The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Here you are. But let me see, Falter—did I understand you correctly? Are you really henceforth a candidate for omniscience? Excuse me, but I don’t have that impression. I can allow that you know something fundamental, but your words contain no concrete indications of absolute wisdom.”

  “Saving my strength,” said Falter. “Anyway, I never affirmed that I know everything now—Arabic, for example, or how many times in your life you have shaved, or who set the type for the newspaper which that fool over there is reading. I only say that I know everything I might want to know. Anyone could say that—couldn’t he?—after having leafed through an encyclopedia; only, the encyclopedia whose exact title I have learned (there, by the way—I am giving you a more elegant definition: I know the title of things) is literally all-inclusive, and therein lies the difference between me and the most versatile scholar on earth. You see, I have learned—and here I am leading you to the very edge of the Riviera precipice, ladies don’t look—I have learned one very simple thing about the world. It is by itself so obvious, so amusingly obvious, that only my wretched humanity can consider it monstrous. When in a moment I say ‘congruent’ I shall mean something infinitely removed from all the congruencies known to you, just as the nature itself of my discovery has nothing in common with the nature of any physical or philosophical conjectures. Now the main thing in me that is congruent with the main thing in the universe could not be affected by the bodily spasm that has thus shattered me. At the same time the possible knowledge of all things, consequent to the knowledge of the fundamental one, did not dispose in me of a sufficiently solid apparatus. I am training myself by willpower not to leave the vivarium, to observe the rules of your mentality as if nothing had happened; in other words, I act like a beggar, a versifier, who has received a million in foreign currency, but goes on living in his basement, for he knows that the least concession to luxury would ruin his liver.”

  “But the treasure is in your possession, Falter—that’s what hurts. Let us drop the discussion of your attitude toward it, and talk about the thing itself. I repeat—I have taken note of your refusal to let me peek at your Medusa, and am further willing to refrain from the most evident inferences, since, as you hint, any logical conclusion is a confinement of thought in itself. I propose to you a different method for our questions and answers: I shall not ask you about the contents of your treasure; but, after all, you will not give away its secret by telling me if, say, it lies in the East, or if there is even one topaz in it, or if even one man has ever passed in its proximity. At the same time, if you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a question, I not only promise to avoid choosing that particular line for a further series of related questions, but pledge to end the conversation altogether.”

  “Theoretically, you are luring me into a clumsy trap,” said Falter, shaking slightly, as another might do when laughing. “Actually, it would be a trap only if you were capable of asking me at least one such question. There is very little chance of that. Therefore, if you enjoy pointless amusement, fire away.”

  I thought a moment and said, “Falter, allow me to begin like the traditional tourist—with an inspection of an ancient church, familiar to him from pictures. Let me ask you: does God exist?”

  “Cold,” said Falter.

  I did not understand and repeated the question.

  “Forget it,” snapped Falter. “I said ‘cold,’ as they say in the game, when one must find a hidden object. If you are looking under a chair or under the shadow of a chair, and the object cannot be in that place, because it happens to be somewhere else, then the question of there existing a chair or its shadow has nothing whatever to do with the game. To say that perhaps the chair exists but the object is not there is the same as saying that perhaps the object is there but the chair does not exist, which means that you end up again in the circle so dear to human thought.”

  “You must agree, though, Falter, that if as you say the thing sought is not anywhere near to the concept of God, and if that thing is, according to your terminology, a kind of universal ‘title,’ then the concept of God does not appear on the title page; hence, there exists no true necessity for such a concept, and since there is no need for God, no God exists.”

  “Then you did not understand what I said about the relationship between a possible place and the impossibility of finding the object in it. All right, I shall put it more clearly. By the very act of your mentioning a given concept you placed your own self in the position of an enigma, as if the seeker himself were to hide. And by persisting in your question, you not only hide, but also believe that by sharing with the sought-for object the quality of ‘hiddenness’ you bring it closer to you. How can I answer you whether God exists when the matter under discussion is perhaps sweet peas or a soccer linesman’s flag? You are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way, cher monsieur, that is all the answer I can give you. And if it seems to you that from this answer you can draw the least conclusion about the uselessness or necessity of God, it is just because you are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way. Wasn’t it you, though, that promised not to follow logical patterns of thought?”

  “Now I too am going to trap you, Falter. Let’s see how you’ll manage to avoid a direct statement. One cannot, then, seek the title of the world in the hieroglyphics of deism?”

  “Pardon me,” replied Falter, “by means of ornate language and grammatical trickery Moustache-Bleue is merely disguising the expected non as an expected oui. At the moment all I do is deny. I deny the expediency of the search for Truth in the realm of common theology, and, to save your mind empty labor, I hasten to add that the epithet I have used is a dead end: do not turn into it. I shall have to terminate the discussion for lack of an interlocutor if you exclaim ‘Aha, then there is another, “uncommon,” truth!’—for this would mean that you have hidden yourself so well as to have lost yourself.”

