Glory (19 page)
But Sonia, ah, Sonia——From his nighttime thoughts about the glorious and dark expedition, from his literary chats with Bubnov, from his daily labors at the tennis club, he would return to her again and again and hold a match over the gas stove for her, whereupon, with a loud gush, the blue flame would extend all its claws. To talk to her of love was useless, but once, while walking her home from the café, where they had imbibed Swedish punch through straws to the wail of a Rumanian violin, he was overwhelmed with such soft passion, because of the warm night and because in every doorway there stood a motionless couple, so infectious was their gaiety and whispering, and sudden silences, and the crepuscular undulation of lilacs in villa gardens, and the fantastic shadows with which the light
of a streetlamp animated the scaffolding of a house in the process of renovation, that he forgot his usual reserve, his usual fear that Sonia would make fun of him, and, by some miracle, began to speak—of what?—of Horace. Yes, Horace had lived in Rome, and Rome, despite a good number of marble edifices, looked like a sprawling village, and there you could see people chasing after a mad dog, and hogs splashing in the mud with their black piglets, and construction was going on all over the place: carpenters hammered away; a wagon carrying Ligurian marble or an enormous pine would clatter past. But toward evening the racket would cease, just as Berlin grew silent at twilight, after which came the rattle of iron chains from shops being shut for the night, quite like the rattling of the Berlin shops’ shutters at closing time, and Horace strolled off to the Field of Mars, debile but paunchy, with a bald head and big ears, clad in a sloppy toga, and listen to the tender whispers under the porticoes, to the enchanting laughter in dark nooks.
“You’re such a dear,” Sonia said all at once, “that I have to kiss you—wait, let’s go over there.”
Near a park gate, under the overflow of dark foliage, Martin pulled Sonia to him, and, so as not to lose the least part of that moment, he did not close his eyes as he slowly kissed her cool, soft lips, watching the while a reflection of pale light on her cheek, and the quivering of her lowered eyelids: they rose for an instant, revealing a moist, blind glistening, and shut again; little shivers shook her, her lips parted under his, but breaking the spell her hand pushed his face aside, and her teeth were chattering, and in a half-whisper she implored him to stop.
“And what if I’m in love with somebody else?” asked Sonia with unexpected vivacity when they were once again strolling along the street.
“That would be awful,” said Martin. He sensed there had been a moment when he could have taken a firm hold of Sonia, but now she had flipped away again.
“Remove your arm,” she remarked, “I can’t walk like that—you behave like a Sunday shop clerk,” and his last hope, the blissful sensation of her warm upper arm under the palm of his hand, vanished also.
“At least he has talent,” she said, “and you, you’re nothing, just a traveling playboy.”
“Talent? Whom are you talking about?”
She did not answer and kept silent all the way home. She did, however, kiss him again on the doorstep, throwing her bare arm around his neck, and her expression was serious and her gaze downcast as she locked the door from the inside. He watched through the door pane: there she goes, up the stairs, caressing the banister, and now the stair bend conceals her—and that is her light going out.
“She did the same to Darwin,” thought Martin, and he felt a tremendous urge to see his old friend; Darwin, however, was far away in America, on an assignment for a London newspaper. Next day all trace of romance had vanished, as if it had never been, and Sonia went with friends to the country, to Peacock Island, for a swim and a picnic, and Martin didn’t even know about it. That evening, a minute before closing time, he had bought a large crimson-ribboned plush dog and was approaching her house with the thing under his arm when he met the whole returning party on the street; Sonia had Kallistratov’s jacket over her shoulders, and between him and her there flashed repeatedly a chance jest, whose meaning nobody bothered to explain to Martin.
He wrote her a letter, and stayed away for several days. She replied a week or so later with a color postcard showing a pretty boy bending over the back of a green bench on
which sat a pretty girl, admiring a bouquet of roses, with a German rhyme in gilt letters at the bottom: “Let a true heart leave unsaid what is told by roses red.” On the reverse Sonia had scribbled: “Aren’t they sweet? That’s real courtship for you. Look, I need your assistance, three strings have snapped on my racket.” And not a word about the letter! However, during one of his next visits she said, “I think it’s ridiculous that you can’t skip a day or two now and then. Surely, Kindermann will replace you.”
“He has his own lessons,” replied Martin hesitantly, but he did speak to Kindermann, and so, one marvelous, impeccably cloudless morning, Martin and Sonia were off for the lacustrine, reedy, piny outskirts of the city, and Martin heroically kept his promise not to make “marmalade” eyes, as she put it, and did not attempt to kiss her. Something they discussed that day happened to lead to a series of quite special exchanges between them. With the intent of striking Sonia’s imagination, Martin vaguely alluded to his having joined a secret group of anti-Bolshevist conspirators that organized reconnaissance operations. It was perfectly true that such a group did exist; in fact, a common friend of theirs, one Lieutenant Melkikh, had twice crossed the border on dangerous missions; it was also true that Martin kept looking for an opportunity to make friends with him (once he had even invited him to dinner) and always regretted that while in Switzerland he had not met the mysterious Gruzinov, whom Zilanov had mentioned, and who, according to information Martin had gathered, emerged as a man of great adventures, a terrorist, a very special spy, and the mastermind of recent peasant revolts against the Soviet rule.
