Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
Meanwhile Uncle Pasha was already blowing his nose and chuckling in the hall; now he came in and paused on the threshold, smiling foolishly and rubbing his hands. “Evgenia,” he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know anybody here. Come, make the introductions.”
“Oh, my goodness!” said Evgenia. “It’s your own niece!”
“So it is, so it is,” said Uncle Pasha and added something outrageous about cheeks and peaches.
“He probably won’t recognize the others
either,” sighed Evgenia and began introducing us in a loud voice.
“Smurov!” exclaimed Uncle Pasha, and his eyebrows bristled. “Oh, Smurov and I are old friends. Happy, happy man,” he went on mischievously, palpating Smurov’s arms and shoulders. “And you think we don’t know … We know all about it … I’ll say one thing—take good care of her! She is a gift from heaven. May you be happy, my children …”
He turned to Vanya but she, pressing a crumpled handkerchief to her mouth, ran out of the room. Evgenia, emitting an odd sound, hurried off after her. Yet Uncle Pasha did not notice that his careless babbling, intolerable to a sensitive being, had driven Vanya to tears. Eyes bulging, Roman Bogdanovich peered with great curiosity at Smurov, who—whatever his feelings—maintained an impeccable composure.
“Love is a great thing,” said Uncle Pasha, and Smurov smiled politely. “This girl is a treasure. And you, you’re a young engineer, aren’t you? Your job coming along well?”
Without going into details Smurov said he was doing all right. Roman Bogdanovich suddenly slapped his knee and grew purple.
“I’ll put in a good word for you in London,”
Uncle Pasha said. “I have many connections. Yes, I’m off, I’m off. Right now, as a matter of fact.”
And the astounding old fellow glanced at his watch and proffered us both hands. Smurov, overcome with love’s bliss, unexpectedly embraced him.
“How do you like that? … There is a queer one for you!” said Roman Bogdanovich, when the door had closed behind Uncle Pasha.
Evgenia came back into the parlor. “Where is he?” she asked with surprise: there was something magical about his disappearance.
She hastened up to Smurov. “Please, excuse my uncle,” she began. “I was foolish enough to tell him about Vanya and Mukhin. He must have got the names mixed up. At first I did not realize how gaga he was——”
“And I listened and thought I was going crazy,” Roman Bogdanovich put in, spreading his hands.
“Oh, come on, come on, Smurov,” Evgenia went on. “What’s the matter with you? You must not take it to heart like that. After all, it’s no insult to you.”
“I’m all right, I just did not know,” Smurov said hoarsely.
“What do you mean you did not know?
Everybody knows … It’s been going on for ages. Yes, of course, they adore each other. It’s almost two years now. Listen, I’ll tell you something amusing about Uncle Pasha: once, when he was still relatively young—no, don’t you turn away, it’s a very interesting story—one day, when he was relatively young he happened to be walking along Nevski Avenue——”
There follows a brief period when I stopped watching Smurov: I grew heavy, surrendered again to the gnawing of gravity, donned anew my former flesh, as if indeed all this life around me was not the play of my imagination, but was real, and I was part of it, body and soul. If you are not loved, but do not know for sure whether a potential rival is loved or not, and, if there are several, do not know which of them is luckier than you; if you subsist on that hopeful ignorance which helps you to resolve in conjecture an otherwise intolerable agitation; then all is well, you can live. But woe when the name is at last announced, and that name is not yours! For she was so enchanting, it even brought tears to one’s eyes, and, at the merest thought of her, a moaning, awful, salty night would well up within me. Her downy face, nearsighted eyes and tender unpainted lips,
which grew chapped and a little swollen from the cold, and whose color seemed to run at the edges, dissolving in a feverish pink that seemed to need so badly the balm of a butterfly kiss; her short bright dresses: her big knees, which squeezed together, unbearably tight, when she played skat with us, bending her silky black head over her cards; and her hands, adolescently clammy and a little coarse, which one especially longed to touch and kiss—yes, everything about her was excruciating and somehow irremediable, and only in my dreams, drenched with tears, did I at last embrace her and feel under my lips her neck and the hollow near the clavicle. But she would always break away, and I would awaken, still throbbing. What difference did it make to me whether she were stupid or intelligent, or what her childhood had been like, or what books she read, or what she thought about the universe? I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything, and which, unlike a human soul (often accessible and possessable), can in no way be appropriated, just as one cannot include among one’s belongings the colors of ragged sunset clouds above black houses, or a flower’s smell that one
inhales endlessly, with tense nostrils, to the point of intoxication, but cannot draw completely out of the corolla.
