Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  2

  After almost three months of fretting I was ready to go. I felt lacquered from head to foot, like that naked ephebe, the bright clou of a pagan procession, who died of dermal asphyxia in his coat of golden varnish. A few days before my actual departure there occurred what seemed a harmless shift at the time. I was to wing off on a Thursday from Paris. On Monday a melodious female voice reached me at my nostalgically lovely hotel, rue Rivoli, to tell me that something—perhaps a hushed-up crash in a Soviet veil of mist—had clogged the general schedule and that I could board an Aeroflot turboprop to Moscow either this Wednesday or the next. I chose the former, of course, for it did not affect the date of my rendezvous.

  My traveling companions were a few English and French tourists and a goodish bunch of gloomy officials from Soviet trade missions. Once inside the aircraft, a certain illusion of cheap unreality enveloped me—to linger about me for the rest of my trip. It was a very warm day in June and the farcical air-conditioning system failed to outvie the whiffs of sweat and the sprayings of Krasnaya Moskva, an insidious perfume which imbued even the hard candy (named Ledenets vzlyotnyy, “take-off caramel,” on the wrapper) generously distributed to us before the start of the flight. Another fairy-tale touch was the bright dapple—yellow curlicues and violet eyespots—adorning the blinds. A similarly colored waterproof bag in the seat pocket before me was ominously labeled “for waste disposal”—such as the disposal of my identity in that fairyland.

  My mood and mental condition needed strong liquor rather than another round of vzlyotnyy or some nice reading matter; still I accepted a publicity magazine from a stout, unsmiling, bare-armed stewardess in sky blue, and was interested to learn that (in contrast to current triumphs) Russia had not done so well in the Soccer Olympics of 1912 when the “Tsarist team” (consisting presumably of ten boyars and one bear) lost 12–0 to a German side.

  I had taken a tranquilizer and hoped to sleep at least part of the way; but a first, and only, attempt at dozing off was resolutely thwarted by a still fatter stewardess, in a still stronger aura of onion sweat, asking me nastily to draw in the leg that I had stuck out too far into the aisle where she circulated with more and more publicity material. I envied darkly my windowside neighbor, an elderly Frenchman—or, anyway, scarcely a compatriot of mine—with a straggly gray-black beard and a terrible tie, who slept through the entire five-hour flight, disdaining the sardines and even the vodka which I could not resist, though I had a flask of better stuff in my hip pocket. Perhaps historians of photography could help me some day to define how, by precisely what indices, I am enabled to establish that the recollection of an anonymous unplaceable face goes back to 1930–1935, say, and not to 1945–1950. My neighbor was practically the twin of a person I had known in Paris, but who? A fellow writer? A concierge? A cobbler? The difficulty of determination grated less than the riddle of its limits as suggested by the degree of perceived “shading” and the “feel” of the image.

  I got a closer but still more teasing look at him when, toward the close of our journey, my raincoat fell from the rack and landed upon him, and he grinned amiably enough as he emerged from under the sudden awakener. And I glimpsed again his fleshy profile and thick eyebrow while submitting for inspection the contents of my only valise and fighting the insane urge to question the propriety of the phrasing in the English form of the Customs Declaration: “… miniature graphics, slaughtered fowl, live animals and birds.”

  I saw him again, but not as clearly, during our transfer by bus from one airport to another through some shabby environs of Moscow—a city which I had never seen in my life and which interested me about as much as, say, Birmingham. On the plane to Leningrad, however, he was again next to me, this time on the inner side. Mixed odors of dour hostess and “Red Moscow,” with a gradual prevalence of the first ingredient, as our bare-armed angels multiplied their last ministrations, accompanied us from 21:18 to 22:33. In order to draw out my neighbor before he and his riddle vanished, I asked him, in French, if he knew anything about a picturesque group that had boarded our aircraft in Moscow. He replied, with a Parisian grasseyement, that they were, he believed, Iranian circus people touring Europe. The men looked like harlequins in mufti, the women like birds of paradise, the children like golden medallions, and there was one dark-haired pale beauty in black bolero and yellow sharovars who reminded me of Iris or a prototype of Iris.

  “I hope,” I said, “we’ll see them perform in Leningrad.”

  “Pouf!” he rejoined. “They can’t compete with our Soviet circus.”

  I noted the automatic “our.”

