Despair

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I remember that one day something very like somnambulism took me to a certain lane I knew well, and so there I was, moving nearer and nearer to the magnetic point that had become the peg of my being; but with a start I collected my wits and fled; and presently--within a few minutes or quite as possibly within a few days--I noticed that again I had entered that lane. It was distribution time, and they came toward me, at a leisurely walk, a dozen blue postmen, and leisurely they dispersed at the corner. I turned, biting my thumb, I shook my head, I was still resisting; and all the while, with the mad throb of unerring intuition, I knew that the letter was there, awaiting my call and that sooner or later I would yield to temptation.

  Chapter Seven

  To begin with, let us take the following motto (not especially for this chapter, but generally): Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

  It was darkish in the post office; two or three people stood at every counter, mostly women; and at every counter, framed in his little window, like some tarnished picture, showed the face of an official. I looked for number nine.... I wavered before going up to it.... There was, in the middle of the place, a series of writing desks, so I lingered there, pretending, in front of my own self, that I had something to write: on the back of an old bill which I found in my pocket, I began to scrawl the very first words that came. The pen supplied by the State screeched and rattled, I kept thrusting it into the inkwell, into the black spit therein; the pale blotting paper upon which I leaned my elbow was all crisscrossed with the imprints of unreadable lines. Those irrational characters, preceded as it were by a minus, remind me always of mirrors: minus X minus = plus. It struck me that perhaps Felix too was a minus I, and that was a line of thought of quite astounding importance, which I did wrong, oh, very wrong, not to have thoroughly investigated.

  Meanwhile the consumptive pen in my hand went on spitting words: can't stop, can't stop, cans, pots, stop, he'll to hell. I crumpled the slip of paper in my fist. An impatient fat female squeezed in and snatched up the pen, now free, shoving me aside as she did so with a twist of her sealskin rump.

  All of a sudden I found myself standing at counter nine. A large face with a sandy moustache glanced at me inquiringly. I breathed the password. A hand with a black cot on the index finger gave me not one but three letters. It now seems to me to have all happened in a flash; and the next moment I was walking along the street with my hand pressed to my heart. As soon as I reached a bench I sat down and tore the letters open.

  Put up some memorial there; for instance, a yellow signpost. Let that particle of time leave a mark in space as well. There I was, sitting and reading--and then suddenly choking with unexpected and irrepressible laughter. Oh, courteous reader, those were letters of the blackmailing kind! A blackmailing letter, which none perhaps will ever unseal, a blackmailing letter addressed P.O. till called for, under an agreed cipher, to boot, i.e., with the candid confession that its sender knows neither the name nor the address of the person he writes to--that is a wildly funny paradox indeed!

  In the first of those three letters (middle of November) the blackmail theme was merely foreshadowed. It was much offended with me, that letter, it demanded explanations, it seemed verily to elevate its eyebrows, as its author did, ready at a moment's notice to smile his arch smile; for he did not understand, he said, he was extremely desirous to understand, why I had behaved so mysteriously, why I had, without clinching matters, stolen away in the dead of night. He did have certain suspicions, that he did, but was not willing to show his cards yet; was ready to conceal those suspicions from the world, if only I acted as I should; and with dignity he expressed his hesitations and with dignity expected a reply. It was all very ungrammatical and, at the same time stilted, that mixture being his natural style.

  In the next letter (end of December. What patience!) the specific theme was already more conspicuous. It was plain now why he wrote to me at all. The memory of that one-thousand-mark note, of that grey-blue vision which had whisked under his very nose and then vanished, gnawed at his entrails; his cupidity was stung to the quick, he licked his parched lips, he could not forgive himself for having let me go and thus been cheated of that adorable rustle, which made the tips of his fingers itch. So he wrote that he was ready to grant me a new interview; that he had thought things over of late; but that if I declined seeing him or simply did not reply he would be compelled--right here came pat an enormous inkblot which the scoundrel had made on purpose with the object of intriguing me, as he had not the faintest notion what kind of threat to declare.

  Lastly, the third, January, letter was a true masterpiece on his part. I remember it in more detail than the rest, because I preserved it somewhat longer:

  Receiving no answers to my first letters it begins seeming to me that it is high time to adopt certain measures but notwithstanding I give you one more month for reflection after which I shall go straight to such a place where your actions will be fully judged at their full value though if there also I find no sympathy for who is uncorruptible nowadays then I shall have recourse to action the exact nature of which I leave wholly to your imagination as I consider that when the government does not want and there is an end of it to punish swindlers it is every honest citizen's duty to produce such a crashing din in relation to the undesirable person as to make the state react willy-nilly but in view of your personal situation and from considerations of kindness and readiness to oblige I am prepared to give up my intention and refrain from making any noise upon the condition that during the current month you send me please a rather considerable sum as indemnity for all the worries I have had the exact amount of which I leave with respect to your own estimation.

  Signed: "Sparrow" and underneath the address of a provincial post office.

