Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
Before committing suicide I wanted to write a few traditional letters and, for five minutes at least, to sit in safety. Therefore I hailed a taxi and went to my former address. Luckily my familiar room was vacant, and the little old landlady started making the bed right away—a wasted effort. I waited impatiently for her to leave, but she fussed on for a long time, filling the pitcher, filling the decanter, drawing the blind, jerking at a stuck cord or something as she looked up, with open black mouth. At last, after emitting a farewell mew, she left.
A wretched, shivering, vulgar little man in a bowler hat stood in the center of the room, for some reason rubbing his hands. That is the glimpse I caught of myself in the mirror. Then I quickly opened the suitcase and took out writing paper and envelopes, found a miserable pencil stub in my pocket, and sat down at the table. It turned out, however, that I had no one to write to. I knew few people and loved no one. So the idea of the letters was discarded, and the rest was discarded too; I had vaguely imagined that I must tidy up things, put on clean linen, and leave all my money—20 marks—in an envelope with a note saying who should receive it. I became aware now that I had decided all this not today but long ago,
at various times, when I used to imagine light-heartedly how people went about shooting themselves. Thus a confirmed city dweller who receives an unexpected invitation from a country friend begins by acquiring a flask and a sturdy pair of boots, not because they might actually be needed, but unconsciously, as a consequence of certain former, untested thoughts about the countryside with its long walks through the woods and mountains. But when he arrives, there are no woods and no mountains, nothing but flat farmland, and no one wants to stride along the highway in the heat. I saw now, as one sees a real turnip field instead of the picture-postcard glens and glades, how conventional were my former ideas on presuicidal occupations; a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since, together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.
A thing I had long suspected—the world’s absurdity—became obvious to me. I suddenly
felt unbelievably free, and the freedom itself was an indication of that absurdity. I took the 20-mark note and tore it up into little pieces. I removed my wrist watch and kept dashing it against the floor until it stopped. It occurred to me that, if I wished, I could, at that moment, run out into the street and, with vulgar expletives of lust, embrace any woman I chose; or shoot the first person I met, or smash a store window … That was about all I could think of: the imagination of lawlessness has a limited range.
Cautiously, clumsily, I loaded the revolver, then turned off the light. The thought of death, which had once so frightened me, was now an intimate and simple affair. I was afraid, terribly afraid of the monstrous pain the bullet might cause me; but to be afraid of the black velvety sleep, of the even darkness, so much more acceptable and comprehensible than life’s motley insomnia? Nonsense—how could one be afraid of
that?
Standing in the middle of the dark room, I unbuttoned my shirt, leaned forward from the hips, felt for and located my heart between the ribs. It was throbbing like a small animal you want to carry to a safe place, a fledgling or field mouse to which you cannot explain that there is nothing to fear,
that, on the contrary, you are acting for its own good. But it was so much alive, my heart; I found it somehow repugnant to press the barrel tight against the thin skin under which a portable world was resiliently pulsating, and therefore I drew away my awkwardly bent arm a little, so that the steel would not touch my naked chest. Then I braced myself and fired. There was a strong jolt, and a delightful vibrating sound rang out behind me; that vibration I shall never forget. It was immediately replaced by the warble of water, a throaty gushing noise. I inhaled, and choked on liquidity; everything within me and around me was aflow and astir. I found myself kneeling on the floor; I put out my hand to steady myself but it sank into the floor as into bottomless water.
S
OME time later, if one can speak here of time at all, it became clear that after death human thought lives on by momentum. I was tightly swaddled in something—was it a shroud? was it simply taut darkness? I remembered everything—my name, life on earth—with perfect clarity, and found wonderful comfort in the thought that now there was nothing to worry about. With mischievous and carefree
logic I progressed from the incomprehensible sensation of tight bandages to the idea of a hospital, and, at once obedient to my will, a spectral hospital ward materialized around me, and I had neighbors, mummies like me, three on either side. What a mighty thing was human thought, that it could hurtle on beyond death! Heaven knows how much longer it would pulsate and create images after my defunct brain had long ceased to be of any use. The familiar crater of a hollow tooth was still with me, and, paradoxically, this afforded some comic relief. I was a bit curious as to how they had buried me, whether there had been a Requiem Mass, and who had come to the funeral.
How persistently, though, and how thoroughly—as if it had been missing its former activity—my thought went about contriving the semblance of a hospital, and the semblance of white-clad human forms moving among the beds, from one of which issued the semblance of human moans. I good-naturedly yielded to these illusions, exciting them, goading them on, until I had managed to create a complete, natural picture, the simple case of a light wound caused by an inaccurate bullet passing clean through the
serratus;
here a doctor (whom I
had created) appeared, and hastened to confirm my carefree conjecture. Then, as I was laughingly swearing that I had been clumsily unloading the revolver, my little old lady also appeared, wearing a black straw hat trimmed with cherries. She sat down by my bed, asked how I felt, and, slyly shaking her finger at me, mentioned a pitcher that had been smashed by the bullet … oh, how cunningly, in what simple, everyday terms my thought explained the ringing and the gurgling that had accompanied me into nonexistence!
I assumed that the posthumous momentum of my thought would soon play itself out, but apparently, while I was still alive, my imagination had been so fertile that enough of it remained to last for a long time. It went on developing the theme of recovery, and pretty soon had me discharged from the hospital. The restoration of a Berlin street looked a great success—and as I glided off along the sidewalk, delicately trying out my still weak, practically disembodied feet, I thought about everyday matters: that I had to have my watch repaired, and get some cigarettes; and that I had no money. Catching myself with these thoughts—not very alarming ones, for that matter—I vividly evoked the 20-mark note, flesh-colored
with an auburn shading, that I had torn up prior to my suicide, and my sensation of freedom and impunity at that moment. Now, however, my action acquired a certain vindictive significance, and I was glad that I had limited myself to a melancholy caprice and had not gone to frolic in the street. For I knew now that after death human thought, liberated from the body, keeps on moving in a sphere where everything is interconnected as before, and has a relative degree of sense, and that a sinner’s torment in the afterworld consists precisely in that his tenacious mind cannot find peace until it manages to unravel the complex consequences of his reckless terrestrial actions.
