Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Says a scribble in my diary: Does not much care for boiled chicken. The Black Widow. With Gene, Ginger, and George. Have passed the “illiterative” sentimentalist and all the rest.

  3

  If Bel is alive today, she is thirty-two—exactly your age at the moment of writing (February 15, 1974). The last time I saw her, in 1959, she was not quite seventeen; and between eleven and a half and seventeen and a half she has changed very slightly in the medium of memory, where blood does not course through immobile time as fast as it does in the perceptual present. Especially unaffected by linear growth is my vision of her pertaining to 1953–1955, the three years in which she was totally and uniquely mine: I see it today as a composite portrait of rapture, in which a mountain in Colorado, my translating Tamara into English, Bel’s high school accomplishments, and an Oregon forest intergrade in patterns of transposed time and twisted space that defy chronography and charting.

  One change, one gradational trend I must note, however. This was my growing awareness of her beauty. Scarcely a month after her arrival I was already at a loss to understand how she could have struck me as “plain.” Another month elapsed and the elfin line of her nose and upper lip in profile came as an “expected revelation”—to use a formula I have applied to certain prosodic miracles in Blake and Blok. Because of the contrast between her pale-gray iris and very black lashes, her eyes seemed rimmed with kohl. Her hollowed cheek and long neck were pure Annette, but her fair hair, which she wore rather short, gave off a richer sheen as if the tawny strands were mixed with gold-olive ones in thick straight stripes of alternate shades. All this is easily described and this also goes for the regular striation of bright bloom along the outside of forearm and leg, which, in fact, smacks of self-plagiarism, for I had given it both to Tamara and Esmeralda, not counting several incidental lassies in my short stories (see for example page 537 of the Exile from Mayda collection, Good-minton, New York, 1947). The general type and bone structure of her pubescent radiance cannot be treated, however, with a crack player’s brio and chalk-biting serve. I am reduced—a sad confession!—to something I have also used before, and even in this book—the well-known method of degrading one species of art by appealing to another. I am thinking of Serov’s Five-petaled Lilac, oil, which depicts a tawny-haired girl of twelve or so sitting at a sun-flecked table and manipulating a raceme of lilac in search of that lucky token. The girl is no other than Ada Bredow, a first cousin of mine whom I flirted with disgracefully that very summer, the sun of which ocellates the garden table and her bare arms. What hack reviewers of fiction call “human interest” will now overwhelm my reader, the gentle tourist, when he visits the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, where I have seen with my own rheumy eyes, on a visit to Sovietland a few years ago, that picture which belonged to Ada’s grandmother before being handed over to the People by a dedicated purloiner. I believe that this enchanting little girl was the model of my partner in a recurrent dream of mine with a stretch of parquetry between two beds in a makeshift demonic guest room. Bel’s resemblance to her—same cheekbones, same chin, same knobby wrists, same tender flower—can be only alluded to, not actually listed. But enough of this. I have been trying to do something very difficult and I will tear it up if you say I have succeeded too well, because I do not want, and never wanted, to succeed, in this dismal business of Isabel Lee—though at the same time I was intolerably happy.

  When asked—at last!—had she loved her mother (for I could not get over Bel’s apparent indifference to Annette’s terrible death) she thought for such a long time that I decided she had forgotten my question, but finally (like a chessplayer resigning after an abyss of meditation), she shook her head. What about Nelly Langley? This she answered at once: Langley was mean and cruel and hated her, and only last year whipped her; she had welts all over (uncovering for display her right thigh, which now, at least, was impeccably white and smooth).

  The education she got in Quirn’s best private school for Young Ladies (you, her coeval, were there for a few weeks, in the same class, but you and she somehow missed making friends with each other) was supplemented by the two summers we spent roaming all over the Western states. What memories, what lovely smells, what mirages, near-mirages, substantiated mirages, accumulated along Highway 138—Sterling, Fort Morgan (El. 4325), Greeley, well-named Loveland—as we approached the paradise part of Colorado!

