Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

Gornotsvetov gave a final pluck to the strings and stopped playing. Everyone felt awkward.

‘Some singers!’ Podtyagin grunted despondently, and shook his head, propped on his hand. He felt bad: the thought of his lost passport was combined with a stifling shortness of breath.

‘I shouldn’t drink, that’s the trouble,’ he added glumly.

‘I told you so,’ murmured Klara. ‘You’re like a baby, Anton Sergeyevich.’

‘Why isn’t anybody eating or drinking?’ said Kolin, waggling his hips as he minced around the table. He began filling up empty glasses. Nobody said anything. The party, obviously, was a failure.

Ganin, who until then had been sitting on the window ledge and staring, with a faint smile of pensive irony, at the mauve glimmer of the table and the strangely lit faces, suddenly jumped down to the floor and gave a peal of clear laughter.

‘Fill ’em up, Kolin,’ he said as he walked over to the table. ‘Some more for Alfyorov. Tomorrow our life changes. Tomorrow I shan’t be here any longer. Come on, down the hatch. Stop looking at me like a wounded deer, Klara. Give her some more of that liqueur. You too, Anton Sergeyevich — cheer up. No good moping about your passport. You’ll get another one, even better than the old one. Recite us some of your poetry. Oh yes, by the way —’

‘Can I have that empty bottle?’ Alfyorov said suddenly, and a lascivious gleam sparkled in his joyful, excited eyes.

‘By the way,’ Ganin repeated, coming up behind the old man and putting his hand on his fleshy shoulder, ‘I remember some of your verses, Anton Sergeyevich. “Full moon — forest and stream” — that’s right, isn’t it?’

Podtyagin turned and looked at him, then gave an unhurried smile. ‘Did you find it in an old calendar? They were very fond of printing my poetry on calendar leaves. On the underside, above the recipe for the day.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, what is he trying to do?’ shouted Kolin, pointing at Alfyorov, who, having flung open the window, had suddenly raised the bottle and was aiming it into the dark blue night.

‘Let him,’ Ganin laughed. ‘Let him act up if he wants to.’

Alfyorov’s beard gleamed, his Adam’s apple swelled and the sparse hair at his temples stirred in the night breeze. Bringing back his arm in a wide sweep, he stood still for a while and then solemnly placed the bottle on the floor.

The dancers burst into laughter.

Alfyorov sat down beside Gornotsvetov, took the guitar from him and began to try to play it. He was a man who got drunk very quickly.

‘Klara’s so serious-looking,’ Podtyagin said with difficulty. ‘Girls like her used to write me such moving letters. Now she doesn’t want to look at me.’

‘Don’t drink any more. Please,’ said Klara, thinking that she had never been so miserable in her life as now.

Podtyagin managed a forced smile and pulled at Ganin’s sleeve. ‘Now here’s the future savior of Russia. Tell us a story, Lyovushka — where did you roam, where did you fight?’

‘Must I?’ asked Ganin with a good-natured grimace.

‘Yes, do. I feel so depressed, you know. When did you leave Russia?’

‘When? Hey, Kolin. Let’s have some of that sticky stuff. No, not for me — for Alfyorov. That’s right. Mix it into his glass.’

Lydia Nikolaevna was already in bed. She had nervously refused the dancers’ invitation and was now sleeping an old woman’s light sleep, through which the heavy vibration of the trains passed with the sound of huge cupboards full of quivering crockery. Occasionally her sleep would be broken, and then she would vaguely hear the voices in room 6. Once she dreamed of Ganin, and in her dreams she could not understand who he was and where he had come from. Indeed, his personality was surrounded by mystery. And no wonder: he never told anybody about his life, his wanderings and his adventures of recent years — even he himself remembered his escape from Russia as though in a dream, a dream that was like a faintly sparkling sea mist.

