The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (65 page)

The table was laid in the main avenue; Russian dappled sunlight played on the tablecloth. The housekeeper, wearing a gorget, her steely hair smoothly combed back, was already in the act of ladling out chocolate which the footmen were serving in dark-blue cups. At close range the Count looked his age: there were ashy streaks in his yellowish beard, and wrinkles fanned out from eye to temple; he had placed his foot on the edge of a garden bench and was making a fox terrier jump: the dog jumped not only very high, trying to hap the already wet ball he was holding, but actually contrived, while hanging in midair, to jerk itself still higher by an additional twist of its entire body. Countess Elizaveta Godunov, a tall rosy woman in a big wavery hat, was coming up from the garden with another lady to whom she was vivaciously talking, and making the Russian two-hand splash gesture of uncertain dismay. Ilya Ilyich stood with his bouquet and bowed. In this varicolored haze (as perceived by Innokentiy, who, despite having briefly rehearsed on the eve an attitude of democratic scorn, was overcorne
by the greatest embarrassment) there flickered young people, running children, somebody’s black shawl embroidered with gaudy poppies, a second fox terrier, and above all, above all, those eyes gliding through shine and shade, those features still indistinct but already threatening him with fatal fascination, the face of Tanya whose birthday was being feted.

Everybody was now seated. He found himself at the shade end of the long table, at which end convives did not indulge so much in mutual conversation as keep looking, all their heads turned in the same direction, at the brighter end where there was loud talk, and laughter, and a magnificent pink cake with a satiny glaze and sixteen candles, and the exclamations of children, and the barking of both dogs that had all but jumped onto the table—while here at this end the garlands of linden shade linked up people of the meanest rank: Ilya Ilyich, smiling in a sort of daze; an ethereal but ugly damsel whose shyness expressed itself in onion sweat; a decrepit French governess with nasty eyes who held in her lap under the table a tiny invisible creature that now and then emitted a tinkle; and so forth. Innokentiy’s direct neighbor happened to be the estate steward’s brother, a blockhead, a bore, and a stutterer; Innokentiy talked to him only because silence would have been worse, so that despite the paralyzing nature of the conversation, he desperately tried to keep it up; later, however, when he became a frequent visitor, and chanced to run into the poor fellow, Innokentiy never spoke to him, shunning him as a kind of snare or shameful memory.

Rotating in slow descent, the winged fruit of a linden lit on the tablecloth.

At the nobility’s end Godunov-Cherdyntsev raised his voice, speaking across the table to a very old lady in a lacy gown, and as he spoke encircled with one arm the graceful waist of his daughter who stood near and kept tossing up a rubber ball on her palm. For quite a time Innokentiy tussled with a luscious morsel of cake that had come to rest beyond the edge of his plate. Finally, following an awkward poke, the damned raspberry stuff rolled and tumbled under the table (where we shall leave it). His father either smiled vacantly or licked his mustache. Somebody asked him to pass the biscuits; he burst into happy laughter and passed them. All at once, right above Innokentiy’s ear, there came a rapid gasping voice: unsmilingly, and still holding that ball, Tanya was asking him to join her and her cousins; all hot and confused, he struggled to rise from table, pushing against his neighbor in the process of disengaging his right leg from under the shared garden bench.

