The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

  He crossed safely. A little while ago, in the churchyard, when the tremulous old priest proposed, according to the ritual, that the choir sing to the eternal memory of the deceased, it took V.I. such a long time and such effort to kneel that the singing was over by the time his knees communicated with the ground, whereupon he could not rise again; old Tihotsky helped him up as the tram conductor had just helped him down. These twin impressions increased a sense of unusual fatigue, which, no doubt, already smacked of the ultimate glebe, yet was pleasant in its own way; and, having decided that in any case it was still too early to head for the apartment of the good, dull people who boarded him, V.I. pointed out a bench to himself with his cane and slowly, not yielding to the force of gravity until the last instant, finally sat down in surrender.

  I would like to understand, though, whence comes this happiness, this swell of happiness, that immediately transforms one’s soul into something immense, transparent, and precious. After all, just think, here is a sick old man with the mark of death already on him; he has lost all his loved ones: his wife, who, when they were still in Russia, left him for Dr. Malinovski, the well-known reactionary; the newspaper where V.I. had worked; his reader, friend, and namesake, dear Vasiliy Ivanovich Maler, tortured to death by the Reds in the civil war years; his brother, who died of cancer in Kharbin; and his sister.

  Once again he thought with dismay about the blurred cross of her grave, which was already creeping over into nature’s camp; it must have been seven years or so since he had stopped taking care of it and let it go free. With striking vividness V.I. suddenly pictured a man his sister had once loved—the only man she had ever loved—a Garshinlike character, a half-mad, consumptive, fascinating man, with a coal-black beard and Gypsy eyes, who unexpectedly shot himself because of another woman: that blood on his dickey, those small feet in smart shoes. Then, with no connection at all, he saw his sister as a schoolgirl, with her new little head, shorn after she had had typhoid fever, explaining to him, as they sat on the ottoman, a complex system of tactile perception she had evolved, so that her life turned into a constant preoccupation with maintaining a mysterious equilibrium between objects: touch a wall in passing, a gliding stroke with the left palm, then the right, as if immersing one’s hands in the sensation of the object, so that they be clean, at peace with the world and reflected in it; subsequently she was interested mainly in feminist questions, organized women’s pharmacies of some kind or other, and had an insane terror of ghosts, because, as she said, she did not believe in God.

  Thus, having lost this sister, whom he had loved with special tenderness for the tears she shed at night; back from the cemetery, where the ridiculous rigmarole with spadefuls of earth had revived those recollections; heavy, feeble, and awkward to such an extent that he could not get up off his knees or descend from the platform of the tram (the charitable conductor had to stoop with downstretched hands—and one of the other passengers helped too, I think); tired, lonely, fat, ashamed, with all the nuances of old-fashioned modesty, of his mended linen, his decaying trousers, his whole unkempt, unloved, shabbily furnished corpulence, V.I. nevertheless found himself filled with an almost indecent kind of joy of unknown origin, which, more than once in the course of his long and rather arduous life, had surprised him by its sudden onset. He sat quite still, his hands resting (with only an occasional spreading out of the fingers) on the crook of his cane and his broad thighs parted so that the rounded base of his belly, framed in the opening of his unbuttoned overcoat, reposed on the edge of the bench. Bees were ministering to the blooming linden tree overhead; from its dense festive foliage floated a clouded, melleous aroma, while underneath, in its shadow, along the sidewalk, lay the bright yellow debris of lime flowers, resembling ground-up horse dung. A wet red hose lay across the entire lawn in the center of the small public garden and, a little way off, radiant water gushed from it, with a ghostly iridescence in the aura of its spray. Between some hawthorn bushes and a chalet-style public toilet a dove-gray street was visible; there, a Morris pillar covered with posters stood like a fat harlequin, and tram after tram passed with a clatter and whine.

