Glory (24 page)

The taxi sped with a susurrous sound; he admired the Tiergarten crowding around him, the lovely warm tints of its autumn foliage: “O dismal period, visual enchantment—” Flowerless but still sumptuous chestnut trees looked at their own reflection in the canal. As he drove over the bridge Martin recognized Hercules’ stone lion and noted that the recently repaired part of its tail still remained too white and would probably take a long time to acquire the seasoned tinge of the rest of the group—how much? ten, fifteen years? Why is it so difficult to imagine oneself at forty?

The basement floor of the Latvian consulate was alive with people. “Knock-knock” went the rubber stamp. Within a few minutes the Swiss citizen Edelweiss had come out of there and walked over to a nearby gloomy mansion where he obtained the inexpensive Lithuanian transit visa.

Now he could seek out Darwin. His hotel faced the Zoological Gardens. “Not in,” said the clerk. “No, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“How tiresome,” thought Martin returning to the street. “I should have given him a definite date—not merely ‘one of these days.’ A blunder. How tiresome!” He looked at his watch. Half past eleven. His passport was in order, his ticket was in his pocket. The day which had announced itself as crammed with activity all at once turned out to be empty. What next? Visit the zoo? Write mother a letter? No, that would come later.

But while he was meditating, muffled work went on in the depths of his consciousness. He resisted it, tried to ignore it, for he had firmly decided after the rejection of his desperate proposal never to see Sonia again. Alas—the air of Berlin was saturated with memories of her. Over there, at the zoo, they had stared together at the golden-red Chinese pheasant, at the fabulous nostrils of the hippopotamus, at the yellow dog dingo that could jump so high. “She is at her office now,” reflected Martin, “and I do have to call on the Zilanovs.”

The Kurfürstendamm began to drift by. Automobiles passed the streetcar, the streetcar passed the bicycles; then came the bridge, the smoke from the trains that ran far below, thousands of rails, the mysterious blue sky. Then a turn, and he was amidst the autumnal loveliness of Grunewald.

Surprisingly, it was Sonia who let him in. She wore a black jumper, looked slightly disheveled, her slanted eyes appeared sleepy, there seemed to be unfamiliar dimples in her pale cheeks. “Whom do I see,” she drawled making a very low
bow, her arms dangling in front of her. “Welcome, welcome,” she said unbending, and one black strand of hair fell in an arc on her temple. She threw it back with a flick of her index finger. “Come this way,” she said and started walking along the passage slap-slapping softly with her bedroom slippers. “I was afraid you might be at the office,” said Martin, trying not to look at the adorable back of her neck. “Headache,” she said without turning and emitted a little grunt as she picked up in passing a mopping rag which she threw onto a trunk in the corridor. They entered the drawing room. “Sit down and tell me all,” she said, dropping asprawl in an armchair, but at once she got up and sat down again with one leg under her.

The drawing room was its old self: the dark Böcklin on the wall, the worn plush of the furniture, some kind of indestructible pale-leaved plant in a pot, and that depressing chandelier in the shape of a tailed swimmer with the bosom and head of a Bavarian girl and deer horns growing out of all parts of her.

“Actually, I arrived only today,” said Martin lighting a cigarette. “I intend to work here. That is, not here actually but in the neighborhood. It is a factory and, as a matter of fact, I shall work there as a simple workman.” “Not really?” murmured Sonia and added, noticing his ash and questing gaze, “Never mind, shed it on the floor.” “Now there is this amusing circumstance,” Martin continued. “You see, actually I don’t want Mother to know that I’m a factory hand. So please, if she happens to write to your mother—sometimes, you know, she likes to find out if I’m all right in a roundabout way—well, then, do you see, she should be told, please, that I often come to see you. In reality, of course, I shall visit you very, very seldom, there will be no time for that.”

“You’ve lost your good looks,” said Sonia meditatively.
“And there’s something coarse about your face—maybe it’s the tan.”

“I’ve wandered all over southern France,” Martin said huskily, “worked on farms, lived like a bum, and, on Sundays, got dressed up and went to Monte Carlo for a bit of good time. Fascinating thing, roulette! And you, what have you been doing? Is everybody all right?”

“The ancestors are all right,” said Sonia with a sigh, “but Irina has become quite unmanageable. What a cross to bear! And the financial situation is as gloomy as ever. Father says we must move to Paris. Have you been in Paris?”

