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Vladimir Nabokov. "That in Aleppo Once..."
© 1943 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov
Dear V.-- Among other things, this is to tell you that at
last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have
led. One of the first persons I saw was our good old Gleb
Alexandrovich Gekko gloomily crossing Columbus Avenue in quest
of the petit cafe du coin which none of us three will
ever visit again. He seemed to think that somehow or other you
were betraying our national literature, and he gave me your
address with a deprecatory shake of his gray head, as if you
did not deserve the treat of hearing from me.
I have a story for you. Which reminds me-- I mean putting
it like this reminds me-- of the days when we wrote our first
udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a
lighted window, cried out to us: "I'm a rhyme!" Yes, this is a
most useful universe. We play, we die: ig-rhyme,
umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a
meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded
newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with
abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept
embankment. But just now I am not a poet. I come to you like
that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described.
I married, let me see, about a month after you left France
and a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris.
Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am
positive now that my wife never existed. You may know her name
from some other source, but that does not matter: it is the
name of an illusion. Therefore, I am able to speak of her with
as much detachment as I would of a character in a story (one of
your stories, to be precise).
It was love at first touch rather than at first sight, for
I had met her several times before without experiencing any
special emotions; but one night, as I was seeing her home,
something quaint she had said made me stoop with a laugh and
lightly kiss her on the hair-- and of course we all know of
that blinding blast which is caused by merely picking up a
small doll from the floor of a carefully abandoned house: the
soldier involved hears nothing; for him it is but an ecstatic
soundless and boundless expansion of what had been during his
life a pinpoint of light in the dark center of his being. And
really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that
the visible firmament, especially at night (above our
blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its boulevard
Exelmans and the ceaseless alpine gurgle of desolate latrines),
is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast
silent explosion.
But I cannot discern her. She remains as nebulous as my
best poem-- the one you made such gruesome fun of in the
Literatmnпe Zapiski. When I want to imagine her, I have
to cling mentally to a tiny brown birthmark on her downy
forearm, as one concentrates upon a punctuation mark in an
illegible sentence. Perhaps, had she used a greater amount of
make-up or used it more constantly, I might have visualized her
face today, or at least the delicate transverse furrows of dry,
hot rouged lips; but I fail, I fail-- although I still feel
their elusive touch now and then in the blindman's buff of my
senses, in that sobbing sort of dream when she and I clumsily
clutch at each other through a heartbreaking mist and I cannot
see the color of her eyes for the blank luster of brimming
tears drowning their irises.
She was much younger than I-- not as much younger as was
Nathalie of the lovely bare shoulders and long earrings in
relation to swarthy Pushkin; but still there was a sufficient
margin for that kind of retrospective romanticism which finds
pleasure in imitating the destiny of a unique genius (down to
the jealousy, down to the filth, down to the stab of seeing her
almond-shaped eyes turn to her blond Cassio behind her
peacock-feathered fan) even if one cannot imitate his verse.
She liked mine though, and would scarcely have yawned as the
other was wont to do every time her husband's poem happened to
exceed the length of a sonnet. If she has remained a phantom to
me, I may have been one to her: I suppose she had been solely
attracted by the obscurity of my poetry; then tore a hole
through its veil and saw a stranger's unlovable face.
As you know, I had been for some time planning to follow
the example of your fortunate flight. She described to me an
uncle of hers who lived, she said, in New York: he had taught
riding at a southern college and had wound up by marrying a
wealthy American woman; they had a little daughter born deaf.
She said she had lost their address long ago, but a few days
later it miraculously turned up, and we wrote a dramatic letter
to which we never received any reply. This did not much matter,
as I had already obtained a sound affidavit from Professor
Lornchenko of Chicago; but little else had been done in the way
of getting the necessary papers, when the invasion began,
whereas I foresaw that if we stayed on in Paris some helpful
compatriot of mine would sooner or later point out to the
interested party sundry passages in one of my books where I
argued that, with all her many black sins, Germany was still
bound to remain forever and ever the laughingstock of the
world.
So we started upon our disastrous honeymoon. Crushed and
jolted amid the apocalyptic exodus, waiting for unscheduled
trains that were bound for unknown destinations, walking
through the stale stage setting of abstract towns, living in a
permanent twilight of physical exhaustion, we fled; and the
farther we fled, the clearer it became that what was driving us
on was something more than a booted and buckled fool with his
assortment of variously propelled junk-- something of which he
was a mere symbol, something monstrous and impalpable, a
timeless and faceless mass of immemorial horror that still
keeps coming at me from behind even here, in the green vacuum
of Central Park.
