Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

Kolin whispered to Ganin, ‘There he goes again — it was the same yesterday — all he could talk about was his wife.’

‘Vulgar little man,’ thought Ganin as he watched Alfyorov’s twitching beard. ‘I bet his wife’s frisky. It’s a positive sin not to be unfaithful to a man like him.’

‘Lamb today,’ Lydia Nikolaevna suddenly announced stiffly, with a cross look at the listless way her lodgers were eating their meat course. Alfyorov bowed for some reason, then went on. ‘You’re making a big mistake by not taking that as a theme.’ (Podtyagin was gently but firmly shaking his head.) ‘When you meet my wife perhaps you’ll understand what I mean. She’s very fond of poetry, by the way. You two ought to agree. And I’ll tell you another thing —’

Glancing sidelong at Alfyorov, Kolin was stealthily beating time to him. Watching his friend’s finger, Gornotsvetov shook with silent laughter.

‘But the chief thing,’ Alfyorov burbled on, ‘is that Russia is finished, done for. She’s been rubbed out, just as if someone had wiped a funny face off a blackboard by smearing a wet sponge across it.’

‘But —’ Ganin smiled.

‘Does what I say upset you, Lev Glebovich?’

‘Yes, it does, but I won’t stop you from saying it, Aleksey Ivanovich.’

‘Does that mean, then, that you believe —’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Podtyagin interrupted in his even, slightly lisping voice. ‘No politics, please. Why must we talk politics?’

‘All the same Monsieur Alfyorov is wrong,’ Klara put in unexpectedly, and gave her hair-do a brisk pat.

‘Is your wife arriving on Saturday?’ asked Kolin in an innocent voice down the length of the table, and Gornotsvetov tittered into his table napkin.

‘Yes, Saturday,’ Alfyorov replied, pushing away his plate with the uneaten remains of his mutton. His eyes lost their combative gleam and immediately faded to a reflective look.

‘Do you know, Lydia Nikolaevna,’ he said, ‘yesterday Lev Glebovich and I were stuck in the lift together.’

‘Stewed pears,’ replied Frau Dorn.

The dancers burst out laughing. Jogging the elbows of the people at table, Erika began to clear away the plates. Ganin carefully rolled up his napkin, squeezed it into its ring and stood up. He never ate dessert.

‘What boredom,’ he thought as he made his way back to his room. ‘What can I do now? Go for a walk, I suppose.’

The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting. Lack of work irked him now, but there was no work to do. Turning up the collar of his old mackintosh, bought for a pound from an English lieutenant in Constantinople (the first stage of exile), and thrusting his fists hard into its pockets, he strolled slowly along the pale April streets, where the black domes of umbrellas bobbed and swam. He stared long at a splendid model of the Mauretania in a steamship company’s window and at the colored strings joining the ports of two continents on a large map. At the back was a photograph of a tropical grove — chocolate-brown palms against a beige sky.

He spent about an hour drinking coffee, sitting at a picture window and watching the passers-by. Back in his room he tried to read, but he found the contents of the book so alien and inappropriate that he abandoned it in the middle of a subordinate clause. He was in the kind of mood that he called ‘dispersion of the will.’ He sat motionless at his table unable to decide what to do: to shift the position of his body, to get up and wash his hands, or to open the window, outside which the bleak day was fading into twilight. It was a dreadful, agonizing state rather like that dull sense of unease when we wake up but at first cannot open our eyelids, as though they were stuck together for good. Ganin felt that the murky twilight which was gradually seeping into the room was also slowly penetrating his body, transforming his blood into fog, and that he was powerless to stop the spell that was being cast on him by the twilight.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle. Nothing relieved his depression, his thoughts slithered aimlessly, his heartbeat was faint, his underclothes stuck unpleasantly to his body. At one moment he felt he should at once write a letter to Lyudmila explaining firmly that it was time to break off this dreary affair, then at the next he remembered that he was going to the cinema with her that evening and that somehow it was much harder to make himself ring her up and cancel today’s date than it was to write a letter, which prevented him from doing either.

How many times had he sworn to himself that he would break with her tomorrow and had had no trouble in concocting the appropriate things to say, only to fail utterly to visualize that final moment when he would press her hand and leave the room. It was that action — turning round, walking out — which seemed so unthinkable. He belonged to the sort of people who can get whatever they want, achieve, surpass; but he was quite incapable of renunciation or flight — which are, after all, one and the same thing. He was held back by a sense of honor and a sense of pity which blunted the will of a man who at other times was capable of any kind of creative enterprise, any exertion, and who would set about a task eagerly and willingly, cheerfully intent on overcoming everything and winning all.

He no more knew what kind of external stimulus would give him the strength to break off his three-month-old liaison with Lyudmila than he knew what was needed to get him up from his chair. Only for a very short time had he been genuinely in love — in that state of mind in which Lyudmila had seemed wreathed in a seductive mist, a state of questing, exalted, almost unearthly emotion, as when music plays at the very moment when one is doing something quite ordinary, such as walking from a table to pay at the bar, and gives an inward dancelike quality to one’s simple movement, transforming it into a significant and immortal gesture.

That music had stopped at the moment one night when on the jolting floor of a dark taxi, he had possessed Lyudmila, and at once it had all become utterly banal — the woman straightening her hat that had slipped down onto the back of her neck, the lights flickering past the window, the driver’s back towering like a black mountain behind the glass partition.

Now he was obliged to pay for that night with laborious deceit, to continue that night forever, and feebly, spinelessly yield to its creeping shadow that now filled every corner of the room, turning the furniture into clouds. He fell into a vague doze, his forehead propped on the palm of his hand and his legs stretched out stiffly under the table.

Later in the cinema it was crowded and hot. For a long time, colored advertisements for grand pianos, dresses, perfumes flocked silently across the screen. At last the orchestra struck up and the drama began.

Lyudmila was unusually cheerful. She had invited Klara to come too because she sensed very well that Klara was attracted to Ganin and she wanted to give pleasure to Klara, and to herself, by flaunting her affair and her ability to conceal it. Klara for her part agreed to come because she knew that Ganin was planning to depart on Saturday; also she was surprised that Lyudmila seemed not to know this — or else she purposely said nothing about it and was going to leave with him.

Sitting between them, Ganin was irritated because Lyudmila, like most women of her type, talked throughout the film about other things, bending across Ganin’s knees toward her friend, every time dousing him in the chilling, unpleasantly familiar smell of her perfume. It was made worse by the fact that the film was thrilling and excellently done.