Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

Sitting bolt upright in an armchair, Lydia Nikolaevna was reading when he entered. Her dachshund slithered off the bed and began thrashing about in a little fit of hysterical devotion at Ganin’s feet.

Lydia Nikolaevna saddened as she realized that this time he really was about to leave. She liked the tall, relaxed figure of Ganin; she generally tended to grow very used to her lodgers and there was something a little akin to death in their inevitable departures.

Ganin paid her for the past week and kissed her hand, light as a faded leaf.

As he walked back down the passage he remembered that today the dancers had invited him to a party and he decided not to go away just yet; he could always take a room in a hotel, even after midnight if necessary.

And tomorrow Mary arrives,’ he exclaimed mentally, glancing round the ceiling, floor and walls with a blissful and frightened look. ‘And tomorrow I’m going to take her away,’ he reflected with the same inward shudder, the same luxurious sigh of his whole being.

With a quick movement he took out the black wallet in which he kept the five letters he had received during his time in the Crimea. Now in a flash he remembered the whole of that Crimean winter, 1917 to 1918: the nor’easter blowing the stinging dust along the Yalta seafront, a wave breaking over the parapet onto the sidewalk, the insolent and bewildered Bolshevik sailors, then the Germans in their helmets like steel mushrooms, then the gay tricolor chevrons — days of expectation, an anxious breathing space; a thin, freckled little prostitute with bobbed hair and a Greek profile walking along the seafront, the nor’easter again scattering the sheet music of the band in the park, and then — at last — his company was on the march: the billets in Tartar hamlets where all day long in the tiny barbers’ shops the razor glittered just as it always had, and one’s cheeks swelled with lather, while little boys in the dusty streets whipped their tops as they had done a thousand years ago. And the wild night attack when you had no idea where the shooting was coming from or who was leaping through the puddles of moonlight between the slanting black shadows cast by the houses.

Ganin took the first letter out of the bundle — a single, thick, oblong leaf with a drawing in the top left-hand corner that showed a young man in a blue tail coat holding behind his back a bouquet of pale flowers and kissing the hand of a lady, as delicate as he, with ringlets down her cheeks, wearing a pink, high-waisted dress.

That first letter had been forwarded to him from St Petersburg to Yalta; it had been written just a little over two years after that blissful autumn.

‘Lyova, I’ve been in Poltava for a whole week now, hellishly boring. I don’t know if I shall ever see you again, but I do so want you not to forget me.’

The handwriting was small and round, and looked exactly as if it were running along on tiptoe. There were strokes under the letter ‘m’ and above the letter ‘m’ for clarity; the final letter of each word tailed off in an impetuous flick to the right; only in the letter ‘ß’ at the end of a word did the bar bend touchingly downward and to the left, as though Mary retracted the word at the last moment; her full stops were very large and decisive, but there were few commas.

‘Just think, I’ve been looking at snow for a week, white cold snow. It’s cold, nasty and depressing. And suddenly like a bird the thought darts through one’s mind that somewhere far far away there are people living another completely different life. They’re not stagnating as I am in the sticks, on a small farm.

‘No, it’s really too awfully dull here. Write me something, Lyova. Even the most absolute trifles.’

Ganin remembered getting this letter, remembered walking up a steep stony path on that distant January evening, past Tartar picket fences hung here and there with horses’ skulls, remembered how he sat beside a rivulet pouring in thin streams over smooth white stones, and stared through the countless, delicate and amazingly distinct bare branches of an apple tree at the mellow pink of the sky, where the new moon glistened like a translucent nail clipping, and beside it, by the lower horn, trembled a drop of brightness — the first star.

He wrote to her the same night — about that star, about the cypresses in the garden, about the donkey whose roaring bray came every morning from the Tartar yard behind the house. He wrote affectionately, dreamily, recalling the wet catkins on the slippery footbridge of the pavilion where they first met.

In those days letters took a long time on the way — the answer did not come until July.

‘Thank you very much for your good, sweet, “southern” letter. Why do you write that you still remember me? And you’ll not forget me? No? How lovely!

‘Today it’s so nice and fresh, after a thunderstorm. As at Voskresensk — remember? Wouldn’t you like to wander round those familiar places again? I would — terribly. How lovely it was to walk in the rain through the park in autumn. Why wasn’t it sad then in bad weather?

‘I’m going to stop writing for a while and go for a walk.

‘I never did manage to finish the letter yesterday. Isn’t that awful of me? Forgive me, Lyova dear, I promise I won’t do it again.’

Ganin dropped his hand with the letter and for a moment sat lost in thought. How well he remembered those merry mannerisms of hers, that husky little laugh when she apologized, that transition from a melancholy sigh to a look of ardent vitality!

‘For a long time I was worried not knowing where you were and how you were,’ she wrote in the same letter. ‘Now we mustn’t break off the little thread which links us. There’s so much I want to write and ask you, but my thoughts wander. I’ve seen and lived through a lot of unhappiness since those days. Write, write for God’s sake, write often and more. All the very best for now. I’d like to say goodbye more affectionately, but perhaps I’ve forgotten how to after all this time. Or perhaps there’s something else holding me back?’

For days after getting that letter he was full of a trembling happiness. He could not understand how he could have parted from Mary. He only remembered their first autumn together — all the rest, those torments and tiffs, seemed so pale and insignificant. The languorous darkness, the conventional sheen of the sea at night, the velvety hush of the narrow cypress avenues, the gleam of the moonlight on the broad leaves of magnolias — all this only oppressed him.

Duty kept him in Yalta — the civil war was under way — but there were moments when he decided to give up everything to go and look for Mary among the farms of the Ukraine.

There was something touching and wonderful about the way their letters managed to pass across the terrible Russia of that time — like a cabbage white butterfly flying over the trenches. His answer to her second letter was very delayed, and Mary simply could not understand what had happened, as she was convinced that where their letters were concerned the usual obstacles of those days somehow did not exist.

‘It must seem strange to you that I’m writing to you despite your silence — but I don’t believe, I refuse to believe, that you still don’t want to reply to me. You haven’t replied, not because you didn’t want to but simply because — well, because you couldn’t, or because you hadn’t time or something. Tell me, Lyova, doesn’t it seem funny to remember what you once said to me — that loving me was your life, and if you couldn’t love me you wouldn’t be alive? Yes, how everything passes, how things change. Would you like to have what happened all over again? I think I’m feeling rather too depressed today...