Âëàäèìèð Íàáîêîâ. Ñìîòðè íà Àðëåêèíîâ (engl)

Vladimir Nabokov. Look at the Harlequins!

             McGraw-Hill, NY, 1974.


            * * *

            To Vèra

Look at the Harlequins!

     <1>



I. Other books by the narrator

     In Russian:

     Tamara 1925
     Pawn Takes Queen 1927
     Plenilune 1929
     Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) 1931
     The Red Top Hat 1934
     The Dare 1950

     In English:

     See under Real 1939
     Esmeralda and Her Parandrus 1941
     Dr. Olga Repnin 1946
     Exile from Mayda 1947
     A Kingdom by the Sea 1962
     Ardis 1970

     <2>


PART ONE

1

     I met the first of my three or  four successive  wives in  somewhat odd
circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy  conspiracy, with
nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real
object but  insisted  on  making  inept  moves  that seemed to  preclude the
slightest  possibility  of  success.  Yet  out  of  those  very  mistakes he
unwittingly wove a  web, in which a  set of  reciprocal  blunders on my part
caused me to get involved and fulfill the  destiny that was the only  aim of
the plot.
     Some time during  the  Easter Term of  my  last Cambridge year (1922) I
happened to be consulted,  "as a Russian," on certain niceties of make-up in
an English  version of Gogol's Inspector  which the Glowworm Group, directed
by Ivor Black, a  fine  amateur actor, intended to  stage. He and I had  the
same tutor  at  Trinity, and he  drove me  to  distraction  with his tedious
miming of  the old man's mincing ways--a performance  he  kept up throughout
most of our lunch at the Pitt. The brief business part turned out to be even
less pleasant. Ivor Black wanted Gogol's Town Mayor to wear a dressing  gown
because "wasn't it merely the old rascal's nightmare and didn't Revizor, its
Russian <3> title, actually come from the French for `dream,'  réve?" I said
I thought it a ghastly idea.
     If there were any  rehearsals, they took  place without me. In fact, it
occurs to me  now that I  do  not really  know if  his project  ever saw the
footlights.
     Shortly after that, I met Ivor  Black a  second time--at some  party or
other, in  the course of which he invited me and five other men to spend the
summer at a Còte d'Azur  villa he had  just inherited, he said, from  an old
aunt. He was very drunk at the moment and seemed surprised when a week or so
later  on  the  eve  of  his departure  I  reminded  him  of  his  exuberant
invitation,  which,  it so  happened, I  alone  had accepted.  We both  were
unpopular orphans, and should, I remarked, band together.
     Illness detained me in England for another month and it was only at the
beginning of July that I sent Ivor Black a polite postcard advising him that
I  might arrive in Cannes or Nice some time next week. I am virtually sure I
mentioned Saturday afternoon as the likeliest date.
     Attempts to telephone from the station proved futile: the line remained
busy, and I am not one  to persevere in a struggle  with faulty abstractions
of space.  But my afternoon was poisoned, and the afternoon  is my  favorite
item  of time. I had been  coaxing myself into believing, at the start of my
long  journey,  that I felt fairly fit; by now I  felt terrible. The day was
unseasonably  dull and  damp.  Palm trees are all right only in mirages. For
some reason, taxis, as in a bad dream, were unobtainable. Finally I  boarded
a small smelly bus  of blue  tin. Up a winding  road, with as  many turns as
"stops  by  request,"  the  contraption  reached  my destination  in  twenty
minutes--about as long as it would  have taken me to get there on foot  from
the  coast by using an easy shortcut that I was to  learn by heart, stone by
stone,  broom  by brush, in  the  course  of that magic  summer. It appeared
anything but magic during that dismal drive! The main reason I had agreed to
come  was  <4>  the  hope  of  treating  in  the "brillant  brine" (Bennett?
Barbellion?) a nervous complaint that skirted insanity. The  left side of my
head was now a bowling  alley  of pain. On the other side  an inane baby was
staring at me across its mother's  shoulder  over  the  back of the seat  in
front  of me. I  sat next to  a warty woman in solid black and pitted nausea
against  the lurches between green sea  and gray  rockwall. By  the time  we
finally  made  it  to  the  village  of  Carnavaux  (mottled  plane  trunks,
picturesque hovels,  a  post office, a church)  all my  senses had converged
into one golden image; the bottle of whisky which  I was bringing Ivor in my
portmanteau  and  which  I swore to  sample even before he  glimpsed it. The
driver ignored the  question I put to him, but a tortoise-like little priest
with  tremendous  feet who  was getting off  before  me  indicated,  without
looking at me, a transverse  avenue. The  Villa Iris, he said, was at  three
minutes of march. As I prepared to carry  my two bags up that  lane toward a
triangle  of  sudden sunlight my presumptive host  appeared on the  opposite
pavement. I remember--after the passing of half a  century!--that I wondered
fleetingly if I had packed the right clothes. He wore plus fours and brogues
but  was incongruously stockingless,  and the  inch of shin he showed looked
painfully pink.  He was heading,  or feigned to  be  heading, for  the  post
office to send me a telegram suggesting I put off  my visit till August when
a job he now had in Cannice would  no longer threaten to  interfere with our
frolics.  He  hoped, furthermore,  that Sebastian--whoever  that  was--might
still be coming for the grape  season or lavender gala. Muttering thus under
his  breath, he relieved  me  of the smaller  of my bags--the one  with  the
toilet things,  medical supplies, and an  almost finished garland of sonnets
(which would eventually go to  a Russian èmigrè magazine in  Paris). Then he
also grabbed my portmanteau that I had set  down  in order to fill  my pipe.
Such lavishness in the registration  of  trivialities  is due, I suppose, to
their being accidentally caught <5>  in the advance light of a  great event.
Ivor broke the silence to add, frowning, that he was delighted to welcome me
as  a house guest, but that he should warn me of something he ought  to have
told me about  in Cambridge. I might get  frightfully bored by  the end of a
week or so because of one melancholy fact. Miss Grunt, his former governess,
a heartless but clever  person, liked to repeat that his little sister would
never  break  the rule of "children  should not  be heard" and, indeed would
never hear it said to anybody. The melancholy fact was that his sister--but,
perhaps, he had better postpone the explanation of her case till  we and the
bags were installed more or less. <6>

2

     "What kind of  childhood did  you have,  McNab" (as  Ivor  insisted  on
calling me because I looked, he thought, like the haggard yet handsome young
actor who adopted that name in the last years of his life or at least fame)?
     Atrocious, intolerable. There  should  be a  natural, internatural, law
against such inhuman beginnings. Had my morbid terrors not been  replaced at
the age of  nine  or ten by more abstract and trite anxieties  (problems  of
infinity, eternity, identity, and so forth),  I  would  have  lost my reason
long before  finding  my  rhymes.  It was  not  a  matter of dark rooms,  or
one-winged agonizing angels, or long  corridors,  or  nightmare mirrors with
reflections  overflowing  in  messy  pools  on  the floor--it was  not  that
bedchamber  of  horrors,  but  simply,  and far  more  horribly,  a  certain
insidious and relentless connection  with other states  of being which  were
not exactly "previous" or  "future,"  but definitely out of bounds, mortally
speaking. I was  to  learn  more, much  more  about those aching  links only
several decades later, so "let us not anticipate" as the condemned  man said
when rejecting the filthy old blindfold.
     The  delights of puberty granted me temporary relief. I was spared  the
morose phase of self-initiation. Blest be my first sweet love, a child in an
orchard,  games of <7> exploration--and her outspread five  fingers dripping
with pearls of surprise. A house tutor let me share with him  the ingènue in
my grand-uncle's private theater. Two lewd young ladies rigged me up once in
a lacy  chemise and  a Lorelei wig and laid me to sleep between them, "a shy
little cousin," as in a ribald  novella, while their husbands snored  in the
next  room  after the  boar hunt. The great houses of various relatives with
whom I dwelt on and  off in my  early teens under  the  pale summer skies of
this or that province  of old Russia offered me as many compliant  handmaids
and fashionable flirts  as  might  have done closets and bowers  a couple of
centuries earlier. In a word, if the years of my infancy might have provided
the subject for  the kind of  learned thesis  upon which a paedopsychologist
founds a lifetime of fame, my teens, on the  other hand, could have yielded,
and in fact did yield,  quite a  number of  erotic  passages scattered  like
rotting plums and brown pears  throughout an aging novelist's books. Indeed,
the present  memoir derives  much of its  value  from  its being a catalogue
raisonnè of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images in
my Russian and especially English fiction.
     I  saw  my  parents  infrequently.  They  divorced  and  remarried  and
redivorced at such  a rapid rate  that had the custodians of my fortune been
less alert, I  might have been auctioned out finally to  a pair of strangers
of Swedish  or  Scottish  descent,  with  sad  bags  under  hungry eyes.  An
extraordinary  grand-aunt,  Baroness  Bredow, born  Tolstoy, amply  replaced
closer blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets of
a  confirmed madman,  I seemed  even to her  (who also was far  from normal)
unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a most
outrageous fashion.
     "Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!
     "What harlequins? Where?" <8>
     "Oh,  everywhere.  All  around  you.  Trees are  harlequins, words  are
harlequins. So  are  situations and  sums. Put two  things  together--jokes,
images--and you  get  a triple harlequin. Come  on! Play! Invent the  world!
Invent reality!"
     I did. By  Jove, I  did. I invented my grand-aunt  in honor of my first
daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of  memory's front porch, here she
slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor  lame lady,  touching  each  step
edge with the rubber tip of her black cane.
     (When she  cried out  those four  words, they  came out in a breathless
dactylic  line with a swift lispy lilt, as if it  were "lookaty," assonating
with "lickety" and introducing  tenderly,  ingratiatingly those "harlequins"
who  arrived with  festive force, the "bar" richly  stressed  in  a burst of
inspired persuasion followed by a liquid fall of sequin-like syllables).
     I  was  eighteen  when the Bolshevist revolution  struck--a  strong and
anomalous verb, I  concede,  used  here  solely  for the  sake  of narrative
rhythm. The recurrence of my childhood's  disarray kept  me in  the Imperial
Sanatorium  at  Tsarskoe for most  of the next winter  and spring. In  July,
1918, I found myself  recuperating in  the  castle of a Polish  landowner, a
distant relation  of mine,  Mstislav  Charnetski  (1880-1919?).  One  autumn
evening poor Mstislav's young mistress  showed me  a fairy-tale path winding
through a great  forest where  a  last  aurochs had been  speared by a first
Charnetski under John  III (Sobieski). I followed that path with a  knapsack
on my back and--why not confess--a tremor of remorse and anxiety in my young
heart.  Was I right in abandoning my cousin in the blackest hour of Russia's
black history?  Did I know how  to  exist  alone  in strange lands?  Was the
diploma I had received after being examined by a special committee (presided
by  Mstislav's father,  a venerable and corrupt  mathematician)  in  all the
subjects of  an ideal lyceum, which I had never attended  bodily, sufficient
for Cambridge without some infernal entrance test? <9> I  trudged all night,
through  a  labyrinth  of moonlight,  imagining  the  rustlings  of  extinct
animals. Dawn at last miniated my  ancient map. I thought I had  crossed the
frontier when a bare-headed  Red  Army  soldier with a Mongol face  who  was
picking whortleberries near the trail challenged me: "And whither," he asked
picking up his cap  from  a stump, "may you be rolling  (kotishsya),  little
apple (yablochko)? Pokazyvay-ka dokumentiki (Let me see your papers)."
     I groped in my pockets, fished out what I needed, and shot him dead, as
he  lunged at me; then he fell on his  face, as  if sunstruck on the  parade
ground, at the feet of his  king. None of the serried tree trunks looked his
way, and I fled, still clutching Dagmara's lovely little revolver. Only half
an hour later, when I reached at  last  another part of the forest in a more
or less conventional republic, only then did my calves cease to quake.
     After a period of loafing through unremembered German and Dutch  towns,
I crossed over to England. The Rembrandt, a little hotel in  London,  was my
next address. The two or three small diamonds that I kept in a chamois pouch
melted away faster than hailstones. On the gray eve  of poverty, the author,
then  a  self-exiled  youth  (I transcribe from an old diary), discovered an
unexpected patron in the person of Count Starov, a grave old-fashioned Mason
who   had  graced   several  great  Embassies  during  a  spacious  span  of
international  intercourse, and who since  1913  had resided in  London.  He
spoke  his mother tongue with pedantic precision,  yet did not spurn  rotund
folksy  expressions. He had no sense of humor whatever. His  man was a young
Maltese (I loathe tea  but dared not call for brandy). Nikifor Nikodimovich,
to use his tongue-twisterish  Christian  name cum patronymic, was rumored to
have been for years  on end an  admirer of my  beautiful and bizarre mother,
whom  I knew mainly  from stock phrases  in  an  anonymous  memoir. A grande
passion can be a  convenient mask, but  on  the  other  hand, a  gentlemanly
devotion to her memory can <10> alone explain his paying for my education in
England  and leaving  me,  after his  death in 1927, a  modest  subsidy (the
Bolshevist  coup  had ruined  him as  it had all our  clan). I  must  admit,
however, that I felt embarrassed by the sudden live glances of his otherwise
dead eyes set in a large,  pasty, dignified face, of the  sort that  Russian
writers used to  call  "carefully shaven"  (tshchatel'no vybritoe), no doubt
because  the ghosts of patriarchal beards  had to be laid,  in the  presumed
imagination of readers (long  dead by  now). I did my best to put down those
interrogatory flashes to  a search for  some  traits of the  exquisite woman
whom once upon a  time he had handed into a calõche, and whom, after waiting
for her  to settle down and  open her parasol, he  would heavily join in the
springy  vehicle; but at the same time I could not help wondering if  my old
grandee  had escaped  a  perversion that was current in so-called circles of
high diplomacy.  N.N. sat in his  easy  chair as  in a voluminous novel, one
pudgy hand on the elbow-rest griffin, the other, signet-ringed, fingering on
the  Turkish  table  beside  him  what  looked like  a silver  snuffbox  but
contained,  in  fact,  a  small  supply  of bead-like cough  drops or rather
droplets,  colored  lilac, green, and, I  believe, coral.  I should add that
some  information  obtained  later  showed  me  to  be  detestably wrong  in
conjecturing on his  part  anything  but a quasi-paternal interest in me, as
well as in  another youth, the son  of a notorious St. Petersburg  courtesan
who preferred an electric brougham  to a calõche; but enough of those edible
beads. <11>

3

     To return to  Carnavaux, to my luggage, to Ivor Black carrying it, with
a big show of travail, and muttering comedy stuff in some rudimentary role.
     The sun had regained full  control, when we entered a garden, separated
from the road by a stone  wall  and a row  of  cypresses. Emblematic  irises
surrounded  a green  pondlet  presided over by a bronze frog.  From under  a
curly  holm oak  a graveled path ran between two orange trees. At one end of
the  lawn a  eucalypt  cast its  striate shade across the canvas of a lounge
chair. This is not  the  arrogance  of  total recall but an attempt at  fond
reconstruction  based  on  old  snapshots  in  an  old  bonbon  box  with  a
fleur-de-lis on its lid.
     It was no use ascending the three steps of the front entrance, "hauling
two tons of stones," said Ivor Black: he had forgotten the spare key, had no
servants to  answer  bells  on Saturday afternoons, and as  he had explained
earlier could not communicate by normal means with his sister though she had
to  be  somewhere  inside, almost certainly  crying in her  bedroom  as  she
usually would whenever guests were expected, especially weekenders who might
be around at all hours, well into  Tuesday.  So  we walked  round the house,
skirting  prickly-pear  shrubs that caught at  the raincoat over  my  arm. I
suddenly heard a <12> horrible  subhuman sound and glanced at Ivor, but  the
cur only grinned.
     It was  a large,  lemon-breasted,  indigo-blue ara with  striped  white
cheeks squawking intermittently  on  its bleak  back-porch  perch. Ivor  had
dubbed it Mata Hari partly because of its  accent  but chiefly  by reason of
its political past. His late aunt, Lady Wimberg, when already a little gaga,
around Nineteen Fourteen or Fifteen, had been kind to  that tragic old bird,
said to have been  abandoned by a shady stranger  with a scarred  face and a
monocle. It could say allò, Otto, and  pa-pa,  a modest vocabulary,  somehow
suggestive  of  a  small  anxious family  in a hot country  far  from  home.
Sometimes when I work  too late  and  the spies  of  thought  cease to relay
messages, a wrong word in motion feels somehow like the dry  biscuit  that a
parrot holds in its great slow hand.
     I  do not remember seeing Iris before dinner (or perhaps I glimpsed her
standing at a stained  window  on the stairs with her back to me as I popped
back from the salle d'eau and its hesitations  to my ascetic room across the
landing). Ivor had taken care to inform me that she was a deaf-mute and such
a shy one, too,  that  even now, at twenty-one,  she could  not make herself
learn to read male lips.  That sounded odd.  I had always thought  that  the
infirmity  in question confined the patient  in an  absolutely safe shell as
limpid and strong as shatterproof glass, within which no shame or sham could
exist. Brother and sister conversed in sign language using an alphabet which
they had invented in childhood and  which had  gone through several  revised
editions. The  present one consisted of preposterously elaborate gestures in
the  low relief of a pantomime  that mimicked things rather  than symbolized
them. I barged in  with some grotesque contribution of my own but Ivor asked
me  sternly not to play the fool, she easily got offended. The  whole affair
(with a sullen maid, an old Canniãoise slapping down plates in the margin of
the scene) <13>  belonged to another life, to another  book,  to a  world of
vaguely incestuous games that I had not yet consciously invented.
     Both were small, but  exquisitely formed, young people, and  the family
likeness  between them  could  not escape one  though  Ivor was  quite plain
looking, with sandy  hair and freckles, and  she a suntanned  beauty with  a
black bob and  eyes like clear honey. I do not recall the dress she wore  at
our first  meeting, but  I  know  that her thin arms were bare  and stung my
senses at every  palm grove and medusa-infested  island that she outlined in
the air while her brother translated for me her patterns in  idiotic asides.
I had my revenge after  dinner. Ivor had gone to fetch my whisky. Iris and I
stood on the terrace in the saintly  dusk. I was lighting my pipe while Iris
nudged  the  balustrade  with  her   hip  and   pointed   out  with  mermaid
undulations--supposed to  imitate waves--the  shimmer of seaside lights in a
parting of the india-ink hills.  At  that moment the telephone rang  in  the
drawing room behind  us,  and  she quickly turned around--but with admirable
presence of mind transformed her dash into a nonchalant shawl dance. In  the
meantime Ivor had already skated phoneward across the parquetry to hear what
Nina Lecerf  or some other neighbor wanted.  We liked to recall, Iris and I,
in our later intimacy that  revelation scene with Ivor bringing us drinks to
toast her fairy-tale recovery and she, without minding his presence, putting
her  light  hand  on  my  knuckles:  I  stood  gripping  the  balustrade  in
exaggerated resentment and was not prompt enough,  poor dupe, to acknowledge
her apology by a Continental hand kiss. <14>

4

     A  familiar  symptom  of my  complaint,  not its  gravest one  but  the
toughest  to get rid of after  every relapse, belongs  to  what  Moody,  the
London specialist,  was the first  to  term the "numerical nimbus" syndrome.
His  account of my case has been recently reprinted in  his collected works.
It teems with ludicrous inaccuracies. That "nimbus" means nothing. "Mr.  N.,
a Russian nobleman" did not display any "signs of  degeneracy."  He  was not
"32" but 22 when he consulted that fatuous celebrity.  Worst of  all,  Moody
lumps  me with a  Mr. V.S.  who is  less of a postscriptum  to the  abridged
description of my "nimbus" than an intruder whose sensations  are mixed with
mine throughout that  learned paper. True,  the symptom  in question  is not
easy to describe, but I think I can do better than either Professor Moody or
my vulgar and voluble fellow sufferer.
     At  its worst it  went like this:  An hour or so  after  falling asleep
(generally well  after midnight and  with the  humble assistance of a little
Old Mead or Chartreuse)  I would wake  up (or rather "wake  in") momentarily
mad. The hideous pang in my brain was triggered  by some hint of faint light
in the line of my sight, for no matter how carefully I might have topped the
well-meaning efforts of <15> a servant  by my  own struggles with blinds and
purblinds, there always remained some  damned  slit, some atom or  dimmet of
artificial streetlight  or  natural  moonlight  that  signaled inexpressible
peril when I raised my  head with a gasp above the level of a choking dream.
Along  the  dim  slit  brighter  points  traveled  with  dreadful meaningful
intervals between them.  Those  dots  corresponded,  perhaps,  to  my  rapid
heartbeats or were connected optically  with  the  blinking of wet eyelashes
but  the rationale of it is inessential; its dreadful part  was my realizing
in helpless panic that the event had been stupidly unforeseen, yet had  been
bound to happen and was the representation of a fatidic problem which had to
be solved lest I perish and indeed might have been solved now if I had given
it  some  forethought  or  had  been  less  sleepy and weak-witted  at  this
all-important moment. The problem itself was of a calculatory order: certain
relations between the  twinkling points had to be  measured or,  in my case,
guessed, since my torpor prevented me from counting them properly, let alone
recalling   what   the   safe   number  should   be.  Error   meant  instant
retribution--beheading  by a  giant  or  worse; the right guess, per contra,
would  allow me to escape into an enchanting region situated just beyond the
gap I had to  wriggle through in the  thorny riddle, a  region resembling in
its idyllic  abstraction  those  little landscapes  engraved  as  suggestive
vignettes--a brook, a bosquet--next  to capital letters of weird,  ferocious
shape such as a  Gothic B beginning  a  chapter  in  old  books  for  easily
frightened children. But how could I know  in my torpor and panic  that this
was the simple solution, that the brook and the boughs and the beauty of the
Beyond all began with the initial of Being?
     There were nights, of  course, when my reason returned  at  once and  I
rearranged the curtains  and presently slept.  But at other,  more  critical
times,  when I  was far from well yet and would experience  that  nobleman's
nimbus, it took  <16> me up to  several hours to abolish  the  optical spasm
which  even the light  of day  could not overcome. My first night in any new
place  never  fails  to be hideous and  is followed  by a dismal day. I  was
racked  with neuralgia,  I was jumpy,  and  pustulous,  and unshaven,  and I
refused  to accompany the Blacks to a seaside party  to which I had been, or
was told I had been, also invited.  In fact, those first  days at Villa Iris
are so badly distorted in my diary, and so blurred in my mind, that I am not
sure if, perhaps, Iris and Ivor were not absent till the middle of the week.
I remember,  however, that  they were kind enough to arrange an  appointment
for me  with  a  doctor  in  Cannice. This presented  itself  as  a splendid
opportunity to check the incompetence of my London luminary against  that of
a local one.
     The  appointment   was  with  Professor  Junker,  a  double  personage,
consisting  of husband  and  wife. They had been  practicing  as a  team for
thirty  years now,  and every  Sunday,  in  a secluded, though  consequently
rather  dirty, corner of the beach, the two  analyzed each other. They  were
supposed by their patients to  be particularly  alert on Mondays,  but I was
not, having got frightfully tight  in one  or two pubs  before  reaching the
mean quarter  where the Junkers and other doctors lived, as I seemed to have
gathered. The front entrance was all right being among the flowers and fruit
of  a market place, but wait  till  you see the back. I was  received by the
female partner, a squat old  thing wearing trousers,  which was delightfully
daring in 1922. That theme was continued immediately outside the casement of
the  WC (where I had  to fill  an absurd vial  large enough for  a  doctor's
purpose  but not for mine) by the performance that a breeze was giving above
a street  sufficiently narrow  for three pairs of long drawers to cross over
on  a string in  as  many  strides or leaps. I  commented on this  and on  a
stained-glass window in  the consulting room featuring  a mauve lady exactly
similar to the one on the <17> stairs of Villa Iris. Mrs. Junker asked me if
I liked boys or girls, and I  looked  around saying guardedly that I did not
know what  she  had to offer.  She did not laugh. The consultation was not a
success.  Before diagnosing neuralgia of the  jaw,  she wanted me  to see  a
dentist when sober. It was right across, she said. I know she rang him up to
arrange  my  visit but do not remember if I went there the same afternoon or
the next. His name was  Molnar with  that n like a grain in a cavity; I used
him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea.
     A girl whom I took to be  the dentist's assistant (which, however,  she
was much too  holidayish in  dress  to be)  sat cross-legged  talking on the
phone in the hallway and merely directed me to a door with the cigarette she
was holding without otherwise interrupting her occupation. I found myself in
a banal and silent room. The best seats had been taken. A large conventional
oil, above  a cluttered bookshelf, depicted an alpine  torrent with a fallen
tree lying across it. From the shelf a few magazines had already wandered at
some earlier consultation hour onto an oval  table  which  supported its own
modest array of things, such  as  an  empty  flower  vase  and  a watch-size
casse-téte. This was a wee circular labyrinth, with five silvery peas inside
that had to be coaxed by judicious turns of the wrist into the center of the
helix. For waiting children.
     None  were present. A  corner armchair contained  a  fat  fellow with a
nosegay of  carnations across his lap. Two elderly ladies were  seated  on a
brown  sofa--strangers to each other, if  one took into  account the  urbane
interval between  them. Leagues away  from  them,  on a cushioned  stool,  a
cultured-looking  young  man,  possibly  a  novelist,  sat holding  a  small
memoranda  book  in which he kept  penciling  separate  items--possibly  the
description of various objects  his  eyes roved over in  between  notes--the
ceiling, the wallpaper, the picture, and  the  hairy  nape of a <18> man who
stood  by the window, with  his  hands clasped  behind him, and gazed  idly,
beyond  flapping underwear, beyond the  mauve casement of the Junkers' W.C.,
beyond the roofs  and  foothills,  at a distant range of mountains  where, I
idly  thought,  there  still might  exist that  withered pine  bridging  the
painted torrent.
     Presently  a door at  the end of the room  flew  open  with a  laughing
sound, and the  dentist entered,  ruddy-faced,  bow-tied, in an  ill-fitting
suit of festive  gray  with a  rather jaunty black armband.  Handshakes  and
congratulations followed. I  started reminding him of our appointment, but a
dignified old lady in  whom I recognized Madame Junker interrupted me saying
it was her mistake. In the meantime Miranda, the daughter of the  house whom
I had  seen  a  moment ago,  inserted  the long  pale  stems of  her uncle's
carnations  into  a tight vase on the table  which  by  now was miraculously
draped. A soubrette placed upon it, amid much applause, a great  sunset-pink
cake with "50" in calligraphic cream. "What a charming attention!" exclaimed
the widower. Tea was served and several groups sat down, others stood, glass
in hand. I heard Iris warning me in a warm whisper that it  was spiced apple
juice,  not liquor, so with  raised hands I recoiled from the tray proffered
by Miranda's fiancè,  the person whom I  had caught  using a spare moment to
check certain  details of the dowry. "We were not expecting you to turn up,"
said Iris, giving the show away, for this could not be the partie de plaisir
to which I  had been invited ("They  have a lovely place on a  rock"). No, I
believe that much of the confused impressions listed here in connection with
doctors  and dentists  must be  classed  as  an oneiric experience  during a
drunken  siesta.  This is corroborated  scriptorially.  Glancing  through my
oldest notes in pocket diaries,  with telephone numbers  and names  elbowing
their way among reports on events, factual or more or less fictional, I <19>
notice that dreams and other distortions of "reality"  are written down in a
special left-slanted hand--at least in the earlier entries, before I gave up
following  accepted  distinctions.  A  lot  of  the  pre-Cantabrigian  stuff
displays that script (but the soldier really did collapse in the path of the
fugitive king). <20>

5

     I know I have been called a solemn owl but  I do detest practical jokes
and am  bored stiff ("Only humorless people use  that phrase," according  to
Ivor)  by  a constant flow  of facetious  insults and  vulgar puns ("A stiff
borer is better than a limp  one"--Ivor again). He was a good chap, however,
and it  was  not  really respite  from his  banter that made me welcome  his
regular  week-day absences. He worked  in a  travel  agency  run by his Aunt
Betty's former  homme  d'affaires, an eccentric  in  his  own right, who had
promised Ivor a bonus in the form of an Icarus phaeton if he was good.
     My health and handwriting very soon reverted to normal, and I began  to
enjoy the South. Iris and I lounged for hours (she wearing a black swimsuit,
I flannels and blazer) in the garden, which I preferred at first, before the
inevitable seduction of seabathing, to the flesh of the plage.  I translated
for her several  short poems  by  Pushkin  and  Lermontov,  paraphrasing and
touching them up for  better  effect. I  told  her in  dramatic detail of my
escape from my country. I mentioned great exiles of  old. She listened to me
like Desdemona.
     "I'd love to learn Russian," she said with the polite wistfulness which
goes with that confession. "My aunt <21> was practically born in Kiev and at
seventy-five still remembered a few  Russian and  Rumanian words, but I am a
rotten linguist. How do you say `eucalypt' in your language?"
     "Evkalipt."
     "Oh, that  would  make a nice  name for a  man in a  short  story.  `F.
Clipton.' Wells has a  `Mr. Snooks' that  turns out to  derive  from  `Seven
Oaks.' I adore Wells, don't you?"
     I said that he was the greatest  romancer and magician of our time, but
that I could not stand his sociological stuff.
     Nor could she.  And did  I remember what Stephen said in The Passionate
Friends when he left the room--the  neutral room--where he had been  allowed
to see his mistress for the very last time?
     "I  can  answer that. The furniture there was slipcovered, and he said,
`It's because of the flies.' "
     "Yes! Isn't that marvelous! Just blurting out  something  so as  not to
cry. It  makes one think  of the  housefly an  old  Master would  paint on a
sitter's hand to show that the person had died in the meantime."
     I said I always  preferred the literal meaning of  a description to the
symbol behind it. She nodded thoughtfully but did not seem convinced.
     And who was our favorite modern poet? How about Housman?
     I had  seen him  many times from afar  and once, plain.  It was  in the
Trinity Library. He stood holding an open book but looking at the ceiling as
if  trying  to  remember  something--perhaps,  the  way another  author  had
translated that line.
     She  said  she would  have been "terribly thrilled." She uttered  those
words thrusting forward  her earnest little face and vibrating it, the face,
with its sleek bangs, rapidly. "You ought to be thrilled now! After all, I'm
here, this is the summer of 1922, this is your brother's house--" <22>
     "It is not," she said, sidestepping the issue (and at the twist  of her
speech  I  felt a sudden  overlap in  the  texture of  time  as if  this had
happened before or would happen again); "It is my  house. Aunt Betty left it
to me as well  as some money, but  Ivor is too stupid or proud to let me pay
his appalling debts."
     The shadow of my  rebuke was more  than a  shadow. I actually  believed
even then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous and
free author, living in a free, universally respected Russia,  on the English
quay of the Neva  or  on  one of  my  splendid estates  in  the country, and
writing  there prose  and  poetry  in  the infinitely plastic  tongue of  my
ancestors: among  them I  counted one  of  Tolstoy's grand-aunts and two  of
Pushkin's boon companions.  The  forefeel of fame  was  as heady as  the old
wines  of nostalgia.  It was remembrance  in reverse,  a great  lakeside oak
reflected so picturesquely in  such  clear waters that its mirrored branches
looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips
of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the  shiver caused by an
electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before the
thunder, or  by one line in King Lear. Why do tears  blur my glasses  when I
invoke that phantasm  of fame as  it  tempted  and  tortured  me  then, five
decades ago? Its image was  innocent, its image was genuine,  its difference
from what actually was to be breaks my heart like the pangs of separation.
     No ambition,  no honors tainted the fanciful future.  The President  of
the Russian Academy  advanced toward me  to the  sound of  slow music with a
wreath on the cushion  he held--and had  to  retreat growling as  I shook my
graying  head. I saw  myself correcting the page proof of a new  novel which
was  to  change  the  destiny  of Russian  literary  style  as  a matter  of
course--my  course (with  no self-love,  no  smugness,  no  surprise  on  my
part)--and  reworking so  much of it  in the margin--where inspiration finds
its <23>  sweetest clover--that the whole had to be set  anew. When the book
made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining  a
few  dear sycophantic friends in  the arbor of my  favorite manor of  Marevo
(where I had first  "looked at the harlequins")  with its alley of fountains
and its shimmering view of  a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It had to be
that way.
     From my cold  bed in Cambridge I surveyed a whole period of new Russian
literature. I looked  forward  to the refreshing  presence of  inimical  but
courteous critics who would chide me in the St. Petersburg  literary reviews
for my pathological indifference  to  politics, major ideas in minor  minds,
and such  vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers. No less amusing
was  it to envisage the inevitable pack of  crooks and  ninnies  abusing the
smiling marble, and ill with envy, maddened by their own mediocrity, rushing
in  pattering  hordes to the lemming's  doom  but presently all running back
from the opposite side of the stage, having missed not  only the point of my
book but also their rodential Gadara.
     The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal  with
her actual, unique traits--the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her
eyebrows,  waiting for  me to see  the point  of  her  joke,  or  the way it
developed  a totally different set of  soft folds  as she  frowned over  the
Tauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me.
My  instrument, however,  was  still too blunt and  immature; it  could  not
express  the divine  detail,  and  her  eyes,  her  hair  became  hopelessly
generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.
     None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were good
enough (particularly when nakedly Englished without  rhyme or treason) to be
shown to Iris; and, besides, an odd  shyness--which I had never  felt before
when courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of  my carnal youth--kept me
back from submitting to Iris a tabulation  <24> of  her charms. On the night
of  July 20, however,  I composed  a  more oblique, more metaphysical little
poem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal  translation that
took me  longer  to  write  than the original. The  title,  under  which  it
appeared  in an  èmigrè daily  in  Paris  (October 8,  1922,  after  several
reminders on my part and one  please-return  request) was,  and  is, in  the
various anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course of
the next fifty  years, Vlyublyonnost', which  puts in a golden nutshell what
English needs three words to express.

     My zabyvàem chto vlyublyñnnost'
     Ne prñsto povorñt litsà,
     A pod kupàvami bezdñnnost',
     Nochnàya pànika plovtsà.

     Pokçda snìtsya, snìs', vlyublyñnnost',
     No probuzhdèniem ne mçch',
     I lçchshe nedogovoryñnnost'
     Chem èta shchèl' i ètot lçch.

     Napominàyu chto vlyublyñnnost'
     Ne yàv', chto mètiny ne tè,
     Chto mñzhet-byt' potustorñnnost'
     Priotvorìlas' v temnotè.

     "Lovely," said Iris. "Sounds like an incantation. What does it mean?"
     "I have  it here on the back. It goes like  this. We  forget--or rather
tend  to forget--that being in love (vlyublyonnost') does not depend  on the
facial angle of the loved one, but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars,
a swimmer's panic in the  night (here the iambic  tetrameter happens  to  be
rendered--last line of  the first  stanza,  nochnàya pànika  plovtsà).  Next
stanza:  While  the dreaming is  good--in  the sense of `while the going  is
good'--do  keep appearing  to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost', but  do  not
torment us  <25>  by waking us up or telling too  much: reticence is  better
than  that chink  and that moonbeam.  Now  comes the  last  stanza  of  this
philosophical love poem."
     "This what?"
     "Philosophical love poem. Napominàyu, I remind you, that vlyublyonnost'
is  not  wide-awake  reality,  that  the  markings   are  not  the  same  (a
moon-striped ceiling, polosatyy ot luny potolok, is,  for  instance, not the
same kind of reality as a ceiling  by day),  and that, maybe, the  hereafter
stands slightly ajar in the dark. Voilþ."
     "Your girl," remarked Iris, "must be having  a jolly  good time in your
company.  Ah, here comes our  breadwinner. Bonjour, Ives. The  toast  is all
gone, I'm afraid. We thought you'd left hours ago."
     She fitted  her  palm for a moment to the  cheek of  the teapot. And it
went into Ardis, it all went into Ardis, my poor dead love. <26>

6

     After fifty summers,  or ten thousand hours,  of sunbathing in  various
countries,  on beaches, benches, roofs, rocks, decks, ledges, lawns, boards,
and balconies,  I might have been unable to  recall my novitiate in  sensory
detail had not there been those old notes of mine which are such a solace to
a pedantic memoirist throughout the account of his illnesses, marriages, and
literary  life.  Enormous amounts  of  Shaker's  Cold  Cream were rubbed  by
kneeling and cooing Iris into my back as I lay prone on a rough towel in the
blaze of  the plage. Beneath my  shut  eyelids  pressed to  my forearm  swam
purple photomatic shapes: "Through the prose of sun blisters came the poetry
of her touch--," thus in my pocket  diary, but I can  improve upon my  young
preciosity. Through the itch of  my skin, and in fact  seasoned by that itch
to an exquisite degree of rather ridiculous enjoyment, the touch of her hand
on my shoulder blades and along my spine  resembled too closely a deliberate
caress not to be deliberate mimicry, and  I could not curb a hidden response
to those nimble  fingers when  in a final  gratuitous  flutter they traveled
down to my very coccyx, before fading away.
     "There," said Iris with  exactly the  same intonation as that used,  at
the  end of  a more special  kind of  treatment, <27> by one of my Cambridge
sweethearts, Violet McD., an experienced and compassionate virgin.
     She,  Iris, had had several lovers, and as I opened my eyes  and turned
to her, and saw her, and the dancing diamonds  in  the blue-green  inward of
every advancing, every tumbling wave, and the wet black pebbles on the sleek
forebeach with dead foam waiting for live foam--and, oh, there it comes, the
crested  wave line,  trotting  again  like white  circus  ponies  abreast, I
understood, as I  perceived her against that  backdrop, how  much adulation,
how many lovers had  helped  form and  perfect my Iris, with that impeccable
complexion of hers, that absence  of any uncertainty in the  profile  of her
high cheekbone, the elegance of the hollow beneath it, the accroche-coeur of
a sleek little flirt.
     "By  the  way,"  said  Iris  as  she  changed  from  a  kneeling  to  a
half-recumbent position, her legs curled under  her, "by the way, I have not
apologized yet for my dismal remark about that  poem. I now have reread your
"Valley Blondies" (vlyublyonnost') a hundred times, both the English for the
matter and  the Russian for the  music.  I think  it's  an absolutely divine
piece. Do you forgive me?"
     I pursed my  lips to kiss the brown iridescent  knee  near  me  but her
hand, as  if measuring a child's fever, palmed my  forehead and  stopped its
advance.
     "We  are watched," she said "by  a number of  eyes which seem  to  look
everywhere except in our  direction. The two nice English schoolteachers  on
my right--say, twenty paces away--have already told me that your resemblance
to the naked-neck photo of Rupert Brooke is a-houri-sang--they know a little
French. If you ever try to kiss me, or my leg, again, I'll beg you to leave.
I've been sufficiently hurt in my life."
     A pause ensued. The iridescence came from atoms of quartz. When  a girl
starts to speak like a novelette, all you need is a little patience. <28>
     Had I posted  the poem to  that  èmigrè  paper?  Not yet; my garland of
sonnets had had to be sent first.  The two  people (lowering my voice) on my
left  were fellow expatriates,  judging  by certain  small  indices.  "Yes,"
agreed Iris, "they practically got up to stand at attention when you started
to recite that  Pushkin  thing about  waves lying  down in  adoration at her
feet. What other signs?"
     "He kept stroking his beard very slowly from top to tip as he looked at
the horizon and she smoked a cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece."
     There was also a child  of ten or so cradling a large yellow beach ball
in her  bare arms.  She seemed to  be  wearing nothing  but a kind of frilly
harness and a very  short pleated  skirt  revealing her trim thighs. She was
what  in a  later  era amateurs  were to call a "nymphet." As she  caught my
glance she gave me, over our sunny globe, a sweet  lewd smile from under her
auburn fringe.
     "At  eleven or  twelve," said  Iris, "I  was as pretty as  that  French
orphan.   That's  her   grandmother  all  in   black  sitting  on  a  spread
Cannice-Matin with her knitting.  I let smelly gentlemen fondle me. I played
indecent games with Ivor--oh nothing very unusual, and anyway he now prefers
dons to donnas--at least that's what he says."
     She  talked a little about her parents who by a fascinating coincidence
had  died on the same  day, she at  seven  A.M. in  New York, he  at noon in
London, only two years  ago. They had separated soon after the war.  She was
American and horrible. You don't speak like that of your mother but she  was
really horrible. Dad was  Vice President of the Samuels Cement  Company when
he died. He came  from a respectable  family and had  "good connections."  I
asked  what grudge  exactly did Ivor bear  to "society" and vice  versa? She
vaguely replied he disliked the "fox-hunting set"  and the "yachting crowd."
I said those were abominable clichès used only by Philistines. In my set, in
my world, in the opulent Russia of my boyhood we stood <29> so far above any
concept  of  "class" that we  only  laughed  or yawned  when  reading  about
"Japanese Barons" or "New England Patricians."  Yet  strangely  enough  Ivor
stopped  clowning  and  became a  normal  serious  individual only  when  he
straddled his old, dappled, bald hobbyhorse and started reviling the English
"upper classes"--especially their  pronunciation. It was,  I remonstrated, a
speech  superior in quality  to the best  Parisian  French,  and  even to  a
Petersburgan's Russian; a  delightfully modulated  whinny, which both he and
Iris were rather  successfully, though no doubt unconsciously, imitating  in
their everyday  intercourse, when  not making  protracted  fun of a harmless
foreigner's stilted or outdated English. By the way what was the nationality
of the bronzed old man with  the hoary  chest hair who was wading out of the
low surf preceded by his bedrabbled dog--I thought I knew his face.
     It  was, she said,  Kanner, the great pianist and butterfly hunter, his
face and name were on all the Morris columns. She was getting tickets for at
least two of his concerts; and there, right there, where his dog was shaking
itself, the P. family (exalted old name) had basked in  June when the  place
was practically empty, and cut Ivor, though  he  knew young L.P. at Trinity.
They'd  now moved down there. Even more select. See that  orange dot? That's
their cabana. Foot of the Mirana Palace. I said nothing but I too knew young
P. and disliked him.
     Same day.  Ran  into  him  in  the Mirana  Men's  Room.  Was effusively
welcomed.  Would I care to  meet his  sister,  tomorrow is  what?  Saturday.
Suggested they stroll  over  tomorrow afternoon to the foot of the Victoria.
Sort of cove to your right. I'm  there with friends. Of course you know Ivor
Black.  Young  P.   duly  turned   up,  with  lovely,  long-limbed   sister.
Ivor--frightfully  rude.  Rise,  Iris,  you forget we  are  having  tea with
Rapallovich and  Chicherini. That  sort  of stuff. Idiotic feuds.  Lydia  P.
screamed with laughter. <30>
     Upon discovering the effect of that miracle cream, at my boiled-lobster
stage, I switched  from a conservative caleãon  de bain to a briefer variety
(still  banned  at  the  time  in  stricter  paradises). The  delayed change
resulted in a  bizarre stratification of tan. I recall sneaking  into Iris's
room  to contemplate myself in a full-length  looking glass--the only one in
the house--on a morning she had chosen for a visit  to a beauty salon, which
I called  up  to make  sure she was there and  not in  the arms of a  lover.
Except for a Provenãal boy polishing the banisters, there was nobody around,
thus  allowing me to indulge  in  one of my oldest and naughtiest pleasures:
circulating stark naked all over a strange house.
     The  full-length  portrait was  not  altogether a  success,  or  rather
contained an element of levity not improper to mirrors and medieval pictures
of exotic beasts. My face was brown,  my torso and  arms caramel, a  carmine
equatorial belt  undermargined the caramel, then came  a white, more or less
triangular, southward pointed space edged with the redundant carmine on both
sides, and (owing to my  wearing shorts all day) my legs were as brown as my
face.  Apically, the  white  of  the  abdomen, brought  out  in  frightening
repoussè, with an ugliness never noticed before, a  man's  portable  zoo,  a
symmetrical mass of animal attributes, the elephant  proboscis, the twin sea
urchins, the baby gorilla, clinging to my  underbelly with  its back to  the
public.
     A  warning spasm  shot through  my  nervous  system. The  fiends of  my
incurable ailment, "flayed consciousness," were shoving aside my harlequins.
I sought first-aid distraction in the baubles  of my love's lavender-scented
bedroom: a Teddy  bear dyed violet, a curious French novel (Du còtè  de chez
Swann) that I had bought for her, a  trim pile of freshly laundered linen in
a Moîse basket, a color photograph of two girls in  a fancy frame, obliquely
inscribed as "The Lady Cressida and thy sweet Nell, <31> Cambridge 1919";  I
mistook the  former for Iris herself in  a  golden wig and a pink make-up; a
closer inspection, however, showed it to be  Ivor in the part of that highly
irritating girl bobbing in and out of Shakespeare's flawed farce. But, then,
Mnemosyne's chromodiascope can also become a bore.
     In the music  room the boy  was now cacophonically dusting the  keys of
the Bechstein as  with less zest I resumed my  nudist rambles.  He  asked me
what  sounded like "Hora?,"  and I demonstrated my wrist turning it this way
and  that  to  reveal  only a  pale ghost of  watch and  watch  bracelet. He
completely  misinterpreted my  gesture  and turned away  shaking his  stupid
head. It was a morning of errors and failures.
     I made  my way to the  pantry for  a  glass  or two  of wine,  the best
breakfast in times of distress. In the passage I trod on a shard of crockery
(we had heard the crash on the eve) and danced on one foot with a curse as I
tried to examine the imaginary gash in the middle of my pale sole.
     The  litre of rouge  I had  visualized was there all right, but I could
not find a corkscrew in any of the drawers. Between bangs the macaw could be
heard crying out something crude and dreary. The  postman had come and gone.
The editor of The New Aurora  (Novaya Zarya) was afraid (dreadful poltroons,
those  editors) that his "modest  èmigrè  venture  (nachinanie)"  could  not
etc.--a crumpled "etc." that flew into the garbage pail. Wineless, wrathful,
with Ivor's Times  under my arm,  I slapped up the back stairs  to my stuffy
room. The rioting in my brain had now started.
     It  was  then  that  I  resolved,  sobbing horribly  into my pillow, to
preface tomorrow's proposal of marriage with a confession that might make it
unacceptable to my Iris. <32>

