Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  ‘Peter Kunitsyn. Yes, I still remember. He was good in school, the rascal. And always so punctual, with a watch in his pocket. During classes he used to hold up his fingers to show how many more minutes until the bell rang. Graduated from high school with a gold medal.’

  ‘It must be strange for you, remembering that,’ said Ganin pensively. ‘Come to think of it, it’s even odd to remember some everyday thing — though really not everyday at all — something that happened a few hours ago.’

  Podtyagin gave him a keen but kindly look. ‘What’s happened to you, Lev Glebovich? Your face looks somehow brighter. Have you fallen in love again? Yes, there is a strangeness about the way we remember things. How nicely you beam, dash it.’

  ‘I had a good reason for coming to see you, Anton Sergeyevich.’

  And all I could offer you was Kunitsyn. Let him be a warning to you. How did you get on at school?’

  ‘So-so,’ said Ganin, smiling again. ‘The Balashov academy in Petersburg — know it?’ he went on, slipping into Podtyagin’s tone of voice, as one often does when talking to an old man. ‘I remember the schoolyard. We used to play football there. There was firewood piled up under an archway and now and again the ball used to knock down a log.’

  ‘We preferred bat-and-tag, and cossacks-and-robbers,’ said Podtyagin. ‘And now life has gone,’ he added unexpectedly.

  ‘Do you know, Anton Sergeyevich, today I remembered those old magazines which used to print your poetry. And the birch groves.’

  ‘Did you really?’ The old man turned to him with a look of good-natured irony. ‘What a fool I was — for the sake of those birch trees I wasted all my life, I overlooked the whole of Russia. Now, thank God, I’ve stopped writing poetry. Done with it. I even feel ashamed at describing myself as “poet” when I have to fill in forms. By the way, I made a complete mess of things again today. The official was even offended. I shall have to go again tomorrow.’

  Ganin looked at his feet and said, ‘When I was in the upper forms my schoolmates thought I had a mistress. And what a mistress — a society lady. They respected me for it. I didn’t object, because it was I who started the rumor.’

  ‘I see,’ Podtyagin nodded. ‘There’s something artful about you, Lyovushka. I like it.’

  ‘In actual fact I was absurdly chaste and felt none the worse for it either. I was proud of it, like a special secret, yet everybody thought I was very experienced. Mind you, I certainly wasn’t prudish or shy. I was simply happy living as I was and waiting. And my schoolmates, the ones who used foul language and panted at the very word “woman,” were all so spotty and dirty, with sweaty palms. I despised them for their spots. And they lied revoltingly about their amorous adventures.’

  ‘I must confess,’ said Podtyagin in his lacklustre voice, ‘that I began with a chambermaid. She was so sweet and gentle, with gray eyes. Her name was Glasha. That’s the way it goes.’

  ‘No, I waited,’ said Ganin softly. ‘From the onset of puberty, to sixteen, say, three years. When I was thirteen we were playing hide-and-seek once and I and another boy of the same age found ourselves hiding together in a wardrobe. In the darkness he told me that there were marvelous beauties who allowed themselves to be undressed for money. I didn’t properly hear what he called them and I thought it was “prinstitute” — a mixture of princess and young ladies’ institute. So I had an entrancing, mysterious mental image of them. But then of course I soon realized how mistaken I had been because I saw nothing attractive about the women who strolled up and down the Nevski rolling their hips and called us high-school boys “pencils.” And so after three years of proud chastity my wait came to an end. It was in summer, at our place in the country.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Podtyagin. ‘I can see it all. Rather hackneyed, though. Sweet sixteen, love in the woods.’

  Ganin looked at him with curiosity. ‘But what could be nicer, Anton Sergeyevich?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, don’t ask me, my dear chap. I put everything into my poetry that I should have put into my life, and now it’s too late for me to start all over again. The only thought that occurs to me at the moment is that in the final reckoning it’s better to have been sanguine by temperament, a man of action, and if you must get drunk do it properly and smash the place up.’

  ‘There was that too,’ Ganin smiled.

  Podtyagin thought for a moment. ‘You were talking about the Russian countryside, Lev Glebovich. You, I expect, will probably see it again. But I shall leave my old bones here. Or if not here then in Paris. I seem to be thoroughly out of sorts today. Forgive me.’

  Both were silent. A train passed. Far, far away a locomotive gave a wild, inconsolable scream. The night was a cold blue outside the uncurtained windowpanes, which reflected the lampshade and a brightly lit corner of the table. Podtyagin sat hunched, his gray head bowed, twirling a leather cigarette case in his hands. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking about: whether it was about the dullness of his past life; or whether old age, illness and poverty had risen before his mind’s eye with the same dark clarity as the reflection in the nighttime window; whether it was about his passport and about Paris; or whether he was thinking glumly that the pattern on the carpet exactly fitted round the toe of his boot, or how much he would like a glass of cold beer, or that his visitor had outsat his welcome — God knows. But as Ganin looked at his big drooping head, at the senile tufts of hair in his ears, at the shoulders rounded from writing, he felt such a sudden access of sadness that he lost all desire to talk about summer in Russia, about the pathways in the park, and least of all about the astonishing thing that had happened the day before.

  ‘Well, I must go now. Sleep well, Anton Sergeyevich.’

  ‘Good night, Lyovushka,’ Podtyagin sighed. ‘I enjoyed our talk. You, at least, do not despise me for taking Kunitsyn’s money.’

  Only at the last moment, in the doorway, did Ganin stop and say, ‘Do you know what, Anton Sergeyevich? I’ve started a wonderful affair. I’m going to her now. I’m very happy.’

  Podtyagin gave an encouraging nod. ‘I see. Give her my regards. I haven’t the pleasure, but give her my regards all the same.’

  6

  Strange to say he could not remember exactly when he had first seen her. Perhaps at a charity concert staged in a barn on the border of his parents’ estate. Perhaps, though, he had caught a glimpse of her even before that. Her laugh, her soft features, her dark complexion and the big bow in her hair were all somehow familiar to him when a student medical orderly at the local military hospital (a world war was in full swing) had told him about this fifteen-year-old ‘sweet and remarkable’ girl, as the student had put it — but that conversation had taken place before the concert. Now Ganin racked his memory in vain; he just could not picture their very first meeting. The fact was that he had been waiting for her with such longing, had thought so much about her during those blissful days after the typhus, that he had fashioned her unique image long before he actually saw her. Now, many years later, he felt that their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was only an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed her.

  That evening in July Ganin had pushed open the creaking iron front door and walked out into the blue of the twilight. The bicycle ran with special ease at dusk, the tire emitting a kind of whisper as it palpated each rise and dip in the hard earth along the edge of the road. As he glided past the darkened stables they gave off a breath of warmth, a sound of snorting and the slight thud of a shifting hoof. Farther on, the road was enveloped on both sides by birch trees, noiseless at that hour; then like a fire smouldering on the threshing-floor a faint light shone in the middle of a field and dark streams of people straggled with a festive hum toward the lone-standing barn.

  Inside a stage had been knocked up, rows of seats installed, light flooded over heads and shoulders, playing in people’s eye
s, and there was a smell of caramels and kerosene. A lot of people had turned up; the back was filled with peasant men and women, the dacha folk were in the middle, while in front, on white benches borrowed from the manorial park, sat about twenty patients from the military hospital in the village, quiet and morose, with hairless patches blotching the gray— blue of their very round, shorn heads. Here and there on the walls, decorated with fir branches, were cracks through which peeped the starry night as well as the black shadows of country boys who had clambered up outside on tall piles of logs.

  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.

  7

  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.