Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

‘But you must agree that we can’t hang here all night.’

‘It looks as if we shall have to. Don’t you think there’s something symbolic in our meeting like this, Lev Glebovich? When we were on terra firma we didn’t know each other. Then we happen to come home at the same time and get into this contraption together. By the way, the floor is horribly thin and there’s nothing but a black well underneath it. Well, as I was saying, we stepped in without a word, still not knowing each other, glided up in silence and then suddenly — stop. And darkness.’

‘What’s symbolic about it?’ Ganin asked gloomily.

‘Well, the fact that we’ve stopped, motionless, in this darkness. And that we’re waiting. At lunch today that man — what’s his name — the old writer — oh yes, Podtyagin — was arguing with me about the sense of this émigré life of ours, this perpetual waiting. You were absent all day, weren’t you, Lev Glebovich?’

‘Yes. I was out of town.’

‘Ah, spring. It must be nice in the country now.’

Alfyorov’s voice faded away for a few moments, and when it sounded again there was an unpleasant lilt to it, probably because the speaker was smiling.

‘When my wife comes I shall take her out into the country. She adores going for walks. Didn’t the landlady tell me that your room would be free by Saturday?’

‘That is so,’ Ganin replied curtly.

‘Are you leaving Berlin altogether?’

Ganin nodded, forgetting that nods were invisible in the dark. Alfyorov fidgeted on the seat, sighed once or twice, then began gently whistling a saccharine tune, stopping and starting again. Ten minutes passed; suddenly there came a click from above.

‘That’s better,’ Ganin said with a smile.

At the same moment the ceiling bulb blazed forth, and the humming and heaving cage was flooded with yellow light. Alfyorov blinked, as though just waking up. He was wearing an old sandy-colored, formless overcoat — of the so-called ‘in-between-season’ sort — and holding a bowler hat. His thin fair hair was slightly ruffled and something about his features reminded one of a religious oleograph: that little golden beard, the turn of that scraggy neck from which he pulled off a bright-speckled scarf.

With a lurch the lift caught on the sill of the fourth-floor landing and stopped.

‘A miracle,’ Alfyorov said, grinning, as he opened the door. ‘I thought someone had pressed the button and brought us up, but there’s no one here. After you, Lev Glebovich.’

But Ganin, with a grimace of impatience, gave Alfyorov a slight push and, having followed him out, relieved his feelings by noisily slamming the steel door behind him. Never before had he been so irritable.

‘A miracle,’ Alfyorov repeated. ‘Up we came and yet there’s no one here. That’s symbolic too.’

The pension was both Russian and nasty. It was chiefly nasty because all day long and much of the night the trains of the Stadtbahn could be heard, creating the impression that the whole building was slowly on the move. The hall, where there hung a bleary mirror with a ledge for gloves, and where stood an oak chest so placed that people naturally barked their shins on it, narrowed into a bare and very cramped passage. Along each side were three rooms, numbered with large black figures stuck onto the doors. These were simply leaves torn off a year-old calendar — the first six days of April, 1923. April I — the first door on the left — was Alfyorov’s room, the next was Ganin’s, while the third belonged to the landlady, Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn, the widow of a German businessman who twenty years ago had brought her here from Sarepta and who the year before had died of brain fever. In the three rooms down the right-hand side — April 4 to 6 — there lived Anton Sergeyevich Podtyagin, an old Russian poet; Klara, a full-busted girl with striking bluish-brown eyes; and, finally, in room 6 at the turn of the passage, two ballet dancers, Kolin and Gornotsvetov, both as giggly as women, thin, with powdered noses and muscular thighs. At the end of the first stretch of the passage was the dining room, with a lithograph of the Last Supper on the wall facing the door and the yellow, horned skulls of deer along another wall above a bulbous sideboard. On it stood two crystal vases, once the cleanest things in the whole apartment but now dulled by a coating of fluffy dust.

Upon reaching the dining room, the passage took a right-angled turn to the right. There, in tragical and malodorous depths, lurked the kitchen, a small room for the maid, a dirty bathroom and a narrow W.C., whose door was labeled with two crimson noughts deprived of the rightful digits with which they had once denoted two Sundays on Herr Dorn’s desk calendar. A month after his death Lydia Nikolaevna, a tiny, slightly deaf woman given to mild oddities, had rented an empty apartment and turned it into a pension . In doing this she showed a singular, rather creepy kind of ingenuity in the way she distributed the few household articles she had inherited. The tables, chairs, creaking wardrobes and bumpy couches were divided among the rooms which she intended to let. Separated, the pieces of furniture at once faded, took on the inept, dejected look of a dismembered skeleton’s bones. Her late husband’s desk, an oaken monster with a cast-iron inkwell in the form of a toad and with a middle drawer as deep as a ship’s hold, found its way to room 1, where Alfyorov now lived, while the revolving stool, originally bought to match the desk, was parted from it and led an orphaned existence with the dancers in room 6. A pair of green armchairs was also severed: one pined in Ganin’s room, and the other one was used by the landlady herself or by her old dachshund, a fat black bitch with a gray muzzle and pendulous ears that had velvety ends like the fringes of a butterfly’s wing. The bookshelf in Klara’s room was adorned by the first few volumes of an encyclopedia, while the remaining volumes were allotted to Podtyagin. Klara had also been given the only decent washstand, with a mirror and drawers; in each of the other rooms there was simply a squat wooden prop and on it a tin basin and a jug of the same material. She had been forced, however, to buy additional beds. This caused Frau Dorn considerable pain, not because she was stingy, but because she had derived a kind of delicious thrill, a sense of pride in her own thrift, from the way she had distributed all her previous furniture. Now that she was a widow and her double bed too spacious for her to sleep in, she resented being unable to saw it up into the required number of parts. In a haphazard way she cleaned the rooms herself, but she had never been able to cope with food, so she kept a cook — the terror of the local market, a vast red-haired virago who on Fridays donned a crimson hat and sailed off for the northern quarters where she traded her blowsy charms. Lydia Nikolaevna was afraid of going into the kitchen and was altogether a quiet, timorous creature. Whenever her blunt-toed little feet brought her pattering along the corridor, the lodgers always had the feeling that this gray, snub-nosed little creature was not the landlady at all, but just some silly old woman who had strayed into someone else’s apartment. Every morning, bent in half like a rag doll, she would hurriedly sweep the dust from under the furniture, then disappear into her room, the smallest of them all. There she would read tattered German books or look through her late husband’s papers, whose contents she understood not a whit. The only other person to go into her room was Podtyagin, who would stroke her affectionate black dachshund, tickle its ears and the wart on its hoary muzzle, and try to make the dog sit up and proffer its crooked paw. He would talk to Lydia Nikolaevna about his senile aches and pains and about how he had been trying for six long months to get a visa to go to Paris where his niece lived, and where the long crusty loaves and the red wine were so cheap. The old lady would nod, occasionally questioning him about the other lodgers, in particular about Ganin, whom she found quite unlike all the other young Russians who had stayed in her pension . Having lived there for three months, Ganin was now preparing to leave, and had even said he would give up his room next Saturday, however, he had planned to leave several times before and had always changed his mind and put off his departure. Lydia Nikolaevna knew, from what the gentle old poet had told her, that Ganin had a girl friend. And there lay the root of the trouble.