The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 23

"What's the matter with you, good sir?" said Leshcheyev's voice. "What's going on here? What happened? Are you sick? What? I can't hear you. Speak up."

"Some unexpected business," replied Lev. "Didn't you get my message?"

"Message my foot. Come on. It's Christmas, the wine's been bought, the wife has a present for you."

"I can't make it," said Lev, "I'm terribly sorry myself...."

"You're a rum fellow! Listen, get out of whatever you're doing there, and we'll be right over. The Fuchses are here too. Or else, I have an even better idea-you get yourself over here. Eh? Olya, be quiet, I can't hear. What's that?"

"I can't. I have my ... I'm busy, that's all there is to it."

Leshcheyev emitted a national curse. "Good-bye," said Lev awkwardly into the already dead phone.

Now Serafim's attention had shifted from the books to a picture on the wall.

"Business call. Such a bore," said Lev with a grimace. "Please excuse me."

"You have a lot of business?" asked Serafim, without taking his eyes off the oleograph-a girl in red with a soot-black poodle.

"Well, I make a living-newspaper articles, various stuff," Lev answered vaguely. "And you-so you aren't here for long?"

"I'll probably leave tomorrow. I dropped in to see you for just a few minutes. Tonight I still have to-"

"Sit down, please, sit down...."

Serafim sat down. They remained silent for a while. They were both thirsty.

"We were talking about books," said Serafim. "What with one thing and another I just don't have the time for them. On the train, though, I happened to pick something up, and read it for want of anything better to do. A German novel. Piffle, of course, but rather entertaining. About incest. It went like this...."

He retold the story in detail. Lev kept nodding and looking at Serafim's substantial gray suit, and his ample smooth cheeks, and as he looked he thought: Was it really worth having a reunion with your brother after ten years to discuss some philistine tripe by Leonard Frank? It bores him to talk about it and I'm just as bored to listen. Now, let's see, there was something I wanted to say ... Can't remember. What an agonizing evening.

"Yes, I think I've read it. Yes, that's a fashionable subject these days. Help yourself to some candy. I feel so guilty about the tea. You say you found Berlin greatly changed." (Wrong thing to say-they had already discussed that.) "The Americanization," answered Serafim. "The traffic. The remarkable buildings."

There was a pause.

"I have something to ask you," said Lev spasmodically. "It's not quite your field, but in this magazine here ... There were bits I didn't understand. This, for instance-these experiments of his."

Serafim took the magazine and began explaining. "What's so complicated about it? Before a magnetic field is formed-you know what a magnetic field is?-all right, before it is formed, there exists a so-called electric field. Its lines of force are situated in planes that pa.s.s through a so-called vibrator. Note that, according to Faraday's teachings, a magnetic line appears as a closed circle, while an electric one is always open. Give me a pencil-no, it's all right, I have one.... Thanks, thanks, I have one."

He went on explaining and sketching something for quite a time, while Lev nodded meekly. He spoke of Young, Maxwell, Hertz. A regular lecture. Then he asked for a gla.s.s of water.

"It's time for me to be going, you know," he said, licking his lips and setting the gla.s.s back on the table. "It's time." From somewhere in the region of his belly he extracted a thick watch. "Yes, it's time."

"Oh, come on, stay awhile longer," mumbled Lev, but Serafim shook his head and got up, tugging down his waistcoat. His gaze stopped once again on the oleograph of the girl in red with the black poodle.

"Do you recall its name?" he asked, with his first genuine smile of the evening.

"Whose name?"

"Oh, you know-Tikhotski used to visit us at the dacha with a girl and a poodle. What was the poodle's name?"

"Wait a minute," said Lev. "Wait a minute. Yes, that's right. I'll remember in a moment."

"It was black," said Serafim. "Very much like this one.... Where did you put my coat? Oh, there it is. Got it."

"It's slipped my mind too," said Lev. "Oh, what was the name?"

"Never mind. To h.e.l.l with it. I'm off. Well ... It was great to see you...." He donned his coat adroitly in spite of his corpulence.

"I'll accompany you," said Lev, producing his frayed raincoat.

Awkwardly, they both cleared their throats at the same instant. Then they descended the stairs in silence and went out. It was drizzling.

"I'm taking the subway. What was that name, though? It was black and had pompons on its paws. My memory is getting incredibly bad."

"There was a k in it," replied Lev. "That much I'm sure of-it had a k in it."

They crossed the street.

