The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (60 page)

Since the day of our last meeting there has been a lapse of sixteen years—the age of a bride, an old dog, or the Soviet republic. Incidentally, let us note the first, but not the worst by far, of your innumerable and sloppy mistakes: Katya and I are not coevals. I was going on eighteen, and she on twenty. Relying on a tried and true method, you have your heroine strip before a full-length mirror whereupon you proceed to describe her loose hair, ash-blond of course, and her young curves.
According to you her cornflower eyes would turn violet in pensive moments—a botanical miracle! You shaded them with the black fringe of lashes which, if I may make a contribution of my own, seemed longer toward the outer corners, giving her eyes a very special, though illusory, slant. Katya’s figure was graceful, but she cultivated a slight stoop, and would lift her shoulders as she entered a room. You make her a stately maiden with contralto tones in her voice.

Sheer torture. I had a mind to copy out your images, all of which ring false, and scathingly juxtapose my infallible observations, but the result would have been “nightmarish nonsense,” as the real Katya would have said, for the Logos allotted me does not possess sufficient precision or power to get disentangled from you. On the contrary, I myself get bogged down in the sticky snares of your conventional descriptions, and have no strength left to liberate Katya from your pen. Nevertheless, like Hamlet, I will argue, and, in the end, will out-argue you.

The theme of your concoction is love: a slightly decadent love with the February Revolution for backdrop, but still, love. Katya has been renamed Olga by you, and I have become Leonid. Well and good. Our first encounter, at the house of friends on Christmas Eve; our meetings at the Yusupov Skating Rink; her room, its indigo wallpaper, its mahogany furniture, and its only ornament, a porcelain ballerina with lifted leg—this is all right, this is all true. Except that you managed to give it all a taint of pretentious fabrication. As he takes his seat at the Parisiana Cinema on Nevsky Avenue, Leonid, a student of the Imperial Lyceum, puts his gloves in his three-cornered hat, while a couple of pages later he is already wearing civilian clothes: he doffs his bowler, and the reader is faced by an elegant young man, with his hair parted
à l’anglaise
exactly in the middle of his small, lacquered-looking head, and a purple handkerchief drooping out of his-breast pocket. I do in fact remember dressing like the film actor Max Linder, and recall the generous spurts of
Vezhetal
lotion cooling my scalp, and Monsieur Pierre taking aim with his comb and flipping my hair over with a linotype swing, and then, as he yanked off the sheet, yelling to a middle-aged, mustachioed fellow, “Boy! Bross off the ’air!” Today my memory reacts with irony to the breast-pocket handkerchief and white spats of those days, but, on the other hand, can in no way reconcile the remembered torments of adolescent shaving with your Leonid’s “smooth opaque pallor.” And I shall leave on your conscience his Lermontovian lusterless eyes and aristocratic profile, as it is impossible to discern much today because of an unexpected increase in fleshiness.

Good Lord, keep me from bogging down in the prose of this lady
writer, whom I do not know and do not wish to know, but who has encroached with astonishing insolence on another person’s past! How dare you write, “The pretty Christmas tree with its
chatoyant
lights seemed to augur to them joy jubilant”? You have extinguished the whole tree with your breath, for one adjective placed after the noun for the sake of elegance is enough to kill the best of recollections. Before the disaster, i.e., before your book, one such recollection of mine was the rippling, fragmentary light in Katya’s eyes, and the cherry reflection on her cheek from the glossy little dollhouse of plasmic paper hanging on a branch as, brushing aside the bristly foliage, she stretched to pinch out the flame of a candle that had gone berserk. What do I have left of all this? Nothing—just a nauseating whiff of literary combustion.

Your version gives the impression that Katya and I inhabited a kind of exquisitely cultured beau monde. You have your parallax wrong, dear lady. That upper-class milieu—the fashionable set, if you will—to which Katya belonged, had backward tastes, to put it mildly. Chekhov was considered an “impressionist,” the society rhymster Grand Duke Constantine a major poet, and the arch-Christian Alexander Blok a wicked Jew who wrote futuristic sonnets about dying swans and lilac liqueurs. Handwritten copies of album verse, French and English, made the rounds, and were recopied in turn, not without distortions, while the author’s name imperceptibly vanished, so that those outpourings quite accidentally assumed a glamorous anonymity; and, generally speaking, it is amusing to juxtapose their meanderings with the clandestine copying of seditious jingles practiced in lower circles. A good indication of how undeservedly these male and female monologues about love were considered most modern examples of foreign lyricism is the fact that the darling among them was a piece by poor Louis Bouilhet, who wrote in the middle of last century. Reveling in the rolling cadences, Katya would declaim his alexandrines, and scold me for finding fault with a certain highly sonorous strophe in which, after having referred to his passion as a violin bow, the author compares his mistress to a guitar.

