Look at the Harlequins! (11 page)

“
Gospod’ s vami, golubchik!
(What an idea, my dear!)” exclaimed Mrs. Stepanov and proceeded to explain that she had been scolding her absentminded husband for sitting down on her new handbag when attending to the telephone.

Although I did not believe one word of her version (too quick! too glib!), I pretended to accept it and promised to look up her bookseller. A few minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it (at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most soothing
voyeuse
imaginable), Berta Stepanov telephoned to say that the oxman (what a shiver my Iris derived from Dr. Moreau’s island zoo—especially from such bits as the “screaming shape,” still half-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would be up till dawn in his shop, among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), that I was a noctambule, so perhaps I might like to stroll over to the Boyan Bookshop
sans tarder
, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.

After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings of insomnia and a walk to rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where according to police statistics an average of forty foreigners and God knows how many unfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced the least urge to commit suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in any light). But I must admit that on that particular night on the fourth or fifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling’s death, I must have
looked pretty suspect, in my black suit and dramatic muffler, to an average policeman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign when a hatless person sobs as he walks, being moved not by lines he might have composed himself but by something he hideously mistakes for his own and presently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:

I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than the ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endless fence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose light would delicately select for its heart-piercing game overhead a young emerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.

The “Boyan” publishing firm (Morozov’s and mine was the “Bronze Horseman,” its main rival), with a bookshop (selling not only
émigré
editions but also tractor novels from Moscow) and a lending library, occupied a smart three-story house of the
hôtel particulier
type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the vista of reverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a group of stone nymphs. The house had belonged to the Merlin de Malaune family and had been acquired at the turn of the century by a Russian cosmopolitan, Dmitri de Midoff who with his friend S. I. Stepanov established there the headquarters of an anti-despotic conspiracy. The latter liked to recall the sign language of old-fashioned rebellion: the half-drawn curtain and alabaster vase revealed in the drawing-room window so as to indicate to the expected guest from Russia that the way was clear. An aesthetic touch graced revolutionary intrigues in those years. Midoff died soon after World War One, and by that time the Terrorist party, to which those cozy people belonged, had lost its “stylistic appeal” as Stepanov himself put it. I do not know who later acquired the house or how it happened that Oks (Osip Lvovich Oksman, 1885?–1943?) rented it for his business.

The house was dark except for three windows: two adjacent rectangles of light in the middle of the upper-floor row, d8 and e8, Continental notation (where the letter denotes the file and the number the rank of a chess square) and another light just below at e7. Good God, had I forgotten at home the note I had scribbled for the unknown Miss Blagovo? No, it was still there in my breast pocket under the old, treasured, horribly hot and long Trinity College muffler. I hesitated between a side door on my right—marked
Magazin
—and the main entrance, with a chess coronet above the bell. Finally I chose the coronet. We were playing a
Blitz
game: my opponent moved at once, lighting the vestibule fan at d6. One could not help wondering if under the house there might not exist the five lower floors which would complete the chessboard and that somewhere, in subterranean mystery, new men might not be working out the doom of a fouler tyranny.

Oks, a tall, bony, elderly man with a Shakespearean pate, started to tell me how honored he was at getting a chance to welcome the author of
Camera
—here I thrust the note I carried into his extended palm and prepared to leave. He had dealt with hysterical artists before. None could resist his bland bookside manner.

“Yes, I know all about it,” he said, retaining and patting my hand. “She’ll call you; though, to tell the truth, I do not envy anybody having to use the services of that capricious, absentminded young lady. We’ll go up to my study, unless you prefer—no, I don’t think so,” he continued, opening a double door on the left and dubiously switching on the light for a moment to reveal a chilly reading room in which a long baize-covered table, dingy chairs, and the cheap busts of Russian classics contradicted a lovely painted ceiling swarming with naked children among purple, pink, and amber clusters of grapes. On the right (another tentative light snapped) a short passage led to the shop proper
where I recalled having once had a row with a pert old female who objected to my not wishing to pay for a few copies of my own novel. So we walked up the once noble stairs, which now had something seldom seen even in Viennese dream comics, namely disparate balustrades, the sinistral one an ugly new ramp-and-railing affair and the other, the original ornate set of battered, doomed, but still charming carved wood with supports in the form of magnified chess pieces.

“I am honored—” began Oks all over again, as we reached his so-called
Kabinet
(study), at e7, a room cluttered with ledgers, packed books, half-unpacked books, towers of books, heaps of newspapers, pamphlets, galleys, and slim white paperback collections of poems—tragic offals, with the cool, restrained titles then in fashion—
Prokhlada
(“coolness”),
Sderzhannost
’ (“restraint”).

He was one of those persons who for some reason or other are often interrupted, but whom no force in our blessed galaxy will prevent from completing their sentence, despite new interruptions, of an elemental or poetical nature, the death of his interlocutor (“I was just saying to him, doctor—”), or the entrance of a dragon. In fact it would seem that those interruptions actually help to polish the phrase and give it its final form. In the meantime the agonizing itch of its being unfinished poisons the mind. It is worse than the pimple which cannot be sprung before one gets home, and is almost as bad as a lifer’s recollection of that last little rape nipped in the sweet bud by the intrusion of an accursed policeman.

“I am deeply honored,” finished at last Oks, “to welcome to this historic house the author of
Camera Obscura
, your finest book in my modest opinion!”

