Mary Read Free Page A

himself of the feeling that every train was passing, unseen, right through the house itself. It would come in from the far side, its phantom reverberation would shake the wall, jolt its way across the old carpet, graze a glass on the washstand, and finally disappear out of the window with a chilling clang—immediately followed by a cloud of smoke billowing up outside the window, and as this subsided a train of the Stadtbahn would emerge as though excreted by the house: olive-drab carriages with a row of dark dog-nipples along their roofs and a stubby little locomotive coupled at the wrong end, moving briskly backward as it pulled the carriages into the white distance between blank walls, whose sooty blackness was either coming off in patches or was mottled with frescoes of outdated advertisements. It was as if an iron draft kept always blowing through the house.
    “Ah, to leave!” muttered Ganin, stretching listlessly, and at once stopped short—what would he do about Lyudmila? It was absurd how flabby he had become. Once (in the days when he had walked on his hands or jumped over five chairs) he had been able not merely to control his will but to play games with it. There had been a time when he used to exercise it by making himself, for instance, get out of bed in the middle of the night in order to go down and throw a cigarette butt into a postbox. Yet now he could not bring himself to tell a woman that he no longer loved her. The day before yesterday she had stayed five hours in his room; yesterday, Sunday, he had spent the whole day with her on the lakes outside Berlin, unable to refuse her this ridiculous little excursion. Everything about Lyudmila he now found repulsive:her yellow locks, fashionably bobbed, the two streaks of unshaven black hairs down the nape of her neck, her dark, languid eyelids, and above all her lips, glossy with purple-red lipstick. He was bored and repelled when as she dressed, after a bout of mechanical lovemaking, she would narrow her eyes, which at once gave them an unpleasantly shaggy look, and say, “I’m so sensitive, you know, that I shall be able to tell at once when you don’t love me as much as you used to.” Ganin, without replying, turned away toward the window, where there rose a white wall of smoke. Then she would give a little nasal snigger and call him in a husky whisper: “Come here.” At that moment he felt like wringing his hands to make the joints crack in delicious pain, and say to her, “Get out, woman, and goodbye.” Instead of that he smiled and bent down to her. She would run her nails, so sharp that they might have been artificial, over his chest, and pout, and flutter her coal-black eyelashes in her performance of a slighted girl or a capricious marquise. There seemed to him something sleazy, stale and old in the smell of her perfume, although she herself was only twenty-five. As he brushed her hot little forehead with his lips she forgot everything—forgot the falsity which she trailed around everywhere like her scent, the falsity of her baby talk, of her exquisite senses, of her passion for some imaginary orchids, as well as for Poe and Baudelaire, whom she had never read; she forgot all her factitious charms, her modishly yellow hair, sultry face powder and piggy-pink silk stockings—and, tilting back her head, she would press against Ganin her whole feeble, pathetic, unwanted flesh.
    Bored and ashamed, Ganin felt a nonsensical tenderness—a melancholy trace of warmth left where love had once fleetingly passed by—which caused him to kiss without passion the painted rubber of her proffered lips, although this tenderness did not succeed in silencing a calm, sarcastic voice advising him: try right now to thrust her away!
    With a sigh he smiled gently down at her upturned faceand could think of nothing to say when she clutched him by the shoulder and begged him in a fluttery voice quite unlike her usual nasal whisper, her whole being seeming to fly into