Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
страница №7
... of leg pulling if you published thedescription of those funny feelings. Three, ten, a herd?"
"Those are not really `feelings' and they are not really `funny.' I
just wished you to be aware that if I go mad it will be in consequence of my
games with the idea of space. `Rolling over' would be cheating and besides
would not help."
"I'll take you to an absolutely divine analyst."
"That's all you can suggest?"
"Why, yes."
"Think, Louise."
"Oh. I'm also going to marry you. Yes, of course, you idiot."
She was gone before I could reclasp her slender form. The star-dusted
sky, usually a scary affair, now vaguely amused me: it belonged, with the
autumn fadeur of barely visible flowers, to the same issue of Woman's Own
World as Louise. I made water into a sizzle of asters and looked up at Bel's
window, square c2. Lit as brightly as e1, the Opal Room. I went back there
and noted with relief that kind hands had cleared and tidied the table, the
round table with the opalescent rim, at which I had delivered a most
successful introductory lecture. I heard Bel's voice calling me from the
upper landing, and taking a palmful of salted almonds ascended the stairs.
<182>
5
Rather early next morning, a Sunday, as I stood, shawled in terry
cloth, and watched four eggs rolling and bumping in their inferno, somebody
entered the living room through a side door that I never bothered to lock.
Louise! Louise dressed up in hummingbird mauve for church. Louise in a
sloping beam of mellow October sun. Louise leaning against the grand piano,
as if about to sing and looking around with a lyrical smile.
I was the first to break our embrace.
VADIM No, darling, no. My daughter may come down any minute. Sit down.
LOUISE (examining an armchair and then settling in it) Pity. You know,
I've been here many times before! In fact I was laid on that grand at
eighteen. Aldy Landover was ugly, unwashed, brutal--and absolutely
irresistible.
VADIM Listen, Louise. I have always found your free, frivolous style
very fetching. But you will be moving into this house very soon now, and we
want a little more dignity, don't we? <183>
LOUISE We'll have to change that blue carpet. It makes the Stein look
like an iceberg. And there should be a riot of flowers. So many big vases
and not one Strelitzia! There was a whole shrub of lilac down there in my
time.
VADIM It's October, you know. Look, I hate to bring this up, but isn't
your cousin waiting in the car? It would be very irregular.
LOUISE Irregular, my foot. She won't be up before lunch. Ah, Scene Two.
(Bel wearing only slippers and a cheap necklace of iridescent glass--a
Riviera souvenir--comes down at the other end of the living room beyond the
piano. She has already turned kitchenward showing the beau-page back of her
head and delicate shoulder blades when she becomes aware of our presence and
retraces her steps.)
BEL (addressing me and casually squinting at my amazed visitor) Ya
bezumno golodnaya (I'm madly hungry).
VADIM Louise dear, this is my daughter Bel. She's walking in her sleep,
really, hence the, uh, non-attire.
LOUISE Hullo, Annabel. The non-attire is very becoming.
BEL (correcting Louise) Isa.
VADIM Isabel, this is Louise Adamson, an old friend of mine, back from
Rome. I hope we'll be seeing a lot of her. <184>
BEL How do you do (question-markless).
VADIM Well, run along, Bel, and put on something. Breakfast is ready.
(To Louise) Would you like to have breakfast too? Hard-boiled eggs? A Coke
with a straw? (Pale violin climbing stairs)
LOUISE Non, merci. I'm flabbergasted.
VADIM Yes, things have been getting a little out of hand, but you'll
see, she's a special child, there's no other child like her. All we need is
your presence, your touch. She has inherited the habit of circulating in a
state of nature from me. An Edenic gene. Curious.
LOUISE Is this a two-people nudist colony or has Mrs. O'Leary also
joined?
VADIM (laughing) No, no, she's not here on Sundays. Everything is fine,
I assure you. Bel is a docile angel. She--
LOUISE (rising to leave) There she comes to be fed (Bel descends the
stairs in a skimpy pink robe). Drop in around tea time. Fay is being taken
by Jane King to a lacrosse game in Rosedale. (Exits)
BEL Who's she? Former student of yours? Drama? Elocution?
VADIM (moving fast) Bozhe moy! (good Lord!). The eggs! They must be as
hard as jade. Come along. I'll acquaint you with the situation, as your
schoolmistress says. <185>
6
The grand was the first to go--it was carried out by a gang of
staggering iceberg movers and donated by me to Bel's school, which I had
reasons to pamper: I am not an easily frightened man but when I am
frightened I am very much frightened, and at a second interview that I had
had with the schoolmistress, my impersonation of an indignant Charles
Dodgson was only saved from failure by the sensational news of my being
about to marry an irreproachable socialite, the widow of our most pious
philosopher. Louise, per contra, regarded the throwing out of a symbol of
luxury as a personal affront and a crime: a concert piano of that kind
costs, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she was
not quite as wealthy as, no doubt, I thought she was, a statement
representing that knot in Logic: the double-hitch lie which does not make
one truth. I appeased her by gradually overcrowding the Music Room (if a
time series be transformed into sudden space) with the modish gadgets she
loved, singing furniture, miniature TV sets, stereorphics, portable
orchestras, better and better video sets, remote-control instruments for
turning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer. For Bel's
birthday she gave her a Rain Sound machine to promote sleep; and to
celebrate my <186> birthday she murdered a neurotic's night by getting me a
thousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock with twelve yellow radii on its
black face instead of figures, which made it look blind to me or feigning
blindness like some repulsive beggar in a hideous tropical town; in
compensation that terrible object possessed a secret beam that projected
Arabic numerals (2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of my
new sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the sacred, complete, agonizingly
achieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I'd buy a gun and shoot it in
the mug, if she did not send it back to the fiend who sold it to her. She
replaced it by "something especially made for people who like originality,"
namely a silver-plated umbrella stand in the shape of a giant
jackboot--there was "something about rain strangely attractive to her" as
her "analyst" wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote to
man. She was also fond of small expensive animals, but here I stood firm,
and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved.
