The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “How many times,” continued Koldunov, examining with interest Lik’s pale-gray trousers, “how many times during the past years … Oh, yes, I thought of you. Yes, indeed! And where, thought I, is my Lavrusha? I’ve told my wife about you. She was once a pretty woman. And what line of work are you in?”

  “I’m an actor,” sighed Lik.

  “Allow me an indiscretion,” said Koldunov in a confidential tone. “I’m told that in the United States there is a secret society that considers the word ‘money’ improper, and if payment must be made, they wrap the dollars in toilet paper. True, only the rich belong—the poor have no time for it. Now, here’s what I’m driving at,” and, his brows raised questioningly, Koldunov made a vulgar, palpating motion with two fingers and thumb—the feel of hard cash.

  “Alas, no!” Lik exclaimed innocently. “Most of the year I’m unemployed, and the pay is miserable.”

  “I know how it is and understand perfectly,” said Koldunov with a smile. “In any case … Oh, yes—in any case, there’s a project I’d like to discuss with you sometime. You could make a nice little profit. Are you doing anything right now?”

  “Well, you see, as a matter of fact, I’m going to Bordighera for the whole day, by bus.… And tomorrow …”

  “What a shame—if you had told me, there’s a Russian chauffeur I know here, with a smart private car, and I would have shown you the whole Riviera. You ninny! All right, all right. I’ll walk you to the bus stop.”

  “And anyway I’m leaving for good soon,” Lik put in.

  “Tell me, how’s the family? … How’s Aunt Natasha?” Koldunov asked absently as they walked along a crowded little street that led down to the seafront. “I see, I see,” he nodded at Lik’s reply. Suddenly a guilty, demented look passed fleetingly across his evil face. “Listen, Lavrusha,” he said, pushing him involuntarily and bringing his face close to Lik’s on the narrow sidewalk. “Meeting you is an omen for me. It is a sign that all is not lost yet, and I must admit that just the other day I was thinking that all was lost. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “Oh, everybody has such thoughts now and then,” said Lik.

  They reached the promenade. The sea was opaque and corrugated under the overcast sky, and, here and there near the parapet, the foam had splashed onto the pavement. There was no one about except for a solitary lady in slacks sitting on a bench with an open book in her lap.

  “Here, give me five francs and I’ll buy you some cigarettes for the trip,” Koldunov said rapidly. Taking the money, he added in a different, easy tone, “Look, that’s the little wife over there—keep her company for a minute, and I’ll be right back.”

  Lik went up to the blond lady and said with an actor’s automatism, “Your husband will be right back and forgot to introduce me. I’m a cousin of his.”

  At the same moment he was sprinkled by the cool dust of a breaker. The lady looked up at Lik with blue, English eyes, unhurriedly closed her red book, and left without a word.

  “Just a joke,” said Koldunov, as he reappeared, out of breath. “Voilà. I’ll take a few for myself. Yes, I’m afraid my little woman has no time to sit on a bench and look at the sea. I implore you, promise me that we’ll meet again. Remember the omen! Tomorrow, after tomorrow, whenever you want. Promise me! Wait, I’ll give you my address.”

  He took Lik’s brand-new gilt-and-leather notebook, sat down, bent forward his sweaty, swollen-veined forehead, joined his knees, and not only wrote his address, reading it over with agonizing care, redotting an i and underlining a word, but also sketched a street map: so, so, then so. Evidently he had done this more than once, and more than once people had stood him up, using the forgotten address as an excuse; hence he wrote with great diligence and force—a force that was almost incantational.

  The bus arrived. “So, I’ll expect you!” shouted Koldunov, helping Lik aboard. Then he turned, full of energy and hope, and walked resolutely off along the promenade as if he had some pressing, important business, though it was perfectly obvious that he was an idler, a drunkard, and a boor.

  The following day, a Wednesday, Lik took a trip to the mountains, and then spent the greater part of Thursday lying in his room with a bad headache. The performance was that evening, the departure tomorrow. At about six in the afternoon he went out to pick up his watch at the jeweler’s and buy some nice white shoes—an innovation he had long wanted to sport in the second act. Separating the bead curtain, he emerged from the shop, shoebox under arm, and ran straight into Koldunov.

