Gornotsvetov gave a final pluck to the strings and stopped playing. Everyone felt awkward.
‘Some singers!’ Podtyagin grunted despondently, and shook his head, propped on his hand. He felt bad: the thought of his lost passport was combined with a stifling shortness of breath.
‘I shouldn’t drink, that’s the trouble,’ he added glumly.
‘I told you so,’ murmured Klara. ‘You’re like a baby, Anton Sergeyevich.’
‘Why isn’t anybody eating or drinking?’ said Kolin, waggling his hips as he minced around the table. He began filling up empty glasses. Nobody said anything. The party, obviously, was a failure.
Ganin, who until then had been sitting on the window ledge and staring, with a faint smile of pensive irony, at the mauve glimmer of the table and the strangely lit faces, suddenly jumped down to the floor and gave a peal of clear laughter.
‘Fill ’em up, Kolin,’ he said as he walked over to the table. ‘Some more for Alfyorov. Tomorrow our life changes. Tomorrow I shan’t be here any longer. Come on, down the hatch. Stop looking at me like a wounded deer, Klara. Give her some more of that liqueur. You too, Anton Sergeyevich — cheer up. No good moping about your passport. You’ll get another one, even better than the old one. Recite us some of your poetry. Oh yes, by the way —’
‘Can I have that empty bottle?’ Alfyorov said suddenly, and a lascivious gleam sparkled in his joyful, excited eyes.
‘By the way,’ Ganin repeated, coming up behind the old man and putting his hand on his fleshy shoulder, ‘I remember some of your verses, Anton Sergeyevich. “Full moon — forest and stream” — that’s right, isn’t it?’
Podtyagin turned and looked at him, then gave an unhurried smile. ‘Did you find it in an old calendar? They were very fond of printing my poetry on calendar leaves. On the underside, above the recipe for the day.’
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, what is he trying to do?’ shouted Kolin, pointing at Alfyorov, who, having flung open the window, had suddenly raised the bottle and was aiming it into the dark blue night.
‘Let him,’ Ganin laughed. ‘Let him act up if he wants to.’
Alfyorov’s beard gleamed, his Adam’s apple swelled and the sparse hair at his temples stirred in the night breeze. Bringing back his arm in a wide sweep, he stood still for a while and then solemnly placed the bottle on the floor.
The dancers burst into laughter.
Alfyorov sat down beside Gornotsvetov, took the guitar from him and began to try to play it. He was a man who got drunk very quickly.
‘Klara’s so serious-looking,’ Podtyagin said with difficulty. ‘Girls like her used to write me such moving letters. Now she doesn’t want to look at me.’
‘Don’t drink any more. Please,’ said Klara, thinking that she had never been so miserable in her life as now.
Podtyagin managed a forced smile and pulled at Ganin’s sleeve. ‘Now here’s the future savior of Russia. Tell us a story, Lyovushka — where did you roam, where did you fight?’
‘Must I?’ asked Ganin with a good-natured grimace.
‘Yes, do. I feel so depressed, you know. When did you leave Russia?’
‘When? Hey, Kolin. Let’s have some of that sticky stuff. No, not for me — for Alfyorov. That’s right. Mix it into his glass.’
15
Lydia Nikolaevna was already in bed. She had nervously refused the dancers’ invitation and was now sleeping an old woman’s light sleep, through which the heavy vibration of the trains passed with the sound of huge cupboards full of quivering crockery. Occasionally her sleep would be broken, and then she would vaguely hear the voices in room 6. Once she dreamed of Ganin, and in her dreams she could not understand who he was and where he had come from. Indeed, his personality was surrounded by mystery. And no wonder: he never told anybody about his life, his wanderings and his adventures of recent years — even he himself remembered his escape from Russia as though in a dream, a dream that was like a faintly sparkling sea mist.