7

     If  one  looked from our garden gate down the  asphalted avenue leading
through leopard shade to the  village some two hundred  paces east, one  saw
the pink cube of the little post office, its  green bench in front, its flag
above, all  this limned  with the numb brightness  of  a color transparency,
between the last two plane trees of the twin files marching on both sides of
the road.
     On the  right (south)  side of  the  avenue,  across a marginal  ditch,
overhung  with brambles, the intervals  between the mottled trunks disclosed
patches of lavender or lucerne and, farther  away, the  low white wall of  a
cemetery running parallel to our lane as those things are apt  to do. On the
left (north) side, through  analogous  intervals, one glimpsed an expanse of
rising ground, a vineyard,  a distant farm,  pine groves, and the outline of
mountains. On the  penult  tree trunk of that  side somebody had pasted, and
somebody else partly scraped off, an incoherent notice.
     We walked down that avenue nearly every morning, Iris and I, on our way
to the  village square and--from  there by  lovely shortcuts--to Cannice and
the sea. Now  and then she liked to return on foot, being one of those small
but strong lassies who  can  hurdle, and play  hockey,  and climb rocks, and
then shimmy  till any pale  mad hour <33> ("do bezçmnogo blèdnogo chàsa"--to
quote  from my first  direct poem to her). She  usually  wore  her  "Indian"
frock, a  kind of  translucent wrap, over  her  skimpy  swimsuit,  and as  I
followed  close  behind,  and   sensed  the  solitude,   the  security,  the
all-permitting dream, I had trouble walking in my bestial state. Fortunately
it was not the none-so-very-secure solitude that held me  back but  a  moral
decision to confess something very grave before I made love to her.
     As seen from those escarpments, the  sea  far below spread  in majestic
wrinkles, and, owing to  distance  and height,  the  recurrent line  of foam
arrived in rather droll slow motion  because we knew it was sure, as we  had
been   sure,  of  its  strapping  pace,  and   now   that   restraint,  that
stateliness...
     Suddenly there came from somewhere  within the natural  jumble  of  our
surroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.
     "Goodness,"  said Iris, "I  do hope  that's  not  a  happy escapee from
Kanner's Circus." (No relation--at least, so it seemed--to the pianist.)
     We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen times
it crossed the looping main road,  our path  grew wider. That day as usual I
argued  with  Iris  about  the  English  names of  the few  plants  I  could
identify--rock  roses  and  griselda  in  bloom,  agaves  (which  she called
"centuries"),  broom and  spurge, myrtle and  arbutus.  Speckled butterflies
came and went like  quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels  of  foliage,
and once a  tremendous  olive-green fellow,  with  a  rosy  flush  somewhere
beneath,  settled  on a  thistlehead  for an  instant.  I know nothing about
butterflies, and indeed do not care  for the fluffier night-flying ones, and
would hate  any  of  them to touch me: even  the prettiest gives  me a nasty
shiver like some floating  spider  web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera,
the silver louse.
     On  the  day now  in  focus, memorable for  a more important matter but
carrying all kinds of synchronous trivia <34>  attached  to it like burrs or
incrustated like marine parasites, we  noticed a butterfly  net moving among
the beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swinging
on its vest-button string, his white locks  flying around his scarlet  brow,
and the whole of his person still  radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we no
doubt had heard a minute ago.
     Upon Iris  immediately describing  to  him the spectacular green thing,
Kanner  dismissed it as  eine "Pandora" (at least  that's what I find jotted
down),  a  common southern Falter (butterfly).  "Aber  (but)," he thundered,
raising his  index, "when  you wish  to look at a  real rarity, never before
observed  west of  Nieder-Æsterreich, then  I  will  show what  I  have just
caught."
     He  leant  his net against  a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked  it up
reverently)  and,  with  profuse thanks (to  Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?)  that
trailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel a
little  stamp envelope and shook out of it  very  gently  a folded butterfly
onto the palm of his hand.
     After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young Cabbage
White. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance, grow.)
     "Now look with  attention," said Kanner ignoring  her quaint remark and
pointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. "What you see is
the inferior  side--the under white of the  left Vorderflýgel (`fore  wing')
and the under yellow of the left Hinterflýgel (`hind wing'). I will not open
the wings  but I think you  can believe what  I'm  going to tell you. On the
upper  side,  which you can't see, this  species  shares  with  its  nearest
allies--the Small White  and Mann's White,  both  common  here--the  typical
little spots of  the fore wing, namely a black full stop  in the  male and a
black  Doppelpunkt (`colon') in the female. In those  allies the punctuation
is reproduced on  the underside,  and only in the species of which  you  see
<35> a  folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing  blank beneath--a
typographical caprice of Nature! Ergo it is an Ergane."
     One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched.
     "Oh, it's alive!" cried Iris.
     "No,  it  can't  fly  away--one  pinch  was  enough,"  rejoined  Kanner
soothingly,  as he slipped the specimen  back  into its pellucid  hell;  and
presently,  brandishing  his  arms  and net in triumphant farewells, he  was
continuing his climb.
     "The  brute!"  wailed  Iris.  She  brooded  over  the  thousand  little
creatures he had tortured, but a few days later,  when Ivor  took us to  the
man's  concert (a most poetical rendition of Grýnberg's suite Les  Cháteaux)
she  derived some consolation from her brother's  contemptuous remark:  "All
that butterfly business is only a publicity stunt." Alas, as a fellow madman
I knew better.
     All I had to do when we reached our stretch of plage in order to absorb
the sun was to shed shirt, shorts,  and sneakers. Iris shrugged off her wrap
and lay down, bare limbed, on the towel next to mine. I was rehearsing in my
head the speech I had prepared. The  pianist's dog was today in  the company
of a handsome old lady, his fourth wife. The nymphet was being buried in hot
sand  by  two young oafs. The Russian lady was reading  an èmigrè newspaper.
Her  husband  was  contemplating the  horizon. The  two  English  women were
bobbing  in the  dazzling sea.  A large French  family of  slightly  flushed
albinos was trying to inflate a rubber dolphin.
     "I'm ready for a dip," said Iris.
     She took out of the beach bag (kept for her  by the Victoria concierge)
her yellow swim  bonnet, and  we  transferred our towels  and things to  the
comparative quiet of an obsolete  wharf of sorts upon which she liked to dry
afterwards.
     Already  twice  in  my young  life a  fit  of total cramp--the physical
counterpart  of  lightning insanity--had  all but <36> overpowered me in the
panic and blackness  of  bottomless water. I see  myself as a lad of fifteen
swimming at dusk across a narrow but deep  river with an athletic cousin. He
is beginning to leave  me behind when a special  effort I  make results in a
sense of  ineffable euphoria which  promises  miracles  of propulsion, dream
prizes on dream shelves--but which, at its satanic climax, is replaced by an
intolerable spasm first in one leg, then in the other, then  in the ribs and
both arms. I have often attempted to explain, in later years, to learned and
ironical doctors, the strange, hideous, segmental quality of those pulsating
pangs that made  a huge  worm of me with limbs  transformed  into successive
coils of agony. By some fantastic fluke  a third  swimmer,  a  stranger, was
right behind me and helped to pull me out of an abysmal tangle of water-lily
stems.
     The  second time  was a year later,  on the West-Caucasian coast. I had
been drinking  with a  dozen older companions at  the birthday  party of the
district governor's son and, around  midnight,  a dashing  young Englishman,
Allan Andoverton (who  was to be, around 1939, my first British  publisher!)
had suggested a moonlight swim. As long as I did not venture too  far in the
sea, the  experience seemed quite  enjoyable.  The water was  warm; the moon
shone benevolently on the starched shirt of my first evening  clothes spread
on  the shingly  shore.  I  could  hear merry  voices  around  me; Allan,  I
remember, had not bothered to strip  and was fooling with a champagne bottle
in  the  dappled swell; but  presently  a cloud engulfed everything, a great
wave  lifted and rolled  me, and soon  I was too upset in all senses to tell
whether I was heading  for Yalta or Tuapse. Abject  fear set loose instantly
the pain I already knew, and I would have drowned there and then had not the
next billow given me a boost and deposited me near my own trousers.
     The shadow of those repellent and rather colorless recolections (mortal
peril is colorless) remained always present <37> in my "dips" and "splashes"
(another word  of hers)  with  Iris. She got used to my habit  of staying in
comfortable  contact with the  bed of shallows, while  she executed "crawls"
(if that is what those overarm strokes were called in the Nineteen-Twenties)
at quite a distance away; but that morning I nearly did a very stupid thing.
     I was gently  floating to and fro in line with the shore and  sinking a
probing toe every now and then to  ascertain if I could still  feel the oozy
bottom  with its unappetizing  to  the  touch,  but  on the whole  friendly,
vegetables, when I noticed  that the  seascape  had changed.  In  the middle
distance  a brown motorboat  manned by a young fellow  in whom I  recognized
L.P. had described a foamy half-circle and stopped beside Iris. She clung to
the bright brim, and he spoke to her, and then made as  if  to drag her into
his boat, but she flipped free, and he sped away, laughing.
     It  all must have lasted a couple of  minutes, but had  the rascal with
his hawkish profile  and white cable-stitched sweater  stayed a few  seconds
longer or had my girl  been  abducted  by her new  beau in the  thunder  and
spray, I would  have  perished;  for  while the  scene  endured, some virile
instinct rather  than one of self-preservation  had caused me to swim toward
them a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular position
to regain my  breath I found  underfoot  nothing  but  water. I  turned  and
started  swimming landward--and  already  felt  the  ominous  foreglow,  the
strange, never  yet described  aura  of total  cramp creeping  over  me  and
forming its deadly pact with  gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand,
and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach. <38>

8

     "I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health."
     "Wait a minute.  Must peel this horrid  thing off--as far down--as  far
down as it can decently go."
     We were lying, I  supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off her
cap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit,
so as to expose her entire back to the sun;  a secondary struggle was taking
place on  the  near  side,  in  the  vicinity  of her  sable  armpit, in her
unsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small  breast  at its tender
juncture with her ribs.  As  soon  as she had  wriggled into a  satisfactory
state  of decorum, she half-reared,  holding her black  bodice to her bosom,
while  her  other hand conducted  that  delightful  rapid  monkey-scratching
search a girl  performs  when groping  for something  in  her  bag--in  this
instance a  mauve package  of  cheap  Salammbòs  and  an expensive  lighter;
whereupon she  again  pressed  her  bosom  to the spread towel. Her  earlobe
burned  red through her  black  liberated  "Medusa," as that type of bob was
called  in  the  young twenties. The  moldings  of her  brown  back,  with a
patch-size beauty spot  below  the left shoulder  blade and  a  long  spinal
hollow, which redeemed  all the  errors of animal  evolution,  distracted me
painfully <39> from the decision I had taken  to preface  my proposal with a
special, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water still
glistened on the  underside  of her brown thighs  and  on  her  strong brown
calves, and a few grains of wet  gravel had  stuck to her rose-brown ankles.
If I have  described so often in my American novels (A Kingdom  by the  Sea,
Ardis) the  unbearable  magic of a girl's back, it is mainly because  of  my
having  loved  Iris.  Her  compact  little nates,  the most  agonizing,  the
fullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrapped
surprises under the Christmas tree.
     Upon  resettling in the  waiting sun after  this  little  flurry,  Iris
protruded  her fat underlip  as she  exhaled smoke and  presently  remarked:
"Your  mental  health is jolly good, I think. You  are sometimes strange and
somber, and  often  silly,  but  that's in character  with ce  qu'on appelle
genius."
     "What do you call `genius'?"
     "Well, seeing things others  don't see. Or  rather the invisible  links
between things."
     "I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing to
do  with genius.  We shall start  with  a specific  example and an authentic
decor. Please close your eyes for a  moment.  Now visualize the avenue  that
goes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees  converging
in perspective and the garden gate between the last two?"
     "No,"  said  Iris, "the  last  one  on  the  right  is  replaced  by  a
lamppost--you can't make it out very clearly from the village square--but it
is really a lamppost in a coat of ivy."
     "Well, no matter. The  main thing  is to imagine we're looking from the
village here toward the garden gate there. We must be very careful about our
here's  and  there's  in  this  problem.  For  the  present  `there' is  the
quadrangle of  green sunlight  in the half-opened gate. We now start to walk
up the  avenue. On the second tree trunk  of the  right-side  file we notice
traces of some local proclamation--" <40>
     "It was Ivor's proclamation. He proclaimed  that things had changed and
Aunt Betty's protègès should stop making their weekly calls."
     "Splendid. We continue to  walk  toward the  garden gate. Intervals  of
landscape  can be made out  between the plane trees  on both sides.  On your
right--please, close your eyes, you will see better--on your right there's a
vineyard;  on  your left, a  churchyard--you  can distinguish its long, low,
very low, wall--"
     "You  make it sound rather  creepy.  And I want to add something. Among
the blackberries,  Ivor  and I discovered  a crooked old tombstone with  the
inscription Dors, Mèdor! and only  the date  of death, 1889; a found dog, no
doubt. It's just before the last tree on the left side."
     "So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter--but  you  stop
all of a sudden:  you've forgotten  to buy those  nice  new stamps  for your
album. We decide to go back to the post office."
     "Can I open my eyes? Because I'm afraid I'm going to fall asleep."
     "On  the  contrary: now is  the moment to  shut  your  eyes  tight  and
concentrate. I want  you to imagine  yourself turning  on your heel so  that
`right' instantly  becomes `left,' and you instantly  see the  `here'  as  a
`there,'  with the  lamppost now  on  your  left and dead Mèdor now on  your
right, and the  plane trees converging toward the post  office. Can  you  do
that?"
     "Done,"  said  Iris.  "About-face executed.  I now stand facing a sunny
hole with a  little pink house  inside it and  a bit  of  blue sky. Shall we
start walking back?"
     "You may,  I  can't!  This  is the point of  the experiment. In actual,
physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with
my  eyes  closed and  my  body immobile,  I am unable  to  switch  from  one
direction to the other. Some swivel cell in  my  brain  does not work. I can
cheat, of course, by setting aside the mental snapshot of <41> one vista and
leisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point.
But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me
mad  if I persevered, prevents me  from imagining the twist which transforms
one  direction into another,  directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying
the whole world on my back in the process of trying to  visualize my turning
around and making myself see in  terms  of  `right' what I  saw  in terms of
`left' and vice versa."
     I thought  she  had  fallen  asleep, but  before I could  entertain the
thought  that she  had  not  heard, not  understood  anything  of  what  was
destroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.
     "First  of  all,  we  shall  agree,"  she said,  "to  cancel  all  such
experiments. Secondly, we shall tell ourselves  that what we had been trying
to do was to solve a stupid philosophical riddle--on the lines of  what does
`right' and  `left' mean  in our  absence, when  nobody is  looking, in pure
space,  and what,  anyway, is space; when I  was a child I thought space was
the inside of a nought, any nought, chalked on a slate and perhaps not quite
tidy, but still a good clean zero. I don't want you to go mad or to drive me
mad,  because those perplexities are catching,  and so  we'll drop the whole
business of revolving avenues altogether. I would like to seal our pact with
a kiss,  but we shall have to postpone that. Ivor is coming in a few minutes
to take  us for a spin  in his new car, but perhaps you do not care to come,
and  so I propose we meet  in  the  garden, for a minute or two, just before
dinner, while he is taking his bath."
     I asked what Bob (L.P.) had been telling her in my dream. "It was not a
dream," she said. "He  just wanted to  know if his sister had phoned about a
dance they wanted us all three to come to. If she had, nobody was at home."
     We repaired for a snack and a  drink to the Victoria bar, and presently
Ivor joined us. He said, nonsense, he <42> could dance and fence beautifully
on the stage but was a  regular  bear at  private affairs and  would hate to
have his innocent sister pawed by all the rastaquouõres of the Còte.
     "Incidentally," he added,  "I don't much  care for P.'s obsession  with
moneylenders. He practically ruined  the  best  one  in  Cambridge  but  has
nothing but conventional evil to repeat about them."
     "My  brother is  a funny person,"  said Iris, turning to me as in play.
"He conceals our ancestry  like a dark  treasure, yet will flare up publicly
if someone calls someone a Shylock."
     Ivor  prattled  on:  "Old  Maurice  (his employer) is  dining  with  us
tonight. Cold cuts and a macèdoine au kitchen rum. I'll also get some tinned
asparagus  at the English  shop; it's much better than  the stuff they  grow
here. The car  is not exactly a  Royce,  but it  rolls. Sorry  Vivian is too
queasy  to come. I saw  Madge Titheridge  this  morning  and she said French
reporters pronounce  her  family  name  `Si c'est riche.'  Nobody's laughing
today." <43>

9

     Being  too excited  to  take my  usual  siesta,  I spent  most  of  the
afternoon working on  a  love poem (and this is  the last entry in  my  1922
pocket  diary--exactly  one  month after my arrival in  Carnavaux). In those
days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one,
who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my
inability  to  appropriate  the  magic  and  madness  offered  me;  and  her
apprentice, her palette girl  and  stand-in, a  little logician, who stuffed
the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers
which became more and more numerous  the  further  I  moved  away  from  the
initial,  evanescent, savage  perfection. The  treacherous music of  Russian
rhythms came to  my specious  rescue like those  demons who break the  black
silence of an artist's hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistorical
birds. Another and final  deception would come with the Fair  Copy in which,
for a short while, calligraphy,  vellum  paper,  and India ink beautified  a
dead doggerel. And  to think that  for almost five years  I kept trying  and
kept getting caught--until  I fired  that painted, pregnant, meek, miserable
little assistant!
     I dressed and went downstairs.  The trench window giving on the terrace
was open. Old Maurice,  Iris, and <44>  Ivor  sat  enjoying Martinis in  the
orchestra  seats  of a  marvelous sunset. Ivor was in the  act of  mimicking
someone, with bizarre intonations  and extravagant  gestures.  The marvelous
sunset has not only  remained as a backdrop of  a life-transforming evening,
but endured, perhaps, behind the suggestion I made to my British publishers,
many years later, to  bring out a coffee-table album of auroras and sunsets,
in the truest possible shades, a collection that would also be of scientific
value, since some learned celestiologist might be hired  to  discuss samples
from various countries  and analyze the striking and never before  discussed
differences between the color  schemes of evening  and dawn. The  album came
out eventually, the price was high  and the pictorial part passable; but the
text  was  supplied  by a  luckless female  whose pretty  prose and borrowed
poetry botched the book (Allan and Overton, London, 1949).
     For  a  couple  of  moments,  while idly attending  to  Ivor's strident
performance,  I stood watching the huge sunset.  Its wash was of a classical
light-orange  tint  with  an  oblique bluish-black  shark crossing it.  What
glorified  the  combination was a  series of  ember-bright  cloudlets riding
along, tattered and hooded, above the red sun which had assumed the shape of
a pawn or a baluster. "Look at the sabbath witches!" I was about to cry, but
then I saw  Iris rise and  heard her say:  "That will do, Ives.  Maurice has
never met the person, it's all lost on him."
     "Not  at  all," retorted her brother, "he will meet him in a minute and
recognize him (the verb was an artist's snarl), that's the point!"
     Iris left the  terrace via the garden steps, and Ivor did  not continue
his  skit,  which  a  swift  playback that  now  burst  on my  consciousness
identified  as  a clever burlesque of my voice  and  manner.  I had the  odd
sensation of a piece of  myself being ripped off and tossed overboard, of my
being separated  from my own self,  of flying forward  and at the  same time
turning  away.  The second action  <45>  prevailed, and presently, under the
holm oak, I joined Iris.
     The crickets were stridulating, dusk had filled the pool, a  ray of the
outside lamp glistened on two parked  cars. I kissed her lips, her neck, her
necklace, her neck, her lips.  Her  response dispelled  my ill humor; but  I
told her  what I thought of the idiot  before she ran  back to the festively
lit villa.
     Ivor  personally brought up my  supper, right to my bedside table, with
well-concealed dismay at  being  balked of  his  art's  reward  and charming
apologies for having offended me, and "had I run out of pyjamas?" to which I
replied  that, on the contrary, I felt rather flattered, and in  fact always
slept naked in summer, but preferred not to come down lest a slight headache
prevent me from not living up to that splendid impersonation.
     I slept fitfully,  and  only in  the small  hours glided into  a deeper
spell (illustrated for  no reason at all with the  image  of my first little
inamorata in the  grass of an orchard) from which I was rudely roused by the
spattering sounds  of  a motor. I slipped  on  a shirt and leant out  of the
window,  sending  a  flock of  sparrows whirring out of  the  jasmin,  whose
luxuriant growth reached up to  the second floor,  and  saw, with a  sensual
start, Ivor putting a  suitcase and a fishing rod into his car  which stood,
throbbing,  practically  in  the garden.  It  was  a  Sunday, and I had been
expecting to have him  around  all  day, but there he was getting behind the
wheel and slamming the door after  him.  The  gardener was  giving  tactical
directions with  both arms; his pretty  little boy was also there, holding a
yellow and blue feather  duster. And then  I heard  her lovely English voice
bidding her brother have a good time. I had to lean out a little more to see
her;  she stood on a patch of cool clean turf, barefooted, barecalved, in an
ample-sleeved  peignoir, repeating her  joyful  farewell, which  he could no
longer hear.
     I dashed to the W.C. across the landing. A few moments <46> later, as I
left my gurgling and gulping retreat, I noticed her on the other side of the
staircase.  She  was  entering  my  room.  My  polo  shirt,  a  very  short,
salmon-colored affair, could not hide my salient impatience.
     "I  hate to see the  stunned  look  on the face  of  a  clock  that has
stopped," she said, as she stretched a  slender brovm  arm  up to the  shelf
where I had relegated  an old egg timer lent me in  lieu of a regular alarm.
As her wide  sleeve fell back I kissed the dark perfumed hollow I had longed
to kiss since our first day in the sun.
     The  door  key  would not  work, that I  knew; still I  tried, and  was
rewarded  by the  silly  semblance  of  recurrent  clicks that did  not lock
anything. Whose  step, whose  sick young cough came from the  stairs? Yes of
course that was Jacquot, the gardener's  boy  who  rubbed and  dusted things
every  morning. He might butt in, I said, already  speaking with difficulty.
To polish, for  instance,  that candlestick.  Oh,  what does it  matter, she
whispered,  he's only  a conscientious child,  a poor foundling, as  all our
dogs and parrots are.  Your tum, she said, is still as pink  as your  shirt.
And please do not forget, darling, to clear out before it's too late.
     How far, how bright, how unchanged by eternity, how disfigured by time!
There were bread crumbs and even a bit of  orange peel in the bed. The young
cough  was  now muted,  but  I could  distinctly  hear creakings, controlled
footfalls, the hum in an ear pressed to the door. I must have been eleven or
twelve when the nephew of my  grand-uncle visited  the Moscow  country house
where  I  was spending  that  hot and  hideous summer.  He  had  brought his
passionate bride  with him--straight from the wedding feast. Next day at the
siesta hour, in  a frenzy of curiosity  and fancy, I crept to a  secret spot
under the second-floor  guest-room window  where  a gardener's ladder  stood
rooted in  a jungle of  jasmin.  It reached  only to the  top of  the closed
first-floor shutters, and though  I found  a foothold <47> above them, on an
ornamental projection, I could only just grip the sill of a half-open window
from which confused sounds issued. I recognized the jangle of bedsprings and
the rhythmic tinkle of  a fruit knife on  a plate near the bed, one post  of
which I  could  make out by stretching  my  neck  to  the  utmost;  but what
fascinated me most  were the manly moans  coming from the  invisible part of
the  bed. A superhuman effort afforded  me the sight of  a salmon-pink shirt
over the back of a chair. He, the enraptured beast, doomed to die one day as
so many are, was now repeating her name with ever increasing urgency, and by
the time my  foot slipped he was in full cry,  thus drowning the noise of my
sudden descent into a crackle of twigs and a snowstorm of petals. <48>

10

     Just  before Ivor returned  from  his fishing  trip,  I  moved  to  the
Victoria, where she visited me daily. That was not enough; but in the autumn
Ivor migrated to Los  Angeles  to  join  his  half-brother  in directing the
Amenic  film company (for which, thirty years later, long after Ivor's death
over Dover, I was to write the  script of Pawn Takes Queen, my  most popular
at  the time,  but  far from  best,  novel), and  we returned to our beloved
villa, in  the  really quite  nice  blue  Icarus, Ivor's  thoughtful wedding
present.
     Sometime in October  my benefactor, now in the last stage  of  majestic
senility, came for  his annual visit to Mentone, and,  without warning, Iris
and I dropped in to see him. His villa was incomparably  grander than  ours.
He staggered to his feet to take between his  wax-pale palms Iris's hand and
stare  at her  with  blue bleary  eyes for at least five  seconds  (a little
eternity, socially) in a kind of ritual silence,  after which he embraced me
with a slow triple cross-kiss in the awful Russian tradition.
     "Your bride," he said, using, I knew, the word  in the sense of fiancèe
(and speaking  an English  which  Iris  said  later was exactly like mine in
Ivor's unforgettable version) "is as beautiful as your wife will be!"
     I quickly  told him--in  Russian--that the maire  of  <49>  Cannice had
married us a month ago  in a brisk ceremony. Nikifor  Nikodimovich gave Iris
another stare  and  finally kissed her  hand, which  I was  glad  to see she
raised in the proper fashion  (coached, no  doubt, by  Ivor who used to take
every opportunity to paw his sister).
     "I misunderstood the rumors," he said, "but all the same  I am happy to
make  the acquaintance of such a charming  young  lady. And  where, pray, in
what church, will the vow be sanctified?"
     "In the temple we shall build, Sir," said Iris--a  trifle insolently, I
thought.
     Count Starov  "chewed his lips," as  old men are wont to do  in Russian
novels. Miss Vrode-Vorodin, the elderly cousin who kept house for him,  made
a  timely  entrance and  led Iris to  an  adjacent alcove  (illuminated by a
resplendent portrait  by Serov,  1896,  of  the  notorious  beauty,  Mme. de
Blagidze, in Caucasian costume) for  a  nice cup of tea. The Count wished to
talk business with me and had only ten minutes "before his injection."
     What was my wife's maiden name?
     I told  him.  He  thought  it over  and shook  his head.  What was  her
mother's name?
     I told him that, too. Same reaction. What about the financial aspect of
the marriage?
     I said  she had a house, a  parrot, a car, and a small income--I didn't
know exactly how much.
     After another minute's thought, he asked me if I would like a permanent
job in  the White Cross? It  had nothing to  do with Switzerland. It was  an
organization that  helped  Russian  Christians all over the world.  The  job
would involve travel, interesting connections, promotion to important posts.
     I declined  so emphatically that  he dropped the silver pill box he was
holding and a number  of  innocent gum drops were spilled all over the table
at  his elbow.  He  swept  them onto the carpet with a  gesture  of  peevish
dismissal. <50>
     What then was I intending to do?
     I said I'd go on with my literary dreams and nightmares. We would spend
most of  the year in Paris. Paris was becoming the  center of èmigrè culture
and destitution.
     How much did I think I could earn?
     Well,  as  N.N. knew,  currencies were  losing  their identities in the
whirlpool  of inflation, but  Boris  Morozov,  a distinguished author, whose
fame had preceded  his  exile,  had  given me some illuminating "examples of
existence" when I met him quite recently in Cannice where he had lectured on
Baratynski at the  local  literaturnyy circle. In his case,  four  lines  of
verse  would pay for  a  bifsteck pommes, while  a  couple of essays  in the
Novosti emigratsii assured a month's  rent for a cheap chambre garnie. There
were also readings, in large auditoriums, at least twice a year, which might
bring him each time the equivalent of, say, one hundred dollars.
     My  benefactor  thought this over and said that as  long  as he lived I
would receive a check for  half that  amount every  first  of the month, and
that he would bequeath  me a certain sum in his testament. He named the sum.
Its paltriness  took me  aback. This  was  a foretaste of the  disappointing
advances publishers were to offer me after a long, promising, pencil-tapping
pause.
     We  rented  a  two-room  apartment  in  the  16th  arrondissement,  rue
Desprèaux, 23. The hallway connecting the rooms led, on the front side, to a
bathroom  and  kitchenette.  Being  a  solitary  sleeper  by  principle  and
inclination, I  relinquished the  double bed to Iris, and slept on the couch
in  the parlor. The  concierge's daughter came  to  clean  up and  cook. Her
culinary  capacities  were  limited,  so  we  often  broke  the  monotony of
vegetable soups and boiled meat by eating at a Russian restoranchik. We were
to spend seven winters in that little flat.
     Owing   to  the  foresight  of   my   dear   guardian  and   benefactor
(1850?--1927), an old-fashioned cosmopolitan with <51> a lot of influence in
the right quarters, I had become by the time of my marriage the subject of a
snug foreign  country and  thus  was  spared  the  indignity of a nansenskiy
pasport  (a pauper's  permit, really), as well as the  vulgar obsession with
"documents," which provoked such evil glee among the Bolshevist rulers,  who
perceived  some similarity between red  tape and  Red  rule  and  a  certain
affinity between the civil plight of a hobbled  expatriate and the political
immobilization of  a Soviet slave. I could,  therefore,  take my wife to any
vacational resort in the world without waiting several weeks for a visa, and
then being refused,  perhaps, a return  visa  to our  accidental  country of
residence, in this case  France,  because of some  flaw  in our precious and
despicable  papers. Nowadays  (1970),  when  my  British  passport  has been
superseded  by a no  less  potent American one, I  still treasure  that 1922
photo of the mysterious young man I then was, with  the mysteriously smiling
eyes and the striped tie and the wavy hair. I remember spring trips to Malta
and Andalusia,  but  every  summer,  around the  first of July,  we drove to
Carnavaux and stayed there for a month or two. The  parrot died in 1925, the
footboy vanished  in 1927. Ivor visited us  twice in Paris,  and I think she
saw him  also in London where she went at least  once  a year to spend a few
days with "friends," whom I did not know, but who sounded harmless--at least
to a certain point.
     I  should have  been  happier.  I had planned to be happier. My  health
continued  patchy  with ominous  shapes showing through its flimsier  edges.
Faith in  my  work  never wavered,  but  despite her touching  intentions to
participate in it, Iris remained  on its outside, and the better it grew the
more  alien it  became  to  her.  She  took  desultory lessons  in  Russian,
interrupting them  regularly, for long periods, and finished by developing a
dull habitual aversion to  the language. I  soon noticed that she had ceased
trying to look attentive and bright when Russian, and Russian only, was <52>
spoken in her presence (after some primitive French had been kept up for the
first minute or two of the party in polite concession to her disability).
     This was,  at best,  annoying;  at  worst,  heartrending;  it  did not,
however, affect my sanity as something else threatened to do.
     Jealousy, a  masked  giant never encountered before  in  the  frivolous
affairs  of my  early youth,  now stood with folded arms,  confronting me at
every corner. Certain little sexual quirks in my sweet, docile, tender Iris,
inflections of lovemaking,  felicities of  fondling, the easy  accuracy with
which she adapted her flexible frame to every pattern  of passion, seemed to
presuppose a wealth of experience. Before starting to suspect the present, I
felt  compelled  to  get  my  fill   of  suspecting  her  past.  During  the
examinations to which I subjected her on my worst nights, she  dismissed her
former  romances  as totally  insignificant,  without  realizing  that  this
reticence left more to my imagination than would the most luridly overstated
truth.
     The  three lovers (a figure I wrested  from her with  the fierceness of
Pushkin's mad gambler and with even less luck) whom she had had in her teens
remained nameless, and therefore spectral; devoid  of any individual traits,
and therefore identical. They performed their sketchy pas in the back of her
lone  act like the lowliest members of the corps de ballet, in a display  of
mawkish  gymnastics  rather  than dance,  and it was clear that none of them
would ever  become the male star  of the  troupe. She, the ballerina, on the
other hand, was a dim diamond with all the facets  of talent ready to blaze,
but  under the pressure of  the nonsense around her had, for  the moment, to
limit  her  steps  and gestures  to  an  expression  of  cold  coquetry,  of
flirtatious evasion--waiting  as  she was for  the tremendous  leap  of  the
marble-thighed athlete in shining tights who  was  to erupt  from  the wings
after a decent prelude. We thought I had  been chosen for  that part  but we
were mistaken. <53>
     Only by projecting thus on the screen of my mind those stylized images,
could I  allay the anguish  of carnal jealousy centered on specters. Yet not
seldom I  chose to succumb to it. The trench  window of  my  studio in Villa
Iris gave on the  same red-tiled balcony as my wife's bedroom did, and could
be set  half-open at such an angle as to provide two different views melting
into one another. It caught obliquely,  through the monastic archway leading
from room to room, part  of her bed and  of her--her hair, a shoulder--which
otherwise I could not see from  the old-fashioned lectern at which I  wrote;
but the glass also held, at arm's length as  it  were, the green  reality of
the garden with a peregrination of cypresses along its  sidewall. So half in
bed  and half in the pale hot sky, she would recline, writing a  letter that
was crucified on my  second-best chessboard. I knew that  if  I  asked,  the
answer would be "Oh, to  an old schoolmate," or "To Ivor,"  or "To  old Miss
Kupalov," and I also knew that in one way or another the letter  would reach
the  post office  at  the end of the plane-tree avenue without my seeing the
name  on the envelope. And still I let her write as she  comfortably floated
in the  life belt  of her pillow, above the cypresses and  the  garden wall,
while  all  the time I gauged--grimly, recklessly--to what  depths  of  dark
pigment the tentacled ache would go. <54>

11

     Most of those Russian  lessons consisted  of her taking one of my poems
or  essays  to  this or  that Russian lady,  Miss  Kupalov  or Mrs.  Lapukov
(neither of  whom had much English) and having it paraphrased orally for her
in a kind  of makeshift  Volapýk. On my pointing out  to Iris that  she  was
losing  her time at this hit-and-miss task, she  cast around for  some other
alchemic method which might  enable her  to  read everything I wrote. I  had
begun by then  (1925) my first novel (Tamara) and she coaxed me into letting
her  have a copy of the first chapter, which I had just typed out. This  she
carried to an agency  that dealt in translations into French of  utilitarian
texts such as applications and supplications  addressed by  Russian refugees
to  various  rats in the ratholes of various commissariats.  The  person who
agreed to  supply her  with  the "literal version,"  which she  paid  for in
valuta, kept the typescript for two months and warned her when delivering it
that my "article" had presented  almost insurmountable difficulties,  "being
written in an idiom  and style utterly  unfamiliar to the  ordinary reader."
Thus an anonymous imbecile in a shabby, cluttered, clattering  office became
my first critic and my first translator.
     I  knew nothing of that venture, until I found her one <55> day bending
her brown curls over sheets of foolscap almost perforated by the violence of
the  violet characters that covered it  without  any semblance of  margin. I
was, in  those  days, naively opposed to  any  kind of  translation,  partly
because my attempts  to turn two or three of my first  compositions  into my
own English  had  resulted in a feeling of morbid  revolt--and in  maddening
headaches. Iris, her  cheek on  her fist  and  her eyes rolling  in  languid
doubt, looked up at me rather sheepishly, but with that gleam of  humor that
never  left her in  the most  absurd  or  trying circumstances.  I noticed a
blunder in the first line, a  boo-boo in  the next, and without bothering to
read any further, tore  up the whole thing--which provoked no reaction, save
a neutral sigh, on the part of my thwarted darling.
     In compensation  for being  debarred from my writings, she  decided  to
become a writer herself. Beginning  with the middle  Twenties and to the end
of her  short,  squandered,  uncharmed  life, my  Iris  kept  working  on  a
detective novel in two, three, four  successive versions, in which the plot,
the people, the setting, everything kept changing  in bewildering bursts  of
frantic deletions--everything except the names (none of which I remember).
     Not only did  she lack  all  literary  talent, but she had not even the
knack of  imitating the small number of gifted authors among  the prosperous
but  ephemeral  purveyors  of  "crime fiction"  which she consumed with  the
indiscriminate zest of  a model prisoner. How, then,  did my Iris  know  why
this had to be altered, that  rejected? What instinct of  genius ordered her
to destroy the whole  heap of her drafts on the eve, practically on the eve,
of her sudden death?  All the  odd girl could ever visualize, with startling
lucidity, was the crimson cover of  the final, ideal paperback on which  the
villain's  hairy  fist would  be  shown  pointing  a pistol-shaped cigarette
lighter at the reader--who was not supposed  to guess until everybody in the
book had died that it was, in fact, a pistol. <56>
     Let me pick out several fatidic points, cleverly disguised at the time,
within the embroidery of our seven winters.
     During a  lull in a magnificent concert  for which we had not been able
to   obtain   adjacent  seats,  I   noticed   Iris   eagerly   welcoming   a
melancholy-looking woman with drab  hair and thin lips; I  certainly had met
her,  somewhere,  quite  recently,  but  the  very  insignificance  of   her
appearance canceled the pursuit of  a vague recollection,  and I never asked
Iris about it. She was to become my wife's last teacher.
     Every author believes,  when  his  first book is published, that  those
that acclaim it  are his  personal  friends or impersonal peers,  while  its
revilers can only be envious rogues  and nonentities.  No doubt I might have
had   similar  illusions  about  the  way  Tamara   was   reviewed  in   the
Russian-language  periodicals  of Paris,  Berlin,  Prague,  Riga, and  other
cities;  but by that time I was already  engrossed in my second novel,  Pawn
Takes Queen, and my first one  had dwindled to a pinch of colored dust in my
mind.
     The editor of Patria, the èmigrè monthly in  which Pawn Takes Queen had
begun to  be  serialized,  invited  "Irida  Osipovna" and me  to a  literary
samovar. I mention it  only because this was one of  the few  salons that my
unsociability deigned to frequent. Iris helped with the sandwiches. I smoked
my  pipe and observed the feeding habits of two major novelists, three minor
ones,  one major  poet,  five  minor ones of  both  sexes,  one major critic
(Demian  Basilevski),  and  nine   minor   ones,  including  the  inimitable
"Prostakov-Skotinin," a  Russian comedy name (meaning "simpleton and brute")
applied to him by his archrival Hristofor Boyarski.
     The major poet,  Boris Morozov, an amiable grizzly bear of  a  man, was
asked how his reading in Berlin  had gone, and he said: "Nichevo" (a "so-so"
tinged with a "well  enough") and  then told a funny but not memorable story
about the new President of the Union  of Èmigrè <57> Writers in Germany. The
lady  next to me informed me  she had  adored that  treacherous conversation
between  the  Pawn  and the Queen about  the husband and  would  they really
defenestrate the poor  chess player?  I said they would but not in  the next
issue, and not for  good:  he would live forever in the  games he had played
and in the multiple exclamation marks of future annotators. I also heard--my
hearing is almost on a  par with my  sight--snatches of general talk such as
an explanatory, "She is an  Englishwoman,"  murmured from behind a hand five
chairs away by one guest to another.
     All that would  have  been much too  trivial to  record unless meant to
serve as the commonplace background,  at any such meeting of exiles, against
which a certain  reminder  flickered now and then, between the  shoptalk and
the tattle--a line of Tyutchev  or Blok, which was cited in passing, as well
as an  everlasting  presence, with the familiarity of  devotion and  as  the
secret height of art, and which ornamented sad lives  with a sudden  cadenza
coming  from some celestial  elsewhere, a glory, a  sweetness, the patch  of
rainbow cast on the wall by a crystal paperweight we cannot locate. That was
what my Iris was missing.
     To return to the trivia: I recall regaling  the company with one of the
howlers I had noticed in the "translation" of Tamara. The sentence vidnelos'
neskol'ko barok  ("several  barges  could  be seen") had become la vue ètait
assez  baroque.  The eminent  critic  Basilevski, a stocky,  fair-haired old
fellow in  a  rumpled brown  suit, shook with abdominal mirth--but then  his
expression changed  to  one  of  suspicion  and  displeasure.  After tea  he
accosted me  and  insisted  gruffly that  I  had  made up  that  example  of
mistranslation. I remember  answering that, if so, he, too, might well be an
invention of mine.
     As we strolled home. Iris complained she would never  learn to  cloud a
glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to
put  up with  her  deliberate  <58>  insularity but  implored her  to  cease
announcing þ la ronde: "Please, don't mind me: I love the sound of Russian."
That  was an insult, like telling  an author  his book  was  unreadable  but
beautifully printed.
     "I am  going to make reparations," she gaily  replied. "I've never been
able to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only  one--and
you refused to  teach me,  because you  were  busy, because  you were tired,
because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I've discovered at
last someone who speaks both languages, yours  and mine,  as two natives  in
one,  and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In fact
it's her own suggestion."
     Nadezhda  Gordonovna  Starov  was  the  wife  of  a  leytenant   Starov
(Christian  name unimportant), who had served under  General Wrangel and now
had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, as
fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or "adopted
nephew"  (whatever that meant), he  was  said to  be.  He was  a  dark-eyed,
dark-complexioned man, three or four  years my  senior; I thought him rather
handsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the  civil  war
had left him with a terrifying tic that  caused his face to change suddenly,
at variable intervals, as if a paper bag were being crumpled by an invisible
hand. Nadezhda  Starov, a  quiet, plain woman with  an indefinable Quakerish
look about  her, clocked those  intervals  for some  reason, no  doubt  of a
medical nature, the man  himself being unconscious of his "fireworks" unless
he happened  to  see them  in  a mirror.  He had  a macabre sense  of humor,
beautiful hands, and a velvety voice.
     I  realized  now that it was  Nadezhda Gordonovna  whom  Iris  had been
talking to in that concert hall. I cannot say exactly when the lessons began
or how  long that  fad  lasted; a month or two months at the most. They took
place  either in  Mrs.  Starov's  lodgings  or in  one  of the <59>  Russian
tearooms both  ladies frequented. I kept a little list  of telephone numbers
so that  Iris might  be  warned  that  I  could  always  make  sure  of  her
whereabouts if,  say, I felt on the brink of losing my mind or wanted her to
buy on  the way home a tin of my favorite Brown Prune tobacco.  She did  not
know, on the other hand, that I would never have dared ring her up, lest her
not being  where  she said  she would  be cause me  even a few minutes of an
agony that I could not face.
     Sometime around  Christmas,  1929,  she  casually  told me  that  those
lessons  had been discontinued  quite a while  ago: Mrs. Starov had left for
England,  and  it was rumored that she  would not return to her husband. The
lieutenant, it seemed, was quite a dasher. <60>

12

     At  a  certain mysterious  point toward  the end of our last  winter in
Paris  something in our  relationship changed for the  better. A wave of new
warmth,  new  intimacy,  new tenderness,  swelled  and swept  away  all  the
delusions of distance--tiffs, silences, suspicions, retreats into castles of
amour-propre  and the like--which  had obstructed our  love  and  of which I
alone was  guilty. A more amiable, merrier  mate I could not have  imagined.
Endearments, love names (based in my case  on Russian  forms) reentered  our
customary exchanges.  I broke the  monastic  rules of work  on my novella in
verse Polnolunie  (Plenilune) by riding  with her  in the Bois  or dutifully
escorting  her to fashion-show teases and exhibitions of avant-garde frauds.
I surmounted  my  contempt  for the "serious" cinema (depicting heartrending
problems with a political twist), which she preferred to American buffoonery
and the trick photography of Germanic horror films. I even gave a talk on my
Cambridge  days at  a  rather  pathetic  English Ladies Club,  to  which she
belonged. And to top the treat, I told her the plot of my next novel (Camera
Lucida).
     One  afternoon, in March  or early April, 1930, she peeped into my room
and, being  admitted,  handed me  the  duplicate  of  a  typewritten  sheet,
numbered 444. It was, she <61> said, a tentative episode in her interminable
tale,  which  would  soon  display  more deletions than  insertions. She was
stuck,  she  said. Diana Vane, an  incidental but on the  whole  nice  girl,
sojourning in  Paris,  happened to  meet,  at a  riding  school,  a  strange
Frenchman, of Corsican,  or  perhaps Algerian,  origin,  passionate, brutal,
unbalanced. He mistook  Diana--and kept on mistaking her despite  her amused
remonstrations--for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he had
last seen ages ago. We had here, said the author,  a  sort of hallucination,
an obsessive fancy,  which Diana, a  delightful flirt  with a  keen sense of
humor, allowed  Jules to  entertain during some  twenty  riding lessons; but
then his attentions grew more  realistic, and she stopped seeing him.  There
had been nothing between them, and yet he simply could not be dissuaded from
confusing  her  with the  girl he once  had possessed or thought he had, for
that girl, too, might well have been only the afterimage  of a still earlier
romance or remembered delirium. It was a very bizarre situation.
     Now this page was supposed to be a last ominous letter  written by that
Frenchman in a foreigner's English to Diana. I was to read  it as if it were
a real letter and suggest, as an experienced  writer, what might be the next
development or disaster.

