Vladimir Nabokov

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!

To Véra

I. Other books by the narrator

In Russian:

Tamara 1925

Pawn Takes Queen 1927

Plenilune 1929

Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) 1931

The Red Top Hat 1934

The Dare 1950

In English:

See under Real 1939

Esmeralda and Her Parandrus 1941

Dr. Olga Repnin 1946

Exile from Mayda 1947

A Kingdom by the Sea 1962

Ardis 1970

PART ONE

1

I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat oddcircumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy conspiracy, withnonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its realobject but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude theslightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes heunwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my partcaused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim ofthe plot.

Some time during the Easter Term of my last Cambridge year (1922) Ihappened to be consulted, "as a Russian," on certain niceties of make-up inan English version of Gogol's Inspector which the Glowworm Group, directedby Ivor Black, a fine amateur actor, intended to stage. He and I had thesame tutor at Trinity, and he drove me to distraction with his tediousmiming of the old man's mincing ways--a performance he kept up throughoutmost of our lunch at the Pitt. The brief business part turned out to be evenless pleasant. Ivor Black wanted Gogol's Town Mayor to wear a dressing gownbecause "wasn't it merely the old rascal's nightmare and didn't Revizor, itsRussian <3> title, actually come from the French for `dream,' rйve?" I saidI thought it a ghastly idea.

If there were any rehearsals, they took place without me. In fact, itoccurs to me now that I do not really know if his project ever saw thefootlights.

Shortly after that, I met Ivor Black a second time--at some party orother, in the course of which he invited me and five other men to spend thesummer at a Cтte d'Azur villa he had just inherited, he said, from an oldaunt. He was very drunk at the moment and seemed surprised when a week or solater on the eve of his departure I reminded him of his exuberantinvitation, which, it so happened, I alone had accepted. We both wereunpopular orphans, and should, I remarked, band together.

Illness detained me in England for another month and it was only at thebeginning of July that I sent Ivor Black a polite postcard advising him thatI might arrive in Cannes or Nice some time next week. I am virtually sure Imentioned Saturday afternoon as the likeliest date.

Attempts to telephone from the station proved futile: the line remainedbusy, and I am not one to persevere in a struggle with faulty abstractionsof space. But my afternoon was poisoned, and the afternoon is my favoriteitem of time. I had been coaxing myself into believing, at the start of mylong journey, that I felt fairly fit; by now I felt terrible. The day wasunseasonably dull and damp. Palm trees are all right only in mirages. Forsome reason, taxis, as in a bad dream, were unobtainable. Finally I boardeda small smelly bus of blue tin. Up a winding road, with as many turns as"stops by request," the contraption reached my destination in twentyminutes--about as long as it would have taken me to get there on foot fromthe coast by using an easy shortcut that I was to learn by heart, stone bystone, broom by brush, in the course of that magic summer. It appearedanything but magic during that dismal drive! The main reason I had agreed tocome was <4> the hope of treating in the "brillant brine" (Bennett?Barbellion?) a nervous complaint that skirted insanity. The left side of myhead was now a bowling alley of pain. On the other side an inane baby wasstaring at me across its mother's shoulder over the back of the seat infront of me. I sat next to a warty woman in solid black and pitted nauseaagainst the lurches between green sea and gray rockwall. By the time wefinally made it to the village of Carnavaux (mottled plane trunks,picturesque hovels, a post office, a church) all my senses had convergedinto one golden image; the bottle of whisky which I was bringing Ivor in myportmanteau and which I swore to sample even before he glimpsed it. Thedriver ignored the question I put to him, but a tortoise-like little priestwith tremendous feet who was getting off before me indicated, withoutlooking at me, a transverse avenue. The Villa Iris, he said, was at threeminutes of march. As I prepared to carry my two bags up that lane toward atriangle of sudden sunlight my presumptive host appeared on the oppositepavement. I remember--after the passing of half a century!--that I wonderedfleetingly if I had packed the right clothes. He wore plus fours and broguesbut was incongruously stockingless, and the inch of shin he showed lookedpainfully pink. He was heading, or feigned to be heading, for the postoffice to send me a telegram suggesting I put off my visit till August whena job he now had in Cannice would no longer threaten to interfere with ourfrolics. He hoped, furthermore, that Sebastian--whoever that was--mightstill be coming for the grape season or lavender gala. Muttering thus underhis breath, he relieved me of the smaller of my bags--the one with thetoilet things, medical supplies, and an almost finished garland of sonnets(which would eventually go to a Russian émigré magazine in Paris). Then healso grabbed my portmanteau that I had set down in order to fill my pipe.Such lavishness in the registration of trivialities is due, I suppose, totheir being accidentally caught <5> in the advance light of a great event.Ivor broke the silence to add, frowning, that he was delighted to welcome meas a house guest, but that he should warn me of something he ought to havetold me about in Cambridge. I might get frightfully bored by the end of aweek or so because of one melancholy fact. Miss Grunt, his former governess,a heartless but clever person, liked to repeat that his little sister wouldnever break the rule of "children should not be heard" and, indeed wouldnever hear it said to anybody. The melancholy fact was that his sister--but,perhaps, he had better postpone the explanation of her case till we and thebags were installed more or less. <6>2

"What kind of childhood did you have, McNab" (as Ivor insisted oncalling me because I looked, he thought, like the haggard yet handsome youngactor who adopted that name in the last years of his life or at least fame)?

Atrocious, intolerable. There should be a natural, internatural, lawagainst such inhuman beginnings. Had my morbid terrors not been replaced atthe age of nine or ten by more abstract and trite anxieties (problems ofinfinity, eternity, identity, and so forth), I would have lost my reasonlong before finding my rhymes. It was not a matter of dark rooms, orone-winged agonizing angels, or long corridors, or nightmare mirrors withreflections overflowing in messy pools on the floor--it was not thatbedchamber of horrors, but simply, and far more horribly, a certaininsidious and relentless connection with other states of being which werenot exactly "previous" or "future," but definitely out of bounds, mortallyspeaking. I was to learn more, much more about those aching links onlyseveral decades later, so "let us not anticipate" as the condemned man saidwhen rejecting the filthy old blindfold.

The delights of puberty granted me temporary relief. I was spared themorose phase of self-initiation. Blest be my first sweet love, a child in anorchard, games of <7> exploration--and her outspread five fingers drippingwith pearls of surprise. A house tutor let me share with him the ingиnue inmy grand-uncle's private theater. Two lewd young ladies rigged me up once ina lacy chemise and a Lorelei wig and laid me to sleep between them, "a shylittle cousin," as in a ribald novella, while their husbands snored in thenext room after the boar hunt. The great houses of various relatives withwhom I dwelt on and off in my early teens under the pale summer skies ofthis or that province of old Russia offered me as many compliant handmaidsand fashionable flirts as might have done closets and bowers a couple ofcenturies earlier. In a word, if the years of my infancy might have providedthe subject for the kind of learned thesis upon which a paedopsychologistfounds a lifetime of fame, my teens, on the other hand, could have yielded,and in fact did yield, quite a number of erotic passages scattered likerotting plums and brown pears throughout an aging novelist's books. Indeed,the present memoir derives much of its value from its being a catalogueraisonnи of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images inmy Russian and especially English fiction.

I saw my parents infrequently. They divorced and remarried andredivorced at such a rapid rate that had the custodians of my fortune beenless alert, I might have been auctioned out finally to a pair of strangersof Swedish or Scottish descent, with sad bags under hungry eyes. Anextraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replacedcloser blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets ofa confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal)unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a mostoutrageous fashion.

"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!

"What harlequins? Where?" <8>

"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words areharlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes,images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world!Invent reality!"

I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my firstdaydreams, and now, down the marble steps of memory's front porch, here sheslowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor lame lady, touching each stepedge with the rubber tip of her black cane.

(When she cried out those four words, they came out in a breathlessdactylic line with a swift lispy lilt, as if it were "lookaty," assonatingwith "lickety" and introducing tenderly, ingratiatingly those "harlequins"who arrived with festive force, the "bar" richly stressed in a burst ofinspired persuasion followed by a liquid fall of sequin-like syllables).

I was eighteen when the Bolshevist revolution struck--a strong andanomalous verb, I concede, used here solely for the sake of narrativerhythm. The recurrence of my childhood's disarray kept me in the ImperialSanatorium at Tsarskoe for most of the next winter and spring. In July,1918, I found myself recuperating in the castle of a Polish landowner, adistant relation of mine, Mstislav Charnetski (1880-1919?). One autumnevening poor Mstislav's young mistress showed me a fairy-tale path windingthrough a great forest where a last aurochs had been speared by a firstCharnetski under John III (Sobieski). I followed that path with a knapsackon my back and--why not confess--a tremor of remorse and anxiety in my youngheart. Was I right in abandoning my cousin in the blackest hour of Russia'sblack history? Did I know how to exist alone in strange lands? Was thediploma I had received after being examined by a special committee (presidedby Mstislav's father, a venerable and corrupt mathematician) in all thesubjects of an ideal lyceum, which I had never attended bodily, sufficientfor Cambridge without some infernal entrance test? <9> I trudged all night,through a labyrinth of moonlight, imagining the rustlings of extinctanimals. Dawn at last miniated my ancient map. I thought I had crossed thefrontier when a bare-headed Red Army soldier with a Mongol face who waspicking whortleberries near the trail challenged me: "And whither," he askedpicking up his cap from a stump, "may you be rolling (kotishsya), littleapple (yablochko)? Pokazyvay-ka dokumentiki (Let me see your papers)."

I groped in my pockets, fished out what I needed, and shot him dead, ashe lunged at me; then he fell on his face, as if sunstruck on the paradeground, at the feet of his king. None of the serried tree trunks looked hisway, and I fled, still clutching Dagmara's lovely little revolver. Only halfan hour later, when I reached at last another part of the forest in a moreor less conventional republic, only then did my calves cease to quake.

After a period of loafing through unremembered German and Dutch towns,I crossed over to England. The Rembrandt, a little hotel in London, was mynext address. The two or three small diamonds that I kept in a chamois pouchmelted away faster than hailstones. On the gray eve of poverty, the author,then a self-exiled youth (I transcribe from an old diary), discovered anunexpected patron in the person of Count Starov, a grave old-fashioned Masonwho had graced several great Embassies during a spacious span ofinternational intercourse, and who since 1913 had resided in London. Hespoke his mother tongue with pedantic precision, yet did not spurn rotundfolksy expressions. He had no sense of humor whatever. His man was a youngMaltese (I loathe tea but dared not call for brandy). Nikifor Nikodimovich,to use his tongue-twisterish Christian name cum patronymic, was rumored tohave been for years on end an admirer of my beautiful and bizarre mother,whom I knew mainly from stock phrases in an anonymous memoir. A grandepassion can be a convenient mask, but on the other hand, a gentlemanlydevotion to her memory can <10> alone explain his paying for my education inEngland and leaving me, after his death in 1927, a modest subsidy (theBolshevist coup had ruined him as it had all our clan). I must admit,however, that I felt embarrassed by the sudden live glances of his otherwisedead eyes set in a large, pasty, dignified face, of the sort that Russianwriters used to call "carefully shaven" (tshchatel'no vybritoe), no doubtbecause the ghosts of patriarchal beards had to be laid, in the presumedimagination of readers (long dead by now). I did my best to put down thoseinterrogatory flashes to a search for some traits of the exquisite womanwhom once upon a time he had handed into a calхche, and whom, after waitingfor her to settle down and open her parasol, he would heavily join in thespringy vehicle; but at the same time I could not help wondering if my oldgrandee had escaped a perversion that was current in so-called circles ofhigh diplomacy. N.N. sat in his easy chair as in a voluminous novel, onepudgy hand on the elbow-rest griffin, the other, signet-ringed, fingering onthe Turkish table beside him what looked like a silver snuffbox butcontained, in fact, a small supply of bead-like cough drops or ratherdroplets, colored lilac, green, and, I believe, coral. I should add thatsome information obtained later showed me to be detestably wrong inconjecturing on his part anything but a quasi-paternal interest in me, aswell as in another youth, the son of a notorious St. Petersburg courtesanwho preferred an electric brougham to a calхche; but enough of those ediblebeads. <11>3

To return to Carnavaux, to my luggage, to Ivor Black carrying it, witha big show of travail, and muttering comedy stuff in some rudimentary role.

The sun had regained full control, when we entered a garden, separatedfrom the road by a stone wall and a row of cypresses. Emblematic irisessurrounded a green pondlet presided over by a bronze frog. From under acurly holm oak a graveled path ran between two orange trees. At one end ofthe lawn a eucalypt cast its striate shade across the canvas of a loungechair. This is not the arrogance of total recall but an attempt at fondreconstruction based on old snapshots in an old bonbon box with afleur-de-lis on its lid.

It was no use ascending the three steps of the front entrance, "haulingtwo tons of stones," said Ivor Black: he had forgotten the spare key, had noservants to answer bells on Saturday afternoons, and as he had explainedearlier could not communicate by normal means with his sister though she hadto be somewhere inside, almost certainly crying in her bedroom as sheusually would whenever guests were expected, especially weekenders who mightbe around at all hours, well into Tuesday. So we walked round the house,skirting prickly-pear shrubs that caught at the raincoat over my arm. Isuddenly heard a <12> horrible subhuman sound and glanced at Ivor, but thecur only grinned.

It was a large, lemon-breasted, indigo-blue ara with striped whitecheeks squawking intermittently on its bleak back-porch perch. Ivor haddubbed it Mata Hari partly because of its accent but chiefly by reason ofits political past. His late aunt, Lady Wimberg, when already a little gaga,around Nineteen Fourteen or Fifteen, had been kind to that tragic old bird,said to have been abandoned by a shady stranger with a scarred face and amonocle. It could say allт, Otto, and pa-pa, a modest vocabulary, somehowsuggestive of a small anxious family in a hot country far from home.Sometimes when I work too late and the spies of thought cease to relaymessages, a wrong word in motion feels somehow like the dry biscuit that aparrot holds in its great slow hand.

I do not remember seeing Iris before dinner (or perhaps I glimpsed herstanding at a stained window on the stairs with her back to me as I poppedback from the salle d'eau and its hesitations to my ascetic room across thelanding). Ivor had taken care to inform me that she was a deaf-mute and sucha shy one, too, that even now, at twenty-one, she could not make herselflearn to read male lips. That sounded odd. I had always thought that theinfirmity in question confined the patient in an absolutely safe shell aslimpid and strong as shatterproof glass, within which no shame or sham couldexist. Brother and sister conversed in sign language using an alphabet whichthey had invented in childhood and which had gone through several revisededitions. The present one consisted of preposterously elaborate gestures inthe low relief of a pantomime that mimicked things rather than symbolizedthem. I barged in with some grotesque contribution of my own but Ivor askedme sternly not to play the fool, she easily got offended. The whole affair(with a sullen maid, an old Canniгoise slapping down plates in the margin ofthe scene) <13> belonged to another life, to another book, to a world ofvaguely incestuous games that I had not yet consciously invented.

Both were small, but exquisitely formed, young people, and the familylikeness between them could not escape one though Ivor was quite plainlooking, with sandy hair and freckles, and she a suntanned beauty with ablack bob and eyes like clear honey. I do not recall the dress she wore atour first meeting, but I know that her thin arms were bare and stung mysenses at every palm grove and medusa-infested island that she outlined inthe air while her brother translated for me her patterns in idiotic asides.I had my revenge after dinner. Ivor had gone to fetch my whisky. Iris and Istood on the terrace in the saintly dusk. I was lighting my pipe while Irisnudged the balustrade with her hip and pointed out with mermaidundulations--supposed to imitate waves--the shimmer of seaside lights in aparting of the india-ink hills. At that moment the telephone rang in thedrawing room behind us, and she quickly turned around--but with admirablepresence of mind transformed her dash into a nonchalant shawl dance. In themeantime Ivor had already skated phoneward across the parquetry to hear whatNina Lecerf or some other neighbor wanted. We liked to recall, Iris and I,in our later intimacy that revelation scene with Ivor bringing us drinks totoast her fairy-tale recovery and she, without minding his presence, puttingher light hand on my knuckles: I stood gripping the balustrade inexaggerated resentment and was not prompt enough, poor dupe, to acknowledgeher apology by a Continental hand kiss. <14>4

A familiar symptom of my complaint, not its gravest one but thetoughest to get rid of after every relapse, belongs to what Moody, theLondon specialist, was the first to term the "numerical nimbus" syndrome.His account of my case has been recently reprinted in his collected works.It teems with ludicrous inaccuracies. That "nimbus" means nothing. "Mr. N.,a Russian nobleman" did not display any "signs of degeneracy." He was not"32" but 22 when he consulted that fatuous celebrity. Worst of all, Moodylumps me with a Mr. V.S. who is less of a postscriptum to the abridgeddescription of my "nimbus" than an intruder whose sensations are mixed withmine throughout that learned paper. True, the symptom in question is noteasy to describe, but I think I can do better than either Professor Moody ormy vulgar and voluble fellow sufferer.

At its worst it went like this: An hour or so after falling asleep(generally well after midnight and with the humble assistance of a littleOld Mead or Chartreuse) I would wake up (or rather "wake in") momentarilymad. The hideous pang in my brain was triggered by some hint of faint lightin the line of my sight, for no matter how carefully I might have topped thewell-meaning efforts of <15> a servant by my own struggles with blinds andpurblinds, there always remained some damned slit, some atom or dimmet ofartificial streetlight or natural moonlight that signaled inexpressibleperil when I raised my head with a gasp above the level of a choking dream.Along the dim slit brighter points traveled with dreadful meaningfulintervals between them. Those dots corresponded, perhaps, to my rapidheartbeats or were connected optically with the blinking of wet eyelashesbut the rationale of it is inessential; its dreadful part was my realizingin helpless panic that the event had been stupidly unforeseen, yet had beenbound to happen and was the representation of a fatidic problem which had tobe solved lest I perish and indeed might have been solved now if I had givenit some forethought or had been less sleepy and weak-witted at thisall-important moment. The problem itself was of a calculatory order: certainrelations between the twinkling points had to be measured or, in my case,guessed, since my torpor prevented me from counting them properly, let alonerecalling what the safe number should be. Error meant instantretribution--beheading by a giant or worse; the right guess, per contra,would allow me to escape into an enchanting region situated just beyond thegap I had to wriggle through in the thorny riddle, a region resembling inits idyllic abstraction those little landscapes engraved as suggestivevignettes--a brook, a bosquet--next to capital letters of weird, ferociousshape such as a Gothic B beginning a chapter in old books for easilyfrightened children. But how could I know in my torpor and panic that thiswas the simple solution, that the brook and the boughs and the beauty of theBeyond all began with the initial of Being?

There were nights, of course, when my reason returned at once and Irearranged the curtains and presently slept. But at other, more criticaltimes, when I was far from well yet and would experience that nobleman'snimbus, it took <16> me up to several hours to abolish the optical spasmwhich even the light of day could not overcome. My first night in any newplace never fails to be hideous and is followed by a dismal day. I wasracked with neuralgia, I was jumpy, and pustulous, and unshaven, and Irefused to accompany the Blacks to a seaside party to which I had been, orwas told I had been, also invited. In fact, those first days at Villa Irisare so badly distorted in my diary, and so blurred in my mind, that I am notsure if, perhaps, Iris and Ivor were not absent till the middle of the week.I remember, however, that they were kind enough to arrange an appointmentfor me with a doctor in Cannice. This presented itself as a splendidopportunity to check the incompetence of my London luminary against that ofa local one.

The appointment was with Professor Junker, a double personage,consisting of husband and wife. They had been practicing as a team forthirty years now, and every Sunday, in a secluded, though consequentlyrather dirty, corner of the beach, the two analyzed each other. They weresupposed by their patients to be particularly alert on Mondays, but I wasnot, having got frightfully tight in one or two pubs before reaching themean quarter where the Junkers and other doctors lived, as I seemed to havegathered. The front entrance was all right being among the flowers and fruitof a market place, but wait till you see the back. I was received by thefemale partner, a squat old thing wearing trousers, which was delightfullydaring in 1922. That theme was continued immediately outside the casement ofthe WC (where I had to fill an absurd vial large enough for a doctor'spurpose but not for mine) by the performance that a breeze was giving abovea street sufficiently narrow for three pairs of long drawers to cross overon a string in as many strides or leaps. I commented on this and on astained-glass window in the consulting room featuring a mauve lady exactlysimilar to the one on the <17> stairs of Villa Iris. Mrs. Junker asked me ifI liked boys or girls, and I looked around saying guardedly that I did notknow what she had to offer. She did not laugh. The consultation was not asuccess. Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted me to see adentist when sober. It was right across, she said. I know she rang him up toarrange my visit but do not remember if I went there the same afternoon orthe next. His name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I usedhim some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea.

A girl whom I took to be the dentist's assistant (which, however, shewas much too holidayish in dress to be) sat cross-legged talking on thephone in the hallway and merely directed me to a door with the cigarette shewas holding without otherwise interrupting her occupation. I found myself ina banal and silent room. The best seats had been taken. A large conventionaloil, above a cluttered bookshelf, depicted an alpine torrent with a fallentree lying across it. From the shelf a few magazines had already wandered atsome earlier consultation hour onto an oval table which supported its ownmodest array of things, such as an empty flower vase and a watch-sizecasse-tйte. This was a wee circular labyrinth, with five silvery peas insidethat had to be coaxed by judicious turns of the wrist into the center of thehelix. For waiting children.

None were present. A corner armchair contained a fat fellow with anosegay of carnations across his lap. Two elderly ladies were seated on abrown sofa--strangers to each other, if one took into account the urbaneinterval between them. Leagues away from them, on a cushioned stool, acultured-looking young man, possibly a novelist, sat holding a smallmemoranda book in which he kept penciling separate items--possibly thedescription of various objects his eyes roved over in between notes--theceiling, the wallpaper, the picture, and the hairy nape of a <18> man whostood by the window, with his hands clasped behind him, and gazed idly,beyond flapping underwear, beyond the mauve casement of the Junkers' W.C.,beyond the roofs and foothills, at a distant range of mountains where, Iidly thought, there still might exist that withered pine bridging thepainted torrent.

Presently a door at the end of the room flew open with a laughingsound, and the dentist entered, ruddy-faced, bow-tied, in an ill-fittingsuit of festive gray with a rather jaunty black armband. Handshakes andcongratulations followed. I started reminding him of our appointment, but adignified old lady in whom I recognized Madame Junker interrupted me sayingit was her mistake. In the meantime Miranda, the daughter of the house whomI had seen a moment ago, inserted the long pale stems of her uncle'scarnations into a tight vase on the table which by now was miraculouslydraped. A soubrette placed upon it, amid much applause, a great sunset-pinkcake with "50" in calligraphic cream. "What a charming attention!" exclaimedthe widower. Tea was served and several groups sat down, others stood, glassin hand. I heard Iris warning me in a warm whisper that it was spiced applejuice, not liquor, so with raised hands I recoiled from the tray profferedby Miranda's fiancé, the person whom I had caught using a spare moment tocheck certain details of the dowry. "We were not expecting you to turn up,"said Iris, giving the show away, for this could not be the partie de plaisirto which I had been invited ("They have a lovely place on a rock"). No, Ibelieve that much of the confused impressions listed here in connection withdoctors and dentists must be classed as an oneiric experience during adrunken siesta. This is corroborated scriptorially. Glancing through myoldest notes in pocket diaries, with telephone numbers and names elbowingtheir way among reports on events, factual or more or less fictional, I <19>notice that dreams and other distortions of "reality" are written down in aspecial left-slanted hand--at least in the earlier entries, before I gave upfollowing accepted distinctions. A lot of the pre-Cantabrigian stuffdisplays that script (but the soldier really did collapse in the path of thefugitive king). <20>5

I know I have been called a solemn owl but I do detest practical jokesand am bored stiff ("Only humorless people use that phrase," according toIvor) by a constant flow of facetious insults and vulgar puns ("A stiffborer is better than a limp one"--Ivor again). He was a good chap, however,and it was not really respite from his banter that made me welcome hisregular week-day absences. He worked in a travel agency run by his AuntBetty's former homme d'affaires, an eccentric in his own right, who hadpromised Ivor a bonus in the form of an Icarus phaeton if he was good.

My health and handwriting very soon reverted to normal, and I began toenjoy the South. Iris and I lounged for hours (she wearing a black swimsuit,I flannels and blazer) in the garden, which I preferred at first, before theinevitable seduction of seabathing, to the flesh of the plage. I translatedfor her several short poems by Pushkin and Lermontov, paraphrasing andtouching them up for better effect. I told her in dramatic detail of myescape from my country. I mentioned great exiles of old. She listened to melike Desdemona.

"I'd love to learn Russian," she said with the polite wistfulness whichgoes with that confession. "My aunt <21> was practically born in Kiev and atseventy-five still remembered a few Russian and Rumanian words, but I am arotten linguist. How do you say `eucalypt' in your language?"

"Evkalipt."

"Oh, that would make a nice name for a man in a short story. `F.Clipton.' Wells has a `Mr. Snooks' that turns out to derive from `SevenOaks.' I adore Wells, don't you?"

I said that he was the greatest romancer and magician of our time, butthat I could not stand his sociological stuff.

Nor could she. And did I remember what Stephen said in The PassionateFriends when he left the room--the neutral room--where he had been allowedto see his mistress for the very last time?

"I can answer that. The furniture there was slipcovered, and he said,`It's because of the flies.' "

"Yes! Isn't that marvelous! Just blurting out something so as not tocry. It makes one think of the housefly an old Master would paint on asitter's hand to show that the person had died in the meantime."

I said I always preferred the literal meaning of a description to thesymbol behind it. She nodded thoughtfully but did not seem convinced.

And who was our favorite modern poet? How about Housman?

I had seen him many times from afar and once, plain. It was in theTrinity Library. He stood holding an open book but looking at the ceiling asif trying to remember something--perhaps, the way another author hadtranslated that line.

She said she would have been "terribly thrilled." She uttered thosewords thrusting forward her earnest little face and vibrating it, the face,with its sleek bangs, rapidly. "You ought to be thrilled now! After all, I'mhere, this is the summer of 1922, this is your brother's house--" <22>

"It is not," she said, sidestepping the issue (and at the twist of herspeech I felt a sudden overlap in the texture of time as if this hadhappened before or would happen again); "It is my house. Aunt Betty left itto me as well as some money, but Ivor is too stupid or proud to let me payhis appalling debts."

The shadow of my rebuke was more than a shadow. I actually believedeven then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous andfree author, living in a free, universally respected Russia, on the Englishquay of the Neva or on one of my splendid estates in the country, andwriting there prose and poetry in the infinitely plastic tongue of myancestors: among them I counted one of Tolstoy's grand-aunts and two ofPushkin's boon companions. The forefeel of fame was as heady as the oldwines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oakreflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored brancheslooked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tipsof my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by anelectric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before thethunder, or by one line in King Lear. Why do tears blur my glasses when Iinvoke that phantasm of fame as it tempted and tortured me then, fivedecades ago? Its image was innocent, its image was genuine, its differencefrom what actually was to be breaks my heart like the pangs of separation.

No ambition, no honors tainted the fanciful future. The President ofthe Russian Academy advanced toward me to the sound of slow music with awreath on the cushion he held--and had to retreat growling as I shook mygraying head. I saw myself correcting the page proof of a new novel whichwas to change the destiny of Russian literary style as a matter ofcourse--my course (with no self-love, no smugness, no surprise on mypart)--and reworking so much of it in the margin--where inspiration findsits <23> sweetest clover--that the whole had to be set anew. When the bookmade its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining afew dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo(where I had first "looked at the harlequins") with its alley of fountainsand its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It had to bethat way.

From my cold bed in Cambridge I surveyed a whole period of new Russianliterature. I looked forward to the refreshing presence of inimical butcourteous critics who would chide me in the St. Petersburg literary reviewsfor my pathological indifference to politics, major ideas in minor minds,and such vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers. No less amusingwas it to envisage the inevitable pack of crooks and ninnies abusing thesmiling marble, and ill with envy, maddened by their own mediocrity, rushingin pattering hordes to the lemming's doom but presently all running backfrom the opposite side of the stage, having missed not only the point of mybook but also their rodential Gadara.

The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal withher actual, unique traits--the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised hereyebrows, waiting for me to see the point of her joke, or the way itdeveloped a totally different set of soft folds as she frowned over theTauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me.My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could notexpress the divine detail, and her eyes, her hair became hopelesslygeneralized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.

None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were goodenough (particularly when nakedly Englished without rhyme or treason) to beshown to Iris; and, besides, an odd shyness--which I had never felt beforewhen courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of my carnal youth--kept meback from submitting to Iris a tabulation <24> of her charms. On the nightof July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical littlepoem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal translation thattook me longer to write than the original. The title, under which itappeared in an émigré daily in Paris (October 8, 1922, after severalreminders on my part and one please-return request) was, and is, in thevarious anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course ofthe next fifty years, Vlyublyonnost', which puts in a golden nutshell whatEnglish needs three words to express.

My zabyvаem chto vlyublyсnnost'

Ne prсsto povorсt litsа,

A pod kupаvami bezdсnnost',

Nochnаya pаnika plovtsа.

Pokзda snмtsya, snмs', vlyublyсnnost',

No probuzhdиniem ne mзch',

I lзchshe nedogovoryсnnost'

Chem иta shchиl' i иtot lзch.

Napominаyu chto vlyublyсnnost'

Ne yаv', chto mиtiny ne tи,

Chto mсzhet-byt' potustorсnnost'

Priotvorмlas' v temnotи.

"Lovely," said Iris. "Sounds like an incantation. What does it mean?"

"I have it here on the back. It goes like this. We forget--or rathertend to forget--that being in love (vlyublyonnost') does not depend on thefacial angle of the loved one, but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars,a swimmer's panic in the night (here the iambic tetrameter happens to berendered--last line of the first stanza, nochnаya pаnika plovtsа). Nextstanza: While the dreaming is good--in the sense of `while the going isgood'--do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost', but do nottorment us <25> by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is betterthan that chink and that moonbeam. Now comes the last stanza of thisphilosophical love poem."

"This what?"

"Philosophical love poem. Napominаyu, I remind you, that vlyublyonnost'is not wide-awake reality, that the markings are not the same (amoon-striped ceiling, polosatyy ot luny potolok, is, for instance, not thesame kind of reality as a ceiling by day), and that, maybe, the hereafterstands slightly ajar in the dark. Voilю."

"Your girl," remarked Iris, "must be having a jolly good time in yourcompany. Ah, here comes our breadwinner. Bonjour, Ives. The toast is allgone, I'm afraid. We thought you'd left hours ago."

She fitted her palm for a moment to the cheek of the teapot. And itwent into Ardis, it all went into Ardis, my poor dead love. <26>6

After fifty summers, or ten thousand hours, of sunbathing in variouscountries, on beaches, benches, roofs, rocks, decks, ledges, lawns, boards,and balconies, I might have been unable to recall my novitiate in sensorydetail had not there been those old notes of mine which are such a solace toa pedantic memoirist throughout the account of his illnesses, marriages, andliterary life. Enormous amounts of Shaker's Cold Cream were rubbed bykneeling and cooing Iris into my back as I lay prone on a rough towel in theblaze of the plage. Beneath my shut eyelids pressed to my forearm swampurple photomatic shapes: "Through the prose of sun blisters came the poetryof her touch--," thus in my pocket diary, but I can improve upon my youngpreciosity. Through the itch of my skin, and in fact seasoned by that itchto an exquisite degree of rather ridiculous enjoyment, the touch of her handon my shoulder blades and along my spine resembled too closely a deliberatecaress not to be deliberate mimicry, and I could not curb a hidden responseto those nimble fingers when in a final gratuitous flutter they traveleddown to my very coccyx, before fading away.

"There," said Iris with exactly the same intonation as that used, atthe end of a more special kind of treatment, <27> by one of my Cambridgesweethearts, Violet McD., an experienced and compassionate virgin.

She, Iris, had had several lovers, and as I opened my eyes and turnedto her, and saw her, and the dancing diamonds in the blue-green inward ofevery advancing, every tumbling wave, and the wet black pebbles on the sleekforebeach with dead foam waiting for live foam--and, oh, there it comes, thecrested wave line, trotting again like white circus ponies abreast, Iunderstood, as I perceived her against that backdrop, how much adulation,how many lovers had helped form and perfect my Iris, with that impeccablecomplexion of hers, that absence of any uncertainty in the profile of herhigh cheekbone, the elegance of the hollow beneath it, the accroche-coeur ofa sleek little flirt.

"By the way," said Iris as she changed from a kneeling to ahalf-recumbent position, her legs curled under her, "by the way, I have notapologized yet for my dismal remark about that poem. I now have reread your"Valley Blondies" (vlyublyonnost') a hundred times, both the English for thematter and the Russian for the music. I think it's an absolutely divinepiece. Do you forgive me?"

I pursed my lips to kiss the brown iridescent knee near me but herhand, as if measuring a child's fever, palmed my forehead and stopped itsadvance.

"We are watched," she said "by a number of eyes which seem to lookeverywhere except in our direction. The two nice English schoolteachers onmy right--say, twenty paces away--have already told me that your resemblanceto the naked-neck photo of Rupert Brooke is a-houri-sang--they know a littleFrench. If you ever try to kiss me, or my leg, again, I'll beg you to leave.I've been sufficiently hurt in my life."

A pause ensued. The iridescence came from atoms of quartz. When a girlstarts to speak like a novelette, all you need is a little patience. <28>

Had I posted the poem to that émigré paper? Not yet; my garland ofsonnets had had to be sent first. The two people (lowering my voice) on myleft were fellow expatriates, judging by certain small indices. "Yes,"agreed Iris, "they practically got up to stand at attention when you startedto recite that Pushkin thing about waves lying down in adoration at herfeet. What other signs?"

"He kept stroking his beard very slowly from top to tip as he looked atthe horizon and she smoked a cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece."

There was also a child of ten or so cradling a large yellow beach ballin her bare arms. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a kind of frillyharness and a very short pleated skirt revealing her trim thighs. She waswhat in a later era amateurs were to call a "nymphet." As she caught myglance she gave me, over our sunny globe, a sweet lewd smile from under herauburn fringe.

"At eleven or twelve," said Iris, "I was as pretty as that Frenchorphan. That's her grandmother all in black sitting on a spreadCannice-Matin with her knitting. I let smelly gentlemen fondle me. I playedindecent games with Ivor--oh nothing very unusual, and anyway he now prefersdons to donnas--at least that's what he says."

She talked a little about her parents who by a fascinating coincidencehad died on the same day, she at seven A.M. in New York, he at noon inLondon, only two years ago. They had separated soon after the war. She wasAmerican and horrible. You don't speak like that of your mother but she wasreally horrible. Dad was Vice President of the Samuels Cement Company whenhe died. He came from a respectable family and had "good connections." Iasked what grudge exactly did Ivor bear to "society" and vice versa? Shevaguely replied he disliked the "fox-hunting set" and the "yachting crowd."I said those were abominable clichиs used only by Philistines. In my set, inmy world, in the opulent Russia of my boyhood we stood <29> so far above anyconcept of "class" that we only laughed or yawned when reading about"Japanese Barons" or "New England Patricians." Yet strangely enough Ivorstopped clowning and became a normal serious individual only when hestraddled his old, dappled, bald hobbyhorse and started reviling the English"upper classes"--especially their pronunciation. It was, I remonstrated, aspeech superior in quality to the best Parisian French, and even to aPetersburgan's Russian; a delightfully modulated whinny, which both he andIris were rather successfully, though no doubt unconsciously, imitating intheir everyday intercourse, when not making protracted fun of a harmlessforeigner's stilted or outdated English. By the way what was the nationalityof the bronzed old man with the hoary chest hair who was wading out of thelow surf preceded by his bedrabbled dog--I thought I knew his face.

It was, she said, Kanner, the great pianist and butterfly hunter, hisface and name were on all the Morris columns. She was getting tickets for atleast two of his concerts; and there, right there, where his dog was shakingitself, the P. family (exalted old name) had basked in June when the placewas practically empty, and cut Ivor, though he knew young L.P. at Trinity.They'd now moved down there. Even more select. See that orange dot? That'stheir cabana. Foot of the Mirana Palace. I said nothing but I too knew youngP. and disliked him.

Same day. Ran into him in the Mirana Men's Room. Was effusivelywelcomed. Would I care to meet his sister, tomorrow is what? Saturday.Suggested they stroll over tomorrow afternoon to the foot of the Victoria.Sort of cove to your right. I'm there with friends. Of course you know IvorBlack. Young P. duly turned up, with lovely, long-limbed sister.Ivor--frightfully rude. Rise, Iris, you forget we are having tea withRapallovich and Chicherini. That sort of stuff. Idiotic feuds. Lydia P.screamed with laughter. <30>

Upon discovering the effect of that miracle cream, at my boiled-lobsterstage, I switched from a conservative caleгon de bain to a briefer variety(still banned at the time in stricter paradises). The delayed changeresulted in a bizarre stratification of tan. I recall sneaking into Iris'sroom to contemplate myself in a full-length looking glass--the only one inthe house--on a morning she had chosen for a visit to a beauty salon, whichI called up to make sure she was there and not in the arms of a lover.Except for a Provenгal boy polishing the banisters, there was nobody around,thus allowing me to indulge in one of my oldest and naughtiest pleasures:circulating stark naked all over a strange house.

The full-length portrait was not altogether a success, or rathercontained an element of levity not improper to mirrors and medieval picturesof exotic beasts. My face was brown, my torso and arms caramel, a carmineequatorial belt undermargined the caramel, then came a white, more or lesstriangular, southward pointed space edged with the redundant carmine on bothsides, and (owing to my wearing shorts all day) my legs were as brown as myface. Apically, the white of the abdomen, brought out in frighteningrepoussи, with an ugliness never noticed before, a man's portable zoo, asymmetrical mass of animal attributes, the elephant proboscis, the twin seaurchins, the baby gorilla, clinging to my underbelly with its back to thepublic.

A warning spasm shot through my nervous system. The fiends of myincurable ailment, "flayed consciousness," were shoving aside my harlequins.I sought first-aid distraction in the baubles of my love's lavender-scentedbedroom: a Teddy bear dyed violet, a curious French novel (Du cтtи de chezSwann) that I had bought for her, a trim pile of freshly laundered linen ina Moоse basket, a color photograph of two girls in a fancy frame, obliquelyinscribed as "The Lady Cressida and thy sweet Nell, <31> Cambridge 1919"; Imistook the former for Iris herself in a golden wig and a pink make-up; acloser inspection, however, showed it to be Ivor in the part of that highlyirritating girl bobbing in and out of Shakespeare's flawed farce. But, then,Mnemosyne's chromodiascope can also become a bore.

In the music room the boy was now cacophonically dusting the keys ofthe Bechstein as with less zest I resumed my nudist rambles. He asked mewhat sounded like "Hora?," and I demonstrated my wrist turning it this wayand that to reveal only a pale ghost of watch and watch bracelet. Hecompletely misinterpreted my gesture and turned away shaking his stupidhead. It was a morning of errors and failures.

I made my way to the pantry for a glass or two of wine, the bestbreakfast in times of distress. In the passage I trod on a shard of crockery(we had heard the crash on the eve) and danced on one foot with a curse as Itried to examine the imaginary gash in the middle of my pale sole.

The litre of rouge I had visualized was there all right, but I couldnot find a corkscrew in any of the drawers. Between bangs the macaw could beheard crying out something crude and dreary. The postman had come and gone.The editor of The New Aurora (Novaya Zarya) was afraid (dreadful poltroons,those editors) that his "modest émigré venture (nachinanie)" could notetc.--a crumpled "etc." that flew into the garbage pail. Wineless, wrathful,with Ivor's Times under my arm, I slapped up the back stairs to my stuffyroom. The rioting in my brain had now started.

