The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 17

Realizing yet again that he would not hear the hoped-for words, and trying to concentrate his thoughts on the fact that, after all, it was to him and not Neverov that the aspiring author had been brought for an opinion, Novodvortsev repositioned his legs, inserted his other hand between them, said with a businesslike tone, "Now, then," and, with a glance at the vein that had swelled on Goliy's forehead, began speaking in a quiet, even voice. He said the story was solidly constructed, that one felt the power of the Collective in the place where the peasants start building a school with their own means, that, in the description of Pyotr's love for Anyuta there might be imperfections of style, but one heard the call of spring and of a wholesome l.u.s.t-and, all the while as he talked, he kept remembering for some reason how he had written recently to this same critic, to remind him that his twenty-fifth anniversary as an author would fall in January, but that he emphatically requested that no festivities be organized, given that his years of dedicated work for the Union were not yet over....

"As for your intellectual, you didn't get him right," he was saying. "There is no real sense of his being doomed...."

The critic still said nothing. He was a red-haired man, skinny and decrepit, rumored to be ill with consumption, but in reality probably healthy as a bull. He had replied, also by letter, that he approved of Novodvortsev's decision, and that had been the end of it. He must have brought Goliy by way of secret compensation.... Novodvortsev suddenly felt so sad-not hurt, just sad-that he stopped short and started wiping his lenses with his handkerchief, revealing quite kindly eyes.

The critic rose. "Where are you off to? It's still early," said Novodvortsev, but he got up too. Anton Goliy cleared his throat and pressed his briefcase to his side.

"He will become a writer, there's no doubt about it," said the critic with indifference, roaming about the room and stabbing the air with his spent cigarette. Humming, with a raspy sound, through his teeth, he drooped over the desk, then stood for a time by an etagere where a respectable edition of Das Kapital dwelt between a tattered volume of Leonid Andreyev and a nameless tome with no binding; finally, with the same stooping gait, he approached the window and drew the blue blind aside.

"Drop in sometime," Novodvortsev was meanwhile saying to Anton Goliy, who bowed jerkily and then squared his shoulders with a swagger. "When you've written something more, bring it on over."

"Heavy snowfall," said the critic, releasing the blind. "By the way, today is Christmas Eve."

He began rummaging listlessly for his coat and hat.

"In the old days, on this date, you and your confreres would be churning out Christmas copy...."

"Not I," said Novodvortsev.

The critic chuckled. "Pity. You ought to do a Christmas story. New-style."

Anton Goliy coughed into his fist. "Back home we once had-" he began in a hoa.r.s.e ba.s.s, then cleared his throat again.

"I'm being serious," continued the critic, climbing into his coat. "One can devise something very clever.... Thanks, but it's already-"

"Back home," Anton Goliy said, "We once had. A teacher. Who. Took it into his head. To do a Christmas tree for the kids. On top he stuck. A red star."

"No, that won't quite do," said the critic. "It's a little heavy-handed for a small story. You can put a keener edge on it. Struggle between two different worlds. All against a snowy background."

"One should be careful with symbols generally," glumly said Novodvortsev. "Now I have a neighbor-upstanding man, party member, active militant, yet he uses expressions like 'Golgotha of the Proletariat.' ..."

When his guests had left he sat down at his desk and propped an ear on his thick, white hand. By the inkstand stood something akin to a square drinking gla.s.s with three pens stuck into a caviar of blue gla.s.s pellets. The object was some ten or fifteen years old-it had withstood every tumult, whole worlds had shaken apart around it-but not a single gla.s.s pellet had been lost. He selected a pen, moved a sheet of paper into place, tucked a few more sheets under it so as to write on a plumper surface....

"But what about?" Novodvortsev said out loud, then pushed his chair aside with his thigh and began pacing the room. There was an unbearable ringing in his left ear.

The scoundrel said it deliberately, he thought, and, as if following in the critic's recent footsteps, went to the window.

