Glory

by Vladimir Nabokov

  38

  When he woke up next morning, Martin could not at once reconstruct the previous day; and the reason why he woke up was that flies were tickling his face. A remarkably soft bed; an ascetic washstand, and, beside it, a toilet utensil in the shape of a violin; hot blue light was breathing through a chink in the window curtain. It was a long time since he had had such a good night of sleep, a long time since he had been so hungry. He drew the curtain aside and saw before him a dazzling white wall. Further off to the left there were shops with striped awnings, a piebald dog sat on the pavement scratching behind its ear with its hind paw, and a streamlet of glittering water ran along the curb.

  The sound of the bell button he pressed resounded through the entire two-story inn and, stomping boldly, there arrived a bright-eyed dirty maid. He ordered a lot of bread, a lot of butter, a lot of coffee, and when she had brought it all, asked her how he could get to Molignac. She proved to be talkative and inquisitive. Martin mentioned casually that he was German, had been sent here by a museum to collect insects; at this she glanced pensively at the wall where there were some suspicious looking reddish-brown dots. Gradually it transpired that in a month, and maybe even before, a bus line would be established between the town and Molignac. “It means, one has to walk?” asked Martin. “Fifteen kilometers,” exclaimed the maid with horror. “What an idea! And in this heat!”

  He left his things at the inn and, having bought a map of the region at the tobacconist’s whose sign was a tricolor pipe protruding over the door, started to stride down the sunny side of the street, and immediately noticed that his open shirt collar and absence of headgear were attracting general attention. The town seemed drawn in bright chalks and was sharply divided into light and shadow; it boasted numerous pastry shops. Presently the crowded houses dropped away, and the paved road between its double row of huge plane trees with flesh-colored patterns on their green trunks went flowing past vineyards. The rare people he met, such as stone breakers, schoolchildren, and country wives in black straw hats, ate him up with their eyes. It occurred to Martin to try out something that might prove useful in the future. He proceeded to advance with the utmost stealth, crossing ditches and hiding behind brambles whenever he glimpsed in the distance a cart drawn by a donkey in black blinders or a dusty ramshackle motor van. After a couple of kilometers he abandoned the road altogether and began to work his way parallel to it along the hillside where he was screened by the oak scrub, the glossy myrtles, the nettle trees. The sun blazed fiercely, cicadas trilled, the hot spicy smells made him dizzy and for a minute he lay in the shade wiping his sticky neck with his handkerchief. A glance at the map showed him that at the fifth kilometer the road made a loop, and that to rejoin it one might cut across yonder hill, all yellow with flowering broom. When he came down on the other side, the white snake of the road did reappear, and as he walked on parallel to it through the fragrant undergrowth, he rejoiced at his capacity to find his bearings.

  Suddenly he heard the cool sound of running water. No better music could exist in the world! A brook quivered on flat stones in a tunnel formed by the foliage. Martin got down on his knees, quenched his thirst, and heaved a deep sigh. He lit a cigarette. In the brilliant air the match burned with an invisible flame and from its sulfur a sweetish taste spread to his tongue. Thus, sitting on a rock and listening to the brook’s gurgling, Martin enjoyed his fill of viatic freedom from all concerns: he was a wanderer, alone and lost in a marvelous world, completely indifferent toward him, in which butterflies danced, lizards darted, and leaves glistened—the same way as they glisten in a Russian or African wood.

  It was long past midday when Martin reached Molignac. So this was where they sparkled at night, the lights which had beckoned to him ever since his childhood! Silence, a burning heat. Through the knotty streamlets of water that ran by the narrow sidewalk shone its varicolored bed made of broken crockery. On the cobblestones timid, dreadfully emaciated white dogs were napping. In the middle of a small square stood a monument: a female personage, with wings, raising a banner.

  First of all Martin visited the post office, a cool, darkish and drowsy place. There he wrote his mother a postcard, to the accompaniment of the piercing complaint of a housefly, one of whose legs had got stuck in the glue of the treacle-colored flypaper affixed to a windowledge. That postcard was the first of a new little batch of letters which Mrs. Edelweiss stored in her chest of drawers: the penultimate batch.

