Speak, Memory

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Around eight in the evening, the hall would house an accumulation of greatcoats and overshoes. In a committee room, next to the library, at a long baize-covered table (where those beautifully pointed pencils had been laid out), my father and his colleagues would gather to discuss some phase of their opposition to the Tsar. Above the hubbub of voices, a tall clock in a dark corner would break into Westminster chimes; and beyond the committee room were mysterious depths--storerooms, a winding staircase, a pantry of sorts--where my cousin Yuri and I used to pause with drawn pistols on our way to Texas and where one night the police placed a fat, blear-eyed spy who went laboriously down on his knees before our librarian, Lyudmila Borisovna Grinberg, when discovered. But how on earth could I discuss all this with schoolteachers?

  5

  The reactionary press never ceased to attack my father's party, and I had got quite used to the more or less vulgar cartoons which appeared from time to time--my father and Milyukov handing over Saint Russia on a plate to World Jewry and that sort of thing. But one day, in the winter of 1911 I believe, the most powerful of the Rightist newspapers employed a shady journalist to concoct a scurrilous piece containing insinuations that my father could not let pass. Since the well-known rascality of the actual author of the article made him "non-duelable" (neduelesposobniy, as the Russian dueling code had it), my father called out the somewhat less disreputable editor of the paper in which the article had appeared.

  A Russian duel was a much more serious affair than the conventional Parisian variety. It took the editor several days to make up his mind whether or not to accept the challenge. On the last of these days, a Monday, I went, as usual, to school. In consequence of my not reading the newspapers, I was absolutely ignorant of the whole thing. Sometime during the day I became aware that a magazine opened at a certain page was passing from hand to hand and causing titters. A well-timed swoop put me in possession of what proved to be the latest copy of a cheap weekly containing a lurid account of my father's challenge, with idiotic comments on the choice of weapons he had offered his foe. Sly digs were taken at his having reverted to a feudal custom that he had criticized in his own writings. There was also a good deal about the number of his servants and the number of his suits. I found out that he had chosen for second his brother-in-law, Admiral Kolomeytsev, a hero of the Japanese war. During the battle of Tsushima, this uncle of mine, then holding the rank of captain, had managed to bring his destroyer alongside the burning flagship and save the naval commander-in-chief.

  After classes, I ascertained that the magazine belonged to one of my best friends. I charged him with betrayal and mockery. In the ensuing fight, he crashed backward into a desk, catching his foot in a joint and breaking his ankle. He was laid up for a month, but gallantly concealed from his family and from our teachers my share in the matter.

  The pang of seeing him carried downstairs was lost in my general misery. For some reason or other, no car came to fetch me that day, and during the cold, dreary, incredibly slow drive home in a hired sleigh I had ample time to think matters over. Now I understood why, the day before, my mother had been so little with me and had not come down to dinner. I also understood what special coaching Thernant, a still finer maitre d'armes than Loustalot, had of late been giving my father. What would his adversary choose, I kept asking myself--the blade or the bullet? Or had the choice already been made? Carefully, I took the beloved, the familiar, the richly alive image of my father at fencing and tried to transfer that image, minus the mask and the padding, to the dueling ground, in some barn or riding school. I visualized him and his adversary, both bare-chested, black-trousered, in furious battle, their energetic movements marked by that strange awkwardness which even the most elegant swordsmen cannot avoid in a real encounter. The picture was so repulsive, so vividly did I feel the ripeness and nakedness of a madly pulsating heart about to be pierced, that I found myself hoping for what seemed momentarily a more abstract weapon. But soon I was in even deeper distress.

  As the sleigh crept along Nevski Avenue, where blurry lights swam in the gathering dusk, I thought of the heavy black Browning my father kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. I knew that pistol as well as I knew all the other, more salient, things in his study; the objets d'art of crystal or veined stone, fashionable in those days; the glinting family photographs; the huge, mellowly illumined Perugino; the small, honey-bright Dutch oils; and, right over the desk, the rose-and-haze pastel portrait of my mother by Bakst: the artist had drawn her face in three-quarter view, wonderfully bringing out its delicate features--the upward sweep of the ash-colored hair (it had grayed when she was in her twenties), the pure curve of the forehead, the dove-blue eyes, the graceful line of the neck.

