Despair

by Vladimir Nabokov

  First, by a slip of the eye, I read "the murderer's identity" and this increased my hilarity, for was it not known from the very beginning that the car belonged to me? But a second reading set me thinking.

  That phrase irritated me. There was some silly hugger-mugger about it. Of course, I at once told myself that either it was some new catch, or else they had found something of no more importance than that ridiculous vodka. Still, it worried me--and for a while I was conscientious enough to check in my mind all the articles that had taken part in the affair (I even remembered the rag he used for a handkerchief and his revolting comb) and as I had acted at the time with sharp and sure accuracy, I now had no difficulty in working back and was satisfied to find everything in order. Q.E.D.

  In vain: I had no peace.... It was high time to get that last chapter finished, but instead of writing I went out of doors again, roaming till late, and when I returned, I was so utterly fagged out, that sleep overcame me at once, despite the confused discomfort of my mind. I dreamt that after a tedious search (offstage--not shown in my dream) I at last found Lydia, who was hiding from me and who now coolly declared that all was well, she had got the inheritance all right and was going to marry another man, "because, you see," she said, "you are dead." I woke up in a terrific rage, my heart pounding madly: fooled! helpless!--for how could a dead man sue the living--yes, helpless--and she knew it! Then I came to my wits again and laughed--what humbugs dreams are liable to be. But of a sudden I felt that there was something extremely disagreeable which no amount of laughing could do away with, and that it was not my dream that mattered--what really mattered was the mysteriousness of yesterday's news: the object found in the car ... if indeed, I reflected, it is neither a wily snare nor a mare's nest; if, indeed, it has proved possible to find a name for the murdered party, and if that name is the right one. No, there were too many ifs; I recalled the carefulness of yesterday's test when I followed up the curves, graceful and regular as the paths of planets, which the diverse objects used had taken--oh, I could have dotted out their orbits! But nevertheless my mind remained ill at ease.

  In quest of some way of freeing myself of those intolerable forebodings I gathered the sheets of my manuscript, weighed the lot on my palm, even muttered a facetious "well, well!" and decided that before penning the two or three final sentences I would read it over from beginning to end.

  It struck me that a great treat was now in store for me. Standing in my nightshirt near the writing table, it was lovingly that I shook down between my hands the rustling profusion of bescribbled pages. That done, I got into my bed once more; properly arranged the pillow under my shoulder blades; then noticed that I had left the manuscript lying on the table, although I could have sworn to its having been in my hands all along. Calmly, without cursing, I got up and brought it back with me into bed, propped up the pillow anew, glanced at the door, asked myself if it was locked or not (as I disliked the prospect of interrupting my reading in order to let in the maid when she would bring my breakfast at nine); got up again--and again quite calmly; satisfied myself that the door was not locked, so that I might have not bothered, cleared my throat, got back into my tumbled bed, settled down comfortably, was about to begin reading, but now my cigarette had gone out. In contrast with German brands, French cigarettes claim one's constant attention. Where had the matches vanished? Had them a moment ago! For the third time I got up, now with my hands trembling slightly; discovered the matches behind the inkpot--but upon returning into my bed squashed under my hip another boxful hiding in the bedclothes, which meant that I again might have spared myself the trouble of getting up. I lost my temper; collected the scattered sheets of my manuscript from the floor, and the delicious foretaste with which I had just been penetrated, now changed to something like pain--to a horrible apprehension, as if an evil imp were promising to disclose to me more and more blunders and nothing but blunders. Having, however, lit up my cigarette again and punched into submissiveness that shrewish pillow, I was able to set about my reading. What amazed me was the absence of title on the first leaf: for assuredly I had at one time invented a title, something beginning with "Memoirs of a--" of a what? I could not remember; and, anyway, "Memoirs" seemed dreadfully dull and commonplace. What should I call my book then? "The Double"? But Russian literature possessed one already. "Crime and Pun"? Not bad--a little crude, though. "The Mirror"? "Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror"? Too jejune, too a la mode ... what about "The Likeness"? "The Unrecognized Likeness"? "Justification of a Likeness"? No--dryish, with a touch of the philosophical. Something on the lines of "Only the Blind Do Not Kill"? Too long. Maybe: "An Answer to Critics"? or "The Poet and the Rabble"? Must think it over ... but first let us read the book, said I aloud, the title will come afterwards.