Presumes to advise me.... And that derisive tone of his.... Probably thinks I have no originality left in me.... I'll go and do a real Christmas story.... And he himself will recollect, in print: "I drop in on him one evening and, between one thing and another, happen to suggest, 'Dmitri Dmitrievich, you ought to depict the struggle between the old order and the new against a background of so-called Christmas snow. You could carry through to its conclusion the theme you traced so remarkably in "The Verge"-remember Tumanov's dream? That's the theme I mean....' And on that night was born the work which ..."

The window gave onto a courtyard. The moon was not visible.... No, on second thought, there is a sheen coming from behind a dark chimney over there. Firewood was stacked in the courtyard, covered with a sparkling carpet of snow. In a window glowed the green dome of a lamp-someone was working at his desk, and the abacus s.h.i.+mmered as if its beads were made of colored gla.s.s. Suddenly, in utter silence, some lumps of snow fell from the roof's edge. Then, again, a total torpor.

He felt the tickling vacuum that always accompanied the urge to write. In this vacuum something was taking shape, growing. A new, special kind of Christmas.... Same old snow, brand-new conflict....

He heard cautious footfalls through the wall. It was his neighbor coming home, a discreet, polite fellow, a Communist to the marrow of his bones. With an abstract rapture, a delicious expectation, Novodvortsev returned to his seat at the desk. The mood, the coloring of the developing work, was already there. He had only to create the skeleton, the subject. A Christmas tree-that's where he should start. In some homes, he imagined people who had formerly been somebody, people who were terrified, ill-tempered, doomed (he imagined them so clearly ...), who must surely be putting paper ornaments on a fir stealthily cut down in the woods. There was no place to buy that tinsel now, and they didn't heap fir trees in the shadow of Saint Isaac's any more....

Cus.h.i.+oned, as if bundled up in cloth, there came a knock. The door opened a couple of inches. Delicately, without poking in his head, the neighbor said, "May I bother you for a pen? A blunt one would be nice, if you have it."

Novodvortsev did.

"Thank you kindly," said the neighbor, soundlessly closing the door.

This insignificant interruption somehow weakened the image that had already been ripening. He recalled that, in "The Verge," Tumanov felt nostalgia for the pomp of former holidays. Mere repet.i.tion wouldn't do. Another recollection flashed inopportunely past. At a recent party some young woman had said to her husband, "In many ways you bear a strong resemblance to Tumanov." For a few days he felt very happy. But then he made the lady's acquaintance, and the Tumanov turned out to be her sister's fiance. Nor had that been the first disillusionment. One critic had told him he was going to write an article on "Tumanovism." There was something infinitely flattering about that "ism," and about the small t with which the word began in Russian. The critic, however, had left for the Caucasus to study the Georgian poets. Yet there had been pleasant occurrences as well. For instance, a list like "Gorky, Novodvortsev, Chirikov ..."

In an autobiography accompanying his complete works (six volumes with portrait of the author), he had described how he, the son of humble parents, had made his way in the world. His youth had, in reality, been happy. A healthy vigor, faith, successes. Twenty-five years had pa.s.sed since a plump journal had carried his first story. Korolenko had liked him. He had been arrested now and then. One newspaper had been closed down on his account. Now his civic aspirations had been fulfilled. Among beginning, younger writers he felt free and at ease. His new life suited him to a T. Six volumes. His name well known. But his fame was pallid, pallid....

He skipped back to the Christmas-tree image, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, remembered the parlor of a merchant family's house, a large volume of articles and poems with gilt-edged pages (a benefit edition for the poor) somehow connected with that house, the Christmas tree in the parlor, the woman he loved in those days, and all of the tree's lights reflected as a crystal quiver in her wide-open eyes when she plucked a tangerine from a high branch. It had been twenty years ago or more-how certain details stuck in one's memory....

He abandoned this recollection with chagrin and imagined once again the same old shabby fir trees that, at this very moment, were surely being decorated.... No story there, although of course one could give it a keener edge.... emigres weeping around a Christmas tree, decked out in their uniforms redolent of mothb.a.l.l.s, looking at the tree and weeping. Somewhere in Paris. Old general recalls how he used to smack his men in the teeth as he cuts an angel out of gilded cardboard.... He thought about a general whom he actually knew, who actually was abroad now, and there was no way he could picture him weeping as he knelt before a Christmas tree....