  When I urged the old, rag-doll-like driver to go faster, he would merely lean to one side with a special half-circular movement of his arm, so as to make his horse believe he was about to produce the short whip he kept in the leg of his right felt boot; and that would be sufficient for the shaggy little hack to make as vague a show of speeding up as the driver had made of getting out his knutishko. In the almost hallucinatory state that our snow-muffled ride engendered, I refought all the famous duels a Russian boy knew so well. I saw Pushkin, mortally wounded at the first fire, grimly sit up to discharge his pistol at d'Anthes. I saw Lermontov smile as he faced Martinov. I saw stout Sobinov in the part of Lenski crash down and send his weapon flying into the orchestra. No Russian writer of any repute had failed to describe une rencontre, a hostile meeting, always of course of the classical duel a volonte type (not the ludicrous back-to-back-march-face-about-bang-bang performance of movie and cartoon fame). Among several prominent families, there had been tragic deaths on the dueling ground in more or less recent years. Slowly my dreamy sleigh drove up Morskaya Street, and slowly dim silhouettes of duelists advanced upon each other and leveled their pistols and fired--at the crack of dawn, in damp glades of old country estates, on bleak military training grounds, or in the driving snow between two rows of fir trees.

  And behind it all there was yet a very special emotional abyss that I was desperately trying to skirt, lest I burst into a tempest of tears, and this was the tender friendship underlying my respect for my father; the charm of our perfect accord; the Wimbledon matches we followed in the London papers; the chess problems we solved; the Pushkin iambics that rolled off his tongue so triumphantly whenever I mentioned some minor poet of the day. Our relationship was marked by that habitual exchange of homespun nonsense, comically garbled words, proposed imitations of supposed intonations, and all those private jokes which are the secret code of happy families. With all that he was extremely strict in matters of conduct and given to biting remarks when cross with a child or a servant, but his inherent humanity was too great to allow his rebuke to Osip for laying out the wrong shirt to be really offensive, just as a first-hand knowledge of a boy's pride tempered the harshness of reproval and resulted in sudden forgiveness. Thus I was more puzzled than pleased one day when upon learning that I had deliberately slashed my leg just above the knee with a razor (I still bear the scar) in order to avoid a recitation in class for which I was unprepared, he seemed unable to work up any real wrath; and his subsequent admission of a parallel transgression in his own boyhood rewarded me for not withholding the truth.

  I remembered that summer afternoon (which already then seemed long ago although actually only four or five years had passed) when he had burst into my room, grabbed my net, shot down the veranda steps--and presently was strolling back holding between finger and thumb the rare and magnificent female of the Russian Poplar Admirable that he had seen basking on an aspen leaf from the balcony of his study. I remembered our long bicycle rides along the smooth Luga highway and the efficient way in which--mighty-calved, knickerbockered, tweed-coated, checker-capped--he would accomplish the mounting of his high-saddled "Dux," which his valet would bring up to the porch as if it were a palfrey. Surveying the state of its polish, my father would pull on his suede glov
es and test under Osip's anxious eye whether the tires were sufficiently tight. Then he would grip the handlebars, place his left foot on a metallic peg jutting at the rear end of the frame, push off with his right foot on the other side of the hind wheel and after three or four such propelments (with the bicycle now set in motion), leisurely translate his right leg into pedal position, move up his left, and settle down on the saddle.

