Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
страница №8
...yer (herrather incredible name) when I told her that I had spurned the Intourist's
offer of a sightseeing tour of Leningrad; that I had not peeped into Lenin's
room in the Smolny; had not visited one cathedral; had not eaten something
called "tabaka chicken"; and that I had left that beautiful, beautiful city
without seeing a single ballet or variety show. "I happen <214> to be," I
explained, "a triple agent and you know how it is--" "Oh!" she exclaimed,
with a pulling-away movement of the torso as if to consider me from a nobler
angle. "Oh! But that's vurry glamorous!"
I had to wait some time for my jet to New York, and being a little
tight and rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not too
gravely ill and not too unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, a
magazine in the living room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements of
her leg, ankle 8 1/2 inches, calf 12 1/2, creamy thigh 19 1/2, and Louise
was in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up a
paperback somebody had left on a seat next to mine in the transit lounge of
the Orly airport. I was the mouse of fate on that pleasant June afternoon
between a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes.
I held in my hands a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced from
the American edition of A Kingdom by the Sea. I had not seen it yet--and
preferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured the
pirated text. On the cover a publicity picture of the child actress who had
played my Virginia in the recent film did better justice to pretty Lola
Sloan and her lollypop than to the significance of my novel. Although
slovenly worded by a hack with no inkling of the book's art, the blurb on
the back of the limp little volume rendered faithfully enough the factual
plot of my Kingdom.
Bertram, an unbalanced youth, doomed to die shortly in an asylum for
the criminal insane, sells for ten dollars his ten-year-old sister Ginny to
the middle-aged bachelor Al Garden, a wealthy poet who travels with the
beautiful child from resort to resort through America and other countries. A
state of affairs that looks at first blush--and "blush" is the right
word--like a case of irresponsible <215> perversion (described in brilliant
detail never attempted before) develops by the grees [misprint] into a
genuine dialogue of tender love. Garden's feelings are reciprocated by
Ginny, the initial "victim" who at eighteen, a normal nymph, marries him in
a warmly described religious ceremony. All seems to end honky-donky [sic!]
in foreverlasting bliss of a sort fit to meet the sexual demands of the most
rigid, or frigid, humanitarian, had there not been running its chaotic
course, in a sheef [sheaf?] of parallel lives beyond our happy couple's ken,
the tragic tiny [destiny?] of Virginia Garden's inconsolable parents, Oliver
and [?], whom the clever author by every means in his power, prevents from
tracking their daughter Dawn [sic!!]. A Book-of-the-Decade choice.
I pocketed it upon noticing that my long-lost fellow traveler,
goat-bearded and black-hatted, as I knew him, had come up from the lavatory
or the bar: Would he follow me to New York or was it to be our last meeting?
Last, last. He had given himself away: The moment he came near, the moment
his mouth opened in the tense-lower-lip shape that discharges, with a
cheerless up-and-down shake of the head, the exclamation "Ekh!," I knew not
only that he was as Russian as I, but that the ancient acquaintance whom he
resembled so strikingly was the father of a young poet, Oleg Orlov, whom I
had met in Paris, in the Nineteen-Twenties. Oleg wrote "poems in prose"
(long after Turgenev), absolutely worthless stuff, which his father, a
half-demented widower, would try to "place," pestering with his son's
worthless wares the dozen or so periodicals of the emigration. He could be
seen in the waiting room miserably fawning on a harassed and curt secretary,
or attempting to waylay an assistant editor <216> between office and toilet,
or writing in stoic misery, at a corner of a crowded table, a special letter
pleading the cause of some horrible little poem that had been already
rejected. He died in the same Home for the Aged where Annette's mother had
spent her last years. Oleg, in the meantime, had joined the small number of
littиrateurs who decided to sell the bleak liberty of expatriation for the
rosy mess of Soviet pottage. His budtime had kept its promise. The best he
had achieved during the last forty or fifty years was a medley of publicity
pieces, commercial translations, vicious denunciations, and--in the domain
of the arts--a prodigious resemblance to the physical aspect, voice,
mannerisms, and obsequious impudence of his father.
"Ekh!" he exclaimed, "Ekh, Vadim Vadimovich dorogoy (dear), aren't you
ashamed of deceiving our great warm-hearted country, our benevolent,
credulous government, our overworked Intourist staff, in this nasty
infantile manner! A Russian writer! Snooping! Incognito! By the way, I am
Oleg Igorevich Orlov, we met in Paris when we were young."
"What do you want, merzavetz (you scoundrel)?" I coldly inquired as he
plopped into the chair on my left.
He raised both hands in the "see-I'm-unarmed" gesture: "Nothing,
nothing. Except to ruffle (potormoshit') your conscience. Two courses
presented themselves. We had to choose. Fyodor Mihaylovich [?] himself had
to choose. Either to welcome you po amerikanski (the American way) with
reporters, interviews, photographers, girls, garlands, and, naturally,
Fyodor Mihaylovich himself [President of the Union of Writers? Head of the
`Big House'?]; or else to ignore you--and that's what we did. By the way:
forged passports may be fun in detective stories, but our people are just
not interested in passports. Aren't you sorry now?"
