The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (67 page)

“Oh I do, even most regularly,” answered Eugenia Isakovna softly, and added, “Why don’t you come to see me, why do you never ring me up?”—and a gust of pain rippled her gaze because well-meaning Madame Shuf shrieked back too piercingly.

They parted. Madame Shuf, who did not know anything yet, went home, while her husband, in his office, was uttering
akhs
and
tsks
, and shaking his head with the receiver pressed to it, as he listened to what Chernobylski was telling him over the telephone.

“My wife has already gone to her,” said Chernobylski, “and in a moment I’ll go there also, though kill me if I know how to begin but my wife is after all a woman, maybe she’ll somehow manage to pave the way.”

Shuf suggested they write on bits of paper, and give her to read, gradual communications: “Sick.” “Very sick.” “Very, very sick.”

“Akh
, I also thought about that, but it doesn’t make it easier. What a calamity, eh? Young, healthy, exceptionally endowed. And to think that it was
I
who got that job for him,
I
who helped him with his living expenses! What? Oh, I understand all that perfectly, but still these thoughts drive me crazy. Okay, we’re sure to meet there.”

Fiercely and agonizingly baring his teeth and throwing back his fat face, he finally got his collar fastened. He sighed as he started to go. He had already turned into her street when he saw her from behind walking quietly and trustfully in front of him, with a net bag full of her
purchases. Not daring to overtake her, he slowed down. God grant she does not turn! Those dutifully moving feet, that narrow back, still suspecting nothing. Ah, it shall bend!

She noticed him only on the staircase. Chernobylski remained silent as he saw her ear was still bare.

“Why, how nice to drop in, Boris Lvovich. No, don’t bother—I’ve been carrying my load long enough to bring it upstairs too; but hold this umbrella if you like, and then I’ll unlock the door.”

They entered. Madame Chernobylski and the warmhearted pianist had been waiting there for quite a long time. Now the execution would start.

Eugenia Isakovna liked visitors and her friends often called on her, so that now she had no reason to be astonished; she was only pleased, and without delay started fussing hospitably. They found it hard to arrest her attention while she dashed this way and that, changing her course at an abrupt angle (the plan that spread its glow within her was to fix a real lunch). At last the musician caught her in the corridor by the end of her shawl and the others heard the woman shouting to her that nobody, nobody would stay for lunch. So Eugenia Isakovna got out the fruit knives, arranged the
gaufrettes
in one little glass vase, bonbons in another.… She was made to sit down practically by force. The Chernobylskis, their lodger, and a Miss Osipov who by that time had somehow managed to appear—a tiny creature, almost a dwarf—all sat down, too, at the oval table. In this way a certain array, a certain order had, at least, been attained.

“For God’s sake, begin, Boris,” pleaded his wife, concealing her eyes from Eugenia Isakovna, who had begun to examine more carefully the faces around her, without interrupting, however, the smooth flow of her amiable, pathetic, completely defenseless words.

“Nu, chto ya mogu!”
(“Well, what can I!”) cried Chernobylski, and spasmodically rising started to walk around the room.

The doorbell rang, and the solemn landlady, in her best dress, let in Ida and Ida’s sister: their awful white faces expressed a kind of concentrated avidity.

“She doesn’t know yet,” Chernobylski told them; he undid all three buttons of his jacket and immediately buttoned it up again.

Eugenia Isakovna, her eyebrows twitching but her lips still retaining their smile, stroked the hands of her new visitors and reseated herself, invitingly turning her little apparatus, which stood before her on the tablecloth, now toward this guest, now toward that, but the sounds slanted, the sounds crumbled. All of a sudden the Shufs came in, then lame Lipshteyn with his mother, then the Orshanskis, and
Lenochka, and (by sheer chance) aged Madame Tomkin—and they all talked among themselves, but were careful to keep their voices away from her, though actually they collected around her in grim, oppressive groups, and somebody had already walked away to the window and was shaking and heaving there, and Dr. Orshanski, who sat next to her at the table, attentively examined a
gaufrette
, matching it, like a domino, with another, and Eugenia Isakovna, her smile now gone and replaced by something akin to rancor, continued to push her hearing aid toward her visitors—and sobbing Chernobylski roared from a distant corner: “What’s there to explain—dead, dead, dead!” but she was already afraid to look in his direction.

