The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (33 page)

The writer sighed again.

“Yes, yes, that did occur to me. I might have added several details. I would have alluded to the passionate love he had for his wife. All kinds of inventions are possible. The trouble is that we are in the dark—maybe Life had in mind something totally different, something much more subtle and deep. The trouble is that I did not learn, and shall never learn, why the passenger cried.”

“I intercede for the Word,” gently said the critic. “You, as a writer of fiction, would have at least thought up some brilliant solution: your character was crying, perhaps, because he had lost his wallet at the station. I once knew someone, a grown-up man of martial appearance, who would weep or rather bawl when he had a toothache. No, thanks, no—don’t pour me any more. That’s sufficient, that’s quite sufficient.”

S
EVEN
years had passed since he and she had parted in Petersburg. God, what a crush there had been at the Nikolaevsky Station! Don’t stand so close—the train is about to start. Well, here we go, good-bye, dearest.… She walked alongside, tall, thin, wearing a raincoat, with a black-and-white scarf around her neck, and a slow current carried her off backward. A Red Army recruit, he took part, reluctantly and confusedly, in the civil war. Then, one beautiful night, to the ecstatic stridulation of prairie crickets, he went over to the Whites. A year later, in 1920, not long before leaving Russia, on the steep, stony Chainaya Street in Yalta, he ran into his uncle, a Moscow lawyer. Why, yes, there was news—two letters. She was leaving for Germany and already had obtained a passport. You look fine, young man. And at last Russia let go of him—a permanent leave, according to some. Russia had held him for a long time; he had slowly slithered down from north to south, and Russia kept trying to keep him in her grasp, with the taking of Tver, Kharkov, Belgorod, and various interesting little villages, but it was no use. She had in store for him one last temptation, one last gift—the Crimea—but even that did not help. He left. And on board the ship he made the acquaintance of a young Englishman, a jolly chap and an athlete, who was on his way to Africa.

Nikolay visited Africa, and Italy, and for some reason the Canary Islands, and then Africa again, where he served for a while in the Foreign Legion. At first he recalled her often, then rarely, then again more and more often. Her second husband, the German industrialist Kind, died during the war. He had owned a goodish bit of real estate in Berlin, and Nikolay assumed there was no danger of her going hungry there. But how quickly time passed! Amazing!… Had seven whole years really gone by?

During those years he had grown hardier, rougher, had lost an index finger, and had learned two languages—Italian and English. The color of his eyes had become lighter and their expression more candid owing to the smooth rustic tan that covered his face. He smoked a pipe. His walk, which had always had the solidity characteristic of short-legged people, now acquired a remarkable rhythm. One thing about him had not changed at all: his laugh, accompanied by a quip and a twinkle.

He had quite a time, chuckling softly and shaking his head, before he finally decided to drop everything and by easy stages make his way to Berlin. On one occasion—at a newsstand, somewhere in Italy, he noticed an emigre Russian paper, published in Berlin. He wrote to the paper to place an advertisement under Personal: So-and-so seeks So-and-so. He got no reply. On a side trip to Corsica, he met a fellow Russian, the old journalist Grushevski, who was leaving for Berlin. Make inquiries on my behalf. Perhaps you’ll find her. Tell her I am alive and well.… But this source did not bring any news either. Now it was high time to take Berlin by storm. There, on the spot, the search would be simpler. He had a lot of trouble obtaining a German visa, and he was running out of funds. Oh, well, he would get there one way or another.…

And so he did. Wearing a trenchcoat and a checked cap, short and broad-shouldered, with a pipe between his teeth and a battered valise in his good hand, he exited onto the square in front of the station. There he stopped to admire a great jewel-bright advertisement that inched its way through the darkness, then vanished and started again from another point. He spent a bad night in a stuffy room in a cheap hotel, trying to think of ways to begin the search. The address bureau, the office of the Russian-language newspaper … Seven years. She must really have aged. It was rotten of him to have waited so long; he could have come sooner. But, ah, those years, that stupendous roaming about the world, the obscure ill-paid jobs, chances taken and chucked, the excitement of freedom, the freedom he had dreamed of in childhood!… It was pure Jack London.… And here he was again: a new city, a suspiciously itchy featherbed, and the screech of a late tram. He groped for his matches, and with a habitual movement of his index stump began pressing the soft tobacco into the pipebowl.

