The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (12 page)

Luzhin’s back moved. Quietly he got off the car. He walked diagonally to the next track, with a calm, relaxed gait, as if taking a stroll.

A through train now thundered into the station. Luzhin went to the edge of the platform and hopped down. The cinders crunched under his heel.

At that instant, the locomotive came at him in one hungry bound. Max, totally unaware of what happened, watched from a distance as the lighted windows flew past in one continuous stripe.

T
HE
low-ceilinged barbershop smelled of stale roses. Horseflies hummed hotly, heavily. The sunlight blazed on the floor in puddles of molten honey, gave the lotion bottles tweaks of sparkle, transluced through the long curtain hanging in the entrance, a curtain of clay beads and little sections of bamboo strung alternately on close-hung cord, which would disintegrate in an iridescent clitterclatter every time someone entered and shouldered it aside. Before him, in the murkish glass, Nikitin saw his own tanned face, the long sculptured strands of his shiny hair, the glitter of the scissors that chirred above his ear, and his eyes were attentive and severe, as always happens when you contemplate yourself in mirrors. He had arrived in this ancient port in the south of France the day before, from Constantinople, where life had grown unbearable for him. That morning he had been to the Russian Consulate and the employment office, had roamed about the town, which, down narrow alleyways, crept seaward, and now, exhausted, prostrated by the heat, he had dropped in to have a haircut and to refresh his head. The floor around his chair was already strewn with small bright mice—the cuttings of his hair. The barber filled his palm with lather. A delicious chill ran through the crown of his head as the barber’s fingers firmly rubbed in the thick foam. Then an icy gush made his heart jump, and a fluffy towel went to work on his face and his wet hair.

Parting the undulating rain of curtain with his shoulder, Nikitin went out into a steep alley. Its right side was in the shade; on the left a narrow stream quivered along the curb in the torrid radiance; a black-haired, toothless girl with swarthy freckles was collecting the shimmering rivulet with her resonant pail; and the stream, the sun, the violet shade—everything was flowing and slithering downward to
the sea: another step and, in the distance, between some walls, loomed its compact sapphire brilliance. Infrequent pedestrians walked on the shady side. Nikitin happened upon a climbing Negro in a Colonial uniform, with a face like a wet galosh. On the sidewalk stood a straw chair from whose seat a cat departed with a cushioned bound. A brassy Provençal voice started jabbering in some window. A green shutter banged. On a vendor’s stand, amid purple mollusks that gave off a whiff of seaweed, lay lemons shot with granulated gold.

Reaching the sea, Nikitin paused to look excitedly at the dense blue that, in the distance, modulated into blinding silver, and at the play of light delicately dappling the white topside of a yacht. Then, unsteady from the heat, he went in search of the small Russian restaurant whose address he had noted on a wall of the consulate.

The restaurant, like the barbershop, was hot and none too clean. In back, on a wide counter, appetizers and fruit showed through billows of protective grayish muslin. Nikitin sat down and squared his shoulders; his shirt stuck to his back. At a nearby table sat two Russians, evidently sailors of a French vessel, and, a little farther off, a solitary old fellow in gold-rimmed glasses was making smacking and sucking noises as he lapped borscht from his spoon. The proprietress, wiping her puffy hands with a towel, gave the newcomer a maternal look. Two shaggy pups were rolling on the floor in a flurry of little paws. Nikitin whistled, and a shabby old bitch with green mucus at the corners of her gentle eyes came and put her muzzle in his lap.

One of the seamen addressed him in a composed and unhurried tone: “Send her away. She’ll get fleas all over you.”

Nikitin cosseted the dog’s head a little and raised his radiant eyes.

“Oh, I’m not afraid of that.… Constantinople … The barracks … You can imagine …”

“Just get here?” asked the seaman. Even voice. Mesh T-shirt. All cool and competent. Dark hair neatly trimmed in back. Clear forehead. Overall appearance decent and placid.

“Last night,” Nikitin replied.

The borscht and the fiery dark wine made him sweat even more. He was happy to relax and have a peaceful chat. Bright sunlight poured through the aperture of the door together with the tremulous sparkle of the alley rivulet; from his corner under the gas meter, the elderly Russian’s spectacles scintillated.

“Looking for work?” asked the other sailor, who was middle-aged, blue-eyed, had a pale walrus mustache, and was also clean-cut, well groomed, levigated by sun and salty wind.

