The Eye

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Khrushchov probably went right to bed; the sisters entered the dining room alone. The door to my dark damasked lair was not shut tight. I believed that now I would learn all I wanted about Smurov.

  “… But rather exhausting,” said Vanya and made a soft och-ing sound conveying to me a yawn. “Give me some root beer, I don’t want any tea.” There was the light scrape of a chair being moved to the table.

  A long silence. Then Evgenia’s voice—so close that I cast an alarmed look at the slit of light. “… The main thing is, let him tell them his terms. That’s the main thing. After all, he speaks English and those Germans don’t. I’m not sure I like this fruit paste.”

  Silence again. “All right, I’ll advise him to do that,” said Vanya. Something tinkled and fell—a spoon, maybe—and then there was another long pause.

  “Look at this,” said Vanya with a laugh.

  “What’s it made of, wood?” asked her sister.

  “I don’t know,” said Vanya and laughed again.

  After a while, Evgenia yawned, even more cosily than Vanya.

  “… clock has stopped,” she said.

  And that was all. They sat on for quite a while; they made clinking sounds with something or other; the nutcracker would crunch and return to the tablecloth with a thump; but there was no more talk. Then the chairs moved again. “Oh, we can leave it there,” drawled Evgenia languidly, and the magical slit from which I had expected so much was abruptly extinguished. Somewhere a door slammed, Vanya’s faraway voice said something, by now unintelligible, and then followed silence and darkness. I lay on the sofa for a while longer and suddenly noticed that it was already dawn. Whereupon I cautiously made my way to the staircase and returned to my room.

  I imagined rather vividly Vanya protruding the tip of her tongue at one side of her mouth and snipping off with her little scissors the unwanted Smurov. But maybe it was not so at all: sometimes something is cut off in order to be framed separately. And to confirm this last conjecture, a few days later Uncle Pasha quite unexpectedly arrived from Munich. He was going to London to visit his brother and stayed in Berlin only a couple of days. The old goat had not seen his nieces for a very long time and was inclined to recall how he used to place sobbing Vanya across his knee and spank her. At first sight this Uncle Pasha seemed merely three times her age but one had only to look a little closer and he deteriorated under your very eyes. In point of fact, he was not 50 but 80, and one could imagine nothing more dreadful than this mixture of youthfulness and decrepitude. A jolly corpse in a blue suit, with dandruff on his shoulders, clean-shaven, with bushy eyebrows and prodigious tufts in his nostrils, Uncle Pasha was mobile, noisy and inquisitive. At his first appearance he interrogated Evgenia in a sprayey whisper about every guest, quite openly pointing now at this person, now at that, with his index, which ended in a yellow, monstrously long nail. On the following day occurred one of those coincidences involving new arrivals that for some reason are so frequent, as if there existed some tasteless prankish Fate not unlike Weinstock’s Abum who, on the very day you return home from a journey, has you meet the man who had chanced to be sitting opposite you in the railway car. For several days already I had felt a strange discomfort in my bullet-punctured chest, a sensation resembling a draft in a dark room. I went to see a Russian doctor, and there, sitting in the waiting room, was of course Uncle Pasha. While I was debating whether or not to accost him (assuming that since the previous evening he had had time to forget both my face and my name), this decrepit prattler, loath to keep hidden a single grain from the storage bins of his experience, started a conversation with an elderly lady who did not know him, but who was evidently fond of openhearted strangers. At first I did not follow their talk, but suddenly Smurov’s name gave me a jolt. What I learned from Uncle Pasha’s pompous and trite words was so important that when he finally disappeared behind the doctor’s door, I left immediately without waiting my turn—and did so quite automatically, as if I had come to the doctor’s office only to hear Uncle Pasha: now the performance was over and I could leave. “Imagine,” Uncle Pasha had said, “the baby girl blossomed into a genuine rose. I’m an expert in roses and concluded at once that there must be a young man in the picture. And then her sister says to me, ‘It’s a great secret, Uncle, so don’t tell anyone, but she’s been in love with this Smurov for a long time.’ Well, of course, it’s none of my business. One Smurov is no worse than another, But it really gives me a kick to think that there was a time when I used to give that lassie a good spanking on her bare little buttocks, and now there she is, a bride. She simply worships him. Well, that’s the way it is, my good lady, we’ve had our fling, now let the others have theirs …”

