The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “That’s exactly the tram you want,” one of them kept saying.

  “Both, please,” Erwin requested quickly.

  “Yes, of course,” said the other in response to her sister’s words.

  Erwin continued along the boulevard. He knew all the smart streets where the best possibilities existed.

  “Three,” he said to himself. “Odd number. So far so good. And if it were midnight right now—”

  Swinging her handbag she was coming down the steps of the Leilla, one of the best local hotels. Her big blue-chinned companion slowed down behind her to light his cigar. The lady was lovely, hatless, bobhaired, with a fringe on her forehead that made her look like a boy actor in the part of a damsel. As she went by, now closely escorted by our ridiculous rival, Erwin remarked simultaneously the crimson artificial rose in the lapel of her jacket and the advertisement on a billboard: a blond-mustachioed Turk and, in large letters, the word “YES!,” under which it said in smaller characters: “I SMOKE ONLY THE ROSE OF THE ORIENT.”

  That made four, divisible by two, and Erwin felt eager to restore the odd-number rigmarole without delay. In a lane off the boulevard there was a cheap restaurant which he sometimes frequented on Sundays when sick of his landlady’s fare. Among the girls he had happened to note at one time or another there had been a wench who worked in that place. He entered and ordered his favorite dish: blood sausage and sauerkraut. His table was next to the telephone. A man in a bowler called a number and started to jabber as ardently as a hound that has picked up the scent of a hare. Erwin’s glance wandered toward the bar—and there was the girl he had seen three or four times before. She was beautiful in a drab, freckled way, if beauty can be drably russet. As she raised her bare arms to place her washed beer steins he saw the red tufts of her armpits.

  “All right, all right!” barked the man into the mouthpiece.

  With a sigh of relief enriched by a belch, Erwin left the restaurant. He felt heavy and in need of a nap. To tell the truth, the new shoes pinched like crabs. The weather had changed. The air was sultry. Great domed clouds grew and crowded one another in the hot sky. The streets were becoming deserted. One could feel the houses fill to the brim with Sunday-afternoon snores. Erwin boarded a streetcar.

  The tram started to roll. Erwin turned his pale face, shining with sweat, to the window, but no girls walked. While paying his fare he noticed, on the other side of the aisle, a woman sitting with her back to him. She wore a black velvet hat, and a light frock patterned with intertwined chrysanthemums against a semitransparent mauve background through which showed the shoulder straps of her slip. The lady’s statuesque bulk made Erwin curious to glimpse her face. When her hat moved and, like a black ship, started to turn, he first looked away as usual, glanced in feigned abstraction at a youth sitting opposite him, at his own fingernails, at a red-cheeked little old man dozing in the rear of the car, and, having thus established a point of departure justifying further castings-around, Erwin shifted his casual gaze to the lady now looking his way. It was Frau Monde. Her full, no-longer-young face was blotchily flushed from the heat, her mannish eyebrows bristled above her piercing prismatic eyes, a slightly sardonic smile curled up the corners of her compressed lips.

  “Good afternoon,” she said in her soft husky voice: “Come sit over here. Now we can have a chat. How are things going?”

  “Only five,” replied Erwin with embarrassment.

  “Excellent. An odd number. I would advise you to stop there. And at midnight—ah, yes, I don’t think I told you—at midnight you are to come to Hoffmann Street. Know where that is? Look between Number Twelve and Fourteen. The vacant lot there will be replaced by a villa with a walled garden. The girls of your choice will be waiting for you on cushions and rugs. I shall meet you at the garden gate—but it is understood,” she added with a subtle smile, “I shan’t intrude. You’ll remember the address? There will be a brand-new streetlight in front of the gate.”

  “Oh, one thing,” said Erwin, collecting his courage. “Let them be dressed at first—I mean let them look just as they were when I chose them—and let them be very merry and loving.”

  “Why, naturally,” she replied, “everything will be just as you wish whether you tell me or not. Otherwise there was no point in starting the whole business, n’est-ce pas? Confess, though, my dear boy—you were on the brink of enrolling me in your harem. No, no, have no fear, I am kidding you. Well, that’s your stop. Very wise to call it a day. Five is fine. See you a few secs after midnight, ha-ha.”

