Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

‘ Genug?’

He then looked sideways at Ganin.

‘What did you say, Lev Glebovich? Forged?’

‘Certainly. My first name really is Lev, but my surname is not Ganin at all.’

‘What do you mean, my dear fellow?’ Podtyagin goggled in amazement and suddenly clutched at his hat — a strong wind was blowing.

‘Well, that’s the way it was,’ ruminated Ganin. ‘About three years ago. Partisan detachment. In Poland. And so on. Thought I’d break through to St Petersburg and raise a rebellion. Now it’s quite convenient and rather fun having this passport.’

Podtyagin suddenly looked away and said glumly, ‘I dreamed about St Petersburg last night, Lyovushka. I was walking along the Nevski. I knew it was the Nevski, although it looked nothing like it. The houses had sloping angles as in a futurist painting, and the sky was black, although I knew it was daytime. And the passers-by were giving me strange looks. Then a man crossed the street and took aim at my head. He’s an old haunter of mine. It’s terrible — oh terrible — that whenever we dream about Russia we never dream of it as beautiful, as we know it was in reality, but as something monstrous — the sort of dreams where the sky is falling in and you feel the world’s coming to an end.’

‘No,’ said Ganin, ‘I only dream about the beautiful things. The same woods, the same country house. Sometimes it’s all rather deserted, with unfamiliar clearings. But that does not matter. We have to get out here, Anton Sergeyevich.’

He went down the spiral staircase and helped Podtyagin to step onto the pavement.

‘Just look at the way that water sparkles,’ Podtyagin remarked, breathing laboriously, and pointed at the canal with all five fingers stretched.

‘Careful — mind that bicycle,’ said Ganin. ‘There’s the consulate over there on the right.’

‘Please accept my sincere thanks, Lev Glebovich. If I’d been on my own I’d never have got through all that red tape. It’s a great relief to me. Farewell, Deutschland.’

They entered the consulate building. As they went up the stairs Podtyagin began searching in his pockets.

‘Come on,’ said Ganin, turning round.

But the old man kept searching.

Only four of the lodgers had turned up for lunch.

‘I wonder why our friends are so late?’ said Alfyorov cheerfully. ‘I suppose they’ve had no luck.’

He positively breathed joyful expectation. On the previous day he had been to the station and found out the exact time of arrival of the morning fast train from the north: 8:05. Today he had cleaned his suit, bought a pair of new cuffs and a bunch of lily-of-the-valley. His financial affairs appeared to have put themselves right. Before lunch he had sat in a café with a gloomy, clean-shaven gentleman who had offered him what was undoubtedly a money-making proposition. His mind, used as it was to figures, was now preoccupied with one single figure, made up of a unit and a decimal fraction: eight point zero five. This was the percentage of happiness which fate had temporarily allotted to him. And tomorrow — he screwed up his eyes, sighed and imagined how early tomorrow morning he would go to the station, how he would wait on the platform, how the train would come rushing in —

After lunch he disappeared, as did the dancers, who went out surreptitiously, as excited as two women, to buy little delicacies.

Only Klara stayed at home. Her head ached and the thin bones of her fat legs were hurting, which was unfortunate, as today was her birthday. ‘I’m twenty-six today,’ she thought, ‘and tomorrow Ganin is leaving. He is bad, he deceives women and he is capable of committing a crime. He can look me calmly in the eyes even though he knows I saw him just about to steal money. Yet he’s wonderful and I think about him literally all day. And there’s no hope whatsoever.’

She looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was paler than usual; beneath a lock of chestnut hair low down on her forehead she had broken out in a faint rash, and there were shadows under her eyes. She could not stand the glossy black dress which she wore day in, day out; there was a very obvious darn on the seam of her dark, transparent stocking; and one of her heels was crooked.

Podtyagin and Ganin returned around five o’clock. Klara heard their footsteps and looked out. Pale as death, his overcoat open and holding his collar and tie in his hand, Podtyagin walked silently past into his room and locked the door behind him.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Klara in a whisper.

Ganin clicked his tongue. ‘He lost his passport, then he had an attack. Right here, in front of the house. I could hardly drag him upstairs. The lift’s not working, unfortunately. We’ve been searching all over town.’

‘I’ll go and see him,’ said Klara, ‘he’ll need comforting.’

Podtyagin would not let her in at first. When he finally did open the door, Klara groaned aloud when she saw his muzzy, confused expression.

‘Have you heard?’ he said with a wistful grin. ‘I am an old idiot. Everything was ready, you see — and then I have to go and —’

‘Where did you drop it, Anton Sergeyevich?’

‘That’s it: I dropped it. Poetic license: elided passport. “The Trousered Cloud” by Mayakovski. Great big clouded cretin, that’s what I am.’

‘Perhaps somebody will pick it up,’ suggested Klara sympathetically.

‘Impossible. It’s fate. There’s no escaping fate. I’m doomed not to leave here. It was preordained.’

He sat down heavily.

‘I don’t feel well, Klara. I was so short of breath on the street just now that I thought it was the end. God, I simply don’t know what to do now. Except perhaps kick the bucket.’

Ganin meanwhile returned to his room and started to pack. From under the bed he pulled out two leather suitcases — one in a check cover, the other bare, tan— colored with pale marks left by labels — and spilled all the contents onto the floor. Then from the shaky, creaking darkness of the wardrobe he took out a black suit, a slender pile of underclothes, a pair of heavy, brass-studded brown boots. From the bedside table he extracted a motley collection of bits and pieces thrown in there at various times: dirty handkerchiefs crumpled into balls, razor blades with rusty stains around their eyelets, old newspapers, picture postcards, some yellow beads like horses’ teeth, a torn silk sock which had lost its twin.

He took off his jacket, squatted down among all this sad, dusty rubbish and began to sort out what to take and what to destroy.

First he packed the suit and the clean underwear, then his automatic and a pair of old riding breeches, badly worn around the crotch.

As he pondered what to take next he noticed a black wallet that had fallen under the chair when he had emptied the suitcase. He picked it up and was going to open it, smiling as he thought of what was in it, but then he told himself that he should hurry up with his packing, so he thrust the wallet into the hip pocket of his trousers and began quickly throwing things at random into the open suitcases: crumpled dirty underclothes, Russian books which God alone knew how he had acquired, and all those trivial yet somehow precious things which become so familiar to our sight and touch, and whose only virtue is that they enable a person condemned to be always on the move to feel at home, however slightly, whenever he unpacks his fond, fragile, human rubbish for the hundredth time.

Having packed, Ganin locked both suitcases, stood them alongside each other, stuffed the wastepaper basket with the corpses of old newspapers, glanced all round his empty room and went off to settle up with the landlady.