I did not expect much of Louise the Intellectual. The only time I saw
her shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when on
the first Sunday of our marriage all the newspapers carried photographs of
the two Albanian authors (a bald-domed old epicist and a longhaired woman
compiler of childrens' books) who shared out between them the Prestigious
Prize that she had told everybody I was sure to win that year. On the other
hand she had only flipped through my novels (she was to read more
attentively, though, A Kingdom by the Sea, which I began slowly to pull out
of myself in 1957 like a long brain worm, hoping it would not break), while
consuming all the "serious" bestsellers discussed by sister consumers
belonging to the Literary Group in which she liked to assert herself as a
writer's wife.
I also discovered that she considered herself a connoisseur of Modern
Art. She blazed with anger at me when <187> I said I doubted that the
appreciation of a green stripe across a blue background had any connection
with its definition in a glossy catalogue as "producing a virtually Oriental
atmosphere of spaceless time and timeless space." She accused me of trying
to wreck her entire view of the world by maintaining--in a facetious vein,
she hoped--that only a Philistine misled by the solemn imbeciles paid to
write about exhibitions could tolerate rags, rinds, and fouled paper rescued
from a garbage can and discussed in terms "of warm splashes of color" and
"good-natured irony." But perhaps most touching and terrible of all was her
honestly believing that painters painted "what they felt"; that a rather
rough and rumpled landscape dashed off in the Provence might be gratefully
and proudly interpreted by art students if a psychiatrist explained to them
that the advancing thundercloud represented the artist's clash with his
father, and the rolling grainfield the early death of his mother in a
shipwreck.
I could not prevent her from purchasing specimens of the pictorial art
in vogue but I judiciously steered some of the more repulsive objects (such
as a collection of daubs produced by "naоve" convicts) into the round dining
room where they swam blurrily in the candlelight when we had guests for
supper. Our routine meals generally took place in the snackbar niche between
the kitchen and the housemaid's quarters. Into that niche Louise introduced
her new Cappuccino Espresso Maker, while at the opposite end of the house,
in the Opal Room, a heavily built, hedonically appareled bed with a padded
headboard was installed for me. The adjacent bathroom had a less comfortable
tub than my former one, and certain inconveniences attended my excursions,
two or three nights per week, to the connubial chamber--via drawing room,
creaky stairs, upper landing, second-floor corridor, and past the
inscrutable chink-gleam of Bel's door; but I treasured my privacy more than
I resented its drawbacks. I had the "Turkish toupet," as Louise <188> called
it, to forbid her to communicate with me by thumping on her floor.
Eventually I had an interior telephone put in my room, to be used only in
certain emergencies: I was thinking of such nervous states as the feeling of
imminent collapse that I experienced sometimes in my nocturnal bouts with
eschatological obsessions; and there was always the half-full box of
sleeping pills that only she could have filched.
The decision to let Bel stay in her apartment, with Louise as her only
neighbor, instead of refurnishing a spiral of space by allotting those two
east-end rooms to Louise--"perhaps I too need a studio?"--while transferring
Bel with bed and books to the Opal Room downstairs and leaving me upstairs
in my former bedchamber, was taken by me firmly despite Louise's rather
bitchy counter-suggestions, such as removing the tools of my trade from the
library in the basement and banishing Bel with all her belongings to that
warm, dry, nice and quiet lair. Though I knew I would never give in, the
very process of shuffling rooms and accessories in my mind made me literally
ill. On top of that, I felt, perhaps wrongly, that Louise was enjoying the
hideous banality of a stepmother-versus-step-daughter situation. I did not
exactly regret marrying her, I recognized her charm and functional
qualities, but my adoration for Bel was the sole splendor, the sole
breathtaking mountain in the drab plain of my emotional life. Being in many
ways an extraordinarily stupid person, I had simply not reckoned with the
tangles and tensions of what was meant to look like a model household. The
moment I woke up--or at least the moment I saw that getting up was the only
way to fool early-morning insomnia--I started wondering what new project
Louise would invent that day with which to harass my girl. When two years
later this gray old dolt and his volatile wife, after treating Bel to a
tedious Swiss tour, left her in Larive, between Hex and Trex, at a
"finishing" school (finishing childhood, <189> finishing the innocence of
young imagination), it was our 1955-1957 period of life ю trois in the Quirn
house, and not my earlier mistakes, that I recalled with curses and sobs.
