The Eye

by Vladimir Nabokov

  It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio’s clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u’s, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine. There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, “What would have happened if …” and substituting one chance occurrence for another, observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy event that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a “thus” and an “otherwise,” with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.

  All these simple thoughts about the wavering nature of life come to mind when I think how easily I might never have happened to rent a room in the house at 5 Peacock Street, or meet Vanya and her sister, or Roman Bogdanovich, or many other people whom I suddenly found, who started to live all at once, so unexpectedly and unwontedly, around me. And again, had I settled in a different house after my spectral exit from the hospital, perhaps an unimaginable happiness would have become my familiar interlocutor … who knows, who knows …

  Above me, on the top floor, lived a Russian family. I met them through Weinstock, from whom they took books—another fascinating device on the part of the fantasy that directs life. Before actually becoming acquainted, we often met on the stairs, and exchanged somewhat wary glances the way Russians do abroad. I noticed Vanya immediately, and immediately my heart gave a flutter; as when, in a dream, you enter a dream-safe room and find therein, at your dream’s disposal, your dream-cornered prey. She had a married sister, Evgenia, a young woman with a nice squarish face that made you think of an amiable and quite handsome bulldog. There was also Evgenia’s burly husband. Once, in the downstairs hall, I happened to hold the door for him, and his mispronounced German “thank you” (danke) rhymed exactly with the locative case of the Russian word for “bank”—where, by the way, he worked.

  With them lived Marianna Nikolaevna, a relative, and, in the evenings, they would have guests, nearly always the same ones. Evgenia was considered the lady of the house. She had a pleasant sense of humor; it was she who had nicknamed her sister “Vanya,” when the latter had demanded to be called “Mona Vanna” (after the heroine of some play or other), finding the sound of her real name—Varvara—somehow suggestive of corpulence and pockmarks. It took me a little time to get used to this diminutive of the masculine “Ivan”; gradually, however, it acquired for me the exact shade that Vanya associated with languorous feminine names.

  The two sisters resembled each other; the frank bulldogish heaviness of the elder’s features was just perceptible in Vanya, but in a different way that lent significance and originality to the beauty of her face. The sisters’ eyes, too, were similar—black-brown, slightly asymmetric, and a trifle slanted, with amusing little folds on the dark lids. Vanya’s eyes were more opaque at the iris than Evgenia’s, and, unlike her sister’s, somewhat myopic, as if their beauty made them not quite suitable for everyday use. Both girls were brunettes and wore their hair the same way: a parting in the middle and a big tight bun low on the nape. But the elder’s hair did not lie with the same heavenly smoothness, and lacked that precious gloss. I want to shake off Evgenia, get rid of her altogether, so as to have done with the necessity of comparing the sisters; and at the same time I know that if it were not for the resemblance, Vanya’s charm would not be quite complete. Only her hands were not elegant: the pale palm contrasted too strongly to the back of the hand, which was very pink and large-knuckled. And there were always little white flecks on her round fingernails.

  What further concentration is needed, what added intensity must one’s gaze attain, for the brain to enslave the visual image of a person? There they are sitting on the sofa; Evgenia is wearing a black velvet dress, and large beads adorn her white neck; Vanya is in crimson, with small pearls in place of beads; her eyes are lowered under their thick black brows; a dab of powder has not disguised the slight rash on the wide glabella. The sisters wear identical new shoes, and keep glancing at each other’s feet—no doubt the same kind of shoe does not look so nice on one’s own foot as on that of another. Marianna, a blonde lady doctor with a peremptory voice, is speaking to Smurov and Roman Bogdanovich about the horrors of the recent civil war in Russia. Khrushchov, Evgenia’s husband, a jovial gentleman with a fat nose—which he manipulates continually, tugging at it, or getting hold of a nostril and trying to twist it off—is standing in the doorway to the next room, talking with Mukhin, a young man with a pince-nez. The two are facing each other from opposite sides of the doorway, like two atlantes.

  Mukhin and the majestic Roman Bogdanovich have long known the family, while Smurov is comparatively a newcomer, although he hardly looks it. None could discern in him the shyness that makes a person so conspicuous among people who know each other well and are bound together by the established echoes of private jokes and by an allusive residue of people’s names that to them are alive with special significance, making the newcomer feel as if the magazine story he has started to read had really begun long ago, in old unobtainable issues; and as he listens to the general conversation, rife with references to incidents unknown to him, the outsider keeps silent and shifts his gaze to whoever is speaking, and, the quicker the exchanges, the more mobile become his eyes; but soon the invisible world that lives in the words of the people around him begins to oppress him and he wonders if they have not deliberately contrived a conversation to which he is a stranger. In Smurov’s case, however, even if he did occasionally feel left out, he certainly did not show it. I must say that he made a rather favorable impression on me those first evenings. He was not very tall, but well proportioned and dapper. His plain black suit and black bow tie seemed to intimate, in a reserved way, some secret mourning. His pale, thin face was youthful, but the perceptive observer could distinguish in it the traces of sorrow and experience. His manners were excellent. A quiet, somewhat melancholy smile lingered on his lips. He spoke little, but everything he said was intelligent and appropriate, and his infrequent jokes, while too subtle to arouse roars of laughter, seemed to unlock a concealed door in the conversation, letting in an unexpected freshness. One would have thought Vanya could not help liking him immediately because of that noble and enigmatic modesty, that pallor of forehead and slenderness of hand … Certain things—for example, the word “blagodarstvuyte” (“thank you”), pronounced without the usual slurring, in full, thus retaining its bouquet of consonants—were bound to reveal to the perceptive observer that Smurov belonged to the best St. Petersburg society.

  Marianna paused for an instant in her account of the horrors of war: she had noticed at last that Roman Bogdanovich, a dignified man with a beard, wanted to put in a word, holding it in his mouth like a large caramel. He had no luck, however, for Smurov was quicker.

  “When ‘harking to the horrors of the war,’ ” said Smurov misquoting with a smile from a famous poem, “I feel sorry ‘neither for the friend, nor for the friend’s mother,’ but for those who have never been to war. It is difficult to put into words the musical delight that the singing of bullets gives you … Or, when you are flying at full gallop to the attack——”

  “War is always hideous,” tersely interrupted Marianna. “I must have been brought up differently from you. A human being who takes another’s life is always a murderer, be he an executione
r or a cavalry officer.”

  “Personally——” began Smurov, but she interrupted again:

  “Military gallantry is a vestige of the past. In my medical practice I have had many occasions to see people who have been crippled or had their lives wrecked by war. Nowadays humanity aspires to new ideals. There is nothing more debasing than to serve as cannon fodder. Perhaps a different upbringing——”

  “Personally——” said Smurov.

  “A different upbringing,” she went on rapidly, “in regard to ideas of humaneness and general cultural interests, makes me look at war through different eyes than you. I have never blazed away at people or driven a bayonet into anyone. Rest assured that among my medical colleagues you will find more heroes than on the battlefield——”

  “Personally, I——” said Smurov.

  “But enough of this,” said Marianna. “I can see neither of us is going to convince the other. The discussion is closed.”

  A brief silence followed. Smurov sat calmly stirring his tea. Yes, he must be a former officer, a daredevil who liked to flirt with death, and it is only out of modesty that he says nothing about his adventures.

  “What I wanted to say was this,” boomed Roman Bogdanovich: “You mentioned Constantinople, Marianna Nikolaevna. I had a close friend there among the émigré crowd, a certain Kashmarin, with whom I subsequently quarreled, an extremely rough and quick-tempered fellow, even if he did cool off fast and was kind in his own way. Incidentally, he once thrashed a Frenchman nearly to death out of jealousy. Well, he told me the following story. Gives an idea of Turkish mores. Imagine——”

  “Thrashed him?” Smurov broke in with a smile. “Oh, good. That’s what I like——”

  “Nearly to death,” repeated Roman Bogdanovich, and launched into his narrative.

  Smurov kept nodding approvingly as he listened. He was obviously a person who, behind his unpretentiousness and quietness, concealed a fiery spirit. He was doubtless capable, in a moment of wrath, of slashing a chap into bits, and, in a moment of passion, of carrying a frightened and perfumed girl beneath his cloak on a windy night to a waiting boat with muffled oarlocks, under a slice of honey-dew moon, as somebody did in Roman Bogdanovich’s story. If Vanya was any judge of character, she must have marked this.

  “I have put it all down in detail in my diary,” Roman Bogdanovich concluded complacently, and took a swallow of tea.

  Mukhin and Khrushchov again froze beside their respective doorjambs; Vanya and Evgenia smoothed kneeward their dresses with an identical stroke; Marianna, for no apparent reason, fixed her gaze on Smurov, who was sitting with his profile toward her and, in keeping with the formula for manly tics, kept tensing his jaw muscles under her unfriendly gaze. I liked him. Yes, I definitely liked him; and I felt that the more intently Marianna, the cultured lady doctor, stared, the more distinct and harmonious became the image of a young daredevil with iron nerves, pale from sleepless nights passed in steppe ravines and shell-shattered railway stations. Everything seemed to be going well.

  Vikentiy Lvovich Weinstock, for whom Smurov worked as salesman (having replaced the helpless old man), knew less about him than anyone. There was in Weinstock’s nature an attractive streak of recklessness. This is probably why he hired someone he did not know well. His suspiciousness required regular nourishment. Just as there are normal and perfectly decent people who unexpectedly turn out to have a passion for collecting dragonflies or engravings, so Weinstock, a junk dealer’s grandson and an antiquarian’s son, staid, well-balanced Weinstock who had been in the book business all his life, had constructed a separate little world for himself. There, in the penumbra, mysterious events took place.

  India aroused a mystical respect in him: he was one of those people who, at the mention of Bombay, inevitably imagine not a British civil servant, crimson from the heat, but a fakir. He believed in the jinx and the hex, in magic numbers and the Devil, in the evil eye, in the secret power of symbols and signs, and in bare-bellied bronze idols. In the evenings, he would place his hands, like a petrified pianist, upon a small, light, three-legged table. It would start to creak softly, emitting cricketlike chirps, and, having gathered strength, would rise up on one side and then awkwardly but forcefully tap a leg against the floor. Weinstock would recite the alphabet. The little table would follow attentively and tap at the proper letters. Messages came from Caesar, Mohammed, Pushkin, and a dead cousin of Weinstock’s. Sometimes the table would be naughty: it would rise and remain suspended in mid-air, or else attack Weinstock and butt him in the stomach. Weinstock would good-naturedly pacify the spirit, like an animal tamer playing along with a frisky beast; he would back across the whole room, all the while keeping his fingertips on the table waddling after him. For his talks with the dead, he also employed a kind of marked saucer and some other strange contraption with a pencil protruding underneath. The conversations were recorded in special notebooks. A dialog might go thus:

  WEINSTOCK: Have you found rest?

  LENIN: This is not Baden-Baden.

  WEINSTOCK: Do you wish to tell me of life beyond the grave?

  LENIN (after a pause): I prefer not to.

  WEINSTOCK: Why?

  LENIN: Must wait till there is a plenum.

  A lot of these notebooks had accumulated, and Weinstock used to say that someday he would have the more significant conversations published. Very entertaining was a ghost called Abum, of unknown origin, silly and tasteless, who acted as intermediary, arranging interviews between Weinstock and various dead celebrities. He treated Weinstock with vulgar familiarity.

  WEINSTOCK: Who art thou, O Spirit?

  REPLY: Ivan Sergeyevich.

  WEINSTOCK: Which Ivan Sergeyevich?

  REPLY: Turgenev.

  WEINSTOCK: Do you continue to create masterpieces?

  REPLY: Idiot.

  WEINSTOCK: Why do you abuse me?

  REPLY (table convulsed): Fooled you! This is Abum.

  Sometimes when Abum began his horseplay, it was impossible to get rid of him throughout the séance. “He’s as bad as a monkey,” Weinstock would complain.

  Weinstock’s partner in these games was a little pink-faced red-haired lady with plump little hands, who smelled of eucalyptus gum, and had always a cold. I learned later that they had been having an affair for a long time, but Weinstock, who in certain respects was singularly frank, never once let this slip out. They addressed each other by their names and patronymics and behaved as though they were merely good friends. She would often drop in at the store and, warming herself by the stove, read a theosophist journal published in Riga. She encouraged Weinstock in his experiments with the hereafter and used to tell how the furniture in her room periodically came to life, how a deck of cards would fly from one spot to another or scatter itself all over the floor, and how once her bedside lamp had hopped down from its table and begun to imitate a dog impatiently tugging at its leash; the plug had finally shot out, there was the sound of a scampering off in the dark, and the lamp was later found in the hall, right by the front door. Weinstock used to say that, alas, real “power” had not been granted him, that his nerves were as slack as old suspenders, while a medium’s nerves were practically like the strings of a harp. He did not, however, believe in materialization, and it was only as a curiosity that he preserved a snapshot given him by a spiritualist that showed a pale, pudgy woman with closed eyes disgorging a flowing, cloud-like mass.

  He was fond of Edgar Poe and Barbey d’Aurevilly, adventures, unmaskings, prophetic dreams, and secret societies. The presence of Masonic lodges, suicides’ clubs, Black Masses, and especially Soviet agents dispatched from “over there” (and how eloquent and awesome was the intonation of that “over there”!) to shadow some poor little émigré man, transformed Weinstock’s Berlin into a city of wonders amid which he felt perfectly at home. He would hint that he was a member of a large organization, supposedly dedicated to the unraveling and rending of the delicate webs spun by a certain bright-scarlet s
pider, which Weinstock had had reproduced on a dreadfully garish signet ring giving an exotic something to his hairy hand.

  “They are everywhere,” he would say with quiet significance. “Everywhere. If I come to a party where there are five, ten, perhaps twenty people, among them, you can be quite sure, oh yes, quite sure, there is at least one agent. I am talking, say, with Ivan Ivanovich, and who can swear that Ivan Ivanovich is to be trusted? Or, say, I have a man working for me in my office—any kind of office, not necessarily this bookstore (I want to keep all personalities out of this, you understand me)—well, how can I know that he is not an agent? They are everywhere, I repeat, everywhere … It is such subtle espionage … I come to a party, all the guests know each other, and yet there is no guarantee that this very same modest and polite Ivan Ivanovich is not actually …” and Weinstock would nod meaningfully.

  I soon began to suspect that Weinstock, albeit very guardedly, was alluding to a definite person. Generally speaking, whoever had a chat with him would come away with the impression that Weinstock’s target was either Weinstock’s interlocutor or a common friend. Most remarkable of all was that once—and Weinstock recalled this occasion with pride—his flair had not deceived him: a person he knew fairly well, a friendly, easygoing, “honest-as-God fellow” (Weinstock’s expression), really turned out to be a venomous Soviet sneak. It is my impression that he would be less sorry to let a spy slip away than to miss the chance to hint to the spy that he, Weinstock, had found him out.