It was then that I resolved, sobbing horribly into my pillow, topreface tomorrow's proposal of marriage with a confession that might make itunacceptable to my Iris. <32>7

If one looked from our garden gate down the asphalted avenue leadingthrough leopard shade to the village some two hundred paces east, one sawthe pink cube of the little post office, its green bench in front, its flagabove, all this limned with the numb brightness of a color transparency,between the last two plane trees of the twin files marching on both sides ofthe road.

On the right (south) side of the avenue, across a marginal ditch,overhung with brambles, the intervals between the mottled trunks disclosedpatches of lavender or lucerne and, farther away, the low white wall of acemetery running parallel to our lane as those things are apt to do. On theleft (north) side, through analogous intervals, one glimpsed an expanse ofrising ground, a vineyard, a distant farm, pine groves, and the outline ofmountains. On the penult tree trunk of that side somebody had pasted, andsomebody else partly scraped off, an incoherent notice.

We walked down that avenue nearly every morning, Iris and I, on our wayto the village square and--from there by lovely shortcuts--to Cannice andthe sea. Now and then she liked to return on foot, being one of those smallbut strong lassies who can hurdle, and play hockey, and climb rocks, andthen shimmy till any pale mad hour <33> ("do bezзmnogo blиdnogo chаsa"--toquote from my first direct poem to her). She usually wore her "Indian"frock, a kind of translucent wrap, over her skimpy swimsuit, and as Ifollowed close behind, and sensed the solitude, the security, theall-permitting dream, I had trouble walking in my bestial state. Fortunatelyit was not the none-so-very-secure solitude that held me back but a moraldecision to confess something very grave before I made love to her.

As seen from those escarpments, the sea far below spread in majesticwrinkles, and, owing to distance and height, the recurrent line of foamarrived in rather droll slow motion because we knew it was sure, as we hadbeen sure, of its strapping pace, and now that restraint, thatstateliness...

Suddenly there came from somewhere within the natural jumble of oursurroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.

"Goodness," said Iris, "I do hope that's not a happy escapee fromKanner's Circus." (No relation--at least, so it seemed--to the pianist.)

We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen timesit crossed the looping main road, our path grew wider. That day as usual Iargued with Iris about the English names of the few plants I couldidentify--rock roses and griselda in bloom, agaves (which she called"centuries"), broom and spurge, myrtle and arbutus. Speckled butterfliescame and went like quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels of foliage,and once a tremendous olive-green fellow, with a rosy flush somewherebeneath, settled on a thistlehead for an instant. I know nothing aboutbutterflies, and indeed do not care for the fluffier night-flying ones, andwould hate any of them to touch me: even the prettiest gives me a nastyshiver like some floating spider web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera,the silver louse.

On the day now in focus, memorable for a more important matter butcarrying all kinds of synchronous trivia <34> attached to it like burrs orincrustated like marine parasites, we noticed a butterfly net moving amongthe beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swingingon its vest-button string, his white locks flying around his scarlet brow,and the whole of his person still radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we nodoubt had heard a minute ago.

Upon Iris immediately describing to him the spectacular green thing,Kanner dismissed it as eine "Pandora" (at least that's what I find jotteddown), a common southern Falter (butterfly). "Aber (but)," he thundered,raising his index, "when you wish to look at a real rarity, never beforeobserved west of Nieder-Жsterreich, then I will show what I have justcaught."

He leant his net against a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked it upreverently) and, with profuse thanks (to Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?) thattrailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel alittle stamp envelope and shook out of it very gently a folded butterflyonto the palm of his hand.

After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young CabbageWhite. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance, grow.)

"Now look with attention," said Kanner ignoring her quaint remark andpointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. "What you see isthe inferior side--the under white of the left Vorderflэgel (`fore wing')and the under yellow of the left Hinterflэgel (`hind wing'). I will not openthe wings but I think you can believe what I'm going to tell you. On theupper side, which you can't see, this species shares with its nearestallies--the Small White and Mann's White, both common here--the typicallittle spots of the fore wing, namely a black full stop in the male and ablack Doppelpunkt (`colon') in the female. In those allies the punctuationis reproduced on the underside, and only in the species of which you see<35> a folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing blank beneath--atypographical caprice of Nature! Ergo it is an Ergane."

One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched.

"Oh, it's alive!" cried Iris.

"No, it can't fly away--one pinch was enough," rejoined Kannersoothingly, as he slipped the specimen back into its pellucid hell; andpresently, brandishing his arms and net in triumphant farewells, he wascontinuing his climb.

"The brute!" wailed Iris. She brooded over the thousand littlecreatures he had tortured, but a few days later, when Ivor took us to theman's concert (a most poetical rendition of Grэnberg's suite Les Chбteaux)she derived some consolation from her brother's contemptuous remark: "Allthat butterfly business is only a publicity stunt." Alas, as a fellow madmanI knew better.

All I had to do when we reached our stretch of plage in order to absorbthe sun was to shed shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Iris shrugged off her wrapand lay down, bare limbed, on the towel next to mine. I was rehearsing in myhead the speech I had prepared. The pianist's dog was today in the companyof a handsome old lady, his fourth wife. The nymphet was being buried in hotsand by two young oafs. The Russian lady was reading an émigré newspaper.Her husband was contemplating the horizon. The two English women werebobbing in the dazzling sea. A large French family of slightly flushedalbinos was trying to inflate a rubber dolphin.

"I'm ready for a dip," said Iris.

She took out of the beach bag (kept for her by the Victoria concierge)her yellow swim bonnet, and we transferred our towels and things to thecomparative quiet of an obsolete wharf of sorts upon which she liked to dryafterwards.

Already twice in my young life a fit of total cramp--the physicalcounterpart of lightning insanity--had all but <36> overpowered me in thepanic and blackness of bottomless water. I see myself as a lad of fifteenswimming at dusk across a narrow but deep river with an athletic cousin. Heis beginning to leave me behind when a special effort I make results in asense of ineffable euphoria which promises miracles of propulsion, dreamprizes on dream shelves--but which, at its satanic climax, is replaced by anintolerable spasm first in one leg, then in the other, then in the ribs andboth arms. I have often attempted to explain, in later years, to learned andironical doctors, the strange, hideous, segmental quality of those pulsatingpangs that made a huge worm of me with limbs transformed into successivecoils of agony. By some fantastic fluke a third swimmer, a stranger, wasright behind me and helped to pull me out of an abysmal tangle of water-lilystems.

The second time was a year later, on the West-Caucasian coast. I hadbeen drinking with a dozen older companions at the birthday party of thedistrict governor's son and, around midnight, a dashing young Englishman,Allan Andoverton (who was to be, around 1939, my first British publisher!)had suggested a moonlight swim. As long as I did not venture too far in thesea, the experience seemed quite enjoyable. The water was warm; the moonshone benevolently on the starched shirt of my first evening clothes spreadon the shingly shore. I could hear merry voices around me; Allan, Iremember, had not bothered to strip and was fooling with a champagne bottlein the dappled swell; but presently a cloud engulfed everything, a greatwave lifted and rolled me, and soon I was too upset in all senses to tellwhether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse. Abject fear set loose instantlythe pain I already knew, and I would have drowned there and then had not thenext billow given me a boost and deposited me near my own trousers.

The shadow of those repellent and rather colorless recolections (mortalperil is colorless) remained always present <37> in my "dips" and "splashes"(another word of hers) with Iris. She got used to my habit of staying incomfortable contact with the bed of shallows, while she executed "crawls"(if that is what those overarm strokes were called in the Nineteen-Twenties)at quite a distance away; but that morning I nearly did a very stupid thing.

I was gently floating to and fro in line with the shore and sinking aprobing toe every now and then to ascertain if I could still feel the oozybottom with its unappetizing to the touch, but on the whole friendly,vegetables, when I noticed that the seascape had changed. In the middledistance a brown motorboat manned by a young fellow in whom I recognizedL.P. had described a foamy half-circle and stopped beside Iris. She clung tothe bright brim, and he spoke to her, and then made as if to drag her intohis boat, but she flipped free, and he sped away, laughing.

It all must have lasted a couple of minutes, but had the rascal withhis hawkish profile and white cable-stitched sweater stayed a few secondslonger or had my girl been abducted by her new beau in the thunder andspray, I would have perished; for while the scene endured, some virileinstinct rather than one of self-preservation had caused me to swim towardthem a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular positionto regain my breath I found underfoot nothing but water. I turned andstarted swimming landward--and already felt the ominous foreglow, thestrange, never yet described aura of total cramp creeping over me andforming its deadly pact with gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand,and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach. <38>8

"I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health."

"Wait a minute. Must peel this horrid thing off--as far down--as fardown as it can decently go."

We were lying, I supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off hercap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit,so as to expose her entire back to the sun; a secondary struggle was takingplace on the near side, in the vicinity of her sable armpit, in herunsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small breast at its tenderjuncture with her ribs. As soon as she had wriggled into a satisfactorystate of decorum, she half-reared, holding her black bodice to her bosom,while her other hand conducted that delightful rapid monkey-scratchingsearch a girl performs when groping for something in her bag--in thisinstance a mauve package of cheap Salammbтs and an expensive lighter;whereupon she again pressed her bosom to the spread towel. Her earlobeburned red through her black liberated "Medusa," as that type of bob wascalled in the young twenties. The moldings of her brown back, with apatch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinalhollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted mepainfully <39> from the decision I had taken to preface my proposal with aspecial, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water stillglistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong browncalves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles.If I have described so often in my American novels (A Kingdom by the Sea,Ardis) the unbearable magic of a girl's back, it is mainly because of myhaving loved Iris. Her compact little nates, the most agonizing, thefullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrappedsurprises under the Christmas tree.

Upon resettling in the waiting sun after this little flurry, Irisprotruded her fat underlip as she exhaled smoke and presently remarked:"Your mental health is jolly good, I think. You are sometimes strange andsomber, and often silly, but that's in character with ce qu'on appellegenius."

"What do you call `genius'?"

"Well, seeing things others don't see. Or rather the invisible linksbetween things."

"I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing todo with genius. We shall start with a specific example and an authenticdecor. Please close your eyes for a moment. Now visualize the avenue thatgoes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees convergingin perspective and the garden gate between the last two?"

"No," said Iris, "the last one on the right is replaced by alamppost--you can't make it out very clearly from the village square--but itis really a lamppost in a coat of ivy."

"Well, no matter. The main thing is to imagine we're looking from thevillage here toward the garden gate there. We must be very careful about ourhere's and there's in this problem. For the present `there' is thequadrangle of green sunlight in the half-opened gate. We now start to walkup the avenue. On the second tree trunk of the right-side file we noticetraces of some local proclamation--" <40>

"It was Ivor's proclamation. He proclaimed that things had changed andAunt Betty's protиgиs should stop making their weekly calls."

"Splendid. We continue to walk toward the garden gate. Intervals oflandscape can be made out between the plane trees on both sides. On yourright--please, close your eyes, you will see better--on your right there's avineyard; on your left, a churchyard--you can distinguish its long, low,very low, wall--"

"You make it sound rather creepy. And I want to add something. Amongthe blackberries, Ivor and I discovered a crooked old tombstone with theinscription Dors, Mиdor! and only the date of death, 1889; a found dog, nodoubt. It's just before the last tree on the left side."

"So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter--but you stopall of a sudden: you've forgotten to buy those nice new stamps for youralbum. We decide to go back to the post office."

"Can I open my eyes? Because I'm afraid I'm going to fall asleep."

"On the contrary: now is the moment to shut your eyes tight andconcentrate. I want you to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that`right' instantly becomes `left,' and you instantly see the `here' as a`there,' with the lamppost now on your left and dead Mиdor now on yourright, and the plane trees converging toward the post office. Can you dothat?"

"Done," said Iris. "About-face executed. I now stand facing a sunnyhole with a little pink house inside it and a bit of blue sky. Shall westart walking back?"

"You may, I can't! This is the point of the experiment. In actual,physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, withmy eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from onedirection to the other. Some swivel cell in my brain does not work. I cancheat, of course, by setting aside the mental snapshot of <41> one vista andleisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point.But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive memad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which transformsone direction into another, directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carryingthe whole world on my back in the process of trying to visualize my turningaround and making myself see in terms of `right' what I saw in terms of`left' and vice versa."

I thought she had fallen asleep, but before I could entertain thethought that she had not heard, not understood anything of what wasdestroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.

"First of all, we shall agree," she said, "to cancel all suchexperiments. Secondly, we shall tell ourselves that what we had been tryingto do was to solve a stupid philosophical riddle--on the lines of what does`right' and `left' mean in our absence, when nobody is looking, in purespace, and what, anyway, is space; when I was a child I thought space wasthe inside of a nought, any nought, chalked on a slate and perhaps not quitetidy, but still a good clean zero. I don't want you to go mad or to drive memad, because those perplexities are catching, and so we'll drop the wholebusiness of revolving avenues altogether. I would like to seal our pact witha kiss, but we shall have to postpone that. Ivor is coming in a few minutesto take us for a spin in his new car, but perhaps you do not care to come,and so I propose we meet in the garden, for a minute or two, just beforedinner, while he is taking his bath."

I asked what Bob (L.P.) had been telling her in my dream. "It was not adream," she said. "He just wanted to know if his sister had phoned about adance they wanted us all three to come to. If she had, nobody was at home."

We repaired for a snack and a drink to the Victoria bar, and presentlyIvor joined us. He said, nonsense, he <42> could dance and fence beautifullyon the stage but was a regular bear at private affairs and would hate tohave his innocent sister pawed by all the rastaquouхres of the Cтte.

"Incidentally," he added, "I don't much care for P.'s obsession withmoneylenders. He practically ruined the best one in Cambridge but hasnothing but conventional evil to repeat about them."

"My brother is a funny person," said Iris, turning to me as in play."He conceals our ancestry like a dark treasure, yet will flare up publiclyif someone calls someone a Shylock."

Ivor prattled on: "Old Maurice (his employer) is dining with ustonight. Cold cuts and a macиdoine au kitchen rum. I'll also get some tinnedasparagus at the English shop; it's much better than the stuff they growhere. The car is not exactly a Royce, but it rolls. Sorry Vivian is tooqueasy to come. I saw Madge Titheridge this morning and she said Frenchreporters pronounce her family name `Si c'est riche.' Nobody's laughingtoday." <43>9

Being too excited to take my usual siesta, I spent most of theafternoon working on a love poem (and this is the last entry in my 1922pocket diary--exactly one month after my arrival in Carnavaux). In thosedays I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one,who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over myinability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and herapprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffedthe torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillerswhich became more and more numerous the further I moved away from theinitial, evanescent, savage perfection. The treacherous music of Russianrhythms came to my specious rescue like those demons who break the blacksilence of an artist's hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistoricalbirds. Another and final deception would come with the Fair Copy in which,for a short while, calligraphy, vellum paper, and India ink beautified adead doggerel. And to think that for almost five years I kept trying andkept getting caught--until I fired that painted, pregnant, meek, miserablelittle assistant!

I dressed and went downstairs. The trench window giving on the terracewas open. Old Maurice, Iris, and <44> Ivor sat enjoying Martinis in theorchestra seats of a marvelous sunset. Ivor was in the act of mimickingsomeone, with bizarre intonations and extravagant gestures. The marveloussunset has not only remained as a backdrop of a life-transforming evening,but endured, perhaps, behind the suggestion I made to my British publishers,many years later, to bring out a coffee-table album of auroras and sunsets,in the truest possible shades, a collection that would also be of scientificvalue, since some learned celestiologist might be hired to discuss samplesfrom various countries and analyze the striking and never before discusseddifferences between the color schemes of evening and dawn. The album cameout eventually, the price was high and the pictorial part passable; but thetext was supplied by a luckless female whose pretty prose and borrowedpoetry botched the book (Allan and Overton, London, 1949).

For a couple of moments, while idly attending to Ivor's stridentperformance, I stood watching the huge sunset. Its wash was of a classicallight-orange tint with an oblique bluish-black shark crossing it. Whatglorified the combination was a series of ember-bright cloudlets ridingalong, tattered and hooded, above the red sun which had assumed the shape ofa pawn or a baluster. "Look at the sabbath witches!" I was about to cry, butthen I saw Iris rise and heard her say: "That will do, Ives. Maurice hasnever met the person, it's all lost on him."

"Not at all," retorted her brother, "he will meet him in a minute andrecognize him (the verb was an artist's snarl), that's the point!"

Iris left the terrace via the garden steps, and Ivor did not continuehis skit, which a swift playback that now burst on my consciousnessidentified as a clever burlesque of my voice and manner. I had the oddsensation of a piece of myself being ripped off and tossed overboard, of mybeing separated from my own self, of flying forward and at the same timeturning away. The second action <45> prevailed, and presently, under theholm oak, I joined Iris.

The crickets were stridulating, dusk had filled the pool, a ray of theoutside lamp glistened on two parked cars. I kissed her lips, her neck, hernecklace, her neck, her lips. Her response dispelled my ill humor; but Itold her what I thought of the idiot before she ran back to the festivelylit villa.

Ivor personally brought up my supper, right to my bedside table, withwell-concealed dismay at being balked of his art's reward and charmingapologies for having offended me, and "had I run out of pyjamas?" to which Ireplied that, on the contrary, I felt rather flattered, and in fact alwaysslept naked in summer, but preferred not to come down lest a slight headacheprevent me from not living up to that splendid impersonation.

I slept fitfully, and only in the small hours glided into a deeperspell (illustrated for no reason at all with the image of my first littleinamorata in the grass of an orchard) from which I was rudely roused by thespattering sounds of a motor. I slipped on a shirt and leant out of thewindow, sending a flock of sparrows whirring out of the jasmin, whoseluxuriant growth reached up to the second floor, and saw, with a sensualstart, Ivor putting a suitcase and a fishing rod into his car which stood,throbbing, practically in the garden. It was a Sunday, and I had beenexpecting to have him around all day, but there he was getting behind thewheel and slamming the door after him. The gardener was giving tacticaldirections with both arms; his pretty little boy was also there, holding ayellow and blue feather duster. And then I heard her lovely English voicebidding her brother have a good time. I had to lean out a little more to seeher; she stood on a patch of cool clean turf, barefooted, barecalved, in anample-sleeved peignoir, repeating her joyful farewell, which he could nolonger hear.

I dashed to the W.C. across the landing. A few moments <46> later, as Ileft my gurgling and gulping retreat, I noticed her on the other side of thestaircase. She was entering my room. My polo shirt, a very short,salmon-colored affair, could not hide my salient impatience.

"I hate to see the stunned look on the face of a clock that hasstopped," she said, as she stretched a slender brovm arm up to the shelfwhere I had relegated an old egg timer lent me in lieu of a regular alarm.As her wide sleeve fell back I kissed the dark perfumed hollow I had longedto kiss since our first day in the sun.

The door key would not work, that I knew; still I tried, and wasrewarded by the silly semblance of recurrent clicks that did not lockanything. Whose step, whose sick young cough came from the stairs? Yes ofcourse that was Jacquot, the gardener's boy who rubbed and dusted thingsevery morning. He might butt in, I said, already speaking with difficulty.To polish, for instance, that candlestick. Oh, what does it matter, shewhispered, he's only a conscientious child, a poor foundling, as all ourdogs and parrots are. Your tum, she said, is still as pink as your shirt.And please do not forget, darling, to clear out before it's too late.

How far, how bright, how unchanged by eternity, how disfigured by time!There were bread crumbs and even a bit of orange peel in the bed. The youngcough was now muted, but I could distinctly hear creakings, controlledfootfalls, the hum in an ear pressed to the door. I must have been eleven ortwelve when the nephew of my grand-uncle visited the Moscow country housewhere I was spending that hot and hideous summer. He had brought hispassionate bride with him--straight from the wedding feast. Next day at thesiesta hour, in a frenzy of curiosity and fancy, I crept to a secret spotunder the second-floor guest-room window where a gardener's ladder stoodrooted in a jungle of jasmin. It reached only to the top of the closedfirst-floor shutters, and though I found a foothold <47> above them, on anornamental projection, I could only just grip the sill of a half-open windowfrom which confused sounds issued. I recognized the jangle of bedsprings andthe rhythmic tinkle of a fruit knife on a plate near the bed, one post ofwhich I could make out by stretching my neck to the utmost; but whatfascinated me most were the manly moans coming from the invisible part ofthe bed. A superhuman effort afforded me the sight of a salmon-pink shirtover the back of a chair. He, the enraptured beast, doomed to die one day asso many are, was now repeating her name with ever increasing urgency, and bythe time my foot slipped he was in full cry, thus drowning the noise of mysudden descent into a crackle of twigs and a snowstorm of petals. <48>10

Just before Ivor returned from his fishing trip, I moved to theVictoria, where she visited me daily. That was not enough; but in the autumnIvor migrated to Los Angeles to join his half-brother in directing theAmenic film company (for which, thirty years later, long after Ivor's deathover Dover, I was to write the script of Pawn Takes Queen, my most popularat the time, but far from best, novel), and we returned to our belovedvilla, in the really quite nice blue Icarus, Ivor's thoughtful weddingpresent.

Sometime in October my benefactor, now in the last stage of majesticsenility, came for his annual visit to Mentone, and, without warning, Irisand I dropped in to see him. His villa was incomparably grander than ours.He staggered to his feet to take between his wax-pale palms Iris's hand andstare at her with blue bleary eyes for at least five seconds (a littleeternity, socially) in a kind of ritual silence, after which he embraced mewith a slow triple cross-kiss in the awful Russian tradition.

"Your bride," he said, using, I knew, the word in the sense of fiancée(and speaking an English which Iris said later was exactly like mine inIvor's unforgettable version) "is as beautiful as your wife will be!"

I quickly told him--in Russian--that the maire of <49> Cannice hadmarried us a month ago in a brisk ceremony. Nikifor Nikodimovich gave Irisanother stare and finally kissed her hand, which I was glad to see sheraised in the proper fashion (coached, no doubt, by Ivor who used to takeevery opportunity to paw his sister).

"I misunderstood the rumors," he said, "but all the same I am happy tomake the acquaintance of such a charming young lady. And where, pray, inwhat church, will the vow be sanctified?"

"In the temple we shall build, Sir," said Iris--a trifle insolently, Ithought.

Count Starov "chewed his lips," as old men are wont to do in Russiannovels. Miss Vrode-Vorodin, the elderly cousin who kept house for him, madea timely entrance and led Iris to an adjacent alcove (illuminated by aresplendent portrait by Serov, 1896, of the notorious beauty, Mme. deBlagidze, in Caucasian costume) for a nice cup of tea. The Count wished totalk business with me and had only ten minutes "before his injection."

What was my wife's maiden name?

I told him. He thought it over and shook his head. What was hermother's name?

I told him that, too. Same reaction. What about the financial aspect ofthe marriage?

I said she had a house, a parrot, a car, and a small income--I didn'tknow exactly how much.

After another minute's thought, he asked me if I would like a permanentjob in the White Cross? It had nothing to do with Switzerland. It was anorganization that helped Russian Christians all over the world. The jobwould involve travel, interesting connections, promotion to important posts.

I declined so emphatically that he dropped the silver pill box he washolding and a number of innocent gum drops were spilled all over the tableat his elbow. He swept them onto the carpet with a gesture of peevishdismissal. <50>

What then was I intending to do?

I said I'd go on with my literary dreams and nightmares. We would spendmost of the year in Paris. Paris was becoming the center of émigré cultureand destitution.

How much did I think I could earn?

Well, as N.N. knew, currencies were losing their identities in thewhirlpool of inflation, but Boris Morozov, a distinguished author, whosefame had preceded his exile, had given me some illuminating "examples ofexistence" when I met him quite recently in Cannice where he had lectured onBaratynski at the local literaturnyy circle. In his case, four lines ofverse would pay for a bifsteck pommes, while a couple of essays in theNovosti emigratsii assured a month's rent for a cheap chambre garnie. Therewere also readings, in large auditoriums, at least twice a year, which mightbring him each time the equivalent of, say, one hundred dollars.

My benefactor thought this over and said that as long as he lived Iwould receive a check for half that amount every first of the month, andthat he would bequeath me a certain sum in his testament. He named the sum.Its paltriness took me aback. This was a foretaste of the disappointingadvances publishers were to offer me after a long, promising, pencil-tappingpause.

We rented a two-room apartment in the 16th arrondissement, rueDesprиaux, 23. The hallway connecting the rooms led, on the front side, to abathroom and kitchenette. Being a solitary sleeper by principle andinclination, I relinquished the double bed to Iris, and slept on the couchin the parlor. The concierge's daughter came to clean up and cook. Herculinary capacities were limited, so we often broke the monotony ofvegetable soups and boiled meat by eating at a Russian restoranchik. We wereto spend seven winters in that little flat.

Owing to the foresight of my dear guardian and benefactor(1850?--1927), an old-fashioned cosmopolitan with <51> a lot of influence inthe right quarters, I had become by the time of my marriage the subject of asnug foreign country and thus was spared the indignity of a nansenskiypasport (a pauper's permit, really), as well as the vulgar obsession with"documents," which provoked such evil glee among the Bolshevist rulers, whoperceived some similarity between red tape and Red rule and a certainaffinity between the civil plight of a hobbled expatriate and the politicalimmobilization of a Soviet slave. I could, therefore, take my wife to anyvacational resort in the world without waiting several weeks for a visa, andthen being refused, perhaps, a return visa to our accidental country ofresidence, in this case France, because of some flaw in our precious anddespicable papers. Nowadays (1970), when my British passport has beensuperseded by a no less potent American one, I still treasure that 1922photo of the mysterious young man I then was, with the mysteriously smilingeyes and the striped tie and the wavy hair. I remember spring trips to Maltaand Andalusia, but every summer, around the first of July, we drove toCarnavaux and stayed there for a month or two. The parrot died in 1925, thefootboy vanished in 1927. Ivor visited us twice in Paris, and I think shesaw him also in London where she went at least once a year to spend a fewdays with "friends," whom I did not know, but who sounded harmless--at leastto a certain point.

I should have been happier. I had planned to be happier. My healthcontinued patchy with ominous shapes showing through its flimsier edges.Faith in my work never wavered, but despite her touching intentions toparticipate in it, Iris remained on its outside, and the better it grew themore alien it became to her. She took desultory lessons in Russian,interrupting them regularly, for long periods, and finished by developing adull habitual aversion to the language. I soon noticed that she had ceasedtrying to look attentive and bright when Russian, and Russian only, was <52>spoken in her presence (after some primitive French had been kept up for thefirst minute or two of the party in polite concession to her disability).

This was, at best, annoying; at worst, heartrending; it did not,however, affect my sanity as something else threatened to do.

Jealousy, a masked giant never encountered before in the frivolousaffairs of my early youth, now stood with folded arms, confronting me atevery corner. Certain little sexual quirks in my sweet, docile, tender Iris,inflections of lovemaking, felicities of fondling, the easy accuracy withwhich she adapted her flexible frame to every pattern of passion, seemed topresuppose a wealth of experience. Before starting to suspect the present, Ifelt compelled to get my fill of suspecting her past. During theexaminations to which I subjected her on my worst nights, she dismissed herformer romances as totally insignificant, without realizing that thisreticence left more to my imagination than would the most luridly overstatedtruth.

The three lovers (a figure I wrested from her with the fierceness ofPushkin's mad gambler and with even less luck) whom she had had in her teensremained nameless, and therefore spectral; devoid of any individual traits,and therefore identical. They performed their sketchy pas in the back of herlone act like the lowliest members of the corps de ballet, in a display ofmawkish gymnastics rather than dance, and it was clear that none of themwould ever become the male star of the troupe. She, the ballerina, on theother hand, was a dim diamond with all the facets of talent ready to blaze,but under the pressure of the nonsense around her had, for the moment, tolimit her steps and gestures to an expression of cold coquetry, offlirtatious evasion--waiting as she was for the tremendous leap of themarble-thighed athlete in shining tights who was to erupt from the wingsafter a decent prelude. We thought I had been chosen for that part but wewere mistaken. <53>

Only by projecting thus on the screen of my mind those stylized images,could I allay the anguish of carnal jealousy centered on specters. Yet notseldom I chose to succumb to it. The trench window of my studio in VillaIris gave on the same red-tiled balcony as my wife's bedroom did, and couldbe set half-open at such an angle as to provide two different views meltinginto one another. It caught obliquely, through the monastic archway leadingfrom room to room, part of her bed and of her--her hair, a shoulder--whichotherwise I could not see from the old-fashioned lectern at which I wrote;but the glass also held, at arm's length as it were, the green reality ofthe garden with a peregrination of cypresses along its sidewall. So half inbed and half in the pale hot sky, she would recline, writing a letter thatwas crucified on my second-best chessboard. I knew that if I asked, theanswer would be "Oh, to an old schoolmate," or "To Ivor," or "To old MissKupalov," and I also knew that in one way or another the letter would reachthe post office at the end of the plane-tree avenue without my seeing thename on the envelope. And still I let her write as she comfortably floatedin the life belt of her pillow, above the cypresses and the garden wall,while all the time I gauged--grimly, recklessly--to what depths of darkpigment the tentacled ache would go. <54>11

Most of those Russian lessons consisted of her taking one of my poemsor essays to this or that Russian lady, Miss Kupalov or Mrs. Lapukov(neither of whom had much English) and having it paraphrased orally for herin a kind of makeshift Volapэk. On my pointing out to Iris that she waslosing her time at this hit-and-miss task, she cast around for some otheralchemic method which might enable her to read everything I wrote. I hadbegun by then (1925) my first novel (Tamara) and she coaxed me into lettingher have a copy of the first chapter, which I had just typed out. This shecarried to an agency that dealt in translations into French of utilitariantexts such as applications and supplications addressed by Russian refugeesto various rats in the ratholes of various commissariats. The person whoagreed to supply her with the "literal version," which she paid for invaluta, kept the typescript for two months and warned her when delivering itthat my "article" had presented almost insurmountable difficulties, "beingwritten in an idiom and style utterly unfamiliar to the ordinary reader."Thus an anonymous imbecile in a shabby, cluttered, clattering office becamemy first critic and my first translator.

I knew nothing of that venture, until I found her one <55> day bendingher brown curls over sheets of foolscap almost perforated by the violence ofthe violet characters that covered it without any semblance of margin. Iwas, in those days, naively opposed to any kind of translation, partlybecause my attempts to turn two or three of my first compositions into myown English had resulted in a feeling of morbid revolt--and in maddeningheadaches. Iris, her cheek on her fist and her eyes rolling in languiddoubt, looked up at me rather sheepishly, but with that gleam of humor thatnever left her in the most absurd or trying circumstances. I noticed ablunder in the first line, a boo-boo in the next, and without bothering toread any further, tore up the whole thing--which provoked no reaction, savea neutral sigh, on the part of my thwarted darling.

In compensation for being debarred from my writings, she decided tobecome a writer herself. Beginning with the middle Twenties and to the endof her short, squandered, uncharmed life, my Iris kept working on adetective novel in two, three, four successive versions, in which the plot,the people, the setting, everything kept changing in bewildering bursts offrantic deletions--everything except the names (none of which I remember).

Not only did she lack all literary talent, but she had not even theknack of imitating the small number of gifted authors among the prosperousbut ephemeral purveyors of "crime fiction" which she consumed with theindiscriminate zest of a model prisoner. How, then, did my Iris know whythis had to be altered, that rejected? What instinct of genius ordered herto destroy the whole heap of her drafts on the eve, practically on the eve,of her sudden death? All the odd girl could ever visualize, with startlinglucidity, was the crimson cover of the final, ideal paperback on which thevillain's hairy fist would be shown pointing a pistol-shaped cigarettelighter at the reader--who was not supposed to guess until everybody in thebook had died that it was, in fact, a pistol. <56>

Let me pick out several fatidic points, cleverly disguised at the time,within the embroidery of our seven winters.

During a lull in a magnificent concert for which we had not been ableto obtain adjacent seats, I noticed Iris eagerly welcoming amelancholy-looking woman with drab hair and thin lips; I certainly had mether, somewhere, quite recently, but the very insignificance of herappearance canceled the pursuit of a vague recollection, and I never askedIris about it. She was to become my wife's last teacher.

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that thosethat acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while itsrevilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities. No doubt I might havehad similar illusions about the way Tamara was reviewed in theRussian-language periodicals of Paris, Berlin, Prague, Riga, and othercities; but by that time I was already engrossed in my second novel, PawnTakes Queen, and my first one had dwindled to a pinch of colored dust in mymind.

The editor of Patria, the émigré monthly in which Pawn Takes Queen hadbegun to be serialized, invited "Irida Osipovna" and me to a literarysamovar. I mention it only because this was one of the few salons that myunsociability deigned to frequent. Iris helped with the sandwiches. I smokedmy pipe and observed the feeding habits of two major novelists, three minorones, one major poet, five minor ones of both sexes, one major critic(Demian Basilevski), and nine minor ones, including the inimitable"Prostakov-Skotinin," a Russian comedy name (meaning "simpleton and brute")applied to him by his archrival Hristofor Boyarski.

The major poet, Boris Morozov, an amiable grizzly bear of a man, wasasked how his reading in Berlin had gone, and he said: "Nichevo" (a "so-so"tinged with a "well enough") and then told a funny but not memorable storyabout the new President of the Union of émigré <57> Writers in Germany. Thelady next to me informed me she had adored that treacherous conversationbetween the Pawn and the Queen about the husband and would they reallydefenestrate the poor chess player? I said they would but not in the nextissue, and not for good: he would live forever in the games he had playedand in the multiple exclamation marks of future annotators. I also heard--myhearing is almost on a par with my sight--snatches of general talk such asan explanatory, "She is an Englishwoman," murmured from behind a hand fivechairs away by one guest to another.

All that would have been much too trivial to record unless meant toserve as the commonplace background, at any such meeting of exiles, againstwhich a certain reminder flickered now and then, between the shoptalk andthe tattle--a line of Tyutchev or Blok, which was cited in passing, as wellas an everlasting presence, with the familiarity of devotion and as thesecret height of art, and which ornamented sad lives with a sudden cadenzacoming from some celestial elsewhere, a glory, a sweetness, the patch ofrainbow cast on the wall by a crystal paperweight we cannot locate. That waswhat my Iris was missing.

To return to the trivia: I recall regaling the company with one of thehowlers I had noticed in the "translation" of Tamara. The sentence vidnelos'neskol'ko barok ("several barges could be seen") had become la vue иtaitassez baroque. The eminent critic Basilevski, a stocky, fair-haired oldfellow in a rumpled brown suit, shook with abdominal mirth--but then hisexpression changed to one of suspicion and displeasure. After tea heaccosted me and insisted gruffly that I had made up that example ofmistranslation. I remember answering that, if so, he, too, might well be aninvention of mine.

As we strolled home. Iris complained she would never learn to cloud aglass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready toput up with her deliberate <58> insularity but implored her to ceaseannouncing ю la ronde: "Please, don't mind me: I love the sound of Russian."That was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable butbeautifully printed.

"I am going to make reparations," she gaily replied. "I've never beenable to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only one--andyou refused to teach me, because you were busy, because you were tired,because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I've discovered atlast someone who speaks both languages, yours and mine, as two natives inone, and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In factit's her own suggestion."

Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of a leytenant Starov(Christian name unimportant), who had served under General Wrangel and nowhad some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, asfellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or "adoptednephew" (whatever that meant), he was said to be. He was a dark-eyed,dark-complexioned man, three or four years my senior; I thought him ratherhandsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the civil warhad left him with a terrifying tic that caused his face to change suddenly,at variable intervals, as if a paper bag were being crumpled by an invisiblehand. Nadezhda Starov, a quiet, plain woman with an indefinable Quakerishlook about her, clocked those intervals for some reason, no doubt of amedical nature, the man himself being unconscious of his "fireworks" unlesshe happened to see them in a mirror. He had a macabre sense of humor,beautiful hands, and a velvety voice.

I realized now that it was Nadezhda Gordonovna whom Iris had beentalking to in that concert hall. I cannot say exactly when the lessons beganor how long that fad lasted; a month or two months at the most. They tookplace either in Mrs. Starov's lodgings or in one of the <59> Russiantearooms both ladies frequented. I kept a little list of telephone numbersso that Iris might be warned that I could always make sure of herwhereabouts if, say, I felt on the brink of losing my mind or wanted her tobuy on the way home a tin of my favorite Brown Prune tobacco. She did notknow, on the other hand, that I would never have dared ring her up, lest hernot being where she said she would be cause me even a few minutes of anagony that I could not face.

Sometime around Christmas, 1929, she casually told me that thoselessons had been discontinued quite a while ago: Mrs. Starov had left forEngland, and it was rumored that she would not return to her husband. Thelieutenant, it seemed, was quite a dasher. <60>12

At a certain mysterious point toward the end of our last winter inParis something in our relationship changed for the better. A wave of newwarmth, new intimacy, new tenderness, swelled and swept away all thedelusions of distance--tiffs, silences, suspicions, retreats into castles ofamour-propre and the like--which had obstructed our love and of which Ialone was guilty. A more amiable, merrier mate I could not have imagined.Endearments, love names (based in my case on Russian forms) reentered ourcustomary exchanges. I broke the monastic rules of work on my novella inverse Polnolunie (Plenilune) by riding with her in the Bois or dutifullyescorting her to fashion-show teases and exhibitions of avant-garde frauds.I surmounted my contempt for the "serious" cinema (depicting heartrendingproblems with a political twist), which she preferred to American buffooneryand the trick photography of Germanic horror films. I even gave a talk on myCambridge days at a rather pathetic English Ladies Club, to which shebelonged. And to top the treat, I told her the plot of my next novel (CameraLucida).

One afternoon, in March or early April, 1930, she peeped into my roomand, being admitted, handed me the duplicate of a typewritten sheet,numbered 444. It was, she <61> said, a tentative episode in her interminabletale, which would soon display more deletions than insertions. She wasstuck, she said. Diana Vane, an incidental but on the whole nice girl,sojourning in Paris, happened to meet, at a riding school, a strangeFrenchman, of Corsican, or perhaps Algerian, origin, passionate, brutal,unbalanced. He mistook Diana--and kept on mistaking her despite her amusedremonstrations--for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he hadlast seen ages ago. We had here, said the author, a sort of hallucination,an obsessive fancy, which Diana, a delightful flirt with a keen sense ofhumor, allowed Jules to entertain during some twenty riding lessons; butthen his attentions grew more realistic, and she stopped seeing him. Therehad been nothing between them, and yet he simply could not be dissuaded fromconfusing her with the girl he once had possessed or thought he had, forthat girl, too, might well have been only the afterimage of a still earlierromance or remembered delirium. It was a very bizarre situation.

Now this page was supposed to be a last ominous letter written by thatFrenchman in a foreigner's English to Diana. I was to read it as if it werea real letter and suggest, as an experienced writer, what might be the nextdevelopment or disaster.

Beloved!

I am not capable to represent to myself that you really desire to tearup any connection with me. God sees, I love you more than life--more thantwo lives, your and my, together taken. Are you not ill? Or maybe you havefound another? Another lover, yes? Another victim of your attraction? No,no, this thought is too horrible, too humiliating for us both.

