Free Mary by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

after a rainstorm, they noticed a swinish phrase scribbled on that garden table. Some village rowdy had linked their names by a short, crude verb, which moreover he had misspelled. The inscription had been done in indelible pencil and was slightly blurred by rain. Twigs, leaves and the chalky vermicules of bird-droppings were also sticking to the tabletop.
    And since the table belonged to them, since it was sacred, sanctified by their meetings, they began calmly and without a word to rub out the damp scribble with tufts of grass. And when the whole surface had turned a ridiculous lilac color and Mary’s fingers looked as if she had just been picking bilberries, Ganin, turning away and staring hard through narrowed eyes at a yellowy-green, warm, flowing something which at normal times was linden foliage, announced to Mary that he had been in love with her for a long time.
    In those first days of love-making they kissed so much that Mary’s lips grew swollen, and her neck, so warm under her hair-bow, bore tender vampire marks. She was an amazinglycheerful girl, who laughed not so much from mockery as from sheer humor. She loved jingles, catchwords, puns and poems. A song would stick in her head for two or three days, then it would be forgotten and a new one would take possession. During their first few meetings, for instance, she kept on soulfully repeating in her burry voice:
    Vanya’s arms and legs they tied
Long in jail was he mortified
    and then she would say with her husky, crooning laugh, “Lovely song!” Around that time the last wild raspberries, rain-soaked and sweet, were ripening in the ditches. She was unusually fond of them, in fact she was more or less permanently sucking something—a stalk, a leaf, a fruit drop. She carried Landrin’s caramels loose in her pocket, stuck together in lumps with bits of rubbish and wool sticking to them. She used a cheap, sweet perfume called “Tagore.” Ganin now tried to recapture that scent again, mixed with the fresh smells of the autumnal park, but, as we know, memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
    For a moment Ganin stopped recollecting and wondered how he had been able to live for so many years without thinking about Mary—and then he caught up with her again: she was running along a dark, rustling path, her black bow looking in flight like a huge Camberwell Beauty. Suddenly Mary pulled up, gripped him by the shoulder, lifted her foot and started to rub her sand-dusted shoe against the stocking of her other leg, higher up, under the hem of her blue skirt.
    Ganin fell asleep lying dressed on top of his bedcover; his reminiscences had blurred and changed into a dream. The dream was odd and most precious, and he would have remembered it if only he had not been woken at dawn by a strange noise that sounded like a peal of thunder. He sat up andlistened. The thunder turned out to be an incomprehensible groaning and shuffling outside the door; somebody was scraping at it. Gleaming very faintly in the dim dawn air, the door handle was suddenly pressed down and flicked up again, but although it was unlocked the door stayed shut. In pleasurable anticipation of adventure, Ganin slipped off his bed and, clenching his left fist in case of need, he flung open the door with his right hand.
    In a sweeping movement, like a huge soft doll, a man fell prone against his shoulder. This was so unexpected that Ganin almost hit him, but he at once sensed that the man had only fallen on him because he was incapable of standing up. He pushed him aside toward the wall and fumbled for the light.
    In front of him, leaning his head against the wall and gasping for air with his mouth wide open, stood old Podtyagin, barefoot, wearing a long nightshirt open at his grizzled chest. His eyes, bare and blind without their pince-nez, were unblinking, his face was the color of dry clay, the large