The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (86 page)

A fortnight later he again came to see me, and again the four German refugees were discussing passport problems, and presently a fifth entered and cheerfully said:
“Bonjour, Monsieur Weiss, bonjour, Monsieur Meyer.”
To my questions, Shishkov replied, rather absently and as it were reluctantly, that the idea of his journal had been found unrealizable, and that he had stopped thinking about it.

“Here’s what I wanted to tell you,” he began after an uneasy silence: “I have been trying and trying to come to a decision and now I think I have hit upon something, more or less.
Why
I am in this terrible
state would hardly interest you; I explained what I could in my letter but that concerned mainly the business in hand, the magazine. The question is more extensive, the question is more hopeless. I have been trying to decide what to do—how to stop things, how to get out. Beat it to Africa, to the colonies? But it is hardly worth starting the Herculean task of obtaining the necessary papers only to find myself pondering in the midst of date palms and scorpions the same things I ponder under the Paris rain. Try making my way back to Russia? No, the frying pan is enough. Retire to a monastery? But religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit. Commit suicide? But capital punishment is something I find too repulsive to be able to act as my own executioner, and, furthermore, I dread certain consequences undreamt of in Hamlet’s philosophy. Thus there remains but one issue: to disappear, to dissolve.”

He inquired further whether his manuscript was safe, and shortly afterwards left, broad-shouldered yet a little stooped, trench-coated, hatless, the back of his neck needing a haircut—an extraordinarily attractive, pure, melancholy human being, to whom I did not know what to say, what assistance to render.

In late May I left for another part of France and upon returning to Paris at the end of August happened to run into Shishkov’s friend. He told me a bizarre story: some time after my departure, “Vasya” had vanished, abandoning his meager belongings. The police could discover nothing—beyond the fact that
le sieur Chichkoff
had long since allowed his
karta
, as the Russians call it, to run out.

That is all. With the kind of incident that opens a mystery story my narrative closes. I got from his friend, or rather chance acquaintance, bits of scant information about Shishkov’s life and these I jotted down—they may prove useful someday. But where the deuce did he go? And, generally speaking, what did he have in mind when he said he intended “to disappear, to dissolve”? Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one’s reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse? One wonders if he did not overestimate

D
O YOU
remember the day you and I were lunching (partaking of nourishment) a couple of years before your death? Assuming, of course, that memory can live without its headdress? Let us imagine—just an “apropositional” thought—some totally new handbook of epistolary samples. To a lady who has lost her right hand: I kiss your ellipsis. To a deceased: Respecterfully yours. But enough of these sheepish vignettes. If you don’t remember, then I remember for you: the memory of you can pass, grammatically speaking at least, for your memory, and I am perfectly willing to grant for the sake of an ornate phrase that if, after your death, I and the world still endure, it is only because you recollect the world and me. I address you now for the following reason. I address you now on the following occasion. I address you now simply to chat with you about Falter. What a fate! What a mystery! What a handwriting! When I tire of trying to persuade myself that he is a half-wit or a
kvak
(as you used to Russianize the English synonym for “charlatan”), he strikes me as a person who … who, because he survived the bomb of truth that exploded in him … became a god! Beside him, how paltry seem all the bygone clairvoyants: the dust raised by the herd at sunset, the dream within a dream (when you dream you have awakened), the crack students in this our institute of learning hermetically closed to outsiders; for Falter stands
outside
our world, in the true reality. Reality!—that is the pouter-pigeon throat of the snake that fascinates me. Remember the time we lunched at the hotel managed by Falter near the luxuriant, many-terraced Italian border, where the asphalt is infinitely exalted by the wisteria, and the air smells of rubber and paradise? Adam Falter was still one of us then, and, if nothing about him presaged … what shall I call it?—say, seerhood—nevertheless his whole strong cast (the caromlike coordination of his bodily movements, as though he had
ball bearings for cartilages, his precision, his aquiline aloofness) now, in retrospect, explains why he survived the shock: the original figure was large enough to withstand the subtraction.

