Glory (18 page)

But perhaps the most unexpected thing about this new, much expanded, postwar Berlin, so peaceful, rustic and bumbling, compared to the compact and elegant city of Martin’s childhood, was the free-mannered, loud-voiced Russia that chattered everywhere, in the trams, in the shops, on street corners, on the balconies of apartment houses. Some ten years before, in one of his prophetic daydreams (and any person with a lot of imagination has prophetic daydreams occasionally—such is the statistics of daydreams), Martin, a schoolboy in the secure St. Petersburg of 1913, imagined himself in years to come as an exile, and felt tears rising when, on the strange dim railway platform of his reverie, he unexpectedly encountered—whom?—a compatriot, sitting on a trunk, on a night of shiverings and delays, and what a marvelous talk they had! For the roles of these fellow exiles he simply chose
Russians he had noticed during that earlier trip abroad: a family in Biarritz, complete with governess, tutor, clean-shaven valet, and brown dachshund; a fascinating fair-haired lady at the Kaiserhof in Berlin; or, in the corridor of the Nord-Express, an old gentleman in a black skullcap, whom Martin’s father had identified, in a whisper, as “the writer Boborykin.” Then, having selected for them appropriate costumes and speeches, he would dispatch them to meetings with himself in the remotest parts of the world. Today, in 1923, that chance fantasy (the consequence of Heaven knows what children’s book) found full incarnation, marked even by some overplaying. When the fat, heavily made-up Russian lady in the tram hung with blatant dejection from her strap, and volleyed over her shoulder some resounding Russian to her companion, an old man with a gray mustache, “Astounding, really astounding, how not one of these ill-bred foreigners offers his seat,” Martin jumped up and, with a radiant smile, repeating what he had rehearsed in his boyhood fantasies, exclaimed, “
Pozhaluysta!
” and, instantly growing pale from the experienced thrill, clutched the strap in his turn. The peaceable Germans whom the lady had called ill-bred were all tired, hungry working people, and the gray sandwiches they chewed in the streetcar, even if they did irritate Russians, were indispensable. For real dinners were expensive that year of monstrous inflation, and, when Martin changed a dollar note in the tram, instead of investing that dollar in real estate, the conductor’s hands would shake with amazement and joy. Martin earned his American
valuta
in a special way, which made him very proud. True, the labor was arduous. Ever since May, when he had stumbled upon that job (thanks to Kindermann, a charming Russian-German, who for a couple of years already had been teaching tennis to whatever wealthy clients turned up), and until mid-October,
when he left to spend the winter with his mother, and then again in the spring of 1924, Martin worked almost daily from early morning to sunset, holding five balls in his left hand (Kindermann managed to hold six) and sending them one by one across the net with an identical smooth stroke of his racket, while the tense, middle-aged pupil (male or female) on the other side of the net swung diligently and as often as not did not hit anything. At first Martin would get so tired, his right shoulder would ache and his feet burn so badly, that as soon as he had earned his five or six dollars he would go to bed. His hair grew lighter and his skin darker from the sun, so that he seemed a negative of himself. His landlady, a major’s widow from whom he concealed his profession so as to seem more mysterious, supposed that the poor fellow—like many cultured people, alas—was obliged to work as a laborer, lugging rocks, for instance (hence the suntan), and was embarrassed about it, as would be any refined person. In the evening, with genteel sighs, she would treat him to sausage that her daughter sent from their Pomeranian estate. The lady was six feet tall, with a ruddy complexion, used cologne on Sundays and kept a parrot and a tortoise in her room. She considered Martin an ideal roomer: he was seldom at home, did not receive guests, and never used the bath (the latter was amply replaced by the shower at the tennis club and the lake in Grunewald). This bath was plastered with the landlady’s hair on the inside, anonymous rags dried on a clothesline overhead, and an old, dusty, rusted bicycle leaned against the opposite wall. Moreover, it was no easy task getting there: one had to follow a long, dark corridor, with an extraordinary number of corners and piled full of all sorts of junk. Martin’s room, on the other hand, was not bad at all, and had its amusing side. It contained such objects of luxury as an upright piano, locked tight from time immemorial,
and a massive, complicated barometer that had stopped working a couple of years before the war, while on the green wall above the couch, like a constant, benevolent reminder, the same naked old chap armed with a trident rose out of his Böcklinian waves as he did—although in a plainer frame—on the wall of the Zilanovs’ parlor.

