Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Another odd thing: with prophetic care I took down in my diary all my stops, all my motels (Mes Moteaux as Verlaine might have said!), the Lakeviews, the Valley Views, the Mountain Views, the Plumed Serpent Court in New Mexico, the Lolita Lodge in Texas, Lone Poplars, that if recruited might have patrolled a whole river, and enough sunsets to keep all the bats of the world—and one dying genius—happy. LATH, LATH, Look At The Harlequins! Look at that strange fever rash of viatic tabulation in which I persevered as if I knew that those motor courts prefigured the stages of my future travels with my darling daughter.

  In late August, 1947, suntanned, and more edgy than ever, I returned to Quirn and transferred my belongings from storage to the new dwelling (1 Larchdell Road) found for me by efficient and cute Miss Soloway. This was a charming two-storied gray-stone house, with a picture window and a white grand in the long drawing-room, three virginal bedrooms upstairs and a library in the basement. It had belonged to the late Alden Landover, the greatest American belle-lettrist of the half-century. With the help of the beaming Trustees—and rather taking advantage of their joy at welcoming me back to Quirn—I resolved to buy that house. I loved its scholarly odor, a treat seldom granted to my exquisitely sensitive Brunn’s membrane, and I also loved its picturesque isolation amidst a tremendous unkempt garden above a larched and golden-rodded steep slope.

  To keep Quirn grateful, I also decided to reorganize completely my contribution to its fame. I scrapped my Joyce seminar which in 1945 had attracted (if that is the word) only six students—five grim graduates and one not quite normal sophomore. In compensation I added a third lecture in Masterpieces (now including Ulysses) to my weekly quota. The chief innovation, however, lay in my bold presentation of knowledge. During my first years at Quirn I had accumulated two thousand pages of literary comments typed out by my assistant (I notice I have not introduced him yet: Waldemar Exkul, a brilliant young Balt, incomparably more learned than I; dixi, Ex!). These I had the Photostat people multiply to accommodate at least three hundred students. At the end of every week each received a batch of the forty pages that I had recited to them, with certain addenda, in the lecture hall. The “certain addenda” were a concession to the Trustees who reasonably remarked that without this catch nobody would need to attend my classes. The three hundred copies of the two thousand typed pages were to be signed by the readers and returned to me before the final examination. There were flaws at first in the system (for example, only 153 incomplete sets, many unsigned, were returned in 1948) but on the whole it worked, or should have worked.

  Another decision I took was to make myself more available to faculty members than I had been before. The red needle of my dial scale now quiver-stopped at a very conservative figure, when, stark naked, arms hanging like those of a clumsy troglodyte, I stood on the fatal platform and with the help of my new housemaid, an enchanting black girl with an Egyptian profile, managed to make out what lay midway in the blur between my reading glasses and my long-distance ones: a great triumph, which I marked by acquiring several new “costumes,” as my Dr. Olga Repnin says in the novel of that name—“I don’t know (all ‘o’s’ as in ‘don’ and ‘anon’) why your horseband wears such not modern costumes.” I visited quite frequently the Pub, a college tavern, where I tried to mix with white-shoed young males, but somehow ended up by getting involved with professional barmaids. And I entered in my pocket diary the addresses of some twenty fellow professors.

  Most treasured among my new friends was a frail-looking, sad-looking, somewhat monkey-faced man with a shock of black hair, gray-streaked at fifty-five, the enchantingly talented poet Audace whose paternal ancestor was the eloquent and ill-fated Girondist of that name (“Bourreau, fais ton devoir envers la Liberté!”) but who did not know a word of French and spoke American with a flat Midwestern accent. Another interesting glimpse of descent was provided by Louise Adamson, the young wife of our Chairman of English: her grandmother, Sybil Lanier, had won the Women’s National Golf Championship in 1896 at Philadelphia!

  Gerard Adamson’s literary reputation was immensely superior to that of the immensely more important, bitter, and modest Audace. Gerry was a big flabby hulk of a man who must have been nearing sixty when after a life of aesthetic asceticism he surprised his special coterie by marrying that porcelain-pretty and very fast girl. His famous essays—on Donne, on Villon, on Eliot—his philosophic poetry, his recent Laic Litanies and so forth meant nothing to me, but he was an appealing old drunk, whose humor and erudition could break the resistance of the most unsociable outsider. I caught myself enjoying the frequent parties at which good old Noteboke and his sister Phoneme, the delightful Kings, the Adamsons, my favorite poet, and a dozen other people did all they could to entertain and comfort me.

  Louise, who had an inquisitive aunt at Honeywell, kept me informed, at tactful intervals, of Bel’s well-being. One spring day in 1949 or 1950 I happened to stop at the Plaza Liquor Store in Rosedale after a business meeting with Horace Peppermill and was about to back out of the parking lot when I saw Annette bending over a baby carriage in front of a grocery store at the other end of the shopping area. Something about her inclined neck, her melancholy concentration, the ghost of a smile directed at the child in the stroller, sent such a pang of pity through my nervous system that I could not resist accosting her. She turned toward me and even before I uttered some wild words—of regret, of despair, of tenderness—there she was shaking her head, forbidding me to come near. “Nikogda,” she murmured, “never,” and I could not bear to decipher the expression on her pale drawn face. A woman came out of the shop and thanked her for tending the little stranger—a pale and thin infant, looking almost as ill as Annette. I hurried back to the parking lot, scolding myself for not realizing at once that Bel must be a girl of seven or eight by this time. Her mother’s moist starry stare kept pursuing me for several nights; I even felt too ill to attend an Easter party at one of the friendly Quirn houses.

