“I hear”—crunch, creak—“that Gruzinov is in Lausanne. Did you”—creak—“happen to run into him? Great friend of mine and a remarkably strong-willed, determined person.”
Martin had not the faintest notion who Gruzinov was but did not ask any questions for fear of committing a blunder. After dinner Sonia washed the plates and he dried them, breaking one.
“It’s an impossible situation,” she exclaimed, and elucidated, “I mean not our finances but my nose, I can’t breathe through it. The financial situation is also pretty bad for that matter.”
Then she accompanied him downstairs to unlock the front door; at the press of a button there was a cute click and the staircase lights flashed on, and Martin kept clearing his throat and could not manage a single word of the many he had prepared. Evenings of a quite different nature followed—a multitude of guests, dancing to records, dancing in a nearby café, the murk of the corner cinema. New people materialized around Martin on all sides, nebulae gave birth to worlds. Definite labels and features were found for the Russian substance scattered about Berlin, for all those elements of expatriation which so excited Martin, be it merely a snatch of routine conversation amid the shoving sidewalk crowd, a chameleon word (such as that russified plural with its wandering accent: dóllary, dolláry, dollará), or a squabbling couple’s recitative, caught in passing (“And I’m telling you——” for female voice; “Oh, have it your way——” for male voice); or, on a summer night, a man with his head thrown back clapping his hands under a lighted window and shouting a resonant name and patronymic that made the whole street vibrate and caused a taxi to emit a nervous squeal and shy to one side after nearly running over the vociferous visitor, who had by now backed to the center of the asphalt, the better to see if the person he needed would appear like Punch in the window. Through the Zilanovs Martin met people among whom he at first felt ignorant and alien. In a certain sense he experienced all over again what had embarrassed him when he first saw the Zilanovs in London. And now, when at the apartment of Stepan Bubnov the talk rolled on in great waves, full of allusions to modern authors, and knowledgeable Sonia cast at Martin a sidelong glance of ironic compassion, Martin blushed, faltered, was about to launch his own frail little contribution on the billows of other people’s speeches, but feared it would capsize immediately, and so kept still. In compensation, shamed by the backwardness of his erudition, he devoted every hour of rain to reading, and very soon became familiar with that special smell, the smell of prison libraries, which emanated from Soviet literature.
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The writer Bubnov (who used to point out with satisfaction how many distinguished Russian literary names of the twentieth century began with the letter B) was a bearish, balding man of thirty, with a huge forehead, deep-set eyes, and a square chin. He smoked a pipe, sucking in his cheeks deeply with every puff, wore an old black bow tie, and considered Martin a fop and a foreigner. As to Martin, he was much taken with Bubnov’s energetic, rotund delivery and with his quite justified fame. Bubnov, whose writing career had begun in exile, had already had three excellent novels brought out by a Russian émigré publisher in Berlin, and was now writing a fourth. Its hero was Christopher Columbus, or, to be more exact, a Muscovite scrivener who, after many escapades, had miraculously ended up as a sailor on one of Columbus’s caravels. Bubnov knew no language other than Russian, so that when he had to go to the State Library for his research and Martin happened to be free, he willingly took him along. Martin’s command of German being mediocre, he was glad when a text chanced to be in French, English, or, better still, Italian. True, he knew that language even less than German, but he particularly prized his scant knowledge, remembering how he used to read Dante with melancholy Teddy’s assistance. Bubnov’s flat was frequented by the émigré literary set—fictionists, journalists, pimply young poets; in Bubnov’s opinion these were all people of middling talent, and he reigned over them justly, hearing out, with his hand over his eyes, yet another poem about nostalgia for the homeland or recollections of St. Petersburg (with the Bronze Horseman inevitably present) and then saying, as he unscreened his beetling brows and kneaded his chin, “Yes, that’s good.” Then, focusing his pale-hazel eyes on some fixed point, he would repeat “Good” with a less convinced intonation; and, once again changing the direction of his gaze, he would say, “Not bad,” and then, “Only, you know, you make Petersburg a little too portable.” And thus, gradually lowering his evaluation, he would reach the point where he muttered in hollow tones, with a sigh, “That stuff is all wrong, all unnecessary,” and dejectedly shake his head; upon which, abruptly, with vivid enthusiasm he would thunder out a poem by Pushkin. Once, when a young poet took offense and objected, “That’s by Pushkin, and this is by me,” Bubnov thought for a moment and replied, “Still, yours is worse.”