Perhaps Mary had written more letters at that time — early 1919 — when he had been fighting in the northern Crimea, but he had not received them if she had. Perekop tottered and fell. Wounded in the head, Ganin had been evacuated to Simferopol; and a week later, sick and listless, cut off from his unit which had retreated to Feodosia, he had been caught up in the mad, nightmarish torrent of the civilian evacuation. In the fields and on the slopes of the Heights of Inkerman, where once the uniforms of Queen Victoria’s soldiers had flashed scarlet among the smoke of toy cannon, the lovely and wild Crimean spring was already blossoming. Smoothly undulating, the milky-white road flowed on, the open cover of the car rattled as the wheels bounced over bumps and holes — and the feeling of speed, the feeling of spring, of space and the pale green of the hills, suddenly fused into a delicious joy which made it possible to forget that this light-hearted road was the way leading out of Russia.

He reached Sevastopol still full of joy, and left his suitcase at the white-stone Hotel Kist, where the confusion was indescribable. Then drunk with hazy sunshine and the dull pain in his head he set off, past the pale doric columns of the portico, down the broad granite flagstones of the steps to the harbour, and stared long at the melting blue glitter of the sea without the idea of exile once entering his head. Then he climbed back up to the square where the gray statue of Admiral Nakhimov stands in long naval frock coat, with spyglass, and wandering along the dusty white street as far as the Fourth Bastion, he visited the Panorama. Beyond the circular balustrade genuine old guns, sandbags, intentionally strewn splinters and real circuslike sand merged into a soft, smoky-blue, rather airless picture which surrounded the sightseers’ platform and teased the eye with the elusiveness of its boundaries.

This was how Sevastopol remained in his memory — vernal, dusty, in the grip of a kind of lifeless, dreamy disquiet.

At night, on board ship, he watched the empty white sleeves of searchlights filling in and sinking again across the sky, while the black water looked varnished in the moonlight and farther away, in the night haze, a brightly lit foreign cruiser rode at anchor, resting on the streamy gold pillars of its own reflection.

He took passage on a shabby Greek ship; the deck was covered with rows of penniless, swarthy refugees from Eupatoria, where the ship had called that morning. Ganin had installed himself in the wardroom, where the lamp ponderously swayed and the long table was piled with huge onion-shaped bundles.

Then came several glorious, sad days at sea. Like two floating white wings the oncoming foam embraced everything, embraced the bow of the steamer as it cut through it; and the green shadows of people leaning on the ship’s rails flickered softly across the bright slopes of the waves. The rusty steering gear creaked, two seagulls glided round the funnel and their wet bills, caught in a ray of sunshine, flashed like diamonds. Nearby a big-headed Greek baby began crying and its mother lost her temper and started to spit at it in a desperate effort to silence it. A stoker sometimes emerged on deck, black all over, with eyes ringed with coal dust and a fake ruby on his index finger.

It was such trivia — and not nostalgia for his abandoned homeland — that stuck in Ganin’s memory, as though only his eyes had been alive and his mind had gone into hiding.

On the second day Istanbul loomed darkly in the orange-colored evening and slowly dissolved in the night which overtook the ship. At dawn Ganin climbed up onto the bridge: the vague, dark blue outline of the Scutari shore was gradually becoming visible. The moon’s reflection narrowed and paled. In the east the blue-mauve of the sky modulated to a golden red, and Istanbul, shining faintly, began to float out of the mist. A silky band of ripples glittered along the shore; a black rowboat and a black fez sailed noiselessly past. Now the east was turning white and a breeze sprung up which brushed over Ganin’s face with a salty tickle. From the shore came the sound of reveille being played; two seagulls, black as crows, flapped over the ship, and with a patter like light rain a shoal of fish broke the surface in a network of momentary rings. A lighter came alongside; on the water beneath it, its shadow extended and then retracted its tentacles. But only when Ganin stepped ashore and saw a blue-clad Turk on the quayside asleep on a mountain of oranges — only then did he feel a clear, piercing sense of how far he was from the warm mass of his own country and from Mary, whom he loved forever.