Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  An angel is now waiting under my restless heels. Doomful despair would invade my poor Annette when she tried to cope with the intricacies of an American household. Our landlady, who occupied the first floor, resolved her perplexities in a jiffy. Two ravishing wiggly-bottomed Bermudian coeds, wearing their national costume, flannel shorts and open shirts, and practically twins in appearance, who took the celebrated “Hotel” course at Quirn, came to cook and char for her, and she offered to share with us their services.

  “She’s a veritable angel,” confided Annette to me in her touchingly phony English.

  I recognized in the woman the Assistant Professor of Russian whom I had met in a brick building on the campus when the head of her remarkably dreary department, meek myopic old Noteboke, invited me to attend an Advanced Group Class (My govorim po-russki. Vy govorite? Pogo-vorimte togda—that kind of awful stuff). Happily I had no connection whatever with Russian grammar at Quirn—except that my wife was eventually saved from utter boredom by being engaged to help beginners under Mrs. Langley’s direction.

  Ninel Ilinishna Langley, a displaced person in more senses than one, had recently left her husband, the “great” Langley, author of A Marxist History of America, the bible (now out of print) of a whole generation of morons. I do not know the reason of their separation (after one year of American Sex, as the woman told Annette, who relayed the information to me in a tone of idiotic condolence); but I did have the occasion of seeing and disliking Professor Langley at an official dinner on the eve of his departure for Oxford. I disliked him for his daring to question my teaching Ulysses my way—in a purely textual light, without organic allegories and quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe; his “Marxism,” on the other hand, was a pleasantly comic and very mild affair (too mild, perhaps, for his wife’s taste) compared to the general attitude of ignorant admiration which American intellectuals had toward Soviet Russia. I remember the sudden hush, and furtive exchange of incredulous grimaces, when at a party, given for me by the most eminent member of our English department, I described the Bolshevist state as Philistine in repose and bestial in action; internationally vying in rapacious deceit with the praying mantis; doctoring the mediocrity of its literature by first sparing a few talents left over from a previous period and then blotting them out with their own blood. One professor, a left-wing moralist and dedicated muralist (he was experimenting that year with automobile paint), stalked out of the house. He wrote me next day, however, a really magnificent, larger-than-nature letter of apology saying that he could not be really cross with the author of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus (1941), which despite its “motley style and baroque imagery” was a masterpiece “pinching strings of personal poignancy which he, a committed artist, never knew could vibrate in him.” Reviewers of my books took the same line, chiding me formally for underestimating the “greatness” of Lenin, yet paying me compliments of a kind that could not fail to touch, in the long run, even me, a scornful and austere author, whose homework in Paris had never received its due. Even the President of Quirn, who timorously sympathized with the fashionable Sovietizers, was really on my side: he told me when he called on us (while Ninel crept up to grow an ear on our landing) that he was proud, etc., and had found my “last (?) book very interesting” though he could not help regretting that I took every opportunity of criticizing “our Great Ally” in my classes. I answered, laughing, that this criticism was a child’s caress when set alongside the public lecture on “The Tractor in Soviet Literature” that I planned to deliver at the end of the term. He laughed, too, and asked Annette what it was like to live with a genius (she only shrugged her pretty shoulders). All this was très américain and thawed a whole auricle in my icy heart.

  But to return to good Ninel.

  She had been christened Nonna at birth (1902) and renamed twenty years later Ninel (or Ninella), as petitioned by her father, a Hero of Toil and a toady. She wrote it Ninella in English but her friends called her Ninette or Nelly just as my wife’s Christian name Anna (as Nonna liked to observe) turned into Annette and Netty.