The first time Martin visited them and saw their cheap, dingy flat, consisting of four rooms and a kitchen, where a strange Sonia with a different hairdo sat on the table, swinging her legs in their darned-up stockings, sniffling, and peeling potatoes, Martin realized that he could expect nothing but sorrows from Sonia, and that his Berlin trip was pointless. Everything about her was unfamiliar: the bronze-colored sweater, the exposed ears, the stuffy voice—she was in the throes of a bad cold, and the skin was red around her nostrils; she would stop peeling to blow her nose, give a dejected grunt, and slice off a new spiral of brown skin with her knife. For supper they had buckwheat groats with margarine instead of butter. Irina came to table holding a kitten from which she was inseparable and greeted Martin with a joyous and dreadful laugh. Both mothers had aged during the past year and had grown to resemble each other even more. Only Zilanov was still his old self, and cut into the bread as mightily as ever.

“I hear”—crunch, creak—“that Gruzinov is in Lausanne. Did you”—creak—“happen to run into him? Great friend of mine and a remarkably strong-willed, determined person.”

Martin had not the faintest notion who Gruzinov was but did not ask any questions for fear of committing a blunder. After dinner Sonia washed the plates and he dried them, breaking one.

“It’s an impossible situation,” she exclaimed, and elucidated, “I mean not our finances but my nose, I can’t breathe through it. The financial situation is also pretty bad for that matter.”

Then she accompanied him downstairs to unlock the front door; at the press of a button there was a cute click and the staircase lights flashed on, and Martin kept clearing his throat and could not manage a single word of the many he had prepared. Evenings of a quite different nature followed—a multitude of guests, dancing to records, dancing in a nearby café, the murk of the corner cinema. New people materialized around Martin on all sides, nebulae gave birth to worlds. Definite labels and features were found for the Russian substance scattered about Berlin, for all those elements of expatriation which so excited Martin, be it merely a snatch of routine conversation amid the shoving sidewalk crowd, a chameleon word (such as that russified plural with its wandering accent:
dóllary, dolláry, dollará
), or a squabbling couple’s recitative, caught in passing (“And I’m telling you——” for female voice; “Oh, have it your way——” for male voice); or, on a summer night, a man with his head thrown back clapping his hands under a lighted window and shouting a resonant name and patronymic that made the whole street vibrate and caused a taxi to emit a nervous squeal and shy to one side after nearly running over the vociferous visitor, who had by now backed to the center of the asphalt, the better to see if the person he needed would appear like Punch in the window. Through the Zilanovs Martin met people among whom he at first felt ignorant and alien. In a certain sense he experienced all over again what had embarrassed him when he first saw the Zilanovs in London. And now, when at the apartment of Stepan Bubnov the talk rolled on in great waves, full of allusions to modern authors, and knowledgeable Sonia cast at Martin a sidelong glance of ironic compassion, Martin blushed, faltered, was about to launch his own
frail little contribution on the billows of other people’s speeches, but feared it would capsize immediately, and so kept still. In compensation, shamed by the backwardness of his erudition, he devoted every hour of rain to reading, and very soon became familiar with that special smell, the smell of prison libraries, which emanated from Soviet literature.

