Mary полностью

And on the black stormy night, when on the eve of his return to St Petersburg for the beginning of the school year they met for the last time on their pillared porch, something dreadful and unexpected occurred, a portent perhaps of all the desecrations to come. The rain that night was particularly noisy and their meeting especially tender. Suddenly Mary cried out and jumped down from the balustrade. By the light of a match Ganin saw that the shutter of one of the windows giving onto the porch was open, and that a human face, its white nose flattened, was pressed against the inside of the black windowpane. It moved and slithered away, but both of them had had time to recognize the carroty hair and gaping mouth of the watchman’s son, a foulmouthed lecher of about twenty who was always crossing their path in the avenues of the park. In one furious leap Ganin hurled himself at the window, shattered the glass with his back and crashed into the icy dark. With this momentum his head butted a powerful chest, which gasped at the blow. Next moment they were grappling and rolling across the echoing parquet, bumping into dead pieces of furniture draped in dust covers. Freeing his right hand, Ganin began to slam his rocklike fist into the wet face which he suddenly found underneath him. He did not get up until the powerful body, which he had pinned to the floor, suddenly went slack and began to groan. Breathing hard, bumping against soft corners in the dark, he reached the window and climbed back onto the porch to find the sobbing, terrified Mary; he noticed then that something warm and tasting of iron was trickling out of his mouth and that his hands were cut by glass splinters. The next morning he left for St Petersburg, and on the way to the station, in the closed carriage rolling along with a soft, muffled rumble, through the window he saw Mary walking on the edge of the road with her girl friends. The coachwork, lined with black leather, hid her immediately, and since he was not alone in the coupé he did not dare glance back through the oval rear peeper.

On that September day fate gave him an advance taste of his future parting from Mary, his parting from Russia.

It was a testing ordeal, a mysterious prevision; there was a peculiar sadness about the rowan trees, flame-red with fruit, receding one after another into the gray overcast, and it seemed incredible that next spring he would see those fields again, that lone boulder, those meditative telegraph poles.

At home in St Petersburg everything seemed newly clean, bright and positive, as it always does when one returns from the country. School began again; he was in the penultimate form; he neglected his studies: The first snow fell, and the cast-iron railings, the backs of the listless horses and the barge-loads of firewood were covered with a thin layer of downy white.

Mary did not move to St Petersburg until November. They met under the same arch where Liza dies in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. Soft oversized snowflakes came down vertically in the gray, mat-glass air. At this, their first meeting in St Petersburg, Mary seemed subtly different, perhaps because she was wearing a hat and a fur coat. From that day began the new, snowbound era of their love. It was difficult to meet, long walks in the frost were agonizing, and finding a warm place to be alone in museums and cinemas was most agonizing of all. No wonder that in the frequent piercingly tender letters which they wrote to each other on blank days (he lived on the English Quay, she on Caravan Street) they both recalled the paths through the park, the smell of fallen leaves, as being something unimaginably dear and gone forever: perhaps they only did it to enliven their love with bittersweet memories, but perhaps they truly realized that their real happiness was over. In the evenings they rang each other up, to find out if a letter had been received, or where and how to meet. Her amusing grasseyement was even more attractive on the telephone; she would say truncated little poems, laugh warmly, and press the mouthpiece to her breast, and he imagined he could hear her heart beating.

They talked like this for hours.

That winter she wore a gray fur coat which made her look slightly plumper, and suede spats put on over her thin indoor shoes. He never saw her suffering from a cold, or even looking chilly. Frost or driving snow only vivified her, and in an icy snowstorm in some dark alleyway he would bare her shoulders; the snowflakes tickled her, she would smile through wet eyelashes, press his head to her, and a miniature snowfall would drop from his astrakhan cap onto her naked breast.