Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
страница №5
... any beetle can have, but certain excruciatingtearings of secret tissues did take place in me. The Russian typewriter was
closed like a coffin. The end of The Dare had been delivered to Patria.
Annette and I planned to go in the spring to England (a plan never executed)
and in the summer of 1939 to America (where she was to die fourteen years
later). By the middle of 19381 felt I could sit back and quietly enjoy both
the private praise bestowed upon me by Andoverton and Lodge in their letters
and the public accusations of aristocratic obscurity which facetious
criticules in the Sunday papers directed at the style of such passages in
the English versions of my two novels as had been authored by me alone. It
was, however, quite a different matter "to work without net" (as Russian
acrobats say), when attempting to compose a novel straight in English, for
now there was no Russian safety net spread below, between me and the lighted
circlet of the arena.
As was also to happen in regard to my next English books (including the
present sketch), the title of my first one came to me at the moment of
impregnation, long before actual birth and growth. Holding that name to the
light, I distinguished the entire contents of the semitransparent <120>
capsule. The title was to be without any choice or change: See under Real. A
preview of its eventual tribulations in the catalogues of public libraries
could not have deterred me.
The idea may have been an oblique effect of the insult dealt by the two
bunglers to my careful art. An English novelist, a brilliant and unique
performer, was supposed to have recently died. The story of his life was
being knocked together by the uninformed, coarse-minded, malevolent Hamlet
Godman, an Oxonian Dane, who found in this grotesque task a Kovalevskian
"outlet" for the literary flops that his proper mediocrity fully deserved.
The biography was being edited, rather unfortunately for its reckless
concocter, by the indignant brother of the dead novelist. As the opening
chapter unfolded its first reptilian coil (with insinuations of
"masturbation guilt" and the castration of toy soldiers) there commenced
what was to me the delight and the magic of my book: fraternal footnotes,
half-a-dozen lines per page, then more, then much more, which started to
question, then refute, then demolish by ridicule the would-be biographer's
doctored anecdotes and vulgar inventions. A multiplication of such notes at
the bottom of the page led to an ominous increase (no doubt disturbing to
clubby or convalescent readers) of astronomical symbols bespeckling the
text. By the end of the biographee's college years the height of the
critical apparatus had reached one third of each page. Editorial warnings of
a national disaster--flooded fields and so on--accompanied a further rise of
the water line. By page 200 the footnote material had crowded out
three-quarters of the text and the type of the note had changed,
psychologically at least (I loathe typographical frolics in books) from
brevier to long primer. In the course of the last chapters the commentary
not only replaced the entire text but finally swelled to boldface. "We
witness here the admirable phenomenon of a bogus <121> biographie romancиe
being gradually supplanted by the true story of a great man's life." For
good measure I appended a three-page account of the great annotator's
academic career: "He now teaches Modern Literature, including his brother's
works, at Paragon University, Oregon."
This is the description of a novel written almost forty-five years ago
and probably forgotten by the general public. I have never reread it because
I reread (je relis, perechityvayu--I'm teasing an adorable mistress!) only
the page proofs of my paperbacks; and for reasons which, I am sure, J. Lodge
finds judicious, the thing is still in its hard-cover instar. But in rosy
retrospect I feel it as a pleasurable event, and have completely dissociated
it in my mind from the terrors and torments that attended the writing of
that rather lightweight little satire.
Actually, its composition, despite the pleasure (maybe also noxious)
that the iridescent bubbles in my alembics gave me after a night of
inspiration, trial, and triumph (look at the harlequins, everybody
look--Iris, Annette, Bel, Louise, and you, you, my ultimate and immortal
one!), almost led to the dementia paralytica that I feared since youth.
In the world of athletic games there has never been, I think, a World
Champion of Lawn Tennis and Ski; yet in two Literatures, as dissimilar as
grass and snow, I have been the first to achieve that kind of feat. I do not
know (being a complete non-athlete, whom the sports pages of a newspaper
bore almost as much as does its kitchen section) what physical stress may be
involved in serving one day a sequence of thirty-six aces at sea level and
on the next soaring from a ski jump 136 meters through bright mountain air.
Colossal, no doubt, and, perhaps, inconceivable. But I have managed to
transcend the rack and the wrench of literary metamorphosis.
We think in images, not in words; all right; when, however, we compose,
recall, or refashion at midnight in our <122> brain something we wish to say
in tomorrow's sermon, or have said to Dolly in a recent dream, or wish we
had said to that impertinent proctor twenty years ago, the images we think
in are, of course, verbal--and even audible if we happen to be lonely and
old. We do not usually think in words, since most of life is mimodrama, but
we certainly do imagine words when we need them, just as we imagine
everything else capable of being perceived in this, or even in a still more
unlikely, world. The book in my mind appeared at first, under my right cheek
(I sleep on my non-cardial side), as a varicolored procession with a head
and a tail, winding in a general western direction through an attentive
town. The children among you and all my old selves on their thresholds were
being promised a stunning show. I then saw the show in full detail with
every scene in its place, every trapeze in the stars. Yet it was not a
masque, not a circus, but a bound book, a short novel in a tongue as far
removed as Thracian or Pahlavi from the fata-morganic prose that I had
willed into being in the desert of exile. An upsurge of nausea overcame me
at the thought of imagining a hundred-thousand adequate words and I switched
on the light and called to Annette in the adjacent bedroom to give me one of
my strictly rationed tablets.