  Both he and I were billeted in the Astoria, a hideous pile built around World War One, I think. The heavily bugged (I had been taught by Guy Gayley a way of finding that out in one gleeful twinkle) and therefore sheepish-looking room “de luxe,” with orange curtains and an orange-draped bed in its old-world alcove, did have a private bath as stipulated, but it took me some time to cope with a convulsive torrent of clay-colored water. “Red Moscow’s” last stand took place on a cake of incarnadine soap. “Meals,” said a notice, “may be served in the rooms.” For the heck of it I tried ordering an evening snack; nothing happened, and I spent another hungry hour in the recalcitrant restaurant. The Iron Curtain is really a lampshade: its variety here was gemmed with glass incrustations in a puzzle of petals. The kotleta po kievski I ordered took forty-four minutes to come from Kiev—and two seconds to be sent back as a non-cutlet, with a tiny oath (murmured in Russian) that made the waitress start and gape at me and my Daily Worker. The Caucasian wine was undrinkable.

  A sweet little scene happened to be enacted as I hurried toward the lift, trying to recall where I had put my blessed Burpies. A flushed athletic liftyorsha wearing several bead necklaces was in the act of being replaced by a much older woman of the pensioned type, at whom she shouted while stomping out of the lift: “Ya tebe eto popomnyu, sterva! (I’ll get even with you, dirty bitch)”—and proceeded to barge into me and almost knock me down (I am a large, but fluff-light old fellow). “Shtoy-ty suyoshsya pod nogi? (Why do you get underfoot?)” she cried in the same insolent tone of voice which left the night attendant quietly shaking her gray head all the way up to my floor.

  Between two nights, two parts of a serial dream, in which I vainly tried to locate Bel’s street (whose name, by a superstition current for centuries in conspiratorial circles I had preferred not to be told), while knowing perfectly well that she lay bleeding and laughing in an alcove diagonally across the room, a few barefooted steps from my bed, I wandered about the city, idly trying to derive some emotional benefit from my being born there almost three-quarters of a century ago. Either because it could never get over the presence of the bog on which a popular bully had built it, or for some other reason (nobody, according to Gogol, knows), St. Petersburg was no place for children. I must have passed there insignificant parts of a few Decembers, and no doubt an April or two; but at least a dozen winters of my nineteen pre-Cambridge ones were spent on Mediterranean or Black Sea coasts. As to summers, to my young summers, all of them had bloomed for me on the great country estates of my family. Thus I realized with silly astonishment that, except for picture postcards (views of conventional public parks with lindens looking like oaks and a pistachio palace instead of the remembered pinkish one, and relentlessly gilded church domes—all of it under an Italianate sky), I had never seen my native city in June or July. Its aspect, therefore, evoked no thrill of recognition; it was an unfamiliar, if not utterly foreign, town, still lingering in some other era: an undefinable era, not exactly remote, but certainly preceding the invention of body deodorants.

  Warm weather had come to stay, and everywhere, in travel agencies, in foyers, in waiting rooms, in general stores, in trolleybuses, in elevators, on escalators, in every damned corridor, everywhere, and especially where women worked, or had worked, invisible onion soup was cooking on invisible stoves. I was to remain only a couple of days in Leningrad and had not t
he time to get used to those infinitely sad emanations.

  From travelers I knew that our ancestral mansion no longer existed, that the very lane where it had stood between two streets in the Fontanka area had been lost, like some connective tissue in the process of organic degeneration. What then succeeded in transfixing my memory? That sunset, with a triumph of bronze clouds and flamingo-pink meltings in the far-end archway of the Winter Canalet, might have been first seen in Venice. What else? The shadow of railings on granite? To be quite honest, only the dogs, the pigeons, the horses, and the very old, very meek cloakroom attendants seemed familiar to me. They, and perhaps the facade of a house on Gertsen Street. I may have gone there to some children’s fête ages ago. The floral design running above the row of its upper windows caused an eerie shiver to pass through the root of wings that we all grow at such moments of dream-like recollection.