  Ninella Langley was a stocky, heavily built creature with a ruddy and rosy face (the two tints unevenly distributed), short hair dyed a mother-in-law ginger, brown eyes even madder than mine, very thin lips, a fat Russian nose, and three or four hairs on her chin. Before the young reader heads for Lesbos, I wish to say that as far as I could discover (and I am a peerless spy) there was nothing sexual in her ludicrous and unlimited affection for my wife. I had not yet acquired the white Desert Lynx that Annette did not live to see, so it was Ninella who took her shopping in a dilapidated jalopy while the resourceful lodger, sparing the copies of his own novels, would autograph for the grateful twins old mystery paperbacks and unreadable pamphlets from the Langley collection in the attic whose dormer looked out obligingly on the road to, and from, the Shopping Center. It was Ninella who kept her adored “Netty” well supplied with white knitting wool. It was Ninella who twice daily invited her for a cup of coffee or tea in her rooms; but the woman made a point of avoiding our flat, at least when we were at home, under the pretext that it still reeked of her husband’s tobacco: I rejoined that it was my own pipe—and later, on the same day, Annette told me I really ought not to smoke so much, especially indoors; and she also upheld another absurd complaint coming from downstairs, namely, that I walked back and forth too late and too long, right over Ninella’s forehead. Yes—and a third grievance: why didn’t I put back the encyclopedia volumes in alphabetic order as her husband had always been careful to do, for (he said) “a misplaced book is a lost book”—quite an aphorism.

  Dear Mrs. Langley was not particularly happy about her job. She owned a lakeside bungalow (“Rustic Roses”) thirty miles north of Quirn, not very far from Honeywell College, where she taught summer school and with which she intended to be even more closely associated, if a “reactionary” atmosphere persisted at Quirn. Actually, her only grudge was against decrepit Mme. de Korchakov, who had accused her, in public, of having a sdobnyy (“mellow”) Soviet accent and a provincial vocabulary—all of which could not be denied, although Annette maintained I was a heartless bourgeois to say so.

  2

  The infant Isabel’s first four years of life are so firmly separated in my consciousness by a blank of seven years from Bel’s girlhood that I seem to have had two different children, one a cheerful red-cheeked little thing, and the other her pale and morose elder sister.

  I had laid in a stock of ear plugs; they proved superfluous: no crying came from the nursery to interfere with my work—Dr. Olga Repnin, the story of an invented Russian professor in America, which was to be published (after a bothersome spell of serialization entailing endless proofreading) by Lodge in 1946, the year Annette left me, and acclaimed as “a blend of humor and humanism” by alliteration-prone reviewers, comfortably unaware of what I was to prepare some fifteen years later for their horrified delectation.

  I enjoyed watching Annette as she took color snapshots of the baby and me in the garden. I loved perambulating a fascinated Isabel through the groves of larches and beeches along Quirn Cascade River, with every loop of light, every eyespot of shade escorted, or so it seemed, by the baby’s gay approbation. I even agreed to spend most of the summer of 1945 at Rustic Roses. There, one day, as I was returning with Mrs. Langley from the nearest liquor store or newspaper stand, something she said, some intonation or gesture, released in me the passing shudder, the awful surmise, that it was not with my wife but with me that the wretched creature had been in love from the very start.

  The torturous tenderness I had always felt for Annette gained new poignancy from my feelings for our little child (I “trembled” over her as Ninella put it in her coarse Russian, complaining it might be bad for the baby, even if one “subtracted the overacting”). That was the human side of our marriage. The sexual side disintegrated altogether.

  For quite a time after her return from the maternity ward, echoes of her pangs in the darkest corridors
of my brain and a frightening stained window at every turn—the afterimage of a wounded orifice—pursued me and deprived me of all my vigor. When everything in me healed, and my lust for her pale enchantments rekindled, its volume and violence put an end to the brave but essentially inept efforts she had been making to reestablish some sort of amorous harmony between us without departing one jot from the puritanical norm. She now had the gall—the pitiful girlish gall—to insist I see a psychiatrist (recommended by Mrs. Langley) who would help me to think “softening” thoughts at moments of excessive engorgement. I said her friend was a monster and she a goose, and we had our worst marital quarrel in years.