Oh, she bore it gamely enough-- with a kind of dazed
cheerfulness. Once, however, quite suddenly she started to sob
in a sympathetic railway carriage. "The dog," she said, "the
dog we left. I cannot forget the poor dog."' The honesty other
grief shocked me, as we had never had any dog. "I know, '" she
said, "but I tried to imagine we had actually bought that
setter. And just think, he would be now whining behind a locked
door." There had never been any talk of buying a setter.
I should also not like to forget a certain stretch of
highroad and the sight of a family of refugees (two women, a
child) whose old father, or grandfather, had died on the way.
The sky was a chaos of black and flesh-colored clouds with an
ugly sunburst beyond a hooded hill, and the dead man was lying
on his back under a dusty plane tree. With a stick and their
hands the women had tried to dig a roadside grave, but the soil
was too hard; they had given it up and were sitting side by
side, among the anйmie poppies, a little apart from the corpse
and its upturned beard. But the little boy was still scratching
and scraping and tugging until he tumbled a flat stone and
forgot the object of his solemn exertions as he crouched on his
haunches, his thin, eloquent neck showing all its vertebrae to
the headsman, and watched with surprise and delight thousands
of minute brown ants seething, zigzagging, dispersing, heading
for places of safety in the Gard, and the Aude, and the Drome,
and the Var, and the Basses-Pyrenees-- we two paused only in
Pau.
Spain proved too difficult and we decided to move on to
Nice. At a place called Faugeres (a ten-minute stop) I squeezed
out of the train to buy some food. When a couple of minutes
later I came back, the train was gone, and the muddled old man
responsible for the atrocious void that faced me (coal dust
glittering in the heat between naked indifferent rails, and a
lone piece of orange peel) brutally told me that, anyway, I had
had no right to get out.
In a better world I could have had my wife located and
told what to do (I had both tickets and most of the money); as
it was, my nightmare struggle with the telephone proved futile,
so I dismissed the whole series of diminutive voices barking at
me from afar, sent two or three telegrams which are probably on
their way only now, and late in the evening took the next local
to Montpellier, farther than which her train would not stumble.
Not finding her there, I had to choose between two
alternatives: going on because she might have boarded the
Marseilles train which I had just missed, or going back because
she might have returned to Faugeres. I forget now what tangle
of reasoning led me to Marseilles and Nice.
Beyond such routine action as forwarding false data to a
few unlikely places, the police did nothing to help: one man
bellowed at me for being a nuisance; another sidetracked the
question by doubting the authenticity of my marriage
certificate because it was stamped on what he contended to be
the wrong side; a third, a fat commissaire with liquid
brown eyes, confessed that he wrote poetry in his spare time. I
looked up various acquaintances among the numerous Russians
domiciled or stranded in Nice. I heard those among them who
chanced to have Jewish blood talk of their doomed kinsmen
crammed into hell-bound trains; and my own plight, by contrast,
acquired a commonplace air of irreality while I sat in some
crowded cafe with the milky blue sea in front of me and a
shell-hollow murmur behind telling and retelling the tale of
massacre and misery, and the gray paradise beyond the ocean,
and the ways and whims of harsh consuls.
A week after my arrival an indolent plainclothesman called
upon me and took me down a crooked and smelly street to a
black-stained house with the word "hotel" almost erased by dirt
and time; there, he said, my wife had been found. The girl he
produced was an absolute stranger, of course; but my friend
Holmes kept on trying for some time to make her and me confess
we were married, while her taciturn and muscular bedfellow
stood by and listened, his bare arms crossed on his striped
chest.
When at length I got rid of those people and had wandered
back to my neighborhood, I happened to pass by a compact queue
waiting at the entrance of a food store; and there, at the very
end, was my wife, straining on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of
what exactly was being sold. I think the first thing she said
to me was that she hoped it was oranges.
Her tale seemed a trifle hazy, but perfectly banal. She
had returned to Faugeres and gone straight to the Commissariat
instead of making inquiries at the station, where I had left a
message for her. A party of refugees suggested that she join
them; she spent the night in a bicycle shop with no bicycles,
on the floor, together with three elderly women who lay, she
said, like three logs in a row. Next day she realized that she
had not enough money to reach Nice. Eventually she borrowed
some from one of the log-women. She got into the wrong train,
however, and traveled to a town the name of which she could not
remember. She had arrived at Nice two days ago and had found
some friends at the Russian church. They had told her I was
somewhere around, looking for her, and would surely turn up
soon.