“Yes, for one day,” replied Martin negligently (that one day spent in Paris, many years ago, on the way from Biarritz to Berlin, children with hoops in the Tuileries Gardens, toy sailboats on the pond, an old man feeding the sparrows, the silvery filigree of the tower, Napoleon’s tomb where the columns resembled wreathed
sucre d’orge
). “Yes, just in passing. Incidentally, have you heard the latest news—Darwin is here.”

Sonia smiled and blinked several times. “Oh, do bring him! You absolutely must, it would be such fun.”

“I have not seen him yet. He is here on business for
The Morning News
. They sent him on a trip to America. But the main thing is this: He has a fiancée back in England, and he is getting married in the spring.”

“How marvelous!” said Sonia softly. “Everything according to pattern. I can imagine her so well: tall, eyes like saucers, and her mother just like her, only leaner and ruddier. Poor Darwin!”

“Nonsense, I’m sure she’s very pretty and intelligent.”

“Well, what else can you tell me,” asked Sonia after a silence. Martin shrugged. How rash of him to have used up all at once his entire stock of conversational topics. It seemed
weirdly absurd to him that there was Sonia sitting in front of him, and he dared not say anything of importance, dared not allude to her last letter, dared not ask if she was going to marry Bubnov—dared not say or do anything. He tried to see himself sitting there, in this same room, after his return: would he then, too, blurt out everything at once? And would Sonia lightly scratch her shin through the silk, as she did now, looking past him at things unknown to him? It occurred to him that he might have come at the wrong moment, that she might be expecting someone else, that she felt ill at ease with him. But he could not bring himself to leave, as he also could not think of anything amusing to say, and Sonia seemed to be deliberately trying to provoke him with her silence. In another moment he would lose control and spill it all—his expedition, and his love, and that innermost, mysterious something, which bound together the expedition, the love, and Pushkin’s ode to autumn.

The entrance door slammed, steps were heard, Zilanov entered the drawing room: “Ah,” he said, “delighted. How is your mother?” A little later Mrs. Zilanov came in through another door and asked the same question. “Won’t you have lunch with us?” she said. They moved to the dining room. Irina, upon seeing Martin, froze still, then suddenly rushed over to him and started kissing him with wet lips. “Ira, Irochka,” her mother kept repeating with a helpless smile. Dark meatballs were heaped on a large serving dish. Zilanov unfolded his napkin and stuck one corner behind his collar.

During the meal Martin showed Irina how to cross the second and third fingers so that you could touch a single small pellet of bread and feel two. For a long time she was unable to adjust her fingers properly, but when at last, with Martin’s assistance, the pellet divided into two under her touch, Irina cooed with rapture. Just as a monkey seeing its
reflection in a fragment of mirror looks to see if there is not another monkey underneath, so she, too, kept bending her head to check if there were not two crumbs under her fingers after all. When lunch was over and Sonia showed Martin to the telephone which was beyond the bend of a passage lined with boxes and trunks, Irina rushed after them with a moan fearing that Martin might be leaving for good. After convincing herself that this was not so, she returned to the dining room to crawl under the table there in search of her bread pellet that had rolled out of sight. “I want to call Darwin,” said Martin. “I must look up the number of his hotel.” Sonia’s face lit up, as she said, spluttering with excitement, “Oh, let me, I’ll do it, I’ll talk to him, it will be fantastic. Come, I’ll completely mystify him.” “No, don’t,” replied Martin, “what’s the use?” “Then I’ll only connect you. No harm in that, is there? What was the number?” She leaned over the telephone book he had opened, and he felt the warmth of her hair. On her cheek, just below the eye, was a little stray lash. Repeating the number rapidly in an undertone so as not to forget it, she seated herself on a trunk and picked up the receiver. “You’re only connecting us, mind you,” Martin remarked sternly. With painstaking clarity Sonia gave the number and waited, with shifting eyes, her heels tapping softly against the side of the trunk. Then she smiled, cuddling the receiver still closer to her ear, and Martin stretched out his hand, but Sonia pushed it aside with her shoulder and hunched over while asking for Darwin in a bright tone of voice. “Give it me,” said Martin, “this is not fair.” But Sonia gathered herself together even tighter. “I’ll cut you off,” threatened Martin. She made a sharp movement to protect the lever, and at the same moment her eyebrows went up. “No, nothing, thank you,” she said and hung up. “Not at home,” she told Martin, looking at him from below.
“You may rest assured, my dear, I shall not call him again. And you—you’ve remained the same boor that you were.” She slithered down from the trunk, groped, found her lost slipper with her toe, and went back to the dining room. The table was being cleared, Irina’s mother was talking to her but she kept turning away. “Shall I find you here later?” asked Zilanov. “Well, I don’t know. As a matter of fact, I should be going now.” “I’ll say good-bye to you just in case,” said Zilanov and retired to his room to work.

