The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (51 page)

During the May thunderstorm Graf descended to the most humiliating depths of transcendental cowardice. In the morning a break occurred in his mood. He considered the merry bright-blue sky, the arborescent designs of dark humidity crossing the drying asphalt, and realized that only one more month remained till the nineteenth of June. On that day he would be thirty-four. Land! But would he be able to swim that distance? Could he hold out?

He hoped he could. Zestfully, he decided to take extraordinary measures to protect his life from the claims of fate. He stopped going out. He did not shave. He pretended to be ill; his landlady took care of his meals, and through her Mr. Engel would transmit to him an
orange, a magazine, or laxative powder in a dainty little envelope. He smoked less and slept more. He worked out the crosswords in the émigré papers, breathed through his nose, and before going to bed was careful to spread a wet towel over his bedside rug in order to be at once awakened by its chill, if his body tried, in a somnambulistic trance, to sneak past the surveillance of thought.

Would he make it? June the first. June the second. June the third. On the tenth the neighbor inquired through the door if he was all right. The eleventh. The twelfth. The thirteenth. Like that world-famous Finnish runner who throws away, before the last lap, his nickel-plated watch which has helped him to compute his strong smooth course, so Graf, on seeing the end of the track, abruptly changed his mode of action. He shaved off his straw-colored beard, took a bath, and invited guests for the nineteenth.

He did not give in to the temptation of celebrating his birthday one day earlier, as slyly advised by the imps of the calendar (he was born in the previous century when there were twelve, not thirteen, days between the Old Style and the New, by which he lived now); but he did write to his mother in Pskov asking her to apprise him of the exact hour of his birth. Her reply, however, was rather evasive: “It happened at night. I remember being in great pain.”

The nineteenth dawned. All morning, his neighbor could be heard walking up and down in his room, displaying unusual agitation, and even running out into the corridor whenever the front-door bell rang, as if he awaited some message. Graf did not invite him to the evening party—they hardly knew each other after all—but he did ask the landlady, for Graf’s nature oddly united absentmindedness and calculation. In the late afternoon he went out, bought vodka, meat patties, smoked herring, black bread.… On his way home, as he was crossing the street, with the unruly provisions in his unsteady embrace, he noticed Mr. Engel illumined by the yellow sun, watching him from the balcony.

Around eight o’clock, at the very moment that Graf, after nicely laying the table, leaned out of the window, the following happened: at the corner of the street, where a small group of men had collected in front of the pub, loud angry cries rang out followed suddenly by the cracking of pistol shots. Graf had the impression that a stray bullet whistled past his face, almost smashing his glasses, and with an “
akh”
of terror, he drew back. From the hallway came the sound of the frontdoor bell. Trembling, Graf peeped out of his room, and simultaneously, Ivan Ivanovich Engel, in his canary-yellow dressing gown, swept
into the hallway. It was a messenger with the telegram he had been awaiting all day. Engel opened it eagerly—and beamed with joy.

“Was dort für Skandale?”
asked Graf, addressing the messenger, but the latter—baffled, no doubt, by his questioner’s bad German—did not understand, and when Graf, very cautiously, looked out of the window again, the sidewalk in front of the pub was empty, the janitors sat on chairs near their porches, and a bare-calved housemaid was walking a pinkish toy poodle.

At about nine all the guests were there—three Russians and the German landlady. She brought five liqueur glasses and a cake of her own making. She was an ill-formed woman in a rustling violet dress, with prominent cheekbones, a freckled neck, and the wig of a comedy mother-in-law. Graf’s gloomy friends, émigré men of letters, all of them elderly, ponderous people, with various ailments (the tale of which always comforted Graf), immediately got the landlady drunk, and got tight themselves without growing merrier. The conversation was, of course, conducted in Russian; the landlady did not understand a word of it, yet giggled, rolled in futile coquetry her poorly penciled eyes, and kept up a private soliloquy, but nobody listened to her. Graf every now and then consulted his wristwatch under the table, yearned for the nearest churchtower to strike midnight, drank orange juice, and took his pulse. By midnight the vodka gave out and the landlady, staggering and laughing her head off, fetched a bottle of cognac. “Well, your health,
staraya Morda”
(old fright), one of the guests coldly addressed her, and she naively, trustfully, clinked glasses with him, and then stretched toward another drinker, but he brushed her away.