Oh, my love, how your presence smiles from that fabled bay—and nevermore!—oh, I bite my knuckles so as not to start shaking with sobs, but there is no holding them back; down I slide with locked brakes, making “hoo” and “boohoo” sounds, and it is all such humiliating physical nonsense: the hot blinking, the feeling of suffocation, the dirty handkerchief, the convulsive yawning alternating with the tears—I just can’t, can’t live without you. I blow my nose, swallow, and then all over again try to persuade the chair which I clutch, the desk which I pound, that I can’t boohoo without you. Are you able to hear me? That’s from a banal questionnaire, which ghosts do not answer, but how willingly our death-cell-mates respond for them; “I know!” (pointing skyward at random), “I’ll be glad to tell you!” Your darling head, the hollow of your temple, the forget-me-not gray of an eye squinting at an incipient kiss, the placid expression of your ears when you would lift up your hair … how can I reconcile myself to your disappearance, to this gaping hole, into which slides everything—my whole life, wet gravel, objects, and habits—and what tombal railings can prevent me from tumbling, with silent relish, into this abyss? Vertigo of the soul. Remember how, right after you died, I hurried out of the sanatorium, not walking but sort of stamping and even dancing with pain (life having got jammed in the door like a finger), alone on that winding road among the exaggeratedly scaly pines and the prickly shields of agaves, in a green armored world that quietly drew in its feet so as not to catch the disease. Ah, yes—everything around me kept warily, attentively silent, and only when I looked at something did that something give a start and begin ostentatiously to move, rustle, or buzz, pretending not to notice me. “Indifferent nature,” says Pushkin. Nonsense! A continuous shying-away would be a more accurate description.

What a shame, though. You were such a darling. And, holding on to you from within by a little button, our child went with you. But, my poor sir, one does not make a child to a woman when she has tuberculosis of the throat. Involuntary translation from French into Hadean. You died in your sixth month and took the remaining twelve weeks with you, not paying off your debt in full, as it were. How much I wanted her to bear me a child, the red-nosed widower informed the walls.
Étes-vous tout à fait certain, docteur, que la science ne connaît pas de ces cas exceptionnels où l’enfant naît dans la tombe?
And the dream I had: that garlicky doctor (who was at the same time Falter, or was it
Alexander Vasilievich?) replying with exceptional readiness, that yes, of course it sometimes did happen, and that such children (i.e., the posthumously born) were known as cadaverkins.

As to you, never once since you died have you appeared in my dreams. Perhaps the authorities intercept you, or you yourself avoid such prison visits with me. At first, base ignoramus that I was, I feared—superstitiously, humiliatingly—the small cracklings that a room always emits at night, but that were now reflected within me by terrifying flashes which made my clucking heart scuttle away faster with low-spread wings. Even worse, however, was the nighttime waiting, when I would lie in bed, trying not to think how you might suddenly give me an answering knock if I thought about it, but this only meant complicating the mental parenthesization, placing brackets within braces (thinking about trying not to think), and the fear within them grew and grew. Oh, how awful was the dry tap of the phantasmal fingernail inside the tabletop, and how little it resembled, of course, the intonation of your soul, of your life. A vulgar ghost with the tricks of a woodpecker, a disincarnate humorist, a corny cobold taking advantage of my stark-naked grief! In the daytime, on the other hand, I was fearless, and would challenge you to manifest your responsiveness in any way you liked, as I sat on the pebbles of the beach, where once your golden legs had been extended; and, as before, a wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams. Pebbles like cuckoo eggs, a piece of tile shaped like a pistol clip, a fragment of topaz-colored glass, something quite dry resembling a whisk of bast, my tears, a microscopic bead, an empty cigarette package with a yellow-bearded sailor in the center of a life buoy, a stone like a Pompeian’s foot, some creature’s small bone or a spatula, a kerosene can, a shiver of garnet-red glass, a nutshell, a nondescript rusty thingum related to nothing, a shard of porcelain, of which the companion fragments must inevitably exist somewhere—and I imagined an eternal torment, a convict’s task, that would serve as the best punishment for such as I, whose thoughts had ranged too far during their life span: namely, to find and gather all these parts, so as to re-create that gravy boat or soup tureen—hunchbacked wanderings along wild, misty shores. And, after all, if one is supremely lucky, one might restore the dish on the first morning instead of the trillionth—and there it is, that most agonizing question of
luck
, of Fortune’s Wheel, of the right lottery ticket, without which a given soul might be denied eternal felicity beyond the grave.

