The Enchanter

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Which leads me to conclude,” said he, “that my proposal has been accepted.” And he shook out into his hand, from a chamois pouch, a splendid uncut stone that seemed illuminated from within by a rosy flame gleaming through a winy-bluish cast.

  THE GIRL ARRIVED two days before the wedding, cheeks aglow and wearing an unbuttoned blue coat with the ends of its belt dangling behind, woolen stockings almost up to her knees, and a beret on her damp curls.

  Yes, yes, it was worth it, he repeated mentally as he held her cold red hand and smilingly grimaced at the yelps of her inevitable companion: “I’m the one who found you a fiancé, I brought you your fiancé, I’m responsible for your fiancé!” (and she tried, in the style of an artilleryman swinging his gun, to give the unwieldy bride a whirl).

  It was worth it, yes—no matter how long he would have to drag this cumbersome behemoth through the quagmire of marriage; it was worth it even if she outlived everybody; it was worth it for the sake of making his presence natural and of his license as future stepfather.

  However, he did not yet know how to take advantage of that license, partly from lack of practice, partly in anticipation of incredibly greater liberty, but mainly because he could never manage to be alone with the girl. It was true that, with her mother’s permission, he took her to a nearby café, and sat, with his hands propped on his walking stick, watching as she leaned forward and ate her way into the apricot edge of some latticed pastry, thrusting out her lower lip to catch the sticky flakes. He tried to make her laugh, and chat with her as he would have with an ordinary child, but his progress was continually hampered by an obstructing thought: had the room been emptier and more cosy-cornered, he would have fondled her a little, without any special pretext and with no fear of strangers’ glances (more perceptive than her trustful innocence). As he walked her home, and as he lagged behind her on the stairs, he was tormented not only by a sense of missed opportunity but also by the thought that, until he had done certain specific things at least once, he could not count on the promises fate transmitted through her innocent speech, the subtle nuances of her childish common sense and her silences (when her teeth, from beneath the listening lip, pressed gently down on the pensive one), the gradual emergence of dimples on hearing old jokes that struck her as being new, and his intuitive perception of the undulations in her subterranean streams (without which she could not have had those eyes). So what if, in the future, his freedom of action, his freedom to do and repeat special things, would render everything limpid and harmonious? Meanwhile, now, today, a misprint of desire distorted the meaning of love. That dark spot represented a kind of obstacle that must be crushed, erased, as soon as possible—no matter with what forgery of bliss—so that the child might at last be aware of the joke and he might be rewarded by their having a good laugh together, by being able to take disinterested care of her, to meld the wave of fatherhood with the wave of sexual love.

  Yes—the forgery, the furtiveness, the fear of the least suspicion, complaint, or innocent report (“You know, Mother, whenever nobody’s around he always starts caressing”), the necessity of being on his guard so as not to fall prey to a chance hunter in these heavily populated valleys—that was what now tormented him, and what would no longer exist in the freedom of his own preserve. But when? when? he thought in despair, as he paced his quiet, familiar rooms.

  The following morning he accompanied his monstrous bride to some office. Thence she was going to the doctor, evidently in order to ask certain ticklish questions, since she instructed her bridegroom to go to her apartment and expect her for dinner in an hour. His nocturnal despair was forgotten. He knew that her friend (whose husband had not come at all) was also out doing errands—and the foretaste of finding the girl alone melted like cocaine in his loins. But when he rushed into the apartment he found her chatting with the charwoman amid a compass rose of drafts. He picked up a newspaper (dated the 32nd) and, unable to distinguish the lines, sat for a long while in the already done parlor, listening to the lively conversation during pauses in the vacuum’s howl in the adjoining room, glancing at the enamel of his watch as he mentally murdered the char and shipped the corpse off to Borneo. Then he heard a third voice and remembered that the old crone was in the kitchen too (he thought he heard the girl being sent to the grocer’s). Then the vacuum finished its wheezing and was turned off, a window slammed shut, and the street noise ceased. He waited out another minute, then got up and, humming sotto voce, with darting eyes, began exploring the now silent apartment.

  No, she had not been sent anywhere. She was standing at the window of her room looking out into the street with her palms pressed against the glass.

  She looked around and quickly said, with a toss of her hair and already resuming her observation, “Look—an accident!”

  He moved closer and closer, sensing with his nape that the door had shut by itself, closer to the lithe concavity of her spine, to the gathers at her waist, to the lozenge-shaped checks of the cloth whose texture he could already palpate from seven feet away, to the firm, light-blue veins above the edge of her knee-high stockings, to the whiteness of her neck sheeny from the sidewise light next to her brown curls, which received another vigorous toss (seven-eighths habit, one little eighth flirtatiousness). “Ah, an accident… a taxi dent …,” he mumbled, pretending to peer through the empty window over the crown of her head but seeing only the tiny flecks of dandruff in its silky vertex.

  “It’s the red one’s fault!” she exclaimed with conviction.

