Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
страница №3
...of telephone numbersso that Iris might be warned that I could always make sure of her
whereabouts if, say, I felt on the brink of losing my mind or wanted her to
buy on the way home a tin of my favorite Brown Prune tobacco. She did not
know, on the other hand, that I would never have dared ring her up, lest her
not being where she said she would be cause me even a few minutes of an
agony that I could not face.
Sometime around Christmas, 1929, she casually told me that those
lessons had been discontinued quite a while ago: Mrs. Starov had left for
England, and it was rumored that she would not return to her husband. The
lieutenant, it seemed, was quite a dasher. <60>
12
At a certain mysterious point toward the end of our last winter in
Paris something in our relationship changed for the better. A wave of new
warmth, new intimacy, new tenderness, swelled and swept away all the
delusions of distance--tiffs, silences, suspicions, retreats into castles of
amour-propre and the like--which had obstructed our love and of which I
alone was guilty. A more amiable, merrier mate I could not have imagined.
Endearments, love names (based in my case on Russian forms) reentered our
customary exchanges. I broke the monastic rules of work on my novella in
verse Polnolunie (Plenilune) by riding with her in the Bois or dutifully
escorting her to fashion-show teases and exhibitions of avant-garde frauds.
I surmounted my contempt for the "serious" cinema (depicting heartrending
problems with a political twist), which she preferred to American buffoonery
and the trick photography of Germanic horror films. I even gave a talk on my
Cambridge days at a rather pathetic English Ladies Club, to which she
belonged. And to top the treat, I told her the plot of my next novel (Camera
Lucida).
One afternoon, in March or early April, 1930, she peeped into my room
and, being admitted, handed me the duplicate of a typewritten sheet,
numbered 444. It was, she <61> said, a tentative episode in her interminable
tale, which would soon display more deletions than insertions. She was
stuck, she said. Diana Vane, an incidental but on the whole nice girl,
sojourning in Paris, happened to meet, at a riding school, a strange
Frenchman, of Corsican, or perhaps Algerian, origin, passionate, brutal,
unbalanced. He mistook Diana--and kept on mistaking her despite her amused
remonstrations--for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he had
last seen ages ago. We had here, said the author, a sort of hallucination,
an obsessive fancy, which Diana, a delightful flirt with a keen sense of
humor, allowed Jules to entertain during some twenty riding lessons; but
then his attentions grew more realistic, and she stopped seeing him. There
had been nothing between them, and yet he simply could not be dissuaded from
confusing her with the girl he once had possessed or thought he had, for
that girl, too, might well have been only the afterimage of a still earlier
romance or remembered delirium. It was a very bizarre situation.
Now this page was supposed to be a last ominous letter written by that
Frenchman in a foreigner's English to Diana. I was to read it as if it were
a real letter and suggest, as an experienced writer, what might be the next
development or disaster.
Beloved!
I am not capable to represent to myself that you really desire to tear
up any connection with me. God sees, I love you more than life--more than
two lives, your and my, together taken. Are you not ill? Or maybe you have
found another? Another lover, yes? Another victim of your attraction? No,
no, this thought is too horrible, too humiliating for us both.
My supplication is modest and just. Give only one more interview to me!
One interview! I am <62> prepared to meet with you it does not matter
where--on the street, in some cafe, in the Forest of Boulogne--but I must
see you, must speak with you and open to you many mysteries before I will
die. Oh, this is no threat! I swear that if our interview will lead to a
positive result, if, otherwise speaking, you will permit me to hope, only to
hope, then, oh then, I will consent to wait a little. But you must reply to
me without retardment, my cruel, stupid, adored little girl!
Your Jules
"There's one thing," I said, carefully folding the sheet and pocketing
it for later study, "one thing the little girl should know. This is not a
romantic Corsican writing a crime passionnel letter; it is a Russian
blackmailer knowing just enough English to translate into it the stalest
Russian locutions. What puzzles me is how did you, with your three or four
words of Russian--kak pozhivaete and do svidaniya--how did you, the author,
manage to think up those subtle turns, and imitate the mistakes in English
that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family,
but still--"
Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to the
heroine of my Ardis forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, she
must have had too many muddled lessons in Russian and she would certainly
correct that extraordinary impression by simply giving the whole letter in
French--from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian had borrowed a
lot of clichиs.
"But that's beside the point," she added. "You don't understand--the
point is what should happen next--I mean, logically? What should my poor
girl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed,
she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?" <63>
"In the wastepaper basket," I whispered, interrupting my work to gather
her small form onto my lap as I often did, the Lord be thanked, in that
fatal spring of 1930.
"Give me back that scrap," she begged gently, trying to thrust her hand
into the pocket of my dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced her
closer.
