Glory (6 page)

Yet his awareness of a certain risk afforded some consolation. Any night, in a treacherous dream, he might distinctly pronounce a full-voweled name, and any night the exasperated husband might steal up with a sharpened razor. Chernosvitov, of course, used only a safety razor; he treated this
little instrument just as sloppily as his brush, and the ashtray always contained a rusty blade with a fringe of petrified foam dotted with black hairs. His sullenness and his insipid sayings seemed to Martin proof of a deep-seated but restrained jealousy. Going as he did to Athens on business for the whole day, he could not help suspecting that his wife was passing the time alone with the good-humored, calm, yet worldly-wise young fellow that Martin fancied himself.

It was very hot and very dusty. The cafés served one a tiny cup of sweet black goo to accompany a huge glass of ice-cold water. On the beach fences, posters with the name of a Russian soprano were growing tattered. The electric train that ran to Athens filled the idle blue day with a soft rumble, whereupon everything grew quiet again. The sleepy little houses of Athens reminded one of a Bavarian townlet. The tawny mountains in the distance were wonderful. Pale poppies quivered in the wind among bits of broken marble on the Acropolis. Right in the middle of the street, haphazardly, began the tracks on which stood the cars of resort-bound trains. Oranges were ripening in the gardens. There might be a vacant lot with a superb growth of columns—one of them fallen and fractured in three places. All of this crumbling, yellow marble was gradually being turned over to nature’s curatorship. Martin’s hotel, destined to remain new for its allotted span, would share the same fate.

As he stood on the seashore with Alla, he told himself with an ecstatic chill that he was in a lovely remote land; and what a condiment that was to being in love, what bliss to stand in the wind next to a laughing woman with wind-blown hair, whose bright skirt would now be worried, now pressed
against her knees by the same breeze that had once filled Ulysses’ sails. One day, while they strolled across the uneven sand, she stumbled, Martin caught her, she glanced over her shoulder at the sole of her shoe, raised high, heel-upward, then stumbled again; that settled it, and he pressed his mouth against her half-open lips. During this lengthy, rather clumsy embrace they both nearly lost their balance. She freed herself and, laughing, declared he kissed too wetly and ought to take some lessons. Martin was aware of a humiliating trembling in his legs, and of the pounding of his heart. He was furious with himself for this agitation, which reminded him of the moment after a fight at school when his classmates exclaimed: “Look how pale he is!” However, this first kiss of his life—shut-eyed and deep, with a kind of quivering point inside whose exact origin he did not immediately understand—was so wonderful, so generously fulfilled his fore-feeling, that his dissatisfaction with himself was soon dispelled. The windy wild day passed in passionate repetitions and improvements, and that evening Martin felt as tired as if he had been toting logs. And when Alla, accompanied by her husband, entered the dining room, where he and his mother were already peeling their oranges, and sat down at the next table (nimbly undoing the miter of her napkin, dropping it in her lap with a slight upward flight of her hands, then moving closer to the table together with her chair) a slow flush invaded Martin’s face, and for a long time he lacked the courage to meet her gaze, but when at last he did, he failed to find an answering embarrassment in her look.

Martin’s avid, unbridled imagination would have been incompatible with chastity. Fantasies known as “impure” had plagued him for the last two or three years, and he made no particular effort to resist them. At first they existed separately from the actual infatuations of his early boyhood. One
memorable winter night in St. Petersburg, after he had taken part in some home theatricals and was still made up, with charcoaled eyebrows, and dressed in a white Russian blouse, he shut himself in a closet with a coeval girl cousin, also made up and with a kerchief at eyebrow level, and as he squeezed her moist little hands, Martin had keenly sensed the romantic nature of his behavior, but had not been excited by it. Mayne Reid’s hero Maurice Gerald, having stopped his steed side-by-side with that of Louise Pointdexter, put his arm around the blond Creole’s limber waist, and here the author exclaimed in a personal aside: “What can compare with such a kiss?” Things like that provided a far greater erotic thrill. What fired him as a rule was the remote, the forbidden, the vague—anything sufficiently indistinct to make his fantasy work at establishing details—whether a portrait of Lady Hamilton or a popeyed schoolmate’s whisperings about “houses of evil repute.” Now the mist had thinned, visibility had improved. He was too engrossed in those sensations to give due attention to Alla’s actual pronouncements: “I shall remain for you a glamorous dream,” “I am insanely voluptuous,” “You will never forget me, as one forgets ‘an old novel read long ago’ (know that song?),” “And you must never, never talk about me to your future mistresses.”