  I began to read--and promptly found myself wondering whether I was reading written lines or seeing visions. Even more: my transfigured memory inhaled, as it were, a double dose of oxygen; my room was still lighter, because the panes had been washed; my past still more graphic, because twice irradiated by art. Once again I was climbing the hill near Prague--hearing the lark in the sky, seeing the round red dome of the gasworks; again in the grip of a tremendous emotion I stood over the sleeping tramp, and again he stretched his limbs and yawned, and again, dangling head down from his buttonhole, a limp little violet hung. I went on reading, and one by one they appeared: my rosy wife, Ardalion, Orlovius; and they all were alive, but in a certain sense I held their lives in my hands. Once again I looked at the yellow signpost, and walked through the wood with my mind already plotting; again on an autumn day my wife and I stood watching a leaf which fell to meet its reflection; and there was I myself, softly falling into a Saxon town full of strange repetitions, and there was my double softly rising to meet me. And again I wove my spell about him, and had him in my toils but he slipped away, and I feigned to give up my scheme, and with an unexpected potency the story blazed forth anew, demanding of its creator a continuation and an ending. And once again on a March afternoon I was dreamily driving along the highway, and there, in the ditch, near the post, he was waiting for me.

  "Get in, quick, we must drive off."

  "Where to?" he queried.

  "Into that wood."

  "There?" he asked and pointed--

  With his stick, reader, with his stick. S-T-I-C-K, gentle reader. A roughly hewn stick branded with the owner's name: Felix Wohlfahrt from Zwickau. With his stickau he pointed, gentle or lowly reader, with his stick! You know what a stick is, don't you? Well, that's what he pointed with--a stick--and got into the car, and left the stick there, upon getting out again, naturally--for the car temporarily belonged to him. I in fact noted that "quiet satisfaction." An artist's memory--what a curious thing! Beats all other kinds, I imagine. "There?"--he asked and pointed with his stick. Never in my life was I so astonished.

  I sat in my bed and stared, pop-eyed, at the page, at the line written by me--sorry, not by me--but by that singular associate of mine: memory; and well did I see how irreparable it was. Not the fact of their finding his stick and so discovering our common name, which would now unavoidably lead to my capture--oh, no, not that galled me--but the thought that the whole of my masterpiece, which I had devised and worked out with such minute care, was now destroyed intrinsically, was turned into a little heap of mold, by reason of the mistake I had committed. Listen, listen! Even if his corpse had passed for mine, all the same they would have found that stick and then caught me, thinking they were pinching him--there is the greatest disgrace! For my whole construction had been based upon just the impossibility of a blunder, and now it appeared that a blunder there had been--and of the very grossest, drollest, tritest nature. Listen, listen! I bent over the shattered remains of my marvelous thing, and an accursed voice shrieked into my ear that the rabble which refused me recognition was perchance right.... Yes, I fell to doubting everything, doubting essentials, and I understood that what little life still lay before me would be solely devoted to a futil
e struggle against that doubt; and I smiled the smile of the condemned and in a blunt pencil that screamed with pain wrote swiftly and boldly on the first page of my work: "Despair"; no need to look for a better title.

  The maid brought my coffee; I drank it, leaving the toast untouched. Then I hurriedly dressed, packed and carried my bag down myself. The doctor luckily did not see me. The manager showed surprise at my sudden departure and made me pay an exorbitant bill; but that did not matter to me any more: I was going away merely because it was de rigueur in such cases. I was following a certain tradition. Incidentally, I had grounds to presume that the French police were already on my scent.

  On the way to town, I saw from my bus two policemen in a fast car which was white as a miller's back: they dashed by in the opposite direction and were gone in a burst of dust; but whether they were coming with the definite purpose of arresting me, that I could not say--and moreover, they may not have been policemen at all--no, I could not say--they passed much too rapidly. Upon arriving at Pignan I called at the post office, and now I am sorry I called, as I could have done perfectly without the letter I got there. On the same day I chose, at random, a landscape in a flamboyant booklet and late in the evening arrived here, at this mountain village. As to that letter ... On second thought I had better copy it out, it is a fine sample of human malice.

