Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  As a typist L.S. was magnificent. Hardly had I finished dictating one sentence, as I paced back and forth, than it had reached her furrow like a handful of grain, and with one eyebrow raised she was already looking at me, waiting for the next strewing. If a sudden alteration for the better occurred to me in mid session, I preferred not to spoil the wonderful give-and-take rhythm of our joint work by introducing painful pauses of word weighing—especially enervating and sterile when a self-conscious author is aware that the bright lady at the waiting typewriter is longing to come up with a helpful suggestion; I contented myself therefore with marking the passage in my manuscript so as later to desecrate with my scrawl her immaculate creation; but she was only glad, of course, to retype the page at her leisure.

  We usually had a ten-minute break around four—or four-thirty if I could not rein in snorting Pegasus on the dot. She would retire for a minute, closing one door after another with a really unearthly gentleness, to the humble toilettes across the corridor, and would reappear, just as silently, with a repowdered nose and a repainted smile, and I would have ready for her a glass of vin ordinaire and a pink gaufrette. It was during those innocent intervals that there began a certain thematic movement on the part of fate.

  Would I like to know something? (Dilatory sip and lip lick.) Well, at all my five public readings since the first on September 3, 1928, in the Salle Planiol, she had been present, she had applauded till her palms (showing palms) ached, and had made up her mind that next time she’d be smart and plucky enough to push her way through the crowd (yes, crowd—no need to smile ironically) with the firm intention of clasping my hand and pouring out her soul in a single word, which, however, she could never find—and that’s why, inexorably, she would always be left standing and beaming like a fool in the middle of the vacated hall. Would I despise her for having an album with reviews of my books pasted in—Morozov’s and Yablokov’s lovely essays as well as the trash of such hacks as Boris Nyet, and Boyarski? Did I know it was she who had left that mysterious bunch of irises on the spot where the urn with my wife’s ashes had been interred four years ago? Could I imagine that she could recite by heart every poem I had published in the émigré press of half-a-dozen countries? Or that she remembered thousands of enchanting minutiae scattered through all my novels such as the mallard’s quack-quack (in Tamara) “which to the end of one’s life would taste of Russian black bread because one had shared it with ducks in one’s childhood,” or the chess set (in Pawn Takes Queen) with a missing Knight “replaced by some sort of counter, a little orphan from another, unknown, game?”

  All this was spread over several sessions and distilled very cunningly, and already by the end of February when a copy of The Red Top Hat, an impeccable typescript, lapped in an opulent envelope, had been delivered by hand (hers again) to the offices of Patria (the foremost Russian magazine in Paris), I felt enmeshed in a bothersome web.

  Not only had I never experienced the faintest twinge of desire in regard to beautiful Lyuba, but the indifference of my senses was turning to positive repulsion. The softer her glances fluttered, the more ungentlemanly my reaction became. Her very refinement had a dainty edge of vulgarity that infested with the sweetness of decay her entire personality. I began to notice with growing irritation such pathetic things as her odor, a quite respectable perfume (Adoration, I think) precariously overlaying the natural smell of a Russian maiden’s seldom bathed body: for an hour or so Adoration still held, but after that the underground would start to conduct more and more frequent forays, and when she raised her arms to put on her hat—but never mind, she was a well-meaning creature, and I hope she is a happy grandmother today.

  I would be a cad to describe our last meeting (March 1 of the same year). Suffice it to say that in the middle of typing a rhymed Russian translation that I had made of Keats’ To Autumn (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”) she broke down, and tormented me till at least eight P.M. with her confessions and tears. When at last she left, I lost another hour composing a detailed letter asking her never to come back. Incidentally, it was the first time that an unfinished leaf was left by her in my typewriter. I removed it and rediscovered it several weeks later among my papers, and then deliberately preserved it because it was Annette who completed the job, with a couple of typos and an x-ed erasure in the last lines—and something about the juxtaposition appealed to my combinational slant.

  3

  In this memoir my wives and my books are interlaced monogrammatically like some sort of watermark or ex libris design; and in writing this oblique autobiography—oblique, because dealing mainly not with pedestrian history but with the mirages of romantic and literary matters—I consistently try to dwell as lightly as inhumanly possible on the evolution of my mental illness. Yet Dementia is one of the characters in my story.

  By the mid-Thirties little had changed in my health since the first half of 1922 and its awful torments. My battle with factual, respectable life still consisted of sudden delusions, sudden reshufflings—kaleidoscopic, stained-glass reshufflings!—of fragmented space. I still felt Gravity, that infernal and humiliating contribution to our perceptual world, grow into me like a monstrous toenail in stabs and wedges of intolerable pain (incomprehensible to the happy simpleton who finds nothing fantastic and agonizing in the escape of a pencil or penny under something—under the desk on which one will live, under the bed on which one will die). I still could not cope with the abstraction of direction in space, so that any given stretch of the world was either permanently “right-hand” or permanently “left-hand,” or at best the one could be changed to the other only by a spine-dislocating effort of the will. Oh, how things and people tortured me, my dear heart, I could not tell you! In point of fact you were not yet even born.

  Sometime in the mid-Thirties, in black accursed Paris, I remember visiting a distant relative of mine (a niece of the LATH lady!). She was a sweet old stranger. She sat all day in a straight-back armchair exposed to the continuous attacks of three, four, more than four, deranged children, whom she was paid (by the Destitute Russian Noblewomen’s Aid Association) to watch, while their parents were working in places not so dreadful and dreary in themselves as dreary and difficult to reach by public conveyance. I sat on an old hassock at her feet. Her talk flowed on and on, smooth, untroubled, reflecting the image of radiant days, serenity, wealth, goodness. Yet all the time this or that poor little monster with a slavering mouth and a squint would move upon her from behind a screen or a table and rock her chair or clutch at her skirt. When the squealing became too loud she would only wince a little which hardly affected her reminiscent smile. She kept a kind of fly whisk within easy reach and this she occasionally brandished to chase away the bolder aggressors; but all the time, all the time, she continued her purling soliloquy and I understood that I, too, should ignore the rude turmoil and din around her.

  I submit that my life, my plight, the voice of words that was my sole joy and the secret struggle with the wrong shape of things, bore some resemblance to that poor lady’s predicament. And mind you, those were my best days, with only a pack of grimacing goblins to hold at bay.

  The zest, the strength, the clarity of my art remained unimpaired—at least to a certain extent. I enjoyed, I persuaded myself to enjoy, the solitude of work and that other, even more subtle solitude, the solitude of an author facing, from behind the bright shield of his manuscript, an amorphous audience, barely visible in its dark pit.

  The jumble of spatial obstacles separating my bedside lamp from the illumined islet of a public lectern was abolished by the magic of thoughtful friends who helped me to get to this or that remote hall without my having to tussle with horribly small and thin, sticky, bus-ticket slips or to venture into the thunderous maze of the Métro. As soon as I was safely platformed with my typed or handwritten sheets at breastbone level on the desk before me, I forgot all about the presence of three hundred eavesdroppers. A decanter of watered vodka, my only lectorial whim, was also my onl
y link with the material universe. Similar to a painter’s spotlight on the brown brow of some ecstatical ecclesiastic at the moment of divine revelation, the radiance enclosing me brought out with oracular accuracy every imperfection in my text. A memoirist has noted that not only did I slow down now and then while unclipping a pencil and replacing a comma by a semicolon, but that I had been known to stop and frown over a sentence and reread it, and cross it out, and insert a correction and “re-mouth the whole passage with a kind of defiant complacency.”

  My handwriting was good in fair copies, but I felt more comfortable with a typescript before me, and I was again without an expert typist. To insert the same wanter in the same paper would have been foolhardy: what if it were to bring back Lyuba, flushed with renewed hope, and rewind that damned cycle all over again?

  I rang up Stepanov, thinking he might help; he guessed he could, and after a muffled confabulation with his fussy wife, just on the brim of the membrane (all I made out was “mad people are unpredictable”), she took over. They knew a very decent girl who had worked at the Russian nursery school “Passy na Rousi” to which Dolly had gone four or five years ago. The girl’s name was Anna Ivanovna Blagovo. Did I know Oksman, the owner of the Russian bookshop on rue Cuvier?

  “Yes, slightly. But I want to ask you—”

  “Well,” she went on, interrupting me, “Annette sekre-tarstvovala for him while his regular typist was hospitalized, but she is now quite well again, and you might—”

  “That’s fine,” I said, “but I want to ask you, Berta Abramovna, why did you accuse me of being an ‘unpredictable madman’? I can assure you that I am not in the habit of raping young women—”

  “Gospod’ s vami, golubchik! (What an idea, my dear!)” exclaimed Mrs. Stepanov and proceeded to explain that she had been scolding her absentminded husband for sitting down on her new handbag when attending to the telephone.

  Although I did not believe one word of her version (too quick! too glib!), I pretended to accept it and promised to look up her bookseller. A few minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it (at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most soothing voyeuse imaginable), Berta Stepanov telephoned to say that the oxman (what a shiver my Iris derived from Dr. Moreau’s island zoo—especially from such bits as the “screaming shape,” still half-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would be up till dawn in his shop, among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), that I was a noctambule, so perhaps I might like to stroll over to the Boyan Bookshop sans tarder, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.

  After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings of insomnia and a walk to rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where according to police statistics an average of forty foreigners and God knows how many unfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced the least urge to commit suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in any light). But I must admit that on that particular night on the fourth or fifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling’s death, I must have looked pretty suspect, in my black suit and dramatic muffler, to an average policeman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign when a hatless person sobs as he walks, being moved not by lines he might have composed himself but by something he hideously mistakes for his own and presently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:

  Zvezdoobraznost’ nebesnyh zvyozd

  Vidish’ tol’ko skvoz’ slyozy …

  (Heavenly stars are seen as stellate

  only through tears.)

  I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than the ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endless fence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose light would delicately select for its heart-piercing game overhead a young emerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.