The writer Bubnov (who used to point out with satisfaction how many distinguished Russian literary names of the twentieth century began with the letter B) was a bearish, balding man of thirty, with a huge forehead, deep-set eyes, and a square chin. He smoked a pipe, sucking in his cheeks deeply with every puff, wore an old black bow tie, and considered Martin a fop and a foreigner. As to Martin, he was much taken with Bubnov’s energetic, rotund delivery and with his quite justified fame. Bubnov, whose writing career had begun in exile, had already had three excellent novels brought out by a Russian
émigré
publisher in Berlin, and was now writing a fourth. Its hero was Christopher Columbus, or, to be more exact, a Muscovite scrivener who, after many escapades, had miraculously ended up as a sailor on one of Columbus’s caravels. Bubnov knew no language other than Russian, so that when he had to go to the State Library for his research and Martin happened to be free, he willingly took him along. Martin’s command of German being mediocre, he was glad when a text chanced to be in French, English, or, better still, Italian. True, he knew that language even less than German, but he particularly prized his scant knowledge, remembering how he used to read Dante with melancholy Teddy’s assistance. Bubnov’s flat was frequented by the
émigré
literary set—fictionists, journalists,
pimply young poets; in Bubnov’s opinion these were all people of middling talent, and he reigned over them justly, hearing out, with his hand over his eyes, yet another poem about nostalgia for the homeland or recollections of St. Petersburg (with the Bronze Horseman inevitably present) and then saying, as he unscreened his beetling brows and kneaded his chin, “Yes, that’s good.” Then, focusing his pale-hazel eyes on some fixed point, he would repeat “Good” with a less convinced intonation; and, once again changing the direction of his gaze, he would say, “Not bad,” and then, “Only, you know, you make Petersburg a little too portable.” And thus, gradually lowering his evaluation, he would reach the point where he muttered in hollow tones, with a sigh, “That stuff is all wrong, all unnecessary,” and dejectedly shake his head; upon which, abruptly, with vivid enthusiasm he would thunder out a poem by Pushkin. Once, when a young poet took offense and objected, “That’s by Pushkin, and this is by me,” Bubnov thought for a moment and replied, “Still, yours is worse.”

Then again, there would be occasions when some newcomer brought a really fine piece, whereupon Bubnov—especially if the piece were in prose—would grow strangely glum and remain out of sorts for several days. Bubnov’s friendship with Martin, who never wrote anything (except letters to his mother and for this was dubbed by a wit “our Madame de Sévigné”), remained sincere and free of misgivings. There was even a night when, relaxed and transparent after his third mug of Pilsener, Bubnov began talking dreamily (and this brought back a campfire in the Crimean mountains) about a girl whose soul was a song, whose dark eyes sang, whose skin was pale like precious porcelain. Then, with a fierce look, he added, “Yes, that’s trite, that’s nauseous, ugh! Despise me if you like, I may lack all talent, but I’m in love
with her. Her name is like a church dome, like the swish of doves’ wings. I see radiant light in her name, that special light, the ‘kana-inum’ of the ancient Khadir sages. A light from there, from the East. Ah, that’s a great mystery, an awesome mystery——” Lowering his voice to a demented whisper, he added, “A woman’s charm is a terrible thing—you understand me, terrible. And her poor little slippers are worn down at the heel, yes, worn down——”

Martin felt uncomfortable and nodded in silence. In Bubnov’s company he always had a strange feeling, as if it were all a dream, and somehow he did not have complete faith either in him or in the Khadir elders. Sonia’s other acquaintances, for example jolly, bright Kallistratov, a former officer now in the “automobile transport business,” or the pleasant, fair-skinned and buxom Veretennikov girl, who played the guitar and sang “There’s a Volgan high cliff” in a rich contralto, or young Iogolevich, an intelligent, viperish, taciturn youth in horn-rimmed glasses who had read Proust and Joyce, were far less complicated than Bubnov. Mixed in with these friends of Sonia’s were the elderly acquaintances of her parents, all respectable, politically active, pure-hearted people, fully deserving a future obituary of a hundred limpid lines. But when, one July day, old Iogolevich heavily fell prone on the sidewalk, dead of heart failure, and the
émigré
papers carried a great deal of stuff about the “irreplaceable loss” and the “true toiler,” and Mihail Platonovich Zilanov, improperly hatless, with his briefcase under his arm, walked in the vanguard of the funeral procession among the roses and the black marble of Jewish graves, Martin had the impression that the obituary writer’s words “he burned with love for Russia” or “he always held high his pen” somehow debased the deceased inasmuch as those same words would have been equally applicable both to Zilanov and to the venerable necrologist himself.
Most of all Martin felt sorry for the originality of the deceased, who was truly irreplaceable—his gestures, his beard, his sculpturesque wrinkles, the sudden shy smile, the jacket button that hung by a thread, and his way of licking a stamp with his entire tongue before sticking it on the envelope and banging it with his fist. In a certain sense this was all of greater value than the social merits for which there existed such easy little clichés, and with an odd shift of thought Martin swore to himself that he himself would never join a political party or attend a meeting, that he would never be the personage who is “given the floor” or who “adjourns the proceedings,” while reveling in the joys of civic virtue. And often Martin would marvel at his inability to mention his long-treasured secret plans to Zilanov or to Zilanov’s friends or to any of those industrious, upstanding Russians, so full of disinterested love for their country.