  "See here, I am writing to you, my good sir, for three reasons: (1) she asked me to do so; (2) my firm intention to tell you exactly what I think of you; (3) a sincere desire on my part to suggest your giving yourself up into the hands of the law, so as to clear up the bloody mess and disgusting mystery, from which she, innocent and terrified, suffers, of course, most. Let me warn you: it is with considerable doubt that I regard all the dark Dostoevskian stuff you had taken the trouble to tell her. Putting it mildly, it is all a damned lie, I dare say. A damned cowardly lie, too, seeing the way you played on her feelings.

  "She has asked me to write, because she thought you might still not know anything; she has quite lost her head and keeps saying you will get cross if one writes to you. I should very much like to see you getting cross now: it ought to be wildly funny.

  "...So that is how matters stand! It is not enough, however, to kill a man and clothe him adequately. A single additional detail is wanted and that is: resemblance between the two; but in the whole world there are not and cannot be, two men alike, however well you disguise them. True, any discussion of such subtleties was never even reached, since the very first thing the police told her was that a dead man with her husband's papers on him had been found, but that it was not her husband. And now comes the terrible part: being trained by a dirty cad, the poor little thing kept insisting, even before viewing the corpse (even before--does that come home to you?), insisting against all likelihood that it was her husband's body and none other's. I fail to grasp how on earth you managed to inspire a woman, who was and is practically a stranger to you, with such sacred awe. To achieve that, one ought to be, indeed, something out of the common in the way of monsters. God knows what an ordeal awaits her yet! It must not be. Your plain duty is to free her from that shade of complicity. Why, the case itself is clear to everybody! Those little tricks, my good man, with life policies, have been known for ages. I should even say that yours is the flattest and most hackneyed one of the lot.

  "Next point: what I think of you. The first news reached me in a town where owing to meeting some fellow artists I happened to be stranded. You see, I never got as far as Italy--and I thank my stars I never did. Well, when I read that news, do you know what I felt? No surprise whatever! I have always known you to be a blackguard and a bully, and believe me, I did not keep back at the inquest all I had seen myself. So I described at length the treatment you gave her--your sneers and gibes and haughty contempt and nagging cruelty, and that chill of your presence which we all found so oppressive. You are wonderfully like a great grisly wild boar with putrid tusks--pity you did not put a roasted one into that suit of yours. And there is something else I want to get off my chest: whatever I may be--a weak-willed drunkard, or a chap ever ready to sell his honor for the sake of his art--let me tell you that I am ashamed of having accepted the morsels you flung me, and gladly would I publish my shame abroad, cry it out in the streets--if that might help to deliver me of its burden.

  "See here, wild boar! This is a state of things that cannot endure. I want you to perish not because you are a killer, but because you are the meanest of mean scoundrels, using for your mean ends the innocence of a credulous young woman, whom, as it is, ten years of dwelling in your private hell have dazed and torn to pieces. If, nevertheless, there is still a chink in your blackness: give yourself up!"

  I should leave this letter without any comments. The fair-minded reader of my previous chapters could not have failed to note the genial tone, the kindliness of my attitude towards Ardalion; and that is how the man repaid me. But let it go, let it go.... Better to think he wrote that disgusting letter in his cups--otherwise it is really too much out of shape, too wide of truth, too full of libelous assertions, the absurdity of which will be easily seen by the same attentive reader. To call my gay, empty, and not very bright Lydia a "woman frightened out of her wits," or--what was his other expression?--"torn to pieces"; to hint at some kind of trouble between her and me, coming almost to cheek-slapping; really, really, that is a bit thick--I scarcely know in what words to describe it. There are no such words. My correspondent has already used them all up--though, true, in another connection. And just because I had of late been fondly supposing that I had passed the supreme limit of possible pain, injury, anxiety of mind, I now came into so dreadful a state whilst reading that letter over, such a fit of trembling possessed my body, that all things around me started shaking: the table; the tumbler on the table; even the mousetrap in a corner of my new room.