Some time later, as I sat on the edge of the only chair in
my garret and held her by her slender young hips (she was
combing her soft hair and tossing her head back with every
stroke), her dim smile changed all at once into an odd quiver
and she placed one hand on my shoulder, staring down at me as
if I were a reflection in a pool, which she had noticed for the
first time.
"I've been lying to you, dear," she said. "Ya
lgunia. I stayed for several nights in Montpellier with
a brute of a man I met on the train. I did not want it at all.
He sold hair lotions." The time, the place, the torture.
Her fan, her gloves, her mask. I spent that night and many
others getting it out of her bit by bit, but not getting it
all. I was under the strange delusion that first I must find
out every detail, reconstruct every minute, and only then
decide whether I could bear it. But the limit of desired
knowledge was unattainable, nor could I ever foretell the
approximate point after which I might imagine myself satiated,
because of course the denominator of every fraction of
knowledge was potentially as infinite as the number of
intervals between the fractions themselves.
Oh, the first time she had been too tired to mind, and the
next had not minded because she was sure I had deserted her;
and she apparently considered that such explanations ought to
be a kind of consolation prize for me instead of the nonsense
and agony they really were. It went on like that for eons, she
breaking down every now and then, but soon rallying again,
answering my unprintable questions in a breathless whisper or
trying with a pitiful smile to wriggle into the semisecurity of
irrelevant commentaries, and I crushing and crushing the mad
molar till my jaw almost burst with pain, a flaming pain which
seemed somehow preferable to the dull, humming ache of humble
endurance.
And mark, in between the periods of this inquest, we were
trying to get from reluctant authorities certain papers which
in their turn would make it lawful to apply for a third kind
which would serve as a stepping-stone toward a permit enabling
the holder to apply for yet other papers which might or might
not give him the means of discovering how and why it had
happened. For even if I could imagine the accursed recurrent
scene, I failed to link up its sharp-angled grotesque shadows
with the dim limbs of my wife as she shook and rattled and
dissolved in my violent grasp.
So nothing remained but to torture each other, to wait for
hours on end in the Prefecture, filling forms, conferring with
friends who had already probed the innermost viscera of all
visas, pleading with secretaries, and filling forms again, with
the result that her lusty and versatile traveling salesman
became blended in a ghastly mix-up with rat-whiskered snarling
officials, rotting bundles of obsolete records, the reek of
violet ink, bribes slipped under gangrenous blotting paper, fat
flies tickling moist necks with their rapid cold padded feet,
new-laid clumsy concave photographs of your six subhuman
doubles, the tragic eyes and patient politeness of petitioners
born in Slutzk, Starodub, or Bobruisk, the funnels and pulleys
of the Holy Inquisition, the awful smile of the bald man with
the glasses, who had been told that his passport could not be
found.
I confess that one evening, after a particularly
abominable day, I sank down on a stone bench weeping and
cursing a mock world where millions of lives were being juggled
by the clammy hands of consuls and commissaires. I
noticed she was crying too, and then I told her that nothing
would really have mattered the way it mattered now, had she not
gone and done what she did.
"You will think me crazy," she said with a vehemence that,
for a second, almost made a real person of her, "but I didn't--
1 swear that I didn't. Perhaps I Jive several lives at once.
Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps this bench is a dream and
we are in Saratov or on some star."
It would be tedious to niggle the different stages through
which I passed before accepting finally the first version of
her delay. I did not talk to her and was a good deal alone. She
would glimmer and fade, and reappear with some trifle she
thought I would appreciate-- a handful of cherries, three
precious cigarettes, or the like-- treating me with the
unruffled mute sweetness of a nurse that trips from and to a
gruff convalescent. I ceased visiting most of our mutual
friends because they had lost all interest in my passport
affairs and seemed to have turned vaguely inimical. I composed
several poems. I drank all the wine I could get. I clasped her
one day to my groaning breast, and we went for a week to
Caboule and lay on the round pink pebbles of the narrow beach.
Strange to say, the happier our new relations seemed, the
stronger I felt an undercurrent of poignant sadness, but I kept
telling myself that this was an intrinsic feature of all true
bliss.
In the meantime, something had shifted in the moving
pattern of our fates and at last I emerged from a dark and hot
office with a couple of plump visas de sortie cupped in
my trembling hands. Into these the U. S. A. serum was duly
injected, and I dashed to Marseilles and managed to get tickets
for the very next boat. I returned and tramped up the stairs. I
saw a rose in a glass on the table-- the sugar pink of its
obvious beauty, the parasitic air bubbles clinging to its stem.
