The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (29 page)

She gobbled up her slice of tart and Erwin, mumbling something, reached for his hat, which had fallen under the table.

“No, don’t go yet,” said Frau Monde, simultaneously beckoning the waiter. “I am offering you something. I am offering you a harem. And if you are still skeptical of my power—See that old gentleman in tortoiseshell glasses crossing the street? Let’s have him hit by a tram.”

Erwin, blinking, turned streetward. As the old man reached the tracks he took out his handkerchief and was about to sneeze into it. At the same instant, a tram flashed, screeched, and rolled past. From both sides of the avenue people rushed toward the tracks. The old gentleman, his glasses and handkerchief gone, was sitting on the asphalt. Someone helped him up. He stood, sheepishly shaking his head, brushing his coat sleeves with the palms of his hands, and wiggling one leg to test its condition.

“I said ‘hit by a tram,’ not ‘run over,’ which I might also have said,” remarked Frau Monde coolly, as she worked a thick cigarette into an enameled holder. “In any case, this is an example.”

She blew two streams of gray smoke through her nostrils and again fixed Erwin with her hard bright eyes.

“I liked you immediately. That shyness, that bold imagination. You
reminded me of an innocent, though hugely endowed, young monk whom I knew in Tuscany. This is my penultimate night. Being a woman has its points, but being an aging woman is hell, if you will pardon me the expression. Moreover, I made such mischief the other day—you will soon read about it in all the papers—that I had better get out of this life. Next Monday I plan to be born elsewhere. The Siberian slut I have chosen shall be the mother of a marvelous, monstrous man.”

“I see,” said Erwin.

“Well, my dear boy,” continued Frau Monde, demolishing her second piece of pastry, “I intend, before going, to have a bit of innocent fun. Here is what I suggest. Tomorrow, from noon to midnight you can select by your usual method” (with heavy humor Frau Monde sucked in her lower lip with a succulent hiss) “all the girls you fancy. Before my departure, I shall have them gathered and placed at your complete disposal. You will keep them until you have enjoyed them all. How does that strike you,
amico?”

Erwin dropped his eyes and said softly: “If it is all true, it would be a great happiness.”

“All right then,” she said, and licked the remains of whipped cream off her spoon: “All right. One condition, nevertheless, must be set. No, it is not what you are thinking. As I told you, I have arranged my next incarnation. Y
our
soul I do not require. Now this is the condition: the total of your choices between noon and midnight must be an odd number. This is essential and final. Otherwise I can do nothing for you.”

Erwin cleared his throat and asked, almost in a whisper: “But—how shall I know? Let’s say I’ve chosen one—what then?”

“Nothing,” said Frau Monde. “Your feeling, your desire, are a command in themselves. However, in order that you may be sure that the deal stands, I shall have a sign given you every time—a smile, not necessarily addressed to you, a chance word in the crowd, a sudden patch of color—that sort of thing. Don’t worry, you’ll know.”

“And—and—” mumbled Erwin, shuffling his feet under the table: “—and where is it all going to—uh—happen? I have only a very small room.”

“Don’t worry about that either,” said Frau Monde, and her corset creaked as she rose. “Now it’s time you went home. No harm in getting a good night’s rest. I’ll give you a lift.”

In the open taxi, with the dark wind streaming between starry sky and glistening asphalt, poor Erwin felt tremendously elated. Frau
Monde sat erect, her crossed legs forming a sharp angle, and the city lights flashed in her gemlike eyes.

“Here’s your house,” she said, touching Erwin’s shoulder. “
Au revoir.”

Many are the dreams that can be brought on by a mug of dark beer laced with brandy. Thus reflected Erwin when he awoke the next morning—he must have been drunk, and the talk with that funny female was all fancy. This rhetorical turn often occurs in fairy tales and, as in fairy tales, our young man soon realized he was wrong.

He went out just as the church clock had begun the laborious task of striking noon. Sunday bells joined in excitedly, and a bright breeze ruffled the Persian lilacs around the public lavatory in the small park near his house. Pigeons settled on an old stone
Herzog
or waddled along the sandbox where little children, their flannel behinds sticking up, were digging with toy scoops and playing with wooden trains. The lustrous leaves of the lindens moved in the wind; their ace-of-spades shadows quivered on the graveled path and climbed in an airy flock the trouser legs and skirts of the strollers, racing up and scattering over shoulders and faces, and once again the whole flock slipped back onto the ground, where, barely stirring, they lay in wait for the next foot passenger. In this variegated setting, Erwin noticed a girl in a white dress who had squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup with warts on its belly. The inclination of her head bared the back of her neck, revealing the ripple of her vertebrae, the fair bloom, the tender hollow between her shoulder blades, and the sun through the leaves found fiery strands in her chestnut hair. Still playing with the puppy, she half-rose from her haunches and clapped her hands above it. The fat little animal rolled over on the gravel, ran off a few feet, and toppled on its side. Erwin sat down on a bench and cast a timid and avid glance at her face.

He saw her so clearly, with such piercing and perfect force of perception, that, it seemed, nothing new about her features might have been disclosed by years of previous intimacy. Her palish lips twitched as if repeating every small soft movement of the puppy; her eyelashes beat so brightly as to look like the raylets of her beaming eyes; but
most enchanting, perhaps, was the curve of her cheek, now slightly in profile; that dipping line no words, of course, could describe. She started running, showing nice legs, and the puppy tumbled in her wake like a woolly ball. In sudden awareness of his miraculous might, Erwin caught his breath and awaited the promised signal. At that moment the girl turned her head as she ran and flashed a smile at the plump little creature that could barely keep up with her.

