The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Plead sickness? Topple down from the box? glumly wondered Peter as the first isbas appeared.

  His tightish white shorts hurt in the crotch, his brown shoes pinched dreadfully, he felt nasty qualms in his stomach. The afternoon awaiting him was oppressive, repulsive—and inevitable.

  They were now driving through the village, and somewhere from behind the fences and log cabins a wooden echo responded to the harmonious plashing of hooves. On the clayey, grass-patched side of the road peasant boys were playing gorodki—pitching stout sticks at wooden pins which resoundingly flew up in the air. Peter recognized the stuffed hawk and silvered spheres that ornamented the garden of the local grocer. A dog dashed out of a gateway, in perfect silence—storing up voice, as it were—and only after flying across the ditch, and finally overtaking the carriage, did it peal forth its bark. Shakily straddling a shaggy nag, a peasant rode by, his elbows widely parted, his shirt, with a tear on the shoulder, ballooning in the wind.

  At the end of the village, on a hillock thickly crested with limes, stood a red church and, next to it, a smaller mausoleum of white stone and pyramidal shape, thus resembling a cream paskha. The river came into view; with the green brocade of aquatic flora coating it at the bend. Close to the sloping highway stood a squat smithy, on the wall of which someone had chalked: “Long Live Serbia!” The sound of the hooves suddenly acquired a ringing, resilient tone—because of the boards of the bridge over which the carriage passed. A barefoot old angler stood leaning against the railing; a tin receptacle gleamed at his ankle. Presently the sound of the hooves turned to a soft thudding: the bridge, the fisherman, and the riverbend dropped back irremediably.

  The victoria was now rolling along a dusty, fluffy road between two rows of stout-trunked birches. In an instant, yes, in an instant, from behind its park the green roof of the Kozlovs’ manorhouse would loom. Peter knew by experience how awkward and revolting it would be. He was ready to give away his new Swift bicycle—and what else in the bargain?—well, the steel bow, say, and the Pugach pistol and all its supply of powder-stuffed corks, in order to be back again in the ancestral domain ten versts from here, and to spend the summer day as always, in solitary, marvelous games.

  From the park came a dark, damp reek of mushrooms and firs. Then appeared a corner of the house and the brick-red sand in front of the stone porch.

  “The children are in the garden,” said Mrs. Kozlov, when Peter and his sister, having traversed several cool rooms redolent of carnations, reached the main veranda where a number of grown-ups were assembled. Peter said how-do-you-do to each, scraping, and making sure not to kiss a man’s hand by mistake as had once happened. His sister kept her palm on the top of his head—something she never did at home. Then she settled in a wicker armchair and became unusually animated. Everybody started talking at once. Mrs. Kozlov took Peter by the wrist, led him down a short flight of steps between tubbed laurels and oleanders, and with an air of mystery pointed gardenward: “You will find them there,” she said; “go and join them,” whereupon she returned to her guests. Peter remained standing on the lower step.

  A rotten beginning. He now had to walk across the garden terrace and penetrate into an avenue where, in spotted sunshine, voices throbbed and colors flickered. One had to accomplish that journey all alone, coming ever nearer, endlessly nearer, while entering gradually the visual field of many eyes.

  It was the name-day of Mrs. Kozlov’s eldest son, Vladimir, a lively and teasy lad of Peter’s age. There was also Vladimir’s brother Constantine, and their two sisters, Baby and Lola. From the adjacent estate a pony-drawn sharabanchik brought the two young Barons Korff and their sister Tanya, a pretty girl of eleven or twelve with an ivory-pale skin, bluish shadows under the eyes, and a black braid caught by a white bow above her delicate neck. In addition there were three schoolboys in their summer uniforms and Vasiliy Tuchkov, a robust, well-built, suntanned thirteen-year-old cousin of Peter’s. The games were directed by Elenski, a university student, the tutor of the Kozlov boys. He was a fleshy, plump-chested young man with a shaven head. He wore a kosovorotka, a shirtlike affair with side buttons on the collarbone. A rimless pince-nez surmounted his nose, whose chiseled sharpness did not suit at all the soft ovality of his face. When finally Peter approached, he found Elenski and the children in the act of throwing javelins at a large target of painted straw nailed to a fir trunk.

