Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
страница №2
...<31> Cambridge 1919"; Imistook the former for Iris herself in a golden wig and a pink make-up; a
closer inspection, however, showed it to be Ivor in the part of that highly
irritating girl bobbing in and out of Shakespeare's flawed farce. But, then,
Mnemosyne's chromodiascope can also become a bore.
In the music room the boy was now cacophonically dusting the keys of
the Bechstein as with less zest I resumed my nudist rambles. He asked me
what sounded like "Hora?," and I demonstrated my wrist turning it this way
and that to reveal only a pale ghost of watch and watch bracelet. He
completely misinterpreted my gesture and turned away shaking his stupid
head. It was a morning of errors and failures.
I made my way to the pantry for a glass or two of wine, the best
breakfast in times of distress. In the passage I trod on a shard of crockery
(we had heard the crash on the eve) and danced on one foot with a curse as I
tried to examine the imaginary gash in the middle of my pale sole.
The litre of rouge I had visualized was there all right, but I could
not find a corkscrew in any of the drawers. Between bangs the macaw could be
heard crying out something crude and dreary. The postman had come and gone.
The editor of The New Aurora (Novaya Zarya) was afraid (dreadful poltroons,
those editors) that his "modest иmigrи venture (nachinanie)" could not
etc.--a crumpled "etc." that flew into the garbage pail. Wineless, wrathful,
with Ivor's Times under my arm, I slapped up the back stairs to my stuffy
room. The rioting in my brain had now started.
It was then that I resolved, sobbing horribly into my pillow, to
preface tomorrow's proposal of marriage with a confession that might make it
unacceptable to my Iris. <32>
7
If one looked from our garden gate down the asphalted avenue leading
through leopard shade to the village some two hundred paces east, one saw
the pink cube of the little post office, its green bench in front, its flag
above, all this limned with the numb brightness of a color transparency,
between the last two plane trees of the twin files marching on both sides of
the road.
On the right (south) side of the avenue, across a marginal ditch,
overhung with brambles, the intervals between the mottled trunks disclosed
patches of lavender or lucerne and, farther away, the low white wall of a
cemetery running parallel to our lane as those things are apt to do. On the
left (north) side, through analogous intervals, one glimpsed an expanse of
rising ground, a vineyard, a distant farm, pine groves, and the outline of
mountains. On the penult tree trunk of that side somebody had pasted, and
somebody else partly scraped off, an incoherent notice.
We walked down that avenue nearly every morning, Iris and I, on our way
to the village square and--from there by lovely shortcuts--to Cannice and
the sea. Now and then she liked to return on foot, being one of those small
but strong lassies who can hurdle, and play hockey, and climb rocks, and
then shimmy till any pale mad hour <33> ("do bezзmnogo blиdnogo chаsa"--to
quote from my first direct poem to her). She usually wore her "Indian"
frock, a kind of translucent wrap, over her skimpy swimsuit, and as I
followed close behind, and sensed the solitude, the security, the
all-permitting dream, I had trouble walking in my bestial state. Fortunately
it was not the none-so-very-secure solitude that held me back but a moral
decision to confess something very grave before I made love to her.
As seen from those escarpments, the sea far below spread in majestic
wrinkles, and, owing to distance and height, the recurrent line of foam
arrived in rather droll slow motion because we knew it was sure, as we had
been sure, of its strapping pace, and now that restraint, that
stateliness...
Suddenly there came from somewhere within the natural jumble of our
surroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.
"Goodness," said Iris, "I do hope that's not a happy escapee from
Kanner's Circus." (No relation--at least, so it seemed--to the pianist.)
We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen times
it crossed the looping main road, our path grew wider. That day as usual I
argued with Iris about the English names of the few plants I could
identify--rock roses and griselda in bloom, agaves (which she called
"centuries"), broom and spurge, myrtle and arbutus. Speckled butterflies
came and went like quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels of foliage,
and once a tremendous olive-green fellow, with a rosy flush somewhere
beneath, settled on a thistlehead for an instant. I know nothing about
butterflies, and indeed do not care for the fluffier night-flying ones, and
would hate any of them to touch me: even the prettiest gives me a nasty
shiver like some floating spider web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera,
the silver louse.
On the day now in focus, memorable for a more important matter but
carrying all kinds of synchronous trivia <34> attached to it like burrs or
incrustated like marine parasites, we noticed a butterfly net moving among
the beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swinging
on its vest-button string, his white locks flying around his scarlet brow,
and the whole of his person still radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we no
doubt had heard a minute ago.
Upon Iris immediately describing to him the spectacular green thing,
Kanner dismissed it as eine "Pandora" (at least that's what I find jotted
down), a common southern Falter (butterfly). "Aber (but)," he thundered,
raising his index, "when you wish to look at a real rarity, never before
observed west of Nieder-Жsterreich, then I will show what I have just
caught."
