’t a real person—can’t you see that, you idiot? This is getting downright insulting. He’s not a person, but a dummy. Nothing inside except heaps of humor. That’s just fine for going to a dance, but, in the long run, humor can get pretty exasperating.”
“He’s a writer, connoisseurs are raving about his stories,” murmured Martin with an effort, and decided that now he had done his duty, had tried enough to convince her, and that there was a limit to noble behavior.
“Exactly, exactly—for connoisseurs only! Very charming, very well written, but all so superficial, so comfortable, so——”
Here Martin felt the rush of a radiant torrent that had burst through the locks, he remembered the tricky cross he had collected so nicely, remembered that the Rose business was settled, that there was a banquet at the club that evening, that he was healthy and strong, that tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and for many, many days more life would go on, replete with all kinds of happiness. All this overwhelmed him in one dizzy instant, and he merrily seized Sonia in his arms together with the cushion she had clutched at, and started kissing her moist teeth, her eyes, her cold nose, and she struggled, and kicked, and her black, violet-scented hair kept getting in his mouth; at last, laughing loudly, he dropped her on the sofa. Here the door was pushed open. At first a foot appeared, then, laden with goodies, Darwin entered. He tried to close the door with his foot but dropped a paper sack out of which tumbled meringues.
“Martin’s been throwing cushions,” said Sonia in a plaintive, breathless voice. “One to nothing is not so grand after all, why behave like a madman?”
27
Next day both Martin and Darwin had an armpit temperature of 100.5° Fahr., aches and pains, sore throats, and a singing in the ears: all the symptoms of flu. Pleasant as it might be to think that the agent of contagion had probably been Sonia, both of them felt rotten, and Darwin, who steadfastly refused to stay in bed, looked, in his colorful dressing gown, like a heavyweight boxer, all red and disheveled after a long fight. Vadim, heroically disdaining contagion, brought medicines, while Martin, who had thrown a laprobe and his winter coat (neither of which did much to allay his chills) on top of his blanket, lay in bed with a scowl on his face, and, in every pattern, in every relationship between chance objects, spots, or shadows, saw human profiles—snoutish mugs, Bourbon noses, Negroid pouts: one wonders why fever specializes so assiduously in drawing rather vulgar caricatures. He would doze off, and immediately be dancing the fox-trot with a skeleton, which, as it danced, began coming unscrewed and losing bones, and he had to snatch them up and hold them in place, at least until the end of that dance; or else he had to take an outrageous examination, quite different from the one Martin had really to take a few months later, in May. In the dream test he was offered monstrous problems with large iron X’s wrapped in cotton wool, while in the real one, in a spacious hall intersected by a dusty sunbeam, philology students had to knock off three compositions in one hour, and Martin, glancing now and then at the wall clock, wrote in his large, round hand about Ivan the Terrible’s Gangmen, about Baratynski, about Peter the First’s reforms, about Loris-Melikov.
His life at Cambridge was nearing its end, and something of a radiant apotheosis attended the final days; while awaiting examination results you could bask all afternoon in the sun, lying on cushions as you floated languidly down the Cam under the majestic auspices of the pink chestnut trees. That spring Sonia moved with her family to Berlin, where Zilanov had begun editing a Russian-language weekly, and now Martin, supine under the softly progressing branches, recalled his last trip to London. Darwin had not wanted to come; he indolently asked to have regards transmitted to Sonia, wiggled his fingers in the air, and plunged back in his book. When Martin arrived, the Zilanovs’ house was in that dreary state of havoc that is so hateful to elderly, homey dogs—fat dachshunds, for instance. The maid and a tousled-haired youth with a cigarette behind his ear were carrying a trunk downstairs. A tearful Irina sat alone in the living room, biting her nails and thinking impenetrable thoughts. Some glass object fell and broke in one of the bedrooms, and the phone in the study rang in immediate response but nobody paid any attention to it. In the dining room a plate, covered by another, meekly waited, but what food it contained remained a mystery. Zilanov arrived from somewhere, wearing a black overcoat despite the warm weather, and sat down to write as coolly as if it were an ordinary day. A confirmed nomad, he evidently did not care in the least that in an hour it would be time to leave for the station, and that a crate of books, still to be nailed shut, stood in a corner; he just sat and wrote, in a current of air that stirred shreds of excelsior and the sheets of old newspapers. Sonia was standing in the middle of her room, her hands pressed to her temples, her moody gaze shuttling between a large package and a suitcase that was already full. Martin sat on the low windowledge smoking. Several times either her mother or her aunt came in, looked for something, failed to find it, and went out. “Are you glad to be going to Berlin?” Martin gloomily asked, considering his cigarette, with its excrescence of ash that resembled lichened fir foliage with an ominous sunset showing through.
“I don’t care,” said Sonia, gauging mentally whether the suitcase would shut.
“Sonia,” said Martin a minute later.
“What? What is it?” she muttered, coming out of her trance, and suddenly began fussing fast, planning to take the suitcase by surprise, with a sudden onslaught.
“Sonia,” said Martin, “is it really true——” Her aunt came in, looked into a corner, and, replying negatively to somebody in the corridor, went out hurriedly without closing the door.
“Can it really be true,” said Martin, “that we’ll never see each other again?”
“That’s for God to decide,” replied Sonia absently.
“Sonia,” Martin began again. She glanced at him with a grimace (or was it a smile?).
“You know,” she said, “he sent back all my letters, all the photos, everything. Funny chap. He could have kept those letters. I spent half an hour ripping them up and flushing them down, and now the toilet’s clogged.”
“You didn’t behave well with him,” grimly said Martin. “You can’t build up a person’s hopes and then turn him down.”
“You keep out,” cried Sonia with a little squeal in her voice. “Hopes of what? How dare you talk about hopes? What vulgarity, what filth! And, in general, why don’t you stop pestering me? Try to sit on this bag instead,”
she added, one tone lower in pitch. Martin sat down on the lid and pressed hard.
“Won’t shut,” he said hoarsely. “And I don’t know why you have to fly into a rage like that. I just wanted to say——”
At that point something clicked reluctantly and, without giving the suitcase time to collect itself, Sonia turned the little key in its lock. “Everything’s fine now,” she said. “Come over here, Martin. Let’s have a heart-to-heart talk.”
Zilanov peeked into the room. “Where’s Mother?” he asked. “Didn’t I say to leave my desk alone? Now the ashtray has disappeared, it had two stamps in it.”
When he was gone, Martin took Sonia’s hand in both of his, squeezed it between his palms, and heaved a melancholy sigh.
“You’re a very sweet boy after all,” said Sonia. “We’ll write to each other, and maybe some time you’ll come to Berlin, or perhaps some day we’ll meet in Russia—won’t that be fun?”
Martin kept shaking his head and felt the tears welling. Sonia snatched her hand away. “Oh well, if you want to sulk,” she said crossly, “do by all means, to your heart’s content.”
“Ah, Sonia,” he uttered sorrowfully.
“Just exactly what is it you want from me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. “Please tell me, what is it you want from me?” Martin turned his head away and shrugged.
“Listen,” she said, “it’s time to go down, time to leave, and your moping only exasperates me. For goodness’ sake, why can’t we keep everything nice and simple?”
“You’ll get married in Berlin,” Martin mumbled hopelessly. As in a farce the maid dashed in and took the suitcase. Mrs. Zilanov, already hatted, appeared behind her,
“Time to go, time to go,” she said. “You took everything in here? Didn’t forget anything? This is dreadful,” she addressed Martin. “We had planned on a leisurely departure tomorrow.”
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