One lay as though on air. To the left the bed was partitioned off from the doorway by a tawny cane screen with wavy curves. Close to him, in a corner to the right, stood the icon case: swarthy-faced images behind glass, wax candles, a coral crucifix. Of the two windows, the more distant one shone straight ahead, and the head of the bed seemed to be pushing itself from the wall while its foot aimed at that window with its brass knobs, each containing a bubble of sunlight; any moment it might be expected to take off, across the room, out into the deep July sky where puffy, bright clouds slanted upward. The second window, on the right-hand wall, gave on to a sloping pale-green roof: the bedroom was on the second floor and this was the roof of a single-story wing which contained the servants’ quarters and the kitchen. At night the windows were closed on the inside with whitewashed folding shutters.
The door behind the screen led onto the staircase, while further along the same wall were a gleaming white stove and an old-fashioned washstand with a cistern and a beaklike tap; you pressed a brass pedal with your foot and a thin fountain squirted out of the tap. To the left of the front window stood a mahogany chest of drawers with very stiff drawers, to the right of it a small ottoman.
The wallpaper was white with bluish roses. Sometimes, in semidelirium, one would fashion people’s profiles out of these roses or wander up and down with one’s eyes, trying not to touch a single flower or a single leaf on the way, finding gaps in the pattern, wriggling through, doubling back, landing in a blind alley and starting one’s journey through the luminous maze all over again. To the right of the bed between the icon case and the side window hung two pictures — a tortoiseshell cat lapping milk from a saucer, and a starling made of real starling’s feathers appliquéd above a drawing of a nesting box. Alongside, by the window frame, was fixed an oil lamp which had a knack of emitting a black tongue of soot. There were other pictures too: above the chest of drawers a lithograph of a barechested Neapolitan boy, and over the washbasin a pencil drawing of a horse’s head with distended nostrils swimming in water.
All day long the bed kept gliding into the hot windy sky and when one sat up one saw the tops of the lime trees, sungilt from above, telephone wires on which swifts perched, and part of the wooden canopy over the red sandy drive where it led up to the front porch. Wonderful sounds came from outside — twittering, distant barking, a creaking pump.
One lay and floated and thought how one would soon be getting up: flies played in a pool of sun; and from Mother’s lap by one’s bedside a ball of colored silk, as though alive, jumped down and gently rolled across the amber-yellow parquet.
In this room, where Ganin had recuperated at sixteen, was conceived that happiness, the image of that girl he was to meet in real life a month later. Everything contributed to the creation of that image — the soft— tinted prints on the walls, the twittering outside the window, the brown face of Christ in the icon case, and even the washstand’s diminutive fountain. The burgeoning image gathered and absorbed all the sunny charm of that room, and without it, of course, it would never have grown. It was after all simply a boyish premonition, a delicious mist, but Ganin now felt that never had such a premonition been so completely fulfilled. All Tuesday he wandered from square to square, from café to café, his memories constantly flying ahead like the April clouds across the tender Berlin sky. People sitting in the cafés supposed that this man staring so fixedly ahead must have some deep grief; on the street he carelessly bumped into people and once a fast car braked hard and swore, having nearly hit him.