The evolution of my English, like that of birds, had had its ups and
downs. A beloved Cockney nurse had looked after me from 1900 (when I was one
year old) to 1903. She was followed by a succession of three English
governesses (1903-1906, 1907-1909, and November, 1909, to Christmas of the
same year) whom I see over the shoulder of time as representing,
mythologically, Didactic Prose, Dramatic Poetry, and the Erotic Idyll. My
grand-aunt, a dear person with uncommonly liberal views, gave in, however,
to domestic considerations, and discharged Cherry Neaple, my last
shepherdess. After an interlude of Russian and French pedagogy, two English
tutors more or less <123> succeeded each other between 1912 and 1916, rather
comically overlapping in the spring of 1914 when they competed for the
favors of a young village beauty who had been my girl in the first place.
English fairy tales had been replaced around 1910 by the B.O.P., immediately
followed by all the Tauchnitz volumes that had accumulated in the family
libraries. Throughout adolescence I read, in pairs, and both with the same
rich thrill, Othello and Onegin, Tyutchev and Tennyson, Browning and Blok.
During my three Cambridge years (1919-1922) and thereafter, till April 23,
1930, my domestic tongue remained English, while the body of my own Russian
works started to grow and was soon to disorb my household gods.
So far so good. But the phrase itself is a glib clichи; and the
question confronting me in Paris, in the late Thirties, was precisely could
I fight off the formula and rip up the ready-made, and switch from my
glorious self-developed Russian, not to the dead leaden English of the high
seas with dummies in sailor suits, but an English I alone would be
responsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light?
I daresay the description of my literary troubles will be skipped by
the common reader; yet for my sake, rather than his, I wish to dwell
mercilessly on a situation that was bad enough before I left Europe but
almost killed me during the crossing.
Russian and English had existed for years in my mind as two worlds
detached from one another. (It is only today that some interspatial contact
has been established: "A knowledge of Russian," writes George Oakwood in his
astute essay on my Ardis, 1970, "will help you to relish much of the
wordplay in the most English of the author's English novels; consider for
instance this: `The champ and the chimp came all the way from Omsk to
Neochomsk.' What a delightful link between a real round place and <124>
`ni-o-chyom,' the About-Nothing land of modern philosophic linguistics!") I
was acutely aware of the syntactic gulf separating their sentence
structures. I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that my
allegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship.
Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English from
the free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in their
Russian counterpart (which Ian Bunyan has so amusingly compared in last
Sunday's NYT to "a dance of the veil performed by a plump graceful lady in a
circle of cheering drunks"). The fantastic number of natural-looking nouns
that the British and the Americans apply in lovely technical senses to very
specific objects also distressed me. What is the exact term for the little
cup in which you place the diamond you want to cut? (We call it "dop," the
pupal case of a butterfly, replied my informer, an old Boston jeweler who
sold me the ring for my third bride). Is there not a nice special word for a
pigling? ("I am toying with `snork' said Professor Noteboke, the best
translator of Gogol's immortal The Carrick). I want the right word for the
break in a boy's voice at puberty, I said to an amiable opera basso in the
adjacent deck chair during my first transatlantic voyage. ("I think, he
said, "it's called `ponticello,' a small bridge, un petit pont, mostik...
Oh, you're Russian too?")
The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing, in a
charming New York apartment (it was leant to Annette and me by a generous
relative of mine and faced the sunset flaming beyond Central Park). The
neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid
black headache that no pill could pierce. Annette rang up James Lodge, and
he, out of the misdirected kindness of his heart, had an old little
physician of Russian extraction examine me. The poor fellow drove me even
crazier than I was by not only insisting on discussing <125> my symptoms in
an execrable version of the language I was trying to shed, but on
translating into it various irrelevant terms used by the Viennese Quack and
his apostles (simbolizirovanie, mortidnik). Yet his visit, I must confess,
strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda. <126>
PART THREE
<127> <128>
1
Neither Slaughter in the Sun (as the English translation of Camera
Lucida got retitled while I lay helplessly hospitalized in New York) nor The
Red Topper sold well. My ambitious, beautiful, strange See under Real shone
for a breathless instant on the lowest rung of the bestseller list in a West
Coast paper, and vanished for good. In those circumstances I could not
refuse the lectureship offered me in 1940 by Quirn University on the
strength of my European reputation. I was to develop a plump tenure there
and expand into a Full Professor by 1950 or 1955: I can't find the exact
date in my old notes.