My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by the
surmise that my wife had been transcribing an authentic letter--received,
say, from one of the wretched, unwashed иmigrи poeticules, with smooth
glossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons of
exile. But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just might be her
own composition with some of the planted faults, borrowed from the French
(supplication, sans tarder), while others could be subliminal echoes of the
Volapэk she had been exposed to, during sessions with Russian teachers,
through bilingual or trilingual exercises in tawdry textbooks. Thus, instead
of losing myself in a jungle of evil conjectures, all I did was preserve
that thin sheet with its unevenly margined lines so characteristic of her
typing in the faded and cracked briefcase before me, among other mementos,
other deaths. <64>
13
On the morning of April 23, 1930, the shrill peal of the hallway
telephone caught me in the act of stepping into my bathwater.
Ivor! He had just arrived in Paris from New York for an important
conference, would be busy all afternoon, was leaving tomorrow, would like
to--
Here intervened naked Iris, who delicately, unhurriedly, with a radiant
smile, appropriated the monologizing receiver. A minute later (her brother
with all his defects was a mercifully concise phoner), she, still beaming,
embraced me, and we moved to her bedroom for our last "fairelamourir" as she
called it in her tender aberrant French.
Ivor was to fetch us at seven P.M. I had already put on my old dinner
jacket; Iris stood sideways to the hallway mirror (the best and brightest in
the whole flat) veering gently as she tried to catch a clear view of the
back of her silky dark bob in the hand glass she held at head level.
"If you're ready," she said, "I'd like you to buy some olives. He'll be
coming here after dinner, and he likes them with his `postbrandy.' "
So I went downstairs and crossed the street and shivered (it was a raw
cheerless night) and pushed open the door of the little delicatessen shop
opposite, and a man behind <65> me stopped it from closing with a strong
hand. He wore a trench coat and a beret, his dark face was twitching. I
recognized Lieutenant Starov.
"Ah!" he said. "A whole century we did not meet!" The cloud of his
breath gave off an odd chemical smell. I had once tried sniffing cocaine
(which only made me throw up), but this was some other drug.
He removed a black glove for one of those circumstantial handshakes my
compatriots think proper to use at every entry and exit, and the liberated
door hit him between the shoulder blades.
"Pleasant meeting!" he went on in his curious English (not parading it
as might have seemed but using it by unconscious association). "I see you
are in a smoking. Banquet?"
I bought my olives, replying the while, in Russian, that, yes, my wife
and I were dining out. Then I skipped a farewell handshake, by taking
advantage of the shopgirl's turning to him for the next transaction.
"What a shame," exclaimed Iris--"I wanted the black ones, not the
green! "
I told her I refused to go back for them because I did not want to run
into Starov again.
"Oh, that's a detestable person," she said. "I'm sure he'll try now to
come and see us, hoping for some vaw-dutch-ka. I'm sorry you spoke to him."
She flung the window open and leant out just as Ivor was emerging from
his taxi. She blew him an exuberant kiss and shouted, with illustrative
gestures, that we were coming down.
"How nice it would be," she said as we hurried downstairs, "if you'd be
wearing an opera cloak. You could wrap it around both of us as the Siamese
twins do in your story. Now, quick!"
She dashed into Ivor's arms, and was the next moment in the safety of
the cab. <66>
"Paon d'Or," Ivor told the driver. "Good to see you, old boy," he said
to me, with a distinct American intonation (which I shyly imitated at dinner
until he growled: "Very funny").
The Paon d'Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a nice
clean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it "Pander" or
"Pandora" and always ordered its "putty saw-lay," and that, I guess, is what
we had. I remember more clearly a glazed case hanging on the gold-figured
wall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies, two huge ones
similar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and two smaller ones beneath
them, the left of a sweeter blue with white stripes and the right gloaming
like silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had been caught by a
convict in South America.
"And how's my friend Mata Hari?" inquired Ivor turning to us again, his
spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward
the "bugs" under discussion.
We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed. And what
about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was--
"In fact," Iris continued, touching my wrist, "we've decided to set off
tomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can't join us, Ives, but perhaps you might
come later."
I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision.
Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone who
would snap it up any time. Iris, he said, knew him too: David Geller, the
actor. "He was (turning to me) her first beau before you blundered in. She
must still have somewhere that photo of him and me in Troilus and Cressida
ten years ago. He's Helen of Troy in it. I'm Cressida."
"Lies, lies," murmured Iris.
Ivor described his own house in Los Angeles. He proposed <67>
discussing with me after dinner a script he wished me to prepare based on
Gogol's Inspector (we were back at the start, so to speak). Iris asked for
another helping of whatever it was we were eating.
"You will die," said Ivor. "It's monstrously rich. Remember what Miss
Grunt (a former governess to whom he would assign all kinds of gruesome
apothegms) used to say: `The white worms lie in wait for the glutton.' "
"That's why I want to be burned when I die," remarked Iris.
He ordered a second or third bottle of the indifferent white wine I had
had the polite weakness to praise. We drank to his last film--I forget its
title--which was to be shown tomorrow in London, and later in Paris, he
hoped.