     Beloved!
     I am not capable to represent to myself that you really desire  to tear
up any connection with me.  God sees, I love you more  than life--more  than
two lives,  your and my, together taken.  Are you not ill? Or maybe you have
found  another?  Another  lover, yes? Another victim of your attraction? No,
no, this thought is too horrible, too humiliating for us both.
     My supplication is modest and just. Give only one more interview to me!
One  interview! I am <62> prepared to  meet  with  you  it  does  not matter
where--on the street,  in some cafe, in the  Forest of  Boulogne--but I must
see you, must  speak with you  and  open to you many mysteries before I will
die.  Oh, this is no threat!  I swear that if  our interview will lead to  a
positive result, if, otherwise speaking, you will permit me to hope, only to
hope, then, oh then, I will consent to wait a little. But you  must reply to
me without retardment, my cruel, stupid, adored little girl!
     Your Jules

     "There's one thing," I said, carefully folding  the sheet and pocketing
it for later study,  "one thing  the little girl should know. This  is not a
romantic Corsican  writing  a  crime  passionnel  letter;  it  is  a Russian
blackmailer  knowing just enough English  to  translate into it  the stalest
Russian  locutions. What puzzles me is how did you,  with your three or four
words  of Russian--kak pozhivaete and do svidaniya--how did you, the author,
manage to think up those  subtle  turns, and imitate the mistakes in English
that only a Russian would make? Impersonation,  I know, runs  in the family,
but still--"
     Iris  replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to  the
heroine  of my  Ardis forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, she
must have had  too  many muddled lessons in Russian and she would  certainly
correct that extraordinary impression by simply giving  the whole  letter in
French--from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian had borrowed  a
lot of clichès.
     "But  that's  beside the point," she added.  "You don't understand--the
point is  what should happen next--I  mean,  logically?  What should my poor
girl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed,
she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?" <63>
     "In the wastepaper basket," I whispered, interrupting my work to gather
her small  form  onto  my lap as I often  did, the Lord  be thanked, in that
fatal spring of 1930.
     "Give me back that scrap," she begged gently, trying to thrust her hand
into the pocket  of  my  dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced her
closer.
     My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by  the
surmise  that my wife had been  transcribing  an authentic letter--received,
say,  from  one of  the  wretched, unwashed  èmigrè  poeticules, with smooth
glossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons of
exile.  But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just might be her
own  composition with  some of  the planted faults, borrowed from the French
(supplication, sans tarder), while  others could be subliminal echoes of the
Volapýk  she  had been  exposed to, during sessions  with Russian  teachers,
through bilingual or trilingual exercises in tawdry textbooks. Thus, instead
of  losing myself in a jungle  of evil conjectures, all I did  was  preserve
that  thin sheet with its unevenly  margined  lines so characteristic of her
typing in  the faded  and cracked briefcase before me, among other mementos,
other deaths. <64>

13

     On  the morning  of April  23, 1930, the  shrill  peal  of the  hallway
telephone caught me in the act of stepping into my bathwater.
     Ivor! He had  just  arrived in Paris  from New  York  for an  important
conference,  would be busy all afternoon,  was leaving tomorrow, would  like
to--
     Here intervened naked Iris, who delicately, unhurriedly, with a radiant
smile, appropriated the monologizing receiver. A  minute later (her  brother
with all his defects was a mercifully  concise phoner),  she, still beaming,
embraced me, and we moved to her bedroom for our last "fairelamourir" as she
called it in her tender aberrant French.
     Ivor was to fetch  us  at seven P.M. I had already put on my old dinner
jacket; Iris stood sideways to the hallway mirror (the best and brightest in
the  whole flat) veering gently as she tried to catch  a  clear view  of the
back of her silky dark bob in the hand glass she held at head level.
     "If you're ready," she said, "I'd like you to buy some olives. He'll be
coming here after dinner, and he likes them with his `postbrandy.' "
     So I went downstairs and crossed  the street and shivered (it was a raw
cheerless  night) and pushed open  the door of the little  delicatessen shop
opposite, and a man behind  <65> me stopped  it from  closing with  a strong
hand.  He wore a  trench coat and a beret, his dark face  was  twitching.  I
recognized Lieutenant Starov.
     "Ah!" he said. "A  whole  century we did  not  meet!" The cloud  of his
breath  gave  off an  odd chemical smell. I had  once tried sniffing cocaine
(which only made me throw up), but this was some other drug.
     He removed a  black glove for one of those circumstantial handshakes my
compatriots  think  proper to use at every entry and exit, and the liberated
door hit him between the shoulder blades.
     "Pleasant meeting!" he went on  in his curious English (not parading it
as might have seemed  but using it  by unconscious association).  "I see you
are in a smoking. Banquet?"
     I bought  my olives, replying the while, in Russian, that, yes, my wife
and I  were dining  out.  Then  I skipped a farewell  handshake,  by  taking
advantage of the shopgirl's turning to him for the next transaction.
     "What a shame,"  exclaimed Iris--"I  wanted  the black  ones,  not  the
green! "
     I told her I refused  to go back for them because I did not want to run
into Starov again.
     "Oh, that's a detestable person," she said. "I'm sure he'll try now  to
come and see us, hoping for some vaw-dutch-ka. I'm sorry you spoke to him."
     She flung the window open and leant out just as  Ivor was emerging from
his  taxi. She  blew  him an exuberant  kiss and shouted, with  illustrative
gestures, that we were coming down.
     "How nice it would be," she said as we hurried downstairs, "if you'd be
wearing  an opera cloak. You could wrap it around both of us  as the Siamese
twins do in your story. Now, quick!"
     She dashed into Ivor's arms, and was  the next moment in the safety  of
the cab. <66>
     "Paon d'Or," Ivor  told the driver. "Good to see you, old boy," he said
to me, with a distinct American intonation (which I shyly imitated at dinner
until he growled: "Very funny").
     The  Paon d'Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a nice
clean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it "Pander" or
"Pandora" and always ordered its "putty saw-lay," and that, I guess, is what
we had. I remember  more  clearly a glazed case  hanging on the gold-figured
wall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies,  two huge ones
similar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and  two smaller ones beneath
them, the left of a  sweeter blue with  white stripes and the right gloaming
like silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had  been caught by  a
convict in South America.
     "And how's my friend Mata Hari?" inquired Ivor turning to us again, his
spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward
the "bugs" under discussion.
     We told him the poor ara  sickened and  had to  be destroyed.  And what
about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was--
     "In fact," Iris continued, touching my wrist, "we've decided to set off
tomorrow for  Cannice. Pity you can't join us, Ives,  but  perhaps you might
come later."
     I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision.
     Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone who
would snap it up any time. Iris,  he said, knew him too:  David Geller,  the
actor.  "He was (turning to me) her  first beau before you blundered in. She
must still have somewhere that photo of him and me  in  Troilus and Cressida
ten years ago. He's Helen of Troy in it. I'm Cressida."
     "Lies, lies," murmured Iris.
     Ivor  described  his  own  house  in  Los  Angeles.  He  proposed  <67>
discussing with me after  dinner a  script he wished me to  prepare based on
Gogol's  Inspector (we were back  at the start, so to speak). Iris asked for
another helping of whatever it was we were eating.
     "You will die,"  said Ivor.  "It's monstrously rich. Remember what Miss
Grunt  (a former  governess to whom  he  would assign all  kinds of gruesome
apothegms) used to say: `The white worms lie in wait for the glutton.' "
     "That's why I want to be burned when I die," remarked Iris.
     He ordered a second or third bottle of the indifferent white wine I had
had the polite  weakness to praise. We drank to  his last film--I forget its
title--which was to  be shown tomorrow in London, and  later  in  Paris,  he
hoped.
     Ivor did not look either very  well or very  happy; he had  developed a
sizable  bald  spot, freckled. I had  never noticed  before that his eyelids
were  so heavy  and  his lashes so  coarse  and pale. Our  neighbors,  three
harmless   Americans,   hearty,  flushed,  vociferous,  were,  perhaps,  not
particularly pleasant, but neither Iris nor I thought Ivor's threat "to make
those Bronxonians pipe down" justified, seeing that he,  too, was talking in
fairly resonant tones. I rather looked forward to the end of the dinner--and
to coffee at home--but Iris on  the contrary  seemed inclined to enjoy every
morsel and drop.  She wore  a very  open, jet-black  frock and the long onyx
earrings I had once given her.  Her cheeks  and arms,  without  their summer
tan,  had  the   mat  whiteness   that  I  was  to  distribute--perhaps  too
generously--among the girls of my future books. Ivor's roving eyes, while he
talked, tended to appraise her bare  shoulders, but by  the  simple trick of
breaking  in with some question, I managed to keep confusing  the trajectory
of his gaze.
     At  last the ordeal came to a  close. Iris said she would  be back in a
minute; her  brother suggested  we "repair  for  a  leak."  I  declined--not
because I did not need it--I did--but <68> because I knew by experience that
a talkative neighbor and the sight of his  immediate stream would inevitably
afflict me with  urinary impotence. As I sat  smoking  in the  lounge of the
restaurant I pondered  the wisdom of  suddenly  transferring the established
habit  of work on Camera Lucida to other surroundings, another desk, another
lighting, another pressure of outside calls and  smells--and  I saw my pages
and notes flash past  like the bright windows of an  express train  that did
not stop at my  station. I  had  decided to talk  Iris  out of her plan when
brother and sister appeared from opposite sides of the stage, beaming at one
another. She had less than fifteen minutes of life left.
     Numbers  are bleary  along  rue Desprèaux,  and  the taximan missed our
front porch by a  couple of  house  lengths. He suggested reversing his cab,
but  impatient Iris had  already  alighted, and  I scrambled  out after her,
leaving Ivor  to pay the taxi. She cast  a look around her; then started  to
walk so fast  toward our house that I had trouble catching up with her. As I
was about to cup her elbow, I heard Ivor's voice behind me, calling out that
he had not enough change. I abandoned Iris and ran back to Ivor, and just as
I reached the two palm readers, they and I heard Iris cry out something loud
and brave, as if  she  were driving  away a  fierce hound. By the light of a
streetlamp we glimpsed the figure of  a mackintoshed  man stride up  to  her
from the  opposite  sidewalk and fire at such close range that he  seemed to
prod her with his large pistol. By now our taximan, followed by Ivor and me,
had come near enough to see the killer stumble over her collapsed and curled
up body. Yet  he did not try to  escape. Instead he knelt down, took off his
beret, threw back his shoulders, and in  this ghastly and ludicrous attitude
lifted his pistol to his shaved head.
     The  story that appeared among other faits-divers in the  Paris dailies
after an investigation by the police--whom  Ivor  and I contrived to mislead
thoroughly--amounted to what follows--I translate: a White Russian, Wladimir
<69>  Blagidze, alias Starov, who was  subject to paroxysms of insanity, ran
amuck  Friday night in the middle of a  calm  street, opened fire at random,
and after killing  with  one pistol  shot  an  English  tourist  Mrs.  [name
garbled],  who chanced to be  passing by,  blew his  brains out  beside her.
Actually he did not die there and then, but retained in his remarkably tough
brainpan  fragments of consciousness and somehow  lingered on well into May,
which  was  unusually  hot  that  year.  Out  of  some  perverse  dream-like
curiosity, Ivor visited him at the very special hospital of the renowned Dr.
Lazareff, a very round, mercilessly round, building on  the top of  a  hill,
thickly  covered with  horse chestnut, wild rose, and other poignant plants.
The hole in Blagidze's mind had caused a  complete set of recent memories to
escape; but the patient remembered  quite  clearly (according  to  a Russian
male nurse good at  decoding the tales of the tortured) how  at six years of
age  he  was taken  to  a  pleasure  park in Italy where a  miniature  train
consisting  of  three  open cars, each  seating six silent children,  with a
battery-operated green engine that  emitted  at realistic intervals puffs of
imitation  smoke, pursued a  circular course  through a  brambly picturesque
nightmare  grove whose dizzy flowers nodded  continuous assent  to  all  the
horrors of childhood and hell.
     From  somewhere in  the  Orkneys,  Nadezhda  Gordonovna and a  clerical
friend arrived in Paris  only after her  husband's burial.  Moved by a false
sense  of duty, she attempted  to  see me so  as to  tell me "everything." I
evaded all contact with her, but she managed to locate Ivor in London before
he left for  the States. I never asked him, and  the dear funny fellow never
revealed to me what that "everything" was; I refuse to believe that it could
have  amounted  to  much--and  I  knew enough, anyway.  By nature I  am  not
vindictive;  yet I like  to dwell in fancy on the image of that little green
train, running on, round and round, forever. <70>


PART TWO
     <71> <72>
        1

     A  curious form of self-preservation moves  us  to get  rid, instantly,
irrevocably, of  all that belonged to the  loved one we lost. Otherwise, the
things she touched every  day and kept in their proper context by the act of
handling them start to become  bloated with an  awful mad life of their own.
Her dresses now  wear their  own selves, her books leaf  through  their  own
pages. We suffocate in  the  tightening  circle of  those  monsters that are
misplaced and misshapen because she is not there  to tend them. And even the
bravest among us cannot meet the gaze of her mirror.
     How to get rid of them is another problem.  I could not drown them like
kittens; in fact, I  could not drown a  kitten, let alone her brush or  bag.
Nor could  I  watch  a stranger collect  them, take them away, come back for
more. Therefore, I simply abandoned the flat, telling the maid to dispose in
any manner she chose of all those unwanted things. Unwanted!  At  the moment
of parting they appeared  quite normal and harmless;  I  would even say they
looked taken aback.
     At first I  tried putting up  in  a third-rate hotel  in the center  of
Paris. I would fight terror and solitude by working all day. I completed one
novel, began another, wrote  forty  poems (all  robbers  and  brothers under
their  motley  <73>  skin),  a dozen  short  stories,  seven  essays,  three
devastating reviews,  one parody. The business of  not losing my mind during
the  night  was  taken care of by swallowing  an  especially potent  pill or
buying a bedmate.
     I remember  a dangerous  dawn  in  May (1931? or  1932?); all the birds
(mostly  sparrows)  were singing as in Heine's  month  of May, with  demonic
monotonous force--that's  why  I  know  it must  have been a  wonderful  May
morning.  I  lay with my  face  to the  wall and  in a  muddled  ominous way
considered the question should  "we" not drive earlier  than usual to  Villa
Iris.  An  obstacle,  however,  kept preventing  me  from  undertaking  that
journey: the car and the house had been sold, so Iris had told me herself at
the  Protestant  cemetery,  because  the  masters  of  her  faith  and  fate
interdicted cremation. I turned in bed from the wall to the window, and Iris
was lying  with her dark head to me on the window side of the bed. I  kicked
off the bedclothes. She was naked, save for her black-stockinged legs (which
was strange but  at the  same time recalled something from a parallel world,
for my mind stood  astride  on two circus horses). In an erotic footnote,  I
reminded myself for the ten thousandth time to mention  somewhere that there
is  nothing more seductive than  a girl's back with the profiled rise of the
haunch  accentuated by her lying  sidelong, one  leg  slightly  bent.  "J'ai
froid," said the girl as I touched her shoulder.
     The Russian  term for  any kind of  betrayal, faithlessness,  breach of
trust, is the snaky, watered-silk word izmena which is based on the  idea of
change,  shift, transformation. This derivation had never occurred to me  in
my constant thoughts about Iris, but now it struck me as the revelation of a
bewitchment,  of a  nymph's turning  into  a whore--and  this  called for an
immediate  and  vociferous protest. One  neighbor thumped  the wall, another
rattled  the  door.  The  frightened girl, snatching  up  her handbag and my
raincoat, bolted  out of  the room, and  a bearded  individual  <74> entered
instead,  farcically clad in a nightshirt and wearing  rubbers  on his  bare
feet. The crescendo of  my  cries,  cries of  rage and distress, ended in  a
hysterical fit. I think some attempt was made to whisk me off to a hospital.
In any case, I had to find  another home sans tarder, a phrase I cannot hear
without a spasm of anguish by mental association with her lover's letter.
     A  small patch of countryside kept  floating before  my eyes  like some
photic illusion.  I  let  my  index  finger stray  at random  over a  map of
northern France;  the  point of  its nail stopped  at the town of Petiver or
Pètit Ver, a small worm or verse, which sounded  idyllic. An autobus took me
to a road station not very far from Orlèans, I believe. All I remember of my
abode is  its  oddly slanting  floor which  corresponded  to a  slant in the
ceiling of the cafe under my room. I also remember  a pastel-green  park  to
the east of the town, and an old  castle. The summer I spent there is a mere
smudge of  color  on  the  dull glass  of my mind; but I  did  write  a  few
poems--at least one of  which, about a company of acrobats staging a show on
the  church square, has  been reprinted a  number of  times in the course of
forty years.
     When I returned to  Paris I found that my kind  friend Stepan Ivanovich
Stepanov, a prominent journalist of independent means  (he was  one of those
very few lucky Russians who had happened  to transfer  themselves and  their
money abroad before the Bolshevik coup), had not only organized my second or
third public reading (vecher, "evening," was the Russian term consecrated to
that kind  of performance) but wanted me to stay in  one of the ten rooms of
his spacious old-fashioned house (Avenue Koch? Roche? It abuts,  or abutted,
on the statue  of a general whose name escapes me but surely lurks somewhere
among my old notes).
     Its residents  were at  the moment  old Mr.  and  Mrs. Stepanov,  their
married daughter Baroness Borg, her <75> eleven-year-old child (the Baron, a
businessman, had  been sent by his  firm to  England),  and  Grigoriy  Reich
(1899-1942?), a gentle, melancholy, lean, young poet, of no talent whatever,
who under  the pen name of Lunin contributed a  weekly elegy to  the Novosti
and acted as Stepanov's secretary.
     I  could not avoid  coming  down  in the evenings to  join the frequent
gatherings  of  literary  and political personages in the ornate salon or in
the dining room with  its huge  oblong table and the oil portrait en pied of
the  Stepanovs'  young  son  who  had  died in  1920 while trying  to save a
drowning schoolmate.  Nearsighted, gruffly jovial  Alexander  Kerenski would
usually  be there, brusquely raising his eyeglass to stare  at a stranger or
greeting an old friend with a ready quip in that rasping voice of his,  most
of its  strength  lost  years  ago  in  the  roar  of  the  Revolution. Ivan
Shipogradov, eminent novelist and recent Nobel Prize  winner,  would also be
present,  radiating  talent  and  charm,  and--after  a   few   jiggers   of
vodka--delighting his  intimates  with the  kind of  Russian bawdy tale that
depends for its artistry on the rustic gusto and fond respect with which  it
treats  our  most  private  organs. A far less  engaging  figure  was I.  A.
Shipogradov's old  rival, a  fragile  little man in a  sloppy suit,  Vasiliy
Sokolovski (oddly nicknamed "Jeremy" by  I.A.), who  since the dawn  of  the
century had been  devoting volume after  volume  to  the mystical and social
history of a Ukrainian clan that had started as a humble family of  three in
the sixteenth century but  by volume six  (1920) had become a whole village,
replete with folklore and myth. It was good to see  old Morozov's rough-hewn
clever face with its shock  of dingy hair and  bright frosty eyes; and for a
special reason I closely observed  podgy dour Basilevski--not because he had
just had or was about to have a row with his young mistress, a feline beauty
who  wrote doggerel verse and  vulgarly flirted with me, but because I hoped
he had already  seen the fun I had made of <76> him in the  last  issue of a
literary review in which we both  collaborated.  Although  his  English  was
inadequate  for the  interpretation of,  say,  Keats (whom he  defined as "a
pre-Wildean aesthete in the beginning of the Industrial Era") Basilevski was
fond of  attempting just that. In discussing  recently  the  "not altogether
displeasing preciosity" of my own stuff, he had imprudently quoted a popular
line from Keats, rendering it as:

     Vsegda nas raduet krasivaya veshchitsa

which in retranslation gives:

     "A pretty bauble always gladdens us."

     Our conversation, however, turned out to be much too  brief to disclose
whether or  not he  had  appreciated  my amusing lesson.  He asked me what I
thought  of   the  new  book  he  was  telling  Morozov   (a   monolinguist)
about--namely Maurois' "impressive  work  on Byron," and  upon my  answering
that  I had found it  to be impressive trash, my austere critic muttered, "I
don't think you have read it," and went on educating the serene old poet.
     I  would  steal  away long before the  party  broke up.  The sounds  of
farewells usually reached me as I glided into insomnia.
     I spent most of the  day working, ensconced in a deep armchair, with my
implements  conveniently  resting  before me  on  a  special  writing  board
provided by my host, a great lover of handy knickknacks. Somehow or other  I
had started to gain weight since my bereavement and by now had  to  make two
or three lurching efforts  in order to  leave my overaffectionate seat. Only
one little person  visited me;  for her I  kept my door  slightly ajar.  The
board's  proximal  edge  had a  thoughtful  incurvature  to  accommodate  an
author's  abdomen, and  the  distal side was equipped <77>  with clamps  and
rubberbands to hold papers and pencils  in place;  I got so  used  to  those
comforts that I regretted ungratefully the absence of toilet  fixtures--such
as one of those hollow canes said to be used by Orientals.
     Every afternoon, at the same hour, a silent push opened the door wider,
and the granddaughter of the Stepanovs brought in a tray  with a large glass
of  strong tea  and a plate of ascetic zwiebacks.  She  advanced, eyes bent,
moving carefully her white-socked,  blue-sneakered  feet; coming to  a  near
stop  when  the  tea  tossed; and  advancing again with the slow steps of  a
clockwork doll. She had flaxen hair  and  a  freckled  nose, and I chose the
gingham  frock  with the glossy  black belt  for her to  wear when I had her
continue her mysterious progress right into the book I was writing,  The Red
Top Hat, in  which  she becomes graceful  little  Amy,  the condemned  man's
ambiguous consoler.
     Those were nice, nice interludes!  One could hear the  Baroness and her
mother playing þ quatre mains in the salon downstairs as they had played and
replayed,  no  doubt,   for  the  last  fifteen   years.  I  had  a  box  of
chocolate-coated biscuits to supplement the  zwiebacks and tempt  my  little
visitor. The writing board was put  aside and  replaced by her folded limbs.
She spoke Russian fluently but with Parisian interjections and interrogatory
sounds,  and  those bird  notes lent  something  eerie  to  the  responses I
obtained,  as she  dangled one  leg and  bit her  biscuit,  to  the ordinary
questions one puts to a child; and  then quite suddenly in the midst of  our
chat, she would wriggle out of my arms and make for the door as  if somebody
were summoning her, though actually the piano kept  stumbling on  and on  in
the homely course of a family happiness in which I had no part and which, in
fact, I had never known.
     My stay at the Stepanovs' had been supposed to last a  couple of weeks;
it lasted  two  months.  At  first  I  felt  comparatively well, or at least
comfortable and refreshed, but a new sleeping pill  which had worked so well
at its beguiling <78> stage  began refusing  to  cope with certain  reveries
which, as  suggested  subsequently  by an incredible  sequel, I  should have
succumbed to like a man and  got done with no matter how; instead of  that I
took advantage of Dolly's removal  to England to  find a new dwelling for my
miserable carcass.  This  was  a  bed-sitting-room in  a  shabby  but  quiet
tenement house on the Left Bank, "at the  corner of rue St. Supplice,"  says
my  pocket  diary with  grim  imprecision.  An  ancient  cupboard  of  sorts
contained a primitive shower bath; but there were no other facilities. Going
out two or  three  times  a day  for  a  meal, or  a cup  of  coffee, or  an
extravagant purchase at a delicatessen, afforded me  a small distraction. In
the next block I  found a  cinema that specialized in old horse operas and a
tiny brothel with four whores ranging in age from  eighteen to thirty-eight,
the youngest being also the plainest.
     I  was to spend  many years in Paris, tied  to that dismal  city by the
threads of a  Russian writer's livelihood. Nothing then, and nothing now, in
backcast, had or has for me any of the spell that enthralled my compatriots.
I am not thinking  of the  blood spot  on the darkest stone  of  its darkest
street; that  is hors-concours in  the  way  of horror; I  just mean that  I
regarded Paris, with its gray-toned  days and charcoal nights, merely as the
chance  setting  for  the most authentic and faithful joys of  my life:  the
colored phrase  in my mind  under the drizzle, the white page under the desk
lamp awaiting me in my humble home. <79>

2

     Since 1925 I had written and published four novels; by the beginning of
1934 I was on the point  of completing  my fifth, Krasnyy Tsilindr (The  Red
Top Hat), the story  of  a  beheading. None of those  books  exceeded ninety
thousand words but  my method of  choosing and blending them could hardly be
called a timesaving expedient.
     A first draft, made in pencil, filled several blue cahiers of  the kind
used  in schools,  and  upon  reaching  the  saturation  point  of  revision
presented  a  chaos  of  smudges  and scriggles.  To  this corresponded  the
disorder of the text which followed a regular sequence only for a few pages,
being then interrupted by  some chunky passage that belonged to  a later, or
earlier, part of the story. After  sorting out and repaginating  all this, I
applied myself to the next stage: the fair copy. It was tidily written  with
a fountain pen in a fat and sturdy exercise book or ledger.  Then an orgy of
new  corrections would  blot out by degrees  all  the  pleasure  of specious
perfection. A third phase started where legibility stopped. Poking with slow
and rigid fingers  at the  keys of my trusty old mashinka ("machine"), Count
Starov's wedding  present, I would be able to type some three hundred  words
in one hour  instead of the round  <80>  thousand  with which  some  popular
novelist of the previous century could cram it in longhand.
     In the case of The  Red Top Hat, however, the neuralgic aches which had
been spreading through my frame like an inner person of pain, all angles and
claws, for the  last  three years, had now attained my extremities, and made
the task  of typing a fortunate impossibility. By economizing on my favorite
nutriments, such  as foie gras and Scotch whisky, and postponing the  making
of a  new suit, I calculated  that  my modest income allowed me  to hire  an
expert typist, to whom I would dictate my corrected manuscript  during, say,
thirty  carefully  planned  afternoons.  I  therefore  inserted  a prominent
wanter, with name and telephone, in the Novosti.
     Among  the three  or four  typists who offered their services,  I chose
Lyubov Serafimovna Savich, the granddaughter of  a country  priest  and  the
daughter of  a famous SR (Social  Revolutionist) who  had  recently  died in
Meudon upon completing his biography of Alexander  the First (a tedious work
in two volumes  entitled  The  Monarch and  the  Mystic,  now  available  to
American students in an indifferent translation. Harvard, 1970).
     Lyuba Savich started working for me on February  1, 1934.  She came  as
often  as necessary and was willing  to stay any number of hours (the record
she  set on an  especially  memorable  occasion was from  one to eight). Had
there been a  Miss Russia and had the  age of prize misses been prolonged to
just  under thirty, beautiful Lyuba would have won the title. She was a tall
woman with slim ankles, big breasts, broad shoulders, and a pair of gay blue
eyes in a round rosy face. Her auburn hair must have always felt as being in
a state of imminent disarray for she constantly  stroked its side wave, in a
graceful elbow-raised gesture,  when  talking to me.  Zdraste, and once more
zdraste, Lyubov Serafimovna--and, oh,  what  a delightful amalgam  that <81>
was,  with lyubov meaning "love," and Serafim ("seraph") being the Christian
name of a reformed terrorist!
     As a typist  L.S. was magnificent. Hardly had I finished dictating  one
sentence, as I paced back  and forth, than  it had reached her furrow like a
handful of grain, and with one eyebrow raised she was already looking at me,
waiting for  the  next strewing.  If  a  sudden  alteration for  the  better
occurred to  me  in mid  session, I  preferred not  to spoil  the  wonderful
give-and-take rhythm of our joint work by introducing painful pauses of word
weighing--especially enervating and sterile  when a self-conscious author is
aware  that the  bright lady at the waiting typewriter is longing to come up
with a helpful  suggestion;  I contented myself therefore  with marking  the
passage  in  my manuscript  so as later  to  desecrate  with  my  scrawl her
immaculate creation; but she was only glad, of course, to retype the page at
her leisure.
     We  usually  had a  ten-minute break around four--or  four-thirty if  I
could  not rein in snorting Pegasus  on  the dot.  She  would  retire  for a
minute, closing one door after another with a  really unearthly  gentleness,
to the  humble toilettes across  the  corridor, and would reappear,  just as
silently, with  a  repowdered nose and  a  repainted smile, and I would have
ready for her a glass of vin ordinaire  and a pink gaufrette.  It was during
those innocent intervals that there began a certain thematic movement on the
part of fate.
     Would  I like to know something? (Dilatory  sip and lip lick.) Well, at
all  my five public  readings  since the  first on September 3, 1928, in the
Salle  Planiol,  she had been  present, she  had  applauded till  her  palms
(showing palms)  ached,  and  had made up  her mind that next time  she'd be
smart and plucky enough to  push her way  through  the crowd (yes, crowd--no
need to smile ironically) with  the firm  intention of clasping my  hand and
pouring out her soul in a single word, which, however, she  could never <82>
find--and  that's  why, inexorably,  she would always be  left standing  and
beaming like a  fool in the middle of the vacated hall. Would I despise  her
for  having an  album with reviews  of  my  books pasted  in--Morozov's  and
Yablokov's lovely essays as well as the trash  of such  hacks as Boris Nyet,
and Boyarski?  Did I  know it was she who had left that mysterious  bunch of
irises on the spot where the urn with my wife's ashes had been interred four
years ago?  Could I imagine that she could recite  by heart every poem I had
published  in the  èmigrè  press  of half-a-dozen  countries?  Or  that  she
remembered thousands of enchanting minutiae scattered  through all my novels
such as the  mallard's quack-quack (in  Tamara)  "which  to the end of one's
life would taste of Russian black bread because one had shared it with ducks
in one's childhood," or the chess  set (in Pawn Takes Queen) with a  missing
Knight  "replaced by  some  sort  of counter, a  little orphan from another,
unknown, game?"
     All this was spread over several sessions and distilled very cunningly,
and  already by  the  end  of February  when a copy of The Red  Top  Hat, an
impeccable typescript, lapped in an opulent envelope, had been  delivered by
hand (hers again) to the offices of Patria (the foremost Russian magazine in
Paris), I felt enmeshed in a bothersome web.
     Not  only  had I never experienced  the  faintest  twinge of desire  in
regard to beautiful Lyuba, but the indifference of my  senses was turning to
positive repulsion. The softer her glances fluttered, the more ungentlemanly
my reaction became. Her very refinement had a dainty edge of  vulgarity that
infested with the  sweetness  of decay  her entire personality.  I  began to
notice  with  growing  irritation such pathetic  things as her odor, a quite
respectable perfume (Adoration, I think) precariously overlaying the natural
smell  of a Russian maiden's seldom bathed body: for an hour or so Adoration
still held, but  after that the underground would start  to conduct more and
more  frequent  <83>  forays,  and  when she raised  her  arms to put on her
hat--but never  mind, she  was a well-meaning creature, and I hope she  is a
happy grandmother today.
     I  would  be a cad  to describe our last  meeting (March 1 of the  same
year). Suffice  it  to  say that in the middle  of typing a  rhymed  Russian
translation that I had made of Keats' To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness")  she  broke down, and tormented  me till at  least eight P.M.
with her confessions  and tears. When at last  she left, I lost another hour
composing a detailed letter  asking her never to come back. Incidentally, it
was the first time that an unfinished leaf was left by her in my typewriter.
I removed  it and rediscovered  it several weeks later among my  papers, and
then deliberately preserved it because it was Annette who completed the job,
with a couple of typos and an  x-ed erasure in the last lines--and something
about the juxtaposition appealed to my combinational slant. <84>

3

     In this memoir my wives  and my books are interlaced  monogrammatically
like some sort of watermark or ex libris design; and in writing this oblique
autobiography--oblique, because dealing mainly  not  with pedestrian history
but with the mirages of romantic and literary matters--I consistently try to
dwell  as  lightly  as  inhumanly possible on  the  evolution  of my  mental
illness. Yet Dementia is one of the characters in my story.
     By the mid-Thirties  little had  changed in my  health  since the first
half  of 1922 and its  awful torments.  My battle  with factual, respectable
life      still      consisted      of     sudden      delusions,     sudden
reshufflings--kaleidoscopic,   stained-glass   reshufflings!--of  fragmented
space. I still felt Gravity,  that infernal and  humiliating contribution to
our  perceptual world, grow  into  me like a monstrous toenail  in stabs and
wedges of intolerable pain  (incomprehensible  to the  happy  simpleton  who
finds nothing fantastic  and  agonizing in the escape of  a  pencil or penny
under  something--under  the desk on which one  will live, under  the bed on
which  one  will  die).  I still  could not  cope  with the  abstraction  of
direction  in  space,  so  that any given stretch of  the  world  was either
permanently  "right-hand" or permanently  "left-hand,"  or  at  best the one
could be changed to the other <85> only by a spine-dislocating effort of the
will. Oh, how things and people tortured me, my dear heart, I could not tell
you! In point of fact you were not yet even born.
     Sometime in  the  mid-Thirties, in  black accursed  Paris,  I  remember
visiting a distant  relative  of mine (a niece of the LATH lady!). She was a
sweet old stranger. She sat all day in a  straight-back armchair  exposed to
the continuous  attacks of three, four, more  than  four, deranged children,
whom she was paid (by the Destitute Russian Noblewomen's Aid Association) to
watch, while their parents were working in places not so dreadful and dreary
in themselves as dreary and difficult  to reach  by public conveyance. I sat
on an  old  hassock  at  her  feet. Her  talk  flowed  on  and  on,  smooth,
untroubled,   reflecting  the  image  of  radiant  days,  serenity,  wealth,
goodness. Yet all the time this or that poor little monster with a slavering
mouth and a squint would  move upon her from behind  a screen or a table and
rock her chair or clutch at her skirt. When  the  squealing became too  loud
she  would only wince a  little which hardly affected her reminiscent smile.
She kept a kind of fly  whisk within  easy reach  and  this she occasionally
brandished to chase  away the bolder aggressors; but  all the  time, all the
time, she continued her  purling  soliloquy  and I  understood that  I, too,
should ignore the rude turmoil and din around her.
     I submit  that my life, my plight, the voice  of words that was my sole
joy  and  the secret  struggle with the  wrong  shape of  things,  bore some
resemblance  to that poor  lady's  predicament. And mind you, those  were my
best days, with only a pack of grimacing goblins to hold at bay.
     The zest, the strength, the  clarity  of my art remained unimpaired--at
least  to  a  certain extent.  I enjoyed,  I persuaded myself  to enjoy, the
solitude  of work and that other, even more subtle solitude, the solitude of
an  author  facing,  from  behind the bright shield of  his  manuscript,  an
amorphous audience, barely visible in its dark pit. <86>
     The jumble  of  spatial obstacles  separating my bedside lamp from  the
illumined islet of a public lectern was abolished by the magic of thoughtful
friends who helped  me to get to this or that remote hall without my  having
to  tussle with horribly  small and thin,  sticky, bus-ticket  slips  or  to
venture into the  thunderous  maze  of the Mètro. As  soon  as I was  safely
platformed with  my typed or handwritten sheets at breastbone  level on  the
desk  before   me,  I  forgot  all  about  the  presence  of  three  hundred
eavesdroppers. A decanter of watered vodka, my only lectorial whim, was also
my only link with the material universe. Similar to a painter's spotlight on
the brown  brow of  some ecstatical ecclesiastic  at  the moment  of  divine
revelation, the  radiance  enclosing me brought out  with oracular  accuracy
every  imperfection in my text. A  memoirist  has noted that not only  did I
slow down now and then while unclipping a pencil and replacing a  comma by a
semicolon, but  that  I had been known to stop and frown over a sentence and
reread it, and cross it out, and insert a correction and "re-mouth the whole
passage with a kind of defiant complacency."
     My  handwriting was good  in fair  copies, but  I felt more comfortable
with a typescript before me, and I  was  again without an expert  typist. To
insert the same  wanter in the same paper would have been foolhardy: what if
it were to  bring  back Lyuba, flushed with  renewed  hope, and  rewind that
damned cycle all over again?
     I rang  up Stepanov, thinking he might help;  he guessed  he could, and
after a muffled confabulation with his  fussy wife, just  on the brim of the
membrane (all I made out was "mad people are unpredictable"), she took over.
They  knew a very decent girl  who  had worked at the Russian nursery school
"Passy na Rousi"  to which Dolly had gone four or five years ago. The girl's
name  was Anna Ivanovna Blagovo. Did I know Oksman, the owner of the Russian
bookshop on rue Cuvier? <87>
     "Yes, slightly. But I want to ask you--"
     "Well," she went on, interrupting me, "Annette sekretarstvovala for him
while his regular typist was hospitalized, but she  is now quite well again,
and you might--"
     "That's fine," I said, "but I want to ask you, Berta Abramovna, why did
you accuse me of being an `unpredictable madman'? I can assure you that I am
not in the habit of raping young women--"
     "Gospod'  s vami, golubchik!  (What an idea, my dear!)"  exclaimed Mrs.
Stepanov  and  proceeded  to  explain   that  she  had  been  scolding   her
absentminded husband for sitting down on her  new handbag when  attending to
the telephone.
     Although I  did not believe  one word of  her  version  (too quick! too
glib!), I pretended  to accept it and promised to look up her  bookseller. A
few minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it
(at moments of raw  widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most
soothing voyeuse  imaginable), Berta  Stepanov telephoned  to  say that  the
oxman  (what   a   shiver  my  Iris   derived  from   Dr.  Moreau's   island
zoo--especially   from   such   bits   as   the  "screaming   shape,"  still
half-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would  be up till dawn in his shop,
among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), that
I was a noctambule,  so  perhaps I might like  to stroll over  to  the Boyan
Bookshop sans tarder, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.
     After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings of
insomnia and a walk to  rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where according
to police statistics  an average  of forty foreigners and God knows how many
unfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced  the
least urge to  commit suicide, that  silly waste  of selfhood  (a gem in any
light). But I must admit that on  that  particular  night on the  fourth  or
fifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling's death, I must have <88> looked
pretty  suspect, in  my  black  suit and  dramatic muffler,  to  an  average
policeman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign when
a hatless person sobs as he walks,  being moved not by  lines he  might have
composed himself  but  by something  he hideously mistakes  for his own  and
presently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:

     Zvezdoobraznost' nebesnyh zvyozd
     Vidish' tol'ko skvoz' slyozy...
     (Heavenly stars are seen as stellate
     only through tears.)

