Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
The day before, in response to a second telegram (“Worried how is your health kiss”—and this kiss written on the telegraph blank was the first real one), came the news that neither of them had any more fever, and, before leaving for home, the still runny-nosed friend showed him a small box and asked if she could take it for the girl (it contained some maternal trinkets from the remote, sacred past), after which she inquired what would happen next, and how. Only then, speaking extremely slowly and expressionlessly, with frequent pauses, as though with
every syllable he were overcoming the speechlessness of sorrow, he announced to her what would happen and how: after first thanking her for the year of care, he advised her that in exactly two weeks he would come to fetch his daughter (the very word he used) to take her south and then probably abroad. “Yes, that’s wise,” replied the other with relief (somewhat tempered, but only by the thought, let us hope, that, of late, she had probably been making a nice little profit on her ward). “Go away, distract yourself—there’s nothing like a trip to calm one’s grief.”
He needed those two weeks to organize his affairs so he would not have to think about them for at least a year; then he would see. He was forced to sell certain items from his own collection. And while packing he happened to find in his desk a coin he had once picked up (which, incidentally, had turned out to be counterfeit). He chuckled: the talisman had already done its job.
W
HEN HE BOARDED THE TRAIN
, day-after-tomorrow’s address still seemed a shoreline in a torrid mist, a preliminary symbol of future anonymity. The only thing he tentatively planned was where they would pass the night on the way to that shimmering South; he found it unnecessary to predetermine subsequent habitations. The locus did not matter—it would always be adorned by a little naked foot; the destination was immaterial—as long as he could abscond with her into the azure void. The telegraph poles, like violin bridges, flew past with spasms of guttural music. The throbbing
of the car’s partitions was like the crackle of mightily bulging wings. We shall live far away, now in the hills, now by the sea, in a hothouse warmth where savagelike nudity will automatically become habitual, perfectly alone (no servants!), seeing no one, just the two of us in an eternal nursery, and thus any remaining sense of shame will be dealt its final blow. There will be constant merriment, pranks, morning kisses, tussles on the shared bed, a single, huge sponge shedding its tears on four shoulders, squirting with laughter amid four legs.
Luxuriating in the concentrated rays of an internal sun, he pondered the delicious alliance between premeditation and pure chance, the Edenic discoveries that awaited her, the way the amusing traits peculiar to bodies of different sex, seen at close range, would appear extraordinary yet natural and homey to her, while the subtle distinctions of intricately refined passion would long remain for her but the alphabet of innocent caresses: she would be entertained only with storybook images (the pet giant, the fairy-tale forest, the sack with its treasure), and with the amusing consequences that would ensue when she inquisitively fingered the toy with the familiar but never tedious trick. He was convinced that, as long as novelty still prevailed and she did not look around her, it would be easy, by means of pet names and jokes confirming the essentially aimless simplicity of given oddities, to divert a normal girl’s attention ahead of time from the comparisons,
generalizations, and questions that might be prompted by something overheard previously, or a dream, or her first menstruation, so as to prepare a painless transition from a world of semiabstractions of which she was probably semi-conscious (such as the correct interpretation of a neighbor’s autonomously swelling belly, or schoolgirl predilections for the mug of a matinee idol), from everything in any way connected with adult love, into the everyday reality of pleasant fun, while decorum and morality, aware neither of the goings-on nor of the address, would refrain from visiting.
Raising drawbridges might be an effective system of protection until such time as the flowering chasm itself reached up to the chamber with a robust young branch. Yet, precisely because during the first two years or so the captive would be ignorant of the temporarily noxious nexus between the puppet in her hands and the puppet-master’s panting, between the plum in her mouth and the rapture of the distant tree, he would have to be particularly cautious, not to let her go anywhere alone, make frequent changes of domicile (the ideal would be a mini-villa in a blind garden), keep a sharp eye out lest she make friends with other children or have occasion to start chatting with the woman from the greengrocer’s or the char, for there was no telling what impudent elf might fly from the lips of enchanted innocence—and what monster a stranger’s ear would carry off for examination and
discussion by the sages. And yet, for what could one possibly reproach the enchanter?
