Despair

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Chapter Three

  How shall we begin this chapter? I offer several variations to choose from. Number one (readily adopted in novels where the narrative is conducted in the first person by the real or substitute author):

  It is fine today, but cold, with the wind's violence unabated; under my window the evergreen foliage rocks and rolls, and the postman on the Pignan road walks backwards, clutching at his cap. My restlessness grows....

  The distinctive features of this variation are rather obvious: it is clear, for one thing, that while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place; he is not simply a kind of spirit, hovering over the page. While he muses and writes, there is something or other going on around him; there is, for instance, this wind, this whirl of dust on the road which I see from my window (now the postman has swerved round and, bent double, still fighting, walks forward). A nice refreshing variation, this number one; it allows a breather and helps to bring in the personal note; thus lending life to the story--especially when the first person is as fictitious as all the rest. Well, that is just the point: a trick of the trade, a poor thing worn to shreds by literary fiction-mongers, does not suit me, for I have become strictly truthful. So we may turn to the second variation which consists of at once letting loose a new character, starting the chapter thus:

  Orlovius was displeased.

  When he happened to be displeased or worried, or merely ignorant of the right answer, he used to pull at the long lobe of his left ear, fringed with grey down; then he would pull at the long lobe of his right ear too, so as to avoid jealousies, and look at you over his plain, honest spectacles and take his time and then at last answer: "It is heavy to say, but I--"

  "Heavy" with him meant "hard," as in German; and there was a Teutonic thickness in the solemn Russian he spoke.

  Now this second variation of a chapter's beginning is a popular and sound method--but there is something too polished about it; nor do I think it becoming for shy, mournful Orlovius to fling open, spryly, the gates of a new chapter. I submit to your attention my third variation.

  In the meantime ... (the inviting gesture of dots, dots, dots).

  Of old, this dodge was the darling of the Kinematograph, alias Cinematograph, alias Moving Pictures. You saw the hero doing this or that, and in the meantime ... Dots--and the action switched to the country. In the meantime ... A new paragraph, please.

  ... Plodding along the sun-parched road and trying to keep in the shade of the apple trees, whenever their crooked whitewashed trunks came marching by its side ...

  No, that is a silly notion: he was not always wandering. Some filthy kulak would require an additional hand; another back would be needed by some beastly miller. Having never been a tramp myself, I failed--and still fail--to rerun his life on my private screen. What I wished to imagine most, was the impression left upon him by a certain morning in May passed on a patch of sickly grass near Prague. He woke up. At his side a well-dressed gentleman was sitting and staring. Happy thought: might give me a smoke. Turned out to be German. Very insistently (was perhaps not quite right in the head?) kept pressing upon me his pocket mirror; got quite abusive. I gathered it was about likenesses. Well, thought I, let them likenesses be. No concern of mine. Chance of his giving me some easy job. Asked about my address. One can never know, something might come of it.

  Later: conversation in a barn on a warm dark night: "Now, as I was saying, that was an odd'un, that bloke I met one day. He made out we were doubles."

  A laugh in the darkness: "It was you who saw double, you old sot."

  Here another literary device has crept in: the imitation of foreign novels, themselves imitations, which depict the ways of merry vagabonds, good hearty fellows. (My devices seem to have got mixed up a little, I am afraid.)

  And speaking of literature, there is not a thing about it that I do not know. It has always been quite a hobby of mine. As a child I composed verse and elaborate stories. I never stole peaches from the hothouse of the North Russian landowner whose steward my father was. I never buried cats alive. I never twisted the arms of playmates weaker than myself; but, as I say, I composed abstruse verse and elaborate stories, with dreadful finality and without any reason whatever lampooning acquaintances of my family. But I did not write down those stories, neither did I talk about them. Not a day passed without my telling some lie. I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating. For such sweet lying my mother would give me a cuff on the ear, and my father thrash me with a riding whip which had once been a bull's sinew. That did not dismay me in the least; rather, on the contrary, it furthered the flight of my fancies. With a stunned ear and burning buttocks, I would lie on my belly among the tall weeds in the orchard, and whistle and dream.

