The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (32 page)

Cautiously, with two fingers, Ivanov lifted the fleshy tip of the man’s nose and, with the same tenderness, began shaving above the upper lip.

“The point, comrade, is that I remember everything. I remember perfectly, and I want you to remember too.…” And, in a soft voice, Ivanov began his account, as he unhurriedly shaved the recumbent, motionless face. The tale he told must have been terrifying indeed, because from time to time his hand would stop, and he would stoop very close to the gentleman sitting like a corpse under the shroudlike sheet, his convex eyelids lowered.

“That is all,” Ivanov said with a sigh, “that’s the whole story. Tell me, what do you think would be a suitable atonement for all that? What is considered an equivalent of a sharp sword? And again, keep in mind that we are utterly, totally alone.

“Corpses are always shaved,” went on Ivanov, running the blade upward along the stretched skin of the man’s neck. “Those sentenced to death are shaved too. And now I am shaving you. Do you realize what is going to happen next?”

The man sat without stirring or opening his eyes. Now the lathery mask was gone from his face. Traces of foam remained only on his
cheekbones and near his ears. This tensed, eyeless, fat face was so pallid that Ivanov wondered if he had not suffered a fit of paralysis. But when he pressed the flat surface of the razor to the man’s neck, his entire body gave a twitch. He did not, however, open his eyes.

Ivanov gave the man’s face a quick wipe and spat some talcum on him from a pneumatic dispenser. “That will do for you,” he said. “I’m satisfied. You may leave.” With squeamish haste he yanked the sheet off the man’s shoulders. The other remained seated.

“Get up, you ninny,” shouted Ivanov, pulling him up by the sleeve. The man froze, with firmly shut eyes, in the middle of the shop. Ivanov clapped the bowler on his head, thrust the briefcase under his arm, and swiveled him toward the door. Only then did the man jerk into motion. His shut-eyed face flashed in all the mirrors. He stepped like an automaton through the door that Ivanov was holding open, and, with the same mechanical gait, clutching his briefcase with an outstretched petrified hand, gazing into the sunny blur of the street with the glazed eyes of a Greek statue, he was gone.

“Y
ES
, Life is more talented than we,” sighed the writer, tapping the cardboard mouthpiece of his Russian cigarette against the lid of his case. “The plots Life thinks up now and then! How can we compete with that goddess? Her works are untranslatable, indescribable.”

“Copyright by the author,” suggested the critic, smiling; he was a modest, myopic man with slim, restless fingers.

“Our last recourse, then, is to cheat,” continued the writer, absentmindedly throwing a match into the critic’s empty wineglass. “All that’s left to us is to treat her creations as a film producer does a famous novel. The producer needs to prevent servant maids from being bored on Saturday nights; therefore he alters the novel beyond recognition; minces it, turns it inside out, throws out hundreds of episodes, introduces new characters and incidents he has invented himself—and all this for the sole purpose of having an entertaining film unfold without a hitch, punishing virtue in the beginning and vice at the end, a film perfectly natural in terms of its own conventions and, above all, furnished with an unexpected but all-resolving outcome. Exactly thus do we, writers, alter the themes of Life to suit us in our drive toward some kind of conventional harmony, some kind of artistic conciseness. We spice our savorless plagiarisms with our own devices. We think that Life’s performance is too sweeping, too uneven, that her genius is too untidy. To indulge our readers we cut out of Life’s untrammeled novels our neat little tales for the use of schoolchildren. Allow me, in this connection, to impart to you the following experience.

“I happened to be traveling in the sleeping car of an express. I love the process of settling into viatic quarters—the cool linen of the berth, the slow passage of the station’s departing lights as they start moving behind the black windowpane. I remember how pleased I was that
there was nobody in the bunk above me. I undressed, I lay down supine with my hands clasped under my head, and the lightness of the scant regulation blanket was a treat in comparison to the puffiness of hotel featherbeds. After some private musings—at the time I was anxious to write a story about the life of railway-car cleaning women—I put out the light and was soon asleep. And here let me use a device cropping up with dreary frequency in the sort of story to which mine promises to belong. Here it is—that old device which you must know so well: ‘In the middle of the night I woke up suddenly.’ What follows, however, is something less stale. I woke up and saw a foot.”

“Excuse me, a what?” interrupted the modest critic, leaning forward and lifting his finger.

“I saw a foot,” repeated the writer. “The compartment was now lighted. The train stood at a station. It was a man’s foot, a foot of considerable size, in a coarse sock, through which the bluish toenail had worked a hole. It was planted solidly on a step of the bed ladder close to my face, and its owner, concealed from my sight by the upper bunk roofing me, was just on the point of making a last effort to hoist himself onto his ledge. I had ample time to inspect that foot in its gray, black-checkered sock and also part of the leg: the violet vee of the garter on the side of the stout calf and its little hairs nastily sticking out through the mesh of the long underwear. It was altogether a most repellent limb. While I looked, it tensed, the tenacious big toe moved once or twice; then, finally, the whole extremity vigorously pushed off and soared out of sight. From above came grunting and snuffling sounds leading one to conclude that the man was preparing to sleep. The light went out, and a few moments later the train jerked into motion.

“I don’t know how to explain it to you, but that limb anguished me most oppressively. A resilient varicolored reptile. I found it disturbing that all I knew of the man was that evil-looking leg. His figure, his face, I never saw. His berth, which formed a low, dark ceiling over me, now seemed to have come lower; I almost felt its weight. No matter how hard I tried to imagine the aspect of my nocturnal fellow traveler all I could visualize was that conspicuous toenail which showed its bluish mother-of-pearl sheen through a hole in the wool of the sock. It may seem strange, in a general way, that such trifles should bother me, but, per contra, is not every writer precisely a person who bothers about trifles? Anyhow, sleep did not come. I kept listening—had my unknown companion started to snore? Apparently he was not snoring but moaning. Of course, the knocking of train wheels at night is
known to encourage aural hallucinations; yet I could not get over the impression that from up there, above me, came sounds of an unusual nature. I raised myself on one elbow. The sounds grew more distinct. The man on the upper berth was sobbing.”

“What’s that?” interrupted the critic. “Sobbing? I see. Sorry—didn’t quite catch what you said.” And, again dropping his hands in his lap and inclining his head to one side, the critic went on listening to the narrator.

“Yes, he was sobbing, and his sobs were atrocious. They choked him; he would noisily let his breath out as if having drunk at one gulp a quart of water, whereupon there followed rapid spasms of weeping with the mouth shut—the frightful parody of a cackle—and again he would draw in air and again let it out in short expirations of sobbing, with his mouth now open—to judge by the ha-ha-ing note. And all this against the shaky background of hammering wheels, which by this token became something like a moving stairway along which his sobs went up and came down. I lay motionless and listened—and felt, incidentally, that my face in the dark looked awfully silly, for it is always embarrassing to hear a stranger sobbing. And mind you, I was helplessly shackled to him by the fact of our sharing the same two-berth compartment, in the same unconcernedly rushing train. And he did not stop weeping; those dreadful arduous sobs kept up with me: we both—I below, the listener, and he overhead, the weeping one—sped sideways into night’s remoteness at eighty kilometers an hour, and only a railway crash could have cleft our involuntary link.

“After a while he seemed to stop crying, but no sooner was I about to drop off than his sobs started to swell again and I even seemed to hear unintelligible words which he uttered in a kind of sepulchral, belly-deep voice between convulsive sighs. He was silent again, only snuffling a bit, and I lay with my eyes closed and saw in fancy his disgusting foot in its checkered sock. Somehow or other I managed to fall asleep; and at half past five the conductor wrenched the door open to call me. Sitting on my bed—and knocking my head every minute against the edge of the upper berth—I hurried to dress. Before going out with my bags into the corridor, I turned to look up at the upper berth, but the man was lying with his back to me, and had covered his head with his blanket. It was morning in the corridor, the sun had just risen, the fresh, blue shadow of the train ran over the grass, over the shrubs, swept sinuously up the slopes, rippled across the trunks of flickering birches—and an oblong pondlet shone dazzlingly in the middle of a field, then narrowed, dwindled to a silvery slit, and with a
rapid clatter a cottage scuttled by, the tail of a road whisked under a crossing gate—and once more the numberless birches dizzied one with their flickering, sun-flecked palisade.