     I  am much  bolder now,  of course, much  bolder  and prouder than  the
ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between  a seemingly endless
fence with its tattered posters and a row of  spaced streetlamps whose light
would  delicately  select  for its  heart-piercing  game  overhead  a  young
emerald-bright  linden leaf. I  now confess that  I was bothered that night,
and  the next and some time before,  by a dream feeling that my life was the
nonidentical  twin, a parody, an  inferior  variant  of another  man's life,
somewhere  on this  or  another earth. A  demon, I felt,  was  forcing me to
impersonate that other man, that other writer who  was and  would  always be
incomparably greater, healthier, and cruder than your obedient servant. <89>

4

     The  "Boyan"  publishing  firm  (Morozov's  and  mine was  the  "Bronze
Horseman," its  main rival),  with  a  bookshop  (selling  not  only  èmigrè
editions  but  also  tractor novels  from  Moscow)  and  a  lending library,
occupied a smart three-story house of the hòtel particulier type. In my  day
it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the  vista of
reverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a group
of stone nymphs. The house had belonged  to the Merlin de Malaune family and
had been acquired at  the turn  of the century  by  a Russian  cosmopolitan,
Dmitri de  Midoff who with his friend S. I. Stepanov established  there  the
headquarters of an antidespotic conspiracy. The latter liked  to recall  the
sign  language  of  old-fashioned  rebellion:  the  half-drawn  curtain  and
alabaster vase revealed in the drawing-room window so as to  indicate to the
expected guest from Russia that the way was clear. An aesthetic touch graced
revolutionary intrigues  in  those years. Midoff died soon  after  World War
One,  and  by that time  the  Terrorist party,  to  which those cozy  people
belonged,  had lost  its "stylistic appeal" as Stepanov himself put it. I do
not know  who  later acquired the house or  how  it happened  that Oks (Osip
Lvovich Oksman, 1885?--1943?) rented it for his business. <90>
     The house was dark except for three windows: two adjacent rectangles of
light in the middle of the  upper-floor row, d8 and e8, Continental notation
(where  the letter  denotes the file  and  the  number the  rank  of a chess
square) and another light  just below  at  e7. Good God, had  I forgotten at
home the note I had scribbled for the unknown Miss Blagovo? No, it was still
there in my  breast pocket under the  old, treasured, horribly  hot and long
Trinity College muffler. I hesitated between a side door on my right--marked
Magazin--and the main entrance, with a chess coronet above the bell. Finally
I chose  the coronet.  We  were playing  a  Blitz game: my opponent moved at
once, lighting  the vestibule  fan  at d6. One could  not help wondering  if
under the  house  there  might not exist the five lower  floors  which would
complete the chessboard and that somewhere, in subterranean mystery, new men
might not be working out the doom of a fouler tyranny.
     Oks, a  tall,  bony, elderly man  with a Shakespearean pate, started to
tell me  how  honored he was at getting  a  chance to welcome the author  of
Camera--here I thrust the note I carried into his extended palm and prepared
to leave. He had dealt with hysterical artists before. None could resist his
bland bookside manner.
     "Yes, I know  all  about it,"  he said, retaining and patting my  hand.
"She'll call you; though, to tell the truth, I do not envy anybody having to
use the services of that capricious, absentminded young lady. We'll go up to
my study, unless you prefer--no, I don't think  so," he continued, opening a
double door on the left and dubiously switching on the light for a moment to
reveal  a chilly reading  room in  which a long  baize-covered table,  dingy
chairs,  and  the  cheap  busts of  Russian classics contradicted  a  lovely
painted ceiling swarming  with naked children among purple,  pink, and amber
clusters of grapes. On the right (another  tentative light snapped) a  short
passage led to the shop  proper <91> where I recalled having  once had a row
with  a pert old  female who objected to  my  not wishing to pay  for  a few
copies of my own novel. So we walked up the once noble stairs, which now had
something  seldom  seen even  in Viennese  dream  comics,  namely  disparate
balustrades,  the sinistral one an ugly new  ramp-and-railing affair and the
other,  the  original ornate  set  of battered,  doomed, but still  charming
carved wood with supports in the form of magnified chess pieces.
     "I  am honored--" began Oks all over again, as we reached his so-called
Kabinet  (study),  at  e7, a  room cluttered  with  ledgers,  packed  books,
half-unpacked  books,  towers  of  books, heaps  of  newspapers,  pamphlets,
galleys, and slim white paperback collections of poems--tragic  offals, with
the  cool,  restrained  titles  then  in  fashion--Prokhlada   ("coolness"),
Sderzhannost' ("restraint").
     He  was  one of those persons  who  for some  reason or other are often
interrupted,  but  whom no force in  our  blessed galaxy will  prevent  from
completing their  sentence, despite new  interruptions,  of  an elemental or
poetical  nature, the death of his interlocutor ("I was  just saying to him,
doctor--"),  or the entrance of a dragon. In fact it  would seem  that those
interruptions actually help to polish the phrase and give it its final form.
In the meantime the agonizing itch of its being unfinished poisons the mind.
It is worse than the pimple which cannot be sprung before one gets home, and
is almost as bad as  a lifer's recollection of that last little  rape nipped
in the sweet bud by the intrusion of an accursed policeman.
     "I  am deeply honored,"  finished at  last  Oks,  "to  welcome to  this
historic house the author  of Camera Obscura, your finest  book in my modest
opinion!"
     "It ought to be modest," I  said, controlling myself (opal ice in Nepal
before the  avalanche), "because, you idiot, the title of my novel is Camera
Lucida."
     "There, there," said Oks (really a very dear man and <92> a gentleman),
after  a  terrible  pause  during  which  all  the  remainders  opened  like
fairy-tale flowers in a fancy film, "A  slip of the tongue does not  deserve
such a harsh rebuke. Lucida, Lucida, by all means! A propos--concerning Anna
Blagovo (another  piece of  unfinished business--or,  who knows,  a touching
attempt to divert and pacify me with an interesting anecdote), I am not sure
you  know that  I  am Berta's first cousin.  Thirty-five  years  ago in  St.
Petersburg she and  I  worked  in  the  same  student organization.  We were
preparing the assassination  of the Premier. How far all that is! His  daily
route had to be closely established; I was one of the observers. Standing at
a certain  corner every day in  the disguise of  a vanilla-ice-cream vendor!
Can you imagine that? Nothing came of our plans. They were thwarted by Azef,
the great double agent."
     I saw no point  in  prolonging my visit,  but he produced a  bottle  of
cognac, and I accepted a drink, for I was beginning to tremble again.
     "Your Camera," he said, consulting a ledger "has been selling not badly
in  my shop, not  badly  at all: twenty-three--sorry, twenty-five--copies in
the first half of last year,  and fourteen in the second. Of course, genuine
fame, not mere commercial success,  depends on the behavior of a book in the
Lending Department, and there all your  titles are hits.  Not to  leave this
unsubstantiated, let us go up to the stacks."
     I followed my energetic host to the  upper  floor.  The lending library
spread like a gigantic spider, bulged like a monstrous tumor,  oppressed the
brain like the expanding world of delirium. In a bright oasis amidst the dim
shelves I noticed a group of people sitting around an oval table. The colors
were  vivid  and  sharp  but  at  the  same  time  remote-looking  as  in  a
magic-lantern scene. A good deal of  red  wine and golden brandy accompanied
the animated discussion. I recognized the  critic Basilevski, his sycophants
Hristov and  Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists <93> Shipogradov and
Sokolovski,  the  honest nonentity  Suknovalov, author of the popular social
satire Geroy nashey ery ("Hero  of  Our Era") and  two young poets,  Lazarev
(collection Serenity) and  Fartuk  (collection  Silence).  Some of the heads
turned toward  us,  and the  benevolent  bear Morozov even struggled  to his
feet,  grinning--but my host said  they were having a business  meeting  and
should be left alone.
     "You have  glimpsed,"  he  added, "the  parturition of  a  new literary
review, Prime Numbers;  at least they think they are parturiating: actually,
they are boozing and gossiping. Now let me show you something."
     He led me to a distant corner and  triumphantly trained  his flashlight
on the gaps in my shelf of books.
     "Look," he cried, "how  many copies  are out. All of Princess  Mary  is
out, I mean Mary--damn it, I mean Tamara. I love Tamara, I mean your Tamara,
not Lermontov's or Rubinstein's. Forgive me.  One gets so confused  among so
many damned masterpieces."
     I said I was not feeling  well and would like to go home. He offered to
accompany me. Or would I like a taxi? I did not. He kept furtively directing
at  me  the electric torch through his incarnadined fingers to see  if I was
not about to  faint. With soothing sounds  he led me down a  side staircase.
The spring night, at least, felt real.
     After  a moment of  rumination and  an  upward  glance  at the  lighted
windows, Oks beckoned to the night watchman who was stroking  the sad little
dog of a dog-walking  neighbor.  I  saw my thoughtful companion  shake hands
with the gray-cloaked old fellow, then point to  the light  of the revelers,
then  look  at  his watch,  then  tip  the  man, and shake hands with him in
parting,  as  if  the  ten-minute  walk  to  my  lodgings  were  a  perilous
pilgrimage.
     "Bon," he said upon rejoining me. "If you don't want a taxi, let us set
out on foot. He will take care of my imprisoned visitors. There are heaps of
things  I  want  you to <94>  tell  me about  your work  and your life. Your
confrõres say you are `arrogant and unsocial' as Onegin describes himself to
Tatiana but we can't  all be Lenskis, can we?  Let me take advantage of this
pleasant stroll to describe my two meetings with your celebrated father. The
first was at the opera in the days of the First Duma. I knew, of course, the
portraits of its most  prominent members. From high up in the gods I, a poor
student,  saw him  appear in a  rosy loge with his wife and two little boys,
one of which  must have been you. The other time was at a public  discussion
of  current  politics in the  auroral  period  of the Revolution;  he  spoke
immediately after Kerenski,  and the contrast between  our fiery friend  and
your father, with his English sangfroid and absence of gesticulation--"
     "My father," I said, "died six months before I was born."
     "Well, I seem to  have  goofed  again (opyat' oskandalisya),"  observed
Oks,  after taking  quite a  minute  to find his handkerchief, blow his nose
with the grandiose  deliberation of Varlamov in  the  role  of Gogol's  Town
Mayor, wrap up the result, and pocket the swaddle. "Yes, I'm  not lucky with
you. Yet that image remains in my mind. The contrast was truly remarkable."
     I was to run  into Oks  again,  three  or four  times at least,  in the
course  of the dwindling years before World  War Two. He used  to welcome me
with a  knowing twinkle as if we shared some very private and rather naughty
secret.  His superb  library was eventually grabbed by the Germans who  then
lost  it to  the Russians, even better  grabbers in that  time-honored game.
Osip Lvovich  himself was to die  when  attempting an intrepid  escape--when
almost  having  escaped--barefoot,  in  bloodstained  underwear,  from   the
"experimental hospital" of a Nazi concentration camp. <95>

5

     My father was a gambler and a rake. His  society  nickname  was  Demon.
Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his
black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by  me, Vadim, son of
Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the  best of
my English romaunts, Ardis (1970).
     The scion  of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a  dozen Tsars,
my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were  of
the casual,  reactionary sort.  He had a  dazzling  and  complicated sensual
life, but his culture  was  patchy and  commonplace.  He was  born  in 1865,
married in 1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October
22,  1898, after a  card-table  fracas  at  Deauville,  some resort in  gray
Normandy.
     There might be nothing  particularly  upsetting about  a  well-meaning,
essentially  absurd  and muddled  old  duffer  mistaking  me  for some other
writer. I myself have been known, in the lecture hall, to say Shelley when I
meant Schiller. But that  a  fool's slip  of the tongue  or error of  memory
should establish a sudden  connection with another world, so soon  after  my
imagining  with especial  dread  that I  might  be permanently impersonating
somebody living  as a real  being beyond the  constellation of my tears  and
<96> asterisks--that was unendurable, that dared not happen!
     As  soon as the last sound  of  poor Oksman's farewells and excuses had
subsided,  I tore off the striped woollen snake strangling me and wrote down
in  cipher  every  detail of my meeting with him.  Then  I drew a thick line
underneath and a caravan of question marks.
     Should I ignore the coincidence and its  implications? Should I, on the
contrary, repattern my entire  life? Should I abandon my art, choose another
line  of   achievement,  take  up  chess   seriously,  or   become,  say,  a
lepidopterist, or spend a dozen years as an obscure scholar making a Russian
translation of Paradise  Lost that would  cause hacks  to  shy and  asses to
kick? But only the  writing of  fiction, the endless re-creation of my fluid
self could keep  me more or  less sane.  All  I  did finally was drop my pen
name, the  rather cloying and  somehow misleading "V. Irisin" (of  which  my
Iris herself used to say that it sounded as if I were  a villa), and  revert
to my own family name.
     It was with this name that  I decided to sign the first  installment of
my  new novel The  Dare for which the  èmigrè magazine Patria was waiting. I
had finished rewriting in reptile-green ink (a placebo to enliven my task) a
second or third fair copy of the opening chapter, when Annette Blagovo  came
to discuss hours and terms.
     She came on  May 2, 1934, half-an-hour late, and as persons do who have
no sense of duration, laid the blame for her lateness on her innocent watch,
an  object  for measuring  motion, not  time.  She was a graceful  blonde of
twenty-six years or so, with very attractive though not exceptionally pretty
features. She wore a gray tailor-made jacket  over a  white silk blouse that
looked frilly and festive because  of a  kind of bow between the  lapels, to
one of which was  pinned a bunchlet of  violets.  Her short smartly cut gray
skirt had a nice dash about  it, and all  in all she was far  more  chic and
soignèe than an average Russian young lady. <97>
     I explained  to her (in what  struck her--so she told me much later--as
the unpleasantly bantering tone of  a  cynic sizing up a  possible conquest)
that  I  proposed  to  dictate  to  her  every  afternoon  "right  into  the
typewriter" (pryamo v mashinku) heavily corrected  drafts or else chunks and
sausages of fair copy that I would probably  revise "in the lonely hours  of
night," to quote A.  K. Tolstoy, and have her retype  next day. She did  not
remove her close-fitting hat,  but peeled  off  her gloves and,  pursing her
bright  pink  freshly  painted  mouth,  put  on  large  tortoiseshell-rimmed
glasses, and  the effect somehow  enhanced her looks:  she desired to see my
machine  (her icy demureness would have  turned  a  saint into  a  salacious
jester), had to hurry to another appointment but just wanted to check if she
could  use it. She took off  her green cabochon  ring  (which I was  to find
after her departure) and seemed about to tap out a quick sample but a second
glance satisfied her that my typewriter was of the same make as her own.
     Our first  session  proved pretty awful. I had learned my part with the
care of a  nervous  actor,  but  did  not  reckon with the  kind  of  fellow
performer  who misses or fluffs every other cue.  She asked me not to go  so
fast. She put me off  by  fatuous  remarks: "There is no such expression  in
Russian,"  or "Nobody  knows that word (vzvoden',  a welter)--why don't  you
just say "big wave" if that's what you  mean? When anger affected  my rhythm
and it  took me some time to unravel the end  of a sentence in its no longer
familiar labyrinth of cancellations and  carets, she would sit back and wait
like a provocative martyr  and stifle a yawn or study her fingernails. After
three  hours  of work, I  examined the  result  of  her dainty  and impudent
rattle. It teemed with misspellings, typos, and ugly erasures. Very meekly I
said that she  seemed  unaccustomed to deal with literary (i.e. non-humdrum)
stuff. She answered I was mistaken, she loved literature. In fact, she said,
in just the  past five months  she  had read  Galsworthy  (in Russian), <98>
Dostoyevski (in French),  General  Pudov-Usurovski's huge  historical  novel
Tsar Bronshteyn (in the original), and L'Atlantide (which I had not heard of
but which a dictionary ascribes to Pierre  Benoít,  romancier franãais  nè þ
Albi, a hiatus in the Tarn). Did she know Morozov's  poetry? No, she did not
much  care  for poetry in any form; it  was  inconsistent with the tempo  of
modern life.  I chided her for not having  read any of my stories or novels,
and she looked annoyed and perhaps  a little frightened (fearing, the little
goose, I might  dismiss her), and presently was giving me a curiously erotic
satisfaction by promising me that  now she  would  look  up all my books and
would certainly know by heart The Dare.
     The reader must  have noticed that  I speak only  in a very general way
about  my  Russian fictions  of the  Nineteen-Twenties and  Thirties,  for I
assume  that  he is familiar  with them  or can easily obtain them  in their
English versions. At this point, however, I must  say a few words about  The
Dare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as "a
gift to the fatherland"). When in 1934 I started to dictate its beginning to
Annette, I knew it would be my longest novel. I did not foresee however that
it would be almost as long as General  Pudov's vile and fatuous "historical"
romance about the way the Zion Wisers usurped St. Rus. It took me about four
years in all to write its four hundred pages, many of which Annette typed at
least twice.  Most of it  had been serialized in èmigrè  magazines  by  May,
1939, when she  and I,  still childless, left for America; but in book form,
the Russian  original appeared  only in 1950 (Turgenev Publishing House, New
York),  followed another decade later by an English translation, whose title
neatly refers not only to the well-known device used to bewilder noddies but
also to the daredevil nature of Victor, the hero and part-time narrator.
     The novel begins with a nostalgic account of  a Russian childhood (much
happier,  though  not  less  opulent  than  <99>  mine).  After  that  comes
adolescence  in England (not unlike  my own  Cambridge years); then  life in
èmigrè Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier) and
the  tying  of amusing knots  in various  literary  intrigues.  Inset in the
middle part is a complete  version of the book my Victor wrote "on  a dare":
this  is a concise biography and critical  appraisal of Fyodor  Dostoyevski,
whose politics  my  author finds hateful  and  whose novels  he condemns  as
absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus
Christ's conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances
of an earlier age. The next  chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment of
èmigrè reviewers, all of them priests  of  the Dostoyevskian persuasion; and
in the last pages my young hero accepts a flirt's challenge and accomplishes
a final  gratuitous feat by walking through  a perilous forest  into  Soviet
territory and as casually strolling back.
     I  am giving  this summary to exemplify what even the poorest reader of
my Dare must  surely retain, unless  electrolysis  destroys  some  essential
cells  soon  after he closes the book. Now part of Annette's frail charm lay
in  her  forgetfulness  which  veiled  everything  toward   the  evening  of
everything, like the kind of pastel haze that obliterates mountains, clouds,
and even its own self as the summer day swoons. I know I  have seen her many
times,  a copy of Patria in her languid lap, follow the printed  lines  with
the pendulum swing of eyes suggestive of reading, and actually reach the "To
be continued" at the end of the current installment of The Dare. I also know
that she  had typed every word  of it and  most  of its commas. Yet the fact
remains that she retained nothing--perhaps  in  result of her having decided
once for all that my prose was not merely "difficult" but hermetic ("nastily
hermetic,"  to  repeat  the  compliment  Basilevski  paid  me the moment  he
realized--a  moment  which came in  due time--that his manner  and mind were
being ridiculed in Chapter  Three <100>  by  my  gloriously happy Victor). I
must say  I forgave her readily her attitude to my work. At public readings,
I admired  her  public smile, the "archaic" smile of Greek statues. When her
rather dreadful parents  asked to see my  books  (as  a suspicious physician
might ask for a  sample of semen), she gave them to read  by mistake another
man's novel because of a silly similarity of  titles. The only real  shock I
experienced was when I overheard her informing some  idiot woman friend that
my  Dare  included  biographies  of  "Chernolyubov  and  Dobroshevski"!  She
actually  started  to argue when I  retorted that only a  lunatic would have
chosen a pair of  third-rate publicists  to write about--spoonerizing  their
names in addition! <101>

6

     I have noticed, or seem to have noticed, in the course of my long life,
that when about to fall in love  or even when still unaware of having fallen
in love, a dream would come, introducing me to a latent inamorata at morning
twilight  in  a somewhat  infantile  setting,  marked  by  exquisite  aching
stirrings that I  knew  as  a boy, as a youth, as a  madman, as an old dying
voluptuary.  The sense  of  recurrence  ("seem  to  have  noticed")  is very
possibly a built-in feeling: for  instance  I may have had  that  dream only
once or twice ("in the course of my  long life") and its familiarity is only
the dropper that comes with the  drops. The place in the dream, per  contra,
is not a  familiar room but one remindful of the  kind we children  awake in
after a  Christmas masquerade or  midsummer  name  day,  in  a great  house,
belonging to  strangers or distant cousins. The impression is that the beds,
two small  beds in the present case, have been put in and placed against the
opposite  walls of a  room that is not a bedroom at heart,  a  room with  no
furniture except those two  separate  beds:  property masters are  lazy,  or
economical, in one's dreams as well as in early novellas.
     In one of  the beds I find myself just awoken from some secondary dream
of only formulary importance; and in the far bed against the right-hand wall
(direction  also <102> supplied), a  girl, a  younger, slighter,  and  gayer
Annette in this particular variant (summer of 1934 by daytime reckoning), is
playfully, quietly talking  to herself but  actually, as I understand with a
delicious quickening of the nether  pulses,  is feigning to talk, is talking
for my benefit, so as to be noticed by me.
     My  next  thought--and  it  intensifies  the  throbbings--concerns  the
strangeness of boy and girl being assigned  to sleep  in  the same makeshift
room: by error,  no  doubt, or  perhaps the  house was full and the distance
between the two  beds,  across an empty  floor, might have been deemed  wide
enough  for perfect decorum in the case of children (my average age has been
thirteen all my life). The cup of pleasure is brimming by now and  before it
spills I hasten to tiptoe across the bare parquet  from my bed  to hers. Her
fair hair gets in the way of my kisses, but presently my lips find her cheek
and neck, and her nightgown has buttons, and she says the maid has come into
the  room, but it  is  too  late,  I cannot restrain myself, and the maid, a
beauty in her own right, looks on, laughing.
     That dream I  had a month or so  after I met  Annette, and her image in
it, that early version of her voice, soft hair, tender skin, obsessed me and
amazed  me with  delight--the  delight of  discovering I loved  little  Miss
Blagovo.  At the time of the dream she and  I were  still  on  formal terms,
super-formal in  fact,  so  I  could  not tell  it to her with the necessary
evocations and associations (as  set down in these notes); and merely saying
"I dreamt of  you"  would have  amounted to the thud of  a  platitude. I did
something much more courageous  and honorable. Before revealing to her  what
she  called (speaking  of  another  couple) "serious intentions"--and before
even solving the riddle  of why really I loved her--I decided to tell her of
my incurable illness. <103>

7

     She was elegant, she was languid, she was  rather angelic in one sense,
and dismally  stupid in  many others.  I  was  lonely, and  frightened,  and
reckless with lust--not  sufficiently reckless, however, not to  warn her by
means of a vivid instance--half paradigm and half object lesson--or what she
laid herself open to by consenting to marry me.

     Milostivaya Gosudarynya
     Anna Ivanovna!
     [Anglice Dear Miss Blagovo]
     Before  entertaining  you  viva-voce  of   a  subject  of  the   utmost
importance, I beg you to join me  in the conduct of an experiment that  will
describe better than a learned article would one of the typical facets of my
displaced mental crystal. So here goes.
     With your permission it is night now and I am in bed (decently clad, of
course, and with every organ  in decent repose), lying supine, and imagining
an ordinary  moment in  an  ordinary place. To further protect the purity of
the experiment, let the visualized spot be an invented one. I imagine myself
coming out of a bookshop and <104> pausing on the curb  before crossing  the
street to the  little sidewalk cafè directly opposite. No cars are in sight.
I  cross.  I imagine myself  reaching the  little  cafè.  The afternoon  sun
occupies  one of its  chairs  and the  half of a table,  but  otherwise  its
open-air section is empty and very inviting: nothing but  brightness remains
of the recent  shower. And here  I  stop short as I recollect that  I bad an
umbrella.
     I do not intend  to bore you, glubokouvazhaemaya  (dear) Anna  Ivanova,
and still less do I wish to crumple this third or fourth poor sheet with the
crashing  sound  only  punished  paper  can  make;  but  the  scene  is  not
sufficiently abstract and schematic, so let me retake it.
     I, your friend and employer Vadim Vadimovich, lying in bed  on  my back
in ideal darkness (I got  up a  minute ago to recurtain the moon that peeped
between the folds of two paragraphs),  I imagine  diurnal  Vadim  Vadimovich
crossing  a  street from a bookshop to a sidewalk cafè.  I am  encased in my
vertical self: not looking down but ahead, thus only indirectly aware of the
blurry  front of my corpulent figure,  of the alternate points  of my shoes,
and  of the rectangular  form of the  parcel under my arm.  I imagine myself
walking  the twenty  paces  needed  to  reach  the opposite  sidewalk,  then
stopping with an unprintable curse and deciding to  go back for the umbrella
I left in the shop.
     There is an  affliction still lacking a name; there is,  Anna (you must
permit me  to call you  that,  I am  ten years  your senior and  very  ill),
something dreadfully wrong with  my sense of direction,  or rather  my power
over conceived  space, because at this juncture I am unable to <105> execute
mentally, in  the dark of my  bed, the simple about-face (an act  I  perform
without thinking  in  physical  reality!)  which would  allow  me to picture
instantly in my mind the once  already traversed asphalt as now being before
me, and the vitrine of the bookshop being now within sight and not somewhere
behind.
     Let me dwell  briefly  on  the procedure involved;  on my  inability to
follow it consciously in my mind--my unwieldy and disobedient mind! In order
to make  myself  imagine  the  pivotal process  I have to force an  opposite
revolution of the decor: I must try, dear friend and assistant, to swing the
entire length of  the  street, with the massive faãades of its houses before
and behind  me, from one direction to another in  the slow wrench  of a half
circle, which  is  like  trying to  turn  the colossal  tiller  of  a  rusty
recalcitrant rudder so as to transform  oneself by  conscious  degrees from,
say, an east-facing Vadim Vadimovich into a  west-sun-blinded one. The  mere
thought of  that action  leads  the bedded  recliner  to  such a muddle  and
dizziness that  one prefers scrapping the  about-face altogether, wiping, so
to speak, the  slate of  one's vision, and beginning  the return journey  in
one's  imagination  as if  it  were  an  initial  one, without any  previous
crossing of  the  street, and  therefore  without  any  of  the intermediate
horror--the horror of struggling with  the steerage  of space  and  crushing
one's chest in the process!
     Voilþ. Sounds rather tame, doesn't it, en fait de dèmence, and, indeed,
if  I stop brooding  over  the  thing,  I  decrease  it to  an insignificant
flaw--the missing pinkie of a  freak born with nine  fingers. Considering it
closer, however, I cannot <106> help suspecting  it to be a warning symptom,
a foreglimpse of the mental  malady that is  known  to affect eventually the
entire brain. Even that malady may not be as imminent and grave as the storm
signals  suggest; I  only want  you  to  be  aware of  the situation  before
proposing to you, Annette.  Do not write, do not phone,  do not mention this
letter, if and when you come Friday afternoon; but, please, if you do, wear,
in propitious sign,  the  Florentine hat  that looks like a cluster of  wild
flowers. I want  you to celebrate your resemblance to  the  fifth girl  from
left to right, the  flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and  serious
gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an  allegory  of Spring,  my  love, my
allegory.

     On Friday afternoon, for the first time in two months she  came "on the
dot" as my American friends  would say. A wedge  of pain replaced my  heart,
and little  black monsters started to  play musical chairs all over my room,
as I noticed that she wore her usual recent hat, of no  interest or meaning.
She  took it  off before the  mirror and suddenly invoked Our Lord with rare
emphasis.
     "Ya idiotka," she said. "I'm an  idiot. I  was looking  for  my  pretty
wreath, when papa started to read to me something about an ancestor of yours
who quarreled with Peter the Terrible."
     "Ivan," I said.
     "I  didn't  catch  the  name,  but I  saw I  was  late  and  pulled  on
(natsepila)  this shapochka instead of the wreath,  your wreath, the  wreath
you ordered."
     I  was helping her  out  of  her  jacket.  Her  words  filled  me  with
dream-free  wantonness. I  embraced  her.  My  mouth sought the  hot  hollow
between neck and clavicle. It was a brief but thorough embrace, and I boiled
over, discreetly, deliciously, merely by pressing  myself against <107> her,
one  hand cupping her  firm  little  behind and  the  other feeling the harp
strings of her ribs. She was trembling all over. An ardent but silly virgin,
she did not understand why my  grip had relaxed with the suddenness of sleep
or windlorn sails.
     Had she read only the beginning and end of  my letter? Well,  yes,  she
had skipped  the poetical  part. In other words, she had  not  the slightest
idea what  I was driving at?  She promised, she said, to reread it.  She had
grasped, however, that I loved her? She had, but how could she be sure  that
I really loved her? I was so strange, so, so--she couldn't express  it--yes,
STRANGE in  every respect. She  never had met anyone  like me. Whom then did
she meet, I inquired: trepanners?  trombonists? astronomists?  Well,  mostly
military men,  if I wished  to know, officers of  Wrangel's army, gentlemen,
interesting people, who spoke of danger and duty, of bivouacs in the steppe.
Oh,  but  look  here, I too  can  speak  of  "deserts idle,  rough quarries,
rocks"--No, she  said,  they did not invent. They talked of  spies they  had
hanged, they talked  of international  politics, of  a new film or book that
explained the meaning of life. And never one unchaste joke,  not one  horrid
risquè comparison... As in  my books? Examples, examples! No, she would  not
give  examples.  She  would not be pinned down  to whirl on  the  pin like a
wingless fly.
     Or butterfly.
     We were walking, one lovely morning, on the outskirts of Bellefontaine.
Something flicked and lit.
     "Look  at  that  harlequin,"  I murmured, pointing  cautiously  with my
elbow.
     Sunning itself  against the white wall of a suburban garden was a flat,
symmetrically outspread butterfly, which  the artist had  placed at a slight
angle to the horizon of his picture. The creature was  painted a smiling red
with yellow  intervals  between black blotches; a row  of blue crescents ran
along the inside of the toothed wing margins. <108> The only feature to rate
a  shiver of squeamishness was the glistening  sweep of  bronzy silks coming
down on both sides of the beastie's body.
     "As  a  former  kindergarten  teacher  I can  tell  you,"  said helpful
Annette, "that it's a most ordinary nettlefly (krapivnitsa). How many little
hands have plucked off its wings and brought them to me for approval!"
     It flicked and was gone. <109>

8

     In view of the amount of typing  to  be done,  and  of her doing it  so
slowly and badly,  she made me promise not to  bother her with what Russians
call "calf cuddlings"  during work. At other times  all she allowed me  were
controlled kisses and flexible holds:  our first  embrace had  been "brutal"
she said (having caught on  very  soon after  that in the matter  of certain
male secrets). She did her  best  to  conceal  the melting, the helplessness
that overwhelmed her  in the natural course of caresses when she would begin
to palpitate in my arms  before pushing  me  away with a puritanical  frown.
Once the back of her hand chanced  to brush  against  the taut  front of  my
trousers; she uttered a chilly  "pardon"  (Fr.), and then  went  into a sulk
upon my saying I hoped she had not hurt herself.
     I  complained  of  the ridiculous obsolete turn  our  relationship  was
taking. She thought it over and promised that as soon as we were "officially
engaged,"  we  would enter a more modern era. I assured her I  was  ready to
proclaim its advent any day, any moment.
     She  took  me  to  see her  parents  with  whom  she shared a  two-room
apartment in Passy.  He had been an  army surgeon before the Revolution and,
with his close-cropped gray head,  clipped mustache, and neat imperial, bore
a <110>  striking  resemblance (abetted no doubt  by  the eager  spirit that
patches up worn parts of the past with new impressions of the same order) to
the kindly  but cold-fingered  (and  cold-earlobed)  doctor  who treated the
"inflammation of the lungs" I had in the winter of 1907.
     As with  so  many  Russians  èmigrès  of  declining  strength and  lost
professions, it  was  hard to say  what exactly were  Dr. Blagovo's personal
resources. He seemed to spend life's overcast evening either reading his way
through  sets  of thick  magazines  (1830 to  1900 or 1850 to  1910),  which
Annette brought him from Oksman's Lending Library, or sitting at a table and
filling   by  means  of   a  regularly   clicking   tobacco   injector   the
semitransparent ends of carton-tubed cigarettes  of which he  never consumed
more than  thirty per day to avoid intercadence at night. He had practically
no  conversation  and  could not  retell  correctly  any  of  the  countless
historical anecdotes he found  in the  battered tomes  of  Russkaya  Starina
("Russian ancientry")--which  explains where  Annette got  her  inability to
remember the poems, the essays, the stories, the novels she had typed for me
(my grumble  is repetitious,  I know, but  the  matter rankles--a word which
comes  from dracunculus,  a  "baby  dragon"). He  was also  one of  the last
gentlemen I ever met who still wore a dickey and elastic-sided boots.
     He  asked me--and  that remained his only memorable question--why I did
not use in print the title  which  went with  my thousand-year-old  name.  I
replied that  I was the  kind  of snob  who assumes that bad readers are  by
nature aware of  an author's origins but who hopes that good readers will be
more interested in his books  than  in his stemma. Dr. Blagovo was a  stupid
old bloke, and his detachable cuffs could have been  cleaner;  but today, in
sorrowful retrospect, I treasure his  memory: he  was not only the father of
my poor Annette,  but  also the  grandfather of my adored  and perhaps still
more unfortunate daughter. <111>
     Dr. Blagovo (1867-1940)  had married at  the age of forty  a provincial
belle in the Volgan town of Kineshma,  a few miles south from one of my most
romanic  country estates, famous for its  wild ravines,  now gravel pits  or
places of  massacre, but then  magnificent evocations of sunken gardens. She
wore elaborate make-up  and spoke in  simpering accents, reducing nouns  and
adjectives  to over-affectionate  forms  which even  the Russian language, a
recognized giant of diminutives, would only condone  on  the wet lips of  an
infant  or  tender  nurse  ("Here," said Mrs.  Blagovo "is  your  chaishko s
molochishkom   [teeny  tea  with   weeny  milk]").  She  struck   me  as  an
extraordinarily garrulous, affable, and  banal lady,  with a  good  taste in
clothes (she worked in a salon de couture).  A  certain  tenseness could  be
sensed in the atmosphere of the household. Annette was obviously a difficult
daughter. In the brief course of my visit I could not help noticing that the
voice  of  the  parent addressing  her developed little  notes of obsequious
panic (notki podobostrastnoy  paniki). Annette would occasionally curb  with
an opaque, almost ophidian, look, her mother's volubility. As I was leaving,
the old girl paid me what she  thought was a  compliment: "You speak Russian
with a Parisian grasseyement and your  manners  are those of an Englishman."
Annette, behind her, uttered a low warning growl.
     That  same evening I wrote  to her father informing him that she  and I
had  decided to marry; and on the following  afternoon, when she arrived for
work,  I  met  her in  morocco slippers  and silk  dressing gown. It  was  a
holiday--the Festival of Flora--I said, indicating, with a not wholly normal
smile, the carnations,  camomiles, anemones,  asphodels, and blue cockles in
blond corn,  which decorated my  room in our honor. Her gaze swept  over the
flowers, champagne, and caviar canapès;  she  snorted  and turned to flee; I
plucked her back into the room, locked the door and pocketed its key. <112>
     I do not mind  recalling that our first tryst was a flop. It took me so
long to persuade her that this was the day, and  she made  such a fuss about
which ultimate inch of clothing could be removed and which parts of her body
Venus,  the Virgin,  and  the  maire of  our  arrondissement allowed  to  be
touched,  that by the  time I  had her in a passably convenient  position of
surrender, I was an impotent wreck.  We were lying naked, in a loose clinch.
Presently her mouth opened  against mine in her  first free kiss. I regained
my  vigor.  I  hastened  to  possess her. She  exclaimed  I was disgustingly
hurting  her and with a vigorous  wriggle expulsed the blooded and thrashing
fish. When I tried  to  close her fingers around it in  humble substitution,
she   snatched  her  hand  away,  calling  me  a  dirty  dèbauchè  (gryaznyy
razvratnik). I had to demonstrate myself  the messy act  while she looked on
in amazement and sorrow.
     We  did better next day, and finished the  flattish  champagne; I never
could quite  tame her,  though.  I remember most promising nights in Italian
lakeside  hotels when  everything  was  suddenly  botched  by her  misplaced
primness. But  on the other hand I am happy now that I was never so vile and
inept as to ignore the exquisite contrast between her irritating prudery and
those rare moments of sweet passion when her features acquired an expression
of  childish concentration,  of solemn  delight,  and her little  moans just
reached the threshold of my undeserving consciousness. <113>

9

     By the  end of the  summer, and  of  the next chapter  of  The Dare, it
became clear that Dr. Blagovo and his wife were looking forward to a regular
Greek-Orthodox  wedding--a  taper-lit  gold-and-gauze  ceremony,  with  high
priest  and  low priest and a  double choir. I do  not know if  Annette  was
astonished when  I said  I  intended to cut out the mummery and  prosaically
register our union before a municipal officer  in  Paris, London, Calais, or
on  one of  the Channel Islands; but she certainly  did not mind astonishing
her parents. Dr.  Blagovo requested an  interview in a stiffly worded letter
("Prince! Anna has  informed us that you  would prefer--"); we settled for a
telephone conversation: two minutes of Dr.  Blagovo (including pauses caused
by his deciphering  a hand that must  have been the despair of apothecaries)
and five of his wife, who after rambling about  irrelevant matters entreated
me to reconsider my decision. I refused, and  was  set upon by a go-between,
good old Stepanov, who  rather  unexpectedly, given his liberal views, urged
me in a telephone call from somewhere in England (where the Borgs now lived)
to keep up a beautiful Christian tradition. I changed the subject and begged
him to arrange a beautiful literary soirèe for me upon his return  to Paris.
<114>
     In the meantime some of the gayer gods came with gifts. Three windfalls
scatter-thudded  around me in a  simultaneous act of  celebration:  The  Red
Topper was bought for  publication  in  English  with  a  two-hundred-guinea
advance; James Lodge of New York offered for Camera Lucida an even handsomer
sum  (one's  sense of beauty  was  easily satisfied  in those days);  and  a
contract for the cinema  rights to a short story was being  prepared by Ivor
Black's half-brother in Los Angeles. I had now to find adequate surroundings
for completing The  Dare in greater comfort than  that in which I wrote  its
first part; and  immediately after  that,  or  concurrently  with  its  last
chapter, I would have to examine, and, no doubt, revise heavily, the English
translation now being  made  of my  Krasnyy Tsilindr by  an  unknown lady in
London (who rather inauspiciously had started to suggest,  before a  roar of
rage stopped her, that "certain passages, not quite proper  or too richly or
obscurely phrased, would  have to be toned  down, or omitted altogether, for
the benefit of the sober-minded English reader"). I also expected to have to
face a business trip to the United States.
     For some odd psychological reason, Annette's parents, who kept track of
those developments, were now urging her to go through no matter what form of
marriage,  civil or  pagan (grazhdanskiy  ili basurmanskiy), without  delay.
Once that  little  tricolor farce  over, Annette and  I paid  our tribute to
Russian tradition by traveling from hotel to hotel during two  months, going
as far as  Venice and Ravenna,  where  I thought  of  Byron  and  translated
Musset. Back in Paris, we rented a three-room apartment on the charming  rue
Guevara (named after an Andalusian playwright of long ago) a two-minute walk
from the  Bois.  We usually lunched at the  nearby Le Peut Diable Boiteux, a
modest  but  excellent  restaurant,  and had cold  cuts for  dinner  in  our
kitchenette. I had somehow  expected Annette to be a versatile cook, and she
did  improve  later,  in rugged  <115>  America. On  rue  Guevara  her  best
achievement remained the Soft-Boiled Egg: I do  not know how she did it, but
she managed to prevent the fatal crack that produced an ectoplasmic swell in
the dancing water when I took over.
     She loved  long walks in  the  park  among  the sedate beeches and  the
prospective-looking  babes; she loved cafès, fashion  shows, tennis matches,
circular  bike races  at the  Vèlodrome,  and especially the cinema.  I soon
realized  that  a little recreation put her in a lovemaking mood--and  I was
frightfully amorous and  strong in our four last years in  Paris,  and quite
unable to stand capricious denials. I drew the line, however, at an overdose
of athletic  sports--a  metronomic tennis  ball twanging to and  fro  or the
ghastly hairy legs of hunchbacks on wheels.
     The second part of the Thirties  in  Paris happened  to be marked  by a
marvelous surge of the  exiled arts, and it would be pretentious and foolish
of  me not to admit that whatever some of the more  dishonest critics  wrote
about me,  I stood at  the peak of that period. In the halls  where readings
took place, in the back rooms  of famous cafès, at private literary parries,
I enjoyed pointing out to my  quiet and stylish companion the various ghouls
of  the inferno, the crooks  and the creeps, the benevolent nonentities, the
groupists,  the  guru  nuts,  the  pious  pederasts,  the lovely  hysterical
Lesbians, the gray-locked old realists,  the talented, illiterate, intuitive
new critics (Adam Atropovich was their unforgettable leader).
     I noted with a sort of scholarly  pleasure (like  that of tracking down
parallel readings) how attentive,  how eager to honor her  were the three or
four, always black-suited, grandmasters of Russian letters (people I admired
with grateful  fervor,  not  only  because  their  high-principled  art  had
enchanted my prime,  but  also because the banishment of their  books by the
Bolshevists  <116>  represented   the  greatest   indictment,  absolute  and
immortal, of  Lenin's and Stalin's  regime).  No  less empressès around  her
(perhaps in subliminal zeal to earn some  of  the rare  praise I  deigned to
bestow on the pure  voice  of the impure) were  certain younger writers whom
their God had created two-faced: despicably corrupt or inane on one  side of
their being and shining  with poignant  genius on the other.  In a word, her
appearance in the beau monde of èmigrè literature  echoed amusingly  Chapter
Eight of Eugene Onegin with Princess N.'s moving coolly through  the fawning
ballroom throng.
     I might have  been  displeased  by the tolerance she showed  Basilevski
(knowing  none  of  his works  and only vaguely  aware  of  his preposterous
reputation)  had it not  occurred to me  that  the theme of her sympathy was
repeating, as it  were, the friendly phase  of my own initial relations with
that faux bonhomme. From behind a more or less Doric  column I overheard him
asking my naîve  gentle Annette  had she  any idea  why  I hated so fiercely
Gorki (for whom he cultivated total veneration). Was  it  because I resented
the world fame of a  proletarian? Had I really  read any  of  that wonderful
writer's  books?  Annette had  looked puzzled  but  all  at once  a charming
childish smile illumined her whole face and she recalled The Mother, a corny
Soviet film that I had criticized, she said, "because the tears rolling down
the faces were too big and too slow."
     "Aha!   That  explains  a  lot,"  proclaimed   Basilevski  with  gloomy
satisfaction. <117>

10

I received the typed translations of The Red Topper (sic) and  Camera Lucida
virtually at the same time, in the autumn  of 1937.  They proved  to be even
more ignoble than I expected. Miss Haworth, an Englishwoman, had spent three
happy years  in Moscow  where her father had been Ambassador; Mr. Kulich was
an elderly Russian-born  New  Yorker  who signed his letters Ben.  Both made
identical mistakes, choosing the wrong term in their identical dictionaries,
and  with identical recklessness never  bothering  to  check the treacherous
homonym of  a familiar-looking word. They were blind to contextual shades of
color  and deaf to nuances of noise. Their classification of natural objects
seldom descended from  the class to the  family; still  more seldom  to  the
genus in the strict sense. They confused the specimen with the species; Hop,
Leap,  and  Jump  wore  in  their  minds  the  drab  uniform  of  regimented
synonymity;  and not one  page passed  without  a boner.  What struck  me as
especially fascinating, in a  dreadful diabolical way, was their  taking for
granted  that  a  respectable  author  could  have  written   this  or  that
descriptive passage, which their  ignorance  and carelessness had reduced to
the cries  and grunts  of a  cretin. In  all their  habits of expression Ben
Kulich and Miss Haworth were so close that I now think <118> they might have
been secretly married  to one another  and  had corresponded regularly  when
trying  to  settle a  tricky paragraph; or  else,  maybe, they  used to meet
midway for lexical picnics on the grassy lip of some crater in the Azores.
     It took me several  months to revise  those  atrocities  and dictate my
revisions to Annette. She derived her English  from  the four years  she had
spent at an  American boarding  school in  Constantinople  (1920-1924),  the
Blagovos' first stage of westward expatriation. I was amazed to see how fast
her vocabulary grew and improved in the performance of her new functions and
was  amused by  the  innocent pride  she took in  correctly taking  down the
blasts and  sarcasms I directed in letters to Allan &  Overton,  London, and
James Lodge,  New  York. In fact, her  doigtè  in English  (and French)  was
better than in the typing of Russian texts. Minor stumbles were,  of course,
bound  to occur in any language. One day, in referring to the carbon copy of
a spate of corrections already  posted to  my patient  Allan, I discovered a
trivial slip she had made, a mere typo ("here" instead of "hero," or perhaps
"that"  instead  of  "hat,"  I don't  even remember--but  there  was an  "h"
somewhere, I think) which, however, gave the  sentence a dismally flat, but,
alas, not implausible sense (verisimilitude  has been the  undoing of many a
conscientious   proofreader).  A   telegram   could   eliminate  the   fault
incontinently, but an overworked edgy author  finds such events jarring--and
I voiced  my annoyance  with  unwarranted vehemence. Annette started looking
for a telegram form in the (wrong) drawer and said, without rasing her head:
     "She  would have helped you so much better than  I,  though I really am
doing my best (strashno starayus', trying terribly)."
     We  never referred to  Iris--that  was a tacit condition in the code of
our marriage--but I instantly  understood that Annette meant her and not the
inept English girl <119> whom an agency had sent me several weeks before and
got back with wrappage and string. For some occult reason (overwork again) I
felt the tears welling and before I could get up and leave the room, I found
myself  shamelessly sobbing  and hitting a fat anonymous book  with my fist.
She glided into my arms, also weeping, and that same evening we  went to see
Renè Clair's new film, followed by supper at the Grand Velour.
     During  those months of correcting and partly rewriting The  Red Topper
and  the  other  thing,  I  began  to experience  the  pangs  of  a  strange
transformation. I  did not wake up  one Central European  morning as a great
scarab with more  legs  than  any beetle  can have, but certain excruciating
tearings of secret tissues did take place in me. The Russian  typewriter was
closed  like a coffin. The end of The  Dare  had  been delivered  to Patria.
Annette and I planned to go in the spring to England (a plan never executed)
and  in  the summer  of 1939 to America (where she was to die fourteen years
later). By the middle of 19381 felt I could  sit back and quietly enjoy both
the private praise bestowed upon me by Andoverton and Lodge in their letters
and  the  public  accusations  of  aristocratic  obscurity  which  facetious
criticules  in the Sunday  papers directed at the style  of such passages in
the English versions of my two novels as had been authored by me  alone.  It
was,  however, quite  a different matter  "to work without net"  (as Russian
acrobats say), when attempting to compose a  novel straight in English,  for
now there was no Russian safety net spread below, between me and the lighted
circlet of the arena.
     As was also to happen in regard to my next English books (including the
present sketch),  the  title of my first one came  to  me at  the  moment of
impregnation, long before actual birth and growth. Holding that  name to the
light,  I  distinguished the entire  contents of  the semitransparent  <120>
capsule. The title was to be without any choice or change: See under Real. A
preview of  its eventual tribulations in the catalogues of  public libraries
could not have deterred me.
     The idea may have been an oblique effect of the insult dealt by the two
bunglers  to my careful art.  An English  novelist,  a brilliant and  unique
performer,  was supposed to  have  recently died. The story of  his life was
being knocked together  by the uninformed,  coarse-minded, malevolent Hamlet
Godman,  an Oxonian Dane, who  found in this grotesque  task  a Kovalevskian
"outlet"  for the literary  flops that his proper mediocrity fully deserved.
The  biography  was being  edited,  rather unfortunately  for  its  reckless
concocter, by  the indignant brother of the dead  novelist. As  the  opening
chapter  unfolded  its  first   reptilian   coil   (with   insinuations   of
"masturbation guilt" and  the  castration  of toy soldiers)  there commenced
what was to me the delight and  the magic  of  my book: fraternal footnotes,
half-a-dozen lines  per page,  then  more, then much more,  which started to
question, then refute, then  demolish by  ridicule the would-be biographer's
doctored anecdotes and vulgar inventions. A multiplication of  such notes at
the bottom of  the page led to  an  ominous increase (no doubt disturbing to
clubby  or  convalescent  readers)  of  astronomical symbols bespeckling the
text.  By the end  of  the  biographee's  college  years  the height  of the
critical apparatus had reached one third of each page. Editorial warnings of
a national disaster--flooded fields and so on--accompanied a further rise of
the  water  line.  By  page  200  the  footnote  material  had  crowded  out
three-quarters  of  the  text  and  the  type  of  the  note   had  changed,
psychologically  at  least (I  loathe typographical frolics  in books)  from
brevier to long primer. In  the course  of the last chapters the  commentary
not  only replaced the  entire  text  but finally swelled  to  boldface. "We
witness here  the admirable phenomenon of a bogus  <121> biographie romancèe
being gradually supplanted  by the true  story  of a great man's life."  For
good measure  I  appended  a  three-page  account of  the great  annotator's
academic  career: "He now teaches Modern Literature, including his brother's
works, at Paragon University, Oregon."
     This is the  description of a novel written almost forty-five years ago
and probably forgotten by the general public. I have never reread it because
I reread (je relis, perechityvayu--I'm teasing an  adorable  mistress!) only
the page proofs of my paperbacks; and for reasons which, I am sure, J. Lodge
finds judicious, the thing  is still in its hard-cover instar. But  in  rosy
retrospect I feel it as a pleasurable event, and have completely dissociated
it in my mind  from the terrors and torments that attended  the  writing  of
that rather lightweight little satire.
     Actually, its composition, despite  the pleasure  (maybe  also noxious)
that the iridescent  bubbles  in  my  alembics gave  me  after  a  night  of
inspiration,  trial,  and  triumph  (look   at   the  harlequins,  everybody
look--Iris, Annette,  Bel, Louise,  and  you, you, my ultimate  and immortal
one!), almost led to the dementia paralytica that I feared since youth.
     In the world of  athletic games there  has never been, I think, a World
Champion of  Lawn Tennis and  Ski; yet in  two Literatures, as dissimilar as
grass and snow, I have been the first to achieve that kind of feat. I do not
know (being a  complete non-athlete,  whom the sports pages  of a  newspaper
bore almost as much as does its kitchen section) what physical stress may be
involved in serving one  day a sequence of thirty-six aces at sea  level and
on the next soaring from a ski  jump 136 meters through bright mountain air.
Colossal,  no  doubt,  and,  perhaps, inconceivable.  But I  have managed to
transcend the rack and the wrench of literary metamorphosis.
     We think in images, not in words; all right; when, however, we compose,
recall, or refashion at midnight in our <122> brain something we wish to say
in tomorrow's sermon,  or  have said to Dolly  in a recent dream, or wish we
had said to that impertinent proctor  twenty years ago,  the images we think
in  are, of course, verbal--and even audible  if we happen to be lonely  and
old. We do not  usually think in words, since most of life is mimodrama, but
we certainly  do imagine  words  when  we  need them,  just  as  we  imagine
everything else capable of being perceived in  this, or even in a still more
unlikely, world. The book in my mind appeared at first, under my right cheek
(I sleep on  my non-cardial side), as a  varicolored procession with  a head
and  a tail, winding in a  general  western direction  through an  attentive
town. The children among you and all my old selves on their thresholds  were
being promised  a stunning  show. I  then saw the show  in full detail  with
every scene  in its  place,  every  trapeze  in the stars.  Yet it was not a
masque, not  a circus,  but  a bound book,  a short novel in a tongue as far
removed  as Thracian or  Pahlavi from  the fata-morganic  prose  that I  had
willed into being in the desert  of  exile. An upsurge of nausea overcame me
at the thought of imagining a hundred-thousand adequate words and I switched
on the light and called to Annette in the adjacent bedroom to give me one of
my strictly rationed tablets.
     The evolution  of my English, like that  of birds, had had its ups  and
downs. A beloved Cockney nurse had looked after me from 1900 (when I was one
year old) to  1903.  She was  followed  by  a  succession of  three  English
governesses (1903-1906, 1907-1909, and November,  1909, to Christmas  of the
same   year)  whom  I  see  over  the  shoulder  of  time  as  representing,
mythologically,  Didactic Prose, Dramatic Poetry,  and  the Erotic Idyll. My
grand-aunt, a dear  person with uncommonly liberal views,  gave in, however,
to  domestic   considerations,  and  discharged  Cherry   Neaple,  my   last
shepherdess. After an  interlude of Russian and French pedagogy, two English
tutors more or less <123> succeeded each other between 1912 and 1916, rather
comically  overlapping in  the  spring  of  1914 when  they competed for the
favors of a young  village beauty who had been my  girl in  the first place.
English fairy tales had been replaced around 1910 by the B.O.P., immediately
followed by  all the Tauchnitz volumes that  had  accumulated in  the family
libraries.  Throughout adolescence I read, in pairs, and  both with the same
rich thrill, Othello and  Onegin, Tyutchev and Tennyson, Browning  and Blok.
During my three Cambridge  years (1919-1922)  and thereafter, till April 23,
1930, my  domestic tongue remained English, while the body of my own Russian
works started to grow and was soon to disorb my household gods.
     So  far so  good. But the  phrase  itself  is  a  glib  clichè; and the
question confronting me in Paris, in  the late Thirties, was precisely could
I  fight  off  the  formula and rip  up  the ready-made,  and switch from my
glorious self-developed Russian, not  to the dead leaden English of the high
seas  with  dummies  in sailor  suits, but  an  English  I  alone  would  be
responsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light?
     I  daresay the description  of my literary troubles will be  skipped by
the  common  reader; yet  for  my  sake,  rather than  his, I wish  to dwell
mercilessly  on a  situation that was bad enough  before I left  Europe  but
almost killed me during the crossing.
     Russian and English  had  existed for  years in my mind  as two  worlds
detached from one another. (It is only today that some interspatial  contact
has been established: "A knowledge of Russian," writes George Oakwood in his
astute essay on  my  Ardis,  1970,  "will help  you  to relish  much of  the
wordplay  in the  most English of the author's  English novels; consider for
instance  this: `The champ and  the  chimp  came all the way  from  Omsk  to
Neochomsk.'  What a delightful link  between a real  round  place and  <124>
`ni-o-chyom,'  the About-Nothing land of modern philosophic linguistics!") I
was  acutely  aware   of   the  syntactic  gulf  separating  their  sentence
structures.  I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that my
allegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship.
Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English from
the free  and fluid  interplay between  the present and  the  past  in their
Russian  counterpart  (which Ian  Bunyan has so amusingly  compared in  last
Sunday's NYT to "a dance of the veil performed by a plump graceful lady in a
circle of cheering drunks").  The  fantastic number of natural-looking nouns
that the British and the Americans apply  in lovely technical senses to very
specific objects also  distressed  me. What is the exact term for the little
cup  in which you place the diamond you want to cut?  (We call it "dop," the
pupal  case of a butterfly, replied my informer, an old  Boston jeweler  who
sold me the ring for my third bride). Is there not a nice special word for a
pigling?  ("I  am  toying with `snork' said  Professor  Noteboke,  the  best
translator of  Gogol's immortal The  Carrick). I want the right word for the
break in a boy's voice at puberty, I said to an  amiable opera  basso in the
adjacent deck  chair during  my first  transatlantic  voyage. ("I  think, he
said, "it's called  `ponticello,' a small bridge,  un  petit pont, mostik...
Oh, you're Russian too?")
     The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after  landing, in a
charming New York  apartment (it was leant  to Annette and me by  a generous
relative  of  mine and faced  the  sunset  flaming beyond Central Park). The
neuralgia in my  right  forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid
black headache that  no pill could pierce. Annette  rang up James Lodge, and
he,  out  of  the  misdirected  kindness  of his heart,  had  an  old little
physician of Russian extraction examine me.  The  poor fellow  drove me even
crazier than I was by not only insisting on  discussing <125> my symptoms in
an  execrable  version  of the  language  I  was  trying  to  shed,  but  on
translating into it various irrelevant terms used by  the Viennese Quack and
his apostles (simbolizirovanie, mortidnik). Yet  his  visit, I must confess,
strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda. <126>