My supplication is modest and just. Give only one more interview to me!One interview! I am <62> prepared to meet with you it does not matterwhere--on the street, in some cafe, in the Forest of Boulogne--but I mustsee you, must speak with you and open to you many mysteries before I willdie. Oh, this is no threat! I swear that if our interview will lead to apositive result, if, otherwise speaking, you will permit me to hope, only tohope, then, oh then, I will consent to wait a little. But you must reply tome without retardment, my cruel, stupid, adored little girl!

Your Jules

"There's one thing," I said, carefully folding the sheet and pocketingit for later study, "one thing the little girl should know. This is not aromantic Corsican writing a crime passionnel letter; it is a Russianblackmailer knowing just enough English to translate into it the stalestRussian locutions. What puzzles me is how did you, with your three or fourwords of Russian--kak pozhivaete and do svidaniya--how did you, the author,manage to think up those subtle turns, and imitate the mistakes in Englishthat only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family,but still--"

Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to theheroine of my Ardis forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, shemust have had too many muddled lessons in Russian and she would certainlycorrect that extraordinary impression by simply giving the whole letter inFrench--from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian had borrowed alot of clichиs.

"But that's beside the point," she added. "You don't understand--thepoint is what should happen next--I mean, logically? What should my poorgirl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed,she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?" <63>

"In the wastepaper basket," I whispered, interrupting my work to gatherher small form onto my lap as I often did, the Lord be thanked, in thatfatal spring of 1930.

"Give me back that scrap," she begged gently, trying to thrust her handinto the pocket of my dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced hercloser.

My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by thesurmise that my wife had been transcribing an authentic letter--received,say, from one of the wretched, unwashed émigré poeticules, with smoothglossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons ofexile. But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just might be herown composition with some of the planted faults, borrowed from the French(supplication, sans tarder), while others could be subliminal echoes of theVolapэk she had been exposed to, during sessions with Russian teachers,through bilingual or trilingual exercises in tawdry textbooks. Thus, insteadof losing myself in a jungle of evil conjectures, all I did was preservethat thin sheet with its unevenly margined lines so characteristic of hertyping in the faded and cracked briefcase before me, among other mementos,other deaths. <64>13

On the morning of April 23, 1930, the shrill peal of the hallwaytelephone caught me in the act of stepping into my bathwater.

Ivor! He had just arrived in Paris from New York for an importantconference, would be busy all afternoon, was leaving tomorrow, would liketo--

Here intervened naked Iris, who delicately, unhurriedly, with a radiantsmile, appropriated the monologizing receiver. A minute later (her brotherwith all his defects was a mercifully concise phoner), she, still beaming,embraced me, and we moved to her bedroom for our last "fairelamourir" as shecalled it in her tender aberrant French.

Ivor was to fetch us at seven P.M. I had already put on my old dinnerjacket; Iris stood sideways to the hallway mirror (the best and brightest inthe whole flat) veering gently as she tried to catch a clear view of theback of her silky dark bob in the hand glass she held at head level.

"If you're ready," she said, "I'd like you to buy some olives. He'll becoming here after dinner, and he likes them with his `postbrandy.' "

So I went downstairs and crossed the street and shivered (it was a rawcheerless night) and pushed open the door of the little delicatessen shopopposite, and a man behind <65> me stopped it from closing with a stronghand. He wore a trench coat and a beret, his dark face was twitching. Irecognized Lieutenant Starov.

"Ah!" he said. "A whole century we did not meet!" The cloud of hisbreath gave off an odd chemical smell. I had once tried sniffing cocaine(which only made me throw up), but this was some other drug.

He removed a black glove for one of those circumstantial handshakes mycompatriots think proper to use at every entry and exit, and the liberateddoor hit him between the shoulder blades.

"Pleasant meeting!" he went on in his curious English (not parading itas might have seemed but using it by unconscious association). "I see youare in a smoking. Banquet?"

I bought my olives, replying the while, in Russian, that, yes, my wifeand I were dining out. Then I skipped a farewell handshake, by takingadvantage of the shopgirl's turning to him for the next transaction.

"What a shame," exclaimed Iris--"I wanted the black ones, not thegreen! "

I told her I refused to go back for them because I did not want to runinto Starov again.

"Oh, that's a detestable person," she said. "I'm sure he'll try now tocome and see us, hoping for some vaw-dutch-ka. I'm sorry you spoke to him."

She flung the window open and leant out just as Ivor was emerging fromhis taxi. She blew him an exuberant kiss and shouted, with illustrativegestures, that we were coming down.

"How nice it would be," she said as we hurried downstairs, "if you'd bewearing an opera cloak. You could wrap it around both of us as the Siamesetwins do in your story. Now, quick!"

She dashed into Ivor's arms, and was the next moment in the safety ofthe cab. <66>

"Paon d'Or," Ivor told the driver. "Good to see you, old boy," he saidto me, with a distinct American intonation (which I shyly imitated at dinneruntil he growled: "Very funny").

The Paon d'Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a niceclean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it "Pander" or"Pandora" and always ordered its "putty saw-lay," and that, I guess, is whatwe had. I remember more clearly a glazed case hanging on the gold-figuredwall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies, two huge onessimilar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and two smaller ones beneaththem, the left of a sweeter blue with white stripes and the right gloaminglike silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had been caught by aconvict in South America.

"And how's my friend Mata Hari?" inquired Ivor turning to us again, hisspread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging towardthe "bugs" under discussion.

We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed. And whatabout his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was--

"In fact," Iris continued, touching my wrist, "we've decided to set offtomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can't join us, Ives, but perhaps you mightcome later."

I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision.

Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone whowould snap it up any time. Iris, he said, knew him too: David Geller, theactor. "He was (turning to me) her first beau before you blundered in. Shemust still have somewhere that photo of him and me in Troilus and Cressidaten years ago. He's Helen of Troy in it. I'm Cressida."

"Lies, lies," murmured Iris.

Ivor described his own house in Los Angeles. He proposed <67>discussing with me after dinner a script he wished me to prepare based onGogol's Inspector (we were back at the start, so to speak). Iris asked foranother helping of whatever it was we were eating.

"You will die," said Ivor. "It's monstrously rich. Remember what MissGrunt (a former governess to whom he would assign all kinds of gruesomeapothegms) used to say: `The white worms lie in wait for the glutton.' "

"That's why I want to be burned when I die," remarked Iris.

He ordered a second or third bottle of the indifferent white wine I hadhad the polite weakness to praise. We drank to his last film--I forget itstitle--which was to be shown tomorrow in London, and later in Paris, hehoped.

Ivor did not look either very well or very happy; he had developed asizable bald spot, freckled. I had never noticed before that his eyelidswere so heavy and his lashes so coarse and pale. Our neighbors, threeharmless Americans, hearty, flushed, vociferous, were, perhaps, notparticularly pleasant, but neither Iris nor I thought Ivor's threat "to makethose Bronxonians pipe down" justified, seeing that he, too, was talking infairly resonant tones. I rather looked forward to the end of the dinner--andto coffee at home--but Iris on the contrary seemed inclined to enjoy everymorsel and drop. She wore a very open, jet-black frock and the long onyxearrings I had once given her. Her cheeks and arms, without their summertan, had the mat whiteness that I was to distribute--perhaps toogenerously--among the girls of my future books. Ivor's roving eyes, while hetalked, tended to appraise her bare shoulders, but by the simple trick ofbreaking in with some question, I managed to keep confusing the trajectoryof his gaze.

At last the ordeal came to a close. Iris said she would be back in aminute; her brother suggested we "repair for a leak." I declined--notbecause I did not need it--I did--but <68> because I knew by experience thata talkative neighbor and the sight of his immediate stream would inevitablyafflict me with urinary impotence. As I sat smoking in the lounge of therestaurant I pondered the wisdom of suddenly transferring the establishedhabit of work on Camera Lucida to other surroundings, another desk, anotherlighting, another pressure of outside calls and smells--and I saw my pagesand notes flash past like the bright windows of an express train that didnot stop at my station. I had decided to talk Iris out of her plan whenbrother and sister appeared from opposite sides of the stage, beaming at oneanother. She had less than fifteen minutes of life left.

Numbers are bleary along rue Desprиaux, and the taximan missed ourfront porch by a couple of house lengths. He suggested reversing his cab,but impatient Iris had already alighted, and I scrambled out after her,leaving Ivor to pay the taxi. She cast a look around her; then started towalk so fast toward our house that I had trouble catching up with her. As Iwas about to cup her elbow, I heard Ivor's voice behind me, calling out thathe had not enough change. I abandoned Iris and ran back to Ivor, and just asI reached the two palm readers, they and I heard Iris cry out something loudand brave, as if she were driving away a fierce hound. By the light of astreetlamp we glimpsed the figure of a mackintoshed man stride up to herfrom the opposite sidewalk and fire at such close range that he seemed toprod her with his large pistol. By now our taximan, followed by Ivor and me,had come near enough to see the killer stumble over her collapsed and curledup body. Yet he did not try to escape. Instead he knelt down, took off hisberet, threw back his shoulders, and in this ghastly and ludicrous attitudelifted his pistol to his shaved head.

The story that appeared among other faits-divers in the Paris dailiesafter an investigation by the police--whom Ivor and I contrived to misleadthoroughly--amounted to what follows--I translate: a White Russian, Wladimir<69> Blagidze, alias Starov, who was subject to paroxysms of insanity, ranamuck Friday night in the middle of a calm street, opened fire at random,and after killing with one pistol shot an English tourist Mrs. [namegarbled], who chanced to be passing by, blew his brains out beside her.Actually he did not die there and then, but retained in his remarkably toughbrainpan fragments of consciousness and somehow lingered on well into May,which was unusually hot that year. Out of some perverse dream-likecuriosity, Ivor visited him at the very special hospital of the renowned Dr.Lazareff, a very round, mercilessly round, building on the top of a hill,thickly covered with horse chestnut, wild rose, and other poignant plants.The hole in Blagidze's mind had caused a complete set of recent memories toescape; but the patient remembered quite clearly (according to a Russianmale nurse good at decoding the tales of the tortured) how at six years ofage he was taken to a pleasure park in Italy where a miniature trainconsisting of three open cars, each seating six silent children, with abattery-operated green engine that emitted at realistic intervals puffs ofimitation smoke, pursued a circular course through a brambly picturesquenightmare grove whose dizzy flowers nodded continuous assent to all thehorrors of childhood and hell.

From somewhere in the Orkneys, Nadezhda Gordonovna and a clericalfriend arrived in Paris only after her husband's burial. Moved by a falsesense of duty, she attempted to see me so as to tell me "everything." Ievaded all contact with her, but she managed to locate Ivor in London beforehe left for the States. I never asked him, and the dear funny fellow neverrevealed to me what that "everything" was; I refuse to believe that it couldhave amounted to much--and I knew enough, anyway. By nature I am notvindictive; yet I like to dwell in fancy on the image of that little greentrain, running on, round and round, forever. <70>

PART TWO

<71> <72>

1

A curious form of self-preservation moves us to get rid, instantly,irrevocably, of all that belonged to the loved one we lost. Otherwise, thethings she touched every day and kept in their proper context by the act ofhandling them start to become bloated with an awful mad life of their own.Her dresses now wear their own selves, her books leaf through their ownpages. We suffocate in the tightening circle of those monsters that aremisplaced and misshapen because she is not there to tend them. And even thebravest among us cannot meet the gaze of her mirror.

How to get rid of them is another problem. I could not drown them likekittens; in fact, I could not drown a kitten, let alone her brush or bag.Nor could I watch a stranger collect them, take them away, come back formore. Therefore, I simply abandoned the flat, telling the maid to dispose inany manner she chose of all those unwanted things. Unwanted! At the momentof parting they appeared quite normal and harmless; I would even say theylooked taken aback.

At first I tried putting up in a third-rate hotel in the center ofParis. I would fight terror and solitude by working all day. I completed onenovel, began another, wrote forty poems (all robbers and brothers undertheir motley <73> skin), a dozen short stories, seven essays, threedevastating reviews, one parody. The business of not losing my mind duringthe night was taken care of by swallowing an especially potent pill orbuying a bedmate.

I remember a dangerous dawn in May (1931? or 1932?); all the birds(mostly sparrows) were singing as in Heine's month of May, with demonicmonotonous force--that's why I know it must have been a wonderful Maymorning. I lay with my face to the wall and in a muddled ominous wayconsidered the question should "we" not drive earlier than usual to VillaIris. An obstacle, however, kept preventing me from undertaking thatjourney: the car and the house had been sold, so Iris had told me herself atthe Protestant cemetery, because the masters of her faith and fateinterdicted cremation. I turned in bed from the wall to the window, and Iriswas lying with her dark head to me on the window side of the bed. I kickedoff the bedclothes. She was naked, save for her black-stockinged legs (whichwas strange but at the same time recalled something from a parallel world,for my mind stood astride on two circus horses). In an erotic footnote, Ireminded myself for the ten thousandth time to mention somewhere that thereis nothing more seductive than a girl's back with the profiled rise of thehaunch accentuated by her lying sidelong, one leg slightly bent. "J'aifroid," said the girl as I touched her shoulder.

The Russian term for any kind of betrayal, faithlessness, breach oftrust, is the snaky, watered-silk word izmena which is based on the idea ofchange, shift, transformation. This derivation had never occurred to me inmy constant thoughts about Iris, but now it struck me as the revelation of abewitchment, of a nymph's turning into a whore--and this called for animmediate and vociferous protest. One neighbor thumped the wall, anotherrattled the door. The frightened girl, snatching up her handbag and myraincoat, bolted out of the room, and a bearded individual <74> enteredinstead, farcically clad in a nightshirt and wearing rubbers on his barefeet. The crescendo of my cries, cries of rage and distress, ended in ahysterical fit. I think some attempt was made to whisk me off to a hospital.In any case, I had to find another home sans tarder, a phrase I cannot hearwithout a spasm of anguish by mental association with her lover's letter.

A small patch of countryside kept floating before my eyes like somephotic illusion. I let my index finger stray at random over a map ofnorthern France; the point of its nail stopped at the town of Petiver orPиtit Ver, a small worm or verse, which sounded idyllic. An autobus took meto a road station not very far from Orlиans, I believe. All I remember of myabode is its oddly slanting floor which corresponded to a slant in theceiling of the cafe under my room. I also remember a pastel-green park tothe east of the town, and an old castle. The summer I spent there is a meresmudge of color on the dull glass of my mind; but I did write a fewpoems--at least one of which, about a company of acrobats staging a show onthe church square, has been reprinted a number of times in the course offorty years.

When I returned to Paris I found that my kind friend Stepan IvanovichStepanov, a prominent journalist of independent means (he was one of thosevery few lucky Russians who had happened to transfer themselves and theirmoney abroad before the Bolshevik coup), had not only organized my second orthird public reading (vecher, "evening," was the Russian term consecrated tothat kind of performance) but wanted me to stay in one of the ten rooms ofhis spacious old-fashioned house (Avenue Koch? Roche? It abuts, or abutted,on the statue of a general whose name escapes me but surely lurks somewhereamong my old notes).

Its residents were at the moment old Mr. and Mrs. Stepanov, theirmarried daughter Baroness Borg, her <75> eleven-year-old child (the Baron, abusinessman, had been sent by his firm to England), and Grigoriy Reich(1899-1942?), a gentle, melancholy, lean, young poet, of no talent whatever,who under the pen name of Lunin contributed a weekly elegy to the Novostiand acted as Stepanov's secretary.

I could not avoid coming down in the evenings to join the frequentgatherings of literary and political personages in the ornate salon or inthe dining room with its huge oblong table and the oil portrait en pied ofthe Stepanovs' young son who had died in 1920 while trying to save adrowning schoolmate. Nearsighted, gruffly jovial Alexander Kerenski wouldusually be there, brusquely raising his eyeglass to stare at a stranger orgreeting an old friend with a ready quip in that rasping voice of his, mostof its strength lost years ago in the roar of the Revolution. IvanShipogradov, eminent novelist and recent Nobel Prize winner, would also bepresent, radiating talent and charm, and--after a few jiggers ofvodka--delighting his intimates with the kind of Russian bawdy tale thatdepends for its artistry on the rustic gusto and fond respect with which ittreats our most private organs. A far less engaging figure was I. A.Shipogradov's old rival, a fragile little man in a sloppy suit, VasiliySokolovski (oddly nicknamed "Jeremy" by I.A.), who since the dawn of thecentury had been devoting volume after volume to the mystical and socialhistory of a Ukrainian clan that had started as a humble family of three inthe sixteenth century but by volume six (1920) had become a whole village,replete with folklore and myth. It was good to see old Morozov's rough-hewnclever face with its shock of dingy hair and bright frosty eyes; and for aspecial reason I closely observed podgy dour Basilevski--not because he hadjust had or was about to have a row with his young mistress, a feline beautywho wrote doggerel verse and vulgarly flirted with me, but because I hopedhe had already seen the fun I had made of <76> him in the last issue of aliterary review in which we both collaborated. Although his English wasinadequate for the interpretation of, say, Keats (whom he defined as "apre-Wildean aesthete in the beginning of the Industrial Era") Basilevski wasfond of attempting just that. In discussing recently the "not altogetherdispleasing preciosity" of my own stuff, he had imprudently quoted a popularline from Keats, rendering it as:

Vsegda nas raduet krasivaya veshchitsawhich in retranslation gives:

"A pretty bauble always gladdens us."

Our conversation, however, turned out to be much too brief to disclosewhether or not he had appreciated my amusing lesson. He asked me what Ithought of the new book he was telling Morozov (a monolinguist)about--namely Maurois' "impressive work on Byron," and upon my answeringthat I had found it to be impressive trash, my austere critic muttered, "Idon't think you have read it," and went on educating the serene old poet.

I would steal away long before the party broke up. The sounds offarewells usually reached me as I glided into insomnia.

I spent most of the day working, ensconced in a deep armchair, with myimplements conveniently resting before me on a special writing boardprovided by my host, a great lover of handy knickknacks. Somehow or other Ihad started to gain weight since my bereavement and by now had to make twoor three lurching efforts in order to leave my overaffectionate seat. Onlyone little person visited me; for her I kept my door slightly ajar. Theboard's proximal edge had a thoughtful incurvature to accommodate anauthor's abdomen, and the distal side was equipped <77> with clamps andrubberbands to hold papers and pencils in place; I got so used to thosecomforts that I regretted ungratefully the absence of toilet fixtures--suchas one of those hollow canes said to be used by Orientals.

Every afternoon, at the same hour, a silent push opened the door wider,and the granddaughter of the Stepanovs brought in a tray with a large glassof strong tea and a plate of ascetic zwiebacks. She advanced, eyes bent,moving carefully her white-socked, blue-sneakered feet; coming to a nearstop when the tea tossed; and advancing again with the slow steps of aclockwork doll. She had flaxen hair and a freckled nose, and I chose thegingham frock with the glossy black belt for her to wear when I had hercontinue her mysterious progress right into the book I was writing, The RedTop Hat, in which she becomes graceful little Amy, the condemned man'sambiguous consoler.

Those were nice, nice interludes! One could hear the Baroness and hermother playing ю quatre mains in the salon downstairs as they had played andreplayed, no doubt, for the last fifteen years. I had a box ofchocolate-coated biscuits to supplement the zwiebacks and tempt my littlevisitor. The writing board was put aside and replaced by her folded limbs.She spoke Russian fluently but with Parisian interjections and interrogatorysounds, and those bird notes lent something eerie to the responses Iobtained, as she dangled one leg and bit her biscuit, to the ordinaryquestions one puts to a child; and then quite suddenly in the midst of ourchat, she would wriggle out of my arms and make for the door as if somebodywere summoning her, though actually the piano kept stumbling on and on inthe homely course of a family happiness in which I had no part and which, infact, I had never known.

My stay at the Stepanovs' had been supposed to last a couple of weeks;it lasted two months. At first I felt comparatively well, or at leastcomfortable and refreshed, but a new sleeping pill which had worked so wellat its beguiling <78> stage began refusing to cope with certain reverieswhich, as suggested subsequently by an incredible sequel, I should havesuccumbed to like a man and got done with no matter how; instead of that Itook advantage of Dolly's removal to England to find a new dwelling for mymiserable carcass. This was a bed-sitting-room in a shabby but quiettenement house on the Left Bank, "at the corner of rue St. Supplice," saysmy pocket diary with grim imprecision. An ancient cupboard of sortscontained a primitive shower bath; but there were no other facilities. Goingout two or three times a day for a meal, or a cup of coffee, or anextravagant purchase at a delicatessen, afforded me a small distraction. Inthe next block I found a cinema that specialized in old horse operas and atiny brothel with four whores ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-eight,the youngest being also the plainest.

I was to spend many years in Paris, tied to that dismal city by thethreads of a Russian writer's livelihood. Nothing then, and nothing now, inbackcast, had or has for me any of the spell that enthralled my compatriots.I am not thinking of the blood spot on the darkest stone of its darkeststreet; that is hors-concours in the way of horror; I just mean that Iregarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as thechance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: thecolored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desklamp awaiting me in my humble home. <79>2

Since 1925 I had written and published four novels; by the beginning of1934 I was on the point of completing my fifth, Krasnyy Tsilindr (The RedTop Hat), the story of a beheading. None of those books exceeded ninetythousand words but my method of choosing and blending them could hardly becalled a timesaving expedient.

A first draft, made in pencil, filled several blue cahiers of the kindused in schools, and upon reaching the saturation point of revisionpresented a chaos of smudges and scriggles. To this corresponded thedisorder of the text which followed a regular sequence only for a few pages,being then interrupted by some chunky passage that belonged to a later, orearlier, part of the story. After sorting out and repaginating all this, Iapplied myself to the next stage: the fair copy. It was tidily written witha fountain pen in a fat and sturdy exercise book or ledger. Then an orgy ofnew corrections would blot out by degrees all the pleasure of speciousperfection. A third phase started where legibility stopped. Poking with slowand rigid fingers at the keys of my trusty old mashinka ("machine"), CountStarov's wedding present, I would be able to type some three hundred wordsin one hour instead of the round <80> thousand with which some popularnovelist of the previous century could cram it in longhand.

In the case of The Red Top Hat, however, the neuralgic aches which hadbeen spreading through my frame like an inner person of pain, all angles andclaws, for the last three years, had now attained my extremities, and madethe task of typing a fortunate impossibility. By economizing on my favoritenutriments, such as foie gras and Scotch whisky, and postponing the makingof a new suit, I calculated that my modest income allowed me to hire anexpert typist, to whom I would dictate my corrected manuscript during, say,thirty carefully planned afternoons. I therefore inserted a prominentwanter, with name and telephone, in the Novosti.

Among the three or four typists who offered their services, I choseLyubov Serafimovna Savich, the granddaughter of a country priest and thedaughter of a famous SR (Social Revolutionist) who had recently died inMeudon upon completing his biography of Alexander the First (a tedious workin two volumes entitled The Monarch and the Mystic, now available toAmerican students in an indifferent translation. Harvard, 1970).

Lyuba Savich started working for me on February 1, 1934. She came asoften as necessary and was willing to stay any number of hours (the recordshe set on an especially memorable occasion was from one to eight). Hadthere been a Miss Russia and had the age of prize misses been prolonged tojust under thirty, beautiful Lyuba would have won the title. She was a tallwoman with slim ankles, big breasts, broad shoulders, and a pair of gay blueeyes in a round rosy face. Her auburn hair must have always felt as being ina state of imminent disarray for she constantly stroked its side wave, in agraceful elbow-raised gesture, when talking to me. Zdraste, and once morezdraste, Lyubov Serafimovna--and, oh, what a delightful amalgam that <81>was, with lyubov meaning "love," and Serafim ("seraph") being the Christianname of a reformed terrorist!

As a typist L.S. was magnificent. Hardly had I finished dictating onesentence, as I paced back and forth, than it had reached her furrow like ahandful of grain, and with one eyebrow raised she was already looking at me,waiting for the next strewing. If a sudden alteration for the betteroccurred to me in mid session, I preferred not to spoil the wonderfulgive-and-take rhythm of our joint work by introducing painful pauses of wordweighing--especially enervating and sterile when a self-conscious author isaware that the bright lady at the waiting typewriter is longing to come upwith a helpful suggestion; I contented myself therefore with marking thepassage in my manuscript so as later to desecrate with my scrawl herimmaculate creation; but she was only glad, of course, to retype the page ather leisure.

We usually had a ten-minute break around four--or four-thirty if Icould not rein in snorting Pegasus on the dot. She would retire for aminute, closing one door after another with a really unearthly gentleness,to the humble toilettes across the corridor, and would reappear, just assilently, with a repowdered nose and a repainted smile, and I would haveready for her a glass of vin ordinaire and a pink gaufrette. It was duringthose innocent intervals that there began a certain thematic movement on thepart of fate.

Would I like to know something? (Dilatory sip and lip lick.) Well, atall my five public readings since the first on September 3, 1928, in theSalle Planiol, she had been present, she had applauded till her palms(showing palms) ached, and had made up her mind that next time she'd besmart and plucky enough to push her way through the crowd (yes, crowd--noneed to smile ironically) with the firm intention of clasping my hand andpouring out her soul in a single word, which, however, she could never <82>find--and that's why, inexorably, she would always be left standing andbeaming like a fool in the middle of the vacated hall. Would I despise herfor having an album with reviews of my books pasted in--Morozov's andYablokov's lovely essays as well as the trash of such hacks as Boris Nyet,and Boyarski? Did I know it was she who had left that mysterious bunch ofirises on the spot where the urn with my wife's ashes had been interred fouryears ago? Could I imagine that she could recite by heart every poem I hadpublished in the émigré press of half-a-dozen countries? Or that sheremembered thousands of enchanting minutiae scattered through all my novelssuch as the mallard's quack-quack (in Tamara) "which to the end of one'slife would taste of Russian black bread because one had shared it with ducksin one's childhood," or the chess set (in Pawn Takes Queen) with a missingKnight "replaced by some sort of counter, a little orphan from another,unknown, game?"

All this was spread over several sessions and distilled very cunningly,and already by the end of February when a copy of The Red Top Hat, animpeccable typescript, lapped in an opulent envelope, had been delivered byhand (hers again) to the offices of Patria (the foremost Russian magazine inParis), I felt enmeshed in a bothersome web.

Not only had I never experienced the faintest twinge of desire inregard to beautiful Lyuba, but the indifference of my senses was turning topositive repulsion. The softer her glances fluttered, the more ungentlemanlymy reaction became. Her very refinement had a dainty edge of vulgarity thatinfested with the sweetness of decay her entire personality. I began tonotice with growing irritation such pathetic things as her odor, a quiterespectable perfume (Adoration, I think) precariously overlaying the naturalsmell of a Russian maiden's seldom bathed body: for an hour or so Adorationstill held, but after that the underground would start to conduct more andmore frequent <83> forays, and when she raised her arms to put on herhat--but never mind, she was a well-meaning creature, and I hope she is ahappy grandmother today.

I would be a cad to describe our last meeting (March 1 of the sameyear). Suffice it to say that in the middle of typing a rhymed Russiantranslation that I had made of Keats' To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellowfruitfulness") she broke down, and tormented me till at least eight P.M.with her confessions and tears. When at last she left, I lost another hourcomposing a detailed letter asking her never to come back. Incidentally, itwas the first time that an unfinished leaf was left by her in my typewriter.I removed it and rediscovered it several weeks later among my papers, andthen deliberately preserved it because it was Annette who completed the job,with a couple of typos and an x-ed erasure in the last lines--and somethingabout the juxtaposition appealed to my combinational slant. <84>3

In this memoir my wives and my books are interlaced monogrammaticallylike some sort of watermark or ex libris design; and in writing this obliqueautobiography--oblique, because dealing mainly not with pedestrian historybut with the mirages of romantic and literary matters--I consistently try todwell as lightly as inhumanly possible on the evolution of my mentalillness. Yet Dementia is one of the characters in my story.

By the mid-Thirties little had changed in my health since the firsthalf of 1922 and its awful torments. My battle with factual, respectablelife still consisted of sudden delusions, suddenreshufflings--kaleidoscopic, stained-glass reshufflings!--of fragmentedspace. I still felt Gravity, that infernal and humiliating contribution toour perceptual world, grow into me like a monstrous toenail in stabs andwedges of intolerable pain (incomprehensible to the happy simpleton whofinds nothing fantastic and agonizing in the escape of a pencil or pennyunder something--under the desk on which one will live, under the bed onwhich one will die). I still could not cope with the abstraction ofdirection in space, so that any given stretch of the world was eitherpermanently "right-hand" or permanently "left-hand," or at best the onecould be changed to the other <85> only by a spine-dislocating effort of thewill. Oh, how things and people tortured me, my dear heart, I could not tellyou! In point of fact you were not yet even born.

Sometime in the mid-Thirties, in black accursed Paris, I remembervisiting a distant relative of mine (a niece of the LATH lady!). She was asweet old stranger. She sat all day in a straight-back armchair exposed tothe continuous attacks of three, four, more than four, deranged children,whom she was paid (by the Destitute Russian Noblewomen's Aid Association) towatch, while their parents were working in places not so dreadful and drearyin themselves as dreary and difficult to reach by public conveyance. I saton an old hassock at her feet. Her talk flowed on and on, smooth,untroubled, reflecting the image of radiant days, serenity, wealth,goodness. Yet all the time this or that poor little monster with a slaveringmouth and a squint would move upon her from behind a screen or a table androck her chair or clutch at her skirt. When the squealing became too loudshe would only wince a little which hardly affected her reminiscent smile.She kept a kind of fly whisk within easy reach and this she occasionallybrandished to chase away the bolder aggressors; but all the time, all thetime, she continued her purling soliloquy and I understood that I, too,should ignore the rude turmoil and din around her.

I submit that my life, my plight, the voice of words that was my solejoy and the secret struggle with the wrong shape of things, bore someresemblance to that poor lady's predicament. And mind you, those were mybest days, with only a pack of grimacing goblins to hold at bay.

The zest, the strength, the clarity of my art remained unimpaired--atleast to a certain extent. I enjoyed, I persuaded myself to enjoy, thesolitude of work and that other, even more subtle solitude, the solitude ofan author facing, from behind the bright shield of his manuscript, anamorphous audience, barely visible in its dark pit. <86>

The jumble of spatial obstacles separating my bedside lamp from theillumined islet of a public lectern was abolished by the magic of thoughtfulfriends who helped me to get to this or that remote hall without my havingto tussle with horribly small and thin, sticky, bus-ticket slips or toventure into the thunderous maze of the Mиtro. As soon as I was safelyplatformed with my typed or handwritten sheets at breastbone level on thedesk before me, I forgot all about the presence of three hundredeavesdroppers. A decanter of watered vodka, my only lectorial whim, was alsomy only link with the material universe. Similar to a painter's spotlight onthe brown brow of some ecstatical ecclesiastic at the moment of divinerevelation, the radiance enclosing me brought out with oracular accuracyevery imperfection in my text. A memoirist has noted that not only did Islow down now and then while unclipping a pencil and replacing a comma by asemicolon, but that I had been known to stop and frown over a sentence andreread it, and cross it out, and insert a correction and "re-mouth the wholepassage with a kind of defiant complacency."

My handwriting was good in fair copies, but I felt more comfortablewith a typescript before me, and I was again without an expert typist. Toinsert the same wanter in the same paper would have been foolhardy: what ifit were to bring back Lyuba, flushed with renewed hope, and rewind thatdamned cycle all over again?

I rang up Stepanov, thinking he might help; he guessed he could, andafter a muffled confabulation with his fussy wife, just on the brim of themembrane (all I made out was "mad people are unpredictable"), she took over.They knew a very decent girl who had worked at the Russian nursery school"Passy na Rousi" to which Dolly had gone four or five years ago. The girl'sname was Anna Ivanovna Blagovo. Did I know Oksman, the owner of the Russianbookshop on rue Cuvier? <87>

"Yes, slightly. But I want to ask you--"

"Well," she went on, interrupting me, "Annette sekretarstvovala for himwhile his regular typist was hospitalized, but she is now quite well again,and you might--"

"That's fine," I said, "but I want to ask you, Berta Abramovna, why didyou accuse me of being an `unpredictable madman'? I can assure you that I amnot in the habit of raping young women--"

"Gospod' s vami, golubchik! (What an idea, my dear!)" exclaimed Mrs.Stepanov and proceeded to explain that she had been scolding herabsentminded husband for sitting down on her new handbag when attending tothe telephone.

Although I did not believe one word of her version (too quick! tooglib!), I pretended to accept it and promised to look up her bookseller. Afew minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it(at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the mostsoothing voyeuse imaginable), Berta Stepanov telephoned to say that theoxman (what a shiver my Iris derived from Dr. Moreau's islandzoo--especially from such bits as the "screaming shape," stillhalf-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would be up till dawn in his shop,among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), thatI was a noctambule, so perhaps I might like to stroll over to the BoyanBookshop sans tarder, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.

After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings ofinsomnia and a walk to rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where accordingto police statistics an average of forty foreigners and God knows how manyunfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced theleast urge to commit suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in anylight). But I must admit that on that particular night on the fourth orfifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling's death, I must have <88> lookedpretty suspect, in my black suit and dramatic muffler, to an averagepoliceman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign whena hatless person sobs as he walks, being moved not by lines he might havecomposed himself but by something he hideously mistakes for his own andpresently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:

Zvezdoobraznost' nebesnyh zvyozd

Vidish' tol'ko skvoz' slyozy...

(Heavenly stars are seen as stellate

only through tears.)

I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than theambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endlessfence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose lightwould delicately select for its heart-piercing game overhead a youngemerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night,and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was thenonidentical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life,somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me toimpersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always beincomparably greater, healthier, and cruder than your obedient servant. <89>4

The "Boyan" publishing firm (Morozov's and mine was the "BronzeHorseman," its main rival), with a bookshop (selling not only émigréeditions but also tractor novels from Moscow) and a lending library,occupied a smart three-story house of the hтtel particulier type. In my dayit stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the vista ofreverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a groupof stone nymphs. The house had belonged to the Merlin de Malaune family andhad been acquired at the turn of the century by a Russian cosmopolitan,Dmitri de Midoff who with his friend S. I. Stepanov established there theheadquarters of an antidespotic conspiracy. The latter liked to recall thesign language of old-fashioned rebellion: the half-drawn curtain andalabaster vase revealed in the drawing-room window so as to indicate to theexpected guest from Russia that the way was clear. An aesthetic touch gracedrevolutionary intrigues in those years. Midoff died soon after World WarOne, and by that time the Terrorist party, to which those cozy peoplebelonged, had lost its "stylistic appeal" as Stepanov himself put it. I donot know who later acquired the house or how it happened that Oks (OsipLvovich Oksman, 1885?--1943?) rented it for his business. <90>

The house was dark except for three windows: two adjacent rectangles oflight in the middle of the upper-floor row, d8 and e8, Continental notation(where the letter denotes the file and the number the rank of a chesssquare) and another light just below at e7. Good God, had I forgotten athome the note I had scribbled for the unknown Miss Blagovo? No, it was stillthere in my breast pocket under the old, treasured, horribly hot and longTrinity College muffler. I hesitated between a side door on my right--markedMagazin--and the main entrance, with a chess coronet above the bell. FinallyI chose the coronet. We were playing a Blitz game: my opponent moved atonce, lighting the vestibule fan at d6. One could not help wondering ifunder the house there might not exist the five lower floors which wouldcomplete the chessboard and that somewhere, in subterranean mystery, new menmight not be working out the doom of a fouler tyranny.

Oks, a tall, bony, elderly man with a Shakespearean pate, started totell me how honored he was at getting a chance to welcome the author ofCamera--here I thrust the note I carried into his extended palm and preparedto leave. He had dealt with hysterical artists before. None could resist hisbland bookside manner.

"Yes, I know all about it," he said, retaining and patting my hand."She'll call you; though, to tell the truth, I do not envy anybody having touse the services of that capricious, absentminded young lady. We'll go up tomy study, unless you prefer--no, I don't think so," he continued, opening adouble door on the left and dubiously switching on the light for a moment toreveal a chilly reading room in which a long baize-covered table, dingychairs, and the cheap busts of Russian classics contradicted a lovelypainted ceiling swarming with naked children among purple, pink, and amberclusters of grapes. On the right (another tentative light snapped) a shortpassage led to the shop proper <91> where I recalled having once had a rowwith a pert old female who objected to my not wishing to pay for a fewcopies of my own novel. So we walked up the once noble stairs, which now hadsomething seldom seen even in Viennese dream comics, namely disparatebalustrades, the sinistral one an ugly new ramp-and-railing affair and theother, the original ornate set of battered, doomed, but still charmingcarved wood with supports in the form of magnified chess pieces.

"I am honored--" began Oks all over again, as we reached his so-calledKabinet (study), at e7, a room cluttered with ledgers, packed books,half-unpacked books, towers of books, heaps of newspapers, pamphlets,galleys, and slim white paperback collections of poems--tragic offals, withthe cool, restrained titles then in fashion--Prokhlada ("coolness"),Sderzhannost' ("restraint").

He was one of those persons who for some reason or other are ofteninterrupted, but whom no force in our blessed galaxy will prevent fromcompleting their sentence, despite new interruptions, of an elemental orpoetical nature, the death of his interlocutor ("I was just saying to him,doctor--"), or the entrance of a dragon. In fact it would seem that thoseinterruptions actually help to polish the phrase and give it its final form.In the meantime the agonizing itch of its being unfinished poisons the mind.It is worse than the pimple which cannot be sprung before one gets home, andis almost as bad as a lifer's recollection of that last little rape nippedin the sweet bud by the intrusion of an accursed policeman.

"I am deeply honored," finished at last Oks, "to welcome to thishistoric house the author of Camera Obscura, your finest book in my modestopinion!"

"It ought to be modest," I said, controlling myself (opal ice in Nepalbefore the avalanche), "because, you idiot, the title of my novel is CameraLucida."

"There, there," said Oks (really a very dear man and <92> a gentleman),after a terrible pause during which all the remainders opened likefairy-tale flowers in a fancy film, "A slip of the tongue does not deservesuch a harsh rebuke. Lucida, Lucida, by all means! A propos--concerning AnnaBlagovo (another piece of unfinished business--or, who knows, a touchingattempt to divert and pacify me with an interesting anecdote), I am not sureyou know that I am Berta's first cousin. Thirty-five years ago in St.Petersburg she and I worked in the same student organization. We werepreparing the assassination of the Premier. How far all that is! His dailyroute had to be closely established; I was one of the observers. Standing ata certain corner every day in the disguise of a vanilla-ice-cream vendor!Can you imagine that? Nothing came of our plans. They were thwarted by Azef,the great double agent."

I saw no point in prolonging my visit, but he produced a bottle ofcognac, and I accepted a drink, for I was beginning to tremble again.

"Your Camera," he said, consulting a ledger "has been selling not badlyin my shop, not badly at all: twenty-three--sorry, twenty-five--copies inthe first half of last year, and fourteen in the second. Of course, genuinefame, not mere commercial success, depends on the behavior of a book in theLending Department, and there all your titles are hits. Not to leave thisunsubstantiated, let us go up to the stacks."

I followed my energetic host to the upper floor. The lending libraryspread like a gigantic spider, bulged like a monstrous tumor, oppressed thebrain like the expanding world of delirium. In a bright oasis amidst the dimshelves I noticed a group of people sitting around an oval table. The colorswere vivid and sharp but at the same time remote-looking as in amagic-lantern scene. A good deal of red wine and golden brandy accompaniedthe animated discussion. I recognized the critic Basilevski, his sycophantsHristov and Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists <93> Shipogradov andSokolovski, the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular socialsatire Geroy nashey ery ("Hero of Our Era") and two young poets, Lazarev(collection Serenity) and Fartuk (collection Silence). Some of the headsturned toward us, and the benevolent bear Morozov even struggled to hisfeet, grinning--but my host said they were having a business meeting andshould be left alone.

