Vladimir Nabokov - Mary

Trying to tread quietly, he walked rapidly down the long passage, chose the wrong door and as he swung it open found himself in a bathroom, from which erupted a hairy arm and a leonine roar. He turned sharply around and after a further encounter with the dumpy maid, who was dusting a bronze bust in the hall, began to descend the low stone steps for the last time. The huge casement on the landing was wide open onto the back courtyard, and down in the yard an itinerant baritone was roaring a Russian Volga song in German.

Listening to that voice, vibrant as springtime itself, and glancing at the colored design on the open windowpane — a bunch of cubic roses and a peacock’s fan — Ganin felt he was free.

He walked slowly along the street, smoking as he went. The day had a milky chill about it; ragged white clouds rose up before him in the blue space between houses. He always thought of Russia whenever he saw fast-moving clouds, but now he needed no clouds to remind him; since last night he had thought of nothing else.

The delightful private event which had occurred last night had caused the entire kaleidoscope of his life to shift and had brought back the past to overwhelm him.

He sat down on a bench in a public garden and at once the gentle companion who had been following him, his gray vernal shadow, stretched out at his feet and began to talk.

Now that Lyudmila had gone he was free to listen.

Nine years ago. Summer of 1915, a country house, typhus. Recuperating from typhus was astonishingly pleasant. One lay as though on undulating air; one’s spleen still ached occasionally, it was true, and every morning a hospital nurse, brought specially from Petersburg, wiped one’s furry tongue — still sticky from sleep — with cotton wool soaked in port. The nurse was very short, with a soft bosom and small capable hands; she gave off a damp, cool, old-maidish smell. She loved to use folksy quips and the bits of Japanese which she remembered from the war of 1904. She had a peasant woman’s face the size of a clenched fist, pock-marked, with a tiny nose; not a single hair ever peeped out from under her headdress.

One lay as though on air. To the left the bed was partitioned off from the doorway by a tawny cane screen with wavy curves. Close to him, in a corner to the right, stood the icon case: swarthy-faced images behind glass, wax candles, a coral crucifix. Of the two windows, the more distant one shone straight ahead, and the head of the bed seemed to be pushing itself from the wall while its foot aimed at that window with its brass knobs, each containing a bubble of sunlight; any moment it might be expected to take off, across the room, out into the deep July sky where puffy, bright clouds slanted upward. The second window, on the right-hand wall, gave on to a sloping pale-green roof: the bedroom was on the second floor and this was the roof of a single-story wing which contained the servants’ quarters and the kitchen. At night the windows were closed on the inside with whitewashed folding shutters.

The door behind the screen led onto the staircase, while further along the same wall were a gleaming white stove and an old-fashioned washstand with a cistern and a beaklike tap; you pressed a brass pedal with your foot and a thin fountain squirted out of the tap. To the left of the front window stood a mahogany chest of drawers with very stiff drawers, to the right of it a small ottoman.

The wallpaper was white with bluish roses. Sometimes, in semidelirium, one would fashion people’s profiles out of these roses or wander up and down with one’s eyes, trying not to touch a single flower or a single leaf on the way, finding gaps in the pattern, wriggling through, doubling back, landing in a blind alley and starting one’s journey through the luminous maze all over again. To the right of the bed between the icon case and the side window hung two pictures — a tortoiseshell cat lapping milk from a saucer, and a starling made of real starling’s feathers appliquéd above a drawing of a nesting box. Alongside, by the window frame, was fixed an oil lamp which had a knack of emitting a black tongue of soot. There were other pictures too: above the chest of drawers a lithograph of a barechested Neapolitan boy, and over the washbasin a pencil drawing of a horse’s head with distended nostrils swimming in water.

All day long the bed kept gliding into the hot windy sky and when one sat up one saw the tops of the lime trees, sungilt from above, telephone wires on which swifts perched, and part of the wooden canopy over the red sandy drive where it led up to the front porch. Wonderful sounds came from outside — twittering, distant barking, a creaking pump.

One lay and floated and thought how one would soon be getting up: flies played in a pool of sun; and from Mother’s lap by one’s bedside a ball of colored silk, as though alive, jumped down and gently rolled across the amber-yellow parquet.

In this room, where Ganin had recuperated at sixteen, was conceived that happiness, the image of that girl he was to meet in real life a month later. Everything contributed to the creation of that image — the soft— tinted prints on the walls, the twittering outside the window, the brown face of Christ in the icon case, and even the washstand’s diminutive fountain. The burgeoning image gathered and absorbed all the sunny charm of that room, and without it, of course, it would never have grown. It was after all simply a boyish premonition, a delicious mist, but Ganin now felt that never had such a premonition been so completely fulfilled. All Tuesday he wandered from square to square, from café to café, his memories constantly flying ahead like the April clouds across the tender Berlin sky. People sitting in the cafés supposed that this man staring so fixedly ahead must have some deep grief; on the street he carelessly bumped into people and once a fast car braked hard and swore, having nearly hit him.

He was a god, re-creating a world that had perished. Gradually he resurrected that world, to please the girl whom he did not dare to place in it until it was absolutely complete. But her image, her presence, the shadow of her memory demanded that in the end he must resurrect her too — and he intentionally thrust away her image, as he wanted to approach it gradually, step by step, just as he had done nine years before. Afraid of making a mistake, of losing his way in the bright labyrinth of memory, he re-created his past life watchfully, fondly, occasionally turning back for some forgotten piece of trivia, but never running ahead too fast. Wandering around Berlin on that Tuesday in spring, he recuperated all over again, felt what it was like to get out of bed for the first time, felt the weakness in his legs. He looked at himself in every mirror. His clothes seemed unusually clean, singularly ample, and slightly unfamiliar. He walked slowly down the wide avenue leading from the garden terrace into the depths of the park. Here and there the earth, empurpled by the shadows of leaves, broke into molehills that looked like heaps of black worms. He had put on white trousers and lilac socks, dreaming of meeting someone, not yet knowing who it would be.

Reaching the end of the avenue, where a white bench gleamed amid the dark greenery of fir needles, he turned back, and now far ahead in a gap between the lindens could be seen the orange-red sand of the garden terrace and the glittering panes of the veranda.

The nurse went back to Petersburg; leaning out of the carriage for a long while she waved her dumpy little arm and the wind worried her wimple. The house was cool, with spreads of sunlight here and there on the floor. Two weeks later he was already riding himself to exhaustion on his bicycle and playing Russian skittles in the evening with the son of the cowman. After another week the event he had been waiting for happened. And where is it all now?’ mused Ganin. ‘Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again — never. I once read about the “eternal return.” But what if this complicated game of patience never comes out a second time? Let me see — there’s something I don’t grasp — yes, this: surely it won’t all die when I do? Right now I’m alone in a foreign city. Drunk. My head’s buzzing from beer laced with cognac. I have tramped my fill. And if my heart bursts, right now, then my whole world bursts with it? Cannot grasp it.’