Ivor did not look either very well or very happy; he had developed a
sizable bald spot, freckled. I had never noticed before that his eyelids
were so heavy and his lashes so coarse and pale. Our neighbors, three
harmless Americans, hearty, flushed, vociferous, were, perhaps, not
particularly pleasant, but neither Iris nor I thought Ivor's threat "to make
those Bronxonians pipe down" justified, seeing that he, too, was talking in
fairly resonant tones. I rather looked forward to the end of the dinner--and
to coffee at home--but Iris on the contrary seemed inclined to enjoy every
morsel and drop. She wore a very open, jet-black frock and the long onyx
earrings I had once given her. Her cheeks and arms, without their summer
tan, had the mat whiteness that I was to distribute--perhaps too
generously--among the girls of my future books. Ivor's roving eyes, while he
talked, tended to appraise her bare shoulders, but by the simple trick of
breaking in with some question, I managed to keep confusing the trajectory
of his gaze.
At last the ordeal came to a close. Iris said she would be back in a
minute; her brother suggested we "repair for a leak." I declined--not
because I did not need it--I did--but <68> because I knew by experience that
a talkative neighbor and the sight of his immediate stream would inevitably
afflict me with urinary impotence. As I sat smoking in the lounge of the
restaurant I pondered the wisdom of suddenly transferring the established
habit of work on Camera Lucida to other surroundings, another desk, another
lighting, another pressure of outside calls and smells--and I saw my pages
and notes flash past like the bright windows of an express train that did
not stop at my station. I had decided to talk Iris out of her plan when
brother and sister appeared from opposite sides of the stage, beaming at one
another. She had less than fifteen minutes of life left.
Numbers are bleary along rue Desprиaux, and the taximan missed our
front porch by a couple of house lengths. He suggested reversing his cab,
but impatient Iris had already alighted, and I scrambled out after her,
leaving Ivor to pay the taxi. She cast a look around her; then started to
walk so fast toward our house that I had trouble catching up with her. As I
was about to cup her elbow, I heard Ivor's voice behind me, calling out that
he had not enough change. I abandoned Iris and ran back to Ivor, and just as
I reached the two palm readers, they and I heard Iris cry out something loud
and brave, as if she were driving away a fierce hound. By the light of a
streetlamp we glimpsed the figure of a mackintoshed man stride up to her
from the opposite sidewalk and fire at such close range that he seemed to
prod her with his large pistol. By now our taximan, followed by Ivor and me,
had come near enough to see the killer stumble over her collapsed and curled
up body. Yet he did not try to escape. Instead he knelt down, took off his
beret, threw back his shoulders, and in this ghastly and ludicrous attitude
lifted his pistol to his shaved head.
The story that appeared among other faits-divers in the Paris dailies
after an investigation by the police--whom Ivor and I contrived to mislead
thoroughly--amounted to what follows--I translate: a White Russian, Wladimir
<69> Blagidze, alias Starov, who was subject to paroxysms of insanity, ran
amuck Friday night in the middle of a calm street, opened fire at random,
and after killing with one pistol shot an English tourist Mrs. [name
garbled], who chanced to be passing by, blew his brains out beside her.
Actually he did not die there and then, but retained in his remarkably tough
brainpan fragments of consciousness and somehow lingered on well into May,
which was unusually hot that year. Out of some perverse dream-like
curiosity, Ivor visited him at the very special hospital of the renowned Dr.
Lazareff, a very round, mercilessly round, building on the top of a hill,
thickly covered with horse chestnut, wild rose, and other poignant plants.
The hole in Blagidze's mind had caused a complete set of recent memories to
escape; but the patient remembered quite clearly (according to a Russian
male nurse good at decoding the tales of the tortured) how at six years of
age he was taken to a pleasure park in Italy where a miniature train
consisting of three open cars, each seating six silent children, with a
battery-operated green engine that emitted at realistic intervals puffs of
imitation smoke, pursued a circular course through a brambly picturesque
nightmare grove whose dizzy flowers nodded continuous assent to all the
horrors of childhood and hell.
From somewhere in the Orkneys, Nadezhda Gordonovna and a clerical
friend arrived in Paris only after her husband's burial. Moved by a false
sense of duty, she attempted to see me so as to tell me "everything." I
evaded all contact with her, but she managed to locate Ivor in London before
he left for the States. I never asked him, and the dear funny fellow never
revealed to me what that "everything" was; I refuse to believe that it could
have amounted to much--and I knew enough, anyway. By nature I am not
vindictive; yet I like to dwell in fancy on the image of that little green
train, running on, round and round, forever. <70>
PART TWO
<71> <72>
1
A curious form of self-preservation moves us to get rid, instantly,
irrevocably, of all that belonged to the loved one we lost. Otherwise, the
things she touched every day and kept in their proper context by the act of
handling them start to become bloated with an awful mad life of their own.
Her dresses now wear their own selves, her books leaf through their own
pages. We suffocate in the tightening circle of those monsters that are
misplaced and misshapen because she is not there to tend them. And even the
bravest among us cannot meet the gaze of her mirror.
