The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  No, that fall and that winter we talked of other matters. I was in anguish. The most awful things were happening to our romance. You give a simple explanation: “Olga began to understand that she was sensual rather than passionate, while for Leonid it was the opposite. Their risky caresses understandably inebriated her, but deep inside there always remained a little unmelted piece”—and so on, in the same vulgar, pretentious spirit. What do you understand of our love? So far, I have deliberately avoided direct discussion of it; but now, if I were not afraid of contagion by your style, I would describe in greater detail both its fire and its underlying melancholy. Yes, there was the summer, and the foliage’s omnipresent rustle, and the headlong pedaling along all of the park’s winding paths, to see who would be the first to race from different directions to the rond-point, where the red sand was covered by the writhing serpentine tracks of our rock-hard tires, and each live, everyday detail of that final Russian summer screamed at us in desperation, “I am real! I am now!” As long as all of this sunny euphoria managed to stay on the surface, the innate sadness of our love went no further than the devotion to a nonexistent past. But when Katya and I once again found ourselves in Petersburg, and it had already snowed more than once, and the wooden paving blocks were already filmed with that yellowish layer—a mixture of snow and horse dung—without which I cannot picture a Russian city, the flaw emerged, and we were left with nothing but torment.

  I can see her now, in her black sealskin coat, with a big, flat muff and gray fur-trimmed boots, walking on her slender legs, as if on stilts, along a very slippery sidewalk; or in a dark, high-necked dress, sitting on a blue divan, her face heavily powdered after much crying. As I walked to her house in the evenings and returned after midnight, I would recognize amid the granite night, under a frosty sky, dove-gray with starlight, the imperturbable and immutable landmarks of my itinerary—always those same huge Petersburg objects, lone edifices of legendary times, adorning the nocturnal wastes and half-turning away from the traveler as all beauty does: it sees you not, it is pensive, and listless, its mind is elsewhere. I would talk to myself, exhorting fate, Katya, the stars, the columns of a huge, mute, abstracted cathedral; and when a desultory exchange of fire began in the dark streets, it would occur to me casually, and not without a sense of pleasure, that I might be picked off by a stray bullet and die right there, reclining on dim snow, in my elegant fur coat, my bowler askew, among scattered white paperbacks of Gumilyov’s or Mandelshtam’s new collections of verse that I had dropped and that were barely visible against the snow. Or else, sobbing and moaning as I walked, I would try to persuade myself that it was I who had stopped loving Katya, as I hastened to gather up all I could recall of her mendacity, her presumption, her vacuity, the pretty patch masking a pimple, the artificial grasseyement that would appear in her speech when she needlessly switched to French, her invulnerable weakness for titled poetasters, and the ill-tempered, dull expression of her eyes when, for the hundredth time, I tried to make her tell me with whom she had spent the previous evening. And when it was all gathered and weighed in the balance, I would perceive with anguish that my love, burdened as it was with all that trash, had settled and lodged only deeper, and that not even draft horses with iron muscles could haul it out of the morass. And the following evening again, I would make my way through the sailor-manned identity checks on the street corners (documents were demanded that allowed me access at least to the threshold of Katya’s soul, and were invalid beyond that point); I would once again go to gaze at Katya, who, at the first pitiful word of mine, would turn into a large, rigid doll who would lower her convex eyelids and respond in china-doll language. When, one memorable night, I demanded that she give me a final, super-truthful reply, Katya simply said nothing, and, instead, remained lying motionless on the couch, her mirrorlike eyes reflecting the flame of the candle which on that night of historical turbulence substituted for electric light, and, after hearing her silence through to the end, I got up and left. Three days later, I had my valet take a note to her, in which I wrote that I would commit suicide if I could not see her just once more. So one glorious morning, with a rosy round sun and creaking snow, we met on Post Office Street; I silently kissed her hand, and for a quarter of an hour, without a single word interrupting our silence, we strolled to and fro, while nearby, on the corner of the Horse Guards Boulevard, stood smoking, with feigned nonchalance, a perfectly respectable-looking man in an astrakhan cap. As she and I silently walked to and fro, a little boy passed, pulling by its string a baized hand sled with a tattered fringe, and a drainpipe suddenly gave a rattle and disgorged a chunk of ice, while the man on the corner kept smoking; then, at precisely the same spot where we had met, I just as silently kissed her hand, which slipped back into its muff forever.