"You have glimpsed," he added, "the parturition of a new literaryreview, Prime Numbers; at least they think they are parturiating: actually,they are boozing and gossiping. Now let me show you something."

He led me to a distant corner and triumphantly trained his flashlighton the gaps in my shelf of books.

"Look," he cried, "how many copies are out. All of Princess Mary isout, I mean Mary--damn it, I mean Tamara. I love Tamara, I mean your Tamara,not Lermontov's or Rubinstein's. Forgive me. One gets so confused among somany damned masterpieces."

I said I was not feeling well and would like to go home. He offered toaccompany me. Or would I like a taxi? I did not. He kept furtively directingat me the electric torch through his incarnadined fingers to see if I wasnot about to faint. With soothing sounds he led me down a side staircase.The spring night, at least, felt real.

After a moment of rumination and an upward glance at the lightedwindows, Oks beckoned to the night watchman who was stroking the sad littledog of a dog-walking neighbor. I saw my thoughtful companion shake handswith the gray-cloaked old fellow, then point to the light of the revelers,then look at his watch, then tip the man, and shake hands with him inparting, as if the ten-minute walk to my lodgings were a perilouspilgrimage.

"Bon," he said upon rejoining me. "If you don't want a taxi, let us setout on foot. He will take care of my imprisoned visitors. There are heaps ofthings I want you to <94> tell me about your work and your life. Yourconfrхres say you are `arrogant and unsocial' as Onegin describes himself toTatiana but we can't all be Lenskis, can we? Let me take advantage of thispleasant stroll to describe my two meetings with your celebrated father. Thefirst was at the opera in the days of the First Duma. I knew, of course, theportraits of its most prominent members. From high up in the gods I, a poorstudent, saw him appear in a rosy loge with his wife and two little boys,one of which must have been you. The other time was at a public discussionof current politics in the auroral period of the Revolution; he spokeimmediately after Kerenski, and the contrast between our fiery friend andyour father, with his English sangfroid and absence of gesticulation--"

"My father," I said, "died six months before I was born."

"Well, I seem to have goofed again (opyat' oskandalisya)," observedOks, after taking quite a minute to find his handkerchief, blow his nosewith the grandiose deliberation of Varlamov in the role of Gogol's TownMayor, wrap up the result, and pocket the swaddle. "Yes, I'm not lucky withyou. Yet that image remains in my mind. The contrast was truly remarkable."

I was to run into Oks again, three or four times at least, in thecourse of the dwindling years before World War Two. He used to welcome mewith a knowing twinkle as if we shared some very private and rather naughtysecret. His superb library was eventually grabbed by the Germans who thenlost it to the Russians, even better grabbers in that time-honored game.Osip Lvovich himself was to die when attempting an intrepid escape--whenalmost having escaped--barefoot, in bloodstained underwear, from the"experimental hospital" of a Nazi concentration camp. <95>5

My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon.Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, hisblack hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son ofVadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best ofmy English romaunts, Ardis (1970).

The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars,my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were ofthe casual, reactionary sort. He had a dazzling and complicated sensuallife, but his culture was patchy and commonplace. He was born in 1865,married in 1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October22, 1898, after a card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in grayNormandy.

There might be nothing particularly upsetting about a well-meaning,essentially absurd and muddled old duffer mistaking me for some otherwriter. I myself have been known, in the lecture hall, to say Shelley when Imeant Schiller. But that a fool's slip of the tongue or error of memoryshould establish a sudden connection with another world, so soon after myimagining with especial dread that I might be permanently impersonatingsomebody living as a real being beyond the constellation of my tears and<96> asterisks--that was unendurable, that dared not happen!

As soon as the last sound of poor Oksman's farewells and excuses hadsubsided, I tore off the striped woollen snake strangling me and wrote downin cipher every detail of my meeting with him. Then I drew a thick lineunderneath and a caravan of question marks.

Should I ignore the coincidence and its implications? Should I, on thecontrary, repattern my entire life? Should I abandon my art, choose anotherline of achievement, take up chess seriously, or become, say, alepidopterist, or spend a dozen years as an obscure scholar making a Russiantranslation of Paradise Lost that would cause hacks to shy and asses tokick? But only the writing of fiction, the endless re-creation of my fluidself could keep me more or less sane. All I did finally was drop my penname, the rather cloying and somehow misleading "V. Irisin" (of which myIris herself used to say that it sounded as if I were a villa), and revertto my own family name.

It was with this name that I decided to sign the first installment ofmy new novel The Dare for which the émigré magazine Patria was waiting. Ihad finished rewriting in reptile-green ink (a placebo to enliven my task) asecond or third fair copy of the opening chapter, when Annette Blagovo cameto discuss hours and terms.

She came on May 2, 1934, half-an-hour late, and as persons do who haveno sense of duration, laid the blame for her lateness on her innocent watch,an object for measuring motion, not time. She was a graceful blonde oftwenty-six years or so, with very attractive though not exceptionally prettyfeatures. She wore a gray tailor-made jacket over a white silk blouse thatlooked frilly and festive because of a kind of bow between the lapels, toone of which was pinned a bunchlet of violets. Her short smartly cut grayskirt had a nice dash about it, and all in all she was far more chic andsoignиe than an average Russian young lady. <97>

I explained to her (in what struck her--so she told me much later--asthe unpleasantly bantering tone of a cynic sizing up a possible conquest)that I proposed to dictate to her every afternoon "right into thetypewriter" (pryamo v mashinku) heavily corrected drafts or else chunks andsausages of fair copy that I would probably revise "in the lonely hours ofnight," to quote A. K. Tolstoy, and have her retype next day. She did notremove her close-fitting hat, but peeled off her gloves and, pursing herbright pink freshly painted mouth, put on large tortoiseshell-rimmedglasses, and the effect somehow enhanced her looks: she desired to see mymachine (her icy demureness would have turned a saint into a salaciousjester), had to hurry to another appointment but just wanted to check if shecould use it. She took off her green cabochon ring (which I was to findafter her departure) and seemed about to tap out a quick sample but a secondglance satisfied her that my typewriter was of the same make as her own.

Our first session proved pretty awful. I had learned my part with thecare of a nervous actor, but did not reckon with the kind of fellowperformer who misses or fluffs every other cue. She asked me not to go sofast. She put me off by fatuous remarks: "There is no such expression inRussian," or "Nobody knows that word (vzvoden', a welter)--why don't youjust say "big wave" if that's what you mean? When anger affected my rhythmand it took me some time to unravel the end of a sentence in its no longerfamiliar labyrinth of cancellations and carets, she would sit back and waitlike a provocative martyr and stifle a yawn or study her fingernails. Afterthree hours of work, I examined the result of her dainty and impudentrattle. It teemed with misspellings, typos, and ugly erasures. Very meekly Isaid that she seemed unaccustomed to deal with literary (i.e. non-humdrum)stuff. She answered I was mistaken, she loved literature. In fact, she said,in just the past five months she had read Galsworthy (in Russian), <98>Dostoyevski (in French), General Pudov-Usurovski's huge historical novelTsar Bronshteyn (in the original), and L'Atlantide (which I had not heard ofbut which a dictionary ascribes to Pierre Benoнt, romancier franгais nи юAlbi, a hiatus in the Tarn). Did she know Morozov's poetry? No, she did notmuch care for poetry in any form; it was inconsistent with the tempo ofmodern life. I chided her for not having read any of my stories or novels,and she looked annoyed and perhaps a little frightened (fearing, the littlegoose, I might dismiss her), and presently was giving me a curiously eroticsatisfaction by promising me that now she would look up all my books andwould certainly know by heart The Dare.

The reader must have noticed that I speak only in a very general wayabout my Russian fictions of the Nineteen-Twenties and Thirties, for Iassume that he is familiar with them or can easily obtain them in theirEnglish versions. At this point, however, I must say a few words about TheDare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as "agift to the fatherland"). When in 1934 I started to dictate its beginning toAnnette, I knew it would be my longest novel. I did not foresee however thatit would be almost as long as General Pudov's vile and fatuous "historical"romance about the way the Zion Wisers usurped St. Rus. It took me about fouryears in all to write its four hundred pages, many of which Annette typed atleast twice. Most of it had been serialized in émigré magazines by May,1939, when she and I, still childless, left for America; but in book form,the Russian original appeared only in 1950 (Turgenev Publishing House, NewYork), followed another decade later by an English translation, whose titleneatly refers not only to the well-known device used to bewilder noddies butalso to the daredevil nature of Victor, the hero and part-time narrator.

The novel begins with a nostalgic account of a Russian childhood (muchhappier, though not less opulent than <99> mine). After that comesadolescence in England (not unlike my own Cambridge years); then life inémigré Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier) andthe tying of amusing knots in various literary intrigues. Inset in themiddle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote "on a dare":this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski,whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns asabsurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of JesusChrist's conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romancesof an earlier age. The next chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment ofémigré reviewers, all of them priests of the Dostoyevskian persuasion; andin the last pages my young hero accepts a flirt's challenge and accomplishesa final gratuitous feat by walking through a perilous forest into Sovietterritory and as casually strolling back.

I am giving this summary to exemplify what even the poorest reader ofmy Dare must surely retain, unless electrolysis destroys some essentialcells soon after he closes the book. Now part of Annette's frail charm layin her forgetfulness which veiled everything toward the evening ofeverything, like the kind of pastel haze that obliterates mountains, clouds,and even its own self as the summer day swoons. I know I have seen her manytimes, a copy of Patria in her languid lap, follow the printed lines withthe pendulum swing of eyes suggestive of reading, and actually reach the "Tobe continued" at the end of the current installment of The Dare. I also knowthat she had typed every word of it and most of its commas. Yet the factremains that she retained nothing--perhaps in result of her having decidedonce for all that my prose was not merely "difficult" but hermetic ("nastilyhermetic," to repeat the compliment Basilevski paid me the moment herealized--a moment which came in due time--that his manner and mind werebeing ridiculed in Chapter Three <100> by my gloriously happy Victor). Imust say I forgave her readily her attitude to my work. At public readings,I admired her public smile, the "archaic" smile of Greek statues. When herrather dreadful parents asked to see my books (as a suspicious physicianmight ask for a sample of semen), she gave them to read by mistake anotherman's novel because of a silly similarity of titles. The only real shock Iexperienced was when I overheard her informing some idiot woman friend thatmy Dare included biographies of "Chernolyubov and Dobroshevski"! Sheactually started to argue when I retorted that only a lunatic would havechosen a pair of third-rate publicists to write about--spoonerizing theirnames in addition! <101>6

I have noticed, or seem to have noticed, in the course of my long life,that when about to fall in love or even when still unaware of having fallenin love, a dream would come, introducing me to a latent inamorata at morningtwilight in a somewhat infantile setting, marked by exquisite achingstirrings that I knew as a boy, as a youth, as a madman, as an old dyingvoluptuary. The sense of recurrence ("seem to have noticed") is verypossibly a built-in feeling: for instance I may have had that dream onlyonce or twice ("in the course of my long life") and its familiarity is onlythe dropper that comes with the drops. The place in the dream, per contra,is not a familiar room but one remindful of the kind we children awake inafter a Christmas masquerade or midsummer name day, in a great house,belonging to strangers or distant cousins. The impression is that the beds,two small beds in the present case, have been put in and placed against theopposite walls of a room that is not a bedroom at heart, a room with nofurniture except those two separate beds: property masters are lazy, oreconomical, in one's dreams as well as in early novellas.

In one of the beds I find myself just awoken from some secondary dreamof only formulary importance; and in the far bed against the right-hand wall(direction also <102> supplied), a girl, a younger, slighter, and gayerAnnette in this particular variant (summer of 1934 by daytime reckoning), isplayfully, quietly talking to herself but actually, as I understand with adelicious quickening of the nether pulses, is feigning to talk, is talkingfor my benefit, so as to be noticed by me.

My next thought--and it intensifies the throbbings--concerns thestrangeness of boy and girl being assigned to sleep in the same makeshiftroom: by error, no doubt, or perhaps the house was full and the distancebetween the two beds, across an empty floor, might have been deemed wideenough for perfect decorum in the case of children (my average age has beenthirteen all my life). The cup of pleasure is brimming by now and before itspills I hasten to tiptoe across the bare parquet from my bed to hers. Herfair hair gets in the way of my kisses, but presently my lips find her cheekand neck, and her nightgown has buttons, and she says the maid has come intothe room, but it is too late, I cannot restrain myself, and the maid, abeauty in her own right, looks on, laughing.

That dream I had a month or so after I met Annette, and her image init, that early version of her voice, soft hair, tender skin, obsessed me andamazed me with delight--the delight of discovering I loved little MissBlagovo. At the time of the dream she and I were still on formal terms,super-formal in fact, so I could not tell it to her with the necessaryevocations and associations (as set down in these notes); and merely saying"I dreamt of you" would have amounted to the thud of a platitude. I didsomething much more courageous and honorable. Before revealing to her whatshe called (speaking of another couple) "serious intentions"--and beforeeven solving the riddle of why really I loved her--I decided to tell her ofmy incurable illness. <103>7

She was elegant, she was languid, she was rather angelic in one sense,and dismally stupid in many others. I was lonely, and frightened, andreckless with lust--not sufficiently reckless, however, not to warn her bymeans of a vivid instance--half paradigm and half object lesson--or what shelaid herself open to by consenting to marry me.

Milostivaya Gosudarynya

Anna Ivanovna!

[Anglice Dear Miss Blagovo]

Before entertaining you viva-voce of a subject of the utmostimportance, I beg you to join me in the conduct of an experiment that willdescribe better than a learned article would one of the typical facets of mydisplaced mental crystal. So here goes.

With your permission it is night now and I am in bed (decently clad, ofcourse, and with every organ in decent repose), lying supine, and imaginingan ordinary moment in an ordinary place. To further protect the purity ofthe experiment, let the visualized spot be an invented one. I imagine myselfcoming out of a bookshop and <104> pausing on the curb before crossing thestreet to the little sidewalk cafи directly opposite. No cars are in sight.I cross. I imagine myself reaching the little cafи. The afternoon sunoccupies one of its chairs and the half of a table, but otherwise itsopen-air section is empty and very inviting: nothing but brightness remainsof the recent shower. And here I stop short as I recollect that I bad anumbrella.

I do not intend to bore you, glubokouvazhaemaya (dear) Anna Ivanova,and still less do I wish to crumple this third or fourth poor sheet with thecrashing sound only punished paper can make; but the scene is notsufficiently abstract and schematic, so let me retake it.

I, your friend and employer Vadim Vadimovich, lying in bed on my backin ideal darkness (I got up a minute ago to recurtain the moon that peepedbetween the folds of two paragraphs), I imagine diurnal Vadim Vadimovichcrossing a street from a bookshop to a sidewalk cafи. I am encased in myvertical self: not looking down but ahead, thus only indirectly aware of theblurry front of my corpulent figure, of the alternate points of my shoes,and of the rectangular form of the parcel under my arm. I imagine myselfwalking the twenty paces needed to reach the opposite sidewalk, thenstopping with an unprintable curse and deciding to go back for the umbrellaI left in the shop.

There is an affliction still lacking a name; there is, Anna (you mustpermit me to call you that, I am ten years your senior and very ill),something dreadfully wrong with my sense of direction, or rather my powerover conceived space, because at this juncture I am unable to <105> executementally, in the dark of my bed, the simple about-face (an act I performwithout thinking in physical reality!) which would allow me to pictureinstantly in my mind the once already traversed asphalt as now being beforeme, and the vitrine of the bookshop being now within sight and not somewherebehind.

Let me dwell briefly on the procedure involved; on my inability tofollow it consciously in my mind--my unwieldy and disobedient mind! In orderto make myself imagine the pivotal process I have to force an oppositerevolution of the decor: I must try, dear friend and assistant, to swing theentire length of the street, with the massive faгades of its houses beforeand behind me, from one direction to another in the slow wrench of a halfcircle, which is like trying to turn the colossal tiller of a rustyrecalcitrant rudder so as to transform oneself by conscious degrees from,say, an east-facing Vadim Vadimovich into a west-sun-blinded one. The merethought of that action leads the bedded recliner to such a muddle anddizziness that one prefers scrapping the about-face altogether, wiping, soto speak, the slate of one's vision, and beginning the return journey inone's imagination as if it were an initial one, without any previouscrossing of the street, and therefore without any of the intermediatehorror--the horror of struggling with the steerage of space and crushingone's chest in the process!

Voilю. Sounds rather tame, doesn't it, en fait de dиmence, and, indeed,if I stop brooding over the thing, I decrease it to an insignificantflaw--the missing pinkie of a freak born with nine fingers. Considering itcloser, however, I cannot <106> help suspecting it to be a warning symptom,a foreglimpse of the mental malady that is known to affect eventually theentire brain. Even that malady may not be as imminent and grave as the stormsignals suggest; I only want you to be aware of the situation beforeproposing to you, Annette. Do not write, do not phone, do not mention thisletter, if and when you come Friday afternoon; but, please, if you do, wear,in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wildflowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl fromleft to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and seriousgray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, myallegory.

On Friday afternoon, for the first time in two months she came "on thedot" as my American friends would say. A wedge of pain replaced my heart,and little black monsters started to play musical chairs all over my room,as I noticed that she wore her usual recent hat, of no interest or meaning.She took it off before the mirror and suddenly invoked Our Lord with rareemphasis.

"Ya idiotka," she said. "I'm an idiot. I was looking for my prettywreath, when papa started to read to me something about an ancestor of yourswho quarreled with Peter the Terrible."

"Ivan," I said.

"I didn't catch the name, but I saw I was late and pulled on(natsepila) this shapochka instead of the wreath, your wreath, the wreathyou ordered."

I was helping her out of her jacket. Her words filled me withdream-free wantonness. I embraced her. My mouth sought the hot hollowbetween neck and clavicle. It was a brief but thorough embrace, and I boiledover, discreetly, deliciously, merely by pressing myself against <107> her,one hand cupping her firm little behind and the other feeling the harpstrings of her ribs. She was trembling all over. An ardent but silly virgin,she did not understand why my grip had relaxed with the suddenness of sleepor windlorn sails.

Had she read only the beginning and end of my letter? Well, yes, shehad skipped the poetical part. In other words, she had not the slightestidea what I was driving at? She promised, she said, to reread it. She hadgrasped, however, that I loved her? She had, but how could she be sure thatI really loved her? I was so strange, so, so--she couldn't express it--yes,STRANGE in every respect. She never had met anyone like me. Whom then didshe meet, I inquired: trepanners? trombonists? astronomists? Well, mostlymilitary men, if I wished to know, officers of Wrangel's army, gentlemen,interesting people, who spoke of danger and duty, of bivouacs in the steppe.Oh, but look here, I too can speak of "deserts idle, rough quarries,rocks"--No, she said, they did not invent. They talked of spies they hadhanged, they talked of international politics, of a new film or book thatexplained the meaning of life. And never one unchaste joke, not one horridrisquи comparison... As in my books? Examples, examples! No, she would notgive examples. She would not be pinned down to whirl on the pin like awingless fly.

Or butterfly.

We were walking, one lovely morning, on the outskirts of Bellefontaine.Something flicked and lit.

"Look at that harlequin," I murmured, pointing cautiously with myelbow.

Sunning itself against the white wall of a suburban garden was a flat,symmetrically outspread butterfly, which the artist had placed at a slightangle to the horizon of his picture. The creature was painted a smiling redwith yellow intervals between black blotches; a row of blue crescents ranalong the inside of the toothed wing margins. <108> The only feature to ratea shiver of squeamishness was the glistening sweep of bronzy silks comingdown on both sides of the beastie's body.

"As a former kindergarten teacher I can tell you," said helpfulAnnette, "that it's a most ordinary nettlefly (krapivnitsa). How many littlehands have plucked off its wings and brought them to me for approval!"

It flicked and was gone. <109>8

In view of the amount of typing to be done, and of her doing it soslowly and badly, she made me promise not to bother her with what Russianscall "calf cuddlings" during work. At other times all she allowed me werecontrolled kisses and flexible holds: our first embrace had been "brutal"she said (having caught on very soon after that in the matter of certainmale secrets). She did her best to conceal the melting, the helplessnessthat overwhelmed her in the natural course of caresses when she would beginto palpitate in my arms before pushing me away with a puritanical frown.Once the back of her hand chanced to brush against the taut front of mytrousers; she uttered a chilly "pardon" (Fr.), and then went into a sulkupon my saying I hoped she had not hurt herself.

I complained of the ridiculous obsolete turn our relationship wastaking. She thought it over and promised that as soon as we were "officiallyengaged," we would enter a more modern era. I assured her I was ready toproclaim its advent any day, any moment.

She took me to see her parents with whom she shared a two-roomapartment in Passy. He had been an army surgeon before the Revolution and,with his close-cropped gray head, clipped mustache, and neat imperial, borea <110> striking resemblance (abetted no doubt by the eager spirit thatpatches up worn parts of the past with new impressions of the same order) tothe kindly but cold-fingered (and cold-earlobed) doctor who treated the"inflammation of the lungs" I had in the winter of 1907.

As with so many Russians émigrés of declining strength and lostprofessions, it was hard to say what exactly were Dr. Blagovo's personalresources. He seemed to spend life's overcast evening either reading his waythrough sets of thick magazines (1830 to 1900 or 1850 to 1910), whichAnnette brought him from Oksman's Lending Library, or sitting at a table andfilling by means of a regularly clicking tobacco injector thesemitransparent ends of carton-tubed cigarettes of which he never consumedmore than thirty per day to avoid intercadence at night. He had practicallyno conversation and could not retell correctly any of the countlesshistorical anecdotes he found in the battered tomes of Russkaya Starina("Russian ancientry")--which explains where Annette got her inability toremember the poems, the essays, the stories, the novels she had typed for me(my grumble is repetitious, I know, but the matter rankles--a word whichcomes from dracunculus, a "baby dragon"). He was also one of the lastgentlemen I ever met who still wore a dickey and elastic-sided boots.

He asked me--and that remained his only memorable question--why I didnot use in print the title which went with my thousand-year-old name. Ireplied that I was the kind of snob who assumes that bad readers are bynature aware of an author's origins but who hopes that good readers will bemore interested in his books than in his stemma. Dr. Blagovo was a stupidold bloke, and his detachable cuffs could have been cleaner; but today, insorrowful retrospect, I treasure his memory: he was not only the father ofmy poor Annette, but also the grandfather of my adored and perhaps stillmore unfortunate daughter. <111>

Dr. Blagovo (1867-1940) had married at the age of forty a provincialbelle in the Volgan town of Kineshma, a few miles south from one of my mostromanic country estates, famous for its wild ravines, now gravel pits orplaces of massacre, but then magnificent evocations of sunken gardens. Shewore elaborate make-up and spoke in simpering accents, reducing nouns andadjectives to over-affectionate forms which even the Russian language, arecognized giant of diminutives, would only condone on the wet lips of aninfant or tender nurse ("Here," said Mrs. Blagovo "is your chaishko smolochishkom [teeny tea with weeny milk]"). She struck me as anextraordinarily garrulous, affable, and banal lady, with a good taste inclothes (she worked in a salon de couture). A certain tenseness could besensed in the atmosphere of the household. Annette was obviously a difficultdaughter. In the brief course of my visit I could not help noticing that thevoice of the parent addressing her developed little notes of obsequiouspanic (notki podobostrastnoy paniki). Annette would occasionally curb withan opaque, almost ophidian, look, her mother's volubility. As I was leaving,the old girl paid me what she thought was a compliment: "You speak Russianwith a Parisian grasseyement and your manners are those of an Englishman."Annette, behind her, uttered a low warning growl.

That same evening I wrote to her father informing him that she and Ihad decided to marry; and on the following afternoon, when she arrived forwork, I met her in morocco slippers and silk dressing gown. It was aholiday--the Festival of Flora--I said, indicating, with a not wholly normalsmile, the carnations, camomiles, anemones, asphodels, and blue cockles inblond corn, which decorated my room in our honor. Her gaze swept over theflowers, champagne, and caviar canapиs; she snorted and turned to flee; Iplucked her back into the room, locked the door and pocketed its key. <112>

I do not mind recalling that our first tryst was a flop. It took me solong to persuade her that this was the day, and she made such a fuss aboutwhich ultimate inch of clothing could be removed and which parts of her bodyVenus, the Virgin, and the maire of our arrondissement allowed to betouched, that by the time I had her in a passably convenient position ofsurrender, I was an impotent wreck. We were lying naked, in a loose clinch.Presently her mouth opened against mine in her first free kiss. I regainedmy vigor. I hastened to possess her. She exclaimed I was disgustinglyhurting her and with a vigorous wriggle expulsed the blooded and thrashingfish. When I tried to close her fingers around it in humble substitution,she snatched her hand away, calling me a dirty dиbauchи (gryaznyyrazvratnik). I had to demonstrate myself the messy act while she looked onin amazement and sorrow.

We did better next day, and finished the flattish champagne; I nevercould quite tame her, though. I remember most promising nights in Italianlakeside hotels when everything was suddenly botched by her misplacedprimness. But on the other hand I am happy now that I was never so vile andinept as to ignore the exquisite contrast between her irritating prudery andthose rare moments of sweet passion when her features acquired an expressionof childish concentration, of solemn delight, and her little moans justreached the threshold of my undeserving consciousness. <113>9

By the end of the summer, and of the next chapter of The Dare, itbecame clear that Dr. Blagovo and his wife were looking forward to a regularGreek-Orthodox wedding--a taper-lit gold-and-gauze ceremony, with highpriest and low priest and a double choir. I do not know if Annette wasastonished when I said I intended to cut out the mummery and prosaicallyregister our union before a municipal officer in Paris, London, Calais, oron one of the Channel Islands; but she certainly did not mind astonishingher parents. Dr. Blagovo requested an interview in a stiffly worded letter("Prince! Anna has informed us that you would prefer--"); we settled for atelephone conversation: two minutes of Dr. Blagovo (including pauses causedby his deciphering a hand that must have been the despair of apothecaries)and five of his wife, who after rambling about irrelevant matters entreatedme to reconsider my decision. I refused, and was set upon by a go-between,good old Stepanov, who rather unexpectedly, given his liberal views, urgedme in a telephone call from somewhere in England (where the Borgs now lived)to keep up a beautiful Christian tradition. I changed the subject and beggedhim to arrange a beautiful literary soirиe for me upon his return to Paris.<114>

In the meantime some of the gayer gods came with gifts. Three windfallsscatter-thudded around me in a simultaneous act of celebration: The RedTopper was bought for publication in English with a two-hundred-guineaadvance; James Lodge of New York offered for Camera Lucida an even handsomersum (one's sense of beauty was easily satisfied in those days); and acontract for the cinema rights to a short story was being prepared by IvorBlack's half-brother in Los Angeles. I had now to find adequate surroundingsfor completing The Dare in greater comfort than that in which I wrote itsfirst part; and immediately after that, or concurrently with its lastchapter, I would have to examine, and, no doubt, revise heavily, the Englishtranslation now being made of my Krasnyy Tsilindr by an unknown lady inLondon (who rather inauspiciously had started to suggest, before a roar ofrage stopped her, that "certain passages, not quite proper or too richly orobscurely phrased, would have to be toned down, or omitted altogether, forthe benefit of the sober-minded English reader"). I also expected to have toface a business trip to the United States.

For some odd psychological reason, Annette's parents, who kept track ofthose developments, were now urging her to go through no matter what form ofmarriage, civil or pagan (grazhdanskiy ili basurmanskiy), without delay.Once that little tricolor farce over, Annette and I paid our tribute toRussian tradition by traveling from hotel to hotel during two months, goingas far as Venice and Ravenna, where I thought of Byron and translatedMusset. Back in Paris, we rented a three-room apartment on the charming rueGuevara (named after an Andalusian playwright of long ago) a two-minute walkfrom the Bois. We usually lunched at the nearby Le Peut Diable Boiteux, amodest but excellent restaurant, and had cold cuts for dinner in ourkitchenette. I had somehow expected Annette to be a versatile cook, and shedid improve later, in rugged <115> America. On rue Guevara her bestachievement remained the Soft-Boiled Egg: I do not know how she did it, butshe managed to prevent the fatal crack that produced an ectoplasmic swell inthe dancing water when I took over.

She loved long walks in the park among the sedate beeches and theprospective-looking babes; she loved cafиs, fashion shows, tennis matches,circular bike races at the Vиlodrome, and especially the cinema. I soonrealized that a little recreation put her in a lovemaking mood--and I wasfrightfully amorous and strong in our four last years in Paris, and quiteunable to stand capricious denials. I drew the line, however, at an overdoseof athletic sports--a metronomic tennis ball twanging to and fro or theghastly hairy legs of hunchbacks on wheels.

The second part of the Thirties in Paris happened to be marked by amarvelous surge of the exiled arts, and it would be pretentious and foolishof me not to admit that whatever some of the more dishonest critics wroteabout me, I stood at the peak of that period. In the halls where readingstook place, in the back rooms of famous cafиs, at private literary parries,I enjoyed pointing out to my quiet and stylish companion the various ghoulsof the inferno, the crooks and the creeps, the benevolent nonentities, thegroupists, the guru nuts, the pious pederasts, the lovely hystericalLesbians, the gray-locked old realists, the talented, illiterate, intuitivenew critics (Adam Atropovich was their unforgettable leader).

I noted with a sort of scholarly pleasure (like that of tracking downparallel readings) how attentive, how eager to honor her were the three orfour, always black-suited, grandmasters of Russian letters (people I admiredwith grateful fervor, not only because their high-principled art hadenchanted my prime, but also because the banishment of their books by theBolshevists <116> represented the greatest indictment, absolute andimmortal, of Lenin's and Stalin's regime). No less empressиs around her(perhaps in subliminal zeal to earn some of the rare praise I deigned tobestow on the pure voice of the impure) were certain younger writers whomtheir God had created two-faced: despicably corrupt or inane on one side oftheir being and shining with poignant genius on the other. In a word, herappearance in the beau monde of émigré literature echoed amusingly ChapterEight of Eugene Onegin with Princess N.'s moving coolly through the fawningballroom throng.

I might have been displeased by the tolerance she showed Basilevski(knowing none of his works and only vaguely aware of his preposterousreputation) had it not occurred to me that the theme of her sympathy wasrepeating, as it were, the friendly phase of my own initial relations withthat faux bonhomme. From behind a more or less Doric column I overheard himasking my naоve gentle Annette had she any idea why I hated so fiercelyGorki (for whom he cultivated total veneration). Was it because I resentedthe world fame of a proletarian? Had I really read any of that wonderfulwriter's books? Annette had looked puzzled but all at once a charmingchildish smile illumined her whole face and she recalled The Mother, a cornySoviet film that I had criticized, she said, "because the tears rolling downthe faces were too big and too slow."

"Aha! That explains a lot," proclaimed Basilevski with gloomysatisfaction. <117>10I received the typed translations of The Red Topper (sic) and Camera Lucidavirtually at the same time, in the autumn of 1937. They proved to be evenmore ignoble than I expected. Miss Haworth, an Englishwoman, had spent threehappy years in Moscow where her father had been Ambassador; Mr. Kulich wasan elderly Russian-born New Yorker who signed his letters Ben. Both madeidentical mistakes, choosing the wrong term in their identical dictionaries,and with identical recklessness never bothering to check the treacheroushomonym of a familiar-looking word. They were blind to contextual shades ofcolor and deaf to nuances of noise. Their classification of natural objectsseldom descended from the class to the family; still more seldom to thegenus in the strict sense. They confused the specimen with the species; Hop,Leap, and Jump wore in their minds the drab uniform of regimentedsynonymity; and not one page passed without a boner. What struck me asespecially fascinating, in a dreadful diabolical way, was their taking forgranted that a respectable author could have written this or thatdescriptive passage, which their ignorance and carelessness had reduced tothe cries and grunts of a cretin. In all their habits of expression BenKulich and Miss Haworth were so close that I now think <118> they might havebeen secretly married to one another and had corresponded regularly whentrying to settle a tricky paragraph; or else, maybe, they used to meetmidway for lexical picnics on the grassy lip of some crater in the Azores.

It took me several months to revise those atrocities and dictate myrevisions to Annette. She derived her English from the four years she hadspent at an American boarding school in Constantinople (1920-1924), theBlagovos' first stage of westward expatriation. I was amazed to see how fasther vocabulary grew and improved in the performance of her new functions andwas amused by the innocent pride she took in correctly taking down theblasts and sarcasms I directed in letters to Allan & Overton, London, andJames Lodge, New York. In fact, her doigtи in English (and French) wasbetter than in the typing of Russian texts. Minor stumbles were, of course,bound to occur in any language. One day, in referring to the carbon copy ofa spate of corrections already posted to my patient Allan, I discovered atrivial slip she had made, a mere typo ("here" instead of "hero," or perhaps"that" instead of "hat," I don't even remember--but there was an "h"somewhere, I think) which, however, gave the sentence a dismally flat, but,alas, not implausible sense (verisimilitude has been the undoing of many aconscientious proofreader). A telegram could eliminate the faultincontinently, but an overworked edgy author finds such events jarring--andI voiced my annoyance with unwarranted vehemence. Annette started lookingfor a telegram form in the (wrong) drawer and said, without rasing her head:

"She would have helped you so much better than I, though I really amdoing my best (strashno starayus', trying terribly)."

We never referred to Iris--that was a tacit condition in the code ofour marriage--but I instantly understood that Annette meant her and not theinept English girl <119> whom an agency had sent me several weeks before andgot back with wrappage and string. For some occult reason (overwork again) Ifelt the tears welling and before I could get up and leave the room, I foundmyself shamelessly sobbing and hitting a fat anonymous book with my fist.She glided into my arms, also weeping, and that same evening we went to seeRenи Clair's new film, followed by supper at the Grand Velour.

During those months of correcting and partly rewriting The Red Topperand the other thing, I began to experience the pangs of a strangetransformation. I did not wake up one Central European morning as a greatscarab with more legs than any beetle can have, but certain excruciatingtearings of secret tissues did take place in me. The Russian typewriter wasclosed like a coffin. The end of The Dare had been delivered to Patria.Annette and I planned to go in the spring to England (a plan never executed)and in the summer of 1939 to America (where she was to die fourteen yearslater). By the middle of 19381 felt I could sit back and quietly enjoy boththe private praise bestowed upon me by Andoverton and Lodge in their lettersand the public accusations of aristocratic obscurity which facetiouscriticules in the Sunday papers directed at the style of such passages inthe English versions of my two novels as had been authored by me alone. Itwas, however, quite a different matter "to work without net" (as Russianacrobats say), when attempting to compose a novel straight in English, fornow there was no Russian safety net spread below, between me and the lightedcirclet of the arena.

As was also to happen in regard to my next English books (including thepresent sketch), the title of my first one came to me at the moment ofimpregnation, long before actual birth and growth. Holding that name to thelight, I distinguished the entire contents of the semitransparent <120>capsule. The title was to be without any choice or change: See under Real. Apreview of its eventual tribulations in the catalogues of public librariescould not have deterred me.

The idea may have been an oblique effect of the insult dealt by the twobunglers to my careful art. An English novelist, a brilliant and uniqueperformer, was supposed to have recently died. The story of his life wasbeing knocked together by the uninformed, coarse-minded, malevolent HamletGodman, an Oxonian Dane, who found in this grotesque task a Kovalevskian"outlet" for the literary flops that his proper mediocrity fully deserved.The biography was being edited, rather unfortunately for its recklessconcocter, by the indignant brother of the dead novelist. As the openingchapter unfolded its first reptilian coil (with insinuations of"masturbation guilt" and the castration of toy soldiers) there commencedwhat was to me the delight and the magic of my book: fraternal footnotes,half-a-dozen lines per page, then more, then much more, which started toquestion, then refute, then demolish by ridicule the would-be biographer'sdoctored anecdotes and vulgar inventions. A multiplication of such notes atthe bottom of the page led to an ominous increase (no doubt disturbing toclubby or convalescent readers) of astronomical symbols bespeckling thetext. By the end of the biographee's college years the height of thecritical apparatus had reached one third of each page. Editorial warnings ofa national disaster--flooded fields and so on--accompanied a further rise ofthe water line. By page 200 the footnote material had crowded outthree-quarters of the text and the type of the note had changed,psychologically at least (I loathe typographical frolics in books) frombrevier to long primer. In the course of the last chapters the commentarynot only replaced the entire text but finally swelled to boldface. "Wewitness here the admirable phenomenon of a bogus <121> biographie romancиebeing gradually supplanted by the true story of a great man's life." Forgood measure I appended a three-page account of the great annotator'sacademic career: "He now teaches Modern Literature, including his brother'sworks, at Paragon University, Oregon."

This is the description of a novel written almost forty-five years agoand probably forgotten by the general public. I have never reread it becauseI reread (je relis, perechityvayu--I'm teasing an adorable mistress!) onlythe page proofs of my paperbacks; and for reasons which, I am sure, J. Lodgefinds judicious, the thing is still in its hard-cover instar. But in rosyretrospect I feel it as a pleasurable event, and have completely dissociatedit in my mind from the terrors and torments that attended the writing ofthat rather lightweight little satire.

Actually, its composition, despite the pleasure (maybe also noxious)that the iridescent bubbles in my alembics gave me after a night ofinspiration, trial, and triumph (look at the harlequins, everybodylook--Iris, Annette, Bel, Louise, and you, you, my ultimate and immortalone!), almost led to the dementia paralytica that I feared since youth.

In the world of athletic games there has never been, I think, a WorldChampion of Lawn Tennis and Ski; yet in two Literatures, as dissimilar asgrass and snow, I have been the first to achieve that kind of feat. I do notknow (being a complete non-athlete, whom the sports pages of a newspaperbore almost as much as does its kitchen section) what physical stress may beinvolved in serving one day a sequence of thirty-six aces at sea level andon the next soaring from a ski jump 136 meters through bright mountain air.Colossal, no doubt, and, perhaps, inconceivable. But I have managed totranscend the rack and the wrench of literary metamorphosis.

We think in images, not in words; all right; when, however, we compose,recall, or refashion at midnight in our <122> brain something we wish to sayin tomorrow's sermon, or have said to Dolly in a recent dream, or wish wehad said to that impertinent proctor twenty years ago, the images we thinkin are, of course, verbal--and even audible if we happen to be lonely andold. We do not usually think in words, since most of life is mimodrama, butwe certainly do imagine words when we need them, just as we imagineeverything else capable of being perceived in this, or even in a still moreunlikely, world. The book in my mind appeared at first, under my right cheek(I sleep on my non-cardial side), as a varicolored procession with a headand a tail, winding in a general western direction through an attentivetown. The children among you and all my old selves on their thresholds werebeing promised a stunning show. I then saw the show in full detail withevery scene in its place, every trapeze in the stars. Yet it was not amasque, not a circus, but a bound book, a short novel in a tongue as farremoved as Thracian or Pahlavi from the fata-morganic prose that I hadwilled into being in the desert of exile. An upsurge of nausea overcame meat the thought of imagining a hundred-thousand adequate words and I switchedon the light and called to Annette in the adjacent bedroom to give me one ofmy strictly rationed tablets.

