The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (7 page)

Kern sensed that he was rocking back and forth, and that some pale girl with pink eyebrows was looking at him from behind a magazine. He took a
Times
from the table and opened the giant sheets. Paper bedspread across the chasm. People invent crimes, museums, games, only to escape from the unknown, from the vertiginous sky. And now this Isabel …

He tossed the paper aside, rubbed his forehead with an enormous fist, and again felt someone’s wondering gaze on him. Then he slowly walked out of the room, past the reading feet, past the fireplace’s orange jaw. He lost his way in the resounding corridors, found himself in some hallway, where the white legs of a bowed chair were reflected by the parquet and a broad painting hung on the wall of William Tell piercing the apple on his son’s head; then he examined at length his clean-shaven, heavy face, the blood streaks on the whites of his eyes, his checked bow tie in the glistening mirror of a bright bathroom
where water gurgled musically and a golden cigarette butt discarded by someone floated in the porcelain depths.

Beyond the windows the snows were dimming and turning blue. Delicate hues illumined the sky. The flaps of the revolving door at the entrance to the din-filled vestibule slowly glinted as they admitted clouds of vapor and snorting, florid-faced people tired after their snowy games. The stairs breathed with footfalls, exclamations, laughter. Then the hotel grew still: everyone was dressing for dinner.

Kern, who had fallen into a vague torpor in his armchair in his twilit room, was awakened by the gong’s vibrations. Reveling in his newfound energy, he turned on the lights, inserted cuff links into a fresh, starched shirt, extracted a flattened pair of black pants from under the squeaking press. Five minutes later, aware of a cool lightness, the firmness of the hair on the top of his head, and every detail of his well-creased clothes, he went down to the dining room.

Isabel was not there. Soup was served, then fish, but she did not appear.

Kern examined with revulsion the dull-bronzed youths, the brickhued face of an old woman with a beauty spot dissimulating a pimple, a man with goatish eyes, and fixed his gloomy gaze on a curly little pyramid of hyacinths in a green pot.

She appeared only when, in the hall where William Tell hung, the instruments of a Negro band had started pounding and moaning.

She smelled of chill air and perfume. Her hair looked moist. Something about her face stunned Kern.

She smiled a brilliant smile, and adjusted the black ribbon on her translucent shoulder.

“You know, I just got back. Barely had time to change and wolf down a sandwich.”

Kern asked: “Don’t tell me you’ve been skiing all this time? Why, it’s completely dark out.”

She gave him an intense look, and Kern realized what had astonished him: her eyes, which sparkled as if they were dusted with frost.

Isabel began gliding softly along the dovelike vowels of English speech: “Of course. It was extraordinary. I hurtled down the slopes in the dark, I flew off the bumps. Right up into the stars.”

“You might have killed yourself,” said Kern.

She repeated, narrowing her downy eyes, “Right up into the stars,” and added, with a glint of her bare clavicle, “and now I want to dance.”

The Negro band rattled and wailed in the hall. Japanese lanterns floated colorfully. Moving on tiptoe, alternating quick steps with suspended
ones, his palm pressed to hers, Kern advanced, at close quarters, on Isabel. One step, and her slender leg would press into him; another, and she would resiliently yield. The fragrant freshness of her hair tickled his temple, and he could feel, under the edge of his right hand, the supple undulations of her bared back. With bated breath he would enter breaks in the music, then glide on from measure to measure.… Around him floated past the intense faces of angular couples with perversely absent eyes. And the opaque song of the strings was punctuated by the patter of primitive little hammers.

The music accelerated, swelled, and ended with a clatter. Everything stopped. Then came applause, demanding more of the same. But the musicians had decided to have a rest.

Pulling a handkerchief out of his cuff and mopping his brow, Kern set off after Isabel, who, with a flutter of her black fan, was heading for the door. They sat down side by side on some wide stairs.

Not looking at him, she said, “Sorry—I had the feeling I was still amid the snow and stars. I didn’t even notice whether you danced well or not.”

