Pnin

by Vladimir Nabokov

  It was, she told him as they drove up Park Street, a school in the English tradition. No, she did not want to eat anything, she had had a big lunch at Albany. It was a "very fancy" school--she said this in English--the boys played a kind of indoor tennis with their hands, between walls, and there would be in his form a--(she produced with false nonchalance a well-known American name which meant nothing to Pnin because it was not that of a poet or a president). "By the way," interrupted Pnin, ducking and pointing, "you can just see a corner of the campus from here." All this was due ("Yes, I see, vizhu, vizhu, kampus kak kampus: The usual kind of thing"), all this, including a scholarship, was due to the influence of Dr. Maywood ("You know, Timofey, some day you should write him a word, just a little sign of courtesy"). The Principal, a clergyman, had shown her the trophies Bernard had won there as a boy. Eric of course had wanted Victor to go to a public school but had been overruled. The Reverend Hopper's wife was the niece of an English Earl.

  "Here we are. This is my palazzo," said jocose Pnin, who had not been able to concentrate on her rapid speech.

  They entered--and he suddenly felt that this day which he had been looking forward to with such fierce longing was passing much too quickly--was going, going, would be gone in a few minutes. Perhaps, he thought, if she said right away what she wanted of him the day might slow down and be really enjoyed.

  "What a gruesome place, kakoy zhutkiy dom," she said, sitting on the chair near the telephone and taking off her galoshes--such familiar movements! "Look at that aquarelle with the minarets. They must be terrible people."

  "No," said Pnin, "they are my friends."

  "My dear Timofey," she said, as he escorted her upstairs, "you have had some pretty awful friends in your time."

  "And here is my room," said Pnin.

  "I think I'll lie on your virgin bed, Timofey. And I'll recite you some verses in a minute. That hellish headache of mine is seeping back again. I felt so splendid all day."

  "I have some aspirin."

  "Uhn-uhn," she said, and this acquired negative stood out strangely against her native speech.

  He turned away as she started to take off her shoes,and the sound they made toppling to the floor reminded him of very old days.

  She lay back, black-skirted, white-bloused, brown-haired, with one pink hand over her eyes.

  "How is everything with you?" asked Pnin (have her say what she wants of me, quick!) as he sank into the white rocker near the radiator.

  "Our work is very interesting," she said, still shielding her eyes, "but I must tell you I don't love Eric any more. Our relations have disintegrated. Incidentally Eric dislikes his child. He says he is the land father and you, Timofey, are the water father."

  Pnin started to laugh: he rolled with laughter, the rather juvenile rocker fairly cracking under him. His eyes were like stars and quite wet.

  She looked at him curiously for an instant from under her plump hand--and went on:

  "Eric is one hard emotional block in his attitude toward Victor. I don't know how many times the boy must have killed him in his dreams. And, with Eric, verbalization--I have long noticed--confuses problems instead of clarifying them. He is a very difficult person. What is your salary, Timofey?"

  He told her.

  "Well," she said, "it is not grand. But I suppose you can even lay something aside--it is more than enough for your needs, for your microscopic needs, Timofey."

  Her abdomen tightly girdled under the black skirt jumped up two or three times with mute, cozy, good-natured reminiscential irony--and Pnin blew his nose, shaking his head the while, in voluptuous, rapturous mirth.

  "Listen to my latest poem," she said, her hands now along her sides as she lay perfectly straight on her back, and she sang out rhythmically, in long-drawn, deep-voiced tones:

  "Ya nadela tyomnoe plat'e,

  I monashenki ya skromney;

  Iz slonovoy kosti raspyat'e

  Nad holodnoy postel'yu moey.

  No ogni nabivalih orgiy

  Prozhigayut moyo zabityo

  I shepchu ya imya Georgiy--

  Zolotoe imya tvoyo!

  (I have put on a dark dress

  And am more modest than a nun;

  An ivory crucifix

  Is over my cold bed.

  But the lights of fabulous orgies

  Burn through my oblivion,

  And I whisper the name George--

  Your golden name!)"

  "He is a very interesting man," she went on, without any interval. "Practically English, in fact. He flew a bomber in the war and now he is with a firm of brokers who have no sympathy with him and do not understand him. He comes from an ancient family. His father was a dreamer, had a floating casino, you know, and all that, but was ruined by some Jewish gangsters in Florida and voluntarily went to prison for another man; it is a family of heroes."

  She paused. The silence in the little room was punctuated rather than broken by the throbbing and tinkling in those whitewashed organ pipes.

  "I made Eric a complete report," Liza continued with a sigh. "And now he keeps assuring me he can cure me if I co-operate. Unfortunately I am also co-operating with George."

  She pronounced George as in Russian--both g's hard, both e's longish.

  "Well, c'est la vie, as Eric so originally says. How can you sleep with that string of cobweb hanging from the ceiling?" She looked at her wrist watch. "Goodness, I must catch the bus at four-thirty. You must call a taxi in a minute. I have something to say to you of the utmost importance."

  Here it was coming at last--so late.

  She wanted Timofey to lay aside every month a little money for the boy--because she could not ask Bernard Maywood now--and she might die--and Eric did not care what happened--and somebody ought to send the lad a small sum now and then, as if coming from his mother--pocket money, you know--he would be among rich boys. She would write Timofey giving him an address and some more details. Yes--she never doubted that Timofey was a darling ("Nu kakoy zhe ti dushka"). And now where was the bathroom? And would he please telephone for the taxi?

  "Incidentally," she said, as he was helping her into her coat and as usual searching with a frown for the fugitive armhole while she pawed and groped, "you know, Timofey, this brown suit of yours is a mistake: a gentleman does not wear brown."

  He saw her off, and walked back through the park. To hold her, to keep her--just as she was--with her cruelty,with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don't believe it, but suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in me and in life--

  He seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to great truths) on the verge of a simple solution of the universe but was interrupted by an urgent request. A squirrel under a tree had seen Pnin on the path. In one sinuous tendril-like movement, the intelligent animal climbed up to the brim of a drinking fountain and, as Pnin approached, thrust its oval face toward him with a rather coarse spluttering sound, its cheeks puffed out. Pnin understood and after some fumbling he found what had to be pressed for the necessary results. Eying him with contempt, the thirsty rodent forthwith began to sample the stocky sparkling pillar of water, and went on drinking for a considerable time. "She has fever, perhaps," thought Pnin, weeping quietly and freely, and all the time politely pressing the contraption down while trying not to meet the unpleasant eye fixed upon him. Its thirst quenched, the squirrel departed without the least sign of gratitude.

  The water father continued upon his way, came to the end of the path, then turned into a side street where there was a small bar of log-cabin design with garnet glass in its casement windows.

  7

  When Joan with a bagful of provisions, two magazines, and three parcels, came h
ome at a quarter past five, she found in the porch mailbox a special-delivery air-mail letter from her daughter. More than three weeks had elapsed since Isabel had briefly written her parents to say that, after a honeymoon in Arizona, she had safely reached her husband's home town. Juggling with her packages, Joan tore the envelope open. It was an ecstatically happy letter, and she gulped it down, everything swimming a little in the radiance of her relief. On the outside of the front door she felt, then saw with brief surprise, Pnin's keys, like a bit of his fondest viscera, dangling with their leathern case from the lock; she used them to open the door, and as soon as she had entered she heard, coming from the pantry, a loud anarchistic knocking--cupboards being opened and shut one after the other.

  She put her bag and parcels down on the sideboard in the kitchen and asked in the direction of the pantry: "What are you looking for, Timofey?"

  He came out of there, darkly flushed, wild-eyed, and she was shocked to see that his face was a mess of un-wiped tears.

  "I search, John, for the viscous and sawdust," he said tragically.

  "I am afraid there is no soda," she answered with her lucid Anglo-Saxon restraint. "But there is plenty of whisky in the dining-room cabinet. However, I suggest we both have some nice hot tea instead."

  He made the Russian "relinquishing" gesture.

  "No, I don't want anything at all," he said, and sat down at the kitchen table with an awful sigh.

  She sat down next to him and opened one of the magazines she had bought.

  "We are going to look at some pictures, Timofey."

  "I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement."

  "You just relax, Timofey, and I'll do the explaining. Oh, look--I like this one. Oh, this is very clever. We have here a combination of two ideas--the Desert Island and the Girl in the Puff. Now, look, Timofey--please"--he reluctantly put on his reading glasses--"this is a desert island with a lone palm, and this is a bit of broken raft, and this is a shipwrecked mariner, and this is the ship's cat he saved, and this here, on that rock--"

  "Impossible," said Pnin. "So small island, moreover with palm, cannot exist in such big sea."

  "Well, it exists here."

  "Impossible isolation," said Pnin.

  "Yes, but--Really, you are not playing fair, Timofey. You know perfectly well you agree with Lore that the world of the mind is based on a compromise with logic."

  "I have reservations," said Pnin. "First of all, logic herself--"

  "All right, I'm afraid we are wandering away from our little joke. Now, you look at the picture. So this is the mariner, and this is the pussy, and this is a rather wistful mermaid hanging around, and now look at the puffs right above the sailor and the pussy."

  "Atomic bomb explosion," said Pnin sadly.

  "No, not at all. It is something much funnier. You see, these round puffs are supposed to be the projections of their thoughts. And now at last we are getting to the amusing part. The sailor imagines the mermaid as having a pair of legs, and the cat imagines her as all fish."

  "Lermontov," said Pnin, lifting two fingers, "has expressed everything about mermaids in only two poems. I cannot understand American humor even when I am happy, and I must say--" He removed his glasses with trembling hands, elbowed the magazine aside, and, resting his head on his arm, broke into muffled sobs.

  She heard the front door open and close, and a moment later Laurence peeped into the kitchen with facetious furtiveness. Joan's right hand waved him away; her left directed him to the rainbow-rimmed envelope on top of the parcels. The private smile she flashed was a summary of Isabel's letter; he grabbed it and, no more in jest, tiptoed out again.