  This little street garden, these roses, this greenery—he had seen them a thousand times, in all their uncomplicated transformations, yet it all sparkled through and through with vitality, novelty, participation in one’s destiny, whenever he and I experienced such fits of happiness. A man with the local Russian newspaper sat down on the same dark-blue, sun-warmed, hospitable, indifferent bench. It is difficult for me to describe this man; then again, it would be useless, since a self-portrait is seldom successful, because of a certain tension that always remains in the expression of the eyes—the hypnotic spell of the indispensable mirror. Why did I decide that the man next to whom I had sat down was named Vasiliy Ivanovich? Well, because that blend of name and patronymic is like an armchair, and he was broad and soft, with a large cozy face, and sat, with his hands resting on his cane, comfortably and motionlessly; only the pupils of his eyes shifted to and fro, behind their lenses, from a cloud traveling in one direction to a truck traveling in the other, or from a female sparrow feeding her fledgling on the gravel to the intermittent, jerky motion of a little wooden automobile pulled on a string by a child who had forgotten all about it (there—it fell on its side, but nevertheless kept progressing). Professor D.’s obituary occupied a prominent place in the paper, and that is how, in my hurry to give V.I.’s morning some sort of setting as gloomy and typical as possible, I happened to arrange for him that trip to the funeral, even though the paper said there would be a special announcement of the date; but, I repeat, I was in a hurry, and I did wish he had really been to the cemetery, for he was exactly the type you see at Russian ceremonies abroad, standing to one side as it were, but emphasizing by this the habitual nature of his presence; and, since something about the soft features of his full clean-shaven face reminded me of a Moscow sociopolitical lady named Anna Aksakov, whom I remembered since childhood (she was a distant relative of mine), almost inadvertently but already with irrepressible detail, I made her his sister, and it all happened with vertiginous speed, because at all costs I had to have somebody like him for an episode in a novel with which I have been struggling for more than two years. What did I care if this fat old gentleman, whom I first saw being lowered from the tram, and who was now sitting beside me, was perhaps not Russian at all? I was so pleased with him! He was so capacious! By an odd combination of emotions I felt I was infecting that stranger with the blazing creative happiness that sends a chill over an artist’s skin. I wished that, despite his age, his indigence, the tumor in his stomach, V.I. might share the terrible power of my bliss, redeeming its unlawfulness with his complicity, so that it would cease being a unique sensation, a most rare variety of madness, a monstrous sunbow spanning my whole inner being, and be accessible to two people at least, becoming their topic of conversation and thus acquiring rights to routine existence, of which my wild, savage, stifling happiness is otherwise deprived. Vasiliy Ivanovich (I persisted in this appellation) took off his black fedora, as if not in order to refresh his head but with the precise intention of greeting my thoughts. He slowly stroked the crown of his head; the shadows of the linden leaves passed across the veins of his large hand and fell anew on his grayish hair. Just as slowly, he turned his head toward me, glanced at my émigré paper, at my face which was made up to look like that of a reader, turned away majestically, and put his hat on again.

  But he was already mine. Presently, with an effort, he got up, straightened, transferred his cane from one hand to the other, took a short, tentative step, and then calmly moved off, forever, if I am not mistaken. Yet he carried off with him, like the plague, an extraordinary disease, for he was sacramentally bound to me, being doomed to appear for a moment in the far end of a certain chapter, at the turning of a certain sentence.

  My representative, the man with the Russian newspaper, was now alone on the bench and, as he had moved over into the shade where V.
I. had just been sitting, the same cool linden pattern that had anointed his predecessor now rippled across his forehead.

  A SLICE OF LIFE

  IN THE next room Pavel Romanovich was roaring with laughter, as he related how his wife had left him.

  I could not endure the sound of that horrible hilarity, and without even consulting my mirror, just as I was—in the rumpled dress of a slatternly after-lunch siesta, and no doubt still bearing the pillow’s imprint on my cheek—I made for the next room (the dining room of my landlord) and came upon the following scene: my landlord, a person called Plekhanov (totally unrelated to the socialist philosopher), sat listening with an air of encouragement—all the time filling the tubes of Russian cigarettes by means of a tobacco injector—while Pavel Romanovich kept walking around the table, his face a regular nightmare, its pallor seeming to spread to his otherwise wholesome-looking close-shaven head: a very Russian kind of cleanliness, habitually making one think of neat engineer troops, but at the present moment reminding me of something evil, something as frightening as a convict’s skull.