  During this or some other period of despondency, I heard one day the hall bell tinkle, and my Negro maid, little Nefertitty as I had dubbed her, hasten to open the front door. Slipping out of bed I pressed my bare flesh to the cool window ledge but was not in time to glimpse the entrant or entrants, no matter how far I leant out into a noisy spring downpour. A freshness of flowers, clusters and clouds of flowers, reminded me of some other time, some other casement. I made out part of the Adamsons’ glossy black car beyond the garden gate. Both? She alone? Solus rex? Both, alas—to judge by the voices reaching me from the hallway through my transparent house. Old Gerry, who disliked unnecessary stairs and had a morbid fear of contagion, remained in the living room. Now his wife’s steps and voice were coming up. We had kissed for the first time a few days before, in the Notebokes’ kitchen—rummaging for ice, finding fire. I had good reason to hope that the intermission before the obligatory scene would be brief.

  She entered, set down two bottles of port for the invalid, and pulled off her wet sweater over her tumbled chestnut-brown, violet-brown curls and naked clavicles. Artistically, strictly artistically, I daresay she was the best-looking of my three major loves. She had upward-directed thin eyebrows, sapphire eyes registering (and that’s the right word) constant amazement at earth’s paradise (the only one she would ever know, I’m afraid), pink-flushed cheekbones, a rosebud mouth, and a lovely concave abdomen. In less time than it took her husband, a quick reader, to skim down two columns of print, we had “attired” him. I put on blue slacks and a pink shirt and followed her downstairs.

  Her husband sat in a deep armchair, reading a London weekly bought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take off his horrible black raincoat—a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of a stagecoach driver in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidable spectacles. He cleared his throat with a characteristic rumble. His purple jowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:

  GERRY Do you ever see this paper, Vadim (accenting “Vadim”
incorrectly on the first syllable)? Mister (naming a particularly lively criticule) has demolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha; it had come out only now in the British edition).

  VADIM May I give you a drink? We’ll toast him and roast him.

  GERRY Yet he’s right, you know. It is your worst book. Chute complète, says the man. Knows French, too.

  LOUISE No drinks. We’ve got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair. Try again. Take your glasses and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I’ll bring you those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school.

  How different it all was, I mused, from the refined adulteries in the castles of my early youth! Where was the romantic thrill of a glance exchanged with one’s new mistress in the presence of a morose colossus—the Jealous Husband? Why did the recollection of the recent embrace not blend any longer as it used to do with the certainty of the next one, forming a sudden rose in an empty flute of crystal, a sudden rainbow on the white wallpaper? What did Emma see a fashionable woman drop into that man’s silk hat? Write legibly.

  2

  The mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes and floods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953, several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage, phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof of their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man, a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver’s seat, stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureau was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor’s widow, to the Rosedale Museum, were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister struck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved.

  Mr. Peppermill, whose natural faculties were no match for his legal acumen, warned me that if I desired to relinquish the child to her grandmother in France, certain formalities would have to be complied with. I observed quietly that Mrs. Blagovo was a half-witted cripple and that my daughter, whom her schoolteacher harbored, should be brought by that person to my house AT ONCE. He said he would fetch her himself early next week.

  After weighing and reweighing every paragraph of the house, every parenthesis of its furniture, I decided to lodge her in the former bedroom of the late Landover’s companion whom he called his nurse or his fiancée depending on his mood of the moment. This was a lovely chamber, east of mine, with lilac butterflies enlivening its wallpaper and a large, low, flouncy bed. I peopled its white bookshelf with Keats, Yeats, Coleridge, Blake, and four Russian poets (in the New Orthography). Although I told myself with a sigh that she would, no doubt, prefer “comics” to my dear bespangled mimes and their wands of painted lath, I felt compelled in my choice by what is termed the “ornamental instinct” among ornithologists. Moreover, knowing well how essential a pure strong light is to reading in bed, I asked Mrs. O’Leary, my new charwoman and cook (borrowed from Louise Adamson who had left with her husband for a long sojourn in England) to screw a couple of hundred-watt bulbs into a tall bedside lamp. Two dictionaries, a writing pad, a little alarm clock, and a Junior Manicure Set (suggested by Mrs. Noteboke, who had a twelve-year-old daughter) were attractively placed on a spacious and stable bedtable. All this was but a rough, naturally. The fair copy would come in due time.