He leant his net against a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked it up
reverently) and, with profuse thanks (to Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?) that
trailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel a
little stamp envelope and shook out of it very gently a folded butterfly
onto the palm of his hand.
After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young Cabbage
White. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance, grow.)
"Now look with attention," said Kanner ignoring her quaint remark and
pointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. "What you see is
the inferior side--the under white of the left Vorderflэgel (`fore wing')
and the under yellow of the left Hinterflэgel (`hind wing'). I will not open
the wings but I think you can believe what I'm going to tell you. On the
upper side, which you can't see, this species shares with its nearest
allies--the Small White and Mann's White, both common here--the typical
little spots of the fore wing, namely a black full stop in the male and a
black Doppelpunkt (`colon') in the female. In those allies the punctuation
is reproduced on the underside, and only in the species of which you see
<35> a folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing blank beneath--a
typographical caprice of Nature! Ergo it is an Ergane."
One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched.
"Oh, it's alive!" cried Iris.
"No, it can't fly away--one pinch was enough," rejoined Kanner
soothingly, as he slipped the specimen back into its pellucid hell; and
presently, brandishing his arms and net in triumphant farewells, he was
continuing his climb.
"The brute!" wailed Iris. She brooded over the thousand little
creatures he had tortured, but a few days later, when Ivor took us to the
man's concert (a most poetical rendition of Grэnberg's suite Les Chбteaux)
she derived some consolation from her brother's contemptuous remark: "All
that butterfly business is only a publicity stunt." Alas, as a fellow madman
I knew better.
All I had to do when we reached our stretch of plage in order to absorb
the sun was to shed shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Iris shrugged off her wrap
and lay down, bare limbed, on the towel next to mine. I was rehearsing in my
head the speech I had prepared. The pianist's dog was today in the company
of a handsome old lady, his fourth wife. The nymphet was being buried in hot
sand by two young oafs. The Russian lady was reading an иmigrи newspaper.
Her husband was contemplating the horizon. The two English women were
bobbing in the dazzling sea. A large French family of slightly flushed
albinos was trying to inflate a rubber dolphin.
"I'm ready for a dip," said Iris.
She took out of the beach bag (kept for her by the Victoria concierge)
her yellow swim bonnet, and we transferred our towels and things to the
comparative quiet of an obsolete wharf of sorts upon which she liked to dry
afterwards.
Already twice in my young life a fit of total cramp--the physical
counterpart of lightning insanity--had all but <36> overpowered me in the
panic and blackness of bottomless water. I see myself as a lad of fifteen
swimming at dusk across a narrow but deep river with an athletic cousin. He
is beginning to leave me behind when a special effort I make results in a
sense of ineffable euphoria which promises miracles of propulsion, dream
prizes on dream shelves--but which, at its satanic climax, is replaced by an
intolerable spasm first in one leg, then in the other, then in the ribs and
both arms. I have often attempted to explain, in later years, to learned and
ironical doctors, the strange, hideous, segmental quality of those pulsating
pangs that made a huge worm of me with limbs transformed into successive
coils of agony. By some fantastic fluke a third swimmer, a stranger, was
right behind me and helped to pull me out of an abysmal tangle of water-lily
stems.
The second time was a year later, on the West-Caucasian coast. I had
been drinking with a dozen older companions at the birthday party of the
district governor's son and, around midnight, a dashing young Englishman,
Allan Andoverton (who was to be, around 1939, my first British publisher!)
had suggested a moonlight swim. As long as I did not venture too far in the
sea, the experience seemed quite enjoyable. The water was warm; the moon
shone benevolently on the starched shirt of my first evening clothes spread
on the shingly shore. I could hear merry voices around me; Allan, I
remember, had not bothered to strip and was fooling with a champagne bottle
in the dappled swell; but presently a cloud engulfed everything, a great
wave lifted and rolled me, and soon I was too upset in all senses to tell
whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse. Abject fear set loose instantly
the pain I already knew, and I would have drowned there and then had not the
next billow given me a boost and deposited me near my own trousers.
The shadow of those repellent and rather colorless recolections (mortal
peril is colorless) remained always present <37> in my "dips" and "splashes"
(another word of hers) with Iris. She got used to my habit of staying in
comfortable contact with the bed of shallows, while she executed "crawls"
(if that is what those overarm strokes were called in the Nineteen-Twenties)
at quite a distance away; but that morning I nearly did a very stupid thing.
I was gently floating to and fro in line with the shore and sinking a
probing toe every now and then to ascertain if I could still feel the oozy
bottom with its unappetizing to the touch, but on the whole friendly,
vegetables, when I noticed that the seascape had changed. In the middle
distance a brown motorboat manned by a young fellow in whom I recognized
L.P. had described a foamy half-circle and stopped beside Iris. She clung to
the bright brim, and he spoke to her, and then made as if to drag her into
his boat, but she flipped free, and he sped away, laughing.
