The river now reflected the terra cotta of the left— hand bank, overgrown at the top with fir and racemosa. Names and dates had been cut in the red steep, and in one place ten years ago someone had carved a huge face with prominent cheekbones. The right bank sloped gently, with purple patches of heather between dappled birch trees. And then cool darkness enveloped the boat under a bridge; from above came the heavy beat of hooves and wheels and, as the boat glided out, the dazzling sun flashed on the tips of the oars, and displayed the haycart crossing the low bridge and a green slope crowned by the white pillars of a boarded-up Alexandrine country mansion. Then a dark wood came down to the water’s edge on both banks, and with a gentle rustle the boat sailed into the reeds.
No one at home knew about it, and life went on its dear, familiar summertime way hardly touched by the distant war which had now been in progress for a whole year. Linked to a wing by a gallery, the old greenish-gray wooden house with stained-glass windows in its twin verandas gazed out toward the fringe of the park, and at the orange, pretzel-shaped pattern of garden paths which framed the black-earth luxuriance of the flowerbeds. In the drawing room with its white furniture the marbled tomes of old bound magazines lay on the rose-embroidered tablecloth, the yellow parquet spilled out of a tilted mirror in an oval frame, and the daguerreotypes on the walls seemed to listen whenever the white upright piano tinkled into life. In the evening the tall blue-coated butler in cotton gloves carried a silk-shaded lamp out onto the veranda, and Ganin would come home to drink tea and to gulp cold curds-and-whey on that lighted veranda, with the rush mat on the floor and the black laurels beside the stone steps leading into the garden.
He now saw Mary every day on the far side of the river where the deserted white mansion stood on a green hill and where there was another park, larger and wilder than the one around the ancestral house.
In front of that other mansion, under the lime trees, on a broad terrace above the river, stood some benches and a round iron table with a hole in its center to drain off the rainwater. From there one could see far below a second bridge crossing a green-scummed bend in the river and the road leading up to Voskresensk. This terrace was their favorite spot.
Once, when they had met there on a sunny evening after a rainstorm, they noticed a swinish phrase scribbled on that garden table. Some village rowdy had linked their names by a short, crude verb, which moreover he had misspelled. The inscription had been done in indelible pencil and was slightly blurred by rain. Twigs, leaves and the chalky vermicules of bird-droppings were also sticking to the tabletop.
And since the table belonged to them, since it was sacred, sanctified by their meetings, they began calmly and without a word to rub out the damp scribble with tufts of grass. And when the whole surface had turned a ridiculous lilac color and Mary’s fingers looked as if she had just been picking bilberries, Ganin, turning away and staring hard through narrowed eyes at a yellowy-green, warm, flowing something which at normal times was linden foliage, announced to Mary that he had been in love with her for a long time.
In those first days of love-making they kissed so much that Mary’s lips grew swollen, and her neck, so warm under her hair-bow, bore tender vampire marks. She was an amazingly cheerful girl, who laughed not so much from mockery as from sheer humor. She loved jingles, catchwords, puns and poems. A song would stick in her head for two or three days, then it would be forgotten and a new one would take possession. During their first few meetings, for instance, she kept on soulfully repeating in her burry voice:
and then she would say with her husky, crooning laugh, ‘Lovely song!’ Around that time the last wild raspberries, rain-soaked and sweet, were ripening in the ditches. She was unusually fond of them, in fact she was more or less permanently sucking something — a stalk, a leaf, a fruit drop. She carried Landrin’s caramels loose in her pocket, stuck together in lumps with bits of rubbish and wool sticking to them. She used a cheap, sweet perfume called ‘Tagore.’ Ganin now tried to recapture that scent again, mixed with the fresh smells of the autumnal park, but, as we know, memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
