Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  3

  The increasing disarray of my nerves was such that the bother of getting a driver’s license could not be contemplated: hence I had to rely on Dolly’s use of Todd’s dirty old sedan in order to seek the conventional darkness of country lanes that were difficult to find and disappointing when found. We had three such rendezvous, near New Swivington or thereabouts, in the complicated vicinity of Casanovia of all places, and despite my muddled condition I could not help noticing that Dolly welcomed the restless wanderings, the wrong turns, the torrents of rain which attended our sordid little affair. “Just think,” she said one especially boggy June night in unknown surroundings, “how much simpler things would be if somebody explained the situation to your wife, just think!”

  On realizing she had gone too far with that proposed thought, Dolly changed tactics and rang me up at my office to tell me with a great show of jubilant excitement that Bridget Dolan, a medical student and a cousin of Todd’s, was offering us for a small remuneration her flat in New York on Monday and Thursday afternoons when she worked as a nurse at the Holy Something Hospital. Inertia rather than Eros caused me to give it a try; I kept up the pretext of having to complete the literary research I was supposed to be conducting in the Public Library, and traveled in a crowded Pullman from one nightmare to another.

  She met me in front of the house, strutting in triumph, brandishing a little key that caught a glint of sun in the hothouse mizzle. I was so very weak from the journey that I had trouble getting out of the taxi, and she helped me to the front door, chattering the while like a bright child. Fortunately the mysterious flat was on the ground floor—I could not have faced a lift’s closure and spasm. A surly janitrix (reminding me in mnemonic reverse of the Cerberean bitches in the hotels of Soviet Siberia which I was to stop at a couple of decades later) insisted on my writing down my name and address in a ledger (“That’s the rule,” sang out Dolly, who had already picked up some intones of local delivery). I had the presence of mind to put down the dumbest address I could produce at the moment, Dumbert Dumbert, Dumberton. Dolly, humming, added unhurriedly my raincoat to those hanging in a communal hallway. If she had ever experienced the pangs of neuralgic delirium, she would not have fumbled with that key when she knew quite well that the door of what should have been an exquisitely private apartment was not even properly closed. We entered a preposterous, evidently ultra-modern living room with painted hard furniture and one lone little white rocker supporting a plush biped rat instead of a sulky child. Doors were still with me, were always with me. The one on the left, being slightly ajar, let in voices from an adjacent suite or asylum. “There’s a party going on there!” I expostulated, and Dolly deftly and softly drew that door almost shut. “They’re a nice friendly group,” she said, “and it’s really too warm in these rooms to choke every chink. Second on the right. Here we are.”

  Here we were. Nurse Dolan for the sake of atmosphere and professional empathy had rigged up her bedroom in hospital style: a snow-pure cot with a system of levers that would have rendered even Big Peter (in the Red Topper) impotent; whitewashed commodes and glazed cabinets; a bedhead chart dear to humorists; and a set of rules tacked to the bathroom door.

  “Now off with that jacket,” cried Dolly gaily, “while I unlace those lovely shoes” (crouching nimbly, and nimbly recrouching, at my retreating feet).

  I said: “You have lost your mind, my dear, if you think I could contemplate making love in this appalling place.”

  “What do you want then?” she asked, angrily brushing away a strand of hair from her flushed face and uncoiling back to her natural length: “Where would you find another such dandy, hygienic, utterly—”

  A visitor interrupted her: a brown, gray-cheeked old dackel carrying horizontally a rubber bone in its mouth. It entered from the parlor, placed the obscene red thing on the linoleum, and stood looking at me, at Dolly, at me again, with melancholy expectation on its raised dogface. A pretty bare-armed girl in black slipped in, grabbed the animal, kicked its toy back into the parlor, and said: “Hullo, Dolly! If you and your friend want some drinks afterwards, please join us. Bridget phoned she’d be home early. It’s J.B.’s birthday.”

  “Righto, Carmen,” replied Dolly, and turning to me continued in Russian: “I think you need that drink right away. Oh, come along! And for God’s sake leave that jacket and waistcoat here. You are drenched with sweat.”