How to get rid of them is another problem. I could not drown them like
kittens; in fact, I could not drown a kitten, let alone her brush or bag.
Nor could I watch a stranger collect them, take them away, come back for
more. Therefore, I simply abandoned the flat, telling the maid to dispose in
any manner she chose of all those unwanted things. Unwanted! At the moment
of parting they appeared quite normal and harmless; I would even say they
looked taken aback.
At first I tried putting up in a third-rate hotel in the center of
Paris. I would fight terror and solitude by working all day. I completed one
novel, began another, wrote forty poems (all robbers and brothers under
their motley <73> skin), a dozen short stories, seven essays, three
devastating reviews, one parody. The business of not losing my mind during
the night was taken care of by swallowing an especially potent pill or
buying a bedmate.
I remember a dangerous dawn in May (1931? or 1932?); all the birds
(mostly sparrows) were singing as in Heine's month of May, with demonic
monotonous force--that's why I know it must have been a wonderful May
morning. I lay with my face to the wall and in a muddled ominous way
considered the question should "we" not drive earlier than usual to Villa
Iris. An obstacle, however, kept preventing me from undertaking that
journey: the car and the house had been sold, so Iris had told me herself at
the Protestant cemetery, because the masters of her faith and fate
interdicted cremation. I turned in bed from the wall to the window, and Iris
was lying with her dark head to me on the window side of the bed. I kicked
off the bedclothes. She was naked, save for her black-stockinged legs (which
was strange but at the same time recalled something from a parallel world,
for my mind stood astride on two circus horses). In an erotic footnote, I
reminded myself for the ten thousandth time to mention somewhere that there
is nothing more seductive than a girl's back with the profiled rise of the
haunch accentuated by her lying sidelong, one leg slightly bent. "J'ai
froid," said the girl as I touched her shoulder.
The Russian term for any kind of betrayal, faithlessness, breach of
trust, is the snaky, watered-silk word izmena which is based on the idea of
change, shift, transformation. This derivation had never occurred to me in
my constant thoughts about Iris, but now it struck me as the revelation of a
bewitchment, of a nymph's turning into a whore--and this called for an
immediate and vociferous protest. One neighbor thumped the wall, another
rattled the door. The frightened girl, snatching up her handbag and my
raincoat, bolted out of the room, and a bearded individual <74> entered
instead, farcically clad in a nightshirt and wearing rubbers on his bare
feet. The crescendo of my cries, cries of rage and distress, ended in a
hysterical fit. I think some attempt was made to whisk me off to a hospital.
In any case, I had to find another home sans tarder, a phrase I cannot hear
without a spasm of anguish by mental association with her lover's letter.
A small patch of countryside kept floating before my eyes like some
photic illusion. I let my index finger stray at random over a map of
northern France; the point of its nail stopped at the town of Petiver or
Pиtit Ver, a small worm or verse, which sounded idyllic. An autobus took me
to a road station not very far from Orlиans, I believe. All I remember of my
abode is its oddly slanting floor which corresponded to a slant in the
ceiling of the cafe under my room. I also remember a pastel-green park to
the east of the town, and an old castle. The summer I spent there is a mere
smudge of color on the dull glass of my mind; but I did write a few
poems--at least one of which, about a company of acrobats staging a show on
the church square, has been reprinted a number of times in the course of
forty years.
When I returned to Paris I found that my kind friend Stepan Ivanovich
Stepanov, a prominent journalist of independent means (he was one of those
very few lucky Russians who had happened to transfer themselves and their
money abroad before the Bolshevik coup), had not only organized my second or
third public reading (vecher, "evening," was the Russian term consecrated to
that kind of performance) but wanted me to stay in one of the ten rooms of
his spacious old-fashioned house (Avenue Koch? Roche? It abuts, or abutted,
on the statue of a general whose name escapes me but surely lurks somewhere
among my old notes).
Its residents were at the moment old Mr. and Mrs. Stepanov, their
married daughter Baroness Borg, her <75> eleven-year-old child (the Baron, a
businessman, had been sent by his firm to England), and Grigoriy Reich
(1899-1942?), a gentle, melancholy, lean, young poet, of no talent whatever,
who under the pen name of Lunin contributed a weekly elegy to the Novosti
and acted as Stepanov's secretary.
I could not avoid coming down in the evenings to join the frequent
gatherings of literary and political personages in the ornate salon or in
the dining room with its huge oblong table and the oil portrait en pied of
the Stepanovs' young son who had died in 1920 while trying to save a
drowning schoolmate. Nearsighted, gruffly jovial Alexander Kerenski would
usually be there, brusquely raising his eyeglass to stare at a stranger or
greeting an old friend with a ready quip in that rasping voice of his, most
of its strength lost years ago in the roar of the Revolution. Ivan
Shipogradov, eminent novelist and recent Nobel Prize winner, would also be
present, radiating talent and charm, and--after a few jiggers of
vodka--delighting his intimates with the kind of Russian bawdy tale that
depends for its artistry on the rustic gusto and fond respect with which it
treats our most private organs. A far less engaging figure was I. A.