"What soggy weather," said Serafim. "Well, well.... So we'll never remember? You say there was a k?"

They turned the corner. Streetlamp. Puddle. Dark post office building. Old beggar woman standing as usual by the stamp machine. She extended a hand with two matchboxes. The beam of the streetlamp touched her sunken cheek; a bright drop quivered under her nostril.

"It's really absurd," exclaimed Serafim. "I know it's there in one of my brain cells, but I can't reach it."

"What was the name ... what was it?" Lev chimed in. "It really is absurd that we can't ... Remember how it got lost once, and you and Tikhotski's girl wandered for hours in the woods searching for it. I'm sure there was a k and perhaps an r somewhere."

They reached the square. On its far side shone a pearl horseshoe on blue gla.s.s-the emblem of the subway. Stone steps led into the depths.

"She was a stunner, that girl," said Serafim. "Well, I give up. Take care of yourself. Sometime we'll get together again."

"It was something like Turk.... Trick ... No, it won't come. It's hopeless. You also take care of yourself. Good luck."

Serafim gave a wave of his spread hand, and his broad back hunched over and vanished into the depths. Lev started walking back slowly, across the square, past the post office and the beggar woman.... Suddenly he stopped short. Somewhere in his memory there was a hint of motion, as if something very small had awakened and begun to stir. The word was still invisible, but its shadow had already crept out as from behind a corner, and he wanted to step on that shadow to keep it from retreating and disappearing again. Alas, he was too late. Everything vanished, but, at the instant his brain ceased straining, the thing stirred again, more perceptibly this time, and like a mouse emerging from a crack when the room is quiet, there appeared, lightly, silently, mysteriously, the live corpuscle of a word.... "Give me your paw, Joker." Joker! How simple it was. Joker....

He looked back involuntarily, and thought how Serafim, sitting in his subterranean car, might have remembered too. What a wretched reunion.

Lev heaved a sigh, looked at his watch, and, seeing it was not yet too late, decided to head for the Leshcheyevs' house. He would clap his hands under their window, and maybe they would hear and let him in.

LIPS TO LIPS.

THE violins were still weeping, performing, it seemed, a hymn of pa.s.sion and love, but already Irina and the deeply moved Dolinin were rapidly walking toward the exit. They were lured by the spring night, by the mystery that had tensely stood up between them. Their two hearts were beating as one.

"Give me your cloakroom ticket," uttered Dolinin (crossed out).

"Please, let me get your hat and manteau" (crossed out).

"Please," uttered Dolinin, "let me get your things" ("and my" inserted between "your" and "things").

Dolinin went up to the cloakroom, and after producing his little ticket (corrected to "both little tickets")- Here Ilya Borisovich Tal grew pensive. It was awkward, most awkward, to dawdle there. Just now there had been an ecstatic surge, a sudden blaze of love between the lonely, elderly Dolinin and the stranger who happened to share his box, a girl in black, whereupon they decided to escape from the theater, far, far away from the decolletes and military uniforms. Somewhere beyond the theater the author dimly visualized the Kupecheskiy or Tsarskiy Park, locusts in bloom, precipices, a starry night. The author was terribly impatient to plunge with his hero and heroine into that starry night. Still one had to get one's coats, and that interfered with the glamour. Ilya Borisovich reread what he had written, puffed out his cheeks, stared at the crystal paperweight, and finally made up his mind to sacrifice glamour to realism. This did not prove simple. His leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items, such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors, or shaking hands when there were numerous characters in a room, and one person or two persons saluted many people. Furthermore Ilya Borisovich tussled constantly with p.r.o.nouns, as for example "she," which had a teasing way of referring not only to the heroine but also to her mother or sister in the same sentence, so that in order to avoid repeating a proper name one was often compelled to put "that lady" or "her interlocutress" although no interlocution was taking place. Writing meant to him an unequal contest with indispensable objects; luxury goods appeared to be much more compliant, but even they rebelled now and then, got stuck, hampered one's freedom of movement-and now, having ponderously finished with the cloakroom fuss and being about to present his hero with an elegant cane, Ilya Borisovich naively delighted in the gleam of its rich k.n.o.b, and did not foresee, alas, what claims that valuable article would make, how painfully it would demand mention, when Dolinin, his hands feeling the curves of a supple young body, would be carrying Irina across a vernal rill.