She and her stepmother stopped speaking to each other altogether; they
communicated, if need be, by signs: Louise, for instance, pointing
dramatically at the ruthless clock and Bel tapping in the negative on the
crystal of her loyal little wristwatch. She lost all affection for me,
twisting away gently when I attempted a perfunctory caress. She adopted
again the wan absent expression that had dimmed her features at her arrival
from Rosedale. Camus replaced Keats. Her marks deteriorated. She no longer
wrote poetry. One day as Louise and I were packing for our next trip to
Europe (London, Paris, Pisa, Stresa, and--in small print--Larive) I started
removing some old maps, Colorado, Oregon, from the silk "cheek" inside a
valise, and the moment my secret prompter uttered that "shcheka" I came
across a poem of hers written long before Louise's intrusion into her
trustful young life. I thought it might do Louise good to read it and handed
her the exercise-book page (all ragged along its torn root but still mine)
on which the following lines were penciled:
At sixty, if I'll look back,
jungles and hills will hide
the notch, the source, the sand
and a bird's footprints across it.
I'll see nothing at all
with my old eyes,
yet I'll know it was there, the source.
How come, then, that when I look back
at twelve--one fifth of the stretch!--with
visibility presumably better
and no junk in between, <190>
I can't even imagine
that patch of wet sand
and the walking bird
and the gleam of my source?
"Almost Poundian in purity," remarked Louise--which annoyed me, because
I thought Pound a fake. <191>
7
Chбteau Vignedor, Bel's charming boarding school in Switzerland, on a
charming hill three hundred meters above charming Larive on the Rhтne, had
been recommended to Louise in the autumn of 1957 by a Swiss lady in Quirn's
French Department. There were two other "finishing" schools of the same
general type that might have done just as well, but Louise set her sights on
Vignedor because of a chance remark made not even by her Swiss friend but by
a chance girl in a chance travel agency who summed up the qualities of the
school in one phrase: "Many Tunisian princesses."
It offered five main subjects (French, Psychology, Savoir-vivre,
Couture, Cuisine), various sports (under the direction of Christine Dupraz,
the once famous skier), and a dozen additional classes on request (which
would keep the plainest girl there till she married), including Ballet and
Bridge. Another supplиment--especially suitable for orphans or unneeded
children--was a summer trimester, filling up the year's last remaining
segment with excursions and nature studies, to be spent by a few lucky girls
at the home of the headmistress, Madame de Turm, an Alpine chalet some
twelve hundred meters higher: "Its solitary light, twinkling in a black fold
of the mountains, can be <192> seen," said the prospectus in four languages,
"from the Chбteau on clear nights." There was also some kind of camp for
differently handicapped local children in different years conducted by our
medically inclined sports directress.
1957, 1958, 1959. Sometimes, seldom, hiding from Louise, who objected
to Bel's twenty well-spaced monosyllables' costing us fifty dollars, I would
call her from Quirn, but after a few such calls I received a curt note from
Mme. de Turm, asking me not to upset my daughter by telephoning, and so
retreated into my dark shell. Dark shell, dark years of my heart! They
coincided oddly with the composition of my most vigorous, most festive, and
commercially most successful novel, A Kingdom by the Sea. Its demands, the
fun and the fancy of it, its intricate imagery, made up in a way for the
absence of my beloved Bel. It was also bound to reduce, though I was hardly
conscious of that, my correspondence with her (well-meant, chatty,
dreadfully artificial letters which she seldom troubled to answer). Even
more startling, of course, more incomprehensible to me, in groaning
retrospect, is the effect my self-entertainment had on the number and length
of our visits between 1957 and 1960 (when she eloped with a progressive
blond-bearded young American). You were appalled to learn the other day,
when we discussed the present notes, that I had seen "beloved Bel" only four
times in three summers and that only two of our visits lasted as long as a
couple of weeks. I must add, however, that she resolutely declined to spend
her vacations at home. I ought never, of course, have dumped her in Europe.
I should have elected to sweat it out in my hellish household, between a
childish woman and a somber child.
The work on my novel also impinged on my marital mores, making of me a
less passionate and more indulgent husband: I let Louise go on suspiciously
frequent trips to out-of-town unlisted eye specialists and neglected her in
the meantime for Rose Brown, our cute housemaid who took <193> three
soapshowers daily and thought frilly black panties "did something to guys."
But the greatest havoc wrought by my work was its effect on my
lectures. To it I sacrificed, like Gain, the flowers of my summers, and,
like Abel, the sheep of the campus. Because of it, the process of my
academic discarnation reached its ultimate stage. The last vestiges of human
interconnection were severed, for I not only vanished physically from the
lecture hall but had my entire course taped so as to be funneled through the
College Closed Circuit into the rooms of headphoned students. Rumor had it
that I was ready to quit; in fact, an anonymous punster wrote in the Quirn
Quarterly, Spring, 1959: "His Temerity is said to have asked for a raise
before emeriting."