He knew he would find sufficient delights in her so as not to disenchant her prematurely, emphasize anything about her by unduly obvious manifestations of rapture, or push his way too insistently into some little blind alley as he acted out his monastic promenade. He knew he would make no attempt on her virginity in the tightest and pinkest sense of the term until the evolution of their caresses had ascended a certain invisible step. He would hold back until that morning when, still laughing, she would hearken to her own responsiveness and, growing mute, demand that the search for the hidden musical string be made jointly.
As he imagined the coming years, he continued to envision her as an adolescent—such was the carnal postulate. However, catching himself on this premise, he realized without difficulty that, even if the putative passage of time contradicted, for the moment, a permanent foundation for his feelings, the gradual progression of successive delights would assure natural renewals of his pact with happiness, which took into account, as well, the adaptability of living love. Against the light of that happiness, no matter what age she attained—seventeen, twenty—her present image would always transpire through her metamorphoses, nourishing their translucent strata from its internal fountainhead. And this very process would
allow him, with no loss or diminishment, to savor each unblemished stage of her transformations. Besides, she herself, delineated and elongated into womanhood, would never again be free to dissociate, in her consciousness and her memory, her own development from that of their love, her childhood recollections from her recollections of male tenderness. Consequently, past, present, and future would appear to her as a single radiance whose source had emanated, as she had herself, from him, from her viviparous lover.
Thus they would live on—laughing, reading books, marveling at gilded fireflies, talking of the flowering walled prison of the world, and he would tell her tales and she would listen, his little Cordelia, and nearby the sea would breathe beneath the moon.… And exceedingly slowly, at first with all the sensitivity of his lips, then in earnest, with all their weight, ever deeper, only thus—for the first time—into your inflamed heart, thus, forcing my way, thus, plunging into it, between its melting edges …
The lady who had been sitting across from him for some reason suddenly got up and went into another compartment; he glanced at the blank face of his wristwatch—it wouldn’t be long now—and then he was already ascending next to a white wall crowned with blinding shards of glass as a multitude of swallows flew overhead.
He was met on the porch by the late person’s friend, who explained the presence of a heap of ashes and charred
logs in a corner of the garden by the fact that there had been a fire that night; the firemen had had trouble bringing the raging flames under control, had broken a young apple tree, and of course nobody had gotten any sleep. Just then
she
came out, in a dark knit dress (in this heat!) with a shiny leather belt, and a chain on her neck, wearing long black stockings, the poor thing, and at this very first instant he had the impression that she was not quite as pretty as before, that she had grown more snub-nosed and leggier. Gloomily, rapidly, with nothing but a feeling of acute tenderness for her mourning, he took her by the shoulder and kissed her warm hair.
“Everything could have caught fire!” she exclaimed, raising her rosily illumined face with the shadows of foliage on her forehead and goggling her eyes, in which shimmered the liquidly transparent reflections of sun and garden.
She contentedly held onto his arm as they entered the house behind its loudly talking mistress—and the spontaneity had already evaporated, already he was awkwardly bending his arm (or was it hers?)—and, at the door to the parlor, where resounded the monologue that had preceded them accompanied by the opening of shutters, he freed his hand and, feigning an absentminded caress (but actually totally engrossed for an instant in a good, firm feel, complete with dimple), he patted her on the hip—as if to say, run along, child—and then he was already sitting down, finding a place for his walking stick,
lighting up, looking for an ashtray, saying something in answer to a question, filled all the while with a savage exultation.
He refused tea, explaining that at any moment the car he had ordered at the station would arrive, that it already contained his luggage (this detail, as occurs in dreams, had a certain glimmer of meaning), and that “you and I will be off to the seashore”—which he almost shouted in the direction of the girl who, looking back in mid-step, nearly crashed into a stool, but instantly regained her youthful balance, turned, and sat down, covering the stool with her settling skirt.