I walked along remembered streets; everything greatly resembled reality, and yet there was nothing to prove that I was not dead and that Passauer Strasse was not a postexistent chimera. I saw myself from the outside, treading water as it were, and was both touched and frightened like an inexperienced ghost watching the existence of a person whose inner lining, inner night, mouth, and taste-in-the-mouth, he knew as well as that person’s shape.
My floating mechanical motion brought me to Weinstock’s shop. Russian books, instantly printed to humor me, promptly appeared in the
window. For a fraction of a second some of the titles still seemed hazy; I focused on them and the haze cleared. The bookshop was empty when I came in, and a cast-iron stove burned in a corner with the dull flame of medieval hells. From somewhere down behind the counter I heard Weinstock’s wheezing. “It rolled under,” he muttered in a strained voice, “it rolled under.” Presently he stood up, and here I caught my imagination (which, it is true, was compelled to work very fast) in an inaccuracy: Weinstock wore a mustache, but now it was not there. My fancy had not finished him in time and the pale space where the mustache should have been showed nothing but a bluish stipple.
“You look awful,” he said, by way of greeting. “Shame, shame. What’s wrong with you? Been sick?” I answered that I had indeed been ill. “Grippe going around,” said Weinstock. “It’s been a long time,” he went on. “Tell me, did you find a job?”
I answered that for a while I had worked as tutor, but had now lost that position, and that I badly wanted to smoke.
A customer came in and requested a Russian-Spanish dictionary. “I think I have one,” said Weinstock, turning toward the shelves and
running his finger across the backs of several fat little volumes. “Ah, here’s a Russian-Portuguese one—practically the same thing.”
“I’ll take it,” said the customer and left with his useless purchase.
Meanwhile a deep sigh, coming from the back of the store, attracted my attention. Someone, concealed by books, shuffled past with a Russian “och-och-och.”
“You’ve hired an assistant?” I asked Weinstock.
“I’m going to fire him soon,” he answered in a low voice. “He’s a completely helpless old man. I need someone young.”
“And how is the Black Hand doing, Vikentiy Lvovich?”
“If you were not such a malicious skeptic,” said Vikentiy Lvovich Weinstock with dignified disapprobation, “I could tell you many interesting things.” He was a little hurt, and this was inopportune: my ghostly, impecunious, weightless condition had to be resolved one way or another, but instead my fantasy was producing some rather insipid small talk.
“No, no, Vikentiy Lvovich, why do you call me a skeptic? On the contrary—don’t you remember?—this business once cost me good money.”
Indeed, when I first met Weinstock, I immediately found in him a kindred trait, a proneness to obsessive ideas. He was convinced that he was being regularly watched by certain persons, to whom he referred, with a mysterious laconism, as “agents.” He hinted at the existence of a “black list” on which his name supposedly appeared. I used to tease him, but quaked inwardly. One day, it struck me as odd to run again into a man I had chanced to notice that very morning on the streetcar, an unpleasant blond fellow with shifty eyes—and now there he was, standing on the corner of my street and pretending to read a newspaper. Thenceforth I began to feel uneasy. I would chide myself, and mentally ridicule Weinstock, but I could do nothing about my imagination. At night I would fancy that someone was climbing in through the window. Finally I bought a revolver and calmed down completely. It was to this expenditure (all the more ridiculous, since my firearms license had now been revoked) that I alluded.
“What good will a weapon do you?” he retorted. “They are cunning as the devil. There is only one possible defense against them—brains. My organization—” He suddenly shot me a suspicious glance, as if he had said too
much. Here I made up my mind and explained, trying to maintain a jocular manner, that I was in a peculiar situation—no one left to borrow from, yet I still had to live and smoke; and as I said all this, I kept recalling a glib stranger with a missing front tooth who had once presented himself to the mother of my pupils, and, in exactly the same jocular tone, had recounted that he had to go to Wiesbaden that night and was exactly 90 pfennigs short. “Well,” she said calmly, “you can keep your Wiesbaden story, but I dare say I’ll give you twenty pfennigs. More I cannot, purely as a matter of principle.”
However, now, as I indulged in this juxtaposition, I did not feel a bit humiliated. Ever since the shot—that shot which, in my opinion, had been fatal—I had observed myself with curiosity instead of sympathy, and my painful past—before the shot—was now foreign to me. This conversation with Weinstock turned out to be the beginning of a new life for me. In respect to myself I was now an onlooker. My belief in the phantomatic nature of my existence entitled me to certain amusements.
It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be
explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio’s clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u’s, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of
Das Kapital
, the fruit of insomnia and migraine. There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, “What would have happened if …” and substituting one chance occurrence for another, observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy event that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a “thus” and an “otherwise,” with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.
All these simple thoughts about the wavering nature of life come to mind when I think
how easily I might never have happened to rent a room in the house at 5 Peacock Street, or meet Vanya and her sister, or Roman Bogdanovich, or many other people whom I suddenly found, who started to live all at once, so unexpectedly and unwontedly, around me. And again, had I settled in a different house after my spectral exit from the hospital, perhaps an unimaginable happiness would have become my familiar interlocutor … who knows, who knows …