Part 5 (1/2)
”Oh, my Lord, of course-I must have dropped it on the way to the dining car when I jerked free-”
She hurried out of the compartment; arms spread, swaying this way and that, holding back her tears, she traversed one car, another. She reached the end of the sleeping car and, through the rear door, saw nothing but air, emptiness, the night sky, the dark wedge of the roadbed disappearing into the distance.
She thought she had got mixed up and gone the wrong way. With a sob, she headed back.
Next to her, by the toilet door, stood a little old woman wearing a gray ap.r.o.n and an armband, who resembled a night nurse. She was holding a little bucket with a brush sticking out of it.
”They uncoupled the diner,” said the little old woman, and for some reason sighed. ”After Cologne there will be another.”
In the diner that had remained behind under the vault of a station and would continue only next morning to France, the waiters were cleaning up, folding the tablecloths. Luzhin finished, and stood in the open doorway of the car's vestibule. The station was dark and deserted. Some distance away a lamp shone like a humid star through a gray cloud of smoke. The torrent of rails glistened slightly. He could not understand why the face of the old lady with the sandwich had disturbed him so deeply. Everything else was clear, only this one blind spot remained.
Red-haired, sharp-nosed Max also came out into the vestibule. He was sweeping the floor. He noticed a glint of gold in a corner. He bent down. It was a ring. He hid it in his waistcoat pocket and gave a quick look around to see if anyone had noticed. Luzhin's back was motionless in the doorway. Max cautiously took out the ring; by the dim light he distinguished a word in script and some figures engraved on the inside. Must be Chinese, he thought. Actually, the inscription read ”1-VIII-1915. ALEKSEY.” He returned the ring to his pocket.
Luzhin's back moved. Quietly he got off the car. He walked diagonally to the next track, with a calm, relaxed gait, as if taking a stroll.
A through train now thundered into the station. Luzhin went to the edge of the platform and hopped down. The cinders crunched under his heel.
At that instant, the locomotive came at him in one hungry bound. Max, totally unaware of what happened, watched from a distance as the lighted windows flew past in one continuous stripe.
THE SEAPORT.
THE low-ceilinged barbershop smelled of stale roses. Horseflies hummed hotly, heavily. The sunlight blazed on the floor in puddles of molten honey, gave the lotion bottles tweaks of sparkle, transluced through the long curtain hanging in the entrance, a curtain of clay beads and little sections of bamboo strung alternately on close-hung cord, which would disintegrate in an iridescent c.l.i.tterclatter every time someone entered and shouldered it aside. Before him, in the murkish gla.s.s, Nikitin saw his own tanned face, the long sculptured strands of his s.h.i.+ny hair, the glitter of the scissors that chirred above his ear, and his eyes were attentive and severe, as always happens when you contemplate yourself in mirrors. He had arrived in this ancient port in the south of France the day before, from Constantinople, where life had grown unbearable for him. That morning he had been to the Russian Consulate and the employment office, had roamed about the town, which, down narrow alleyways, crept seaward, and now, exhausted, prostrated by the heat, he had dropped in to have a haircut and to refresh his head. The floor around his chair was already strewn with small bright mice-the cuttings of his hair. The barber filled his palm with lather. A delicious chill ran through the crown of his head as the barber's fingers firmly rubbed in the thick foam. Then an icy gush made his heart jump, and a fluffy towel went to work on his face and his wet hair.
Parting the undulating rain of curtain with his shoulder, Nikitin went out into a steep alley. Its right side was in the shade; on the left a narrow stream quivered along the curb in the torrid radiance; a black-haired, toothless girl with swarthy freckles was collecting the s.h.i.+mmering rivulet with her resonant pail; and the stream, the sun, the violet shade-everything was flowing and slithering downward to the sea: another step and, in the distance, between some walls, loomed its compact sapphire brilliance. Infrequent pedestrians walked on the shady side. Nikitin happened upon a climbing Negro in a Colonial uniform, with a face like a wet galosh. On the sidewalk stood a straw chair from whose seat a cat departed with a cus.h.i.+oned bound. A bra.s.sy Provencal voice started jabbering in some window. A green shutter banged. On a vendor's stand, amid purple mollusks that gave off a whiff of seaweed, lay lemons shot with granulated gold.
Reaching the sea, Nikitin paused to look excitedly at the dense blue that, in the distance, modulated into blinding silver, and at the play of light delicately dappling the white topside of a yacht. Then, unsteady from the heat, he went in search of the small Russian restaurant whose address he had noted on a wall of the consulate.
The restaurant, like the barbershop, was hot and none too clean. In back, on a wide counter, appetizers and fruit showed through billows of protective grayish muslin. Nikitin sat down and squared his shoulders; his s.h.i.+rt stuck to his back. At a nearby table sat two Russians, evidently sailors of a French vessel, and, a little farther off, a solitary old fellow in gold-rimmed gla.s.ses was making smacking and sucking noises as he lapped borscht from his spoon. The proprietress, wiping her puffy hands with a towel, gave the newcomer a maternal look. Two s.h.a.ggy pups were rolling on the floor in a flurry of little paws. Nikitin whistled, and a shabby old b.i.t.c.h with green mucus at the corners of her gentle eyes came and put her muzzle in his lap.