  From Lupine Lodge, Estes Park, where we spent a whole month, a path margined with blue flowers led through aspen groves to what Bel drolly called The Foot of the Face. There was also the Thumb of the Face, at its southern corner. I have a large glossy photograph taken by William Garrell who was the first, I think, to reach The Thumb, in 1940 or thereabouts, showing the East Face of Longs Peak with the checkered lines of ascent superimposed in a loopy design upon it. On the back of this picture—and as immortal in its own little right as the picture’s subject—a poem by Bel, neatly copied in violet ink, is dedicated to Addie Alexander, “First woman on Peak, eighty years ago.” It commemorates our own modest hikes:

  Longs’ Peacock Lake:

  the Hut and its Old Marmot;

  Boulderfield and its Black Butterfly;

  And the intelligent trail.

  She had composed it while we were sharing a picnic lunch, somewhere between those great rocks and the beginning of The Cable, and after testing the result mentally a number of times, in frowning silence, she finally scribbled it on a paper napkin which she handed to me with my pencil.

  I told her how wonderful and artistic it was—particularly the last line. She asked: what’s “artistic”? I said: “Your poem, you, your way with words.”

  In the course of that ramble, or perhaps on a latter occasion, but certainly in the same region, a sudden storm swept upon the glory of the July day. Our shirts, shorts, and loafers seemed to dwindle to nothing in the icy mist. A first hailstone hit a tin can, another my bald spot. We sought refuge in a cavity under a jutting rock. Thunderstorms to me are agony. Their evil pressure destroys me; their lightning forks through my brain and breast. Bel knew this; huddling against me (for my comfort rather than hers!), she kept giving me a quick little kiss on the temple at every bang of thunder, as if to say: That one’s over, you’re still safe. I now felt myself longing for those crashes never to cease; but presently they turned to halfhearted rumbles, and the sun found emeralds in a patch of wet turf. She could not stop shivering, though, and I had to thrust my hands under her skirt and rub her thin body, till it glowed, so as to ward off “pneumonia” which she said, laughing jerkily, was a “new,” was a “moon,” was a “new moon” and a “moan,” a “new moan,” thank you.

  There is a hollow of dimness again in the sequence, but it must have been soon after that, in the same motor court, or in the next, on the way home, that she slipped into my room at dawn, and sat down on my bed—move your legs—in her pyjama top to read me another poem:

  In the dark basement, I stroked

  the silky head of a wolf.

  When the light returned

  and all cried: “Ah!,”

  it turned out to be only

  Médor, a dead dog.

  I again praised her talent, and kissed her more warmly, perhaps, than the poem deserved; for, actually, I found it rather obscure, but did not say so, and presently she yawned and fell asleep on my bed, a practice I usually did not tolerate. Today, however, on rereading those strange lines, I see through their starry crystal the tremendous commentary I could write about them, with galaxies of reference marks and footnotes like the reflections of brightly lit bridges spanning black water. But my daughter’s soul is hers, and my soul is mine, and may Hamlet Godman rot in peace.

  4

  As late as the start of the 1954–1955 school year, with Bel nearing her thirteenth birthday, I was still deliriously happy, still seeing nothing wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous, in the relationship between my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses—a few hot drops of overf
lowing tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of stuff—my relations with her remained essentially innocent. But whatever qualities I might have possessed as a Professor of Literature, nothing but incompetence and a reckless laxity of discipline can I see today in the rearview reflection of that sweet wild past.

