The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (69 page)

My representative, the man with the Russian newspaper, was now alone on the bench and, as he had moved over into the shade where V.I. had just been sitting, the same cool linden pattern that had anointed his predecessor now rippled across his forehead.

I
N THE
next room Pavel Romanovich was roaring with laughter, as he related how his wife had left him.

I could not endure the sound of that horrible hilarity, and without even consulting my mirror, just as I was—in the rumpled dress of a slatternly after-lunch siesta, and no doubt still bearing the pillow’s imprint on my cheek—I made for the next room (the dining room of my landlord) and came upon the following scene: my landlord, a person called Plekhanov (totally unrelated to the socialist philosopher), sat listening with an air of encouragement—all the time filling the tubes of Russian cigarettes by means of a tobacco injector—while Pavel Romanovich kept walking around the table, his face a regular nightmare, its pallor seeming to spread to his otherwise wholesome-looking close-shaven head: a very Russian kind of cleanliness, habitually making one think of neat engineer troops, but at the present moment reminding me of something evil, something as frightening as a convict’s skull.

He had come, actually, looking for my brother—who had just gone, but this did not really matter to him: his grief had to speak, and so he found a ready listener in this rather unattractive person whom he hardly knew. He laughed, but his eyes did not participate in his guffaws, as he talked of his wife’s collecting things all over their flat, of her taking away by some oversight his favorite eyeglasses, of the fact that all her relatives were in the know ahead of him, of his wondering—

“Yes, here’s a nice point,” he went on, now addressing directly Plekhanov, a God-fearing widower (for his speech until then had been more or less a harangue in sheer space), “a nice, interesting point: how will it be in the hereafter—will she cohabitate there with me or with that swine?”

“Let us go to my room,” I said in my most crystalline tone of voice—and only then did he notice my presence: I had stood, leaning
forlornly against a corner of the dark sideboard, with which seemed to fuse my diminutive figure in its black dress—yes, I wear mourning, for everybody, for everything, for my own self, for Russia, for the fetuses scraped out of me. He and I passed into the tiny room I rented: it could scarcely accommodate a rather absurdly wide couch covered in silk, and next to it the little low table bearing a lamp whose base was a veritable bomb of thick glass filled with water—and in this atmosphere of my private coziness Pavel Romanovich became at once a different man.

He sat down in silence, rubbing his inflamed eyes. I curled up beside him, patted the cushions around us, and lapsed into thought, cheek-propped feminine thought, as I considered him, his turquoise head, his big strong shoulders which a military tunic would have suited so much better than that double-breasted jacket. I gazed at him and marveled how I could have been swept off my feet by this short, stocky fellow with insignificant features (except for the teeth—oh my, what fine teeth!); yet I was crazy about him barely two years ago at the beginning of émigré life in Berlin when he was only just planning to marry his goddess—and how very crazy I was, how I wept because of him, how haunted my dreams were by that slender chainlet of steel around his hairy wrist!

He fished out of his hip pocket his massive, “battlefield” (as he termed it) cigarette case. Against its lid, despondently nodding his head, he tapped the tube end of his Russian cigarette several times, more times than he usually did.

“Yes, Maria Vasilevna,” he said at last through his teeth as he lit up, raising high his triangular eyebrows. “Yes, nobody could have foreseen such a thing. I had faith in that woman, absolute faith.”

After his recent fit of sustained loquacity, everything seemed uncannily quiet. One heard the rain beating against the windowsill, the clicking of Plekhanov’s tobacco injector, the whimpering of a neurotic old dog locked up in my brother’s room across the corridor. I do not know why—either because the weather was so very gray, or perhaps because the kind of misfortune that had befallen Pavel Romanovich should demand some reaction from the surrounding world (dissolution, eclipse)—but I had the impression that it was late in the evening, though actually it was only three p.m., and I was still supposed to travel to the other end of Berlin on an errand my charming brother could have well done himself.