  At school I used, invariably, to get the lowest mark for Russian composition, because I had a way of my own with Russian and foreign classics; thus, for example, when rendering "in my own words" the plot of Othello (which was, mind you, perfectly familiar to me) I made the Moor skeptical and Desdemona unfaithful.

  A sordid bet won from a wenching upperformer resulted in a revolver's coming into my possession; so I would trace with chalk, on the aspen trunks in the wood, ugly, screaming, white faces and proceeded to shoot those wretches, one by one.

  I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by the mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?

  For several years I was haunted by a very singular and very nasty dream: I dreamed I was standing in the middle of a long passage with a door at the bottom, and passionately wanting, but not daring to go and open it, and then deciding at last to go, which I accordingly did; but at once awoke with a groan, for what I saw there was unimaginably terrible; to wit, a perfectly empty, newly whitewashed room. That was all, but it was so terrible that I never could hold out; then one night a chair and its slender shadow appeared in the middle of the bare room--not as a first item of furniture but as though somebody had brought it to climb upon it and fix a bit of drapery, and since I knew whom I would find there next time stretching up with a hammer and a mouthful of nails, I spat them out and never opened that door again.

  At sixteen, while still at school, I began to visit more regularly than before a pleasantly informal bawdy house; after sampling all seven girls, I concentrated my affection on roly-poly Polymnia with whom I used to drink lots of foamy beer at a wet table in an orchard--I simply adore orchards.

  During the War, as I may have already mentioned, I moped in a fishing village not far from Astrakhan, and had it not been for books, I doubt whether I should have lived through those dingy years.

  I first met Lydia in Moscow (whither I had got by miracle, after wriggling through the accursed hubbub of civil strife), at the flat, belonging to a chance acquaintance of mine, where I lived. He was a Lett, a silent, white-faced man with a cuboidal skull, a crew cut, and fish-cold eyes. By profession a teacher of Latin, he somehow managed, later, to become a prominent Soviet official. Into those lodgings Fate had packed several people who hardly knew one another, and there was among them that other cousin of Lydia's, Ardalion's brother Innocent, who, for some reason or another, got executed by the shooting squad soon after our departure. (To be frank, all this would be far more befitting at the beginning of the first chapter than at the beginning of the third.)

  Bold and scoffing but inwardly tortured

  (O, my soul, will your torch not ignite?),

  From the porch of your God and His orchard

  Why take off for the Earth and the night?

  My own, my own! My juvenile experiments in the senseless sounds I loved, hymns inspired by my beery mistress--and "Shvinburne" as he was called in the Baltic provinces ... Now, there is one thing I should like to know: was I endowed in those days with any so-called criminal inclinations? Di
d my adolescence, so dun and dull to all appearances, secrete the possibility of producing a lawbreaker of genius? Or was I, perhaps, only making my way along that ordinary corridor of my dreams, time after time shrieking with horror at finding the room empty, and then one unforgettable day finding it empty no more? Yes, it was then that everything got explained and justified--my longing to open that door, and the queer games I played, and that thirst for falsehood, that addiction to painstaking lying which had seemed so aimless till then. Hermann discovered his alter ego. This happened, as I have had the honor of informing you, on the ninth of May; and in July I visited Orlovius.

  The decision, which I had formed and which was now swiftly brought into execution, met with his full approval, the more so, as I was following an old piece of advice of his.

  A week later I asked him to dinner. He tucked the corner of his napkin sideways into his collar. While tackling his soup, he expressed displeasure with the trend of political events. Lydia breezily inquired whether there would be any war and with whom? He looked at her over his spectacles, taking his time (such, more or less, was the glimpse you caught of him at the beginning of this chapter) and finally answered: "It is heavy to say, but I think war excluded. When I young was, I came upon the idea of supposing only the best" (he all but turned "best" into "pest," so gross were his lip-consonants). "I hold this idea always. The chief thing by me is optimismus."

