The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (25 page)

Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you.

It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects—the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one’s desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy
sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight—as he moves against the direction of the car’s travel.

As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute.

A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted—except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.

And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk—how unexpectedly!— the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree.

Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prostitute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged whore, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he passes her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistinguishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impassive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At
the top of a steep staircase an equally impassive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it.

And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly.

I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local café. Many fellow exiles of mine denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man’s mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women’s dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fashion breathes through the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion’s breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes—in London ballrooms—perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: “monotonous and mad.” It’s all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals … Here’s what I found in D’Agricourt’s memoirs: “I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities.”

And so I enjoy watching, in the
cafés dansants
here, how “pair after pair flick by,” to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind.

On that kind of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow
strands still adhering where the rope (“brand-new one,” he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child’s, on the damp soil by the plinth. “She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there’s no mess at all,” observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself.

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.

I
N THE
morning, if the sun was inviting, I would leave Berlin to go swimming. At the end of the trolley line, on a green bench, sat the motormen, stocky fellows in enormous blunt-toed boots, resting, savoring their smokes, from time to time rubbing their massive, metal-redolent hands, and watching a man in a wet leather apron water the flowering sweetbriar along the tracks nearby; the water gushed in a flexible silvery fan from the glistening hose, how flying in the sunlight, now smoothly swooping over the palpitating shrubs. Clutching my rolled-up towel under my arm, I passed by them, striding swiftly toward the edge of the forest. There, the thickly growing slender pine trunks, rough and brown below, flesh-colored higher up, were speckled with fragments of shadow, and the sickly grass underneath was strewn with scraps of newspaper and scraps of sunlight that seemed to supplement each other. Suddenly the sky gaily parted the trees, and I descended along the silvery waves of sand toward the lake, where the voices of bathers would burst forth and subside and dark heads could be glimpsed bobbing on the smooth, luminous surface. All over the sloping bank lay supine or prone bodies with every possible shade of suntan; some still had a pinkish rash on their shoulder blades, others glowed like copper or were the color of strong coffee with cream. I would discard my shirt, and right away the sun overwhelmed me with its blind tenderness.

And every morning, punctually at nine o’clock, the same man would appear next to me. He was a bowlegged, elderly German in trousers and jacket of semimilitary cut, with a large bald head that the sun had smoothed to a red sheen. He brought along an umbrella the color of an aged raven and a neatly tied bundle, which immediately separated into a gray blanket, a beach towel, and a batch of newspapers. He carefully spread the blanket on the sand and, stripping to the
bathing trunks he had providently worn under his trousers, arranged himself most comfortably on the blanket, adjusted the umbrella over his head so that his face alone would be in the shade, and went to work on his newspapers. I observed him out of the corner of my eye, noting the dark, woolly, combed-looking growth on his strong crooked legs, and his plump belly with the deep navel gazing heavenward like an eye, and I amused myself trying to guess who this pious sun-worshipper might be.

We spent hours lolling on the sand. Summer clouds glided by in a fluctuating caravan—camel-shaped clouds, tent-shaped clouds. The sun tried to slip in between them, but they would sweep over it with their blinding edge; the air grew dim, then the sun ripened again, but it was the opposite bank that would be illumined first—we remained in the even, colorless shade, while over there the warm light had already spread itself. The shadows of the pines revived on the sand; small naked figures flared up, modeled out of sunlight; and, all of a sudden, like an enormous happy oculus, the radiance opened to engulf our side as well. Then I jumped to my feet, and the gray sand softly scalded my soles as I ran toward the water, which I parted noisily with my body. How nice it was to dry off afterwards in the blazing sun and feel its stealthy lips greedily drink the cool pearls remaining on one’s body!

My German slaps shut his umbrella and, his crooked calves cautiously quivering,
descends
in his turn toward the water, where he first wets his head, as elderly bathers do, and then starts swimming with sweeping gestures. A vendor of hard candy passes along the lakeshore, hawking his wares. Two others, in bathing suits, hurry past with a pail of cucumbers, and my neighbors in the sun, somewhat coarse, beautifully built fellows, pick up the terse calls of the vendors in artful imitation. A naked infant, all black because of the wet sand sticking to him, waddles past me, and his soft little beak bounces drolly between his plump, clumsy little legs. Close by sits his mother, an attractive young woman, half undressed; she is combing out her long dark hair, holding the hairpins between her teeth. Farther, at the very edge of the forest, sun-browned youths play a hard game of catch, flinging their soccer ball one-handed in a motion that revives the immortal gesture of the Discobolus; and now a breeze sets the pines aboil with an Attic rustle, and I dream that our entire world, like that large, firm ball, has flown back in a wondrous arc into the grip of a naked pagan god. Meanwhile an airplane, with an aeolian exclamation, soars above the pines, and one of the swarthy athletes interrupts his game to gaze at the sky where two blue wings speed toward the sun with a rapturous Daedalian hum.

I wish to tell all this to my neighbor when, breathing heavily, and baring his uneven teeth, he comes out of the water and lies down again on the sand, and it is only my lack of German words that keeps him from understanding me. He does not understand me but still answers with a smile that involves his entire being, the brilliant bald spot on his head, the black thicket of his mustache, his jolly meaty belly with a woolly path running down its center.

His profession was revealed to me, in time, by sheer accident. Once, at twilight, when the roar of motorcars became muffled and the hillocks of oranges on hawkers’ carts acquired a southern brightness in the blue air, I happened to stroll through a distant district and drop into a tavern to quench the evening thirst so familiar to urban vagabonds. My merry German stood behind the glistening bar, letting a thick yellow stream spurt from the spigot, trimming off the foam with a small wooden spatula, and letting it spill lavishly over the rim. A massive, ponderous wagon driver with a monstrous gray mustache leaned on the bar, watching the spigot and listening to the beer, which hissed like horse urine. The host raised his eyes, grinned a friendly grin, poured a beer for me too, and flung my coin into the drawer with a clink. Next to him, a young girl in a checkered dress, fair-haired, with pointed pink elbows, was washing glasses and nimbly drying them with a squeaky cloth. That same night, I learned that she was his daughter, that her name was Emma, and that his last name was Krause. I sat down in a corner and started unhurriedly sipping the light, white-maned beer, with its faintly metallic aftertaste. The tavern was of the usual type—a couple of posters advertising drinks, some deer antlers, and a low, dark ceiling festooned with paper flaglets, remnants of some festival or other. Beyond the bar, bottles glistened on the shelves, and higher up an old-fashioned, hut-shaped cuckoo clock tocked resonantly. A cast-iron stove dragged its annulate pipe along the wall, then folded it into the overhead motley of the flags. The dirty white of the cardboard beer-mug coasters stood out against the bare sturdy tables. At one of the tables, a sleepy man with appetizing folds of fat on his nape, and a glum, white-toothed fellow—a typesetter or an electrician, judging by his appearance—were shooting craps. All was quiet and peaceful. Unhurriedly, the clock kept breaking off dry little sections of time. Emma clinked her glasses and kept glancing at the corner where, in a narrow mirror bisected by the gold lettering of an advertisement, was reflected the sharp profile of the electrician and his hand holding up the conical black cup with the dice.