The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  But enough. I shall not recount how I was arrested, nor tell of my subsequent ordeals. Suffice it to say that it cost me incredible patience and effort to get back abroad, and that, ever since, I have forsworn carrying out commissions entrusted one by the insanity of others.

  A BUSY MAN

  THE man who busies himself overmuch with the workings of his own soul cannot help being confronted by a common, melancholy, but rather curious phenomenon: namely, he witnesses the sudden death of an insignificant memory that a chance occasion causes to be brought back from the humble and remote almshouse where it had been completing quietly its obscure existence. It blinks, it is still pulsating and reflecting light—but the next moment, under your very eyes, it breathes one last time and turns up its poor toes, having not withstood the too abrupt transit into the harsh glare of the present. Henceforth all that remains at your disposal is the shadow, the abridgment of that recollection, now devoid, alas, of the original’s bewitching convincingness. Grafitski, a gentle-tempered and death-fearing person, remembered a boyhood dream which had contained a laconic prophecy; but he had ceased long ago to feel any organic link between himself and that memory, for at one of the first summonses, it arrived looking wan, and died—and the dream he now remembered was but the recollection of a recollection. When was it, that dream? Exact date unknown. Grafitski answered, pushing away the little glass pot with smears of yogurt and leaning his elbow on the table. When? Come on—approximately? A long time ago. Presumably, between the ages of ten and fifteen: during that period he often thought about death—especially at night.

  So here he is—a thirty-two-year-old, smallish, but broad-shouldered man, with protruding transparent ears, half-actor, half-literatus, author of topical jingles in the émigré papers over a not very witty pen name (unpleasantly reminding one of the “Caran d’Ache” adopted by an immortal cartoonist). Here he is. His face consists of horn-framed dark glasses, with a blindman’s glint in them, and of a soft-tufted wart on the left cheek. His head is balding and through the straight strands of brushed-back dunnish hair one discerns the pale-pink chamois of his scalp.

  What had he been thinking about just now? What was the recollection under which his jailed mind kept digging? The recollection of a dream. The warning addressed to him in a dream. A prediction, which up to now had in no way hampered his life, but which at present, at the inexorable approach of a certain deadline, was beginning to sound with an insistent, ever-increasing resonance.

  “You must control yourself,” cried Itski to Graf in a hysterical recitative. He cleared his throat and walked to the closed window.

  An ever-increasing insistence. The figure 33—the theme of that dream—had got entangled with his unconscious, its curved claws like those of a bat, had got caught in his soul, and there was no way to unravel that subliminal snarl. According to tradition, Jesus Christ lived to the age of thirty-three and perhaps (mused Graf, immobilized next to the cross of the casement frame), perhaps a voice in that dream had indeed said: “You’ll die at Christ’s age”—and had displayed, illumined upon a screen, the thorns of two tremendous threes.

  He opened the window. It was lighter without than within, but streetlamps had already started to glow. Smooth clouds blanketed the sky; and only westerward, between ochery housetops, an interspace was banded with tender brightness. Farther up the street a fiery-eyed automobile had stopped, its straight tangerine tusks plunged in the watery gray of the asphalt. A blond butcher stood on the threshold of his shop and contemplated the sky.

  As if crossing a stream from stone to stone, Graf’s mind jumped from butcher to carcass and then to somebody who had been telling him that somebody else somewhere (in a morgue? at a medical school?) used to call a corpse fondly: the “smully” or “smullicans.” “He’s waiting around the corner, your smullicans.” “Don’t you worry: smully won’t let you down.”

  “Allow me to sort out various possibilities,” said Graf with a snigger as he looked down askance from his fifth floor at the black iron spikes of a palisade. “Number one (the most vexing): I dream of the house being attacked or on fire, I leap out of bed, and, thinking (we are fools in sleep) that I live at street level, I dive out of the window—into an abyss. Second possibility: in a different nightmare I swallow my tongue—that’s known to have happened—the fat thing performs a back somersault in my mouth and I suffocate. Case number three: I’m roaming, say, through noisy streets—aha, that’s Pushkin trying to imagine his way of death:

  In combat, wanderings or waves,

  Or will it be the nearby valley …

  etc., but mark—he began with ‘combat,’ which means he did have a presentiment. Superstition may be masked wisdom. What can I do to stop thinking those thoughts? What can I do in my loneliness?”