  Koldunov’s greeting lacked the former ardor, and had a slightly derisive note instead. “Oho! You won’t wriggle out of it this time,” he said, taking Lik firmly by the elbow. “Come on, let’s go. You’ll see how I live and work.”

  “I have a performance tonight,” Lik objected, “and I’m leaving tomorrow!”

  “That’s just the point, my friend, that’s just the point. Seize the opportunity! Take advantage of it! There will never be another chance. The card is trumped! Come on. Get going.”

  Repeating disconnected words and imitating with all his unattractive being the senseless joy of a man who has reached the borderline, and perhaps even gone beyond it (a poor imitation, Lik thought vaguely), Koldunov walked briskly, prodding on his weak companion. The entire company of actors was sitting on the terrace of a corner café, and, noticing Lik, greeted him with a peripatetic smile that really did not belong to any one member of the group, but skittered across the lips of each like an independent spot of reflected sunlight.

  Koldunov led Lik up a crooked little street, mottled here and there by jaundiced, crooked sunlight. Lik had never visited this squalid, old quarter. The tall, bare façades of the narrow houses seemed to lean over the pavement from either side, with their tops almost meeting; sometimes they coalesced completely, forming an arch. Repulsive infants were puttering about by the doorways; black, foul-smelling water ran down the sidewalk gutter. Suddenly changing direction, Koldunov shoved him into a shop and, flaunting the cheapest French slang (in the manner of many Russian paupers), bought two bottles of wine with Lik’s money. It was evident that he was long since in debt here, and now there was a desperate glee in his whole bearing and in his menacing exclamations of greeting, which brought no response whatever from either the shopkeeper or the shopkeeper’s mother-in-law, and this made Lik even more uncomfortable. They walked on, turning into an alley, and although it had seemed that the vile street they had just ascended represented the utmost limit of squalor, filth, and congestion, this passage, with limp wash hanging overhead, managed to embody an even greater dejection. At the corner of a lopsided little square, Koldunov said that he would go in first, and, leaving Lik, headed for the black cavity of an open door. Simultaneously a fair-haired little boy came dashing out of it, but, seeing the advancing Koldunov, ran back, brushing against a pail which reacted with a harsh clink. “Wait, Vasyuk!” shouted Koldunov, and lumbered into his murky abode. As soon as he entered, a frenzied female voice issued from within, yelling something in what seemed a habitually overwrought tone, but then the scream ceased abruptly, and a minute later Koldunov peeped out and grimly beckoned to Lik.

  Lik crossed the threshold and immediately found himself in a low-ceilinged, dark room, whose bare walls, as if distorted by some awful pressure from above, formed incomprehensible curves and corners. The place was crammed with the dingy stage properties of indigence. The boy of a moment ago sat on the sagging connubial bed; a huge fair-haired woman with thick bare feet emerged from a corner and, without a smile on her bloated pale face (whose every feature, even the eyes, seemed smudged, by fatigue, or melancholy, or God knows what), wordlessly greeted Lik.

  “Get acquainted, get acquainted,” Koldunov muttered in derisive encouragement, and immediately set about uncorking the wine. His wife put some bread and a plate of tomatoes on the table. She was so silent that Lik began to doubt whether it had been this woman who had screamed a moment ago.

  She sat down on
a bench in the back of the room, busying herself with something, cleaning something … with a knife over a spread newspaper, it seemed—Lik was afraid to look too closely—while the boy, his eyes glistening, moved over to the wall and, maneuvering cautiously, slipped out into the street. There was a multitude of flies in the room, and with maniacal persistence they haunted the table and settled on Lik’s forehead.

  “All right, let’s have a drink,” said Koldunov.

  “I can’t—I’m not allowed to,” Lik was about to object, but instead, obeying the oppressive influence he knew well from his nightmares, he took a swallow—and went into a fit of coughing.