  4

  The “Boyan” publishing firm (Morozov’s and mine was the “Bronze Horseman,” its main rival), with a bookshop (selling not only émigré editions but also tractor novels from Moscow) and a lending library, occupied a smart three-story house of the hôtel particulier type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the vista of reverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a group of stone nymphs. The house had belonged to the Merlin de Malaune family and had been acquired at the turn of the century by a Russian cosmopolitan, Dmitri de Midoff who with his friend S. I. Stepanov established there the headquarters of an anti-despotic conspiracy. The latter liked to recall the sign language of old-fashioned rebellion: the half-drawn curtain and alabaster vase revealed in the drawing-room window so as to indicate to the expected guest from Russia that the way was clear. An aesthetic touch graced revolutionary intrigues in those years. Midoff died soon after World War One, and by that time the Terrorist party, to which those cozy people belonged, had lost its “stylistic appeal” as Stepanov himself put it. I do not know who later acquired the house or how it happened that Oks (Osip Lvovich Oksman, 1885?–1943?) rented it for his business.

  The house was dark except for three windows: two adjacent rectangles of light in the middle of the upper-floor row, d8 and e8, Continental notation (where the letter denotes the file and the number the rank of a chess square) and another light just below at e7. Good God, had I forgotten at home the note I had scribbled for the unknown Miss Blagovo? No, it was still there in my breast pocket under the old, treasured, horribly hot and long Trinity College muffler. I hesitated between a side door on my right—marked Magazin—and the main entrance, with a chess coronet above the bell. Finally I chose the coronet. We were playing a Blitz game: my opponent moved at once, lighting the vestibule fan at d6. One could not help wondering if under the house there might not exist the five lower floors which would complete the chessboard and that somewhere, in subterranean mystery, new men might not be working out the doom of a fouler tyranny.

  Oks, a tall, bony, elderly man with a Shakespearean pate, started to tell me how honored he was at getting a chance to welcome the author of Camera—here I thrust the note I carried into his extended palm and prepared to leave. He had dealt with hysterical artists before. None could resist his bland bookside manner.

  “Yes, I know all about it,” he said, retaining and patting my hand. “She’ll call you; though, to tell the truth, I do not envy anybody having to use the services of that capricious, absentminded young lady. We’ll go up to my study, unless you prefer—no, I don’t think so,” he continued, opening a double door on the left and dubiously switching on the light for a moment to reveal a chilly reading room in which a long baize-covered table, dingy chairs, and the cheap busts of Russian classics contradicted a lovely painted ceiling swarming with naked children among purple, pink, and amber clusters of grapes. On the right (another tentative light snapped) a short passage led to the shop proper where I recalled having once had a row with a pert old female who objected to my not wishing to pay for a few copies of my own novel. So we walked up the once noble stairs, which now had something seldom seen even in Viennese dream comics, namely disparate balustrades, the sinistral one an ugly new ramp-and-railing affair and the other, the original ornate set of battered, doomed, but still charming carved wood with supports in the form of magnified chess pieces.

  “I am honored—” began Oks all over again, as we reached his so-called Kabinet (study), at e7, a room cluttered with ledgers, packed books, half-unpacked books, towers of books, heaps of newspapers, pamphlets, galleys, and slim white paperback collections of poems—tragic offals, with the cool, restrained titles t
hen in fashion—Prokhlada (“coolness”), Sderzhannost’ (“restraint”).

  He was one of those persons who for some reason or other are often interrupted, but whom no force in our blessed galaxy will prevent from completing their sentence, despite new interruptions, of an elemental or poetical nature, the death of his interlocutor (“I was just saying to him, doctor—”), or the entrance of a dragon. In fact it would seem that those interruptions actually help to polish the phrase and give it its final form. In the meantime the agonizing itch of its being unfinished poisons the mind. It is worse than the pimple which cannot be sprung before one gets home, and is almost as bad as a lifer’s recollection of that last little rape nipped in the sweet bud by the intrusion of an accursed policeman.

  “I am deeply honored,” finished at last Oks, “to welcome to this historic house the author of Camera Obscura, your finest book in my modest opinion!”

  “It ought to be modest,” I said, controlling myself (opal ice in Nepal before the avalanche), “because, you idiot, the title of my novel is Camera Lucida.”

  “There, there,” said Oks (really a very dear man and a gentleman), after a terrible pause during which all the remainders opened like fairy-tale flowers in a fancy film, “A slip of the tongue does not deserve such a harsh rebuke. Lucida, Lucida, by all means! A propos—concerning Anna Blagovo (another piece of unfinished business—or, who knows, a touching attempt to divert and pacify me with an interesting anecdote), I am not sure you know that I am Berta’s first cousin. Thirty-five years ago in St. Petersburg she and I worked in the same student organization. We were preparing the assassination of the Premier. How far all that is! His daily route had to be closely established; I was one of the observers. Standing at a certain corner every day in the disguise of a vanilla-ice-cream vendor! Can you imagine that? Nothing came of our plans. They were thwarted by Azef, the great double agent.”