In the summer of that year my third wife and I saw Bel for the last
time. Allan Garden (after whom the genus of the Cape Jasmin should have been
named, so great and triumphant was the flower in his buttonhole) had just
been united in wedlock to his youthful Virginia, after several years of
cloudless concubinage. They were to live to the combined age of 170 in
absolute bliss, yet one grim fateful chapter remained to be constructed. I
foiled over its first pages at the wrong desk, in the wrong hotel, above the
wrong lake, with a view of the wrong isoletta at my left elbow. The only
right thing was a pregnant-shaped bottle of Gattinara before me. In the
middle of a mangled sentence Louise came to join me from Pisa, where I
gathered--with amused indifference--that she had recoupled with a former
lover. Playing on the strings of her meek uneasiness I took her to
Switzerland, which she detested. An early dinner with Bel was scheduled at
the Larive Grand Hotel. She arrived with that Christ-haired youth, both
purple trousered. The maнtre d'hтtel murmured something over the menu to my
wife, and she rode up and brought down my oldest necktie for the young lout
to put around his <194> Adam's apple and scrawny neck. His grandmother had
been related by marriage, so it turned out, to a third cousin of Louise's
grandfather, the not quite untarnished Boston banker. This took care of the
main course. We had coffee and kirsch in the lounge, and Charlie Everett
showed us pictures of the summer Camp for Blind Children (who were spared
the sight of its drab locust trees and rings of ashed refuse amidst the
riverside burdocks) which he and Bella (Bella!) were supervising. He was
twenty-five years old. He had spent five years studying Russian, and spoke
it as fluently, he said, as a trained seal. A sample justified the
comparison. He was a dedicated "revolutionary," and a hopeless nincompoop,
knowing nothing, crazy about jazz, existentialism, Leninism, pacifism, and
African Art. He thought snappy pamphlets and catalogues so much more
"meaningful" than fat old books. A sweet, stale, and unhealthy smell
emanated from the poor fellow. Throughout the dinner and coffee-drinking
ordeal I never once--never once, reader!--looked up at my Bel, but as we
were about to part (forever) I did look at her, and she had new twin lines
from nostrils to wicks, and she wore granny glasses, and a middle part, and
had lost all her pubescent prettiness, remnants of which I had still
glimpsed during a visit to Larive a spring and winter ago. They had to be
back at half-past-twenty, alas--not really "alas."
"Come and see us at Quirn soon, soon, Dolly," I said, as we all stood
on the sidewalk with mountains outlined in solid black against an aquamarine
sky, and choughs jacking harshly, flying in flocks to roost, away, away.
I cannot explain the slip, but it angered Bel more than anything had
ever angered her at any time.
"What is he saying?" she cried, looking in turn at Louise, at her beau,
and again at Louise. "What does he mean? Why does he call me `Dolly'? Who is
she for God's sake? Why, why (turning to me), why did you say that?"
"Obmolvka, prosti (lapse of the tongue, sorry)," I <195> replied,
dying, trying to turn everything into a dream, a dream about that hideous
last moment.
They walked briskly toward their little Klop car, he half-overtaking
her, already poking the air with his car key, on her left, on her right. The
aquamarine sky was now silent, darkish and empty, save for a star-shaped
star about which I wrote a Russian elegy ages ago, in another world.
"What a charming, good-natured, civilized, sexy young fellow," said
Louise as we stamped into the lift. "Are you in the mood tonight? Right
away, Vad?" <196>
PART FIVE
<197> <198>
1
This penultimate part of LATH, this spirited episode in my otherwise
somewhat passive existence, is horribly hard to set down, reminding me of
the pensums, which the crudest of my French governesses used to inflict upon
me--some old saw to be copied cent fois (hiss and spittle)--in punishment
for my adding my own marginal illustrations to those in her Petit Larousse
or for exploring under the schoolroom table the legs of Lalage L., a little
cousin, who shared lessons with me that unforgettable summer. I have,
indeed, repeated the story of my dash to Leningrad in the late
nineteen-sixties innumerable times in my mind, to packed audiences of my
scribbling or dreaming selves--and yet I keep doubting both the necessity
and the success of my dismal task. But you have argued the question, you are
tenderly adamant, yes, and your decree is that I should relate my adventure
in order to lend a semblance of significance to my daughter's futile fate.
In the summer of 1960, Christine Dupraz, who ran the summer camp for
disabled children between cliff and highway, just east of Larive, informed
me that Charlie Everett, one of her assistants, had eloped with my Bel after
burning--in a grotesque ceremony that she visualized more <199> clearly than
I--his passport and a little American flag (bought at a souvenir stall
especially for that purpose) "right in the middle of the Soviet Consul's
back garden"; whereupon the new "Karl Ivanovich Vetrov" and the
eighteen-year-old Isabella, a ci-devant's daughter, had gone through some
form of mock marriage in Berne and incontinently headed for Russia.
The same mail brought me an invitation to discuss in New York with a
famous compхre my sudden Number One position on the Bestselling Authors
list, inquiries from Japanese, Greek, Turkish publishers, and a postcard
from Parma with the scrawl: "Bravo for Kingdom from Louise and Victor." I
never learned who Victor was, by the way.
Brushing all my engagements aside, I surrendered again--after quite a
few years of abstinence!--to the thrill of secret investigations. Spying had
been my clystхre de Tchиkhov even before I married Iris Black whose later
passion for working on an interminable detective tale had been sparked by
this or that hint I must have dropped, like a passing bird's lustrous
feather, in relation to my experience in the vast and misty field of the
Service. In my little way I have been of some help to my betters. The tree,
a blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound I caught the two "diplomats,"
Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence, still stands,
hardly scarred, on its hilltop above San Bernardino. But for structural
economy I have omitted that entertaining strain from this story of love and
prose. Its existence, however, helped me now to ward off--for a while, at
least--the madness and anguish of hopeless regret.
