I’ve already said that when he stayed over in Leningrad she met him almost every day, so that he could gaze into her beautiful eyes and sit close enough to touch her, on condition that he not touch her; he could tell her anything; she told him some things; in short, he could go on and on proudly loving her and being with her as long as he could tell her everything. But now she was saying that they had never been together and that he was not permitted to tell her everything. That was why he felt the strangling pain.
When the richly plump girl, who was even darkhaired, started kissing him so deeply with her paddle-shaped tongue, he stroked her hair and desired her, which is to say that he didn’t desire her in and of herself; he simply needed to sojourn in any woman’s body; so he took her into his arms on one of those empty double beds he slept in, but the instant he began to ride her, prestissimo con moto if he could say so himself, he saw the face of the woman he loved gazing at him right through the flesh of the substitute, whose whiteness might have been tracing paper, so little did it conceal that intensely looking and listening face of the darkhaired woman with its not quite sad quarter-smile of red, red lips which crazed his desire into something which could be expressed only chokingly, by falling on his knees when she wasn’t there to be molested by his prayers; yes, so little could strange flesh conceal the dark, dark hair which glowed through it; and so his hands withered and fell away.
Thus, she, the one he loved, lay, not between them exactly, but beyond them, more real than either he or this other whom he was now inside; even with his eyes shut he could not help but see her face gazing steadily at him through the other woman’s flesh; her eyes, unflinching and sad, remained on him; it was just as if she were sitting next to him on the sofa; she’d said that he didn’t need to hide anything from her, that he could tell her anything…
He made the richly plump girl very happy, grateful even, and that was something, something to solve his own loneliness partially, and something good in and of itself.
Than he went to see the woman with the dark, dark hair.
How’s your daughter, Elena?
She’s well; thank you for asking—
Then he said to her: I believe you’re trying not to, so to speak, love me, but I, I also believe you love me just the same.
What do you want, Mitya? It was so long ago—
And whenever you try to pretend that we’re not together now—
We aren’t.
Or that we never were together, when in fact—
She was turning away.
In point of fact, you, well. Recently I passed by that dacha near Luga. If you remember, you wrote our initials behind the head of the bed and told me not to look, so this time I, I, it turns out that the heart you drew is also still there; it survived the Germans.
I don’t remember. I was never there; I hardly know you…
This is precisely what gives me hope, my dear Elena, when you, yes, yes, yes, I’m so sorry that now you’re, please forgive me.
The next time he saw her he asked for her photograph again and she said no; the time after that he whispered: Do you have a photograph for me? and Elena smiled; she smiled with a lazy smile and said: Maybe.
Night after night he came to know the ambiguous boundary in that photograph between her yellow-ivory face and her hair, her dark, dark hair which framed it to the latitude of her lower lip so that her temples and her cheeks blended into something both gold and black, essence of tiger, while the white light frozen on each upcurling hair on her face’s right side made a more zebra-ish contrast. If he could simply, well, or if she could meet him alone at Komarovo, which would have been out of the question, then… Margarita wouldn’t care as long as he… She’d even make the bed afterward! Oh, Elena, you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me.
She was smiling at him, her dark eyes elongated by that smile, a smile which seemed to see and know him even though she hadn’t met him in that year when the photograph was taken; he hadn’t yet married Nina, either; the smile seemed to say: I accept your love and acknowledge it although I will never be yours; I will be your sky; you will always be able to look up and see me; I will never stop smiling upon you.
Needless to say, she’d been much younger when she was happily, lovingly, sincerely smiling in that way with her perfect red lips and perfect white teeth—how can a smile be described? Everybody has a mouth, you know! (Lebedinsky would understand. But he couldn’t tell anyone, not even Lebedinsky. He’d promised her.) And her hair, her dark hair which she might have started dyeing by now, for she was forty-five, which he could hardly believe, had been just a little lighter in the sunlight of those days; his ballet “Bolt” had just premiered and she was sixteen; her hair had been almost reddish, because it had been so dark that it was almost every color, and every hair of her perfect eyebrows was visible against her fair, fair face; her dark eyes were smiling at somebody else, the unknown photographer; who it was she didn’t remember, or said she didn’t remember; later she said that it might have been her best friend Vera Ivanova; since then her face had tanned slightly and her hair had darkened.
As she got older, her eyes elongated less often into any smile; they gazed with loving intimacy at the other man, then at the other man after him; her deeply red lips which only the other man would ever taste half-smiled at the other man as they sometimes did at him who now possessed this photograph to be a relic and a comfort to him forever; and that hair, that dark, dark hair, brown or black depending on the light, made a living loving darkness in which the other man could rest.
Whenever he fell into that photograph, sinking far past the way that her face widened at the cheekbones and then, just below the mouth, drew in to make a long chin whose strange grace reminded him of a flute-note in a Haydn sonata, he was able to believe if he could have just waited and been patient for he’d never know how many years, she might perhaps have found herself able to give him more of herself without thereby damaging herself. Until she’d given him the photograph, the difficulty had been that he couldn’t be sure that he possessed any part of her at all except for the handshake-equivalent which almost anybody would give almost anybody; for she was correct; that summer morning near Luga had never happened; Glikman was the one who had gone there for him and returned to say: My dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I’m sorry to tell you that only one wall is standing. A direct hit from a Tiger tank…