The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

  SOLUS REX

  AS ALWAYS happened, the king was awakened by the clash between the predawn watch and the midmorning one (morndammer wagh and erldag wagh). The former, unduly punctual, would leave its post at the prescribed minute, while the latter would be late by a constant number of seconds, not because of negligence, but probably because somebody’s gouty timepiece was habitually slow. Therefore those departing and those arriving always met at one and the same place—the narrow footpath directly under the king’s bedroom window, between the rear wall of the palace and a tangled growth of dense but meagerly blooming honeysuckle, under which was scattered all manner of trash: chicken feathers, broken earthenware, and large, red-cheeked tin cans that had contained “Pomona,” a national brand of preserved fruit. The meeting would invariably be accompanied by the muffled sound of a brief, good-natured tussle (and it was this that awakened the king), as one of the predawn sentries, being of a roguish bent, would pretend he did not want to surrender the slate bearing the password to one of the midmorning men, an irritable and stupid old codger, veteran of the Swirhulm campaign. Then all would grow still again, and the only audible sound would be the businesslike, now and then accelerating, crepitation of rain, which would systematically fall for precisely 306 days out of 365 or -6, so that the weather’s peripeties had long since ceased to trouble anyone (here the wind addressed the honeysuckle).

  The king made a right turn out of his sleep and propped a big white fist under his cheek, on which the blazon embroidered on the pillowcase had left a chessboard impression. Between the inside edges of the brown, loosely drawn curtains, in the single but broad window, there seeped a beam of soapy light, and the king at once remembered an imminent duty (his presence at the inauguration of a new bridge across the Egel) whose disagreeable image seemed inscribed with geometric inevitability into that pale trigon of day. He was not interested in bridges, canals, or shipbuilding, and even though after five years—yes, exactly five years (826 days)—of nebulous reign he really ought to have acquired the habit of attending diligently to a multitude of matters that filled him with loathing because of their organic sketchiness in his mind (where very different things, in no way related to his royal office, were infinitely and unquenchably perfect), he felt depressingly aggravated every time he was obliged to have contact not only with anything that demanded a false smile from his deliberate ignorance, but also with that which was nothing more than a veneer of conventional standards on a senseless or perhaps even nonexistent object. If the inauguration of the bridge, the plans for which he did not even remember though he had no doubt approved them, struck him as merely a vulgar festival, it was also because nobody ever bothered to inquire whether he was interested in that intricate fruit of technology, suspended in midair, and yet today he would have to ride slowly across in a lustrous convertible with a toothy grille, and this was torture; and then there was that other engineer about whom people had been telling him ever since he had happened to mention (just like that, simply to get rid of someone or something) that he would enjoy doing some climbing, if only the island had a single decent mountain (the old, long-dead coastal volcano did not count, and, furthermore, a lighthouse—which, incidentally, did not work either—had been built on its summit). This engineer, whose dubious fame thrived in the drawing rooms of court ladies and courtesans, attracted by his honey-brown complexion and insinuating speech, had proposed elevating the central part of the insular plain and transforming it into a mountain massif, by means of subterranean inflation. The inhabitants of the chosen locality would be allowed to remain in their dwellings while the soil was being puffed up. Poltroons who preferred to withdraw from the test area where their little brick houses huddled and amazed red cows mooed, sensing the change in altitude, would be punished by their having to spend much more time on their return along the newly formed escarpments than they had on their recent retreat over the doomed flatland. Slowly the meadows swelled; boulders moved their round backs; a lethargic stream tumbled out of bed and, to its own surprise, turned into an alpine waterfall; trees traveled in file cloudward and many of them (the firs, for instance) enjoyed the ride; the villagers, leaning on their porch railings, waved their handkerchiefs and admired the pneumatic development of landscape. So the mountain would grow and grow, until the engineer ordered that the monstrous pumps be stopped. The king, however, did not wait for the stoppage, but dozed off again, with barely time to regret that, constantly resisting as he did the Councilors’ readiness to support the realization of every harebrained scheme (while, on the other hand, his most natural, most human rights were constricted by rigid laws), he had not given permission for the experiment, and now it was too late, the inventor had committed suicide after patenting a gallow tree for indoor use (thus, anyway, the spirit of slumber retold it to the slumberer).