  "Which comes in very handy, seeing your profession," said I with a smile.

  He lowered at me and replied quite seriously:

  "But it is pessimismus that gives clients to us."

  The end of the dinner was unexpectedly crowned with tea served in glasses. For some unaccountable reason Lydia thought such a finish very clever and nice. Orlovius at any rate was pleased. Ponderously and lugubriously telling us of his old mother, who lived in Dorpat, he held up his glass to stir what remained of his tea in the German fashion--that is, not with a spoon, but by means of a circular motion of the wrist--so as not to waste the sugar settled at the bottom.

  The agreement I signed with his firm was, on my part, a curiously hazy and insignificant action. It was about that time I became so depressed, silent, absent-minded; even my unobservant wife noticed a change in me--especially as my lovemaking had lapsed into a drab routine after all that furious dissociation. Once, in the middle of the night (we were lying awake in bed, and the room was impossibly stuffy, notwithstanding the wide-open window), she said:

  "You do seem overworked, Hermann; in August we'll go to the seaside."

  "Oh," I said, "it's not only that, but town life generally, that's what is boring me to death."

  She could not see my face in the dark. After a minute she went on:

  "Now, take for instance Aunt Elisa--you know that aunt of mine who lived in France, in Pignan. There is such a town as Pignan, isn't there?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, she doesn't live there any more, but has gone to Nice with the old Frenchman she married. They've got a farm down there."

  She yawned.

  "My chocolate is going to the devil, old girl," said I and yawned also.

  "Everything will be all right," Lydia muttered. "You must have a rest, that's all."

  "A change of life, not a rest," said I with the pretense of a sigh.

  "Change of life," said Lydia.

  "Tell me," I asked her, "wouldn't you like us to live somewhere in a quiet sunny nook, wouldn't it be a treat for you, if I retired from business? The respectable rentier sort of thing, eh?"

  "I'd like living with you anywhere, Hermann. We'd have Ardalion come too, and perhaps we'd buy a great big dog."

  A silence.

  "Well, unfortunately we shan't go anywhere. I'm practically broke. That chocolate will have to be liquidated, I suppose."

  A belated pedestrian passed by. Chock! And again: chock! He was probably knocking the lamposts with his cane.

  "Guess: my first is that sound, my second is an exclamation, my third will be prefixed to me when I'm no more; and my whole is my ruin."

  The smooth sizzle of a passing motorcar.

  "Well--can't you guess?"

  But my fool of a wife was already asleep. I closed my eyes, turned on my side, tried to sleep too; was unsuccessful. Out of the darkness, straight towards me, with jaw protruding and eyes looking straight into mine, came Felix. As he closed up on me he dissolved, and what I saw before me was merely the long, empty road by which he had come. Then again, from afar, there appeared a form, that of a man, giving a knock with his stick to every wayside tree-trunk; nearer and nearer he stalked, and I tried to make out his face.... And lo, with jaw protruding and eyes looking straight into mine--But he faded as before, the moment he reached me, or, better say, he seemed to enter into me, and pass through, as if I were a shadow; and then again there was only the road stretching out expectantly, and again a figure appeared, and again it was he.

  I turned on my other side, and for a while all was dark and peaceful, unruffled blackness; then, gradually, a road became perceptible: the same road, but the other way round; and there appeared suddenly before my very face, as if coming out of me, the back of a man's head and the bag strapped to his shoulders; slowly his figure diminished, he was going, going, in another instant would be gone ... but all of a sudden he stopped, glanced back and retraced his steps, so that his face grew clearer and clearer; and it was my own face.

  I turned again, this time lying supine, and then, as if seen through a dark glass, there stretched above me a varnished blue-black sky, a band of sky between the ebon shapes of trees which on either side were slowly receding; but when I lay face downwards, I saw running below me the pebbles and mud of a country road, wisps of dropped hay, a cart rut brimming with rainwater, and in that wind-wrinkled puddle the trembling travesty of my face; which, as I noticed with a shock, was eyeless.