Dolinin was simply "elderly"; Ilya Borisovich Tal would soon be fifty-five. Dolinin was "colossally wealthy," without precise explanation of his source of income; Ilya Borisovich directed a company engaged in the installation of bathrooms (that year, incidentally, it had been appointed to panel with enameled tiles the cavernal walls of several underground stations) and was quite well-to-do. Dolinin lived in Russia-South Russia, probably-and first met Irina long before the Revolution. Ilya Borisovich lived in Berlin, whither he had migrated with wife and son in 1920. His literary output was of long standing, but not big: the obituary of a local merchant, famous for his liberal political views, in the Kharkov Herald (1910), two prose poems, ibid. (August 1914 and March 1917), and one book, consisting of that obituary and those two prose poems-a pretty volume that landed right in the raging middle of the civil war. Finally, upon reaching Berlin, Ilya Borisovich wrote a little etude, "Travelers by Sea and Land," which appeared in a humble emigre daily published in Chicago; but that newspaper soon vanished like smoke, while other periodicals did not return ma.n.u.scripts and never discussed rejections. Then followed two years of creative silence: his wife's illness and death, the Inflationszeit, a thousand business undertakings. His son finished high school in Berlin and entered Freiburg University. And now, in 1925, at the onset of old age, this prosperous and on the whole very lonely person experienced such an attack of writer's itch, such a longing-oh, not for fame, but simply for some warmth and heed on the part of readerdom-that he resolved to let himself go, write a novel and have it published at his own cost.

Already by the time that its protagonist, the heavy-hearted, world-weary Dolinin, hearkened to the clarion of a new life and (after that almost fatal stop at the cloakroom) escorted his young companion into the April night, the novel had acquired a t.i.tle: Lips to Lips. Dolinin had Irina move to his flat, but nothing had happened yet in the way of lovemaking, for he desired that she come to his bed of her own accord, exclaiming: "Take me, take my purity, take my torment. Your loneliness is my loneliness, and however long or short your love may be, I am prepared for everything, because around us spring summons us to humanness and good, because the sky and the firmament radiate divine beauty, and because I love you."

"A powerful pa.s.sage," observed Euphratski. "Terra firma meant, I dare say. Very powerful."

"And it is not boring?" asked Ilya Borisovich Tal, glancing over his horn-rimmed gla.s.ses. "Eh? Tell me frankly."

"I suppose he'll deflower her," mused Euphratski.

"Mimo, chitatel', mimol" ("Wrong, reader, wrong!") answered Ilya Borisovich (misinterpreting Turgenev). He smiled rather smugly, gave his ma.n.u.script a resettling shake, crossed his fat-thighed legs more comfortably, and continued his reading.

He read his novel to Euphratski bit by bit, at the rate of production. Euphratski, who had once swooped upon him on the occasion of a concert with a charitable purpose, was an emigre journalist "with a name," or, rather, with a dozen pseudonyms. Hitherto Ilya Borisovich's acquaintances used to come from German industrial circles; now he attended emigre meetings, lectures, amateur theatricals, and had learned to recognize some of the belles-lettres brethren. He was on especially good terms with Euphratski and valued his opinion as coming from a stylist, although Euphratski's style belonged to the topical sort we all know. Ilya Borisovich frequently invited him, they sipped cognac and talked about Russian literature, or more exactly Ilya Borisovich did the talking, and the guest avidly collected comical sc.r.a.ps with which to entertain his own cronies later. True, Ilya Borisovich's tastes were on the heavyish side. He gave Pushkin his due, of course, but knew him mainly through the medium of three or four operas, and in general found him "olympically serene and incapable of stirring the reader." His knowledge of more recent poetry was limited to his remembering two poems, both with a political slant, "The Sea" by Veynberg (18301908) and the famous lines of Skitaletz (Stepan Petrov, born 1868) in which "dangled" (on the gallows) rhymes with "entangled" (in a revolutionary plot). Did Ilya Borisovich like to make mild fun of the "Decadents"? Yes, he did, but then, one must note that he frankly admitted his incomprehension of verse. Per contra, he was fond of discussing Russian fiction: he esteemed Lugovoy (a regional mediocrity of the 1900s), appreciated Korolenko, and considered that Artsybashev debauched young readers. In regard to the novels of modern emigre writers he would say, with the "empty-handed" Russian gesture of inutility, "Dull, dull!," which sent Euphratski into a kind of rapturous trance.