The evolution of my English, like that of birds, had had its ups anddowns. A beloved Cockney nurse had looked after me from 1900 (when I was oneyear old) to 1903. She was followed by a succession of three Englishgovernesses (1903-1906, 1907-1909, and November, 1909, to Christmas of thesame year) whom I see over the shoulder of time as representing,mythologically, Didactic Prose, Dramatic Poetry, and the Erotic Idyll. Mygrand-aunt, a dear person with uncommonly liberal views, gave in, however,to domestic considerations, and discharged Cherry Neaple, my lastshepherdess. After an interlude of Russian and French pedagogy, two Englishtutors more or less <123> succeeded each other between 1912 and 1916, rathercomically overlapping in the spring of 1914 when they competed for thefavors of a young village beauty who had been my girl in the first place.English fairy tales had been replaced around 1910 by the B.O.P., immediatelyfollowed by all the Tauchnitz volumes that had accumulated in the familylibraries. Throughout adolescence I read, in pairs, and both with the samerich thrill, Othello and Onegin, Tyutchev and Tennyson, Browning and Blok.During my three Cambridge years (1919-1922) and thereafter, till April 23,1930, my domestic tongue remained English, while the body of my own Russianworks started to grow and was soon to disorb my household gods.

So far so good. But the phrase itself is a glib clichи; and thequestion confronting me in Paris, in the late Thirties, was precisely couldI fight off the formula and rip up the ready-made, and switch from myglorious self-developed Russian, not to the dead leaden English of the highseas with dummies in sailor suits, but an English I alone would beresponsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light?

I daresay the description of my literary troubles will be skipped bythe common reader; yet for my sake, rather than his, I wish to dwellmercilessly on a situation that was bad enough before I left Europe butalmost killed me during the crossing.

Russian and English had existed for years in my mind as two worldsdetached from one another. (It is only today that some interspatial contacthas been established: "A knowledge of Russian," writes George Oakwood in hisastute essay on my Ardis, 1970, "will help you to relish much of thewordplay in the most English of the author's English novels; consider forinstance this: `The champ and the chimp came all the way from Omsk toNeochomsk.' What a delightful link between a real round place and <124>`ni-o-chyom,' the About-Nothing land of modern philosophic linguistics!") Iwas acutely aware of the syntactic gulf separating their sentencestructures. I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that myallegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship.Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English fromthe free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in theirRussian counterpart (which Ian Bunyan has so amusingly compared in lastSunday's NYT to "a dance of the veil performed by a plump graceful lady in acircle of cheering drunks"). The fantastic number of natural-looking nounsthat the British and the Americans apply in lovely technical senses to veryspecific objects also distressed me. What is the exact term for the littlecup in which you place the diamond you want to cut? (We call it "dop," thepupal case of a butterfly, replied my informer, an old Boston jeweler whosold me the ring for my third bride). Is there not a nice special word for apigling? ("I am toying with `snork' said Professor Noteboke, the besttranslator of Gogol's immortal The Carrick). I want the right word for thebreak in a boy's voice at puberty, I said to an amiable opera basso in theadjacent deck chair during my first transatlantic voyage. ("I think, hesaid, "it's called `ponticello,' a small bridge, un petit pont, mostik...Oh, you're Russian too?")

The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing, in acharming New York apartment (it was leant to Annette and me by a generousrelative of mine and faced the sunset flaming beyond Central Park). Theneuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solidblack headache that no pill could pierce. Annette rang up James Lodge, andhe, out of the misdirected kindness of his heart, had an old littlephysician of Russian extraction examine me. The poor fellow drove me evencrazier than I was by not only insisting on discussing <125> my symptoms inan execrable version of the language I was trying to shed, but ontranslating into it various irrelevant terms used by the Viennese Quack andhis apostles (simbolizirovanie, mortidnik). Yet his visit, I must confess,strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda. <126>

PART THREE

<127> <128>

1

Neither Slaughter in the Sun (as the English translation of CameraLucida got retitled while I lay helplessly hospitalized in New York) nor TheRed Topper sold well. My ambitious, beautiful, strange See under Real shonefor a breathless instant on the lowest rung of the bestseller list in a WestCoast paper, and vanished for good. In those circumstances I could notrefuse the lectureship offered me in 1940 by Quirn University on thestrength of my European reputation. I was to develop a plump tenure thereand expand into a Full Professor by 1950 or 1955: I can't find the exactdate in my old notes.

Although I was adequately remunerated for my two weekly lectures onEuropean Masterpieces and one Thursday seminar on Joyce's Ulysses (from ayearly 5000 dollars in the beginning to 15,000 in the Fifties) and hadfurthermore several splendidly paid stories accepted by The Beau and theButterfly, the kindest magazine in the world, I was not really comfortableuntil my Kingdom by the Sea (1962) atoned for a fraction of the loss of myRussian fortune (1917) and bundled away all financial worries till the endof worrisome time. I do not usually preserve cuttings of adverse criticismand envious abuse; but I do treasure the following definition: "This is theonly known case <129> in history when a European pauper ever became his ownAmerican uncle [amerikanskiy dyadyushka, oncle d'Amиrique]," so phrased bymy faithful Zoilus, Demian Basilevski; he was one of the very few largersaurians in the émigré marshes who followed me in 1939 to the hospitable andaltogether admirable U.S.A., where with egg-laying promptness he founded aRussian-language quarterly which he is still directing today, thirty-fiveyears later, in his heroic dotage.

The furnished apartment we finally rented on the upper floor of ahandsome house (10 Buffalo St.) was much to my liking because of anexceptionally comfortable study with a great bookcase full of works onAmerican lore including an encyclopedia in twenty volumes. Annette wouldhave preferred one of the dacha-like structures which the Administrationalso showed us; but she gave in when I pointed out to her that what lookedsnug and quaint in summer was bound to be chilly and weird the rest of theyear.

Annette's emotional health caused me anxiety: her graceful neck seemedeven longer and thinner. An expression of mild melancholy lent a new,unwelcome, beauty to her Botticellian face: its hollowed outline below thezygoma was accentuated by her increasing habit of sucking in her cheeks whenhesitative or pensive. All her cold petals remained closed in our infrequentlovemaking. Her abstraction grew perilous: stray cats at night knew that thesame erratic deity that had not shut the kitchen window would leave ajar thedoor of the fridge; her bath regularly overflowed while she telephoned,knitting her innocent brows (what on earth did she care for my pains, mywelling insanity!), to find out how the first-floor person's migraine ormenopause was faring; and that vagueness of hers in relation to me was alsoresponsible for her omitting a precaution she was supposed to take, so thatby the autumn, which followed our moving into the accursed Langley <130>house, she informed me that the doctor she had just consulted looked thevery image of Oksman and that she was two-months pregnant.

An angel is now waiting under my restless heels. Doomful despair wouldinvade my poor Annette when she tried to cope with the intricacies of anAmerican household. Our landlady, who occupied the first floor, resolved herperplexities in a jiffy. Two ravishing wiggly-bottomed Bermudian coeds,wearing their national costume, flannel shorts and open shirts, andpractically twins in appearance, who took the celebrated "Hotel" course atQuirn, came to cook and char for her, and she offered to share with us theirservices.

"She's a veritable angel," confided Annette to me in her touchinglyphony English.

I recognized in the woman the Assistant Professor of Russian whom I hadmet in a brick building on the campus when the head of her remarkably drearydepartment, meek myopic old Noteboke, invited me to attend an Advanced GroupClass (My govorim po-russki. Vy govorite? Pogovorimte togda--that kind ofawful stuff). Happily I had no connection whatever with Russian grammar atQuirn--except that my wife was eventually saved from utter boredom by beingengaged to help beginners under Mrs. Langley's direction.

Ninel Ilinishna Langley, a displaced person in more senses than one,had recently left her husband, the "great" Langley, author of A MarxistHistory of America, the bible (now out of print) of a whole generation ofmorons. I do not know the reason of their separation (after one year ofAmerican Sex, as the woman told Annette, who relayed the information to mein a tone of idiotic condolence); but I did have the occasion of seeing anddisliking Professor Langley at an official dinner on the eve of hisdeparture for Oxford. I disliked him for his daring to question my teachingUlysses my way--in a purely textual <131> light, without organic allegoriesand quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe; his "Marxism," on the otherhand, was a pleasantly comic and very mild affair (too mild, perhaps, forhis wife's taste) compared to the general attitude of ignorant admirationwhich American intellectuals had toward Soviet Russia. I remember the suddenhush, and furtive exchange of incredulous grimaces, when at a party, givenfor me by the most eminent member of our English department, I described theBolshevist state as Philistine in repose and bestial in action;internationally vying in rapacious deceit with the praying mantis; doctoringthe mediocrity of its literature by first sparing a few talents left overfrom a previous period and then blotting them out with their own blood. Oneprofessor, a left-wing moralist and dedicated muralist (he was experimentingthat year with automobile paint), stalked out of the house. He wrote me nextday, however, a really magnificent, larger-than-nature letter of apologysaying that he could not be really cross with the author of Esmeralda andHer Parandrus (1941), which despite its "motley style and baroque imagery"was a masterpiece "pinching strings of personal poignancy which he, acommitted artist, never knew could vibrate in him." Reviewers of my bookstook the same line, chiding me formally for underestimating the "greatness"of Lenin, yet paying me compliments of a kind that could not fail to touch,in the long run, even me, a scornful and austere author, whose homework inParis had never received its due. Even the President of Quirn, whotimorously sympathized with the fashionable Sovietizers, was really on myside: he told me when he called on us (while Ninel crept up to grow an earon our landing) that he was proud, etc., and had found my "last (?) bookvery interesting" though he could not help regretting that I took everyopportunity of criticizing "our Great Ally" in my classes. I answered,laughing, that this criticism was a child's caress when set alongside thepublic lecture on <132> "The Tractor in Soviet Literature" that I planned todeliver at the end of the term. He laughed, too, and asked Annette what itwas like to live with a genius (she only shrugged her pretty shoulders). Allthis was trхs amиricain and thawed a whole auricle in my icy heart.

But to return to good Ninel.

She had been christened Nonna at birth (1902) and renamed twenty yearslater Ninel (or Ninella), as petitioned by her father, a Hero of Toil and atoady. She wrote it Ninella in English but her friends called her Ninette orNelly just as my wife's Christian name Anna (as Nonna liked to observe)turned into Annette and Netty.

Ninella Langley was a stocky, heavily built creature with a ruddy androsy face (the two tints unevenly distributed), short hair dyed amother-in-law ginger, brown eyes even madder than mine, very thin lips, afat Russian nose, and three or four hairs on her chin. Before the youngreader heads for Lesbos, I wish to say that as far as I could discover (andI am a peerless spy) there was nothing sexual in her ludicrous and unlimitedaffection for my wife. I had not yet acquired the white Desert Lynx thatAnnette did not live to see, so it was Ninella who took her shopping in adilapidated jalopy while the resourceful lodger, sparing the copies of hisown novels, would autograph for the grateful twins old mystery paperbacksand unreadable pamphlets from the Langley collection in the attic whosedormer looked out obligingly on the road to, and from, the Shopping Center.It was Ninella who kept her adored "Netty" well supplied with white knittingwool. It was Ninella who twice daily invited her for a cup of coffee or teain her rooms; but the woman made a point of avoiding our flat, at least whenwe were at home, under the pretext that it still reeked of her husband'stobacco: I rejoined that it was my own pipe--and later, on the same day,Annette told me I really ought not to smoke so much, especially indoors; andshe also upheld another absurd <133> complaint coming from downstairs,namely, that I walked back and forth too late and too long, right overNinella's forehead. Yes--and a third grievance: why didn't I put back theencyclopedia volumes in alphabetic order as her husband had always beencareful to do, for (he said) "a misplaced book is a lost book"--quite anaphorism.

Dear Mrs. Langley was not particularly happy about her job. She owned alakeside bungalow ("Rustic Roses") thirty miles north of Quirn, not very farfrom Honeywell College, where she taught summer school and with which sheintended to be even more closely associated, if a "reactionary" atmospherepersisted at Quirn. Actually, her only grudge was against decrepit Mme. deKorchakov, who had accused her, in public, of having a sdobnyy ("mellow")Soviet accent and a provincial vocabulary--all of which could not be denied,although Annette maintained I was a heartless bourgeois to say so. <134>2

The infant Isabel's first four years of life are so firmly separated inmy consciousness by a blank of seven years from Bel's girlhood that I seemto have had two different children, one a cheerful red-cheeked little thing,and the other her pale and morose elder sister.

I had laid in a stock of ear plugs; they proved superfluous: no cryingcame from the nursery to interfere with my work--Dr. Olga Repnin, the storyof an invented Russian professor in America, which was to be published(after a bothersome spell of serialization entailing endless proofreading)by Lodge in 1946, the year Annette left me, and acclaimed as "a blend ofhumor and humanism" by alliteration-prone reviewers, comfortably unaware ofwhat I was to prepare some fifteen years later for their horrifieddelectation.

I enjoyed watching Annette as she took color snapshots of the baby andme in the garden. I loved perambulating a fascinated Isabel through, thegroves of larches and beeches along Quirn Cascade River, with every loop oflight, every eyespot of shade escorted, or so it seemed, by the baby's gayapprobation. I even agreed to spend most of the summer of 1945 at RusticRoses. There, one day, as I was returning with Mrs. Langley from the nearestliquor <135> store or newspaper stand, something she said, some intonationor gesture, released in me the passing shudder, the awful surmise, that itwas not with my wife but with me that the wretched creature had been in lovefrom the very start.

The torturous tenderness I had always felt for Annette gained newpoignancy from my feelings for our little child (I "trembled" over her asNinella put it in her coarse Russian, complaining it might be bad for thebaby, even if one "subtracted the overacting"). That was the human side ofour marriage. The sexual side disintegrated altogether.

For quite a time after her return from the maternity ward, echoes ofher pangs in the darkest corridors of my brain and a frightening stainedwindow at every turn--the afterimage of a wounded orifice--pursued me anddeprived me of all my vigor. When everything in me healed, and my lust forher pale enchantments rekindled, its volume and violence put an end to thebrave but essentially inept efforts she had been making to reestablish somesort of amorous harmony between us without departing one jot from thepuritanical norm. She now had the gall--the pitiful girlish gall--to insistI see a psychiatrist (recommended by Mrs. Langley) who would help me tothink "softening" thoughts at moments of excessive engorgement. I said herfriend was a monster and she a goose, and we had our worst marital quarrelin years.

The creamy-thighed twins had long since returned with their bicycles tothe island of their birth. Plainer young ladies came to help with thehousekeeping. By the end of 1945 I had virtually ceased visiting my wife inher cold bedroom.

Sometime in mid-May, 1946, I traveled to New York--a five-hour traintrip--to lunch with a publisher who was offering me better terms for acollection of stories (Exile from Mayda) than good Lodge. After a pleasantmeal, in the sunny haze of that banal day, I walked over to the <136> PublicLibrary, and by a banal miracle of synchronization she came dancing downthose very steps, Dolly von Borg, now twenty-four, as I trudged up towardher, a fat famous writer in his powerful forties. Except for a gleam of grayin the abundant fair mane that I had cultivated for my readings in Paris,more than a decade ago, I do not believe I could have changed sufficientlyto warrant her saying, as she began doing, that she would never haverecognized me had she not been so fond of the picture of meditation on theback of See under. I recognized her because I had never lost track of herimage, readjusting it once in a while: the last time I had notched the scorewas when her grandmother, in response to my wife's Christmas greetings, in1939, sent us from London a postcard-size photo of a bare-shouldered flapperwith a fluffy fan and false eyelashes in some high-school play, terriblychi-chi. In the two minutes we had on those steps--she pressing with bothhands a book to her breast, I at a lower level, standing with my right footplaced on the next step, her step, and slapping my knee with a glove (many atenor's only known gesture)--in those two minutes we managed to exchangequite a lot of plain information.

She was now studying the History of the Theater at Columbia University.Parents and grandparents were tucked away in London. I had a child, right?Those shoes I wore were lovely. Students called my lectures fabulous. Was Ihappy?

I shook my head. When and where could I see her?

She had always had a crush on me, oh yes, ever since I used tomesmerize her in my lap, playing sweet Uncle Gasper, muffing every otherline, and now all had come back and she certainly wished to do somethingabout it.

She had a remarkable vocabulary. Summarize her. Mirages of motels inthe eye of the penholder. Did she have a car?

Well, that was rather sudden (laughing). She could <137> borrow,perhaps, his old sedan though he might not like the notion (pointing to anondescript youth who was waiting for her on the sidewalk). He had justbought a heavenly Hummer to go places with her.

Would she mind telling me when we could meet, please.

She had read all my novels, at least all the English ones. Her Russianwas rusty!

The hell with my novels! When?

I had to let her think. She might visit me at the end of the term.Terry Todd (now measuring the stairs with his eyes, preparing to mount) hadbriefly been a student of mine; he got a D minus for his first paper andquit Quirn.

I said I consigned all the D people to everlasting oblivion. Her "endof the term" might bend away into Minus Eternity. I required more precision.

She would let me know. She would call me next week. No, she would notpart with her own telephone number. She told me to look at that clown (hewas now coming up the steps). Paradise was a Persian word. It was simplyPersian to meet again like that. She might drop in at my office for a fewmoments, just to chat about old times. She knew how busy--

"Oh, Terry: this is the writer, the man who wrote Emerald and thePander."

I do not recall what I had planned to look up in the library. Whateverit was, it was not that unknown book. Aimlessly I walked up and down severalhalls; abjectly visited the W.C.; but simply could not, short of castratingmyself, get rid of her new image in its own portable sunlight--the straightpale hair, the freckles, the banal pout, the Lilithan long eyes--though Iknew she was only what one used to call a "little tramp" and, perhaps,because she was just that.

I gave my penultimate "Masterpieces" lecture of the spring term. I gavemy ultimate one. An assistant distributed <138> the blue books for the finalexamination in that course (which I had curtailed for reasons of health) andcollected them while three or four hopeless hopefuls still kept scribblingmadly in separate spots of the hall. I held my last Joyce seminar of theyear. Little Baroness Borg had forgotten the end of the dream.

In the last days of the spring term a particularly stupid baby-sittertold me that some girl whose name she had not quite caught--Tallbird orDalberg--had phoned that she was on her way to Quirn. It so happened that aLily Talbot in my Masterpieces class had missed the examination. On thefollowing day I walked over to my office for the ordeal of reading thedamned heap on my desk. Quirn University Official Examination Book. Allacademic work is conducted on the assumption of general horror. Write on theconsecutive right- and left-hand pages. What does "consecutive" really mean,Sir? Do you want us to describe all the birds in the story or only one? As arule, one-tenth of the three hundred minds preferred the spelling "Stern" to"Sterne" and "Austin" to "Austen."

The telephone on my spacious desk (it "slept two" as my ribald neighborProfessor King, an authority on Dante, used to say) rang, and this LilyTalbot started to explain, volubly, unconvincingly, in a kind of lovely,veiled, and confidential voice, why she had not taken the examination. Icould not remember her face or her figure, but the subdued melody ticklingmy ear contained such intimations of young charm and surrender that I couldnot help chiding myself for overlooking her in my class. She was about tocome to the point when an eager childish rap at the door diverted myattention. Dolly walked in, smiling. Smiling, she indicated with a tilt ofher chin that the receiver should be cradled. Smiling, she swept theexamination books off the desk and perched upon it with her bare shins in myface. What might have promised the most refined ardors turned out to be thetritest scene in this memoir. I hastened <139> to quench a thirst that hadbeen burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I hadfondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier. The ultimateconvulsion rocked the desk lamp, and from the class just across the corridorcame a burst of applause at the end of Professor King's last lecture of theseason.

When I came home, I found my wife alone on the porch swinging gently ifnot quite straight in her favorite glider and reading the Krasnaya Niva("Red Corn"), a Bolshevist magazine. Her purveyor of literatura was awaygiving some future mistranslators a final examination. Isabel had been outof doors and was now taking a nap in her room just above the porch.

In the days when the bermudki (as Ninella indecently called them) usedto minister to my humble needs, I experienced no guilt after the operationand confronted my wife with my usual, fondly ironical smile; but on thisoccasion I felt my flesh coated with stinging slime, and my heart missed athump, when she said, glancing up and stopping the line with her finger:"Did that girl get in touch with you at your office?"

I answered as a fictional character might "in the affirmative": "Herpeople," I added, "wrote you, it appears, about her coming to study in NewYork, but you never showed me that letter. Tant mieux, she's a frightfulbore."

Annette looked utterly confused: "I'm speaking," she said, "or tryingto speak, about a student called Lily Talbot who telephoned an hour ago toexplain why she missed the exam. Who is your girl?"

We proceeded to disentangle the two. After some moral hesitation ("Youknow, we both owe a lot to her grandparents") Annette conceded we reallyneed not entertain little strays. She seemed to recall the letter because itcontained a reference to her widowed mother (now moved to a comfortable homefor the old into which I had recently turned my villa at Carnavaux--despitemy <140> lawyer's well-meaning objections). Yes, yes, she had mislaidit--and would find it some day in some library book that had never beenreturned to an unattainable library. A strange appeasement was now flowingthrough my poor veins. The romance of her absentmindedness always made melaugh heartily. I laughed heartily. I kissed her on her infinitelytender-skinned temple.

"How does Dolly Borg look now?" asked Annette. "She used to be a veryhomely and very brash little brat. Quite repulsive, in fact."

"That's what she still is," I practically shouted, and we heard littleIsabel crow: "Ya prosnulas'" through the yawn of the window: "I am awake."How lightly the spring cloudlets scudded! How glibly that red-breastedthrush on the lawn pulled out its unbroken worm! Ah--and there was Ninella,home at last, getting out of her car, with the string-bound corpses ofcahiers under her sturdy arm. "Gosh," said I to myself, in my ignobleeuphoria, "there's something quite nice and cozy about old Ninel after all!"Yet only a few hours later the light of Hell had gone out, and I writhed, Iwrung my four limbs, yes, in an agony of insomnia, trying to find somecombination between pillow and back, sheet and shoulder, linen and leg, tohelp me, help me, oh, help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn. <141>3

The increasing disarray of my nerves was such that the bother ofgetting a driver's license could not be contemplated: hence I had to rely onDolly's use of Todd's dirty old sedan in order to seek the conventionaldarkness of country lanes that were difficult to find and disappointing whenfound. We had three such rendezvous, near New Swivington or thereabouts, inthe complicated vicinity of Casanovia of all places, and despite my muddledcondition I could not help noticing that Dolly welcomed the restlesswanderings, the wrong turns, the torrents of rain which attended our sordidlittle affair. "Just think," she said one especially boggy June night inunknown surroundings, "how much simpler things would be if somebodyexplained the situation to your wife, just think!"

On realizing she had gone too far with that proposed thought, Dollychanged tactics and rang me up at my office to tell me with a great show ofjubilant excitement that Bridget Dolan, a medical student and a cousin ofTodd's, was offering us for a small remuneration her flat in New York onMonday and Thursday afternoons when she worked as a nurse at the HolySomething Hospital. Inertia rather than Eros caused me to give it a try; Ikept up the pretext of having to complete the literary <142> research I wassupposed to be conducting in the Public Library, and traveled in a crowdedPullman from one nightmare to another.

She met me in front of the house, strutting in triumph, brandishing alittle key that caught a glint of sun in the hothouse mizzle. I was so veryweak from the journey that I had trouble getting out of the taxi, and shehelped me to the front door, chattering the while like a bright child.Fortunately the mysterious flat was on the ground floor--I could not havefaced a lift's closure and spasm. A surly janitrix (reminding me in mnemonicreverse of the Cerberean bitches in the hotels of Soviet Siberia which I wasto stop at a couple of decades later) insisted on my writing down my nameand address in a ledger ("That's the rule," sang out Dolly, who had alreadypicked up some intones of local delivery). I had the presence of mind to putdown the dumbest address I could produce at the moment, Dumbert Dumbert,Dumberton. Dolly, humming, added unhurriedly my raincoat to those hanging ina communal hallway. If she had ever experienced the pangs of neuralgicdelirium, she would not have fumbled with that key when she knew quite wellthat the door of what should have been an exquisitely private apartment wasnot even properly closed. We entered a preposterous, evidently ultra-modernliving room with painted hard furniture and one lone little white rockersupporting a plush biped rat instead of a sulky child. Doors were still withme, were always with me. The one on the left, being slightly ajar, let invoices from an adjacent suite or asylum. "There's a party going on there!" Iexpostulated, and Dolly deftly and softly drew that door almost shut."They're a nice friendly group," she said, "and it's really too warm inthese rooms to choke every chink. Second on the right. Here we are."

Here we were. Nurse Dolan for the sake of atmosphere and professionalempathy had rigged up her bedroom in hospital style: a snow-pure cot with asystem of levers <143> that would have rendered even Big Peter (in the RedTopper) impotent; whitewashed commodes and glazed cabinets; a bedhead chartdear to humorists; and a set of rules tacked to the bathroom door.

"Now off with that jacket," cried Dolly gaily, "while I unlace thoselovely shoes" (crouching nimbly, and nimbly recrouching, at my retreatingfeet).

I said: "You have lost your mind, my dear, if you think I couldcontemplate making love in this appalling place."

"What do you want then?" she asked, angrily brushing away a strand ofhair from her flushed face and uncoiling back to her natural length: "Wherewould you find another such dandy, hygienic, utterly--"

A visitor interrupted her: a brown, gray-cheeked old dackel carryinghorizontally a rubber bone in its mouth. It entered from the parlor, placedthe obscene red thing on the linoleum, and stood looking at me, at Dolly, atme again, with melancholy expectation on its raised dogface. A prettybare-armed girl in black slipped in, grabbed the animal, kicked its toy backinto the parlor, and said: "Hullo, Dolly! If you and your friend want somedrinks afterwards, please join us. Bridget phoned she'd be home early. It'sJ.B.'s birthday."

"Righto, Carmen," replied Dolly, and turning to me continued inRussian: "I think you need that drink right away. Oh, come along! And forGod's sake leave that jacket and waistcoat here. You are drenched withsweat."

She forced me out of the room; I went rumbling and groaning; she gave aperfunctory pat to the creaseless cot and followed the man of snow, the manof tallow, the dying lopsided man.

Most of the party had now invaded the parlor from the next room. Icringed and tried to hide my face as I recognized Terry Todd. He raised hisglass in delicate congratulation. What that slut had done to ensure athwarted beau's complicity, I shall never know; but I should never have put<144> her in my Krasnyy Tsilindr; that's the way you breed livemonsters--from little ballerinas in books. Another person I had once seenalready--in a car that kept passing us somewhere in the country--a youngactor with handsome Irish features, pressed upon me what he called aHonolulu Cooler, but at the eoan stage of an attack I am beyond alcohol, socould only taste the pineapple part of the mixture. Amidst a circle ofsycophants a bull-size old fellow in a short-sleeved shirt monogrammed"J.B." posed, one hairy arm around Dolly, for a naughty shot that his wifesnapped. Carmen removed my sticky glass on her neat little tray with apillbox and a thermometer in the corner. Not finding a seat, I had to leanagainst the wall, and the back of my head caused a cheap abstract in aplastic frame to start swinging above me: it was stopped by Todd who hadsidled up to me and now said, lowering his voice: "Everything is settled.Prof, to everybody's satisfaction. I've kept in touch with Mrs. Langley,sure I have, she and the missus are writing you. I believe they've alreadyleft, the kid thinks you're in Heaven--now, now, what's the matter?"

I am not a fighter. I only hurt my hand against a tall lamp and lostboth shoes in the scuffle. Terry Todd vanished--forever. The telephone wasbeing used in one room and ringing in the other. Dolly, retransformed by thealchemy of her blazing anger--and now untellable from the little girl whohad hurled a three-letter French word at me when I told her I found it wiserto stop taking advantage of her grandfather's hospitality--virtually tore mynecktie in two, yelling she could easily get me jailed for rape butpreferred to see me crawling back to my consort and harem of baby-sitters(her new vocabulary, though, remained richly theatrical, even when sheshrieked).

I felt trapped like a silver pea teased into the center of a toy maze.A threatening crowd, held back by J.B., the head doctor, separated me fromthe exit; so I retreated to <145> Bridget's private wardette and saw, with asense of relief (also "eoan" alas) that beyond a previously unnoticed,half-opened French window there extended to a fabulous distance an innercourt, or only one comforting part of an inner court, with lightly robedpatients circulating in a geometry of lawns and garden walks, or quietlysitting on benches. I staggered out, and as my white-socked feet touched thecool turf I noticed that the vagabond wench had undone the ankle strings ofthe long linen underpants I was wearing. Somehow, somewhere, I had shed andlost all the rest of my clothes. As I stood there, my head brimming with ablackness of pain seldom known before, I became aware of a flurry of motionbeyond the court. Far, far away, nurse Dolan or Nolan (at that distance suchnice distinctions no longer mattered) emerged from a wing of the hospitaland came running to my assistance. Two males followed her with a stretcher.A helpful patient gathered up the blanket they had dropped.

"You know, you know . . . you should have never done that," she criedpanting. "Don't move, they'll help you to get up (I had collapsed on theturf). If you'd escaped after surgery you might have died right where youare. On such a lovely day, too!"

And so I was carried by two sturdy palanquiners who stank all the way(the hind bearer solidly, the front man in rhythmic wafts) not to Bridget'sbed but to a real hospital cot in a ward for three between two old men, bothdying of cerebritis. <146>4

Rustic Roses

13. IV. 46

The step I have taken, Vadim, is not subject to discussion (nepodlezhit obsuzhdeniyu). You must accept my departure as a fait accompli.1Had I really loved you I would not have left you; but I never loved youreally, and maybe your escapade--which no doubt is not your first since ourarrival in this sinister (zloveshchuyu) "free" country"2--is for me a merepretext for leaving you.

We have never been very happy together, you and I, during our twelve3years of marriage. You regarded me from the start as a cute, dutiful, butdefinitely disappointing little circus animal4 which you tried to teachimmoral disgusting tricks--condemned as such according to the faithfulcompanion without whom I might not have survived in ghastly "Kvirn"5 by thelatest scientific stars of our fatherland. I, on the other hand, was sopainfully nonplussed by your trenne (sic)6 de vie, your habits, yourblack-locked7 friends, your decadent novels, and--why not admit it?--your<147> pathological revolt against Art and Progress in the Soviet Land,including the restoration of lovely old churches,8 that I would havedivorced you, had I dared upset9 poor papa and mama who were so eager intheir dignity and naоvetи to have their daughter addressed--by whom, goodLord?--as "Your Serenity" (Siyatel'stvo).

Now comes a serious demand, an absolute injunction. Never, never--atleast while I am still alive--never, I repeat, shall you try to communicatewith the child. I do not know--Nelly is better versed in this--what thelegal situation is, but I know that in certain respects you are a gentlemanand it is to the gentleman that I say and shout: Please, please, keep away!If some dreadful American illness strikes me, then remember I wish her to bebrought up as a Russian Christian.10

I was sorry to learn about your hospitalization. This is your second,and I hope last, attack of neurasthenia11 since the time we made the mistakeof leaving Europe instead of waiting quietly for the Soviet Army to liberateit from the fascists. Good-bye.

PS. Nelly wishes to add a few lines.

Thank you, Netty. I shall indeed be brief. The information imparted tous by your girl-friend's fiancé and his mother,12 a saintly woman ofinfinite compassion and common sense, lacked, fortunately, the element ofdreadful surprise. A roommate of Berenice Mudie (the one that stole thecut-crystal decanter Netty gave me) had already been spreading certain oddrumors a couple of years ago; I tried to protect your sweet wife <148> bynot allowing that gossip to reach her or at least by drawing her attentionto it in a very oblique, half-humorous way long after those prostitutes hadgone. But now let us talk turkey.13

There can be no problem, I am sure, in separating your things fromhers. She says: "Let him take the countless copies of his novels and all thetattered dictionaries"; but she must be allowed to keep her householdtreasures such as my little birthday gifts to her--the silver-plated caviarbowl as well as the six pale-green handblown wine glasses, etc.

I can especially sympathize with Netty in this domestic catastrophebecause my own marriage resembled hers in many, many ways. It began soauspiciously! I was stranded and lost in a territory suddenly occupied byEstonian fascists, a poor little war-tossed Moscow girl,14 when I first metProfessor Langley in quite romantic circumstances: I was interpreting forhim (the study of foreign languages stands at a remarkable level in theSoviet Land), but when I was shipped with other DP's to the UK, and we metagain and married, all went wrong--he ignored me in the daytime, and ournights were full of incompatibility.15 One good consequence is that Iinherited, so to speak, a lawyer, Mr. Horace Peppermill, who has consentedto grant you a consultation and help you to settle all business details. Itwill be wise on your part to follow Professor Langley's example and giveyour wife a monthly allowance while placing a sizable "guarantee sum" in thebank which can be available to her in extreme cases and, naturally, afteryour demise or during an overprotracted terminal illness. We do not <149>have to remind you that Mrs. Blagovo should continue to receive regularlyher usual check until further notice.

The Quirn house will be offered for sale immediately--it is overflowingwith odious memories. Consequently, as soon as they let you out, which Ihope will happen without retardment (bez zamedleniya, sans tarder), move outof the house, please.16 I am not on speaking terms with Miss MyrnaSoloway--or, in reality, simply Soloveychik--of my department, but Iunderstand she is very good at ferreting out places for rent.

We have fine weather here after all that rain. The lake is beautiful atthis time of the year! We are going to refurnish our dear little dacha. Itsonly drawback in one sense (an asset in all others!) is that it stands a weebit apart from civilization or at least from Honeywell College. The policeare always on the lockout for bothers in the nude, prowlers, etc. We areseriously thinking of acquiring a big Alsatian!17COMMENTARY

* 1.

En franгais dans le texte.

* 2.

The first four or five lines are no doubt authentic, but then comevarious details which convince me that not Netty but Nelly masterminded theentire communication. Only a Soviet woman would speak like that of America.

* 3.

At first typed "fourteen" but expertly erased and replaced by thecorrect "twelve," as seen clearly in the carbon copy that I found pinned,"just in case," to the blotter in my study. Netty would have been totallyincapable of producing such a clean typescript--especially with the NewOrthography machine used by her friend.

* 4.

The term in the text is durovskiy zveryok, meaning a small animaltrained by the famous Russian clown Durov, a reference <150> less familiarto my wife than to a person of the older generation to which her friendbelonged.

* 5.

Contemptuous transliteration of "Quirn."

* 6.

Symptomatic misspelling of train. Annette's French was excellent.Ninette's French (as well as her English) was a joke.

* 7.

My wife coming as she did from an obscurant Russian milieu was noparagon of racial tolerance; but she would never have used the vulgaranti-Semitic phraseology typical of her friend's character and upbringing.

* 8.

The interpolation of those "lovely old churches" is a stock platitudeof Soviet patriotism.

* 9.

Actually my wife rather liked to upset her people on every possibleoccasion.

* 10.

I might have done something about it had I known for sure whose wish itwas. To spite her parents--a strange but constant policy on herpart--Annette never went to church, not even at Easter. As to Mrs. Langley,devotional decorum was the motto; the woman made the sign of the cross everytime American Jupiter split the black clouds.

* 11.

"Neurasthenia" indeed!

* 12.

A totally new character--this mother. Myth? Impersonation act? I turnedto Bridget for some explanation; she said there was no such person around(the real Mrs. Todd died long ago) and advised me "to drop the subject" withthe irritating curtness of one dismissing a topic as the product ofanother's delirium. I am ready to agree that my recollection of the scene ather apartment is tainted by the state I was in, but that "saintly mother"must remain an enigma.

* 13.

En Anglais dans le texte.

* 14.

The little Muscovite must have been around forty at the time.

* 15.

En Anglais dans le texte.

* 16.

This I did not dream of doing before my lease expired, which it did onAugust 1, 1946.

* 17.

Let us refrain from a final comment.

Good-bye, Netty and Nelly. Good-bye, Annette and Ninette. Good-bye,Nonna Anna. <151> <152>

PART FOUR

<153> <154>

1

Learning to drive that "Caracal" (as I fondly called my new whitecoupи) had its comic as well as dramatic side, bat after two flunks and afew little repairs, I found myself legally and physically fit at last tospin off West on a protracted tour. There was, true, a moment of acutedistress, as the first distant mountains disowned suddenly any likeness tolilac clouds, when I recalled the trips Iris and I used to make to theRiviera in our old Icarus. If she did occasionally allow me to take thewheel, it was only in a spirit of fun, for she was such a sportive girl.With what sobs I now remembered the time when I managed to hit the postman'sbicycle which had been left leaning against a pink wall at the entrance ofCarnavaux, and how my Iris doubled up in beautiful mirth as the thingslithered off in front of us!

I spent what remained of the summer exploring the incredibly lyricalRocky Mountain states, getting drunk on whiffs of Oriental Russia in thesagebrush zone and on the North Russian fragrances so faithfully reproducedabove timberline by certain small bogs along trickles of sky between thesnowbank and the orchid. And yet--was that all? What form of mysteriouspursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, tostare <155> every dandelion in the face, to start at every colored motepassing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation ofhaving come empty-handed--without what? A gun? A wand? This I dared notprobe lest I wound the raw fell under my thin identity.

Skipping the academic year, in a kind of premature "sabbatical leave"that left the Trustees of Quirn University speechless, I wintered in Arizonawhere I tried to write The Invisible Lath, a book rather similar to that inthe reader's hands. No doubt I was not ready for it and perhaps foiled toomuch over inexpressible shades of emotion; anyway I smothered it under toomany layers of sense as a Russian peasant woman, in her stuffy log house,might overlay (zaspat') her baby in heavy oblivion after making hay or beingthrashed by her drunken husband.

I pushed on to Los Angeles--and was sorry to learn that the cinemacompany I had counted upon was about to fold after Ivor Black's death. On myway back, in early spring, I rediscovered the dear phantasmata of mychildhood in the tender green of aspen groves at high altitudes here andthere, on conifer-clothed ridges. For almost six months I roamed again frommotel to motel, several times having my car scratched and cracked bycretinous rival drivers and finally trading it in for a sedate Bellargussedan of a celestial blue that Bel was to compare with that of a Morpho.

Another odd thing: with prophetic care I took down in my diary all mystops, all my motels (Mes Moteaux as Verlaine might have said!), theLakeviews, the Valley Views, the Mountain Views, the Plumed Serpent Court inNew Mexico, the Lolita Lodge in Texas, Lone Poplars, that if recruited mighthave patrolled a whole river, and enough sunsets to keep all the bats of theworld--and one dying genius--happy. LATH, LATH, Look At The Harlequins! Lookat that strange fever rash of viatic tabulation in which I persevered as ifI knew that those <156> motor courts prefigured the stages of my futuretravels with my darling daughter.

In late August, 1947, suntanned, and more edgy than ever, I returned toQuirn and transferred my belongings from storage to the new dwelling (1Larchdell Road) found for me by efficient and cute Miss Soloway. This was acharming two-storied gray-stone house, with a picture window and a whitegrand in the long drawing-room, three virginal bedrooms upstairs and alibrary in the basement. It had belonged to the late Alden Landover, thegreatest American belle-lettrist of the half-century. With the help of thebeaming Trustees--and rather taking advantage of their joy at welcoming meback to Quirn--I resolved to buy that house. I loved its scholarly odor, atreat seldom granted to my exquisitely sensitive Brunn's membrane, and Ialso loved its picturesque isolation amidst a tremendous unkempt gardenabove a larched and golden-rodded steep slope.