I made as if to move to another seat, but he made as if <217> to
accompany me there. So I stayed where I was, and feverishly grabbed
something to read--that book in my coat pocket.
"Et ce n'est pas tout," he went on. "Instead of writing for us, your
compatriots, you, a Russian writer of genius, betray them by concocting, for
your paymasters, this (pointing with a dramatically quivering index at A
Kingdom by the Sea in my hands), this obscene novelette about little Lola or
Lotte, whom some Austrian Jew or reformed pederast rapes after murdering her
mother--no, excuse me--marrying mama first before murdering her--we like to
legalize everything in the West, don't we, Vadim Vadimovich?"
Still restraining myself, though aware of the uncontrollable cloud of
black fury growing within my brain, I said: "You are mistaken. You are a
somber imbecile. The novel I wrote, the novel I'm holding now, is A Kingdom
by the Sea. You are talking of some other book altogether."
"Vraiment? And maybe you visited Leningrad merely to chat with a lady
in pink under the lilacs? Because, you know, you and your friends are
phenomenally naоve. The reason Mister (it rhymed with `Easter' in his foul
serpent-mouth) Vetrov was permitted to leave a certain labor camp in
Vadim--odd coincidence--so he might fetch his wife, is that he has been
cured now of his mystical mania--cured by such nutcrackers, such shrinkers
as are absolutely unknown in the philosophy of your Western sharlatanchy. Oh
yes, precious (dragotsennyy) Vadim Vadimovich--"
The swing I dealt old Oleg with the back of my left fist was of quite
presentable power, especially if we remember--and I remembered it as I
swung--that our combined ages made 140.
There ensued a pause while I struggled back to my feet (unaccustomed
momentum had somehow caused me to fall from my seat).
"Nu, dali v mordu. Nu, tak chtozh?" he muttered <218> (Well, you've
given me one in the mug. Well, what does it matter?). Blood blotched the
handkerchief he applied to his fat muzhikian nose.
"Nu, dali," he repeated and presently wandered away.
I looked at my knuckles. They were red but intact. I listened to my
wristwatch. It ticked like mad. <219> <220>
PART SIX
<221> <222>
1
Speaking of philosophy, I recalled when starting to readjust myself,
very temporarily, to the corners and crannies of Quirn, that somewhere in my
office I kept a bundle of notes (on the Substance of Space), prepared
formerly toward an account of my young years and nightmares (the work now
known as Ardis). I also needed to sort out and remove from my office, or
ruthlessly destroy, a mass of miscellanea which had accumulated ever since I
began teaching.
That afternoon--a sunny and windy September afternoon--I had decided,
with the unaccountable suddenness of genuine inspiration, that 1969-1970
would be my last term at Quirn University. I had, in fact, interrupted my
siesta that day to request an immediate interview with the Dean. I thought
his secretary sounded a little grumpy on the phone; true, I declined to
explain anything beforehand, beyond confiding to her, in an informal
bantering manner, that the numeral "7" always reminded me of the flag an
explorer sticks in the cranium of the North Pole.
After setting out on foot and reaching the seventh poplar I realized
that there might be quite a load of papers to bring from my office, so I
went back for my car, and <223> then had difficulty in finding a place to
park near the library where I intended to return a number of books which
were months, if not years, overdue. In result, I was a little late for my
appointment with the Dean, a new man and not my best reader. He consulted,
rather demonstratively, the clock and muttered he had a "conference" in a
few minutes at some other place, probably invented.
I was amused rather than surprised by the vulgar joy he did not trouble
to conceal at the news of my resignation. He hardly heard the reasons which
common courtesy impelled me to give (frequent headaches, boredom, the
efficiency of modern recording, the comfortable income my recent novel
supplied, and so forth). His whole manner changed--to use a clichи he
deserves. He paced to and fro, positively beaming. He grasped my hand in a
burst of brutal effusion. Certain fastidious blue-blooded animals prefer
surrendering a limb to the predator rather than suffer ignoble contact. I
left the Dean encumbered with a marble arm that he kept carrying in his
prowlings like a trayed trophy, not knowing where to put it down.
So off to my office I stalked, a happy amputee, more than ever eager to
clean up drawers and shelves. I began, however, by dashing off a note to the
President of the University, another new man, informing him with a touch of
French malice, rather than English "malice," that my entire set of one
hundred lectures on European Masterpieces was about to be sold to a generous
publisher who offered me an advance of half-a-million bucks (a salubrious
exaggeration), thus making transmissions of my course no longer available to
students, best regards, sorry not to have met you personally.
In the name of moral hygiene I had got rid long ago of my Bechstein
desk. Its considerably smaller substitute contained note paper, scratch
paper, office envelopes, photostats of my lectures, a copy of Dr. Olga
Repnin (hard-back) which I had intended for a colleague (but had <224>
spoiled by misspelling his name), and a pair of warm gloves belonging to my
assistant (and successor) Exkul. Also three boxfuls of paper clips and a
half-empty flask of whisky. From the shelves, I swept into the wastebasket,
or onto the floor in its vicinity, heaps of circulars, separata, a displaced
ecologist's paper on the ravages committed by a bird of some sort, the
Ozimaya Sovka ("Lesser Winter-Crop Owl"?), and the tidily bound page proofs
(mine always come in the guise of long, horribly slippery and unwieldy
snakes) of picaresque trash, full of cricks and punts, imposed on me by
proud publishers hoping for a rave from the lucky bastard. A mess of
business correspondence and my tractatule on Space I stuffed into a large
worn folder. Adieu, lair of learning!