Perhaps Mary had written more letters at that time — early 1919 — when he had been fighting in the northern Crimea, but he had not received them if she had. Perekop tottered and fell. Wounded in the head, Ganin had been evacuated to Simferopol; and a week later, sick and listless, cut off from his unit which had retreated to Feodosia, he had been caught up in the mad, nightmarish torrent of the civilian evacuation. In the fields and on the slopes of the Heights of Inkerman, where once the uniforms of Queen Victoria’s soldiers had flashed scarlet among the smoke of toy cannon, the lovely and wild Crimean spring was already blossoming. Smoothly undulating, the milky-white road flowed on, the open cover of the car rattled as the wheels bounced over bumps and holes — and the feeling of speed, the feeling of spring, of space and the pale green of the hills, suddenly fused into a delicious joy which made it possible to forget that this light-hearted road was the way leading out of Russia.
He reached Sevastopol still full of joy, and left his suitcase at the white-stone Hotel Kist, where the confusion was indescribable. Then drunk with hazy sunshine and the dull pain in his head he set off, past the pale doric columns of the portico, down the broad granite flagstones of the steps to the harbour, and stared long at the melting blue glitter of the sea without the idea of exile once entering his head. Then he climbed back up to the square where the gray statue of Admiral Nakhimov stands in long naval frock coat, with spyglass, and wandering along the dusty white street as far as the Fourth Bastion, he visited the Panorama. Beyond the circular balustrade genuine old guns, sandbags, intentionally strewn splinters and real circuslike sand merged into a soft, smoky-blue, rather airless picture which surrounded the sightseers’ platform and teased the eye with the elusiveness of its boundaries.
This was how Sevastopol remained in his memory — vernal, dusty, in the grip of a kind of lifeless, dreamy disquiet.
At night, on board ship, he watched the empty white sleeves of searchlights filling in and sinking again across the sky, while the black water looked varnished in the moonlight and farther away, in the night haze, a brightly lit foreign cruiser rode at anchor, resting on the streamy gold pillars of its own reflection.
He took passage on a shabby Greek ship; the deck was covered with rows of penniless, swarthy refugees from Eupatoria, where the ship had called that morning. Ganin had installed himself in the wardroom, where the lamp ponderously swayed and the long table was piled with huge onion-shaped bundles.
Then came several glorious, sad days at sea. Like two floating white wings the oncoming foam embraced everything, embraced the bow of the steamer as it cut through it; and the green shadows of people leaning on the ship’s rails flickered softly across the bright slopes of the waves. The rusty steering gear creaked, two seagulls glided round the funnel and their wet bills, caught in a ray of sunshine, flashed like diamonds. Nearby a big-headed Greek baby began crying and its mother lost her temper and started to spit at it in a desperate effort to silence it. A stoker sometimes emerged on deck, black all over, with eyes ringed with coal dust and a fake ruby on his index finger.
It was such trivia — and not nostalgia for his abandoned homeland — that stuck in Ganin’s memory, as though only his eyes had been alive and his mind had gone into hiding.
On the second day Istanbul loomed darkly in the orange-colored evening and slowly dissolved in the night which overtook the ship. At dawn Ganin climbed up onto the bridge: the vague, dark blue outline of the Scutari shore was gradually becoming visible. The moon’s reflection narrowed and paled. In the east the blue-mauve of the sky modulated to a golden red, and Istanbul, shining faintly, began to float out of the mist. A silky band of ripples glittered along the shore; a black rowboat and a black fez sailed noiselessly past. Now the east was turning white and a breeze sprung up which brushed over Ganin’s face with a salty tickle. From the shore came the sound of reveille being played; two seagulls, black as crows, flapped over the ship, and with a patter like light rain a shoal of fish broke the surface in a network of m
omentary rings. A lighter came alongside; on the water beneath it, its shadow extended and then retracted its tentacles. But only when Ganin stepped ashore and saw a blue-clad Turk on the quayside asleep on a mountain of oranges — only then did he feel a clear, piercing sense of how far he was from the warm mass of his own country and from Mary, whom he loved forever.
All this now unfolded in his memory, flashing disjointedly, and shrank again into a warm lump when Podtyagin, with a great effort, asked him, ‘How long ago did you leave Russia?’
‘Five years,’ he answered curtly; and then, as he sat in a corner in the languorous violet light which poured over the cloth on the table in the center of the room and over the smiling faces of Kolin and Gornotsvetov, who were dancing silently and energetically in the middle of the room, Ganin thought, ‘What happiness! Tomorrow — no, it’s today, it’s already past midnight. Mary cannot have changed since then, her Tartar eyes still burn and smile just as they did.’ He would take her far away, he would work tirelessly for her. Tomorrow all his youth, his Russia, was coming back to him again.