  At last I was home, and immediately upon entering the vestibule I became aware of loud, cheerful voices. With the opportuneness of dream arrangements, my uncle the Admiral was coming downstairs. From the red-carpeted landing above, where an armless Greek woman of marble presided over a malachite bowl for visiting cards, my parents were still speaking to him, and as he came down the steps, he looked up with a laugh and slapped the balustrade with the gloves he had in his hand. I knew at once that there would be no duel, that the challenge had been met by an apology, that all was right. I brushed past my uncle and reached the landing. I saw my mother's serene everyday face, but I could not look at my father. And then it happened: my heart welled in me like that wave on which the Buyniy rose when her captain brought her alongside the burning Suvorov, and I had no handkerchief, and ten years were to pass before a certain night in 1922, at a public lecture in Berlin, when my father shielded the lecturer (his old friend Milyukov) from the bullets of two Russian Fascists and, while vigorously knocking down one of the assassins, was fatally shot by the other. But no shadow was cast by that future event upon the bright stairs of our St. Petersburg house; the large, cool hand resting on my head did not quaver, and several lines of play in a difficult chess composition were not blended yet on the board.

  The author in 1915, St. Petersburg.

  10

  1

  THE Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid (1818-1883), translated and simplified, was tremendously popular with Russian children at the beginning of this century, long after his American fame had faded. Knowing English, I could savor his Headless Horseman in the unabridged original. Two friends swap clothes, hats, mounts, and the wrong man gets murdered--this is the main whorl of its intricate plot. The edition I had (possibly a British one) remains in the stacks of my memory as a puffy book bound in red cloth, with a watery-gray frontispiece, the gloss of which had been gauzed over when the book was new by a leaf of tissue paper. I see this leaf as it disintegrated--at first folded improperly, then torn off--but the frontispiece itself, which no doubt depicted Louise Pointdexter's unfortunate brother (and perhaps a coyote or two, unless I am thinking of The Death Shot, another Mayne Reid tale), has been so long exposed to the blaze of my imagination that it is now completely bleached (but miraculously replaced by the real thing, as I noted when translating this chapter into Russian in the spring of 1953, and namely, by the view from a ranch you and I rented that year: a cactus-and-yucca waste whence came that morning the plaintive call of a quail--Gambel's Quail, I believe--overwhelming me with a sense of undeserved attainments and rewards).

  We shall now meet my cousin Yuri, a thin, sallow-faced boy with a round cropped head and luminous gray eyes. The son of divorced parents, with no tutor to look after him, a town boy with no country home, he was in many respects different from me. He spent his winters in Warsaw, with his father, Baron Evgeniy Rausch von Traubenberg, its military governor, and his summers at Batovo or Vyra, unless taken abroad by his mother, my eccentric Aunt Nina, to dull Central European spas, where she went for long solitary walks leaving him to the care of messenger boys and chambermaids. In the country, Yuri got up late, and I did not see him before my return to lunch, after four or five hours of butterfly hunting. From his earliest boyhood, he was absolutely fearless, but was squeamish and wary of "natural history," could not make himself touch wriggly things, could not endure the amusing emprisoned tickle of a small frog groping about in one's fist like a person, or the discreet, pleasantly cool, rhythmically undulating caress of a caterpillar ascending one's bare shin. He collected little soldiers of painted lead--these meant nothing to me but he knew their uniforms as well as I did different butterflies. He did not play any ball games, was incapable of pitching a stone properly, and could not swim, but had never told me he could not, and one day, as we were trying to cross the river by walking over a jam of pine logs afloat near a sawmill, he nearly got drowned when a particularly slippery bole started to plop and revolve under his feet.