“It ought to be modest,” I said, controlling myself (opal ice in Nepal before the avalanche), “because, you idiot, the title of
my
novel is
Camera Lucida.
”

“There, there,” said Oks (really a very dear man and
a gentleman), after a terrible pause during which all the remainders opened like fairy-tale flowers in a fancy film, “A slip of the tongue does not deserve such a harsh rebuke.
Lucida, Lucida
, by all means!
A propos
—concerning Anna Blagovo (another piece of unfinished business—or, who knows, a touching attempt to divert and pacify me with an interesting anecdote), I am not sure you know that I am Berta’s first cousin. Thirty-five years ago in St. Petersburg she and I worked in the same student organization. We were preparing the assassination of the Premier. How far all that is! His daily route had to be closely established; I was one of the observers. Standing at a certain corner every day in the disguise of a vanilla-ice-cream vendor! Can you imagine that? Nothing came of our plans. They were thwarted by Azef, the great double agent.”

I saw no point in prolonging my visit, but he produced a bottle of cognac, and I accepted a drink, for I was beginning to tremble again.

“Your
Camera
,” he said, consulting a ledger “has been selling not badly in my shop, not badly at all: twenty-three—sorry, twenty-five—copies in the first half of last year, and fourteen in the second. Of course, genuine fame, not mere commercial success, depends on the behavior of a book in the Lending Department, and there all your titles are hits. Not to leave this unsubstantiated, let us go up to the stacks.”

I followed my energetic host to the upper floor. The lending library spread like a gigantic spider, bulged like a monstrous tumor, oppressed the brain like the expanding world of delirium. In a bright oasis amidst the dim shelves I noticed a group of people sitting around an oval table. The colors were vivid and sharp but at the same time remote-looking as in a magic-lantern scene. A good deal of red wine and golden brandy accompanied the animated discussion. I recognized the critic Basilevski, his sycophants Hristov and Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists
Shipogradov and Sokolovski, the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular social satire
Geroy nashey ery
(“Hero of Our Era”) and two young poets, Lazarev (collection
Serenity
) and Fartuk (collection
Silence
). Some of the heads turned toward us, and the benevolent bear Morozov even struggled to his feet, grinning—but my host said they were having a business meeting and should be left alone.

“You have glimpsed,” he added, “the parturition of a new literary review,
Prime Numbers
; at least they
think
they are parturiating: actually, they are boozing and gossiping. Now let me show you something.”

He led me to a distant corner and triumphantly trained his flashlight on the gaps in
my
shelf of books.

“Look,” he cried, “how many copies are out. All of
Princess Mary
is out, I mean
Mary
—damn it, I mean
Tamara
. I love
Tamara
, I mean your
Tamara
, not Lermontov’s or Rubinstein’s. Forgive me. One gets so confused among so many damned masterpieces.”

I said I was not feeling well and would like to go home. He offered to accompany me. Or would I like a taxi? I did not. He kept furtively directing at me the electric torch through his incarnadined fingers to see if I was not about to faint. With soothing sounds he led me down a side staircase. The spring night, at least, felt real.

After a moment of rumination and an upward glance at the lighted windows, Oks beckoned to the night watchman who was stroking the sad little dog of a dog-walking neighbor. I saw my thoughtful companion shake hands with the gray-cloaked old fellow, then point to the light of the revelers, then look at his watch, then tip the man, and shake hands with him in parting, as if the ten-minute walk to my lodgings were a perilous pilgrimage.

“
Bon
,” he said upon rejoining me. “If you don’t want a taxi, let us set out on foot. He will take care of my imprisoned visitors. There are heaps of things I want you to
tell me about your work and your life. Your
confrères
say you are ‘arrogant and unsocial’ as Onegin describes himself to Tatiana but we can’t all be Lenskis, can we? Let me take advantage of this pleasant stroll to describe my two meetings with your celebrated father. The first was at the opera in the days of the First Duma. I knew, of course, the portraits of its most prominent members. From high up in the gods I, a poor student, saw him appear in a rosy loge with his wife and two little boys, one of which must have been you. The other time was at a public discussion of current politics in the auroral period of the Revolution; he spoke immediately after Kerenski, and the contrast between our fiery friend and your father, with his English
sangfroid
and absence of gesticulation—”

“My father,” I said, “died six months before I was born.”

“Well, I seem to have goofed again (
opyat’ oskandalisya
),” observed Oks, after taking quite a minute to find his handkerchief, blow his nose with the grandiose deliberation of Varlamov in the role of Gogol’s Town Mayor, wrap up the result, and pocket the swaddle. “Yes, I’m not lucky with you. Yet that image remains in my mind. The contrast was truly remarkable.”

I was to run into Oks again, three or four times at least, in the course of the dwindling years before World War Two. He used to welcome me with a knowing twinkle as if we shared some very private and rather naughty secret. His superb library was eventually grabbed by the Germans who then lost it to the Russians, even better grabbers in that time-honored game. Osip Lvovich himself was to die when attempting an intrepid escape—when almost having escaped—barefoot, in bloodstained underwear, from the “experimental hospital” of a Nazi concentration camp.

My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon. Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son of Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best of my English romaunts,
Ardis
(1970).

The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars, my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were of the casual, reactionary sort. He had a dazzling and complicated sensual life, but his culture was patchy and commonplace. He was born in 1865, married in 1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October 22, 1898, after a card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in gray Normandy.