  “That’s better,” said Koldunov with a sigh, wiping his trembling lips with the back of his hand. “You see,” he continued, filling Lik’s glass and his own, “here’s the situation. This is going to be a business talk! Allow me to tell you in brief. At the beginning of summer, I worked for a month or so with some other Russians here, collecting beach garbage. But, as you well know, I am an outspoken man who likes the truth, and when a scoundrel turns up, I come right out and say, ‘You’re a scoundrel,’ and, if necessary, I punch him in the mouth. Well, one day …”

  And Koldunov began telling, circumstantially, with painstaking repetitions, a dull, wretched episode, and one had the feeling that for a long time his life had consisted of such episodes; that humiliation and failure, heavy cycles of ignoble idleness and ignoble toil, culminating in the inevitable row, had long since become a profession with him. Lik, meanwhile, began to feel drunk after the first glass, but nevertheless went on sipping, with concealed revulsion. A kind of tickling fog permeated every part of his body, but he dared not stop, as if his refusal of wine would lead to a shameful punishment. Leaning on one elbow, Koldunov talked uninterruptedly, stroking the edge of the table with one hand and occasionally slapping it to stress some particularly somber word. His head, the color of yellowish clay (he was almost completely bald), the bags under his eyes, the enigmatically malignant expression of his mobile nostrils—all of this had completely lost any connection with the image of the strong, handsome schoolboy who used to torment Lik, but the coefficient of nightmare remained unchanged.

  “There you are, friend.… This is no longer important,” said Koldunov in a different, less narrative tone. “Actually, I had this little tale all ready for you last time, when it occurred to me that fate—I’m an old fatalist—had given a certain meaning to our meeting, that you had come as a savior, so to speak. But now it turns out that, in the first place, you—forgive me—are as stingy as a Jew and, in the second place … Who knows, maybe you really are not in a position to make me a loan.… Have no fear, have no fear.… This topic is closed! Moreover, it would have only been a question of a small sum to get me back not on my feet—that would be a luxury—but merely on all fours. Because I’m sick of sprawling with my face in the muck. I’m not going to ask anything of you; it’s not my style to beg. All I want is your opinion, about something. It’s merely a philosophical question. Ladies need not listen. How do you explain all this? You see, if a definite explanation exists, then fine, I’m willing to put up with the muck, since that means there is something logical and justified in all this, perhaps something useful to me or to others, I don’t know. Here, explain this to me: I am a human being—you certainly cannot deny that, can you? All right. I am a human being, and the same blood runs in my veins as in yours. Believe it or not, I was my late mama’s only and beloved. As a boy, I played pranks; as a youth, I went to war, and the ball started rolling—God, how it rolled! What went wrong? No, you tell me—what went wrong? I just want to know what went wrong, then I’ll be satisfied. Why has life systematically baited me? Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied, thrown into jail? Here’s an example for you: When they were taking me away after a certain incident in Lyon—and I might add that I was absolutely in the right, and am now very sorry I did not finish him off—well, as the police were taking me away, ignoring my protests, you know what they did? They stuck a little hook right here in the live flesh of my neck—what kind of treatment is that, I ask you?—and off the cop led me to the police station, and I floated along like a sleepwalker, because every additional motion made me black out with pain. Well, can you explain why they don’t do this to other people and then, all of a sudden, do it to me? Why did my first wife run away with a Circassian? Why did seven people nearly beat me to death in Antwerp in ’32, in a small room? And look at all this—what’s the reason for it?—these rags, these walls, that Katya over there? … The story of my life interests me, and has so for a long while! This isn’t any Jack London or Dostoyevski story for you! I live in a corrupt country—all right. I am willing to put up with the French. All right! But we must find some explanation, gentlemen! I was talking with a guy once, and he asks me, ‘Why don’t you go back to Russia?’ Why not, after all? The difference is very small! There they’d persecute me just the same, knock my teeth in, stick me in the cooler, and then invite me to be shot—and at least that would be honest. You see, I’m even willing to respect them—God knows, they are honest murderers—while here these crooks will think up such tortures for you, it’s almost enough to make you feel nostalgic for the good old Russian bullet. Hey, why aren’t you looking at me—you, you, you—or don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

  “No, I understand everything,” said Lik. “Only please excuse me. I don’t feel well, I must be going. I have to be at the theater soon.”