“The only other people in the corridor were two women with sleepy, sloppily made-up faces, and a little old man wearing suede gloves and a traveling cap. I detest rising early: for me the most ravishing dawn in the world cannot replace the hours of delicious morning sleep; and therefore I limited myself to a grumpy nod when the old gentleman asked me if I, too, was getting off at … he mentioned a big town where we were due in ten or fifteen minutes.

“The birches suddenly dispersed, half a dozen small houses poured down a hill, some of them, in their haste, barely missing being run over by the train; then a huge purple-red factory strode by flashing its windowpanes; somebody’s chocolate hailed us from a ten-yard poster; another factory followed with its bright glass and chimneys; in short, there happened what usually happens when one is nearing a city. But all at once, to our surprise, the train braked convulsively and pulled up at a desolate whistle-stop, where an express had seemingly no business to dawdle. I also found it surprising that several policemen stood out there on the platform. I lowered a window and leaned out. ‘Shut it, please,’ said one of the men politely. The passengers in the corridor displayed some agitation. A conductor passed and I asked what was the matter. ‘There’s a criminal on the train,’ he replied, and briefly explained that in the town at which we had stopped in the middle of the night, a murder had occurred on the eve: a betrayed husband had shot his wife and her lover. The ladies exclaimed ‘
akh!,’
the old gentleman shook his head. Two policemen and a rosy-cheeked, plump, bowlerhatted detective who looked like a bookmaker entered the corridor. I was asked to go back to my berth. The policemen remained in the corridor, while the detective visited one compartment after another. I showed him my passport. His reddish-brown eyes glided over my face; he returned my passport. We stood, he and I, in that narrow coupé on the upper bunk of which slept a dark-cocooned figure. ‘You may leave,’ said the detective, and stretched his arm toward that upper darkness: ‘Papers, please.’ The blanketed man kept on snoring. As I lingered in the doorway, I still heard that snoring and seemed to make out through it the sibilant echoes of his nocturnal sobs. ‘Please, wake up,’ said the detective, raising his voice; and with a kind of professional jerk he pulled at the edge of the blanket at the sleeper’s nape. The latter stirred but continued to snore. The detective shook him by the shoulder. This was rather sickening. I turned away and stared at the
window across the corridor, but did not really see it, while listening with my whole being to what was happening in the compartment.

“And imagine, I heard absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. The man on the upper berth sleepily mumbled something, the detective distinctly demanded his passport, distinctly thanked him, then went out and entered another compartment. That is all. But think only how nice it would have seemed—from the writer’s viewpoint, naturally—if the evil-footed, weeping passenger had turned out to be a murderer, how nicely his tears in the night could have been explained, and, what is more, how nicely all that would have fitted into the frame of my night journey, the frame of a short story. Yet, it would appear that the plan of the Author, the plan of Life, was in this case, as in all others, a hundred times nicer.”

The writer sighed and fell silent, as he sucked his cigarette, which had gone out long ago and was now all chewed up and damp with saliva. The critic was gazing at him with kindly eyes.

“Confess,” spoke the writer again, “that beginning with the moment when I mentioned the police and the unscheduled stop, you were sure my sobbing passenger was a criminal?”

“I know your manner,” said the critic, touching his interlocutor’s shoulder with the tips of his fingers and, in a gesture peculiar to him, instantly snatching back his hand. “If you were writing a detective story, your villain would have turned out to be not the person whom none of the characters suspect but the person whom everybody in the story suspects from the very beginning, thus fooling the experienced reader who is used to solutions proving to be
not
the obvious ones. I am well aware that you like to produce an impression of inexpectancy by means of the most natural denouement; but don’t get carried away by your own method. There is much in life that is casual, and there is also much that is unusual. The Word is given the sublime right to enhance chance and to make of the transcendental something that is not accidental. Out of the present case, out of the dance of chance, you could have created a well-rounded story if you had transformed your fellow traveler into a murderer.”