Glory (12 page)

“Funny thing,” said Darwin one night, as he and Martin came out of a small Cambridge cinema, “it’s all unquestionably poor, vulgar, and rather implausible, and yet there is something exciting about all that flying foam, the
femme fatale
on the yacht, the ruined and ragged he-man swallowing his tears.”

“It’s nice to travel,” said Martin. “I’d like to travel a lot.”

This fragment of conversation, surviving by chance from one April night, came back to Martin when, at the beginning of summer vacation, already in Switzerland, he received a letter from Darwin in Tenerife. Tenerife—God, what a lovely, emerald word! It was morning. Marie, with disastrously deteriorated looks and an oddly bloated appearance, was kneeling in a corner, wringing out a floor rag into a pail. Large white clouds glided above the mountains, catching on the peaks, and from time to time some smoky filaments would descend the slopes, on which the light changed continuously with the ebb and flow of the sun. Martin went out into the garden, where Uncle Henry, wearing a monstrous straw hat, was talking with the village curé. When the curé, a small man with glasses, which he kept adjusting with the thumb and little finger of his left hand, made a low bow and, with a rustle of his black cassock, walked off by the shiny white wall and climbed into his cabriolet hitched to a fat, pinkish-white
horse all speckled with mustard, Martin said, “It’s wonderful here, and I adore this region, but, perhaps, just for a few weeks, I would like to take a trip somewhere—the Canary Islands, for instance.”

“What folly, what folly,” answered Uncle Henry with fright, and his mustache bristled slightly. “Your mother, who waited for you so anxiously, who is so happy that you are staying with her until October—and suddenly you leave …”

“We could all go together,” said Martin.

“Quelle folie,”
Uncle Henry repeated. “Later, when you finish your studies, I’ll have no objection. I have always believed that a young man should see the world. Remember that your mother is only now recovering from the shocks she suffered. No, no, no.”

Martin shrugged and, with his hands in the pockets of his shorts, wandered off along the trail that led to the waterfall. He knew his mother was waiting for him there by the larch-shaded grotto: that was the agreement. She would go out walking very early and, not wanting to wake Martin, would leave him a note: “By the grotto at ten” or “Near the spring on the road to Ste. Claire.” However, even though he knew she was waiting, Martin suddenly changed direction, left the trail and started upward across the heather.

The slope became steeper and steeper, the sun was scorching, flies kept trying to get at his lips and eyes. Upon reaching a circular birch grove, he rested, smoked a cigarette, pulled up his sports stockings tighter, and resumed the ascent, munching on a birch leaf. The heather was crunchy and slippery. Now and then he caught his foot in
the low thornbushes. At the top of the incline gleamed an amassment of rocks, between which ran a crevice. It fanned out toward him, and was filled with fine debris that came into motion as soon as he stepped upon it. This way could not serve to reach the peak, so Martin began to climb straight up the face of the rocks. Occasionally some root or moss patch at which he clutched detached itself from the stone, and feverishly he would seek a support with his foot, or else it was his foothold that gave, and he would be left hanging by his hands and have to pull himself painfully up. The peak was almost within reach when he suddenly slipped and started to slither down, clutching at shrublets of rough flowers; he lost his grip, felt a burning pain as his knee scraped against the rock, attempted to embrace the steepness that was gliding up and past him—and abruptly salvation bumped against his soles.

He found himself on a cornice; to the right it narrowed and merged with the cliff, but to the left it could be seen going on for a few yards before turning a corner—what then happened to it remained unknown. His ledge recalled the stage setting of nightmares. He stood, pressing closely to the rock against which he had bruised his chest on the way down, and dared not unglue himself from it. With an effort glancing over his shoulder, he saw under his heels a prodigious precipice, a sun-illumined abyss with, in its depths, several outdistanced firs running in panic after the descending forest, and still further down the steep meadows and the tiny, ivory white hotel. “So that’s what its message was,” thought Martin with a superstitious shiver. “I’ll fall, I’ll perish, that’s what it’s watching for. That—that——” It was equally terrifying to look down the precipice or up the vertical cliff above him. A width of bookshelf underfoot and a knobby spot in the rock wall to which his fingers clung was
all that Martin retained of the solid world to which he was used.

He experienced faintness, dizziness, sickening fear, yet at the same time he observed himself from the outside, noting with odd lucidity his open-collared flannel shirt, his clumsy clinging position on the ledge, the thistle ball that had attached itself to his stocking and the entirely black butterfly that fluttered by with enviable casualness like a quiet little devil and began to rise along the rock face; and though there was no one around to make showing off worth while, Martin began to whistle; then he vowed to himself that he would pay no attention to the invitation of the abyss and began to displace his feet slowly, as he moved to the left. Ah, if only one could see what the cornice did after it turned that corner! The rock wall seemed to push against his breast, crowding him toward the precipice, whose impatient breath he felt on his back. His nails dug into the stone, the stone was hot, the tufts of flowers were of an intense blue, a lizard traced a quick incomplete figure eight and froze again, flies tickled his face. Every now and then he had to stop, and he heard himself complaining to himself—I cannot any more, I cannot—and when he caught himself doing that, he began to produce with his lips a rudimentary tune, a fox-trot or the “Marseillaise,” then moistened his lips and, again complaining, resumed his sidewise progress. There remained only a yard or so to the turn when something began to spill from under his shoe sole; he could not help turning his head, and in the sunny void the white spot of the hotel started to rotate slowly. Martin closed his eyes and stopped short, but then he controlled his nausea and began to move again. At the turn he said rapidly “Please, I beg you, please,” and his request was immediately granted: beyond the turn the shelf widened,
became a platform, and beyond was the already familiar scree and the heather-covered slope.

There he caught his breath. His entire body ached and vibrated. His nails had become dark red as if he had been picking strawberries; the knee he had barked was smarting. The danger that he had just experienced seemed to him far more real than the one into which he had blundered in the Crimea. Now he felt proud of himself but this pride suddenly lost all its flavor when Martin asked himself if he could again perform, this time deliberately, what he had performed accidentally. In a few days he gave in, climbed again up the heather-grown steeps, but when he reached the platform from where the cornice started, he could not make himself step on it. This angered him, he tried to incite himself, he taunted his own cowardice, imagined Darwin looking at him with a mocking smile—stood there for a while, then shrugged and turned back, doing his best to ignore the ruffian who was raging within him. Again and again, to the very end of vacation, that rowdy made irruptions and would riot so offensively that finally Martin decided not to walk up that mountain any more to avoid being tormented by the sight of the narrow shelf which he dared not tread.

In October he returned to England in a stinging mood of self-depreciation. Straight from the station he went to see the Zilanovs. The housemaid who opened the door was new, and this was unpleasant, making it seem he had come to a strange house. Sonia, dressed all in black, stood in the middle of the living room smoothing her temples, then proffered her hand, in a straight sharp gesture as was her wont. With amazement Martin realized that not once during the summer had he thought of her, not once had he written, but that nonetheless it would have been worth while to travel a long way, if
only for the sake of that embarrassment that he now felt as he looked at her pale sullen face. “You probably have not heard of our grief,” said Sonia and in an oddly cross tone related that the week before, on the same day, they had received information that Nelly had died in childbirth in Brindisi, and her husband had been killed in the Crimea. “Ah, then he left Yudenich to join Wrangel,” said Martin lamely, and with exceptional clarity visualized that husband of Nelly’s whom he had seen but once, and Nelly herself who at the time had seemed to him dull and insipid, and now had gone and died in Brindisi. “Mother is in a terrible state,” said Sonia leafing through a book that lay abandoned on the sofa. “And father’s been traveling in secret to God knows what places, possibly as far as Kiev,” she added after a while and separating several pages with a thumb allowed them to mill rapidly. Martin seated himself in an armchair rubbing his hands. Sonia slapped the book closed and said raising her face: “Darwin has been perfect, simply perfect. He was a tremendous help to us. So touching, and not one wrong word. Are you staying for the night?” “Actually,” said Martin, “I could go up to Cambridge tonight. It would surely bother you to put me up, and so forth.” “No, what nonsense,” said Sonia and sighed. The sound of the dinner gong reached them from downstairs, and this clashed with the atmosphere of mourning that pervaded the house. Martin went to wash his hands. As he entered the lavatory he collided with Zilanov who did not make it a custom to lock the door. He glanced at Martin out of lusterless eyes while unhurriedly buttoning his fly. “Accept my deepest sympathy,” muttered Martin and stupidly clicked his heels. Zilanov lowered his lids in sign of gratitude and shook hands with Martin. The fact that all this occurred on the threshold of the lavatory underlined the absurdity of the handclasp and the ready-made words. Zilanov
slowly walked off, his thighs twitching as if he were shaking down something between them. Martin’s nose, as its owner noticed in the mirror, was wrinkled in anguish. “After all I
did
have to say something,” he muttered through his teeth.

