The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Well, then, in 1919 we have a grown-up young lady, with a pale, broad face that overdid things in terms of the regularity of its features, but just the same very lovely. Tall, with soft breasts, she always wears a black jumper and a scarf around her white neck and holds an English cigarette in her slender-fingered hand with a prominent little bone just above the wrist.

  Yet there was a time in her life, at the end of 1916 or so, when at a summer resort near the family estate there was no schoolboy who did not plan to shoot himself because of her, there was no university student who would not … In a word, there had been a special magic about her, which, had it lasted, would have caused … would have wreaked … But somehow, nothing came of it. Things failed to develop, or else happened to no purpose. There were flowers that she was too lazy to put in a vase, there were strolls in the twilight now with this one, now with another, followed by the blind alley of a kiss.

  She spoke French fluently, pronouncing les gens (the servants) as if rhyming with agence and splitting août (August) in two syllables (a-ou). She naively translated the Russian grabezhi (robberies) as les grabuges (quarrels) and used some archaic French locutions that had somehow survived in old Russian families, but she rolled her r’s most convincingly even though she had never been to France. Over the dresser in her Berlin room a postcard of Serov’s portrait of the Tsar was fastened with a pin with a fake turquoise head. She was religious, but at times a fit of giggles would overcome her in church. She wrote verse with that terrifying facility typical of young Russian girls of her generation: patriotic verse, humorous verse, any kind of verse at all.

  For about six years, that is until 1926, she resided in a boarding-house on the Augsburgerstrasse (not far from the clock), together with her father, a broad-shouldered, beetle-browed old man with a yellowish mustache, and with tight, narrow trousers on his spindly legs. He had a job with some optimistic firm, was noted for his decency and kindness, and was never one to turn down a drink.

  In Berlin, Olga gradually acquired a large group of friends, all of them young Russians. A certain jaunty tone was established. “Let’s go to the cinemonkey,” or “That was a heely deely German Diele, dance hall.” All sorts of popular sayings, cant phrases, imitations of imitations were much in demand. “These cutlets are grim.” “I wonder who’s kissing her now?” Or, in a hoarse, choking voice: “Mes-sieurs les officiers …”

  At the Zotovs’, in their overheated rooms, she languidly danced the fox-trot to the sound of the gramophone, shifting the elongated calf of her leg not without grace and holding away from her the cigarette she had just finished smoking, and when her eyes located the ashtray that revolved with the music she would shove the butt into it, without missing a step. How charmingly, how meaningfully she could raise the wineglass to her lips, secretly drinking to the health of a third party as she looked through her lashes at the one who had confided in her. How she loved to sit in the corner of the sofa, discussing with this person or that somebody else’s affairs of the heart, the oscillation of chances, the probability of a declaration—all this indirectly, by hints—and how understandingly her eyes would smile, pure, wide-open eyes with barely noticeable freckles on the thin, faintly bluish skin underneath and around them. But as for herself, no one fell in love with her, and this was why she long remembered the boor who pawed her at a charity ball and afterwards wept on her bare shoulder. He was challenged to a duel by the little Baron R., but refused to fight. The word “boor,” by the way, was used by Olga on any and every occasion. “Such boors,” she would sing out in chest tones, languidly and affectionately. “What a boor …” “Aren’t they boors?”

  But presently her life darkened. Something was finished, people were already getting up to leave. How quickly! Her father died, she moved to another street. She stopped seeing her friends, knitted the little bonnets in fashion, and gave cheap French lessons at some ladies’ club or other. In this way her life dragged on to the age of thirty.