  Others forestalled me in perspicacity. My first critic happened to be Mrs. Noteboke, a stout dark lady in suffragettish tweeds, who instead of keeping her Marion, a depraved and vulgar nymphet, from snooping on a schoolmate’s home life, lectured me on the upbringing of Bel and strongly advised my hiring an experienced, preferably German, governess to look after her day and night. My second critic—a much more tactful and understanding one—was my secretary, Myrna Soloway, who complained that she could not keep track of the literary magazines and clippings in my mail—because of their being intercepted by an unscrupulous and avid little reader—and who gently added that Quirn High School, the last refuge of common sense in my incredible plight, was astounded by Bel’s lack of manners almost as much as by her intelligence and familiarity with “Proust and Prévost.” I spoke to Miss Lowe, the rather pretty petite headmistress, and she mentioned “boarding facilities,” which sounded like some kind of wooden jail, and the even more dismal (“with all those rippling birdcalls and wickering trills in the woods, Miss Lowe—in the woods”!) “summer instruction” to replace the “eccentricities of an artist’s (‘A great artist’s, Professor’) household.” She pointed out to the giggling and apprehensive artist that a young daughter should be treated as a potential component of our society and not as a fancy pet. Throughout that talk I could not shake off the feeling of its all being a nightmare that I had had or would have in some other existence, some other bound sequence of numbered dreams.

  An atmosphere of vague distress was gathering (to speak in verbal clichés about a cliché situation) around my metaphorical head, when there occurred to me a simple and brilliant solution of all my problems and troubles.

  The tall looking glass before which many of Landover’s houris had onduled in their brief brown glory now served me to behold the image of a lion-hued fifty-five-year-old would-be athlete performing waist-slimming and chest-expanding exercises by means of an “Elmago” (“Combines the mechanical know-how of the West with the magic of Mithra”). It was a good image. An old telegram (found unopened in an issue of Artisan, a literary review, filched by Bel from the hallway table), was addressed to me by a Sunday paper in London, asking me to comment on the rumors—which I had already heard—to the effect that I was the main candidate in the abstract scramble for what our American kid brothers called “the most prestigious prize in the world.” This, too, might impress the rather success-minded person I had in view. Finally, I knew that in the vacational months of 1955 a series of strokes had killed off in London poor old Gerry Adamson, a great guy, and that Louise was free. Too free in fact. An urgent letter I now wrote her, summoning her back to Quirn at once, for a serious Discussion of a matter concerning both her and me, reached her only after describing a comic circle via four fashionable spots on the Continent. I never saw the wire she said she sent me from New York on October 1.

  On October 2, an abnormally warm day, the first of a week-long series, Mrs. King telephoned in the afternoon to invite me with rather enigmatic little laughs to an “impromptu soirée, in a few hours, say at nine P.M. after you have tucked in your adorable daughter.” I agreed to come because Mrs. King was an especially nice soul, the kindest on the campus.

  I had a black headache and decided that a two-mile walk in the cool clear night would do me good. My dealings with space and spatial transitions are so diabolically complicated that I do not recall whether I really walked, or drove, or limited myself to pacing up and down the open gallery running along the front side of our second floor, or what.

  The first person to whom my hostess introduced me—with a subdued fanfare of social elation—was the “English” cousin with whom Louise had been staying in Devonshire, Lady Morgain, “daughter of our former Ambassador and widow of the Oxford medievalist”—shadowy figures on a briefly lit screen. She was a rather deaf and decidedly dotty witch in her middle fifties, comically coiffured and dowdily dressed, and she and her belly advanced upon me with such energetic eagerness that I scarcely had time to sidestep the well-meant attack before getting wedged “between the books and the bottles” as poor Gerry used to say in reference to academic cocktails. I passed into a different, far more stylish world as I bent to kiss Louise’s expertly swanned cool little hand. My dear old Audace welcomed me with the kind of Latin accolade that he had especially developed to mark the highest degree of spiritual kinship and mutual esteem. John King, whom I had seen on the eve in a college corridor, greeted me with raised arms as if the fifty hours elapsed since our last chat had been magically blown-up into half a century. We were only six people in a spacious parlor, not counting two painted girl-children in Tyrolean dress, whose presence, identity, and very existence have remained to this day a familiar mystery—familiar, because such zigzag cracks in the plaster are typical of the prisons or palaces into which recrudescent derangement merrily leads me whenever I have prepared to make, as I was to do now, a difficult, climactic announcement that demanded absolute clarity of concentration. So, as I just said, we were only six animal people in that room (and two little phantoms), but through the translucid unpleasant walls I could make out—without looking!—rows and tiers of dim spectators, with the sense of a sign in my brain meaning “standing room only” in the language of madness.