As for Sofia she was pleased and displeased at the same time. When some acquaintance would coyly report, “We were out strolling today and we saw him, yes, we did—with the poetess on his arm—lost his head completely, that boy of yours,” Sofia replied that this was all quite natural at his age. Martin’s early revelation of manly passions made her proud, yet she could not ignore the fact that even though Alla was a sweet, affable young lady, she was perhaps a little too “fast,” as the English say, and, while excusing her son’s folly, Sofia did not excuse Alla’s attractive vulgarity. Fortunately their
stay in Greece was coming to an end: within a few days Sofia expected from Henry Edelweiss (her husband’s cousin) in Switzerland a reply to a very frank letter, written with great difficulty, about her husband’s death and the exhaustion of their means. Henry used to visit them in Russia, was good friends with her and her husband, was fond of his nephew, and always enjoyed the reputation of an honest and generous man. “Do you remember, Martin, when was the last time that Uncle Henry came to see us? In any case it was
before
, wasn’t it?” That “
before
” always lacking an object, meant before the quarrel, before the separation from her husband, and Martin also would say “before” or “after” without further qualification. “I think it was after,” he answered, recalling how Uncle Henry had arrived at their dacha, had had a long private interview with his mother, and emerged red-eyed, as he was particularly lachrymose, and even cried at the movies. “Yes, of course—how stupid of me,” Sofia said quickly, suddenly reconstructing his visit, the discussion they had about her husband, Henry’s exhortations that they make up. “And you remember him well, don’t you? Every time he came he brought you something.”

“The last time it was a room-to-room telephone,” said Martin, making a face: installing the telephone was boring, and when somebody finally did install it, running it from the nursery to his mother’s room, it never worked well, then broke down altogether, and was abandoned, along with other previous gifts from Uncle, such as
The Swiss Family Robinson
, for instance, which was extremely dull after the real
Robinson Crusoe
, or the little tin freight cars, which had provoked secret tears of disappointment, for Martin liked only passenger trains.

“Why are you grimacing?” asked Sofia.

He explained, and she said with a laugh, “That’s true, that’s
true,” and stopped to think for a moment about Martin’s childhood, about irretrievable, ineffable things, and there was a heartrending charm about this reverie: how quickly everything passes! … Just think—has begun to shave, has clean nails, that smart lilac necktie, that woman. “That woman is very sweet, of course,” said Sofia, “but don’t you think she’s just a little too lively? You shouldn’t get carried away like this. Tell me—no, I prefer not to ask you anything. Only they say she was a terrible flirt in St. Petersburg. And don’t tell me you really like her poetry? That female demonism? She has such an affected way of reciting verse. Is it true you’ve reached the point of—I don’t know, of holding hands, or something like that?”

Martin smiled enigmatically.

“I’m sure there’s nothing between you,” Sofia said slyly, considering with love the twinkling, equally sly eyes of her son. “I’m certain there is nothing. You aren’t old enough yet.”

Martin laughed, she pulled him close, and planted a juicy, greedy kiss on his cheek. All this was taking place at a garden table on the terrace before the hotel, early in the morning. The day promised to be lovely; the cloudless sky still had a hazy cast, as a sheet of gauze paper sometimes covers an exceptionally vivid frontispiece in an expensive edition of fairy tales. Martin carefully removed this translucent sheet, and there, down the white steps, swinging her low hips ever so slightly, wearing a bright-blue skirt across which an orderly ripple ran back and forth as, stepping down with calculated unhurriedness, first one foot and then the other extended the tip of its polished shoe, rhythmically balancing her brocaded handbag and already smiling, her hair parted on one side, came a limpid-eyed, slender-necked woman with large black earrings that also swung in rhythm with her descent.
Martin went to meet her, kissed her hand, stepped back, and she, laughing and trilling her “r’s,” greeted Sofia, who sat in a wicker armchair smoking a thick English cigarette, her first after morning coffee.