“Do not forget us,” said the two ladies simultaneously and each touched the other’s black sleeve, with a smile that acknowledged the superstition. Martin bowed. Irina made a dash for him and clutched the lapels of his jacket with both hands. He felt embarrassed, tried cautiously to unclasp her fingers; but she held tight, and when Mrs. Pavlov took hold of her shoulders from behind the poor creature broke out into loud sobs. Martin could hardly conceal his revulsion as he observed the dreadful expression of her face, the red rash on her forehead. With a sharp, if not rough movement, he tore loose from her hold. She was led away, her chesty howl retreated, and subsided at last. “The same worries all the time,” said Sonia as she accompanied Martin to the hallway. Martin put on his raincoat—the raincoat was a complicated affair, and it took him some time to arrange the belt properly. “Drop in sometime in the evening,” said Sonia as she watched his operation, her hands deep in the front pockets of her jumper. Gloomily Martin shook his head. “We get together and dance,” Sonia said and with her legs close together, she shifted first her toes, then her heels, then again toes and again heels, in a slight sideways motion. “Well,” said Martin slapping his pockets. “I don’t think I had any parcels.” “Remember?” asked Sonia and began to whistle softly the tune of a London fox-trot. Martin cleared his throat. “I don’t like your
hat,” she remarked. “They don’t wear them like that any more?”
“Proshchay,”
said Martin, and skillfully grabbing Sonia pushed his lips against her bared teeth, her cheek, the tender part behind her ear, then let her go (she backed away and almost fell), and quickly left, involuntarily slamming the door.

He noticed that he was grinning and out of breath, and that his heart was beating fast. “Well, that’s that,” he said to himself, and began walking away with bold strides as if he were in a hurry. But there was no place to go. Darwin’s absence confused his plans. As he went along the Kurfürstendamm, he kept noting with vague sadness Berlin’s familiar features: the austere church at the crossroads, so lonely amidst pagan cinemas; the Tauentzienstrasse, where pedestrians inexplicably avoid the median boulevard, preferring to progress in a tight flow close to the display windows. The blind man, who sold sight and light, kept thrusting a box of matches into eternal darkness; there were stalls with heather and asters, stalls with bananas and apples; a person in a brown overcoat stood on the seat of an old convertible, holding out fanwise tablets of a nameless chocolate whose exquisite quality he eloquently described to a small crowd of loafers. Martin turned into a side street and entered a Russian bookshop where
émigré
and Soviet works lay next to foreign magazines. A corpulent gentleman with the face of a polite reptile spread on the counter what he called
novinki
, “novelties.” Martin found nothing to his liking and bought a copy of
Punch
. What next? That meal at the Zilanovs’ had been decidedly scant. He directed his steps toward the Pir Goroy where he used to eat a year ago. From there he rang
up Darwin’s hotel. Darwin had not yet returned.
“Zwanzig pfennig, pozhaluysta,”
said the thickly powdered lady behind the counter.
“Merci.”

The proprietor was the painter Danilevski, whom Martin had known at Adreiz, a short man wearing a stiff collar, with a rosy infantile face and a blond wart under one eye. He came up to Martin’s table and asked shyly, “Bo-borshch all right?” (like many stammerers he was strangely attracted to sounds that were the hardest to master). “Yes, indeed,” answered Martin, and as always felt heartrending tenderness as he visualized Danilevski against the backdrop of the Crimean night.

The latter sat down and watched with approval Martin consuming his soup. “Did I tell you that according to certain information they’ve be-be-been living all these years at Adreiz—remarkable!”

(Can it be that they were never disturbed in their manor? reflected Martin. Can it be that everything has remained the same—those little pears, for example, drying on the veranda roof?)