Shipogradov's old rival, a fragile little man in a sloppy suit, Vasiliy
Sokolovski (oddly nicknamed "Jeremy" by I.A.), who since the dawn of the
century had been devoting volume after volume to the mystical and social
history of a Ukrainian clan that had started as a humble family of three in
the sixteenth century but by volume six (1920) had become a whole village,
replete with folklore and myth. It was good to see old Morozov's rough-hewn
clever face with its shock of dingy hair and bright frosty eyes; and for a
special reason I closely observed podgy dour Basilevski--not because he had
just had or was about to have a row with his young mistress, a feline beauty
who wrote doggerel verse and vulgarly flirted with me, but because I hoped
he had already seen the fun I had made of <76> him in the last issue of a
literary review in which we both collaborated. Although his English was
inadequate for the interpretation of, say, Keats (whom he defined as "a
pre-Wildean aesthete in the beginning of the Industrial Era") Basilevski was
fond of attempting just that. In discussing recently the "not altogether
displeasing preciosity" of my own stuff, he had imprudently quoted a popular
line from Keats, rendering it as:
Vsegda nas raduet krasivaya veshchitsa
which in retranslation gives:
"A pretty bauble always gladdens us."
Our conversation, however, turned out to be much too brief to disclose
whether or not he had appreciated my amusing lesson. He asked me what I
thought of the new book he was telling Morozov (a monolinguist)
about--namely Maurois' "impressive work on Byron," and upon my answering
that I had found it to be impressive trash, my austere critic muttered, "I
don't think you have read it," and went on educating the serene old poet.
I would steal away long before the party broke up. The sounds of
farewells usually reached me as I glided into insomnia.
I spent most of the day working, ensconced in a deep armchair, with my
implements conveniently resting before me on a special writing board
provided by my host, a great lover of handy knickknacks. Somehow or other I
had started to gain weight since my bereavement and by now had to make two
or three lurching efforts in order to leave my overaffectionate seat. Only
one little person visited me; for her I kept my door slightly ajar. The
board's proximal edge had a thoughtful incurvature to accommodate an
author's abdomen, and the distal side was equipped <77> with clamps and
rubberbands to hold papers and pencils in place; I got so used to those
comforts that I regretted ungratefully the absence of toilet fixtures--such
as one of those hollow canes said to be used by Orientals.
Every afternoon, at the same hour, a silent push opened the door wider,
and the granddaughter of the Stepanovs brought in a tray with a large glass
of strong tea and a plate of ascetic zwiebacks. She advanced, eyes bent,
moving carefully her white-socked, blue-sneakered feet; coming to a near
stop when the tea tossed; and advancing again with the slow steps of a
clockwork doll. She had flaxen hair and a freckled nose, and I chose the
gingham frock with the glossy black belt for her to wear when I had her
continue her mysterious progress right into the book I was writing, The Red
Top Hat, in which she becomes graceful little Amy, the condemned man's
ambiguous consoler.
Those were nice, nice interludes! One could hear the Baroness and her
mother playing ю quatre mains in the salon downstairs as they had played and
replayed, no doubt, for the last fifteen years. I had a box of
chocolate-coated biscuits to supplement the zwiebacks and tempt my little
visitor. The writing board was put aside and replaced by her folded limbs.
She spoke Russian fluently but with Parisian interjections and interrogatory
sounds, and those bird notes lent something eerie to the responses I
obtained, as she dangled one leg and bit her biscuit, to the ordinary
questions one puts to a child; and then quite suddenly in the midst of our
chat, she would wriggle out of my arms and make for the door as if somebody
were summoning her, though actually the piano kept stumbling on and on in
the homely course of a family happiness in which I had no part and which, in
fact, I had never known.
My stay at the Stepanovs' had been supposed to last a couple of weeks;
it lasted two months. At first I felt comparatively well, or at least
comfortable and refreshed, but a new sleeping pill which had worked so well
at its beguiling <78> stage began refusing to cope with certain reveries
which, as suggested subsequently by an incredible sequel, I should have
succumbed to like a man and got done with no matter how; instead of that I
took advantage of Dolly's removal to England to find a new dwelling for my
miserable carcass. This was a bed-sitting-room in a shabby but quiet
tenement house on the Left Bank, "at the corner of rue St. Supplice," says
my pocket diary with grim imprecision. An ancient cupboard of sorts
contained a primitive shower bath; but there were no other facilities. Going
out two or three times a day for a meal, or a cup of coffee, or an
extravagant purchase at a delicatessen, afforded me a small distraction. In
the next block I found a cinema that specialized in old horse operas and a
tiny brothel with four whores ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-eight,
the youngest being also the plainest.
I was to spend many years in Paris, tied to that dismal city by the
threads of a Russian writer's livelihood. Nothing then, and nothing now, in
backcast, had or has for me any of the spell that enthralled my compatriots.
