Read Glory for Free Online Page B

memory except for three or four minarets that looked like factory chimneys in the mist, and the voiceof the lady in the raincoat, who talked to herself out loud as she gazed at the gloomy coast; Martin, straining to overhear, seemed to distinguish the adjective “amethyst”
(ametistovïy)
, but decided he was mistaken.

8
    After Constantinople the sky cleared, though the sea remained “
ochen
(very) choppy,” as Patkin expressed it. Sofia ventured on deck, but promptly returned to the saloon, saying that there was nothing more hateful in the world than this servile sinking and rising of all one’s insides in rhythm with the rising and sinking of the ship’s prow. The lady’s husband moaned, inquired of God when this would end, and hurriedly, with trembling hands, grabbed for the basin. Martin, whom his reclining mother was holding by the hand, felt that unless he left at once, he would throw up too. At that moment the lady came in with a flick of her scarf, and addressed a compassionate question to her husband. Her husband, without speaking or opening his eyes, made a Russian slicing gesture with his hand across his Adam’s apple (meaning: I’m being slaughtered), whereupon she asked the same question of Sofia, who responded with a martyred smile. “You don’t look too happy either,” said the lady, with a severe glance at Martin. Then she staggered, tossed the end of her scarf over her shoulder, and went out. Martin followed her, and the fresh wind in his face and the sight of the bright-blue, whitecapped sea made him feel better. She was sitting on some coiled ropes, writing in a small morocco notebook. The other day one of the passengers had said about her “not bad, that broad,” and Martin turned angrily but could not identify the rascal among several despondent, middle-aged men with turned-up collars. Now, as he looked at her redlips, which she kept licking as her pencil whipped across the page, he was embarrassed, did not know what to talk about, and felt a salty taste on his lips. She wrote on and seemed not to notice him. And yet Martin’s nice round face, his seventeen years, a certain trim solidity of build and movement, often present in Russians, but for some reason classified as “something British”—the whole appearance of Martin in his belted blue overcoat had made a certain impression on the lady.
    She was twenty-five, her name was Alla, and she wrote poetry: three things, one would think, that were bound to make a woman fascinating. Her favorite poets were two fashionable mediocrities, Paul Géraldy and Victor Gofman; and her own poems, so sonorous, so spicy, always addressed the man in the polite form (“you,” not “thou”) and were asparkle with rubies as red as blood. One of them had recently enjoyed great success in St. Petersburg society. It began thus:
    On purple silks, beneath an Empire pall,
You vampirized me and caressed me all,
And we tomorrow die, burned to the end;
Our lovely bodies with the sand will blend.
    The ladies would copy it from each other, learn it by heart and recite it, and one naval cadet even set it to music. Married at eighteen, she remained faithful to her husband for more than two years, but the world all around was saturated with the rubineous fumes of sin; clean-shaven, persistent males would schedule their own suicides at seven Thursday evening, midnight Christmas Eve, or three in the morning under her windows; the dates got jumbled, and it was hard to keep all of those assignations. A Grand Due languished because of her; Rasputin pestered her for a month with telephonecalls. And sometimes she said that her life was but the light smoke of an amber-perfumed Régie cigarette.
    Martin did not understand any of this at all. Her poetry left him somewhat perplexed. When he said that Constantinople was anything but amethyst-colored, Alla objected that he was devoid of poetic imagination, and, on their arrival in Athens, gave him Pierre Louÿs’s
Chansons de