Glory Read Free Page B

that human life flowedin zigzags, that now the first bend had been passed, and that his life had turned at the instant his mother summoned him from the cypress avenue to the terrace and said in a strange voice, “I have received a letter from Zilanov,” then continuing in English, “I want you to be brave, very brave—it is about your father—he is no more.” Martin turned pale and smiled a bewildered smile. Then he roamed for a long time in Vorontsov Park, repeating now and then an infantine nickname he had once bestowed on his father, and trying to imagine—and imagining with a certain warm, dreamy cogency—that his father was beside him, in front, behind, under that cedar over there, there on that sloping lawn, nearby, far off, everywhere.
    It was hot, even though a rainstorm had raged a short time before. Blowflies buzzed around the glossy medlar shrubs. An ill-tempered black swan floated in the pool, moving from side to side its bill which was so crimson that it seemed painted. Petals had fallen from the almond trees, and stood out pale on the dark earth of the damp path, like almonds in gingerbread. Not far from some enormous cedars of Lebanon grew a lone birch tree, with that particular slant to its foliage that only a birch has (as if a girl had let her hair down on one side to be combed, and stood still). A zebra-striped swallowtail glided past, its tails extended and joined. The sparkling air, the shadows of the cypresses (old trees, with a rusty cast, their small cones half-hidden under their cloaks); the black glass of the pool, where concentric circles spread around the swan; the radiant blue into which serrated Mount Petri rose wearing a broad belt of karakul-like pine—everything was permeated with agonizing bliss, and it seemed to Martin that somehow his father played a part in the distribution of shadow and shine.
    “If you were twenty instead of fifteen,” said his motherthat evening, “if you had already finished high school, and if I were no longer alive, then, of course, you could … I suppose it would be your duty to——” She paused in mid-sentence, thinking of the White Army and seeing with her mind’s eye the South Russian prairie and Cossack-capped horsemen, among whom she tried to recognize Martin from afar. But, thank God, he stood next to her, in an open-necked shirt, his hair close-cropped, his skin sun-browned, with untanned little lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. “While, on the other hand, if we return to St. Petersburg——” she went on in a questioning tone, and at some anonymous station a shell exploded, and the locomotive reared up. “All this will probably end one day,” she added after a pause. “In the meantime we must think up something.”
    “I’m going for a swim,” put in Martin, with a conciliatory intonation. “The whole gang is there—Nicky, Lida.”
    “Yes, go, by all means,” said Sofia. “After all, the revolution will end some day, and it will be strange remembering it. Our stay in the Crimea has done wonders for your health. And you will somehow finish your schooling at the Yalta Gymnasium. Look, isn’t that cliff beautifully lit up over there?”
    That night neither mother nor son could sleep, and both thought about death. Sofia tried to think in an undertone, that is, without sobbing or sighing (the door to her son’s room was ajar). She recalled again, punctiliously and in detail, everything that had led up to her separation from Edelweiss. Going over every instant, she saw clearly that in this circumstance and in that she could not have acted otherwise. But still a mistake lurked hidden somewhere; still, if they had not parted, he would not have died like that, alone in an empty room, suffocating, helpless, perhaps recalling their last year of happiness (and very comparative happiness at that), andtheir last trip abroad, to Biarritz, the excursion to Croix-de-Mouguère, and the little galleries of Bayonne. She firmly