  But suddenly I slapped my brow and burst out laughing. How simple it all was! How simply, said I to myself, the mysterious frenzy of that letter has now been solved. A proprietor's frenzy! Ardalion cannot forgive my having taken his name for cipher and staging the murder on his strip of earth. He is mistaken; all are gone bankrupt long ago; nobody knows whom this earth really belongs to--and ... Ah, enough, enough about my fool Ardalion! The ultimate dab is laid on his portrait. With a last flourish of the brush I have signed it across the corner. It is a better thing than the nasty-colored death mask which that buffoon made of my face. Enough! A fine likeness, gentlemen.

  And yet ... How dare he? ... Oh, go to the devil, go to the devil, all go to the devil!

  March 31st. Night.

  Alas, my tale degenerates into a diary. There is nothing to be done, though; for I have grown so used to writing, that now I am unable to desist. A diary, I admit, is the lowest form of literature. Connoisseurs will appreciate that lovely, self-conscious, falsely significant "Night" (meaning readers to imagine the sleepless variety of literary persons, so pale, so attractive). But as a matter of fact it is night at present.

  The hamlet where I languish lies in the cradle of a dale, between tall close mountains. I have rented a large barnlike room in the house of a dusky old woman who has a grocer's shop below. The village consists of a single street. I might dwell at length on the charms of the spot, describing for instance the clouds that squeeze in and crawl through the house, using one set of windows, and then crawl out, using the opposite one--but it is a dull business describing such things. What amuses me is that I am the only tourist here; a foreigner to boot, and as folks have somehow managed to sniff out (oh, well, I suppose I told my landlady myself) that I came all the way from Germany, the curiosity I excite is unusual. Not since a film company came here a couple of seasons ago to take pictures of their starlet in Les Contrebandiers has there been such excitement. Surely, I ought to hide myself, instead of which I get into the most conspicuous place; for it would be hard to find a brighter spotlight if that was the object. But I am dead-tired; the quicker it all ends, the better.

  Today, most
aptly, I made the acquaintance of the local gendarme--a perfectly farcical figure! Fancy a plumpish pink-faced individual, knock-kneed, wearing a black mustache. I was sitting at the end of a street on a bench, and all around me villagers were being busy; or better say: were pretending to be busy; in reality they kept observing me with fierce inquisitiveness and no matter in what posture they happened to be--using every path of vision, across the shoulder, via the armpit, or from under the knee; I saw them at it quite clearly. The gendarme approached me with some diffidence; mentioned the rainy weather; passed on to politics and then to the arts. He even pointed out to me a scaffold of sorts painted yellow which was all that remained of the scene where one of the smugglers almost got hanged. He reminded me in some way of the late lamented Felix: that judicious note, that mother wit of the self-made man. I asked him when the last arrest had been effected in the place. He thought a bit and replied that it had been six years ago, when they took a Spaniard who had been pretty free with his knife during a brawl and then fled to the mountains. Anon my interlocutor found it necessary to inform me that in those mountains there existed bears which had been brought thither by man, to get rid of the indigenous wolves, which struck me as very comic. But he did not laugh; he stood there, with his right hand dejectedly twirling the left point of his mustache and proceeded to discuss modern education: "Now take me for example," he said. "I know geography, arithmetic, the science of war; I write a beautiful hand...." "And do you, perchance," I asked, "play the fiddle?" Sadly he shook his head.

  At present, shivering in my icy room; cursing the barking dogs; expecting every minute to hear the guillotinette of the mousetrap in the corner crash down and behead an anonymous mouse; mechanically sipping the verbena infusion which my landlady considers it her duty to bring me, thinking I look seedy and fearing probably that I might die before the trial; at present, I say, I am sitting here and writing on this ruled paper--no other obtainable in the village--and then meditating, and then again glancing askance at the mousetrap. There is, thank God, no mirror in the room, no more than there is the God I am thanking. All is dark, all is dreadful, and I do not see any special reason for my lingering in the dark, vainly invented world. Not that I contemplate killing myself: it would be uneconomical--as we find in almost every country a person paid by the state to help a man lethally. And then the hollow hum of blank eternity. But the most remarkable thing, perhaps, is that there is a chance of it not ending yet, i.e., of their not executing me, but sentencing me to a spell of hard labor; in which case it may happen that in five years or so with the aid of some timely amnesty, I shall return to Berlin and manufacture chocolate all over again. I do not know why--but it sounds exceedingly funny.