Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  and a bird’s footprints across it.

  I’ll see nothing at all

  with my old eyes,

  yet I’ll know it was there, the source.

  How come, then, that when I look back

  at twelve—one fifth of the stretch!—

  with visibility presumably better

  and no junk in between,

  I can’t even imagine

  that patch of wet sand

  and the walking bird

  and the gleam of my source?

  “Almost Poundian in purity,” remarked Louise—which annoyed me, because I thought Pound a fake.

  7

  Château Vignedor, Bel’s charming boarding school in Switzerland, on a charming hill three hundred meters above charming Larive on the Rhône, had been recommended to Louise in the autumn of 1957 by a Swiss lady in Quirn’s French Department. There were two other “finishing” schools of the same general type that might have done just as well, but Louise set her sights on Vignedor because of a chance remark made not even by her Swiss friend but by a chance girl in a chance travel agency who summed up the qualities of the school in one phrase: “Many Tunisian princesses.”

  It offered five main subjects (French, Psychology, Savoir-vivre, Couture, Cuisine), various sports (under the direction of Christine Dupraz, the once famous skier), and a dozen additional classes on request (which would keep the plainest girl there till she married), including Ballet and Bridge. Another supplément—especially suitable for orphans or unneeded children—was a summer trimester, filling up the year’s last remaining segment with excursions and nature studies, to be spent by a few lucky girls at the home of the headmistress, Madame de Turm, an Alpine chalet some twelve hundred meters higher: “Its solitary light, twinkling in a black fold of the mountains, can be seen,” said the prospectus in four languages, “from the Château on clear nights.” There was also some kind of camp for differently handicapped local children in different years conducted by our medically inclined sports directress.

  1957, 1958, 1959. Sometimes, seldom, hiding from Louise, who objected to Bel’s twenty well-spaced monosyllables’ costing us fifty dollars, I would call her from Quirn, but after a few such calls I received a curt note from Mme. de Turm, asking me not to upset my daughter by telephoning, and so retreated into my dark shell. Dark shell, dark years of my heart! They coincided oddly with the composition of my most vigorous, most festive, and commercially most successful novel, A Kingdom by the Sea. Its demands, the fun and the fancy of it, its intricate imagery, made up in a way for the absence of my beloved Bel. It was also bound to reduce, though I was hardly conscious of that, my correspondence with her (well-meant, chatty, dreadfully artificial letters which she seldom troubled to answer). Even more startling, of course, more incomprehensible to me, in groaning retrospect, is the effect my self-entertainment had on the number and length of our visits between 1957 and 1960 (when she eloped with a progressive blond-bearded young American). You were appalled to learn the other day, when we discussed the present notes, that I had seen “beloved Bel” only four times in three summers and that only two of our visits lasted as long as a couple of weeks. I must add, however, that she resolutely declined to spend her vacations at home. I ought never, of course, have dumped her in Europe. I should have elected to sweat it out in my hellish household, between a childish woman and a somber child.

  The work on my novel also impinged on my marital mores, making of me a less passionate and more indulgent husband: I let Louise go on suspiciously frequent trips to out-of-town unlisted eye specialists and neglected her in the meantime for Rose Brown, our cute housemaid who took three soapshowers daily and thought frilly black panties “did something to guys.”

  But the greatest havoc wrought by my work was its effect on my lectures. To it I sacrificed, like Cain, the flowers of my summers, and, like Abel, the sheep of the campus. Because of it, the process of my academic discarnation reached its ultimate stage. The last vestiges of human interconnection were severed, for I not only vanished physically from the lecture hall but had my entire course taped so as to be funneled through the College Closed Circuit into the rooms of headphoned students. Rumor had it that I was ready to quit; in fact, an anonymous punster wrote in the Quirn Quarterly, Spring, 1959: “His Temerity is said to have asked for a raise before emeriting.”