To keep Quirn grateful, I also decided to reorganize completely mycontribution to its fame. I scrapped my Joyce seminar which in 1945 hadattracted (if that is the word) only six students--five grim graduates andone not quite normal sophomore. In compensation I added a third lecture inMasterpieces (now including Ulysses) to my weekly quota. The chiefinnovation, however, lay in my bold presentation of knowledge. During myfirst years at Quirn I had accumulated two thousand pages of literarycomments typed out by my assistant (I nonce I have not introduced him yet:Waldemar Exkul, a brilliant young Balt, incomparably more learned than I;dixi, Ex!). These I had the Photostat people multiply to accommodate atleast three hundred students. At the end of every week each received a batchof the forty pages that I had recited to them, with certain addenda, in thelecture hall. The "certain addenda" were a concession to the Trustees whoreasonably remarked that without this catch nobody would <157> need toattend my classes. The three hundred copies of the two thousand typed pageswere to be signed by the readers and returned to me before the finalexamination. There were flaws at first in the system (for example, only 153incomplete sets, many unsigned, were returned in 1948) but on the whole itworked, or should have worked.

Another decision I took was to make myself more available to facultymembers than I had been before. The red needle of my dial scale nowquiver-stopped at a very conservative figure, when, stark naked, armshanging like those of a clumsy troglodyte, I stood on the fatal platform andwith the help of my new housemaid, an enchanting black girl with an Egyptianprofile, managed to make out what lay midway in the blur between my readingglasses and my long-distance ones: a great triumph, which I marked byacquiring several new "costumes," as my Dr. Olga Repnin says in the novel ofthat name--"I don't know (all `o's' as in `don' and `anon') why yourhorseband wears such not modern costumes." I visited quite frequently thePub, a college tavern, where I tried to mix with white-shoed young males,but somehow ended up by getting involved with professional barmaids. And Ientered in my pocket diary the addresses of some twenty fellow professors.

Most treasured among my new friends was a frail-looking, sad-looking,somewhat monkey-faced man with a shock of black hair, gray-streaked atfifty-five, the enchantingly talented poet Audace whose paternal ancestorwas the eloquent and ill-fated Girondist of that name ("Bourreau, fais tondevoir envers la Libertи!") but who did not know a word of French and spokeAmerican with a flat Midwestern accent. Another interesting glimpse ofdescent was provided by Louise Adamson, the young wife of our Chairman ofEnglish: her grandmother, Sybil Lanier, had won the Women's National GolfChampionship in 1896 at Philadelphia! <158>

Gиrard Adamson's literary reputation was immensely superior to that ofthe immensely more important, bitter, and modest Audace. Gerry was a bigflabby hulk of a man who must have been nearing sixty when after a life ofaesthetic asceticism he surprised his special coterie by marrying thatporcelain-pretty and very fast girl. His famous essays--on Donne, on Villon,on Eliot--his philosophic poetry, his recent Laic Litanies and so forthmeant nothing to me, but he was an appealing old drunk, whose humor anderudition could break the resistance of the most unsociable outsider. Icaught myself enjoying the frequent parties at which good old Noteboke andhis sister Phoneme, the delightful Kings, the Adamsons, my favorite poet,and a dozen other people did all they could to entertain and comfort me.

Louise, who had an inquisitive aunt at Honeywell, kept me informed, attactful intervals, of Bel's well-being. One spring day in 1949 or 1950 Ihappened to stop at the Plaza Liquor Store in Rosedale after a businessmeeting with Horace Peppermill and was about to back out of the parking lotwhen I saw Annette bending over a baby carriage in front of a grocery storeat the other end of the shopping area. Something about her inclined neck,her melancholy concentration, the ghost of a smile directed at the child inthe stroller, sent such a pang of pity through my nervous system that Icould not resist accosting her. She turned toward me and even before Iuttered some wild words--of regret, of despair, of tenderness--there she wasshaking her head, forbidding me to come near. "Nikogda," she murmured,"never," and I could not bear to decipher the expression on her pale drawnface. A woman came out of the shop and thanked her for tending the littlestranger--a pale and thin infant, looking almost as ill as Annette. Ihurried back to the parking lot, scolding myself for not realizing at oncethat Bel must be a girl of seven or eight by <159> this time. Her mother'smoist starry stare kept pursuing me for several nights; I even felt too illto attend an Easter party at one of the friendly Quirn houses.

During this or some other period of despondency, I heard one day thehall bell tinkle, and my Negro maid, little Nefertitty as I had dubbed her,hasten to open the front door. Slipping out of bed I pressed my bare fleshto the cool window ledge but was not in time to glimpse the entrant orentrants, no matter how far I leant out into a noisy spring downpour. Afreshness of flowers, clusters and clouds of flowers, reminded me of someother time, some other casement. I made out part of the Adamsons' glossyblack car beyond the garden gate. Both? She alone? Solus rex? Both, alas--tojudge by the voices reaching me from the hallway through my transparenthouse. Old Gerry, who disliked unnecessary stairs and had a morbid fear ofcontagion, remained in the living room. Now his wife's steps and voice werecoming up. We had kissed for the first time a few days before, in theNotebokes' kitchen--rummaging for ice, finding fire. I had good reason tohope that the intermission before the obligatory scene would be brief.

She entered, set down two bottles of port for the invalid, and pulledoff her wet sweater over her tumbled chestnut-brown, violet-brown curls andnaked clavicles. Artistically, strictly artistically, I daresay she was thebest-looking of my three major loves. She had upward-directed thin eyebrows,sapphire eyes registering (and that's the right word) constant amazement atearth's paradise (the only one she would ever know, I'm afraid),pink-flushed cheekbones, a rosebud mouth, and a lovely concave abdomen. Inless time than it took her husband, a quick reader, to skim down two columnsof print, we had "attired" him. I put on blue slacks and a pink shirt andfollowed her downstairs.

Her husband sat in a deep armchair, reading a London <160> weeklybought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take off his horribleblack raincoat--a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of astagecoach driver in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidablespectacles. He cleared his throat with a characteristic rumble. His purplejowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:

GERRY Do you ever see this paper, Vadim (accenting "Vadim" incorrectlyon the first syllable)? Mister (naming a particularly lively criticule) hasdemolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha; it had come out onlynow in the British edition).

VADIM May I give you a drink? We'll toast him and roast him.

GERRY Yet he's right, you know. It is your worst book. Chute complхte,says the man. Knows French, too.

LOUISE No drinks. We've got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair.Try again. Take your glasses and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I'll bringyou those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school.

How different it all was, I mused, from the refined adulteries in thecastles of my early youth! Where was the romantic thrill of a glanceexchanged with one's new mistress in the presence of a morose colossus--theJealous Husband? Why did the recollection of the recent embrace not blendany longer as it used to do with the certainty of the next one, forming asudden rose in an empty flute of crystal, a sudden rainbow on the whitewallpaper? What did Emma see a fashionable woman drop into that man's silkhat? Write legibly. <161>2

The mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli andShakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all herflowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes andfloods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953,several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage,phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof oftheir shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the pictureof a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man,a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver's seat,stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureauwas accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteenschoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animalsdonated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor's widow, to the Rosedale Museum,were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twisterstruck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drownedbodies of its two occupants were never retrieved.

Mr. Peppermill, whose natural faculties were no match for his legalacumen, warned me that if I desired to relinquish the child to hergrandmother in France, certain <162> formalities would have to be compliedwith. I observed quietly that Mrs. Blagovo was a half-witted cripple andthat my daughter, whom her schoolteacher harbored, should be brought by thatperson to my house AT ONCE. He said he would fetch her himself early nextweek.

After weighing and reweighing every paragraph of the house, everyparenthesis of its furniture, I decided to lodge her in the former bedroomof the late Landover's companion whom he called his nurse or his fiancéedepending on his mood of the moment. This was a lovely chamber, east ofmine, with lilac butterflies enlivening its wallpaper and a large, low,flouncy bed. I peopled its white bookshelf with Keats, Yeats, Coleridge,Blake, and four Russian poets (in the New Orthography). Although I toldmyself with a sigh that she would, no doubt, prefer "comics" to my dearbespangled mimes and their wands of painted lath, I felt compelled in mychoice by what is termed the "ornamental instinct" among ornithologists.Moreover, knowing well how essential a pure strong light is to reading inbed, I asked Mrs. O'Leary, my new charwoman and cook (borrowed from LouiseAdamson who had left with her husband for a long sojourn in England) toscrew a couple of hundred-watt bulbs into a tall bedside lamp. Twodictionaries, a writing pad, a little alarm clock, and a Junior Manicure Set(suggested by Mrs. Noteboke, who had a twelve-year-old daughter) wereattractively placed on a spacious and stable bedtable. All this was but arough, naturally. The fair copy would come in due time.

Landover's nurse or fiancée could rush to his assistance either along ashort passage or through the bathroom between the two bedrooms: Landover hadbeen a large man and his long deep tub was a soaker's delight. Another,narrower bathroom followed Bel's bedroom easterly--and here I really missedmy dainty Louise when racking my brain for the correct epithet betweenwell-scrubbed and perfumed. Mrs. Noteboke could not help me: her daughter,<163> who used the messy parental facilities, had no time for sillydeodorants and loathed "foam." Wise old Mrs. O'Leary, on the other hand,held before her mind's eye Mrs. Adamson's creams and crystals in a Flemishartist's detail and made me long for her employer's speedy return byconjuring up that picture, which she then proceeded to simplify, but notvulgarize, while retaining such major items as the huge sponge, the jumbocake of lavender soap, and a delicious toothpaste.

Walking still farther sunriseward, we reach the corner guest room(above the round dining room at the east end of the first floor); this Itransformed with the help of a handyman, Mrs. O'Leary's cousin, into anefficiently furnished studio. It contained, when I finished with it, a couchwith boxy pillows, an oak desk with a revolving chair, a steel cabinet, abookcase, Klingsor's Illustrated Encyclopedia in twenty volumes, crayons,writing tablets, state maps, and (to cite the School Buyer's Guide for1952-1953) "a globe ball that lifts out of a cradle so that every child canhold the world in his or her lap."

Was that all? No. I found for the bedroom a framed photograph of hermother, Paris, 1934, and for the studio a reproduction in color of Levitan'sClouds above a Blue River (the Volga, not far from my Marevo), paintedaround 1890.

Peppermill was to bring her on May 21, around four P.M. I had to fillsomehow the abyss of the afternoon. Angelic Ex had already read and markedthe entire batch of exams, but he thought I might want to see some of theworks he had reluctantly failed. He had dropped in some time on the eve andhad left them downstairs on the round table in the round room next to thehallway at the west end of the house. My poor hands ached and trembled sodreadfully that I could hardly leaf through those poor cahiers. The roundwindow gave on the driveway. It was <164> a warm gray day. Sir! I need apassing mark desperately. Ulysses was written in Zurich and Greece andtherefore consists of too many foreign words. One of the characters inTolstoy's Death of Ivan is the notorious actress Sarah Bernard. Stern'sstyle is very sentimental and illiterative. A car door banged. Mr.Peppermill came with a duffel bag in the wake of a tall fair-haired girl inblue jeans carrying, and slowing down, to change from hand to hand, anunwieldy valise.

Annette's moody mouth and eyes. Graceful but plain. Fortified by aserenacin tablet, I received my daughter and lawyer with the neutral dignityfor which effusive Russians in Paris used to detest me so heartily.Peppermill accepted a drop of brandy. Bel had a glass of peach juice and abrown biscuit. I indicated to Bel--who was displaying her palms in a politeRussian allusion--the dining-room toilet, an old-fashioned touch on thearchitect's part. Horace Peppermill handed me a letter from Bel's teacherMiss Emily Ward. Fabulous Intelligence Quotient of 180. Menses alreadyestablished. Strange, marvelous child. One does not quite know whether tocurb or encourage such precocious brilliance. I accompanied Horace halfwayback to his car, fighting off, successfully, the disgraceful urge to tellhim how staggered I was by the bill his office had recently sent me.

"Let me now show you your apartаmenty. You speak Russian, don't you?"

"I certainly do, but I can't write it. I also know a little French."

She and her mother (whom she mentioned as casually as if Annette werein the next room copying something for me on a soundless typewriter) hadspent most of last summer at Carnavaux with babushka. I would like to havelearned what room exactly Bel had occupied in the villa, but an oddlyobtrusive, though irrelevant-looking, recollection <165> somehow preventedme from asking: shortly before her death Iris had dreamed one night that shehad given birth to a fat boy with dusky red cheeks and almond eyes and theblue shadow of mutton chops: "A horrible Omarus K."

Oh yes, said Bel, she had loved it. Especially the path down, down tothe sea and the aroma of rosemary (chudnyy zapakh rozmarina). I was torturedand charmed by her "shadowless" émigré Russian, untainted, God blessAnnette, by the Langley woman's fruity Sovietisms.

Did Bel recognize me? She looked me over with serious gray eyes.

"I recognize your hands and your hair."

"On se tutoie in Russian henceforward. All right. Let's go upstairs."

She approved of the studio: "A schoolroom in a picture book." Sheopened the medicine chest in her bathroom. "Empty--but I know what I'll putthere." The bedroom "enchanted" her. Ocharovatel'no! (Annette's favoritepraise word.) She criticized, though, the bedside bookshelf: "What, noByron? No Browning? Ah, Coleridge! The little golden sea snakes. Miss Wardgave me an anthology for Russian Easter: I can recite your last duchess--Imean `My Last Duchess' "

I caught my breath with a moan. I kissed her. I wept. I sat, shaking,on a fragile chair that creaked in response to my hunched-up paroxysm. Belstood looking away, looking up at a prismatic reflection on the ceiling,looking down at her luggage, which Mrs. O'Leary, a dumpy but doughty woman,had already brought up.

I apologized for my tears. Bel inquired in a socially perfectlet's-change-the-subject manner if there was a television set in the house.I said we'd get one tomorrow. I would leave her now to her own devices.Dinner in half-an-hour. She had noticed, she said, that a picture she'd like<166> to see was being shown in town. After dinner we drove to The StrandTheater.

Says a scribble in my diary: Does not much care for boiled chicken. TheBlack Widow. With Gene, Ginger, and George. Have passed the "illiterative"sentimentalist and all the rest. <167>3

If Bel is alive today, she is thirty-two--exactly your age at themoment of writing (February 15, 1974). The last time I saw her, in 1959, shewas not quite seventeen; and between eleven and a half and seventeen and ahalf she has changed very slightly in the medium of memory, where blood doesnot course through immobile time as fast as it does in the perceptualpresent. Especially unaffected by linear growth is my vision of herpertaining to 1953-1955, the three years in which she was totally anduniquely mine: I see it today as a composite portrait of rapture, in which amountain in Colorado, my translating Tamara into English, Bel's high schoolaccomplishments, and an Oregon forest intergrade in patterns of transposedtime and twisted space that defy chronography and charting.

One change, one gradational trend I must note, however. This was mygrowing awareness of her beauty. Scarcely a month after her arrival I wasalready at a loss to understand how she could have struck me as "plain."Another month elapsed and the elfin line of her nose and upper lip inprofile came as an "expected revelation"--to use a formula I have applied tocertain prosodic miracles in Blake and Blok. Because of the contrast betweenher pale-gray iris and very black lashes, her eyes seemed rimmed <168> withkohl. Her hollowed cheek and long neck were pure Annette, but her fair hair,which she wore rather short, gave off a richer sheen as if the tawny strandswere mixed with gold-olive ones in thick straight stripes of alternateshades. All this is easily described and this also goes for the regularstriation of bright bloom along the outside of forearm and leg, which, infact, smacks of self-plagiarism, for I had given it both to Tamara andEsmeralda, not counting several incidental lassies in my short stories (seefor example page 537 of the Exile from Mayda collection, Goodminton, NewYork, 1947). The general type and bone structure of her pubescent radiancecannot be treated, however, with a crack player's brio and chalk-bitingserve. I am reduced--a sad confession!--to something I have also usedbefore, and even in this book--the well-known method of degrading onespecies of art by appealing to another. I am thinking of Serov'sFive-petaled Lilac, oil, which depicts a tawny-haired girl of twelve or sositting at a sun-flecked table and manipulating a raceme of lilac in searchof that lucky token. The girl is no other than Ada Bredow, a first cousin ofmine whom I flirted with disgracefully that very summer, the sun of whichocellates the garden table and her bare arms. What hack reviewers of fictioncall "human interest" will now overwhelm my reader, the gentle tourist, whenhe visits the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, where I have seen with my ownrheumy eyes, on a visit to Sovietland a few years ago, that picture whichbelonged to Ada's grandmother before being handed over to the People by adedicated purloiner. I believe that this enchanting little girl was themodel of my partner in a recurrent dream of mine with a stretch of parquetrybetween two beds in a makeshift demonic guest room. Bel's resemblance toher--same cheekbones, same chin, same knobby wrists, same tender flower--canbe only alluded to, not actually listed. But enough of this. I have beentrying to do something very difficult and I will tear <169> it up if you sayI have succeeded too well, because I do not want, and never wanted, tosucceed, in this dismal business of Isabel Lee--though at the same time Iwas intolerably happy.

When asked--at last!--had she loved her mother (for I could not getover Bel's apparent indifference to Annette's terrible death) she thoughtfor such a long time that I decided she had forgotten my question, butfinally (like a chessplayer resigning after an abyss of meditation), sheshook her head. What about Nelly Langley? This she answered at once: Langleywas mean and cruel and hated her, and only last year whipped her; she hadwelts all over (uncovering for display her right thigh, which now, at least,was impeccably white and smooth).

The education she got in Quirn's best private school for Young Ladies(you, her coeval, were there for a few weeks, in the same class, but you andshe somehow missed making friends with each other) was supplemented by thetwo summers we spent roaming all over the Western states. What memories,what lovely smells, what mirages, near-mirages, substantiated mirages,accumulated along Highway 138--Sterling, Fort Morgan (El. 4325), Greeley,well-named Loveland--as we approached the paradise part of Colorado!

From Lupine Lodge, Estes Park, where we spent a whole month, a pathmargined with blue flowers led through aspen groves to what Bel drollycalled The Foot of the Face. There was also the Thumb of the Face, at itssouthern corner. I have a large glossy photograph taken by William Garrellwho was the first, I think, to reach The Thumb, in 1940 or thereabouts,showing the East Face of Longs Peak with the checkered lines of ascentsuperimposed in a loopy design upon it. On the back of this picture--and asimmortal in its own little right as the picture's subject--a poem by Bel,neatly copied in violet ink, is <170> dedicated to Addie Alexander, "Firstwoman on Peak, eighty years ago." It commemorates our own modest hikes:

Longs' Peacock Lake:

the Hut and its Old Marmot;

Boulder field and its Black Butterfly;

And the intelligent trail.

She had composed it while we were sharing a picnic lunch, somewherebetween those great rocks and the beginning of The Cable, and after testingthe result mentally a number of times, in frowning silence, she finallyscribbled it on a paper napkin which she handed to me with my pencil.

I told her how wonderful and artistic it was--particularly the lastline. She asked: what's "artistic"? I said: "Your poem, you, your way withwords."

In the course of that ramble, or perhaps on a latter occasion, butcertainly in the same region, a sudden storm swept upon the glory of theJuly day. Our shirts, shorts, and loafers seemed to dwindle to nothing inthe icy mist. A first hailstone hit a tin can, another my bald spot. Wesought refuge in a cavity under a jutting rock. Thunderstorms to me areagony. Their evil pressure destroys me; their lightning forks through mybrain and breast. Bel knew this; huddling against me (for my comfort ratherthan hers!), she kept giving me a quick little kiss on the temple at everybang of thunder, as if to say: That one's over, you're still safe. I nowfelt myself longing for those crashes never to cease; but presently theyturned to halfhearted rumbles, and the sun found emeralds in a patch of wetturf. She could not stop shivering, though, and I had to thrust my handsunder her skirt and rub her thin body, till it glowed, so as to ward off"pneumonia" which she said, laughing jerkily, was a "new," was a "moon," was<171> a "new moon" and a "moan," a "new moan," thank you.

There is a hollow of dimness again in the sequence, but it must havebeen soon after that, in the same motor court, or in the next, on the wayhome, that she slipped into my room at dawn, and sat down on my bed--moveyour legs--in her pyjama top to read me another poem:

In the dark basement, I stroked

the silky head of a wolf.

When the light returned

and all cried: "Ah!,"

it turned out to be only

Mиdor, a dead dog.

I again praised her talent, and kissed her more warmly, perhaps, thanthe poem deserved; for, actually, I found it rather obscure, but did not sayso, and presently she yawned and fell asleep on my bed, a practice I usuallydid not tolerate. Today, however, on rereading those strange lines, I seethrough their starry crystal the tremendous commentary I could write aboutthem, with galaxies of reference marks and footnotes like the reflections ofbrightly lit bridges spanning black water. But my daughter's soul is hers,and my soul is mine, and may Hamlet Godman rot in peace. <172>4

As late as the start of the 1954-1955 school year, with Bel nearing herthirteenth birthday, I was still deliriously happy, still seeing nothingwrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous, in the relationshipbetween my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses--a few hotdrops of overflowing tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort ofstuff--my relations with her remained essentially innocent. But whateverqualities I might have possessed as a Professor of Literature, nothing butincompetence and a reckless laxity of discipline can I see today in therearview reflection of that sweet wild past.

Others forestalled me in perspicacity. My first critic happened to beMrs. Noteboke, a stout dark lady in suffragettish tweeds, who instead ofkeeping her Marion, a depraved and vulgar nymphet, from snooping on aschoolmate's home life, lectured me on the upbringing of Bel and stronglyadvised my hiring an experienced, preferably German, governess to look afterher day and night. My second critic--a much more tactful and understandingone--was my secretary, Myrna Soloway, who complained that she could not keeptrack of the literary magazines and clippings in my mail--because of theirbeing intercepted by an unscrupulous and avid little reader--and who <173>gently added that Quirn High School, the last refuge of common sense in myincredible plight, was astounded by Bel's lack of manners almost as much asby her intelligence and familiarity with "Proust and Prиvost." I spoke toMiss Lowe, the rather pretty petite headmistress, and she mentioned"boarding facilities," which sounded like some kind of wooden jail, and theeven more dismal ("with all those rippling birdcalls and wickering trills inthe woods, Miss Lowe--in the woods"!) "summer instruction" to replace the"eccentricities of an artist's (`A great artist's, Professor') household."She pointed out to the giggling and apprehensive artist that a youngdaughter should be treated as a potential component of our society and notas a fancy pet. Throughout that talk I could not shake off the feeling ofits all being a nightmare that I had had or would have in some otherexistence, some other bound sequence of numbered dreams.

An atmosphere of vague distress was gathering (to speak in verbalclichиs about a clichи situation) around my metaphorical head, when thereoccurred to me a simple and brilliant solution of all my problems andtroubles.

The tall looking glass before which many of Landover's houris hadonduled in their brief brown glory now served me to behold the image of alion-hued fifty-five-year-old would-be athlete performing waist-slimming andchest-expanding exercises by means of an "Elmago" ("Combines the mechanicalknow-how of the West with the magic of Mithra"). It was a good image. An oldtelegram (found unopened in an issue of Artisan, a literary review, filchedby Bel from the hallway table), was addressed to me by a Sunday paper inLondon, asking me to comment on the rumors--which I had already heard--tothe effect that I was the main candidate in the abstract scramble for whatour American kid brothers called "the most prestigious prize in the world."This, too, might impress the rather success-minded person I had in view.<174> Finally, I knew that in the vacational months of 1955 a series ofstrokes had killed off in London poor old Gerry Adamson, a great guy, andthat Louise was free. Too free in fact. An urgent letter I now wrote her,summoning her back to Quirn at once, for a serious Discussion of a matterconcerning both her and me, reached her only after describing a comic circlevia four fashionable spots on the Continent. I never saw the wire she saidshe sent me from New York on October 1.

On October 2, an abnormally warm day, the first of a week-long series,Mrs. King telephoned in the afternoon to invite me with rather enigmaticlittle laughs to an "impromptu soirиe, in a few hours, say at nine P.M.after you have tucked in your adorable daughter. I agreed to come becauseMrs. King was an especially nice soul, the kindest on the campus.

I had a black headache and decided that a two-mile walk in the coolclear night would do me good. My dealings with space and spatial transitionsare so diabolically complicated that I do not recall whether I reallywalked, or drove, or limited myself to pacing up and down the open galleryrunning along the front side of our second floor, or what.

The first person to whom my hostess introduced me--with a subduedfanfare of social clarion--was the "English" cousin with whom Louise hadbeen staying in Devonshire, Lady Morgain, "daughter of our former Ambassadorand widow of the Oxford medievalist"--shadowy figures on a briefly litscreen. She was a rather deaf and decidedly dotty witch in her middlefifties, comically coiffured and dowdily dressed, and she and her bellyadvanced upon me with such energetic eagerness that I scarcely had time tosidestep the well-meant attack before getting wedged "between the books andthe bottles" as poor Gerry used to say in reference to academic cocktails. Ipassed into a different, far more stylish world as I bent to kiss Louise's<175> expertly swanned cool little hand. My dear old Audace welcomed me withthe kind of Latin accolade that he had especially developed to mark thehighest degree of spiritual kinship and mutual esteem. John King, whom I hadseen on the eve in a college corridor, greeted me with raised arms as if thefifty hours elapsed since our last chat had been magically blown-up intohalf a century. We were only six people in a spacious parlor, not countingtwo painted girl-children in Tyrolean dress, whose presence, identity, andvery existence have remained to this day a familiar mystery--familiar,because such zigzag cracks in the plaster are typical of the prisons orpalaces into which recrudescent derangement merrily leads me whenever I haveprepared to make, as I was to do now, a difficult, climactic announcementthat demanded absolute clarity of concentration. So, as I just said, we wereonly six animal people in that room (and two little phantoms), but throughthe translucid unpleasant walls I could make out--without looking!--rows andtiers of dim spectators, with the sense of a sign in my brain meaning"standing room only" in the language of madness.

We were now sitting at a round clockfaced table (practicallyundistinguishable from the one in the Opal Room of my house, west of thealbino Stein), Louise at twelve o'clock, Professor King at two, Mrs. Morgainat four, Mrs. King in green silk at eight, Audace at ten, and I at six,presumably, or a minute past, because Louise was not quite opposite, ormaybe she had pushed her chair a sixty-second space closer to Audacealthough she had sworn to me on the Social Register as well as on a Who'sWho that he had never made that pass at her somehow suggested by hismagnificent little poem in the Artisan.

Speaking of, ah, yesternights,

I had you, dear, within earshot <176>

of that party downstairs,

on the broad bed of my host

piled with the coats of your guests,

old macks, mock minks,

one striped scarf (mine),

a former flame's furs

(more rabbit than flipperling),

yea, a mountain of winters,

like that upon which flunkeys sprawl

in the vestibule of the Opera,

Canto One of Onegin,

where under the chandeliers

of a full house, you, dear,

should have been the dancer

flying, like fluff, in a decor

of poplars and fountains.

I started to speak in the high, clear, insolent voice (taught me byIvor on the beach of Cannice) by which I instilled the fear of Phoebus wheninaugurating a recalcitrant seminar in my first years of teaching at Quirn:"What I plan to discuss is the curious case of a close friend of mine whom Ishall call--"

Mrs. Morgain set down her glass of whisky and leaned toward meconfidentially: "You know I met little Iris Black in London, around 1919, Iguess. Her father was a business friend of my father, the Ambassador. I wasa starry-eyed American gal. She was a fantastic beauty and mostsophisticated. I remember how thrilled I was later to learn that she hadgone and married a Russian Prince!"

"Fay," cried Louise from twelve to four: "Fay! His Highness is makinghis throne speech."

Everyone laughed, and the two bare-thighed Tyrolean children chasingeach other around the table bounced across my knees and were gone again.<177>

"I shall call this close friend of mine, whose case we are about toexamine, Mr. Twidower, a name with certain connotations, as those of you whoremember the title story in my Exile from Mayda will note."

(Three people, the Kings and Audace, raised three hands, looking at oneanother in shared smugness.)

"This person, who is in the mighty middle of life, thinks of marrying athird time. He is deeply in love with a young woman. Before proposing toher, however, honesty demands that he confess he is suffering from a certainailment. I wish they would stop jolting my chair every time they run by.`Ailment' is perhaps too strong a term. Let's put it this way: there arecertain flaws, he says, in the mechanism of his mind. The one he told meabout is harmless in itself but very distressing and unusual, and may be asymptom of some imminent, more serious disorder. So here goes. When thisperson is lying in bed and imagining a familiar stretch of street, say, theright-hand sidewalk from the Library to, say--"

"The Liquor Store," put in King, a relentless wag.

"All right, Recht's Liquor Store. It is about three hundred yardsaway--"

I was again interrupted, this time by Louise (whom, in fact, I wassolely addressing). She turned to Audace and informed him that she couldnever visualize any distance in yards unless she could divide it by thelength of a bed or a balcony.

"Romantic," said Mrs. King. "Go on, Vadim."

"Three hundred paces away along the same side as the College Library.Now comes my friend's problem. He can walk in his mind there and back but hecan't perform in his mind the actual about-face that transforms `there' into`back.' "

"Must call Rome," muttered Louise to Mrs. King, and was about to leaveher seat, but I implored her to hear me <178> out. She resigned herself,warning me however that she could not understand a word of my peroration.

"Repeat that bit about twisting around in your mind," said King."Nobody understood."

"I did," said Audace: "We suppose the Liquor Store happens to beclosed, and Mr. Twidower, who is a friend of mine too, turns on his heel togo back to the Library. In the reality of life he perfoms this actionwithout a hitch or hiatus, as simply and unconsciously as we all do, even ifthe artist's critical eye does see--A toi, Vadim."

"Does see," I said, accepting the relay-race baton, "that, depending onthe speed of one's revolution, palings and awnings pass counterwise aroundyou either with the heavy lurch of a merry-go-round or (saluting Audace) ina single brisk flip like that of the end of a striped scarf (Audace smiled,acknowledging the Audacianism) that one flings over one's shoulder. But whenone lies immobile in bed and rehearses or rather replays in one's mind theprocess of turning, in the manner described, it is not so much the pivotalswing which is hard to perceive mentally--it is its result, the reversion ofvista, the transformation of direction, that's what one vainly strives toimagine. Instead of the liquor-store direction smoothly turning into theopposite one, as it does in the simplicity of waking life, poor Twidower isbaffled--"

I had seen it coming but had hoped that I would be allowed to completemy sentence. Not at all. With the infinitely slow and silent movement of agray tomcat, which he resembled with his bristly whiskers and arched back,King left his seat. He started to tiptoe, with a glass in each hand, towardthe golden glow of a densely populated sideboard. With a dramatic slap ofboth hands against the edge of the table I caused Mrs. Morgain to jump (shehad either dozed off or aged tremendously in the last few minutes) andstopped old King in his tracks; he silently <179> turned like an automaton(illustrating my story) and as silently stole back to his seat with theempty Arabesque glasses.

"The mind, my friend's mind, is baffled, as I was saying, by somethingdreadfully strainful and irksome in the machinery of the change from oneposition to another, from east to west or west to east, from one damnednymphet to another--I mean I'm losing the thread of my tale, the zipper ofthought has stuck, this is absurd--"

Absurd and very embarrassing. The two cold-thighed, cheesy-neckedgirleens were now engaged in a quarrelsome game as to who should sit on myleft knee, that side of my lap where the honey was, trying to straddle LeftKnee, warbling in Tyrolese and pushing each other off, and cousin Fay keptbending toward me and saying with a macabre accent: "Elles vous aimenttant!" Finally I pinched and twisted the nearest buttock, and with a squealthey resumed their running around, like that eternal little pleasure-parktrain, brushing the brambles.

I still could not disentangle my thoughts, but Audace came to myrescue.

"To conclude," he said (and an audible ouf! was emitted by cruelLouise), "our patient's trouble concerns not a certain physical act but theimagining of its performance. All he can do in his mind is omit theswiveling part altogether and shift from one visual plane to another withthe neutral flash of a slide change in a magic lantern, whereupon he findshimself facing in a direction which has lost, or rather never contained, theidea of `oppositeness.' Does anybody wish to comment?"

After the usual pause that follows such offers, John King said: "Myadvice to your Mr. Twitter is to dismiss that nonsense once for all. It'scharming nonsense, it's colorful nonsense, but it's also harmful nonsense.Yes, Jane?" <180>

"My father," said Mrs. King, "a professor of botany, had a ratherendearing quirk: he could memorize historical dates and telephonenumbers--for example our number 9743--only insofar as they contained primes.In our number he remembered two figures, the second and last, a uselesscombination; the other two were only black gaps, missing teeth."

"Oh, that's good," cried Audace, genuinely delighted. I remarked it wasnot at all the same thing. My friend's affliction resulted in nausea,dizziness, kegelkugel headache.

"Well yes, I understand, but my father's quirk also had its sideeffects. It was not so much his inability to memorize, say, his house numberin Boston, which was 68 and which he saw every day, but the fact that hecould do nothing about it; that nobody, but nobody could explain why all hecould make out at the far end of his brain was not 68 but a bottomlesshole."

Our host resumed his vanishing act with more deliberation than before.Audace lidded his empty glass with his palm. Though swine-drunk, I longedfor mine to be refilled, but was bypassed. The walls of the round room hadgrown more or less opaque again, God bless them, and the Dolomite Dollieswere no longer around.

"In the days when I longed to be a ballerina," said Louise, "and wasBlanc's little favorite, I always rehearsed exercises in my mind lying inbed, and had no difficulty whatever in imagining swirls and whirls. It is amatter of practice, Vadim. Why don't you just roll over in bed when you wantto see yourself walking back to that Library? We must be going now, Fay,it's past midnight."

Audace glanced at his wristwatch, uttered the exclamation which Timemust be sick of hearing, and thanked me for a wonderful evening. LadyMorgain's mouth mimicked the pink aperture of an elephant's trunk as itmutely formed the word "loo" to which Mrs. King, fussily <181> swishing ingreen, immediately took her. I remained alone at the round table, thenstruggled to my feet, drained the rest of Louise's daiquiri, and joined herin the hallway.

She had never melted and shivered so nicely in my embrace as she didnow.

"How many quadruped critics," she asked after a tender pause in thedark garden, "would accuse you of leg pulling if you published thedescription of those funny feelings. Three, ten, a herd?"

"Those are not really `feelings' and they are not really `funny.' Ijust wished you to be aware that if I go mad it will be in consequence of mygames with the idea of space. `Rolling over' would be cheating and besideswould not help."

"I'll take you to an absolutely divine analyst."

"That's all you can suggest?"

"Why, yes."

"Think, Louise."

"Oh. I'm also going to marry you. Yes, of course, you idiot."

She was gone before I could reclasp her slender form. The star-dustedsky, usually a scary affair, now vaguely amused me: it belonged, with theautumn fadeur of barely visible flowers, to the same issue of Woman's OwnWorld as Louise. I made water into a sizzle of asters and looked up at Bel'swindow, square c2. Lit as brightly as e1, the Opal Room. I went back thereand noted with relief that kind hands had cleared and tidied the table, theround table with the opalescent rim, at which I had delivered a mostsuccessful introductory lecture. I heard Bel's voice calling me from theupper landing, and taking a palmful of salted almonds ascended the stairs.<182>5

Rather early next morning, a Sunday, as I stood, shawled in terrycloth, and watched four eggs rolling and bumping in their inferno, somebodyentered the living room through a side door that I never bothered to lock.

Louise! Louise dressed up in hummingbird mauve for church. Louise in asloping beam of mellow October sun. Louise leaning against the grand piano,as if about to sing and looking around with a lyrical smile.

I was the first to break our embrace.

VADIM No, darling, no. My daughter may come down any minute. Sit down.

LOUISE (examining an armchair and then settling in it) Pity. You know,I've been here many times before! In fact I was laid on that grand ateighteen. Aldy Landover was ugly, unwashed, brutal--and absolutelyirresistible.

VADIM Listen, Louise. I have always found your free, frivolous stylevery fetching. But you will be moving into this house very soon now, and wewant a little more dignity, don't we? <183>

LOUISE We'll have to change that blue carpet. It makes the Stein looklike an iceberg. And there should be a riot of flowers. So many big vasesand not one Strelitzia! There was a whole shrub of lilac down there in mytime.

VADIM It's October, you know. Look, I hate to bring this up, but isn'tyour cousin waiting in the car? It would be very irregular.

LOUISE Irregular, my foot. She won't be up before lunch. Ah, Scene Two.

(Bel wearing only slippers and a cheap necklace of iridescent glass--aRiviera souvenir--comes down at the other end of the living room beyond thepiano. She has already turned kitchenward showing the beau-page back of herhead and delicate shoulder blades when she becomes aware of our presence andretraces her steps.)

BEL (addressing me and casually squinting at my amazed visitor) Yabezumno golodnaya (I'm madly hungry).

VADIM Louise dear, this is my daughter Bel. She's walking in her sleep,really, hence the, uh, non-attire.

LOUISE Hullo, Annabel. The non-attire is very becoming.

BEL (correcting Louise) Isa.

VADIM Isabel, this is Louise Adamson, an old friend of mine, back fromRome. I hope we'll be seeing a lot of her. <184>

BEL How do you do (question-markless).

VADIM Well, run along, Bel, and put on something. Breakfast is ready.(To Louise) Would you like to have breakfast too? Hard-boiled eggs? A Cokewith a straw? (Pale violin climbing stairs)

LOUISE Non, merci. I'm flabbergasted.

VADIM Yes, things have been getting a little out of hand, but you'llsee, she's a special child, there's no other child like her. All we need isyour presence, your touch. She has inherited the habit of circulating in astate of nature from me. An Edenic gene. Curious.

LOUISE Is this a two-people nudist colony or has Mrs. O'Leary alsojoined?

VADIM (laughing) No, no, she's not here on Sundays. Everything is fine,I assure you. Bel is a docile angel. She--

LOUISE (rising to leave) There she comes to be fed (Bel descends thestairs in a skimpy pink robe). Drop in around tea time. Fay is being takenby Jane King to a lacrosse game in Rosedale. (Exits)

BEL Who's she? Former student of yours? Drama? Elocution?

VADIM (moving fast) Bozhe moy! (good Lord!). The eggs! They must be ashard as jade. Come along. I'll acquaint you with the situation, as yourschoolmistress says. <185>6

The grand was the first to go--it was carried out by a gang ofstaggering iceberg movers and donated by me to Bel's school, which I hadreasons to pamper: I am not an easily frightened man but when I amfrightened I am very much frightened, and at a second interview that I hadhad with the schoolmistress, my impersonation of an indignant CharlesDodgson was only saved from failure by the sensational news of my beingabout to marry an irreproachable socialite, the widow of our most piousphilosopher. Louise, per contra, regarded the throwing out of a symbol ofluxury as a personal affront and a crime: a concert piano of that kindcosts, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she wasnot quite as wealthy as, no doubt, I thought she was, a statementrepresenting that knot in Logic: the double-hitch lie which does not makeone truth. I appeased her by gradually overcrowding the Music Room (if atime series be transformed into sudden space) with the modish gadgets sheloved, singing furniture, miniature TV sets, stereorphics, portableorchestras, better and better video sets, remote-control instruments forturning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer. For Bel'sbirthday she gave her a Rain Sound machine to promote sleep; and tocelebrate my <186> birthday she murdered a neurotic's night by getting me athousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock with twelve yellow radii on itsblack face instead of figures, which made it look blind to me or feigningblindness like some repulsive beggar in a hideous tropical town; incompensation that terrible object possessed a secret beam that projectedArabic numerals (2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of mynew sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the sacred, complete, agonizinglyachieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I'd buy a gun and shoot it inthe mug, if she did not send it back to the fiend who sold it to her. Shereplaced it by "something especially made for people who like originality,"namely a silver-plated umbrella stand in the shape of a giantjackboot--there was "something about rain strangely attractive to her" asher "analyst" wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote toman. She was also fond of small expensive animals, but here I stood firm,and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved.