  She forced me out of the room; I went rumbling and groaning; she gave a perfunctory pat to the creaseless cot and followed the man of snow, the man of tallow, the dying lopsided man.

  Most of the party had now invaded the parlor from the next room. I cringed and tried to hide my face as I recognized Terry Todd. He raised his glass in delicate congratulation. What that slut had done to ensure a thwarted beau’s complicity, I shall never know; but I should never have put her in my Krasnyy Tsilindr; that’s the way you breed live monsters—from little ballerinas in books. Another person I had once seen already—in a car that kept passing us somewhere in the country—a young actor with handsome Irish features, pressed upon me what he called a Honolulu Cooler, but at the eoan stage of an attack I am beyond alcohol, so could only taste the pineapple part of the mixture. Amidst a circle of sycophants a bull-size old fellow in a short-sleeved shirt monogrammed “J.B.” posed, one hairy arm around Dolly, for a naughty shot that his wife snapped. Carmen removed my sticky glass on her neat little tray with a pillbox and a thermometer in the corner. Not finding a seat, I had to lean against the wall, and the back of my head caused a cheap abstract in a plastic frame to start swinging above me: it was stopped by Todd who had sidled up to me and now said, lowering his voice: “Everything is settled, Prof, to everybody’s satisfaction. I’ve kept in touch with Mrs. Langley, sure I have, she and the missus are writing you. I believe they’ve already left, the kid thinks you’re in Heaven—now, now, what’s the matter?”

  I am not a fighter. I only hurt my hand against a tall lamp and lost both shoes in the scuffle. Terry Todd vanished—forever. The telephone was being used in one room and ringing in the other. Dolly, retransformed by the alchemy of her blazing anger—and now untellable from the little girl who had hurled a three-letter French word at me when I told her I found it wiser to stop taking advantage of her grandfather’s hospitality—virtually tore my necktie in two, yelling she could easily get me jailed for rape but preferred to see me crawling back to my consort and harem of baby-sitters (her new vocabulary, though, remained richly theatrical, even when she shrieked).

  I felt trapped like a silver pea teased into the center of a toy maze. A threatening crowd, held back by J.B., the head doctor, separated me from the exit; so I retreated to Bridget’s private wardette and saw, with a sense of relief (also “eoan” alas) that beyond a previously unnoticed, half-opened French window there extended to a fabulous distance an inner court, or only one comforting part of an inner court, with lightly robed patients circulating in a geometry of lawns and garden walks, or quietly sitting on benches. I staggered out, and as my white-socked feet touched the cool turf I noticed that the vagabond wench had undone the ankle strings of the long linen underpants I was wearing. Somehow, somewhere, I had shed and lost all the rest of my clothes. As I stood there, my head brimming with a blackness of pain seldom known before, I became aware of a flurry of motion beyond the court. Far, far away, nurse Dolan or Nolan (at that distance such nice distinctions no longer mattered) emerged from a wing of the hospital and came running to my assistance. Two males followed her with a stretcher. A helpful patient gathered up the blanket they had dropped.

  “You know, you know … you should have never done that,” she cried panting. “Don’t move, they’ll help you to get up (I had collapsed on the turf). If you’d escaped after surgery you might have died right where you are. On such a lovely day, too!”

  And so I was carried by two sturdy palanquiners who stank all the way (the hind bearer solidly, the front man in rhythmic wafts) not to Bridget’s bed but t
o a real hospital cot in a ward for three between two old men, both dying of cerebritis.

  4

  Rustic Roses

  13. IV. 46

  The step I have taken, Vadim, is not subject to discussion (ne podlezhit obsuzhdeniyu). You must accept my departure as a fait accompli.1 Had I really loved you I would not have left you; but I never loved you really, and maybe your escapade—which no doubt is not your first since our arrival in this sinister (zloveshchuyu) “free” country2—is for me a mere pretext for leaving you.