  “Oh, no. Wait just a minute. I understand a few things myself. You’re a strange fellow.… Come on, make me an offer of some kind.… Try! Maybe you’ll shower me with gold after all, eh? Listen, you know what? I’ll sell you a gun—it’ll be very useful to you on the stage: bang, and down goes the hero. It’s not even worth a hundred francs, but I need more than a hundred—I’ll let you have it for a thousand. Want it?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Lik listlessly. “And I really have no money. I’ve been through it all myself, the hunger and so forth.… No, I won’t have any more, I feel sick.”

  “You keep drinking, you son of a bitch, and you won’t feel sick. All right, forget it. I just did it to see what you’d say—I won’t be bought anyway. Only, please answer my question. Who was it decided I should suffer, and then condemned my child to the same lousy Russian fate? Just a minute, though—suppose I, too, want to sit down in my dressing gown and listen to the radio? What went wrong, eh? Take you, for instance—what makes you better than me? You go swaggering around, living in hotels, smooching with actresses.… What’s the reason for it? Come on, explain it to me.”

  Lik said, “I turned out to have—I happened to have … Oh, I don’t know … a modest dramatic talent, I suppose you could say.”

  “Talent?” shouted Koldunov. “I’ll show you talent! I’ll show you such talent that you’ll start cooking applesauce in your pants! You’re a dirty rat, chum. That’s your only talent. I must say that’s a good one!” (Koldunov started shaking in very primitive mimicry of side-splitting laughter.) “So, according to you, I’m the lowest, filthiest vermin and deserve my rotten end? Splendid, simply splendid. Everything is explained—eureka, eureka! The card is trumped, the nail is in, the beast is butchered!”

  “Oleg Petrovich is upset—maybe you ought to be going now,” Koldunov’s wife suddenly said from her corner, with a strong Estonian accent. There was not the least trace of emotion in her voice, causing her remark to sound wooden and senseless. Koldunov slowly turned in his chair, without altering the position of his hand, which lay as if lifeless on the table, and fixed his wife with an enraptured gaze.

  “I am not detaining anyone,” he spoke softly and cheerfully. “And I’ll be thankful not to be detained by others. Or told what to do. So long, mister,” he added, not looking at Lik, who for some reason found it necessary to say: “I’ll write from Paris, without fail.…”

  “So he’s going to write, is he?” sa
id Koldunov softly, apparently still addressing his wife. With some trouble Lik extricated himself from the chair and started in her direction, but swerved and bumped into the bed.

  “Go away, it’s all right,” she said calmly, and then, with a polite smile, Lik stumbled out of the house.

  His first sensation was one of relief. He had escaped from the orbit of that drunken, moralizing moron. Then came a mounting horror: he was sick to his stomach, and his arms and legs belonged to different people. How was he to perform that night? The worst of all, though, was that his whole body, which seemed to consist of ripples and dots, sensed the approach of a heart attack. It was as if an invisible stake were pointing at him and he might impale himself any moment. This was why he must follow a weaving course, even stopping and backing slightly now and then. Nevertheless, his mind remained rather lucid, he knew that only thirty-six minutes remained before the start of the performance, and he knew the way home.… It would be a better idea, though, to go down to the embankment, to sit by the sea until he felt better. This will pass, this will pass, if only I don’t die.… He also grasped the fact that the sun had just set, that the sky was already more luminous and more tender than the earth. What unnecessary, offensive nonsense. He walked, calculating every step, but sometimes he would err and passersby would turn to look at him. Happily, he did not encounter many of them, since it was the hallowed dinner hour, and when he reached the seafront, he found it quite deserted; the lights burned on the pier, casting long reflections on the tinted water, and these bright dots and inverted exclamation marks seemed to be shining translucently in his own head. He sat down on a bench, hurting his coccyx as he did so, and shut his eyes. But then everything began to spin; his heart was reflected as a terrifying globe on the dark inner side of his eyelids. It continued to swell agonizingly, and, to put a stop to this, he opened his eyes and tried to hook his gaze on things—on the evening star, on that black buoy in the sea, on a darkened eucalyptus tree at the end of the promenade. I know all this, he thought, I understand all this, and, in the twilight, the eucalyptus strangely resembles a big Russian birch. Can this be the end? Such an idiotic end.… I feel worse and worse.… What’s happening to me? … Oh, my God!