Glory by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page A

himself.

9
    It was very hot and very dusty. The cafés served one a tiny cup of sweet black goo to accompany a huge glass of ice-cold water. On the beach fences, posters with the name of a Russian soprano were growing tattered. The electric train that ran to Athens filled the idle blue day with a soft rumble, whereupon everything grew quiet again. The sleepy little houses of Athens reminded one of a Bavarian townlet. The tawny mountains in the distance were wonderful. Pale poppies quivered in the wind among bits of broken marble on the Acropolis. Right in the middle of the street, haphazardly, began the tracks on which stood the cars of resort-bound trains. Oranges were ripening in the gardens. There might be a vacant lot with a superb growth of columns—one of them fallen and fractured in three places. All of this crumbling, yellow marble was gradually being turned over to nature’s curatorship. Martin’s hotel, destined to remain new for its allotted span, would share the same fate.
    As he stood on the seashore with Alla, he told himself with an ecstatic chill that he was in a lovely remote land; and what a condiment that was to being in love, what bliss to stand in the wind next to a laughing woman with wind-blown hair, whose bright skirt would now be worried, now pressedagainst her knees by the same breeze that had once filled Ulysses’ sails. One day, while they strolled across the uneven sand, she stumbled, Martin caught her, she glanced over her shoulder at the sole of her shoe, raised high, heel-upward, then stumbled again; that settled it, and he pressed his mouth against her half-open lips. During this lengthy, rather clumsy embrace they both nearly lost their balance. She freed herself and, laughing, declared he kissed too wetly and ought to take some lessons. Martin was aware of a humiliating trembling in his legs, and of the pounding of his heart. He was furious with himself for this agitation, which reminded him of the moment after a fight at school when his classmates exclaimed: “Look how pale he is!” However, this first kiss of his life—shut-eyed and deep, with a kind of quivering point inside whose exact origin he did not immediately understand—was so wonderful, so generously fulfilled his fore-feeling, that his dissatisfaction with himself was soon dispelled. The windy wild day passed in passionate repetitions and improvements, and that evening Martin felt as tired as if he had been toting logs. And when Alla, accompanied by her husband, entered the dining room, where he and his mother were already peeling their oranges, and sat down at the next table (nimbly undoing the miter of her napkin, dropping it in her lap with a slight upward flight of her hands, then moving closer to the table together with her chair) a slow flush invaded Martin’s face, and for a long time he lacked the courage to meet her gaze, but when at last he did, he failed to find an answering embarrassment in her look.
    Martin’s avid, unbridled imagination would have been incompatible with chastity. Fantasies known as “impure” had plagued him for the last two or three years, and he made no particular effort to resist them. At first they existed separately from the actual infatuations of his early boyhood. Onememorable winter night in St. Petersburg, after he had taken part in some home theatricals and was still made up, with charcoaled eyebrows, and dressed in a white Russian blouse, he shut himself in a closet with a coeval girl cousin, also made up and with a kerchief at eyebrow level, and as he squeezed her moist little hands, Martin had keenly sensed the romantic nature of his behavior, but had not been excited by it. Mayne Reid’s hero Maurice Gerald, having stopped his steed side-by-side with that of Louise Pointdexter, put his arm around the blond Creole’s limber waist, and here the author exclaimed in a personal aside: “What can compare with such a kiss?” Things like that provided a far greater erotic