Although I was adequately remunerated for my two weekly lectures on
European Masterpieces and one Thursday seminar on Joyce's Ulysses (from a
yearly 5000 dollars in the beginning to 15,000 in the Fifties) and had
furthermore several splendidly paid stories accepted by The Beau and the
Butterfly, the kindest magazine in the world, I was not really comfortable
until my Kingdom by the Sea (1962) atoned for a fraction of the loss of my
Russian fortune (1917) and bundled away all financial worries till the end
of worrisome time. I do not usually preserve cuttings of adverse criticism
and envious abuse; but I do treasure the following definition: "This is the
only known case <129> in history when a European pauper ever became his own
American uncle [amerikanskiy dyadyushka, oncle d'Amиrique]," so phrased by
my faithful Zoilus, Demian Basilevski; he was one of the very few larger
saurians in the иmigrи marshes who followed me in 1939 to the hospitable and
altogether admirable U.S.A., where with egg-laying promptness he founded a
Russian-language quarterly which he is still directing today, thirty-five
years later, in his heroic dotage.
The furnished apartment we finally rented on the upper floor of a
handsome house (10 Buffalo St.) was much to my liking because of an
exceptionally comfortable study with a great bookcase full of works on
American lore including an encyclopedia in twenty volumes. Annette would
have preferred one of the dacha-like structures which the Administration
also showed us; but she gave in when I pointed out to her that what looked
snug and quaint in summer was bound to be chilly and weird the rest of the
year.
Annette's emotional health caused me anxiety: her graceful neck seemed
even longer and thinner. An expression of mild melancholy lent a new,
unwelcome, beauty to her Botticellian face: its hollowed outline below the
zygoma was accentuated by her increasing habit of sucking in her cheeks when
hesitative or pensive. All her cold petals remained closed in our infrequent
lovemaking. Her abstraction grew perilous: stray cats at night knew that the
same erratic deity that had not shut the kitchen window would leave ajar the
door of the fridge; her bath regularly overflowed while she telephoned,
knitting her innocent brows (what on earth did she care for my pains, my
welling insanity!), to find out how the first-floor person's migraine or
menopause was faring; and that vagueness of hers in relation to me was also
responsible for her omitting a precaution she was supposed to take, so that
by the autumn, which followed our moving into the accursed Langley <130>
house, she informed me that the doctor she had just consulted looked the
very image of Oksman and that she was two-months pregnant.
An angel is now waiting under my restless heels. Doomful despair would
invade my poor Annette when she tried to cope with the intricacies of an
American household. Our landlady, who occupied the first floor, resolved her
perplexities in a jiffy. Two ravishing wiggly-bottomed Bermudian coeds,
wearing their national costume, flannel shorts and open shirts, and
practically twins in appearance, who took the celebrated "Hotel" course at
Quirn, came to cook and char for her, and she offered to share with us their
services.
"She's a veritable angel," confided Annette to me in her touchingly
phony English.
I recognized in the woman the Assistant Professor of Russian whom I had
met in a brick building on the campus when the head of her remarkably dreary
department, meek myopic old Noteboke, invited me to attend an Advanced Group
Class (My govorim po-russki. Vy govorite? Pogovorimte togda--that kind of
awful stuff). Happily I had no connection whatever with Russian grammar at
Quirn--except that my wife was eventually saved from utter boredom by being
engaged to help beginners under Mrs. Langley's direction.
Ninel Ilinishna Langley, a displaced person in more senses than one,
had recently left her husband, the "great" Langley, author of A Marxist
History of America, the bible (now out of print) of a whole generation of
morons. I do not know the reason of their separation (after one year of
American Sex, as the woman told Annette, who relayed the information to me
in a tone of idiotic condolence); but I did have the occasion of seeing and
disliking Professor Langley at an official dinner on the eve of his
departure for Oxford. I disliked him for his daring to question my teaching
Ulysses my way--in a purely textual <131> light, without organic allegories
and quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe; his "Marxism," on the other
hand, was a pleasantly comic and very mild affair (too mild, perhaps, for
his wife's taste) compared to the general attitude of ignorant admiration
which American intellectuals had toward Soviet Russia. I remember the sudden
hush, and furtive exchange of incredulous grimaces, when at a party, given
for me by the most eminent member of our English department, I described the
Bolshevist state as Philistine in repose and bestial in action;
internationally vying in rapacious deceit with the praying mantis; doctoring
the mediocrity of its literature by first sparing a few talents left over
from a previous period and then blotting them out with their own blood. One
professor, a left-wing moralist and dedicated muralist (he was experimenting
that year with automobile paint), stalked out of the house. He wrote me next
day, however, a really magnificent, larger-than-nature letter of apology
saying that he could not be really cross with the author of Esmeralda and
Her Parandrus (1941), which despite its "motley style and baroque imagery"
was a masterpiece "pinching strings of personal poignancy which he, a
committed artist, never knew could vibrate in him." Reviewers of my books
took the same line, chiding me formally for underestimating the "greatness"
of Lenin, yet paying me compliments of a kind that could not fail to touch,
in the long run, even me, a scornful and austere author, whose homework in
Paris had never received its due. Even the President of Quirn, who
timorously sympathized with the fashionable Sovietizers, was really on my
side: he told me when he called on us (while Ninel crept up to grow an ear
on our landing) that he was proud, etc., and had found my "last (?) book
very interesting" though he could not help regretting that I took every
opportunity of criticizing "our Great Ally" in my classes. I answered,
laughing, that this criticism was a child's caress when set alongside the
public lecture on <132> "The Tractor in Soviet Literature" that I planned to
deliver at the end of the term. He laughed, too, and asked Annette what it
was like to live with a genius (she only shrugged her pretty shoulders). All
this was trхs amиricain and thawed a whole auricle in my icy heart.