  Dora was to meet me Friday morning on the Square of the Arts in front of the Russian Museum near the statue of Pushkin erected some ten years before by a committee of weathermen. An Intourist folder had yielded a tinted photograph of the spot. The meteorological associations of the monument predominated over its cultural ones. Frock-coated Pushkin, the right-side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breeze rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward and to the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise, to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in the Leningrad parks). It had dwindled, when I arrived, to a warm drizzle, a mere murmur in the lindens above the long garden benches. Dora was supposed to be sitting on Pushkin’s left, id est my right. The bench was empty and looked dampish. Three or four children, of the morose, drab, oddly old-fashioned aspect that Soviet kids have, could be seen on the other side of the pedestal, but otherwise I was loitering all alone, holding the Humanité in my hand instead of the Worker which I was supposed to signal with discreetly but had not been able to obtain that day. I was in the act of spreading the newspaper on the bench when a lady with the predicted limp came along a garden path toward me. She wore the, also expected, pastel-pink coat, had a clubfoot, and walked with the aid of a sturdy cane. She also carried a diaphanous little umbrella which had not figured in the list of attributes. I dissolved in tears at once (though I was farced with pills). Her gentle beautiful eyes were also wet.

  Had I got A.B.’s telegram? Sent two days ago to my Paris address? Hotel Moritz?

  “That’s garbled,” I said, “and besides I left earlier. Doesn’t matter. Is she much worse?”

  “No, no, on the contrary. I knew you would come all the same, but something has happened. Karl turned up on Tuesday while I was in the office and took her away. He also took my new suitcase. He has no sense of ownership. He will be shot some day like a common thief. The first time he got into trouble was when he kept declaring that Lincoln and Lenin were brothers. And last time—”

  Nice voluble lady, Dora. What was Bel’s illness exactly?

  “Splenic anemia. And last time, he told his best student in the language school that the only thing people should do was to love one another and pardon their enemies.”

  “An original mind. Where do you suppose—”

  “Yes, but the best student was an informer, and Karlusha spent a year in a tundrovyy House of Rest. I don’t know where he took her now. I even don’t know whom to ask.”

  “But there must be some way. She must be brought back, taken out of this hole, this hell.”

  “That’s impossible. She adores, she worships Karlusha. C’est la vie, as the Germans say. It’s a pity A.B. is in Riga till the end of the month. You saw very little of him. Yes, it’s a pity, he’s a freak and a dear (chudak i dushka) with four nephews in Israel, which sounds, he says, as ‘the dramatic persons in a pseudoclassical play.’ One of them was my husband. Life gets sometimes very complicated, and the more complicated the happier it should be, one would think, but in reality ‘complicated’ always means for some reason grust’ i toska (sorrow and heartache).”

  “But look here, can’t I do something? Can’t I sort of hang around and make inquiries, and perhaps seek advice from the Embassy—”

  “She is not English any more and was never American. It’s hopeless, I tell you. We were very close, she and I, in my very complicated life, but, imagine, Karl did not allow her to leave at least one little word for me—and for you, of course. She had informed him, unfortunately, that you were coming, and this he could not bear in spite of all the sympathy he works up for all unsympathetic people. You know, I saw your face last year—or was it two years ago?—two years, rather—in a Dutch or Danish magazine, and I would have recognized you at once, anywhere.”

  “With the beard?”

  “Oh, it does not change you one droplet. It’s like wigs or green spectacles in old comedies. As a girl I dreamt of becoming a female clown, ‘Madam Byron,’ or ‘Trek Trek.’ But tell me, Vadim Vadimovich—I mean Gospodin Long—haven’t they found you out? Don’t they intend to make much of you? After all, you’re the secret pride of Russia. Must you go now?”

  I detached myself from the bench—with some scraps of L’Humanité attempting to follow me—and said, yes, I had better be going before the pride outstripped the prudence. I kissed her hand whereupon she remarked that she had seen it done only in a movie called War and Peace. I also begged her, under the dripping lilacs, to accept a wad of bank notes to be used for any purpose she wished including the price of that suitcase for her trip to Sochi. “And he also took my whole set of safety pins,” she murmured with her all-beautifying smile.