"An author should be soulful," Ilya Borisovich would reiterate, "and compa.s.sionate, and responsive, and fair. Maybe I'm a flea, a nonent.i.ty, but I have my credo. Let at least one word of my writings impregnate a reader's heart." And Euphratski would fix reptilian eyes upon him, foretasting with agonizing tenderness tomorrow's mimetic report, A's belly laugh, Z's ventriloquistic squeak.

At last came the day when the first draft of the novel was finished. To his friend's suggestion that they repair to a cafe, Ilya Borisovich replied in a mysterious and weighty tone of voice, "Impossible. I'm polishing my phrasing."

The polishing consisted of his launching an attack on the too frequently occurring adjective molodaya, "young" (feminine gender), replacing it here and there by "youthful," yunaya, which he p.r.o.nounced with a provincial doubling of the consonant as if it were spelled yunnaya.

One day later. Twilight. Cafe on Kurfurstendamm. Settee of red plush. Two gentlemen. To a casual eye: businessmen. One-respectable-looking, even rather majestic, a nonsmoker, with an expression of trust and kindliness on his fleshy face; the other-lean, beetle-browed, with a pair of fastidious folds descending from his triangular nostrils to the lowered corners of his mouth from which protrudes obliquely a cigarette not yet lit. The first man's quiet voice: "I penned the end in one spurt. He dies, yes, he dies."

Silence. The red settee is nice and soft. Beyond the picture window a transluscent tram floats by like a bright fish in an aquarium tank.

Euphratski clicked his cigarette lighter, expulsed smoke from his nostrils, and said, "Tell me, Ilya Borisovich, why not have a literary magazine run it as a serial before it comes out in book form?"

"But, look, I've no pull with that crowd. They publish always the same people."

"Nonsense. I have a little plan. Let me think it over."

"I'd be happy...." murmured Tal dreamily.

A few days later in I. B. Tal's room at the office. The unfolding of the little plan.

"Send your thing" (Euphratski narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice) "to Arion."

"Arion? What's that?" said I.B., nervously patting his ma.n.u.script.

"Nothing very frightening. It's the name of the best emigre review. You don't know it? Ay-ya-yay! The first number came out this spring, the second is expected in the fall. You should keep up with literature a bit closer, Ilya Borisovich!"

"But how to contact them? Just mail it?"

"That's right. Straight to the editor. It's published in Paris. Now don't tell me you've never heard Galatov's name?"

Guiltily Ilya Borisovich shrugged one fat shoulder. Euphratski, his face working wryly, explained: a writer, a master, new form of the novel, intricate construction, Galatov the Russian Joyce.

"Djoys," meekly repeated Ilya Borisovich after him.

"First of all have it typed," said Euphratski. "And for G.o.d's sake acquaint yourself with the magazine."

He acquainted himself. In one of the Russian bookshops of exile he was handed a plump pink volume. He bought it, thinking aloud, as it were: "Young venture. Must be encouraged."

"Finished, the young venture," said the bookseller. "One number was all that came out."

"You are not in touch," rejoined Ilya Borisovich with a smile. "I definitively know that the next number will be out in autumn."

Upon coming home, he took an ivory paperknife and neatly cut the magazine's pages. Therein he found an unintelligible piece of prose by Galatov, two or three short stories by vaguely familiar authors, a mist of poems, and an extremely capable article about German industrial problems signed Tigris.

Oh, they'll never accept it, reflected Ilya Borisovich with anguish. They all belong to one crew.

Nevertheless he located one Madame Lubansky ("stenographer and typist") in the advertis.e.m.e.nt columns of a Russian-language newspaper and, having summoned her to his apartment, started to dictate with tremendous feeling, boiling with agitation, raising his voice-and glancing ever and again at the lady to see her reaction to his novel. Her pencil kept flitting as she bent over her writing pad-a small, dark woman with a rash on her forehead-and Ilya Borisovich paced his study in circles, and the circles would tighten around her at the approach of this or that spectacular pa.s.sage. Toward the end of the first chapter the room vibrated with his cries.

"And his entire yore seemed to him a horrible error," roared Ilya Borisovich, and then added, in his ordinary office voice, "Type this out for tomorrow, five copies, wide margins, I shall expect you here at the same hour."

That night, in bed, he kept thinking up what he would tell Galatov when sending the novel ("... awaiting your stern judgment ... my contributions have appeared in Russia and America...."), and on the following morning-such is the enchanting obligingness of fate-Ilya Borisovich received this letter from Paris: Dear Boris Grigorievich, I learn from a common friend that you have completed a new opus. The editorial board of Arion would be interested in seeing it, since we would like to have something "refreshing" for our next issue.

