Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

‘What were you in those days, Aleksey Ivanovich?’ Ganin inquired without curiosity.

Alfyorov shook his head. ‘I don’t remember. How can one remember what one was in a past life — an oyster maybe, or a bird, let’s say, or perhaps a teacher of mathematics? In any case our old life in Russia seems like something that happened before time began, something metaphysical or whatever you call it — that’s not quite the word — yes, I know: metempsychosis.’

Ganin looked at the photograph in the open drawer without much interest. It was the face of a tousled young woman with a merry, very toothy mouth. Alfyorov leaned over his shoulder. ‘No, that’s not my wife, that’s my sister. She died of typhus, in Kiev. She was a nice, jolly girl, very good at playing tag.’

He produced another photograph.

‘And that’s Mary, my wife. Poor snapshot, but quite a good likeness all the same. And here’s another, taken in our garden. Mary’s the one sitting, in the white dress. I haven’t seen her for four years. But I don’t suppose she’s changed much. I really don’t know how I’ll survive till Saturday. Wait! Where are you going, Lev Glebovich? Do stay!’

Ganin, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, was walking toward the door.

‘What’s the matter, Lev Glebovich? Did I say something that offended you?’

The door slammed shut. Alfyorov was left standing alone in the middle of his room.

‘Really! How rude,’ he mumbled. ‘What’s bitten him?’

That night, as every night, a little old man in a black cape plodded along the curb down the long deserted avenue, poking the point of a gnarled stick into the asphalt as he looked for cigarette-ends — gold, cork or plain paper — and flaking cigar butts. Occasionally, braying like a stag, a motorcar would dash by or something would happen which no one walking in a city ever notices: a star, faster than thought and with less sound than a tear, would fall. Gaudier, gayer than the stars were the letters of fire which poured out one after another above a black roof, paraded in single file and vanished all at once in the darkness.

‘Can — it — be — possible,’ said the letters in a discreet neon whisper, then the night would sweep them away at a single velvet stroke. Again they would start to creep across the sky: ‘Can — it —’

And darkness descended again. But the words insistently lit up once more and finally, instead of disappearing at once, they stayed alight for a whole five minutes, as had been arranged between the advertising agency and the manufacturer.

But then who can tell what it really is that flickers up there in the dark above the houses — the luminous name of a product or the glow of human thought; a sign, a summons; a question hurled into the sky and suddenly getting a jewel-bright, enraptured answer?

And in those streets, now as wide as shiny black seas, at that late hour when the last beer-hall has closed, and a native of Russia, abandoning sleep, hatless and coatless under an old mackintosh, walks in a clairvoyant trance; at that late hour down those wide streets passed worlds utterly alien to each other: no longer a reveler, a woman, or simply a passer-by, but each one a wholly isolated world, each a totality of marvels and evil. Five hackney droshkies stood on the avenue alongside the huge drumlike shape of a street pissoir : five sleepy, warm, gray worlds in coachman’s livery; and five other worlds on aching hooves, asleep and dreaming of nothing but oats streaming out of a sack with a soft crackly sound.

It is at moments like this that everything grows fabulous, unfathomably profound, when life seems terrifying and death even worse. And then, as one swiftly strides through the night-time city, looking at the lights through one’s tears and searching in them for a glorious, dazzling recollection of past happiness — a woman’s face, resurgent after many years of humdrum oblivion — all of a sudden, in one’s mad progress, one is politely stopped by a foot passenger and asked how to get to such and such a street; asked in an ordinary voice, but a voice which one will never hear again.

Waking late on Tuesday morning, he felt some ache in his calves and, leaning his elbow on his pillow, he sighed once or twice, startled and amazed with the delight of it as he remembered what had happened that night.

The morning was a gentle, smoky white. The windowpanes shook with a businesslike rumble.

With a determined sweep he jumped out of bed and started shaving. Today this gave him a particular pleasure. People who shave grow a day younger every morning. Ganin felt that today he had become exactly nine years younger. Softened by flakes of lather, the bristles on his taut skin steadily crepitated as they fell to the little steel ploughshare of his safety razor. As he shaved Ganin moved his eyebrows and then, as he stood in the bathtub and doused his body in cold water from a jug, smiled with joy. He brushed his damp black hair, dressed quickly and went out.

None of the other lodgers spent their mornings in the pension except for the dancers, who usually did not get up until lunchtime. Alfyorov was away to see a friend with whom he was starting up some business, Podtyagin had gone to the police station to try and obtain his exit visa, while Klara, already late for work, was waiting for a tramcar on the corner, clutching to her chest a paper bag of oranges.

Very calmly Ganin climbed up to the second floor of a familiar house and pulled the bell-ring. Opening the door but without removing the chain, a maid peeped out and said that Fräulein Rubanski was still asleep.

‘I don’t care, I must see her,’ said Ganin, and, pushing his hand into the gap, he unlatched the chain himself.

The maid, a pallid thickset girl, muttered indignantly, but Ganin elbowed her aside with the same firmness, marched into the semiobscurity of the corridor and knocked on a door.

‘Who’s there?’ came Lyudmila’s slightly hoarse morning voice.

‘It’s me. Open.’

She pattered across the floor on bare feet, turned the key and, before looking at Ganin, ran to the bed and jumped back under the bedclothes. From the tip of her ear it was obvious that she was smiling, waiting for Ganin’s approach.

But he stayed in the middle of the room and stood there for some time, clinking the small change in his mackintosh pockets.

Lyudmila suddenly turned onto her back and, laughing, opened her thin, bare arms. Morning did not suit her; her face was pale and puffy and her yellow hair stood on end.

‘Well, come here,’ she pleaded and closed her eyes. Ganin stopped clinking his money.

‘Look, Lyudmila,’ he said quietly. She sat up, her eyes open wide.

‘Has something happened?’

Ganin stared hard at her and replied, ‘Yes. It seems I’m in love with somebody else. I’ve come to say goodbye.’

She blinked her sleep-clogged eyelashes and bit her lip.

‘That’s all, really,’ said Ganin. ‘I’m very sorry, but it can’t be helped. Let’s say goodbye now. I think it will be better like that.’

Lyudmila covered her face and fell back again face downward on the pillow. Her sky-blue quilt began slipping off sideways onto the fluffy white rug. Ganin picked it up and straightened it. Then he walked a couple of times back and forth across the room.

‘The maid didn’t want to let me in,’ he said.

Lyudmila lay buried in the pillow as if dead.

‘She’s never been exactly welcoming,’ said Ganin.

‘It’s time to turn off the heating. It’s spring,’ he said a little while later. He walked from the door to the white full-length mirror, then put on his hat.

Lyudmila still did not move. He stood for a little longer, looked at her in silence and then, making a faint sound as though to clear his throat, he left the room.