  4

  Upon reaching his room, Erwin took off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. He woke up toward evening. A mellifluous tenor at full blast streamed from a neighbor’s phonograph: “I vant to be happee—”

  Erwin started thinking back: Number one, the Maiden in White, she’s the most artless of the lot. I may have been a little hasty. Oh, well, no harm done. Then the Twins near the pillar of glass. Gay, painted young things. With them I’m sure to have fun. Then number four, Leilla the Rose, resembling a boy. That’s, perhaps, the best one. And finally, the Fox in the ale-house. Not bad either. But only five. That’s not very many!

  He lay prone for a while with his hands behind his head, listening to the tenor, who kept wanting to be happy: Five. No, that’s absurd. Pity it’s not Monday morning: those three shopgirls the other day—oh, there are so many more beauties waiting to be found! And I can always throw in a streetwalker at the last moment.

  Erwin put on his regular pair of shoes, brushed his hair, and hurried out.

  By nine o’clock he had collected two more. One of them he noticed in a café where he had a sandwich and two drams of Dutch gin. She was talking with great animation to her companion, a beard-fingering foreigner, in an impenetrable language—Polish or Russian—and her gray eyes had a slight slant, her thin aquiline nose wrinkled when she laughed, and her elegant legs were exposed to the knee. While Erwin watched her quick gestures, the reckless way in which she tap-tapped cigarette ash all over the table, a German word, like a window, flashed open in her Slavic speech, and this chance word (“offenbar”) was the “evident” sign. The other girl, number seven on the list, turned up at the Chinese-style entrance of a small amusement park. She wore a scarlet blouse with a bright-green skirt, and her bare neck swelled as she shrieked in glee, fighting off a couple of slap-happy young boors who were grabbing her by the hips and trying to make her accompany them.

  “I’m willing, I’m willing!” she cried out at last, and was rushed away.

  Varicolored paper lanterns enlivened the place. A sledgelike affair with wailing passengers hurtled down a serpentine channel, disappeared in the angled arcades of medieval scenery, and dived into a new abyss with new howls. Inside a shed, on four bicycle seats (there were no wheels, just the frames, pedals, and handlebars), sat four girls in jerseys and shorts—a red one, a blue one, a green one, a yellow one—their bare legs working at full tilt. Above them hung a dial on which moved four pointers, red, blue, green, and yellow. At first the blue one was first, then the green overtook it. A man with a whistle stood by and collected the coins of the few simpletons who wanted to place their bets. Erwin stared at those magnificent legs, naked nearly up to the groin and pedaling with passionate power.

  They must be terrific dancers, he thought; I could use all four.

  The pointers obediently gathered into one bunch and came to a stop.

  “Dead heat!” shouted the man with the whistle. “A sensational finish!”

  Erwin drank a glass of lemonade, consulted his watch, and made for the exit.

  Eleven o’clock and eleven women. That will do, I suppose.

  He narrowed his eyes as he imagined the pleasures awaiting him. He was glad he had remembered to put on clean underwear.

  How slyly Frau Monde put it, reflected Erwin with a smile. Of course she will spy on me and why not? It will add some spice.

  He walked, looking down, shaking his head delightedly, and only rarely glancin
g up to check the street names. Hoffmann Street, he knew, was quite far, but he still had an hour, so there was no need to hurry. Again, as on the previous night, the sky swarmed with stars and the asphalt glistened like smooth water, absorbing and lengthening the magic lights of the town. He passed a large cinema whose radiance flooded the sidewalk, and at the next corner a short peal of childish laughter caused him to raise his eyes.

  He saw before him a tall elderly man in evening clothes with a little girl walking beside—a child of fourteen or so in a low-cut black party dress. The whole city knew the elderly man from his portraits. He was a famous poet, a senile swan, living all alone in a distant suburb. He strode with a kind of ponderous grace; his hair, the hue of soiled cotton wool, reached over his ears from beneath his fedora. A stud in the triangle of his starched shirt caught the gleam of a lamp, and his long bony nose cast a wedge of shadow on one side of his thin-lipped mouth. In the same tremulous instant Erwin’s glance lit on the face of the child mincing at the old poet’s side; there was something odd about that face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a little girl—the old man’s granddaughter, no doubt—one might suspect that her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her legs moved closer together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing voice—and although Erwin gave no command mentally, he knew that his swift secret wish had been fulfilled.

