Mary by Vladimir Nabokov

did not want to go inside into a compartment. She was holding a bar of Blighen and Robinson’s chocolate, and at once broke off a piece and offered it to him.
    It made Ganin terribly sad to look at her: there was something odd and timid in her whole appearance; she smiled less and kept turning her head away. On her tender neck there were livid marks, like a shadowy necklace, which greatly suited her. He spouted nonsense, showed her the scratch on his jackboot made by a bullet, talked about politics, while the train clattered on between peat-bogs burning in the tawny torrent of the sunset; the grayish peat smoke drifted gently over the ground, forming what seemed like two waves of mist between which the train clove its way.
    She got off at the first station and for a long time he stared from the carriage platform after her departing blue figure,and the further away she went the clearer it became to him that he could never forget her. She did not look round. Out of the dusk came the heavy and fluffy scent of racemosa in bloom.
    As the train moved off he went inside. There it was dark, the conductor having thought it unnecessary to light the lamp wicks in empty compartments. He lay down on his back on the striped cover of the couchlike seat and through the open door and the corridor window he watched thin wires rising through the smoke of burning peat and the dark gold of the sunset. There was something strange and spooky about traveling in this empty, rattling coach between streams of gray smoke, and curious thoughts passed through his head, as though this had all happened at some time before—as though he had lain there as now, his hands pillowing the back of his neck, in the drafty, clattering darkness, and the same smoky sunset had amply and sonorously swept past the windows.
    He never saw Mary again.

ten
    The noise grew louder, flooded in, a pale cloud enveloped the window, a glass rattled on the washstand. A train had passed by and now the empty expanse of the railway tracks could be seen again fanning out from the window. Berlin, gentle and misty, toward evening, in April.
    That Thursday at twilight, when the noise of the trains sounded hollower than ever, Klara came to see Ganin in a high state of agitation to give him a message from Lyudmila: “Tell him,” Lyudmila had said, “tell him this: that I’m not one of those women that men can just drop. I’m the one who does the dropping. Tell him I don’t want anything from him, I’m not making any demands, but I think it was filthy of him not to have answered my letter. I wanted to break it off with him in a friendly way, to suggest that even if we don’t love each other any more we can simply be friends, but he couldn’t even be bothered to ring me up. Tell him, Klara, that I wish him luck with his German girl and that I know he won’t be able to forget me as quickly as he may think.”
    “Where on earth did she get the German girl from?” said Ganin, making a face, when Klara, without looking at him and talking in a low, rapid voice, had delivered her message. “Anyway, why does she have to involve you in this business? It’s all very tiresome.”
    “You know, Lev Glebovich,” Klara burst out, dousing him with one of her moist looks, “you really are heartless. Lyudmila thinks nothing but good of you, she idealizes you, but if she knew all about you—” Ganin looked at her with amiable astonishment. Embarrassed, Klara dropped her glance.
    “I only gave you the message because she asked me to,” Klara said quietly.
    “I must leave,” Ganin said after a silence. “This room, these trains, Erika’s cooking—I’m fed up with it all. Besides, I’m nearly out of money and I shall have to work again soon. I’m thinking of leaving Berlin for good on Saturday, going south, to some sea port.”
    He clenched and unclenched his fist and lapsed into pensiveness.
    “I don’t know, though—there’s one circumstance—You’d be amazed if you knew what