The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  THE FIGHT

  IN THE morning, if the sun was inviting, I would leave Berlin to go swimming. At the end of the trolley line, on a green bench, sat the motormen, stocky fellows in enormous blunt-toed boots, resting, savoring their smokes, from time to time rubbing their massive, metal-redolent hands, and watching a man in a wet leather apron water the flowering sweetbriar along the tracks nearby; the water gushed in a flexible silvery fan from the glistening hose, how flying in the sunlight, now smoothly swooping over the palpitating shrubs. Clutching my rolled-up towel under my arm, I passed by them, striding swiftly toward the edge of the forest. There, the thickly growing slender pine trunks, rough and brown below, flesh-colored higher up, were speckled with fragments of shadow, and the sickly grass underneath was strewn with scraps of newspaper and scraps of sunlight that seemed to supplement each other. Suddenly the sky gaily parted the trees, and I descended along the silvery waves of sand toward the lake, where the voices of bathers would burst forth and subside and dark heads could be glimpsed bobbing on the smooth, luminous surface. All over the sloping bank lay supine or prone bodies with every possible shade of suntan; some still had a pinkish rash on their shoulder blades, others glowed like copper or were the color of strong coffee with cream. I would discard my shirt, and right away the sun overwhelmed me with its blind tenderness.

  And every morning, punctually at nine o’clock, the same man would appear next to me. He was a bowlegged, elderly German in trousers and jacket of semimilitary cut, with a large bald head that the sun had smoothed to a red sheen. He brought along an umbrella the color of an aged raven and a neatly tied bundle, which immediately separated into a gray blanket, a beach towel, and a batch of newspapers. He carefully spread the blanket on the sand and, stripping to the bathing trunks he had providently worn under his trousers, arranged himself most comfortably on the blanket, adjusted the umbrella over his head so that his face alone would be in the shade, and went to work on his newspapers. I observed him out of the corner of my eye, noting the dark, woolly, combed-looking growth on his strong crooked legs, and his plump belly with the deep navel gazing heavenward like an eye, and I amused myself trying to guess who this pious sun-worshipper might be.

  We spent hours lolling on the sand. Summer clouds glided by in a fluctuating caravan—camel-shaped clouds, tent-shaped clouds. The sun tried to slip in between them, but they would sweep over it with their blinding edge; the air grew dim, then the sun ripened again, but it was the opposite bank that would be illumined first—we remained in the even, colorless shade, while over there the warm light had already spread itself. The shadows of the pines revived on the sand; small naked figures flared up, modeled out of sunlight; and, all of a sudden, like an enormous happy oculus, the radiance opened to engulf our side as well. Then I jumped to my feet, and the gray sand softly scalded my soles as I ran toward the water, which I parted noisily with my body. How nice it was to dry off afterwards in the blazing sun and feel its stealthy lips greedily drink the cool pearls remaining on one’s body!

  My German slaps shut his umbrella and, his crooked calves cautiously quivering, descends in his turn toward the water, where he first wets his head, as elderly bathers do, and then starts swimming with sweeping gestures. A vendor of hard candy passes along the lakeshore, hawking his wares. Two others, in bathing suits, hurry past with a pail of cucumbers, and my neighbors in the sun, somewhat coarse, beautifully built fellows, pick up the terse calls of the vendors in artful imitation. A naked infant, all black because of the wet sand sticking to him, waddles past me, and his soft little beak bounces drolly between his plump, clumsy little legs. Close by sits his mother, an attractive young woman, half undressed; she is combing out her long dark hair, holding the hairpins between her teeth. Farther, at the very edge of the forest, sun-browned youths play a hard game of catch, flinging their soccer ball one-handed in a motion that revives the immortal gesture of the Discobolus; and now a breeze sets the pines aboil with an Attic rustle, and I dream that our entire world, like that large, firm ball, has flown back in a wondrous arc into the grip of a naked pagan god. Meanwhile an airplane, with an aeolian exclamation, soars above the pines, and one of the swarthy athletes interrupts his game to gaze at the sky where two blue wings speed toward the sun with a rapturous Daedalian hum.

  I wish to tell all this to my neighbor when, breathing heavily, and baring his uneven teeth, he comes out of the water and lies down again on the sand, and it is only my lack of German words that keeps him from understanding me. He does not understand me but still answers with a smile that involves his entire being, the brilliant bald spot on his head, the black thicket of his mustache, his jolly meaty belly with a woolly path running down its center.