Kern glanced at her as if not hearing, and she was indeed immersed in her own radiant thoughts, thoughts unknown to him.

One step lower sat a youth in a very narrow jacket and a skinny girl with a birthmark on her shoulder blade. When the music started again, the youth invited Isabel to dance a Boston. Kern had to dance with the skinny girl. She smelled of slightly sour lavender. Colored paper streamers swirled out through the hall, tangling themselves about the dancers. One of the musicians stuck on a white mustache, and for some reason Kern felt ashamed for him. When the dance was over he abandoned his partner and rushed off in search of Isabel. She was nowhere to be seen—not at the buffet nor on the staircase.

That’s it—bedtime, was Kern’s terse thought.

Back in his room he held the drape aside before lying down, and, without thinking, looked into the night. Reflections of windows lay on the dark snow in front of the hotel. In the distance, the metallic summits floated in a funereal radiance.

He had the sensation he had glanced into death. He pulled the folds together tightly so that not a ray of night could leak into the room. But when he switched off the light and lay down, he noticed a glint coming from the edge of a glass shelf. He got up and fiddled a long time around the window, cursing the splashes of moonlight. The floor was cold as marble.

When Kern loosened the cord of his pajamas and closed his eyes, slippery slopes started to rush beneath him. A hollow pounding began
in his heart, as if it had kept silent all day and was now taking advantage of the quiet. He began feeling frightened as he listened to this pounding. He recalled how once, on a very windy day, he was passing a butcher’s shop with his wife, and a carcass rocked on its hook with a dull thudding against the wall. That was how his heart felt now. His wife, meanwhile, had her eyes narrowed against the wind and was holding her hat as she said that the wind and the sea were driving her crazy, that they must leave, they must leave.…

Kern rolled over onto his other side—gingerly, so his chest would not burst from the convex blows.

“Can’t go on like this,” he mumbled into the pillow, forlornly folding up his legs. He lay for a while on his back peering at the ceiling, at the wan gleams that had penetrated, as piercing as his ribs.

When his eyes closed again, silent sparks started to glide in front of him, then infinitely unwinding transparent spirals. Isabel’s snowy eyes and fiery mouth flashed past, then came sparks and spirals again. For an instant his heart retracted into a lacerating knot. Then it swelled and gave a thump.

Can’t go on like this, I’ll go crazy. No future, just a black wall. There’s nothing left.

He had the impression that the paper streamers were slithering down his face, rustling and ripping into narrow shreds. And the Japanese lanterns flowed with colored undulations in the parquet. He was dancing, advancing.

If I could just unclench her, flip her open.… And then …

And death seemed to him like a gliding dream, a fluffy fall. No thoughts, no palpitations, no aches.

The lunar ribs on the ceiling had imperceptibly moved. Footfalls passed quietly along the corridor, a lock clicked somewhere, a soft ringing flew past; then footfalls again, the mutter and murmur of footfalls.

That means the ball is over, thought Kern. He turned his stuffy pillow over.

Now, all around, there was an immense, gradually cooling silence. Only his heart oscillated, taut and heavy. Kern groped on the bedside table, located the pitcher, took a swallow from the spout. An icy streamlet scalded his neck and collarbone.

He started thinking of methods to induce sleep. He imagined waves rhythmically running up onto a shoreline. Then plump gray sheep slowly tumbling over a fence. One sheep, two, three …

Isabel is asleep next door, thought Kern. Isabel is asleep, wearing yellow pajamas, probably. Yellow becomes her. Spanish color. If I
scratched on the wall with my fingernail she’d hear me. Damned palpitations …

He fell asleep at the very moment he had begun trying to decide whether there was any point in turning on the light and reading something for a while. There’s a French novel lying on the armchair. The ivory knife glides, cutting the pages. One, two …

He came to in the middle of the room, awakened by a sense of unbearable horror. The horror had knocked him off the bed. He had dreamt that the wall next to which stood his bed had begun slowly collapsing onto him—so he had recoiled with a spasmodic exhalation.