Coincidence is a pimp and cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a
marvelous artist in the patterns of fact recollected by a non-ordinary
memoirist. Only asses and geese think that the re-collector skips this or
that bit of his past because it is dull or shoddy (that sort of episode
here, for example, the interview with the Dean, and how scrupulously it is
recorded!). I was on the way to the parking lot when the bulky folder under
my arm--replacing my arm, as it were--burst its string and spilled its
contents all over the gravel and grassy border. You were coming from the
library along the same campus path, and we crouched side by side collecting
the stuff. You were pained you said later (zhalostno bylo) to smell the
liquor on my breath. On the breath of that great writer.
I say "you" retroconsciously, although in the logic of life you were
not "you" yet, for we were not actually acquainted and you were to become
really "you" only when you said, catching a slip of yellow paper that was
availing itself of a bluster to glide away with false insouciance:
"No, you don't." <225>
Crouching, smiling, you helped me to cram everything again into the
folder and then asked me how my daughter was--she and you had been
schoolmates some fifteen years ago, and my wife had given you a lift several
times. I then remembered your name and in a photic flash of celestial color
saw you and Bel looking like twins, silently hating each other, both in blue
coats and white hats, waiting to be driven somewhere by Louise. Bel and you
would both be twenty-eight on January 1, 1970.
A yellow butterfly settled briefly on a clover head, then wheeled away
in the wind.
"Metamorphoza," you said in your lovely, elegant Russian.
Would I care to have some snapshots (additional snapshots) of Bel? Bel
feeding a chipmunk? Bel at the school dance? (Oh, I remember that dance--she
had chosen for escort a sad fat Hungarian boy whose father was assistant
manager of the Quilton Hotel--I can still hear Louise snorting!)
We met next morning in my carrel at the College Library, and after that
I continued to see you every day. I will not suggest, LATH is not meant to
suggest, that the petals and plumes of my previous loves are dulled or
coarsened when directly contrasted with the purity of your being, the magic,
the pride, the reality of your radiance. Yet "reality" is the key word here;
and the gradual perception of that reality was nearly fatal to me.
Reality would be only adulterated if I now started to narrate what you
know, what I know, what nobody else knows, what shall never, never be
ferreted out by a matter-of-fact, father-of-muck, mucking biograffitist. And
how did your affair develop, Mr. Blong? Shut up, Ham Godman! And when did
you decide to leave together for Europe? Damn you, Ham!
See under Real, my first novel in English, thirty-five years ago! <226>
One little item of subhuman interest I can disclose, however, in this
interview with posterity. It is a foolish, embarrassing trifle and I never
told you about it, so here goes. It was on the eve of our departure, around
March 15, 1970, in a New York hotel. You were out shopping. ("I think"--you
said to me just now when I tried to check that detail without telling you
why--"I think I bought a beautiful blue suitcase with a zipper"--miming the
word with a little movement of your dear delicate hand--"which proved to be
absolutely useless.") I stood before the closet mirror of my bedroom in the
north end of our pretty "suite," and proceeded to take a final decision. All
right, I could not live without you; but was I worthy of you--I mean, in
body and spirit? I was forty-three years older than you. The Frown of Age,
two deep lines forming a capital lambda, ascended between my eyebrows. My
forehead, with its three horizontal wrinkles that had not really
overasserted themselves in the last three decades, remained round, ample and
smooth, waiting for the summer tan that would scumble, I knew, the liver
spots on my temples. All in all, a brow to be enfolded and fondled. A
thorough haircut had done away with the leonine locks; what remained was of
a neutral, grayish-dun tint. My large handsome glasses magnified the senile
group of wart-like little excrescences under each lower eyelid. The eyes,
once an irresistible hazel-green, were now oysterous. The nose, inherited
from a succession of Russian boyars, German barons, and, perhaps (if Count
Starov who sported some English blood was my real father), at least one Peer
of the Realm, had retained its bone hump and tip rime, but had developed on
the frontal flesh, within its owner's memory, an aggravating gray hairlet
that grew faster and faster between yanks. My dentures did not do justice to
my former attractively irregular teeth and (as I told an expensive but
obtuse dentist who did not understand what I meant) "seemed to ignore my
smile." A furrow sloped <227> down from each nosewing, and a jowl pouch on
each side of my chin formed in three-quarter-face the banal flexure common
to old men of all races, classes, and professions. I doubted that I had been
right in shaving off my glorious beard and the trim mustache that had
lingered, on try, for a week or so after my return from Leningrad. Still, I
passed my face, giving it a C-minus mark.
Since I had never been much of an athlete, the deterioration of my body
was neither very marked, nor very interesting. I gave it a C plus, mainly
for my routing tank after tank of belly fat in a war with obesity waged
between intervals of retreat and rest since the middle Fifties. Apart from
incipient lunacy (a problem with which I prefer to deal separately), I had
been in excellent health throughout adulthood.