Nikitin said with a smile, “I certainly am.… Today I went to the employment office.… They have jobs planting telegraph poles, weaving hawsers—I’m just not sure.…”

“Come work with us,” said the black-haired one. “As a stoker or something. No nonsense there, you can take my word.… Ah, there you are, Lyalya—our profound respects!”

A young girl entered, wearing a white hat, with a sweet, plain face. She made her way among the tables and smiled, first at the puppies, then at the seamen. Nikitin had asked them something but forgot his question as he watched the girl and the motion of her low hips, by which you can always recognize a Russian damsel. The owner gave her daughter a tender look, as if to say, “You poor tired thing,” for she had probably spent all morning in an office, or else worked in a store. There was something touchingly homespun about her that made you think of violet soap and a summer flag stop in a birch forest. There was no France outside the door, of course. Those mincing movements … Sunny nonsense.

“No, it’s not complicated at all,” the seaman was saying, “here’s how it works—you have an iron bucket and a coal pit. You start scraping. Lightly at first, so long as the coal goes sliding down into the bucket by itself, then you scrape harder. When you’ve filled the bucket you set it on a cart. You roll it over to the chief stoker. A bang of his shovel and—one!—the firebox door’s open, a heave of the same shovel and—two!—in goes the coal—you know, fanned out so it will come down evenly. Precision work. Keep your eye on the dial, and if that pressure drops …”

In a window that gave on the street appeared the head and shoulders of a man wearing a panama and a white suit.

“How are you, Lyalya dearest?”

He leaned his elbows on the windowsill.

“Of course it
is
hot in there, a real furnace—you wear nothing to work but pants and a mesh T-shirt. The T-shirt is black when you’re finished. As I was saying, about the pressure—‘fur’ forms in the firebox, an incrustation hard as stone, which you break up with a poker this long. Tough work. But afterwards, when you pop out on deck, the sunshine feels cool even if you’re in the tropics. You shower, then down you go to your quarters, straight into your hammock—that’s heaven, let me tell you.…”

Meanwhile, at the window: “And he insists he saw me in a car, you see?” (Lyalya in a high-pitched, excited voice).

Her interlocutor, the gentleman in white, stood leaning on the sill
from the outside, and the square window framed his rounded shoulders, his soft, shaven face half-lit by the sun—a Russian who had been lucky.

“He goes on to tell me I was wearing a lilac dress, when I don’t even own a lilac dress,” yelped Lyalya, “and he persists: ‘
zhay voo zasyur.’ ”

The seaman who had been talking to Nikitin turned and asked, “Couldn’t you speak Russian?”

The man in the window said, “I managed to get this music, Lyalya. Remember?”

That was the momentary aura, and it felt almost deliberate, as if someone were having fun inventing this girl, this conversation, this small Russian restaurant in a foreign port—an aura of dear workaday provincial Russia, and right away, by some miraculous, secret association of thoughts, the world appeared grander to Nikitin, he yearned to sail the oceans, to put into legendary bays, to eavesdrop everywhere on other people’s souls.

“You asked what run we’re on? Indochina,” spontaneously said the seaman.

Nikitin pensively tapped a cigarette out of its case; a gold eagle was etched on the wooden lid.

“Must be wonderful.”

“What do you think? Sure it is.”

“Well, tell me about it. Something about Shanghai, or Colombo.”

“Shanghai? I’ve seen it. Warm drizzle, red sand. Humid as a greenhouse. As for Ceylon, for instance, I didn’t get ashore to visit it—it was my watch, you know.”

Shoulders hunched, the white-jacketed man was saying something to Lyalya through the window, softly and significantly. She listened, her head cocked, fondling the dog’s curled-over ear with one hand. Extending its fire-pink tongue, panting joyously and rapidly, the dog looked through the sunny chink of the door, most likely debating whether or not it was worthwhile to go lie some more on the hot threshold. And the dog seemed to be thinking in Russian.

Nikitin asked, “Where should I apply?”

The seaman winked at his mate, as if to say, “See, I brought him round.” Then he said, “It’s very simple. Tomorrow morning bright and early you go to the Old Port, and at Pier Two you’ll find our
Jean-Bart
. Have a chat with the first mate. I think he’ll hire you.”

Nikitin took a keen and candid look at the man’s clear, intelligent forehead. “What were you before, in Russia?” he asked.