  The creamy-thighed twins had long since returned with their bicycles to the island of their birth. Plainer young ladies came to help with the housekeeping. By the end of 1945 I had virtually ceased visiting my wife in her cold bedroom.

  Sometime in mid-May, 1946, I traveled to New York—a five-hour train trip—to lunch with a publisher who was offering me better terms for a collection of stories (Exile from Mayda) than good Lodge. After a pleasant meal, in the sunny haze of that banal day, I walked over to the Public Library, and by a banal miracle of synchronization she came dancing down those very steps, Dolly von Borg, now twenty-four, as I trudged up toward her, a fat famous writer in his powerful forties. Except for a gleam of gray in the abundant fair mane that I had cultivated for my readings in Paris, more than a decade ago, I do not believe I could have changed sufficiently to warrant her saying, as she began doing, that she would never have recognized me had she not been so fond of the picture of meditation on the back of See under. I recognized her because I had never lost track of her image, readjusting it once in a while: the last time I had notched the score was when her grandmother, in response to my wife’s Christmas greetings, in 1939, sent us from London a postcard-size photo of a bare-shouldered flapper with a fluffy fan and false eyelashes in some high-school play, terribly chi-chi. In the two minutes we had on those steps—she pressing with both hands a book to her breast, I at a lower level, standing with my right foot placed on the next step, her step, and slapping my knee with a glove (many a tenor’s only known gesture)—in those two minutes we managed to exchange quite a lot of plain information.

  She was now studying the History of the Theater at Columbia University. Parents and grandparents were tucked away in London. I had a child, right? Those shoes I wore were lovely. Students called my lectures fabulous. Was I happy?

  I shook my head. When and where could I see her?

  She had always had a crush on me, oh yes, ever since I used to mesmerize her in my lap, playing sweet Uncle Gasper, muffing every other line, and now all had come back and she certainly wished to do something about it.

  She had a remarkable vocabulary. Summarize her. Mirages of motels in the eye of the penholder. Did she have a car?

  Well, that was rather sudden (laughing). She could borrow, perhaps, his old sedan though he might not like the notion (pointing to a nondescript youth who was waiting for her on the sidewalk). He had just bought a heavenly Hummer to go places with her.

  Would she mind telling me when we could meet, please.

  She had read all my novels, at least all the English ones. Her Russian was rusty!

  The hell with my novels! When?

  I had to let her think. She might visit me at the end of the term. Terry Todd (now measuring the stairs with his eyes, preparing to mount) had briefly been a student of mine; he got a D minus for his first paper and quit Quirn.

  I said I consigned all the D people to everlasting oblivion. Her “end of the term” might bend away into Minus Eternity. I required more precision.

  She would let me know. She would call me next week. No, she would not part with her own telephone number. She told me to look at that clown (he was now coming up the steps). Paradise was a Persian word. It was simply Persian to meet again like that. She might drop in at my office for a few moments, just to chat about old times. She knew how busy—

  “Oh, Terry: this is the writer, the man who wrote Emerald and the Pander.”

  I do not recall what I had planned to look up in the library. Whatever it was, it was not that unknown book. Aimlessly I walked up and down several halls; abjectly visited the W.C.; but simply could not, short of castrating myself, get rid of her new image in its own portable sunlight—the straight pale hair, the freckles, the banal pout, the Lilithan long eyes—though I knew she was only what one used to call a “little tramp” and, perhaps, because she was just that.

  I gave my penultimate “Masterpieces” lecture of the spring term. I gave my ultimate one. An assistant distributed the blue books for the final examination in that course (which I had curtailed for reasons of health) and collected them while three or four hopeless hopefuls still kept scribbling madly in separate spots of the hall. I held my last Joyce seminar of the year. Little Baroness Borg had forgotten the end of the dream.