  She was still the same beauty, with that enchanting slant of the widely spaced eyes and with that rarest line of lips into which the geometry of the smile seems to be already inscribed. But her hair lost its shine and was poorly cut. Her black tailored suit was in its fourth year. Her hands, with their glistening but untidy fingernails, were roped with veins and were shaking from nervousness and from her wretched continuous smoking. And we’d best pass over in silence the state of her stockings.…

  Now, when the silken insides of her handbag were in tatters (at least there was always the hope of finding a stray coin); now, when she was so tired; now, when putting on her only pair of shoes she had to force herself not to think of their soles, just as when, swallowing her pride, she entered the tobacconist’s, she forbade herself to think of how much she already owed there; now that there was no longer the least hope of returning to Russia, and hatred had become so habitual that it almost ceased to be a sin; now that the sun was getting behind the chimney, Olga would occasionally be tormented by the luxury of certain advertisements, written in the saliva of Tantalus, imagining herself wealthy, wearing that dress, sketched with the aid of three or four insolent lines, on that ship-deck, under that palm tree, at the balustrade of that white terrace. And then there was also another thing or two that she missed.

  One day, almost knocking her off her feet, her one-time friend Vera rushed like a whirlwind out of a telephone booth, in a hurry as always, loaded with parcels, with a shaggy-eyed terrier whose leash immediately became wound twice around her skirt. She pounced upon Olga, imploring her to come and stay at their summer villa, saying that it was fate itself, that it was wonderful and how have you been and are there many suitors. “No, my dear, I’m no longer that age,” answered Olga, “and besides.…” She added a little detail and Vera burst out laughing, letting her parcels sink almost to the ground. “No, seriously,” said Olga, with a smile. Vera continued coaxing her, pulling at the terrier, turning this way and that. Olga, starting all at once to speak through her nose, borrowed some money from her.

  Vera adored arranging things, be it a party with punch, a visa, or a wedding. Now she avidly took up arranging Olga’s fate. “The matchmaker within you has been aroused,” joked her husband, an elderly Balt (shaven head, monocle). Olga arrived on a bright August day. She was immediately dressed in one of Vera’s frocks, her hairdo and make-up were changed. She swore languidly, but yielded, and how festively the floorboards creaked in the merry little villa! How the little mirrors, suspended in the green orchard to frighten off birds, flashed and sparkled!

  A Russified German named Forstmann, a well-off athletic widower, author of books on hunting, came to spend a week. He had long been asking Vera to find him a bride, “a real Russian beauty.” He had a massive, strong nose with a fine pink vein on its high bridge. He was polite, silent, at times even morose, but knew how to form, instantly and while no one noticed, an eternal friendship with a dog or with a child. With his arrival Olga became difficult. Listless and irritable, she did all the wrong things and she knew that they were wrong. When the conversation turned to old Russia (Vera tried to make her show off her past), it seemed to her that everything she said was a lie and that everyone understood that it was a lie, and therefore she stubbornly refused to say the things that Vera was trying to extract from her and in general would not cooperate in any way.

  On the veranda, they would slam their cards down hard. Everyone would go off together for a stroll through the woods, but Forstmann conversed mostly with Vera’s husband, and, recalling some pranks of their youth, the two of them would turn red with laughter, lag behind, and collapse on the moss. On the eve of Forstmann’s departure they were playing cards on the veranda, as they usually did in the evening. Suddenly, Olga felt an impossible spasm in her throat. She still managed to smile and to leave without undue haste. Vera knocked on her door but she did not open. In the middle of the night, having swatted a multitude of sleepy flies and smoked continuously to the point where she was no longer able to inhale, ir
ritated, depressed, hating herself and everyone, Olga went into the garden. There, the crickets stridulated, the branches swayed, an occasional apple fell with a taut thud, and the moon performed calisthenics on the whitewashed wall of the chicken coop.

  Early in the morning, she came out again and sat down on the porch step that was already hot. Forstmann, wearing a dark blue bathrobe, sat next to her and, clearing his throat, asked if she would consent to become his spouse—that was the very word he used: “spouse.” When they came to breakfast, Vera, her husband, and his maiden cousin, in utter silence, were performing nonexistent dances, each in a different corner, and Olga drawled out in an affectionate voice “What boors!” and next summer she died in childbirth.

  That’s all. Of course, there may be some sort of sequel, but it is not known to me. In such cases, instead of getting bogged down in guesswork, I repeat the words of the merry king in my favorite fairy tale: Which arrow flies forever? The arrow that has hit its mark.

  BREAKING THE NEWS

  EUGENIA ISAKOVNA MINTS was an elderly émigré widow, who always wore black. Her only son had died on the previous day. She had not yet been told.