But to return to good Ninel.
She had been christened Nonna at birth (1902) and renamed twenty years
later Ninel (or Ninella), as petitioned by her father, a Hero of Toil and a
toady. She wrote it Ninella in English but her friends called her Ninette or
Nelly just as my wife's Christian name Anna (as Nonna liked to observe)
turned into Annette and Netty.
Ninella Langley was a stocky, heavily built creature with a ruddy and
rosy face (the two tints unevenly distributed), short hair dyed a
mother-in-law ginger, brown eyes even madder than mine, very thin lips, a
fat Russian nose, and three or four hairs on her chin. Before the young
reader heads for Lesbos, I wish to say that as far as I could discover (and
I am a peerless spy) there was nothing sexual in her ludicrous and unlimited
affection for my wife. I had not yet acquired the white Desert Lynx that
Annette did not live to see, so it was Ninella who took her shopping in a
dilapidated jalopy while the resourceful lodger, sparing the copies of his
own novels, would autograph for the grateful twins old mystery paperbacks
and unreadable pamphlets from the Langley collection in the attic whose
dormer looked out obligingly on the road to, and from, the Shopping Center.
It was Ninella who kept her adored "Netty" well supplied with white knitting
wool. It was Ninella who twice daily invited her for a cup of coffee or tea
in her rooms; but the woman made a point of avoiding our flat, at least when
we were at home, under the pretext that it still reeked of her husband's
tobacco: I rejoined that it was my own pipe--and later, on the same day,
Annette told me I really ought not to smoke so much, especially indoors; and
she also upheld another absurd <133> complaint coming from downstairs,
namely, that I walked back and forth too late and too long, right over
Ninella's forehead. Yes--and a third grievance: why didn't I put back the
encyclopedia volumes in alphabetic order as her husband had always been
careful to do, for (he said) "a misplaced book is a lost book"--quite an
aphorism.
Dear Mrs. Langley was not particularly happy about her job. She owned a
lakeside bungalow ("Rustic Roses") thirty miles north of Quirn, not very far
from Honeywell College, where she taught summer school and with which she
intended to be even more closely associated, if a "reactionary" atmosphere
persisted at Quirn. Actually, her only grudge was against decrepit Mme. de
Korchakov, who had accused her, in public, of having a sdobnyy ("mellow")
Soviet accent and a provincial vocabulary--all of which could not be denied,
although Annette maintained I was a heartless bourgeois to say so. <134>
2
The infant Isabel's first four years of life are so firmly separated in
my consciousness by a blank of seven years from Bel's girlhood that I seem
to have had two different children, one a cheerful red-cheeked little thing,
and the other her pale and morose elder sister.
I had laid in a stock of ear plugs; they proved superfluous: no crying
came from the nursery to interfere with my work--Dr. Olga Repnin, the story
of an invented Russian professor in America, which was to be published
(after a bothersome spell of serialization entailing endless proofreading)
by Lodge in 1946, the year Annette left me, and acclaimed as "a blend of
humor and humanism" by alliteration-prone reviewers, comfortably unaware of
what I was to prepare some fifteen years later for their horrified
delectation.
I enjoyed watching Annette as she took color snapshots of the baby and
me in the garden. I loved perambulating a fascinated Isabel through, the
groves of larches and beeches along Quirn Cascade River, with every loop of
light, every eyespot of shade escorted, or so it seemed, by the baby's gay
approbation. I even agreed to spend most of the summer of 1945 at Rustic
Roses. There, one day, as I was returning with Mrs. Langley from the nearest
liquor <135> store or newspaper stand, something she said, some intonation
or gesture, released in me the passing shudder, the awful surmise, that it
was not with my wife but with me that the wretched creature had been in love
from the very start.
The torturous tenderness I had always felt for Annette gained new
poignancy from my feelings for our little child (I "trembled" over her as
Ninella put it in her coarse Russian, complaining it might be bad for the
baby, even if one "subtracted the overacting"). That was the human side of
our marriage. The sexual side disintegrated altogether.
For quite a time after her return from the maternity ward, echoes of
her pangs in the darkest corridors of my brain and a frightening stained
window at every turn--the afterimage of a wounded orifice--pursued me and
deprived me of all my vigor. When everything in me healed, and my lust for
her pale enchantments rekindled, its volume and violence put an end to the
brave but essentially inept efforts she had been making to reestablish some
sort of amorous harmony between us without departing one jot from the
puritanical norm. She now had the gall--the pitiful girlish gall--to insist
I see a psychiatrist (recommended by Mrs. Langley) who would help me to
think "softening" thoughts at moments of excessive engorgement. I said her
friend was a monster and she a goose, and we had our worst marital quarrel
in years.
The creamy-thighed twins had long since returned with their bicycles to
the island of their birth. Plainer young ladies came to help with the
housekeeping. By the end of 1945 I had virtually ceased visiting my wife in
her cold bedroom.