  I was long in relishing that last letter, the Gothic charm of which my rather tame translation is hardly capable of rendering. All its features pleased me: that majestic stream of words, untrammeled by a single punctuation mark; that doltish display of puny curdom coming from so harmless-looking an individual; that implied consent to accept any proposal, however revolting, provided he got the money. But what, above all, gave me delight, delight of such force and ripeness that it was difficult to bear, consisted in the fact that Felix of his own accord, without any prompting from me, had reappeared and was offering me his services; nay, more: was commanding me to make use of his services and, withal doing everything I wished, was relieving me of any responsibility that might be incurred by the fatal succession of events.

  I rocked with laughter as I sat on that bench. Oh, do erect a monument there (a yellow post) by all means! How did he conceive it--the simpleton? That his letters would, by some sort of telepathy, inform me of their arrival and that after a magical perusal of their contents I would magically believe in the potency of his phantom menaces? How amusing that I did somehow feel that the letters awaited me, counter number nine, and that I did intend answering them, in other words, what he--in his arrogant stupidity--had conjectured, had happened!

  As I sat on that bench and clasped those letters in my burning embrace, I was suddenly aware that my scheme had received a final outline and that everything, or nearly everything, was already settled; a mere couple of details were still missing which would be no trouble to fix. What, indeed, does trouble mean in such matters? It all went on by itself, it all flowed and fused together, smoothly taking inevitable forms, since that very moment when I had first seen Felix.

  Why, what is this talk about trouble, when it is the harmony of mathematical symbols, the movement of planets, the hitchless working of natural laws which have a true bearing upon the subject? My wonderful edifice grew without my assistance; yes, from the very start everything had complied with my wishes; and when now I asked myself what to write to Felix, I was hardly astonished to find that letter in my brain, as ready-made there as those congratulatory telegrams with vignettes that can be sent for a certain additional payment to newly married couples. It only remained to inscribe
the date in the space left for it on the printed form.

  Let us discuss crime, crime as an art; and card tricks. I am greatly worked up just at present. Oh, Conan Doyle! How marvelously you could have crowned your creation when your two heroes began boring you! What an opportunity, what a subject you missed! For you could have written one last tale concluding the whole Sherlock Holmes epic; one last episode beautifully setting off the rest: the murderer in that tale should have turned out to be not the one-legged bookkeeper, not the Chinaman Ching and not the woman in crimson, but the very chronicler of the crime stories, Dr. Watson himself--Watson, who, so to speak, knew what was Whatson. A staggering surprise for the reader.

  But what are they--Doyle, Dostoevsky, Leblanc, Wallace--what are all the great novelists who wrote of nimble criminals, what are all the great criminals who never read the nimble novelists--what are they in comparison with me? Blundering fools! As in the case of inventive geniuses, I was certainly helped by chance (my meeting Felix), but that piece of luck fitted exactly into the place I had made for it; I pounced upon it and used it, which another in my position would not have done.

  My accomplishment resembles a game of patience, arranged beforehand; first I put down the open cards in such a manner as to make its success a dead certainty; then I gathered them up in the opposite order and gave the prepared pack to others with the perfect assurance it would come out.

  The mistake of my innumerable forerunners consisted of their laying principal stress upon the act itself and in their attaching more importance to a subsequent removal of all traces, than to the most natural way of leading up to that same act which is really but a link in the chain, one detail, one line in the book, and must be logically derived from all previous matter; such being the nature of every art. If the deed is planned and performed correctly, then the force of creative art is such, that were the criminal to give himself up on the very next morning, none would believe him, the invention of art containing far more intrinsical truth than life's reality.

  All this, I remember, sped through my mind, just at the time I was sitting with those letters in my lap, but then it was one thing, now another; now I would slightly amend the statement, adding to it that (as happens with wonderful works of art which the mob refuses, for a long time, to understand, to acknowledge, and the spell of which it resists) the genius of a perfect crime is not admitted by people and does not make them dream and wonder; instead, they do their best to pick out something that can be pecked at and pulled to bits, something to prod the author with, so as to hurt him as much as possible. And when they think they have discovered the lapse they are after, hear their guffaws and jeers! But it is they who have erred, not the author; they lack his keensightedness and see nothing out of the common there, where the author perceived a marvel.

  After having laughed my fill and then quietly and clearly thought out my next moves, I put the third and most vicious letter into my pocketbook and tore up the other two, throwing their fragments into the neighboring shrubbery (which at once attracted several sparrows who mistook them for crumbs). Then I sallied to my office where I typed a letter to Felix with detailed indications as to when and where he should come; enclosed twenty marks and went out again.