I am not thinking of the blood spot on the darkest stone of its darkest
street; that is hors-concours in the way of horror; I just mean that I
regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the
chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the
colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk
lamp awaiting me in my humble home. <79>
2
Since 1925 I had written and published four novels; by the beginning of
1934 I was on the point of completing my fifth, Krasnyy Tsilindr (The Red
Top Hat), the story of a beheading. None of those books exceeded ninety
thousand words but my method of choosing and blending them could hardly be
called a timesaving expedient.
A first draft, made in pencil, filled several blue cahiers of the kind
used in schools, and upon reaching the saturation point of revision
presented a chaos of smudges and scriggles. To this corresponded the
disorder of the text which followed a regular sequence only for a few pages,
being then interrupted by some chunky passage that belonged to a later, or
earlier, part of the story. After sorting out and repaginating all this, I
applied myself to the next stage: the fair copy. It was tidily written with
a fountain pen in a fat and sturdy exercise book or ledger. Then an orgy of
new corrections would blot out by degrees all the pleasure of specious
perfection. A third phase started where legibility stopped. Poking with slow
and rigid fingers at the keys of my trusty old mashinka ("machine"), Count
Starov's wedding present, I would be able to type some three hundred words
in one hour instead of the round <80> thousand with which some popular
novelist of the previous century could cram it in longhand.
In the case of The Red Top Hat, however, the neuralgic aches which had
been spreading through my frame like an inner person of pain, all angles and
claws, for the last three years, had now attained my extremities, and made
the task of typing a fortunate impossibility. By economizing on my favorite
nutriments, such as foie gras and Scotch whisky, and postponing the making
of a new suit, I calculated that my modest income allowed me to hire an
expert typist, to whom I would dictate my corrected manuscript during, say,
thirty carefully planned afternoons. I therefore inserted a prominent
wanter, with name and telephone, in the Novosti.
Among the three or four typists who offered their services, I chose
Lyubov Serafimovna Savich, the granddaughter of a country priest and the
daughter of a famous SR (Social Revolutionist) who had recently died in
Meudon upon completing his biography of Alexander the First (a tedious work
in two volumes entitled The Monarch and the Mystic, now available to
American students in an indifferent translation. Harvard, 1970).
Lyuba Savich started working for me on February 1, 1934. She came as
often as necessary and was willing to stay any number of hours (the record
she set on an especially memorable occasion was from one to eight). Had
there been a Miss Russia and had the age of prize misses been prolonged to
just under thirty, beautiful Lyuba would have won the title. She was a tall
woman with slim ankles, big breasts, broad shoulders, and a pair of gay blue
eyes in a round rosy face. Her auburn hair must have always felt as being in
a state of imminent disarray for she constantly stroked its side wave, in a
graceful elbow-raised gesture, when talking to me. Zdraste, and once more
zdraste, Lyubov Serafimovna--and, oh, what a delightful amalgam that <81>
was, with lyubov meaning "love," and Serafim ("seraph") being the Christian
name of a reformed terrorist!
As a typist L.S. was magnificent. Hardly had I finished dictating one
sentence, as I paced back and forth, than it had reached her furrow like a
handful of grain, and with one eyebrow raised she was already looking at me,
waiting for the next strewing. If a sudden alteration for the better
occurred to me in mid session, I preferred not to spoil the wonderful
give-and-take rhythm of our joint work by introducing painful pauses of word
weighing--especially enervating and sterile when a self-conscious author is
aware that the bright lady at the waiting typewriter is longing to come up
with a helpful suggestion; I contented myself therefore with marking the
passage in my manuscript so as later to desecrate with my scrawl her
immaculate creation; but she was only glad, of course, to retype the page at
her leisure.
We usually had a ten-minute break around four--or four-thirty if I
could not rein in snorting Pegasus on the dot. She would retire for a
minute, closing one door after another with a really unearthly gentleness,
to the humble toilettes across the corridor, and would reappear, just as
silently, with a repowdered nose and a repainted smile, and I would have
ready for her a glass of vin ordinaire and a pink gaufrette. It was during
those innocent intervals that there began a certain thematic movement on the
part of fate.
Would I like to know something? (Dilatory sip and lip lick.) Well, at
all my five public readings since the first on September 3, 1928, in the
Salle Planiol, she had been present, she had applauded till her palms
(showing palms) ached, and had made up her mind that next time she'd be
smart and plucky enough to push her way through the crowd (yes, crowd--no
need to smile ironically) with the firm intention of clasping my hand and
pouring out her soul in a single word, which, however, she could never <82>
find--and that's why, inexorably, she would always be left standing and
beaming like a fool in the middle of the vacated hall. Would I despise her
for having an album with reviews of my books pasted in--Morozov's and
Yablokov's lovely essays as well as the trash of such hacks as Boris Nyet,
and Boyarski? Did I know it was she who had left that mysterious bunch of
irises on the spot where the urn with my wife's ashes had been interred four
years ago? Could I imagine that she could recite by heart every poem I had
published in the иmigrи press of half-a-dozen countries? Or that she
remembered thousands of enchanting minutiae scattered through all my novels
such as the mallard's quack-quack (in Tamara) "which to the end of one's
life would taste of Russian black bread because one had shared it with ducks
in one's childhood," or the chess set (in Pawn Takes Queen) with a missing
Knight "replaced by some sort of counter, a little orphan from another,
unknown, game?"
