Mary

11

On Friday morning the dancers sent round the following note to the other four lodgers:

Because:

‘How kind of them,’ said Podtyagin with a smile as he went out of the house with Ganin, who had agreed to accompany him to the police station. ‘Where are you going when you leave Berlin, Lyovushka? Far away? Yes, you’re a bird of passage. When I was young I longed to travel, to swallow the whole wide world. Well, it’s damn well happened —’

He hunched himself against the fresh spring wind, turned up the collar of his well-kept dark gray overcoat with its huge bone buttons. He still felt a debilitating weakness in the legs, an aftereffect of his heart attack, but today he derived a certain cheerful relief from the thought that now he would most likely have done with all the fuss about his passport and that he might even get permission to leave for Paris the very next day.

The vast purple-red building of the central police headquarters faced onto four streets. It was built in a grim but extremely bad Gothic style with dim windows and a highly intriguing courtyard forbidden to the public; an impassive policeman stood at the main portal. An arrow on the wall pointed across the street to a photographer’s studio, where in twenty minutes one could obtain a miserable likeness of oneself: half a dozen identical physiognomies, of which one was stuck onto the yellow page of the passport, another one went into the police archives, while the rest were probably distributed among the officials’ private collections.

Podtyagin and Ganin entered a wide gray corridor. At the door of the passport department stood a little table where an ancient bewhiskered official issued numbered tickets, occasionally casting a schoolmasterly glance over his spectacles at the small polyglot crowd of people.

‘You must stand in the queue and get a number,’ said Ganin.

‘And I never did that before,’ the old poet replied in a whisper. ‘I just used to go straight in through the door.’

When he received his ticket a few minutes later he was delighted, and looked even more like a fat guinea pig than ever.

In the bare, stuffy, sunlit room where officials sat at their desks behind a low partition, there was another crowd which appeared to have come for the sole purpose of staring at those lugubrious scribes.

Ganin pushed his way through, with Podtyagin snuffling along trustfully after him.

Half an hour later, having handed in Podtyagin’s passport, they moved over to another desk; again a queue, a crush of people, somebody’s bad breath and, at last, for the price of a few marks the yellow sheet of paper was returned, now adorned with the magic stamp.

‘Now off we go to the consulate,’ grunted Podtyagin joyfully as they left the redoubtable-looking though in reality rather dreary building. ‘It’s in the bag now. How do you manage to talk to them so calmly, my dear Lev Glebovich? It was such agony for me when I went before! Come on, let’s go on the top deck of the bus. What a joy this is — I’m actually in a sweat, you know.’

He was the first to clamber up the twisting staircase. The conductor on the top deck banged on the iron side with his hand and the bus moved off. Houses, signboards, sunlight on shop windows floated by.

‘Our grandchildren will never understand all this nonsense about visas,’ said Podtyagin, reverentially examining his passport. ‘They’ll never understand that there could be so much human anxiety connected with a simple rubber stamp. Do you think,’ he added anxiously, ‘that the French really will give me a visa now?’

‘Of course they will,’ said Ganin. ‘After all, they told you that permission had been given.’

‘I think I’ll leave tomorrow,’ Podtyagin smiled. ‘Let’s go together, Lyovushka. It’ll be fine in Paris. No, you just look what a mug I have here.’

Ganin glanced over his arm at the passport with its photograph in the corner. The photograph was quite remarkable: a dazed, bloated face swam in a grayish murk.

‘I have no less than two passports,’ Ganin said with a smile. ‘One Russian, which is real but very old, and a Polish one, forged. That’s the one I use.’

As he paid the conductor, Podtyagin put down the yellow document on the seat beside him, selected 40 pfennigs from the several coins in his hand and glanced up at the conductor.

‘Genug?’

He then looked sideways at Ganin.

‘What did you say, Lev Glebovich? Forged?’

‘Certainly. My first name really is Lev, but my surname is not Ganin at all.’

‘What do you mean, my dear fellow?’ Podtyagin goggled in amazement and suddenly clutched at his hat — a strong wind was blowing.

‘Well, that’s the way it was,’ ruminated Ganin. ‘About three years ago. Partisan detachment. In Poland. And so on. Thought I’d break through to St Petersburg and raise a rebellion. Now it’s quite convenient and rather fun having this passport.’

Podtyagin suddenly looked away and said glumly, ‘I dreamed about St Petersburg last night, Lyovushka. I was walking along the Nevski. I knew it was the Nevski, although it looked nothing like it. The houses had sloping angles as in a futurist painting, and the sky was black, although I knew it was daytime. And the passers-by were giving me strange looks. Then a man crossed the street and took aim at my head. He’s an old haunter of mine. It’s terrible — oh terrible — that whenever we dream about Russia we never dream of it as beautiful, as we know it was in reality, but as something monstrous — the sort of dreams where the sky is falling in and you feel the world’s coming to an end.’

‘No,’ said Ganin, ‘I only dream about the beautiful things. The same woods, the same country house. Sometimes it’s all rather deserted, with unfamiliar clearings. But that does not matter. We have to get out here, Anton Sergeyevich.’

He went down the spiral staircase and helped Podtyagin to step onto the pavement.

‘Just look at the way that water sparkles,’ Podtyagin remarked, breathing laboriously, and pointed at the canal with all five fingers stretched.

‘Careful — mind that bicycle,’ said Ganin. ‘There’s the consulate over there on the right.’

‘Please accept my sincere thanks, Lev Glebovich. If I’d been on my own I’d never have got through all that red tape. It’s a great relief to me. Farewell, Deutschland.’

They entered the consulate building. As they went up the stairs Podtyagin began searching in his pockets.

‘Come on,’ said Ganin, turning round.

But the old man kept searching.