It all must have lasted a couple of minutes, but had the rascal with
his hawkish profile and white cable-stitched sweater stayed a few seconds
longer or had my girl been abducted by her new beau in the thunder and
spray, I would have perished; for while the scene endured, some virile
instinct rather than one of self-preservation had caused me to swim toward
them a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular position
to regain my breath I found underfoot nothing but water. I turned and
started swimming landward--and already felt the ominous foreglow, the
strange, never yet described aura of total cramp creeping over me and
forming its deadly pact with gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand,
and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach. <38>
8
"I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health."
"Wait a minute. Must peel this horrid thing off--as far down--as far
down as it can decently go."
We were lying, I supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off her
cap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit,
so as to expose her entire back to the sun; a secondary struggle was taking
place on the near side, in the vicinity of her sable armpit, in her
unsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small breast at its tender
juncture with her ribs. As soon as she had wriggled into a satisfactory
state of decorum, she half-reared, holding her black bodice to her bosom,
while her other hand conducted that delightful rapid monkey-scratching
search a girl performs when groping for something in her bag--in this
instance a mauve package of cheap Salammbтs and an expensive lighter;
whereupon she again pressed her bosom to the spread towel. Her earlobe
burned red through her black liberated "Medusa," as that type of bob was
called in the young twenties. The moldings of her brown back, with a
patch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinal
hollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted me
painfully <39> from the decision I had taken to preface my proposal with a
special, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water still
glistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong brown
calves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles.
If I have described so often in my American novels (A Kingdom by the Sea,
Ardis) the unbearable magic of a girl's back, it is mainly because of my
having loved Iris. Her compact little nates, the most agonizing, the
fullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrapped
surprises under the Christmas tree.
Upon resettling in the waiting sun after this little flurry, Iris
protruded her fat underlip as she exhaled smoke and presently remarked:
"Your mental health is jolly good, I think. You are sometimes strange and
somber, and often silly, but that's in character with ce qu'on appelle
genius."
"What do you call `genius'?"
"Well, seeing things others don't see. Or rather the invisible links
between things."
"I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing to
do with genius. We shall start with a specific example and an authentic
decor. Please close your eyes for a moment. Now visualize the avenue that
goes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees converging
in perspective and the garden gate between the last two?"
"No," said Iris, "the last one on the right is replaced by a
lamppost--you can't make it out very clearly from the village square--but it
is really a lamppost in a coat of ivy."
"Well, no matter. The main thing is to imagine we're looking from the
village here toward the garden gate there. We must be very careful about our
here's and there's in this problem. For the present `there' is the
quadrangle of green sunlight in the half-opened gate. We now start to walk
up the avenue. On the second tree trunk of the right-side file we notice
traces of some local proclamation--" <40>
"It was Ivor's proclamation. He proclaimed that things had changed and
Aunt Betty's protиgиs should stop making their weekly calls."
"Splendid. We continue to walk toward the garden gate. Intervals of
landscape can be made out between the plane trees on both sides. On your
right--please, close your eyes, you will see better--on your right there's a
vineyard; on your left, a churchyard--you can distinguish its long, low,
very low, wall--"
"You make it sound rather creepy. And I want to add something. Among
the blackberries, Ivor and I discovered a crooked old tombstone with the
inscription Dors, Mиdor! and only the date of death, 1889; a found dog, no
doubt. It's just before the last tree on the left side."
"So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter--but you stop
all of a sudden: you've forgotten to buy those nice new stamps for your
album. We decide to go back to the post office."
"Can I open my eyes? Because I'm afraid I'm going to fall asleep."
"On the contrary: now is the moment to shut your eyes tight and
concentrate. I want you to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that
`right' instantly becomes `left,' and you instantly see the `here' as a
`there,' with the lamppost now on your left and dead Mиdor now on your
right, and the plane trees converging toward the post office. Can you do
that?"
"Done," said Iris. "About-face executed. I now stand facing a sunny
hole with a little pink house inside it and a bit of blue sky. Shall we
start walking back?"
"You may, I can't! This is the point of the experiment. In actual,
physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with
my eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from one
direction to the other. Some swivel cell in my brain does not work. I can
cheat, of course, by setting aside the mental snapshot of <41> one vista and
leisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point.
But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me
mad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which transforms
one direction into another, directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying
the whole world on my back in the process of trying to visualize my turning
around and making myself see in terms of `right' what I saw in terms of
`left' and vice versa."
I thought she had fallen asleep, but before I could entertain the
thought that she had not heard, not understood anything of what was
destroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.
