The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (56 page)

At school, recently, the geography teacher, Berezovski (author of a booklet “Chao-San, the Land of the Morning: Korea and Koreans, with thirteen illustrations and a map in the text”), fingering his dark little beard, informed the entire class, unexpectedly and malapropos, that Mascara was giving Peter and him private lessons in boxing. Everybody stared at Peter. Embarrassment caused Peter’s face to glow brightly and even to become somewhat puffy. At the next recess, Shchukin, his strongest, roughest, and most backward classmate, came up to him and said with a grin: “Come on, show how you box.” “Leave me alone,” replied Peter gently. Shchukin emitted a nasal grunt and hit Peter in the underbelly. Peter resented this. With a straight left, as taught by Monsieur
Mascara, he bloodied Shchukin’s nose. A stunned pause, red spots on a handkerchief. Having recovered from his astonishment, Shchukin fell upon Peter and started to maul him. Though his whole body hurt, Peter felt satisfied. Blood from Shchukin’s nose continued to flow throughout the lesson of Natural History, stopped during Sums, and retrickled at Sacred Studies. Peter watched with quiet interest.

That winter Peter’s mother took Mara to Mentone. Mara was sure she was dying of consumption. The absence of his sister, a rather badgering young lady with a caustic tongue, did not displease Peter, but he could not get over his mother’s departure; he missed her terribly, especially in the evenings. He never saw much of his father. His father was busy in a place known as the Parliament (where a couple of years earlier the ceiling had collapsed). There was also something called the Kadet Party, which had nothing to do with parties or cadets. Very often Peter would have to dine separately upstairs, with Miss Sheldon—who had black hair and blue eyes and wore a knit tie with transverse stripes over her voluminous blouse—while downstairs near the monstrously swollen hallstands fully fifty pairs of rubbers would accumulate; and if he passed from the vestibule to the side room with its silk-covered Turkish divan he could suddenly hear—when somewhere in the distance a footman opened a door—a cacophonic din, a zoolike hubbub, and the remote but clear voice of his father.

One gloomy November morning Dmitri Korff, who shared a school desk with Peter, took out of his piebald satchel and handed to him a cheap satirical magazine. On one of the first pages there was a cartoon—with green color predominating—depicting Peter’s father and accompanied by a jingle. Glancing at the lines, Peter caught a fragment from the middle:

“Is it true?” asked Dmitri in a whisper (the lesson had just begun). “What do you mean—true?” whispered Peter back. “Pipe down, you two,” broke in Aleksey Matveich, the teacher of Russian, a muzhiklooking man, with an impediment in his speech, a nondescript and untidy growth above a crooked lip, and celebrated legs in screwy trousers:
when he walked his feet tangled—he set the right one where the left should have landed and vice versa—but nevertheless his progress was extremely rapid. He now sat at his table and leafed through his little notebook; presently his eyes focused on a distant desk, from behind which, like a tree grown by the glance of a fakir, Shchukin was rising.

“What do you mean—true?” softly repeated Peter, holding the magazine in his lap and looking askance at Dmitri. Dmitri moved a little closer to him. Meanwhile, Shchukin, crop-headed, wearing a Russian blouse of black serge, was beginning for the third time, with a sort of hopeless zest:
“Mumu
 … Turgenev’s story
Mumu
 …” “That bit about your father,” answered Dmitri in a low voice. Aleksey Matveich banged the
Zhivoe Slovo
(a school anthology) against the table with such violence that a pen jumped and stuck its nib in the floor. “What’s going on there? … What’s this … you whisperers?” spoke the teacher, spitting out sibilant words incoherently: “Stand up, stand up.… Korff, Shishkov.… What is it you’re doing there?” He advanced and nimbly snatched away the magazine. “So you’re reading smut … sit down, sit down … smut.” His booty he put into his briefcase.

Next, Peter was called to the blackboard. He was told to write out the first line of a poem which he was supposed to have learned by heart. He wrote:

Here came a shout so jarring that Peter dropped his bit of chalk:

“What are you scrawling? Why
bedoy
, when it’s
lebedoy
, orache—a clingy weed? Where are your thoughts roaming? Go back to your seat!”

