Mother and son always spoke Russian between themselves, and this constantly irritated Uncle Henry, who knew only one word, nichevo, in which for some reason he perceived a symbol of Slav fatalism. That day he felt depressed, besides being bothered by the pain in his jaw, and now he sharply pushed back his chair, swept off the crumbs from his stomach with his napkin, and sucking on his tooth retired to his study. “How old he is,” thought Martin watching his gray nape. “Or is it the light—such gloomy weather.”
“Well, it’s almost time for you to get ready,” remarked Mrs. Edelweiss. “The car has probably been brought up.” She looked out of the window. “Yes, it has. Look, how amusing—nothing to be seen in the fog over there, as if there were no mountains at all. Amusing, isn’t it?” “I think I forgot my razor,” said Martin.
He went up to his room, packed his razor and slippers, and had trouble clicking shut the locks of his bag. In Riga or Rezhitsa he would buy plain coarse things—a cap, a short sheepskin coat, boots. Perhaps, a pistol? “Proshchay, proshchay” in rapid tempo sang out the bookcase crowned with the black figurine of a football player, which by some occult association of memories always made him think of Alla Chernosvitov.
In the roomy entrance hall downstairs stood Mrs. Edelweiss, her hands thrust into the pockets of her raincoat, and hummed as was her wont in moments of stress. “Hadn’t you better stay at home?” she said as Martin came down. “Really, why go away?” From the door on the right, with the antelope’s head over it, came Uncle Henry, and looking at Martin from under his brows he asked, “Are you sure you have enough money?” “Quite enough,” answered Martin, “thank you.” “Good-bye,” said Uncle Henry. “I am taking leave of you here because I avoid going out today. Had someone else ever had such a toothache, he would long ago have been in the madhouse.”
“Let’s go,” said Mrs. Edelweiss. “I’m afraid you’ll miss your train.”
Rain, wind. His mother’s hair immediately became disarranged, and she kept smoothing it over her ears. “Wait,” she said, just before reaching the garden wicket, at a spot near two firs between the trunks of which a hammock was hung in summer. “Wait, I want to kiss you.” Martin put down his valise. “Give her my greetings,” she whispered with a meaningful smile, and Martin nodded. Oh, to get going! This is unbearable.
The chauffeur obligingly opened the wicket for them. The car glistened with moisture, the rain made a tinkling sound against it. “And please do write, if only once a week,” she said, and stepped back, and waved her hand smiling, and slushing along in the mud the black car vanished beyond the fir avenue.
44
The night journey, in a Schnellzug sleeping car of a dark dirty-plum color, seemed to have no end: there were moments when Martin sank into sleep, then woke up with a start, then again found himself clattering down amusement-park slopes and again swung up, and caught through the dull knock of the wheels the snores of the lower-bunk passenger, a rhythmic wheeze that sounded like part of the train’s motion.
Long before arrival, while everybody in the carriage was still asleep, Martin descended from his elevation, and taking sponge, soap, towel, shaving kit and collapsible tub proceeded to the lavatory. First of all he spread over its sickening floor layered sheets of a London Times he had bought in Lausanne; next he unfolded upon them his rather wobbly-rimmed but still serviceable rubber tub; he took off his pajamas and proceeded to coat with soap lather his muscular sun-tanned body. There was not much space, the car rocked violently, he was conscious of the transparent proximity of the racing rails, and of the danger of coming inadvertently in contact with filthy fixtures; but Martin could not manage without his morning bath (in the sea, in a pond, in a shower, or in this tub), which represented, he thought, a kind of heroic defense: a defense against the obstinate attack of the earth advancing by means of a film of insidious dust, as if it could not wait to take possession of a man before his time. No matter how poorly Martin might have slept, after bathing he would be permeated with a beneficent vigor. At such times the thought of death, the thought that sometime, maybe soon (who could know?), he would be compelled to surrender and go through what billions and trillions of humans had gone through before him—this thought of an inevitable death accessible to everyone troubled him but slightly. It gained strength only toward evening, and with the coming of night would sometimes swell to monstrous dimensions. The custom of performing executions at dawn seemed charitable to Martin: may the Lord permit it to happen in the morning when a man has control over himself—clears his throat, smiles, then stands straight, spreading his arms.
When he stepped out onto the platform of the Anhalter station, he inhaled with pleasure the cold, smoky morning air. Far away, in the direction from which the train had arrived, one could see through the opening of the iron-and-glass arch a pale-blue sky and a gleam of rails, and in comparison to this luminosity all was drab under the station vault. He walked past the dusky cars; past the huge hissing and sweating engine, and, having surrendered his ticket into the human hand of a control booth, descended the steps to the street. Out of attachment to the images of his childhood, he had decided to select as the starting point of his journey the Friedrich station, where, one remote day, his parents and he, after staying at the nearby Continental, had caught the Nord-Express. His valise was quite heavy, but Martin was in such an excited and restless state that he decided to walk. However, by the time he reached Potsdamerstrasse he began to feel ravenous, and upon estimating the remaining distance to the Friedrich Bahnhof, wisely took the bus. From the very start of that unusual day all his senses were on edge—it seemed to him that he was committing to memory the faces of all the passers-by, and that he absorbed with particular keenness colors, smells, and sounds. The automobile honkings that on rainy nights used to torture his hearing by their swinish moist tones now sounded somehow extramundane, melodious and doleful. As he sat in the bus he heard a ripple of Muscovite speech near him. It came from a couple, of Soviet rather than émigré aspect, and their two round-eyed little boys. The elder had settled close to the window, the younger kept pressing against his brother. “A restaurant,” the bigger one said ecstatically. “Look, a restaurant!” said the smaller one, pressing. “I can see for myself,” snapped his brother. “It’s a restaurant,” said the smaller one with conviction. “Shut up, idiot,” said his brother. “It’s not the Linden yet, is it?” the mother asked worriedly. “It’s still the Post Dammer,” said the father with authority. “We’ve already passed the Post Dammer,” cried the boys, and there ensued a short argument. “What an archway, that’s class for you,” exulted the elder boy stabbing at the window with his finger. “Don’t yell like that,” remarked the father. “What’s that?” “I said don’t yell.” The boy looked hurt. “In the first place I spoke softly, and did not yell at all.” “Archway,” uttered the smaller boy with awe. The whole family became absorbed in the contemplation of the Brandenburg Gate. “Historical site,” the bigger boy said. “An ancient arch, yes,” confirmed the father. “How shall we wriggle through?” the bigger boy wondered, fearing for the sides of the bus, “it’s a squeeze!” “We did wriggle through,” the smaller boy whispered with relief. “And now this is the Unter,” cried the mother, “time to get off.” “The Unter is such a long, long street,” said the bigger boy, “I saw it on the map.” “This is President Street,” said the smaller boy dreamily. “Shut up, idiot! It’s the Unter Linden.” Then, in chorus, “Unter is long, long, long,” and a male solo voice, “It’s an endless journey.”
Here Martin got off. His childhood, he thought with strange anguish, his childish excitement had been similar, and yet utterly different. The juxtaposition lasted one instant: it sang by and subsided.
After checking his bag and buying a ticket for the evening train to Riga, he seated himself in the resonant station café where he was brought a regular sunburst of fried eggs. In the latest issue of an émigré weekly that he read as he ate he found a vicious review of Bubnov’s latest book
Caravella. Having appeased his hunger, he lit a cigarette and looked around. A young girl at the nearest table sat writing, and wiping her tears. She looked at him for an instant with dim wet eyes, pressing her pencil against her lips, and, having found the word she sought, scribbled again, holding her pencil the way children do: almost at the tip, with forefinger tensely bent. Black coat opened at neck, shabby rabbit-fur collar, amber beads, tender white neck, handkerchief crumpled in fist. He paid for his meal and, planning to follow her, began waiting for her to get up. But when she had finished writing, she leaned her elbows on the table and continued to sit there, looking up, with parted lips. She remained sitting for a long time while somewhere beyond the windowpanes trains were leaving, and Martin, who had to get to the Latvian consulate before closing time, decided to give her just five minutes more, and go. The five minutes passed. “All I would do would be to ask her to meet me for a drink in the afternoon—only that,” he pleaded mentally, imagining at the same time how he would allude to a distant perilous journey and how she would weep. Another minute passed. “All right, forget it,” said Martin, and, throwing his raincoat over his shoulder in the English manner, made for the exit.
45
The taxi sped with a susurrous sound; he admired the Tiergarten crowding around him, the lovely warm tints of its autumn foliage: “O dismal period, visual enchantment—” Flowerless but still sumptuous chestnut trees looked at their own reflection in the canal. As he drove over the bridge Martin recognized Hercules’ stone lion and noted that the recently repaired part of its tail still remained too white and would probably take a long time to acquire the seasoned tinge of the rest of the group—how much? ten, fifteen years? Why is it so difficult to imagine oneself at forty?