  I have always found it difficult to loosen my grip of the letter suspended above the abysmal chink. It is like diving into icy water or jumping from a burning balcony into what looks like the heart of an artichoke, and now it was particularly hard to let go. I gulped, I felt a queer sinking in the pit of my stomach; and still holding the letter, I proceeded down the street and stopped at the next letter box, where the same thing happened all over again. I walked on, burdened by the letter and fairly bending under that huge white load, and again, beyond a block of houses, I came to a letter box. My indecision was becoming a nuisance, as it was quite causeless and senseless in view of the firmness of my intentions; perhaps it could be dismissed as a physical, mechanical indecision, a muscular reluctance to relax; or, better still, it might be, as a Marxist observer would put it (Marxism getting the nearest to Absolute Truth, as I always say)--the indecision of an owner who is always loath (such being his very essence) to part with property; and it is noteworthy that in my case the idea of property was not confined merely to the money I was sending, but corresponded to that share of my soul which I had put into my letter. Be it as it might, I had already overcome my hesitation when I reached my fourth or fifth letter box. I knew as distinctly as I know that I am going to set down this sentence--I knew that nothing could prevent me from dropping now the letter into the slit, and I even foresaw the sort of little gesture I would make immediately afterwards--brushing one palm against the other, as if some specks of dust had been left on my gloves by the letter, which, being posted, was mine no more, and so its dust was not mine either. That's done, that's finished (such was the meaning of my imagined gesture).

  Nevertheless, I did not drop the letter in, but stood there, bending under my burden as before, and looking from under my brows at two little girls playing near me on the pavement: they rolled by turns an iridescent marble, aiming at a pit in the soil near the curb.

  I selected the younger of the two--she was a delicate little thing, dark-haired, dressed in a checkered frock (what a wonder she was not cold on that harsh February day) and, patting her on the head, I said: "Look here, my dear, my eyes are so weak that I'm afraid of missing the slit; do, please, drop this letter for me into the box over there."

  She glanced up at me, rose from her squatting position (she had a small face of translucid pallor and rare beauty), took the letter, gave me a divine smile accompanied by a sweep of her long lashes, and ran to the letter box. I did not wait to see the rest, and crossed the street, slitting my eyes (that ought to be noted) as if I really did not see well: art for art's sake, for there was no one about.

  At the next corner I slipped into the glass booth of a public telephone and rang up Ardalion: it was necessary to do something about him as I had decided long ago that this meddlesome portrait-painter was the only person of whom I ought to beware. Let psychologists clear up the question whether it was the simulation of nearsightedness that by association prompted me to act at once toward Ardalion as I had long intended to act, or was it, on the contrary, my constantly reminding myself of his dangerous eyes that gave me the idea of feigning nearsightedness.

  Oh, by the bye, lest I forget, she will grow up, that child, she will be very good-looking and probably happy, and she will never know in what an eerie business she had served as go-between.

  Then, also, there is another likelihood: fate, not suffering such blind and naive brokerage, envious fate with its vast experience, assortment of confidence tricks, and hatred of competition, may cruelly punish that little maiden for intruding, and make her wonder--"Whatever have I done to be so unfortunate?" and never, never, never will she understand. But my conscience is clear. Not I wrote to Felix, but he wrote to me; not I sent him the answer, but an unknown child.

  When I reached my next destination, a pleasant cafe, in front of which, amid a small public garden, there used to play on summer evenings a fountain of changing colors, cleverly lit up from below by polychromatic projectors (but now the garden was bare and dreary, and no fountain twinkled, and the thick curtains of the cafe had won in their class struggle with loafing draughts ... how racily I write and, what is more, how cool I am, how perfectly self-possessed); when, as I say, I arrived, Ardalion was already sitting there, and upon seeing me, he raised his arm in the Roman fashion. I took off my gloves, my hat, my white silk muffler, sat down next to him, and threw out on the table a packet of expensive cigarettes.

  "What are the good tidings?" asked Ardalion, who always spoke to me in a special fatuous manner.

  I ordered coffee and began approximately thus:

  "Well, yes--there is news for you. Of late I have been greatly worried, my friend, by the thought that you were going to the dogs. An artist cannot live without mistresses and cypresses, as Pushkin says somew
here or should have said. Owing to the hardships you undergo and to the general stuffiness of your way of living, your talent is dying, is pining away, so to speak; does not squirt in fact, just as that colored fountain in that garden over there does not squirt in winter."

  "Thank you for the comparison," said Ardalion, looking hurt. "That horror ... that illumination in the caramel style. I would rather, you know, not discuss my talent, because your conception of ars pictoris amounts to ..." (an unprintable pun here).

  "Lydia and I have often spoken," I went on, ignoring his dog-latin and vulgarity--"spoken about your plight. I consider you ought to change your surroundings, refresh your mind, imbibe new impressions."

  Ardalion winced.

  "What have surroundings to do with art?" he muttered.

  "Anyway, your present ones are disastrous to you, so they do mean something, I suppose. Those roses and peaches with which you adorn your landlady's dining room, those portraits of respectable citizens at whose houses you contrive to sup--"

  "Well, really ... contrive!"

  "... It may all be admirable, even full of genius, but--excuse my frankness--doesn't it strike you as rather monotonous and forced? You ought to dwell in some other clime with plenty of sunshine: sunshine is the friend of painters. I can see, though, that this topic doesn't interest you. Let's talk of something else. Tell me, for instance, how do matters stand with that allotment of yours?"