When traveling the way he did you forget the names of time; they are crowded out by those of places. In the morning, when Nikolay went out intending to go to the police station, the gratings were down on all the shop fronts. It was a damned Sunday. So much for the address office and the newspaper. It was also late autumn: windy weather,
asters in the public gardens, a sky of solid white, yellow trees, yellow trams, the nasal honking of rheumy taxis. A chill of excitement came over him at the idea that he was in the same town as she. A fifty-pfennig coin bought him a glass of port in a cab drivers’ bar, and the wine on an empty stomach had a pleasant effect. Here and there in the streets there came a sprinkling of Russian speech: “… 
Skol’ko raz ya tebe govorila”
(“…  How many times have I told you”). And again, after the passage of several natives: “…  He’s willing to sell them to me, but frankly, I …” The excitement made him chuckle and finish each pipeful much more quickly than usual. “…  Seemed to be gone, but now Grisha’s down with it too.…” He considered going up to the next pair of Russians and asking, very politely: “Do you know by any chance Olga Kind, born Countess Karski?” They must all know each other in this bit of provincial Russia gone astray.

It was already evening, and, in the twilight, a beautiful tangerine light had filled the glassed tiers of a huge department store when Nikolay noticed, on one of the sides of a front door, a small white sign that said:
“I. S. WEINER, DENTIST. FROM PETROGRAD.”
An unexpected recollection virtually scalded him. This fine friend of ours is pretty well decayed and must go. In the window, right in front of the torture seat, inset glass photographs displayed Swiss landscapes.… The window gave on Moika Street. Rinse, please. And Dr. Weiner, a fat, placid, white-gowned old man in perspicacious glasses, sorted his tinkling instruments. She used to go to him for treatment, and so did his cousins, and they even used to say to each other, when they quarreled for some reason or other, “How would you like a Weiner?” (i.e., a punch in the mouth?). Nikolay dallied in front of the door, on the point of ringing the bell, remembering it was Sunday; he thought some more and rang anyway. There was a buzzing in the lock and the door gave. He went up one flight. A maid opened the door. “No, the doctor is not receiving today.” “My teeth are fine,” objected Nikolay in very poor German. “Dr. Weiner is an old friend of mine. My name is Galatov—I’m sure he remembers me.…” “I’ll tell him,” said the maid.

A moment later a middle-aged man in a frogged velveteen jacket came out into the hallway. He had a carroty complexion and seemed extremely friendly. After a cheerful greeting he added in Russian, “I don’t remember you, though—there must be a mistake.” Nikolay looked at him and apologized: “Afraid so. I don’t remember you either. I was expecting to find the Dr. Weiner who lived on Moika Street in Petersburg before the Revolution, but got the wrong one. Sorry.”

“Oh, that must be a namesake of mine. A common namesake. I lived on Zagorodny Avenue.”

“We all used to go to him,” explained Nikolay, “and well, I thought … You see, I’m trying to locate a certain lady, a Madame Kind, that’s the name of her second husband—”

Weiner bit his lip, looked away with an intent expression, then addressed him again. “Wait a minute.… I seem to recall … I seem to recall a Madame Kind who came to see me here not long ago and was also under the impression—We’ll know for sure in a minute. Be kind enough to step into my office.”

The office remained a blur in Nikolay’s vision. He did not take his eyes off Weiner’s impeccable calvities as the latter bent over his appointment book.

“We’ll know for sure in a minute,” he repeated, sunning his fingers across the pages. “We’ll know for sure in just a minute. We’ll know in just … Here we are. Frau Kind. Gold filling and some other work—which I can’t make out, there’s a blot here.”

“And what’s the first name and patronymic?” asked Nikolay, approaching the table and almost knocking off an ashtray with his cuff.

“That’s in the book too. Olga Kirillovna.”

“Right,” said Nikolay with a sigh of relief.

“The address is Plannerstrasse fifty-nine, care of Babb,” said Weiner with a smack of his lips, and rapidly copied the address on a separate slip. “Second street from here. Here you are. Very happy to be of service. Is she a relative of yours?”

“My mother,” replied Nikolay.