  The king slept on till half past seven and, at the habitual minute, his mind jolted into action and was already on its way to meet Frey when Frey entered the bedroom. That decrepit, asthmatic konwacher invariably emitted in motion a queer supplementary sound, as if he were in a great hurry, although haste was apparently not in his line, seeing he had not yet got around to dying. He lowered a silver basin onto a taboret with a heart design cut out in its seat, as he had already been doing for half a century, under two kings; today he was waking a third, for whose predecessors this vanilla-scented and seemingly witch-charmed water had probably served an ablutionary purpose. Now, however, it was quite superfluous; and yet every morning the basin and taboret appeared, along with a towel that had been folded five years before. Continuing to emit his special sound, the old valet admitted the daylight in its entirety. The king always wondered why Frey did not open the curtains first, instead of groping in the penumbra to move the taboret with its useless utensil toward the bed. But speaking to Frey was out of the question because of his deafness, that went so well with the snow-owl white of his hair: he was cut off from the world by the cotton wool of old age, and, as he went out with a bow to the bed, the wall clock in the bedroom began to ticktack more distinctly, as if it had been given a recharge of time.

  The bedroom now came into focus, with the dragon-shaped crack traversing its ceiling and the huge clothes tree standing like an oak in the corner. An admirable ironing board stood leaning against the wall. A thing for yanking one’s riding boot off by the heel, an obsolete appliance in the shape of a huge cast-iron stag beetle, lurked under the border of an armchair robed in a white furniture cover. An oak wardrobe, obese, blind, and drugged by naphthalene, stood next to an ovoid wickerwork receptacle for soiled linen, set on end there by some unknown Columbus. Various objects hung at random on the bluish walls: a clock (it had already tattled about its presence), a medicine cabinet, an old barometer that indicated remembered rather than real weather, a pencil sketch of a lake with reeds and a departing duck, a myopic photograph of a leather-legginged gentleman astride a blurrytailed horse held by a solemn groom in front of a porch, the same porch with strained-faced servants assembled on its steps, some fluffy flowers pressed under dusty glass in a circular frame.… The paucity of the furnishings and their utter irrelevance to the needs and the tenderness of whoever used this spacious bedroom (once, it seems, inhabited by the Husmuder, as the wife of the preceding king had been dubbed) gave it an oddly untenanted appearance, and if it were not for the intrusive basin and the iron bed, on the edge of which sat a man in a nightshirt with a frilly collar, his strong bare feet resting upon the floor, it was impossible to imagine that anyone spent his nights here. His toes groped for and found a pair of morocco slippers and, donning a dressing gown as gray as the morning, the king walked across the creaking floorboards to the felt-padded door. When he subsequently recalled that morning, it seemed to him that, upon arising, he had experienced, both in mind and in muscles, an unaccustomed heaviness, the fateful burden of the coming day, so that the awful misfortune which that day brought (and which beneath the mask of trivial boredom stood already on guard at the Egel bridge), absurd
and unforeseeable as it was, thereafter seemed to him a kind of resolvent. We are inclined to attribute to the immediate past (I just had it in my hands, I put it right there, and now it’s not there) lineaments relating it to the unexpected present, which in fact is but a bounder pluming himself on a purchased escutcheon. We, the slaves of linked events, endeavor to close the gap with a spectral ring in the chain. As we look back, we feel certain that the road we see behind us is the very one that has brought us to the tomb or the fountainhead near which we find ourselves. Life’s erratic leaps and lapses can be endured by the mind only when signs of resilience and quagginess are discoverable in anterior events. Such, incidentally, were the thoughts that occurred to the no longer independent artist Dmitri Nikolaevich Sineusov, and evening had come, and in vertically arranged ruby letters glowed the word RENAULT.

  The king set out in search of breakfast. He never knew in which of the five possible chambers situated along the cold stone gallery, with cobwebs in the corners of its ogival windows, his coffee would be waiting. Opening the doors one by one, he kept trying to locate the little set table, and finally found it where it happened least frequently: under a large, opulently dark portrait of his predecessor. King Gafon was portrayed at the age at which he remembered him, but features, posture, and bodily structure were endowed with a magnificence that had never been characteristic of that stoop-shouldered, fidgety, and sloppy old man with a peasant crone’s wrinkles above his hairless and somewhat crooked upper lip. The words of the family arms, “see and rule” (sassed ud halsem), used to be changed by wags, when referring to him, to “armchair and filbert brandy” (sasse ud hazel). He reigned thirty-odd years, arousing neither particular love nor particular hatred in anyone, believing equally in the power of good and the power of money, docile in his acquiescence to the parliamentary majority, whose vapid humanitarian aspirations appealed to his sentimental soul, and generously rewarding from a secret treasury the activities of those deputies whose devotion to the crown assured its stability. Kingcraft had long since become for him the flywheel of a mechanical habit, and the benighted submissiveness of the country, where the Peplerhus (parliament) faintly shone like a bleary and crackling rushlight, appeared as a similar form of regular rotation. And if the very last years of his reign were poisoned nevertheless by bitter sedition, coming as a belch after a long and carefree dinner, not he was to blame, but the person and behavior of the crown prince. Indeed, in the heat of vexation good burghers found that the one-time scourge of the learned world, the now forgotten Professor ven Skunk, did not err much when he affirmed that childbearing was but an illness, and that every babe was an “externalized,” self-existent parental tumor, often malignant.