The man shrugged and gave a wry smile.

“What was he? A fool,” Droopy Mustache answered for him in a bass voice.

Later they both got up. The younger man pulled out the wallet he carried inserted in the front of his pants behind his belt buckle, in the manner of French sailors. Something elicited a high-pitched laugh from Lyalya as she came up and gave them her hand (palm probably a little damp). The pups were tumbling about the floor. The man standing at the window turned away, whistling absently and tenderly. Nikitin paid and went out leisurely into the sunlight.

It was about five in the afternoon. The sea’s blueness, glimpsed at the far ends of alleys, hurt his eyes. The circular screens of the outdoor toilets were ablaze.

He returned to his squalid hotel and, slowly stretching his intertwined hands behind his head, collapsed onto the bed in a state of blissful solar inebriation. He dreamt he was an officer again, walking along a Crimean slope overgrown with milkweed and oak shrubs, mowing off the downy heads of thistles as he went. He awoke because he had started laughing in his sleep; he awoke, and the window had already turned a twilight blue.

He leaned out into the cool chasm, meditating: Wandering women. Some of them Russian. What a big star.

He smoothed his hair, rubbed the dust off the knobby tips of his shoes with a corner of the blanket, checked his wallet—only five francs left—and went out to roam some more and revel in his solitary idleness.

Now it was more crowded than it had been in the afternoon. Along the alleys that descended toward the sea, people were sitting, cooling off. Girl in a kerchief with spangles.… Flutter of eyelashes.… Paunchy shopkeeper, sitting astride a straw chair, elbows propped on its reversed back, smoking, with a flap of shirt protruding on his belly from beneath his unbuttoned waistcoat. Children hopping in a squatting posture as they sailed little paper boats, by the light of a streetlamp, in the black streamlet running next to the narrow sidewalk. There were smells of fish and wine. From the sailors’ taverns, which shone with a yellow gleam, came the labored sound of hurdy-gurdies, the pounding of palms on tables, metallic exclamations. And, in the upper part of town, along the main avenue, the evening crowds shuffled and laughed, and women’s slender ankles and the white shoes of naval officers flashed beneath clouds of acacias. Here and there, like the colored flames of some petrified fireworks display, cafés blazed in the purple twilight. Round tables right out on the sidewalk, shadows
of black plane trees on the striped awning, illuminated from within. Nikitin stopped, picturing a mug of beer, ice-cold and heavy. Inside, beyond the tables, a violin wrung its sounds as if they were human hands, accompanied by the full-bodied resonance of a rippling harp. The more banal the music, the closer it is to the heart.

At an outer table sat a weary streetwalker all in green, swinging the pointed tip of her shoe.

I’ll have the beer, decided Nikitin. No I won’t … Then again …

The woman had doll-like eyes. There was something very familiar about those eyes, about those elongated, shapely legs. Gathering up her purse, she got up as if in a hurry to get somewhere. She wore a long jacketlike top of knitted emerald silk that adhered low on her hips. Past she went, squinting from the music.

It would be strange indeed, mused Nikitin. Something akin to a falling star hurtled through his memory, and, forgetting about his beer, he followed her as she turned into a dark, glistening alley. A streetlamp stretched her shadow. The shadow flashed along a wall and skewed. She walked slowly and Nikitin checked his pace, afraid, for some reason, to overtake her.

Yes, there’s no question.… God, this is wonderful.…

The woman stopped on the curb. A crimson bulb burned over a black door. Nikitin walked past, came back, circled the woman, stopped. With a cooing laugh she uttered a French word of endearment.

In the wan light, Nikitin saw her pretty, fatigued face, and the moist luster of her minute teeth.

“Listen,” he said in Russian, simply and softly. “We’ve known each other a long time, so why not speak our native language?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Inglish? Yew spik Inglish?”

Nikitin gave her an intent look, then repeated somewhat helplessly, “Come, you know and I know.”

“T’es Polonais, alors?”
inquired the woman, dragging out the final rolled syllable as they do in the South.

Nikitin gave up with a sardonic smile, thrust a five-franc note into her hand, turned quickly, and started across the sloping square. An instant later he heard rapid footfalls behind him, and breathing, and the rustle of a dress. He looked back. There was no one. The square was deserted and dark. The night wind propelled a newspaper sheet across the flagstones.