  We have never been very happy together, you and I, during our twelve3 years of marriage. You regarded me from the start as a cute, dutiful, but definitely disappointing little circus animal4 which you tried to teach immoral disgusting tricks—condemned as such according to the faithful companion without whom I might not have survived in ghastly “Kvirn”5 by the latest scientific stars of our fatherland. I, on the other hand, was so painfully nonplussed by your trenne (sic)6 de vie, your habits, your black-locked7 friends, your decadent novels, and—why not admit it?—your pathological revolt against Art and Progress in the Soviet Land, including the restoration of lovely old churches,8 that I would have divorced you, had I dared upset9 poor papa and mama who were so eager in their dignity and naïveté to have their daughter addressed—by whom, good Lord?—as “Your Serenity” (Siyatel’stvo).

  Now comes a serious demand, an absolute injunction. Never, never—at least while I am still alive—never, I repeat, shall you try to communicate with the child. I do not know—Nelly is better versed in this—what the legal situation is, but I know that in certain respects you are a gentleman and it is to the gentleman that I say and shout: Please, please, keep away! If some dreadful American illness strikes me, then remember I wish her to be brought up as a Russian Christian.10

  I was sorry to learn about your hospitalization. This is your second, and I hope last, attack of neurasthenia11 since the time we made the mistake of leaving Europe instead of waiting quietly for the Soviet Army to liberate it from the fascists. Good-bye.

  P.S. Nelly wishes to add a few lines.

  Thank you, Netty. I shall indeed be brief. The information imparted to us by your girlfriend’s fiancé and his mother,12 a saintly woman of infinite compassion and common sense, lacked, fortunately, the element of dreadful surprise. A roommate of Berenice Mudie (the one that stole the cut-crystal decanter Netty gave me) had already been spreading certain odd rumors a couple of years ago; I tried to protect your sweet wife by not allowing that gossip to reach her or at least by drawing her attention to it in a very oblique, half-humorous way long after those prostitutes had gone. But now let us talk turkey.13

  There can be no problem, I am sure, in separating your things from hers. She says: “Let him take the countless copies of his novels and all the tattered dictionaries”; but she must be allowed to keep her household treasures such as my little birthday gifts to her—the silver-plated caviar bowl as well as the six pale-green handblown wine glasses, etc.

  I can especially sympathize with Netty in this domestic catastrophe because my own marriage resembled hers in many, many ways. It began so auspiciously! I was stranded and lost in a territory suddenly occupied by Estonian fascists, a poor little war-tossed Moscow girl,14 when I first met Professor Langley in quite romantic circumstances: I was interpreting for him (the study of foreign languages stands at a remarkable level in the Soviet Land); but when I was shipped with other DP’s to the U.S. and we met again and married, all went wrong—he ignored me in the daytime, and our nights were full of incompatibility.15 One good consequence is that I inherited, so to speak, a lawyer, Mr. Horace Peppermill, who has consented to grant you a consultation and help you to settle all business details. It will be wise on your part to follow Professor Langley’s example and give your wife a monthly allowance while placing a sizable “guarantee sum” in the bank which can be available to her in extreme cases and, naturally, after your demise or during an overprotracted terminal illness. We do not have to remind you that Mrs. Blagovo should continue to receive regularly her usual check until further notice.

  The Quirn house will be offered for sale immediately—it is overflowing with odious memories, Consequently, as soon as they let you out, which I hope will happen without retardment (bez zamedleniya, sans tarder), move out of the house, please.16 I am not on speaking terms with Miss Myrna Soloway—or, in reality, simply Soloveychik—of my department, but I understand she is very good at ferreting out places for rent.

  We have fine weather here after all that rain. The lake is beautiful at this time of the year! We are going to refurnish our dear little dacha. Its only drawback in one sense (an asset in all others!) is that it stands a wee bit apart from civilization or at least from Honeywell College. The police are always on the lookout for bathers in the nude, prowlers, etc. We are seriously thinking of acquiring a big Alsatian!17

  COMMENTARY

  1. En français dans le texte.

  2. The first four or five lines are no doubt authentic, but then come various details which convince me that not Netty but Nelly masterminded the entire communication. Only a Soviet woman would speak like that of America

  3. At first typed “fourteen” but expertly erased and replaced by the correct “twelve,” as seen clearly in the carbon copy that I found pinned, “just in case,” to the blotter in my study. Netty would have been totally incapable of producing such a clean typescript—especially with the New Orthography machine used by her friend.