What about the state of my art? What could I offer to you there? You
had studied, as I hope you recall, Turgenev in Oxford and Bergson in Geneva,
but thanks to family ties with good old Quirn and Russian New York (where a
last иmigrи periodical was still deploring, with idiotic innuendoes, my
"apostasy") you had followed pretty closely, as I discovered, the procession
of my Russian and English harlequins, followed by a tiger or two,
scarlet-tongued, and a libellula girl on an elephant. You had also studied
those obsolete photocopies--which proved that my method avait du bon after
all--pace the monstrous accusations leveled at them by a pack of professors
in envious colleges.
As I peered, stripped naked and traversed by opaline rays, into
another, far deeper mirror, I saw the whole vista of my Russian books and
was satisfied and even thrilled by what I saw: Tamara, my first novel
(1925): a girl at sunrise in the mist of an orchard. A grandmaster betrayed
in Pawn Takes Queen. Plenilune, a moonburst of verse. Camera Lucida, the
spy's mocking eye among the meek blind. The Red Top Hat of decapitation in a
country <228> of total injustice. And my best in the series: young poet
writes prose on a Dare.
That Russian batch of my books was finished and signed and thrust back
into the mind that had produced them. All of them had been gradually
translated into English either by myself or under my direction, with my
revisions. Those final English versions as well as the reprinted originals
would be now dedicated to you. That was good. That was settled. Next
picture:
My English originals, headed by the fierce See under Real (1940), led
through the changing light of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus, to the fun of Dr.
Olga Repnin and the dream of A Kingdom by the Sea. There was also the
collection of short stories Exile from Mayda) a distant island; and Ardis,
the work I had resumed at the time we met--at the time, too, of a deluge of
postcards (postcards!) from Louise hinting at last at a move which I wanted
her to be the first to make.
If I estimated the second batch at a lower value than the first, it was
owing not only to a diffidence some will call coy, others, commendable, and
myself, tragic, but also because the contours of my American production
looked blurry to me; and they looked that way because I knew I would always
keep hoping that my next book--not simply the one in progress, like
Ardis--but something I had never attempted yet, something miraculous and
unique, would at last answer fully the craving, the aching thirst that a few
disjunct paragraphs in Esmeralda and The Kingdom were insufficient to
quench. I believed I could count on your patience. <229>
2
I had not the slightest desire to reimburse Louise for being forced to
shed me; and I hesitated to embarrass her by supplying my lawyer with the
list of her betrayals. They were stupid and sordid, and went back to the
days when I still was reasonably faithful to her. The "divorce dialogue," as
Horace Peppermill, Junior, horribly called it, dragged on during the entire
spring: You and I spent part of it in London and the rest in Taormina, and I
kept putting off talks of our marriage (a delay you regarded with royal
indifference). What really bothered me was having also to postpone the
tedious statement (to be repeated for the fourth time in my life) that would
have to precede any such talks. I fumed. It was a shame to leave you in the
dark regarding my derangement.
Coincidence, the angel with the eyed wings mentioned before, spared me
the humiliating rigmarole that I had found necessary to go through before
proposing to each of my former wives. On June 15, at Gandora, in the Tessin,
I received a letter from young Horace giving me excellent news: Louise had
discovered (how does not matter) that at various periods of our marriage I
had had her shadowed, in all sorts of fascinating old cities, by a private
detective (Dick Cockburn, a staunch friend of mine); that the tapes <230> of
love calls and other documents were in my lawyer's hands; and that she was
ready to make every possible concession to speed up matters, being anxious
to marry again--this time the son of an Earl. And on the same fatidic day,
at a quarter past five in the afternoon, I finished transcribing on 733
medium-sized Bristol cards (each holding about 100 words), with a
fine-nibbed pen and in my smallest fair-copy hand, Ardis, a stylized memoir
dealing with the arbored boyhood and ardent youth of a great thinker who by
the end of the book tackles the itchiest of all noumenal mysteries. One of
the early chapters contained an account (couched in an overtly personal,
intolerably tortured tone) of my own tussles with the Specter of Space and
the myth of Cardinal Points.
By 5:30 I had consumed, in a fit of private celebration, most of the
caviar and all the champagne in the friendly fridge of our bungalow on the
green grounds of the Gandora Palace Hotel. I found you on the veranda and
told you I would like you to devote the next hour to reading attentively--
"I read everything attentively."
"--this batch of thirty cards from Ardis" After which I thought you
might meet me somewhere on my way back from my late-afternoon stroll: always
the same--to the spartitraffico fountain (ten minutes) and thence to the
edge of a pine plantation (another ten minutes). I left you reclining in a
lounge chair with the sun reproducing the amethyst lozenges of the veranda
windows on the floor, and barring your bare shins and the insteps of your
crossed feet (right toe twitching now and then in some obscure connection
with the tempo of assimilation or a twist in the text). In a matter of
minutes you would have learned (as only Iris had learned before you--the
others were no eaglesses) what I wished you to be aware of when consenting
to be my wife. "Careful, please, when you cross," you said, without <231>
raising your eyes but then looking up and tenderly pursing your lips before
going back to Ardis.
Ha! Weaving a little! Was that really I, Prince Vadim Blonsky, who in
1815 could have outdrunk Pushkin's mentor, Kaverin? In the golden light of a
mere quart of the stuff all the trees in the hotel park looked like
araucarias. I congratulated myself on the neatness of my stratagem though
not quite knowing whether it concerned my third wife's recorded frolics or
the disclosure of my infirmity through a bloke in a book. Little by little
the soft spicy air did me good: my soles clung more firmly to gravel and
sand, clay and stone. I became aware that I had gone out wearing morocco
slippers and a torn, bleached denim trousers-and-top with, paradoxically, my
passport in one nipple pocket and a wad of Swiss bank notes in the other.
Local people in Gandino or Gandora, or whatever the town was called, knew
the face of the author of Un regno sul mare or Ein Kжnigreich an der See or
Un Royaume au Bord de la Mer, so it would have been really fatuous on my
part to prepare the cue and the cud for the reader in case a car was really
to hit me.
Soon I was feeling so happy and bright that when I passed by the
sidewalk cafe just before reaching the square, it seemed a good idea to
stabilize the fizz still ascending in me by means of a jigger of
something--and yet I demurred, and passed by, cold-eyed, knowing how
sweetly, yet firmly, you disapproved of the most innocent tippling.
One of the streets projecting west beyond the traffic island traversed
the Corso Orsini and immediately afterwards, as if having achieved an
exhausting feat, degenerated into a soft dusty old road with traces of
gramineous growth on both sides, but none of pavement.
I could say what I do not remember having been moved to say in years,
namely: My happiness was complete. As I walked, I read those cards with you,
at your pace, your <232> diaphanous index at my rough peeling temple, my
wrinkled finger at your turquoise temple-vein. I caressed the facets of the
Blackwing pencil you kept gently twirling, I felt against my raised knees
the fifty-year-old folded chessboard, Nikifor Starov's gift (most of the
noblemen were badly chipped in their baize-lined mahogany box!), propped on
your skirt with its pattern of irises. My eyes moved with yours, my pencil
queried with your own faint little cross in the narrow margin a solecism I
could not distinguish through the tears of space. Happy tears, radiant,
shamelessly happy tears!
A goggled imbecile on a motorcycle who I thought had seen me and would
slow down to let me cross Corso Orsini in peace swerved so clumsily to avoid
killing me that he skidded and ended up facing me some way off after an
ignominious wobble. I ignored his roar of hate and continued my steady
stroll westward in the changed surroundings I have already mentioned. The
practically rural old road crept between modest villas, each in its nest of
tall flowers and spreading trees. A rectangle of cardboard on one of the
west-side wickets said "Rooms" in German; on the opposite side an old pine
supported a sign "For Sale" in Italian. Again on the left, a more
sophisticated houseowner offered "Lunchings." Still fairly far was the green
vista of the pineta.
My thoughts reverted to Ardis. I knew that the bizarre mental flaw you
were now reading about would pain you; I also knew that its display was a
mere formality on my part and could not obstruct the natural flow of our
common fate. A gentlemanly gesture. In fact, it might compensate for what
you did not yet know, what I would have to tell you too, what I suspected
you would call the not quite savory little method (gnusnovaten'kiy sposob)
of my "getting even" with Louise. All right--but what about Ardis? Apart
from my warped mind, did you like it or loathe it? <233>
Composing, as I do, whole books in my mind before releasing the inner
word and taking it down in pencil or pen, I find that the final text remains
for a while committed to memory, as distinct and perfect as the floating
imprint that a light bulb leaves on the retina. I was able therefore to
rerun the actual images of those cards you read: they were projected on the
screen of my fancy together with the gleam of your topaz ring and the beat
of your eyelashes, and I could calculate how far you had read not simply by
consulting my watch but by actually following one line after the other to
the right-hand brink of each card. The lucidity of the image was correlated
with the quality of the writing. You knew my work too well to be ruffled by
a too robust erotic detail, or annoyed by a too recondite literary allusion.
It was bliss reading Ardis with you that way, triumphing that way over the
stretch of colored space separating my lane from your lounge chair. Was I an
excellent writer? I was an excellent writer. That avenue of statues and
lilacs where Ada and I drew our first circles on the dappled sand was
visualized and re-created by an artist of lasting worth. The hideous
suspicion that even Ardis, my most private book, soaked in reality,
saturated with sun flecks, might be an unconscious imitation of another's
unearthly art, that suspicion might come later; at the moment--6:18 P.M. on
June 15, 1970, in the Tessin--nothing could scratch the rich humid gloss of
my happiness.
I was now reaching the end of my usual preprandial walk. The ra-ta-ta,
ta-ta, tac of a typist's finishing a last page came from a window through
motionless foliage, reminding me pleasantly that I had long since eschewed
the long labor of having my immaculate manuscripts typed when they could be
reproduced photographically in one hum. It was now the publisher who bore
the brunt of having my hand transformed directly into printed characters,
and I know he disliked the procedure as a well-bred <234> entomologist may
find revolting an irregular insect's skipping some generally accepted stage
of metamorphosis.
Only a few steps--twelve, eleven--remained before I would start to walk
back: I felt you were thinking of this in a reversal of distant perception,
just as I felt a kind of mental loosening, which told me you had finished
reading those thirty cards, placed them in their proper order, tidied the
stack by knocking its base slightly against the table, found the elastic
lying there in the assumed shape of a heart, banded the batch, carried it to
the safety of my desk, and were now preparing to meet me on my way back to
Gandora Palace.
