The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (90 page)

“In that case,” said Falter, shaking again in soundless mirth, “I understand you even less. Skip the preface, and it’s in the bag!”

“Un bon mouvement
, Falter—tell me your secret.”

“What are you trying to do, catch me off guard? You’re crafty, I see. No, that is out of the question. In the first days—yes, in the first days I thought it might be possible to share my secret. A grown man, unless he is a bull like me, would not stand it—all right; but I wondered if one could not bring up a new generation of the
initiated
, that is, turn my attention to children. As you see, I did not immediately overcome the infection of local dialects. In practice, however, what would happen? In the first place, one can hardly imagine pledging kiddies to a vow of priestly silence lest any of them with one dreamy word commit manslaughter. In the second place, as soon as the child grows up, the information once imparted to him, accepted on faith, and allowed to sleep in a remote corner of his consciousness may give a start and awake, with tragic consequences. Even if my secret does not always destroy a mature member of the species, it is unthinkable that it should spare a youth. For who is not familiar with that period of life when all kinds of things—the starry sky above a Caucasian spa, a book read in the toilet, one’s own conjectures about the cosmos, the delicious panic of solipsism—are in themselves enough to provoke a frenzy in all the senses of an adolescent human being? There is no reason for me to become an executioner; I have no intention of annihilating enemy regiments through a megaphone; in short, there is no one for me to confide in.”

“I asked you two questions, Falter, and you have twice proved to me the impossibility of an answer. It seems to me useless to ask you about anything else—say, about the limits of the universe, or the origin of life. You would probably suggest that I be content with a speckled minute on a second-rate planet, served by a second-rate sun, or else you would again reduce everything to a riddle: is the word ‘heterologous’ heterologous itself.”

“Probably,” agreed Falter, giving a lengthy yawn.

His brother-in-law quietly scooped his watch out of his waistcoat and glanced at his wife.

“Here’s the odd thing, though, Falter. How does superhuman knowledge of the ultimate truth combine in you with the adroitness of a banal sophist who knows nothing? Admit it, all your absurd quibbling was nothing more than an elaborate sneer.”

“Oh well, that is my only defense,” said Falter, squinting at his sister, who was nimbly extracting a long gray woolen scarf from the sleeve of the overcoat already being offered to him by his brother-in-law. “Otherwise, you know, you might have teased it out of me. However,” he added, inserting the wrong arm, and then the right one in the sleeve, and simultaneously moving away from the helping shoves of his assistants, “however, even if I did browbeat you a little, let me console you: amid all the piffle and prate I inadvertently gave myself away—only two or three words, but in them flashed a fringe of absolute insight—luckily, though, you paid no attention.”

He was led away, and thus ended our rather diabolical dialogue. Not only had Falter told me nothing, he had not even allowed me to get close, and no doubt his last pronouncement was as much of a mockery as all the preceding ones. The following day his brother-in-law’s dull voice informed me on the telephone that Falter charged 100 francs for a visit; I asked why on earth had I not been warned of this, and he promptly replied that if the interview were to be repeated, two conversations would cost me only 150. The purchase of Truth, even at a discount, did not tempt me, and, after sending him the sum of that unexpected debt, I forced myself not to think about Falter any more. Yesterday, though.… Yes, yesterday I received a note from Falter himself, from the hospital: he wrote, in a clear hand, that he would die on Tuesday, and that in parting he ventured to inform me that—here followed two lines which had been painstakingly and, it seemed, ironically, blacked out. I replied that I was grateful for his thoughtfulness and that I wished him interesting posthumous impressions and a pleasant eternity.