The basement floor of the Latvian consulate was alive with people. “Knock-knock” went the rubber stamp. Within a few minutes the Swiss citizen Edelweiss had come out of there and walked over to a nearby gloomy mansion where he obtained the inexpensive Lithuanian transit visa.
Now he could seek out Darwin. His hotel faced the Zoological Gardens. “Not in,” said the clerk. “No, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“How tiresome,” thought Martin returning to the street. “I should have given him a definite date—not merely ‘one of these days.’ A blunder. How tiresome!” He looked at his watch. Half past eleven. His passport was in order, his ticket was in his pocket. The day which had announced itself as crammed with activity all at once turned out to be empty. What next? Visit the zoo? Write mother a letter? No, that would come later.
But while he was meditating, muffled work went on in the depths of his consciousness. He resisted it, tried to ignore it, for he had firmly decided after the rejection of his desperate proposal never to see Sonia again. Alas—the air of Berlin was saturated with memories of her. Over there, at the zoo, they had stared together at the golden-red Chinese pheasant, at the fabulous nostrils of the hippopotamus, at the yellow dog dingo that could jump so high. “She is at her office now,” reflected Martin, “and I do have to call on the Zilanovs.”
The Kurfürstendamm began to drift by. Automobiles passed the streetcar, the streetcar passed the bicycles; then came the bridge, the smoke from the trains that ran far below, thousands of rails, the mysterious blue sky. Then a turn, and he was amidst the autumnal loveliness of Grunewald.
Surprisingly, it was Sonia who let him in. She wore a black jumper, looked slightly disheveled, her slanted eyes appeared sleepy, there seemed to be unfamiliar dimples in her pale cheeks. “Whom do I see,” she drawled making a very low bow, her arms dangling in front of her. “Welcome, welcome,” she said unbending, and one black strand of hair fell in an arc on her temple. She threw it back with a flick of her index finger. “Come this way,” she said and started walking along the passage slap-slapping softly with her bedroom slippers. “I was afraid you might be at the office,” said Martin, trying not to look at the adorable back of her neck. “Headache,” she said without turning and emitted a little grunt as she picked up in passing a mopping rag which she threw onto a trunk in the corridor. They entered the drawing room. “Sit down and tell me all,” she said, dropping asprawl in an armchair, but at once she got up and sat down again with one leg under her.
The drawing room was its old self: the dark Böcklin on the wall, the worn plush of the furniture, some kind of indestructible pale-leaved plant in a pot, and that depressing chandelier in the shape of a tailed swimmer with the bosom and head of a Bavarian girl and deer horns growing out of all parts of her.
“Actually, I arrived only today,” said Martin lighting a cigarette. “I intend to work here. That is, not here actually but in the neighborhood. It is a factory and, as a matter of fact, I shall work there as a simple workman.” “Not really?” murmured Sonia and added, noticing his ash and questing gaze, “Never mind, shed it on the floor.” “Now there is this amusing circumstance,” Martin continued. “You see, actually I don’t want Mother to know that I’m a factory hand. So please, if she happens to write to your mother—sometimes, you know, she likes to find out if I’m all right in a roundabout way—well, then, do you see, she should be told, please, that I often come to see you. In reality, of course, I shall visit you very, very seldom, there will be no time for that.”
“You’ve lost your good looks,” said Sonia meditatively. “And there’s something coarse about your face—maybe it’s the tan.”
“I’ve wandered all over southern France,” Martin said huskily, “worked on farms, lived like a bum, and, on Sundays, got dressed up and went to Monte Carlo for a bit of good time. Fascinating thing, roulette! And you, what have you been doing? Is everybody all right?”
“The ancestors are all right,” said Sonia with a sigh, “but Irina has become quite unmanageable. What a cross to bear! And the financial situation is as gloomy as ever. Father says we must move to Paris. Have you been in Paris?”
“Yes, for one day,” replied Martin negligently (that one day spent in Paris, many years ago, on the way from Biarritz to Berlin, children with hoops in the Tuileries Gardens, toy sailboats on the pond, an old man feeding the sparrows, the silvery filigree of the tower, Napoleon’s tomb where the columns resembled wreathed sucre d’orge). “Yes, just in passing. Incidentally, have you heard the latest news—Darwin is here.”