A low wall of gray stone, waist-high, paunch-thick, built in the
general shape of a transversal parapet, put an end to whatever life the road
still had as a town street. A narrow passage for pedestrians and cyclists
divided the parapet in the middle, and the width of that gap was preserved
beyond it in a path which after a flick or two slithered into a fairly dense
young pinewood. You and I had rambled there many times on gray mornings,
when lakeside or poolside lost all attraction; but that evening, as usual, I
terminated my stroll at the parapet, and stood in perfect repose, facing the
low sun, my spread hands enjoying the smoothness of its top edge on both
sides of the passage. A tactile something, or the recent ra-ta-tac, brought
back and completed the image of my 733, twelve centimers by ten-and-a-half
Bristol cards, which you would read chapter by chapter whereupon a great
pleasure, a parapet of pleasure, would perfect my task: in my mind there
arose, endowed with the clean-cut compactness of some great solid--an altar!
a mesa!--the image of the shiny photocopier in one of the offices of our
hotel. My trustful hands were still spread, but my soles no longer sensed
the soft soil. I wished to go back to you, to life, to the amethyst
lozenges, to the pencil lying on the veranda table, and I could not. What
used to happen so often in thought, now <235> had happened for keeps: I
could not turn. To make that movement would mean rolling the world around on
its axis and that was as impossible as traveling back physically from the
present moment to the previous one. Maybe I should not have panicked, should
have waited quietly for the stone of my limbs to regain some tingle of
flesh. Instead, I performed, or imagined performing, a wild wrenching
movement--and the globe did not bulge. I must have hung in a spread-eagle
position for a little while longer before ending supine on the intangible
soil. <236>
PART SEVEN
<237> <238>
1
There exists an old rule--so old and trite that I blush to mention it.
Let me twist it into a jingle--to stylize the staleness:
The I of the book
Cannot die in the book.
I am speaking of serious novels, naturally. In so-called
Planchette-Fiction the unruffled narrator, after describing his own
dissolution, can continue thus: "I found myself standing on a staircase of
onyx before a great gate of gold in a crowd of other bald-headed angels..."
Cartoon stuff, folklore rubbish, hilarious atavistic respect for
precious minerals!
And yet--
And yet I feel that during three weeks of general paresis (if that is
what it was) I have gained some experience; that when my night really comes
I shall not be totally unprepared. Problems of identity have been, if not
settled, at least set. Artistic insights have been granted. I was allowed to
take my palette with me to very remote reaches of dim and dubious being.
Speed! If I could have given my definition of death to <239> the
stunned fisherman, to the mower who stopped wiping his scythe with a handful
of grass, to the cyclist embracing in terror a willow sapling on one green
bank and actually getting up to the top of a taller tree on the opposite
side with his machine and girlfriend, to the black horses gaping at me like
people with trick dentures all through my strange skimming progress, I would
have cried one word: Speed! Not that those rural witnesses ever existed. My
impression of prodigious, inexplicable, and to tell the truth rather silly
and degrading speed (death is silly, death is degrading) would have been
conveyed to a perfect void, without one fisherman tearing by, without one
blade of grass bloodied by his catch, without any reference mark altogether.
Imagine me, an old gentleman, a distinguished author, gliding rapidly on my
back, in the wake of my outstretched dead feet, first through that gap in
the granite, then over a pinewood, then along misty water meadows, and then
simply between marges of mist, on and on, imagine that sight!
Madness had been lying in wait for me behind this or that alder or
boulder since infancy. I got used by degrees to feeling the sepia stare of
those watchful eyes as they moved smoothly along the line of my passage. Yet
I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it
also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence of
an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.
For practical purposes, such as keeping body-mind and mind-body in a
state of ordinary balance, so as not to imperil one's life or become a
burden to friends or governments, I preferred the latent variety, the
awfulness of that watchful thing that meant at best the stab of neuralgia,
the distress of insomnia, the battle with inanimate things which have never
disguised their hatred of me (the runaway button which condescends to be
located, the paper clip, a thievish slave, not content to hold a couple of
humdrum <240> letters, but managing to catch a precious leaf from another
batch), and at worst a sudden spasm of space as when the visit to one's
dentist turns into a burlesque party. I preferred the muddle of such attacks
to the motley of madness which, after pretending to adorn my existence with
special forms of inspiration, mental ecstasy, and so forth, would stop
dancing and flitting around me and would pounce upon me, and cripple me, and
for all I know destroy me. <241>
2
At the start of the great seizure, I must have been totally
incapacitated, from top to toe, while my mind, the images racing through me,
the tang of thought, the genius of insomnia, remained as strong and active
as ever (except for the blots in between). By the time I had been flown to
the Lecouchant Hospital in coastal France, highly recommended by Dr. Genfer,
a Swiss relative of its director, I became aware of certain curious details:
from the head down I was paralyzed in symmetrical patches separated by a
geography of weak tactility. When in the course of that first week my
fingers "awoke" (a circumstance that stupefied and even angered the
Lecouchant sages, experts in dementia paralydea, to such a degree that they
advised you to rush me off to some more exotic and broadminded
institution---which you did) I derived much entertainment from mapping my
sensitive spots which were always situated in exact opposition, e.g. on both
sides of my forehead, on the jaws, orbital parts, breasts, testicles, knees,
flanks. At an average stage of observation, the average size of each spot of
life never exceeded that of Australia (I felt gigantic at times) and never
dwindled (when I dwindled myself) below the diameter of a medal of medium
merit, at which <242> level I perceived my entire skin as that of a leopard
painted by a meticulous lunatic from a broken home.