Sometime in mid-May, 1946, I traveled to New York--a five-hour train
trip--to lunch with a publisher who was offering me better terms for a
collection of stories (Exile from Mayda) than good Lodge. After a pleasant
meal, in the sunny haze of that banal day, I walked over to the <136> Public
Library, and by a banal miracle of synchronization she came dancing down
those very steps, Dolly von Borg, now twenty-four, as I trudged up toward
her, a fat famous writer in his powerful forties. Except for a gleam of gray
in the abundant fair mane that I had cultivated for my readings in Paris,
more than a decade ago, I do not believe I could have changed sufficiently
to warrant her saying, as she began doing, that she would never have
recognized me had she not been so fond of the picture of meditation on the
back of See under. I recognized her because I had never lost track of her
image, readjusting it once in a while: the last time I had notched the score
was when her grandmother, in response to my wife's Christmas greetings, in
1939, sent us from London a postcard-size photo of a bare-shouldered flapper
with a fluffy fan and false eyelashes in some high-school play, terribly
chi-chi. In the two minutes we had on those steps--she pressing with both
hands a book to her breast, I at a lower level, standing with my right foot
placed on the next step, her step, and slapping my knee with a glove (many a
tenor's only known gesture)--in those two minutes we managed to exchange
quite a lot of plain information.
She was now studying the History of the Theater at Columbia University.
Parents and grandparents were tucked away in London. I had a child, right?
Those shoes I wore were lovely. Students called my lectures fabulous. Was I
happy?
I shook my head. When and where could I see her?
She had always had a crush on me, oh yes, ever since I used to
mesmerize her in my lap, playing sweet Uncle Gasper, muffing every other
line, and now all had come back and she certainly wished to do something
about it.
She had a remarkable vocabulary. Summarize her. Mirages of motels in
the eye of the penholder. Did she have a car?
Well, that was rather sudden (laughing). She could <137> borrow,
perhaps, his old sedan though he might not like the notion (pointing to a
nondescript youth who was waiting for her on the sidewalk). He had just
bought a heavenly Hummer to go places with her.
Would she mind telling me when we could meet, please.
She had read all my novels, at least all the English ones. Her Russian
was rusty!
The hell with my novels! When?
I had to let her think. She might visit me at the end of the term.
Terry Todd (now measuring the stairs with his eyes, preparing to mount) had
briefly been a student of mine; he got a D minus for his first paper and
quit Quirn.
I said I consigned all the D people to everlasting oblivion. Her "end
of the term" might bend away into Minus Eternity. I required more precision.
She would let me know. She would call me next week. No, she would not
part with her own telephone number. She told me to look at that clown (he
was now coming up the steps). Paradise was a Persian word. It was simply
Persian to meet again like that. She might drop in at my office for a few
moments, just to chat about old times. She knew how busy--
"Oh, Terry: this is the writer, the man who wrote Emerald and the
Pander."
I do not recall what I had planned to look up in the library. Whatever
it was, it was not that unknown book. Aimlessly I walked up and down several
halls; abjectly visited the W.C.; but simply could not, short of castrating
myself, get rid of her new image in its own portable sunlight--the straight
pale hair, the freckles, the banal pout, the Lilithan long eyes--though I
knew she was only what one used to call a "little tramp" and, perhaps,
because she was just that.
I gave my penultimate "Masterpieces" lecture of the spring term. I gave
my ultimate one. An assistant distributed <138> the blue books for the final
examination in that course (which I had curtailed for reasons of health) and
collected them while three or four hopeless hopefuls still kept scribbling
madly in separate spots of the hall. I held my last Joyce seminar of the
year. Little Baroness Borg had forgotten the end of the dream.
In the last days of the spring term a particularly stupid baby-sitter
told me that some girl whose name she had not quite caught--Tallbird or
Dalberg--had phoned that she was on her way to Quirn. It so happened that a
Lily Talbot in my Masterpieces class had missed the examination. On the
following day I walked over to my office for the ordeal of reading the
damned heap on my desk. Quirn University Official Examination Book. All
academic work is conducted on the assumption of general horror. Write on the
consecutive right- and left-hand pages. What does "consecutive" really mean,
Sir? Do you want us to describe all the birds in the story or only one? As a
rule, one-tenth of the three hundred minds preferred the spelling "Stern" to
"Sterne" and "Austin" to "Austen."
The telephone on my spacious desk (it "slept two" as my ribald neighbor
Professor King, an authority on Dante, used to say) rang, and this Lily
Talbot started to explain, volubly, unconvincingly, in a kind of lovely,
veiled, and confidential voice, why she had not taken the examination. I
could not remember her face or her figure, but the subdued melody tickling
my ear contained such intimations of young charm and surrender that I could
not help chiding myself for overlooking her in my class. She was about to
come to the point when an eager childish rap at the door diverted my
attention. Dolly walked in, smiling. Smiling, she indicated with a tilt of
her chin that the receiver should be cradled. Smiling, she swept the
examination books off the desk and perched upon it with her bare shins in my
face. What might have promised the most refined ardors turned out to be the
tritest scene in this memoir. I hastened <139> to quench a thirst that had
been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had
fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier. The ultimate
convulsion rocked the desk lamp, and from the class just across the corridor
came a burst of applause at the end of Professor King's last lecture of the
season.