"I'm on the right track, though," Novodvortsev said aloud, impatiently pursuing some thought that had slipped away. Then something new and unexpected began to take shape in his fancy-a European city, a well-fed, fur-clad populace. A brightly lit store window. Behind it an enormous Christmas tree, with hams stacked at its base and expensive fruit affixed to its branches. Symbol of well-being. And in front of the window, on the frozen sidewalk- With triumphal agitation, sensing that he had found the necessary, one-and-only key, that he would write something exquisite, depict as no one had before the collision of two cla.s.ses, of two worlds, he commenced writing. He wrote about the opulent tree in the shamelessly illuminated window and about the hungry worker, victim of a lockout, peering at that tree with a severe and somber gaze.

"The insolent Christmas tree," wrote Novodvortsev, "was afire with every hue of the rainbow."

THE POTATO ELF.

1.

ACTUALLY his name was Frederic Dobson. To his friend the conjuror, he talked about himself thus: "There was no one in Bristol who didn't know Dobson the tailor for children's clothes. I am his son-and am proud of it out of sheer stubbornness. You should know that he drank like an old whale. Some time around 1900, a few months before I was born, my gin-soaked dad rigged up one of those waxwork cherubs, you know-sailor suit, with a lad's first long trousers-and put it in my mother's bed. It's a wonder the poor thing did not have a miscarriage. As you can well understand, I know all this only by hearsay-yet, if my kind informers were not liars, this is, apparently, the secret reason I am-"

And Fred Dobson, in a sad and good-natured gesture, would spread out his little hands. The conjuror, with his usual dreamy smile, would bend down, pick up Fred like a baby, and, sighing, place him on the top of a wardrobe, where the Potato Elf would meekly roll up and start to sneeze softly and whimper.

He was twenty, and weighed less than fifty pounds, being only a couple of inches taller than the famous Swiss dwarf, Zimmermann (dubbed "Prince Balthazar"). Like friend Zimmermann, Fred was extremely well built, and had there not been those wrinkles on his round forehead and at the corners of his narrowed eyes, as well as a rather eerie air of tension (as if he were resisting growth), our dwarf would have easily pa.s.sed for a gentle eight-year-old boy. His hair, the hue of damp straw, was sleeked down and evenly parted by a line which ran up the exact middle of his head to conclude a cunning agreement with its crown. Fred walked lightly, had an easy demeanor, and danced rather well, but his very first manager deemed it wise to weight the notion of "elf" with a comic epithet upon noticing the fat nose inherited by the dwarf from his plethoric and naughty father.

The Potato Elf, by his sole aspect, aroused a storm of applause and laughter throughout England, and then in the main cities of the Continent. He differed from most dwarfs in being of a mild and friendly nature. He became greatly attached to the miniature pony Snowdrop, on which he trotted diligently around the arena of a Dutch circus; and, in Vienna, he conquered the heart of a stupid and glum giant hailing from Omsk by stretching up to him the first time he saw him and pleading like an infant to be taken up in Nurse's arms.

He usually performed not alone. In Vienna, for example, he appeared with the Russian giant and minced around him, neatly attired in striped trousers and a smart jacket, with a voluminous roll of music under his arm. He brought the giant's guitar. The giant stood like a tremendous statue and took the instrument with the motions of an automaton. A long frock coat that looked carved out of ebony, elevated heels, and a top hat with a sheen of columnar reflections increased the height of the stately three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Siberian. Thrusting out his powerful jaw, he beat the strings with one finger. Backstage, in womanish tones, he complained of giddiness. Fred grew very fond of him and even shed a few tears at the moment of separation, for he rapidly became accustomed to people. His life, like a circus horse's, went round and round with smooth monotony. One day in the dark of the wings, he tripped over a bucket of house paint and mellowly plopped into it-an occurrence he kept recalling for quite a long while as something out of the ordinary.