In some connection with those "tactile symmetries" (about which I am
still attempting to correspond with a not too responsive medical journal,
swarming with Freudians), I would like to place the first pictorial
compositions, flat, primitive images, which occurred in duplicate, right and
left of my traveling body, on the opposite panels of my hallucinations. If,
for example, Annette boarded a bus with her empty basket on the left of my
being, she came out of that bus on my right with a load of vegetables, a
royal cauliflower presiding over the cucumbers. As the days passed, the
symmetries got replaced by more elaborate inter-responses, or reappeared in
miniature within the limits of a given image. Picturesque episodes now
accompanied my mysterious voyage. I glimpsed Bel rummaging after work amidst
a heap of naked babies at the communal day-nursery, in frantic search for
her own firstborn, now ten months old, and recognizable by the symmetrical
blotches of red eczema on its sides and little legs. A glossy-haunched
swimmer used one hand to brush away from her face wet strands of hair, and
pushed with the other (on the other side of my mind) the raft on which I
lay, a naked old man with a rag around his foremast, gliding supine into a
full moon whose snaky reflections rippled among the water lilies. A long
tunnel engulfed me, half-promised a circlet of light at its far end,
half-kept the promise, revealing a publicity sunset, but I never reached it,
the tunnel faded, and a familiar mist took over again. As was "done" that
season, groups of smart idlers visited my bed, which had slowed down in a
display hall where Ivor Black in the role of a fashionable young doctor
demonstrated me to three actresses playing society belles: their skirts
ballooned as they settled down on white chairs, and one lady, indicating my
groin, would have touched me with her cold fan, had <243> not the learned
Moor struck it aside with his ivory pointer, whereupon my raft resumed its
lone glide.
Whoever charted my destiny had moments of triteness. At times my swift
course became a celestial affair at an allegorical altitude that bore
unpleasant religious connotations--unless simply reflecting transportation
of cadavers by commercial aircraft. A certain notion of daytime and
nighttime, in more or less regular alternation, gradually established itself
in my mind as my grotesque adventure reached its final phase. Diurnal and
nocturnal effects were rendered obliquely at first with nurses and other
stagehands going to extreme lengths in the handling of movable properties,
such as the bouncing of fake starlight from reflecting surfaces or the
daubing of dawns here and there at suitable intervals. It had never occurred
to me before that, historically, art, or at least artifacts, had preceded,
not followed, nature; yet that is exactly what happened in my case. Thus, in
the mute remoteness clouding around me, recognizable sounds were produced at
first optically in the pale margin of the film track during the taking of
the actual scene (say, the ceremony of scientific feeding); eventually
something about the running ribbon tempted the ear to replace the eye; and
finally hearing returned--with a vengeance. The first crisp nurse-rustle was
a thunderclap; my first belly wamble, a crash of cymbals.
I owe thwarted obituarists, as well as all lovers of medical lore, some
clinical elucidations. My lungs and my heart acted, or were induced to act,
normally; so did my bowels, those buffoons in the cast of our private
miracle plays. My frame lay flat as in an Old Master's Lesson of Anatomy.
The prevention of bedsores, especially at the Lecouchant Hospital, was
nothing short of a mania, explicable, maybe, by a desperate urge to
substitute pillows and various mechanical devices for the rational treatment
of an unfathomable disease. My body was "sleeping" as a giant's foot might
be "sleeping"; more accurately, however, <244> my condition was a horrible
form of protracted (twenty nights!) insomnia with my mind as consistently
alert as that of the Sleepless Slav in some circus show I once read about in
The Graphic. I was not even a mummy; I was--in the beginning, at least--the
longitudinal section of a mummy, or rather the abstraction of its thinnest
possible cut. What about the head?--readers who are all head must be
clamoring to be told. Well, my brow was like misty glass (before two lateral
spots got cleared somehow or other); my mouth stayed mute and benumbed until
I realized I could feel my tongue--feel it in the phantom form of the kind
of air bladder that might help a fish with his respiration problems, but was
useless to me. I had some sense of duration and direction--two things which
a beloved creature seeking to help a poor madman with the whitest of lies,
affirmed, in a later world, were quite separate phases of a single
phenomenon. Most of my cerebral aqueduct (this is getting a little
technical) seemed to descend wedgewise, after some derailment or inundation,
into the structure housing its closest ally--which oddly enough is also our
humblest sense, the easiest and sometimes the most gratifying to dispense
with--and, oh, how I cursed it when I could not close it to ether or
excrements, and, oh (cheers for old "oh"), how I thanked it for crying
"Coffee!" or "Plage!" (because an anonymous drug smelled like the cream Iris
used to rub my back with in Cannice half a century ago!).
