Pnin (6 page)

“Look,” said Joan Saturday morning to her husband, “I have decided to tell Timofey they will have the house to themselves today from two to five. We must give those pathetic creatures every possible chance. There are things I can do in town, and you will be dropped at the library.”

“It so happens,” answered Laurence, “that I have not the least intention to be dropped or otherwise moved anywhere today. Besides, it is highly improbable they will need eight rooms for their reunion.”

Pnin put on his new brown suit (paid for by the Cremona lecture) and, after a hurried lunch at The Egg and We, walked through the snow-patched park to the Waindell bus station, arriving there almost an hour too early. He did not bother to puzzle out why exactly Liza had felt the urgent need to see him on her way back from visiting St. Bartholomew’s, the preparatory school near Boston that her son would go to next fall: all he knew was that a flood of happiness foamed and rose behind the invisible barrier that was to burst open any moment now. He met five buses, and in each of them clearly made out Liza waving to him through a window
as she and the other passengers started to file out, and then one bus after another was drained and she had not turned up. Suddenly he heard her sonorous voice (“
Timofey, zdrastvuy!
”) behind him, and, wheeling around, saw her emerge from the only Greyhound he had decided would not bring her. What change could our friend discern in her? What change could there be, good God! There she was. She always felt hot and buoyant, no matter the cold, and now her sealskin coat was wide open on her frilled blouse as she hugged Pnin’s head and he felt the grapefruit fragrance of her neck, and kept muttering: “
Nu, nu, vot i horosho, nu vot
”—mere verbal heart props—and she cried out: “Oh, he has splendid new teeth!” He helped her into a taxi, her bright diaphanous scarf caught on something, and Pnin slipped on the pavement, and the taximan said “Easy,” and took her bag from him, and everything had happened before, in this exact sequence.

It was, she told him as they drove up Park Street, a school in the English tradition. No, she did not want to eat anything, she had had a big lunch at Albany. It was a “very fancy” school—she said this in English—the boys played a kind of indoor tennis with their hands, between walls, and there would be in his form a—(she produced with false nonchalance a well-known American name which meant nothing to Pnin because it was not that of a poet or a president). “By the way,” interrupted Pnin, ducking and pointing, “you can just see a corner of the campus from here.” All this was due (“Yes, I see,
vizhu, vizhu, kampus kak kampus:
The usual kind of thing”), all this, including a scholarship, was due to the influence of Dr. Maywood (“You know, Timofey, some day you should write him a word, just a
little sign of courtesy”). The Principal, a clergyman, had shown her the trophies Bernard had won there as a boy. Eric of course had wanted Victor to go to a public school but had been overruled. The Reverend Hopper’s wife was the niece of an English Earl.

“Here we are. This is my
palazzo
,” said jocose Pnin, who had not been able to concentrate on her rapid speech.

They entered—and he suddenly felt that this day which he had been looking forward to with such fierce longing was passing much too quickly—was going, going, would be gone in a few minutes. Perhaps, he thought, if she said right away what she wanted of him the day might slow down and be really enjoyed.

“What a gruesome place,
kakoy zhutkiy dom,
” she said, sitting on the chair near the telephone and taking off her galoshes—such familiar movements! “Look at that aquarelle with the minarets. They must be terrible people.”

“No,” said Pnin, “they are my friends.”

“My dear Timofey,” she said, as he escorted her upstairs, “you have had some pretty awful friends in your time.”

“And here is my room,” said Pnin.

“I think I’ll lie on your virgin bed, Timofey. And I’ll recite you some verses in a minute. That hellish headache of mine is seeping back again. I felt so splendid all day.”

“I have some aspirin.”

“Uhn-uhn,” she said, and this acquired negative stood out strangely against her native speech.

He turned away as she started to take off her shoes,
and the sound they made toppling to the floor reminded him of very old days.

She lay back, black-skirted, white-bloused, brown-haired, with one pink hand over her eyes.

“How is everything with you?” asked Pnin (have her say what she wants of me, quick!) as he sank into the white rocker near the radiator.

“Our work is very interesting,” she said, still shielding her eyes, “but I must tell you I don’t love Eric any more. Our relations have disintegrated. Incidentally Eric dislikes his child. He says he is the land father and you, Timofey, are the water father.”

Pnin started to laugh: he rolled with laughter, the rather juvenile rocker fairly cracking under him. His eyes were like stars and quite wet.

She looked at him curiously for an instant from under her plump hand—and went on:

“Eric is one hard emotional block in his attitude toward Victor. I don’t know how many times the boy must have killed him in his dreams. And, with Eric, verbalization—I have long noticed—confuses problems instead of clarifying them. He is a very difficult person. What is your salary, Timofey?”

He told her.

“Well,” she said, “it is not grand. But I suppose you can even lay something aside—it is more than enough for your needs, for your microscopic needs, Timofey.”

Her abdomen tightly girdled under the black skirt jumped up two or three times with mute, cozy, good-natured reminiscential irony—and Pnin blew his nose, shaking his head the while, in voluptuous, rapturous mirth.

“Listen to my latest poem,” she said, her hands now
along her sides as she lay perfectly straight on her back, and she sang out rhythmically, in long-drawn, deep-voiced tones:

“He is a very interesting man,” she went on, without any interval. “Practically English, in fact. He flew a bomber in the war and now he is with a firm of brokers who have no sympathy with him and do not understand him. He comes from an ancient family. His father was a dreamer, had a floating casino, you know, and all that, but was ruined by some Jewish gangsters in Florida and voluntarily went to prison for another man; it is a family of heroes.”

She paused. The silence in the little room was punctuated
rather than broken by the throbbing and tinkling in those whitewashed organ pipes.

