‘No, I waited,’ said Ganin softly. ‘From the onset of puberty, to sixteen, say, three years. When I was thirteen we were playing hide-and-seek once and I and another boy of the same age found ourselves hiding together in a wardrobe. In the darkness he told me that there were marvelous beauties who allowed themselves to be undressed for money. I didn’t properly hear what he called them and I thought it was “prinstitute” — a mixture of princess and young ladies’ institute. So I had an entrancing, mysterious mental image of them. But then of course I soon realized how mistaken I had been because I saw nothing attractive about the women who strolled up and down the Nevski rolling their hips and called us high-school boys “pencils.” And so after three years of proud chastity my wait came to an end. It was in summer, at our place in the country.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Podtyagin. ‘I can see it all. Rather hackneyed, though. Sweet sixteen, love in the woods.’
Ganin looked at him with curiosity. ‘But what could be nicer, Anton Sergeyevich?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, don’t ask me, my dear chap. I put everything into my poetry that I should have put into my life, and now it’s too late for me to start all over again. The only thought that occurs to me at the moment is that in the final reckoning it’s better to have been sanguine by temperament, a man of action, and if you must get drunk do it properly and smash the place up.’
‘There was that too,’ Ganin smiled.
Podtyagin thought for a moment. ‘You were talking about the Russian countryside, Lev Glebovich. You, I expect, will probably see it again. But I shall leave my old bones here. Or if not here then in Paris. I seem to be thoroughly out of sorts today. Forgive me.’
Both were silent. A train passed. Far, far away a locomotive gave a wild, inconsolable scream. The night was a cold blue outside the uncurtained windowpanes, which reflected the lampshade and a brightly lit corner of the table. Podtyagin sat hunched, his gray head bowed, twirling a leather cigarette case in his hands. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking about: whether it was about the dullness of his past life; or whether old age, illness and poverty had risen before his mind’s eye with the same dark clarity as the reflection in the nighttime window; whether it was about his passport and about Paris; or whether he was thinking glumly that the pattern on the carpet exactly fitted round the toe of his boot, or how much he would like a glass of cold beer, or that his visitor had outsat his welcome — God knows. But as Ganin looked at his big drooping head, at the senile tufts of hair in his ears, at the shoulders rounded from writing, he felt such a sudden access of sadness that he lost all desire to talk about summer in Russia, about the pathways in the park, and least of all about the astonishing thing that had happened the day before.
‘Well, I must go now. Sleep well, Anton Sergeyevich.’
‘Good night, Lyovushka,’ Podtyagin sighed. ‘I enjoyed our talk. You, at least, do not despise me for taking Kunitsyn’s money.’
Only at the last moment, in the doorway, did Ganin stop and say, ‘Do you know what, Anton Sergeyevich? I’ve started a wonderful affair. I’m going to her now. I’m very happy.’
Podtyagin gave an encouraging nod. ‘I see. Give her my regards. I haven’t the pleasure, but give her my regards all the same.’
Strange to say he could not remember exactly when he had first seen her. Perhaps at a charity concert staged in a barn on the border of his parents’ estate. Perhaps, though, he had caught a glimpse of her even before that. Her laugh, her soft features, her dark complexion and the big bow in her hair were all somehow familiar to him when a student medical orderly at the local military hospital (a world war was in full swing) had told him about this fifteen-year-old ‘sweet and remarkable’ girl, as the student had put it — but that conversation had taken place before the concert. Now Ganin racked his memory in vain; he just could not picture their very first meeting. The fact was that he had been waiting for her with such longing, had thought so much about her during those blissful days after the typhus, that he had fashioned her unique image long before he actually saw her. Now, many years later, he felt that their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was only an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed her.