When speaking of her, people exclaimed, “What a pretty girl!” She
had light-gray eyes, velvet-black eyebrows, a largish, pale, tender mouth, sharp incisors, and—when she was unwell or out of humor—one could distinguish the dark little hairs above her lip. She was inordinately fond of all summer games, tennis, badminton, croquet, doing everything deftly, with a kind of charming concentration—and, of course, that was the end of the artless afternoons of fishing with Vasiliy, who was greatly perplexed by the change and would pop up in the vicinity of the school toward evening, beckoning Innokentiy with a hesitating grin and holding up at face level a canful of worms. At such moments Innokentiy shuddered inwardly as he sensed his betrayal of the people’s cause. Meanwhile he derived not much joy from the company of his new friends. It so happened that he was not really admitted to the center of their existence, being kept on its green periphery, taking part in open-air amusements, but never being invited into the house. This infuriated him; he longed to be asked for lunch or dinner just to have the pleasure of haughtily refusing; and, in general, he remained constantly on the alert, sullen, suntanned, and shaggy, the muscles of his clenched jaws twitching—and feeling that every word Tanya said to her playmates cast an insulting little shadow in his direction, and, good God, how he hated them all, her boy cousins, her girlfriends, the frolicsome dogs. Abruptly, everything dimmed in noiseless disorder and vanished, and there he was, in the deep blackness of an August night, sitting on a bench at the bottom of the park and waiting, his breast prickly because of his having stuffed between shirt and skin the note which, as in an old novel, a barefooted little girl had brought him from the manor. The laconic style of the assignation led him to suspect a humiliating practical joke, yet he succumbed to the summons—and rightly so: a light crunch of footfalls detached itself from the even rustle of the night. Her arrival, her incoherent speech, her nearness struck him as miraculous; the sudden intimate touch of her cold nimble fingers amazed his chastity. A huge, rapidly ascending moon burned through the trees. Shedding torrents of tears and blindly nuzzling him with salt-tasting lips, Tanya told him that on the following day her mother was taking her to the Crimea, that everything was finished, and—oh, how could he have been so obtuse! “Don’t go anywhere, Tanya!” he pleaded, but a gust of wind drowned his words, and she sobbed even more violently. When she had hurried away he remained on the bench without moving, listening to the hum in his ears, and presently walked back in the direction of the bridge along the country road that seemed to stir in the dark, and then came the war years—ambulance work, his father’s death—and after that, a general disintegration of things, but gradually life picked up again, and by
1920 he was already the assistant of Professor Behr at a spa in Bohemia, and three or four years later worked, under the same lung specialist, in Savoy, where one day, somewhere near Chamonix, Innokentiy happened to meet a young Soviet geologist; they got into conversation, and the latter mentioned that it was here, half a century ago, that Fedchenko, the great explorer of Fergana, had died the death of an ordinary tourist; how strange (the geologist added) that it should always turn out that way: death gets so used to pursuing fearless men in wild mountains and deserts that it also keeps coming at them in jest, without any special intent to harm, in all other circumstances, and to its own surprise catches them napping. Thus perished Fedchenko, and Severtsev, and Godunov-Cherdyntsev, as well as many foreigners of classic fame—Speke, Dumont d’Urville. And after several years more spent in medical research, far from the cares and concerns of political expatriation, Innokentiy happened to be in Paris for a few hours for a business interview with a colleague, and was already running downstairs, gloving one hand, when, on one of the landings, a tall stoop-shouldered lady emerged from the lift—and he at once recognized Countess Elizaveta Godunov-Cherdyntsev. “Of course I remember you, how could I not remember?” she said, gazing not at his face but over his shoulder as if somebody were standing behind him (she had a slight squint). “Well, come in, my dear,” she continued, recovering from a momentary trance, and with the point of her shoe turned back a corner of the thick doormat, replete with dust, to get the key. Innokentiy entered after her, tormented by the fact that he could not recall what he had been told exactly about the how and the when of her husband’s death.

And a few moments later Tanya came home, all her features fixed more clearly now by the etching needle of years, with a smaller face and kinder eyes; she immediately lit a cigarette, laughing, and without the least embarrassment recalling that distant summer, while he kept marveling that neither Tanya nor her mother mentioned the dead explorer and spoke so simply about the past, instead of bursting into the awful sobs that he, a stranger, kept fighting back—or were those two displaying, perhaps, the self-control peculiar to their class? They were soon joined by a pale dark-haired little girl about ten years of age: “This is my daughter, come here, darling,” said Tanya, putting her cigarette butt, now stained with lipstick, into a seashell that served as an ashtray. Then her husband, Ivan Ivanovich Kutaysov, came home, and the Countess, meeting him in the next room, was heard to identify their visitor, in her domestic French brought over from Russia, as
“le fils du maître d’école chez nous au village,”
which reminded Innokentiy
of Tanya saying once in his presence to a girlfriend of hers whom she wanted to notice his very shapely hands:
“Regarde ses mains”;
and now, listening to the melodious, beautifully idiomatic Russian in which the child replied to Tanya’s questions, he caught himself thinking, malevolently and quite absurdly, Aha, there is no longer the money to teach the kids foreign languages!—for it did not occur to him at that moment that in those émigré times, in the case of a Paris-born child going to a French school, this Russian language represented
the
idlest and best luxury.