Then again, there would be occasions when some newcomer brought a really fine piece, whereupon Bubnov—especially if the piece were in prose—would grow strangely glum and remain out of sorts for several days. Bubnov’s friendship with Martin, who never wrote anything (except letters to his mother and for this was dubbed by a wit “our Madame de Sévigné”), remained sincere and free of misgivings. There was even a night when, relaxed and transparent after his third mug of Pilsener, Bubnov began talking dreamily (and this brought back a campfire in the Crimean mountains) about a girl whose soul was a song, whose dark eyes sang, whose skin was pale like precious porcelain. Then, with a fierce look, he added, “Yes, that’s trite, that’s nauseous, ugh! Despise me if you like, I may lack all talent, but I’m in love with her. Her name is like a church dome, like the swish of doves’ wings. I see radiant light in her name, that special light, the ‘kana-inum’ of the ancient Khadir sages. A light from there, from the East. Ah, that’s a great mystery, an awesome mystery——” Lowering his voice to a demented whisper, he added, “A woman’s charm is a terrible thing—you understand me, terrible. And her poor little slippers are worn down at the heel, yes, worn down——”
Martin felt uncomfortable and nodded in silence. In Bubnov’s company he always had a strange feeling, as if it were all a dream, and somehow he did not have complete faith either in him or in the Khadir elders. Sonia’s other acquaintances, for example jolly, bright Kallistratov, a former officer now in the “automobile transport business,” or the pleasant, fair-skinned and buxom Veretennikov girl, who played the guitar and sang “There’s a Volgan high cliff” in a rich contralto, or young Iogolevich, an intelligent, viperish, taciturn youth in horn-rimmed glasses who had read Proust and Joyce, were far less complicated than Bubnov. Mixed in with these friends of Sonia’s were the elderly acquaintances of her parents, all respectable, politically active, pure-hearted people, fully deserving a future obituary of a hundred limpid lines. But when, one July day, old Iogolevich heavily fell prone on the sidewalk, dead of heart failure, and the émigré papers carried a great deal of stuff about the “irreplaceable loss” and the “true toiler,” and Mihail Platonovich Zilanov, improperly hatless, with his briefcase under his arm, walked in the vanguard of the funeral procession among the roses and the black marble of Jewish graves, Martin had the impression that the obituary writer’s words “he burned with love for Russia” or “he always held high his pen” somehow debased the deceased inasmuch as those same words would have been equally applicable both to Zilanov and to the venerable necrologist himself. Most of all Martin felt sorry for the originality of the deceased, who was truly irreplaceable—his gestures, his beard, his sculpturesque wrinkles, the sudden shy smile, the jacket button that hung by a thread, and his way of licking a stamp with his entire tongue before sticking it on the envelope and banging it with his fist. In a certain sense this was all of greater value than the social merits for which there existed such easy little clichés, and with an odd shift of thought Martin swore to himself that he himself would never join a political party or attend a meeting, that he would never be the personage who is “given the floor” or who “adjourns the pro
ceedings,” while reveling in the joys of civic virtue. And often Martin would marvel at his inability to mention his long-treasured secret plans to Zilanov or to Zilanov’s friends or to any of those industrious, upstanding Russians, so full of disinterested love for their country.