Kern found the headboard by touch, and would have gone back to sleep immediately if it had not been for a noise he heard through the wall. He did not understand right away where this noise was coming from, and the act of straining his hearing made his consciousness, which was ready to glide down the slope of sleep, abruptly grow lucid. The noise occurred again: a twang, followed by the rich sonority of guitar strings.

Kern remembered—it was Isabel who was in the next room. Right away, as if in response to his thought, came a peal of her laughter. Twice, thrice, the guitar throbbed and dissolved. Then an odd, intermittent bark sounded and ceased.

Seated on his bed, Kern listened in wonder. He pictured a bizarre scene: Isabel with a guitar and a huge Great Dane looking up at her with blissful eyes. He put his ear to the chilly wall. The bark rang out again, the guitar twanged as from a fillip, and a strange rustle began undulating as if an ample wind were whirling there in the next room. The rustle stretched out into a low whistle, and once again the night filled with silence. Then a frame banged—Isabel had shut the window.

Indefatigable girl, he thought—the dog, the guitar, the icy drafts.

Now all was quiet. Having expelled all those noises from her room, Isabel had probably gone to bed and was now asleep.

“Damn it! I don’t understand anything. I don’t have anything. Damn it, damn it,” moaned Kern, burying himself in the pillow. A leaden fatigue was compressing his temples. His legs ached and tingled unbearably. He groaned in the darkness for a long time, turning heavily from side to side. The rays on the ceiling were long since extinguished.

The next day Isabel did not appear until lunchtime.

Since morning the sky had been blindingly white and the sun had been moonlike. Then snow began falling, slowly and vertically. The dense flakes, like ornamental spots on a white veil, curtained the view of the mountains, the heavily laden firs, the dulled turquoise of the rink. The plump, soft particles of snow rustled against the windowpanes, falling, falling without end. If one watched them for long, one had the impression the entire hotel was slowly drifting upward.

“I was so tired last night,” Isabel was saying to her neighbor, a young man with a high olive forehead and piercing eyes, “so tired I decided to loll in bed.”

“You look stunning today,” drawled the young man with exotic courtesy.

She inflated her nostrils derisively.

Looking at her through the hyacinths, Kern said coldly, “I didn’t know, Miss Isabel, that you had a dog in your room, as well as a guitar.”

Her downy eyes seemed to narrow even more, against a breeze of embarrassment. Then she beamed with a smile, all carmine and ivory.

“You overdid it on the dance floor last night, Mr. Kern,” she replied. The olive youth and the little fellow who recognized only Bible and billiards laughed, the first with a hearty ha-ha, the second very softly, with raised eyebrows.

Kern said with a frown, “I’d like to ask you not to play at night. I don’t have an easy time falling asleep.”

Isabel slashed his face with a rapid, radiant glance.

“You had better ask your dreams, not me, about that.”

And she began talking to her neighbor about the next day’s ski competition.

For some minutes already Kern had felt his lips stretching into a spasmodic, uncontrollable sneer. It twitched agonizingly in the corners of his mouth, and he suddenly felt like yanking the tablecloth off the table, hurling the pot with the hyacinths against the wall.

He rose, trying to conceal his unbearable tremor, and, seeing no one, went out of the room.

“What’s happening to me,” he questioned his anguish. “What’s going on here?”

He kicked his suitcase open and started packing. He immediately felt dizzy. He stopped and again began pacing the room. Angrily he stuffed his short pipe. He sat down in the armchair by the window, beyond which the snow was falling with nauseating regularity.

He had come to this hotel, to this wintry, stylish nook called Zermatt, in order to fuse the sensation of white silence with the pleasure of lighthearted, motley encounters, for total solitude was what he feared most. But now he understood that human faces were also intolerable to him, that the snow made his head ring, and that he lacked the inspired vitality and tender perseverance without which passion is powerless. While for Isabel, probably, life consisted of a splendid ski run, of impetuous laughter, of perfume and frosty air.