  Landover’s nurse or fiancée could rush to his assistance either along a short passage or through the bathroom between the two bedrooms: Landover had been a large man and his long deep tub was a soaker’s delight. Another, narrower bathroom followed Bel’s bedroom easterly—and here I really missed my dainty Louise when racking my brain for the correct epithet between well-scrubbed and perfumed. Mrs. Noteboke could not help me: her daughter, who used the messy parental facilities, had no time for silly deodorants and loathed “foam.” Wise old Mrs. O’Leary, on the other hand, held before her mind’s eye Mrs. Adamson’s creams and crystals in a Flemish artist’s detail and made me long for her employer’s speedy return by conjuring up that picture, which she then proceeded to simplify, but not vulgarize, while retaining such major items as the huge sponge, the jumbo cake of lavender soap, and a delicious toothpaste.

  Walking still farther sunriseward, we reach the corner guest room (above the round dining room at the east end of the first floor); this I transformed with the help of a handyman, Mrs. O’Leary’s cousin, into an efficiently furnished studio. It contained, when I finished with it, a couch with boxy pillows, an oak desk with a revolving chair, a steel cabinet, a bookcase, Klingsor’s Illustrated Encyclopedia in twenty volumes, crayons, writing tablets, state maps, and (to cite the School Buyer’s Guide for 1952–1953) “a globe ball that lifts out of a cradle so that every child can hold the world in his or her lap.”

  Was that all? No. I found for the bedroom a framed photograph of her mother, Paris, 1934, and for the studio a reproduction in color of Levitan’s Clouds above a Blue River (the Volga, not far from my Marevo), painted around 1890.

  Peppermill was to bring her on May 21, around four P.M. I had to fill somehow the abyss of the afternoon. Angelic Ex had already read and marked the entire batch of exams, but he thought I might want to see some of the works he had reluctantly failed. He had dropped in some time on the eve and had left them downstairs on the round table in the round room next to the hallway at the west end of the house. My poor hands ached and trembled so dreadfully that I could hardly leaf through those poor cahiers. The round window gave on the driveway. It was a warm gray day. Sir! I need a passing mark desperately. Ulysses was written in Zurich and Greece and therefore consists of too many foreign words. One of the characters in Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan is the notorious actress Sarah Bernard. Stern’s style is very sentimental and illiterative. A car door banged. Mr. Peppermill came with a duffel bag in the wake of a tall fair-haired girl in blue jeans carrying, and slowing down, to change from hand to hand, an unwieldy valise.

  Annette’s moody mouth and eyes. Graceful but plain.

  Fortified by a serenacin tablet, I received my daughter and lawyer with the neutral dignity for which effusive Russians in Paris used to detest me so heartily. Peppermill accepted a drop of brandy. Bel had a glass of peach juice and a brown biscuit. I indicated to Bel—who was displaying her palms in a polite Russian allusion—the dining-room toilet, an old-fashioned touch on the architect’s part. Horace Peppermill handed me a letter from Bel’s teacher Miss Emily Ward. Fabulous Intelligence Quotient of 180. Menses already established. Strange, marvelous child. One does not quite know whether to curb or encourage such precocious brilliance. I accompanied Horace halfway back to his car, fighting off, successfully, the disgraceful urge to tell him how staggered I was by the bill his office had recently sent me.

  “Let me now show you your apartámenty. You speak Russian, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do, but I can’t write it. I also know a little French.”

  She and her mother (whom she mentioned as casually as if Annette were in the next room copying something for me on a soundless typewriter) had spent most of last summer at Carnavaux with babushka. I would like to have learned what room exactly Bel had occupied in the villa, but an oddly obtrusive, though irrelevant-looking, recollection somehow prevented me from asking: shortly before her death Iris had dreamed one night that she had given birth to a fat boy with dusky red cheeks and almond eyes and the blue shadow of mutton chops: “A horrible Omarus K.”

  Oh yes, said Bel, she had loved it. Especially the path down, down to the sea and the aroma of rosemary (chudnyy zapakh rozmarina). I was tortured and charmed by her “shadowless” émigré Russian, untainted, God bless An
nette, by the Langley woman’s fruity Sovietisms.

  Did Bel recognize me? She looked me over with serious gray eyes.

  “I recognize your hands and your hair.”

  “On se tutoie in Russian henceforward. All right. Let’s go upstairs.”

  She approved of the studio: “A schoolroom in a picture book.” She opened the medicine chest in her bathroom. “Empty—but I know what I’ll put there.” The bedroom “enchanted” her. Ocharovatel’no! (Annette’s favorite praise word.) She criticized, though, the bedside bookshelf: “What, no Byron? No Browning? Ah, Coleridge! The little golden sea snakes. Miss Ward gave me an anthology for Russian Easter: I can recite your last duchess—I mean ‘My Last Duchess.’ ”

  I caught my breath with a moan. I kissed her. I wept. I sat, shaking, on a fragile chair that creaked in response to my hunched-up paroxysm. Bel stood looking away, looking up at a prismatic reflection on the ceiling, looking down at her luggage, which Mrs. O’Leary, a dumpy but doughty woman, had already brought up.

  I apologized for my tears. Bel inquired in a socially perfect let’s-change-the-subject manner if there was a television set in the house. I said we’d get one tomorrow. I would leave her now to her own devices. Dinner in half-an-hour. She had noticed, she said, that a picture she’d like to see was being shown in town. After dinner we drove to The Strand Theater.