In this way the dwarf traveled around most of Europe, and saved money, and sang with a castrato-like silvery voice, and in German variety theaters the audience ate thick sandwiches and candied nuts on sticks, and in Spanish ones, sugared violets and also nuts on sticks. The world was invisible to him. There remained in his memory the same faceless abyss laughing at him, and afterwards, when the performance was over, the soft, dreamy echo of a cool night that seems of such a deep blue when you leave the theater.

Upon returning to London he found a new partner in the person of Shock, the conjuror. Shock had a tuneful delivery, slender, pale, virtually ethereal hands, and a lick of chestnut-brown hair that came down on one eyebrow. He resembled a poet more than a stage magician, and demonstrated his skill with a sort of tender and graceful melancholy, without the fussy patter characteristic of his profession. The Potato Elf a.s.sisted him amusingly and, at the end of the act, would turn up in the gallery with a cooing exclamation of joy, although a minute before everyone had seen Shock lock him up in a black box right in the middle of the stage.

All this happened in one of those London theaters where there are acrobats soaring in the tinkle-and-s.h.i.+ver of the trapezes, and a foreign tenor (a failure in his own country) singing barcaroles, and a ventriloquist in naval uniform, and bicyclists, and the inevitable clown-eccentric shuffling about in a minuscule hat and a waistcoat coming down to his knees.

2.

Latterly Fred had been growing gloomy, and sneezing a lot, soundlessly and sadly, like a little j.a.panese spaniel. While not experiencing for months any hankering after a woman, the virginal dwarf would be beset now and then by sharp pangs of lone amorous anguish which went as suddenly as they came, and again, for a while, he would ignore the bare shoulders showing white beyond the velvet boundary of loges, as well as the little girl acrobats, or the Spanish dancer whose sleek thighs were revealed for a moment when the orange-red curly fluff of her nether flounces would whip up in the course of a rapid swirl.

"What you need is a female dwarf," said Shock pensively, producing with a familiar flick of finger and thumb a silver coin from the ear of the dwarf, whose little arm went up in a brus.h.i.+ng-away curve as if chasing a fly.

That same night, as Fred, after his number, snuffling and grumbling, in bowler and tiny topcoat, was toddling along a dim backstage pa.s.sage, a door came ajar with a sudden splash of gay light and two voices called him in. It was Zita and Arabella, sister acrobats, both half-undressed, suntanned, black-haired, with elongated blue eyes. A s.h.i.+mmer of theatrical disorder and the fragrance of lotions filled the room. The dressing table was littered with powder puffs, combs, cut-gla.s.s atomizers, hairpins in an ex-chocolate box, and rouge sticks.

The two girls instantly deafened Fred with their chatter. They tickled and squeezed the dwarf, who, glowering and empurpled with l.u.s.t, rolled like a ball in the embrace of the bare-armed teases. Finally, when frolicsome Arabella drew him to her and fell backward upon the couch, Fred lost his head and began to wriggle against her, snorting and clasping her neck. In attempting to push him away, she raised her arm and, slipping under it, he lunged and glued his lips to the hot p.r.i.c.klish hollow of her shaven axilla. The other girl, weak with laughter, tried in vain to drag him off by his legs. At that moment the door banged open, and the French partner of the two aerialists came into the room wearing marble-white tights. Silently, without any resentment, he grabbed the dwarf by the scruff of the neck (all you heard was the snap of Fred's wing collar as one side broke loose from the stud), lifted him in the air, and threw him out like a monkey. The door slammed. Shock, who happened to be wandering past, managed to catch a glimpse of the marble-bright arm and of a black little figure with feet retracted in flight.

Fred hurt himself in falling and now lay motionless in the corridor. He was not really stunned, but had gone all limp, with eyes fixed on one point, and fast-chattering teeth.

"Bad luck, old boy," sighed the conjuror, picking him up from the floor. He palpated with translucent fingers the dwarf's round forehead and added, "I told you not to b.u.t.t in. Now you got it. A dwarf woman is what you need."

Fred, his eyes bulging, said nothing.

"You'll sleep at my place tonight," decided Shock, and carried the Potato Elf toward the exit.

3.

There existed also a Mrs. Shock.