  Peter’s last visit to the Kozlovs had been in St. Petersburg at Easter and on that occasion magic-lantern slides had been shown. Elenski read aloud Lermontov’s poem about Mtsyri, a young monk who left his Caucasian retreat to roam among the mountains, and a fellow student handled the lantern. In the middle of a luminous circle on the damp sheet there would appear (stopping there after a spasmodic incursion) a colored picture: Mtsyri and the snow leopard attacking him. Elenski, interrupting the reading for a minute, would point out with a short stick first the young monk and then the leaping leopard, and as he did so, the stick borrowed the picture’s colors which would then slip off his wand when Elenski removed it. Each illustration tarried for quite a time on the sheet as only some ten slides were assigned to the long-winded epic. Vasiliy Tuchkov now and then raised his hand in the dark, reached up to the ray, and five black fingers spread out on the sheet. Once or twice the assistant inserted a slide the wrong way, topsy-turvying the picture. Tuchkov roared with laughter, but Peter was embarrassed for the assistant and, in general, did his best to feign enormous interest. That time, too, he first met Tanya Korff and since then often thought about her, imagining himself saving her from highwaymen, with Vasiliy Tuchkov helping him and devotedly admiring his courage (it was rumored that Vasiliy had a real revolver at home, with a mother-of-pearl grip).

  At present, his brown legs set wide, his left hand loosely placed on the chainlet of his cloth belt which had a small canvas purse on one side, Vasiliy was aiming the javelin at the target. He swung back his throwing arm, he hit the bull’s-eye, and Elenski uttered a loud “bravo.” Peter carefully pulled out the spear, quietly walked back to Vasiliy’s former position, quietly took aim and also hit the white, red-ringed center; no one, however, witnessed this as the competition was over by now and busy preparations for another game had begun. A kind of low cabinet or whatnot had been dragged into the avenue and set up there on the sand. Its top had several round holes and a fat frog of metal with a wide-open mouth. A large leaden counter had to be cast in such a way as to pop into one of the holes or enter the gaping green mouth. The counter fell through the holes or the mouth into numbered compartments on the shelves below; the frog’s mouth gave one five hundred points, each of the other holes one hundred or less depending on its distance from la grenouille (a Swiss governess had imported the game). The players took turns in throwing one by one several counters, and marks were laboriously written down on the sand. The whole affair was rather tedious, and between turns some of the players sought the bilberry jungle under the trees of the park. The berries were big, with a bloom dimming their blue, which revealed a bright violet luster if touched by beslavered fingers. Peter, squatting on his haunches and gently grunting, would accumulate the berries in his cupped hand and then transfer the entire handful to his mouth. That way it tasted particularly good. Sometimes a serrate little leaf got mixed up in one’s mouth with the fruit. Vasiliy Tuchkov found a small caterpillar, with varicolored tufts of hair along its back in toothbrush arrangement, and calmly swallowed it to the general admiration. A woodpecker was tapping nearby; heavy bumblebees droned above the undergrowth and crawled into the pale bending corollas of boyar bell-flowers. From the avenue came the clatter of cast counters and the stentorian, r-trilling voice of Elenski advising somebody to “keep trying.” Tanya crouched next to Peter, and with her pale face expressing the greatest attention, her glistening purple lips parted, groped for the berries. Peter silently offered her his hand-cupped collection, she graciously accepted it, and he started to gather a new helping for her. Presently, however, came her turn to play
, and she ran back to the avenue, lifting high her slim legs in white stockings.

  The grenouille game was becoming a universal bore. Some dropped out, others played haphazardly; as to Vasiliy Tuchkov, he went and hurled a stone at the gaping frog, and everybody laughed, except Elenski and Peter. The imeninnik (name-dayer), handsome, charming, merry Vladimir, now demanded that they play at palochkastukalochka (knock-knock stick). The Korff boys joined in his request. Tanya skipped on one foot, applauding.