When I came home, I found my wife alone on the porch swinging gently if
not quite straight in her favorite glider and reading the Krasnaya Niva
("Red Corn"), a Bolshevist magazine. Her purveyor of literatura was away
giving some future mistranslators a final examination. Isabel had been out
of doors and was now taking a nap in her room just above the porch.
In the days when the bermudki (as Ninella indecently called them) used
to minister to my humble needs, I experienced no guilt after the operation
and confronted my wife with my usual, fondly ironical smile; but on this
occasion I felt my flesh coated with stinging slime, and my heart missed a
thump, when she said, glancing up and stopping the line with her finger:
"Did that girl get in touch with you at your office?"
I answered as a fictional character might "in the affirmative": "Her
people," I added, "wrote you, it appears, about her coming to study in New
York, but you never showed me that letter. Tant mieux, she's a frightful
bore."
Annette looked utterly confused: "I'm speaking," she said, "or trying
to speak, about a student called Lily Talbot who telephoned an hour ago to
explain why she missed the exam. Who is your girl?"
We proceeded to disentangle the two. After some moral hesitation ("You
know, we both owe a lot to her grandparents") Annette conceded we really
need not entertain little strays. She seemed to recall the letter because it
contained a reference to her widowed mother (now moved to a comfortable home
for the old into which I had recently turned my villa at Carnavaux--despite
my <140> lawyer's well-meaning objections). Yes, yes, she had mislaid
it--and would find it some day in some library book that had never been
returned to an unattainable library. A strange appeasement was now flowing
through my poor veins. The romance of her absentmindedness always made me
laugh heartily. I laughed heartily. I kissed her on her infinitely
tender-skinned temple.
"How does Dolly Borg look now?" asked Annette. "She used to be a very
homely and very brash little brat. Quite repulsive, in fact."
"That's what she still is," I practically shouted, and we heard little
Isabel crow: "Ya prosnulas'" through the yawn of the window: "I am awake."
How lightly the spring cloudlets scudded! How glibly that red-breasted
thrush on the lawn pulled out its unbroken worm! Ah--and there was Ninella,
home at last, getting out of her car, with the string-bound corpses of
cahiers under her sturdy arm. "Gosh," said I to myself, in my ignoble
euphoria, "there's something quite nice and cozy about old Ninel after all!"
Yet only a few hours later the light of Hell had gone out, and I writhed, I
wrung my four limbs, yes, in an agony of insomnia, trying to find some
combination between pillow and back, sheet and shoulder, linen and leg, to
help me, help me, oh, help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn. <141>
3
The increasing disarray of my nerves was such that the bother of
getting a driver's license could not be contemplated: hence I had to rely on
Dolly's use of Todd's dirty old sedan in order to seek the conventional
darkness of country lanes that were difficult to find and disappointing when
found. We had three such rendezvous, near New Swivington or thereabouts, in
the complicated vicinity of Casanovia of all places, and despite my muddled
condition I could not help noticing that Dolly welcomed the restless
wanderings, the wrong turns, the torrents of rain which attended our sordid
little affair. "Just think," she said one especially boggy June night in
unknown surroundings, "how much simpler things would be if somebody
explained the situation to your wife, just think!"
On realizing she had gone too far with that proposed thought, Dolly
changed tactics and rang me up at my office to tell me with a great show of
jubilant excitement that Bridget Dolan, a medical student and a cousin of
Todd's, was offering us for a small remuneration her flat in New York on
Monday and Thursday afternoons when she worked as a nurse at the Holy
Something Hospital. Inertia rather than Eros caused me to give it a try; I
kept up the pretext of having to complete the literary <142> research I was
supposed to be conducting in the Public Library, and traveled in a crowded
Pullman from one nightmare to another.
She met me in front of the house, strutting in triumph, brandishing a
little key that caught a glint of sun in the hothouse mizzle. I was so very
weak from the journey that I had trouble getting out of the taxi, and she
helped me to the front door, chattering the while like a bright child.
Fortunately the mysterious flat was on the ground floor--I could not have
faced a lift's closure and spasm. A surly janitrix (reminding me in mnemonic
reverse of the Cerberean bitches in the hotels of Soviet Siberia which I was
to stop at a couple of decades later) insisted on my writing down my name
and address in a ledger ("That's the rule," sang out Dolly, who had already
picked up some intones of local delivery). I had the presence of mind to put
down the dumbest address I could produce at the moment, Dumbert Dumbert,
Dumberton. Dolly, humming, added unhurriedly my raincoat to those hanging in
a communal hallway. If she had ever experienced the pangs of neuralgic
delirium, she would not have fumbled with that key when she knew quite well
that the door of what should have been an exquisitely private apartment was
not even properly closed. We entered a preposterous, evidently ultra-modern
living room with painted hard furniture and one lone little white rocker
supporting a plush biped rat instead of a sulky child. Doors were still with
me, were always with me. The one on the left, being slightly ajar, let in
voices from an adjacent suite or asylum. "There's a party going on there!" I
expostulated, and Dolly deftly and softly drew that door almost shut.