“Well, is it true?” asked Dmitri in a well-timed whisper. Peter pretended he did not hear. He could not stop the shiver running through him; in his ears there kept echoing the verse about the “revolver, dagger, or épée”; he kept seeing before him the sharp-angled pale-green caricature of his father, with the green crossing the outline in one place and not reaching it in another—a negligence of the color print. Quite recently, before his ride to school, that crepitation of steel, that scrape of soles … his father and the fencing master, both wearing padded chest protectors and wire-mesh masks.… It had all been so habitual—the Frenchman’s uvular cries,
rompez, battez!
, the robust movements of
his father, the flicker and clink of the foils.… A pause: panting and smiling, he removed the convex mask from his damp pink face.

The lesson ended. Aleksey Matveich carried away the magazine. Chalk-pale, Peter kept sitting where he was, lifting and lowering the lid of his desk. His classmates, with deferential curiosity, clustered around him, pressing him for details. He knew nothing and tried himself to discover something from the shower of questions. What he could make out was that Tumanski, a fellow member of the Parliament, had aspersed his father’s honor and his father had challenged him to a duel.

Two more lessons dragged by, then came the main recess, with snowball fights in the yard. For no reason at all Peter began stuffing his snowballs with frozen earth, something he had never done before. In the course of the next lesson Nussbaum, the German teacher, lost his temper and roared at Shchukin (who was having bad luck that day), and Peter felt a spasm in his throat and asked leave to go to the toilet—so as not to burst into tears in public. There, in solitary suspension near the washbowl, was the unbelievably soiled, unbelievably slimy towel—more exactly the corpse of a towel that had passed through many wet, hastily kneading hands. For a minute or so Peter looked at himself in the glass—the best method of keeping the face from dissolving in a grimace of crying.

He wondered if he should not leave for home before three o’clock, the regular time, but chased that thought away. Self-control, the motto is self-control! The storm in class had subsided. Shchukin, scarlet-eared but absolutely calm, was back in his place, sitting there with his arms folded crosswise.

One more lesson—and then the final bell, which differed in sustained hoarse emphasis from those that marked the earlier periods. Arctics, short fur coat,
shapska
with earflaps, were quickly slipped on, and Peter ran across the yard, penetrated into its tunnel-like exit, and jumped over the dogboard of the gate. No automobile had been sent to fetch him, so he had to take a hackney sleigh. The driver, lean-bottomed, flat-backed, perching slightly askew on his low seat, had an eccentric way of urging his horse on: he would pretend to draw the knout out of the leg of his long boot, or else his hand adumbrated a kind of beckoning gesture directed to no one in particular, and then the sleigh jerked, causing the pencil case to rattle in Peter’s satchel, and it was all dully oppressive and increased his anxiety, and oversize, irregularly shaped, hastily modeled snowflakes fell upon the sleazy sleighrobe.

At home, since the departure of his mother and sister, afternoons
were quiet. Peter went up the wide, gentle-graded staircase where on the second landing stood a table of green malachite with a vase for visiting cards, presided over by a replica of the Venus of Milo that his cousins had once rigged up in a plush-velveteen coat and a hat with sham cherries, whereupon she began to resemble Praskovia Stepanovna, an impoverished widow who would call every first of the month. Peter reached the upper floor and hallooed his governess’s name. But Miss Sheldon had a guest for tea, the English governess of the Veretennikovs. Miss Sheldon sent Peter to prepare his school tasks for the next morning. Not forgetting first to wash his hands and drink his glass of milk. Her door closed. Peter, feeling smothered in cottonwoollish, ghastly anguish, dawdled in the nursery, then descended to the second floor and peeped into his father’s study. The silence there was unendurable. Then a crisp sound broke it—the fall of an incurved chrysanthemum petal. On the monumental writing desk the familiar, discreetly gleaming objects were fixed in an orderly cosmic array, like planets: cabinet photographs, a marble egg, a majestic inkstand.

Peter passed into his mother’s boudoir, and thence into its oriel and stood there for quite a while looking through an elongated casement. It was almost night by that time, at that latitude. Around the globes of lilac-tinted lights the snowflakes fluttered. Below, the black outlines of sleighs with the silhouettes of hunched-up passengers flowed hazily. Maybe next morning? It always takes place in the morning, very early.