Once, at Christmas, before a ball to which they were all going without me, I glimpsed, in a strip of mirror through a door left ajar, her sister powdering Vanya’s bare shoulder blades; on another occasion I noticed a flimsy bra in the bathroom. For me these were exhausting events, that had a delicious but dreadfully draining effect on my dreams, although never once in them did I go beyond a hopeless kiss (I myself do not know why I always wept so when we met in my dreams). What I needed from Vanya I could never have taken for my perpetual use and possession anyway, as one cannot possess the tint of the cloud or the scent of the flower. Only when I finally realized that my desire was bound to remain insatiable and that Vanya was wholly a creation of mine, did I calm down, and grow accustomed to my own excitement, from which I had extracted all the sweetness that a man can possibly obtain from love.
Gradually my attention returned to Smurov. Incidentally, it turned out that, in spite of his interest in Vanya, Smurov had, on the sly, set
his sights on the Khrushchovs’ maid, a girl of 18, whose special attraction was the sleepy cast of her eyes. She herself was anything but sleepy. It is amusing to think what depraved devices of love play this modest-looking girl-named Gretchen or Hilda, I do not remember which—would think up when the door was locked and the practically naked light bulb, suspended by a long cord, illumined the photograph of her fiancé (a sturdy fellow in a Tirolese hat) and an apple from the masters’ table. These doings Smurov recounted in full detail, and not without a certain pride, to Weinstock, who abhorred indecent stories and would emit a strong eloquent “Pfui!” upon hearing something salacious. And that is why people were especially eager to tell him things of this nature.
Smurov would reach her room by the back stairs, and stay with her a long time. Apparently, Evgenia once noticed something—a quick scuttle at the end of the corridor, or muffled laughter behind the door—for she mentioned with irritation that Hilda (or Gretchen) had taken up with some fireman. During this outburst Smurov cleared his throat complacently a few times. The maid, casting down her charming dim eyes, would pass through the
dining room; slowly and carefully place a bowl of fruit and her breasts on the sideboard; sleepily pause to brush back a dim fair lock off her temple, and then somnambule back to the kitchen; and Smurov would rub his hands together as if about to deliver a speech, or smile in the wrong places during the general conversation. Weinstock would grimace and spit in disgust when Smurov dwelt on the pleasure of watching the prim servant maid at work when, such a short time ago, gently pattering with bare feet on the bare floor, he had been fox-trotting with the creamy-haunched wench in her narrow little room to the distant sound of a phonograph coming from the masters’ quarters: Mister Mukhin had brought back from London some really lovely records of moan-sweet Hawaiian dance music.
“You’re an adventurer,” Weinstock would say, “a Don Juan, a Casanova …” To himself, however, he undoubtedly called Smurov a double or triple agent and expected the little table within which fidgeted the ghost of Azef to yield important new revelations. This image of Smurov, though, interested me but little now: it was doomed to gradual fading owing to the absence of supporting evidence. The mystery of Smurov’s personality, of course, remained,
and one could imagine Weinstock, several years hence and in another city, mentioning, in passing, a strange man who had once worked as a salesman for him, and who now was God knows where. “Yes, a very odd character,” Weinstock will say pensively. “A man knit of incomplete intimations, a man with a secret hidden in him. He could ruin a girl … Who had sent him, and whom he was trailing, it is hard to say. Though I did learn from one reliable source … But then I don’t want to say anything.”
