Mary by Vladimir Nabokov Page A

has just occurred to me. An extraordinary, incredible plan! If it comes off I’ll be out of this town by the day after tomorrow.”
    “Really, what a strange man he is,” thought Klara, with that aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place.
    Ganin’s glassy black pupils dilated, his thick eyelashes gave his eyes a warm, downy look and a serene smile of contemplation lifted slightly his upper lip, baring the white expanse of his glistening, even teeth. His dark eyebrows, which reminded Klara of scraps of expensive fur, alternately met and parted, and soft furrows came and went on his smooth forehead.
    Noticing Klara’s stare, he blinked, passed his hand across his face and remembered what he had been intending to say to her. “Yes. I’m going, and that will end everything. Simply tell her that Ganin is leaving and wants her not to think ill of him. That’s all.”

eleven
    On Friday morning the dancers sent round the following note to the other four lodgers:
    Because:
     
Mr. Ganin is leaving us.
Mr. Podtyagin is preparing to leave.
Mr. Alfyorov’s wife is arriving tomorrow.
Mlle. Klara is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday
                                        and
The undersigned have obtained an engagement in this city—because of all this a celebration will be held tonight at 10 p.m. in room April 6th.
    “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 mostlikely 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 afew marks the yellow sheet