  “No, no, children, impossible,” said Elenski. “In half an hour or so we shall go to a picnic; it is a long drive, and colds are caught quickly if one is all hot from running.”

  “Oh, please, please,” cried the children.

  “Please,” softly repeated Peter after the others, deciding he would manage to share a hiding place either with Vasiliy or Tanya.

  “I am forced to grant the general request,” said Elenski, who was prone to round out his utterings. “I do not see, however, the necessary implement.” Vladimir sped off to borrow it from a flower bed.

  Peter went up to a seesaw on which stood Tanya, Lola, and Vasiliy; the latter kept jumping and stamping, making the plank creak and jerk while the girls squealed, trying to keep their balance.

  “I’m falling, I’m falling!” exclaimed Tanya, and both she and Lola jumped down on the grass.

  “Would you like some more bilberries?” asked Peter.

  She shook her head, then looked askance at Lola and, turning to Peter again, added: “She and I have decided to stop speaking to you.”

  “But why?” mumbled Peter, flushing painfully.

  “Because you are a poseur,” replied Tanya, and jumped back onto the seesaw. Peter pretended to be deeply engrossed in the examination of a frizzly-black molehill on the edge of the avenue.

  In the meantime a panting Vladimir had brought the “necessary implement”—a green sharp little stick, of the sort used by gardeners to prop up peonies and dahlias but also very much like Elenski’s wand at the magic-lantern show. It remained to be settled who would be the “knocker.”

  “One. Two. Three. Four,” began Elenski in a comic narrative tone, while pointing the stick at every player in turn. “The rabbit. Peeped out. Of his door. A hunter. Alas” (Elenski paused and sneezed powerfully). “Happened to pass” (the narrator replaced his pince-nez). “And his gun. Went bang. Bang. And. The. Poor” (the syllables grew more and more stressed and spaced). “Hare. Died. There.”

  The “there” fell on Peter. But all the other children crowded around Elenski, clamoring for him to be the seeker. One could hear them exclaiming: “Please, please, it will be much more fun!”

  “All right, I consent,” replied Elenski, without even glancing at Peter.

  At the point where the avenue joined the garden terrace, there stood a whitewashed, partly peeled bench with a barred back, also white and also peeling. It was on this bench that Elenski sat down with the green stick in his hands. He humped his fat shoulders, closed his eyes tight and started to count aloud to one hundred, giving time to the players to hide. Vasiliy and Tanya, as if acting in collusion, disappeared in the depths of the park. One of the uniformed schoolboys cannily placed himself behind a linden trunk, only three yards away from the bench. Peter, after a wistful glance at the speckled shade of the shrubbery, turned away and went in the opposite direction, toward the house: he planned to ambuscade on the veranda—not on the main one, of course, where the grown-ups were having tea to the sound of a brass-horned gramophone singing in Italian, but on a lateral porch giving on Elenski’s bench. Luckily, it turned out to be empty. The various colors of the panes inset in its latticed casements were reflected beneath on the long narrow divans, upholstered in dove-gray with exaggerated roses, that lined the walls. There were also a bentwood rocking chair, a dog’s bowl, licked clean, on the floor, and an oilcloth-covered table with nothing upon it save a lone-looking pair of old-person spectacles.

  Peter crept up on the many-colored window and kneeled on a cushion under the white ledge. At some distance one saw a coral-pink Elenski sitting on a coral-pink bench under the ruby-black leaves of a linden. The rule was that the “seeker,” when leaving his post to spy out the concealed players, should also leave his stick behind. Wariness and nice judgment of pace and place advised him not to stray too far, lest a player made a sudden dash from an unsighted point and reach the bench before the “seeker” could get back to it and give a rap of victory with the regained wand. Peter’s plan was simple: as soon as Elenski, having finished counting, put the stick down on the bench, and set off toward the shrubbery with its most likely lurking spots, Peter would sprint from his veranda to the bench and give it the sacramental “knock-knock” with the unguarded stick. About half a minute had already elapsed. A light-blue Elenski sat hunched up under indigo-black foliage and tapped his toe on the silver-blue sand in rhythm with the count. How delightful it would have been to wait thus, and peer through this or that lozenge of stained glass, if only Tanya … Oh, why? What did I do to her?