  So—it has happened. Smurov is loved. Evidently Vanya, myopic but sensitive Vanya, had discerned something out of the ordinary in Smurov, had understood something about him, and his quietness had not deceived her. That same evening, at the Khrushchovs’, Smurov was particularly quiet and humble. Now, however, when one knew what bliss had smitten him—yes, smitten (for there is bliss so strong that, with its blast, with its hurricane howl, it resembles a cataclysm)—now a certain palpitation could be discerned in his quietude, and the carnation of joy showed through his enigmatic pallor. And dear God, how he gazed at Vanya! She would lower her lashes, her nostrils would quiver, she would even bite her lips a little, hiding from all her exquisite feelings. That night it seemed that something must be resolved.

  Poor Mukhin was not there: he had gone for a few days to London. Khrushchov was also absent. In compensation, however, Roman Bogdanovich (who was gathering material for the diary which with old-maidish precision he weekly sent to a friend in Tallin) was more than ever his sonorous and importunate self. The sisters sat on the sofa as always. Smurov stood leaning one elbow on the piano, ardently gazing at the smooth parting in Vanya’s hair, at her dusky-red cheeks … Evgenia several times jumped up and thrust her head out of the window—Uncle Pasha was coming to say goodbye and she wanted to be sure and be on hand to unlock the elevator for him. “I adore him,” she said, laughing. “He is such a character. I bet he won’t let us accompany him to the station.”

  “Do you play?” Roman Bogdanovich politely asked Smurov, with a meaningful look at the piano. “I used to play once,” Smurov calmly replied. He opened the lid, glanced dreamily at the bared teeth of the keyboard, and brought the lid back down. “I love music,” Roman Bogdanovich observed confidentially. “I recall, in my student days——”

  “Music,” said Smurov in a louder tone, “good music at least, expresses that which is inexpressible in words. Therein lie the meaning and the mystery of music.”

  “There he is,” shouted Evgenia and left the room.

  “And you, Varvara?” asked Roman Bogdanovich in his coarse, thick voice. “You—‘with fingers lighter than a dream’—eh? Come on, anything … Some little ritornello.” Vanya shook her head and seemed about to frown but instead giggled and lowered her face. No doubt, what excited her mirth was this thickhead’s inviting her to sit down at the piano when her soul was ringing and flowing with its own melody. At this moment one could have noted in Smurov’s face a most violent desire that the elevator carrying Evgenia and Uncle Pasha get stuck forever, that Roman Bogdanovich tumble right into the jaws of the blue Persian lion depicted on the rug, and, most important, that I—the cold, insistent, tireless eye—disappear.

  Meanwhile Uncle Pasha was already blowing his nose and chuckling in the hall; now he came in and paused on the threshold, smiling foolishly and rubbing his hands. “Evgenia,” he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know anybody here. Come, make the introductions.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” said Evgenia. “It’s your own niece!”

  “So it is, so it is,” said Uncle Pasha and added something outrageous about cheeks and peaches.

  “He probably won’t recognize the others either,” sighed Evgenia and began introducing us in a loud voice.

  “Smurov!” exclaimed Uncle Pasha,
and his eyebrows bristled. “Oh, Smurov and I are old friends. Happy, happy man,” he went on mischievously, palpating Smurov’s arms and shoulders. “And you think we don’t know … We know all about it … I’ll say one thing—take good care of her! She is a gift from heaven. May you be happy, my children …”

  He turned to Vanya but she, pressing a crumpled handkerchief to her mouth, ran out of the room. Evgenia, emitting an odd sound, hurried off after her. Yet Uncle Pasha did not notice that his careless babbling, intolerable to a sensitive being, had driven Vanya to tears. Eyes bulging, Roman Bogdanovich peered with great curiosity at Smurov, who—whatever his feelings—maintained an impeccable composure.

  “Love is a great thing,” said Uncle Pasha, and Smurov smiled politely. “This girl is a treasure. And you, you’re a young engineer, aren’t you? Your job coming along well?”