  He had come, actually, looking for my brother—who had just gone, but this did not really matter to him: his grief had to speak, and so he found a ready listener in this rather unattractive person whom he hardly knew. He laughed, but his eyes did not participate in his guffaws, as he talked of his wife’s collecting things all over their flat, of her taking away by some oversight his favorite eyeglasses, of the fact that all her relatives were in the know ahead of him, of his wondering—

  “Yes, here’s a nice point,” he went on, now addressing directly Plekhanov, a God-fearing widower (for his speech until then had been more or less a harangue in sheer space), “a nice, interesting point: how will it be in the hereafter—will she cohabitate there with me or with that swine?”

  “Let us go to my room,” I said in my most crystalline tone of voice—and only then did he notice my presence: I had stood, leaning forlornly against a corner of the dark sideboard, with which seemed to fuse my diminutive figure in its black dress—yes, I wear mourning, for everybody, for everything, for my own self, for Russia, for the fetuses scraped out of me. He and I passed into the tiny room I rented: it could scarcely accommodate a rather absurdly wide couch covered in silk, and next to it the little low table bearing a lamp whose base was a veritable bomb of thick glass filled with water—and in this atmosphere of my private coziness Pavel Romanovich became at once a different man.

  He sat down in silence, rubbing his inflamed eyes. I curled up beside him, patted the cushions around us, and lapsed into thought, cheek-propped feminine thought, as I considered him, his turquoise head, his big strong shoulders which a military tunic would have suited so much better than that double-breasted jacket. I gazed at him and marveled how I could have been swept off my feet by this short, stocky fellow with insignificant features (except for the teeth—oh my, what fine teeth!); yet I was crazy about him barely two years ago at the beginning of émigré life in Berlin when he was only just planning to marry his goddess—and how very crazy I was, how I wept because of him, how haunted my dreams were by that slender chainlet of steel around his hairy wrist!

  He fished out of his hip pocket his massive, “battlefield” (as he termed it) cigarette case. Against its lid, despondently nodding his head, he tapped the tube end of his Russian cigarette several times, more times than he usually did.

  “Yes, Maria Vasilevna,” he said at last through his teeth as he lit up, raising high his triangular eyebrows. “Yes, nobody could have foreseen such a thing. I had faith in that woman, absolute faith.”

  After his recent fit of sustained loquacity, everything seemed uncannily quiet. One heard the rain beating against the windowsill, the clicking of Plekhanov’s tobacco injector, the whimpering of a neurotic old dog locked up in my brother’s room across the corridor. I do not know why—either because the weather was so very gray, or perhaps because the kind of misfortune that had befallen Pavel Romanovich should demand some reaction from the surrounding world (dissolution, eclipse)—but I had the impression that it was late in the evening, though actually it was only three p.m., and I was still supposed to travel to the other end of Berlin on an errand my charming brother could have well done himself.

  Pavel Romanovich spoke again, this time in sibilant tones: “That stinking old bitch,” he said, “she and she alone pimped them together. I always found her disgusting and didn’t conceal it from Lenochka. What a bitch! You’ve seen her, I think—around sixty, dyed a rich roan, fat, so fat that she looks round-backed. It’s a big pity that Nicholas is out. Let him call me as soon as he returns. I am, as you know, a simple, plain-spoken man and I’ve been telling Lenochka for ages that her mother is an evil bitch. Now here’s what I have in mind: perhaps your brother might help me to rig up a letter to the old hag—a sort of formal statement explaining that I knew and realize perfectly well whose instigation it was, who nudged my wife—yes, something on those lines, but most politely worded, of course.”