  It was a March day in 1935, and after a rainy dawn, one horizontal section of Berlin was reflected in the other—variegated zigzags intermingling with flatter textures, et cetera. The Chernobylskis, old friends of Eugenia Isakovna, had received the telegram from Paris around seven a.m., and a couple of hours later a letter had come by airmail. The head of the factory office where Misha had worked announced that the poor young man had fallen into an elevator shaft from the top floor, and had remained in agony for forty minutes: although unconscious, he kept moaning horribly and uninterruptedly, till the very end.

  In the meantime Eugenia Isakovna got up, dressed, flung with a crosswise flick a black woolen shawl over her sharp thin shoulders and made herself some coffee in the kitchen. The deep, genuine fragrance of her coffee was something she prided herself upon in relation to Frau Doktor Schwarz, her landlady, “a stingy, uncultured beast”: it had now been a whole week since Eugenia Isakovna had stopped speaking to her—and that was not their first quarrel by far—but, as she told her friends, she did not care to move elsewhere for a number of reasons, often enumerated and never tedious. A manifest advantage that she had over this or that person with whom she might decide to break off relations lay in her being able simply to switch off her hearing aid, a portable gadget resembling a small black handbag.

  As she carried the pot of coffee back to her room across the hallway, she noticed the flutter of a postcard, which, upon having been pushed by the mailman through a special slit, settled on the floor. It was from her son, of whose death the Chernobylskis had just learned by more advanced postal means, in consequence of which the lines (virtually inexistent) that she now read, standing with the coffeepot in one hand, on the threshold of her sizable but inept room, could have been compared by an objective observer to the still visible beams of an already extinguished star. My darling Moolik (her son’s pet-name for her since childhood), I continue to be plunged up to the neck in work and when evening comes I literally fall off my feet, and I never go anywhere—

  Two streets away, in a similar grotesque apartment crammed with alien bagatelles, Chernobylski, not having gone downtown today, paced from one room to another, a large, fat, bald man, with huge arching eyebrows and a diminutive mouth. He wore a dark suit but was collarless (the hard collar with inserted tie hung yokelike on the back of a chair in the dining room) and he gestured helplessly as he paced and spoke: “How shall I tell her? What gradual preparation can there be when one has to yell? Good God, what a calamity. Her heart will not bear it, it will burst, her poor heart!”

  His wife wept, smoked, scraped her head through her sparse gray hair, telephoned the Lipshteyns, Lenochka, Dr. Orshanski—and could not make herself go to Eugenia Isakovna first. Their lodger, a woman pianist with a pince-nez, big-bosomed, very compassionate and experienced, advised the Chernobylskis not to hurry too much with the telling—“All the same there will be that blow, so let it be later.”

  “But on the other hand,” cried Chernobylski hysterically, “neither can one postpone it! Clearly one cannot! She is the mother, she may want to go to Paris—who knows? I don’t—or she may want him to be brought here. Poor, poor Mishuk, poor boy, not yet thirty, all life before him! And to think that it was I who helped him, found him a job, to think that, if it had not been for that lousy Paris—”

  “Now, now, Boris Lvovich,” soberly countered the lady lodger, “who could foresee? What have you to do with it? It is comical—In general, I must say, incidentally, that I don’t understand how he could fall. You understand how?”

