Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

He never saw Mary again.

The noise grew louder, flooded in, a pale cloud enveloped the window, a glass rattled on the washstand. A train had passed by and now the empty expanse of the railway tracks could be seen again fanning out from the window. Berlin, gentle and misty, toward evening, in April.

That Thursday at twilight, when the noise of the trains sounded hollower than ever, Klara came to see Ganin in a high state of agitation to give him a message from Lyudmila: ‘Tell him,’ Lyudmila had said, ‘tell him this: that I’m not one of those women that men can just drop. I’m the one who does the dropping. Tell him I don’t want anything from him, I’m not making any demands, but I think it was filthy of him not to have answered my letter. I wanted to break it off with him in a friendly way, to suggest that even if we don’t love each other any more we can simply be friends, but he couldn’t even be bothered to ring me up. Tell him, Klara, that I wish him luck with his German girl and that I know he won’t be able to forget me as quickly as he may think.’

‘Where on earth did she get the German girl from?’ said Ganin, making a face, when Klara, without looking at him and talking in a low, rapid voice, had delivered her message. ‘Anyway, why does she have to involve you in this business? It’s all very tiresome.’

‘You know, Lev Glebovich,’ Klara burst out, dousing him with one of her moist looks, ‘you really are heartless. Lyudmila thinks nothing but good of you, she idealizes you, but if she knew all about you —’ Ganin looked at her with amiable astonishment. Embarrassed, Klara dropped her glance.

‘I only gave you the message because she asked me to,’ Klara said quietly.

‘I must leave,’ Ganin said after a silence. ‘This room, these trains, Erika’s cooking — I’m fed up with it all. Besides, I’m nearly out of money and I shall have to work again soon. I’m thinking of leaving Berlin for good on Saturday, going south, to some sea port.’

He clenched and unclenched his fist and lapsed into pensiveness.

‘I don’t know, though — there’s one circumstance — You’d be amazed if you knew what has just occurred to me. An extraordinary, incredible plan! If it comes off I’ll be out of this town by the day after tomorrow.’

‘Really, what a strange man he is,’ thought Klara, with that aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place.

Ganin’s glassy black pupils dilated, his thick eyelashes gave his eyes a warm, downy look and a serene smile of contemplation lifted slightly his upper lip, baring the white expanse of his glistening, even teeth. His dark eyebrows, which reminded Klara of scraps of expensive fur, alternately met and parted, and soft furrows came and went on his smooth forehead.

Noticing Klara’s stare, he blinked, passed his hand across his face and remembered what he had been intending to say to her. ‘Yes. I’m going, and that will end everything. Simply tell her that Ganin is leaving and wants her not to think ill of him. That’s all.’

On Friday morning the dancers sent round the following note to the other four lodgers:

Because:

1. Mr Ganin is leaving us.

2. Mr Podtyagin is preparing to leave.

3. Mr Alfyorov’s wife is arriving tomorrow.

4. Mlle Klara is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday and

5. The undersigned have obtained an engagement in this city — because of all this a celebration will be held tonight at 10 p.m. in room April 6th.

‘How kind of them,’ said Podtyagin with a smile as he went out of the house with Ganin, who had agreed to accompany him to the police station. ‘Where are you going when you leave Berlin, Lyovushka? Far away? Yes, you’re a bird of passage. When I was young I longed to travel, to swallow the whole wide world. Well, it’s damn well happened —’

He hunched himself against the fresh spring wind, turned up the collar of his well-kept dark gray overcoat with its huge bone buttons. He still felt a debilitating weakness in the legs, an aftereffect of his heart attack, but today he derived a certain cheerful relief from the thought that now he would most likely have done with all the fuss about his passport and that he might even get permission to leave for Paris the very next day.

The vast purple-red building of the central police headquarters faced onto four streets. It was built in a grim but extremely bad Gothic style with dim windows and a highly intriguing courtyard forbidden to the public; an impassive policeman stood at the main portal. An arrow on the wall pointed across the street to a photographer’s studio, where in twenty minutes one could obtain a miserable likeness of oneself: half a dozen identical physiognomies, of which one was stuck onto the yellow page of the passport, another one went into the police archives, while the rest were probably distributed among the officials’ private collections.

Podtyagin and Ganin entered a wide gray corridor. At the door of the passport department stood a little table where an ancient bewhiskered official issued numbered tickets, occasionally casting a schoolmasterly glance over his spectacles at the small polyglot crowd of people.

‘You must stand in the queue and get a number,’ said Ganin.

‘And I never did that before,’ the old poet replied in a whisper. ‘I just used to go straight in through the door.’

When he received his ticket a few minutes later he was delighted, and looked even more like a fat guinea pig than ever.

In the bare, stuffy, sunlit room where officials sat at their desks behind a low partition, there was another crowd which appeared to have come for the sole purpose of staring at those lugubrious scribes.

Ganin pushed his way through, with Podtyagin snuffling along trustfully after him.

Half an hour later, having handed in Podtyagin’s passport, they moved over to another desk; again a queue, a crush of people, somebody’s bad breath and, at last, for the price of a few marks the yellow sheet of paper was returned, now adorned with the magic stamp.

‘Now off we go to the consulate,’ grunted Podtyagin joyfully as they left the redoubtable-looking though in reality rather dreary building. ‘It’s in the bag now. How do you manage to talk to them so calmly, my dear Lev Glebovich? It was such agony for me when I went before! Come on, let’s go on the top deck of the bus. What a joy this is — I’m actually in a sweat, you know.’

He was the first to clamber up the twisting staircase. The conductor on the top deck banged on the iron side with his hand and the bus moved off. Houses, signboards, sunlight on shop windows floated by.

‘Our grandchildren will never understand all this nonsense about visas,’ said Podtyagin, reverentially examining his passport. ‘They’ll never understand that there could be so much human anxiety connected with a simple rubber stamp. Do you think,’ he added anxiously, ‘that the French really will give me a visa now?’

‘Of course they will,’ said Ganin. ‘After all, they told you that permission had been given.’

‘I think I’ll leave tomorrow,’ Podtyagin smiled. ‘Let’s go together, Lyovushka. It’ll be fine in Paris. No, you just look what a mug I have here.’

Ganin glanced over his arm at the passport with its photograph in the corner. The photograph was quite remarkable: a dazed, bloated face swam in a grayish murk.

‘I have no less than two passports,’ Ganin said with a smile. ‘One Russian, which is real but very old, and a Polish one, forged. That’s the one I use.’

As he paid the conductor, Podtyagin put down the yellow document on the seat beside him, selected 40 pfennigs from the several coins in his hand and glanced up at the conductor.