  Farewell, my anguish and my ardor,

  Farewell, my dream, farewell, my pain!

  Along the paths of the old garden

  We two shall never pass again.

  Yes, yes: farewell, as the tzigane song has it. In spite of everything you were beautiful, impenetrably beautiful, and so adorable that I could cry, ignoring your myopic soul, and the trivality of your opinions, and a thousand minor betrayals; while I, with my overambitious verse, the heavy and hazy array of my feelings, and my breathless, stuttering speech, in spite of all my love for you, must have been contemptible and repulsive. And there is no need for me to tell you what torments I went through afterwards, how I looked and looked at the snapshot in which, with a gleam on your lip and a glint in your hair, you are looking past me. Katya, why have you made such a mess of it now?

  Come, let us have a calm, heart-to-heart talk. With a lugubrious hiss the air has now been let out of the arrogant rubber fatman who, tightly inflated, clowned around at the beginning of this letter; and you, my dear, are really not a corpulent lady novelist in her novelistic hammock but the same old Katya, with Katya’s calculated dash of demeanor, Katya of the narrow shoulders, a comely, discreetly made-up lady who, out of silly coquetry, has concocted a worthless book. To think that you did not even spare our parting! Leonid’s letter, in which he threatens to shoot Olga, and which she discusses with her future husband; that future husband, in the role of undercover agent, standing on a street corner, ready to rush to the rescue if Leonid should draw the revolver that he is clutching in his coat pocket, as he passionately entreats Olga not to go, and keeps interrupting with his sobs her level-headed words: what a disgusting, senseless fabrication! And at the end of the book you have me join the White Army and get caught by the Reds during a reconnaissance, and, with the names of two traitresses—Russia, Olga—on my lips, die valiantly, felled by the bullet of a “Hebrew-dark” commissar. How intensely I must have loved you if I still see you as you were sixteen years ago, make agonizing efforts to free our past from its humiliating captivity, and save your image from the rack and disgrace of your own pen! I honestly do not know, though, if I am succeeding. My letter smacks strangely of those rhymed epistles that you would rattle off by heart—remember?

  The sight of my handwriting may surprise you

  —but I shall refrain from closing, as Apukhtin does, with the invitation:

  The sea awaits you here, as vast as love

  And love, vast as the seal

  —I shall refrain, because, in the first place, there is no sea here, and, in the second, I have not the least desire to see you. For, after your book, Katya, I am afraid of you. Truly there was no point in rejoicing and suffering as we rejoiced and suffered only to find one’s past besmirched in a lady’s novel. Listen—stop writing books! At least let this flop serve as a lesson. “At least,” for I have the right to wish that you will be stunned by horror upon realizing what you have perpetrated. And do you know what else I long for? Perhaps, perhaps (this is a very small and sickly “perhaps,” but I grasp at it and hence do not sign this letter)—perhaps, after all, Katya, in spite of everything, a rare coincidence has occurred, and it is not you that wrote that tripe, and y
our equivocal but enchanting image has not been mutilated. In that case, please forgive me, colleague Solntsev.

  THE LEONARDO

  THE objects that are being summoned assemble, draw near from different spots; in doing so, some of them have to overcome not only the distance of space but that of time: which nomad, you may wonder, is more bothersome to cope with, this one or that, the young poplar, say, that once grew in the vicinity but was cut down long ago, or the singled-out courtyard which still exists today but is situated far away from here? Hurry up, please.