"First of all, we shall agree," she said, "to cancel all such
experiments. Secondly, we shall tell ourselves that what we had been trying
to do was to solve a stupid philosophical riddle--on the lines of what does
`right' and `left' mean in our absence, when nobody is looking, in pure
space, and what, anyway, is space; when I was a child I thought space was
the inside of a nought, any nought, chalked on a slate and perhaps not quite
tidy, but still a good clean zero. I don't want you to go mad or to drive me
mad, because those perplexities are catching, and so we'll drop the whole
business of revolving avenues altogether. I would like to seal our pact with
a kiss, but we shall have to postpone that. Ivor is coming in a few minutes
to take us for a spin in his new car, but perhaps you do not care to come,
and so I propose we meet in the garden, for a minute or two, just before
dinner, while he is taking his bath."
I asked what Bob (L.P.) had been telling her in my dream. "It was not a
dream," she said. "He just wanted to know if his sister had phoned about a
dance they wanted us all three to come to. If she had, nobody was at home."
We repaired for a snack and a drink to the Victoria bar, and presently
Ivor joined us. He said, nonsense, he <42> could dance and fence beautifully
on the stage but was a regular bear at private affairs and would hate to
have his innocent sister pawed by all the rastaquouхres of the Cтte.
"Incidentally," he added, "I don't much care for P.'s obsession with
moneylenders. He practically ruined the best one in Cambridge but has
nothing but conventional evil to repeat about them."
"My brother is a funny person," said Iris, turning to me as in play.
"He conceals our ancestry like a dark treasure, yet will flare up publicly
if someone calls someone a Shylock."
Ivor prattled on: "Old Maurice (his employer) is dining with us
tonight. Cold cuts and a macиdoine au kitchen rum. I'll also get some tinned
asparagus at the English shop; it's much better than the stuff they grow
here. The car is not exactly a Royce, but it rolls. Sorry Vivian is too
queasy to come. I saw Madge Titheridge this morning and she said French
reporters pronounce her family name `Si c'est riche.' Nobody's laughing
today." <43>
9
Being too excited to take my usual siesta, I spent most of the
afternoon working on a love poem (and this is the last entry in my 1922
pocket diary--exactly one month after my arrival in Carnavaux). In those
days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one,
who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my
inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her
apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed
the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers
which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the
initial, evanescent, savage perfection. The treacherous music of Russian
rhythms came to my specious rescue like those demons who break the black
silence of an artist's hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistorical
birds. Another and final deception would come with the Fair Copy in which,
for a short while, calligraphy, vellum paper, and India ink beautified a
dead doggerel. And to think that for almost five years I kept trying and
kept getting caught--until I fired that painted, pregnant, meek, miserable
little assistant!
I dressed and went downstairs. The trench window giving on the terrace
was open. Old Maurice, Iris, and <44> Ivor sat enjoying Martinis in the
orchestra seats of a marvelous sunset. Ivor was in the act of mimicking
someone, with bizarre intonations and extravagant gestures. The marvelous
sunset has not only remained as a backdrop of a life-transforming evening,
but endured, perhaps, behind the suggestion I made to my British publishers,
many years later, to bring out a coffee-table album of auroras and sunsets,
in the truest possible shades, a collection that would also be of scientific
value, since some learned celestiologist might be hired to discuss samples
from various countries and analyze the striking and never before discussed
differences between the color schemes of evening and dawn. The album came
out eventually, the price was high and the pictorial part passable; but the
text was supplied by a luckless female whose pretty prose and borrowed
poetry botched the book (Allan and Overton, London, 1949).
For a couple of moments, while idly attending to Ivor's strident
performance, I stood watching the huge sunset. Its wash was of a classical
light-orange tint with an oblique bluish-black shark crossing it. What
glorified the combination was a series of ember-bright cloudlets riding
along, tattered and hooded, above the red sun which had assumed the shape of
a pawn or a baluster. "Look at the sabbath witches!" I was about to cry, but
then I saw Iris rise and heard her say: "That will do, Ives. Maurice has
never met the person, it's all lost on him."
"Not at all," retorted her brother, "he will meet him in a minute and
recognize him (the verb was an artist's snarl), that's the point!"
Iris left the terrace via the garden steps, and Ivor did not continue
his skit, which a swift playback that now burst on my consciousness
identified as a clever burlesque of my voice and manner. I had the odd
sensation of a piece of myself being ripped off and tossed overboard, of my
being separated from my own self, of flying forward and at the same time
turning away. The second action <45> prevailed, and presently, under the
holm oak, I joined Iris.
The crickets were stridulating, dusk had filled the pool, a ray of the
outside lamp glistened on two parked cars. I kissed her lips, her neck, her
necklace, her neck, her lips. Her response dispelled my ill humor; but I
told her what I thought of the idiot before she ran back to the festively
lit villa.
Ivor personally brought up my supper, right to my bedside table, with
well-concealed dismay at being balked of his art's reward and charming
apologies for having offended me, and "had I run out of pyjamas?" to which I
replied that, on the contrary, I felt rather flattered, and in fact always
slept naked in summer, but preferred not to come down lest a slight headache
prevent me from not living up to that splendid impersonation.