At sunrise Grafitski said good-bye to his guests. On the little table in the hallway there lay, he noticed, now torn open and discarded, the telegram that had so delighted his neighbor. Graf abstractly read it:
“SOGLASEN PRODLENIE” (“EXTENSION AGREED
”), then he returned to his room, introduced some order, and, yawning, replete with a strange sense of boredom (as if he had planned the length of his life according to the prediction, and now had to start its construction all over again), sat down in an armchair and flipped through a dilapidated book (somebody’s birthday present)—a Russian anthology of good stories and puns, published in the Far East: “How’s your son, the poet?”—“He’s a sadist now.”—“Meaning?”—“He writes only sad distichs.” Gradually Graf dozed off in his chair and in his dream he saw Ivan Ivanovich Engel singing couplets in a garden of sorts and fanning his bright-yellow, curly-feathered wings, and when Graf woke up the lovely June sun was lighting little rainbows in the landlady’s liqueur glasses, and
everything was somehow soft and luminous and enigmatic—as if there was something he had not understood, not thought through to the end, and now it was already too late, another life had begun, the past had withered away, and death had quite, quite removed the meaningless memory, summoned by chance from the distant and humble home where it had been living out its obscure existence.

T
HE
sound of the waterfall grew more and more muffled, until it finally dissolved altogether, and we moved on through the wildwood of a hitherto unexplored region. We walked, and had been walking, for a long time already—in front, Gregson and I; our eight native porters behind, one after the other; last of all, whining and protesting at every step, came Cook. I knew that Gregson had recruited him on the advice of a local hunter. Cook had insisted that he was ready to do anything to get out of Zonraki, where they pass half the year brewing their
von-gho
and the other half drinking it. It remained unclear, however—or else I was already beginning to forget many things, as we walked on and on—exactly who this Cook was (a runaway sailor, perhaps?).

Gregson strode on beside me, sinewy, lanky, with bare, bony knees. He held a long-handled green butterfly net like a banner. The porters, big, glossy-brown Badonians with thick manes of hair and cobalt arabesques between their eyes, whom we had also engaged in Zonraki, walked with a strong, even step. Behind them straggled Cook, bloated, red-haired, with a drooping underlip, hands in pockets and carrying nothing. I recalled vaguely that at the outset of the expedition he had chattered a lot and made obscure jokes, in a manner he had, a mixture of insolence and servility, reminiscent of a Shakespearean clown; but soon his spirits fell and he grew glum and began to neglect his duties, which included interpreting, since Gregson’s understanding of the Badonian dialect was still poor.

There was something languorous and velvety about the heat. A stifling fragrance came from the inflorescences of
Vallieria mirifica
, mother-of-pearl in color and resembling clusters of soap bubbles, that arched across the narrow, dry streambed along which we proceeded. The branches of porphyroferous trees intertwined with those of the
black-leafed limia to form a tunnel, penetrated here and there by a ray of hazy light. Above, in the thick mass of vegetation, among brilliant pendulous racemes and strange dark tangles of some kind, hoary monkeys snapped and chattered, while a cometlike bird flashed like Bengal light, crying out in its small, shrill voice. I kept telling myself that my head was heavy from the long march, the heat, the medley of colors, and the forest din, but secretly I knew that I was ill. I surmised it to be the local fever. I had resolved, however, to conceal my condition from Gregson, and had assumed a cheerful, even merry air, when disaster struck.

“It’s my fault,” said Gregson. “I should never have got involved with him.”

We were now alone. Cook and all eight of the natives, with tent, folding boat, supplies, and collections, had deserted us and vanished noiselessly while we busied ourselves in the thick bush, chasing fascinating insects. I think we tried to catch up with the fugitives—I do not recall clearly, but, in any case, we failed. We had to decide whether to return to Zonraki or continue our projected itinerary, across as yet unknown country, toward the Gurano Hills. The unknown won out. We moved on. I was already shivering all over and deafened by quinine, but still went on collecting nameless plants, while Gregson, though fully realizing the danger of our situation, continued catching butterflies and diptera as avidly as ever.