  4. The term in the text is durovskiy zveryok, meaning a small animal trained by the famous Russian clown Durov, a reference less familiar to my wife than to a person of the older generation to which her friend belonged.

  5. Contemptuous transliteration of “Quirn.”

  6. Symptomatic misspelling of train. Annette’s French was excellent. Ninette’s French (as well as her English) was a joke.

  7. My wife coming as she did from an obscurant Russian milieu was no paragon of racial tolerance; but she would never have used the vulgar anti-Semitic phraseology typical of her friend’s character and upbringing.

  8. The interpolation of those “lovely old churches” is a stock platitude of Soviet patriotism.

  9. Actually my wife rather liked to upset her people on every possible occasion.

  10. I might have done something about it had I known for sure whose wish it was. To spite her parents—a strange but constant policy on her part—Annette never went to church, not even at Easter. As to Mrs. Langley, devotional decorum was the motto; the woman made the sign of the cross every time American Jupiter split the black clouds.

  11. “Neurasthenia” indeed!

  12. A totally new character—this mother. Myth? Impersonation act? I turned to Bridget for some explanation; she said there was no such person around (the real Mrs. Todd died long ago) and advised me “to drop the subject” with the irritating curtness of one dismissing a topic as the product of another’s delirium. I am ready to agree that my recollection of the scene at her apartment is tainted by the state I was in, but that “saintly mother” must remain an enigma.

  13. En Anglais dans le texte.

  14. The little Muscovite must have been around forty at the time.

  15. En Anglais dans le texte.

  16. This I did not dream of doing before my lease expired, which it did on August 1, 1946.

  17. Let us refrain from a final comment.

  Good-bye, Netty and Nelly. Good-bye, Annette and Ninette.

  Good-bye, Nonna Anna.

  Part Four

  1

  Learning to drive that “Caracal” (as I fondly called my new white coupé) had its comic as well as dramatic side, but after two flunks and a few little repairs, I found myself legally and physically fit at last to spin off West on a protracted tour. There was, true, a moment of acute distress, as the first distant mountains disowned suddenly any likeness to lilac clouds, when I recalled the trips Iris and I used to make to the Riviera in our old Icarus. If she did
occasionally allow me to take the wheel, it was only in a spirit of fun, for she was such a sportive girl. With what sobs I now remembered the time when I managed to hit the postman’s bicycle which had been left leaning against a pink wall at the entrance of Carnavaux, and how my Iris doubled up in beautiful mirth as the thing slithered off in front of us!

  I spent what remained of the summer exploring the incredibly lyrical Rocky Mountain states, getting drunk on whiffs of Oriental Russia in the sagebrush zone and on the North Russian fragrances so faithfully reproduced above timberline by certain small bogs along trickles of sky between the snowbank and the orchid. And yet—was that all? What form of mysterious pursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, to stare every dandelion in the face, to start at every colored mote passing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation of having come empty-handed—without what? A gun? A wand? This I dared not probe lest I wound the raw fell under my thin identity.

  Skipping the academic year, in a kind of premature “sabbatical leave” that left the Trustees of Quirn University speechless, I wintered in Arizona where I tried to write The Invisible Lath, a book rather similar to that in the reader’s hands. No doubt I was not ready for it and perhaps toiled too much over inexpressible shades of emotion; anyway I smothered it under too many layers of sense as a Russian peasant woman, in her stuffy log house, might overlay (zaspat’) her baby in heavy oblivion after making hay or being thrashed by her drunken husband.

  I pushed on to Los Angeles—and was sorry to learn that the cinema company I had counted upon was about to fold after Ivor Black’s death. On my way back, in early spring, I rediscovered the dear phantasmata of my childhood in the tender green of aspen groves at high altitudes here and there, on conifer-clothed ridges. For almost six months I roamed again from motel to motel, several times having my car scratched and cracked by cretinous rival drivers and finally trading it in for a sedate Bellargus sedan of a celestial blue that Bel was to compare with that of a Morpho.