I did not expect much of Louise the Intellectual. The only time I sawher shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when onthe first Sunday of our marriage all the newspapers carried photographs ofthe two Albanian authors (a bald-domed old epicist and a longhaired womancompiler of childrens' books) who shared out between them the PrestigiousPrize that she had told everybody I was sure to win that year. On the otherhand she had only flipped through my novels (she was to read moreattentively, though, A Kingdom by the Sea, which I began slowly to pull outof myself in 1957 like a long brain worm, hoping it would not break), whileconsuming all the "serious" bestsellers discussed by sister consumersbelonging to the Literary Group in which she liked to assert herself as awriter's wife.

I also discovered that she considered herself a connoisseur of ModernArt. She blazed with anger at me when <187> I said I doubted that theappreciation of a green stripe across a blue background had any connectionwith its definition in a glossy catalogue as "producing a virtually Orientalatmosphere of spaceless time and timeless space." She accused me of tryingto wreck her entire view of the world by maintaining--in a facetious vein,she hoped--that only a Philistine misled by the solemn imbeciles paid towrite about exhibitions could tolerate rags, rinds, and fouled paper rescuedfrom a garbage can and discussed in terms "of warm splashes of color" and"good-natured irony." But perhaps most touching and terrible of all was herhonestly believing that painters painted "what they felt"; that a ratherrough and rumpled landscape dashed off in the Provence might be gratefullyand proudly interpreted by art students if a psychiatrist explained to themthat the advancing thundercloud represented the artist's clash with hisfather, and the rolling grainfield the early death of his mother in ashipwreck.

I could not prevent her from purchasing specimens of the pictorial artin vogue but I judiciously steered some of the more repulsive objects (suchas a collection of daubs produced by "naоve" convicts) into the round diningroom where they swam blurrily in the candlelight when we had guests forsupper. Our routine meals generally took place in the snackbar niche betweenthe kitchen and the housemaid's quarters. Into that niche Louise introducedher new Cappuccino Espresso Maker, while at the opposite end of the house,in the Opal Room, a heavily built, hedonically appareled bed with a paddedheadboard was installed for me. The adjacent bathroom had a less comfortabletub than my former one, and certain inconveniences attended my excursions,two or three nights per week, to the connubial chamber--via drawing room,creaky stairs, upper landing, second-floor corridor, and past theinscrutable chink-gleam of Bel's door; but I treasured my privacy more thanI resented its drawbacks. I had the "Turkish toupet," as Louise <188> calledit, to forbid her to communicate with me by thumping on her floor.Eventually I had an interior telephone put in my room, to be used only incertain emergencies: I was thinking of such nervous states as the feeling ofimminent collapse that I experienced sometimes in my nocturnal bouts witheschatological obsessions; and there was always the half-full box ofsleeping pills that only she could have filched.

The decision to let Bel stay in her apartment, with Louise as her onlyneighbor, instead of refurnishing a spiral of space by allotting those twoeast-end rooms to Louise--"perhaps I too need a studio?"--while transferringBel with bed and books to the Opal Room downstairs and leaving me upstairsin my former bedchamber, was taken by me firmly despite Louise's ratherbitchy counter-suggestions, such as removing the tools of my trade from thelibrary in the basement and banishing Bel with all her belongings to thatwarm, dry, nice and quiet lair. Though I knew I would never give in, thevery process of shuffling rooms and accessories in my mind made me literallyill. On top of that, I felt, perhaps wrongly, that Louise was enjoying thehideous banality of a stepmother-versus-step-daughter situation. I did notexactly regret marrying her, I recognized her charm and functionalqualities, but my adoration for Bel was the sole splendor, the solebreathtaking mountain in the drab plain of my emotional life. Being in manyways an extraordinarily stupid person, I had simply not reckoned with thetangles and tensions of what was meant to look like a model household. Themoment I woke up--or at least the moment I saw that getting up was the onlyway to fool early-morning insomnia--I started wondering what new projectLouise would invent that day with which to harass my girl. When two yearslater this gray old dolt and his volatile wife, after treating Bel to atedious Swiss tour, left her in Larive, between Hex and Trex, at a"finishing" school (finishing childhood, <189> finishing the innocence ofyoung imagination), it was our 1955-1957 period of life ю trois in the Quirnhouse, and not my earlier mistakes, that I recalled with curses and sobs.

She and her stepmother stopped speaking to each other altogether; theycommunicated, if need be, by signs: Louise, for instance, pointingdramatically at the ruthless clock and Bel tapping in the negative on thecrystal of her loyal little wristwatch. She lost all affection for me,twisting away gently when I attempted a perfunctory caress. She adoptedagain the wan absent expression that had dimmed her features at her arrivalfrom Rosedale. Camus replaced Keats. Her marks deteriorated. She no longerwrote poetry. One day as Louise and I were packing for our next trip toEurope (London, Paris, Pisa, Stresa, and--in small print--Larive) I startedremoving some old maps, Colorado, Oregon, from the silk "cheek" inside avalise, and the moment my secret prompter uttered that "shcheka" I cameacross a poem of hers written long before Louise's intrusion into hertrustful young life. I thought it might do Louise good to read it and handedher the exercise-book page (all ragged along its torn root but still mine)on which the following lines were penciled:

At sixty, if I'll look back,

jungles and hills will hide

the notch, the source, the sand

and a bird's footprints across it.

I'll see nothing at all

with my old eyes,

yet I'll know it was there, the source.

How come, then, that when I look back

at twelve--one fifth of the stretch!--with

visibility presumably better

and no junk in between, <190>

I can't even imagine

that patch of wet sand

and the walking bird

and the gleam of my source?

"Almost Poundian in purity," remarked Louise--which annoyed me, becauseI thought Pound a fake. <191>7

Chбteau Vignedor, Bel's charming boarding school in Switzerland, on acharming hill three hundred meters above charming Larive on the Rhтne, hadbeen recommended to Louise in the autumn of 1957 by a Swiss lady in Quirn'sFrench Department. There were two other "finishing" schools of the samegeneral type that might have done just as well, but Louise set her sights onVignedor because of a chance remark made not even by her Swiss friend but bya chance girl in a chance travel agency who summed up the qualities of theschool in one phrase: "Many Tunisian princesses."

It offered five main subjects (French, Psychology, Savoir-vivre,Couture, Cuisine), various sports (under the direction of Christine Dupraz,the once famous skier), and a dozen additional classes on request (whichwould keep the plainest girl there till she married), including Ballet andBridge. Another supplиment--especially suitable for orphans or unneededchildren--was a summer trimester, filling up the year's last remainingsegment with excursions and nature studies, to be spent by a few lucky girlsat the home of the headmistress, Madame de Turm, an Alpine chalet sometwelve hundred meters higher: "Its solitary light, twinkling in a black foldof the mountains, can be <192> seen," said the prospectus in four languages,"from the Chбteau on clear nights." There was also some kind of camp fordifferently handicapped local children in different years conducted by ourmedically inclined sports directress.

1957, 1958, 1959. Sometimes, seldom, hiding from Louise, who objectedto Bel's twenty well-spaced monosyllables' costing us fifty dollars, I wouldcall her from Quirn, but after a few such calls I received a curt note fromMme. de Turm, asking me not to upset my daughter by telephoning, and soretreated into my dark shell. Dark shell, dark years of my heart! Theycoincided oddly with the composition of my most vigorous, most festive, andcommercially most successful novel, A Kingdom by the Sea. Its demands, thefun and the fancy of it, its intricate imagery, made up in a way for theabsence of my beloved Bel. It was also bound to reduce, though I was hardlyconscious of that, my correspondence with her (well-meant, chatty,dreadfully artificial letters which she seldom troubled to answer). Evenmore startling, of course, more incomprehensible to me, in groaningretrospect, is the effect my self-entertainment had on the number and lengthof our visits between 1957 and 1960 (when she eloped with a progressiveblond-bearded young American). You were appalled to learn the other day,when we discussed the present notes, that I had seen "beloved Bel" only fourtimes in three summers and that only two of our visits lasted as long as acouple of weeks. I must add, however, that she resolutely declined to spendher vacations at home. I ought never, of course, have dumped her in Europe.I should have elected to sweat it out in my hellish household, between achildish woman and a somber child.

The work on my novel also impinged on my marital mores, making of me aless passionate and more indulgent husband: I let Louise go on suspiciouslyfrequent trips to out-of-town unlisted eye specialists and neglected her inthe meantime for Rose Brown, our cute housemaid who took <193> threesoapshowers daily and thought frilly black panties "did something to guys."

But the greatest havoc wrought by my work was its effect on mylectures. To it I sacrificed, like Gain, the flowers of my summers, and,like Abel, the sheep of the campus. Because of it, the process of myacademic discarnation reached its ultimate stage. The last vestiges of humaninterconnection were severed, for I not only vanished physically from thelecture hall but had my entire course taped so as to be funneled through theCollege Closed Circuit into the rooms of headphoned students. Rumor had itthat I was ready to quit; in fact, an anonymous punster wrote in the QuirnQuarterly, Spring, 1959: "His Temerity is said to have asked for a raisebefore emeriting."

In the summer of that year my third wife and I saw Bel for the lasttime. Allan Garden (after whom the genus of the Cape Jasmin should have beennamed, so great and triumphant was the flower in his buttonhole) had justbeen united in wedlock to his youthful Virginia, after several years ofcloudless concubinage. They were to live to the combined age of 170 inabsolute bliss, yet one grim fateful chapter remained to be constructed. Ifoiled over its first pages at the wrong desk, in the wrong hotel, above thewrong lake, with a view of the wrong isoletta at my left elbow. The onlyright thing was a pregnant-shaped bottle of Gattinara before me. In themiddle of a mangled sentence Louise came to join me from Pisa, where Igathered--with amused indifference--that she had recoupled with a formerlover. Playing on the strings of her meek uneasiness I took her toSwitzerland, which she detested. An early dinner with Bel was scheduled atthe Larive Grand Hotel. She arrived with that Christ-haired youth, bothpurple trousered. The maнtre d'hтtel murmured something over the menu to mywife, and she rode up and brought down my oldest necktie for the young loutto put around his <194> Adam's apple and scrawny neck. His grandmother hadbeen related by marriage, so it turned out, to a third cousin of Louise'sgrandfather, the not quite untarnished Boston banker. This took care of themain course. We had coffee and kirsch in the lounge, and Charlie Everettshowed us pictures of the summer Camp for Blind Children (who were sparedthe sight of its drab locust trees and rings of ashed refuse amidst theriverside burdocks) which he and Bella (Bella!) were supervising. He wastwenty-five years old. He had spent five years studying Russian, and spokeit as fluently, he said, as a trained seal. A sample justified thecomparison. He was a dedicated "revolutionary," and a hopeless nincompoop,knowing nothing, crazy about jazz, existentialism, Leninism, pacifism, andAfrican Art. He thought snappy pamphlets and catalogues so much more"meaningful" than fat old books. A sweet, stale, and unhealthy smellemanated from the poor fellow. Throughout the dinner and coffee-drinkingordeal I never once--never once, reader!--looked up at my Bel, but as wewere about to part (forever) I did look at her, and she had new twin linesfrom nostrils to wicks, and she wore granny glasses, and a middle part, andhad lost all her pubescent prettiness, remnants of which I had stillglimpsed during a visit to Larive a spring and winter ago. They had to beback at half-past-twenty, alas--not really "alas."

"Come and see us at Quirn soon, soon, Dolly," I said, as we all stoodon the sidewalk with mountains outlined in solid black against an aquamarinesky, and choughs jacking harshly, flying in flocks to roost, away, away.

I cannot explain the slip, but it angered Bel more than anything hadever angered her at any time.

"What is he saying?" she cried, looking in turn at Louise, at her beau,and again at Louise. "What does he mean? Why does he call me `Dolly'? Who isshe for God's sake? Why, why (turning to me), why did you say that?"

"Obmolvka, prosti (lapse of the tongue, sorry)," I <195> replied,dying, trying to turn everything into a dream, a dream about that hideouslast moment.

They walked briskly toward their little Klop car, he half-overtakingher, already poking the air with his car key, on her left, on her right. Theaquamarine sky was now silent, darkish and empty, save for a star-shapedstar about which I wrote a Russian elegy ages ago, in another world.

"What a charming, good-natured, civilized, sexy young fellow," saidLouise as we stamped into the lift. "Are you in the mood tonight? Rightaway, Vad?" <196>

PART FIVE

<197> <198>

1

This penultimate part of LATH, this spirited episode in my otherwisesomewhat passive existence, is horribly hard to set down, reminding me ofthe pensums, which the crudest of my French governesses used to inflict uponme--some old saw to be copied cent fois (hiss and spittle)--in punishmentfor my adding my own marginal illustrations to those in her Petit Larousseor for exploring under the schoolroom table the legs of Lalage L., a littlecousin, who shared lessons with me that unforgettable summer. I have,indeed, repeated the story of my dash to Leningrad in the latenineteen-sixties innumerable times in my mind, to packed audiences of myscribbling or dreaming selves--and yet I keep doubting both the necessityand the success of my dismal task. But you have argued the question, you aretenderly adamant, yes, and your decree is that I should relate my adventurein order to lend a semblance of significance to my daughter's futile fate.

In the summer of 1960, Christine Dupraz, who ran the summer camp fordisabled children between cliff and highway, just east of Larive, informedme that Charlie Everett, one of her assistants, had eloped with my Bel afterburning--in a grotesque ceremony that she visualized more <199> clearly thanI--his passport and a little American flag (bought at a souvenir stallespecially for that purpose) "right in the middle of the Soviet Consul'sback garden"; whereupon the new "Karl Ivanovich Vetrov" and theeighteen-year-old Isabella, a ci-devant's daughter, had gone through someform of mock marriage in Berne and incontinently headed for Russia.

The same mail brought me an invitation to discuss in New York with afamous compхre my sudden Number One position on the Bestselling Authorslist, inquiries from Japanese, Greek, Turkish publishers, and a postcardfrom Parma with the scrawl: "Bravo for Kingdom from Louise and Victor." Inever learned who Victor was, by the way.

Brushing all my engagements aside, I surrendered again--after quite afew years of abstinence!--to the thrill of secret investigations. Spying hadbeen my clystхre de Tchиkhov even before I married Iris Black whose laterpassion for working on an interminable detective tale had been sparked bythis or that hint I must have dropped, like a passing bird's lustrousfeather, in relation to my experience in the vast and misty field of theService. In my little way I have been of some help to my betters. The tree,a blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound I caught the two "diplomats,"Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence, still stands,hardly scarred, on its hilltop above San Bernardino. But for structuraleconomy I have omitted that entertaining strain from this story of love andprose. Its existence, however, helped me now to ward off--for a while, atleast--the madness and anguish of hopeless regret.

It was child's play to find Karl's relatives in the U.S.; namely, twogaunt aunts who disliked the boy even more than they did one another. AuntNumber One assured me he had never left Switzerland--they were stillforwarding his Third Class mail to her in Boston. Aunt Number <200> Two, thePhiladelphia Fright, said he liked music and was vegetating in Vienna.

I had overestimated my forces. A serious relapse hospitalized me fornearly a whole year. The complete rest ordered by all my doctors was thenbotched by my having to stand by my publisher in a long legal fight againstobscenity charges leveled at my novel by stuffy censors. I was again veryill. I still feel the pressure of the hallucinations that beset me, as mysearch for Bel got somehow mixed up with the controversy over my novel, andI saw as clearly as one sees mountains or ships, a great building, allwindows lit, trying to advance upon me, through this or that wall of theward, seeking as it were a weak spot to push through and ram my bed.

In the late Sixties I learned that Bel was now definitely married toVetrov but that he had been sent to some remote place of unspecified work.Then came a letter.

It was forwarded to me by an old respectable businessman (I shall callhim A.B.) with a note saying that he was "in textiles" though by education"an engineer"; that he represented "a Soviet firm in the U.S. and viceversa"; that the letter he was enclosing came from a lady working in hisLeningrad office (I shall call her Dora) and concerned my daughter "whom hedid not have the honor to know but who, he believed, needed my assistance."He added that he would be flying back to Leningrad in a month's time andwould be glad if I "contacted him." The letter from Dora was in Russian.

Much-respected Vadim Vadimovich!

You probably receive many letters from people in our country who manageto obtain your books--not an easy enterprise! The present letter, however,is not from an admirer but simply from a friend of Isabella Vadimovna Vetrovwith <201> whom she has been sharing a room for more than a year now.

She is ill, she has no news from her husband, and she is without akopek.

Please, get in touch with the bearer of this note. He is my employer,and also a distant relative, and has agreed to bring a few lines from you,Vadim Vadimovich, and a little money, if possible, but the main thing, themain thing (glavnoe, glavnoe) is to come in person (lichno). Let him know ifyou can come and if yes, when and where we could meet to discuss thesituation. Everything in life is urgent (speshno, "pressing," "not to bepostponed") but some things are dreadfully urgent and this is one of them.

In order to convince you that she is here, with me, telling me to writeyou and unable to write herself, I am appending a little clue or token thatonly you and she can decode: "...and the intelligent trail (i umnitsatropka)."

For a minute I sat at the breakfast table--under the compassionatestare of Brown Rose--in the attitude of a cave dweller clasping his handsaround his head at the crash of rocks breaking above him (women make thesame gesture when something falls in the next room). My decision was, ofcourse, instantly taken. I perfunctorily patted Rose's young buttocksthrough her light skirt, and strode to the telephone.

A few hours later I was dining with A.B. in New York (and in the courseof the next month was to exchange several long-distance calls with him fromLondon). He was a superb little man, perfectly oval in shape, with a baldhead and tiny feet expensively shod (the rest of his envelope looked lessclassy). He spoke friable English with a soft Russian accent, and nativeRussian with Jewish <202> question marks. He thought that I should begin byseeing Dora. He settled for me the exact spot where she and I might meet. Hewarned me that in preparing to visit the weird Wonderland of the SovietUnion a traveler's first step was the very Philistine one of being assigneda nomer (hotel room) and that only after he had been granted one could the"visa" be tackled. Over the tawny mountain of "Bogdan's" brown-speckled,butter-soaked, caviar-accompanied bliny (which A.B. forbade me to pay forthough I was lousy with A Kingdom's money), he spoke poetically, and at somelength, about his recent trip to Tel Aviv.

My next move--a visit to London--would have been altogether delightful,had I not been overwhelmed all the time by anxiety, impatience, anguishedforebodings. Through several venturesome gentlemen--a former lover of AllanAndoverton's and two of my late benefactor's mysterious chums--I hadretained some innocent ties with the BINT, as Soviet agents acronymize thewell-known, too well-known, British intelligence service. Consequently itwas possible for me to obtain a false or more-or-less false passport. SinceI may want to avail myself again of those facilities, I cannot reveal heremy exact alias. Suffice it to say that some teasing similarity with my realfamily name could make the assumed one pass, if I got caught, for a clericalerror on the part of an absentminded consul and for indifference to officialpapers on that of the deranged bearer. Let us suppose my real name to havebeen "Oblonsky" (a Tolstoyan invention); then the false one would be, forexample, the mimetic "O. B. Long," an oblong blursky, so to speak. This Icould expand into, say, Oberon Bernard Long, of Dublin or Dumberton, andlive with it for years on five or six continents.

I had escaped from Russia at the age of not quite nineteen, leavingacross my path in a perilous forest the felled body of a Red soldier. I hadthen dedicated half a century to berating, deriding, twisting into funnyshapes, wringing <203> out like blood-wet towels, kicking neatly in Evil'sstinkiest spot, and otherwise tormenting the Soviet regime at every suitableturn of my writings. In fact, no more consistent critic of Bolshevistbrutality and basic stupidity existed during all that time at the literarylevel to which my output belonged. I was thus well aware of two facts: thatunder my own name I would not be given a room at the Evropeyskaya or Astoriaor any other Leningrad hotel unless I made some extraordinary amends, someabjectly exuberant recantation; and that if I talked my way to that hotelroom as Mr. Long or Blong, and got interrupted, there might be no end oftrouble. I decided therefore not to get interrupted.

"Shall I grow a beard to cross the fronder?" muses homesick GeneralGurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus.

"Better than none," said Harley Q., one of my gayest advisers. "But,"he added, "do it before we glue on and stamp O.B.'s picture and don't loseweight afterwards." So I grew it--during the atrocious heartracking wait forthe room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ampleVictorian affair, of a nice, rough, tawny shade threaded with silver. Itreached up to my apple-red cheekbones and came down to my waistcoat,commingling on the way with my lateral yellow-gray locks. Special contactlenses not only gave another, dumbfounded, expression to my eyes, butsomehow changed their very shape from squarish leonine, to round Jovian.Only upon my return did I notice that the old tailor-made trousers, on meand in my bag, displayed my real name on the inside of the waistband.

My good old British passport, which had been handled cursorily by somany courteous officers who had never opened my books (the only realidentity papers of its accidental holder), remained, after a procedure, thatboth decency and incompetence forbid me to describe, <204> physically thesame in many respects; but certain of its other features, details ofsubstance and items of information, were, let us say, "modified" by a newmethod, an alchemysterious treatment, a technique of genius, "still notunderstood elsewhere," as the chaps in the lab tactfully expressed people'sutter unawareness of a discovery that might have saved countless fugitivesand secret agents. In other words nobody, no forensic chemist not in theknow, could suspect, let alone prove, that my passport was false. I do notknow why I dwell on this subject with such tedious persistence. Probably,because I otlynivayu--"shirk"--the task of describing my visit to Leningrad;yet I can't put it off any longer. <205>2

After almost three months of fretting I was ready to go. I feltlacquered from head to foot, like that naked ephebe, the bright clou of apagan procession, who died of dermal asphyxia in his coat of golden varnish.A few days before my actual departure there occurred what seemed a harmlessshift at the time. I was to wing off on a Thursday from Paris. On Monday amelodious female voice reached me at my nostalgically lovely hotel, rueRivoli, to tell me that something---perhaps a hushed-up crash in a Sovietveil of mist--had clogged the general schedule and that I could board anAeroflot turboprop to Moscow either this Wednesday or the next. I chose theformer, of course, for it did not affect the date of my rendezvous.

My traveling companions were a few English and French tourists and agoodish bunch of gloomy officials from Soviet trade missions. Once insidethe aircraft, a certain illusion of cheap unreality enveloped me--to lingerabout me for the rest of my trip. It was a very warm day in June and thefarcical air-conditioning system failed to outvie the whiffs of sweat andthe sprayings of Krasnaya Moskva, an insidious perfume which imbued even thehard candy (named Ledenets vzlyotnyy, "take-off caramel," on the wrapper)generously distributed to us before the start <206> of the flight. Anotherfairy-tale touch was the bright dapple--yellow curlicues and violeteyespots--adorning the blinds. A similarly colored waterproof bag in theseat pocket before me was ominously labeled "for waste disposal"--such asthe disposal of my identity in that fairy-land.

My mood and mental condition needed strong liquor rather than anotherround of vzlyotnyy or some nice reading matter; still I accepted a publicitymagazine from a stout, unsmiling, bare-armed stewardess in sky blue, and wasinterested to learn that (in contrast to current triumphs) Russia had notdone so well in the Soccer Olympics of 1912 when the "Tsarist team"(consisting presumably of ten boyars and one bear) lost 12-0 to a Germanside.

I had taken a tranquilizer and hoped to sleep at least part of the way;but a first, and only, attempt at dozing off was resolutely thwarted by astill fatter stewardess, in a still stronger aura of onion sweat, asking menastily to draw in the leg that I had stuck out too far into the aisle whereshe circulated with more and more publicity material. I envied darkly mywindowside neighbor, an elderly Frenchman--or, anyway, scarcely a compatriotof mine--with a straggly gray-black beard and a terrible tie, who sleptthrough the entire five-hour flight, disdaining the sardines and even thevodka which I could not resist, though I had a flask of better stuff in myhip pocket. Perhaps historians of photography could help me some day todefine how, by precisely what indices, I am enabled to establish that therecollection of an anonymous unplaceable face goes back 1930-1935, say, andnot to 1945-1950. My neighbor was practically the twin of a person I hadknown in Paris, but who? A fellow writer? A concierge? A cobbler? Thedifficulty of determination grated less than the riddle of its limits assuggested by the degree of perceived "shading" and the "feel" of the image.<207>

I got a closer but still more teasing look at him when, toward theclose of our journey, my raincoat fell from the rack and landed upon him,and he grinned amiably enough as he emerged from under the sudden awakener.And I glimpsed again his fleshy profile and thick eyebrow while submittingfor inspection the contents of my only valise and fighting the insane urgeto question the propriety of the phrasing in the English form of the CustomsDeclaration: "...miniature graphics, slaughtered fowl, live animals andbirds."

I saw him again, but not as clearly, during our transfer by bus fromone airport to another through some shabby environs of Moscow--a city whichI had never seen in my life and which interested me about as much as, say,Birmingham. On the plane to Leningrad, however, he was again next to me,this time on the inner side. Mixed odors of dour hostess and "Red Moscow,"with a gradual prevalence of the first ingredient, as our bare-armed angelsmultiplied their last ministrations, accompanied us from 21:18 to 22:33. Inorder to draw out my neighbor before he and his riddle vanished, I askedhim, in French, if he knew anything about a picturesque group that hadboarded our aircraft in Moscow. He replied, with a Parisian grasseyement,that they were, he believed, Iranian circus people touring Europe. The menlooked like harlequins in mufti, the women like birds of paradise, thechildren like golden medallions, and there was one dark-haired pale beautyin black bolero and yellow sharovars who reminded me of Iris or a prototypeof Iris.

"I hope," I said, "we'll see them perform in Leningrad."

"Pouf!" he rejoined. "They can't compete with our Soviet circus."

I noted the automatic "our."

Both he and I were billeted in the Astoria, a hideous pile built aroundWorld War One, I think. The heavily bugged (I had been taught by Guy Gayleya way of finding that <208> out in one gleeful twinkle) and thereforesheepish-looking room "de luxe," with orange curtains and an orange-drapedbed in its old-world alcove, did have a private bath as stipulated, but ittook me some time to cope with a convulsive torrent of clay-colored water."Red Moscow's" last stand took place on a cake of incarnadine soap. "Meals,"said a notice, "may be served in the rooms." For the heck of it I triedordering an evening snack; nothing happened, and I spent another hungry hourin the recalcitrant restaurant. The Iron Curtain is really a lampshade: itsvariety here was gemmed with glass incrustations in a puzzle of petals. Thekotleta po kievski I ordered took forty-four minutes to come from Kiev--andtwo seconds to be sent back as a non-cutlet, with a tiny oath (murmured inRussian) that made the waitress start and gape at me and my Daily Worker.The Caucasian wine was undrinkable.

A sweet little scene happened to be enacted as I hurried toward thelift, trying to recall where I had put my blessed Burpies. A flushedathletic liftyorsha wearing several bead necklaces was in the act of beingreplaced by a much older woman of the pensioned type, at whom she shoutedwhile stomping out of the lift: "Ya tebe eto popomnyu, sterva! (I'll geteven with you, dirty bitch)"--and proceeded to barge into me and almostknock me down (I am a large, but fluff-light old fellow). "Shtoy-tysuyoshsya pod nogi? (Why do you get underfoot?)" she cried in the sameinsolent tone of voice which left the night attendant quietly shaking hergray head all the way up to my floor.

Between two nights, two parts of a serial dream, in which I vainlytried to locate Bel's street (whose name, by a superstition current forcenturies in conspiratorial circles I had preferred not to be told), whileknowing perfectly well that she lay bleeding and laughing in an alcovediagonally across the room, a few barefooted steps from my bed, I wanderedabout the city, idly trying to derive some <209> emotional benefit from mybeing born there almost three-quarters of a century ago. Either because itcould never get over the presence of the bog on which a popular bully hadbuilt it, or for some other reason (nobody, according to Gogol, knows), St.Petersburg was no place for children. I must have passed there insignificantparts of a few Decembers, and no doubt an April or two; but at least a dozenwinters of my nineteen pre-Cambridge ones were spent on Mediterranean orBlack Sea coasts. As to summers, to my young summers, all of them hadbloomed for me on the great country estates of my family. Thus I realizedwith silly astonishment that, except for picture postcards (views ofconventional public parks with lindens looking like oaks and a pistachiopalace instead of the remembered pinkish one, and relentlessly gilded churchdomes--all of it under an Italianate sky), I had never seen my native cityin June or July. Its aspect, therefore, evoked no thrill of recognition; itwas an unfamiliar, if not utterly foreign, town, still lingering in someother era: an undefinable era, not exactly remote, but certainly precedingthe invention of body deodorants.

Warm weather had come to stay, and everywhere, in travel agencies, infoyers, in waiting rooms, in general stores, in trolleybuses, in elevators,on escalators, in every damned corridor, everywhere, and especially wherewomen worked, or had worked, invisible onion soup was cooking on invisiblestoves. I was to remain only a couple of days in Leningrad and had not thetime to get used to those infinitely sad emanations.

From travelers I knew that our ancestral mansion no longer existed,that the very lane where it had stood between two streets in the Fontankaarea had been lost, like some connective tissue in the process of organicdegeneration. What then succeeded in transfixing my memory? That sunset,with a triumph of bronze clouds and flamingo-pink meltings in the far-endarchway of the Winter Canalet, <210> might have been first seen in Venice.What else? The shadow of railings on granite? To be quite honest, only thedogs, the pigeons, the horses, and the very old, very meek cloakroomattendants seemed familiar to me. They, and perhaps the faгade of a house onGertsen Street. I may have gone there to some children's fйte ages ago. Thefloral design running above the row of its upper windows caused an eerieshiver to pass through the root of wings that we all grow at such moments ofdream-like recollection.

Dora was to meet me Friday morning on the Square of the Arts in frontof the Russian Museum near the statue of Pushkin erected some ten yearsbefore by a committee of weathermen. An Intourist folder had yielded atinted photograph of the spot. The meteorological associations of themonument predominated over its cultural ones. Frock-coated Pushkin, theright-side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breezerather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward andto the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise,to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in theLeningrad parks). It had dwindled, when I arrived, to a warm drizzle, a meremurmur in the lindens above the long garden benches. Dora was supposed to besitting on Pushkin's left, id est my right. The bench was empty and lookeddampish. Three or four children, of the morose, drab, oddly old-fashionedaspect that Soviet kids have, could be seen on the other side of thepedestal, but otherwise I was loitering all alone, holding the Humanitи inmy hand instead of the Worker which I was supposed to signal with discreetlybut had not been able to obtain that day. I was in the act of spreading thenewspaper on the bench when a lady with the predicted limp came along agarden path toward me. She wore the, also expected, pastel-pink coat, had aclubfoot, and walked with the aid of a sturdy cane. She also carried adiaphanous little umbrella which had not figured in the list of <211>attributes. I dissolved in tears at once (though I was farced with pills).Her gentle beautiful eyes were also wet.

Had I got A.B.'s telegram? Sent two days ago to my Paris address? HotelMoritz?

"That's garbled," I said, "and besides I left earlier. Doesn't matter.Is she much worse?"

"No, no, on the contrary. I knew you would come all the same, butsomething has happened. Karl turned up on Tuesday while I was in the officeand took her away. He also took my new suitcase. He has no sense ofownership. He will be shot some day like a common thief. The first time hegot into trouble was when he kept declaring that Lincoln and Lenin werebrothers. And last time--"

Nice voluble lady, Dora. What was Bel's illness exactly?

"Splenic anemia. And last time, he told his best student in thelanguage school that the only thing people should do was to love one anotherand pardon their enemies."

"An original mind. Where do you suppose--"

"Yes, but the best student was an informer, and Karlusha spent a yearin a tundrovyy House of Rest. I don't know where he took her now. I evendon't know whom to ask."

"But there must be some way. She must be brought back, taken out ofthis hole, this hell."

"That's impossible. She adores, she worships Karlusha. C'est la vie, asthe Germans say. It's a pity A.B. is in Riga till the end of the month. Yousaw very little of him. Yes, it's a pity, he's a freak and a dear (chudak idushka) with four nephews in Israel, which sounds, he says, as `the dramaticpersons in a pseudoclassical play.' One of them was my husband. Life getssometimes very complicated, and the more complicated the happier it shouldbe, one would think, but in reality `complicated' always means for somereason grust' i toska (sorrow and heartache)."

"But look here, can't I do something? Can't I sort of <212> hang aroundand make inquiries, and perhaps seek advice from the Embassy--"

"She is not English any more and was never American. It's hopeless, Itell you. We were very close, she and I, in my very complicated life, but,imagine, Karl did not allow her to leave at least one little word forme--and for you, of course. She had informed him, unfortunately, that youwere coming, and this he could not bear in spite of all the sympathy heworks up for all unsympathetic people. You know, I saw your face lastyear--or was it two years ago?--two years, rather--in a Dutch or Danishmagazine, and I would have recognized you at once, anywhere."

"With the beard?"

"Oh, it does not change you one droplet. It's like wigs or greenspectacles in old comedies. As a girl I dreamt of becoming a female clown,`Madam Byron,' or `Trek Trek.' But tell me, Vadim Vadimovich--I meanGospodin Long--haven't they found you out? Don't they intend to make much ofyou? After all, you're the secret pride of Russia. Must you go now?"

I detached myself from the bench--with some scraps of L'Humanitиattempting to follow me--and said, yes, I had better be going before thepride outstripped the prudence. I kissed her hand whereupon she remarkedthat she had seen it done only in a movie called War and Peace. I alsobegged her, under the dripping lilacs, to accept a wad of bank notes to beused for any purpose she wished including the price of that suitcase for hertrip to Sochi. "And he also took my whole set of safety pins," she murmuredwith her all-beautifying smile. <213>3

I cannot be sure it was not again my fellow traveler, the black-hattedman, whom I saw hurrying away as I parted with Dora and our National Poet,leaving the latter to worry forever about all that wasted water (compare theTsarskoselski Statue of a rock-dwelling maiden who mourns her broken butstill brimming jar in one of his own poems); but I know I saw Monsieur Poufat least twice in the restaurant of the Astoria, as well as in the corridorof the sleeping car on the night train that I took in order to catch theearliest Moscow-Paris plane. On that plane he was prevented from sittingnext to me by the presence of an elderly American lady, with pink and violetwrinkles and rufous hair: we kept alternately chatting, dozing and drinkingBloody Marshas, her joke--not appreciated by our sky-blue hostess. It wasdelightful to observe the amazement expressed by old Miss Havemeyer (herrather incredible name) when I told her that I had spurned the Intourist'soffer of a sightseeing tour of Leningrad; that I had not peeped into Lenin'sroom in the Smolny; had not visited one cathedral; had not eaten somethingcalled "tabaka chicken"; and that I had left that beautiful, beautiful citywithout seeing a single ballet or variety show. "I happen <214> to be," Iexplained, "a triple agent and you know how it is--" "Oh!" she exclaimed,with a pulling-away movement of the torso as if to consider me from a noblerangle. "Oh! But that's vurry glamorous!"

I had to wait some time for my jet to New York, and being a littletight and rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not toogravely ill and not too unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, amagazine in the living room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements ofher leg, ankle 8 1/2 inches, calf 12 1/2, creamy thigh 19 1/2, and Louisewas in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up apaperback somebody had left on a seat next to mine in the transit lounge ofthe Orly airport. I was the mouse of fate on that pleasant June afternoonbetween a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes.

I held in my hands a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced fromthe American edition of A Kingdom by the Sea. I had not seen it yet--andpreferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured thepirated text. On the cover a publicity picture of the child actress who hadplayed my Virginia in the recent film did better justice to pretty LolaSloan and her lollypop than to the significance of my novel. Althoughslovenly worded by a hack with no inkling of the book's art, the blurb onthe back of the limp little volume rendered faithfully enough the factualplot of my Kingdom.

Bertram, an unbalanced youth, doomed to die shortly in an asylum forthe criminal insane, sells for ten dollars his ten-year-old sister Ginny tothe middle-aged bachelor Al Garden, a wealthy poet who travels with thebeautiful child from resort to resort through America and other countries. Astate of affairs that looks at first blush--and "blush" is the rightword--like a case of irresponsible <215> perversion (described in brilliantdetail never attempted before) develops by the grees [misprint] into agenuine dialogue of tender love. Garden's feelings are reciprocated byGinny, the initial "victim" who at eighteen, a normal nymph, marries him ina warmly described religious ceremony. All seems to end honky-donky [sic!]in foreverlasting bliss of a sort fit to meet the sexual demands of the mostrigid, or frigid, humanitarian, had there not been running its chaoticcourse, in a sheef [sheaf?] of parallel lives beyond our happy couple's ken,the tragic tiny [destiny?] of Virginia Garden's inconsolable parents, Oliverand [?], whom the clever author by every means in his power, prevents fromtracking their daughter Dawn [sic!!]. A Book-of-the-Decade choice.

I pocketed it upon noticing that my long-lost fellow traveler,goat-bearded and black-hatted, as I knew him, had come up from the lavatoryor the bar: Would he follow me to New York or was it to be our last meeting?Last, last. He had given himself away: The moment he came near, the momenthis mouth opened in the tense-lower-lip shape that discharges, with acheerless up-and-down shake of the head, the exclamation "Ekh!," I knew notonly that he was as Russian as I, but that the ancient acquaintance whom heresembled so strikingly was the father of a young poet, Oleg Orlov, whom Ihad met in Paris, in the Nineteen-Twenties. Oleg wrote "poems in prose"(long after Turgenev), absolutely worthless stuff, which his father, ahalf-demented widower, would try to "place," pestering with his son'sworthless wares the dozen or so periodicals of the emigration. He could beseen in the waiting room miserably fawning on a harassed and curt secretary,or attempting to waylay an assistant editor <216> between office and toilet,or writing in stoic misery, at a corner of a crowded table, a special letterpleading the cause of some horrible little poem that had been alreadyrejected. He died in the same Home for the Aged where Annette's mother hadspent her last years. Oleg, in the meantime, had joined the small number oflittиrateurs who decided to sell the bleak liberty of expatriation for therosy mess of Soviet pottage. His budtime had kept its promise. The best hehad achieved during the last forty or fifty years was a medley of publicitypieces, commercial translations, vicious denunciations, and--in the domainof the arts--a prodigious resemblance to the physical aspect, voice,mannerisms, and obsequious impudence of his father.

"Ekh!" he exclaimed, "Ekh, Vadim Vadimovich dorogoy (dear), aren't youashamed of deceiving our great warm-hearted country, our benevolent,credulous government, our overworked Intourist staff, in this nastyinfantile manner! A Russian writer! Snooping! Incognito! By the way, I amOleg Igorevich Orlov, we met in Paris when we were young."

"What do you want, merzavetz (you scoundrel)?" I coldly inquired as heplopped into the chair on my left.

He raised both hands in the "see-I'm-unarmed" gesture: "Nothing,nothing. Except to ruffle (potormoshit') your conscience. Two coursespresented themselves. We had to choose. Fyodor Mihaylovich [?] himself hadto choose. Either to welcome you po amerikanski (the American way) withreporters, interviews, photographers, girls, garlands, and, naturally,Fyodor Mihaylovich himself [President of the Union of Writers? Head of the`Big House'?]; or else to ignore you--and that's what we did. By the way:forged passports may be fun in detective stories, but our people are justnot interested in passports. Aren't you sorry now?"

I made as if to move to another seat, but he made as if <217> toaccompany me there. So I stayed where I was, and feverishly grabbedsomething to read--that book in my coat pocket.