On these early spring days the narrow strip of shingle is unadorned and forlorn, but strollers would pass along the promenade above, and
this person or that, no doubt, must have said, on observing my shoulder blades, “There’s Sineusov, the artist—lost his wife the other day.” And I would probably have sat like that forever, picking at the desiccated jetsam, watching the stumbling foam, noting the sham tenderness of elongated serial cloudlets all along the horizon and the wine-dark washes of warmth in the chill blue-green of the sea, if someone indeed had not recognized me from the sidewalk.

However (as I fumble among the torn silks of phrase), let me return to Falter. As you have by now remembered, we went there once, on a torrid day, crawling like two ants up a flower-basket ribbon, because I was curious to take a look at my former tutor (whose lessons were limited to witty polemics with the compilers of my manuals), a resilient-looking, well-groomed man with a large white nose and a glossy parting in his hair; and it was along this straight line that he later traveled to business success, while his father, Ilya Falter, was only the senior chef at Ménard’s in St. Petersburg:
il y a pauvre Ilya
, turning on
povar
, which is “man cook” in Russian. My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like “dental” and “transcendental” (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch—words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons—so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world).

I was now seeing him after an interval of twenty years; and how right I had been, when approaching the hotel, to construe all of its classical ornaments—the cedar of Lebanon, the eucalyptus, the banana tree, the terra-cotta tennis court, the enclosure for cars beyond the lawn—as a ceremonial of fortunate fate, as a symbol of the corrections that the former image of Falter now required! During our years of separation (quite painless for us both) he had changed from a poor, wiry student with animated night-dark eyes and a beautiful, strong, sinistral handwriting into a dignified, rather corpulent gentleman, though the liveliness of his glance and the beauty of his large hands were undiminished—only I would never have recognized him from the back, for, instead of the thick, sleek hair and shaven nape, there was now a nimbus of black fluff encircling a sun-browned bald spot akin to a tonsure. With his silk shirt, the color of stewed rutabaga, his checked tie, his wide pearl-gray pants, and his piebald shoes, he struck me as being dressed up for a fancy-dress ball; but his large nose was the same as
ever, and with it he infallibly caught the light scent of the past when I came up, slapped him on his muscular shoulder, and posed him my riddle. You were standing a little way off, your bare ankles pressed together on their high cobalt-blue heels, examining with restrained but mischievous interest the furnishings of the enormous hall, empty at that hour—the hippopotamus hide of the armchairs, the austere bar, the British magazines on the glass-topped table, the frescoes, of studied simplicity, depicting scanty-breasted bronzed girls against a golden background, one of whom, with parallel strands of stylized hair falling along her cheek, had for some reason gone down on one knee. Could we conceive that the master of all this splendor would ever cease to see it? My angel.… Meanwhile, taking my hands in his, squeezing them, puckering the skin between his brows and fixing me with dark, narrowed eyes, he was observing that life-suspending pause observed by those who are about to sneeze but are not quite sure if they will succeed … but he succeeded, the past burst into light, and he loudly pronounced my nickname. He kissed your hand, without bending his head, and then, in a benevolent fuss, obviously enjoying the fact that I, a person who had seen better days, had now found him in the full glory of the life he had himself created by the power of his sculptitory will, he seated us on the terrace, ordered cocktails and lunch, introduced us to his brother-in-law, Mr. L., a cultured man in a dark business suit that contrasted oddly with Falter’s exotic foppishness. We drank, we ate, we talked about the past as about someone gravely ill, I managed to balance a knife on the back of a fork, you petted the wonderful nervous dog that feared its master, and after a minute of silence, in the midst of which Falter suddenly uttered a distinct “Yes,” as if concluding a diagnostic deliberation, we parted, making each other promises that neither he nor I had the least intention of keeping.