PART THREE
     <127> <128>
        1

     Neither  Slaughter in the Sun  (as  the  English translation  of Camera
Lucida got retitled while I lay helplessly hospitalized in New York) nor The
Red Topper sold well. My  ambitious, beautiful, strange See under Real shone
for a breathless instant on the lowest rung of the bestseller list in a West
Coast paper,  and  vanished for  good.  In  those circumstances  I could not
refuse  the  lectureship  offered me  in 1940  by  Quirn  University on  the
strength of my European  reputation. I was to  develop a plump  tenure there
and  expand into a Full Professor by  1950 or 1955: I  can't  find the exact
date in my old notes.
     Although  I  was adequately remunerated  for  my two weekly lectures on
European  Masterpieces  and one Thursday seminar on  Joyce's Ulysses (from a
yearly  5000  dollars in  the  beginning to  15,000 in the Fifties)  and had
furthermore several splendidly  paid stories accepted  by The  Beau and  the
Butterfly, the kindest magazine in the world, I was  not really  comfortable
until my Kingdom by  the Sea (1962) atoned for a fraction of  the loss of my
Russian fortune  (1917)  and bundled away all financial worries till the end
of  worrisome time. I do not usually preserve cuttings of  adverse criticism
and envious abuse; but I do treasure  the following definition: "This is the
only known case <129> in history when a European pauper ever became his  own
American  uncle [amerikanskiy dyadyushka,  oncle d'Amèrique]," so phrased by
my faithful Zoilus,  Demian  Basilevski; he was one  of the very few  larger
saurians in the èmigrè marshes who followed me in 1939 to the hospitable and
altogether  admirable U.S.A., where with egg-laying promptness he  founded a
Russian-language  quarterly which  he is still directing today,  thirty-five
years later, in his heroic dotage.
     The  furnished apartment  we finally rented  on the  upper  floor  of a
handsome  house  (10  Buffalo  St.)  was  much  to  my liking because of  an
exceptionally  comfortable study  with  a  great bookcase  full of  works on
American lore including an  encyclopedia in twenty  volumes.  Annette  would
have preferred one of  the  dacha-like structures  which the  Administration
also showed us; but she  gave in when  I pointed out to her that what looked
snug and  quaint in summer  was bound to be chilly and weird the rest of the
year.
     Annette's emotional health caused me anxiety:  her graceful neck seemed
even  longer  and thinner.  An  expression of mild melancholy  lent  a  new,
unwelcome, beauty to her Botticellian face: its  hollowed  outline below the
zygoma was accentuated by her increasing habit of sucking in her cheeks when
hesitative or pensive. All her cold petals remained closed in our infrequent
lovemaking. Her abstraction grew perilous: stray cats at night knew that the
same erratic deity that had not shut the kitchen window would leave ajar the
door of  the  fridge;  her  bath  regularly overflowed while she telephoned,
knitting her  innocent brows (what on earth did she care  for  my  pains, my
welling insanity!), to  find  out  how the first-floor  person's migraine or
menopause was faring; and that vagueness  of hers in relation to me was also
responsible for her omitting a precaution she was  supposed to take, so that
by the autumn,  which followed  our moving into the  accursed  Langley <130>
house, she  informed me  that  the doctor she had just  consulted looked the
very image of Oksman and that she was two-months pregnant.
     An angel is now  waiting under my restless heels. Doomful despair would
invade my  poor Annette when  she tried to cope  with the  intricacies of an
American household. Our landlady, who occupied the first floor, resolved her
perplexities in  a  jiffy.  Two  ravishing  wiggly-bottomed Bermudian coeds,
wearing  their  national  costume,  flannel  shorts  and  open  shirts,  and
practically twins in  appearance, who took the celebrated "Hotel"  course at
Quirn, came to cook and char for her, and she offered to share with us their
services.
     "She's a veritable  angel,"  confided Annette to me  in her  touchingly
phony English.
     I recognized in the woman the Assistant Professor of Russian whom I had
met in a brick building on the campus when the head of her remarkably dreary
department, meek myopic old Noteboke, invited me to attend an Advanced Group
Class (My govorim  po-russki. Vy govorite? Pogovorimte togda--that  kind  of
awful stuff). Happily I had  no  connection whatever with Russian grammar at
Quirn--except that my wife was eventually saved  from utter boredom by being
engaged to help beginners under Mrs. Langley's direction.
     Ninel  Ilinishna Langley, a displaced  person  in more senses than one,
had  recently  left her  husband, the  "great" Langley,  author of A Marxist
History of America, the bible (now  out of print)  of a whole generation  of
morons.  I  do not know the  reason  of their separation (after one year  of
American Sex,  as the woman told Annette, who relayed the information to  me
in a tone of idiotic condolence); but I  did have the occasion of seeing and
disliking Professor Langley  at  an  official  dinner  on  the  eve  of  his
departure for Oxford. I disliked him for his daring to  question my teaching
Ulysses  my way--in a purely textual <131> light, without organic allegories
and quasi-Greek  myths and that  sort of tripe;  his "Marxism," on the other
hand,  was a pleasantly comic and very  mild  affair (too mild, perhaps, for
his wife's taste) compared to  the general  attitude of ignorant  admiration
which American intellectuals had toward Soviet Russia. I remember the sudden
hush, and furtive exchange of  incredulous grimaces, when at a  party, given
for me by the most eminent member of our English department, I described the
Bolshevist   state  as  Philistine  in   repose  and   bestial  in   action;
internationally vying in rapacious deceit with the praying mantis; doctoring
the mediocrity of  its literature by first sparing a few  talents left  over
from a previous period and then blotting  them out with their own blood. One
professor, a left-wing moralist and dedicated muralist (he was experimenting
that year with automobile paint), stalked out of the house. He wrote me next
day,  however, a  really magnificent,  larger-than-nature letter of  apology
saying that he could not be  really cross  with the author of Esmeralda  and
Her Parandrus  (1941), which despite  its "motley style and baroque imagery"
was  a masterpiece  "pinching strings  of personal  poignancy  which  he,  a
committed artist,  never  knew could vibrate in him." Reviewers of  my books
took the same line, chiding me formally for underestimating  the "greatness"
of Lenin, yet paying me compliments of a kind that could not  fail to touch,
in  the long run, even me, a scornful and austere author, whose homework  in
Paris  had never  received  its  due.  Even  the  President  of  Quirn,  who
timorously sympathized with the  fashionable  Sovietizers, was really  on my
side: he told me  when he called on us (while Ninel crept  up to grow an ear
on our landing) that he  was  proud,  etc., and had  found my "last (?) book
very  interesting"  though he  could  not help regretting  that I took every
opportunity  of criticizing  "our Great  Ally"  in my classes.  I  answered,
laughing, that this criticism was a child's  caress  when set alongside  the
public lecture on <132> "The Tractor in Soviet Literature" that I planned to
deliver at the  end  of the term. He laughed, too, and asked Annette what it
was like to live with a genius (she only shrugged her pretty shoulders). All
this was trõs amèricain and thawed a whole auricle in my icy heart.
     But to return to good Ninel.
     She had been  christened Nonna at birth (1902) and renamed twenty years
later Ninel (or Ninella), as petitioned by her  father, a Hero of Toil and a
toady. She wrote it Ninella in English but her friends called her Ninette or
Nelly just  as my  wife's  Christian  name Anna (as  Nonna liked to observe)
turned into Annette and Netty.
     Ninella Langley  was a stocky, heavily  built creature with a ruddy and
rosy  face  (the  two  tints  unevenly  distributed),  short  hair  dyed   a
mother-in-law  ginger,  brown eyes even madder  than mine, very thin lips, a
fat  Russian nose,  and  three or  four hairs on her chin. Before  the young
reader  heads for Lesbos, I wish to say that as far as I could discover (and
I am a peerless spy) there was nothing sexual in her ludicrous and unlimited
affection for  my wife. I had  not yet acquired the white  Desert Lynx  that
Annette did not  live to  see, so it was Ninella who took  her shopping in a
dilapidated  jalopy while the resourceful lodger,  sparing the copies of his
own novels, would autograph for the  grateful twins  old mystery  paperbacks
and unreadable pamphlets  from  the  Langley  collection in the  attic whose
dormer looked out obligingly on the road to, and  from, the Shopping Center.
It was Ninella who kept her adored "Netty" well supplied with white knitting
wool. It was Ninella who twice daily invited her  for a cup of coffee or tea
in her rooms; but the woman made a point of avoiding our flat, at least when
we were at home, under  the  pretext that  it still  reeked of her husband's
tobacco: I rejoined that it  was my  own  pipe--and  later, on the same day,
Annette told me I really ought not to smoke so much, especially indoors; and
she  also upheld  another  absurd <133>  complaint  coming from  downstairs,
namely, that I walked back  and forth  too  late and  too  long,  right over
Ninella's forehead. Yes--and  a third  grievance:  why didn't I put back the
encyclopedia volumes in alphabetic  order as  her  husband had  always  been
careful to  do,  for  (he said) "a  misplaced book is a lost book"--quite an
aphorism.
     Dear Mrs. Langley was not particularly happy about her job. She owned a
lakeside bungalow ("Rustic Roses") thirty miles north of Quirn, not very far
from  Honeywell College, where she taught summer school  and  with which she
intended to be even more  closely associated, if  a "reactionary" atmosphere
persisted at  Quirn. Actually, her only  grudge was against decrepit Mme. de
Korchakov, who had accused  her,  in public, of having  a sdobnyy ("mellow")
Soviet accent and a provincial vocabulary--all of which could not be denied,
although Annette maintained I was a heartless bourgeois to say so. <134>

2

     The infant Isabel's first four years of life are so firmly separated in
my consciousness by a blank of seven years from Bel's girlhood that  I  seem
to have had two different children, one a cheerful red-cheeked little thing,
and the other her pale and morose elder sister.
     I had laid in a stock  of ear plugs; they proved superfluous: no crying
came  from the nursery to interfere with my work--Dr. Olga Repnin, the story
of  an  invented  Russian professor in America,  which was  to  be published
(after a bothersome spell  of serialization entailing endless  proofreading)
by  Lodge in 1946, the year Annette  left  me, and acclaimed as  "a blend of
humor and humanism" by alliteration-prone reviewers,  comfortably unaware of
what  I  was  to  prepare  some  fifteen  years  later  for their  horrified
delectation.
     I enjoyed watching Annette as  she took color snapshots of the baby and
me  in  the garden. I loved  perambulating a fascinated  Isabel through, the
groves of larches and beeches along  Quirn Cascade River, with every loop of
light, every  eyespot of  shade escorted, or so it seemed, by the baby's gay
approbation. I even  agreed  to spend  most of the summer  of 1945 at Rustic
Roses. There, one day, as I was returning with Mrs. Langley from the nearest
liquor <135>  store or newspaper stand, something  she said, some intonation
or gesture, released in me  the passing shudder, the awful surmise,  that it
was not with my wife but with me that the wretched creature had been in love
from the very start.
     The torturous  tenderness  I  had  always  felt  for Annette gained new
poignancy from my feelings for  our little child (I "trembled" over  her  as
Ninella put  it in her coarse  Russian, complaining it might be bad  for the
baby, even if one  "subtracted the overacting"). That was the human  side of
our marriage. The sexual side disintegrated altogether.
     For  quite a time after her return  from the maternity  ward, echoes of
her  pangs in  the darkest corridors of  my brain and a  frightening stained
window at every  turn--the afterimage of  a wounded orifice--pursued  me and
deprived me  of all my vigor. When everything in me healed, and my  lust for
her pale enchantments  rekindled, its volume and violence  put an end to the
brave but essentially inept  efforts she had been making to reestablish some
sort  of  amorous harmony  between  us without departing  one jot  from  the
puritanical norm. She  now had the gall--the pitiful girlish gall--to insist
I  see a  psychiatrist (recommended  by Mrs. Langley) who would  help me  to
think "softening"  thoughts  at moments of excessive engorgement. I said her
friend was a monster and  she a goose, and we had our worst  marital quarrel
in years.
     The creamy-thighed twins had long since returned with their bicycles to
the  island of  their birth.  Plainer  young  ladies came  to  help with the
housekeeping.  By the end of 1945 I had virtually ceased visiting my wife in
her cold bedroom.
     Sometime  in mid-May, 1946, I traveled to  New  York--a five-hour train
trip--to lunch  with a publisher  who was  offering  me  better  terms for a
collection of stories (Exile  from  Mayda) than good Lodge. After a pleasant
meal, in the sunny haze of that banal day, I walked over to the <136> Public
Library, and by a  banal miracle  of synchronization  she came dancing  down
those very  steps, Dolly von Borg, now  twenty-four, as I  trudged up toward
her, a fat famous writer in his powerful forties. Except for a gleam of gray
in the  abundant fair  mane that I had cultivated  for my readings in Paris,
more than  a decade ago, I do not believe I  could have changed sufficiently
to  warrant  her  saying, as she began  doing,  that  she  would  never have
recognized me had she not been so fond of the picture  of meditation on  the
back of See under. I  recognized  her because I had never lost track  of her
image, readjusting it once in a while: the last time I had notched the score
was when her grandmother, in  response to my wife's  Christmas greetings, in
1939, sent us from London a postcard-size photo of a bare-shouldered flapper
with  a fluffy fan and  false eyelashes  in some high-school  play, terribly
chi-chi. In the two minutes we had  on  those steps--she  pressing with both
hands a book  to her breast, I at a lower level, standing with my right foot
placed on the next step, her step, and slapping my knee with a glove (many a
tenor's  only  known gesture)--in those  two minutes we managed to  exchange
quite a lot of plain information.
     She was now studying the History of the Theater at Columbia University.
Parents and  grandparents were tucked away in London.  I had a child, right?
Those shoes I  wore were lovely. Students called my lectures fabulous. Was I
happy?
     I shook my head. When and where could I see her?
     She had  always  had a crush  on me,  oh  yes,  ever  since I  used  to
mesmerize her in my  lap, playing sweet  Uncle Gasper, muffing  every  other
line, and now all had come  back and she  certainly wished  to do  something
about it.
     She  had a remarkable vocabulary. Summarize her. Mirages of  motels  in
the eye of the penholder. Did she have a car?
     Well, that  was  rather  sudden  (laughing).  She could  <137>  borrow,
perhaps,  his old sedan though he might  not like the  notion (pointing to a
nondescript  youth who was  waiting for  her  on the  sidewalk). He had just
bought a heavenly Hummer to go places with her.
     Would she mind telling me when we could meet, please.
     She had read all my novels, at  least all the English ones. Her Russian
was rusty!
     The hell with my novels! When?
     I had  to  let her think. She  might visit me at the end  of the  term.
Terry Todd (now measuring the stairs  with his eyes, preparing to mount) had
briefly been a student  of  mine; he got a D  minus for his first paper  and
quit Quirn.
     I said I consigned  all  the D people to everlasting oblivion. Her "end
of the term" might bend away into Minus Eternity. I required more precision.
     She would let  me know. She would call me next  week. No, she would not
part with her own telephone  number. She  told me to look at that  clown (he
was now  coming up  the steps).  Paradise was a Persian word.  It was simply
Persian  to meet  again like that. She might drop in at  my office for a few
moments, just to chat about old times. She knew how busy--
     "Oh, Terry:  this is  the  writer, the man  who wrote  Emerald and  the
Pander."
     I do not recall what I had planned to look up in  the library. Whatever
it was, it was not that unknown book. Aimlessly I walked up and down several
halls; abjectly visited  the W.C.; but simply could not, short of castrating
myself, get rid of her new image in its own portable sunlight--the  straight
pale hair,  the freckles, the  banal pout,  the Lilithan long eyes--though I
knew she  was only  what one  used  to  call a "little tramp"  and, perhaps,
because she was just that.
     I gave my penultimate "Masterpieces" lecture of the spring term. I gave
my ultimate one. An assistant distributed <138> the blue books for the final
examination in that course (which I had curtailed for reasons of health) and
collected them  while three or four  hopeless hopefuls still kept scribbling
madly in  separate spots of the  hall.  I  held my last Joyce seminar of the
year. Little Baroness Borg had forgotten the end of the dream.
     In the last  days of the spring  term a particularly stupid baby-sitter
told me  that  some girl  whose name  she had not  quite caught--Tallbird or
Dalberg--had phoned that she was  on her way to Quirn. It so happened that a
Lily Talbot  in  my Masterpieces class  had missed the  examination. On  the
following  day I  walked  over to  my office  for the ordeal of  reading the
damned  heap on  my desk.  Quirn University  Official Examination Book.  All
academic work is conducted on the assumption of general horror. Write on the
consecutive right- and left-hand pages. What does "consecutive" really mean,
Sir? Do you want us to describe all the birds in the story or only one? As a
rule, one-tenth of the three hundred minds preferred the spelling "Stern" to
"Sterne" and "Austin" to "Austen."
     The telephone on my spacious desk (it "slept two" as my ribald neighbor
Professor King, an  authority on Dante, used  to say)  rang, and  this  Lily
Talbot  started to explain,  volubly, unconvincingly, in  a kind  of lovely,
veiled, and  confidential  voice, why  she had not taken the examination.  I
could not  remember her face or her figure,  but the subdued melody tickling
my ear contained such intimations  of young charm and surrender that I could
not help chiding  myself  for overlooking her in my class. She was  about to
come to  the  point  when an eager  childish rap  at the  door  diverted  my
attention. Dolly walked in, smiling. Smiling,  she indicated with  a tilt of
her  chin  that  the  receiver  should be cradled.  Smiling, she  swept  the
examination books off the desk and perched upon it with her bare shins in my
face. What might have promised the most refined ardors turned out to be  the
tritest scene in this memoir. I hastened <139> to quench  a thirst  that had
been burning  a  hole  in the mixed metaphor  of my  life ever  since I  had
fondled  a quite  different  Dolly  thirteen  years  earlier.  The  ultimate
convulsion rocked the desk lamp, and from the class just across the corridor
came a burst of applause at the end of Professor  King's last lecture of the
season.
     When I came home, I found my wife alone on the porch swinging gently if
not quite straight  in  her  favorite glider  and reading the  Krasnaya Niva
("Red Corn"), a  Bolshevist magazine.  Her  purveyor of  literatura was away
giving  some future  mistranslators a final examination. Isabel had been out
of doors and was now taking a nap in her room just above the porch.
     In the days when the bermudki (as Ninella  indecently called them) used
to  minister to my humble needs, I experienced no guilt after the  operation
and confronted my wife with  my  usual, fondly  ironical smile;  but on this
occasion I felt my flesh coated  with stinging slime, and  my heart missed a
thump,  when  she said, glancing up  and  stopping the line with her finger:
"Did that girl get in touch with you at your office?"
     I  answered as a  fictional  character might "in the affirmative": "Her
people," I  added, "wrote you, it appears, about  her coming to study in New
York, but  you never showed me  that  letter. Tant mieux, she's  a frightful
bore."
     Annette looked  utterly confused:  "I'm speaking," she said, "or trying
to speak, about a student called Lily Talbot  who telephoned an hour ago  to
explain why she missed the exam. Who is your girl?"
     We proceeded to disentangle the two. After some moral  hesitation ("You
know, we  both owe a  lot to her grandparents")  Annette conceded we  really
need not entertain little strays. She seemed to recall the letter because it
contained a reference to her widowed mother (now moved to a comfortable home
for the old into which I had recently turned  my villa at Carnavaux--despite
my  <140> lawyer's  well-meaning  objections). Yes,  yes,  she  had  mislaid
it--and would  find  it some  day in some  library  book that had never been
returned to  an unattainable library.  A strange appeasement was now flowing
through my poor veins. The romance of  her  absentmindedness always  made me
laugh  heartily.  I  laughed  heartily.  I  kissed  her  on  her  infinitely
tender-skinned temple.
     "How does Dolly Borg look now?"  asked Annette. "She  used to be a very
homely and very brash little brat. Quite repulsive, in fact."
     "That's what she still is," I practically shouted, and  we heard little
Isabel crow:  "Ya prosnulas'"  through the yawn of the window: "I am awake."
How  lightly  the spring cloudlets  scudded!  How  glibly  that red-breasted
thrush on the lawn pulled out its unbroken worm! Ah--and  there was Ninella,
home at  last,  getting out  of  her car,  with the string-bound  corpses of
cahiers  under  her  sturdy  arm. "Gosh," said  I to  myself, in  my ignoble
euphoria, "there's something quite nice and cozy about old Ninel after all!"
Yet only a few hours later the light of Hell had gone out, and  I writhed, I
wrung my four limbs,  yes, in an  agony of insomnia,  trying  to  find  some
combination between  pillow and back, sheet and  shoulder, linen and leg, to
help me, help me, oh, help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn. <141>

3

     The  increasing  disarray  of  my  nerves  was such  that the bother of
getting a driver's license could not be contemplated: hence I had to rely on
Dolly's use  of Todd's  dirty old sedan  in  order to seek  the conventional
darkness of country lanes that were difficult to find and disappointing when
found. We had three  such rendezvous, near New Swivington or thereabouts, in
the complicated vicinity of Casanovia of all places, and despite my  muddled
condition  I  could  not  help  noticing that Dolly  welcomed  the  restless
wanderings, the wrong turns, the torrents of rain which  attended our sordid
little  affair. "Just think," she  said one  especially boggy June  night in
unknown  surroundings,  "how  much  simpler  things  would  be  if  somebody
explained the situation to your wife, just think!"
     On realizing  she had gone  too far with that proposed  thought,  Dolly
changed tactics and rang me up  at my office to tell me with a great show of
jubilant excitement  that  Bridget Dolan, a medical student and a  cousin of
Todd's, was  offering us for  a small remuneration her flat in New  York  on
Monday  and Thursday  afternoons when  she worked  as a  nurse  at the  Holy
Something Hospital. Inertia  rather than  Eros caused me to give it a try; I
kept up the pretext of having to complete the  literary <142> research I was
supposed to  be conducting in  the Public Library, and traveled in a crowded
Pullman from one nightmare to another.
     She met me in front of the house, strutting  in triumph, brandishing  a
little key that caught a glint of  sun in the hothouse mizzle. I was so very
weak from the journey that I had trouble getting  out of  the taxi,  and she
helped  me  to the front  door, chattering the  while  like a bright  child.
Fortunately the  mysterious  flat was on the ground floor--I could not  have
faced a lift's closure and spasm. A surly janitrix (reminding me in mnemonic
reverse of the Cerberean bitches in the hotels of Soviet Siberia which I was
to stop at a couple of decades later)  insisted on my writing down  my  name
and address in a ledger ("That's the rule," sang out Dolly, who  had already
picked up some intones of local delivery). I had the presence of mind to put
down the dumbest address I could  produce  at the  moment,  Dumbert Dumbert,
Dumberton. Dolly, humming, added unhurriedly my raincoat to those hanging in
a communal hallway.  If  she  had  ever  experienced  the pangs of neuralgic
delirium, she would not have fumbled with that key when  she knew quite well
that the door of what should  have been an exquisitely private apartment was
not even properly closed. We  entered a preposterous, evidently ultra-modern
living  room  with  painted hard furniture and one lone little white  rocker
supporting a plush biped rat instead of a sulky child. Doors were still with
me, were always with me. The one  on the left, being  slightly ajar, let  in
voices from an adjacent suite or asylum. "There's a party going on there!" I
expostulated, and  Dolly  deftly  and  softly  drew  that door  almost shut.
"They're a nice friendly  group," she  said,  "and it's really too  warm  in
these rooms to choke every chink. Second on the right. Here we are."
     Here  we were. Nurse  Dolan for the sake of atmosphere and professional
empathy had rigged up her bedroom in hospital  style: a snow-pure cot with a
system  of levers <143>  that would have rendered even Big Peter (in the Red
Topper) impotent; whitewashed commodes and glazed  cabinets; a bedhead chart
dear to humorists; and a set of rules tacked to the bathroom door.
     "Now  off  with that jacket," cried Dolly gaily, "while I  unlace those
lovely shoes" (crouching  nimbly, and  nimbly  recrouching, at my retreating
feet).
     I  said: "You have  lost  your  mind, my  dear,  if you think  I  could
contemplate making love in this appalling place."
     "What do you want  then?" she asked, angrily brushing away a  strand of
hair from her flushed face and uncoiling back to  her natural length: "Where
would you find another such dandy, hygienic, utterly--"
     A  visitor interrupted her:  a brown, gray-cheeked  old dackel carrying
horizontally a rubber bone in  its mouth. It entered from the parlor, placed
the obscene red thing on the linoleum, and stood looking at me, at Dolly, at
me again,  with  melancholy  expectation on  its  raised dogface.  A  pretty
bare-armed girl in black slipped in, grabbed the animal, kicked its toy back
into the parlor, and  said: "Hullo, Dolly! If you and your  friend want some
drinks afterwards, please join  us. Bridget phoned she'd be home early. It's
J.B.'s birthday."
     "Righto,  Carmen,"  replied  Dolly,  and  turning  to  me continued  in
Russian: "I think you need that drink right  away.  Oh, come  along! And for
God's  sake leave  that  jacket and  waistcoat  here.  You are drenched with
sweat."
     She forced me out of the room; I went rumbling and groaning; she gave a
perfunctory pat to the creaseless cot and followed the man of snow,  the man
of tallow, the dying lopsided man.
     Most  of the party  had  now invaded the parlor from  the next  room. I
cringed and tried to hide my face as I recognized Terry Todd. He  raised his
glass  in  delicate  congratulation. What  that  slut had done to  ensure  a
thwarted beau's complicity, I shall never know; but I should  never have put
<144>  her  in  my  Krasnyy  Tsilindr;  that's  the  way   you  breed   live
monsters--from little ballerinas  in books. Another person  I had  once seen
already--in a car  that kept passing us somewhere  in  the  country--a young
actor  with  handsome  Irish  features,  pressed  upon me  what he  called a
Honolulu Cooler, but at  the eoan stage of an attack I am beyond alcohol, so
could  only  taste the  pineapple  part of the mixture. Amidst  a  circle of
sycophants a bull-size old  fellow  in  a  short-sleeved  shirt  monogrammed
"J.B." posed, one  hairy arm around Dolly, for  a naughty shot that his wife
snapped. Carmen removed my sticky  glass  on her  neat  little  tray with  a
pillbox and a thermometer in the corner.  Not finding a  seat, I had to lean
against the  wall,  and  the back of my head  caused  a cheap abstract in  a
plastic frame to start  swinging above me:  it was  stopped by Todd  who had
sidled up to me and now  said,  lowering  his voice: "Everything is settled.
Prof, to  everybody's  satisfaction.  I've kept in  touch with Mrs. Langley,
sure I have, she and the missus  are writing you.  I believe they've already
left, the kid thinks you're in Heaven--now, now, what's the matter?"
     I  am  not a fighter. I only hurt my hand against  a tall lamp and lost
both shoes in the  scuffle. Terry  Todd vanished--forever. The telephone was
being used in one room and ringing in the other. Dolly, retransformed by the
alchemy of her blazing anger--and now untellable  from  the little girl  who
had hurled a three-letter French word at me when I told her I found it wiser
to stop taking advantage of her grandfather's hospitality--virtually tore my
necktie  in two, yelling  she  could  easily  get  me  jailed for  rape  but
preferred  to see me crawling back  to my consort  and harem of baby-sitters
(her new  vocabulary, though, remained  richly  theatrical,  even  when  she
shrieked).
     I felt trapped like a silver pea teased into the center of  a toy maze.
A threatening crowd, held back by J.B., the  head doctor, separated  me from
the exit; so I retreated to <145> Bridget's private wardette and saw, with a
sense  of relief (also  "eoan"  alas)  that beyond a  previously  unnoticed,
half-opened  French  window there  extended to a fabulous distance  an inner
court, or  only one comforting part  of an  inner court, with lightly  robed
patients circulating in  a  geometry of lawns and  garden walks, or  quietly
sitting on benches. I staggered out, and as my white-socked feet touched the
cool  turf I noticed that the vagabond wench had undone the ankle strings of
the long linen underpants I was  wearing. Somehow, somewhere, I had shed and
lost all the rest of my clothes. As I stood there, my  head  brimming with a
blackness  of pain seldom known before, I became aware of a flurry of motion
beyond the court. Far, far away, nurse Dolan or Nolan (at that distance such
nice distinctions no longer  mattered) emerged from a  wing  of the hospital
and came running  to my assistance. Two males followed her with a stretcher.
A helpful patient gathered up the blanket they had dropped.
     "You know, you know . . .  you should have never done  that," she cried
panting. "Don't move, they'll  help you to get  up (I  had  collapsed on the
turf).  If you'd escaped after surgery you  might have  died right where you
are. On such a lovely day, too!"
     And so I was  carried by two sturdy palanquiners who stank all  the way
(the hind bearer solidly, the front man in  rhythmic wafts) not to Bridget's
bed but to a real hospital cot in a ward for three between two old men, both
dying of cerebritis. <146>

4

     Rustic Roses
     13. IV. 46

     The  step  I  have  taken,  Vadim,  is not  subject  to discussion  (ne
podlezhit  obsuzhdeniyu). You must accept my departure  as a fait accompli.1
Had  I really loved  you  I would not have  left  you; but I never loved you
really, and maybe  your escapade--which no doubt is not your first since our
arrival in this sinister (zloveshchuyu)  "free"  country"2--is for me a mere
pretext for leaving you.
     We have  never been very  happy together, you and I, during our twelve3
years of marriage.  You regarded  me from the start as a  cute, dutiful, but
definitely  disappointing  little circus  animal4  which  you tried to teach
immoral  disgusting tricks--condemned  as  such  according  to  the faithful
companion without whom I might not have survived in  ghastly "Kvirn"5 by the
latest scientific  stars of  our fatherland. I, on the  other hand,  was  so
painfully  nonplussed  by  your  trenne  (sic)6 de  vie, your  habits,  your
black-locked7 friends, your decadent novels,  and--why  not admit  it?--your
<147>  pathological revolt  against Art  and Progress in  the  Soviet  Land,
including the  restoration  of  lovely  old  churches,8  that I  would  have
divorced you, had  I  dared upset9  poor papa and mama  who were so eager in
their  dignity and  naîvetè to have their daughter addressed--by  whom, good
Lord?--as "Your Serenity" (Siyatel'stvo).
     Now  comes  a  serious demand, an absolute injunction. Never, never--at
least while I am still alive--never, I repeat, shall  you try to communicate
with  the child. I  do not  know--Nelly is better  versed in this--what  the
legal situation is, but I know that in certain respects you  are a gentleman
and it is to the  gentleman that I say and shout: Please, please, keep away!
If some dreadful American illness strikes me, then remember I wish her to be
brought up as a Russian Christian.10
     I was sorry to learn about  your hospitalization. This  is your second,
and I hope last, attack of neurasthenia11 since the time we made the mistake
of leaving Europe instead of waiting quietly for the Soviet Army to liberate
it from the fascists. Good-bye.
     PS. Nelly wishes to add a few lines.

     Thank you, Netty. I shall indeed be brief.  The information imparted to
us  by  your girl-friend's  fiancè  and  his  mother,12  a  saintly woman of
infinite compassion and  common  sense, lacked, fortunately, the  element of
dreadful surprise. A  roommate  of  Berenice Mudie  (the one that stole  the
cut-crystal decanter Netty  gave me) had  already been spreading certain odd
rumors a couple of years ago;  I tried to protect  your sweet  wife <148> by
not allowing that gossip to reach  her or at least by drawing  her attention
to it in a very oblique, half-humorous way long after those prostitutes  had
gone. But now let us talk turkey.13
     There can  be  no problem, I am sure, in  separating your  things  from
hers. She says: "Let him take the countless copies of his novels and all the
tattered  dictionaries";  but  she must  be allowed to  keep  her  household
treasures such  as my little birthday gifts to her--the silver-plated caviar
bowl as well as the six pale-green handblown wine glasses, etc.
     I can especially sympathize  with  Netty in  this  domestic catastrophe
because  my own  marriage resembled  hers in many, many  ways.  It began  so
auspiciously!  I was stranded and lost in a territory suddenly  occupied  by
Estonian fascists, a poor little war-tossed Moscow girl,14 when I first  met
Professor Langley  in quite romantic circumstances:  I was interpreting  for
him  (the study of foreign  languages  stands  at a remarkable  level in the
Soviet Land), but when I was shipped with other  DP's to the UK, and we  met
again and  married,  all went  wrong--he ignored me in  the daytime, and our
nights  were  full of  incompatibility.15  One  good  consequence is that  I
inherited, so to speak,  a lawyer, Mr.  Horace Peppermill, who has consented
to grant you a consultation and  help you to settle all business details. It
will be  wise  on your part to  follow Professor Langley's example and  give
your wife a monthly allowance while placing a sizable "guarantee sum" in the
bank which can be available to her in  extreme  cases and, naturally,  after
your demise  or during  an overprotracted terminal illness. We do not  <149>
have to remind you that Mrs.  Blagovo should  continue to  receive regularly
her usual check until further notice.
     The Quirn house will be offered for sale immediately--it is overflowing
with odious memories. Consequently, as  soon as  they let you  out, which  I
hope will happen without retardment (bez zamedleniya, sans tarder), move out
of  the  house,  please.16 I  am  not  on  speaking  terms with  Miss  Myrna
Soloway--or,  in  reality,  simply  Soloveychik--of  my  department,  but  I
understand she is very good at ferreting out places for rent.
     We have fine weather here after all that rain. The lake is beautiful at
this time of the year! We are going to refurnish our dear little  dacha. Its
only drawback in one sense (an asset in all others!) is that it stands a wee
bit apart  from civilization or at least from Honeywell College.  The police
are  always on the  lockout for  bothers  in the nude, prowlers, etc. We are
seriously thinking of acquiring a big Alsatian!17

COMMENTARY
     * 1.
     En franãais dans le texte.
     * 2.
     The  first  four  or five lines are  no doubt  authentic, but then come
various details which convince me that not Netty but  Nelly masterminded the
entire communication. Only a Soviet woman would speak like that of America.
     * 3.
     At first typed  "fourteen"  but  expertly  erased  and replaced by  the
correct "twelve," as seen clearly in  the carbon copy that I  found  pinned,
"just  in case," to the  blotter in my study. Netty  would have been totally
incapable  of  producing such a  clean  typescript--especially with  the New
Orthography machine used by her friend.
     * 4.
     The term  in the  text is  durovskiy zveryok,  meaning  a small  animal
trained by  the  famous Russian clown Durov, a reference <150> less familiar
to my wife than to a person  of the  older  generation  to  which her friend
belonged.
     * 5.
     Contemptuous transliteration of "Quirn."
     * 6.
     Symptomatic  misspelling  of  train.  Annette's French  was  excellent.
Ninette's French (as well as her English) was a joke.
     * 7.
     My wife  coming  as  she  did from an  obscurant  Russian milieu was no
paragon of  racial  tolerance;  but  she  would  never  have used the vulgar
anti-Semitic phraseology typical of her friend's character and upbringing.
     * 8.
     The interpolation of those  "lovely old  churches" is a stock platitude
of Soviet patriotism.
     * 9.
     Actually my wife rather  liked  to  upset her  people on every possible
occasion.
     * 10.
     I might have done something about it had I known for sure whose wish it
was.   To  spite  her   parents--a  strange  but  constant  policy  on   her
part--Annette never went to church, not even at Easter. As  to Mrs. Langley,
devotional decorum was the motto; the woman made the sign of the cross every
time American Jupiter split the black clouds.
     * 11.
     "Neurasthenia" indeed!
     * 12.
     A totally new character--this mother. Myth? Impersonation act? I turned
to Bridget for  some explanation; she  said there was no such person  around
(the real Mrs. Todd died long ago) and advised me "to drop the subject" with
the irritating  curtness  of  one  dismissing  a  topic as  the  product  of
another's delirium. I am ready to agree that my recollection of the scene at
her  apartment is tainted by the state I  was in,  but that "saintly mother"
must remain an enigma.
     * 13.
     En Anglais dans le texte.
     * 14.
     The little Muscovite must have been around forty at the time.
     * 15.
     En Anglais dans le texte.
     * 16.
     This I did not dream of doing before  my lease expired, which it did on
August 1, 1946.
     * 17.
     Let us refrain from a final comment.