  “All right. I shall believe you. Let us grant that theology muddies the issue. Is that right, Falter?”

  “This is the house that Jack built,” said Falter.

  “All right, we dismiss this false trail as well. Even though you could probably explain to me why it is false (for there is something queer and elusive here, something that irritates you), and then your reluctance to reply would be clear to me.”

  “I could,” said Falter, “but it would be equivalent to revealing the gist of the matter, that is, exactly what you are not going to get out of me.”

  “You repeat yourself, Falter. Don’t tell me you will be just as evasive if, for instance, I ask you: can one expect an afterlife?”

  “Does it interest you very much?”

  “Just as much as it does you, Falter. Whatever you may know about death, we are both mortal.”

  “In the first place,” said Falter, “I call your attention to the following curious catch: any man is mortal; you are a man; therefore, it is also possible that you are not mortal. Why? Because a specified man (you or I) for that very reason ceases to be any man. Yet both of us are indeed mortal, but I am mortal in a different way than you.”

  “Don’t spite my poor logic, but give me a plain answer: is there even a glimmer of one’s identity beyond the grave, or does it all end in ideal darkness?”

  “Bon,” said Falter, as is the habit of Russian émigrés in France. “You want to know whether Gospodin Sineusov will forever reside within the snugness of Gospodin Sineusov, otherwise Moustache-Bleue, or whether everything will abruptly vanish. There are two ideas here, aren’t there? Round-the-clock lighting and the black inane. Actually, despite the difference in metaphysical color, they greatly resemble each other. And they move in parallel. They even move at considerable speed. Long live the totalizator! Hey, hey, look through your turf glasses, they’re racing each other, and you would very much like to know which will arrive first at the post of truth, but in asking me to give you a yes or no for either one or the other, you want me to catch one of them at full speed by the neck—and those devils
have awfully slippery necks—but even if I were to grab one of them for you, I would merely interrupt the competition, or the winner would be the other, the one I did not snatch, an utterly meaningless result inasmuch as no rivalry would any longer exist. If you ask, however, which of the two runs faster, I shall retort with another question: what runs faster, strong desire or strong fear?”

  “Same pace, I suppose.”

  “That’s just it. For look what happens in the case of the poor little human mind. Either it has no way to express what awaits you—I mean, us—after death, and then total unconsciousness is excluded, for that is quite accessible to our imagination—every one of us has experienced the total darkness of dreamless sleep; or, on the contrary, death can be imagined, and then one’s reason naturally adopts not the notion of eternal life, an unknown entity, incongruent with anything terrestrial, but precisely that which seems more probable—the familiar darkness of stupor. Indeed, how can a man who trusts in his reason admit, for instance, that someone who is dead drunk and dies while sound asleep from a chance external cause—thus losing by chance what he no longer really possessed—again acquires the ability to reason and feel thanks to the mere extension, consolidation, and perfection of his unfortunate condition? Hence, if you were to ask me only one thing: do I know, in human terms, what lies beyond death—that is, if you attempted to avert the absurdity in which must peter out the competition between two opposite, but basically similar concepts—a negative reply on my part would logically make you conclude that your life cannot end in nothingness, while from an affirmative you would draw the opposite conclusion. In either case, as you see, you would remain in exactly the same situation as before, since a dry ‘no’ would prove to you that I know no more than you about the given subject, while a moist ‘yes’ would suggest that you accept the existence of an international heaven which your reason cannot fail to doubt.”

  “You are simply evading a straightforward answer, but allow me to observe nevertheless that on the subject of death you do not give me the answer ‘cold.’ ”

  “There you go again,” sighed Falter. “Didn’t I just explain to you that any deduction whatsoever conforms to the curvature of thought? It is correct, as long as you remain in the sphere of earthly dimensions, but when you attempt to go beyond, your error grows in proportion to the distance you cover. And that’s not all: your mind will construe any answer of mine exclusively from a utilitarian viewpoint, for you are unable to conceive death otherwise than in the image of your own gravestone, and this in turn would distort to such an extent the sense of my answer as to turn it into a lie, ipso facto. So let us observe decorum even when dealing with the transcendental. I cannot express myself more clearly—and you ought to be grateful for any evasiveness. You have an inkling, I gather, that there is a little hitch in the very formulation of the question, a hitch, incidentally, that is more terrible than the fear itself of death. It’s particularly strong in you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Falter. The terror I feel at the thought of my future unconsciousness is equal only to the revulsion caused in me by a mental foreview of my decomposing body.”

  “Well put. Probably other symptoms of this sublunary malady are present as well? A dull pang in the heart, suddenly, in the middle of the night, like the flash of a wild creature among domestic emotions and pet thoughts: ‘Someday I also must die.’ It happens to you, doesn’t it? Hatred for the world, which will very cheerfully carry on without you. A basic sensation that all things in the world are trifles and phantasmata compared to your mortal agony, and therefore to your life, for, you say to yourself, life itself is the agony before death. Yes, oh yes, I can imagine perfectly well that sickness from which you all suffer to a lesser or greater degree, and I can say one thing: I fail to understand how people can live under such conditions.”