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But Sonia, ah, Sonia——From his nighttime thoughts about the glorious and dark expedition, from his literary chats with Bubnov, from his daily labors at the tennis club, he would return to her again and again and hold a match over the gas stove for her, whereupon, with a loud gush, the blue flame would extend all its claws. To talk to her of love was useless, but once, while walking her home from the café, where they had imbibed Swedish punch through straws to the wail of a Rumanian violin, he was overwhelmed with such soft passion, because of the warm night and because in every doorway there stood a motionless couple, so infectious was their gaiety and whispering, and sudden silences, and the crepuscular undulation of lilacs in villa gardens, and the fantastic shadows with which the light of a streetlamp animated the scaffolding of a house in the process of renovation, that he forgot his usual reserve, his usual fear that Sonia would make fun of him, and, by some miracle, began to speak—of what?—of Horace. Yes, Horace had lived in Rome, and Rome, despite a good number of marble edifices, looked like a sprawling village, and there you could see people chasing after a mad dog, and hogs splashing in the mud with their black piglets, and construction was going on all over the place: carpenters hammered away; a wagon carrying Ligurian marble or an enormous pine would clatter past. But toward evening the racket would cease, just as Berlin grew silent at twilight, after which came the rattle of iron chains from shops being shut for the night, quite like the rattling of the Berlin shops’ shutters at closing time, and Horace strolled off to the Field of Mars, debile but paunchy, with a bald head and big ears, clad in a sloppy toga, and listen to the tender whispers under the porticoes, to the enchanting laughter in dark nooks.
“You’re such a dear,” Sonia said all at once, “that I have to kiss you—wait, let’s go over there.”
Near a park gate, under the overflow of dark foliage, Martin pulled Sonia to him, and, so as not to lose the least part of that moment, he did not close his eyes as he slowly kissed her cool, soft lips, watching the while a reflection of pale light on her cheek, and the quivering of her lowered eyelids: they rose for an instant, revealing a moist, blind glistening, and shut again; little shivers shook her, her lips parted under his, but breaking the spell her hand pushed his face aside, and her teeth were chattering, and in a half-whisper she implored him to stop.
“And what if I’m in love with somebody else?” asked Sonia with unexpected vivacity when they were once again strolling along the street.
“That would be awful,” said Martin. He sensed there had been a moment when he could have taken a firm hold of Sonia, but now she had flipped away again.
“Remove your arm,” she remarked, “I can’t walk like that—you behave like a Sunday shop clerk,” and his last hope, the blissful sensation of her warm upper arm under the palm of his hand, vanished also.
“At least he has talent,” she said, “and you, you’re nothing, just a traveling playboy.”
“Talent? Whom are you talking about?”
She did not answer and kept silent all the way home. She did, however, kiss him again on the doorstep, throwing her bare arm around his neck, and her expression was serious and her gaze downcast as she locked the door from the inside. He watched through the door pane: there she goes, up the stairs, caressing the banister, and now the stair bend conceals her—and that is her light going out.
“She did the same to Darwin,” thought Martin, and he felt a tremendous urge to see his old friend; Darwin, however, was far away in America, on an assignment for a London newspaper. Next day all trace of romance had vanished, as if it had never been, and Sonia went with friends to the country, to Peacock Island, for a swim and a picnic, and Martin didn’t even know about it. That evening, a minute before closing time, he had bought a large crimson-ribboned plush dog and was approaching her house with the thing under his arm when he met the whole returning party on the street; Sonia had Kallistratov’s jacket over her shoulders, and between him and her there flashed repeatedly a chance jest, whose meaning nobody bothered to explain to Martin.
He wrote her a letter, and stayed away for several days. She replied a week or so later with a color postcard showing a pretty boy bending over the back of a green bench on which sat a pretty girl, admiring a bouquet of roses, with a German rhyme in gilt letters at the bottom: “Let a true heart leave unsaid what is told by roses red.” On the reverse Sonia had scribbled: “Aren’t they sweet? That’s real courtship for you. Look, I need your assistance, three strings have snapped on my racket.” And not a word about the letter! However, during one of his next visits she said, “I think it’s ridiculous that you can’t skip a day or two now and then. Surely, Kindermann will replace you.”