All this was spread over several sessions and distilled very cunningly,
and already by the end of February when a copy of The Red Top Hat, an
impeccable typescript, lapped in an opulent envelope, had been delivered by
hand (hers again) to the offices of Patria (the foremost Russian magazine in
Paris), I felt enmeshed in a bothersome web.
Not only had I never experienced the faintest twinge of desire in
regard to beautiful Lyuba, but the indifference of my senses was turning to
positive repulsion. The softer her glances fluttered, the more ungentlemanly
my reaction became. Her very refinement had a dainty edge of vulgarity that
infested with the sweetness of decay her entire personality. I began to
notice with growing irritation such pathetic things as her odor, a quite
respectable perfume (Adoration, I think) precariously overlaying the natural
smell of a Russian maiden's seldom bathed body: for an hour or so Adoration
still held, but after that the underground would start to conduct more and
more frequent <83> forays, and when she raised her arms to put on her
hat--but never mind, she was a well-meaning creature, and I hope she is a
happy grandmother today.
I would be a cad to describe our last meeting (March 1 of the same
year). Suffice it to say that in the middle of typing a rhymed Russian
translation that I had made of Keats' To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness") she broke down, and tormented me till at least eight P.M.
with her confessions and tears. When at last she left, I lost another hour
composing a detailed letter asking her never to come back. Incidentally, it
was the first time that an unfinished leaf was left by her in my typewriter.
I removed it and rediscovered it several weeks later among my papers, and
then deliberately preserved it because it was Annette who completed the job,
with a couple of typos and an x-ed erasure in the last lines--and something
about the juxtaposition appealed to my combinational slant. <84>
3
In this memoir my wives and my books are interlaced monogrammatically
like some sort of watermark or ex libris design; and in writing this oblique
autobiography--oblique, because dealing mainly not with pedestrian history
but with the mirages of romantic and literary matters--I consistently try to
dwell as lightly as inhumanly possible on the evolution of my mental
illness. Yet Dementia is one of the characters in my story.
By the mid-Thirties little had changed in my health since the first
half of 1922 and its awful torments. My battle with factual, respectable
life still consisted of sudden delusions, sudden
reshufflings--kaleidoscopic, stained-glass reshufflings!--of fragmented
space. I still felt Gravity, that infernal and humiliating contribution to
our perceptual world, grow into me like a monstrous toenail in stabs and
wedges of intolerable pain (incomprehensible to the happy simpleton who
finds nothing fantastic and agonizing in the escape of a pencil or penny
under something--under the desk on which one will live, under the bed on
which one will die). I still could not cope with the abstraction of
direction in space, so that any given stretch of the world was either
permanently "right-hand" or permanently "left-hand," or at best the one
could be changed to the other <85> only by a spine-dislocating effort of the
will. Oh, how things and people tortured me, my dear heart, I could not tell
you! In point of fact you were not yet even born.
Sometime in the mid-Thirties, in black accursed Paris, I remember
visiting a distant relative of mine (a niece of the LATH lady!). She was a
sweet old stranger. She sat all day in a straight-back armchair exposed to
the continuous attacks of three, four, more than four, deranged children,
whom she was paid (by the Destitute Russian Noblewomen's Aid Association) to
watch, while their parents were working in places not so dreadful and dreary
in themselves as dreary and difficult to reach by public conveyance. I sat
on an old hassock at her feet. Her talk flowed on and on, smooth,
untroubled, reflecting the image of radiant days, serenity, wealth,
goodness. Yet all the time this or that poor little monster with a slavering
mouth and a squint would move upon her from behind a screen or a table and
rock her chair or clutch at her skirt. When the squealing became too loud
she would only wince a little which hardly affected her reminiscent smile.
She kept a kind of fly whisk within easy reach and this she occasionally
brandished to chase away the bolder aggressors; but all the time, all the
time, she continued her purling soliloquy and I understood that I, too,
should ignore the rude turmoil and din around her.
I submit that my life, my plight, the voice of words that was my sole
joy and the secret struggle with the wrong shape of things, bore some
resemblance to that poor lady's predicament. And mind you, those were my
best days, with only a pack of grimacing goblins to hold at bay.