Dinner proceeded in silence if one discounted the old-fashioned slurp with which Zilanov ate his soup. Irina and her mother were at an out-of-town sanitarium, and Mrs. Zilanov did not come down, so that they dined just the three of them. The telephone rang, and Zilanov marched to his study chewing on the way. “I know you don’t like mutton,” Sonia said softly, and Martin silently smiled a slightly muted smile. “Iogolevich will drop in,” said Zilanov resuming his place at the table. “He has just returned from St. Petersburg. Pass me the mustard. He says he crossed the border wrapped in a shroud.” “Less conspicuous on snow,” said Martin a moment later to keep up the conversation, but no conversation ensued.

Aleksandr Naumovich Iogolevich turned out to be a fat bearded man in a knit gray waistcoat and shabby black suit, with dandruff on his shoulders. The side-ears of his black prunella boots stuck out, and the ankle ties of his underpants glimmered through his sagging socks. The way he completely ignored inanimate objects (such as the arm support of the chair which he mechanically kept tapping with his hand, or the thick book on which he sat down by mistake, then took out from under him without a smile, and put aside without glancing at it) pointed to a secret affinity with Zilanov. Nodding his large frizzly head, he only responded with a short clucking of his tongue to the news of his friend’s bereavement; then quickly passing the palm of
his hand down his coarsely fashioned face, without any preliminaries, launched into his story. It was obvious that the only thing that filled his consciousness, the only thing that preoccupied and affected him, was Russia’s woe, and with trepidation Martin pictured to himself what would happen were he to interrupt Iogolevich’s stormy tense speech by telling the anecdote about the student and his girl cousin. Sonia sat at a distance, propping her elbows on her knees, and her face on her palms. Zilanov listened, one finger stretched along his nose, occasionally removing the finger to say: “Excuse me, Aleksandr Naumovich, but, for instance, when you mention—” and Iogolevich would stop for an instant, blink, then resume his tale, with a constant remarkable motion of his rough, ceaselessly changing features—his shaggy brows, the nostrils of his pear-shaped nose, the folds of his bearded cheeks—nor did his hands with black hair on the phalanges rest for one second: they lifted something, tossed it upward, seized it again, strewed it in every direction, and all the while, hotly, in a rolling delivery, he spoke of executions, of famine, of St. Petersburg turned into a desert, of the regime’s malice, stupidity and vulgarity. He left after midnight and suddenly turning around on the threshold asked how much
kaloshi
(rubbers) cost in London. After the door had closed, Zilanov remained standing, lost in thought, then went upstairs to his wife. The doorbell rang three minutes later: Iogolevich had come back; it turned out that he did not know the way to the tube station. Martin offered to take him there and while striding at Iogolevich’s side cast about in distress for a subject of conversation. “Remind your father,” said Iogolevich abruptly, “I quite forgot to tell him that Maksimov is impatient to receive the article on his impressions from visiting the Southern Volunteer Army. He will know what it’s about. Just tell him. Maksimov has written to
your father before.” “Certainly,” answered Martin; was about to add something but checked himself.

He slowly returned to the house, imagining now Iogolevich crossing the border wrapped in a white sheet, then Zilanov with his briefcase at some demolished railroad station under the starry Ukrainian sky. All was silent in the house when he went up the stairs. He kept yawning while he undressed. He felt an odd, vague anguish. The lamp on the bedside table burned bright, the wide bed looked white and soft, his dressing gown of lustrous blue silk had been taken out of his bag by the maid and was slung invitingly over the armchair. He noticed with a shock of vexation that he had forgotten to bring up from the living room a book he had set his heart on there, and had been looking forward to reading in bed. He pulled on his dressing gown and walked down to the second floor. The book was a dilapidated volume of Chekhov’s stories. He found it—for some reason it was lying on the floor—and returned to his bedroom. But the heartache did not dissipate, although Martin was one of those people for whom a good book before sleep is something to look forward to all day. Such a person, upon happening to recall, amidst routine occupations, that on his bedside table a book is waiting for him, in perfect safety, feels a surge of inexpressible happiness. Martin began to read, choosing the story he knew, loved, could read through one hundred times in a row: “The Lady with the Little Dog.” Ah, how nicely she lost that lorgnette in the crowd on the pier in Yalta! And here, without any apparent reason, he realized what it was that disturbed him so. Only a year before, in this room, Nelly had slept, and now she was dead.