Ganin remembered getting this letter, remembered walking up a steep stony path on that distant January evening, past Tartar picket fences hung here and there with horses’ skulls, remembered how he sat beside a rivulet pouring in thin streams over smooth white stones, and stared through the countless, delicate and amazingly distinct bare branches of an apple tree at the mellow pink of the sky, where the new moon glistened like a translucent nail clipping, and beside it, by the lower horn, trembled a drop of brightness — the first star.
He wrote to her the same night — about that star, about the cypresses in the garden, about the donkey whose roaring bray came every morning from the Tartar yard behind the house. He wrote affectionately, dreamily, recalling the wet catkins on the slippery footbridge of the pavilion where they first met.
In those days letters took a long time on the way — the answer did not come until July.
‘Thank you very much for your good, sweet, “southern” letter. Why do you write that you still remember me? And you’ll not forget me? No? How lovely!
‘Today it’s so nice and fresh, after a thunderstorm. As at Voskresensk — remember? Wouldn’t you like to wander round those familiar places again? I would — terribly. How lovely it was to walk in the rain through the park in autumn. Why wasn’t it sad then in bad weather?
‘I’m going to stop writing for a while and go for a walk.
‘I never did manage to finish the letter yesterday. Isn’t that awful of me? Forgive me, Lyova dear, I promise I won’t do it again.’
Ganin dropped his hand with the letter and for a moment sat lost in thought. How well he remembered those merry mannerisms of hers, that husky little laugh when she apologized, that transition from a melancholy sigh to a look of ardent vitality!
‘For a long time I was worried not knowing where you were and how you were,’ she wrote in the same letter. ‘Now we mustn’t break off the little thread which links us. There’s so much I want to write and ask you, but my thoughts wander. I’ve seen and lived through a lot of unhappiness since those days. Write, write for God’s sake, write often and more. All the very best for now. I’d like to say goodbye more affectionately, but perhaps I’ve forgotten how to after all this time. Or perhaps there’s something else holding me back?’
For days after getting that letter he was full of a trembling happiness. He could not understand how he could have parted from Mary. He only remembered their first autumn together — all the rest, those torments and tiffs, seemed so pale and insignificant. The languorous darkness, the conventional sheen of the sea at night, the velvety hush of the narrow cypress avenues, the gleam of the moonlight on the broad leaves of magnolias — all this only oppressed him.
Duty kept him in Yalta — the civil war was under way — but there were moments when he decided to give up everything to go and look for Mary among the farms of the Ukraine.
There was something touching and wonderful about the way their letters managed to pass across the terrible Russia of that time — like a cabbage white butterfly flying over the trenches. His answer to her second letter was very delayed, and Mary simply could not understand what had happened, as she was convinced that where their letters were concerned the usual obstacles of those days somehow did not exist.
‘It must seem strange to you that I’m writing to you despite your silence — but I don’t believe, I refuse to believe, that you still don’t want to reply to me. You haven’t replied, not because you didn’t want to but simply because — well, because you couldn’t, or because you hadn’t time or something. Tell me, Lyova, doesn’t it seem funny to remember what you once said to me — that loving me was your life, and if you couldn’t love me you wouldn’t be alive? Yes, how everything passes, how things change. Would you like to have what happened all over again? I think I’m feeling rather too depressed today...
‘Nice little poem, but I can’t remember the beginning or the end and I forget who wrote it. Now I shall wait for your letter. I don’t know how to say goodbye to you. Perhaps I’ve kissed you. Yes, I suppose, I have.’
Two or three weeks later came her fourth letter:
‘I was glad to get your letter, Lyova. It is such a nice, nice letter. Yes, one can never forget how much and how radiantly one loved. You write that you would give your whole future life for a moment from the past — but it would be better to meet and verify one’s feelings.
‘Lyova, if you