  The present king (pre-accessionally, let us designate him as K in chess notation) was the old man’s nephew, and in the beginning no one dreamed that the nephew would accede to a throne rightfully promised to King Gafon’s son, Prince Adulf, whose utterly indecent folkname (based on a felicitous assonance) must, for the sake of decorum, be translated “Prince Fig.” K grew up in a remote palace under the eye of a morose and ambitious grandee and his horsey, masculine wife, so he barely knew his cousin and started seeing him a little more often only at the age of twenty, when Adulf was near forty.

  We have before us a well-fed, easygoing fellow, with a stout neck, a broad pelvis, a big-cheeked, evenly pink face, and fine, bulging eyes. His nasty little mustache, resembling a pair of blue-black feathers, somehow did not match his fat lips, which always looked greasy, as if he had just finished sucking on a chicken bone. His dark, thick, unpleasantly smelling, and also greasy hair lent a foppish something, uncommon in Thule, to his large, solidly planted head. He had a penchant for showy clothes and was at the same time as unwashed as a papugh (seminarian). He was well versed in music, sculpture, and graphics, but could spend hours in the company of dull, vulgar persons. He wept profusely while listening to the melting violin of the great Perelmon, and shed the same tears while picking up the shards of a favorite cup. He was ready to help anyone in any way, if at that moment he was not occupied with other matters; and, blissfully wheezing, poking, and nibbling at life, he constantly contrived, in regard to third parties whose existence he did not bother about, to cause sorrows far exceeding in depth that of his own soul—sorrows pertaining to another, the other, world.

  In his twentieth year K entered the University of Ultimare, situated at four hundred miles of purple heather from the capital, on the shore of the gray sea, and there learned something about the crown prince’s morals, and would have heard much more if he did not avoid talks and discussions that might overburden his already none too easy anonymity. The Count, his guardian, who came to visit him once a week (sometimes arriving in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by his energetic wife), continually emphasized how nasty, disgraceful, and dangerous it would be if any of the students or professors learned that this lanky, gloomy youth, who excelled as much at his studies as at vanbol on the two-hundred-year-old-court behind the library building, was not at all a notary’s son, but a king’s nephew. Whether it was submission to one of those many whims, enigmatic in their stupidity, with which someone unknown and mightier than the king and the Peplerhus together for some reason troubled the shabby, monotonous, northern life, faithful to half-forgotten covenants, of that “île triste et lointaine”; or whether the peeved grandee had his own private scheme, his far-sighted calculation (the rearing of kings was supposed to be kept secret), we do not know; nor was there any reason to speculate about this, since, anyway, the unusual student was busy with other matters. Books, wallball, skiing (winters then used to be snowy), but, most of all, nights of special meditation by the hearth, and, a little later, his romance with Belinda—all sufficiently filled up his existence to leave him unconcerned with the vulgar little intrigues of metapolitics. Moreover, while diligently studying the annals of the fatherland, it never occurred to him that within him slumbered the very blood that had coursed through the veins of preceding kings; or that actual life rushing past was also “history”—history that had issued from the tunnel of the ages into pallid sunlight. Either because his subject of concentration ended a whole century before the reign of Gafon, or because the magic involuntarily evolved by the most sober chroniclers seemed more precious to him than his own testimony, the bookman in him overcame the eyewitness, and later on, when he tried to reestablish connection with the present, he had to content himself with knocking together provisional passages, which only served to deform the familiar remoteness of legend (that bridge on the Egel, that blood-spattered bridge!).