Much more entertaining was Gretchen’s (or Hilda’s) concept of Smurov. One day in January a new pair of silk stockings disappeared from Vanya’s wardrobe, whereupon everyone remembered a multitude of other petty losses: 70 pfennigs in change left on the table and huffed like a piece in checkers: a crystal powder box that “escaped from the Nes S. S. R.,” as Khrushchov punned; a silk handkerchief, much treasured for some reason (“Where on earth could I have put it?”). Then, one day, Smurov came wearing a bright-blue tie with a peacock sheen, and Khrushchov blinked and said that he used to have a tie just exactly
like that; Smurov grew absurdly embarrassed, and he never wore that tie again. But, of course, it did not enter anyone’s head that the silly goose had stolen the tie (she used to say, by the way, “A tie is a man’s best ornament”) and had given it, out of sheer mechanical habit, to her boyfriend of the moment—as Smurov bitterly informed Weinstock. Her undoing came when Evgenia happened to enter her room while she was out, and found in the dresser a collection of familiar articles resurrected from the dead. And so Gretchen (or Hilda) left for an unknown destination; Smurov tried to locate her but soon gave up and confessed to Weinstock that enough was enough. That evening Evgenia said she had learned some remarkable things from the janitor’s wife. “It was not a fireman, it was not a fireman at all,” said Evgenia, laughing, “but a foreign poet, isn’t that delightful? … This foreign poet had had a tragic love affair and a family estate the size of Germany, but he was forbidden to return home, really delightful, isn’t it? … It’s a pity the janitor’s wife didn’t ask what his name was—I’m sure he was Russian, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if it were someone who comes to see us … For
instance, that chap last year, you know whom I mean—the dark boy with the fatal charm, what was his name?”
“I know whom you have in mind,” Vanya put in. “That baron something or other.”
“Or maybe it was somebody else,” Evgenia went on. “Oh, that’s
so
delightful! A gentleman who was all soul, a ‘spiritual gentleman,’ says the janitor’s wife. I could die laughing …”
“I’ll make a point of taking all that down,” said Roman Bogdanovich in a juicy voice. “My friend in Tallin will get a most interesting letter.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of it?” asked Vanya. “I started keeping a diary several times but always dropped it. And when I read it over I was always ashamed of what I had put down.”
“Oh, no,” said Roman Bogdanovich. “If you do it thoroughly and regularly you get a good feeling, a feeling of self-preservation, so to speak—you preserve your entire life, and, in later years, rereading it, you may find it not devoid of fascination. For instance, I’ve done a description of you that would be the envy of any professional writer. A stroke here, a stroke there, and there it is—a complete portrait …”
“Oh, please show me!” said Vanya.
“I can’t,” Roman Bogdanovich answered with a smile.
“Then show it to Evgenia,” said Vanya.
“I can’t. I’d like to, but I can’t. My Tallin friend stores up my weekly contributions as they arrive, and I deliberately keep no copies so there will be no temptation to make changes ex post facto—to cross things out and so on. And one day, when Roman Bogdanovich is very old, Roman Bogdanovich will sit down at his desk and start rereading his life. That’s who I’m writing for—for the future old man with the Santa-Claus beard. And if I find that my life has been rich and worth while, then I shall leave this memoir as a lesson for posterity.”
“And if it’s all nonsense?” asked Vanya.
“What is nonsense to one may have sense for another,” replied Roman Bogdanovich rather sourly.
The thought of this epistolary diary had long interested and somewhat troubled me. Gradually the desire to read at least one excerpt became a violent torment, a constant preoccupation. I had no doubt that those jottings contained a description of Smurov. I knew that very often a trivial account of conversations,
and country rambles and one’s neighbor’s tulips or parrots, and what one had for lunch that overcast day when, for example, the king was beheaded—I knew that such trivial notes often live hundreds of years, and that one reads them with pleasure, for the savor of anciency, for the name of a dish, for the festive-looking spaciousness where now tall buildings crowd together. And, besides, it often happens that the diarist, who in his lifetime has gone unnoticed or had been ridiculed by forgotten nonentities, emerges 200 years later as a first-rate writer, who knew how to immortalize, with a striggle of his old-fashioned pen, an airy landscape, the smell of a stagecoach, or the oddities of an acquaintance. At the very thought that Smurov’s image might be so securely, so lastingly preserved I felt a sacred chill, I grew crazed with desire, and felt that I must at any cost interpose myself spectrally between Roman Bogdanovich and his friend in Tallin. Experience warned me, of course, that the particular image of Smurov, which was perhaps destined to live forever (to the delight of scholars), might be a shock to me; but the urge to gain possession of this secret, to see Smurov through the eyes of future centuries, was so bedazzling that no thought of disappointment
could frighten me. I feared only one thing—a lengthy and meticulous perlustration, since it was difficult to imagine that in the very first letter I intercepted, Roman Bogdanovich would start right off (like the voice, in full swing, that bursts upon your ears when you turn on the radio for a moment) with an eloquent report on Smurov.