Now comes a snaggy bit: I do not know if my eyes remained always wide
open "in a glazed look of arrogant stupor" as imagined by a reporter who got
as far as the corridor desk. But I doubt very much I could blink--and
without the oil of blinking the motor of sight could hardly have run. Yet,
somehow, during my glide down those illusory canals and cloudways, and right
over another continent, I did glimpse off and on, through subpalpebral
mirages, the shadow of a hand or the glint of an instrument. <245> As to my
world of sound, it remained solid fantasy. I heard strangers discuss in
droning voices all the books I had written or thought I had written, for
everything they mentioned, titles, the names of characters, every phrase
they shouted was preposterously distorted by the delirium of demonic
scholarship. Louise regaled the company with one of her good stories--those
I called "name hangers" because they only seemed to reach this or that
point--a quid pro quo, say, at a party--but were really meant to introduce
some high-born "old friend" of hers, or a glamorous politician, or a cousin
of that politician. Learned papers were read at fantastic symposiums. In the
year of grace 1798, Gavrila Petrovich Kamenev, a gifted young poet, was
heard chuckling as he composed his Ossianic pastiche Slovo o polku Igoreve.
Somewhere in Abyssinia drunken Rimbaud was reciting to a surprised Russian
traveler the poem Le Tramway ivre (...En blouse rouge, ю face en pis de
vache, le bourreau me trancha la tйte aussi...). Or else I'd hear the
pressed repeater hiss in a pocket of my brain and tell the time, the rime,
the meter that who could dream I'd hear again?
I should also point out that my flesh was in fairly good shape: no
ligaments torn, no muscles trapped; my spinal cord may have been slightly
bruised during the absurd collapse that precipitated my voyage but it was
still there, lining me, shading my being, as good as the primitive structure
of some translucent aquatic creature. Yet the medical treatment I was
subjected to (especially at the Lecouchant place) implied--insofar as now
reconstructed--that my injuries were all physical, only physical, and could
be only dealt with by physical means. I am not speaking of modern alchemy,
of magic philtres injected into me--those did, perhaps, act somehow, not
only on my body, but also on the divinity installed within me, as might the
suggestions of ambitious shamans or quaking councilors upon a mad emperor;
what I cannot get over are such imprinted images <246> as the damned braces
and belts that held me stretched on my back (preventing me from walking away
with my rubber raft under my arm as I felt I could), or even worse the
man-made electric leeches, which masked executioners attached to my head and
limbs--until chased away by that saint in Catapult, Cal., Professor H. P.
Sloan, who was on the brink of suspecting, just when I started to get well,
that I might be cured--might have been cured!--in a trice by hypnosis and
some sense of humor on the hypnotist's part. <247>
3
To the best of my knowledge my Christian name was Vadim; so was my
father's. The U.S.A. passport recently issued me--an elegant booklet with a
golden design on its green cover perforated by the number 00678638--did not
mention my ancestral title; this had figured, though, on my British
passport, throughout its several editions. Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, before
the last one was mutilated beyond recognition by friendly forgers, practical
jokers at heart. All this I re-gleaned one night, as certain brain cells,
which had been frozen, now bloomed anew. Others, however, still puckered
like retarded buds, and although I could freely twiddle (for the first time
since I collapsed) my toes under the bedclothes, I just could not make out
in that darker corner of my mind what surname came after my Russian
patronymic. I felt it began with an N, as did the term for the beautifully
spontaneous arrangement of words at moments of inspiration like the rouleaux
of red corpuscles in freshly drawn blood under the microscope--a word I once
used in See under Real, but could not remember either, something to do with
a roll of coins, capitalistic metaphor, eh, Marxy? Yes, I definitely felt my
family name began with an N and bore an odious resemblance to the surname or
pseudonym of a presumably <248> notorious (Notorov? No) Bulgarian, or
Babylonian, or, maybe, Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained иmigrиs
from some other galaxy constantly confused me; but whether it was something
on the lines of Nebesnyy or Nabedrin or Nablidze (Nablidze? Funny) I simply
could not tell. I preferred not to overtax my willpower (go away,
Naborcroft) and so gave up trying--or perhaps it began with a B and the n
just clung to it like some desperate parasite? (Bonidze? Blonsky?--No, that
belonged to the BINT business.) Did I have some princely Caucasian blood?
Why had allusions to a Mr. Nabarro, a British politician, cropped up among
the clippings I received from England concerning the London edition of A
Kingdom by the Sea (lovely lilting title)? Why did Ivor call me "MacNab"?
Without a name I remained unreal in regained consciousness. Poor
Vivian, poor Vadim Vadimovich, was but a figment of somebody's--not even my
own--imagination. One dire detail: in rapid Russian speech longish
name-and-patronymic combinations undergo familiar slurrings: thus "Pavel
Pavlovich," Paul, son of Paul, when casually interpellated is made to sound
like "Pahlpahlych" and the hardly utterable, tapeworm-long "Vladimir
Vladimirovich" becomes colloquially similar to "Vadim Vadimych."
I gave up. And when I gave up for good my sonorous surname crept up
from behind, like a prankish child that makes a nodding old nurse jump at
his sudden shout.
There remaine