He walked down to the first floor. A silent wilderness. In the library, with nervous haste, he switched on the light and the black shadows swept away. Having settled down in a nook near one of the bookcases, he tried to occupy his mind with the examination of the huge bound volumes of the
Zhivopisnoe obozrenie
(a Russian counterpart of
The Graphic):
Masculine beauty depends on a splendid beard and a sumptuous mustache. Since girlhood I suffered from blackheads. Concert accordion “Pleasure,” with twenty voices and ten valves. A group of priests and a wooden church. A painting with the legend “Strangers”: gentleman moping at his writing desk, lady with curly boa standing some distance away in the act of gloving her wide-fingered hand. I’ve already looked at this volume. He pulled out another and instantly was confronted by the picture of a duel between two Italian swordsmen: one lunges madly, the other sidesteps the thrust and pierces his opponent’s throat. Peter slammed the heavy tome shut, and froze, holding his temples like a grown-up. Everything was frightening—the stillness, the motionless bookcases, the glossy dumbbells on an oaken table, the black boxes of the card index. With bent head he
sped like the wind through murky rooms. Back again in the nursery, he lay down on a couch and remained lying there until Miss Sheldon remembered his existence. From the stairs came the sound of the dinner gong.

As Peter was on his way down, his father came out of his study, accompanied by Colonel Rozen, who had once been engaged to the long-dead young sister of Peter’s father. Peter dared not glance at his father and when the latter’s large palm, emitting familiar warmth, touched the side of his son’s head, Peter blushed to the point of tears. It was impossible, unbearable, to think that this man, the best person on earth, was going to duel with some dim
Enigmanski
. Using what weapons? Pistols? Swords? Why does nobody talk about it? Do the servants know? The governess? Mother in Mentone? At table the colonel joked as he always did, abruptly, briefly, as if cracking nuts, but tonight Peter instead of laughing was suffused with blushes, which he tried to conceal by deliberately dropping his napkin so as to rally quietly under the table and regain there his normal complexion, but he would crawl out even redder than before and his father would raise his eyebrows—and merrily, unhurriedly, with characteristic evenness perform the rites of eating dinner, of carefully quaffing wine from a low golden cup with a handle. Colonel Rozen went on cracking jokes. Miss Sheldon, who had no Russian, kept silent, sternly protruding her chest; and whenever Peter hunched his back she would give him a nasty poke under the shoulder blades. For dessert there was pistachio parfait, which he loathed.

After dinner, his father and the colonel went up to the study. Peter looked so queer that his father asked: “What’s the matter? Why are you sulking?” And miraculously Peter managed to answer distinctly: “No, I’m not sulking.” Miss Sheldon led him bedward. As soon as the light was extinguished, he buried his face in the pillow. Onegin shed his cloak, Lenski plopped down on the boards like a black sack. One could see the point of the épée coming out at the back of the Italian’s neck. Mascara liked to tell about the
rencontre
which he had had in his youth: half a centimeter lower—and the liver would have been pierced. And the homework for tomorrow has not been done, and the darkness in the bedroom is total, and he must get up early, very early, better not shut my eyes or I’ll oversleep—the thing is sure to be scheduled for tomorrow. Oh, I’ll skip school, I’ll skip it, I’ll say—sore throat. Mother will be back only at Christmas. Mentone, blue picture postcards. Must insert the latest one in my album. One corner has now gone in, the next—

Peter woke up as usual, around eight, as usual he heard a ringing
sound: that was the servant responsible for the stoves—he had opened a damper. With his hair still wet after a hasty bath, Peter went downstairs and found his father boxing with Mascara as if it were an ordinary day. “Sore throat?” he said, repeating it after Peter. “Yes, a scrapy feeling,” said Peter, speaking low. “Look here, are you telling the truth?” Peter felt that all further explanations were perilous: the floodgate was about to burst, liberating a disgraceful torrent. He silently turned away and presently was seated in the limousine with his satchel in his lap. He felt queasy. Everything was horrible and irremediable.

Somehow or other he managed to be late for the first lesson, and stood for a long time with his hand raised behind the glazed door of his class but was not permitted to enter and went roaming about in the hall, and then hoisted himself onto a window ledge with the vague idea of doing his tasks but did not get farther than: