Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

Lately he had become dull and gloomy. Only a short while ago he could walk on his hands, quite as well as a Japanese acrobat, and with legs elegantly erect move along like a sail. He could pick up a chair in his teeth. He could break a string by flexing his biceps. His body was always burning with the urge to do something — to jump over a fence or uproot a post, in short to ‘bang,’ as we used to say when we were young. Now, however, some bolt had worked loose inside him, he had even acquired a stoop and he admitted to Podtyagin that he was suffering from insomnia ‘like a nervous female.’ He had an especially bad night from Sunday to Monday, after the twenty minutes spent with the effusive fellow in the stuck lift. On Monday morning he sat for a long time naked, gripping his cold, outstretched hands between his knees, appalled by the thought that today was another day and that he would have to put on shirt, trousers, socks — all those wretched things impregnated with sweat and dust — and he imagined a circus poodle which looks so ghastly, so sickeningly pitiful, when dressed up in human clothes. His inertia stemmed partly from his jobless state. He had no particular need to work at the moment, having saved that winter a certain amount of money, true, there was now no more than two hundred marks left of it: life had been rather expensive these last three months.

On arriving in Berlin last year he had at once found work and had worked until January at several different jobs. He had learned what it meant to go to work in a factory in the yellow murk of early morning; he had learned, too, how one’s legs ached after trotting six sinuous miles a day carrying plates between the tables of the Pir Goroy restaurant; he had known other jobs too, and had sold every imaginable sort of goods on commission — Russian buns, and brilliantine, and just plain brilliants. Nothing was beneath his dignity; more than once he had even sold his shadow, as many of us have. In other words he went out to the suburbs to work as a movie extra on a set, in a fairground barn, where light seethed with a mystical hiss from the huge facets of lamps that were aimed, like cannon, at a crowd of extras, lit to a deathly brightness. They would fire a barrage of murderous brilliance, illumining the painted wax of motionless faces, then expiring with a click — but for a long time yet there would glow, in those elaborate crystals, dying red sunsets — our human shame. The deal was clinched, and our anonymous shadows sent out all over the world.

His remaining money was enough for him to leave Berlin, but that would mean shedding Lyudmila, and he did not know how to break with her. And although he had given himself a week to do it in and had told the landlady that he had finally decided to leave on Saturday, Ganin felt that neither this week nor the next would change anything. Meanwhile nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring. His window looked out onto the railway tracks, so that the chance of getting away never ceased to entice him. Every five minutes a subdued rumble would start to move through the house, followed by a huge cloud of smoke billowing outside the window and blotting out the white Berlin daylight. Then it would slowly dissolve again, revealing the fan of the railway tracks that narrowed in the distance between the black, sliced-off backs of houses, all under a sky as pale as almond milk.

Ganin would have felt more at ease had he been living on the other side of the corridor, in Podtyagin’s room, or in Klara’s; their windows looked out onto a rather dull street, and although it was crossed by a railway bridge it at least lacked the view into the pale, seductive distance. That bridge was a continuation of the tracks that could be seen from Ganin’s window, and he could never rid himself of the feeling that every train was passing, unseen, right through the house itself. It would come in from the far side, its phantom reverberation would shake the wall, jolt its way across the old carpet, graze a glass on the washstand, and finally disappear out of the window with a chilling clang — immediately followed by a cloud of smoke billowing up outside the window, and as this subsided a train of the Stadtbahn would emerge as though excreted by the house: olive-drab carriages with a row of dark dog-nipples along their roofs and a stubby little locomotive coupled at the wrong end, moving briskly backward as it pulled the carriages into the white distance between black walls, whose sooty blackness was either coming off in patches or was mottled with frescoes of outdated advertisements. It was as if an iron draft kept always blowing through the house.

‘Ah, to leave!’ muttered Ganin, stretching listlessly, and at once stopped short — what would he do about Lyudmila? It was absurd how flabby he had become. Once (in the days when he had walked on his hands or jumped over five chairs) he had been able not merely to control his will but to play games with it. There had been a time when he used to exercise it by making himself, for instance, get out of bed in the middle of the night in order to go down and throw a cigarette butt into a postbox. Yet now he could not bring himself to tell a woman that he no longer loved her. The day before yesterday she had stayed five hours in his room; yesterday, Sunday, he had spent the whole day with her on the lakes outside Berlin, unable to refuse her this ridiculous little excursion. Everything about Lyudmila he now found repulsive: her yellow locks, fashionably bobbed, the two streaks of unshaven black hairs down the nape of her neck, her dark, languid eyelids, and above all her lips, glossy with purple-red lipstick. He was bored and repelled when as she dressed, after a bout of mechanical lovemaking, she would narrow her eyes, which at once gave them an unpleasantly shaggy look, and say, ‘I’m so sensitive, you know, that I shall be able to tell at once when you don’t love me as much as you used to.’ Ganin, without replying, turned away toward the window, where there rose a white wall of smoke. Then she would give a little nasal snigger and call him in a husky whisper: ‘Come here.’ At that moment he felt like wringing his hands to make the joints crack in delicious pain, and say to her, ‘Get out, woman, and goodbye.’ Instead of that he smiled and bent down to her. She would run her nails, so sharp that they might have been artificial, over his chest, and pout, and flutter her coal-black eyelashes in her performance of a slighted girl or a capricious marquise. There seemed to him something sleazy, stale and old in the smell of her perfume, although she herself was only twenty-five. As he brushed her hot little forehead with his lips she forgot everything — forgot the falsity which she trailed around everywhere like her scent, the falsity of her baby talk, of her exquisite senses, of her passion for some imaginary orchids, as well as for Poe and Baudelaire, whom she had never read; she forgot all her factitious charms, her modishly yellow hair, sultry face powder and piggy-pink silk stockings — and, tilting back her head, she would press against Ganin her whole feeble, pathetic, unwanted flesh.

Bored and ashamed, Ganin felt a nonsensical tenderness — a melancholy trace of warmth left where love had once fleetingly passed by — which caused him to kiss without passion the painted rubber of her proffered lips, although this tenderness did not succeed in silencing a calm, sarcastic voice advising him: try right now to thrust her away!

With a sigh he smiled gently down at her upturned face and could think of nothing to say when she clutched him by the shoulder and begged him in a fluttery voice quite unlike her usual nasal whisper, her whole being seeming to fly into words, ‘Tell me — please — do you love me?’ But as soon as she noticed his reaction — a familiar shadow, an involuntary frown — she remembered that she should be fascinating him with poetry, scent and sensibility, and at once began putting on her act that wavered between the poor little girl and the subtle courtesan. And again Ganin was seized with boredom, and he paced back and forth from the window to the door and back again, almost in tears from trying to yawn with his mouth shut while she put on her hat and watched him surreptitiously in the mirror.