  Here comes the ovate little poplar, all punctated with April greenery, and takes its stand where told, namely by the tall brick wall, imported in one piece from another city. Facing it, there grows up a dreary and dirty tenement house, with mean little balconies pulled out one by one like drawers. Other bits of scenery are distributed about the yard: a barrel, a second barrel, the delicate shade of leaves, an urn of sorts, and a stone cross propped at the foot of the wall. All this is only sketched and much has to be added and finished, and yet two live people—Gustav and his brother Anton—already come out on their tiny balcony, while rolling before him a little pushcart with a suitcase and a heap of books, Romantovski, the new lodger, enters the yard.

  As seen from the yard, and especially on a bright day, the rooms of the house seem filled up with dense blackness (night is always with us, in this or that place, inside, during one part of twenty-four hours, outside, during the other). Romantovski looked up at the black open windows, at the two frog-eyed men watching him from their balcony, and shouldering his bag—with a forward lurch as if someone had banged him on the back of the head—plunged into the doorway. There remained, sunlit: the pushcart with the books, one barrel, another barrel, the nictating young poplar and an inscription in tar on the brick wall: VOTE FOR (illegible). Presumably it had been scrawled by the brothers before the elections.

  Now this is the way we’ll arrange the world: every man shall sweat, every man shall eat. There will be work, there will be belly-cheer, there will be a clean, warm, sunny—

  (Romantovski became the occupant of the adjacent one. It was even drabber than theirs. But under the bed he discovered a small rubber doll. He concluded that his predecessor had been a family man.)

  Despite the world’s not having yet conclusively and totally turned into solid matter and still retaining sundry regions of an intangible and hallowed nature, the brothers felt snug and confident. The elder one, Gustav, had a furniture-moving job; the younger happened to be temporarily unemployed, but did not lose heart. Gustav had an evenly ruddy complexion, bristling fair eyebrows, and an ample, cupboardlike torso always clothed in a pullover of coarse gray wool. He wore elastic bands to hold his shirtsleeves at the joints of his fat arms, so as to keep his wrists free and prevent sloppiness. Anton’s face was pockmarked, he trimmed his mustache in the shape of a dark trapezoid, and wore a dark red sweater over his spare wiry frame. But when they both leaned their elbows on the balcony railings, their backsides were exactly the same, big and triumphant, with identically checkered cloth enclosing tightly their prominent buttocks.

  Repeat: the world shall be sweaty and well fed. Idlers, parasites, and musicians are not admitted. While one’s heart pumps blood one should live, damn it! For two years now Gustav had been saving money to marry Anna, acquire a sideboard, a carpet.

  She would come every other evening, that plump-armed buxom woman, with freckles on the broad bridge of her nose, a leaden shadow under her eyes, and spaced teeth one of which, moreover, had been knocked out. The brothers and she would swill beer. She had a way of clasping her bare arms behind her nape, displaying the gleaming-wet red tufts of her armpits. With head thrown back, she opened her mouth so generously that one could survey her entire palate and uvula, which resembled the tail end of a boiled chicken. The anatomy of her mirth was greatly to the liking of the two brothers. They tickled her with zest.

  In the daytime, while his brother worked, Anton sat in a friendly pub or sprawled among the dandelions on the cool, still vividly green grass along the canal bank and observed with envy exuberant roughs loading coals on a barge, or else stared stupidly at the empty blue of the sleep-inducing sky. But presently in the well-oiled life of the brothers some obstruction occurred.

  From the very moment he had appeared, rolling his pushcart into the yard, Romantovski had provoked a mixture of irritation and curiosity in the two brothers. Their infallible flair let them sense that here was someone different from other people. Normally, one would not discern anything special in him at a casual glance, but the brothers did. For example, he walked differently: at every step he rose on a buoyant toe in a peculiar manner, stepping and flying up as if the mere act of treading allowed him a chance to perceive something uncommon over the common heads. He was what is termed a “slank,” very lean, with a pale sharp-nosed face and appallingly restless eyes. Out of the much too short sleeves of his double-breasted jacket his long wrists protruded with a kind of annoying and nonsensical obviousness (“here we are: what should we do?”). He went out and came home at unpredictable hours. On one of the first mornings Anton caught sight of him near a bookstand: he was pricing, or had actually bought something, because the vendor nimbly beat one dusty volume against another and carried them to his nook behind the stand. Additional eccentricities were noted: his light remained on practically until dawn; he was oddly unsociable.

