7.
There are two photographs of Leuthold (they can be found in the book, Nabokov’s Butterflies). In one, she and Nabokov are seated on a tree trunk. The first thing one notices about her is her watch, and beyond the watch, her plain summer dress draped over her generous frame. In the second photograph are the three of them—Nabokov, butterfly net in hand and summer hat on head, Leuthold wearing glasses, in that same plain dress, with a purse—she has it on her lap and holds the handle with both hands—and Véra, a slender woman in slacks wearing a fetching bandana, with sunglasses—they stand leaning on Leuthold’s Pontiac. Next to the Nabokovs, Leuthold looks plain but also somewhat less real, as if she’d made every effort to adapt her demeanor to the stereotype of the obliging “old maid,” the mousy librarian, who is willing to go the distance and drive a family all the way across the country, because she doesn’t know how better to spend her summer vacation than be of service to a writer, a great future writer. Had it not been for the trip, she probably would have done without a vacation and spent those days where she otherwise spent her life, among books, a fat, half-blind bookworm. As it was, she earned her entry ticket to eternity, she, the Neonympha dorothea dorothea . . .
* Andrew Field, VN, The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York 1986, p. 207-208.
† Stacy Schiff, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), 1999, p. 110.
‡ Ibid., p. 115.
§ Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra (edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd). New York 2015, p. 443.
** “the immortality of this red label on a little butterfly,” the last line of Nabokov’s poem “On Discovering a Butterfly.”
†† Stephen Jay Gould, “No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov.” In: I Have Landed, The End of a Beginning in Natural History, 2011.
‡‡ Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra, p. 482.
§§ Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra, p. 484.
PART SIX
The Fox’s Widow
There was a fox’s widow once
And twelve wee kits were in her brood
Into the sun her kits she led
Into the sunlight on a hill,
Dy-lee-doe, dy-lie-lee-doe dy-lie-doe
She sat them down to pick their fleas
Picked their fleas and wept her tears
How will your mother feed you now
A wee young kit, so small and shrewd,
Dy-lee-doe, dy-lie-lee-doe dy-lie-doe
To his mother then he said:
Oh mother dear, now don’t you cry,
You’ll feed us easily by and by
Into the hunter’s pouch we’ll go
Dy-lee-doe, dy-lie-lee-doe dy-lie-doe
Gracing the throats of the richest folk
In the Sultan’s white city of Istanbul.
—Bulgarian folk song
1.
Up and down jumps the little girl in a wonderfully regular rhythm, as light as a ball as she bounces. Up and down. Up and down. Other children tire after a time, they fall, wriggle around on the trampoline, giggle, push one another, make silly faces, eye their parents who stand, the hovering supervisors, around the trampoline. My little girl seems wrapped in an invisible membrane. Her face is calm and bright. She looks not at me, but straight ahead. Her lithe little body doesn’t betray the slightest effort, her muscles are relaxed, she jumps as if jumping is her natural state, she’s a bouncy ball. Her straight, short hair and bangs swing up on her forehead and drop down in regular rhythm. The sunbeams play over her hair. The girl radiates light. Not far from the trampoline shines the blue sea. Other children give up, new ones climb up onto the trampoline, but my little girl doesn’t stop. Up and down, up and down. With her jumping she halts time. If she were to get down from the trampoline, fall, drop to her knees, catch her breath, she’d have to be growing up. Every moment she rests she invites unknown danger. Because as long as she jumps effortlessly into the air, as long as she’s absorbed in the rhythm, no danger threatens. She is safe. She’s as safe as Peter Pan.
2.
After asking the flight attendant for a glass of water I swallowed another five dark-pink two-hundred-milligram tablets of Ibuprofen, though I knew my back pain wouldn’t let up. I’m a veteran, I call my back pain mine with the knowledge that I’ve earned the right. I’ve built it into my life as if it were my closest family member, my little adoptee, I feed it with pain pills the hue of raw meat, as if it were a household pet. It’s the result of my “migrations and anxieties,” as Véra Nabokov said somewhere. I remembered her words, I liked them, there was a comforting ring to them even if they were not entirely accurate. I should never have gone on the trip but I did; only five days, I said to myself. Yet the particulars were troublesome. With my stubborn optimism I never expect them to be, yet they always are. So it was that as I arrived in Rome, the first stop on a five-day reading tour, Rome–Milan–Turin, my back pain began its irritating march and all because of the cheap B&B, a fourth-floor walk-up. The risers on the stairs were far too steep. True, the step itself wasn’t the real cause, the spasm in my back comes on in tandem with other, less tangible signals: internal jitters that have no visible origin, uneasy qualms at a situation we find ourselves coerced into against our will, a sense of betrayal that can be sniffed in the air like rain.