We had scarcely walked half a mile when suddenly Cook overtook us. His shirt was torn—apparently by himself, deliberately—and he was panting and gasping. Without a word Gregson drew his revolver and prepared to shoot the scoundrel, but he threw himself at Gregson’s feet and, shielding his head with both arms, began to swear that the natives had led him away by force and had wanted to eat him (which was a lie, for the Badonians are not cannibals). I suspect that he had easily incited them, stupid and timorous as they were, to abandon the dubious journey, but had not taken into account that he could not keep up with their powerful stride and, having fallen hopelessly behind, had returned to us. Because of him invaluable collections were lost. He had to die. But Gregson put away the revolver and we moved on, with Cook wheezing and stumbling behind.

The woods were gradually thinning. I was tormented by strange hallucinations. I gazed at the weird tree trunks, around some of which were coiled thick, flesh-colored snakes; suddenly I thought I saw, between the trunks, as though through my fingers, the mirror of a half-open wardrobe with dim reflections, but then I took hold of myself, looked more carefully, and found that it was only the deceptive glimmer
of an acreana bush (a curly plant with large berries resembling plump prunes). After a while the trees parted altogether and the sky rose before us like a solid wall of blue. We were at the top of a steep incline. Below shimmered and steamed an enormous marsh, and, far beyond, one distinguished the tremulous silhouette of a mauve-colored range of hills.

“I swear to God we must turn back,” said Cook in a sobbing voice. “I swear to God we’ll perish in these swamps—I’ve got seven daughters and a dog at home. Let’s turn back—we know the way.…”

He wrung his hands, and the sweat rolled from his fat, red-browed face. “Home, home,” he kept repeating. “You’ve caught enough bugs. Let’s go home!”

Gregson and I began to descend the stony slope. At first Cook remained standing above, a small white figure against the monstrously green background of forest; but suddenly he threw up his hands, uttered a cry, and started to slither down after us.

The slope narrowed, forming a rocky crest that reached out like a long promontory into the marshes; they sparkled through the steamy haze. The noonday sky, now freed of its leafy veils, hung oppressively over us with its blinding darkness—yes, its blinding darkness, for there is no other way to describe it. I tried not to look up; but in this sky, at the very verge of my field of vision, there floated, always keeping up with me, whitish phantoms of plaster, stucco curlicues and rosettes, like those used to adorn European ceilings; however, I had only to look directly at them and they would vanish, and again the tropical sky would boom, as it were, with even, dense blueness. We were still walking along the rocky promontory, but it kept tapering and betraying us. Around it grew golden marsh reeds, like a million bared swords gleaming in the sun. Here and there flashed elongated pools, and over them hung dark swarms of midges. A large swamp flower, presumably an orchid, stretched toward me its drooping, downy lip, which seemed smeared with egg yolk. Gregson swung his net—and sank to his hips in the brocaded ooze as a gigantic swallowtail, with a flap of its satin wing, sailed away from him over the reeds, toward the shimmer of pale emanations where the indistinct folds of a window curtain seemed to hang. I
must not
, I said to myself, I
must not
.… I shifted my gaze and walked on beside Gregson, now over rock, now across hissing and lip-smacking soil. I felt chills, in spite of the greenhouse heat. I foresaw that in a moment I would collapse altogether, that the contours and convexities of delirium, showing through the sky and through the golden reeds, would gain complete control of my consciousness. At times Gregson and Cook seemed to grow transparent, and I thought I
saw, through them, wallpaper with an endlessly repeated design of reeds. I took hold of myself, strained to keep my eyes open, and moved on. Cook by now was crawling on all fours, yelling, and snatching at Gregson’s legs, but the latter would shake him off and keep walking. I looked at Gregson, at his stubborn profile, and felt, to my horror, that I was forgetting who Gregson was, and why I was with him.

Meanwhile we kept sinking into the ooze more and more frequently, deeper and deeper; the insatiable mire would suck at us; and, wriggling, we would slip free. Cook kept falling down and crawling, covered with insect bites, all swollen and soaked, and, dear God, how he would squeal when disgusting bevies of minute, bright-green hydrotic snakes, attracted by our sweat, would take off in pursuit of us, tensing and uncoiling to sail two yards and then another two. I, however, was much more frightened by something else: now and then, on my left (always, for some reason, on my left), listing among the repetitious reeds, what seemed a large armchair but was actually a strange, cumbersome gray amphibian, whose name Gregson refused to tell me, would rise out of the swamp.