Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
“Maybe you’re an actor,” said Felix dubiously.
“If I understand you aright, friend, you mean that at our first meeting you thought: ‘Ah, he is probably one of those theatrical blokes, the dashing kind, with funny fancies and fine clothes; maybe a celebrity.’ Am I correct?”
Felix fixed the toe of his shoe with which he was smoothing the gravel, and his face assumed a rather strained expression.
“I didn’t think anything,” he said peevishly. “I simply saw—well, that you were sort of curious about me, and so on. And do you actors get well paid?”
A tiny note: the idea he gave me appeared to me subtle; the singular bend which it took brought it into contact with the main part of my plan.
“You’ve guessed,” I exclaimed, “you’ve guessed. Yes, I’m an actor. A film actor, to be accurate. Yes, that’s right. You put it nicely, splendidly! What else can you say about me?”
Here I noticed that somehow his spirits had fallen. My profession seemed to have disappointed him. There he sat frowning moodily with the half-smoked cigarette held between finger and thumb. Suddenly he lifted his head, blinked.
“And what kind of work do you want to offer me?” he inquired without his former ingratiating sweetness.
“Not so fast, not so fast. All in its proper time. I was asking you what else did you think of me? Come, answer me. Please.”
“Oh, well … I know you like traveling; that’s about all.”
In the meantime night was approaching; the sparrows had long disappeared; the monument loomed darker and seemed to have grown in size. From behind a black tree there came out noiselessly a gloomy and fleshful moon. A cloud slipped a mask over it in passing, which left visible only its chubby chin.
“Well, Felix, it’s getting dark and dismal out here. I bet you are hungry. Come on, let us find something to eat and go on with our talk over a pint of ale. Does that suit you?”
“It does,” said Felix in a slightly livelier voice and then added sententiously: “A hungry belly has no ears” (I translate his adages anyhow; in German they all jingled with rhymes).
We got up and advanced towards the yellow lights of the boulevard. As night fell, I was hardly aware of our resemblance. Felix slouched beside me, seemingly deep in thought and his mode of walking was as dull as himself.
I queried: “Have you ever been to Tarnitz before?”
“No,” he answered. “I don’t care for towns. Me and my likes find towns tiresome.”
The sign of a pothouse. Standing in the window a barrel, guarded by two bearded brownies of terra-cotta. As good as any other. We entered and chose a table in a far corner. As I withdrew the glove from my hand, I surveyed the place with a searching eye. There were only three people and these paid no attention to us whatever. The waiter came up, a pale little man with pince-nez (it was not the first time I had seen a pince-nez’d waiter, but I could not recall where and when I had seen one before). While awaiting our order, he looked at me, then at Felix. Naturally, owing to my mustache, our likeness did not leap to the eyes; and indeed, I had let my mustache grow with the special purpose of not attracting undue attention when appearing together with Felix. There is, I believe, somewhere in Pascal a wise thought: that two persons resembling each other do not present any interest when met singly, but create quite a stir when both appear at once. I have never read Pascal nor do I remember where I pinched that quotation. Oh, I used to thrive on such monkey-tricks in my youth! Unfortunately I was not alone in making a show of this or that pickpocket maxim. In St. Petersburg once, at a party, I remarked: “There are feelings, says Turgenev, which may be expressed only by music.” A few minutes later there arrived one more guest, who, in the middle of the conversation, delivered the very same phrase, lifted from the program of a concert at which I had noticed him heading for the greenroom. He, and not I, made an ass of himself, to be sure; still, it produced an uncomfortable feeling in me (though I derived some relief from asking him slyly how he had liked the great Viabranova), so I decided to cut out the highbrow business. All this is a digression and not an evasion—most emphatically not an evasion; for I fear
nothing and will tell all. It should be admitted that I exercise an exquisite control not only over myself but over my style of writing. How many novels I wrote when young—just like that, casually, and without the least intention of publishing them. Here is another utterance: a published manuscript, says Swift, is comparable to a whore. I happened one day (in Russia) to give Lydia a manuscript of mine to read, telling her that it was the work of a friend; she found it boring and did not finish it. To this day my handwriting is practically unfamiliar to her. I have exactly twenty-five kinds of handwritings, the best (i.e., those I use the most readily) being as follows: a round diminutive one with a pleasant plumpness about its curves, so that every word looks like a newly baked fancy-cake; then a fast cursive, sharp and nasty, the scribble of a hunchback in a hurry, with no dearth of abbreviations; then a suicide’s hand, every letter a noose, every comma a trigger; then the one I prize most: big, legible, firm and absolutely impersonal; thus might write the abstract hand in its superhuman cuff, which one finds figured on signposts and in textbooks of physics. It was in such a hand that I began writing the book now offered to the reader; soon, however, my pen ran amok: this book is written in all my twenty-five hands mixed together, so that the typesetter or some typist, unknown to me, or again the definite person I have elected, that Russian author to whom my manuscript will be forwarded when the time comes, might think that several people participated in the writing of my book; and it is also extremely probable that some rat-faced, sly little expert will discover in its cacographic orgy a sure sign of psychic abnormality. So much the better.