     Good-bye, Netty and  Nelly. Good-bye, Annette  and  Ninette.  Good-bye,
Nonna Anna. <151> <152>


PART FOUR
     <153> <154>
        1

     Learning  to  drive that "Caracal"  (as I fondly called  my  new  white
coupè)  had its comic as well as dramatic side, bat after two  flunks and  a
few  little  repairs, I found myself legally and  physically  fit at last to
spin off  West on  a  protracted tour. There  was, true,  a  moment of acute
distress, as the first  distant mountains disowned suddenly any likeness  to
lilac clouds, when I recalled  the  trips  Iris  and I  used to  make to the
Riviera  in  our old Icarus.  If  she did  occasionally allow me to take the
wheel, it was only in a  spirit of fun, for  she was such a  sportive  girl.
With what sobs I now remembered the time when I managed to hit the postman's
bicycle which had  been left leaning against a pink wall at  the entrance of
Carnavaux,  and how my Iris  doubled  up in  beautiful  mirth  as the  thing
slithered off in front of us!
     I spent what remained of the  summer exploring  the  incredibly lyrical
Rocky Mountain states, getting drunk  on whiffs of  Oriental  Russia  in the
sagebrush zone and on the North Russian fragrances  so faithfully reproduced
above timberline by  certain  small bogs  along trickles of sky between  the
snowbank and the orchid.  And  yet--was that all?  What  form  of mysterious
pursuit  caused me  to get my feet wet like  a child, to pant up a talus, to
stare <155>  every  dandelion in the  face, to start  at every  colored mote
passing just beyond  my field of  vision?  What was the dream  sensation  of
having  come  empty-handed--without what? A  gun? A  wand?  This I dared not
probe lest I wound the raw fell under my thin identity.
     Skipping the academic year,  in a  kind of premature "sabbatical leave"
that left the Trustees of Quirn University speechless, I wintered in Arizona
where I tried to write The Invisible Lath, a book rather similar  to that in
the reader's hands. No doubt I  was not ready for it and  perhaps foiled too
much over inexpressible shades of emotion;  anyway I  smothered it under too
many layers of  sense as a  Russian peasant  woman, in her stuffy log house,
might overlay (zaspat') her baby in heavy oblivion after making hay or being
thrashed by her drunken husband.
     I  pushed on  to Los  Angeles--and was sorry to  learn  that the cinema
company I had counted upon was about to fold after Ivor Black's death. On my
way  back,  in  early  spring,  I rediscovered  the  dear phantasmata  of my
childhood  in the tender green of  aspen groves at high altitudes  here  and
there, on conifer-clothed ridges. For almost  six months I roamed again from
motel  to motel,  several times  having  my  car scratched  and  cracked  by
cretinous  rival drivers and  finally  trading it  in for a sedate Bellargus
sedan of a celestial blue that Bel was to compare with that of a Morpho.
     Another odd thing:  with  prophetic care I took down in my diary all my
stops,  all  my  motels  (Mes  Moteaux  as  Verlaine might  have said!), the
Lakeviews, the Valley Views, the Mountain Views, the Plumed Serpent Court in
New Mexico, the Lolita Lodge in Texas, Lone Poplars, that if recruited might
have patrolled a whole river, and enough sunsets to keep all the bats of the
world--and one dying genius--happy. LATH, LATH, Look At The Harlequins! Look
at that strange fever rash of  viatic tabulation in which I persevered as if
I  knew that those <156> motor  courts  prefigured  the stages  of my future
travels with my darling daughter.
     In late August, 1947, suntanned, and more edgy than ever, I returned to
Quirn and  transferred my  belongings  from  storage to the new dwelling  (1
Larchdell Road) found for  me by efficient and cute Miss Soloway. This was a
charming two-storied gray-stone house, with a picture  window  and  a  white
grand  in  the  long  drawing-room,  three virginal bedrooms upstairs and  a
library in the  basement.  It had  belonged to the late Alden  Landover, the
greatest  American  belle-lettrist of the half-century. With the help of the
beaming  Trustees--and rather taking advantage of their joy at welcoming  me
back to Quirn--I  resolved to buy  that house. I loved its scholarly odor, a
treat seldom granted  to my  exquisitely sensitive Brunn's membrane,  and  I
also loved  its picturesque  isolation amidst  a  tremendous  unkempt garden
above a larched and golden-rodded steep slope.
     To  keep Quirn grateful, I also decided  to  reorganize  completely  my
contribution to  its fame. I  scrapped my  Joyce  seminar which in  1945 had
attracted (if that  is  the word) only six students--five grim graduates and
one not quite normal sophomore.  In compensation I added a third lecture  in
Masterpieces  (now  including  Ulysses)  to  my  weekly  quota.  The   chief
innovation,  however,  lay  in  my bold presentation of knowledge. During my
first  years at  Quirn  I  had  accumulated two thousand  pages  of literary
comments typed out by my assistant (I nonce I  have not introduced him  yet:
Waldemar Exkul, a brilliant young Balt, incomparably  more learned  than  I;
dixi, Ex!).  These  I had  the  Photostat people multiply to  accommodate at
least three hundred students. At the end of every week each received a batch
of the forty pages that I had recited to them, with certain addenda,  in the
lecture hall.  The "certain  addenda" were a concession  to the Trustees who
reasonably  remarked  that  without this  catch  nobody would <157>  need to
attend my classes. The three hundred copies of  the two thousand typed pages
were  to  be  signed by  the readers  and returned  to me  before the  final
examination. There were flaws at first in the system (for example, only  153
incomplete sets, many unsigned,  were returned in 1948) but on the whole  it
worked, or should have worked.
     Another decision  I took was  to make myself more available to  faculty
members than  I  had  been before.  The red  needle  of  my  dial scale  now
quiver-stopped  at  a  very  conservative  figure, when,  stark naked,  arms
hanging like those of a clumsy troglodyte, I stood on the fatal platform and
with the help of my new housemaid, an enchanting black girl with an Egyptian
profile, managed to make out what lay midway in the  blur between my reading
glasses  and  my long-distance ones:  a  great  triumph, which I  marked  by
acquiring several new "costumes," as my Dr. Olga Repnin says in the novel of
that  name--"I don't  know (all  `o's' as  in  `don'  and  `anon')  why your
horseband  wears such not  modern costumes." I  visited quite frequently the
Pub,  a college tavern, where I tried  to mix  with white-shoed young males,
but somehow ended  up by getting involved with  professional barmaids. And I
entered in my pocket diary the addresses of some twenty fellow professors.
     Most treasured  among my new friends was a  frail-looking, sad-looking,
somewhat monkey-faced man  with  a  shock of black  hair,  gray-streaked  at
fifty-five,  the enchantingly talented  poet  Audace whose paternal ancestor
was  the eloquent  and ill-fated Girondist of that name ("Bourreau, fais ton
devoir envers la Libertè!") but who did not know a word  of French and spoke
American  with a  flat  Midwestern accent. Another  interesting  glimpse  of
descent  was provided by Louise Adamson, the young wife of  our  Chairman of
English: her grandmother, Sybil Lanier,  had  won the  Women's National Golf
Championship in 1896 at Philadelphia! <158>
     Gèrard Adamson's literary reputation  was immensely superior to that of
the immensely more  important, bitter, and  modest Audace. Gerry  was a  big
flabby hulk of a man who must have been nearing  sixty when after a life  of
aesthetic asceticism  he  surprised his special  coterie  by  marrying  that
porcelain-pretty and very fast girl. His famous essays--on Donne, on Villon,
on Eliot--his philosophic  poetry, his  recent  Laic Litanies  and so  forth
meant nothing to me,  but  he was  an appealing  old drunk, whose  humor and
erudition could  break  the resistance  of  the most unsociable outsider.  I
caught  myself enjoying the frequent parties  at which good old Noteboke and
his sister Phoneme,  the delightful Kings, the  Adamsons, my favorite  poet,
and a dozen other people did all they could to entertain and comfort me.
     Louise, who had an inquisitive aunt at Honeywell, kept me  informed, at
tactful intervals,  of Bel's well-being. One  spring  day in  1949 or 1950 I
happened to  stop at  the Plaza Liquor  Store  in Rosedale  after a business
meeting with Horace Peppermill and was about to back out of the parking  lot
when I saw Annette bending over  a baby carriage in front of a grocery store
at the other end  of the shopping area. Something  about her inclined  neck,
her melancholy concentration, the  ghost of a smile directed at the child in
the stroller,  sent such a  pang of pity  through my nervous  system  that I
could not  resist accosting her.  She  turned  toward me  and even before  I
uttered some wild words--of regret, of despair, of tenderness--there she was
shaking her head,  forbidding  me  to  come  near.  "Nikogda," she murmured,
"never," and  I could not  bear to decipher the expression on her pale drawn
face. A woman came out of  the shop and thanked  her for  tending the little
stranger--a pale  and  thin  infant,  looking  almost as ill as  Annette.  I
hurried back to the parking lot, scolding  myself for not  realizing at once
that Bel must be a girl of seven  or eight by <159> this time.  Her mother's
moist starry  stare kept pursuing me for several nights; I even felt too ill
to attend an Easter party at one of the friendly Quirn houses.
     During this  or some other  period of  despondency, I heard one day the
hall bell tinkle, and my Negro maid, little Nefertitty  as I had dubbed her,
hasten to open the  front door. Slipping out of bed I pressed my  bare flesh
to  the  cool  window ledge  but was not in time to glimpse the  entrant  or
entrants, no matter how  far I  leant  out into a  noisy spring downpour.  A
freshness of  flowers, clusters and  clouds of flowers, reminded me  of some
other time,  some other casement.  I made  out part of the Adamsons'  glossy
black car beyond the garden gate. Both? She alone? Solus rex? Both, alas--to
judge  by  the voices  reaching me  from the  hallway through my transparent
house. Old Gerry, who disliked  unnecessary stairs and  had a morbid fear of
contagion, remained in the living room. Now his  wife's steps and voice were
coming  up.  We had kissed  for the  first  time a few  days before,  in the
Notebokes' kitchen--rummaging  for ice, finding fire.  I  had good reason to
hope that the intermission before the obligatory scene would be brief.
     She entered, set  down two bottles of port for the  invalid, and pulled
off her  wet sweater over her tumbled chestnut-brown, violet-brown curls and
naked clavicles. Artistically, strictly artistically, I daresay she was  the
best-looking of my three major loves. She had upward-directed thin eyebrows,
sapphire eyes registering (and that's the right word) constant amazement  at
earth's  paradise  (the  only   one  she  would  ever  know,   I'm  afraid),
pink-flushed cheekbones,  a rosebud mouth, and a  lovely concave abdomen. In
less time than it took her husband, a quick reader, to skim down two columns
of print,  we had "attired" him. I put on blue slacks  and a  pink shirt and
followed her downstairs.
     Her  husband sat in  a deep armchair,  reading a  London  <160>  weekly
bought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take  off his horrible
black raincoat--a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of a
stagecoach driver  in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidable
spectacles. He  cleared his throat with a  characteristic rumble. His purple
jowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:

     GERRY Do you ever  see this paper, Vadim (accenting "Vadim" incorrectly
on the first syllable)? Mister  (naming a particularly lively criticule) has
demolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha;  it had come out only
now in the British edition).
     VADIM May I give you a drink? We'll toast him and roast him.
     GERRY Yet he's right, you know. It is  your worst book. Chute complõte,
says the man. Knows French, too.
     LOUISE No drinks. We've  got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair.
Try again. Take your glasses  and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I'll bring
you those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school.

     How different it all was, I mused,  from  the refined adulteries in the
castles  of  my  early youth! Where  was the  romantic  thrill of  a  glance
exchanged  with one's new mistress in the presence of a morose colossus--the
Jealous Husband? Why did  the recollection  of the recent  embrace not blend
any longer as  it used to do with the  certainty  of the next one, forming a
sudden rose  in  an empty flute of  crystal, a sudden rainbow  on the  white
wallpaper? What did Emma see a  fashionable woman  drop into that man's silk
hat? Write legibly. <161>

2

     The mad scholar in Esmeralda and  Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and
Shakespeare  together  by  having  Primavera end as  Ophelia  with  all  her
flowers.  The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks  that tornadoes and
floods  are  really  sensational  only  in North America. On  May 17,  1953,
several  papers  printed a photograph of a family, complete  with  birdcage,
phonograph, and other  valuable possessions, riding it  out  on the  roof of
their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture
of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man,
a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver's seat,
stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality  in  the Weather Bureau
was  accused  of   criminally   delayed   forecasts.   A  group  of  fifteen
schoolchildren who  had been  taken to  see a collection of  stuffed animals
donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor's  widow, to the Rosedale  Museum,
were safe in the sudden  darkness of that  sturdy building when the  twister
struck. But  the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away,  and the drowned
bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved.
     Mr. Peppermill, whose  natural faculties were  no match for  his  legal
acumen,  warned me  that  if  I  desired to  relinquish  the  child  to  her
grandmother in France, certain  <162> formalities would  have to be complied
with. I  observed quietly  that Mrs. Blagovo was  a half-witted cripple  and
that my daughter, whom her schoolteacher harbored, should be brought by that
person  to my  house AT ONCE. He said he  would fetch her himself early next
week.
     After weighing and  reweighing  every paragraph  of  the  house,  every
parenthesis of its furniture, I decided to  lodge her  in the former bedroom
of the late Landover's companion  whom he called  his nurse  or his  fiancèe
depending  on his  mood of the moment.  This  was  a lovely chamber, east of
mine, with lilac butterflies  enlivening  its wallpaper  and  a  large, low,
flouncy bed.  I  peopled its white  bookshelf with Keats, Yeats,  Coleridge,
Blake, and  four  Russian poets  (in the New Orthography). Although  I  told
myself with a  sigh that she would,  no doubt,  prefer  "comics" to my  dear
bespangled  mimes and  their wands of painted  lath, I felt compelled  in my
choice  by what  is termed the "ornamental instinct"  among  ornithologists.
Moreover, knowing well  how essential  a pure strong  light is to reading in
bed, I asked Mrs. O'Leary,  my new charwoman and cook (borrowed from  Louise
Adamson  who  had left with  her husband  for a long sojourn in  England) to
screw  a  couple  of  hundred-watt  bulbs  into a  tall  bedside  lamp.  Two
dictionaries, a writing pad, a little alarm clock, and a Junior Manicure Set
(suggested  by  Mrs.  Noteboke,  who had  a twelve-year-old  daughter)  were
attractively placed  on a spacious and  stable bedtable. All  this was but a
rough, naturally. The fair copy would come in due time.
     Landover's nurse or fiancèe could rush to his assistance either along a
short passage or through the bathroom between the two bedrooms: Landover had
been a large man and  his long  deep tub  was  a soaker's delight.  Another,
narrower bathroom followed Bel's bedroom easterly--and  here I really missed
my  dainty  Louise when racking  my  brain for the  correct  epithet between
well-scrubbed and perfumed. Mrs.  Noteboke could not help  me: her daughter,
<163>  who  used the  messy  parental  facilities,  had  no  time for  silly
deodorants and  loathed "foam."  Wise old  Mrs. O'Leary, on the  other hand,
held  before her mind's  eye Mrs. Adamson's creams and crystals in a Flemish
artist's  detail  and made me long  for  her  employer's  speedy  return  by
conjuring up  that picture, which she then proceeded  to  simplify,  but not
vulgarize, while  retaining  such major items as  the huge sponge, the jumbo
cake of lavender soap, and a delicious toothpaste.
     Walking still  farther  sunriseward, we  reach the  corner  guest  room
(above the round dining  room at the  east  end  of the first floor); this I
transformed  with the  help of  a  handyman, Mrs. O'Leary's cousin,  into an
efficiently furnished studio. It contained, when I finished with it, a couch
with boxy  pillows, an oak desk with a revolving chair, a  steel  cabinet, a
bookcase,  Klingsor's Illustrated Encyclopedia in  twenty  volumes, crayons,
writing tablets, state  maps, and  (to cite the  School  Buyer's  Guide  for
1952-1953) "a globe ball that  lifts out of a cradle so that every child can
hold the world in his or her lap."
     Was that all? No. I found for  the  bedroom a framed  photograph of her
mother, Paris, 1934, and for the studio a reproduction in color of Levitan's
Clouds  above a  Blue River (the Volga,  not far  from  my Marevo),  painted
around 1890.
     Peppermill was to bring her on May 21,  around four P.M. I had to  fill
somehow  the abyss  of the afternoon. Angelic Ex had already read and marked
the entire batch of exams, but he thought I  might want to see  some of  the
works he had reluctantly failed. He had dropped in  some time on the eve and
had left them  downstairs on  the round table in  the round room next to the
hallway at  the west end of the  house. My poor hands ached and  trembled so
dreadfully  that  I could hardly  leaf through those poor cahiers. The round
window  gave on the driveway. It was <164>  a warm  gray day. Sir!  I need a
passing mark  desperately. Ulysses  was  written in  Zurich  and  Greece and
therefore  consists  of  too many foreign words. One of  the  characters  in
Tolstoy's Death  of Ivan  is the notorious  actress  Sarah  Bernard. Stern's
style  is  very  sentimental  and  illiterative.  A  car  door  banged.  Mr.
Peppermill  came with a duffel bag in the wake of a tall fair-haired girl in
blue  jeans carrying, and  slowing  down,  to change  from  hand to hand, an
unwieldy valise.
     Annette's moody  mouth and eyes.  Graceful  but plain.  Fortified by  a
serenacin tablet, I received my daughter and lawyer with the neutral dignity
for  which effusive  Russians  in Paris  used  to  detest  me  so  heartily.
Peppermill accepted a drop of  brandy. Bel had a glass of peach juice and  a
brown biscuit. I indicated to  Bel--who was displaying her palms in a polite
Russian allusion--the dining-room  toilet,  an  old-fashioned  touch on  the
architect's part.  Horace Peppermill  handed me a letter  from Bel's teacher
Miss  Emily  Ward. Fabulous Intelligence  Quotient  of 180.  Menses  already
established. Strange, marvelous child. One  does not quite know  whether  to
curb  or encourage such precocious brilliance.  I accompanied Horace halfway
back to his  car,  fighting  off, successfully, the disgraceful urge to tell
him how staggered I was by the bill his office had recently sent me.
     "Let me now show you your apartàmenty. You speak Russian, don't you?"
     "I certainly do, but I can't write it. I also know a little French."
     She  and her mother (whom she mentioned  as casually as if Annette were
in the next room  copying something for  me  on  a soundless typewriter) had
spent most of last  summer at  Carnavaux with babushka. I would like to have
learned what  room  exactly Bel had  occupied  in the  villa,  but an  oddly
obtrusive,  though irrelevant-looking,  recollection <165> somehow prevented
me from asking: shortly before her death Iris had dreamed one night that she
had given birth to a fat  boy  with dusky red cheeks and almond eyes and the
blue shadow of mutton chops: "A horrible Omarus K."
     Oh  yes, said Bel, she had loved it. Especially  the path down, down to
the sea and the aroma of rosemary (chudnyy zapakh rozmarina). I was tortured
and  charmed  by  her  "shadowless"  èmigrè  Russian,  untainted, God  bless
Annette, by the Langley woman's fruity Sovietisms.
     Did Bel recognize me? She looked me over with serious gray eyes.
     "I recognize your hands and your hair."
     "On se tutoie in Russian henceforward. All right. Let's go upstairs."
     She  approved of  the  studio: "A  schoolroom in a picture  book."  She
opened  the medicine chest in her bathroom. "Empty--but I know what I'll put
there."  The bedroom  "enchanted"  her. Ocharovatel'no! (Annette's  favorite
praise word.) She  criticized, though,  the  bedside  bookshelf:  "What,  no
Byron? No Browning? Ah, Coleridge!  The  little golden sea snakes. Miss Ward
gave me an anthology for  Russian Easter:  I can recite your last duchess--I
mean `My Last Duchess' "
     I caught  my breath with a moan. I kissed her. I wept. I sat,  shaking,
on  a fragile chair that creaked in response  to my hunched-up paroxysm. Bel
stood  looking away, looking  up  at a prismatic reflection on  the ceiling,
looking down at her  luggage, which Mrs. O'Leary, a dumpy but doughty woman,
had already brought up.
     I  apologized  for  my  tears.  Bel  inquired  in  a  socially  perfect
let's-change-the-subject manner if there was  a television set in the house.
I  said  we'd get one tomorrow. I would  leave  her  now to her own devices.
Dinner in half-an-hour. She had noticed, she said, that a picture she'd like
<166>  to see was being  shown in town. After dinner we drove to The  Strand
Theater.
     Says a scribble in my diary: Does not much care for boiled chicken. The
Black Widow. With  Gene, Ginger, and George. Have passed  the "illiterative"
sentimentalist and all the rest. <167>

3

     If  Bel  is  alive today, she is thirty-two--exactly  your  age  at the
moment of writing (February 15, 1974). The last time I saw her, in 1959, she
was not quite seventeen; and  between eleven and  a half and seventeen and a
half she has changed very slightly in the medium of memory, where blood does
not  course  through  immobile  time as fast  as it does in  the  perceptual
present.  Especially  unaffected  by  linear  growth  is  my  vision  of her
pertaining to  1953-1955,  the three  years in  which she  was  totally  and
uniquely mine: I see it today as a composite portrait of rapture, in which a
mountain in Colorado, my translating Tamara into  English, Bel's high school
accomplishments, and an Oregon forest  intergrade  in patterns of transposed
time and twisted space that defy chronography and charting.
     One  change, one  gradational trend I must note,  however. This was  my
growing awareness of her  beauty.  Scarcely a month after her  arrival I was
already  at a loss to understand how she could  have struck  me  as "plain."
Another month elapsed and  the  elfin  line  of  her nose  and  upper lip in
profile came as an "expected revelation"--to use a formula I have applied to
certain prosodic miracles in Blake and Blok. Because of the contrast between
her pale-gray iris and very  black lashes, her eyes seemed rimmed <168> with
kohl. Her hollowed cheek and long neck were pure Annette, but her fair hair,
which she wore rather short, gave off a richer sheen as if the tawny strands
were mixed with  gold-olive ones  in  thick  straight  stripes  of alternate
shades. All this  is easily described  and  this also goes for  the  regular
striation of  bright bloom  along the outside of forearm and leg, which,  in
fact, smacks  of self-plagiarism, for  I had given it  both  to  Tamara  and
Esmeralda, not counting several incidental lassies in my  short stories (see
for example  page 537 of  the Exile  from Mayda collection, Goodminton,  New
York, 1947). The general type and bone structure  of her pubescent  radiance
cannot  be treated,  however,  with  a crack player's brio  and chalk-biting
serve.  I  am  reduced--a sad  confession!--to something  I have  also  used
before,  and  even  in this  book--the well-known  method  of  degrading one
species  of  art  by  appealing  to  another.   I  am  thinking  of  Serov's
Five-petaled Lilac, oil, which depicts  a tawny-haired girl of twelve or  so
sitting at a sun-flecked table and manipulating  a raceme of lilac in search
of that lucky token. The girl is no other than Ada Bredow, a first cousin of
mine whom  I flirted with disgracefully that  very  summer, the sun of which
ocellates the garden table and her bare arms. What hack reviewers of fiction
call "human interest" will now overwhelm my reader, the gentle tourist, when
he  visits  the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, where I have seen with my own
rheumy eyes, on a visit to Sovietland  a few years  ago,  that picture which
belonged  to Ada's grandmother before  being handed over to the People by  a
dedicated  purloiner. I believe  that this enchanting  little girl  was  the
model of my partner in a recurrent dream of mine with a stretch of parquetry
between two beds in  a makeshift  demonic  guest  room. Bel's resemblance to
her--same cheekbones, same chin, same knobby wrists, same tender flower--can
be only alluded to, not actually  listed.  But enough  of this.  I have been
trying to do something very difficult and I will tear <169> it up if you say
I  have  succeeded too well,  because I  do  not want,  and never wanted, to
succeed, in this  dismal business of Isabel  Lee--though at the  same time I
was intolerably happy.
     When asked--at  last!--had  she loved  her mother (for  I could not get
over Bel's apparent indifference  to  Annette's terrible death)  she thought
for such  a long  time  that  I decided  she had forgotten  my question, but
finally (like a chessplayer  resigning  after an  abyss  of meditation), she
shook her head. What about Nelly Langley? This she answered at once: Langley
was  mean and cruel and  hated her, and  only last year whipped her; she had
welts all over (uncovering for display her right thigh, which now, at least,
was impeccably white and smooth).
     The education  she got in Quirn's best private school for Young  Ladies
(you, her coeval, were there for a few weeks, in the same class, but you and
she  somehow missed making  friends with each other) was supplemented by the
two  summers we spent roaming all over  the Western states.  What  memories,
what  lovely  smells,  what  mirages, near-mirages,  substantiated  mirages,
accumulated along Highway 138--Sterling, Fort  Morgan (El.  4325),  Greeley,
well-named Loveland--as we approached the paradise part of Colorado!
     From  Lupine Lodge, Estes Park, where  we spent  a whole  month, a path
margined with  blue  flowers led  through aspen groves  to what  Bel  drolly
called  The Foot of the Face. There was  also the Thumb  of the Face, at its
southern corner. I have a large  glossy  photograph taken by William Garrell
who was the  first, I think,  to reach  The  Thumb,  in 1940 or thereabouts,
showing  the  East  Face of  Longs Peak  with the checkered lines of  ascent
superimposed in a loopy  design upon it. On the back of this picture--and as
immortal  in its own little  right as the  picture's subject--a poem by Bel,
neatly copied in violet ink,  is <170> dedicated to  Addie Alexander, "First
woman on Peak, eighty years ago." It commemorates our own modest hikes:

     Longs' Peacock Lake:
     the Hut and its Old Marmot;
     Boulder field and its Black Butterfly;
     And the intelligent trail.

     She  had  composed it while  we were sharing a  picnic lunch, somewhere
between those great rocks and the  beginning of The Cable, and after testing
the  result  mentally a number of  times,  in frowning silence, she  finally
scribbled it on a paper napkin which she handed to me with my pencil.
     I told  her how wonderful  and  artistic it  was--particularly the last
line.  She asked: what's "artistic"? I said: "Your  poem, you, your way with
words."
     In  the course of  that ramble,  or  perhaps on  a latter occasion, but
certainly in  the same region, a  sudden storm swept  upon  the glory of the
July day. Our  shirts,  shorts, and loafers seemed to  dwindle to nothing in
the icy mist.  A  first hailstone hit a tin can, another  my  bald  spot. We
sought  refuge in a  cavity under a jutting  rock.  Thunderstorms to  me are
agony.  Their  evil pressure destroys me;  their lightning forks through  my
brain and breast.  Bel knew this; huddling against me (for my comfort rather
than  hers!), she kept giving me a  quick little kiss on the temple at every
bang of thunder, as  if  to say:  That one's  over, you're still safe. I now
felt myself longing for  those  crashes  never  to cease; but presently they
turned to halfhearted rumbles,  and the sun found emeralds in a patch of wet
turf. She could  not stop shivering,  though,  and I had to thrust my  hands
under her skirt and  rub  her thin body, till it  glowed, so  as to ward off
"pneumonia" which she said, laughing jerkily, was a "new," was a "moon," was
<171> a "new moon" and a "moan," a "new moan," thank you.
     There  is  a hollow of dimness again in the sequence, but it  must have
been soon after that, in  the same  motor court, or in the next, on the  way
home, that she slipped into  my room at dawn,  and sat  down on my bed--move
your legs--in her pyjama top to read me another poem:

     In the dark basement, I stroked
     the silky head of a wolf.
     When the light returned
     and all cried: "Ah!,"
     it turned out to be only
     Mèdor, a dead dog.

     I again praised her talent, and kissed her  more warmly, perhaps,  than
the poem deserved; for, actually, I found it rather obscure, but did not say
so, and presently she yawned and fell asleep on my bed, a practice I usually
did  not  tolerate. Today, however, on rereading  those strange lines, I see
through their starry crystal  the tremendous commentary I could  write about
them, with galaxies of reference marks and footnotes like the reflections of
brightly lit bridges spanning black water. But my  daughter's soul  is hers,
and my soul is mine, and may Hamlet Godman rot in peace. <172>

4

     As late as the start of the 1954-1955 school year, with Bel nearing her
thirteenth birthday,  I  was still deliriously happy,  still  seeing nothing
wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous,  in  the  relationship
between my daughter and me. Save  for a few  insignificant lapses--a few hot
drops  of overflowing tenderness, a  gasp masked by a cough and that sort of
stuff--my relations with  her remained essentially  innocent.  But  whatever
qualities I might have possessed  as a Professor of Literature, nothing  but
incompetence and  a reckless laxity of  discipline can  I  see  today in the
rearview reflection of that sweet wild past.
     Others forestalled me in perspicacity. My first  critic  happened to be
Mrs.  Noteboke, a stout  dark lady in suffragettish  tweeds, who  instead of
keeping her  Marion,  a depraved and  vulgar  nymphet,  from  snooping  on a
schoolmate's home life, lectured me on  the upbringing of  Bel  and strongly
advised my hiring an experienced, preferably German, governess to look after
her day  and night.  My second critic--a much more tactful and understanding
one--was my secretary, Myrna Soloway, who complained that she could not keep
track of the literary magazines and clippings  in my mail--because  of their
being intercepted by an unscrupulous  and avid little  reader--and who <173>
gently added that Quirn High School,  the last refuge of common  sense in my
incredible plight, was astounded  by Bel's lack of manners almost as much as
by her intelligence and  familiarity with  "Proust  and Prèvost." I spoke to
Miss  Lowe,  the  rather  pretty  petite  headmistress,  and  she  mentioned
"boarding facilities," which  sounded like some kind of wooden jail, and the
even more dismal ("with all those rippling birdcalls and wickering trills in
the woods,  Miss Lowe--in  the woods"!) "summer instruction" to replace  the
"eccentricities  of  an artist's (`A great artist's, Professor') household."
She  pointed  out to  the giggling and  apprehensive  artist  that  a  young
daughter should be treated as a potential  component of our  society and not
as a fancy  pet.  Throughout that talk I could not  shake off the feeling of
its  all  being a nightmare that  I  had had  or  would  have in  some other
existence, some other bound sequence of numbered dreams.
     An  atmosphere of vague distress  was  gathering (to  speak  in  verbal
clichès about a  clichè  situation)  around my metaphorical head, when there
occurred  to me  a  simple and  brilliant  solution of  all my  problems and
troubles.
     The  tall looking  glass  before  which many of  Landover's houris  had
onduled in  their brief brown glory now served me  to behold the image  of a
lion-hued fifty-five-year-old would-be athlete performing waist-slimming and
chest-expanding exercises by means of an "Elmago"  ("Combines the mechanical
know-how of the West with the magic of Mithra"). It was a good image. An old
telegram (found unopened in an issue of Artisan, a literary  review, filched
by Bel from the  hallway table),  was addressed  to me  by a Sunday paper in
London, asking  me to comment on  the rumors--which I  had already heard--to
the  effect that I was  the main candidate in the abstract scramble for what
our American kid brothers called "the most prestigious  prize in the world."
This, too,  might  impress the rather success-minded  person I had in  view.
<174> Finally, I knew that  in  the  vacational months of 1955 a  series  of
strokes had  killed  off in London  poor old Gerry Adamson, a great guy, and
that Louise was free.  Too free in fact. An  urgent  letter I now wrote her,
summoning her back to  Quirn at once, for a serious  Discussion  of a matter
concerning both her and me, reached her only after describing a comic circle
via four fashionable  spots on the Continent. I never saw the wire  she said
she sent me from New York on October 1.
     On October 2, an abnormally warm day, the  first of a week-long series,
Mrs.  King telephoned in the afternoon  to  invite me  with rather enigmatic
little  laughs  to  an "impromptu soirèe, in  a few hours,  say at nine P.M.
after you  have tucked in your  adorable daughter. I agreed to come  because
Mrs. King was an especially nice soul, the kindest on the campus.
     I had a black  headache and decided that a  two-mile  walk  in the cool
clear night would do me good. My dealings with space and spatial transitions
are  so  diabolically complicated  that  I do  not  recall whether I  really
walked, or  drove, or limited  myself to pacing up and down the open gallery
running along the front side of our second floor, or what.
     The  first person  to whom  my  hostess  introduced  me--with a subdued
fanfare  of social clarion--was  the "English" cousin  with  whom Louise had
been staying in Devonshire, Lady Morgain, "daughter of our former Ambassador
and widow  of  the  Oxford  medievalist"--shadowy figures  on a briefly  lit
screen.  She  was a  rather  deaf and decidedly  dotty witch in  her  middle
fifties,  comically  coiffured and dowdily  dressed, and  she and  her belly
advanced  upon  me with such energetic eagerness that I scarcely had time to
sidestep  the well-meant attack before getting wedged "between the books and
the bottles" as poor Gerry used to say in reference to academic cocktails. I
passed  into a different, far more stylish world as I bent to kiss  Louise's
<175> expertly swanned cool little hand. My dear old Audace welcomed me with
the  kind of  Latin  accolade that he  had especially developed to  mark the
highest degree of spiritual kinship and mutual esteem. John King, whom I had
seen on the eve in a college corridor, greeted me with raised arms as if the
fifty  hours elapsed since our  last  chat had been magically  blown-up into
half a century. We were only six  people in a spacious parlor,  not counting
two  painted girl-children in Tyrolean dress, whose  presence, identity, and
very  existence have remained  to  this  day  a  familiar mystery--familiar,
because such zigzag cracks  in the  plaster  are  typical of the prisons  or
palaces into which recrudescent derangement merrily leads me whenever I have
prepared to make, as  I was to  do now, a difficult, climactic  announcement
that demanded absolute clarity of concentration. So, as I just said, we were
only six animal people  in  that room (and two little phantoms), but through
the translucid unpleasant walls I could make out--without looking!--rows and
tiers  of dim spectators, with the  sense  of  a  sign  in my brain  meaning
"standing room only" in the language of madness.
     We   were  now  sitting  at   a  round  clockfaced  table  (practically
undistinguishable from the  one  in the  Opal Room of my  house, west of the
albino Stein), Louise at twelve o'clock, Professor King at two, Mrs. Morgain
at four, Mrs.  King  in green silk  at eight, Audace  at ten, and I  at six,
presumably,  or  a  minute past, because Louise was not  quite  opposite, or
maybe  she  had  pushed  her chair  a  sixty-second  space closer to  Audace
although she  had sworn to me on the  Social  Register as well as on a Who's
Who  that  he  had  never made that pass  at her  somehow  suggested  by his
magnificent little poem in the Artisan.

     Speaking of, ah, yesternights,
     I had you, dear, within earshot <176>
     of that party downstairs,
     on the broad bed of my host
     piled with the coats of your guests,
     old macks, mock minks,
     one striped scarf (mine),
     a former flame's furs
     (more rabbit than flipperling),
     yea, a mountain of winters,
     like that upon which flunkeys sprawl
     in the vestibule of the Opera,
     Canto One of Onegin,
     where under the chandeliers
     of a full house, you, dear,
     should have been the dancer
     flying, like fluff, in a decor
     of poplars and fountains.

     I  started to speak  in the  high, clear, insolent  voice (taught me by
Ivor on  the beach of Cannice) by which I instilled the fear of Phoebus when
inaugurating a recalcitrant seminar in my first years of teaching  at Quirn:
"What I plan to discuss is the curious case of a close friend of mine whom I
shall call--"
     Mrs.  Morgain  set  down  her glass  of  whisky  and  leaned toward  me
confidentially: "You know I met little Iris  Black in London, around 1919, I
guess. Her father was a business friend of my father,  the Ambassador. I was
a  starry-eyed  American  gal.  She   was  a  fantastic  beauty   and   most
sophisticated. I remember how  thrilled  I was later to  learn that she  had
gone and married a Russian Prince!"
     "Fay,"  cried Louise from twelve to four: "Fay! His Highness  is making
his throne speech."
     Everyone laughed, and  the two  bare-thighed Tyrolean children  chasing
each  other  around the table bounced  across my knees and were  gone again.
<177>
     "I shall  call this close friend of mine,  whose case we are  about  to
examine, Mr. Twidower, a name with certain connotations, as those of you who
remember the title story in my Exile from Mayda will note."
     (Three people, the Kings and Audace, raised three hands, looking at one
another in shared smugness.)
     "This person, who is in the mighty middle of life, thinks of marrying a
third  time. He is deeply in  love with a  young woman. Before proposing  to
her, however, honesty demands that he confess he is suffering from a certain
ailment. I  wish they would stop  jolting my chair  every time  they run by.
`Ailment' is  perhaps  too strong  a  term. Let's put it this way: there are
certain flaws,  he says, in the mechanism  of his mind.  The one he told  me
about is harmless in itself but very distressing and  unusual, and may be  a
symptom of  some imminent,  more serious  disorder. So here goes. When  this
person is lying  in bed and imagining a familiar stretch of street, say, the
right-hand sidewalk from the Library to, say--"
     "The Liquor Store," put in King, a relentless wag.
     "All  right,  Recht's  Liquor  Store.  It is about  three hundred yards
away--"
     I was again interrupted, this  time  by  Louise (whom,  in fact, I  was
solely  addressing).  She  turned to Audace  and informed him that she could
never visualize  any distance in yards  unless she  could  divide it  by the
length of a bed or a balcony.
     "Romantic," said Mrs. King. "Go on, Vadim."
     "Three hundred paces away along  the same side  as the College Library.
Now comes my friend's problem. He can walk in his mind there and back but he
can't perform in his mind the actual about-face that transforms `there' into
`back.' "
     "Must call Rome," muttered Louise to Mrs. King, and was about to  leave
her  seat, but I  implored her  to hear me <178> out. She  resigned herself,
warning me however that she could not understand a word of my peroration.
     "Repeat  that  bit about twisting  around  in your  mind,"  said  King.
"Nobody understood."
     "I did," said  Audace:  "We  suppose  the  Liquor Store  happens  to be
closed, and Mr. Twidower, who is a friend of  mine too, turns on his heel to
go  back  to the  Library. In  the reality of  life he  perfoms  this action
without a hitch or hiatus, as simply and unconsciously as we all do, even if
the artist's critical eye does see--A toi, Vadim."
     "Does see," I said, accepting the relay-race baton, "that, depending on
the speed  of one's revolution,  palings and awnings pass counterwise around
you either with  the heavy lurch of a merry-go-round or (saluting Audace) in
a single brisk flip like that of the end of  a striped scarf (Audace smiled,
acknowledging the Audacianism) that one flings over one's shoulder. But when
one lies immobile in bed  and rehearses or rather replays in one's  mind the
process of turning, in the  manner described, it is  not so much the pivotal
swing which is hard to perceive mentally--it is its result, the reversion of
vista, the transformation  of direction, that's what  one  vainly strives to
imagine. Instead  of  the liquor-store direction smoothly turning  into  the
opposite one, as it does in the simplicity of  waking life, poor Twidower is
baffled--"
     I had seen it  coming but had hoped that I would be allowed to complete
my sentence.  Not at  all. With the infinitely slow and silent movement of a
gray  tomcat, which  he resembled with his bristly whiskers and arched back,
King left his seat. He started  to tiptoe, with a glass in each hand, toward
the golden glow of a densely populated sideboard. With a  dramatic  slap  of
both hands against the edge of the table I caused Mrs. Morgain to  jump (she
had  either dozed  off  or  aged tremendously in the last  few minutes)  and
stopped old King in his  tracks; he silently <179>  turned like an automaton
(illustrating my story) and as silently  stole  back to  his seat  with  the
empty Arabesque glasses.
     "The mind, my friend's mind, is baffled, as  I was saying, by something
dreadfully strainful  and irksome  in the machinery  of the  change from one
position to another,  from east  to west  or west to east,  from one  damned
nymphet to another--I mean I'm  losing the thread  of my tale, the zipper of
thought has stuck, this is absurd--"
     Absurd  and  very  embarrassing.  The two  cold-thighed,  cheesy-necked
girleens  were now engaged in a quarrelsome game as  to who should sit on my
left knee, that side of my lap where the honey was, trying to  straddle Left
Knee, warbling in Tyrolese and pushing each other off, and  cousin Fay  kept
bending toward  me  and  saying with  a macabre accent:  "Elles vous  aiment
tant!" Finally I pinched and twisted the nearest buttock, and with  a squeal
they resumed their  running around, like  that eternal  little pleasure-park
train, brushing the brambles.
     I still  could  not  disentangle my thoughts,  but Audace  came  to  my
rescue.
     "To  conclude," he said  (and  an audible  ouf!  was emitted  by  cruel
Louise), "our patient's trouble concerns not a certain physical  act but the
imagining  of  its performance.  All  he  can  do  in his mind is  omit  the
swiveling part  altogether and shift from one  visual plane  to another with
the neutral flash of a slide  change in a magic lantern, whereupon  he finds
himself facing in a direction which has lost, or rather never contained, the
idea of `oppositeness.' Does anybody wish to comment?"
     After  the usual  pause  that follows  such offers, John King said: "My
advice to your Mr. Twitter  is to dismiss that nonsense  once for  all. It's
charming nonsense, it's colorful  nonsense, but it's also harmful  nonsense.
Yes, Jane?" <180>
     "My father," said  Mrs. King, "a  professor  of  botany,  had a  rather
endearing   quirk:   he  could   memorize  historical  dates  and  telephone
numbers--for example our number 9743--only insofar as they contained primes.
In our  number  he  remembered two figures, the  second  and last, a useless
combination; the other two were only black gaps, missing teeth."
     "Oh, that's good," cried Audace, genuinely delighted. I remarked it was
not at  all  the same  thing. My  friend's affliction  resulted  in  nausea,
dizziness, kegelkugel headache.
     "Well  yes, I understand,  but  my  father's  quirk  also had  its side
effects. It was not so much his inability to memorize, say, his house number
in  Boston, which was 68 and  which he  saw every day,  but the fact that he
could  do nothing about it; that nobody, but nobody could explain why all he
could make out  at the  far end  of his  brain was  not 68 but a  bottomless
hole."
     Our host  resumed his vanishing act with more deliberation than before.
Audace  lidded his empty glass with his palm. Though  swine-drunk,  I longed
for mine to be refilled,  but was bypassed.  The walls of the round room had
grown more or less opaque  again, God bless them,  and  the Dolomite Dollies
were no longer around.
     "In  the days when I longed to  be a ballerina," said Louise,  "and was
Blanc's little favorite,  I  always rehearsed exercises in my  mind lying in
bed, and had no  difficulty whatever in imagining swirls and whirls. It is a
matter of practice, Vadim. Why don't you just roll over in bed when you want
to see yourself walking back  to that Library? We must be  going  now,  Fay,
it's past midnight."
     Audace glanced  at his wristwatch, uttered  the exclamation which  Time
must be  sick  of  hearing,  and  thanked  me for a wonderful evening.  Lady
Morgain's  mouth mimicked the pink aperture  of an elephant's  trunk  as  it
mutely formed  the word "loo" to which  Mrs. King, fussily <181> swishing in
green, immediately  took  her. I remained  alone  at  the  round table, then
struggled to my feet, drained the rest of Louise's daiquiri,  and joined her
in the hallway.
     She had never  melted and shivered so nicely  in  my embrace as she did
now.
     "How many quadruped critics," she  asked  after a  tender  pause in the
dark  garden, "would  accuse  you  of  leg  pulling  if  you  published  the
description of those funny feelings. Three, ten, a herd?"
     "Those are not  really  `feelings' and they  are  not really `funny.' I
just wished you to be aware that if I go mad it will be in consequence of my
games with  the idea of space. `Rolling  over' would be cheating and besides
would not help."
     "I'll take you to an absolutely divine analyst."
     "That's all you can suggest?"
     "Why, yes."
     "Think, Louise."
     "Oh. I'm also going to marry you. Yes, of course, you idiot."
     She was gone  before I could reclasp her slender form. The  star-dusted
sky,  usually  a scary affair, now vaguely  amused me: it belonged, with the
autumn fadeur  of barely visible flowers, to the same  issue  of Woman's Own
World as Louise. I made water into a sizzle of asters and looked up at Bel's
window, square c2. Lit as brightly as e1, the Opal  Room. I  went back there
and noted with relief that kind hands had cleared  and tidied the table, the
round  table  with  the opalescent rim,  at  which I  had delivered  a  most
successful  introductory lecture.  I heard  Bel's voice calling  me from the
upper landing, and taking a  palmful of salted almonds  ascended the stairs.
<182>

5

     Rather  early  next morning,  a  Sunday, as  I  stood, shawled in terry
cloth, and watched four eggs rolling and bumping in their inferno,  somebody
entered the living room through a side door that I never bothered to lock.
     Louise! Louise dressed  up in hummingbird mauve for church. Louise in a
sloping beam of mellow October sun. Louise leaning against  the grand piano,
as if about to sing and looking around with a lyrical smile.
     I was the first to break our embrace.