  I said nothing. Here he was, visiting me for the first time (his visits to Nick did not count), for the first time he sat on my Kautsch, and shed cigarette ashes on my polychrome cushions; yet the event, which would formerly have given me divine pleasure, now did not gladden me one bit. Good people had been reporting a long while ago that his marriage had been a flop, that his wife had turned out to be a cheap, skittish fool—and far-sighted rumor had long been giving her a lover in the very person of the freak who had now fallen for her cowish beauty. The news of that wrecked marriage did not, therefore, come to me as a surprise; in fact I may have vaguely expected that someday Pavel Romanovich would be deposited at my feet by a wave of the storm. But no matter how deep I rummaged within myself, I failed to find one crumb of joy; on the contrary, my heart was, oh, so heavy, I simply cannot say how heavy. All my romances, by some kind of collusion between their heroes, have invariably followed a prearranged pattern of mediocrity and tragedy, or more precisely, the tragic slant was imposed by their very mediocrity. I am ashamed to recall the way they started, and appalled by the nastiness of their denouements, while the middle part, the part that should have been the essence and core of this or that affair, has remained in my mind as a kind of listless shuffle seen through oozy water or sticky fog. My infatuation with Pavel Romanovich had had at least the delightful advantage of staying cool and lovely in contrast to all the rest; but that infatuation too, so remote, so deeply buried in the past, was borrowing now from the present, in reverse order, a tinge of misfortune, failure, even plain mortification, just because I was forced to hear this man’s complaining of his wife, of his mother-in-law.

  “I do hope,” he said, “Nicky comes back soon. I have still another plan in reserve, and, I think, it’s quite a good one. And in the meantime I’d better toddle along.”

  And still I said nothing, in great sadness looking at him, my lips masked by the fringe of my black shawl. He stood for a moment by the windowpane, on which in tumbling motion, knocking and buzzing, a fly went up, up, and presently slid down again. Then he passed his finger across the spines of the books on my shelf. Like most people who read little, he had a sneaking affection for dictionaries, and now he pulled out a thick-bottomed pink volume with the seed head of a dandelion and a red-curled girl on the cover.

  “Khoroshaya shtooka,” he said—crammed back the shtooka (thing), and suddenly broke into tears. I had him sit down close to me on the couch, he swayed to one side with his sobs increasing, and ended by burying his face in my lap. I stroked lightly his hot emery-papery scalp and rosy robust nape which I find so attractive in males. Gradually his spasms abated. He bit me softly through my skirt, and sat up.

  “Know what?” said Pavel Romanovich and while speaking he sonorously clacked together the concave palms of his horizontally placed hands (I could not help smiling as I remembered an uncle of mine, a Volga landowner, who used to render that way the sound of a procession of dignified cows letting their pies plop). “Know what, my
dear? Let us move to my flat. I can’t stand the thought of being there alone. We’ll have supper there, take a few swigs of vodka, then go to the movies—what do you say?”

  I could not decline his offer, though I knew that I would regret it. While telephoning to cancel my visit to Nick’s former place of employment (he needed the rubber overshoes he had left there), I saw myself in the looking glass of the hallway as resembling a forlorn little nun with a stern waxy face; but a minute later, as I was in the act of prettying up and putting on my hat, I plunged as it were into the depth of my great, black, experienced eyes, and found therein a gleam of something far from nunnish—even through my voilette they blazed, good God, how they blazed!

  In the tram, on the way to his place, Pavel Romanovich became distant and gloomy again: I was telling him about Nick’s new job in the ecclesiastical library, but his gaze kept shifting, he was obviously not listening. We arrived. The disorder in the three smallish rooms which he had occupied with his Lenochka was simply incredible—as if his and her things had had a thorough fight. In order to amuse Pavel Romanovich I started to play the soubrette, I put on a diminutive apron that had been forgotten in a corner of the kitchen, I introduced peace in the disarray of the furniture, I laid the table most neatly—so that Pavel Romanovich slapped his hands together once more and decided to make some borscht (he was quite proud of his cooking abilities).