  His profession was revealed to me, in time, by sheer accident. Once, at twilight, when the roar of motorcars became muffled and the hillocks of oranges on hawkers’ carts acquired a southern brightness in the blue air, I happened to stroll through a distant district and drop into a tavern to quench the evening thirst so familiar to urban vagabonds. My merry German stood behind the glistening bar, letting a thick yellow stream spurt from the spigot, trimming off the foam with a small wooden spatula, and letting it spill lavishly over the rim. A massive, ponderous wagon driver with a monstrous gray mustache leaned on the bar, watching the spigot and listening to the beer, which hissed like horse urine. The host raised his eyes, grinned a friendly grin, poured a beer for me too, and flung my coin into the drawer with a clink. Next to him, a young girl in a checkered dress, fair-haired, with pointed pink elbows, was washing glasses and nimbly drying them with a squeaky cloth. That same night, I learned that she was his daughter, that her name was Emma, and that his last name was Krause. I sat down in a corner and started unhurriedly sipping the light, white-maned beer, with its faintly metallic aftertaste. The tavern was of the usual type—a couple of posters advertising drinks, some deer antlers, and a low, dark ceiling festooned with paper flaglets, remnants of some festival or other. Beyond the bar, bottles glistened on the shelves, and higher up an old-fashioned, hut-shaped cuckoo clock tocked resonantly. A cast-iron stove dragged its annulate pipe along the wall, then folded it into the overhead motley of the flags. The dirty white of the cardboard beer-mug coasters stood out against the bare sturdy tables. At one of the tables, a sleepy man with appetizing folds of fat on his nape, and a glum, white-toothed fellow—a typesetter or an electrician, judging by his appearance—were shooting craps. All was quiet and peaceful. Unhurriedly, the clock kept breaking off dry little sections of time. Emma clinked her glasses and kept glancing at the corner where, in a narrow mirror bisected by the gold lettering of an advertisement, was reflected the sharp profile of the electrician and his hand holding up the conical black cup with the dice.

  The next morning, I walked again past the stocky motormen, past the fan of spraying water in which momentarily hovered a glorious rainbow, and found myself again on the sunlit shore, where Krause was already reclining. He thrust his sweaty face out from under his umbrella and began talking—about the water, about the heat. I lay down, squinting to keep out the sun, and when I reopened my eyes everything around me was a light blue. All of a sudden, among the pines of the sun-dappled lakeside road, a small van drove up, followed by a policeman on a bicycle. Inside the van, yelping desperately, a small captured dog thrashed about. Krause raised himself up and yelled at the top of his voice, “Watch out! Dogcatcher!” At once someone took up that shout, and it passed from throat to throat, curving around the circular lake, outdistancing the catcher, and the forewarned owners ran for their dogs, hurriedly muzzled them, and clicked on leashes. Krause listened with pleasure as the resounding repetitions receded, and said with a good-natured wink, “There. That’s the last one he’ll get.”

  I began to visit his tavern fairly often. I very much liked Emma—her naked elbows, the small birdlike face, the vapid, tender eyes. But what I liked most was the way she looked at her lover, the electrician, as he lazily leaned on the bar. I had a
side view of him—the baleful, malevolent wrinkle beside his mouth, his glowing, wolflike eye, the blue bristles on his sunken, long-unshaven cheek. She looked at him with such apprehension and such love when he spoke to her while transfixing her with his unflinching gaze, and she nodded so trustingly, with her pale lips half open, that I, in my corner, had a blissful sensation of joy and well-being, as if God had confirmed to me the immortality of the soul or a genius had praised my books. I also committed to memory the electrician’s hand, wet with beer foam; the thumb of that hand gripping the mug; the huge black nail with a crack in the middle.

  The last time I was there, the evening, as I remember it, was muggy and pregnant with the promise of an electrical storm. Then the wind began gusting violently and people in the square ran for the subway stairs; in the ashen dark outside, the wind tore at their clothes as in the painting The Destruction of Pompeii. The host felt hot in the dim little tavern; he had unbuttoned his collar and was gloomily eating his supper in the company of two shopkeepers. It was getting late and the rain was rustling against the windowpanes when the electrician arrived. He was soaking wet and chilled, and muttered something in annoyance when he saw that Emma was not at the bar. Krause kept silent, munching on a boulder-gray sausage.

  I sensed that something extraordinary was about to happen. I had had a lot to drink, and my soul—my avid, sharp-eyed inner self—craved a spectacle. It all began very simply. The electrician walked to the bar, casually poured himself a glass of brandy from a flat bottle, swallowed, wiped his mouth with his wrist, gave his cap a slap, and headed for the door. Krause lowered his knife and fork crosswise onto his plate and loudly said, “Wait! That’ll be twenty pfennigs!”

  The electrician, with his hand already on the doorknob, looked back. “I thought I was at home here.”

  “You don’t intend to pay?” asked Krause.

  Emma suddenly appeared from beneath the clock at the back of the bar, looked at her father, then at her lover, and froze. Above her, the cuckoo hopped out of its hut and hid again.

  “Leave me alone,” the electrician said slowly, and went out.

  Whereupon, with astounding agility, Krause rushed after him, yanking open the door.

  I drank the rest of my beer and ran out too, feeling a gust of moist wind rush pleasantly over my face.

  They were standing face-to-face on the black, rain-lustrous sidewalk, and both were yelling. I could not catch all the words in the crescendo of this roaring ruckus, but there was one word that was distinctly and continually repeated: twenty, twenty, twenty. Several people had already stopped to have a look at the quarrel—I myself was enthralled by it, by the reflections of the streetlamp on the distorted faces, the strained sinew in Krause’s naked neck; for some reason it brought back a splendid scuffle I had once had in a seaport dive with a beetle-black Italian, during which my hand had somehow got into his mouth and I had fiercely tried to squeeze, to tear, the wet skin inside his cheek.

