The maid, a pallid thickset girl, muttered indignantly, but Ganin elbowed her aside with the same firmness, marched into the semiobscurity of the corridor and knocked on a door.
‘Who’s there?’ came Lyudmila’s slightly hoarse morning voice.
‘It’s me. Open.’
She pattered across the floor on bare feet, turned the key and, before looking at Ganin, ran to the bed and jumped back under the bedclothes. From the tip of her ear it was obvious that she was smiling, waiting for Ganin’s approach.
But he stayed in the middle of the room and stood there for some time, clinking the small change in his mackintosh pockets.
Lyudmila suddenly turned onto her back and, laughing, opened her thin, bare arms. Morning did not suit her; her face was pale and puffy and her yellow hair stood on end.
‘Well, come here,’ she pleaded and closed her eyes. Ganin stopped clinking his money.
‘Look, Lyudmila,’ he said quietly. She sat up, her eyes open wide.
‘Has something happened?’
Ganin stared hard at her and replied, ‘Yes. It seems I’m in love with somebody else. I’ve come to say goodbye.’
She blinked her sleep-clogged eyelashes and bit her lip.
‘That’s all, really,’ said Ganin. ‘I’m very sorry, but it can’t be helped. Let’s say goodbye now. I think it will be better like that.’
Lyudmila covered her face and fell back again face downward on the pillow. Her sky-blue quilt began slipping off sideways onto the fluffy white rug. Ganin picked it up and straightened it. Then he walked a couple of times back and forth across the room.
‘The maid didn’t want to let me in,’ he said.
Lyudmila lay buried in the pillow as if dead.
‘She’s never been exactly welcoming,’ said Ganin.
‘It’s time to turn off the heating. It’s spring,’ he said a little while later. He walked from the door to the white full-length mirror, then put on his hat.
Lyudmila still did not move. He stood for a little longer, looked at her in silence and then, making a faint sound as though to clear his throat, he left the room.
Trying to tread quietly, he walked rapidly down the long passage, chose the wrong door and as he swung it open found himself in a bathroom, from which erupted a hairy arm and a leonine roar. He turned sharply around and after a further encounter with the dumpy maid, who was dusting a bronze bust in the hall, began to descend the low stone steps for the last time. The huge casement on the landing was wide open onto the back courtyard, and down in the yard an itinerant baritone was roaring a Russian Volga song in German.
Listening to that voice, vibrant as springtime itself, and glancing at the colored design on the open windowpane — a bunch of cubic roses and a peacock’s fan — Ganin felt he was free.
He walked slowly along the street, smoking as he went. The day had a milky chill about it; ragged white clouds rose up before him in the blue space between houses. He always thought of Russia whenever he saw fast-moving clouds, but now he needed no clouds to remind him; since last night he had thought of nothing else.
The delightful private event which had occurred last night had caused the entire kaleidoscope of his life to shift and had brought back the past to overwhelm him.
He sat down on a bench in a public garden and at once the gentle companion who had been following him, his gray vernal shadow, stretched out at his feet and began to talk.
Now that Lyudmila had gone he was free to listen.
Nine years ago. Summer of 1915, a country house, typhus. Recuperating from typhus was astonishingly pleasant. One lay as though on undulating air; one’s spleen still ached occasionally, it was true, and every morning a hospital nurse, brought specially from Petersburg, wiped one’s furry tongue — still sticky from sleep — with cotton wool soaked in port. The nurse was very short, with a soft bosom and small capable hands; she gave off a damp, cool, old-maidish smell. She loved to use folksy quips and the bits of Japanese which she remembered from the war of 1904. She had a peasant woman’s face the size of a clenched fist, pock-marked, with a tiny nose; not a single hair ever peeped out from under her headdress.