But all this brings me no nearer to you, my angel. Just in case, I am keeping all the windows and doors of life wide open, even though I sense that you will not condescend to the time-honored ways of apparitions. Most terrifying of all is the thought that, inasmuch as you glow henceforth within me, I must safeguard my life. My transitory bodily frame is perhaps the only guarantee of your ideal existence: when I vanish, it will vanish as well. Alas, with a pauper’s passion I am doomed to use physical nature in order to finish recounting you to myself, and then to rely on my own ellipsis.…

A
S ALWAYS
happened, the king was awakened by the clash between the predawn watch and the midmorning one
(morndammer wagh
and
erldag wagh)
. The former, unduly punctual, would leave its post at the prescribed minute, while the latter would be late by a constant number of seconds, not because of negligence, but probably because somebody’s gouty timepiece was habitually slow. Therefore those departing and those arriving always met at one and the same place—the narrow footpath directly under the king’s bedroom window, between the rear wall of the palace and a tangled growth of dense but meagerly blooming honeysuckle, under which was scattered all manner of trash: chicken feathers, broken earthenware, and large, red-cheeked tin cans that had contained “Pomona,” a national brand of preserved fruit. The meeting would invariably be accompanied by the muffled sound of a brief, good-natured tussle (and it was this that awakened the king), as one of the predawn sentries, being of a roguish bent, would pretend he did not want to surrender the slate bearing the password to one of the midmorning men, an irritable and stupid old codger, veteran of the Swirhulm campaign. Then all would grow still again, and the only audible sound would be the businesslike, now and then accelerating, crepitation of rain, which would systematically fall for precisely 306 days out of 365 or -6, so that the weather’s peripeties had long since ceased to trouble anyone (here the wind addressed the honeysuckle).

The king made a right turn out of his sleep and propped a big white fist under his cheek, on which the blazon embroidered on the pillowcase had left a chessboard impression. Between the inside edges of the brown, loosely drawn curtains, in the single but broad window, there seeped a beam of soapy light, and the king at once remembered an imminent duty (his presence at the inauguration of a new bridge
across the Egel) whose disagreeable image seemed inscribed with geometric inevitability into that pale trigon of day. He was not interested in bridges, canals, or shipbuilding, and even though after five years—yes, exactly five years (826 days)—of nebulous reign he really ought to have acquired the habit of attending diligently to a multitude of matters that filled him with loathing because of their organic sketchiness in his mind (where very different things, in no way related to his royal office, were infinitely and unquenchably perfect), he felt depressingly aggravated every time he was obliged to have contact not only with anything that demanded a false smile from his deliberate ignorance, but also with that which was nothing more than a veneer of conventional standards on a senseless or perhaps even nonexistent object. If the inauguration of the bridge, the plans for which he did not even remember though he had no doubt approved them, struck him as merely a vulgar festival, it was also because nobody ever bothered to inquire whether he was interested in that intricate fruit of technology, suspended in midair, and yet today he would have to ride slowly across in a lustrous convertible with a toothy grille, and this was torture; and then there was that other engineer about whom people had been telling him ever since he had happened to mention (just like that, simply to get rid of someone or something) that he would enjoy doing some climbing, if only the island had a single decent mountain (the old, long-dead coastal volcano did not count, and, furthermore, a lighthouse—which, incidentally, did not work either—had been built on its summit). This engineer, whose dubious fame thrived in the drawing rooms of court ladies and courtesans, attracted by his honey-brown complexion and insinuating speech, had proposed elevating the central part of the insular plain and transforming it into a mountain massif, by means of subterranean inflation. The inhabitants of the chosen locality would be allowed to remain in their dwellings while the soil was being puffed up. Poltroons who preferred to withdraw from the test area where their little brick houses huddled and amazed red cows mooed, sensing the change in altitude, would be punished by their having to spend much more time on their return along the newly formed escarpments than they had on their recent retreat over the doomed flatland. Slowly the meadows swelled; boulders moved their round backs; a lethargic stream tumbled out of bed and, to its own surprise, turned into an alpine waterfall; trees traveled in file cloudward and many of them (the firs, for instance) enjoyed the ride; the villagers, leaning on their porch railings, waved their handkerchiefs and admired the pneumatic development of landscape. So the mountain would grow and grow, until the engineer ordered that the monstrous pumps be stopped. The
king, however, did not wait for the stoppage, but dozed off again, with barely time to regret that, constantly resisting as he did the Councilors’ readiness to support the realization of every harebrained scheme (while, on the other hand, his most natural, most human rights were constricted by rigid laws), he had not given permission for the experiment, and now it was too late, the inventor had committed suicide after patenting a gallow tree for indoor use (thus, anyway, the spirit of slumber retold it to the slumberer).