  We were now sitting at a round clockfaced table (practically undistinguishable from the one in the Opal Room of my house, west of the albino Stein), Louise at twelve o’clock, Professor King at two, Mrs. Morgain at four, Mrs. King in green silk at eight, Audace at ten, and I at six, presumably, or a minute past, because Louise was not quite opposite, or maybe she had pushed her chair a sixty-second space closer to Audace although she had sworn to me on the Social Register as well as on a Who’s Who that he had never made that pass at her somehow suggested by his magnificent little poem in the Artisan.

  Speaking of, ah, yesternights,

  I had you, dear, within earshot

  of that party downstairs,

  on the broad bed of my host

  piled with the coats of your guests,

  old macks, mock minks,

  one striped scarf (mine),

  a former flame’s furs

  (more rabbit than flipperling),

  yea, a mountain of winters,

  like that upon which flunkeys sprawl

  in the vestibule of the Opera,

  Canto One of Onegin,

  where under the chandeliers

  of a full house, you, dear,

  should have been the dancer

  flying, like fluff, in a decor

  of poplars and fountains.

  I started to speak in the high, clear, insolent voice (taught me by Ivor on the beach of Cannice) by which I instilled the fear of Phoebus when inaugurating a recalcitrant seminar in my first years of teaching at Quirn: “What I plan to discuss is the curious case of a close friend of mine whom I shall call—”

  Mrs. Morgain set down her glass of whisky and leaned toward me confidentially: “You know I met little Iris Black in London, around 1919, I guess. Her father was a business friend of my father, the Ambassador. I was a starry-eyed American gal. She was a fantastic beauty and most sophisticated. I remember how thrilled I was later to learn that she had gone and married a Russian Prince!”

  “Fay,” cried Louise from twelve to four: “Fay! His Highness is making his throne speech.”

  Everyone laughed, and the two bare-thighed Tyrolean children chasing each other around the table bounced across my knees and were gone again.

  “I shall call this close friend of mine, whose case we are about to examine, Mr. Twidower, a name with certain connotations, as those of you who remember the title story in my Exile from Mayda will note.”

 
; (Three people, the Kings and Audace, raised three hands, looking at one another in shared smugness.)

  “This person, who is in the mighty middle of life, thinks of marrying a third time. He is deeply in love with a young woman. Before proposing to her, however, honesty demands that he confess he is suffering from a certain ailment. I wish they would stop jolting my chair every time they run by. ‘Ailment’ is perhaps too strong a term. Let’s put it this way: there are certain flaws, he says, in the mechanism of his mind. The one he told me about is harmless in itself but very distressing and unusual, and may be a symptom of some imminent, more serious disorder. So here goes. When this person is lying in bed and imagining a familiar stretch of street, say, the right-hand side-walk from the Library to, say—”

  “The Liquor Store,” put in King, a relentless wag.

  “All right, Recht’s Liquor Store. It is about three hundred yards away—”

  I was again interrupted, this time by Louise (whom, in fact, I was solely addressing). She turned to Audace and informed him that she could never visualize any distance in yards unless she could divide it by the length of a bed or a balcony.

  “Romantic,” said Mrs. King. “Go on, Vadim.”

  “Three hundred paces away along the same side as the College Library. Now comes my friend’s problem. He can walk in his mind there and back but he can’t perform in his mind the actual about-face that transforms ‘there’ into ‘back.’ ”

  “Must call Rome,” muttered Louise to Mrs. King, and was about to leave her seat, but I implored her to hear me out. She resigned herself, warning me however that she could not understand a word of my peroration.

  “Repeat that bit about twisting around in your mind,” said King. “Nobody understood.”

  “I did,” said Audace: “We suppose the Liquor Store happens to be closed, and Mr. Twidower, who is a friend of mine too, turns on his heel to go back to the Library. In the reality of life he performs this action without a hitch or hiatus, as simply and unconsciously as we all do, even if the artist’s critical eye does see—A toi, Vadim.”