  It was, then, before the beginning of his second college year that K, having come to the capital for a brief vacation and taken modest lodgings at the so-called Cabinet Members’ Club, met, at the very first court reception, the crown prince, a boisterous, plump, indecently young-looking charmeur, defying one not to recognize his charm. The meeting took place in the presence of the old king, who sat in a high-backed armchair by a stained-glass window, quickly and nimbly devouring those tiny olive-black plums that were more a delicacy than a medicine for him. Even though Adulf seemed at first not to notice his young relative and continued to address two stooge-courtiers, the prince nevertheless started on a subject carefully calculated to fascinate the newcomer, to whom he offered a three-quarter view of himself: paunch-proud, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his wrinkled check trousers, he stood rocking slightly from heels to toes.

  “For instance,” he said in the triumphant voice he reserved for public occasions, “take our entire history, and you will see, gentlemen, that the root of power has always been construed among us as having originated in magic, with obedience conceivable only when, in the mind of the obeyer, it could be identified with the infallible effect of a spell. In other words, the king was either sorcerer or himself bewitched, sometimes by the people, sometimes by the Councilors, sometimes by a political foe who would whisk the crown off his head like a hat from a hatrack. Recall the hoariest antiqu
ity and the rule of the mossmons” (high priests, “bog people”), “the worship of luminescent peat, that sort of thing; or take those … those first pagan kings—Gildras and, yes, Ofodras, and that other one, I forget what he was called, anyway, the fellow who threw his goblet into the sea, after which, for three days and nights, fishermen scooped up seawater transformed into wine.… Solg ud digh vor je sage vel, ud jem gotelm quolm osje musikel” (“Sweet and rich was the wave of the sea and lassies drank it from seashells”—the prince was quoting Uperhulm’s ballad). “And the first friars, who arrived in a skiff equipped with a cross instead of a sail, and all that business of the ‘Fontal Rock’—for it was only because they guessed the weak spot of our people that they managed to introduce the crazy Roman creed. What is more,” continued the prince, suddenly moderating the crescendos of his voice, for a dignitary of the clergy was now standing a short distance away, “if the so-called church never really engorged on the body of our state, and, in the last two centuries, entirely lost its political significance, it is precisely because the elementary and rather monotonous miracles that it was able to produce very soon became a bore”—the cleric moved away, and the prince’s voice regained its freedom—“and could not compete with the natural sorcery, la magie innée et naturelle of our fatherland. Take the subsequent, unquestionably historical kings and the beginning of our dynasty. When Rogfrid the First mounted, or rather scrambled up onto the wobbly throne that he himself called a sea-tossed barrel, and the country was in the throes of such insurrection and chaos that his aspiration to kinghood seemed a childish dream, do you recall the first thing he does upon acceding to power? He immediately mints kruns, half-kruns, and grosken depicting a sexdigitate hand. Why a hand? Why the six fingers? Not one historian has been able to figure it out, and it is doubtful that Rogfrid even knew himself. The fact remains, however, that this magical measure promptly pacified the country. Later, under his grandson, when the Danes attempted to impose upon us their protégé, and he landed with immense forces, what happened? Suddenly, with the utmost simplicity, the anti-government party—I forget what it was called, anyway, the traitors, without whom the whole plot would not have come into existence—sent a messenger to the invader with a polite announcement that they were henceforth unable to support him; because, you see, ‘the ling’ “—that is, the heather of the plain across which the turncoat army was to pass to join with the foreign forces—” ‘had entwined the stirrups and shins of treachery, thus preventing further advance,’ which apparently is to be taken literally, and not interpreted in the spirit of those stale allegories on which schoolboys are nourished. Then again—ah, yes, a splendid example—Queen Ilda, we must not omit Queen Ilda of the white breast and the abundant amours, who would resolve all state problems by means of incantations, and so successfully that any individual who did not meet her approval would lose his reason; you know yourselves that to this day insane asylums are known among the populace as ildehams. And when that populace begins to take part in legislative and administrative matters, it is absurdly clear that magic is on the people’s side. I assure you, for instance, that if poor King Edaric found himself unable to take his seat at the reception for the elected officers, it was certainly not a question of piles. And so on and so forth—” (the prince was beginning to have enough of the topic he had selected) “—the life of our country, like some amphibian, keeps its head up amid simple nordic reality, while submerging its belly in fable, in rich, vivifying sorcery. It’s not for nothing that every one of our mossy stones, every old tree has participated at least once in some magical occurrence or other. Here’s a young student, he is reading History, I am sure he will confirm my opinion.”