Arms akimbo, throwing back his head and shaking it, now gliding, now stamping his heels and waving a handkerchief, Kolin was weaving around Gornotsvetov, who, squatting on his haunches, was nimbly and rakishly kicking his legs out quicker and quicker until he was finally revolving on one bent leg. Totally drunk, Alfyorov sat swaying with a benign expression. Klara kept glancing anxiously at Podtyagin’s gray, sweating face; the old man sat in an awkward sideways position on the bed.
‘You aren’t well, Anton Sergeyevich,’ she whispered. ‘You should go to bed, it’s around half past one.’
Oh, how simple it would be: tomorrow — no, today — he would see her again, provided Alfyorov got really tight. Only six hours more. Right now she would be asleep in her compartment, the telegraph poles flying by in the darkness, pine trees and hills rushing up to the train — what a noise these boys were making. Won’t they ever stop dancing? Yes, amazingly simple — at times there was something like genius in the workings of fate —
‘All right, I shall go and lie down a bit,’ said Podtyagin dully, and with a heavy sigh started to leave.
‘Where is the grand fellow going? Stop — stay a bit longer,’ Alfyorov muttered gaily.
‘Have another drink and shut up,’ Ganin said to Alfyorov, then quickly joined Podtyagin. ‘Lean on me, Anton Sergeyevich.’
The old man looked hazily at him, made a gesture as though swatting a fly and suddenly, with a faint cry, he staggered and pitched forward.
Ganin and Klara managed to catch him in time, while the dancers fussed around. Scarcely moving his sticky tongue, Alfyorov blabbered with drunken callousness, ‘Look, look — he’s dying.’
‘Stop running about and do something useful, Gornotsvetov,’ Ganin said calmly. ‘Hold his head. Kolin — support him here. No, that’s my arm — higher up. Stop gaping at me like that. Higher up, I say. Open the door, Klara.’
The three of them carried the old man to his room. Staggering, Alfyorov made as if to follow them, then limply waved his hand and sat down at the table. With a shaking hand he poured himself out some vodka, then pulled a nickel-plated watch out of his waistcoat pocket and put it in front of him on the table.
‘Three, four, five, six, seven, eight.’ He drew his finger round the Roman figures, stopped, his head turned aside, and sat watching the second hand with one eye.
In the passage, the dachshund began yelping in a high-pitched, excited voice. Alfyorov grimaced. ‘Lousy little dog. Ought to be run over.’
A little later he took an indelible pencil out of another pocket and smeared a mauve mark on the glass above the figure eight.
‘She’s coming, coming, coming,’ he said to himself in time with the ticking.
He glanced round the table, took a chocolate and immediately spat it out. A brown blob smacked against the wall.
‘Three, four, five, seven,’ Alfyorov started counting again and winked at the dial with a bleary, ecstatic smile.
16
The town had grown quiet in the night. The hunched old man in the black cloak was already on the move, tapping his stick and bending over with a grunt whenever its sharp point turned up a butt-end. An occasional car drove by, and even more rarely a night droshky would jolt by with a click of hooves. A drunk in a bowler hat was waiting for a tram on the corner, although the trams had stopped running at least two hours ago. A few prostitutes were strolling up and down, yawning and talking to shady loafers with upturned coat collars. One of the girls accosted Kolin and Gornotsvetov as they advanced almost at a run, but she turned away again at once after casting a professional glance at their pale, effeminate faces.
The dancers had undertaken to fetch a Russian doctor they knew to see Podtyagin, and indeed, after an hour and a half, they returned accompanied by a sleepy-looking gentleman with stiff, clean-shaven features. He stayed for half an hour, now and again making a sucking noise as though he had a hole in his tooth, and then left.
It was now very quiet in the unlighted room. There reigned that special, heavy, dull silence which always comes when several people are sitting in silence around a sick person. The night was now waning. Ganin’s profile, turned toward the bed, seemed carved out of pale blue stone; at the foot of the bed, in a vague armchair floating on the waves of the dawn, Klara sat looking fixedly in the same direction. Farther away, Gornotsvetov and Kolin huddled side by side on a little divan — and their faces were like two pale blobs.