“What?” she asked, brushing back her hair with a sidewise glance at the hostess (the stool had already once been broken). He said it again. She joyously raised her eyebrows—she had no idea it would happen like this, today.
“And I was hoping,” lied the hostess, “that you would spend the night with us.”
“Oh, no!” cried the girl, rushing over to him with a parquet slide, and then continued with unexpected rapidity, “Do you think I can learn how to swim soon? A friend of mine says you can, right away, all you have to do is learn not to be afraid first, and that takes a month.…” But the woman was already nudging her by the elbow so she would go finish packing, with Maria, the things that had been laid out in the left section of the wardrobe.
“I confess I don’t envy you,” she said, turning over her
tutelage, after the child had run out. “Lately, especially after her flu, she’s been having all kinds of outbursts and tantrums; the other day she was rude to me—it’s a difficult age. All in all I think it would be a good thing if you hired some young woman to look after her and, in the fall, found her a good Catholic boarding school. As you can see, the death of her mother has not been too much of a shock to her—of course, she may be holding it in, for all I know. Our shared existence is over with.… By the way, I still owe you … No, no, I won’t hear of it, I insist.… Oh, he doesn’t get home from work till around seven—he’ll be very disappointed.… That’s life, what can you do. At least she has found her peace in Heaven, poor thing, and you are looking better too.… If it hadn’t been for our encounter … I simply don’t see how I could have kept supporting someone else’s child, and as for orphanages, they lead directly you know where. That’s why I always say—you never know in life. Remember that day, on the bench—remember? It never occurred to me she could find a second husband, and yet my feminine intuition told me that something in you was longing for just that kind of refuge.”
A car materialized behind the foliage. In we get! The familiar black cap, coat over her arm, a small suitcase, help from red-handed Maria. Just wait, you’ll see the things I’ll buy for you.… She insisted on sitting next to the driver, and he had to consent, concealing his chagrin.
The woman, whom we shall never see again, was waving good-bye with an apple-tree branch. Maria was shooing the chicks in. We’re off, we’re off.
He sat leaning back, holding his stick—a very valuable, antique thing with a thick coral head—between his knees, gazing through the glass partition at the beret and the contented shoulders. The weather was exceptionally warm for June, a stream of heat rushed in through the window, and soon he took off his tie and unbuttoned his collar.
After an hour the girl looked around at him (she was pointing at something beside the road but, although he turned, open-mouthed, he was too late to see anything—and, for some reason, with no logical connection, the thought crossed his mind that there was, after all, an age difference of nearly thirty years). At six they stopped for ice cream, while the talkative chauffeur drank beer at the next table, sharing various considerations with his client.
On we go. He looked at the forest that kept approaching in undulating hops from hillside to hillside until it slid down an incline and tripped over the road, where it was counted and stored away. “Shall we take a break here?” he wondered. “We could have a short walk, sit for a while on the moss among the mushrooms and the butterflies.…” But he could not bring himself to stop the chauffeur: there was something unbearable about the idea of a suspicious car standing idle on the highway.
Then it got dark and their headlights imperceptibly came on. They stopped for dinner at the first roadside eatery, the philosophizer again sprawled nearby, and seemed to be glancing over less at his employer’s steak and potato croquettes than at the profile of the hair screening her face and at her exquisite cheek.… My darling is tired and flushed from the trip, the rich meat course, the drop of wine. The sleepless night with the rosy glow of the fire in the darkness is taking its toll, her napkin is slipping off the soft hollow of her skirt.… And now all this is mine.… He asked if they had rooms available—no, they did not.
In spite of her increasing lassitude she resolutely refused to exchange her seat in front for support in the car’s cosy depths, saying she would get carsick in back. At last, at last, lights began ripening and bursting amid the hot, black void, a hotel was immediately selected and the agonizing journey paid for, and that part was done with. She was half asleep as she crawled out onto the sidewalk, halting numbly amid the bluish, coarse-grained darkness, the warm burnt fragrance, the roar and throb of two, three, four trucks taking advantage of the deserted nighttime street to descend with appalling speed from behind a bend that concealed a whining, straining, grinding upgrade.