  Without going into details Smurov said he was doing all right. Roman Bogdanovich suddenly slapped his knee and grew purple.

  “I’ll put in a good word for you in London,” Uncle Pasha said. “I have many connections. Yes, I’m off, I’m off. Right now, as a matter of fact.”

  And the astounding old fellow glanced at his watch and proffered us both hands. Smurov, overcome with love’s bliss, unexpectedly embraced him.

  “How do you like that? … There is a queer one for you!” said Roman Bogdanovich, when the door had closed behind Uncle Pasha.

  Evgenia came back into the parlor. “Where is he?” she asked with surprise: there was something magical about his disappearance.

  She hastened up to Smurov. “Please, excuse my uncle,” she began. “I was foolish enough to tell him about Vanya and Mukhin. He must have got the names mixed up. At first I did not realize how gaga he was——”

  “And I listened and thought I was going crazy,” Roman Bogdanovich put in, spreading his hands.

  “Oh, come on, come on, Smurov,” Evgenia went on. “What’s the matter with you? You must not take it to heart like that. After all, it’s no insult to you.”

  “I’m all right, I just did not know,” Smurov said hoarsely.

  “What do you mean you did not know? Everybody knows … It’s been going on for ages. Yes, of course, they adore each other. It’s almost two years now. Listen, I’ll tell you something amusing about Uncle Pasha: once, when he was still relatively young—no, don’t you turn away, it’s a very interesting story—one day, when he was relatively young he happened to be walking along Nevski Avenue——”

  There follows a brief period when I stopped watching Smurov: I grew heavy, surrendered again to the gnawing of gravity, donned anew my former flesh, as if indeed all this life around me was not the play of my imagination, but was real, and I was part of it, body and soul. If you are not loved, but do not know for sure whether a potential rival is loved or not, and, if there are several, do not know which of them is luckier than you; if you subsist on that hopeful ignorance which helps you to resolve in conjecture an otherwise intolerable agitation; then all is well, you can live. But woe when the name is at last announced, and that name is not yours! For she was so enchanting, it even brought tears to one’s eyes, and, at the merest thought of her, a moaning, awful, salty night would well up within me. Her downy face, nearsighted eyes and tender unpainted lips, which grew chapped and a little swollen from the cold, and whose color seemed to run at the edges, dissolving in a feverish pink that seemed to need so badly the balm of a butterfly kiss; her short bright dresses: her big knees, which squeezed together, unbearably tight, when she played skat with us, bending her silky black head over her cards; and her hands, adolescently clammy and a little coarse, which one especially longed to touch and kiss—yes, everything about her was excruciating and somehow irremediable, and only in my dreams, drenched with tears, did I at last embrace her and feel under my lips her neck and the hollow near the clavicle. But she would always break away, and I would awaken, still throbbing. What difference did it make to me whether she were stupid or intelligent, or what her childhood had been like, or what books she read, or what she thought about the universe? I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything, and which, unlike a human soul (often accessible and possessable), can in no way be appropriated, just as one cannot include among one’s belongings the colors of ragged sunset clouds above black houses, or a flower’s smell that one inhales endlessly, with tense nostrils, to the point of intoxication, but cannot draw completely out of the corolla.

  Once, at Christmas, before a ball to which they were all going without me, I glimpsed, in a strip of mirror through a door left ajar, her sister powdering Vanya’s bare shoulder blades; on another occasion I noticed a flimsy bra in the bathroom. For me these were exhausting events, that had a delicious but dreadfully draining effect on my dreams, although never once in them did I go beyond a hopeless kiss (I myself do not know why I always wept so when we met in my dreams). What I needed from Vanya I could never have taken for my perpetual use and possession anyway, as one cannot possess the tint of the cloud or the scent of the flower. Only when I finally realized that my desire was bound to remain insatiable and that Vanya was wholly a creation of mine, did I calm down, and grow accustomed to my own excitement, from which I had extracted all the sweetness that a man can possibly obtain from love.