Sonia smiled and blinked several times. “Oh, do bring him! You absolutely must, it would be such fun.”
“I have not seen him yet. He is here on business for The Morning News. They sent him on a trip to America. But the main thing is this: He has a fiancée back in England, and he is getting married in the spring.”
“How marvelous!” said Sonia softly. “Everything according to pattern. I can imagine her so well: tall, eyes like saucers, and her mother just like her, only leaner and ruddier. Poor Darwin!”
“Nonsense, I’m sure she’s very pretty and intelligent.”
“Well, what else can you tell me,” asked Sonia after a silence. Martin shrugged. How rash of him to have used up all at once his entire stock of conversational topics. It seemed weirdly absurd to him that there was Sonia sitting in front of him, and he dared not say anything of importance, dared not allude to her last letter, dared not ask if she was going to marry Bubnov—dared not say or do anything. He tried to see himself sitting there, in this same room, after his return: would he then, too, blurt out everything at once? And would Sonia lightly scratch her shin through the silk, as she did now, looking past him at things unknown to him? It occurred to him that he might have come at the wrong moment, that she might be expecting someone else, that she felt ill at ease with him. But he could not bring himself to leave, as he also could not think of anything amusing to say, and Sonia seemed to be deliberately trying to provoke him with her silence. In another moment he would lose control and spill it all—his expedition, and his love, and that innermost, mysterious something, which bound together the expedition, the love, and Pushkin’s ode to autumn.
The entrance door slammed
, steps were heard, Zilanov entered the drawing room: “Ah,” he said, “delighted. How is your mother?” A little later Mrs. Zilanov came in through another door and asked the same question. “Won’t you have lunch with us?” she said. They moved to the dining room. Irina, upon seeing Martin, froze still, then suddenly rushed over to him and started kissing him with wet lips. “Ira, Irochka,” her mother kept repeating with a helpless smile. Dark meatballs were heaped on a large serving dish. Zilanov unfolded his napkin and stuck one corner behind his collar.
During the meal Martin showed Irina how to cross the second and third fingers so that you could touch a single small pellet of bread and feel two. For a long time she was unable to adjust her fingers properly, but when at last, with Martin’s assistance, the pellet divided into two under her touch, Irina cooed with rapture. Just as a monkey seeing its reflection in a fragment of mirror looks to see if there is not another monkey underneath, so she, too, kept bending her head to check if there were not two crumbs under her fingers after all. When lunch was over and Sonia showed Martin to the telephone which was beyond the bend of a passage lined with boxes and trunks, Irina rushed after them with a moan fearing that Martin might be leaving for good. After convincing herself that this was not so, she returned to the dining room to crawl under the table there in search of her bread pellet that had rolled out of sight. “I want to call Darwin,” said Martin. “I must look up the number of his hotel.” Sonia’s face lit up, as she said, spluttering with excitement, “Oh, let me, I’ll do it, I’ll talk to him, it will be fantastic. Come, I’ll completely mystify him.” “No, don’t,” replied Martin, “what’s the use?” “Then I’ll only connect you. No harm in that, is there? What was the number?” She leaned over the telephone book he had opened, and he felt the warmth of her hair. On her cheek, just below the eye, was a little stray lash. Repeating the number rapidly in an undertone so as not to forget it, she seated herself on a trunk and picked up the receiver. “You’re only connecting us, mind you,” Martin remarked sternly. With painstaking clarity Sonia gave the number and waited, with shifting eyes, her heels tapping softly against the side of the trunk. Then she smiled, cuddling the receiver still closer to her ear, and Martin stretched out his hand, but Sonia pushed it aside with her shoulder and hunched over while asking for Darwin in a bright tone of voice. “Give it me,” said Martin, “this is not fair.” But Sonia gathered herself together even tighter. “I’ll cut you off,” threatened Martin. She made a sharp movement to protect the lever, and at the same moment her eyebrows went up. “No, nothing, thank you,” she said and hung up. “Not at home,” she told Martin, looking at him from below. “You may rest assured, my dear, I shall not call him again. And you—you’ve remained the same boor that you were.” She slithered down from the trunk, groped, found her lost slipper with her toe, and went back to the dining room. The table was being cleared, Irina’s mother was talking to her but she kept turning away. “Shall I find you here later?” asked Zilanov. “Well, I don’t know. As a matter of fact, I should be going now.” “I’ll say good-bye to you just in case,” said Zilanov and retired to his room to work.
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