I slept fitfully, and only in the small hours glided into a deeper
spell (illustrated for no reason at all with the image of my first little
inamorata in the grass of an orchard) from which I was rudely roused by the
spattering sounds of a motor. I slipped on a shirt and leant out of the
window, sending a flock of sparrows whirring out of the jasmin, whose
luxuriant growth reached up to the second floor, and saw, with a sensual
start, Ivor putting a suitcase and a fishing rod into his car which stood,
throbbing, practically in the garden. It was a Sunday, and I had been
expecting to have him around all day, but there he was getting behind the
wheel and slamming the door after him. The gardener was giving tactical
directions with both arms; his pretty little boy was also there, holding a
yellow and blue feather duster. And then I heard her lovely English voice
bidding her brother have a good time. I had to lean out a little more to see
her; she stood on a patch of cool clean turf, barefooted, barecalved, in an
ample-sleeved peignoir, repeating her joyful farewell, which he could no
longer hear.
I dashed to the W.C. across the landing. A few moments <46> later, as I
left my gurgling and gulping retreat, I noticed her on the other side of the
staircase. She was entering my room. My polo shirt, a very short,
salmon-colored affair, could not hide my salient impatience.
"I hate to see the stunned look on the face of a clock that has
stopped," she said, as she stretched a slender brovm arm up to the shelf
where I had relegated an old egg timer lent me in lieu of a regular alarm.
As her wide sleeve fell back I kissed the dark perfumed hollow I had longed
to kiss since our first day in the sun.
The door key would not work, that I knew; still I tried, and was
rewarded by the silly semblance of recurrent clicks that did not lock
anything. Whose step, whose sick young cough came from the stairs? Yes of
course that was Jacquot, the gardener's boy who rubbed and dusted things
every morning. He might butt in, I said, already speaking with difficulty.
To polish, for instance, that candlestick. Oh, what does it matter, she
whispered, he's only a conscientious child, a poor foundling, as all our
dogs and parrots are. Your tum, she said, is still as pink as your shirt.
And please do not forget, darling, to clear out before it's too late.
How far, how bright, how unchanged by eternity, how disfigured by time!
There were bread crumbs and even a bit of orange peel in the bed. The young
cough was now muted, but I could distinctly hear creakings, controlled
footfalls, the hum in an ear pressed to the door. I must have been eleven or
twelve when the nephew of my grand-uncle visited the Moscow country house
where I was spending that hot and hideous summer. He had brought his
passionate bride with him--straight from the wedding feast. Next day at the
siesta hour, in a frenzy of curiosity and fancy, I crept to a secret spot
under the second-floor guest-room window where a gardener's ladder stood
rooted in a jungle of jasmin. It reached only to the top of the closed
first-floor shutters, and though I found a foothold <47> above them, on an
ornamental projection, I could only just grip the sill of a half-open window
from which confused sounds issued. I recognized the jangle of bedsprings and
the rhythmic tinkle of a fruit knife on a plate near the bed, one post of
which I could make out by stretching my neck to the utmost; but what
fascinated me most were the manly moans coming from the invisible part of
the bed. A superhuman effort afforded me the sight of a salmon-pink shirt
over the back of a chair. He, the enraptured beast, doomed to die one day as
so many are, was now repeating her name with ever increasing urgency, and by
the time my foot slipped he was in full cry, thus drowning the noise of my
sudden descent into a crackle of twigs and a snowstorm of petals. <48>
10
Just before Ivor returned from his fishing trip, I moved to the
Victoria, where she visited me daily. That was not enough; but in the autumn
Ivor migrated to Los Angeles to join his half-brother in directing the
Amenic film company (for which, thirty years later, long after Ivor's death
over Dover, I was to write the script of Pawn Takes Queen, my most popular
at the time, but far from best, novel), and we returned to our beloved
villa, in the really quite nice blue Icarus, Ivor's thoughtful wedding
present.
Sometime in October my benefactor, now in the last stage of majestic
senility, came for his annual visit to Mentone, and, without warning, Iris
and I dropped in to see him. His villa was incomparably grander than ours.
He staggered to his feet to take between his wax-pale palms Iris's hand and
stare at her with blue bleary eyes for at least five seconds (a little
eternity, socially) in a kind of ritual silence, after which he embraced me
with a slow triple cross-kiss in the awful Russian tradition.
"Your bride," he said, using, I knew, the word in the sense of fiancиe
(and speaking an English which Iris said later was exactly like mine in
Ivor's unforgettable version) "is as beautiful as your wife will be!"
I quickly told him--in Russian--that the maire of <49> Cannice had
married us a month ago in a brisk ceremony. Nikifor Nikodimovich gave Iris
another stare and finally kissed her hand, which I was glad to see she
raised in the proper fashion (coached, no doubt, by Ivor who used to take
every opportunity to paw his sister).
"I misunderstood the rumors," he said, "but all the same I am happy to
make the acquaintance of such a charming young lady. And where, pray, in
what church, will the vow be sanctified?"