There … I have mentioned you, my first reader, you, the well-known author of psychological novels. I have read them
and found them very artificial, though not badly constructed. What will you feel, reader-writer, when you tackle my tale? Delight? Envy? Or even … who knows? … you may use my termless removal to give out my stuff for your own … for the fruit of your own crafty … yes, I grant you that … crafty and experienced imagination; leaving me out in the cold. It would not be hard for me to take in advance proper measures against such impudence. Whether I
shall
take them, that is another question. What if I find it rather flattering that you should steal my property? Theft is the best compliment one can possibly pay a thing. And do you know the most amusing part? I assume that, having made up your mind to effect that pleasant robbery, you will suppress the compromising lines, the very lines I am writing now, and, moreover, fashion certain bits to your liking (which is a less pleasant thought) just as a motorcar thief repaints the car he has stolen. And, in this respect, I shall allow myself to relate a little story, which is certainly the funniest little story I know.
Some ten days ago, that is, about the tenth of March 1931 (half a year has suddenly gone—a fall in a dream, a run in time’s stocking), a person, or persons, passing along the highway or through the wood (that, I think, will be settled in due course) espied, on its edge, and unlawfully took possession of, a small blue car of such and such a make and power (I leave out the technical details). And, as a matter of fact, that is all.
I do not claim that this story has universal appeal: its point is none too obvious. It made
me
scream with laughter only because I was in the know. I may add that nobody told it me, nor have I read it anywhere; what I did was, really, to deduce it by means of some close reasoning from the bare fact of the
car’s disappearance, a fact quite wrongly interpreted by the papers. Back again, time!
“Can you drive?” was, I remember, the question I suddenly put to Felix, when the waiter, failing to notice anything particular about us, placed before me a lemonade and before Felix a tankard of beer, into the profuse froth of which my blurred double eagerly dipped his upper lip.
“What?” he uttered, with a beatific grunt.
“I was asking if you can drive a car.”
“Can’t I just! I once chummed up with a chauffeur who worked at a castle near my village. One fine day we ran over a sow. Lord, how she squealed!”
The waiter brought us some sort of gravy-logged hash, a great deal of it, and mashed potatoes, also drowned in sauce. Where the deuce had I already seen a pince-nez on a waiter’s nose? Ah—it comes back to me (only now, while writing this!)—at a rotten little Russian restaurant in Berlin; and that other waiter was very like this one—the same sort of sullen straw-haired little man, but of gentler birth.
“So that’s that, Felix. We have eaten and drunk; now, let us talk. You have made certain suppositions concerning me and these have proved correct. Now, before going deeper into the business on hand, I want to sketch out for your benefit a general picture of my personality and life; you won’t be long in understanding why it is urgent. To begin with …”
I took a sip and resumed:
“To begin with, I was born of a rich family. We had a house and a garden—ah, what a garden, Felix! Imagine, not merely rose trees but rose thickets, roses of all kinds, each variety bearing a framed label: roses, you know, receive names as resounding as those given to racehorses. Besides roses, there grew in our garden a quantity of other flowers,
and when, of a morning, the whole place was brilliant with dew, the sight, Felix, was a dream. When still a child, I loved to look after our garden and well did I know my job: I had a small watering can, Felix, and a small mattock, and my parents would sit in the shade of an old cherry tree, planted by my grandfather, and look on, with tender emotion, at me, the small busybody (just imagine, imagine the picture!) engaged in removing from the roses, and squelching, caterpillars that looked like twigs. We had plenty of farmyard creatures, as, for example, rabbits, the most oval animal of all, if you know what I mean; and choleric turkeys with carbuncular caruncles (I made a gobbling sound) and darling little kids and many, many others.