“It never occurred to me,” said Sonia, “that you thought about things like that. Only, you know, if you really have joined that organization, it’s very naive to start blabbing about it right away.”
“Oh, I was only joking,” said Martin, and slit his eyes enigmatically so as to make Sonia believe he had deliberately turned it into a joke. She, however, did not catch that nuance; stretched out on the dry, needle-strewn ground, beneath the pines whose trunks the sun blotched with color, she put her bare arms behind her head, exposing her lovely armpits which she had recently started to shave and which were now shaded as if with a pencil, and said it was a strange thing, but she too had often thought about it—about there being a land where ordinary mortals were not admitted.
“What shall we call that land?” asked Martin, suddenly recollecting his games with Lida on the Crimean fairy-tale shore.
“Some northern name,” answered Sonia. “Look at that squirrel.” The squirrel, playing hide-and-seek, jerkily climbed a tree trunk and vanished amidst the foliage.
“Zoorland, for example,” said Martin. “A Norman mariner mentions it.”
“Yes, of course—Zoorland,” Sonia concurred, and he grinned broadly, somewhat astounded by her unexpectedly revealed capacity for daydreaming.
“May I remove an ant?” he asked parenthetically.
“Depends where.”
“Stocking.”
“Scram, chum” (addressing the ant). She brushed it off and continued, as if reciting, “Winters are cold there, and monster icicles hang from the eaves, a whole system of them, like organ pipes. Then they melt and everything gets very watery, and there are sootlike specks on the thawing snow. Oh, I can tell you everything about it. For instance, they’ve just passed a law that all inhabitants must shave their heads, so that now the most important, most influential people are the barbers.”
“Equality of heads,” said Martin.
“Yes. And of course the bald ones are best off. And you know——”
“Bubnov would have a grand time there,” Martin interjected facetiously.
For some reason Sonia took offense and dried up. Yet from that day on she occasionally condescended to play Zoorland with him, and Martin was tormented by the thought that she might be making sophisticated fun of him and that any moment she might cause him to take a false step, prodding him toward the boundary beyond which phantasmata become tasteless—and the dreamwalker is jolted into seeing the roof edge from which he is dangling, his own hiked-up nightshirt, the crowd looking up from the sidewalk, the firemen’s helmets. But even if this was a form of derision on Sonia’s part, no matter, no matter, he enjoyed the opportunity to let himself go in her presence. They studied Zoorlandian customs and laws. The region was rocky and windy, and the wind was recognized as a positive force since by championing equality in not tolerating towers and tall trees, it only subserved the public aspirations of atmospheric strata that kept diligent watch over the uniformity of the temperature. And, naturally, pure arts, pure science were outlawed, lest the honest dunces be hurt to see the scholar’s brooding brow and offensively thick books. Shaven-headed, wearing brown cassocks, the happy Zoorlanders warmed themselves by bonfires as the strings of burning violins snapped with loud reports, and discussed plans to level the land by blowing up mountains that stuck up too presumptuously. Sometimes during the general conversation—at table, for instance—Sonia would suddenly turn to him and quickly whisper, “Have you heard, there’s a new law forbidding caterpillars to pupate,” or “I forgot to tell you, Savior-and-Mauler” (the sobriquet of one of the chieftains) “has ordered physicians to stop casting around and to treat all illnesses in exactly the same way.”
When he returned for the winter to Switzerland, Martin looked forward to an entertaining correspondence, but Sonia made no mention of Zoorland in her infrequent letters. In one of them, however, she asked him to give her father’s regards to Gruzinov. It turned out that Gruzinov was staying at the Majestic, the hotel that had had such an odd attraction for Martin. But when he skied down to it, he found that Gruzinov had left and would be away for some time. He transmitted Zilanov’s regards to Gruzinov’s wife, a young-looking, brightly dressed lady in her forties, with blue-black hair and a cautious smile that attempted to conceal protruding front teeth always smeared with lipstick. Martin had never seen such exquisite hands as hers. They were small and soft, and adorned with glowing rings. But though everybody considered her attractive, and admired her grace and melodious, caressive voice, Martin’s senses remained unstirred; in fact it irked him to think that, maybe, she was trying to charm him. His suspicions were unfounded. Mrs. Gruzinov was as indifferent to him as to the tall big-nosed Englishman with gray bristly hair on his narrow head and a striped scarf around his neck who took her sleigh-riding.