"They're a nice friendly group," she said, "and it's really too warm in
these rooms to choke every chink. Second on the right. Here we are."
Here we were. Nurse Dolan for the sake of atmosphere and professional
empathy had rigged up her bedroom in hospital style: a snow-pure cot with a
system of levers <143> that would have rendered even Big Peter (in the Red
Topper) impotent; whitewashed commodes and glazed cabinets; a bedhead chart
dear to humorists; and a set of rules tacked to the bathroom door.
"Now off with that jacket," cried Dolly gaily, "while I unlace those
lovely shoes" (crouching nimbly, and nimbly recrouching, at my retreating
feet).
I said: "You have lost your mind, my dear, if you think I could
contemplate making love in this appalling place."
"What do you want then?" she asked, angrily brushing away a strand of
hair from her flushed face and uncoiling back to her natural length: "Where
would you find another such dandy, hygienic, utterly--"
A visitor interrupted her: a brown, gray-cheeked old dackel carrying
horizontally a rubber bone in its mouth. It entered from the parlor, placed
the obscene red thing on the linoleum, and stood looking at me, at Dolly, at
me again, with melancholy expectation on its raised dogface. A pretty
bare-armed girl in black slipped in, grabbed the animal, kicked its toy back
into the parlor, and said: "Hullo, Dolly! If you and your friend want some
drinks afterwards, please join us. Bridget phoned she'd be home early. It's
J.B.'s birthday."
"Righto, Carmen," replied Dolly, and turning to me continued in
Russian: "I think you need that drink right away. Oh, come along! And for
God's sake leave that jacket and waistcoat here. You are drenched with
sweat."
She forced me out of the room; I went rumbling and groaning; she gave a
perfunctory pat to the creaseless cot and followed the man of snow, the man
of tallow, the dying lopsided man.
Most of the party had now invaded the parlor from the next room. I
cringed and tried to hide my face as I recognized Terry Todd. He raised his
glass in delicate congratulation. What that slut had done to ensure a
thwarted beau's complicity, I shall never know; but I should never have put
<144> her in my Krasnyy Tsilindr; that's the way you breed live
monsters--from little ballerinas in books. Another person I had once seen
already--in a car that kept passing us somewhere in the country--a young
actor with handsome Irish features, pressed upon me what he called a
Honolulu Cooler, but at the eoan stage of an attack I am beyond alcohol, so
could only taste the pineapple part of the mixture. Amidst a circle of
sycophants a bull-size old fellow in a short-sleeved shirt monogrammed
"J.B." posed, one hairy arm around Dolly, for a naughty shot that his wife
snapped. Carmen removed my sticky glass on her neat little tray with a
pillbox and a thermometer in the corner. Not finding a seat, I had to lean
against the wall, and the back of my head caused a cheap abstract in a
plastic frame to start swinging above me: it was stopped by Todd who had
sidled up to me and now said, lowering his voice: "Everything is settled.
Prof, to everybody's satisfaction. I've kept in touch with Mrs. Langley,
sure I have, she and the missus are writing you. I believe they've already
left, the kid thinks you're in Heaven--now, now, what's the matter?"
I am not a fighter. I only hurt my hand against a tall lamp and lost
both shoes in the scuffle. Terry Todd vanished--forever. The telephone was
being used in one room and ringing in the other. Dolly, retransformed by the
alchemy of her blazing anger--and now untellable from the little girl who
had hurled a three-letter French word at me when I told her I found it wiser
to stop taking advantage of her grandfather's hospitality--virtually tore my
necktie in two, yelling she could easily get me jailed for rape but
preferred to see me crawling back to my consort and harem of baby-sitters
(her new vocabulary, though, remained richly theatrical, even when she
shrieked).
I felt trapped like a silver pea teased into the center of a toy maze.
A threatening crowd, held back by J.B., the head doctor, separated me from
the exit; so I retreated to <145> Bridget's private wardette and saw, with a
sense of relief (also "eoan" alas) that beyond a previously unnoticed,
half-opened French window there extended to a fabulous distance an inner
court, or only one comforting part of an inner court, with lightly robed
patients circulating in a geometry of lawns and garden walks, or quietly
sitting on benches. I staggered out, and as my white-socked feet touched the
cool turf I noticed that the vagabond wench had undone the ankle strings of
the long linen underpants I was wearing. Somehow, somewhere, I had shed and
lost all the rest of my clothes. As I stood there, my head brimming with a
blackness of pain seldom known before, I became aware of a flurry of motion
beyond the court. Far, far away, nurse Dolan or Nolan (at that distance such
nice distinctions no longer mattered) emerged from a wing of the hospital
and came running to my assistance. Two males followed her with a stretcher.
A helpful patient gathered up the blanket they had dropped.
"You know, you know . . . you should have never done that," she cried
panting. "Don't move, they'll help you to get up (I had collapsed on the
turf). If you'd escaped after surgery you might have died right where you
are. On such a lovely day, too!"