     VADIM No, darling, no. My daughter may come down any minute. Sit down.
     LOUISE (examining an armchair and then settling  in it) Pity. You know,
I've  been  here  many  times before! In  fact I was laid  on  that grand at
eighteen.   Aldy  Landover   was  ugly,  unwashed,  brutal--and   absolutely
irresistible.
     VADIM Listen, Louise.  I  have always found your  free, frivolous style
very fetching. But  you will be moving into this house very soon now, and we
want a little more dignity, don't we? <183>
     LOUISE  We'll have  to change that blue carpet. It makes the Stein look
like an iceberg.  And there should be a riot of  flowers.  So many big vases
and not one  Strelitzia! There  was a whole shrub of lilac down  there in my
time.
     VADIM It's October, you know. Look, I hate  to bring this up, but isn't
your cousin waiting in the car? It would be very irregular.
     LOUISE Irregular, my foot. She won't be up before lunch. Ah, Scene Two.
     (Bel wearing only slippers and a cheap necklace of  iridescent glass--a
Riviera souvenir--comes down at the other end  of the living room beyond the
piano. She has already turned kitchenward showing the beau-page back  of her
head and delicate shoulder blades when she becomes aware of our presence and
retraces her steps.)
     BEL  (addressing me and  casually  squinting at my amazed  visitor)  Ya
bezumno golodnaya (I'm madly hungry).
     VADIM Louise dear, this is my daughter Bel. She's walking in her sleep,
really, hence the, uh, non-attire.
     LOUISE Hullo, Annabel. The non-attire is very becoming.
     BEL (correcting Louise) Isa.
     VADIM Isabel, this is  Louise Adamson, an old friend of mine, back from
Rome. I hope we'll be seeing a lot of her. <184>
     BEL How do you do (question-markless).
     VADIM Well,  run along, Bel, and put on something. Breakfast is  ready.
(To Louise) Would you like to have breakfast too?  Hard-boiled eggs? A  Coke
with a straw? (Pale violin climbing stairs)
     LOUISE Non, merci. I'm flabbergasted.
     VADIM  Yes, things have been  getting a  little out of hand, but you'll
see, she's a special  child, there's no other child like her. All we need is
your presence, your touch. She has inherited  the habit of  circulating in a
state of nature from me. An Edenic gene. Curious.
     LOUISE  Is  this a  two-people nudist  colony or  has Mrs. O'Leary also
joined?
     VADIM (laughing) No, no, she's not here on Sundays. Everything is fine,
I assure you. Bel is a docile angel. She--
     LOUISE  (rising to leave) There  she comes to be  fed (Bel descends the
stairs in a skimpy  pink robe). Drop in around tea time. Fay is being  taken
by Jane King to a lacrosse game in Rosedale. (Exits)
     BEL Who's she? Former student of yours? Drama? Elocution?
     VADIM (moving  fast) Bozhe moy! (good Lord!). The eggs! They must be as
hard as  jade.  Come along. I'll acquaint  you with the  situation,  as your
schoolmistress says. <185>

6

     The  grand  was  the  first to  go--it was carried  out  by  a  gang of
staggering  iceberg movers  and donated by me to Bel's  school, which  I had
reasons  to  pamper:  I  am not  an  easily  frightened  man  but when  I am
frightened I am very much frightened, and  at a second interview  that I had
had  with  the  schoolmistress,  my  impersonation  of an indignant  Charles
Dodgson  was  only saved  from failure by the sensational news  of my  being
about to  marry an irreproachable socialite,  the  widow  of our most  pious
philosopher. Louise, per contra,  regarded the throwing out of  a symbol  of
luxury as  a  personal affront and  a crime: a concert  piano of  that  kind
costs, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she was
not  quite  as  wealthy as,  no  doubt,  I  thought  she  was,  a  statement
representing that knot in Logic: the  double-hitch lie which does  not  make
one  truth.  I appeased her by gradually  overcrowding the Music Room  (if a
time series be  transformed  into sudden space)  with the modish gadgets she
loved,   singing  furniture,  miniature  TV   sets,  stereorphics,  portable
orchestras,  better and better  video  sets,  remote-control instruments for
turning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer. For Bel's
birthday  she  gave  her  a  Rain  Sound machine  to promote sleep;  and  to
celebrate my <186>  birthday she murdered a neurotic's night by getting me a
thousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock  with  twelve yellow  radii  on  its
black face instead of  figures, which  made  it look blind to me or feigning
blindness  like  some  repulsive  beggar  in  a  hideous  tropical town;  in
compensation that  terrible object possessed  a secret beam  that  projected
Arabic numerals (2:00,  2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of my
new  sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the  sacred, complete,  agonizingly
achieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I'd buy a gun and  shoot it in
the mug, if she did not send it back  to  the fiend who sold  it to her. She
replaced it by "something especially  made for people who like originality,"
namely  a   silver-plated  umbrella  stand  in   the   shape   of   a  giant
jackboot--there was  "something  about rain  strangely attractive to her" as
her "analyst" wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote to
man. She  was also fond of small expensive animals,  but  here I stood firm,
and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved.
     I did not expect much of  Louise the Intellectual. The only time  I saw
her shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when on
the first Sunday  of our marriage all the  newspapers carried photographs of
the two Albanian authors (a  bald-domed old  epicist and a  longhaired woman
compiler of childrens'  books)  who shared out between  them the Prestigious
Prize that she had told everybody I was sure to win  that year. On the other
hand  she  had  only  flipped  through  my novels  (she  was  to  read  more
attentively, though, A Kingdom by the Sea, which I began  slowly to pull out
of myself in 1957 like a long brain worm,  hoping it would not break), while
consuming  all  the  "serious"  bestsellers  discussed by  sister  consumers
belonging to  the Literary Group in which she liked to  assert  herself as a
writer's wife.
     I also discovered  that she  considered herself a connoisseur of Modern
Art. She  blazed with anger  at  me  when <187> I said  I  doubted  that the
appreciation of a green stripe across a blue background had  any  connection
with its definition in a glossy catalogue as "producing a virtually Oriental
atmosphere of spaceless  time  and timeless space." She accused me of trying
to wreck her entire  view of the world  by maintaining--in a facetious vein,
she hoped--that only a  Philistine misled by  the solemn imbeciles  paid  to
write about exhibitions could tolerate rags, rinds, and fouled paper rescued
from a  garbage can and discussed  in terms  "of warm splashes of color" and
"good-natured irony."  But perhaps most touching and terrible of all was her
honestly  believing that painters  painted  "what they felt";  that a rather
rough  and rumpled landscape  dashed off in the Provence might be gratefully
and proudly interpreted by art students if a psychiatrist explained  to them
that the  advancing thundercloud  represented  the artist's  clash  with his
father,  and  the  rolling  grainfield the early  death of his mother  in  a
shipwreck.
     I could not prevent her from purchasing  specimens of the pictorial art
in vogue but I judiciously steered some of the more repulsive objects  (such
as a collection of daubs produced by "naîve" convicts) into the round dining
room where they  swam blurrily in  the  candlelight when  we had  guests for
supper. Our routine meals generally took place in the snackbar niche between
the kitchen and the housemaid's quarters.  Into that niche Louise introduced
her new Cappuccino Espresso Maker, while at the  opposite end of the  house,
in the Opal Room, a heavily built, hedonically  appareled bed with a  padded
headboard was installed for me. The adjacent bathroom had a less comfortable
tub than my former  one, and  certain inconveniences attended my excursions,
two or  three nights  per week, to  the connubial chamber--via drawing room,
creaky  stairs,   upper  landing,  second-floor  corridor,   and   past  the
inscrutable chink-gleam of Bel's door; but I  treasured my privacy more than
I resented its drawbacks. I had the "Turkish toupet," as Louise <188> called
it,  to  forbid  her  to  communicate with me  by  thumping  on  her  floor.
Eventually I had an interior telephone put in my  room, to  be  used only in
certain emergencies: I was thinking of such nervous states as the feeling of
imminent collapse  that I  experienced  sometimes in my nocturnal bouts with
eschatological  obsessions;  and  there  was  always  the  half-full box  of
sleeping pills that only she could have filched.
     The decision to let Bel stay  in her apartment, with Louise as her only
neighbor, instead of refurnishing a spiral  of space by  allotting those two
east-end rooms to Louise--"perhaps I too need a studio?"--while transferring
Bel with bed and books to the Opal Room downstairs  and leaving me  upstairs
in my  former bedchamber, was  taken  by  me  firmly despite Louise's rather
bitchy counter-suggestions, such as removing the tools of my trade  from the
library in the basement  and banishing  Bel with  all her belongings to that
warm, dry, nice  and quiet lair. Though  I knew I  would never give  in, the
very process of shuffling rooms and accessories in my mind made me literally
ill.  On top of that, I felt, perhaps wrongly, that Louise was  enjoying the
hideous banality of a stepmother-versus-step-daughter situation.  I did  not
exactly  regret  marrying  her,   I  recognized  her  charm  and  functional
qualities, but  my adoration  for  Bel  was  the  sole  splendor,  the  sole
breathtaking mountain in the drab plain of my emotional life. Being  in many
ways an extraordinarily stupid  person, I had simply not  reckoned  with the
tangles and tensions of what was  meant to look like  a model household. The
moment I woke up--or at least the moment I saw  that getting up was the only
way  to  fool early-morning insomnia--I started wondering  what new  project
Louise would invent that day  with which to  harass my girl.  When two years
later this gray  old  dolt  and his volatile wife, after treating Bel  to  a
tedious Swiss  tour,  left  her  in  Larive,  between  Hex  and Trex,  at  a
"finishing" school (finishing  childhood,  <189> finishing the  innocence of
young imagination), it was our 1955-1957 period of life þ trois in the Quirn
house, and not my earlier mistakes, that I recalled with curses and sobs.
     She and her stepmother stopped speaking to each other  altogether; they
communicated,   if  need  be,  by  signs:  Louise,  for  instance,  pointing
dramatically at  the  ruthless clock and Bel tapping in the negative on  the
crystal  of her loyal little  wristwatch.  She  lost  all  affection for me,
twisting away  gently when  I  attempted a perfunctory  caress.  She adopted
again the wan absent expression that  had dimmed her features at her arrival
from  Rosedale. Camus replaced Keats. Her marks deteriorated. She no  longer
wrote poetry. One  day as Louise and I were  packing for our  next  trip  to
Europe  (London, Paris, Pisa, Stresa, and--in small print--Larive) I started
removing  some old  maps,  Colorado, Oregon, from the silk  "cheek" inside a
valise,  and  the moment  my secret  prompter uttered that  "shcheka" I came
across  a  poem of  hers written  long before  Louise's intrusion  into  her
trustful young life. I thought it might do Louise good to read it and handed
her the exercise-book page (all ragged along its torn root but  still  mine)
on which the following lines were penciled:

     At sixty, if I'll look back,
     jungles and hills will hide
     the notch, the source, the sand
     and a bird's footprints across it.
     I'll see nothing at all
     with my old eyes,
     yet I'll know it was there, the source.

     How come, then, that when I look back
     at twelve--one fifth of the stretch!--with
     visibility presumably better
     and no junk in between, <190>
     I can't even imagine
     that patch of wet sand
     and the walking bird
     and the gleam of my source?

     "Almost Poundian in purity," remarked Louise--which annoyed me, because
I thought Pound a fake. <191>

7

     Cháteau Vignedor, Bel's  charming boarding school in  Switzerland, on a
charming hill three hundred meters above  charming Larive  on the Rhòne, had
been recommended to Louise in the  autumn of 1957 by a Swiss lady in Quirn's
French  Department.  There were  two  other "finishing" schools  of the same
general type that might have done just as well, but Louise set her sights on
Vignedor because of a chance remark made not even by her Swiss friend but by
a chance girl in a chance travel agency  who summed up the qualities  of the
school in one phrase: "Many Tunisian princesses."
     It  offered  five  main  subjects  (French,  Psychology,  Savoir-vivre,
Couture, Cuisine), various sports (under  the direction of Christine Dupraz,
the  once famous skier), and a dozen additional  classes  on request  (which
would keep the plainest girl  there till she married), including  Ballet and
Bridge.  Another supplèment--especially  suitable for  orphans  or  unneeded
children--was  a summer trimester,  filling  up  the year's  last  remaining
segment with excursions and nature studies, to be spent by a few lucky girls
at the  home  of the  headmistress,  Madame de  Turm, an Alpine chalet  some
twelve hundred meters higher: "Its solitary light, twinkling in a black fold
of the mountains, can be <192> seen," said the prospectus in four languages,
"from  the Cháteau  on clear nights." There was also some kind of  camp  for
differently handicapped local children in  different years conducted  by our
medically inclined sports directress.
     1957, 1958, 1959. Sometimes, seldom,  hiding  from Louise, who objected
to Bel's twenty well-spaced monosyllables' costing us fifty dollars, I would
call her  from Quirn, but after a few such calls I received a curt note from
Mme. de Turm, asking  me  not  to  upset my daughter  by telephoning, and so
retreated  into  my dark  shell. Dark  shell, dark years of  my heart!  They
coincided oddly with  the composition of my most vigorous, most festive, and
commercially most successful novel, A Kingdom by the Sea.  Its  demands, the
fun and  the  fancy of it, its intricate imagery,  made up in  a way for the
absence of my beloved Bel.  It was also bound to reduce, though I was hardly
conscious   of  that,   my  correspondence  with  her  (well-meant,  chatty,
dreadfully  artificial letters  which she  seldom troubled to answer).  Even
more  startling,  of  course,  more  incomprehensible  to  me,  in  groaning
retrospect, is the effect my self-entertainment had on the number and length
of our  visits between  1957  and 1960 (when she  eloped  with a progressive
blond-bearded young American).  You were  appalled  to learn  the other day,
when we discussed the present notes, that I had seen "beloved Bel" only four
times in three summers and that only two of our  visits lasted  as long as a
couple of weeks. I must add, however, that  she resolutely declined to spend
her vacations at home. I  ought never, of course, have dumped her in Europe.
I should  have elected to sweat  it out  in my  hellish household, between a
childish woman and a somber child.
     The  work on my novel also impinged on my marital mores, making of me a
less passionate and more indulgent husband:  I let Louise go on suspiciously
frequent trips  to out-of-town unlisted eye specialists and neglected her in
the meantime  for  Rose Brown,  our cute  housemaid  who  took  <193>  three
soapshowers daily and thought frilly black panties "did something to guys."
     But  the  greatest havoc wrought  by my  work  was  its  effect  on  my
lectures. To it I sacrificed,  like  Gain, the flowers  of  my summers, and,
like  Abel, the sheep  of  the  campus.  Because  of it, the process  of  my
academic discarnation reached its ultimate stage. The last vestiges of human
interconnection were severed,  for I  not only vanished physically  from the
lecture hall but had my entire course taped so as to be funneled through the
College  Closed Circuit into  the rooms of headphoned students. Rumor had it
that I was ready to quit;  in fact, an anonymous punster wrote in  the Quirn
Quarterly,  Spring, 1959: "His  Temerity is said  to have asked for a  raise
before emeriting."
     In the summer  of that year  my third wife and  I saw  Bel for the last
time. Allan Garden (after whom the genus of the Cape Jasmin should have been
named, so great and  triumphant was  the flower in his buttonhole) had  just
been  united in  wedlock  to his youthful Virginia, after  several years  of
cloudless concubinage. They  were  to  live  to the combined age of  170  in
absolute bliss, yet one  grim fateful chapter remained to be constructed.  I
foiled over its first pages at the wrong desk, in the wrong hotel, above the
wrong lake, with a view of the wrong isoletta  at  my  left elbow. The  only
right  thing was  a pregnant-shaped  bottle of  Gattinara  before me. In the
middle  of a mangled sentence Louise  came to  join me from  Pisa,  where  I
gathered--with  amused  indifference--that she  had  recoupled with a former
lover. Playing  on  the  strings  of  her  meek  uneasiness  I  took her  to
Switzerland, which  she detested. An early  dinner with Bel was scheduled at
the  Larive Grand Hotel. She  arrived  with  that Christ-haired  youth, both
purple trousered. The maítre d'hòtel murmured something  over the menu to my
wife, and she rode up and brought down my oldest necktie for the  young lout
to put around his <194>  Adam's apple and scrawny neck. His grandmother  had
been related by marriage, so it  turned out, to a  third  cousin of Louise's
grandfather, the not  quite untarnished Boston banker. This took care of the
main course.  We  had coffee and  kirsch in the lounge,  and Charlie Everett
showed us pictures of  the  summer Camp for Blind Children (who were  spared
the sight of its drab locust  trees and  rings of  ashed refuse  amidst  the
riverside  burdocks) which he  and Bella (Bella!)  were supervising. He  was
twenty-five years  old. He had spent five years studying  Russian, and spoke
it  as  fluently, he  said, as  a  trained  seal.  A  sample  justified  the
comparison. He  was a dedicated  "revolutionary," and a hopeless nincompoop,
knowing nothing, crazy about jazz,  existentialism, Leninism,  pacifism, and
African  Art.  He thought  snappy  pamphlets  and  catalogues  so much  more
"meaningful"  than  fat old  books.  A  sweet,  stale,  and  unhealthy smell
emanated from the  poor  fellow. Throughout  the dinner  and coffee-drinking
ordeal  I never once--never once, reader!--looked  up  at  my Bel, but as we
were about to part (forever) I did  look at her, and she had new  twin lines
from nostrils to wicks, and she wore granny  glasses, and a middle part, and
had  lost  all  her  pubescent prettiness,  remnants  of  which  I had still
glimpsed during a  visit to  Larive a spring and winter ago. They  had to be
back at half-past-twenty, alas--not really "alas."
     "Come and see us at Quirn soon,  soon,  Dolly," I said, as we all stood
on the sidewalk with mountains outlined in solid black against an aquamarine
sky, and choughs jacking harshly, flying in flocks to roost, away, away.
     I  cannot explain the slip, but it angered Bel  more  than anything had
ever angered her at any time.
     "What is he saying?" she cried, looking in turn at Louise, at her beau,
and again at Louise. "What does he mean? Why does he call me `Dolly'? Who is
she for God's sake? Why, why (turning to me), why did you say that?"
     "Obmolvka,  prosti (lapse  of the  tongue,  sorry),"  I <195>  replied,
dying,  trying  to turn everything into a dream, a  dream about that hideous
last moment.
     They  walked briskly toward  their little Klop  car, he half-overtaking
her, already poking the air with his car key, on her left, on her right. The
aquamarine  sky was now  silent, darkish and empty, save  for a  star-shaped
star about which I wrote a Russian elegy ages ago, in another world.
     "What  a  charming,  good-natured,  civilized, sexy young fellow," said
Louise as we  stamped into  the lift.  "Are  you in the mood tonight?  Right
away, Vad?" <196>


PART FIVE
     <197> <198>
        1

     This penultimate  part of LATH, this  spirited episode  in my otherwise
somewhat passive existence, is horribly hard  to  set down, reminding me  of
the pensums, which the crudest of my French governesses used to inflict upon
me--some old  saw to be copied cent  fois (hiss  and spittle)--in punishment
for my adding my own marginal illustrations to those  in her Petit  Larousse
or for exploring under the schoolroom table the legs  of Lalage L., a little
cousin,  who  shared lessons with  me  that unforgettable  summer.  I  have,
indeed,  repeated  the  story  of   my  dash  to   Leningrad   in  the  late
nineteen-sixties  innumerable times in  my mind, to packed  audiences of  my
scribbling  or dreaming  selves--and yet I keep  doubting both the necessity
and the success of my dismal task. But you have argued the question, you are
tenderly adamant, yes,  and your decree is that I should relate my adventure
in order to lend a semblance of significance to my daughter's futile fate.
     In the  summer of 1960, Christine Dupraz,  who ran the  summer camp for
disabled children between  cliff and highway, just east  of Larive, informed
me that Charlie Everett, one of her assistants, had eloped with my Bel after
burning--in a grotesque ceremony that she visualized more <199> clearly than
I--his  passport  and  a  little  American flag (bought at a souvenir  stall
especially for that purpose)  "right in  the  middle of the Soviet  Consul's
back  garden";  whereupon  the   new  "Karl   Ivanovich   Vetrov"   and  the
eighteen-year-old Isabella,  a  ci-devant's daughter,  had gone through some
form of mock marriage in Berne and incontinently headed for Russia.
     The  same mail brought me an invitation  to discuss in New  York with a
famous  compõre  my sudden Number One position  on  the Bestselling  Authors
list,  inquiries from Japanese, Greek,  Turkish publishers,  and a  postcard
from Parma with  the  scrawl: "Bravo for Kingdom from Louise  and Victor." I
never learned who Victor was, by the way.
     Brushing  all my engagements aside,  I surrendered again--after quite a
few years of abstinence!--to the thrill of secret investigations. Spying had
been  my clystõre de  Tchèkhov even before I  married Iris Black whose later
passion for  working on an interminable  detective tale had  been sparked by
this  or that hint I  must  have dropped,  like  a  passing bird's  lustrous
feather,  in relation to my  experience in the vast  and  misty field of the
Service. In my little way I have  been of some help to my betters. The tree,
a blue-flowering  ash, whose  cortical wound I caught  the two  "diplomats,"
Tornikovski and Kalikakov,  using  for  their correspondence,  still stands,
hardly  scarred, on its  hilltop above  San  Bernardino. But for  structural
economy I have  omitted that entertaining strain from this story of love and
prose. Its existence, however, helped  me now  to  ward off--for a while, at
least--the madness and anguish of hopeless regret.
     It was child's play to find Karl's relatives in  the U.S.;  namely, two
gaunt aunts who disliked the boy even  more than they did one  another. Aunt
Number  One  assured  me  he  had never  left  Switzerland--they were  still
forwarding his Third Class mail to her in Boston. Aunt Number <200> Two, the
Philadelphia Fright, said he liked music and was vegetating in Vienna.
     I had overestimated my forces. A serious  relapse  hospitalized me  for
nearly a  whole year. The complete rest ordered by all  my doctors  was then
botched by my having to stand by my publisher in a  long legal fight against
obscenity charges leveled at my  novel  by  stuffy censors. I was again very
ill. I still feel the  pressure  of the hallucinations  that beset me, as my
search for Bel got  somehow mixed up with the controversy over my novel, and
I  saw  as clearly as one sees mountains or  ships, a  great  building,  all
windows lit,  trying to advance upon  me,  through this or that wall of  the
ward, seeking as it were a weak spot to push through and ram my bed.
     In the late  Sixties I learned that  Bel  was now definitely married to
Vetrov but that he had been sent  to some remote place of unspecified  work.
Then came a letter.
     It was forwarded to me by an old  respectable businessman (I shall call
him A.B.) with a note  saying that he was  "in textiles" though by education
"an  engineer"; that  he represented  "a  Soviet firm  in the U.S. and  vice
versa"; that the  letter  he  was enclosing  came from a lady working in his
Leningrad office (I shall call her Dora)  and concerned my daughter "whom he
did not have the honor to know but who, he believed, needed my  assistance."
He added  that he would  be flying back to Leningrad in a month's  time  and
would be glad if I "contacted him." The letter from Dora was in Russian.

     Much-respected Vadim Vadimovich!
     You probably receive many letters from people in our country who manage
to obtain your books--not an easy  enterprise! The  present letter, however,
is not from an admirer but simply from a friend of Isabella Vadimovna Vetrov
with <201> whom she has been sharing a room for more than a year now.
     She  is  ill, she has  no news  from her husband, and she is  without a
kopek.
     Please, get in  touch with  the bearer of this note. He is my employer,
and also a distant relative,  and has agreed to bring a few  lines from you,
Vadim Vadimovich, and a little money, if possible, but  the main thing,  the
main thing (glavnoe, glavnoe) is to come in person (lichno). Let him know if
you  can come and  if  yes, when  and  where we  could  meet  to discuss the
situation.  Everything  in life is  urgent (speshno, "pressing," "not to  be
postponed") but some things are dreadfully urgent and this is one of them.
     In order to convince you that she is here, with me, telling me to write
you  and unable to write herself, I am appending a little clue or token that
only  you  and she  can decode: "...and the  intelligent  trail  (i  umnitsa
tropka)."

     For a minute I  sat at  the  breakfast table--under  the  compassionate
stare  of Brown Rose--in  the attitude  of a cave dweller clasping his hands
around his  head at  the  crash of  rocks breaking above him (women make the
same  gesture when something  falls in the  next room). My  decision was, of
course,  instantly  taken.  I  perfunctorily  patted  Rose's young  buttocks
through her light skirt, and strode to the telephone.
     A few hours later I was dining with A.B. in New York (and in the course
of the next month was to  exchange several long-distance calls with him from
London). He  was a  superb little man, perfectly oval in shape, with a  bald
head and  tiny feet expensively shod (the rest of  his  envelope looked less
classy). He  spoke friable  English  with  a soft Russian accent, and native
Russian with Jewish <202>  question marks. He thought that I should begin by
seeing Dora. He settled for me the exact spot where she and I might meet. He
warned me  that in  preparing to visit  the weird Wonderland  of the  Soviet
Union a traveler's first step was the very Philistine one  of being assigned
a nomer (hotel room) and that only  after  he had been granted one could the
"visa" be tackled. Over the  tawny  mountain  of "Bogdan's"  brown-speckled,
butter-soaked, caviar-accompanied bliny  (which  A.B. forbade  me to pay for
though I was lousy with A Kingdom's money), he spoke poetically, and at some
length, about his recent trip to Tel Aviv.
     My next move--a visit to London--would have been altogether delightful,
had  I not  been overwhelmed all the  time by anxiety, impatience, anguished
forebodings. Through several venturesome gentlemen--a former lover of  Allan
Andoverton's  and two  of  my  late  benefactor's  mysterious  chums--I  had
retained some innocent ties with the  BINT, as  Soviet agents acronymize the
well-known, too  well-known, British  intelligence service. Consequently  it
was  possible for me to obtain a false or more-or-less false passport. Since
I may want to  avail myself again of those facilities, I cannot reveal  here
my exact alias. Suffice it to say that some  teasing similarity with my real
family name could make the assumed one pass, if I got caught, for a clerical
error on the part of an absentminded consul and for indifference to official
papers on that of  the deranged bearer. Let us  suppose my real name to have
been "Oblonsky" (a Tolstoyan invention);  then the  false  one would be, for
example,  the mimetic "O. B. Long," an oblong blursky, so  to  speak. This I
could expand into, say,  Oberon Bernard Long,  of  Dublin or Dumberton,  and
live with it for years on five or six continents.
     I had  escaped  from Russia at the  age of  not quite nineteen, leaving
across my path in a perilous  forest the felled body of a Red soldier. I had
then dedicated half  a  century to berating,  deriding,  twisting into funny
shapes,  wringing <203>  out like blood-wet towels, kicking neatly in Evil's
stinkiest spot, and otherwise tormenting the Soviet regime at every suitable
turn  of my writings. In  fact,  no  more consistent  critic  of  Bolshevist
brutality  and basic stupidity existed during all that time at  the literary
level to which my output belonged. I was thus well  aware of two facts: that
under my own name I would not be given a room at the Evropeyskaya or Astoria
or any  other Leningrad hotel  unless I made some extraordinary amends, some
abjectly exuberant recantation; and  that if  I talked my way  to that hotel
room as  Mr.  Long  or Blong, and got  interrupted, there might be no end of
trouble. I decided therefore not to get interrupted.
     "Shall I  grow a  beard to cross  the  fronder?" muses homesick General
Gurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus.
     "Better than none," said Harley Q., one of my  gayest  advisers. "But,"
he added, "do it before we glue on and  stamp O.B.'s  picture and don't lose
weight afterwards." So I grew it--during the atrocious heartracking wait for
the room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ample
Victorian affair, of  a  nice,  rough, tawny  shade threaded with silver. It
reached up  to my  apple-red  cheekbones  and  came  down  to my  waistcoat,
commingling on  the  way with my lateral yellow-gray  locks. Special contact
lenses not  only  gave  another,  dumbfounded, expression  to my  eyes,  but
somehow  changed  their very shape from  squarish  leonine, to round Jovian.
Only upon my return did I notice  that  the old tailor-made trousers,  on me
and in my bag, displayed my real name on the inside of the waistband.
     My good  old British passport,  which had  been handled cursorily by so
many  courteous  officers who  had  never  opened  my  books  (the only real
identity papers of its accidental holder), remained, after a procedure, that
both  decency and  incompetence forbid  me to describe, <204> physically the
same  in  many  respects;  but certain  of  its other  features,  details of
substance and  items  of information, were, let us say, "modified" by  a new
method,  an  alchemysterious treatment, a  technique  of  genius, "still not
understood elsewhere,"  as the chaps in the lab tactfully expressed people's
utter unawareness  of a  discovery that might have saved countless fugitives
and  secret agents.  In other words  nobody, no forensic chemist not in  the
know, could  suspect, let alone prove, that my passport  was false. I do not
know why  I dwell on this  subject with such tedious  persistence. Probably,
because I otlynivayu--"shirk"--the task of describing my visit to Leningrad;
yet I can't put it off any longer. <205>

2

     After almost three  months  of  fretting I  was ready  to  go.  I  felt
lacquered from  head to foot, like that naked ephebe, the  bright  clou of a
pagan procession, who died of dermal asphyxia in his coat of golden varnish.
A few days before my actual departure  there occurred what seemed a harmless
shift at the time. I was  to wing off on a Thursday  from Paris. On Monday a
melodious female voice  reached me  at  my  nostalgically  lovely hotel, rue
Rivoli,  to tell me  that something---perhaps a  hushed-up crash in a Soviet
veil  of  mist--had  clogged the general schedule and that I  could board an
Aeroflot turboprop to Moscow either  this Wednesday or the next. I chose the
former, of course, for it did not affect the date of my rendezvous.
     My  traveling companions were a few  English and French  tourists and a
goodish bunch of gloomy  officials from Soviet  trade missions. Once  inside
the aircraft, a certain illusion of cheap unreality enveloped  me--to linger
about me for the rest  of my trip. It  was  a very warm day in June and  the
farcical air-conditioning  system failed to  outvie the whiffs of  sweat and
the sprayings of Krasnaya Moskva, an insidious perfume which imbued even the
hard candy (named  Ledenets vzlyotnyy,  "take-off  caramel," on the wrapper)
generously distributed  to us before the start <206> of  the flight. Another
fairy-tale  touch   was  the  bright  dapple--yellow  curlicues  and  violet
eyespots--adorning the blinds.  A  similarly  colored waterproof bag in  the
seat pocket before me was  ominously  labeled "for waste  disposal"--such as
the disposal of my identity in that fairy-land.
     My mood and  mental condition needed strong liquor rather than  another
round of vzlyotnyy or some nice reading matter; still I accepted a publicity
magazine from a stout, unsmiling, bare-armed stewardess in sky blue, and was
interested to learn  that (in contrast  to current triumphs)  Russia had not
done  so  well in  the  Soccer Olympics  of  1912  when  the  "Tsarist team"
(consisting presumably of ten boyars  and one bear) lost  12-0  to a  German
side.
     I had taken a tranquilizer and hoped to sleep at least part of the way;
but a  first, and  only,  attempt at dozing off was resolutely thwarted by a
still fatter stewardess, in a still stronger aura  of onion sweat, asking me
nastily to draw in the leg that I had stuck out too far into the aisle where
she circulated  with more  and more  publicity material. I  envied darkly my
windowside neighbor, an elderly Frenchman--or, anyway, scarcely a compatriot
of mine--with  a straggly gray-black  beard and  a  terrible  tie, who slept
through the entire  five-hour flight,  disdaining the sardines  and even the
vodka which I  could not resist, though I had a flask of better stuff  in my
hip  pocket. Perhaps  historians of  photography could help  me some day  to
define  how, by precisely  what indices, I am enabled to establish  that the
recollection of an anonymous unplaceable face goes back 1930-1935,  say, and
not to 1945-1950. My  neighbor was practically the twin of a  person  I  had
known  in  Paris, but who?  A  fellow writer? A  concierge? A  cobbler?  The
difficulty  of determination  grated  less than the riddle  of its limits as
suggested by the degree of perceived "shading" and the  "feel" of the image.
<207>
     I got  a closer  but  still more teasing  look  at him when, toward the
close of our  journey,  my raincoat fell  from the rack and landed upon him,
and he grinned amiably enough as  he emerged from under the sudden awakener.
And I glimpsed again his fleshy profile  and thick eyebrow while  submitting
for inspection the  contents of my only  valise and fighting the insane urge
to question the propriety of the phrasing in the English form of the Customs
Declaration:  "...miniature  graphics, slaughtered  fowl,  live animals  and
birds."
     I saw him again, but not  as clearly, during our transfer by  bus  from
one airport to another through some  shabby environs of Moscow--a city which
I had never seen in my life and which  interested me about  as much as, say,
Birmingham. On the plane  to  Leningrad,  however, he was  again next to me,
this  time on the inner side. Mixed odors  of dour hostess and "Red Moscow,"
with a gradual prevalence of the first  ingredient, as our bare-armed angels
multiplied their last ministrations, accompanied us from 21:18 to 22:33.  In
order to draw  out my neighbor before he  and  his  riddle vanished, I asked
him,  in  French, if  he knew anything  about a picturesque group  that  had
boarded our aircraft  in Moscow. He  replied, with a  Parisian grasseyement,
that they  were, he believed, Iranian circus  people touring Europe. The men
looked like  harlequins  in  mufti,  the  women like birds  of paradise, the
children  like golden  medallions, and there was one dark-haired pale beauty
in black  bolero and yellow sharovars who reminded me of Iris or a prototype
of Iris.
     "I hope," I said, "we'll see them perform in Leningrad."
     "Pouf!" he rejoined. "They can't compete with our Soviet circus."
     I noted the automatic "our."
     Both he and I were billeted in the Astoria, a hideous pile built around
World War One, I think. The heavily bugged (I had been taught by  Guy Gayley
a way  of  finding that  <208> out in  one  gleeful twinkle)  and  therefore
sheepish-looking  room "de luxe," with orange curtains  and an orange-draped
bed in  its old-world alcove, did have  a private bath as stipulated, but it
took me some time to cope with a convulsive  torrent of  clay-colored water.
"Red Moscow's" last stand took place on a cake of incarnadine soap. "Meals,"
said a  notice,  "may be  served in the rooms." For the  heck of it  I tried
ordering an evening snack; nothing happened, and I spent another hungry hour
in the recalcitrant restaurant. The Iron Curtain  is really a lampshade: its
variety here was gemmed with glass  incrustations in a puzzle of petals. The
kotleta po kievski I ordered  took forty-four minutes to come from Kiev--and
two seconds to be  sent back as a non-cutlet, with a  tiny oath (murmured in
Russian) that made  the waitress start and  gape at  me and my Daily Worker.
The Caucasian wine was undrinkable.
     A sweet little scene  happened to be  enacted  as I hurried toward  the
lift,  trying  to  recall where I  had  put my  blessed Burpies.  A  flushed
athletic liftyorsha  wearing several bead necklaces was in  the act of being
replaced by  a much  older woman of the pensioned type, at whom she  shouted
while stomping  out of  the lift:  "Ya  tebe eto popomnyu, sterva! (I'll get
even with  you, dirty  bitch)"--and proceeded  to barge into  me and  almost
knock  me  down (I  am  a  large,  but  fluff-light old  fellow).  "Shtoy-ty
suyoshsya  pod nogi?  (Why  do  you  get underfoot?)"  she cried in the same
insolent tone  of voice which left the night attendant  quietly shaking  her
gray head all the way up to my floor.
     Between  two  nights, two  parts of a serial dream, in  which I  vainly
tried to locate  Bel's street (whose  name, by a  superstition  current  for
centuries in  conspiratorial circles I had  preferred not to be told), while
knowing  perfectly well that she  lay bleeding  and  laughing  in  an alcove
diagonally across the room, a few barefooted  steps from my  bed, I wandered
about the city, idly trying  to derive some <209> emotional  benefit from my
being born there almost  three-quarters of  a century ago. Either because it
could never  get over the presence of the bog  on which  a popular bully had
built  it, or for some other reason (nobody, according to Gogol, knows), St.
Petersburg was no place for children. I must have passed there insignificant
parts of a few Decembers, and no doubt an April or two; but at least a dozen
winters of my  nineteen  pre-Cambridge ones were  spent on  Mediterranean or
Black Sea  coasts. As to  summers,  to  my  young summers,  all  of them had
bloomed for me on the great country estates of my family.  Thus  I  realized
with  silly  astonishment  that,  except  for  picture postcards  (views  of
conventional public parks with lindens  looking like  oaks  and a  pistachio
palace instead of the remembered pinkish one, and relentlessly gilded church
domes--all of it under an  Italianate sky), I had never  seen my native city
in June or July. Its  aspect, therefore, evoked no thrill of recognition; it
was  an unfamiliar, if  not utterly  foreign, town,  still lingering in some
other era:  an  undefinable era, not exactly remote, but certainly preceding
the invention of body deodorants.
     Warm weather had come to stay, and  everywhere, in travel agencies,  in
foyers, in waiting rooms, in general stores,  in trolleybuses, in elevators,
on escalators, in  every  damned corridor,  everywhere, and especially where
women worked, or  had worked, invisible  onion soup was cooking on invisible
stoves. I was to  remain only a couple of days in  Leningrad and had not the
time to get used to those infinitely sad emanations.
     From travelers I knew that  our ancestral  mansion  no  longer existed,
that the very lane where  it had stood between  two streets in the  Fontanka
area had been lost, like some connective  tissue in the  process of  organic
degeneration. What  then succeeded  in transfixing  my memory? That  sunset,
with  a triumph of bronze clouds and flamingo-pink meltings  in the  far-end
archway of the Winter Canalet, <210> might  have been  first seen in Venice.
What else? The shadow of railings  on granite?  To be quite honest, only the
dogs,  the  pigeons,  the  horses, and the  very old,  very  meek  cloakroom
attendants seemed familiar to me. They, and perhaps the faãade of a house on
Gertsen Street. I may have gone there to some children's féte ages  ago. The
floral design running above the row of  its upper  windows  caused  an eerie
shiver to pass through the root of wings that we all grow at such moments of
dream-like recollection.
     Dora  was to meet  me Friday morning on the Square of the Arts in front
of  the Russian  Museum near the  statue  of Pushkin erected some  ten years
before  by  a  committee of weathermen. An  Intourist  folder  had yielded a
tinted  photograph of  the  spot.  The  meteorological associations  of  the
monument predominated  over its  cultural  ones.  Frock-coated  Pushkin, the
right-side lap of  his garment  permanently  agitated  by  the Nevan  breeze
rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus,  stands looking upward  and
to the left while his right hand is stretched out  the other way,  sidewise,
to test  the rain (a very natural attitude at  the  time lilacs bloom in the
Leningrad parks). It had dwindled, when I arrived, to a warm drizzle, a mere
murmur in the lindens above the long garden benches. Dora was supposed to be
sitting on Pushkin's left, id est my right. The bench  was  empty and looked
dampish. Three or four children, of the morose,  drab,  oddly  old-fashioned
aspect that  Soviet kids  have, could be  seen on  the  other  side  of  the
pedestal,  but otherwise I was loitering  all alone, holding the Humanitè in
my hand instead of the Worker which I was supposed to signal with discreetly
but had not been able to obtain that day. I  was in the act of spreading the
newspaper  on the  bench when  a lady with the  predicted limp  came along a
garden  path toward me. She wore the, also expected, pastel-pink coat, had a
clubfoot, and walked with  the aid  of a sturdy  cane.  She  also carried  a
diaphanous little  umbrella  which had not  figured  in the  list  of  <211>
attributes. I  dissolved in tears at once (though  I was farced with pills).
Her gentle beautiful eyes were also wet.
     Had I got A.B.'s telegram? Sent two days ago to my Paris address? Hotel
Moritz?
     "That's garbled," I said, "and besides I left earlier. Doesn't  matter.
Is she much worse?"
     "No,  no,  on the  contrary. I knew  you would come all the  same,  but
something has happened. Karl  turned up on Tuesday while I was in the office
and took  her  away. He also  took  my  new  suitcase. He  has no  sense  of
ownership. He will be shot some day like a common  thief. The first time  he
got  into  trouble was  when he  kept  declaring that Lincoln and Lenin were
brothers. And last time--"
     Nice voluble lady, Dora. What was Bel's illness exactly?
     "Splenic  anemia. And last time,  he  told  his  best  student  in  the
language school that the only thing people should do was to love one another
and pardon their enemies."
     "An original mind. Where do you suppose--"
     "Yes, but the best student was  an informer, and  Karlusha spent a year
in  a  tundrovyy House of  Rest. I don't know where he took her now.  I even
don't know whom to ask."
     "But there must be  some  way. She must be brought  back, taken out  of
this hole, this hell."
     "That's impossible. She adores, she worships Karlusha. C'est la vie, as
the Germans say. It's a  pity A.B. is in Riga till the end of the month. You
saw very little of him. Yes, it's a pity, he's a  freak and a dear (chudak i
dushka) with four nephews in Israel, which sounds, he says, as `the dramatic
persons  in a pseudoclassical play.' One of  them was my husband. Life  gets
sometimes very complicated,  and the more  complicated the happier it should
be, one  would  think,  but in reality  `complicated'  always means for some
reason grust' i toska (sorrow and heartache)."
     "But look here, can't I do something? Can't I sort of <212> hang around
and make inquiries, and perhaps seek advice from the Embassy--"
     "She  is not English any more and  was never American. It's hopeless, I
tell you. We were very close, she  and I, in my  very complicated life, but,
imagine,  Karl did not allow  her to  leave  at  least one  little word  for
me--and for  you,  of course. She had informed him, unfortunately,  that you
were  coming, and  this he could not  bear in spite of all  the sympathy  he
works up for all  unsympathetic people.  You  know,  I  saw  your  face last
year--or was it  two years  ago?--two years, rather--in  a  Dutch or  Danish
magazine, and I would have recognized you at once, anywhere."
     "With the beard?"
     "Oh,  it does  not  change  you one droplet.  It's like wigs  or  green
spectacles in old comedies. As a girl I dreamt  of becoming a  female clown,
`Madam  Byron,'  or  `Trek  Trek.'  But  tell me, Vadim  Vadimovich--I  mean
Gospodin Long--haven't they found you out? Don't they intend to make much of
you? After all, you're the secret pride of Russia. Must you go now?"
     I detached  myself from  the  bench--with  some  scraps  of  L'Humanitè
attempting to follow me--and said, yes,  I  had better be  going before  the
pride outstripped  the prudence. I kissed  her  hand whereupon  she remarked
that  she had  seen it done only  in  a movie  called War and Peace.  I also
begged her, under the dripping lilacs, to accept a wad of bank notes  to  be
used for any purpose she wished including the price of that suitcase for her
trip to Sochi.  "And he also took my whole set of safety pins," she murmured
with her all-beautifying smile. <213>

3

     I cannot be sure it was  not again my fellow traveler, the black-hatted
man, whom  I saw hurrying away as I parted with Dora  and our National Poet,
leaving the latter to worry forever about all that wasted water (compare the
Tsarskoselski  Statue of  a rock-dwelling  maiden  who mourns her broken but
still brimming jar in one of his own poems);  but I know I saw Monsieur Pouf
at least twice in the restaurant of the Astoria, as  well as in the corridor
of the sleeping  car on the night train  that I took  in order to  catch the
earliest Moscow-Paris plane. On  that plane he  was  prevented from  sitting
next to me by the presence of an elderly American lady, with pink and violet
wrinkles  and rufous hair: we kept alternately chatting, dozing and drinking
Bloody Marshas, her joke--not  appreciated by our sky-blue hostess.  It  was
delightful to observe  the  amazement expressed  by old Miss Havemeyer  (her
rather incredible name) when I  told her that I had  spurned the Intourist's
offer of a sightseeing tour of Leningrad; that I had not peeped into Lenin's
room in the Smolny; had not visited one cathedral; had  not  eaten something
called "tabaka chicken";  and that I had left that beautiful, beautiful city
without seeing  a single ballet  or variety show. "I happen <214>  to be," I
explained, "a  triple agent  and you know how it  is--" "Oh!" she exclaimed,
with a pulling-away movement of the torso as if to consider me from a nobler
angle. "Oh! But that's vurry glamorous!"
     I had to wait  some time  for my  jet to  New  York, and being a little
tight and  rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not too
gravely ill and not too  unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, a
magazine  in  the living  room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements of
her leg, ankle 8 1/2 inches, calf  12 1/2, creamy  thigh  19 1/2, and Louise
was in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up a
paperback somebody had left on a seat next  to mine in the transit lounge of
the Orly airport. I  was  the mouse of fate on that pleasant June  afternoon
between a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes.
     I held  in my hands  a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced from
the American edition of A  Kingdom  by the  Sea. I had not seen it  yet--and
preferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured the
pirated text. On the cover a  publicity picture of the child actress who had
played my  Virginia in  the recent  film did better  justice to  pretty Lola
Sloan  and  her  lollypop  than  to the significance  of my novel.  Although
slovenly worded  by a hack  with no inkling  of the book's art, the blurb on
the back of the limp  little volume rendered  faithfully enough  the factual
plot of my Kingdom.

     Bertram, an unbalanced youth,  doomed to die  shortly in  an asylum for
the criminal insane, sells for ten dollars his ten-year-old  sister Ginny to
the middle-aged bachelor Al Garden,  a  wealthy  poet who  travels  with the
beautiful child from resort to resort through America and other countries. A
state  of  affairs  that looks  at  first blush--and "blush"  is  the  right
word--like a case of  irresponsible <215> perversion (described in brilliant
detail never  attempted  before) develops by  the  grees  [misprint]  into a
genuine dialogue  of tender  love. Garden's  feelings  are  reciprocated  by
Ginny, the  initial "victim" who at eighteen, a normal nymph, marries him in
a warmly described religious ceremony. All seems  to  end honky-donky [sic!]
in foreverlasting bliss of a sort fit to meet the sexual demands of the most
rigid,  or frigid,  humanitarian, had there  not  been  running  its chaotic
course, in a sheef [sheaf?] of parallel lives beyond our happy couple's ken,
the tragic tiny [destiny?] of Virginia Garden's inconsolable parents, Oliver
and [?], whom the clever author by every means  in his power,  prevents from
tracking their daughter Dawn [sic!!]. A Book-of-the-Decade choice.