“My husband won’t be back before July,” she said, and began questioning Martin about the Zilanovs. “Yes, yes. I do pity her mother” (Martin had mentioned Irina). “You know, don’t you, how it all started?” Martin knew. During the civil war, in Southern Russia, Irina, then a quiet, plump, normal though melancholy girl of fourteen, was on a train with her mother: they had had to be content with a bench in a freight car crammed with all sorts of riffraff, and during the long journey two rowdies, ignoring the protests of some
of their pals, palpated, pinched, and tickled the child, saying monstrous obscenities to her. Mrs. Pavlov, wearing the smile of helpless horror, and doing her best to protect her, kept repeating, “Never mind, Irochka, never mind—oh please leave the child alone, you should be ashamed of yourselves—never mind, Irochka——” then, on the next train, nearer to Moscow, with similar cries and mutterings, she again cradled her daughter’s head when other roughs, deserters or the like, ejected her corpulent husband by squeezing him through the window with the train going full speed. Yes, he was very fat, and he laughed hysterically, having got stuck halfway through, but finally, with a unanimous heave-ho they succeeded, he disappeared from sight, and there only remained the blind snow driving past the empty window. Miraculously he rejoined his family at some little railway station buried in snow; and, miraculously, too, Irina survived a severe typhoid infection; but she lost the power of speech, and it was only a year later in London that she learned to produce mooing sounds with different intonations and to pronounce “ma-ma” with tolerable clarity.
Martin, who somehow had never paid much attention to Irina, having soon become used to her mental deficiency, now experienced a strange shock as Mrs. Gruzinov added, “That’s how they have in their home a permanent living symbol.” The night of Zoorland seemed to him even darker, its wildwood deeper, and Martin already knew that nothing and nobody could prevent him from penetrating, as a free pilgrim, into those woods, where plump children are tortured in the dark, and a smell of burning and of putrefaction permeates the air. When he returned in the spring to Berlin and to Sonia, he could have almost believed (so crowded with adventures had been his winter-night fantasies) that he had already concluded that solitary and courageous expedition,
and now was going to talk and talk about his adventures. As he entered her room, he said (being anxious to express it before the familiar frustrating effect of her lusterless eyes had reasserted itself): “Like this, like this, I shall return some day, and then, ah, then——” “There’ll never be anything,” she exclaimed in the tones of Pushkin’s Naïna (“Hero, I still do not love thee!”). She was even paler than usual, her office work was very fatiguing; at home she wore an old black velvet dress with a narrow leather belt around the hips and backless slippers with frayed pompons. Often after supper she would put on her raincoat and leave, and Martin, after strolling aimlessly from room to room for a time, would leave too and walk slowly to the streetcar stop, hands deep in trouser pockets; at the opposite end of Berlin he would whistle tenderly under the window of a cabaret dancer whom he had met at the tennis club. She flitted out onto the balcony, froze for an instant at its parapet, disappeared, flitted out again and tossed him the house key wrapped in paper. In her bedroom Martin drank green crème de menthe and kissed her naked golden-brown back, and, tossing her head, she would tightly contract her shoulder blades. He liked to watch her as she rapidly paced the room setting close together her muscular suntanned legs and furiously reviling always the same theatrical agent; he liked her bizarre little face with its orange-tinted incarnadine, unnaturally thin eyebrows, and smoothly brushed-back hair; and he vainly tried not to think of Sonia. One night in May he emitted his soft whistle with a special trill, but instead of his mistress, an elderly man in braces came out onto the balcony and Martin sighed and walked away. He went back by tram to the Zilanovs’ street and started to walk back and forth between two lamps. Sonia returned past midnight, alone, and while she rummaged in her handbag in search of her keys, Martin approached and
asked timidly where she had been. “Won’t you ever leave me alone?” cried Sonia and without waiting for an answer turned her key with a double crunch, and the heavy door swung open, stopped for a moment, banged shut. Then came a time when Martin began to imagine that not only Sonia, but all their common acquaintances, were avoiding him, that he was unwanted, that no one cared for him. He dropped in on Bubnov, and the latter stared at him in an odd way, excused himself, and continued to write. At last—feeling that after a little more of this he would turn into Sonia’s shadow and to the end of his life continue to haunt Berlin’s sidewalks, wasting on a futile passion the important and solemn thing that was ripening in him—Martin decided to have done with Berlin in order to think over in purifying solitude the plan of the expedition. In mid-May 1924, with the ticket for Strasbourg already in his wallet, he went to take leave of Sonia, and, of course, did not find her at home. Amidst the twilight of the room, all in white, sat Irina, seeming to float in the dusk like a ghostly turtle. She did not take her eye off him. He wrote on an envelope, “Polar night decreed in Zoorland,” put it on the pillow in Sonia’s room, got into the waiting taxicab, and, wearing neither overcoat nor hat, with only one bag, left for the station.