  39

  He told the woman who ran the only Molignac inn that he was Swiss (which was confirmed by his passport) and gave her to understand that he had long been roving the world, working at odd jobs here and there. The same information he conveyed to her brother, a farmer, purple with wine and sanguineness, by whom, in consequence of the rover’s complete destitution, he was hired as day laborer. It was thus the third time in a couple of days that Martin changed his nationality, testing the credulity of strangers and learning to live incognito. The fact of his having been born in a remote northern land had long since acquired a shade of enchanting mystery. A carefree visitor from a distant shore, he strolled through the bazaars of the infidels, and everything was entertaining and colorful, but no matter where he might go, nothing could weaken in him the wonderful sense of being different and elect. Such words, such notions and images, as those that Russia had engendered did not exist in other countries, and it often happened that he would lapse into incoherence, or start to laugh nervously when vainly trying to explain to a foreigner the various meanings of some special term, say, poshlost’. He felt flattered by the infatuation of the English with Chekhov, by that of the Germans with Dostoevski. Once, in Cambridge, he discovered in a sixty-year-old issue of the local review a poem coolly signed: A. Jameson. It began:

  I walk along the road alone.

  My stony path spreads far,

  Still is the night and cold the stone,

  And star talks unto star.

  and was a shameless paraphrase of Lermontov’s greatest lyrical poem. A strange pensiveness would pervade him when, at times, from the depths of a Berlin courtyard would rise the sound of a hurdy-gurdy which was not aware that the tune it had borrowed had once touched the hearts of sentimental drunks in Russian taverns. Music! Martin regretted that an inner sentinel forbade to his vocal cords the sounds that lived in his ears. Still, when his fellow workers, young Italians, sang loudly, among the branches of Provence cherry trees, Martin would start his own song—hoarsely, boldly, and phenomenally out of tune—and that song would echo the nights when at picnics in the Crimea the baritone Zaryanski, drowned out by the choir, sang about the “seven-stringed companion,” or the “little goblet.”

  Far below him the lucerne rippled in the wind, from above the glowing blue pressed upon him, silver-veined leaves rustled close to his cheek, and the oilcloth-lined basket suspended from a bough gradually acquired weight as it got filled with the glossy-black fruit Martin pulled off by its taut stems. After the cherries had been harvested came sun-steeped apricots, and precious peaches which had to be tenderly cradled in one’s palm lest they get bruised. There also were other kinds of labor. Naked to the waist, his back already the hue of terra cotta, Martin, to humor the young maize, loosened and heaped up the soil, grubbed out with the sharp corner of his hoe the wily and stubborn speargrass, or for hours on end stood bending over the shoots of infant trees, apple and pear, clicking his pruning shears. He especially enjoyed conducting the water from the reservoir in the yard to the nurseries, where the mattocked furrows joined with one another and with the hollows dug around the stems. As the water spread all over the young plantation, it picked its way like a live thing; here it would stop, there run on, extending bright tentacles, and Martin, grimacing occasionally from the stings of tiny thistleheads, sloshed up to his ankles in fat purple mud, driving in forcefully an iron shield for a barrier or, on the contrary, helping a streamlet to break through; the hollowed earth would fill with bubbling brown water and, feeling in it with a spad
e, he mercifully softened the soil, until something gave delightfully, and the percolating water sank away, washing the roots. He felt happy he knew how to satisfy a plant’s thirst, happy that chance had helped him to find work that could serve to try out both his shrewdness and his endurance. Together with the other laborers he lodged in a shed, drank, as they did, one and a half liters of wine a day, and found satisfaction in looking like them—except for the little blond beard that he had quietly let grow.

  In the evening, before turning in, he would walk over to the cork woods beyond the farm, and smoke and muse. Overhead the nightingales whistled in short rich phrases, from the pond came the rubbery croaking of frogs. The air was tender and dullish, not quite twilight yet, but no longer day, and the terraced olives and the mythographic hills in the distance, and that pine standing separate on a rock—the whole landscape was reliefless and a little swoony under an evenly fading sky which oppressed and lulled one, and made one long for the vivifying stars to appear. Night fell, lights trembled on the silhouetted hills, the windows of the farmhouse lit up; and when far, far away, in the unknown gloom, a tiny rattling train would pass by broken into small fiery segments, and vanish, Martin told himself with deep satisfaction that from there, from that train, the farm and Molignac looked like a handful of jewels. He was glad to have heeded the call of those lights, to have uncovered their lovely quiet essence. One Sunday night, in Molignac, he noticed a small white house, at the foot of steep vineyards; a crooked old post said: “FOR SALE.” And, indeed, would it not be better to dismiss the perilous, daredevil project, to renounce the desire to peer into the merciless Zoorland night, and to get settled with a young wife right here, on this wedge of fertile soil waiting for an industrious master? Yes, he had to decide: time was running out, the dark autumn night he had marked for slipping across the border was nearing, and he now felt rested, refreshed, sure of being able to get away with any kind of impersonation, of never losing his presence of mind, of adjusting whenever and wherever it might be to the kind of life that circumstances demanded.