How strange! Only the other day I found myself recalling your elegant miniatures in the Kharkov Herald!

"I'm remembered, I'm wanted," distractedly uttered Ilya Borisovich. Thereupon he rang up Euphratski, and throwing himself back in his armchair, sideways-with the uncouthness of triumph-leaning the hand that held the receiver upon his desk, while outlining an ample gesture with the other, and beaming all over, he drawled, "Well, oh-old boy, well, oh-old boy"-and suddenly the various bright objects upon the desk began to tremble and twin and dissolve in a moist mirage. He blinked, everything resumed its right place, and Euphratski's languid voice replied, "Oh, come! Brother writers. Ordinary good turn."

Five stacks of typed pages grew higher and higher. Dolinin, who with one thing and another had not yet possessed his fair companion, happened to discover that she was infatuated with another man, a young painter. Sometimes I.B. dictated in his office, and then the German typists in the other rooms, hearing that remote roar, wondered who on earth was being bawled out by the usually good-natured boss. Dolinin had a heart-to-heart talk with Irina, she told him she would never leave him, because she prized too highly his beautiful lonely soul, but, alas, she belonged physically to another, and Dolinin silently bowed. At last, the day came when he made a will in her favor, the day came when he shot himself (with a Mauser pistol), the day came when Ilya Borisovich, smiling blissfully, asked Madame Lubansky, who had brought the final portion of the typescript, how much he owed her, and attempted to overpay.

With ravishment he reread Lips to Lips and handed over one copy to Euphratski for corrections (some discreet editing had already been accomplished by Madame Lubansky at such points where chance omissions garbled her shorthand notes). All Euphratski did was to insert in one of the first lines a temperamental comma in red pencil. Ilya Borisovich religiously transported that comma to the copy destined for Arion, signed his novel with a pseudonym derived from "Anna" (the name of his dead wife), fastened every chapter with a trim clip, added a lengthy letter, slipped all this into a huge solid envelope, weighed it, went to the post office himself, and sent the novel by registered mail.

With the receipt tucked away in his wallet, Ilya Borisovich braced himself for weeks and weeks of tremulous waiting. Galatov's reply came, however, with miraculous promptness-on the fifth day.

Dear Ilya Grigorievich, The editors are more than entranced with the material you sent us. Seldom have we had the occasion to peruse pages upon which a "human soul" has been so clearly imprinted. Your novel moves the reader with a face's singular expression, to paraphrase Baratynski, the singer of the Finnish crags. It breathes "bitterness and tenderness." Some of the descriptions, such as for example that of the theater, in the very beginning, compete with a.n.a.logous images in the works of our cla.s.sical writers and in a certain sense gain the ascendancy. This I say with a full awareness of the "responsibility" attached to such a statement. Your novel would have been a genuine adornment of our review.

As soon as Ilya Borisovich had somewhat recovered his composure, he walked over to the Tiergarten-instead of riding to his office-and sat there on a park bench, tracing arcs on the brown ground, thinking of his wife, and imagining how she would have rejoiced with him. After a while he went to see Euphratski. The latter lay in bed, smoking. They a.n.a.lyzed together every line of the letter. When they got to the last one, Ilya Borisovich meekly raised his eyes and asked, "Tell me, why do you think he put 'would have been' and not 'will be'? Doesn't he understand that I'm overjoyed to give them my novel? Or is it simply a stylistic device?"

"I'm afraid there's another reason," answered Euphratski. "No doubt it's a case of concealing something out of sheer pride. In point of fact the magazine is folding up-yes, that's what I've just learned. The emigre public consumes as you know all sorts of trash, and Arion is meant for the sophisticated reader. Well, that's the result."

"I've also heard rumors," said very much perturbed Ilya Borisovich, "but I thought it was slander spread by compet.i.tors, or mere stupidity. Can it be really possible that no second issue will ever come out? It is awful!"

"They have no funds. The review is a disinterested, idealistic enterprise. Such publications, alas, perish."

"But how, how can it be!" cried Ilya Borisovich, with a Russian splash-gesture of helpless dismay. "Haven't they approved my thing, don't they want to print it?"

"Yes, too bad," said Euphratski calmly. "By the way, tell me-" and he changed the subject.