“You were sleeping so prettily, Alla, that I didn’t want to wake you,” said Sofia, her long, enameled cigarette holder held at a distance and glancing out of the corner of her eye at Martin, who now sat on the balustrade, swinging his legs. Bubbling over with excitement Alla began recounting the dreams she had seen last night, marvelous marble dreams with priests of ancient Greece, whose capacity to appear in dreams Sofia strongly doubted. And the freshly watered gravel glistened moistly.

Martin’s curiosity grew. The rambles on the beach, and the kisses that anyone could spy on began to seem too lengthy a foreword; at the same time his desire for the main text was mixed with anxiety: Martin failed to imagine certain details, and his inexperience alarmed him. The unforgettable day on which Alla said that she was not made of wood, that he must not caress her like that, and that after lunch, when her husband was safely away in the city, and Sofia was enjoying her siesta, she would slip into Martin’s room to show him somebody’s poems—that day was the very same one that opened with the conversation about Uncle Henry and the room-to-room telephone. When, later in Switzerland, Uncle Henry gave Martin a black statuette (a soccer player dribbling the ball) for his birthday, Martin could not understand why, at the very instant his uncle placed that useless object on the table, he pictured with astounding clarity a distant, tender morning in Greece with Alla descending the white stairs. Right after dinner he had gone to his room and begun to wait. Chernosvitov’s shaving brush he hid behind the mirror: somehow its presence encumbered him. From the courtyard
came the clang of water pails, the splashing of water, and the sound of guttural speech. The yellow window curtain swelled mellowly, and a spot of sunlight changed its shape on the floor. Instead of circles the flies described parallelograms and trapezoids around the shaft of the ceiling lamp, settling every now and then on the brass. He took off his jacket and collar, lay down supine on the couch, and communed with the thump of his heart. When he heard her light footfalls and the knock on his door, something seemed to snap in the pit of his stomach. “Look, I’ve brought a whole batch,” said Alla in a conniving whisper, but at the moment Martin could not care less about verse. “What a wild boy, goodness, what a wild boy,” she kept whispering as she helped him discreetly. Martin hurried, pursued rapture, overtook it, and she covered his mouth with her hand, saying under her breath “Sh, sh—the people next door …”

“This, at least, is a little object that will stay with you always,” said Uncle Henry in a clear voice, and leaned back, openly admiring the statuette. “At eighteen a person must already think about decorating his future study and, since you’re fond of English games——”

“It’s beautiful,” said Martin, not wishing to hurt his uncle, and ran his fingers over the motionless ball at the tip of the player’s boot.

Around the wooden chalet grew dense firs; fog hid the mountains. Hot, tawny Greece was indeed left far behind. But how vibrant the emotion of that proud, festive day: I have a mistress! What a conspiratorial air the blue couch had had later that evening! At bedtime Chernosvitov as usual scratched his shoulder blades, assumed weary attitudes, then creaked in the dark, requested that winds should not go free, and at last snored, whistling through his nose, while Martin thought, ah, if only he knew.… And then, one day, when
by all rights her husband ought to have been in the city, and in his and Martin’s room Alla was rearranging her dress (having already “taken a peek into paradise,” as she put it), while Martin, sweaty and disheveled, was searching for a cufflink dropped in that same paradise, suddenly, with a powerful nudge at the door, Chernosvitov came in and said, “So that’s where you are, my dear. I forgot, of course, to take Spiridonov’s letter with me. Fine muddle that would have been.”

Alla ran her hand over her wrinkled skirt and asked with a frown, “Has he signed yet?”

“That old bastard Bernstein keeps dawdling,” said Chernosvitov, digging in a suitcase. “If they want to delay payment, they can damn well get out of the mess by themselves, the swine.”

“Don’t forget the postponement, that’s the main thing,” said Alla. “Well, have you found it?”

“Damn his mother to mucking hell,” muttered Chernosvitov, rummaging through some envelopes. “It’s got to be here. It can’t have got lost, after all.”

“If it is lost, then the whole thing has fallen through,” she said with displeasure.

“Dawdling, dawdling,” muttered Chernosvitov. “That’s no way to do business. It’s enough to drive you nuts. I’ll be very glad if Spiridonov refuses.”