As he pondered what to take next he noticed a black wallet that had fallen under the chair when he had emptied the suitcase. He picked it up and was going to open it, smiling as he thought of what was in it, but then he told himself that he should hurry up with his packing, so he thrust the wallet into the hip pocket of his trousers and began quickly throwing things at random into the open suitcases: crumpled dirty underclothes, Russian books which God alone knew how he had acquired, and all those trivial yet somehow precious things which become so familiar to our sight and touch, and whose only virtue is that they enable a person condemned to be always on the move to feel at home, however slightly, whenever he unpacks his fond, fragile, human rubbish for the hundredth time.
Having packed, Ganin locked both suitcases, stood them alongside each other, stuffed the wastepaper basket with the corpses of old newspapers, glanced all round his empty room and went off to settle up with the landlady.
Sitting bolt upright in an armchair, Lydia Nikolaevna was reading when he entered. Her dachshund slithered off the bed and began thrashing about in a little fit of hysterical devotion at Ganin’s feet.
Lydia Nikolaevna saddened as she realized that this time he really was about to leave. She liked the tall, relaxed figure of Ganin; she generally tended to grow very used to her lodgers and there was something a little akin to death in their inevitable departures.
Ganin paid her for the past week and kissed her hand, light as a faded leaf.
As he walked back down the passage he remembered that today the dancers had invited him to a party and he decided not to go away just yet; he could always take a room in a hotel, even after midnight if necessary.
And tomorrow Mary arrives,’ he exclaimed mentally, glancing round the ceiling, floor and walls with a blissful and frightened look. ‘And tomorrow I’m going to take her away,’ he reflected with the same inward shudder, the same luxurious sigh of his whole being.
With a quick movement he took out the black wallet in which he kept the five letters he had received during his time in the Crimea. Now in a flash he remembered the whole of that Crimean winter, 1917 to 1918: the nor’easter blowing the stinging dust along the Yalta seafront, a wave breaking over the parapet onto the sidewalk, the insolent and bewildered Bolshevik sailors, then the Germans in their helmets like steel mushrooms, then the gay tricolor chevrons — days of expectation, an anxious breathing space; a thin, freckled little prostitute with bobbed hair and a Greek profile walking along the seafront, the nor’easter again scattering the sheet music of the band in the park, and then — at last — his company was on the march: the billets in Tartar hamlets where all day long in the tiny barbers’ shops the razor glittered just as it always had, and one’s cheeks swelled with lather, while little boys in the dusty streets whipped their tops as they had done a thousand years ago. And the wild night attack when you had no idea where the shooting was coming from or who was leaping through the puddles of moonlight between the slanting black shadows cast by the houses.
Ganin took the first letter out of the bundle — a single, thick, oblong leaf with a drawing in the top left-hand corner that showed a young man in a blue tail coat holding behind his back a bouquet of pale flowers and kissing the hand of a lady, as delicate as he, with ringlets down her cheeks, wearing a pink, high-waisted dress.
That first letter had been forwarded to him from St Petersburg to Yalta; it had been written just a little over two years after that blissful autumn.
‘Lyova, I’ve been in Poltava for a whole week now, hellishly boring. I don’t know if I shall ever see you again, but I do so want you not to forget me.’
The handwriting was small and round, and looked exactly as if it were running along on tiptoe. There were strokes under the letter ‘m’ and above the letter ‘m’ for clarity; the final letter of each word tailed off in an impetuous flick to the right; only in the letter ‘ß’ at the end of a word did the bar bend touchingly downward and to the left, as though Mary retracted the word at the last moment; her full stops were very large and decisive, but there were few commas.
‘Just think, I’ve been looking at snow for a week, white cold snow. It’s cold, nasty and depressing. And suddenly like a bird the thought darts through one’s mind that somewhere far far away there are people living another completely different life. They’re not stagnating as I am in the sticks, on a small farm.
‘No, it’s really too awfully dull here. Write me something, Lyova. Even the most absolute trifles.’