  “Oh, of course, of course,” replied the old man coaxingly, bending toward the child.

  They passed, Erwin caught a whiff of perfume. He looked back, then went on.

  “Hey, careful,” he suddenly muttered as it dawned upon him that this made twelve—an even number: I must find one more—within half an hour.

  It vexed him a little to go on searching, but at the same time he was pleased to be given yet another chance.

  I’ll pick up one on the way, he said to himself, allaying a trace of panic. I’m sure to find one!

  “Maybe, it will be the nicest of all,” he remarked aloud as he peered into the glossy night.

  And a few minutes later he experienced the familiar delicious contraction—that chill in the solar plexus. A woman in front of him was walking along with rapid and light steps. He saw her only from the back and could not have explained why he yearned so poignantly to overtake precisely her and have a look at her face. One might, naturally, find random words to describe her bearing, the movement of her shoulders, the silhouette of her hat—but what is the use? Something beyond visible outlines, some kind of special atmosphere, an ethereal excitement, lured Erwin on and on. He marched fast and still could not catch up with her; the humid reflections of lights flickered before him; she tripped along steadily, and her black shadow would sweep up, as it entered a streetlamp’s aura, glide across a wall, twist around its edge, and vanish.

  “Goodness, I’ve got to see her face,” Erwin muttered. “And time is flying.”

  Presently he forgot about time. That strange silent chase in the night intoxicated him. He managed at last to overtake her and went on, far ahead, but had not the courage to look back at her and merely slowed down, whereupon she passed him in her turn and so fast that he did not have time to raise his eyes. Again he was walking ten paces behind her and by then he knew, without seeing her face, that she was his main prize. Streets burst into colored light, petered out, glowed again; a square had to be crossed, a space of sleek blackness, and once more with a brief click of her high-heeled shoe the woman stepped onto a sidewalk, with Erwin behind, bewildered, disembodied, dizzy from the misty lights, the damp night, the chase.

  What enticed him? Not her gait, not her shape, but something else, bewitching and overwhelming, as if a tense shimmer surrounded her: mere fantasy, maybe, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy, or maybe it was that which changes a man’s entire life with one divine stroke—Erwin knew nothing, he just sped after her over asphalt and stone, which seemed also dematerialized in the iridescent night.

  Then trees, vernal lindens, joined the hunt: they advanced whispering on either side, overhead, all around him; the little black hearts of their shadows intermingled at the foot of each streetlamp, and their delicate sticky aroma encouraged him.

  Once again Erwin came near. One more step, and he would be abreast of her. She stopped abruptly at an iron wicket and fished out her keys from her handbag. Erwin’s momentum almost made him bump into her. She turned her face toward him, and by the light a streetlamp cast through emerald leaves, he recognized the girl who had been playing that morning with a woolly black pup on a graveled path, and immediately remembered, immediately understood all her charm, tender warmth, priceless radiance.

  He stood staring at her with a wretched smile.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she said quietly. “Leave me alone.”

  The little gate opened, and slammed. Erwin remained standing under the hushed lindens. He looked around, not knowing which way to go. A few paces away, he saw two blazing bubbles: a car standing by the sidewalk. He went up to it and touched the motionless, dummylike chauffeur on the shoulder.

  “Tell me what street is this? I’m lost.”

  “Hoffmann Street,” said the dummy dryly.

  And then a familiar, husky, soft voice spoke out of the depths of the car.

  “Hello. It’s me.”

  Erwin leaned a hand on the car door and limply responded.

  “I am bored to death,” said the voice, “I’m waiting here for my boyfriend. He is bringing the poison. He and I are dying at dawn. How are you?”

  “Even number,” said Erwin, running his finger along the dusty door.

  “Yes, I know,” calmly rejoined Frau Monde. “Number thirteen turned out to be number one. You bungled the job rather badly.”

  “A pity,” said Erwin.

  “A pity,” she echoed, and yawned.