  Testing fate, he wrote to Sonia. The answer came quickly and after reading it, Martin sighed with relief. “Stop tormenting me,” wrote Sonia. “Enough, for Christ’s sake. I will never marry you. Moreover, I loathe vineyards, the heat, snakes, and, especially, garlic. Cross me out, do me that favor, darling.”

  The same day he left for town on the brand-new bus, shaved off his beard, fetched his valise from the inn, and walked over to the station. There, at the same table, his head on his arm, slept the same workman. The lamps were being lit, bats skimmered by, the greenish sky was fading. Proshchay, proshchay (adieu, adieu) sounded in Martin’s ears with the refrain of a Russian song as he looked at the tousled junipers on the other side of the already vibrating rails, at the signal lights, at the black outline of a man pushing the black outline of a luggage cart.

  The night express pounded into the station; a minute later it started again and Martin experienced a momentary urge to jump out and return to the happy, fairy-tale farm. But the station had already ceased to exist. He stood looking through the window, waiting for the appearance of his beloved lights, to bid them good-bye. Here they came, far away, spilled jewels in the blackness, unbelievably lovely—“Tell me,” Martin asked the conductor, “Those lights there—that’s Molignac, isn’t it?” “What lights?” the man asked glancing at the window, but at this moment everything was shut out by the sudden rise of a dark bank. “In any case, it’s not Molignac,” said the conductor. “Molignac can’t be seen from the railroad.”

  At the kiosk of the Lausanne station Martin bought the Sunday issue of a Russian émigré paper published in Berlin. He could hardly believe his eyes when he found in the lower half of the second page a feuilleton entitled: “ZOORLAND.” It was signed “S. Bubnov,” and turned out to be a short story in that author’s admirable style “with a touch of the fantastic,” as critics like to put it. In it Martin recognized with disgust and embarrassment (as if he were witnessing some dreadfully obscene act) much of what he and Sonia used to think up—now oddly illumined by the imagination of an intruder. “How treacherous she is, after all,” Martin reflected and in a surge of acute and hopeless jealousy recalled having once observed Bubnov and her walking arm in arm down a dark street; and how he had tried to believe what she told him on the following day—that she had gone to the movies with the Veretennikov girl.

  It was drizzling, and only the lower half of the mountains could be made out, when, wedged among hampers and corpulent females, he reached by public charabanc the village situated at ten minutes’ walk from his uncle’s villa. Mrs. Edelweiss knew that her son was about to arrive. For three days she had been expecting a wire, and had looked forward to the excitement of driving down to the station to meet him. She was in the living room doing some embroidery when there came from the garden her son’s deep young voice and the soft husky laughter which was typical of his demeanor when he came back after a long separation. He was walking beside flushed Marie, who was trying to relieve him of his valise while he shifted it from one hand to the other and back again as he walked. His face was copper-dark, the color of his eyes seemed to have paled by contrast, and he smelled wonderfully of stale tobacco, wet woolen jacket, and train. “You’ve come for a long, long time now,” she kept repeating in a happy barking voice. “Generally speaking, yes,” Martin answered sedately. “I’ll just have to go to Berlin on business in about a fortnight, then I’ll return.” “Oh, forget about business, it can wait!” she cried—and Uncle Henry, who had been resting in his room after lunch, woke up, listened, quickly put on his shoes, and came down.

  “The prodigal son,” he said entering. “Delighted to see you again.” Martin touched his cheek with his own, and both simultaneously kissed the void, as was their wont on such occasions. “I hope—for some time?” the uncle asked, without taking his eyes off Martin; still staring, he groped for the back of a chair and sat down with knees apart. “Generally speaking, yes,” answered Martin while he devoured some ham. “I’ll just have to go to Berlin in about a fortnight, but I’ll return.” “You won’t,” said Mrs. Edelweiss laughing, “I know you. Come, tell us how it all was. Can it be that you actually plowed, and made hay, and milked the cows?” “Milking is fun,” said Martin and spreading two fingers showed how one does it (milking was precisely the one thing he never did at Molignac—that was the job of his namesake, Martin Roc—and it was not clear why he began his story with a spurious detail when there was so much else, authentic, to tell).