  The number of plain-glass panes was much inferior to that of the rest. A gray and white wagtail walked past across the sand-colored sand. There were bits of cobweb in the corners of the latticework. On the ledge a dead fly lay on its back. A bright-yellow Elenski rose from his golden bench and gave a warning knock. At the same instant, the door leading onto the veranda from the inside of the house opened, and out of the dusk of a room there came first a corpulent brown dachshund and then a gray bobhaired little old woman in a tight-belted black dress with a trefoil-shaped brooch on her chest and a chainlet around her neck connecting with the watch stuck into her belt. Very indolently, sideways, the dog descended the steps into the garden. As to the old lady she angrily snatched up the spectacles—for which she had come. All of a sudden she noticed the boy crawling off his seat.

  “Priate-qui? Priate-qui?” (pryatki, hide-and-seek), she uttered with the farcical accent inflicted on Russian by old Frenchwomen after half a century of life in our country. “Toute n’est caroche” (tut ne khorosho, here not good), she continued, considering with kindly eyes Peter’s face that expressed both embarrassment with his situation and entreaty not to speak too loud. “Sichasse pocajou caroche messt” (seychas pokazhu khoroshee mesto, right away I’ll show a good place).

  An emerald Elenski stood with arms akimbo on the pale green sand and kept glancing in all directions at once. Peter, fearing the creaky and fussy voice of the old governess might be heard outside, and fearing even more to offend her by a refusal, hastened to follow her, though quite conscious of the ludicrous turn things were taking. Holding him firmly by the hand she led him through one room after another, past a white piano, past a card table, past a little tricycle, and as the variety of sudden objects increased—elk anders, bookcases, a decoy duck on a shelf—he felt she was taking him to the opposite side of the house and making it more and more difficult to explain, without hurting her, that the game she had interrupted was not so much a matter of hiding as of awaiting the moment when Elenski would retreat sufficiently far from the bench to allow one to run to it and knock upon it with the all-important stick!

  After passing through a succession of rooms, they turned into a corridor, then went up a flight of stairs, then traversed a sunlit mangle room where a rosy-cheeked woman sat knitting on a trunk near the window: she looked up, smiled, and lowered her lashes again, her knitting needles never stopping. The old governess led Peter into the next room where stood a leathern couch and an empty bird’s cage and where there was a dark niche between a huge mahogany wardrobe and a Dutch stove.

  “Votte” (“Here you are”), said the old lady, and having pressed him with a light push into that hiding place, went back to the mangle room, where in her garbled Russian she continued a gossipy conversation with the comely knitter who kept inserting every now and then an automatic “Skazhite pozhaluysta!” (“Well, I never!”).

  For a while Peter remained kneeling politely in his absurd nook; presently he str
aightened up, but continued standing there and peering at the wallpaper with its blandly indifferent azure scroll, at the window, at the top of a poplar rippling in the sun. One could hear a clock hoarsely ticktocking and that sound reminded one of various dull and sad things.

  A lot of time passed. The conversation in the next room began to move away and to lose itself in the distance. Now all was silent, except the clock. Peter emerged from his niche.

  He ran down the stairs, tiptoed rapidly through the rooms (bookcases, elkhorns, tricycle, blue card table, piano) and was met at the open door leading to the veranda by a pattern of colored sun and by the old dog returning from the garden. Peter stole up to the windowpanes and chose an unstained one. On the white bench lay the green wand. Elenski was invisible—he had walked off, no doubt, in his unwary search, far beyond the lindens that lined the avenue.

  Grinning from sheer excitement, Peter skipped down the steps and rushed toward the bench. He was still running, when he noted an odd irresponsiveness around him. However, at the same swift pace he reached the beach and knocked its seat thrice with the stick. A vain gesture. Nobody appeared. Flecks of sunlight pulsated on the sand. A ladybird was walking up a bench arm, the transparent tips of her carelessly folded wings showing untidily from under her small spotted cupola.