  Erwin bowed, kissed her large black glove, stuffed with five outspread fingers, and with a little cough turned into the darkness. He walked with a heavy step, his legs ached, he was oppressed by the thought that tomorrow was Monday and it would be hard to get up.

  TERROR

  HERE is what sometimes happened to me: after spending the first part of the night at my desk—that part when night trudges heavily uphill—I would emerge from the trance of my task at the exact moment when night had reached the summit and was teetering on that crest, ready to roll down into the haze of dawn; I would get up from my chair, feeling chilly and utterly spent, turn on the light in my bedroom, and suddenly see myself in the looking glass. Then it would go like this: during the time I had been deep at work, I had grown disacquainted with myself, a sensation akin to what one may experience when meeting a close friend after years of separation: for a few empty, lucid, but numb moments you see him in an entirely different light even though you realize that the frost of this mysterious anesthesia will presently wear off, and the person you are looking at will revive, glow with warmth, resume his old place, becoming again so familiar that no effort of the will could possibly make you recapture that fleeting sensation of estrangedness. Precisely thus I now stood considering my own reflection in the glass and failing to recognize it as mine. And the more keenly I examined my face—those unblinking alien eyes, that sheen of tiny hairs along the jaw, that shade along the nose—and the more insistently I told myself “This is I, this is So-and-so,” the less clear it became why this should be “I,” the harder I found it to make the face in the mirror merge with that “I” whose identity I failed to grasp. When I spoke of my odd sensations, people justly observed that the path I had taken led to the madhouse. In point of fact, once or twice, late at night, I peered so lengthily at my reflection that a creepy feeling came over me and I put out the light in a hurry. Yet next morning, while shaving, it would never occur to me to question the reality of my image.

  Another thing: at night, in bed, I would abruptly remember that I was mortal. What then took place within my mind was much the sa
me as happens in a huge theater if the lights suddenly go out, and someone shrilly screams in the swift-winged darkness, and other voices join in, resulting in a blind tempest, with the black thunder of panic growing—until suddenly the lights come on again, and the performance of the play is blandly resumed. Thus would my soul choke for a moment while, lying supine, eyes wide open, I tried with all my might to conquer fear, rationalize death, come to terms with it on a day-by-day basis, without appealing to any creed or philosophy. In the end, one tells oneself that death is still far away, that there will be plenty of time to reason everything out, and yet one knows that one never will do it, and again, in the dark, from the cheapest seats, in one’s private theater where warm live thoughts about dear earthly trifles have panicked, there comes a shriek—and presently subsides when one turns over in bed and starts to think of some different matter.

  I assume that those sensations—the perplexity before the mirror at night or the sudden pang of death’s foretaste—are familiar to many, and if I dwell on them it is only because they contain just a small particle of that supreme terror that I was destined once to experience. Supreme terror, special terror—I am groping for the exact term but my store of ready-made words, which in vain I keep trying on, does not contain even one that will fit.

  I led a happy life. I had a girl. I remember well the torture of our first separation. I had gone on a business trip abroad, and upon my return she met me at the station. I saw her standing on the platform, caged as it were in tawny sunlight, a dusty cone of which had just penetrated through the station’s glazed vault. Her face kept rhythmically turning to and fro as the train windows slowly glided by to a stop. With her I always felt easy and at rest. Once only—and here again I feel what a clumsy instrument human speech is. Still, I would like to explain. It is really such nonsense, so ephemeral: we are alone in her room, I write while she darns a silk stocking stretched taut over the back of a wooden spoon, her head bent low; one ear, translucently pink, is half concealed by a strand of fair hair, and the small pearls around her neck gleam touchingly, and her tender cheek appears sunken because of the assiduous pout of her lips. All at once, for no reason at all, I become terrified of her presence. This is far more terrifying than the fact that somehow, for a split second, my mind did not register her identity in the dusty sun of the station. I am terrified by there being another person in the room with me; I am terrified by the very notion of another person. No wonder lunatics don’t recognize relatives. But she raises her head, all her features participate in the quick smile she gives me—and no trace is left now of the odd terror I felt a moment ago. Let me repeat: this happened only one single time, and I took it to be a silly trick of my nerves, forgetting that on lonely nights before a lonely mirror I had experienced something quite similar.