The doctor was already going down the stairs behind the black figure of Frau Dorn, her bunch of keys chinking softly as she apologized for the lift being out of order. Reaching the bottom she opened the heavy front door and the doctor, raising his hat, departed into the bluish haze.
The old woman carefully locked the door, wrapped herself tighter in her black knitted shawl and went upstairs. The steps were lit by a cold yellow light. Her keys tinkling gently, she reached the landing. The light on the staircase went out.
In the lobby she met Ganin, who had come out of Podtyagin’s room, carefully pulling the door behind him.
‘The doctor has promised to come back in the morning,’ whispered the old woman. ‘How is he now — better?’
Ganin shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think not, though. The way he is breathing — it’s a frightening sound.’
Lydia Nikolaevna sighed and timidly entered the room. With an identical movement Klara and the two dancers turned their palely glistening eyes toward her and then turned back again to stare at the bed. A breeze rattled the frame of the half-open window.
Ganin walked down the passage on tiptoe and went back to the room where the party had recently taken place. As he supposed, Alfyorov was still sitting at the table. His face seemed swollen and shone gray from the combination of the light of dawn and the theatrically shaded lamp. He was nodding, occasionally belching. On the watchglass in front of him gleamed a drop of vodka in which a mauve trace of indelible pencil was spreading. Only four hours to go.
Ganin sat down beside that drunken, drowsy creature and stared long at him, knitting his thick brows and propping his temple on his clenched fist, which stretched his skin and caused his eye to slant.
Alfyorov suddenly came to life and slowly turned to look at him.
‘Isn’t it time you were going to bed, my dear Aleksey Ivanovich,’ said Ganin distinctly.
‘No,’ Alfyorov pronounced with difficulty, and after some thought, as though solving a difficult problem, he repeated, ‘No.’
Ganin switched off the unnecessary light, took out his cigarette case and lit a cigarette. Whether from the cold of the pale dawn or from the whiff of tobacco, Alfyorov seemed to sober up a little.
He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand, looked around and stretched out a fairly firm hand for a bottle.
Halfway to it his hand stopped, he shook his head, then with a slack smile said to Ganin, ‘Mustn’t have any more. Mary’s coming.’
After a
while he shook Ganin’s arm. ‘Hey, you, what’s your name — Leb Lebovich — d’you hear — Mary —’
Ganin exhaled the smoke and stared hard into Alfyorov’s face. He took it all in at once: the wet, half-open mouth, the little dung-colored beard, the watery blinking eyes.
‘Listen, Leb Lebovich’ — Alfyorov swayed and grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘Right now I’m dead drunk, canned, tight as a drum. They made me drink, damn ’em — no, that’s not it — I wanted to tell you about the girl —’
‘You need a good sleep, Aleksey Ivanovich.’
‘There was a girl, I tell you. No, I’m not talking about my wife — my wife’s pure — but I’d been so many years without my wife. So not long ago — no, it was long ago — can’t remember when — girl took me up to her place. Foxy-looking little thing — such filth — and yet delicious. And now Mary’s coming. D’you realize what it means? D’you realize or not? I’m drunk — can’t remember how to say perp — purple — perpendicular and Mary’ll be here soon. Why did it all have to happen like this? Eh? I’m asking you! You, you damn Bolshevik! Can you tell me why?’
Ganin gently pushed away his hand. Head nodding, Alfyorov leaned forward over the table; his elbow slipped, rumpling the tablecloth and knocking over the glasses. The glasses, a saucer and the watch slid to the floor.
‘Bed,’ said Ganin and jerked him violently to his feet.
Alfyorov did not resist, but he was so unsteady that Ganin could hardly make him walk in the right direction.
Finding himself in his own room, he gave a broad, sleepy grin and collapsed slowly onto the bed. Suddenly horror crossed his face.
‘Alarm clock —’ he mumbled, sitting up. ‘Leb — over there, on the table, alarm clock — set it for half-past seven.’
‘All right,’ said Ganin, and began moving the hand. He set it for ten o’clock, then changed his mind and set it for eleven.
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