  In the last days of the spring term a particularly stupid baby-sitter told me that some girl whose name she had not quite caught—Tallbird or Dalberg—had phoned that she was on her way to Quirn. It so happened that a Lily Talbot in my Masterpieces class had missed the examination. On the following day I walked over to my office for the ordeal of reading the damned heap on my desk. Quirn University Official Examination Book. All academic work is conducted on the assumption of general horror. Write on the consecutive right- and left-hand pages. What does “consecutive” really mean, Sir? Do you want us to describe all the birds in the story or only one? As a rule, one-tenth of the three hundred minds preferred the spelling “Stern” to “Sterne” and “Austin” to “Austen.”

  The telephone on my spacious desk (it “slept two” as my ribald neighbor Professor King, an authority on Dante, used to say) rang, and this Lily Talbot started to explain, volubly, unconvincingly, in a kind of lovely, veiled, and confidential voice, why she had not taken the examination. I could not remember her face or her figure, but the subdued melody tickling my ear contained such intimations of young charm and surrender that I could not help chiding myself for overlooking her in my class. She was about to come to the point when an eager childish rap at the door diverted my attention. Dolly walked in, smiling. Smiling, she indicated with a tilt of her chin that the receiver should be cradled. Smiling, she swept the examination books off the desk and perched upon it with her bare shins in my face. What might have promised the most refined ardors turned out to be the tritest scene in this memoir. I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier. The ultimate convulsion rocked the desk lamp, and from the class just across the corridor came a burst of applause at the end of Professor King’s last lecture of the season.

  When I came home, I found my wife alone on the porch swinging gently if not quite straight in her favorite glider and reading the Krasnaya Niva (“Red Corn”), a Bolshevist magazine. Her purveyor of literatura was away giving some future mistranslators a final examination. Isabel had been out of doors and was now taking a nap in her room just above the porch.

  In the days when the bermudki (as Ninella indecently called them) used to minister to my humble needs, I experienced no guilt after the operation and confronted my wife with my usual, fondly ironical smile; but on this occasion I felt my flesh coated with stinging slime, and my heart missed a thump, when she said, glancing up and stopping the line with her finger: “Did that girl get in touch with you at your office?”

  I answered as a fictional character might “in the affirmative”: “Her people,” I added, “wrote you, it appears, about her coming to study in New York, but you never showed me that letter. Tant mieux, she’s a frightful bore.”

  Annette looked utterly confused: “I’m speaking,” she said, “or trying to speak, about a student called Lily Talbot who telephoned an hour ago to explain why she missed the exam. Who is your girl?”

  We proceeded to disentangle the two. Af
ter some moral hesitation (“You know, we both owe a lot to her grandparents”) Annette conceded we really need not entertain little strays. She seemed to recall the letter because it contained a reference to her widowed mother (now moved to a comfortable home for the old into which I had recently turned my villa at Carnavaux—despite my lawyer’s well-meaning objections). Yes, yes, she had mislaid it—and would find it some day in some library book that had never been returned to an unattainable library. A strange appeasement was now flowing through my poor veins. The romance of her absentmindedness always made me laugh heartily. I laughed heartily. I kissed her on her infinitely tender-skinned temple.

  “How does Dolly Borg look now?” asked Annette. “She used to be a very homely and very brash little brat. Quite repulsive, in fact.”

  “That’s what she still is,” I practically shouted, and we heard little Isabel crow: “Ya prosnulas’,” through the yawn of the window: “I am awake.” How lightly the spring cloudlets scudded! How glibly that red-breasted thrush on the lawn pulled out its unbroken worm! Ah—and there was Ninella, home at last, getting out of her car, with the string-bound corpses of cahiers under her sturdy arm. “Gosh,” said I to myself, in my ignoble euphoria, “there’s something quite nice and cozy about old Ninel after all!” Yet only a few hours later the light of Hell had gone out, and I writhed, I wrung my four limbs, yes, in an agony of insomnia, trying to find some combination between pillow and back, sheet and shoulder, linen and leg, to help me, help me, oh, help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn.