Thenceforth both brothers (but especially Anton, thanks to his lacking a job) established a watch over their neighbor’s insomnia. The enemy, however, was astute and endowed with a fine hearing. No matter how quietly one advanced toward his door, his light went out instantly, as if it never had been there; and only if one stood in the cold corridor for a goodish length of time, holding one’s breath, could one hope to see the return of the sensitive lamp beam. Thus beetles faint and recover.
The task of detection turned out to be most exhausting. Finally, the brothers chanced to catch him on the stairs and jostled him.
“Suppose it’s my habit to read at night. What business of yours is it? Let me pass, please.”
When he turned away, Gustav knocked off his hat in jest. Romantovski picked it up without a word.
A few days later, choosing a moment at nightfall—he was on his way back from the W.C. and failed to dart back into his room quickly enough—the brothers crowded around him. There were only two of them, yet they managed to form a crowd. They invited him to their room.
“There will be some beer,” said Gustav with a wink.
He tried to refuse.
“Oh, come along!” cried the brothers; they grabbed him under the arms and swept him off (while at it, they could feel how thin he was—that weakness, that slenderness below the shoulder offered an irresistible temptation—ah, to give a good squeeze so as to make him crunch, ah, hard to control oneself, let us, at least, dig into him on the move, just once, lightly …).
“You are hurting me,” said Romantovski. “Leave me alone, I can walk by myself.”
The promised beer, the large mouth of Gustav’s fiancée, a heavy smell in the room. They tried to make him drunk. Collarless, with a copper stud under his conspicuous and defenseless Adam’s apple, long-faced and pale, with quivering eyelashes, he sat in a complicated pose, partly doubled up, partly bent out, and when he got up from his chair he seemed to unwind like a spiral. However, they forced him to fold up again and, upon their suggestion, Anna sat in his lap. He kept glancing askance at the swell of her instep in the harness of a tight shoe, but mastered his dull anguish as best he could, not daring to get rid of the inert red-haired creature.
There was a minute when it seemed to them that he was broken, that he had become one of them. In fact, Gustav said, “You see, you were silly to look down on our company. We find offensive the way you have of keeping mum. What do you read all night?”
“Old, old tales,” replied Romantovski in such a tone of voice that the brothers suddenly felt very bored. The boredom was suffocating and grim, but drink prevented the storm from bursting out, and, on the contrary, weighed the eyelids down. Anna slipped off Romantovski’s knee, brushing the table with a drowsy hip; empty bottles swayed like ninepins, one collapsed. The brothers stooped, toppled, yawned, still looking through sleepy tears at their guest. He, vibrating and diffusing rays, stretched out, thinned, and gradually vanished.
This cannot go on. He poisons the life of honest folks. Why, it can well happen that he will move at the end of the month—intact, whole, never taken to pieces, proudly strutting about. It is not enough that he moves and breathes differently from other people; the trouble is that we just cannot put our finger upon the difference, cannot catch the tip of the ear by which to pull out the rabbit. Hateful is everything that cannot be palpated, measured, counted.
A series of trivial torments began. On Monday they managed to sprinkle his bedclothes with potato flour, which is said to provoke a maddening itch. On Tuesday they ambushed him at the corner of their street (he was carrying books hugged to his breast) and hustled him so neatly that his load landed in the puddle they had picked out for it. On Wednesday they painted the toilet seat with carpenter’s glue. By Thursday the brothers’ imagination was exhausted.
He said nothing, nothing whatever. On Friday, he overtook Anton, with his flying step, at the gate of the yard, and offered him an illustrated weekly—maybe you’d like to look at it? This unexpected courtesy perplexed the brothers and made them glow still hotter.
Gustav ordered his fiancée to stir up Romantovski, which would give one the opportunity to pick a quarrel with him. You involuntarily tend to set a football rolling before kicking it. Frolicsome animals also prefer a mobile object. And though Anna, no doubt, greatly repelled Romantovski with those bug-brown freckles on her milky skin, the vacant look in her light eyes, and the little promontories of wet gums between her teeth, he found fit to conceal his distaste, fearing to infuriate Anna’s lover by spurning her.
Since he went all the same to the cinema once a week, he took her with him on Saturday in the hope that this attention would be enough. Unnoticed, at a discreet distance, both wearing new caps and orange-red shoes, the brothers stole after the pair, and on those dubious streets, in that dusty dusk, there were hundreds of their likes but only one Romantovski.
In the small elongated movie house, night had started to flicker, a self-manufactured lunar night, when the brothers, furtively hunching, seated themselves in the back row. They sensed the darkly delicious presence of Romantovski somewhere in front. On the way to the cinema, Anna failed to worm anything out of her disagreeable companion, nor did she quite understand what exactly Gustav wanted of him. As they walked, the mere sight of his lean figure and melancholy profile made her want to yawn. But once the picture started, she forgot about him, pressing an insensate shoulder against him. Specters conversed in trumpet tones on the newfangled speaking screen. The baron tasted his wine and carefully put his glass down—with the sound of a dropped cannonball.
And after a while the sleuths were pursuing the baron. Who would have recognized in him the master crook? He was hunted passionately, frenziedly. Automobiles sped with bursts of thunder. In a nightclub they fought with bottles, chairs, tables. A mother was putting an enchanting child to bed.
When it was all over, and Romantovski, with a little stumble, followed her out into the cool darkness, Anna exclaimed, “Oh, that was wonderful!”
He cleared his throat and said after a pause, “Let’s not exaggerate. In real life, it is all considerably duller.”
“It’s you who’s dull,” she retorted crossly, and presently chuckled softly as she recalled the pretty child.
Behind them, gliding along at the same distance as before, came the brothers. Both were gloomy. Both were pumping themselves up with gloomy violence. Gloomily, Anton said, “That’s not done, after all—going out walking with another’s bride.”
“And especially on Saturday night,” said Gustav.
A passerby, coming abreast of them, happened to glance at their faces—and could not help walking faster.
The night wind chased rustling rubbish along the fences. It was a dark and desolate part of Berlin. Far to the left of the road, above the canal, blinked scattered lights. On the right were vacant lots from which a few hastily silhouetted houses had turned their black backs away. After a little while the brothers accelerated their step.
“My mother and sister live in the country,” Anna was telling him in a rather cozy undertone amid the velvety night. “As soon as I get married, I hope to visit them with him. Last summer my sister—”
Romantovski suddenly looked back.
“—won a lottery prize,” continued Anna, mechanically looking back too.
Gustav emitted a sonorous whistle.
“Why, it’s them!” exclaimed Anna, and joyfully burst out laughing. “Ah, the rascals!”
“Good evening, good evening,” said Gustav hastily, in a panting voice. “What are you doing here, you ass, with my girl?”
“I’m not doing anything. We have just been—”
“Now, now,” said Anton and, drawing back his elbow, hit Romantovski crisply in the lower ribs.
“Please, don’t use your fists. You know perfectly well that—”
“Leave him alone, fellows,” said Anna with a soft snigger.
“Must teach him a lesson,” said Gustav, warming up
and forefeeling with a poignant glow how he too would follow his brother’s example and feel those cartilages, that crumpy backbone.
“Apropos, a funny thing happened to me one day,” Romantovski started to say, talking fast, but here Gustav began to jam and twist the huge lumps of his knuckles into his victim’s side, causing utterly indescribable pain. In lurching back Romantovski slipped and nearly fell: to fall would have meant perishing then and there.
“Let him go,” said Anna.
He turned and, holding his side, walked off along the dark rustling fences. The brothers followed, all but treading upon his heels. Gustav rumbled in the anguish of blood lust, and that rumble might turn any moment into a pounce.
Far away before him a bright twinkle promised safety; it meant a lighted street, and although what could be seen was probably one lone lamp, that slit in the blackness seemed a marvelous festive blaze, a blissful region of radiance, full of rescued men. He knew that if he started to run it would be the end, since he could not get there sufficiently fast; he should go at a quiet and smooth walk, then he might cover that distance, keeping silent the while and trying not to press his hand against his burning ribs. So he strode on, with his usual springy step, and the impression was that he did so on purpose, to mock nonflyers, and that next moment he might take off.
Anna’s voice: “Gustav, don’t tangle with him. You know quite well you won’t be able to stop. Remember what you did once to that bricklayer.”
“Hold your tongue, old bitch, don’t teach him what must be done.” (That’s Anton’s voice.)
Now at last, the region of light—where one could distinguish a chestnut’s foliage, and what looked like a Morris pillar, and farther still, to the left, a bridge—that breathlessly waiting imploring light, at last, at last, was not so very remote.… And still one should not run. And though he knew he was making a fatal mistake, all at once, beyond the control of his will, he flew up and, with a sob, dashed forward.
He ran and seemed, as he ran, to be laughing exultingly. Gustav overtook him in a couple of leaps. Both fell, and amid the fierce rasping and crunching there occurred a special sound—smooth and moist, once, and a second time, up to the hilt—and then Anna instantly fled into the darkness, holding her hat in her hand.
Gustav stood up. Romantovski was lying on the ground and speaking in Polish. Abruptly his voice broke off.
“And now let’s be gone,” said Gustav. “I stuck him.”
“Take it out,” said Anton, “take it out of him.”
“I did,” said Gustav. “God, how I stuck him.”
They scurried off, though not toward the light, but across dark vacant lots. After skirting the cemetery they reached a back alley, exchanged glances, and slowed down to a normal walk.
Upon coming home, they immediately fell asleep. Anton dreamed he was sitting on the grass and watching a barge drift by. Gustav did not dream of anything.
Early next morning police agents arrived; they searched the murdered man’s room and briefly questioned Anton, who had come out into the passage. Gustav stayed in bed, replete and somnolent, his face the color of Westphalian ham, in contrast to the whitish tufts of his eyebrows.
Presently, the police left and Anton returned. He was in an unusual state of elation, choking with laughter, flexing his knees, noiselessly hitting his palm with his fist.
“What fun!” he said. “Do you know who the fellow was? A leonardo!”
In their lingo a leonardo (from the name of the painter) meant a maker of counterfeit bills. And Anton related what he had managed to find out: the fellow, it appeared, belonged to a gang and had just got out of jail. Before that he had been designing fake paper money; an accomplice had knifed him, no doubt.
Gustav shook with mirth too, but then his expression changed suddenly.
“He slipped us his slither, the rogue!” cried Gustav and ran, naked, to the wardrobe where he kept his money box.
“Doesn’t matter, we’ll pass it,” said his brother. “A nonexpert won’t see the difference.”
“Yes, but what a rogue!” Gustav kept repeating.
My poor Romantovski! And I who believed with them that you were indeed someone exceptional. I believed, let me confess, that you were a remarkable poet whom poverty obliged to dwell in that sinister district. I believed, on the strength of certain indices, that every night, by working on a line of verse or nursing a growing idea, you celebrated an invulnerable victory over the brothers. My poor Romantovski! It is all over now. Alas, the objects I had assembled wander away. The young poplar dims and takes off—to return where it had been fetched from. The brick wall dissolves. The house draws in its little balconies one by one, then turns, and floats away. Everything floats away. Harmony and meaning vanish. The world irks me again with its variegated void.
IN MEMORY OF L. I. SHIGAEV
LEONID IVANOVICH SHIGAEV is dead.… The suspension dots, customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words that have departed on tiptoe, in reverent single file, leaving their tracks on the marble.… However, I would like to violate this sepulchral silence. Please allow me to … Just a few fragmentary, chaotic, basically uncalled-for … But no matter. He and I met about eleven years ago, in a year that for me was disastrous. I was virtually perishing. Picture to yourself a young, still very young, helpless and lonely person, with a perpetually inflamed soul (it feared the least contact, it was like raw flesh) and unable to cope with the pangs of an unhappy love affair.… I shall take the liberty of dwelling on this point for a moment.
There was nothing exceptional about that thin, bobhaired German girl, but when I used to look at her, at her suntanned cheek, at her rich fair hair, whose shiny, golden-yellow and olive-gold strands sloped so roundly in profile from crown to nape, I felt like howling with tenderness, a tenderness that just would not fit inside me simply and comfortably, but remained wedged in the door and would not bulge in or out—bulky, brittle-cornered, and of no use to anyone, least of all to that lass. In short, I discovered that once a week, at her house, she betrayed me with a respectable paterfamilias, who, incidentally, was so infernally meticulous that he would bring his own shoe trees with him. It all ended with the circuslike whump of a monstrous box on the ear with which I knocked down the traitress, who rolled up in a ball where she had collapsed, her eyes glistening at me through her spread fingers—all in all quite flattered, I think. Automatically, I searched for something to throw at her, saw the china sugar bowl I had given her for Easter, took the thing under my arm and went out, slamming the door.
A footnote: this is but one of the conceivable versions of my parting with her; I had considered many of these impossible possibilities while still in the first heat of my drunken delirium, imagining now the gross gratification of a good slap; now the firing of an old Parabellum pistol, at her and at myself, at her and at the paterfamilias, only at her, only at myself; then, finally, a glacial irony, noble sadness, silence—oh, things can go in so many ways, and I have long since forgotten how they actually went.
My landlord at the time, an athletic Berliner, suffered permanently from furunculosis: the back of his neck showed a square of disgustingly pink sticking plaster with three neat apertures—for ventilation, maybe, or for the release of the pus. I worked in an émigré publishing house for a couple of languid-looking individuals who in reality were such cunning crooks that plain people upon observing them got spasms in the chest, as when one steps onto a cloud-piercing summit. As I began coming late (“systematically late” as they called it) and missing work, or arriving in such condition that it was necessary to send me home, our relationship became unbearable, and finally, thanks to a joint effort—with the enthusiastic collaboration of the bookkeeper and of some stranger who had come in with a manuscript—I was thrown out.
My poor, my pitiful youth! I vividly visualize the ghastly little room that I rented for five dollars a month, the ghastly flowerets of the wallpaper, the ghastly lamp hanging from its cord, with a na
ked bulb whose manic light glowed sometimes till morn. I was so miserable there, so indecently, luxuriously miserable, that the walls to this day must be saturated with misfortune and fever, and it is unthinkable that some happy chap could have lived there after me, whistling, humming. Ten years have elapsed, and even now I can still imagine myself then, a pale youth seated in front of the shimmery mirror, with his livid forehead and black beard, dressed only in a torn shirt, guzzling cheap booze and clinking glasses with his reflection. What times those were! Not only was I of no use to anyone in the world, but I could not even imagine a set of circumstances in which someone might care a whit about me.
By dint of prolonged, persistent, solitary drinking I drove myself to the most vulgar of visions, the most Russian of all hallucinations: I began seeing devils. I saw them every evening as soon as I emerged from my diurnal dreamery to dispel with my wretched lamp the twilight that was already engulfing us. Yes, even more clearly than I now see the perpetual tremor of my hand, I saw the precious intruders and after some time I even became accustomed to their presence, as they kept pretty much to themselves. They were smallish but rather plump, the size of an overweight toad—peaceful, limp, black-skinned, more or less warty little monsters. They crawled rather than walked, but, with all their feigned clumsiness, they proved uncapturable. I remember buying a dog whip and, as soon as enough of them had gathered on my desk, I tried to give them a good lashing, but they miraculously avoided the blow; I struck again, and one of them, the nearest, only blinked, screwing up his eyes crookedly, like a tense dog that someone wishes to threaten away from some tempting bit of ordure. The others dispersed, dragging their hind legs. But they all stealthily clustered together again while I wiped up the ink spilled on the desk and picked up a prostrate portrait. Generally speaking, their densest habitat was the vicinity of my writing table; they materialized from somewhere underneath and, in leisurely fashion, their sticky bellies crepitating and smacking against the wood, made their way up the desk legs, in a parody of climbing sailors. I tried smearing their route with Vaseline but this did not help, and only when I happened to select some particularly appetizing little rotter, intently clambering upward, and swatted him with the whip or with my shoe, only then did he fall on the floor with a fat-toad thud; but a minute later there he was again, on his way up from a different corner, his violet tongue hanging out from the strain, and once over the top he would join his comrades. They were numerous, and at first they all seemed alike to me: dark little creatures with puffy, basically rather good-natured faces; they sat in groups of five or six on the desk, on various papers, on a volume of Pushkin, glancing at me with indifference. One of them might scratch behind his ear with his foot, the long claw making a coarse scraping sound, and then freeze motionless, forgetting his leg in midair. Another would doze, uncomfortably crowding his neighbor, who, for that matter, was not blameless either: the reciprocal inconsiderateness of amphibians, capable of growing torpid in intricate attitudes. Gradually I began distinguishing them, and I think I even gave them names depending on their resemblance to acquaintances of mine or to various animals. One could make out larger and smaller specimens (although they were all of quite portable size), some were more repulsive, others more acceptable in aspect, some had lumps or tumors, others were perfectly smooth. A few had a habit of spitting at each other. Once they brought a new boy, an albino, of a cinereous tint, with eyes like beads of red caviar; he was very sleepy and glum, and gradually crawled away. With an effort of will I would manage to vanquish the spell for a moment. It was an agonizing effort, for I had to repel and hold away a horrible iron weight, for which my entire being served as a magnet: I had but to loosen my grip, to give in ever so slightly, and the phantasma would take shape again, becoming precise, growing stereoscopic, and I would experience a deceptive sense of relief—the relief of despair, alas—when I once again yielded to the hallucination, and once again the clammy mass of thick-skinned clods sat before me on the desk, looking at me sleepily and yet somehow expectantly. I tried not only the whip, but also a famous time-honored method, on which I now find myself embarrassed to enlarge, especially since I must have used it in some wrong, very wrong way. Still, the first time it did work: a certain sacramental sign with bunched fingers, pertaining to a particular religious cult, was unhurriedly performed by me at a height of a few inches above the compact group of devils and grazed them like a red-hot iron, with a succulent hiss, both pleasant and nasty; whereupon, squirming from their burns, my rascals disparted and dropped with ripe plops to the floor. But, when I repeated the experiment with a new gathering, the effect proved weaker and after that they stopped reacting altogether, that is, they very quickly developed a certain immunity … but enough about that. With a laugh—what else did I have left?—I would utter “T’foo!” (the only expletive, by the way, borrowed by the Russian language from the lexicon of devils; see also the German “Teufel”), and, without undressing, go to bed (on top of the covers, of course, as I was afraid of encountering unwanted bedfellows). Thus the days passed, if one can call them days—these were not days, but a timeless fog—and when I came to I found myself rolling on the floor, grappling with my hefty landlord among the shambles of the furniture. With a desperate lunge I freed myself and flew out of the room and thence onto the stairs, and the next thing I knew I was walking down the street, trembling, disheveled, a vile bit of alien plaster sticking to my fingers, with an aching body and a ringing head, but almost totally sober.
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Page 47