W
HEN
the streetlamps hanging in the dusk came on, practically in unison, all the way to Bayerischer Platz, every object in the unlit room shifted slightly under the influence of the outdoor rays, which started by taking a picture of the lace curtain’s design. He had been lying supine (a long-limbed flat-chested youth with a pince-nez glimmering in the semiobscurity) for about three hours, apart from a brief interval for supper, which had passed in merciful silence: his father and sister, after yet another quarrel, had kept reading at table. Drugged by the oppressive, protracted feeling so familiar to him, he lay and looked through his lashes, and every line, every rim, or shadow of a rim, turned into a sea horizon or a strip of distant land. As soon as his eye got used to the mechanics of these metamorphoses, they began to occur of their own accord (thus small stones continue to come alive, quite uselessly, behind the wizard’s back), and now, in this or that place of the room’s cosmos, an illusionary perspective was formed, a remote mirage enchanting in its graphic transparency and isolation: a stretch of water, say, and a black promontory with the minuscule silhouette of an araucaria.

At intervals scraps of indistinct, laconic speech came from the adjacent parlor (the cavernal centerpiece of one of those bourgeois flats which Russian émigré families used to rent in Berlin at the time), separated from his room by sliding doors, through whose ripply matte glass the tall lamp beyond shone yellow, while lower down there showed through, as if in deep water, the fuzzy dark back of a chair placed in that position to foil the propensity of the door leaves to crawl apart in a series of jerks. In that parlor (probably on the divan at its farthest end) his sister sat with her boyfriend, and, to judge by the mysterious pauses, resolving at last in a slight cough or a tender questioning laugh, the two were kissing. Other sounds could be heard
from the street: the noise of a car would curl up like a wispy column to be capitaled by a honk at the crossing; or, vice versa, the honk would come first, followed by an approaching rumble in which the shudder of the door leaves participated as best it could.

And in the same way as the luminosity of the water and its every throb pass through a medusa, so everything traversed his inner being, and that sense of fluidity became transfigured into something like second sight. As he lay flat on his couch, he felt carried sideways by the flow of shadows and, simultaneously, he escorted distant foot-passengers, and visualized now the sidewalk’s surface right under his eyes (with the exhaustive accuracy of a dog’s sight), now the design of bare branches against a sky still retaining some color, or else the alternation of shop windows: a hairdresser’s dummy, hardly surpassing the queen of hearts in anatomic development; a picture framer’s display, with purple heathscapes and the inevitable
Inconnue de la Seine
, so popular in the Reich, among numerous portraits of President Hindenburg; and then a lampshade shop with all bulbs aglow, so that one could not help wondering which of them was the workaday lamp belonging to the shop itself.

All at once it occurred to him, as he reclined mummylike in the dark, that it was all rather awkward—his sister might think that he was not at home, or that he was eavesdropping. To move was, however, incredibly difficult; difficult, because the very form of his being had now lost all distinctive marks, all fixed boundaries. For example, the lane on the other side of the house might be his own arm, while the long skeletal cloud that stretched across the whole sky with a chill of stars in the east might be his backbone. Neither the striped obscurity in his room nor the glass of the parlor door, which was transmuted into nighttime seas shining with golden undulations, offered him a dependable method of measuring and marking himself off; that method he found only when in a burst of agility the tactile tip of his tongue, performing a sudden twist in his mouth (as if dashing to check, half-awake, if all was well), palpated and started to worry a bit of soft foreign matter, a shred of boiled beef firmly lodged in his teeth; whereupon he reflected how many times, in some nineteen years, it had changed, that invisible but tangible householdry of teeth, which the tongue would get used to until a filling came out, leaving a great pit that presently would be refurnished.

He was now prompted to move not so much by the shamelessly frank silence behind the door as by the urge to seek out a nice, pointed little tool, to aid the solitary blind toiler. He stretched, raised his head, and switched on the light near his couch, thus entirely restoring his
corporeal image. He perceived himself (the pince-nez, the thin, dark mustache, the bad skin on his forehead) with that utter revulsion he always experienced on coming back to his body out of the languorous mist, promising—what? What shape would the force oppressing and teasing his spirit finally take? Where did it originate, this thing growing in me? Most of my day had been the same as usual—university, public library—but later, when I had to trudge to the Osipovs on Father’s errand, there was that wet roof of some pub on the edge of a vacant lot, and the chimney smoke hugged the roof, creeping low, heavy with damp, sated with it, sleepy, refusing to rise, refusing to detach itself from beloved decay, and right then came that thrill, right then.