  In the summer of that year my third wife and I saw Bel for the last time. Allan Garden (after whom the genus of the Cape Jasmin should have been named, so great and triumphant was the flower in his buttonhole) had just been united in wedlock to his youthful Virginia, after several years of cloudless concubinage. They were to live to the combined age of 170 in absolute bliss, yet one grim fateful chapter remained to be constructed. I toiled over its first pages at the wrong desk, in the wrong hotel, above the wrong lake, with a view of the wrong isoletta at my left elbow. The only right thing was a pregnant-shaped bottle of Gattinara before me. In the middle of a mangled sentence Louise came to join me from Pisa, where I gathered—with amused indifference—that she had recoupled with a former lover. Playing on the strings of her meek uneasiness I took her to Switzerland, which she detested. An early dinner with Bel was scheduled at the Larive Grand Hotel. She arrived with that Christ-haired youth, both purple trousered. The maître d’hôtel murmured something over the menu to my wife, and she rode up and brought down my oldest necktie for the young lout to put around his Adam’s apple and scrawny neck. His grandmother had been related by marriage, so it turned out, to a third cousin of Louise’s grandfather, the not quite untarnished Boston banker. This took care of the main course. We had coffee and kirsch in the lounge, and Charlie Everett showed us pictures of the summer Camp for Blind Children (who were spared the sight of its drab locust trees and rings of ashed refuse amidst the riverside burdocks) which he and Bella (Bella!) were supervising. He was twenty-five years old. He had spent five years studying Russian, and spoke it as fluently, he said, as a trained seal. A sample justified the comparison. He was a dedicated “revolutionary,” and a hopeless nincompoop, knowing nothing, crazy about jazz, existentialism, Leninism, pacifism, and African Art. He thought snappy pamphlets and catalogues so much more “meaningful” than fat old books. A sweet, stale, and unhealthy smell emanated from the poor fellow. Throughout the dinner and coffee-drinking ordeal I never once—never once, reader!—looked up at my Bel, but as we were about to part (forever) I did look at her, and she had new twin lines from nostrils to wicks, and she wore granny glasses, and a middle part, and had lost all her pubescent prettiness, remnants of which I had still glimpsed during a visit to Larive a spring and winter ago. They had to be back at half-past-twenty, alas—not really “alas.”

  “Come and see us at Quirn soon, soon, Dolly,” I said, as we all stood on the sidewalk with mountains outlined in solid black against an aquamarine sky, and choughs jacking harshly, flying in flocks to roost, away, away.

  I cannot explain the slip, but it angered Bel more than anything had ever angered her at any time.

  “What is he saying?” she cried, looking in turn at Louise, at her beau, and again at Louise. “What does he mean? Why does he call me ‘Dolly’? Who is she for God’s sake? Why, why (turning to me), why did you say that?”

  “Obmolvka, prosti (lapse of the tongue, sorry),” I replied, dying, trying to turn everything into a dream, a dream about that hideous last moment.

  They walked briskly toward their little Klop car, he half-overtaking her, already poking the air with his car key, on her left, on her right. The aquamarine sky was now silent, darkish and empty, save for a star-shaped star about which I wrote a Russian elegy ages ago, in another world.

  “What a charming, good-natured, civilized, sexy young fellow,” said Louise as we stamped into the lift. “Are you in the mood tonight? Right away, Vad?”

  Part Five

  1

  This penultimate part of LATH, this spirited episode in my otherwise somewhat passive existence, is horribly hard to set do
wn, reminding me of the pensums, which the cruelest of my French governesses used to inflict upon me—some old saw to be copied cent fois (hiss and spittle)—in punishment for my adding my own marginal illustrations to those in her Petit Larousse or for exploring under the schoolroom table the legs of Lalage L., a little cousin, who shared lessons with me that unforgettable summer. I have, indeed, repeated the story of my dash to Leningrad in the late nineteen-sixties innumerable times in my mind, to packed audiences of my scribbling or dreaming selves—and yet I keep doubting both the necessity and the success of my dismal task. But you have argued the question, you are tenderly adamant, yes, and your decree is that I should relate my adventure in order to lend a semblance of significance to my daughter’s futile fate.