  Pnin's unnecessarily robust shoulders continued to shake. She closed the magazine and for a minute studied its cover: toy-bright school tots, Isabel and the Hagen child, shade trees still off duty, a white spire, the Waindell bells.

  "Doesn't she want to come back?" asked Joan softly.

  Pnin, his head on his arm, started to beat the table with his loosely clenched fist.

  "I haf nofing," wailed Pnin between loud, damp sniffs, "I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!"

  Chapter Three

  1

  During the eight years Pnin had taught at Waindell College he had changed his lodgings--for one reason or another, mainly sonic--about every semester. The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody. The rooms of his Waindell period looked especially trim in comparison with one he had had in uptown New York, midway between Tsentral Park and Reeverside, on a block memorable for the wastepaper along the curb, the bright pat of dog dirt somebody had already slipped upon, and a tireless boy pitching a ball against the steps of the high brown porch; and even that room became positively dapper in Pnin's mind (where a small ball still rebounded) when compared with the old, now dust-blurred lodgings of his long Central-European, Nansen-passport period.

  With age, however, Pnin had become choosy. Pretty fixtures no longer sufficed. Waindell was a quiet town-let, and Waindellville, in a notch of the hills, was yet quieter; but nothing was quiet enough for Pnin. There had been, at the start of his life here, that studio in the thoughtfully furnished College Home for Single Instructors, a very nice place despite certain gregarious drawbacks ("Ping-pong, Pnin?" "I don't any more play at games of infants"), until workmen came and started to drill holes in the street--Brainpan Street, Pningrad--and patch them up again, and this went on and on, in fits of shivering black zigzags and stunned pauses, for weeks, and it did not seem likely they would ever find again the precious tool they had entombed by mistake. There had been (to pick out here and there only special offenders) that room in the eminently hermetic-looking Duke's Lodge, Waindellville: a delightful kabinet, above which, however, every evening, among crashing bathroom cascades and banging doors, two monstrous statues on primitive legs of stone would grimly tramp-shapes hard to reconcile with the slender build of his actual upstairs neighbors, who turned out to be the Starrs, of the Fine Arts Department ("I am Christopher, and this is Louise"), an angelically gentle couple keenly interested in Dostoevski and Shostakovich. There had been--in yet another rooming house--a still cozier bedroom-study, with nobody butting in for a free lesson in Russian; but as soon as the formidable Waindell winter began to penetrate the coziness by means of sharp little drafts, coming not only from the window but even from the closet and the base plugs, the room had developed something like a streak of madness or mystic delusion--namely, a tenacious murmur of music, more or less classical, oddly located in Pnin's silver-washed radiator. He tried to muffle it up with a blanket, as if it were a caged songbird, but the song persisted until Mrs. Thayer's old mother was removed to the hospital where she died, upon which the radiator switched to Canadian French.

  He tried habitats of another type: rooms for rent in private houses which, although differing from each other in many respects (not all, for instance, were clapboard ones; a few were stucco, or at least partly stucco), had one generic characteristic in common: in their parlor or stair-landing bookcases Hendrik Willem van Loon and Dr. Cronin were inevitably present; they might be separated by a flock of magazines, or by some glazed and buxom historical romance, or even by Mrs. Garnett impersonating somebody (and in such houses there would be sure to hang somewhere a Toulouse-Lautrec poster), but you found the pair without fail, exchanging looks of tender recognition, like two old friends at a crowded party.

  2

  He had returned for a spell to the College Home, but so had the pavement drillers, and there had cropped up other nuisances besides. At present Pnin was still renting the pink-walled, white-flounced second-floor bedroom in the Clements' house, and this was the first house he really liked and the first room he had occupied for m
ore than a year. By now he had weeded out all trace of its former occupant; or so he thought, for he did not notice, and probably never would, a funny face scrawled on the wall just behind the headboard of the bed and some half-erased height-level marks penciled on the doorjamb, beginning from a four-foot altitude in 1940.

  For more than a week now, Pnin had had the run of the house: Joan Clements had left by plane for a Western state to visit her married daughter, and a couple of days later, at the very beginning of his spring course in philosophy, Professor Clements, summoned by a telegram, had flown West too.

  Our friend had a leisurely breakfast, pleasantly based on the milk that had not been discontinued, and at half-past nine prepared for his usual walk to the campus.

  It warmed my heart, the Russian-intelligentski way he had of getting into his overcoat: his inclined head would demonstrate its ideal baldness, and his large, Duchess of Wonderland chin would firmly press against the crossed ends of his green muffler to hold it in place on his chest while, with a jerk of his broad shoulders, he contrived to get into both armholes at once; another heave and the coat was on.

  He picked up his portfel' (briefcase), checked its contents, and walked out.

  He was still at a newspaper's throw from his porch when he remembered a book the college library had urgently requested him to return, for the use of another reader. For a moment he struggled with himself; he still needed the volume; but kindly Pnin sympathized too much with the passionate clamor of another (unknown) scholar not to go back for the stout and heavy tome: It was Volume 18--mainly devoted to Tolstoyana--of Sovetskiy Zolotoy Fond Literaturi (Soviet Gold Fund of Literature), Moskva-Leningrad, 1940.