“Then my parents lost all their money and died, and the lovely garden vanished; and it is only now that happiness seems to have come my way once more: I have lately managed to acquire a bit of land on the edge of a lake, and there will be a new garden still better than the old one. My sappy boyhood was perfumed through and through with all those flowers and fruits, whereas the neighboring wood, huge and thick, cast over my soul a shadow of romantic melancholy.
“I was always lonely, Felix, and I am lonely still. Women … No need to talk of those fickle and lewd beings. I have traveled a good deal; just like you, I love to rove with a bag strapped to my shoulders, although, to be sure, there were always certain reasons (which I wholly condemn) for my wanderings to be more agreeable than yours. It is really a striking thing: have you ever pondered over the following matter?—two men, alike poor, live not alike; one say, as you, frankly and hopelessly leading a beggar’s existence, while the other, though quite as poor, living in a very different style—a carefree, well-fed fellow, moving among the gay rich.…
“Why is it so? Because, Felix, those two belong to different classes; and speaking of classes, let us imagine a man who travels fourth-class without a ticket and another who travels first, without one either: X sits on a hard bench; Mr. Y lolls on a cushioned seat; but both have empty purses—or, to be precise, Mr. Y has got a purse to show, though empty, whereas X has not even that and can show nothing but holes in the lining of his pocket.
“By speaking thus I am trying to make you grasp the difference between us: I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting. You are denied even that; and you would have always remained a pauper, had not a miracle occurred; that miracle is my meeting you.
“There is not a thing, Felix, that one could not exploit. Nay, more: there is not a thing that one could not exploit for a very long time, and very successfully. Maybe in the more fiery of your dreams you saw a number of two figures, the limit of your aspirations. Now, however, the dream does not only come true, but at once runs into three figures. None too easy for your fancy to comprehend, is it, for didn’t you feel you were nearing a hardly thinkable infinity when you reckoned above ten? And now we are turning the corner of that infinity, and a century beams at you, and over its shoulder—another; and who knows, Felix, maybe a fourth figure is ripening; yes, it makes the head swim, and the heart beat, and the nerves tingle, but it is true nevertheless. See here: you have grown so used to your miserable fate that I doubt whether you catch my meaning; what I say seems dark to you, and strange; what comes next will seem still darker and stranger.”
I spoke a long while in that vein. He kept glancing at me with distrust; quite likely, he had gradually acquired the notion that I was making fun of him. Fellows of his kind remain good-natured up to a certain point only. As it dawns upon them that they are about to be put upon, all their goodness comes off, there appears in their eyes a vitreous glint, they work themselves heavily into a state of solid passion.
I spoke obscurely, but my object was not to infuriate him. On the contrary, I wished to curry favor with him; to perplex, but at the same time to attract; in a word, to convey to him vaguely but cogently the image of a man of his nature and inclinations. My fancy, however, ran riot and that rather disgustingly, with the weighty playfulness of an elderly but still smirking lady who has had a drop too much.
Upon my noting the impression I was making, I stopped for a minute, half sorry I had frightened him, but then, all at once, I felt how sweet it was to be able to make one’s listener thoroughly uncomfortable. So I smiled and continued thus:
“You must forgive me, Felix, for all this chatter, but, you see, I seldom have occasion to take my soul for an outing. Then, too, I am in a great hurry to demonstrate myself from all sides, for I want to give you an exhaustive description of the man with whom you will have to work, the more so as the work in question will be directly concerned with our resemblance. Tell me, do you know what an understudy is?”