It was child's play to find Karl's relatives in the U.S.; namely, two
gaunt aunts who disliked the boy even more than they did one another. Aunt
Number One assured me he had never left Switzerland--they were still
forwarding his Third Class mail to her in Boston. Aunt Number <200> Two, the
Philadelphia Fright, said he liked music and was vegetating in Vienna.
I had overestimated my forces. A serious relapse hospitalized me for
nearly a whole year. The complete rest ordered by all my doctors was then
botched by my having to stand by my publisher in a long legal fight against
obscenity charges leveled at my novel by stuffy censors. I was again very
ill. I still feel the pressure of the hallucinations that beset me, as my
search for Bel got somehow mixed up with the controversy over my novel, and
I saw as clearly as one sees mountains or ships, a great building, all
windows lit, trying to advance upon me, through this or that wall of the
ward, seeking as it were a weak spot to push through and ram my bed.
In the late Sixties I learned that Bel was now definitely married to
Vetrov but that he had been sent to some remote place of unspecified work.
Then came a letter.
It was forwarded to me by an old respectable businessman (I shall call
him A.B.) with a note saying that he was "in textiles" though by education
"an engineer"; that he represented "a Soviet firm in the U.S. and vice
versa"; that the letter he was enclosing came from a lady working in his
Leningrad office (I shall call her Dora) and concerned my daughter "whom he
did not have the honor to know but who, he believed, needed my assistance."
He added that he would be flying back to Leningrad in a month's time and
would be glad if I "contacted him." The letter from Dora was in Russian.
Much-respected Vadim Vadimovich!
You probably receive many letters from people in our country who manage
to obtain your books--not an easy enterprise! The present letter, however,
is not from an admirer but simply from a friend of Isabella Vadimovna Vetrov
with <201> whom she has been sharing a room for more than a year now.
She is ill, she has no news from her husband, and she is without a
kopek.
Please, get in touch with the bearer of this note. He is my employer,
and also a distant relative, and has agreed to bring a few lines from you,
Vadim Vadimovich, and a little money, if possible, but the main thing, the
main thing (glavnoe, glavnoe) is to come in person (lichno). Let him know if
you can come and if yes, when and where we could meet to discuss the
situation. Everything in life is urgent (speshno, "pressing," "not to be
postponed") but some things are dreadfully urgent and this is one of them.
In order to convince you that she is here, with me, telling me to write
you and unable to write herself, I am appending a little clue or token that
only you and she can decode: "...and the intelligent trail (i umnitsa
tropka)."
For a minute I sat at the breakfast table--under the compassionate
stare of Brown Rose--in the attitude of a cave dweller clasping his hands
around his head at the crash of rocks breaking above him (women make the
same gesture when something falls in the next room). My decision was, of
course, instantly taken. I perfunctorily patted Rose's young buttocks
through her light skirt, and strode to the telephone.
A few hours later I was dining with A.B. in New York (and in the course
of the next month was to exchange several long-distance calls with him from
London). He was a superb little man, perfectly oval in shape, with a bald
head and tiny feet expensively shod (the rest of his envelope looked less
classy). He spoke friable English with a soft Russian accent, and native
Russian with Jewish <202> question marks. He thought that I should begin by
seeing Dora. He settled for me the exact spot where she and I might meet. He
warned me that in preparing to visit the weird Wonderland of the Soviet
Union a traveler's first step was the very Philistine one of being assigned
a nomer (hotel room) and that only after he had been granted one could the
"visa" be tackled. Over the tawny mountain of "Bogdan's" brown-speckled,
butter-soaked, caviar-accompanied bliny (which A.B. forbade me to pay for
though I was lousy with A Kingdom's money), he spoke poetically, and at some
length, about his recent trip to Tel Aviv.
My next move--a visit to London--would have been altogether delightful,
had I not been overwhelmed all the time by anxiety, impatience, anguished
forebodings. Through several venturesome gentlemen--a former lover of Allan
Andoverton's and two of my late benefactor's mysterious chums--I had
retained some innocent ties with the BINT, as Soviet agents acronymize the
well-known, too well-known, British intelligence service. Consequently it
was possible for me to obtain a false or more-or-less false passport. Since
I may want to avail myself again of those facilities, I cannot reveal here
my exact alias. Suffice it to say that some teasing similarity with my real
family name could make the assumed one pass, if I got caught, for a clerical
error on the part of an absentminded consul and for indifference to official
papers on that of the deranged bearer. Let us suppose my real name to have
been "Oblonsky" (a Tolstoyan invention); then the false one would be, for
example, the mimetic "O. B. Long," an oblong blursky, so to speak. This I
could expand into, say, Oberon Bernard Long, of Dublin or Dumberton, and
live with it for years on five or six continents.
I had escaped from Russia at the age of not quite nineteen, leaving
across my path in a perilous forest the felled body of a Red soldier. I had
then dedicated half a century to berating, deriding, twisting into funny
shapes, wringing <203> out like blood-wet towels, kicking neatly in Evil's
stinkiest spot, and otherwise tormenting the Soviet regime at every suitable
turn of my writings. In fact, no more consistent critic of Bolshevist
brutality and basic stupidity existed during all that time at the literary
level to which my output belonged. I was thus well aware of two facts: that
under my own name I would not be given a room at the Evropeyskaya or Astoria
or any other Leningrad hotel unless I made some extraordinary amends, some
abjectly exuberant recantation; and that if I talked my way to that hotel
room as Mr. Long or Blong, and got interrupted, there might be no end of
trouble. I decided therefore not to get interrupted.
"Shall I grow a beard to cross the fronder?" muses homesick General
Gurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus.
"Better than none," said Harley Q., one of my gayest advisers. "But,"
he added, "do it before we glue on and stamp O.B.'s picture and don't lose
weight afterwards." So I grew it--during the atrocious heartracking wait for
the room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ample
Victorian affair, of a nice, rough, tawny shade threaded with silver. It
reached up to my apple-red cheekbones and came down to my waistcoat,
commingling on the way with my lateral yellow-gray locks. Special contact
lenses not only gave another, dumbfounded, expression to my eyes, but
somehow changed their very shape from squarish leonine, to round Jovian.
Only upon my return did I notice that the old tailor-made trousers, on me
and in my bag, displayed my real name on the inside of the waistband.
My good old British passport, which had been handled cursorily by so
many courteous officers who had never opened my books (the only real
identity papers of its accidental holder), remained, after a procedure, that
both decency and incompetence forbid me to describe, <204> physically the
same in many respects; but certain of its other features, details of
substance and items of information, were, let us say, "modified" by a new
method, an alchemysterious treatment, a technique of genius, "still not
understood elsewhere," as the chaps in the lab tactfully expressed people's
utter unawareness of a discovery that might have saved countless fugitives
and secret agents. In other words nobody, no forensic chemist not in the
know, could suspect, let alone prove, that my passport was false. I do not
know why I dwell on this subject with such tedious persistence. Probably,
because I otlynivayu--"shirk"--the task of describing my visit to Leningrad;
yet I can't put it off any longer. <205>
2
After almost three months of fretting I was ready to go. I felt
lacquered from head to foot, like that naked ephebe, the bright clou of a
pagan procession, who died of dermal asphyxia in his coat of golden varnish.
A few days before my actual departure there occurred what seemed a harmless
shift at the time. I was to wing off on a Thursday from Paris. On Monday a
melodious female voice reached me at my nostalgically lovely hotel, rue
Rivoli, to tell me that something---perhaps a hushed-up crash in a Soviet
veil of mist--had clogged the general schedule and that I could board an
Aeroflot turboprop to Moscow either this Wednesday or the next. I chose the
former, of course, for it did not affect the date of my rendezvous.
My traveling companions were a few English and French tourists and a
goodish bunch of gloomy officials from Soviet trade missions. Once inside
the aircraft, a certain illusion of cheap unreality enveloped me--to linger
about me for the rest of my trip. It was a very warm day in June and the
farcical air-conditioning system failed to outvie the whiffs of sweat and
the sprayings of Krasnaya Moskva, an insidious perfume which imbued even the
hard candy (named Ledenets vzlyotnyy, "take-off caramel," on the wrapper)
generously distributed to us before the start <206> of the flight. Another
fairy-tale touch was the bright dapple--yellow curlicues and violet
eyespots--adorning the blinds. A similarly colored waterproof bag in the
seat pocket before me was ominously labeled "for waste disposal"--such as
the disposal of my identity in that fairy-land.
My mood and mental condition needed strong liquor rather than another
round of vzlyotnyy or some nice reading matter; still I accepted a publicity
magazine from a stout, unsmiling, bare-armed stewardess in sky blue, and was
interested to learn that (in contrast to current triumphs) Russia had not
done so well in the Soccer Olympics of 1912 when the "Tsarist team"
(consisting presumably of ten boyars and one bear) lost 12-0 to a German
side.
I had taken a tranquilizer and hoped to sleep at least part of the way;
but a first, and only, attempt at dozing off was resolutely thwarted by a
still fatter stewardess, in a still stronger aura of onion sweat, asking me
nastily to draw in the leg that I had stuck out too far into the aisle where
she circulated with more and more publicity material. I envied darkly my
windowside neighbor, an elderly Frenchman--or, anyway, scarcely a compatriot
of mine--with a straggly gray-black beard and a terrible tie, who slept
through the entire five-hour flight, disdaining the sardines and even the
vodka which I could not resist, though I had a flask of better stuff in my
hip pocket. Perhaps historians of photography could help me some day to
define how, by precisely what indices, I am enabled to establish that the
recollection of an anonymous unplaceable face goes back 1930-1935, say, and
not to 1945-1950. My neighbor was practically the twin of a person I had
known in Paris, but who? A fellow writer? A concierge? A cobbler? The
difficulty of determination grated less than the riddle of its limits as
suggested by the degree of perceived "shading" and the "feel" of the image.
<207>
I got a closer but still more teasing look at him when, toward the
close of our journey, my raincoat fell from the rack and landed upon him,
and he grinned amiably enough as he emerged from under the sudden awakener.
And I glimpsed again his fleshy profile and thick eyebrow while submitting
for inspection the contents of my only valise and fighting the insane urge
to question the propriety of the phrasing in the English form of the Customs
Declaration: "...miniature graphics, slaughtered fowl, live animals and
birds."
I saw him again, but not as clearly, during our transfer by bus from
one airport to another through some shabby environs of Moscow--a city which
I had never seen in my life and which interested me about as much as, say,
Birmingham. On the plane to Leningrad, however, he was again next to me,
this time on the inner side. Mixed odors of dour hostess and "Red Moscow,"
with a gradual prevalence of the first ingredient, as our bare-armed angels
multiplied their last ministrations, accompanied us from 21:18 to 22:33. In
order to draw out my neighbor before he and his riddle vanished, I asked
him, in French, if he knew anything about a picturesque group that had
boarded our aircraft in Moscow. He replied, with a Parisian grasseyement,
that they were, he believed, Iranian circus people touring Europe. The men
looked like harlequins in mufti, the women like birds of paradise, the
children like golden medallions, and there was one dark-haired pale beauty
in black bolero and yellow sharovars who reminded me of Iris or a prototype
of Iris.
"I hope," I said, "we'll see them perform in Leningrad."
"Pouf!" he rejoined. "They can't compete with our Soviet circus."
I noted the automatic "our."
Both he and I were billeted in the Astoria, a hideous pile built around
World War One, I think. The heavily bugged (I had been taught by Guy Gayley
a way of finding that <208> out in one gleeful twinkle) and therefore
sheepish-looking room "de luxe," with orange curtains and an orange-draped
bed in its old-world alcove, did have a private bath as stipulated, but it
took me some time to cope with a convulsive torrent of clay-colored water.
"Red Moscow's" last stand took place on a cake of incarnadine soap. "Meals,"
said a notice, "may be served in the rooms." For the heck of it I tried
ordering an evening snack; nothing happened, and I spent another hungry hour
in the recalcitrant restaurant. The Iron Curtain is really a lampshade: its
variety here was gemmed with glass incrustations in a puzzle of petals. The
kotleta po kievski I ordered took forty-four minutes to come from Kiev--and
two seconds to be sent back as a non-cutlet, with a tiny oath (murmured in
Russian) that made the waitress start and gape at me and my Daily Worker.
The Caucasian wine was undrinkable.
A sweet little scene happened to be enacted as I hurried toward the
lift, trying to recall where I had put my blessed Burpies. A flushed
athletic liftyorsha wearing several bead necklaces was in the act of being
replaced by a much older woman of the pensioned type, at whom she shouted
while stomping out of the lift: "Ya tebe eto popomnyu, sterva! (I'll get
even with you, dirty bitch)"--and proceeded to barge into me and almost
knock me down (I am a large, but fluff-light old fellow). "Shtoy-ty
suyoshsya pod nogi? (Why do you get underfoot?)" she cried in the same
insolent tone of voice which left the night attendant quietly shaking her
gray head all the way up to my floor.
Between two nights, two parts of a serial dream, in which I vainly
tried to locate Bel's street (whose name, by a superstition current for
centuries in conspiratorial circles I had preferred not to be told), while
knowing perfectly well that she lay bleeding and laughing in an alcove
diagonally across the room, a few barefooted steps from my bed, I wandered
about the city, idly trying to derive some <209> emotional benefit from my
being born there almost three-quarters of a century ago. Either because it
could never get over the presence of the bog on which a popular bully had
built it, or for some other reason (nobody, according to Gogol, knows), St.
Petersburg was no place for children. I must have passed there insignificant
parts of a few Decembers, and no doubt an April or two; but at least a dozen
winters of my nineteen pre-Cambridge ones were spent on Mediterranean or
Black Sea coasts. As to summers, to my young summers, all of them had
bloomed for me on the great country estates of my family. Thus I realized
with silly astonishment that, except for picture postcards (views of
conventional public parks with lindens looking like oaks and a pistachio
palace instead of the remembered pinkish one, and relentlessly gilded church
domes--all of it under an Italianate sky), I had never seen my native city
in June or July. Its aspect, therefore, evoked no thrill of recognition; it
was an unfamiliar, if not utterly foreign, town, still lingering in some
other era: an undefinable era, not exactly remote, but certainly preceding
the invention of body deodorants.
Warm weather had come to stay, and everywhere, in travel agencies, in
foyers, in waiting rooms, in general stores, in trolleybuses, in elevators,
on escalators, in every damned corridor, everywhere, and especially where
women worked, or had worked, invisible onion soup was cooking on invisible
stoves. I was to remain only a couple of days in Leningrad and had not the
time to get used to those infinitely sad emanations.
From travelers I knew that our ancestral mansion no longer existed,
that the very lane where it had stood between two streets in the Fontanka
area had been lost, like some connective tissue in the process of organic
degeneration. What then succeeded in transfixing my memory? That sunset,
with a triumph of bronze clouds and flamingo-pink meltings in the far-end
archway of the Winter Canalet, <210> might have been first seen in Venice.
