He felt uneasy, a feeling he seldom experienced lately. Not only had Martin’s arrival excited him as a tender echo of their university days, but it had been in itself extraordinary, everything about Martin had been extraordinary—the roughish tan, the breathless voice, the bizarre dark utterances, and that new haughty look in his eyes. However, Darwin had recently had such a well-balanced kind of life, his heart had been beating so regularly (even when he proposed), his mind had so firmly concluded that after the troubles and thrills of youth he had now reached a smoothly paved road, that he could now hardly fail to subdue the disturbing impression made by Martin, and force himself to believe that the silly jester would reappear this very night. He had already donned his dinner jacket and was examining his powerful figure and large Roman-nosed face in the wardrobe glass, when the telephone rang on the night table. Either because the connection was bad or because he did not remember Martin’s telephone tone, he identified it with difficulty: “Reminding you of my request,” said the blurred deep voice. “You’ll get the batch within a few days, you’ll send them off one by one. My train is about to leave. What? I said: my train——Yes, yes, train——”
The voice vanished. Darwin resoundingly put down the receiver and for a while kept scratching his cheek. Then he walked to the lift and rode down. There he asked for the timetable. Yes, correct. What the devil——
That night he did not go anywhere. He kept waiting for something, some sort of further development. When he sat down to write a letter to his fiancée he found nothing to write about. Several days passed. On Wednesday he received a fat envelope from Riga and found inside four picture postcards with Berlin views addressed to Mrs. Edelweiss in Switzerland. On one of them, inserted in the Russian text, Darwin discovered a sentence in English “I often go to music halls with Darwin.” It gave him an eerie shock. On Thursday morning, with the dreadful feeling that he was taking part in some evil affair, he gingerly inserted the card with the earliest date into the blue mailbox next to the hotel entrance. A week passed; he posted the second card. After that he could not stand it any longer and traveled to Riga, where he visited the British consul, the Swiss consul, the General Registry, the police, but obtained no information whatever. Martin seemed to have dissolved in the air. Darwin returned to Berlin and reluctantly mailed the third postcard. On Friday, a huge man, obviously a foreigner, called at Zilanov’s new publishing house (Russian calendars and political pamphlets); upon taking a closer look, Zilanov recognized in him the young Englishman who had courted his daughter in London. Speaking German (which Zilanov understood somewhat better than English) Darwin calmly related his conversation with Martin. “But wait,” said Zilanov. “There is something not logical here. He said to my daughter he would work in a factory near Berlin. You are sure he went away? What a strange history!” “At first I thought he was joking,” said Darwin, “but now I don’t know what to think. If he has really——” “What a crazy fellow,” exclaimed Zilanov. “Who would have supposed! The young man produced an effect of good sense, of solidity. It’s simply hard to believe, you know, looks like some kind of provocation. Gut. The first thing to do is to find if my daughter knows anything about this. Let’s go to my quarters.”
When Sonia saw her father coming in with Darwin and noticed the odd, solemn expression of their faces, she thought for one hundredth part of an instant that Darwin had come to make, this time officially, an offer of marriage (such momentary nightmares are known to occur). “Hello, hello, Sonia,” cried out Darwin with very artificial offhandedness. Zilanov, fixing his dull dark eyes on his daughter and “preparing her,” begged her not to be frightened, and told her practically the whole story right there, in the hallway. Sonia turned white as a sheet and sank down on one of the vestibule chairs. “But that’s awful,” she said softly. After a little pause, she slapped her knees and repeated in a still smaller voice: “That’s awful.” “Did he tell you anything? Do you have any information?” Zilanov kept asking her in Russian and German. Darwin stood rubbing his cheek, trying not to look at Sonia. He felt the most appalling thing a man of his race and set can feel: the urge to break into tears. “Of course, I know all about it,” said Sonia in a thin crescendo. Mrs. Zilanov appeared in the background, and her husband signaled to her not to disturb them. “Just what do you know? Come, out with it,” said Zilanov, and touched Sonia on the shoulder. She suddenly doubled over and began to sob loudly, burying her face in her hands. Then she unbent, emitted a great gasp as if she were choking, swallowed, and began to scream between sobs, “They’ll kill him, oh God, they’ll kill him.” “Control yourself,” said Zilanov. “Don’t scream. I demand that you explain quietly and clearly what it was that he told you. Olya” (addressing his wife), “take this gentleman somewhere——Yes, to the drawing room, ach, never mind the electrician. Sonia, stop screaming! You’ll frighten Irina. Stop, I demand it.”