  3

  I cannot be sure it was not again my fellow traveler, the black-hatted man, whom I saw hurrying away as I parted with Dora and our National Poet, leaving the latter to worry forever about all that wasted water (compare the Tsarskoselski Statue of a rock-dwelling maiden who mourns her broken but still brimming jar in one of his own poems); but I know I saw Monsieur Pouf at least twice in the restaurant of the Astoria, as well as in the corridor of the sleeping car on the night train that I took in order to catch the earliest Moscow-Paris plane. On that plane he was prevented from sitting next to me by the presence of an elderly American lady, with pink and violet wrinkles and rufous hair: we kept alternately chatting, dozing and drinking Bloody Marshas, her joke—not appreciated by our sky-blue hostess. It was delightful to observe the amazement expressed by old Miss Havemeyer (her rather incredible name) when I told her that I had spurned the Intourist’s offer of a sightseeing tour of Leningrad; that I had not peeped into Lenin’s room in the Smolny; had not visited one cathedral; had not eaten something called “tabaka chicken”; and that I had left that beautiful, beautiful city without seeing a single ballet or variety show. “I happen to be,” I explained, “a triple agent and you know how it is—” “Oh!” she exclaimed, with a pulling-away movement of the torso as if to consider me from a nobler angle. “Oh! But that’s vurry glamorous!”

  I had to wait some time for my jet to New York, and being a little tight and rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not too gravely ill and not too unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, a magazine in the living room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements of her leg, ankle 8½ inches, calf 12½, creamy thigh 19½; and Louise was in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up a paperback somebody had left on a seat next to mine in the transit lounge of the Orly airport. I was the mouse of fate on that pleasant June afternoon between a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes.

  I held in my hands a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced from the American edition of A Kingdom by the Sea. I had not seen it yet—and preferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured the pirated text. On the cover a publicity picture of the child actress who had played my Virginia in the recent film did better justice to pretty Lola Sloan and her lollypop than to the significance of my novel. Although slovenly worded by a hack with no inkling of the book’s art,
the blurb on the back of the limp little volume rendered faithfully enough the factual plot of my Kingdom.

  Bertram, an unbalanced youth, doomed to die shortly in an asylum for the criminal insane, sells for ten dollars his ten-year-old sister Ginny to the middle-aged bachelor Al Garden, a wealthy poet who travels with the beautiful child from resort to resort through America and other countries. A state of affairs that looks at first blush—and “blush” is the right word—like a case of irresponsible perversion (described in brilliant detail never attempted before) develops by the grees [misprint] into a genuine dialogue of tender love. Garden’s feelings are reciprocated by Ginny, the initial “victim” who at eighteen, a normal nymph, marries him in a warmly described religious ceremony. All seems to end honky-donky [sic!] in foreverlasting bliss of a sort fit to meet the sexual demands of the most rigid, or frigid, humanitarian, had there not been running its chaotic course, in a sheef [sheaf?] of parallel lives beyond our happy couple’s ken, the tragic tiny [destiny?] of Virginia Garden’s inconsolable parents, Oliver and [?], whom the clever author by every means in his power, prevents from tracking their daughter Dawn [sic!!]. A Book-of-the-Decade choice.

  I pocketed it upon noticing that my long-lost fellow traveler, goat-bearded and black-hatted, as I knew him, had come up from the lavatory or the bar: Would he follow me to New York or was it to be our last meeting? Last, last. He had given himself away: The moment he came near, the moment his mouth opened in the tense-lower-lip shape that discharges, with a cheerless up-and-down shake of the head, the exclamation “Ekh!,” I knew not only that he was as Russian as I, but that the ancient acquaintance whom he resembled so strikingly was the father of a young poet, Oleg Orlov, whom I had met in Paris, in the Nineteen-Twenties. Oleg wrote “poems in prose” (long after Turgenev), absolutely worthless stuff, which his father, a half-demented widower, would try to “place,” pestering with his son’s worthless wares the dozen or so periodicals of the emigration. He could be seen in the waiting room miserably fawning on a harassed and curt secretary, or attempting to waylay an assistant editor between office and toilet, or writing in stoic misery, at a corner of a crowded table, a special letter pleading the cause of some horrible little poem that had been already rejected. He died in the same Home for the Aged where Annette’s mother had spent her last years. Oleg, in the meantime, had joined the small number of littérateurs who decided to sell the bleak liberty of expatriation for the rosy mess of Soviet pottage. His budtime had kept its promise. The best he had achieved during the last forty or fifty years was a medley of publicity pieces, commercial translations, vicious denunciations, and—in the domain of the arts—a prodigious resemblance to the physical aspect, voice, mannerisms, and obsequious impudence of his father.