I am an “economy-class” writer. Writers are either economy-class or business-class, categorized by their media exposure and what they receive for their advance. The great majority of us are economy-class, while only a negligible minority are business-class. To be honest, I’d say it seems that those whose job it is to work with us writers do everything they can to clip our wings, regardless of class. Whatever the case, I am clearly economy-class, and the economy class is a breeding ground for misanthropy. The air in economy is thick with irritation at one’s fellow travelers; the symptoms—lassitude, headache, suffocation—are identical to those arising from a shortage of negative ions. For years I’ve not been able to comprehend why whoever sits in front of me on a plane lowers the seat, though it’s perfectly obvious that when they lower the seat, the seatback will mash my knees and the coffee I’m drinking will spill all over my lap, It seldom happens that a fellow traveler in front of me mercifully forgets to lower the seat. The gadflies are fond of boasting, strutting, flapping their wings, nesting into their seat, after all they paid for it, they wedge their fellow travelers in and let everybody else know that all the others are the same worthless human beings they are. Young women who travel in economy class are fond of flicking their tresses back over the seat, whipping the person sitting behind them with their hair. And at these and other similar gestures, my sullen mood rises from my stomach to my gullet, abrading it along the way. With economy class come cheap B&Bs in which the shower or the hot-water heater doesn’t work; something essential is out of order at every one. Economy class further brings with it toting my luggage on my own; paying for the cab myself. The organizers deliberately neglect to settle such matters, they’re trained to squeeze every ounce out of the economy-class writer’s patience like toothpaste to the very end of the tube.
I recall with a dose of implausible cheer a literary gathering in London where the organizers sought financial support from the Austrian embassy, and the embassy accommodated us (us being several participants who were coming from the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy) in the attic of their spacious building. The attic was decked out in Alpine style, its walls paneled with rustic wood planks, replete with cuckoo clocks, Alpine landscapes, and antlers. All together it came across as a sort of retro-art installation, an Alpine sabotage, the secret cell of a terrorist group for disseminating Alpine kitsch planted in the heart of elegant Belgravia . . . Okay, I admit my overactive imagination may have added the antlers, but the Embassy staff—largely Polish, who also used the attic, smoked on the little balcony, and did everything they could to thwart our access to the bathroom and the telephone—was no embellishment. Theirs was
an innocent game of torment, a bit of “teasing” that the “attic folk” had devised for us: instead of the empathy we might have met, we were put through a mild version of “cousinly” malice.
With far less cheer I recall a writers retreat, a one-month residency, in a Middle-European city, all under the auspices of a dubious EU cultural project. The people behind the “project” were a local figure of some sort and his female companion. Thanks to his EU connections, he started a writers’ retreat in his apartment, and the rent, maintenance, and modest stipend for the visiting writer were financed by the dubious EU source. Because of the nature of his “project,” the local figure arrived at the notion that he, too, could write, and in this was supported fervently by his companion, twenty years his senior, who was determined not to spend her dotage in a hole in the wall. As soon as I arrived, the local figure offered me evidence in the form of translations of his autobiographical prose into Estonian, Urdu, and Korean. He boasted that during a trip to South Korea he’d established prestigious literary connections, and after my stay the next writer would be a young South-Korean. This Dickensian couple (Wackford Squeers and wife) was running what was, in fact, a writers’ orphanage, and the EU and the local authorities had given their blessings in this sluggish Middle-European town where even the town fountain sprayed in slow-motion. It wasn’t as if I’d sought them out. They’d cajoled me into coming with ingratiating pleas, vaunting their “project” as a major plus both for the town and the visiting writer. I, who can never get used to the fact that culture and business have begun so handily cohabiting in a bourgeois marriage, was lured in only to flee like a bat out of hell a few days later.
The chances are slim that economy-class writers will ever cross paths with their business-class counterparts; the honoraria grow ever slimmer, the habit of failing to pay the contracted fee is fast becoming commonplace, the likelihood that the economy-class writer will throw up his hands grows more real. While an honorarium is indeed worth kicking a fuss up over, there is little point in battling over a tip. All this, of course, is well-trodden ground for the taskmasters: the publishers, those who organize the literary events, the people in charge of publicity, all those who live off literature and on literature, and all those who are cynically certain that the author’s place is the lowest in the chain. And, in fact, they’re right: the author’s place on the food chain is indeed the lowest.
Aching bones, foul moods, gripes, backache . . . I bribe my bad back with odd tidbits, capsules of New Zealand green-lipped mussels, also called kuku and kutai, and shark’s-liver oil extract. I lubricate my ossified joints because my ability to ossify in a flash has been imprinted upon my bones and my psychogram like a tattoo. I’m gradually turning to stone while I look the world in the eye and pay for my pigheadedness with larger and larger banknotes of pain. Most people look prudently away, they don’t stare where they shouldn’t, they don’t see, they don’t hear, they don’t protest, they don’t gripe, they keep their mouths shut, they buckle, while I’m left wrestling not only with my bad back but also with the full knowledge of the futility of all my confrontations. Never have I succeeded in budging anything, because one law alone rules this world of ours: the powerful are the sole ones in charge. Everything else is “fairy tales for little children,” “claptrap,” “tell me another.”
True, there’s also an exhilarating ingredient in the cocktail of back pain and gripes. Grumbling, grousing, moaning, whinging, groaning, and bellyaching have a palliative effect. They act like Diazepam. Griping brings with it a kind of mental spryness. A grumbler is so drained after a time that he drops off to sleep in the end like a well-fed reptile, just as I did, no longer caring a whit about the cramped seat and thoughtless fellow travelers. And besides I was, myself, no exemplar of courtesy: I was started from my brief doze by my own snores.
