Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

‘Listen, Lyudmila Borisovna,’ said Ganin, unable to restrain himself any longer, ‘do stop whispering. The German behind me is starting to get annoyed.’

She gave him a quick glance in the darkness, leaned back and looked at the bright screen.

‘I don’t understand a thing. It’s pure rubbish.’

‘No wonder you can’t understand it,’ said Ganin, ‘when you spend all the time whispering.’

On the screen moved luminous, bluish-gray shapes. A prima donna, who had once in her life committed an involuntary murder, suddenly remembered it while playing the role of a murderess in opera. Rolling her improbably large eyes, she collapsed supine onto the stage. The auditorium swam slowly into view, the public applauded, the boxes and stalls rose in an ecstasy of approval. Suddenly Ganin sensed that he was watching something vaguely yet horribly familiar. He recalled with alarm the roughly carpentered rows of seats, the chairs and parapets of the boxes painted a sinister violet, the lazy workmen walking easily and nonchalantly like blue-clad angels from plank to plank high up above, or aiming the blinding muzzles of klieg lights at a whole army of Russians herded together onto the huge set and acting in total ignorance of what the film was about. He remembered young men in threadbare but marvelously tailored clothes, women’s faces smeared with mauve and yellow make-up, and those innocent exiles, old men and plain girls who were banished far to the rear simply to fill in the background. On the screen that cold barn was now transformed into a comfortable auditorium, sacking became velvet, and a mob of paupers a theatre audience. Straining his eyes, with a deep shudder of shame, he recognized himself among all those people clapping to order, and remembered how they had all had to look ahead at an imaginary stage where instead of a prima donna a fat, red-haired, coatless man was standing on a platform between floodlights and yelling himself to insanity through a megaphone.

Ganin’s doppelgänger also stood and clapped, over there, alongside the very striking-looking man with the black beard and the ribbon across his chest. Because of that beard and his starched shirt he had always landed in the front row; in the intervals he munched a sandwich and then, after the take, would put on a wretched old coat over his evening dress and return home to a distant part of Berlin, where he worked as a compositor in a printing plant.

And at the present moment Ganin felt not only shame but also a sense of the fleeting evanescence of human life. There on the screen his haggard image, his sharp uplifted face and clapping hands merged into the gray kaleidoscope of other figures; a moment later, swinging like a ship, the auditorium vanished and now the scene showed an aging, world-famous actress giving a very skillful representation of a dead young woman. ‘We know not what we do,’ Ganin thought with repulsion, unable to watch the film any longer.

Lyudmila was whispering to Klara again — something about a dressmaker and some stuff for a dress. The drama came to an end and Ganin felt mortally depressed. A few moments later, as they were pushing their way toward the exit Lyudmila pressed close to him and whispered, ‘I’ll ring you at two tomorrow, sweetie.’

Ganin and Klara saw her home and then set off together back to their pension . Ganin was silent and Klara tried painfully to find a topic. ‘Are you going to leave us on Saturday?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, I really don’t,’ Ganin replied gloomily.

As he walked he thought how his shade would wander from city to city, from screen to screen, how he would never know what sort of people would see it or how long it would roam round the world. And when he went to bed and listened to the trains passing through that cheerless house in which lived seven Russian lost shades, the whole of life seemed like a piece of film-making where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.

Ganin could not sleep. A nervous tingling ran through his legs and the pillow tormented his head. Then in the middle of the night his neighbor Alfyorov started to hum a tune. Through the thin wall he could hear him shuffling across the floor, first near then moving away, while Ganin lay there in anger. Whenever a train rattled past, Alfyorov’s voice blended with the noise, only to surface again — tum-ti-tumn, tum-ti, tum-ti-tum.

Ganin could bear it no longer. He pulled on his trousers, went out into the passage and thumped on the door of room i with his fist. In his wanderings Alfyorov happened at that moment to be right beside the door, and he flung it open so unexpectedly that Ganin gave a start of surprise.

‘Please come in, Lev Glebovich.’

He was wearing shirt and underpants, his blond beard was slightly ruffled — presumably from puffing away at his songs — and his pale blue eyes were alive with happiness.

‘You’re singing,’ said Ganin, frowning, ‘and it’s keeping me awake.’

‘Come in for heaven’s sake, don’t hang about there in the doorway,’ fussed Aleksey Ivanovich, putting his arm round Ganin’s waist in a well-meant but clumsy gesture. ‘I’m so sorry if I annoyed you.’

Ganin went reluctantly into the room. It contained very little, yet was very untidy. Instead of standing at the desk (that oaken monster with the inkwell shaped like a large toad) one of the two kitchen chairs seemed to have wandered off in the direction of the washbasin but had stopped halfway there, having obviously stumbled over the turned-up edge of the green carpet. The other chair, which stood beside the bed and served as a bedside table, had disappeared under a black jacket whose collapse seemed as heavy and shapeless as if it had fallen from the top of Mount Ararat. Thin sheets of paper were scattered all over the wooden wilderness of the desk and over the bed. Ganin noticed from a casual glance that on these sheets were pencil drawings of wheels, squares, done without the least technical accuracy, simply scribbles to pass the time. Alfyorov himself, in his woollen underpants — which make any man, be he built like Adonis or elegant as Beau Brummel, look extraordinarily unattractive — had started pacing up and down again amidst the ruins of his room, occasionally flipping his fingernail against the green glass shade of the table lamp or the back of a chair.

‘I’m terribly glad you’ve dropped in at last,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t sleep either. Just think — my wife’s coming on Saturday. And tomorrow’s Tuesday already. Poor girl, I can just imagine what agony she’s been through in that accursed Russia of ours!’

Ganin, who had been glumly trying to decipher a chess problem drawn on one of the pieces of paper lying around on the bed, suddenly looked up. ‘What did you say?’

‘She’s coming,’ Alfyorov replied with a bold flick of his nail.

‘No, not that. What did you call Russia?’

‘Accursed. It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know — the epithet struck me as curious.’

‘Now, Lev Glebovich’ — Alfyorov suddenly stopped in the middle of the room — ‘it’s time you stopped playing at being a Bolshevik. You might think it very amusing, but what you do is very wrong, believe me. It’s time we all admitted frankly that Russia is done for, that our “saintly” Russian peasantry has turned out to be nothing but gray scum — as might have been expected, by the way — and that our country is finished for good.’

Ganin laughed. ‘Quite, quite, Aleksey Ivanovich.’

Alfyorov wiped his gleaming face from top to bottom with his palm and suddenly smiled a wide, dreamy smile. ‘Why aren’t you married, old chap, eh?’

‘Never had the chance,’ Ganin replied. ‘Is it fun?’

‘Delightful. My wife is adorable. A brunette, you know, with such lively eyes. Still very young. We were married in Poltava in 1919, and in 1920 I had to emigrate. I’ve some photos in the desk drawer — I’ll show them to you.’ Crooking his fingers underneath it, he pulled open the wide drawer.