Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

All this now unfolded in his memory, flashing disjointedly, and shrank again into a warm lump when Podtyagin, with a great effort, asked him, ‘How long ago did you leave Russia?’

‘Five years,’ he answered curtly; and then, as he sat in a corner in the languorous violet light which poured over the cloth on the table in the center of the room and over the smiling faces of Kolin and Gornotsvetov, who were dancing silently and energetically in the middle of the room, Ganin thought, ‘What happiness! Tomorrow — no, it’s today, it’s already past midnight. Mary cannot have changed since then, her Tartar eyes still burn and smile just as they did.’ He would take her far away, he would work tirelessly for her. Tomorrow all his youth, his Russia, was coming back to him again.

Arms akimbo, throwing back his head and shaking it, now gliding, now stamping his heels and waving a handkerchief, Kolin was weaving around Gornotsvetov, who, squatting on his haunches, was nimbly and rakishly kicking his legs out quicker and quicker until he was finally revolving on one bent leg. Totally drunk, Alfyorov sat swaying with a benign expression. Klara kept glancing anxiously at Podtyagin’s gray, sweating face; the old man sat in an awkward sideways position on the bed.

‘You aren’t well, Anton Sergeyevich,’ she whispered. ‘You should go to bed, it’s around half past one.’

Oh, how simple it would be: tomorrow — no, today — he would see her again, provided Alfyorov got really tight. Only six hours more. Right now she would be asleep in her compartment, the telegraph poles flying by in the darkness, pine trees and hills rushing up to the train — what a noise these boys were making. Won’t they ever stop dancing? Yes, amazingly simple — at times there was something like genius in the workings of fate —

‘All right, I shall go and lie down a bit,’ said Podtyagin dully, and with a heavy sigh started to leave.

‘Where is the grand fellow going? Stop — stay a bit longer,’ Alfyorov muttered gaily.

‘Have another drink and shut up,’ Ganin said to Alfyorov, then quickly joined Podtyagin. ‘Lean on me, Anton Sergeyevich.’

The old man looked hazily at him, made a gesture as though swatting a fly and suddenly, with a faint cry, he staggered and pitched forward.

Ganin and Klara managed to catch him in time, while the dancers fussed around. Scarcely moving his sticky tongue, Alfyorov blabbered with drunken callousness, ‘Look, look — he’s dying.’

‘Stop running about and do something useful, Gornotsvetov,’ Ganin said calmly. ‘Hold his head. Kolin — support him here . No, that’s my arm — higher up. Stop gaping at me like that. Higher up, I say. Open the door, Klara.’

The three of them carried the old man to his room. Staggering, Alfyorov made as if to follow them, then limply waved his hand and sat down at the table. With a shaking hand he poured himself out some vodka, then pulled a nickel-plated watch out of his waistcoat pocket and put it in front of him on the table.

‘Three, four, five, six, seven, eight.’ He drew his finger round the Roman figures, stopped, his head turned aside, and sat watching the second hand with one eye.

In the passage, the dachshund began yelping in a high-pitched, excited voice. Alfyorov grimaced. ‘Lousy little dog. Ought to be run over.’

A little later he took an indelible pencil out of another pocket and smeared a mauve mark on the glass above the figure eight.

‘She’s coming, coming, coming,’ he said to himself in time with the ticking.

He glanced round the table, took a chocolate and immediately spat it out. A brown blob smacked against the wall.

‘Three, four, five, seven,’ Alfyorov started counting again and winked at the dial with a bleary, ecstatic smile.

The town had grown quiet in the night. The hunched old man in the black cloak was already on the move, tapping his stick and bending over with a grunt whenever its sharp point turned up a butt-end. An occasional car drove by, and even more rarely a night droshky would jolt by with a click of hooves. A drunk in a bowler hat was waiting for a tram on the corner, although the trams had stopped running at least two hours ago. A few prostitutes were strolling up and down, yawning and talking to shady loafers with upturned coat collars. One of the girls accosted Kolin and Gornotsvetov as they advanced almost at a run, but she turned away again at once after casting a professional glance at their pale, effeminate faces.

The dancers had undertaken to fetch a Russian doctor they knew to see Podtyagin, and indeed, after an hour and a half, they returned accompanied by a sleepy-looking gentleman with stiff, clean-shaven features. He stayed for half an hour, now and again making a sucking noise as though he had a hole in his tooth, and then left.

It was now very quiet in the unlighted room. There reigned that special, heavy, dull silence which always comes when several people are sitting in silence around a sick person. The night was now waning. Ganin’s profile, turned toward the bed, seemed carved out of pale blue stone; at the foot of the bed, in a vague armchair floating on the waves of the dawn, Klara sat looking fixedly in the same direction. Farther away, Gornotsvetov and Kolin huddled side by side on a little divan — and their faces were like two pale blobs.

The doctor was already going down the stairs behind the black figure of Frau Dorn, her bunch of keys chinking softly as she apologized for the lift being out of order. Reaching the bottom she opened the heavy front door and the doctor, raising his hat, departed into the bluish haze.

The old woman carefully locked the door, wrapped herself tighter in her black knitted shawl and went upstairs. The steps were lit by a cold yellow light. Her keys tinkling gently, she reached the landing. The light on the staircase went out.

In the lobby she met Ganin, who had come out of Podtyagin’s room, carefully pulling the door behind him.

‘The doctor has promised to come back in the morning,’ whispered the old woman. ‘How is he now — better?’

Ganin shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think not, though. The way he is breathing — it’s a frightening sound.’

Lydia Nikolaevna sighed and timidly entered the room. With an identical movement Klara and the two dancers turned their palely glistening eyes toward her and then turned back again to stare at the bed. A breeze rattled the frame of the half-open window.

Ganin walked down the passage on tiptoe and went back to the room where the party had recently taken place. As he supposed, Alfyorov was still sitting at the table. His face seemed swollen and shone gray from the combination of the light of dawn and the theatrically shaded lamp. He was nodding, occasionally belching. On the watchglass in front of him gleamed a drop of vodka in which a mauve trace of indelible pencil was spreading. Only four hours to go.

Ganin sat down beside that drunken, drowsy creature and stared long at him, knitting his thick brows and propping his temple on his clenched fist, which stretched his skin and caused his eye to slant.

Alfyorov suddenly came to life and slowly turned to look at him.

‘Isn’t it time you were going to bed, my dear Aleksey Ivanovich,’ said Ganin distinctly.

‘No,’ Alfyorov pronounced with difficulty, and after some thought, as though solving a difficult problem, he repeated, ‘No.’

Ganin switched off the unnecessary light, took out his cigarette case and lit a cigarette. Whether from the cold of the pale dawn or from the whiff of tobacco, Alfyorov seemed to sober up a little.

He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand, looked around and stretched out a fairly firm hand for a bottle.