  Gradually my attention returned to Smurov. Incidentally, it turned out that, in spite of his interest in Vanya, Smurov had, on the sly, set his sights on the Khrushchovs’ maid, a girl of 18, whose special attraction was the sleepy cast of her eyes. She herself was anything but sleepy. It is amusing to think what depraved devices of love play this modest-looking girl-named Gretchen or Hilda, I do not remember which—would think up when the door was locked and the practically naked light bulb, suspended by a long cord, illumined the photograph of her fiancé (a sturdy fellow in a Tirolese hat) and an apple from the masters’ table. These doings Smurov recounted in full detail, and not without a certain pride, to Weinstock, who abhorred indecent stories and would emit a strong eloquent “Pfui!” upon hearing something salacious. And that is why people were especially eager to tell him things of this nature.

  Smurov would reach her room by the back stairs, and stay with her a long time. Apparently, Evgenia once noticed something—a quick scuttle at the end of the corridor, or muffled laughter behind the door—for she mentioned with irritation that Hilda (or Gretchen) had taken up with some fireman. During this outburst Smurov cleared his throat complacently a few times. The maid, casting down her charming dim eyes, would pass through the dining room; slowly and carefully place a bowl of fruit and her breasts on the sideboard; sleepily pause to brush back a dim fair lock off her temple, and then somnambule back to the kitchen; and Smurov would rub his hands together as if about to deliver a speech, or smile in the wrong places during the general conversation. Weinstock would grimace and spit in disgust when Smurov dwelt on the pleasure of watching the prim servant maid at work when, such a short time ago, gently pattering with bare feet on the bare floor, he had been fox-trotting with the creamy-haunched wench in her narrow little room to the distant sound of a phonograph coming from the masters’ quarters: Mister Mukhin had brought back from London some really lovely records of moan-sweet Hawaiian dance music.

  “You’re an adventurer,” Weinstock would say, “a Don Juan, a Casanova …” To himself, however, he undoubtedly called Smurov a double or triple agent and expected the little table within which fidgeted the ghost of Azef to yield important new revelations. This image of Smurov, though, interested me but little now: it was doomed to gradual fading owing to the absence of supporting evidence. The mystery of Smurov’s personality, of course, remained, and one could imagine Weinstock, several years hence and in another city, mentioning, in passing, a strange man who had once worked as a salesman for him, and who now was God knows where. “Yes, a very odd character,” Weinstock will say pensively. “A man knit of incomplete intimations, a man with a secret hid
den in him. He could ruin a girl … Who had sent him, and whom he was trailing, it is hard to say. Though I did learn from one reliable source … But then I don’t want to say anything.”

  Much more entertaining was Gretchen’s (or Hilda’s) concept of Smurov. One day in January a new pair of silk stockings disappeared from Vanya’s wardrobe, whereupon everyone remembered a multitude of other petty losses: 70 pfennigs in change left on the table and huffed like a piece in checkers: a crystal powder box that “escaped from the Nes S. S. R.,” as Khrushchov punned; a silk handkerchief, much treasured for some reason (“Where on earth could I have put it?”). Then, one day, Smurov came wearing a bright-blue tie with a peacock sheen, and Khrushchov blinked and said that he used to have a tie just exactly like that; Smurov grew absurdly embarrassed, and he never wore that tie again. But, of course, it did not enter anyone’s head that the silly goose had stolen the tie (she used to say, by the way, “A tie is a man’s best ornament”) and had given it, out of sheer mechanical habit, to her boyfriend of the moment—as Smurov bitterly informed Weinstock. Her undoing came when Evgenia happened to enter her room while she was out, and found in the dresser a collection of familiar articles resurrected from the dead. And so Gretchen (or Hilda) left for an unknown destination; Smurov tried to locate her but soon gave up and confessed to Weinstock that enough was enough. That evening Evgenia said she had learned some remarkable things from the janitor’s wife. “It was not a fireman, it was not a fireman at all,” said Evgenia, laughing, “but a foreign poet, isn’t that delightful? … This foreign poet had had a tragic love affair and a family estate the size of Germany, but he was forbidden to return home, really delightful, isn’t it? … It’s a pity the janitor’s wife didn’t ask what his name was—I’m sure he was Russian, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if it were someone who comes to see us … For instance, that chap last year, you know whom I mean—the dark boy with the fatal charm, what was his name?”