Under the table lamp gleamed an oilcloth-bound exercise book, and next to it, on the ink-mottled blotter, lay a razor blade, its apertures encircled with rust. The light also fell on a safety pin. He unbent it, and following his tongue’s rather fussy directions, removed the mote of meat, swallowed it—better than any dainties; after which the contented organ calmed down.

Suddenly a mermaid’s hand was applied from the outside to the ripply glass of the door; then the leaves parted spasmodically and his sister thrust in her shaggy head.

“Grisha dear,” she said, “be an angel, do get some cigarettes from Father.”

He did not respond, and the bright slits of her furry eyes narrowed (she saw very poorly without her horn-rimmed glasses) as she tried to make out whether or not he was asleep on the couch.

“Get them for me, Grishenka,” she repeated, still more entreatingly. “Oh, please! I don’t want to go to him after what happened yesterday.”

“Maybe I don’t want to either,” he said.

“Hurry, hurry,” tenderly uttered his sister, “come on, Grisha dear!”

“All right, lay off,” he said at last, and carefully reuniting the two halves of the door, she dissolved in the glass.

He examined again his lamp-lit island, remembering hopefully that he had put somewhere a pack of cigarettes which one evening a friend had happened to leave behind. The shiny safety pin had disappeared, while the exercise book now lay otherwise and was half-open (as a person changes position in sleep). Perhaps, between my books. The light just reached their spines on the shelves above the desk. Here was haphazard trash (predominantly), and manuals of political economy (I wanted something quite different, but Father won out); there were also some favorite books that at one time or another had done his heart good: Gumilyov’s collection of poems
Shatyor (Tent)
, Pasternak’s
Sestra moya Zhizn’ (Life, My Sister)
, Gazdanov’s
Vecher u Kler (Evening at Claire’s)
, Radiguet’s
Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel
, Sinn’s
Zashchita Luzhina (Luzhin’s Defense)
, Ilf and Petrov’s
Dvenadtsat’ Stul’ev (Twelve Chairs)
, Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Baratynski, and an old Russian guidebook. Again that gentle mysterious shock. He listened. Would the thrill be repeated? His mind was in a state of extreme tension, logical thought was eclipsed, and when he came out of his trance, it took him some time to recall why he was standing near the shelves and fingering books. The blue-and-white package that he had stuck between Professor Sombart and Dostoyevski proved to be empty. Well, it had to be done, no getting out of it. There was, however, another possibility.

In worn bedroom slippers and sagging pants, listlessly, almost noiselessly, dragging his feet, he passed from his room to the hallway and groped for the switch. On the console under the looking glass, next to the guest’s smart beige cap, there remained a crumpled piece of soft paper: the wrappings of liberated roses. He rummaged in his father’s overcoat, penetrating with squeamish fingers into the insensate world of a strange pocket, but did not find there the spare pack he had hoped to obtain, knowing as he did his father’s heavyish providence. Nothing to be done, I must go to him.

Here, that is at some indeterminate point of his somnambulic itinerary, he again stepped into a zone of mist, and this time the renewed vibration within him possessed such power, and, especially, was so much more vivid than all external perceptions, that he did not immediately identify as his proper confines and countenance the stoop-shouldered youth with the pale, unshaven cheek and the red ear who glided soundlessly by in the mirror. He overtook his own self and entered the dining room.

There, at the table which long since, before going to bed, the maid had laid for late-evening tea, sat his father: one finger was grating in his black, gray-streaked beard; between the finger and thumb of his other hand he held aloft a pince-nez by its springy clips; he sat studying a large plan of Berlin badly worn at the folds. A few days ago, at the house of some friends, there had been a passionate, Russian-style argument about which was the shortest way to walk from a certain street to another, neither of which, incidentally, did any of the arguers ever frequent; and now, to judge by the expression of displeased astonishment on his father’s inclined face, with those two pink figure-eights on the sides of his nose, the old man had turned out to be wrong.