  He married in 1924, in Riga, coming from Pskov with a skimpy theatrical company. Was the coupleteer of the show—and when before his act he took off his spectacles to touch up with paint his deadish little face one saw that he had eyes of a smoky blue. His wife was a large, robust woman with short black hair, a glowing complexion, and a fat prickly nape. Her father sold furniture. Soon after marrying her Graf discovered that she was stupid and coarse, that she had bowlegs, and that for every two Russian words she used a dozen German ones. He realized that they must separate, but deferred the decision because of a kind of dreamy compassion he felt for her and so things dragged until 1926 when she deceived him with the owner of a delicatessen on Lachplesis Street. Graf moved from Riga to Berlin where he was promised a job in a filmmaking firm (which soon folded up). He led an indigent, disorganized, solitary life and spent hours in a cheap pub where he wrote his topical poems. This was the pattern of his life—a life that made little sense—the meager, vapid existence of a third-rate Russian émigré. But as is well known, consciousness is not determined by this or that way of life. In times of comparative ease as well as on such days when one goes hungry and one’s clothes begin to rot, Grafitski lived not unhappily—at least before the approach of the fateful year. With perfect good sense he could be called a “busy man,” for the subject of his occupation was his own soul—and in such cases, there can be no question of leisure or indeed any necessity for it. We are discussing the air holes of life, a dropped heartbeat, pity, the irruptions of past things—what fragrance is that? What does it remind me of? And why does no one notice that on the dullest street every house is different, and what a profusion there is, on buildings, on furniture, on every object, of seemingly useless ornaments—yes, useless, but full of disinterested, sacrificial enchantment.

  Let us speak frankly. There is many a person whose soul has gone to sleep like a leg. Per contra, there exist people endowed with principles, ideals—sick souls gravely affected by problems of faith and morality; they are not artists of sensibility, but the soul is their mine where they dig and drill, working deeper and deeper with the coal-cutting machine of religious conscience and getting giddy from the black dust of sins, small sins, pseudo-sins. Graf did not belong to their group: he lacked any special sins and had no special principles. He busied himself with his individual self, as others study a certain painter, or collect certain mites, or decipher manuscripts rich in complex transpositions and insertions, with doodles, like hallucinations, in the margin, and temperamental deletions that burn the bridges between masses of imagery—bridges whose restoration is such wonderful fun.

  His studies were now interrupted by alien considerations—this was unexpected and dreadfully painful—what should be done about it? After lingering by the window (and doing his best to find some defense against the ridiculous, trivial, but invincible idea that in a few days, on June the nineteenth, he would have attained the age mentioned in his boyhood dream), Graf quietly left his darkening room, in which all objects, buoyed up slightly by the waves of the crepuscule, no longer stood, but floated, like furniture during a great flood. It was still day—and somehow one’s heart contracted from the tenderness of early lights. Graf noticed at once that
not all was right, that a strange agitation was spreading around: people gathered at the corners of streets, made mysterious angular signals, walked over to the opposite side, and there again pointed at something afar and then stood motionless in eerie attitudes of torpor. In the twilight dimness, nouns were lost, only verbs remained—or at least the archaic forms of a few verbs. This kind of thing might mean a lot: for example, the end of the world. Suddenly with a numbing tingle in every part of his frame, he understood: There, there, across the deep vista between buildings, outlined softly against a clear golden background, under the lower rim of a long ashen cloud, very low, very far, and very slowly, and also ash-colored, also elongated, an airship was floating by. The exquisite, antique loveliness of its motion, mating with the intolerable beauty of the evening sky, tangerine lights, blue silhouettes of people, caused the contents of Graf’s soul to brim over. He saw it as a celestial token, an old-fashioned apparition, reminding him that he was on the point of reaching the established limit of his life; he read in his mind the inexorable obituary: our valuable collaborator … so early in life … we who knew him so well … fresh humor … fresh grave.… And what was still more inconceivable: all around that obituary, to paraphrase Pushkin again,… indifferent nature would be shining—the flora of a newspaper, weeds of domestic news, burdocks of editorials.

