Mary by Vladimir Nabokov Page A

before his mind’s eye with the same dark clarity as the reflection in the nighttime window; whether it was about his passport and about Paris; or whether he was thinking glumly that the pattern on the carpet exactly fitted round the toe of his boot, or how much he would like a glass of cold beer, or that his visitor had outsat his welcome—God knows. But as Ganin looked at his big drooping head, at the senile tufts of hair in his ears, at the shoulders rounded from writing, he felt such a sudden access of sadness that he lost all desire to talk about summer in Russia, about the pathways in the park, and least of all about the astonishing thing that had happened the day before.
    “Well, I must go now. Sleep well, Anton Sergeyevich.”
    “Good night, Lyovushka,” Podtyagin sighed. “I enjoyed our talk. You, at least, do not despise me for taking Kunitsyn’s money.”
    Only at the last moment, in the doorway, did Ganin stop and say, “Do you know what, Anton Sergeyevich? I’ve started a wonderful affair. I’m going to her now. I’m very happy.”
    Podtyagin gave an encouraging nod. “I see. Give her my regards. I haven’t the pleasure, but give her my regards all the same.”

six
    Strange to say he could not remember exactly when he had first seen her. Perhaps at a charity concert staged in a barn on the border of his parents’ estate. Perhaps, though, he had caught a glimpse of her even before that. Her laugh, her soft features, her dark complexion and the big bow in her hair were all somehow familiar to him when a student medical orderly at the local military hospital (a world war was in full swing) had told him about this fifteen-year-old “sweet and remarkable” girl, as the student had put it—but that conversation had taken place before the concert. Now Ganin racked his memory in vain; he just could not picture their very first meeting. The fact was that he had been waiting for her with such longing, had thought so much about her during those blissful days after the typhus, that he had fashioned her unique image long before he actually saw her. Now, many years later, he felt that their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was only an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed her.
    That evening in July Ganin had pushed open the creaking iron front door and walked out into the blue of the twilight. The bicycle ran with special ease at dusk, the tire emitting a kind of whisper as it palpated each rise and dip in the hardearth along the edge of the road. As he glided past the darkened stables they gave off a breath of warmth, a sound of snorting and the slight thud of a shifting hoof. Further on, the road was enveloped on both sides by birch trees, noiseless at that hour; then like a fire smouldering on the threshing-floor a faint light shone in the middle of a field and dark streams of people straggled with a festive hum toward the lone-standing barn.
    Inside a stage had been knocked up, rows of seats installed, light flooded over heads and shoulders, playing in people’s eyes, and there was a smell of caramels and kerosene. A lot of people had turned up; the back was filled with peasant men and women, the dacha folk were in the middle, while in front, on white benches borrowed from the manorial park, sat about twenty patients from the military hospital in the village, quiet and morose, with hairless patches blotching the gray-blue of their very round, shorn heads. Here and there on the walls, decorated with fir branches, were cracks through which peeped the starry night as well as the black shadows of country boys who had clambered up outside on tall piles of logs.
    The opera bass from Petersburg, a gaunt man with a face like a horse, gave forth a cavernal boom; the village school choir, obedient to the melodious flick of a tuning fork, joined in with the refrain.
    Amid the hot