Her two spare dresses were gone, her comb was gone, her
checkered coat was gone, and so was the mauve hairband with a
mauve bow that had been her hat. There was no note pinned to
the pillow, nothing at all in the room to enlighten me, for of
course the rose was merely what French rhymesters call une
cheville. I went to the Veretennikovs, who could tell me
nothing; to the Hellmans, who refused to say anything; and to
the Elagins, who were not sure whether to tell me or not.
Finally the old lady-- and you know what Anna Vladimirovna is
like at crucial moments-- asked for her rubber-tipped cane,
heavily but energetically dislodged her bulk from her favorite
armchair, and took me into the garden. There she informed me
that, being twice my age, she had the right to say I was a
bully and a cad.
You must imagine the scene: the tiny graveled garden with
its blue Arabian Nights jar and solitary cypress; the cracked
terrace where the old lady's father had dozed with a rug on his
knees when he retired from his Novgorod governorship to spend a
few last evenings in Nice; the pale-green sky; a whiff of
vanilla in the deepening dusk; the crickets emitting their
metallic trill pitched at two octaves above middle C; and Anna
Vladimirovna, the folds of her cheeks jerkily dangling as she
flung at me a motherly but quite undeserved insult.
During several preceding weeks, my dear V., every time she
had visited by herself the three or four families we both knew,
my ghostly wife had filled the eager ears of all those kind
people with an extraordinary story. To wit: that she had madly
fallen in love with a young Frenchman who could give her a
turreted home and a crested name; that she had implored me for
a divorce and I had refused; that in fact I had said I would
rather shoot her and myself than sail to New York alone; that
she had said her father in a similar case had acted like a
gentleman; that I had answered I did not give a hoot for her
cocu de pиre. There were loads of other preposterous
details of the kind-- but they all hung together in such a
remarkable fashion that no wonder the old lady made me swear I
would not seek to pursue the lovers with a cocked pistol. They
had gone, she said, to a chвteau in Lozиre. I inquired whether
she had ever set eyes upon the man. No, but she had been shown
his picture. As I was about to leave, Anna Vladimirovna, who
had slightly relaxed and had even given me her five fingers to
kiss, suddenly flared up again, struck the gravel with her
cane, and said in her deep strong voice: "But one thing I shall
never forgive you-- her dog, that poor beast which you hanged
with your own hands before leaving Paris. '"
Whether the gentleman of leisure had changed into a
traveling salesman, or whether the metamorphosis had been
reversed, or whether again he was neither the one nor the
other, but the nondescript Russian who had courted her before
our marriage-- all this was absolutely inessential. She had
gone. That was the end. I should have been a fool had I begun
the nightmare business of searching and waiting for her all
over again.
On the fourth morning of a long and dismal sea voyage, I
met on the deck a solemn but pleasant old doctor with whom I
had played chess in Paris. He asked me whether my wife was very
much incommoded by the rough seas. I answered that I had sailed
alone; whereupon he looked taken aback and then said he had
seen her a couple of days before going on board, namely in
Marseilles, walking, rather aimlessly he thought, along the
embankment. She said that I would presently join her with bag
and tickets.
This is, I gather, the point of the whole story-- although
if you write it, you had better not make him a doctor, as that
kind of thing has been overdone. It was at that moment that I
suddenly knew for certain that she had never existed at all. I
shall tell you another thing. When I arrived I hastened to
satisfy a certain morbid curiosity: I went to the address she
had given me once; it proved to be an anonymous gap between two
office buildings; I looked for her uncle's name in the
directory; it was not there; I made some inquiries, and Gekko,
who knows everything, informed me that the man and his horsey
wife existed all right, but had moved to San Francisco after
their deaf little girl had died.
Viewing the past graphically, I see our mangled romance
engulfed in a deep valley of mist between the crags of two
matter-of-fact mountains: life had been real before, life will
be real from now on, I hope. Not tomorrow, though. Perhaps
after tomorrow. You, happy mortal, with your lovely family (how
is Inиs? how are the twins?) and your diversified work (how are
the lichens?), can hardly be expected to puzzle out my
misfortune in terms of human communion, bur you may clarify
things for me through the prism of your art. Yet the pity
of it. Curse your art, I am hideously unhappy. She keeps on
walking to and fro where the brown nets are spread to dry on
the hot stone slabs and the dappled light of the water plays on
the side of a moored fishing boat. Somewhere, somehow, I have
made some fatal mistake. There are tiny pale bits of broken
fish scales glistening here and there in the brown meshes. It
may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V.:
you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you
took that for a title.
Last-modified: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 11:00:58 GMT
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