Free Mary by Vladimir Nabokov Page A

neck.
    Then toward evening he escorted her and her friends to the village and as they walked down a green, weed-grown forest path, at the spot where stood a lame bench, he told them with a very straight face, “Macaroni grows in Italy. When still small it’s called vermicelli. That means Mike’s worms in Italian.”
    He arranged to take them all boating next day; but she appeared without her companions. At the rickety jetty he unwound the clanking chain of the rowboat, a big heavy affair of mahogany, removed the tarpaulin, screwed in the rowlocks, pulled the oars out of a long box, inserted the rudder pintle into its steel socket.
    From some distance came the steady roar of the sluice gates at the water mill; one could distinguish the foamy folds of the falling water and the russet-gold sheen of pine logs that floated near.
    Mary sat at the rudder. He pushed off with a boat hook and slowly started to row along the park shore where dense alder shrubs cast reflections like black eye-spots upon thewater and many dark-blue demoiselle dragonflies flittered about. Then he turned into the middle of the river, weaving between the islets of algal brocade, while Mary, holding both ends of the tiller rope in one hand, dangled the other in the water trying to pull off the shiny yellow heads of waterlilies. The rowlocks creaked at every stroke of the oars and as he leaned back, then stretched forward, Mary, facing him in the stern, alternately moved away and drew closer in her navy-blue jacket, open over a light blouse that breathed with her.
    The river now reflected the terra cotta of the left-hand bank, overgrown at the top with fir and racemosa. Names and dates had been cut in the red steep, and in one place ten years ago someone had carved a huge face with prominent cheekbones. The right bank sloped gently, with purple patches of heather between dappled birch trees. And then cool darkness enveloped the boat under a bridge; from above came the heavy beat of hooves and wheels and, as the boat glided out, the dazzling sun flashed on the tips of the oars, and displayed the haycart crossing the low bridge and a green slope crowned by the white pillars of a boarded-up Alexandrine country mansion. Then a dark wood came down to the water’s edge on both banks, and with a gentle rustle the boat sailed into the reeds.
    No one at home knew about it, and life went on its dear, familiar summertime way hardly touched by the distant war which had now been in progress for a whole year. Linked to a wing by a gallery, the old greenish-gray wooden house with stained-glass windows in its twin verandas gazed out toward the fringe of the park, and at the orange, pretzel-shaped pattern of garden paths which framed the black-earth luxuriance of the flowerbeds. In the drawing room with its white furniture the marbled tomes of old bound magazines lay on the rose-embroidered tablecloth, the yellow parquet spilled out of a tilted mirror in an oval frame, and the daguerreotypes on the walls seemed to listen whenever the white upright pianotinkled into life. In the evening the tall blue-coated butler in cotton gloves carried a silk-shaded lamp out onto the veranda, and Ganin would come home to drink tea and to gulp cold curds-and-whey on that lighted veranda, with the rush mat on the floor and the black laurels beside the stone steps leading into the garden.
    He now saw Mary every day on the far side of the river where the deserted white mansion stood on a green hill and where there was another park, larger and wilder than the one around the ancestral house.
    In front of that other mansion, under the lime trees, on a broad terrace above the river, stood some benches and a round iron table with a hole in its center to drain off the rainwater. From there one could see far below a second bridge crossing a green-scummed bend in the river and the road leading up to Voskresensk. This terrace was their favorite spot.
    Once, when they had met there on a sunny evening