“Number one,” Erwin said to himself with unwonted complacency, and got up from his bench.

He followed the graveled path with scraping footsteps, in gaudy, reddish-yellow shoes worn only on Sundays. He left the oasis of the diminutive park and crossed over to Amadeus Boulevard. Did his eyes rove? Oh, they did. But, maybe, because the girl in white had somehow left a sunnier mark than any remembered impression, some dancing blind spot prevented him from finding another sweetheart. Soon, however, the blot dissolved, and near a glazed pillar with the tramway timetable our friend observed two young ladies—sisters, or even twins, to judge by their striking resemblance—who were discussing a streetcar route in vibrant, echoing voices. Both were small and slim, dressed in black silk, with saucy eyes and painted lips.

“That’s exactly the tram you want,” one of them kept saying.

“Both, please,” Erwin requested quickly.

“Yes, of course,” said the other in response to her sister’s words.

Erwin continued along the boulevard. He knew all the smart streets where the best possibilities existed.

“Three,” he said to himself. “Odd number. So far so good. And if it were midnight right now—”

Swinging her handbag she was coming down the steps of the Leilla, one of the best local hotels. Her big blue-chinned companion slowed down behind her to light his cigar. The lady was lovely, hatless, bobhaired, with a fringe on her forehead that made her look like a boy actor in the part of a damsel. As she went by, now closely escorted by our ridiculous rival, Erwin remarked simultaneously the crimson artificial rose in the lapel of her jacket and the advertisement on a billboard: a blond-mustachioed Turk and, in large letters, the word “
YES
!,” under which it said in smaller characters: “
I SMOKE ONLY THE ROSE OF THE ORIENT.”

That made four, divisible by two, and Erwin felt eager to restore the odd-number rigmarole without delay. In a lane off the boulevard there was a cheap restaurant which he sometimes frequented on Sundays when sick of his landlady’s fare. Among the girls he had happened
to note at one time or another there had been a wench who worked in that place. He entered and ordered his favorite dish: blood sausage and sauerkraut. His table was next to the telephone. A man in a bowler called a number and started to jabber as ardently as a hound that has picked up the scent of a hare. Erwin’s glance wandered toward the bar—and there was the girl he had seen three or four times before. She was beautiful in a drab, freckled way, if beauty can be drably russet. As she raised her bare arms to place her washed beer steins he saw the red tufts of her armpits.

“All right, all right!” barked the man into the mouthpiece.

With a sigh of relief enriched by a belch, Erwin left the restaurant. He felt heavy and in need of a nap. To tell the truth, the new shoes pinched like crabs. The weather had changed. The air was sultry. Great domed clouds grew and crowded one another in the hot sky. The streets were becoming deserted. One could feel the houses fill to the brim with Sunday-afternoon snores. Erwin boarded a streetcar.

The tram started to roll. Erwin turned his pale face, shining with sweat, to the window, but no girls walked. While paying his fare he noticed, on the other side of the aisle, a woman sitting with her back to him. She wore a black velvet hat, and a light frock patterned with intertwined chrysanthemums against a semitransparent mauve background through which showed the shoulder straps of her slip. The lady’s statuesque bulk made Erwin curious to glimpse her face. When her hat moved and, like a black ship, started to turn, he first looked away as usual, glanced in feigned abstraction at a youth sitting opposite him, at his own fingernails, at a red-cheeked little old man dozing in the rear of the car, and, having thus established a point of departure justifying further castings-around, Erwin shifted his casual gaze to the lady now looking his way. It was Frau Monde. Her full, no-longer-young face was blotchily flushed from the heat, her mannish eyebrows bristled above her piercing prismatic eyes, a slightly sardonic smile curled up the corners of her compressed lips.

“Good afternoon,” she said in her soft husky voice: “Come sit over here. Now we can have a chat. How are things going?”

“Only five,” replied Erwin with embarrassment.

“Excellent. An odd number. I would advise you to stop there. And at midnight—ah, yes, I don’t think I told you—at midnight you are to come to Hoffmann Street. Know where that is? Look between Number Twelve and Fourteen. The vacant lot there will be replaced by a villa with a walled garden. The girls of your choice will be waiting for you on cushions and rugs. I shall meet you at the garden gate—but it
is understood,” she added with a subtle smile, “I shan’t intrude. You’ll remember the address? There will be a brand-new streetlight in front of the gate.”

“Oh, one thing,” said Erwin, collecting his courage. “Let them be dressed at first—I mean let them look just as they were when I chose them—and let them be very merry and loving.”

“Why, naturally,” she replied, “everything will be just as you wish whether you tell me or not. Otherwise there was no point in starting the whole business,
n’est-ce pas?
Confess, though, my dear boy—you were on the brink of enrolling me in your harem. No, no, have no fear, I am kidding you. Well, that’s your stop. Very wise to call it a day. Five is fine. See you a few secs after midnight, ha-ha.”

Upon reaching his room, Erwin took off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. He woke up toward evening. A mellifluous tenor at full blast streamed from a neighbor’s phonograph:
“I vant to be happee—”

Erwin started thinking back: Number one, the Maiden in White, she’s the most artless of the lot. I may have been a little hasty. Oh, well, no harm done. Then the Twins near the pillar of glass. Gay, painted young things. With them I’m sure to have fun. Then number four, Leilla the Rose, resembling a boy. That’s, perhaps, the best one. And finally, the Fox in the ale-house. Not bad either. But only five. That’s not very many!