Apropos of guitars, Madam, you write that “in the evening the young people would gather and Olga would sit at a table and sing in a rich contralto.” Oh, well—one more death, one more victim of your sumptuous prose. Yet how I cherished the echoes of modish
tziganshchina
that inclined Katya to singing, and me to composing verse! Well do I know that this was no longer authentic Gypsy art such as that which enchanted Pushkin and, later, Apollon Grigoriev, but a barely breathing, jaded, and doomed muse; everything contributed to
her ruin: the gramophone, the war, and various so-called
tzigane
songs. It was for good reason that Blok, in one of his customary spells of providence, wrote down whatever words he remembered from Gypsy lyrics, as if hastening to save at least this before it was too late.

Should I tell you what those husky murmurs and plaints meant to us? Should I reveal to you the image of a distant, strange world where:

where, deep in the lilac bushes,

and where all the senses are dominated by the memory of lost love, that wicked ruler of pseudo-Gypsy romanticism? Katya and I also would have liked to reminisce, but, since we had nothing yet to reminisce about, we would counterfeit the remoteness of time and push back into it our immediate happiness. We transformed everything we saw into monuments to our still nonexistent past by trying to look at a garden path, at the moon, at the weeping willows, with the same eyes with which
now
—when fully conscious of irreparable losses—we might have looked at that old, waterlogged raft on the pond, at that moon above the black cow shed. I even suppose that, thanks to a vague inspiration, we were preparing in advance for certain things, training ourselves to remember, imagining a distant past and practicing nostalgia, so that subsequently, when that past really existed for us, we would know how to cope with it, and not perish under its burden.

But what do you care about all this? When you describe my summer sojourn at the ancestral estate you dub “Glinskoye,” you chase me into the woods and there compel me to write verse “redolent of youth and faith in life.” This was all not quite so. While the others played tennis (using a single red ball and some Doherty racquets, heavy and saggy, found in the attic) or croquet on a ridiculously overgrown lawn with a dandelion in front of every hoop, Katya and I would make for the kitchen garden, and, squatting there, gorge ourselves on two species of strawberry—the bright-crimson “Victoria”
(sadovaya zemlyanika)
and the Russian hautbois
(klubnika)
, purplish berries often slimed by frogs; and there was also our favorite “Ananas” variety, unripe-looking, yet wonderfully sweet. Without straightening our backs, we moved, grunting, along the furrows, and the tendons behind our knees ached, and our insides filled with a rubious weight. The
hot sun bore down, and that sun, and the strawberries, and Katya’s frock of tussore silk with darkening blotches under the arms, and the patina of tan on the back of her neck—all of it blended into a sense of oppressive delight; and what bliss it was, without rising, still picking berries, to clasp Katya’s warm shoulder and hear her soft laughter and little grunts of greed and the crunch of her joints as she rummaged under the leaves. Forgive me if I pass directly from that orchard, floating by with the blinding gleam of its hothouses and the swaying of hairy poppies along its avenues, to the water closet where, in the pose of Rodin’s
Thinker
, my head still hot from the sun, I composed my verse. It was dismal in all senses of the word, that verse; it contained the trills of nightingales from
tzigane
songs and bits of Blok, and helpless echoes of Verlaine:
Souvenir, Souvenir, que me veux-tu? L’automne
 …—even though autumn was still far off, and my happiness shouted with its marvelous voice nearby, probably over there, by the bowling alley, behind the old lilac bushes under which lay piles of kitchen refuse, and hens walked about. In the evenings, on the veranda, the gramophone’s gaping mouth, as red as the lining of a Russian general’s coat, would pour forth uncontrollable Gypsy passion; or, to the tune of “Under a Cloud the Moon’s Hidden,” a menacing voice would mimic the Kaiser: “Give me a nib and a holder, to write ultimatums it’s time.” And on the garden terrace a game of
Gorodki
(townlets) was going on: Katya’s father, his collar unbuttoned, one foot advanced in its soft house boot, would take aim with a cudgel as if he were firing a rifle and then hurl it with force (but wide of the mark) at the “town-let” of skittles while the setting sun, with the tip of its final ray, brushed across the palisade of pine trunks, leaving on each a fiery band. And when night finally fell, and the house was asleep, Katya and I would look at the dark house from the park where we kept huddled on a hard, cold, invisible bench until our bones ached, and it all seemed to us like something that had already once happened long ago: the outline of the house against the pale-green sky, the sleepy movements of the foliage, our prolonged, blind kisses.

In your elegant description, with profuse dots, of that summer, you naturally do not forget for a minute—as we used to forget—that since February of that year the nation was “under the rule of the Provisional Government,” and you oblige Katya and me to follow revolutionary events with keen concern, that is, to conduct (for dozens of pages) political and mystical conversations that—I assure you—we never had. In the first place, I would have been embarrassed to speak, with the righteous pathos you lend me, of Russia’s destiny and, in the second place, Katya and I were too absorbed in each other to pay much attention to
the Revolution. I need but say that my most vivid impression in that respect was a mere trifle: one day, on Million Street in St. Petersburg, a truck packed with jolly rioters made a clumsy but accurate swerve so as to deliberately squash a passing cat, which remained lying there, as a perfectly flat, neatly ironed, black rag (only the tail still belonged to a cat—it stood upright, and the tip, I think, still moved). At the time this struck me with some deep occult meaning, but I have since had occasion to see a bus, in a bucolic Spanish village, flatten by exactly the same method an exactly similar cat, so I have become disenchanted with hidden meanings. You, on the other hand, have not only exaggerated my poetic talent beyond recognition, but have made me a prophet besides, for only a prophet could have talked, in the fall of 1917, about the green pulp of Lenin’s deceased brain, or the “inner” emigration of intellectuals in Soviet Russia.

No, that fall and that winter we talked of other matters. I was in anguish. The most awful things were happening to our romance. You give a simple explanation: “Olga began to understand that she was sensual rather than passionate, while for Leonid it was the opposite. Their risky caresses understandably inebriated her, but deep inside there always remained a little unmelted piece”—and so on, in the same vulgar, pretentious spirit. What do you understand of our love? So far, I have deliberately avoided direct discussion of it; but now, if I were not afraid of contagion by your style, I would describe in greater detail both its fire and its underlying melancholy. Yes, there was the summer, and the foliage’s omnipresent rustle, and the headlong pedaling along all of the park’s winding paths, to see who would be the first to race from different directions to the
rond-point
, where the red sand was covered by the writhing serpentine tracks of our rock-hard tires, and each live, everyday detail of that final Russian summer screamed at us in desperation, “I am real! I am now!” As long as all of this sunny euphoria managed to stay on the surface, the innate sadness of our love went no further than the devotion to a nonexistent past. But when Katya and I once again found ourselves in Petersburg, and it had already snowed more than once, and the wooden paving blocks were already filmed with that yellowish layer—a mixture of snow and horse dung—without which I cannot picture a Russian city, the flaw emerged, and we were left with nothing but torment.

I can see her now, in her black sealskin coat, with a big, flat muff and gray fur-trimmed boots, walking on her slender legs, as if on stilts, along a very slippery sidewalk; or in a dark, high-necked dress, sitting on a blue divan, her face heavily powdered after much crying. As I walked to her house in the evenings and returned after midnight, I
would recognize amid the granite night, under a frosty sky, dove-gray with starlight, the imperturbable and immutable landmarks of my itinerary—always those same huge Petersburg objects, lone edifices of legendary times, adorning the nocturnal wastes and half-turning away from the traveler as all beauty does: it sees you not, it is pensive, and listless, its mind is elsewhere. I would talk to myself, exhorting fate, Katya, the stars, the columns of a huge, mute, abstracted cathedral; and when a desultory exchange of fire began in the dark streets, it would occur to me casually, and not without a sense of pleasure, that I might be picked off by a stray bullet and die right there, reclining on dim snow, in my elegant fur coat, my bowler askew, among scattered white paperbacks of Gumilyov’s or Mandelshtam’s new collections of verse that I had dropped and that were barely visible against the snow. Or else, sobbing and moaning as I walked, I would try to persuade myself that it was I who had stopped loving Katya, as I hastened to gather up all I could recall of her mendacity, her presumption, her vacuity, the pretty patch masking a pimple, the artificial
grasseyement
that would appear in her speech when she needlessly switched to French, her invulnerable weakness for titled poetasters, and the ill-tempered, dull expression of her eyes when, for the hundredth time, I tried to make her tell me with whom she had spent the previous evening. And when it was all gathered and weighed in the balance, I would perceive with anguish that my love, burdened as it was with all that trash, had settled and lodged only deeper, and that not even draft horses with iron muscles could haul it out of the morass. And the following evening again, I would make my way through the sailor-manned identity checks on the street corners (documents were demanded that allowed me access at least to the threshold of Katya’s soul, and were invalid beyond that point); I would once again go to gaze at Katya, who, at the first pitiful word of mine, would turn into a large, rigid doll who would lower her convex eyelids and respond in china-doll language. When, one memorable night, I demanded that she give me a final, super-truthful reply, Katya simply said nothing, and, instead, remained lying motionless on the couch, her mirrorlike eyes reflecting the flame of the candle which on that night of historical turbulence substituted for electric light, and, after hearing her silence through to the end, I got up and left. Three days later, I had my valet take a note to her, in which I wrote that I would commit suicide if I could not see her just once more. So one glorious morning, with a rosy round sun and creaking snow, we met on Post Office Street; I silently kissed her hand, and for a quarter of an hour, without a single word interrupting our silence, we strolled to and fro, while nearby, on the corner of the Horse
Guards Boulevard, stood smoking, with feigned nonchalance, a perfectly respectable-looking man in an astrakhan cap. As she and I silently walked to and fro, a little boy passed, pulling by its string a baized hand sled with a tattered fringe, and a drainpipe suddenly gave a rattle and disgorged a chunk of ice, while the man on the corner kept smoking; then, at precisely the same spot where we had met, I just as silently kissed her hand, which slipped back into its muff forever.