‘
A short while later he went out into the passage and knocked at his neighbor’s.
Ganin thought, ‘Why can’t they leave me alone today?’
Coming straight to the point, Alfyorov began as he surveyed the room all around, ‘I say, Gleb Lvovich, when are you thinking of leaving?’
Ganin looked at him with irritation. ‘My first name is Lev. Try and remember.’
‘But you are leaving on Saturday, aren’t you?’ Alfyorov asked, thinking to himself, ‘We’ll have to place the bed differently. And the wardrobe must be moved away from the communicating door.’
‘Yes, I’m leaving,’ Ganin replied, and again, as at lunch the day before, he felt acutely embarrassed.
‘Well, that’s splendid,’ Alfyorov put in excitedly. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Gleb Lvovich.’
And with a final glance round the room he went noisily out.
‘Idiot,’ muttered Ganin. ‘To hell with him. What was I thinking about so delightfully just now? Ah, yes — the night, the rain, the white pillars.’
‘Lydia Nikolaevna! Lydia Nikolaevna!’ Alfyorov’s oily voice called loudly from the corridor.
‘There’s no getting away from him,’ thought Ganin angrily. ‘I won’t lunch here today. Enough!’
The street asphalt gave off a violet gloss, the sun tangled with the wheels of motorcars. Near the beer-hall there was a garage and from the gaping gloom of its entrance came a tender whiff of carbide. And that chance exhalation helped Ganin to remember more vividly yet the rainy Russian late August and early September, the torrent of happiness, which the specters of his Berlin life kept interrupting.
Straight out of the bright country house, he would plunge into the black, bubbling darkness and ignite the soft flame of his bicycle lamp; and now, when he inhaled that smell of carbide, it brought back everything at once: the wet grasses whipping against his moving leg and wheel spokes; the disk of milky light that imbibed and dissolved the obscurity, the different objects that emerged from it — now a wrinkled puddle, or a glistening pebble, then the bridge planks carpeted with horse dung, then, finally, the turnstile of the wicket, through which he pushed, with the rain— drenched pea-tree hedge yielding to the sweep of his shoulder.
Presently, through the streams of the night, there became visible the slow rotation of columns, washed by the same gentle whitish beam of his bicycle lamp; and there on the six-columned porch of a stranger’s closed mansion Ganin was welcomed by a blur of cool fragrance, a blend of perfume and damp serge — and that autumnal rain kiss was so long and so deep that afterward great luminous spots swam before one’s eyes and the broad-branching, many-leaved, rustling sound of the rain seemed to acquire new force. With rain-wet fingers he opened the little lantern’s glass door and blew out the light. Out of the darkness a humid and heavy pressure of gusty air reached the lovers. Mary, now perched on the peeling balustrade, caressed his temples with the cold palm of her little hand and he could make out in the dark the vague outline of her soggy hairbow and the smiling brilliance of her eyes.
In the whirling blackness the strong, ample downpour surged through the limes facing the porch and drew creaks from their trunks, which were banded with iron clasps to support their decaying might. And amid the hubbub of the autumn night, he unbuttoned her blouse, kissed her hot clavicle; she remained silent — only her eyes glistened faintly, and the skin of her bared breast slowly turned cold from the touch of his lips and the humid night wind. They spoke little, it was too dark to speak. When at last he struck a match to consult his watch, Mary blinked and brushed a wet strand of hair from her cheek. He flung his arm around her while impelling his bicycle with one hand placed on its saddle, and thus they slowly walked away in the night, now reduced to a drizzle; first there was the descent along the path to the bridge, and then the farewell there, protracted and sorrowful, as though before a long separation.