  On a quiet summer night he turned thirty-three. Alone in his room, clad in long underpants, striped like those of a convict, glassless and blinking, he celebrated his unbidden birthday. He had not invited anybody because he feared such contingencies as a broken pocket mirror or some talk about life’s fragility, which the retentive mind of a guest would be sure to promote to the rank of an omen. Stay, stay, moment—thou art not as fair as Goethe’s—but nevertheless stay. Here we have an unrepeatable individual in an unrepeatable medium: the storm-felled worn books on the shelves, the little glass pot of yogurt (said to lengthen life), the tufted brush for cleaning one’s pipe, the stout album of an ashen tint in which Graf pasted everything, beginning with the clippings of his verse and finishing with a Russian tram ticket—these are the surroundings of Graf Ytski (a pen name he had thought up on a rainy night while waiting for the next ferry), a butterfly-eared, husky little man who sat on the edge of his bed holding the holey violet sock he had just taken off.

  Henceforth he began to fear everything—the lift, a draft, builders’ scaffolds, the traffic, demonstrators, a truck-mounted platform for the repairing of trolley wires, the colossal dome of the gashouse that might explode right when he passed by on his way to the post office, where, furthermore, a bold bandit in a homemade mask might go on a shooting spree. He realized the silliness of his state of mind but was unable to overcome it. In vain did he try to divert his attention, to think of something else: on the footboard at the back of every thought that went speeding by like a sledded carriage stood Smully, the ever-present groom. On the other hand the topical poems with which he continued diligently to supply the papers became more and more playful and artless (since nobody should note in them retrospectively the presentiment of nearing death), and those wooden couplets whose rhythm recalled the seesaw of the Russian toy featuring a muzhik and a bear, and in which “shrilly” rhymed with “Dzhugashvili”—those couplets, and not anything else, turned out to be actually the most substantial and fitty piece of his being.

  Naturally, faith in the immortality of the soul is not forbidden; but there is one terrible question which nobody to my knowledge has set (mused Graf over a mug of beer): may not the soul’s passage into the hereafter be attended with the possibility of random impediments and vicissitudes similar to the various mishaps surrounding a person’s birth in this world? Cannot one help that passage to succeed by taking while still alive certain psychological or even physical measures? Which specifically? What must one foresee, what must one stock, what must one avoid? Should one regard religion (argued Graf, dallying in the deserted darkened pub where the chairs were already yawning and being put to bed on the tables)—religion, which covers the walls of life with sacred pictures—as something on the lines of that attempt to create a favorable setting (rather in the same way as, according to certain physicians, the photographs of professional babies, with nice, chubby cheeks, by adorning the bedroom of a pregnant woman act beneficially on the fruit of her womb)? But even if the necessary measures have been taken, even if we do know why Mr. X (who fed on this or that—milk, music—or whatever) safely crossed over into the hereafter, while Mr. Y (whose nourishment was slightly different) got stuck and perished—might there not exist other hazards capable of occurring at the very moment of passing over—and somehow getting in one’s way, spoiling everything—for, mind you, even animals or plain people creep away when their hour approaches: do not hinder, do not hinder me in my difficult, perilous task, allow me to be delivered peacefully of my immortal soul.

  All this depressed Graf, but meaner yet and more terrible was the thought of there not being any “hereafter” at all, that a man’s life bursts as irremediably as the bubbles that dance and vanish in a tempestuous tub under the jaws of a rainpipe—Graf watched them from the veranda of the suburban café—it was raining hard, autumn had come, four months had elapsed since he had reached the fatidic age, death might hit any minute now—and those trips to the dismal pine barrens near Berlin were extremely risky. If, however, thought Graf, there is no hereafter, then away with it goes everything else that involves the idea of an independent soul, away goes the possibility of omens and presentiments; all right, let us be materialists, and therefore, I, a healthy individual with a healthy heredity shall, probably, live half a century more, and so why yield to neurotic illusions—they are only the result of a certain temporary instability of my social class, and the individual is immortal inasmuch as his class is immortal—and the great class of the bourgeoisie (continued Graf, now thinking aloud with disgusting animation), our great and powerful class shall conquer the hydra of the proletariat, for we, too, slave-owners, corn merchants, and their loyal troubadours, must step onto the platform of our class (more zip, please), we all, the bourgeois of all countries, the bourgeois of all lands … and nations, arise, our oil-mad (or gold-mad?) kollektiv, down with plebeian miscreations—and now any verbal adverb ending in ‘iv’ will do as a rhyme; after that two more strophes and again: up, bourgeois of all lands and nations! long live our sacred kapitál! Tra-ta-ta (anything in ‘—ations’), our bourgeois Internatsionál! Is the result witty? Is it amusing?