The zest, the strength, the clarity of my art remained unimpaired--at
least to a certain extent. I enjoyed, I persuaded myself to enjoy, the
solitude of work and that other, even more subtle solitude, the solitude of
an author facing, from behind the bright shield of his manuscript, an
amorphous audience, barely visible in its dark pit. <86>
The jumble of spatial obstacles separating my bedside lamp from the
illumined islet of a public lectern was abolished by the magic of thoughtful
friends who helped me to get to this or that remote hall without my having
to tussle with horribly small and thin, sticky, bus-ticket slips or to
venture into the thunderous maze of the Mиtro. As soon as I was safely
platformed with my typed or handwritten sheets at breastbone level on the
desk before me, I forgot all about the presence of three hundred
eavesdroppers. A decanter of watered vodka, my only lectorial whim, was also
my only link with the material universe. Similar to a painter's spotlight on
the brown brow of some ecstatical ecclesiastic at the moment of divine
revelation, the radiance enclosing me brought out with oracular accuracy
every imperfection in my text. A memoirist has noted that not only did I
slow down now and then while unclipping a pencil and replacing a comma by a
semicolon, but that I had been known to stop and frown over a sentence and
reread it, and cross it out, and insert a correction and "re-mouth the whole
passage with a kind of defiant complacency."
My handwriting was good in fair copies, but I felt more comfortable
with a typescript before me, and I was again without an expert typist. To
insert the same wanter in the same paper would have been foolhardy: what if
it were to bring back Lyuba, flushed with renewed hope, and rewind that
damned cycle all over again?
I rang up Stepanov, thinking he might help; he guessed he could, and
after a muffled confabulation with his fussy wife, just on the brim of the
membrane (all I made out was "mad people are unpredictable"), she took over.
They knew a very decent girl who had worked at the Russian nursery school
"Passy na Rousi" to which Dolly had gone four or five years ago. The girl's
name was Anna Ivanovna Blagovo. Did I know Oksman, the owner of the Russian
bookshop on rue Cuvier? <87>
"Yes, slightly. But I want to ask you--"
"Well," she went on, interrupting me, "Annette sekretarstvovala for him
while his regular typist was hospitalized, but she is now quite well again,
and you might--"
"That's fine," I said, "but I want to ask you, Berta Abramovna, why did
you accuse me of being an `unpredictable madman'? I can assure you that I am
not in the habit of raping young women--"
"Gospod' s vami, golubchik! (What an idea, my dear!)" exclaimed Mrs.
Stepanov and proceeded to explain that she had been scolding her
absentminded husband for sitting down on her new handbag when attending to
the telephone.
Although I did not believe one word of her version (too quick! too
glib!), I pretended to accept it and promised to look up her bookseller. A
few minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it
(at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most
soothing voyeuse imaginable), Berta Stepanov telephoned to say that the
oxman (what a shiver my Iris derived from Dr. Moreau's island
zoo--especially from such bits as the "screaming shape," still
half-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would be up till dawn in his shop,
among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), that
I was a noctambule, so perhaps I might like to stroll over to the Boyan
Bookshop sans tarder, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.
After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings of
insomnia and a walk to rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where according
to police statistics an average of forty foreigners and God knows how many
unfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced the
least urge to commit suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in any
light). But I must admit that on that particular night on the fourth or
fifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling's death, I must have <88> looked
pretty suspect, in my black suit and dramatic muffler, to an average
policeman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign when
a hatless person sobs as he walks, being moved not by lines he might have
composed himself but by something he hideously mistakes for his own and
presently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:
Zvezdoobraznost' nebesnyh zvyozd
Vidish' tol'ko skvoz' slyozy...
(Heavenly stars are seen as stellate
only through tears.)
I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than the
ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endless
fence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose light
would delicately select for its heart-piercing game overhead a young
emerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night,
and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the
nonidentical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life,
somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to
impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be
incomparably greater, healthier, and cruder than your obedient servant. <89>
4
The "Boyan" publishing firm (Morozov's and mine was the "Bronze
Horseman," its main rival), with a bookshop (selling not only иmigrи
editions but also tractor novels from Moscow) and a lending library,
occupied a smart three-story house of the hтtel particulier type. In my day
it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the vista of
reverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a group
of stone nymphs. The house had belonged to the Merlin de Malaune family and
had been acquired at the turn of the century by a Russian cosmopolitan,
Dmitri de Midoff who with his friend S. I. Stepanov established there the
headquarters of an antidespotic conspiracy. The latter liked to recall the
sign language of old-fashioned rebellion: the half-drawn curtain and
alabaster vase revealed in the drawing-room window so as to indicate to the
expected guest from Russia that the way was clear. An aesthetic touch graced
revolutionary intrigues in those years. Midoff died soon after World War
One, and by that time the Terrorist party, to which those cozy people
belonged, had lost its "stylistic appeal" as Stepanov himself put it. I do
not know who later acquired the house or how it happened that Oks (Osip
Lvovich Oksman, 1885?--1943?) rented it for his business. <90>
The house was dark except for three windows: two adjacent rectangles of
light in the middle of the upper-floor row, d8 and e8, Continental notation
(where the letter denotes the file and the number the rank of a chess
square) and another light just below at e7. Good God, had I forgotten at
home the note I had scribbled for the unknown Miss Blagovo? No, it was still
there in my breast pocket under the old, treasured, horribly hot and long
T...
