The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (92 page)

The riding whip had come the previous day but had not been taken: the prince (who, by the way, had set the fashion of using bad French at court) had called it with scorn “
ce machin ridicule”
and contended that it belonged to the groom’s little boy, who must have forgotten it on the king’s porch.
“Et mon bonhomme de père, tu sais, a une vraie passion pour les objets trouvés.”

“I’ve been thinking how much truth there is in what you were saying. Books say nothing about it at all.”

“About what?” asked the prince, laboriously trying to reconstruct which stray theory he had been expounding lately in front of his cousin.

“Oh, you remember! The magical origin of power, and the fact—”

“Yes, I do, I do,” hastily interrupted the prince and forthwith found the best way to have done with the faded topic: “I didn’t finish then because there were too many ears around. You see, our whole misfortune lies today in the government’s strange ennui, in national inertia, in the dreary bickering of
Peplerhus
members. All this is so because the very force of the spells, both popular and royal, has somehow evaporated, and our ancestral sorcery has been reduced to mere hocus-pocus. But let’s not discuss these depressing matters now, let’s turn to more cheerful ones. Say, you must have heard a good deal about me at college? I can imagine! Tell me, what did they talk about? Why are you silent? They called me a libertine, didn’t they?”

“I kept away from malicious chatter,” said K, “but there was indeed some gossip to that effect.”

“Well, hearsay is the poetry of truth. You are still a boy—quite a pretty boy to boot—so there are many things you won’t understand right now. I shall offer you only this observation: all people are basically naughty, but when it is done under the rose, when, for instance, you hasten to gorge yourself on jam in a dark corner, or send your imagination on God knows what errands, all that doesn’t count; nobody considers it a crime. Yet when a person frankly and assiduously satisfies the appetites inflicted upon him by his imperious body, then, oh then, people begin to denounce intemperance! And another consideration: if, in my case, that legitimate satisfaction were limited simply to one and the same unvarying method, popular opinion would become resigned, or at most would reproach me for changing my mistresses too often. But God, what a ruckus they raise because I do not stick to the code of debauchery but gather my honey wherever I find
it! And mark, I am fond of everything—whether a tulip or a plain little grass stalk—because you see,” concluded the prince, smiling and slitting his eyes, “I really seek only the fractions of beauty, leaving the integers to the good burghers, and those fractions can be found in a ballet girl as well as in a docker, in a middle-aged Venus as well as in a young horseman.”

“Yes,” said K, “I understand. You are an artist, a sculptor, you worship form.…”

The prince reined in his horse and guffawed.

“Oh, well, it isn’t exactly a matter of sculpture—
à moins que tu ne confondes la galanterie avec la Galatée
—which, however, is pardonable at your age. No, no—it’s all much less complicated. Only don’t be so bashful with me, I won’t bite you, I simply can’t stand lads
qui se tiennent toujours sur leurs gardes
. If you don’t have anything more interesting in view, we can return via Grenlog and dine on the lakeside, and then we’ll think up something.”

“No, I’m afraid I—well—I have something to take care of—It so happens that tonight I—”

“Oh, well, I’m not forcing you,” the prince said affably, and a little farther, by the mill, they said good-bye.

As many very shy people would have done in his place, K, when forcing himself to face that ride, foresaw an especially trying ordeal for the very reason of Adulf’s passing for a jovial talker: with a mild, minor-mode person it would have been easier to establish the tone of the outing beforehand. As he prepared himself for it, K tried to imagine all the awkward moments that might result from the necessity of raising his normal mood to Adulf’s sparkling level. Moreover he felt obligated by their first meeting, by the fact that he had imprudently concurred with the opinions of someone who therefore could rightfully expect that both men would get along just as nicely on subsequent occasions. In making a detailed inventory of his potential blunders and, above all, in fancying with the utmost clarity the tension, the leaden load in his jaws, the desperate boredom he would feel (because of his innate capacity, on all occasions, for watching askance his projected self)—in tabulating all this, including futile efforts to merge with his other self and find interesting such things as were supposed to be interesting, K also pursued a secondary, practical aim: to disarm the future, whose only force is surprise. In this he nearly succeeded. Fate, constrained by its own evil choice, was apparently content with the innocuous items he had left beyond the field of prevision: the pale sky, the heath-country wind, a creaking saddle, an impatiently responsive horse, the unflagging monologue of his self-complacent companion, all
fused into a fairly endurable sensation, particularly since K had mentally set a certain time limit for the ride. It was only a matter of seeing it through. But when the prince, with a novel proposal, threatened to extend this limit into the unknown, all of whose possibilities had once again to be agonizingly appraised (and here “something interesting” was again being forced upon K, requiring an expression of happy anticipation), this additional period of time—superfluous! unforeseen!— was intolerable; and so, at the risk of seeming impolite, he had used the pretext of a nonexistent impediment. True, as soon as he turned his horse, he regretted this discourtesy just as acutely as, a moment ago, he had been concerned for his freedom. Consequently, all the nastiness expected from the future deteriorated into a doubtful echo of the past. He thought for a moment if he should not overtake the prince and consolidate the foundation of friendship through a belated, but hence doubly precious, acquiescence to a new ordeal. But his fastidious apprehension of offending a kind, cheerful man did not outweigh his fear of obviously being unable to match that kindness and cheerfulness. Thus it happened that fate outwitted him after all, and, by means of a last furtive pinprick, rendered valueless that which he was prepared to consider a victory.