  The electrician and Krause yelled louder and louder. Past me slipped Emma and stopped, not daring to approach, only shouting in desperation, “Otto! Father! Otto! Father!” And at each of her shouts the swell of a contained, expectant cackle ran through the small crowd.

  The two men switched to hand-to-hand combat eagerly, with a muffled thumping of fists. The electrician hit in silence, while Krause emitted a short grunt with every blow. Skinny Otto’s back bent; some dark blood began to trickle from one nostril. Suddenly he tried to seize the heavy hand that was pummeling his face, but, failing in this, swayed and crashed facedown onto the sidewalk. People ran toward him, screening him from my sight.

  I remembered having left my hat on the table and went back into the tavern. Inside, it seemed oddly light and quiet. Emma sat at a corner table with her head lying on an outstretched arm. I went over to her and stroked her hair. She raised her tear-stained face, then dropped her head again. I cautiously kissed the delicate part in her kitchen-scented hair, found my hat, and walked out.

  In the street, a crowd was still gathered. Krause, breathing heavily, the way he did when he came out of the lake, was explaining something to a policeman.

  I neither know nor wish to know who was wrong and who was right in this affair. The story could have been given a different twist, and made to depict compassionately how a girl’s happiness had been mortified for the sake of a copper coin, how Emma spent the whole night crying, and how, after falling asleep toward morning, she saw again, in her dreams, the frenzied face of her father as he pummeled her lover. Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way.

  THE RETURN OF CHORB

  THE KELLERS left the opera house at a late hour. In that pacific German city, where the very air seemed a little lusterless and where a transverse row of ripples had kept shading gently the reflected cathedral for well over seven centuries, Wagner was a leisurely affair presented with relish so as to overgorge one with music. After the opera Keller took his wife to a smart nightclub renowned for its white wine. It was past one in the morning when their car, flippantly lit on the inside, sped through lifeless streets to deposit them at the iron wicket of their small but dignified private house. Keller, a thickset old German, closely resembling Oom Paul Kruger, was the first to step down on the sidewalk, across which the loopy shadows of leaves stirred in the streetlamp’s gray glimmer. For an instant his starched shirtfront and the droplets of bugles trimming his wife’s dress caught the light as she disengaged a stout leg and climbed out of the car in her turn. The maid met them in the vestibule and, still carried by the momentum of the news, told them in a frightened whisper about Chorb’s having called. Frau Keller’s chubby face, whose everlasting freshness somehow agreed with her Russian merchant-class parentage, quivered and reddened with agitation.

  “He said she was ill?”

  The maid whispered still faster. Keller stroked his gray brush of hair with his fat palm, and an old man’s frown overcast his large, somewhat simian face, with its long upper lip and deep furrows.

  “I simply refuse to wait till tomorrow,” muttered Frau Keller, shaking her head as she gyrated heavily on one spot, trying to catch the end of the veil that covered her auburn wig. “We’ll go there at once. Oh dear, oh dear! No wonder there’s been no letters for quite a month.”

  Keller punched his gibus open and said in his precise, sightly guttural Russian: “The man is insane. How dare he, if she’s ill, take her a second time to that vile hotel?”

  But they were wrong, of course, in thinking that their daughter was ill. Chorb said so to the maid only because it was easier to utter. In point of fact he had returned alone from abroad and only now realized that, like it or not, he would have to explain how his wife had perished, and why he had written nothing about it to his in-laws. It was all very difficult. How was he to explain that he wished to possess his grief all by himself, without tainting it by any foreign substance and without sharing it with any other soul? Her death appeared to him as a most rare, almost unheard-of occurrence; nothing, it seemed to him, could be purer than such a death, caused by the impact of an electric stream, the same stream which, when poured into glass receptacles, yields the purest and brightest light.

  Ever since that spring day when, on the white highway a dozen kilometers from Nice, she had touched, laughing, the live wire of a storm-felled pole, Chorb’s entire world ceased to sound like a world: it retreated at once, and even the dead body that he carried in his arms to the nearest village struck him as something alien and needless.

  In Nice, where she had to be buried, the disagreeable consumptive clergyman kept in vain pressing him for details: Chorb responded only with a languid smile. He sat daylong on the shingly beach, cupping colored pebbles and letting them flow from hand to hand; and then, suddenly, without waiting for the funeral, he traveled back to Germany.

&nbs
p; He passed in reverse through all the spots they had visited together during their honeymoon journey. In Switzerland where they had wintered and where the apple trees were now in their last bloom, he recognized nothing except the hotels. As to the Black Forest, through which they had hiked in the preceding autumn, the chill of the spring did not impede memory. And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving—to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing—light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves. He thought that if he managed to gather all the little things they had noticed together—if he re-created thus the near past—her image would grow immortal and replace her forever. Nighttime, though, was unendurable. Night imbued with sudden terror her irrational presence. He hardly slept at all during the three weeks of his trek—and now he got off, quite drugged with fatigue, at the railway station, which had been last autumn their point of departure from the quiet town where he had met and married her.