  In the summer of 1960, Christine Dupraz, who ran the summer camp for disabled children between cliff and highway, just east of Larive, informed me that Charlie Everett, one of her assistants, had eloped with my Bel after burning—in a grotesque ceremony that she visualized more clearly than I—his passport and a little American flag (bought at a souvenir stall especially for that purpose) “right in the middle of the Soviet Consul’s back garden”; whereupon the new “Karl Ivanovich Vetrov” and the eighteen-year-old Isabella, a ci-devant’s daughter, had gone through some form of mock marriage in Berne and incontinently headed for Russia.

  The same mail brought me an invitation to discuss in New York with a famous compère my sudden Number One position on the Bestselling Authors list, inquiries from Japanese, Greek, Turkish publishers, and a postcard from Parma with the scrawl: “Bravo for Kingdom from Louise and Victor.” I never learned who Victor was, by the way.

  Brushing all my engagements aside, I surrendered again—after quite a few years of abstinence!—to the thrill of secret investigations. Spying had been my clystère de Tchékhov even before I married Iris Black whose later passion for working on an interminable detective tale had been sparked by this or that hint I must have dropped, like a passing bird’s lustrous feather, in relation to my experience in the vast and misty field of the Service. In my little way I have been of some help to my betters. The tree, a blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound I caught the two “diplomats,” Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence, still stands, hardly scarred, on its hilltop above San Bernardino. But for structural economy I have omitted that entertaining strain from this story of love and prose. Its existence, however, helped me now to ward off—for a while, at least—the madness and anguish of hopeless regret.

  It was child’s play to find Karl’s relatives in the U.S.; namely, two gaunt aunts who disliked the boy even more than they did one another. Aunt Number One assured me he had never left Switzerland—they were still forwarding his Third Class mail to her in Boston. Aunt Number Two, the Philadelphia Fright, said he liked music and was vegetating in Vienna.

  I had overestimated my forces. A serious relapse hospitalized me for nearly a whole year. The complete rest ordered by all my doctors was then botched by my having to stand by my publisher in a long legal fight against obscenity charges leveled at my novel by stuffy censors. I was again very ill. I still feel the pressure of the hallucinations that beset me, as my search for Bel got somehow mixed up with the controversy over my novel, and I saw as clearly as one sees mountains or ships, a great building, all windows lit, trying to advance upon me, through this or that wall of the ward, seeking as it were a weak spot to push through and ram my bed.

  In the late Sixties I learned that Bel was now definitely married to Vetrov but that he had been sent to some remote place of unspecified work. Then came a letter.

  It was forwarded to me by an old respectable businessman (I shall call him A.B.) with a note saying that he was “in textiles” though by education “an engineer”; that he represented “a Soviet firm in the U.S. and vice versa”; that the letter he was enclosing came from a lady working in his Leningrad office (I shall call her Dora) and concerned my daughter “whom he did not have the honor to know but who, he believed, needed my assistance.” He added that he would be flying back to Leningrad in a month’s time and would be glad if I “contacted him.” The letter from Dora was in Russian.

  Much-respected Vadim Vadimovich!

  You probably receive many letters from people in our country who manage to obtain your books—not an easy enterprise! The present letter, however, is not from an admirer but simply from a friend of Isabella Vadimovna Vetrov with whom she has been sharing a room for more than a year now.

  She is ill, she has no news from her husband, and she is without a kopek.

  Please, get in touch with the bearer of this note. He is my employer, and also a distant relative, and has agreed to bring a few lines from you, Vadim Vadimovich, and a little money, if possible, but the main thing, the main thing (glavnoe, glavnoe) is to come in person (lichno). Let him know if you can come and if yes, when and where we could meet to discuss the situation. Everything in life is urgent (speshno, “pressing,” “not to be postponed”) but some things are dreadfully urgent and this is one of them.

  In order to convince you that she is here, with me, telling me to write you and unable to write herself, I am appending a little clue or token that only you and she can decode: “… and the intelligent trail (i umnitsa tropka).”

  For a minute I sat at the breakfast table—under the compassionate stare of Brown Rose—in the attitude of a cave dweller clasping his hands around his head at the crash of rocks breaking above him (women make the same gesture when something falls in the next room). My decision was, of course, instantly taken. I perfunctorily patted Rose’s young buttocks through her light skirt, and strode to the telephone.