3.
In the morning she gets up, enveloped in the warm fog of sleep. She’s quiet. If she’s in a good mood, she waves (slender twig!), signaling she’s seen me but isn’t in the mood for talk. At breakfast she always drinks milk, only milk, though she’s nearly twelve. She drinks it down in long, powerful gulps, sometimes taking a straw and sucking it up with strong sips. She doesn’t eat, she crumbles up her bread, wads it into balls, plays with it, chewing bores her.
She drinks her milk, she doesn’t see me, as if she’s still dreaming she whispers something to herself, scribbles in the air as if writing on an invisible computer screen. Sometimes, she, already slender, grows wispier yet, her lavender veins show through her tender hair, her temples go pale, her pupils darken, a gray shadow slips over her small face and it’s as if my little girl sinks. And then she pulls out of her momentary internal slump and her energy zings.
She calls me Aunt (stern, blunt, unusual), Auntie Em (Where did she get that from?), Super Auntie, Auntie Dearest, Aunteroo (Where does she find them all?), or sometimes Tante (her French lessons?). “Auntie” she saves for special intonations. She employs an endearing, querulous tone when she’d like to tell me something but first wants to check to see if I’m listening (Hey, Auntieee?). A scolding tone with which she feigns reproach is used to show me she knows I’m not being serious (Auuuuntie!).
Seldom does she call me by name. We seem to use the name of a person readily only when we’re not emotionally attached. I don’t use her name either, I vary the substitutes, such as “pumpkin,” “cupcake,” “mouse” . . . Who knows, this may be a subconscious superstition at work. A name could, possibly, attract something like an evil ear. Indigenous people do not utter their spouse’s given name. In indigenous communities, parents seldom praise the goodness and beauty of their children out of fear that the Evil Eye might steal a glance at their child and wreak havoc. So we use “he” and “she” and “it” for a child.
When she speaks of her grandmother (my mother), she uses words without restraint. “Grandma lives in her grave,” she says. When she speaks of her mother, she’s more cautious. “That’s when mama was around,” she’ll say. Never does she say, “But that’s when mama wasn’t around any more.” She evades facing that her mother is gone, though she likes going to the cemetery with her father, especially in May, to check and see whether the rose bush they planted by the tombstone has bloomed. And though the names of my father (with a five-pointed star above it), my mother, and her mother are carved onto the headstone, she associates the place only with her grandmother. Her grandfather she never met, he died years ago; she remembers her grandmother; she won’t speak of her mother. Hence, as far as she’s concerned, only her grandmother lives in the grave.
4.
A friend of mine once tried to explain the difference between “us” and “them,” though he wasn’t very clear about who the “we” and the “they” were. My friend was on his way back to Europe from a stay in the United States, and an elderly traveler sat next to him. When he asked her where she was going, she said: “To Europe. Munich . . . Isn’t Munich in Europe?” And having been reassured that Munich is, indeed, in Europe she fell asleep and didn’t wake until the plane landed at the Munich airport.
“See the difference? That woman wasn’t sure of whether Munich was or was not in Europe, but she was one hundred percent certain she’d get there. That’s why she fell asleep so cheerfully. We,”—here my friend enrolled me, without even asking, in his “club”—“we come from a different culture, we can never be sure of anything, there is nothing on which we can rely. We can’t be sure that we are who we are, that tomorrow we’ll be who we were today; we aren’t sure of the language we speak, voilà, it turns out we’re speaking three languages when we thought we were speaking only one; we can’t be sure of our borders, of the regime, of our history, of our country (every so often we wake up in another country without ever having gotten out of bed!); we can’t be sure whether the images playing out before our eyes are real or not. We don’t trust anybody, because they’re forever betraying us. Can you see what a difficult, exhausting, vast, and intransigent frustration this i
s? So this is why while they peacefully snore, we worry. We fret about all sorts of things! While the passenger next to me snored, I was mid-air over the ocean, rifling in my mind through all the worries of the world, all the injustices it has visited upon me, all the historical blows . . . I went back as far as my Turkish oppression. And all the while in my mind I was helping the pilot, one should never be cavalier about pilots . . .!”
My friend said all this with a healthy dose of self-irony, we chuckled, but what he said was true. This might come across as a comical exaggeration to the uninitiated ear, a breezy lie, but we knew we were victims of the truth that we trot out as a lie to give us the room to process it. Why do I think back on this episode? I notice that over the years I’ve come to sympathize more with my highstrung friend. I feel an instinctive bond with the “highstrung” types, the people who mutter to themselves in public, quibble loudly with invisible collocutors. The elderly traveler buffered her deep airborne sleep with ignorance of where she was headed, or simply with being at an age when people are sleeping more. I feel a bond with her, as well. Unlike my “highstrung” friend she is a healthy human being. And as far as I’m concerned, in my thoughts I, too, am helping the pilot more often these days.
Fox Page 24