  "I always leave the eyes to the last," said Ardalion self-approvingly.

  He held before him, at arm's length, the charcoal picture which he had begun making of me, and bent his head this way and that. He used to come frequently, and it was on the balcony that we generally had the sitting. I had plenty of leisure now: it had occurred to me to give myself something in the way of a small holiday.

  Lydia was present too, curled up in a wicker armchair with a book; a half-squashed cigarette end (she never quite crushed them to death) with grim tenacity of life let forth a thin, straight thread of smoke out of the ashtray: now and then some tiny wind would make it dip and wobble, but it recovered again as straight and thin as ever.

  "Anything but a good likeness," said Lydia, without, however, lifting her eyes from her book.

  "It may come yet," rejoined Ardalion. "Here, I'm going to prune this nostril and we'll get it. Kind of dull light this afternoon."

  "What's dull?" inquired Lydia, lifting her eyes and holding one finger on the interrupted line.

  Let me interrupt this passage, too, for there is still another piece of my life that summer worthy of your attention, reader. While apologizing for the muddle and mottle of my tale, let me repeat that it is not I who am writing, but my memory, which has its own whims and rules. So, watch me roaming again about the forest near Ardalion's lake; this time I have come alone and not by car, but by train (as far as Koenigsdorf) and bus (as far as the yellow post).

  On the suburban map Ardalion left on our balcony one day all the features of the locality stand out very clear. Let us suppose I am holding that map before me; then the city of Berlin, which is outside the picture, may be imagined somewhere in the vicinity of my left elbow. On the map itself, in its southwestern corner, there stretches northward, like a black and white bit of scaled tape, the railway line, which, metaphysically at least, runs along my sleeve cuffward from Berlin. My wristwatch is the small town of Koenigsdorf, beyond which the black and white ribbon turns and proceeds eastward, where there is another circle (the lower button of my waistcoat): Eichenberg.

  No need, however, to travel as far as that ye
t; we get off at Koenigsdorf. As the railway line swerves to the east, its companion, the main road, leaves it and continues north alone, straight to the village of Waldau (the nail of my left thumb). Thrice a day there is a bus plying between Koenigsdorf and Waldau (seventeen kilometers); and it is at Waldau, by the bye, that the center of the land-selling enterprise is situated; a gaily painted pavilion, a fancy flag flapping, numerous yellow signposts: one, for instance, points "to the bathing beach," but there is yet no beach to speak of--only a bog on the lip of the Waldau lake; another points "to the casino," but the latter is likewise absent, though represented by something looking like a tabernacle, with an incipient coffee stall; still another sign invites you "to the sports ground," and sure enough you find there, newly erected, a complicated affair for gymnastics, rather like gallows, but there is nobody who might use the thing, apart from some village urchin swinging head downward and showing the patch on his bottom; and all around, in every direction, lie the lots; some of them are half sold and on Sundays you see fat men in bathing suits and horn-rimmed glasses sternly engaged in building rudimentary bungalows; here and there you may even see flowers freshly planted, or else a pink privy enlaced with climbing roses.

  We shall, however, not go as far as Waldau either, but leave the bus on the tenth kilometer from Koenigsdorf, at a point where a solitary yellow post stands on our right. On the east side of the highway the map shows a vast space all dotted over: it is the forest; there, in its very heart, lies the small lake we bathed in, with, on its western bank, spread fanwise like playing cards, a dozen allotments, only one of which is sold (Ardalion's--if you can call it sold).

  We are now getting to the exciting part. Mention has already been made of the station of Eichenberg which comes after Koenigsdorf when you travel east. Now comes a technical question: can a person starting from the neighborhood of Ardalion's lake reach Eichenberg on foot? The answer is: yes. We should go round the southern side of the lake and then bear east through the wood. After a four-kilometer walk, keeping in the wood all the time, we come out to a rustic lane, one end of which leads no matter where, to hamlets we need not bother about, while the other brings us to Eichenberg.