"In the temple we shall build, Sir," said Iris--a trifle insolently, I
thought.
Count Starov "chewed his lips," as old men are wont to do in Russian
novels. Miss Vrode-Vorodin, the elderly cousin who kept house for him, made
a timely entrance and led Iris to an adjacent alcove (illuminated by a
resplendent portrait by Serov, 1896, of the notorious beauty, Mme. de
Blagidze, in Caucasian costume) for a nice cup of tea. The Count wished to
talk business with me and had only ten minutes "before his injection."
What was my wife's maiden name?
I told him. He thought it over and shook his head. What was her
mother's name?
I told him that, too. Same reaction. What about the financial aspect of
the marriage?
I said she had a house, a parrot, a car, and a small income--I didn't
know exactly how much.
After another minute's thought, he asked me if I would like a permanent
job in the White Cross? It had nothing to do with Switzerland. It was an
organization that helped Russian Christians all over the world. The job
would involve travel, interesting connections, promotion to important posts.
I declined so emphatically that he dropped the silver pill box he was
holding and a number of innocent gum drops were spilled all over the table
at his elbow. He swept them onto the carpet with a gesture of peevish
dismissal. <50>
What then was I intending to do?
I said I'd go on with my literary dreams and nightmares. We would spend
most of the year in Paris. Paris was becoming the center of иmigrи culture
and destitution.
How much did I think I could earn?
Well, as N.N. knew, currencies were losing their identities in the
whirlpool of inflation, but Boris Morozov, a distinguished author, whose
fame had preceded his exile, had given me some illuminating "examples of
existence" when I met him quite recently in Cannice where he had lectured on
Baratynski at the local literaturnyy circle. In his case, four lines of
verse would pay for a bifsteck pommes, while a couple of essays in the
Novosti emigratsii assured a month's rent for a cheap chambre garnie. There
were also readings, in large auditoriums, at least twice a year, which might
bring him each time the equivalent of, say, one hundred dollars.
My benefactor thought this over and said that as long as he lived I
would receive a check for half that amount every first of the month, and
that he would bequeath me a certain sum in his testament. He named the sum.
Its paltriness took me aback. This was a foretaste of the disappointing
advances publishers were to offer me after a long, promising, pencil-tapping
pause.
We rented a two-room apartment in the 16th arrondissement, rue
Desprиaux, 23. The hallway connecting the rooms led, on the front side, to a
bathroom and kitchenette. Being a solitary sleeper by principle and
inclination, I relinquished the double bed to Iris, and slept on the couch
in the parlor. The concierge's daughter came to clean up and cook. Her
culinary capacities were limited, so we often broke the monotony of
vegetable soups and boiled meat by eating at a Russian restoranchik. We were
to spend seven winters in that little flat.
Owing to the foresight of my dear guardian and benefactor
(1850?--1927), an old-fashioned cosmopolitan with <51> a lot of influence in
the right quarters, I had become by the time of my marriage the subject of a
snug foreign country and thus was spared the indignity of a nansenskiy
pasport (a pauper's permit, really), as well as the vulgar obsession with
"documents," which provoked such evil glee among the Bolshevist rulers, who
perceived some similarity between red tape and Red rule and a certain
affinity between the civil plight of a hobbled expatriate and the political
immobilization of a Soviet slave. I could, therefore, take my wife to any
vacational resort in the world without waiting several weeks for a visa, and
then being refused, perhaps, a return visa to our accidental country of
residence, in this case France, because of some flaw in our precious and
despicable papers. Nowadays (1970), when my British passport has been
superseded by a no less potent American one, I still treasure that 1922
photo of the mysterious young man I then was, with the mysteriously smiling
eyes and the striped tie and the wavy hair. I remember spring trips to Malta
and Andalusia, but every summer, around the first of July, we drove to
Carnavaux and stayed there for a month or two. The parrot died in 1925, the
footboy vanished in 1927. Ivor visited us twice in Paris, and I think she
saw him also in London where she went at least once a year to spend a few
days with "friends," whom I did not know, but who sounded harmless--at least
to a certain point.
I should have been happier. I had planned to be happier. My health
continued patchy with ominous shapes showing through its flimsier edges.
Faith in my work never wavered, but despite her touching intentions to
participate in it, Iris remained on its outside, and the better it grew the
more alien it became to her. She took desultory lessons in Russian,
interrupting them regularly, for long periods, and finished by developing a
dull habitual aversion to the language. I soon noticed that she had ceased
trying to look attentive and bright when Russian, and Russian only, was <52>
spoken in her presence (after some primitive French had been kept up for the
first minute or two of the party in polite concession to her disability).
This was, at best, annoying; at worst, heartrending; it did not,
however, affect my sanity as something else threatened to do.