  We hear Anton’s voice: “That fine gentleman shows off. We should give him a closer look.”

  “I’ll sell him the pipe,” said Gustav.

  The misty origins of the pipe. Anna had brought it over one day, but the brothers recognized only cigarillos. An expensive pipe, not yet blackened. It had a little steel tube inserted in its stem. With it came a suede case.

  “Who’s there? What do you want?” asked Romantovski through the door.

  “Neighbors, neighbors,” answered Gustav in a deep voice.

  And the neighbors entered, avidly looking around. A stump of sausage lay on the table next to an uneven pile of books; one of them was opened on a picture of ships with numerous sails and, flying above, in one corner, an infant with puffed-out cheeks.

  “Let’s get acquainted,” rumbled the brothers. “Folks live side by side, one can say, but never meet somehow or other.”

  The top of the commode was shared by an alcohol burner and an orange.

  “Delighted,” said Romantovski softly. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and with bent forehead, its V-vein inflamed, started to lace his shoes.

  “You were resting,” said Gustav with ominous courtesy. “We come at the wrong time?”

  Not a word, not a word, did the lodger say in reply; instead he straightened up suddenly, turned to the window, raised his finger, and froze.

  The brothers looked but found nothing unusual about that window; it framed a cloud, the tip of the poplar, and part of the brick wall.

  “Why, don’t you see anything?” asked Romantovski.

  Red sweater and gray went up to the window and actually leaned out, becoming identical twins. Nothing. And both had the sudden feeling that something was wrong, very wrong! They wheeled around. He stood near the chest of drawers in an odd attitude.

  “I must have been mistaken,” said Romantovski, not looking at them. “Something seemed to have flown by. I saw once an airplane fall.”

  “That happens,” assented Gustav. “Listen, we dropped in with a purpose. Would you care to buy this? Brand new. And there’s a nice sheath.”

  “Sheath? Is that so? Only, you know, I smoke very seldom.”

  “Well, you’ll smoke oftener. We sell it cheap. Three-fifty.”

  “Three-fifty. I see.”

  He fingered the pipe, biting his nether lip and pondering something. His eyes did not really look at the pipe, they moved to and fro.

  Meanwhile the brothers began to swell, to grow, they filled up the whole room, the whole house, and then grew out of it. In comparison to them the young poplar was, by
then, no bigger than one of those toy treelets, made of dyed cotton wool, that are so unstable on their round green supports. The dollhouse, a thing of dusty pasteboard with mica windowpanes, barely reached up to the brothers’ knees. Gigantic, imperiously reeking of sweat and beer, with beefy voices and senseless speeches, with fecal matter replacing the human brain, they provoke a tremor of ignoble fear. I don’t know why they push against me; I implore you, do leave me alone. I’m not touching you, so don’t you touch me either; I’ll give in, only do leave me alone.

  “All right, but I don’t have enough change,” said Romantovski in a low voice. “Now if you can give me six-fifty—”

  They could, and went away, grinning. Gustav examined the ten-mark bill against the light and put it away in an iron money box.

  Nevertheless, they did not leave their room neighbor in peace. It just maddened them that despite their having got acquainted with him, a man should remain as inaccessible as before. He avoided running into them: one had to waylay and trap him in order to glance fleetingly into his evasive eyes. Having discovered the nocturnal life of Romantovski’s lamp, Anton could not bear it any longer. He crept up barefoot to the door (from under which showed a taut thread of golden light) and knocked.

  Romantovski did not respond.

  “Sleep, sleep,” said Anton, slapping the door with his palm.

  The light peered silently through the chink. Anton shook the door handle. The golden thread snapped.