  “Ah, the red one… We’ll get the red one,” he continued incoherently and, standing in back of her, feeling faint, abolishing the final inch of the melting distance, took hold of her hands from behind and began senselessly spreading and tugging them, while she did no more than gently rotate the slender wristbone of her right hand, mechanically trying to point her finger at the guilty party. “Wait,” he said hoarsely, “press your elbows against your sides and let’s see if I can, if I can lift you.” Just then a bang came from the vestibule followed by the ominous rustling of a raincoat, and he moved away from her with an awkward abruptness, thrusting his hands in his pockets, clearing his throat with a growl, starting to say in a loud voice, “…at last! We’re famished here….” And, as they were sitting down to table, there was still an aching, frustrated, gnawing weakness in his calves.

  After dinner some ladies came for coffee, and, toward evening, when the wave of guests had receded and her faithful friend had discreetly left for the cinema, the exhausted hostess stretched out on the couch.

  “Go on home, my dear,” she said without raising her eyelids. “You must have things to take care of, you probably don’t have anything packed, and I’d like to go to bed, or else I won’t be up to doing anything tomorrow.”

  With a short mooing sound to simulate tenderness he pecked her on the forehead, which was cold as cottage cheese, then said, “By the way, I keep thinking how sorry I feel for the girl. I suggest we keep her here after all. Why should the poor thing have to continue staying with strangers? It’s downright ludicrous now that there is a family once again. Think it over carefully, dearest.”

  “And I’m still sending her off tomorrow,” she drawled in a feeble voice, without opening her eyes.

  “Please, try to understand,” he continued more softly, for the girl, who had been dining in the kitchen, had apparently finished and her faint glow was present somewhere nearby. “Try to understand what I’m saying. Even if we pay them for everything, and even overpay them, do you think that will make her feel any more at home there? I doubt it. There’s a fine school there, you’ll tell me,” (she was silent) “but we’ll find an even better one here, apart from the fact that I am and always have been in favor of private instruction at home. But the main thing is… you see, people might get the impression—and you already heard one little hint of that kind just today—that, in spite of the changed situation, i.e., now that you have support of all kinds from me and we can get a larger apartm
ent, arrange complete privacy for ourselves, and so forth, the mother and stepfather still tend to neglect the kid.”

  She said nothing.

  “Of course you can do as you please,” he said nervously, frightened by her silence (he had gone too far!).

  “I’ve already told you,” she drawled with that same ridiculous, martyrlike softness, “that what is paramount to me is my peace and quiet. If it is disrupted I shall die…. Listen: there she goes scraping her foot on the floor or banging something—it wasn’t very loud, was it?—yet it’s already enough to give me a nervous spasm and make me see spots before my eyes. And a child cannot live without banging around; even if there are twenty-five rooms all twenty-five will be noisy. Therefore you’ll have to choose between me and her.”

  “No, no—don’t even say such things!” he cried with a panicky catch in his throat. “There isn’t even any question of choosing…. Heaven forbid! It was just a theoretical consideration. You’re right. All the more so, because I, too, value peace and quiet. Yes! I’m in favor of the status quo, and let the gossips keep jabbering. You’re right, dearest. Of course, I don’t rule out that perhaps later on, next spring… if you’re quite well again …”

  “I’ll never be quite well,” she answered softly, raising herself and, with a creak, rolling heavily onto her side. Then she propped up her cheek with her fist and, with a shake of her head and an oblique glance, repeated the same sentence.

  The next day, following the civil ceremony and a moderately festive dinner, the girl left after having twice, in front of everyone, touched his shaven cheek with her cool, unhurried lips: once over the champagne glass to congratulate him, and then at the door, as she was saying good-bye. After which he brought over his suitcases and spent a long time arranging his things in her former room where, in a bottom drawer, he found a little rag of hers that told him far more than those two incomplete kisses.

  Judging by the tone that the person (he found the appellation “wife” inapplicable to her) used to emphasize how it was generally more convenient to sleep in separate rooms (he did not argue) and how she herself, incidentally, was accustomed to sleeping alone (he let it go by), he could not avoid the conclusion that that very night he was expected to be instrumental in the first infraction of that habit. As the murk gradually thickened outside the window, and he felt increasingly foolish sitting next to her couch in the parlor, wordlessly compressing or applying to his tense jowl her ominously obedient hand, with bluish freckles on its glossy back, he perceived ever more clearly that the moment of reckoning had arrived, that now no escape remained from what he had of course long foreseen, but without giving it much thought (when the moment comes I’ll manage somehow); now that moment was knocking at the door and it was perfectly clear that he (little Gulliver) would be physically unable to tackle those broad bones, those multiple caverns, the bulky velvet, the formless anklebones, the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis, not to mention the rancid emanations of her wilted skin and the as yet undisclosed miracles of surgery… here his imagination was left hanging on barbed wire.

  Already at dinner, first refusing a second glass with an apparent lack of resolve, then seeming to yield to temptation, he had, for safety’s sake, explained to her that at moments of elation he was subject to sundry angular aches. So now he began gradually releasing her hand and, rather crudely feigning twinges in his temple, said he was going out for a breath of air. “You must understand,” he added, noticing the oddly intent gaze (or was he imagining things?) of her two eyes and wart, “you must understand—happiness is so new to me… and your closeness… no, I never even dared dream of having such a wife….”

  “Just don’t be long. I go to bed early, and don’t like being awakened,” she answered, letting down her freshly waved hair and tapping the top button of his waistcoat with her fingernail; then she gave him a little shove, and he realized that the invitation was not declinable.

  Now he was roaming amid the shivering indigence of the November night, through the fog of streets that, ever since the Great Flood, had fallen into a state of perpetual damp. In an attempt to distract himself, he concentrated on his bookkeeping, his prisms, his profession, artificially magnifying its importance in his life—and it all kept dissolving in the mush, the feverish chill of the night, the agony of undulating lights. Yet, for the very reason that any kind of happiness was totally out of the question at the moment, something else suddenly became clear. He took precise measure of how far he had come, evaluated the entire instability and spectrality of his calculations, this whole quiet madness, the evident error of the obsession, which was free and genuine only when flowering within the confines of fantasy but which had now deviated from that sole legitimate form, to embark (with the pathetic diligence of a lunatic, a cripple, an obtuse child—yes, at any moment it would be rebuffed and thrashed!) on designs and actions that lay within the sole competence of adult, material life. And he could still get out of it! Flee immediately, then send a hurried letter to that person explaining that cohabitation was impossible for him (any reasons would do), that only a somewhat eccentric sense of compassion (expand) had motivated his commitment to support her, and that now, having legitimated it forever (be more specific), he was once again withdrawing into his fairyland obscurity.

  “On the other hand,” he continued mentally, under the impression that he was still pursuing the same sober line of reasoning (and not noticing that a banished barefoot creature had returned by the back door), “how simple it would be if dear Mummy were to die tomorrow. But no—she’s in no hurry, she has sunk her teeth into life, and will hang on, and what do I stand to gain if she takes her time dying, and what arrives for her funeral will be a touch-me-not of sixteen or a stranger of twenty? How simple it would be” (he reflected, pausing, quite appropriately, by the illuminated display window of a pharmacy) “if there were some poison handy…. Certainly wouldn’t need much, if, for her, a cup of chocolate is as deadly as strychnine! But a poisoner leaves his cigarette ash in the descended elevator…. Besides, they’ll inevitably open her up, out of sheer habit.” And even though reason and conscience vied with each other (all the while egging him on a little) in affirming that in any case, even if he were to find an untraceable poison, he was not one to commit murder (unless, perhaps, the poison were quite, quite untraceable, and even then—in the extreme hypothesis—for the sole purpose of curtailing the torments of a wife who was doomed, no matter what), he gave free rein to the theoretical development of an impossible thought as his absent gaze stumbled on impeccably packaged vials, the model of a liver, a panopticon of soaps, the reciprocal, splendidly coral-colored smiles of a feminine head and a masculine one gazing gratefully at each other. Then he slitted his eyes, cleared his throat, and, after a moment’s hesitation, entered the pharmacy.

  When he returned home it was dark in the apartment—the hope darted through his mind that she might already be asleep, but, alas, the door to her bedroom had been underlined with rulerlike precision by a fine-honed point of light.

  “Charlatans …,” he thought with a grim contortion. “We’ll have to stick to the original version. I’ll say good night to the dear departed and turn in.” (What about tomorrow? What about the next day? What about all the days after that?)

  But in the middle of his farewell speeches about his migraine, by her luxuriant headboard, things suddenly, unexpectedly, and spontaneously took a sharply angled turn and identity became immaterial, so that, after the fact, it was with astonishment that he discovered the corpse of the miraculously vanquished giantess and gazed at the moiré girdle that almost totally concealed her scar.

  Of late she had been feeling tolerably well (the only complaint that still tormented her was eructation), but, during the very first days of their marriage, the pains she knew from the previous winter quietly reappeared. She posited, not unpoetically, that the massive, grouchy organ that had, as it were, dozed away “like an old dog” amid the warmth of incessant pamp
ering was now jealous of her heart, a newcomer that “had been given but a single pat.” Be that as it may, she spent a good month in bed listening intently to this internal turmoil, to the tentative scrabbling and the cautious nibbling; then it all quieted down, she even got up, rummaged through her first husband’s letters, burned some of them, sorted certain exceedingly old small objects—a child’s thimble; a mesh change purse of her mother’s; something else, thin, golden, fluid as time itself. At Christmastime she again grew ill, and her daughter’s planned visit came to nought.

  He was unfailingly attentive. He made mooing sounds of consolation and accepted her awkward caresses with concealed hatred when, on occasion, she tried to explain, grimacing, that not she but it (a little finger indicated her belly) was responsible for their nocturnal separation, and it all sounded exactly as if she were pregnant (a false pregnancy, a pregnancy with her own death). Always even-tempered, always self-controlled, he sustained the smooth tone he had assumed from the start, and she was grateful for everything—for the old-fashioned gallantry with which he treated her, the polite form of address that in her estimation gave tenderness a dignified dimension, the way he satisfied her whims, the new radio phonograph, his docile acquiescence to twice changing the nurses who were hired to care for her around the clock.