Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

‘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.

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:

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.

Podtyagin had been unsuccessful again today, the old man really had no luck. The French had allowed him in, but the Germans for some reason would not let him out. Meanwhile he only had just enough money left to make the journey, and if that foul-up lasted for another week he would have to spend his money on subsistence and then it would not be enough to get him to Paris. As he consumed his soup he described with a cheerless and ponderous jocularity how he had been chased from one department to another, how he had been unable to explain what he wanted, and how finally a tired and exasperated official had bawled him out.

Ganin looked up and said, ‘Let me come with you tomorrow, Anton Sergeyevich. I have plenty of time to spare. I’ll help you to talk to them.’

His German was, indeed, good.

‘Why, thank you,’ Podtyagin replied, and he again noticed, as he had the day before, the unusual brightness of Ganin’s expression. ‘It’s enough to make one weep, you know. I spent two hours standing in a queue again and came back empty-handed. Thanks, Lyovushka.’

‘I expect my wife will be having trouble too,’ Alfyorov began. Something then happened to Ganin which had never happened to him before. He felt an intolerable blush slowly suffusing his face and tickling his forehead, as if he had drunk too much vinegar. Coming to lunch it had not occurred to him that these people, the ghosts of his dream-life in exile, would talk about his real life — about Mary. With horror and shame he recalled that in his ignorance the day before yesterday at lunch he had laughed with the others at Alfyorov’s wife. And somebody might laugh again today.

‘She’s very efficient, though,’ Alfyorov was saying meanwhile. ‘She can stand up for herself. She knows how to look after herself, does my little wife.’

Kolin and Gornotsvetov exchanged looks and giggled. Silently, sullenly, Ganin rolled a bread-ball. He almost got up and went out, but mastered himself. Raising his head he made himself look at Alfyorov, and having looked, was amazed how Mary could have married that person with the sparse little beard and shiny, plump nose. And the thought that he was sitting beside the man who had caressed Mary, who knew the feel of her lips, her jokes, her laugh, her movements, and who was now waiting for her — the thought was terrible, but with it he also felt a certain thrilling pride as he recalled that it had been to him and not her husband that Mary had first surrendered her profound, unique fragrance.

After lunch he went for a walk, then climbed up onto the top deck of a bus. Down below the streets poured by, little black figures dashed around on the shiny sunlit asphalt, the bus swayed and thundered — and Ganin felt that this alien city passing before him was nothing but a moving picture. As he returned home he saw Podtyagin knocking on Klara’s door and Podtyagin too seemed to him a ghost, something extraneous and irrelevant.

‘Our friend is in love with someone again.’ Anton Sergeyevich nodded toward the door as he drank tea with Klara. ‘It’s not you, is it?’

Klara turned away; her ample bust rose and fell. She could not believe it to be true; it frightened her, she was frightened by the Ganin who rifled other people’s desks, but she was nevertheless pleased by Podtyagin’s question.