  A few hours later I was dining with A.B. in New York (and in the course of the next month was to exchange several long-distance calls with him from London). He was a superb little man, perfectly oval in shape, with a bald head and tiny feet expensively shod (the rest of his envelope looked less classy). He spoke friable English with a soft Russian accent, and native Russian with Jewish question marks. He thought that I should begin by seeing Dora. He settled for me the exact spot where she and I might meet. He warned me that in preparing to visit the weird Wonderland of the Soviet Union a traveler’s first step was the very Philistine one of being assigned a nomer (hotel room) and that only after he had been granted one could the “visa” be tackled. Over the tawny mountain of “Bogdan’s” brown-speckled, butter-soaked, caviar-accompanied bliny (which A.B. forbade me to pay for though I was lousy with A Kingdom’s money), he spoke poetically, and at some length, about his recent trip to Tel Aviv.

  My next move—a visit to London—would have been altogether delightful, had I not been overwhelmed all the time by anxiety, impatience, anguished forebodings. Through several venturesome gentlemen—a former lover of Allan Andoverton’s and two of my late benefactor’s mysterious chums—I had retained some innocent ties with the BINT, as Soviet agents acronymize the well-known, too well-known, British intelligence service. Consequently it was possible for me to obtain a false or more-or-less false passport. Since I may want to avail myself again of those facilities, I cannot reveal here my exact alias. Suffice it to say that some teasing similarity with my real family name could make the assumed one pass, if I got caught, for a clerical error on the part of an absentminded consul and for indifference to official papers on that of the deranged bearer. Let us suppose my real name to have been “Oblonsky” (a Tolstoyan invention); then the false one would be, for example, the mimetic “O. B. Long,” an oblong blur-sky, so to speak. This I could expand into, say, Oberon Bernard Long, of Dublin or Dumberton, and live with it for years on five or six continents.

  I had escaped from Russia at the age of not quite nineteen, leaving across my path in a perilous forest the felled body of a Red soldier. I had then dedicated half a century to berating, deriding, twisting into funny shapes, wringing out like blood-wet towels, kicking neatly in Evil’s stinkiest spot, and otherwise tormenting the Soviet regime at every suitabl
e turn of my writings. In fact, no more consistent critic of Bolshevist brutality and basic stupidity existed during all that time at the literary level to which my output belonged. I was thus well aware of two facts: that under my own name I would not be given a room at the Evropeyskaya or Astoria or any other Leningrad hotel unless I made some extraordinary amends, some abjectly exuberant recantation; and that if I talked my way to that hotel room as Mr. Long or Blong, and got interrupted, there might be no end of trouble. I decided therefore not to get interrupted.

  “Shall I grow a beard to cross the frontier?” muses homesick General Gurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus.

  “Better than none,” said Harley Q., one of my gayest advisers. “But,” he added, “do it before we glue on and stamp O.B.’s picture and don’t lose weight afterwards.” So I grew it—during the atrocious heartracking wait for the room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ample Victorian affair, of a nice, rough, tawny shade threaded with silver. It reached up to my apple-red cheekbones and came down to my waistcoat, commingling on the way with my lateral yellow-gray locks. Special contact lenses not only gave another, dumbfounded, expression to my eyes, but somehow changed their very shape from squarish leonine, to round Jovian. Only upon my return did I notice that the old tailor-made trousers, on me and in my bag, displayed my real name on the inside of the waistband.

  My good old British passport, which had been handled cursorily by so many courteous officers who had never opened my books (the only real identity papers of its accidental holder), remained, after a procedure, that both decency and incompetence forbid me to describe, physically the same in many respects; but certain of its other features, details of substance and items of information, were, let us say, “modified” by a new method, an alchemysterious treatment, a technique of genius, “still not understood elsewhere,” as the chaps in the lab tactfully expressed people’s utter unawareness of a discovery that might have saved countless fugitives and secret agents. In other words nobody, no forensic chemist not in the know, could suspect, let alone prove, that my passport was false. I do not know why I dwell on this subject with such tedious persistence. Probably, because I otlynivayu—“shirk”—the task of describing my visit to Leningrad; yet I can’t put it off any longer.