“He has his own lessons,” replied Martin hesitantly, but he did speak to Kindermann, and so, one marvelous, impeccably cloudless morning, Martin and Sonia were off for the lacustrine, reedy, piny outskirts of the city, and Martin heroically kept his promise not to make “marmalade” eyes, as she put it, and did not attempt to kiss her. Something they discussed that day happened to lead to a series of quite special exchanges between them. With the intent of striking Sonia’s imagination, Martin vaguely alluded to his having joined a secret group of anti-Bolshevist conspirators that organized reconnaissance operations. It was perfectly true that such a group did exist; in fact, a common friend of theirs, one Lieutenant Melkikh, had twice crossed the border on dangerous missions; it was also true that Martin kept looking for an opportunity to make friends with him (once he had even invited him to dinner) and always regretted that while in Switzerland he had not met the mysterious Gruzinov, whom Zilanov had mentioned, and who, according to information Martin had gathered, emerged as a man of great adventures, a terrorist, a very special spy, and the mastermind of recent peasant revolts against the Soviet rule.
“It never occurred to me,” said Sonia, “that you thought about things like that. Only, you know, if you really have joined that organization, it’s very naive to start blabbing about it right away.”
“Oh, I was only joking,” said Martin, and slit his eyes enigmatically so as to make Sonia believe he had deliberately turned it into a joke. She, however, did not catch that nuance; stretched out on the dry, needle-strewn ground, beneath the pines whose trunks the sun blotched with color, she put her bare arms behind her head, exposing her lovely armpits which she had recently started to shave and which were now shaded as if with a pencil, and said it was a strange thing, but she too had often thought about it—about there being a land where ordinary mortals were not admitted.
“What shall we call that land?” asked Martin, suddenly recollecting his games with Lida on the Crimean fairy-tale shore.
“Some northern name,” answered Sonia. “Look at that squirrel.” The squirrel, playing hide-and-seek, jerkily climbed a tree trunk and vanished amidst the foliage.
“Zoorland, for example,” said Martin. “A Norman mariner mentions it.”
“Yes, of course—Zoorland,” Sonia concurred, and he grinned broadly, somewhat astounded by her unexpectedly revealed capacity for daydreaming.
“May I remove an ant?” he asked parenthetically.
“Depends where.”
“Stocking.”
“Scram, chum” (addressing the ant). She brushed it off and continued, as if reciting, “Winters are cold there, and monster icicles hang from the eaves, a whole system of them, like organ pipes. Then they melt and everything gets very watery, and there are sootlike specks on the thawing snow. Oh, I can tell you everything about it. For instance, they’ve just passed a law that all inhabitants must shave their heads, so that now the most important, most influential people are the barbers.”
“Equality of heads,” said Martin.
&
nbsp; “Yes. And of course the bald ones are best off. And you know——”
“Bubnov would have a grand time there,” Martin interjected facetiously.
For some reason Sonia took offense and dried up. Yet from that day on she occasionally condescended to play Zoorland with him, and Martin was tormented by the thought that she might be making sophisticated fun of him and that any moment she might cause him to take a false step, prodding him toward the boundary beyond which phantasmata become tasteless—and the dreamwalker is jolted into seeing the roof edge from which he is dangling, his own hiked-up nightshirt, the crowd looking up from the sidewalk, the firemen’s helmets. But even if this was a form of derision on Sonia’s part, no matter, no matter, he enjoyed the opportunity to let himself go in her presence. They studied Zoorlandian customs and laws. The region was rocky and windy, and the wind was recognized as a positive force since by championing equality in not tolerating towers and tall trees, it only subserved the public aspirations of atmospheric strata that kept diligent watch over the uniformity of the temperature. And, naturally, pure arts, pure science were outlawed, lest the honest dunces be hurt to see the scholar’s brooding brow and offensively thick books. Shaven-headed, wearing brown cassocks, the happy Zoorlanders warmed themselves by bonfires as the strings of burning violins snapped with loud reports, and discussed plans to level the land by blowing up mountains that stuck up too presumptuously. Sometimes during the general conversation—at table, for instance—Sonia would suddenly turn to him and quickly whisper, “Have you heard, there’s a new law forbidding caterpillars to pupate,” or “I forgot to tell you, Savior-and-Mauler” (the sobriquet of one of the chieftains) “has ordered physicians to stop casting around and to treat all illnesses in exactly the same way.”
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