  “There, Falter, we seem to be getting somewhere. Apparently, then, if I admitted that, in moments of happiness, of rapture, when my soul is laid bare, I suddenly feel that there is no extinction beyond the grave; that in an adjacent locked room, from under whose door comes a frosty draft, there is being prepared a peacock-eyed radiance, a pyramid of delights akin to the Christmas tree of my childhood; that everything—life, patria, April, the sound of a spring or that of a dear voice—is but a muddled preface, and that the main text still lies ahead—if I can feel that way, Falter, is it not possible to live, to live—tell me it’s possible, and I’ll not ask you anything more.”

  “In that case,” said Falter, shaking again in soundless mirth, “I understand you even less. Skip the preface, and it’s in the bag!”

  “Un bon mouvement, Falter—tell me your secret.”

  “What are you trying to do, catch me off guard? You’re crafty, I see. No, that is out of the question. In the first days—yes, in the first days I thought it might be possible to share my secret. A grown man, unless he is a bull like me, would not stand it—all right; but I wondered if one could not bring up a new generation of the initiated, that is, turn my attention to children. As you see, I did not immediately overcome the infection of local dialects. In practice, however, what would happen? In the first place, one can hardly imagine pledging kiddies to a vow of priestly silence lest any of them with one dreamy word commit manslaughter. In the second place, as soon as the child grows up, the information once imparted to him, accepted on faith, and allowed to sleep in a remote corner of his consciousness may give a start and awake, with tragic consequences. Even if my secret does not always destroy a mature member of the species, it is unthinkable that it should spare a youth. For who is not familiar with that period of life when all kinds of things—the starry sky above a Caucasian spa, a book read in the toilet, one’s own conjectures about the cosmos, the delicious panic of solipsism—are in themselves enough to provoke a frenzy in all the senses of an adolescent human being? There is no reason for me to become an executioner; I have no intention of annihilating enemy regiments through a megaphone; in short, there is no one for me to confide in.”

  “I asked you two questions, Falter, and you have twice proved to me the impossibility of an answer. It seems to me useless to ask you about anything else—say, about the limits of the universe, or the origin of life. You would probably suggest that I be content with a speckled minute on a second-rate planet, served by a second-rate sun, or else you would again reduce everything to a riddle: is the word ‘heterologous’ heterologous itself.”

  “Probably,” agreed Falter, giving a lengthy yawn.

  His brother-in-law quietly scooped his watch out of his waistcoat and glanced at his wife.

  “Here’s the odd thing, though, Falter. How does superhuman knowledge of the ultimate truth combine in you with the adroitness of a banal sophist who knows nothing? Admit it, all your absurd quibbling was nothing more than an elaborate sneer.”

  “Oh well, that is my only defense,” said Falter, squinting at his sister, who was nimbly extracting a long gray woolen scarf from the sleeve of the overcoat already being offered to him by his brother-in-law. “Otherwise, you know, you might have teased it out of me. However,” he added, inserting the wrong arm, and then the right one in the sleeve, and simultaneously moving away from the helping shoves of his assistants, “however, even if I did browbeat you a little, let me console you: amid all the piffle and prate I inadvertently gave myself away—only two or three words, but in them flashed a fringe of absolute insight—luckily, though, you paid no attention.”

  He was led away, and thus ended our rather diabolical dialogue. Not only had Falter told me nothing, he had not even allowed me to get close, and no doubt his last pronouncement was as much of a mockery as all the preceding ones. The following day his brother-in-law’s dull voice informed me on the telephone that Falter charged 100 francs for a visit; I asked why on earth had I not been warned of this, and he promptly replied that if the interview were to be repeated, two conversations would cost me only 150. The purchase of Truth, even at a discount, did not tempt me, and, after sending
him the sum of that unexpected debt, I forced myself not to think about Falter any more. Yesterday, though.… Yes, yesterday I received a note from Falter himself, from the hospital: he wrote, in a clear hand, that he would die on Tuesday, and that in parting he ventured to inform me that—here followed two lines which had been painstakingly and, it seemed, ironically, blacked out. I replied that I was grateful for his thoughtfulness and that I wished him interesting posthumous impressions and a pleasant eternity.

  But all this brings me no nearer to you, my angel. Just in case, I am keeping all the windows and doors of life wide open, even though I sense that you will not condescend to the time-honored ways of apparitions. Most terrifying of all is the thought that, inasmuch as you glow henceforth within me, I must safeguard my life. My transitory bodily frame is perhaps the only guarantee of your ideal existence: when I vanish, it will vanish as well. Alas, with a pauper’s passion I am doomed to use physical nature in order to finish recounting you to myself, and then to rely on my own ellipsis.…