  Next morning, as Martin glanced at the mountains, he thought again, to the same sobbing tune, “Adieu, adieu,” but at once scolded himself for unworthy faintheartedness. At that moment his mother came in with a letter, and from the threshold said cheerfully, before her son would have time to assume mistakenly that it was from Sonia, “I think it’s Darwin’s hand. I forgot to give it to you last night.” After reading the very first lines Martin began to chuckle quietly. Darwin wrote that he was about to marry a splendid English girl he had met at a hotel in Niagara Falls; that he was traveling around a great deal; and that in a week’s time he would be in Berlin. “Do invite him here,” Mrs. Edelweiss said quickly. “What could be simpler?” “No, no, I tell you I have to go to Berlin. It all fits in perfectly.”

  “Martin,” she began but hesitated and stopped. “What’s the matter?” he asked gaily. “How is it working out? — Oh, you know what I mean — Maybe you’re already engaged?” Martin slit his eyes, laughed, but did not answer. “I shall be very fond of her,” whispered Mrs. Edelweiss piously. “Let’s go for a walk. Such glorious weather,” said Martin, pretending to be deliberately changing the subject. “You go,” she replied. “Like a fool, I invited, precisely today, the old Drouet couple. They would die of a heart attack if one tried to phone them.”

  In the garden Uncle Henry was adjusting a ladder against the trunk of an apple tree; then, with the greatest care, he climbed up to the third rung. By the draw well, ar
ms akimbo, stood Marie looking away, forgetful of the pail which overran with gleaming water. She had gained much weight these last years, but at that instant, with the sun playing on her dress, on her neck, left uncovered by her twisted, tightly bunched-up braids, she reminded him of his fleeting infatuation. She suddenly turned her face toward him. It was a fat and expressionless face.

  40

  As he walked with springy steps through the mountainside fir forest whose blackness was broken from place to place by the radiance of a slender birch tree, he anticipated with rapture a similar sun-pierced thicket on a far Northern plain with spiderwebs spread on the sunbeams, and with damp hollows choked with willow herb, and, beyond, the luminous open spaces, the empty autumnal fields, and the squat little white church on a hillock tending as it were the isbas that looked on the point of wandering away; and, encircling the hillock, there would be the bright bend of a river brimming with enmeshed reflections. He was almost surprised when he glimpsed an alpine slope through the conifers.

  This reminded him that before he left he had an account with his conscience to settle. Unhurriedly, purposefully, he ascended the slope and reached the broken gray rocks. He climbed up the stony steepness and found himself on the same little platform from which the familiar cornice started to round the sheer cliff. Without hesitation, obeying an inner command that could not be disregarded, he began to sidle along the narrow shelf. When it tapered to an end he looked down over his shoulder and saw, under his very heels, the sunny precipice and at the bottom of it the porcelain hotel. “There,” said Martin to the little white thing, “lump it!” and fighting dizziness, began to move the way he had come. He stopped again, however, and, checking his self-control, attempted to extract his cigarette case from his hip pocket and light up. There came a moment when without holding onto the cliff he merely leant his chest against it, and felt the abyss behind him strain and pull at his calves and shoulders. He did not light that cigarette only because he dropped the matchbox. The absolute noiselessness of its fall was awesome, and when he resumed his progress along the cornice the feeling persisted that the matchbox was still plunging through space. Upon safely reaching the platform, Martin grunted with joy, and in the same purposeful way, with a stern sense of duty fulfilled, climbed down scree and heather, found the right path and descended toward the Majestic—to see what it would have to say. By the tennis court in the garden Mrs. Gruzinov sat on a bench next to a white-trousered man. Martin hoped she would not notice him. He was loath to dissipate so soon the treasure he had brought down from the mountaintop. “Hello, Martin,” she cried, and Martin grinned and went up to her. “Yurochka, this is the son of Dr. Edelweiss,” said Mrs. Gruzinov to her companion. The latter half-rose and without removing his straw hat drew back his elbow, took good aim, and shooting his palm out, vigorously shook hands with Martin. “Gruzinov,” he said softly, as if imparting a secret.