She was a lady of uncertain age, with dark eyes which had a yellowish tinge around the iris. Her skinny frame, parchment complexion, lifeless black hair, a habit of strongly exhaling tobacco smoke through her nostrils, the studied untidiness of her attire and hairdo-all this could hardly attract many men, but, no doubt, was to Mr. Shock's liking, though actually he never seemed to notice his wife, as he was always engaged in imagining secret devices for his show, always appeared unreal and s.h.i.+fty, thinking of something else when talking about trivialities, but keenly observing everything around him when immersed in astral fancies. Nora had to be constantly on the lookout, since he never missed the occasion to contrive some small, inutile, yet subtly artful deception. There had been, for instance, that time when he amazed her by his unusual gluttony: he smacked his lips juicily, sucked chicken bones clean, again and again heaped up food on his plate; then he departed after giving his wife a sorrowful glance; and a little later the maid, giggling into her ap.r.o.n, informed Nora that Mr. Shock had not touched one sc.r.a.p of his dinner, and had left all of it in three brand-new pans under the table.

She was the daughter of a respectable artist who painted only horses, spotty hounds, and huntsmen in pink coats. She had lived in Chelsea before her marriage, had admired the hazy Thames sunsets, taken drawing lessons, gone to ridiculous meetings attended by the local Bohemian crowd-and it was there that the ghost-gray eyes of a quiet slim man had singled her out. He talked little about himself, and was still unknown. Some people believed him to be a composer of lyrical poems. She fell headlong in love with him. The poet absentmindedly became engaged to her, and on the very first day of matrimony explained, with a sad smile, that he did not know how to write poetry, and there and then, in the middle of the conversation, he transformed an old alarm clock into a nickel-plated chronometer, and the chronometer into a miniature gold watch, which Nora had worn ever since on her wrist. She understood that nevertheless conjuror Shock was, in his own way, a poet: only she could not get used to his demonstrating his art every minute, in all circ.u.mstances. It is hard to be happy when one's husband is a mirage, a peripatetic legerdemain of a man, a deception of all five senses.

4.

She was idly tapping a fingernail against the gla.s.s of a bowl in which several goldfish that looked cut out of orange peel breathed and fin-flashed when the door opened noiselessly, and Shock appeared (silk hat askew, strand of brown hair on his brow) with a little creature all screwed up in his arms.

"Brought him," said the conjuror with a sigh.

Nora thought fleetingly: Child. Lost. Found. Her dark eyes grew moist.

"Must be adopted," softly added Shock, lingering in the doorway.

The small thing suddenly came alive, mumbled something, and started to scrabble shyly against the conjuror's starched s.h.i.+rtfront. Nora glanced at the tiny boots in chamois spats, at the little bowler.

"I'm not so easy to fool," she sneered.

The conjuror looked at her reproachfully. Then he laid Fred on a plush couch and covered him with a lap robe.

"Blondinet roughed him up," explained Shock, and could not help adding, "Bashed him with a dumbbell. Right in the tummy."

And Nora, kindhearted as childless women frequently are, felt such an especial pity that she almost broke into tears. She proceeded to mother the dwarf, she fed him, gave him a gla.s.s of port, rubbed his forehead with eau de cologne, moistened with it his temples and the infantine hollows behind his ears.

Next morning Fred woke up early, inspected the unfamiliar room, talked to the goldfish, and after a quiet sneeze or two, settled on the ledge of the bay window like a little boy.

A melting, enchanting mist washed London's gray roofs. Somewhere in the distance an attic window was thrown open, and its pane caught a glint of suns.h.i.+ne. The horn of an automobile sang out in the freshness and tenderness of dawn.

Fred's thoughts dwelt on the previous day. The laughing accents of the girl tumblers got oddly mixed up with the touch of Mrs. Shock's cold fragrant hands. At first he had been ill-treated, then he had been caressed; and, mind you, he was a very affectionate, very ardent dwarf. He dwelt in fancy on the possibility of his rescuing Nora someday from a strong, brutal man resembling that Frenchman in white tights. Incongruously, there floated up the memory of a fifteen-year-old female dwarf with whom he appeared together at one time. She was a bad-tempered, sick, sharp-nosed little thing. The two were presented to the spectators as an engaged couple, and, s.h.i.+vering with disgust, he had to dance an intimate tango with her.