"Et ce n'est pas tout," he went on. "Instead of writing for us, yourcompatriots, you, a Russian writer of genius, betray them by concocting, foryour paymasters, this (pointing with a dramatically quivering index at AKingdom by the Sea in my hands), this obscene novelette about little Lola orLotte, whom some Austrian Jew or reformed pederast rapes after murdering hermother--no, excuse me--marrying mama first before murdering her--we like tolegalize everything in the West, don't we, Vadim Vadimovich?"

Still restraining myself, though aware of the uncontrollable cloud ofblack fury growing within my brain, I said: "You are mistaken. You are asomber imbecile. The novel I wrote, the novel I'm holding now, is A Kingdomby the Sea. You are talking of some other book altogether."

"Vraiment? And maybe you visited Leningrad merely to chat with a ladyin pink under the lilacs? Because, you know, you and your friends arephenomenally naоve. The reason Mister (it rhymed with `Easter' in his foulserpent-mouth) Vetrov was permitted to leave a certain labor camp inVadim--odd coincidence--so he might fetch his wife, is that he has beencured now of his mystical mania--cured by such nutcrackers, such shrinkersas are absolutely unknown in the philosophy of your Western sharlatanchy. Ohyes, precious (dragotsennyy) Vadim Vadimovich--"

The swing I dealt old Oleg with the back of my left fist was of quitepresentable power, especially if we remember--and I remembered it as Iswung--that our combined ages made 140.

There ensued a pause while I struggled back to my feet (unaccustomedmomentum had somehow caused me to fall from my seat).

"Nu, dali v mordu. Nu, tak chtozh?" he muttered <218> (Well, you'vegiven me one in the mug. Well, what does it matter?). Blood blotched thehandkerchief he applied to his fat muzhikian nose.

"Nu, dali," he repeated and presently wandered away.

I looked at my knuckles. They were red but intact. I listened to mywristwatch. It ticked like mad. <219> <220>

PART SIX

<221> <222>

1

Speaking of philosophy, I recalled when starting to readjust myself,very temporarily, to the corners and crannies of Quirn, that somewhere in myoffice I kept a bundle of notes (on the Substance of Space), preparedformerly toward an account of my young years and nightmares (the work nowknown as Ardis). I also needed to sort out and remove from my office, orruthlessly destroy, a mass of miscellanea which had accumulated ever since Ibegan teaching.

That afternoon--a sunny and windy September afternoon--I had decided,with the unaccountable suddenness of genuine inspiration, that 1969-1970would be my last term at Quirn University. I had, in fact, interrupted mysiesta that day to request an immediate interview with the Dean. I thoughthis secretary sounded a little grumpy on the phone; true, I declined toexplain anything beforehand, beyond confiding to her, in an informalbantering manner, that the numeral "7" always reminded me of the flag anexplorer sticks in the cranium of the North Pole.

After setting out on foot and reaching the seventh poplar I realizedthat there might be quite a load of papers to bring from my office, so Iwent back for my car, and <223> then had difficulty in finding a place topark near the library where I intended to return a number of books whichwere months, if not years, overdue. In result, I was a little late for myappointment with the Dean, a new man and not my best reader. He consulted,rather demonstratively, the clock and muttered he had a "conference" in afew minutes at some other place, probably invented.

I was amused rather than surprised by the vulgar joy he did not troubleto conceal at the news of my resignation. He hardly heard the reasons whichcommon courtesy impelled me to give (frequent headaches, boredom, theefficiency of modern recording, the comfortable income my recent novelsupplied, and so forth). His whole manner changed--to use a clichи hedeserves. He paced to and fro, positively beaming. He grasped my hand in aburst of brutal effusion. Certain fastidious blue-blooded animals prefersurrendering a limb to the predator rather than suffer ignoble contact. Ileft the Dean encumbered with a marble arm that he kept carrying in hisprowlings like a trayed trophy, not knowing where to put it down.

So off to my office I stalked, a happy amputee, more than ever eager toclean up drawers and shelves. I began, however, by dashing off a note to thePresident of the University, another new man, informing him with a touch ofFrench malice, rather than English "malice," that my entire set of onehundred lectures on European Masterpieces was about to be sold to a generouspublisher who offered me an advance of half-a-million bucks (a salubriousexaggeration), thus making transmissions of my course no longer available tostudents, best regards, sorry not to have met you personally.

In the name of moral hygiene I had got rid long ago of my Bechsteindesk. Its considerably smaller substitute contained note paper, scratchpaper, office envelopes, photostats of my lectures, a copy of Dr. OlgaRepnin (hard-back) which I had intended for a colleague (but had <224>spoiled by misspelling his name), and a pair of warm gloves belonging to myassistant (and successor) Exkul. Also three boxfuls of paper clips and ahalf-empty flask of whisky. From the shelves, I swept into the wastebasket,or onto the floor in its vicinity, heaps of circulars, separata, a displacedecologist's paper on the ravages committed by a bird of some sort, theOzimaya Sovka ("Lesser Winter-Crop Owl"?), and the tidily bound page proofs(mine always come in the guise of long, horribly slippery and unwieldysnakes) of picaresque trash, full of cricks and punts, imposed on me byproud publishers hoping for a rave from the lucky bastard. A mess ofbusiness correspondence and my tractatule on Space I stuffed into a largeworn folder. Adieu, lair of learning!

Coincidence is a pimp and cardsharper in ordinary fiction but amarvelous artist in the patterns of fact recollected by a non-ordinarymemoirist. Only asses and geese think that the re-collector skips this orthat bit of his past because it is dull or shoddy (that sort of episodehere, for example, the interview with the Dean, and how scrupulously it isrecorded!). I was on the way to the parking lot when the bulky folder undermy arm--replacing my arm, as it were--burst its string and spilled itscontents all over the gravel and grassy border. You were coming from thelibrary along the same campus path, and we crouched side by side collectingthe stuff. You were pained you said later (zhalostno bylo) to smell theliquor on my breath. On the breath of that great writer.

I say "you" retroconsciously, although in the logic of life you werenot "you" yet, for we were not actually acquainted and you were to becomereally "you" only when you said, catching a slip of yellow paper that wasavailing itself of a bluster to glide away with false insouciance:

"No, you don't." <225>

Crouching, smiling, you helped me to cram everything again into thefolder and then asked me how my daughter was--she and you had beenschoolmates some fifteen years ago, and my wife had given you a lift severaltimes. I then remembered your name and in a photic flash of celestial colorsaw you and Bel looking like twins, silently hating each other, both in bluecoats and white hats, waiting to be driven somewhere by Louise. Bel and youwould both be twenty-eight on January 1, 1970.

A yellow butterfly settled briefly on a clover head, then wheeled awayin the wind.

"Metamorphoza," you said in your lovely, elegant Russian.

Would I care to have some snapshots (additional snapshots) of Bel? Belfeeding a chipmunk? Bel at the school dance? (Oh, I remember that dance--shehad chosen for escort a sad fat Hungarian boy whose father was assistantmanager of the Quilton Hotel--I can still hear Louise snorting!)

We met next morning in my carrel at the College Library, and after thatI continued to see you every day. I will not suggest, LATH is not meant tosuggest, that the petals and plumes of my previous loves are dulled orcoarsened when directly contrasted with the purity of your being, the magic,the pride, the reality of your radiance. Yet "reality" is the key word here;and the gradual perception of that reality was nearly fatal to me.

Reality would be only adulterated if I now started to narrate what youknow, what I know, what nobody else knows, what shall never, never beferreted out by a matter-of-fact, father-of-muck, mucking biograffitist. Andhow did your affair develop, Mr. Blong? Shut up, Ham Godman! And when didyou decide to leave together for Europe? Damn you, Ham!

See under Real, my first novel in English, thirty-five years ago! <226>

One little item of subhuman interest I can disclose, however, in thisinterview with posterity. It is a foolish, embarrassing trifle and I nevertold you about it, so here goes. It was on the eve of our departure, aroundMarch 15, 1970, in a New York hotel. You were out shopping. ("I think"--yousaid to me just now when I tried to check that detail without telling youwhy--"I think I bought a beautiful blue suitcase with a zipper"--miming theword with a little movement of your dear delicate hand--"which proved to beabsolutely useless.") I stood before the closet mirror of my bedroom in thenorth end of our pretty "suite," and proceeded to take a final decision. Allright, I could not live without you; but was I worthy of you--I mean, inbody and spirit? I was forty-three years older than you. The Frown of Age,two deep lines forming a capital lambda, ascended between my eyebrows. Myforehead, with its three horizontal wrinkles that had not reallyoverasserted themselves in the last three decades, remained round, ample andsmooth, waiting for the summer tan that would scumble, I knew, the liverspots on my temples. All in all, a brow to be enfolded and fondled. Athorough haircut had done away with the leonine locks; what remained was ofa neutral, grayish-dun tint. My large handsome glasses magnified the senilegroup of wart-like little excrescences under each lower eyelid. The eyes,once an irresistible hazel-green, were now oysterous. The nose, inheritedfrom a succession of Russian boyars, German barons, and, perhaps (if CountStarov who sported some English blood was my real father), at least one Peerof the Realm, had retained its bone hump and tip rime, but had developed onthe frontal flesh, within its owner's memory, an aggravating gray hairletthat grew faster and faster between yanks. My dentures did not do justice tomy former attractively irregular teeth and (as I told an expensive butobtuse dentist who did not understand what I meant) "seemed to ignore mysmile." A furrow sloped <227> down from each nosewing, and a jowl pouch oneach side of my chin formed in three-quarter-face the banal flexure commonto old men of all races, classes, and professions. I doubted that I had beenright in shaving off my glorious beard and the trim mustache that hadlingered, on try, for a week or so after my return from Leningrad. Still, Ipassed my face, giving it a C-minus mark.

Since I had never been much of an athlete, the deterioration of my bodywas neither very marked, nor very interesting. I gave it a C plus, mainlyfor my routing tank after tank of belly fat in a war with obesity wagedbetween intervals of retreat and rest since the middle Fifties. Apart fromincipient lunacy (a problem with which I prefer to deal separately), I hadbeen in excellent health throughout adulthood.

What about the state of my art? What could I offer to you there? Youhad studied, as I hope you recall, Turgenev in Oxford and Bergson in Geneva,but thanks to family ties with good old Quirn and Russian New York (where alast émigré periodical was still deploring, with idiotic innuendoes, my"apostasy") you had followed pretty closely, as I discovered, the processionof my Russian and English harlequins, followed by a tiger or two,scarlet-tongued, and a libellula girl on an elephant. You had also studiedthose obsolete photocopies--which proved that my method avait du bon afterall--pace the monstrous accusations leveled at them by a pack of professorsin envious colleges.

As I peered, stripped naked and traversed by opaline rays, intoanother, far deeper mirror, I saw the whole vista of my Russian books andwas satisfied and even thrilled by what I saw: Tamara, my first novel(1925): a girl at sunrise in the mist of an orchard. A grandmaster betrayedin Pawn Takes Queen. Plenilune, a moonburst of verse. Camera Lucida, thespy's mocking eye among the meek blind. The Red Top Hat of decapitation in acountry <228> of total injustice. And my best in the series: young poetwrites prose on a Dare.

That Russian batch of my books was finished and signed and thrust backinto the mind that had produced them. All of them had been graduallytranslated into English either by myself or under my direction, with myrevisions. Those final English versions as well as the reprinted originalswould be now dedicated to you. That was good. That was settled. Nextpicture:

My English originals, headed by the fierce See under Real (1940), ledthrough the changing light of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus, to the fun of Dr.Olga Repnin and the dream of A Kingdom by the Sea. There was also thecollection of short stories Exile from Mayda) a distant island; and Ardis,the work I had resumed at the time we met--at the time, too, of a deluge ofpostcards (postcards!) from Louise hinting at last at a move which I wantedher to be the first to make.

If I estimated the second batch at a lower value than the first, it wasowing not only to a diffidence some will call coy, others, commendable, andmyself, tragic, but also because the contours of my American productionlooked blurry to me; and they looked that way because I knew I would alwayskeep hoping that my next book--not simply the one in progress, likeArdis--but something I had never attempted yet, something miraculous andunique, would at last answer fully the craving, the aching thirst that a fewdisjunct paragraphs in Esmeralda and The Kingdom were insufficient toquench. I believed I could count on your patience. <229>2

I had not the slightest desire to reimburse Louise for being forced toshed me; and I hesitated to embarrass her by supplying my lawyer with thelist of her betrayals. They were stupid and sordid, and went back to thedays when I still was reasonably faithful to her. The "divorce dialogue," asHorace Peppermill, Junior, horribly called it, dragged on during the entirespring: You and I spent part of it in London and the rest in Taormina, and Ikept putting off talks of our marriage (a delay you regarded with royalindifference). What really bothered me was having also to postpone thetedious statement (to be repeated for the fourth time in my life) that wouldhave to precede any such talks. I fumed. It was a shame to leave you in thedark regarding my derangement.

Coincidence, the angel with the eyed wings mentioned before, spared methe humiliating rigmarole that I had found necessary to go through beforeproposing to each of my former wives. On June 15, at Gandora, in the Tessin,I received a letter from young Horace giving me excellent news: Louise haddiscovered (how does not matter) that at various periods of our marriage Ihad had her shadowed, in all sorts of fascinating old cities, by a privatedetective (Dick Cockburn, a staunch friend of mine); that the tapes <230> oflove calls and other documents were in my lawyer's hands; and that she wasready to make every possible concession to speed up matters, being anxiousto marry again--this time the son of an Earl. And on the same fatidic day,at a quarter past five in the afternoon, I finished transcribing on 733medium-sized Bristol cards (each holding about 100 words), with afine-nibbed pen and in my smallest fair-copy hand, Ardis, a stylized memoirdealing with the arbored boyhood and ardent youth of a great thinker who bythe end of the book tackles the itchiest of all noumenal mysteries. One ofthe early chapters contained an account (couched in an overtly personal,intolerably tortured tone) of my own tussles with the Specter of Space andthe myth of Cardinal Points.

By 5:30 I had consumed, in a fit of private celebration, most of thecaviar and all the champagne in the friendly fridge of our bungalow on thegreen grounds of the Gandora Palace Hotel. I found you on the veranda andtold you I would like you to devote the next hour to reading attentively--

"I read everything attentively."

"--this batch of thirty cards from Ardis" After which I thought youmight meet me somewhere on my way back from my late-afternoon stroll: alwaysthe same--to the spartitraffico fountain (ten minutes) and thence to theedge of a pine plantation (another ten minutes). I left you reclining in alounge chair with the sun reproducing the amethyst lozenges of the verandawindows on the floor, and barring your bare shins and the insteps of yourcrossed feet (right toe twitching now and then in some obscure connectionwith the tempo of assimilation or a twist in the text). In a matter ofminutes you would have learned (as only Iris had learned before you--theothers were no eaglesses) what I wished you to be aware of when consentingto be my wife. "Careful, please, when you cross," you said, without <231>raising your eyes but then looking up and tenderly pursing your lips beforegoing back to Ardis.

Ha! Weaving a little! Was that really I, Prince Vadim Blonsky, who in1815 could have outdrunk Pushkin's mentor, Kaverin? In the golden light of amere quart of the stuff all the trees in the hotel park looked likearaucarias. I congratulated myself on the neatness of my stratagem thoughnot quite knowing whether it concerned my third wife's recorded frolics orthe disclosure of my infirmity through a bloke in a book. Little by littlethe soft spicy air did me good: my soles clung more firmly to gravel andsand, clay and stone. I became aware that I had gone out wearing moroccoslippers and a torn, bleached denim trousers-and-top with, paradoxically, mypassport in one nipple pocket and a wad of Swiss bank notes in the other.Local people in Gandino or Gandora, or whatever the town was called, knewthe face of the author of Un regno sul mare or Ein Kжnigreich an der See orUn Royaume au Bord de la Mer, so it would have been really fatuous on mypart to prepare the cue and the cud for the reader in case a car was reallyto hit me.

Soon I was feeling so happy and bright that when I passed by thesidewalk cafe just before reaching the square, it seemed a good idea tostabilize the fizz still ascending in me by means of a jigger ofsomething--and yet I demurred, and passed by, cold-eyed, knowing howsweetly, yet firmly, you disapproved of the most innocent tippling.

One of the streets projecting west beyond the traffic island traversedthe Corso Orsini and immediately afterwards, as if having achieved anexhausting feat, degenerated into a soft dusty old road with traces ofgramineous growth on both sides, but none of pavement.

I could say what I do not remember having been moved to say in years,namely: My happiness was complete. As I walked, I read those cards with you,at your pace, your <232> diaphanous index at my rough peeling temple, mywrinkled finger at your turquoise temple-vein. I caressed the facets of theBlackwing pencil you kept gently twirling, I felt against my raised kneesthe fifty-year-old folded chessboard, Nikifor Starov's gift (most of thenoblemen were badly chipped in their baize-lined mahogany box!), propped onyour skirt with its pattern of irises. My eyes moved with yours, my pencilqueried with your own faint little cross in the narrow margin a solecism Icould not distinguish through the tears of space. Happy tears, radiant,shamelessly happy tears!

A goggled imbecile on a motorcycle who I thought had seen me and wouldslow down to let me cross Corso Orsini in peace swerved so clumsily to avoidkilling me that he skidded and ended up facing me some way off after anignominious wobble. I ignored his roar of hate and continued my steadystroll westward in the changed surroundings I have already mentioned. Thepractically rural old road crept between modest villas, each in its nest oftall flowers and spreading trees. A rectangle of cardboard on one of thewest-side wickets said "Rooms" in German; on the opposite side an old pinesupported a sign "For Sale" in Italian. Again on the left, a moresophisticated houseowner offered "Lunchings." Still fairly far was the greenvista of the pineta.

My thoughts reverted to Ardis. I knew that the bizarre mental flaw youwere now reading about would pain you; I also knew that its display was amere formality on my part and could not obstruct the natural flow of ourcommon fate. A gentlemanly gesture. In fact, it might compensate for whatyou did not yet know, what I would have to tell you too, what I suspectedyou would call the not quite savory little method (gnusnovaten'kiy sposob)of my "getting even" with Louise. All right--but what about Ardis? Apartfrom my warped mind, did you like it or loathe it? <233>

Composing, as I do, whole books in my mind before releasing the innerword and taking it down in pencil or pen, I find that the final text remainsfor a while committed to memory, as distinct and perfect as the floatingimprint that a light bulb leaves on the retina. I was able therefore torerun the actual images of those cards you read: they were projected on thescreen of my fancy together with the gleam of your topaz ring and the beatof your eyelashes, and I could calculate how far you had read not simply byconsulting my watch but by actually following one line after the other tothe right-hand brink of each card. The lucidity of the image was correlatedwith the quality of the writing. You knew my work too well to be ruffled bya too robust erotic detail, or annoyed by a too recondite literary allusion.It was bliss reading Ardis with you that way, triumphing that way over thestretch of colored space separating my lane from your lounge chair. Was I anexcellent writer? I was an excellent writer. That avenue of statues andlilacs where Ada and I drew our first circles on the dappled sand wasvisualized and re-created by an artist of lasting worth. The hideoussuspicion that even Ardis, my most private book, soaked in reality,saturated with sun flecks, might be an unconscious imitation of another'sunearthly art, that suspicion might come later; at the moment--6:18 P.M. onJune 15, 1970, in the Tessin--nothing could scratch the rich humid gloss ofmy happiness.

I was now reaching the end of my usual preprandial walk. The ra-ta-ta,ta-ta, tac of a typist's finishing a last page came from a window throughmotionless foliage, reminding me pleasantly that I had long since eschewedthe long labor of having my immaculate manuscripts typed when they could bereproduced photographically in one hum. It was now the publisher who borethe brunt of having my hand transformed directly into printed characters,and I know he disliked the procedure as a well-bred <234> entomologist mayfind revolting an irregular insect's skipping some generally accepted stageof metamorphosis.

Only a few steps--twelve, eleven--remained before I would start to walkback: I felt you were thinking of this in a reversal of distant perception,just as I felt a kind of mental loosening, which told me you had finishedreading those thirty cards, placed them in their proper order, tidied thestack by knocking its base slightly against the table, found the elasticlying there in the assumed shape of a heart, banded the batch, carried it tothe safety of my desk, and were now preparing to meet me on my way back toGandora Palace.

A low wall of gray stone, waist-high, paunch-thick, built in thegeneral shape of a transversal parapet, put an end to whatever life the roadstill had as a town street. A narrow passage for pedestrians and cyclistsdivided the parapet in the middle, and the width of that gap was preservedbeyond it in a path which after a flick or two slithered into a fairly denseyoung pinewood. You and I had rambled there many times on gray mornings,when lakeside or poolside lost all attraction; but that evening, as usual, Iterminated my stroll at the parapet, and stood in perfect repose, facing thelow sun, my spread hands enjoying the smoothness of its top edge on bothsides of the passage. A tactile something, or the recent ra-ta-tac, broughtback and completed the image of my 733, twelve centimers by ten-and-a-halfBristol cards, which you would read chapter by chapter whereupon a greatpleasure, a parapet of pleasure, would perfect my task: in my mind therearose, endowed with the clean-cut compactness of some great solid--an altar!a mesa!--the image of the shiny photocopier in one of the offices of ourhotel. My trustful hands were still spread, but my soles no longer sensedthe soft soil. I wished to go back to you, to life, to the amethystlozenges, to the pencil lying on the veranda table, and I could not. Whatused to happen so often in thought, now <235> had happened for keeps: Icould not turn. To make that movement would mean rolling the world around onits axis and that was as impossible as traveling back physically from thepresent moment to the previous one. Maybe I should not have panicked, shouldhave waited quietly for the stone of my limbs to regain some tingle offlesh. Instead, I performed, or imagined performing, a wild wrenchingmovement--and the globe did not bulge. I must have hung in a spread-eagleposition for a little while longer before ending supine on the intangiblesoil. <236>

PART SEVEN

<237> <238>1

There exists an old rule--so old and trite that I blush to mention it.Let me twist it into a jingle--to stylize the staleness:

The I of the book

Cannot die in the book.

I am speaking of serious novels, naturally. In so-calledPlanchette-Fiction the unruffled narrator, after describing his owndissolution, can continue thus: "I found myself standing on a staircase ofonyx before a great gate of gold in a crowd of other bald-headed angels..."

Cartoon stuff, folklore rubbish, hilarious atavistic respect forprecious minerals!

And yet--

And yet I feel that during three weeks of general paresis (if that iswhat it was) I have gained some experience; that when my night really comesI shall not be totally unprepared. Problems of identity have been, if notsettled, at least set. Artistic insights have been granted. I was allowed totake my palette with me to very remote reaches of dim and dubious being.

Speed! If I could have given my definition of death to <239> thestunned fisherman, to the mower who stopped wiping his scythe with a handfulof grass, to the cyclist embracing in terror a willow sapling on one greenbank and actually getting up to the top of a taller tree on the oppositeside with his machine and girlfriend, to the black horses gaping at me likepeople with trick dentures all through my strange skimming progress, I wouldhave cried one word: Speed! Not that those rural witnesses ever existed. Myimpression of prodigious, inexplicable, and to tell the truth rather sillyand degrading speed (death is silly, death is degrading) would have beenconveyed to a perfect void, without one fisherman tearing by, without oneblade of grass bloodied by his catch, without any reference mark altogether.Imagine me, an old gentleman, a distinguished author, gliding rapidly on myback, in the wake of my outstretched dead feet, first through that gap inthe granite, then over a pinewood, then along misty water meadows, and thensimply between marges of mist, on and on, imagine that sight!

Madness had been lying in wait for me behind this or that alder orboulder since infancy. I got used by degrees to feeling the sepia stare ofthose watchful eyes as they moved smoothly along the line of my passage. YetI have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen italso as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence ofan immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.

For practical purposes, such as keeping body-mind and mind-body in astate of ordinary balance, so as not to imperil one's life or become aburden to friends or governments, I preferred the latent variety, theawfulness of that watchful thing that meant at best the stab of neuralgia,the distress of insomnia, the battle with inanimate things which have neverdisguised their hatred of me (the runaway button which condescends to belocated, the paper clip, a thievish slave, not content to hold a couple ofhumdrum <240> letters, but managing to catch a precious leaf from anotherbatch), and at worst a sudden spasm of space as when the visit to one'sdentist turns into a burlesque party. I preferred the muddle of such attacksto the motley of madness which, after pretending to adorn my existence withspecial forms of inspiration, mental ecstasy, and so forth, would stopdancing and flitting around me and would pounce upon me, and cripple me, andfor all I know destroy me. <241>2

At the start of the great seizure, I must have been totallyincapacitated, from top to toe, while my mind, the images racing through me,the tang of thought, the genius of insomnia, remained as strong and activeas ever (except for the blots in between). By the time I had been flown tothe Lecouchant Hospital in coastal France, highly recommended by Dr. Genfer,a Swiss relative of its director, I became aware of certain curious details:from the head down I was paralyzed in symmetrical patches separated by ageography of weak tactility. When in the course of that first week myfingers "awoke" (a circumstance that stupefied and even angered theLecouchant sages, experts in dementia paralydea, to such a degree that theyadvised you to rush me off to some more exotic and broadmindedinstitution---which you did) I derived much entertainment from mapping mysensitive spots which were always situated in exact opposition, e.g. on bothsides of my forehead, on the jaws, orbital parts, breasts, testicles, knees,flanks. At an average stage of observation, the average size of each spot oflife never exceeded that of Australia (I felt gigantic at times) and neverdwindled (when I dwindled myself) below the diameter of a medal of mediummerit, at which <242> level I perceived my entire skin as that of a leopardpainted by a meticulous lunatic from a broken home.

In some connection with those "tactile symmetries" (about which I amstill attempting to correspond with a not too responsive medical journal,swarming with Freudians), I would like to place the first pictorialcompositions, flat, primitive images, which occurred in duplicate, right andleft of my traveling body, on the opposite panels of my hallucinations. If,for example, Annette boarded a bus with her empty basket on the left of mybeing, she came out of that bus on my right with a load of vegetables, aroyal cauliflower presiding over the cucumbers. As the days passed, thesymmetries got replaced by more elaborate inter-responses, or reappeared inminiature within the limits of a given image. Picturesque episodes nowaccompanied my mysterious voyage. I glimpsed Bel rummaging after work amidsta heap of naked babies at the communal day-nursery, in frantic search forher own firstborn, now ten months old, and recognizable by the symmetricalblotches of red eczema on its sides and little legs. A glossy-haunchedswimmer used one hand to brush away from her face wet strands of hair, andpushed with the other (on the other side of my mind) the raft on which Ilay, a naked old man with a rag around his foremast, gliding supine into afull moon whose snaky reflections rippled among the water lilies. A longtunnel engulfed me, half-promised a circlet of light at its far end,half-kept the promise, revealing a publicity sunset, but I never reached it,the tunnel faded, and a familiar mist took over again. As was "done" thatseason, groups of smart idlers visited my bed, which had slowed down in adisplay hall where Ivor Black in the role of a fashionable young doctordemonstrated me to three actresses playing society belles: their skirtsballooned as they settled down on white chairs, and one lady, indicating mygroin, would have touched me with her cold fan, had <243> not the learnedMoor struck it aside with his ivory pointer, whereupon my raft resumed itslone glide.

Whoever charted my destiny had moments of triteness. At times my swiftcourse became a celestial affair at an allegorical altitude that boreunpleasant religious connotations--unless simply reflecting transportationof cadavers by commercial aircraft. A certain notion of daytime andnighttime, in more or less regular alternation, gradually established itselfin my mind as my grotesque adventure reached its final phase. Diurnal andnocturnal effects were rendered obliquely at first with nurses and otherstagehands going to extreme lengths in the handling of movable properties,such as the bouncing of fake starlight from reflecting surfaces or thedaubing of dawns here and there at suitable intervals. It had never occurredto me before that, historically, art, or at least artifacts, had preceded,not followed, nature; yet that is exactly what happened in my case. Thus, inthe mute remoteness clouding around me, recognizable sounds were produced atfirst optically in the pale margin of the film track during the taking ofthe actual scene (say, the ceremony of scientific feeding); eventuallysomething about the running ribbon tempted the ear to replace the eye; andfinally hearing returned--with a vengeance. The first crisp nurse-rustle wasa thunderclap; my first belly wamble, a crash of cymbals.

I owe thwarted obituarists, as well as all lovers of medical lore, someclinical elucidations. My lungs and my heart acted, or were induced to act,normally; so did my bowels, those buffoons in the cast of our privatemiracle plays. My frame lay flat as in an Old Master's Lesson of Anatomy.The prevention of bedsores, especially at the Lecouchant Hospital, wasnothing short of a mania, explicable, maybe, by a desperate urge tosubstitute pillows and various mechanical devices for the rational treatmentof an unfathomable disease. My body was "sleeping" as a giant's foot mightbe "sleeping"; more accurately, however, <244> my condition was a horribleform of protracted (twenty nights!) insomnia with my mind as consistentlyalert as that of the Sleepless Slav in some circus show I once read about inThe Graphic. I was not even a mummy; I was--in the beginning, at least--thelongitudinal section of a mummy, or rather the abstraction of its thinnestpossible cut. What about the head?--readers who are all head must beclamoring to be told. Well, my brow was like misty glass (before two lateralspots got cleared somehow or other); my mouth stayed mute and benumbed untilI realized I could feel my tongue--feel it in the phantom form of the kindof air bladder that might help a fish with his respiration problems, but wasuseless to me. I had some sense of duration and direction--two things whicha beloved creature seeking to help a poor madman with the whitest of lies,affirmed, in a later world, were quite separate phases of a singlephenomenon. Most of my cerebral aqueduct (this is getting a littletechnical) seemed to descend wedgewise, after some derailment or inundation,into the structure housing its closest ally--which oddly enough is also ourhumblest sense, the easiest and sometimes the most gratifying to dispensewith--and, oh, how I cursed it when I could not close it to ether orexcrements, and, oh (cheers for old "oh"), how I thanked it for crying"Coffee!" or "Plage!" (because an anonymous drug smelled like the cream Irisused to rub my back with in Cannice half a century ago!).

Now comes a snaggy bit: I do not know if my eyes remained always wideopen "in a glazed look of arrogant stupor" as imagined by a reporter who gotas far as the corridor desk. But I doubt very much I could blink--andwithout the oil of blinking the motor of sight could hardly have run. Yet,somehow, during my glide down those illusory canals and cloudways, and rightover another continent, I did glimpse off and on, through subpalpebralmirages, the shadow of a hand or the glint of an instrument. <245> As to myworld of sound, it remained solid fantasy. I heard strangers discuss indroning voices all the books I had written or thought I had written, foreverything they mentioned, titles, the names of characters, every phrasethey shouted was preposterously distorted by the delirium of demonicscholarship. Louise regaled the company with one of her good stories--thoseI called "name hangers" because they only seemed to reach this or thatpoint--a quid pro quo, say, at a party--but were really meant to introducesome high-born "old friend" of hers, or a glamorous politician, or a cousinof that politician. Learned papers were read at fantastic symposiums. In theyear of grace 1798, Gavrila Petrovich Kamenev, a gifted young poet, washeard chuckling as he composed his Ossianic pastiche Slovo o polku Igoreve.Somewhere in Abyssinia drunken Rimbaud was reciting to a surprised Russiantraveler the poem Le Tramway ivre (...En blouse rouge, ю face en pis devache, le bourreau me trancha la tйte aussi...). Or else I'd hear thepressed repeater hiss in a pocket of my brain and tell the time, the rime,the meter that who could dream I'd hear again?

I should also point out that my flesh was in fairly good shape: noligaments torn, no muscles trapped; my spinal cord may have been slightlybruised during the absurd collapse that precipitated my voyage but it wasstill there, lining me, shading my being, as good as the primitive structureof some translucent aquatic creature. Yet the medical treatment I wassubjected to (especially at the Lecouchant place) implied--insofar as nowreconstructed--that my injuries were all physical, only physical, and couldbe only dealt with by physical means. I am not speaking of modern alchemy,of magic philtres injected into me--those did, perhaps, act somehow, notonly on my body, but also on the divinity installed within me, as might thesuggestions of ambitious shamans or quaking councilors upon a mad emperor;what I cannot get over are such imprinted images <246> as the damned bracesand belts that held me stretched on my back (preventing me from walking awaywith my rubber raft under my arm as I felt I could), or even worse theman-made electric leeches, which masked executioners attached to my head andlimbs--until chased away by that saint in Catapult, Cal., Professor H. P.Sloan, who was on the brink of suspecting, just when I started to get well,that I might be cured--might have been cured!--in a trice by hypnosis andsome sense of humor on the hypnotist's part. <247>3

To the best of my knowledge my Christian name was Vadim; so was myfather's. The U.S.A. passport recently issued me--an elegant booklet with agolden design on its green cover perforated by the number 00678638--did notmention my ancestral title; this had figured, though, on my Britishpassport, throughout its several editions. Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, beforethe last one was mutilated beyond recognition by friendly forgers, practicaljokers at heart. All this I re-gleaned one night, as certain brain cells,which had been frozen, now bloomed anew. Others, however, still puckeredlike retarded buds, and although I could freely twiddle (for the first timesince I collapsed) my toes under the bedclothes, I just could not make outin that darker corner of my mind what surname came after my Russianpatronymic. I felt it began with an N, as did the term for the beautifullyspontaneous arrangement of words at moments of inspiration like the rouleauxof red corpuscles in freshly drawn blood under the microscope--a word I onceused in See under Real, but could not remember either, something to do witha roll of coins, capitalistic metaphor, eh, Marxy? Yes, I definitely felt myfamily name began with an N and bore an odious resemblance to the surname orpseudonym of a presumably <248> notorious (Notorov? No) Bulgarian, orBabylonian, or, maybe, Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained émigrésfrom some other galaxy constantly confused me; but whether it was somethingon the lines of Nebesnyy or Nabedrin or Nablidze (Nablidze? Funny) I simplycould not tell. I preferred not to overtax my willpower (go away,Naborcroft) and so gave up trying--or perhaps it began with a B and the njust clung to it like some desperate parasite? (Bonidze? Blonsky?--No, thatbelonged to the BINT business.) Did I have some princely Caucasian blood?Why had allusions to a Mr. Nabarro, a British politician, cropped up amongthe clippings I received from England concerning the London edition of AKingdom by the Sea (lovely lilting title)? Why did Ivor call me "MacNab"?

Without a name I remained unreal in regained consciousness. PoorVivian, poor Vadim Vadimovich, was but a figment of somebody's--not even myown--imagination. One dire detail: in rapid Russian speech longishname-and-patronymic combinations undergo familiar slurrings: thus "PavelPavlovich," Paul, son of Paul, when casually interpellated is made to soundlike "Pahlpahlych" and the hardly utterable, tapeworm-long "VladimirVladimirovich" becomes colloquially similar to "Vadim Vadimych."

I gave up. And when I gave up for good my sonorous surname crept upfrom behind, like a prankish child that makes a nodding old nurse jump athis sudden shout.

There remained other problems. Where was I? What about a little light?How did one tell by touch a lamp's button from a bell's button in the dark.What was, apart from my own identity, that other person, promised to me,belonging to me? I could locate the bluish blinds of twin windows. Why notuncurtain them?

Tak, vdol' naklсnnogo luchа

Ya vщshel iz paralichа.

<249>

Along a slanting ray, like this

I slipped out of paralysis.--if "paralysis" is not too strong a word for the condition that mimicked it(with some obscure help from the patient): a rather quaint but not tooserious psychological disorder--or at least so it seemed in lightheartedretrospect.

I was prepared by certain indices for spells of dizziness and nauseabut I did not expect my legs to misbehave as they did, when--unbuckled andalone--I blithely stepped out of bed on that first night of recovery.Beastly gravity humiliated me at once: my legs telescoped under me. Thecrash brought in the night nurse, and she helped me back into bed. Afterthat I slept. Never before or since did I sleep more deliciously.

One of the windows was wide open when I woke up. My mind and my eyewere by now sufficiently keen to make out the medicaments on my bedsidetable. Amidst its miserable population I noticed a few stranded travelersfrom another world: a transparent envelope with a nonmasculine handkerchieffound and laundered by the staff; a diminutive golden pencil belonging tothe eyelet of a congeric agenda in a vanity bag; a pair of harlequinsunglasses, which for some reason suggested not protection from a harshlight but the masking of tear-swollen lids. The combination of thoseingredients resulted in a dazzling pyrotechny of sense; and next moment(coincidence was still on my side) the door of my room moved: a smallsoundless move that came to a brief soundless stop and then was continued ina slow, infinitely slow sequence of suspension dots in diamond type. Iemitted a bellow of joy, and Reality entered. <250>4

With the following gentle scene I propose to conclude thisautobiography. I had been wheeled into the rose-twined gallery for SpecialConvalescents in the second and last of my hospitals. You were reclining ina lounge chair beside me, in much the same attitude in which I had left youon June 15, at Gandora. You complained gaily that a woman in the room nextto yours on the ground floor of the annex had a phonograph playing bird-callrecords, by means of which she hoped to make the mockingbirds of thehospital park imitate the nightingales and thrushes of her place in Devon orDorset. You knew very well I wished to find out something. We both hedged. Idrew your attention to the beauty of the climbing roses. You said:"Everything is beautiful against the sky (na fone neba)" and apologized forthe "aphorism." At last, in the most casual of tones I asked how you hadliked the fragment of Ardis I gave you to read just before taking the littlewalk from which I had returned only now, three weeks later, in Catapult,California.

You looked away. You considered the mauve mountains. You cleared yourthroat and bravely replied that you had not liked it at all.

Meaning she would not marry a madman? <251>

Meaning she would marry a sane man who could tell the differencebetween time and space.

Explain.

She was awfully eager to read the rest of the manuscript, but thatfragment ought to be scrapped. It was written as nicely as everything Iwrote but happened to be marred by a fatal philosophical flaw.

Young, graceful, tremendously charming, hopelessly homely Mary Middlecame to say I would have to be back when the bell tinkled for tea. In fiveminutes. Another nurse signaled to her from the sun-striped end of thegallery, and she fluttered away.

The place (you said) was full of dying American bankers and perfectlyhealthy Englishmen. I had described a person in the act of imagining hisrecent evening stroll. A stroll from point H (Home, Hotel) to point P(Parapet, Pinewood). Imagining fluently the sequence of waysideevents--child swinging in villa garden, lawn sprinkler rotating, dog chasinga wet ball. The narrator reaches point P in his mind, stops--and is puzzledand upset (quite unreasonably as we shall see) by being unable to executementally the about-face that would turn direction HP into direction PH.

"His mistake," she continued, "his morbid mistake is quite simple. Hehas confused direction and duration. He speaks of space but he means time.His impressions along the HP route (dog overtakes ball, car pulls up at nextvilla) refer to a series of time events, and not to blocks of painted spacethat a child can rearrange in any old way. It has taken him time--even ifonly a few moments--to cover distance HP in thought. By the time he reachesP he has accumulated duration, he is saddled with it! Why then is it soextraordinary that he cannot imagine himself turning on his heel? Nobody canimagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time isnot reversible. <252> Reverse motion is used in films only for comiceffects--the resurrection of a smashed bottle of beer--

"Or rum," I put in, and here the bell tinkled.

"That's all very well," I said, as I groped for the levers of mywheelchair, and you helped me to roll back to my room. "And I'm grateful,I'm touched, I'm cured! Your explanation, however, is merely an exquisitequibble--and you know it; but never mind, the notion of trying to twirl timeis a trouvaille; it resembles (kissing the hand resting on my sleeve) theneat formula a physicist finds to keep people happy until (yawning, crawlingback into bed) until the next chap snatches the chalk. I had been promisedsome rum with my tea--Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands (mumblingcomfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away)--"

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