“I made Eric a complete report,” Liza continued with a sigh. “And now he keeps assuring me he can cure me if I co-operate. Unfortunately I am also co-operating with George.”

She pronounced George as in Russian—both
g
’s hard, both
e
’s longish.

“Well,
c’est la vie
, as Eric so originally says. How can you sleep with that string of cobweb hanging from the ceiling?” She looked at her wrist watch. “Goodness, I must catch the bus at four-thirty. You must call a taxi in a minute. I have something to say to you of the utmost importance.”

Here it was coming at last—so late.

She wanted Timofey to lay aside every month a little money for the boy—because she could not ask Bernard Maywood now—and she might die—and Eric did not care what happened—and somebody ought to send the lad a small sum now and then, as if coming from his mother—pocket money, you know—he would be among rich boys. She would write Timofey giving him an address and some more details. Yes—she never doubted that Timofey was a darling (“
Nu kakoy zhe tï dushka
”). And now where was the bathroom? And would he please telephone for the taxi?

“Incidentally,” she said, as he was helping her into her coat and as usual searching with a frown for the fugitive armhole while she pawed and groped, “you know, Timofey, this brown suit of yours is a mistake: a gentleman does not wear brown.”

He saw her off, and walked back through the park. To hold her, to keep her—just as she was—with her cruelty,
with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don’t believe it, but suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in me and in life—

He seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to great truths) on the verge of a simple solution of the universe but was interrupted by an urgent request. A squirrel under a tree had seen Pnin on the path. In one sinuous tendril-like movement, the intelligent animal climbed up to the brim of a drinking fountain and, as Pnin approached, thrust its oval face toward him with a rather coarse spluttering sound, its cheeks puffed out. Pnin understood and after some fumbling he found what had to be pressed for the necessary results. Eying him with contempt, the thirsty rodent forthwith began to sample the stocky sparkling pillar of water, and went on drinking for a considerable time. “She has fever, perhaps,” thought Pnin, weeping quietly and freely, and all the time politely pressing the contraption down while trying not to meet the unpleasant eye fixed upon him. Its thirst quenched, the squirrel departed without the least sign of gratitude.

The water father continued upon his way, came to the end of the path, then turned into a side street where there was a small bar of log-cabin design with garnet glass in its casement windows.

When Joan with a bagful of provisions, two magazines, and three parcels, came home at a quarter past five, she found in the porch mailbox a special-delivery air-mail letter from her daughter. More than three weeks had elapsed since Isabel had briefly written her parents to say that, after a honeymoon in Arizona, she had safely reached her husband’s home town. Juggling with her packages, Joan tore the envelope open. It was an ecstatically happy letter, and she gulped it down, everything swimming a little in the radiance of her relief. On the outside of the front door she felt, then saw with brief surprise, Pnin’s keys, like a bit of his fondest viscera, dangling with their leathern case from the lock; she used them to open the door, and as soon as she had entered she heard, coming from the pantry, a loud anarchistic knocking—cupboards being opened and shut one after the other.

She put her bag and parcels down on the sideboard in the kitchen and asked in the direction of the pantry: “What are you looking for, Timofey?”

He came out of there, darkly flushed, wild-eyed, and she was shocked to see that his face was a mess of un-wiped tears.

“I search, John, for the viscous and sawdust,” he said tragically.

“I am afraid there is no soda,” she answered with her lucid Anglo-Saxon restraint. “But there is plenty of whisky in the dining-room cabinet. However, I suggest we both have some nice hot tea instead.”

He made the Russian “relinquishing” gesture.

“No, I don’t want anything at all,” he said, and sat down at the kitchen table with an awful sigh.

She sat down next to him and opened one of the magazines she had bought.

“We are going to look at some pictures, Timofey.”

“I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.”

“You just relax, Timofey, and I’ll do the explaining. Oh, look—I like this one. Oh, this is very clever. We have here a combination of two ideas—the Desert Island and the Girl in the Puff. Now, look, Timofey—please”—he reluctantly put on his reading glasses—“this is a desert island with a lone palm, and this is a bit of broken raft, and this is a shipwrecked mariner, and this is the ship’s cat he saved, and this here, on that rock—”

“Impossible,” said Pnin. “So small island, moreover with palm, cannot exist in such big sea.”

“Well, it exists here.”

“Impossible isolation,” said Pnin.

“Yes, but—Really, you are not playing fair, Timofey. You know perfectly well you agree with Lore that the world of the mind is based on a compromise with logic.”

“I have reservations,” said Pnin. “First of all, logic herself—”

“All right, I’m afraid we are wandering away from our little joke. Now, you look at the picture. So this is the mariner, and this is the pussy, and this is a rather wistful mermaid hanging around, and now look at the puffs right above the sailor and the pussy.”

“Atomic bomb explosion,” said Pnin sadly.

“No, not at all. It is something much funnier. You see,
these round puffs are supposed to be the projections of their thoughts. And now at last we are getting to the amusing part. The sailor imagines the mermaid as having a pair of legs, and the cat imagines her as all fish.”

“Lermontov,” said Pnin, lifting two fingers, “has expressed everything about mermaids in only two poems. I cannot understand American humor even when I am happy, and I must say—” He removed his glasses with trembling hands, elbowed the magazine aside, and, resting his head on his arm, broke into muffled sobs.

She heard the front door open and close, and a moment later Laurence peeped into the kitchen with facetious furtiveness. Joan’s right hand waved him away; her left directed him to the rainbow-rimmed envelope on top of the parcels. The private smile she flashed was a summary of Isabel’s letter; he grabbed it and, no more in jest, tiptoed out again.

Pnin’s unnecessarily robust shoulders continued to shake. She closed the magazine and for a minute studied its cover: toy-bright school tots, Isabel and the Hagen child, shade trees still off duty, a white spire, the Waindell bells.