Again a lone klaxon sang out and swept by. Sunlight was beginning to infuse the mist over London's soft wilderness.

Around half-past seven the flat came to life. With an abstract smile Mr. Shock left for an unknown destination. From the dining room came the delicious smell of bacon and eggs. With her hair done anyhow, wearing a kimono embroidered with sunflowers, appeared Mrs. Shock.

After breakfast she offered Fred a perfumed cigarette with a redpetaled tip and, half-closing her eyes, had him tell her about his existence. At such narrative moments Fred's little voice deepened slightly: he spoke slowly, choosing his words, and, strange to say, that unforeseen dignity of diction became him. Bent-headed, solemn, and elastically tense, he sat sideways at Nora's feet. She reclined on the plush divan, her arms thrown back, revealing her sharp bare elbows. The dwarf, having finished his tale, lapsed into silence but still kept turning this way and that the palm of his tiny hand, as if softly continuing to speak. His black jacket, inclined face, fleshy little nose, tawny hair, and that middle parting reaching the back of his head vaguely moved Nora's heart. As she looked at him through her lashes she tried to imagine that it was not an adult dwarf sitting there, but her nonexistent little son in the act of telling her how his schoolmates bullied him. Nora stretched her hand and stroked his head lightly-and, at that moment, by an enigmatic a.s.sociation of thought, she called forth something else, a curious, vindictive vision.

Upon feeling those light fingers in his hair, Fred at first sat motionless, then began to lick his lips in feverish silence. His eyes, turned askance, could not detach their gaze from the green pompon on Mrs. Shock's slipper. And all at once, in some absurd and intoxicating way, everything came into motion.

5.

On that smoke-blue day, in the August sun, London was particularly lovely. The tender and festive sky was reflected in the smooth spread of the asphalt, the glossy pillar boxes glowed crimson at the street corners, through the Gobelin green of the park cars flashed and rolled with a low hum-the entire city s.h.i.+mmered and breathed in the mellow warmth, and only underground, on the platforms of the Tube, could one find a region of coolness.

Every separate day in the year is a gift presented to only one man-the happiest one; all other people use his day, to enjoy the suns.h.i.+ne or berate the rain, never knowing, however, to whom that day really belongs; and its fortunate owner is pleased and amused by their ignorance. A person cannot foreknow which day exactly will fall to his lot, what trifle he will remember forever: the ripple of reflected sunlight on a wall bordering water or the revolving fall of a maple leaf; and it often happens that he recognizes his day only in retrospection, long after he has plucked, and crumpled, and chucked under his desk the calendar leaf with the forgotten figure.

Providence granted Fred Dobson, a dwarf in mouse-gray spats, the merry August day in 1920 which began with the melodious hoot of a motor horn and the flash of a cas.e.m.e.nt swung open in the distance. Children coming back from a walk told their parents, with gasps of wonder, that they had met a dwarf in a bowler hat and striped trousers, with a cane in one hand and a pair of tan gloves in the other.

After ardently kissing Nora good-bye (she was expecting visitors), the Potato Elf came out on the broad smooth street, flooded with sunlight, and instantly knew that the whole city had been created for him and only for him. A cheerful taxi driver turned down with a resounding blow the iron flag of his meter; the street started to flow past, and Fred kept slipping off the leathern seat, while chuckling and cooing under his breath.

He got out at the Hyde Park entrance, and without noticing the looks of curiosity, minced along, by the green folding chairs, by the pond, by the great rhododendron bushes, darkling under the shelter of elms and lindens, above a turf as bright and bland as billiard cloth. Riders sped past, lightly going up and down on their saddles, the yellow leather of their leggings creaking, the slender faces of their steeds springing up, their bits clinking; and expensive black motorcars, with a dazzling glitter of wheel spokes, progressed sedately over the ample lacework of violet shade.