And so I was carried by two sturdy palanquiners who stank all the way
(the hind bearer solidly, the front man in rhythmic wafts) not to Bridget's
bed but to a real hospital cot in a ward for three between two old men, both
dying of cerebritis. <146>
4
Rustic Roses
13. IV. 46
The step I have taken, Vadim, is not subject to discussion (ne
podlezhit obsuzhdeniyu). You must accept my departure as a fait accompli.1
Had I really loved you I would not have left you; but I never loved you
really, and maybe your escapade--which no doubt is not your first since our
arrival in this sinister (zloveshchuyu) "free" country"2--is for me a mere
pretext for leaving you.
We have never been very happy together, you and I, during our twelve3
years of marriage. You regarded me from the start as a cute, dutiful, but
definitely disappointing little circus animal4 which you tried to teach
immoral disgusting tricks--condemned as such according to the faithful
companion without whom I might not have survived in ghastly "Kvirn"5 by the
latest scientific stars of our fatherland. I, on the other hand, was so
painfully nonplussed by your trenne (sic)6 de vie, your habits, your
black-locked7 friends, your decadent novels, and--why not admit it?--your
<147> pathological revolt against Art and Progress in the Soviet Land,
including the restoration of lovely old churches,8 that I would have
divorced you, had I dared upset9 poor papa and mama who were so eager in
their dignity and naоvetи to have their daughter addressed--by whom, good
Lord?--as "Your Serenity" (Siyatel'stvo).
Now comes a serious demand, an absolute injunction. Never, never--at
least while I am still alive--never, I repeat, shall you try to communicate
with the child. I do not know--Nelly is better versed in this--what the
legal situation is, but I know that in certain respects you are a gentleman
and it is to the gentleman that I say and shout: Please, please, keep away!
If some dreadful American illness strikes me, then remember I wish her to be
brought up as a Russian Christian.10
I was sorry to learn about your hospitalization. This is your second,
and I hope last, attack of neurasthenia11 since the time we made the mistake
of leaving Europe instead of waiting quietly for the Soviet Army to liberate
it from the fascists. Good-bye.
PS. Nelly wishes to add a few lines.
Thank you, Netty. I shall indeed be brief. The information imparted to
us by your girl-friend's fiancи and his mother,12 a saintly woman of
infinite compassion and common sense, lacked, fortunately, the element of
dreadful surprise. A roommate of Berenice Mudie (the one that stole the
cut-crystal decanter Netty gave me) had already been spreading certain odd
rumors a couple of years ago; I tried to protect your sweet wife <148> by
not allowing that gossip to reach her or at least by drawing her attention
to it in a very oblique, half-humorous way long after those prostitutes had
gone. But now let us talk turkey.13
There can be no problem, I am sure, in separating your things from
hers. She says: "Let him take the countless copies of his novels and all the
tattered dictionaries"; but she must be allowed to keep her household
treasures such as my little birthday gifts to her--the silver-plated caviar
bowl as well as the six pale-green handblown wine glasses, etc.
I can especially sympathize with Netty in this domestic catastrophe
because my own marriage resembled hers in many, many ways. It began so
auspiciously! I was stranded and lost in a territory suddenly occupied by
Estonian fascists, a poor little war-tossed Moscow girl,14 when I first met
Professor Langley in quite romantic circumstances: I was interpreting for
him (the study of foreign languages stands at a remarkable level in the
Soviet Land), but when I was shipped with other DP's to the UK, and we met
again and married, all went wrong--he ignored me in the daytime, and our
nights were full of incompatibility.15 One good consequence is that I
inherited, so to speak, a lawyer, Mr. Horace Peppermill, who has consented
to grant you a consultation and help you to settle all business details. It
will be wise on your part to follow Professor Langley's example and give
your wife a monthly allowance while placing a sizable "guarantee sum" in the
bank which can be available to her in extreme cases and, naturally, after
your demise or during an overprotracted terminal illness. We do not <149>
have to remind you that Mrs. Blagovo should continue to receive regularly
her usual check until further notice.
The Quirn house will be offered for sale immediately--it is overflowing
with odious memories. Consequently, as soon as they let you out, which I
hope will happen without retardment (bez zamedleniya, sans tarder), move out
of the house, please.16 I am not on speaking terms with Miss Myrna
Soloway--or, in reality, simply Soloveychik--of my department, but I
understand she is very good at ferreting out places for rent.
We have fine weather here after all that rain. The lake is beautiful at
this time of the year! We are going to refurnish our dear little dacha. Its
only drawback in one sense (an asset in all others!) is that it stands a wee
bit apart from civilization or at least from Honeywell College. The police
are always on the lockout for bothers in the nude, prowlers, etc. We are
seriously thinking of acquiring a big Alsatian!17
COMMENTARY
* 1.
En franгais dans le texte.
* 2.
The first four or five lines are no doubt authentic, but then come
various details which convince me that not Netty but Nelly masterminded the
entire communication. Only a Soviet woman would speak like that of America.
* 3.
At first typed "fourteen" but expertly erased and replaced by the
correct "twelve," as seen clearly in ...