The king slept on till half past seven and, at the habitual minute, his mind jolted into action and was already on its way to meet Frey when Frey entered the bedroom. That decrepit, asthmatic
konwacher
invariably emitted in motion a queer supplementary sound, as if he were in a great hurry, although haste was apparently not in his line, seeing he had not yet got around to dying. He lowered a silver basin onto a taboret with a heart design cut out in its seat, as he had already been doing for half a century, under two kings; today he was waking a third, for whose predecessors this vanilla-scented and seemingly witch-charmed water had probably served an ablutionary purpose. Now, however, it was quite superfluous; and yet every morning the basin and taboret appeared, along with a towel that had been folded five years before. Continuing to emit his special sound, the old valet admitted the daylight in its entirety. The king always wondered why Frey did not open the curtains first, instead of groping in the penumbra to move the taboret with its useless utensil toward the bed. But speaking to Frey was out of the question because of his deafness, that went so well with the snow-owl white of his hair: he was cut off from the world by the cotton wool of old age, and, as he went out with a bow to the bed, the wall clock in the bedroom began to ticktack more distinctly, as if it had been given a recharge of time.

The bedroom now came into focus, with the dragon-shaped crack traversing its ceiling and the huge clothes tree standing like an oak in the corner. An admirable ironing board stood leaning against the wall. A thing for yanking one’s riding boot off by the heel, an obsolete appliance in the shape of a huge cast-iron stag beetle, lurked under the border of an armchair robed in a white furniture cover. An oak wardrobe, obese, blind, and drugged by naphthalene, stood next to an ovoid wickerwork receptacle for soiled linen, set on end there by some unknown Columbus. Various objects hung at random on the bluish walls: a clock (it had already tattled about its presence), a medicine cabinet, an old barometer that indicated remembered rather than real weather, a pencil sketch of a lake with reeds and a departing duck, a myopic photograph of a leather-legginged gentleman astride a blurrytailed
horse held by a solemn groom in front of a porch, the same porch with strained-faced servants assembled on its steps, some fluffy flowers pressed under dusty glass in a circular frame.… The paucity of the furnishings and their utter irrelevance to the needs and the tenderness of whoever used this spacious bedroom (once, it seems, inhabited by the
Husmuder
, as the wife of the preceding king had been dubbed) gave it an oddly untenanted appearance, and if it were not for the intrusive basin and the iron bed, on the edge of which sat a man in a nightshirt with a frilly collar, his strong bare feet resting upon the floor, it was impossible to imagine that anyone spent his nights here. His toes groped for and found a pair of morocco slippers and, donning a dressing gown as gray as the morning, the king walked across the creaking floorboards to the felt-padded door. When he subsequently recalled that morning, it seemed to him that, upon arising, he had experienced, both in mind and in muscles, an unaccustomed heaviness, the fateful burden of the coming day, so that the awful misfortune which that day brought (and which beneath the mask of trivial boredom stood
already
on guard at the Egel bridge), absurd and unforeseeable as it was, thereafter seemed to him a kind of resolvent. We are inclined to attribute to the immediate past (I just had it in my hands, I put it right there, and now it’s not there) lineaments relating it to the unexpected present, which in fact is but a bounder pluming himself on a purchased escutcheon. We, the slaves of linked events, endeavor to close the gap with a spectral ring in the chain. As we look back, we feel certain that the road we see behind us is the very one that has brought us to the tomb or the fountainhead near which we find ourselves. Life’s erratic leaps and lapses can be endured by the mind only when signs of resilience and quagginess are discoverable in anterior events. Such, incidentally, were the thoughts that occurred to the no longer independent artist Dmitri Nikolaevich Sineusov, and evening had come, and in vertically arranged ruby letters glowed the word
RENAULT
.