He spent a long time comforting and questioning her. Darwin sat gravely in the drawing room. An electrician was also there, busy mending a socket and plug, looking up and down again as the light went on and off.
“The child is obviously right in demanding that immediate measures be taken,” said Zilanov when he and Darwin had regained the street. “But what can one do? Besides, I don’t think there is as much romance of adventure here as seems to her. She tends to see things that way. Very high-strung nature. I simply refuse to believe that a young man, pretty much removed from Russian political problems and more of a foreign cut I’d say, could prove capable of—well, of a high deed, if you like. Naturally, I shall get in touch with certain people, and I may have to go to Latvia, but the matter is fairly hopeless, if he has really tried to steal across the border. By the way, it is so strange, but I was the one, yes, I, who years ago informed Frau Edelweiss of the death of her first husband.”
A few more days passed. The only point to become clear was that one had to be patient and wait. Not Zilanov, but Darwin went to Switzerland to inform Mrs. Edelweiss. In Lausanne everything looked gray, a fine rain was falling. Higher up in the mountains there was an odor of damp snow, and water dripped from the trees because of the sudden thaw that had followed the first frosts. The car he had hired brought him quickly to the village, skidded on a curve and overturned in the ditch. The only damage was the chauffeur’s bruised arm. Darwin scrambled out, shook the wet snow off his overcoat and asked a villager how far it was to Henry Edelweiss’s place. He was shown the shortest way—a footpath through a fir forest. Once out of the woods, he crossed a dirt road, went up an avenue, and saw the ornate greenish-brown house. The rubber soles of his sturdy shoes left patterned impressions on the dark soil in front of the wicket. These footprints slowly filled with muddy water, and a little later the wicket he had not closed properly creaked in a gust of damp wind and violently swung open. Then a titmouse alighted on it, uttered a tsi-tsi-tsi and an incha-incha, and flew over to the branch of a fir. Everything was very wet and dim. An hour elapsed. Darwin emerged from the brown depths of the melancholy garden, closed the wicket behind him (it promptly opened again), and started back along the path through the woods. There he paused to light his pipe. His ample camelhair coat was unbuttoned, the ends of his striped scarf dangled at his chest. It was quiet in the woods, all one could hear was a faint gurgle: water was running somewhere under the wet gray snow. Darwin listened and for no perceptible reason shook his head. His pipe, which had gone out, emitted a helpless sucking sound. He said something under his breath, rubbed his cheek pensively, and walked on. The air was dingy, here and there tree roots traversed the trail, black fir needles now and then brushed against his shoulder, the dark path passed between the tree trunks in picturesque and mysterious windings.
About the Author
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to the Crimea in 1917, during the Bolshevik Revolution, then went into exile in Europe. Nabokov studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, earning a degree in French and Russian literature in 1922,
and lived in Berlin and Paris for the next two decades, writing prolifically, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, memoirist, critic, and translator) while teaching Russian, creative writing, and literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of the master prose stylists of the century in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including Lolita—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.
BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ADA, OR ARDOR
Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0
BEND SINISTER
While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9
DESPAIR
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication, Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1
THE ENCHANTER
The Enchanter is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3
THE EYE
The Eye is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1
THE GIFT
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5
GLORY
Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING
Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE
Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0
LOLITA
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72728-6
THE LUZHIN DEFENSE
As a young boy, Luzhin is unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen—an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge, and rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72722-4
PALE FIRE
Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreward and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72342-4
PNIN
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72341-7
THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT
Many knew of Sebastian Knight, distinguished novelist, but few knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with clues found in the novelist’s private papers.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72726-2
SPEAK, MEMORY
Speak, Memory is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works.
Autobiography/Literature/978-0-679-72339-4
ALSO AVAILABLE
The Annotated Lolita, 978-0-679-72729-3
Laughter in the Dark, 978-0-679-72450-6
Lolita: A Screenplay, 978-0-679-77255-2
Mary, 978-0-679-72620-3
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 978-0-679-72997-6
Strong Opinions, 978-0-679-72609-8
Transparent Things, 978-0-679-72541-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
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