Jealousy, a masked giant never encountered before in the frivolous
affairs of my early youth, now stood with folded arms, confronting me at
every corner. Certain little sexual quirks in my sweet, docile, tender Iris,
inflections of lovemaking, felicities of fondling, the easy accuracy with
which she adapted her flexible frame to every pattern of passion, seemed to
presuppose a wealth of experience. Before starting to suspect the present, I
felt compelled to get my fill of suspecting her past. During the
examinations to which I subjected her on my worst nights, she dismissed her
former romances as totally insignificant, without realizing that this
reticence left more to my imagination than would the most luridly overstated
truth.
The three lovers (a figure I wrested from her with the fierceness of
Pushkin's mad gambler and with even less luck) whom she had had in her teens
remained nameless, and therefore spectral; devoid of any individual traits,
and therefore identical. They performed their sketchy pas in the back of her
lone act like the lowliest members of the corps de ballet, in a display of
mawkish gymnastics rather than dance, and it was clear that none of them
would ever become the male star of the troupe. She, the ballerina, on the
other hand, was a dim diamond with all the facets of talent ready to blaze,
but under the pressure of the nonsense around her had, for the moment, to
limit her steps and gestures to an expression of cold coquetry, of
flirtatious evasion--waiting as she was for the tremendous leap of the
marble-thighed athlete in shining tights who was to erupt from the wings
after a decent prelude. We thought I had been chosen for that part but we
were mistaken. <53>
Only by projecting thus on the screen of my mind those stylized images,
could I allay the anguish of carnal jealousy centered on specters. Yet not
seldom I chose to succumb to it. The trench window of my studio in Villa
Iris gave on the same red-tiled balcony as my wife's bedroom did, and could
be set half-open at such an angle as to provide two different views melting
into one another. It caught obliquely, through the monastic archway leading
from room to room, part of her bed and of her--her hair, a shoulder--which
otherwise I could not see from the old-fashioned lectern at which I wrote;
but the glass also held, at arm's length as it were, the green reality of
the garden with a peregrination of cypresses along its sidewall. So half in
bed and half in the pale hot sky, she would recline, writing a letter that
was crucified on my second-best chessboard. I knew that if I asked, the
answer would be "Oh, to an old schoolmate," or "To Ivor," or "To old Miss
Kupalov," and I also knew that in one way or another the letter would reach
the post office at the end of the plane-tree avenue without my seeing the
name on the envelope. And still I let her write as she comfortably floated
in the life belt of her pillow, above the cypresses and the garden wall,
while all the time I gauged--grimly, recklessly--to what depths of dark
pigment the tentacled ache would go. <54>
11
Most of those Russian lessons consisted of her taking one of my poems
or essays to this or that Russian lady, Miss Kupalov or Mrs. Lapukov
(neither of whom had much English) and having it paraphrased orally for her
in a kind of makeshift Volapэk. On my pointing out to Iris that she was
losing her time at this hit-and-miss task, she cast around for some other
alchemic method which might enable her to read everything I wrote. I had
begun by then (1925) my first novel (Tamara) and she coaxed me into letting
her have a copy of the first chapter, which I had just typed out. This she
carried to an agency that dealt in translations into French of utilitarian
texts such as applications and supplications addressed by Russian refugees
to various rats in the ratholes of various commissariats. The person who
agreed to supply her with the "literal version," which she paid for in
valuta, kept the typescript for two months and warned her when delivering it
that my "article" had presented almost insurmountable difficulties, "being
written in an idiom and style utterly unfamiliar to the ordinary reader."
Thus an anonymous imbecile in a shabby, cluttered, clattering office became
my first critic and my first translator.
I knew nothing of that venture, until I found her one <55> day bending
her brown curls over sheets of foolscap almost perforated by the violence of
the violet characters that covered it without any semblance of margin. I
was, in those days, naively opposed to any kind of translation, partly
because my attempts to turn two or three of my first compositions into my
own English had resulted in a feeling of morbid revolt--and in maddening
headaches. Iris, her cheek on her fist and her eyes rolling in languid
doubt, looked up at me rather sheepishly, but with that gleam of humor that
never left her in the most absurd or trying circumstances. I noticed a
blunder in the first line, a boo-boo in the next, and without bothering to
read any further, tore up the whole thing--which provoked no reaction, save
a neutral sigh, on the part of my thwarted darling.
In compensation for being debarred from my writings, she decided to
become a writer herself. Beginning with the middle Twenties and to the end
of her short, squandered, uncharmed life, my Iris kept working on a
detective novel in two, three, four successive versions, in which the plot,
the people, the setting, everything kept changing in bewildering bursts of
frantic deletions--everything except the names (none of which I remember).
Not only did she lack all literary talent, but she had not even the
knack of imitating the small number of gifted authors among the prosperous
but ephemeral purveyors of "crime fiction" which she consumed with the
indiscriminate zest of a model prisoner. How, then, did my Iris know why
this had to be altered, that rejected? What instinct of genius ordered her
to destroy the whole heap of her drafts on the eve, practically on the eve,
of her sudden death? All the odd girl could ever visualize, with startling
lucidity, was the crimson cover of the final, ideal paperback on which the
villain's hairy fist would be shown pointing a pistol-shaped cigarette
lighter at the reader--who was not supposed to guess until everybody in the
book had died that it was, in fact, a pistol. <56>
Let me pick out several fatidic points, cleverly disguised at the time,
within the embroidery of our seven winters.