A few days later he received another invitation from the prince, asking that he “drop in” any evening of the following week. K could not refuse. Moreover, a sense of relief that the other was not offended treacherously smoothed the way.

He was ushered into a large yellow room, as hot as a greenhouse, where a score of people, fairly evenly divided by sex, sat on divans, hassocks, and a deep rug. For a fraction of a second the host seemed vaguely perplexed by his cousin’s arrival, as if he had forgotten that he had invited him, or thought he had asked him for a different day. However, this momentary expression immediately gave way to a grin of welcome, after which the prince ignored his cousin, and neither, for that matter, was any attention paid to K by the other guests, evidently close friends of the prince: extraordinarily thin, smooth-haired young women, half a dozen middle-aged gentlemen with clean-shaven, bronzed faces, and several young men in the open-necked silk shirts that were fashionable at the time. Among them K suddenly recognized the famous young acrobat Ondrik Guldving, a sullen blond boy with a bizarre gentleness of gesture and gait, as if the expressiveness of his body, so remarkable in the arena, were muffled by clothes. To K this acrobat served as a key to the entire constellation of the gathering; and, even if the observer was ridiculously inexperienced and chaste, he immediately sensed that those gauze-dim, delectably elongated girls,
their limbs folded with varied abandon, who were making not conversation but mirages of conversation (consisting of slow half-smiles and “hms” of interrogation or response through the smoke of cigarettes inserted in precious holders), belonged to that essentially deaf-and-dumb world that in former days had been known as “demi-monde” (all curtains drawn, no
other
world known). The fact that, interspersed among them, were ladies one saw at court balls did not change things in the least. The male group was likewise somehow homogeneous, despite its comprising representatives of the nobility, artists with dirty fingernails, and young roughs of the stevedore type. And precisely because the observer was inexperienced and chaste, he immediately had doubts about his initial, involuntary impression and accused himself of common prejudice, of trusting slavishly the trite talk of the town. He decided that everything was in order, i.e., that his world was in no way disrupted by the inclusion of this new province, and that everything about it was simple and comprehensible: a fun-loving, independent person had freely selected his friends.

The quietly carefree and even somehow childish rhythm of this gathering was particularly reassuring to K. The mechanical smoking, the various dainties on gold-veined little plates, the comradely cycles of motion (somebody found some sheet music for somebody; a girl tried on another girl’s necklace), the simplicity, the serenity, all of it denoted in its own way that kindliness which K, who himself did not possess it, recognized in all of life’s phenomena, be it the smile of a bonbon in its goffered bonnet, or the echo of an old friendship divined in another’s small talk. With a frown of concentration, occasionally releasing a series of agitated groans, which would end in a grunt of vexation, the prince was busy trying to drive six tiny balls into the center of a pocket-size maze of glass. A redhead in a green dress and sandals on her bare feet kept repeating, with comic mournfulness, that he would never succeed; but he persisted for a long time, jiggling the recalcitrant gimmick, stamping his foot, and starting all over again. Finally he tossed it on a sofa, where some of the others promptly started on it. Then a man with handsome features, distorted by a tic, sat down at the piano, struck the keys with disorderly vigor in parody of somebody’s way of playing, and right away rose again, whereupon he and the prince began arguing about the talent of a third party, probably the author of the truncated melody, and the redhead, scratching a graceful thigh through her dress, started explaining to the prince the injured party’s position in a complicated musical feud. Abruptly the prince consulted his watch and turned to the blond young acrobat who was drinking orangeade in a corner: “Ondrik,” he said with a worried air,
“I think it is time.” Ondrick somberly licked his lips, put down his glass, and came over. With fat fingers, the prince undid Ondrik’s fly, extracted the entire pink mass of his private parts, selected the chief one, and started to rub regularly its glossy shaft.