One of the seamen addressed him in a composed and unhurried tone: ”Send her away. She'll get fleas all over you.”
Nikitin cosseted the dog's head a little and raised his radiant eyes.
”Oh, I'm not afraid of that.... Constantinople ... The barracks ... You can imagine ...”
”Just get here?” asked the seaman. Even voice. Mesh T-s.h.i.+rt. All cool and competent. Dark hair neatly trimmed in back. Clear forehead. Overall appearance decent and placid.
”Last night,” Nikitin replied.
The borscht and the fiery dark wine made him sweat even more. He was happy to relax and have a peaceful chat. Bright sunlight poured through the aperture of the door together with the tremulous sparkle of the alley rivulet; from his corner under the gas meter, the elderly Russian's spectacles scintillated.
”Looking for work?” asked the other sailor, who was middle-aged, blue-eyed, had a pale walrus mustache, and was also clean-cut, well groomed, levigated by sun and salty wind.
Nikitin said with a smile, ”I certainly am.... Today I went to the employment office.... They have jobs planting telegraph poles, weaving hawsers-I'm just not sure....”
”Come work with us,” said the black-haired one. ”As a stoker or something. No nonsense there, you can take my word.... Ah, there you are, Lyalya-our profound respects!”
A young girl entered, wearing a white hat, with a sweet, plain face. She made her way among the tables and smiled, first at the puppies, then at the seamen. Nikitin had asked them something but forgot his question as he watched the girl and the motion of her low hips, by which you can always recognize a Russian damsel. The owner gave her daughter a tender look, as if to say, ”You poor tired thing,” for she had probably spent all morning in an office, or else worked in a store. There was something touchingly homespun about her that made you think of violet soap and a summer flag stop in a birch forest. There was no France outside the door, of course. Those mincing movements ... Sunny nonsense.
”No, it's not complicated at all,” the seaman was saying, ”here's how it works-you have an iron bucket and a coal pit. You start sc.r.a.ping. Lightly at first, so long as the coal goes sliding down into the bucket by itself, then you sc.r.a.pe harder. When you've filled the bucket you set it on a cart. You roll it over to the chief stoker. A bang of his shovel and-one!-the firebox door's open, a heave of the same shovel and-two!-in goes the coal-you know, fanned out so it will come down evenly. Precision work. Keep your eye on the dial, and if that pressure drops ...”
In a window that gave on the street appeared the head and shoulders of a man wearing a panama and a white suit.
”How are you, Lyalya dearest?”
He leaned his elbows on the windowsill.
”Of course it is hot in there, a real furnace-you wear nothing to work but pants and a mesh T-s.h.i.+rt. The T-s.h.i.+rt is black when you're finished. As I was saying, about the pressure-'fur' forms in the firebox, an incrustation hard as stone, which you break up with a poker this long. Tough work. But afterwards, when you pop out on deck, the suns.h.i.+ne feels cool even if you're in the tropics. You shower, then down you go to your quarters, straight into your hammock-that's heaven, let me tell you....”
Meanwhile, at the window: ”And he insists he saw me in a car, you see?” (Lyalya in a high-pitched, excited voice).
Her interlocutor, the gentleman in white, stood leaning on the sill from the outside, and the square window framed his rounded shoulders, his soft, shaven face half-lit by the sun-a Russian who had been lucky.
”He goes on to tell me I was wearing a lilac dress, when I don't even own a lilac dress,” yelped Lyalya, ”and he persists: 'zhay voo zasyur.' ”
The seaman who had been talking to Nikitin turned and asked, ”Couldn't you speak Russian?”
The man in the window said, ”I managed to get this music, Lyalya. Remember?”
That was the momentary aura, and it felt almost deliberate, as if someone were having fun inventing this girl, this conversation, this small Russian restaurant in a foreign port-an aura of dear workaday provincial Russia, and right away, by some miraculous, secret a.s.sociation of thoughts, the world appeared grander to Nikitin, he yearned to sail the oceans, to put into legendary bays, to eavesdrop everywhere on other people's souls.
”You asked what run we're on? Indochina,” spontaneously said the seaman.
Nikitin pensively tapped a cigarette out of its case; a gold eagle was etched on the wooden lid.
”Must be wonderful.”
”What do you think? Sure it is.”
”Well, tell me about it. Something about Shanghai, or Colombo.”
”Shanghai? I've seen it. Warm drizzle, red sand. Humid as a greenhouse. As for Ceylon, for instance, I didn't get ash.o.r.e to visit it-it was my watch, you know.”
Shoulders hunched, the white-jacketed man was saying something to Lyalya through the window, softly and significantly. She listened, her head c.o.c.ked, fondling the dog's curled-over ear with one hand. Extending its fire-pink tongue, panting joyously and rapidly, the dog looked through the sunny c.h.i.n.k of the door, most likely debating whether or not it was worthwhile to go lie some more on the hot threshold. And the dog seemed to be thinking in Russian.
Nikitin asked, ”Where should I apply?”
The seaman winked at his mate, as if to say, ”See, I brought him round.” Then he said, ”It's very simple. Tomorrow morning bright and early you go to the Old Port, and at Pier Two you'll find our Jean-Bart. Have a chat with the first mate. I think he'll hire you.”