Coming out of the dentist’s, he proceeded with a somewhat quickened step. Finding her so easily astonished him, like a card trick. He had never paused to think, while traveling to Berlin, that she might long since have died or moved to a different city, and yet the trick had worked. Weiner had turned out to be a different Weiner—and yet fate found a way. Beautiful city, beautiful rain! (The pearly autumn drizzle seemed to fall in a whisper and the streets were dark.) How would she greet him—tenderly? Sadly? Or with complete calm. She had not spoiled him as a child. You are forbidden to run through the drawing room while I am playing the piano. As he grew up, he would feel more and more frequently that she did not have much use for him. Now he tried to picture her face, but his thoughts obstinately refused to take on color, and he simply could not gather in a living optical image what he knew in his mind: her tall, thin figure with that loosely assembled look about her; her dark hair with streaks of gray at the temples; her large, pale mouth; the old raincoat she had on the last time he saw her; and the tired, bitter expression of an aging woman, that seemed to have always been on her face—even before the death of his father,
Admiral Galatov, who had shot himself shortly before the Revolution. Number 51. Eight houses more.

He suddenly realized that he was unendurably, indecently perturbed, much more so than he had been, for example, that first time when he lay pressing his sweat-drenched body against the side of a cliff and aiming at an approaching whirlwind, a white scarecrow on a splendid Arabian horse. He stopped just short of Number 59, took out his pipe and a rubber tobacco pouch; stuffed the bowl slowly and carefully, without spilling a single shred; lit up, coddled the flame, drew, watched the fiery mound swell, gulped a mouthful of sweetish, tongue-prickling smoke, carefully expelled it, and with a firm, unhurried step walked up to the house.

The stairs were so dark that he stumbled a couple of times. When, in the dense blackness, he reached the second-floor landing, he struck a match and made out a gilt nameplate. Wrong name. It was only much higher that he found the odd name “Babb.” The flamelet burned his fingers and went out. God, my heart is pounding.… He groped for the bell in the dark and rang. Then he removed the pipe from between his teeth and began waiting, feeling an agonizing smile rend his mouth.

Then he heard a lock, a bolt made a double resonant sound, and the door, as if swung by a violent wind, burst open. It was just as dark in the anteroom as on the stairs, and out of that darkness floated a vibrant, joyful voice. “The lights are out in the whole building
—eto oozhas
, it’s appalling”—and Nikolay recognized at once that long emphatic “oo” and on its basis instantly reconstructed down to the most minute feature the person who now stood, still concealed by darkness, in the doorway.

“Sure, can’t see a thing,” said he with a laugh, and advanced toward her.

Her cry was as startled as if a strong hand had struck her. In the dark he found her arms, and shoulders, and bumped against something (probably the umbrella stand). “No, no, it’s not possible …” she kept repeating rapidly as she backed away.

“Hold still, Mother, hold still for a minute,” he said, hitting something again (this time it was the half-open front door, which shut with a great slam).

“It can’t be … Nicky, Nick—”

He was kissing her at random, on the cheeks, on the hair, everywhere, unable to see anything in the dark but with some interior vision recognizing all of her from head to toe, and only one thing about her had changed (and even this novelty unexpectedly made him recall his
earliest childhood, when she used to play the piano): the strong, elegant smell of perfume—as if those intervening years had not existed, the years of his adolescence and her widowhood, when she no longer wore perfume and faded so sorrowfully—it seemed as if nothing of that had happened, and he had passed straight from distant exile into childhood.… “It’s you. You’ve come. You’re really here,” she prattled, pressing her soft lips against him. “It’s good.… This is how it should be.…”

“Isn’t there any light anywhere?” Nikolay inquired cheerfully.

She opened an inner door and said excitedly, “Yes, come on. I’ve lit some candles there.”

“Well, let me look at you,” he said, entering the flickering aura of candlelight and gazing avidly at his mother. Her dark hair had been bleached a very light strawlike shade.

“Well, don’t you recognize me?” she asked, with a nervous intake of breath, then added hurriedly, “Don’t stare at me like that. Come on, tell me all the news! What a tan you have … my goodness! Yes, tell me everything!”

That blond bob … And her face was made up with excruciating care. The moist streak of a tear, though, had eaten through the rosy paint, and her mascara-laden lashes were wet, and the powder on the wings of her nose had turned violet. She was wearing a glossy blue dress closed at the throat. And everything about her was unfamiliar, restless and frightening.