  Having finished her coffee and rinsed her cup in the kitchen (while not paying any attention whatsoever to the presence of Frau Schwarz), Eugenia Isakovna, with black net bag, handbag, and umbrella, went out. The rain, after hesitating a little, had stopped. She closed her umbrella and proceeded to walk along the shining sidewalk, still holding herself quite straight, on very thin legs in black stockings, the left sagging slightly. One also noted that her feet seemed disproportionately large and that she set them down somewhat draggingly, with toes turned out. When not connected with her hearing aid she was ideally deaf, and very deaf when connected. What she took for the hum of the town was the hum of her blood, and against this customary background, without ruffling it, there moved the surrounding world—rubbery pedestrians, cotton-wool dogs, mute tramcars—and overhead crept the ever-so-slightly rustling clouds through which, in this or that place, blabbed, as it were, a bit of blue. Amid the general silence, she passed, impassive, rather satisfied on the whole, black-coated, bewitched and limited by her deafness, and kept an eye on things, and reflected on various matters. She reflected that tomorrow, a holiday, So-and-so would drop in; that she ought to get the same little pink gaufrettes as last time, and also marmelad (candied fruit jellies) at the Russian store, and maybe a dozen dainties in that small pastry shop where one can always be sure that everything is fresh. A tall bowler-hatted man coming toward her seemed to her from a distance (quite some distance, in fact) frightfully like Vladimir Markovich Vilner, Ida’s first husband, who had died alone, in a sleeping-car, of heart failure, so sad, and as she went by a watchmaker’s she remembered that it was time to call for Misha’s wristwatch, which he had broken in Paris and had sent her by okaziya (i.e., “taking the opportunity of somebody’s traveling that way”). She went in. Noiselessly, slipperily, never brushing against anything, pendulums swung, all different, all in discord. She took her purselike gadget out of her larger, ordinary handbag, introduced with a quick movement that had been shy once the insert into her ear, and the familiar faraway voice of the watchmaker replied—began to vibrate—then faded away, then jumped at her with a crash: “Freitag … Freitag—”

  “All right, I hear you, next Friday.”

  Upon leaving the shop, she again cut herself off from the world. Her faded eyes with yellowish stains about the iris (as if its color had run) acquired once more a serene, even gay, expression. She went along streets which she had not only learned to know well during the half-dozen years since her escape from Russia, but which had now become as full of fond entertainment as those of Moscow or Kharkov. She kept casting casual looks of approval on kids, on small dogs, and presently she yawned as she went, affected by the resilient air of early spring. An awfully unfortunate man, with an unfortunate nose, in an awful old fedora, passed by: a friend of some friends of hers who always mentioned him, and by now she knew everything about him—that he had a deranged daughter, and a despicable son-in-law, and diabetes. Having reached a certain fruit stall (discovered by her last spring) she bought a bunch of wonderful bananas; then she waited quite a time for her turn in a grocery, with her eyes never leaving the profile of an impudent woman, who had come later than she but nevertheless had squeezed nearer than she to the counter: there came a moment when the profile opened like a nutcracker—but here Eugenia
Isakovna took the necessary measures. In the pastry shop she carefully chose her cakes, leaning forward, straining on tiptoe like a little girl, and moving hither and thither a hesitant index—with a hole in the black wool of the glove. Hardly had she left and grown engrossed in a display of men’s shirts next door than her elbow was grasped by Madame Shuf, a vivacious lady with a somewhat exaggerated make-up; whereupon Eugenia Isakovna, staring away into space, nimbly adjusted her complicated machine, and only then, with the world become audible, gave her friend a welcoming smile. It was noisy and windy; Madame Shuf stooped and exerted herself, red mouth all askew, as she endeavored to aim the point of her voice straight into the black hearing aid: “Do you have—news—from Paris?”

  “Oh I do, even most regularly,” answered Eugenia Isakovna softly, and added, “Why don’t you come to see me, why do you never ring me up?”—and a gust of pain rippled her gaze because well-meaning Madame Shuf shrieked back too piercingly.

  They parted. Madame Shuf, who did not know anything yet, went home, while her husband, in his office, was uttering akhs and tsks, and shaking his head with the receiver pressed to it, as he listened to what Chernobylski was telling him over the telephone.

  “My wife has already gone to her,” said Chernobylski, “and in a moment I’ll go there also, though kill me if I know how to begin but my wife is after all a woman, maybe she’ll somehow manage to pave the way.”

  Shuf suggested they write on bits of paper, and give her to read, gradual communications: “Sick.” “Very sick.” “Very, very sick.”

  “Akh, I also thought about that, but it doesn’t make it easier. What a calamity, eh? Young, healthy, exceptionally endowed. And to think that it was I who got that job for him, I who helped him with his living expenses! What? Oh, I understand all that perfectly, but still these thoughts drive me crazy. Okay, we’re sure to meet there.”