     I  pocketed  it  upon  noticing  that  my  long-lost  fellow  traveler,
goat-bearded and black-hatted, as I knew him,  had come up from the lavatory
or the bar: Would he follow me to New York or was it to be our last meeting?
Last, last. He  had given  himself away: The moment he came near, the moment
his  mouth  opened in  the  tense-lower-lip shape  that  discharges, with  a
cheerless up-and-down shake of the head, the exclamation "Ekh!,"  I knew not
only that he was as Russian as I, but that the ancient  acquaintance whom he
resembled so strikingly was the father of a  young poet, Oleg  Orlov, whom I
had  met in  Paris, in  the  Nineteen-Twenties. Oleg  wrote "poems in prose"
(long  after  Turgenev), absolutely worthless  stuff,  which his  father,  a
half-demented  widower, would  try  to  "place,"  pestering  with his  son's
worthless wares the dozen or so periodicals  of the  emigration. He could be
seen in the waiting room miserably fawning on a harassed and curt secretary,
or attempting to waylay an assistant editor <216> between office and toilet,
or writing in stoic misery, at a corner of a crowded table, a special letter
pleading  the  cause  of  some  horrible little  poem that had  been already
rejected. He died in the same Home for the  Aged where Annette's mother  had
spent her last years. Oleg, in the meantime, had joined the small number  of
littèrateurs  who decided to sell  the bleak liberty of expatriation for the
rosy mess of  Soviet pottage. His budtime had kept  its promise. The best he
had achieved during the last forty or  fifty years was a medley of publicity
pieces, commercial translations, vicious  denunciations, and--in the  domain
of  the  arts--a  prodigious  resemblance  to  the  physical  aspect, voice,
mannerisms, and obsequious impudence of his father.
     "Ekh!" he exclaimed,  "Ekh, Vadim Vadimovich dorogoy (dear), aren't you
ashamed  of  deceiving  our  great  warm-hearted  country,  our  benevolent,
credulous  government,  our  overworked  Intourist  staff,  in   this  nasty
infantile  manner! A Russian writer! Snooping!  Incognito! By the way,  I am
Oleg Igorevich Orlov, we met in Paris when we were young."
     "What  do you want, merzavetz (you scoundrel)?" I coldly inquired as he
plopped into the chair on my left.
     He  raised  both  hands in  the  "see-I'm-unarmed"  gesture:  "Nothing,
nothing.  Except  to  ruffle  (potormoshit') your  conscience.  Two  courses
presented themselves.  We had to choose. Fyodor Mihaylovich  [?] himself had
to choose.  Either to welcome  you  po amerikanski (the  American  way) with
reporters,  interviews,  photographers,  girls,  garlands,  and,  naturally,
Fyodor Mihaylovich himself [President of  the Union of Writers? Head of  the
`Big  House'?]; or else to  ignore you--and that's what we did. By the  way:
forged passports may be  fun in detective  stories, but our people are  just
not interested in passports. Aren't you sorry now?"
     I  made as  if to  move to another seat,  but  he  made as if <217>  to
accompany  me  there.  So  I  stayed where  I  was,  and  feverishly grabbed
something to read--that book in my coat pocket.
     "Et ce  n'est pas tout," he  went on. "Instead of writing for  us, your
compatriots, you, a Russian writer of genius, betray them by concocting, for
your  paymasters,  this  (pointing with a  dramatically quivering index at A
Kingdom by the Sea in my hands), this obscene novelette about little Lola or
Lotte, whom some Austrian Jew or reformed pederast rapes after murdering her
mother--no, excuse me--marrying  mama first before murdering her--we like to
legalize everything in the West, don't we, Vadim Vadimovich?"
     Still restraining myself, though aware of  the uncontrollable  cloud of
black  fury growing within  my  brain, I said: "You are mistaken. You  are a
somber imbecile. The novel  I wrote, the novel I'm holding now, is A Kingdom
by the Sea. You are talking of some other book altogether."
     "Vraiment? And  maybe you visited Leningrad  merely to chat with a lady
in pink under  the  lilacs?  Because, you know,  you  and your  friends  are
phenomenally naîve. The reason Mister  (it rhymed with `Easter' in  his foul
serpent-mouth)  Vetrov  was  permitted  to leave a  certain  labor  camp  in
Vadim--odd coincidence--so he  might  fetch his  wife, is  that  he has been
cured now  of his  mystical mania--cured by such nutcrackers, such shrinkers
as are absolutely unknown in the philosophy of your Western sharlatanchy. Oh
yes, precious (dragotsennyy) Vadim Vadimovich--"
     The swing I dealt old Oleg  with the back  of my left fist was of quite
presentable  power,  especially  if  we remember--and I remembered it  as  I
swung--that our combined ages made 140.
     There ensued a  pause while I struggled  back to my  feet (unaccustomed
momentum had somehow caused me to fall from my seat).
     "Nu,  dali  v  mordu. Nu, tak chtozh?"  he muttered <218> (Well, you've
given  me one  in  the mug. Well, what does it matter?).  Blood blotched the
handkerchief he applied to his fat muzhikian nose.
     "Nu, dali," he repeated and presently wandered away.
     I  looked at my  knuckles. They were  red but intact. I listened  to my
wristwatch. It ticked like mad. <219> <220>


PART SIX
     <221> <222>
        1

     Speaking of philosophy, I  recalled when  starting to readjust  myself,
very temporarily, to the corners and crannies of Quirn, that somewhere in my
office I kept  a  bundle  of  notes (on  the Substance of  Space),  prepared
formerly  toward an account of  my  young years and nightmares (the work now
known as  Ardis). I also needed to  sort  out and remove from my  office, or
ruthlessly destroy, a mass of miscellanea which had accumulated ever since I
began teaching.
     That afternoon--a  sunny and windy September afternoon--I  had decided,
with  the  unaccountable suddenness of genuine  inspiration,  that 1969-1970
would be  my last term at Quirn University. I had,  in fact,  interrupted my
siesta that day  to request an immediate interview with the Dean. I  thought
his  secretary  sounded a  little grumpy on  the phone; true,  I declined to
explain  anything  beforehand,  beyond  confiding  to  her,  in an  informal
bantering manner, that the numeral "7"  always reminded me  of  the  flag an
explorer sticks in the cranium of the North Pole.
     After setting out on foot and reaching  the  seventh poplar  I realized
that  there might be quite a load  of papers to  bring from my office, so  I
went  back  for my car, and <223> then had difficulty in finding  a place to
park  near  the library where  I intended  to return a number of books which
were months, if not  years, overdue. In result,  I was a little  late for my
appointment with the Dean, a new  man  and not my best reader. He consulted,
rather demonstratively, the clock and muttered he  had  a  "conference" in a
few minutes at some other place, probably invented.
     I was amused rather than surprised by the vulgar joy he did not trouble
to conceal at  the news of my resignation. He hardly heard the reasons which
common  courtesy  impelled  me  to give  (frequent headaches,  boredom,  the
efficiency  of  modern recording,  the comfortable  income  my recent  novel
supplied,  and  so  forth). His  whole manner  changed--to use  a clichè  he
deserves. He paced to and  fro, positively beaming.  He grasped my hand in a
burst  of brutal  effusion.  Certain fastidious blue-blooded  animals prefer
surrendering  a  limb to the predator rather than suffer  ignoble contact. I
left the  Dean  encumbered with a  marble arm that he  kept  carrying in his
prowlings like a trayed trophy, not knowing where to put it down.
     So off to my office I stalked, a happy amputee, more than ever eager to
clean up drawers and shelves. I began, however, by dashing off a note to the
President of the University, another new man,  informing him with a touch of
French malice, rather  than  English "malice," that  my  entire  set of  one
hundred lectures on European Masterpieces was about to be sold to a generous
publisher who offered  me  an advance  of half-a-million bucks (a salubrious
exaggeration), thus making transmissions of my course no longer available to
students, best regards, sorry not to have met you personally.
     In  the name  of moral hygiene I had got rid  long ago of  my Bechstein
desk.  Its  considerably  smaller  substitute contained  note paper, scratch
paper,  office  envelopes, photostats  of  my lectures, a  copy of  Dr. Olga
Repnin  (hard-back)  which  I had  intended for  a colleague  (but had <224>
spoiled by  misspelling his name), and a pair of warm gloves belonging to my
assistant (and  successor) Exkul. Also three boxfuls  of  paper clips  and a
half-empty flask of whisky. From the shelves, I swept into the  wastebasket,
or onto the floor in its vicinity, heaps of circulars, separata, a displaced
ecologist's  paper  on  the ravages committed by a  bird of  some sort,  the
Ozimaya Sovka ("Lesser Winter-Crop Owl"?), and  the tidily bound page proofs
(mine always  come  in  the  guise of long, horribly  slippery  and unwieldy
snakes) of  picaresque  trash, full of  cricks and punts, imposed  on  me by
proud  publishers hoping  for a  rave  from the  lucky  bastard. A  mess  of
business  correspondence and my tractatule on Space I  stuffed  into a large
worn folder. Adieu, lair of learning!
     Coincidence  is  a pimp  and  cardsharper in  ordinary  fiction  but  a
marvelous  artist  in  the  patterns  of fact recollected  by a non-ordinary
memoirist.  Only asses and  geese think that the re-collector skips  this or
that  bit of his past  because it is  dull  or shoddy (that sort  of episode
here, for example, the  interview with the Dean, and how scrupulously it  is
recorded!). I  was on the way to the parking lot when the bulky folder under
my  arm--replacing my  arm,  as it  were--burst its string  and  spilled its
contents all  over  the gravel and grassy  border.  You were coming from the
library along the same campus path, and we crouched side by side  collecting
the  stuff.  You were  pained you said later (zhalostno  bylo) to  smell the
liquor on my breath. On the breath of that great writer.
     I say "you"  retroconsciously, although in the logic of  life you  were
not "you" yet, for  we were not actually acquainted and  you  were to become
really "you" only when you said,  catching a slip  of yellow  paper that was
availing itself of a bluster to glide away with false insouciance:

     "No, you don't." <225>

     Crouching, smiling, you helped me to cram  everything  again  into  the
folder  and then  asked  me  how  my  daughter  was--she  and  you had  been
schoolmates some fifteen years ago, and my wife had given you a lift several
times. I  then remembered your name and in a photic flash of celestial color
saw you and Bel looking like twins, silently hating each other, both in blue
coats and  white hats, waiting to be driven somewhere by Louise. Bel and you
would both be twenty-eight on January 1, 1970.
     A yellow butterfly settled briefly on a  clover head, then wheeled away
in the wind.
     "Metamorphoza," you said in your lovely, elegant Russian.
     Would I care to have some snapshots (additional  snapshots) of Bel? Bel
feeding a chipmunk? Bel at the school dance? (Oh, I remember that dance--she
had chosen  for  escort a sad fat Hungarian boy whose father  was  assistant
manager of the Quilton Hotel--I can still hear Louise snorting!)
     We met next morning in my carrel at the College Library, and after that
I continued to see you every day.  I will not suggest, LATH  is not meant to
suggest, that the  petals and  plumes  of my  previous  loves  are dulled or
coarsened when directly contrasted with the purity of your being, the magic,
the pride, the reality of your radiance. Yet "reality" is the key word here;
and the gradual perception of that reality was nearly fatal to me.
     Reality  would be only adulterated if I now started to narrate what you
know, what  I  know, what nobody  else knows,  what shall  never,  never  be
ferreted out by a matter-of-fact, father-of-muck, mucking biograffitist. And
how did your  affair develop, Mr.  Blong? Shut up, Ham Godman! And  when did
you decide to leave together for Europe? Damn you, Ham!
     See under Real, my first novel in English, thirty-five years ago! <226>
     One little item of subhuman interest I  can disclose, however, in  this
interview with posterity.  It is a foolish, embarrassing trifle  and I never
told you about it, so  here goes. It was on the eve of our departure, around
March 15, 1970, in a New York  hotel. You were out shopping. ("I think"--you
said to me just now  when  I tried to check  that detail without telling you
why--"I think I bought a beautiful blue  suitcase with a zipper"--miming the
word with a little movement of your dear delicate hand--"which  proved to be
absolutely useless.") I stood before the closet mirror of my bedroom  in the
north end of our pretty "suite," and proceeded to take a final decision. All
right,  I  could  not live without you; but was I  worthy of you--I mean, in
body and  spirit? I was forty-three years older  than you. The Frown of Age,
two deep lines forming a capital lambda, ascended  between  my  eyebrows. My
forehead,   with  its  three  horizontal   wrinkles   that  had  not  really
overasserted themselves in the last three decades, remained round, ample and
smooth,  waiting  for the summer tan that would scumble,  I knew,  the liver
spots  on my  temples.  All in all, a  brow to  be enfolded  and fondled.  A
thorough haircut had done  away with the leonine locks; what remained was of
a neutral, grayish-dun tint.  My large handsome glasses magnified the senile
group of wart-like little excrescences  under each  lower  eyelid. The eyes,
once  an irresistible hazel-green, were now  oysterous. The nose,  inherited
from a succession of Russian boyars, German  barons, and, perhaps  (if Count
Starov who sported some English blood was my real father), at least one Peer
of the Realm, had retained its bone hump and  tip rime, but had developed on
the frontal  flesh, within its  owner's memory, an  aggravating gray hairlet
that grew faster and faster between yanks. My dentures did not do justice to
my  former  attractively irregular teeth and  (as  I  told an  expensive but
obtuse dentist who did  not  understand what I meant)  "seemed  to ignore my
smile." A furrow  sloped <227> down  from each nosewing, and a jowl pouch on
each side of  my chin formed in three-quarter-face the banal flexure  common
to old men of all races, classes, and professions. I doubted that I had been
right  in shaving off  my glorious beard  and the  trim  mustache  that  had
lingered, on try, for a week or so after  my return from Leningrad. Still, I
passed my face, giving it a C-minus mark.
     Since I had never been much of an athlete, the deterioration of my body
was neither very marked, nor  very interesting.  I gave it  a C plus, mainly
for my routing  tank  after tank  of belly fat in  a  war with obesity waged
between intervals of retreat and  rest since the middle Fifties. Apart  from
incipient lunacy (a problem with which I prefer  to deal separately),  I had
been in excellent health throughout adulthood.
     What about  the state of my art?  What could I  offer to you there? You
had studied, as I hope you recall, Turgenev in Oxford and Bergson in Geneva,
but thanks to family ties with good  old Quirn and Russian New York (where a
last èmigrè periodical  was  still  deploring,  with idiotic innuendoes,  my
"apostasy") you had followed pretty closely, as I discovered, the procession
of  my  Russian  and  English  harlequins,  followed  by  a  tiger  or  two,
scarlet-tongued, and a libellula girl on an elephant.  You had also  studied
those obsolete photocopies--which proved that my  method avait du  bon after
all--pace the monstrous accusations leveled at  them by a pack of professors
in envious colleges.
     As  I peered,  stripped  naked  and  traversed  by  opaline  rays, into
another, far deeper  mirror,  I saw  the whole vista of my Russian books and
was  satisfied and even thrilled  by  what I  saw:  Tamara,  my first  novel
(1925): a girl  at sunrise in the mist of an orchard. A grandmaster betrayed
in Pawn Takes Queen. Plenilune,  a moonburst  of verse. Camera  Lucida,  the
spy's mocking eye among the meek blind. The Red Top Hat of decapitation in a
country  <228> of total injustice. And my  best  in  the series:  young poet
writes prose on a Dare.
     That Russian batch of my  books was finished and signed and thrust back
into the  mind  that had  produced  them.  All of  them  had  been gradually
translated  into  English either by myself  or under my direction,  with  my
revisions. Those final English versions as well  as  the reprinted originals
would be  now  dedicated  to  you.  That  was good. That  was settled.  Next
picture:
     My English originals, headed  by the fierce See under Real (1940),  led
through the changing light of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus, to the fun of Dr.
Olga  Repnin and  the dream  of A Kingdom by  the  Sea. There  was  also the
collection of short stories Exile from Mayda) a distant  island;  and Ardis,
the work I had resumed at the time  we met--at the time, too, of a deluge of
postcards (postcards!) from  Louise hinting at last at a move which I wanted
her to be the first to make.
     If I estimated the second batch at a lower value than the first, it was
owing not only to a diffidence some will  call coy, others, commendable, and
myself,  tragic, but also because  the contours  of my  American  production
looked  blurry to me; and they looked that way because I knew I would always
keep  hoping  that  my  next  book--not simply  the one  in  progress,  like
Ardis--but  something  I had never  attempted yet, something miraculous  and
unique, would at last answer fully the craving, the aching thirst that a few
disjunct  paragraphs in  Esmeralda and  The  Kingdom  were  insufficient  to
quench. I believed I could count on your patience. <229>

2

     I had not the slightest desire to reimburse Louise  for being forced to
shed me; and  I hesitated to embarrass her by supplying my lawyer  with  the
list of  her  betrayals. They were stupid  and sordid, and went back to  the
days when I still was reasonably faithful to her. The "divorce dialogue," as
Horace Peppermill, Junior, horribly  called it, dragged on during the entire
spring: You and I spent part of it in London and the rest in Taormina, and I
kept  putting off talks  of  our marriage (a  delay  you regarded with royal
indifference).  What  really bothered  me was  having  also  to postpone the
tedious statement (to be repeated for the fourth time in my life) that would
have to precede any such talks. I  fumed. It was a shame to leave you in the
dark regarding my derangement.
     Coincidence, the angel  with the eyed wings mentioned before, spared me
the humiliating rigmarole that  I had found necessary  to go  through before
proposing to each of my former wives. On June 15, at Gandora, in the Tessin,
I received a  letter from young Horace giving me excellent news: Louise  had
discovered (how does not  matter) that at  various periods of our marriage I
had had her  shadowed, in all sorts of fascinating  old cities, by a private
detective (Dick Cockburn, a staunch friend of mine); that the tapes <230> of
love calls and other documents were in  my lawyer's  hands; and that she was
ready to make every possible concession  to speed up matters, being  anxious
to marry again--this time the son of an  Earl.  And on the same fatidic day,
at  a  quarter  past five in the afternoon, I finished transcribing  on  733
medium-sized  Bristol   cards  (each  holding  about  100  words),  with   a
fine-nibbed pen and in my smallest  fair-copy hand, Ardis, a stylized memoir
dealing with the arbored boyhood and ardent youth of a great thinker  who by
the  end of the book tackles the itchiest of all noumenal mysteries.  One of
the  early chapters contained an account  (couched  in  an overtly personal,
intolerably tortured tone)  of my own tussles with the Specter  of Space and
the myth of Cardinal Points.
     By 5:30 I  had consumed, in a fit of private  celebration, most of  the
caviar and all the champagne in the friendly fridge of our bungalow  on  the
green grounds of the  Gandora Palace  Hotel. I found  you on the veranda and
told you I would like you to devote the next hour to reading attentively--
     "I read everything attentively."
     "--this batch  of thirty cards from Ardis"  After which I  thought  you
might meet me somewhere on my way back from my late-afternoon stroll: always
the  same--to  the  spartitraffico fountain (ten minutes) and thence  to the
edge of a pine  plantation (another ten minutes).  I left you reclining in a
lounge  chair with the sun reproducing the amethyst lozenges of  the veranda
windows  on the floor, and  barring  your bare shins and the insteps of your
crossed feet (right toe twitching now and then  in  some obscure  connection
with the  tempo of assimilation  or a  twist  in the text). In a  matter  of
minutes you  would have learned (as only  Iris had  learned  before you--the
others were no eaglesses)  what I wished you to  be aware of when consenting
to be my wife. "Careful,  please,  when you cross," you said,  without <231>
raising your eyes but then looking  up and tenderly pursing your lips before
going back to Ardis.
     Ha!  Weaving a  little! Was that really I, Prince Vadim Blonsky, who in
1815 could have outdrunk Pushkin's mentor, Kaverin? In the golden light of a
mere  quart of  the stuff  all  the  trees  in the  hotel  park  looked like
araucarias. I congratulated  myself on the neatness  of my  stratagem though
not quite knowing  whether it concerned  my third wife's recorded frolics or
the disclosure  of my infirmity through a bloke  in a book. Little by little
the soft spicy air did me  good:  my soles  clung more firmly to gravel  and
sand, clay and stone.  I  became aware that  I  had gone out wearing morocco
slippers and a torn, bleached denim trousers-and-top with, paradoxically, my
passport in one  nipple pocket and a wad  of Swiss bank notes in the  other.
Local people in Gandino or Gandora, or  whatever  the town was  called, knew
the face of the author of Un regno sul mare or Ein Kænigreich  an der See or
Un  Royaume au Bord de la  Mer, so it would have  been really  fatuous on my
part to prepare the cue and the cud for  the reader in case a car was really
to hit me.
     Soon  I was  feeling so  happy and  bright  that  when I passed  by the
sidewalk cafe  just before reaching the square, it  seemed  a  good  idea to
stabilize  the  fizz  still  ascending  in  me  by  means  of  a  jigger  of
something--and  yet  I  demurred,  and  passed  by,  cold-eyed,  knowing how
sweetly, yet firmly, you disapproved of the most innocent tippling.
     One of the  streets projecting west beyond the traffic island traversed
the Corso  Orsini  and  immediately afterwards,  as if  having  achieved  an
exhausting feat,  degenerated  into a  soft dusty old  road  with traces  of
gramineous growth on both sides, but none of pavement.
     I could say what I do not remember  having  been moved to say in years,
namely: My happiness was complete. As I walked, I read those cards with you,
at  your  pace, your <232> diaphanous index at  my  rough peeling temple, my
wrinkled finger at  your turquoise temple-vein. I caressed the facets of the
Blackwing pencil you kept  gently  twirling, I felt against my raised  knees
the  fifty-year-old folded  chessboard, Nikifor  Starov's gift (most  of the
noblemen were badly chipped in their baize-lined mahogany box!),  propped on
your skirt with its pattern  of irises. My eyes moved with  yours, my pencil
queried with your own  faint little cross in the  narrow margin a solecism I
could not  distinguish  through  the tears of space.  Happy tears,  radiant,
shamelessly happy tears!
     A goggled imbecile on a motorcycle who I thought had  seen me and would
slow down to let me cross Corso Orsini in peace swerved so clumsily to avoid
killing  me that he skidded and ended up  facing  me some  way off  after an
ignominious  wobble. I  ignored his  roar  of  hate and  continued my steady
stroll westward in the  changed  surroundings I have  already mentioned. The
practically rural old road crept between modest villas, each in  its nest of
tall flowers and  spreading  trees. A rectangle of  cardboard on one of  the
west-side wickets said "Rooms"  in German; on the opposite side an old  pine
supported  a  sign  "For  Sale"  in Italian.  Again  on  the  left,  a  more
sophisticated houseowner offered "Lunchings." Still fairly far was the green
vista of the pineta.
     My thoughts reverted to Ardis. I knew that the  bizarre mental flaw you
were now reading about  would pain  you;  I also knew that its display was a
mere formality  on my  part and could  not obstruct the  natural flow of our
common  fate.  A gentlemanly gesture. In fact, it might  compensate for what
you  did not yet know, what I  would have to tell you  too, what I suspected
you would call the not quite savory  little method  (gnusnovaten'kiy sposob)
of  my "getting even"  with Louise.  All right--but what  about Ardis? Apart
from my warped mind, did you like it or loathe it? <233>
     Composing, as I do, whole books in  my  mind before releasing the inner
word and taking it down in pencil or pen, I find that the final text remains
for a while committed to memory,  as  distinct and  perfect as the  floating
imprint that a  light  bulb  leaves on the retina. I was  able  therefore to
rerun the actual images of those cards you read: they were projected  on the
screen of my fancy together with the  gleam of your topaz ring  and the beat
of your eyelashes, and I could calculate how far you had read not  simply by
consulting my watch but  by actually following one  line after the other  to
the  right-hand brink of each card. The lucidity of the image was correlated
with the quality  of the writing. You knew my work too well to be ruffled by
a too robust erotic detail, or annoyed by a too recondite literary allusion.
It  was bliss reading Ardis with  you that way, triumphing that way over the
stretch of colored space separating my lane from your lounge chair. Was I an
excellent writer? I  was  an  excellent writer. That avenue  of statues  and
lilacs where Ada and  I  drew  our  first circles  on  the dappled sand  was
visualized and  re-created by  an  artist  of  lasting  worth.  The  hideous
suspicion  that  even  Ardis, my  most  private  book,  soaked  in  reality,
saturated with  sun flecks,  might be  an unconscious imitation of another's
unearthly art, that suspicion might come later; at the moment--6:18 P.M.  on
June 15, 1970, in the Tessin--nothing could scratch the  rich humid gloss of
my happiness.
     I was now reaching the end of my usual  preprandial walk. The ra-ta-ta,
ta-ta, tac  of a typist's finishing a last page came  from a window  through
motionless  foliage,  reminding me pleasantly that I had long since eschewed
the long labor of having my immaculate  manuscripts typed when they could be
reproduced photographically in one  hum. It was now the  publisher  who bore
the  brunt  of having my hand  transformed directly into printed characters,
and I know he disliked the  procedure as a  well-bred <234> entomologist may
find revolting an  irregular insect's skipping some generally accepted stage
of metamorphosis.
     Only a few steps--twelve, eleven--remained before I would start to walk
back: I felt you were thinking of this in a reversal of  distant perception,
just as I  felt a kind of mental loosening, which told  me  you had finished
reading those  thirty cards, placed them  in their proper order,  tidied the
stack by  knocking  its base slightly  against  the table, found the elastic
lying there in the assumed shape of a heart, banded the batch, carried it to
the safety of my desk, and were now preparing to meet me on my  way back  to
Gandora Palace.
     A  low  wall of  gray  stone, waist-high, paunch-thick,  built  in  the
general shape of a transversal parapet, put an end to whatever life the road
still had as a town  street. A narrow passage  for  pedestrians and cyclists
divided the parapet in the  middle, and the width of that gap  was preserved
beyond it in a path which after a flick or two slithered into a fairly dense
young pinewood. You  and I had rambled  there many  times on gray  mornings,
when lakeside or poolside lost all attraction; but that evening, as usual, I
terminated my stroll at the parapet, and stood in perfect repose, facing the
low sun, my spread hands enjoying the smoothness  of  its top  edge  on both
sides of  the passage. A tactile something, or the recent ra-ta-tac, brought
back and completed the  image  of my 733, twelve centimers by ten-and-a-half
Bristol cards,  which  you  would read  chapter by chapter whereupon a great
pleasure, a parapet of pleasure, would  perfect  my task: in  my mind  there
arose, endowed with the clean-cut compactness of some great solid--an altar!
a  mesa!--the image of  the  shiny photocopier  in one of the offices of our
hotel. My trustful hands  were still spread, but  my soles no  longer sensed
the  soft soil.  I  wished  to  go  back to you,  to life, to  the  amethyst
lozenges, to the pencil lying  on  the veranda  table, and I could not. What
used to happen  so often  in thought,  now <235> had happened  for  keeps: I
could not turn. To make that movement would mean rolling the world around on
its axis  and that  was as impossible as traveling back physically from  the
present moment to the previous one. Maybe I should not have panicked, should
have  waited  quietly  for  the stone  of my limbs to regain  some tingle of
flesh.  Instead,  I  performed, or  imagined  performing,  a wild  wrenching
movement--and the globe  did not  bulge. I  must have hung in a spread-eagle
position for  a  little while longer before  ending supine on the intangible
soil. <236>


PART SEVEN
     <237> <238>

1

     There exists an old rule--so old and trite that  I blush to mention it.
Let me twist it into a jingle--to stylize the staleness:

     The I of the book
     Cannot die in the book.

     I   am   speaking   of  serious   novels,   naturally.   In   so-called
Planchette-Fiction   the  unruffled  narrator,  after   describing  his  own
dissolution,  can continue thus: "I found myself standing on  a staircase of
onyx before a great gate of gold in a crowd of other bald-headed angels..."
     Cartoon  stuff,  folklore  rubbish,  hilarious  atavistic  respect  for
precious minerals!
     And yet--
     And yet I feel  that  during three weeks of general paresis (if that is
what it was) I have gained some experience; that when my night really  comes
I shall not  be totally  unprepared.  Problems of identity have been, if not
settled, at least set. Artistic insights have been granted. I was allowed to
take my palette with me to very remote reaches of dim and dubious being.
     Speed!  If  I  could have given  my definition of death  to  <239>  the
stunned fisherman, to the mower who stopped wiping his scythe with a handful
of grass, to the cyclist  embracing in terror  a willow sapling on one green
bank and actually getting up  to the  top of a taller  tree  on the opposite
side with his machine and girlfriend, to the black horses gaping at  me like
people with trick dentures all through my strange skimming progress, I would
have cried one word: Speed! Not that those rural witnesses ever  existed. My
impression of prodigious, inexplicable, and to tell  the truth  rather silly
and  degrading  speed (death is silly, death is  degrading) would  have been
conveyed to a  perfect void,  without one fisherman tearing  by, without one
blade of grass bloodied by his catch, without any reference mark altogether.
Imagine me,  an old gentleman, a distinguished author, gliding rapidly on my
back,  in  the wake of my outstretched dead feet, first through that  gap in
the granite, then over a pinewood, then  along misty water meadows, and then
simply between marges of mist, on and on, imagine that sight!
     Madness had been  lying  in wait for  me behind this  or that  alder or
boulder since infancy. I got  used  by degrees to feeling the sepia stare of
those watchful eyes as they moved smoothly along the line of my passage. Yet
I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it
also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that  the very absence  of
an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.
     For  practical  purposes, such as keeping body-mind and mind-body  in a
state of  ordinary  balance, so as  not  to  imperil one's  life or become a
burden to  friends or  governments, I  preferred  the  latent  variety,  the
awfulness of that watchful thing  that  meant at best the stab of neuralgia,
the distress of insomnia, the battle with inanimate things which  have never
disguised their  hatred of me (the  runaway  button which condescends  to be
located, the paper clip, a thievish  slave,  not content to hold a couple of
humdrum <240> letters, but  managing to  catch  a precious leaf from another
batch), and at  worst a sudden  spasm of space as when  the  visit to  one's
dentist turns into a burlesque party. I preferred the muddle of such attacks
to  the motley of madness which, after pretending to adorn my existence with
special forms of  inspiration,  mental  ecstasy, and  so  forth, would  stop
dancing and flitting around me and would pounce upon me, and cripple me, and
for all I know destroy me. <241>

2

     At  the  start  of  the  great  seizure,  I  must   have  been  totally
incapacitated, from top to toe, while my mind, the images racing through me,
the tang of thought,  the genius of  insomnia, remained as strong and active
as ever (except for the blots in between). By the  time I had  been flown to
the Lecouchant Hospital in coastal France, highly recommended by Dr. Genfer,
a Swiss relative of its director, I became aware of certain curious details:
from the  head down I was paralyzed in  symmetrical patches  separated  by a
geography of  weak  tactility.  When  in  the course  of that first week  my
fingers  "awoke"  (a  circumstance  that  stupefied  and  even  angered  the
Lecouchant sages, experts in dementia paralydea,  to such a degree that they
advised  you   to  rush  me   off  to  some  more  exotic   and  broadminded
institution---which  you did) I  derived much  entertainment from mapping my
sensitive spots which were always situated in exact opposition, e.g. on both
sides of my forehead, on the jaws, orbital parts, breasts, testicles, knees,
flanks. At an average stage of observation, the average size of each spot of
life never exceeded that of  Australia (I  felt gigantic at times) and never
dwindled (when I dwindled myself) below the diameter of  a medal  of  medium
merit, at which <242> level I  perceived my entire skin as that of a leopard
painted by a meticulous lunatic from a broken home.
     In  some connection with those  "tactile symmetries" (about  which I am
still  attempting to correspond  with a not too responsive  medical journal,
swarming  with  Freudians),  I  would  like  to  place the  first  pictorial
compositions, flat, primitive images, which occurred in duplicate, right and
left of my traveling body,  on the opposite panels of my hallucinations. If,
for example, Annette boarded a bus with her empty basket  on the left  of my
being, she  came  out of that bus  on my right with a load of  vegetables, a
royal  cauliflower  presiding over the  cucumbers. As the  days passed,  the
symmetries got replaced by more elaborate inter-responses, or reappeared  in
miniature  within  the  limits  of  a given image. Picturesque episodes  now
accompanied my mysterious voyage. I glimpsed Bel rummaging after work amidst
a heap of naked babies at the  communal  day-nursery, in frantic  search for
her own firstborn, now ten months old,  and recognizable  by the symmetrical
blotches of  red  eczema  on  its  sides and little legs. A  glossy-haunched
swimmer used one hand  to brush away from her face wet strands of  hair, and
pushed with the  other (on the other side  of my  mind) the raft on which  I
lay, a  naked  old man with a rag around his foremast, gliding supine into a
full moon  whose snaky reflections  rippled  among the water lilies.  A long
tunnel  engulfed  me,  half-promised  a  circlet of  light at its  far  end,
half-kept the promise, revealing a publicity sunset, but I never reached it,
the tunnel faded, and a familiar mist took  over  again. As was  "done" that
season, groups of smart idlers visited my  bed,  which  had slowed down in a
display hall  where Ivor  Black  in the  role of a fashionable  young doctor
demonstrated  me  to  three actresses playing  society  belles: their skirts
ballooned as they settled down  on white chairs, and one lady, indicating my
groin, would  have touched me with  her  cold fan, had <243> not the learned
Moor struck it aside  with his ivory pointer, whereupon my raft  resumed its
lone glide.
     Whoever charted my destiny had moments of  triteness. At times my swift
course  became  a celestial affair at  an  allegorical  altitude  that  bore
unpleasant religious  connotations--unless simply  reflecting transportation
of  cadavers  by  commercial aircraft.  A  certain  notion  of  daytime  and
nighttime, in more or less regular alternation, gradually established itself
in  my mind as my grotesque adventure reached its  final phase. Diurnal  and
nocturnal effects  were  rendered obliquely at first  with  nurses and other
stagehands going to  extreme lengths in the  handling of movable properties,
such  as  the bouncing of  fake starlight  from  reflecting surfaces or  the
daubing of dawns here and there at suitable intervals. It had never occurred
to me before that, historically, art, or  at least  artifacts, had preceded,
not followed, nature; yet that is exactly what happened in my case. Thus, in
the mute remoteness clouding around me, recognizable sounds were produced at
first optically in the  pale margin of the film track  during the taking  of
the  actual  scene  (say,  the  ceremony  of scientific feeding); eventually
something  about the running ribbon  tempted the ear to replace the eye; and
finally hearing returned--with a vengeance. The first crisp nurse-rustle was
a thunderclap; my first belly wamble, a crash of cymbals.
     I owe thwarted obituarists, as well as all lovers of medical lore, some
clinical elucidations. My lungs and my heart acted, or were induced to  act,
normally;  so  did my  bowels, those buffoons  in  the cast  of  our private
miracle plays. My frame lay flat as in an  Old  Master's Lesson of  Anatomy.
The prevention  of bedsores,  especially  at  the Lecouchant  Hospital,  was
nothing  short  of  a  mania, explicable,  maybe,  by a  desperate  urge  to
substitute pillows and various mechanical devices for the rational treatment
of an unfathomable disease. My body was  "sleeping"  as a giant's foot might
be "sleeping"; more accurately,  however, <244> my condition was  a horrible
form of protracted (twenty  nights!)  insomnia with my mind  as consistently
alert as that of the Sleepless Slav in some circus show I once read about in
The Graphic. I  was not even a mummy; I was--in the beginning, at least--the
longitudinal section of a mummy,  or rather the abstraction of its  thinnest
possible  cut. What  about  the  head?--readers  who  are  all head must  be
clamoring to be told. Well, my brow was like misty glass (before two lateral
spots got cleared somehow or other); my mouth stayed mute and benumbed until
I realized I could  feel my tongue--feel it in the phantom form of the  kind
of air bladder that might help a fish with his respiration problems, but was
useless to me. I  had some sense of duration and direction--two things which
a beloved creature seeking to  help a poor  madman with the whitest of lies,
affirmed,  in  a  later  world,  were  quite  separate phases  of  a  single
phenomenon.  Most  of  my  cerebral  aqueduct  (this  is  getting  a  little
technical) seemed to descend wedgewise, after some derailment or inundation,
into the structure housing its closest ally--which  oddly enough is also our
humblest sense, the easiest and  sometimes  the most gratifying  to dispense
with--and, oh,  how  I  cursed it  when I  could not  close  it to ether  or
excrements, and,  oh (cheers  for  old  "oh"),  how I thanked  it for crying
"Coffee!" or "Plage!" (because an anonymous drug smelled like the cream Iris
used to rub my back with in Cannice half a century ago!).
     Now comes a snaggy bit: I do  not know  if my eyes remained always wide
open "in a glazed look of arrogant stupor" as imagined by a reporter who got
as far as  the  corridor  desk.  But I  doubt very  much I could  blink--and
without  the  oil of blinking the motor of sight could hardly have run. Yet,
somehow, during my glide down those illusory canals and cloudways, and right
over another  continent,  I did glimpse  off  and on,  through  subpalpebral
mirages, the shadow  of a hand or the glint of an instrument. <245> As to my
world  of sound, it  remained  solid fantasy.  I heard strangers  discuss in
droning  voices all the books I  had  written or thought  I had written, for
everything they mentioned,  titles,  the  names  of characters, every phrase
they  shouted  was preposterously  distorted  by  the  delirium  of  demonic
scholarship. Louise  regaled the company with one of her good stories--those
I called  "name hangers" because  they  only  seemed  to reach this or  that
point--a quid pro quo, say,  at a party--but were  really meant to introduce
some high-born "old friend" of hers, or a glamorous politician, or  a cousin
of that politician. Learned papers were read at fantastic symposiums. In the
year of  grace  1798, Gavrila Petrovich Kamenev,  a gifted  young poet,  was
heard chuckling as he composed his  Ossianic pastiche Slovo o polku Igoreve.
Somewhere in Abyssinia drunken Rimbaud was  reciting  to a surprised Russian
traveler the  poem Le Tramway ivre (...En  blouse  rouge,  þ  face en pis de
vache,  le  bourreau  me  trancha  la téte aussi...).  Or else I'd hear  the
pressed repeater hiss in a pocket  of my  brain and tell the time, the rime,
the meter that who could dream I'd hear again?
     I  should  also point  out that my flesh  was  in fairly good shape: no
ligaments torn, no muscles trapped;  my  spinal cord may  have been slightly
bruised during  the absurd  collapse that precipitated my voyage  but it was
still there, lining me, shading my being, as good as the primitive structure
of  some  translucent  aquatic creature.  Yet  the  medical treatment  I was
subjected to (especially at the  Lecouchant  place) implied--insofar as  now
reconstructed--that my injuries were all physical, only physical, and  could
be only  dealt  with by physical means. I am not speaking of modern alchemy,
of magic philtres injected  into me--those  did, perhaps,  act  somehow, not
only on my body, but also on the divinity  installed within me, as might the
suggestions of ambitious shamans or quaking councilors upon  a  mad emperor;
what I cannot get over  are such imprinted images <246> as the damned braces
and belts that held me stretched on my back (preventing me from walking away
with my  rubber  raft under my arm as I felt I could),  or  even  worse  the
man-made electric leeches, which masked executioners attached to my head and
limbs--until chased away by  that saint in  Catapult,  Cal., Professor H. P.
Sloan, who was on the brink of suspecting,  just when I started to get well,
that I might be cured--might  have been cured!--in a  trice by hypnosis  and
some sense of humor on the hypnotist's part. <247>

3

     To  the  best  of my knowledge my Christian  name was  Vadim; so was my
father's. The U.S.A. passport recently issued me--an elegant  booklet with a
golden design on its green cover  perforated by the number 00678638--did not
mention  my  ancestral  title;  this  had figured,  though,  on  my  British
passport, throughout its several editions. Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, before
the last one was mutilated beyond recognition by friendly forgers, practical
jokers at  heart.  All this I  re-gleaned one night, as certain brain cells,
which  had been frozen,  now  bloomed  anew. Others, however, still puckered
like retarded buds, and although I  could freely twiddle (for the first time
since I collapsed) my toes under  the  bedclothes, I just could not make out
in that  darker corner  of  my  mind  what  surname  came  after  my Russian
patronymic. I felt  it began with an N, as did the  term for the beautifully
spontaneous arrangement of words at moments of inspiration like the rouleaux
of red corpuscles in freshly drawn blood under the microscope--a word I once
used in See under Real, but  could not remember either, something to do with
a roll of coins, capitalistic metaphor, eh, Marxy? Yes, I definitely felt my
family name began with an N and bore an odious resemblance to the surname or
pseudonym  of  a  presumably  <248>  notorious (Notorov?  No) Bulgarian,  or
Babylonian, or, maybe,  Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained èmigrès
from some other galaxy constantly confused  me; but whether it was something
on the lines  of Nebesnyy or Nabedrin or Nablidze (Nablidze? Funny) I simply
could  not  tell.  I  preferred  not  to  overtax  my  willpower  (go  away,
Naborcroft) and so gave up trying--or  perhaps it  began with a B  and the n
just clung  to it like some desperate parasite? (Bonidze? Blonsky?--No, that
belonged to the BINT business.)  Did I have some  princely  Caucasian blood?
Why had allusions  to a Mr. Nabarro, a British politician,  cropped up among
the  clippings I received  from England concerning the London edition  of  A
Kingdom by the Sea (lovely lilting title)? Why did Ivor call me "MacNab"?
     Without  a  name I  remained unreal  in  regained  consciousness.  Poor
Vivian, poor Vadim Vadimovich, was but a figment  of somebody's--not even my
own--imagination.   One  dire  detail:  in  rapid  Russian   speech  longish
name-and-patronymic combinations  undergo  familiar slurrings:  thus  "Pavel
Pavlovich," Paul, son of Paul, when  casually interpellated is made to sound
like  "Pahlpahlych"  and  the  hardly   utterable,  tapeworm-long  "Vladimir
Vladimirovich" becomes colloquially similar to "Vadim Vadimych."
     I gave up. And when  I  gave up for good  my sonorous  surname crept up
from behind, like a prankish child that makes  a nodding  old nurse  jump at
his sudden shout.
     There remained other problems.  Where was I? What about a little light?
How did one tell by touch a lamp's button from a bell's button in  the dark.
What  was, apart from my  own identity, that other  person, promised to  me,
belonging  to me? I could  locate the bluish blinds of twin windows. Why not
uncurtain them?

     Tak, vdol' naklñnnogo luchà
     Ya vùshel iz paralichà.
     <249>

     Along a slanting ray, like this
     I slipped out of paralysis.

--if "paralysis" is not too strong a word for the condition that mimicked it
(with some obscure  help from  the  patient): a rather  quaint  but not  too
serious psychological disorder--or at least  so  it  seemed  in lighthearted
retrospect.
     I  was prepared by certain indices  for spells of dizziness  and nausea
but I did not  expect my legs  to misbehave as they did, when--unbuckled and
alone--I  blithely stepped  out  of  bed  on that first night  of  recovery.
Beastly  gravity humiliated  me  at  once: my legs telescoped under  me. The
crash brought in the night  nurse,  and she helped me back  into  bed. After
that I slept. Never before or since did I sleep more deliciously.
     One of  the windows  was wide  open when I woke up. My  mind and my eye
were  by  now sufficiently  keen to make out the medicaments  on my  bedside
table. Amidst  its  miserable population I noticed a few  stranded travelers
from another world: a transparent envelope with a nonmasculine  handkerchief
found and  laundered by the  staff; a diminutive golden pencil belonging  to
the eyelet  of a  congeric  agenda  in a vanity  bag;  a  pair of  harlequin
sunglasses, which  for some reason  suggested  not  protection  from a harsh
light  but  the  masking  of  tear-swollen lids.  The  combination of  those
ingredients  resulted in  a dazzling  pyrotechny of sense;  and next  moment
(coincidence was  still  on  my side) the  door  of  my room  moved: a small
soundless move that came to a brief soundless stop and then was continued in
a  slow,  infinitely slow  sequence of  suspension dots in  diamond  type. I
emitted a bellow of joy, and Reality entered. <250>

4

     With   the  following  gentle  scene  I   propose   to  conclude   this
autobiography. I had been wheeled into  the rose-twined  gallery for Special
Convalescents in the second and last  of my hospitals. You were reclining in
a lounge chair beside me, in  much the same attitude in which I had left you
on June 15, at Gandora. You  complained gaily that  a woman in the room next
to yours on the ground floor of the annex had a phonograph playing bird-call
records, by  means  of  which  she hoped  to make  the mockingbirds  of  the
hospital park imitate the nightingales and thrushes of her place in Devon or
Dorset. You knew very well I wished to find out something. We both hedged. I
drew  your attention  to  the  beauty  of  the  climbing  roses.  You  said:
"Everything is beautiful against the  sky (na fone neba)" and apologized for
the "aphorism." At last, in the  most casual of  tones I asked  how  you had
liked the fragment of Ardis I gave you to read just before taking the little
walk  from which I had returned only now,  three weeks  later, in  Catapult,
California.
     You  looked away. You considered the  mauve mountains. You cleared your
throat and bravely replied that you had not liked it at all.
     Meaning she would not marry a madman? <251>
     Meaning she  would  marry  a  sane  man who  could  tell the difference
between time and space.
     Explain.
     She was awfully  eager to read the  rest of  the manuscript,  but  that
fragment ought to  be  scrapped. It  was  written as  nicely as everything I
wrote but happened to be marred by a fatal philosophical flaw.
     Young, graceful,  tremendously charming, hopelessly  homely Mary Middle
came to say I would have to be back when the  bell  tinkled for tea. In five
minutes. Another nurse signaled  to her  from  the  sun-striped end  of  the
gallery, and she fluttered away.
     The place (you said) was full of  dying American bankers  and perfectly
healthy Englishmen. I  had  described  a person in the  act of imagining his
recent evening stroll.  A stroll  from  point  H (Home,  Hotel) to  point  P
(Parapet,   Pinewood).   Imagining   fluently   the   sequence   of  wayside
events--child swinging in villa garden, lawn sprinkler rotating, dog chasing
a  wet ball. The narrator reaches point P in his mind, stops--and is puzzled
and upset (quite unreasonably as  we shall  see) by being unable to  execute
mentally the about-face that would turn direction HP into direction PH.
     "His mistake," she continued, "his  morbid mistake is quite simple.  He
has confused direction and  duration. He speaks of  space but he means time.
His impressions along the HP route (dog overtakes ball, car pulls up at next
villa) refer to a series of  time events, and not to blocks of painted space
that a child can rearrange in any old way.  It  has  taken him time--even if
only  a few moments--to cover distance HP in thought. By the time he reaches
P he has  accumulated duration,  he is saddled with  it! Why then  is  it so
extraordinary that he cannot imagine himself turning on his heel? Nobody can
imagine  in physical  terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time  is
not  reversible. <252>  Reverse motion  is  used  in films  only  for  comic
effects--the resurrection of a smashed bottle of beer--
     "Or rum," I put in, and here the bell tinkled.
     "That's all very  well,"  I  said, as  I groped for  the levers  of  my
wheelchair,  and  you helped me to roll back  to my room. "And I'm grateful,
I'm touched, I'm cured!  Your  explanation, however, is  merely an exquisite
quibble--and you know it; but never mind, the notion of trying to twirl time
is a trouvaille; it  resembles (kissing  the hand resting on my sleeve)  the
neat formula a physicist finds to keep people happy until (yawning, crawling
back into bed) until the next chap  snatches the chalk. I  had been promised
some  rum  with my  tea--Ceylon and Jamaica,  the sibling  islands (mumbling
comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away)--" <253>


[notes]


     Italics, <page  numbers>, [text in square brackets],  ISO8859-1 accents
(àáþãÈèéõìíîÆñòæçýù)

     Possible misprints in the book (left as is):

     Words: "recolections",  "sharlatanchy" (Russian: "sharlatany"?),  "Anna
Ivanova" (instead of "Ivanovna"?)
     No closing quote after the phrases:
     "resurrection of a smashed bottle of beer--"
     "tucked in your adorable daughter"
     Extra two lines "marked by a marvelous surge of the exiled arts, and it
would be pretentious and foolish  of me not to admit that whatever" repeated
after "and especially the cinema. I soon realized that" -- lines excluded in
this text.
Last-modified: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 18:15:45 GMT










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