The Leshino topic was falling apart; Tanya, getting it all wrong, insisted that he used to teach her the pre-Revolution songs of radical students, such as the one about “the despot who feasts in his rich palace hall while destiny’s hand has already begun to trace the dread words on the wall.” “In other words, our first
stengazeta”
(Soviet wall gazette), remarked Kutaysov, a great wit. Tanya’s brother was mentioned: he lived in Berlin, and the Countess started to talk about him. Suddenly Innokentiy grasped a wonderful fact: nothing is lost, nothing whatever; memory accumulates treasures, stored-up secrets grow in darkness and dust, and one day a transient visitor at a lending library wants a book that has not once been asked for in twenty-two years. He got up from his seat, made his adieus, was not detained overeffusively. How strange that his knees should be trembling. That was really a shattering experience. He crossed the square, entered a café, ordered a drink, briefly rose to remove his own squashed hat from under him. What a dreadful feeling of uneasiness. He felt that way for several reasons. In the first place, because Tanya had remained as enchanting and as invulnerable as she had been in the past.

O
LGA
, of whom we are about to speak, was born in the year 1900, in a wealthy, carefree family of nobles. A pale little girl in a white sailor suit, with a side parting in her chestnut hair and such merry eyes that everyone kissed her there, she was deemed a beauty since childhood. The purity of her profile, the expression of her closed lips, the silkiness of her tresses that reached to the small of her back—all this was enchanting indeed.

Her childhood passed festively, securely, and gaily, as was the custom in our country since the days of old. A sunbeam falling on the cover of a
Bibliothèque Rose
volume at the family estate, the classical hoarfrost of the Saint Petersburg public gardens.… A supply of memories, such as these, comprised her sole dowry when she left Russia in the spring of 1919. Everything happened in full accord with the style of the period. Her mother died of typhus, her brother was executed by the firing squad. All these are ready-made formulae, of course, the usual dreary small talk, but it all did happen, there is no other way of saying it, and it’s no use turning up your nose.

Well, then, in 1919 we have a grown-up young lady, with a pale, broad face that overdid things in terms of the regularity of its features, but just the same very lovely. Tall, with soft breasts, she always wears a black jumper and a scarf around her white neck and holds an English cigarette in her slender-fingered hand with a prominent little bone just above the wrist.

Yet there was a time in her life, at the end of 1916 or so, when at a summer resort near the family estate there was no schoolboy who did not plan to shoot himself because of her, there was no university student who would not … In a word, there had been a special magic about her, which, had it lasted, would have caused … would have wreaked … But somehow, nothing came of it. Things failed to develop,
or else happened to no purpose. There were flowers that she was too lazy to put in a vase, there were strolls in the twilight now with this one, now with another, followed by the blind alley of a kiss.

She spoke French fluently, pronouncing
les gens
(the servants) as if rhyming with
agence
and splitting
août
(August) in two syllables
(a-ou)
. She naively translated the Russian
grabezhi
(robberies) as
les grabuges
(quarrels) and used some archaic French locutions that had somehow survived in old Russian families, but she rolled her
r
’s most convincingly even though she had never been to France. Over the dresser in her Berlin room a postcard of Serov’s portrait of the Tsar was fastened with a pin with a fake turquoise head. She was religious, but at times a fit of giggles would overcome her in church. She wrote verse with that terrifying facility typical of young Russian girls of her generation: patriotic verse, humorous verse, any kind of verse at all.

For about six years, that is until 1926, she resided in a boarding-house on the Augsburgerstrasse (not far from the clock), together with her father, a broad-shouldered, beetle-browed old man with a yellowish mustache, and with tight, narrow trousers on his spindly legs. He had a job with some optimistic firm, was noted for his decency and kindness, and was never one to turn down a drink.