Pavel Romanovich spoke again, this time in sibilant tones: “That stinking old bitch,” he said, “she and she alone pimped them together. I always found her disgusting and didn’t conceal it from Lenochka.
What a bitch! You’ve seen her, I think—around sixty, dyed a rich roan, fat, so fat that she looks round-backed. It’s a big pity that Nicholas is out. Let him call me as soon as he returns. I am, as you know, a simple, plain-spoken man and I’ve been telling Lenochka for ages that her mother is an evil bitch. Now here’s what I have in mind: perhaps your brother might help me to rig up a letter to the old hag—a sort of formal statement explaining that I knew and realize perfectly well whose instigation it was, who nudged my wife—yes, something on those lines, but most politely worded, of course.”

I said nothing. Here he was, visiting me for the first time (his visits to Nick did not count), for the first time he sat on my
Kautsch
, and shed cigarette ashes on my polychrome cushions; yet the event, which would formerly have given me divine pleasure, now did not gladden me one bit. Good people had been reporting a long while ago that his marriage had been a flop, that his wife had turned out to be a cheap, skittish fool—and far-sighted rumor had long been giving her a lover in the very person of the freak who had now fallen for her cowish beauty. The news of that wrecked marriage did not, therefore, come to me as a surprise; in fact I may have vaguely expected that someday Pavel Romanovich would be deposited at my feet by a wave of the storm. But no matter how deep I rummaged within myself, I failed to find one crumb of joy; on the contrary, my heart was, oh, so heavy, I simply cannot say how heavy. All my romances, by some kind of collusion between their heroes, have invariably followed a prearranged pattern of mediocrity and tragedy, or more precisely, the tragic slant was imposed by their very mediocrity. I am ashamed to recall the way they started, and appalled by the nastiness of their denouements, while the middle part, the part that should have been the essence and core of this or that affair, has remained in my mind as a kind of listless shuffle seen through oozy water or sticky fog. My infatuation with Pavel Romanovich had had at least the delightful advantage of staying cool and lovely in contrast to all the rest; but that infatuation too, so remote, so deeply buried in the past, was borrowing now from the present, in reverse order, a tinge of misfortune, failure, even plain mortification, just because I was forced to hear this man’s complaining of his wife, of his mother-in-law.

“I do hope,” he said, “Nicky comes back soon. I have still another plan in reserve, and, I think, it’s quite a good one. And in the meantime I’d better toddle along.”

And still I said nothing, in great sadness looking at him, my lips masked by the fringe of my black shawl. He stood for a moment by the windowpane, on which in tumbling motion, knocking and buzzing, a
fly went up, up, and presently slid down again. Then he passed his finger across the spines of the books on my shelf. Like most people who read little, he had a sneaking affection for dictionaries, and now he pulled out a thick-bottomed pink volume with the seed head of a dandelion and a red-curled girl on the cover.

“Khoroshaya shtooka,”
he said—crammed back the
shtooka
(thing), and suddenly broke into tears. I had him sit down close to me on the couch, he swayed to one side with his sobs increasing, and ended by burying his face in my lap. I stroked lightly his hot emery-papery scalp and rosy robust nape which I find so attractive in males. Gradually his spasms abated. He bit me softly through my skirt, and sat up.

“Know what?” said Pavel Romanovich and while speaking he sonorously clacked together the concave palms of his horizontally placed hands (I could not help smiling as I remembered an uncle of mine, a Volga landowner, who used to render that way the sound of a procession of dignified cows letting their pies plop). “Know what, my dear? Let us move to my flat. I can’t stand the thought of being there alone. We’ll have supper there, take a few swigs of vodka, then go to the movies—what do you say?”

I could not decline his offer, though I knew that I would regret it. While telephoning to cancel my visit to Nick’s former place of employment (he needed the rubber overshoes he had left there), I saw myself in the looking glass of the hallway as resembling a forlorn little nun with a stern waxy face; but a minute later, as I was in the act of prettying up and putting on my hat, I plunged as it were into the depth of my great, black, experienced eyes, and found therein a gleam of something far from nunnish—even through my voilette they blazed, good God, how they blazed!

In the tram, on the way to his place, Pavel Romanovich became distant and gloomy again: I was telling him about Nick’s new job in the ecclesiastical library, but his gaze kept shifting, he was obviously not listening. We arrived. The disorder in the three smallish rooms which he had occupied with his Lenochka was simply incredible—as if his and her things had had a thorough fight. In order to amuse Pavel Romanovich I started to play the soubrette, I put on a diminutive apron that had been forgotten in a corner of the kitchen, I introduced peace in the disarray of the furniture, I laid the table most neatly—so that Pavel Romanovich slapped his hands together once more and decided to make some borscht (he was quite proud of his cooking abilities).

