These meetings in the wind and frost tortured him more than her. He felt that their love was fraying and wearing thin as a result of these incomplete trysts. Every love demands privacy, shelter, refuge — and they had no such refuge. Their families did not know each other; their secret, which at first had been so wonderful, now hindered them. He began to feel that all would be well if she became his mistress, even if only in furnished rooms — and this thought somehow persisted in his mind apart from his feelings of desire, which were already weakening under the torment of their meager contacts.
So they roamed all winter, reminiscing about the countryside, dreaming of next summer, occasionally quarreling in fits of jealousy, squeezing each other’s hands under the shaggy but scrimp rugs of cab drivers’ sleighs; then early in the new year Mary was taken away to Moscow.
Strangely enough, this parting was a relief for Ganin.
He knew that in the summer she was planning to return to a cottage on his parents’ land in the province of St Petersburg. At first he thought about it a lot, imagined a new summer, new meetings, wrote her the same piercing letters and then began to write less often, and when his family moved to their country estate in mid-May he stopped writing altogether. Simultaneously he found time to make and break a liaison with an elegant and enchanting blond lady whose husband was fighting in Galicia.
Then Mary returned.
Her voice crackled weakly from a great distance, a noise hummed in the telephone as in a seashell, at times an even more distant voice on a crossed line kept interrupting, carrying on conversations with someone else in the fourth dimension — the telephone in their country house was an old one with a hand crank — and between Mary and him lay thirty miles of roaring darkness.
‘I’ll come to see you,’ Ganin shouted into the receiver. ‘I’m saying I’ll come. On my bicycle. It’ll take a couple of hours.’
‘— didn’t want to stay at Voskresensk again. D’you hear? Papa refused to rent a dacha at Voskresensk again. From your place to this town it’s thirty —’
‘Don’t forget to bring those boots,’ interrupted a low, unconcerned voice.
Then Mary was heard again through the buzzing, in miniature, as if she were speaking from the wrong end of a telescope. And when she had vanished altogether Ganin leaned against the wall and felt that his ears were burning.
He set off at about three o’clock in the afternoon, in an open-necked shirt and football shorts, rubber-soled shoes on his sockless feet. With the wind behind him he rode fast, picking out the smooth patches between sharp flints on the highway, and he remembered how he used to ride past Mary last July before he even knew her.
After ten miles or so his back tire burst, and he spent a long time repairing it, seated on the edge of a ditch. Larks sang above the fields on both sides of the road; a gray convertible sped by in a cloud of gray dust, carrying two military men in owlish goggles. The tire mended, he pumped it up hard and rode on, aware that he had not allowed for this and was already an hour behind time. Turning off the highway he rode through a wood along a path shown to him by a passing muzhik. Then he took another turning, but a wrong one this time, and continued for a long while before getting back onto the right road again. He rested and had a bite to eat in a little village, and then, when he only had some eight miles to go, he ran over a sharp stone and once more the same tire expired with a whistle.
It was already getting dark when he reached the small town where Mary was spending the summer. She was waiting for him at the gates of the public park, as they had agreed, but she had already given up hope of his coming as she had been waiting since six o’clock. When she saw him she stumbled with excitement and almost fell. She was wearing a diaphanous white dress which Ganin did not know. Her black bow had gone, and, in result, her adorable head seemed smaller. There were blue cornflowers in her piled-up hair.
That night, in the strange stealthily deepening darkness, under the lindens of that spacious public park, on a stone slab sunk deep in moss, Ganin in the course of one brief tryst grew to love her more poignantly than before and fell out of love with her, as it seemed then, forever.
At first they conversed in a rapturous murmur — about the long time they had not seen each other, about the resemblance of a glowworm that shone in the moss to a tiny semaphore. Her dear, dear Tartar eyes glided near his face, her white dress seemed to shimmer in the dark — and oh, God, that fragrance of hers, incomprehensible, unique in the world!
‘I am yours,’ she said, ‘do what you like with me.’