What else? The shadow of railings on granite? To be quite honest, only the
dogs, the pigeons, the horses, and the very old, very meek cloakroom
attendants seemed familiar to me. They, and perhaps the faгade of a house on
Gertsen Street. I may have gone there to some children's fйte ages ago. The
floral design running above the row of its upper windows caused an eerie
shiver to pass through the root of wings that we all grow at such moments of
dream-like recollection.
Dora was to meet me Friday morning on the Square of the Arts in front
of the Russian Museum near the statue of Pushkin erected some ten years
before by a committee of weathermen. An Intourist folder had yielded a
tinted photograph of the spot. The meteorological associations of the
monument predominated over its cultural ones. Frock-coated Pushkin, the
right-side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breeze
rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward and
to the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise,
to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in the
Leningrad parks). It had dwindled, when I arrived, to a warm drizzle, a mere
murmur in the lindens above the long garden benches. Dora was supposed to be
sitting on Pushkin's left, id est my right. The bench was empty and looked
dampish. Three or four children, of the morose, drab, oddly old-fashioned
aspect that Soviet kids have, could be seen on the other side of the
pedestal, but otherwise I was loitering all alone, holding the Humanitи in
my hand instead of the Worker which I was supposed to signal with discreetly
but had not been able to obtain that day. I was in the act of spreading the
newspaper on the bench when a lady with the predicted limp came along a
garden path toward me. She wore the, also expected, pastel-pink coat, had a
clubfoot, and walked with the aid of a sturdy cane. She also carried a
diaphanous little umbrella which had not figured in the list of <211>
attributes. I dissolved in tears at once (though I was farced with pills).
Her gentle beautiful eyes were also wet.
Had I got A.B.'s telegram? Sent two days ago to my Paris address? Hotel
Moritz?
"That's garbled," I said, "and besides I left earlier. Doesn't matter.
Is she much worse?"
"No, no, on the contrary. I knew you would come all the same, but
something has happened. Karl turned up on Tuesday while I was in the office
and took her away. He also took my new suitcase. He has no sense of
ownership. He will be shot some day like a common thief. The first time he
got into trouble was when he kept declaring that Lincoln and Lenin were
brothers. And last time--"
Nice voluble lady, Dora. What was Bel's illness exactly?
"Splenic anemia. And last time, he told his best student in the
language school that the only thing people should do was to love one another
and pardon their enemies."
"An original mind. Where do you suppose--"
"Yes, but the best student was an informer, and Karlusha spent a year
in a tundrovyy House of Rest. I don't know where he took her now. I even
don't know whom to ask."
"But there must be some way. She must be brought back, taken out of
this hole, this hell."
"That's impossible. She adores, she worships Karlusha. C'est la vie, as
the Germans say. It's a pity A.B. is in Riga till the end of the month. You
saw very little of him. Yes, it's a pity, he's a freak and a dear (chudak i
dushka) with four nephews in Israel, which sounds, he says, as `the dramatic
persons in a pseudoclassical play.' One of them was my husband. Life gets
sometimes very complicated, and the more complicated the happier it should
be, one would think, but in reality `complicated' always means for some
reason grust' i toska (sorrow and heartache)."
"But look here, can't I do something? Can't I sort of <212> hang around
and make inquiries, and perhaps seek advice from the Embassy--"
"She is not English any more and was never American. It's hopeless, I
tell you. We were very close, she and I, in my very complicated life, but,
imagine, Karl did not allow her to leave at least one little word for
me--and for you, of course. She had informed him, unfortunately, that you
were coming, and this he could not bear in spite of all the sympathy he
works up for all unsympathetic people. You know, I saw your face last
year--or was it two years ago?--two years, rather--in a Dutch or Danish
magazine, and I would have recognized you at once, anywhere."
"With the beard?"
"Oh, it does not change you one droplet. It's like wigs or green
spectacles in old comedies. As a girl I dreamt of becoming a female clown,
`Madam Byron,' or `Trek Trek.' But tell me, Vadim Vadimovich--I mean
Gospodin Long--haven't they found you out? Don't they intend to make much of
you? After all, you're the secret pride of Russia. Must you go now?"
I detached myself from the bench--with some scraps of L'Humanitи
attempting to follow me--and said, yes, I had better be going before the
pride outstripped the prudence. I kissed her hand whereupon she remarked
that she had seen it done only in a movie called War and Peace. I also
begged her, under the dripping lilacs, to accept a wad of bank notes to be
used for any purpose she wished including the price of that suitcase for her
trip to Sochi. "And he also took my whole set of safety pins," she murmured
with her all-beautifying smile. <213>
3
I cannot be sure it was not again my fellow traveler, the black-hatted
man, whom I saw hurrying away as I parted with Dora and our National Poet,
leaving the latter to worry forever about all that wasted water (compare the
Tsarskoselski Statue of a rock-dwelling maiden who mourns her broken but
still brimming jar in one of his own poems); but I know I saw Monsieur Pouf
at least twice in the restaurant of the Astoria, as well as in the corridor
of the sleeping car on the night train that I took in order to catch the
earliest Moscow-Paris plane. On that plane he was prevented from sitting
next to me by the presence of an elderly American lady, with pink and violet
wrinkles and rufous hair: we kept alternately chatting, dozing and drinking
Bloody Marshas, her joke--not appreciated by our sky-blue hostess. It was
delightful to observe the amazement expressed by old Miss Haveme...