After two or three ponies of vodka, his mood became inordinately energetic and pseudoefficient, as if there really existed a certain project
that had to be attended to now. I am at a loss to decide whether he had got self-infected by the theatrical solemnity with which a stalwart expert in drinking is able to decorate the intake of Russian liquor, or whether he really believed that he and I had begun, when still in my room, to plan and discuss something or other—but there he was, filling his fountain pen and with a significant air bringing out what he called the dossier: letters from his wife received by him last spring in Bremen where he had gone on behalf of the émigré insurance company for which he worked. From these letters he began to cite passages proving she loved
him
and not the other chap. In between he kept repeating brisk little formulas such as “That’s that,” “Okey-dokey,” “Let’s see now”—and went on drinking. His argument reduced itself to the idea that if Lenochka wrote “I caress you mentally, Baboonovich dear,” she could not be in love with another man, and if she thought she was, her error should be patiently explained to her. After a few more drinks his manner changed, his expression grew somber and coarse. For no reason at all, he took off his shoes and his socks, and then started to sob and walked sobbing, from one end of his flat to the other, absolutely ignoring my presence and ferociously kicking aside with a strong bare foot the chair into which he kept barging. En passant, he managed to finish the decanter, and presently entered a third phase, the final part of that drunken syllogism which had already united, in keeping with strict dialectical rules, an initial show of bright efficiency and a central period of utter gloom. At the present stage, it appeared that he and I had established something (what exactly, remained rather blurry) that displayed her lover as the lowest of villains, and the plan consisted in my going to see her on my own initiative, as it were, to “warn” her. It was also to be understood that Pavel Romanovich remained absolutely opposed to any intrusion or pressure and that his own suggestions bore the stamp of angelic disinterestedness. Before I could disentangle my wits, already tightly enveloped in the web of his thick whisper (while he was hastily putting on his shoes), I found myself getting his wife on the phone and only when I heard her high, stupidly resonant voice did I suddenly realize that I was drunk and behaving like an idiot. I slammed down the receiver, but he started to kiss my cold hands which I kept clenching—and I called her again, was identified without enthusiasm, said I had to see her on a piece of urgent business, and after some slight hesitation she agreed to have me come over at once. By that time—that is by the time he and I had started to go, our plan, it transpired, had ripened in every detail and was amazingly simple. I was to tell Lenochka that Pavel Romanovich had to convey to her something of exceptional
importance—in no way, in no way whatever, related to their broken marriage (this he forcibly stressed, with a tactician’s special appetite) and that he would be awaiting her in the bar just across her street.

It took me ages, dim ages, to climb the staircase, and for some reason I was terribly tormented by the thought that at our last meeting I wore the same hat and the same black fox. Lenochka, on the other hand, came out to me smartly dressed. Her hair seemed to have just been curled, but curled badly, and in general she had grown plainer, and about her chicly painted mouth there were puffy little pouches owing to which all that chic was rather lost.

“I do not believe one minute,” she said, surveying me with curiosity, “that it is all that important, but if he thinks we haven’t done arguing, fine, I agree to come, but I want it to be before witnesses, I’m scared to remain alone with him, I’ve had enough of that, thank you very much.”

When we entered the pub, Pavel Romanovich sat leaning on his elbow at a table next to the bar; he rubbed with his minimus his red naked eyes, while imparting at length, in monotone, some “slice of life,” as he liked to put it, to a total stranger seated at the same table, a German, enormously tall, with sleekly parted hair but a black-downed nape and badly bitten fingernails.

“However,” Pavel Romanovich was saying in Russian, “my father did not wish to get into trouble with the authorities and therefore decided to build a fence around it. Okay, that was settled. Our house was about as far from theirs as—” He looked around, nodded absentmindedly to his wife, and continued in a perfectly relaxed manner: “—as far as from here to the tramway, so that they could not have any claims. But you must agree, that spending the entire autumn in Vilna without electricity is no joking matter. Well, then, most reluctantly—”