“At first,” related K, “I thought that I had lost my mind, that I was hallucinating.” Most of all he was shocked by the natural quality of the procedure. Nausea welled within him, and he left. Once in the street, he even ran for a while.

The only person with whom he felt able to share his indignation was his guardian. Although he had no affection for the not very attractive Count, he resolved to consult him as the sole familiar he had. He asked the Count in despair how could it be that a man of Adulf’s morals, a man, moreover, no longer young, and therefore unlikely to change, would become the ruler of the country. By the light in which he had suddenly seen the crown prince, he also perceived that besides hideous ribaldry, and despite a taste for the arts, Adulf was really a savage, a self-taught oaf, lacking real culture, who had appropriated a handful of its beads, had learned how to flaunt the glitter of his adaptive mind, and of course did not worry in the least about the problems of his impending reign. K kept asking was it not crazy nonsense, the delirium of dreams, to imagine such a person king; but in setting those questions he hardly expected matter-of-fact replies: it was the rhetoric of young disenchantment. Nevertheless, as he went on expressing his perplexity, in abrupt brittle phrases (he was not born eloquent), K overtook reality and had a glimpse of its face. Admittedly, he at once fell back again, but that glimpse imprinted itself in his soul, revealing to him in a flash what perils awaited a state doomed to become the plaything of a prurient ruffian.

The Count heard him out attentively, now and then turning on him the gaze of his lashless vulturine eyes: they reflected a strange satisfaction. A calculating and cool mentor, he replied most cautiously, as if not quite agreeing with K, calming him down by saying that what he had happened to catch sight of was acting upon his judgment with undue force; that the only purpose of the hygiene established by the prince was not to allow a young friend to waste his strength on wenching; and that Adulf had qualities which might show themselves upon his ascension. At the end of the interview the Count offered to have K meet a certain wise person, the well-known economist Gumm. Here the Count pursued a double purpose: on one hand, he freed himself of all responsibility for what might follow, and remained aloof, which would do very nicely in case of some mishap; and on the other hand, he was passing K over to an experienced conspirator, thus beginning
the realization of a plan that the evil and wily Count had been nursing, it seems, for quite a time.

Meet Gumm, meet economist Gumm, a round-tummied little old man in a woolen waistcoat, with blue spectacles pushed up high on his pink forehead, bouncy, trim, giggly Gumm. Their meetings increased in frequency, and at the end of his second year at college, K even sojourned for about a week in Gumm’s house. By that time K had discovered enough things about the crown prince’s behavior not to regret that first explosion of indignation. Not so much from Gumm himself, who seemed always to be rolling somewhither, as from his relatives and entourage, K learned about the measures which had already been tried to subdue the prince. At first, people had attempted to inform the old king about his son’s frolics, so as to obtain parental restraint. Indeed, when this or that person, after gaining, through the thorns of protocol, access to the king’s
kabinet
, depicted frankly those stunts to His Majesty, the old man, flushing purple and nervously pulling together the skirts of his dressing gown, displayed greater wrath than one might have hoped for. He shouted that he would put an end to it, that the cup of endurance (wherein his morning coffee stormily splashed) was overflowing, that he was happy to hear a candid report, that he would banish the lecherous cur for six months to a
suyphellhus
(monastery ship, floating hermitage), that he would—And when the audience had come to a close, and the pleased official was about to bow his way out, the old king, still puffing, but already pacified, would take him aside, with a businesslike confidential air (though actually they were alone in the study), and say, “Yes, yes, I understand all that, all that is so, but listen—quite between us—tell me, if we look at it reasonably—after all my Adulf is a bachelor, a gay dog, he’s fond of a little sport—is it necessary to get all worked up? Remember, we also were boys once.” That last consideration sounded rather silly, for the king’s distant youth had flowed with milky tranquillity, and afterwards, the late queen, his wife, treated him with unusual severity till he was sixty. She was, incidentally, a remarkably obstinate, stupid, and petty-minded woman with a constant propensity for innocent but extremely absurd fantasies; and very possibly it was owing to her that the habitus of the court and, to a certain extent, of the state acquired those peculiar, difficult-to-define features, oddly blending stagnation and caprice, improvidence and the primness of nonviolent insanity, that so much tormented the present king.