During a lull in a magnificent concert for which we had not been able
to obtain adjacent seats, I noticed Iris eagerly welcoming a
melancholy-looking woman with drab hair and thin lips; I certainly had met
her, somewhere, quite recently, but the very insignificance of her
appearance canceled the pursuit of a vague recollection, and I never asked
Iris about it. She was to become my wife's last teacher.
Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those
that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its
revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities. No doubt I might have
had similar illusions about the way Tamara was reviewed in the
Russian-language periodicals of Paris, Berlin, Prague, Riga, and other
cities; but by that time I was already engrossed in my second novel, Pawn
Takes Queen, and my first one had dwindled to a pinch of colored dust in my
mind.
The editor of Patria, the иmigrи monthly in which Pawn Takes Queen had
begun to be serialized, invited "Irida Osipovna" and me to a literary
samovar. I mention it only because this was one of the few salons that my
unsociability deigned to frequent. Iris helped with the sandwiches. I smoked
my pipe and observed the feeding habits of two major novelists, three minor
ones, one major poet, five minor ones of both sexes, one major critic
(Demian Basilevski), and nine minor ones, including the inimitable
"Prostakov-Skotinin," a Russian comedy name (meaning "simpleton and brute")
applied to him by his archrival Hristofor Boyarski.
The major poet, Boris Morozov, an amiable grizzly bear of a man, was
asked how his reading in Berlin had gone, and he said: "Nichevo" (a "so-so"
tinged with a "well enough") and then told a funny but not memorable story
about the new President of the Union of Иmigrи <57> Writers in Germany. The
lady next to me informed me she had adored that treacherous conversation
between the Pawn and the Queen about the husband and would they really
defenestrate the poor chess player? I said they would but not in the next
issue, and not for good: he would live forever in the games he had played
and in the multiple exclamation marks of future annotators. I also heard--my
hearing is almost on a par with my sight--snatches of general talk such as
an explanatory, "She is an Englishwoman," murmured from behind a hand five
chairs away by one guest to another.
All that would have been much too trivial to record unless meant to
serve as the commonplace background, at any such meeting of exiles, against
which a certain reminder flickered now and then, between the shoptalk and
the tattle--a line of Tyutchev or Blok, which was cited in passing, as well
as an everlasting presence, with the familiarity of devotion and as the
secret height of art, and which ornamented sad lives with a sudden cadenza
coming from some celestial elsewhere, a glory, a sweetness, the patch of
rainbow cast on the wall by a crystal paperweight we cannot locate. That was
what my Iris was missing.
To return to the trivia: I recall regaling the company with one of the
howlers I had noticed in the "translation" of Tamara. The sentence vidnelos'
neskol'ko barok ("several barges could be seen") had become la vue иtait
assez baroque. The eminent critic Basilevski, a stocky, fair-haired old
fellow in a rumpled brown suit, shook with abdominal mirth--but then his
expression changed to one of suspicion and displeasure. After tea he
accosted me and insisted gruffly that I had made up that example of
mistranslation. I remember answering that, if so, he, too, might well be an
invention of mine.
As we strolled home. Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a
glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to
put up with her deliberate <58> insularity but implored her to cease
announcing ю la ronde: "Please, don't mind me: I love the sound of Russian."
That was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but
beautifully printed.
"I am going to make reparations," she gaily replied. "I've never been
able to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only one--and
you refused to teach me, because you were busy, because you were tired,
because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I've discovered at
last someone who speaks both languages, yours and mine, as two natives in
one, and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In fact
it's her own suggestion."
Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of a leytenant Starov
(Christian name unimportant), who had served under General Wrangel and now
had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, as
fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or "adopted
nephew" (whatever that meant), he was said to be. He was a dark-eyed,
dark-complexioned man, three or four years my senior; I thought him rather
handsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the civil war
had left him with a terrifying tic that caused his face to change suddenly,
at variable intervals, as if a paper bag were being crumpled by an invisible
hand. Nadezhda Starov, a quiet, plain woman with an indefinable Quakerish
look about her, clocked those intervals for some reason, no doubt of a
medical nature, the man himself being unconscious of his "fireworks" unless
he happened to see them in a mirror. He had a macabre sense of humor,
beautiful hands, and a velvety voice.
I realized now that it was Nadezhda Gordonovna whom Iris had been
talking to in that concert hall. I cannot say exactly when the lessons began
or how long that fad lasted; a month or two months at the most. They took
place either in Mrs. Starov's lodgings or in one of the <59> Russian
tearooms both ladies frequented. I kept a little list ...