  We had first become aware of each other around Christmas 1904 (I was five and a half, he seven), in Wiesbaden: I remember him coming out of a souvenir shop and running toward me with a breloque, an inch-long little pistol of silver, which he was anxious to show me--and suddenly sprawling on the sidewalk but not crying when he picked himself up, unmindful of a bleeding knee and still clutching his minuscule weapon. In the summer of 1909 or 1910, he enthusiastically initiated me into the dramatic possibilities of the Mayne Reid books. He had read them in Russian (being in everything save surname much more Russian than I) and, when looking for a playable plot, was prone to combine them with Fenimore Cooper and his own fiery inventions. I viewed our games with greater detachment and tried to keep to the script. The staging took place generally in the park of Batovo, where the trails were even more tortuous and trappy than those of Vyra. For our mutual manhunts we used spring pistols that ejected, with considerable force, pencil-long sticks (from the brass tips of which we had manfully twisted off the protective rubber suction cups). Later came airguns of various types, which shot wax pellets or small tufted darts, with non-lethal, but often quite painful consequences. In 1912, the impressive mother-of-pearl plated revolver he arrived with was calmly taken away and locked up by my tutor Lenski, but not before we had blown to pieces a shoebox lid (in prelude to the real thing, an ace), which we had been holding up by turns at a gentlemanly distance in a green avenue where a duel was rumored to have been fought many dim years ago. The following summer he was away in Switzerland with his mother--and soon after his death (in 1919), upon revisiting the same hotel and getting the same rooms they had occupied that July, she thrust her hand into the recesses of an armchair in quest of a fallen hairpin and brought up a tiny cuirassier, unhorsed but with bandy legs still compressing an invisible charger.

  When he arrived for a week's visit in June 1914 (now sixteen and a half to my fifteen, and the interval was beginning to tell), the first thing he did, as soon as we found ourselves alone in the garden, was to take out casually an "ambered" cigarette from a smart silver case on the gilt inside of which he bade me observe the formula 3 x 4 = 12 engraved in memory of the three nights he had spent, at last, with Countess G. He was now in love with an old general's young wife in Helsingfors and a captain's daughter in Gatchina. I witnessed with a kind of despair every new revelation of his man-of-the-world style. "Where can I make some rather private calls?" he asked. So I led him past the five poplars and the old dry well (out of which we had been rope-hauled by three frightened gardeners only a couple of years before) to a passage in the servants' wing where the cooing of pigeons came from an inviting windowsill and where there hung on the sun-stamped wall the remotest and oldest of our country-house telephones, a bulky boxlike contraption which had to be clangorously cranked up to educe a small-voiced operator. Yuri was now even more relaxed and sociable than the mustanger of former years. Sitting on a deal table against the wall and dangling his long legs, he chatted with the servants (something I was not supposed to do, and did not know how to do)--with an aged footman with sideburns whom I had never seen grin before or with a kitchen flirt, of whose bare neck and bold eyes I became aware only then. After Yuri had concluded his third long-distance conversation (I noticed with a blend of relief and dismay how awful his French was), we walked down to the village grocery which otherwise I never dreamed of visiting, let alone buying there a pound of black-and-white sunflower seeds. Throughout our return stroll, among the late afternoon butterflies that were preparing to roost, we munched and spat, he showing me how to perform it conveyer-wise: split the seed open between the
right-side back teeth, ease out the kernel with the tongue, spit out the husk halves, move the smooth kernel to the left-side molars, and munch there, while the next seed which in the meantime has already been cracked on the right, is being processed in its turn. Speaking of right, he admitted he was a staunch "monarchist" (of a romantic rather than political nature) and went on to deplore my alleged (and perfectly abstract) "democratism." He recited samples of his fluent album poetry and proudly remarked that he had been complimented by Dilanov-Tomski, a fashionable poet (who favored Italian epigraphs and sectional titles, such as "Songs of Lost Love," "Nocturnal Urns," and so on), for the striking "long" rhyme "vnemlyu muze ya" ("I hearken to the Muse") and "lyubvi kontuziya" ("love's contusion"), which I countered with my best (and still unused) find: "zapoved' " (commandment) and "posapivat' " (to sniffle). He was boiling with anger over Tolstoy's dismissal of the art of war and burning with admiration for Prince Andrey Bolkonski--for he had just discovered War and Peace which I had read for the first time when I was eleven (in Berlin, on a Turkish sofa, in our somberly rococo Privatstrasse flat giving on a dark, damp back garden with larches and gnomes that have remained in that book, like an old postcard, forever).